Tag: Review

Street Fighter (2026) Review

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Quick Synopsis: It’s a Street Fighter movie, are you here for the plot?

I’m familiar with the Street Fighter games, kind of. I played them a little bit growing up, specifically Street Fighter 2 on the SNES. I stopped playing after that because I was fed up with the constant updated releases. People insult EA Sports’ yearly releases, but that’s nothing compared to what Capcom did with this franchise in the early ’90s. I was also terrible at the game, so I never managed to unlock the endings. So whilst I recognise references, I’m not going to treat the lore as gospel.

There are A LOT of references to the games, as you’d expect. There’s also a reference to the 1994 film, specifically the “For me, it was Tuesday” line, which, along with Raul Julia’s performance, is one of the few things that film got right. Thankfully, it doesn’t cram in so many references that you feel like you need a study session before watching. It’s not like Uncharted, with its obvious “hey, this guy was in the game” reference.

Of all the video game adaptations this year (and there’s been a lot for some reason), this is the most video game-like. Not in terms of narrative (Resident Evil still feels like a series of levels rather than a traditional film), but in terms of tone. The music and visuals do a great job of capturing the feel of the games. Sometimes that works. The fights, in particular, are a lot of fun. But sometimes it doesn’t, and the action feels forced. The bar fight before the tournament is the clearest example. The characters’ motivations are muddled, and it’s never entirely clear what starts the fight or why everyone gets involved. The one thing everyone seems to know, somehow, is that nobody’s going to suffer any lasting damage. That’s another problem: the damage characters take in fights is inconsistent. You’re never sure whether being thrown through a wall is going to kill someone, cripple them, or simply result in them getting back up and carrying on fighting.

That’s not my biggest problem. I was thoroughly enjoying this film. At one point, I was genuinely excited to see where it was going. I was settling in for a final third packed with action and excitement. Then it ended. I’m usually pretty good at spotting sequel hooks, but this one genuinely caught me off guard. Everything felt like it was building towards a climax that never arrived. As a result, the film feels unfinished. Given how many high-profile films have flopped at the box office this year, making a film that NEEDS a sequel seems like a risky move.

Really, that’s my main criticism. That, and Jason Momoa as Blanka, whose performance veers a bit too close to silly for my liking. Thankfully, most of the cast do their jobs well. Noah Centineo and Andrew Koji make a near-perfect Ken and Ryu. Koji’s been in some great action films recently, including Bullet Train and Boy Kills World. He’s a great action performer who’s ready to lead a franchise. Callina Liang makes a great Chun-Li, although I suspect she’ll get more to do in the sequel. Much of the supporting cast consists of professional wrestlers, including Roman Reigns, Cody Rhodes and Hirooki Goto. Casting them in physically demanding roles makes sense when they can perform the action sequences themselves. They hold their own, but you get the feeling there’s more to come from them in the sequel. On the subject of wrestlers, I’m pretty sure the only reason I couldn’t take Alexander Volkanovski as Joe seriously is that he reminded me too much of “Oh yeah, it’s that guy” WCW mid-carder Disco Inferno.

The supporting cast do well, but it’s Centineo and Koji who carry the film. Their relationship is what elevates Street Fighter above what it has any right to be, occasionally giving the film some genuine emotional weight. You understand their conflict. Ryu is the master fighter. His adoptive brother? He’s just Ken.

So how are the fight scenes? Aside from the inconsistent damage, they’re pretty good. The hotel-room fight is great, with Ryu being as laid-back and pacifist as possible. None of them will enter the pantheon of all-time great action scenes, but none are particularly terrible either. The moves from the games are recreated faithfully, and it’s great to see some of them brought to life in live action.

Speaking of live-action, it’s a surprise to see so many animated sections. It’s a clever way to handle flashbacks without having to use copious amounts of makeup or de-ageing technology. It reminds me of the animated Street Fighter movie from the ’90s (only with less full-frontal nudity). It’s a brave move to open the film with animation, but I respect it. Plus, it means the film builds towards seeing these familiar characters in live action.

Ultimately, I had a good time with this movie. It’s colourful, knowingly dumb, and understands that its most important job is to be fun. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it also doesn’t abandon the idea that its characters should have something resembling an emotional connection. That’s more than can be said for plenty of video game adaptations. I just wish the film had the confidence to deliver a complete story rather than seemingly saving all its best ideas for next time.

Digger (2026) Review

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Quick Synopsis: An eccentric oil tycoon scrambles alongside the US President and a brilliant scientist to spin the narrative and position himself as humanity’s savior after a catastrophic explosion at an Arctic oil field triggers a massive ecological crisis.

Film reviews can be many things. Some writers treat them as deep analysis, poring over every frame and judging it against the masterpieces that came before. Others use them as an excuse to push a political agenda, declaring any film which features a non-white lead to be “woke”. I do neither. I don’t have the patience to treat my reviews as serious analysis, and I couldn’t give a shit about a film being “too woke”.

I treat every review I write as an opportunity to do two things: write dumb jokes and answer the simple question, “Should I watch this film?”

Which makes it rather tricky to talk about Digger.

I was astounded by what I saw. The performances are good, the film is very funny, and it has an important message. I know for a fact I’ll watch it again. But as soon as I came out of the cinema, I messaged some people who hadn’t seen it to ask what they thought. They told me they were wondering whether they should watch it.

Despite all my positive feelings towards this film, all I could reply was, “Maybe not.”

I’ve mentioned before how some films fail to win me over, yet are still relatively easy to like. Digger is the opposite. I bought what this movie was selling, but I recognise it’s a very easy film to hate. It’s pretentious, the colour grading seems designed to be actively off-putting, and there’s a very important part of the story that wasn’t even hinted at in the trailer. A part that WILL put people off.

