Tag: Cinema

Heads Of State (2025) Review

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Quick synopsis: The UK PM and the US President are forced to put aside their personal rivalries when the plane they’re travelling on gets shot down.

This is a weird thing to say, but in 2025, Amazon originals are better than Netflix. That might be because netflix is much better at showing you new stuff, so it’s easier for me to see when they add a new original film to add to my watchlist, whereas Prime showcases stuff it doesn’t have access to unless you pay more, so your brain filters most of it unless something stands out in some way.

Heads Of State (HOS, pronounced hoes, because obviously) is not meant to top any “best films of 2025” lists. It’s not a technical masterpiece that will astond you and change the way you think about cinema. But it is exactly what it needs to be: a fun waste of time. You can tell it does WANT to be smart though. There are multiple twists and turns designed to keep you on your toes. But they happen so quickly that none of them have an impact. If I tell you “My name is Jonas, no it’s not, it’s Earl, actually it’s Who”, then when I reveal that my name is actually Slim Shady, you won’t give a shit because I’ve spent so long trying to convince you my name is something else that the actual revelation lands deader than my hopes and dreams. I’m not saying it needs to be dumber, but it would be improved if it had a more streamlined vision.

The action scenes are good, but I would expect better from Ilya Naishuller. This is the third film by Naishuller; he previously directed Nobody and Hardcore Henry, both of which had a distinctive style that made them memorable. By comparison, HOS could have been made by a number of different directors. There are moments where his style seeps through; the fight in Belarus, in particular, is a lot of fun, almost Jackie Chan-esque in how it combines violence and comedy. It’s also incredibly creative in the way it uses the surroundings.

HOS is the perfect showcase for the performers. I’m not sure whether it was intentional, but it does seem like there’s a subtext to the casting. Idris Elba, a respected actor who has honed his craft across decades, alongside John Cena, a brash American who walks in and starts getting top roles. Especially with lines like “I don’t watch your movies, I watch actual cinema”. The supporting cast all play their part. Although I’m pretty sure Priyanka Chopra is supposed to be co-lead, that’s certainly the impression the marketing gives you. HOS doesn’t fuck around with its supporting cast, having Stephen Root, Sharlto Copley, Sarah Niles, and Paddy Considine. Considine, in particular, is building up more evidence that he’s one of the most versatile performers around. He keeps going like this, and he’s going to end up in a reboot of Jaws, as the shark, and he will be magnificent.

Now it’s time for the downsides. It feels like Idris and Cena stay opposed for longer than they should. The “reluctant team-up” is a vital part of a movie like this, but it feels like they’re too hostile for each other for an unnaturally long time, especially for two people who’s jobs require them to be respectful to people they hate. There are times when it works, but those are mostly in the first half, where it would make sense for them to act like that to each other. I’m thinking mainly of their argument on the plane, where the two lay out their disdain for each other, and they both have a point. That should lead to some thawing of animosity, but it doesn’t. I’m also not a fan of one character surviving, mainly because they didn’t feel important enough to earn an end-credits appearance.

Overall, there are better films than this, but there are A LOT worse. It will be difficult to watch HOS and not, at the very least, be somewhat entertained. Although it is somewhat unrealistic that the two countries would both have politicians who are likeable.

Napoleon (2023) Review

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Quick synopsis: The (partial) life story of a French Emporer

Napoleon is a strange film, and one I’m not entirely sure needs to exist. For something like this to exist it needs to be either educational, overblown, or relevant. This fails on all three counts.

The educational: the accuracy of it has been called into question multiple times. This was going to be obvious from the first time you see the tagline: He came from nothing, he conquered everything. He didn’t come from nothing, and it’s weird to say he did. For starters, his dad was an aristocrat (not to be confused with an aristocat. who are pets who get to sleep on velvet mats, naturalment). It puts him present at the execution of Marie Antoinette when he was actually on a battlefield at the time. It also shows him firing at the Pyramids in Giza, which never happened. These are such needless lies too. But they call into question the accuracy of everything, did Napoleon mastermind a victory over the English at the siege of Toulon? Did his marriage fall apart because of fertility issues? Is there even a country called France? These are all things presented as true within the film, but so are proven falsehoods, so it’s hard to tell.

