fresh movie reviews and human wordsmithing while you wait

dir: David Cronenberg

2024

There is much of The Shrouds that is not baffling. That the director recently lost his wife Carolyn, a (second) marriage that lasted over 40 years, and that it factors into this flick wouldn’t surprise anyone.

This is still a film by the guy whose movies and name are synonymous with the overused term “body horror”. He didn’t invent it but by all the eldritch gods he’s certainly profited from it over the decades.

What is, in truth, more horrible than what actually happens to human bodies when we die? And yet this film, or at least its premise, centres around the idea that there are people so unable to let go of their loved ones that they would pay top dollar to have them buried in a technological marvel of a shroud that allows them, whenever they feel like, to watch their loved one decomposing.

I mean, forgive me if I reach for a bucket, but that’s not something I can stomach or that appeals to me in any way shape or form. And yet it’s something I can understand. The film’s not suggesting that humanity in general craves such a connection to their dead loved ones. But it’s positing the powerful idea that not being able to let go of those we love makes us do some very strange things.

Grief is etc etc. And its vast awfulness or its minute and exquisite tediousness is different for everyone. In David Cronenberg what it conjured up was a desire to make a 10 episode Netflix series where Vincent Cassell, looking a lot like Cronenberg except without the trademark glasses, but with the same shock of silver hair, is completely unable to let go of his wife. And through the magic of technology he can ‘keep’ holding onto her, in his very twisted way, but there is such demand for similar connection from others that he can become a tech overlord of sorts.

dir: Gavin O’Connor

2025

Who in the name of fuck asked for a sequel to The Accountant? Other than Ben Affleck, or Ben Affleck's accountant, can you imagine anyone writing letters to their local MP or kids in comment sections begging for another movie where Ben Affleck plays an autistic chartered accountant who also happens to have access to limitless funds and no shortage of weaponry?

Wait, that just sounds like another Batman sequel.

When I say that such a sequel is unlikely, when it clearly exists, it’s because the first movie, if you went into it blind, was a hilarious example of escalation into insane realms: it was the equivalent of finding out that the guy making your sandwich at the local deli is not only ex-SAS, but they’re undercover, and they can kill 50 trained killers with only their butter knife, but not only that, but they own all the butter knives in the world, and run all the Subway franchises, plus they have weapons everywhere, and they somehow can kill anyone they want to because they’re neuro-divergent?

The fact that the entirety of the characterisation they give for this character is that he’s autistic, and that it justifies two feature action films where he gets to kill hundreds of people is perhaps an unintended slight against an entire community of people who never asked for such slander, but also it raises the bar to a completely unrealistic level of expectation. It was bad enough back in the day when Rain Man established an unearned and unrealistic expectation that severely autistic people make up for their lack of social graces and ability to communicate by being able to count cards in Las Vegas; these contemporary flicks posit that autistic people make for great killers, hackers and super criminals just because they’re on the spectrum.

dir: Jesse Armstrong

2025

Ye gods I fucking hated this movie.

But I have to be fair – I have no doubt the intention was to get us to hate these people with every fibre of our beings. After all, the writer and director of this horrible satire is Jesse Armstrong, probably best known for creating Succession: a series about a terrible media mogul and his defective children. Any resemblances to Rupert Murdoch and his cursed progeny are purely intentional.

The luxury that the series had was having the time to show these despicable characters from a number of different angles, such that the sheer enormity of their vileness could be appreciated from different perspectives, in numerous contexts, in countless ways, for years.

This here movie Mountainhead is just a movie, so we’re hopefully only ever going to have this exposure to these deeply shitty billionaires this one time for this collection of toxic minutes, 109 of them, to be exact. Amidst all of those minutes were scant moments where I didn’t want to kick my screen in.

There are some things too strange to satirise. The rise of the tech billionaires has given us these strange people to mock or, for many even stranger people, symbols to idolise, envy or bootlick. They have acquired political power through their control of social media or through the sheer magnitude of their wealth; they wield outsized influence with complete impunity, and we just shrug our shoulders, and go back to whatever it was we were doing before. Probably doomscrolling.

This stuff is well known if you’ve read any news at all over the last however many years, but the solution, unless you’re Luigi Mangioni, isn’t immediately clear. It’s one thing to joke about whipping the guillotines out, but the reality is that they are the new aristocracy, so high above us, and who’s going to lug a guillotine up into the mountains of Utah, anyway?

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.

(파과)

dir: Min Kyu-dong

2025

I’ve never pretended to be an expert on South Korean culture or South Korean movies, but I can definitively say that they sometimes make great films.

This isn’t one of them, but it’s important to remind yourself of that fact.

This flick is okay, though. It is essentially a South Korean take on John Wick, just with a woman of the same age in the role, and instead of killing thousands of people she only kills a hundred or so. It must be a modesty thing.