It’s hard to talk about that moment without spoiling things, so this will probably be the paragraph I rewrite the most. I can talk about how it affected my viewing experience, though. Essentially, it made everything that happened feel inconsequential, as if nothing in the movie had any actual consequences. There are times when it feels like this particular storytelling device exists primarily to transition between scenes more smoothly, rather than serving any meaningful purpose of its own.

The cast? They’re fine. The trouble is, everyone is ACTING! Which makes it difficult to see them as anything other than caricatures. I understand that’s the point, but much like my feelings about performances in Wes Anderson films, just because I understand the reasoning behind those performances doesn’t mean I agree with it.

The humour will also be divisive. At times, it’s very funny. At others, it feels like it’s trying too hard, with everyone involved seemingly determined to tell you it’s funny in the hope that you’ll believe them. Essentially, it’s a Saturday Night Live sketch at times, complete with loud noises. When the jokes work, they’re brilliant. When they don’t, it’s just a bunch of people behaving like idiots.

So that’s the general concept, the storytelling device used, and the performances all criticised. So why did I still kind of dig it? I think because it’s done so confidently. This doesn’t feel like a film designed to make money (which, considering the box office, is probably a good thing). In a world where corporate buzzwords are being applied to films, where studios can cancel movies for tax reasons, and where every film feels like you’ve seen it before, it’s refreshing to see something like this. A film which is open in its ambition and scope. A film that doesn’t compromise what it wants to be in order to appeal to those who wouldn’t want to see it anyway. So many films seem to be made by committee, with every decision being made by the studios. Digger has the opposite problem. It’s so committed to doing things its own way that I suspect plenty of people will spend the entire runtime wishing somebody had told the filmmakers to calm the fuck down.

The message is probably the most interesting thing about the film, and also the thing that makes it difficult to discuss without giving too much away. There’s a lot to chew on here, and I suspect the film will stick with me longer than plenty of technically better movies I’ve seen this year. That doesn’t necessarily mean I think it’s a masterpiece, or that I agree with every decision it makes. I can appreciate what a film is trying to do without pretending every attempt is successful. And Digger certainly has its fair share of moments where I found myself questioning what the hell I was watching. It has one of the simplest yet most powerful endings I’ve seen in a long time, and the choice of song is perfect.

Which brings me back to that original question: should you watch Digger?

Honestly, I don’t fucking know.

I loved it. I also completely understand why somebody else might hate it. I want to watch it again, partly because I think there’s more to unpack here, and partly because I’m curious whether certain moments will land differently when I know what’s coming. But recommending it to somebody else is a completely different matter. I can easily imagine somebody walking out of this film wondering why they wasted two hours of their life, and I wouldn’t even have a particularly convincing argument to change their mind.

Digger is one of those films where I suspect your enjoyment will depend less on whether it’s good and more on whether you’re willing to go along with what it’s doing. If you’re looking for a conventional comedy, a straightforward story, or characters who behave like actual human beings, I’d probably give it a miss. If you’re willing to put up with something strange, pretentious, occasionally hilarious, and frequently frustrating, there’s a lot here that might appeal to you.

As for me? I’m glad I watched it. I’m glad films like this still get made. And I’m absolutely going to watch it again.

But if you ask me whether you should watch it, I’m still going to say maybe not.

Other Mommy (2026) Review

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Quick Synopsis: A young girl must protect herself and her fracturing family from a shape-shifting demon masquerading as her mother that seeks the child’s permission to possess her.

First off, terrible title. “Other Mother” was right there. Apparently, the director agreed, but the studio overruled him. Studios are stupid sometimes.

I know this is based on Josh Malerman’s book Incidents Around the House, but I haven’t read it, so I won’t be judging how faithfully the film adapts it. The only thing I know about the book is that it has kind of a downer ending. The movie does too, but it’s more bittersweet than outright depressing.

So, the film itself, how is it? I’ll give it credit for getting straight to the point. Other Mommy appears almost immediately, and the rest of the family know about her presence before the opening credits. There’s not much time wasted on the usual “Our silly daughter is telling lies again, and she somehow lifted a bed heavier than herself and dropped it from the ceiling, causing the splinters to spell out a warning to leave” style bullshit.

But that quickness also works against it. The problem is that there’s not much room for escalation. The danger starts at an 8/10 and stays there for the rest of the film. The audience knows things can’t get much worse for the main characters, so there’s little sense of danger for the people we spend the entire film with.

The side characters? Yup, they’re fucked, brutally so. One character dies in an explosion of glitter. The scene looks like a unicorn’s orgasm. The character who died like that? Frank. A man who’s having an affair with normal mommy Ursula. That affair is the only time the film shows any narrative restraint, although it’s so obvious that I’m not sure it even counts as foreshadowing. It’s more like the film is just telling you what’s going to happen.

When Frank dies, Russ fears he’ll be the number one suspect in his murder. He needn’t worry. It never comes up again. This film has no consequences. A group of “paranormal investigators” get killed near the end, and are never mentioned again.

Other Mommy makes Bela disappear during a ball-pit attraction, transporting her into a locked car that fills with balls. In the moment, there’s panic, fear, and confusion. So how does the wider world react to this? It doesn’t. There are no TV news reports or newspaper stories; the incident isn’t even filmed and uploaded to YouTube.

Which brings me to my next point: Other Mommy’s powers are inconsistent. At times, she behaves like a cosmic entity, much like Pennywise (the clown, not the punk band). She can transport people, but only when the plot needs her to. For example, she doesn’t teleport Bella somewhere isolated, away from her parents, where she could spend more time convincing Bella to accept her. She never teleports normal mommy away, either, even though removing Ursula would make it easier for her to take her place in the world. There’s a million things she could do with her powers, but she’s limited to whatever the film can put in its trailers: cheap scares with no tension, consistency, or stakes. It is possible that Other Mommy is just an idiot who doesn’t know how to use her powers.

