Groverdox

The third movie photographer David Hamilton made might have been his best one yet. It is livelier and more interesting than "Bilitis" and "Laura", and also has a more convincing sense of time and place. You can actually believe that the characters and locale in the movie are real, and that they go on existing in between shots, and outside of them.

However, probably nobody watched a David Hamilton movie for the mise-en-scene. His movies were like artful softcore pornography. "Tendres cousines" actually seems to have less nudity than the previous two flicks. "Bilitis" and "Laura" both had lengthy communal shower scenes with young women frolicking naked. I didn't see any of that here, though there is of course still nudity.

What always struck me about this flick - and the only thing I remembered about it from watching it years ago - is that the male lead, a fourteen year old boy, is more strikingly beautiful than any of the women in the movie. At first, he detracts from the beauty of the female lead, because she is nowhere near as striking as he is, and you wonder why he is interested in her. Then later, when you get a better look at her, you realise she is beautiful too.

The plot features the same theme Hamilton used in his previous two movies: that of unrequited love. Poune (what a name) is in love with her cousin Julien, who is in love with his cousin Julia. His sister Claire is engaged to Charles, but he's got his eye on Julia. A maid at the house tries to seduce Julien and take his virginity, but is caught and fired after she strips naked and lies with him and gets his shirt off. He makes up for it later, though, bagging himself a couple of other girls. He doesn't even look like he's in puberty yet.

I enjoyed this flick more than the others. I just felt like it was more professionally done.

"Laura" is quite a bit better than "Bilitis", the photographer-turned-filmmaker David Hamilton, for a few reasons. For one thing, it has a stronger sense of plot, which makes it more watchable and carries the movie past its boring bits. "Bilitis" was barely about anything. For another, the actresses are much better looking this time. Dawn Dunlap, who plays Laura, is beautiful. Patti D'Arbanville, who played "Bilitis", was not. Even the male lead is better looking this time.

The plot: the protagonist is a sculptor who shares his favourite subject with Hamilton: beautiful teenage girls in the nude. He reconnects with an old flame, and becomes infatuated with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Laura. He wants to sculpt her, but the mother is jealous and comes between them. For some reason she'll only allow him to use photos of the girl naked to sculpt from. Later on, however, the sculptor is blinded in a fire, and the movie has its climax when Laura allows the artist to run his hands over her nude body, so as to recreate this nubile terrain in stone.

"Laura" has a very similar structure to "Bilitis". It begins like a fly on the wall observing the dreamy, halcyon day-to-day life of a group of beautiful schoolgirls, of course showing them frolicking nude in the shower like "Bilitis" did. Regrettably, when the plot kicks in the movie largely leaves its gratuitous nudity behind, which is the same mistake that movie made. At least here, the plot is enough to carry the movie, and I found it more watchable than the director's first pic.

It's hard to know what to say about a movie called "Bilitis". It was filmed by a photographer who is famous for his soft-focus pictures of adolescent girls who are usually naked, and that's basically what the movie gives us, except he uses a film camera to capture them this time.

The movie starts promisingly with copious nudity and suggestions of lesbianism, but when its plot starts to come to the fore it gets in the way and ruins our fun. I don't even know what the movie was supposed to be about. I got that the titular Bilitis is a schoolgirl in a boarding school where the girls skinny dip and slip into each other's beds. Bilitis has an aunt, who is romantically involved with some guy, and she may also pursue a romance with a local boy, but I don't remember seeing that, or him.

Another problem is that the actresses (and actors) aren't really that great looking. Patti D'Arbanville, who plays Bilitis, is really nothing special to look at, and nor are any of the other people on screen. The actors don't really make an impression with their looks, and it is sometimes hard to tell them apart.

This, however, might just be down to the "soft-focus" photography, which would probably give you a migraine if you looked at it for too long.

At least "Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds" is better than the first movie, which is small praise indeed. It's actually fairly competently made. There are no takes that go on for too long this time, where you expect the actors to look at each other confused, and nor is there an obnoxious soundtrack over every scene, drowning out the actors.

