fresh movie reviews and human wordsmithing while you wait

dir: Natalie Erika James

2026

Food itself is horrifying to some people.

I get it: so many people have eating disorders, I appreciate that and I’m not making light of it. People in my family, dear friends, so many people I know have been touched by the spectre of eating disorders that have impacted terribly upon their lives at some stages. Thankfully, most of them are still alive.

It’s an interesting place to start from for the premise of a horror flick, because in tandem with that is also society’s obsession with being thin as both a beauty ideal and a moral manifestation of what is “right” or good or proper. People who are thin are intelligent, disciplined, capable of self-restraint and delaying gratification, and are therefore good and reasonable people. Fat people lack moral fibre, can’t control themselves, and are therefore weak and bad people, under this logic. Our fear of varying, of not fitting in is universal, and we’re constantly being told what we should look like if we want people to think of us in particular ways, which is almost always unattainable for most of us, and how we’re worthless pieces of shit for not achieving that.

And all the endless scrolling on our phones doesn’t make a goddamn thing better, not for a second. So, eventually, that external ‘voice’ becomes an internal one.

Yes, this is a long-arse preamble – I can see that there’s a section of viewers, or a sub-section, for whom watching a person eat food enthusiastically would be inherently horrifying / disgusting.

I am not one of them. I was keenly aware of this as I watched the main character eating food with a bottomless, insatiable hunger, that I wasn’t the target audience. And yes this flick might be disturbing, but then I find a lot of romantic comedies disturbing too, mostly about how they still treat gender roles.

I never really found it scary, frightening, horrifying or other words a thesaurus would be happy to supply given how little it impacted me in that way, which is unusual for a horror film. But I was generally always interested in it, curious as to where it was going.

It’s still an interesting flick, is what I’m saying, even if it’s not particularly successful as a horror flick. Maybe I’m looking at it from the wrong genre perspective / lens. There are a heap of people, women, those identifying as women or non-binary, who would probably get a lot out of this flick who will never hear of it or ever see it because it’s a horror flick, and that’s a damn shame, I reckons.

dir: Sandra Sciberras

2026

Well. This film’s title promises seven snipers, and it delivers seven snipers, six of which are there to die because one of them is so much better than all the others.

That this is an Australian movie, or at least a movie made in Australia that’s not pretending it’s somewhere else doesn’t improve anything one bit. Not one bit. And the fact that it has some famous people in it just makes you think how desperate for work many of them must be.

I mean, I can’t imagine they got paid that much, but it helps to keep busy, eh?

The devil does apparently make work for idle hands and for out of work actors. In this gloriously inessential movie Radha Mitchell plays some ex-military ex-mercenary who has been hiding out in some fairly isolated country area (being Ipswich, Queensland, from which nothing good has ever originated) who thinks the people after her for 16 years have finally tracked her down.

Coincidentally, she has a teenage daughter who’s about, oh, 16 years of age. Anja (Annabel Wolfe) is also surly and resentful about being kept on the farm. I wonder if she’s going to rebel in some way.

Anyway, a jerk posing as a real estate agent (Ryan Kwanten) rocks up to the property, and Radha’s character immediately clocks that something is wrong: mostly, a real estate agent turning up anywhere means something terrible is about to happen to more than just property values and the rights of tenants. This triggers a cascade of events in that, it means some really bad person now knows where Radha’s character is, and that this person, the Dragon (Tim Roth) is coming.

Tim Roth? How desperate for cigarette and beer money must he be to appear in this? The budget for this would have been about a packet of smokes and a six pack per actor, so admittedly that’s about $70 per actor.

He is one of the greatest snipers in world history, for some reason. Radha’s character, who I keep referring to as “Radha’s character” because calling her by her name, being Kris or Hendricks, or her call sign, being Voodoo Child, embarrasses me, is also meant to be one of the all-time greats, but she doesn’t think she can take him on her own. She calls someone who calls other people, and then we have Seven Snipers sipping Singapore Slings while awaiting certain death at the trigger finger of the Dragon.

dir: Steven Soderbergh

2026

America’s greatest living director makes another pretty good okayish movie in Britain somewhere. Yay!

Yay?

Extra points to all involved for being British. This flick is already turning up on Best of 2026 lists, even though it’s June 2026, because people love writing up Best of lists so much that they’re now resorting to Best of 2026 so far lists, and, like the loyal trained seal that I am, I click on them anyway.

Perceptive enough to see when clickbait is generated – not perceptive enough to stop clicking on it.

The Christophers is unlike the vast majority of flicks that Soderbergh has ever made, but then his oeuvre of flicks has almost no consistency in terms of actors, technique or theme, except for the Ocean’s ones maybe. And with that in mind maybe it’s not beyond the pale to describe this as a very slow version of one of those heist movies.

Although the pleasure in this is not watching how a heist gets pulled off; it’s solely in watching these characters interact, even though that doesn’t feel entirely accurate. There is dialogue in this film, as in, two actors or more talking with each other, responding to each other. Yet large swathes of the flick involve one person pontificating, monologuing, old mansplaining to his heart’s content.

It helps when the monologuist is played by Sir Ian McKellen. The great Sir Ian McKellen. The strange thing for me about Sir Ian McKellen is that he’s played an old man for so long that to me he’s like someone who’s been ancient for the last 40 years, which doesn’t make logical sense.

If the first flick I saw him in that I remember him from is Gods and Monsters from the 90s, where he played the famous director of the original Frankenstein movies James Whale, as an old lion in decline, how is it that 30 years later he’s playing a similar role now? Was he faking it back then? Being old? It’s hard to fake, you’d think, but nothing is beyond a thespian of his salty calibre, surely?

Maybe these days he finds it helpful to play an old man because… he is an old, old salty dusty man now, or always was, and I guess it’s not like he can play a young man instead(?)

Here he plays a celebrated, if not infamous, British artist perhaps in the style of David Hockney or either one of Gilbert and / or George. I say “perhaps” because I’m not going to pretend I am completely up to date on the contemporary art scene, British or otherwise. And additionally I don’t think Julian is in the place Hockney was just before he died last week, in that Hockney was much beloved, certainly hadn’t been ‘cancelled’, and was still producing works that were selling for squillions.

Oh, and, in terms of David Hockney: Rest in Peace, Mr Hockney – no-one will be able to paint a swimming pool for the next 100 years without being accused of ripping you off.

狂野时代
Kuángyě Shídài

dir: Bi Gan

2025

Well. That was…something.

Something extraordinary. I have not seen a film like it, I think, probably ever.

That’s not necessarily a good thing.

Resurrection is quite a baffling movie. It might be because it’s really 6 short movies wearing a trenchcoat and hat pretending to be one movie. I don’t know the origin of this flick or how this director operates generally, so I wonder whether the whole production was planned out the whole way, or whether it’s become this out of necessity. Even directors as celebrated as Davids Lynch and Cronenberg have had to reconfigure their projects sometimes cobbled together into movies when they started as series and then funding was pulled.

