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The Beast in Me is a failed attempt at a dark thriller - predictable, earnest, and about as suspenseful as filing a tax return, and it leaves about as much charm behind as an empty McDonald's box crushed on the sidewalk.

The premise should work: Claire Danes as a grieving, unstable writer; Matthew Rhys as the enigmatic neighbor with secrets. Instead, Netflix swings its usual blunt moral hammer: the queer, grieving woman is instantly excused for all her complexity, while the rich, straight man with a slightly dangerous face is immediately filed under "villain." And I mean immediately, from his first scene, where he offers financial help to a woman clearly drowning in debt, the show practically screams: "See? He's BAD. Only a MONSTER would offer money!"

Apparently, in Ntfx-land, a man helping a woman is tantamount to serial murder. Their logic is a wondrous thing.

Rhys, master of restrained menace in The Americans, is wasted here. His soft, thoughtful qualities are erased by the show's terror of ambiguity. The moment he steps on screen, you can hear the writers whispering "Villain!" as subtly as a foghorn. So much for noir's nuance. Noir thrives on doubt, not on moral coloring books.

Aggie, meanwhile, cannot possibly be in the wrong. She's grieving, she's a struggling artist, and she's lesbian. With that holy trinity of narrative protection, she could set the neighborhood on fire and still get a soft-focus redemption arc.

What remains is a show that pretends to explore the darkness within people but is too frightened of moral complexity to actually go there. It wants to be Hitchcock, but it ends up as Hygiene Hitchcock: sanitized, predictable, and narratively pre-chewed.

It would be time to stop turning every wealthy, straight man into Epstein Lite and every queer woman into Saint Trauma. Real noir has claws. This has safety scissors.

Hollywood resurrects an old concept, pumps it full of protein powder, algorithmic pop, and the unmistakable scent of creative bankruptcy. The result is The Fall Guy, a sunburnt migraine masquerading as a movie.

Gosling and Blunt have the chemistry of two mannequins from ZARA sharing a showroom. The film keeps insisting they're in love; I've seen fiercer sparks between two people reaching for the same ripe avocado. Blunt is trapped in the usual "strong female lead" template - all noise, no nuance - while Gosling floats through the plot like a guilty golden retriever begging for forgiveness.

The Australian beach scene, where Blunt cheerfully overshares details of their fling to the entire crew, is so mortifying I considered blushing on their behalf. And just when you think it can't get dumber, Gosling calls her to discuss their relationship while being chased by assassins on a speedboat. Romance by way of Looney Tunes. Not endearing, just ludicrous.

Even the movie-within-the-movie, Metalstorm (or whatever cardboard title they slapped on it), is a soulless blockbuster parody without the self-awareness.

As for the stunts: the film fires them at you like desperate confetti. There's even a stunt-performing dog, thrown in as a last-ditch plea for audience affection. "Please clap," the movie seems to whimper.

Cherry on the cake is the dreadful pacing. Imagine stop-and-go traffic accompanied by an air horn. And every now and then, it quotes a far better film, as if whispering, "Remember when cinema had soul? We don't.

Easy A is a film that mistakes shrillness for wit and self-awareness for substance. Emma Stone spends the entire runtime breaking the fourth wall like a caffeinated tour guide, delivering a monologue nobody asked for. Her performance is so mannered and grating it makes Ellen Page in Juno look like Katharine Hepburn in comparison.

The plot - The Scarlet Letter mangled through a pop-culture blender - relies on cheap quips, forced sass, and the kind of faux-feminist moralising that flatters itself into thinking it's clever but it isn't.

The parents are sitcom escapees armed with "quirky" one-liners, the random African kid is pure tokenism, and the script reeks of "fashionable" smugness that aged like warm mayonnaise. Every scene winks so hard at the audience it's a miracle the film doesn't develop a lazy eye.

Unfortunately, Easy A is neither smart, nor daring, nor funny. It's a smug, noisy adolescent desperately elbowing you to acknowledge its brilliance but you just want it to shut up.