Tag: Katherine Waterston

Fackham Hall (2025) Review

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Quick Synopsis: Downtown Abbey meets Airplane, but not in a plane crash way.

We’re beginning to reach the end of 2025, which means it’s soon time for me to write the annual awards. So I’m starting to think of the best movies of the year. Among the obvious candidates are a film about the power of music mixed in with a gothic tale of racism and American history, a personal drama about trauma and family via a visit to a concentration camp, and a tale about the existence of the afterlife and all the implications of eternity. All very serious topics, all very “big”. Despite how that might make me look; I adore silliness. I like silly, fun little films, of which Fackham Hall is one of the best of the year. Really, the only comparison lately is The Naked Gun, which had the advantage of having an established style.

So, how does this compare? It’s not quite as joke heavy as TNG, with a distinct lack of sign-based jokes which aren’t signposted. There are also fewer background jokes. Basically, I don’t think there are any jokes that I missed that I’ll catch on a second viewing. So I didn’t laugh as often as I did during TNG, but I did laugh louder. I can remember more jokes from this than I can TNG, although that might be down to me having seen it more recently.

But does it stand out on its own? I’d say it does. There was a surprisingly full screening when I went, and everybody seemed entertained. Nobody walked out, which for a film barely advertised and which from the poster you could mistake for a period drama, was a pleasant surprise.

The performances are exactly what’s needed. I’m not familiar with Ben Radcliffe, but he does seem like he’d be perfect in an actual period drama. Thomasin McKenzie is building a weird filmography, which makes it hard to pin down her niche: JoJo Rabbit, Last Night In Soho, The Justice Of Bunny King, and now this. All of those are completely different films, and her roles are very different, yet they’re all somehow still “her”; she’s one of the most chameleonic (is that a word? Is now) performers around. Katherine Waterston is quickly becoming one of my favourite performers, which is odd as I’ve never intentionally seen a film because she’s in it; she just happens to be in films I watch, and happens to always be REALLY good. She has a face that feels like its come straight out of the 1940’s, so she’s perfect for films like this. She also has surprisingly perfect comic timing.

On the downside, the plot is muddled. The murder of the lord feels weird in terms of pacing. The arrival of the detective investigating it turns it more into a Hercule Poirot pastiche than a period parody. That feels like a genre rife for parody, but we’re not given enough time to fully explore that. I would be fully up for a sequel with that concept, by the way. If the murder was cut out, then it would leave a hole that needs fixing (and you’d lose one of the funniest sequences), but I’m sure it could be replaced with something more suitable. It feels like Jimmy Carr wanted to put those jokes in, not realising it might have been smarter to save them for a different film; now he can’t use those jokes and scenes in a more suitable film.

The reveal at the end is a bit too obvious, but not obvious enough that it seems deliberate and is, as such, a joke. Similar to the reveal of the murderer. But I think that if you go into a film like this expecting to be wowed by the plot, you’re in the wrong movie.

Really, the biggest negative of watching this is how it affected my viewing experience of another film. You know how, when you play Tetris or Guitar Hero, it changes the way you see things briefly? All you can see is falling circles and bricks for a while? I went through a comedic version of that. My brain watched the next fil,m and it took about 20 minutes for it to adjust and try not to see a joke in every single action or moment. That’s the biggest compliment I can give this film; It broke my brain with comedy.

2024 In Film: Day Two (The Bad)

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Films which are very bad, but at least have one thing I like about them

AfrAId
Ups: REALLY good soundtrack.
Downs: Loses faith in its own story.
Best Performer: Katherine Waterston
Best Moment: The enforced car crash. It killed a creepy sex pest, so yay.
Worst Moment: There’s a REALLY bad edit where it cuts straight from characters driving to them parked up and one of them exiting the car.
Opening: An AI poem. It’s weirdly haunting and beautiful. Then some music that reminded me of Portal. Overall, it was a much stronger start than I thought it would have. Yes, the characters are there just as fodder, but the opening actually references them as missing people, continuity!
Closing: The family decide to treat the AI like my family treats me: they don’t like it but they’ll just live with it for now.
Best Line: I’ve seen a lot in my life. They didnt’ even have ipads when I was born.
Original review here

