7 stars

The Surrender

Though loves be lost love shall not;
And Death shall have no dominion

dir: Julia Max

2025

I know nothing about this director, but I did hear that this was a keen horror flick about a family losing a beloved father and deciding that denial, delusion and necromancy was the preferred way to go instead of acceptance and healthy grieving, and I was like “sign me the fuck up, Shudder, I’ll watch that for sure!”

And I eventually did. And even though it’s not the best thing I’ve seen in my life, it was a suitably horrifying experience, and not one I can entirely relate to, but there were some resonances.

Colby Minifie stars as Megan, the daughter of a dying patriarch, and she’s finding the situation too much to bear, hence the screaming of obscenities and the surreptitious smoking. She and her mother (Kate Burton) fight constantly about the father’s care, which is understandable at such a time even between a mother and daughter who got along reasonably well, which these two certainly do not.

The father is in a great deal of pain due to… I can’t even remember what he’s dying of, but it’s not like it matters beyond the fact that he is in horrific pain, and prescribed morphine is the only solution. He doesn’t seem like he’s long for this world, as the phrase goes, and he is only semi-mobile, as in able to get up to maybe make it to the bathroom in time, but not often enough. The mother seems determined to do everything in her power to keep her husband around as long as possible, as would anyone in that situation.

The great thing about the story (not the plot), as in, the level of thinking that went into the writing and the performances, is that the conflict between mother and daughter is beyond the fact that they are natural enemies: it’s the keener conflict between the images, the constructs of her parents that Megan carries around in her head with her, versus who they actually are or were. There are regular flashbacks, and their purpose is more to explore whether the way Megan looks at the past has any accuracy, or whether she’s as delusional as her mother eventually is.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about The Surrender
803 reads

Final Destination Bloodlines

Death is an eternally thirsty bitch...

dirs: Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein

2025

It’s hard to go wrong with such a great horror premise. They’ve gotten six films out of this flimsy premise. All of the flicks are virtually the same, and it doesn’t matter. They all go the same way, and no-one survives in the end.

The reason for that is, that Death is a petty bitch and always gets his way in the end.

The first film set the template: someone about to do something has a premonition that they and a large group of other people (depending on the budget) are going to die. They stop the activity, whether it’s catching a flight or going on a rollercoaster ride, they and their peeps get off or out of the thing, the thing goes ahead and kills everyone else, and then Death starts stalking those who ‘cheated’ until they’re all dead too.

The one mainstay of all the entries is the appearance of horror legend Tony Todd. You don’t know who Tony Todd is? Well, he played the same cameo role in all these films as a coroner, pathologist? Mortician, whatever. But his far more famous role was as The Candyman in the legendary flicks from the 90s (not so much the pretentious remake). And a tonne of other stuff, including The Crow, but he’s also been the mainstay of these films, at critical points, explaining to the protagonists that they’re all fucked.

And he does so here, again, for the last time, since he mentions in the movie that Death has finally come for him too, with cancer, and he died soon after filming his touching scenes here. As a tribute to the man with the subterranean voice, they also incorporate his story into the fabric of the films further by giving him a link to all the shenanigans that we’ve been watching in general, but specifically to the protagonists of this flick.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about Final Destination Bloodlines
721 reads

Highest 2 Lowest

Easy there grandpa, try not to bust a hip as you're busting rhymes

dir: Spike Lee

2025

I do admit I still get excited when I hear that there’s a new Spike Lee movie coming out.

Yes, it’s because I’m a slave to the past. He made some great films back in the day. Genuinely great flicks. Do the Right Thing. Malcolm X. Mo’ Better Blues. Inside Man. 25th Hour. Some other ones, surely…

As a legacy Great One, does that mean his new flicks warrant attention/distraction/adulation? Of course! For me, at least.

And that it’s a remake of an Akira Kurosawa flick, well, that’s two good reasons. The presence, the dominance of Denzel? Three strikes, I’m in!

I have actually seen the original, High and Low a few times, and thought it was an amazing flick, mostly because I had forced myself initially to watch it because I couldn’t believe that Kurosawa made other films that weren’t about samurai lopping off each other’s limbs and heads with their shiny swords. That he made other flicks about doctors with syphilis or cops who’d lost their guns or the poorest of the poor sleeping around and eking out their miserable existences amazed me (at the time, late 90s), because I thought surely if you could make flicks with guys running around with swords, you’d just do that all the time.