But there is an overarching story being told (I think?), a theme being played out, something about the senses, and there’s something about history, and the history of cinema, and dreams.

There is some entity, referred to as a Deliriant, who dreams when others have given up their dreams for immortality instead. And it’s happening in a silent movie? And the Deliriant eats a bunch of poppies? And has like a film projector inside his heart?

And then there’s a story about some guy maybe driven mad by a sound, or someone’s voice. Someone maybe was murdered, and a suspect (Jackson Yee, who also plays the Deliriant), being tortured. I wasn’t sure who was doing the torturing, whether it was cops or secret police or someone even worse. There is something said about the Japanese, so maybe it’s the 1930s – 1940s. Is it spies? Is it wartime traitors? I have no idea. People get stabbed in the ear, or stab themselves in the ear, some guy plays the theramin.

Then the older guy stabs the younger guy, which definitely, totally, no way is that intended homoerotically, and then it’s on to the next story before the bafflement truly sets in.

dir: Curry Barker

2026

This flick, this Obsession, is something of a black swan event that I don’t think anyone could have really anticipated.

Oh, sure, the company that ponied up the money had some confidence that Curry Barker, a maker of short films on Youtube, might make something that would connect with audiences, but they only gave him a million dollars. And yet the return on that is 300-fold so far. So everyone pretending they’re a genius for “finding” him must also have been taken by surprise.

No film, at least at the American box office, has ever made more money in its second and third weekends since ET came out in the 1980s.

As for why…

I have no idea. I’ve watched the film, and I have opinions, thoughts, feelings, and my usual stock standard icy cold takes. But nothing really gives me an insight into why this flick’s popularity has skyrocketed with audiences, the more people have seen it. If this is a date film, as in a flick to take your sweetheart and your other friends in couples to, after a milkshake and a cheeseburger down at the local diner, it’s the darkest one I’ve seen since at least Heart Eyes last year, and far, far nastier.

I have read reviews, written by people my age or older, who say things like “the film really speaks to the concerns and fears of Gen Z” and while I’m not going to argue that its terrors, trials and tribulations are universal, I’m not sure that I see it being so specific to a new, gratingest generation. Unrequited love as the starting point for a dreadful, as in dread-filled story, is not exactly new. One of the oldest books, being the Bible, which is more of a long short story collection, I guess, is about humanity’s unrequited love for God, who definitely never loves us back.

All of our literature, and much of our art as a species seems to mostly be about longing, and longing by its definition never gets satisfied. It’s always about the ones who got away, never loved us back, or so adeptly broke our hearts.
Of course most of that is because of how goddamn immature we are until it’s way too late…

dir: BT Meza

2026

No-one’s ever done something awful in the name of love, have they?

Affection’s baffling title doesn’t even make sense in retrospect, after the mysteries within this plot are revealed. I read some reviews saying this flick was the bee’s knees, and I guess my expectations were high, but it doesn’t help that, with a few tweaks, it’s virtually the same premise as another flick I saw recently, which I won’t name, because that would be a tremendous spoiler.

I see dead people – no, that’s not the one. Queen of the World? No, not that one either.

After some opening action, a woman wakes up, confused, in a bed, with some guy she doesn’t know. We’ve all been there at some point in our lives, girl.

When she wanders around a house she doesn’t recognise, a man appears calling himself Bruce (Joseph Cross) but he assures her that everything is okay, and that he’s her loving husband, and she’s just having issues with her memory because of an accident.

Based on the sheer quantity of movies I watch, and the sheer quantity of movies that seem to have the same premise, millions of women every day are waking up and being gaslit by some jerk first thing every morning. What an exhausting way to spend your morning, trying to figure out who you are. I guess heavy drinkers get used to it over time, but the rest of you…you have my pity and my thanks.

However violently the woman (Jessica Rothe) rejects this scenario, upon seeing a young girl who calls her mommy (Julianna Layne), she is taken aback. She doesn’t remember the girl; she remembers having a son, but she feels like the child wouldn’t lie about something so important.

So, hmm, I wonder what’s going on? And we shall wonder for a while, ever waiting for the reveal we know is coming, one shoe after another dropping until there are no shoes left to drop.

And then, before the big reveal, Bruce, like all Bruces eventually do, shows his true colours: He’s just a wife guy too much in love with his wife.

dir: Aleshea Harris

2026

Things are about to get Biblical around here…

As someone without a fraction of religiosity within them, I can still appreciate the use of Old Testament thematics in the telling of a very Southern tale of revenge. And by Southern I mean the places that fought a war to retain slavery in the US, and by Old Testament I mean people butchering people they’re related to with their bare hands.

I am reliably informed, not by the Bible, but by the legendary Tom Waits, in his song “Dirt in the Ground” that “Now, Cain slew Abel / He killed him with a stone / The sky cracked open / And the thunder groaned” and I have no reason to doubt in Tom Waits now or forever, as opposed to the King James Version of the Bible. A lot of people get deaded in this flick, deaded as doornails, and I think most of it happens in this Biblical fashion, with this Biblical implement, so there’s something there thematically.

I’ve seen other reviewers mention less of ye Olde Testament, and more something like the ancient Greek plays, Sophocles or Aeschylus and such, and well, maybe that’s there too, but that makes this sound awfully highbrow, like we’re watching opera or some shit like that. If this is opera, it’s of the distinctly murderous ‘soap’ variety, rather than the singing and dying of consumption variety.

Not that capital O Opera has any shortage of murderous shenanigans.

Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) are twins bearing terrible scars, in their early twenties. Racine is the Rough One; Anaia the Quiet One. Racine’s burns are on her arm and body, Anaia’s are mostly on her face and neck. Whenever anyone insults Anaia, Racine gets protective and violent, and it’s repeated continuously throughout their lives. Since they work together, and this seems to happen a fair bit, they don’t stay in the same jobs for very long.

Products both of domestic violence and the foster system, they expect no kindness in this world, and probably not in the next either. When they get a letter from a mother they thought dead, they take a journey into the dark heart of the South in order to hear their god’s proclamation.

“She made us”, says Racine, so therefore she must be God.

dir: Ian Tuason

2026

There might not be anything scarier than the thought of looking after your parents as they lay dying.

Based on a dedication at the end of the credits, this director spent around three years looking after both of his parents as they slowly declined, in the house the movie is entirely set within, and, yes, it can take a lot out of you, and affect your mind in ways you couldn’t have imagined.

Years after the fact, I sometimes still hear my dad cry out for help in my sleep, and wake up terrified that I’ve let him down again.

So, it would be counterproductive and awfully precious to claim that this film undertone is targeting those members of the audience who’ve had this experience of looking after a parent or loved one as the sands ever so slowly, then abruptly, and then slowly again, run out of their hourglass. The movie takes that as its basis, as in, the experience of going nuts as you’re providing that level of care for someone, too afraid to leave the house in case something happens, desperate to get away to breath, painstakingly doing all the things you can to keep them alive, while wondering how much longer it can possibly take, and smushes it together with a podcast / audio experience from Hell weaving in contemporary ‘true crime’ type tropes and ancient myths.

