What have you watched recently? 3D!

Mad Max: Fury Road - the 2010s were really the decade when endless sequels and franchise films came to dominate mainstream film to an overwhelming degree. And yet only a handful of them IMO had lasting worth beyond (at best) a fun, forgettable night at the cinema. There's Toy Story 3. Mission Impossible Fallout. The Last Jedi. Kinda start running out quickly after that. But, above all of them, towers Fury Road.

I remember being slightly underwhelmed when I first watched it - I mean very slightly, but still that tad less gushingly enthusiastic than others. That said, I think I've watched it four times now, and it just gets better and better. To see those hundreds of millions pumped into a wildly idiosyncratic vision of next-generation action movie carnage... it pretty much stands alone in that sense. As great and hypnotic as the endless action is, it would mean little if the storytelling wasn't so blissfully economical. The world and ideas and characters are rich here, but they simply exist naturally in the post-apocalyptic fever dream: exposition is at a bare minimum, and the sheer pace of the chase is reflected in its zero-nonsense storytelling.

THE greatest, most blistering aberration in recent mainstream cinema history.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park - if I were to choose my two favourite popcorn flicks, it'd probably boil down to Fury Road and Jurassic Park. But as a kid The Lost World was the one I got to see in the cinema, having only caught up with the original on VHS. Saw this sequel twice at the time, but pretty sure I hadn't seen it since the big screen release (maybe on ITV or something one quiet schoolnight).

Oh boy. Spielberg definitely didn't capture the magic twice. I mean, in some ways, that was inevitable. Part of the magic of JP is how it waits patiently to show you what everyone's there for. But once you've seen a raptor or t-rex, that trick can't be repeated. Sequels, in a sense, are doomed by that inability to pull off the same reveals, so perfectly realised in 1993. Maybe that's built into the franchise - the idea of a dinosaur theme park is an amazing one, but hardly robust or complex enough to count the four and counting sequels it has spawned.

But I think this fails in ways beyond that too. The middle act is the strongest: the action scenes are pretty well-crafted, and supporting characters are dutifully picked off in fun, dino-tastic ways. But it's the final act where all falls apart. It's clearly tacked on, but worse it's so terribly contrived. I'm no fan of plot hole nitpicking, but this just descends into ill-explained nonsense ( ) to justify its big dramatic dino-rampage at the end. Main characters just disappear, and even the primal thrill of a t-rex rampaging through an American city feels hollow and poorly realised. Spielberg, at his best, is one of the smartest of blockbuster filmmakers - but this sequel is just dumb.

Le Corbeau - recent Mubi watch, and a fascinating one. Henri-Georges Clouzot's is a valuable relic of occupied France - even down to the morally-murky production history of the movie. But the film itself is a great exercise in the cinema of mid-century paranoia: a small town's social fabric being torn asunder by anonymous letters revealing secrets and making wild allegations. The final reveal is barely significant: the damage the eponymous raven does is what drives the film forward, and the motivations are secondary. It remains a straight-talking, provocative film to this day - tackling the kind of taboo social issues other countries wouldn't get around to cinematically for decades.