Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023)

All the various models of Barbie and Ken dolls live in a pink, sterile fantasy world or relentless cheer and inanity, until the 'sterotypical Barbie' suffers an existential crisis and has to enter the real world to try to fix herself. Naturally, this proves to be a jarring experience and produces some decent scenes of culture-clash comedy, akin to that seen in some time-travel films, which are a very welcome break from the endless hyper-choreographed musical numbers in Barbieland.

The executives of Mattel of course do not like their commercial property being compromised, to they try to put her back into the box. The fact that the film was authorised by Mattel really sums it up in a nutshell: it both satirises and promotes the company and the product. So everyone's content, while no one can be fully satisfied, including any segment of the audience. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as the primary Barbie and Ken do clearly have a blast, at least.

6/10

Black Adam (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2022)

Still the people behind the DCEU persist in trying to compete with Marvel, when all they have as interesting and well-known characters is Superman (potentially) and Batman (always). Wonder Woman doesn't cut the mustard, as even just the painfully reductionist name will tell you. So, unable to fall back on any of these, they have to go with crappy variations on the omnipotent being theme, this time with 5,000-year-old demigod Black Adam, brought back from eternal imprisonment to combat returned forces of evil in yet another made up country, basically a generic mishmash of various Middle Eastern ones.

Marvel have made some absolute disasters along the way, most notoriously Madame Web, but this has a good go at being just as bad. Normally The Rock, as the titular antihero,  is decent value for money when playing with his meat-mountain image for comic effect, but any attempt to do so is hopelessly drowned under a two-hour-torrent of extremely boring CGI fight after fight. Nor can Pierce Brosnan, as a wise old magician, save the affair from utter pointlessness.

3/10

Spectral (Nic Mathieu, 2016)

The bravest feat this action film achieves is choosing to wreck an Eastern European city in a battle against supernatural enemies rather than the usual L.A. So, the capital of Moldova (played by Budapest) gets it, with an impending civil war exarcerbated by hordes of ghosts that kill on contact. Naturally it's left to the U.S. army to sort things out, represented by a scientist, who sees the ghosts for what they really are, tagging along with a bunch of rent-a-grunts. Basically Aliens, but with considerably less plot logic, despite bunging in lots of pseudoscience. Ho hum.

4/10