fresh movie reviews and human wordsmithing while you wait

dir: Josh Safdie

2025

Now this is a movie. This is a FILM.

Not an enjoyable one, at least for me, but you have no doubt while watching this that it’s an actual, honest to Gods, film.

Fucking hell it is exhausting, though. Oh my stars it is like a two and a half hour migraine in the back of a stationwagon driving down a very bumpy road with no suspension whatsoever.

Some people might compare it to the films of John Cassavetes, or maybe the Crank movies, but to me this is, like many things from the 1990s, the wrong lessons learned from the “right” movies.

This is what I mean: a lot of people watched and liked Boogie Nights. Regardless of its subject matter, and regardless of the profound dumbness of one of the central actors, it’s a remarkable, propulsive experience. Towards the back end of the movie, there’s this sequence which very loosely is based on the so-called ‘Wonderland Murders’, or at least the precipitating event being when some foolish fools tried to rip off a drug dealer.

In that movie, everything that can be done to ramp up the tension onscreen and in the audience is done. There’s a too loud soundtrack, there’s people acting erratically before and after doing copious amounts of blow, there’s our knowledge that they’re all about to commit a terrible mistake, and there’s a half-naked Asian-American chap striding around in his underwear letting off firecrackers.

It’s all too much, but it’s just a sequence, a set piece, so to speak, one which happens before everything falls apart for a lot of the characters. It’s maybe ten minutes, fifteen minutes at most?

The Safdie Brothers saw that scene and thought “we need to make movies, and all our movies will be like that sequence, but for two hours plus, every fucking time!”

That’s why Good Times exists, that’s why Uncut Gems exists.

This cinema is not for the faint of heart. Or maybe I’m not doing enough work to imagine that there might be people out there who enjoy feeling like they’ve downed 7 Red Bulls in a row.

It looks amazing, I mean, making something now that looks like the 1950s is far more complex than slapping a few filters on or getting the costuming right. I think that’s mostly down to the skills of legendary cinematographer Darius Khonji, but what do I know. Maybe Timothée Chalamet made it all happen just with the power of his poxy teenage mo.

dir: Chloe Zhao

2025

What a mixed bag.

I was excited to see this, or at least the critical acclaim was off the charts and awards seemed to be pouring from the heavens, and now that I’ve seen it, part of me thinks critics have been trained like Pavlovian dogs to start slavering at the sound of Academy Awards chatter, or almost anything to do with Shakespeare.

Jessie Buckley is a great actor, or at least has been some times in other movies. I don’t think this is a great performance, here, at all. It’s so actorly, so contrived in certain spaces, so distracting in its efforts, it quite often took me out of the story and made me wonder why the actor in question made the decisions she made, and why the director and everyone else went along with it.

Paul Mescal is possibly an okay actor who I’ve enjoyed watching in other things. I did not enjoy or appreciate many if not most of his scenes here. They’re so mannered and contrived and distracting in the effort involved. It quite often took me out of the story and made me wonder what bad choices the actor was making, and left me wondering why the director and everyone else went along with it.

Emily Watson has been a great actor for decades, and does masterful work here, as a somewhat disapproving but ultimately supportive mother-in-law to the main family. And what a family it is.

A woman, Agnes, (Jessie Buckley) awakes from a nap in the hollow of a log open to the elements, to the sky. It just happens to be beneath a large tree, next to a deep hole in the ground. She wakes, and calls her hawk from the branch it rests on, and it alights on her glove and eats the scraps of meat she has ready for it.

Nature. It’s great, isn’t it? We get the sense she is a deeply witchy woman, of the forest, of the Earth itself.

As she returns to a rural property, a bored tutor (Paul Mescal) to some young lads learning Latin spies her out the window, and approaches her. This is not an Elizabethan meet-cute: it’s an awkward intro to two characters who are almost always awkward with each other except during a sex scene that will only happen ages from now. There is much space in between.

They eventually become a couple, over the objections of both families, but since she’s pregnant, eh, whatcha gonna do? The father is currently a glover’s son, subject to abuse, but he somehow has a plan to write something, maybe a sonnet or two, maybe a play. Is there money in that?

dir: Max Minghella

2024

When I randomly found out about a film I’d never heard of, that was made around the same time as The Substance, with similar themes and a body horror aesthetic, only starring Elisabeth Moss and released without much if any fanfare, I was surprised. Astounded, even.

I mean, she’s a pretty big star, maybe not in movies, but she’s been in pretty well known tv series, from Mad Men to Handmaid’s Tale to Shining Girls to some incomprehensible spy series on Amazon whose name escapes me. She’s a somebody, probably better known than Demi Moore was when their two rival films came out. So I was still a bit perplexed.

And then I watched the flick. Now I understand why it was buried.

It’s pretty shit.

That explains it.

Actor Max Minghella, somewhat known, and son of acclaimed director Anthony Minghella, didn’t inherit any of his father’s directorial abilities, because this flick is poorly directed, poorly constructed, poorly shot and put together and not well thought out. It’s a real shame.

Once I realised just how crappy this was going to be, I wondered if they were going to go the “so bad it’s secretly good / deliberately bad because we want it to be a camp classic!” route, but it’s not a camp anything. It’s just unironically bad – bad.

Films and tv series that focus on the insanity of businesses that profit from tormenting women based on their insecurities is a rich, fertile, endlessly renewable resource. We know this because films keep telling us how society only values women for their beauty and their youth, and once they lose those they’re less than worthless and they’re a burden on society. Instead of interrogating the underpinning misogyny inherent in the patriarchal systems that force these expectations upon women, most flicks are content to just go down the “ain’t they vain bitches?” and blame them for what comes next, which is usually body horror stuff to emphasise the fear of the monstrous feminine.

The Substance was hardly a feminist masterpiece, but what it did do is use its strong visuals to tell a bonkers story not about how far someone will go to stay youthful, but more so how idiotic it would be to create a younger version of yourself through technology and then turn into a hideous mound monster that shoots milk everywhere.

Shell isn’t even as clever as that. The premise here is, an aging actress is bullied into starting a regimen / undergoes genetic manipulation, and for a minute it makes her look a bit younger, but then she starts mutating. Did you ever think there would be side effects to remaining forever young? That never occurred to nobody ever!

Moss plays an actress who’s not getting the roles anymore. She was on a series when she was younger, but now struggles to even get auditions.

It’s because she’s not in her thirties anymore, okay? And maybe she’s not as slender as her heyday on the show Hannah Has a Heart, but she’s still putting herself out there!

What is additionally funny, or at least funny to me, is Elisabeth Moss, multi-talented, multi-awarded actor is actually pregnant playing a role in a movie where agents, casting people, random people on the street are telling her she looks like shit, and she pretty much agrees with them in order to make it believable that she’d undergo this bizarre procedure.