"Eating Out 2" also has one legendary scene that I have never forgotten. It's a CFNM scene where poor Rebekah Kochan (the only actor unfortunate enough to appear in every movie in the franchise) gets up close and personal with the beautiful Marco Dapper's penis.

The movie also limits the amount of homophobia and misogyny that was bizarrely present in the previous flick. Kochan's character, Tiffany von der Sloot, is still mostly just comic relief for her sex drive, but at least Gwen (Emily Styles) isn't the homophobe she was in the previous film.

The movie still does kind of have a problem with homophobia though. It has been praised for showing the so-called "ex-gay movement", ie. Cultists who try to brainwash same-sex attracted people into thinking they're really straight. The director and co-writer Phillip Bartell has said that he thought homophobes' minds might be changed by seeing this "movement" exposed for the sham anybody with half a brain knows it is. But why would they be watching this movie in the first place?

I thought the inclusion of the Christian far-right into a goody LGBT sex comedy was a little awkward, and detracted from the fun atmosphere the movie cultivates.

"Eating Out" is a movie I less want to review than reject. I have seen YouTube skits more professionally made than this. It's the kind of movie where you stop bothering to follow the inane and confusing plot and instead just begin ticking off every mistake the filmmakers made.

Where to begin with those mistakes? The movie has near-constant muzak on its soundtrack, often distracting, always migraine inducing. It is also too loud and shows up how badly recorded the dialogue is. The camera also often feels too far away from the actors, the editing is slapdash such that you're often waiting for cuts that don't happen. Shots go on too long, making you expect to see the actors looking at each other, confused. In fact, the acting is about the only thing this movie has going for it.

Even the movie's opening credit sequence is discouraging. The cast and crew's names appear with an effect that looks like a PowerPoint presentation from 1997.

The plot is something to do with straight guys pretending to be gay to get girls, and gay guys pretending to be straight to get straight guys. There are actually some issues that could have been raised and questions that could have been asked about the role of sexual orientation in modern sexual relationships with this premise, but "Eating Out" doesn't go there. It just uses it to confuse you, and you stop paying attention and go back to noticing everything else the movie is doing wrong.

I will say that the movie does have (only) one scene that works. One guy has phone sex with Gwen, the movie's other token female (next to Tiffany von der Sloot) while he is making out with another guy. This was actually kind of sexy.

Let's not forget that this is also an LGBT-themed movie, and yet it is by turns homophobic and misogynistic. That is perhaps its biggest problem, or at least the most unforgivable thing about it. Like its sequels, the movie only really has two female characters. One, a Tiffany von der Sloot, played by Rebekah Kochan, is only in this movie (and all of its sequels) to be mocked for her sexuality. "Sloot", get it? The other, Gwen Anderson (Emily Stiles) was also basically a female stereotype in the second movie (a girl next door, gay guys' best friend type), but here her character is very different. She's a really nasty piece of work in this movie, spewing constant homophobia. I have to wonder why they made her like that. Are we supposed to like her? She is horrible. She even refers to herself with a particular word for the female anatomy, you know, that word which is supposed to be the worst thing you can call someone. Is that the famous LGBT alliance with feminism?

I am at a loss to explain two things about this movie. One, it was successful enough to spawn four sequels, and two, it was made by and for gay men. People must be really desperate for gay-themed sex comedies. But with so much of high culture having come from by gay men, ie. The Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, Wittgenstein, Tchaikovsky, Nureyev... how did something this tasteless and terrible get released under the LGBT banner?

It's a gay-themed, supposedly pro-feminist movie that ends up being genuinely offensive to both women and gays.

"The Iron Claw" has a great cast and great performances, and is also evocatively photographed and has an eye for period detail. It just feels like its actors, and even its characters, are tied down in a script that won't let them move around and develop.