The strongest element in this flick’s favour is that it delivers exactly what the title promises: There is an older South Korean woman in this flick, and she is often shown holding a variety of knives, with which she usually kills people. Or she at least harms them greatly and gets them to reconsider the life choices that brought them to this moment in time.

On the other hand you could argue that instead of being an example of truth in advertising, that it’s actually false advertising because, like in a lot of South Korean action flicks, sure they start off with knives, but then by the end there’s guns akimbo, hammers and anything else that comes to hand involved.

There isn’t anything particularly unusual or novel about this flick, but it has something of a more melodramatic premise than these kinds of flicks usually require. I mean the aforementioned Keanu Reeves franchise used the murder of the protagonist’s dog as the starting point of a 4 movie killing spree that killed most of the (assassin) population of three continents. This flick, again about a stone cold killer, really leans in to the (fairly generic) premise of that stone cold killer having at least one thing or one person or one group of people that they really care about to justify all the wickedness that is to come.

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: Fleur Fortuné

2025

At this stage, I think it has become redundant to say things like “this new sci fi film is set in a dystopian future”, because when I look at the sci fi flicks I’ve watched in the last couple of years, the last one that wasn’t set in a bleak, dystopian future was… no idea. Maybe After Yang, that was the least bleak. None of them foretell a future that isn’t grim, where there aren’t vast wastelands or forbidden zones everywhere, where the world isn’t scarred by climate change related disasters. They’re not all Mad Max, but they’re not far off.

So, yes, in this latest film that I watched, called The Assessment, terrible things have happened to the world, but a select few live in some domed place somehow exempt from the ravages of anthropomorphic climate change. These select few live elongated lives, but are forbidden from procreating naturally (the same drug that gives them longevity prevents them from being fertile). In order to have a child, ex-vitro being the term, they have to apply to the regime in control, and be assessed by an assessor, hence the title.

Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) are the couple that want a baby, and Virginia (Alicia Vikander) is the assessor. She will make their lives a living hell for the next 7 days, under the guise of testing their suitability as parents.

She’s from The Government, you see, so everything she does must be for the greater good, surely?

The couple live near the ocean, in an incredibly expensive looking place. I guess not all apocalypses are equal. They seem to be doing okay, but I guess they’re bored, so they think a child will save their relationship.

Reference is often made to the “Old World”, as a terrible place where people are sent as a punishment or because they’re poor. Mia’s mother, we are told over and over, was exiled to the Old World to punish her presumably for telling the truth about something, like what a terrible regime is in power ruling over their lives with petty, persistent drudgery.

Probably fascist, probably voted for by a majority of voters, who knows. They probably campaigned on “We’ll make your lives a living hell, but at least we hate refugees more” and won in a landslide.

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: Steven Soderbergh

2025

Soderbergh delivers another consistently solid flick. He’s delivered so many of them. He’s like the Stephen King of movies. Most of them aren’t masterpieces by any stretch, but they’re better than merely passable, way better than average, and really well put together.

This is another competent genre exercise, but it’s not as prosaic as I’m making it sound. It’s ruthlessly mechanical, but there’s a quick footed charm to the whole thing. It’s the kind of flick about spies and agents that people say they prefer compared to the other ones that are filled with gratuitous violence and car chases and things blowing up.

But then the same people, upon starting to watch something like this, would invariably find it boring because of the lack of explosions, shootings and general action-y bullshit. That stuff is there for a reason. It angries up the blood and keeps you from dozing off.

The action here, for the most part, is conversational. The spy tradecraft is mostly but not exclusively of the low tech variety – of people working things out with their brains (in retrospect) and duelling not with guns or knives but with words.

And yet there’s the high tech spy shit as well, satellites and evil computer viruses and every form of surveillance possible in the panopticon wonderland that is London. It’s just that it’s not the majority of the flick.

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!”

dir: Christopher Landon

2025

There’s something a bit brave about making a flick dependent on some fad app that is already forgotten by the time audiences get to watch the flick. If there is an app that insists, that allows random fuckheads to force you to download it in order to receive messages which disappear after you look at them, I don’t know about it, but I am aware that people can “drop” messages or photos to each other using a panoply of apps, but it’s already wronger than wrong.

And I don’t care. This story is entirely dependent on these apps to maintain tension or a sense of being surveilled at all times, but it’s bullshit, and it doesn’t matter in the end. The point of the premise is that it’s a thriller premise, and a woman at one location, being a fancy restaurant, is being watched constantly by someone in the restaurant, who forces her to do things because, back at home, her son and sister are being menaced by some jerk with a gun, which she can also see via her phone.