As if it wasn’t horrifying enough already.

dir: Ben Wheatley

2026

I mean, what even is ‘normal’ these days? Who do we allow to define it, and to whose benefit?

We aspire to free will, we like to think of ourselves as freethinkers who live their lives on their own terms, but we’re still mostly conforming sheep, too concerned about standing out in case we catch people’s notice and they say something about any aspect of our appearances, our clothing, how we do what we do. We are still herd animals, even when we think we’re all alphas loping across the plains majestically without a care in the world.

It’s fucking stultifying. And that’s part of the imagined joke here, that a town called Normal, in Minnesota, the absolute pinnacle of Minnesota Nice, might not be that normal a place at all. That what Americans consider ‘normal’ is a fucking abomination in disguise.

For a full half hour of this flick, I thought I’d completely misjudged it, as in, for its first half hour it seemed like it was a serious kind of film about someone who’d had a crisis of faith (in Justice!) just trying to get by and get along in a temporary gig as a small town’s sheriff. The sheriff, for all his world-weariness, played by the great Bob Odenkirk, of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fame, chugs around this shitty little town being nice and polite to everyone, so as to rustle no feathers and cause no conflicts. Every shop, every establishment is called “Normal Savings and Loans”, “Normal Yarn & Twine”, “Normal Hardware”, you get the idea.

Everyone’s mostly polite, but this isn’t even about the hypocrisy of them being vampires or something fundamentally antithetical to the projected wholesome image of white picket fence Americana. In the very first few minutes of the movie we watch some Japanese yakuza bullshit happening in Osaka, where two (of three) lucky survivors are dispatched, missing a bit of their pinkie fingers, to the town of Normal. It’s not a jolly; it’s for work reasons.

Work reasons that are quite dumb. Ulysses, the sheriff, pieces together some odd things about the town during his travels, but the true magnitude of what’s happening behind the scenes eludes him until it becomes the plot front and centre, and he has to kill almost everyone in the town in order to not die.

dir: Damian McCarthy

2026

Ireland’s greatest living director, of horror flicks or otherwise, returns with a new flick starring Adam Scott as a complete arsehole.

Hold the front pages! Two seasons of Severance somehow convinced audiences that Adam Scott was some kind of nice guy. Nuh-Uh! This flick is here to remind us that Adam Scott excels at playing awful cruel jerks. He doesn’t just love it, he lives for this shit.

Here, he’s not only a jerk, but a jerk who’s a successful writer, who can’t figure out how he wants to end his trilogy of Conquistador novels that seem to be unrealistically popular with the masses. He has contrived an ending where the hero, presumably the Conquistador, wonders whether he should just die, or whether he should shatter a bottle that contains a map leading him out of the desert by smashing it on a child’s head, presumably killing the boy.

What the fuck? How dare you start a film like that!

What kind of a writer, what kind of a person would come up with something like that?

Maybe it’d be someone who has no fucks left to give about anything, let alone his career.

As he writes, alone, in his grey concrete monstrosity of an apartment, drinking heavily, we can see that he’s already haunted.

For reasons we don’t yet know he’s decided to travel to Ireland, to stay at a specific hotel, carrying his parent’s ashes. After some pointers as to the location of a particular tree, he lovingly and carefully lays down his mother’s ashes. When he gets rid of his dad’s ashes, it’s like he’s throwing away a container full of shit.

So already we know he loved his mother dearly, and did not care much for his father at all.

Nothing’s ever that simple in family dynamics, is it?

dir: Dylan Southern

2025

“What” is the Thing with Feathers, you could be forgiven for asking with such a title, and the answer would be “Grief”. Grief is the thing with feathers. Not “Hope”, from the Emily Dickinson poem. No, she lied to us.

Grief. It makes other people uncomfortable. The critics, how shall I say this, fucking hated this flick, even though it has a Cumberbatch in it, and critics are usually well-disposed towards Cumberbatches. Maybe it is a shit film, and I just can’t see it, because I’m blinded by…something.

I feel like I got a lot out of it. I find it fascinating that there are so many films recently about people grieving in their own demented ways, with birds of different types playing such a key role in the story. H is for Hawk famously has a hawk in it, being Mabel the goshawk, but is more about Helen grieving for her father. Tuesday has a macaw standing in for Death Itself, as a mother pre-emptively grieves for her dying daughter. The recent abominable Crow remake, like all iterations of the franchise, has a character brought back to life to avenge the death of a beloved. By a puffin. No, sorry, I meant a crow.

Look, I get that we associate crows and ravens with death, but really, now it’s any and every bird standing in for the Grim Reaper.

And I think I recall watching a recentish Melissa McCarthy movie that had a bird standing in for her lost daughter in The Starling, or grief, or the general shittiness of life, something.

Birds equal death and grief and loss. Such a burden for such tiny shoulders.

Cumberbatch plays a grieving dad, a “sad dad” as he is mocked, later on. He has two young boys to look after, and he is not coping well. His wife, their mother, we never really see or get to know. Her absence leaves a tremendous void, an unfillable void. That is one of the many ways we understand grief as experienced by this character.

We like saying to people “so sorry for your loss, if there’s anything you need, I know people say that, but I really mean it, anything you need, just ask” but then we understand, you’re meant to leave it there. You did your duty, now leave the grieving person / people alone until they sort their shit out. If you do have to chat with them, make sure to make awkward jokes to try to lighten the mood or change the very uncomfortable subject to something else.

Grief is vast, yes, I’ve written that many times before, and different for different people at different times. This flick tries to go out of its ways to show the heaviness of trying to carry on and do all the ‘normal’ everyday stuff when you’re drowning in grief. One could say “no-one wants to see that”, and in truth it’s uncomfortable to watch. It is uncomfortable watching someone spiralling further and further down. It is the opposite of what people generally go to a cinema to watch.

dir: Kane Parsons

2026

This is, thus far at least, one of the best and most successful horror flicks of the year, springing as it does from what I would have thought was one of the less likeliest places to arise from, being a series of Youtube videos that have been watched tens if not hundreds of millions of times.

Though of course there are cute cat videos that have billions of views, so let’s hope they don’t get their own franchise.

Why this all seems so unlikely is that around 4 years ago a sixteen year old kid started making these creepy videos, a mixture of ‘found footage’ stuff filmed with video cameras and 3D stuff made with Blender and Adobe After Effects (and a lot of heavy breathing and someone saying “what the fuck?” every few seconds), and a legend was reborn. I say ‘reborn’ because all of this is dredged from the depths of the internet itself, iterations of iterations, copies of copies, but this version really got a lot of eyeballs and fans, regardless or because of its creepypasta origins.