(Affeksjonsverdi)

dir: Joachim Trier

2025

Sentimental Value has value far beyond the sentimental level. I’m not implying the title is somewhat ironic, but this is a flick that’s neither sentimental nor nostalgic, though it is about parents and their children, and time, and a house, and how almost none of our wounds are actually healed by time, regardless of what the adage says.

I’m not going to say that this is a naturalistic kind of flick, because it’s pretty much a story within a story within a story, using the artifice of film production to tell its story on a couple of levels. It’s not a particularly melodramatic flick. Some of these characters carry deep pain within themselves, but there are no easy solutions, cathartic breakdowns or elaborate, grand gestures that make everything okay for everyone forevermore.

Although one could argue that having the luxury to write and make a movie as an apology to one of your kids is a pretty grand, elaborate gesture, in the grand, elaborate scheme of things, but that’s a mere quibble.

This is set in Oslo, Norway, in a beautiful two storey wooden house, much of the time. The house is central to the story and to the characters, even though only one of them is living there when the film is transpiring in the present.

Stellan Skarsgård, patriarch of an immensely talented family of actors, plays Gustav Borg, an acclaimed director who might have been hot shit thirty years ago, but these days has to go cap in hand to Netflix to try to secure money for his projects. He abandoned his family, being his wife and two daughters, a long, long time ago.

dir: Craig Brewer

2025

Look, I know how terrible this sounds on paper.

If you saw the poster, if you just heard the title, you might think it’s a cheesy biopic about Neil Diamond.

But wait, it’s not even that.

Song Sung Blue is a biopic about a cheesy Neil Diamond impersonator, and his eventual wife who sometimes impersonates Patsy Cline.

Huh. You could imagine people lining up around the block at their nearest multiplex for that one.

Hugh Jackman is great. Who doesn’t love Hugh Jackman?

He played the character of Wolverine / a guy who cuts people up with his metal claws in dozens of movies so often that, to overcompensate, he’s done a slew of other movies where he just sings. Singing is how he started off his career, playing the lead in The Boy from Oz, don’t you know, so it’s not something he only does when he’s drunk at karaoke like the rest of us.

So, yeah, his career is evenly split between cutting up people with his adamantium claws, and crooning to delightful crowds of basic bitches and general normies in flicks like Les Miserables, The Greatest Showman and Happy Feet, and then this flick here.

You might like Hugh Jackman, like I do, and you might like his singing, to which I am studiously indifferent. A lot of people loved him in Greatest Showman, like, a lot of people; I had friends, relatives and complete strangers telling me how much they loved that film.

And I’m still like: Okay. This flick isn’t necessarily going to make you a believer, but he plays it so, so well.

What I’m talking about, though, is the character that he’s playing, who was a real person, who was loved, who had his demons and still overcame them, who lived a life not of quiet desperation like the majority of us, but of out and loud determination to be a version of a star, who still yearned for the applause and the adulation, knowing full well that no-one would ever see him as anything more than an impersonator.

And his beloved Claire (Kate Hudson, who is so great in this). She, too is, like us, a total fucking nobody living a barely working class existence in suburban Milwaukee, who loves to sing too. She has no delusions of grandeur or greatness, and she is less a has been than a never was. But when she sings Patsy’s songs, she sings with her whole heart, and when she sings with Mike together on stage they are glorious, incandescent and fucking untouchable.

Even if what they’re singing is Neil Diamond songs.

dir: Nia DaCosta

2026

That was… insane.

I thought pretty highly of 28 Years Later, but this second half caps this story off beautifully.

And what a deeply strange story it is.

Jack O’Connell has played evil fuckers for a good long while, and this character is probably one of his nastiest, and it follows closely on the heels of him playing another evil fucker in Sinners, only his prosthetic teeth here are far nastier, somehow.

This flick does not stand alone as a separate story, in that, someone watching this one without having seen the one from last year would have no fucking idea what’s going on, none whatsoever, although the same would not be said for someone who watched 28 Years Later without watching 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later.

That doesn’t detract from my enjoyment in the slightest. It picks up immediately where the previous flick ended, being poor Spike (Alfie Williams) being in the hands of the awful people who saved him from certain death at the hands of the infected.

These strange wig wearing weirdoes are the Jimmys, led by Lord Sir Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell), who forces his minions to wear ill-fitting, painful looking wigs, and to call themselves some variation of Jimmy, and do his infernal bidding. They are his Fingers, and he takes orders from Old Nick, who seems to tell him to do the same thing every time they come across uninfected survivors: torture then murder people.

Seems like a shitty way to spend the British apocalypse, but it’s not like Spike is given much of a choice. He is given the option of being able to die instead but as luck would have it he survives an altercation with a Jimmy that leaves that Jimmy dead and Spike alive.

Though maybe it would have been easier to just die already.

Completely separate from these Jimmy related shenanigans, that crazy orange guy at the ossuary is still doing his thing, being Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, never better or weirder), who is determined to put every bone and skull in its right place in his monument to those lost in the epidemic.

dir: Kurtis David Harder

2025

Who does deserve to die in horror films? It’s fiction, so, it’s okay?

But when you look at the genre, and you think about what anxieties this genre often captures, it’s sometimes hard not to extrapolate and conjure the imagined worldview of the makers based on who does the killing and who gets killed.

The slasher flicks of the 80s allegedly were right wing coded, because the kids killed by Jason / Freddie / Michael Myers were the ones doing drugs, drinking and having pre-marital sex, thus it was cautionary.

A flick where rich people hunt the poor, and then a ‘poor’ who they underestimate kills them back and Gets Revenge is not really a right-wing take on how to deal with the homelessness ‘problem’. Similarly, a flick where poor crims kidnap a rich person’s kid for ransom money isn’t necessarily a progressive argument for equity in wealth redistribution.

Obviously, since this flick is called Influencers, and it’s a continuation of the story started in Influencer from 2022, you’d think the flick is taking the radical position of saying that influencers in general and often specifically deserve to die because they are a cancer on society, metastasising across the world through the perniciousness of social media.

Not only die, like we all do anyway, but die violently, cut off in their clicks and likes harvesting prime.

Few flicks that premiere on the most excellent of horror streaming services, being Shudder, have that much of a budget, yet this film incredibly captures amazing footage and moves around multiple postcard worthy locations, between Bali, France and the States, and there’s some footage from Thailand but I think that’s footage from the previous flick anyway, on what had to be a slender budget. Yet it looks phenomenal.

Of course, CW (Cassandra Naud) is back, because these flicks are nothing without her, but she’s been living a quiet life in France with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar), and hasn’t murdered anyone for ages. It must be really hard for her to resist those impulses, but I guess she’s been lucky in that she hasn’t been provoked by any influencers for a good long time.

dir: David Frayne

2025

You would think a movie titled Eternity would perhaps lean towards some kind of profound ideas about the human condition, about our lives and deaths and what they mean in the big cosmic picture, if anything. Or maybe you wouldn’t, because your expectations are reasonably low when it comes to expectations about movies produced for mass audiences.

