fresh movie reviews and human wordsmithing while you wait

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 given 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.

dir: Viktor Kossakovsky

2024

You won’t usually hear me praising documentaries, mostly because when they’re really good I find them so depressing I can’t even write about them, and when they’re bad I don’t want to bring any additional notice to them, however meagre it might be.

A24, also, isn’t that well known for snapping up and releasing docos, so that A24 being involved was the first thing that intrigued me about this. Plus the name. It sounds like some villain out of ages past, or a Transformers movie.

In Greek it just means “architect”, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising because it’s right there in the name, but here I think, given the subject matter, it’s meant to mean more, as in, what are we making of this world?

It’s about cement, but you’re not going to know that until way, way into the film, almost towards the end. Until you get there, you’re going to think maybe it’s about the destruction of war (specifically the destruction wrought by that pigfucker Vladimir Putin in Ukraine), or the patient destruction that comes with time, as we see so much footage of ancient structures, of places where all that remains are the arches above entrances or doorways.

And rocks, lots of rocks, how they are wrenched from the earth, how they are broken down to powder.

(门前宝地
Men Qian Bao Di)

dirs: Xu Junfeng & Xu Haofeng

2023

100 Yards is unlike anything I’ve seen for a long time. I mean, they used to make 5 of these a week back in the 1990s out of Hong Kong, but that industry died in the arse a long while ago.

Plus it’s set in Tianjin in the 1920s. I don’t remember anything from back in the day being set in Tianjin. There’s probably reasons, even though none of this feels like even vaguely being based on a true story. But colonialism does play a big part in the story, so there’s that.

There’s a martial arts academy. The master of the academy is dying. He has a son, Shen An (Jacky Heung), but he doesn’t want his son to follow in his footsteps. He has a top student Qi Quan (Andy On), and everyone seems happier with him getting the top gig.

They are meant to duel, and they do, but the only one watching is the master.

These aren’t epic, fully choreographed fights. They’re brief flurries of action; they’re not looking to wound each other (yet), just to prove who’s better, who knows more, and who is awesomest.

The dying master tells his brightest pupil to just do the thing already that he’s been taught that the son doesn’t know, to show how outclassed he is; the student does it, the son takes a tumble, the master dies.

dir: Joachim Rønning

2025

I mean, three strikes, you’re out, surely?

The original Tron is not some beloved 80s sci fi flick; you couldn’t even say it’s a cult classic. It’s on the level of the mostly forgotten Disney stuff from ages ago like The Shaggy D.A. about a human cursed to be a dog, or, even worse, a dog cursed to be a human, or Hervey the Love Bug. It’s stuff that exists but no-one really cares about it. It’s not some rich resource to keep mining, to warrant continuing to return to the well.

Tron was and still is a pretty silly film about a guy who gets sucked into a computer and discovers a funky world where people fling these disks at each other and ride on light cycles. Lots of strong colours, and the ‘real’ world being replicated in the electronic world with easily vanquished bad guys and lots of blue neon everywhere.

Blue means ‘good’, red means ‘evil’.

Jeff Bridges played a guy who gets sucked into the computer world. He’s not even the main character. Tron is. It’s in the name, Tron’s the hero, played by the great Bruce Boxleitner. Now that’s a name you don’t hear often enough.

Anyway, it was a pretty cheesy kids movie. I was a kid. I liked cheese. I watched a copy of Tron taped off of the telly squillions of times, and then I presumably got bored of it. It holds no special place in my nerdy heart.

And then for some baffling reason they made a sequel called Tron Legacy in 2010, which is a terrible, terrible movie with great visuals, a banging soundtrack and nothing but terrible narrative and acting choices.

It didn’t do that well. More people got the soundtrack (by which I mean illegally downloaded) because it was great, and by Daft Punk, and not because they liked the movie.

The script, the dialogue? It was terrible, like, genuinely terrible. There’s an actual line of dialogue where Jeff Bridges says “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man!”

