One-sentence reviews – Page 10

Man on a Ledge (Asger Leth 2012)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Man on a Ledge (2012) is not the heist sequence’s homages to Mario Bava’s Diabolik (1968) and Michael Lehmann’s Hudson Hawk (1991) – let’s be generous, let’s not call them thefts, because nothing could be more painful to a filmmaker than to be accused of stealing from Hudson Hawk – but is in fact the moment when you realise that the reason gauntly villainous Peter Weller is so good is that it is in fact haggardly nefarious Ed Harris, stupid…

Trespass (Joel Schumacher 2011)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Trespass (2011) is neither Nicolas Cage’s reliably amusing hair nor the film’s surprising, if unsurprisingly ham-fisted, commentary on the intertwined illusory nature of finance capital, masculinity and sexual/commodity desire, but that moment when you realise that Nic and his equally insufferable family have been taken hostage by a violent gang of inept home invaders cum jewel thieves led by that bloke who used to be in Neighbours…

Jupiter Ascending (Wachowski siblings 2015)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Jupiter Ascending (2015) is not that Meg’s name suddenly makes you flashback to all those Alfred Hitchcock presents The Three Investigator novels you read as a kid; nor is it Channing Tatum being, yet again, so much better than the film he is in either warrants or deserves; neither is it ditto Sean Bean or Nikki Akuka-Bird; nor is it watching all those respectable British thespians hamming it up in exchange for filthy Hollywood lucre; nor is it that the film looks so pretty, though it does; nor is it the comforting familiarity of the Wachowskis’ inability to construct a plot (except when James M. Cain did it for them decades earlier); nor is it the profoundly reassuring sense of your own embodied existence provided by the Wachowskis’ inability to pace a film (be honest, The Matrix is a good 40 minutes longer than it needs to be just because someone somewhere was scared folks wouldn’t understand what was going on, a fear cast aside in the sequels, with their more purely modernist and thoroughly interminable commitment to durée); no, it turns out the best thing about Jupiter Ascending is none of these things at all, but instead the sheer audacity of the title’s claim that not the entire film but merely its ending is complete and utter arse…

(more on Jupiter Ascending here)

Goon (Michael Dowse 2011)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Goon (2011) is not that it recalls George Roy Hill’s Slap Shot (1977), though it does and that is generally a good thing, more or less, but no, it turns out the best thing about Goon is every single fucking frame of it in which Seann William Scott, the most underrated actor of his generation, appears…

Mr Skeffington (Vincent Sherman 1944)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Mr Skeffingon (1944) is not tittering at the name of the conceited beauty and all-round awful Fanny (Bette Davis), but the sequence right at the end, after she has been brought low (through ageing, a medically dubious bout of dyptheria and some grotesque Perc Westmore makeup) and to the point of accepting the truth of her estranged husband’s words (‘a woman is beautiful when she’s loved, and only then’) just as he, Job (Claude Rains), returns from a Nazi concentration camp – a worn out broken man – and they are able to reunite because he stills loves her and, more importantly, as him tripping over a footstool reveals, he is now blind and cannot see that she is no longer beautiful and so she does not have to learn any kind of moral lesson whatsoever…

Carrie (Kimberly Peirce 2013)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Carrie (2013) is the moment when you remember that back in 1988 the Royal Shakespeare Company decided it would be a good idea to blow the best part of $10 million on a flop Broadway musical version, but it turns out the very worst thing about it comes a moment later when you realise you would much rather be in the stalls, singing along and soaked in pig’s blood…

R.I.P.D. (Robert Schwentke 2013)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about R.I.P.D. (2013) is that you get to indulge in all the pork based humour you can muster for almost ninety minutes thanks to the thoughtful casting of Kevin Bacon alongside piggy-eyed charisma vacuum Ryan Reynolds,…

The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianofrance 2012)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) is that part way through they replace Ryan Gosling with Bradley Cooper, just so you know you can get up and leave and no one will mind…

Harry Brown (Daniel Barber 2009)

and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Harry Brown (2009) is the bit when septuagenarian vigilante Michael Caine, pursuing some criminal yoof across a sarf London estate, has a sudden attack of emphysema and it suddenly becomes Breath Wish…

Chaos (Tony Giglio 2005)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Chaos is the moment when Jason Statham takes it upon himself to use a word incorrectly in order not merely to correct the grammar of a woman he is questioning but also to demonstrate how annoying such unforced errors are by pointing out that ‘a double negative infers a positive’…