Garfield
Ups: One or two funny moments.
The animation of the humans looks good.
Some cute small references.
Downs: Have the writers ever read a Garfield strip?
Best Performer: Brett Goldstein
Best Moment: The acorn-as-phone.
Worst Moment: The train fight/rescue.
Opening: A funky happy song. Because when you think “Garfield” you think happy and funky.
Closing: A hostage swap
Best Line: “I really hope this works otherwise she’ll put us down; with her words and cutting insults”.
Original review here

Imaginary
Ups: Some half-decent moments of tension.
Good idea.
Downs: It feels like a tribute act to better horror movies.
Nothing stands out.
Best Performer: Pyper Braun
Best Moment: The bit where they first enter the Never Ever is pretty cool and inventive. Reminded me of Among The Sleep
Worst Moment: To open the door the characters need to feel pain. Physical pain isn’t enough so one of the characters engages in a brutal speech to her stepdaughter. It’s not brutal enough. Harsher sentences are said throughout.
Opening: Woman being stalked through a house at night by a standard evil thing. It’s well made, it’s just not really anything we haven’t seen before. The opening credits are much better though. A bunch of family home movies. It’s so sweet and really plays up the idea of a family unit. THAT gives us a much better idea of tone than the actual scene with dialogue did.
Closing: Sequel bait. Eugh.
Best Line: “So your imaginary friend was a terrorist?”
Original review here

Joker: Folie A Deux
Ups: Some beautiful shots.
Good performances.
Important/interesting themes.
Downs: Those themes are VERY badly explored.
Boring.
Too bleak, stopped caring.
Wastes a lot of good ideas.
Doesn’t explore the world as much as it should.
Best Performer: Lady GaGa
Best Moment: The weird brightly coloured 60’s TV-inspired song/dream sequence.
Worst Moment: The implied prison rape.
Opening: An animated segment. Makes sense, and plays into the theme of being destroyed by your shadow. But doesn’t suit the films tone.
Closing: He dies. So the two films called “Joker” weren’t actually about the Joker.
Best Line: I couldn’t go back to work. I still can’t sleep and I’m scared all the time. I never used to be scared. I’m scared right now, here. With you in front of me. I couldn’t do anything that day. I felt so small. I was reminded how powerless I really am.
Original review here

Kraven The Hunter
Ups: Bloody.
Some fairly decent fight scenes.
Downs: Boring soundtrack.
Inconsistent accents.
Bad CGI
Badly written script.
Disservice to the character
Best Performer: Russell Crowe. He’s hamming it up, but you have to.
Best Moment: The death of The Foreigner. Oh god, that sounds wrong.
Worst Moment: “She died after that, and I never saw her again”. Was the dialogue in this movie written by AI?
Opening: Kraven in prison, hunting. Shows what Aaron Taylor-Johnson can do, for better and worse. Physical performance: good. Accent: Bad. Does show what this film has going for it; blood.
Closing: His brother has now become confident, and a villain. A villain we will not see because the franchise is deader than Uncle Ben.
Best Line: My father puts evil into the world. I take it out.
Original review here

Madame Web
Ups: It starts with a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song and ends with a Cranberries one, just ignore everything else and you’ll have a good time.
Downs: A waste of the character.
Characters change personalities depending on the scene.
Dakota Johnson.
Best Performer: Adam Scott.
Best Moment: A car quickly drives away, turning as it does so. The shot is a standard “snow gets kicked up into the air by a speeding tyre”, but with broken glass. It looks absolutely stunning and may be one of my favourite shots of the year. It cannot be overstated how good it is. That shot, and ONLY that shot, is why this movie wasn’t in the “awful” section.
Worst Moment: Pepsi.
Opening: A scientist shoots a pregnant woman who then gives birth. So generic it’s barely worth having.
Closing: Madame Web is now blind but is fully clairvoyant. So whilst she can see the future, she is unable to read the reviews.
Best Line: And you know the best thing about the future? It hasn’t happened yet
Original review here

