fresh movie reviews and human wordsmithing while you wait

dir: Edward Berger

2025

There are no small roles, just small players, and I don’t think Colin Farrell does “small”. Oh sure, he’s had some shitty roles, but they weren’t small. And, sure, when he started out he was often drunk on set, but, still, you’d never accuse him of doing anything less than giving the biggest brassiest performances you’ve ever seen.

Here, in this film, he plays a small time crim / fuck up who is down to his last roll of cash, living as he does very high up on the hog, in Macau.

Macau, like Hong Kong before it, was a Chinese town controlled by a European power, being Portugal, for a long time. That time is done, and now, other that the thousands of casinos, the influence remains in the colonial architecture (that the CCP hasn’t gotten around to getting rid of yet) and the cuisine.

So even today, as a setting, it has a kind of cosmopolitan air, or at least it gives the impression that a European scallywag pretending to be some kind of high roller or aristocrat would be cut some slack there, for whatever reason.

But really, when it’s mostly set in high-end casinos and hotel rooms, you realise this is all tourist bullshit. You could set this anywhere where there are casinos and hotels, but Vegas has been overdone, and if 'Lord Doyle' pulled this shit at the Crown casino here in Melbourne, he wouldn’t get months of leeway and third chances – the second they sniffed that he was out of cash he’d be out on his arse.

For some reason, though, they are letting him play out the last moments of his bender, but we are under no illusions that he’s not fucked.

dir: Viktor Kossakovsky

2024

You won’t usually hear me praising documentaries, mostly because when they’re really good I find them so depressing I can’t even write about them, and when they’re bad I don’t want to bring any additional notice to them, however meagre it might be.

A24, also, isn’t that well known for snapping up and releasing docos, so that A24 being involved was the first thing that intrigued me about this. Plus the name. It sounds like some villain out of ages past, or a Transformers movie.

In Greek it just means “architect”, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising because it’s right there in the name, but here I think, given the subject matter, it’s meant to mean more, as in, what are we making of this world?

It’s about cement, but you’re not going to know that until way, way into the film, almost towards the end. Until you get there, you’re going to think maybe it’s about the destruction of war (specifically the destruction wrought by that pigfucker Vladimir Putin in Ukraine), or the patient destruction that comes with time, as we see so much footage of ancient structures, of places where all that remains are the arches above entrances or doorways.

And rocks, lots of rocks, how they are wrenched from the earth, how they are broken down to powder.

(门前宝地
Men Qian Bao Di)

dirs: Xu Junfeng & Xu Haofeng

2023

100 Yards is unlike anything I’ve seen for a long time. I mean, they used to make 5 of these a week back in the 1990s out of Hong Kong, but that industry died in the arse a long while ago.

Plus it’s set in Tianjin in the 1920s. I don’t remember anything from back in the day being set in Tianjin. There’s probably reasons, even though none of this feels like even vaguely being based on a true story. But colonialism does play a big part in the story, so there’s that.

There’s a martial arts academy. The master of the academy is dying. He has a son, Shen An (Jacky Heung), but he doesn’t want his son to follow in his footsteps. He has a top student Qi Quan (Andy On), and everyone seems happier with him getting the top gig.

They are meant to duel, and they do, but the only one watching is the master.

These aren’t epic, fully choreographed fights. They’re brief flurries of action; they’re not looking to wound each other (yet), just to prove who’s better, who knows more, and who is awesomest.

The dying master tells his brightest pupil to just do the thing already that he’s been taught that the son doesn’t know, to show how outclassed he is; the student does it, the son takes a tumble, the master dies.

dir: Joachim Rønning

2025

I mean, three strikes, you’re out, surely?

The original Tron is not some beloved 80s sci fi flick; you couldn’t even say it’s a cult classic. It’s on the level of the mostly forgotten Disney stuff from ages ago like The Shaggy D.A. about a human cursed to be a dog, or, even worse, a dog cursed to be a human, or Hervey the Love Bug. It’s stuff that exists but no-one really cares about it. It’s not some rich resource to keep mining, to warrant continuing to return to the well.

Tron was and still is a pretty silly film about a guy who gets sucked into a computer and discovers a funky world where people fling these disks at each other and ride on light cycles. Lots of strong colours, and the ‘real’ world being replicated in the electronic world with easily vanquished bad guys and lots of blue neon everywhere.

Blue means ‘good’, red means ‘evil’.

Jeff Bridges played a guy who gets sucked into the computer world. He’s not even the main character. Tron is. It’s in the name, Tron’s the hero, played by the great Bruce Boxleitner. Now that’s a name you don’t hear often enough.

Anyway, it was a pretty cheesy kids movie. I was a kid. I liked cheese. I watched a copy of Tron taped off of the telly squillions of times, and then I presumably got bored of it. It holds no special place in my nerdy heart.

And then for some baffling reason they made a sequel called Tron Legacy in 2010, which is a terrible, terrible movie with great visuals, a banging soundtrack and nothing but terrible narrative and acting choices.

It didn’t do that well. More people got the soundtrack (by which I mean illegally downloaded) because it was great, and by Daft Punk, and not because they liked the movie.

