American Assassin (2017)

This movie with a hate-fuelled lone wolf terrorist as its hero falls apart in its middle stretch - read, 'middle six-eighths' - and reveals itself to be just an incredibly dopey action movie sandwiched between a provocative opening scene (ripped from news headlines, designed to appeal to our outrage) and an extravagant last-ditch-effort-at-multiplex-credibility sfx finale that might only seem impressive after so much dull A-team TV episode-grade fisticuffs and gunplay.

★☆☆☆☆

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Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

The first looong hour reestablishes the 'anything goes' fantasy world of the original Kingsman (a world which I think is supposed to appeal to the now slightly older Harry Potter fan - this Harry Potter swears, smokes bongs, and has sex) and then the second hour demands that the viewer care (less) about a sprawling, charmless white bogan teenage boy's idea of a sophisticated spy world (more Spice World than James Bond with its hammy, unamusing cameos), care (less) about seen-it-before-in-Charlie's-Angels fight scenes, and care (less) about a plot tailor-made for the adolescent.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Snowman (2017)

Ice-cold and grisly Norwegian thrillers are popular among readers but this Jo Nesbø adaptation plays out on screen like it has been hacked to pieces and put back together again by a crazed killer with a piano wire, with scenes appearing out-of-order and side storylines, particularly the ones involving Chloë Sevigny as identical twins, Val Kilmer as a drunk detective, and J K Simmons as the leader of a Winter Olympics Host City bid, built-up elaborately like the serial killer's snowmen only to melt away without consequence.

★☆☆☆☆

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Flatliners (2017)

Surely when tasked with remaking the 1990 horror thriller Flatliners, your only job is to use new cinetechnology to update the spectacle of the afterlife, but in Niels Arden Oplev's moribund morality tale, death is about as out-of-reach an experience as a Red Balloon motorcycle ride or a swim-with-the-jellyfish gift voucher and by the end of the movie it is revealed the afterlife doesn't even bear upon the crises being experienced by this self-centred and super-dull group of med students.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Dinner (2017)

In a fancy restaurant, a multi-course degustation delivered to tables by convoys of sleek, choreographed waitstaff is this movie's metaphor for a smooth, controlled passage or course through things, from A to B, and the dinner guests at one particular table - a politician, his second wife, his brother and sister-in-law - are the antithesis, an uncooperative, distracted, disparate group gathered to decide on their best course now that their teenaged sons have committed a despicable crime, in this frustrating film which tries to be both profound and farcical while it grapples with themes as wide-ranging as politics, American Civil War history, teenage bullying, adolescent crime, racism, parenting, sibling rivalry, familial secrets, and mental illness, all with a sassy, isn't-this-so-so-clever attitude.

★☆☆☆☆

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Beatriz at Dinner (2017)

This episode of 'Touched By A Vegetarian, Reiki-Practising Angel' overreaches with its story of a Cecil the Lion-killing business mogul who is never, over the course of a dinner, going to be made to accept responsibility for all the evils of the world (including the murder of a pet goat) and so, with nowhere to go, it ends exactly as all your dinner parties ever have when someone wants to drunkenly cure all societal ills - guests end up wanting to kill themselves.

★☆☆☆☆

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Snatched (2017)

A really funny opening scene in a clothes store showcases Amy Schumer's exceptional talent in sending up self-obsessed urban American Gen-Yers - and then the rest of the film transports this talent to the jungles of Ecuador where Schumer's character Emily and Emily's mum (Goldie Hawn) go on the run from kidnappers in a story that passes in so mindless, so mundane and so unfunny a fashion, the movie ends with you realising you have been looking at it but not watching.

★☆☆☆☆

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It Comes At Night (2017)

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

It Comes At Night's "it" refers to no clearly articulated thing; "comes" presumably means 'moves near to' the house that features in the movie - a boarded-up safehold of which viewers are afforded only glimpses of one dimly-lit corridor with a red door, some beds, a kitchen table and a plastic sheet-lined foyer; and 'at night' is generally when the not very interesting events of this plot-free horror occur: a child is found out of bed and a door that should be locked is found unlocked, so the family of three who are in the house sheltering themselves from some sort of pandemic - a family who have only just spent the first half of the movie making the decision to welcome another family into the house - hysterically revisit that decision and after some unjustified violence, head back to sit at the kitchen table.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Family (2016)

Thrown together, I'm sure, to cash-in on other recent cult-themed documentary releases, this one about Anne Hamilton-Byrne who in the 80s took advantage of Australia's lax adoption laws to steal, raise, and generally mess-up as many as 28 children, is a boring and unfocused mess of information that leaves viewers nonethewiser about how much of what happened was masterminded by Hamilton-Byrne and how much simply grew out of circumstance, and ultimately you are left with the impression the documentary makers themselves didn't know what story they were telling.

☆☆☆☆☆

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