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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Wonka (2023)

Like a Wonka' chocolate, this prequel is a confection entirely concocted from scratch by some lunatic using the weird and wonderful ingredients from Dahl's books, so there's giraffe milk and chocolatier wars, exotic oompa loompa lands and stuff, but there is also a pervading sense that the movie is all a rigmarole to perpetuate a non-canon add-on chapter of not-especially-good songs, childish acting, and some wonky cgi, making this confection a sickly sweet one – you end up feeling that to pick up a book or go to see a movie isn't worth the risk of having thrust upon you the burden of an ever-expanding film and television universe.

★★★☆☆

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Where The Crawdads Sing (2022)

In this D-grade To Kill A Mockingbird that takes Harper Lee's Southern Gothicism and replaces it with Hallmark schmaltz, a patently absurd Boo Radley archetype — a "Marsh Girl" ostracized by townsfolk despite being polite, independent, self-sufficient, strong, well-groomed, self-educated, and someone who easily attracts a spunky local boyfriend not once but twice, and who sets herself up as a mussel-monger and later as a book illustrator by communicating winningly with local shop owners and uppity city book publishers — is made a cause célèbre when she contrives a way to have her abusive boyfriend drop sixty-five feet from a firetower.

★☆☆☆☆

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Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009)

When its master dies, leaving it to run free, a Japanese Akita called Hachi takes up residence at a train station, where everyone assumes it is showing extreme loyalty to its deceased master, but it's easy to cynically flip this otherwise pleasant story - based on the 1920s real-life dog, Hachiko - into a tale of animal neglect, seeing the dog's choice to squat at the station as the result of its having been turfed out by uncaring family, made to sit through rain, hail, or shine in the only place anybody will feed and pet him...sorry.

★★★☆☆

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Bullet Train (2022)

It is supposed to be a bit of Tarantino-esque fun, this adaptation of Kōtarō Isaka's book about five assassins aboard the same fast train in Japan, but there's something sad about it: not even Tarantino does Tarantino very well, lately; Brad Pitt in the lead role certainly doesn't manage a young and edgy "Tyler Durden" anymore; and by casting him and other non-Japanese actors in an American adaptation of the Japanese story set in Japan, the action movie inadvertently becomes a message film, with the message - the destructive influence of foreigners upon Japanese society - front and centre, an inescapable part of every crescendoing action scene, yet completely ignored.

★★☆☆☆

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21 Bridges (aka Manhattan Lockdown) (2019)

The fact Chadwick Boseman's NYPD police detective locks down Manhattan Island as a means of hunting down two police killers is just a passing detail, really, but so little else of note happens in this police procedural - just several moments of clunky editing and a completely from-the-start predictable plot - it is the closure of the twenty-one exit points from Manhattan Island that gives this ho-hum crime drama its title!

★★☆☆☆

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The Great Wall (长城) (2017)

The poster teases, "What were they trying to keep out [by building the Great Wall of China]?" but the intrigue ends very early on in this Matt Damon-helmed fantasy action when the gnashing dog beasts, the Tao Tei, are revealed and then shown over and over and over again, with every subsequent shot of a dog beast leaping forward into a 'mouth spear' further deadening your interest, and nor is your interest likely to be kindled by scenes of political friction between Damon's European mercenary (in China in search of gunpowder) and Jing Tian's Commander Lin - back and forth, back and forth they go: are they allies or are they enemies? - for these scenes exist simply to break up the monotony of the monster wave attacks...and myriad weapons (fiery cannonballs, bungee ropes, big scissors and bedsheets fashioned into wonky balloons) also fail to recapture the wonder of that teaser question.

★★☆☆☆

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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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Hot Pursuit (2015)

The premise (an uptight rookie cop escorts an 'opposite', a glamorous Colombian drug informant, across America and they bicker but ultimately, after surviving much danger, become friends), while hardly original, should work, especially with the likeable presence of Reese Witherspoon as the cop and Sofia Vergara as the informant, but the comedy is so unsophisticated, the performances so dialled in, and the action set pieces so laboured and unremarkable (during a freeway chase, for example, a tour bus crashes through...witches hats, and after getting evicted from a nightclub sting operation, the cop wangles her way back into the building by...going through the door), the only thing worth watching is the outtakes which run as the credits roll - they show that Witherspoon and Vergara do in fact have chemistry and are likeable, but this has somehow been stripped from a tired final product.

★☆☆☆☆

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