fresh movie reviews and human wordsmithing while you wait

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 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.

dir: Sam Raimi

2026

I have seen this movie many times, even though I’ve only seen it once. You have seen it before too, even if you’ve never seen it. True, that can be said of so many movies, but this is particularly familiar.

And that is okay. I don’t think this movie represents that much of a spin, or transformation of cheesy stock concepts or tropes to justify its existence, but I guess we are lucky it’s not terrible.

Two people survive a catastrophe, and end up on an island. Whether it’s Madonna, Tom Hanks, or Wilson the Volleyball, we know tough times are ahead for our Robinson Crusoe-like heroes.

The flick is not about surviving against the odds, or the desperation of almost getting rescued in order to return to a life of indoor plumbing and climate control / climate change-exacerbating comforts. It’s about two people trying to get what they want out of life. Since they want apposite things, only one of them can get their way.

Linda (Rachel McAdams) is a socially awkward white collar worker at some company. She is very good at her job (in the Planning and Strategy section, *not* Accounting), but she isn’t particularly well liked by her co-workers. She was promised a promotion at some point, but the failson nepo baby who has somehow inherited the business gives the job to someone who was in his frat, who wears suspenders and slicked back hair like American Psycho is back in fashion again.

Bradley (Dylan O’Brian) is an entitled, sexist abusive jerk who is disgusted by Linda because she’s a woman in her 40s. He intends to give her the flick from her job, but only after an ‘important’ junket to somewhere that will result in them having to take a private jet together.

Whittled down to the bare essentials by force majeure, meaning, their jet crashes and kills everyone else, the power dynamic of abusive smarmy boss and helpless employee dissolves into thin air, as Linda now has the upper most of upper hands.

Her years of social exclusion and not having much else to do has resulted in her becoming obsessed with the tv program Survivor one that has been running for like 50 seasons and which I’ve never watched an episode of, which in turn led her to become obsessed with survival skills with the hopes of perhaps one day competing on the show.

Now, clearly, is her time to shine.

dir: Philippa Lowthorpe

2025

When they talk about books that couldn’t or shouldn’t be made into movies, they’re talking about books like the one this movie is based on. I acknowledge the irony of my writing that in a review of said film, just like I acknowledge the lands of the First Nations people upon which I unleash my dribble from.

Sovereignty was never ceded. Anyway, I am lucky enough, blessed enough to have read the book, and I remember being deeply moved and affected by it, seeing as I read it at a time when I was also grieving for a beloved parent that I had lost at the time. The writing was precise, exquisite, evocative, and transporting.

It was also about a person at a very difficult, very fraught period in her life, rendered into a successful art form, but still predominately about the most muddled, harrowing, isolating, claustrophobic, mentally unstable time of her life. And you can get away with that, so to speak, in a novel, because one has the perspective, the elocution and erudition of this author, in order to capture all of that, with a distance afforded by time.

Short of having reams and reams of voiceover, which this flick never uses, we do not have access to the author’s thoughts, or, since the lead actor is playing the author here, the character’s thoughts other than what she does, what she says, or what expressions we see on her face.

I just don’t see how audiences who haven’t read the novel would be able to get as much from this flick. The story’s scope, rendered visually, is so narrow, in a lot of ways, so limiting.

Without the eloquent prose of the book, you have a story about a woman who loses her father, whom she loved dearly, who cannot either handle her grief or acknowledge her grief, who lets everything else (job, friends, family, paying bills, hygiene) fall by the wayside as she fixates on a goshawk she calls Mabel.

Watching the film, you’d be like “How random!” Though there are an array of movies, even just recently where someone, usually a fairly famous actor, acts with a mostly CGI bird. It’s almost like a rite of middle-age passage. There was…Naomi Watts and some magpie? Steve Coogan and some penguin? Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and some parrot?

You kinda get that it’s not about the bird itself, but then it’s also all about the bird? I mean the beautiful, majestic goshawk does look incredible, close up and in flight, with those piercing eyes, and those monstrous talons and a beak that can pierce through flesh and bone with ease?

(აპრილი)

dir: Dea Kulumbegashvili

2024

Let me tell you about the next film you’re going to go out of your way to watch. It’s incredibly slow, it’s set in a miserable rural area of Georgia (the country not the American hillbilly southern state), and it’s the bleakest most unflinching character study (of an inscrutable character) who is a celebrated OB/GYN who illegally performs abortions down in the villages for desperate women and children.