But Kurosawa drew inspiration from lots of sources, almost always from outside of Japan, and liked doing way more than just period pieces. In High and Low he managed to make a taut little thriller half of which seemed to be filmed in one room, in one house, high up on a hill, and was the better for it.

There’s only one flaw in a flick that otherwise would be a masterpiece, and that’s the very ending, which has the antagonist turn into an incoherently screaming lunatic, just to reassure 1950s Japanese audiences that criminals like this were rare and utterly bonkers, so, nothing to worry about here, move along, citizen.

Transposed to modern day New York, a city Spike Lee seems to have some affinity for, the idea is the same; the presentation is very different.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about Highest 2 Lowest
810 reads

The Thursday Murder Club

Only murders on Thursdays, and only in or
around the Building

dir: Chris Columbus

2025

I reckon Richard Osman’s heart leapt high into the sky when he heard Steven Spielberg’s production company Amblin wanted to option his novel in order to adapt it into a movie. I mean, that’s got to be way up there, in terms of achievements. That’s beyond anything most authors, crime writers or otherwise, could ever aspire to. Dare to dream, indeed.

And then I imagine how much his heart sank when he heard that Señor Spielbergo wasn’t going to direct it himself, instead it would be the same guy who directed Home Alone, Mrs Doubtfire and the first couple of Harry Potter movies.

I mean, ouch. Dry your eyes on those cheques, though, Richard. I’m sure you’ll get over it one day.

I have not read any of his very successful and very beloved novels in this series or any other, though I have it on good authority from one of the smartest and most attractive people I know that his books are brilliant and a joy to read. I don’t read crime novels, ‘cosy’ or otherwise, because… look there are too many books to read as it is, maybe I’ll get around to them eventually, who knows. I’ve been reading the same book for the last three months, so maybe when I finish that 800+ page monstrosity…

Certain genres have, require, formula. From what I have heard and read, including from the man’s own mouth (in the podcast he does bi-weekly with Marina Hyde called The Rest is Entertainment), he delights in using the practical set-up aspects, the constructions, the artifice of it all (in the detective novel genre) in new and cheeky ways to tell short chaptered, fast paced stories anyone can enjoy. So the contrivance around creating something that seems so calculated as a delightful collection of golden oldies solving crimes and exchanging cake recipes must have seemed both a challenge and an opportunity at first, like a puzzle to solve, with massive sales as the potential prize.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about The Thursday Murder Club
761 reads

M3GAN 2.0

Creepy no matter what angle you look at her from

dir: Gerald Johnstone

2025

M3GAN 2.0 is a terrible title. I mean, M3GAN was a terrible title too, since where does it leave them to go in a third instalment? Nowhere! You can’t “do” M3GAN again even if it would make visual sense, or M3GAN 3.0 even if it makes this distorted type of number plate mental “sense” where people use 4s instead of As or 3s instead of Es.

Every time I have to look at it I sarcastically mumble to myself “huh, Mah-three-gan too” like I’m one of the idiots from Beavis and Butthead. Which possibly accounts for some of my troubles on public transport recently.

It’s painful. Like watching someone have to come up with a password that has one uppercase letter and a number and a non-alphanumeric symbol in order to proceed, and The System keeps rejecting it.

It makes me shudder just seeing it. Anyway, after the surprise super success of the first film, which was about a foster mother farming out her parental responsibilities to a complicated “mobile” device, and having the whole world punished for it, they made this one. I don’t think the title of the 3rd one is going to be much of an issue, since this sequel tanked so hard.

The first one made hundreds of millions. This one despite following the Terminator 2: Judgement Day template, made tens of millions of dollars. Flicks that make tens of millions don’t get sequels these days.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about M3GAN 2.0
739 reads

Superman

Super was a really good film by James Gunn.
Superman... well

dir: James Gunn

2025

Mostly, what I feel is, is relief.

Not that the film is okay, which it is, but that it wasn’t out and out bad. Heavens know why I would feel protective of this character.

Also I feel relief that Zack Snyder is no longer making movies with Superman in them. Ideally Snyder won’t make any movies full stop, but not making any more with DC’s characters is a good enough substitute for that, one that I can happily live with.