The script, the dialogue? It was terrible, like, genuinely terrible. There’s an actual line of dialogue where Jeff Bridges says “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man!”

(I danatti)

2024

This is not to be confused with the legendary punk band with such members as David Vanian, Captain Sensible, Rat Scabies and Brian James, or the flick from 1967 made by the great communist aristocrat director Luchino Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde; or the recent flick by an Icelandic director set in Iceland in the 1870s about a bunch of people at a fishing station trying to do some fishing and then bad things happen to them.

This is a completely different movie that came out recently called The Damned. You can see why I chose to watch and review it right now? Maximum confusion, that’s what I’m going for. How do two such completely different flicks come out in the same year, with the same title?

It’s not even that great a title, or even really that applicable here. Are all the people involved damned? Sure, but no more so than any of the rest of us. Is it a war movie, or even more importantly, is it a movie about the US Civil War? Well, kinda.

Mostly this flick is about a camera that hides behind a bunch of guys in Union army clothing wandering around doing stuff, or not doing stuff. There’s no film score to convince you that you’re watching something fictional. But it’s not a documentary. It’s kind of a re-enactment, but we usually call that “fiction”.

It’s just some guys, hanging out. When they speak the dialogue sounds pretty contemporary, as in, there’s no attempt to make it sound like dialogue from the 1800s. And what they talk about is the mundane aspects of what they’re doing, or about their lives, or about what they’re meant to do.

dir: Thordur Palsson

2025

To be clear this isn’t the flick from 1967 made by the great communist aristocrat director Luchino Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde; this is a recent flick by an Icelandic director set in Iceland in the 1870s about a bunch of people at a fishing station trying to do some fishing and then bad things happen to them.

I hadn’t heard of fishing stations either, but I guess they were a thing at some point in human history? A lot of Nordic looking people wearing black in the most forbidding environment you can imagine outside of Antarctica talking about fish and the sea like they know the sea hates them?

That must have been a thing, else there wouldn’t be a terrifying movie like this about such a scenario.

Unlike the last horror flick I saw that had some people being tormented near the sea, this flick has a well-crafted story with compelling performances from decent (mostly) character actors confronting the unknown with sheer terror and a tremendous sense of foreboding. And even involving a group of people even Ingmar Bergman would think should lighten up, anything you shoot in or near Iceland is 1000% more compelling, and makes these people seem more credible.

Eva (Australia’s Own Odessa Young) is a young widow whose husband died a year ago. She owns the fishing station where these grimy chilly souls are trying to do their thing. It’s the middle of winter, so it’s not like they can leave, and they haven’t had a good run lately. In terms of stores they only have fish left over for bait, and they’re resorting to eating that.

dir: Samuel Clemens

2025

I knew almost nothing about this flick before I watched it, and now I know even less.

For much of its beginning, I was really on board, in that the start of the flick has a disturbing atmosphere and troubling, tense visuals despite the fact that there’s only one person on screen. He has the air of someone who’s very concerned about being seen or is being chased or something. It feels really tense, as he makes his way to an isolated house on the coast. They never mention it in the flick, but it’s a house on the coast of Kent, which is south-east England.

This chap, Eric (Alan Calton) sweeps and clears the house room by room with a gun out, so you know he’s not fucking around. I don’t know what he’s done or he’s planning to do, but it doesn’t seem like he’s involved in charity work. This beginning is dialogue-free, until someone else shows up.

Matt (Dominic Vulliamy) starts quizzing Eric as to where Matt’s mother is. Eric doesn’t mention that he found a bangle in a puddle of blood at the edge of the beach just before Matt turned up. They seem like a couple(?)

Reference is made to a painting. Reference is made to whether everything went as planned or if they fucked up, and where’s Denise anyway? Denise is Matt’s mum. We haven’t seen Denise, so who knows what happened to her.

Clearly, these jerks stole some painting worth tens of millions of pounds, so they’re concerned that someone is going to find them. We only see the painting in snippets, when weird shit is happening.

When I say “weird shit is happening” I mean this is a film in which weird shit is happening all the time, with zero explanation, but we kind of get it because bad things happen to bad people, I guess. A better film gets us to care about the central protagonists or their plight, or at least have thoughts about them but this flick doesn’t have the budget to make us care about these people, or the inclination to care in general.

dir: Sean Byrne

2025

There really must have been something in the water earlier this year or last year, because there are no shortage of shark films at the moment. I mean, there have been shark films bubbling around in the background, but I have to attribute the current upsurge to the 50th anniversary of the release of the first summer blockbuster Jaws.

Its success paved the way for Spielbergo to make plenty of other non-shark related films, and for the rest of us to be scared of being in open water on the ocean, which is a very sensible fear. But it also means there’s no shortage of lesser films banking on our inherent fear of these terrifying creatures.

I say that knowing full well that each year literally more people are killed by falling coconuts, cows and horses than are ever killed by the gentle sharks that have been so poorly maligned and slandered since Spielbergo catapulted his career into the stratosphere from upon their scaly backs. Very unfair, if you ask me, but no-one did, so I guess I should talk about this nasty film instead.