If that sounds like a barrel of laughs, read on, fair reader, read on.

There’s no good reason to fuck around talking about this flick: It is super bleak, that’s true, and that’s even well before we get to the subject matter that the flick is ostensibly about. This is a place with very little hope. It is a brutish and chauvinistic rural area (unlike all the other ones world-wide), but it doesn’t have that aura just because of poverty, specifically. It’s a poverty of the soul, the collective soul of the place. Women live in perpetual fear. Not just of bad health care choices or the selfishness of men, but this is a place where if you’re husband doesn’t murder you for finding out you’re on the pill because you don’t want a tenth child, it could be your fathers or brothers who kill you because you somehow did something to bring shame upon the family.

The country of Georgia surely has shitloads of problems, not least of which being that it is again controlled by a puppet regime that takes its marching orders from Putin. But even in the so-called “independent” areas where this flick was secretly filmed, mostly being the regions around Lagodekhi, surrounded as it is by the Caucasus mountains, women have less rights than, um, even women in the Southern state of Georgia, which also outlawed abortions and thinks women having rights is wokeness gone mad.

The second scene of this film is a birth scene, as in an actual scene of a woman giving birth. It’s not special effects, it’s not CGI. Hopefully not in reality, but within the context of the movie, the baby doesn’t survive the delivery.

In the third of 72 very long, extended scenes, the hospital administrator explains to the glowering expectant father that Nina, our main character (Ia Sukhitashvili) is the hospital’s best obstetrician, and it surely wasn’t her fault the infant didn’t survive, but they will do a full inquest to figure out what happened. Once the other people leave the room, leaving the father and Nina alone, he tells her he knows what she does down in the villages, and then spits on her.

Nina is… a complicated character, as depicted. She maintains an inscrutable passivity throughout the movie which belies a nature that seems at odds with her actions and her beliefs. She seems almost determined to destroy herself professionally and personally. In other characters it would be an obligation to adhere to the truth of something that motivates them to do what they do and not lie about it, but in her, I dunno.

dir: Maggie Gyllenhaal

2026

Even if.

Even if there have been too many Frankenstein versions and movies lately. Even if not every part of what they were trying to do here entirely works. Even if the decision to make the framing device the soul of Mary Shelley trying to manipulate people in the (film’s) present, being 1936, is a strange and not entirely fruitful one.

Even then, I can see what they were going for, being the director, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Jessie Buckley as The Bride! of the title, and of course Christian Bale as Frankie.

They do well with their characters, our central duo. I’m not sure if they should make any sense whatsoever, but they do really struggle and struggle hard to get their characters across.

Bale would seem to have the greater struggle, but he does more than okay with a version of Dr Frankenstein’s creation that is not the elfin somehow ‘hot’ creature that Jacob Elordi played in Guillermo Del Torro’s recent version. No, he’s brutish and grotesque, with stitches, staples and deformities across his whole body.

And he balances a child-like goofiness with an insurmountable rage, along with some very human motivations, terrible as they are.

Then there’s Ida (Jessie Buckley). She’s hanging around with Chicago gangsters, having to put up with their bullshit, but she’s teetering on the edge of saying “no” when she would rather not do something, but she’s not quite there yet. As in, a horrible goon tries to force her to eat an oyster, which she hates, but she does it anyway, with predictable results.

This displeases the dipshit, and words are exchanged.

In some dark limbo, Mary Shelley (also played by Jessie Buckley) has just been hanging around alone since her death, but for whatever reason now she’s inspired to deliver her own sequel to her most famous book, but her apparent motivation is more so that she could never have gotten away with what she really wanted to write.

Now she really wants to create a new story, and also get revenge for downtrodden and voiceless women.

So she somehow possesses Ida, and gets her to speak random sounding (but obviously scripted) nutty phrases in a Tourette’s inflected manner, just before Ida launches off a set of stairs and dies a horrible death.

Either by coincidence or by design, Frankie arrives in Chicago because he wants to convince a genius mad scientist called Doctor C. Euphronius (Annette Benning, who’s excellent in something that could have come across as so fucking silly) to create a mate for him. Mate? Meat? Helpmeet? Helpmate?

