Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (2024)

The Dry 2 squanders the two things the original The Dry had going for it: its strong evocation of small-town Australia - so real - and Eric Bana's likeable Falk, tied to that place through his past but now a fish-out-of-water city slicker - but here, the setting is a fictional rainforest (the Dandenong, Yarra, and Otway Ranges standing in for the - for some reason fictional - Giraling Ranges) and Falk has been reduced to a generic interrogator of one suspect after another - and in a particularly uninteresting mystery - the disappearance of a woman from the world's dreariest company retreat where five or six women snap at each other about too many plot points all out of scope of their miserable forest prison: peripheral corporate skullduggery, references to bullying, allusions to the wayward pasts of two young sisters, ultimately unnecessary harkbacks to a serial killer case, and Falk's unilluminating backstory - a feeble attempt at grounding him once more in place through his mother's weird disappearance years and years earlier. 

 

★★☆☆☆

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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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Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

The final episode goes to a lot of trouble to tie in characters and storylines from across the previous I-don't-know-how-many movies, and the result is an exhausting first hour of bombast, but once these operatics are out of the way, the action starts - also exhausting (impossible missions, truly, in sunken submarines in subzero temperatures, and high-speed dogfights and plane-hopping at high altitudes) but exhausting in exactly the way fans of the Mission: Impossible movies want.

★★★★☆

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Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Werner Herzog takes as his inspiration the story of Carlos Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber trader in the 1800s who transported a disassembled ship over a mountain, and turns this audacious business endeavour into a tragi-comic misadventure of epic proportions, rendered with his usual metered storytelling and cinematic visuals, but there's also rich thought-provoking analogy in the fact his own film-making famously became an undertaking as audacious, dismaying, and mad as Fitzcarrald's.

★★★★★

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The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

You would think setting The Fantastic Four: First Steps on a kitsch Austin Powers alternate Earth (after the 90s cartoon series (but with monochromatic blue replacing the lurid Austin Powers palette)) would help make this Marvel superhero movie a nostalgic joy, but rather than zing, it feels inert, ponderous, empty even, despite the cartoonish action, but helping fill the time is Julia Garner in another steely performance as a surfboarding metal bad guy, and while Pedro Pascale never fully inhabits his character, he is easy to look at as Reed Richards, the mild-mannered brainiac head of a superhero family.

★★★☆☆

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Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

The world-building and mythologising reign over plot, logic, and sense in this sixth (has it really only been six?) Final Destination movie, which plays like a cartoon series - it's glossy, wonkily computer-generated in parts, and the deaths are separate mini-episodes - and it is hard to care about the family members being picked off one-by-one by Death given noone in it cares either, and anyway, the characters are always secondary to the attempts here at a origin story and attempt at a reboot, often cornball - the holed-up Death-whispering grandma doesn't belong in the series, and the death-by-peanut allergy is a low point.

★★★☆☆

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The Fall Guy (2024)

As battle-scarred stuntman Col Seavers, Ryan Gosling does his gormless The Nice Guys schtick that he is so good at, and with terrific chemistry between him and Emily Blunt's Jody Moreno - she's the lead actress of a film-in-production that Seavers is working on - this romantic comedy action blockbuster overcomes its middle-stretch of ennui (during a stunt sequence set in Sydney, Australia, the film starts to feel like it has no place to go) and becomes, ultimately, utterly charming.

★★★★☆ 

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Fall (2022)

A confined-space thriller in which the confined space is a small platform at the top of a 2000-foot radio antenna in a US desert, this movie, beyond this original setting, is completely by-the-numbers, rolling out in such formulaic fashion, you suspect an AI spat out the story, but watch it for my favourite  moment when the hero, dehydrated, overexposed to the Sun and at death's door, eats a vulture and turns immediately, momentarily, into a slinky, confident Lara Croft.

★★★☆☆

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The Flash (2023)

Even The Parent Trap in 1961 does a better job of duplicating its star (Hayley Mills, playing twins) than this peculiar 2023 DC exercise that randomly turns the second-versions of lead actor Ezra Miller into a weird slack-jawed cartoon - sometimes completely unnecessarily, like at times when there is only one Ezra Miller on screen! - and these NQR Polar Express doppelgangers distract from an already uninvolving Back To The Future time travel multiverse superhero origin story, one about a super-super-fast, red-lycraed Flash.

★★★☆☆

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The Fabelmans (2023)

The poster says, "Capture every moment," but a more appropriate line would be "capture just a series of moments from mostly one formative year in the life of a young schoolboy who dreams of making movies, and really wallow for most of the time in the uncomfortable matter of the boy's involvement in his mother's love, sex, and fidelity, while only treating very cursorily the much more interesting ideas of the camera's fidelity - its equal ability to tell truth and lie - leaving bemused viewers wondering why, if this is Steven Spielberg's deeply personal life story, the lead is Sam, not Steven, and why the life story abruptly ends with a shrug (and a playful wink) in the middle of Sam's teens - perhaps this was to be a Wonder Years-style TV show gone wrong; perhaps seventy other years' worth of cinematic genius are on the cutting room floor.

★★☆☆☆

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Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (Felkészülés meghatározatlan ideig tartó együttlétre) (2021)

A neurosurgeon quits her job in New Jersey, USA, and heads to Budapest, Hungary for a romantic rendevous on the Pest side of the Liberty Bridge, but the object of her infatuation, a surgeon she met at a conference, doesn't show up and when she tracks him down, he doesn't know who she is, so is she mad, is he lying, or is there a Hitchcockian thriller afoot - it's suspenseful, intriguing, but you won't know until the very last frame precisely the nature of this slowburn but razor sharp film. 