In what I regard as a curious trajectory, the success of The Backrooms online meant that a studio, being A24, offered this 19-year-old (he’s now 20) ten million dollars to turn this concept into a feature length movie, and a certain percentage of the people who viewed and loved his stuff on Youtube turned out and made this flick a tremendous success.

And the baffling thing (for us oldies) is that all the film references we would make or would think must have been relevant for this director and this production, are not. We are going to mention Kubrick and David Lynch and maybe Tarkovsky or movies like Skinamarink or The Blair Witch Project, or Severance and if Kane Parsons was listening to us, he’d probably tilt his head to the side quizzically as to the references, never having seen or heard of them.

He’s coming from a different place. It resonates with the youngs because it comes from a different place.

You know that I can’t avoid pretentious blather when it seems relevant. So the phrase I’m going to repeat, that has also been used in a million videos, is “liminal spaces”, or a “the fear or the horror of liminal spaces”. In between places. Open plan office spaces. Office spaces in general. Office spaces specifically. Places that seem unnatural even when nothing specifically or obviously creepy is happening.

Spaces painted in colours and patterns no one should ever have agreed to. Hallways and doorways, wherever there is a recess in shadow, meaning there is something always lurking potentially somewhere. And there is, something, somewhere, but even seeing glimpses of things is not as unsettling as these spaces.

dir: Mona Fastvold

2025

What a whacky film. I’m sure you could make a thousand films about the thousands of charlatans and lunatics the States has either bred or attracted over the centuries, but this here one is about someone almost no-one would know about, and, after watching it, you could rightly wonder why you should care.

Maybe because I’m not Christian, someone in the past declaring themselves to be the Christ Reborn, the Second Coming, doesn’t really strike me as that unusual, since there have been lots of people who lied about it and another vast sub-section of humanity deluded or deranged enough to believe it to be true, and all the beatings and medication could never change their minds until the end. There was even a guy in China in the 1800s who led a rebellion resulting in millions of deaths telling everyone he was Jesus’s brother, which is only a tiny bit less implausible than saying you’re the Big Kahuna yourself.

So, even if the delusion isn’t that rare, instances where other people believe it as well also aren’t that rare either, because people, in case you haven’t noticed, are stupid. Individually, like Tommy Lee Jones’ character says in Men in Black, a person might be smart, but collectively, people are dumb, panicky animals prone to following any leader calling themselves a guru, a Jesus or a Führer.

So desperate are we to believe in something that we’ll believe anything. There are worse things to believe in than Shakerism, though, I would hazard a guess. They were pacifists, at least, though that certainly didn’t help when people came after them.

With its roots in Quakerism, this mob starting off in Manchester in the 1700s believed that this particular woman was the Second Coming of the Christ, and, honestly, they could have done worse. Amanda Seyfried is no-one’s favourite actor, like, I don’t imagine anyone has pictures of her on their folder / trapper keeper for school or on their teen wonderwall at home, but she tries her darnedest to win a golden statue for her performance in this flick. Biopic? Tick. Persecuted religious figure? Tick. Nudity? Unfortunately tick. Sexual, um, unpleasantness? Tick.

Songs? Lots of them. So many of them, and none of them are certified bangers. This flick takes what is for me an unusual route and treats the beliefs of Ann Lee and her followers with absolute seriousness, as if to say “we have no idea, maybe she was the real deal?”

I mean, I don’t know for a fact that she wasn’t the Second Coming of Christ. The ways and motivations of gods and demi-gods are not for me to know or scrutinise. To quote the legendary song by Andy Prieboy called Tomorrow Wendy:
“I told the priest, don’t count on any second coming
God got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slumming
He had the balls to come, the gall to die, and then forgive us
No I don’t wonder why, I wonder what he thought it’d get us”

So He came down again, in the form of a woman this time, from Manchester. Manchester! And was tormented pretty much, based on this film, all of her miserable life, and died at the ripe old age of 48.

And yet… and yet… She still found some joy along the way.

dir: Simon McQuoid

2026

Terrible, just terrible. But enough about my weekend.

Mortal Kombat II manages to build on the “success” of the first of the reboots that came out during the awful covid era, and actually has some kind of tournament, the result of which is meant to dictate who rules this world or that world, so us humans are meant to have a stake in what happens. It’s no credible way to establish a civil or economically stable society, but compared to the current messes going on, it couldn’t possibly be worse.

It is utterly silly foolishness, but I’ve played most if not all of the games, up until Mortal Kombat 11, and then the one that came out immediately after that, mysteriously titled Mortal Kombat 1. Mathematics and pulling people’s spines out through their mouths do not mix.

Earth needs a new hero to defend it from, um, supernatural people, so naturally the ‘Elder Gods’ decide a washed up action movie actor called Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) should do it.

Karl Urban is not a washed up anything, probably having the time of his life and starring in all sorts of series and franchises, but he can perfectly easily play an arrogant jerk who also keeps whining about not having any powers like the people he is confronted with / by.

Complicating things further, very arbitrarily, a necromancer called, uh, Quan Chi? resurrects whoever the makers want to be alive at any given time, including a guy who I was so glad died in the first flick, being Kano (Josh Lawson). Even as I thought we were safe from his ozzie ozzie ozzie oi oi oi type of being painfully Australian, he’s back swearing even more than ever! It is a remarkable bit of casting. Lawson has proven to be the most annoying character in at least 6 films I’ve watched, and that’s no mean achievement.

He goes for absolute gold here, though he in no way makes Australia proud.

dir: Olivia Newman

2026

Just to avoid any confusion, or any amped up expectations, let me just admit outright that this is not a great flick. That’s right, the flick about octopuses probably ‘inspired’ by the success of covid-era documentary My Octopus Teacher is not a great flick.

It is cheesy. It is dorky. It is clumsy. It is obvious. It is so contrived that it deserves to be mocked. It is something that would have been ‘released’ on the Lifetime or Hallmark cable channels in the years gone by instead of Netflix.

And yet I still enjoyed it. I’m not going to say “I enjoyed it immensely”, but I laughed (very) occasionally, teared up a few times and did cry at the end, so that counts for something, hopefully, in this sometimes cold and brutal world(?)

Sally Field. She is probably one of the main reasons why I enjoyed the flick or at least had tender / forgiving feelings towards it. Who doesn’t love Sally Field? What kind of hollowed out husk of a jerk doesn’t adore this glorious woman?

I haven’t seen her in anything since the sweet Hello, My Name is Doris which surely was like a decade ago. But of course most people remember her as, I dunno, what do people remember her from the most? Playing Forrest’s momma in Forrest Gump? If you’re an Old, then you’d seen reruns of Gidget and The Flying Nun when you were a kiddlywink. Mrs Doubtfire? Not Without My Daughter? Soap? Aunt May in the Andrew Garfield Amazing Spider-Man movies? Mrs Lincoln in Lincoln?