Depending on who you believe, almost everyone in America is either being menaced with a gun in their homes or is doing the menacing themselves at any given moment. The strength or failure of such a premise is entirely dependent on whether we think it’s believable for someone to be trapped in such a way, and to go along with what her antagonists want, until she finds a heroic solution to all her problems. If you buy it, then this flick becomes an exciting thrill ride as a young widow chooses to either go along with or reject the dictates of what the unknown psycho pestering her through her phone is forcing her to do.

I can’t think of many flicks like this, but I’m sure there are a bunch of them. There are plenty of flicks where someone forces the protagonist to do whatever under threat of something worse happening, but I can’t think of too many where someone is restricted to one location and observed from every possible angle which the protagonist can’t figure out for most of the plot.

dir: Christian Zübert

2025

So now there’s another Die Hard variant, only this time it’s “German Die Hard but in the American Consulate so they speak German and English half the time, and WITH A WOMAN!”, plus she doesn’t really need to be in the building the whole time, but she chooses to, because they’ve kidnapped HER SON!

As Die Hard variants, this is ok. I don’t know why it’s made with an English-speaking (only) audience in mind, with people never speaking too much Deutsche before reverting to English at any given time, even if they’re not people known for their crisp pronunciation of the great Germanic language. I mean, Dougray Scott pretending to be an American who’s fluent in German?

His nationality is in his name, somewhat. Now, he’s playing mid-level bureaucrat middle aged villains with bad moustaches. It’s not Movember, Dougray, no excuses for that monstrosity.

The star of the show is a German actor I’m not going to pretend I’ve seen in anything else, being Jeanne Goursaud, playing Sara Wulf, an ex-special forces type person who is our main character.

Unlike a lot of films lately starring bald ex-wrestlers or bald Stathams, Sara can fuck people up royally with some okay choreography, but she often loses fights too, which is somewhat more realistic. I mean, special forces is special forces, but they’re more likely to kill a whole village through poisoning their water supply or torture civilians just for practice rather than actually have to dominate a consulate full of Marines.

dir: Osgood Perkins

2025

The Monkey is probably one of the best Stephen King adaptations ever. At least, “best of” for this year. There have been so many, probably more than Dickens, adaptations of his work, that probably even he can’t keep track of them all.

But this feels like a perfect melding of King’s gruesome ideas and this director’s various obsessions, into a flick that is often hard to watch in just how gory it gets, but manages to be relentlessly entertaining throughout.

And it’s funny. It’s the darkest humour you can imagine, but damn if it didn’t have me chortling like a foolish thing.

The monkey in question is styled like the stereotypical organ grinder’s monkey (an image / ‘meme’ from a million years ago) with the vest and such, but with drumsticks and drums instead of cymbals. Disney apparently own the copyright on the monkey with the cymbals somehow, due to the Pixar Toy Story movies, because of course they do.

It is large. Its eyes are huge, and terrifying on their own. But the monkey’s grin, those teeth, well it’s the stuff of nightmares. It is not alive but it’s also not dead. If you dismember it, it somehow gets put back together. If you burn it, it reappears, somehow. You can’t give it away, but you also can’t live it. You think you successfully buried it somewhere, and then it’s back in your cupboard behind the Hungry Hungry Hippos and the Connect 4.

It’s especially gratifying for me because, unlike a lot of strange, possibly funny-smelling people, I did not care at all for this director’s previous outing, which was called Longlegs, and I absolutely adore an older film of his called I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House. I’m not saying this is his best film, but this feels certainly like the time where all the elements have come together to deliver a coherent, nasty delight.

(آیه های زمینی
Ayeh haye zamini)

dirs.: Ali Asgari & Alireza Khatami

2023

Iranian films. I review a fair few Iranian films. It’s probably still the tiniest fraction of flicks that are made and exported each year, because the ones I hear about are the ones that tour the festival circuit and occasionally win prizes or enough good reviews for them to come to my scattered attention.

To put it in the laziest, most cultural appropriation kind of way, I love their culture, I love their cinema history, and I abhor their theocratic and above all cruel totalitarian regime. Unlike other flicks that got international acclaim in the last couple of years, like Seed of the Sacred Fig, this flick doesn’t directly say the monstrous regime turns families against each other and tries to choke the life out of all, not just the womenfolk.

It takes a more oblique path, expressing a sometimes comical exasperation and disbelief rather than horror, but it’s powerful nonetheless. In nine vignettes it shows how the regime turns anyone in the slightest position of authority into a petty tyrant against their fellow citizens, getting them to inflict bureaucratic horrors even if they’re not part of the superstructure of control that is imposed upon all life in Tehran and beyond.

dir: Alex Scharfman

2025

Stupid premises can still make for interesting / amusing movies. I’m not going to pretend this is a particularly great film, but it did amuse me. It kept me amused, and it didn’t overstay its welcome, which is important.

It is important not because my time is valuable – it is because stupid premises don’t justify running times over 90 minutes, and passing that they make you want to chew your own leg off in order to escape a cinema you voluntarily walked into.

