Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Pleasantly charming but rather sluggish. Needed more Wilder and less Capra.
Rating: Bad

Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

The "Pret A Porter" level artworld satire is tepid, the horror elements perfunctory, the story spotty and the dialogue clunky. When the occasional running joke or horror set-up threatens to become clever, they fluff it. This should have been a 90 minute horror with satirical elements.
Rating: Bad

The Fighter (2010)

Strong performance from Bale and solid support from Leo and Adams, lively direction, and a satisfying upward slope at the end, but to get to it you have to go through about an hour or so of watching an uncharismatic mumbly whiny Wahlberg getting pushed around by losers and bullies, and inexplicably winning the loving support of sparky, smart Adams. And even then, there's not much substance: the story is 'boxer is shit, grows a spine and then does well'.
Rating: Fine

1922 (2017)

Atmospheric, with solid clench-jawed performances, but the slow build never goes anywhere. I haven't read the short story but I suspect there was just about enough material in it to fill 80 minutes at most, not 105.
Rating: Bad

I Am Mother (2019)

Great design, looks great, convincing performances and great thriller pacing. A lot of the reveals were predictable, but the storytelling was solid enough that I didn't really mind.
I'm not convinced by Mother's plan though - is this one girl raising babies in a bunker really going to herald a better humanity, especially as it seems a few of the previous babies weren't up to snuff. Perhaps Mother has further phases planned, but nothing is implied.
Rating: Good

Good Time (2017)

Fantastic. One of those tightly-wound 'someone hangs on from falling into disaster by their fingernails, using only their ingenuity' stories, with a bunch of great performances, and loads of style, atmosphere and tension.
Rating: Great

Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

Well-acted and directed, but it handles an intriguing concept in a very shortsighted way - it never really makes sense and the film doesn't milk it for half of its comedic or dramatic potential, and it almost seems to forget about it for a good stretch in the middle. A writer is, essentially, God, and yet the dramatic stakes come down to whether her next book is quite as good as the last one.
Rating: Bad

Triple Frontier (2019)

Starts as a slick if cliched 'group of grey morals tough guys get too greedy and shit goes south' movie, and ends as a slick but toothless 'these mercenaries have hearts of gold and resolve all their arguments and it doesn't really matter that they killed a fuckton of people in the country they claim to be helping and one of them dies, because they get out with barely a scratch and give their money to the dead guy's family, except *that* doesn't even matter because the lead guy has the coordinates to a shitload more money and a sexy traumatised refugee to fuck' that the actors all get through on autopilot.
Symptomatic of lunk-headed 'fuck the world' American foreign policy, or a satire of it? I strongly suspect the former.

Gets 1.5 because the action's put-together really well.
Rating: Bad

The Invitation (2015)

75 minutes of nothing happening except for people not leaving a creepy cultish dinner party when they clearly should, and then 20 minutes of making just as stupid decisions while fighting crazies in a house. A load of hoary old horror tropes done reeeeally slowly.
Rating: Awful

Thunder Road (2018)

A touching dark comedy drama that deals with toxic masculinity and stigmas around mental health, anchored by an incredible central performance and strong supporting ones. It threatens to become just a series of character monologues threaded together, but the short running time and regular plot progressions keep it on the right side of feeling like a story.
Rating: Very Good

Destroyer (2018)

Strong performances, effectively gritty atmosphere, taut direction, but it's rather repetitive and over-long, with a deflated ending (the pointless timeline twist and the confrontation with Cyrus which the whole film has been building up to is hugely anti-climactic - maybe this is the point, that she was the bad person, the destroyer all along, and he was just some loser criminal, but when the film has been portraying him as a genius manipulator supervillain for two hours, it's a bit of a letdown to have him show up for ten seconds then get shot; like, we already know she was at fault, the film spelled it out for us already).
Rating: Fine

Await Further Instructions (2018)

"TV is evil" says the movie on my TV.

Fucking terrible. A mildly interesting idea, scuppered by bad acting, clunky dialogue, non-existent characterisation, constant horror-movie-character-idiocy, and lousy pacing (watching people slowly lose their minds doesn't work if they start out as insane angry bigots and then two minutes in they're all fully brainwashed cult members). Also, they put the big reveal from about 82 mins into the 90 minute movie on the fucking poster.