If you’re a Young then you don’t know or care who Sally Field is and consider whole, entire movies to be a dead artform from the olden days, and you would rather watch 60 two minute TikToks or Reels in a row rather that one whole movie that goes for 2 hours.

And likely you don’t care about giant Pacific octopuses either, since by the time you read this they’ve probably gone extinct or something, and yes it was somehow your fault.

Even though usually constant voiceover drives me up the wall I did not in fact dislike the constant voiceover here. Mostly that’s because the voiceover is delivered by one of the greats, being Alfred Molina, with that amazing voice of his. Of course, famously he played the dastardly Dr Otto Octavius in a couple of Spider-Man movies, though not the ones Sally Field was in.

Even better here he is vocalising, entirely for our benefit, the thoughts of a giant Pacific octopus that the humans call Marcellus. I don’t know that he associates the name with himself, as in, I don’t know that he thinks of himself as a Marcellus, but that’s what they call him. Those thoughts are mostly of his loathing for humans.

It’s true, we’re a pretty loathsome bunch. We haven’t done wonders with the oceans, that’s for sure. And a number of humans, thinking they were helping him out, ‘rescued’ him and put him in an aquarium after he lost a limb to some vicious eel.

dir: Jim Jarmusch

2025

That sneaky director, Jim Jarmusch, maker of cool films for over 40 years, member of the secret Sons of Lee Marvin lookalike society, tried to sneak one past me. How did I not hear about this flick, that he had a new flick out, huh?

Father Mother Sister Brother is more like three short films wearing an overcoat and a fedora pretending to be one movie. Given the title you’d think it’s got something to do with families and such. And they do, but they aren’t directly linked or using the same actors in different set ups and scenarios. If they are united by anything, it is quantum entanglement where actions and connections can occur at a spooky distance.

If you know the tempo, the measure, the tenor that Jarmusch usually works in / with, this will all seem familiar even if the scenarios and dialogue aren’t. You either like the way he works or you rejected it a long while ago. Those new to his films would watch this flick and probably be perplexed by it, and why everything seems so odd.

And if you’re a long term watcher and appreciator of his movies, watching the first segment and seeing Tom Waits pop up as the chap who puts the father in the “Father” sequence would be delightful, seeing as Tom is one of a long list of people Jarmusch has worked with over the years, and a welcome one to see again (even if his character is a bit of a prick).

Two siblings, played by Mayim Bialik and Adam Driver, who seem like okay people, are driving to visit their dad, who they clearly don’t see or hear from very often. They seem to get along fairly well, with each other. The dad lives in a fairly rural area, and they look very much like city people.

As they’re travelling towards him, the odd thing is they’re discussing what his health must be like, whether he’s doing okay, how it is that he gets by financially, and we’re watching him move things around at his place. He’s not cleaning up; he’s actually trying to make the place look like more of a dump, messier. He’s covering up the nice furniture and cluttering things up.

dir: Akinole Davies Jnr

2026

This film feels, and I feel sure, is meant to feel, less like a period piece and more like a shared memory. Admittedly, the thought of movies set in the 1990s as being period pieces is staggering to me, but I cannot ignore the march of time, no matter how much I wish I could. 1993 was many years ago. I remember (parts of) 1993 very well, but I didn’t have the experiences these two brothers did that they try to capture here, so hopefully their memories are better than mine.

Akinole Davies Jnr and his brother Wale are remembering a day they spent with their dad shortly before his death. Obviously, since 33 years have passed since then, and they might have been eleven and eight at the time, in scripting and directing this film, with child actors playing them and the talented Sope Dirisu playing their dad, it’s less about achieving historical accuracy and more about capturing the feeling of hanging out with a dad they lost too soon after these events. It’s a dream, a tightly held one, overflowing with sadness and a bit of joy, but mostly aching loss.

Folarin, their dad, is a complex character. He is not exactly a stern patriarch but he is pretty serious. He doesn’t fuck around. When he tells the brothers to get dressed to accompany him to the capital of Nigeria, being Lagos, they snap to it regardless of their misgivings.

We get the impression he is rarely around. They have a mother who works, but is absent this day. Folarin is usually away working, yet this itself is its own complication.

To get to the capital they try to catch a bus. Things are kind of messed up in Nigeria at this time. There’s been a military dictatorship for the last decade, there’s been a free and fair election recently, and everyone is on edge waiting for the results to be announced. How that results in a national fuel shortage is not entirely clear, but it’s so bad that the bus they’re travelling on conks out half-way to the capital, due to a lack of fuel. Some guy had been collecting money from everyone that was getting on, but he’s got nothing to say other than “the bus is out of fuel” when people start complaining.

How else to get the rest of the way? Taxis are too pricey, so Folarin asks a guy with a bike to take them some distance. Four people, two of them admittedly children, on one bike. Now that’s practically an ad for whatever company that bike was from.

dir: David Lowery

2026

It’s hard to feel bad for mega wealthy pop diva superstars, but this flick tries damn hard to make us feel that way.

Mother Mary is a strange flick. When it starts, right from the start, we are put in a certain position because of the words we keep hearing uttered by a very angry fashion designer, being Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), who, due to the sheer magnitude of the hate she has for the star, can feel that she is travelling towards her.

Sam’s hatred is pure, and she wants some kind of revenge, and, initially, we are somewhat convinced that she is entitled to her feelings, if not her revenge. Her main beef is that she helped create this pop persona that Hathaway’s character rode to global success, and yet she was never credited for it and was cut off by the pop starlet when she made it big.

As it goes on a bit, though, I started thinking “is it reasonable for someone to feel entitled to a life long commitment from a Madonna / Kylie / Beyoncé / Taylor Swift type?” I mean, pop stars probably go through fashion designers the way that someone with a cold goes through boxes of tissues. I’m not discounting the work they would do: the iconic looks crafted for these divas that make them global icons have to be created by someone. And ‘created’ doesn’t mean being yelled at by a star until you somehow get it right: one has to craft the vision both of them see.

Sam’s business has flourished in the years that have passed since their estrangement, but from Sam’s telling she felt compelled to make her business succeed solely out of spite. Spite is a decent motivator for creative endeavours, no doubt. Such is her malice towards, uh, Mother Mary, that she intends to relish the fuck out of this opportunity to berate and humiliate this star, who has literally come crawling back. “You’ll come crawling back” is a thing someone yells as an ex departs, but they rarely, if ever, do.

But back she has come, and she is somewhat crawling.

David Lowery, famous for a bunch of weird but great looking films, seems a bit perplexed as to what the point of this flick is, I feel. He is trying to capture that feel of a top of the world performer, or like a melodramatic two hander where two actors are going at it hammer and tongs, but neither really succeeds. For all of Sam’s venom, and the relish with which Michaela Coel delivers her lines, this isn’t a flick where the banter between two characters is like a tense tennis match. Mostly it’s Sam spitting fire, and Mother Mary responding with wet newspaper.

dir: The Adams Family

2025

Mother of Flies is the most recent horror movie from a family of talented weirdos, possibly the most talented family of weirdos, that I’ve ever come across.

