by Sam Sewell-Peterson

This isn’t your grandad’s Mummy movie, it’s Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. Despite the bizarre possessive clarifier in the title (studio-mandated, one suspects, to differentiate from the Universal franchise) this is by quite some distance the scariest, gnarliest and most morbidly funny outing for the undead Egyptian monster yet.

Praise be to Ra, finally we have a Mummy film that’s not about a resurrected priest looking for his reincarnated love! The life of an American family living in Cairo is thrown into turmoil on the day their young daughter goes missing without a trace. Eight years later, Katie (Natalie Grace) is found—disfigured, malnourished and alternately catatonic and convulsive—but still alive. Back at their home in Albuquerque, the Cannon family soon come to realise that something else came back from the Sahara Desert with their daughter which will painfully tear their lives apart.

This film takes as much influence from The Exorcist as other Mummy movies, and is if anything this is much more of a possession movie than one that revolves around a shambling bandaged creature. There’s also a touch of a horror procedural like The Silence of the Lambs about some of it. After an opening act set in Egypt that introduces us both to the main characters and the sinister collective with a basalt pyramid in their basement, the action shifts Stateside for a story about a family under assault from an external threat brought unwittingly into their own home.

Giving your audience time to get to know the loving, if a bit dysfunctional, family that are about to be put through a living hell pays off in spades. Dad Charlie (Jack Reynor) is a TV news reporter on the brink of a career breakthrough, mum Larissa (Laia Costa) is an overworked nurse and children, Katie and Seb (Emily Mitchell and Dean Allen Williams), bicker and try to get their parents to take their side in arguments like most siblings do. This is long as horror movies go, but you’d never want to sacrifice any of the slow burn or the smaller moments that establish the emotional dynamic between the family members before their trauma that makes everyone feel more human.

The ensemble all impress, but of particular note are Reynor and Costa as emotionally ravaged parents, and in her extremely physically demanding, courageous feature debut, Natalie Grace as the increasingly monstrous Katie. Grace is a complete revelation here, and the sheer amount she can convey through heavy prosthetics and the tight physical control she demonstrates as she flips from playing a sick teenager to a malignant entity wearing the skin of one is terrifyingly effective. The toenail clipping scene especially will live on in infamy for years to come.

This is some Lucio Fulci-level squelchy gore executed with practical in-camera effects. This version of the Mummy gruesomely has their bandages covered in incantations beneath its flayed skin, and the way each elaborate skin, toenail or tooth-based body horror set-piece builds and pays off really works.

Incredibly, this is the first Hollywood Mummy movie to feature Egyptian actors in major roles, and May Calamawy (Moon Knight) and May Elghety are both excellent and share the key role of bringing some real authenticity to this story. Calamawy is Detective Zaki, a Cairo cop tasked with re-opening the investigation into Katie’s disappearance and getting to the bottom of what was done to this American girl and why, while Elghety plays a small but crucial role in the second half of the film. It’s about time we started to see this kind of shift on screen, considering the orientalist, xenophobic-to-outright racist depictions of Egyptian people (usually played by inappropriately cast actors) and culture in most of these films.

This is a fascinating take on the Mummy as a monster. It’s easy to forget that the version we know, like the Wolfman, is a movie invention rather than being drawn from literature or mythology. Yes, it’s all inspired by the curse that supposedly fell on Howard Carter, the Earl of Carnarvon and everyone else who opened Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922, but the idea of a resurrected Egyptian on a revenge mission is pure Hollywood. Cronin combines this with demonic possession and just a dash of Irish changeling folklore to come up with something truly disturbing, if not always 100% clear on which horror movie monster rules it is following.

As much as this largely justifies its extended runtime, the sheer intensity and onslaught of the graphic imagery in the final act and disappointing increased reliance on CG embellishment does grind you down to a pile of sand by the end credits. This is a horror film with real ambition that should be applauded, but it can feel over-stuffed and a little unfocussed as it goes on. The last scene seems to have been tacked on as an afterthought as well, either as a disappointingly conventional final “gotcha” or an unnecessary sequel hook.

Following on from Evil Dead Rise, Lee Cronin’s unique take on The Mummy further solidifies his place as a genre filmmaker to watch, a director who wears his horror influences on his sleeve but commits to reworking familiar material into new, visceral and shocking forms. This may prove hugely divisive as it isn’t a movie for any viewer with a weak stomach or someone expecting traditional Mummy horror iconography. But the combination of committed performances, upsetting emotional rawness and a well-executed series of excessive, but very scary sequences makes this one of the biggest horror surprises of the year so far.

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by Sam Sewell-Peterson

Could anyone have predicted just how prescient that quote would become? A film about one of the most obscene acts of criminality and corruption in 20th century American politics still makes waves five decades later because so much of the same is happening all over again right now. The difference this time is it is happening largely unchallenged by the press.

All the President’s Men begins and ends on a close-up of a typewriter urgently moving to get the news out there, before transitioning to newsreel footage. June 17, 1972 and Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) begin to investigate a strange break-in at the Watergate hotel and gradually unearth a vast conspiracy leading all the way to the Nixon White House. Their monumental task soon becomes proving that acts of illegal surveillance, extortion and misappropriation of election funds were done on the direct order of the US Executive Branch and finding a source willing to testify to that on the record.

There’s a reason this is so often held up as the film about journalism to beat. Director Alan J. Pakula’s third part of his loose “Paranoia Trilogy” following Klute and The Parallax View has you peer over the shoulder of Woodward and Bernstein as they navigate the spider web of connections that eventually form a complete picture of the crimes that have been committed at the highest level of the US Government.

Aside from the two stars in the lead roles playing off each other so naturally and spontaneously, the cast is filled out with naturalistic performers with real, lived-in faces, believably tired and dishevelled journalists and political hangers-on working the busiest beat in the US. It’s this verisimilitude, this tactility and firm rooting in time and place that makes everything feel so believable even as the story’s era fades in the rear-view mirror.

When we’re not alongside our protagonists in the bullpen, digging through a mountain of paper or pounding pavements to interview key sources, we see Washington D.C. from a God’s-eye view, cars and tiny, insignificant people milling around indifferently in a city getting on with life and oblivious of their leaders committing blatant crimes behind closed doors.

All the President’s Men has to be in contention for the best-looking film of the 1970s. Cinematographer Gordon Willis also shot the other main contender, The Godfather. The shadows in this film are, appropriately, the blackest of blacks. From the opening Watergate break-in sequence to the clandestine meetings with all-knowing anonymous informant Deep Throat in the underground car park, secrets and deception permeate the cinematography and atmosphere of the film at large. The newspaper office is brightly lit and captured in deep focus to best capture the teeming warren of reporters in search of the truth, unearthing the next big story. Anything more intimate and character-focussed takes place in the near-dark, half-obscured seemingly to give people the confidence to tell a reporter all they know while fighting against their overriding instinct for self-preservation.

The film was rightly nominated for multiple Oscars but missed out on most of the major ones (the more obviously crowd-pleasing Rocky coming out on top) apart from Goldman’s adapted screenplay and Jason Robards’ Best Supporting Actor. As Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, with his feet permanently on his desk as he dresses down his reporters and passive-aggressively pushes them to do their jobs and not disgrace their profession or him, Robards very nearly steals the show. The casual but portentous way he delivers the line “Nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country” probably won him his award.

Redford has talked about how he encouraged the real Woodward and Bernstein to put themselves front-and-centre in the book about their investigation, to make themselves the intrepid heroes rather than cogs in the machine perhaps with the inevitable film adaptation and leading role in mind. Redford found appealing “the idea of the fact that these guys were doing this hard work from the lowest rung of the professional ladder…and that their work would lead to the take-down of the highest office in the land”. The film Woodward goes for the big picture stuff and the film Bernstein drills into the specifics: macro and micro focus. As Hoffman says during his research he found that “Woodward was the didactic one…and Carl was the opposite…he made leaps”. Woodward is quite willing to methodically ring every number in the phone book, Bernstein engages with his sources on a personal level when he’s convinced there’s still a key piece of information to be found buried under a mass of obscurity.

Carl Bernstein said that 20 years ago, and it’s never been more true than today. All the President’s Men has retained its seismic impact as one of the all-time great political thriller films because despite the era of dirty politics it rails against, the same misuse of power and disregard for the electorate that give leaders said same power comes around time and time again in a different form every generation. The media landscape has also changed beyond recognition and the idea of an objective truth has been warped to the extent that powerful public figures can get away with abuses of their position with impunity. Pakula’s film uses cinematic language expertly to tell a compelling against-the-odds true story but it is the unjust world and people utterly without morals who are prepared to do anything to retain their position of control over the masses that ensures it will always feel sickeningly relevant. It was a totemic film of the 1970s and will likely retain this status until we learn our lessons from the past and hold liars, grifters and mobsters in government to account.

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The Thing From Another World (1951)

Director: Christian Nyby

Screenwriters: Charles Lederer, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, John W. Campbell Jr (based on the novella by)

Starring: Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, Robert Cornthwaite, Dewey Martin, Robert Nichols, James Arness

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by Kieran Judge

Years before John Carpenter went on to make his iconic, influential, and revered take on the story by John W. Campbell Jr. in 1982, it was the team of producer Howard Hawks and director Christopher Nyby who took a stab at the classic story of the alien in the ice. With a loose premise taken from Campbell’s Who Goes There? novella, but with a number of important changes to its alien menace, a team of scientists near Anchorage, Alaska, investigate the site of a meteor crash, only to discover a spaceship and alien life form now buried in the ice. After taking the alien back to their base, it thaws out and goes on a rampage against the base in search of blood.

After the 1940s, and especially following in the wake of the Second World War, horror changed. No longer were the creeping castles and malevolent moors of Universal Studios’ 1930s chillers the sites of creepiness, which were made into endless sequels before being parodied in the monster rallies and Abbott And Costello movies of the 40s. The mechanised horror and atomic terror of the Second World War just a few years prior, shifted the focus of what was truly terrifying. It wasn’t some beast from a grave; now it was the realm of science. In post-war years, the Golden Age of Science Fiction is really kicking off. The first Foundation novel by Isaac Asimov, collecting the short stories published over the previous decade, was released in 1951, the year The Thing from Another World was released. Arthur C. Clarke published his first novel, Against the Fall of Night, in the same year, and Robert A. Heinlein started publishing his first novels in 1946. The true atomic terror monster, Godzilla, made his appearance in 1954. Them! was released in the same year, with a tale of mutated giant ants. The Body Snatchers would be published in 1955. It Came From Outer Space is in 1953, and War of the Worlds and Earth vs The Flying Saucers get unveiled in 1953 and 56 respectively. The Roswell incident occurred only in 1947. Science, and science-fiction, are the threats here.