I have to compliment the people who put together the trailer for this flick, because it is a singularly painful trailer that I would think would actively warn people against watching the flick. Nevertheless, I watched the flick anyway, despite the aggressive damage to my eyes and soul, because I’m just a trooper that way.

As trite and mawkish as these flicks can be about an afterlife, and a metaphysical architecture to the universe that actually looks after our immortal souls when we die, there are some great shows and movies that have tackled the concept. There’s the great Defending Your Life by Albert Brooks, What Dreams May Come, the many versions of Heaven Can Wait, and in terms of tv series there’s the hilarious and philosophically dense The Good Place, which I feel is like the main inspiration behind this flick, only further dumbed down for the masses, somehow.

There would have to be something supremely disappointing about regaining consciousness after dying and finding yourself trapped in a place that looks like a 1960s modernist Best Western hotel hosting the shittiest conference centre you’ve ever beheld. There’s countless other souls in the same boat as you, as these weird people with clipboards and matching air hostess-like uniforms shepherd you towards deciding upon an ‘eternity’ for all eternity, before you’ve even figured out what the hell is going on.

Were you Good, were you Bad: It doesn’t matter. All that matters is making an ill-informed decision, and sticking with it f-o-r-e-v-e-r.

To confuse things a bit more, these Eternities are called “worlds”, so you get to decide between Beach World, Mountain World, Food World, Satanist’s World, Gay World (no straights!), Smoker’s World (“Because cigarettes can’t kill you twice!!”), Studio 54 World which has all the cocaine, and, my personal favourite Man-Free World #443 (#444 will be opening soon!) obviously popular with women who put up with a little bit too much mansplaining and being told to smile over the course of their lives.

dir: Joe Carnahan

2026

It’s been a long time coming, but at least it’s finally here.

No, I’m not talking about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck reuniting in front of the cameras to star in a movie together: I mean I’m glad Joe Carnahan has finally made a decent movie again.

The last one of his I watched that was okay wasn’t that great, being Copshop for which I could describe with many clichés, which instead I’ll rely on one: it’s very much the definition of overegging a pudding. There’s a lot of shlock in his filmography, and the last genuinely great flick he made was The Grey with Liam Neeson fighting Alaska and wolves, in that order, and coming off second best.

Before that… it was Narc, with Jason Patric, and that was like the early 2000s, so a lot of time and money has been wasted in between.

This isn’t perhaps a great showcase for Carnahan as a director, because this was made for Netflix, meaning it’s a very Netflixian kind of movie. The main characters spend a lot of time repeating the plot and what’s going on, in case the audience watching the flick has had at least one of their eyes glued to their phone for much of the flick’s duration.

It’s okay. It can be a bit irritating if you’re the kind of viewer who pays attention and actually likes watching movies, and it might prompt a few exasperated “we know, we get it, get on with it” like statements. But for people who like doing chores like folding laundry when they watch their stories on the streamers, it’s probably greatly appreciated that the premise is often restated for their benefit, so they don’t get too lost.

The Rip feels like a shitty title, but it’s not that egregious, especially since they restate the title of the film throughout the movie. “What’s the rip? We’re going to the rip. How much is the rip? Where’s the rip? Have I told you lately that I love you, and I love rips?” Eventually you’ll realise you can’t live without saying “rip” a few times every few minutes, just to maintain a serious demeanour.

I have to say that, yes, I am that cheap a date that seeing Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in a flick together again so long after their fresh faced debuts in Good Will Hunting and as two fallen angels in Kevin Smith’s Dogma all these years later is a kick, is a trip, because damn, they old, which means we old.

They look and act like sad dads, 99 per cent of the flick. Mad dads for the other 1 per cent. They have beards too, but they’re not paunchy, middle-aged and spending all their time online arguing with other middle-aged losers about the tanks used in World War II. They’re working career cops not two days before retirement, who maybe have been in long enough and become mean and cynical enough to maybe be corrupt as well.

dir: Jafar Panahi

2025

It’s not that strange that there would be people who might think that there are no accidents, no coincidences, that all is planned or fated or meant to be. We like to think that we are free agents, with free will and self-determination, even though there’s no shortage of scientists / neurologists telling us, depressingly, that consciousness may be an illusion.

I think this flick is using the title ironically (uh derr fred, someone might say, if this was forty years ago, or 28 Years Later, for that matter). Running over a stray dog may have been accidental, but everything that transpires from then on is dripping with intentionality.

This flick, as you would expect from the Iranian master of cinema, Jafar Panahi, does a sly bait and switch in its opening minutes: we observe a husband and wife driving down a road on the outskirts of what we assume is Tehran. Panahi hasn’t been able to make a movie in Iran for decades because of the stupid authoritarian regime without being jailed, so it’s probably not filmed in Iran, but what do I know?

The accidental running over of a stray dog results in the family car needing repairs, which results in the car ending up at a mechanic’s garage.

The mechanic loses his mind when he hears the customer walking about: the guy that was driving has a prosthetic leg, and the mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), fears he knows the sound of that prosthetic leg all too well. Vahid is convinced that this guy was his torturer when he was kidnapped off the street, kept without reason or legal charge, and tormented by a guy they called Eghbal, or “Peg-Leg” (Ebraham Azizi).

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that ‘Peg-Leg’ is probably an ableist slur, but, contextually, I will point out that the people who use it in the film are people who were horribly tortured by the jerk who did it on behalf of one of the worst regimes in human history. I mean, in reality, the fuckers have slaughtered something close to 20,000 protesters in the last fortnight, leaving out all the other awful stuff they’ve been doing to their own people for years.

The second point I’d make is that they, his victims, don’t know his real name.

Third point is, and the flick hinges on this, Vahid and the other people who he knows who were tortured, have never seen the chap. They don’t know what he looks like.

dir: James Vanderbilt

2025

When you openly say, or admit in public, that a flick is terrible and misguided, and it’s about one of the worst chapters in human history, and it includes archival footage of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, you can sound like a terrible person yourself. You could sound like you’re trying to minimise those atrocities, or imply they never happened or shouldn’t be emphasised or repeated, because of whatever dumb and dishonest reasons; or you could sound like one of those precious people who think making movies like this trivialises the true terribleness of what humans have done in the name of ideology, idiotic cruelty or callous indifference.

I am none of the above. I think film is the only medium that can capture certain ideas, certain magnitudes, certain scales. But I think some films made with the best of intentions, perhaps, can still severely miss the mark.

This film is about, I’m not making this up, an American associate justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Robert H Jackson (Michael Shannon) who wishes to have a legitimate trial in order to convict some of the most senior Nazi leaders captured after the end of the war before they’re executed. And he wants the trial to be conducted at Nuremberg with judges from the US, UK, France and the Soviet Union, because of the rallies that Hitler held, because of the Nuremberg laws that were passed to make the extermination of the Jews seem legal, and because it would be a warning to all other nations that if they do something like what the Nazis did, they will be held to account under international law.

