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

Verdens Verste Menneske (Joachim Trier, 2021)

The theme of a young woman without a sense of vocational or emotional purpose is becoming a well-weathered trope, noticeably in affluent, egalitarian countries such as Norway, where appositely The Worst Person in the World is set. So the central character, Julie, flits aimlessly from studying one subject to another and from one relationship to the next, until settling down with a satirical comic artist fifteen years older than her, who warns her that she may still come to change her goals. And so it proves before long, a flirtation with someone closer to her personality turning into yet another relationship.

It is nominally a romcom, but one without much in the way of warmth or comedy, so while it does succinctly reflect many truths about relationships, overall it isn't much more focused than its protagonist, not that this seems to have bothered most critics or international awards juries.

6/10

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

Wake Up Dead Man Rian Johnson, 2025)

Daniel Craig left one franchise with Bond, and has now become entrenched in another in the role of Poirotesque detective Benoit Blanc, this time taking on the case of the murder of a fire-and-brimstone preacher at a New England smalltown church. Naturally the puzzle doesn't prove as straightforward to solve as it first appears, and the initial suspect, Judd, an dealistic young priest who just arrived at the church and found hmself immediately at loggerheads with his hate-filled predecessor, can be dismissed from the list of suspects without too much analysis. Less so when it comes to the congregation, all of whom, in typical Agatha Christie style (director Johnson always explicitly acknowledges the debt to her stories) have clouded motives.

It's a lot do do with the conflict between the importance of religious faith and logic, embodied by Judd and Blanc, and the exchanges between them are really the most interesting element of an overlong film. There are some inconsistencies in the plot which really should have been avoided, especially given the genre, but at least Craig in particular is clearly having fun, and so you can expect a fourth instalment to get the green light posthaste.

6/10

Torden (André Øvredal, 2020)

Apparently the Norwegians just can't keep their fingers off the Norse gods as a vehicle for doing fantasy to compete with the Hollywood mega-budget appropriation of Thor at al. for superheroics. This does have a different take on the mythology, in that an locally-born American backpacker in the fjords can't understand what keeps on happening to him when he's provoked, shooting off lightning in all directions and developing worse and worse burns on his body. But you do know pretty early on where it's going, and the involvement of a sympathetic psychiatrist and policeman helping him to evade the authorities, who are figureheaded by an improbably Asian U.S. government agent, doesn't manage to prevent the inevitable. You can easily tell that Mortal was conceived when the USA started turning into an evil empire again, and is touchingly optimistic about its appeal by leaving room for a continuation.

4/10

Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

Well, I may have resisted it for 45 years, but eventually having a film bestowed with the title of 'one of the greatest ever' becomes too difficult to resist. So, in Scorsese's third collaboration with Robert De Niro, we get the warts-and-all story of 1940s boxing champ Jake LaMotta, shot in black and white both as a decision to avoid glamourising the character, and yet also following the vogue of auteur-driven drama films of the time (Manhattan, Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, to name just a few of the more successful examples).

It certainly doesn't work as a boxing film (the fights pay less attention to realistic technique than even Rocky did), but then it never means to, being only concerned with the rage and self-loathing of an inarticulate man. So he paranoically rails against everybody around him, constantly accusing those closest to him of lying and ending up finally ending up beating his wife. In short, as detestable a prick of a protagonist as you could ever expect to see in a big film, and it's hence not surprising that it just goes around and around in circles, LaMotta learning very little from it all. Still, you have to admire the performances of the leads, as well as the bravery of De Niro and Scorsese for going out on such a limb.

7/10

Ghost Planet (Philip Cook, 2024)

We're now in the rarely fruitful realm of the Kickstarter-funded production, here applied to a sci-fi theme. The micro-budget naturally entails a very TV movie feel with lashings of CGI backdrops and green screens instead of anything solid, apart from miniature vehicles reminiscent of Gerry Anderson's Terrahawks TV series. So the obvious route is to go fully tongue-in-cheek with a post-events narrative that removes any real tension as a group of human travellers use an alien spaceship they found to try to stake their claim to even more alien tech and the untold riches that that would mean. Unsurprisingly, they're not the only ones, so there's a confrontation to deal with.

Ghost Planet cheerfully plunders from any sci-fi source it can think of, including having their employer's synthetic representative with a hidden agenda tag along (Alien et al.), and so there are no original elements at all, apart from the blasé tone. The best that can be said is that it has no pretensions.

4/10

The Moomins and the Comet Chase (Maria Lindberg, 2010)

A 3D stop motion animation cobbled together from a Polish TV series from the 1980s, restored and revoiced by a panoply of estimable Swedish actors for the English-language version, including Max Von Sydow and Stellan Skarsgård, this is a welcome reminder of a time in animation before the twin curses of emotionally autistic anime and lazily excessive use of CGI. Moomintroll is on a quest with his friends to find out if a comet seemingly heading straight for them spells doom, and it may not have much to impart in the way of substance as such, but it does have a wonderfully calming air that all ADHD-afflicted modern children's animation would do well to learn from.

6/10

The Roses (Jay Roach, 2025)

It's not often I bother watching remakes, but the combination of the currently omnipresent Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman in the roles played back in 1989 by Kathleen Tuner and Michael Douglas was too hard to resist. And they do indeed make the film, tearing into each other with gusto as the titular couple whose marriage descends over the years through resentment into outright hatred, mostly brought on by her as the breadwinner of the family, a successful chef, Cumberbatch being the one who raises their children. How it differs from The War of the Roses isn't just in the reversal of the genders, but also by including barbed attacks on the American society they have relocated to, with its Californian new age psychobabble, inability to cope with 'cusswords' and self-subjugation to lawyers. Unfortunately it does go completely over the top in the vitriol content in doing so, but then you couldn't expect much in the way of subtlety from the director of the Austin Powers films, and at least while the force of the disintegration of their relationship beggars belief, the dialogue is sharp and crisply delivered.

6/10

Goodbye June (Kate Winslet, 2025)

The terminal stage of matriarch Helen Mirren's cancer brings her squabbling four children together around her hospital bed, where they try to both come to terms with their impending bereavement and mend bridges between each other. Yes, it's a family drama about a serious matter, and its star actors (including Timothy Spall doing one of his trademark curmudgeonly turns as Mirren's husband in a state of denial) manage to inject enough pathos into the scenes to make it work in that sense. But the first-time director Winslet also wants to have herself a piece of the feelgood Christmas movie/Richard Curtis cake, so sugary icing is always lurking in the background too. Thus it was no surprise that it was released exactly in time for Christmas.

5/10