How do you make a watchable movie out of not just a 44-year old IP that was created purely to sell action figures, but one that was extremely cheesy at the time? The answer is to assemble a cast and crew who completely understand the assignment and hit the daftest elements harder than the Most Powerful Man In The Universe™ punches Skeletor.
The follow-up to Andy Weir's Science-em-up The Martian offers more of the same clever problem solving and scientific extrapolations, but this time with much bigger stakes at play.
This was an odd duck. Ostensibly a turbo-charged action vehicle, some serious pacing problems make it feel meandering and stodgy when it needs to be nimble and hard-hitting.
The blurb for this made it sound like a standard gangster comedy affair but it has a sci-fi twist that becomes apparent as loan shark Nick (Vince Vaughan) calls Mike (James Marsden) away from an adulterous rendezvous with his wife, Alice (Eiza Gonzalez). Mike is understandable worried he is about to get whacked for the affair but is confused when he is told to chloroform... Nick. But a different, identical Nick who is in Nick's house.
"Bob Odenkirk as an unlikely action hero" is a snack jar that Hollywood has double-dipped already via Nobody (Ilya Naishuller, 2021) and its sequel Nobody 2 (Timo Tjajanto, 2025). Normal is co-written by Nobody writer Derek Kolstad and Odenkirk himself so you have to hope this is them refining the formula, right?
More light-hearted, transgressive fun from cinema's Monsieur Chuckles. Climax is a largely improvised film supposedly based on the true story of a French dance troupe who had their after-party drinks spiked with LSD.
This would have been a lot more impressive if I hadn't recently seen Ready Or Not 2 (or, indeed, Ready Or Not 1) as the two films have a quite similar premise. In this, ex-convict Asia (Zazie Beetz) arrives late one night to start her new job as a live-in maid at The Virgil, an exclusive apartment building in New York, under her boss Lilith (Patricia Arquette).
This extremely odd, occasionally very funny horror/sex comedy begins with Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) in her therapist's office, talking about a brief and intense affair she had with this random guy she met at a coffee shop. The tale quickly takes a turn as she reveals that 'Brian' was in fact an alien, on a mission to save the world from climate change. Oh, and his touch brings both indescribable ecstasy and cures Joey's crippling anxiety.
Stop me if you have heard this one before, but what if, MAN was THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME OF ALL? Eh? Makes you think!
2019's Ready Or Not was a gleefully nasty action/horror/comedy in which newlywed Grace (Samara Weaving) was ritually hunted in a game of hide & seek by her new husband's family. The final act twist was that the ritual was genuinely supernatural and their failure to kill Grace meant the entire bloodline exploded in a fountain of gore at the displeasure of 'Mr Le Bail', who was implied to be Satan Himself.
A fun creature feature/disaster flick from the director of the awesome Dead Snow (2009), the incredible The Trip (2021) and the also-a-film Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013) among others.
A solid attempt at a slow-burn, grown-up crime drama in the Heat vein that never quite clicks into the high gear it needs to.
Double-hard Finnish Bastard, Aatami (Jorma Tommila) returns for another killing spree. This time, with the War over and no further Nazis requiring murder, Aatami decides to dismantle his family home (where his wife and children were murdered during his long absence) in Soviet-occupied Karella and drive it on a truck across the border to free Finland.
Fast zombies, slow zombies, zombies that aren't actually zombies but 'infected'? Sure, but have you ever seen SAD zombies?
Final Destination-esque hokum as Dafne Keen and friends discover an Aztec Death Whistle (google it) that when blown can summon your actual Death.
A solid attempt at a Terry Gilliam-style sci-fi movie that has something to say about the rise of AI and social media in general that mostly works and only occasionally feels like an old person tediously going on about 'screens'.
A cheap, cheerful and fairly well done creature feature about a pet chimp that goes ape crazy after contracting rabies.
What if Predator, but exploding and not as good? is the question asked and answered by this Alan Ritchson vehicle.
Groundbreaking action thriller in which Jason Statham plays against type as a taciturn ex-special forces operator who is trying to escape his past but ends up back in the game when he is forced to defend an innocent. Honestly, where do they get these crazy ideas?
A strong contender for the most aggressively stupid film I have seen since The Room, Mercy is a dystopian AI fable that, among its many other faults, somehow manages to mangle its message such that it ends up as pro-dystopia.
The first part of the intended 28 Days Later sequel trilogy, directed by Danny Boyle, ended on an almighty WTF of a cliffhanger with young survivor Spike being rescued from a horde of infected by... a team of ninja Jimmy Savile cosplayers? Nia DaCosta picks up the reins to let you know that, no, in fact you really did see that and you were not hallucinating. In so doing, she has crafted, with series writer Alex Garland, arguably the best and most moving entry yet.
This was a fun ride that does an interesting trick of subverting the formulaic thriller you think it will be, by cramming in about two film's worth of reversals, while still kind of being that formulaic thriller.
This is an absolutely by the number buddy action movie that is only slightly elevated by the presence of Dave Bautista and Jason Mamoa, both of whom are far better than this material. Bautista in particular seems to have gotten all the 'I am an acTOR, actually' stuff out of his system with his excellent work in Blade Runner 2049 and Knock on the Cabin Door and realised he can make bank by just doing... well, this.
A film doomed to be ungoogleable thanks to Christopher Nolan's Homeric hyperbole, Odyssey is a micro-budget thriller of sorts that focuses on Natasha (Polly Maberly), an estate agent in financial trouble who owes money to 'the wrong people'.
As a third installment to a franchise that almost nobody is invested in - some 15 years after Tron:Legacy and 43(!) years after the original Tron - Tron:Ares is... not bad? It might even be good if you can overlook a few major flaws.
Matt Damon & Ben Affleck team up again to play narcotics cops who have recently lost one of their team to murder.
Anyone hoping for a retread or continuation of Hannibal - Brian Fuller's previous collaboration with Mads Mikkelsen - will be disappointed at the dearth of artfully-flayed corpses and Turner Prize-baiting murder scenes, but Dust Bunny does share Fuller's distinctive eye for a captivating image and the subject matter is, on the face if it, quite grim.
Benoit, I say, MISTAH Ben-wah Blanc does make his ree-turn to cogitate upon a most intriguing... oh sod it I'll just do it normally. It's Knives Out 3, this time set in a small parish in upstate New York (actually, High Beach in Epping Forest, Essex) where a local preacher (Josh Brolin, somehow more sinister here than as Thanos) has been puzzlingly murdered during one of his fire and brimstone services and his younger would-be replacement (Josh O'Connor) is the chief suspect.
Fairly formulaic but smart thriller in which ex-con Nate (Taron Egerton) either kidnaps or rescues his estranged daughter Polly (a brilliant turn by 11-year-old Ana Sophia Heger) in order to protect her from a kill order from the Aryan Nation-style gang he was forced to join, then betray while in the joint.