It has been accused of being anti-French, but what else would you expect from a Scott? You know, because the director is Ridley Scott, and Scotland is part of the UK, who have famously nearly always been at war with France? I know, the joke would have worked better if the film also involved Britt Eckland (if I spelt it Brit), Robert Englund (if I spelt it England), or Kerry VonFuckTheFrench (if I spelt it Kerri).

It’s not just the French who are annoyed at this movie; idiots are too. Accusing Ridley Scott of making a film that discriminates against white men by showing one of them as a bit of a dick and he had a wife who cheated on him. The wife part; yes, she did cheat on him, but he cheated on her. He ended the marriage just because she couldn’t get pregnant, and impregnated a teen. The wife ended up dying alone and in pain, what a bitch. And of course, it shows him as a bad person, he was a military leader responsible for the deaths of thousands. Something that’s not in the movie is the siege of Jaffa, where Napoleon allowed/encouraged his soldiers to spend two days massacring and raping the inhabitants of Jaffa (a city in now-Israel, not the chocolate and orange treat that’s a cake for tax purposes). Most European leaders in history were dicks, and most of them were white men, both of those things are facts. So if you want to watch a movie about European history, you’re going to have to put up with a white man being terrible. So we can either not make historical movies, we can make historical movies about non-Europeans, or we make Henry VIII a black woman. Maybe then the internet will stop complaining. In response to the historical inaccuracies, Ridley Scott has said that historical accuracy isn’t important. I’m hoping he continues this point of view when I release my new film “Ridley Scott once bummed a hedgehog”

The overblown: it’s all a bit dour. There’s not much on the excess of emperors. It’s a Ridley Scott film so there are some fantastic shots in it. I’m normally not a fan of animal deaths in movies, but I’m very glad his horse got shot with a cannon in this because it means I could make a joke about how his horse was Napoleon Blown-Apart.

I’m not going to though.

The horse death does give me an excuse to talk about the violence. It’s incredibly violent, in a good way. You can tell this from the opening scene when Antoinette is executed. Usually, when you see that on screen it’s a clean cut and the head is held up like a mannequin head. When her head is held up here it’s dripping blood and bits of skin, it’s horrific, but does a good job of reminding you that this is an actual human head that just a few seconds ago was full of life. Whilst the visuals are good, the audio is a bit meh. Not in terms of music and sound, but the accents. Nobody has a French accent. This would be okay if it was all taking place in France or if every character was clearly defined, and it’s fine for small scenes. But when there are scenes of characters from multiple countries it can be a bit confusing. This is best highlighted in battle scenes which just consists of people with English accents and nondescript outfits charging at each other, with no idea of who belongs to which side. I haven’t seen fight scenes this confusing since the last Transformers movie I watched where action scenes were just chunks of metal rolling around. (I think it was the second one).

This does have the potential to be a good movie, and there are times when it does live up to that potential. But it mostly doesn’t. The pacing is weird, skipping over important details way too quickly. His first exile and escape took place entirely in my quick pee break. But this is a moment where he was exiled and completely hopeless, yet he escaped by commandeering the people who were supposed to be guarding him. That’s a classic moment of historical farce, which with the right build-up and setup could have been incredible. There are multiple moments of that. It’s both too short to go into things with as much detail as it should, but also too long to hold your attention. I would say it’s wasted potential, but really, I expected nothing less. Every worry I had about this turned out to be correct. And really that’s the most disappointing thing, well, that and the fact that I still can’t stop singing the name to the tune of Linoleum by NoFX. The film also doesn’t contain a scene where goes around San Dimas eating ice cream and helping two kids with their history presentation. Bullshit. *storms out review*

Wait

*comes back in*

I forgot my chocolate, I’m still angry.

*storms back out*

Fisherman’s Friends: One And All (2022)

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Quick synopsis: Cornish singing fisherman continue to sing, this time joined by a Welsh farmer.