Most of these problems aren’t down to the performers. Okay, the acting isn’t exactly great across the board. Jessica Chastain is capable of great performances; she’s proved it in Mother’s Instinct, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and IT: Chapter Two (how has that film got two references in this review?). But she’s not at her best here. There’s something slightly flat about her performance, as if she’s holding back.

Jay Duplass is fine, but never feels like a lead. It’s a bit sad to see Karen Allen in films like this, although I didn’t recognise her anyway.

Arabella Olivia Clark, though, is incredible, especially given her age and relative inexperience. I’ve seen her before in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (reviewed here) and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (reviewed here). This is the first time I’ve seen her in a featured role, though, and she steps up wonderfully.

Truth be told, I only saw this film because I was already at the cinema, having watched Street Fighter and Forgotten Island. I wouldn’t have made a special trip to see it, as neither the premise nor the trailer particularly excited me. Having seen the film, I feel my initial reservations were justified. Apart from Clark’s performance and a few select moments, there’s nothing to recommend here. Beyond its pacing, there’s nothing new here. It’s all just a rehash of other, better films.

Our Hero, Balthazar (2025) Review

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Quick Synopsis: A wealthy, performative New York City teen (Balthazar) travels to Texas to befriend an online troll (Solomon) he believes is planning a school shooting

Our Hero, Balthazar, which I will call OHB (pronounced Oh-bie) because I know if I keep typing it out I’m going to misspell Balthazar at some point, is a weird film. I haven’t seen a film with this few likeable characters since I watched the news. To be fair, the two characters are:

  • A self-loathing incel who dreams of violence.
  • A narcissist who fakes being passionate about school shootings because he’s interested in a girl at his school.

And that’s basically the setup. Two deeply unpleasant people become involved in this story about school shootings, masculinity, narcissism and America’s gun culture. On paper, that sounds like the setup for a pretty savage satire. Unfortunately, OHB seems to be much more interested in showing us how fucked up everything is than actually doing anything particularly interesting with it.

You can’t make those characters likeable. Well, you could, but it would be very difficult. The only character who is even slightly likeable is Eleanor, a classmate Balthazar is interested in. She is appropriately disgusted when Balt tries to make a move on her while they’re discussing school shootings. Even after he becomes a national hero and starts appearing on the news, she’s still so disgusted by him that she leaves him on read. Honestly, I’m much more interested in her story. She’s played by Pippa Knowles, I have no idea who she is, but she absolutely nails the performance here. She also gets one of the best lines in the film:

“This doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world. It’s only in America where we have such easy access to guns, coinciding with a zero-sum economy and the monetisation of narcissism, all of which push hopeless, lonely people, kids, into an annihilation mentality”

Boom! That’s it. A character who says that is a character I want to spend time with. The line comes during a school shooting drill, which is depressingly appropriate. The fact that the American solution to school shootings is essentially “train students how to hide” rather than “stop handing out guns with cheese at Walmart” is both horrifying and depressingly accurate. At one point, the guy teaching the drill tells the students, “you are the last defence against a mass shooting.” Last defence? Wouldn’t “first defence” be more accurate?

From that moment, from that interaction, you’d think this would be incredibly biting satire. It’s not. If anything, it’s “slowly gumming to death” satire. It has an interesting point, but takes WAAAAY too long to get to it. If this was a short, it would be one of my favourites. But as a feature-length film, it takes forever to do nothing, so it’s hard to continue caring. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a 30-minute drum solo: very good for a while, but slightly tiresome the longer it goes on. The problem isn’t that there’s nothing here. There is. The problem is that the film keeps making the same point long after you’ve already got it.

It does have a lot to say. Not just about gun culture, but also about masculinity, loneliness, narcissism and the way we turn damaged people into celebrities. The problem is that it doesn’t really know what to say about any of them beyond holding up a mirror. It asks a lot of questions, but has no interest in answering them. There’s no real examination of why these things happen, or what they might say about the society that produces them. It’s basically a film of: “You know this thing everybody accepts is bad?” “Yeah?” “I think it’s bad too.” “Erm, okay.”

And perhaps that’s why the ending frustrated me so much. It takes what could have been the film’s biggest question: what happens when someone like Balthazar is rewarded for all of this? The answer seems to be, “he wins.”

Spoilers from here on: Balt insults Solomon and threatens to make him homeless. During a fight, a rifle is discharged, killing Solomon’s mother. Balt then shoots Solomon in the head and frames him for his mother’s death. He presents it as another example of youth violence, before going on TV and becoming a national hero.

I wasn’t a fan of the downer ending. Do we really need another film where rich people win? Unlike Bad Apples, I wanted a coda here. I wanted some clue that Balt didn’t get away with it. Not necessarily because I needed him to be punished, but because I wanted the film to do something with the idea it had spent so long setting up.

The film seems to be arguing that everyone can be a shit, but money, narcissism and media attention can turn the right kind of shit into a national hero. That’s actually an interesting idea. I just wish the film had something more interesting to say about it.

I don’t hate this movie. But I don’t like it. It has all the ingredients for a delicious satire: gun culture, masculinity, narcissism, social media, wealth and America’s obsession with turning people into celebrities. The problem is that it never really cooks with any of them. It just lays them out on the table and points at them for two hours.

Essentially, it’s a cinematic Hello Fresh.

Resident Evil (2026) Review

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Quick Synopsis: An everyday medical courier named Bryan must transport a crucial package containing a missing cure ingredient into a chaotic, zombie-infested Raccoon City

I was a Nintendo kid growing up, and stayed that way until the Wii, when I decided my lack of coordination probably wasn’t going to work with the core of what that system was offering. So I switched to Xbox. I’ve just never really vibed with PlayStation, possibly because the kids who played it when I was growing up were the “I’m so cool, I’ll beat the shit out of you if you look at me weird” dickheads who I didn’t get on with. You know the type. The kind who would eventually move on to playing Call of Duty.

As such, Resident Evil isn’t a big part of my gaming life. Yes, it eventually moved onto other consoles, but it became a major gaming franchise on a system I’d never touched. I’m aware of the series and some of its lore, mainly thanks to the Kill Count by Zoran “I Can’t Think Of A Funny Nickname Like He Does And It Would Be An Insult To Try” Gvojic. I’ve seen one or two of the films, although the only thing I can remember is wondering why one of them used its final line – which was supposed to be a big twist – as the tagline. Oh, and I have the soundtrack to Extinction for some reason.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m not approaching this as a video game adaptation. I don’t know enough about Resident Evil to tell you whether it’s faithful to the games, and I’m not going into it like a cast member of The Traitors, desperately looking for clues about how faithful everything is. I’m just judging it as a film.

So, how does it work as a film? It’s pretty good. It’s not my favourite horror movie of the year, but I’m aware that a lot of the things I didn’t like about it are probably the exact things other people will like about it. For one thing, characters appear and disappear without much reason or rhyme. Maxine (played by Kali Reis) is a good example. She’s introduced as confident, badass, and very good at her job, which makes her feel like someone the film is setting up to stick around. She feels like a character being saved for an extended role in a sequel. So when she’s killed a few minutes after we’ve seen her effortlessly be awesome, it feels less shocking than it does cheap. The film spends time convincing us that Maxine is going to matter, only to immediately take her away.

The tonal whiplash was also jarring for me. Some characters just don’t seem to be taking the threat seriously, particularly the scientists in the closing level, who joke around as if they aren’t currently in the middle of the end of civilisation. You might have noticed I used the word “level” rather than scene. That’s not me being stupid (for once); that’s genuinely how it feels. The film plays like we’re moving through levels rather than following a conventional script. And that’s not entirely a bad thing. Moving between locations and characters gives the film opportunities to do things that wouldn’t work elsewhere, and it makes good use of them. The moment when the infected jump from the rooftops, splattering onto the street as Bryan runs towards the hospital, is something that can only happen in that location. Likewise, the acid-filled hospital lift works because it’s part of that particular sequence. The film’s game-like structure can make it feel disjointed, but it also gives it an excuse to keep throwing completely different situations at us.

The scares in the hospital were the highlights for me. The harsh lighting certainly helps, and hospitals are creepy enough without an army of infected people running around them. But Resident Evil doesn’t just rely on the obvious advantages of the setting; it comes up with some genuinely inventive scares of its own. The maternity ward scene, in particular, is sure to become the stuff of legend.

Conversely, the farmhouse wasn’t nearly as effective for me. Mainly because it’s one of the few sections where the film seems to lose its own identity. A lot of the moments there could have been lifted from almost any other horror movie. That’s what makes it stand out: for long stretches, Resident Evil knows exactly what it is and has a distinctive visual and tonal identity. So when it suddenly starts feeling like a generic horror film, you notice it. The problem isn’t that the farmhouse is less scary; it’s that it feels like Resident Evil has temporarily stopped being Resident Evil.

Performances? Austin Abrams does fine. Actually, he does more than fine. But every time I try to remember him, my brain immediately replaces him with Franz Kranz’s performance in The Cabin in the Woods. Nobody else is around for long enough to make much of an impression, so this is very much Abrams’ movie. He’s good in it, but it’s not the sort of performance that’s going to linger with me.

His character, however, has considerably more depth than I’d expect from a film like this. I haven’t seen a video game adaptation with this much character development since To Kill a Mockingbird (which everybody knows was an adaptation of Duck Hunt). Bryan’s entire character is built around avoiding parenthood and responsibility. So when he finds a young girl in danger, you’d expect the rest of the film to be him escorting her to safety like Pedro Pascal. Nope. She dies.

But that doesn’t make the relationship pointless. Her death is actually what makes his arc work. Bryan spends the film trying to avoid responsibility, and eventually he’s forced to step up and do what needs to be done. He doesn’t suddenly become a different person; he’s finally forced to become the person he’s been avoiding being.

In summary, I can’t tell you whether this is a good Resident Evil adaptation. I’m guessing not, but that’s not really my area of expertise. What I can say is that it feels like a video game movie. The characters, the visuals, the way the story is structured, even the fact that the hero is given the most important job in human history and then apparently nobody thinks to give him any help, so he has to do it all himself. It’s basically the video game experience distilled into a film.

Most importantly, it’s fun. It’s the kind of film that makes you want to watch it again, partly because you want to see what comes next and partly because you just want to experience the madness of it all again. And there aren’t many video game movies you can say that about.

Mayday (2026) Review

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Quick Synopsis: A US Pilot is trapped behind enemy lines, assisted only by a former KGB agent who wants to defect.

I’ve written this style of opening so many times that even I’m bored of reading it, so let’s skip the full sentences and get straight to the quick notes. Apple Original Movie? Probably dull. Ryan Reynolds? Usually good. Ryan Reynolds’ recent film choices? Questionable. Director? Has made films I like. This film? Not one of them. There, that’s saved all of us a lot of effort.

Sadly, I can’t do the whole review like that. I’m going to have to come up with something original to say about this movie, which is more than the writers managed. The film opens with a bird flying into the ocean, and it looks so fake that I genuinely wondered whether I was watching some kind of Hot Shots-style parody. From there, things don’t exactly improve.

The feeling that this might actually be a parody doesn’t go away as the film goes on. The US military has provided production assistance to numerous movies over the years, often in return for cooperation over how the military is portrayed. It’s part of the reason films like Top Gun have been so closely associated with military recruitment (to the point of recruiters setting up stations outside screenings). Some of the films made with assistance from the Department of Defense include Armageddon (kind of makes sense, I guess), In The Army Now (makes sense), and Ernest Saves Christmas (that… makes less sense). Mayday isn’t on that list, but it feels like it should be.

It’s a film assembled entirely from Serious Military Movie™ parts, complete with earnest speeches, American flags, men staring meaningfully into the middle distance and enough patriotism to make a bald eagle start feeling embarrassed. The result is a film that feels strangely dated.

