Pikku Siperia (Dome Karukoski, 2025)

After an opening sequence skipping through billions of years of cosmic history, reminiscent of the prologue to Adaptation, We land in a village in present-day Finnish Northern Karelia in the middle of winter, with eccentric locals going about their daily business. then a small meteorite crashes through a man's car roof and stirs up the populace. There is much speculation about its commercial value to the depressed community, as well as about its possibly divine provenance, preoccupying the village vicar most of all in the midst of his crisis of faith.

So far, so good, roughly in the manner of Fargo, but when it follows that superlative film by turning into a crime thriller, with crooks after the meteorite, Little Siberia quickly loses its footing on the omnipresent ice, and both tone and purpose go out of the window along with that. A pity, because the initial set-up promised a lot more.

5/10

The Electric State (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2025)

Direct enough massive MCU superhero blockbusters, and you will be give $320 million to chuck at the screen in the hope that some of it sticks. So this is the Russo brothers adapting an acclaimed graphic novel about an alternative mid-1990s where a war took place between mankind and their sentient robot servants a little earlier, leaving the robots imprisoned on a reservation in New Mexico and the human populace, almost without exception, slavishly hooked on virtual reality and the actual world experienced only through their personal drones. A feisty young heroine sets out across the country with a bot that carries fragments of the conciousness of her lost brother, whom she hopes to find with the bot's aid. They're pursued by a ruthless robot hunter and joined by a black marketeer who has his own bot partner.

The bulk of the budget then goes on FX, particularly on animating the colourful cast of robots they meet on the journey and which join forces with them to fight the tech billionaire mastermind behind the whole sorry state of the world. It does manage to amuse at times between the protracted action sequences, but being squarely for young audiences, it can't delve too deeply into satirical dissection of the relentless march of society towards its own demise, following the will-o'-the-wisp of the promise of a future utopia of endless consumerist leisure.

Critics largely hated it, but it would probably have escaped most of the scathing reviews if only it hadn't spent so much time and money on big setpieces and just a little more on ideas with substance.

4/10

Sisu (Jalmari Helander, 2022)

The text right at the start explaining that the Finnish word 'sisu' is untranslatable does not bode well for what's to come (this is an oft-stated Finnish fallacy, 'guts' or 'determination' are quite adequate translations). In any case, the protagonist if meant to be the embodiment of it, a one-man army prospecting for gold in the wilds of Lapland in 1944 with the retreating German army all around. He comes up against a German unit who try to rob him of his gold, so he summarily kills the lot of them. Then another unit comes after him, led by an off-the-shelf cartoonishly brutal Nazi officer, and more extreme violence ensues.

It is as efficiently scripted as its hero is single-minded and taciturn, but that doesn't excuse the tiresome ludicrosity of it action sequences, scant regard for historical accuracy and lack of any point at all.

4/10

He ovat paenneet (Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää, 2014)

A young man who went AWOL from his national military service is sent to a centre for problem youths to carry out his national service as civil service instead. There he's befriended by a troubled girl who's determined to get out and they set out across the country in a stolen car, on a quest for what she promises is buried treasure. As in every road movie, there are numerous twists and turns along the way, including encounters with many odd characters, but unlike in most, there are constant surrealistic interludes with the quality of mystical visions and large gaps in the narrative which leave the viewer with the task of trying to piece together what might have happened between scenes. This would be justifiable, but only if there were enough of a promise of a concrete reward for the effort demanded. This They Have Escaped ultimately fails to deliver, stringing you along with its sheer weirdness, a hotchpotch of thriller, arthouse drama, and horror.

4/10 

Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger (Chris Foggin, 2025)

The first part did nicely, being mostly fact-based about a very real topical issue and a feelgood comedy at the same time, with decent actors. So of course there was going to be a sequel, with Rory Kinnear's crusader now taking on the ogres of the loathsome payday loan companies driving people to destitution with their astronomical interest rates and other criminal practices. We know he'll win, so exactly as last time around, the pleasure isn't in the plot, just in the vicarious satisfaction of seeing the little guy stick it to the crooks, which is needed quite badly in the current global climate.

6/10

Comment je suis devenu super-héros (Douglas Attal, 2020)

How I Became a Superhero does have one newish take on the flagging genre, in that superpowers are not just existent in some individuals, but that stupid teens in particular are desperate to acquire ones of their own. This means that the villain is a gang boss who abducts people with powers to tap them for their blood and turn it into a street drug. After that, though, it's strictly run of the mill fare, two cops tracking the bad guys down with the help of retired superheroes. Its stabs at a comic tone fall pretty flat too.

4/10

Treasure (Julia von Heinz, 2024)

 

A New York jounalist takes her father, a Holocaust survivor, back to Poland to try to dissect what happened 50 years earlier. She insists on getting to the bottom of it and he  tries constantly stave it off.

It's a new approach to the subject of the mass genocide, especially by having a comic tone until the closing stages, but is hindered by the lead actress's pointlessly teenage behaviour and really having nothing of import to say. Worthy but beige, just like its TV movie presentation.

5/10

Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016)

Two Texan brothers, one up to his neck in debt and the other just a thrill-seeking loose cannon, embark on a spree of bank robberies across their home state. You know from the very start, with the drawn-out shots of miles and miles of featureless plains and Jeff Bridges as a wise old buzzard of a lawman on their tail, nearing retirement, that things will not turn out well for them. This is the America of Badlands and No Country for Old Men, all hicks with guns, endless roads and dead-end small towns with no prospects.