While watching the movie I often found myself wondering whether you would have to be a rabid pro-wrestling fan to get into the movie all that much. Toward the end though, I realised that even most WWE fans would be bored by the flick too. You probably need to have at least a working knowledge of the Von Erich clan to be able to follow along or really feel much for them.

You feel like you're seeing some brilliant acting at times, but it doesn't hit the emotional mark with you because the script keeps getting in the way.

So I just watched this movie again and rarely, if ever, has my opinion on a film changed more upon second viewing. I saw it around the time it came out and didn't like it. To me it seemed like just a bunch of trucks driving in the desert while people scream at each other for two hours. Watching it again, knowing what to expect, I thought it was brilliant.

This is like a sci-fi-action-carsploitation-arthouse movie. It's an adrenaline rush from start to finish, sure, but it's like every frame of the movie is jampacked with creativity. Every line of dialogue, every performance, offers a hint of something much more. There are so many little details, you know it's a movie that's only going to reward repeated viewings.

I wish I'd watched it on the big screen.

Now, there's a sequel coming out, and I don't know if that's a good thing. It reminds me of "Sin City" and to a lesser extent, "300". Both captured lightning in a bottle and both had lacklustre sequels. Watching "Sin City" made me think you couldn't have too much of a good thing, but "A Dame to Kill For" had all the joy of creation taken out of it. Lightning can't strike twice.

Of course, "Fury Road" is a sequel in itself, and as far as I know there's never been a bad Max Max movie. I can't see them repeating this trick a second time though, so it'll probably have to be something different.

There's a lot going on in "Cobweb". Maybe too much. The movie manages a decent atmosphere, but is too confusingly told, too muddled, and has a mishandled conclusion.

The plot: Peter is a bullied boy with weird and creepy parents. A voice behind the wall in his room starts talking to him and he ends up getting expelled for following their advice.

Peter's parents become even more weird and lock him up. People from school come to pay him a visit, some to help him, some for revenge, right when the voice behind the wall becomes more insistent.

"Cobweb" occasionally grabbed me with its atmosphere and visuals, but the story eventually lost me, and I didn't care that much about it.

"Cat Person" is nowhere near as thought-provoking or razor-sharp as it should be and presumably wants to be. It's like an indie drama smashed into a thriller, or a thriller smashed into an indie drama. The genres duel and undercut each other.

The movie doesn't have enough interesting characters or situations for the incisive drama it should be. There was only one moment where the movie had me thinking of real life, which was where the protagonist and her bestie were barged in on and terrified by their two immature male friends. When I was younger, I was aware that some of my own idiot friends thought it was funny to scare women and girls, but this was a joke I never got, because I don't think it's funny to make people who are generally smaller and weaker than me feel afraid.

There is another scene which probably struck a chord with most viewers, but it missed its mark with me. It's where the protagonist is terrified to be walking around alone at night-time, as a young woman. Feminists want us to believe that all women are terrified of men all the time because we are just so-o-o-o likely to murder them.

The thing is, statistically, they aren't and we're not. Studies have shown that only one in four women is afraid walking around alone at night time, which didn't surprise me considering how often women have come up to me asking for directions after dark. Plus, men are about 80% of all murder victims worldwide. Women are even much less likely to be the victim of a violent crime than men are.

What's funny is that the antagonist, if that's what he is, isn't scary or weird enough for us to share the protagonist's fear. Nicholas Braun is far more suited to an indie drama than he is playing the bad guy in a thriller. He may be very tall, but he doesn't appear even remotely capable of violence.

I suppose the point is we're supposed to ponder if the character really did enough to make the protagonist afraid, or if that was just her overreacting? I don't know. It didn't underline that ambiguity enough, perhaps because the filmmakers were too scared of angering feminists by implying there is ever a time where women shouldn't be terrified.

It actually could have been interesting and thought-provoking, but the filmmakers seem reluctant to go for it. So we're left with tepid thrills and only the occasional interesting story beat.