Much like England has never got over World War 2, the US has never got over the Cold War. Probably because Russia was the last enemy America had where they could cast white actors and just tell them to do an accent. Try doing that with a modern Middle Eastern villain and you’re either veering straight into blackface-level territory or, God forbid, actually casting actors from the region. And we all know which option Hollywood would prefer. Spoilers: it’s the shitty one.

The problem is that Mayday could probably work as a pulpy action thriller if it wasn’t so determined to make everything about America. One character decides to risk everything to help another because, apparently, “I like America.” That’s the motivation. That’s the character development. It’s difficult to take seriously. Yes, there is a moment where the main character starts to question the US military after they gave his dad cancer and covered it up. But even that feels tacked on. You’d think “the government ruined my father’s life, covered it up, and then suspended me when I told people about it” might lead to a small amount of national introspection. Nope.

And then there are the action scenes.

Some of the film actually looks pretty good. There’s some nice use of colour and a few shots that suggest the filmmakers know exactly what they’re doing. Unfortunately, the fight choreography is bizarrely robotic, with characters seemingly pausing between every move to make sure everyone knows what’s happening. There’s no natural flow, everyone feels stiff (not in a sexual way) and unnatural. It feels like rehearsal footage rather than a finished scene. That’s especially strange considering this comes from the same team behind Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves and Game Night, both of which had incredible choreography. It’s not that the filmmaking here is generally incompetent; quite the opposite. But that one fight scene is painful to watch.

The logic isn’t much better. At one point, there’s a train full of soldiers, and apparently nobody has a walkie-talkie, knows how to use hand signals, or has any other means of communicating. Their only solution seems to be firing weapons in the general direction of their fellow soldiers, because that’s what military training gets you to do; potentially wipe out your colleagues. It’s the sort of thing that makes you stop paying attention to the plot and start asking questions the film really doesn’t want you asking.

Ryan Reynolds is perfectly capable of doing serious roles. So why does it feel like he’s been stuck playing variations of Ryan Reynolds for years? At least Kenneth Branagh is doing something slightly different from normal. It’s always nice to see Maria Bakalova onscreen. She has a great career ahead of her.

There’s probably a decent film buried somewhere here. Strip away some of the Cold War baggage and the relentless American exceptionalism, and perhaps the story could breathe a little. Instead, it’s so aggressively American that it ends up hurting itself. It’s not a completely incompetent film. There are some good-looking shots, some decent performances, and moments where the action works. But it is so weighed down by clichés and dated ideas that it becomes difficult to take seriously. It feels like there’s a reason this went straight to streaming, and it’s the same reason Disney sequels used to go straight to video back in the day.

Soulm8te (2026) Review

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Quick synopsis: David volunteers to beta test an android companion to cope with the death of his wife.

A bit of background. Soulm8te was originally supposed to have a theatrical release in January this year. Obviously, that didn’t happen. I keep a list of films I want to see each year, with titles indented if I haven’t seen a trailer. Soulm8te was on there for ages, until I eventually decided it probably wasn’t going to be released and deleted it. Two days later, the trailer came out. The first I knew it had finally been released was when I spotted it on Disney+ while I was going to watch the new season of Scrubs.

You know how Disney+ puts the release date next to the title? Soulm8te was listed as being released in the year 3000 (where not much has changed but they live underwater. And your great great great granddaughter was pretty fine). In the kindest possible interpretation, this was a joke about how futuristic the film is. It wasn’t. They eventually changed it, so it was clearly just a mistake. The fact that it was sitting there with the wrong release date for several days tells you something about the level of care that went into releasing this film. And the fact that it didn’t even become a meme tells you how little attention anyone was paying.

That being said, Coyote Vs. Acme was also beset with release problems, and that turned out to be incredible. Plus, Soulm8te is directed by Kate Dolan, who gave us You Are Not My Mother, a great hidden gem if you like low-budget horror. That film showed she could take a strange, unsettling premise and turn it into something genuinely creepy, so her involvement gave me some hope that Soulm8te might be better than its troubled release suggested. And some genuinely great films have been released straight to streaming. So, despite everything, not all hope is lost.

Until you start to watch it. Then you give up hope pretty quickly. I will admit, I only watched this because of the M3GAN connection. If that’s why you’re watching it too, don’t. There is no meaningful connection. No serious connection, anyway. It mentions one company that also appeared in M3GAN, and that’s about it. If anything, the fact that it’s set in the same universe actively harms the movie. The events of the M3GAN films would be well known in this world, yet they’re never mentioned. You’d think a robotics company making lifelike companion dolls would say something like, “And remember, be careful you don’t end up with a situation like that doll a few years ago that killed a bunch of people.” Instead, people come face to face with Sara and seem AMAZED that a robot can look lifelike. Almost as if the M3GAN films didn’t exist.

And it gets even sillier when one of the people who hates Sara for being a robot does so because she pays for something using her palm at a chip and PIN machine. That’s not scary futuristic robot technology. That’s something people can already do if they have the right implant. That’s like someone in a movie shooting another person because, “He was using a wireless telephone! Witchcraft!”

It’s not all bad. There is something weirdly sweet about David’s early interactions with Sara. They’re very wholesome, even if the relationship is obviously one-sided. But then again, she is an AI companion, so asking about her childhood pets and stuff would be a bit weird and disingenuous. He’s getting to know her, while she’s essentially been designed to get to know him.

The performances are good across the board. Sadly, I think David Rysdahl is the weakest, although that’s only because everyone else is so good. Lily Sullivan is perfect as Sara, managing to make her feel convincingly human while still retaining something slightly artificial about her. She’s not in it much, but I also liked Emma Ramos. I really enjoyed Claudia Doumit’s performance, too. She has the same kind of inherent likeability that makes Jameela Jamil so watchable, where you can’t help but enjoy having her on screen.

