Godzilla Minus One (2023)

"Godzilla looks really ticked off," a naval officer says at one point, and it is funny because in this 37th Godzilla movie in 2023 the kaiju is still a stiff, rather rubbery, frozen-faced stare-bear - it doesn't matter if he has taken gunfire to the face, swallowed a mine, or been plunged over 1,500 metres to the bottom of the ocean, the demented grin persists - but everything else in Godzilla Minus One, which takes the series back to its roots and presents Godzilla as nuclear annihilation itself, is elaborately, effectively staged, from the razed-to-zero post-Second World War Japan setting to the big-budget Jurassic Park-style chomps and stomps.

★★★★☆

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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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Nightwatch - Demons Are Forever ('Nattevagten – Dæmoner går i arv') (2023)

You need to have seen the 1994 original to appreciate the genius of this sequel that takes the themes and look of the original and cements them as classic by reworking the story with a new gender politic, putting Fanny Leander Bornedal in the lead role as the daughter of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau's character in the original - she takes on the morgue nightwatch job to better understand her parents' ordeal - and just when you think things are going to be too same-same (moths in the light fittings, alarm lights that threaten to go off...) this gnarly, twisted mystery really goes places!

★★★★☆

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Delirium (Óráð) (2023)

I had to turn this Icelandic horror movie off at the mandolin finger-slicing scene, despite my interest in the first half, which is effectively creepy and made me deeply uneasy.  

RATING: NO RATING (I can't finish it!)

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River Wild (2023)

There's not much connecting this thriller to the 1990's The River Wild starring Meryl Streep except the title and the fact that whitewater rafting and a psychopath feature, but beyond these things, this is a grim crime story, charmless and full of low budget nasty realism, not high adventure, that makes it feel more like a re-enactment on that 48 Hour tv true crime doco, the sort you might snap off when it gets too bleak.

★★☆☆☆

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Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)

When mythological monsters run amok in Philadelphia and among them are angry unicorns only placated by handfuls of Skittles, things in this DC-related superhero movie start to teeter at my "switch off" point, especially given up to that point I'd already tired of a superhero movie that wants to champion a true mythological hero while also making him an annoying teen only as strong as each of his six team members, not to mention all those uncomfortable scenes showing teenaged boys holding hands and being romanced with 6000-year-old women. 

★★★☆☆

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Missing (2023)

This doesn't quite succeed in sustaining, like "Searching" did, its wholly tech-window-delivered thrills in which everything that happens happens on a phone- and/or computer screen, about halfway through losing momentum and starting to rely on increasingly unlikely sources of video footage, but the mystery of an American teen's mother contains some clever developments.

★★★☆☆

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The Royal Hotel (2023)

This refreshing Australian suspense avoids tired outback horror tropes and instead presents a horror of the sort you read about in the news, of international tourists on an adventure ending up working under terrible circumstances in remote parts of Australia, on farms, say, or in this movie's FIFO mining town and specifically  at a pub that everyone - the drunk local men, the two new female staff, the audience - knows needs to be burned to the ground long before an alcohol-fuelled Mick Taylor is let to wreak his inevitable bloody havoc.  

★★★☆☆

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In The Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)

Patriot Games also pitted an IRA terrorist against a hero who makes the mistake of killing the terrorist's brother, but this movie transports the story to an unlikely setting, a tiny coastal village of Ireland where it can be hard for viewers to believe that the two parties - Liam Neeson's brother-killing hero Finbar Murphy and Kerry Condon as the terrorist and sister of the man killed -  don't immediately find each other and have it out; the unbelievable delay is to allow the movie to build to a melodramatic - and a little out-of-place in a small Irish village - John Woo finale where the town suddenly has the population density amd proportions of a major city.

★★★☆☆

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The Teacher's Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) (2023)

I love movies about school - school is such a perfect hotbed of issues - and this German film is a ripper with Leonie Benesch perfect as the fresh-faced and idealistic teacher who sees all her hard work creating a harmonious classroom environment undone when speculation runs rife through the school campus that one of their own is a thief.

★★★★☆

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Perfect Days (2023)

It is Groundhog Day but backwards, with this Japanese 'Phil', Hirayama, living what appears to be a perfectly contented day over and over, cleaning Tokyo toilets and pausing occasionally to admire light through trees, wood grain, or reflected colour, but upheaval eventually arrives as director Wim Wenders throws unexpected encounters at this toilet cleaner, highlighting the delicate balance between the uncomplaining endurance demanded by Japanese society and an individual's private contentment in the detail of a dazzling impermanence. 

