The Guilty (2021)

This American remake of the one-man, one-night, confined-space Danish thriller about an emergency service telephone operator trying to save a kidnapped woman, suffers the same problems as the original film with the decisions and actions of the main character so poor that a more appropriate title would have been 'The Incompetent', but I think this American remake takes the unpleasant little crime drama and better establishes the reason for Jake Gyllenhall's character's poor choices, including his heightened state of anxiety over some kind of formal hearing that is taking place at the end of his shift.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Assistant (2019)

It is mesmerising watching Julia Garner as Jane, assistant to a busy and important film somebody, going about her work, delivering to desks scripts and bagged lunches, being receptive to muted anger over the phone, and picking up after others - let's face it, acting like a mother - but these tedious tasks are labours of love, it turns out, because this assistant has aspirations for something better and this wee slip of a movie, telling just odd minutes of Jane's working life with clinical office visuals and sparse dialogue, doesn't need extra runtime or drama to articulate so sharply such a common abusive corporate relationship that is nowadays so unmistakeable, undeniable but still one extremely hard to extricate oneself from.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS