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“And so I thought: Could a simple New York City gal like me really beat the shit out of a pregnant teenager?”

When I came home this evening after some post work drinks, I didn’t want to commit to watching any specific film, so I flicked through the TV channels and found Disaster Movie had just started. I the lost art of the terrible, shitty parody film of the late 2000’s, and I ed watching Disaster Movie back then as a 12 year old with a suitably juvenile sense of humour. 

My god. Disaster Movie truly is, without hyperbole, one of the worst films I have ever seen. It is less a movie than it is a collection of disconnected and totally unfunny skits that weakly parody the culture of the late 2000’s. All the usual suspects are here - Michael Jackson gags, transphobia, Alvin and the Chipmunks, emerging social media lingo like “ROTFL” and “LOL” - and it is all absolutely hellacious. 

There’s nothing redeemable about Disaster Movie, because it isn’t a film at all. There’s no story. There’s no characters. There’s no point to any of it other than to make characters do such things as remove the Crystal Skull from Indiana Jones from their vagina. It is pure and utter trash.

“Typical isn't it? You wait 20 years for a dad and then three come along at once.“

Mamma Mia! is my mother’s all time favourite film and we must have watched it a dozen times by now, but the last time was probably a decade ago. 

Look, Mamma Mia! isn’t a good film. You can tell the actors had a great time filming the movie, but that results in a film so unrestrained that it’s chaotic - the acting is choppy, the singing is largely terrible, and there’s a distinct A-lister drunk karaoke vibe to the whole affair. 

But I have such a soft spot for Mamma Mia! regardless. It’s such a bonkers, batshit, bubbly movie that you can’t help but go with the innate madness of it all. It’s also a massive assist that the film revolves around ABBA’s greatest hits, some of the greatest pop songs ever recorded, and moments like “Slipping Through My Fingers” really do stop you in your tracks because they’re so emotionally charged. 

Mamma Mia! is a blast, regardless of what my critical brain tells me. I can’t hear him over “Super Trooper” replaying on loop in my head.

"I don't think I should be in swim shorts for this moment.”

Death of a Unicorn is a near-total misfire, in my eyes, and it is wholly all over the place from a tonal, narrative and character perspective. 

You have seen this eat-the-rich satire so, so many times before (including from A24 themselves), and there’s nothing new here other than badly visualised unicorns. Death of a Unicorn’s social satire is extremely obvious and nauseatingly trite. The film doesn’t really have anything interesting to say in its puddle-deep first hour, and then it suddenly decides it wants to become a poorly executed gore fest? Whatever, sure. The humour is grating, with only Will Poulter eliciting the faintest of chuckles in the film. It’s truly shocking that Death of a Unicorn managed to make Paul Rudd both unfunny and unlikeable. 

Death of a Unicorn desperately wishes to be seen as Spielbergian, but it leaves out all the ingredients that make Spielberg’s films so timeless - tension, heart, interesting characters, well directed setpieces, stunningly realised CGI beasts, and more. To mention Death of a Unicorn in the same breath as Jurassic Park should be a prosecutable offence. 

I’ve seen worse films this year, but Death of a Unicorn has the foundations of an interesting film, and that makes it’s lameness that much more disappointing. I respect A24 for their original film output, but Death of a Unicorn alongside Opus and Y2K are proving that some quality control seems to be missing within their studio at the moment.

“I hear you can talk to fish.”

I encountered Justice League late on this Saturday night whilst flicking through the TV channels thinking it was Zack Snyder’s Justice League and being aghast to learn that it was actually Josstice League… I’m shocked to learn that they even have this widely redacted abomination in circulation?!

Josstice League is abysmal, and I don’t even care too much for ZSJL. It is a complete Frankenstein of a film - you can almost see the stitching in between the scenes shot by Snyder and reshot by Whedon (if the Cavill phantom upper lip didn’t give that away in its own right). It is visually repugnant, and has to be one of the worst looking major blockbusters of the century? Gal Gadot continues not to be able to act out of a paper bag, Ezra Miller becomes Whedon’s lame humour mouthpiece, Ben Affleck’s depression at being involved with this trainwreck is contagious, and it’s just so, so DULL. 

Josstice League is woeful, and has inflicted a malaise upon DC that they still have not and may never be able to return from. ZSJL is a massive improvement in that it is at very least a single man’s vision and it is mostly coherent, but even ZSJL’s core narrative is imperfect. Josstice League makes it look like Citizen Kane, though.

Rewatch 1 (24/5/2025)

Man, Jackass is cinema. Pure and simple. I’ll always love these freaks. 

Dark Shark’s skydiving gag has to be top 5 Jackass gags ever - I cannot believe it didn’t make it into the final Jackass Forever cut. 

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“That was pretty much my first day meeting everyone, and then seeing their dicks and their butt holes, and it felt like family after that.”

God this was hilarious. I was literally hyperventilating, laugh out loud crying at everything related to Dark Shark in Jackass 4.5, especially the final prank with the plane. Some of the best material in Jackass series history. 

Jackass Forever is my favourite in the series because I loved how it ed the torch to new, loveable idiots (Poopies is a star), whilst also not taking it easy on the original group. What I loved most, however, was how surprisingly introspective and emotional it was as an assumed final entry in the original’s run on the Jackass crew. It pays beautiful homage to the fucked up brotherhood formed between the group, and it’s a joy to see it the behind the scenes camaraderie whilst making Jackass Forever. 

And to repeat myself - that final prank is just spectacular. I’ve not laughed that hard in a while.

Rewatch 2 (24/5/2025)

I wanted to watch a turn your brain off comedy tonight, and Jackass Forever is without competition in that category. 

What a weirdly wholesome and thoroughly hilarious film. I always forget the majority of gags in these films after I watch them, and I love how much I’m surprised by the carnage that ensues when I revisit them. 

Danger Ehren, all time GOAT of Jackass. 

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Rewatch 1 (5/4/2022)

God, this is just as funny as the first time. The pogo stick stunt is the worst I’ve ever winced in my life though.

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“Preston should've pooped before he came to work today. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.”

I really loved Jackass Forever - this was my first time in years going to the cinema to see a comedy movie that successfully made the entire audience belly laugh consistently. It honestly made me emotional after such a dreary 2 years. 

Jackass Forever is the greatest in the series - and I’m not talking about the stunts/gags (though they’re hilarious as ever). What makes this entry so fantastic is the fact that there are newbies on the team who are introduced here and fit right in with the OGs - the proverbial Jackass torch is ed on to a new generation of really funny newcomers. It was really great to see the old and the new here. 

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that these newcomers take all the hard knocks whilst the OGs sit back and watch - I won’t spoil anything, but please give Danger Ehren a massive raise for the suffering he endured in this movie. 

Go see Jackass Forever if you want 2 hours of belly laughs, strange wholesomeness and an all around good time. You won’t regret it.

“Sometimes I eat so much I can’t… breathe?”

The original animated Lilo & Stitch is probably my favourite Disney animated film of all time. I have watched it dozens of times in the last two decades, and I think it is essentially a masterpiece. 

I do not care for Disney live action remakes - in fact, I haven’t even bothered to watch the majority of them, such as The Lion King, Mufasa, Beauty & the Beast, Mulan, Aladdin, and more. I don’t see the artistic justification for these live action remakes to exist, other than as a means for The Mouse to squeeze hundreds of millions of dollars out of an already successful animated film. 

You can probably see my conundrum then. Lilo & Stitch is an amazing film, and therefore the live action version of Lilo & Stitch could never be outright terrible. However, live action Lilo & Stitch strangely both sticks so close to the source material that it never justifies its existence in and of itself, but it also makes some big changes to the original story - and I almost universally disliked all of the changes that were made. It’s probably a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation - I wish they just made a live action reinvention of the story. 

Starting with the positives, hearing Chris Sanders’ incredible voice work as Stitch did warm my heart. Sanders is so, so good at playing Stitch, and all of his additional voice work was so much fun (even if I didn’t always like the additional scenes said voice work was in). Maia Kealoha is wonderful as Lilo - she’s funny, she’s a genuinely good actress, she makes the character her own, and she is absolutely adorable. Sydney Agudong is similarly stellar as Nani, and Billy Magnussen stole the show as Pleakley (even if I loathed what they did with Pleakley, but we’ll get to that). I love the original film, and it was fun to be in this world with these characters and to see this story translated into live action. The third act is almost completely different to the original film, and whilst I think it’s an inferior version, I do respect that they attempted some semblance of originality in the final act of the film. 

But I have so many problems with live action Lilo & Stitch - most egregiously, what this adaptation did with Pleakley and Jumba. It is cowardice of the highest order that Disney chickened out of dressing Pleakley in female clothing whilst he is on Earth (a core tenet of his character and the original movie!), and it’s clearly a reaction to the anti-woke trend of the moment. To make matters worse, both Pleakley and Jumba are instead in their human forms for the majority of the film, a transparent budgetary constraint placed upon the film which was originally intended for a Disney+ release. It is shocking and disappointing, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. 

There’s a miscellaneous list of other issues that I have with live action Lilo & Stitch too - like Moana 2 last year, this film was reverted from a straight-to-streaming release into a full blown theatrical release (a smart decision given this will almost certainly make $1b and be the highest grossing film of the summer), but the film doesn’t feel particularly cinematic. There’s also so many weird changes and additions that really distracted from the simple but flawless story from the original film, such as a complete absence of Captain Gantu, needless convolutions for Cobra Bubbles’ character, an “Uptown Funk” jumpscare (yes, really), and some truly terrible product placement for Capri-Sun (who will certainly get value for their money given the runaway success this film will be). 

Overall, live action Lilo & Stitch is okay. When it plays the hits from the original it excels, but it also feels uninspired. When it tries something new or changes something from the original, it’s usually at the detriment to the story rather than an improvement upon it. It is an unenviable task, to be fair, and I think this is probably the best live action version we could have gotten (I will never forgive them for Pleakley, though). Here’s hoping the inevitable sequel based on original material does better.

“We're gonna die!”
“Think positive!”
“We're gonna die quickly!”

For as much as I watched the original live action Scooby-Doo as a kid, I didn’t very much from the sequel Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, and I can see why. 

Monsters Unleashed is way more slapstick than I expected it to be, and it’s way more incoherent too. It’s loud, it’s colourful, it has actual monsters from the iconic cartoon, Scooby-Doo is animated much better and Matthew Lillard is great once again… but there’s really not much else going on. Without the nostalgia I had for Scooby-Doo, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed is a bit of a chore. There’s very little of value here for anyone above 9 years of age. 

Still, I would love a middle aged reunion with this version of the Mystery Inc. - make the film, David Zaslav!

“I know you. All you care about are swimsuit models.”
“Look, I'm a man of substance. Dorky chicks like you turn me on, too.”

Man, it’s been a very, very long time since I last saw Scooby-Doo, a favourite of mine when I was a kid. Despite watching it a lot when I was young, I actually didn’t much about the film - particularly that Scrappy-Doo is in it?!

It feels unfair to look upon a film I loved as a kid and dissect it with fully-grown adult eyes, but Scooby-Doo is a very messy film. To call the CGI outdated would be very generous indeed - a big problem for a film with a CGI animated titular character and monstrous villains. The film is so Shaggy/Scooby centric as well, and it makes Fred/Daphne/Velma feel additional rather than required narratively. Speaking of the plot, it’s quite sparse - so much happens in < 90 minutes, and yet… nothing really happens too? It’s a weirdly stagnant film for one that is so loud and manic. 

But look, it’s a kid film! I can see why I had fun with it when I was a kid - there’s an extended burp & fart off, for God sake. What more can you ask for as a 6 year old?

“I'm made of rocks, as you can see, but don't let that intimidate you. You don't need to be afraid, unless you're made of scissors! Just a little Rock, Paper, Scissors joke for you.“

Thor: Ragnarok is peak MCU.

A film that stands on its own whilst also feeling relevant in the broader context of the cinematic universe. A film with genuine humour (for the most part). A film with a compelling narrative. How good we had it back in 2017, huh?

Ragnarok is the rare Taika Waititi film I can stomach, because he hadn’t yet gotten fully drunk on his own flatulence as he did in Love & Thunder. Waititi revitalised the dull Thor character in Ragnarok, and took full advantage of Chris Hemsworth’s innate comedic sensibilities. Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is also transformed in Ragnarok for the better, this is the best version of Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk to date, and Cate Blanchett munches upon the scenery throughout the film. 

Ragnarok is great fun! Definitely a top 10 MCU film for me.

“Are you ok?”
“I think I’ll live.”

As someone with a very recently pierced septum, I feel very attacked!!!

Final Destination: Bloodlines is easily the best film in the series, in a lot of ways - the actors are actually, dare I say… able to act!? The kills are almost universally great, and mainly because the film is so patient with it’s setup and fake outs. The deepened mythology of Death and his twisted game was fascinating - it’s one of those concepts that you’ll hardly believe wasn’t done until 6 films in because it’s such a no brainer. The balance between horror and comedy is absolutely perfect. Finally, the premonition sequence is masterfully done. 

Final Destination: Bloodlines is a shot of adrenaline in the arm of a series I only started watching for the first time last week, but one that I could feel the juice running dry in. The 14 year gap between Final Destination 5 and Final Destination: Bloodlines was both a genius decision and totally mandatory, given the diminishing returns (even though I enjoyed 5 quite a bit). The franchise returns with a film that is actually directed and written by people who are good at directing and writing, a film that is both oppressively nihilistic and rapturously funny in one fell swoop, and a film with death sequences that may well in time stand alongside franchise highlights like the sunbeds and laser eye surgery sequences. 

Final Destination: Bloodlines is a very fun time at the movies with a big bag of popcorn, so it’s feels pointless to nitpick it, but the film isn’t perfect. The family trauma plot point is necessary given the concept of Bloodlines, but it’s also quite uninventive and lacking. There’s a connection between a character later in the film and the premonition sequence too that I thought was a little too obvious and even retroactive, and I think it could have been handled a bit better. 

But all of these are small grievances - I had a blast with Final Destination: Bloodlines. It’s too early to solidify my Final Destination rankings, but I’ve a feeling that Bloodlines may settle at the top of the pile. The film looks to overperform at the box office this coming weekend, so hopefully this revived and revitalised series has another great entry in the not-too-distant future.

“I don’t make the rules… I just clean up after the game is over.”

I’m so glad I trudged through the bad-to-terrible 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Final Destination films, because Final Destination 5 may actually be my favourite in the franchise (pre-Bloodlines). This was so much fun, and I had no idea that (spoilers) it was a prequel! My jaw hit the ground during the final scene. 

Final Destination 5 has some of the same issues that are now just inherent with this franchise - dodgy CGI, dodgier acting, a weak script, and surface level characters. However, I think Final Destination 5 does the most to improve those flaws than any of it’s predecessors. The CGI is definitely aged, but it’s nowhere near as abysmal as The Final Destination. The acting is poor (particularly for the male lead), but it’s mainly serviceable rather than intolerable. The characterisation is a mixed bag, but I think that for the standard of the Final Destination series it is well above average - I actually somewhat enjoyed my time with this bunch of survivors/victims. The story is just right too, with an interesting take on Death’s games that doesn’t over complicate or detract from the kills we all want to see. 

The bridge premonition is solid, and a massive improvement from the shitty rollercoaster and NASCAR races that opened the previous two sequels. A good premonition scene should make you ever so slightly nervous about the setting of said premonition, and Final Destination 5 has certainly planted a seed of doubt in my head regarding bridges. 

The kills in Final Destination 5 are some of my favourites in the franchise thus far, mainly because of how patiently executed they are. Most of the previous films skipped buildup and instead went for speed and brutality, but the death scenes in Final Destination 5 do the opposite - the best examples being the nail bitingly tense gymnastics scene, the laser eye surgery scene, and the acupuncture scene. Final Destination 5 balances well the dual horror/comedy tone of the franchise, and I’m very impressed. 

Final Destination 5 was great fun! It’s really revived my interest in catching Final Destination: Bloodlines this week after my enthusiasm waning after the 3rd/4th films in the series. My pre-Bloodlines ranking of the franchise is:

5 > 1 > 2 > 3 > dog shit > 4

“Your fate has been dictated, it’s out of your hands.”

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is being removed from Netflix forever tomorrow due to changes to the platform’s UI and system operational structure, so I had to get it ticked off my Black Mirror rewatch list before I lost the opportunity. 

I watched Bandersnatch back in 2018 with my ex whilst we were both very, very high, and we overthought everything to the point where our given ending was pretty shite. I tried to choose things differently this time around, but it just lead me to realise that these choose your own adventure style TV episodes inherently do not and cannot work due to the broad pathways within, and the need for them to connect.

It is ittedly cool when the protagonist becomes sentient to his free will being diminished by someone on Netflix in the 21st century and having to explain that to him, and the trademark Black Mirror dystopia is heightened given you are the one making the decisions. But it just… doesn’t really come together, and I found it frustrating how many false choices there were that would give you the illusion of choice only to bring you right back to the start again. 

Goodbye, Bandersnatch - we hardly knew ya.

Rewatch 1 (11/5/2025) - Rating changed 4 > 3.5

This is my first time rewatching Blink Twice since last August when it released, and I still think that this a really accomplished debut picture from Zoë Kravitz. It’s such a twisty, enthralling and darkly funny film, even if it does borrow quite heavily from a lot of other films. 

However, I had an issue with the ending the first time, and that’s even more pronounced the second time, so I’ve deducted a half star. The film ends 2 or 3 times before it actually does, and the final scene of the film is too broad and unsatisfying in my eyes. 

Still, Blink Twice is stellar. I hope Kravitz’ directorial follow up is at least as strong as this was. 

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“That is a fat blunt, queen!”

I went into Blink Twice totally blind, and I highly highly recommend you do the same (tl;dr - I really liked it!). Blink Twice wasn’t on my radar at all until the surprisingly stellar critic reviews started to come in, and it was Mark Kermode’s strong thumbs up for the film that made me seek it out in theatres. 

Blink Twice is a staggeringly strong directorial debut from Zoë Kravitz. I really didn’t think she had a film this accomplished within her as a director, especially as a debut, and I can’t wait to see where she goes from here behind the camera. Blink Twice isn’t perfect nor does it reinvent the wheel conceptually, but it is a devilishly entertaining psychological mystery that is packed with terrific performances, beautiful cinematography, great shot compositions, and unflinchingly dark post-2017 social commentary. 

To compare Blink Twice to other films would be to spoil the film itself, so I’ll refrain from doing so, but I will say that I can see Blink Twice becoming the social media phenomenon that a fellow Amazon M.G.M. film became late last year. Blink Twice from what I can see is flying under everyone’s radar, and when (not if) it blows up I can see it being extremely controversial. Blink Twice opens with a trigger warning, but despite being aware of the content without the added context, I was still taken aback by how brutal it gets in the third act. People will have issues with the lengths the film goes to and I think that’s fair, but to me the nastiness and brutality depicted are done so in order to not let these villains off the hook and in order to show them as the monsters they truly are. 

The performances in Blink Twice are the film’s crucial asset, and they are outstanding. Channing Tatum has never been better than he is in Blink Twice, a truly revelatory piece of acting. Tatum plays a character best left unspoiled, with clear real life parallels to a number of tech billionaires and infamous island owners. Naomi Ackie, Adria Arjona and Alia Shawkat are all standouts amongst the central female characters, with Ackie and Arjona in particular having some of the most emotionally wrought scenes in the film. It’s also good to see Simon Rex get more work off the back of Red Rocket, and he is note-perfect as the slimy tech bro wingman to Tatum’s Slater King. 

Blink Twice from a narrative perspective is undeniably engrossing, but I will concede that there are some slight issues. The film shows it’s hand a bit early in some aspects of the mystery, and I guessed a few twists when I am usually very poor at guessing twists - but to be fair, there were just as many twists and revelations that surprised me too. My biggest issue with Blink Twice is the last five minutes, when a central character makes a choice that didn’t make sense to me whatsoever. It felt like Kravitz and Blink Twice as a film took one last left turn for the sake of turning, and it didn’t feel earned, but I am eager to rewatch the film again and see whether or not I’m just missing something (which is entirely possible). 

Overall, I predict that Blink Twice will be one of the sleeper hits of 2024 (at the very least from a conversation perspective), and I think it very much deserves to be. Blink Twice is a biting satirisation of the post-2017 era of “cancel culture”, and the way that villains don’t ever really change, but rather they just get smarter and more covert. Never trust a “nice guy” who says he loves therapy!

Also, the needle drop near the end? Spectacular, deadass.

“Hands up, let’s go Brazil!”

Lady Gaga is my favourite artist of all time, ever. As a closeted teen in the early 2010’s, her outspoken criticism of gay inequality at the time was truly inspiring for me - she could have easily kept her mouth shut after the success of Just Dance, Poker Face and Bad Romance and let the money flow in, but she made a stand at perhaps the cost of a large proportion of the general public. I’ve been locked in as a Little Monster ever since, and I’ve been lucky enough to see Lady Gaga live three times. 

Sadly, I was unable to get tickets to Gaga’s The Mayhem Ball, and Mayhem on the Beach has made me feel so much worse about missing out on those tickets. 

It’s so gratifying to see my favourite artist on a career peak 16 years into her career, given all she has already achieved. 2.5 million people singing every word in Rio de Janeiro… it is truly staggering. All the Gaga naysayers post-Joker Folie à Deux have been silenced. It’s one thing to attract a crowd though, and it’s entirely another to captivate them - and Gaga did exactly that during Mayhem on the Beach. Gaga is effortless and infallible in her live performances - the vocals, the charisma, the theatrics, the stage presence, the songs themselves - it’s all top notch, and it cements her as potentially the greatest living live performer of our generation. 

I’m so fucking mad that I failed to get Mayhem Ball tickets, and Mayhem on the Beach just made me feel worse.

“Your choice, head or tails, but… you know I like head.”

My god… I had heard that The Final Destination (what a ridiculous title) was the worst entry in the Final Destination series, but I had no idea it was this bad. This is honestly one of the worst films I have seen in quite some time. Doo-doo, poop, shit, faeces, excrement - the only adjectives to describe this abominable film. 

There is NOTHING redeemable in The Final Destination, thus my 0.5 rating. The film was clearly made to jump on the early 2010’s 3-D bandwagon, and it results in all of the kills being terribly visualised and tacky in a standard 2-D viewing experience. The acting for this franchise has always been poor, but The Final Destination makes actors in the previous films look like Daniel Day-Lewis; the acting is genuinely Tommy Wiseau The Room levels bad. The opening premonition scene sucks because who goes to NASCAR races other than bad people in the first place? Why does the film feel directed as if it were a music video?? Why is there so much blatant racism in this movie?!?! 

The Final Destination is abysmal, in every sense of the word. A black character tries to hang himself unsuccessfully and then keeps the failed noose on his neck for an uncomfortably long period… that is what we’re dealing with here. It’s regressive, it’s trashy, and it’s an embarrassment to those who appreciate horror cinema as something more than low-brow nihilism. 

I’m gonna watch Final Destination 5 just for completionism before Final Destination Bloodlines next week, and I’m confident that neither film can possibly sink as low as this piece of shit. I’m mad I wasted my time!

“Our birth’s nothing but death begun.”

I’m actually so disappointed with Final Destination 3. I knew that the fourth entry in the series is supposedly bad (I’ve not yet seen it), but so many people have hyped this third one (with some even saying it’s their favourite) and I… just do not see it. 

Starting with the good - Final Destination 3 has the least awful acting of the first three films (that’s not saying much), largely due to Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ryan Merriman’s onscreen work together. The death scenes aren’t all spectacular, but I think Final Destination 3 can at least say that it has perhaps the most horrific death scene (that I’ve seen at least) - that sunbed death scene is truly terrifying; slow, painful, two-for-one… yikes. 

But there’s so much that isn’t good in Final Destination 3 too. The rollercoaster premonition scene is by far the weakest of the trilogy, and it is so jarringly visually crafted that it isn’t that scary either - a successful premonition scene has to make you a tiny bit nervous like the plane and motorway scenes previously did, and this didn’t do it for me. The character writing was also certainly… a choice… with weird pervs and a goth kid turned homicidal within the space of 5 minutes both distracting from the film. 

The story and the writing are very poor too. The whole thing with the photos being clues was ridiculous I’m sorry, and it doesn’t make for that exciting a film to follow characters staring at photos for 90 minutes. The script is staggeringly stupid - who the fuck doesn’t know that SpongeBob SquarePants lives under the sea? A camera apparently triggers the rollercoaster death scene during the premonition, and yet the camera guy ends up backing out of the ride… with his camera? Why are there so many references to 9/11, including Cheney being a war criminal (based af), Osama Bin Laden still being on the run (dated af), and seemingly an implication that we could’ve prevented 9/11 had we looked at a photo better?! It boggles the mind. 

I still had dumb fun with Final Destination 3 for the most part, but I could really feel the juice running dry in the series by this point. I’m determined to finish the rest of them before Final Destination Bloodlines next week, but I can’t do another double bill of them again.

“Pileup! Pileup! Pileup! Pileup! Pileup!”

Final Destination 2 is a noticeably lesser film than the original film, especially given I only watched that yesterday for the first time. 

There’s still some fun to be had in Final Destination 2, don’t get me wrong. The deaths are bonkers, and the film is much more knowledgeable about the uncomfortable relationship between horror and comedy - it’s a much more tongue in cheek film than its predecessor. 

However, Final Destination 2 overly complicates and convolutes its central premise at the cost of the fun factor and enjoyability of the film. The whole Death working backwards, “only new life can defeat Death” stuff, etc. all felt like hindrances to the sequel rather than improvements to the stellar formula for the original. 

The acting is somehow even worse than the original film, and the characters are too. Imagine my surprise when the main character of Final Destination who survived Death originally was unceremoniously killed off screen? What the fuck was that about?! That really soured the entire affair for me. 

I’m gonna watch the rest of the series, even if I don’t expect any to be as good as the original - they’re just dumb nonsense, but I’ve been having fun with them! 

Although if another character screams about how they “control my own life”, I’ll have to tap out.

“In death, there are no accidents.”

Ahead of Final Destination: Bloodlines releasing this month, I thought now was as good a time as any to finally watch the five Final Destination films already released. 

Final Destination was surprisingly fun! Sure, the acting is almost universally terrible, the characterisations the same, the events of the film are obviously preposterous… and yet I enjoyed the hell out of this. The fact that the central narrative spawned from a plane explosion and this released one year before 9/11 is wild. 

I wasn’t expecting Death to be this evil entity stalking his escaped victims either! You gotta hand it to him, he knows how to make it spectacular - there are no aneurysms or heart attacks here, folks. 

I’m looking forward to catching the rest of these, though I believe the reception for the sequels declined with each new entry.

Rewatch ? (4/5/2025) - Rating changed 3 > 3.5

May the Fourth Be With You! 

I love Revenge of the Sith. It’s so silly, so overacted (and at times badly acted), it’s so gaudy, it’s so operatic… and I’ll take that over what Star Wars has become under Disney’s control - a franchise so terrified of doing something new that it has resigned into an endless nostalgia loop. 

Ian McDiarmid absolutely munches the scenery in RotS - every line he utters is so quotable, it’s crazy. 

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Rewatch ? (24/5/2023)

I still stick by nearly everything I said in my original Letterboxd review of Revenge of the Sith - the bar was set unspeakably low by the previous two prequels, but Episode III regardless nails the key character moments and is a flawed but nevertheless satisfying conclusion to the pre-Vader Anakin story. 

And man, Ewan McGregor is a blessing to this franchise. So many iconic lines here. It’s a shame to see how excited I was for Obi-Wan Kenobi this time last year and how mid that turned out to be. 

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Rewatch ? (4/5/2022)

May The Fourth Be With You!

This is going to be the most biased review I’ll ever do on Letterboxd, and I it that easily. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of The Sith is probably the film I’ve watched more than any other in my entire life. I’ve watched this close to 90 times (give or take), and it was the first Star Wars film I watched in cinema at 8.5 years old. I had already grown up on Episode I & II but Revenge of The Sith was (at the time) the most tragic, touching and entertaining film I had ever seen. 

Given all of that, there’s a special place in my heart for Revenge of The Sith. It is by far the best of the prequels and honestly outranks Episodes VII and IX too in my opinion. ROTS is (for better and worse) wholly George Lucas’ vision and a totally satisfying ending for the prequel trilogy. 

It’s of course not perfect, however. The CGI is over-abundant and often unnecessary (no backgrounds or sets look real), and the dialogue is extremely clunky (some Anakin/Pe scenes are excruciating) - but despite that, ROTS nails the core relationship between Anakin and Obi-Wan. You truly feel the anguish and pain in Ewan McGregor’s performance in the third act, complimented by the desperation of Hayden Christensen’s. Ian McDiarmid is also wonderfully campy as Palpatine and is a lot of fun to watch. 

There’s a lot of valid reasons to dislike ROTS but I’m incapable of being objectively critical given how dear this film was for me as a kid. I can’t wait to see Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney+ later this month after rewatching this.

Rewatch 3 (3/5/2025)

The perfect hangover movie. I’m cured. 

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Rewatch 2 (15/2/2025) - Rating changed 4 > 4.5

Barbie really clicked for me the third time around. 

It still has all the issues that I flagged previously, without a doubt - but it’s just so fucking funny. The script is so sharp, the performances are so intentional, the meta-commentary is so well done… that I can’t help but submit to how clever a film it is overall, even if it’s not perfect. 

And the “What Was I Made For?” montage gets me every single time. 

—————

Rewatch 1 (3/9/2023)

I’ve not stopped thinking about Barbie since I first watched it. Firstly, the film is absolutely inescapable, but also my thoughts have been so scattered regarding it. I knew I liked Barbie overall, but it has a lot of peaks and valleys and tonal issues at times. I can sum up my pros and cons roughly as follows:

(spoilers follow)

Pros:
• lead performances, direction, set design, choreography
• some fantastic jokes and clever screenwriting
• portrays the female experience and what it means to be a woman perfectly (according to every woman I’ve discussed the film with)
• depressed Barbie ad
• both the final scene and the beautiful montage of real life women who were involved with/relatives of someone involved with the making of Barbie (as revealed by Greta Gerwig)

Cons:
• Barbie comes so close to emotional profundity and succeeds at times, but it feels like it scratched the surface when it examined the impact of Barbie on real life women and girls with the teenager conversation, only for that to be dropped immediately. 
• whose idea was it to give the Ken’s an (overly long) song and dance number and not the Barbie’s? It was baffling. 
• the Mattel stuff
• the random extended Chevrolet commercial in what is already a 2 hour commercial
• the resolution - it felt regressive that Barbie saw how awful the real world was for women and instead didn’t look to really improve the Ken’s standing in Barbieland by not giving them a Supreme Court Justice. It’s a reflection of the real world sure, but I would’ve thought the Barbie’s would want to balance the scales and be better. 

So it’s really the definition of a mixed bag. However, for all my issues, Barbie still has so much heart, love and creativity baked into it and so many beautiful moments that I can’t help but be fond of it regardless. It’s not perfect, but neither is Barbie herself. 

—————

“I want to do the imagining, I don’t want to be the idea.”

It’s been a torturous week waiting to see Barbie and avoiding the omnipresent memes, marketing and clips as much as possible. I've long been excited for this as a huge fan of Greta Gerwig, Ryan Gosling and a former Barbie doll enjoyer (don’t tell my Dad), so today couldn’t have come fast enough. 

Overall, I really liked Barbie. However, I will it that I found it to be an overwhelming film with so many characters, so many plot points, so many tonal shifts, etc. that it demands a rewatch before concrete thoughts can be made (and I do think there’s some recency bias on here for this film). I’ll discuss some of my scattered thoughts after my initial viewing:

For the positives, the biggest is easily Ryan Gosling as Ken. This is Best ing Actor level work in my opinion, and it would be an absolute travesty if he was not in contention in 2024. Gosling’s physical comedy has always been one of his strongest qualities, and it has never been better than in Barbie. I cannot imagine anyone else as this character other than Gosling - his line deliveries (“sublime!”), smirks and his hidden loneliness are excellently portrayed by Gosling. It’s a close call between Blade Runner 2049 and Barbie for the best Ryan Gosling performance in my eyes. 