That all sounds legit, doesn’t it? Well, what if I told you that no-one behind this production had any confidence that audiences would give a fuck about any of that, so they end up framing the plot as a so called psychological cat and mouse game between an American psychiatrist, Dr Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) and one of the worst humans to ever live until Trump came along, being Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (Sir Russell Ira Crowe)? Would you still make the mistake, like I did, of sitting down to watch this, this monstrosity?

You probably wouldn’t, you’re smarter than that. Rami Malek… Rami Malek – it’s hard to say when Rami Malek has been miscast in something, because he is such a very odd fellow. Sometimes his oddfellowness is appropriate for a role, like with the tv series Mr Robot, which he suited to a tee. I thought he did great as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody as well. But other times I watch what he does in a role, and I can’t hardly believe what I’m watching, and I’m not sure if it’s the actor’s fault, the director’s fault, the script’s fault or the casting agent’s fault.

dir: Ira Sachs

2025

This could be, I imagine, one of the most boring films that 2025 conjured, for certain people.

Let’s be honest, for most people. I don’t think most people, most humans, though not most people who love film, would have the time or the inclination to watch a flick like this. They would have far more entertaining things to do with their lives and their time, which could include anything from whacking cane toads, to counting trains to even jogging.

But for weird people (like me), who make decisions on what to watch based on what films esteemed film critics like Richard Brody of The New Yorker nominate in their best of end of year lists, you would come along to a film like this primed, ready to be fascinated and entertained.

And of course it helps that the film stars two people, both accomplished actors, both dream boats in their own ways. If you love Ben Whishaw, then this flick would be like crack to you: It’s 70 or so minutes of him talking talking talking endlessly and smoking. It further helps if you think Rebecca Hall is the bee’s knees too, which I do. She’s a great actor and an accomplished director as well.

The other criteria for possibly enjoying something like this is that it helps if you’re a bit of an art wanker, or whether you’re art wanker adjacent. I’m not going to pretend I knew who either Linda Rosenkrantz or Peter Hujar were back in the day or before watching this flick, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve learned that much about them, but they namedrop Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, Warhol and Allen Ginsburg, and I know all of them, so I get some of the milieu they were swimming around in, back in December of 1974.

1974! That long ago? That’s like… 52 years ago! Wow, imagine if someone was, like, born in 1974? They’d be ancient! I feel like disintegrating into dust and flying away in the wind right now, but anyway…

People back then were very different, mostly because of a profound lack of technology. They didn’t fill their days with endless doomscrolling, or with posting movie reviews on websites, or shopping for furry costumes online.

They called people. On telephones. And talked to them. They smoked cigarettes, and talked face to face with people. They left their domiciles and travelled to other buildings in order to photograph people, or record them talking about themselves on tape recorders.

Sounds like the Middle Ages or something.

Artist Linda Rosenkrantz gets the idea to interview artist friends she knows in order to capture every detail of a given day of their artistic lives. She interviews her friend Peter (Whishaw), as he relates to her every single thing he did, every thought he had, every lie he said or thought of, every element of every task he performed on that particular day, being the previous day.

dir: Oliver Hermanus

2025

The film’s first 10 minutes are absolutely perfect. Few films can sustain such perfection for even that long, but almost none can maintain it for an entire running time.

I mean, it’s not the first 10 minutes of Pixar’s Up, but almost nothing on this planet in this reality have ever been able to compete with that.

I should qualify further, in that, obviously, it’s only perfect as far as I’m concerned: others could watch the same ten minutes and wonder what the fuck I was either on or on about.

The intro brings us into a world as experienced by one man early in the 20th century. As a boy, he experiences the world not only through the wonderment of sound, but through the synaesthesia that he is host to. He has perfect pitch, but also experiences every sound as musical, knowing what key his mother coughs in, or that dogs bark in.

All related to us by the sure, certain tones of Chris Cooper, as the old man looking back on the younger man, who was born in and grew up in a shack in Kentucky. They may have been dirt poor dirt farmers in the 1910s, but they still had music, at least. Young Lionel first feels the pull of unknown songs, a hunger for every folk song and story, at too young an age.

His gift sees him sent to a conservatory in Boston, just as the Americans are about to enter the Great War, and it’s there that he meets the love of his life, David (Josh O’Connor). They bond over a shared love of folk music, somehow knowing tunes in common despite having grown up on different sides of the pond. David’s parents died when he was young, and so he travelled through the Lakes District in England with his uncle, collecting such songs.

Much later in the film we hear the elder Lionel reading the introduction to a book of his, explaining why folk music is the most “warm blooded” form of music, across the world, across nationalities. It’s important to grasp that these folk songs, the existence of these songs, is pretty important to the film. It is not a musical by any stretch but there is a lot of singing, a lot of playing.

dir: Kelly Reichardt

2025

Hmm.

I think the title is meant to be ironic.

The Mastermind is so low stakes, despite what the jazzy 70s soundtrack would have you believe, that it’s almost a comedy. Almost. But comedy implies funny, whereas this is too wry to be openly comedic.

The central guy JB, or mastermind, if you will, is a blank chap (played by Josh O’Connor) who lives a mundane suburban life with his wife (Alana Haim, in a thankless role) and two sons. She works, and he spends most days in his boxers, dreaming of something. He is an art school dropout, and a competent carpenter, but otherwise doesn’t work. Family visits to his parents, a conservative judge (Bill Camp) and doting mother (Hope Davis) infuriate him, even though he’s way too old to be a rebellious teen.

It’s meant to be important that this is set in the 1970s, specifically 1970. The mood is intense. The war in Vietnam is escalating, and an empowered Nixon makes it feel like the spirit of activism and rebellion deserves to be crushed under the jackboots and batons of the cops and the National Guard. Previously hopeful hippies and dissidents have fled, gone underground. The tide has turned, the mood has shifted.

I don’t really see how what JB does, which is, organise the theft of four paintings from a Framingham gallery somewhere in Massachusetts, has to do with any of that, but the theft all happens early in the movie, so there’s no build up, no carefully concocted plan with meticulous precision or any of that bullshit. It just happens, but then everything runs off the rails almost immediately.

The director isn’t interested in the heist – there is far more time spent watching JB trying to hide the paintings in carefully tailored cloth bindings and a well-constructed wooden box, that he stashes in the roof above a pig sty. And when I say that’s what she’s interested in, I mean she makes us watch as JB drives to the site, removes the box from the trunk of the car, remove the paintings from the box, climb a ladder clutching two of the paintings at a time, then carry the box up the ladder, then put the paintings back in the box, then hide the box under some straw.

