Pete's Dragon (2016)

Surprisingly restrained and tasteful, this is a very gentle, sweet movie with lots of touching, underplayed performances. It reminded me of E.T., not least in how successful it is in creating emotional scenes between a child actor and a CG creature. The only possible criticism really is that there's not a lot to it - it eventually gets into the Harry And The Hendersons type 'misguided hunter' territory, but most of the focus is on Pete's emotional journey when he rediscovers the wider world. If you're looking for a family movie that is the second half of Cast Away with some ET sprinkled in, this is it.

Rating: Good.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

SPOILERS BELOW

Effective low-key look into the mindset of someone who gets drawn into a cult and then escapes, especially the paranoia and the inability to discuss it with those around you despite that making things worse. It doesn't have much of an ending, but I guess that's the point - she's going to feel the sword of Damocles hanging over her for the rest of her life now.

Rating: Good.

Black Widow (2021)

SPOILERS BELOW

The Ohio opening was fantastic, thrilling and emotionally affecting. Then the movie basically spends the rest of its time getting stuff in place for the climax. The action isn't awful, but the use of Flubbering CG doubles and choppy editing make it feel cartoonish and unsatisfying. The comedy banter falls flat consistently. The villain is crap (wish they'd got Julie Delpy back).

Taskmaster was kind of cool, I guess, and it was a clever Bourne-y idea to have this interquel (or whatever) based around Natasha dealing with her red ledger, so even though we know what's going to happen to her after the events of this story it doesn't cause that common prequel issue of no dramatic tension. Also, that post-credits scene got me more excited for Hawkeye (which I'm already looking forward to because it seems like they're going to take a lot of influence from the Matt Fraction run, which I loved), so well done there.

Rating: Meh.

Guns Akimbo (2019)

Utterly charmless, wholly derivative, and smugly self-satisfied at how distanced and post-modern it's being as if Fight Club, The Running Man and Death Race 2000 to name but a few didn't do all this decades ago. It's not even effective on the genre level, with no one acting remotely like human beings, super-fighters suddenly losing the ability to aim straight and the wimpy dweeb thrown into a world of violence able to survive back-alley surgery, gunshots and car crashes without missing a step. It also attempts to offer a treatise on humanity's relationship with violence, but can't even decide whether it's really bad or really cool.

Rating: Awful.

(Addendum: having now read about the director harassing a couple of critics, both women of colour, by falsely accusing them of bullying, it makes a lot of sense that this movie feigns condemnation of the fetishisation of violence while simultaneously enacting it.)

C.H.U.D. (1984)

Surprisingly good creature and gore effects, and solid acting (not so surprising considering the amazing list of big names in the cast, even if most of them are pre-fame and only get a 2 minute scene). But this is incredibly slow and sloppy, and clearly only had the budget for one take per shot.

Rating: Bad.

Army Of The Dead (2021)

SPOILERS BELOW

Has some interesting ideas and wastes them all, instead ending up as an overlong, dull cliché-fest. The entire 'smart zombies' thing pretty much made zero difference to the story - you could pretty easily replace them with lots of regular zombies and everything would work the same. The characters had potential but in two and a half hours there's barely any character development. Some of the alpha zombies having blue shiny stuff (I thought I saw some actual metallic endoskeleton stuff but that may have been a trick of the light [EDIT: turns out there are robot zombies , and they were put in there to set up prequel expanded lore stuff - ugggh]) - pointless. The guy getting out at the end - pointless. The heist itself is underwhelming. The action is solid but bland.

The title sequence is at least pretty good, though as with Watchmen the song choice is painfully on the nose (at least this one is narratively clearer); Bautista gives a solid performance, the first of his I've seen that hasn't been (purposefully and successfully) over- or under-played; there's a strong sequence where one character has to fight their way through a bunch of classic zombies at close quarters; otherwise this fails at every point.

Rating: Bad.

The Mitchells Vs the Machines (2021)

SPOILERS BELOW

I abandoned it 45 mins in. It feels like those adverts that steal internet memes ten years after everyone got sick of them, and I'm not finding it funny at all. Also lots of little gripes like pointless 'two days earlier' beginning, the kid brother with a voice actor who sounds 50, the dad isn't just a bit out of touch or whatever, he's a dick, 'dinosaurs' isn't a weird interest for a kid to be into, kids would love her home-made movies not ostracise her for them, it was unclear for a while whether Pal turned in that moment when she was rejected at the presentation or she'd been planning this for a while, and also they stole calling a robot companion PAL from hit game Time Gentlemen, Please!. I do like the shaders or whatever, though, it's a nice blend of 3D and 2D, like everything's a pastel painting or something. (Not as fond of the character design style, but at least it's slightly different from the Pixar standard.

Basically, not as good as A Goofy Movie.

Rating: Bad.