Exit 8 (2025)

The computer game it is based on is a simple spot-the-difference game, but this movie adaptation starring the charismatic Ninomiya Kazunari expands the premise into something at times disturbing and often profoundly moving, turning the main world-weary character's struggle to find Exit 8 in an underground train station in Japan into an analogy for stepping up, taking a stand against, and refusing to ignore life's anomalies - no easy task anywhere, but especially in consensus-driven Japan, and particularly resonant in light of recent scandals involving Fuji TV and Johnny and Associates, and more broadly in this age of male reckoning.

★★★★☆

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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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しんぼる ('Symbol') (2009)

This very funny oddity jumps back and forth between two disparate situations - an aged Mexican wrestler gears up for a bout as his family races to attend and, in a completely separate absurdist fantasy, a man-child wakes inside a white cube and finds he has no means of escape but there are a large number of cherubs' penis buttons dotted around the room that, when pushed, dispense food and other random objects.....really.

★★★☆☆ for the wrestler story

★★★★☆ for the absurd comedy

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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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Blue Beetle (2023)

It took me four or five sittings to get through this looong DC superhero movie that tells, with a glossy magazine look, the origin story of a superhero called Blue Beetle, a human teenager enhanced with a glowing blue parasitic alien technology that effectively disappears the movie's biggest asset, the young and good-looking Xolo Maridueña into a Power Ranger suit.

★★☆☆☆

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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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Poor Things (2023)

The saddest thing about Yorgos Lanthimos's icky Poor Things, a title that I think refers to audiences after two long hours, is that it takes an elaborate steampunk alternate fairytale-reality full of wonky actors playing wonky characters - including a Frankenstein sex doll-come-to-life with, perhaps don't think about it too hard, a child's brain - for the director  to elucidate so very little about the plight of women in today's world (or to be precise, the plight of women in fantasy realities of an alternate past) and there isn't much said of interest about sex or old-school gendered-rules about social propriety, either.

★☆☆☆☆

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Reminiscence (2022)

What was apparently intended was a noir detective story set in a water-inundated future world - Hugh Jackman's Nick provides the hardboiled voiceover, wondering out-loud things like why a dame like Rebecca Ferguson's sultry bar singer Mae walked into a "memory detective" agency like his - but the photography is glossy, the actors look like they are in a fashion magazine, the set design is 'Dick Tracy' cartoony and cheap like an escape room, and the lighting is 'BioShock' neon and bright, leaving you with the impression that the writer, the lighting person, the set designer, and the actors needed to sit down together at least once for a production meeting.

★★☆☆☆

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Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

Paul W S Anderson's third Resident Evil directorial effort - the fifth movie in the series - dutifully brings the game franchise to life again, delivering the zombie-killing action across a series of distinct, game-like map areas and peppering scenes with fan-pleasing nostalgia - Umbrella Corporation logos, red barrels, ladders that slowly extend downwards, and a host of familiar characters played by actors who speak and move like polygon clusters - but even as a huge fan of the series myself, I find it hard to imagine anyone would be still paying attention at the one-hour mark, by which point this slick but completely vacant horror action exercise has been well and truly, er, done to death.

★★★☆☆

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Daguerrotype (aka Le Secret de la Chambre Noire) (ダゲレオタイプの女) (2016)

What starts out as a metered and interesting contemplation of daguerrotypy quickly becomes a ponderous ghost story (daguerreotypy, just an analogy for memory, is never mentioned again) and it is a ghost story difficult to care about given all the characters are fairytale simpletons, the pace is catatonic, and the choices the characters start making about halfway through are so unlikely, so stripped of sense that the entire exercise becomes a completely untethered fantasy.

★★☆☆☆

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Ragnarok (Gåten Ragnarok) (2013)

Following in the giant footsteps of André Øvredal's Troll Hunter (2010) is this creature feature - nothing to do with superheroes - also set in the wildest reaches of Norway, but where Troll Hunter plumbed Norwegian folklore and came up with a creature feature that was inventive, this movie is far more tired with its main character, a gormless cross between an Indiana Jones archeologist and an Alan Grant paleontologist, banging on for the first half of the movie about Norse mythology - Oseberg ship artefact finding, runic alphabet-deciphering, code-breaking and very loose history-building - but only as an extremely longwinded way of getting him and his two children and a few other hangers-on to a Jurassic Park in Finnmark where a giant monster briefly harrasses them.

★☆☆☆☆

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Detective Dee and the Four Heavenly Kings (狄仁杰之四大天王) (2018)

Like 2013s Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon, this third Tsui Hark-directed Detective Dee movie is a prequel to 2010s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame and again involves the titular character, Di Renjie (an actual Tang Dynasty historical figure embellished with Sherlockian powers of deduction) investigating a gong'an crime - a crime steeped in the supernatural that ultimately looks like threatening the life of the Emperor - and it is clearly meant to be a bigger and better blockbuster than the previous movies and boy does it feature some spectacularly realised bad guys, but ultimately this wuxia costume drama ends up suffering 'the curse of the third movie' with the drive to be bigger and better coming at the expense of a sensible ending.