(I danatti)

2024

This is not to be confused with the legendary punk band with such members as David Vanian, Captain Sensible, Rat Scabies and Brian James, or the flick from 1967 made by the great communist aristocrat director Luchino Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde; or the recent flick by an Icelandic director set in Iceland in the 1870s about a bunch of people at a fishing station trying to do some fishing and then bad things happen to them.

This is a completely different movie that came out recently called The Damned. You can see why I chose to watch and review it right now? Maximum confusion, that’s what I’m going for. How do two such completely different flicks come out in the same year, with the same title?

It’s not even that great a title, or even really that applicable here. Are all the people involved damned? Sure, but no more so than any of the rest of us. Is it a war movie, or even more importantly, is it a movie about the US Civil War? Well, kinda.

Mostly this flick is about a camera that hides behind a bunch of guys in Union army clothing wandering around doing stuff, or not doing stuff. There’s no film score to convince you that you’re watching something fictional. But it’s not a documentary. It’s kind of a re-enactment, but we usually call that “fiction”.

It’s just some guys, hanging out. When they speak the dialogue sounds pretty contemporary, as in, there’s no attempt to make it sound like dialogue from the 1800s. And what they talk about is the mundane aspects of what they’re doing, or about their lives, or about what they’re meant to do.

dir: Thordur Palsson

2025

To be clear this isn’t the flick from 1967 made by the great communist aristocrat director Luchino Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde; this is a recent flick by an Icelandic director set in Iceland in the 1870s about a bunch of people at a fishing station trying to do some fishing and then bad things happen to them.

I hadn’t heard of fishing stations either, but I guess they were a thing at some point in human history? A lot of Nordic looking people wearing black in the most forbidding environment you can imagine outside of Antarctica talking about fish and the sea like they know the sea hates them?

That must have been a thing, else there wouldn’t be a terrifying movie like this about such a scenario.

Unlike the last horror flick I saw that had some people being tormented near the sea, this flick has a well-crafted story with compelling performances from decent (mostly) character actors confronting the unknown with sheer terror and a tremendous sense of foreboding. And even involving a group of people even Ingmar Bergman would think should lighten up, anything you shoot in or near Iceland is 1000% more compelling, and makes these people seem more credible.

Eva (Australia’s Own Odessa Young) is a young widow whose husband died a year ago. She owns the fishing station where these grimy chilly souls are trying to do their thing. It’s the middle of winter, so it’s not like they can leave, and they haven’t had a good run lately. In terms of stores they only have fish left over for bait, and they’re resorting to eating that.

dir: Samuel Clemens

2025

I knew almost nothing about this flick before I watched it, and now I know even less.

For much of its beginning, I was really on board, in that the start of the flick has a disturbing atmosphere and troubling, tense visuals despite the fact that there’s only one person on screen. He has the air of someone who’s very concerned about being seen or is being chased or something. It feels really tense, as he makes his way to an isolated house on the coast. They never mention it in the flick, but it’s a house on the coast of Kent, which is south-east England.

This chap, Eric (Alan Calton) sweeps and clears the house room by room with a gun out, so you know he’s not fucking around. I don’t know what he’s done or he’s planning to do, but it doesn’t seem like he’s involved in charity work. This beginning is dialogue-free, until someone else shows up.

Matt (Dominic Vulliamy) starts quizzing Eric as to where Matt’s mother is. Eric doesn’t mention that he found a bangle in a puddle of blood at the edge of the beach just before Matt turned up. They seem like a couple(?)

Reference is made to a painting. Reference is made to whether everything went as planned or if they fucked up, and where’s Denise anyway? Denise is Matt’s mum. We haven’t seen Denise, so who knows what happened to her.

Clearly, these jerks stole some painting worth tens of millions of pounds, so they’re concerned that someone is going to find them. We only see the painting in snippets, when weird shit is happening.

