Dont Say a Word (2001): review: 2.5/10

A psychiatrist lives in a large apartment in New York with a small girl and a woman with a broken leg which is in plaster. The other leg is bare. She lies on the beg and he gives her bare leg a sponge bath, presumably as a prelude to some sort of sexual activity. The bare leg is nice to see and, happily, features a lot in the film.

The small girl likes to play hiding games. But one day the shrink cannot find the girl: this is because she has been kidnapped as part of a complex scheme run by an unpleasant but cleverly calculating cold-hearted Englishman (probably from Yorkshire): his goal is to obtain detail of how to find a big ruby from a patient at the psychiatrist's hospital and to get the pyschiatrist to extract the information from the patient.The Englishman uses bad language and is threatening and even violent. He seems to be able to watch people all the time His coherts are unloveable too. Luckily one of the characters is a female police officer with beautiful long hair. She is very efficient. Eventually she will catch up with the baddies in a graveyard at night!

It starts off promisingly, but the plot is too convoluted and the characters not well fleshed out enough to garmer sympathy: it goes on forever

None of the acting is quite convincing- Murphy is totally out of her depth and, like everyone else, is just trying too hard. Douglas goes about being gruffly self assured and husky- as ever. The sound score is unsubtle.  The film requires more humour.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009): review: 2/10

A journalist decides to pursue a District Attorney, whom he believes has been falsifying evidence to win convictions. He has a personality-free girlfriend whose happens to work for the DA too.

A film that plods helplessly along, failing to entrance at all, featuring implausable characters and zero wit.

It is also lacking in atmosphere and has an annoying glossiness about it.

Solitary Man (2009): review: 5.5/10

An aging lothario and disgraced car dealer visits a university campus with his girlfriends daughter, with whom he has sex, something which causes him no end of bother.

Michael Douglas plays the usual, as do Danny deVito and Susan Sarandon in a piece that, while entirely watchable, does little to suprise.

The reason for this might lie with the moralistic intent of the makers. We are supposed to tut tut, I think, at Douglas's character all the way through: the true dreadfulness of pursuing skirt and all its destructiveness apparantly revealed. But since nothing Douglas does in the movie is really bad, this attitude serves merely to dampen the viewers' delight in seeing a shark gobble its fish.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010): review: 1/10

Notorious financier Gecko is released from prison, writes a book and gives lectures. His dreary daughter is having a relationship with a young broker with an effeminate manner*  and big dark eyes: thanks in part to Gecko this fellow sees the light and rejects the wicked ways of speculative capitalism.

This results in the usual macho posturing in boardrooms as well as supposedly creepy meetings and conversations with his mentor.

This is a long, preachy and joyless film, an utter stinker, which even Douglas cannot save from tedium.

*Don't you think he looks rather like the Marc Almond in his "Tainted Love" days?