A Quiet Place Part II

 A fine sequel, taking the characters and situation set up in the first one in logical progression, pushing Millicent Simmonds into more of a lead action role, and presenting several new challenges to our post-apocalyptic family and those they find along the way (along with the same freaky monster things). There's good intercutting of the various perils, tight structure and very few uses of the stupid stick. If it doesn't entirely wrap the storyline, it does at least leave it in a place that feels a lot like resolution. The only negative is that Djimon Honsou has pretty much a nothing role, with nota lot of time between being introduced and being killed.

The Godmother (aka Mama Weed)

 An unusual Huppert movie in that she's somewhat overwhelmed by circumstances early in the film - a widowed Arabic translator whose financial struggles to keep her mother in a decent nursing home find relief when she finds a connection between her mother's lovely nurse and the subject of a police investigation. Huppert is not normally an actress who appears to particularly care how likably she comes across, so this kind of charming caper movie is a delightful diversion in her filmography- full of twists and turns. It is very much a "safe for your mum" drug dealing movie, but that's no bad thing in my book

My name is Guliplili

 This is a bit messily assembled - David Gulpilil talking about his career and life in his own words. The well-worn anecdotal nature of some of the stories is highlighted by cutting between current interviews and gulpilil performing them onstage decades ago, and the main new material is seeing the relationship between David and his carer, which is sweet but not quite enough to hold it all together

Mortal Kombat

 A fun reboot of the based-on-a-video-game series, this combines a lot of ludicrous lore with suitably outlandish characters finding various reasons to punch each other in preparations for a tournament (said tournament not appearing in this movie). The fights are mostly pretty fun, the lore is convoluted but mostly reasonably enjoyable, and the violence quota is suitably high. This is mostly about delivering familiar stuff in a new package, but it does that okay. Also I did pretty well at spotting the three Australian actors with small roles, but less well at spotting the two Australian voice actors.

Spiral from the book of Saw

 This is an improvement on the last attempt to bring "Saw" back, by virtue of feeling vaguely relevant and like it's enaged in its characters rather than being a dull rehash of the best bits, though it still suffers from extended flashbacks-that-you've-already-seen and a villain who's supposed to be a surprise but who feels way too obvious. The thematic look at police corruption is pretty good (although the line "Jigsaw never killed cops" is .. um, not particularly accurate), Chris Rock is not so great at the dramatic moments, Samuel L. Jackson clearly only signed up for a few days but makes them count, and it mostly works as a middling entry without all the convolutions of the later plots that turned the series into extremely gory soap opera. I enjoyed this while making the mental modifications for this just being a regular old saw movie

Cliff Walkers

 This is a beautiful looking 1930s Chinese spy thriller, with old-fashioned cars and suits and so much snow.... but unfortunately the plot feels a tad incomprehensible, with a lot of fairly undercharacterised people running around trying to find out who's betraying who. It's almost worth watching for the look, but the content just isn't there.

First Cow

 There's the core of a good idea in this, but it's all dealt with a little too slowly and with not enough investment in the characters to make them interesting. The basic concept, an odd kinda heist movie involving milk, is sound, although a lot of how it plays out requires too many characters to be stupid when it's convenient to the plot, and the central relationship isn't ever really warm enough to make us care how it ends up playing out.