The Fault in Our Stars (2014)

Adapted from the novel by John Green and directed by Josh Boone, this is a romance about two teens with terminal cancer. It’s more watchable than that description might suggest. 

Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort star as the main couple, Hazel and Gus, and both are fairly compelling. Since it’s very much from a teen perspective, the adults are oddly marginalised. Laura Dern just about has a role as Hazel’s mother, but Sam Trammell is a complete nothing of a character as her father.

Another interesting aspect is Hazel’s (dying) wish to seek out an obscure author whose work she admires (played by Willem Dafoe). When she eventually meets him, in Amsterdam, he’s a disappointingly unpleasant alcoholic. It’s a slightly odd plot – especially when he shows up again, and surprisingly hasn’t been humbled or redeemed by his encounters with the innocently adoring fan.

An unusual affair all round, but it certainly makes you think.

Inside Man (2006)

Directed by Spike Lee, this is an unusual and original thriller focused on a hostage siege during a New York City bank robbery. 

Clive Owen masterminds the heist. Denzel Washington is the detective and hostage negotiator, who finds that the case is stranger than his usual tasks. Jodie Foster plays a mysterious power broker who tries to help the bank’s founder Christopher Plummer protect something in his safe deposit box. 

It’s edgy and dynamic, and also occasionally funny. 

The music by jazz musician and trumpeter Terence Blanchard is oddly jarring at times, but it works. 

The three leads are all at their best, although I would have liked more dialogue from Clive Owen.

Platoon (1986)

Oliver Stone’s first Vietnam war film seems trashy in places (the script could have been stronger), but it does a good job of storytelling. There are three main threads: the young soldier who loses his innocence (Charlie Sheen), two feuding sergeants (Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger), and a wider narrative about the US forces being out of their depth in a conflict that made no sense to them. It’s gory and harrowing at times. Watching it so soon after Apocalypse Now meant it was difficult not to compare them, and Platoon has none of that masterpiece’s poetry or visual flair. It’s rather surreal that the star of this film is the son of the star of that film, almost as if Platoon is the sequel.

If you believe Full Metal Jacket, all new soldiers had their heads shaved. Why, then, did Charlie Sheen have long, 1980s-style hair?

Despite its flaws, Platoon builds to a satisfying resolution, and as an anti-war film it very effectively shows you how desperate and horrible it was for these young men.

Clear and Present Danger (1994)

Harrison Ford stars in this adaptation of a Tom Clancy thriller about a CIA man who gets involved in both a Colombian drug war and the murky secrets of the White House. Maybe it worked as a novel, but as a film it’s too long and too slow. Buried in there somewhere are two interesting stories – a guns ’n’ copters action plot and a political saga built around protocols that sadly seem almost quaint in the debased Trump era. Instead, you get a rather drab and convoluted mess that cannot satisfy. That said, Harrison Ford is as riveting as ever, Willem Dafoe isn’t bad as field agent John Clark and James Earl Jones is convincing as the dying Vice Admiral James Greer.