Paul Rudd is Paul Rudd, and while a lot of people might love him he in and of himself is not really enough of a drawcard to pull an audience into a theatre, if that audience includes me. I don’t know if Jenna Ortega has a massive fanbase based on Wednesday, but she would presumably be the main attraction here, unless it’s the unicorns people desperately want to see.

Or maybe I’m underestimating how many Richard E. Grant fans there are out there, absolute Withnail and I diehards.

The overall premise is less “what if unicorns were real?” and more so “rich people are awful, and do awful things to anything and anyone and have a supportive world that justifies all their worst self-serving actions”. I can even see a world in which they get to spin this flick with them as the “good guys” – “Commie pinkos try to tear down a hard working family that happens to run a pharmaceutical company, when all they want to do is cure cancer and maximise shareholder value”.

The real villain in this is Paul Rudd, as a shitty father and even worse as a handmaiden to rich fucks who seek at all times to remind the lower orders that they are lower and thus expendable, and must be expended. The rich fucks are monsters in the way that we expect them to be, within expected parameters.

But the unicorns, plural? They’re straight out of our worst nightmares.

dir: Flying Lotus

2025

This looks like a sci fi flick, but it’s very much a horror flick, just in case the pretty colours and funky music lured you in.

Someone wakes up in some kind of facility, with lots of dead bodies around, and she doesn’t remember what happened, who she is, or what anything is.

What would screenwriters do without amnesia as a plot device? Would they have to actually write cool screenplays that didn’t resort to crutches and timeworn tropes?

That sounds more derisive than I intend it to be. This might be somewhat familiar, and crib certain elements from the Alien films, and probably Carpenter’s The Thing, and elsewhere as well, but it’s well done for what it is. It’s not, to my eye, just an extended film clip from someone who makes music and film clips. There are a number of (predictable) twists, but that doesn’t at all detract from the back half of the flick when shit gets impossibly graphic.

This is a very violent, very gory film, in service of a plot where for the longest time, we, like Riya (Eiza Gonzalez) don’t really get what’s happening. But then we do, and oh gods it’s so awful.

There’s this facility on some planet where humans were hoping they could either relocate the humans from a dying Earth, or find some kind of advancement / technology that could help them back home. The facility would look suspiciously like a New Zealand door factory were it not for the really sexy looking underground bar-like lighting. I didn’t come up with this line, so I can’t take credit for it, but another reviewer referred to it as being the most bisexual lighting ever committed to film. I don’t entirely get what it means but I get what they mean. There are scenes with Aaron Paul’s character of Brion where half his face is bathed in blue gel light, and the other half in red, and you think “wow, this director / cinematographer’s game is really on point”. Or at least that they watched a lot of Dario Argento’s early flicks.

It feels a bit unusual for this kind of flick to feel so carefully crafted. There are times when I regret the level of craft put into some of the horrific imagery and designs. I regret seeing some of that stuff, because it is cosmic horror, the worst kind, and it is now engraved upon my poor brain.

dir: Gareth Evans

2025

It’s… it’s not good.

Why, yes, I did have sky high expectations based on this chap’s previous work. So if anyone’s at fault, it’s me. Certainly not the director or the star of this misbegotten amalgamation of every action film from the last forty years.

I can see what he was going for, I honestly can. Before I even read a word of an interview where Evans specifically says he wanted to capture the feel and the energy of John Woo flicks from the late 80s early 90s (more A Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled rather than his Hollywood flicks), I could tell.

But that’s not what we’ve got. What we’ve got is Tom Hardy playing a corrupt cop who mumbles his way through a flick constructed with city scenes that are, honest to goodness, computer generated rather than filmed on a city street. Like, I could have recorded that same kind of second unit filler footage on my phone, and it would have looked better, and no-one would be able to tell it was downtown Melbourne if I got the angle right.

This film tries to transpire in a generic American city, and yet it was made in Wales. In fucking Wales! Why aren’t there Welsh people talking about being The Only Gay in the Village or saying elaborate pronunciations of Welsh names like Myfanwy or Owain Glyndwr out loud?

(Une langue universelle
آواز بوقلمون
Āvāz-e bughalamun)

dir: Matthew Rankin

2025

If you haven’t noticed yet, I live for movies. I love the very existence of movies, and have done so for many decades. But even I realise the futility of such a thing.

The movies will never love me back. You give your heart and soul to something, but what it gives you is something completely one-sided. All my adulation, all my longing is for naught…

But that’s okay. I will love cinema not one bit less ever just because it doesn’t love me back.

How else would I get to watch something as niche as this flick? A Canadian movie with the deliberate aesthetics and visual references to Iranian films of yesteryear, set in an alternate reality Winnipeg where Canada’s two main languages are Farsi and French?