★★★☆☆

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Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986)

The Canon Group intended to release an Allan Quatermain trilogy, but even before this 1986 sequel to King Soloman's Mines is over, there are signs the money has dried up and number three isn't going to happen, for example, while Quatermain (Richard Chamberlain) and his fiancée, Jesse Huston (Sharon Stone, reprising her Razzie Worst Actress-nominated role) trek across Africa searching for his brother (Chamberlain's partner at the time, Martin Rabbett), the dangers they face are not massive Indiana Jones boulder setpieces but just incredibly low-budget things like the ditch they stumble across which they simply jump, or the bats they find which simply fly away, or the snakes, two Cecils-the-Lion, and cannibalistic tribespeople they encounter which Quatermain simply shoots, and if anyone remains hopeful for a third in the series after all these underwhelming things, the climactic wire fu endscenes with their conspicuous wires, undisguised safety harnesses, and golden porridge remove all doubt.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Dark Tower (2017)

This Stephen King book adaptation about a supernaturally gifted boy upon whom the continued existence of multiple worlds relies never ceases world-building so that even three-quarters of the way through, Idris Elba's Gunslinger (a Western sheriff crossed with Devil May Cry's Dante, in a good-versus-evil battle with Matthew McConnaughy's Man in Black, a cadaverous Christopher Walken impersonation) turns to the boy to utter short scene-final explanations - "[the shapeshifting monster we've just bested] was exploiting your weakness, [by appearing in the form of your father]" and "What happens in this world [i.e. beams of light from the sky and portals opening and closing] is mirrored in other worlds," or things like that - and it is funny that by film's end you still have no idea what this intensively explained world is and why anyone should care less about it ceasing to exist, though it won't cease to exist - it is a part of the Stephen King canon that will be dredged up and reimagined forevermore irrespective of whether it makes sense or is interesting or not.

★☆☆☆☆

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Oh, God! (1977)

Given in the end it takes God turning up in person in an American courtroom to convince those gathered of his existence, his plan occupying the rest of this comedy - communing exclusively with supermarket manager Jerry Landers and having him spread the Word to people who without exception believe him to be a delusional whack-job - seems a harebrained undertaking longwindedly achieving nothing, but John Denver stars as Landers - so that's interesting for a start - and the movie avoids tiresome God-bothering and the trap of sanctimoniousness or saccharinity and instead, with George Burns as a bespectacled waddling old man of a God, is dryly funny and effortless to watch, even given the idiocy of God's plan.

★★★☆☆

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Glass (2019)

** SPOILER WARNING **

Having in the last unexpected scene of 2016's Split created a connection between that film and his Unbreakable film from sixteen years earlier, M Night Shyamalan continues the unlikely series in this third film by having a new character, Dr Ellie Staple, assemble the old characters in a psychiatric ward for sessions of psychoanalysis designed to break the patients' shared delusion that they are superheroes, which, as a plot, raises interesting ideas about human potential, shared experience and the limits people place on themselves, and with the glut of superhero blockbusters in cinemas, this plot provides a welcome spin on a tired genre, but the movie errs in the end when it seems to choose a side but abandons viewers on the other side of the movie's central question: is anything extraordinary happening on the screen?

★★★☆☆

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Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

The antics of Marvel's goofiest, most family-friendly superhero continue in this not-as-good sequel of Ant-Man chronicling Ant-Man's encounters with a mysterious time- and space-shifting "Baba Yaga", and while most of the humour falls flat this time around (except for one "previously on..." sequence narrated by Ant-Man's sidekick and tech-guy, Luis) this is easy, undemanding and family-friendly superhero action enlivened by a couple of great action sequences and by Evangeline Lilly's appearance as Wasp, a wing- and blast-gun-enhanced hero who fights alongside Ant-Man but who could easily do it on her own.

★★★☆☆

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Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindlewald (2018)

This Harry Potter universe expansion pack is about an older, constipated (?) Harry Potter/Doctor Who type who surrounds himself with only the most uninteresting of friends - are we really supposed to care about the irritating Queenie and her spellbound Poirot, or keep track of who is and who isn't a fullblood wizard? - and punctuating the "you can only possibly care less about all this if you've read the books" plot are belaboured cgi sequences - a Groot climbing in and out and in and out of Eddy Redmayne's pocket, a mole collecting coins, a bird, etc.. - that I presume are included as careful nods to the Potterverse or to remind you of characters who will become important again in number three, four, five -  and they are spectacular feats of animation - but here, in this decidedly unmagical, heavyhanded snorefest, these moments merely slow down an already tedious series of magic-school carry-on and pokemon creature reveals.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

The adventures of Katniss Everdeen continue in this, for readers of the book, perfectly watchable but for all others, slightly mystifying sequel that sees the heroine propelled to celebrity status, on tour by high-speed train across 'the districts', involved in backstage image management and audience manipulation, becoming the reluctant figurehead of a rebel movement, then thrown into the death arena that now features mandrills, oh, and poison mist, oh, and lightning, oh, and tidal waves, oh, and mockingbirds, oh, and wait, it's a clock...?

★★☆☆☆

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The Hunger Games (2012)

If in your mind Big Brother evictions and "rose ceremonies" lack a little bloodspill and need, say, a few more snapped necks and some more arrows to the contestants' eye sockets, you'll enjoy this movie based on the first of Suzanne Collins' books about young Katniss Everdeen selected to participate in a televised fight to the death, but personally I fail to see why this series is so popular given its charmless and unnecessary extrapolation of the tenets of reality tv to their most violent extreme.

★★☆☆☆

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