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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The Mean Season (1985)

Based on a book by John Katzenbach called In The Heat of The Summer, the dull The Mean Season should have capitalised on Florida's oppressive Summer, but everyone in it — Kurt Russell's journalist, a camera-toting colleague, his boss, and a detective played by a very young Andy Garcia — remains fresh despite running around after a serial killer - and Mariel Hemingway's love interest at one point even leaves Kurt a message written in a fogged up car window - and in the same way, the serial killer himself, a taunter of the public via the phone on Malcolm's news desk and a presence that really should sweep through with menace and ravage the community, never actually takes a compelling shape.

★★☆☆☆

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Peewee As Himself (2025)

My love of Pee-Wee Herman is inexplicable - I'm Australian, only learned of the existence of Paul Reubens' alter-ego as a university student, and never grew up on Pee-Wee's Playhouse or knew anything of the genesis of this character via Paul Reubens' time as a 'Groundling' and regular David Letterman guest, but having watched this gentle, mildly interesting two-part documentary, I can confirm there is something charismatic about Reubens - as Pee-wee or as himself, young or old - and I admire his not, to his death in 2023, talking about THAT...

★★★★☆

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Lifeboat (1944)

There's a terrific scene early on where the lifeboat swings around and our attention moves from Tallulah Bankhead's character, who falls out of focus and becomes slightly muted, to a group of other characters towards the front of the boat, who come into focus and become audible, revealing how cleverly Alfred Hitchcock manages and keeps interesting his adaptation of John Steinbeck's story, a confined-space war drama set almost start to finish on a lifeboat.

★★★★☆

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A Royal Night Out (2015)

We've seen royal daughters or the daughters of American Presidents going incognito to experience 'normal life', from Roman Holiday to Disney's Aladdin, and the twist here is that this movie tells of an actual example from history in which Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret embarked one night out of the palace to celebrate the end of the war, which may well have happened but almost certainly not as it is presented in this easy-enough-to-watch but heavily, heavily fictionalised comedy romance. 

★★★☆☆

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Graduation Day (1981)

Except for the fact Jamie Lee Curtis doesn't appear, this 1981 slasher follows the 80s teen slasher formula exactly — it could even be Scream -1 — opening on an initial tragedy at Woodsboro, I mean, Midvale High School that sets into motion a grisly series of killings of the members of the school's track-and-field team, and about the only thing that sets Graduation Day apart from the long line of identical others is a rocking film clip at the one-hour mark — Felony's Gangster Rock — which injects new energy — not a lot, but new — into the final thirty-minute lead-up to the clumsy reveal of The Fisherman, I mean, Ghostface, I mean...

★★☆☆☆

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The Sex Of The Angels (El Sexo De Los Angeles) (2012)

The Sex Of the Angels (aka Angels of Sex) (or, my alternative title, How Difficult It Is To Set Up And Maintain A Threesome) is a very dry look at how Bruno, happily committed to his girlfriend Carla, encounters and starts having sex with Rai, a dancer, but despite the actors' obvious commitment to the film's positive polyamorous message and the attempt to keep things titillating with butt shots and sex scenes, this thruple never feels even slightly like it would go the distance, and the film is ultimately only as exciting as a well-intentioned public service announcement. 

★★☆☆☆

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Enigma (2018)

When a television show approaches the mother of a murdered woman proposing a 90-minute true-crime special that might help reveal the truth of the daughter's death, the mother is torn because first her husband, sisters, and large number of daughters must address some matters that until now have been dealt with as deeply private, and although this is an important and very well-acted film, there is something infuriating about watching all the extended family members and friends whispering and gossiping for an hour over something that, outside of conservative Chile at least, shouldn't stand in the way of a murder investigation.

★★☆☆☆

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I'm Chevy Chase And You're Not (2025)

You can imagine, after years of being told, "You're funny," a comedian might eventually start believing it and forget about the importance of material and timing, energy, audience, and cultural context, and so end up acting zany - look at me, blowing raspberries! - rather than delivering hard-earned jokes, and Cornelius Crane "Chevy" Chase - a man as funny as he is obnoxious, as loved here as he is hated there, happy-go-lucky yet deeply ashamed - might come close to that line today; you certainly can't watch the octogenarian presented here, and can't hear about his long catalogue of laugh-free comedy film bombs, and can't hear about his childhood trials and tribulations and come away saying, simply, he's funny.

★★★☆☆

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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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Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (2024)

The Dry 2 squanders the two things the original The Dry had going for it: its strong evocation of small-town Australia - so real - and Eric Bana's likeable Falk, tied to that place through his past but now a fish-out-of-water city slicker - but here, the setting is a fictional rainforest (the Dandenong, Yarra, and Otway Ranges standing in for the - for some reason fictional - Giraling Ranges) and Falk has been reduced to a generic interrogator of one suspect after another - and in a particularly uninteresting mystery - the disappearance of a woman from the world's dreariest company retreat where five or six women snap at each other about too many plot points all out of scope of their miserable forest prison: peripheral corporate skullduggery, references to bullying, allusions to the wayward pasts of two young sisters, ultimately unnecessary harkbacks to a serial killer case, and Falk's unilluminating backstory - a feeble attempt at grounding him once more in place through his mother's weird disappearance years and years earlier. 