He has been ever so lonely, you see, and he’s got no-one else to bone, so she’s meant to create someone for him to “marry”. I mean, think all of all the moral quandaries, the ethical complexities, the panoply of reasons why you shouldn’t…

Nah, she doesn’t, not at all. Frankie digs up Ida’s body, and Dr Euphronius resurrects her using technology, some black liquid, and maybe a quickly whispered prayer to Lord Satan.

dir: Bart Layton

2026

If you’re going to call a movie Crime 101 you could at least have some educational material embedded in the flick. But no. This flick taught me absolutely nothing about crime that I didn’t already know. Crime hurts people. Crime doesn’t pay, unless you’re rich enough to have political cover, in which case, crime absolutely does pay.

I did learn one other strange factoid from watching this flick: Americans are so inured to gun violence, so worshipful of their shiny metal dicks, that you’ll have a so-called law enforcement officer repeat multiple times that a suspected crim (Doug Hemsworth) is not a violent criminal, even though he points guns at people’s heads in carrying out his daring raids. Many times.

That’s not considered a violent act in today’s America.

Anyway, what is this flick: Obviously one with crimes in it. A crime thriller, if you will. A kind of simplistic and not very believable one, but somewhat enjoyable all the same. Many of the parts don’t fit, and there’s one element, being the character played by Barry Keoghan, who seems like he’s from a completely different movie. Still, the Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo and Halle Berry do okay with some stock standard characters.

Ruffalo especially feels like he’s played this before, at least a couple of times. You have to know, even though you never asked, it’s both comforting and disconcerting to watch Ruffalo playing dishevelled over the hill “I’m too old for this shit” cop characters. For years (well, before all the Marvel Hulk stuff), he was put forward as the thinking woman’s piece of crumpet, and now he looks like someone you’d avoid making eye contact with if he was in your pilates class, huffing and puffing away.

He’s still solid though, as you would think he would be. His last bunch of films have been grating and disappointing (at least for me, and I'm talking about his Trump impression in Mickey 17, and whatever the hell he was doing (and whatever the hell that accent was) in Poor Things, but this is a comfortable fit, given the character’s practically the same as what he played in that excellent mini-series Task.

Hemsworth is… I admit I’ve never known nor will I ever know the immense burden of having the magnificent body of a Greek (or Norse) god, and the chiselled good looks to go along with it, but Hemsworth is not someone you go to hoping to play a character with depth, with layers, with a complicated psychology behind them. He’s just not that kind of actor. One emotion at a time. Anger. Olympian arrogance. Deep regret. Sadness (le boo hoo), maybe.

dir: Eva Victor

2025

Eva Victor wrote the screenplay, directs the film, and stars as the main character. I’m guessing they have some random connection to the story…

I shouldn’t be glib. This is a pretty serious story, dealt, dare I say it, with a light and humorous touch, and it’s not just about the terrible thing it’s about. It’s also about friendship, and how those relationships (just as important if not more so than ‘romantic’ ones) change over time, and need to change regardless of all the reasons we don’t want them to.

And it’s mostly about our odd main character, Agnes (Eva Victor). As the story opens she’s greeting her dearest friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) who is in town just to visit her. This is several years after they both did grad studies at this particular, small liberal arts college (I’m guessing somewhere in New England), one that Lydie has moved away from, and that Agnes is still entrenched in.

Amidst their catching up, and the kinds of goofy carry-ons that only long time intense friends have, there is concern on Lydie’s part, and continuous, unconvincing reassurance on Agnes’ part, that she’s okay, she’s not trapped, she’s not suicidal, it’s okay. They dance around The Bad Thing that must have happened to her, but not for too long, because it’s important to let us know what the Bad Thing was that happened to Agnes, that now colours many aspects of her life, so that it doesn’t become a distraction that they keep being mysterious about it.

The film is separated into chapters based on particular years that don’t follow chronologically, but the film does start and end in the same year, the Year of the Baby. It then jumps back to the Year with the Bad Thing, and the years that followed, and then it’s back to where the flick gets its title from, being Agnes apologising to an actual baby.

I feel like… maybe the chapter titles are a not-so-subtle allusion to David Foster Wallace, since Agnes is a lecturer in Modern American Literature, and though I doubt she has Infinite Jest on her syllabus, at least none of the chapters was titled The Year of the Chewable Ambien Tab or the like. Could be a bit of a reach, on my part. But it wouldn’t be out of line with the environment, seeing as it’s people who voluntarily immerse themselves in the cozy, smothering world of academia, with its attendant pitfalls and pretentious prats.

