Rakkaani merikapteeni (Klaus Härö, 2022)

Rather clumsily titled My Sailor, My Love in English, being entirely set in North Ireland with Irish and British actors, this is a family drama with James Cosmo as a retired sea captain, a grumpy widower living alone surrounded by food scraps in a dark, remote house. His daughter persists in trying to get him into a retirement home, and then settles for hiring a part-time housekeeper without telling him first. This has the unexpected consequence that he warms to the new presence in his home and they develop a loving relationship, something that his daughter rails against as it means that he both drifts even further from her and also out of her control of his life.

Now the father turns jovial and the daughter, now having issues with her husband too, is beyond despair, until the father's health becomes a concern and changes the balance again.

This is a very sensitively composed piece, with subtly realised depictions of relationships withing families and fine acting, but it does have one flaw, which is a structural one: it leaves it until the very last segment to properly explain what kind of a man the sea captain really was when his wife died and what the daughter had to go through to leave her so damaged, and feeding this background in more slowly from earlier on would have meant less of a jolt just for the sake of it, and more fully rounded character growth. Still, a small criticism of a film that's a rare anmal in a world where most films just seek to capitalise on cheap twists and histrionics.

7/10

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

Mr. Blobby in the White House has led furious right-minded souls in Hollywood to produce yet another full-frontal attack on him and the parlous state of the USA. He isn't referred to directly in Anderson's updated adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, but it's as clear as day that he and his army of fascist goons are the villains, represented here by a cabal of wealthy and powerful white supremacists calling themselves The Christmas Adventurers Club, and Sean Penn playing a racist military officer charged with hunting down and exterminating not just left-wing terrorists, but immigrants in general.

The underground resistance may employ excessive violence in its actions, but we see most of it through the filter of Leonardo DiCaprio's character, a dope and alcohol-frazzled wreck of a man who used to make pyrotechnic diversions for the revolutionaries and now just lives in hiding with his teenage daughter. Of course the quiet life can't last, as the MAGA-analogues step up their actions to wipe out anyone who doesn't pass their 'true American' criteria, and that means native Americans fail their tests too. The satire therein may be crude, but it is vicariously gratifying.

So, they come after DiCaprio and his daughter, and he stumbles and bumbles on in a blind panic to get her back after she flees from Penn's brutal villain. It does go on for far too long to make its point, but at least the one thing you expect American filmmakers to be good at, i.e. relentless car chases, are handled more interestingly than usual, and there is a political and emotional point to the whole enterprise in the current sick climate.

7/10

Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho, 2025)

It's quite apparent that Bong Joon Ho lost his sense of direction in the six years fater the excellent Parasite, and now is just content to entertain. Mickey 17 is a sci-fi stab at doing so, with Robert Pattinson an 'expendable' charged with all the most dangerous jobs in the attempt of a politician to colonise an alien planet. He gets all the worst missions because he can be recreated every time he dies, with his memories backed up, and duly proceeds to die 16 times before the cycle is broken.

The Film can't quite settle in one mode, and that's a virtue in the sense that it doesn't become fully predictable, but going from slapstick black comedy to sci-fi thriller, political satire and back again within minutes, but this is also due to directorial aimlessness. Mark Ruffalo, as the relentlessly self-aggrandising dictatorial leader of the mission, is also a particularly thinly-veiled parody of the current U.S. President, and I'm no longer sure if every work of fiction needs its own Trump as the villain you can't wait to see die.

5/10

The Mandalorian and Grogu (Jon Favreau, 2026)

The TV series was rather good and popular, so let's make more money by dragging the punters to the cinemas. Don't worry about having a plot, just chuck lots of FX at them and they'll still lap it up.

Now the duo are rescuing a Hutt from enforced cage fighting servitude. Somehow this is stretched out to more than two hours. It makes The Rise of  Skywalker look meaningful.

4/10

In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Wim Wenders, 1993)

Faraway, So Close! picks up from where Wings of Desire left off six years earlier, with Cassiel, the angel who'd decided against giving up his wings, now forced to do so to rescue a girl falling from a balcony. He has tremendous difficulty adjusting to the limitations of life as a human, and then falls in with a gangster to boot.

All the main characters from the 1987 film show up, including Peter Falk with another cameo as himself, and likewise Lou Reed and Mikhail Gorbachev. Nastassja Kinski and Willem Dafoe as otherworldly observers are given one ponderous speech after another to deliver about time, human perception and purpose.

Wenders also wants to use the fact that the Wall has fallen since the first film to say something meaningful, but clearly doesn't know what that is, and having overtly succumbed to Christianity in the interim has also muddled his mind, since it's now stuffed in as part of the message at every possible opportunity. The strong supporting cast and sprinkles of humour are compensations, but it's overlong, totally unfocussed and very reliant on continued goodwill accrued by its masterpiece of a predecessor, which it adds nothing to in terms of substance.

5/10

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (BenDavid Grabinski, 2026)

This one requires tolerance of two Vince Vaughns, because a time travel MacGuffin sends one from six months in the future back to the present to correct the mistakes of his current gangster self. Of course that means it's a comedy, and with the gangster theme also extremely violent, to the point of taking anything that the John Wick films get away with for granted. The baseline is thus firmly in the region of The Hangover franchise, but the sci-fi twist adds a lot and playing around with any other stock elements of various genres is genuinely entertaining.

6/10

45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

Those 45 years being how long Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay have been married, and are about to celebrate their wedding anniversary until she discovers that he lost a German partner in an accident years before they met, and would probably have married her first instead. She accordingly becomes fixated on the idea that their whole marriage has been a sham of sorts, unable to process what she's learnt, in an alarmingly adolescent way.

Rampling has always specialised in unsympathetic characters, and this is no exception. The performances by the couple are strong and very true to life, but dramatically it's all as flat as the Norfolk Broads that they live in.

6/10