 

★★☆☆☆

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The Relic (1997)

It starts like a tongue-in-cheek episode of Law & Order with Tom Sizemore's suited cop joining forces with Linda Hunt's museum director and Penelope Ann Miller's evolutionary biologist to investigate grisly urban deaths, and for as long as the investigation lasts, it is fun 90s horror nostalgia full of sassy lines and smirks, but the second half - once the hideous reptilian monster from South America is revealed - plays out in the near-total darkness of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History's afterhours, and it doesn't matter how many times Penelope Ann Miller's biologist is able to find time to put her hair up and don glasses at a computer, the results of her scans of Brazilian leaf eggs - revealing a dizzying confluence of genetics, South American mythology, and something about hypothalami and DNA and a "Kothoga" - never help and merely drag out to overlong the shadowy goings-on.

★★☆☆☆

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Insomnia (2002)

Because there is so much to cover - the Alaskan environment, its community and way-of-life, the effect the extended daylight hours of the region has on Al Pacino's cop and his investigation into a girl's murder, not to mention his tense relationship with his partner and his burgeoning one with an eager young Alaskan cop-in-training played by Hilary Swank - Christopher Nolan's exceptionally well-acted thriller, with its fine production values, ends up feeling thin as ice where it really demands to be grand and sweeping.

★★★☆☆

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Apex (2026)

As if Dangerous Animals weren't abominable enough, Netflix essentially repeats the exercise here: a big Hollywood name - in this case, Charlize Theron - gets thrown in amongst the Aussies in a horror thriller that squanders its most interesting idea, namely that a strong independent woman is pitted against  toxic masculinity in a remote Aussie environment, and instead serves up unedifying nonsense about an impossibly bizarre killer - Taron Egerton's psycho would sit more comfortably in Pan's Labyrinth - and, suggesting how little anyone cares about this throwaway exercise, the film has been given a name that is destined to bury it amongst Google search results for a computer game and an old Bruce Willis bomb.

★★☆☆☆

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Bird on a Wire (1990)

Mel Gibson's mullet and wild-eyed "loose cannon" routine feels self-conscious and tired here - after Lethal Weapon 1 and 2 - but he and Goldie Hawn generate chemistry together, and occasional laughs, as former lovers fleeing killers from his pre-witness protection life, and helping bind the wafer-thin plot, action and comedy together into a palatable something is the Neville Brothers' easy-listening cover of Leonard Cohen's Bird On A Wire.

★★★☆☆

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Sobibor (Собибор) (2018)

When James Cameron injects high spectacle, grand romance, and completely made-up characters like Billy Zane's suave, tuxedoed, gun-toting villain Caledon Hockley into a painstakingly recreated Titanic, viewers can shrug off expectations of historical accuracy and give themselves up to blockbuster spectacle - never mind the roughly 1500 real people who died in 1912 - but the same can't be said of Sobibor, Russia's odd entry for Best Foreign Language film at the 2019 Academy Awards, a high-gloss but button-pushing movie in which writer, director, and star Konstantin Khabensky presents the lead up to the uprising of the prisoners in the Jewish extermination camp, Sobibor - with a similar appetite for spectacle over accuracy, so atrocities play out in unflinching full where restraint might be more respectful, and Christopher Lambert's Karl Frenzel tips over into caricature - a mumbling, starey Dirk Dastardly whose abhorrent acts are here tied to a camp love triangle.

★★☆☆☆

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The Stranger (2025)

My head was racing as François Ozon's adaptation of Camus' The Stranger started and, unlike my millions of thoughts, the movie proved glacially paced and yet its exquisite spell managed to entrance me: an enthralling moving artwork of black and white images that builds Camus' stark, existential, absurd treatise into a quiet fervour.

★★★★★

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Midnight Lace (1960)

Filled with Hitchcock alumni - Doris Day from The Man Who Knew Too Much and John Williams from Dial M For Murder, but alongside Rex Harrison, not James Stewart or Cary Grant - and about an American woman (Day), newly married and in London, in distress after she starts being stalked by a disembodied voice - first in a pea soup London fog, atmospherically, and then over a series of phone calls - this thriller directed by David Miller really feels like a classic Hitchcock: London, too, with its double deckers, phone boxes, opera performances, and pubs, and while thriller fans will know where it's heading, there are a few well-handled surprises in the end.

★★★★☆

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Storm boy (1976)

I understand Colin Thiele makes it clear in his book that Mister Percival, the pelican raised by Storm Boy, is trained and responds to voice commands, but the movie springs this idea on its audience right when Mister Percival is needed to save a boatful of fishermen, resulting in a laughable Skippy moment that slightly strains the otherwise faithful adaptation, an emotional, likeable, and touching Australian classic, with the ten-year-old Storm Boy living a lonely but - to me - dream existence, quietly at the beach with the Coorong - its beaches, birdlife, and Ngarrindjeri culture (as taught to Storm Boy by David Gulpilil's Fingerbone Bill) - resplendent around him.

★★★★☆

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Birth (2004)

Jonathan Glazer's beautifully acted and beautiful-to-look-at Birth, about an affluent Upper East Side New York family intruded upon by a boy who claims to be a reincarnated dead husband, wants to be taken seriously - and some people oblige, calling it a mystery and treatise on profound things like belief and loss, but it plays out more like a deadly earnest fairytale - that is to say, it plays out ridiculously - and while the final scene does a good job, finally, of grounding the first-world problems of these toffs in some real emotion, getting there is far too long a road - an absurd and monotonous one - with an especially icky bath scene and kiss scene along the way.

★★★☆☆

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