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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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

The inferior sequel to Knives Out tries to repeat the same tricks, cutting back and forwards in time to interject scenes that upend what we thought we knew of the developing mystery (this time set on a tech billionaire's hi-tech Greek island where guests have gathered for a murder mystery weekend) but like that murder mystery weekend, which Daniel Craig's nondescript Benoit Blanc abruptly ends by prematurely solving it, so too is the movie's main mystery - the murder of one of the guests - abruptly over, solved within an hour of starting, and all the jumping back and forth between past and present, the crowdpleasing techpreneur teardown, and jarring celebrity cameos can't disguise how brief and empty it is.

★★☆☆☆

No Time To Die (2021)

When it is all said and done, this final Daniel Craig James Bond movie has revealed that all the major players of all the recent movies have been moving all their lives in a circle so so small, so insular that the spy's world ends up looking like a daytime soap: he/she grew up with him/her and he/she is the son/daughter/mother/father/secret twin of him/her and is the one responsible for this/that major event in this/that other character's life, and everyone's made at least two trips through the snow to a particular home in remote Norway - making No Time To Die the soapiest, most melodramatic James Bond episode yet; themes are ripped from Greek tragedy: there's long-lost family secrets, a modern-day Midas touch, and diabolical revenge sought by yet another facially disfigured male villain; but it is beautiful and engrossing and checks all of those James Bond boxes - exquisitely photographed locations, expertly choreographed action, sophistication and sexiness - not quite achieving the sublime thrills of Casino Royale but certainly not a Quantum of Solace either - in terms of James Bond quality, this is more Skyfall or Spectre.

★★★★☆

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The Jacket (2005)

There are delicious moments of time travel madness early on as returned soldier, asylum inmate and murder suspect Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) richochets between a romantic future and a miserable asylum incarceration in the present, but this isn't Twelve Monkeys (Jennifer Jason Leigh is the psychiatric doctor tagging along but just stares and mumbles no matter what happens - she's no Madeleine Stowe) and the thriller elements fail to survive to an ending that, after so much dark potential, collapses into something with a corny The Lake House vibe.

★★☆☆☆

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Casino Royale (2006)

From its opening scene, a vertiginous dash through a construction site, the pace and excitement of this 2006 film of Ian Fleming's first Bond book never lets up, except perhaps for the card game where an effort is made to keep things moving with stairwell fisticuffs, a shower trauma, some defibrillator nonsense, but James has a card game to play and so the action is interrupted by really quite ridiculous scenes of the agent with a licence to kill repeatedly returning to the card table, coolly adjusting his cuff while a look of muted surprise appears on the face of bad guy Mads Mikkelsen.

★★★★★

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Knives Out (2019)

Not as effective a homage to the Agatha Christie murder mystery as it is a homage to the parlour game thriller stage plays of the likes of Ira Levin and Anthony Shaffer, director Rian Johnson nods to Sleuth with his mystery novellist's mansion setting crammed full of unusual murder mystery objects (including a prominent Jolly Jack Tar figure) and Deathtrap is brought to mind watching this movie's twisting, changing thriller-, not mystery-, plot and, really, this mostly fun, mostly well-plotted movie is in fact at it worst in its messy third act and attempts at a detective dénouement - Agatha Christie was never so longwinded. 

★★★☆☆

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Spectre (2015)

A message from beyond the grave from Judy Dench's M sends Daniel Craig's icy James Bond from a Dias de Los Muertos parade in Mexico to Austria, Morocco and to the deserts of Northern Africa as he hunts the head of a powerful network of evil, in this 24th Bond instalment, for the most part a spectacular thrill ride but punctuated with a number of scenes in which the agent's luck is groanworthy.

★★★★☆

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The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011)

Marvellous to look at and full of hilarious details that kept me and my nephews laughing, this elaborately rendered animation from Steven Spielberg brings the characters of Herge's Tintin comics to amazing 3D life but while scenes are fluid and exciting like Indiana Jones setpieces, the greater story is an anticlimactic vacuum: a drunk sailor, Haddock, needs to quit the bottle in order to be able to recall vital family history which isn't actually vital at all - at last remembered, it just catches him up with what audiences pretty much knew from the start.

★★★★☆

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Skyfall (2012)

A masterpiece addition to the Bond canon, up there with the recent Casino Royale as one of the best Bonds ever made, but why are M and the agent with the license to kill left in such a dire pickle in the end with just a doddery old Groundskeeper Willie with a shotgun to help?

★★★★★

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Cowboys and Aliens (2011)

There is a deadly earnestness throughout this weird hybrid sci-fi western that jars with 1) its occasional vague comedy 2) its nods to alien horror classics, and 3) the fact that Harrison Ford looks like he is trying hard not to roll his eyes; viewers will take time working out this is not a parody a la Mars Attacks, not an absurd genre mashup like Wild Wild West but a film adaptation of a fanboy graphic novel that has misfired (and perhaps Harrison Ford knows it).

★★☆☆☆

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