Most Films of 2023

I was all set to do my usual year's best and worst movies of the year list, albeit with a few caveats - this was the year where my last remaining steady film reviewing gig stopped answering my emails, so I'd missed a few of the bigger big titles - when a film came along that redefined the very notion of "best". That film? 

Muzzle.

 

A sleazy right-wing gritty cop fantasy packed with plot points too demented to recount with a straight face - though Muzzle makes a good fist of it, being completely po-faced no matter how absurd the twist - it was in no way a "good film". But to me, and very possibly only to me, its delirious nutbaggery was consistently entertaining in a way many much better films couldn't come close to achieving.

That I often enjoy violent trash cinema is no surprise. But Muzzle was a reminder that year-end best-of lists - and critical opinion in general - are really nothing more than a way for a critic to try and explain what kind of person they are. The point is not so much "these are the films I thought were the best", as it is "I want to let you know I am the kind of person who liked these films".

Which is the whole point of the exercise, obviously: who want to take film recommendations from a critic they have nothing in common with? And thus freed from any requirement to present to you, my most likely non-existent reader, a list of films I think achieved some arbitrary benchmark of overall quality, here instead in no particular order are 25 films I saw for the first time this year (either at home or in the cinema) that I enjoyed more than usual. 

Hopefully there's some titles here you might be inspired to check out for yourself, if only to discuss the completely insane and totally terrifying camel attack (seriously!) in Naga.

*Mother’s Day (the violent Polish one)

 

*Master Gardener

 

*Furies

 

*Aftersun

 

*How to Have Sex

 

*Tar

 

*Jung_E

 

*The Locksmith

 

*Skinamarink

 

*Dead Shot

 

*How to Blow Up a Pipeline

 

*Silent Night

 

*No One Will Save You

 

*Fair Play

 

*Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

 

*Bottoms

 

*Plane

 

*Sisu

 

*The Royal Hotel

 

*Rise of the Footsoldier: Vengeance

 

*Night of the Hunted

 

*May December

 

*The Yellow Sea

 

*Naga

 

*John Wick: Chapter 4

Review: Coup de Chance

The skills required to be a first-class comedian often prove applicable in less overtly humourous ways - just look at the long list of comedians who've delivered powerhouse performances in dramatic roles. And so it is with Woody Allen.

A new comedy from the 87 year old hasn't exactly been cause for celebration for a while now. But with the French-language and (intentionally) laugh-free Coup de Chance, Allen shows that when he serves up a wry look at human failings, he's still got what it takes to make a killing.

Fanny (Lou de Laage) has it all. Decent job, well-off husband, big apartment in Paris. But when she bumps into old high school classmate Alain (Niels Schneider) after a decade, he's a living reminder of a path not taken. He's a writer living in a garret; her evenings are spent dining with the stuffy friends of her husband Jean (Melvil Poupaud), a man who makes "rich people richer".

Alain makes no secret of the fact he had a crush on her, and that his feelings haven't changed. Increasingly, Jean's controlling side stifles her; soon they're having a full blown affair. Jean is not the kind of man to dismiss minor clues, and he hires an investigator to find out what's going on. Once he's given the bad news, he hires someone with a very different set of skills.  

For a while it seems like Jean has (yet again?) pulled off the perfect crime, until an unlikely investigator arrives. Fanny's mother Camille (Valerie Lemercier) is someone who doesn't let things go, and the more she thinks about it the more she thinks Jean is up to something. But the closer she gets to the truth, the greater the obstacle she becomes to Jean - and we already know how he deals with obstacles.

At a time when it feels like being bombastic is the main requirement for a cinema release, this small scale tale of all-too-human ruthlessness and romance is a breath of fresh air. 

The contrast between the surface charm and the story's dark undercurrent is energising. There's always something compelling about seeing people propelled down a path because of their nature, and Allen retains a comedians eye when it comes to crafting engaging characters.

Likewise, his ability to conjure an lovingly idealised image of urban life is undiminished, even if here it's Paris rather than New York that's on adoring display. Putting good looking people in attractive locations will take you a long way in a movie; throw in a well-crafted plot with some sharp observations and you've got a winner.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Saltburn

Seems rich people are vapid, self-obsessed, thoughtlessly cruel, and often stupid: who knew? But don't worry, Saltburn also lets us know that poor(er) people are creepy, abrasive, socially inept and straight-out murderous. Lucky everyone is so good looking, hey?

Emerald Fennell's follow-up to Promising Young Woman once again wraps a story that wants to mean something but really doesn't in a very stylish package largely carried by the performances, though here there's also a collection of decade-old bangers on the soundtrack to keep you distracted. It'd be a case of style over substance, only there isn't any substance - but there is a bit of substance abuse that eventually becomes relevant to the plot.

Oxford student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) has no mates and no connections, which puts him perpetually on the outer at a university where either you're part of the elite or you're nothing. And at the center of the social swirl is Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi); women want him, men want to be him, and when Oliver lends him his bike so he can get to class on time, suddenly Oliver has an in with the in crowd.

Maintaining his status isn't easy, and even distracted viewers will rapidly pick up on the not-so-subtle clues that things aren't entirely as they seem with Oliver. No matter: a personal tragedy at just the right time scores Oliver an invite to spend the holidays with Felix at the family mansion Saltburn, and there the real fun begins.

Felix's parents (Richard E Grant and Rosamund Pike) are comedy buffoons; his sister Annabel (Sadie Soverall) is what you might call "a party girl". Fellow guest Farleigh (Archie Madewe) has a bully's eye for Oliver's weaknesses, partly because his family's standing (and wealth) isn't as solid as he'd like. As for Pamela (Carey Mulligan), she's a drip who doesn't seem to realise it's time to leave.

This stretch is the best in the film, mostly because stupid careless rich people are always entertaining even if there's absolutely nothing new being said. Fennell is at her best when she's merely suggesting that something isn't quite right, and the numerous scenes here where class and status is undermined and then re-enforced have an engaging energy to them.

But even the best parties have to end sometime, and gradually it becomes clear that Oliver's interest in Felix isn't merely friendship but runs on some unsettling parallel track marked obsession. Also, he seems surprisingly good at manipulating the other members of Felix's family (admittedly, not a tough job). What exactly is his end game, and why is he slurping up Felix's bathwater after Felix jerked off into it?

Unfortunately the answer seems to be "don't worry about it", because no sooner does the plot kick in than it becomes clear that Fennell is a lot better at coming up with striking scenes than she is with stringing them all together in a way that builds to anything, let alone makes sense. 

The film's shock twist conclusion pretty much contradicts much of what's come before and largely relies on you going "oh, it's an update of The Talented Mr Ripley, I'm quite smart for having realised that"; on whatever level you choose, the story doesn't work.

Overall it's largely forgettable and often silly, but there are a number of fun and effective scenes along the way. It definitely doesn't hurt that Keoghan - whose short stature is repeatedly emphasised here - is 100% going for it every chance he gets. 

There's not a lot of roles that require you to drop your pants and literally have sex with (not on - with) a fresh grave; the fact that's not the part of his performance everyone is talking about should give you some idea of what you're in for with Saltburn.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Silent Night

A good Christmas action movie - and there aren't that many of them - keeps the Christmas side of things to a minimum. A bit of tinsel here, an exploding Christmas tree there: once you've established the ironic contrast between goodwill and a good kill, move on. A tacky jumper and a bad guy in a Santa jacket aside, Silent Night is barely holiday themed at all. If it wasn't for a calendar with KILL THEM ALL written across December 24, you wouldn't even know it's Christmas.

