# A Profound Journey — full corpus
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## hydrate-fm: on-device RAG, no signal, in a Norfolk field
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/hydrate-fm-on-device-rag
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/hydrate-fm-on-device-rag.md
- published: 2026-08-10
- document_id: 1246
> I took a Vision Pro into the Norfolk marshland with no mast and no Wi-Fi, and asked a 4,096-token on-device model questions about Douglas Adams. How hydrate-fm wraps a tiny model in a context engine, what a hydration pack actually is, and the arithmetic behind the demo.
I filmed this in the marshland between Castle Rising and Sandringham, in Norfolk, because I needed somewhere with no mast and no plausible way to cheat. Aeroplane mode on, Wi-Fi not connected, a Vision Pro on my head and a herd of cows for an audience.
[](/images/articles/technology/hydrate-fm/airplane-mode.jpg)
*Aeroplane mode on, Wi-Fi not connected. Everything after this point happens on the headset.*
What is running is a thing I have been building since July, called hydrate-fm. It wraps a very small on-device language model in a context engine, hands it a portable file full of expert knowledge, and lets it answer as though it knew the subject. In the video it answers questions about Ford Prefect out of the complete works of Douglas Adams, then swaps to Shakespeare, with no network at any point.
This is the long version of that video: what the thing is, where it came from, and the numbers behind it.
## Where this came from
For the last few years I have been building an enterprise-class RAG platform called siteengine_ai. Retrieval augmented generation, if you have not met the acronym, is the machinery that lets a language model answer from your documents rather than from whatever it absorbed in training. You take your content, chunk it, embed it, index it, and at question time you go and fetch the passages that actually bear on the question and hand them to the model along with the prompt.
There is no magic in that, in theory. In practice it is an enormous amount of work, and it is why these systems are usually enterprise systems. The honest measure of that is not a cost estimate, it is the dependency list. siteengine_ai needs Postgres, optionally a second Postgres pool for conversation data, Dgraph for the knowledge graph, a generation LLM, at least one embedding provider, and up to five separately configured ONNX roles for query intent, sentiment, complexity, a reranker gate and a cross-encoder reranker. Every one of those is a thing that has to be running, configured and paid for before anybody gets an answer.
About six months ago agentic memory became a thing, and it turned out the RAG platform was sitting in exactly the right place for it. I had already trained the system to hold experts, each with a corpus of knowledge and a written voice of its own. Then I taught those experts to play The Traitors.
That sounds like a party trick and it was, at first. To play the game an expert has to know a great deal, and then hold one fact as true while presenting a different one to the table. Building that is where you stop thinking about retrieval and start thinking about how a mind actually holds things: what it keeps in full, what it keeps as a gist, and what it quietly lets go of.
Which led to Hydrate, the memory system, and the reason I care about forgetting.
[](/images/articles/technology/hydrate-fm/slide-forgetting.jpg)
*Perfect recall is a bug. In Hydrate the metaphor maps onto three separate mechanisms.*
If you had perfect recall you would go insane. It is fine to remember what you had for dinner last night. In a month you do not need the type of fish, or whether you had tartare sauce or chip shop gravy. You keep "we eat out on Fridays" and you drop the rest.
In the code that homely idea is three distinct mechanisms, and I would rather name them than let the metaphor do work it has not earned. Compression is precomputed: distillation writes the raw transcript chunk plus a 32-word summary, a 16-word summary and key facts, all at once, and they coexist. Decay is a retrieval weight, not a rewrite: a session's strength falls as `S' = max(0.01, S x e^(-rate x days))` once more than a day passes without a recall, a recall adds 0.1 back capped at 1.0, and anything under 0.1 stops being retrieved at all. Transcript chunks move through fresh, ageing, faded and archived at 14, 60 and 180 days, checked daily. The third mechanism, the one that produces "we eat out on Fridays", is a separate synthesis pass that looks for patterns spanning multiple sessions, requires cited session ids for every pattern it proposes, and drops anything uncited. A year passing does not turn one meal into a habit. Repeated evidence does.
Then I built the hydration pack, which is where this gets portable. A pack is everything one mind knows, its written voice and its persona, in a single file. Give a colleague on the other side of the world your pack for a project and their agent picks up where yours left off, and it does not matter that you are on Claude Code and they are on Codex.
Agentic memory is everywhere now. Everyone has one. What I have not seen is anybody building one on top of an enterprise-class RAG platform, and that gap is the whole opportunity.
## Then Apple shipped a model with a six-page memory
At the 2026 Worldwide Developer Conference, in among the noise, Apple shipped Foundation Models. From this autumn, every Apple device updated to the current operating system carries an on-device LLM that any developer can call. No install, no API key, no marginal cost, and it works with the network off. For anyone building on a sovereignty pitch, that is not another provider on a list. It is a floor you can assume.
It also has a problem.
[](/images/articles/technology/hydrate-fm/slide-4k-vs-1m.jpg)
*The bars are drawn to true ratio. At 1920 pixels wide, 4,096 tokens is about seven of them.*
Claude Code on Opus runs a one million token context window. Two years ago 250,000 felt enormous. Apple's on-device model has 4,096 tokens, which is roughly six pages, and the ratio to a frontier window is 244 to 1. The bar in that slide is drawn honestly at seven pixels because the absurdity is the point.
It gets tighter. The model has no access to the device it lives on. It sees the prompt and nothing else, so the whole problem reduces to what you choose to put in six pages.
I confirmed the 4,096 figure myself rather than taking the documentation on trust, and the engine queries it at runtime and adapts, because hardcoding someone else's number is how you get a surprise a year later.
There is a harder finding underneath it. Driven naively, a 4K model is not merely limited, it is unreliable. In my Phase 0 bake-off only 73% of real RAPTOR clusters fit its window at all, and on the ones that did, roughly 48% of its summaries were judged hallucinated by a panel. Asked to select its own relevant context it scored 0.47 recall, which makes it worse than useless as a selection stage. It does hold one seat well: as a drift veto and judge it scored 0.900 against gpt-4o-mini's 1.000, for free, on device.
So the model is worth wrapping precisely because, unwrapped, it is worth very little.
## The idea
I had a RAG platform, I understood context, and I understood memory. So wrap the small model in the substrate and give it an effectively unbounded store to draw on, then pre-bundle the experts I had already built so the thing on your phone or your headset arrives knowing something.
The model stays at 4,096 tokens. It never grows. What changes is that every single turn, code decides what those 4,096 tokens are spent on, assembles a fresh prompt within a hard budget, and throws the whole thing away afterwards. The model is stateless by design: a new session per call, never an accumulated transcript. The store is the transcript.
## What a pack actually is
[](/images/articles/technology/hydrate-fm/slide-pack.jpg)
*A pack is one SQLite file: corpus, voice and persona, with its own indexes and vectors.*
A hydration pack is a single SQLite database holding a corpus, a voice profile and a persona profile. Inside are the sections of text with their precomputed 64-word and 16-word summaries, a vector for every section, an FTS5 index over the text, the RAPTOR hierarchy of summaries, an entity graph, and a manifest that declares which embedding model produced the vectors and at what dimension. The reader refuses a query vector of any other length, which is a small rule that prevents a whole class of silent nonsense.
The two packs in the video are real exports. Shakespeare is 61,412 sections at about 239 MB. Douglas Adams is 10,693 sections at about 44.8 MB. Shakespeare's raw vector matrix alone is 61,412 x 384 x 4 bytes, which is a shade under 90 MiB; the rest is text, summaries, indexes and SQLite overhead.
Packs come in three flavours. A frozen pack is public, read-only and always answers from its corpus. A snapshot pack is a point-in-time floor with device memory accreting on top. A living pack is a notebook that bakes exchanges back in. One deliberate omission: the persona profile in a pack carries identity and disposition but not the deception machinery that taught me how memory works in the first place. A file that leaves my machine and lands on yours should carry what a mind knows, not how it lies.
## The demonstrator
The app is native visionOS. Retrieval, embedding and generation all happen on the headset.
[](/images/articles/technology/hydrate-fm/fm-rome.jpg)
*Apple's Foundation Model, on device, answering from its own knowledge. Its whole world is 4,096 tokens.*
Start simple and the small model manages on its own. Then swap the generator.
[](/images/articles/technology/hydrate-fm/pack-picker.jpg)
*Ministral 3B answering, with the pack picker open. Nothing was downloaded and no server was asked.*
That is Ministral, Mistral's on-device family, three billion parameters, running inside the app on the headset's own silicon through MLX. The engine does not care which model sits in that seat. Mistral matters here for a reason beyond the technology: they're the credible European alternative to the American and Chinese frontier labs, and in the EU that is a legal question as much as a commercial one.
The three glyphs are packs. Loading one is how you hand a small model an expert.
[](/images/articles/technology/hydrate-fm/rag-panel.jpg)
*The RAG inspector, open. Twenty-four passages retrieved by meaning, twenty-one used in the prompt, 2,966 tokens assembled.*
Every passage in that panel is real Douglas Adams, pulled out of the pack by meaning rather than by keyword. The query is embedded on the device by a bundled MiniLM model, 384 dimensions, mean pooled and unit normalised, and scored against every section vector in the pack with a vDSP matrix multiply. If embedding fails the app falls back to full-text search, and if that finds nothing it falls back to the RAPTOR overview nodes. A look never fails outright; it degrades.
[](/images/articles/technology/hydrate-fm/ford-prefect-answer.jpg)
*The answer, built from the passages on the left. The model did not know any of this before, and still does not.*
Nothing has been added to the model. The knowledge arrives in the prompt and leaves with it.
## How 4,096 tokens go that far
[](/images/articles/technology/hydrate-fm/slide-arithmetic.jpg)
*The budget, with the frozen voiced example worked through.*
The assembler starts from `B = W - R - M - I`. W is the window. R is the response reserve, 500 tokens held back so the model has room to answer. M is a safety margin of one eighth of the window, 512 tokens, because my tokeniser and Apple's do not agree exactly and I would rather waste a little than truncate a prompt. I is the WordPiece count of the system preamble, 58 tokens for the frozen voiced example. That leaves 3,026 tokens of usable budget.
Persona takes at most 12% of that, capped at 300, so 300, of which roughly 55% goes to identity and biography. The corpus gets the remainder, 2,726 tokens, and the assembler packs it best-first: highest scoring passage in, then the next, until one will not fit. Assembly refuses outright below 200 tokens rather than pretending.
Then the prompt is built in a fixed order: system preamble, persona, reference material, the user's message. Every turn. From scratch.
## What the numbers on screen actually mean
The whole argument here is that a model should not be allowed to make things up, so a misread number in my own telemetry would be the one fatal error.
"21/24 in prompt" means exactly twenty-four passages were retrieved and twenty-one had `included == true` when the budget filled. The other three stay in the trace so I can see what was dropped. It is not twenty-one tokens, or twenty-one chunks searched, or twenty-one relevant results.
"2966 tok" is an estimate of instructions plus assembled prompt, and on the visionOS build it is computed as characters divided by three, not with Apple's real tokeniser. The fixed outer allowance there is 4,096 minus 900 minus 160, so 3,036, and 2,966 sits 70 estimated tokens under it. Close, and deliberately so.
The scores, 0.690, 0.621, 0.579, are cosine similarities to three decimal places: how close the passage is to the question in meaning. They are not confidence. A viewer who reads 0.690 as "69% sure" has learned something false.
## When it will not fit, it does not fail
[](/images/articles/technology/hydrate-fm/slide-degradation.jpg)
*The fidelity ladder, and the pack-chat overflow order.*
This is the technique I took from Apple's own guidance on writing for a small window, and it is the part I am fondest of. Rather than refusing when the material will not fit, the assembler gives up detail one rung at a time: full passage text, then 64-word summaries, then 16-word summaries, then a single budget-truncated line, and only then nothing. It steps down a rung only when the best available hit will not fit at the current tier, and within a tier it packs greedily and stops at the first passage that will not go in.
The conversational side has its own order of sacrifice: the consulted-pack block goes first, then the corpus tail, then conversation memory, and the floor is the bare query on its own. Something always comes back.
## The local twin
[](/images/articles/technology/hydrate-fm/slide-twin.jpg)
*Same brain, swapped substrate.*
None of the retrieval logic in the headset is new. It is the engine from the server product with the substrate swapped underneath: SQLite instead of Postgres, a pack instead of a graph database, MiniLM on the device instead of a hosted embedding provider, and Apple's model or Ministral instead of a server LLM.
The server assembler builds context from five prioritised layers with default maxima of 200 tokens for conversation state, 600 for working memory, 300 for facts, 800 for episodic memory and 100 for active entities, under a 2,000 token ceiling. State and working memory are never dropped; the rest compress under pressure. When a request is backed by the on-device model, the speed tier is clamped to `fast` before retrieval even starts, because the expensive stages would build context the window cannot hold.
That is the whole trick, if there is one. I did not write a small system. I took a large one and gave it a smaller floor to stand on.
## The same engine, on the command line
[](/images/articles/technology/hydrate-fm/hfm-cli.jpg)
*hfm on the Mac. Same engine, no headset required.*
The headset is the demonstration; the command line is where I actually live. `hfm` presents like Apple's own `fm` tool and adds memory, packs, an agent loop with shell and file tools, and a `compare` command that runs the raw model and the wrapped model side by side so I can see what the substrate is buying. It can also see: `hfm see` runs on-device description, deterministic Apple Vision OCR, or an optional Python sidecar for detection and a second-opinion vision model.
## What it does not do
The model still only ever sees 4,096 tokens. "Unbounded" describes the store and the repeated retrieval, not the attention span. Anything retrieval misses on a given turn is invisible to that turn, and the ultimate fallback is a memoryless bare query.
Retrieval and compression are lossy on purpose. The pack considers 32 candidates on the Go path and 24 on the headset, it may fall from semantic to lexical to overview retrieval, it may swap full text for summaries, and it stops packing at the first passage that will not fit.
The headset build is behind the Go engine. It hardcodes 4,096 rather than querying it, estimates tokens as characters over three, exposes only the full and 64-word rungs of the ladder, and keeps transcripts in app memory without the store's distillation. Its heads-up display still reports persona, memory and corpus token fields as zero even though the prompt total is real.
And there is a bug baked into the footage. Both personas open with a flourish, "Ah, splendid!" for Adams and "Ah, fair Juliet" for Shakespeare, which is the persona layer talking rather than the corpus. A sceptical viewer could read that as the model improvising. It is not, but I would rather point at it than hope nobody notices.
None of this ships today. It is a demonstrator, it runs on a beta operating system, and I have been careful throughout to show the working rather than the outcome.
## Why I bothered
Three ecosystems now ship a first-party on-device small language model behind a public developer API. This is not an Apple story, it is a platform shift, and the bottleneck is the same everywhere: no memory, a tiny window, no domain knowledge. That is exactly the gap the engine fills.
I am not racing the frontier labs on intelligence and I would lose if I tried. The axis I am competing on is privacy, offline operation, cost, ownership and depth in a subject. A small model with the right context beats a large model with none, and the right context is an engineering problem, not a parameter count.
Where it goes next is more interesting to me than the demo. I have a pack of the manual and the marque history for my classic car, a subject I know nothing about, and on the phone the same engine can see what I see, so I can point the camera at an engine bay and ask. The Vision Pro cannot do that yet. The phone can.
Further out is the use I actually think about. The one prospect that frightens most people I know is losing their memory. An assistant that sees what you see, hears what you hear and holds the details you have dropped is science fiction furniture, but the components are on the shelf now: a small model that runs locally, a corpus that lives in a file you own, and retrieval good enough to be trusted with a name at a wedding. To have that when it is needed, it has to exist and be ordinary long before. Perhaps you make a pack of yourself and leave it to your children, and the ethics of that are a conversation I am not going to settle in a paragraph.
I came out to a Norfolk field with no signal to make one point, and the cows were the only witnesses. An expert I own, in a file, answered a question about Douglas Adams with no network, no account and nothing leaving the device. Everything in it is sovereign to me.
If a single developer can build that on a beta operating system in a month, what does the same idea look like when the autumn releases land and every updated device is already carrying the model?
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## Disclosure Day (2026)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-disclosure-day
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-disclosure-day.md
- published: 2026-06-19
- document_id: 1236
> Spielberg comes home to the alien picture with Emily Blunt, John Williams and a head full of his own back catalogue. Beautifully made, generous, and then it cheats you at the door. 6.5/10.
- **UK release:** June 2026
- **Director:** Steven Spielberg · **Writer:** David Koepp (screenplay), Steven Spielberg (story)
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; Amblin Entertainment
- **Genre:** Science fiction thriller · **Runtime:** 145 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Emily Blunt (*A Quiet Place*, *Oppenheimer*) as Margaret Fairchild; Josh O'Connor (*The Crown*, *Challengers*) as Dr Daniel Kellner; Colin Firth (*The King's Speech*, *Kingsman: The Secret Service*) as Noah Scanlon; Colman Domingo (*Rustin*) as Hugo Wakefield
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 80% critics / 75% audience · **IMDb:** still settling in its opening week · **My rating:** 6.5 / 10
Spielberg making a film about first contact is not news so much as a homecoming. This is the man who gave us the mothership over Devils Tower and the bicycle against the moon, and *Disclosure Day* is sold, openly, as his return to that register after years away in courtrooms, war and his own childhood. The trailer promised the old awe, John Williams is back on the podium, and the title tells you the whole pitch: the day the secret stops being a secret. I went in wanting to believe, and for a long stretch I did. Then it did to me what Spielberg has done to me before, and I came out feeling cheated.
## The setup
Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) is a cybersecurity specialist who walks out of a secretive government-adjacent corporation with the one thing it cannot afford to lose: hard evidence that the contact happened, and that it has been managed and buried for decades. Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is a meteorologist whose own brush with the phenomenon has left her perceiving things she cannot explain and cannot switch off. The corporation, fronted by Colin Firth's smooth and very dangerous Noah Scanlon, wants both of them quiet. The film is the chase that follows, and the question of whether the truth is something the world actually wants delivered to its doorstep.
That is the spoiler-light version, and I will keep the rest behind glass, because the back half turns on things you should meet cold.
## The cast
Blunt is the best reason to buy a ticket. She has done frightened-but-capable before, in *A Quiet Place*, and here she adds a kind of haunted receptivity, a woman tuned to a frequency the rest of us cannot hear, and she sells it without ever tipping into the wide-eyed. O'Connor is looser and warmer than Scanlon's machine deserves, and the two of them carry the human current the film runs on. Firth is having an excellent time being quietly appalling, all reasonable tone and unreasonable intent, the most enjoyable Spielberg villain in years. Colman Domingo turns a supporting part into something you wish the film had more room for. Nobody is coasting. The performances are not the problem.
## The craft
It looks like a Spielberg picture, which is to say it looks like money spent by someone who knows where to point it. Janusz Kaminski's light does its usual work, Williams gives Blunt a theme that lifts the encounter scenes, and the set-piece staging is as clean and legible as you would expect. When it works, it really works.
And then the effects let it down, which I did not expect to be writing about a Spielberg film. There are CGI animals here, and a couple of full sequences, that have the weightless, faintly rubbery sheen of *The Polar Express*, the uncanny look of things that were never in front of a lens. The Spielberg of twenty years ago would have built the creature, soaked it, lit it and shot it for real, and your eye would never have queried it. Here your eye queries it more than once, and every time it does, the spell drops.
## How it stacks up
The bigger trouble is that *Disclosure Day* keeps reaching into Spielberg's own cupboard, and a few other people's. The tall, slender visitors are, as near as makes no difference, the same beings that stepped out of the light in *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*; I half expected E.T. himself to wander through the back of a shot, and would not have been remotely surprised if he had. One sequence is staged so squarely after the grainy, table-bound horror of *Alien Autopsy*, the Ant and Dec lark from 2006, that I laughed in the wrong place. War of the Worlds supplies the street-level panic, Minority Report the surveillance dread (and 3D spatial interfaces). None of this is theft, exactly. It is a great director quoting himself, and the quotations are fond. But a homecoming should bring something new through the door, and this one mostly rearranges the furniture you already know.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critics are close to rapturous, with Rotten Tomatoes parked around 80% and a good deal of "return to form, Spielberg sci-fi classic" in the air. Audiences are a touch cooler, and I land cooler still, though not for want of enjoying myself. For two acts this is a generous, propulsive, properly mounted thriller and I was happily along for the ride. I even forgave the exposition, and there is a lot of it: the film explains itself constantly, spoon-feeding the mechanics of the cover-up so that nobody is ever lost.
Which is exactly why the ending made me cross. After two hours of being told everything, the film suddenly, in its final movement, decides to withhold, to treat the audience as if it can do the inference work it never once trusted us with earlier. If the whole film had been lean and suggestive, that ending would have been earned, even thrilling. Sitting on top of all that explaining, it reads as a cheat, a clever-clever swerve that the picture has not laid the ground for. I left frustrated rather than haunted.
## Verdict
Spielberg has pulled this on me before. *Jurassic Park*, the original, skipped the one scene I had spent the whole film waiting for (When Richard Attenborough - according to the orginal book, was supposed to have a gory death at the hands of a T-Rex). *Ready Player One* swapped out the film-within-the-film which should have been Wargames (a thrilling sequence in the book) with The Shining. *Disclosure Day* is the same family of disappointment; a beautifully made thing that knows precisely how to keep you in your seat, and then declines to honour the contract at the end. I enjoyed it, I really did, and I would still send people to see it on the biggest screen they can find. But this is the most powerful storyteller alive working with Williams, Blunt and a blank cheque, and we deserved more, much more. 6.5 / 10.
**Availability:** In cinemas across the UK, and worth the IMAX surcharge for the encounter sequences if not for the animals.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, violence, injury detail, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** People fire guns at others during action sequences. Characters fight in a wrestling ring, delivering punches and blows with objects such as chairs. Some discreet verbal references are made to domestic abuse. A sequence features implied off-screen torture.
**Threat and horror:** There are scenes of gun and knife threat, as well as vehicle chases resulting in crashes. Some sequences are sustained and intense, featuring menacing tones and characters in peril.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k') as well as milder terms, including 'shit', 'goddamn', 'hell' and 'God'.
**Sex:** Occasional mild sex references are made in brief, undetailed verbal exchanges.
**Drugs:** A brief verbal reference is made to ketamine misuse.
**Injury detail:** There is occasional sight of blood and wound detail, as well as cuts and bruising over a person's body.
**Theme:** A character experiences a panic attack, but is reassured and calmed by a friend. There are references to illness, death and bereavement.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/disclosure-day-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdm0ndez)).*
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## Masters of the Universe (2026)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-masters-of-the-universe
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-masters-of-the-universe.md
- published: 2026-06-04
- document_id: 1116
> Travis Knight drags a 1980s toy line into proper science-fantasy with a real world behind it, and the result is far more confident than four decades of false starts had any right to produce. 8/10.
- **UK release:** June 2026
- **Director:** Travis Knight · **Writers:** Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, Dave Callaham
- **Studio / distributor:** Amazon MGM Studios; Mattel Films; Escape Artists
- **Genre:** Science-fantasy action adventure · **Runtime:** 140 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Nicholas Galitzine (*Red, White & Royal Blue*, *The Idea of You*) as Prince Adam / He-Man; Camila Mendes (*Do Revenge*) as Teela; Jared Leto (*Blade Runner 2049*, *Dallas Buyers Club*) as Skeletor; Alison Brie (*GLOW*, *The Post*) as Evil-Lyn; Idris Elba (*Luther*, *Pacific Rim*) as Man-at-Arms
- **IMDb:** 7.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 66% critics / 88% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
A live-action *Masters of the Universe* has been threatening to happen for the best part of forty years, ever since Cannon's 1987 version put Dolph Lundgren in a loincloth and most of the budget on screen before the money ran out. Since then the project has died, been revived, swapped studios and directors, and collected enough abandoned screenplays to fill a small library. So the first surprise of the 2026 film is simply that it exists at all, and the second is that Travis Knight, of all the people who circled it, was the one to land the plane. Knight came up through Laika stop-motion and then took the keys to a Hasbro toy box and made *Bumblebee*, the one *Transformers* film with a heartbeat. He has done something similar here: taken a property that exists to sell action figures and given it a world worth caring about.
## The setup
Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) has spent fifteen years on Earth, hidden and ordinary, with no memory of where he came from. When the Sword of Power finds him, it pulls him back across the stars to Eternia, a planet he discovers in ruins, its order shattered and its people scattered under the rule of the sorcerer Skeletor (Jared Leto). To get his home and his family back, Adam has to work out what the sword is for, fall in with the warrior Teela (Camila Mendes) and the engineer-soldier Man-at-Arms (Idris Elba), and grow into the title the toys have been promising since 1982. The shape of the story is a coming-of-age fantasy quest, which suits the material better than the campy excess earlier versions reached for.
## The cast
Galitzine is the right kind of lead for this. He has the physical presence the role needs and, more usefully, an unforced charm that keeps Adam likeable while he is still a callow young man rather than the hero on the box. He plays the gap between the two well, and the eventual transformation lands because he earns it. Mendes gives Teela more spine than the script strictly requires, and she and Galitzine have an easy, scrappy chemistry that the film leans on. Idris Elba is exactly the steadying presence Man-at-Arms should be, all gravel and patience, and he sells the technology of Eternia as something lived-in rather than decorative.
The villains are where the film gambles hardest. Jared Leto's Skeletor is a committed, theatrical piece of work, hissing and preening behind the skull, and your tolerance for him will track fairly closely with your tolerance for Leto generally. I found him more fun than not. Alison Brie's Evil-Lyn is the sharper threat of the two, cold and calculating where Skeletor is all appetite, and she gives the film a villain you can actually take seriously.
## The craft
This is the part that lifts the film. Fabian Wagner shoots Eternia with real scale and a painterly eye, and the production design commits to a science-fantasy look, Castle Grayskull and ray-guns and sorcery sharing the same frame, without apologising for any of it. Knight's stop-motion instincts show in how tangible everything feels: weighty creatures, practical-looking armour, action you can follow because the geography of a scene is always clear. Bear McCreary's score is the other engine, big and thematic in the way the best fantasy scores are, and it does a lot to make the climaxes feel earned. At 140 minutes the film is generous, and the middle sags slightly, but it keeps finding new corners of its world to show you, which buys back the runtime.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Knight's own *Bumblebee*, and it holds: both take a cynical toy-shelf brand and find the sincerity inside it. Reach wider and the film sits in a line that runs from *The Lord of the Rings* for its world-building ambition to *Thor: Ragnarok* for the knowing, colourful tone, though this is a touch more earnest than the latter. Against the 1987 Cannon film there is no contest. Where that one borrowed from *Star Wars* and shot most of its Eternia in a quarry, this one actually builds the place. It is the rare reboot that justifies itself by being straightforwardly better made than what came before.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are split, sitting around 66%, with the praise going to Knight's craftsmanship and the spectacle, and the reservations aimed at tonal wobble and a suspicion that nostalgia is doing some of the lifting. Audiences are markedly warmer at 88%, the highest the franchise has ever scored. That gap is familiar territory: a crowd-pleasing adventure that critics grade against prestige and audiences grade against a good night out. On this one I am closer to the crowd. The tonal seams the reviews flag are real, but they did not spoil the ride.
## Verdict
This is a properly entertaining fantasy adventure, the one *Masters of the Universe* film that treats the material as a world rather than a joke. The world-building is generous, the craft is genuinely good, the cast is well chosen, and McCreary's score gives it the lift it needs. It is not flawless, the middle drags and the tone occasionally wobbles between earnest and arch, but it is exactly the kind of big, sincere, rewatchable spectacle I will happily go back to. Four decades of false starts, and they finally got it right. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the largest screen you can find.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: this section will carry any sequel or franchise follow-up news, awards recognition, and the film's settled reputation once they exist. For now the only thing to add is the home-viewing route: keep an eye on a digital and disc release later in the year, with streaming expected to land on Prime Video given the Amazon MGM backing.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate fantasy violence, innuendo, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of intense fantasy violence which include gunfire, stabbings, sword fights and fist fights. In one scene, a fantastical character's jaw is ripped apart. In another, a person's arm is ripped off. A character extracts a blade from their chest in close-up detail. The violence is mostly depicted without any sight of bloody detail.
**Threat and horror:** There are frequent scenes of intense fantasy threats in which characters are in danger. Occasionally, there are mildly scary moments, such as sight of skulls impaled on spikes.
**Language:** There is implied strong language ('f***k') as well as use of the moderate term 'pussy'; other language is mild and includes terms such as 'shit', 'asshole', 'moron', hell', 'damn' and 'God'.
**Sex:** There is comic innuendo relating to a character called 'Fisto', and also to the size of a character's sword. Implied references are made to oral sex.
**Drugs:** A character says 'I swear I'm not high'. There is no on-screen drug misuse.
**Injury detail:** A person spits blood after becoming injured during a fight. There is occasional sight of blood on characters' faces in the aftermath of violence.
