Mickey 17 (2025)

Bong Joon-Ho's Mickey 17 is a messy overreaching film about an "expendable", a worker on a spaceship who is employed to die over and over (with a new self 3D-printed after each death); it's a childish pantomine of conflated woke themes presented plainly - a rehash of ideas from Okja and Snowpiercer - with Toni Collete stepping in for Tilda Swinton, and Mark Ruffalo arrived directly from the set of Poor Thing.

★★★☆☆

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Hector and the Search For Happiness (2014)

Things momentarily improve when Toni Collette turns up in the last third and shines brightly as the only genuine thing on the screen, but otherwise this is a nauseating affair about a psychiatrist (Simon Pegg) - a sometimes accident-prone Mr Bean, a sometimes naive trenchcoated Monsieur Hulot, an occasionally slapstick Charlie Chaplin, once a midair doctor, and at other times a wide-eyed Walter Mitty fantasist - who zips around the world like that Eat Pray Love person, searching for happiness, which he finds and packages up in fifteen one-line platitudes that appear on the screen occasionally throughout the movie like patronising summary statements of all the nonsense that has come before - cartoon sequences, a brutal kidnapping, mawkish travelogues, cloying romance, slapstick - a series of events seemingly intended as a "wondrous kaleidoscope" of the human condition but just irritating.  

★★☆☆☆

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Knives Out (2019)

Not as effective a homage to the Agatha Christie murder mystery as it is a homage to the parlour game thriller stage plays of the likes of Ira Levin and Anthony Shaffer, director Rian Johnson nods to Sleuth with his mystery novellist's mansion setting crammed full of unusual murder mystery objects (including a prominent Jolly Jack Tar figure) and Deathtrap is brought to mind watching this movie's twisting, changing thriller-, not mystery-, plot and, really, this mostly fun, mostly well-plotted movie is in fact at it worst in its messy third act and attempts at a detective dénouement - Agatha Christie was never so longwinded. 

★★★☆☆

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Hereditary (2018)

Obviously influenced by last year's mother!, this horror misfire establishes from its very first frame that nothing that happens - not a Donnie Darko high school fantasy nor an Evil Dead gorefest nor a United States of Tara family drama - is going to mean anything more than, say, a Madame Tussaud's display of French Revolution grotesquery or a Wes Andersen theatre model box, and indeed what plays out - a personality-free, uneven, charmless series of make-it-up-as-we-go decapitations, seances, Amityville Horror bug infestations, etc.. - is equal parts gruelling, boring, and laughable.

★☆☆☆☆

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Fright Night (2011)

Colin Farrell does a great vampire slinking around with menace and there are two inventive vampire special effects which raise a smile, but otherwise this update of the 1985 original about a high schooler who discovers a neighbour is a vampire, has, in adopting a more sophisticated look and abandoning restraint, lost some of the original's daggy fun and, er, bite.

★★☆☆☆

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Enough Said (2013)

At around 90 minutes, this comedy is barely longer than a tv show and in fact star Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Eva, a divorced, single parent masseuse who, through a big coincidence, ends up dating the ex-husband of a client, is such great company that when the movie ends you'll wish it were a tv series and the character of Eva one you could catch up with again.

★★★★☆

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Japanese Story (2003)

A deeply affecting romantic drama about a rigid Japanese businessman (Gotaro Tsunashima) and his reluctant guide, an Australian geologist (Toni Collette) who end up traversing the West Australian Pilbara together; despite the harsh conditions and their cultural differences, an intense relationship develops.

★★★★☆

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The Sixth Sense (1999)

The spooky thriller that momentarily shot director M Night Shyamalan and child star Haley Joel Osment to fame features Toni Collette as the mother of a troubled boy (Osment) who sees dead people, Bruce Willis as the child psychologist trying to help, and a now famous twist in the movie's tail.

★★★★☆

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