There’s also some genuinely fun moments. Her singing Lovefool at karaoke is lovely, and really sells David’s feelings for Sara, making you believe that he genuinely cares about her. The film also comes up with some surprisingly creative deaths. A guy gets his dick ripped off and then kneed in the face. She also kills someone using her ever-tightening vagina. (Ever-tightening Vagina was my folk-reggaepunk band back in college.) These are the moments where the film is at its most entertaining, because it seems to remember that having a bit of fun with some of its more ridiculous ideas is actually a good thing.

But that brings me onto the downside. Yes, the suffocating vagina death is fun to watch, but it has no consequence. In fact, none of the kills do. Sara kills a fair few people, and their deaths have almost no effect on the story. There’s no news reports about them. No police. Nothing. It’s not that I need Soulm8te to suddenly turn into a police procedural, but these deaths should have some kind of impact. For a film supposedly interested in the importance of human connection, it has remarkably little interest in the people who actually die.

The film has the potential to say something genuinely interesting about human relationships, and I get the feeling some of that may have been lost in the edit, particularly when it comes to David’s ex-wife, Lizzie. There’s the potential for something beautiful there. David has lost his wife, and then finds himself forming a relationship with an artificial person who is designed to give him the companionship he’s lost. But besides the dialogue telling us about it, we don’t really FEEL that David is haunted by Lizzie’s death. We needed more moments of him watching footage of the two of them, remembering their life together, or even just struggling with the fact that Sara is filling a space that Lizzie left behind. That would make his relationship with Sara much more emotionally complicated – and much more interesting.

On the subject of the characters: Sara herself is strange. She has moments of brilliance. When she says, “Your hypocrisy forces me to contort myself into this impossible ideal,” it briefly shows a much better version of this movie than the one that actually exists. A movie that focuses on male entitlement to female bodies and attention. Sara has been created to be the perfect companion, designed around what a man wants from a woman, and yet the moment she develops desires and expectations of her own, she’s suddenly the problem. If the film leant more into that, it could have been really interesting. It would draw comparisons with films like Companion and Obsession, and, more importantly, give Soulm8te something genuinely worth discussing beyond whether its robot vagina kills are funny.

But Sara isn’t all good. She doesn’t understand a lot of very basic things about human nature, but somehow understands how to blackmail someone using deepfake porn. And why was she programmed with jealousy in the first place? It seems like her behaviour is based less on what would make sense for an AI and more on whatever the plot needs her to do at that particular moment.

Although I suppose it is a bit much to expect logic from a film with a title as mind-numbingly stupid as Soulm8te. I’m sorry, but it’s possibly the worst name a film has had all year. It doesn’t even say “soulm-eight”. It says “Soulm-eight-et”. A character actually points this out in the movie, but acknowledging that your title is stupid doesn’t magically make it less stupid. If anything, it just confirms that you knew it was stupid and went with it anyway.

In summary, it should be better. That’s the most frustrating thing about Soulm8te: I’ve seen what this movie could be, and I’ve seen what it actually is. There’s a genuinely interesting film buried in here about loneliness, grief, male entitlement and what happens when an artificial companion develops desires of its own. Instead, we get a movie that’s too serious, more po-faced than a Teletubbies mask.

It’s not even that sexy. Which, for a film labelled an “erotic thriller”, is a death knell. It mistakes nudity for sexuality. There’s no atmosphere, no passion, just cold, sterile nudity. And nobody wants cold nudity. It’s why you don’t see many naked people in the Arctic.

Fall 2 (2026) Review

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Quick Synopsis: A grieving woman and her late sister’s friend get trapped thousands of feet up on a dangerous mountain plank walk in Thailand after a rockslide destroys the path.

I absolutely loved Fall; it was probably the most tense film I’ve ever watched. I remember watching it, and at one particularly intense moment, a guy sitting nearby stood up, loudly proclaimed, “fuck this”, and walked out. Honestly, I get it. It was an unsettling watch that made my stomach jump constantly (although that could have been the sweet popcorn). So I was incredibly excited by the idea of a sequel.

I was a bit nervous that it was only a few months away from release and there still wasn’t a trailer. Then the trailer came out, and it was… fine. It didn’t blow me away, but mainly because it was so short that it didn’t really showcase much. I figured the finished film would be worth it.

It’s not. I’ll state that up front. It’s nowhere near as good as the first one; it feels like a cheap knock-off. Part of that is because I now have expectations. But part of it is because it’s simply not as good. There are moments where it’s incredible, where you finish a scene and realise just how tightly wound you were while watching it. So it’s not a terrible film, but it isn’t a good one either. There are three main issues: the script, the characters, and the visuals.

The script. The idea for Fall 2 is simple: two characters are trapped on a wooden bridge high up on a mountain. That’s it. Everything is there. It doesn’t need complicating. But it does it anyway. It tries to be clever, adding unnecessary twists and turns.

I’ll talk about one of them because it doesn’t really impact the script, so it’s not a spoiler. Who we thought was called Luce is actually called Billie. She claimed she was a friend of Shiloh (the woman from the first movie, and the sister of Fall 2 protagonist Jax), and it’s a shock to discover that she was actually just a fan. All shocking, all effective. Well, it would be, if any of this had actually mattered before. The fact that Luce is friends with Shiloh is mentioned in dialogue that is so ineffectual it’s basically homoeopathic. There are no conversations about “so what was my sister like at college?”, or discussions of their supposed friendship. There are so many dialogue-heavy scenes that it’s impossible to remember every single thing that was mentioned in passing.

It would be like if I suddenly said: “I absolutely detest sweet popcorn, much preferring salted.” It would mean nothing, because nobody reading this review is going to remember that I mentioned popcorn in the first paragraph. Why would you?

