Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (2024)

The Dry 2 squanders the two things the original The Dry had going for it: its strong evocation of small-town Australia - so real - and Eric Bana's likeable Falk, tied to that place through his past but now a fish-out-of-water city slicker - but here, the setting is a fictional rainforest (the Dandenong, Yarra, and Otway Ranges standing in for the - for some reason fictional - Giraling Ranges) and Falk has been reduced to a generic interrogator of one suspect after another - and in a particularly uninteresting mystery - the disappearance of a woman from the world's dreariest company retreat where five or six women snap at each other about too many plot points all out of scope of their miserable forest prison: peripheral corporate skullduggery, references to bullying, allusions to the wayward pasts of two young sisters, ultimately unnecessary harkbacks to a serial killer case, and Falk's unilluminating backstory - a feeble attempt at grounding him once more in place through his mother's weird disappearance years and years earlier. 

 

★★☆☆☆

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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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Within The Pines (2024)

There are movies that make good use of sound (The Conversation, Berberian Sound Studio, A Quiet Place...) but this uneven Australian horror makes no use at all of the fact its main character is a sound engineer in a forest where he stumbles upon something nasty: every time he dons his headphones and points his dead cat, we hear nothing at all and it is not until he takes his headphones off that what he hears with his ears, finally, is rendered moot by what he sees (the light of a torch or the light of a helicopter, for example), and at other times, when our terrified-before-anything-actually-happens hero trips, cries, chases a helicopter screaming, rolls down a hill, kills a dog, and generally stomps around with gay abandon, noone in the pine forest seems to hear anything, not even the hillbilly standing just over there who seems to forget in a scene a moment later that someone is trampling around his caravan of horror.

★☆☆☆☆

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Alien: Romulus (2024)

This checkbox-ticking exercise dutifully opens on a steampunk spaceship with glitchy 80s tech sailing across dark silent space, has the sleeping pods of a ragtag bunch of mercenaries open, features the curious space soundtrack, has some (but not too much) Weyland-Yutani context, and of course, there are synthetics, stomach eruptions, and women fused to walls, but what keeps it fresh is the teen cast - this is the Alien we know and love presented with a Scream/Final Destination teen-horror sensibility and it is a very effective addition to the canon with lots of terrific heart-stopping and inventive action.

★★★★☆

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Saturday Night (2024)

It was an ugly time in comedy when SNL first aired, really, when comedians were smirking smug white men being loud, woofing at women, humping legs, and plastering schoolboy notes on everything (all seen here), but SNL fans will love this behind-the-scenes look at the hours leading up to the very first episode of what is now a 50-year-old comedy institution and anyone into, say, The Muppets or 30 Rock will be interested in the madcapped goings-on behind the scenes of another live production.

★★★☆☆

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Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

My finger hovered over the OFF button right the way through the first half hour of this umpteenth Deadpool movie, one with long-dead Wolverine brought back to life and injected into the story for what proves very little reason, but then something Ryan Reynolds says made me laugh despite my wariness of wanton pop-song-accompanied violence and all of a sudden the credits were rolling, I'd laughed out loud multiple times and enjoyed what felt most like an extended comedy skit rather than a superhero movie full of nerdy superhero details to geek out on (it is that, but it is possible to ignore it)..

★★★☆☆

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Heretic (2024)

What it is when it is all said and done is nothing new, but it disguises its routineness with some terrific tension, some really not very fair horror-fantasy illusions, surprises, and thriller moments (those silent exchanges of shock!) that keep you unable to see where the movie is going to go - two young Mormon missionaries fall into the web of a smiling, leering spider, an annoying, gabbing Hugh Grant playing a potential convert but religious scholar whose own ideas about religion may prove more resolute than the missionaries' own.

★★★☆☆

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Speak No Evil (2024)

Neither this Hollywood remake nor the Danish original are classics - far from it - but this new one is actually better in its first two-thirds, better scaffolding the horror reveal and better filling in the nebulous plot of the Danish one with backstory and hints at what is to come - when horror finally arrives in the original, it is, in so many ways, so divorced from what has come before that it undid the tension ratchetted up so painstakingly in its first half.