When I say “weird shit is happening” I mean this is a film in which weird shit is happening all the time, with zero explanation, but we kind of get it because bad things happen to bad people, I guess. A better film gets us to care about the central protagonists or their plight, or at least have thoughts about them but this flick doesn’t have the budget to make us care about these people, or the inclination to care in general.

dir: Sean Byrne

2025

There really must have been something in the water earlier this year or last year, because there are no shortage of shark films at the moment. I mean, there have been shark films bubbling around in the background, but I have to attribute the current upsurge to the 50th anniversary of the release of the first summer blockbuster Jaws.

Its success paved the way for Spielbergo to make plenty of other non-shark related films, and for the rest of us to be scared of being in open water on the ocean, which is a very sensible fear. But it also means there’s no shortage of lesser films banking on our inherent fear of these terrifying creatures.

I say that knowing full well that each year literally more people are killed by falling coconuts, cows and horses than are ever killed by the gentle sharks that have been so poorly maligned and slandered since Spielbergo catapulted his career into the stratosphere from upon their scaly backs. Very unfair, if you ask me, but no-one did, so I guess I should talk about this nasty film instead.

It has, at least from my perspective, been a long time between drinks from this horror auteur, Australia’s Own Sean Byrne. Anyone who saw The Loved Ones way back in the day knows what sheer brutal nastiness this director is capable of.

dir: Kiah Roache-Turner

2025

It’s literally the 50th anniversary of when Jaws came out. As such, every film released in the second half of 2025 has to be a shark film where sharks eat people.

Australia is not exempt from this, in fact, for whatever reason now shark movies have taken over from coal as one of our main exports.

When I saw the introduction to this film where it said “Based on a True Story”, I blurted out, out loud, involuntarily, “Bullshit!”, quicker and louder than Natasha Lyonne does on that show Poker Face where she sorts out the liars from the lied to, the murderers from the murder-curious. Because there is no way any part of this movie conforms to anything that ever happened to anyone, except in that there was a World War II, there were Australian soldiers, and that sharks exist and occasionally eat people.

Beyond that, this film is purest fantasy. Yeah, the HMS Armadale sank in 1942, but that's got nothing to do with this, .

The starting sequence will be familiar to anyone who has ever watched a) any war movies or b) anyone who has watched a movie. Boot camp. Young soldiers being yelled at. Recruits who are wonderful, wholesome and handsome (like our hero Leo played by Mark Coles Smith), or awful, ugly, mean, racist, selfish jerks (like the necessary villain beyond the shark played by Sam Delich, who has an unfortunate resemblance to that FriendlyJordies chap). There are no in-betweens, there are no grey areas on the battlefield or in personalities.

dir: Michael Shanks

2025

Now this is a bit more my tempo.

This, too, is a film about a couple in danger of tearing each other and themselves apart, but this works far batter, way way better even if it doesn’t have Sir Lord Esquire Benedict Cumberbatch and Academy Award Winner Olivia Colman in the lead roles, unlike the bloody Roses.

In fact, it has Alison Brie and Dave Franco, instead. You could probably not get two actors more opposite than them to the classy Brit thespians of the aforementioned title. Dave Franco is the younger, non-problematic Franco compared to his brother James, who, while a great actor, is also a notorious serial assaulter of women. Alison Brie is, if you like her work, a delight in shows as varied as Mad Men, GLOW, Community and a bunch of films, and yet also an accomplished actor capable of tremendous nuance and complexity in her roles. And she’s pretty fearless.

And Dave Franco… is Dave Franco. You wouldn’t think that they would suit such roles in a keen body horror flick, but they’re perfect for these roles.

Another key difference is that Brie and Franco are married in real life, so when they’re playing a couple in distress, it is somewhat more believable. They’re not playing a couple who have turned murderous due to decades of resentment and generally being very shitty people – they are playing a (younger) couple, despite being in their 40s who have only recently moved to the country, and who don’t seem to be sure of each other even after nearly ten years of being together.

Excruciatingly, Brie’s character Millie gets down on bended knee, for some reason, to propose to Tim when they’re having their hipster abundant going away party with all their friends. He awkwardly demurs yet they still go through with the move. He doesn’t really have a job and doesn’t want to give up his dream of being an unsuccessful musician, whereas she’s a teacher, and has apparently been supporting them both for the longest time.

