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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If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)

Mary Bronstein, who appears as Dr Spring, wrote and directed the engrossing and exhausting If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (no comma), apparently basing it on her own traumatic time caring for a sick child, and its the truth at the core, along with Rosie Byrne's "performance of a lifetime", that makes this unflinching look at motherhood - the guilt, the shame, the obsession, and the killer power - so utterly captivating: a comedy so dark it more than verges on horror, and you've got to love the reviewers, many male, saying it (read 'two hours of motherhood') is monotonous, too long, and not the entertaining experience you want when you go to the cinema!

★★★★☆

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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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Not Me That Went Viral (俺ではない炎上) (2025)

This book adaptation with a terribly translated English title starts promisingly with a social-media-age update of the Hitchcockian 'wrong man' plot, with Taisuke Yamagata, a fifty-something real estate sales manager, falsely accused of murder by well-meaning but misguided online amateur sleuths, but by the end, the tone has lurched awkwardly between comedy, thriller, and social commentary (isn't online amateur crime reporting terrible?), and the plot has required audiences to at once sympathise with Yamagata as the wronged hero while also regarding him with disdain and pity as a problematic antihero - a difficult balancing act given his portrayal by the likeable Hiroshi Abe.

★★☆☆☆

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Exit 8 (2025)

The computer game it is based on is a simple spot-the-difference game, but this movie adaptation starring the charismatic Ninomiya Kazunari expands the premise into something at times disturbing and often profoundly moving, turning the main world-weary character's struggle to find Exit 8 in an underground train station in Japan into an analogy for stepping up, taking a stand against, and refusing to ignore life's anomalies - no easy task anywhere, but especially in consensus-driven Japan, and particularly resonant in light of recent scandals involving Fuji TV and Johnny and Associates, and more broadly in this age of male reckoning.

★★★★☆

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Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

The final episode goes to a lot of trouble to tie in characters and storylines from across the previous I-don't-know-how-many movies, and the result is an exhausting first hour of bombast, but once these operatics are out of the way, the action starts - also exhausting (impossible missions, truly, in sunken submarines in subzero temperatures, and high-speed dogfights and plane-hopping at high altitudes) but exhausting in exactly the way fans of the Mission: Impossible movies want.

★★★★☆

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The Housemaid (2025)

A plot synopsis of this "thriller" on Wikipedia would reveal the twists just as artfully and thrillingly as director Paul Feig's movie - an adaptation of the hit book by Freida McFadden and hark-back to the throwaway domestic thrillers of the 90s - a monotonous, personality-free drear with no redeemable characters and nothing to care about, and when I genuinely ask family and friends who profess to have loved it what exactly they liked, the answer is frequently Sydney Sweeney's boobs.

★★☆☆☆

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Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

Number 2 left me cold, but this third Knives Out mystery is a return to form with another star-studded cast populating a twisty-turny mystery full of surprises as a priest is murdered in his church and suspicion falls on the newest assistant pastor, the fantastically likeable and wonderfully emotive (and really, I think, a big reason why this is so good even though the plot is a bit overcooked) Josh O'Connor.

★★★★☆

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The Amateur (2025)

Run-of-the-mill rogue agent stuff not made any more engaging - in fact, it is all rendered a bit daft - by the fact Rami Malek's hero is a hastily trained amateur - a data geek working deep in the bowels of CIA headquarters who takes it upon his pasty little self to track down and kill the terrorists responsible for killing his wife, in outlandish ways that are laughable given the smug way he glibly enacts these logically impossible booby traps.

★★☆☆☆

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The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

You would think setting The Fantastic Four: First Steps on a kitsch Austin Powers alternate Earth (after the 90s cartoon series (but with monochromatic blue replacing the lurid Austin Powers palette)) would help make this Marvel superhero movie a nostalgic joy, but rather than zing, it feels inert, ponderous, empty even, despite the cartoonish action, but helping fill the time is Julia Garner in another steely performance as a surfboarding metal bad guy, and while Pedro Pascale never fully inhabits his character, he is easy to look at as Reed Richards, the mild-mannered brainiac head of a superhero family.

★★★☆☆

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Thunderbolts (2025)

I think Florence Pugh is great as Yelena Belova, the main character in a thrown-together-by-chance superhero ensemble called "Thunderbolts", a sort of rough-around-the-edges Avengers group ('the Bvengers') whose first movie outing cleverly takes on movie audiences' superhero fatigue by trumping it - the characters here are worldweary, eye-rolling rejects, and that includes the always terrific Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the cumbersomely named Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, an unflappable corrupt agent navigating career turmoil of her own callous creation.

★★★★☆

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Black Bag (2025)

Don't think too hard about the plot, which is full of outlandish extraneous details and relies on an impossible amount of inter-agent bedhopping (some of it blurring professional boundaries in very unlikely ways) and just enjoy the sleek, sexy spy thrills as Michael Fassbender's mild-mannered spy, George Wodehouse, learns his wife's name is on a list of five potential traitor agents.

★★★★☆

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Wolf man (2025)

The poignant family drama at the start suggests something interesting will follow — perhaps the strong cast is getting you ready for creature chills and spills that mean something to the family psychology – and don't forget director Leigh Whannel did something interesting in 2020's The Invisible Man – except once Wolf Man's family retreats to a cabin in the woods, complete ennui devours the movie and the cast: there are scenes where the two leads literally stand opposite each other and appear not to know what they should do or day to continue the scene, and the whole movie amounts to one single tiresome werewolf-transition scene extrapolated to movie-length.

★☆☆☆☆

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Dangerous Animals (2025)

As if to demonstrate the abyssmal depths to which film has sunk, this serial killer thriller and creature-feature mash-up, about an Australian serial killer who feeds foreign tourists to sharks, is built up around its thirty-minute-mark spectacle of a woman being torn to pieces by a shark, and nothing else matters:, the plot, very possibly spat out by Chatgpt, starts with a thoroughly unclever and utterly unrewarding opening sequence, then features disappearing bodies, plastic shiv neck injuries and knife wounds that are shaken off and disappear, plot lurches that defy logic, and a lot of repetitive catch-and-escape, catch-and-escape sequences - Tom and Jerry cartoons are more entertaining and efficient - and chaining the film industry to its watery grave forever at the bottom of the ocean is the fact mind-numbed audiences have given this prosaic nonsense an 86% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

★★☆☆☆

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Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)

A string of five or six encounters with dinosaurs - one encounter at sea, one on a cliff, another in some sort of tunnel, many involving water - with very little effort made to link these encounters with a sensible story or populate the episodes with characters you care less about and want not to get chomped or stomped.

★★☆☆☆

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Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

The world-building and mythologising reign over plot, logic, and sense in this sixth (has it really only been six?) Final Destination movie, which plays like a cartoon series - it's glossy, wonkily computer-generated in parts, and the deaths are separate mini-episodes - and it is hard to care about the family members being picked off one-by-one by Death given noone in it cares either, and anyway, the characters are always secondary to the attempts here at a origin story and attempt at a reboot, often cornball - the holed-up Death-whispering grandma doesn't belong in the series, and the death-by-peanut allergy is a low point.

★★★☆☆

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Mickey 17 (2025)

Bong Joon-Ho's Mickey 17 is a messy overreaching film about an "expendable", a worker on a spaceship who is employed to die over and over (with a new self 3D-printed after each death); it's a childish pantomine of conflated woke themes presented plainly - a rehash of ideas from Okja and Snowpiercer - with Toni Collete stepping in for Tilda Swinton, and Mark Ruffalo arrived directly from the set of Poor Thing.

★★★☆☆

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