28 Weeks Later (2007)

Flaunting rules during COVID - maybe that I can kind of understand, but in the face of apocalyptic evidence post-the-virus in this sequel to 28 Days Later, it is hard to believe anyone, even kids, would "sneak out", but they do, and that lapse in credibility becomes the film's defining weakness as, repeatedly, family reunions defy apocalyptic chaos, characters display magical virus expertise, and John Woo-style theatrics push the story towards spectacle and away from the unsettling plausibility that made the original so engrossing.

★★★☆☆

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28 Days Later (2002)

Even though the zombie action here is tried-and-true - an apparently lone survivor stumbles across other survivors, they argue about what to do, and eventually agree to seek out the source of radio-broadcast messages about a safe haven -  director Danny Boyle keeps things stylistically and visually fresh with rapid, rabid zombies - not the slow-moving hordes - and a gritty British rock aesthetic, right from the start, for example, pairing anti-establishment thrash with frenzied scenes of a virus breach at a research lab before cutting to a lengthy sequence of unnerving silence as Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital in a completely deserted London.

★★★★☆

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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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Tightrope (1984)

Of course it is hard for New Orleans police detective Wes Block (Clint Eastwood) to catch the serial killer on the loose in the city - he is one of those badly drawn 80s-movie serial killers with an everchanging modus operandi, neither disorganised nor organised, at times a random targetter of women on the streets and at other times a player of diabolical games of cat-and-mouse who ends up a balaclava-ed home invader - and it is the macho 80s, so every single woman in this movie is coquettish and aching for it, and it doesn't matter how crotchetty and old and wrinkled the men are or how revolting their come-on lines are, the women are desperate to please - wait to hear Block's attempts at wooing the rape prevention instructor, Beryl Thibodeaux (the only woman in it who isn't a street walker) when they lunch together by the New Orleans' harbour, and wait and baulk when she becomes interested! - and keep in mind Block knows by this stage a serial killer is targeting the women he beds, but I guess Thibodeaux wants it so bad, Block simply has no choice, despite the obvious danger, to scratch her itch like a hero.

★★★☆☆

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Thunderbolts (2025)

I think Florence Pugh is great as Yelena Belova, the main character in a thrown-together-by-chance superhero ensemble called "Thunderbolts", a sort of rough-around-the-edges Avengers group ('the Bvengers') whose first movie outing cleverly takes on movie audiences' superhero fatigue by trumping it - the characters here are worldweary, eye-rolling rejects, and that includes the always terrific Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the cumbersomely named Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, an unflappable corrupt agent navigating career turmoil of her own callous creation.

★★★★☆

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The Teacher's Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) (2023)

I love movies about school - school is such a perfect hotbed of issues - and this German film is a ripper with Leonie Benesch perfect as the fresh-faced and idealistic teacher who sees all her hard work creating a harmonious classroom environment undone when speculation runs rife through the school campus that one of their own is a thief.

★★★★☆

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Ten to sen (aka 'Points and Lines' or 'Point and Line') (点と線) (1958)

Seiichi Matsumoto's mystery, a mere slip of a book written in the spare style of Simenon, is in some ways the counter to Hitchcock's A Lady Vanishes - instead of disappearing from a train, here one character steadfastly appears on one while detectives suspect he was elsewhere - but to say more would ruin the surprise of both the book and this faithful 1958 adaptation that opens with a Vertigo-style animated journey across the points and lines of a train map set to a jaunty discordant thriller score, barrels like an express train through its mystery, and ends with a solution to an impossible crime as ingenious as it is simple, hinging on a trick that is uniquely Japanese - there'll never be a Western adaptation! 

★★★★★

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Ten Little Indians (1965)

Agatha Christie's grisly plot is so good, movie adaptations just can not mess it up, and even this prosaic 1965 version, filmed in large and austere, airy sets that undo the plot's claustrophobia, manages to be thrilling - keeping things fresh is the setting of a snowed-in mansion (not an island off the Devon coast), some deaths from great mountain heights, and a hilarious but oddly effective "Whodunnit break" (a one-minute pause with a voice-over that prompts audience members to turn to their neighbour and hazard a guess at whodunnit!)

★★★☆☆

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Toy Soldiers (1991)

Die Hard in 1988 launched a genre - the non-War, modern and corporate The Great Escape - and was followed by a rush of similar action adventures centred on an everyman hero taking on a team of hostage-takers from within a hostage situation, this one taking place in a private boys school where Sean Austin plays a rebellious teenaged "John McClane" leading a schoolyard group of  fellow "prisoners" who plot their escape under the watch of machine-gun wielding "Germans", and it is corny, teenage, 90s-cult film fun.

★★★☆☆

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The Human Trap (aka The Trap) (2021)

The synopsis of this 2021 South Korean 88-minute mere slip of a movie - teenagers go camping and end up terrorised in the woods - will drive away most non-slasher fans, and that is a small shame because while the events undoubtedly grow grisly by the end, the story preceding that is a punchy, reasonably restrained and intelligent one - a thriller with twists and turns not so hard to predict but doled out quick enough to maintain interest, at least in my case - for eighty-eight minutes of a nine-hour flight.

★★★☆☆

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Triangle of Sadness (2022)

We meet a male model and his model girlfriend having dinner at a swanky restaurant and an argument starts between them over paying the bill; from there this dry comedy moves aboard a ship offering cruises to the rich and famous and hell breaks loose there, too, offering more sharp commentary about privilege and control in a modern world of poor freeloaders, rich hoarders, those in service and those who wantonly wield power.

