Wake Up Dead Man Rian Johnson, 2025)

Daniel Craig left one franchise with Bond, and has now become entrenched in another in the role of Poirotesque detective Benoit Blanc, this time taking on the case of the murder of a fire-and-brimstone preacher at a New England smalltown church. Naturally the puzzle doesn't prove as straightforward to solve as it first appears, and the initial suspect, Judd, an dealistic young priest who just arrived at the church and found hmself immediately at loggerheads with his hate-filled predecessor, can be dismissed from the list of suspects without too much analysis. Less so when it comes to the congregation, all of whom, in typical Agatha Christie style (director Johnson always explicitly acknowledges the debt to her stories) have clouded motives.

It's a lot do do with the conflict between the importance of religious faith and logic, embodied by Judd and Blanc, and the exchanges between them are really the most interesting element of an overlong film. There are some inconsistencies in the plot which really should have been avoided, especially given the genre, but at least Craig in particular is clearly having fun, and so you can expect a fourth instalment to get the green light posthaste.

6/10

Torden (André Øvredal, 2020)

Apparently the Norwegians just can't keep their fingers off the Norse gods as a vehicle for doing fantasy to compete with the Hollywood mega-budget appropriation of Thor at al. for superheroics. This does have a different take on the mythology, in that an locally-born American backpacker in the fjords can't understand what keeps on happening to him when he's provoked, shooting off lightning in all directions and developing worse and worse burns on his body. But you do know pretty early on where it's going, and the involvement of a sympathetic psychiatrist and policeman helping him to evade the authorities, who are figureheaded by an improbably Asian U.S. government agent, doesn't manage to prevent the inevitable. You can easily tell that Mortal was conceived when the USA started turning into an evil empire again, and is touchingly optimistic about its appeal by leaving room for a continuation.

4/10

Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

Well, I may have resisted it for 45 years, but eventually having a film bestowed with the title of 'one of the greatest ever' becomes too difficult to resist. So, in Scorsese's third collaboration with Robert De Niro, we get the warts-and-all story of 1940s boxing champ Jake LaMotta, shot in black and white both as a decision to avoid glamourising the character, and yet also following the vogue of auteur-driven drama films of the time (Manhattan, Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, to name just a few of the more successful examples).

It certainly doesn't work as a boxing film (the fights pay less attention to realistic technique than even Rocky did), but then it never means to, being only concerned with the rage and self-loathing of an inarticulate man. So he paranoically rails against everybody around him, constantly accusing those closest to him of lying and ending up finally ending up beating his wife. In short, as detestable a prick of a protagonist as you could ever expect to see in a big film, and it's hence not surprising that it just goes around and around in circles, LaMotta learning very little from it all. Still, you have to admire the performances of the leads, as well as the bravery of De Niro and Scorsese for going out on such a limb.

7/10

Ghost Planet (Philip Cook, 2024)

We're now in the rarely fruitful realm of the Kickstarter-funded production, here applied to a sci-fi theme. The micro-budget naturally entails a very TV movie feel with lashings of CGI backdrops and green screens instead of anything solid, apart from miniature vehicles reminiscent of Gerry Anderson's Terrahawks TV series. So the obvious route is to go fully tongue-in-cheek with a post-events narrative that removes any real tension as a group of human travellers use an alien spaceship they found to try to stake their claim to even more alien tech and the untold riches that that would mean. Unsurprisingly, they're not the only ones, so there's a confrontation to deal with.

Ghost Planet cheerfully plunders from any sci-fi source it can think of, including having their employer's synthetic representative with a hidden agenda tag along (Alien et al.), and so there are no original elements at all, apart from the blasé tone. The best that can be said is that it has no pretensions.

4/10

The Moomins and the Comet Chase (Maria Lindberg, 2010)

A 3D stop motion animation cobbled together from a Polish TV series from the 1980s, restored and revoiced by a panoply of estimable Swedish actors for the English-language version, including Max Von Sydow and Stellan Skarsgård, this is a welcome reminder of a time in animation before the twin curses of emotionally autistic anime and lazily excessive use of CGI. Moomintroll is on a quest with his friends to find out if a comet seemingly heading straight for them spells doom, and it may not have much to impart in the way of substance as such, but it does have a wonderfully calming air that all ADHD-afflicted modern children's animation would do well to learn from.

6/10

The Roses (Jay Roach, 2025)

It's not often I bother watching remakes, but the combination of the currently omnipresent Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman in the roles played back in 1989 by Kathleen Tuner and Michael Douglas was too hard to resist. And they do indeed make the film, tearing into each other with gusto as the titular couple whose marriage descends over the years through resentment into outright hatred, mostly brought on by her as the breadwinner of the family, a successful chef, Cumberbatch being the one who raises their children. How it differs from The War of the Roses isn't just in the reversal of the genders, but also by including barbed attacks on the American society they have relocated to, with its Californian new age psychobabble, inability to cope with 'cusswords' and self-subjugation to lawyers. Unfortunately it does go completely over the top in the vitriol content in doing so, but then you couldn't expect much in the way of subtlety from the director of the Austin Powers films, and at least while the force of the disintegration of their relationship beggars belief, the dialogue is sharp and crisply delivered.

6/10

Goodbye June (Kate Winslet, 2025)

The terminal stage of matriarch Helen Mirren's cancer brings her squabbling four children together around her hospital bed, where they try to both come to terms with their impending bereavement and mend bridges between each other. Yes, it's a family drama about a serious matter, and its star actors (including Timothy Spall doing one of his trademark curmudgeonly turns as Mirren's husband in a state of denial) manage to inject enough pathos into the scenes to make it work in that sense. But the first-time director Winslet also wants to have herself a piece of the feelgood Christmas movie/Richard Curtis cake, so sugary icing is always lurking in the background too. Thus it was no surprise that it was released exactly in time for Christmas.

5/10