I found "A League of Their Own" pretty hard to enjoy as a non-baseball fan, which surprised me. I mean, I liked "Bad News Bears". And what '90s kid from Australia didn't like "Rookie of the Year" , and "The Mighty Ducks" as someone who had never even seen, let alone played, baseball or ice hockey?

I guess this one is kind of made for the fans, which is fine. If you're a baseball fan that's a good thing, but I'm not, so I didn't really get into it that much.

I need to say some more things to make this review long enough to submit, so I'll say some things about the actors. Tom Hanks is a stand-out because even though his character begins the movie as unpleasant - like coaches in sports movies always do - he's still really charismatic. He has to be one of the most charismatic actors in history.

Geena Davis also lights up the screen. She was a born star. It seems ridiculous that her career was irreparably damaged after this because of "Cut-throat Island",

I feel a similar way about Yorgos Lanthimos's movies as I do about Peter Greenaway's and Andrzej Zulawski's. I am hugely appreciative that pictures so bold and original exist, but I don't usually enjoy them all that much.

"Poor Things" is no exception. It's a typically crazy idea from Lanthimos, though in a way it might be the most orthodox flick he's made since "Dogtooth". It makes sense as science fiction, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein did.

In the movie, Emma Stone has what must be an amazing role for an actor to take on. It's no surprise she's been nominated for an Oscar. She plays a character who had died when she was with child, and the child's brain was surgically implanted into her skull, making her a baby with an adult's body. As the movie goes on her brain develops, and she starts learning how to talk better, and how to act, though she kind of remains a Kaspar Hauser type figure.

The movie's plot has a very obvious feminist parable underpinning it. A young woman, a ward or even a prisoner to the men around her, discovers sexual pleasure and goes on an odyssey of self-discovery, even working at a brothel by choice because she is thumbing her nose at (patriarchal) Victorian society.

I'm kind of sick of these parables. Stone is great in her role, and so is Dafoe, and the movie mostly works because of them. But I don't want to be preached at or told what to think.

Christopher Abbott (from "Girls") makes a very belated appearance in the last twenty minutes. It feels like his character was added for necessity, to really drive the point home that this movie is a feminist parable. Although he is really just a plot device, Abbott is impressive in the role. It is interesting to reflect that he is almost unrecognisable in his role, and yet Willem Dafoe is not, and Dafoe is the one acting from underneath pounds of make-up.

"Poor Things" just isn't as thought-provoking, shocking, or contrarian as it should be. Its parable is surprisingly heavy handed and obvious, despite the movie being so unwound. I still appreciate that it exists, though.

"When Evil Lurks" is another movie I just didn't get into at all, and was just waiting for it to end.

I don't know what it was about. Something to do with possession making people morbidly obese? I didn't really understand it.

None of the actors make any impression in their roles, nor create any characters you care about or are interested in in the least.

The movie does have a couple of shocking moments, but they're not as shocking as they should be, because I didn't get into the movie at all. It's not like that infamous scene in "Hereditary", where I felt like the director was holding me in the palm of his hand. Here, I was barely paying attention, because I didn't understand or care about what I was seeing on screen.

This is one of those movies where I felt like I was watching it through a window in another room. I feel this irritating distance between me and what's happening on screen. It's as though the filmmakers forgot to provide a point of entry for the viewer, so I never got involved in what I was seeing.

The pacing also feels off. It's like trying to listen to a story told by an insane old man who never pauses to take a breath. You realise you're not going to understand it, so you only pay attention for the story's more shocking moments. But even those aren't all that interesting.

"The Last Voyage of the Demeter" has an intriguing premise, good production values and good performances, but it lost me after about the first act and never really got me back.

The movie is about Dracula's ocean voyage from Romania to England, on a ship called the Demeter. I have read "Dracula" but I don't remember too much about that in the book. Wait a sec, I'll look it up...

So in the book it actually shows the captain's log, narrating the disappearance of each crewmember until only Dracula remains. I'd forgotten about that. The only bit I remember is the thing about him travelling with boxes filled with earth from his castle.