If you went to uni, and especially if you lived on campus, the vibes of these kinds of college set stories (though this is not to be confused with the “college novel” genre, like Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Bret Easton Ellis’ early novels before he tried to hide his proximity from the closet by making everything about murder from American Psycho onwards) are familiar. Universities are absurd places. Plus, if you were there for any length of time, you either experienced sexual assault, had friends who survived it (or didn’t), or, in the least likely category if you’re ever reading one of my reviews, you committed it. Statistically speaking, three likely options, many horrible outcomes.

dir: Vicky Jewson

2026

They’re Pretty? And they’re Lethal? What a clever title!

Like, maybe for a great-grandma, amused by the simplest of wordplay, but she shouldn’t watch the flick, oh no, she’d hate it!

I don’t entirely know who the market for this flick is, but it seems like a brilliant idea and I can’t believe no-one else hasn’t thought of it yet. I mean, except for all the other films where they do the same thing.

Its singular premise is that professional ballerinas are extremely well trained at what they do, extremely fit and very strong, with a high tolerance for pain. With a bit of improvisation and sufficient motivation, if they had to, they could carve their way through a succession of goons like the reaper’s scythe through summer wheat, and look fabulous while doing it.

There was a whole-arse John Wick adjacent flick last year called, you guessed it, Ballerina. Ana de Armas? Did anyone other than me see it? He-hello?

I mean, I know it’s implausible, but implausibility is a central part of movie making magic. They don’t call it a “willing suspension of disbelief” because movies are meant to always be difficult to believe yet oh so realistic.

The Neverending Story ended, and had sequels, that also ended. Tom Cruise can run for real but probably can’t save the world from nuclear destruction by sky diving into the North Sea and diving to a sunken submarine and finding a flash drive and then riding a motorbike onto a plane or train and doing it all just before some timer gets two seconds before zero, and do it all over again like 8 times. Even if he can run really fast and occasionally does some of his own stunts.

As an idea, it’s not that implausible. I mean, in terms of the women they corralled together to play prima ballerinas that can get shit done and massacre a bunch of Hungarian Andrew Tates / Timothée Chalamets, they picked the right ones for their roles.

dir: David Michôd

2025

This flick died a strange death at the cinemas, critically and commercially.

I know, you don’t need to tell me, none of that dictates whether a flick is actually good or not.

I just find it funny when people scream from the rooftops when something is obvious Oscar-bait, and it’s punished as something completely worthless, and the times when they not only let it slide but praise it to the high heavens.

You can’t tell me that Hamnet was less Oscar-baity than this flick. There’s no way.

And yet…

I have no doubt someone at some point probably mentioned to Sydney Sweeney that this could do for her what Million Dollar Baby did for Hillary Swank or Monster did for Charlize Theron. Considering how young she is she might have said “Who?” but that’s neither here nor there.

Since its release just before the Oscars I haven’t been able to find a single positive review for it, although most of the reviews don’t fault the acting, they blame the Australian director David Michôd for not finding the hidden depths of these characters, or for not making it more stylish or melodramatic than it already is.

I don’t feel the same. This is a sad film about a woman who fought like a demon to escape poverty, was trapped in a horrible marriage to a horrible man, and then eventually got free because he tried but failed to murder her.

And she boxed a bunch of times in the interim.

dir: Julia Jackman

2025

100 Nights of Hero is a curious thing.

I feel like… it’s what Emerald Fennell was trying to do with her version of ”Wuthering Heights”, but couldn’t quite grasp. It is not based on a beloved literature classic, but instead a graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg, that is still connected to the One Thousand and One Nights, that classic compilation of Middle Eastern, Asian and North African folklore, in concept if not in content.

Singing for your dinner is not a new concept, and neither is telling stories in order to stop the executioner’s axe. 100 Nights transmutes these ideas into a fairy tale (of sorts) that seeks to save women with storytelling.

It is an explicitly feminist story, since it is told about a world not our own, but somehow even more structurally misogynistic that this one. How is that even possible, you could be thinking, given who our world elevates as its leaders, and celebrates on the daily?

On this planet, which has three moons, people were created by some weird god-like figure called Kiddo, but her father objected to their existence because they weren’t suffering enough (at least half of them), so he made them oppress all the women and focus all their spiritual thinking on him and only him. So they all worship Birdman (briefly played by Richard E. Grant, which is such a weird cameo), and institutionally and structurally oppress women at His Divine, Bird-Like bidding.