Technically, Barbie is also stunning. Greta Gerwig does a terrific job directing the film, and it looks like no other blockbuster I have ever seen. The production and costume design are shoe ins for next years Academy Awards, and deservedly so. Not to be forgotten, Margot Robbie and the endless cast of famous faces are also great in Barbie, with Robbie in particular having some truly poignant emotional beats in the flawless final 30 minutes of the film. 

As for the stuff that didn’t totally work for me the first time around, I did feel that tonally the film was all over the place in parts. In the same vein, I think subtlety is a fine line and at times Barbie communicated it’s social commentary with the subtlety of a brick. The message could have been made clear without some of the extremely heavy handed dialogue and the feeling of being “talked at” rather than engaged as an audience member. 

I also feel like the film flirts with being a generational examination of the meaning of “Barbie” as a product and cultural touchstone (particularly during the conversation between Barbie and the teenagers), but after that instead decides to ignore that titillating notion and revert back to the same points about modern day society in general. For a film called Barbie, I wish we explored more the impact of Barbie on women today. 

Take all these viewpoints with a grain of salt as I am eagerly looking forward to rewatching Barbie as soon as possible, and it’s possible that my rating could go up (or down) with further viewings. 

That final scene/line though? One of the best go-home scenes I’ve ever seen, 5/5.

“Righteousness without power is just an opinion.”

I had a feeling that Thunderbolts* was gonna be good, and I’m glad that my hunch has been proved correct!

Thunderbolts* is my favourite MCU film since Galaxy of the Guardians Vol. 3, and it’s a surprisingly unique entry in a cinematic universe 30-odd films in. 

Thunderbolts* is nevertheless plagued with general MCU problems - quippy humour that detracts from the stakes at hand, dodgy CGI (particularly during the debut scene of The Sentry), uneven character development (Ghost got scraps), exposition for days (at the beginning), and some formulaic elements (ragtag misfits who hate each other learn to work together as a team and bring out the best in each other), etc. 

But Thunderbolts* has enough originality (for the MCU at least) to minimise those criticisms. This really isn’t the typical MCU/superhero film in quite a few ways. There is no third act alien CGI clusterfuck finale - yes, there are lots of visual effects in the finale, but it is much more restrained than you’ve come to expect for this franchise, and crucially it has actual emotional weight behind it. The character work is really strong in Thunderbolts*, and the script makes you care about what these people have went through, are going through, and what they strive to be. Thunderbolts* also earnestly tackles mental health issues including depression, self-loathing, anxiety, and grief in a really poignant and heartfelt manner - I found it really touching. 

The main reason why I had faith in Thunderbolts* despite my declining interest in the MCU was because of Florence Pugh and the fact that she’s never given a bad performance in her career, and Pugh is the heart and soul of Thunderbolts*. Pugh gives a performance that is packed with nuance and pathos far above her contemporaries in the wider superhero genre, and her ability to flow effortlessly between tones is stunning. Wyatt Russell was also quite strong as John Walker, and I’m glad that his excellent performance in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier wasn’t the end for his character. And of course, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina finally gets her moment in the MCU spotlight after years of background skulking, and JLD doesn’t miss a step - she is truly one of the greatest actresses of our generation, and I hope she is the pseudo-Nick Fury of the MCU going forward. 

Thunderbolts* isn’t perfect, and I am at risk of perhaps overrating it, but I respect the restraint it showed in the finale and the risk of doing so, I respect the mental health aspects of the film, and I enjoyed my time with The Thunderbolts (that asterisk isn’t unintentional, and anyone with even remote comic book knowledge knows what it’s referring to). 

Thunderbolts* also crucially felt like the MCU finally taking a step forward narratively for the first time since Endgame with the second post-credits - I just hope it’s not too late!

“My horoscope was right!”

Imagine my surprise not knowing that Drop was filmed in Ireland until the protagonist is racing through a locale which is so clearly the Dublin docklands!

Drop is a barnstormingly stupid film. It is cheesy, it stretches credulity to breaking point, the script is atrocious, and it is shockingly predictable - I called the secret antagonist of the film straight away, and I’m usually wrong about that kind of stuff. These characters are something else… how sex starved do you have to be to stay with someone on a first date who’s constantly on their phone, not listening, and running to other tables?! Why is the waiter who looks like Mr. Beast somehow the most loathsome and irritable character in all of cinema?! Why the hell didn’t she turn off her AirDrop after the second or third random meme?!?! It boggles the mind. 

Drop isn’t all bad (but it mostly is). Christopher Landon employs some interesting visual storytelling methods, particularly with his illustration of the incoming texts from the anonymous villain. Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar are relatively solid together, at least given the material they’re working with. 

And… that’s really it. Drop isn’t funny enough to pull off it’s attempts at comedy, nor is it exciting enough to be a successful thriller, nor is it original enough to be memorable, I predict. I hate to use the term “streaming movie” about any film, but Drop really is exactly that. I would have been annoyed if I had went out of my way to see this in the cinema.

“You think what I do here is a war crime, and you’re cooperating with a person who committed a war crime?”
“Well, I’m interviewing you.”
“It’s a light felony.”

We sadly don’t get many Louis Theroux documentaries anymore, but The Settlers has to be one of his best in at least the last 10 years. This documentary is so depressing, so disgusting, and so maddening that it moved me to genuine tears, and it’s also very brave of Louis (and that’s why he’s the GOAT).

Undoubtedly the Zionists/Israeli state media will portray Louis as an anti-Semite for The Settlers, but Louis allowed for very little logic behind such accusations - the titular settlers speak for themselves and speak freely in this documentary, and their testimonies are damning. The behaviour of the settlers, the mob-like IDF, the invaders not even from Israel but Russia and America… it all paints a picture of a heinous apartheid regime who live out their days terrorising the native population of Palestine and taking sightseeing field trips to the smouldering ruins of Gaza. It is abhorrent, and it is masterfully laid bare by Louis Theroux here. 

There is no conversation anymore, and frankly, there never really was one - Israel is an apartheid state committing ethnic cleansing and daily war crimes upon the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank. One day, history will look back upon this period as shamefully as we do upon South African apartheid, and those who remain silent (or worse, actively such misery and violence) will be disgraced. 

Free Palestine. 🇵🇸

Rewatch ? (27/4/2025)

T2 is a true classic in every sense of the word, and everything that a good sequel should strive to be. I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen T2, but it’s leaving Prime Video in < 4 days and I couldn’t resist catching it yet again. 

I still prefer the original, but there’s really no faults to be found with T2. It’s the type of practical action film they rarely make at this scale anymore. 

—————

“Hasta la vista, baby.”

T2: Terminator 2 Judgement Day is often considered the quintessential sequel, and one of the greatest blockbusters of all time. I don’t necessarily disagree, although I do prefer The Terminator by a tiny margin. 

T2 works due to completely reimagining and reinventing the formula established by its predecessor. Having Arnold’s Terminator become a protector of John Connor rather than his would be assassin is a terrifically clever idea even all these years later and establishes an emotional connection to the machine not felt whatsoever in The Terminator. 

However, I’m personally just more interested in the iconic Terminator actually trying to terminate, rather than protect, so I prefer the unstoppable force elements of the original a tad bit more overall. 

There are elements of T2 that are undoubtedly better than The Terminator, however. Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor is a badass here, unabashedly cool and a heroine in the vein of Ripley from Cameron’s Aliens. The T-1000 liquid metal concept is also fantastic, despite it’s uniqueness being diluted by its repeated recreations in the numerous sequels after T2. 

All in all, T2 is the definition of a classic sequel, and one of the rare few that sures the original in the eyes of the majority - just not for myself, by the tiniest of margins. Both are tremendous though.

Rewatch 1 (26/4/2025)

6 months on from first watching The Wild Robot and man, this film still slaps. I’m fighting for reasons not to give this a straight 5/5. 

The Wild Robot might be the best hangover film I’ve seen in some time - it’s just so full of wholesomeness, beauty, earnestness and emotion. The score in particular really stood out to me this time around, and I’ve automatically added the soundtrack to my Spotify. 

A true animated classic, in every sense of the word. 

—————

“Sometimes to survive, you must become more than you were programmed to be.”

I took a boyfriend mandated Halloween horror movie marathon break tonight for The Wild Robot, and I am so, so glad I did. The Wild Robot is not only my favourite animated film of 2024, but it is high on my list of the best films of 2024 more generally. What a beautiful little film. 

The Wild Robot instantly stuck out to me as a “special” film. It is packed with beautiful life lessons on acceptance, comion, humanity and family, without ever coming across as preachy. Not since the original Inside Out has a film in my opinion been as poignant as The Wild Robot, nor has any animated kids film been so perfectly suited for both kids and adults alike. The Wild Robot is a genuinely heartfelt tribute to the transformative power of love, and how stepping up to a challenge (albeit sometimes imperfectly) is the true measure of a parent and/or person. 

The Wild Robot also looks gorgeous. I love that the film didn’t go for photo realism, and instead employed a beautifully diverse animation style that switched from watercolour to computer generated and beyond. Chris Sanders directs and writes the hell out of The Wild Robot too, and like his work on Lilo & Stitch two decades ago, Sanders is a master at portraying the innate beauty of irregular family units. 

The voice work is equally terrific. Lupita Nyong’o is superb as Roz, a glorified Orisa from Overwatch 2 but with so much more humour and heart. Nyong’o’s ability to change her voice work as Roz grows more emotionally intelligent was amazing to witness. Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor and Matt Berry all too have outstanding starring roles in The Wild Robot as well. 

And finally, it goes without saying that The Wild Robot made both me and my boyfriend hysterically weep on at least four occasions, but not in a manipulative way - we wept because of the gorgeous, soaring score from Kris Bowers, the outstanding cinematography, the authentic characters, and our investment in the narrative. 

The Wild Robot is a very special film, as I said. It’s a film that quite quickly struck me as being something truly exceptional, and I’m so glad to see its success and how it has touched the hearts of so many people (other than me and my boyfriend). A masterwork.

“You gotta be kidding me! Who greenlit this garbage?”

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is a delight. Sure, it’s not the most polished film from a script or animation perspective , nor is it that memorable, but it has everything you could ever reasonably expect from a Looney Tunes feature film - zany, frenetic action, enjoyable lead characters, and even a spoof of influencers!

It’s all quite exhausting (in a good way for me, but others may differ), but I think that the intended audience (children) will enjoy The Day the Earth Blew Up. I think it’s cool that Looney Tunes continues to entertain consecutive generations of young people, even despite Warner Bros. best efforts to diminish the brand.

We’ll probably never get a sequel given Warner Bros. sold this film to the highest bidder, and it’s a shame because I think these characters would excel in a bigger budget sequel.

“Why did you just say, "Ride smooth with Thirst Trap Lube"?”

I had great intentions of rewatching all of Black Mirror before catching up with this new batch of episodes, but I heard good things about Common People and I couldn’t resist. 

What a terrific instalment of Black Mirror, a series that I’ve long felt was on the decline since Netflix bought the show. This is easily the best episode of Black Mirror since Nosedive, if not earlier, and it’s probably in my top five for the entire series. 