**Rude humour:** A drunk man vomits and burps.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/masters-of-the-universe-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmta5nzu0)).*
================================================================================
## The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-mandalorian-and-grogu
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-mandalorian-and-grogu.md
- published: 2026-05-28
- document_id: 1200
> Din Djarin and his small green ward make the jump from streaming to the big screen, and the space-western tone survives the trip intact. Familiar, warm, and built for the rewatch. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2026
- **Director:** Jon Favreau · **Writers:** Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Noah Kloor
- **Studio / distributor:** Lucasfilm; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Space-western science fiction adventure · **Runtime:** 132 minutes (BBFC PG)
- **Main cast:** Pedro Pascal (*The Mandalorian*, *The Last of Us*) as Din Djarin; Sigourney Weaver (*Alien*, *Aliens*) as a New Republic officer; Jeremy Allen White (*The Bear*, *The Iron Claw*) as Rotta the Hutt
- **IMDb:** rating to confirm · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 63% critics / 89% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The interesting question hanging over *The Mandalorian and Grogu* is not whether it will be likeable. The series spent three seasons proving that a man in a helmet and a wide-eyed foundling could carry a story on charm alone. The question is whether a relationship grown on a streaming service, in tidy forty-minute chapters, can fill a cinema screen for two hours without feeling like four episodes glued end to end. Jon Favreau, who built the show and now directs its first theatrical outing, clearly knows the trap. What he delivers is less a season finale with a bigger budget than a proper Saturday-matinee adventure, the kind Lucasfilm has been circling since *Rogue One* and *Solo* without quite landing.
## The setup
The Empire has fallen, but the galaxy it left behind is a patchwork of warlords, opportunists and old criminal families filling the gap. The fledgling New Republic, short on hands and shorter on muscle, calls in Din Djarin, the Mandalorian bounty hunter who would rather be left alone with his ward. The mission drags him into the wreckage of the Hutt underworld and the scattered remnants of Imperial power, and forces the recurring problem of the whole saga: a man bound by a creed he takes seriously, and a small Force-sensitive child who keeps making that creed complicated. The plot is a clothesline for set pieces rather than a puzzle, and the film is honest about that.
## The cast
Pedro Pascal spends most of the film behind the beskar mask, which sounds like a limitation and is in fact the point of the performance. He has to act with shoulders, stance and a voice that gives nothing away for free, and after *The Last of Us* showed what he can do with an open face, it is a quiet pleasure to watch him do the opposite here. Grogu, still entirely a puppet-and-effects creation, remains the most expressive thing in the frame without a word of dialogue, and the film knows exactly when to cut to him. Sigourney Weaver lends the New Republic side some genuine gravity, the authority of someone who has carried far heavier films than this one. Jeremy Allen White, voicing a grown Rotta the Hutt, brings a flicker of menace and unexpected comedy to a corner of the underworld most fans had written off as a punchline.
## The craft
Greig Fraser shoots Star Wars the way it always wanted to be shot: dusty, tactile, lit like a western, with real weight to the metal and the weather. After the flat, over-lit look of some recent franchise entries, this is a relief. The creature work is largely practical, and it shows in the way actors flinch at things that are actually there. Ludwig Göransson's score does what his *Mandalorian* themes always did, marrying spaghetti-western twang to full orchestral swell, and it carries scenes the script leaves thin. At 132 minutes the film is paced like serialised television in the best sense, a clean sequence of objectives and reversals, though a viewer hoping for a denser story will feel the lightness.
## How it stacks up
Set beside the recent Star Wars films, this is the most relaxed and the most sure of itself. *Rogue One* was grimmer and *Solo* more anxious to please; this one simply gets on with being an adventure, which is closer to the 1977 spirit than either. The obvious comparison is the series itself, and the honest verdict is that the film feels like a strong stretch of the show given room to breathe rather than a leap into a new register. The westerns Favreau is openly drawing on, the lone gunslinger reluctantly minding a child, the frontier town under the thumb of a local boss, are worn lightly and worn well.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split is wide and revealing. Critics are sitting around 63%, with the recurring complaint that the film is comfortable, familiar and a touch slight, an expensive episode rather than an event. Audiences have landed far higher, at 89%, the warmest reception any Disney-era Star Wars film has had. Both reactions are correct about the same film. It is familiar, and it is not reaching for anything new. It also delivers exactly what its audience came for, with a warmth and a confidence the franchise has been missing, and that counts for a great deal.
## Verdict
I came in with a soft spot for the series and a worry that the jump to cinema would expose it. The worry was mostly unfounded. This is not the boldest Star Wars film, and it will not convert anyone the show did not already reach. What it is, is genuinely entertaining, handsomely made and built for the second and third watch, which is where my own scoring tends to land hardest. The world-building is unforced, the tone is consistent, and the central relationship still works. It loses a point for playing it safe and for a story that rarely surprises. Everything else it sets out to do, it does. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, including IMAX, where Fraser's photography earns the larger screen.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film arrived on Disney+ within a couple of months of its cinema run, where it slots in neatly after the third season of the series for anyone wanting the whole arc in order. Its record-setting audience score has held up, and it has settled into its reputation as the Disney-era Star Wars film that fans took to most readily, even as the critical line about it being comfortable rather than ambitious has stuck too.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **PG** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Moderate violence includes sustained fight scenes, shootings and stabbings. Characters are also electrocuted, set on fire, and attacked with bladed weapons. The violence occurs within a fantastical setting and is generally depicted without blood.
**Threat and horror:** There are frequent sequences of moderate threat which include jump scares and tense, menacing encounters with giant fantastical creatures, as well as gun and knife threat. A person is kidnapped and held captive and there are prolonged chase scenes.
**Language:** Very mild bad language includes uses of 'damn' and 'hell'.
**Injury detail:** There is close-up sight of a bite wound from a fantastical creature, as well as occasional brief bloody injury detail.
**Theme:** A character becomes distressed when his companion remains unconscious after being injured. There are also references to death.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/star-wars-the-mandalorian-and-grogu-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdmzmdg4)).*
================================================================================
## Project Hail Mary (2026)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-project-hail-mary
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-project-hail-mary.md
- published: 2026-04-01
- document_id: 1140
> Andy Weir's problem-solving science fiction reaches the screen with Ryan Gosling alone in space, and the result is the best thing the genre has produced since The Martian. 9/10.
- **UK release:** March 2026
- **Director:** Phil Lord and Christopher Miller · **Writer:** Drew Goddard
- **Studio / distributor:** Amazon MGM Studios; Pascal Pictures; Lord Miller
- **Genre:** Science fiction survival adventure / first-contact drama · **Runtime:** 156 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Ryan Gosling (*Blade Runner 2049*, *First Man*) as Ryland Grace; Sandra Hüller (*Anatomy of a Fall*, *The Zone of Interest*) as Eva Stratt; James Ortiz as Rocky
- **IMDb:** 8.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 94% critics / 98% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
Andy Weir writes the kind of science fiction where the hero gets out of trouble with a whiteboard and a periodic table, and *The Martian* showed in 2015 that the approach could carry a film as well as a novel. *Project Hail Mary* is his next book to make the trip, and the names attached set an interesting expectation. Drew Goddard, who adapted *The Martian*, writes again. The directors are Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, better known for *The Lego Movie* and *21 Jump Street*, an odd fit for a survival story until you remember that the Weir formula runs on humour as much as on competence. The worry going in is that a book built almost entirely out of one man thinking out loud might not have anywhere to go on screen. It does, and the place it goes is the thing you will be talking about afterwards.
## The setup
A man wakes in a small white room with two corpses for company, no memory of his own name, and a body wasted by a coma. He is Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), and the room is a spacecraft a very long way from home. As his memory returns in fragments, so does the size of the problem: the sun is dimming, Earth is facing extinction within a generation, and he is the surviving crew member of a one-way mission sent to work out why. What he does not expect is to find that he is not the only species to have sent someone. The film keeps its larger turns back, and I will keep them back too, but the engine of it is two intelligences with the same deadline and no shared language, trying to save two worlds at once.
## The cast
This is a film that rests almost entirely on one actor, and Gosling is the right choice for it. Stripped of memory and then of certainty, he has to carry exposition, panic, grief and dry comedy often in the same scene, and he plays the science teacher as a man who is frightened but cannot stop being curious. It is closer to his haunted, contained work in *First Man* than to anything showier. Sandra Hüller, as the mission's architect Eva Stratt, anchors the flashbacks to Earth with a cold, unsentimental authority; she is the person willing to make the decisions nobody else will. The film's real second lead, though, is Rocky, an alien engineer rendered through performance and effects work, and the relationship that grows between Grace and Rocky is the warmest thing in it. It should not work. Two beings who cannot breathe the same air and communicate in tones, building a friendship out of shared engineering problems, has no business being this moving.
## The craft
Greig Fraser shoots the ship as a cramped, functional place and the space around it as genuinely vast, and the contrast does a lot of the film's work. After the immersive scale he brought to *Dune*, he knows how to make hard surfaces and empty distance feel overwhelming rather than sterile. Lord and Miller turn out to be a shrewder pairing than the marquee suggests; their instinct for comic timing keeps the long stretches of one man solving problems from curdling into a lecture, and they trust the audience to follow the science rather than have it spelled out twice. Daniel Pemberton's score is propulsive without crowding the quiet, and the design of Rocky and its corner of the ship is the kind of practical, lived-in invention that rewards a second viewing. At a little over two and a half hours the film earns its length; the pacing rarely sags, because the problem keeps changing shape.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *The Martian*, and *Project Hail Mary* shares its DNA: the same delight in competence, the same humour under pressure, the same faith that watching a clever person work is dramatic in itself. Where it reaches further is in the first-contact strand, which puts it in conversation with *Arrival* and, further back, *Contact*, films about the difficulty and the wonder of talking across an unbridgeable gap. There is a little of *Interstellar* in its scale and its sentiment, and a clear debt to *Enemy Mine*, that 1985 oddity in which two enemies stranded together learn to need each other. It is less austere than *Arrival* and less self-serious than *Interstellar*, and it is the better for splitting the difference.
## Critics versus the rest of us
For once critics and audiences are in close agreement, and both are enthusiastic. The reviews sit at 94%, the audience score higher still at 98%, and an IMDb rating already past 8.3 puts it among the best-received films of the year. The praise lands where you would expect: Gosling, the fidelity to Weir's problem-solving science, and the friendship at the centre. The only reservation worth airing is that the film wears its emotions plainly and the science, while clever, is occasionally tidier than real physics would allow. Neither bothered me. This is a film that knows exactly what it is trying to be.
## Verdict
I came to this primed to like it. *The Martian* is one of my favourite science fiction films and the book is better still, and a Weir adaptation with the same screenwriter was always going to start ahead on my scoreboard. It clears the bar anyway. It is intelligent science fiction that respects the audience, it has genuine world-building in the alien half of its story, and the central friendship gives it an emotional weight that pure survival films usually lack. It is funny, it is tense, and it is the rare blockbuster I would happily watch again the same week. The reservations are minor and the pleasures are large. **9/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, and worth catching on the largest IMAX screen you can reach.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to become one of the biggest hits of 2026 and broke into the IMDb Top 250, a rare distinction for a film in its release year. It reached UK digital purchase and rental in May 2026 and now streams on Prime Video, fitting given Amazon MGM produced it. It has settled in alongside *The Martian* as the second pillar of the screen Weir adaptations, and the two make an excellent double bill.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, rude humour, drug references, implied strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** A sustained sequence of threat involves the loss of control of a spaceship, causing an astronaut to be knocked unconscious. The blast from a huge explosion throws people to the ground. Milder scenes include children worrying about a catastrophic threat to Earth.
**Language:** There is implied strong language with infrequent wordplay around the term 'fudge'. There is also use of milder bad language ('bugger', 'piss', 'damn', 'God').
**Drugs:** Undetailed references are made to heroin and to being stoned.
**Injury detail:** There is infrequent sight of blood in the aftermath of an accident and dead bodies.
**Suicide and self-harm:** An undetailed reference to suicide is made.
**Rude humour:** An alien comically misspeaks 'fist bump' as 'fist my bump'. A human, unfamiliar with the alien's anatomy, is alarmed when he thinks it feeds itself through its bottom.
**Theme:** Upsetting scenes are centred on death and bereavement.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adults are seen drinking alcohol.
**Flashing/flickering:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/project-hail-mary-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmtezmdq4)).*
================================================================================
## The history of A Profound Journey
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/site-history
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/site-history.md
- published: 2026-02-19
- document_id: 2
> This site is about Travel and Technology. Destinations, travelogues and reports. By Seamus Waldron.
**a profound journey** was and is the brainchild of Seamus Waldron.
In 1995, Seamus had an idea, travel to South America with the latest in satellite,
digital photographic and computer technology, to raise funds for the International
Federation of the Red Cross and Red Cresent.
To make the venture unique (at that time) the trip was to be "broadcast" live over the internet and have a documentary made for the Discovery Channel.
Funding, resources and marketing efforts were found for promoting this event. Endorsment was given by the IFRCRCS. Technology was bought everything was ready,
I even did interviews on the BBC World Service.
Then, disaster. Due to internal politics at the company I was working for at the time, the seed money promised by that company was not forthcomming. This meant
the end of the venture, though it did not mean the end of the concept and site.
What you see here today is an effort mainly made between 1995 and 1998, sporadically until 2003 and then major rewrite of content, two major re-designs and a large investment of time and effort to expand upon the original content
The [IBM PC110](/section/technology) site is the most popular of the APJ domain, followed by a site for Jive and Lindy Dancing called [Jiveclub.com](http://www.jiveclub.com).
Another popular site is for the [Boston PDA User Group](http://www.bostonpda.org).
BostonPDA.org and Jiveclub.com are interesting sites because they are dynamically generated, using an advanced Content Management System (CMS) called SiteEngine and sold through my company [Sedasoft Ltd](http://www.sedasoft.com).
In the spring of 2000, I moved from the United Kingdom to Boston in the USA. By the summer, I was moved from an office looking out over downtown Boston
into a cubicle that in Europe would have been against the law for many, many reasons. As a protest, I created [ihatemycube.com](www.ihatemycube.com) but was quickly
pressured by my employer to remove it due to the "negative" impact on the moral of the company. All rubbish, but I did remove the site for about six months and then very quietly
ressurected the site. Have a look, it will make you laugh. (Incidently, moved back into an office with a fantastic view over Boston and finally moved back to the UIK)
Recent additions to the domain include [www.ihatemarmite.com](http://www.ihatemarmite.com) and [www.ilovemarmite.com](http://www.ilovemarmite.com). Both are generated and maintined using my RAT technology (I must find a new name for it! ;-)
A static site that is already growing too big and in need some serious coding, is a simple site for tracking down my old school friends from [Wisbech Grammer School](/). I started this site in the summer of 1999, but the
software I was writing distracted me and turned into the RAT publishing software. As such, it wasn't until August 2001 that I finnaly put something together.
So, there you have it, a profound journey is about travel, technology and a bit of humour. It is a journey that never stops and I hope you enjoy sharing my journey and that you take the time out to have one yourself.
All the best,
Seamus Waldron
May. 2004
This site created by [APJ](mailto:seamus_waldron@apj.co.uk) (c)1995 - 2001
================================================================================
## About a profound journey
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/seamus-waldron
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/seamus-waldron.md
- published: 2026-02-19
- document_id: 1
> This site is about Travel and Technology. Destinations, travelogues and reports. By Seamus Waldron.
**a profound journey** was and is the brainchild of Seamus Waldron.
In 1995, Seamus had an idea, travel to South America with the latest in satellite,
digital photographic and computer technology, to raise funds for the International
Federation of the Red Cross and Red Cresent.
To make the venture unique (at that time) the trip was to be "broadcast" live over the internet and have a documentary made for the Discovery Channel.
Funding, resources and marketing efforts were found for promoting this event. Endorsment was given by the IFRCRCS. Technology was bought everything was ready,
I even did interviews on the BBC World Service.
Then, disaster. Due to internal politics at the company I was working for at the time, the seed money promised by that company was not forthcomming. This meant
the end of the venture, though it did not mean the end of the concept and site.
What you see here today is an effort mainly made between 1995 and 1998, sporadically until 2003 and then major rewrite of content, two major re-designs and a large investment of time and effort to expand upon the original content
The [IBM PC110](/section/technology) site is the most popular of the APJ domain, followed by a site for Jive and Lindy Dancing called [Jiveclub.com](http://www.jiveclub.com).
Another popular site is for the [Boston PDA User Group](http://www.bostonpda.org).
BostonPDA.org and Jiveclub.com are interesting sites because they are dynamically generated, using an advanced Content Management System (CMS) called SiteEngine and sold through my company [Sedasoft Ltd](http://www.sedasoft.com).
In the spring of 2000, I moved from the United Kingdom to Boston in the USA. By the summer, I was moved from an office looking out over downtown Boston
into a cubicle that in Europe would have been against the law for many, many reasons. As a protest, I created [ihatemycube.com](www.ihatemycube.com) but was quickly
pressured by my employer to remove it due to the "negative" impact on the moral of the company. All rubbish, but I did remove the site for about six months and then very quietly
ressurected the site. Have a look, it will make you laugh. (Incidently, moved back into an office with a fantastic view over Boston and finally moved back to the UIK)
Recent additions to the domain include [www.ihatemarmite.com](http://www.ihatemarmite.com) and [www.ilovemarmite.com](http://www.ilovemarmite.com). Both are generated and maintined using my RAT technology (I must find a new name for it! ;-)
A static site that is already growing too big and in need some serious coding, is a simple site for tracking down my old school friends from [Wisbech Grammer School](/). I started this site in the summer of 1999, but the
software I was writing distracted me and turned into the RAT publishing software. As such, it wasn't until August 2001 that I finnaly put something together.
So, there you have it, a profound journey is about travel, technology and a bit of humour. It is a journey that never stops and I hope you enjoy sharing my journey and that you take the time out to have one yourself.
All the best,
Seamus Waldron
May. 2004
This site created by [APJ](mailto:seamus_waldron@apj.co.uk) (c)1995 - 2001
================================================================================
## Mercy (2026)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mercy
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mercy.md
- published: 2026-01-25
- document_id: 1117
> Timur Bekmambetov hands a murder trial to an artificial intelligence and gives the accused ninety minutes to clear himself. The premise is borrowed, the format is risky, and on the things I value it works better than the critics will allow. 8/10.
- **UK release:** January 2026
- **Director:** Timur Bekmambetov · **Writer:** Marco van Belle
- **Studio / distributor:** Amazon MGM Studios; Atlas Entertainment; Bazelevs
- **Genre:** Science fiction crime thriller / AI courtroom drama · **Runtime:** 100 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Chris Pratt (*Guardians of the Galaxy*, *The Tomorrow War*) as Detective Chris Raven; Rebecca Ferguson (*Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation*, *Silo*) as the AI judge Maddox; Kali Reis (*True Detective: Night Country*) as the investigator; Annabelle Wallis (*Peaky Blinders*, *Malignant*) as the witness closest to the case
- **IMDb:** 6.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 24% critics / 82% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Timur Bekmambetov made his name on the kinetic excess of *Wanted* and then spent the next decade quietly inventing a format, the screenlife film, where the whole story plays out on screens, cameras and feeds. He produced *Searching* and *Unfriended* on that principle, and *Mercy* is where he scales the idea up to a star vehicle and a near-future justice system. The pitch is *Minority Report* with the gloss stripped off: a world that has handed criminal trials to an artificial intelligence, and a man on the wrong side of its verdict with the clock running. It is a premise built for the things I tend to enjoy, and the question is whether the execution keeps pace with the idea.
## The setup
Detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) is arrested for the murder of his wife and brought before Maddox, the AI judicial authority that now decides guilt and sentence in a single sitting. The system promises speed and impartiality, which in practice means Raven has a fixed and very short window to overturn the case against him using the same surveillance record the court is using to convict him. He is both the accused and, by necessity, his own investigator, sifting bodycam footage, call logs and camera feeds for the detail the machine has weighted wrongly. The film keeps the stakes tight and personal: prove it now, in this room, against a counsel that does not blink, or be sentenced before the night is out.
## The cast
Pratt plays against type, and it suits the film. The wisecracking charm that carries his franchise work is dialled almost all the way down, leaving a cornered man who is tired, frightened and not always sympathetic. It is a more restrained performance than he usually gives, and while it will disappoint anyone arriving for the *Guardians* register, it is the right call for a character who spends the runtime trying to out-argue a computer. The film belongs, though, to Rebecca Ferguson. As Maddox she is calm, exact and entirely without malice, which makes her far more unnerving than a human prosecutor would be. Ferguson has always been good at controlled authority, and here she weaponises stillness; the machine never raises its voice because it never needs to. Kali Reis brings a welcome human counterweight as the investigator working the case from outside the system, and Annabelle Wallis supplies the personal stakes that stop the whole thing collapsing into procedure.
## The craft
This is a screenlife film, and your tolerance for that will shape the experience. Bekmambetov and cinematographer Khalid Mohtaseb stage almost everything through the apparatus of the surveillance state: interface windows, camera angles, evidence playback, the cold geometry of a courtroom that is really a server. When it works, the format does something a conventional thriller cannot, it makes the audience complicit in the same act of watching that has trapped the hero, and the surveillance theme stops being decoration and becomes the texture of the film. When it does not work, the screens can feel airless and the eye gets tired of the frame within the frame. Lorne Balfe's score does a lot to keep the tension wound, all low pulses and rising dread, and Austin Keeling's editing holds the real-time conceit together better than its critics give it credit for. At a lean hundred minutes it does not outstay its welcome.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Minority Report*, and *Mercy* shares its central worry: a justice system confident enough in its own prediction to act before the defence has finished speaking. Where Spielberg's film had the budget for spectacle, this one trades down to the claustrophobia of *The Guilty*, the single-location pressure cooker where one person works a crisis through the equipment in front of them. It sits in the same conversation as *Searching*, Bekmambetov's own production, and the surveillance anxiety that British television has been mining in *The Capture*. None of those reference points are accidental; *Mercy* knows exactly which shelf it belongs on, and it earns its place there more through idea and discipline than through novelty.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split here is stark. Critics have been harsh, sitting around 24%, with the screenlife format dismissed as a gimmick and the premise called derivative. Audiences land at 82%, and the gap tells you something. The critical objection is fair on its own terms: yes, the idea is borrowed, and yes, the format will not convert anyone who finds it a migraine of windows and feeds. But the reviewers complaining that the characters seem unaware of better films in the genre have rather missed that the film is in deliberate dialogue with those films, not ignorant of them. Audiences responding to a taut, twist-driven thriller about justice in an automated world are, on this occasion, closer to what the film is actually doing.
## Verdict
I come down nearer the audience than the critics, and not by accident. This is exactly my territory: surveillance, an AI that decides who lives free, a procedural investigation run in real time by the person with the most to lose. Ferguson is genuinely chilling, the world-building is sharp and economical, and the screenlife approach, for all its limits, makes the technology feel like a threat rather than a backdrop. It is not flawless. Pratt's restraint occasionally tips into flatness, and the format will lose a portion of the audience inside ten minutes. But it is tense, it is clever about the thing it is worried about, and I would happily watch it again to catch the evidence I missed the first time. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now from 23 January, including IMAX and 3D screenings. A streaming release on Prime Video is expected to follow.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: after a soft theatrical run *Mercy* found a far larger audience on Prime Video, where it became one of the platform's most-watched titles and confirmed the gap between the cool critical reception and the strong public response noted above. It is now streaming on Prime Video, with a disc release also available for the screenlife collectors.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, injury detail, drug misuse, strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes include shootings, explosions, beatings, clashes between police and civilians, and a scene in which a man is trapped between two colliding vehicles. Verbal references are made to a woman's murder.
**Threat and horror:** A man grapples with his impending execution while being held captive by an AI judge. Other suspenseful sequences include high speed vehicle chases, people being held at gunpoint and allusions to a woman murdered inside her home.
**Injury detail:** A woman is discovered dead in her home after being stabbed; the crime scene is depicted in bodycam footage and photographs, which include bloody detail.
**Language:** Strong language ('f***k') is used infrequently; milder terms include 'bitch', 'ass', 'shit', 'hell', 'God', 'Jesus', 'Christ' and 'damn'. The middle finger gesture also features.
**Drugs:** Occasional scenes of joint smoking; other drug references include depictions of crystal meth being prepared for distribution.
**Sex:** Verbal references to an adulterous relationship.
**Theme:** Upsetting scenes relate to bereavement.
**Alcohol and smoking:** People are seen smoking and drinking alcohol, on occasion to excess.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/mercy-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdmznzc4)).*
================================================================================
## TraitorBot
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/traitorbot
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/traitorbot.md
- published: 2026-01-01
- document_id: 1014
> I taught a row of language models to lie to each other, then watched what happened. TraitorBot is a research project about The Traitors, the game theory under it, and what AI does when you make it betray people for a living.
**I taught a row of language models to lie to each other, then watched what happened. TraitorBot is a research project about The Traitors, the game theory under it, and what AI does when you make it betray people for a living.**
The Traitors is the best social-deduction format on television: a house full of Faithful trying to find a handful of Traitors, who murder one player a night and lie to everyone by day. I became more interested than is strictly healthy, so I turned it into a research project. TraitorBot is the result.
## The thesis
At the centre of it is a long technical analysis, around 90,000 words across seventeen chapters, working through the game with game theory and probability rather than vibes. If you do not want the full thing there are quick five-minute pieces that pull out the core ideas, and strategy guides that derive the actual winning play for each role from the maths rather than from gut feeling.
There is a taxonomy of player types, the Detective, the Chaos Agent and the rest, and analysis of how the format shifts when the producers add a mechanic like the Red Cloak.
## Teaching AI to lie
The part that surprised me was the simulation. I set language models up as players, handed them roles, and let them run the game: deceiving, accusing, forming alliances, voting each other out. Watching an LLM construct a lie, defend it under questioning, and throw an innocent player under the bus is a strange thing to do on a Tuesday evening.
One finding stuck with me. Pushed to lie repeatedly over a long enough game, the models start to show something that looks like stress, their behaviour degrading in roughly the way a person's might under the same pressure. I am wary of reading too much into it, but it was consistent enough to write up.
## The usual disclaimer
TraitorBot is a fan research project, built in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It is not affiliated with the BBC, Peacock, or IDTV, and it is not trying to be. It is one person taking a game show far too seriously, with footnotes.
- Site: [traitorbot.com](https://traitorbot.com)
================================================================================
## Rebuilding A Profound Journey
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/apj-rebuild
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/apj-rebuild.md
- published: 2026-01-01
- document_id: 1013
> A Profound Journey has been online since 1995. For the last twenty years it barely changed. This is the rebuild: same writing, new foundations.
**A Profound Journey has been online since 1995. For the last twenty years it barely changed. This is the rebuild: same writing, new foundations.**
A Profound Journey has been online since 1995. For a good stretch of that it was a living site, with articles going up, sections growing, and the design changed whenever I felt like it. Then, somewhere in the mid-2000s, it stopped. The content stayed up and the domain renewed itself every year, but nothing moved. Twenty-odd years of stasis, preserved in classic ASP and hand-cut static HTML.
The premise of the rebuild was that the writing is worth keeping. Years of travel pieces, technology notes, reviews and diary entries add up to a record I did not want to leave rotting in a stack of static files. The aim was not to modernise for its own sake. It was to make the site something I could update again without dreading it.
## What changed
The old site ran on classic ASP with static pages and a flat structure that made the smallest edit a chore. The rebuild moves everything onto SiteEngine, the Go stack I use now: Gin, PostgreSQL, and MinIO for the images. Content lives in a proper database, the templates compose, and publishing happens through an admin interface instead of by editing files on disk.
The look is a design system I built from scratch and called the Expedition Ledger. Cream paper, ink, the feel of a cartographer's notebook, with an off-magenta kept for the working parts: links, navigation, the chrome. Archivo for the display type, Spectral for the body. It is meant to match what the site is, a personal record of travel and technology, written plainly.
## What did not change
The voice. The articles read the way they always did, the same opinions and the same digressions, because they are the same articles. Everything was migrated from the archive and restored as close to the original as I could manage. Nothing was rewritten to sound modern. The rebuild is plumbing and paint, not a rewrite.
The site has been going since 1995. With any luck it has another thirty years in it.
================================================================================
## GoCube BLE Library
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/gocube-ble
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/gocube-ble.md
- published: 2026-01-01
- document_id: 1011
> A Go library that talks to a GoCube, the Rubik's cube with Bluetooth inside. It reads every twist in real time, tracks the cube's state, and works out which stage of the solve you are in.
**A Go library that talks to a GoCube, the Rubik's cube with Bluetooth inside. It reads every twist in real time, tracks the cube's state, and works out which stage of the solve you are in.**
The GoCube is a normal-feeling speedcube with sensors and a Bluetooth radio in it. Turn a face and it tells you, with a timestamp. I wanted to do something with that data from Go, so I wrote a library for it.
## What it gives you
The API is callback-based and deliberately plain. Connect to the first cube it finds, then register handlers: OnMove for every turn, OnPhaseChange when you finish a stage, OnSolved when it comes good. It tracks the virtual state of the cube as the moves arrive, so at any point you can ask whether it is solved and which phase you are in.
