Captain America: Brave New World (2025)

This seems to be Marvel's boysy 90s action tv-style superhero series - think A-team's all-male cast, its leather jackets, grey military bases, tanks and fighter jets, and lots of good old-fashioned fisticuffs - and while there's special effects, of course, they are toned down - the bad guy wears a hoodie and simply has a painted-green face for much of the movie - which makes this story of a mind-controlled White House being led into war an okay change from Marvel's otherwise younger cartoony smart-arse superhero series.

★★★☆☆

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

There are three minor issues to contend with watching this fifth and final Harrison Ford-led Indiana Jones adventure: one, the Uncanny Valley effect of Ford's de-aged face floating through the lengthy opening sequence; two, a plot development at the end that derails the whole movie (but only until one brief line of dialogue so glibly uttered you could miss it puts the minecart back on the track); and three, a moribund and frankly preposterous "go on without me, leave me here" moment at the end; but other than that, this is as good as Indiana Jones gets: a fun, fast, funny family blockbuster action adventure.

★★★★★

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Blade Runner (1982)

This classic film noir, an adaptation of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, stars Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, a gumshoe-turned-bounty hunter tasked with tracking down, in a future cyberpunk-neon Los Angeles of perpetual rain, six runaway replicants, androids built by the Tyrell Corporation replete with emotions and memories, making it hard for Deckard to distinguish them from humans.

★★★★☆ 

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The Conversation (1974)

In writer, director and producer Francis Ford Coppola's acclaimed 1974 mystery thriller, lonely and anonymous Harry Caul, a man extremely protective of his own right to privacy and secrets, ironically works as a wiretapper able to listen in on the conversations of others no matter what barriers - walls or crowds or bodies of water - stand between him and them; when his work for a shadowy someone surreptiously recording a couple's private conversations looks like it is going to abet violence, he is troubled because of his complicity, of course, but perhaps troubled mostly because the situation accentuates for him the fact that even the latest hi-tech bugging equipment - voice actuators and enormous reels of tape - can't overcome his remove from others.

★★★★★

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Patriot Games (1992)

Tom Clancy's brick is given the Hollywood treatment with Harrison Ford stepping into the role previously played by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt For Red October, CIA agent and future PotUS Jack Ryan, a family man, patriot, and all-round impossibly good guy who here becomes the target of an IRA revenge plot that greatly endangers the lives of his beautifully expressive wife (Anne Archer) and daughter.

★★★★☆

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What Lies Beneath (2000)

In director Robert Zemeckis' supernatural mystery, a wife comes to believe her renovated lakehouse is haunted by the ghost of a blonde, green-eyed female, probably a former locksmith given the incredible number of times we see doors swing open by paranormal force, and it is all dopey fun that doesn't warrant too much thought except when all is said and done and the protracted denouement is over (having made very elaborate use of only momentarily spotted paralysed laboratory mice and a bridge in a mobile reception blackspot), viewers who do stop to think twice about what has occurred will recognise the irrelevance of the first hour of the movie, the sheer number of unnecessary characters, and an ennui that pervades the performances, probably a result of the actors being involved in so much redundant nonsense.

★★★☆☆

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Firewall (2006)

This is one of those thrillers like Panic Room and Red Eye that is built around a criminal's diabolical - but from the get-go ludicrous - plan that descends into chaos before it even begins, but still it goes on and on, and as Paul Bettany's archvillain looks less and less (and less) likely to get anything for the enormous amount of trouble he has gone to (kidnapping Harrison Ford's banking security expert's family, distributing spy camera biros, stealing epipens, doling out poor dietary choices of biscuits, spending a long couple of listless days on his victim's couch eating cereal and watching Fred Flintstone) still he persists with the chaos, to the end carting around the yappy family dog, keeping people alive for no reason, and resolutely ignoring the fact that his criminal gang is destroying itself from the inside as the family of victims rests and listens to their iPods.

★★☆☆☆

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Six Days, Seven Nights (1998)

After crashing on an island, a pilot and his passenger must overcome their differences (including a significant age gap) in order to survive snakes, dangerous base-jumps and murderous pirates, and in all the excitement, they fall in love, in Ivan Reitman's very minor but inoffensive romantic comedy adventure.

★★★☆☆

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Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

Number two, in which Indy tries to recover magical stones in East India, is a big dopey comicbook adventure with poor gender and race politics but it remains my favourite, well, perhaps second favourite of the Indiana Jones movies on account of its big opening Shanghai dance number, its hilarious banquet scene, its comedy routine involving jungle animals, the lengthy carry-on involving Indy getting trapped with Shorty in a spikey booby trap, the minecart rollercoaster ride that I've dreamed of going on since I was a kid, and of course the climactic collapsing rope bridge.

★★★★☆

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Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

This is a rivetting and just in one particular area of the plot a slightly cryptic neo-noir sci-fi mystery about a replicant hunter, full of awesome future fashions, worryingly likely depictions of future city landscapes, glimpses of wondrous tech, and myriad things to think about like, "If replicants could birth children, then what would the ramifications be for humankind?" and, "If this represents a sexist, white boy's fantasy of the future, then what might the opposite look like?" and, "What freedom did director Denis Villeneuve have in creating his vision of the future and how much was dictated by Ridley Scott's classic 1982 original, and in what ways should the two, made 35 years apart, be different?"

★★★★☆

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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

The sought-after archeological wonder in number three is the Holy Grail but Indy's biggest challenge isn't death-defying derring-do as he races the Nazis to decipher biblical clues and decode Knights Templar maps but his father, the doddering academic Dr Jones Snr played hilariously by Sean Connery.

★★★★☆

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The Fugitive (1993)

The 60s show, The Fugitive" stretched its story - Dr Richard Kimble flees from police after a one-armed man murders his wife - to 120 fifty-one minute tv episodes across four seasons screened between 1963 and 1967, whereas this 1993 movie adaptation compacts the story into just two hours and adds blockbuster flair in the form of a spectacular train crash, a river plunge, Tommy Lee Jones as the dogged but misguided detective, and everyone's favourite good-guy-in-distress, Harrison Ford as the fugitive.

★★★★☆

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Random Hearts (1999)

Random Hearts tells the incredibly boring story of two complete strangers, played by Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas, whose worlds collide when their respective partners die in a plane crash together and it is revealed they'd been having an affair.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Air Force One (1997)

Jack Ryan eventually became President in Tom Clancy's series of books, and Harrison Ford who played Jack Ryan in two movies went on to become President in this popcorn action adventure - but why not as Jack Ryan is something to ponder as you otherwise mindlessly watch terrorists hijack Air Force One only to have their diabolical plans undone by the most winning, wholesome, fist-fighting, plane-flying, terrorist-trouncing do-gooder US President since, well, Jack Ryan.

★★★☆☆

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Morning Glory (2010)

Harrison Ford (great in romantic comedies - Working Girl, for example), Rachel McAdams (perfectly likeable lead actress) and Diane Keaton (who doesn't love her?) add up to naught in this unfocused um, romcom (?) about Becky Fuller, a down-on-her-luck executive producer hired to repair broken breakfast tv show, DayBreak, but apart from general disunity, we never learn what core problems Becky needs to solve nor how exactly she solves them (she sacks two people but otherwise appears to simply bungle her way) and there is zero romance (Patrick Wilson's role as love interest is completely drama-,  interest- and purpose-free), and the entire movie, like Becky Fuller, runs around in circles gabbing madly.

★☆☆☆☆

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Clear And Present Danger (1994)

With Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt and Napoleon Solo emulating DC and Marvel superheroes in search of box office success, it's a pleasure to revisit this, the third film adaptation of a Tom Clancy novel, with its hero, deeply likeable family man Jack Ryan, getting the audience rallying behind him without superhuman theatrics or bombastic action setpieces, but with cunning, diplomacy and an impossibly righteous moral code, here coming head-to-head with Colombian druglords.

★★★★☆

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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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