That’s… so niche it’s created its own niche. Its own genre. A pigeonhole for one.

And then there’s that title, implying that maybe Farsi should be the universal language, or Quebecois, take yer pick, but I suspect in fact the title is talking more about friendship and kindness.

To say this is a weird film is both an understatement and false advertising, because while it’s weird, it’s more in the “gently odd” category rather than the outlandish or surreal. The easiest, laziest go-to I can think of is something like what Jared Hess first conjured way back when with Napoleon Dynamite, decades before making that Minecraft movie but without the catchphrases or quirks. This is not an outwardly quirky flick, nor is it a dark Lynchian sexual / violent odyssey into Winnipeg’s dank underbelly.

dir: Jaume Collet-Serra

2025

I wanted to like this. I wanted to watch a version of this kind of movie and enjoy it.

You can’t always get what you want, though, and regardless of the Rolling Stones song that’s been lying to us for so many decades, sometimes you don’t get what you need either.

This was never going to be it. Not with this director.

The central question of the movie, being who is the woman in the yard in the movie called The Woman In the Yard, is a question that is answered too many times to diminishing returns each time. It should not be like that. Who the woman in the yard is, should be irrelevant, if mainly she’s meant to inspire unease and evoke terror.

Is this an update of The Woman in Black, who just happens to be Black, terrorising a Black family? I wish I could say it was. That story has an explanation of what the people being terrorised are going through, as in the reason for it. It tells those people, obsessed with a ‘logical’ explanation for something happening that’s supernatural, and they fool themselves into thinking there’s a way out of their predicament. A rational solution to an irrational problem. They often do this in horror films.

The beauty of it is that better horror flicks only use it as another rug beneath the audience’s feet to pull out from under them when the time is right. Vengeful, enraged supernatural entities don’t always care about when you’ve dotted your Is and crossed your Ts; they want to torment people for a need for vengeance that cannot be sated. Beyond Death, beyond all reason, beyond our desperate need for rationality.

This isn’t one of the better horror flicks, so the ‘explanation’ ends up being, in the immortal words of an ancient Saturday Night Live sketch, a floor wax AND a dessert topping! And yet in writing that I feel a bit churlish, especially in terms of how seriously it seems to treat at least one part of the story.

Grief, in case you haven’t experienced it yet, and it’s unlikely that you haven’t, dear reader, is vast, as you know. Guilt is terrible, regret is awful, lots of feelings are harrowing, but grief is… so infinite does it seem that it can feel like flailing in an endless ocean with no floor and no land on the horizon.

It’s the thing with feathers and claws, yes, and plenty more clunky metaphors.

dir: David Ayer

2025

Whoa whoa whoa whoa he’s A Working (Class) Man.

I’m the first to admit that when you buy a ticket to a Jason Statham movie, to act surprised that it’s like every other Jason Statham movie is a bit disingenuous, a bit deliberately naïve.

“Sure, the other twenty Statham movies I’ve seen him in have him playing an isolated stoic loner with super killing skills who comes out of retirement / obscurity to save / protect / kidnap a girl / get revenge, but then I watched the latest one and it was exactly the same as all the others!”

It’d be like watching any American movie and being amazed when guns appear.

Guns? I didn’t sign up for this!

Instead of saying this is like every other Jason Statham movie ever made, I’m just going to say it is almost indistinguishable from his last film, being The Beekeeper, except there are no bee puns at all. At All. And no Jeremy Ironses doing appalling American accents.

Speaking of which, Statham thankfully also doesn’t do an American accent, preferring to play a character that is a Brit and who served loyally for 20 years as a Royal Marines commando, killing the empire’s enemies around the globe with style, grace and presumably crumpets and cucumber sandwiches on tap.

Through this heroic work, as the gobsmackingly awful opening credit animations inform us, he bonded with his American military equivalents, a bond that has not faded yet though his service has ended, and he carries that work ethic through to his current type of employment, being hard labour.

Now, he is the working man of the title, in that he works in construction, which is fine.

I mean, if you’re a weirdo like me you could spend a whole chunk of time wondering why they went with this angle, and what it “means” to posit that a character working nobly with his hands (he’s a site manager / foreman, he doesn’t need to actually use his hands in theory). That kind of sociological pondering would amuse me perhaps the more I indulged in it, but it wouldn’t really give much of an indication as to whether this flick warrants a viewing, or whether it is terrible trash with no redeeming qualities. To point out that someone involved in this is fetishising the idea of a working class man without having any desire to depict a working class man in any way means “working man” is a costume, like “fireman”, “sexy nurse” or “stripper cop”, with no further depth to it.

dirs.: Dan Berk & Robert Olsen

2025

What a premise! Guy who doesn’t feel pain getting caught up in crime shenanigans, somehow wins the day but is tortured, burned, shot, stabbed, mutilated and humiliated for our entertainment for an hour and fifty long, long minutes.