It has, at least from my perspective, been a long time between drinks from this horror auteur, Australia’s Own Sean Byrne. Anyone who saw The Loved Ones way back in the day knows what sheer brutal nastiness this director is capable of.

dir: Kiah Roache-Turner

2025

It’s literally the 50th anniversary of when Jaws came out. As such, every film released in the second half of 2025 has to be a shark film where sharks eat people.

Australia is not exempt from this, in fact, for whatever reason now shark movies have taken over from coal as one of our main exports.

When I saw the introduction to this film where it said “Based on a True Story”, I blurted out, out loud, involuntarily, “Bullshit!”, quicker and louder than Natasha Lyonne does on that show Poker Face where she sorts out the liars from the lied to, the murderers from the murder-curious. Because there is no way any part of this movie conforms to anything that ever happened to anyone, except in that there was a World War II, there were Australian soldiers, and that sharks exist and occasionally eat people.

Beyond that, this film is purest fantasy. Yeah, the HMS Armadale sank in 1942, but that's got nothing to do with this, .

The starting sequence will be familiar to anyone who has ever watched a) any war movies or b) anyone who has watched a movie. Boot camp. Young soldiers being yelled at. Recruits who are wonderful, wholesome and handsome (like our hero Leo played by Mark Coles Smith), or awful, ugly, mean, racist, selfish jerks (like the necessary villain beyond the shark played by Sam Delich, who has an unfortunate resemblance to that FriendlyJordies chap). There are no in-betweens, there are no grey areas on the battlefield or in personalities.

dir: Michael Shanks

2025

Now this is a bit more my tempo.

This, too, is a film about a couple in danger of tearing each other and themselves apart, but this works far batter, way way better even if it doesn’t have Sir Lord Esquire Benedict Cumberbatch and Academy Award Winner Olivia Colman in the lead roles, unlike the bloody Roses.

In fact, it has Alison Brie and Dave Franco, instead. You could probably not get two actors more opposite than them to the classy Brit thespians of the aforementioned title. Dave Franco is the younger, non-problematic Franco compared to his brother James, who, while a great actor, is also a notorious serial assaulter of women. Alison Brie is, if you like her work, a delight in shows as varied as Mad Men, GLOW, Community and a bunch of films, and yet also an accomplished actor capable of tremendous nuance and complexity in her roles. And she’s pretty fearless.

And Dave Franco… is Dave Franco. You wouldn’t think that they would suit such roles in a keen body horror flick, but they’re perfect for these roles.

Another key difference is that Brie and Franco are married in real life, so when they’re playing a couple in distress, it is somewhat more believable. They’re not playing a couple who have turned murderous due to decades of resentment and generally being very shitty people – they are playing a (younger) couple, despite being in their 40s who have only recently moved to the country, and who don’t seem to be sure of each other even after nearly ten years of being together.

Excruciatingly, Brie’s character Millie gets down on bended knee, for some reason, to propose to Tim when they’re having their hipster abundant going away party with all their friends. He awkwardly demurs yet they still go through with the move. He doesn’t really have a job and doesn’t want to give up his dream of being an unsuccessful musician, whereas she’s a teacher, and has apparently been supporting them both for the longest time.

In a new town, in a small town where they don’t know anyone, they are similarly repelled by and entirely dependent on each other, which creates its own pressures. Couples who spend too much time together, without clear boundaries in their heads, can get confused: Where do you end and I begin? A lack of boundaries, projected harsh boundaries that are too extreme or exclusionary; withholding oneself, depriving the other of what they want or need; relationships are hard, aye?

dir: Jay Roach

2025

I really wonder what Americans think British people are. Watching a film like this makes you think Americans think Brits are like these polite but profane aliens who don’t really physically exist in the same world as them, but they have those delightful accents, so what’s not to like?

Olivia Colman and Benedict Timothy Carlton “Cumbersomely Named” Cumberbatch are probably great actors who have been great in all sorts of things. They are, shall we say, less than great here. They are game, they’re trying, you can tell they’re trying, but this script, the stuff these Americans make them do in order to amuse other Americans…ugh. It’s ugly.

It’s ugly and unpleasant, and pretends constantly that it’s not, and they play terrible people, so I question how anyone thought this was going to work. I mean, I have no doubt people saw this flick, as in, might have even bought tickets and such, popcorn, the works, maybe on a date night out. Why didn’t they release it around Valentine’s Day, I’m sure some marketing genius is lamenting?

But, fucking hell. I know that the story is based on a book, and I know they made an earlier movie from it starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, and I remember watching that movie, back in the day, when I was still a kid. A young, impressionable kid. I can’t lie I hated that fucking film too, but at least that had some good actors in it. Good American actors, that is.

The novelty was that these two people had starred in these moderately successful romantic action flicks, Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile, in which Danny De Vito was also along for the ride, and then the thought was to have a flick where Turner and Douglas play a couple whose divorce gets messy and murderous. Ha ha, so funny, and De Vito can direct and play the third wheel!