So it's not the holiday that gives this its title. Rather, it's the bullet to the throat that suburban dad Brian Godlock (Joel Kinnaman) takes in the opening sequence that removes his voice - and seemingly everyone else's, as this is basically dialogue-free for the 90-odd minutes plus credits run time. There's the occasional distant shout, some radio chat and a few text messages, but otherwise, as Elvis once put it, it's all about a little less conversation, a little more action please.

This isn't a new trick. The direct to streaming horror film No One Will Save You pulled it off earlier this year, though that had the advantage of being set over a handful of days in a sparsely populated stretch of countryside. Silent Night takes place over an entire year, from one bloody holiday season to the next, as Godlock recovers from his wounds - taken while chasing down and almost wiping out the drive-by shooters whose stray bullets killed his son - then trains himself up to be the ultimate killing machine while his wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno) drifts away, before he finally hits the streets of his Texas town for a night of violent revenge aimed directly at local scumbag Playa (Harold Torres) and his army of nameless goons.

It's a pretty shaky premise, but Silent Night has a secret weapon. It's the return to US shores of director John Woo, last seen in English-language cinema with 2003's Paycheck but remembered forever for Hong Kong classics like The Killer and Hardboiled alongside his one American great, Face/Off.

Despite his undeniable skill at staging action, Woo was always a poor fit for Hollywood. In part that's because he doesn't do irony; whatever his films flaws, they're always achingly sincere and blatantly emotional in a way that blockbusters then (and to a large extent now) have tried to avoid. 

Here though, he's making a Christmas movie about a grieving father; sincerity and emotion come with the territory. So while the broad outlines of this story are exactly what you expect and there are absolutely no surprises whatsoever, it's the little moments - and Woo's undeniable skill when it comes to action - that pack a punch. Godlock is driven to revenge (and to buy a cool car to do it in), but that doesn't mean he likes it, and Kinnaman gets to pull a lot of anguished and tormented faces as he takes his pain and shares it around.

Because there's no dialogue, the storytelling has to be entirely visual. Again, this plays to Woo's strengths as a film maker who tells it like he sees it. Much of the pleasure here comes from simply watching someone get good at what they're trying to do; we're well past the halfway mark before Godlock's extensive training starts being put to use.

Action cinema has come a long way since Woo was making A Better Tomorrow, but it's still a lot of fun seeing the old master revive the old standards. Does someone use two guns to turn a bad guy into a sieve? Of course. Is there a moment with a fluttering bird? Naturally. And as for the power of brotherhood - or just two previous foes realising in the middle of a gunfight that they can only rely on each other - it's a valuable message no matter what time of year.

But those moments are brief, little more than nods to the longtime fans. Woo is telling a story, not serving up a greatest hits show, and while this is definitely a John Woo film it's the full throttle emotions as much as the relentless and visceral violence that shows his stamp.

Put another way, this is the rare recent revenge rampage that dares to suggest that extreme violence might be a bad thing, and that murdering a whole lot of people might leave you feeling empty inside. It's that willingness to tell a story that's full of cartoon cliche bad guys and raw emotion, and not just having to shoot bad guys a dozen times to make sure they don't get back up, that makes Silent Night a classic John Woo movie.

Though there is a fair bit of that in there too.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Thanksgiving

Of all the fake trailers that were part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's 2007 double feature Grindhouse, the one for Thanksgiving seemed the most plausible as a feature. Not a good feature, mind you - but as another drab yet gory 80s slasher with murder on the menu it worked just fine. 

So now that director Eli Roth has finally expanded it into a full film, it's a pleasant surprise to say it's at least on par with its inspirations. And that's pretty much the only pleasant surprise that awaits anyone in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

A prologue sets the scene: a year ago a shopping stampede for Thanksgiving bargains turned bloody, leaving three extremely dead and nobody charged (that's capitalism for you). Now a mysterious killer dressed up like a pilgrim is murdering those visible in a viral video of the splattered shoppers. 

You'd think the prime target would be Jessica (Nell Verlaque) the teen daughter of the death shop owner (Rick Hoffman), but it seems like the killer is saving something special for her. If you remember the depraved and deadly dinner that was the centerpiece of the trailer, you know where things are heading.

In expanding on the trailer, the faux-80s stylings are dropped, while a few subplots about internet fame and rich versus poor are mixed in without ever really going much of anywhere. This is a whodunnit slasher (think Scream), though it's hard to care all that much about that side of things - especially when even the locals don't seem all that fussed as the body count rises and the sheriff (Patrick Dempsey) isn't exactly a brains trust. 

At first it seems like that's the point: the whole town is so committed to Thanksgiving that, much like the beach town in Jaws, they don't want to face what's really going on. But as things progress it starts to feel like Roth's just more interested in the kills than the killer.

To be fair, so is the audience. On that level - which is really the only one that counts - this doesn't disappoint, though some of the more memorable moments from the trailer turn out to work better in snippet form (and a couple of them are scaled back; what worked well as a quick joke would have hit a very different note in an expanded feature film). 

Tonally this is a little shaky and the early promise of some serious satire is never really followed up on. But plenty of annoying losers die very gory deaths and that's exactly the point of this kind of film. Roth knows how to serve up a memorable holiday feast.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Five Nights at Freddy's

Five Nights at Freddy's is a great title for a video game. There's the concept right there: you've got to make it through five nights! Turn it into a movie title, and the threat becomes a promise: you're going to spend five whole nights at Freddys! Which means you're going to make it alive through at least the first four, and there goes any suspense for 4/5ths of the movie. Which, when it's a 110 minute movie, is a lot of run time to spend looking at some (intentionally) cheesy animatronic killbots.

It's the 1990s, and security guard Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) isn't exactly on a career upswing. Which is a problem as he's guardian to his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio) and even if they don't really connect personally he's still got to pay the bills. That's looking a lot more difficult after he loses his mall job for assaulting a guy he thought was kidnapping a child (does Mike have a traumatic past that will be relevant later? You bet!) and now his aunt wants custody of Abby for those sweet, sweet government benefit checks.

So Mike is in a very vulnerable position when his somewhat offputting job advisor (Matthew Lillard, always great to see) directs him to a gig spending his nights guarding a Freddy Fazbear's Pizza place. Once a thriving child-friendly franchise where anamatronic mascots performed, it's now a creepy abandoned dump. Why does it even need a security guard? Could it be that his job isn't so much to keep the local dirtbags out, as keep what lurks within... in?

No, not really. It takes Mike a fair while to figure out what's going on - the pizza mascots are possessed and murderous - so while the killbots are racking up a body count thanks to some daytime break-ins, Mike is gradually learning the lore from local cop Vanessa Shelly (Elizabeth Lail). Turns out the place closed down back in the 80s after five children were murdered there. Could there possibly be a link to Mike's own past? Will he have to bring Abby with him to work at the worst possible time? Why is all this treated so seriously? Some of these questions (not the last one) will soon be answered.

For an idea that's already been ripped off by multiple movies (the recent Banana Splits film, the "Nicolas Cage doesn't speak" horror movie Willy's Wonderland) this plays things surprisingly straight. Presumably the fans of the extremely successful video game franchise wouldn't have it any other way; for movie-goers, the lack of decent laughs in a movie that's meant to be about cutesy robots brutally murdering people is a major weakness.

What this does have going for it is cutesy robots who are also creepy, and it's not hard to see their appeal. "See" being the important word; while visually they're impressive (and impressively sinister at times), they never really develop much personality as monsters. While there's an in-story reason for that, it's also a missed opportunity to really build on what's easily the most interesting element here.

With its mix of not-scary-enough horror and too-extensive backstory (there's an entire subplot about using lucid dreaming to try and solve a crime), this ends up feeling more like franchise maintenance than entertainment. It's a film that exists to further the brand rather than be enjoyable in its own right, something aimed entirely at pre-sold audiences - whether they might be long time fans or just a group (or cinema full) of people who think the idea of killer cuddly toys is so awesome that the actual movie is an afterthought.