My Spy: The Eternal City
Ups: Anna Farris is bae.
Good charisma.
Has Ashnikko on the soundtrack, gets points for that.
I’m assuming kids will like it.
Downs: The separation moment between the two leads doesn’t seem legit.
Unnecessary.
Assumes you remember more more of the previous film than most people would.
Best Performer: Either Farris or Chloe.
Best Moment: The villain reveal. It is possible I’m an idiot but I didn’t expect it.
Worst Moment: The bodyguard explained how he killed JJ’s friends, family and fish. Kind of came out of nowhere.
Opening: He’s now a bodyguard watching over a singer. It sets this up in about 5 seconds. Plane-based action sequence where he beats up a flight attendant. Sophie (his daughter) saves the day using a flight suit. I don’t remember the first film, but I can’t recall it being quite as dumb as this is. But that’s okay as it then turns out to be a dream sequence. A weird choice to open up on a dream sequence, especially in an action movie as it makes it difficult to manage expectations.
Closing: The world is saved, and two of the side characters are paired together.
Best Line: “You got me a used burner phone. Maybe I can use it to buy meth or order a hitman”
Original review here

The Watched/Watchers
Ups: Good idea.
Downs: Wastes so much potential.
Runs entirely on conveniences and luck.
Seriously, how do you now do a cool mirror/double scare?
Best Performer: Georgina Campbell.
Best Moment: The mirror being cracked, very unsettling.
Worst Moment: The entire third act. Unnaturally stretches the runtime.
Opening: Mina’s manager sends her to deliver a bird to someone. There’s NO indication of how that person reacted to not getting their delivery when she went missing. In fact, there’s no reaction to her going missing at all. That sums up my issues with The Watched; if you think about it for more than a minute thenTh it falls apart.
Closing: Mina convinces Madeline not to kill her, with the power of love.
Best Line: Try not to die
Original review here

AfrAId (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: A family takes an experimental AI into their house. Everything works out fine. Psych! Stuff starts to suck.

AfrAId was directed by Chris Weitz, who also directed About A Boy, The Twilight Zone: New Moon, and The Golden Compass, which is a weird film history if you think about it. Not really relevant at all, I just wanted to mention it.

I went into this with lower expectations than I would if Gillingham were playing Barcelona (football joke, I NEVER make them), I knew it had bad reviews and box office, and bad horror movies are usually The Crow-est of the low. So I knew this would be terrible. But then something went wrong; it’s not terrible. It’s not good, but it’s not terrible. It is never bad enough to be awful, but also it’s never quite good enough to stand out. It doesn’t help that it’s quite derivative, it’s not saying that much which hasn’t been said before (primarily by equally stupidly titled M3gan). It can’t compare to that, and not just because the AI in this isn’t as memorable, or as well-written. Occasionally it only does things BECAUSE it’s a horror movie, there’s no “non-creepy” justification for many of the AI’s choices.

On the plus side, it does seem like it has something to say, which I always like to see in a horror movie. The proliferation of AI is a concerning development and one that’s too big for films to ignore. This film also says a lot about how families interact with themselves and with technology, especially concerning how that affects parenting. It doesn’t always work, though. There are some parts where the AI nature of it just

The revenge porn bit, in particular, didn’t sit right with me. I don’t care that it ruined that kid’s life, he knowingly made and shared porn of his girlfriend. I don’t give a shit that he won’t go to college or that he’s being tried as an adult. To be perfectly honest I hope he gets hit by a fucking car. Now it gets fun. No word of a lie, I legit wrote that line, and then that character died in a car crash. So that’s nice.

On the upside; the performances are good. John Cho is underrated (as anybody who has watched Searching will know), and I’m still waiting for the world to pay attention to just how utterly fantastic Katherine Waterston is. Both of them feel slightly beyond this movie, almost like this was a film made years ago and only just released now to make use of their fame. There’s also no issue with direction; it looks good, has decent audio cues etc.