Fun fact: the synopsis currently on google is “After the highs of performing on the pyramid stage at Glastonbury, the group struggle with their second album. During a divisive tour of South Australia, they will trace their ancestors and embrace a new community, and discover their musical DNA.”, that’s not what happens. The film ENDS with them on the pyramid stage at Glastonbury, so I’m not entirely sure what is going on there. And the one on IMDB is just “a sequel to the first film”. Bit weird.

I’ll admit, I was going to be a bit cheeky in this. My original plan for this review was to just post the review of the first one, and then make a snarky comment about how weirdly everything about my review still fits. I read that review, and I was going through it I was thinking “wow, this is actually perfect, ALL of this still applies to this film”. But then I got to this line:

“The above made complete sense in relation to this film. Which is weird, as with the exception of 3 words, it was lifted word for word from an earlier review.”

The rest of the review mentioned some specific things about the film, but that one sentence is a curse. Because it means this film is so generic that I can do a review that’s not even a copy, but is a copy of a copy. I missed about 6 minutes of the film, and wasn’t lost when I came back. Stuff had happened in that gap, but it was stuff you knew was going to happen. In fact, I’d argue that you only need to watch about 15 minutes of this to get the whole plot. It’s a shame as it is enjoyable. It’s funny, heartwarming, and everybody is doing a great job. At its heart, it is a good film. It does everything well. There’s nothing inherently bad about it, and it’s a difficult film to dislike. When you’re watching it you’re not bored or distracted. Everybody in the screen I was in enjoyed it. If it’s on TV and I need something on in the background, I’ll keep it on. But I can’t imagine a scenario where I’d go out of my way to watch it. In a months time I won’t be able to remember any lines from it or moments I enjoyed, and as time goes on it will be increasingly difficult to remember what happened in this film and what happened in the first one. There are certain scenes in this that I felt I’d seen before, and that’s never a good thing. I’ll admit, there were also times I laughed, and times I was emotionally affected by the film. But there was absolutely nothing that will stay with me.

So to sum up: you won’t be bored or angry, but it’s not going to change your life. It’s almost the perfect definition of “If you liked the first one”.

Sweat (2020)

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Quick Synopsis: A few days in the life of social media influencer Sylwia Zajac (Magdalena Kolesnik).

I will admit, I’m not too familiar with Polish cinema (which considering I lived with two Polish girls for a year, is not a good sign for me), my only experience being the SUBLIME 2014 film Bogowie which I still hold up as one of the best surprises I’ve had at the cinema, and is my default option for both “suggest a great foreign language film” and “suggest a great film nobody has heard of”. Plus, I’m a white English guy, so my head still unfortunately lumps a lot of European films together because I don’t know enough to differentiate different countries film cultures yet. And the last “European” film I saw was The Columnist (which was also the last film I saw of any description before this) so my brain was always going to compare the two. So this film had the unlucky nature to have both high expectations, yet also be something I knew nothing about.

So with that in mind what can I say about this? Well my immediate thought is wondering whether the two Polish films I’ve watched are outliers or if Polish cinema is fucking incredible. This film is incredibly intense. Not in a “Death and bleakness and horribleness” kind of way that you think “I’m glad this isn’t happening to me”, but in a “this is relentlessly emotionally devastating and I don’t know how this person copes and it’s obviously happening to a lot of people around the world” way.

There’s a lot of criticism of social media influencers, especially fitness ones. The general consensus from people is that it’s not a “proper job” and it’s easy. This film shows just how foolish the notion that it’s “easy” is. Her job defines her whole character. Everything she does, she does it through the lens of her job. Not in a “this is bad writing” way, but because that’s the only way she knows to define herself, she feels she has no identity. She is aware that she has a lot of followers but no friends. Everybody watches her talk, but nobody LISTENS to her.

The film has a real intimacy to it, but it’s a strange detached sense of intimacy. It feels like it’s mostly handheld and shot via very intrusive close ups so you get the sense that even when she’s not filming herself on her phone, that she doesn’t really have any privacy. Even when she’s in a room on her own, the way that Magnus Von Horn shot it means that it still feels like she’s being watched and is putting on a front. I’m a big fan of using the camera to tell a story instead of just “put the camera in this spot and have people talk”, and Von Horn does a fantastic job of it to the point where the camera feels like another character.

