Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023)

All the various models of Barbie and Ken dolls live in a pink, sterile fantasy world or relentless cheer and inanity, until the 'sterotypical Barbie' suffers an existential crisis and has to enter the real world to try to fix herself. Naturally, this proves to be a jarring experience and produces some decent scenes of culture-clash comedy, akin to that seen in some time-travel films, which are a very welcome break from the endless hyper-choreographed musical numbers in Barbieland.

The executives of Mattel of course do not like their commercial property being compromised, to they try to put her back into the box. The fact that the film was authorised by Mattel really sums it up in a nutshell: it both satirises and promotes the company and the product. So everyone's content, while no one can be fully satisfied, including any segment of the audience. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as the primary Barbie and Ken do clearly have a blast, at least.

6/10

Black Adam (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2022)

Still the people behind the DCEU persist in trying to compete with Marvel, when all they have as interesting and well-known characters is Superman (potentially) and Batman (always). Wonder Woman doesn't cut the mustard, as even just the painfully reductionist name will tell you. So, unable to fall back on any of these, they have to go with crappy variations on the omnipotent being theme, this time with 5,000-year-old demigod Black Adam, brought back from eternal imprisonment to combat returned forces of evil in yet another made up country, basically a generic mishmash of various Middle Eastern ones.

Marvel have made some absolute disasters along the way, most notoriously Madame Web, but this has a good go at being just as bad. Normally The Rock, as the titular antihero,  is decent value for money when playing with his meat-mountain image for comic effect, but any attempt to do so is hopelessly drowned under a two-hour-torrent of extremely boring CGI fight after fight. Nor can Pierce Brosnan, as a wise old magician, save the affair from utter pointlessness.

4/10

Spectral (Nic Mathieu, 2016)

The bravest feat this action film achieves is choosing to wreck an Eastern European city in a battle against supernatural enemies rather than the usual L.A. So, the capital of Moldova (played by Budapest) gets it, with an impending civil war exarcerbated by hordes of ghosts that kill on contact. Naturally it's left to the U.S. army to sort things out, represented by a scientist, who sees the ghosts for what they really are, tagging along with a bunch of rent-a-grunts. Basically Aliens, but with considerably less plot logic, despite bunging in lots of pseudoscience. Ho hum.

4/10

Heads of State (Ilya Naishuller, 2025)

John Cena and Idris Elba respectively play the U.S. President and British Prime Minister, baling out of Air Force One as it's attacked by terrorists of some ilk over Belarus. They then have to get over their bickering enough to avoid further attempts to kill them and get to the NATO summit they were supposed to be attending in Trieste.

It's basically a mismatched buddy comedy, with dollops upon dollops of ludicrous action eventually almost suffocating the film's strong suit, Cena's action film star turned gung-ho POTUS (a nod to Schwarzenegger's stint as Governor of California there) bouncing off Elba's pragmatist who has actual life experience. So, safely playing to national stereotypes, albeit so much from a Hollywood angle that Britain is just Buckingham Palace and fish and chips, and Elba even says 'diaper' at one point. While well choreographed, as most things are these days, the action does get tiresome, but it's hard to dislike the duo, who are clearly enjoying themselves immensely, and you can forgive its wanton stupidity because of that.

6/10

Nuestros Tiempos (Chava Cartas, 2025)

Once again in the land that time will never forget, the time travel genre. This time, a physicist couple in the Mexico of 1966 construct a machine that takes them to the modern day and while at first it's only the technological differences they find baffling, soon the changes in society become a bigger issue for them to contend with. This is particularly to do with the changed status of women, which threatens to split the couple as while he just wants to get back home, she can no longer face it.

So, Our Times does try to put a new spin on the oft-visited theme. But it's a romance at heart with a modish sci-fi element, rather than a serious cogitation on causality, which would be the modern norm for the genre. In the end, the social comment angle wears thin too.

5/10

The Flash (Andy Muschietti, 2023)

So, in their attempt to keep up with Marvel, having only three heroes most people have heard of, the DCEU fall back on The Flash, who can...run incredibly fast. This apparently means he can reach such a velocity that he can breach the barrier between alternate universes and try to undo the death of his mother. Naturally the butterfly effect of trying to alter time comes into play, and whatever he or his younger version in the alternate universe try to do to change events is cancelled by the halfheartedly explained immutable timeline, or somesuch.

To the film's credit, it is made clear that the hero hasn't got a clue about consequences either, and despite the usual overabundance of digitally-animated action and fight sequences, it is actually quite good fun, bringing together multiple versions of Batman from over the years to assist the hero (principally Michael Keaton reprising an older Batman from Tim Burton's films) and incorporating numerous other nods to genre fans.

But they shouldn't take this as the way to go in the DCEU. Marvel have already tried quite a few times, and it's not a pony with many tricks.

6/10

28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007)

Horror franchises where the first part had something new to offer are more unkillable than zombies, so more zombies is what we get. The US military has taken over Britain, presuming that the rage virus has finally been eradicated, except of course there'd be no film without it. Cue large chunks of London being laid to waste and mass slaughter of innocents, so the real enemy is actually 'shoot first' American foreign policy, which funnily enough makes more sense now than it did when the film was released in 2007. The gruesome action is, of course, relentless, so chaotically shot that anything could be happening for all you know, and there's virtually no attention paid to the geography of the city, location scouting apparently having been done by a particularly clueless American tourist with a checklist of landmarks. It is still a riveting ride, but that's the basic minimum you could expect, and it depressingly closes on a final shot promising a worldwide continuation of the menace, and therefore another sequel.

4/10