Heads of State (Ilya Naishuller, 2025)

John Cena and Idris Elba respectively play the U.S. President and British Prime Minister, baling out of Air Force One as it's attacked by terrorists of some ilk over Belarus. They then have to get over their bickering enough to avoid further attempts to kill them and get to the NATO summit they were supposed to be attending in Trieste.

It's basically a mismatched buddy comedy, with dollops upon dollops of ludicrous action eventually almost suffocating the film's strong suit, Cena's action film star turned gung-ho POTUS (a nod to Schwarzenegger's stint as Governor of California there) bouncing off Elba's pragmatist who has actual life experience. So, safely playing to national stereotypes, albeit so much from a Hollywood angle that Britain is just Buckingham Palace and fish and chips, and Elba even says 'diaper' at one point. While well choreographed, as most things are these days, the action does get tiresome, but it's hard to dislike the duo, who are clearly enjoying themselves immensely, and you can forgive its wanton stupidity because of that.

6/10

Nuestros Tiempos (Chava Cartas, 2025)

Once again in the land that time will never forget, the time travel genre. This time, a physicist couple in the Mexico of 1966 construct a machine that takes them to the modern day and while at first it's only the technological differences they find baffling, soon the changes in society become a bigger issue for them to contend with. This is particularly to do with the changed status of women, which threatens to split the couple as while he just wants to get back home, she can no longer face it.

So, Our Times does try to put a new spin on the oft-visited theme. But it's a romance at heart with a modish sci-fi element, rather than a serious cogitation on causality, which would be the modern norm for the genre. In the end, the social comment angle wears thin too.

5/10

The Flash (Andy Muschietti, 2023)

So, in their attempt to keep up with Marvel, having only three heroes most people have heard of, the DCEU fall back on The Flash, who can...run incredibly fast. This apparently means he can reach such a velocity that he can breach the barrier between alternate universes and try to undo the death of his mother. Naturally the butterfly effect of trying to alter time comes into play, and whatever he or his younger version in the alternate universe try to do to change events is cancelled by the halfheartedly explained immutable timeline, or somesuch.

To the film's credit, it is made clear that the hero hasn't got a clue about consequences either, and despite the usual overabundance of digitally-animated action and fight sequences, it is actually quite good fun, bringing together multiple versions of Batman from over the years to assist the hero (principally Michael Keaton reprising an older Batman from Tim Burton's films) and incorporating numerous other nods to genre fans.

But they shouldn't take this as the way to go in the DCEU. Marvel have already tried quite a few times, and it's not a pony with many tricks.

6/10

28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007)

Horror franchises where the first part had something new to offer are more unkillable than zombies, so more zombies is what we get. The US military has taken over Britain, presuming that the rage virus has finally been eradicated, except of course there'd be no film without it. Cue large chunks of London being laid to waste and mass slaughter of innocents, so the real enemy is actually 'shoot first' American foreign policy, which funnily enough makes more sense now than it did when the film was released in 2007. The gruesome action is, of course, relentless, so chaotically shot that anything could be happening for all you know, and there's virtually no attention paid to the geography of the city, location scouting apparently having been done by a particularly clueless American tourist with a checklist of landmarks. It is still a riveting ride, but that's the basic minimum you could expect, and it depressingly closes on a final shot promising a worldwide continuation of the menace, and therefore another sequel.

4/10

The Old Guard 2 (Victoria Mahoney, 2025)

How prescient Lulu's 1969 Eurovision winner, Boom-Bang-a-Bang was, when it comes to dealing with action film sequels. Because that's what so many of them do, just add more booms and bangs to their predecessors. The Old Guard was a product that really didn't deserve a continuation, being a pot of ripped-off ideas, mainly from Highlander, but apparently that wasn't enough to stand in the way of milking a cash cow for more. So, Charlize Theron and her crew of immortals must foil the plot of the first ever immortal to kill them all, and this naturally means lots and lots of gunplay and the standard unfeasible martial arts. Sure, the action sequences are competently constructed, but take them away and there's really nothing left.

4/10