6 stars

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: 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: 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: 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?