7 stars

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: 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: 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: 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.