Rather than extol the virtues of their previous films, let me just launch in to why this flick works so well; lots of movies have witches as characters, as threats, as the big bad, and these flicks are often set in nature, but few flicks fuse together their natural settings and their themes in a manner that works perfectly from a storytelling perspective.

Is a witch a magical being made powerful by being outside of nature, above nature, more than nature, or does their power derive from being so in tune with nature that magical stuff happens?

In this flick someone who embraces nature fully has to embrace if not seduce Death as well in order to neither be living nor dead, but some third state in between, which is all well and good for witches and necromancers, but what about regular people? Regular shmoes, just trying to survive the everyday?

Micky (Zelda Adams) has been struggling with cancer and chemo / radiation therapy for years, but it hasn’t staved off the tumour that now seems like it’s going to kill her. There is nothing more that so-called Western medicine can do for her. So she turns to an unlikely possible cure.

I’m not talking about alternative medicine, or those dickheads who will tell you / sell you ivermectin / horse dewormer, or like Helen Garner’s friend in her novel The Spare Room who had cancer and had been convinced that massive doses of Vitamin C would save her (dear reader: it didn’t).

In Mother of Flies, a witch contacts Mickey through her dreams and tells her where to come so that they can help each other out.

dirs.: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

2026

I haven’t read the book, but I hear it’s a good read, if you’re into that kind of thing. I feel like, perhaps unfairly, Andy Weir’s books are for people who like easily digestible science fiction where something exciting happens at the end of every chapter, and every chapter is only a page and a half.

Probably not true, but we all have our biases. Based on this unfounded set of assumptions, I think that could be one of the reasons why his books translate into flicks so easily. The Martian was hard to hate even if it mostly had one person, being Matt Damon, Matt Damoning his way across Mars and jabbering at us in voiceover for over two and a half hours.

Project Hail Mary similarly has mostly one person on screen for most of its length, with a bunch of flashbacks to Earth, but has the added bonus of a cute alien friend for our main character to chat with.

Also unlike The Martian, while the flick might rest on the shoulders of a scientist type doing science-y things in order to survive (with a confident and calm manner), this time around our main character may be science smart, but he’s a raging, cowardly doofus who bangs around like a pinball in order to make us laugh. The makers really lean in on that shit.

When you’re thinking of someone playing the lead in one of these kinds of flicks, Ryan Gosling wouldn’t usually be where your mind would go. Sure, he can play stoic robots, and dead-eyed psychopaths, but a role like this needs someone who can express stuff. He’s the guy you get when you need a white guy to save jazz, but not usually the one you want to save the world.

Gosling cries multiple times in this movie. I just want to reassure potential audiences, he mostly acts humanly and humanely in this movie, and is not like a glum robot like in most of his roles.

He plays someone whose surname is Grace, so they call him Grace for most of the movie, despite the fact that he has a first name, you know. Ryland. Anyway, this jerk wakes up on a spaceship with a beard and long hair. He has no idea how he got there and doesn’t really know why he’s there. He slowly pieces it together, that he’s on some mission to save the Earth.

dir: Meredith Alloway

2026

I don’t know what I was expecting when I sat down on a Thursday night to watch something trashy, but it wasn’t this. I had read reviews or seen the flick mentioned in the same breath as certain classics like Heathers, The Craft, Jawbreaker, the non-musical Mean Girls, and, come on, surely they were taking the piss?

This flick is… about a group of young women who work at a clothing store at a mall, and they are held in awe or at least their leader is feared by all. They have names related to fruits, hence they are the Forbidden Fruits of the title. Their leader is, of course, Apple (Lili Reinhart). They work in Free Eden. Apple, Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) are the in group.

If you’ve worked in a mall, or been to a mall, immediately you can see how implausible this scenario is. The histrionics of a redhead and her hangers on wouldn’t even register three shops down, let alone throughout the place. Malls have hundreds of employees. Thousands, tens of thousands of people can come through on given days. Who has time to care?

However, you work with the premise you have, not the premise someone else came up with after the fact. A new devotee calling herself Pumpkin (Lola Tung) insinuates her way into the group in order to get close to Apple.

Pumpkin are fruits. I’ve never thought of it before, but they are. Wikipedia confirms it. Apple seems excited to have a new devotee/slave, and inducts her into their witchy coven through a fairly gross ritual.

As you can probably imagine without wanting to watch any of it or a trailer, Apple is Regina George / Nancy, and is really mean to the others and they’re all terrified of earning her disfavour. But for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. The extension of this dynamic / template beyond school doesn’t feel like it makes a lot of sense. You don’t have to tell me about how people’s insecurities and group dynamics in a workplace could end up leading to a group of idiots being coerced into doing something incredibly stupid (like voting for One Nation), but I could never figure out whilst watching why any of them would put up with Apple’s bullshit. Fig is a college graduate (in astrophysics no less) so why is she even there?

Cherry is perhaps not as gifted intellectually (okay she’s the straight Gretchen analogue who keeps trying to make fetch happen), but why is she putting up with all this abuse regardless? Her feelings of loss and loneliness upon losing her family in a fire couldn’t possibly be assuaged by being continuously abused and controlled by this horrible person.

dir: Kirill Sokolov

2026

The title sounds like either a threat or a warning, but it’s in no way accurate in terms of the movie it exists as the title for. A more accurate and less comprehensible at first title would be You Will Have to Kill Them Over and Over Again. Because that’s literally what happens.

And yet I still wouldn’t have advised that, because if there’s one thing I hate in film titles, and there are lots of things I hate about film titles, it’s excessive literalism.

Although Plane still amuses me to this day. That film was about a plane, don’t you know?

No, They Will Kill You is pretty much the same film as either of the Ready Or Nots, either one, but released at the same time as the sequel, so there could be some spite involved. Never underestimate the power of spite. It’s a powerful motivator.

It gets shit done. Both flicks are about a bunch of devil worshippers trying to kill one person, and then two persons, who happen to be sisters. Both have estranged sisters as their main characters, who have to resolve their longstanding resentments / guilt in order to survive long enough to reconcile. Both flicks have siblings protagonists at the mercy of the supernatural, but who manipulate their dire circumstances in order to survive (and thrive) at the end, damning their enemies.

Both have lots of violence, but They Will Kill You has the better action sequences, and by ‘better’ I mean it has action sequences that are so violent that they’re cartoonish. If you’re of a certain age you’d watch something like this and see all the influences, but try and keep it currentish by saying the makers have definitely watched and taken notes from Kill Bill, as if any of that wasn’t ripped off from other HK and Japanese flicks, but also the Sam Raimi Evil Dead movies.

This flick leans more into the horror genre, seeing as there are lots of opportunities to do terrible things to people’s bodies when magic makes them reform and reconstruct (so you can do it all again).