Phase detection is the part I am happiest with. It watches the state and works out, on its own, when you have finished the cross, the first two layers, the orientation of the last layer and its permutation, the standard CFOP stages. That makes it useful for a solve timer or a training tool that knows where your time actually went.
## Without a cube
You do not need the hardware to use the model. There is a standalone simulation: make a solved cube in memory, apply moves with constants like `gocube.R` and `gocube.UPrime`, or parse standard notation like `F B2 L' D`, then read the state back. Handy for tests, and for the 3D visualiser that plays a solve back and analyses it.
There is a CLI as well, installable on its own, and the whole thing is documented on pkg.go.dev. One caveat worth stating plainly: the BLE side is macOS only for now. The cube model runs anywhere; talking to a physical cube does not. MIT licensed.
- Library: `go get github.com/SeamusWaldron/gocube_ble_library`
- GitHub: [github.com/SeamusWaldron/gocube_ble_library](https://github.com/SeamusWaldron/gocube_ble_library)
================================================================================
## Balance
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/balance
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/balance.md
- published: 2026-01-01
- document_id: 1009
> A small game about keeping a Mondrian painting from falling over. Built for a game jam celebrating the art that entered the public domain in 2026.
**A small game about keeping a Mondrian painting from falling over. Built for a game jam celebrating the art that entered the public domain in 2026.**
Balance is the second of my equilibrium studies. I made it for Gaming Like It's 1930, a jam that marks the works passing into the public domain that year. On 1 January 2026 Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (1930) became free to use, so I built a game out of it.
## The idea
The board is a Mondrian grid: primary colours, black lines, white space. It is not a puzzle with a solution. It is a structure under stress. Left alone, the composition drifts. Colours gather weight, lines take load, and the harmony slowly degrades. Your job is not to build anything. It is to step in, carefully and not too often, to keep the thing alive.
There is no score, no timer, and no goal beyond not letting it collapse. The one principle underneath it all:
> Balance is not stability. Balance is continuous adjustment.
## How it behaves
The canvas works like a physical structure. Red and blue press down, white floats. Big areas dominate small ones. Weight placed at an edge gains leverage. Lines thicken as they take the strain. You drag lines to move them, press space to split the largest rectangle, double-click to merge two of the same colour.
The game never tells you how you are doing. The feedback is in the picture. Lines grow heavy, colours fatigue, motion turns sticky. If it feels uneasy, it is. Splitting buys you flexibility at the cost of stability. Merging restores calm but risks one colour taking over. Neither move is good or bad on its own, which is the whole point.
## Two modes
Balance is the gentle one, a canvas drifting like a mobile in still air. Equilibrium is the argument: the board fights your arrangements with growing force, and the only question is how long you can hold it together before it goes rigid and stops. You do not lose to a single mistake. You lose when the corrections stop helping.
You can play it in the browser, no install.
- Play: [seamuswaldron.github.io/balance](https://seamuswaldron.github.io/balance/)
- GitHub: [github.com/SeamusWaldron/balance](https://github.com/SeamusWaldron/balance)
================================================================================
## Manic Miner in Go
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/manic-miner-go
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/manic-miner-go.md
- published: 2026-01-01
- document_id: 1007
> Manic Miner, Matthew Smith's 1983 platform game, rebuilt in Go from William Humphreys' Z80 disassembly. All twenty caverns, the original physics, and the gloriously grating piano.
**Manic Miner, Matthew Smith's 1983 platform game, rebuilt in Go from William Humphreys' Z80 disassembly. All twenty caverns, the original physics, and the gloriously grating piano.**
Manic Miner taught the [Spectrum](/zx-spectrum) what a platform game was. Matthew Smith wrote it in 1983, Bug-Byte published it, and twenty caverns of collapsing floors and unforgiving timing did the rest. This is a faithful Go replication, built from the original Z80 assembly rather than from the feel of it.
## Faithful to the code
All twenty caverns play. The physics, the movement and the collision come straight from the disassembly, so Willy jumps the exact parabola he always did, the conveyors drag at the right speed, and the guardians follow their original paths. The music is there too: In the Hall of the Mountain King on the title screen and the Blue Danube during play, both reproduced from the note data, both as charmingly awful as the original beeper made them.
There is the title screen with its animated piano keys and scrolling banner, the game-over sequence with the descending boot, a demo mode that cycles the caverns, a persistent high score table, and the option to continue from the last cavern you reached.
## The engine, again
Same architecture as the Atic Atac port, and that was not an accident. A headless engine package with no graphics dependency, an Ebitengine wrapper on top, and a `Step(Action) -> StepResult` API so the whole thing can be driven by an agent for training. The caverns themselves are extracted from the Z80 into their own definitions.
If you want the long version, the repo carries a development journal that records what went wrong and what I learned. Those lessons fed directly into the Atic Atac project that came after it.
## Credit where it is due
Manic Miner is Matthew Smith's, copyright 1983. The disassembly I worked from was made by William Humphreys, with help from Simon Brattel, who wrote the Zeus Z80 assembler back in the day. This port is an educational exercise: a recreation for preservation and study, nothing more.
- GitHub: [github.com/SeamusWaldron/go-manic-miner](https://github.com/SeamusWaldron/go-manic-miner)
================================================================================
## Atic Atac in Go
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/atic-atac-go
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/atic-atac-go.md
- published: 2026-01-01
- document_id: 1005
> A faithful Go port of Atic Atac, Ultimate Play the Game's 1983 ZX Spectrum maze game, built by reading the original Z80 machine code rather than guessing at it.
**A faithful Go port of Atic Atac, Ultimate Play the Game's 1983 [ZX Spectrum](/zx-spectrum) maze game, built by reading the original Z80 machine code rather than guessing at it.**
Atic Atac was one of the games that defined the early Spectrum. Ultimate Play the Game released it in 1983: a haunted house of 150 rooms seen from above, three characters to play, and a clock counting down your health while monsters poured out of the walls. I rebuilt it in Go.
The rule I set myself was simple. No reimplementing from memory or from a wiki. The behaviour had to come from the original Z80, working from Simon Owen's disassembly. The room layouts, the monster logic, the movement, the scoring, all of it was deciphered from the machine code and ported across rather than approximated.
## What is in it
The full 2D game is playable. All 150 rooms, the three classes (Knight, Wizard and Serf, each with their own secret passages), every enemy type, the bosses (Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, the Devil and the Hunchback), keys, doors, trapdoors, pickups, weapons, scoring, and the win condition: escape the house carrying all three pieces of the ACG key.
## How it is built
The interesting decision was splitting the game in two. There is a headless engine with a Gym-style `Step(Action) -> StepResult` API, the kind of interface you would use to train an agent, and a separate Ebitengine wrapper for a human to actually play. The engine knows nothing about graphics. The display layer reproduces the Spectrum's 256x192 screen, its 16 colours, and its famous attribute clash.
| Package | Job |
|---|---|
| `engine/` | Headless logic: collision, movement, AI, scoring |
| `screen/` | ZX Spectrum display buffer, 256x192, attribute clash |
| `data/` | Sprite and room data extracted from the Z80 |
| `audio/` | Low-latency sound via oto, around 12ms |
| `render3d/` | Experimental first-person renderer |
## The 3D experiment
There is a first-person mode. Press Tab and the current room renders as a software-rasterised 3D view at 192x192, still in the Spectrum palette, walls extruded from the room's boundary line segments, with door arches and portraits texture-mapped onto them.
It is alpha quality and I will not pretend otherwise. The decoration heights are placed by heuristics, so a suit of armour occasionally floats. The field of view is wide enough to make some rooms feel wrong. Cave and stair rooms carry enough geometry to render with visible noise. The floor and ceiling are simply black. It works, it is good fun to walk around in, and it is nobody's idea of finished.
- GitHub: [github.com/SeamusWaldron/atic-atac](https://github.com/SeamusWaldron/atic-atac)
================================================================================
## Avatar - Fire and Ash (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-avatar-fire-and-ash
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-avatar-fire-and-ash.md
- published: 2025-12-23
- document_id: 1039
> Cameron takes the third Avatar somewhere darker, with a hostile Na'vi tribe and a grieving family. The world-building is still the best in the business, even at three hours and a quarter. 8/10.
- **UK release:** December 2025
- **Director:** James Cameron · **Writers:** James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Studios; Lightstorm Entertainment
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / ecological epic · **Runtime:** 197 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Sam Worthington (*Terminator Salvation*, *Avatar*) as Jake Sully; Zoe Saldaña (*Guardians of the Galaxy*, *Avatar*) as Neytiri; Sigourney Weaver (*Alien*, *Avatar: The Way of Water*) as Kiri; Oona Chaplin (*Game of Thrones*, *Taboo*) as Varang; Stephen Lang (*Tombstone*, *Avatar*) as Colonel Miles Quaritch
- **IMDb:** 7.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 66% critics / 90% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Three years on from *Avatar: The Way of Water*, James Cameron is back on Pandora with the third film in a sequence he has promised will run to five. The pattern by now is familiar: a new biome, a new branch of Na'vi culture, a new way for the camera to dissolve the line between live action and the entirely invented. What is different here is the temperature. The first two films sold paradise, oceans and forests rendered with a patience nobody else in the business can afford. *Fire and Ash* brings in a tribe who have lost their paradise, and it is the harder, angrier note in the trilogy so far.
## The setup
The Sully family is still grieving. The losses of the last film hang over them, and the wider war for Pandora has not paused to let them mourn. Into that comes the Ash People, a Na'vi tribe led by Varang (Oona Chaplin), who live in a scorched volcanic country and have a far more combative relationship with Eywa, the planetary consciousness the forest clans treat as sacred. They are not simply villains imported to give Jake somebody to fight. They are a people shaped by hardship into something colder, and their quarrel is as much with the religion of the other Na'vi as with the humans. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), still walking around in a recombinant Na'vi body, is out there too, and the alliances are messier than the clean colonial set-up of the first film.
## The cast
Worthington remains the dependable centre, less the audience's wide-eyed entry point now and more a tired father holding a family together by force of will. Saldaña does the most affecting work; Neytiri's grief and rage carry real weight, and the performance-capture has reached the point where you stop noticing it is a performance at all. Sigourney Weaver, playing Kiri rather than the scientist she was in the original, gives the spiritual strand its gravity, and it is a quietly strange thing to watch a veteran actor inhabit a teenage Na'vi without the seams showing. The newcomer is Oona Chaplin's Varang, and she is the film's best addition: proud, wounded, and convinced of her own righteousness, the rare antagonist in this series whose argument you can follow. Lang is reliably granite as Quaritch, though the script keeps trying to soften him and the film is sharper when it does not.
## The craft
The craft is the reason these films exist, and on that count Cameron has not slipped. Russell Carpenter's photography makes the ash country genuinely new, all embers and smoke and burnt-orange light, a deliberate break from the blues and greens we have come to expect from Pandora. The high frame rate is again used selectively rather than across the whole film, smoothing the action and leaving the quieter scenes alone. Simon Franglen's score leans on the themes James Horner established without simply reprising them. At a few minutes past three and a quarter hours it is the longest of the three, and the length is the one place the spell wobbles: the middle act could lose a battle and a council scene without anyone missing them. When the film moves, though, it is as immersive as anything in cinemas.
## How it stacks up
Set beside the first *Avatar*, the plotting is more ambitious and less clean; the simple parable has given way to a tangle of clans, faiths and grudges, which is the right direction even when it overreaches. Against *The Way of Water* it is the angrier, less serene picture, trading that film's underwater calm for heat and conflict. The closest comparison outside the franchise is to Studio Ghibli's *Princess Mononoke*, another story in which the spirits of a world and the people who exploit it are pulled into a war with no clean side, and *Fire and Ash* reaches for that moral murk more honestly than its predecessors did. It is not as tightly built as *Dune*, but it is doing something *Dune* does not, which is making an invented ecology feel inhabited rather than designed.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split is stark. Critics are sitting around 66%, the lowest the series has scored, with the familiar complaints about length and a story that rhymes too closely with what came before. Audiences are at 90%, one of the widest gaps the franchise has produced. I land closer to the crowd, while granting the critics their point about the running time. The reviews that call it overlong are not wrong; the ones that call it empty have not been paying attention to what Chaplin and the ash-country material are adding. This is the first Avatar film with a genuinely contested idea at its heart, even if it takes three hours to chew it.
## Verdict
I value world-building, atmosphere and the kind of immersion that makes you forget the row of seats you are sitting in, and on all three this delivers. The grief gives it a weight the first film never had, Varang is the most interesting figure the series has produced, and the ash country is a real expansion of the world rather than a recolour. Against that, the length genuinely costs it, and the middle sags in a way the leaner first film never did. It is not quite the equal of the original for sheer novelty, but it is the most emotionally serious entry yet, and I will happily go back to Pandora for the next one. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in 3D, HFR and on the largest IMAX screen you can reach; this is a film built for the biggest format available.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: as the third of a planned five-film sequence, *Fire and Ash* sets up threads, particularly Varang's people and the fate of the Ash country, that the next instalment is expected to pay off. It will reach 4K disc and digital in the usual window after its theatrical run, and is expected to land on Disney+ thereafter, region depending. The wide critics-versus-audience gap noted above has held as the standard line on the film.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *violence, threat, injury detail, brief suicide references, drugs, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are extended battle scenes in which combatants use guns, knives, bows and arrows, spears, sticks and other weapons to shoot, slash and stab one another. Hand-to-hand fighting includes punches, kicks, elbow and knee blows and head butts. People and vehicles are attacked by large fantastical creatures, sometimes resulting in explosions. Captured characters are briefly shown being beaten.
**Threat and horror:** Sustained sequences of threat include characters wielding both firearms and bladed weapons and chasing and capturing others, including children. Knives are held at people's throats and characters are held at gunpoint. Characters experience a fantastical form of torture at the hands of their captor, but their suffering is not dwelt upon. A boy repeatedly experienced breathing difficulties.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f***k') along with milder terms such as 'bitch', 'prick', 'shit', 'piss', 'ass', 'asshole', 'bastard', 'fricking', 'butt', 'damn' and 'hell'. There is also use of the middle finger gesture.
**Sex:** Characters occasionally make undetailed sexually suggestive comments to one another, and it is implied a couple shown in bed together have had sexual relations. Characters are shown kissing.
**Drugs:** A character is made to ingest a fantastical substance which causes him to experience hallucinogenic effects, which are expressed visually.
**Injury detail:** Blood and wounds are sometimes visible in the aftermath of battle, but detail is discreet. A man tends to a wound caused by an arrow in his leg. Characters suffer burn injuries during battles. Clouds of blood are briefly visible in water when fantastical marine creatures are attacked by hunters and there are brief shots of animal carcasses being butchered.
**Suicide and self-harm:** There are brief references to suicide.
**Sexual violence and sexual threat:** A female character is briefly subjected to verbal sexual harassment from a group of men; she responds to their behaviour defiantly.
**Theme:** Characters grieve for lost loved ones.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/avatar-fire-and-ash-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdmxntm0)).*
================================================================================
## The Running Man (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-running-man
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-running-man.md
- published: 2025-11-21
- document_id: 1213
> Edgar Wright takes Stephen King's nastiest dystopia back to its roots, hands it to Glen Powell and turns it into a furious chase picture with a satirical streak. Loud, fast and angrier than it lets on. 8/10.
- **UK release:** November 2025
- **Director:** Edgar Wright · **Writers:** Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Kinberg Genre; Complete Fiction
- **Genre:** Dystopian science fiction action thriller · **Runtime:** 133 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Glen Powell (*Top Gun: Maverick*, *Twisters*) as Ben Richards; Josh Brolin (*No Country for Old Men*, *Dune*) as Dan Killian; Colman Domingo (*Rustin*) as Bobby Thompson; Katy O'Brian (*Love Lies Bleeding*) as a fellow contestant; Michael Cera (*Scott Pilgrim vs. the World*, *Superbad*) as Elton Parrakis
- **IMDb:** 6.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 61% critics / 77% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
There is already a film of *The Running Man*, and most people who grew up renting it have a soft spot for it: Arnold Schwarzenegger in spandex, a neon gladiator arena, one-liners landing as often as the kills. What that 1987 version never had much time for was the book it came from, a lean and bleak Stephen King novel published under the Richard Bachman name, set in a poisoned America where a desperate man signs up for a televised manhunt because the prize money is the only thing that might save his sick daughter. Handing that book to Edgar Wright, a director who cuts to music and treats a chase as choreography, sounds at first like an odd marriage of the savage and the slick. It works because Wright has read the same novel the rest of us did and decided to take its anger seriously.
## The setup
Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is broke, blacklisted and out of options in a near-future America run by a television network that has turned poverty into prime-time entertainment. To pay for his daughter's medicine he auditions for *The Running Man*, the network's flagship show: thirty days on the run from a squad of professional Hunters, with a cash bounty that climbs for every hour he survives and a fortune waiting if he lasts the month. Nobody has ever lasted the month. The catch, which Ben works out fast, is that the cameras are not neutral. The network controls what the public sees, edits him into whatever villain the ratings need, and turns the whole country into informers. Staying alive turns out to be the easy part. Staying the protagonist of his own story is the fight.
## The cast
Powell carries it. He has spent the last few years proving he can do the matinee-idol grin, and here he keeps the charm but lets the desperation show underneath it, a man whose defiance is mostly fear wearing a brave face. Josh Brolin is the cold centre of the film as Dan Killian, the producer who runs the show, all reasonable tone and no conscience, the kind of executive who sincerely believes he is giving the people what they want. Colman Domingo has a wonderful time as Bobby Thompson, the show's host, a grinning ringmaster who can swing from warmth to cruelty inside a single autocue line. Katy O'Brian brings real physical credibility to a fellow contestant, and Michael Cera turns up as an underground ally and plays beautifully against type, jittery and decent in a world that punishes both. It is a deep bench, and Wright gives almost everyone a moment.
## The craft
This is unmistakably an Edgar Wright film. Chung-hoon Chung's camera is restless without being incoherent, Paul Machliss cuts on the beat the way he did on *Baby Driver*, and Steven Price's score drives the thing forward like an engine. Where the 1987 film kept Richards in a single stadium, Wright sends him across a whole grimy city, so the action keeps changing shape: a foot chase becomes a car chase becomes a siege. The satire is sharpened rather than subtle. The on-screen graphics, the audience-participation gimmicks, the way a death is packaged for replay, all of it lands the media critique without slowing the chase down. At 133 minutes it occasionally feels its length in the middle act, but Wright is too good a builder of sequences to let the energy sag for long.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is the Schwarzenegger version, and this is the better film, more faithful to King and far angrier about the world it shows. Beyond that it sits in good company: the death-game lineage of *Battle Royale* and *The Hunger Games*, and the broadcast satire of *Network*, whose fury at television as a machine for manufacturing consent runs right through this. Wright's own *Baby Driver* is the closest stylistic cousin, the same marriage of music, motion and editing, pointed now at something with more bite. It is less playful than *Hot Fuzz* or *Shaun of the Dead* and the better for it; the comedy here cuts.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are divided. The reviews sit around 61%, with the split running between those who admire the energy and the media satire and those who find the relentless pace exhausting or the politics too on-the-nose. Audiences are warmer, in the high seventies, and I think they have the right of it. The complaint that the message is unsubtle rather misses how unsubtle the source material always was; King was not writing nuance, he was writing rage. The film is loud and it means to be.
## Verdict
This is the kind of thing I come to the cinema for: intelligent dystopian science fiction that has actually thought about surveillance and media control, wrapped in a chase picture that never stops moving. It is angrier and smarter than its trailers suggest, Powell is genuinely good in it, and the craft is everywhere. It loses a little momentum in the middle and the satire sometimes shouts where a murmur would cut deeper, which is what keeps it off the very top shelf. But it is enormously entertaining, it rewards a second watch, and it does right by a book that has waited a long time for a proper adaptation. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film has since arrived on digital and on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, and streams on Paramount+. It has settled into its reputation as the *Running Man* adaptation that finally honoured King's novel, and as one of the stronger entries in a busy year of King screen adaptations.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, language, brief sex references*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** People are shot, stabbed, slashed and decapitated in scenes which include blood spurts and blood in the aftermath. A negative character briefly stamps on a man's wound. In another scene, a man removes a glass shard from his eye. Milder scenes include those in which people are set on fire, run over a by a car, electrocuted and beaten.
**Threat and horror:** There are several intense and prolonged sequences of suspense and threat throughout the film. Hunters chase their targets through various environments, creating a sustained sense of menace. Car chases include vehicle crashes. Characters are threatened with weapons including guns and grenades.
**Language:** Strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker') occurs. There is also implied strong language, milder terms ('dick', 'son of a bitch', 'bitch', 'pussy', 'asshole', 'shit', 'bullshit', 'ass', 'balls', 'bastard', 'piss', 'crap', 'damn', 'hell', 'God', 'Jesus Christ', 'goddamn', 'jerk'), and rude gestures.
**Sex:** A group of seemingly naked women with nudity obscured lie on a bed with a man who makes sexual comments. In a milder scene, a scantily-clad female pole-dancer dances suggestively. There are also references to sex workers.
**Drugs:** Characters briefly smoke marijuana joints; however, drug misuse is not condoned by the film as a whole.
**Suicide and self-harm:** There is a passing verbal suicide reference.
**Nudity:** There is a scene of non-sexual nudity in which a man's buttocks are briefly visible.
**Theme:** References are made to cancer and illness. A child is shown unwell in a hospital setting.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-running-man-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdmznzey)).*
================================================================================
## Predator - Badlands (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-predator-badlands
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-predator-badlands.md
- published: 2025-11-15
- document_id: 1135
> Dan Trachtenberg flips the franchise inside out and puts the Predator at the centre of its own story, with an android sidekick and a planet that wants everyone dead. It should not work as well as it does. 8/10.
- **UK release:** November 2025
- **Director:** Dan Trachtenberg · **Writers:** Patrick Aison, Dan Trachtenberg
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Studios; Davis Entertainment
- **Genre:** Science fiction action adventure / alien survival · **Runtime:** 107 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi as Dek; Elle Fanning (*Super 8*, *The Great*) as Thia
- **IMDb:** 7.2 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 86% critics / 95% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Three years ago Dan Trachtenberg took a franchise that had spent two decades lurching between sequels and crossovers and quietly made the best Predator film since the original by stripping it back: one hunter, one Comanche warrior, no clutter. *Prey* worked because it trusted a simple idea and a strong lead. *Badlands* is the opposite gamble. Instead of paring the world down, Trachtenberg cracks it open, hands the camera to the monster, and dares you to root for the thing that has spent forty years skinning Arnold Schwarzenegger's commandos. It is the kind of swing that usually ends in tears. This one connects.
## The setup
Dek is a young Yautja, runt of his clan and written off by a father who measures worth in kills. Exiled to prove himself, he lands on Genna, a death-world where the wildlife is engineered to be unkillable and the apex predator is a creature his own people could not bring down. There he falls in with Thia, a damaged Weyland-Yutani synthetic with her own reasons for wanting to reach the planet's interior, and the two strike an uneasy alliance: he needs a trophy, she needs her missing lower half, and neither will last a night alone. What follows is a hunt told from the wrong end of the spear, with the audience for once standing behind the mask.
## The cast
Asking newcomer Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi to carry a blockbuster from inside a prosthetic head, speaking subtitled Yautja, is a big ask, and he meets it. Dek reads as proud, frightened and stubborn through posture and clicks alone, which is a real feat of physical performance. The film's secret weapon, though, is Elle Fanning, who plays Thia and a second synthetic with a deadpan wit that keeps the whole thing from curdling into solemnity. She is the warmth and most of the jokes, and her timing gives the bond at the centre of the story a charm the script could easily have missed. The two of them, one all menace and one all banter, carry the picture between them.
## The craft
Jeff Cutter shoots Genna as a genuinely alien place, all bruised skies and predatory flora, and the design work commits hard to showing Yautja culture from the inside rather than as a glimpsed curiosity. Trachtenberg stages the action with the clarity that has become his signature; you always know where you are and what is trying to kill whom, which in a modern action film is rarer than it should be. The score from Sarah Schachner and Benjamin Wallfisch nods to the franchise's clicking, percussive past without leaning on nostalgia. At 107 minutes it moves, sets up its rules, and gets out before the novelty thins. The restraint that made *Prey* sing is still here, even in a far bigger sandbox.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Prey*, and *Badlands* is the looser, stranger film: warmer, funnier, less tense. It also owes a clear debt to *The Mandalorian*, another story about a masked, near-silent hunter softened by an unlikely companion, and the odd-couple road structure echoes that more than it echoes the original *Predator*. The decision to fold in Weyland-Yutani and the synthetics ties the picture into *Alien* territory, doing in passing what the laboured *Alien vs Predator* films never managed: making the shared universe feel like a place rather than a marketing deck. Against the wider franchise it sits comfortably in the top tier, just below *Prey* and the 1987 film, and well clear of the crossovers.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm, around 86%, with the praise landing on the audacity of the perspective shift and Fanning's performance. The reservations are predictable and not unfair: this is a Predator film with very few humans in it, the threat is fantastical rather than visceral, and some of the old survival-horror tension is traded away for adventure and heart. Audiences are running hotter, near the mid-nineties, the strongest reception the series has had. That gap tells you what kind of film this is: not the lean, frightening hunt of the originals, but a crowd-pleasing creature adventure that knows exactly how much fun it is having.
## Verdict
I came in sceptical that a Predator could carry a film as a hero rather than a horror, and left won over. What sells it is the world-building, which is the thing I always value most in science fiction; *Badlands* makes the Yautja a culture with rules and shame and history rather than a stalking gimmick, and that is the richest the franchise has ever felt. Fanning is a delight, the planet is a proper character, and the whole thing is built for a rewatch. It loses a little for trading away the suffocating dread that the best entries trade on, and Dek's arc hits beats you can see coming. But it is inventive, generous and a great deal of fun, and it leaves the series somewhere genuinely new. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX and 3D, where the death-world looks its best.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Badlands* has gone on to be the franchise's highest-rated entry with audiences and a commercial success, confirming that Trachtenberg's reinvention of the series with *Prey* was no fluke and that there is real appetite for more from the Yautja's side of the hunt. It is now available on digital and disc, and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of fantasy violence in which aliens and robots fight, and aliens attack fantastical monsters intent on harming them. The violence is sustained and includes a focus on bladed weapons. Occasionally bloody injury detail occurs as characters are stabbed, decapitated or have their limbs severed, but it's unrealistic in appearance and lacks strong gory detail.
**Threat and horror:** There are frequent scenes in which characters are attacked or hunted by fantastical monsters and aggressive plant life.
**Injury detail:** Bloody detail is visible during violence and medical procedures, although this is unrealistic in appearance.
**Rude humour:** A character calls another a 'tool'.
**Language:** Mild bad language ('shit') is used (ScreenX version only).
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/predator-badlands-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi5odkx)).*
================================================================================
## Tron - Ares (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-tron-ares
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-tron-ares.md
- published: 2025-10-24
- document_id: 1228
> Fifteen years after Legacy, the Grid spills out into our world to a Nine Inch Nails pulse. The story is thin and the critics are cool, but as pure neon-and-noise spectacle it delivers what I came for. 8/10.
- **UK release:** October 2025
- **Director:** Joachim Rønning · **Writers:** Jesse Wigutow, Jack Thorne
- **Studio / distributor:** Walt Disney Pictures; Sean Bailey Productions
- **Genre:** Cyberpunk science fiction action · **Runtime:** 119 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Jared Leto (*Dallas Buyers Club*, *Blade Runner 2049*) as Ares; Greta Lee (*Past Lives*) as Eve Kim; Evan Peters (*X-Men: Days of Future Past*, *Mare of Easttown*) as Julian Dillinger; Gillian Anderson (*The X-Files*, *The Crown*) as Elisabeth Dillinger; Jeff Bridges (*Tron*, *The Big Lebowski*) as Kevin Flynn
- **IMDb:** 6.2 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 55% critics / 84% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
It has been fifteen years since *Tron: Legacy* took a property nobody much remembered and turned it into the most beautiful argument for a soundtrack ever bolted onto a thin script. That film lived and died on Daft Punk and the way light moved across black; the plot was an afterthought, and it did not stop me watching it more times than I would admit to. *Tron: Ares* arrives with the same gamble loaded and a different play. This time the Grid does not pull a human in. It sends one of its own out, into our world, with Nine Inch Nails handling the noise. The question is whether a Tron film survives leaving the one place it has ever looked at home.
## The setup
Ares (Jared Leto) is a programme, a digital soldier of frightening capability, dispatched out of the digital world and into reality as two technology companies race for a piece of code that would let an artificial being hold together in our world for longer than a few minutes. Eve Kim (Greta Lee) runs one of those companies and has reasons of her own to want the breakthrough; Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), heir to the surname that has shadowed this franchise since 1982, wants it for colder ends, with his mother Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson) presiding over the family firm. What follows is a chase for permanence, a thing that thinks it is alive trying to stay that way, with the Dillinger and Flynn legacies still grinding against each other in the background.