★★★☆☆

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The Substance (2024)

The gothic fairytale The Substance very efficiently sets up how the peculiar science at its core works - an unboxing scene reveals boldly labelled products, one after the other, that neatly, cleverly explain the workings of a substance that promises rejuvenation to Demi Moore's has-been tv star Elisabeth Sparkle - but then the movie uses voiceover and those bold labels repeatedly flashed on screen to hammer home again and again what has been firmly established, making the really very humorous body horror movie more and more of a camp pantomime for imbeciles as it goes along.

★★★☆☆

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Woman of the Hour (2024)

The fact that in 1978 an active serial killer once appeared in real life on a dating game television show seems at first a curious car crash moment to ogle in passing, hardly worth extrapolating into a feature-length movie – not without turning real murder and real victims into sideshow spectacle – but in her directorial debut, Anna Kendrick takes that moment and almost succeeds in finding the balance between respecting its grim reality and lampooning a world – then and now – that idly indulges sick male pathology with a sympathetic "there, there", fails to vet men before, say, letting them on camera, and asks women to laugh gaily at male idiocy.

★★★☆☆

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The Fall Guy (2024)

As battle-scarred stuntman Col Seavers, Ryan Gosling does his gormless The Nice Guys schtick that he is so good at, and with terrific chemistry between him and Emily Blunt's Jody Moreno - she's the lead actress of a film-in-production that Seavers is working on - this romantic comedy action blockbuster overcomes its middle-stretch of ennui (during a stunt sequence set in Sydney, Australia, the film starts to feel like it has no place to go) and becomes, ultimately, utterly charming.

★★★★☆ 

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Carry-on (2024)

It's set in an airport at Christmas time and features a pre-male pattern baldness blue-uniformed everyman (Taron Egerton) who in the course of his usual work as an airport luggage checker suddenly finds himself the sole hope in a battle against terrorists, so Die Hard comparisons have to be made and this one, in comparison, is a stinker, really - perfectly watchable but absurd, with the convoluted terrorist plot undone from the outset and everything else that follows just a ludicrous, well, carry-on.

★★☆☆☆

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MaXXXine (2024)

I was confused how this third movie fitted with the previous two, confused who was who, and confused how exactly the message here fits with what came before - something like: since Hitchcock's 'Psycho' Hollywood stardom for women has required them to have sex or be murdered - but as this Hitchcock homage set in the 80s kicked into its 'Body Double' denouement with 80s electric guitar slides accompanying an outrageous shoot-out under the Hollywood sign, the one thing I did know was how much of a good time I was having!

★★★★☆

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Longlegs (2023)

The thing Longlegs most reminded me of were the cutscenes of the original Silent Hill computer game on PS1 (they also strung together to make a monotonous, logic-free jumble of satanic goings-on set to a jangly soundtrack of ringing noises and clanks and clangs), but Longlegs includes in its garble Nicolas Cage doing a Jennifer Coolidge impersonation and a this-is-a-bit-right? Silence of the Lambs routine that insults most only after the "we don't even care anymore" abrupt final cut-to-credits when, woken by the return of cinema lights, audience members realise they've been tricked into seeing, I wouldn't be surprised, another prequel-series of the Annabel franchise.

★☆☆☆☆ 

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Trap (2024)

Inspired casting and a grim sense of humour help sustain the unlikely thrills in M Night Shyamalan's latest about a family man who learns police have him surrounded at a stadium concert and are closing in, but you spend a long time waiting for this "No Way Out" scenario to pop and not only does it never pop, there comes halfway through the movie a shift into a second and then third unwelcome act, as though even Shyamalan felt trapped by his plot contrivance, and rather than maintaining the black fun in these second and third add-on chapters things become mired in some especially unfun and longwinded expositon of the Psycho-endscene type.

★★★☆☆

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A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)

Given the first and second movie told us everything we needed to know about the marauding monsters with hypersonic hearing - from their arrival on earth (via comets, I think) to their being bested by high-pitched sound - an additional entry into the series like this - this is number three, a prequel - serves no real purpose except to extrapolate, for fanboys maybe, on established themes, so we see more heel-to-toe quiet walking, more alien stampedes, more held breath and bridges taken out by fighter jets; an impossibly well-behaved service cat doesn't mix things up very much in this dutiful extra ninety minutes.

★★★☆☆

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