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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Within The Pines (2024)

There are movies that make good use of sound (The Conversation, Berberian Sound Studio, A Quiet Place...) but this uneven Australian horror makes no use at all of the fact its main character is a sound engineer in a forest where he stumbles upon something nasty: every time he dons his headphones and points his dead cat, we hear nothing at all and it is not until he takes his headphones off that what he hears with his ears, finally, is rendered moot by what he sees (the light of a torch or the light of a helicopter, for example), and at other times, when our terrified-before-anything-actually-happens hero trips, cries, chases a helicopter screaming, rolls down a hill, kills a dog, and generally stomps around with gay abandon, noone in the pine forest seems to hear anything, not even the hillbilly standing just over there who seems to forget in a scene a moment later that someone is trampling around his caravan of horror.

★☆☆☆☆

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Wolf man (2025)

The poignant family drama at the start suggests something interesting will follow — perhaps the strong cast is getting you ready for creature chills and spills that mean something to the family psychology – and don't forget director Leigh Whannel did something interesting in 2020's The Invisible Man – except once Wolf Man's family retreats to a cabin in the woods, complete ennui devours the movie and the cast: there are scenes where the two leads literally stand opposite each other and appear not to know what they should do or day to continue the scene, and the whole movie amounts to one single tiresome werewolf-transition scene extrapolated to movie-length.

★☆☆☆☆

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Woman of the Hour (2024)

The fact that in 1978 an active serial killer once appeared in real life on a dating game television show seems at first a curious car crash moment to ogle in passing, hardly worth extrapolating into a feature-length movie – not without turning real murder and real victims into sideshow spectacle – but in her directorial debut, Anna Kendrick takes that moment and almost succeeds in finding the balance between respecting its grim reality and lampooning a world – then and now – that idly indulges sick male pathology with a sympathetic "there, there", fails to vet men before, say, letting them on camera, and asks women to laugh gaily at male idiocy.

★★★☆☆

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Wonka (2023)

Like a Wonka' chocolate, this prequel is a confection entirely concocted from scratch by some lunatic using the weird and wonderful ingredients from Dahl's books, so there's giraffe milk and chocolatier wars, exotic oompa loompa lands and stuff, but there is also a pervading sense that the movie is all a rigmarole to perpetuate a non-canon add-on chapter of not-especially-good songs, childish acting, and some wonky cgi, making this confection a sickly sweet one – you end up feeling that to pick up a book or go to see a movie isn't worth the risk of having thrust upon you the burden of an ever-expanding film and television universe.

★★★☆☆

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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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The Watcher (2024)

Uprooted when her partner accepts a job in Romania, a young woman (captivating Scream Queen Maika Munroe) floats around her new city alone like Scarlett Johansson in Lost In Translation, feebly grappling with the culture and new language, and she finds her feelings of isolation compounded by the fact a serial killer is operating in the neighbourhood...and because there's a person watching her from an apartment across the street.

★★★★☆

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Where The Crawdads Sing (2022)

In this D-grade To Kill A Mockingbird that takes Harper Lee's Southern Gothicism and replaces it with Hallmark schmaltz, a patently absurd Boo Radley archetype — a "Marsh Girl" ostracized by townsfolk despite being polite, independent, self-sufficient, strong, well-groomed, self-educated, and someone who easily attracts a spunky local boyfriend not once but twice, and who sets herself up as a mussel-monger and later as a book illustrator by communicating winningly with local shop owners and uppity city book publishers — is made a cause célèbre when she contrives a way to have her abusive boyfriend drop sixty-five feet from a firetower.

★☆☆☆☆

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Weird: The Al Jankovich Story (2022)

I wasn't terribly interested to know more about the 80s pop song parodist Weird Al Jankovich, but one minute with this droll comedy with its hilarious cliched approach to the music biopic and tongue-in-cheek exaggeration and I was hooked, laughing and snorting all the way through as Weird Al's life and times is, well, expertly parodied.

★★★★☆

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Wakanda Forever, this 2022 sequel to Black Panther, certainly goes forever, told with the sweep of a grand war saga after Homer, which is a feat given almost the whole of its nearly three-hour runtime revolves around a single battle, and even though this conflict — between a deep-sea kingdom and Wakanda — seems easily-avoidable and founded on a misunderstanding, and even though two-and-a-half hours of not terribly interesting political exposition is spent trying to explain how and why it is avoidable to a Homeric catalogue of overwrought characters, the epic CGI fight goes ahead in the end.

★★☆☆☆

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What Happened To Monday (2017)

In an overpopulated world of food shortages and unrest, a one-child policy is strictly enforced meaning illegal septuplets, all played The Klumps-style by Noomi Rapace, grow up confined to an apartment with each able to venture outside only on their one allocated day per week and only provided they all pretend to be the same person, which is the starting point of this patently absurd scifi action that sees the septuplets' lives (blessed lives free from health emergencies, apartment fires, unwanted visitors and noise complaints from neighbours) suddenly thrown into disarray when "Monday" goes missing and the remaining six, despite their cloistered upbringings, find themselves suddenly able to take on evil agents repeatedly breaking down their apartment door.