I think what I really hate about these kinds of flicks, ones that pretend to be about the breakdown of a relationship or a marriage, is just how inherently dishonest they are. There’s nothing even vaguely hilarious about intimate partner violence, domestic violence, people trying to kill each other. It happens every day. Every week in Australia a woman is murdered by her partner or her former partner. That’s not to ignore the countless thousands of people who endure physical and emotional abuse, threats to murder, threats to suicide, every awful permutation possible, each and every day. Not exclusively women at the hands of men, but the vast majority being women on the receiving end.

dir: Darren Aronofsky

2025

He’s back! But then he’s never really been away.

Darren Aronofsky’s last film (The Whale) wasn’t that long ago (2022), and it had the odd distinction of being very successful awards-wise for people involved in the film other than himself, but hated by audiences and critics. This feels like… no-one really cares that much to even criticise it, but some people want to act like it’s a return to form. My point is you could hardly tell – every film Aronofsky has ever made has been significantly different from the ones that came before. The closest you could come to is say it’s set in a similar New York to Requiem for a Dream, but this comes across almost as a comic crime caper in comparison, and it’s nowhere near as depressing.

It is really strange, in my head, to watch something that is deliberately set in New York in 1998 and to think of it as a period piece, as a historical artefact. I mean, I know that it was, on paper, 27 years ago, it’s just that it doesn’t feel like it was nearly three decades ago.

Our clearest signal that it is a different time, different place, is that the World Trade Centre towers still stand, proudly, made of wholesome, American CGI, unaware that they would be mere dust in three years’ time.

Hank (Austin Butler) works bar at place called Paul’s Bar. Something something baseball. Baseball is or was very important to him. A car crash keeps being referred to and keeps being brought up again and again. I am guessing it is of some significance.

Hank has a neighbour, a British mohawked punk called Russ (Matt Smith, who was a Doctor, at some point?) who seems like a bit of a lunatic, but he needs a favour – look after me cat, he says, which Hank is reluctant to do.

Within minutes of Russ disappearing, some Russian thugs turn up and one of them beats up Hank so viciously that Hank loses a kidney.

dir: Mike Flanagan

2025

The Life of Chuck is a flick that seems to have not found much of an audience, despite being the creation, at least in its written form, of America’s most prolific, best and possibly most handsome writer, being Stephen King. He is a one man industry, or at least, his ideas are so great that all of them have to be adapted into something.

Unlike most of his stuff, this isn’t horror – this is something… else. Maybe it’s existential in nature, maybe it’s a gentle “live life to its fullest because we never know when it’s going to end” type of story, maybe it is a story about how life is like a box of chocolates, so you might as well dance before the world ends.

Who knows (Stephen King probably knows)? What I did see in reviews of the flick, from those reviewers that I follow, or respect, or both, is that those who loved it really thought it was one of the films of the year. I’m going to lazily say that half the people who saw it thought it was great and half thought it was absolute hollow dogshit, because I’m not sure I want to take the time to calculate the real statistic.

Reviews were very much like that. I only mention it (I mean, who cares what reviewers say about anything, huh?) because it really was one of those cases where those who loved it really did, and those who didn’t thought it wasn’t mediocre, they thought it was fucking terrible. That level of hostility, I’m not going to read too much psychology into it, but to me that kind of extreme comes from people feeling actively betrayed by what they watched.

I don’t really get it. I neither think it’s a great film, nor do I think it’s terrible. I didn’t find its central conceit too insulting, nor did I find its seeming message to be anything that extraordinary. I find it perplexing that Tom Hiddleston is in this, because he really doesn’t have that much to do, and he doesn’t even play the Chuck character for the majority of the flick.

My main agreement with anyone else that might complain is that it is a very strange story told arse-backwards for a very good reason, that reason being it’s about the life of Chuck rather than his death. We know he’s going to die, because everyone does, but if there’s anything this flick is trying to impress upon us, is that you should really take up every opportunity to dance with someone while you can.

(十一人の賊軍)

dir: Kazuya Shiraishi

2024

11 Rebels joins the illustrious ranks of Japanese period piece katana wielding action movies where a small number of wonderful people fight a much greater force and somehow come out on top but also all still mostly die by the end.

Why, yes, I am taking the piss, but am I exaggerating? Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is literally about seven guys who fight off 40 or so bandits, and win but mostly die. This flick set the template for so many action flicks for decades to come, not just in Japan, that we’re still suffering for it to this very day. Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, itself a loose remake of Kurosawa’s masterpiece, doubled the number of fighters but multiplied the enemy into the hundreds.

And of course I can’t not mention 47 Ronin, which literally has a bunch of ronin get revenge on a lord who dishonoured them, and once they’ve won their epic battle (after four hours of screen time), they all commit harakiri, which is just insane, the most insane thing that’s ever happened in the history of insane things happening. And Japanese people love that fucking story!

This flick has 11 people forced to fight against their will, or against being immediately executed, with the promise of maybe not being executed later if they survive, which they’re not meant to, and it’s all a lie because the sneaky piece of shit who’s really pulling all of the strings needs everyone to be dead anyway.

