Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024)

Leigh, now in his eighties, still won't stop ploughing the same furrow of depicting complex, flawed characters struggling to deal with the real world, but in reuniting with Marianne Jean-Baptiste nearly 30 years after Secrets & Lies, he may have gone a step too far with the personality defects. Jean-Baptiste's Pansy is quite possibly the most misanthropic, paranoid, self-pitying, self-centred, exploitative and verbally abusive creation in the history of cinema. All she does for the length of the film is invent slights against her and then lay into anyone unfortunate enough to be around her. It's a great performance by the actress, and certainly works on a ludicrous level of that kind of monstrosity in the age of Trump, but is just too OTT to also work as a study of self-harming depression, which may well have been Leigh's intent as well. You can't always have your cake and eat it.

6/10

Der Tiger (Dennis Gansel, 2025)

80 years after the end of WWII and it appears we're finally ready to have action films that have German soldiers as the protagonists. But it's not that cut and dried: just like in Das Boot back in 1981, the safest way to go is still to have them cocooned safely away from where the actual atrocities towards civilians take place, this time inside a tank on a solo mission to bring back a single officer with secret documents from deep behind enemy lines.

So, for a good long while it's a standard actioner, and a pretty efficient one, with the crew negotiating hazard after hazard, interspersed with them questioning the purpose of it all and whether there'll be anything left to go back home to. This places The Tank above most of its Hollywood equivalents, so it's unfortunate that it goes off its tracks in the end sequence, which dismantles everything that has transpired before it with half-baked metaphysical aspirations.

6/10

War Machine (Patrick Hughes, 2026)

The plot, which won't have taken a whole napkin to write down on, is the off-the-shelf one of gung-ho U.S. squaddies getting hunted down by an unstoppable killer, this time an alien machine. There's the Rambo-style hero with mental issues, his black mate who doesn't get to play much of a  part beyond reassuring the audience that the hero isn't racist, and of course the speccy one. It's basically Aliens or Predator without the intellect of even the latter, as the purpose of the killer is not even implied. So, a framework just for panic and lashings of explosions. To be fair, it delivers this pretty efficiently. Just don't go expecting that it will ever suggest that the title actually refers to the one again globally invasive USA instead of the killer robot, because any kind of subtlety would really get in the way of the mayhem.

5/10

Afterlight (Alison Kohlhardt & Andrew McGee, 2025)

This purports to be an anthology film, but its five parts have no connecting thread at all, except for vaguely being classifiable as dystopian sci-fi. The first part, after which the whole is titled, at least has a decent stab at a Black Mirror-derivative plausible near-future cautionary tale, with a woman slavishly dependent on her smart lenses that provide her with informative links and prompts generated by everything she observes becoming a victim of extortion by her tech. But the other stories are utterly pointless: a tedious story about a war between alien worlds, an aimless post-apocalyptic interlude, something about a woman in yet another future dystopia ruled by corporations alone, and then a very short rip-off of the end sequence of 2001. The makers obviously want to get the financing for a TV series, failed to do so, and thus opted to lump all their odds and ends into one bag and called it a single film.

3/10

Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2008)

Well, I've avoided this for nearly two decades since its release, armed with the well-founded belief that anything involving the 'Frat Pack' will be squarely aimed at the lowest-brow common denominators of humour, such as farts. Of course all countries have their own localised equivalents, but none have the massive backing of the Hollywood machine or universal power of American celebrities behind them.

So it was with some wariness that I approached this, and was pleasantly surprised at an actual innovation at the start: three false beginnings before the standard opening credits, each a trailer for a terrible film in a different genre: Ben Stiller in the latest instalment of an action hero franchise, Jack Black in a comedy about a fat family that, yes, just farts, and Robert Downey Jr. in a blindingly obviously Oscar bait drama.

Then on to the actual film, and all three are ficionalised primadonna versions of themselves, shooting a Platoon rip-off Vietnam war film, which naturally soon goes horribly wrong and they find themselves in a real struggle to survive. This is a pity, particularly because Downey Jr.'s character's ludicrously OTT method acting has to be pushed aside by the demands of turning it all into just another gross-out action comedy. Oh well, marks for at least having tried.

6/10

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