It's only getting 1 star instead of half because visually it was alright and at least it doesn't like racists.
Rating: Awful

Downsizing (2017)

A gentle, thoughtful movie, that is imaginative enough that it's fun to watch all the way through, but regardless it's very long for a movie that doesn't seem to have much to say outside of "be nice".
Rating: Fine

The Irishman (2019)

Very effective at showing the passage of time, and the futility of all that violence. Really nicely put together, as you'd expect from Scorsese - pacey, gorgeously shot. The CG de-aging is a little distracting at first - even when they're at their youngest, their faces feel a little beefy - but overall it's convincing and within a few minutes I was paying more attention to De Niro's eye colour than anything else.
Really, the main issue is that as a historical film, it doesn't have much of a dramatic structure, and this is not helped by the fact that De Niro is playing a guy who shows barely any emotion ever, isn't a family man, and is just a soldier who has so little individuality that he sits on both sides of the main conflict of the film without ever getting so much as a threat. In fact, Al Pacino and Stephen Graham are pretty much the only actors in the whole movie who so much as raise their voices.
Rating: Good

I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017)

Fun film that starts as a quirky indie com-dram then twists into a dark little thriller. Really speaks to that "everyone's an arsehole, should I give up and be one too" modern life feeling, and gives an ambiguous response to it. Has a nice gentle, melancholic feel, but this does also leave it feeling a little slight.
Rating: Good

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

Good performances and sharp dialogue, but the case is a little dull, clues are given away too early, and it all looks a little flat outside of some nice Baker Street exteriors/mattes.
Rating: Fine

Triple Threat (2019)

Good action scenes - acrobatic and good use of props and surroundings, although the Uwais vs White fight was a bit disappointing (also, MJW looks a bit weird here, very bloated face, not sure what that's about) - and some nice rich cinematography in places, but the rest of this is pretty terrible. The plot's a mess, every single character down to the one-line cops is useless and stupid, the acting is atrocious (probably in part because there are a lot of actors speaking English as a second language), and Uwais' character, who is kind of the lead though the film never really decides, is a complete shithead.
Rating: Bad

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (2018)

It's an interesting undertaking, to give what seems like an inherently pulpy concept a quiet, melancholic treatment. And for the most part it's very effective - great dramatic performances, well-paced direction. But, in the end, what is it about? It seems to be circling around the inhumanity of war, or of Man, or the quietly heroic everyman vs the immorality of those in power, but it never zeroes in on anything so this ends up just being a well-told story about a sad man who did some weird stuff.
Rating: Good

Child's Play (2019)

Fun in places, and a couple of cool ideas, but it bounces back and forth between tones (horror, comedy, kid's adventure) and horror sub-genres (stalker, slasher, gremlin), and there aren't any interesting or well-drawn characters to anchor it.
I don't think I could be bothered to watch a sequel, whereas I'd happily check out whatever Don Mancini wants to do with OG Chucky.
Rating: Bad

See You Yesterday (2019)

I stopped watching this partway through. Partly because I feel outside of the target audience - I guess it's aimed specifically at African-American teens - but mostly because it's a clumsy mix of social issues drama and sci-fi romp, neither done particularly well. I'd be more forgiving of the after-school special vibe and the irritating protagonist (fine, she's got anger issues, but in a boring shouty way, she uses all her amazing inventions which would definitely get her an A+ in science (and earn her millions of dollars) to invent time-travel so she can get an A+ in science class (because yeah that's the best way to unveil a mind-bogglingly important discovery - in fact, didn't F4ntastic pull some similar bullshit?), and she's a mega-genius and yet within two minutes of travelling back into the past she's running around like an idiot purposefully fucking up time) if it were aimed at tweens but surely there's too many "fuck"s here for that to be the case.
Rating: Bad

Gerald's Game (2017)

A cool genre idea, intertwined with psychological drama in a clever way. Unfortunately, the last ten minutes or so pile on a bunch of extra ideas that would work well in a short story (or perhaps a novel, depending on execution - I'll be interested to find some reviews of the source novel!) but feel totally unnecessary and tacked on here, especially as they're mostly told not shown (perhaps there was a way for them to pull it off, but this wasn't it). Gugino and Greenwood are fantastic, though, as are the flashback kid and father (he's like 5% too theatrical but I suspect this is intentional).
Rating: Good

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018)

The CG in this got a knocking, but I thought it looked fine. I liked the humanish faces of the animals too - certainly better than the jarringly photo-realistic talking animals in the Favreau Jungle Book (with the exception of that movie's Walken-faced King Louie, who was great). Unfortunately, the action isn't particularly interesting or well-directed, and it's a big chunk of the movie. Plus, it has that Narnia feel where they're trying to layer LOTR style epic story and big-brushstroke character arcs over relatively simple and episodic source material (along with child actors who can't quite manage that stuff - Chand can just about summon bemused, sad and angry). Speaking of LOTR, the casting is particularly lazy in that regard, with Serkis, Cumberbatch (as the animal villain) and Blanchett (as the mystic future-seer and prologue narrator).
Kudos for having the hero yell "Khaaaaaan!" though.
Rating: Bad

The Perfection (2018)

DOUBLE SPOILER WARNING! I recommend you watch this movie going in knowing as little as possible, so just in case you got past Letterboxd's spoiler warning, here's another one. Don't read on!

