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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The Royal Hotel (2023)

This refreshing Australian suspense avoids tired outback horror tropes and instead presents a horror of the sort you read about in the news, of international tourists on an adventure ending up working under terrible circumstances in remote parts of Australia, on farms, say, or in this movie's FIFO mining town and specifically  at a pub that everyone - the drunk local men, the two new female staff, the audience - knows needs to be burned to the ground long before an alcohol-fuelled Mick Taylor is let to wreak his inevitable bloody havoc.  

★★★☆☆

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The Assistant (2019)

It is mesmerising watching Julia Garner as Jane, assistant to a busy and important film somebody, going about her work, delivering to desks scripts and bagged lunches, being receptive to muted anger over the phone, and picking up after others - let's face it, acting like a mother - but these tedious tasks are labours of love, it turns out, because this assistant has aspirations for something better and this wee slip of a movie, telling just odd minutes of Jane's working life with clinical office visuals and sparse dialogue, doesn't need extra runtime or drama to articulate so sharply such a common abusive corporate relationship that is nowadays so unmistakeable, undeniable but still one extremely hard to extricate oneself from.

★★★★☆

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