Venom: The Last Dance (Kelly Marcel, 2024)

The last dance, eh? If wishes were horses...still, surely an actor of Tom Hardy's calibre must have made enough sponds from this by now to return to proper acting. As it is, instalment three of the franchise continues with more of the same, the human stuck with an alien symbiote inside him trying to evade both the U.S. military and also a host of monsters sent by an imprisoned evil deity to get a key to his prison from inside the protagonist. So, this means numerous chases and messy CGI fight after fight, and would be utterly joyless if it wasn't for the leavening effect of the continuous squabbling and banter between the tired human host and his hedonistic, casually brutal and foul-mouthed symbiote. It's enough to get you through, but only just.

5/10

Thunderbolts* (Jake Schreier, 2025)

Film number 36, and if it isn't stopped, the size of the MCU will eventually overtake that of the real universe. Taking a cue from the overall failure of Eternals, a team composed only of ridiculously superpowered individuals, Thunderbolts* instead serves up a bunch of bickering misfits with virtually no powers at all. The villain is also not powered, but the scheming director of the CIA, seeking to weaponise a mentally unstable man her researchers have imbued with godlike abilities so that he can serve both as a PR figurehead and a one-man replacement for the now defunct Avengers as Earth's protector. This also means doing away with the titular crew since they know all about her self-serving schemes.

Naturally a torrent of chases and blurry fight sequences must fill the bulk of the running time, but there is also plenty of humour deprecating genre cliches, a reasonable stab at drawing parallels between the villain's motives and Trump's world of toxic propraganda, and Florence Pugh, flavour of the month though she might be, again producing a commanding performance as the conflicted de facto leader of the protagonists.

Still a bit of a mess, but a step in the right direction at least.

5/10

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.

3/10

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