Anyway, the movie lost me after the set-up, more or less. When we finally see Dracula he doesn't look particularly impressive. He's played by an actor from Spain with extraordinary physicality called Javier Botet, who is six-foot-eight but only weighs fifty-four kilograms, due to his Marfan syndrome. His Dracula, though, just looks like a poor special effect, and could have been handled much better, especially with such a unique looking person playing him.

Judy Blume's classic novel is one classic of children's literature I haven't caught up with yet. I've read a bunch now, such as "Go Ask Alice", "My Name is Asher Lev", "The Chocolate War", but for some reason ""Are you there God? It's Me, Margaret." has escaped me.

Now that I've seen this movie version, I might have to change that. The author thinks it's even better than her novel.

The plot is about an eleven year old girl named Margaret and her attempts to find herself amidst a confusing family background (she is Jewish on her father's side, and Christian on her mother's side, but her maternal grandparents disowned her mother for marrying a Jewish boy).

Margaret is also uprooted at the beginning of the movie and taken to a new school where she quickly makes friends and develops a crush on a neighbourhood boy.

Margaret's friend group is strange. They compete with each other over puberty milestones and lord it over each other when they arrive. Also the de facto leader of the group is kind of a bully to poor Laura Danker, a girl who is ostracised because of her precocious puberty.

I liked this movie quite a bit. It kept me interested for most of its length. Abby Ryder Fortson was of course impressive for how well she carried the movie, but for me the standouts were Kathy Bates as her grandmother, and a young actress I hadn't seen before called Elle Graham, who played the mercurial Nancy Wheeler.

I'm wondering why I didn't like the movie as much as I wanted to. It wasn't as touching as you might have hoped, and the ending seemed kind of rushed. I looked at the run time and was disappointed it was almost over, knowing that I was going to like the movie, but would probably forget about it pretty soon.

You know, I was just asking myself that eternal question: how do the people who make movie trailers have a better idea of the kind of movies people want to see, than the people who make the movies the trailers are from?

I mean, the trailer for "Madame Web" was so good I almost watched the movie, but luckily I was warned against it.

Nobody warned me about this "Mean Girls" remake though. And it's a classic example of a movie with a lying trailer. I mean, did you know this remake is a musical? I didn't. None of the previews showed a second of that.

I see you, trailer-making people. You know what we want to see. You know most of us wouldn't have wasted our time if we knew we were going to have to sit through a movie in which at any moment the characters threaten to break into song.

And of course, the songs all suck and are completely forgettable.

Take away the songs, and what we're left with is a bloodless copy of the original movie, with actors left looking like they're holding the ball when the time to pass was five seconds ago. They look startled, like they don't know what they're doing there. At times, they intone classic lines from the original movie, but without any of the panache, and the words fall as flat as the song lyrics do.

I feel bad for the actors. They were never going to be anything better than impostors. The movie seems to be doing well at the box office, so here's hoping it doesn't tank their careers, particularly Angourie Rice and Avantika.

Tina Fey, on the other hand, should have known better.

I just watched this movie last night in an open air setting with brilliant accompaniment from a bluegrass band. It was fantastic.

Keaton's, Chaplin's, Lloyd's silent films don't age. If anything aspects of them are more impressive now than they were upon first release. Keaton did all his own stunts, risking life and limb countless times per production for our entertainment like Lloyd, and painstakingly repeating takes until he got the shot just right, like Chaplin.

Take for example a scene in "Our Hospitality" where Keaton's love is floating perilously close to the edge of a waterfall, and he ties a rope to himself and swings across and snags her right before she falls. How dangerous was this to complete, and how many times did they need to do it before they finally got it right?

Keaton's movies were so inventive and ingenious that you can still feel what I imagine people felt when they saw them the first time, over a hundred years ago. There is a magical quality to them, where you can see the work that went into each frame, and more than anything else, the love. You get the feeling like you're watching geniuses at work.

You don't get the same from modern movies. It's been lost. Despite the zillions of dollars they pour into their monstrosities, what they end up with is shallow and smug and anodyne. There's no love in modern movies.

