The Woman In Cabin 10 (2025)

On a superyacht off the coast of Norway, a journalist (Keira Knightley) sees a woman go overboard one night, but none of the other guests – a who's who of the business and entertainment worlds gathered for a charity event – believes her, in this Ruth Ware book adaptation that is first third run-of-the-mill murder mystery set-up (assorted characters gather on board a yacht), second third effective thriller that borrows liberally from Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, full of shocks and surprises as the journalist finds herself increasingly isolated, labelled mad, and drawn deeper and deeper into paranoia, and final third messy denouement – a terribly cliched gala event showdown – that makes no logistical sense; the middle third makes it worth watching the whole.

★★★☆☆

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Bloodshot (2020)

Leigh Whannell's Upgrade took the done-to-death Robocop/Venom story (a killed cop or war hero or aggrieved boyfriend is resurrected with super-enhancements) and brought it back to high-octane life, so it's possible, but Bloodshot, this big screen launch of a Valiant extended universe, tries to tell the same story, throwing in some memory manipulation stuff, but this turns Vin Diesel's Bloodshot into a hard-to-care-about automaton and turns the villain into a kind of Kermit the Frog, a beset "memory" theatre show producer - in a movie that feels more dated than 1987's Robocop with a seen-it-all-before male notion of cool (slow-motion swaggering and Blue Steel pouts as the superhumans disperse smoke grenades and slam fists into concrete), delivered with scenes of tired universe-building exposition, some not very Marvel-lous attempts at humour, in cheap-looking studio lots or against lifeless cgi backdrops.

★★☆☆☆

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Mary Queen of Scots (2018)

The actual historical figure also had grand aspirations to be something greater but failed because there were others that had already succeeded in her place.

★★☆☆☆

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Holding The Man (2015)

This Australian movie tells the story of Timothy Conigrave and John Caleo whose love develops from their first meeting as students at Melbourne's Xavier College and endures through a lifetime of social intolerance, periods of separation, other lovers and ill health, and it is just unfortunate that the movie, based on Tim Conigrave's touching 1994 memoir, feels at times like a highlight reel of issues faced by gay men.

★★★☆☆

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The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994)

A transsexual (a hilariously deadpan Terence Stamp) and two female impersonators (one, Guy Pearce playing Cesar Romero doing The Joker) hit the road in a big lavender bus, taking their drag show from Sydney to Alice Springs via mining towns Broken Hill and Coober Pedy, in this much-loved 1994 comedy drama that downplays or entirely sidesteps points of possible contention and ends up feeling like a disingenuous string of encounters between the performers and outback locals.

★★★☆☆

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The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

Alexander Dumas' book, published in eighteen parts over two years, is the famous rollicking adventure thriller about one man's revenge served fourteen years cold; this movie version, cramming the book's 1000 pages into an hour and a half, does a reasonable job of telling the story but never has a hope of being able to convey the thrills or present some of the more extravagant details in such a rush without looking pretty corny at times.

★★★☆☆

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