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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Skyscraper

The tallest, most wooden, most hollow character in this action is - surprise! - not The Rock (who is actually quite charismatic, always, and even in a dopey exercise like this) but the elaborately cgi-animated 'Nakatomi Plaza' that is this action movie's title-skyscraper 'The Pearl', a cloud-puncturing phallus full of stupid hi-tech with no purpose to exist except for a silly movie "house of mirrors" showdown - so, while the action movie starts strong, the minute it enters the hard-to-fathom cgi insides of The Pearl, things plummet into a void.

★★★☆☆

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Switch (2011)

A fashion designer in Montreal is encouraged to do a homeswap with someone in Paris, and for the first day this seems like it was a really good idea - she flirts with a man in a park, enjoys the city, sees the Eiffel Tower - but then on day two the fashion designer wakes up to the Parisian police knocking down her door accusing her of grisly murder and suddenly she's alone in a foreign country, accused of murder and even worse, on the case are only the most bungling of detectives believing her to be a Parisian psycho while unwilling or unable to make a simple phone call to Canada to verify the facts of her life - it is an intriguing set-up that has nowhere to go but stupid.

★★☆☆☆

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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

The irreverence of some of the universes in an infinite multiverse makes sense, but that doesn't mean literal sausage fingers, raccoon chefs, goggly-eyed rocks, and swirling black-hole bagels are any less irritating in this sci-fi adventure about a woman who learns a simple life lesson in the most repetitive, long-winded way imaginable - not from the first iteration of her multiverse, where the message was already crystal clear, but only after ad nauseam repetition of several of the silliest iterations - yes, literal sausage fingers again and again and again - over 139 minutes that feel longer than a zillion lifetimes strung together.

★★☆☆☆

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Don't Breathe 2 (2021)

Well, they've certainly fulfilled the brief, taking all that ugliness of the first movie (remember when things turned unexpectedly nasty in the basement?) and fashioning a really equally vile sequel in which that blind ex-Navy Seal kidnapper, rapist and murderer in number one returns, the victim of another home invasion but this time a kind of antihero as he resists the efforts of a group of men trying to kidnap his daughter, a crime that starts out mega-gory and ends with sickening "who thinks up this stuff?" gothic horror involving, wait for it, involuntary organ donation, some Grande Dame Guignol psycho-biddy grotesquery, hacked off arms and popped eyeballs.

★★★☆☆

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Alien vs. Predator (2004)

A security guard at work assures me that the bringing together of the Predator from the Predator movies and the Alien from the Alien movies into an Alien Vs Predator (AVP) series of movies isn't silly, that the two series and two monsters complement each other nicely, but this first movie of the series has a research team investigating an underground pyramid in the Antartic, unleashing from a prison the beginnings of a long Predator/Alien mythology that is pretty bloody silly. 

★★☆☆☆

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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor) (2009)

I came very late to these adaptations of the Stieg Larsson books - was I on another planet? - but have, in 2021,  finally watched the Swedish movie series and can say they are gripping, often brutal action mysteries, this first one introducing Noomi Rapace as the kickass title heroine who investigates a 40-year-old murder mystery, one of those plots that require a fair suspension of your disbelief as details from all those decades ago present themselves to the hacker-slash-investigator impossibly conveniently, untouched and intact in the modern day.

★★★★☆

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Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt) (1998)

Run Lola Run (DVD)

Run Lola Run (DVD)

When her boyfriend loses a large bag of cash on a train, Lola has just twenty frantic minutes to find a replacement bag of money and get it to her boyfriend before anyone scary gets to him, and this inventive, low budget German independent film with a pulsing techno soundtrack gives Lola the opportunity of a do-over when things don't pan out, a sensational quirk in 1998 but one that seems pedestrian by today's Memento/Sliding Doors standards.

★★☆☆☆

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The Raid (2011)

This Indonesian action flick with a minimal plot, about police on the sixth floor of a tenement building surrounded on all sides and up and down by ruthless drug criminals, is one of the most violent movies you'll ever see but you'll be unable to tear your eyes from the gore (the fluorescent tubes to the neck and the bodies smashed into concrete and the bullets through heads, and so on and so on) because you'll be completely transfixed by the lightning-speed balletic action, perhaps the best martial arts action - or best action, period - ever filmed.

★★★★★

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Bastille Day (aka The Take) (2016)

Apparently filmed before the Charlie Hebdo massacre but released after, this action movie is loaned a gritty political realism through its Paris setting, a city that in the movie experiences an act of terrorism and a chaotic aftermath as multiple agencies descend on the city to chase the pickpocket assumed responsible, but that the gritty realism was unintended becomes clear as the pickpocket and Idris Elba's CIA operative form a Lethal Weapon pair of mismatched crime fighters who run around Paris dodging bullets until a really not very sensible Die Hard siege ending.