Going by the US box office, there's a lot of those people out there: Five Nights at Freddy's is back in business.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Expend4bles

The hook with the original Expendables was simple: all your old favourite action heroes are back! Well, not all of them, but over the next couple of movies they managed to pull pretty much everyone from the 80s and 90s back onto the big screen one last time. But even if you haven't looked at a calendar lately you'd be aware that the 80s aren't getting any closer time-wise: how do you make an action sequel starring classic action heroes when they're finally too old for this shit?

If you're Expend4bles, you just leave all the oldies out of it. The series has always thrown in a few younger stars here and there, with Jason Statham as the co-lead to bring in action fans who like their stars to still be able to kick their way out of trouble. It's been almost a decade since the last film and Statham's now the only cast member left with any kind of box office clout - even series star Sylvester Stallone has moved over to TV - and this is his film in all but name.

After a middle east massacre led by bad guy Suarto (Iko Uwais) and a totally unrelated bar fight over a ring belonging to Barney (Stallone) that couldn't possibly become relevant later, the plot kicks in. A mysterious bad guy from Barney's past (codename: Ocelot) is back, and CIA handler Marsh (Andy Garcia) wants The Expendables to investigate the carnage in Libya that presumably has been going on for days considering Suarto is still driving around shooting stuff when they finally arrive.

Lee Christmas (Statham), Gunnar (Dolph Lungren, now with longer hair that the film feels needs explaining), Toll Road (Randy Couture), and newcomers Easy Day (50 Cent) and Galan (Jacob Scipio) are the ground team, while Barney stays with the plane overhead. Where is the safest place to be when Suarto and his team start blowing even more stuff up? The answer may surprise you.

After the bungled mission - turns out Suarto escaped with a trigger that'll enable Ocelot to create an atomic bomb - Christmas is on the outs and his sex buddy Gina (Megan Fox) is the new team leader. While she's off to get the trigger back, he's stuck working as a bodyguard for an online influencer while wearing his old suit from The Transporter films.

Previous films in the series sold the idea of international mercenaries traveling the globe killing people while looking like an over-the-hill bikie gang. Much of the rest of this one takes place on an old freighter in the middle of nowhere. It makes for a decent enough action location while still giving off distinct "we ran out of money" vibes, but at least it means less need for cheap-looking CGI.

The smaller scale does have some advantages. This is basically a Jason Statham (and friends) movie (Stallone sits much of it out), which means the fights are usually decent, there's a few comedy scenes that aren't completely embarrassing, and the whole thing moves forward with the bare minimum of time wasting subplots or fan service. It's nothing special, but it's been a long time since the first Expendables was a surprise hit, and seeing this kind of basic action movie on the big screen is increasingly rare.

The problem is that The Expendables franchise was never a traditional action series. Having the oldies stagger out for one last punch-up was the whole point; with the pensioners now pensioned off, all that's left is new faces delivering the same old mindless world-saving violence. 

If they're going to make Lee Christmas the star, time to latch onto the latest action trend and just set it during Christmas with a Christmas pun for a title; paint a few hand grenades to look like Christmas baubles, wrap some tinsel around a knife, and Expendables:5lay Ride is a sure-fire hit.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Creator

Originality is an overrated virtue in movies. Big-screen storytelling is about taking us on a journey: sometimes we just want to check out the same old haunts. Despite the title, there's not a lot that feels created about The Creator. It's a mash-up collection of tropes and cliches and SF paperback cover art from a director (Gareth Edwards) best known for striking visuals and same old stories. Does that make it a bad movie? Not automatically.

In a future where very little is what it seems but all the surprises can be seen coming a mile away, Joshua (John David Washington) is a man on a mission. The development of artificial intelligence (presented via an opening retro faux-newsreel) was going fine until a nuke destroyed LA: having seen The Terminator, the US military assumed computers were making a move to wipe out humanity and decided to fight back, with Joshua at the pointy end of the spear.

While the US binned their AI (though they kept their unintelligent machines handy), New Asia became a haven for thinking software, though most of it seems to be walking around in robot bodies - there's no talking cars or smart houses. Seeing AI as a global threat, the US declared war. While they mostly fire off drone strikes from a giant suborbital platform called NOMAD, there's still room for boots on the ground - such as Joshua, who we meet on an undercover mission to ferret out the human brain behind the AI revolution.

Things go wrong, Joshua fails both at his mission and at keeping the woman he loves alive, and five years later he's a washed up drunk until the military comes calling with an offer he can't refuse. If the New Asia struggle is a Vietnam War analogue, it's Apocalypse Now time. Well, for a few minutes at least, as Joshua leads a team to a secret jungle lab where they will a): take out a ultimate AI weapon, b): kill its creator, and c): hopefully find his dead love. The twist? The ultimate weapon is (in the form of) a child, Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who can shut machines down with their mind.

The road trip that follows makes up in incident what it lacks in originality: there's always something happening, even if not much of it lingers. And Edwards does serve up a lot of great visuals, though they rarely generate much of a sense of the world behind them. One or two of these big background images deployed in a short film would make for powerful world-building; here they just pile up one atop the other without ever coming together to create a plausible New Asia.

That said, there are times where the haphazard approach does click. Despite being at war with the US - NOMAD is just drifting through their airspace dropping missiles, while giant US ARMY-branded tanks crush villages - New Asia doesn't seem to have any military of their own. As Joshua and Alphie flee the remains of his former team (who haven't given up on dropping Alphie into a trash compactor) and hit the road, the only obstacles are local robot cops and some Vietcong-style robot rebels, while in the cyberpunk cities life goes on. The idea that the US declared a war and the other side went "whatever" feels more futuristic than any number of hollow-headed, human-faced robots walking around.

Mash-ups can be satisfying in their own right, and eventually the emotional through-line of the story kicks in hard enough to clarify that the striking backdrops are just meant to be striking backdrops. The world of The Creator rarely feels more than 2D (the robots too often look like humans in dress up, which they are), but Washington gives a battered performance that's almost enough to make everything around him feel real through sheer gravity. 

His performance comes direct from a smaller, better film, but those big science-fiction backdrops he's standing in front of definitely have an appeal of their own.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Retribution

There are two ways to go with a high concept thriller. Either you stick with the concept right to the very end, or you try something new in act three and hope the audience doesn't mind. Speed is probably the best-known example of the latter, ditching the whole "there's a bomb on the bus" angle with twenty minutes to go. In Retribution, the bomb is in a car - though it turns out there's slightly more to the evil scheme than that.

Berlin-based Matt Turner (Liam Neeson) is a typical Liam Neeson character, only pushed just that little bit further. We're used to seeing him play a gruff dad who's blunt nature hides a desire to do what's right for his family; here his family barely seems an afterthought. He's all about making money for his dodgy hedge fund and his pushy boss (Matthew Modine), and if he has to take the kids (Jack Champion and Lily Aspell) to school, they'd better not get in the way of his sleazy sales calls.

Then he gets a phone call telling him there's a bomb in his car. He triggered it when he sat down, and it he gets up, the car goes boom (much like another car did at the beginning of the film). If he lets the kids out, boom. If he calls the police, boom. You get the idea: he has to do what he's told if he wants to stay alive - even if what he's being told to do seems a little more personal than you'd expect. 

Being a Liam Neeson character, it doesn't take Turner long to a): start reconnecting with his kids, and b): start working on ways out of this situation. The film - a tight 90 minutes - is basically split into thirds: the first third sets the scene, the middle is a lot of driving around trying not to set off a bomb (other drivers around are not so fortunate) even as the police zero in on him, and the final third sees him turning the tables, though there's still a few twists to come.