It is therefore not surprising that Campbell’s 1938 story of a monstrous entity mimicking people known as normal and harmless by their peers for many years, when Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini are on the fascism scene, would see a slight change for an alien creature now consisting of vegetable matter, the realm of science gone wild. Animals, plants, the natural world, attack with a vengeance, with an insatiable thirst for blood which updates the old Slavic vampire legends for the modern age. We move to the North Pole, Alaska, close to the USSR borders, and much closer than Antarctica. We dress one of the misguided scientists, Dr Carrington (with a name very close to Carrion), up in a felt hat closer to Russian dress than the others. This is the context of the film, steeped in the global politics and generic changes of the age, at the cusp of the McCarthy trials in only a few years time, when the old imitation narratives that The Thing from Another World eschews from the novel would return in force in the Cold War sci-fi horror movies that this film is part of, but doesn’t lean as heavily into as others would in future years.

Thankfully you don’t have to know any of this context, because even without it, the film is 90 minutes of good, chilly, classic horror fun. Cleverly building up the tension, everything goes step by step, from rumours in the north, to Geiger counters playing up, to the slow reveal of the size of the ship. The monster itself, played by James Arness, is kept hidden from the viewer for over half the runtime, only appearing sporadically for maximum impact, a huge, Frankensteinian mountain of a man with the only intent to destroy with great paws, impervious to bullet fire. It is built up with description at first, in a similar vein to Hannibal Lecter’s reveal in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Although the changing of the monster’s physiognomy downplays a lot of the paranoia elements that would be brought back into play in John Carpenter’s 1982 version (with a title sequence very much in homage to this film’s shining titles), there’s still moments of squabbling and arguing in a taut, uninviting environment which keep the viewer as tense as it can manage.

Most of the performances are good, with Robert Cornthwaite’s turn as the obsessive Dr Carrington eventually earning him a spot in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1993. With archetypal mad-scientist lines such as ‘“There are no enemies in science, only phenomenon to study”’ and ‘“Knowledge is more important than life!”’, he prefigures Ian Holm’s android Ash from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) by nearly thirty years. Elements involving a Geiger counter slowly creeping up as the creature advances down a dark hallway, a faraway corporation demanding the lifeform’s survival despite the danger to life, and Carrington’s assertion that ‘“No emotions, superior in every way,”’ are lifted almost directly from this film and put straight into Dan O’Bannon’s script. Considering O’Bannon lifted elements from almost every other science-fiction film going, this isn’t surprising. This additionally raises the point that the sound design, as the monster isn’t on screen for much of the time, has to do 90% of the heavy lifting, so it’s a damn good thing that lift it certainly does.

What is surprising is how nice the film looks, considering a lower budget, although maybe this is Hawks’s good producing. The direction, aside from an edit here or there, is well done, Nyby copying Hawks’ style as someone he looked up to (and who, depending on who told the tale, either directed almost all of it, some of it, or none of it) to give everything a smooth, polished look, and make this one of the cleaner-looking genre films of the era. The cinematography is well done, and the effects, including some explosions, fire-stunts for The Thing, and lightning in the finale, still hold up today. Nothing beats good-old fashioned actual, on-set fire when you need it.

The romance between Hendry and Nicholson (Tobey and Sheridan respectively) isn’t needed at all, but it’s an American B-movie in the 1950s: you’ve got to have a girl to be flirted over and make the odd sarcastic remark in a team of men. She does come up with some good ideas as the film goes on, but the rest of the time she’s a secretary reduced to pouring coffee. The ending of ‘“Watch the skies, everywhere!”’ is, whilst iconic, incredibly cheesy, addressed almost directly to the viewer. The characterisation of The Thing is also fairly sloppy, for all the good work the film does the rest of the time to build it up. With seeing the characters playing chess when arriving at the base, and the opening scene with several characters playing poker, one would think this game-playing element would transfer over, as Mac’s chess game against the computer translates to his battle of wits against The Thing in John Carpenter’s film. Yet despite it being intelligent enough to cut off the heating and electricity to the research base, it also decides simply to bust down doors whilst everyone is looking at it, advance slowly and clumsily, and, when on screen, just act as a big, dumb, stompy guy. Despite apparently being ‘“…a lot smarter than we give it credit for,”’ much like Ghostface in Scream, it is a ninja until seen; when it then it becomes the clumsiest thing in the universe.

All in all, this doesn’t stop the film from being a fun time with some good performances and a nice build-up. It suffers from still being stuck in B-movie mentality, but science-fiction and horror have yet to be given serious A-movie treatment, and at least for audiences today, nobody is expecting cinematic perfection. If you want a good 90 minutes with a bucket of popcorn on a chilly evening, simply put on The Thing from Another World and remember to watch the screens, everywhere.

by Sam Sewell-Peterson

Project Hail Mary, the ambitious new epic sci-fi from directing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, is not only spectacular to look at, but is funnier than most comedies and more heart-wrenching than most awards-worthy dramas. It’s only the end of March, but the bar has well and truly been set for 2026 genre cinema.

In a future where the Sun is mysteriously dying and NASA sends out a mission to find a solution, science teacher Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up in deep space alone and without most of his memories. After gradually and painfully piecing together who he is and what he has been tasked to do, Grace encounters an alien life form on its own mission and strikes up an unlikely bond.

If you were being reductive, you might call this Interstellar for the average Joe on the street. It doesn’t confront the same number of existential philosophical concepts as Christopher Nolan’s film, or if it does approach the same neighbourhood of ideas then it does it in a much more digestible manner. That’s not a criticism, merely an observation. Author Andy Weir, and by extension his adapter Drew Godard, are great at explaining huge concepts in astrophysics in a way that doesn’t feel overwhelming, yet aren’t dumbed down for the cheap seats. Grace as a character has his area of expertise, but is unequivocally not an astronaut and has to problem-solve his way out of several situations, with much of the essential information in a given scene relying very much on context clues.

Gosling is such an underrated physical comedian. From the first moment Ryland Grace wakes from his induced coma and immediately proceeds to cough up gunk and tries to escape by flopping around on the floor like a bearded worm, all while the ship’s computer tries to run its standardised cognition and physical health tests, you know he’s the right actor for the job. Much like Mark Watney as played by Matt Damon in The Martian, Grace is an everyman with a very focussed set of skills, who will nonetheless have to improvise under unimaginable pressures in order to survive.

Most of the film is a two-hander which follows Grace and his alien counterpart working each other out and teaming up to save their respective worlds from destruction, but in flashbacks to the time before, Sandra Hüller and Lionel Boyce both make their mark as Grace’s recruiter and security escort respectively, both having to play clinical and pragmatic but still human.

It would have been great to see what Lord and Miller’s version of Solo would have ended up being. Judging by their well-judged mix of breathtaking visuals, eye-popping interstellar action and a very wry sense of humour, we missed out on a treat. It would have at least been memorable rather than an indistinct re-hash.

Neal Scanlan of ILM is a genius of creature design, a real Stan Winston of the contemporary era. Whatever you might say about the Star Wars sequel trilogy, the return to reliance on practical animatronic creature effects under Scanlan was a stylistic highlight. Hail Mary uses the even more archaic, but pleasingly tactile techniques of puppetry and in-camera manipulation of props in bringing the alien character Rocky to life. James Ortiz voiced the character on set and his oddball performance is preserved in the film, while the team of performance artists moving the faceless rock-crab creature around are digitally erased and some elements of the movement enhanced with CGI. You have all the expected visual pizzazz elsewhere in bringing starfields and alien realms to life, but a good portion of this is confined to Grace and Rockey’s respective ships and very much relies on practical, in-camera execution.

The extent to which Grace, and, by extension humanity, is intellectually and technologically outclassed in their quest to stop the Sun from being snuffed out is made clear in the his first contact with an extraterrestrial presence. In order to explain their understanding of another life form, the Eridians send intricate metal models of a star map, a humanoid figure, and his inelegant transport. Grace responds with his own cruder model made out of instant ramen.

For all its big ideas and existential stakes, you’re here for a classic story of a boy (or man-boy) and his alien friend. The scenes of two lifeforms so physically different but with shared values and even a childish sense of humour, are the undeniable highlight here. The point where Rocky escapes his atmospheric confines to come and visit, and eventually co-habitate with Grace in an angular hamster ball, is wonderful. It’s the weirdest but most satisfying Odd Couple scenario we’ve seen in years.

The emotional scenes hit hard, and would have worked just with Gosling’s natural emotional ernestness paired with an artificial, but still really there, on-screen partner. But add in a rich and emotive score from Lord and Miller’s long creative collaborator Daniel Pemberton (the Spider-Verse movies) and you’re on to something truly special.

A moment in the final act where Grace has “a moment” when confronted with the infinite power of the universe is among the most achingly beautiful images in all of sci-fi. Then you have the human’s rock monster BFF disconcertingly feeding through his craggy behind. This is undoubtedly worth seeing in IMAX if you can, though the sheer magnitude of visual information you’re asked to process at once in addition to often on-the-move cinematograpy (from Dune’s Greig Fraser) can at times be overwhelming. This is also a film that could comfortably end several scenes earlier than it actually does, though you don’t begrudge giving these characters more time together.

It’s been far too long since our last Lord and Miller feature film. Few filmmakers get the tonal balance just right every time, delivering genre thrills, massive stakes and all the required beats of a satisfying story, whilst always letting the inherent absurdity and contradictions of being a human trying to do their best shine through. Project Hail Mary is a sci-fi adventure classic in the making, and the new poster child for unconventional platonic pairings across this and every universe. We’ll all be saying “fist my bump” to our nearest and dearest in short order, I guarantee it.

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by Sam Sewell-Peterson

Maggie Gyllehaal’s second film as director is a strange one, to say the least. The Bride! is a Bonnie and Clyde style outlaw couple on the run chase movie, an absurdist musical, and a feminist satire all at once. Not all its parts fit together, but you’ll have a hard time forgetting it.

