Cop Car (2015)

A tense, pared-down thriller directed with impressive restraint of pacing and plotting, with four very good performances, two child and two adult.

Rating: Very good.

V/H/S (2012)

This anthology found-footage horror movie has a few major problems:
the seeming lack of an overseeing creative hand, leading to far too much overall running time spent on 'mundane goings on' build-up, and a lot of repetition between segments
the stories are all centred around jock arseholes of varying levels of rapeyness, and women who take their clothes off
the typical found footage horror issues of bad improv acting and unbelievable reactions (even if we suspend disbelief as to continued filming and unexplained editing)

Overall, this is not a very reassuring calling card for the up and coming horror directors of 2012...

Rating: Awful

Ride Along (2014)

Unfunny, predictable, dull. Kevin Hart is okay if a little muted, but Ice Cube gives a one-note snarl of a performance with not even an attempt at comedy. A poor man's The Hard Way. 

Rating: Bad.

Mandy (2018)

What could have been a fun throwback to 80s fantasy horror (if rather tired at this point - surely it's time to move past neon and synth and onto pastiching post-modern 90s horror by now?) is ruined by that strain of pretension in 2010s horror that leads to incredibly slow, boring movies. Much like Hereditary or The VVitch, this film is at least half an hour too long and stretches the first act of any regular horror out for almost the entire film. To be fair to Mandy, it does get moving in the last 40 minutes or so, but even then what could be a fun Evil Dead 2 (or at least Kung Fury) style action horror, with Cage descending into madness as he slashes his way through Lovecraftian fishmen in Clive Barker get-ups, drowns under the film's constant need to say 'look at me, I'm so weird! All the performances and lighting and camera moves and processing and soundscape is so weird, and the narrative is so disjointed and meandering and hollow, and the action scenes are so difficult to follow!'

This would probably have made a very cool fake grindhouse trailer.

Rating: Bad.

The Brave One (2007)

 A dull, cheesy vigilante flick with pretensions to poetry. It wants to be a rumination on grief but the dialogue is straight out of Die Hard (but not as good) and the plot contrivances are sillier than Falling Down's (but without that movie's handle on tone).

Rating: Bad.

Happy Death Day 2U (2019)

This is so nearly an excellent sequel. It has great fun extrapolating, explaining and reshuffling elements of the original, and adds a new device to stop it getting stale. Unfortunately, that new device eventually overcomplicates the story and leads to plotholes and unexplained contrivances. One of the first movie's main strengths was how tight it was; the sequel spins out of control in the second half. Fun, but frustrating.

Rating: Pretty good.

Extract (2009)

 Lots of great scenes, great ensemble cast, and Judge as always is great at nailing the workplace and the social cruft of low-key weirdoes and irritants that one gathers over their lifetime. The music is a little overbearing, though, and more importantly the film becomes rudderless in the last third - it feels like it's building to a climactic third act then not much happens and everything just solves itself.

Rating: Pretty good.