★★☆☆☆

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Big Game (2014)

Alone overnight in the Finnish wilderness taking part in a coming-of-age hunting ritual, a 13-year-old ends up protector, not hunter, of the President of the United States on the run from a psychotic Arab prince in German officer jodhpurs who has just downed Air Force One, and you just wish a movie with this sort of outlandish plot, one featuring Samuel L Jackson as POTUS, spent less time on the set-up and allowed more time for the 13-year-old to show his mettle and outsmart the baddies, not simply outrun them in comicbook-style for twenty minutes near the end.

★★☆☆☆

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Nerve (2016)

David Fincher's far superior The Game, in which millionaire Nicholas van Orton is made to endure a thorough ordeal of a "game" but only to experience catharsis in the end, took the main character to hell and back - he even wakes up penniless in a grave in a Mexican cemetery at one stage - but in Nerve, Emma Roberts' Vee is - at lunchtime - introduced to the online game of public nuisance, 'Nerve' - a massive multiplayer online game "that can't be shut down" despite it resulting in teenage deaths - and later that same day, she has already experienced Kim Kardashian fame, crushing Nicholas van Orton defeat, has become involved in a ridiculous 'Nerve' grand finale (remember, this is a game that has existed since long before lunchtime) and later that night, she has also successfully shut down the game site, making "Nerve" a bit like three volumes of The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner all in one afternoon...and apart from Juliette Lewis' strong but sadly unnecessary performance as mom, the movie will get on your nerves.

★☆☆☆☆

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Hostage (2005)

The Die Hard series went on hiatus between 1995 and 2007 once the awful Die Hard With A Vengeance (that dopey one with John McClane playing Simon Says with the Riddler) demonstrated no-one was very sure how to keep the series fresh, so in the downtime Bruce Willis decided to star in this 2005 movie adaptation of a Robert Crais book about a hostage situation in a smaller Nakatomi Plaza - the family home of a rich mob accountant - that needs a John McClane (reluctant hero cop Jeff Talley, upon whom family members' lives depend) and like the Die Hard sequels, it is overthought and nowhere near as good as the original Die Hard.

★★☆☆☆

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You Only Live Twice (1967)

A shuttlejacking creates tension between world superpowers and unfortunately Sean Connery's James Bond has been shot dead, bundled up like an Egyptian mummy and buried at sea, but his death is all just a cunning ruse to allow the spy to secretly follow up leads in Japan where for the first time Blofeld shows his face and, thanks to an especially sleazy screenplay by Roald Dahl, 007 experiences all of the oriental delights the Land of the Rising Sun has to offer, including betrothal to a woman, Kissy Suzuki, who spends most of her time in a wet bikini.

★★☆☆☆

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Robo Geisha (ロボゲイシャ) (2009)

Japanophiles, students of the Japanese language, lovers of female-on-female wrestling, and robotics nerds - not even these people will enjoy sitting through this tripe about a troupe of geisha assassins under the employ of an uncharismatic Mr Kengan.

★☆☆☆☆

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Deadpool (2016)

An especially juvenile entry into Marvel's superhero canon is 2016's Deadpool about a superhero whose superpowers seem to be slow body rejuvenation, an ability to run through machine gun fire, and an inexhaustible stream-of-consciousness prattle about erections, masturbation, blowjobs and other topics Marvel counts on being popular with its target demographic - not me.

★★☆☆☆

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Con Air (1997)

Psychopathic prisoners take over the plane transporting them I forget where - it doesn't matter - and it is up to John Cusack on the ground and Nicolas Cage and his spectacular mullet in the air to thwart the criminals' plans to do I forget what - something diabolical, it doesn't matter - in this shamelessly unsubtle 90s action that just goes on and on and on with lots of slo mo swagger, fiery explosions, and a squealing electric guitar insisting how super exciting it all is.

★★☆☆☆

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The Equalizer (2014)

Like The Hulk, a hardware store manager erupts into violence at the sight of injustice and manages to take down the Russian criminal underworld one-by-bloody-one thanks to expert tactical skills and the fact scores of bad guys don't recognise when a situation requires them to retreat and think again, like, for example, when they find themselves in a Home Alone-style booby-trapped DIY store.

★★★☆☆

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Vice (2015)

A company, "Vice", that offers hedonistic roleplaying experiences, embellishes its A.I. sex robots with elaborate backstories and personalities, which seems a fairly unnecessary thing to do not just for the clientele who are not privy to the robots' bedtime conversations with their robot sisters but also unnecessary to the chase that occupies most of this daft scifi's runtime when one of the sex robots escapes Vice and for an hour and a half runs through point blank machine-gun fire.

★☆☆☆☆

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Star Trek Beyond (2016)

That scene, barely a second long, showing Sulu when he is not at the helm of the Enterprise is a brilliant addition to a series that at its core is a celebration of universal diversity and inclusion, with this particular episode also succeeding where perhaps Into Darkness didn't, delivering good old reliable Star Trek space exploration, action, humour and philosophy — the franchise doesn't need too many tweaks or new skins or tricks, as its fifty year anniversary this year clearly demonstrates.

★★★★☆

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