Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024)

Once again, I've been suckered into watching one of Lanthimos's deranged concoctions because of the strong cast (Emma Stone, Jesses Plemons and Willem Dafoe, all in multiple roles) and the hope that the director's idiosyncracies might finally produce something meaningful to the world outside his head. No such luck. After 2 hours and 45 minutes of a loosely connected triptych of stories, all that is learnt once again is that Lanthimos is so autistic as to border on being a sociopath. David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky, Michael Haneke and Lars Von Trier are notable directors of highly leftfield, visionary films which have more than their fair share of wilfully jarring moments, but ones with a sense of empathy and purpose. Lanthimos, on the other hand, is to be placed in the same category of emotionally-stunted misanthropes as Ulrich Seidl and Tom Six. That category may well also be a competition between them.

Each part of the triptych presents an enslaved main character: first one whose every timiest life choice is completely dictated by his boss, then a man who falls prey to the delusion that the woman who has returned from a disastrous expedition isn't really his wife, and finally a woman who is completely in thrall to to a  cult of resurrectionists. The ideas are all interesting enough, which will keep you watching, but there's simply no pay-off at the end of any of them.

5/10

A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow, 2025)

Bigelow returns once again to the genre of the military-political thriller with a premise where a nuclear missile of unknown provenance is heading for the continental USA and the clanking gears of the country's defence network have to go into overdrive to deal with the impending catastrophe. The scene constantly jumps for two hours from one military intelligence installation to another, each with its own set of characters either mechanically following protocol or falling to pieces.  This is a thriller with no action content, just a fairly feasible insight into how the USA, the titular 'house of dynamite' armed to the teeth would actually go about dealing briskly with a real crisis. In that regard, it's more worrying than most horror films are. Nevertheless, the imperative to show the workings of the machine is very much in the driving seat, at the cost of any characterisation until Idris Elba is revealed as the U.S. President, having been kept off camera up to very late in the film, and gets to do some proper acting as he agonises over the limited range of executive options he has, all of them terrible.

6/10

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (Matt Shakman, 2025)

Ten years after the unmitigated disaster of the first attempt at a reboot of Marvel's least interesting sperhero team, whuch made them into teenagers for some ludicrous reason, MCU #37 goes for transposing it all  to a retro-futuristic alternate Earth of 1964, and the primary-colour approach of the comic books of the era. This works in that it's largely played as an airy family drama until, of course, a cosmic being turns up intent on devouring the whole planet and the floodgates are opened to a deluge of CGI. Saying that it deals with the twin threats of Galactus and the Silver Surfer better than the 2007 film with the same basic plot really isn't much more than the faintest of praise.

4/10

Heretic (Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, 2024)

Two young Mormon missionaries meet more than they bargained on when they knock on the door of a seemingly charming older Englishman, who engages them in discussion about their faith. They immediately prove no match for neither his verbosity, nor his ability to constantly keep them off balance. Then their discomfort grows more intense when it transpires that they can't leave the house until the morning and thy can't get a phone signal, and so we enter the realm of psychological horror. This does eventually descend into more standard horror, because current horror films simply demand bloodletting, which is a shame, but Hugh Grant is marvellous in the role of the host, veering from avuncular and self-effacing to truly menacing at the flick of a switch, and the intelligence of the dialogue is far, far beyond that of the modern genre norm. Also on the plus side, it clearly scared the shit out of countless reactionary U.S. Christians when it dissected their myths, and the pound of flesh they got with the full revelation of the captor's sociopathic egotism just wasn't enough for them.

7/10

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 2024)

After 36 years, Burton comes back with a sequel to his iconic comedy horror film, and takes basically the same approach as what Danny Boyle did with Trainspotting 2: continue the story with the same main characters and other elements. Granted, due to age and other commitments, the original ghost couple occupying the house aren't there (cheekily referred to in the dialogue as having left after finding a 'loophole'), but madcap fun is expected. This is duly delivered, although with unsurprisingly a lesser impact than the first time around, in a story where the teenage goth of Winona Ryder's Lydia has now become a haunted house talkshow host with a teenage daughter in the form of Jenna Ortega, not far removed at all from her current role as Wednesday Addams, attending the funeral of Lydia's father in the town where the events of the original film took place.

Naturally, it doesn't take too long before grand scale mayhem is unleashed as Michael Keaton's Betelgeuse is brought back by a Lydia desperate to get her daughter, abducted by a pychopathic ghost, out of the Netherworld. Betelgeuse has a problem of his own, with Monica Bellucci as his soul-sucking ex-wife out to kill him for good. So, lots of wisecracking by Keaton and ghoulish visions, ticking all the boxes and thereby satisfying all and sundry, even if adding nothing new as such.

7/10

Släpp taget (Josephine Bornebusch, 2024)

The mother of a disintegrating family decides to take them all on a trip across the country to her daughter's pole-dancing competition. Her husband, selfish and detached from his family, wants a divorce and is reluctant, but agrees on condition that they separate once back home.

Numerous fractitious conversations ensue, which is not unfamiliar to anyone with experience of Swedish relationship dramas, and neither is the fact that the parents are just too ready to indulge their children's ever whim, in sterotypically Scandinavian fashion. But what makes Let Go a shade better than the norm is not just its sense of realism, but the way the climb out of their collective rut, not least the husband's, is both convincing and positive.

6/10

The Thursday Murder Club (Chris Columbus, 2025)

Given the enormous success of Richard Osman's debt novel and the current vogue for murder mysteries with comical overtones, it was inevitable that it would be adapted onto the big screen. So, the unfeasibly plush retirement home (basically an even more palatial Downton Abbey) under siege from an unscrupulous property developer (David Tennant doing one of his evil turns quite convincingly), is the setting, and its residents are pretty much every big-name actor over 70 from the British Isles, led by Mirren, Kingsley and Brosnan. The plot of course involves a murder, namely that of one of the co-owners of the retirement home, and the trio of pensioners get to sleuthing. This is pretty formulaic, so you're really just watching it for the stars and the cosy comic interplay between them.

For once, it's not that lkely that all four of Osman's sequels (to date) will be adapted for the screen, since they involve the same lead characters and it's doubtful whether the actors even want to commit to such an extended series on the same theme at this advanced stage in their careers.

6/10