The Call of Cthulhu (2005)
The marriage of low-budget and silent film style is one made in heaven, particularly when you add in the dedication of the makers. They built impressive props, ingenious sets, and employed model work in various inventive ways, all to execute a story that includes a cultist swamp orgy, a mysterious island, a sea battle, and a skyscraper-sized monster.
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Drive Angry (2011)
It’s got a crazy plot, crazy action, gratuitous violence, gratuitous nudity, rough production values, variable acting, loopy bad guys — the highlight is definitely the latter, with William Fichtner channelling Christopher Walken. The whole thing could do with being punchier and pacier, and shorter
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Fantastic Four (2005)
this incarnation of the FF doesn’t really have a story. They kind of meander through a few things that Happen, then a villain finally emerges and they defeat him. It leaves the film bereft of narrative drive; a series of scenes strung together without a common goal.
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The Final Destination (2009)
None of the deaths matter because nothing is done to make us care about these characters, or even be broadly interested in them, unlike the best of the earlier entries. So there's zero tension, zero emotion, just elaborate death after elaborate death. It's one of the most hollow films I can think of.
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The Lincoln Lawyer (2011)
it’s a solid crime/legal thriller; the kind of thing we’d probably get as a 90-minute TV episode over here, but thanks to America not really having that format, it gets the cinema treatment. Nonetheless, it’s well enough acted, with an interesting enough story, to sustain the grander status automatically afforded to something released theatrically.
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Passchendaele (2008)
Despite winning a bunch of Canadian film awards, this First World War drama seems to have been really poorly received by critics — the Radio Times even saw fit to award it just 1 star! I must dissent, however, because I thought it was very good.
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Tiny Furniture (2010)
Tiny Furniture comes with a predisposition to dislike it from anyone who isn’t a hipster or desperate to be relevant to hipsters... It’s a slow-paced, consciously arthouse-drama-y story film about unlikeable people leading unlikeable lives. I think everyone in it is either selfish or at least self-centred.
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More next Sunday.
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