"Our Hospitality" is like a palate cleanser after suffering through "Madame Web".

Why was I looking forward to this movie?

The trailer made it look like something different, like an anti-romantic comedy, and there aren't many American movies I've seen that are set in Australia.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it ends up being a pretty typical romcom, and the Australian setting is barely utilised. The characters seem to barely notice they're in a different country.

In fact, it's like they know they're in a movie. It never feels believable at all.

The movie is also never funny. The humour is pretty predictable.

The movie gets a lot of mileage out of male humiliation, particularly of the lead, who was played by a guy I never heard of called Glen Powell. At one point, Powell strips naked and Sydney Sweeney appears to be peering up his anus.

So I guess it'll flatter those that hate men, and I know there are plenty of those around. I wonder if most people would find these scenes as cringe-inducing and unnecessary as I did, though.

The main characters also just don't feel like real people.

Legendary Australian actors Brian Brown and Rachel Griffiths here but are both under-utilised, perhaps because they'd show up Powell and Sweeney for the poor job's they're doing, or the screenplay for not really giving them much character to work with.

The whole thing just felt fake and forced, and the movie never really grabbed me. It took an act of will for me to care about it enough to keep watching.

"The Passenger" is a movie that trots over familiar ground, seeming to want to go somewhere new but never really does.

A bullied young man discovers he has a psychopathic workmate when the guy responds to his being bullied with extreme violence. The guy then more or less takes the young man hostage, and they go on a strange journey where the psycho forces the young man to confront his past, sort of like the ghost of Christmas killing.

I realised when watching that great episode of "Six Feet Under" that this is a common plot because it's a common nightmare of nebbishy people. The psycho seems to know way too much about the guy he's kidnapped. His understanding of the guy's psychology is flawless. As such, it's impossible to believe in him, or the situation.

"Six Feet Under" had the wisdom to scale back on this though, so it felt real to watch. I really thought the psycho might kill David. But here? I wasn't sure what to make of it. I didn't care too much, maybe because I didn't buy what I was watching.

For a movie which delves into the psychology of the main character, it doesn't go very deep, and he never aroused my interest nor sympathy. The psycho is also not particularly scary.

"Maggie Moore(s)" is one of those movies where you sit down trying to join the dots to add up all the positives you have on screen into the cohesive whole the movie should have been. It's like a jigsaw puzzle with beautiful pieces that don't quite fit together.

The movie is so much like something the Coen brothers would have made that you realise they also should have made it. That really could have worked. It's set in a small town in which everyone has a distinct personality you can immediately make out, and they're all played by great character actors. It's mostly like "Fargo" out of all their movies, though you can also see a bit of "The Man Who Wasn't There". We have a desperate, pathetic, bumbling man whose transgression onto the wrong side of the law spirals totally out of control and leads to bloodshed.

Jon Hamm plays the foil for the imbecile, I guess, another small town guy who is also in romantic straits, having just lost his wife, but he shows how you can handle that without going off the deep end. It reminded me of that last scene in "Fargo" where Margie is back home with her husband, and all the carnage is over, and you're just thinking, these are good people, and thank god for that.

"Maggie Moore(s)" just left me wondering why a movie with so many decent aspects didn't deliver. The ending, for my last example, feels totally rushed and even bungled. It keeps you waiting for some kind of surprise so long that when it comes it's too late and it just felt like a cop-out. And I also didn't even really care.

It's a shame, I liked Jon Hamm in his role, and Tina Fey could have been good but their relationship was undercooked so it just felt annoying. Micah Stock was also ideally cast as the bumbling loser, and I liked Nick Mohammed as the deputy. Happy Anderson as the supposedly Mute mountain-man (and man-mountain) killer seemed like a character the Coen brothers just hadn't used yet.

But it just doesn't come together, and the ending is so slapdash it almost felt like a spit in the face.

