Predator: Badlands (Dan Trachtenberg, 2025)

Still the Predator franchise grinds on, its sixth instalment spurred on by the critical plaudits the last non-animated one, i.e. the fifth, received just for changing the setting to 18th-century North America and the protagonists to Comanches, not because the antagonist was any more interesting than the super-efficient killer aliens of the previous rounds. Here, the novelty value is just in having the story from the killer alien's perspective instead, out to gain glory by killing an unkillable beast on a planet full of other lethal natural obstacles. Of course, the whole film can't just be the hunter roaring and chopping, so he finds a human-facsimile android, or 'synth', with her legs missing who becomes his 'tool' to find the prey and engages him in gabby conversation to provide us with some counterbalance to the grim hunting. The said prey is eventually found, and then so are the protagonists, by another party of synths sent to bring back the prey, who are then shown as the real antagonists. 

So, a sci-fi action film with no actual humans in it, and I'll bet the makers were ever so pleased with themselves for having come up with that idea. After that and naturally lots of megaviolence, there isn't too much else here to chew on, though, apart from the explicit establishment of the Predatorverse as being the same as the Alienverse (which the two feeble Alien vs. Predator films tried to set up around 20 years ago), with the nefarious Weyland-Yutani corporation of the latter scheming away in the background.

5/10

Du bist nicht allein (Bernd Böhlich, 2007)

Made 17 years after the fall of the Wall, You Are Not Alone shows East Berlin still in a parlous state through a bunch of unemployed or drifting characters. They spend money they don't have, get enraged at the authorities about their lack of opportunities, or take on utterly pointless jobs. Their situations are treated with some humour, but really no more than in any Mike Leigh production, so it stands more as a snapshot of what happened when people used to an authoritarian system were left to their own devices without orders or support, and not a fully-rounded piece of drama as such.

5/10

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