Zazie Beetz plays the lead role here, and it’s nice to see someone playing this kind of role who’s not a 90-lb dyed blonde waif with dark eyebrows for once. The other difference is that her character of Asia Reaves isn’t ‘here’ against her will: she wants to be here, she wants to kill these fuckers, in order to find her sister Maria (Myha’la).

dirs: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillet

2026

Did we… did we really need another go? Didn’t she suffer enough in the first flick?

The success of the first Ready or Not I guess necessitated a sequel, but I can’t imagine a lot of people went to see it? Must be less than went to see the original.

It can’t offer anything new, can it? The first flick had the main character played by Samara Weaving running around a mansion as terrible people try to kill her lest the devil kill them too. This “new” flick picks up the next day, as a bunch of terrible people kidnap her and her sister (Kathryn Newton), and let her run around a mansion as they try to kill her, for either control of the world or to not explode.

To say it’s more of the same implies that I don’t get that its virtue, as a sequel, is an endless array of callbacks to the original film.

No. This new flick has so much more to offer. It has two estranged siblings figuring out their relationship and saying “I’m sorry” eventually but only after bickering endlessly as the forces of Satan try to kill them both.

dirs. Madeline Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli

2026

This film doesn’t feel like it was ‘produced’, or extruded by any kind of machine or blind process: it feels like it was made, created, crafted by people who wanted to carefully put something specific together.

It’s not a feeling I always get when I’m watching movies, because most of them feel and look like everything else you’ve seen before in order to not scare the horses, mostly. And mostly what that results in is movies that go down smooth and easy and are barely memorable afterwards.

Honey Bunch is not one of those movies that I will forget easily. A movie that starts with a song from a weirdo Scottish polymath like Ivor Cutler, called I Worn My Elbows to the Bone, for You, is going to be a memorable entry into a film’s world.

And what a disturbing world it is. We see a man push a wheelchair with his disabled beloved towards the waves, and then carry her into the water, for no good purpose, we imagine, despite the fact that he tells her “I love you” when it looks like he’s going to drown her.

From grim beginnings grim things grow. In sunnier times that same husband, Homer (Ben Petrie) is driving some 70s station wagon to some country place. His wife Diana (Grace Glowicki) wakes in the passenger seat, unsure of what’s going on, which will persist for about the next hour.

There is reference made to an accident, there are hopes expressed about someone finally being able to help her with her issues, and all of it seems like the creepy set up to countless horror flicks where someone tries to do something terrible to a woman.

When they meet the main person who seems to run the show, called Farah (Kate Dickie), things only seem to become even more ominous, because, well, if you’ve seen Kate Dickie in stuff before, her appearance is always a cause for concern.

Kate Dickie has been in a million things, but for me when she played Lysa Arryn way back in the day, in Game of Thrones, it sealed the deal for me for a certain type of typecasting that meant whenever I am to see her pop up in something again, I’m naturally going to think she’s up to terrible, terrible things. It’s not Kate Dickie’s fault that Lysa Arryn’s actions in that show caused every action that followed, eight years of butchery and misery for hundreds of thousands of people, but it’s not something easy to forget, just like the image of her breastfeeding her appalling teenaged son.

dir: Ethan Coen

2025

Lesbians. Tricia Cooke has made two movies, and they’ve mostly been about how much fun it is to be a lesbian. Oh I know it says the director is Ethan Coen, but everyone knows it’s Tricia pulling the lesbian strings.

Otherwise it looks very strange as to why a middle-aged cis het man is making so many movies with them as the main characters.

Although I will point out that none of the actors playing these lesbians identifies as gay or lesbian, but then they’re also not private detectives, cops or murderers in real life either, so I guess it’s all staying true to acting being a curiously expensive form of playing make believe.

There have been oodles of other plot elements in these two films of a threatened lesbian detective trilogy of films, but like the Maltese Falcon in The Maltese Falcon, and the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, it doesn’t really matter what the special item people are after is, what matters is whether the lesbians have sex on screen in a convincing manner.

No, it’s not that either. It’s all about the banter.

Both of these films have starred Margaret Qualley in the lead role. Now, when I first saw Drive Away Dolls, I hadn’t seen Margaret Qualley in anything as yet, and didn’t think that much of her abilities as an actor. Since then I have seen her in at least 3000 movies, and now, watching her in this, I have a far greater appreciation for her qualities as an actor.

She plays this role “straight”, as in, like she’s a detective in a 1970s flick, even if it’s set contemporarily, but she’s not hamming it up for the camera. Everyone else acts like they’re in a comedic crime caper, but she’s dedicated to her deadpan role.

She’s so dedicated to deadpan that when they bring Aubrey Plaza into the story, Qualley out-deadpans her, which is no minor achievement.

dir: Andrew Stanton

2026

It’s kind of miraculous that they still let Andrew Stanton make movies, especially in this day and age where moviemaking is seen as a dying, legacy art form, akin to opera and ballet, don’t you know. In the past if you made a flick that massively bombed and lost a studio a massive amount of money they rarely if ever allowed you to make a movie again.

Stanton directed Finding Nemo, and WALL-E, which I’m sure did very well in the era when all Pixar movies did very well, but then they let him make John Carter, which, adjusted for inflation lost more money than any other flick ever, even more than Pluto Nash or Wild Wild West or almost every release since the covid era that hasn’t made its money back. And yet the dream factory hasn’t slowed down at all…

The truth is, a lot of it is bullshit. As per Hollywood accounting, even successful movies don’t make a cent because the studios don’t want to pay taxes or residuals, so it’s all a smokescreen to allow money to keep pouring into a black hole of neediness, with almost nothing coming out of it except memes and cute visuals.

All the same, the sheer scale of John Carter’s floppiness has been a joke haunting Stanton’s career ever since then. Disney clearly still loves him, though, because they let him direct humans again here in a curious science fiction flick before they let him direct Toy Story 5.

In the Blink of an Eye seems ambitious, in that it pretends it’s telling three interlinked stories set in three distinct and distant time periods that seek to embody aspects of our (collective, human) past, present and future. It isn’t really that ‘big’ or complicated. When I was watching this, I mostly felt glad I was watching a science fiction flick that didn’t degenerate into contrived conflict and action for the sake of action when it trusted the story it was telling to be told in a fairly standard way.

But that’s another reason why I think not that many people are going to catch this on the streaming services (on Hulu if you’re taking notes).

Forty five thousand years ago, there are these people, who happen to be Neanderthals, and they basically live at the mercy of nature and whatever fate befalls them. They find food, they fuck, and the next generation comes along. Just like us in the present.

In the present, a couple very decisively don’t fuck, with the main character in this section kicking out the guy she’s brought home, pointedly reaching for her trusty device to see the job done properly. She happens to be an academic archaeologist, trying to figure out what she’s just pried out of the fossilised grasp of a Neanderthal skeleton.

dir: Baltasar Kormákur

2026

When you ask yourself whether you can be bothered watching this flick, what you really need to be asking yourself is “do I really want to sit around for a couple of hours watching a man terrorising a woman for most of a movie’s duration before she gets her revenge / he gets his comeuppance?”