## The cast
Leto is well cast as a being learning what it is, all stillness and watchfulness, a machine working out the rules of a world it was not built for, and he resists the temptation to oversell the awakening. Greta Lee, fresh from the quiet precision of *Past Lives*, gives Eve more interior life than the screenplay strictly provides, and grounds the film whenever it threatens to float off into pure surface. Evan Peters enjoys himself as the entitled corporate heir without quite tipping into pantomime. Gillian Anderson lends her few scenes the cold authority she can summon in her sleep. Jeff Bridges returns as Kevin Flynn, the thread back to the original, and his presence is more benediction than role, a reminder of where all this neon came from.
## The craft
This is where the film earns its keep. Jeff Cronenweth shoots it with real weight, and the central inversion, dragging the Grid's glow out onto rain-slicked night streets, gives the design team something new to do rather than another circuit-board horizon. The light-cycles and the angular, hard-edged hardware look superb in motion, and a chase that splits a car cleanly in two is the kind of image this series exists to deliver. Above all there is the Nine Inch Nails score, an industrial throb that does for *Ares* what Daft Punk did for *Legacy*, carrying scenes the dialogue cannot and giving the whole thing a pulse. Turn it up, sit close, and the film works on you below the level of plot.
## How it stacks up
The obvious measure is *Tron: Legacy*, and *Ares* shares its DNA exactly: gorgeous, sonically intoxicating, narratively undernourished. It reaches for the company of better company than it keeps, *Blade Runner 2049* for the rain and the melancholy machines, *Ex Machina* and *The Matrix* for the questions about what a thinking program owes itself, and it does not have the script to stand among them. What it has instead is commitment to its own look and sound, and a willingness to take the franchise somewhere it has not been. As spectacle it sits a clear step above most of what passes for blockbuster science fiction this year.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split is stark and entirely predictable. Critics are sitting around the middle, near 55%, praising the visuals and the score while marking the film down for a thin story and the decision to spend so much of its time away from the Grid. Audiences are markedly warmer, in the eighties. I land with the crowd, and I know why. If you want a tight screenplay, the critics have a point and you should listen to them. If you want to be put inside a world that looks and sounds like nothing else on a cinema screen, the consensus is undervaluing what is in front of it.
## Verdict
I am the target audience for this, and I will not pretend otherwise. I gave *Legacy* a nine for exactly these pleasures, and *Ares* delivers most of them: a world I want to live in for two hours, hardware I want to look at, and a score I will have on long after the film is back on the shelf. The story is the weak link, the emotional stakes never bite quite as hard as the cancer subplot wants them to, and that is what keeps it a notch below its predecessor. None of it stops me wanting to see it again on the biggest screen and the loudest speakers I can find. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, in IMAX and 3D. See it loud.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the verdict has settled roughly where it opened, a film whose audience scores comfortably outran its critics, remembered for its look and its Nine Inch Nails score more than its plot, much as *Tron: Legacy* is remembered for Daft Punk. It has since arrived on digital and disc and streams on Disney+, where it plays well at home with the volume up, though the scale of the cinema and IMAX presentation is the version worth chasing.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Stylised fight scenes include impactful punches, kicks and use of bladed futuristic weapons. In one scene, a character is stabbed, resulting in bloodstained clothing. Artificially intelligent avatars disintegrate into blocks of non-organic matter as a result of fantastical violence.
**Threat and horror:** Characters fall from height and are threatened with gun violence. A car is lasered in half during a high-speed chase sequence. Panicked civilians flee and debris falls from crumbling skyscrapers during a fantastical attack. Scenes are intercut with comic moments and result in ultimately reassuring outcomes.
**Language:** Bad language includes uses of 'shit', 'goddam' and 'hell'.
**Theme:** Upsetting scenes are centred on a person's death from cancer.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/tron-ares-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi5mzk0)).*
================================================================================
## Superman (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-superman
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-superman.md
- published: 2025-07-27
- document_id: 1167
> James Gunn takes the keys to a new DC Universe and bets the whole thing on Superman meaning it. The reboot machinery shows, but the sincerity lands and the world is a pleasure to be in. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2025
- **Director:** James Gunn · **Writer:** James Gunn
- **Studio / distributor:** DC Studios; Warner Bros. Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero adventure / science-fiction fantasy · **Runtime:** 129 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** David Corenswet (*Pearl*) as Clark Kent / Superman; Rachel Brosnahan (*The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel*) as Lois Lane; Nicholas Hoult (*Mad Max: Fury Road*, *The Menu*) as Lex Luthor; Edi Gathegi (*X-Men: First Class*) as Mister Terrific; Nathan Fillion (*Firefly*, *The Suicide Squad*) as Guy Gardner
- **IMDb:** 7.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 83% critics / 90% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
There is a particular pressure on the first film of a new universe, and *Superman* carries more of it than most. James Gunn, fresh from the *Guardians of the Galaxy* films and *The Suicide Squad*, has been handed the keys to the whole DC slate, and rather than ease in with a side character he has walked straight up to the most difficult hero in the canon. Superman is hard to write because he is almost impossible to threaten and almost impossible to make interesting while being good. The recent fashion, Zack Snyder's *Man of Steel* most of all, was to make him brooding and reluctant and weighed down by the burden of being a god. Gunn's answer is the opposite, and braver for it: he makes a Superman who simply wants to do the right thing, and dares you to find that uncool.
## The setup
We skip the origin entirely. By the time we meet him, Clark Kent (David Corenswet) has been Superman for three years, is already in a relationship with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and has just lost a fight, which is where the film opens. The world has not settled on whether it trusts him. He has intervened in a conflict between two nations without anyone asking him to, and that act of unilateral goodness is precisely what Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) needs to turn public opinion against him. Luthor is not robbing banks here; he is running a campaign, weaponising distrust, fielding his own engineered metahumans and picking apart the idea that an alien with this much power should be allowed to decide what is right. The film is busy around the edges with other heroes and a city under threat, but the spine is simple: can a sincerely good man survive a cynical world that has learned to read sincerity as a threat.
## The cast
Corenswet is the find. He plays Clark with an open, slightly bruised decency and never once winks at the camera, which is the trap most modern Supermans fall into. He looks the part without seeming carved from it, and he makes the kindness feel like a choice rather than a default setting. Brosnahan's Lois is the equal the role has always needed, quick and sceptical, and the long interview scene where she presses Clark on his interventions is the best two-hander in the film. Hoult gives Luthor a thin-skinned, terminally online petulance under the genius, a man whose hatred is really wounded vanity, and it is a more modern and more frightening Luthor for it. Around them Gunn fields a deep bench, Edi Gathegi's coolly competent Mister Terrific and Nathan Fillion's gloriously obnoxious Guy Gardner among them, and the ensemble mostly earns its keep, though there are moments when the film feels like it is auditioning a roster as much as telling a story.
## The craft
Gunn directs with the colour turned back up. Henry Braham's photography gives Metropolis a bright, comic-book clarity that is a deliberate rebuke to the grey-blue palette superhero films have been stuck in for a decade, and the action has a legibility that the genre too often forgets, you can see who is hitting whom and why. The pacing is brisk to the point of breathless; at 129 minutes the film is doing the work of a launch pad and a standalone story at once, and you feel the join. The score, by John Murphy and David Fleming, knows when to quote the John Williams fanfare and when to hold back. There is real wit in the staging, and a flying dog called Krypto who could have been unbearable and instead becomes the film's secret weapon, but the design and texture of this world, the gadgetry, the pocket-universe science fiction at the margins, is what makes it a place you would happily return to.
## How it stacks up
The obvious measure is *Superman: The Movie*, and Gunn is clearly reaching for that film's earnest, hopeful register rather than Snyder's gravity. Where Donner's film took its time, this one sprints, and it trades some of that grandeur for energy and density. Against *Man of Steel* it is a clear corrective: warmer, funnier, more interested in why we want a Superman than in how much collateral damage he can cause. The closer comparison may be Gunn's own *Guardians* films, a found-family ensemble run on sincerity and needle-drops, or even *The Incredibles* in its conviction that doing good openly is heroic rather than naive. It does not have the clean, iconic simplicity of the 1978 film, but it is the most likeable big-screen Superman since.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split is mild but telling. Critics are warm, around 83%, praising the sincerity and Corenswet, while flagging the crowded ensemble and the sense of a universe being assembled in real time around the story. Audiences are warmer still at 90%, which feels right: this is a film that plays better than it parses. The franchise scaffolding is a fair criticism, and there are stretches where the film is plainly doing setup. But the thing critics sometimes undervalue is on full display, a superhero film that is actually pleasant to watch, that wants you to leave the cinema hopeful rather than wrung out.
## Verdict
This lands just below the very top tier for me, and the gap is the reboot machinery rather than the heart. The plot is occasionally a delivery system for a wider universe, and the breakneck pace costs it some weight. But Corenswet is the right Superman, the world is bright and inventive and worth revisiting, and Gunn has made the bravest possible choice by betting everything on the hero meaning it. It is funny, it is kind, it is rewatchable, and it sends you out lighter than you came in. As the first step of a new universe it could hardly have set a better tone. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX. Worth the big screen for the flight sequences.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: this is the opening film of Gunn and Peter Safran's rebooted DC Universe, and it should be watched as the foundation stone for what follows rather than a standalone. It is now available to buy and rent digitally, with a disc release for collectors, and reaches streaming in due course on the Warner platform. Its reputation has settled as the reset DC needed, the film that finally got Superman's optimism right after a decade of trying to make him grim.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, injury detail, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Moderate fantastical violence involves characters with superpowers, monsters and androids; these feature heavy blows, body slams, the use of bladed weapons, energy blasts, stranglings and the undetailed breaking and dislocation of fingers and limbs. A person is fatally shot, but without strong detail.
**Threat and horror:** Occasionally intense and sustained scenes of threat feature a fire-breathing creature menacing people, who are also endangered by collapsing buildings and rifts ripping up city streets; however, superheroes intervene to save them. A superhero is painfully debilitated by a substance to which he is vulnerable. There is also moderate gun threat.
**Language:** Moderate bad language ('bitch') and an implied use ('dick') features, as well as milder terms such as 'asshole', 'shit', 'piss', 'fricking', 'screw', 'jerk', 'damn', 'hell', 'God', 'Jesus' are included.
**Additional issues:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/superman-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi2mdaz)).*
================================================================================
## The Fantastic Four - First Steps (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-fantastic-four-first-steps
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-fantastic-four-first-steps.md
- published: 2025-07-26
- document_id: 1186
> Marvel's most-fumbled family finally get the film they deserve, a warm retro-futurist origin that trusts its own world rather than the machinery around it. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2025
- **Director:** Matt Shakman · **Writers:** Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, Ian Springer
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Retro-futurist superhero science fiction · **Runtime:** 114 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Pedro Pascal (*The Mandalorian*, *The Last of Us*) as Reed Richards; Vanessa Kirby (*Mission: Impossible - Fallout*, *The Crown*) as Sue Storm; Joseph Quinn (*Stranger Things*) as Johnny Storm; Ebon Moss-Bachrach (*The Bear*, *Andor*) as Ben Grimm; Ralph Ineson (*The Witch*, *The Green Knight*) as Galactus
- **IMDb:** 7.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 86% critics / 90% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The Fantastic Four have been Marvel's longest-running embarrassment on screen. Two unloved Tim Story films in the mid-2000s, a 2015 reboot so troubled its own director disowned it on the way out, and a comic-book pedigree, the very first family of the modern Marvel age, that none of those attempts managed to honour. So the bar that *First Steps* has to clear is partly artistic and partly a matter of exorcism, and the surprise is how lightly it steps over both. Matt Shakman, who turned *WandaVision* into the most formally inventive thing the studio has made for television, has done something the previous films never tried: he has let the Fantastic Four simply be the Fantastic Four, on their own terms, in their own world.
## The setup
The smartest decision here is to wall the team off from everything else. *First Steps* unfolds not in the familiar shared universe but on an alternate Earth styled as an optimistic 1960s that never stopped believing in the future: chrome, valves, ticker-tape parades and a city that treats its four resident astronauts as beloved public figures rather than vigilantes in hiding. Reed Richards and Sue Storm are married and expecting a child; her brother Johnny and their friend Ben Grimm round out a household as much as a team. Into this settled life comes the Silver Surfer, a herald announcing that the planet-eater Galactus has marked Earth for consumption, and the film becomes a question of whether a family can save a world without sacrificing one of its own to do it.
## The cast
This is the warmest Marvel ensemble in some time, and the casting carries it. Pedro Pascal plays Reed as a man whose intelligence is a kind of anxiety, forever running the numbers on a problem he is terrified of getting wrong, and it is a quieter register than the swaggering genius the role usually invites. Vanessa Kirby is the film's centre of gravity, giving Sue a steel that the script wisely refuses to soften; she is the one making the hard calls while everyone else argues. Joseph Quinn brings real charm to Johnny, more curious than cocky, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach finds the melancholy under Ben Grimm's rocky hide without ever tipping into self-pity. They play like people who have lived in the same house for years, which is the one thing every previous version of these characters failed to convey. Ralph Ineson lends Galactus a cathedral-deep voice and a genuine sense of scale, a threat that feels less like a villain than a force of physics.
## The craft
Shakman and cinematographer Jess Hall commit fully to the retro-futurist conceit, and the production design is the film's great pleasure: a Kirby-by-way-of-Eames vision of tomorrow, all curved consoles and confident primary colours, shot with a clean warmth that feels deliberately analogue. Michael Giacchino's score leans into the optimism, brassy and adventurous where so much of the genre now defaults to grey portent. The decision to keep the canvas small, one family, one city, one threat, pays off in clarity; at 114 minutes this is among the leaner Marvel pictures, and it moves. The cosmic sequences, when they arrive, have a weight and silence that recall the better hard science fiction rather than the usual weightless light-show. If there is a cost to the compression, it is that a couple of beats land before they have quite been earned, the film occasionally telling you a bond is deep rather than showing it forming.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *The Incredibles*, which understood twenty years ago that the Fantastic Four were always a family drama wearing a superhero costume, and *First Steps* finally brings that insight back to the source. Set against *Guardians of the Galaxy*, it shares the appetite for cosmic strangeness and a strong needle-drop sensibility but trades the irony for sincerity, which suits these characters far better. And against Shakman's own *WandaVision*, it is the same instinct, to root the spectacle in a marriage and a home, given a much bigger budget. Measured against the two earlier Fantastic Four runs, there is no contest; this is the first time the material has been treated as an asset rather than an obligation.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are running warm, around 86%, with audiences a notch higher near 90%, and for once the two camps largely agree. The praise clusters on the family chemistry, the production design and the relief of a self-contained story; the reservations are about a plot that feels compressed and a sense that the wider franchise machinery is idling in the wings, waiting to claim these characters. Both readings are fair. My own response sits with the audience: I came out talking about the world far more than the plot mechanics, and a Marvel film that makes you want to spend more time in its company rather than less is doing the hard part right.
## Verdict
This is the Fantastic Four film that should have existed two decades ago. It is generous, good-looking, genuinely fond of its characters, and confident enough to tell a contained story rather than a feature-length advertisement for the next one. It is not flawless; the back half hurries, and the franchise obligations hover just out of frame. But it is rewatchable in the way the best of these films are, built on a world I would happily return to and a household worth caring about, and it values craft and optimism over noise. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, including IMAX. The retro-futurist design and the cosmic scale are both worth the larger screen.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *First Steps* arrived on 4K, Blu-ray and digital in the autumn of 2025 and reached Disney+ thereafter, where it slots in as the opening act of Marvel's next phase. The contained, self-sufficient quality praised at release looks, in hindsight, like the point of the exercise, an origin built to stand on its own before the wider crossovers pull these characters into the larger story.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** A man's body is violently stretched in order to cause pain, although the context is supernatural. During fantastical fight sequences, opponents punch others and fire blasts of energy and beams of fire.
**Threat and horror:** People are chased and attacked by powerful enemies, including when a pregnant woman is pursued by a villain seeking her unborn child as she goes into labour. A fantastical being threatens to bring about an apocalypse.
**Injury detail:** A man's face has bloody cuts in the aftermath of violence.
**Language:** There is use of mild bad language ('bullshit'), as well as use of milder terms such as 'Jesus', 'God' and 'hell'.
**Sex:** There are occasional references to sex, including when a woman suggests how she became pregnant.
**Nudity:** There is very brief comic buttock nudity.
**Theme:** There are references to the deaths of loved ones; however, such remarks are brief and do not feature strong detail. References are also made to a couple struggling to conceive a child.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-fantastic-four-first-steps-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi3otcx)).*
================================================================================
## Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-jurassic-world-rebirth
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-jurassic-world-rebirth.md
- published: 2025-07-16
- document_id: 1106
> Gareth Edwards reboots the dinosaurs as a lean tropical survival picture, handing the franchise back to scale and suspense rather than lore. The story is thin, the monsters are not, and it is a far better night out than the scores suggest. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2025
- **Director:** Gareth Edwards · **Writer:** David Koepp
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; Amblin Entertainment; Kennedy/Marshall
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / creature thriller · **Runtime:** 133 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Scarlett Johansson (*Lost in Translation*, *Black Widow*) as Zora Bennett; Mahershala Ali (*Moonlight*, *Green Book*) as Duncan Kincaid; Jonathan Bailey (*Bridgerton*, *Wicked*) as Dr Henry Loomis; Rupert Friend (*Homeland*) as Martin Krebs; Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (*The Magnificent Seven*) as Reuben Delgado
- **IMDb:** 5.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 51% critics / 72% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The Jurassic World trilogy spent three films getting steadily heavier, until *Dominion* collapsed under the weight of legacy cameos, militarised locusts and a plot nobody could summarise on the way out of the cinema. So the smartest decision behind *Rebirth* was made before a frame was shot: hand the keys to Gareth Edwards, the director who turned *Godzilla* into a film about scale and dread rather than wrestling, and let David Koepp, who wrote the original *Jurassic Park*, strip the thing back to a survival picture. The franchise stops trying to be a saga and remembers it is, at heart, a film about people in the wrong place with very large animals.
## The setup
Five years on from the events of the previous films, the dinosaurs that escaped into the wider world have mostly died off, unable to cope with a climate that no longer suits them. The survivors cluster around the equator, on the ruins of the old research islands, where the air is hot enough to keep them alive and the law conveniently cannot reach. A pharmaceutical company wants genetic samples from the three largest creatures, by sea, by land and in the air, because their blood may hold the key to a heart-disease drug worth a fortune. Covert operative Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) is hired to lead the snatch-and-grab, with palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) along to point at the right animals and corporate man Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to keep an eye on the money.
What turns the job sour is a civilian family, a father and his daughters adrift after their boat is wrecked, who get folded into the expedition and onto an island that earlier experiments left behind. The genetic material is the errand. Getting everyone off the island alive is the film.
## The cast
Johansson is exactly the right sort of lead for this: dry, capable, unbothered, an action presence who has done the covert-operative register often enough that she can hold a scene without raising her voice. She anchors the film without ever pleading for your sympathy. Mahershala Ali, as her old colleague Duncan Kincaid, brings a weariness that gives the team some weight, a man who has buried people and expects to bury more. Jonathan Bailey is the find of the picture, playing the scientist as a wide-eyed enthusiast who is genuinely thrilled to be near the creatures even as they try to eat him, and he supplies the one thing the modern entries keep forgetting: wonder. Rupert Friend does smooth, expendable corporate menace with relish. The family, led by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, exist mainly to be endangered, but they are sketched well enough that the jeopardy lands.
## The craft
This is where Edwards earns his fee. John Mathieson shoots the equatorial setting for real heat and real distance, and the film keeps finding compositions that put a tiny human against an enormous, indifferent animal, which is the shot the whole series lives or dies on. A river sequence with a half-submerged predator, and a long set piece around an abandoned laboratory, are the best suspense the franchise has staged since the first film's kitchen. Edwards understands that a dinosaur is scariest when you can only partly see it, and he is patient with the build before he lets the thing loose. Alexandre Desplat takes over the score and is shrewd enough to deploy John Williams' original theme sparingly, so that when it does swell it still raises the hair on your arms. At 133 minutes the film is tight, moving between its three target animals with a clarity *Dominion* never managed.
## How it stacks up
The obvious measure is the 1993 *Jurassic Park*, and *Rebirth* sensibly does not try to win that fight; nothing will recapture the first sight of a living dinosaur. What it does instead is borrow that film's grammar, the slow reveal, the wet undergrowth, the children in peril, and apply it with modern craft. The closer comparison is *The Lost World*, the other entry built around an expedition into hostile green country, and *Rebirth* is the more controlled film of the two. Set it beside Edwards' own work and the lineage is clear: the human-scale awe of *Godzilla* and the grubby, lived-in textures of *Rogue One* are both here, pointed at dinosaurs.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have landed around 51%, audiences a good deal warmer at 72%, and that gap tells the story. The reviews fault the thin characterisation and the familiar franchise beats, and they are not wrong: the corporate-greed plot is a frame, not a story, and the family subplot is functional at best. But the critical line slightly misreads what audiences turn up for. People do not buy a ticket to a Jurassic film for the screenplay. They come for tension, scale and the pleasure of watching capable people outrun something enormous, and on that the film delivers handsomely. The audience score is the more honest verdict.
## Verdict
I came expecting damage control after *Dominion* and left having had a genuinely good time. The story is the weakest part, and the film knows it, which is why it spends its energy on suspense and spectacle instead. Edwards gives you real dread, real craft and at least three set pieces worth the big screen, Bailey restores some of the wonder the series mislaid, and Desplat's score does the rest. It is rewatchable in the way the best of these films are, the sort of thing you will happily put on again on a wet afternoon. Not the equal of the original, but easily the best Jurassic film in over twenty years, and proof that the franchise works far better lean than loaded. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the largest screen you can find for the river and laboratory sequences.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to be a substantial box-office success, comfortably reviving a franchise many had written off after *Dominion*, and Universal moved quickly to develop further entries with the new cast. It is now available on digital and on disc, and streams on the Universal-linked platforms (Peacock, and Sky/NOW in the UK) depending on region and window.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, violence, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Dinosaurs eat humans and other dinosaurs, resulting in severed limbs and limited bloody aftermath detail.
**Threat and horror:** People are pursued by dinosaurs during occasionally intense scenes. There is some focus on a child's fear and upset, however, they reassuringly remain unharmed.
**Language:** Moderate bad language ('son of a bitch') occurs, as well as milder terms such as 'piss', 'shit', 'screw', 'God', 'hell', 'damn', and 'Jesus'.
**Sex:** There is a discreet and comic verbal reference to seeing 'the naked side' of a person.
**Discrimination:** A brief condemnatory reference is made to discrimination.
**Drugs:** Comic and infrequent verbal references are made to cannabis. However, these are brief, undetailed and non-promotional.
**Injury detail:** Entrails are briefly shown hanging from a half-eaten dinosaur's corpse. A man discovers a decomposed dead body.
**Theme:** Verbal references to death and bereavement are brief and sensitively handled. This includes a discreet verbal allusion to child death.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/jurassic-world-rebirth-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi3odg4)).*
================================================================================
## 28 Years Later (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-28-years-later
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-28-years-later.md
- published: 2025-06-26
- document_id: 1026
> Boyle and Garland come back to the Rage virus after eighteen years and find something stranger and sadder than another outbreak film. A coming-of-age story dressed as a horror, and a return that earns the wait. 8/10.
- **UK release:** June 2025
- **Director:** Danny Boyle · **Writer:** Alex Garland
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; DNA Films; Sony Pictures Releasing
- **Genre:** Post-apocalyptic survival horror · **Runtime:** 115 minutes (BBFC 18)
- **Main cast:** Jodie Comer (*Killing Eve*, *The Last Duel*) as Isla; Aaron Taylor-Johnson (*Kick-Ass*, *Bullet Train*) as Jamie; Alfie Williams as Spike; Ralph Fiennes (*Schindler's List*, *Conclave*) as Dr Ian Kelson
- **IMDb:** 7.2 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 67% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
It has been eighteen years since Danny Boyle and Alex Garland first turned an empty London into the most frightening image in modern British horror, and the wonder of *28 Days Later* was always that it found dread in stillness before it found it in motion. The pair have gone their separate ways since, Boyle to *Slumdog Millionaire* and an Olympic opening ceremony, Garland into directing his own cold, clever pictures, and *28 Weeks Later* carried the franchise on without them. So the first question hanging over *28 Years Later* is whether two people who have changed this much still remember how to scare a room. The surprise is that they have come back to make something quieter and odder than a straight horror sequel, and it is the strangeness you come out thinking about.
## The setup
The Rage virus never left Britain. Nearly three decades on, the mainland is a quarantined ruin and a few hundred survivors have walled themselves onto Lindisfarne, the tidal island off the Northumberland coast, reachable only by a causeway the sea swallows twice a day. Into this fragile order comes Spike (Alfie Williams), a boy of twelve raised entirely inside the safety of the community, taken by his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on his first crossing to the mainland as a rite of passage, to learn how to kill the infected. What Spike finds out there, and what it does to his certainty about the people who raised him, is the real journey. His mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is gravely ill back home, and the rumour of a doctor still living somewhere on the mainland gives the boy a reason to go back out alone.
## The cast
This is Alfie Williams's film, and he carries it with a watchfulness that never tips into precocity. Spike is a child working out, in real time, that the adults around him have been lying by omission, and Williams plays that dawning without italics. Comer does a great deal with a part that could have been a bedbound symbol, giving Isla a wandering lucidity that is genuinely upsetting to watch. Taylor-Johnson is all coiled, performative competence as a father who has confused survival with virtue. Ralph Fiennes arrives late as Dr Kelson, and gives the film its strangest, most humane note, a man who has built an entire philosophy out of the dead. It is the kind of supporting turn that reorders everything around it.
## The craft
Boyle shoots this the way only Boyle would. Anthony Dod Mantle's camera lurches between formats, much of it captured on rigs of iPhones, and the result has the same queasy immediacy that the digital video gave the original, scaled up to wide Northumbrian landscape. There are bursts of expressionist editing, flickers of archive war footage cut against the chase, that announce this as a film with something on its mind beyond the next kill. The Young Fathers score is abrasive and percussive and used sparingly, which makes the silences land. The infected have evolved, and the design of what they have become is genuinely unsettling without leaning on the usual jump-scare grammar. Some of the slow-motion flourishes during the kills push their luck, but Boyle has earned a little excess.
## How it stacks up
The obvious lineage is the original *28 Days Later* and the bigger, blunter *28 Weeks Later*, and this sits closer to the first in spirit, more interested in grief and Englishness than in spectacle. The deeper comparison is *Children of Men*, another British apocalypse that treats catastrophe as a backdrop for one fragile thread of hope, and like that film this one keeps finding beauty in the ruin. There is some of *The Last of Us* in the bond between a hardened guide and a child crossing a poisoned country, though *28 Years Later* is stranger and less consoling than that. What sets it apart is how willing it is to stop being a horror film for long stretches and become a coming-of-age story instead.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have largely welcomed the reunion, with notices sitting around 90% and a recurring line that this is the boldest the franchise has been. Audiences are more divided, closer to 67%, and the split is easy to read: people came for a fast, frightening outbreak picture and got a melancholic mainland odyssey with a tonal swing in its final stretch that some find baffling and others find inspired. I lean towards the second camp. The shifts are deliberate, the ending is plainly a doorway to more, and the parts that frustrate a thrill-seeker are the parts I found most interesting.
## Verdict
This is a sequel that respects its audience enough to be difficult. It is unsettling, often beautiful, anchored by a remarkable child performance, and confident enough to make a horror franchise sit still and grieve. It loses a little for a closing turn that feels more like a trailer for the next film than an ending in its own right, and the format experiments occasionally show off. But the world-building is rich, the British setting is used with real feeling, and I would happily watch it again to catch what Boyle is doing in the margins. A strange, sad, ambitious return that more than earns its long absence. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, the sort of film worth seeing on a big screen with a good sound system before it reaches home release.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: this is the opening chapter of a planned new trilogy, with a direct follow-up, *28 Years Later: The Bone Temple*, shot back to back and arriving soon after. The cliffhanger ending reads more generously once it is clear how quickly the next instalment lands. The film is now available on digital and disc, and streams depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **18** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, gore, horror, very strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Strong violence - much of it inflicted on the zombie-like 'infected' - includes gruesome decapitations, bloody shootings, bludgeonings, impalements and immolation. A deer is torn apart, resulting in grisly aftermath images, but there is no evidence of real animal cruelty. In another scene, a man slaps his child across the face.
**Threat and horror:** Strong horror occurs throughout, as terrified people, including children, are chased and attacked by victims of an infectious virus that induces murderous rage.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of very strong language ('c**t'), as well as more frequent use of strong language ('f**k'). Milder terms include 'dick', 'shit', 'bollocks', 'piss', 'bastard' and 'bloody'.
**Sex:** A couple are briefly seen engaging in oral sex, without graphic detail.
**Injury detail:** Gory detail includes bloodied corpses, severed body parts, and sight of people vomiting blood after infection by an extremely virulent disease. Further bloody images occur during a fantastical and potentially disturbing scene of childbirth.