★★★★☆

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Frozen Ground (2013)

The action is heightened and some of the events clearly can't have happened in real life exactly as they play out here, but this based-on-a-true-story movie is gripping viewing with Nicolas Cage playing a cop who needs to first convince dismissive colleagues and officials that there is a serial killer active in Anchorage, Alaska before he can bring to justice Robert Hansen, a man whose real-life existence and crimes you"ll probably wish you'd stayed unaware of.

★★★☆☆

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End Of The Century (Fin de siglo) (2019)

In this beautiful slip of a film — a romance tinged with sadness — Ocho, an Argentine poet, encounters Javi, a producer of children's television, while knocking about Barcelona one day and after immediately hitting it off is startled to learn they first met twenty years earlier at a time when Ocho, perhaps due to the times, wasn't yet himself.

★★★★★

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Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Joel McCrea is no Cary Grant, lacking charisma as the lead of this Hitchcock thriller, but then I suppose he is supposed to - an American crime reporter in London seconded as a foreign correspondent in Amsterdam, he is both a man out of his league and a fish out of water tasked with investigating the potential for war in Europe  - but the other problem is the plot is rambly and loose and barely holds Hitchcock's setpieces together, so thank goodness those setpieces - an assassination, thrills inside a windmill, dizzying scenes atop a hotel and a chapel, and a spectacular plane crash - are so, so memorable! 

★★★★☆

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The Father (2020)

This multi-Oscar-Award-winning film is no-one's idea of a good time but it is so rivetting on account of its being so well-acted and filmed and told, you are not able to take your eyes off it and the sting in the tail of course is that while delivered with thrills of a distinctly Hitchcockian style, these thriller elements are just the trappings of a very real, commonplace, and oh-so-heart-breaking aged-care conundrum and the film cleverly makes you guilty of assuming wrong things about the cantankerous old man Anthony Hopkins plays.

★★★★☆

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Fear (1997)

Sarah McLachlan's "Wild Horses" plays whenever Nicole (Reese Witherspoon) believes things are good between her and David (Mark Wahlberg), like during rollercoaster sex, but at other times angry thrash metal plays and David doles out a black eye to Nicole, drives like a maniac, cheats, engages in grimy partner-swap sex, and in a laughable homage to "Cape Fear" meant to confirm David a right looney tune, he self-tattoos "NICOLE 4 EVA" across his torso with black biro ink as dissonate chords crescendo, but the genuinely tense abusive relationship that develops between the teens is muddied in the last half of this psycho thriller with David turning out to be as much a lawless gangbanging squatter with daddy issues as he is obsessive about Nicole.

★★☆☆☆

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1408 (2007)

In this Stephen King short story adaptation, John Cusack is perfect as the drily funny, cynical paranormal investigator and professional skeptic who checks into room 1408 of New York's Dolphin Hotel wanting to debunk claims the room is somehow evil, but both he and the viewers soon have the smiles wiped off their faces once the supernatural terror kicks in, though these chills and jump scares wear thin a good time before the movie's oblique, that'll-do, "whatever" ending.

★★★☆☆

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The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) (2009)

Released in the same year, 2009, as Dragon Tattoo, this sequel in fact takes up the story one full year later, so was released in shorter time than the story - but that is still so short a time, Played With Fire feels like just the second half of one looong movie - with this part filling in some of the details surrounding Salander's, er, particular way of being (ruthless, traumatised goth fighting machine) while she computer-hacks and investigates and becomes the prime suspect in another mystery, this time involving sex trafficking, which she investigates in unison with - but again physically distanced from - her journalist friend (Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist) and it ends up being more "James Bond" than the first movie's Agatha Christie-style 40-year-old murder-mystery-in-a-mansion - there's even a hulking Jaws character impervious to pain!

★★★☆☆

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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

Victor Frankenstein's experiments are given a David Copperfield jazz-magic vibe that I don't think Mary Shelley intended but by far the biggest deviation of this mostly faithful adaptation is the fact the monster is a re-creation, not a creation - Robert De Niro is a resuscitated organ recipient, - scarred but not a hideous daemon - with prior knowledge, not a birthling - probably because it isn't easy to translate to the screen Mary Shelley's caginess regarding Frankenstein's methods of bestowing life upon the inanimate (pretty much in the book a man says the word, 'galvanisation' and then a big yellow eye opens); there's also fewer deaths in a rushed ending: once this movie's grand climax is revealed (an inspired gothic moment that repulses and horrifies and finally hits the right note) the movie decouples from the book, turning into about seven minutes years of Frankenstein's madness and incarceration and anguish, as if everyone has tired of the whole exercise and wants simply to sail prematurely home.

★★★☆☆

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Follow Me (2020)

To mark the tenth anniversary of his online success, a Logan Paul type of vlogger (read "young, irresponsible and annoying") heads to Moscow with friends to participate in a livestreamed "escape room" only to realise too late into the puzzle-solving experience that the racially-stereotyped Russian heavies in charge of the venue have watched and want to reenact Eli Roth's Hostel - their wanton bloodshed stays mostly offscreen, thankfully, but the film doesn't do a very good job of hiding the reason why.

★☆☆☆☆

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