Their entire belief system seems to be built on this terror of women, so much so that women are forbidden from learning how to read and write and legally have some lower status than probably bits of furniture. Executions of women are frequent and meant to be educational.

The main part of the story has to do with Jerome (Amir El-Masry), who has a young bride called Cherry (Maika Monroe). Because she has not yet had a child, people are concerned. And by people, I mean some weird bird skull wearing priest-like dude who declares that if Cherry hasn’t gotten pregnant within 100 days, she’s going to get the chop, and by ‘chop’ I don’t mean divorce.

Jerome is… hard to work out. It is not clear whether he hates Cherry because she’s a woman in a world where women are detested, or whether he’s just gay, and does not want to have sex with her because eww girl germs. His family won’t leave him alone if he doesn’t have an heir, but that pressure is not enough for him to transcend his feelings about women and their womanly parts.

dir: Frank E. Flowers

2026

Pirates! Remember when we, and by “we” I mean I used to look forward to movies about pirates doing piratical things? I loved and love pirates to bits.

Pirates of Penzance, Captain Blood, Treasure Island, Cutthroat Island, The Pirates!: Band of Misfits, Yellowbeard , Our Flag Means Death, Black Sails the list is endless and that’s a great thing! Who doesn’t love / isn’t sick of ‘Talk Like a Pirate’ Day? Maybe that’s showing my Western privilege: not everyone, admittedly, has the luxury of irritating their co-workers only on that one day a year by summoning their heartiest “Yarghs!!!”

And so many games I’ve played over so many years, especially the classic Sid Meir’s Pirates!, the original and best, and the Port Royale series, and more recently Sea of Thieves, Assassins’ Creed: Black Flag and Skull and Bones, absolute time sinks, all of them.

Can’t get enough of the stuff. And then there was that film, what was it called, oh yeah something about Pirates of the Caribbean, and their Black Pearl that happened to be under a Curse. Remember when (briefly) Jack Sparrow was everywhere, and Johnny Depp was the biggest star in the world and they were paying him $25 million dollars a movie?

And then all the other increasingly terrible movies came out in the series, and we started hating all that bullshit, and more importantly, at least for me, we found out Depp was an abusive alcoholic piece of shit who not only abused his former partner(s) but also hired PR firms to blacken their names and to engage bot farms to generate so much negative publicity on social media about them that the victims became hated targets, and the perpetrator sailed away, scot free like always?

Ah, those were the days. I can’t talk about those flicks anymore because I refuse to talk further about that piece of shit, and I refuse to watch any future movie he’s in, so where does that leave me? Like the sheeple fucking basic bitch that I am, it leaves me saying “the first Pirates OTC movie was great, they should make more action pirate-y movies!”

And they did! For Amazon! (boo, Jeffrey Bezos, I boo what you’re doing)

And even if they say it’s set on an island called Cayman Brac in the Caribbean, at the tail end of the Golden Age of Piracy, when most countries that could be colonised had been by the European powers, it was clearly made last year or so in Queensland! So yay patriotism.

dir: Freddy Macdonald

2025

It’s not often that a film’s title becomes part of the international (in English, at least) vernacular. I don’t just mean when a film’s title becomes almost universally recognisable or known because it’s watched by all (something which rarely happens these days anyway).

I mean when a title like Sliding Doors takes on a life of its own as a phrase people use to describe a particular thing, like the so-called ”Sliding Doors moment” that people might experience in life that has nothing to do with the film.

Whether you remember that flick fondly or with fury, or with complete indifference, or have never heard of it, chances still are that you’ve heard someone use the phrase “it was a real sliding doors moment”, describing something small or seemingly random that made a profound difference to someone’s life either immediately or down the track, in ways no one could have anticipated. You missed a particular meeting or flight, and you didn’t die in the September 11 attacks. You stubbed your toe and that meant you just escaped from being run over by a semi-trailer.

You stayed at the pub one night one drink longer than you should have, and so that’s why you’re in jail / married / head of the Nationals / One Nation party now

In movies it’s not always easy to pull off, because unless there’s some kind of conceit / construct, audiences can sometimes be like “what the fuck am I watching and why should I care?” And even when there is one, it can still be hard to swallow.

Run Lola Run never explained why its protagonist got multiple chances to replay the same scenario until it hopefully resulted in an outcome where neither Lola nor her dumb boyfriend died, but, if you enjoyed the flick back in the day, hopefully you were happy and relieved at the film’s end, but let’s admit it was mostly down to the soundtrack.