One other thing, at least, is that James Gunn knows how to make something funny, or at least he has a sense of humour, again unlike Snyder. It doesn’t mean every joke lands; it doesn’t always mean I appreciate the perverted directions his leanings sometimes take him, but I generally find his takes pretty funny.

He is incredibly obsessed with threatening characters eyeballs. There is an almost demented amount of eyeball torture for heroes, villains, and everyone in between in this film. Come to think of it, wasn’t there a crucial moment in his Suicide Squad that depended on Harley Quinn saving the day by piercing someone or something’s eye with something sharp?

Eww, that gives me the heebie-jeebies just remembering it. But there’s so much more of it here.

What else don’t we get here: it starts, thankfully, with Superman as Superman already, a superbeing in their world, trying to do good and being resented for it. It’s an okay place to start. We didn’t need to see Krypton again, we don’t need to live through the origin once again, in the same way that we don’t ever need to see anyone’s parents being shot in Crime Alley ever again, with Martha’s pearls spilling into the gutter for the thousandth time.

He already has his gig at the Daily Planet, Lois (Rachel Brosnahan) already knows about him and his dual identities, but eugh, in this version / reality / reboot / redo universe, Jimmy Olsen is somehow a desirable ladies man.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about Superman
671 reads

28 Years Later

Twenty-eight years later, I am twenty-eight years older *sigh*

dir: Danny Boyle

2025

It hasn’t been 28 years since 28 Days Later, but 23 Years Later maybe would have confused too many people. I have no idea whether this has been successful financially or not, but I was very ultra keen to see it, very curious as to what Danny Boyle wanted to say after all these years.

And it should also mean that we get a bunch of long after the fact sequels to many of his previous films. Who doesn’t want to see what happened to the characters from Shallow Grave, or at least the ones who made it to the end of the film? What about updates to The Beach, to see how Leonardo DiCaprio’s really annoying character is doing, or Tilda’s character, who I am sure is running an ashram somewhere with an iron fist? What about 127 Hours? Did that guy end up chopping his other arm off, due to some horribly ironic circumstance?

I don’t need to ask about an update to Trainspotting, because that unfortunately already happened, with Irvine Welsh unable to stop himself from updating us again and again about what those rascals were up to both before and after the events of the original film, with one of those sequels already having been made into an unfortunate movie that I just don’t want to talk about anymore.

I wouldn’t want to ask about an update to Slumdog Millionaire, because I’m going to assume that it would be way too depressing. Everyone dead except for the jerk host of the tv game show, who's probably Prime Minister now.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about 28 Years Later
974 reads

Ballerina 2025

I wonder if she will get to kill more people in the next one?

dir: Len Wiseman

2025

I’m calling this film Ballerina 2025 to differentiate it from the South Korean action film Ballerina from a couple of years ago, because calling it its full title of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina is just too embarrassing except to the kinds of people who live to work in marketing. To them such a title is sweeter than crack.

The only other thing it has in common with the South Korean film from 2023 is that the film is not about a ballerina at all: that flick was about a depressed super assassin who wanted revenge against a jerk who sexually abused her only friend, leading to hundreds of deaths. This flick is about a pretend ballerina who’s really a super assassin who wants revenge on the guy who killed her father, leading to hundreds of deaths.

It is unashamedly a John Wick flick that doesn’t have John Wick as the lead that still, thanks to situating it temporarily between the 3rd and 4th movies, still has John fucking Wick in it. You know, as someone who saw the other 4 movies, I did wonder if he killed enough people back then.

Now he’s killed even more. It’s an excellent cheat. Despite the results of the 4th film in his franchise, he could be killing more people for all eternity. So what if he killed over 400 people over the course of those four flicks – he can always beat his highest score.

I don’t know if this flick was successful money-wise guaranteeing more films where someone who’s not a ballerina kills hundreds more people, but there is something to be said for a flick that illuminates / betrays the emptiness of its central conceit: It was always absurd that one person could kill literally hundreds of people at a time. And now, with even less justification, the mayhem continues, like she’s a one person IDF, mowing down countless Palestinians…

Numbers. It comes down to numbers. If the mainstay attraction of those films is a main character killing hundreds of people, then I guess a film where the protagonist maims dozens of people but only kills the main bad guy would be considered a failure. Never fear, she probably kills, I dunno, 30, 40 people here? She gets to roast a bunch of them, but also stab and shoot a whole bunch of them too.

