Carry-on (2024)

It's set in an airport at Christmas time and features a pre-male pattern baldness blue-uniformed everyman (Taron Egerton) who in the course of his usual work as an airport luggage checker suddenly finds himself the sole hope in a battle against terrorists, so Die Hard comparisons have to be made and this one, in comparison, is a stinker, really - perfectly watchable but absurd, with the convoluted terrorist plot undone from the outset and everything else that follows just a ludicrous, well, carry-on.

★★☆☆☆

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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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Fall (2022)

A confined-space thriller in which the confined space is a small platform at the top of a 2000-foot radio antenna in a US desert, this movie, beyond this original setting, is completely by-the-numbers, rolling out in such formulaic fashion, you suspect an AI spat out the story, but watch it for my favourite  moment when the hero, dehydrated, overexposed to the Sun and at death's door, eats a vulture and turns immediately, momentarily, into a slinky, confident Lara Croft.

★★★☆☆

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The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Featuring Dashiell Hammett's gumshoe Sam Spade - a character played in film twice before but immortalised here by Humphrey Bogart - this noir classic gives Sam Spade plenty of opportunity to stand up to big 'fat men' crime bosses, deflate femme fatale molls, and talk smart to cops-on-the-beat while being hired and rehired to chase an invaluable jewel-encrusted bird statue.

★★★★☆

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Last Suspect (2023)

A laughable cliche of a high-powered, ultra-successful criminal lawyer - she never loses a case - and a laughable cliche of a loose-wire cop - the sort who shoots first and shows no respect to the station chief - team up in a watchable but patently absurd thriller that grows increasingly ridiculous as it goes on - the lawyer's daughter is kidnapped for an unusual ransom, with the lawyer coerced into reinvestigating and solving a murder before the young man found guilty of the crime is sentenced.

★★☆☆☆

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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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