Even her own family don’t take her worries seriously. She mentions about how she had to confront a guy who was stalking her, and he was outside her house in his car masturbating as he stared at her. The reaction from her family is “why did you have to go up to his window” and “you were too mean, he could have been a very nice person”. So even among her family she has nobody she feels she can talk to, even among people who “know” her, she can’t talk to them about her concerns. It’s a horrifying scene, which is strange considering it’s just people talking. But that’s what this film is, if I could sum it up it would be an emotional horror movie. Instead of seeing a woman killed, we see her psyche and sense of self-worth take a constant battering and it’s genuinely difficult to watch. This is best highlighted in one of the closing scenes where she’s on a talk show and she just BREAKS, completely, giving one of the most beautiful and heart-breaking speeches I’ve seen:

“What’s wrong with the fact that I admitted that right now there’s no one in my life who loves me? Does that mean that I’m weak or pathetic? In that case I want to be weak and pathetic because that’s when I’m myself. When I’m the Sylwia from the posters I feel very lonely and I’m just tired of pretending that I’m better than I am. I’m tired of wondering that I’m not good enough. I want to be weak and pathetic because weak pathetic people are the most beautiful people on earth”

You could show somebody that scene and they would instantly understand her character. The most heart-breaking part of that speech? That it doesn’t matter. She gets up and does another workout on television in front of the camera. The final shot is her having a big old smile, a big fake smile, that you can see her losing as the film fades to black. That’s the life of a person like this. If you want a vision of their future, imagine a camera pointed at their face, forever.

In summary, I highly recommend this film. It’s like a reverse Joker. That was a film about someone crying out to be noticed by society, this about someone wanting to be noticed by her own friends and family, and for society to let her live for a while. This is available to rent on Curzon Home Cinema for like a fiver, and is well worth it.

Sonic The Hedgehog (2020)

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So the cinemas are now open again so I’m back at this. It’s been over a month since my last blog (been mainly writing some stuff I’ll be posting soon, which involved having to do research into Nigerian slang). There are some good films showing at the moment, Proxima looks like it could be good, My Spy could be fun, Onward is Pixar so should be great, and Unhinged looks like it could be great popcorn cinema. Not only that but classic films are being shown too; Goodfellas, Empire, Back To The Future, all classics in cinema history yet I am still yet to see and I have a chance to see them on the big screen for free so I’d be a fool not to do that, right?

So with all those great options in mind, what film did I deem important enough to be the first film I see post-lockdown? Sonic The Freaking Hedgehog. That should not be a surprise though considering that, well, it’s in the title of the page so if you didn’t read that then why are you here?

So was it worth it? Hard to tell, I consider it worth me seeing it as it’s a film I needed to have an opinion on, but it’s not one I feel was deeply important that I saw on a big screen, I wouldn’t have lost anything if I watched it on Netflix later in the year. Truth be told I’m not sure I would have even felt guilty if I illegally watched it.

I had hopes this wouldn’t be the greatest film in the world, but would at least be done with a lot of love. When the original trailer dropped and audiences complained about Sonics teeth being really creepy, the studio delayed the film so they could fix that issue. That showed to me that they had some pride in the project, and in some aspects that is easy to see. The closing credits are the most unique I’ve seen all year and it shows a real love not only for the film but for the original series. Sadly, this isn’t matched by the script. So much of it seems incredibly “first draft”. There are scenes and sequences which don’t really have any purpose, they don’t effect the story in any way whatsoever. Weirdly, this accusation could be levelled at the opening scene too (no, not the “I bet you’re wondering how I got here?” opening) where we see Sonic as a youth being hunted by echidnas before being protected by an owl. The echidnas are never mentioned again. There are other issues with the script as well, mainly in terms of consistency. I’ll start with the big one first: how fast does sonic go? Because usually when he runs we can see a blur so we know he’s moved, just very quickly (at much the same speed as an incredibly fast car, at one point it’s stated as 300mph). But when the story (or a joke) needs it, he can run A LOT faster. Two main examples: at one point he covers 800 miles in about 2 seconds, doing 400 of it soaking wet and with a fish on his head. The second is during the “bullet time” moments, one of which he moves and causes chaos around the room (affecting a whole bar-room full of people) in a split second. The other inconsistency: he says he needs human help to get inside the building as his bag of rings (just go with it) is on the roof of the building. Yet in the opening scene we see him do a vertical run up a similar building, so it’s pointless. Him being sneaked into the building leads to a moment you probably saw in the trailer where two random people hear sonic talking from inside the main character’s bag and think he’s kidnapped a child. “oh, it’s not mine” and they back off staring at him. Two things with this:

  1. This NEVER comes up again. So did they not tell the police?
  2. By this point the government think this guy is a terrorist and has put out a nationwide alert for him, putting his face all over the news. So these two people saw a terrorist going with a suspicious package into a large building, and didn’t question him? Bit weird. Even the security guard at the door didn’t recognise him. Also there’s never any information on how the government did the “oh he’s innocent now” announcement.

Mentioning the government has reminded me of something: our government are bastards. But also this: they didn’t see Robotnik get transported into the mushroom kingdom (eugh, I know, I know) so what exactly do they think happened? And why did they let the main character go free rather than question him A LOT about what happened? It’s like they didn’t put any thought into the story elements if it ruined their jokes. It’s all VERY “first draft”. There’s a lot of basic issues with this film that a good script editor would have fixed.

So yeah, that’s Sonic. It’s alright, has a few very funny moments, and Jim Carrey is somehow both the best and worst thing in the movie, with the exact same justification for both (his energy is both brilliant, yet also entirely inconsistent with the other characters). Definitely a “wait until netflix” film. Oh, the ending for this has THE most blatent product placement.

Films I’ve Avoided This Year

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So we’ve been a bit quiet for a while. There’s a reason for that. I aimed to review every film I’ve seen at the cinema this year, but I haven’t seen anything in about a month. “woo, see every film!” very quickly changes to “see every film?” around this time of year and I find myself struggling to find the energy to be bothered about the incredibly minimal releases. Films have been released but they’re like Solo, Jurassic World etc. All of them are franchises I haven’t really paid much attention to. Both of those were released close to each other and dominated cinema schedules. So they were out, as were the films I’ve already seen (Deadpool 2, Infinity War), which left me with terrible children’s movies, and I just don’t hate myself quite that much. But there are a few films I’ve missed out for other, more personal reasons. Reasons which are much harder to explain, so here we are.

The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society

One reason, and one reason only. I’m really bored of films based on World War 2 at the moment, I’m suffering from WW2 film fatigue (or blitztigue). They’re not ugly enough. Period films are shot with an eye towards the beauty of elegance, which seems kind of inappropriate for a period of time where millions were massacred, particularly considering there are people today who support the people who did it (some people call them neo-nazi’s, I just call them pricks). I’m not saying there’s no beauty in ugliness, but I’m bored of every war film lately looking the same and attempting to create an air of nostalgia and warmth.

I Feel Pretty

I want to like Amy Schumer. I really do, she’s funny, and likeable, and with the right script is incredibly funny. But she’s also an alleged plagiarist, and when she’s in a bad film, it’s almost embarrassing, especially in a film where 80% of the jokes are “this person is above the average Hollywood weight, hahahahahahaha” (very much like Melissa McCarthy). But that didn’t have too much to do with me avoiding this film. I avoided it because the very concept annoys me. The whole “you just need self belief, then you’ll be pretty because you’ll have confidence” just seems a bit weird coming from an able-bodied blonde white woman with great complexion, she fulfils most of the definitions of classicly attractive by western standards. As someone who is genuinely ugly, with a bad face, it annoys the hell out of me that people say “you just need to believe in yourself”, as if being attractive to me isn’t as unobtainable as going to space on my BMX.

Show Dogs

I probably wasn’t going to see this anyway because, well, it looked kind of shit. But then I saw something else which confirmed my suspicions. It’s a typical kids movie about a talking dog that solves crime. To solve one he has to go undercover in a dog show, which requires having his genitals touched. So his human partner has to get him used to getting them touched, by training him to not react to people randomly grabbing his junk. Teaching him how to escape into your head whilst it happens. That’s……that’s grooming. It’s legitimately how child predators do it, a gymnastics coach who abused his students for years did it, telling them that he needed to do it to train them. It’s just kind of uncomfortable and weird. As Ruth Graham wrote for slate.com:

“The movie’s solution to Max’s discomfort with the inspection is not to empower him to escape it somehow; it’s to have him learn to check out mentally while he endures it, and to make no outward sign of his humiliation. It is not paranoid to say that this is a bad message for kids.”

