mid90s (2018)

A slice of life with a good sense of time and place. The optimistic ending is abrupt though, and it ends up feeling like the first half of a 'kid falls in with the wrong crowd' story stretched to a whole movie without adding any depth to the stock characterisation.
Rating: Fine

Hush (2016)

A grab-bag of tired poorly-used gimmicks and silly contrivances, in which one stupid person hunts another stupid person. This really shouldn't exist in 2016.
Rating: Bad

To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018)

Perfectly sweet teen rom-com-dram, but utterly rote and really only of interest to tweens.
Rating: Fine

The Wandering Earth (2019)

Essentially a modern, less goofy Armageddon, this looks great, is well-directed, full of strong performances, interesting and well thought-out world-building (literally), thrilling action and lots of deeply sincere fist-pumping moments. It's occasionally a little difficult to keep track of all the objectives, obstacles and character groups in the bigger sequences (though this may be a language thing), and it could perhaps be ten minutes shorter, but overall consistently engaging.
Rating: Very Good

Tallulah (2016)

Strong performances, well directed. Occasionally edges into mawkish, but overall a fine drama.
Rating: Good

Manhunt (2017)

Very dull and incredibly cheap-feeling. I'll let the bad acting and dialogue go, as that might just be the result of a tri-lingual movie, but this is full of tacky CG blood hits, compositing, and editing choices. The action is underwhelming and there's never enough coverage. Hugely disappointing to get this careless dross from the guy who made Hard Boiled and Face/Off.
Rating: Awful

Let's Be Cops (2014)

Gave up on this halfway through. Predictable story beats (they accidentally get tangled up with a scary crime-lord, a romantic subplot where he keeps trying to confess he's not a cop but gets interrupted etc) and not very funny - the writing is all very flat, placeholder stuff, no sharp dialogue, no character depth. I gave up at the comedy set-piece "a man has his face near to another man's scrotum and screams at a high-pitch".
Rating: Bad

Goon: Last of the Enforcers (2017)

Kudos to the sequel for not just being the exact same movie again, and taking on multiple plot threads while staying funny and charming. Unfortunately, a lot of it unravels by the end - Schreiber's character fizzles out, Russell's character completely changes halfway through, and although the movie overtly protests that it's not making Pill's character into a boring naggy wife, it totally is. Still, it's fun to revisit the gang, with the addition of Elisha Cuthbert showing comedy chops and Baruchel putting his shtick into overdrive for good measure.
Rating: Fine

The Breaker Upperers (2018)

Gave up on this halfway through, didn't find it particularly funny or original. One of those movies where it feels like they just decided to ad-lib it all but they didn't come up with anything particularly good.
Rating: Bad

Lord of Illusions (1995)

Lots of great atmosphere and imagery (some top effects, some ropey), and the first 40 minutes or so charge along splendidly. But after that it get directionless, as the PI protagonist has nothing specific to investigate and is just catching up on lore that we already know for the rest of the movie, until the drawn-out climactic dark magic showdown where the villain pretty much just does weird shit for 20 minutes while the heroes react very slowly to it.
Rating: Fine

Lifeforce (1985)

Some cool ideas and visuals, but it switches between long runs of hitting the same beats and exposition over and over, and something weird and new happening every few minutes. Interesting, utterly odd mess.
Rating: Bad

Steve Jobs (2015)

Good performances, snappy Sorkin script, trendy Boyle direction. But I wasn't bowled over by it and I'm not sure why. I guess because it feels ephemeral, like a mood painting rather than a biography. The movie lampshades it at one point, but the 'everything happens before three important launches' structure feels very theatrical. It's clever but it's also clever-clever.
Rating: Good

The Intern (2015)

A very lovely, very gentle movie. Doesn't fall into any 'successful businesswoman and mother' cliches, no contrived drama, good performances. Nice nice nice.
Rating: Good

Angel Has Fallen (2019)

A step down from the last two. It's not as tight conceptually - the villain and FBI stories just fade out halfway through, the neat idea of Banning having to deal with concussions and spinal injuries from all those floors he fell through in the previous movies adds up to nothing and, while it's always pleasing to see more movies lift the Last Crusade father and son dynamic, Nick Nolte's character drops in and out of the movie in a way that suggests multiple script drafts clashing. The action isn't as spectacular either, though it has a few nice sequences (the drone attack, the lorry chase and the forest raid), and the franchise's history of under-utilising character actors is in full force here. More competent than solid.
Rating: Bad

Anna (2019)

So close to amazing, but scuppered by a lead who either can't act or is one of those models/singers etc who are too scared to act badly and so underplay everything to the point of not acting at all. This charisma vacuum is mostly compensated for by some solid supporting performances (especially Mirren having fun on just the right side of ham), an energetic time-jumping narrative and some great action. Unfortunately, it spends too much time on Anna and too much time in general (almost two hours) - if you're going to have a blank-slate protagonist played robotically throughout, you need to strip the movie down to the bare essentials and have more than two action sequences.
Not up there with Nikita, Leon or even Lucy, but I'd probably watch this again before any of the John Wicks.
Rating: Good

Jennifer Eight (1992)

Terrible, stagey performances from the two leads, ultra-cheesy dialogue, and a plot that thrashes all over the place until a last-minute killer's identity reveal that comes out of nowhere.
Rating: Awful

A Quiet Place (2018)

Solid, well-thought-through thriller. The family drama aspect does sometimes threaten to overwhelm the monster thriller aspect (especially when there's heavy use of score for a movie based around silence) and it's a shame that the ending doesn't escalate as much as it could (probably due to budget). Full of great performances, though, and directed effectively.
Rating: Good

The Equalizer 2 (2018)

Washington has his usual buckets of charisma, and there are some cool action/thriller sequences here, but it is soooo long (cut the old German man subplot for a start!), what story is there is very predictable, there's never a sense of jeopardy, the final action sequence hits an operatic level of silliness and the final showdown is mostly done in long shots with stunt performers.
Rating: Bad

Searching (2018)

Solid mystery movie. The central conceit works well to modernise the beats of the story, and it manages to stretch to the needs of the narrative without totally breaking believability.
The acting styles and energy levels clash a little at times, some going so naturalistic as to feel flat, others getting a little too stagey for a computer screen. But overall the performances are sympathetic and technically impressive as they track emotional ups and downs mostly through webcams, and use eyelines to interact with other onscreen information without overdoing it.
By the end, the movie had totally pulled me in!
Rating: Good

Men in Black: International (2019)

Boring, overlong, unimaginative, predictable, unfunny. Another film with the 'we let the actors improvise the entire script but they didn't come up with anything good so now the whole film is unfunny babbling' problem.
Rating: Awful