And honestly I just don’t have the strength anymore, much of the time. I don’t really want to watch anyone being terrorised, but at least for me as well it’s becoming increasing untenable to justify to myself watching stuff however transgressive it might seem or how satisfying the catharsis at the end might be.

At least, well, there must be some virtues to this flick. Let’s figure them out together!

Charlize Theron has played Amazonian, dauntless, massacrers of monstrous men before, and this isn’t one of those feral roles. She does not play her role here in Apex like Furiosa in Fury Road, or like her savage secret agent in Atomic Blonde. Mostly, because even though it would have been enjoyable (for me), it wouldn’t have made much sense in the context of the film. The character she plays here, of Sasha, is not a chrome plated bionic avenger of wronged women and children everywhere, or a super trained fashionista with lethal skills to pay the bills: She’s just a woman who likes to climb mountains and go white water rafting.

Her character was also married to an Australian, Australianly played by Australia’s Own Eric Bana. Several months before the main part of this story transpires, Sasha and her husband were scaling the Troll Wall in Norway, being all cute and charming and cuddly with each other.

And then of course her husband dies.

Not only dies, but she has to literally cut him loose in order to not be killed by his dead weight, and THEN he dies.

What guilt to carry around with you… how sad. Boo hoo. To honour her fallen companion, she decides to travel to his original stomping grounds, to honour him by doing some camping, some climbing, and some rafting.

She finds herself at the Blue Mountains, even though they’re not calling it the Blue Mountains in the movie, and everyone from the local rangers to the feral locals act like they’re trying to horrify her for the sin of being an unaccompanied woman. A woman! In the wilderness? On her own? How dare she, who does she think she is wearing pants etc etc

dir: Jonah Hill

2026

I didn’t think I’d ever watch and review a movie directed by Jonah Hill, but then I also never imagined I’d live in a world where one dissipated American orang-utan would hold the entire world to ransom.

And yet here we all are. The other main reason I never thought I’d watch something with Jonah Hill in it and / or directed by him is that I tired of his bullshit a long time ago. The last time I recall seeing him onscreen would have been when he was doing his Don Jnr routine in Don’t Look Up as the shitty son of Meryl Streep’s MAGA inflected president, and I think we were all like “that’s plenty, thanks.”

Around the same time there was a curious Netflix series where Hill stretched out these strange on camera recordings with his therapist, which, on the surface seemed like a recognisable Hollywood person talking openly and honestly about their struggles with mental health issues, encouraging others, especially men, to decrease the stigma around these issues and to seek the help and support they need.

And then an ex-girlfriend posted texts from Hill on social media to show how this manipulative and abusive piece of shit used therapy-speak and empty mental health phrases to berate and coercively control his former partner. Not so much ‘cancelled’, which isn’t really a thing, he showed that he still had some capacity for shame and scurried away to “work” on himself, presumably.

dir: Oliver Laxe

2025

What…

Huh? Sirāt is, well, you can’t accuse it of being the same old same old as usual.

The name in Arabic means way or path, but it’s commonly, at least religiously, a reference to the path to Paradise, which is a very difficult place to get to, apparently. Fall either side of the path, as in, fall short along the path and you’ll either be cut to shreds or burned to ashes.

This film is about… I have no idea what it’s about, to be honest. Maybe it’s how great electronic dance music is, or how great it is to dance to rave music, how great it truly can be to feel like part of a collective, and like you’re not alone, if only for a time.

Beyond that, I dunno. Your guess, if you haven’t seen it, is as good as mine. If you have, well, you have my condolences.

We watch as some roadies stack up some speakers, in a desert. Towers of speakers. Against an ancient backdrop of cliffs, mesas, the old bones of the earth and the defiant sky, mocking us.

Then there’s music, and entranced people dancing, dancing, dancing. These people, if you have an eye for it, are not extras selected to fill in the background of a rave / nightclub scene, like what we’ve seen in countless movies. These people are… you can tell they are living a lifestyle, a certain lifestyle. They are the chemically affected worshippers of a techno god, and I don’t mean the DJ. Their worship is their dancing, like Sufi dervishes, like mystics themselves, in furious motion with elegant purpose.

And intruding into that world comes someone who clearly doesn’t belong there, handing out fliers and asking one question: Have you seen this girl?

The question is asked in an array of languages, but the person asking is clearly Spanish, even if all this dancing mania is happening somewhere that is either Morocco or meant to be Morocco, where raves go for days and apparently, for these people, only lead to more raves afterwards.

Luis, the man asking the question, who I said is obviously Spanish, I said because I recognised the actor, being Sergi Lopez, who might not be a household name but he’s well known to people who watch sub-titled movies. He played the evil Captain / Generalissimo Franco stand-in in Pan’s Labyrinth all those years ago. Now, well, these days he looks more like me.

O Agente Secreto

dir: Kleber Mendonça Filho

2025

This was a fascinating film to watch. Oppression, and living under a fascist dictatorship never looked so glowing and golden, and sounded so cool.

We get it. Fascism is terrible. Dictatorships are horrible. Fascist military dictatorships are the worst. We, or at least those of us of a certain age or who have lived long enough to watch all the films about awful oppressive regimes expect grim scenes, blank cruel functionaries, dungeons, lots of grey concrete and innocent people being annihilated. The Secret Agent takes a different tack to tell its story, set in the middle of the military dictatorship that brutally ruled Brazil up until the mid 80s. It’s not about all the awful things that this junta did or that juntas did or do.

It’s about how living in a place under such rule corrupts everything all the way down to the street level, to the personal level, and how casually life can go on not noticing the awfulness embedded all around.

The opening sequence, deceptively languid in how it’s paced, delivers the film’s premise and thesis statement without having to highlight or underline anything. It’s such a brilliant sequence. There are plenty of other sequences that are solid throughout the flick; I’m not implying it peaks in its opening 15 minutes. It’s just such a great encapsulation of the era the flick is situated in.

There’s a phrase I have to actively stop myself from using too much in relation to the central character here, as played by Brazilian actor Wagner Moura; everything he does, he does with effortless cool. Whatever it is that he might look like, whatever it is that he feels inside in a given scene, he does everything, whether lighting a cigarette or staring at someone who might want to kill him, he does it with effortless cool. I don’t know how, but it’s a great ability for an actor.

In that opening scene I alluded to earlier, all he’s doing is driving his yellow VW Beetle to a petrol station, looking to get some fuel. It’s in a rural area, and there’s a dead body on the ground nearby, with a few bits of cardboard over him. No-one seems to be too put out about the body, but it’s definitely something of a hassle when local stray dogs try to rip off some souvenirs.

The proprietor of the petrol station explains the thief was shot by another attendant a couple of days ago when he tried to rob the place. Since then, none of the actions you assume would happen in a functioning society, even in 1977, have taken place, because no-one gives a fuck.