Crime 101
We all know what it's like to receive a prettily-packaged present that doesn't quite live up to its wrapping. Crime 101 is like that, a slick thriller with a fine cast that presents all the cliches of the genre in an attractive enough way... but is not as satisfying as it ought to be.
Adapted from a Don Winslow novella and set in and around Los Angeles, the story is as American as the Super Bowl. Yet the writer-director is an Englishman, Bart Layton; the leading man is an Australian, Chris Hemsworth; and the obligatory headcase is played by an Irishman, Barry Keoghan.
In addition, there's Mark Ruffalo as a dishevelled LAPD detective with marital problems, plus Halle Berry and Nick Nolte, not to mention a cameo for Jennifer Jason Leigh. So the cast is 18-carat, to say nothing of the diamonds. You guessed it: there's a jewel thief at large.
Someone is driving up and down California freeway 101 carrying out armed heists, and Detective Lou Lubesnick (Ruffalo) is on the case. I remember Clive James back in the 1970s identifying one of the great mysteries of American television: how could Lieutenant Kojak dress so well and Lieutenant Columbo so badly, on what was presumably the same salary?
Well, Lubesnick is in the latter tradition, unkempt and unshaven, but with a mind as sharp as the razor he appears not to possess. In accordance with another crime-thriller tradition, he's a grizzled white guy who spends a fair amount of time squabbling with his sleek black partner (Corey Hawkins).
Their quarry is Mike Davis (Hemsworth), a criminal with a conscience, who, like another pair of 1970s TV icons, outlaws Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry, does all his robbing without killing anyone.
As you may have gathered, there's a deeply confused morality to the story and it persists all the way to the end.
Berry plays a high-end insurance broker keen on yoga and mindfulness tapes, whose iron-clad integrity lasts until the sexism in her office gets too much for her. Meanwhile, Lubesnick is such a softie that not even the law, which he's spent his entire career upholding, can quite stop him helping nice people down on their luck.
In other words, neither plot nor characterisation stands up to scrutiny, and I haven't even started on the screeching high-speed car and motorbike chases which bring chaos and carnage to the LA streets without attracting the attention, so far as I could tell, of a single traffic cop.
Still, do any of these quibbles really matter? Glossy heist thrillers need exciting car chases as much as they need relentless throbbing music, and Crime 101 offers both. Not much of it adds up, but watching it fail to add up is modest fun.
There's more modest fun in Whistle, a horror film set in and around a high school somewhere in America's industrial heartland, but also directed by a Brit, Corin Hardy. Which doubtless explains why one of the teachers is played by Nick Frost. Oddly, none of his pupils seem to notice that chubby Mr Craven, dishing out detentions here in the US rust belt, has a pure English accent.
Even more oddly, it takes them an age to realise that the ancient Aztec death whistle found in the locker of a basketball star who perished in terrible circumstances might possibly be cursed.
I'm not kidding about the terrible circumstances; the poor lad was incinerated in a spectacular fireball while having a shower. 'Something about his death doesn't add up,' concludes one of the other pupils much later in the film, and she's quicker on the uptake than most.
Whistle isn't a comedy but it certainly made me laugh.
That said, it also has a few nicely choreographed scares and should keep even the most fearless of you well away from Aztec death whistles for the foreseeable future.
Wuthering Heights
Emerald Fennell's adaptation of Emily Bronte's celebrated 1847 novel didn't float my boat, but it certainly wasn't for want of water. The amount of rain in it could raise the Queen Mary.
With Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, the moody pair who rival Romeo and Juliet as literature's most star-crossed lovers, Fennell re-imagines the story as a dark fairy tale. There are unsubtle nods to Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood, plus lashings of kinky sex. It's less Wuthering Heights, more Fifty Shades Of Grimm.
As children, Cathy and Heathcliff bond across the class divide. Her father (Martin Clunes) has brought a grubby urchin home to Wuthering Heights, the family's storm-lashed Yorkshire farm, and they soon become playmates.
In adulthood, 'playmates' isn't the half of it. In the book their love is never consummated. On screen they're at it constantly once Heathcliff has returned, his social status enhanced, after years away. But by then Cathy has married her wealthy, cultured neighbour Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif).
At 35, Robbie is way too mature to play Bronte's complex teenage heroine. And while she and Elordi are very pleasing on the eye, their Cathy and Heathcliff are so shallow and selfish that I could not have felt less invested in their emotional tumult.
Meanwhile, Edgar's sister Isabella (Alison Oliver) is used purely as comic relief - until the vengeful Heathcliff marries her and subjects her to degradation worthy of a porn film.
Fennell, whose film Saltburn showed her fondness for sexual depravity on screen, sexes up Wuthering Heights in other ways, including music by Charli XCX. But it's to service a love story about two people I simply didn't care about.