Does that sound fascinating to you? Does that sound like an attack on American imperialism and the domestic malaise that middle America was suffering through way back when?

dir: Richard Linklater

2025

I never would have thought one of my favourite movies of 2025 would be a biopic about some short-arsed shmuck I’d never heard of, though I do of course recognise some of the songs mentioned. And I also never thought I’d see Ethan Hawke play an actual character as opposed to the same Ethan Hawke character he seems to play in everything from Reality Bites to The Black Phone movies. It’s important to remember that much of Hawke’s best works have been with this same director over the decades, whether it’s the Before trilogy with Julie Delpy or the great elongated experiment Boyhood.

It’s really a transformative performance, as in, you regularly / occasionally forget it’s Ethan Hawke playing this dapper, motor-mouthed, whiney, irritating, charming, delightful jerk called Lorenz Hart.

That might not be a household name anymore, but the songwriting duo of Rodgers and Hart was a formidable one, up until it was eclipsed by the far more famous and successful Rodgers and Hammerstein, what with their Oklahoma!s and their Kings and I and their Sounds of Music and whatnot.

Rodgers was the music composer, Hart the lyricist, but considering the movie begins with Hart’s death, and then jumps back several months to the opening night of the premiere of Oklahoma! on stage, we can surmise that there’s been some falling out between the duo, resulting in Rodgers and Hammerstein hooking up (professionally speaking).

Hart bails from the premiere overflowing with resentment and mockery. For the entirety of the flick he refers to that successful musical as “Oklahoma Exclamation Point” to show his utter contempt for its cornpone pandering, but we start to get the idea that it’s less his critical, unbiased judgement, and more his wounded pride that’s talking. He can’t believe that Rodgers has “left” him for Hammerstein, but still hopes to coax him back, somehow.

dir: Rian Johnson

2025

It’s hard to talk about a film that’s really about faith without sounding like I’m succumbing to the religious bullshit we snorkel through in every day life (as atheists, obviously believers and godbotherers don’t have this problem). This film isn’t about religion, or against religion per se, but it’s not coming from the usual place you’d expect when it comes to which side it’s on.

Daniel Craig, again playing detective Benoit Blanc for the third time, might seem to be a stand in for the director, or the main character in this ambiguously named flick, but it’s not really about him, and I feel like Josh O’Connor plays the real main character. For most of the flick, or at least the entirety of the first half, he’s relating the events he experienced leading up to the murder of a beloved monsignor, in the hopes of enlisting someone’s aid in proving his innocence. It’s O’Connor who somehow walks away with the film, somehow managing to credibly and believably portray something I had no idea was still possible, being an earnest Catholic priest who actually believes in his faith and who actually wants to love and help people.

That in itself is something of a miracle. He even does okay with the American accent, which couldn’t have been easy against the Foghorn Leghorn bullshit of Benoit Blanc (admittedly with the volume turned way down this time around).

Even with these solid performers in the mix, there’s also towering performances from Josh Brolin and Glenn Close to compete with, since this flick is somewhat more dramatically serious and less openly comedic than the earlier two movies (Glass Onion especially, which was way more farce than class). All the while I don’t want to make the flick sound like a slog; murder mysteries after all aren’t meant to be stolidly ‘serious’ cinema, unless you’re talking about the true crime variety. It’s meant to almost be fun and breezy, despite the number of bodies piling up.

These films are never about grief over who died, they’re whodunits and howdunits, and even then, I hesitate to mention, the good versions of these mean that the actual solution doesn’t really matter that much, it’s just punctuation at the end. This film, being a self-aware entity, even knows this, mentions all the predictable plot requirements and sources (locked room mysteries, or impossible crimes) and only subverts them in the mildest of manners.

dir: Jalmari Helander

2025

Sisu was, in its way, the perfect Nazi-killing action film, so in their infinite wisdom the makers decided to make another one, this time with the Soviets as antagonists, because why not.

I mean, they have snazzy uniforms, and no regard for human rights, so they’re perfect. They are at least recognisable and easily hateable, since the Soviets we’re talking about are the Red Army that raped and pillaged its way back to the borders of the Soviet Empire after the war ended.

This is a Finnish flick, though, and considering Finland’s tortured history with the Russians, it has to involve actual history in order to angry up the blood. After numerous wars the Finns were forced to cede the Karelia region to the Commies, and of course that’s where the taciturn hero of these two movies had his home, the home he was so desperate to return to in the first flick.

But the Soviets have already murdered his family, and all Finns are being expelled from the region, so what’s a war hero to do other than go home, cry a bunch for the loss of his wife and children, and then literally deconstruct the entire house, slap it onto a truck, and then start driving for Finland?

Our hero, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), or the Immortal, as he is nicknamed, doesn’t know it, but the Soviets really, really hate him for embarrassing them during the Winter War, and they dispatch a crusty old jerk (Stephen Lang) to capture Korpi and send him to the gulag in Siberia, as a warning to any Finns who are thinking about getting uppity.

The other supposed benefit / bonus is that the crusty old Jerk Draganov is the same person who butchered Korpi’s family. Hearing him lovingly describe killing Korpi’s son with a shovel is one of the most sick-inducing things I’ve ever heard in any film. But Korpi is completely unaware of any of this for most of the flick’s shortish running time (it’s just an eyelash under 90 minutes), so from his perspective, it’s just the story of his life. Of course random jerks want to kill him: He’s awesome, and it’s the price you pay for awesomeness.

dir: Edgar Wright

2025

This was never a good idea. It wasn’t a success the first time. I’m not saying you can’t remake a movie, because, that’s like 90 per cent of movies these days, but if you couldn’t make a movie work with Arnie in the lead role, what makes you think remaking it with a blancmange, a sculpted lump of tofu like Glen Powell is going to crack the box office?

The original Running Man from 1987 had Arnold in his prime, and it still died at the box office, because audiences weren’t ready to see him star in weird sci-fi adjacent corporate tv satires yet. I mean, there are probably a stack of other reasons why it didn’t delight audiences and make lots of money, but that has to be the main one. Plus audiences, mostly made up of morons, didn’t like watching a movie that mocked them for loving game shows, and telling them they’re morons who consume the dumbest media because they’re sadistic braying donkeys who love watching people die in horrible ways.

What has changed since then? Not much, really.

The most disappointing aspect of this whole endeavour is having Edgar Wright direct such an uninspiring ‘property’. He’s so great and brilliant everywhere else! He’s even delivered multiple parodies of these kinds of movies before, and yet now, as penance, they forced him, perhaps at gunpoint to make an uninspired straight version of the kind of Hollywood movie we thought he probably despised.

This is, for me, the most memorable part of the original Running Man - it’s not Arnie one-liners like “Well that hit the spot” or “he had to split” or “that boy’s one mean motherfucker” uttered by a sweet old lady, or any of the action, strange clothing choices or any other nonsense that happens: it’s the scene where two women are at a vending machine, and, to show how expensive things are in the “future”, being 2017, a can of Coke costs $6, and one of the ladies grunts over how many coins she has to feed into the machine to get her precious drink.

Six bucks? At least they got one thing right about the horrible future they envisaged way back in the 1980s. They got absolutely everything else wrong, though.