"Blood and Gold" is a mostly entertaining little Nazi-killing action flick from Germany. It has a few cool moments, some that were even unexpected by this viewer.

I don't really know what the movie was about, and it's not off-the-wall crazy enough for that to bother me. It feels like all the expository scenes and dialogue were cut from the movie. I got that there were two good guys, a man and a woman. When the movie begins, we see the man running from Nazis, but we don't know what for. So the movie begins right in the middle of the action, and it mostly continues that way.

Inexplicably and improbably, the Nazis catch the hero, but don't just kill him outright - they hang him, giving the lady hero a chance to enter the fray (she saves him).

What's troubling to me about movies like this is that this is set in a real-life time and place, and yet it's more like a comic book. When you see the Nazis throwing their weight around, killing people and assaulting women, you know what you're seeing really happened. But then when you see the heroes ride in, avoiding gunfire by running sideways and dispatching the Nazis in creatively violent ways, you know that didn't happen. They may have lost the war, but they got away with plenty. Life isn't a movie. So it makes you wish they had created a fake war for their fake heroics, and not reminded us of a real-life situation in which millions of innocents were killed, and the guilty mostly got away with it.

The feel-good sports flick might be the most formulaic of film subgenres. You could argue it's even more familiar to us than the slasher movie. How many times have you seen this in a movie: a down-on-their-luck sports team gets a down-on-his-luck coach to whip them into shape, but the coach doesn't want to be there, he tries to get out of it, he ends up bonding with some of the team over their quirky individuality, he starts seeing within them a chance at redemption, they work hard in preparation for the big game, it looks like all hope is lost when the team suddenly lose hope so the coach has to make a big speech, where typically he realises that he has actually regained confidence in the team, and therefore himself (redemption arc).

If you grew up in the '90s like me, you probably know "Champions"/"The Mighty Ducks", "Cool Runnings", maybe "The Air Up There". Prior to that, there's "Bad News Bears", "Hoosiers", maybe also "A League of their Own", though I haven't seen that one, but it seems like a safe bet.

I don't blame them for basically making the same movie over and over again, with changes in sport and location. The formula works; it's like they finally discovered the secret of alchemy: how to turn rubbish into gold.

I particularly don't mind when somebody like Taika Watiti is at the helm. Watiti breathes new life into this formula. I mostly watched it because of him, and the fact that the movie is set in American Samoa, and I've never seen a movie set in Polynesia before.

The movie is made with warm humour, and an eye for detail, and an understanding of place, and what makes Polynesia special. Note details like Sunday being church day, the whole island's speed limit being a slow crawl, the local cop radioing his mother for details.

Also, there's the fa'fa'fiine. Probably few know about the role of transgenderism in Samoan society. Remember what I said about the coach bonding with individual team members over their individuality? And the bit about Watiti breathing new life into clichés? Here's the best example of both: Watiti uses the current issue of transgenderism to reinvigorate this old cliché, making the individual problem the character has something instantly recognisable, and also making it involve an obscure fact about a fascinating culture.

I'd be lying if I said the movie probably wouldn't have been more interesting with less of the formula, but would it have been as successful?

There is one other problem with the movie, though, and that's the casting of Michael Fassbender as the coach. You can forgive him for never dropping his Irish accent in character as a Dutchman, in a movie this good-natured and charming. But can you forgive them for casting him in the first place? Fassbender is a great actor. Check out "Hunger" and "Shame" for two of the best performances of the new millennium. But whose idea was it to cast an actor that disturbingly real and intense in a movie this cheerful and easygoing? He just doesn't fit. They should have cast a Ryan Reynolds or a Ben Affleck type. Somebody with an easy command of Hollywood charisma, who can appear troubled but you know a wisecrack and a wink at the audience is never far away. Fassbender seems to be working from a reserve of pain the audience can't begin to understand. This isn't his world: watching him here I kept being reminded of the character he played in "12 Years a Slave", who was just pure sadism.

"Mob Land" is one of those movies that is so hard to follow and poorly explained that it barely ever connects with the audience and just becomes an exercise in pointlessness.