The main issues are pretty much entirely down to the script. The pacing is like a drunk driver; all over the place, causing great damage, and indefensible. The ending is a huge letdown. It goes too “real”, with the AI making incursions into reality which are a bit too far-fetched and would be easily solved by humans. The closing scenes are also far too predictable, to the point where it feels like a parody.

In summary; not as bad as I expected, but not as good as I wanted. AfrAId is like people who discuss politics on Twitter, too concerned with saying stuff “now” than trying to figure out how to say it.

Alien: Romulus (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: A group of disillusioned colonists get set for one big job to earn enough money for their freedom from the corporation that essentially owns them. As you can guess from the title, they meet a Xenomorph.

I managed to catch Covenant at the cinema during its theatrical release, and I wasn’t too impressed by it. Part of me wondered whether that was because I hadn’t seen any of the others. However, just through cultural osmosis, I recognised certain bits of it as paying homage to the original, making it seem like a greatest hits package, albeit one rerecorded by a different line-up because the lead singer fired everybody and didn’t want to pay them royalties so replaced them all with session musicians. By which I mean, I recognised the narrative and visual melodies, but they weren’t as sharp and exciting as I knew they had originally been.

Now, onto Romulus. Romulus VERY heavily leans into the original, taking place between that and Aliens, as well as featuring dialogue that explicitly references the original, just oddly delivered. The Xenomorph in Romulus is the same creature from the original, and there is an android that physically resembles Ash (the android, not the result of fire, or the Pokemon animal torturer). Now I have actually seen the first two films in the franchise, so am more able to spot more subtle references, it wouldn’t be a stretch for me to dislike Romulus as much as I did Covenant. Especially since it was written/directed by Fede Alvarez and co-written by Rodo Sayagues, the team responsible for the “you’ve kind of made a rapist sympathetic” horror movie Don’t Breathe (which I heavily disliked) and its “So you’ve made the rapist the hero now?” sequel Don’t Breathe 2, (which I utterly despised).

I didn’t. I, well I don’t want to say “enjoy”, as it was tense as hell and disturbing, but I was thoroughly “oooo”‘d, and a little bit “aaaaaa”‘d. There are some truly fantastic set pieces in this, full of creativity and intelligence. The use of the acidic blood in some of the scenes is superb, with my personal highlight being when the characters make a zero gravity journey through a corridor whilst the acidic blood floats around them. Some amazing scenes make the best use of gravity mechanics available to the characters. It felt like Alvarez and Sayagues looked at the toys they had to work with in terms of the technology and location developed earlier in the franchise, and then thought of scenes that would make the best use of them.

I haven’t felt this tense (at the cinema at least) since Civil War, which also starred Cailee Spaeny. The Alien franchise has many flaws, but one thing it’s always EXCELLED at has been casting perfect female leads. Noomi Rapace, Katherine Waterston, Weaver etc are all critically acclaimed performers, and I know that Spaeny will get there. She received some acclaim for her role in Priscilla, but that’s not enough. She was incredible in Civil War, to the point where in my review (link here) I specifically pointed out her performance, saying (and I quote):

she is damn near perfect. I want to see what she does next because she is fucking phenomenal in this

I didn’t quite expect her next performance to be this good. It’s genuinely difficult to figure out which of her performances is better. I dunno, maybe her next film will be shit. I’ll just see what she’s in next. *checks*. Knives Out 3. Oh damn, she’s in line for a perfect three-film run.

Romulus isn’t all perfect, some of the fanservice is a little bit too obvious, the final third drags a little bit, and some of the CGI feels a little weird. Those are very nitpicking criticisms though. Overall it’s incredible. There’s so much to like about it. David Jonsson (last seen here in Rye Lane) as a defective droid is great, with the character providing so much tension and humanity throughout, especially with a few of the narrative reveals (essentially the trolly problem) adding some background to humanity’s relationship with androids. The other characters are fine, but aren’t really explored enough, they don’t need to be though. Not everybody is a main character, so it’s fine if some characters are less developed than others.