Fantastic twisty pulp. I went in knowing *nothing* about it, and it worked perfectly on me. I totally thought I was about to watch a zombie movie right up until the point she brought out the meat cleaver. Then it gave me just enough time to breath before going crazy all over again. Now, granted, they did give the game away a little by having Lizzie explain Charlotte's motivation to a high level of detail - I figured this was either bad writing or a sign that she was working with Charlotte. However, I couldn't think of a way this could possibly be the case, so I put it aside and by the time the twist arrived, it got me anyway. (If I'd paused the film and considered other stuff I'd noticed - the tattoos of course, plus the fact that no one had called the police on Charlotte - I probably could have figured the whole thing out, but it moved quickly enough that I didn't. If it hadn't been for that bit of dialogue I would have been nowhere close.)
Then that ending was utterly fantastic and washed away these minor issues. The film walked a delicate tightrope with its pacing and twists, but for my money it pulled it off wonderfully.
Rating: Very Good

Black Death (2010)

An effectively grimy 'religion sucks' movie, but it never finds direction - it takes an hour to get to the main plot, then rushes through the remaining events with a sense of resigned inevitability to everything, it never settles on a viewpoint character, and even in the last few minutes it's pushing the ostensible protagonist through an entire years-long arc.
Not surprising to find that the director re-wrote the second half of the film, sacrificing it to silly twists in the same way as he did with Triangle.
Rating: Bad

I Lost My Body (2019)

At first I thought this was an Amelie wannabe, full of twee romance and fanciful imagery. It seemed like I was watching a Thing Addams adventure, complete with hand-view flashbacks, and I wasn't onboard. But as it goes on, it becomes something more heartfelt and sad, almost Lynchian. Elaborate romantic gestures are called out as creepy, and magic is revealed as metaphor. Some well-directed action sequences and deftly sketched peeks at French life from a hand's viewpoint.
Rating: Good

Moneyball (2011)

Solid, Sorkin-y drama. Good performances, snappy dialogue, rousing ups and downs. The only flaw is that the historical facts lead to a deflated ending; the movie doesn't quite stack the deck strongly enough throughout to successfully turn it into a happy one.
Rating: Good

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016)

A rather shallow sequel to the classic first film. It's more cartoony in the colour correction full of bright purples/greens and oranges/teals, in the witch/sneering warlord villains, there's not much story here, and what there is feels like a redo of the first film, and none of the characters have much to them. It does look quite nice and have some well-choreographed fights, though the latter aren't directed quite as clearly or as distinctive as the first film.
Rating: Bad

Missing Link (2019)

Through all the computer-printed, computer-coloured faces, the green-screen, the CGI and, I suspect, a heavy use of digital filters, any of the organic, tactile feel of the stop-animation is lost to the point that this may as well have been a fully computer-generated movie. And taking it on those terms, it has some nice visual design, a few good jokes and visual flourishes but overall it's a slow story, unenergetically directed, with rather unsophisticated humour and action (especially compared to, say, the wit of Aardman productions).
Rating: Bad

Blue Ruin (2013)

An effective, tight little thriller with a few interesting turns and a believably half-competent protagonist. A haunted lament at the casually violent American psyche, disconnected veterans on one side and racist murder families on the other, all toting cabinets full of guns. Much like A Vigilante, Blue Ruin doesn't want you to enjoy the bloodshed - it's not a fist-pumping movie, it's a twist of the knife in the gut. It does lean into the standard vigilante tropes a little more, though, which leads to a dissonant feel come the end.
Rating: Good

A Vigilante (2018)

A study of violence against women in thriller clothing.
An incredible lead performance by Wilde drives this film. It's surrounded by small but powerful supporting turns, economical storytelling, direction that is at once taut yet willing to hold on a character's emotional struggle for as long as is needed, and a refusal to indulge the viewer in cathartic, titillating scenes of vengeful violence, or the usual sub-genre tropes (the vigilante forms a bond with someone despite themselves, they come up against a well-resourced big villain who threatens their new friend, etc).
Rating: Great

Headshot (2016)

A very slender plot, but full of the usual Uwais fight scenes (perhaps not quite as tight as The Raid, but still cracking) and a bunch of nicely pitched performances, either delicate or maniacal as needed, give some believable character dynamics and history to hang the action on.
Rating: Good

Bleach (2018)

Made it about halfway through this before giving up. I haven't read the manga. The film is just a bunch of non-characters splurging lore at each other. The action is fine, nothing to write home about.
Rating: Awful