The characters. This was a slight issue in the first film: people taking reasonable decisions for their safety are labelled “not living life”, and standard things to make sure you don’t die are described as “letting fear run your life”. That’s taken to the extreme in this. Especially in a flashback sequence detailing the time Jax and Shiloh went skydiving, and Shiloh pretended to pass out mid-air. When they land, Shiloh does the whole “It was to teach you not to let fear run your life”. No, if you’re skydiving and the person you are trusting to keep you safe passes out, you have every right to be scared, and it’s not unreasonable to be pissed off if it turns out they’re faking it. It’s why parenting books don’t recommend breaking into your kid’s bedroom swinging a chainsaw to teach them about stranger danger. Also, Shiloh’s death doesn’t come up that much. At no point does Jax say, “Yes, I’m scared of falling from heights, but I have a good reason to be; my sister died falling from one”. They mention how her sister didn’t let fear rule her life, how she climbed tall structures with abandon, but don’t mention that it’s that fearlessness that killed her.

Fall 2 also has issues with pacing. It takes seemingly forever for them to actually get to the spot, so it doesn’t even feel like the main part of its own movie. For an idea of how long it takes to get there, the current plot section on the film’s Wikipedia page is 678 words long. It takes over 200 words before we get to “The two women are then left stranded.” The entire section describing the two of them alone is just 232 words.

Finally, the visuals. What worked about the first film was that it was set on a small radio tower. The tower itself was a constant visual reminder that there was nothing between them and the ground. Here, they’re on the edge of a mountain, so most of the shots are the two leads in the foreground, with a huge chunk of rock behind them. You don’t get that same constant reminder of the peril they’re in. There are a few moments where you do see just how high they are, but they’re few and far between.

I also felt the opening was overly stylised, shot more like an action movie than a survival thriller, which detracted from the realism somewhat.

This has all seemed pretty negative, much more so than this film deserves. On its own merits, it’s perfectly fine. It has some incredible shots, and the performances are all good too. My only criticism of the cast is how much Tom Brittney looks like a mix of Tom Ellis and Santino Fontana, but that’s not his fault; it’s just my brain looking for shortcuts.

Harriet Slater and Arsema Thomas are solid leads, only really let down by the script. I get the feeling that if they were scripted as friends, they’d be allowed to be much more natural with each other. As it is, they have to play two strangers, which means there’s only so much chemistry they can show.

In summary, I really wanted to like this. I’m still waiting for the obvious contender for my favourite film of the year, and I hoped Fall 2 would be the one to do it. Instead, it’s a clear favourite for “Most Disappointing”. If this had been released on its own, I’d be much warmer towards it. But when the original Fall had me genuinely considering whether I could stomach another minute of it, it’s hard not to feel let down by a sequel that never comes close to that level of tension.

The mountain in Fall 2 is MUCH higher than the tower from the first one, but the biggest difference in height is the difference in quality between the two. There’s a third movie on the way, featuring the leads from both films, and it looks like it’s set on a snowy mountain. If it follows the same approach as this one, I’m expecting much the same thing, but with added snow and clearer skies – which doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that the visuals will be any more tense.

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (2025) Review

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Quick Synopsis: Two hapless friends and aspiring musicians accidentally travel back in time to 2008 while trying to pull off a scheme to book a gig at a real-life Toronto music venue. Based on a web series, nothing to do with Kurt Cobain

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (NTBTSTM, pronounced Not-bot-tis-tum) is based on a web series and TV show that I’ve never seen. This could end badly for me. Humour is subjective enough without walking into a film that’s potentially packed with years’ worth of in-jokes and references I don’t understand. And then there’s the fact that it’s Canadian. There was every chance I’d spend the entire thing wondering what the hell everyone was talking about.

I mean, all of those things could still be true. But if they are, they were done skillfully enough that I didn’t notice. This is not a subtle movie. In fact, it’s about as far from subtle as you can get. At one point, a character says, “This whole 2008 sequence, which would be very hard to fake if this were not 2008, will not be filmed.” That’s not so much winking at the audience as batting eyelashes, buying them a drink and asking if they’d like to come back to theirs. And I love it. The film knows exactly how ridiculous it is and leans into that as hard as it possibly can. It kind of has to. If it played things straight, it wouldn’t be nearly as funny. And it is funny. Incredibly so at times. Some of the dialogue and situations are so absurd that you can’t help but laugh.

I can tell I liked it because I managed to get over a pretty big hurdle. I don’t think he normally does, but in this movie, Jay McCarrol REALLY looked like a guy I grew up on the same street as. This guy once beat the shit out of a kid and flushed his head down the toilet. You’d think that would be some kind of classroom hijinks. Nope. The dude was in his 30s at the time. Naturally, this led to me Googling what he’s up to now. I think he’s dead. Apparently, he died by suicide. For a lot of films, that would be enough to permanently ruin an actor’s face for me. Here, it barely registered. And then there’s Matt Johnson, who was in Matt and Mara, a film I detest partly because I should have loved it but didn’t. So yeah, the fact that this film managed to overcome both of those hurdles says quite a lot.

Not that it’s a great movie. The pacing is a chore, and sometimes it feels like a genuine struggle to get through. The narrative could be tighter, too. There is an overall story in there somewhere, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting about it at times. The original web series episodes were between 10 and 20 minutes, while the TV show episodes were roughly 22 minutes apiece. I don’t think they’ve quite worked out how to stretch that into a feature. It puts me in mind of Moana 2, which was originally supposed to be a miniseries before they merged the different episodes into a movie. The result was something that felt episodic and disjointed. There’s a similar thing here. It feels like a series of skits rather than a cohesive narrative.

That being said, I admire creativity, and this definitely has that. The way they use unsuspecting members of the public to drive the story through their interactions with the performers is genius. If you know what’s happening, you can spot it. But if you don’t, it just looks like incredibly clever foreshadowing. That’s the kind of thing I really appreciate in a film: something that is genuinely impressive once you know how it was done, but still works perfectly well if you don’t.