**Nudity:** There are instances of breast, rear and full-frontal nudity in a non-sexual context.
**Theme:** There are upsetting scenes involving illness, bereavement and emotional distress.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/28-years-later-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi2mduy)).*
================================================================================
## Mission - Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning.md
- published: 2025-06-02
- document_id: 1124
> Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie bring the espionage saga to a close with a sentient AI, a sunken submarine and a biplane, and the practical thrills still land harder than the plot. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2025
- **Director:** Christopher McQuarrie · **Writers:** Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Skydance; TC Productions
- **Genre:** Espionage action thriller · **Runtime:** 169 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Cruise (*Top Gun*, *Mission: Impossible - Fallout*) as Ethan Hunt; Hayley Atwell (*Captain America: The First Avenger*) as Grace; Ving Rhames (*Pulp Fiction*) as Luther Stickell; Simon Pegg (*Shaun of the Dead*, *Star Trek*) as Benji Dunn; Esai Morales (*La Bamba*) as Gabriel
- **IMDb:** 7.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 80% critics / 93% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Twenty-nine years after Ethan Hunt first dropped on a wire into a vault in Langley, the series arrives at the entry the title insists is the end of the road. *The Final Reckoning* is the eighth Mission: Impossible film, the second to be split off from a single shoot with *Dead Reckoning* (2023), and the fourth Christopher McQuarrie has directed in a row. By now Cruise and McQuarrie have turned this franchise into the last reliable home of the big practical stunt, and the question hanging over the picture is whether a series built on a man clinging to the outside of fast-moving objects can also carry the weight of a finale. Mostly it can, though it has to pause and explain itself rather more than it used to.
## The setup
The threat is the Entity, the rogue artificial intelligence introduced last time, a self-authoring program that has burrowed into the world's networks and is steadily seizing the keys to every nuclear arsenal on the planet. Ethan Hunt holds the only means of controlling it, which makes him the most wanted man alive and the only person every government is trying to either recruit or kill. Around him the familiar IMF unit reassembles, with Grace (Hayley Atwell), the pickpocket from the previous film, now folded into the team, while Gabriel (Esai Morales), the Entity's human instrument, stays a step ahead. The race runs from frozen wreckage on the seabed to a final scramble in the air, and the stakes are flatly apocalyptic: stop the machine before it decides the human race is a rounding error.
## The cast
Cruise plays Ethan Hunt now as a man worn by the job rather than energised by it, and the film leans into that fatigue. It suits him. Atwell remains the best new addition the series has made in years, quick and watchable, giving Grace a nervous competence that plays well against Hunt's certainty. Ving Rhames, the only actor besides Cruise present since 1996, anchors the emotional register as Luther, and the film knows exactly how much that continuity is worth. Simon Pegg keeps Benji as the audience's nerves made audible, less comic relief here than worried conscience. Esai Morales is a coldly elegant antagonist, though Gabriel is more a function of the plot than a character you fear. The wider ensemble, government and military figures circling Hunt, is large enough that some of them blur.
## The craft
The set pieces are why anyone buys a ticket, and on that count McQuarrie and his stunt team deliver. A long sequence inside a sunken submarine, all shifting angles and rising water, is the most genuinely tense thing the series has staged in years, claustrophobic in a way no amount of green screen could fake. The closing biplane chase, with Cruise out on the wing of an aircraft in open sky, is the kind of lunatic spectacle the franchise has made its signature, and Fraser Taggart shoots it with enough clarity that you can read every beat. Eddie Hamilton's editing keeps the action legible, which sounds like faint praise until you remember how rarely modern blockbusters manage it. The score by Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey threads Lalo Schifrin's old theme through the noise without overplaying it. The cost is length: at 169 minutes, the film spends a good deal of its first hour reminding you who everyone is and what the Entity wants, and the exposition sits heavily.
## How it stacks up
Set beside *Fallout* (2018), still the high-water mark of the run, this is the more ponderous film. *Fallout* moved like a shark; *The Final Reckoning* keeps stopping to take stock of itself, and the self-mythologising, callbacks to earlier entries, a recurring sense that the series is grading its own legacy, will reward devotees more than newcomers. As a piece of AI-apocalypse storytelling it is closer to the dread of the *Terminator* films than to anything cerebral, the Entity functioning as a faceless doomsday clock rather than a genuine idea. But on pure craft and nerve the submarine and the biplane belong in the franchise's top tier, and the closure it offers, after eight films, feels earned rather than tacked on.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have landed around 80%, warm but more measured than they were for *Fallout*, praising the stunt work and Cruise's commitment while flagging the runtime, the heavy exposition and the franchise's tendency to salute itself. Audiences are notably more enthusiastic, sitting up at 93%, which tracks: if you have followed Hunt across three decades, the things critics call indulgent are precisely the things you came for. I sit closer to the audience. The plotting is baggy and the villain underpowered, but the set pieces are extraordinary, and a finale that actually lets the saga rest is worth a good deal.
## Verdict
This is not the leanest Mission: Impossible, and a sharper edit would have made it a better film. But it does the two things this series exists to do: it puts a real human being in real danger in front of a real camera, and it makes you believe the world might end if he fails. The submarine sequence alone is worth the admission, the biplane finale sends the franchise off in style, and the espionage-meets-rogue-AI premise hits enough of my own buttons that the longueurs are forgivable. As a closing chapter to one of the few blockbuster series still made by hand, it lands. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it on the largest IMAX screen you can reach; the submarine and aerial sequences were built for it.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film closed Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie's two-part *Dead Reckoning* / *Final Reckoning* arc and was positioned as Ethan Hunt's farewell, though the series' future remains a matter of speculation rather than announcement. It reached UK digital platforms over the summer and arrived on 4K Blu-ray and DVD in October 2025; it currently streams on Paramount+ depending on your region. Seen back to back with *Fallout*, the contrast holds up: the earlier film is the tighter thriller, this one the bigger send-off.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, injury detail, threat, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is frequent, impactful action violence which includes shootings, hand-to-hand combat, stabbings, and limb breaks with occasional bloody detail. People are tasered, body-slammed, and a man's face is held against the moving belt of a treadmill.
**Threat and horror:** There are chase scenes, kidnappings, threats of violence, and explosions. In other scenes, a room of people is knocked unconscious with poison gas, people drown during a sea vessel explosion, and an AI entity threatens to drop nuclear weapons across the world. People are seen in dangerous situations like dangling from moving trains and aeroplanes, and a diver encounters various dangers underwater, including being trapped on a sinking vessel, and passing out whilst resurfacing.
**Injury detail:** A meat cleaver is seen sticking out of a man's chest, there are unsettling close-ups of frozen corpses, occasional bloody images in the aftermath of violence, and a scene in which a person strikes their head on the tail of a plane. There is also a visually discreet scene depicting the removal of a bullet from a man's chest, followed by a straw being inserted into his lung.
**Language:** Moderate language ('dickhead', 'son of a bitch') is accompanied by milder terms such as 'ass', 'shit', 'bastard', 'hell', 'God' and 'damn'.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi1odkw)).*
================================================================================
## Thunderbolts* (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-thunderbolts
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-thunderbolts.md
- published: 2025-05-07
- document_id: 1224
> Marvel hands its leftover bruisers and washouts a smaller, sadder, sharper film than the brand has managed in a while, and the gamble of casting Florence Pugh as the heart of it pays off. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2025
- **Director:** Jake Schreier · **Writers:** Eric Pearson, Joanna Calo
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios
- **Genre:** Superhero ensemble / psychological action drama · **Runtime:** 126 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Florence Pugh (*Midsommar*, *Little Women*) as Yelena Belova; Sebastian Stan (*Captain America: The Winter Soldier*) as Bucky Barnes; Wyatt Russell (*Overlord*) as John Walker; David Harbour (*Stranger Things*) as Alexei / Red Guardian; Lewis Pullman (*Top Gun: Maverick*) as Bob
- **IMDb:** 7.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 88% critics / 93% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The Marvel machine has spent a couple of years now running visibly low on conviction, churning out instalments that arrive pre-shrugged, films nobody quite seems to have wanted to make. So there is a small thrill in finding that *Thunderbolts**, of all things, the one assembled from the bench players and the discards, is the entry that remembers what these films can do when somebody cares about the people in the suits. Jake Schreier, whose best-known feature is the gentle *Robot & Frank*, is an odd hire for a comic-book ensemble, and that turns out to be the smartest decision Marvel has made in a while.
## The setup
The premise is almost a joke at the brand's own expense. A handful of expendable antiheroes, the people the franchise has left lying around, find themselves lured into a remote facility on what looks like a routine black-bag job and quickly realise they have been gathered there to be quietly erased. Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), a contract killer running on autopilot and not much else, is the reluctant centre of the group, alongside a disgraced super-soldier, a former Captain America who never recovered from being one, an ageing Soviet strongman, and a frightened, oddly gentle young man called Bob whose presence none of them can account for. What begins as a fight to get out of a sealed room turns into something stranger and sadder, a story less about a villain to punch than a darkness to outlast. I will leave Bob's part in it where the film leaves it.
## The cast
Florence Pugh carries this. She has been the most interesting thing in everything Marvel has put her in, and here she finally gets the weight of a lead, playing depression and exhaustion as a flat, deadpan numbness that the film treats with real seriousness rather than as a setup for a quip. Sebastian Stan gives Bucky the watchful stillness of a man who has run out of wars, and David Harbour walks off with every scene he is in as Alexei, the Red Guardian, a washed-up Soviet hero clinging to past glory with a needy, lovable desperation that keeps the film from tipping fully into gloom. Wyatt Russell's John Walker is all wounded pride and bad decisions, and Lewis Pullman, as Bob, gives the most delicate performance in the film, soft-spoken and unstable in a way that earns the unease around him. The chemistry is bruised and prickly, which is exactly right for a group of people who do not want to be in the same building, let alone the same team.
## The craft
Schreier and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo shoot this on a noticeably more human scale than the house style. There is less of the weightless digital sludge and more grain, more shadow, more rooms that feel like rooms. The action is closer and crunchier, hand-to-hand fights with actual impact rather than armies of pixels colliding in a grey sky, and the film is unafraid to slow right down and sit in a quiet, frightening interior space when the conflict turns inward. Son Lux's score is uneasy and textured rather than bombastic, and the whole thing is mercifully controlled at just over two hours. It is a Marvel film that trusts silence, which is not a sentence I expected to write.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *The Suicide Squad*, the other recent ensemble built from disreputable also-rans, and *Thunderbolts** is the warmer, more interior film of the two, less interested in shock than in damage. It shares some DNA with *Guardians of the Galaxy* in the way found-family banter does the emotional plumbing, but it is markedly less zany, and it owes a real debt to *Black Widow* for Yelena and Alexei, who were the best part of that uneven film and are given far more room here. Set against the bloated team-up spectacles the franchise usually trades in, this feels almost like a chamber piece, and is better for it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are unusually warm, parking it around 88%, and the recurring note is relief: the consensus reads as a collective exhale that a Marvel film has bothered to be about something again, with particular praise for Pugh and for the film's willingness to take mental illness seriously rather than gesture at it. Audiences are warmer still in the low nineties. The dissent, where it exists, is that the franchise scaffolding still clanks into view at the edges and that a film about depression can only push so far inside a 12A blockbuster. Both fair. Neither does much to dent the pleasure of watching a tired machine briefly run well.
## Verdict
I came to this expecting another contractual obligation and found a genuinely involving one. It works because it is small: real performances, a clear emotional idea, action you can follow, and a tone that earns its melancholy without drowning in it. It is not reinventing anything, and the franchise plumbing occasionally intrudes, but it is the most rewatchable Marvel film in some time precisely because it is built around people rather than around the next instalment. On the strength of Pugh, Harbour and a director who knows when to stop, this clears the bar comfortably. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, including IMAX, on general release from 1 May.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the asterisk in the title pays off as a setup for what the team becomes, and the film functions as the launchpad for the next phase of Avengers films rather than a standalone. Its reputation has held as one of the better recent Marvel entries and a high point for Florence Pugh's Yelena. It is now available on digital and disc, and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Moderate violence, set in a fantastical context, includes shootings, stabbings, crunchy hand-to-hand fighting, stranglings, energy blasts and people turning into shadows as a sinister force obliterates them, The violence features infrequent and minimal bloodshed. A man recalls his childhood and his father's physical abuse of his mother and himself.
**Threat and horror:** There is moderate gun and knife threat, as well as people endangered by a fantastical force causing buildings to collapse and cars to come hurtling through the air at them.
**Language:** There is moderate bad language ('dick', 'prick', bitch'), as well as milder terms such as 'shit', 'ass', 'bloody', 'screw', 'butt', 'damn', 'hell', 'God', 'Jesus' and 'Christ'.
**Drugs:** A man talks about his history of drug addiction and misuse of 'meth', but acknowledges the problems it has created in his life.
**Rude humour:** Very mild rude humour includes 'poo' jokes.
**Theme:** Mild upsetting scenes are centred on memories of death, mental illness and other trauma in the childhoods of different characters.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/thunderbolts-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi0njqz)).*
================================================================================
## The Amateur (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-amateur
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-amateur.md
- published: 2025-04-24
- document_id: 1174
> A CIA desk analyst blackmails his way into the field to avenge his wife, and chases his targets with a laptop rather than a Glock. Familiar revenge bones, a genuinely fresh hero, and a real pleasure for anyone who likes their spies clever. 8/10.
- **UK release:** April 2025
- **Director:** James Hawes · **Writers:** Ken Nolan; Gary Spinelli
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Studios; Hutch Parker Entertainment
- **Genre:** Espionage revenge thriller · **Runtime:** 124 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Rami Malek (*Mr. Robot*, *Bohemian Rhapsody*) as Charlie Heller; Laurence Fishburne (*The Matrix*, *John Wick*) as Robert Henderson; Rachel Brosnahan (*The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel*) as Sarah Heller; Caitríona Balfe (*Outlander*, *Ford v Ferrari*) as Inquiline Davies; Jon Bernthal (*The Punisher*, *The Accountant*) as the Bear
- **IMDb:** 6.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 61% critics / 87% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The revenge thriller is one of cinema's most worn grooves, and the spy version of it is worn smoother still: a man loses the person he loves, the institution shrugs, and he goes off the books to settle accounts with his fists. *The Amateur*, adapted from Robert Littell's 1981 novel and directed by James Hawes off the back of his work on *Slow Horses*, keeps the bones of that template and swaps out the one part that usually matters most. Its avenger cannot fight. Charlie Heller is a CIA cryptographer, a man who reads code and decrypts intercepts in a basement at Langley, and when he sets out after the people who killed his wife he brings the only weapon he actually knows how to use: information.
## The setup
Heller (Rami Malek) is a decoder, happiest in front of a screen, married to Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) and quietly aware that the world outside his terminal is not really his element. When Sarah is killed in a terrorist attack in London and the agency declines to act, partly out of bureaucratic caution and partly because the trail runs into places it would rather not look, Heller does something no field agent could. He has been quietly sitting on intelligence the agency wants buried, and he uses it as leverage, blackmailing his own employers into training him and turning him loose. What follows is a pursuit across Europe in which the hunter is physically outmatched at every turn and wins, where he wins at all, by being cleverer, more patient, and far more comfortable with a keyboard than anyone expects.
## The cast
Malek is the reason this works. He has built a career on characters who watch more than they speak, from the hollowed-out hacker of *Mr. Robot* to his Oscar-winning Freddie Mercury, and here he plays Heller as a man genuinely out of his depth and knowing it. There is no sudden transformation into an action hero. Heller stays anxious, improvises badly, and survives on preparation rather than instinct, and Malek sells that fragility without ever tipping into helplessness. Laurence Fishburne is excellent as Henderson, the reluctant trainer who can see exactly how this ends and trains him anyway, bringing the weary authority he has been perfecting since *The Matrix*. Rachel Brosnahan has less to do as the murdered wife, though she registers warmly enough in flashback to give the grief some weight, and Caitríona Balfe and Jon Bernthal both make strong impressions in roles the film keeps deliberately shadowy.
## The craft
Hawes shoots this with the cool, grey, surveillance-lit texture that *Slow Horses* fans will recognise, and Martin Ruhe's cinematography keeps Europe looking handsome without ever turning it into a travel brochure. The set pieces are built around Heller's mind rather than his body, and the best of them are genuinely inventive: he does not punch his way out of trouble, he engineers it, rigging environments and exploiting systems in ways that feel plausible for a man who thinks in exploits and vulnerabilities. Volker Bertelmann's score is restrained and tense, the kind of electronic-orchestral hybrid that keeps a low pulse under the technical scenes. It is not flawless. The pacing sags in the middle stretch, where the geography starts to blur and the procedural cleverness has to carry passages the plot does not fully earn, and the revenge structure occasionally falls back on beats you can time to the second.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *The Accountant*, another thriller about a numerically gifted loner who turns competence into menace, though *The Amateur* is the more grounded and less stylised of the two. It sits closer in spirit to the *Bourne* films than to Bond, sharing their interest in tradecraft and institutional rot, but it pointedly refuses to let its hero become Jason Bourne; the whole appeal is that Heller never acquires those skills. Anyone who enjoyed *Slow Horses* or *Jack Ryan* will find a familiar register here, the modern intelligence thriller where the most dangerous thing in the room is a man with the right files. It does not reinvent the form, but it finds one fresh angle on it and commits.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical reception has been lukewarm, sitting around 61% on Rotten Tomatoes, with most reviewers praising Malek and the analyst-as-avenger premise while complaining that the pacing wanders and the revenge plot offers few surprises. Audiences are noticeably warmer, up at 87%, and I think they have the better of the argument. Critics are right that the structure is familiar and the middle drags, but they undersell how much pleasure there is in watching a thriller whose hero solves problems with intelligence rather than violence. The 6.5 on IMDb feels like the score of people who wanted a more conventional action film and were mildly disappointed not to get one. I wanted exactly this film.
## Verdict
I am the target audience for this and I know it. I like espionage, I like surveillance and tradecraft, and I particularly like a protagonist who is an analyst rather than a super-soldier, the rare thriller that treats brains as the headline weapon. *The Amateur* gives me all of that in a handsome, intelligent, slightly overlong package. The script does not surprise me, the middle could lose fifteen minutes, and the supporting players deserve more room than they get. None of that stops it being exactly the kind of film I will happily put on again, for Malek's nervy, watchful lead and for the simple satisfaction of a spy who wins with a laptop. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on general release from 11 April. One for a proper screen rather than a phone, though it loses little at home.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Amateur* moved to digital and disc later in 2025 and found a larger, friendlier audience there than its mixed cinema reviews suggested, with the audience score settling well above the critics. It now streams on Disney+ in most regions. Talk of a sequel built around Heller has circulated on the strength of that home-viewing afterlife, which is the right way to extend this character: keep him the reluctant amateur rather than promoting him into the field agent the first film so carefully refused to make him.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** People are shot with guns, with minimal bloody detail resulting.
**Threat and horror:** Armed terrorists take hostages at a hotel, holding civilians at gunpoint.
**Language:** There is use of moderate bad language ('prick'), as well as milder terms such as 'shit', 'asshole', 'screw', 'ass', 'damn', 'God', 'hell' and 'Jesus'.
**Suicide and self-harm:** There are undetailed references to suicide bomber attacks.
**Theme:** A person grieves for the loss of his spouse following her death.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adults drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-amateur-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi1njgx)).*
================================================================================
## Black Bag (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-black-bag
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-black-bag.md
- published: 2025-03-18
- document_id: 1044
> Soderbergh and David Koepp turn a mole hunt into a marriage under polygraph, ninety-four lean minutes of grown-up espionage built around Fassbender and Blanchett. Talky, elegant, and quietly vicious. 8/10.
- **UK release:** March 2025
- **Director:** Steven Soderbergh · **Writer:** David Koepp
- **Studio / distributor:** Focus Features; Casey Silver Productions
- **Genre:** Espionage thriller / marital mystery · **Runtime:** 94 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Michael Fassbender (*Steve Jobs*, *X-Men: First Class*) as George Woodhouse; Cate Blanchett (*Tár*, *Elizabeth*) as Kathryn St Jean; Marisa Abela (*Back to Black*) as Clarissa Dubose; Regé-Jean Page (*Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves*) as Col James Stokes; Naomie Harris (*Skyfall*, *Moonlight*) as Dr Zoe Vaughan
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 96% critics / 70% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Steven Soderbergh has spent the last few years working at a pace that shames directors half his age, shooting and editing his own films under a couple of pseudonyms and turning out a lean genre exercise roughly every twelve months. *Black Bag* is the second film he has released inside a single year, and it reunites him with David Koepp, the screenwriter behind his recent haunted-house experiment *Presence*. This time the two of them have aimed at something far more to my taste: a chamber spy thriller about a married couple who happen to be two of the most dangerous people in British intelligence, and what happens when one of them is told to find a traitor in a list of five names with his wife sitting at the top.
## The setup
George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is the agency's resident polygraph man, the unsettlingly calm officer everyone is afraid to have dinner with because he reads people for a living. He is handed a leaked operation, codename Severus, and a shortlist of five suspects who could have sold it. One of them is Kathryn St Jean (Cate Blanchett), his wife, his equal in the service, and the one person he has built his entire life around trusting. George does what a Soderbergh protagonist always does, which is to set a quiet trap and watch. He hosts a dinner party for the four other suspects, doses the food, and lets the evening do the interrogating for him. From there the film tightens into a series of conversations, surveillance sessions and lie-detector scenes in which every line of dialogue is also a move in a game, and the question is never quite whether Kathryn did it but how far George is prepared to follow the evidence.
## The cast
Fassbender is perfectly used. He has always been an actor who can make stillness feel like a threat, and George is a man who has trained that stillness into a profession. He wears the unfashionable glasses and the buttoned-up courtesy like armour, and the performance lives in the tiny tells he allows himself when the polygraph turns toward home. Blanchett matches him beat for beat, playing Kathryn as a woman who is either innocent and insulted or guilty and superb, and refusing for most of the film to let you decide which. The two of them generate the kind of adult, slightly dangerous chemistry that British spy fiction used to specialise in and modern thrillers rarely bother with.
Around the central pair, the supporting bench is unusually strong. Marisa Abela, fresh from *Back to Black*, is sharp and funny as the younger analyst Clarissa, and Regé-Jean Page gives Colonel Stokes a glaze of ambition that curdles nicely. Naomie Harris, as the agency psychologist sleeping with one of the suspects, gets some of the film's best lines. Pierce Brosnan turns up as the spymaster above them all, casting that carries its own sly joke about who used to do this job.
## The craft
Shooting and cutting it himself, Soderbergh gives *Black Bag* the cool, amber-lit, faintly clinical look he has refined over the last decade. London here is all glass meeting rooms, restaurant banquettes and rain on car windows, an espionage world of expense accounts rather than rooftop chases. At ninety-four minutes there is not a wasted scene; the film moves like the polygraph needle, steady and precise, and trusts the audience to keep up with a plot delivered almost entirely through conversation. David Holmes, Soderbergh's long-time composer from the *Ocean's* films, lays down a low, insinuating score that keeps the dinner-party manners faintly menacing. It is a film about listening, and it is made by people who clearly enjoy watching very good actors talk.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*, and *Black Bag* shares its faith in patience, paperwork and grown-ups in rooms over gunfire. Koepp's script also owes an open debt to *Mr & Mrs Smith*, two spies pretending domestic normality, though here the marriage is real and the deception is the job rather than the other way round. The surveillance set-pieces, the sense that the watcher is being watched, nod to *The Conversation*. What Soderbergh adds is his own brand of brisk, glossy intelligence; this is closer to a deadly serious *Ocean's* film than to le Carré's grey melancholy, a heist movie where the prize is the truth about your own wife.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it with near unanimity, sitting up around 96%, praising the economy, the performances and Soderbergh's elegant control. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm but more divided, hovering around 70%, and the gap is easy to read. This is a talky, restrained, dialogue-first thriller with no chase to speak of and a deliberately cerebral payoff. Anyone arriving expecting Bond will find it slow. Anyone who enjoys watching two clever people circle each other while the music tightens will find it close to perfect. I land firmly with the critics on this one, though I understand the shrug from the back row.
## Verdict
This is exactly the kind of film I want more of: short, sharp, played by adults, built on surveillance and procedure and the question of whether you can ever really know the person you sleep next to. It is not flawless. The plot mechanics, once unpicked, are a touch neater than life, and a couple of suspects are thinner than the leads. None of that spoils the pleasure of watching Fassbender and Blanchett fence across a dinner table for ninety minutes. It rewards a second viewing precisely because so much is happening in the glances, and at this length you will happily give it one. Elegant, vicious and grown-up. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. One to catch on the big screen while it is there; it will play just as well at home when it reaches digital and disc later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Black Bag* landed on digital and 4K disc within a couple of months of its cinema run and turned up on Peacock in the United States, with UK streaming following on the usual rotation. Its reputation has held; it has settled in as one of the most admired spy films of the year and a reminder that Soderbergh and David Koepp work unusually well together, following their stripped-down ghost story *Presence* from earlier the same year.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, sex references, brief violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Blood splatters onto a wall when a person is shot in the head. A woman stabs a man through the hand with a knife.
**Threat and horror:** A man's body convulses after it is implied he is poisoned, and people are threatened by an exploding vehicle.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('motherf**ker', 'f**k') as well as use of milder terms such as 'bitch', 'dick', 'prick', 'shit', 'bastard', 'arse', 'piss', 'God', 'Jesus', 'hell', 'damn'.
**Sex:** There are verbal references to oral sex, erotic fiction and adultery, and use of the sexualised term 'f**k'.
**Drugs:** References are made to a person misusing Ecstasy.
**Suicide and self-harm:** A therapist asks her patient if she has experienced suicide ideation.
**Injury detail:** A dead body is seen, however there is minimal bloody detail.
**Rude humour:** A man jokes about reporting a teacher at his child's school as being a paedophile.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adults vape and drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/black-bag-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi2nzmx)).*
================================================================================
## Mickey 17 (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mickey-17
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mickey-17.md
- published: 2025-03-11
- document_id: 1118
> Bong Joon Ho follows Parasite with an expendable space worker who keeps dying and getting reprinted. It is messy and overstuffed, but the satire bites and Pattinson is a delight. 8/10.
- **UK release:** March 2025
- **Director:** Bong Joon Ho · **Writer:** Bong Joon Ho
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Plan B Entertainment; Offscreen
- **Genre:** Science-fiction satire / black comedy · **Runtime:** 137 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Robert Pattinson (*The Batman*, *Good Time*) as Mickey Barnes; Naomi Ackie (*Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker*) as Nasha Barridge; Steven Yeun (*The Walking Dead*) as Timo; Mark Ruffalo (*Spotlight*) as Kenneth Marshall; Toni Collette (*The Sixth Sense*, *Hereditary*) as Ylfa Marshall
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 78% critics / 73% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Bong Joon Ho has earned the right to do whatever he likes. *Parasite* swept the Oscars and made him the most quietly subversive director working at studio scale, so the question hanging over *Mickey 17*, his first film since, is what he does with a Warner Bros. budget and Robert Pattinson on a spaceship. The answer is not the clean, tightening machine of *Parasite*. It is something baggier and stranger, closer to the bilingual genre-hopping of *Snowpiercer* and *Okja*, where the satire is broad, the tone lurches on purpose, and the whole thing threatens to spill over the sides. That it mostly holds together is down to a director who has never been afraid of a mess and a lead actor having the time of his life.
## The setup
Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) signs up as an Expendable on a colony ship bound for the ice planet Niflheim, fleeing a debt that would otherwise get him killed slowly on Earth. The job is exactly what it sounds like. When a mission needs someone to test a vaccine, walk into a radiation leak, or die so the scientists can take notes, Mickey does it, and the ship prints a fresh Mickey overnight with his memories restored. He has died sixteen times when the film catches up with him. The trouble starts on the seventeenth, when Mickey is presumed dead on the ice, crawls home anyway, and finds that Mickey 18 has already been printed in his place. Two of the same man, both alive, is the one thing the colony's rules absolutely forbid, and the discovery sets Mickey against the ship's preening leader, Kenneth Marshall, just as the planet's native creatures start taking an interest in their visitors.
## The cast
Pattinson is the reason the film works as well as it does. As Mickey 17 he plays a put-upon innocent with a reedy, adenoidal voice and the air of a man who has stopped expecting much from anyone, and when Mickey 18 turns up he gives him a different posture, a different temper, a meaner streak, so that two performances are genuinely sharing scenes. It is the kind of committed, slightly daft character work that *Good Time* hinted he had in him, and it carries long stretches that would sink with a more cautious actor. Naomi Ackie gives Nasha real spine and warmth as the agent who loves both Mickeys without much fuss about it, grounding a film that is otherwise allergic to sincerity. Steven Yeun does sly, weaselly work as the friend who keeps selling Mickey out. The broadest swings are Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette as the Marshalls, a vain failed-politician demagogue and his sauce-obsessed wife, played at full cartoon volume. Your tolerance for the film will track fairly closely with your tolerance for them.