Efficiency is an underrated virtue in thrillers, and while there's not a lot that's especially new here, director Nimrod Antal doesn't act like he's reinventing the wheel either. Expected plot points arrive early or are skimmed  past, while the action beats are well deployed and effective. The ride is still a little bumpy, but the basic emotional through-line - why is this happening to me, how can I keep my kids safe, how long before I can get revenge - is refreshingly solid for a B-movie.

Retribution also arrests a recent decline in Neeson's action adventures, returning to a level of solid competency after a run of films that often stumbled in one way or another. Perhaps responding to this, Neeson's performance is a notch above his action norm, making clear Turner's confusion, his fear for his kids, and his nagging sense that maybe he did do something to deserve all this. 

Also, in a development that shouldn't be surprising but actually is, it turns out the Berlin police are both competent and highly motivated to stop someone driving around like a madman with a bomb in his car. No doubt this was set in Europe for financial reasons, but having Turner up against a police department that won't just fire a couple thousand rounds into the car and call it a day definitely helps this run longer than your average Mercedes commercial.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Nun II

 

One of the best things about the various horror universes that have spun off from the work of James Wan - you know, The Conjuring (nine films and counting), Insidious, the Saw movies - is that they're very committed to their continuity while making it clear to audiences that they don't really have to follow any of it. They're always full of moments that feel like they're connected to previous films but if you don't remember how or why, it doesn't really matter: the backstory never gets in the way of the jump scares.

So here goes. The Nun II is the sequel to The Nun, which was a spin-off from The Conjuring 2 (The Conjuring is the franchise that also gave us the evil doll movie Annabelle). Do you need to know any of this to enjoy The Nun's comeback? No you do not. The Nun is a demon who likes freaking people out by looking like an evil nun: there, you're up to speed.

The Nun II hits the ground running in a way that makes it seem like this particular demon is not going to be messing around when it comes to racking up a body count, but don't worry - once things settle down the Nun gets back in the habit (sorry) of tormenting its victims in the kind of jump scare-packed fashion that enables a film like this to run longer than half an hour. 

As for the scares themselves? They're usually decent concepts well executed - there's one involving a magazine stand that's a high point - but they're rarely truly scary. You get why the people in the film are freaking out; in the cinema, not so much.

Story-wise, after seemingly defeating the Nun in the first film, Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) has retired to a quiet nunnery where she can spend her days looking enigmatic while the older nuns recount the plot of the first film then add "and nobody knows where the Sister who helped defeat the demon is today". 

At least she has the rebellious (well, she smokes, which isn't really all that rebellious in the 1950s when this is set) Sister Debra (Storm Reid) to hang out with. And then she gets a call from the Church hierarchy.  Looks like The Nun is tearing a path across Europe and only one extremely expendable sister can stop its reign of terror.

Meanwhile on the other side of the continent, fellow first film survivor Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet) - who is actually from Romania, but is now back in France - is charming both the students and the teachers at a girls boarding school. It used to be a monastery and no spoilers but there is a lot of extremely heavy-handed exposition in this film so you really don't have to worry about missing something that'll be important later. Unfortunately for Frenchie, evil seems to have followed him to the school and it's brought a lot of jump scares with it.

The two plots run parallel for a while just to drag things out, with Sisters Irene and Debra trying to figure out where the Nun is heading and what it wants (turns out it's torching priests and killing kids for a reason), while at the boarding school it rapidly becomes obvious that not all is well with Frenchie. Eventually everyone meets up and the film switches from jump scares (which, in case you missed it, this has a lot of) to full on demonic activity. 

If you're expecting any kind of set limits or clear parameters on the Nun's evil powers, forget it: one character comes back from the dead but isn't really a zombie, while another monster is seemingly summoned out of a stained glass window. If it's scary or creepy, then the Nun can probably do it; on the flip side, if the story requires a human to fight against demonic possession or escape certain death, they can probably manage it. Basically, it all evens out.

As a demon-themed thrill ride this has it's good points. Farmiga makes for a compelling and plausibly fragile lead, and the fact that pure evil here lurks inside the only male character (though some of the school students are pretty nasty bullies) is no doubt no coincidence. Director Michael Chaves (a Conjuring-verse veteran) eventually builds enough of a convincingly intense mood towards the end to justify proceedings, but there's not a lot here that'll inspire nightmares.

That said, it probably doesn't pay to think too long about how this occasionally feels a little too much like propaganda for the Catholic Church. It's a movie set in the 1950s where agents of the Church go into a boarding school to save kids from evil; there'd be some parts of the world where that might be harder to believe than the idea of a demonic nun who makes people burst into flames just by looking at them.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Biosphere

Post-apocalypse buddy comedies aren't quite as rare as you might think - having nobody else left is a great way to force two miss-matched types together - but they're not so common that Biosphere ever feels run-of-the-mill. Co-written by and co-starring Mark Duplass, who's best known for a string of mumblecore films with his brother Jay but has an extensive acting career as well, it's a film that starts out as one thing and turns into another. Which, as it turns out, is strangely appropriate.

Billy (Duplass) is the former President of the United States. Ray (Sterling K Brown) is his childhood friend, a scientist who was also his former advisor. They are the only two people left alive after an undefined catastrophe that it seems likely Billy had something to do with. The dome they live in is the only thing keeping them alive, though that's not quite correct: the fish they live off are also keeping them alive, and the last surviving female has just died. Uh oh.

What follows touches on a lot of issues and topics without ever really digging down onto any of them, which is possibly the point. At its heart it's a story about a connection between two people going through a lot of changes, and like any kind of real connection its going to take in a lot of external factors. While it seems like the set-up is ripe with possibilities to explore politics, race, sexuality and so on, for the most part they're only glanced at. It's a film about two people building a new world, not what destroyed the old one.

In this loose-limbed and sometimes ramshackle comedy, what matters most is the chemistry between the leads - it is a buddy movie after all, and Duplass and Brown are convincing buddies. Ray is seemingly the more progressive of the pair values-wise, but he has his limits; Billy is more of a "let's go with it" guy, which may not have been the best possible trait in a President. Together, they're well matched and have an easy charm: it's not hard to believe their lives now aren't all that different from back when the world wasn't a barren lifeless wasteland.

That said, as written the characters are more types than plausible people (there's a lot of talk that feels more like internet confessional speak than things people would actually say, but that's where the comedy lies). It's a common stumbling block in two-handers: if people don't overtalk, what is there to say? Thankfully the performances keep things grounded. Or as grounded as an end-of-the-world story gets. 

Sharply directed by co-writer Mel Eslyn, Biosphere turns out to be surprisingly optimistic: this is not a story where a potential food shortage leads directly to cannibalism. It takes a little while to get past the nagging feeling that the pair are exactly the kind of guys who created the situation that wiped out everyone else, but eventually the film earns its optimism and the duo earn their future. It's all about moving forward. As the saying goes, life finds a way. 

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Equalizer 3

There aren't a lot of surprises left in the vigilante genre. What made the first Equalizer movie stand out was a third act swerve into slasher-style horror that made it pretty clear that Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) was basically the good guy murder version of someone like Friday the 13th's Jason. He was an unstoppable killing machine happy to use the tools at hand - and the first film's final showdown took place in the hardware store where he worked, so you know there were plenty of tools handy - to get the job done.

This third installment (the less said about the disappointing second film the better) opens with McCall having already murdered an entire Sicilian Mafia stronghold, casually waiting (at gunpoint) for the boss to arrive so he can also murder him - and finish off a few other henchmen foolish enough to still be sticking around. But when a shock twist sees McCall catching a bullet in the back on the way out, it looks like he might be on his way out for good. Roll credits? Not yet.

