28 Weeks Later (2007)

Flaunting rules during COVID - maybe that I can kind of understand, but in the face of apocalyptic evidence post-the-virus in this sequel to 28 Days Later, it is hard to believe anyone, even kids, would "sneak out", but they do, and that lapse in credibility becomes the film's defining weakness as, repeatedly, family reunions defy apocalyptic chaos, characters display magical virus expertise, and John Woo-style theatrics push the story towards spectacle and away from the unsettling plausibility that made the original so engrossing.

★★★☆☆

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I'm Chevy Chase And You're Not (2025)

You can imagine, after years of being told, "You're funny," a comedian might eventually start believing it and forget about the importance of material and timing, energy, audience, and cultural context, and so end up acting zany - look at me, blowing raspberries! - rather than delivering hard-earned jokes, and Cornelius Crane "Chevy" Chase - a man as funny as he is obnoxious, as loved here as he is hated there, happy-go-lucky yet deeply ashamed - might come close to that line today; you certainly can't watch the octogenarian presented here, and can't hear about his long catalogue of laugh-free comedy film bombs, and can't hear about his childhood trials and tribulations and come away saying, simply, he's funny.

★★★☆☆

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Before and After (1996)

When their teenage son is suspected of murder, Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, as the boy's parents, must grapple with small-town police friends, lawyers, vigilantes, and their own feelings of culpability over covering up the crime, in Barbet Schroeder's earnest but a touch too pat adaptation of Rosellen Brown's book.

★★★☆☆

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Insomnia (2002)

Because there is so much to cover - the Alaskan environment, its community and way-of-life, the effect the extended daylight hours of the region has on Al Pacino's cop and his investigation into a girl's murder, not to mention his tense relationship with his partner and his burgeoning one with an eager young Alaskan cop-in-training played by Hilary Swank - Christopher Nolan's exceptionally well-acted thriller, with its fine production values, ends up feeling thin as ice where it really demands to be grand and sweeping.

★★★☆☆

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Bird on a Wire (1990)

Mel Gibson's mullet and wild-eyed "loose cannon" routine feels self-conscious and tired here - after Lethal Weapon 1 and 2 - but he and Goldie Hawn generate chemistry together, and occasional laughs, as former lovers fleeing killers from his pre-witness protection life, and helping bind the wafer-thin plot, action and comedy together into a palatable something is the Neville Brothers' easy-listening cover of Leonard Cohen's Bird On A Wire.

★★★☆☆

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Birth (2004)

Jonathan Glazer's beautifully acted and beautiful-to-look-at Birth, about an affluent Upper East Side New York family intruded upon by a boy who claims to be a reincarnated dead husband, wants to be taken seriously - and some people oblige, calling it a mystery and treatise on profound things like belief and loss, but it plays out more like a deadly earnest fairytale - that is to say, it plays out ridiculously - and while the final scene does a good job, finally, of grounding the first-world problems of these toffs in some real emotion, getting there is far too long a road - an absurd and monotonous one - with an especially icky bath scene and kiss scene along the way.

★★★☆☆

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Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Look at online photos from the real incident at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972, and photos of the real robber John Wojtowicz - in the movie, Sonny Wortzik, played by Al Pacino - and you'll be impressed by the likenesses, but exactly why these events led to such a painstakingly recreated film treatment by Sidney Lumet is lost in time: hailed for its portrayal of desperate 1970s New York, the film in fact revels in two other things - the comic chaos of the bungled robbery turned fourteen-hour hostage situation, and the fact Wojtowicz apparently wanted the stolen money to fund a lover's gender-affirming surgery - and, though well acted, is ultimately as chaotic and unrewarding as the robbery - a dull little mess - itself.

★★★☆☆

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The Woman In Cabin 10 (2025)

On a superyacht off the coast of Norway, a journalist (Keira Knightley) sees a woman go overboard one night, but none of the other guests – a who's who of the business and entertainment worlds gathered for a charity event – believes her, in this Ruth Ware book adaptation that is first third run-of-the-mill murder mystery set-up (assorted characters gather on board a yacht), second third effective thriller that borrows liberally from Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, full of shocks and surprises as the journalist finds herself increasingly isolated, labelled mad, and drawn deeper and deeper into paranoia, and final third messy denouement – a terribly cliched gala event showdown – that makes no logistical sense; the middle third makes it worth watching the whole.

★★★☆☆

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Agatha Christie's Seven Dials (2026)

Agatha Christie wasn't called the Queen of Mystery for her occasional attempts at the espionage thriller, as any reader of The Big Four, They Came to Baghdad, and Passenger to Frankfurt can attest, and so, except for a ridiculously embellished final reveal, we can't entirely blame the makers of this three-part series for the ludicrous plotting of their adaptation of The Seven Dials Mystery, a comic adventure after Nancy Drew rather than a traditional murder mystery, about British government agents, scientists, spies, absurd secret societies, and, when you dissect it, a circular story of unlikely coincidence rather than sensible clues.

★★★☆☆

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Scream 4

The kill count at ten minutes is five, halfway through it is seven, and overall, thirteen - not bad for an hour and forty minutes - so number four in the meta-horror series really drives the knife in for slasher fans, but even in an exercise this tongue-in-cheek - and it succeeds in being funny a number of times - it can be frustrating sitting through the idiocy on display: remember, Ghostface is a serial killer who has well and truly put a dent in the population of Woodsboro High on three previous occasions, yet in the midst of spree number four, as the body count rises, these teens hold parties, get drunk, wander outside into the dark woods, and play astonishingly tone-deaf "Ghostface" pranks on each other, making it more than a little tiresome waiting out the Scooby-Doo unmasking at the end.