Sure, neo-liberalism and corporatism dominated society to a ridiculous extent, but we haven’t had food riots yet (in the States at least). There is the war in Venezuela to look forward to, though.

From the vantage point of the 1980s, they really did imagine that the dystopias of the future would look and feel like the 70s, just with odder clothing, resource shortages, pastel colours and perms as far as the eye could see.

Is Arnie good in the original flick? Of course not, but what does that matter, when has that ever mattered with Arnie? He’s fucking Arnie! That’s his superpower, his calling card and his motivation for everything.

The original also tries to tackle the idea of a group of revolutionaries trying to take on their corporate masters in order to cast off the shackles of oppression, but it’s a whole underground militia. What links there are between the masters of television and the political powers / military junta is not clear, just that it all blurs together In THE FUTURE!

Here, it’s far more explicit that the regime in charge that produces a program as dumb as this one is in cahoots with a privatised corporate police force called the NCG that brutalises whoever the Running Man show wants brutalised, and anyone else as well for good measure.

If the premise of the first flick was somewhat far-fetched; that the most important and viewed program of all time was one in which criminals are hunted and executed by ‘heroic’ hunters, this flick pushes things in an even less believable direction given people’s relationship with linear television these days: people religiously watching one program where three victims are selected, demonised by the program makers, and then graphically executed on camera.

Would people watch that? Of course they would. But what is this thing called ‘television’ they keep referring to? No-one watches that now, so why would they be watching it in the future?

dir: Lynne Ramsay

2025

This flick could not be more different from the other two I watched and reviewed recently, even though it is about the same themes, regarding motherhood, regarding alienation, regarding the world that destroys young mothers and leaves them helpless once they actually have that first baby.

After watching three films in a row about this very issue, I have to say, I am now certain I don’t want to have any more babies. If was on the fence before, I’m pretty sure it’s the worst possible thing any woman can do for herself.

Of course, I am already a parent, and more importantly, I am not a woman, so I cannot ever be a mother or that particular victim of the patriarchy that suffers most. That brings me some relief, but it doesn’t make me feel any better for the squillions of women who go through these experiences, or much worse.

It comes as a major surprise to me that, of the three, Die, My Love is the worst, the absolutely worst rendering of what happens to a woman who becomes a first time mother in a rural Montana area, whose art (writing, she’s a writer, don’t you know) needs to be cast aside as she deals with the all-consuming reality of being a mum.

Except…

What stands out about this telling is that she, the mum, played by Jennifer Lawrence, doesn’t seem that fazed, under pressure, or overwhelmed. People keep assuming she has post-partum depression or anxiety, keep offering support, and she’s like “nah, that’s not what’s happening”. She doesn’t seem to dislike the baby boy, or hanging out with him, doing dumb stuff with him, or dislike the pressures of being a mum at all. She’s just bored.

She doesn’t seem to like being in Montana, Big Sky Country, that much. Previously from New York City, she doesn’t really see any point ingratiating herself with her husband’s family or friends, and resents small talk with locals, or with anyone, really. She especially hates being asked about her writing, like most writers.

So what happens for the rest of the movie? She acts out, perpetually doing weird, dumb or dangerous shit.

Why? Well, there’s the rub.

dir: Marielle Heller

2025

In this ongoing series / festival of recent movies in the “maternal rage” sub-genre, which has seen something of a renaissance recently, there is this flick. These are important flicks with women in key roles, not only as the main character but as the writers / directors themselves, and I’m not even sure that they’re here because of awards-bait reasons (although that has to be a factor, because none of them were box office gold). I am interested in them because they carry very different messages about how women deal with the underlying disappointments that come with getting the brass ring we are constantly told they should want and need (it’s a biological imperative, don’t you know).

These ‘big three’ flicks I’m alluding to are If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Nightbitch and Die, My Love. There is no doubt Jennifer Lawrence is going to nominated; I hope and am pretty sure Rose Byrne will get a guernsey for If I Had Legs. I don’t think anyone was going to die on a hill over Amy, poor Amy getting any shiny ornaments for her mantelpiece for this flick.

First of all, the title. That’s a hard sell especially to the demographic you’re aiming at.

All these films are explicitly about the same thing; the regret that comes with becoming a mum, the resentment towards others who are not recent mothers; the resentment towards others who are recent mothers who seem to be doing it easier or have more support; doing everything for the household, the baby and themselves even if they’re not ‘single mothers’, it just feels that way; losing one’s sense of self; seeing the death of the illusions one had about themselves and their self-worth that isn’t connected to becoming a mother, and so on.

When I say these ideas are universally relatable, I mean many if not most mums might be able to relate through their own experiences, other lumps like me might acknowledge their righteous and justified rage, but not relate to it personally, but at least recognise how the “system” benefits me and jerks like me to the detriment of mothers everywhere.

When people talk about who does what in the home, within a family, within a couple with a new kid, the distribution of labour we know still falls along gendered lines. So almost nothing has changed on that front even if some guy somewhere emptied the dishwasher properly for once or brings the washing in from the line and dumps it all on the floor thinking the job is done: women / mothers are still “expected” to do everything regardless of whether they work or not and regardless of whether it’s crushing their souls or not.

Men are still like “but I worked all week, I need some time to relax?” or “but I spent all afternoon doing the lawns and building something out of stone and wood in the backyard, you can’t expect me to vacuum, make dinner, feed the baby and the dog, and give the kid their bath just because it needs doing”, and all is right in the world.

For us, for the guys. For the women who feel compelled to turn into wild animals in order to escape, well, I guess the story is different from their perspective.

This is a confused, confusing, all too pat, yet superficially ‘empowering’ version of this kind of story. It is less a desperate cry to be seen and heard, less a primal scream and more a personal story squeezed through an Oprah-like lens in order to make it more palatable to mass audiences, even mass audiences of women who could possibly relate but maybe shouldn't.

It’s not an easy watch, but not for the reasons you might think. I had actually tried watching this flick way, way earlier in 2025, and gave up because I was cringing so painfully that I couldn’t continue. So only now when I launched into this idea of reviewing these similarly themed movies to see what worked and what didn’t, did I force myself to continue watching it past its first 10 minutes.

dir: Mary Bronstein

2025

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You sounds like both an empty threat and like the punchline to a strained, perhaps Yiddish, joke. What it is, is a film which exists as a primal scream of maternal rage aimed at channelling the frustration that comes from living in a world that pays lip service to the wonderfulness of motherhood, and the complete abandonment women face in getting the support they need to survive that comes with it.

It is not a comedy or a horror film, but it does include elements of both. I don’t even feel completely comfortable calling it a drama. Rose Byrne, Australia’s Own Rose Byrne, plays the central role, and brings all the anger, disbelief, and terror that she can muster and that the role requires.