★★☆☆☆

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Weekend At Bernie's (1989)

This 80s comedy with a cult following will make you smirk a couple of times, especially when Bernie — the dead body Andrew McCarthy's shouty and annoying Larry and Jonathan Silverman's straight-man Richard drag around pretending it to be alive — is dragged behind a boat and banged against buoys or dragged across uneven ground, but these black slapstick moments, a single joke played over and over, hardly sustain the just-short-of two-hour runtime.

★★☆☆☆

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What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)

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While We're Young (2014)

Husband and wife forty-somethings find themselves caught between two worlds — that of their procreating couple-friends, and the hipster orbit of a couple of twenty-somethings whose grooviness reinvigorates them — in this really very funny comedy with witty things to say about Gen Xers getting old and having to "hurry up because they've changed the rules, honey."

★★★★★

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The Woman In The Window (2020)

The plot of A J Finn's book was tailored for fans of the classic film thrillers of the 30s and 40s and 50s — essentially a string of all the especially twisty-turny bits of Hitchcock's The Lady Vamishes and Rear Window mixed with the memorable moments of other noir thrillers like Witness To Murder — but what the book lacks and what this adaptation dutifully lacks is any masterful thriller storytelling: there is no clever pacing or building of suspense or deft shifts in tone, just a relentless, frenetically paced string of twists and, like the book, the movie is filled not with characters but mere shapes who all speak with A J Finn's voice and dart around with the same urgency and at the same speed, driving the story to its end before you've even started to distinguish between these blobs.

★★☆☆☆

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Who Killed The Cat? (1966)

A play adaptation featuring sweet old ladies, arsenic, and murder, this thriller is obviously written in the vein of Arsenic and Old Lace and The Ladykillers but is far less memorable than those comedy thriller classics, mostly because the mystery here, about a murdered cat, poisoned whisky, jewellery thefts and the murder of a wicked stepmother is crammed into the movie's last fifteen minutes after a long and convoluted hour of dreary drama.

★★☆☆☆

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WW84 (2020)

Towards the end of this sprawling, goofy superhero almost-cartoon, one surely modelled on Superman II and III, Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman has trouble pushing her way through a maelstrom of wind and swirling A4 papers — I don't know why — and her plight mirrors that of her audience who have at that point struggled for nearly three hours with this sequel's maelstrom of unclear ideas, left asking questions like, "Whose wishes have been granted and whose wishes have been renounced?", "When a wish is renounced, what shifts in reality take place?", "Why wasn't Steve Trevor simply magicked to 1984 in his own body instead of this movie's convoluted Oh God! You Devil! bodyswapping nonsense?", "Was that schmuck (this movie's Oh God! You Devil! original rockstar) ever missed by anyone?", "What is a broadcasting machine and how is it that a boy on a freeway can communicate with his father via it?", "Why can't today's sfx technology make superfast running look good?" and, the question that most preoccupied me during WW84's exceedingly long runtime: "Do superhero movie studios deliberately ride this wave of excellent originals followed by overcooked, cheap sequels, seeing what they can cheaply get away with once audiences have bought-in?"

★★★☆☆

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Woman In Gold (2015)

A monumental Supreme Court decision proves not so monumental a cinema experience in Woman In Gold with the verdict in the case (one brought by Maria Altmann against the Austrian Government in an attempt to reclaim Klimt artworks lost to her family during Austria's Nazi occupation) padded out to movie-length by way of tired, "but we already know what happened" hurdles to her cause and, further padding, the irrelevant (to the law) and not very illuminating character foibles of Altmann and her lawyer Randy Schoenberg, played respectively by underoccupied Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds.

★★☆☆☆

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Harry, He's Here To Help (aka With A Friend Like Harry) (Un Ami Qui Vous Veut Du Bien) (2000)

Thrillers are described as Hitchcockian with wild abandon but the term is applied to this 2000 French thriller with only slight abandon: there's something wrong (some trouble) with the main character, Harry, a variety of Psycho whose waddle and gaze, at once twinkly and steely, recalls Robert Walker's deranged Bruno Antony and like Antony, this Harry has an off-kilter plan — but the real trouble with Harry, who turns up and wreaks havoc in his old school chum Michel's life, is there is no clear motivation for his actions - Hitchcock wouldn't have simply called him a psycho without also injecting the character with a mother or psychoanalysis or an inflated sense of superiority — and even Patricia Highsmith, whose works this thriller with its two males in stand-off very closely resembles, kept things cracking, not dour like this, and imbued her wafer-thin characters with clear motivations, ensuring her psychopath-driven plots were more than just shell...

★★☆☆☆

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Little Women (2019)

One strategy to try and make Louisa May Alcott's obnoxious Little Women tolerable viewing for anyone who has already sat through the seven or eight other adaptations is to populate it with Hollywood's most affected performers and rip through the story at a relentless pace after throwing the scenes into the air and presenting them in the order you pick them up off the floor.

★★★☆☆

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