Rescued by the only cop on the planet who takes a gunshot victim passed out in his car to a kindly old local doctor, McCall slowly heals up and makes a few calls to the CIA (played here by Dakota Fanning) to tip them off about the dead Mafia guy's shady stockpile of drugs and cash. Unfortunately, the living Mafia has its eye on the small Italian town McCall has come to love, seeing prime real estate being sat on by a bunch of fish sellers and cafe owners they plan to move on by any (nasty) means necessary. Guess it's time once again for McCall to take out the trash.

Being the human embodiment of Death itself, there's not a lot of suspense (but definitely a lot of satisfaction) when McCall goes up against the bad guys. Director Antoine Fuqua turns this to the film's advantage, in part by staging the big action scenes as stalk-and-slash horror sequences (complete with over-the-top gore), where the end result is never in doubt. Seeing the bad guys get what's coming is the whole point of the exercise, and McCall does not disappoint.

McCall is also a vigilante who likes to be proactive. Despite the utterly predictable story, the film keeps the suspense up by messing with the usual rhythms of an action thriller; the bad guys suffer a defeat, they sulk back to regroup, we're expecting a breather but McCall is already waiting there to get back to work. It's not a trick audiences will fall for forever, but in a 100 minute thriller it's pretty effective.

Everything else is solid without distracting from why we're here. The cute town that needs protection is a maze of steep stairs and cliffside dwellings so it's interesting enough to look at, the locals are all cliches but they only get a scene or two so they're never boring, and the Mafia guys are scum through and through - we first meet chief dirtbag Vincent (Andrea Scarduzio) throwing a wheelchair-bound old man out a window - so their gruesome and occasionally prolonged deaths are well deserved.

As for Washington, he's having fun playing a man who doesn't seem particularly tortured by a lifetime of perfecting the art of mass murder. There's hints of nuance here and there (he's too good an actor not to mess around a little), but this feels like one of the installments in a long-running series where the lead's backstory remains in the background. He's a professional: both he and The Equalizer 3 get the job done in admirably efficient fashion.

- Anthony Morris

Review; Gran Turismo

Despite all the early focus on gamers, Gran Turismo turns out to be a fairly traditional sports movie, where "extremely good at playing Gran Turismo" serves roughly the same function as "naturally talented but from the wrong side of the tracks". Fortunately, as sports movies go this is a good one: sometimes sticking to the basics pays off.

Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) is a UK teen who's extremely good at the Playstation racing simulator Gran Turismo and not all that good at getting through to his father (Djimon Hounsou) that his pastime is just as much a real sport as soccer (which his father played at a professional level, with his older brother firmly on the same path). Sadly, professional racing is a rich man's game, and there's no career path from racing simulated cars to driving the real thing. Or is there?

Meanwhile in Japan, marketing guy Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) is pitching an crazy idea to his bosses at Nissan. Today's drivers don't care about cars, but Grand Turismo players do: what if they created a contest where the winner got to drive race cars for real, thus inspiring a generation of gamers to take their skills onto non-virtual roadways? Management says yes - so long as nobody dies.

To manage this, Moore turns to grumpy burnt out mechanic Jack Salter (David Harbour, who gives a performance way above and beyond what this kind of film requires), mostly because nobody else wants to be responsible for a bunch of gamers losing control of race cars at lethal speeds. His approach is to basically neg the drivers constantly, and rightly so. Oh wait, here comes Jann: could he possibly he the one to melt Salter's heart and make good on the track?

There aren't a lot of surprises here (being based on a true story obviously limits the possible twists), but the stakes are just low enough that the challenges have real dramatic tension. Jann obviously isn't going to win a big race first time out, but is he good enough to come fourth once in six races and earn his formal qualifications? Is his faltering media presence going to be so big a stumbling block (this is a marketing campaign after all) that Moore might cut him loose even if he's the best racer? Is he ruthless enough to survive in a world where fatal accidents are part of life?

Director Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Chappie) pulls out a bunch of camera tricks and a lot of game-style graphics to give the races that something extra. But fast cars going extremely fast is the real appeal here and he films the races with a punchy mix of hyperbole (camera zooming into engines, drone camera zooming across the track) and gritty realism that makes them thrilling viewing. 

The off-track plot strands are less flashy but equally effective, stripping a collection of traditional subplots (the disapproving father, the cocky rival, the new girlfriend, the evil adversary, the disapproving mentor who has to be won over) down to their bare essentials and throwing them all into the mix. 

Add in a range of winning performances - Bloom's marketing man is just sleazy enough to be convincing without being a bad guy, Harbour is deserving of his own spin-off where each movie he trains up a new batch of out-of-their-depth kids, and an always likable Madekwe is convincing as a slightly awkward teen whose only real drawback is his lack of confidence in himself - and you've got a rock-solid sports film that's a lot better than it should be. 

Especially as it's basically a commercial for both the Playstation version of Gran Turismo and Nissan. If this leads Hollywood to decide the more brands your film features the better the film is, when we get a slasher movie that cross-promotes McDonalds, Black & Decker, Adidas, Patagonia and Kings Funerals we'll know who to blame.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Sisu

Is Sisu the best movie of 2023? If what you want from a film is a series of increasingly nasty and brutal execution-style killings of various thoroughly unpleasant Nazis, then let's go with "probably". An extremely satisfying slice of pulp violence, it knows exactly what it's doing and delivers in every scene. As far as films go where the hero uses a mining pick to hook himself onto a plane as it's taking off so he can kill everyone on board, this is at the head of the pack.

It's the dying days of World War II and Finland - which for a while there was fighting alongside the Nazis - has switched sides. Not that it matters to Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), who has retired from war and is now just a gold prospector hoping to strike it lucky. 

Which he does and then some; now he has to get the gold into town and into a bank, and the only thing standing between him and his goal is the retreating German army. They're operating under a scorched earth policy; some of their cannier soldiers - most notably Helldorf (Aksel Hennie) and his sidekick Wolf (Jack Doolan) - have one eye on how they're going to get out of Europe entirely.

When Helldorf an his men encounter Korpi they let him pass: he's an old man with a horse and a dog and not much else, plus there are more soldiers coming along to take care of him. Unfortunately for those other soldiers, Korpi is a killing machine who wipes them out when they discover his gold. Helldorf turns his tank back to investigate, and an extremely bloody chapter of the war is about to begin. 

As much (or more) a spaghetti western as it is a war movie (think Tarantino without the dialogue), this carefully ratchets up the carnage scene by bloody scene. By the time things start to get a little (well, a lot) implausible it all fits seamlessly into the insanely violent world that's been established. 

Killing someone by throwing a land mine at their helmet is only the beginning, and while the violence is the main draw here there's just enough plot and characterisation going on to tell a highly entertaining story where a lot of scumbags get what they deserve.

Korpi survives an implausible amount of damage, but that's what the film is about. "Sisu" is a uniquely Finnish characteristic that means something like "too stubborn to die". And so he proves to be. 

At 90 minutes it gets the job done and then some with a minimum of messing about; the one subplot about the women the Nazis have kidnapped just opens the door for some bonus vengeance.  If Finland wants to be the home of thrilling pulp action, they're off to a rip-roaring start.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is all about power, though only occasionally the kind that scours the Earth black with atomic fire. A relentless, thudding portrait of the man who led the multi-billion dollar (and that's 1940s dollars) project to build the atomic bomb, on one level - and this is a film with no shortage of levels - it's about someone who decides that if the system won't give him the power he desires, he'll go outside it. Which is a problem if you have a head full of atomic secrets and your government never trusted you in the first place.