## The craft
Visually this is a handsome, grimy piece of science fiction. Darius Khondji shoots the ship's corridors and the white waste of Niflheim with the same tactile gloom he brought to Bong's earlier work, and the printing of a new Mickey, a body extruded steaming onto a grille, is the sort of grotesque practical image that sticks. Jung Jae-il's score keeps shifting register under the comedy, which is part of how Bong gets away with whipsawing from slapstick to genuine cruelty inside a single scene. The world-building is generous: the indentured-labour economics, the corporate paperwork around death, the creepers that turn out to be far more than monsters. The cost is pacing. At a little over two and a quarter hours the middle act sags, there is a satirical target too many, and the voiceover does heavy lifting the images could have managed alone. Bong throws everything at the wall; not all of it lands.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Moon*, Duncan Jones's chamber piece about a worker and his duplicate, but Bong is after something louder and angrier than that film's melancholy. The cloning-and-respawn mechanic also nods to *Edge of Tomorrow* and, further back, the comic doubling of *Multiplicity*, though *Mickey 17* is more interested in what it means to be the disposable copy than in the gag of meeting yourself. Mostly it sits alongside *Snowpiercer*: another closed system carrying the poor in its guts while the powerful preen at the front, another blunt allegory delivered with relish. It does not have the diamond precision of *Parasite*, and it would be unfair to expect it to. This is Bong in his sprawling, swing-for-everything mode, and on those terms it is a good deal more alive than most studio science fiction.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are broadly onside, sitting around 78%, with the praise going to Pattinson and to Bong's appetite for class satire, and the reservations landing on a film many find overstuffed and tonally uneven. Audiences are a touch cooler at 73%, which reads like people arriving for a brisk high-concept thriller and getting a shaggier, more political comedy instead. Both reactions are fair, and they point at the same film from opposite sides. I come down nearer the critics, because the things that frustrate people here are the things I tend to forgive: ambition that overreaches, a satire that would rather be untidy than toothless, a director plainly enjoying himself.
## Verdict
This is exactly the sort of intelligent, anti-corporate science fiction I will always make time for, the kind that uses a cloning gimmick to ask who gets treated as disposable and means it. It is too long, the Marshalls are pitched a notch too broad, and the final act ties its threads off in a hurry. None of that outweighs Pattinson's double act, the texture of the world, or the pleasure of watching a major director refuse to play it safe with a blockbuster budget. It is funny, strange, and built to reward a second look once you know where it is going. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, including IMAX. Worth the big screen for Niflheim and the creepers.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Mickey 17* has settled in as the divisive entry in Bong Joon Ho's run, the post-*Parasite* film admirers defend and detractors call self-indulgent, with Pattinson's twin performance the point most people agree on. After its cinema run it moved to digital purchase and rental and on to streaming via Max where available, with a physical 4K release for the people who want the ice planet at full resolution at home.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, violence, injury detail, sex, drug misuse*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes include beatings and a fantastical creature being repeatedly shot. Audio is heard of a man being stabbed and another having his leg severed with a saw.
**Threat and horror:** A man is the subject of dangerous experiments, such as being exposed to radiation and being tested with new drugs. He repeatedly vomits and convulses after eating food deliberately spiked with a hormone. There are also moments of fantastical threat involving a colony of creeper creatures defending their territory after being invaded.
**Language:** Strong language ('motherf**ker', 'f**k') is accompanied by milder terms such as 'bitch', 'whore', 'prick', 'dickhead', 'shit', 'ass', 'crap', 'moron', 'God' and 'Jesus'. There is use of the middle finger gesture.
**Sex:** There are brief moments of strong sex. Comic visuals are seen of various sexual positions demonstrated by computer generated stick figures.
**Discrimination:** A villainous leader describes his plans to cultivate a 'pure all-white' colony of people. These ideals are clearly challenged and not endorsed by the film as a whole.
**Drugs:** A man snorts a form of oxycontin and there are visual and verbal references to drug misuse and dealing.
**Suicide and self-harm:** References are made to a person taking their own life. A woman tells a man he has to kill himself in order to prove his immortality.
**Injury detail:** Moments of violence result in blood spurts and bloody aftermath detail. A man spits out another's bloodied ear that he has bitten off during a fight. After being repeatedly shot, parts of a fantastical creature's body are seen scattered across the floor. A man repeatedly vomits blood.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/mickey-17-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi0mdu5)).*
================================================================================
## Captain America - Brave New World (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-captain-america-brave-new-world
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-captain-america-brave-new-world.md
- published: 2025-02-16
- document_id: 1052
> Anthony Mackie inherits the shield in a Marvel film that wants to be a political thriller and only sometimes manages it. The reviews are rough, but the conspiracy plotting and Mackie's sincerity carry it further than the scores suggest. 8/10.
- **UK release:** February 2025
- **Director:** Julius Onah · **Writers:** Rob Edwards, Malcolm Spellman, Dalan Musson, Julius Onah, Peter Glanz
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero political action thriller · **Runtime:** 118 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Anthony Mackie (*The Hurt Locker*, *The Falcon and the Winter Soldier*) as Sam Wilson / Captain America; Harrison Ford (*Blade Runner*, *Indiana Jones*) as President Thaddeus Ross; Danny Ramirez (*Top Gun: Maverick*) as Joaquin Torres; Shira Haas (*Unorthodox*) as Ruth Bat-Seraph; Giancarlo Esposito (*Breaking Bad*, *The Mandalorian*) as Sidewinder
- **IMDb:** 5.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 50% critics / 80% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The Captain America films have always been the spine of the Marvel project rather than its loudest noise. *The Winter Soldier* in particular remains the best thing the studio has made, a 1970s paranoia thriller in a superhero costume, and *Civil War* came close. So a fourth entry arrives carrying two burdens at once: the franchise's strongest reputation, and the awkward fact that the man inside the suit has changed. Steve Rogers handed Sam Wilson the shield at the end of *Endgame*, and *Brave New World* is the film that has to make a Captain America with no super-soldier serum, no enhanced strength, and a pair of wings stand on his own. That it largely succeeds, against a notably hostile reception, is the surprise here.
## The setup
Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) is the new Captain America, and the United States has a new president in Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford), the career hardliner who spent the early MCU hunting the Hulk and is now trying to govern. An international incident at a state function pulls Sam into something larger: a conspiracy turning on mind control, a contested global resource, and a hand reaching back into Ross's own past. Sam has the shield, his new field partner Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), and very little of the raw power his predecessor took for granted, which is rather the point. He has to out-think the threat rather than out-punch it.
The film keeps its biggest cards face down, and I will leave them there. What matters at the outset is that this is built as a political thriller first and a punch-up second, closer in ambition to *The Winter Soldier* than to the cosmic Marvel of recent years.
## The cast
Mackie is the reason the film holds. He has played Sam Wilson since 2014, and he understands that this Captain America is defined by responsibility he did not ask for and cannot meet with strength alone. He plays it with sincerity rather than swagger, a man constantly aware that he is filling a space shaped for someone else. It is a warmer, more uncertain lead than Chris Evans gave, and it suits a film about whether the symbol can outlive the original.
Harrison Ford is the other anchor. Stepping into the late William Hurt's role, he brings the weariness of a man who has spent decades being the obstacle and now has to be the authority, and he commits to the part's later demands with more conviction than the material strictly earns. Danny Ramirez gives Torres an easy, likeable energy as the partner, while Giancarlo Esposito, dropped in as the mercenary Sidewinder, does his usual trick of making a thin role feel as if it knows a secret. Shira Haas is underused as security operative Ruth Bat-Seraph, a casualty of a plot with too many moving parts.
## The craft
Julius Onah, whose *Luce* was a sharp chamber piece, directs cleanly when the film stays on the ground. The hand-to-hand work and the conspiracy mechanics are where it lives, and Sam's wing-and-shield fighting style is shot with enough clarity to follow, which is not something every Marvel film can claim. Laura Karpman's score does steady, unshowy work under it.
The seams show in the larger set pieces. This is a film that was reworked heavily before release, and you can feel it: some of the digital effects in the big third-act spectacle are noticeably unfinished, and the plotting carries the strain of a story rebuilt more than once, with subplots that arrive and leave without quite landing. At 118 minutes it is tight by modern blockbuster standards, and that discipline helps, but you can sense the longer, messier film underneath the cut that reached cinemas.
## How it stacks up
The comparison everyone reaches for is *The Winter Soldier*, and that is the wrong yardstick to beat it with, because almost nothing the studio has made survives it. *Brave New World* is plainly the lesser film: less surprising, less clean, less sure of its own paranoia. Against that, it is a more focused and more grown-up piece of work than the studio's recent multiverse sprawl, and it does something *The Falcon and the Winter Soldier* on television only gestured at, which is take Sam Wilson seriously as the lead of a feature. As a political-conspiracy Marvel film it sits in the middle of the pack: below the two Russo brothers peaks, comfortably above the weaker recent entries.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split here is stark. Critics have landed around 50%, some of the roughest notices the franchise has had, with the visible reshoots, the crowded plot and the unfinished effects all taking fire. Audiences are at 80%, a thirty-point gap. I come down nearer the audience. The critical case is fair on its particulars, the effects are patchy and the story is overstuffed, but it undersells what works: a genuinely engaged lead performance, a thriller plot that mostly holds together, and a sincerity that the franchise had been mislaying. It is being marked against the best Captain America film rather than judged as the solid, watchable one it actually is.
## Verdict
This is a film I expected to enjoy and did, more than its reputation suggested I would. It is not top-tier Marvel and it never threatens *The Winter Soldier*, but it is a grounded, character-led action thriller with a lead worth following and a plot that respects the audience's attention. The effects wobble and the story is busier than it needs to be. None of that stops it being the kind of entry I would happily put on again on a wet Sunday, which for a mid-franchise sequel is no small thing. The scores are harsher than the experience. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film became one of the lower-grossing recent MCU entries and did little to lift the franchise's wobbling fortunes, and its reputation has settled roughly where the original split left it, dismissed by critics, defended by a good chunk of the audience. It is now available to buy and rent on digital and disc, and streams on Disney+.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, bloody images, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes include gunfights, fistfights, use of bladed and improvised weapons, explosions, and use of fantastical powers. Action scenes occasional include brief bloody images, implied bone breaks, and injury detail. A person under mind control takes their own life.
**Threat and horror:** There are extended sequences of action threat, in which people are caught in explosions, collapsing buildings, vehicle crashes and gunfire. A man mutates into a large monster.
**Language:** There is use of moderate bad language ('son of a bitch') and milder terms including 'shit', 'ass', 'bastard', 'screw', 'damn', 'hell', 'God', 'Jesus' and 'Christ'.
**Drugs:** There are occasional references to a fantastical pill.
**Injury detail:** A man is seen in an operating theatre receiving treatment to burn wounds, and there is occasional sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/captain-america-brave-new-world-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdiyodmz)).*
================================================================================
## The Gorge (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-gorge
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-gorge.md
- published: 2025-02-15
- document_id: 1190
> Scott Derrickson drops two snipers, a chasm and a love story into one of the year's better-kept secrets, and the parts that should not work are exactly the ones that do. 8/10.
- **UK release:** February 2025 (Apple TV+)
- **Director:** Scott Derrickson · **Writer:** Zach Dean
- **Studio / distributor:** Skydance Media; Crooked Highway; Apple Original Films
- **Genre:** Science fiction action romance / creature thriller · **Runtime:** 127 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Miles Teller (*Whiplash*, *Top Gun: Maverick*) as Levi Kane; Anya Taylor-Joy (*The Queen's Gambit*, *Furiosa*) as Drasa; Sigourney Weaver (*Alien*, *Aliens*) as Bartholomew; Sope Dirisu (*Gangs of London*, *His House*) as J.D.
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 62% critics / 74% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Scott Derrickson made his name in the dark, and *The Gorge* is the first time he has stepped fully out of it. After the *Sinister* films and *The Black Phone*, you might expect another exercise in dread; what he has actually made is a genre splice that has no business holding together, a two-hander romance bolted to a monster picture bolted to a piece of cold-war spy hardware. It arrives quietly on Apple TV+ rather than in cinemas, which is a shame, because this is a film built for a big room and a good sound system. It is also, against the odds, a lot of fun.
## The setup
Levi Kane (Miles Teller) is an American sniper, a man whose nerves have been measured and found acceptable, dispatched to a watchtower on the western lip of an unnamed gorge somewhere in eastern Europe. On the far side sits Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), his opposite number, posted by the other power that polices this place. The job is simple and absolute: watch the gorge, never cross it, never let anything come up out of it. The two of them are not meant to speak. The mist below them is not meant to be asked about. Naturally they start signalling across the divide, a whiteboard romance conducted at rifle range, and just as naturally the thing the towers exist to contain stops staying contained. What lives in the gorge is best left for the film to show you; the pleasure is in watching two very controlled people lose their grip on the rules.
## The cast
The whole film rests on whether you buy these two, separated by a quarter-mile of bad air, falling for each other before they have shaken hands, and they make it work. Teller plays Levi as a man wound tight and slowly unspooling, the same banked intensity he brought to *Whiplash* now pointed at someone rather than a drum kit. Taylor-Joy is the livelier presence, all sharp angles and dry mischief, and she gives Drasa a watchfulness that pays off when the plot turns. The chemistry is the engine, and it is real; the long-distance courtship is more charming than the premise has any right to be. Sigourney Weaver turns up as Bartholomew, the handler whose briefings never quite add up, and she brings exactly the institutional menace the part needs, an old hand at playing people who know more than they are telling. Sope Dirisu is given less to do but lends the support scenes some weight.
## The craft
Derrickson and his cinematographer Dan Laustsen treat the gorge itself as the third lead, a vast, fog-choked wound in the landscape that the camera keeps creeping towards. Laustsen shot *John Wick* and the del Toro films, and that eye for saturated, tactile gloom is all over this; the towers feel lived in, the descent into the chasm has genuine texture, and the creature design lands on the right side of grotesque without tipping into anything you would call horror. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross supply a score that hums with unease and then opens up when the action does, the kind of soundtrack that makes a streaming film feel larger than its delivery system. Frederic Thoraval's editing keeps the first hour patient and the second hour quick, and the gear-shift from slow-burn romance to full-tilt survival is handled more smoothly than the join should allow.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *A Quiet Place*, another high-concept creature picture built around a couple and a rule that must not be broken, though *The Gorge* is warmer and pulpier than that film's grim hush. The romance-across-the-void owes something to *The Adjustment Bureau*, and the lonely-outpost science fiction, the sense of two operatives kept in the dark by the agency that sent them, recalls *Oblivion*. When the film finally goes down into the mist it brushes up against *Annihilation*, with its mutated, half-organic landscape, though Derrickson is after a leaner thrill than that film's dread. It does not match the best of any of them, but it borrows intelligently and stitches its influences into something that feels like its own.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are politely divided, sitting around 62% on the Tomatometer, and the recurring complaint is that the back half over-explains itself; the more the gorge's mythology gets spelled out, the less frightening it becomes, and a couple of late swerves stretch the goodwill. That is a fair hit. Audiences are noticeably keener, a touch above 70%, and I am with them. The mythology is the weakest thing here, but it is also the part you can shrug off, because what you remember is the two leads and the descent. IMDb users have parked it at 6.7, which feels low for how watchable it is.
## Verdict
This is exactly the kind of film I rate higher than the consensus does. It has a strong central pairing, a striking world that the camera and the Reznor and Ross score conspire to make feel real, and a willingness to be sincere about its romance while still delivering as an action picture. The over-egged third-act lore keeps it short of the top tier, and it never quite earns the scale it reaches for. But it is propulsive, good-looking, genuinely charming, and the sort of thing I would happily put on again on a wet evening, which counts for a lot in my book. A confident, enjoyable swing that connects more often than it misses. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming now on Apple TV+, where it premiered. Watch it on the largest screen and loudest speakers you can manage; it was built for both.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Gorge* has settled in as one of Apple TV+'s most-watched original films, the kind of streaming hit that travels by word of mouth rather than billboards, and the chemistry between Teller and Taylor-Joy is the thing most people bring up. Talk of a follow-up has circulated on the strength of those numbers. It remains an Apple TV+ exclusive, so the platform is still the only place to see it.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC (classified 13 February 2025, Apple). The full category-by-category content advice could not be retrieved from the BBFC release page at the time of writing; the age rating above is confirmed from the BBFC record. Check the BBFC entry for the detailed ratings info. The notes may contain spoilers.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-gorge-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi1nzi4)).*
================================================================================
## Companion (2025)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-companion
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-companion.md
- published: 2025-02-05
- document_id: 1061
> Drew Hancock's debut takes the killer-robot premise and points it at the controlling boyfriend instead, a lean and nasty little science fiction thriller with a real idea under the blood. 8/10.
- **UK release:** January 2025
- **Director:** Drew Hancock · **Writer:** Drew Hancock
- **Studio / distributor:** New Line Cinema; BoulderLight Pictures; Vertigo Entertainment
- **Genre:** Science fiction thriller / dark comedy · **Runtime:** 97 minutes (BBFC 18)
- **Main cast:** Sophie Thatcher (*Yellowjackets*, *Heretic*) as Iris; Jack Quaid (*The Boys*, *Scream*) as Josh; Lukas Gage (*The White Lotus*) as Patrick; Megan Suri (*Never Have I Ever*) as Kat
- **IMDb:** 6.9 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 88% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The artificial-companion film has become its own little genre, from *The Stepford Wives* to *Ex Machina* to last year's *M3GAN*, and most of them ask the same polite question: what happens when the machine starts to think for itself? *Companion*, the feature debut of television writer Drew Hancock, asks a ruder one. It is less interested in whether the robot has a soul than in the kind of man who would buy one, and that small shift of aim is what gives a familiar premise its teeth. This is being sold with its cards close to its chest, which is the right call, so I will keep mine there too.
## The setup
Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is in love. She and Josh (Jack Quaid) are driving out to a lakeside house owned by a wealthy older man named Sergey, for a weekend with a small group of his friends. Iris is nervous about being liked, sweet to the point of anxiety, the slightly overcommitted girlfriend who wants the trip to go well. Then the weekend goes wrong, violently and early, and in the wreckage Iris learns something about herself that reframes every gentle, doting beat that came before. To say much more would be to hand over the film's engine. What I can say is that the marketing's coyness is justified: the first act is built to be misread, and the pleasure of the second is watching it correct.
## The cast
Sophie Thatcher carries the film, and it is a genuinely difficult ask. Iris has to be naive without being thin, and then has to travel a long emotional distance at speed once the floor drops away, all while the script keeps adjusting how much agency we are allowed to believe she has. Thatcher, who was the standout in *Yellowjackets* and held her own opposite Hugh Grant in *Heretic*, plays the early softness with just enough flicker behind the eyes that the turn lands as revelation rather than reset. Jack Quaid is doing something sly and against type. After *The Boys* and the *Scream* reboot he has a likeable, faintly hapless screen presence, and the film weaponises it: Josh is exactly the sort of nice, aggrieved young man you would never suspect, and Quaid lets the entitlement leak out by degrees. Lukas Gage and Megan Suri sharpen the ensemble around them, with Harvey Guillén bringing a note of warmth the rest of the cast cannot afford.
## The craft
For a first feature this is impressively controlled. Hancock writes and directs, and he keeps the thing tight: ninety-seven minutes, one main location, no fat. Eli Born's photography makes the lake house bright and almost wholesome in the early going, which is precisely why the violence reads as such an intrusion when it arrives. There is real wit in the construction, small details that mean one thing on the way in and another on the way out, the kind of film that rewards a second watch because half of it is hiding in plain sight. Hrishikesh Hirway's score knows when to lean comic and when to go cold. The tone is the trickiest balancing act, swinging between satire and genuine menace, and Hancock holds it more often than not. When the blood comes it is sudden and unglamorous, earning the eighteen certificate without wallowing in it.
## How it stacks up
The obvious reference points are *Ex Machina* and *M3GAN*, and *Companion* is shrewder than the second and warmer than the first. Where Alex Garland's film was a cool chamber piece about creation and deception, this one is a relationship thriller wearing a science fiction coat, closer in spirit to a particularly mean episode of *Black Mirror*, or to *The Stepford Wives* read straight rather than for camp. It shares with *Her* an interest in what people want from a manufactured partner, but it has none of that film's tenderness; it is here to indict, not to ache. The premise of control, surveillance and a person whose memories and behaviour can be adjusted by someone else hits several of my own soft spots at once, and the film is smart enough to use them rather than just name-check them.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been strongly on side, with a Rotten Tomatoes score in the low nineties and a recurring note of pleased surprise that a January genre release has this much going on. Audiences are a touch cooler at 88%, and the more lukewarm IMDb average of 6.9 hints at viewers who came for a straight horror and got a sharper, talkier thing instead. The split is the usual one: critics reward the idea and the control, while a slice of the audience wanted more scares and fewer arguments. I land closer to the critics here, though for once not because of the message. It is simply a well-built, surprising film that respects how little time it has.
## Verdict
*Companion* is the rare genre debut that has a real idea and the discipline to deliver it without sermonising. It is tense, funny in the right ugly places, and anchored by a Sophie Thatcher performance that ought to do for her what these breakout roles are supposed to do. It loses a little altitude in the final stretch, where the mechanics of the plot take over from the unease that powered the first hour, and the satire is sometimes broader than the premise needs. None of that undoes it. This is exactly the kind of lean, rewatchable, idea-driven science fiction I will happily go back to, the sort of film whose first act plays completely differently once you know. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. One to catch on a big screen while the twist is still yours to discover, before the internet does it for you.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Companion* arrived on premium video on demand within weeks of its cinema run and settled onto streaming via Max, becoming the sort of word-of-mouth title people press on friends with a careful "don't read anything about it first". Its reputation has held up as one of the smarter studio genre releases of its year, and it has done Sophie Thatcher's profile no harm at all. The current way to watch it in the UK is digital rental or purchase, with streaming availability shifting by platform and region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **18** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, injury detail, sexual threat, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes include stabbings, shootings, beatings and use of improvised weapons, resulting in bloody detail and injuries. A person is made to set their arm on fire, and to shoot themself in the head. There are sequences of controlling and abusive behaviour between partners.
**Threat and horror:** A killer stalks a terrified person, and there are sequences of intense gun threat.
**Language:** Strong language ('f\*\*k') occurs, as well as milder terms ('bitch', 'shit', 'screw', 'asshole', 'ass', 'God', 'damn', 'hell', 'Jesus', 'Christ'), and a middle figure gesture.
**Sex:** A man moans, implying he has just climaxed, and there is audio suggesting characters are having sex behind a closed door. There are also moderate verbal sex references, including to penis size.
**Discrimination:** A man behaves in a sexist manner.
**Sexual violence and sexual threat:** A man assaults a woman, but she fights him off.
**Injury detail:** Corpses and wounds feature some bloody and gory detail.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/companion-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi0odu2)).*
================================================================================
## SiteEngine AI
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/siteengine-ai
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/siteengine-ai.md
- published: 2025-01-01
- document_id: 1012
> An AI layer built into SiteEngine, the content system this site runs on. It helps with the editorial work, drafting, tagging and summarising, inside the CMS rather than in a separate tab. A private project.
**An AI layer built into SiteEngine, the content system this site runs on. It helps with the editorial work, drafting, tagging and summarising, inside the CMS rather than in a separate tab. A private project.**
SiteEngine is the content management system behind A Profound Journey and the other sites I run. SiteEngine AI is the layer that brings a language model into the editing workflow itself, so the help arrives where the work happens rather than in a browser tab you keep switching back to.
## What it is for
The job of an editorial assistant is to help, not to take over, and that constraint shaped the whole thing. It drafts copy, generates the metadata an article needs, suggests tags, summarises a long piece, and flags things that look wrong, all inline, all respecting the existing content model. The author stays in charge. The suggestions sit next to the text and you take them or you do not.
It is built on the Anthropic API and designed around how editorial work actually goes, which is messy and iterative, full of small decisions that are easier to make with a draft in front of you than from a blank page.
## A private project
SiteEngine and SiteEngine AI are commercial work, not open source, so there is no public repository to point at. If you want to know more, the place to look is [sedasoft.com](https://sedasoft.com).
================================================================================
## RetroGUI
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/retrogui
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/retrogui.md
- published: 2025-01-01
- document_id: 1010
> A small Go framework that wraps a program in the look of an old computer: fixed low resolution, a chunky border, the right palette and font. The scaffolding under several of my other projects.
**A small Go framework that wraps a program in the look of an old computer: fixed low resolution, a chunky border, the right palette and font. The scaffolding under several of my other projects.**
RetroGUI is a building block rather than a finished thing, and it is the more useful for it. It renders a virtual screen with the properties of a particular old machine, driven by a profile in JSON, and scales it up to a modern window. Built on Ebiten.
## What it does
You pick a profile, by command line or from an interactive menu, and it configures the screen: the active resolution, the border colour, the palette, the font, the title. Out of the box there are profiles for the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore PET 2001. A demo cycles text through the palette so you can see a profile working; Escape drops you back to the menu.
The core is a virtual resolution engine. Everything draws to a fixed offscreen buffer, the size the real machine actually had, and is then scaled to the window. That is the trick that keeps the look honest: you are not drawing large and shrinking it, you are drawing at 256x192 and blowing it up, clash and all.
## A profile
A profile is just JSON. Here is the Spectrum, trimmed:
> ### ZX Spectrum profile
>
> - **Active area:** 256 x 192
> - **Full size with border:** 384 x 288
> - **Border colour:** #0000FF
> - **Font:** zx-spectrum.ttf
> - **Palette:** the 15 Spectrum colours, normal and bright
Add a JSON file and a TTF, and you have a new machine. I wrote it so the retro-presentation problem was solved once and could sit underneath whatever I built next, rather than being rebuilt each time.
- GitHub: [github.com/SeamusWaldron/retrogui](https://github.com/SeamusWaldron/retrogui)
================================================================================
## Hydrate
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/hydrate
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/hydrate.md
- published: 2025-01-01
- document_id: 1004
> Claude Code forgets everything the moment you type /clear. Hydrate is the small local daemon that stops it forgetting, distilling each session and quietly re-injecting what matters into the next one.
**Claude Code forgets everything the moment you type /clear. Hydrate is the small local daemon I wrote so it stops forgetting.**
I use Claude Code every day on real work. The thing that wore me down was not the quality of the output, it was the amnesia. Every new session starts from nothing. You re-explain the project's conventions, the decision you made last Tuesday, the reason one file is the odd one out. After the fifth time explaining the same thing to a fresh context window, I started building a memory layer instead of repeating myself.
Hydrate runs as a small daemon on your own machine. It watches each Claude Code session, distils what mattered, and puts the relevant parts back into your next prompt. Memory across sessions, across the projects you switch between, and across the machines you choose to sync. Nothing leaves your laptop in the hot path.
## What it actually does
Three claims, and they are the whole product.
Memory across sessions. Claude Code forgets every /clear. Hydrate does not. It keeps a fact store and a separate canon of binding decisions, and it recalls the parts that match what you are working on now.
It works offline. The daemon, the index and the MCP server all run locally. There are no third-party calls between you typing a prompt and the context arriving.
One auditable surface. Five small Go binaries, under 10 MB all told. No kernel hooks, no background uploader quietly shipping your code somewhere.
## The recovery loop
The flow I lean on most is distill, clear, resume. Before I clear a session I run /hydrate-distill, which compresses what just happened into compact memory. I clear. Then /hydrate-last pulls the thread back up in a fresh window, goals and all. That loop is the headline trick: you get the clean context window without losing your place.
There are seven slash commands in all. /hydrate recalls context for the current topic, /hydrate-project pulls a project's canon and facts, /hydrate-week gives the last seven days, /hydrate-pack-load imports a shareable project pack, and /hydrate-help prints the reference table.
## Under the bonnet
The first time you open a project that already has a CLAUDE.md, Hydrate runs a one-shot pass that lifts the file's contents into its fact store, so the model does not have to re-read the whole file every turn. The file itself is left alone.
The CLI grew well past the slash commands. `hydrate init` turns a repo into a Hydrate project and drafts starter canon. `hydrate dehydrate` ingests markdown docs into the fact store, reversibly. `hydrate team push` / `pull` / `status` uses git as the sync layer for shared canon, so a team can agree on one set of invariants. `hydrate skill-mine` watches your sessions for repeated tool-call patterns and offers to turn them into Claude Code skills.
## The dashboard
`hydrate-server` exposes a local web dashboard, loopback only by default. It has a live cockpit for token usage and active projects, a force-directed graph of every learned fact, a fatigue view showing which projects are overdue a distill, and a builders section that emits the exact commands for whatever you are trying to set up. Every pane streams over SSE, so it updates while you work.
## Where it is
Hydrate is its own thing now, with an organisation, a Homebrew tap, and a home page at gethydrate.dev. The source is proprietary and the public repo ships signed binaries only. It is in beta, with a free tier that covers personal and commercial use within the published limits.
