A Royal Night Out (2015)

We've seen royal daughters or the daughters of American Presidents going incognito to experience 'normal life', from Roman Holiday to Disney's Aladdin, and the twist here is that this movie tells of an actual example from history in which Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret embarked one night out of the palace to celebrate the end of the war, which may well have happened but almost certainly not as it is presented in this easy-enough-to-watch but heavily, heavily fictionalised comedy romance. 

★★★☆☆

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Apex (2026)

As if Dangerous Animals weren't abominable enough, Netflix essentially repeats the exercise here: a big Hollywood name - in this case, Charlize Theron - gets thrown in amongst the Aussies in a horror thriller that squanders its most interesting idea, namely that a strong independent woman is pitted against  toxic masculinity in a remote Aussie environment, and instead serves up unedifying nonsense about an impossibly bizarre killer - Taron Egerton's psycho would sit more comfortably in Pan's Labyrinth - and, suggesting how little anyone cares about this throwaway exercise, the film has been given a name that is destined to bury it amongst Google search results for a computer game and an old Bruce Willis bomb.

★★☆☆☆

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All The President's Men (1975)

Two Washington Post journalists (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, showing everyone how it is done) are assigned to investigate a burglary, but little do they realise the story they are about to uncover will go right to the very top and result in the first resignation of a President of the United States - a riveting account of the Watergate scandal from start to...well, resignation, but not finish.

★★★★★

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A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantastica) (2017)

This is a marvellous character study, not just of the fantastic woman at the movie's heart, who resiliently navigates first the death of her partner, then the suspicion she encounters from the man's family, friends and the police, but also of the world around her, which struggles with challenges to its polarised gender constructs, with every scene in this smart, snappy movie crammed with unmistakable signs - uncertain air kisses, awkward handshakes, stammered titles - that betray the fact that the world is organised, now perhaps more than ever before, to exclude, not include.

★★★★☆

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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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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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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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All the Kind Strangers (aka 'Evil In The Swamp') (1974)

A group of scowling kids inhabit a farmhouse and scout potential new fill-in 'parents' using a murderous recruitment process, in this made-for-American tv movie starring Stacy Keach as the latest mark to fall into the kids' trap, but the movie never really makes the most of its well-ahead-of-its-time 'Speak no evil' plot - there's no apparent reason for Martha to be mute, for example. 

★★☆☆☆

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Another Man's Poison (1951)

This noir introduces us to Bette Davis' crime novelist, living in a gothic mansion by a windswept moor, who, we discover from the opening scene's whispered telephone box conversation, is having an affair, and from this strong thriller set-up, the movie proceeds as if trying to check off every thriller box imaginable - a dead body in a study,  an imposter and a fake marriage, a bank robbery, a criminal on the loose, not to mention animal murder and even My Cousin Rachel-style vehicle tampering - and more and more, until it runs wildly away with itself, though thankfully Davis seems aware of the absurdity and plays it for all it is worth.

★★★☆☆

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Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos) (2009)

I think it was the laugh-out-loud melodrama I enjoyed most watching Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, an overwrought carry-on about a blind film writer's affair with an actress, but everything else left me a little cold, including the rush to tie all the nonsense up sensibly in the end.

★★★☆☆

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Un Flic (Eng: 'A Cop') (aka Dirty Money) (1972)

All those Mission Impossible movies owe a lot to Jean-Pierre Melville's last French crime "flic" that features a centrepiece stunt distinctly Ethan Hunt in style involving a train and a helicopter...oh, and a cigar robe, a white pencil, and a horseshoe magnet (far too much detail: couldn't he have just gone into the bathroom and reappeared changed?) but unlike the Mission: Impossible movies, which plotwise are pretty straightforward, you'll need to watch Un Flic ("A cop") twice to confirm what might not be clear the first time through: that Alan Delon is a police commissioner, that apart from being committed by the same criminal gang, a drug robbery is a second crime unrelated to the first, and a second watch will help you to distinguish between far too many grey-faced trenchcoats and blonde bombshells, all of them (the bombshells AND the trenchcoats) mesmerized, transfixed by Delon.

★★★☆☆

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Anna (2019)

I think what Luc Besson intended was another slick, smart, minimally-plotted sexy violent spy thriller like 'La Femme Nikita' and its American remake 'The Assassin' with Bridget Fonda, but 'Anna' is a far cry from those movies with its woeful acting, laughable casting, terrible editing that makes the fisticuff action look like tai chi. and a story told via choppy-changey timehops that you know are just an attempt to try to disguise how wafer-thin and ridiculous the story is (a globe-trotting supermodel-slash-spy brings the KGB and the CIA together with a kiss each).