Frankenstein’s Creature, now calling himself Frank (Christian Bale) emerges after a century in hiding in 1930s Chicago looking for a mad scientist to make him a mate. Said scientist, Dr. Euphronious (Annette Being) duly obliges and performs a miracle of revitalisation on the body of Ida (Jessie Buckley), a headstrong call girl mixed up with the mob, and after several violent incidents, Frank and the woman now calling herself the Bride go on the run across the USA pursued by cops and gangsters.

One of the stranger decisions Gyllenhaal makes in this builds on an idea lifted, appropriately, from James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. In that film, Mary Shelley makes an appearance in a framing device played by the same actress who would play the Bride at the climax. Gyllenhaal also has a Mary Shelley played by her Bride actress, but here she’s a frenzied spirit dissatisfied with her eventual fate who sporadically possesses Ida (Buckley switching from a Midwestern American twang to sounding like the English boarding school headmistress from Hell to symbolise this).

What’s weird here is that in this film’s universe, Mary Shelley still wrote Frankenstein, but a real Baron Frankenstein apparently also created his Creature (since he’s there to ask for his mate to be made), so was she documenting real events or did her fictional characters somehow gain life? Given the film’s porous sense of reality, either could be true, but it’s a shame to not interrogate this any further in the text itself.

Buckley is having another incredible year following her acclaimed turn in Hamnet, and here she attacks her role with relish, playing her character with physical and vocal wild abandon. The other performances are more of an acquired taste, a varying degree of scenery-chewing (especially from Bale), or being limited to a single character trait (Peter Sarsgaard eats all the time, Penélope Cruz is a woman in a man’s world). Too often everyone’s choice come down to, when in doubt, shout.

Frank is shown to be a big fan of cinema, chiefly represented by romantic films starring song and dance heartthrob Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). He frequently imagines himself and his bride appearing in the middle of the films he loves so much, the heightened world of the silver screen. Good visual metaphor for what a character is experiencing on an emotional level: it works. However, when other characters are also shown to be able to see the couple’s shared hallucinations, you’re just left confused.

You expect the references to Universal Horror and popular studio movies of the era, but riffs on Young Frankenstein and music videos are a little more perplexing. There’s more than one dance number that comes out of nowhere, which tonally jars with the gothic romance and more violent horror elements, especially when it’s left unclear how much of it is actually happening for real in the film’s world. It’s a sense of continuity, of a natural flow and momentum, that this work is really missing, leaving it as a series of disconnected, bizarre vignettes of the monster couple committing crimes and having a seriously unhealthy relationship.

Gyllenhaal has surrounded herself with a team of extremely talented collaborators doing among their best work. With her makeup and prosthetics, Nadia Stacey creates instantly iconic pop art takes on classic monsters, physically transforming Buckley and Bale while leaving them fully able to emote. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is both jazzy and moody, and the vivid colours and exaggerated shapes of Sandy Powell’s costumes perfectly match an off-kilter reality.

You have to applaud the ambition, and the boldness of some of the storytelling choices in The Bride!, but the final product ends up feeling like it’s rebelling against its creator’s abundance of ideas. Frankenstein in prohibition-era Chicago, Mary Shelley possessing someone to finish her story, a female monster’s plight inspiring a “good for her” feminist revolution; any of these would have been fascinating to see play out on their own. Trying to do all of these at once leaves the viewer perplexed and frustrated, even if they’re rarely not beguiled as well.

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Killer fungus is really having a moment in horror. You can primarily blame The Last of Us, but now everyone who spends any time reading about weird stuff online knows how terrifying cordyceps, the real-world fungus that burrows into ants and forces them to climb and spread their spores can be.

In Cold Storage, two young security guards (Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery) at a storage facility find themselves fighting for their lives against an invasive fungal organism which has escaped the decommissioned military facility buried deep below them. Their only hope is a retired, heavily armed biological weapons expert (Liam Neeson) travelling across the country to address the situation with extreme prejudice.

Does David Koepp ever sleep? The Jurassic Park script writer penned the screenplays of three films released in 2025, two (that we know about) in 2026 and two novels over the last half decade including Cold Storage, which he self-adapts here.

This feels very Michael Crichton (complimentary) and there’s not an ounce of fat on it. We stick with a few likeable characters going through a really bad day at work, and get to know them as they become more open with each other, all the while steadily more extreme sci-fi horror imagery keeps you gasping and grimacing. Jonny Campbell has previously proven himself with some very good directing on TV (Doctor Who, In the Flesh) and judging by his work here he could be a very reliable genre filmmaker going forward.

Admittedly, Liam Neeson doesn’t exactly have to stretch himself to play another guy with a particular set of skills, though there is some refreshing acknowledgment of his advancing age here. Lesley Manville and Vanessa Redgrave playing supporting roles in a movie like this also takes some getting used to, but then another fungus-swarmed creature explodes in a shower of viscera and you stop worrying about anything.

Cold Storage may not shoot for the stars, but enjoyable performances, consistent tension and the right balance between humour and horror make this a great time at the movies.

It’s not every day you see someone being violently dispatched with a conch. Sights such as this, and more await you in this straight-to-Prime Video Caribbean actioner.

If you were being overly reductive you might call The Bluff “girl boss Pirates of the Caribbean” but it’s more accurately like a Jason Statham action movie set in the 18th century. Former infamous pirate Ercell’s (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) island paradise life with her family is obliterated by the kidnap of her husband and the arrival of former shipmates under the command of the bloodthirsty Captain Connor (Karl Urban) in search of his treasure. Now the woman until recently known as “Bloody Mary” must take the fight to the invading buccaneers.

This isn’t really bad, but it’s not quite good either. For all the pleasing flourishes of ultraviolence, the plot feels second-hand and pretty much all the characters have been ported over wholesale from some much better movies.

You probably have to mention how monumentally stupid some stylistic decisions in this are. The bad guys basically being a SEAL sniper team running around 1700s Caribbean islands is only one step removed from the Taron Egerton Robin Hood opening with a Call of Duty cutscene but with bows and arrows.

The costumes and locations look good, and Chopra Jonas throws herself fully into the visceral fight scenes, but there’s an off-putting CG sheen to too much of this, and it’s at least 20 minutes too long for what should be a lean, mean modern take on a pirate B-movie.

Park your brain at the door and you might get a certain amount of enjoyment out of The Bluff on a base level, but it’s certainly not going to stay with you and probably isn’t the sign of another cycle of swashbuckling films on the horizon.

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Scream 7 (2026)

Director: Kevin Williamson

Screenwriters: Kevin Williamson, Guy Busick, James Vanderbilt (story by)

Starring: Neve Campbell, Isabel May, Courteney Cox, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, McKenna Grace, Asa Germann, Joel McHale, Matthew Lillard, Anna Camp, Celeste O’Connor, Sam Rechner, Roger L. Jackson

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by Kieran Judge

Well, it has finally come around, and boy has it been a journey to get here. First, the directors of the previous two films, Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, stepped away from the project, the third in a planned trilogy. Then Melissa Barrera was fired from the film by Paramount due to posting online comments condemning the Israeli government’s actions in Palestine, and afterward Jenna Ortega swiftly followed, though she claimed that the filming of this movie was always going to clash with filming Wednesday season 2. When they’re your two new franchise stars, that’s not a good look. We thought we were going to get Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day, Freaky, Drop) to helm the film, but after a few months, when Ortega and Barrera were ousted, that didn’t happen. So they went and got Kevin Williamson, the original writer of the first four films, to direct this one. Neve Campbell was obviously paid the right amount of money to come back. Courteney Cox, as always, signed on. And after that, well, this is the result.

What’s Ghostface up to this time? Well, he’s going to burn down the Macher house, the scene of the finales for both the 1996 original and the 2022 film. Then he’s going to go after Sidney personally, who has been trying to hide herself away with her 17-year-old daughter, Tatum, and Mark (not Patrick Dempsey’s Mark from Scream 3, a different one). And he will gut and slash and take out Tatum’s friends, with all the fingers pointing this way and the other as to who it could be this time, with everything, as always, leading back to Sidney.

It’s a shame to say that all of this sounds much more interesting than the final product ends up being. In all the retooling of the script, the changes and abandoned plans and retraces, something has been lost in the vision of the final product. The heart of the Scream franchise has always been that it’s a slasher franchise for slasher fans. It was built upon the conventions, and the playful use and subversion of those conventions with an understanding that it is itself a construction. It itself was a movie nerd, never letting a single opportunity pass by to get in a reference or an in-joke to slasher movies of the past. All the killers construct their acts as if they are film directors. Here, that core element is lacking, traded in for treating itself as the wellspring of references and tropes from which to draw. The only movies that are worth talking about for Scream 7 are those in its own franchise, and how great and amazing and important they are.

This is all theoretically fine. Even as early as the second film, where the killer was taking out victims with the same names as the original, being called out in-film as a copycat, the franchise has fed carnivorously upon the first film’s instantaneous iconic status. Yet despite this it always managed to use that in combination with other factors. Here it is the entire focus. It is all it has to use, a deliberate choice; everything else is getting in the way, and whilst Sidney wasn’t in the events of New York in Scream VI, we have to have a film in Scream 7 which as zoomed in on her in order to balance out the universe. So much has it put its blinkers on to try and avoid looking anywhere else that Sam and Tara (Barrera and Ortega respectively) aren’t even mentioned, despite Mindy and Chad (Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding) turning up halfway through the film to help out alongside Gale. Fire them, yes, but you can’t write them out completely when they’ve been fundamental to the past events. Even Sidney was explained as being out of New York in the previous film. Hayden Panettiere is also absent as Kirby Reed, after being introduced triumphantly in the last film. We lost Sidney for a movie, now we have to have twice as much of her and move everyone else out of the way as a result.

This correction feels far too much like an overcorrection, no matter how much you love Neve Campbell and Sidney Prescott. The focus is so much on Sidney and Tatum’s relationship and the trauma of the previous films that, whilst this is important, we lose any semblance of caring for the other characters. The main cast of individuals who could all be the killer? You’ll remember one, maybe two of them. They’re there because a Scream film requires them to be, not because they’re going to be used in any interesting way. As a result of a lack of focus on our new potential killers, the eventual reveal of who is behind the mask this time comes as far too much of a disappointment because we never got to know anyone. Nothing feels important, nothing feels like it’s cared about. It’s a character study which sets off a whodunnit slasher, rather than, as the tried-and-tested formula has proven, a whodunnit slasher which allows room for character studies.