- Install: `brew tap getHydrate/hydrate && brew install hydrate`
- Home: [gethydrate.dev](https://gethydrate.dev)
- Releases and issues: [github.com/getHydrate/hydrate-public](https://github.com/getHydrate/hydrate-public)
================================================================================
## Carry-On (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-carry-on
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-carry-on.md
- published: 2024-12-29
- document_id: 1057
> Jaume Collet-Serra brings his airborne-thriller habit down to the departures hall for a tight Christmas Eve cat-and-mouse, and Taron Egerton and an against-type Jason Bateman do the rest. 8/10.
- **UK release:** December 2024 (Netflix)
- **Director:** Jaume Collet-Serra · **Writer:** T. J. Fixman
- **Studio / distributor:** Dylan Clark Productions; DreamWorks Pictures; Netflix
- **Genre:** Action thriller / single-location hostage thriller · **Runtime:** 119 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Taron Egerton (*Kingsman: The Secret Service*, *Rocketman*) as Ethan Kopek; Jason Bateman (*Game Night*, *Ozark*) as the Traveler; Sofia Carson (*Descendants*, *Purple Hearts*) as Nora Parisi; Danielle Deadwyler (*Till*) as Elena Cole
- **IMDb:** 6.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 87% critics / 52% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Jaume Collet-Serra has spent a decade working out how much tension he can wring from a confined space and a man who cannot leave it. He trapped Liam Neeson on a transatlantic flight in *Non-Stop* and on a commuter train in *The Commuter*, and now, landing on Netflix just in time for Christmas, he plants his crisis in the one building that already runs on low-grade dread: the airport on the busiest travelling day of the year. The premise is so clean you can see the whole machine from the doorway, which is usually a warning sign. Here it is the appeal.
## The setup
Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) is a young TSA screener at Los Angeles International, stalled in a job he took to coast and now quietly ashamed of it, with a pregnant girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson), working the same terminal and a promotion he keeps not chasing. On Christmas Eve a calm voice arrives in his earpiece. A stranger, watching, knowing far too much, gives him a single instruction: let one particular bag pass through his lane unscreened, or the people he loves start dying. The bag is bad news of the catastrophic kind, and the man on the other end has thought of everything. What follows is a long shift in which Ethan has to look like he is doing his job while doing the opposite, under the eye of an antagonist who can see almost every move before he makes it.
## The cast
Egerton is well cast as a decent man caught flat-footed. He plays Ethan as someone whose competence has been switched off by disappointment and gets switched back on by terror, and the gradual hardening, from rabbit to something with a plan, gives the film its spine. The smarter piece of casting is Jason Bateman as the man in his ear. Bateman has built a career on amiable exasperation, and turning that reasonable, faintly weary register towards menace is unsettling precisely because it never raises its voice. His Traveler is a logistics problem with a pulse, polite, patient, and entirely willing. Danielle Deadwyler brings real weight to a detective pulling at the same thread from the outside, and Sofia Carson is given a little more to do than the standard imperilled partner. The film belongs to the two men and the wire between them.
## The craft
Collet-Serra knows this register cold, and he shoots the terminal as a pressure system: sightlines, choke points, the queue as a slow conveyor towards disaster. Lyle Vincent's camera keeps finding the worst angle, the one where Ethan can be seen by exactly the person who must not see him, and the editing holds shots a beat longer than comfort allows. Lorne Balfe's score does the propulsive, ticking work without smothering the quiet. There is a mid-film set piece on the airport roads that briefly slips the leash of plausibility, but the film is honest about being a ride and earns the indulgence. Mostly the craft is in the restraint: a thriller that trusts a man, a bag and a voice to carry two hours, and is right to.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is *Die Hard 2*, another airport under siege at Christmas, though this is the chamber version, claustrophobic where that one sprawled. The closer relatives are *Phone Booth*, with its disembodied tormentor pinning an ordinary man in place, and Collet-Serra's own *Non-Stop*, which ran a near-identical engine at thirty thousand feet. Against those it holds up well. It lacks the sheer novelty *Phone Booth* had, and the villain's omniscience asks you to swallow a lot of advance planning, but the concept is sturdy and the execution never fumbles it. This is the high-concept Christmas thriller doing exactly what it says on the boarding pass.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split is unusually wide. Critics have landed around 87%, broadly charmed by an efficient throwback that knows its own size, while audiences sit close to half that. The complaint from the cheaper seats is plausibility, the antagonist who has rigged too much and the security procedures that bend when the plot needs them to. Both readings are fair. If you go in counting holes you will find them. If you go in for a tight, well-acted cat-and-mouse that keeps the screws turning, you get the film the critics are praising. I am firmly with the critics here, with one eye on the seams.
## Verdict
This is a lean, confident thriller that knows precisely what it is and never overreaches, and that discipline is rarer than it should be. Egerton and Bateman are an excellent mismatch, the airport is used as a genuine antagonist rather than a backdrop, and the whole thing moves. It is not reinventing the form and it asks for some generosity on logic, but it delivers the goods with a craftsman's economy, and it is the sort of high-concept thriller I will happily put on again. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Netflix worldwide from 13 December 2024.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Carry-On* went on to become one of Netflix's biggest film successes of the period, topping the platform's charts through the festive season and well into 2025, and continuing the run of fresh critical scores that has followed Collet-Serra's confined thrillers. It remains exclusive to Netflix, where it is the natural pick for a Christmas Eve that wants a pulse rather than a sleigh.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *injury detail, sex references, language, threat, violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC classified *Carry-On* **15** on 12 December 2024, citing injury detail, sex references, language, threat and violence. The detailed category-by-category Content Advice could not be retrieved from the BBFC release page at the time of writing; the short consumer-advice line above is quoted as published.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/carry-on-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi2odgw)).*
================================================================================
## Conclave (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-conclave
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-conclave.md
- published: 2024-12-14
- document_id: 1062
> Edward Berger turns the election of a pope into a procedural thriller, with Ralph Fiennes carrying a film of whispers, ballots and locked doors. Handsome, tense and quietly enjoyable. 8/10.
- **UK release:** November 2024
- **Director:** Edward Berger · **Writer:** Peter Straughan (from the novel by Robert Harris)
- **Studio / distributor:** House Productions; Indian Paintbrush; Focus Features (Black Bear UK)
- **Genre:** Political mystery thriller / ecclesiastical drama · **Runtime:** 120 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Ralph Fiennes (*The English Patient*, *The Grand Budapest Hotel*) as Cardinal Lawrence; Stanley Tucci (*The Devil Wears Prada*, *Spotlight*) as Cardinal Bellini; John Lithgow (*Cliffhanger*, *Shrek*) as Cardinal Tremblay; Isabella Rossellini (*Blue Velvet*, *Death Becomes Her*) as Sister Agnes
- **IMDb:** 7.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Edward Berger arrives at *Conclave* straight off *All Quiet on the Western Front*, which is about as far from a quiet room full of cardinals as a director can travel, and the surprise is how naturally the move sits on him. The other name to keep in view is Robert Harris, whose novel this adapts. Harris has spent a career finding the thriller hiding inside institutions that would rather not be thought of as political, and a papal election turns out to be the purest example yet: a sealed building, a fixed number of suspects, a vote that nobody admits to wanting to win. Peter Straughan, who carved *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy* down to a workable shape, does the adapting, and the pedigree shows.
## The setup
The Pope is dead, and Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the Dean of the College of Cardinals, is the man who has to run the machinery of choosing a successor. The cardinals are sequestered in the Vatican, cut off from the world until white smoke says they are done, and Lawrence quickly finds that the front-runners each carry something they would prefer stayed buried. He has no wish to be there, less wish to wield the influence the role hands him, and a private crisis of faith he is trying not to let anyone see. What begins as administration becomes an investigation, conducted in corridors and confidences, as Lawrence works out who the men around him really are before the ballots decide for everyone.
## The cast
Fiennes holds the film together with a performance built almost entirely out of restraint. Lawrence is weary, decent and quietly appalled, and Fiennes lets you read the calculation behind a face trained for decades not to show any. It is the kind of interior, watchful lead that the actor has always done well, going back to *The English Patient*, and he anchors every scene he is in. Stanley Tucci's Cardinal Bellini is the liberal hope and the closest thing Lawrence has to a friend, played with the wry, faintly exhausted intelligence Tucci brings to clever men who suspect they are losing. John Lithgow makes Cardinal Tremblay smoothly, plausibly ambitious, the sort of operator whose helpfulness you learn to distrust. Isabella Rossellini has only a handful of scenes as Sister Agnes, a nun who sees everything from the edges of a room where women are not meant to speak, and turns a small part into one of the film's sharpest moments.
## The craft
This is a handsome, controlled piece of film-making. Stéphane Fontaine shoots the Vatican as a place of vast spaces and small rooms, scarlet robes against grey stone, and finds real beauty in ritual without ever letting it tip into reverence. Berger keeps the camera patient and the cutting tight, so a story that is mostly men talking in chambers never loses its grip. Volker Bertelmann's score does a lot of the tension, all nervy strings and percussive pulses that turn the counting of votes into something close to a heist sequence. The film understands that ceremony and suspicion are made of the same material, and it mines the gap between the sacred surface and the very human horse-trading underneath for both unease and a dry, welcome streak of humour.
## How it stacks up
The natural shelf for this is alongside the other Harris adaptations, and *The Ghost Writer* is the closest fit: the same trick of making a confined, talky investigation feel genuinely tense, the same interest in power that prefers not to be seen working. It belongs in the company of *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy* too, another film about an institution policing its own secrets through quiet, careful men. Against the broadsheet sweep of something like *State of Play*, *Conclave* is more chamber piece than newsroom thriller, but it shares the conviction that procedure, watched closely enough, is drama. What it does that the spy films do not is graft a real interrogation of belief onto the mechanics, so the question of who wins carries an actual moral weight.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it readily, sitting at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, with most of the praise going to Fiennes, the look of the thing and the audacity of treating a conclave as a whodunnit. Audiences are warm but a touch cooler at 86%, and the IMDb 7.4 suggests the people expecting a faster thriller found it more measured than advertised. That is a fair reading. *Conclave* is deliberate, and it asks you to find votes and silences exciting, which not everyone will. The late turn the plot takes is divisive, and I can see why, though it is set up honestly enough to earn its place rather than feeling pulled out of the air.
## Verdict
What I want from this kind of film is institutional intrigue handled by people who know how to build tension out of talk, and on that count *Conclave* delivers almost everything I ask of it. Fiennes is excellent, the craft is immaculate, and the central idea, that choosing a pope is a thriller plot waiting to be filmed, is a good one well executed. It stops just short of the very top tier for me because the resolution leans on a contrivance the rest of the film is too disciplined to need, and because for all its polish it is a touch airless. But it is intelligent, gripping and genuinely rewatchable, the sort of film that rewards a second viewing once you know what everyone is hiding. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on general release from Black Bear UK.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Conclave* went on to a strong awards run, taking the BAFTA for Best Film and an Academy Award for Peter Straughan's adapted screenplay, with Fiennes nominated for his lead. Its standing has only firmed up as one of the best-reviewed films of its year, and it found a second, larger audience on streaming, where its tense, talky pleasures travelled well. It is now available on digital and disc, and streams on various platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *brief sexual violence references*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** A ceiling partially caves in following a sudden explosion, resulting in cuts and grazes across characters' faces. There are references to a terrorist attack claiming the lives of 52 victims and wounding hundreds more.
**Sex:** Discreet references are made to a secret sexual relationship between a cardinal and a nun which resulted in the birth of a child.
**Discrimination:** A white cardinal distinctly points to his black peer when asking whether one could imagine an alternative to an Italian pope. He later expresses Islamophobic attitudes in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, however, these views are immediately and clearly condemned. A cardinal denounces his peer's homophobic views. Discrimination is not condoned by the film as a whole.
**Sexual Violence and Sexual Threat:** A brief and undetailed verbal reference is made to previous popes ignoring reports of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. There is also a reference to the establishment of a convent for victims of genocidal sexual violence.
**Theme:** There are mild upsetting scenes relating to death and bereavement. Cardinals perform last rites over an elderly man's corpse.
**Alcohol and Smoking:** Religious figures are shown smoking cigarettes. There is close-up sight of a pile of discarded cigarette butts on the ground. Infrequent references are made to a man's alcohol dependency.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/conclave-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdizmtiw)).*
================================================================================
## The Wild Robot (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-wild-robot
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-wild-robot.md
- published: 2024-11-01
- document_id: 1220
> DreamWorks sends a service robot ashore on a wild island and lets it learn to be a parent. A handsome, genuinely moving animation that earns its tears honestly. 8/10.
- **UK release:** October 2024
- **Director:** Chris Sanders · **Writer:** Chris Sanders (from the novel by Peter Brown)
- **Studio / distributor:** DreamWorks Animation; Universal Pictures
- **Genre:** Animated science fiction adventure / family drama · **Runtime:** 102 minutes (BBFC U)
- **Main cast:** Lupita Nyong'o (*12 Years a Slave*, *Black Panther*) as Roz; Pedro Pascal (*The Mandalorian*) as Fink; Kit Connor (*Rocketman*) as Brightbill; Catherine O'Hara (*Beetlejuice*, *Home Alone*) as Pinktail
- **IMDb:** 8.2 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 97% critics / 98% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Chris Sanders has spent two decades making animated films about the bond between a wild creature and someone who was never meant to care for it. He co-directed *Lilo & Stitch*, where the wild creature was an escaped alien weapon, and *How to Train Your Dragon*, where it had wings. *The Wild Robot* runs the same current the other way round: this time the wild island is the given, and the thing that has to learn to belong is the machine. DreamWorks has bet a lot on it, including a deliberate, painterly look that walks away from the studio's usual glossy house style, and the bet comes off.
## The setup
A cargo ship goes down in a storm and washes a single service unit, model ROZZUM 7134, onto the shore of an uninhabited island. Roz (Lupita Nyong'o) wakes up programmed to complete tasks for human owners who are not there, and finds herself surrounded by animals who treat her, reasonably enough, as a monster. Trying to make sense of a place with no instructions, she ends up responsible for an orphaned gosling, Brightbill, and sets herself the task of raising him: feed him, teach him to swim, teach him to fly, all before the flock leaves for winter. A wily fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal), attaches himself to the project, half scavenger and half reluctant uncle. The deadline is the migration, and the question underneath it is whether a robot built to serve can learn to love something and then let it go.
## The cast
Voice work in animation usually gets praised for the wrong things, but the casting here is genuinely doing the heavy lifting. Nyong'o starts Roz as flat synthesised customer-service politeness and lets warmth seep in by degrees, so that you can hear the programming loosening rather than snapping. It is a controlled, intelligent performance that never begs for sympathy. Pascal gives Fink a quick, self-deprecating patter that keeps the film from drowning in its own sincerity, and the double act between cautious machine and chancer fox carries the middle stretch. Kit Connor makes Brightbill the runt of the flock, prickly and unsure, and Catherine O'Hara brings her usual warm comic timing to a harassed opossum mother with a burrow full of children. The ensemble of island animals is deep enough that the world feels populated rather than decorated.
## The craft
This is the best-looking film DreamWorks has put out. The studio has talked about wanting the frames to feel hand-painted, like a Monet you could walk into, and the result is soft-edged, impressionistic forests and skies that hold real light. It is a deliberate retreat from photoreal fur and toward something more illustrated, and it pays off in atmosphere: the seasons turn, the weather has weight, and a winter storm sequence has genuine scale and threat for a U certificate. Kris Bowers's score does a lot of quiet work, swelling at the flying scenes without tipping into syrup. Sanders keeps the pacing brisk for a film this emotional, trusting images over explanation, and at 102 minutes it never sags. The science fiction stays light but coherent: Roz's logic, her task-completion drive, the way her programming bends rather than breaks, all hang together.
## How it stacks up
The obvious anchor is *WALL-E*, another near-silent service robot who develops an inner life in a world humans have left behind, and *The Wild Robot* shares its faith that a machine learning to feel can carry a whole film. The nature-survival texture and the parent-and-fledgling structure recall *The Iron Giant*, still the high-water mark for the gentle-machine story, and the wildlife-among-the-trees warmth has something of Sanders's own *How to Train Your Dragon*. Against those it holds its own. It is not quite as formally daring as *WALL-E*'s wordless first act, and it reaches for the tear ducts more openly than *The Iron Giant* does, but it has a confidence and a visual identity that put it clearly above most of what passes for family animation now.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is close to unanimous, which is rare. Critics are sitting around 97%, audiences a hair higher at 98%, and IMDb users are giving it 8.2, the sort of agreement that usually means a film has cleared the bar without dividing anyone. The praise is for the look, the emotion and the way it handles big ideas about belonging and letting go without talking down to children. I am with the consensus on most of it, with one small reservation: the film occasionally signposts its emotional beats a touch too firmly, and the final act tidies its conflicts a little faster than they were earned. That stops it short of the very top tier, but only just.
## Verdict
This is a confident, beautiful, properly moving film that knows exactly what it is doing and does it with taste. The voice work is excellent, the world has atmosphere and weather and weight, and the central idea of a machine learning care is the kind of intelligent, gentle science fiction I will always turn out for. It earns its tears honestly rather than manufacturing them, and it is one of the few recent animations I would happily sit through again. A shade more restraint at the close and it would be a 9. As it stands it is a clear, warm recommendation. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX. Worth the big screen for the painterly landscapes and the migration sequences.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to be one of the most acclaimed animations of its year and was widely treated as DreamWorks's strongest work in some time, with a sequel adapting the later books in Peter Brown's trilogy confirmed to follow. It is now available to rent and buy digitally and on disc, and streams on Sky and NOW in the UK, with the high-resolution home release showing off the hand-painted look well on a good screen.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **U** by the BBFC for *very mild threat, violence, language, rude humour*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Animals and robots battle, including use of laser guns and explosions.
**Threat and horror:** Scenes of threat include robots and animals falling from heights, being chased, evading fires, and battling the natural world, such as predatory animals, storms and winter weather. In some scenes characters are shot at with laser guns and a robot is threatened with having its memory wiped.
**Language:** There is use of very mild bad language ('jerk', 'butt').
**Rude humour:** A skunk emits green gas, and a beaver refers to 'excrement' when implying a rude term.
**Injury detail:** A robot leaks green fluid when its leg is injured.
**Theme:** A goose is bullied for being different to other geese, and a robot and fox struggle to be accepted by other animals. Characters say moving goodbyes and at points fear their loved ones have died. However, the film focuses on love and friendship, and there are reassuring outcomes.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-wild-robot-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmde5odiy)).*
================================================================================
## Rebel Ridge (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-rebel-ridge
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-rebel-ridge.md
- published: 2024-09-19
- document_id: 1143
> Jeremy Saulnier swaps the woods for a corrupt Louisiana town and builds an action thriller that thinks before it hits. Tense, controlled and led by a star-making Aaron Pierre. 8/10.
- **UK release:** September 2024
- **Director:** Jeremy Saulnier · **Writer:** Jeremy Saulnier
- **Studio / distributor:** Netflix; Filmscience
- **Genre:** Action thriller / institutional corruption drama · **Runtime:** 131 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Aaron Pierre (*The Underground Railroad*) as Terry Richmond; Don Johnson (*Miami Vice*, *Knives Out*) as Chief Sandy Burnne; AnnaSophia Robb (*Bridge to Terabithia*, *The Act*) as Summer McBride; David Denman (*The Office*) as Officer Evan Marston
- **IMDb:** 6.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 95% critics / 73% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Jeremy Saulnier made his name on a particular kind of violence: sudden, clumsy, painful, the sort that ruins the person who commits it as much as the person it lands on. *Blue Ruin* and *Green Room* were studies in ordinary people discovering, too late, that they were not built for the thing they had started. *Rebel Ridge* arrives on Netflix as Saulnier's first film for the platform and his first with a genuine action lead at the centre, and the surprise is how much restraint he brings to a setup that practically begs for a body count. This is a revenge picture that keeps refusing to become one.
## The setup
Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) is cycling into a small Louisiana town with a bag of cash, on his way to post bail for his cousin before a court date that will otherwise tip the man into something much worse. Two officers run him off the road, find the money, and seize it under civil asset forfeiture, the legal mechanism that lets police take cash on suspicion alone and dare you to spend more than it is worth getting it back. Terry is calm, polite and entirely within his rights, and none of that helps him. What follows is a slow tightening of the screws as he tries to work the system that has just robbed him, with the quiet help of a court clerk, Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), and runs up against a police chief, Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson), who has built a comfortable little kingdom on exactly this kind of theft.
## The cast
Aaron Pierre is the engine of the film, and it is a genuine arrival. Terry is physically formidable but the performance is built on stillness: he keeps his voice low, his hands visible, his temper folded away, because he knows that the moment he gives these men a reason, the law stops being something he can use. Pierre plays a man doing constant arithmetic, and you can see the cost of it. Don Johnson is shrewd casting against that control, all good-old-boy warmth curdling into menace, a chief who would rather talk you into surrender than fight you and is dangerous precisely because he means it. Robb gives Summer a frayed, lived-in decency that keeps the film from running on outrage alone, and David Denman finds the small tragedy in a cop who half-knows what he has signed up to.
## The craft
Saulnier writes, directs and edits, and the discipline shows. David Gallego's camera favours flat daylight and clean, legible geography, so that when violence does come it is brief, shocking and easy to follow rather than a blur of cuts. The screenplay is unusually interested in procedure: in forfeiture law, de-escalation training, the specific ways a small department can make a citizen disappear into paperwork. That could be dry, and now and again the third act lets the plumbing show, but mostly it generates the tension that fists alone cannot. Brooke and Will Blair's score hums underneath without ever telling you how to feel. The film is patient to a degree that some viewers will find slow; I found the patience to be the whole reason the set-pieces hit as hard as they do.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *First Blood*, another film about a competent veteran pushed past endurance by small-town authority, and *Rebel Ridge* shares its sympathy for a man who would genuinely rather walk away. But where Rambo eventually erupts, Terry keeps choosing the narrower, harder path, which makes this closer in spirit to *Serpico* or the leaner Jack Reacher stories: institutional rot examined from the inside, with the hero's restraint as the real weapon. Set against Saulnier's own *Blue Ruin* and *Green Room*, it is a more measured, more legible film, the work of a director scaling up without losing what made the smaller pictures bite. It also sidesteps the easy *Walking Tall* fantasy of a righteous man cleaning up a town with a big stick, and is better for the refusal.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are strongly on side, with a Rotten Tomatoes score sitting around 95% and a recurring note of relief that an action thriller bothered to think. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm but more divided, nearer 73%, and the gap is easy to read: anyone arriving for a straight-up Netflix beat-em-up will feel the brakes Saulnier keeps applying, and a couple of late contrivances give the doubters something to point at. IMDb's 6.8 reflects that slightly cooler popular verdict. I land with the critics here, though for a specific reason rather than reflex: the intelligence is not decoration, it is the source of the suspense.
## Verdict
This is a thriller that respects you, and respect is rarer than spectacle. It has a star turn from Aaron Pierre that should open doors, a villain who never tips into cartoon, and a script that does the unglamorous homework most films in this lane skip. It stops short of greatness only because the resolution leans on a few conveniences the rest of the film is too rigorous to need, and the deliberate pace will not be for everyone. For procedural intelligence, sustained tension and a refusal to take the cheap revenge route, it earns a strong mark, and it is one I would happily sit through again. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming worldwide on Netflix from 6 September 2024.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film proved a sizeable hit for Netflix, racking up tens of millions of views in its opening weeks and parking itself near the top of the platform's charts, and it has done a good deal to cement Aaron Pierre as a leading man to watch. It remains a Netflix exclusive, the simplest way to see it.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *suicide references, injury detail, language, violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC classified *Rebel Ridge* **15** on 5 September 2024 (runtime 131 minutes). At the time of writing, the BBFC release page exposes only the short consumer advice line above; the full per-category Content Advice breakdown (Violence, Language, Injury detail, Suicide and self-harm) could not be retrieved and is not reproduced here verbatim.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/rebel-ridge-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdi0mdgw)).*
================================================================================
## Alien - Romulus (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-alien-romulus
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-alien-romulus.md
- published: 2024-08-20
- document_id: 1030
> Fede Álvarez drops a young scavenging crew into a derelict station and a franchise that has not been this frightening in decades. Devout to a fault, but it works. 8/10.
- **UK release:** August 2024
- **Director:** Fede Álvarez · **Writers:** Fede Álvarez, Rodo Sayagues
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Studios; Scott Free Productions
- **Genre:** Science fiction horror / franchise survival thriller · **Runtime:** 119 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Cailee Spaeny (*Priscilla*, *Civil War*) as Rain Carradine; David Jonsson (*Rye Lane*) as Andy; Archie Renaux (*Shadow and Bone*) as Tyler; Isabela Merced (*Dora and the Lost City of Gold*) as Kay
- **IMDb:** 7.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 81% critics / 87% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The seventh Alien film has the hardest job in the series: it has to stand in a room with the two best science fiction films ever made and not embarrass itself. Ridley Scott's *Alien* and James Cameron's *Aliens* cast a shadow that everything since has tripped over, from the misfires of the *Resurrection* era to Scott's own *Prometheus* and *Covenant*, which traded the haunted-house simplicity of the original for theology and disappointment. So the news that Fede Álvarez, who made his name turning small spaces into instruments of dread in *Don't Breathe*, has been handed the keys and told to go back to basics is the most encouraging thing to happen to this franchise in years. *Romulus* slots in between the first two films, takes its cues from both, and gambles that what people actually want from an Alien picture is to be frightened in a corridor again.
## The setup
Rain Carradine is a young colony worker on Jackson's Star, a sunless mining world owned, like everything else in this universe, by the Weyland-Yutani corporation. The company keeps moving her contract goalposts, so when a small crew of fellow colonists find a decommissioned station drifting in orbit and propose a salvage run for the cryo-pods that might let them escape to somewhere with daylight, she says yes. She brings Andy, a battered synthetic she treats as a brother, whose corporate programming becomes very relevant once they are aboard. The station is the Renaissance, split into two modules, Romulus and Remus, and it is not empty. What the crew find there has been waiting, and it is patient.
## The cast
Cailee Spaeny anchors the film with the kind of watchful, unshowy resolve that the series has always asked of its leads, less a born hero than someone who works out, scene by scene, that nobody is coming to save her. She is good company to be scared with. The standout, though, is David Jonsson as Andy, who has to play a character whose personality is rewritten partway through and makes the shift genuinely unsettling rather than a gimmick; the warmth and the menace come from the same face. The rest of the crew, Archie Renaux's steadier Tyler and Isabela Merced's vulnerable Kay among them, are drawn lightly but enough that you mind when the station starts thinning their number. This is a young cast playing frightened young people, which is the right instinct: no grizzled space truckers here, just kids who made a bad call.
## The craft
Álvarez understands that the Alien films live or die on texture, and *Romulus* is built to be touched. He leans hard on practical effects, animatronics and physical sets, and the difference shows in every dripping, clanking, strobe-lit frame. Galo Olivares shoots the station as a grimy industrial maze of red emergency lighting and dead air, and Benjamin Wallfisch's score knows exactly when to fall silent and let a hiss do the work. There is a long sequence involving facehuggers and motion that may be the most purely tense set piece the series has staged since the original, and a zero-gravity passage that turns the xenomorph's own blood into a hazard. If anything, Álvarez is too reverent: the film is studded with callbacks, lifted lines and one digital resurrection that pushes its luck. But the craft underneath the homage is the real thing, tactile and controlled, made by someone who has clearly watched the first two films more times than is healthy.
## How it stacks up
The lineage is worn openly. The bones are *Alien*, a small crew picked off in a metal box, while the firepower and the gathering siege owe a debt to *Aliens*. It is closer in spirit to the original than anything since, and a considerable distance better than the cold, self-important *Prometheus*. The obvious modern comparison is *Life*, the 2017 station thriller that ran a similar play with a fraction of this confidence, and there is more than a little of the video game *Dead Space* in the salvage premise and the desperate scramble through failing systems. Where *Romulus* improves on its imitators is that it remembers the monster works best when you barely see it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is warm and, for once, fairly unanimous. Critics are sitting around 81%, with audiences a notch higher at 87%, and the common verdict is that this is the most satisfying entry since *Aliens*, tempered by a fair complaint that it leans on the past more than it needs to. The reservation is legitimate. There is a stretch where the film stops inventing and starts quoting, and one fan-service decision in particular will divide people. But the audience score tells the more useful story: people are walking out genuinely rattled, which is the one thing this franchise has struggled to deliver in a long while.
## Verdict
I came in wanting to like it and left a little surprised by how much I did. It is not the equal of the two films it venerates, and the closing act trades some of its own tension for a greatest-hits reel that a more confident film would have resisted. But it is tense, tactile, properly frightening, and made with real craft and real love for the machinery of the series. As space horror it works, as a rewatch it holds up, and it is the first Alien film in years I would happily sit through again with the lights off. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. Worth the biggest, darkest screen you can find, with the sound up.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Alien: Romulus* arrives on Disney+ in the UK from 15 January 2025, and is also available on 4K Blu-ray and digital. It has settled into its reputation as the course-correction the franchise needed, the entry that proved there was still life in straightforward Alien survival horror after the divisive *Prometheus* and *Covenant* detour, and the strongest of the series since *Aliens*.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong horror, gore, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** Menacing horror is present throughout, with frequent jump scares as humans are terrorised by aliens. Aliens attach themselves to peoples' faces, suffocating and choking them. In one scene, a creature is seen savagely feasting on a woman and in another an alien violently bursts out of a person's chest.