Skipping across multiple timelines - this is a Christopher Nolan film, after all - much of the meat of the story comes framed by a grey-haired Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) testifying in a shabby little room to a group of men who, it rapidly becomes clear, do not have his best interests at heart. Youthful, frizzy haired Oppenheimer's past studying "the new physics" across Europe is skimmed across; when he settles down in Berkley to teach, the clouds of war are already boiling and his dalliances with Communism are raising eyebrows.

Meanwhile in a black & white 1959, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) is going before a senate committee hearing to confirm him as a member of Eisenhower's cabinet. Post war, he gave Oppenheimer a job at Princeton; now, it gradually becomes clear, the father of the Atomic Bomb has fallen from public favour. Will their past connection cost Strauss a cushy government job? And what exactly was the nature of their connection anyway?

Nolan is good at a lot of things, and juggling plot points to create suspense has been a strong point of his all the way back to Memento. The final hour of this three hour film pulls together a range of well-woven strands to build a solid drama around the fall of an American Prometheus (though Icarus seems almost as appropriate). For a film touted for its stunning visuals and IMAX cinematography, it's surprising how much of this is just men in suits in small rooms; there are other ways for a film to be big, and when it counts this delivers big time.

For one, there's a cast stacked with stars (a repeated pattern is a recognisable name getting one big scene, then a muted callback set years later); for another there's plenty of sweeping desert scenery at Los Alamos - at times it feels like Oppenheimer's trademark hat should have been a cowboy one. Despite many of the scientists being refugees from Europe (and wanting to beat Hitler to the Bomb is shown as their primal motivation), Nolan makes sure to frame this as an American saga, stars and stripes flying high.

The core of this story is the Manhattan Project, though the mechanics and technical challenges are largely kept off-screen. Background reading isn't essential but wouldn't hurt, if only to keep track of the hurricane of scientists swirling around Oppenheimer's eye. We get the drift: the Bomb was a big deal, and on the rare occasions when this film wants to hammer home the point about the awful forces being unleashed - they do have to test the Bomb, even if there's more than zero chance it will ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world - rest assumed the hammer hits hard.

More important here is Oppenheimer himself; it's his name on the poster after all. This is a big budget epic with a recognisable human being at its center, which is to say Oppenheimer is often a smug jerk who turns his back on one wife (Florence Pugh), cheats on another (Emily Blunt), informs on his commie friends to a government he knows contains people who will torture or kill them, is wracked with guilt maybe a little too late, and is shocked to learn that the US military isn't his best friend once he's given them the city-destroying Bomb they wanted.

The film focuses tight on Oppenheimer, and intentionally so. The Atomic Bomb may have changed the world, but this isn't a film about that world; if he didn't see it, or imagine it, then - Strauss's confirmation aside - neither will we. He's a man who could and did inspire others, a leader of personal charm and charisma (how else could he have kept a rabble of top scientists working in the desert for years on a super weapon?), but here much of that is told, not shown. 

When Oppenheimer does speak to a crowd or group, Nolan will often use that moment to show us his thoughts (sex scenes, charred corpses) rather than the effect of his words. Whatever he had in him to inspire such loyalty - beyond the natural attraction of Murphy's always compelling performance - remains a mystery.

What we do see clearly is that the world around him is one of overlapping modes of power, whether the systems of the state, the unity of organised labour, or personal commitment to an individual. Each are in violent dispute with the other, and giving your loyalty to one earns you the lifelong enmity of the rest. It is a world of eternal, brutal conflict; no wonder Oppenheimer came to regret giving it the Bomb.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One

Nobody ever watches a Mission:Impossible movie for the story. The series has been legendarily incoherent from the very first installment: a big part of the fun is the surprise reveals - there's always at least one mask-removing twist - as the Impossible Mission Force battles some world-ending threat that involves a mix of computer hacking and old-fashioned physical risk.

Much like the Fast & Furious franchise (which this resembles more than it would like to admit), it had a bumpy run after the first film, taking a few more movies to fully find its feet. The result now is a franchise stripped of everything but the basics. All but gone are the shock betrayals and complicated high-tech heists, replaced by what seems to be the sole remaining selling point: Tom Cruise risking his life doing incredible stunts he probably doesn't need to do.

As is traditional, the plot revolves around various factions trying to obtain an object that will give the owner global dominance - you know, like the plot of the current Indiana Jones movie, only the hi-tech is ultra-modern rather than steeped in antiquity - but this time the object (a key) comes in two parts so double the chase sequences.

All the usual suspects are back: hacker Luther (Ving Rhames), slightly more energetic hacker Benji (Simon Pegg), with pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) possibly being of use to the IMF while ex-MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) continues to be out there going rogue. Even IMF boss Eugene Kitterage (Henry Czerny) returns for the first time since the first film to be somewhat competent yet never quite ahead of our hero Ethan Hunt (Cruise).

For a film where the action sequences are so carefully worked out, the story is a bit of a mess, and not just in the usual "let's keep the audience guessing" fashion. It's your standard globe-trotting between action set pieces (at one point they stop in at a nightclub seemingly awaiting a visit from John Wick) while various evil forces - and some good guys led by Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham, in his usual flustered but competent mode) - join the fray.

This is yet another blockbuster that's either tapped into the zeitgeist or is stitched together out of bits of other recent blockbusters, only more so. Often we know major plot points before any of the characters do, while one major development is that an important gadget breaks for no reason; the standard scene where everyone explains everything to each other takes place while Hunt is off riding a motorcycle elsewhere. Hopefully someone fills him in before part two.

The big bad here is a self-aware computer program known as "the Entity" that is designed to falsify data but is also so good at reading patterns it can predict the future. Every government in the world wants to use it, while letting it roam free will result in an internet where nothing can be trusted (clearly this movie is set in 2016 and the good guys lose).

There's a clear split set up here between the virtual bad guys - Gabriel (Esai Morales), a sinister figure from Ethan's past who's never been mentioned before is the Entity's embodied henchman, with hitwoman Paris (Pom Klementieff) by his side - and the physical IMF force. One works online and has everything under control, the other is clearly winging it and specialises in physical deception and running around a lot. The film doesn't really do anything with this split, but it does add a nice contrast.

Much more importantly, the action scenes - which are the whole point of this relentlessly energetic film - are very good. Setting-wise they're not always that inventive (there's a car chase through the streets of Rome a la the last Fast & Furious film) but they're extremely well crafted whether they're going for blunt force or fluid motion, and they often have enough of a sense of humour to them to work as more than just a pile of increasingly unlikely developments. 

All the really big stunts are in the trailers, but that doesn't lessen their impact here. The final sequence on board the Orient Express (which seems to still be a steam train in the M:I universe) is worth the price of admission alone, an ever-escalating series of nail-biting events where Cruise riding a motorbike off a cliff and parachuting away is only the mid-point.

Also, despite the whole "part one" thing, this actually has a solid, satisfying ending. Ironically enough, this only makes the prospect of the next installment more appealing. Who knew that making a good film was the way to get people interested in your next one?

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Indiana Jones was never supposed to grow old. Created as a homage to the Republic serial heroes of the 1940s, he's the kind of stock pulp hero designed to have adventures, not character. He was out of date the moment he hit the screens, and much like the other remaining pulp heroes - James Bond, and that's about it as far as the box office goes, though it's possible to argue the success of superhero movies is in part because superheroes are largely stock pulp characters - every time they come back they seem a little less suited to the times.

As the self-proclaimed last ever Indiana Jones movie until a combination of deep fake technology and licensing agreements brings Harrison Ford circa 1984 back from the grave permanently, Dial of Destiny has to deal with endings and time passing and all the things pulp heroes are explicitly designed not to have to worry about (does anyone want to watch a movie where Doc Savage gets old?). It can only do so good a job: there's only so much baggage you can add before things start to break down.