It's well shot, with lots of low, moody lighting, and well acted. Stephen Dorff's voice now sounds like he follows his two-pack-a-day habit by chowing down on the ashtray. John Travolta, who most of us haven't seen in a while, totally looks like he belongs in this Dixie-fried thriller, which is surprising because he never fit with something this gritty before. He makes it work.

I'm not too sure what the movie was about. Two guys rob another guy, getting "New Orleans mafia" enforcer Dorff involved. See, if not for reading a plot description, I wouldn't even have known that Dorff was an enforcer, or really that he was after the two guys who robbed the other guy.

And why did that robbery take so long to happen? If that was the catalyst for the movie's action, it should have happened at the beginning, then Dorff should have been properly introduced.

How do movies get made, when the people who make them know so little about how to structure a story to make it most effective, and how to introduce characters?

So here's yet another Rise of the Footsoldier movie, and again with archetypal Cockney tough guy, Craig Fairbrass, who played a minor role in the classic first flick.

Here's what the producers don't seem to understand: the first Footsoldier movie was successful not only because of the violence and constant use of the c-word, but also because the movie had a strong sense of character and story. You knew who it was about and what it was about. You could follow it from scene to scene, knowing what was going on.

With all these sequels, it feels like a melange of scenes that weren't good enough to go in the first movie. There's barely any throughline to the story. All I got was Fairbrass asking everybody if they'd seen somebody called Billy.

Why is it so hard to make a movie with a discernible plot and characters?

Here's a strange one. I guess it's fairly unique. It's one of those movies that only really grabs you right at the end, when it pulls its twist out, and maybe makes you want to go back and re-watch.

I don't know if I will though. Probably the only parts of this movie I'll remember, if any, will be memorable for how disgusting they were. In one scene, Barry Keoghan slurps at semen-laced bathwater after Jacob Elordi has burped the worm in the tub, and in another scene, we see Keoghan's lips red with blood after he goes down on a menstruating woman. Both pretty gross.

There's no denying that Keoghan has something. His character here reminded me of the one he played in "Killing of a Sacred Deer". Remote and unsettling. His small, blue eyes seem to see everything, but his homely face gives nothing away.

I kept thinking that Keoghan is like one of those old-style movie stars like James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart. Despite his unconventional looks and short stature he just has something that makes you want to watch him.

Elordi, on the other hand, I'm still not sure of. He reminds me of Armie Hammer. Tall, too Hollywood handsome. Boring. Without a style of his own. Playing against Keoghan, they're like polar opposites. Elordi looks like a model whose face you'd see on the wall of a hair salon. You forget what he looks like. Keoghan, though? There's a face you can't forget, which, again, is just like Cagney, Bogart, Robinson.

As I say, I might re-watch this movie to see if I like it any better the second time. Not sure if I will though. The twist was impressive, but it was a pretty hard slog to get to it.

I don't normally watch short movies, but here is one I liked enough that I watched it twice, and knew I was going to have to tell you about it.

Blake is a young man in a world where some revolutionary new technology has found a way to link us with our perfect partner. Blake's apparently had no luck with it anyway, sitting in his bathtub scrolling through his 17,000th mismatch, before finally he finds the one for him - but then he accidentally drops the tablet in the bathtub.

Submerging himself in the water, he finds that each time he gets newly soaked, he is teleported to water someplace else, such as the ocean, a swimming pool, a restaurant, a backyard party, a shower room. Eventually, he is teleported, naked, in front of Natalie, the girl for him... or has the tablet made a mistake?

I thought this was a pretty brilliant short movie. It's invigorating, captivating, touching. The performances of the man (Blake) and woman (Natalie) are both striking without any real dialogue. I felt something for both of them.

John Bubniak, who plays Blake, reminded me of Samuel Johnson, early 2000s It boy of Australian TV.

I'm surprised it has only one other review on IMDB, and so few ratings. Where's the audience it deserves? More people should see it.