I love when Black Mirror makes me feel depressed - get that Hang the DJ shit away from me - and boy did Common People make me feel depressed!

The concept at hand here is unfiltered dystopia - a medical instalment that will save your life for a monthly fee, only for the pricing structure to change, for ads to be forced upon you, for subscription tiers to be merged and renamed, etc. It is a hellacious concept, and one that feels all too possible within the United States healthcare industry in the not too distant future. It’s pretty bold of Netflix to release this episode (though I imagine they have zero creative control over Charlie Brooker’s work), and my only issue with Common People is that it released on Netflix - releasing an episode that critiques your craven subscription service model doesn’t take you off the hook for said subscription model!

I’m going to be pondering Common People for quite some time, whereas I couldn’t recall an episode from the last 3 seasons of Black Mirror right now if I tried. A really good start to the new season, and I may have to continue my detour within these new episodes before returning to my rewatch.

“We built walls around us, and all the time, all the time, the real danger was inside - inside with us.”

I’ve been wanting to rewatch The Two Popes for some time, and with the ing of Pope Francis yesterday, it could not have been a more appropriate time to revisit this film. I’m glad I waited!

The Two Popes is a fairly pedestrian film that’s buoyed heavily by two terrific lead performances. The film itself is a bit by the numbers, with some shonky green screen and ADR, with a few scenes that stretch credibility, and with an unnecessary and distracting pre-papacy Cardinal Bergoglio storyline. 

But the inherent subject of The Two Popes is undeniably fascinating: the first time in 600 years that a Pope resigned the office, and only the second time ever. Pope Benedict and Pope Francis could not have been any more different - Benedict the arch-conservative following in the footsteps of John-Paul, a Pope who is only too happy to ignore the elitism of the Church hierarchy and similarly ignore their misdeeds, and Francis the reformer and revolutionary, a man of genuine and practiced humility who detested the piousness of an ailing institution. Francis may not have been perfect, but I think his quiet reformism during his papacy will hopefully lead to his successor completing his goals (but I’m not a practicing Catholic anyway, so what do I care). 

Anthony Hopkins is a mirror image of Pope Benedict, and as usual he is terrific in The Two Popes as the grouchy, loner Pope Emeritus. Jonathan Pryce is solid as Pope Francis also, even though the voice that came out of his mouth when he spoke Spanish very much wasn’t his own (at least I don’t think so?). 

The Two Popes is well acted but only competently made. Still, for the week that’s in it, I recommend catching this on Netflix ahead of the next papal conclave where the future of the Catholic Church will be decided yet again.

Rewatch 1 (21/4/2025)

I mean… there was really no other choice for tonight’s film other than Conclave given the ing of Pope Francis this morning. 

I’m still not head over heels in love with Conclave the second time around, but it does a fantastic job at capturing and illustrating the drama and politicking of the papal conclave. I would pay very handsomely to see a documentary or something of the imminent real life papal conclave. 

Like many Irish people, I’m officially Catholic but have long stopped practicing/believing (not that I ever really did either), but still - I’m eager to see who succeeds Pope Francis. Francis was a “liberal” and a reformist, and it will be fascinating to see whether or not the backlash to Francis’ papacy and the cultural global moment we are in now reflects in his successor. 

—————

“I know what it is to exist between the world’s certainties.”

Conclave is my type of film - a load of men in dresses trading in gossip, voting by secret ballot, backstabbing each other and in general being as messy as humanly possible. 

In a lot of ways, Conclave is sublime. Conclave has easily some of the best cinematography that you will see in any film released in 2024. The score from Volker Bertelmann is terrific, and it very well may bag him his second Academy Award following on from All Quiet on the Western Front, his previous collaboration with Edward Berger. The writing is sharp and avoids melodrama for the most part. Crucially, the performances in Conclave are without exception all outstanding. Ralph Fiennes is magnetic and note-perfect as the director of the Papal election (and chief gossip collector) Cardinal Lawrence, a man haunted by his own demons and burdened by duty. Fiennes is rightly the frontrunner for next year’s Best Actor Academy Award, and though his best work will always be that in Schindler’s List, I would be very happy to see Fiennes finally anointed with an Oscar for Conclave. Elsewhere, Stanley Tucci is in his element, John Lithgow is devilishly seedy, and Isabella Rossellini steals the show as Sister Agnes, a nun rarely heard from but who speaks with earth shattering impact when she chooses to use her voice. 

Conclave is very good, but something was missing for me overall. It starts very strong and it ends even stronger, but I felt it lacked forward momentum for a stretch in the middle of the film. I’m not sure if I would necessarily have shortened Conclave to sub-100 minutes, but the pacing did undeniably slow down. I also would have preferred if Conclave explored more of the many, many cardinals who weren’t in contention for the Papacy, and for the film to spend some time exploring why they voted for who they voted for, what their individual beliefs were, etc. 

Overall though, Conclave is a film that is inherently interesting due to its unique premise and setting, and it’s a fairly gripping political chamber piece thriller that’s very good - but just not quite great.

Rewatch 1 (20/4/2025) - Rating changed 4 > 3.5

This is my first time rewatching No Time to Die since the original viewing in the cinema back in 2021, and though it’s still solid, it’s not quite as excellent as I ed it being. I think the excitement of the film being my first COVID film going experience probably affected my initial review. 

The pacing in No Time to Die is sluggish, and I don’t think the film needed to be pushing 3 hours long. The first hour in particular is very baggy and weighed down by endless MacGuffins and exposition. 

Still, I think it’s so badass that James Bond actually fuckin’ died. That’s so cool. If this is the last good 007 movie now that Amazon have usurped control of the franchise, then it could have gone out on a much worse note. 

—————

“We want to be told how to live and then die when we're not looking.”

wow. this was really unexpectedly terrific. 

I’m not the biggest Bond fan, and have only mildly liked 2/4 of Craig’s outings as 007. But I loved No Time To Die and it really was worth the wait. What a fantastic swan song for the greatest onscreen Bond. 

The movie is worth the price of ission alone for Ana De Armas’ Paloma, a sexy, funny and deadly agent. De Armas is used criminally little but makes a huge impact and I hope we see Paloma again in some form. 

Everyone is superb in NTTD - Lashana Lynch, Daniel Craig, Ralph Fiennes and Léa Seymour in particular - everyone but Rami Malek in one of the most dull Bond villains in memory. Just another run of the mill, cookie cutter villain with an Eastern European accent and what seems to be scurvy (based on Rami’s unique mouth shape). To be fair, Malek is barely used in an already bloated near 3 hour movie and is a distraction from what you came to see - Craig’s goodbye to the character he revitalised. 

If you go just for that, you won’t be disappointed. And see it on the biggest screen possible, it really was made for it.

And I also really loved the ending. I’m so excited for the first time in my life about the future of the 007 franchise.

“Anybody on our side hiding any shocking and fantastic abilities they'd like to disclose?”

Team Iron Man, by the way. I fail to see how anyone can justify being on Team Cap. 

With the release of the Marvel Rivals video game late last year, I’ve been more interested in revisiting the MCU than usual lately. Captain America: Civil War is very much amongst the best of the MCU, at least in the interconnected, overarching cinematic universe sense. It’s a pseudo-Avengers film with a great political thriller twist, it has incredible setpieces, and it introduces Chadwick Boseman’s brief but excellent take on Black Panther, and Tom Holland’s take on Spider-Man. 

The usual MCU issues are still here - namely, the overuse of quippy humour that take away from the stakes of the film - but I think Civil War does everything else so well that it doesn’t really matter. 

Let’s hope that this is the Russo Brothers we are getting with the next Avengers films - I’m not holding my breath.

“You keep dancin’ with the devil… one day he gon’ follow you home.”

(this is a non-spoiler review where I don’t directly discuss the twist/conceit of Sinners, in case people don’t know what it is - the first trailer was perfectly mysterious & the second sadly spoiled it for me)

Sinners is already a serious contender for my favourite film of 2025. Granted, it’s only April, but I think Sinners is so outstanding, so cinematic, so brutal, and so weighty from an emotional and social perspective that I cannot see it being omitted from my eventual Top 3 of the year list. 

Ryan Coogler… what a maestro. Coogler effortlessly crafts a film in Sinners that is haunting, evocative, terrifying, darkly comedic and genuinely powerful, all in one. Coogler is clearly paying reverence to that which came before within this genre of film, but he isn’t afraid to innovate either and to imbue a well-worn cinematic foundation with his own style and sensibilities. Coogler absolutely swings for the fences in Sinners, and it’s such a baller move that he talked David Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery into giving him $100m to make Sinners and also for the rights to return to him/his family in 2050. Coogler is forcing the audience he amassed with the Black Panther and Creed films to meet him on his own , in his unfiltered playground, within his point of view. It’s a type of filmmaking reserved for a select few auteurs these days (at least at this budget), and I’m very glad that Coogler knocked it out of the park. 

Coogler is the main key to Sinners’ success, but that isn’t to say that credit isn’t shared. Ludwig Göransson returns to work alongside Coogler yet again, and once again Göransson proves that he is perhaps the most exciting composer in cinema today. Göransson is seemingly incapable of not adapting to any genre, any director, any style; and his work in Sinners is excellent. Göransson‘s compositions are more subdued than say Black Panther, but when he really gets going he makes the film soar. A film so heavily revolving around music lives or dies on it’s composer, and Göransson does not let Sinners down. 

The actors are terrific across the board too. I’m not the biggest Michael B. Jordan fan - I think he has a tendency to overact, and he does at times here too - but he’s solid and does a good job at individualising the twins Smoke and Stack. Miles Caton is terrific in his debut on screen role (?!), and there is a one-take scene with him at the centre that is so transcendent and jawdropping that it stopped me in my tracks - you’ll know it when you see it. I also loved Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, and particularly Jack O’Connell who is best left undiscussed in a non-spoiler review. 

There’s so much else I loved about Sinners. I loved the unexpected Irish elements within the film - I confess to quietly singing along to “Wild Mountain Thyme” in the theatre, and I found the commentary on how the Irish have historically been pillaged and abused too, albeit by a religious organisation, to be fascinating. I loved the entire second half of the film - I was growing slightly impatient by the end of the first hour, not knowing where it was heading to, but that build up and foundational groundwork with these characters made the ending that much more powerful. I loved the Tarantino-esque ending sequence also. 

Sinners is spectacular, bottom line, and it demands to be seen in theatres on the biggest screen you can get to. Original, non-IP based big budget films sadly live or die on box office receipts, and this one deserves to be held up as an example of what an evolving moviegoing audience demands from studios in 2025. I’m going to try very hard not to rewatch this again before Halloween 2025, but I don’t know if I can resist.

“Be very careful… how you speak to me.”