A few moments will please fans. A shocking death with a bar tap will get a dark-humoured cinema crowd in hysterics. There’s a few fairly nice lines, especially between Mindy and Chad. There’s even a very cute reference to a scare in the original Halloween film, with Ghostface being revealed in a dark space behind a character just as Michael Myers was revealed behind Laurie at the top of the stairs. But you can’t get away from it feeling like a generic thriller with a Scream sheen that’s been AI-ed over the top, and as much as franchises need to try out different things, if it doesn’t feel like Scream, if it doesn’t feel like it has the nerdy heart of the previous six films, you’ve got a serious problem.

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by Sam Sewell-Peterson

This week Trainspotting, Danny Boyle and John Hodge’s iconic adaptation of the indelible Irvine Welsh novel celebrates its 30th anniversary. A lot has happened for the creatives involved in the project, as well as wider British society and culture in the years since its release. Boyle won an Oscar. Deprived areas of Edinburgh were regenerated. Ewan McGregor joined A Galaxy Far Far Away. Cocaine overtook heroin as the Class A drug of choice in Scotland. A sequel picked up the story of these characters 20 years later and jettisoned most of the novel it was based on. Even now though, you find yourself drawn back to the seismic impact of this tale of the incredible highs and extreme lows of heroin addicts in Scotland’s capital city.

In late 1980s Edinburgh, Renton (Ewan McGregor) is a young man endeavouring to overcome his addiction to heroin. But try as he might to keep the poison out of his veins, the lure of having one last hit as he socialises with his friends brings him back under the influence of his cruel and alluring narcotic mistress. This world of addiction fuelled by petty crime is all he knows, and his time to choose between true life and a vicious cycle of euphoric highs and crushing lows is about to come crashing into focus.

Danny Boyle’s regular screenwriter John Hodge (Shallow Grave, Trance) respectfully but not slavishly adapts Irvine Welsh’s story, lifting key scenes (“The Worst Toilet in Scotland”) and the most memorable dialogue (“I don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers.”) completely intact, while being unafraid to streamline things elsewhere for the screen, either by combining characters and omitting extraneous scenes. The result never loses momentum or energy and accurately captures the youthful counter-culture energy of Welsh’s work, perhaps only missing a little of the detailed and authentic richness of the novel.

The casting could hardly be better, from McGregor’s misguided would-be-moral compass Renton to Ewen Bremner’s affable moron Spud and Robert Carlyle’s volcanic, terrier-like hard man Begbie. Renton has arguably had a few of his rough edges removed by casting the charming McGregor in the role, and you might miss such entertaining subplots like Renton’s benefit fraud scheme from the novel, but Bremner feels like Spud lurched straight from page to screen, and it was a stroke of genius to cast the diminutive, wiry Carlyle as a character envisioned as tall and broad; somehow Franco feels so much more chilling and unpredictable this way. Every cast member, from Jonny Lee Miller’s love-to-hate wiseguy Sick Boy, to Kevin McKidd’s lovelorn, self-righteous Tommy, and Kelly Macdonald as the wise-before-her-time Diane, gets their moment to shine, and all portray humanity warts and all.

Boyle, cinematographer Brian Tufano and editor Masahiro Hirakubo recognise the powerful potential for surrealism in a story where its anti-heroes are so often operating on another plane of reality while happily under the influence. Renton’s dive into an ocean through a bottomless toilet to retrieve his recently ejected opium suppositories, and his sink into the oblivion of a manky shag carpet (accompanied by the deliciously ironic “Perfect Day” on the soundtrack) following an overdose from a bad batch, represent two of his very lowest points, all juxtaposed with beautiful and bizarre imagery. The filmmakers don’t avoid the upsetting realities of drug addiction, how it can bring immense harm to the most vulnerable members of society (particularly in an infamous moment straight out of a horror movie), and they certainly don’t glamorise it as some commentators so wrongly claimed.

Trainspotting is like a time capsule of pop culture and societal concerns in the late 80s/early 90s, with the old guard of underground rock music (Iggy Pop, Lou Reed) giving way to electronica and rave culture (Leftfield, Underworld); unemployment, drug addiction and AIDS mere headlines for many and inescapable everyday life for others. It certainly looks like a film made in the period it was, but the energy, self-awareness and sheer style on show keeps it from feeling dated. The grimy bedsit sets and the clever use of Glasgow as a cheaper stand-in for Edinburgh helps Trainspotting overcome its budgetary limitations, keeping our focus on the characters and steadfastly avoiding a glamorous tourist’s view of “Embra” (the kind that poor American Fringe-goer came looking for before our heroes follow him into a bathroom to ruin his day).

Much like with Welsh’s novel, the film is coarsely witty and has some of the best scatological humour around (between “The Worst Toilet” and Spud’s catastrophic “accident” at breakfast, you wonder why any other movie ever bothered with poo gags), whilst regularly alternating between being emotionally crushing and unexpectedly uplifting as Renton and co bounce between choosing heroin and choosing life. It’s left pretty ambiguous at the close of this film what the characters will make of the rest of their time on Earth, but you’re inclined to be optimistic for Renton at least as he leaves his old life and friends behind to begin a new one, reprising his opening monologue almost word-for-word, but with a decidedly different tone in his voice. Two decades later, T2 Trainspotting would prove a worthy follow-up and an equally joyous and devastating catch-up with these characters, but there’s no beating the original. It really is one of a kind.

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The Strangers: Chapter 3 (2026)

Director: Renny Harlin

Screenwriters: Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland, Bryan Bertino (based on characters by)

Starring: Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Ema Horvath, Richard Brake, Rache. Shenton, Ella Bruccoleri

by Kieran Judge

Stupid. Ignorant. Annoying. Irritating. Bad. Bewildering. Abhorrent. Moronic. Dull. Derivative. Shameful. Awful. Crass. Crude, Disrespectful. Dire. Excremental. Terrible. Grating. Horrible. Lame. Lousy. Mercifully-short. Numbing. Painful. Queasy. Undeserving. Villainous. Weak. Wanting. Wasteful. Yellow. Ailing. Bland. Empty. Shocking. Depressing. Substandard. Poor. Inferior. Unsatisfying. Inadequate. Unacceptable. Deficient. Unpleasant. Disagreeable. Insulting. Unwelcome. Dreadful. Nasty. Abominable. Amateurish. Atrocious. Disgraceful. Worthless. Miserable. Lousy. Abysmal. Woeful. Worthless. Pitiful. Brainless. Mindless. Foolish. Dense. Vapid. Vacuous. Imbecilic. Braindead. Inept. Deplorable. Despicable. Dishonourable. Reprehensible. Shabby. Odious. Loathsome. Meaningless.

A tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying far, far less than nothing.

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by Sam Sewell-Peterson

Castaway meets Misery is a good elevator pitch, but you likely won’t guess exactly where the latest Sam Raimi film - his long-awaited return to original filmmaking after a 17 year hiatus - is going. Send Help, at least up until its final act, is among the least horror-inflected Raimi films to date, but it does come loaded with his usual sense of mischief, his love of really putting his actors through the wringer, and his childlike amusement at geysers of bodily fluids.

What if you were stranded on a desert island with the worst boss in the world? What if you were stranded on a desert island with an employee who is better at everything than you? After being passed over for promotion despite her dedication and hard work, Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) travels with her young boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) and his executive team to Thailand to prove herself. But when their plane crashes on a remote tropical island leaving Linda and Bradley as the sole survivors, the tables turn and he has to rely on her for his life.

It’s nice to have a survival film that starts with the importance of a sensible pair of shoes and builds out from there. Linda is literally introduced to us shoes first as she steps out of the elevator. You very well might learn something useful from the survival strategies Linda demonstrates in this film, not to mention how to turn an inhospitable - though beautifully filmed, thanks to D.O.P. Bill Pope - environment against someone who really needs to be taught a lesson.

Raimi doesn’t really do subtlety, but over the past 25 years he has used his films to champion the common man and push everyday struggles to extremes in order to comment on everyday financial and professional struggles. Think of Peter Parker/Spider-Man trying to balance superhero duties with both studying and part-time work to pay rent on a crappy apartment, or Drag Me to Hell’s Christine putting her hard-fought career advancement ahead of her morals and getting cursed for her trouble. Linda does everything she can to fit in with office culture and goes above and beyond, hoping she will finally be rewarded with a position befitting her talents, but because she’s a bit awkward, a fan of eating tuna sandwiches in an open-plan workspace, and definitely not “in” with the right people, she never stands a chance.

You think Raimi has already hit his quota of splatter early on when both his stars get face-fulls of boar blood (following an action scene that repurposes the floaty Evil Dead vision as the POV of a very angry wild piggy) but he then proceeds to jet torrents of horrible stuff at them at every opportunity and when you least expect it, to hilarious effect.

Raimi uses whip pans creatively; not in the usual way they are employed in horror films, but rather to show the passage of time. Bradley initially arrogantly dismisses Linda when he regains consciousness and so to teach him a lesson she leaves him to his own devices for an entire day, each whip pan edit to his increasingly delirious and sunburnt face mounting tension and becoming more darkly comic.

Rachel McAdams has one of the warmest megawatt smiles in Hollywood, so it’s rather disconcerting to learn just how little more she needs to push it to become a deranged grin. It’s a powerhouse performance that can change from endearing to terrifying at a moment’s notice, Linda evolving (or devolving) from submissive and nice to dominant and ruthless. She pairs off effortlessly with O’Brien who plays the bro-y toxic male so well, but brings a real deep-rooted vulnerability to Bradley as time progresses.

Linda’s bubbly personality and positive attitude, not to mention her extensive knowledge and skills cribbed from obsessively watching every season of Survivor, makes her the ideal person to be trapped on a desert island with. Despite this, she gets under Bradley’s skin as everything he is not, a constant reminder he has lost all of his authority and power in this world where he can no longer leverage his usual position of privilege or fail upwards by virtue of his sex.

The ebb and flow of the film’s central dynamic keeps you on your toes and there are certainly some curve balls thrown here and there. You might question whether Linda and Bradley both looking photogenic enough for a shampoo advert as they fight for their lives works or not. This might have also worked better as a tighter, leaner thriller as it starts to run out of steam in the final few scenes, though at the same time this allows Raimi to indulge in his usual cheer-worthy gnarly excesses, so it’s hard to begrudge him that.

