Ballerina (2025) - 4/10
Look, I'd watch Ana de Armas do anything. Literally anything. Someone could release a film of her reading the manual of a Worcester Bosch Greenstar 4000 30kW boiler and I'd give it a go. She glides through the John Wick universe with lethal grace, fantastic posture, that incredible arse and a face so perfect that Helen of Troy would be jealous. The gist of this movie is basically, "gorgeous woman seeking vengeance by kicking people in the face", so if that sounds like your thing, then off you go. I've realised of late that I'm just not into fighting films any more. They literally do nothing for me. I haven't liked any of the previous John Wick films and I barely liked this one either. If there ever was a spy/assassin as good looking as De Armas, having her being punched in the nose constantly would be a terrible use of her attributes. But everything about the John Wick films is ridiculous and this latest installment is no different.
The King (2019) - 3/10
Medieval dramas involving privately-educated pricks clanking around in armour and doing shit Shakespeare impressions generally aren't my thing, but I fully intended to watch this one. Until, that is, the accents showed up and chose violence. At least when these Southern pricks talk their posh, gilded-spoon-up-the-arse English they're being genuine. Within minutes, American actors are heard drifting between "vaguely British", "confused Irish" and "fella who learned English entirely from watching Black Adder and Braveheart after a night down the pub. It’s like the director told every actor to do an accent but didn't specify which one. Even the British actors are at it. I spent most of my time trying to decipher their vowel choices when I should have been following the plot, which from what I could tell was mostly mud, shouting and Timothée Chalamet looking like a Victorian ghost in his dad's fancy dress outfit. Eventually, with a migraine brewing, I turned it off. Shite.
Nosferatu (2024) - 6/10
On my They-Could-Have-Got-A-Fitter-Bird scale, I think they've pretty much smashed it in this. Lily-Rose Depp is the perfect combination of good-looking and Looks-Like-Skeletor that fits the bill here perfectly. When the hair and make-up departments aren't trying to make her look like a corpse, she is very shaggable, but here she is as gaunt and as gothic as you'd want. This is a classic vampire film but done modernly with proper cameras and a proper budget. In a world where everyone looks permanently traumatized, everything looks permanently damp, and questionable shadows have people constantly looking over their shoulder with haunted eyes, it reminded me a lot of my early sexual experiences. For what they were trying to achieve, they've absolutely done it. It'll certainly leave you craving sunlight on your skin and a nice warm brew.
Relay (2024) - 6/10
This is an interesting film in which you find yourself wondering, "Does shit like this really go on?" The world is mad place - especially in 2026 - so it probably does. These relay workers must have heard some shit. It struck a chord with me how you can have this sort of relationship with someone without ever actually speaking to them on the phone. There are plenty of whispered conversations delivered via burner phones, so in that sense it reminds me a lot of all the time I've spent calling sex lines over the years. There really is nothing more dangerous, intimate, or thrilling than taking the opportunity whilst your wife is in the bath to sneak into the spare bedroom with some tissues and a tub of vaseline to grunt down the phone to a mysterious voice on the other end. It's about secrets, surveillance, paranoia and corporate conspiracies, although disappointing, not once is anyone asked, "So... what are you wearing?"
The Brutalist (2025) - 6/10
This is a film about a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who gets separated from his family and travels to New York to make a new life for himself. It touches on romance, on hard-work, on the immigrant struggle and, most importantly, on how the only thing László loves more than his wife is concrete. Adrien Brody plays the part very well; you can see in his eyes how torn he is between human connection and the seductive promise of reinforced cement. When he's not thinking about load-bearing walls, he's either re-living his trauma or doing heroin in an attempt to make it through to bed-time. The cinematography and musical compositons are great and you definitely come out of the film feeling like you've experienced something, but what exactly? I'm not so sure. I definitely felt like I wasn't clever enough to be the films intended audience though, which did feel marginally insulting. It's a mad film but worth a watch.