And she does it really well. Ana de Armas is blessed with being a performer who is often as good as the film she’s in (like her roles in No Time to Die, or Knives Out), and often she puts in a better performance than the film deserves (The Gray Man, Ghosted, Dark Waters, Blonde). She’s pretty great.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about Ballerina 2025
1146 reads

Smile 2

Just keep smiling, just keep smiling,
just keep smiling smiling smiling

dir: Parker Finn

2025

Fucking hell. That was nasty.

Following on directly from the first movie, which I thought was pretty mid, this one feels like a significantly better flick than its predecessor, by dint of maybe having a bigger budget, but more so because it leans in to its premise of being an absolute fucking nightmare for the protagonist, even as it tries to find new ways to one up the Final Destination franchise.

The first flick, as best as I can remember, introduced its premise about some kind of supernatural entity that attaches itself to a person, torments them for about a week, then compels them to kill themselves in front of someone else, thus furthering the infection by transferring to a new host. It’s a somewhat laborious premise, and it’s been done a few times before already, and better, in many of those other cases. Many of them try to be more elaborate, or convoluted, or American, but they’re really all rip offs of the original Japanese Ringu saga. You watch the tape, Sadako comes and gets you, you die.

To fill out the running time, this iteration, which like I said earlier I think is significantly better than the first installment, has a tremendous performance from its lead, being Naomi Scott playing a pop starlet called Skye.

I think Skye is meant to not quite be at the Taylor Swift / Beyoncè level of superstardom, but she’s probably at the level just underneath them. Maybe the Sabrina Carpenter / Chappelle Roan / Charlie XCX level. Fantastically wealthy, dealing with the aftermath of a terrible car accident and the subsequent addiction issues, being bossed around by a terrifying stage mother (Rosemarie DeWitt), her life is tough, but for the next week of her life the Smile entity, for lack of a better descriptor, will make her life a living hell such that death itself might seem like sweet relief.

But it won’t be. Oh no.

This is not a horror flick that holds your hand, oh no it does not. It puts Skye (and therefore us) through the absolute fucking wringer, and it’s not like she deserves it at all. I mean, there are allusions made to the car accident that damaged her physically and mentally, which resulted in her boyfriend’s death, and maybe there’s a lot of guilt there.

But I’m telling you, once we’re shown the scene which leads up to the accident, wow, the little Baby Jesus himself would have murdered that motherfucker with his bare hands.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about Smile 2
1109 reads

Presence

Absence can be a presence as well

dir: Steven Soderbergh

2024

America’s most reliably competent director is back with another reliably competent movie / genre exercise. It’s too much of an experiment to just consider it as a straight haunted house / ghost story flick, but it’s one that aims to tell its story somewhat uniquely, rather than just deliver thrills and/or chills.

Soderbergh has long been his own cinematographer, under the fake name of Peter Andrews this time, which means he’s the one holding the camera during these long, choreographed takes. The slight difference here, is that the ‘camera’ is the ‘presence’ of the title, a presence that observes what’s happening (which is why we get to see it), but is also occasionally sensed by some of the characters.

Nothing indicates why the presence, or ghost, is where it is. It roams through the empty house and settles back into a closet, before doing it all again as a realtor shows a family through the house. The teenage girl of the family is the only one who feels that there’s something wrong, some ‘thing’ floating around observing her, being the camera/ghost. It’s weird.

It’s weird on a number of levels. It’s weird in the sense that she sense’s there’s a supernatural presence there. It’s weird because she’s directing her attention towards the camera, something that never happens in 99 per cent of movies, whereby the unspoken rule is “never look at the camera, and never make eye contact with Tom Cruise”. It’s weird on a third level because it’s almost (at least for me) like she’s detecting that we, as in the audience, are watching her. Like she knows we’re there, and she’s uncomfortable about it, which kinda makes me feel voyeuristic and uncomfortable about it, too.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about Presence
814 reads

7 stars

The Surrender

Final Destination Bloodlines

Highest 2 Lowest

The Thursday Murder Club

M3GAN 2.0

Superman

28 Years Later

Ballerina 2025

Smile 2

Presence

Pages

Movie Reviews by Year

Movie Reviews by Genre

Author Rating

7 stars

Pages

User login