It’s a comedy, but in some ways it’s body horror, and really it’s not that different from other crime / action related flicks where the guy endures heaps of bodily abuse in order to get revenge / get the bad guys / avenge his dog, except instead of being brutalised but stoically persisting, like a John Wick / any Statham movie, the completely untrained main guy cops the abuse, doesn’t feel anything, but keeps going anyway.

Of course the premise is bullshit. A person with what Nathan Caine – He Feels No Pain! is most likely to succumb to is hyperthermia, or a terrible infection, or any number of undetected injuries. They don’t usually become reluctant action heroes. The condition doesn’t somehow grant immunity from severing muscle tissue, tendons or what should result in catastrophic blood loss.

But let’s not let logic slow us down now – we’re meant to be having fun!

At least, that is if your definition of fun is watching bits of some guy sheer off of his body like you’re watching a Troma film like Toxic Avenger or Street Trash from yesteryear.

I do have to admit that I’m a pretty squeamish person so that this kind of hook for a flick is no hook for me to hang anything from. I hate watching scenes of people gleefully, sadistically tormenting someone even if it is cartoonish. And the difference here is conceptual, rather than anything else. There’s a scene where one of the bad guys is doing what he thinks would cause maximum pain for the lead, by ripping his fingernails out with pliers, and while Nathan only pretends that it’s painful, as opposed to any actor in an equivalent scene pretending that it’s agony for real, doesn’t it amount to the same thing?

dir: Bong Joon-Ho

2025

Multiple Robert Pattinsons = barely enough for some people. For me, one is too many depending on the film. He is an actor that I still can’t wrap my head around, but I have seen him put in some decent performances in the “right” movies, and some performances that make me grind my teeth to dust.

I think he’s okay in this flick, but that’s the thing when you get to play multiple versions of a character – law of averages eventually means you’ll get at least one of them right.

Set slightly in the future, as in, about twenty-five years from now, our planet is a climate wasteland ruled by corporate churches and billionaire morons. Having thoroughly fucked up this planet, the plan is to set up a colony on a planet they call Niflheim, after the Norse name for a frozen realm of ice, storms and dead souls. Clearly a paradise for all to behold.

In order to make the colonisation easier, late stage capitalism, even more ethically challenged than the version we currently have, allows for the creations of clones of people who die in perilous circumstances, ie. on a frozen planet. How best to test if there are lethal pathogens in the atmosphere, or whether radiation levels are fatal, or any other number of probable origins of death in all its glory? Well, you send out Mickey (Robert Pattinson), or do human testing on him in the lab, and through his multiple deaths you make scientific progress!

Out of a printer that looks like an MRI pops out another Mickey, with most of his memories intact, ready to be killed again in the service of this expedition lead by an even dumber and more terrible version of Trump, here called Marshall, and here played by Mark Ruffalo. Now Mark Ruffalo’s hatred of the orange emperor is well known and celebrated, but seeing and hearing it in this flick is not pleasant, not funny, and ultimately not helpful in telling this story. Hating a villain is hardly anything new in terms of storytelling, but playing this buffoon this way makes it harder to take this flick seriously, if at all.

Mickey17 is the latest in a long line of Mickeys, and he’s something of whiny loser, as was the original. I am not sure if he’s ‘simple’, or just not particularly bright, but he does a fuckload of narration in that voice, and it’s a pretty annoying voice. It kinda sounds like Woody Allen on helium, and that, paired with Pattinson’s young Brando-like dumb/handsome looks, makes him sound like he could drop the “I coulda been a contender if it hadn't been for my allergies” speech at a moment’s notice.

dir: Martin Campbell

2025

Like I said, I sometimes like watching trash…

I have seen the same movie two nights in a row! Not literally the same movie, but literally the same genre, being Die Hard but with some permutation. Yesterday it was Die Hard but with an African-American woman as President saving the day. Today it was Die Hard but it’s the window cleaner who saves the day.

And what a day to save… Eco terrorists take over the building where an energy company, long known to be amongst the nicest and most ecologically sympathetic of companies, is lauding itself as a beacon of profitability and sustainability.

The company has been, you know, polluting the earth, murdering activists, convincing the British government to pass legislation that outlaws peaceful protest, but it’s the terrorists who are the bad guys? What’s happened to our collective moral compass?

Of course I am joking. When their leader takes off his mask, I gasped, because Clive Owen was playing the leader of the environmental activists. I gasped because I was surprised to see him. All those years ago he played a similar role (ish, in that he was the leader of a group of bank robbers in Spike Lee’s Inside Man, who was ethical and sensitive and all that crap), and it felt like something of an in joke.

His plan, and that of most of the people with him, seems to be to record the high ups at the company confessing to their many and varied crimes on camera, and then publish it on the internet, as if that would make a lick of fucking difference or even impact on their share prices at all.