Send Help is a twisted, funny desert island thriller that gives its two leads an idyllic playground to explore toxic work relationships and power imbalances with some visceral, peek-through-your-fingers bodily trauma. Sam Raimi isn’t just a horror director, but he’ll always bring a certain amount the genre he’s best known for to whatever project he brings to fruition, and when the end result is this entertaining and timely, you have to say bring on the next one.

by Sam Sewell-Peterson

From the sounds of it, Amazon made a mistake planning their early 2026 movie slate, giving the Chris Pratt sci-fi Mercy a big screen release and dumping this Jason Mamoa/Dave Bautista action-comedy straight to Prime. Because, for all its derivativeness, the punching, shooting, driving and exploding of The Wrecking Crew is a lot of fun.

Estranged half-brothers Johnny (Jason Mamoa) and James (Dave Bautista) try to put aside their differences to investigate the murder of their P.I. dad in Hawaii but soon stumble across a much more far-reaching organised crime plot.

It’s never a good sign when the main characters have to state their whole deal out loud, feeling the need to remind the audience every spare moment that one’s a cop, the other a navy SEAL, one’s a tearaway, the other a wife guy. You also get a sneaking suspicion that both of them will have to use their special skills in the finale.

Pairing two man mountains and have them play half brothers is obvious, but it works. Mamoa being funny and Bautista being a good actor helps as well. Johnny telling a Yukuza thug his dragon tattoo “Looks like an angry horsey” sets the tone here, as does James’ disbelieving expression at most of his brother’s actions. They are supported by a likeable Jacob Batalon and an under-utilised Morena Baccarin, while Claes Bang plays a generic hipster baddie.

Who’d have thought that midway through the 2020s, using a cheese grater in a weapon would have become a violent cliché? Tenet, Evil Dead Rise, Boy Kills World and now this all put the toast-lovers’ essential to sickening use, but even when The Wrecking Crew lacks originality in its action scenes (up to and including a blatant Oldboy corridor fight) it’s all very slickly executed. It’s a shame that some unconvincing CG embellishment here and there sticks out, but not to the extent it ruins your good time.

It’s good to see a big action movie given some authenticity through representation of Hawaiian culture, but they do invite comparisons to sanitised Disney efforts by casting both Moana’s dad (Temuera Morrison) and the live action Lilo (Maia Kealoha).

The Wrecking Crew is undemanding but enjoyable, doesn’t do a whole lot different from run-of-the-mill action but delivers spectacle aplenty with style and momentum.

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“Once, long, long ago…Or not long, long ago?” This is how Shingo Yamashita’s animated film endearingly announces itself before sweeping you off on an adventure powered by sheer sonic and visual excess.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya! as you might expect from that title, isn’t the standard re-telling of the Japanese folk story The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (for a more faithful take, see Isao Takahata’s 2013 Studio Ghibli animation The Tale of the Princess Kaguya). This could scarcely be more modern an interpretation.

In a near-future Japan dominated by virtual reality technology, hard-working student and keen gamer Iroha (Anna Nagase) discovers a baby magically transported to our world, before she rapidly ages into Kaguya (Yūko Natsuyoshi) who proceeds to turn Iroha’s life upside down while forming an unbreakable bond with her.

The moon princess here is born not out of a bamboo shoot but a telephone pole glowing “like a gaming PC”. She becomes a teenager in a day, before being seduced by the delights of the human world. More traditional tellings of the tale usually see Kaguya being presented to the Japanese nobility and seeking a suitor, whereas here when she’s not eating her out of house and home she becomes part of Iroha’s virtual reality world and helps her triumph in e-sports and connect with her favourite A.I. singer.

The film doesn’t underplay the bizarreness of a futuristic take on this story, blurring magic, mythology and technology while acknowledging the moon princess’s origins must be kept a secret because “Poor Kaguya might get dissected!”. It also unabashedly leans into the weirder (for Western audiences) aspects of Japanese culture, from fox and cat girl avatars, to J-Idols and boundary-pushing para-relationships.

Kaguya! also combines several different styles of Japanese animation to best fit the tone in any given scene, becoming more realistic for the domestic scenes, more cartoony for the comic asides, using glossy CGI for the fight scenes in addition to incorporating elements of Manga artwork, social media engagement notifications and video game iconography elsewhere to form a rich visual collage.

While it’s not quite as accessible as KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix perhaps hoping to repeat that animated behemoth’s success through purchasing a similar sounding story from another pop culture-dominating East Asian territory) there is some stated DNA here with both films overflowing with visual energy and powered by a soundtrack of pop bangers.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya! tells the same moving tale as has been told for a millennia while making it feel more relevant than ever with current cultural touchstones, ever-increasing technological dominance and swapping fantasy trappings for sci-fi. It’s a breathless, exhausting but dazzling and deliriously entertaining work of animation that might just leave you with a tear in your eye and a (catchy) song in your heart.

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by Sam Sewell-Peterson

Five years ago, Chloé Zhao became the second woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director. The decidedly less successful, if still wildly ambitious Marvel film Eternals followed, but just about everybody was crying out for Zhao to return to her more modest indie roots. She is now in the awards conversation once more, having already succeeded at the Golden Globes, with the heartbreaking Shakespearean drama Hamnet.

Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel (which O’Farrell adapts for the screen with Zhao), we follow Agnes and William Shakespeare (Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal) who after quickly falling in love and having three children encounter relationship hurdles as Will tries to break through as a playwright in London and increasingly neglects his young family in Stratford. But when they suffer the worst tragedy imaginable - the untimely death of their son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) at the age of 11 - Agnes and Will process their grief very differently.

Agnes and Will are introduced to us and framed as coming from completely different worlds, the former a strange spirit freely wandering the woods, flying her hawk and letting the experience of being one with nature wash over her, while the latter, still bearing the scars of physical abuse, peers sadly through a grimy window, dreaming of his own artistic liberation. The pair make an instant, passionate connection, their chemistry and longing for each other palpable from their very first meeting, much to the consternation of their parents.

Mescal does some good work, but because Will disappears periodically from the narrative to “become Shakespeare” and Agnes is always on screen, this is without a doubt Jessie Buckley’s show. Not only do never really leave Agnes’s side, but the camera seldom leaves her face, shown in unforgiving, grief-stricken close-up as she goes through living hell. Perhaps the most upsetting scene to sit through is a prolonged and traumatic labour when she is having twins (in the family home as a storm brings flood water under their door), but there is scarcely a passage in this where Buckley won’t destroy you with a subtle change in her hugely expressive face or an explosive outburst at the cruel injustice dealt to her and her family.

Zhao’s films are always inextricably tied to nature, our relationship with it and our understanding of it. Songs My Brothers Taught Me, The Rider and Nomadland are all in conversation with the natural world and how we relate to it as a species. This film closely examines the role of the village herbalist, wise woman and midwife; key members of medieval and Renaissance society that were nonetheless often regarded with fear and suspicion or branded as witches because they knew more than most men and seemed to hold a certain power over death through their knowledge of the land, foraging and medicinal treatments passed down from mother to daughter over generations.

Hamnet has such an intoxicating mixture of styles, being simultaneously gritty and grounded, spiritual and dreamlike. Everyone’s hair is unkempt, their teeth and nails grimy, the moss and the soil of the woodland felt with every step. But then you have the black abyss of the hole in the ground in the woods that seems to herald death, the omens of what is to come in the characters’ futures, the muted colours of an afterlife glimpsed through gauze fabric. This juxtaposition roots us in this unforgiving era of history in the most tactile way imaginable while emphasising through some ambiguous visual symbolism how much of our existence we will never fully comprehend.

It’s all about how grief affects everyone very differently and how everyone has their own way of processing the worst moments of their life, often to the detriment of their loved ones. Agnes is living it; she was there as her son’s life left him, but Will missed it and is repressing through his daily life and only able to express his feelings through his art.

It has long been theorised by scholars that Shakespeare was processing something when writing Hamlet, that his pain directly inspired one of his great works, a tale of regret, guilt and fathers and sons. The casting of real brothers here is a stroke of genius, a highly emotional meta-textual boost the story on screen. Young Jacobi Jupe plays Hamnet as a cheery and imaginative child inseparable from his twin sister, while the elder Noah Jupe (A Quiet Place) performs as the on-stage Hamlet in the film’s final act and is tasked with embodying the the man Agnes and Will’s real son would never become and with finally prompting their wordless understanding of each other’s lived experiences.

If the raw performances and the traumatic events of the story don’t get you, then Max Richter’s score might just push you over the edge. There is a moment in the final sequence on stage that, while a massively emotional crescendo, wasn’t quite going to bring on tears, but then an image of hands touching coupled with Richter’s music swelling caused the dam to break.

Hamnet is not an easy watch, in fact it can be a bit of a trial for the soul. There are nitpicks for history nerds and if you know the real story from Shakespeare’s biography then there’s not much in the plot to surprise you. But Zhao has still delivered another powerful humanist tale that perhaps comes the closest of any recent film to truly understanding our relationship with love, death and our brief time on this planet. The raw performances, the seamless portrayal of a harsh historical world and the sheer force of the emotions on show makes for something powerful and lasting.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

Director: Nia DaCosta

Screenwriter: Alex Garland

Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry

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by Kieran Judge

This could either go very well or very badly. January is well known for being the month where studios dump films they don’t care about, and though there are surprises, often the rule holds true. Nobody’s got money after Christmas and New Year, all the money they do have has gone on gym memberships they’ll attend solely for January and never go again, and the rare good films that are released go completely unnoticed until the Oscars, by which time it’s too late. When it comes to 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the second instalment in the new 28 Days Later sequel trilogy following last year’s 28 Years Later, this is perhaps more important than ever, considering you have a black female director in Nia DaCosta (Candyman, The Marvels) helming a major studio film in a major franchise with a budget of over $60m behind it. If it does badly, chances are it’s she that will be thrown under the bus.

The story she has to helm follows on from the previous film. Young Spike (Alfie Williams), who was accosted by a group of tracksuit-wearing zombie slayers in the final scene of 28 Years Later, has reluctantly taken his place in the gang, a group led by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell). The gang believe that Crystal can speak to Old Nick, aka Satan, who has brought his demons onto the earth, and it is Crystal’s job to go round as Nick’s claw, killing and skinning and causing general death and destruction. Meanwhile, Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), living in his bone temple shrine to the departed, has managed to semi-tame one of the alpha infected, which he names Samson, and works to try and remove the infection and break through to his human side.