There’s no mechanism, no glitch in the Matrix or in the space-time continuum that explains why Gwyneth Paltrow catching a train or not catching a train results in one path in life (that leads to premature death) and an alternative one as well, but we accept it as such, because we want things to be enjoyable more than we want them to make sense. And plus the film has John Hannah at his most charming and delightful as the love interest, so what’s not to like?

Well, Gwyneth, for one. But I digress. If that film had a point, it was a very simplistic and mawkish one, being the idea that it was inevitable that the two lovers would meet and fall in love, no matter which storyline and who dies when, and regardless of whether she caught the train or not.

I mention this because this film here, Sew Torn obviously uses a version of this kind of storytelling, alternative what ifs? that it factors not solely based on random outcomes arising from unexpected moments, but there’s the repetitive chant of “choices… choices… choices” that’s meant to resonate with us. People, or in this case “person”, in the form of Barbara (Eve Connelly), gets multiple opportunities to make choices that may or may not result in many people’s deaths and a bag full of cash.

Right, wrong, who’s to judge? Well, us, for one.

dir: Patrick Hughes

2026

War Machine is set somewhere in the States, but I can tell you right now, for free, that much of it was filmed in Victoria. Some of it was filmed in New Zealand / Aotearoa, but mostly Victoria.

That makes for a somewhat strange viewing experience, especially for those cursed Victorians. You’re watching soldiers clamber around on hills and mountains, and you think “have I been there? That looks vaguely…familiar.” It has the odd aspect of taking you out of something you’re watching, even when it’s science fiction, like this.

This doesn’t have an intriguing premise: it is two different stories wedged together. The War Machine of the title is either man mountain Alan Ritchson, who is such a soldier that the other soldiers either want to be him or want to have sex with him (not sure which), or it refers to a machine that appears after around 40 minutes that starts killing everyone relentlessly.

It is, despite the trappings, the exact same premise as Beast of War that came out last year: first part is soldiers going through basic / training stuff / bonding, next part is them being picked off one by one by a relentless, remorseless, emotionless killing machine.

The first part is meant to make you care about the characters, the second part makes you feel bad when they get mangled / feel happy when they escape.

In theory. That’s the intention. The reality is, though, we’ve seen this shit a million times. If you get attached to these kinds of disposable characters that not only barely have any distinguishing characteristics, but who don’t even have names (they have numbers instead), then the fault lies not in the stars, dear Brutus, but in ourselves.

And yet, I’m exactly that kind of sucker.

In the greatest implausibility in a film that has an extra-terrestrial killing robot killing humans in the hills of the Victorian countryside, Alan Ritchson plays a guy who desperately wants to get through Ranger training to honour the brother (Jai Courtney) whose life he couldn’t save when they served together in Afghanistan. As if it was his fault, and not the fault of the Taliban, but anyway.

Despite being in his forties, 81, which is the number they’ve allocated to him, is determined to survive a training regimen that sometimes kills hyperfit guys twenty years younger than him, just so he can get his “scroll”, being the patch insignia commonly worn by Army Rangers. The psychological depth they are granting this character is that he doesn’t want this thing for his own pride, or to get back at someone who snubbed him, or to get back at an ex, which is the motivation for what most people do in movies. It’s just so that if he gets across that finish line, metaphorically and literally, then it will somehow make up for his brother dying.

As such, because it also somehow means his character knows what’s coming for the other members of the brutal selection course, he doesn’t get to know or spend any time socialising with any of the other recruits. He knows they will all be dead soon, so what’s the point?

It would be a waste of time, his and theirs. He doesn’t tell them, though, but just acts shy and standoffish.

dir: Ric Roman Waugh

2026

As a new year begins, at around this time, more reliable than Santa, a new Jason Statham movie is released into cinemas, and into the wild…

Last year it was A Working Man, where he played an isolated ex-special forces guy who has to come out of retirement to save a girl from… something, rich people, probably. To do so he will have to kill many, many people.

The year before it was The Beekeeper, where he played an isolated ex-special forces guy who has to come out of retirement to avenge his landlady’s death because of scammers / rich people. To do so he will have to kill many, many people.

This year it’s Shelter, where he plays an isolated ex-special forces guy who has to come out of retirement to protect a young girl from… powerful rich people in the British government. To do so he will have to kill many, many people.

When you’re on a good thing, stick with it, I guess.