Everyone thinks they’re the main character in this flick. All of them with the exclusion of one character, being Mizoguchi (Sadao Abe) are profoundly wrong. The young lord who thinks he runs this province is wrong. The smug generals who lead two competing armies are wrong. The de facto and completely unwilling leader of the 11 rebels doesn’t want to be the main character at all, and he gets his wish. The samurai bullying the rebels into defending a key bridge and a key fortress thinks he’s the main character, because he’s a samurai, but guess what, he’s not right either.

They’re all wrong except for Mizoguchi. This is the era in Japanese history where samurai had to shave the middle bit of their heads, so many of the samurai look, to use the culturally sensitive term, fucking ridiculous. Mizoguchi definitely has that, as well as beady, froglike eyes, and is middle-aged, so he doesn’t lop off a single head or limb. But there is no doubt at all that everything that happens for the next two plus hours is because he wills it to happen.

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.

dirs.: Bryan M. Ferguson Diet Phantasma, Casper Kelly Fun Size, Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman Home Haunt, Alex Ross Perry Kidprint, Paco Plaza Ut Supra Sic Infra, Anna Zlokovic Coochie Coochie Coo

2025

Well, this year’s installment of this found footage horror sub-genre franchise is probably one of its best outings so far, which is extraordinary considering how these things usually go. This time out might not have an overarching thematic link (as opposed to a shared setting, being obviously Halloween except for the Spanish segment Ut Supra Sic Infra, I think), with the interstitial bits between segments having nothing to do with any of them or Halloween, but it hardly matters.

What most of these segments benefit from is brevity, which I believe is the soul of both wit and lingerie, according to Dorothy Parker. Most of them don’t have enough of a premise to sustain a feature length horror flick, except perhaps Kidprint, but the fact that they’re only generally ten or fifteen minutes long means they’re around for long enough to shock, horrify, provoke discomfort, and then they’re gone. Short, punchy, lethal, to the point.

I like that, or at least I appreciate that, to not have my time wasted.

The opening scene, telling a quite pointless story about how far soft drink companies are prepared to go in order to add bizarre components to their best selling products, doesn’t really do much other than deliver spasmodic gore in even shorter bursts than the segments themselves (in the interstitials). Test subjects file into a recently cleaned room, in order to take a few sips of the new product being tested, being Diet Phantasma, and then horrible things happen to them. For whatever reason, as in, not for any explicable purpose, they’ve added some kind of poltergeist juice or demonic essence to the drink. Not as a mistake, not even to cut costs, but just to kill their own customers, I guess, because they can?

Take that, late stage capitalism!

That’s trenchant satire, that is. The first real segment is Coochie Coochie Coo, which is deeply discomfiting and an appalling / great start to the proceedings. Two obnoxious girls, one of whom is meant to leave town for college soon, go trick or treating, knowing full well that they’re probably actors in their mid twenties masquerading as even teens too old to trick or treat.

As they’re quite rude to people and irritating even when they’re on their own, when they get to a particular house and face a supernaturally horrific mother organism that turns people into milk-saturated babies, it’s hard to know what to hope for. I didn’t exactly want anything bad to happen to them, but I didn’t particularly want them to have a narrow escape and happy lives afterwards either.

dir: Rungano Nyoni

2025

Because I am a creature of habit, and of several dark habits, I feel compelled to point out that this is not the sequel to Kirsten Dunst’s one season series On Becoming a God in Central Florida, and that it has nothing to do with mid-level marketing schemes or cult leaders, either. Yet similarly, no-one turns into a Floridian God nor does anyone physically turn into a guinea fowl.

So both titles suffer ultimately from false advertising. In this instance, however, there is more of an explanation as to why one would aspire to become as such.

A young woman driving home at night, happy, after a dress-up party (where I think she’d gone as Missy Elliot?), sees a body on the other side of the road. She is driving somewhere on the outskirts of the capital of Zambia, being Lukasa. She is not distressed by the sight of the body, and she happens to know the body’s name.

She is neither happy nor sad that she has found her uncle Fred here. Maybe she even feels relieved. Out of nowhere a drunk appears and starts calling her by name through the car windows, but she ignores the woman, who recognised her, since they’re cousins, and also recognises the body, since he was uncle to them both. Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) likes to party, though, so death hasn’t seemed to bum her out, as she twerks to a song playing from her portable speaker, mere metres from the body.

There is no urgency; the cops tell them to not worry, it will be all be sorted in the morning; the initial woman, Shula (Susan Chardy) calls her dad, and he doesn’t seem to care, but hits her up for some money for a taxi ride to the site that he never takes. The call to her mother, the sister of the dead uncle, has a different effect, though.

dir: Paul Greengrass

2025

2018 isn’t that long ago. I mean, I know that the covid years in between were about 10 years long, but in truth the events depicted in this agitating and deeply stressful movie only happened 7 years ago. The so-called Camp Fire of 2018 saw over 13,000 buildings and houses burn down, but far more tragically, 85 lives lost to the fires or the general chaos that ensued.

What this film, with a certain degree of difficulty, gets us to care about, is whether 85 people dying is bad enough, or whether the survival of a busload of kids, their teacher and the bus driver, or not, would make us feel better or worse.