Still, knowing what the outcome will be, doesn't make it a pointless exercise at all. It's packed with sparse but pithy dialogue, the action scenes are efficiently shot and it doesn't resort to too many cliches in terms of plot turns. It also helpfully reminds you again, if any reminder were needed, not to go to Texas.

6/10

Empire of Light (Sam Mendes, 2022)

Most critics did not particularly like this, simplistically misinterpreting it as yet another paean to the magic of cinema à la Cinema Paradiso. Yes, it revolves around a seaside cinema and its staff, and wonderful classic films are there in the background, but it's really about mental illness, misogyny and racism. The backdrop is Thatcher's Britain in 1981, riven with economic depression and race riots. The peerless Olivia Colman plays the duty manager at a Margate cinema, on lithium following a schizophrenic breakdown and constantly dragged in by her sleazy boss for illicit sex in his office. When a sensitive younger black man joins the staff, they become friends and eventually lovers. But given toxic atmosphere of the era and her mental fragility, there are dark clouds on the horizon.

The film does tail off to some extent in its closing part, as unwilling to acknowledge a tidy ending as many great works are wont to do, but there are some genuinely moving moments along the way, and Colman's performance in particular is quite remarkable, as is the luminous photography of the incomparable Roger Deakins.

7/10

Nr. 24 (John Andreas Andersen, 2024)

Of all the resistance movements in World War II, cinema has amply covered the French one, but there is still some room for stories from other countries to be told, as long as they don't play around with facts for effect and yet work as impactful drama. Number 24 ticks both these boxes in relating the story of Gunnar Sønsteby, Norway's most decorated fighter against the German occupation, told by the man himself in extreme old age before an audience of schoolchildren from his home town. The bulk of the film is a flashback to his younger self, leading a group of saboteurs, who eventually end up killing the most prominent Nazi collaborators too. The story is told tautly and without undue dwelling on action or attempts to rouse passions, and the interruptions to the narrative by students from the audience asking naive questions about what Sønsteby personally did and whether it was justified form a neat contrast to the harsh reality of what life was in the war. It would be hard to cover the topic in a more measured and sensitive way than this.

7/10

65 (Scott Beck & Bryan Woods, 2023)

That's 65 million years ago, and an stronaut from another planet with a cargo of passengers in cryogenic suspension crashes on an unknown planet, which we are promptly told with a caption is actually Earth in the past. Only one of the passengers has survived, a truculent girl, and the pilot takes this as reason to persevere to try to get to the escape vessel that crashed some distance away. This means making their way through a primordial jungle full of dinosaurs out to eat them.

That's all there is in terms of plot, and there isn't much in the way of dialogue beyond the monosyllabic either. Adam Driver is utterly wasted in the role, apparently having opted for the route of a quality actor doing a simple-minded sci-fi flick just as Adrien Brody did with Predators. How the protagonists are near-future American humans in our Cretaceous period in their speech, mannerisms, technology and even dress isn't explained in the slightest, nor does the film bother with any other attempts at cohesiveness or logic either. Only the utterly preposterous premise, the conjoined hope of it being played out to some meaningful surprise finale and the presence of Driver made me persist to the end. I wouldn't recommend that anyone else bothers.

4/10

A Haunting in Venice (Kenneth Branagh, 2023)

Branagh's third outing as Hercule Poirot shifts Agatha Christie's lesser-known source novel Hallowe'en Party to the telegenic setting of Venice, as the jetsetters' other popular choices of the Orient Express and Nile have already been used, and sees the detective coaxed out of self-imposed retirement by a crime novelist acquaintance to investigate a local 'unsolvable' mystery. This involves the past death of the daughter of a former opera singer at her huge palazzo, a seance there on Halloween and the usual array of guests with chequered backstories to suspect once murders inevitably start occurring. Nothing new so far then, but playing with the eerie possibility that the house is actually haunted, and the fresh challenge presented by that to Poirot's analytical mind, does add a nice twist.

Diverting, but Branagh really should start considering handing the directorial reins to someone else. The pacing is uneven and the logic of the plot has more cracks in it than the walls of the palazzo.

6/10

Alien: Romulus (Fede Álvarez, 2024)

In space, no one can hear you yawn. Not that horror hack director Álvarez pays any heed to this in the seventh film of the Alien franchise, which features even more screaming and running around than ever before. It's chronologically set between the iconic first and second films, exploiting the gap in the timeline so that its young band of protagonists, boarding an abandoned space station to escape the shackles of their company contract as indentured miners on a remote colony planet, can be blissfully unaware of the existence of any alien threat and duly walk straight into mortal danger.

As also is customary these days, the reliance on sensory overbombardment by gore and CGI soon becomes a burden too, so it's interesting to note that the most interesting detail and actorly performance is that of the disembodied head of an android identical to Ash, the covert antagonist of the first film, replicating the likeness of the late actor Ian Holm with his family's blessing and, unlike the botched recent digital recreations of the appearances of key actors from the first Star Wars film, avoids taking us into the uncanny valley too, although being not quite human in the first place must help.

Scott and Cameron did both give the film their stamp of approval, but that's no surprise either, as rather than violating their works, it emphasises their quality even further.

If only the saga would end there, but not only is an Earth-bound TV series is the works, but even Scott, at 87, is unwisely contemplating one more go.

5/10