Movie: Last Seen Alive
Director: Brian Goodman
Stars: Gerard Butler, Jaimie Alexander, Russell Hornsby

Gerard Butler, playing frantic. Okay, for those of you still reading this is actually better than its IMDB 5.7. For a start it is a tight 95 minutes and manages to maintain tension, despite it being a familiar story. Wife disappears at highway gas station and husband quickly falls under suspicion per Policing 101 – and has to kick on himself.

Normally I do not really like flashbacks outside courtrooms, but they are kept short here and are used effectively first to broaden then to shrink the range of possibilities. Wraps up a little too quickly, but other than that, does not threaten your suspension of disbelief. For “wind down” entertainment this is fair value for the cinema but also will work well on a streamer once it gets there.

Movie: The Batman
Director:  Matt Reeves
Stars: Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright
Firstly, for the impatient, this runs for three hours, and you should move on now.
Okay. Two main thought lines. Pattinson and mood.
Robert Pattinson makes a better Bruce Wayne than I would have predicted, even after I thought he was particularly watchable in Tenet. He has not bulked up, but he at least firmed up. It struck me as he delivered his early narration that it is a pity a younger Carl Urban never got a run as Bruce, but Pattinson’s done a good job here. There are some solid names in the cast, and they turn up. Jeffrey Wright I really rate.
For the first two hours I was feeling this as a grim, gritty and well envisioned Batman that was patient but involving. The soundtrack, the cold and wet weather, the dark lighting, and the limited dialogue were all contributing to a Gotham that was simultaneously novel yet dependably Gotham. It was certainly living up to its 8.4 on IMDB.
Then in the third hour it shifted: the tone started to dissolve, rather than moving towards resolution, threads were unravelling, and the number of pseudo endings became annoying. The word count seemed to be rising for little benefit. I went from deep involvement to wondering whether the cinema had effectively communicated to the shopping centre there was a session going past midnight, and to leave the stairs open. As a movie fan this does not really matter to me, I already had what I paid for by then, but you might want to be aware of it before you commit.

Movie: Belfast
Directors:  Kenneth Branagh
Stars:  Jamie Dornan, Catriona Balfe, Jude Hill

This is an affecting film and not terribly far from the critical acclaim. While it starts with panoramic shots of modern Belfast it is set in the black and white of the sixties. Clever because black and white vision is dependent entirely on shades of grey.

It is built on tensions; between the innocence of childhood and the realities confronted in adulthood, the ties of the past and the needs of the future, community and opportunity, wives and husbands, freedom and security, the mob and the individual, and the list goes on as far as your seeking for them - even between the projected future hope of Star Trek and Thunderbirds with the old-as-time sectarian violence. Underlying everything is the sense that some terrible tragedy is only minutes away. That is a lot to pack into a small, almost claustrophobic, film that runs under 100 minutes, and you have to bring it because limitations, partly from C-19 restrictions, exist.
Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe as the central parents, and Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds as Jamie’s character’s parents, bring plenty of acting heft. Hard to know with young children but Jude Hill’s Buddy is well directed with a face that screams childlike naïveté.

Hard to recommend widely, how much of this is late boomer and early X-er dependent is difficult to say. Watch a few trailers, and certainly a film to test a new date with.

Movie: The Lost City
Director:  Aaron Nee, Adam Nee
Stars:  Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe

Sandra Bullock is about to turn 58, and Channing Tatum just turned 42. Full credit to this film for turning those tables, but if I told you Sandra Bullock was playing a widowed romance novelist and Tatum a himbo what would you think would happen and how? If you can still enjoy a movie even though you can lay out the rough plot arc accurately a few minutes in, but you get a kick out of seeing just how they will fill out the details, then this will be fine.

This was well put together, elicited a lot of out-loud laughter from the audience, and was surprisingly good “switch off” fun. It has a delightful small role from Brad Pitt - which very much left me hungry for more - perhaps a PittBull romance.

Movie: Operation Mincemeat
Director: John Madden
Stars:  Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald

Kelly Macdonald, Colin Firth, Mark Gatiss, Jason Isaacs, Tom Wilkinson - I read this on the cineplex blurb when checking what was released that day and thought “Well I can’t say no to that!”. Unfortunately, Tom Wilkinson isn’t in it, so no idea what that was about, but still if you like a bit of British then hard to miss here. Oh, and Simon Russell Beale is slipped in as a Churchill not being played to the hilt as a Churchill impersonation for once. Johnny Flynn plays Ian Fleming too. Yes, that Ian Fleming.

On the good side my WW2 “utter bullshit” detector was not blaring at me throughout the entire film which made for a pleasant change, and, admittedly, even some of the times it did go off it was trivial stuff. Nonetheless with the actual tedium of intelligence work being largely skipped over this was turned into a melodrama with a focus on the relationships between the team members. There was no getting around the whiff that this film might have been somewhat inspired by the money that the woeful The Imitation Game drew.

It is not bad, not great. If you know nothing, you will know something by the end but, by definition, you will not be able to put these things into context. Of course, if you know anything then the suspense cannot work - especially in the way they have presented it. What I suppose it does, is it makes a WW2 movie a potential date pic, particularly if the parties like a bit of Firth.

Juddy keeps busy consuming cultural media while posing as a student at a major Sydney university, thus shirking real work. He hosts pub trivia, and tutors at said university, for beer and book money.