At All. If anything it would make their stocks skyrocket. “CEO admits they kill activists and whistleblowers”. Things being as they currently are in the States they’d probably make him the head of the Treasury, as long as he promises to bludgeon people to death with tariffs.

dir: Patricia Riggen

2025

In the immortal words of Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, I (occasionally) love trash. I don’t love all trash, because even a grouch has to be picky sometimes, which means I am incapable of watching something like Married at First Sight without whacking myself in the face with a hammer.

But when it comes to movies, especially towards the end of the week, and especially when I’ve been drinking (which only happens at the end of the week), I don’t always feel like a 3 ½ epic about a Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust trying to build buildings in America and dodge the rapist tendencies of a billionaire played by Guy Pearce, or a long slow film about a depressed textile worker in a 17th century factory who finds relief in pricking herself with needles as an important and entirely valid commentary on social inequity and the benefits and drawbacks of alternative medicines.

No. Sometimes I just want to watch Viola Davis fuck people up.

Sure, there’s plenty of movies available where people come to a violent end at the hands of a righteous avenger, but then I heard that a new flick was coming out with Davis as the lead playing an American President pretty much in a Die Hard scenario, saving the day, making quips, giving the baddies what for.

On that count, on paper, I cannot say that this flick doesn’t deliver on exactly those counts. Viola Davis does play the American president at the annual G20 conference, where all the biggest and hottest economies getting together to figure out how they’re going to fuck over the rest of the world, this time in Cape Town South Africa.

She was formerly in the army, so her ability and willingness to kill people is backed up by story detail. It is also, since she’s referred to as a war hero, her ticket to political success in an America that this film imagines isn’t dominated by racist and sexist morons who would rather vote for an adjudicated rapist and 36 count felon whose every business has failed except for the one propping up White Supremacy. In other words, this fantasy realm is nothing like our actual world.

dir: Mimi Cave

2025

I like weird. I live for weird.

Weird alone is not enough. If a film is going to trade in weird, it has to go so, so far, in order to justify itself if it doesn’t make any earthly sense.

David Lynch earned that honour, that distinction. Mimi Cave, as much as I loved her previous film Fresh, about a woman trying to survive at the hands of a cannibal, that goodwill doesn’t carry over enough for me to enjoy this flick as much, if at all.

Holland is set in Holland, which is a town in the state of Michigan, in the United States (States united by their supplication to a cankerous enthroned poltroon). Not Holland the country in Europe, nor New Holland, the name they tried on for Australia which never took (even though colonisation caught on in a big way).

Holland, Michigan is a real place that has a lot of the imagery and accoutrements that people stereotypically associate with Holland the country, as if everyone in Holland wanders around wearing peasant garb and clogs, tilting at windmills and chewing on tulips. It’s a weird sounding place, but then every place in America looks weird when looked at from the outside: they’re all fucking nuts, many of whom gladly voted for one of the worst cretins in human history.

dir: Titus Kaphar

2024

This is a tough watch. Families, huh?

They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they don’t mean to but they do.

I’m not going to quote the rest of the Philip Larkin poem, but it’s eternally relevant, yeah, in terms of this being the verse.

I had lovely parents, don’t get me wrong. I was very lucky in that, or should I say I was clearly very entitled to be born to such wonderful people (I somehow earned that honour). And yet I can watch a film like this, about a monster parent trying to reconcile with their adult child, and feel utterly torn in twain.

Your sympathies may be pulled, must be, in the direction of Tarrell (the great André Holland), a man who works as an artist, painting big canvasses, trying to be a loving father to his young son Jermaine and supportive partner to his wife Aisha (Andra Day) who is an artist herself. His art conceals, but not for very long, a tension between a childhood he yearns for and the one he actually had. In the present, and in parallel to Tarrell’s struggles, we see a seemingly homeless guy do his strange homeless things before copping a severe beating. He hobbles to someone who might help him, who does, only until his wife finds out and starts yelling at the visitor as to where all her rings are at. Obviously bad blood there. Best not to ask.

The man is funnelled towards the basement of a hard man who imposes strictures upon this chap, which if they aren’t obeyed, will see him homeless again.

But this man, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), is transformed. He is clean for the first time in a long time, washed and shaven. As such it’s time for him to demand forgiveness from those he has wronged.

(誤判)

dir: Donnie Yen

2025

Two of my favourite tv shows from the 1990s were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The West Wing. The longstanding joke viewers of both shows used to bandy about was “one of these shows is a fantasy about a group of competent, funny people who fight evil on a regular basis and win, and the other show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

No one really thought The West Wing was an actually accurate representation of life in the Oval Office, especially now that the current occupant is a feces-flinging orangutan, and we finally realise that if the worst people in the world get together, with the worst of intentions, the worst people will vote for them, with hilarity ensuing for the rest of the world, democracy be damned.

