The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy, 1985)

A man wakes up in his house in New Zealand, wanders out and finds no sign of life anywhere, just the entire city like the Marie Celeste, with nothing but half-finished meals and empty cars, and only white noise on the TV, radio or at the end of the phone. Unsurprisingly, he concludes that's he's the only person left in the world and has a spree for a while, fairly much the usual kind seen in post-apocalyptic films, so moving into a posh house, going on a consumerist rampage through shops, drinking champagne for breakfast and so on. Where this does diverge from the genre norm is that he then also declares himself ruler of the world, addressing imaginary adoring multitudes from a balcony, and rails against religion, defying God to show himself.

Of course this alone can't sustain the running length, so two other living people are introduced, a man and a woman, leading to tensions between all of them in a deliberate evocation of Sartre's vision of hell. Then there's a quasi-scientific layer, as the first character, whowas involved in the experiment that caused the extinction-level event, seeks to rectify the situation.

A shoestring budget like this one for a sci-fi film is utterly dependent on a big idea, and it does its best to work with what it has, but does falter in the end due to not having a clear plan, taking the escape route of the open end without any resolution. Still, if only its modern Hollywood counterparts with megabudgets would try even half as hard.

6/10

The Sheep Detectives (Kyle Balda, 2026)

When presented with the German internationally popular source novel, the reductionist approach to the conundrum of what to do with a whodunnit where clever sheep are the detectives would have been to just turn it into a cutesy story with talking animals. Thankfully, that temptation has been avoided.

Hugh Jackman is a reclusive shepherd reading murder mysteries to his flock outside a picturebook English village, until one morning he's found poisoned. So his sheep do take it on themselves to investigate, although they haven't ever even been exposed properly to the concept of death. The bedtime stories that their benevolent master has told them have simply led them to believe that only people in murder mystery books die, and they're also convinced that sheep turn into clouds when their time is up. But the quest the most intrepid of them undertake to discover the truth of what happened then also brings many more lessons about the nature of reality, some of these terrifying.

Although the plot is very much yet another of those currently faddish Agatha Christie by-the-numbers affairs, and the fact that it's still fundamentally a film to take your kids to means that the denouement has to both be sugary and contain a big life lesson, the artfully animated sheep (voiced by the likes of Bryan Cranston and Patrick Stewart) are fully-realised characters and there are many truly perspicacious and hilarious moments too. So, to recap, not just another loud kids' film dependent on CGI and relentless action sequences, but something far more rewarding, akin to Paddington 2.

7/10

The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan, 2024)

An accountant's life is told backwards from the moment of his death in three acts. No cause for alarm, it's not a remake of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but an adaptation of a Stephen King short story, albeit that even that mere precis forebodes the kind of anodynely vague messages about the meaning of life that Hollywood is so fond of (cf. the ridiculous success of Everything Everywhere All at Once). And so it proves. The three acts are linked together by the presence of the titular character at different ages and the same repeated aphorisms coming from the mouths of various personae. Its beginning, the moment of Chuck's death, is also apparently the end of the universe, as he is later/earlier made out to be the only thing that truly exists. So, the film sells masturbatory solipsism in the guise of philosophical profundity. Which is a pity, because it does also contain a lot of wonderful scenes, particularly the one with Tom Hiddleston as Chuck dancing his socks off, and some rather wasted supporting talents, such as Chiwetel Ejiofor. But the overall experience is frustrating, like panning for gold and only finding flecks after so much toil.

5/10

Blue Beetle (Ángel Manuel Soto, 2023)

Having milked their three bankable characters, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman to death, the DCEU continues to dredge the bottom of the barrel. Regardless of every tolerable product derived from this endeavour, namely The Flash, the second Suicide Squad film and Birds of Prey, there have been more noisy, derivative and pointless failings, such as Black Adam and the braces of Aquaman and Shazam films. Blue Beetle is very much in this category, only adding a tad more humour, a supportive family for the titular hero and making the hero a Mexican American too, just to capture another previously mostly untouched audience demographic. The character itself is a transparent Iron Man copy, the mystical origins of his armour neatly obviating the need for any quasi-science. Then there's the regulation unfeasibly villainous corporation after the suit and a tailormade identically-powered adversary to fight. That's all you need to know.

4/10

Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022)

At first there are only flashes of images and fragments of handheld video, and after a while, there's a creeping worry that there won't be much else. But then dialogue and story do make their entrance, and it's a young girl on holiday in Turkey with her dad, clearly some decades ago. Deliberately protracted and static shots still persist, and it becomes apparent that this and the use of colour in each frame are highly significant: these are just scattered recollections of a brief period that still matters to the adult recalling it, everything seen from the viewpoint of a child, too young to grasp her dad's underlying depression.

The director could have provided an earlier signal that what the viewer is about to witness is completely impressionistic, but persisting with it is worthwhile in that it provides something meaningful and real without the usual spoon-feeding. You get to live the memory instead.

7/10

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson, 2023)

The estimable Jeffrey Wright plays a literature professor whose highbrow novels aren't selling, sent on leave by his college for challenging his students' notions of political correctness. He duly goes to visit his family back in Boston.

It should be stated at this point that, as per the USA's one-drop rule, he's considered to be black, and his frustrations are largely due to the white-dominated publishing world only wanting black literature to conform to stereotypes of foul-mouthed rappers, gangstas with guns and drugs in the hood or proud, downtrodden individuals nobly suffering oppression, so that it sells to the majority white readership. Or, as he refers to it, 'black trauma porn'. So he sets out to write the very worst example of that genre for the purposes of ridiculing and undermining it, and is then dismayed when it's just taken at face value and becomes hugely popular instead.

What may strike non-American viewers as particularly surprising is finding an American film that combines a such subtle sense of ironic satire with a serious message. It doesn't consistently get the balance right, having to also somewhat needlessly incorporate the issues of other characters, mainly his mother with dementia, his intelligent-seeming new girlfriend and his reckless gay brother, but the point still gets through in the end, assuming that end isn't yet another fictional layer.

7/10

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Hettie Macdonald, 2023)

Rachel Joyce did write the best-selling novel in 2012, but the very thematically similar The Last Bus pipped the film adaptation of this one to the screen. Both revolve wholly around an elderly man going on a solo quest across the country to fulfil a promise and gain redemption. Both tragically lost a son years before and cannot totally avoid people on their way, their journeys going viral and then becoming no longer quite their own, with multitudes giving them assistance towards their respective goals. The two men are even played by go-to national treasures for hangdog, downtrodden elderly men roles, here Jim Broadbent as opposed Timothy Spall in the other film. The only significant differences are that Spall's character was carrying his wife's ashes, whereas the titular Fry's wife is very much alive and well and frustrated at her husband's loopy conviction that his trek will somehow cure the cancer of a dying former colleague at the end of the voyage, and that Fry's route is far more scenic, with secluded country lanes and small historic towns.

Unsurprisingly, it falls prey to sentimentality and could have done without all the flashbacks to past events to gradually explain the reaons for Fry's sense of guilt, which really break the atmosphere and flow of the story. Broadbent and Penelope Wilton as the Frys do their best, as usual, to compensate for these shortcomings.

6/10