If I was to say that it’s a fairly harrowing movie, it might make you think it’s something on a level with Requiem for a Dream or the flicks of Gasper Noé. I think that would misrepresent the flick somewhat. I’m talking about something closer akin to the recent Mike Leigh film Hard Truths, where a main character is deliberately unlikeable and gives no quarter to anyone. It is a difficult watch, but it’s not necessarily because the subject matter is too traumatic or the film is visually gory or upsetting. It’s a difficult watch because it’s about a woman no longer able to hide her dissatisfaction with being a mother.

And because it’s honest, it’s painful. People don’t want to hear it, whether they’re characters in this movie or members of an audience. They don’t want to hear women playing characters expressing how much they are not enjoying being mothers some of the time. They want neat narratives about women struggling to balance looking after little ones, themselves and any of their personal and professional ambitions, and deciding that sacrificing themselves is the best course of action for all concerned.

dir: Carson Lund

2025

Now, no-one has ever accused me of being that big a fan of sport, any sport, ever. And that’s unlikely to change. I have never had any interest in it, although when it comes to movies, it’s a different matter entirely. There are a stack of sports movies that I’ve enjoyed over the years, because enjoying them doesn’t require actually giving a fuck about sports.

This mentality holds true right here as well, in that this is a movie about a baseball game, but doesn’t require anyone to a) know anything about baseball, b) like baseball or c) like sports at all. This game isn’t even pretending to be more important than any of the other ones: it is just as insignificant as any of the other ones, if not more so.

But just because things are pointless doesn’t mean they’re worthless or have no meaning. I’m not going to pretend I came up with this formulation, but lauded West Australian writer Tim Winton most pithily put it when he stated that surfing, an amazing activity, was both beautiful and pointless, and that that’s what its main attraction is derived from.

And this game, as depicted in Eephus, is also pointless, but there may still be some beauty in there, somewhere, if you look hard enough.

This game, whenever it is meant to have been happening, I suspect about 30 years ago, is the last game of this suburban league at this baseball field in Massachusetts. In mere days, ground will be broken to build a new school. This is as far away from the major league as it is possible to be. The majority of the players seem to be in their 30s, 40s, some are clearly older. Some of them have athletic physiques, many look more like me: ie, like they should be wearing Santa costumes instead of baseball uniforms.

There is no crowd for this game, beyond a couple of stoner skaters who don’t even understand what they’re watching, and a couple of kids whose dad begged them to come see him play one last time.

The enemy is not urban development or apathy: many of these chaps will never play again because they don’t want to drive 30 minutes to the nearest other field on a Sunday. And they’re too old for this shit, for this excuse to spend time away from their families on the weekend. You know, same reason golf was invented.

So it’s the last game ever, between the team in red and white sponsored by Adler’s Paint, so they’re the Adler’s Paints, and the blue and white Riverdogs.

dir: Clint Bentley

2025

It’s being called one of the films of the year, which is all well and good, but now that I’ve watched it, it’s my time to pontificate about it.

It’s okay but it’s no masterpiece. It’s a very small film, not in scope or in terms of visuals, but in terms of being like a miniature portrait of a quiet man, who didn’t do much of anything, yet felt haunted all his live long life.

Sure, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) worked as a logger and on the laying of tracks for a railroad in the Pacific North West, but you could hardly say he built the American empire that would take over that whole continent (and reduced those great forests to the 13% of the total that remain). And his whole life, as depicted here, has him more as bystander, observer to his own experiences, rather than active participant in the eight decades that he lives through.

It would not be fair to say he’s passive in the face of his own life, which spans much of the early twentieth century, but he really doesn’t do much, and all his struggles are mostly internal, and we’re told about them at great length via ceaseless voice over. I guess it would be impossible to do otherwise. Without it the majority of the flick would be Joel Edgerton standing around looking sad and / or pensive, and not saying much of anything, for decades. A lifetime of quiet desperation, if you will.

And that would be enough for a lot of people, including me. He’s really good at it (looking pensive, though he’s good at sitting or standing around as well). It’s not so much brooding as looking haunted. He is haunted from beginning to end, and maybe it’s not entirely his fault.

dir: Yorgos Lanthimos

2025

People believe some crazy shit these days… I mean, people believed a heap of stuff that wasn’t true in the past, but it takes real effort, real commitment to believe patently untrue things these days.

I mean, being a flat earther 500 years ago was the default. Believing it now, well, that takes wilful blind ignorance.

If you tell me a theory that aliens from the Andromeda galaxy are on Earth for no better reason than to kill the bees, I’m going to say “okay, thanks for sharing” and then back away slowly with my hands up in a gesture meant to convey “everyone stay chill” .

But then if you’re Teddy (Jesse Plemons), and you’ve struck upon this theory as the explanation for why everything has gone wrong in your life, and this is the latest theory out of hundreds of conspiracy theories that you’ve come to believe, you’re going to cling to it bitterly, for dear life, to the exclusion of all else.

But it’s not enough to know the truth – you need to convince at least one other person that it’s true as well, otherwise you’re just a solo loon. So Teddy has to enlist his younger autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to help in his two-person struggle against intergalactic forces.

Surely these two fuckheads will save us all?

The target of their ire is the CEO of a company that Teddy happens to work for, and she, played by Emma Stone, doesn’t do herself any favours, since she’s a CEO, and we know they’re all evil even if they’re not from another galaxy.

dir: Guillermo del Toro

2025

I was excited, I guess, when I heard about Guillermo del Toro making his version of the Frankenstein story. Now I feel a bit foolish because, ultimately, it’s just another version of a very familiar story.

And furthermore I’ve realised I don’t really need new versions of these stories. I don’t need another Dracula, don’t need more Frankensteins, don’t need more invisible people or werewolves, because I’ve seen them all, and they’re all just variations on very narrow themes.

It almost seems surprising that del Toro hadn’t already made a dozen Frankensteins up till now, because he’s made whatever else he wanted before, with all the gothic flourishes and insane costuming choices he could possibly fit into a flick even when there wasn’t enough story to justify it all (I’m looking at you, Crimson Peak, you wasted three good actors in that flick, but great costumes, eh?)

This is his dream version, his ultimate iteration, with the best cast he could get and presumably the biggest budget Netflix could give him. Maybe that means more people will see it than otherwise would have seen it on the big screen. Either way, he seems awfully pleased with himself, and people seem to be fans of it.

I thought it was okay. Okay is good enough sometimes. You go in expecting revelation or wonderment, but all you’re doing is comparing this version with the other versions you’ve seen, with the original story, with the other offshoots. You argue with yourself as to whether it’s in tune with the original, but if it hewed too closely to the original, then what’s the point. And where it varies, you wonder, “does that mean anything, to justify the change?”

dir: Nia DaCosta

2025

Hedda Gabler… Is Hedda Gabler, the character as opposed to the play (or this movie, based on the play), one of the most toxic and destructive characters in all of, I dunno, cinema and theatre?

