News of the World

 This is a weird case of a film that knows that the stories you choose to tell can have a literal effect on the world, while at the same time not recognising that a post civil war film with minimal black people and non speaking native Americans is not a good look. It's effective at what it does, i just wish it chose to do more

Occupation: Rainfall

 Director/writer/editor Luke Sparke desperately needs friends to pick up at least two of his jobs - his action directing and editing borders on the incoherent too frequently as aliens and humans battle for the fate of humanity. The plotting is a little overstuffed as various factions pursue separate goals, but on the plus side this looks remarkably like a proper big action sci-fi movie with a few nicely ridiculous ideas.

A Call to Spy

 This kinda falls a bit flat - the three leading women are kept apart way too often and the film never really does a great job of selling how important their work is - it's just sorta assumed as spies helping the french underground, we'll know the importance - we never really see a lot of individual missions or tight squeezes or tense moments. It's one of the reasons why history needs to be rejiggled a bit for narrative purposes - if your three most important characters hardly ever met, bring them together anyway, or at least look like they're showing some common purpose. It's not great at building the bits of research into a compelling overall narrative. Still, the three lead performances are reasonably strong, there's some decent sequences and it works okay - but it does feel like there's a couple of much better movies that could come from this topic which this movie never quite is.

Shadow in the Cloud

 This is another "good execution, dumb premise" film - it's largely helped by the decision to isolate Chloe Grace Moretz early and play as much of the movie on her as possible. Some of the scripting getting her isolated is a little ropey and feels more like a chance to get a lot of anti woman statements in the script under the excuse that they're being said by assholes, and a couple of the plot twists are ludicrous but it plays what it has pretty darn well

My Salinger Year

 This is something that does pretty much what it looks like what it's going to do - young woman enters the literary world as an assistant and finds her voice through supporting other writers. It's name droppy and Qualley doesn't exactly inspire expectations of hidden depths, but it's nice to see Sigourney in condescending upper class mode and it satisfies as a classy new York vision

Pieces of a Woman

 For the title and subject of this, we get a few too many pieces of Shia LaBoef early on, leaving Kirby a tad undefined for a little too long - given this is a film largely about a woman, post the death of her baby after childbirth, and the way her responses are governed by everybody else around her. Still when the film focusses on Kirby and her attempts to regain normality and process her grief, it really finds its place and is powerful and strong.

Monster Hunter

This is an adequate time passer without ever hitting the insane heights of some of Jovavich/Anderson's previous work - based on a game series that isn't particularly plot heavy, this therefore ends up with fairly thin characters running around arid desert locations fighting various monsters which are mostly pretty generically designed. On the plus side the film minimises the guff, emphasising the monster fighting and the bonding between Mila and Tony Jaa, with a couple of exotic extra characters entering late in the flick - on the minus, the monster fights never get a chance to go gorgeously over the top - it's all presented fairly flatly - even the weird weapons don't really get a chance to show off as much as they should.