★☆☆☆☆

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American Ultra (2015)

This is a charmless blend of stoner comedy and one of those "dormant sleeper-agent wakes up" action movies of the Jason Bourne and The Long Kiss Goodnight sort, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart as an uncharismatic Bill-and-Ted pair of small-town America stoners who one day find themselves thrust headlong into a CIA conspiracy inspired by the MKUltra experiments of the 50s and 60s.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Abandoned (查無此心) (2022)

This Taiwanese crime flick takes the problem of "runaway workers" (illegal immigrants) in Taiwan (from Thailand and Vietnam, for example) and makes this gritty real issue the context of a run-of-the-mill serial killer thriller, perfectly watchable, except as it reaches its denouement (a "the serial killer wears a birthday party hat and laughs maniacally in his underground lair" denouement) the gritty realism gives way to more and more eye-rolling cliche.

★★★☆☆

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A Haunting In Venice (2023)

With his third Agatha Christie adaptation (the first being Murder On The Orient Express; the second, Death On The Nile) director, lead actor, and likely infatuated-starer-at-self-in-mirrors Kenneth Brannagh delivers another big glossy star vehicle (this one has Tina Fey, terrific as Poirot's mystery novelist friend Ariadne Oliver, and Michelle Yeoh appears) but he again mishandles the all-important mystery, this time transforming Halloween Party into a supernatural horror, forgetting that to solve a mystery Hercule Poirot needs clues, not just to simply float around a crumbly Venetian mansion in extreme close-up; in the end, Brannagh's Poirot looks ridiculous presenting grand revelations magically-gleaned from two clues: flowers and a ringing phone. 

★★★☆☆

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Mindscape (aka "Anna") (2013)

The high-concept sci-fi is really just a contrivance, the only thing separating this movie from a more run-of-the-mill whodunit with Mark Strong's "memory investigator", a man able to piggybank along in people's memories, really just a Hercule Poirot who might otherwise have to simply interview those involved in a mystery involving a housebound and hunger-striking teenager (another eye-roll-inducing contrivance), a family secret, a murder, schoolyard bullying and mistaken identity.

★★☆☆☆

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Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

The uprising that takes place in this third Ant-Man movie against new villain Kang, an uprising that starts with the Ant-Man family suddenly being sucked into Kang's subatomic-sized Quantum universe, spans the family's meeting the tiny world's inhabitants and choosing to side with them in a long-running conflict, and an uprising that ends with the family's takedown of Kang in a dizzying film-final cgi battle, all seems to happen in a narrative time of about twenty minutes, which isn't to say the movie is exciting - it is written so that everything happens in the time it takes to shrug your shoulders and is in fact the least interesting of the three movies of the series.

★★☆☆☆

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A Good Woman Is Hard To Find (2019)

This Irish crime drama does a good job of depicting the vicious cycle of hardship and crime and the judgement women face from men, women, shopkeepers, the authorities - everyone - but there are hard-to-believe aspects to the situation Sarah, a mum of two young children, finds herself in at the start, and something unlikely about the crime that sets off her grisly journey to protect her kids and find out the truth of her husband's murder in a housing project, and the movie ends on a wilful, gleeful and unlikely climax engineered for thrills rather than realism, detracting from the bleak social crime drama that precedes it.

★★★☆☆

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A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

In Woody Allen's inconsequential, breezy romantic comedy - which I quite enjoyed - Timothée Chalamet's gloomy Gatsby Welles shuffles hunch-shouldered, arms in pockets around a rainy New York City, spending a day with sunny partner Ashleigh that doesn't go to plan, and just as you think it yourself about his slight and self-aware performance, Allen has Chalamet say - ostensibly about another character but far too applicable to his own performance to be coincidence - "[He's] a James Dean minus the acting chops".

★★★☆☆

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Appearances (Les Apparences) (2020)

I've never heard of the Swedish crime author Karin Alvtegena but here one of her books, Betrayal, is adapted for the screen and it is a mostly compelling psychological drama (although one messily over-plotted with a crime hurried in at the end) with a terrific lead performance by Karin Viard as the wife of an orchestra conductor, who 'keeps up appearances' after she discovers her husband has betrayed her. 

★★★☆☆

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