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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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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Toy Soldiers (1991)

Die Hard in 1988 launched a genre - the non-War, modern and corporate The Great Escape - and was followed by a rush of similar action adventures centred on an everyman hero taking on a team of hostage-takers from within a hostage situation, this one taking place in a private boys school where Sean Austin plays a rebellious teenaged "John McClane" leading a schoolyard group of  fellow "prisoners" who plot their escape under the watch of machine-gun wielding "Germans", and it is corny, teenage, 90s-cult film fun.

★★★☆☆

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Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023)

D&D, that role-playing game enjoyed by unwashed geeks sitting for days at a table talking about charisma points and elvin lore, is adapted in this movie with Chris Pine - charming as always - playing the roguish leader of a misfit band of thieves who must traverse wild monster-strewn landscapes collecting magical items to help them overcome some wizards hellbent on fantasy-world domination, and it is a funny and fresh adventure, and you do not need to be a fantasy-loving unwashed geek to thoroughly enjoy it.

★★★★☆

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Contact (1997)

In Robert Zemeckis' adaptation that does a good job of digesting into an engrossing blockbuster the hard science fiction of Carl Sagan's novel, a researcher (Jodie Foster, in top form, perfectly cast) sits under satellite dishes with headphones listening for messages from outerspace, eventually coming across a code blipped from somewhere far off, the deciphered message of which is a set of instructions to build something, but religious leaders are wary and politicians are defensive as space agencies hurry to act.

★★★★☆

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Candleshoe (1977)

There's some dated gender stereotyping and at least one cringeworthy allusion to race, but Disney's Candleshoe is a classic family adventure in which a young Jodie Foster, a year on from her standout Taxi Driver performance, stars as a streetwise kid who inveigles her way into a family mansion by pretending to be a long-lost heir because she wants to get her hands on a hidden treasure.

★★★☆☆

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Wakanda Forever, this 2022 sequel to Black Panther, certainly goes forever, told with the sweep of a grand war saga after Homer, which is a feat given almost the whole of its nearly three-hour runtime revolves around a single battle, and even though this conflict — between a deep-sea kingdom and Wakanda — seems easily-avoidable and founded on a misunderstanding, and even though two-and-a-half hours of not terribly interesting political exposition is spent trying to explain how and why it is avoidable to a Homeric catalogue of overwrought characters, the epic CGI fight goes ahead in the end.

★★☆☆☆

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Super 8 (2011)

 

A Goonies gang accidentally captures government secrets on their Super 8 camera as they make a zombie film, and while the kids revel in making their zombie movie, you get the sense director J J Abrams himself is revelling in making  the sort of movie Spielberg made in the 80s with kids on an adventure  in a richly detailed small-town America, but J J Abrams is also paying homage to the paranoid scifi invasion B-movies of the 50s and this dual, conflicting purpose strips some Spielberg heart from the kids' adventure.

★★★☆☆

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Uncharted (2022)

Tom Holland is a far too baby-faced Nathan Drake, the supposed-to-be manly hero of Naughty Dog's Uncharted game series adapted here for the big screen, and casting Mark Wahlberg, too young and clean-shaven, as the game's Victor "Sully" Sullivan robs the movie of some of the game's emotion given the character is supposed to be a father-like figure in grown-up orphan Nathan's life, but despite this horrible casting, the movie succeeds as an engaging popcorn adventure with moments of great excitement and, for lovers of the series, plenty of nods to the game.

★★★☆☆

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The Lost City (2022)

Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum make a likeable, if slightly indistinctly characterised, leading pair (is he a dopey muscle-bound try-hard, sage truth-bomber, or simply gaga in love?) in this romantic action comedy that is most fun in its first twenty minutes before the action shifts to a "forgotten island" (which turns out to have an airport, a village, and a volcano that features in the tv news) where Daniel Radcliffe's villain, dressed as Colonel Sanders, seeks a treasure and the movie's initially sharp wit quickly descends into juvenile things like bum leeches and dick carry-on.

★★☆☆☆

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The Green Knight (2021)

 

I read The Quest of the Holy Grail once, and this adaptation of a related tale about the nephew of King Arthur, Sir Gawain, journeying to see a Green Knight to pay a due, brought that book back to mind, perfectly evoking the dreaminess and painterliness of the book's chapters, with some, like the episodes in the movie, ending without obvious point while others thrill with chivalrous exploits, all taking place against a beautifully realised medieval time steeped in magic and religion, albeit in a movie with two or three scenes, clanging attempts at modernity, which jolt the viewer out of the otherwise mesmerising fantasy.