In a new town, in a small town where they don’t know anyone, they are similarly repelled by and entirely dependent on each other, which creates its own pressures. Couples who spend too much time together, without clear boundaries in their heads, can get confused: Where do you end and I begin? A lack of boundaries, projected harsh boundaries that are too extreme or exclusionary; withholding oneself, depriving the other of what they want or need; relationships are hard, aye?

dir: Jay Roach

2025

I really wonder what Americans think British people are. Watching a film like this makes you think Americans think Brits are like these polite but profane aliens who don’t really physically exist in the same world as them, but they have those delightful accents, so what’s not to like?

Olivia Colman and Benedict Timothy Carlton “Cumbersomely Named” Cumberbatch are probably great actors who have been great in all sorts of things. They are, shall we say, less than great here. They are game, they’re trying, you can tell they’re trying, but this script, the stuff these Americans make them do in order to amuse other Americans…ugh. It’s ugly.

It’s ugly and unpleasant, and pretends constantly that it’s not, and they play terrible people, so I question how anyone thought this was going to work. I mean, I have no doubt people saw this flick, as in, might have even bought tickets and such, popcorn, the works, maybe on a date night out. Why didn’t they release it around Valentine’s Day, I’m sure some marketing genius is lamenting?

But, fucking hell. I know that the story is based on a book, and I know they made an earlier movie from it starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, and I remember watching that movie, back in the day, when I was still a kid. A young, impressionable kid. I can’t lie I hated that fucking film too, but at least that had some good actors in it. Good American actors, that is.

The novelty was that these two people had starred in these moderately successful romantic action flicks, Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile, in which Danny De Vito was also along for the ride, and then the thought was to have a flick where Turner and Douglas play a couple whose divorce gets messy and murderous. Ha ha, so funny, and De Vito can direct and play the third wheel!

I think what I really hate about these kinds of flicks, ones that pretend to be about the breakdown of a relationship or a marriage, is just how inherently dishonest they are. There’s nothing even vaguely hilarious about intimate partner violence, domestic violence, people trying to kill each other. It happens every day. Every week in Australia a woman is murdered by her partner or her former partner. That’s not to ignore the countless thousands of people who endure physical and emotional abuse, threats to murder, threats to suicide, every awful permutation possible, each and every day. Not exclusively women at the hands of men, but the vast majority being women on the receiving end.

dir: Darren Aronofsky

2025

He’s back! But then he’s never really been away.

Darren Aronofsky’s last film (The Whale) wasn’t that long ago (2022), and it had the odd distinction of being very successful awards-wise for people involved in the film other than himself, but hated by audiences and critics. This feels like… no-one really cares that much to even criticise it, but some people want to act like it’s a return to form. My point is you could hardly tell – every film Aronofsky has ever made has been significantly different from the ones that came before. The closest you could come to is say it’s set in a similar New York to Requiem for a Dream, but this comes across almost as a comic crime caper in comparison, and it’s nowhere near as depressing.

It is really strange, in my head, to watch something that is deliberately set in New York in 1998 and to think of it as a period piece, as a historical artefact. I mean, I know that it was, on paper, 27 years ago, it’s just that it doesn’t feel like it was nearly three decades ago.

Our clearest signal that it is a different time, different place, is that the World Trade Centre towers still stand, proudly, made of wholesome, American CGI, unaware that they would be mere dust in three years’ time.

Hank (Austin Butler) works bar at place called Paul’s Bar. Something something baseball. Baseball is or was very important to him. A car crash keeps being referred to and keeps being brought up again and again. I am guessing it is of some significance.

Hank has a neighbour, a British mohawked punk called Russ (Matt Smith, who was a Doctor, at some point?) who seems like a bit of a lunatic, but he needs a favour – look after me cat, he says, which Hank is reluctant to do.