Is he playing the same person? I’m not sure. They have different names, but they all do exactly the same things and they all look exactly the same, and grunt in the same charming way.

All his characters in every film all act like what fuckheads who watch Joe Rogan or “read” Jordan B. Peterson’s books think a stoic would act like, ignoring the fact that someone who lived the precepts of something like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations wouldn’t travel the world killing hundreds of people at a time. They have confused stoicism, a belief that neither the good times nor the bad times in life last that long, and you shouldn’t get too attached to either of them, with grim men exhibiting no emotion as they grimly murder their way through the world.

I know he’s in other films, slightly other types of films, but we know he’s not going to vary that much. He is a man who has one way of playing a man, generally. Only one way.

But wait! I’m no Negative Nelly, only looking for the bad in movies so I can poke fun and amuse myself and others, in order to ignore, if only for a few minutes, all the escalating insanity in the world. I should also find positive elements, nice things to say too, shouldn’t I?

dir: Gore Verbinski

2026

Rarely have I started watching a film and enjoyed it initially, and then had that enjoyment plummet so quickly and completely, as with this fucking flick.

I literally gasped at how rapidly it went terrible, but part of me wonders whether that was the actual point?

To anyone who’s watched movies over the last 40 years or so, almost every element of the film will be familiar, but its point isn’t just to plunder the back catalogue: it’s to make a heartfelt plea to the audience to not pre-emptively embrace AI in all its vile glory.

They know it’s a losing battle, because social media is too seductive and the average consumer (ie. American) is too lazy and thoughtless to see the techno-apocalypse that they are ushering in to existence. And the makers and extruders of entertainment products want to save time and money by not paying people and instead engaging slop generators to generate slop.

So maybe that’s why it’s not a coincidence that this script and many of the visuals feel like they were generated by a soulless sequence of algorithms and prompts that ‘borrowed’ all that it could from a myriad of other, better movies.

As I said earlier, it’s starts off okay. Sam Rockwell, even in something as misguided as this, is always a delight, or at least often a delight, and he delighted me here. Looking like a retro-futurist crazy homeless person (deliberately intended to recall Bruce Willis’ character from 12 Monkeys bursts into a diner called Norm’s, and starts haranguing the other diners. He tells them that he’s from the future, and that he needs the help of a number of them in order to prevent an AI from destroying the world.

dir: Emerald Fennell

2026

“I think I’m going to die in this house…”

That could be my favourite part of the film – a song used that is a collaboration between Charli XCX, a very young, very successful international pop star, and John Cale, one of the oldest living people around. It’s terrifying. It sounds like a song that would be the intro to a horror movie, and it’s used at the beginning of this film, to set a tone.

What’s this film called, you say? “Wuthering Heights”. Not Wuthering Heights. ”Wuthering Heights”. Those quotation marks will cost your soul extra.

Cinematic provocateur and something of a deviant Emerald Fennell directs her version of the story by Emily Brontë that is almost nothing like the story written by Emily Brontë. Sure, it’s a famous book, but almost no cinematic version of it is like the actual story, which is why most versions of the story are pretty crappy. It’s not a romance, the book, I mean. It’s mostly obsessed with who gets to inherit which properties, like most books of the 1800s. Love and cruelty play second fiddle to real estate.

This film is meant to be romantic. It’s changed enough in a way to make it “more” romantic, but it’s no less tragic in the end (although, with so much left out, it also leaves out further tragedy and also the supernatural elements of the last part of the novel).

This flick flickers in between multiple strange states, at times overdone and over-designed, and yet goofy and a little bit empty. There are flashes of (gross) earthy ‘realism’, and yet a level of set design and art direction that often makes it look like a fairy tale / Tim Burton movie.

dir: Josh Safdie

2025

Now this is a movie. This is a FILM.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Chloe Zhao

2025

What a mixed bag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Max Minghella

2024

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

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

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

It’s pretty shit.

That explains it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Affeksjonsverdi)

dir: Joachim Trier

2025

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Craig Brewer

2025

Look, I know how terrible this sounds on paper.

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

But wait, it’s not even that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Nia DaCosta

2026

That was… insane.

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

And what a deeply strange story it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Kurtis David Harder

2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: David Frayne

2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Joe Carnahan

2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Jafar Panahi

2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: James Vanderbilt

2025

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Ira Sachs

2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds like the Middle Ages or something.

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

dir: Oliver Hermanus

2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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