★★★★☆

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Spider-man: No Way Home (2021)

I wasn't always rivetted, as evidenced by the fact I was able to make to-do lists in my head as the dizzying cgi-action sequences went on and on, but there's no denying the cleverness of this Spider-man movie (the sixth Marvel film to feature Tom Holland as the webslinger but the first to characterise him as a mature agent of salvation, not a juvenile wannabe meter-out of violent justice), one that makes all the previous iterations of Spider-man, the ones with Andrew Garfield or Toby Maguire or even, say, Shinji Tôdô an extension of this movie, neatly rendering moot any and all past inconsistencies in plot or character or circumstance that may have niggled at viewers of umpteen versions, making everything connected and sensible and, get ready for it, ripe for multiple concurrent Spider-man releases.

★★★★☆

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Black Widow (2021)

We learn more about Natasha Romanov's childhood in this action thriller that is thankfully, refreshingly a Marvel superhero movie made with adults in mind with the sort of globetrotting locations and over-the-top hi-tech-villainry (and then some) found in James Bond movies.

★★★☆☆

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The 100 Year-Old Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared (2013)

Forrest Gump spouted his mother's life lessons and walked innocently, gormlessly through some of the 20th Century's most momentous historical occasions and so does Allan Karlsson, the 100 year-old birthday boy and 'Swedish Forrest Gump' of Jonas Jonasson's 2009 book adapted here into this movie which starts with good humour as Allan wanders out of his retirement home and embarks on an adventure involving a suitcase full of cash, a growing body count, and explosions, but quickly runs out of energy as the reenacted moments in history and the encounters with thugs become repetitive and the investigation into Allan's disappearance stalls and the absurd developments become more and more predictable.

★★☆☆☆

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The Meg (2018)

A team of marine researchers led by a wetsuit-clad, ripped Martin Brody-sort of disbelieved boy-who-cried-shark (Jason Statham) takes on a megladon, a prehistoric shark of incredible proportions dwelling unseen in the deepest parts of the ocean until thermal currents bring it to the surface; the occasional sight of the megladon leaping out of the water or torpedoing out of the ocean's darkness towards the camera makes it worth wading through the rest of this overlong creature-features's by-the-numbers mindlessness.

★★★☆☆

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Enola Holmes (2020)

The sister of the famous Baker Street detective, a character dreamt up by author Nancy Springer for a series of teen detective novels, is brought up outside the conventions of turn-of-the-century Britain and so as a young adult is perfectly equipped with the sass, street-smarts and probing scientific mind needed to solve a mystery - her mother disappears and a Marquess disappears and our hero, Enola, embarks on a rollicking, satisfying (well, mostly...not including the underdeveloped plot thread regarding Helena Bonham Carter's character) adventure through a London on the cusp of a sweeping social change.

★★★★☆

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Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Of course, the single purpose of these kaiju movies is to stage spectacular cgi fights between the towering beasts, which this movie does impressively and without a boggly ping-pong eyeball in sight; everything else - a signing child, a conceptually confusing Hollow Earth, a mystical glowing axe, a plethora of unnecessary characters (many of them annoying children with no business being there at all), a visit to Hong Kong, mecha-robots, "skullcrawlers", is just a whole lot of nonsense to fill the time and whether you care less about this filler will depend on which side of thirteen you are. 

★★★☆☆ (my score)

★★★★★ (my nephew's score)

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Fool's Gold (2008)

This much-maligned sun-drenched adventure from Warner Bros. has goofball divorcees, played by bronzed beach babes Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, reuniting in a race to claim a sunken treasure in the Caribbean, and it is so harmless a romantic romp, like an especially cartoony Romancing the Stone, it is hard to see why so many people regard it with such disdain, even if Donald Sutherland's appearance as a rich yacht owner feels unnecessary and his character's relationship with his daughter is irritating, even if McConaughey and Hudson are not the most likeable leads, and even if you are never going to want to watch it again, ever.

★★★☆☆

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The Core (2003)

When Earth's electromagnetic forces start misbehaving, unleashing a barrage of stock-footage world-landmark destruction, a crew of scientists, geologists and astronauts is assembled to drive a worm-like burrowing craft to the centre of the Earth to "restart the Earth's core", and boy do they have their work cut out for them: no, not saving the Earth but trying to make look interesting their repetitive chair-shaking encounters with, "Oh my god, diamonds the size of Cape Cod" (chair shake, chair shake) and "Oh my god, giant empty geodes" (chair shake, chair shake) and "Oh my god, hull-breaching lava" (chair shake, chair shake) etc, etc.

★★☆☆☆

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Golden Kingdom (2015)

In director Brian Perkins' perfectly imperfect narrative film populated with only first time actors, the abbot of a monastery in remote Myanmar is called away from his temple, leaving his very young charges, four novice monks, alone for they don't know how long, trying to keep on with their peaceful, ordered lives.

★★★★★

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