Let’s not fuck around – they wouldn’t have made this if the kids didn’t survive. But watching this flick you would have been convinced that there was no freaking way all these people survived this apocalyptic hellfire, not only including these kids but especially these kids.

And given those circumstances, and the fact that this is the past we’re watching, and not a post-apocalyptic future, its very verisimilitude is what makes it so hard to believe sometimes.

This is a very stressful flick. There’s no two ways about it: every choice the director makes is intended to increase our stress to try to match the terror of the people involved. The camerawork is jittery, handheld, and matches the editing and the overamped nature of the performances, and a lot of the real footage that I’m assuming they got and included in the film.

It feels too real a lot of the time. I have no doubts everything was done safely and no kids or McCounagheys were harmed in the making of this movie etc etc, but the queasy line between fact and fiction is often blurred, deliberately. There are scenes with the firefighters figuring out that the fires are only going to get worse and worse that looked like they were filmed when it was actually happening.

Very obviously, this was a horrific set of circumstances that impacted a lot of people in terrible ways, but some more than others. Everyone else in the film except the bus driver doesn’t get the luxury of a backstory, because you see the bus driver, the one that drives the lost bus of the title, he’s played by Matthew McConaughey. And if he’s playing a character, he’s not confused as to whether he has main character energy or not: he must have all of it. No-one else in this flick is afforded that luxury, which is to the film’s benefit, because honestly, we didn’t need it.

dir: Matt Shakman

2025

There was something fundamentally goofy about this flick which meant it was never going to really make a lot of sense in any context, in any alternate reality.

And my deep love and admiration for all things Pedro Pascal should be well known and appreciated by now. Delighted as I am that he’s getting all the work in all the films doesn’t mean that there are times when I wonder whether he’s right in the role. It feels blasphemous saying that it feels a bit like he’s miscast in this.

Shame shame shame I should be paraded through the streets of King’s Landing (not naked though, because however much I deserve to suffer, the denizens of King’s Landing do not) for saying such. It’s possible he’s not the only one. It’s possible they’re all miscast. It’s so hard to tell, sometimes.

But does it matter? Probably not.

It seems especially redundant to make such a flick when the greatest version of the Fantastic Four has already been made, and it was called The Incredibles, and no amount of money or dreamy stars attached to a project is ever going to change that. Sure, they tried before, they’ve tried booting, rebooting, sequelling, re-sequelling and yet nothing seems to take

Still, they keep trying because $$$

This is set in the 1960s, which is… okay I guess. That it’s an alternate dimension to regular Marvel Earth doesn’t really make any difference, because I’m sure they’re going to find a way for it to not matter that they’re living in the past or in an alternate reality.

It means that the kinds of people who say that they wanted to do something new or exciting in terms of the setting, the look, the feel of the flick can just rip off plenty of imagery from The Jetsons or any other Mad Men - Silver Age - Space Age imagery in order to give it a look they desperately want to call “unique” but you know it’s not because it’s all so painstakingly familiar. I don’t begrudge them that; I like that look. It’s cool, it’s funky, it’s retro-futuristic somehow and yet it's like a sitcom we never watched from back in the day.

dir: Akiva Schaffer

2025

I was a fool to think that just because some people said this was funny, that I would find it funny. ‘Funny’ is more subjective than beauty, sleaze or profundity. Cuteness, hotness, cringe – now they’re universal.

There’s also the factor that seeing something on your own is never the same experience as watching something funny with other people. The collective energy makes a big difference. The involuntary, unconscious group dynamics can take you out of yourself and deliver you a very different experience. Duh, I know you’re thinking, no shit, Sherlock.

I didn’t have the luxury of watching this flick in a cinema. And no-one else at my place was awake to watch this with. So alone I trudged through this relatively brisk 85 minute movie, not laughing at what I am told is a steady stream of gags in the style of the classic Zucker – Abrams – Zucker movies like Kentucky Fried Movie, Flying High, Top Secret, Hot Shots and all those other pieces of shit, including the original Naked Gun movies with Leslie Nielsen.

Nah, that’s not fair, I take that back. I laughed at plenty of those when I was a child. I’ll laugh at anything. Finding stuff funny isn’t some elitist, rarefied pursuit like fox hunting or snorting caviar. Everyone laughs at fart jokes. Not all fart jokes, but the right ones, the most unexpected?

I laughed at some stuff here. Just not that often.

This was less like watching a modern version of those specific films from the past, and more like watching a couple of episodes of Family Guy back to back. I’ve seen plenty of episodes of that animated show, and I probably chuckled a few times, but it’s pretty mediocre in the scheme of things. The New Naked Gun does benefit from having Liam Neeson in the lead role, because you don’t expect him to be funny, and when he is, it’s surprising! I’ve seen him be funny in things (intentionally), including guest roles in The Simpsons and in Derry Girls, and in some other cameos here or there. But putting the whole flick on his massive shoulders, well, now that’s risky.

dir: Timo Tjahjanto

2025

Nobody 2 is maybe the sequel nobody wanted to a film called Nobody, which someone wanted because it was a minor hit. Premised with “what if you had a middle aged guy bored with his life who decides to go on John Wick- like rampages just for shits and giggles and because his family think he’s pathetic?” it really struck a chord with shlubs and schlemiels everywhere.

