John Carpenter's The Fog (1980)

Celebrating the town's centenary, the folk of seaside Antonio Bay are weirded out by a fog that occasions a pandemic of shattered glass and maritime deaths, but all it takes is for local Father Malone to read a couple of pages of an old diary and suddenly everyone is confidently spouting paranormal fog lore and exhibiting magical knowledge of things they can't possibly have seen or heard, and this silliness doesn't matter because The Fog is atmospheric horror so fun I'd like to see it continued as an ongoing series of sequels, origin stories and offshoots - forgetting all about the woeful 2005 remake, of course.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTEMCE REVIEWS

Snow Day (2000)

Thematically similar to Ferris Bueller's Day Off and perhaps originally intended as a National Lampoon's vacation, this not very interesting kids' entertainment has young schoolkids conspiring to prolong a Snow Day by hijacking a snowplow and features the wasted comic talents of Chevy Chase and the less wasted comic talents of Chris Elliott.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Take Shelter (2011)

In this tense but ultimately dissatisfying thriller, kind of like a movielength episode of TV's Doomsday Bunkers, a man presees disaster and despite the disbelief, concern and ridicule he experiences from all sides, not to mention the potential financial ruin he faces, he persists in constructing a stocked and comfortable underground shelter, the sort that would help at ground zero of a nuclear event.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Impossible (2012)

A family holidaying in Khao Lak in Thailand (including a very young Tom Holland aa the son of Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts) is caught up in a natural disaster in a movie which perfectly illustrates the power and destruction of tsunami in comparison to the feebleness of human life, but the movie does not sustain beyond early disaster special effects.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW