Not Me That Went Viral (俺ではない炎上) (2025)

This book adaptation with a terribly translated English title starts promisingly with a social-media-age update of the Hitchcockian 'wrong man' plot, with Taisuke Yamagata, a fifty-something real estate sales manager, falsely accused of murder by well-meaning but misguided online amateur sleuths, but by the end, the tone has lurched awkwardly between comedy, thriller, and social commentary (isn't online amateur crime reporting terrible?), and the plot has required audiences to at once sympathise with Yamagata as the wronged hero while also regarding him with disdain and pity as a problematic antihero - a difficult balancing act given his portrayal by the likeable Hiroshi Abe.

★★☆☆☆

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Nightwatch - Demons Are Forever ('Nattevagten – Dæmoner går i arv') (2023)

You need to have seen the 1994 original to appreciate the genius of this sequel that takes the themes and look of the original and cements them as classic by reworking the story with a new gender politic, putting Fanny Leander Bornedal in the lead role as the daughter of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau's character in the original - she takes on the morgue nightwatch job to better understand her parents' ordeal - and just when you think things are going to be too same-same (moths in the light fittings, alarm lights that threaten to go off...) this gnarly, twisted mystery really goes places!

★★★★☆

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Nosferartu (1979)

In his 1979 remake of the 1922 original film, Werner Herzog brings sound and colour to the story, which helps him achieve his usual painterly, mesmerizing style, but he also takes the opportunity to align the story much more closely with Bram Stoker's Dracula, which of course is exactly what Nosferatu is - Dracula with the title and character names changed after a copyright challenge from Stoker's widow, Florence Stoker.

★★★★☆

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Nightwatch ('Nattevagten') (1994)

This, at several key points, very ugly 1994 Danish horror thriller - that restaurant scene! - spawned a sequel and a English-language remake, so is a movie good enough to warrant that and largely, I think, because of the smiley, geek-chic rizz of Nicolaj Coster-Waldau in the lead, whose boyish enthusiasm and jokey disregard and goofy wide-eyed awe - of things like prostitutes, sex, and death - balances nicely with the dark and dread of his new nightshift work at a creepy morgue somehow linked to a spate of serial killings.   

★★★☆☆

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Night Watch (1973)

Like the best parlour-game play-adapted mysteries of the 70s and 80s, like Ira Levin's Deathtrap or Simon's Murder By Death,, this atmospheric mystery-thriller features a jangly 70s organ that accompanies the shadowy thrills and lightning-flash-reveals of its creepy old-house murder mystery, with its cast of five players, including Elizabeth Taylor's lead, a hysterical witness to murder, running around in a thriller that reworks and melds together plot elements of other classic thrillers, like Suspicion, Rear Window, Deathtrap, Sleuth, Murder By Death, Shock - like these classics, this is a well-acted, effectively staged jangly good murder mystery time.

..

★★★★☆

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The Nest (2020)

The title, from the start, is a clever way to keep audiences guessing, hinting as it does at slimey masses of eggs of some sort of weird alien family, while the initial set-up is horror-home stuff - an entrepreneur moves his family from the US to London, into an old country manor a la Amityville Horror; halfway through, I stopped to google whether I was watching an adaptation of Agatha Christie's 'Endless Night', and along the way was reminded of 'Arbitrage', 'The Devil's Advocate', that awful 'Saltburn'...but this not knowing exactly what you are getting with 'The Nest' is what keeps the exceptionally well-acted, handsomely produced Canadian thriller razorwire sharp, taut.

★★★★☆

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南方车站的聚会 (Nanfang chezhan de juhui) (The Wild Goose Lake (2019)

This crime drama is a touch overloaded with cinematic flourishes — there is a police hunt in a zoo at night, a scene in a funhouse full of mirrors, luminescent night-bootscooting, disconcerting moments as the camera swings between twins, and loads of noirish shadow-play — but with the style and slinkiness of In The Mood For Love, sharing that classic's bold colour palette and muted sexy tone but applied to a gritty modern-day crime story, it is an utterly capivating thriller about man-on-the-run Zedong Zhou, a small-time crim caught up in big-time crime, and the prostitute who may be helping him...or might she in fact be after the reward for bringing him in?

★★★★☆

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No Man of God (2021)

It's the American criminal justice system, one in the 1980s with a newly established criminal profiling department, that is the star of this oft-told, awful true crime story, approached from a peculiar angle - somehow Elijah Wood as real-life founding criminal profiler Bill Hagmaier and Luke Kirby's idiosyncratic and distracting Ted "Surely he sat up straight and spoke without a hand in front of his face, once?" Bundy disappear into the beige 1980s backgrounds, achieving little in their conversations about the infamous killer's crimes, and it is the access rules, prison protocols, and government bureaucracy that step forward and gently but insistently drive the interest here.  

★★★☆☆

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The Night of the Living Dead (1968)

George A Romero's low-budget black-and-white indie talkfest takes place almost entirely in the confines of a farmhouse where seven people are sheltering from an army of slow-moving, flesh-eating "ghouls" - there are more verbal descriptions of the horror these living dead inflict than horrors seen on screen, yet it is effective and captivating - a well-acted, often-copied launch pad for so much modern horror.

★★★★☆

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Not Without My Daughter (1991)

Sally Field is Betty Mahmoody, the real woman who turned her experience being abducted with her daughter by her husband into a best-selling novel adapted here into a gripping movie with Alfred Mollina playing the Iranian doctor who tricks his American family into a one-way trip to Iran.

★★★☆☆

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Natural Born Killers (1994)

Just what Oliver Stone intended with this wafer-thin heavy metal video clip - all symbolism, zero realism, and seemingly a grand thesis of one simplistic note - I don't know but it is loud, long and monotonous: a two-hour fight scene that plays out as though everyone is making it up as they go along, with one-dimensional characters screaming their way through one long unlikely situation, with the chaos of mass murderers Mickey and Mallory's "deep love" affair (read occasional "dry humping" and tongue kisses) and violent crime spree spliced meaninglessly with cartoon clips, black and white photography and - in a last-ditch attempt at relevance - media clips of actual celebrated tv crime reports. 

★☆☆☆☆

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New Year's Eve (2011)

On a New Year's Eve, the Times Square Ball gets stuck, neither up nor down, and this same inert state befalls a veritable Love, Actually ensemble of New Yorkers whose lives grind to a stop in deeply uninteresting, go-nowhere situations like the nurse (Halle Berry) who tends bedside to a dying man in hospital (Robert De Niro) - that's everything - or the man in pyjamas (Ashton Kutcher) who gets stuck in an elevator with a singer (that woman from Glee) - the end - or the pregnant couple who are, well, pregnant - and still pregnant each time the movie unnecessarily returns to them - or, in the most peculiar of the go-nowhere vignettes, a delivery guy (Zac Efron) escorts a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) around NYC on a scooter skimping on her bucket list that she has no reason to rush through before midnight when, spoiler alert, the Times Square Ball drops and this dull romcom ends and life starts moving again.

★★☆☆☆

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No Sudden Move (2021)

The elaborate costuming of the ensemble cast and period 1960s Detroit setting feel like an affectation until late in this Steven Soderbergh movie when a card is played that turns the riveting, finely-acted neo-noir crime flick into something sharper: a pointed social commentary.

★★★★☆

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The Ninth Guest (1934)

Among the more shocking moments of this 1934 horror mystery are scenes showing hysterical characters throwing themselves against the electrified door of the booby-trapped New Orleans apartment they are trapped inside having been lured there with dinner-party invitations but finding themselves not wined and dined but picked off one by one by their mysterious host, a plot that suggests Agatha Christie may have had inspiration for her famous "And Then There Were None."

★★★☆☆

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Number One (Numèro Uno) (aka Woman Up) (2017)

In what is a really strong engrossing start to the film, a group of feminists approach Emmanuelle Blachey, a business executive, with a plan to manouevre her into the top role at a government water company, but is the corporate skullduggery Blachey has to contend with at the hands of rivals for the position better or worse than the treatment she receives from her current boss and colleagues who objectify and devalue her and in one weird moment that almost derails the whole movie, let her sing to them over dinner on an oil rig? 

★★★☆☆

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The Night Clerk (2016)

I think we are supposed to be relieved when the 'Norman Bates' secret of a hotel night clerk with Asbergers is out and turns out to be not quite what we suspected because this thriller seems to think that that is the end of the matter and moves breezily on, apparently unaware of a whole lot of concerns and questions and 'but-hold-on-a-minutes' the viewer has about this witness to a hotel room murder who becomes embroiled in an investigation; it's an initially intriguing but ultimately ŕather sad little thriller.

★★☆☆☆

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Narrow Margin (1990)

The RKO screenplay, first filmed in 1955 and then this time in 1990, has all the ingredients of a classic thriller: a train carrying a witness to murder and thugs trying to identify her before she and her escort, a Deputy District Attorney played by Gene Hackman, get to Vancouver to testify against a Mr Big - but it all ends up silly, empty stuff with the action amounting to Hackman flinging himself sideways into a sleeping car or into a nook or into a quiet cargo hold as the inept baddies trawl up and down and up and down the train corridors ridiculously unable to pinpoint the car in which Anne Archer, the witness, sits either being breathless and scared in the dark or else engaged in long conversations with the DA somehow still able to stop by regularly for lengthy heart-to-hearts.

★★★☆☆

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Spider-man: No Way Home (2021)

I wasn't always rivetted, as evidenced by the fact I was able to make to-do lists in my head as the dizzying cgi-action sequences went on and on, but there's no denying the cleverness of this Spider-man movie (the sixth Marvel film to feature Tom Holland as the webslinger but the first to characterise him as a mature agent of salvation, not a juvenile wannabe meter-out of violent justice), one that makes all the previous iterations of Spider-man, the ones with Andrew Garfield or Toby Maguire or even, say, Shinji Tôdô an extension of this movie, neatly rendering moot any and all past inconsistencies in plot or character or circumstance that may have niggled at viewers of umpteen versions, making everything connected and sensible and, get ready for it, ripe for multiple concurrent Spider-man releases.

★★★★☆

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The Door Into Summer (夏への扉 キミのいる未来へ) (2021)

Robert A Heinlein's 1956 science fiction novel is turned here into an unhurried Japanese 'heartful' drama mixed with madcapped and madly paced science fiction of a distinctly "Back To The Future" kind (replete with a mad professor in a white coat screaming about there being no time to lose to a bewildered kid in a orange/red puffer jacket) but the two elements - sloooow heartful drama and zany science fiction -  do not sit well together, plus the sight of the pretty-J-boy hero turning to booze, swigging from a flask, or the cat-hating J-femme fatale "letting go" and becoming a hideous Jabba the Hut draws unintended laughs, detracting from the scifi adventure.

★★☆☆☆

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Nomadland (2020)

The underpaid and overworked man I'm friendly with in my supermarket didn't recognise the name of this movie when I told him it was the reason why I was passing through on the way home so much later than usual, so I told him, "A woman lives in a van and drives around America," and joked that that was everything, he didn't need to see it, he knew everything, but of course there is so much more to Nomadland than that: it is a poem, really, full of breathtaking moments, about the humans who out of necessity pare life down to its most simple form and push, drive on, and somehow manage to still find great beauty in things - say, broken eggshells - even when all else around them is broken.

★★★★☆

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