For everyone involved, it is a wonder that this film is good. Second instalments in horror trilogies, especially those of recent years (see Halloween Kills (2021) and The Strangers: Chaper Two (2025)) are almost never good. What makes this film particularly interesting is that, as in most zombie film traditions, it fully moves away from the ravenous plague hordes, who appear only in small moments, and puts the spotlight fully on how people cope in the postapocalyptic landscape, which it actually manages to make work. It is a full examination of how people, in throes of grief and misery and aimlessness and abandonment, find purpose. Kelson holds on to the meaning of life itself, trying his best, solitarily, to live a philosopher’s life. Crystal, only eight years old when the infected took his vicar father, falls to mental illness and psychopathy of half-remembered childhood stories and religious imagery.

To pull this off requires a good script and good direction, and the film has both. Alex Garland, mastermind behind the entire series, even manages to bring in a few more fenced-off cottages with inhabitants, evidently drawn once again from the original film’s inspiration, John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids. Matching scenes of shocking brutality with scenes of quiet sentiment, it takes DaCosta’s talent, matching the action sequences with the traditional shaky stylings of the franchise, and the smaller moments with more stabilised, simplistic, efficient camerawork of the great masters of directing past, to bring exactly what is needed exactly when it is needed. And although in some ways Crystal’s character is a caricature, a laugh, a ridiculous man and a ridiculous image, O’Connell’s intensity and brutality carries it to genuinely chilling territories.

Enhanced by the droning score of Hildur Guðnadóttir (Joker, Sicario), the film disturbs in a different way to the previous film. With the world of 28 Years Later set up, it falls to The Bone Temple to examine the mindsets of those who have survived in the harshest possible environment, those who manage to massacre the infected and the normal individuals alike without a second thought, and those who mourn and still, nearly three decades on, hope for something which will end the madness. There are some scenes which border on the ridiculous, which although thoroughly entertaining feel tonally out of place, on the whole the film does its predecessors good service whilst carving out its own unique place, becoming its own beast in the franchise. It is, in some ways, the most hopeful of all the films, and maybe that’s what the world needs about now.

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by Sam Sewell-Peterson

It’s been a while since writer-director Joe Carnahann has been on his A-game (and that’s not a cheeky reference to his misguided A-Team movie reboot). Known for his tricky, morally murky debut cop thriller Narc, wild ensemble action-comedy Smokin’ Aces, and Liam Neeson vs wolves thriller The Grey, Carnahan returns to the big time with the latest onscreen reunion between best buddies Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, in the unfortunately titled The Rip.

Following the murder of their leader, an anonymous tip leads to a raid on a cartel drop site in a deserted housing project, which goes south when the specialist Tactical Narcotics Team finds not the thousands they were expecting but twenty million in cash. Having been set up by parties unknown, suspicion soon falls to each other as they weigh up how to turn the situation around and get out alive.

Carnahan has assembled quite a cast here. Damon and Affleck, both impressively bearded, play the morally flexible Lt. Dane Dumars (introduced justifying his maverick actions to his superior) and the volatile Det. JD Byrne (introduced throwing his FBI agent brother around a conference room), while their unit are made up of Steven Yeun (Mickey 17), Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another) and Catalina Sandino Moreno (Ballerina). Sasha Calle (The Flash) and Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights) round out the ensemble as a victim of both the cops’ and the cartels’ brutality and JD’s DEA team backup.

Mobile phones have become extensions of most people’s arms in the time since Carnahan’s last dirty cop movie, so it’s no surprise how prominent a plot device they are here, admittedly providing somewhat of an undramatic shortcut in some cases. Dumars may confiscate his team’s devices to avoid escalating their predicament, but word still gets around a lot quicker than it would in a film made 20 years ago.

I’m not sure if there’s a less clunky way of making sure the audience is keeping up with the technical jargon and the acronyms than characters stopping to explain anything tricky to others out loud, but it does break momentum in a scene. There’s a bit too much telling over showing in general in this movie, enough to wish filmmakers and/or the studios funding their projects had more faith in an audience’s attention span.

It’s a tense picture that slowly but surely ratchets everything up. A particularly creepy moment sees every exterior light in what is essentially a ghost town turn on at the same time before starting to blink in sequence, seemingly as a final warning to the cops to get out of dodge. Then there are some other nice touches, like the bulk of the story advancing in real-time, letting the characters really live with their anxieties and their questionable decisions moment-to-moment; particularly effective when a threatening phone call delivering a countdown to an all-out war turns out to be accurate to the minute.

It’s interesting that Damon and Affleck’s roles could have have easily been flipped given the former’s usual straight-arrow hero persona and the latter’s knotty, tortured turns. Here it’s Damon in the grey and Affleck trying to act as his conscience, and some of the most compelling scenes here seem to be toying with, and subverting our expectations about the kinds of characters these frequent co-stars play.

Damon’s character has two prominent acronym tattoos on each hand (which of course have to be explained out loud and linked to a tragic backstory) and when it’s revealed that “A.W.T.G.G” means “are we the good guys?” and “W.A.A.W.B” is “we are and always will be” some will find the whole thing a little tricky to swallow. Cop movies are a difficult sell for many these days, and even if they are represented by complicated, conflicted and far from all-out heroic characters like they are here, if we’re still coming down the side of their actions often being brutal but ultimately necessary then we’ve got a problem. The reality of headlines, bodycam footage and the testimonies of victims just don’t match with this kind of story, so it’s no surprise it’s more successful if you treat it as a gritty neo-Western and you ignore its misguided commentary on contemporary law enforcement.

For a while it looks like this film is going in a more interesting direction… then it just doesn’t. We get the standard action-heavy finale and all the twists and double-crosses can be seen a mile off. The action is all pretty slickly executed, the performances are decent, even if the characters on the page are well-worn. The Rip is good enough, but even with Damon and Affleck’s star power and Carnahan’s technical skill, this one seems destined for a single watch only during your latest scroll through Netflix.

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The Housemaid (2025)

Director: Paul Feig

Screenwriters: Rebecca Sonnenshine, Frieda McFadden (based on the novel by)

Starring: Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried, Brandon Sklenar, Michelle Morrone, Elizabeth Perkins, Indiana Elle

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by Kieran Judge

In May 2025 I had the chance to meet Peter Bradshaw, chief film critic for The Guardian, and asked him a question or two. One of them was what to do for a review when you’d watched a film that you ended coming out of with absolutely no opinions at all, and he replied by saying that he called that a feeling of being ‘whelmed’. If any word could describe watching The Housemaid, based on Frieda McFadden’s 2022 novel, then ‘whelmed’ would certainly cover it.

A young woman desperately needing a job (Millie, played by Sydney Sweeney). The wife of a rich businessman (Nina, played by Amanda Seyfried) accepting her for the position of live-in housemaid. The businessman who dotes on his wife but is not averse to flirting with the help (Andrew, played by Brandon Skelnar). The tension rising as the days go on, the unease inside the household, the dark secrets which begin to emerge from the corners. The past bubbling to the surface for all of them. The danger placed upon Nina’s daughter, Cecilia (Indiana Elle). The twists and turns.

Seyfried goes above and beyond in this film. She destroys every scene she’s in. She swings this way and that and stretches both her own acting ability and that of her character’s, bringing every inch of her character through the cinema screen and into the theatre space itself. Sweeney meanders through, seemingly bored for most of the film, although does get a few good moments near the end when she gets to lose control. All of this is kept together by Feig’s directing, which is tight enough to be decently workable, especially for someone who has made a career off Melissa McCarthy comedies. The transition to thriller and horror isn’t one that everyone manages, though some (Jordan Peele being probably the most well known example) have done well of it. It’s not a Peele-level directing job, but it serves the film well enough.

But what good is all this when the film as a whole feels so incredibly average? The beats are so clear, so well known, so well-trodden, that it all feels far too clean. For a film about cleanliness, about perfection, everything feels far too ordered, ironically, to be truly interesting. Nothing feels like it wants to break out of its formulaic cage. Nothing fizzes off the screen. Its origins as a tradeback novel come through in the random scatterings of voiceover work, several short sections for Sweeney’s character and a big-old monologue from Seyfried, and it reveals a lack of interest in trying to show any of this visually or with any kind of interest; why do that when we can just spell it out?

The film should have been a good 15 minutes shorter than it is, dragging its heels as much as it can even with launching right into Nina and Millie’s first meeting in scene 1. Either that, or this might have been the better way, it should have been done as a 5/6 episode miniseries, with the final act being the final episode of the show. It’s either too short or too long, and that the only certainty is that the length it is happens to be the wrong one is revealing in itself.

Utterly forgettable in every way, this is a film which will do decently at the box office but should have been made for $10m less than it was (budgets inflated presumably only for actress and directing fees), and then end up on Netflix in three years time, probably hailed as ‘a slept-on masterpiece of feminist critique’. If so, good for the film, and good for helping to keep the theatrical experience alive. Until then, it’s not bad, but it’s not good either. Maybe if they’d made more of Millie, Sweeney’s character, who looks and feels incredibly bored until the second half of the film, then The Housemaid might have been far more interesting.

‘Whelmed’ indeed.

Anaconda (2025)

Director: Tom Gormican

Screenwriters: Tom Gormican, Kevin Etten

Starring: Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton, Daniela Melchior, Selton Mello

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by Kieran Judge

December 2025 has been a time for franchises returning to the big screen that you’d completely forgotten about after the first film, following on from Silent Night, Deadly Night released only a few weeks ago. Now it’s the turn of Anaconda, which had a first franchise entry back in 1997 with Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube and became somewhat of a cult classic. Following a string of awful sequels which included a crossover with the Lake Placid franchise, and most of them Syfy originals, it’s back to the big screen, with somehow a good $40-45m budget behind it.

In the now time-worn tradition of films going incredibly meta on their franchises, especially in the horror genre where fans have such strong attachments to their favourites, the film works itself back in on itself. Best friends Doug (Jack Black) and Griff (Paul Rudd), who used to want to be filmmakers in their youth, go to realise a lifelong dream when Griff acquires the rights to the Anaconda franchise. Full of enthusiasm, they secure a small loan and take a skeleton crew of their old filmmaking friends and journey to Brazil to shoot a low-budget remake, reworking, spiritual sequel, to their favourite film. The only trouble is that they’re eventually attacked by a real giant anaconda snake, and it’s all mayhem from there, even before the gold-smugglers get involved.

