2025

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: 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: 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: 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.