She’s not in it for kittens and rainbows. She’s kinda like the Joker and Margo from All About Eve and Lady Macbeth and Iago and a tornado of libidinous destruction, which I guess is great. If you’re of a certain age, you had to do Hedda Gabler at school in Eng Lit (if you’re from a nation that had English Literature on its school curriculum of course; I can’t imagine it being high on the syllabus in China). As such it’s probably one of those stories you remember, but not well, and don’t like, because you were ‘forced’ to read it.

This here is not an entirely contemporary retelling, but it does set it in England in the 1920s, rather than the Norway from whence it came, and it significantly changes aspects of the story, making it unpredictable even for someone who remembers the text well, or has seen it as a play recently.

I remember about… twenty years ago Cate Blanchett played Hedda in a staging of the play that (we were told) was really important in Sydney. I never saw it, but I did watch a documentary on it called In the Company of Actors, which I very much enjoyed, because it meant a) I didn’t have to travel to Sydney b) I didn’t have to watch a play and c) I didn’t have to make awkward small talk with some society matron from the North Shore over sherries during the interval.

dir: Paul Thomas Anderson

2025

I never thought I’d live long enough to see Paul Thomas Anderson make another great movie. I keep being told that he’s made lots of great movies since Boogie Nights, but mostly I’ve found his films since then to be extremely frustrating.

With the advantage of time I think there have been occasions where I haven’t been that fair, or been generous enough to accept that no flicks, whether PT Anderson’s or not, have to perfectly conform with my expectations in order to actually be good or not. It’s just that it had become for me a major stumbling block with his movies, whereby there would inevitably be an aspect of it, or, in the case of There Will Be Blood or The Master, a final section so bonkers that it made me question whatever merits I thought I’d experienced up to that point.

I’ve long known above movies having terrible endings because sometimes directors just don’t know how to end their stories, but rarely do I experience endings that make me hate the whole fucking movie.

That rare honour is Anderson’s, in that I’ve felt duped multiple times by his filmography, even more times than by M. Night Shyamalan.

Well, as usual, an unasked for preamble saying the opposite of what I want to say about a movie: this is a strong movie, with an ending that doesn’t sink the whole endeavour or render it embarrassing, one that I enjoyed / was thrilled by almost from beginning to end. It’s got some great characters, it’s got some insanely great performances; it depicts the recognisable slide into authoritarianism that we see playing out in the States under the guise of border enforcement, and yet it’s not at all about the current ICE goon squads rounding up anyone vaguely ethnic looking, whether citizens or not, or about the MAGA fuckheads explicitly. It’s about the excitement, the thrill of revolution and rebellion in the 60s-70s which gave way to disillusionment and destruction when it all turned to shit.

And it’s about a secretive cabal of white supremacists trying to recruit a new member to their Christmas Adventurers Club.

dir: Dan Trachtenberg

2025

This should absolutely not work, and yet somehow it does.

Taking a Predator, and making it the protagonist of a movie seems like insanity. And yet, they go even further, and make it a buddy movie with a synthetic android (Elle Fanning), as they help each other in ways that they couldn’t achieve on their own.

Yes, since I mention synthetics, and I’m about to mention the Weyland Yutani corporation, this does sound worryingly like an Aliens Versus Predator crossover yet again, but it’s not really full throttle. It’s just that the Weyland Yutani stuff is meant to prepare us for a future where corporations are somehow even more evil.

And it also means that, as with every synthetic ever depicted in these films (except for Bishop in Aliens), they always betray the living to serve inhuman ends.

So we know, despite how sunny Thia (Fanning) seems to always be, there’s something coming down the line. Her further job, other than to explain everything, is to gently trick the young Yautja (that’s what the Predators call themselves: I guess it would be weird if they called themselves predators like “hey, Predator, how’s it hanging?”) into being less of an arsehole. In effect, she’s humanising him.

This film is certainly an argument for nurture over nature, in that while the Yautja have been depicted in all the films they’ve been involved in as dudes who live only to kill stuff, and take trophies, in a hyper-aggressive warrior culture in which they have to kill everything around them or risk feeling insecure, it’s never made a whole lot of sense. To somewhat mangle a phrase from Reservoir Dogs, if everyone around you is a kill crazy psychopath, it seems like it would be hard to get shit done. A society, or a civilisation where the only merit is in hunting stuff across the universe, otherwise the people around you kill you for being weak, well, how do you develop and maintain space ships that travel faster than light? Who cleans the bins? Who does the boring logistics stuff? Who looks after the little Yautja when they’re in their in crèches, handing them their first weapons and bandaging their first owies?

dir: Kathryn Bigelow

2025

Fuck this film, honestly.

Sure, it’s well made, the performances are all fine, the tension is over the top, but come on.

I don’t think anyone other than the dumbest of Americans thinks nuclear war is winnable, that there’s a scenario whereby one can win a war by using nuclear weapons (now). I think most people get that having them means countries without them can’t attack you or talk too much shit about you. With the countries that have them, well, you fight through proxies, but never directly, because you don’t want to nuke each other.

We all pretty much get that if one was launched at the States, or at China, or Russia, from anywhere, we’re pretty much all fucked. It’s all over. Done. This film goes to some trouble to explain why.

In the 80s at least, though it was policy probably decades before (since Eisenhower), the president at the time, who the rest of us naively thought would be the worst president those fuckheads would come up with after Nixon, explained to the American people that Reagan’s policy with respect to what would happen if the Soviets ever launched or detonated a missile over the US would mean there would be Mutually Assured Destruction. If the States couldn’t rule the world, there was no way they were going to let the Russkies have all the cake and eat it too. If we go, we all go, was the message.

dir: Edward Berger

2025

There are no small roles, just small players, and I don’t think Colin Farrell does “small”. Oh sure, he’s had some shitty roles, but they weren’t small. And, sure, when he started out he was often drunk on set, but, still, you’d never accuse him of doing anything less than giving the biggest brassiest performances you’ve ever seen.

Here, in this film, he plays a small time crim / fuck up who is down to his last roll of cash, living as he does very high up on the hog, in Macau.

Macau, like Hong Kong before it, was a Chinese town controlled by a European power, being Portugal, for a long time. That time is done, and now, other that the thousands of casinos, the influence remains in the colonial architecture (that the CCP hasn’t gotten around to getting rid of yet) and the cuisine.

So even today, as a setting, it has a kind of cosmopolitan air, or at least it gives the impression that a European scallywag pretending to be some kind of high roller or aristocrat would be cut some slack there, for whatever reason.

But really, when it’s mostly set in high-end casinos and hotel rooms, you realise this is all tourist bullshit. You could set this anywhere where there are casinos and hotels, but Vegas has been overdone, and if 'Lord Doyle' pulled this shit at the Crown casino here in Melbourne, he wouldn’t get months of leeway and third chances – the second they sniffed that he was out of cash he’d be out on his arse.

For some reason, though, they are letting him play out the last moments of his bender, but we are under no illusions that he’s not fucked.