There are good points. Honest. Black manages to, at times, dial down the Jack Black-ness, a hard thing to accomplish, and manages for moments to slip into his character. He’s got decent chemistry with Paul Rudd, and Thandiwe Newton and the others, when they’re not shoved to one side, do try to do something. When the film gets in some of its more inventive meta-humour, such as bringing in another crew wanting to remake Anaconda, with a whole argument about Sony owning the rights (Sony making this film as well, of course), it shows off one of the few rare moments of cleverness in the writing. That, and a certain cameo appearance set to AC/DC’s Back in Black, which for 10 seconds almost makes the whole ordeal worth it.

Almost makes it worth it, because the film is an arduous ordeal in what has lovingly been called ‘brainrot’ in recent times. The directing isn’t particularly clever or even good, and the writing is tacky and stupid and dumb of exactly the wrong kind. Aside from an aforementioned joke or two, the rest is utterly devoid of any kind of brainpower at all, so much so that despite only a 99 minute runtime, the film becomes such an utter chore to watch that you really wish they’d all get eaten quickly just so you can leave the screen and go home. Double whammy that the film just keeps spinning it out over and over again, going for tiny scene of scares cutting straight to them slowing down because scare scene is over, let’s kill the momentum. There are perhaps two scenes of (badly manufactured) tension which extend over more than thirty seconds, and one of them is the finale. For what started out as a horror franchise, you have to ask yourself if this film even wants to touch the genre. We shouldn’t have to endure this, and we shouldn’t have to endure a significant lack of actual anaconda, in badly-rendered CGI, with less blood than it’s sequels which were made for a box of doughnuts and product placement.

Speaking of sequels, despite the film making no mention of them, the whole thing still feels like it’s just a big budget Syfy movie that they decided to pump money into once they got Black and Rudd onboard. Scenes of toilet humour, which are in such tonal bad taste and disrespect to the film, were shot later, with a mid-credits scene shot in the middle of November, last month. How bad did the execs at Sony think it was going to be?

There is no reason for the film to exist, except for perhaps a rights issue which this particular reviewer certainly isn’t aware of. It’s stupid in every regard, has less blood of even the CGI variety than its predecessors, is completely unfunny, and has had all the life squeezed out of it from the get-go. Don’t bother seeing it on the big screen. If you absolutely have to, wait until the eventual showings on Syfy, where it should have been made for in the first place, and where it should have stayed.

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by Jacob Davis

Richard Linklater’s latest film shows the production process of Cahiers du cinema critic Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature Breathless, which is one of my favorite films, as he transitioned from reviewing movies to making them. In theory, I’m exactly the target audience for this film, but it failed to fully grab me. Nouvelle Vague treats Godard and the New Wave as something to be preserved rather than interrogated, and, in doing so, uses cinema’s power of reproduction to reinforce myth rather than generate thought.

It should be noted that this is the express purpose of the film. Linklater used to contemporary notes, photos, and details to meticulously re-create the production of Breathless. “I’m making,” Linklater told Christopher Reed, “a black-and-white … French movie with English subtitles, the way all these films came to me when I was falling in love with cinema in my early twenties. This is what these films looked and sounded like. So I’m just replicating that.” He has undoubtedly achieved his experiential goals.

The performances, and looks of the actors, are spot-on. Guillaume Marbeck shines by disappearing into the idea of Godard, the real genius of the New Wave (as young Godard would like people to think). Zoey Deutch gets to act as an important foil to Godard in some moments, expressing her distaste for his manner as she grows into what her character’s role calls for. Aubry Dullin’s resemblance and performance as the great Jean-Paul Belmondo is about as good of a simulation one could ask for. Non-English films are great for me because they allow me to get an impression of tone and mannerism over the specific words, and there isn’t a single performance that doesn’t deliver what is needed.

Nouvelle Vaugue’s visuals are gorgeous as the film takes on aspects of Breathless’ aesthetic, including the black-and-white and aspect ratio, and its period music recalls the original’s score. It’s form, for the most part, is unintrusive and immerses the audience into 1959 France. The main formal hiccup is the Wes Anderson-style character indexing when a new person first appears. Ultimately, the film’s aesthetic reduces the New Wave to a pretty surface. Monochrome, cigarettes, and intellectual film conversations are décor that lack the edge and revolutionary attitude of Godard and his film.

While Deutch’s Seberg provides some critique of Godard, its ultimately hollow. There’s no tension surrounding Godard’s unusual methods or contradiction of his “genius” narrative. Even surrounded by a crew and collaborators, Linklater’s Godard embodies the worst aspects of auteur theory when he, as a singular driving force, is vindicated through every decision he makes. The film doesn’t need to be a hit piece, but some level of real investigation into Godard as a person and filmmaker would make for a better work.

Nouvelle Vague accomplishes what it set out to do while being well-crafted and reverent, but its goals limit how great it can be. One might be better off reading the story in Richard Brody’s Godard biography or watching Godard par Godard. It isn’t a bad film by any means, but it’s a minor disappointment for a New Wave nerd, and it makes me want to watch Breathless and other French New Wave films instead.

Marty Supreme has all the intensity and unsavoriness of Uncut Gems while managing to remain fun thanks to an incredible performance from its lead. The film follows the young aspiring ping-pong champion Marty Mauser as he tears his way through New York City and several relationships to try and get his shot at a crown against a rival player.

Timothée Chalamet is the stand-out in a piece worthy of his talent, no offense to Dune and some offense to A Complete Unknown. Marty, as he says, is performing, and Chalamet hits all the charm needed for a con-man, as well as the frustration that builds as Marty’s cons are continuously disrupted. You can see the ongoing shifts throughout each scene as Marty calculates how exactly to manipulate whatever situation he’s found himself in with a shoe store employee, a sick dog, or a high-powered CEO.

The ensemble around Chalamet is also excellent. Gwyneth Paltrow’s character sees through Marty’s fast-talk and is able to play sensual old Hollywood glamour with style. Kevin O’Leary is imposing, and gives layers to a character in a way that’s unexpected from a TV personality. Odessa A’zion’s Rachel is at first cast aside, but comes back strong in the film’s second half. Abel Ferrara, Tyler, the Creator, and Géza Röhrig all shine in their minor roles, and the non-professional cast is impressive.

Pacing is vital to making a Safdie film work, even if it is just the one brother, and it’s perfect for the film’s story and evoking anxiety from the audience. There’s little breathing room in the film which reflects Marty’s lack of reflection in his relentless pursuit of ping-pong superstardom. The closest the movie comes to a pause is when Marty needs to (somewhat) resolve one situation before giving another his attention. Viewers may still find themselves questioning whether or not Marty should carry on, whether he’s worth rooting for, but Chalamet’s charm and the immersion into Marty’s subjective experience overwhelm audience rationality.

It’s an exhausting film, but the journey and payoff are worth it. Part of that satisfaction is the lack of bleak cynicism. It doesn’t change-up the Safdie playbook in the same way The Smashing Machine does, but it’s so well executed and entertaining that it’s hard to care. It’s wild and fun in all the ways you wouldn’t expect from a film about ping-pong and well worth a trip to the theater.

Movie Review: Silent Night, Deadly Night (2025)

Director: Mike P. Nelson

Screenwriters: Mike P. Nelson

Starring: Rohan Campbell, Ruby Modine, David Lawrence Brown, David Tomlinson, Mark Acheson

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Well, here’s a remake nobody saw coming. The last time anyone had thought about Silent Night, Deadly Night, was in YouTube essays from people arguing that the second film is a maligned masterpiece. Spoiler: it isn’t – it’s bad, possibly in the so-bad-it’s-good category, but that doesn’t make it actually good. Before that, perhaps the main character in Grady Hendrix’s 2021 novel The Final Girl Support Group, cast out by the rest of the final girls for accidentally surviving a massacre eerily similar to the film after being impaled on a stag’s head’s antlers, was the latest instance in which it crossed our minds. Before that, the reboot in 2012 which everyone quickly forgot existed.

So when there’s a remake hitting the big screen no less, not just straight to Netflix or Shudder, of the story of a homicidal Santa-costume-wearing-psychopath who got messed up because his parents were killed by another Santa-costume-wearing-psychopath many years ago, you might well imagine the surprise of almost the entire horror world. But, it’s got the producers of the Terrifier movies behind it, and the third one made waves. Got to be something going for it, right?

Well, maybe, depending on what you’re after. It’s pure exploitation schlock at its heart, grindhouse blood and gore, which is at least the right way to do it. Aside from the original concept, pretty much everything else is changed, making it more of a reimagining than a remake, which is at least something in its favour in that it’s not just going over the same ground. In this version, Billy Chapman rolls into a sleepy town and decides to stay. Got to make a change from running away from cops, especially when it’s only a few days from Christmas, because Billy’s a serial killer, and every year he has to kill one person a day in December to fill up his blood-marked advent calendar. Oh, and he has the voice of his parents’ killer in his head, who can somehow locate bad people to axe up. If Bruce Willis in Unbreakable was a schizophrenic psychopath in a red suit, you’d have something close to this version of the story.

Time for the highlights. A particular scene involving Billy going into a Nazi Christmas party and hacking and slashing two dozen Santa-costumed Nazis is incredibly satisfying, best in the film, and probably one just to have on loop in the future. Additionally, the odd moment when the film borders into black comedy, such as part of a montage with Billy, full costume, badly chasing a girl down a high-school corridor with a chainsaw, is amusing. When the film leans into this aspect heavily, with the voice in his head advising him against stupid actions which shy, emotionally damaged Billy is going to do anyway, that’s where the film gets its moments in. It’s a concept nobody should be taking seriously now that the slasher film is in its sixth decade proper if we start from the 70s and Halloween, including the film itself.

But despite these points, the film still feels cheap and nasty, which is what it was going for, but doesn’t make it better cinematically. It’s tried to make Billy into a psychic avenging demon struggling with inner torment, with a love interest who is a massive fan of serial killer documentaries, a young man who murders because a voice in his head tells him to do so and has brainwashed him to do it, not because he’s just generally messed up. When the original film was at least an attempt to look into a Freudian origin of a killer, with someone by the end who, although unfortunate, is ultimately irredeemable, this one tries to make us actually sympathise with Billy. Look at him, he’s going to track down kidnappers eventually, so he’s good at heart. Maybe, but also he’s a serial killer, and has killed over 100 people in brutal, bloody fashion. He should not be sympathised with, or made any kind of hero, in any way. This is a monumentally dangerous route to take, even if anyone watching knows the film is fictional.

