6 stars

dir: Scott Waugh

2026

No! This obviously isn’t the one with Gal Gadot running around London, is it?

No. It’s the one with man mountain Alan Ritchson driving slowly around Brisbane and the Gold Coast instead. Why do they call him the Runner, anyway? No idea. He’s a courier.

We already have a word for that. Courier. Or delivery driver. A porter, a carter, a logistics specialist. There’s so many to choose from. Man Mountain with a Van. Transporter. Mover. White Van Man. Man with a Van and a Plan. What does Amazon call them? Fulfillment Agents?

No, I just looked at a van. They call them "Amazon Service Providers". Ugh, how dull.

But Runner for whatever reason in these people’s minds sounded more action-y, even if there are already a plethora of movies called Runner, Bladed or otherwise.

This absurd movie has a giant man mountain car driver initially driving a Toyota Landcruiser around Brisbane, which you probably wouldn’t drive if you were a courier, because you’d be driving a van – that vehicle designed for delivering packages and such? – but never mind, and he picks up and delivers stuff. At least in theory.

He is, get this, the best damn runner in Brisbane, or at least as far as a disembodied voice on a phone called Iggy keeps telling him. Sadly it’s not Iggy Pop, it’s some Australian jerk. The two main leads are American, being Ritchson and Owen Wilson, the main antagonist is a Brazilian guy playing a Columbian cartel drug lord, so you could wonder what the fuck any of this has to do with Brisbane specifically or Queensland in general: Not a goddamn thing. Like most films this could have been set anywhere, there’s no real sense of place or culture (which is a bit of a stretch expecting something filmed on the Gold Coast to have any whiff of culture eh?)

But I’m pretty sure tax breaks and government incentives convinced whoever was producing this to consider Brisbane instead of Georgia / Toronto, the usual standbys.

Speaking as an Australian, geez, we don’t come out of this looking too great. Our bikies team up with awful overseas criminals who want to murder small children, our hospitals are full of corrupt nurses and doctors, our cops are useless and no-one can get the job done expect for an American. Doesn’t say much about our locals, does it? Jobs clearly that Australians aren’t willing to do, so we have to import people from overseas in order to get the job done right.

Senator Pauline won’t be happy when she hears about it. She’ll react like she just heard someone do a Welcome to Country on Gadagal land. Her pinched, wizened features will get even more pinched and wizened, her joyless mouth forming even more of a cat’s bum than usual.

She’ll try and fail to bring in a member’s bill in the Senate demanding the expulsion of Alan Ritchson from the country, and probably some Jews and Muslims as well just for good measure.

dir: Jon Favreau

2026

The titles of films are often baffling, but could you imagine trying to explain the title of this flick, a Star Wars to, say, a non-English speaking immigrant in their 70s? For some reason I’ve become fixated on an imaginary conversation in my head that could never happen these days since my sainted mother has passed on from this mortal coil:

“Son, what did you do this weekend?”
- “Well, Mother dearest, I went to a cinema and watched a movie.”
“Praytell, what was the movie called?”
- “Err, um, it was called The Mandalorian and Grogu
“What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck are those things, individually and then put together in that sentence?”
- “Mum, they’re made up sci fi bullshit.”
“Oh, okay then, sorry I asked. I just wanted to know what my son has been up to and if he’s been all right and instead I get passive-aggressive nonsense and salty talk. I cannot abide salty talk.”
- “I’m sorry mum, please forgive me. Here, have ten thousand flowers to make up for it.”
“It’s barely enough.”
- “I know let me try harder…”

Okay, so that was self-indulgent twaddle, but, hey, when you lose your mother, then you can tell me what the appropriate way to honour her is. First things first, she would never have sworn like that, but secondly, however prone to exaggeration I might be, if I’d said the words The Mandalorian and Grogu to her face she probably would have slapped me, and with good reason.

To be fair I would never have been able to explain Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to her either, mostly because I think all of us only ever pretended to know what it meant.

The thing about Star Wars that I think all of us are starting to appreciate, with a certain amount of creeping dread, is that the ‘thing’ that George Lucas and a whole bunch of other people created, everything and everywhere that it was cobbled together from, it as an entity can only ever look backwards. The one thing they’ll never do is stop looking backwards. A new film that comes out this year is set in the past. Does that make any sense? Something supposedly set in a far distant future / past in a far flung galaxy has to always, always, always be set in the late 70s, early 80s.

Entirely independent of anything to do with a story or plot, I was fascinated to watch long sections of this flick set on… a moon of a planet named after Shakira, who, presumably in this universe is rich enough to own her own star systems. And the setting of this planet that our hero walks around in has sets that pretty much look identical to Blade Runner from forty years ago. Don’t get me wrong, it looked fine, it’s just that, for whatever reasons, and I’m sure there’s lots of them, it looked deliberately like the past’s idea of what the future might look like circa 1985.

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: 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.