Wake Up Dead Man (2025) - 5/10
This is the latest installment of the Knives Out franchise, which essentially are feature-length games of Cluedo repackaged for Gen Z who haven't got the patience themselves to sit down and play a board game. Somehow, yet again, every other character is a bigger prick than Benoit Blanc, which takes some doing. You know the format, it's been done since the dawn of time. Some cunt comes to a sticky end and we have to figure out who's done it... Yeah, I know. There's smug rich people, deceit and dodgy accents aplenty, although, again, it's a let down compared to the original Knives Out, which had Ana de Armas in it, so of fucking course it's not going to be as good as that.
Train Dreams (2025) - 6/10
I love getting the train. There's something about sitting there, staring out the window and seeing the world shoot by that inspires melancholy, and in a fast-moving world where you don't have time for anything, I very much appreciate that. I also enjoy eyeing-up good-looking women on the train and imagining an entire shared life together. I like to ask myself, "Where would we go on Honeymoon?", "How many kids would we have?" and, "Why hasn't she looked my way once?" And thus, more melancholy as I mourn a relationship that lasted exactly three stops. This film, too, is very much about the melancholy, about life choices, about doing your best and about consequence. It's slow but in a good way, and I enjoyed seeing a glimpse into how people lived in that part of the world at that point in time. Worth a watch.
Misery (1990) - 7/10
The morale of this story is that all women are cray-cray. I know I may be overstating that, but come on. We've all had girlfriends and wives long enough to know that this is the case. In many cases, it's not even their fault; it's the hormones. But that doesn't stop it being true. I'm obviously joking here because Annie Wilkes is spectacularly unwell, but you know what I mean. You didn't watch Jaws and then think that all fish will fuck you up given the chance, did you? It's not out of order to suggest that Kathy Bates (as Annie) delivers here one of the most iconic performances in cinema history. I, like Annie, despise continuity errors in fiction but are they punishable by death? Well, that's for you to decide. Annie has certainly made her mind up. The genius of Misery is how it weaponises home comforts. A cosy house, a comfortable bed and a bottle of wine with your meal all seem well and good until you've got a smirking psychopath offering you a biscuit with a scalding cup of tea so close to your face. This is the most realistic horror film you'll probably ever see and therefore it deserves a lot of respect.
Filth (2013) - 4/10
Watching this is like being trapped in the mind of a bad man who thinks collecting women like football cards is the most entertaining game ever, especially when off your face. It's one of the most misogynistic films you'll ever see, and given everything we know about Hollywood, that's saying something. In fact, I think that's what Irvine Welsh set out to do. Imagine a person whose entire personality was contempt for women and you've got the main character in this. I think we're meant to be repulsed by it rather than to celebrate it, so if you actual enjoy this, then you're a massive twat. I bet if your teenage nephew watched it, it'd be his favourite film ever. The only person Bruce hates more than he hates women is himself. It is grimy, chaotic and aggressively Scottish, yet, somehow, paints a portrait of a man on a path to self-destruction bringing as many others down with him as he can. I recognised all of that, yet I didn't like it, because of all the above, which is strange, because I hate women as much as anyone.
Sinners (2025) - 5/10
This is basically what From Dusk Till Dawn would have been if you'd ordered it off Alibaba. It, like From Dusk Till Dawn, is basically a film in two parts, where the first part is all serious and setting the scene and the second part is, well, fucking vampires. Both films have fantastic lighting based in wooden shacks, and both contain numerous people of questionable morals and pits them up against a bunch of bloodsucking baddies. Neither do the shift from part one to part two subtly and that's sort of the point. More films should follow this arc. Imagine Andy fretting all that time in Shawshank prison, only so that when he eventually emerges, covered in shit, from that pipe, and with his hands to the sky, a fucking vampire jumps on his back and rips out his throat! Now you're talking! Or Gladiator whereby, instead of tigers coming out the ground to munch on Maximus, they instead released vampires! I'd watch that. Or imagine Ripley getting to LV-426 and she's greeted by a bunch of - actually, no; that can't be improved upon. The big-titted, cocoa-skinned elephant in the room, though, is that there's no Salma Hayek equivalent. Sinners has plenty of dancing and plenty of menace, but nothing quite as delightful as Hayek shimmying to the enchanting melody of After Dark. But really, has there ever been? I don't think so, so good on them for not even trying. There is one plot hole bigger than the Grand Canyon in this though, but when another plot point is vampires, you can't really question too much.