★★★☆☆

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Majboor ('Convulsed') (1974)

Ravi has a mother, sister, young brother, and a love interest we get to know, first, watching their jolly good times at home and at the beach; time is also spent establishing the kidnap and murder case Ravi is involved in as a witness; he then develops and is diagnosed with a brain tumor; dying, he concocts a plan to falsely confess to a kidnap-murder and claim the reward money for his family; then comes an operation - miraculously - that cures him; and it is only after all this convoluted set-up - a perfunctory first hour and a half (perfunctory despite brightly coloured Bollywood music-and-dance set-pieces) - that the mystery thriller can start: poor helpless and alone ("majboor"), Ravi's only way out of the death penalty is to go on the run and find the real murderer.

★★★☆☆

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Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas) (2021)

Orchestral swells and tremulous strings help turn kitchen-table drama into grand operatic melodrama in Pedro Almodóvar's story of two new mothers sharing their experiences of childbirth, but the link between this melodrama and the broader politics Almodóvar bookends the movie with feels pretty tenuous - living without knowing, living with a secret, and correcting past wrongs seem to be the vague thematic bridge.

★★★☆☆

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Scream VI (2023)

Just brutally violent, not scary, this sequel to 2022's "rerequel" Scream and the meta-horror series' sixth entry riffs on the idea that Scream is now a mega-franchise with the momentum to continue even without its legacy characters, so Courteney Cox's investigative reporter Gale Weathers (here, again) and other long-timers are apparently at risk of being killed off - it isn't a big point of difference, and other standard elements, like the opening set-piece, are tired, but the mystery elements of Scream VI and a neat sequence on a New York City subway train keep the bloodletting intermittently interesting.

★★★☆☆

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The Idea of You (2024)

A romance ignites between a woman and a man, and standing in the way of their being in love forevermore are their considerable age gap (she is a 40-year-old single mother of a grown child and an art dealer; he is twenty-four) and his life in the spotlight as a boy-band idol, but both issues result in only two brief blips of conflict over the course of this breezy, thin rom-slight-com, padded out with not very rewarding Backstreet Boys-style song-and-dance routines.  

★★★☆☆

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Dead of Winter (2025)

I'm sure the first two encounters the widow (Emma Thompson) has with the crims in this snowbound thriller are shown out-of-order - as it is, the first encounter is redundant, and the second, in light of the first, is, on the part of the crims, idiotic - and this continuity problem hangs over the first hour, calling into doubt all of the zigzagging the players do back and forth and back and forth between a cabin in the woods and an icy lake, but eventually, the action crescendos to something that allows you to surrender your reservations, and it is nice to see these Harry Brown-style thrillers in which an older person violently takes down deserving crims.

★★★☆☆

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Murder By Numbers (2002)

Hitchcock's Rope, based on a play, was a chamber thriller focused with icy precision on its chilling pair of Leopold-and-Loeb intellectual killers, whereas Barbet Schroeder's Murder By Numbers might be its dopey cousin 'Fray': it starts strong, in a Hitchcockian world that extends out the window to the horizon - more Rear Window than Rope - but descends into mess as its two killers (Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) turn on each other, with the film asking us to care about too many extraneous things - the cop's sex life, her traumatic past, one killer's love interest, and even a monkey - until the murdering pair, in the end plodding here and there in plastic body suits and swim goggles, look less icy and more and more like the bungling burglars from Home Alone.

★★★☆☆

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Tightrope (1984)

Of course it is hard for New Orleans police detective Wes Block (Clint Eastwood) to catch the serial killer on the loose in the city - he is one of those badly drawn 80s-movie serial killers with an everchanging modus operandi, neither disorganised nor organised, at times a random targetter of women on the streets and at other times a player of diabolical games of cat-and-mouse who ends up a balaclava-ed home invader - and it is the macho 80s, so every single woman in this movie is coquettish and aching for it, and it doesn't matter how crotchetty and old and wrinkled the men are or how revolting their come-on lines are, the women are desperate to please - wait to hear Block's attempts at wooing the rape prevention instructor, Beryl Thibodeaux (the only woman in it who isn't a street walker) when they lunch together by the New Orleans' harbour, and wait and baulk when she becomes interested! - and keep in mind Block knows by this stage a serial killer is targeting the women he beds, but I guess Thibodeaux wants it so bad, Block simply has no choice, despite the obvious danger, to scratch her itch like a hero.

★★★☆☆

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Nightwatch ('Nattevagten') (1994)

This, at several key points, very ugly 1994 Danish horror thriller - that restaurant scene! - spawned a sequel and a English-language remake, so is a movie good enough to warrant that and largely, I think, because of the smiley, geek-chic rizz of Nicolaj Coster-Waldau in the lead, whose boyish enthusiasm and jokey disregard and goofy wide-eyed awe - of things like prostitutes, sex, and death - balances nicely with the dark and dread of his new nightshift work at a creepy morgue somehow linked to a spate of serial killings.   

★★★☆☆

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Cold Sweat (1971)

In this adaptation of a Richard Mathieson novella, (also the basis of an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents) Charles Bronson's Joe Martin must protect his wife and daughter from a criminal gang he used to drive for - they've come back into Joe's life seeking redress for a wrong they feel Joe committed against them.

★★★☆☆

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Death Wish (1974)

For one brief moment, Charles Bronson's Dr Paul Kersey - an architect whose wife is killed and daughter raped by gangbangers (one of them a young and lanky Jeff Goldblum) - steps out onto a NYC rooftop and surveys the city from above, and this vigilante may as well be in Gothan in a mask and cape, or, come to think of it, perhaps he's more like Victor Zsasz because it's a pretty unpleasant, unrewarding, socially troubling revenge he metes out.

★★★☆☆

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