NTBTSTM is not among the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. But it is a lot of fun. More importantly, it made me want to watch the TV show. I’m sure there are running jokes and references I didn’t catch, and once I’ve seen the show, I’ll inevitably have to come back to this and watch it again with the missing context. If a film can make someone who has never seen its source material want to go back and explore it, I’d say that’s a success.

Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma (2026) Review

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Quick Synopsis: Kris, a 29-year-old filmmaker, is hired to resurrect and reboot the tired Camp Miasma slasher franchise for modern audiences. Wanting to pay tribute to the original, she tracks down the actress from the original; shit gets weird.

I have a somewhat complex history with the work of Jane Schoenbrun. I think she’s one of the best filmmakers around today. Her use of colour is among the best in the business. The way she weaves metaphor and storytelling into the shots is a thing of wonder. I always leave her movies feeling slightly like I’ve been hypnotised and entranced. That being said, I’m not a fan of her scripts. They always start promising but end up just on the wrong side of incomprehensibility, although I suspect cohesion and understanding aren’t really the point. I’m aware that this, more than almost any other criticism, is deeply personal and subjective. Some people will love it BECAUSE of that, because the audience is constantly wrong-footed and left in a state of confusion. Personally, I don’t mind being confused; I just want a place in the narrative to ground myself

If you loved her previous work, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma (TSADACM, pronounced Tee-Sad-At-Cam) won’t dissuade you from being a fan; if you don’t like it, this won’t change your mind. Everything that works about her previous films is now better in this. The shots are better, the music is incredible, and the performances are outstanding. Schoenbrun knows how to make a killer playlist, helped enormously by a returning Alex G. There’s a great selection of danceable synth pop for you to sink your teeth into. Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson have a chemistry that leaps off the screen. From the moment they first meet, there seems to be a magnetic pull between them, like the universe is begging them to kiss. They are helped by how unbelievably horny the script is. There’s an air of unashamed sexuality over the entire thing; arguably the sex is more important than the death. The supporting characters are all fine, but none are as fully fleshed out as those two, so the actors aren’t really given as much of a chance to shine.

It feels like a deeply personal story for Schoenbrun. Much like her previous work, this feels like she’s writing it as an exploration of her own personality, rather than worrying too much about whether the audience can follow along. It’s her examining her own sexual desires and feelings. And that’s fine, but if you do something like that, you have to be aware that it won’t fully land with everybody. Every time I felt I knew what was happening, the film was determined to throw me off. I’m still not sure whether the ending actually happened, was a fantasy, an alternate universe, or a dying thought. There’s a moment where the switch from “believable and understandable” to “confusion and oddness” happens, and it’s so abrupt that it becomes genuinely jarring.

So far, this review has probably seemed fairly negative, and it’s not meant to. There’s a lot to like about TSADACM. It has one of my favourite openings I’ve seen all year. The opening credits set up how Miasma is regarded in this world, complete with reviews, initial analysis, its place in pop culture, and how it’s viewed in modern society. There are multiple references to classic cinema, and problematic histories that a lot of long-running franchises have, especially when it came to how they treated characters who weren’t cisgender, straight white men. Fans of cinema and film theory will get a lot more out of some of the dialogue than casual viewers probably will.

So, is the in-universe movie believable? Kind of. Weirdly, Camp Miasma (the in-universe movie) has the exact opposite problem that Camp Miasma (the movie we’re watching, which I’ll refer to as TSADACM for clarity’s sake) has. The writing, characters and backstories of Camp Miasma feel convincingly rooted in the 80s. Yet the filmmaking itself definitely feels modern. If anything, Schoenbrun feels TOO good a director to make a believable, slightly terrible 80s slasher. Her use of camera movement and music is too advanced and slick for it to work. It pulled me out of the movie a little bit, despite the scene itself being incredible. If an 80s movie had used some of Schoenbrun’s techniques, it wouldn’t just have been good; it would have changed the genre. It’s the musical equivalent of Green Day attempting to make a ramshackle 70s punk record. Even without trying, they’d do things that wouldn’t have been done back then, either because the technology wasn’t available or because nobody had thought of doing them yet. Put all of that together on one album, and it would inevitably be too much

Gonna be honest, I’m still not entirely sure what genre this would fit into. It doesn’t really feel like horror so much as a video thesis ABOUT horror that uses horror scenes to illustrate its point. So you can’t really judge it like you would a traditional horror movie, by examining the villain, the scares, etc. I guess the closest I can think of would be *deep breath* Surrealsexual Romantic Psychological Thriller. It’s definitely unique, and for that alone it’s worth your time and money.

This is one of only two films I’ve paid to see in the last few years, and I watched it at the Curzon, which isn’t cheap. Plus it was on my birthday, and I was on my own. It had everything working against it, and I still want to see it again.

I should note that I’m not exactly the person these themes are aimed at. I love that films like this exist; it’s clearly going to be VERY important to someone, potentially even someone who feels seen by it in a way they haven’t felt seen before. But to me? I admire it and want to study it more than I like it. This wasn’t made with someone like me in mind, but it doesn’t need to be. It feels like it’s aimed at the confused teens (and adults) who need more films like this, and I think they’ll love it. Of course, I haven’t actually spoken to any people about this film, so for all I know, I’m woefully off the fucking mark.

Although there is one important thing to note, especially after what I just said. I don’t really feel comfortable explicitly stating what I’m about to say, so I’ll try to work around it. A few years ago, for my end-of-year awards, I noticed that EVERY film in the “most me” category had a female lead. It led me to ask myself a few questions about why that was, and whether those were questions I should actually talk to someone about. I did have a discussion with some friends, and they encouraged me to explore it further, many of them speaking from their own personal experiences. I never really got anywhere with those questions, but they haven’t entirely gone away either. So there’s something increasingly strange about the fact that TSADACM is almost certainly going to win the award this year. It’s another film that feels intensely, uncomfortably close to me in a way that I don’t entirely know how to explain. And every time that happens, I get a little closer to HAVING to ask myself those questions again.