The violence scenes themselves – Nazi killing spree excluded – are also not particularly memorable, and as horrible as it sounds, if you’re making a schlocky slasher flick, quality of kill scenes is one of the important parts. Rohan Campbell, maybe picked for Billy following his controversial previous role as Corey Cunningham in Halloween Ends, and therefore used to being partially-possessed by the spirits of mass murderers, never quite manages to land on sympathetic side no matter how hard he and the film try, so even when going for sympathy points, never manages to pull it off. As a result, the film tells you constantly to root for someone you just can’t get behind.

The music isn’t memorable, the ending somewhat predictable, if the only route you could actually take the finale after the leadup to it, and it all feels like a stale cookie Santa forgot to pick up on his way through. You could still theoretically eat it, but you do so wishing it were fresh.

Avatar: Fire And Ash (2025)

Director: James Cameron

Screenwriters: James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver

Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Oona Chaplin, Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, David Thewlis

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Well, here we are. The third instalment of James Cameron’s mammoth science fantasy extravaganza is here, wheeling out the exact same stuff you remember from the first two films, still in 3D if you want to go in for that. But Cameron would never be one to just remake things, because that wouldn’t be correct. In the first film, you had earth and air. In the second film, just like a new section of a video game, you had the water level. And now, in the third film, we have to go to another elemental zone: the fire level, because we hadn’t been there yet.

Although, strangely, despite the film being called Fire and Ash, there’s a lot less of the actual fire and ash than you’d think from the title. Maybe that’s where all of the originality went: up in smoke. Because here, Jake Sully and Neytiri and family, following the events of The Way of Water, are living in their village, and then the sky people attack. Stephen Lang as Quaritch is still trying to find Sully and bring him in for being a traitor. A new clan of the Na’vi appear on the scene. There are captures. Escapes. A big battle on the water (literally in near enough the same location as the big boat final fight as The Way of Water) from the previous film. Getting déjà vu by any chance?

Honestly, we wonder why we go in expecting anything different. Then again, the trailers did have Oona Chaplin scowling at the screen as the villainous Na’vi ash tribe leader, Varang, and hissing “Your goddess has no dominion here,” so maybe we were expecting something radical, or at least a different slant on the story. Maybe Sully would be on his own, cut off, forced to go to the dark side in order to save his people, sacrifice everything, including himself. But that would be too much to hope for. For the most part, the exact same beats which grossed the previous films’ $2b each at the box office, are still in force. It’s still absolutely gorgeous to look at, and we must praise the painters and effects artists and designers and lighting people to the stars and back for presenting us with such a stunning visual feast. The actors are still somewhat trying, though you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who looks like they’re trying to go for an Oscar. You’ve got to give them that.

What should also be given, to the audience, is a pillow. There’s lots of things happening but nothing much feeling. Everything just passes in front of the eyes in a dull blur that is vaguely entertaining on a shallow level in the way that most good-looking but ultimately empty action films do. The writing isn’t sharp, there’s too many characters now for anyone to actually care about any of them, and there’s never the slightest hint of danger for any of them. It still wants to just do the same stuff over again, including getting the dragons to rip down the ships in balls of fire in the midst of floating islands as per the first film, and stage big fiery battles on ships near the finale as per the second. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Perhaps the film’s worst error, of which including introducing David Thewlis for five minutes before writing him out of the film is just one, falls on Varang. This is Fire and Ash, supposedly all about the people of fire, the Mangkwan clan who live at the bottom of a volcano which wiped out their entire village. We are present in this location for a grand total of two, maybe three scenes. Good job on that front.

Then we have the clan itself. There’s a single identifiable character here, because the writers decided that one character as representative was all that we needed, and that character is Varang, a vicious, hardened, brutal warrior priestess of the fire. She is vicious, a headhunter (or at least cutting off the hair of Na’vi which connects them to Eywa). She dresses the dress, lives in the biggest tent of the tribe with a very suggestive opening that H. R. Giger would have been proud to design. When Quaritch is forced to turn to her to help track down Jake, she is completely in control, then engaging in a battle of wits inside her tent as Quaritch goes through her drug-fuelled ritual. The opening scenes with her are undoubtedly the best in the film, and when she’s around you feel that maybe, just maybe, everything could turn around.

And after this, when an alliance between her tribe and Quaritch is made… she’s just sort of there. His trophy. She does some snarling, kicks people, and lays around in a post-coital haze on Quaritch’s chest. Hanging around. That’s about it. Reduced to an aesthetically-pleasing guard dog for over half of the total film’s seemingly eternal runtime. The absolute nerve to think that this is a) a good idea and b) OK from a gender perspective just shows that, whilst the film is marginally better than The Way of Water, and whilst there’s a fun zero-gravity-fight-lite which isn’t as fun as the fight in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Cameron thinks we care about exactly the wrong things. Cool visuals with a recycled plot to justify it works fine in his book, and as someone who had to settle with Harlan Ellison out of court for admitting to stealing the plot for The Terminator, James Cameron is someone who knows a lot about reusing plotlines.

Then again, who are we to argue? Come out and play all the hits. It’ll still work wonders at the box office. James Cameron knows what he’s doing. Just a shame he couldn’t have made a better film while he was at it.

by Sam Sewell-Peterson

Writer-director Rian Johnson and star Daniel Craig have expressed a desire to keep making these films for the rest of their lives, and judging by the quality of Wake Up Dead Man, we should all be very happy about that. The third Benoit Blanc Mystery eschews the scenic excess of Glass Onion and returns to something like the first Knives Out from 2019, in that it’s shadowy, gothic and darkly ironic in its take on the contemporary world.

Shortly after being posted to a quiet rural parish in the lead-up to Easter, Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) and his new congregation are shocked by the sudden brutal murder of vocally zealous religious leader Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) in a closet next to the church altar. All the regular worshippers are suspect, but the circumstances of the crime seem to be quite impossible, and so renowned detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) arrives to unravel the mystery.

To appropriate Chandler Bing’s catchphrase, could this *be* any more of of a lapsed Catholic story? Rian Johnson was raised in the faith and gets a lot of mileage out of the iconography, from the bleached space of a missing cross on a church wall, abruptly obscured by the shadow of a priest entering the room, to more flagrant iconoclasm as the film goes on. What better world is there to set a story of whispered secrets, tainted holy rituals, and people being driven to do both good and bad things by their foundational beliefs?

Johnson’s script is very much one in the long tradition of Whodunnit mysteries going back to Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and beyond. The genre-twisting writer-director wears his influences on his sleeve, even to the extent of name-checking one as a key plot point: The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr, particularly its highly influential “Locked Room Lecture”, which of course feeds into this story in a big way. A bit of well-placed vulgarity doesn’t hurt either in keeping the whole thing not too self-important. Jeffrey Wright’s Bishop very reluctantly re-assigns Father Jud after he assaulted a Deacon, because “Deacon Clarke is famously a dick”, while Glenn Close’s Martha innocently misidentifies the local teenagers’ obscene graffiti on Wicks’ tomb: “Makes me sick, these kids painting rocket ships over his sacred resting place!”

Benoit Blanc doesn’t show up until 40 minutes in, and film’s all the better for it, using the time to flesh out the ensemble and their unexpected, often contradictory dynamics with each other. This series has always been great at spotlighting their P.O.V characters; ordinary people who support Blanc in his investigations and usually serve as the emotional fulcrum of the story, allowing the Southern gentleman detective to remain colourfully enigmatic. This is undoubtedly Josh O’Connor’s movie, playing Jud (“Young, dumb and full of Christ”) as the classic devout man suffering a crisis of faith and constantly tortured by his violent past, but ultimately wanting to get to the bottom of a mystery, even if the answer doesn’t align with his beliefs.

The number of characters and the star power of the ensemble overall is roughly equivalent in each instalment, but they always manage to get a few “very hot right now” names in there. Let’s introduce the suspects of foul play on holy ground, or as they’re described at one point, the “hardened cyst of regulars”. You’ve got the severe, over-attentive church administrator (Glenn Close); the intense village doctor (Jeremy Renner); the shifty author (Andrew Scott); the pained young musical socialite (Cailey Spaeny); the uptight lawyer and her adopted, ambitious MAGA influencer son (Kerry Washington and Daryl McCormack) and the alcoholic groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church). Close, Spaeny and McCormack are probably the highlights here, but everyone gets their moment to shine.

Much like the previous Knives Out films, though not every character is guilty, most are detestable to various extents and have a lot to do with what’s wrong with the world as it is today - far right or conspiratorial political beliefs, regressive social views, fundamentalist religious faith - the gang’s all here. The first two films were built around everything wrong with having too much money and too few morals, while this one asks what horrors are possible when an unshakeable set of beliefs and trying to make others believe the same becomes your driving force in life.

What’s fun about Blanc as a character beyond Craig’s flamboyant affectations is that he gets genuinely excited by the thrill of investigation, of chasing down the truth. For the longest time this particular mystery completely baffles him, to the extent that he comes to almost question his own deeply-held rationalism. Even someone who doesn’t believe in a higher power can feel something intangible when they enter a place of worship after all, and some things just can’t be explained no matter how much we might want them to be. Pairing him with a man of God and trapping him in an environment where everyone else is looking for explanation beyond what can be seen and proven is a heady cocktail indeed.

It’s pretty long as these kind of things go, and a handful of the characters are perhaps a little too broad an archetype, but then again this gives plenty of time to pull the rug out from under the audience multiple times even after we think everything has been all neatly wrapped up. By the time Blanc takes to the church pulpit (of course) to break down who has done what and why, you’ll be breathless with anticipation.

Wake Up Dead Man is a compelling mystery that interrogates faith, conscience, and the very concept of truth. While that might make it sound overly worthy or too much like hard work, it’s also often funny, regularly profound and always exquisitely performed. This film brings Johnson’s lucrative deal with Netflix to a close, but it wouldn’t be surprising in the least if he re-teamed with them to bring Blanc back to screens on a new case a few years down the road.

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