Wow, what a premise. So in the first flick the main guy was bored, enervated, listless, a lump to his wife and kids, going through the motions, despite having been at an earlier point in his life a government sanctioned killer of killers. He decides to come out of retirement not because of any crisis or because anyone killed his dog or anything; it’s just because he’s bored.

And he beats up some Russians, which leads to needing to kill more Russians, and by the end he has to kill all the Russians. And then everyone; wife, children, dog, they are satisfied and grateful, and Hutch (Bob Odenkirk) gives up his boring job and goes back to killing people full time. Everybody’s happy!

This sequel is predicated on the premise that even someone really good at killing would get bored of his job eventually. It entirely replicates the whole basis of the first flick, being that Hutch is working in such a dedicated fashion that it’s indistinguishable from the mundane job he was previously doing down at the cracker factory that left him disconnected from his family and dissatisfied with life in general. So, it’s exactly where the first one started from, but it tenders a different solution to his existential malaise this time: maybe a holiday from all the killings will help Hutch reconnect with his family, by actually spending time with them?

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.

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.

dir: Zach Cregger

2025

It was, at least for me, always going to be hard for this director to follow up his last, very excellent horror flick Barbarian. It was so good and so unexpected that, yes, okay, I demand, in full Karen mode not to speak to his manager but for him to make another solid, unexpected, unpredictable flick.

I guess he did that. It was successful, more successful than Barbarian financially, and it had ads on tv and on bus shelters in my strange neck of the woods.

So why didn’t I like it that much?

There are parts of the so-called “American Experiment” that, to the people outside of America, make it look utterly insane. I’m not going to lower myself to talk about the political stuff. The gun thing, the collective shoulder shrug after each new gun massacre, the thoughts and prayers and business as usual after classrooms get shot up, and countless children die, that makes them all look collectively fucking insane.

Weapons, perversely, pops us into this national psychosis, but has nothing to do with gun violence. It’s animated by something that almost seems like one of the tragedies alluded to, but instead takes it into an unpredictable yet unfortunately unproductive direction. Because of how insanely comical the ‘solution’ is, how outside of actual human experience, for me the flick itself becomes something of a shoulder shrug, where you wonder what the point was.

The set up is fine, the explanation is meaningless.

One particular night in an unremarkable Pennsylvanian town, a bunch of kids, all from the same 3rd grade primary school classroom go missing, all bar one, being Alex (Cary Christopher). All seventeen of the kids snuck out of their homes at exactly 2.17am, and started running in the same direction, with their arms out behind them.

Everyone thinks the teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), must know something or be responsible. Everyone thinks Alex must know something, but he couldn’t be responsible, could he, and he’s not forthcoming with info.

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.

dir: Miki Magasiva

2024

This is one of the biggest flicks in Aotearoa’s box office history, and yet did anyone else outside of those holy isles hear about it?

I’m not going to pretend (too much) that I know that much about films from NZ in a scholarly sense, but I can make broad statements based on snippets I’ve seen online and the kinds of flicks I see available on streaming services and SBS online: there is a confidence, and there is money enough, that sustains a tv and film industry that is very different compared to so-called Australia, despite our proximity to each other. There are entire Kiwi films in te reo Maori (Maori language) set during the Treaty Wars, different uprisings, and I’m not even talking about movies starring Temuera Morrison or that other famous Kiwi actor Guy Pearce.

And I’m not even talking about that one-man industry Taika Waititi, who’s now all Hollywood and such.

There are Kiwi flicks where the main characters aren’t even white / Pākehā (*gasp*). But it’s also vibrant enough as an industry that there’s no uniformity to it, stories cover all sorts of topics from the mythical to the historical (as well as the legacy of colonisation and disenfranchisement of indigenous people from their lands and culture etc etc), and there’s room enough for a flick like Tinā.

It’s not the main character’s name, it’s a Samoan term meaning ‘mother’, though no-one uses it in the context of calling their actual mums ‘mum’. The main character, who is a Samoan New Zealander, played by a Samoan New Zealander, rejects the term when people use it.

It’s based on a true story, and it’s all been wedged into a fairly familiar format which I very much doubt proceeded in the ways this flick does, but then I rarely believe anything is verbatim in movies, since they’re movies. And it seems, on the surface, and in the trailer, like a fun, uplifting, crowd-pleasing film.

It’s anything but. Honestly, it’s a pretty grim story, and the fact that it’s based on a true story makes it seem even more depressing.

Yet, all that being said, I’m a sucker for sad stories.

dir: Gareth Edwards

2025

Dinosaurs. Now people are sick of them. Now people are bored of them, apparently.

Except kids. Kids between the ages of, I dunno, 5 and 12 are still fascinated by them, but everyone else is suffering from reptilian fatigue. I guess.