The other big issue is that it's a homage to something hardly anyone remembers any more. Even the previous Indy film, 2008's Crystal Skull, felt like it was an imitation of previous films for much of the time. And before that there were only three films, and only two of them were better than pretty good. James Bond has been going for 60 years, but there were over a dozen books to work with even before the movies; what makes a great Indiana Jones movie is pretty much limited to "what they did in Raiders of the Lost Ark".

So going in the bar has been set at "good enough". Worst case, it's a reminder that Indy's days have passed; best case, it's a fond farewell to yet another one of Harrison Ford's iconic characters. Either way, it's had enough money and talent thrown at it - and there's enough examples of what's worked in the past to work from - to ensure that the financial viability of the character for theme parks and other spin-offs is somewhat restored.

On the plus side, Harrison Ford is a charming and charismatic actor (obviously), and while his recent returns to iconic characters have been relatively brief (he was firmly in a supporting role in both Blade Runner 2049 and Star Wars: The Force Awakens) here he's the star from start to finish. He starts out digitally de-aged in a WWII-set flashback, but even that is mostly handled well so long as you don't spend the entire sequence thinking about how, now that they have trained the various programs on the real-life Ford, just how much easier it'll be to replicate him in the future.

The film itself is, if you can ignore everything around it, good enough. Set mostly in 1969 and mostly involving various factions (including Indy's god-daughter, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge in a very Phoebe Waller-Bridge fashion) fighting to recover an artifact that could change the course of history, it's a mostly fun romp where most of the parts work. 

It's not as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that was never going to be an option. Maybe one day someone will make a big exciting thrill ride movie that's based on their love for the Indiana Jones movies while delivering something new. Until then, this is the world we live in, no matter what ancient magic gizmos we uncover.

- Anthony Morris

Review: No Hard Feelings

Every now and again, Hollywood decides to dust off a time-honoured genre and take it out for a spin, just to see if there's any interest out there in anything that isn't horror movies or superhero sagas. Here's a tip: always see these movies. 

Why? Because they're put together by people actively trying to make a good movie and not just serving up another product from the assembly line. Even if the subject doesn't seem to be up your alley, you'll find a care and attention to detail that's often lacking in something that might seem like more of a sure thing. 

Not to mention they're usually working from a large database of examples that worked: if you're going to make a teen sex romp in 2023, it's not like you're short of classic examples to borrow from. Plus you hardly have to worry that someone else is making a rival that'll come out two weeks before yours and steal your raunchy thunder.

(note to self: write script titled Raunchy Thunder)

In case you'd hadn't picked up on it, No Hard Feelings is one of these films, a test sample released into the wild to see if there's any life left in the teen sex comedy - a genre that dominated the low-budget end of the box office for three decades in living memory but today largely seems like an embarrassing accident everyone would like to pretend never happened. Heard anyone mention Porky's in polite company lately?

The twist here is that while the set-up is pure classic sex comedy - a wimpy guy's rich parents hire a mature hottie to, uh, "guide him into manhood" and give him some vital experience-slash-self-confidence before he heads off to college  - the focal character is not the wimp or his sleazy mates (he doesn't even have any sleazy mates), but the hottie, Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence).

Working in a resort town in Upstate New York, Maddie is financially struggling under the weight of property taxes she can't pay off without working over summer as an Uber driver, and she can't work as a driver because her car's just been impounded because of the unpaid taxes. The solution? Seems some rich locals are running an ad on Craigslist offering a free (old) car to any woman who will "date" their son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), and away we go.

Pretty much all the obvious questions in 2023 are handled with impressive efficiency: no, lonely boy isn't gay (his parents have seen his porn), and he's not some undatable incel either - just socially stunted due to school problems and helicopter parents and being named Percy. 

Maddie herself is refreshingly upfront about the deal: she needs a car, women have sex for all manner of unromantic reasons (the list includes not wanting to be murdered by your date), so as long as the kid isn't a monster, it's a deal.

You'd think that'd pretty much be the end of the movie right there. What heterosexual eighteen year old is going to throw up roadblocks with Jennifer Lawrence hitting on him? But it turns out that she's really, really bad at hitting on guys outside of drunken bar hook-ups (we've already learned she's not big on commitment either), while he is refreshingly sensible and wary about the bizarre situation he finds himself in. Looks like they're going to have to get to know each other first.

Even at their sleaziest, many of the best teen sex comedies had a heart; it was more about finding a connection and love than just getting it on. Here it rapidly becomes clear that Percy is already 95% of the way towards being a decent guy (he even has girls his age interested in him) and what Maddie has to offer isn't really going to get him over the line. 

Maddie, on the other hand, is secretly (and not-so-secretly at times) a bit of a wreck, and Lawrence is perfect at making Maddie seem messed up enough to get herself into this situation without tipping over into being a comedy trainwreck. She's not incompetent, she just has issues (and a blunt sense of humor that doesn't really mesh well with the phone-obsessed puriteens that are Percy's peers).

The core of why No Hard Feelings works so well is that both leads are believable, likable, often funny characters you want to see succeed. Even when the jokes don't work there's still reason to keep watching; when the jokes do - and they do most of the time - it's a winner. 

The slightly shabby realism of the setting helps ground things further; even the big comedy moments still feel plausible in a way that reinforces the characters' struggles. They might go flying off car bonnets or run naked out of the ocean to punch drunk teens stealing their clothes, but there's no easy answers for the problems they face. 

Even when the problem is "I want to have sex and this attractive older woman is throwing herself at me for some unknown reason".

- Anthony Morris

Review: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

Every new Transformers movie starts with a question. Will this finally be the film where a robot transforms with a human inside and crushes them to death? Of course not. But Transformers: Rise of the Beasts poses an all-new question: why would transforming robots on another planet take on the form of animals from Earth? Especially when they're giant sized robots that could in no way be confused for the thing they're trying to imitate?

Our story begins with the long-awaited arrival of planet-eating-planet Unicron (Colman Domingo in a role originated by Orson Wells) who sends his underling Scourge (Peter Dinklage) onto an alien world to get the Transwarp Key, a device that will enable Unicron to travel anywhere in the universe. Scourge and his sidekicks wreak havoc, only to find the Key's animal-style transformer guardians the Maximals have escaped with it (so Unicron eats the planet). Smash cut to Earth, that unknown backwater that transforming robots just can't stay away from. 

The year is 1994, the place is New York, and while museum intern Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) studies an ancient statue that in no way resembles the Transwarp Key, Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) struggles to find a job despite his skill with electronics - especially when it comes to getting free cable TV.

When Elena breaks open the statue to reveal the Key (well, half of it) it sends out a pulse that alerts boss truck Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, back again), who summons a collection of autobots that includes Bumblebee and fellow car Mirage (Pete Davidson). Mirage is in the middle of being stolen by Diaz, but as Mirage is the kind of transformer that likes humans - unlike Optimus Prime, who is pretty much a space racist for much of this film - he brings him along on their mission to grab the key before Scourge and his evil crew turn up.

Obviously the Maximals, notably their gorilla leader Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) and the falcon-like Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), are going to turn up, but not until a bunch of fight scenes and setbacks sees everyone head to Peru for more fights and setbacks. It's a mcguffin-driven movie that's all about ancient relics and lost tombs; they even make an Indiana Jones joke.

With Michael Bay now out of the transforming business, the series - both this and 2018's Bumblebee were prequels to Bay's run of films - has lowered its sights a little, preferring to build up the human characters and keep the fight scenes to a semi-plausible scale and length.