★★★★☆

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Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Taika Waititi's Thor episode dresses up the same old same old 'superhero battles a supervillain' plot in an 80s rock opera skin and fills it with big-name cameos, Taika Waititi's trademark kooky humour, and schoolkid-pleasing nonsense, but it is like this particular Marvel franchise is a hammer of God and try as he might Taika Waititi simply isn't able to lift it.

★★☆☆☆

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21 Bridges (aka Manhattan Lockdown) (2019)

The fact Chadwick Boseman's NYPD police detective locks down Manhattan Island as a means of hunting down two police killers is just a passing detail, really, but so little else of note happens in this police procedural - just several moments of clunky editing and a completely from-the-start predictable plot - it is the closure of the twenty-one exit points from Manhattan Island that gives this ho-hum crime drama its title!

★★☆☆☆

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Tom At The Farm (Tom à la ferme)

The tyranny Tom finds himself subject to at the farmhouse of Guilliame, the friend whose funeral he is attending, is the sort of tyranny of classic romantic literature - I thought of the terror Joss held over the 'Jamaica Inn' - and the Quebecois farm is wintery and isolated like the Jamaica Inn or like Manderley, and like 'Rebecca', Tom represents the new, a liberal young alternative urbanite who doesn't belong, and he little realises how completely his world will have to change - and how quickly - to maintain Guilliame's family's rigid, secretive, retentive rural conservatism.

★★★★☆

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The Third Murder (三度目の殺人) (Sandome no Satsujin) (2017)

Where his past films have been about family (shinkansen umbilical cords, absent mothers and fathers, and crime-family surrogates) Director Hirokazu Kore-eda surprises here, turning his attention to a legal procedural, but as the murder trial progresses and as lawyer Shigemori works hard to get at the truth behind his murder suspect client's lies, issues of familial connection again come to the fore as Shigemori's relationship with his daughter, a murder victim's relationship with his daughter, and a suspect's relationship with his daughter all speak to what's inside, if anything, the relationship Japan's hulking, self-interested and image-conscious legal system has with those caught up in it.

★★★★☆

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The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997)

This Bill Murray comedy, modelled after the spy farces of the sixties, has lots in common with Austin Powers and nothing at all to do with the Hitchcock movies "The Man Who Knew Too Much", with Murray, as droll as always and especially funny doing a traditional Russian folk dance towards the end of the movie, playing an American in London who thinks himself a participant in a theatre sport event, not realising he is in fact embroiled in a political assassination plot.

★★★☆☆

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Ten Little Indians (1989)

Transporting Agatha Christie's classic mystery, an early example of the modern slasher, to an African safari rather than an island off the Devon coast was probably just meant to reduce staging costs to the purchase of a single tent, and it gives the classic story of gathered guests being picked off one by one by a mysterious safari host a distinctly Gilligan's Island-feel as our gathered guests, or doomed victims, including Frank Stallone as Phillip Lombard, take showers behind cane shower screens, traverse ravines in a rickety vine cable car,  and deliver lines of dialogue in the wooden manner of The Skipper.

★★☆☆☆

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Terror Train (1980)

Three years after a (really revolting) med student prank, a group of students gather for a New Year's Eve party aboard a steam train, and as the train shoots through the night, it turns out one of those on board is picking the others off one by bloody one....and the passenger we sympathise with, not so involved in that prank and striving to stay alive while all her besties end up sliced and diced is -- no, not a starey young David Copperfield who appears as a magician without a Working With Children check, hired to be the onboard entertainment - but Jamie Lee Curtis, adding her 80s-horror clout to this effective slasher with several truly chilling moments.

★★★☆☆

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The Tip of the Iceberg (La Punta Del Iceberg) (2016)

 

This thriller about a woman, Sofia Cuevas who in her capacity as a company director is sent to investigate a series of suicides at a branch of her employer's megacorporation, has a tricky job trying to hit the right note because although you expect some moments of solemnity in a thriller about suicide, things become outright maudlin -  scarves flutter in slow motion in the wind and workers who have suicided reappear and look pained or at peace depending on the current status of Cuevas' investigation - making this a slick corporate thriller with jarring, emotionally overwrought moments, but it is always interesting, calling into question the line between work and life and control and subservience, and features a terrific performance from lead Maribel Verdú.

★★★☆☆

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Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Terminator 2 was the best one, wasn't it, and so it is little wonder the floundering, misstepping series, having tried among other things forward time travel and making John Connor bad, has done a full-circle and with this 2019 episode is trying especially hard to emulate that second, 1989 one, featuring as it does a white-singletted tech-enhanced Sarah Connor lookalike leading the charge against a T-1000 lookalike (a liquid metal bot from the future with the requisite short dark hair, the tried-and-true steely look and some new tricks up its policeman-uniform sleeves) and the action happens on highways in trucks and helicopters, the drivers-seats of which the morphing bot slops into and out of a la Robert Patrick, and to help mark this movie as something more than a vacuous action retread, Arnie returns (and has one of the funniest lines of the entire series to date (<deadly serious> I said, 'Don't. Don't do it!') as well as Linda Hamilton, though perhaps she signed on very late into production - it appears very much like the young thing in her white singlet was originally intended as a Ripley B/ Sarah Connor B character, perhaps rewritten last minute?

★★★☆☆

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