But at least it adhered to some real world aesthetics and physics. This here film The Prosecutor is possibly one of the least believable legal dramas I’ve ever seen in my life, and I say that as someone who knows nothing about the law in Hong Kong and how it is practiced.

The funniest, absolute funniest part is that this is allegedly based on a true story.

Ponder if you will this set up. There is a policeman called Fok (Donnie Yen), and he and his fellow cops take down an entire gang in an abandoned, I dunno, factory or something. They take them all the way down, as in, the opening gun battle is spectacular and vicious, even resorting to first person perspective like it’s a shooter. However, even though the boss of the gang is arrested at the scene, and nearly killed a cop (who Fok saved at the last minute, resulting in him being in traction), he gets off because of top notch lawyering.

Fok becomes so despondent at this result that he quits the Hong Kong police force, goes to uni to study law, and then 8 years later becomes a junior prosecutor, because he’s certain he could do better.

പ്രഭയായ് നിനച്ചതെല്ലാം
Prabhayay Ninachathellam)
dir: Payal Kapadia

2024

All We Imagine as Light is something of an enigma, at least for me. I thought I knew where it was coming from, and numerous times I was proven wrong.

I had it slotted into the types of films from India that are more about social realism than the flamboyant spectacle we’re more stereotypically used to. I have seen enough older Indian films to also know about the ones where the horribleness of the upper castes and the eternally put-upon lower castes are paraded around for our amusement / horror for three hours a pop.

But this is not that. This isn’t about the unfairness of the system, or institutional abuses or cartoonish selfishness. This is just about people trying to get by, in a society that is pretty constraining upon women (unlike all those other ones).

The three women the movie mostly focusses on are Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha) and Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam). Prabha and Anu are nurses, while Parvathy works as a cook in the same hospital all three work in. Before we even meet these women, there are night time scenes of market stalls being set up pre-dawn, or general city scenes and packed train platforms in Mumbai, as voice recordings, sounding like legit vox pops, talk about how desirable or how difficult it is having moved from the country to the city for work.

Later on in the film one of these voices says something along the lines of “they say this city is the City of Dreams, but I think it’s more a city of illusions. You have to believe the illusion, or else you go mad.”

dir: Scott Derrickson

2025

Just as I was complaining about the kinds of films made specifically or exclusively for streaming services, I watched another movie made solely for a streaming service, being the Apple one. Compared to the other ones, almost no-one watches AppleTV+, I don’t know if you’ve noticed.

If they do, they let you know about it. If they have endlessly bored you with how much they cried watching Ted Lasso or how much they love season 2 of Severance, then they are of the happy few who bother to subscribe to it.

To the rest of the world it might as well be some obscure streaming site from Uzbekistan. This film, though, seems to have gotten some attention, reasons for which escape me, really. Neither Miles Teller nor Anja Taylor-Joy are box office draws, even if people might recognise them. The title is fairly non-illuminating nor is it arresting. A gorge. A valley. A dingly, dingly dell.

No, but this is about THE Gorge, which must have something interesting about it to justify a whole film about it, don’t you think?

Even if none of the elements are that novel, or original, the first hour of this flick, at least for me, were quite enjoyable. Ludicrous as the premise is, once I accepted it, I was able to go along with it and enjoy the interactions of the two main characters as they somehow meet cute and get to know each other before everything turns to shit.

Just like in real life.

dir: Russo Brothers

2025

90s nostalgia doesn’t really do much for me. This flick would seem like it’s aiming for 90s nostalgia, in the way that Stranger Things owes much of its existence and probable popularity to 80s nostalgia, and in both cases it just comes across as lazy consumerist grasping.

I guess I remember the 90s well enough to not need to revisit it through some distorted lens. Yes, I get the references, yes I remember a lot of the music and the films. No, I don’t much care for American advertising. And I still don’t think I’ve ever eaten a Twinkie, so I don’t care about them either.

I don’t think the book this was based on by Simon Stålenhag was centred around 90s nostalgia or any deep love of American consumerism. If anything, it’s main intention was to deliver gloomy, somewhat macabre graphics of an American world falling apart because of a slow-rolling apocalypse due to technology. Giant robots, gloomy landscapes, and a population absorbed into a virtual reality environment that leaves their bodies as husks strewn across a landscape traversed by a teenaged girl and a robot.

Humanity is in decline, a hive mind has emerged, and its intentions are less than benevolent. Drones from a war litter the dying landscape. It’s like The Road, but slightly more techie and with less cannibals.

The Russos take that premise and tries to deliver a Steven Spielberg film, without having the grace to craft anything interesting around that desire. They were somehow given the baffling amount of money of $320 million earth dollars to make content for their streamer of choice, being Netflix. All that money, all the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted, and this is what they made.