I’ve been eagerly awaiting Magazine Dreams for literally years now. During the brief period when Jonathan Majors looked like the next big thing in Hollywood, when Magazine Dreams enjoyed rave Sundance reviews and a high profile distribution purchase by Disney Searchlight, I fully expected that Jonathan Majors would be a front runner for the Best Actor Oscar. 

How times have changed!

Jonathan Majors’ career is rightly in ruins due to his pathological violence and manipulative behaviour. His role as the central villain of the MCU has been snatched away, and along with it the existence of Kang the Conqueror in any MCU project. Disney shelved Magazine Dreams indefinitely, only to return the rights of the film to its filmmakers nearly a year after purchase. Despite finally now being released, I can honestly say that I have a better shot at being Academy Award nominated next year than Jonathan Majors. 

And all of the above is such a terrible shame, because Jonathan Majors is objectively excellent in Magazine Dreams. Majors’ work is phenomenal, from top to bottom in Magazine Dreams. The film itself is slightly above average, and clearly owes a debt to Taxi Driver, Joker, Whiplash, and Eminem’s “Stan”. But for whatever originality the film itself is lacking, Majors makes up for it with an absolutely insidious performance as Killian Maddox. Killian Maddox is violent, emotionally unstable, clearly mentally ill, and obsessive… all of which are also traits you could reasonably describe Jonathan Majors as having, which makes the entire film feel quite disturbing. I try to separate the art from the artist, but Majors is so good at playing someone so unhinged that you can’t help but wonder was there any acting required?

Magazine Dreams is a solid film revolving around a great performance. As mentioned, it’s not particularly original nor is it narratively unpredictable. At just over 2 hours long, it slightly overstays its welcome and repeats the same beats one too many times. I also found the ending to be a bit unsatisfactory. 

Jonathan Majors and Magazine Dreams is one of the biggest “what ifs?” in Hollywood from the last decade. I do believe that with a Disney Searchlight awards campaign, Majors’ rising star and his performance, Jonathan Majors could have etched out Sebastian Stan (in the Academy’s eyes) and made the 2025 Best Actor nominees list. What a waste.

“♪♪ Call on me… ♪♪“

Warfare is the first truly great film and transcendent theatrical experience of 2025. I loved it. 

Like Alex Garland’s Civil War from this time last year, Alex Garland (and Ray Mendoza’s) Warfare is a film that demands to be seen in the biggest, loudest theatrical screen you can get your hands on. The sound design in Warfare is second-to-none. Every shot fired is so thunderous and purposeful that I leapt out of my seat on a number of occasions (I watched this in Dolby). The various scenes of the American “show of force” were jawdropping visually and outstanding sonically - the seats in my auditorium literally shook with the raw power of American jets blasting above the houses. The sound design can go from suffocatingly hectic with a flurry of comms, screaming soldiers, gunfire, grenades, etc… to absolute silence, in a heartbeat. If nothing else, Warfare is a technical marvel. 

There’s a lot of uneasiness regarding the subject and perspective of Warfare, given it is about American troops during the pointless Iraq War back in 2006, told from the memories and viewpoint of the Americans who were there. I think it’s right to be critical of Warfare’s perspective, but I do feel like there was a lot of pre-judgement on the film too.

The American troops in Warfare are not heroes. They are an invading colonial-esque force who steal and destroy the home of an innocent Iraqi family, all in the name of some nonsense goal of “destroying terrorism” or getting revenge for a terrorist attack back on home soil committed by terrorists who weren’t from Iraq. And yet, Warfare isn’t really about the morality of the men in Alpha One - I believe it allows you to make your own judgements on that - Warfare is simply a recollection of what these men went through, and that was nothing other than horrific and hellacious. These men are not heroes, but they are not monsters either (even if their mission was pointless and destructive in the grand scheme of things). 

I felt genuine empathy for the men of Alpha One, despite my conviction that they are not heroes. At the end of the day, these were young men led astray by the toxic patriotism of the post-9/11 period who thought they were doing the right thing. The actors in Warfare are all incredible across the board, and this film feels like one we will look back on as being stacked with future megastars. Joseph Quinn is incredibly good, as is Cosmo Jarvis (my future husband, btw), and Charles Melton is sublime also. But it was Will Poulter and Kit Connor who really left an impression on me in Warfare. Poulter is the officer in charge of Alpha One, and his behavioural journey as the events of Warfare unfolded was fascinating. Kit Connor’s role is nearly wordless, but deeply effective nevertheless - the shock, fear and dazed look on Connor’s face is striking, and I felt such sympathy for him to the point where I almost cried. 

Warfare is one of the strongest war films I have seen in quite some time. It’s not perfect - the characterisation of the platoon is sparse (though understandable given the snappy runtime), and the viewpoint is clearly a dealbreaker for a considerable subset of the audience. But the technical prowess, the theatrical experience, and the perfomances in Warfare all make it an excellent film in my eyes, and I highly recommend catching it on a Dolby or IMAX screen before it’s too late.

“No, not the fingernails!”

Novocaine is essentially an idea masquerading as a feature film, and to be fair it’s a good idea! A revenge action comedy featuring a man who feels no pain chasing down his girl’s kidnappers with classic comic book violence and bloodshed? It does everything you need a film like Novocaine to do. And a great soundtrack too! (Chappell Roan! Caroline Polachek!)

But Novocaine just isn’t much more than it’s central concept, sadly. Jack Quaid does a solid job, but his increased exposure over the last few years has laid bare that he can seemingly only play the wisecracking nerd (Novocaine, The Boys) or an incel-ish creep (Scream, Companion) - it’s a performance that we’ve seen a number of times before from him. There’s also very little stakes in Novocaine. You know the protagonist cannot feel any pain, and inherently so there is no danger in the narrative. It doesn’t help that the central plot is so formulaic, and it ends exactly how you expect it will. More bafflingly, Novocaine reaches a natural conclusion at the 85 minute mark and yet it strangely continues for another 25 minutes only for a schmaltzy, saccharine ending for you to roll your eyes at. 

Maybe I’m being too harsh, but I thought Novocaine was ultimately forgettable bar the central conceit, and that’s a shame.

Rewatch 3 (13/4/2025)

I’ve been in a bit of a movie rut lately, with little desire to watch any (which I’m trying to convince myself is a healthy thing and that my made up Letterboxd figures are not that deep). One thing I have been watching has been Celebrity Big Brother UK, with Mickey Rourke being the biggest star of the season with all his latent homophobia, misogyny and senility. 

Rourke in Celebrity Big Brother has been so wild and unhinged that I couldn’t believe that this is the same guy who was arguably robbed of an Oscar for The Wrestler, so I needed to revisit this film and remind myself. 

What an absolute classic. Rourke is undeniably incredible as Randy, and the physicality he brings to the role and within the wrestling sequences is commendable. The Wrestler is tragic, poignant and moving, all in one, and it is wonderful. 

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“Have you ever seen a one trick pony in the field so happy and free? / If you've ever seen a one trick pony then you've seen me”.

The Wrestler has seemingly been forgotten in the 15 years since it released (as has it’s star Mickey Rourke who rode a wave of resurgence after the success of this film) - which is a shame because The Wrestler is one of the most emotionally provocative and deeply affecting films of the noughties. 

The Wrestler is an undeniable companion piece to Darren Aronofsky’s subsequent picture (and my favourite film of all time), Black Swan. Both films follow people who sacrifice everything for their respective art forms - the people in their lives, their bodies and ultimately themselves. Where The Wrestler differentiates itself is that Robin Ramzinksi is nothing without his alter ego, Randy “The Ram” Robinson. Whereas Nina Sayers desperately tries to become the character of the Black Swan, Robin is already completely consumed by the character of “The Ram” and cannot be without it, as doing so is a sober reminder of his failures as a real life person 

Mickey Rourke is incredible in The Wrestler, and it’s a role I cannot imagine anyone else in. Rourke is fully believable as a grizzled veteran wrestler and disappears fully in the character. Rourke also has stellar dramatic acting chops, helped in no small part by his scene partners Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood. The scenes with Evan Rachel Wood as Robin’s daughter are the emotional core of The Wrestler and they are quietly devastating. 

It’s a travesty that Mickey Rourke and this transcendent performance lost the Academy Award for Best Actor to Sean Penn in 2009. Cheap heat brother.

“ me, though I have to travel far…”

God, Coco still hits me like an emotional wrecking ball. What a great film. 

Gorgeous animation, beautifully representative and loving storytelling, wonderful music, great narrative… Coco really has it all. It’s a classic Pixar film, one with the perfect mix of sentimentality, humour, aesthetics and animation. It’s just so moving!

I don’t have much else to say - Coco is probably in my top 5 for Pixar films.

“When life gives you lemons, just say 'Fuck the lemons,' and bail.“

Insane Russell Brand jumpscare. Phoeey. 

It’s been almost three months since my 13 year relationship ended, and at least I can take solace in the fact (I hope) that I wasn’t as grovelling as Peter was in being dumped. Small mercies.

“As a child, I yearned for the mines.”

My opening day matinee screening of A Minecraft Movie was probably the strangest cinema experience I’ve ever had. The audience was a mix of kids/their parents and teenagers with sebum filled pores and complete ignorance to the existence of deodorant, and when the film ended the vast majority of my fellow moviegoers gave A Minecraft Movie an earnest standing ovation, whooping and hollering as the credits rolled (this is unheard of in Ireland - I didn’t even witness that kind of reaction for prime MCU films). 

I have a fondness for Minecraft which likely has influenced my opinion on A Minecraft Movie. Between 2012- 2014, Minecraft was everything to me, and rushing home from school to play for hours and hours with my schoolmates in our intricately curated worlds are some of my fondest video game memories.

Overall, I had fun with A Minecraft Movie! It’s not perfect, and I can see why critics and a subset of the audience aren’t responding to it (especially if you’ve never played the game), but I thought it was charmingly silly and appropriately reverent to the video game source material. 

If you dislike Jack Black or Jason Momoa and their similar styles of comedy, you’re not gonna enjoy A Minecraft Movie. I am a moderate fan of both of them, and their chemistry is undeniable - even when there’s not much there on the page, Black & Momoa make the lamest of exposition and dialogue work for the most part. In general, I found A Minecraft Movie to be surprisingly funny! Yes, it’s all very juvenile and very silly, but I would be lying if I said that I didn’t laugh quite a bit during the film - particularly during Jennifer Coolidge’s side plot. Coolidge is perfect casting for the comedic tone that A Minecraft Movie is going for, and every scene that she’s in is gold (though there are too few of them and she’s too disconnected from the main narrative).

A Minecraft Movie also does a stellar job at visualising the phenomenon that millions of people around the world have been obsessed with for a decade and a half. There’s zombies, skeletons on spiders, Endermen, redstone, torches, minecarts, mud huts, creepers, villagers… it’s pretty well translated for the most part. Minecraft also has some of the greatest and most iconic ambient music ever made, and I appreciated the nods to C418’s work. 

A Minecraft Movie does have issues, though. The emotional side of the narrative feels undercooked - the two kids’ parents have died (I think?) and they move to this new town and it’s never brought up again? Also, Jack Black’s Steve starts off strong but eventually becomes an exposition machine who endlessly verbalises what’s happening and what is on screen at all times, and it felt clunky. Though the world of Minecraft is paid homage to, that doesn’t mean that it always actually looks good - the lighting quite often makes no sense in relation to the placement of the sun, and the brightness of the daytime setting makes the soundstages more prominent and the artificiality of the environment very clear. Finally, it was disappointing to see the two female leads in A Minecraft Movie get so little to do other than chase after the boys - Minecraft is the rare game that has excelled with both genders, and this film feels very boy-centric. 

There are also criticisms to be levied against A Minecraft Movie for preaching the importance of creativity whilst being so uncreative in its plotting and execution, but look - I had a good time! I usually hate being in cinema crowds that are anything but silent, but it kinda worked for A Minecraft Movie. This is a silly film and it knows it is, and pretty much every kid who left the cinema after the film was telling their parents how much they loved it, and I think that’s cool. 

P.S. - the funniest film in the scene is right as the credits roll. Give Jennifer Coolidge her Oscar, dammit!

“What is it that you guys do?”
“Would you like to see?”

I was excited for Opus when I first heard of it’s existence - I love Ayo Edebiri, I ire A24’s consistent output of original films (even if they don’t always land), and I like the films that it is inspired by/rips off like Get Out, The Menu, Blink Twice, Midsommar, etc. 

However, the problem is that Opus is not nearly as coherent as any of the previously mentioned films, nor is it as intriguing, well written or mysterious as those films. Opus really lets itself down by being so scattershot and relying solely on “vibes”. There’s just not much to Opus, nevermind anything original. Edebiri’s character Ariel Ecton almost instantly feels that the vibes on the compound are off… because they are. John Malkovich’s Bowie-esque pop icon seems sinister… because he is.  It seems like people are going missing, being harmed, or worse on the compound… because they are. There’s precious little surprises in Opus. The third act of Opus completely transforms the film from a satire/mystery to a full blown thriller (undeservingly and jarringly so, I may add), and the closure on the story and the lack of reasoning for the events of the film felt frustrating. 

And yet, I didn’t hate Opus. The cast of actors give valiant efforts to carry the film, particularly Ayo Edebiri and John Malkovich who had really strong chemistry together. Malkovich reminded me of Nicolas Cage in Longlegs last year, as in Malkovich is so over the top and so hammy in Opus that I’m not sure whether or not he was overdoing it, but I am sure that it was at the very least fun to watch. 

I’m probably being overly generous by a half star for Opus, but I think I appreciate the effort more than the result (especially from Edebiri). I think we all, and especially A24, need to let the “invited to a rich person’s island and things go bad” subgenre rest for a while.

“Not everything that isn't true is a lie.”

Wow, I had forgotten all about The Entire History of You - in fact, I’m not sure if I’d ever even seen it before now. This is definitely the first episode where Black Mirror became the show it is (or at least was pre-Netflix), and it is now one of my favourites. 

How blessed are we to forget?

The Entire History of You has one of the most chilling dystopian concepts in any Black Mirror episode - what if you could rerun every moment of your life on demand? What if you could no longer rely on the comfort of your memory fading, of trauma being softened, of painful facts being distorted? It sounds on the surface not all that bad, but the thought of seeing in microscopic detail every facial expression, every awkward moment, and every muffled whisper is my version of hell. 

Toby Kebbell is so great in The Entire History of You. His ending made me stare silently at the black mirror of my iPad as the credits rolled, a sure sign of a stellar episode of the show.

“When you can lie about everything, when you can deny everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?”

I’ve never been the biggest fan of Steven Soderbergh’s films, and that hasn’t changed with Black Bag. 

I’m slightly shocked at the rave reviews that Black Bag has received - I found this to be a pretty dull affair indeed. Sure, it looks very pretty and it’s well crafted visually and technically, and sure the performances across the board are stellar… but when the pacing of Black Bag is this lethargic with a barely 90 minute runtime, then you have a problem. 

For a spy caper with a married couple suspecting each other of intermarital espionage, Black Bag just isn’t very fun! It’s all quite droll and restrained. It doesn’t help that the central mystery and the narrative itself is so uninteresting, either. 

Black Bag is a quintessential long flight movie, one sandwiched between two better ones that is destined to be forgotten before the wheels of the plane hits the tarmac at your destination. 

Great lighting, though.

Rewatch 1 (31/3/2025)

Netflix told me this was leaving the service after today, so I had to revisit Punch-Drunk Love. 

What a gorgeous, gorgeous film. It’s currently tied with There Will Be Blood as my favourite Paul Thomas Anderson picture. 

There’s so much empathy, sentimentality, romance, comedy and sadness in Punch-Drunk Love, all expertly derived from Adam Sandler’s career best performance. This is cinema, folks. 

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“I sometimes cry a lot for no reason.”

I’m humiliated that it has taken me until now to watch Punch-Drunk Love for the first time. I absolutely adored this film, and I look forward to rewatching it again because I have a feeling it may well be a perfect film. 

Punch-Drunk Love is so whimsical and romantic that I found myself swooned by it fairly quickly. Paul Thomas Anderson’s direction is masterful as ever even early in his career, with some truly gorgeous cinematography from Robert Elswit and a noticeably beautiful score from Jon Brion that both assist in Punch-Drunk Love being one of my favourite PTA films (that I’ve seen). 

However, I don’t think this film would work as well as it does without Adam Sandler and everything he provides to the characterisation of Barry Egan. Punch-Drunk Love is the greatest performance in Sandler’s career, slightly edging out Uncut Gems in my eyes because there’s no real comedic crutch. Sandler is fascinating here; he plays arguably the same archetype he’s played so many times before - the socially inept “weirdo” with anger issues - but it is not in the slightest played for laughs in Punch-Drunk Love, and it allows the viewer to empathise and connect with Barry as a person struggling with what is almost certainly his Autism and/or crippling social anxiety issues. Barry as a character was so compelling because he is so often betrayed and deceived by others - his sisters who antagonise him, the call girl business, the male friend who betrays his moment of vulnerability - and yet he remains optimistic and kindhearted, unless someone he loves is mistreated and he flies off the handle. Barry is a truly selfless character and Adam Sandler knocked it out of the park. 

I really can’t wait to watch Punch-Drunk Love again, and I’m just so sorry I went this long in complete ignorance to its greatness.

Rewatch 1 (30/3/2025) - Rating changed 2.5 > 3

This is my first rewatch of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness since release weekend, and I’ll it to being slightly too harsh on the film (largely due to my disappointment at what it omitted and ignored from WandaVision, which isn’t a fully fair critique of the film at hand). 

I still don’t think Multiverse of Madness is great, though. There are some all-time worst wigs onscreen here, particularly for Doctor Strange, and the COVID production elements are unignorable - terrible green screen, a complete lack of tactility for the human actors in the digitised environments, actors who are clearly not physically present in scenes together (The Illuminati).

But there’s still good stuff here. I appreciated much more this time around the Raimi-isms within Multiverse of Madness, and the horror elements really excel. Elizabeth Olsen is the star of the film, and she arguably brings the most gravitas to her character than anyone in the entire MCU. It’s a fun film, but one that would have worked better if it was the same Wanda we were invested in after WandaVision. 

—————

“You break the rules and become a hero, I do it and I become the enemy… that doesn't seem fair.”

It’s getting harder and harder to review these MCU movies without entering spoiler territory, although I will try (despite the ads showing everything noteworthy already). 

Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness is an amalgamation of about 5 different films - a Sam Raimi horror pic (where it works best), another entry in the MCU canon, a Doctor Strange sequel, a WandaVision sequel, and a multiverse film. Therefore, it doesn’t truly nail any of those attempts and ends up being a mess of half baked ideas. It’s another middling entry in the MCU’s troubled Phase 4. 

DSITMOM works best as a Sam Raimi feature - perhaps his direction even overpowers the film at times. It is genuinely scary in parts - I’m surprised it got it’s 12A rating. It’s also filled with unique camera angles and a terrific Danny Elfman score which help it stand out from the MCU pack. Raimi does a good job making the film his own. 

However, pretty much everything else is lacklustre. 

Wanda is completely butchered as a character, as if her development in the fantastic WandaVision didn’t even happen at all. Olsen is phenomenal in the role but was dealt a shitty hand by the creatives here. I also felt the lack of Paul Bettany’s Vision in any multiverse was a shame - it was jarring to see how little he was even mentioned given how deep her love is for him too. 

The comedy is awful - even worse than usual for MCU films. “The Illumi-whatty?” line was diabolical and I’m not sure why the writers think Benedict Cumberbatch is capable of pulling off the Tony Stark-esque quips when he’s really painfully not. 

The subplots and pacing leave a lot to be desired too. I don’t care about Stephen Strange and Christine Palmer’s relationship and this film spent way too much thinking that that emotional beat would resonate, when it really didn’t. The film also considerably slowed whenever Wanda wasn’t on screen and there are so many McGuffin’s I lost count. 

The biggest sin DSITMOM commits, however, was completely wasting the multiverse concept. The multiverse is finally introduced and what we get is a few mild cameos and a New York City with red-means-go traffic lights and a lot more greenery? Really?

All in all, another enjoyable (albeit deeply flawed) go on the MCU merry-go-round. Phase 4’s most interesting project being so mediocre doesn’t fill me with excitement for the future of this cinematic universe.

Rewatch 2 (29/3/2025)

I was on a staycation by the coast of Ireland with my friend this weekend and she hadn’t seen Anora, so we had to throw it on so she could understand what the hype was all about…

Yup, still a masterpiece! It honestly gets better with every viewing. Unbelievably funny, devastatingly sad, and riotously enjoyable throughout… it’s one of the most inspired Best Picture winners of the 21st Century in my eyes. 

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Rewatch 1 (31/12/2024)

This rewatch of Anora is my 300th film logged for 2024, and it will also be my last as I want to end on a clean cut number. Happy New Year everyone! 🎉

Anora is sublime, pure and simple. It’s a heartbreaking, hilarious, honest and horrific insight into the abuse, exploitation and life of Ani, and it is without a doubt in contention for my favourite film of 2024. Mikey Madison is revelatory in Anora, and from what I’ve seen this year I would be shocked if she doesn’t walk out of The Oscars with the Best Actress award in her hands. 

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“Toosh.”

I love all of Sean Baker’s films, and I think he is a singular talent in American independent cinema today. The Florida Project is in my top 5 films of the 2010’s, Red Rocket is superb, as is Tangerine. Baker’s penchant to shine a light on marginalised American communities (immigrants, sex workers, impoverished communities) is his greatest asset, and I love that he does so without ever ing judgement or exploiting these marginalised people. 

That all being said, it was safe to say that I was excited for Anora already, but with it being the most acclaimed Sean Baker film to date in the film festival circuit and even winning this year’s Palme d’Or, I genuinely couldn’t wait to finally catch Anora (my first Sean Baker film in cinemas). 

