Men (2022)

This fascinating movie plays with the idea that a woman can hold herself open and available to men, or else retreat in increasingly smaller boxes and sequester herself away from their incursions, and although there's a visual trickery involved as the horror encroaches upon poor Harper alone in a manor in the English countryside, the horror she is fleeing from is not supernatural.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

The People Upstairs (Spanish: "Sentimental")

With the exception of Javier Cámara's character, so sarcastic and annoying he almost bursts the whole, this comedy drama is a light and frothy bubble, a surprise given the subject matter could so easily have been treated as salacious, about a get-together between neighbouring couples with the couple from upstairs proving so disarmingly open, the downstairs couple are forced to face some truths.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Klaus (2019)

It hijacks the Christmas tradition and completely fabricates a Christmas origin story, but Klaus is worth watching for the beautiful hand-drawn animation alone, and for Jason Schwartzman's hilarious voice performance of the main character Jesper - a lazy son cast out by his father to a remote snowy outpost - who finds reward in hard work and in getting good out of people, albeit duplicitously.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

The joys of The Little Shop of Horrors, which as a musical continues to lure to theatres crowds that raucously sing along and guffaw, elude me and watching this 1960 movie which started it all - not a musical but a camp scifi with a wet sense of humour and a cult following, made on a budget of $30,000 - I am nonethewiser, mystified as to why people so enjoy the story of a plant named Audrey Two which has an insatiable appetite for human blood..

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS