A set of mini-reviews for the movies I watched in the recent past follows!

• Blue Streak (8 Nov): Martin Lawrence is a thief who steals a diamond from a museum.  When police arrive at the scene, he is forced to run to an adjacent construction site, where he hides the diamond.  He is sent to prison and gets out several months later - but when he returns to the site, he finds it's now become a police station!  He therefore poses as a cop to get the diamond - and actually does a great job!  An entertaining movie.
• Phone Booth (11 Nov): Publicist Stu Sheppard (Colin Farrell) enters a phone booth in Manhattan - and receives a call from an anonymous sniper who says he will kill him if he hangs up or leaves the booth.  Intriguing premise, well executed and particularly well acted movie, with lots of stylish camerawork!  Written by Larry Cohen and directed by Joel Schumacher.
• Memento (29 Nov): Guy Pearce plays detective Leonard Shelby.  His wife was raped and killed by someone he only knows as "John G.", and ever since the incident, he's been unable to form new memories due to a head injury.  Under this condition, he tries to find this John G., using polaroids, notes on scraps of paper and tattoos on his body, as clues for himself!  Very unique movie with a unique concept and a totally fantastic presentation style (the entire movie is presented backwards!).  Directed by Christopher Nolan, who wrote the screenplay based on the short story "Memento Mori" by his brother, Jonathan Nolan.
• The Matrix Revolutions (29 Dec): Only a few hours are left before thousands of sentinels will attack Zion, thus starting the machine wars that will determine humanity's fate.  After Morpheus and Trinity rescue Neo from the Trainman and his world between the Matrix and the real world, Neo seems to be humanity's only hope.  Meanwhile, Agent Smith has become one uncontrollable program, copying himself throughout the Matrix.  The final act in the Wachowski Brothers's trilogy I enjoyed a lot, the added bonus being I got to watch it in an IMAX theatre!  The visual effects were simply stunning and better than anything I've seen before, though the story was rather straightforward (I expected something far more complex after everything that happened in The Matrix Reloaded).  But everything was neatly tied up, I felt.
• Johnny English (1 Jan): Rowan Atkinson is secret agent Johnny English, who must save England from being taken over by a maniacal Frenchman called Pascal Sauvage (John Malkovich).  A funny comedy which I appreciated because it had some good jokes and relied less on slapstick humour.  Directed by Peter Howitt.
• The Usual Suspects (3 Jan): A crippled conman, Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) narrates to Special Agent David Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) a tale of how he and four others ("the usual suspects" of the title) came to be at the scene of a bloodbath on a boat, starting off with a police line-up days ago.  The tale is a twisted and fast-paced one - as the five are imprisoned on the pretext of a stolen truck, they plot a crime - which leads to others and eventually to the realisation that a feared crime lord called Keyser Soze may be setting them up.  A superbly done, complex movie that has lots of style!  Kevin Spacey won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and Christopher McQuarrie won one for his screenplay.  The movie is directed by Bryan Singer (X-Men).

A movie I would like to watch is the new John Woo film, Paycheck, starring Ben Affleck.  It's based on a Philip K. Dick story and seems pretty interesting!