These Final Hours (Zak Hilditch, 2013)

Australian filmmakers have clearly been somewhat fixated since Mad Max with the notion that when the end of the world comes, their country will be the last to go, and this film is unequivocal about its mission from the very first lines and shots. Of course this goes even further back, to Nevil Shute's 1957 novel On the Beach and its subsequent Hollywood screen adaptation, but there the armageddon was manmade, whereas here it's an asteroid hitting the other side of the globe that starts the countdown to doom.

So, a wastrel of a man in Perth leaves his pregnant gorlfriend, heading for an end-of-the-world party, and his derailed by deciding to rescue a young girl from being raped as society turns to total anarchy and barbarism, as tends to happen in virtually all apocalypse scenarios. The absolute certainty that there will be no deliverance does set this apart from others in its genre, and so does the concomitant lack of a purpose to any action at all, but saying that the final scene (unsurprisingly, on a beach) was lifted three years later by Rogue One: A Star Wars Story isn't giving the game away in the slightest.

6/10

Project Power (Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, 2020)

To misquote Tina Turner, "We don't need more superheroes". Project Power tries to get around this challenge by making superpowers the selling point of an illegal drug that may give the person taking it five minutes of an unpredictable type of power, or just kill them instantly. In this scenario, the drug barons are not just out to make money, but to use their customers as subjects in de facto clandestine unregulated clinical trials aimed at creating the 'next stage of human evolution'. So, we have a mishmash of the X-Men, supersoldiers à la Captain America, and various other derivatives of the Human Torch, the Hulk, the Invisible Man, Wolverine and so on. Plenty of FX and breakneck pagga, of course, and an off-the-shelf plot to hang it on, with the team of heroes composed of a father looking for his lost daughter by means fair or foul, the last good cop left in New Orleans and a teenage dealer with a sick mum.

So, it's wholly unsurprising that the end product is not essential viewing. It does have solid leads, gets through its countless action scenes efficiently and is adequately leavened with humour, but that's the least you'd expect.

5/10

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024)

Apparently Charlize Theron's hardnut character from Mad Max: Fury Road needed a prequel backstory of her own, and the decision to give her one had nothing at all to do with the hefty profits made by the 2015 film. So, the same formula is judged fit for purpose too, meaning non-stop road battles through the Outback with splatterings of ultraviolence and gallows humour. Oh, and since it's a prequel, Anya Taylor-Joy takes over as a younger Furiosa, for what it's worth. The dialogue, when you can actually hear it above the engine noise and explosions, is as sparse and matter-of-fact as required, apart from the verbose pronouncements of Chris Hemsworth's self-styled Messiah warlord to his followers.When he declares to Furiosa that "there is no hope", this sums up the futility of the whole overlong exercise quite nicely. Of course the relentless clashes between cars are as impressively choreographed as ever, and there's some kind of stab at having a wider messages, namely institutionalised misogyny, religious fanaticism and disregard for maintaining the planet, but these are decisively drowned out by the imperative to never stop piling on more and more repetitively chaotic action.

Time to pull out the spark plug.

5/10

Project Hail Mary (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, 2026)

So, how do you make a winning formula in the sci-fi genre? First, take the plot of 2007's Sunshine, i.e. in the near future, the sun inexplicably begins dying. Second, throw in a daring space mission to a distant star with a stab at hard science, to emulate 2001. Finally, add an encounter with an alien that turns out to be benevolent and cute when a relationship with it is formed, so that the E.T. element is in place too. Oh, and have the lonely protagonist played by Ryan Gosling to ensure that audiences of both genders flock in.

If that summary sounds too dismissive, it's also a pleasant surprise that all the borrowed elements do gel and even though the running time is stretched to breaking point and the pseudoscience discards credibility pretty early on, the whole isn't a disaster by any means.

6/10

Ladies First (Thea Sharrock, 2026)

A remake of the French Je ne suis pas un homme facile, Sacha Baron Cohen plays a dyed-in-the-wool male chauvinist in an advertising agency and Rosamund Pike his put-upon employee. He bangs his head and wakes up in a society where all the gender roles have been reversed. If this sounds familiar, it's basically the Two Ronnies' The Worm that Turned from 1980, expanded to feature length and with added gender-swiched modernisms such as 'womansplaining'. Observing Baron Cohen struggle to cope with now being an underling who has to dolly himself up to curry the favour of his bosses is fun for a while, but the concept is badly flawed from the outset by just turning one unrealistically prejudiced society into another. The cast of umerous British acting heavyweights relishing being silly keeps you watching, but it isn't much more subtle than the Two Ronnies' story and no surprise that despite the London setting, the script and production are completely Hollywood products. It could easily have been cast with Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Aniston in the lead roles instead, if that isn't enough of a warning.

4/10

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