Within minutes of Russ disappearing, some Russian thugs turn up and one of them beats up Hank so viciously that Hank loses a kidney.

dir: Mike Flanagan

2025

The Life of Chuck is a flick that seems to have not found much of an audience, despite being the creation, at least in its written form, of America’s most prolific, best and possibly most handsome writer, being Stephen King. He is a one man industry, or at least, his ideas are so great that all of them have to be adapted into something.

Unlike most of his stuff, this isn’t horror – this is something… else. Maybe it’s existential in nature, maybe it’s a gentle “live life to its fullest because we never know when it’s going to end” type of story, maybe it is a story about how life is like a box of chocolates, so you might as well dance before the world ends.

Who knows (Stephen King probably knows)? What I did see in reviews of the flick, from those reviewers that I follow, or respect, or both, is that those who loved it really thought it was one of the films of the year. I’m going to lazily say that half the people who saw it thought it was great and half thought it was absolute hollow dogshit, because I’m not sure I want to take the time to calculate the real statistic.

Reviews were very much like that. I only mention it (I mean, who cares what reviewers say about anything, huh?) because it really was one of those cases where those who loved it really did, and those who didn’t thought it wasn’t mediocre, they thought it was fucking terrible. That level of hostility, I’m not going to read too much psychology into it, but to me that kind of extreme comes from people feeling actively betrayed by what they watched.

I don’t really get it. I neither think it’s a great film, nor do I think it’s terrible. I didn’t find its central conceit too insulting, nor did I find its seeming message to be anything that extraordinary. I find it perplexing that Tom Hiddleston is in this, because he really doesn’t have that much to do, and he doesn’t even play the Chuck character for the majority of the flick.

My main agreement with anyone else that might complain is that it is a very strange story told arse-backwards for a very good reason, that reason being it’s about the life of Chuck rather than his death. We know he’s going to die, because everyone does, but if there’s anything this flick is trying to impress upon us, is that you should really take up every opportunity to dance with someone while you can.

(十一人の賊軍)

dir: Kazuya Shiraishi

2024

11 Rebels joins the illustrious ranks of Japanese period piece katana wielding action movies where a small number of wonderful people fight a much greater force and somehow come out on top but also all still mostly die by the end.

Why, yes, I am taking the piss, but am I exaggerating? Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is literally about seven guys who fight off 40 or so bandits, and win but mostly die. This flick set the template for so many action flicks for decades to come, not just in Japan, that we’re still suffering for it to this very day. Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, itself a loose remake of Kurosawa’s masterpiece, doubled the number of fighters but multiplied the enemy into the hundreds.

And of course I can’t not mention 47 Ronin, which literally has a bunch of ronin get revenge on a lord who dishonoured them, and once they’ve won their epic battle (after four hours of screen time), they all commit harakiri, which is just insane, the most insane thing that’s ever happened in the history of insane things happening. And Japanese people love that fucking story!

This flick has 11 people forced to fight against their will, or against being immediately executed, with the promise of maybe not being executed later if they survive, which they’re not meant to, and it’s all a lie because the sneaky piece of shit who’s really pulling all of the strings needs everyone to be dead anyway.

Everyone thinks they’re the main character in this flick. All of them with the exclusion of one character, being Mizoguchi (Sadao Abe) are profoundly wrong. The young lord who thinks he runs this province is wrong. The smug generals who lead two competing armies are wrong. The de facto and completely unwilling leader of the 11 rebels doesn’t want to be the main character at all, and he gets his wish. The samurai bullying the rebels into defending a key bridge and a key fortress thinks he’s the main character, because he’s a samurai, but guess what, he’s not right either.

They’re all wrong except for Mizoguchi. This is the era in Japanese history where samurai had to shave the middle bit of their heads, so many of the samurai look, to use the culturally sensitive term, fucking ridiculous. Mizoguchi definitely has that, as well as beady, froglike eyes, and is middle-aged, so he doesn’t lop off a single head or limb. But there is no doubt at all that everything that happens for the next two plus hours is because he wills it to happen.