The result is undoubtedly more satisfying on a basic storytelling level: these are solid films, in contrast to Bay's garbled brain-vomit. Unfortunately, they also lack the impact and sheer insanity that Bay brought to the story of giant alien transforming robots that turn into cars and trucks then trash the planet.

On the up side, now the humans are playing actual plausible human beings, while the robots come across as real characters distinct from each other. The stakes are no less enormous and over-the-top, but now the characters' struggles in the shadow of armageddon have at least some dramatic weight: when somebody dies, it means more than just one less mass of pixels gyrating around on screen.

Director Steven Caple Jr (Creed II) serves up a perfectly respectable and often exciting tale of giant transforming robots and the humans who love them, but there are times when Bay's demented approach to what is always going to be the violent adventures of giant toys feels sorely missed. Who can forget the time Shia LeBeof and Megan Fox made out on the bonnet of a transformer while another transformer watched? And now the transformers are sending heartwarming messages to sick kids. 

Hollywood needs to transform back into a pit of depravity before they start thinking a wholesome Barbie movie is a good idea oh wait.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: The Flash

Super-speed has always been one of the more obvious super-powers. Who wouldn't like to be able to get things done in one one-thousandth of the time? And yet The Flash goes for 150 minutes; guess even when you can travel so fast you go back in time, there's always one more thing to do.

The Flash as a character has been around in various forms since the 40s (DC has had three separate main Flashes, plus an entire family of spin-offs and sidekicks), so they've had plenty of time to come up with new twists on his super-speed. Time and dimensional travel is one; being able to vibrate his molecules so he can move between solid objects is another. Throw in some lightning bolts and you'd have a pretty effective fighting machine if Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) wasn't so much of a dork.

Treated as a joke by his co-workers at CSI Central City and used as something of a last resort by the Justice League - with Alfred (Jeremy Irons) handling the disaster relief scheduling - Allen's mostly a goof who's funny largely by accident. But he's deadly serious when it comes to trying to free his father (Ron Livingstone), currently in prison for murdering his wife / Allen's mother (Maribel Verdu) in a crime that seems to have been a case of the police arresting the first person they saw and saying "yeah, he'll do".

When Allen accidentally discovers the ability to run so fast he can travel back in time (via a visually interesting temporal amphitheater where past events circle around him like 3D frames of film - the closer in time they are, the nearer they get to him) he's tormented enough by the possibilities to have a brief chat with Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), who advises him that the past has made him who he is today. Unfortunately, the past has made Allen into someone who wants to mess with the past, and so back to save his mother he goes.

It's no surprise that time travel only makes things more complicated, and not just because now there are two Allens - "our" version and a teenage one who never lost his parents and might not gain his powers unless Allen gets him in the right place at the right time. Then General Zod (Michael Shannon) shows up just like he did in that Superman movie, only there doesn't seem to be a Superman handy and when the Allens go ask for Batman's help it turns out this Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) isn't the one our Allen was expecting.

Like all multiverse movies, the whole point is that there's a lot to take in. Having two Barry Allens works well for Miller, as he gets to play up the comedy side with the younger version while the older one is slightly more tortured (and annoyed at his younger self). The traditional superhero angst here is largely kept simmering in the background but it's well used when it comes to the fore, making for one of the more solidly satisfying DCU movies to date.

The always-reliable Keaton is basically the third lead once he shows up. His version of Bruce Wayne gets enough of a character arc (and a very cool batcave) to make his appearance feel worthwhile and not just a nostalgia cash-grab trap for Tim Burton fans. Sadly Zod and Supergirl (Sasha Calle) are basically glorified cameos. Everyone else? Pretty much action figures.

The story moves fast (sorry) and the action scenes are thrilling, but the big surprise here is how funny it often is. Some scenes - most notably a big early rescue based on a "baby shower" pun - go for a more over-the-top and cartoony take than we've seen in the DC movies (aside from new boss James Gunn's The Suicide Squad, so the DCU's new direction possibly starts here). The DC films have often distinguished themselves from the Marvel pack by actually putting in some thought as to cool things you could do with superpowers, and there are a number of decent gags (and a few dramatic moments) based on Allen's connection to the Speed Force.

The recent Spider-verse film might have stolen some of the multiversal thunder, but The Flash is more about the ideas and possibilities of an interactive multiverse. Here it's Barry Allen's actions and choices that create the parallel worlds as a reflection of his drive to change his own circumstances - they're not just a setting that enables him to meet a bunch of different versions of himself.

He meets a bunch of different versions of the more popular character Batman instead. 

- Anthony Morris

Review: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Considering how far animation technology has come in the last few decades, it's a shame we haven't seen bigger leaps in how animated films actually look. Especially as one of the many reasons why 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was such a hit was because it wasn't afraid to mix things up a little (or a lot) visually. The directors may have changed but the goal remains the same: the animation style of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is often so busy you might need a second to figure out where best to let your gaze rest in some of the more frenetic scenes.

"Busy" is probably a good way to describe the latest animated Spider-adventure in general. Opening with a focus shift to the super-powered parallel world version of Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), drummer and somewhat depressed teen after the death of her version of Peter Parker (and her cop father's determination to hunt down the masked menace he thinks killed him), we're swiftly introduced to a pan-dimensional Spider-Society charged with tracking down menaces to the cosmos.

Meanwhile "our" Spider-Man, the now fifteen year-old Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is doing... not bad. Which is off-brand for a Spider-Man, as their character arcs usually revolve around tragic loss and isolation. Actually, there is a bit of isolation going on, as while school is ok and crime-fighting is working out well - even if current "villain of the week" portal-potholed bad guy The Spot (Jason Schwatzman) is a little trickier than he looks - Miles wouldn't mind someone he could really talk to. Someone like Gwen, last seen months ago returning to her home dimension he has no way to access.

If you remember the ending of the previous film you know where this is going (turns out that movie's finish was set a third of the way into this one), but the idea of jumping across dimensions making wise-cracks while fighting bad guys isn't quite as fun as it seems. 

For one, Gwen (and everyone else) seems strangely reluctant to get Miles involved. And when he doesn't take no for an answer - meeting up with Spiders Jessica Drew (Issa Ray), the extremely cool Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya), and the angsty, humourless boss Spider behind the dimensional defence team, Miguel O'Hara (Oscar Issac) - things quickly take a turn for the extremely serious. Even if old friend and mentor Peter B Parker (Jake Johnson) also shows up. And he's got a baby!

It's the extremes that make Spider-Man work as a character. He's good with a quip; he's also constantly being put through the emotional wringer. This film happily spins both sides of the coin, being packed with jokes and easter eggs while also going really hard on both Gwen and Miles' teen angst. One of animations big advantages is that you don't have to be constrained by human limitations; here even the script has taken that to heart.

As for the animation itself, it looks great, pinballing from relatively sedate and serious to near impressionistic (the backgrounds sometimes degrade to near-abstract in big emotional moments), with characters from various dimensions often having striking different visual styles. Throw in the wide range of looks of the dimensions themselves and an approach to action sequences best described as "chaotic" (without ever becoming confusing) and this isn't so much a feast for the eyes as the kind of banquet you stagger away from feeling like you won't need to eat again for a week.

Miles and Gwen's struggles are firmly grounded even as everything around them seems to be in violent flux for the full 140 minute run time (and this is only the first half of the story: the rest is due in a year or so). Which is probably the point: as a metaphor for general teenagedness - and unlike most movie Spider-men who inhabit the usual "they're in high school but they're clearly in their early 20s" zone of movie "teens", Miles is firmly 15 and still under his parents (loving) thumb - having a broken heart be your anchor in a world constantly exploding around you is a lot better than most.

Which handily is also where Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse falls on the superhero movie scale.

- Anthony Morris