These films do seem to be doing a bizarre meta-commentary on themselves. They seem to be saying “well, sure, we keep pumping these out, and your interest waxes and wanes, but maybe this time…?” The last flick, Jurassic World Dominion, described a world with an abundance, an embarrassment of riches of dinosaurs. A modern world overflowing with them. They were on the streets, in people’s breakfast cereals, on their subways; you couldn’t get away from them.

To combat the plethora of thunder lizards they hired / cast way too many people, humans (if you include Chris Pratt amongst them), including the other OGs of the franchises, being Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum (and 17 other main roles, no exaggeration). And yet when was the last time you heard anyone say anything positive about that flick other than “it was nice to see Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum again?”

I mean, these days… if you quizzed most people, they wouldn’t even be able to tell you what the last one’s title was, they’d probably just say in conversation “the last one.”

Add to that, this one, which people, if they saw it, will just refer to as the last one. As maximalist as the previous one might have sounded, in this one the dinosaurs have made a full retreat by mostly regaining their status as extinct. Only random, narratively convenient dinosaurs still live these days, and that’s mostly around the equator, mostly just doing their thing.

Those areas are marked off limits to humans, and are patrolled etc to keep them out rather than the dinos in, yet of course the characters here will need some reason to break in and be chased by dinosaurs for a couple of hours for our amusement.

It’s very much a return to the traditional model of just having people run around as much as possible as dinosaurs try to eat them. And the classic, most traditional model of this needs kids to arbitrarily be wedged into the story so that kids can be imperiled, which we enjoy more, somehow?

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.

dir: Pedro Almodóvar

2024

Who else was excited by the prospect of watching another film by Pedro Almodóvar, one of the world’s (not just Spain’s) great directors for the better part of the last 45 years? What about getting to watch his first film in English, with two greats in lead roles, being Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, at the peak of their powers? What about that it’s based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez?

Nothing? No-one? Huh.

I remember when this was playing the film festivals, there was this thing called “buzz” about the new film by Almodóvar. And then the flick was screened, and picked up for international distribution, got an award or two, and everyone was very polite about it. It’s like when you have a new article come out, or get something new published, and people are like “yes, that was a thing that happened.” It doesn’t mean it’s bad, or that people are embarrassed to be associated with you. It’s that it happened, they saw it / read it / endured it, it’s over, and now we can get on with our lives.

I don’t actually know why this didn’t connect with more people, unless it’s the issue of the subject matter, maybe in a religious context, but then Almodóvar’s films have never shied away from controversial topics like murder, sexual abuse and violence, intimate partner violence, child abuse, LGBTQI+ themes etc etc. Few (successful, Spanish) directors have opposed the Catholic Church, the religious establishment, the previous appeasers of fascism as much as Almodóvar.

I’m going to stop saying his name now. Maybe he’s not as popular as he was. I mean, I haven’t truly loved his films since maybe Volver all those years ago with Penelope Cruz in the lead role, but I’ve admired his subsequent films, and I admire this one.

I didn’t love it, it didn’t deeply resonate with me, I didn’t love the performances, but I enjoyed it as much as one can enjoy a film about one person who’s dying from cancer and wants to end things before it gets too much worse, and another person who wants to help their friend but can’t handle the idea of death at all.

It’s not a barrel of laughs, that’s for fucking sure, but neither is it a morose or depressing experience either. None of the harsh realities of what being in that state are depicted; it’s more about what a person thinks about, chooses to articulate, or how they make peace with their lives and the people they care about in the time they have left.

dir: Christopher McQuarrie

2025

Enough already.

We’ve seen enough of Tom Cruise running. We get it. You’re the boy that won’t grow up, besides being in your 60s. We further get it: you’re really fit for your age, and possibly Scientology is keeping you eternally youthful (I mean, comparatively, for someone your age). And you can run fast and jump off things and onto other things, and that you’re “famous” for doing your own stunts.

We get it. No-one’s saying you can’t do all of that stuff. We’re just saying, okay, we believe you, but that’s enough already.

These films have never been about a team of heroes who save the world from megalomaniacal villains. They have all been about one guy, called Ethan Hunt, who saves the world routinely, and then there are some hangers on. Of course they do “important” stuff, but if they weren’t around, Ethan Hunt would doubtless figure out how to save the day some other way, he just wouldn’t have someone around to explain things to (for the audience’s sake). Sure, they could have gone the Deadpool route and have had him continuously talking to the audience, but even his star power couldn’t make that that interesting for eight fucking movies.

This film completes whatever all that bullshit was that they did in the previous movie, which, if I recall, was called Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1. Terrible name for a movie, almost as bad as calling a film The Last Samurai and having Tom Cruise as the main character. In the previous film there was a really nasty guy called Gabriel (Esai Morales) who strutted around mostly killing women that Ethan Hunt had spoken to or held hands with. He did this for his own personal gratification, not generally because the plot required it. He also happened to be in league with an AI that had reached self-awareness and therefore immediately planned to kill everyone.

What would an AI want with a dead planet? No idea, but I am not as smart as theoretical AIs in films where people jump motorbikes onto trains or fight people for parachutes in biplanes or have to find things in sunken submarines in order to save us all.