The location is also a highlight. Much like the other entries in the franchise, there’s a kind of future-retro feel to everything. There’s a lot of future technology, but all the computers etc have all clearly seen better days. It would be much like having a film in 2010 featuring VHS players, but the film itself being released in the 1950’s.

Overall, I loved this movie. It’s cruel, atmospheric, and downright terrifying in parts, absolutely perfect for cinema.

The End We Start From (2023) Review

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Quick synopsis: After floods decimate the UK, a new mother does her best to find a safe space for her and her child.

I watched this in the middle of summer, and you’d think a film about torrential rainfall wouldn’t make sense to be watched in the summer. Ordinarily, you’d be right, but you’ve forgotten one thing; I live in England. I’ve spoken before about how the external atmosphere can affect the film-watching experience (I am wondering if part of my disdain for how Oculus ended was because the cinema turned the lights on early), but watching this in a weirdly wet summer definitely changed it, was like having surround sound.

The End We Start From (TEWSF, pronounced Two-soff) sets its genius relatively early on, having the scenes of her giving birth be intercut with scenes of her house being flooded. This is both smart and an obvious thing to do, but obvious like “having cheese on pizza instead of boiled foot dust” is obvious, in that if you did otherwise it would be weird. I do have some issues with the opening section though. It has her husband (referred to as R, and played brilliantly by Joel Fry) be away. With that, you’d assume the story would be about the two of them trying to reach each other. But then he just appears at the hospital after she’s given birth, so his not being in the opening didn’t affect the plot. It’s peculiar when you consider they get separated again. So their on-screen chemistry feels very stop-start. Ordinarily, I’d say “Keep them separated until the end so when the two meet again it feels special”, but that would be a stupid thing to do as it would rob TEWSF of a key scene; the one where R’s parents die. We know one dies but aren’t told anything about how or why until a few scenes later, and when you find out, damn it’s brutal, so, damn, brutal. It all feels real too. COVID taught us a lot (For example; that you should wash your hands after peeing, and that you shouldn’t sneeze directly on people. Both of which are things that apparently needed teaching), but the most sobering thought (so sobering it drives me to drink) was that people are dicks. They need to go to Ladbrokes even if it does kill the person behind the counter who’s forced to work even whilst sick.

I kind of wish we saw more of the world the film takes place in, most of what we see is just the universe surrounding the main character (Jodie Comer, credited as Woman). Much like AQP: DP, it all happens so quickly and the character isn’t at the centre of it. We do see a few other people, but only sporadically. It’s essentially a road movie where we only see the pit stops. As such, we feel like we’re in a weird purgatory where the character spends a lot of time in various places but none long enough to let the audience feel grounded and like we’re getting to know anybody. So much happens, but because they all feel like they have no impact, weirdly it seems like nothing happens.

That’s a shame as I would like to see more of some of the characters; partly as an excuse to see more Gina McKee and Katherine Waterston, especially Waterston who is always incredible. Of course, Comer is great, but that’s to be expected. I was surprised by how good Joey Fry is, I’ve only seen him in comedies, or acting alongside other sitcom actors. He more than holds his own in this. He’s surprisingly key to how this works. Considering it’s about a mother and a newborn child, you’d think it would contain a lot about modern femininity, and it does. But it also tackles masculinity, the feeling that if you’re not a provider then you are failing as a man.

It’s not just the people on screen, there’s a lot of talent behind the camera too. The music is mostly fitting, there is one part where it feels slightly too jaunty for what just happened, but otherwise, it’s dour and depressing. The visuals are sublime too, there are no gorgeous shots in it, but it’s not a movie for beauty, it’s about ugliness. Mahalia Belo has done a fantastic job of directing TEWSF. Even just the little moments are done as well as they could be. There’s a two-second shot of the television networks shutting down, that two seconds is creepier than most horror movies. Watching TEWSF is like wading through a murky puddle, but doing so in the middle of summer so that even when you are nearly stuck, you can still feel the warmth and have a small glimmer of hope of what’s coming.

In summary, it has flaws, but it’s incredibly powerful and definitely worth your time. Although I do question the logic of the main character crying so much during a flood; that’s just making it worse.