★★★★☆

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Barbie (2023)

It isn't terrifically funny, generating just a handful of laughs, and while a positive and important message film, it is hard to enjoy it without cynically appraising it as a Mattel marketing exercise and feeling duped: much of the film is spent positioning an antiquated white-skinned, blonde-haired and pink kitchen-accessoried doll - and prime offender over decades in promoting unrealistic female standards - as a torchbearer for feminism and cultural diversity.

★★★☆☆

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Wonka (2023)

Like a Wonka' chocolate, this prequel is a confection entirely concocted from scratch by some lunatic using the weird and wonderful ingredients from Dahl's books, so there's giraffe milk and chocolatier wars, exotic oompa loompa lands and stuff, but there is also a pervading sense that the movie is all a rigmarole to perpetuate a non-canon add-on chapter of not-especially-good songs, childish acting, and some wonky cgi, making this confection a sickly sweet one – you end up feeling that to pick up a book or go to see a movie isn't worth the risk of having thrust upon you the burden of an ever-expanding film and television universe.

★★★☆☆

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Late Night With The Devil (2023)

If this indie horror about a late-night talk show that supernaturally derails had been a real talk show that I stumbled across on TV, I'd have turned off quickly given the show's ugly 70s colour palette, uncharismatic performances, and the fact its supernatural happenings are tediously expounded - the very concept of the movie being to expound, in talk show format, supernatural events - but by far the worst thing about this movie, inexplicably lauded in universally good reviews, is it features its own frequent, deadly-boring ad breaks! 

★★☆☆☆

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The Flash (2023)

Even The Parent Trap in 1961 does a better job of duplicating its star (Hayley Mills, playing twins) than this peculiar 2023 DC exercise that randomly turns the second-versions of lead actor Ezra Miller into a weird slack-jawed cartoon - sometimes completely unnecessarily, like at times when there is only one Ezra Miller on screen! - and these NQR Polar Express doppelgangers distract from an already uninvolving Back To The Future time travel multiverse superhero origin story, one about a super-super-fast, red-lycraed Flash.

★★★☆☆

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怪物 (かいふつ) (Monster) (2023)

Hirokazu Kore-eda's drama, again just a smidge too twee, is about people, very young or old, who either throw themselves outside Japan's strict parameters of social propriety or else find themselves pushed outside those lines by circumstance or by others, and billed as a thriller, Kore-eda's movie will keep you guessing who - an arsonist, a drunk, a bully, a domestic abuser, a liar, or a strange elvin sociopath - the real kaibutsu (monster) of the title is, and it could be any number of dead-in-the-eye non-humans who are, the story shows by changing perspectives round and round, so misunderstood and sadly beautiful.

★★★★☆

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The Vourdalak (French: 'La Famille du Vourdalak') (2023)

This French fantasy — at times horrible but never really horror; more ghastly, like a Grimms' fairytale — is based on a 1839 Russian novella about an aristocrat, lost in a Serbian forest, who encounters a strange family, and it's this story rather than the movie that is interesting — the monstrous patriarch predates Bram Stoker's Dracula — but the ghastly monster-like character is a weird overacting claymation or puppet, which detracts from rather than enhances your engagement with the gothic goings-on. 

★★★☆☆

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Strange Darling (2023)

'Strange Darlings', a movie that really needs to be seen - if it needs to be seen at all - not knowing anything about it, starts off troubling and I considered walking out to spare myself the trauma of what I imagined was coming, but sticking with it I was reasonably entertained, though not, as promotional material claims, by "the cleverest thriller of its kind," given that in this thriller some cops remain unaware of un-ignorable neighbourhood violence; because you can see where things are headed very early on; and because the exhilaration I felt when I worked out an audacious surprise turned to disappointment when the surprise didn't eventuate.

★★★☆☆

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The Lesson (2023)

Employed to tutor a teen hoping to enter a prestigious university, a tutor takes up residence in the mansion of a famous writer, finds himself thrust deep into family tensions, and at night is subjected to absurd and untitillating sexual voyeurism in a thriller that grows sillier and sillier as it goes on, featuring Richard E Grant (who I suspect never went home between filming this and Saltburn) and, by far the worst element of the whole silly enterprise, Julie Delpy as the author's wife, who receives good news, bad news, and oral sex, all with the same deadpan expression.

★★☆☆☆

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

This Marvel superhero series distinguishes itself from all the other Marvel superhero series with its catalogue of immature characters exhibiting only the basest of functions, so the space-adventuring troupe of GotG number 1 and 2 continue to do 1s and 2s in this number 3, and like Groot's one note repeated ad nauseum (*i am Groot"), we see these base character-identifiers over and over again over two hours, and it is tiring - adults like me might like to daydream about more interesting things like what is behind the movie's central thesis, expounded gently but repeatedly, that, "Good dog," is better than, "Bad!"

★★★☆☆

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