Anora is not only fighting for the top spot as my favourite film of 2024, but in time I can even see it challenging The Florida Project as Sean Baker’s magnum opus. What an incredible cinematic achievement. 

Anora is a lot of thing simultaneously - a fairytale whirlwind romance, a rags-to-riches tale in the vein of Pretty Woman, an angst-ridden nailbiter like Uncut Gems, an incredibly funny madcap comedy, a character portrait of a service worker being cruelly exploited, and so much more. In the hands of lesser auteurs, Anora would not work; but Sean Baker pulls it off expertly. Baker’s script in Anora may be his most accomplished to date - the dialogue is vivacious but never anything less than authentic, and his characters leap off the screen with personality and humanity. Baker once again shines an almost documentarian light on a marginalised person in Anora, and his ability to capture her life and personality in all its peaks and valleys is spectacular. 

Sean Baker deserves immense credit for the success of Anora, but equal credit must be given to the titular Anora, Mikey Madison. Madison’s turn in Anora demands to be her star-making, Oscar nominated breakout, and I will accept nothing less. Madison is incredible in Anora, and so much is demanded from her - a Brooklyn accent, Russian dialogue, to be sexy (easy work), to be funny, to be chaotic, to scream, to cry, to make us feel for her as the audience - and she does everything demanded of her to absolute perfection. Madison’s final scene in Anora in particular was transcendent; no spoilers, but her vulnerability and pain were palpable, and Anora is very much a tale of two scenes (opening and closing). 

A key ingredient to Sean Baker’s success is his use of non-actors/relative unknown actors in key and ing roles in his films, often from the marginalised communities depicted, which always adds a layer of authenticity to his stories. Even by Baker’s standards, he knocks it out of the park in Anora. Mark Eydelshteyn is great as Anora’s sudden husband Ivan (once you look past his atrocious Xbox controller acting - yikes!), and Karren Karagulian (Toros) and Vache Tovmasyan (Garnick) are stellar too. But it’s Yura Borisov (Igor) who steals the show in a ing role - Igor is quite often hilarious, but he develops from bald henchman initially to something much more poignant and fascinating by the time the credits rolled, and it is one of my favourite ing performances of the year. 

I usually give masterful films a 4.5 upon initial viewing, but I’m taking the leap of faith and giving Anora its masterpiece accolade now for a number of reasons. It’s a long film and I did feel its runtime, but I never once was anything other than glued to the screen. Anora is also easily the funniest film I have seen in 2024, and it was also one of the most enjoyable cinema going experiences I have had in a while too - everyone was laughing heartily at all the right moments, and that ending stunned us all into a stony silence to the point where no one got out of their chair to leave for at least 20 seconds into the credits. That is cinematic gold, to me. Also, any film with Take That on the soundtrack is an automatic masterpiece.

2024 is genuinely shaping up to be a generational year for cinema.

“Aren’t you lucky?”

Pretty dreadful stuff. 

I’m so disappointed by Holland just because of how wasted the efforts by Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen, Gael García Bernal were. Even modern day Princess Diana Rachel Sennott is let down by such a lumpen and baffling script!

Holland is utterly uninteresting, plain and simple. The themes, the narrative, the “mystery”, the psychological thriller elements… they’re all so tired and so well trodden, and Holland brings nothing new to the table. Holland is a film all over the place for 90% of its runtime, and it doesn’t even stick the landing after all that. It is a complete waste of time, a complete squandering of solid performances, and a complete bore. 

Don’t Worry Darling looks like Citizen Kane compared to Holland.

“I’m sorry, son. I should’ve done better.”

I finished Adolescence in a four hour straight, glued to the television binge about an hour ago, and I am still crying. 

Wrap it up - the race for the best television show of 2025 is now over. 

Adolescence is outstanding, in every single way. From a technical standpoint, it is an absolute marvel - I have zero idea how they pulled off four 1 hour long one take episodes. I was desperately trying to find the hidden cuts within the seams of the episodes, and I really could not. It is stunning. But the one take stylistic approach is no gimmick, and it never once lets you have a moment of respite from the chilling horrors of the central story at hand, and it feels purposely and effectively oppressive. 

The performances in Adolescence are also sublime. Stephen Graham is heartbreaking as Eddie Miller, the father of the accused killer who is left wondering what he could have done to save his son, whether or not he should have spoke up during football in defence of his son, whether or not he should have done more… it’s the anchor performance of Adolescence, and Graham’s final scene is one of the most devastating scenes I have seen since the ending of Normal People back in 2020. 

It is Owen Cooper as Jamie, the 13 year old accused murderer, whose performance I’m sure will linger with me for a long time to come. It is astonishing that this is Cooper’s first ever on screen performance, and in a one take TV show too. Cooper never puts a single foot wrong in Adolescence - he is cold blooded, incendiary, childlike, and deeply sympathetic all in one fell swoop. Jamie is accused of committing a heinous act, but Cooper’s performance still allowed for sympathy to be felt for Jamie because of how warped his mind has become by the internet that Millenials and Boomers have allowed to babysit Gen Z since they were iPad kids in the early 2010s. 

Adolescence is one of the most terrifying and insidious TV shows I have ever seen, to the point where I think I will struggle to sleep tonight. It is utterly disturbing to look into the abyss and stare at what we as a society have allowed to happen to Gen Z boys and men - their vilification and rampant misogyny towards women, their crushing self-loathing, their worth only coming from dominating women, being a “sigma”, and mimicking charlatans like Andrew Tate. An entire generation of boys and men have arguably reached a point of no return, and it’d make your blood turn cold. 

Give Adolescence all the awards.

“Friendship means little when it's convenient.”

The John Wick films undeniably jump the shark in Chapter 4 (if they hadn’t already). John Wick: Chapter 4 is completely bonkers and utterly preposterous. The titular John Wick is essentially a Marvel superhero in this film with his bulletproof suit, generous gun magazines, and surviving falling down 100’s of stairs, jumping from a 3 storey tall building, getting hit with at least 12 different speeding cars, etc. 

And yet… John Wick: Chapter 4 may well be my favourite entry in the entire series. This film may be obscenely silly, but it is also crafted near-flawlessly and has some of the most propulsive and exciting action sequences I have ever seen. 

My central misgiving with John Wick: Chapter 4 is that it has absolutely no business being nearly 3 hours long, and such a long runtime for a film as frenetic as John Wick: Chapter 4 makes the film feel slightly exhausting. It’s not like there isn’t fat to trim either - I would have gotten rid of that entire techno nightclub sequence with the fat guy and his silver tooth, personally. 

Other than the excessive length of John Wick: Chapter 4, I had a blast. I’m not the biggest Keanu Reeves fan (hot take - I think he’s very wooden), but John Wick is his character and I give him kudos for his incredible stunt work. And imagine my surprise to see “Comme Des Garçons” chanteuse and Dublin Pride 2022 headliner Rina Sawayama in this film too?! That’s mother, I wish she came back later after her abrupt exit from the film. Also, if I had a euro for everytime Donnie Yen played a badass fighter who happened to be blind, I’d have €2… which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it happened twice. Finally, Bill Skarsgård does what he does best in John Wick: Chapter 4 - playing a villain with an interesting accent very well. 

The stories of these John Wick films and Chapter 4 are fine… to be honest, it’s been the same story for the last two films, but whatever. It is the stunt work, the fight choreography and the fight sequences that make the John Wick films soar, and my God are they amazing in Chapter 4. Every punch, every bullet fired, every katana swing… all of it is meticulously planned and orchestrated, and it’s simply breathtaking. The sequence set at the Arc de Triomphe in John Wick: Chapter 4 is probably my favourite in any of these films - it was unbelievably creative, enthralling, and silly. 

I sadly knew the ending of John Wick: Chapter 4 going into it, and I’m sour that I didn’t see this in cinema, but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of watching this for the first time. I think John Wick: Chapter 4 is probably a 3.5 in my book because I just can’t look past the bloated runtime and the dodgy CGI background during the film’s climactic moments… but I just had too much fun to not give it a 4 for the batshit final 60 minutes alone. 

If this is the last mainline John Wick film (I doubt it personally), what a swan song to finish up on. I’m eager to see Ballerina this summer now, especially given that Chad Stahelski reportedly pseudo-directed the film during extensive reshoots. I hope it’s solid!

“The faker the fodder, the more you love it, because fake fodder's the only thing that works any more!”

Ooft, this one is bleak! I had forgotten all about it. 

I really liked the cynicism of Fifteen Million Merits, and the aim being on satirising/critiquing the endless stream of sob story filled reality shows that Simon Cowell made famous in the U.K. and Ireland, mixed with messaging about the commodification of absolutely everything in modern day society (which is even more so now in 2025 than back in 2011). 

Fifteen Million Merits doesn’t come together as cleanly as later Black Mirror entries like Nosedive, but it’s still solid, particularly with the incredible central performance by Daniel Kaluuya.

It’s New Year’s Eve! 🎉

Time for my fourth annual ranking of the films of the year, this time for 2024.

This is based on the films released in 2024 or competing in awards season 2025.

1. The Substance
2. Challengers
3. Dune: Part Two
4. Anora
5. Queer
6. Nosferatu
7. The Brutalist
8. Sing Sing
9. The Wild Robot
10. Nickel Boys

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

It’s New Year’s Eve! 🥳

Time for my third annual end of year ranking of the films I’ve seen that released in 2023/are competing in the 2024 awards season.

1. Oppenheimer
2. The Zone of Interest
3. The Iron Claw
4. Anatomy of a Fall
5. Rotting in the Sun
6. All of Us Strangers
7. Godzilla Minus One
8. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
9. Past Lives
10. The Holdovers

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

It’s New Years Eve, which means it’s time for my second ever list, my annual end of year ranking of the films I’ve seen in 2022.

This is all based on my own personal enjoyment of each. There was so many great films this year that I have chosen 15 rather than the usual 10!

1. The Banshees of Inisherin
2. The Batman
3. TÁR
4. All Quiet on the Western Front
5. Everything Everywhere All at Once
6. Bodies Bodies Bodies
7. Barbarian
8. Nope
9. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
10. Elvis

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

It’s New Years Eve! So I’m gonna rank my top 10 from the year - this is all personal choice. 

To be clear, however, I’ve not seen every single notable movie this year (yet) due to work commitments and restrictions/release dates being different in Ireland, including the following as of list creation:

West Side Story
Titane
The Lost Daughter
The Power of the Dog
The Green Knight
Cmon, Cmon
Nightmare Alley
Encanto
Zola
The Tragedy of Macbeth
Licorice Pizza
The Last Duel

1. Dune
2. Sound of Metal
3. The Father
4. Luca
5. Bo Burnham: Inside
6. Promising Young Woman
7. Red Rocket
8. Spider-Man: No Way Home
9. Judas and the Black Messiah
10. tick, tick... BOOM!