I mean, yeah it got edited out after the first week or so, but it shouldn’t have been there in the first place. It’s like if McDonalds said “Our Chicken Nuggets no longer contain arsenic” and expecting me to still eat them. Now I know “it’s just movie”, but it’s a kids movie. And that’s where people get morals from, as it’s used as indicator for society as a whole to children. It’s where they get their ideas from about how the wider world works. You don’t think that’s true? Okay, what do you think would happen if in every single kids film from now on, there was a character called “Chris” who constantly shit his pants? Do you think when a child meets someone called Chris, they’re NOT going to bully him about shitting his pants, despite the fact he actually hasn’t, because that’s what movies have taught him they do?

Book Club

Because my watching this film could be seen as an indicator that I don’t despise Fifty Shades, and I can’t risk that.

So yeah that’s that. There are more I avoided but mainly for boring reasons, primarily a lot of “wooo, America and guns are awesome” films I’ve avoided like healthy food at a house party. Luckily there’s Hereditary released today, and I’m really looking forward to that as it looks unsettling as hell.

Winchester (2018)

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Imagine going to see a magician. You sit in the crowd watching, wondering whether he’ll be any good. She (for the purposes of this hypothetical it’s a female magician) comes on stage and for her first trick pulls a lion out of a hat. Wow, pretty impressive. Then for her next trick, she turns a bouquet of flowers into a Ford Fiesta, again you’re impressed. She then produces a hat, you’re excited to see what she’ll do, you anxiously await to see what will happen. Drum roll, lights dim, and she slowly reaches into the hat and pulls out……a lion. I mean, that’s still impressive, but less so than it was before.  But then she gets another bouquet of flowers out. You fear the worst, and she does the worst, transforming them again into a Ford Fiesta. She repeats those two tricks for the entire night. Now, no matter how impressive those tricks were the first time you saw them, would you still consider that a good show? No, you’d consider it a waste of time and ask for your money back. That, pretty much, is what watching this film is like. It runs out of steam after the opening scares, which, by the way, aren’t needed. You can cut the entire opening and it wouldn’t affect the film at all. Actually, it might improve it as it would save some of the creepy visuals for later.

I really wish this film was better. It has a great concept, someone has acquired vast sums of wealth but feel guilty by the deaths caused by it, so seeks to make amends to those who have died. That would be a great character-driven drama to have. It also wastes the location. It’s set in a house that’s constantly changing and with no real floor plan. That’s PERFECT for a horror film. A house that’s a maze, trapping people in there making you wonder if the house is genuinely set up like that or if the characters are losing their minds. Actually, that would be a great survival horror video game; you’re locked in an ever-changing house and need to escape before you starve to death and the longer you last the harder it gets as you start to suffer hallucinations.

And now back to the film. It has its good points. There’s a scene near the end where a room full of guns suddenly rise and point themselves at the main character, it’s a beautifully composed shot in an otherwise visually-lacking film. The story has potential but never really fully lives up to what you think it can do. The performances are……..okay. Helen Mirren deserves better than this. Jason Clarke continues to be a dependable “where do I know that guy from? Oh right, ALMOST EVERYTHING” guy. His performances are usually pretty good, but every single one makes it seem like he’s the guy they get in to replace the actor when a successful film franchise goes straight to DVD. I’ve never really found much to fault with his performances, but I’ve also never been overly impressed, he’s just been there, like the casting equivalent of white bread.

I think that’s the best way to describe this film actually; bland. When I come to the end of year list this will be really hard to write about and place as I don’t think I’m going to be able to remember much about it, in fact, if I didn’t keep a list I’m not sure I’d even remember I saw it. Helen Mirren deserves better, the story deserves better, and the audience deserves better. It kind of feels like a modern remake of a far superior film.