2025

dir: Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza

2025

This is… the kind of film that you watch when you’re fascinated by war films, but which is completely unlike every other war film you can think of or have seen so far.

To be sure, it’s just like every war film that has people yelling things, wearing uniforms, shooting at people, explosions, all that shit. But. And this is such a big but. It has none of the other elements that everyone has come to love and expect in the war content they are consuming.

There are no character arcs. There is no heroism. There is no extraneous dialogue whatsoever. There is no success beyond a number of people surviving. There is no achievement of anything other than surviving. There is no explanation for why these Navy SEALS were where they were when they had this terrible, no good, very bad day, no justification for it, and no “it was for the greater good” or any other ironic rationale supplied.

They were there, they were professional and competent, it didn’t help them, most of them survived.

We watch a very competent team of SEALS follow a path to a specific house in Ramadi in 2006 during the second Iraq War (the one started by Pres. George W Bush which was apparently a complete success, Mission Accomplished, good job everyone, five stars). They sneak into a compound with a two-storey house, waking and frightening the families living there but not shooting them, for some reason, and then just setting up shop and waiting, waiting, waiting.

What are they waiting for? Maybe for Godot, but otherwise I have no idea, they never tell us specifically what they were there for. They watch, quietly, with snipers, drones, their own eyes, to see how people, being guys with explosives and AKs and grenades and stuff, are going to react to their presence in the house. Even though they’re being quiet, as in not making their presence obvious, they have no illusions that the local community doesn’t know that they’re there.

dir: Ryan Coogler

2025.

Damn. I really wanted to love this flick, like really love it. As it stands, or at least after one viewing, I like it but wonder what else could have been done instead, how it could have gone in a different direction.

The setup is immaculate, the look of the film is sublime. The cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw is so perfect you wish you could frame countless scenes, countless images, on the walls or screensaver of your mind. The acting is spot on as well. If you like Michael B. Jordan, you’re lucky enough to get two performances, as he plays twins Elijah and Elias Moore, better known as hardened veterans and crims Smoke and Stack. They are identical except for the fact that one wears a red hat and the other wears a blue cap.

If you don’t like Michael B. Jordan, then there’s twice as much of him to dislike, and you’re also probably the kind of jerk that doesn’t even know what D’Angelo screaming “Where’s Wallace?” means.

I despair for you and sigh despondently in your general direction.

They are both fierce, and fairly quick to violence. I will admit to not knowing which one was which much of the time, and then there’s a fight between them towards the end and I was like “which one do I want to win again?”

The brothers have returned from Chicago, having worked in the crime mines created by Prohibition, now with a bunch of Irish beer, Italian wine and oodles of money at their disposal. Back to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to do what they’ve always wanted to do which is to run their own juke joint.

A place catering entirely to a Black clientele, in the 1930s, at a time when the children and grand-children of the losing side of the Civil War still think they’ve got a chance of re-litigating the argument, so to speak. When they hand over the cash for the sawmill, the constantly spitting owner gives no indication that this arrangement has any permanency. When the twins solemnly intone that if they see a single Klansman set foot on the grounds of their new property, they’ll be promptly shot.

“There’s no Klan here” smiles the guy, clearly the Grand Octopus or Pulsating Rectum or whatever the head honcho of the Klan hereabouts is called. I have to admit, both because I’m such a nerd, and because I’m also a despicable bureaucrat that every government tries to get its populace to resent, what with our stylish cardigans and countless elitist perks like tap water and workspaces where you can never open a window, all I could think of during this scene was “how are you genius twins going to prove you purchased the property legally? Where’s the title? Who’s doing the conveyancing?”

dir: Josh Ruben

2025

Who doesn’t love love?

What sick twisted individuals aren’t moved by the rush of reactions and hormones that occur in our bodies tricking us into thinking there’s more than biological imperatives going on when we hook up for lustful reasons or more prosaic ones like just wanting someone to eat chips with on the couch in front of the tv?

Churls, absolute ungrateful churls, the lot of them. And you would think that a serial killer who seems to target loving couples around St Valentine’s Day resulting in massacres of love struck fools, you would think it’s this killer that must hate love itself, abhor romance, disdain delirious passion.

But no, it’s not the killer wearing a goofy mask with glowing hearts for eyes who is the ungrateful churl who hates love; it’s our lead character Ally (Olivia Holt), who is anti-romantic in a world that constantly seems to be punishing people for being in love and posting about it on IG, or for not believing in love enough.

Mixed messages. Ally looks like the American lead of every American romantic comedy ever, especially the Lifetime / Hallmark ones pumped out by the Romance / Military – Industrial Complex. Someone must be watching them all, because they keep making them, and what they know is that the lead has to be a blonde woman who’s been burnt before but just when she’s given up hope of ever finding love again, finds someone who at first she hates but then realises is the single and only greatest person who’s ever lived, fixing every problem in their lives before the gift-wrapped ending.

dir: Jake Scherier

2025

What do people want from superhero films anymore? I genuinely don’t know. I don’t know what studio heads imagine people want, what audiences want, at this stage, after almost everything that can be done, punched, shot or blown up, has been. Icons have been created, have done their bit, have been destroyed, have gone away. We have seen it all, and so anything else becomes just a variation on a theme.

There are no worlds left to conquer, surely?

The thing about success under late stage capitalism is that you can never stop until you become so unsuccessful that you can’t keep going. Then you go bankrupt, then some other entity comes along and strip mines your legacy for exploitable intellectual property that they can then recycle. If Marvel have released 73 movies so far, you get the feeling that they’re never going to stop, like some kind of relentless Terminator, until they’re destroyed. While it’s profitable, and someone somewhere is profiting from it, the rollout continues.

Thunderbolts* is an admission by Marvel that, despite all their grand plans for the future, for an industry that is 95% superhero flicks and 5% Sydney Sweeney / Glenn Powell movies, blowing shit up is pretty redundant. They’re at the stage of saying “Heroes? Tired. Anti-heroes? Inspired!”