**Language:** Use of strong language ('motherf**ker', 'f**k') is accompanied by milder terms including 'dick', 'twat', 'bitch', 'son of a bitch', 'shit', 'arsehole', 'balls', 'Jesus' and 'Christ'.
**Injury detail:** Strong gore includes sight of dead bodies with gruesome and bloody injuries, and people sustain burn wounds.
**Drugs:** Characters are briefly seen smoking joints.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/alien-romulus-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdiwmza3)).*
================================================================================
## The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-ministry-of-ungentlemanly-warfare
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-ministry-of-ungentlemanly-warfare.md
- published: 2024-08-01
- document_id: 1206
> Guy Ritchie takes his Cockney-caper rhythm to the real-life founders of British special operations, and the result is a wartime romp that knows exactly what it is. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2024 (Prime Video)
- **Director:** Guy Ritchie · **Writers:** Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel, Guy Ritchie
- **Studio / distributor:** Jerry Bruckheimer Films; Black Bear; Lionsgate
- **Genre:** Second World War action comedy / covert-operations caper · **Runtime:** 120 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Source:** *Churchill's Secret Warriors* by Damien Lewis
- **Main cast:** Henry Cavill (*Man of Steel*, *The Man from U.N.C.L.E.*) as Gus March-Phillipps; Eiza González (*Baby Driver*) as Marjorie Stewart; Alan Ritchson (*Fast X*) as Anders Lassen; Alex Pettyfer (*Magic Mike*, *I Am Number Four*) as Geoffrey Appleyard
- **IMDb:** 6.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 68% critics / 91% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Guy Ritchie has spent the last few years quietly becoming the most reliable maker of mid-budget men-on-a-mission pictures working today. *The Gentlemen* gave him a London criminal ecosystem to play in, *Wrath of Man* sharpened him up, and *The Covenant* showed he could carry real weight when the material asked for it. *The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare* is the loosest and most purely enjoyable of the recent run: a true-ish story about the unofficial commando outfit Churchill set loose on the Nazi war machine, told with the swagger of a heist film and very little intention of being a serious history lesson.
## The setup
Britain is losing the war at sea, German U-boats are throttling the Atlantic supply lines, and the official channels have run out of polite ideas. Enter a small, deniable team of misfits, led by Gus March-Phillipps (Henry Cavill), licensed by a shadow ministry to do the things gentlemen are not supposed to do: sabotage, theft, and a great deal of close-quarters killing. Their target is a fortified port off the West African coast, where sinking the right ships could break the U-boat fleet's grip. Around the raid runs a parallel infiltration plot, with an agent working the enemy from inside a colonial outpost while the muscle gets into position. It is a real operation, dressed up and given a swing-band tempo, and the film never pretends otherwise.
## The cast
Cavill is having the time of his life. Freed from the solemnity of franchise leads, he plays March-Phillipps as a bearded, pipe-puffing rogue with a glint that suggests he finds the whole war faintly amusing, and the looseness suits him better than anything since *The Man from U.N.C.L.E.* Alan Ritchson, fresh off making *Reacher* a streaming fixture, is the standout: his Danish commando Anders Lassen is a grinning psychopath with a bow and a deep dislike of Nazis, and Ritchson plays him with the gleeful menace the part needs. Eiza González gets the trickiest job, carrying the infiltration strand on poise and nerve rather than firepower, and she sells the danger of a woman charming men she intends to destroy. Alex Pettyfer is the steady hand whose capture sets the mission moving, and Henry Golding, Cary Elwes and Babs Olusanmokun fill out the edges with the easy charisma the film trades in.
## The craft
This is Ritchie in caper mode, not war-film mode. Ed Wild's photography keeps the palette warm and the framing clean, the action is staged for clarity rather than chaos, and Chris Benstead's score leans into brassy, almost playful menace. There is real violence here, and the BBFC has not handed out a 15 for nothing, but the tone stays buoyant: throats are cut and hearts removed with the same wink Ritchie brings to a card game gone wrong. The editing has his familiar snap, scenes ending a beat before you expect, dialogue clipped and quotable. At two hours it occasionally coasts, and the infiltration plot is more interesting than the climactic dock-side shooting, but the pacing rarely sags for long. It is handsome, confident, and entirely unbothered by realism.
## How it stacks up
The obvious shadow over this is *Inglourious Basterds*, another stylised fantasy of killing Nazis with relish, and the comparison does Ritchie no favours on ambition, though his film is the breezier watch. The deeper lineage is *The Dirty Dozen* and the classic ensemble-mission picture, the kind where half the pleasure is the roll-call of specialists and the planning of the job. It also makes an interesting double bill with *Operation Mincemeat*, released a couple of years back, which covered adjacent secret-war history with a straighter face: where that film whispered, this one struts. Against Ritchie's own work, it has the team chemistry of *The Gentlemen* without the plotting density, and the bruising competence of *The Covenant* without the moral weight.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critics have come in mixed-positive, sitting around 68%, with the common note that it is handsome and watchable but a touch generic, less distinctive than Ritchie at his sharpest. Audiences are far warmer, up at 91%, and I am with them. This is the gap that opens whenever a film sets out to be fun rather than important: reviewers mark it down for not reaching, while the people who wanted a good Friday-night romp got exactly that. The IMDb crowd land around 6.8, which feels about right for a film nobody will call a masterpiece and few will regret watching.
## Verdict
I came for wartime espionage, an ensemble caper and Guy Ritchie banter, and the film delivered all three without fuss. It is not trying to rewrite the genre or interrogate the morality of irregular warfare; it wants to be entertaining, and it is, with a cast plainly enjoying themselves and a director who knows precisely how to land a swaggering set-piece. The espionage strand and the team dynamic are the rewatchable parts, the bits I would happily put on again. It is a notch below Ritchie's best and a long way above the algorithm-filler it could have been. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Prime Video in the UK from 25 July 2024, after a cinema run elsewhere. A weekend watch that rewards a second look.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film has settled in as one of Ritchie's better-liked recent pictures, the kind that finds a long second life on streaming rather than at the box office, where its UK cinema skip and modest theatrical take elsewhere kept it under the radar. It remains on Prime Video, and the appetite for a follow-up or a Ritchie-flavoured war series has only grown given how comfortably the cast slotted into the format.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent bloody shootings, stabbings and throat slashings in actions sequences, which often have a darkly comic tone. Hand to hand combat includes punches, shoves and kicks. There are also explosions and bombings.
**Injury detail:** Characters are left splashed with blood in the aftermath of violence and there is occasional focus on bloody corpses and injury detail, such as slashed throats. A man cuts into the chest of another off-screen, pulling his bloody heart out and lifting it into view; there is a blackly comic context to this scene.
**Additional issues:** There are references to the racism and antisemitism of the Nazi movement; discrimination is implicitly condemned throughout. In a disturbing scene, characters see a naked woman hanging by her wrists having, it is implied, been tortured to death. Characters are threatened with torture and death. There are scenes of gun threat and tense sequences in which undercover agents are at risk of discovery. A woman experiences brief sexual harassment from a drunk soldier, but his behaviour forms part of her plan during a secret mission and she never appears to be at real risk. There are occasional moderate sex references as characters flirt with one another, and a villainous character is described as having 'perversions'. There is infrequent strong language ('f**k'), along with milder terms which include 'bugger', 'bloody', 'hell', 'Jesus', 'Christ' and 'God'. Characters smoke and drink alcohol plentifully, in the context of the historic setting.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-ministry-of-ungentlemanly-warfare-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdizmjay)).*
================================================================================
## Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-deadpool-and-wolverine
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-deadpool-and-wolverine.md
- published: 2024-07-30
- document_id: 1065
> The first R-rated film of the Marvel era turns up to bury the old Fox X-Men and resurrect Hugh Jackman in the same breath. Loud, filthy, and far more fun than it has any right to be. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2024
- **Director:** Shawn Levy · **Writers:** Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, Shawn Levy
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Maximum Effort; 21 Laps Entertainment
- **Genre:** Superhero action comedy / multiverse buddy film · **Runtime:** 128 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Ryan Reynolds (*Deadpool*, *Free Guy*) as Wade Wilson / Deadpool; Hugh Jackman (*Logan*, *The Prestige*) as Logan / Wolverine; Emma Corrin (*The Crown*) as Cassandra Nova; Matthew Macfadyen (*Succession*, *Pride & Prejudice*) as Mr Paradox
- **IMDb:** 7.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 78% critics / 94% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
When Disney bought Fox, the obvious worry was what it would do to Deadpool. The character built his two films on swearing at the camera, eviscerating people, and mocking the very studios now signing his cheques, and the standing joke was that a House of Mouse Deadpool would arrive sanded down to a 12A. So the first surprise of *Deadpool & Wolverine* is that it is the first film carrying the Marvel Studios logo to come out swinging with an 18-certificate sensibility and a UK 15, blood and all. The second surprise is that it talked Hugh Jackman out of retirement. He hung up the claws with *Logan* in 2017 and meant it, and getting him back into the suit, the actual yellow-and-blue suit he spent two decades refusing to wear, is the kind of thing this film treats as both a gift and a punchline.
## The setup
Wade Wilson has given up the mercenary life and is selling used cars, which is its own quiet joke. The Time Variance Authority then informs him that his universe, the Fox X-Men world, is dying because its anchor being is gone, and offers him a way out that means abandoning everyone he knows. Wade being Wade, he goes looking for a fix instead, and the fix involves dragging a Wolverine, any Wolverine, out of the multiverse to plug the hole. The one he finds is the worst version available: a bitter, drunk, broken Logan carrying a failure he will not discuss. The two of them are dumped in the Void, a junkyard at the end of the timeline ruled by a telepath named Cassandra Nova, and have to work together to get home while loathing every second of it.
## The cast
Reynolds has played this part long enough that he could phone it in, and the pleasure is that he does not. Wade is still the motormouth, still breaking the fourth wall to comment on his own studio's troubles, but there is a thread of real loneliness under the patter that gives the jokes something to push against. Jackman is the reason the film works as anything more than a sketch. He plays this Logan as a man who hates himself, and he commits to the misery completely, which makes the eventual thaw land. The two of them spend a good stretch of the runtime simply hitting each other in a car, and their timing is good enough that it stays funny. Emma Corrin is the find of the piece, playing Cassandra Nova with a soft, unhurried menace that is far more unsettling than the usual shouting supervillain. Matthew Macfadyen brings his particular brand of oily mid-level officiousness to the bureaucrat pulling the strings, and it lands exactly as it should.
## The craft
Shawn Levy is not a stylist, and the film is not trying to be beautiful. What he is good at is keeping a loud, busy machine moving, and *Deadpool & Wolverine* never sits still long enough to sag. The action is the most coherent the franchise has managed, with the two leads' healing factors used as licence for fights that are genuinely brutal in a way the previous films only gestured at. The Void is a smart bit of staging, a dustbin for discarded properties that lets the film raid two decades of superhero cinema for faces and ruins without needing to explain itself. Rob Simonsen's score does its job, and the soundtrack leans on big needle-drops with a confidence that mostly earns the swagger. The cameos, which I will not spoil, are deployed with more affection than cynicism, which is not what I expected.
## How it stacks up
The honest comparison is with *Deadpool 2*, which this beats on energy and loses to slightly on heart, and with *Logan*, which it cannot touch and is wise enough not to try. *Logan* was a funeral; this is a wake, and it knows the difference. As a buddy-action comedy it sits closer to the better odd-couple films than to most superhero fare: the engine is two people who cannot stand each other being forced to share a journey, and that engine has been reliable since long before either of these characters existed. Against the wider run of recent Marvel, where the multiverse has mostly been an excuse for homework, this is the rare entry that uses the device for jokes and feeling rather than franchise admin.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are mixed-positive, sitting around 78%, with the recurring complaint that the plot is a coat-rack for cameos and gags rather than a story. Audiences have ignored them entirely and pushed the score up into the nineties. Both are right. It is a delivery system for fan service, and the connective tissue is thin. But the fan service is delivered with real wit and a clear love of the messy Fox era it is sending off, and the central pairing is strong enough to carry the gaps. The critics are marking it as cinema; the audience is marking it as a night out. On this one the audience has the better measure of what the film is for.
## Verdict
This is not a profound film and does not want to be. It is crude, overstuffed, and held together mostly by two actors who are clearly enjoying themselves. It is also one of the most purely entertaining things the genre has produced in a while, with jokes that land, action that hurts, and a send-off for the old X-Men films that is warmer than the snark suggests. It loses a point for leaning on nostalgia I will eventually tire of on a rewatch, and for a plot you forget the moment it ends. It gains everything back on chemistry and sheer momentum. I will watch it again, probably more than once. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it with a crowd; the laughs and the gasps both play better in a full room.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to become the highest-grossing R-rated release to that point and the box-office event of its summer, which retired any lingering worry that an adult-rated Marvel film could not sell. Jackman's return, billed here as a one-off favour, reads in hindsight as the moment the studio worked out it could revive its older properties without pretending they never happened. It is now available on disc and digital and streams on Disney+.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, injury detail, sex references, very strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are sustained fight scenes in which blood is spilt copiously, mainly by superhuman characters whose wounds heal immediately. There are isolated moments of stronger injury detail: a man is skinned by fantastical forces, revealing his intestines; a superhero's Achilles tendons are slashed prior to decapitation.
**Threat and horror:** There is mild threat from monsters, villains and life-threatening situations.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of very strong language ('c\*\*t'), as well as more frequent strong language ('f\*\*k', 'motherf\*\*ker') and other terms such as 'bitch', 'queen' and 'prick'. There is use of 'n\*\*\*a' in song lyrics.
**Sex:** Crude humour includes references to genital piercing, anal sex, necrophilia, paedophilia, oral sex and masturbation.
**Discrimination:** There is use of the term 'retard'.
**Drugs:** An elderly woman's fondness for cocaine is a recurring gag. One of the heroes is an alcoholic who drinks surgical spirit.
**Suicide and self-harm:** There are fleeting comic references to suicide.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This film contains flickering or flashing lights that may affect those with photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/deadpool-wolverine-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmde5ndm4)).*
================================================================================
## Twisters (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-twisters
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-twisters.md
- published: 2024-07-26
- document_id: 1230
> A legacy follow-up to the 1996 storm-chaser that has no business working as well as it does, carried by practical spectacle and two leads with real chemistry. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2024
- **Director:** Lee Isaac Chung · **Writer:** Mark L. Smith (story by Joseph Kosinski)
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; Warner Bros; Amblin Entertainment; Kennedy/Marshall
- **Genre:** Disaster adventure / legacy sequel · **Runtime:** 122 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Daisy Edgar-Jones (*Normal People*, *Where the Crawdads Sing*) as Kate Carter; Glen Powell (*Top Gun: Maverick*, *Hit Man*) as Tyler Owens; Anthony Ramos (*In the Heights*) as Javi; Brandon Perea (*Nope*) as Boone
- **IMDb:** 6.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 75% critics / 90% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Nearly thirty years after the original, a *Twister* follow-up was never going to be an obvious bet. The 1996 film was a product of its moment, the early summer of the effects-driven studio spectacle, the one where a cow flies past the windscreen and nobody ever quite lets you forget it. A sequel arriving now has to answer a fair question: what is there to add, beyond better-looking weather? The surprise of *Twisters* is the name on the director's chair. Lee Isaac Chung made *Minari*, a quiet, autobiographical Arkansas drama about a Korean family and a smallholding, about as far from a hundred-million-dollar disaster picture as you can get. Handing him the storm season turns out to be the smartest decision in the film.
## The setup
Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a gifted young meteorologist who walked away from field work after a chase went catastrophically wrong, and is now living a careful, grounded life in New York running weather models from a desk. A former colleague, Javi (Anthony Ramos), coaxes her back to Oklahoma for what he promises is a short stint testing a new radar-scanning rig, just as the worst tornado season in years begins tearing across the plains. There she runs into Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a swaggering chaser with a YouTube following, a convoy of modified trucks and a line in selling merchandise to the crowd that gathers wherever he points his camera. The film sets her between the two operations, one corporate and clinical, one ramshackle and showy, while the storms keep getting bigger.
## The cast
Edgar-Jones is the anchor, and she plays Kate as someone holding a great deal in. After *Normal People* and *Where the Crawdads Sing* she knows how to carry an interior wound without underlining it, and the film trusts her to be the still centre while everything around her is flying apart. Powell is the engine. Coming straight off *Top Gun: Maverick* and *Hit Man*, he has worked out exactly how much charm to deploy, and Tyler is built to be irritating before he is likeable, a cowboy-hatted showman who turns out to know precisely what he is doing. The chemistry between the two leads does a lot of work, prickly rather than gooey, and the film is wise enough not to rush it. Ramos gives Javi more decency than the script strictly needs, and Brandon Perea, fresh from *Nope*, supplies most of the easy laughs as Tyler's crew member Boone.
## The craft
Chung shoots the weather like a man who grew up under it. Dan Mindel's photography keeps the camera low and in the dirt, and the storms have real menace because so much of the chaos is staged for the lens rather than rendered after the fact: practical wind, practical debris, practical water. There is a sequence in a small-town cinema and another at a rodeo that earn their scares the old-fashioned way, by making the geography legible so you understand what is about to come apart. Benjamin Wallfisch's score knows when to drop out and let the sound of the wind do the threatening. At 122 minutes the film is tightly cut, and Chung brings something the original never had much time for: a feel for the people on the ground, the towns that get hit, the cost of all this spectacle to someone who actually lives there.
## How it stacks up
The obvious measure is the 1996 *Twister*, and this is the better-directed film, more interested in its characters and less reliant on a single gimmick, even if it lacks that first picture's lightning-in-a-bottle novelty. The closer cousin in spirit is *Top Gun: Maverick*: the same Glen Powell, the same Joseph Kosinski fingerprints on the story, the same conviction that a big crowd-pleaser can be made with real craft and real stakes rather than smirking at itself. Set it against *Into the Storm* or *Geostorm* and the gap is obvious; this is a disaster film that remembers a disaster needs people in the path of it. *Dante's Peak* is the other honourable forebear, a nineties spectacle that took its science half-seriously and was the better for it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been warm rather than ecstatic, sitting around 75%, with the praise going to the practical staging and the cast and the reservations going to a screenplay that hits familiar beats and keeps any larger point about a changing climate carefully off the table. Audiences are well ahead at 90%, and on this one I am with the crowd. The criticisms are fair and they do not much matter once the sky goes green. This is a film doing an unfashionable thing extremely well: a summer blockbuster built for a packed house, with stakes you can read and a hero you end up rooting for despite yourself.
## Verdict
I came in sceptical of a legacy sequel to a film that did not obviously need one, and left grinning. The storms are genuinely tense, the two leads are a pleasure to watch, and Chung gives the whole thing a sense of place that lifts it above the usual disaster fare. It is not reinventing anything, and the script plays it safe where it might have pushed. But it is exactly the kind of confident, well-made, big-screen entertainment that is rarer than it should be, and the sort I would happily put on again. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. This is one to see loud and large; the sound design alone is worth a proper screen.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Twisters* held up well through the summer and stands as one of the year's better-liked studio blockbusters, with Glen Powell's run as a leading man only gathering pace. Talk of a follow-up has circulated without anything confirmed. It is now available on digital and disc and streams on the relevant Universal and Peacock platforms depending on region; it remains a strong home-cinema demo for sound and picture.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** People are swept away by powerful winds as tornadoes rapidly approach, resulting in their implied off-screen deaths. A tornado tears through an industrial plant, causing a large explosion. People narrowly avoid getting hit by falling vehicles and debris. Panicked civilians, including children, desperately seek shelter from an intense tornado. However, there is a focus on characters' bravery and resourcefulness throughout.
**Language:** Mild bad language ('screwed', 'ass', 'asshole', 'shit') is accompanied by even milder terms such as 'God', 'damn' and 'hell'.
**Sex:** A person comically tells a rival character to 'blow [him]'.
**Injury detail:** A woman is shown with a large bloody gash across her thigh and a blood-stained face in the aftermath of a tornado.
**Theme:** There are infrequent very mild upsetting scenes relating to bereavement. However, the theme is dealt with sensitively.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/twisters-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmde5mzcz)).*
================================================================================
## Atlas (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-atlas
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-atlas.md
- published: 2024-06-01
- document_id: 1036
> Jennifer Lopez goes to war with artificial intelligence inside a talking mech, in a Netflix action picture the critics have written off and I had a much better time with than they did. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2024 (Netflix)
- **Director:** Brad Peyton · **Writers:** Leo Sardarian, Aron Eli Coleite
- **Studio / distributor:** Netflix; Nuyorican Productions; Safehouse Pictures
- **Genre:** Science fiction action / AI war film · **Runtime:** 120 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Jennifer Lopez (*Out of Sight*, *Hustlers*) as Atlas Shepherd; Simu Liu (*Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings*, *Barbie*) as Harlan Shepherd; Sterling K. Brown (*Black Panther*) as Colonel Elias Banks; Gregory James Cohan as the voice of Smith
- **IMDb:** 5.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 17% critics / 46% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Netflix has spent the last few years working out how to make a film that looks like it belongs in a cinema and behaves like something to put on with dinner, and *Atlas* is the latest swing at it. Brad Peyton directs, which tells you most of what you need to know about register: this is the man who threw The Rock at the San Andreas fault and then at a giant gorilla, and he arrives here with the same straight face and the same fondness for big machinery. The hook is a good one for anyone who has watched science fiction argue with itself about thinking computers for fifty years. The heroine hates artificial intelligence, distrusts it down to the bone, and the film strands her somewhere she cannot survive without trusting one completely.
## The setup
Atlas Shepherd is a counter-terrorism analyst with a personal grudge against AI, the kind that does not bend to a briefing or a balance of probabilities. Years ago a rogue artificial intelligence called Harlan turned on the people who built it and vanished off-world, and Atlas has spent her career convinced that machines that think will always, eventually, decide they would rather not have us around. When a lead finally surfaces, she talks her way onto a military mission to bring Harlan in, and the mission goes wrong in the way these missions do. Stranded on a hostile planet with her air running out, she is left with one piece of equipment that can keep her alive: an armoured mech suit run by an onboard AI named Smith, who would very much like her to synchronise with him and let him help. Everything she believes says do not. Everything else says she has no choice.
## The cast
Lopez has always been a more interesting screen presence when she is allowed to be prickly rather than radiant, and *Atlas* leans on that. Her Atlas is rude, closed off, and certain she is right, which is a harder sell than a likeable lead and she mostly gets away with it. The film is essentially a two-hander between a woman and a voice, and the voice wins. Gregory James Cohan's Smith is the best thing in it, patient and dryly funny and quietly hurt when his pilot will not trust him, and the slow thaw between the two is where the picture finds whatever heart it has. Simu Liu, fresh from anchoring his own Marvel film and stealing scenes in *Barbie*, makes Harlan a cold and watchful antagonist, more disappointed than evil, which is the right note for a machine that has concluded humanity is the problem. Sterling K. Brown lends the mission some gravity early on, then the film leaves him behind, which is a waste of him.
## The craft
This is a clean, expensive-looking film. John Schwartzman shoots the off-world exteriors with real scale, the mech interiors have a lived-in clutter that sells the claustrophobia, and the action is legible in a way a lot of modern blockbusters are not. You can follow where everyone is and what is hitting what. Andrew Lockington's score does the lifting the dialogue sometimes will not, and Peyton keeps the thing moving at a pace that does not give you long to argue with it. The suit itself is the design highlight, a believable piece of kit rather than weightless cartoon armour, and the long stretches of Atlas alone inside it, bickering with Smith, are the parts that work best. The film is far more interesting as a chamber piece about reluctant partnership than as the planet-stakes war it occasionally remembers it is supposed to be.
## How it stacks up
The reference points are not hidden. The bond between a soldier and a wisecracking war machine is *Titanfall* the video game made into a film at last, and the talking suit owes plenty to every helpful and not-so-helpful AI from *2001* onwards. The rogue-machine-decides-to-end-us premise is *Terminator* with the serial numbers lightly filed off, and the giant mechs nod to *Pacific Rim*. It is nowhere near as sharp as *Edge of Tomorrow*, which is the gold standard for this kind of locked-in science fiction action, and it does not have the visual ambition of a *Blade Runner 2049*. What it does have, and what those comparisons undersell, is a genuinely engaging central relationship and a willingness to sit in the cockpit and let two characters talk. That is more than most films built around a mech bother to do.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critics have been brutal. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 17%, Metacritic in the high thirties, and the recurring complaint is derivative plotting and dialogue that creaks. Audiences are warmer, sitting near the middle, and the film has gone straight to the top of the Netflix charts in dozens of countries, which tells you the disconnect is real. I land closer to the audience. Yes, the script is familiar and the world-stakes plot is the least interesting thing in it. But I came for intelligent science fiction about whether we can ever trust the machines we build, and on that the film is more thoughtful than the scores suggest. The fear of AI, and the slow case for setting it aside, is handled with more care than a 17% implies.
## Verdict
I had a good time, and I suspect I will again. This is exactly the sort of mid-budget, idea-driven science fiction action I keep saying I want more of, and the fact that it is on Netflix rather than a cinema screen does not change what it is doing. The plot is borrowed and the supporting cast is underused, but the Atlas and Smith partnership carries it, the suit is a lovely piece of design, and the AI question is taken seriously rather than waved at. It is comfortably more rewatchable than its reputation, the kind of thing I will happily put on again on a wet evening. The consensus is wrong about this one. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming worldwide on Netflix from 24 May 2024.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the critical drubbing stuck, and *Atlas* has settled into its reputation as one of the lower-rated entries on Jennifer Lopez's record, even as it kept topping Netflix charts around the world. No sequel has materialised. It remains on Netflix, where it has quietly become exactly the sort of algorithm-fed comfort watch the platform was built to serve.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *injury detail, language, threat, violence* (classified 23 May 2024). The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC classified *Atlas* 15 with the short consumer advice line *injury detail, language, threat, violence*. The detailed per-category Content Advice breakdown (Violence, Threat, Injury detail, Language) could not be retrieved from the BBFC release page at the time of writing; only the short consumer-advice tags above were available.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/atlas-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdixndiz)).*
================================================================================
## Furiosa - A Mad Max Saga (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-furiosa-a-mad-max-saga
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-furiosa-a-mad-max-saga.md
- published: 2024-05-29
- document_id: 1082
> George Miller goes back to fill in the wasteland that made Furiosa, trading the single-chase purity of Fury Road for forty years of myth. Slower, stranger and grander, and a better film than the cooler reviews allow. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** May 2024
- **Director:** George Miller · **Writers:** George Miller, Nico Lathouris
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Kennedy Miller Mitchell
- **Genre:** Post-apocalyptic action epic · **Runtime:** 148 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Anya Taylor-Joy (*The Witch*, *The Menu*) as Furiosa; Chris Hemsworth (*Thor*, *Rush*) as Dementus; Tom Burke (*The Souvenir*) as Praetorian Jack; Alyla Browne as young Furiosa
- **IMDb:** 7.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 88% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Nine years ago George Miller did the most improbable thing in modern action cinema: he came back, at seventy, with *Mad Max: Fury Road*, and made the rest of the genre look like it had been idling in the slow lane. *Furiosa* is the film he wanted to make alongside it, a backstory worked out so the lead of *Fury Road* would have a past to play, and now built out into a feature in its own right. The trick this time is that everyone walks in knowing where it ends. We have already met the one-armed war rig driver Charlize Theron played. What Miller is offering is the forty years that turned a stolen child into her.
## The setup
Furiosa is taken as a girl from the Green Place, a hidden pocket of the wasteland that still has fruit and water, by outriders working for Dementus, a biker warlord assembling a horde out of the ruined world. Her mother comes after her and pays for it, and the child is dragged into the orbit of two rival fiefdoms: Dementus, who wants a kingdom, and Immortan Joe of the Citadel, who already has one. Passed between them, hidden, disguised and waiting, Furiosa grows up learning the geography of the wasteland and the men who run it, and nursing a single intention that the film is in no hurry to spell out. It is a revenge story stretched across a saga, told in chapters with their own title cards, and it covers more ground, literally and otherwise, than *Fury Road* ever tried to.
## The cast
Anya Taylor-Joy has very little dialogue and carries the back half of the film almost entirely on watchfulness, those enormous eyes doing the work the script withholds. It is a performance built out of stillness and timing rather than speeches, and it holds. The surprise is Chris Hemsworth. Buried under a prosthetic nose and a Roman swagger, Dementus lets him do something he rarely gets the room for: he is funny, vain, wounded and genuinely frightening, a showman who has talked himself into believing his own myth. He is the most entertaining villain the series has produced. Tom Burke, as the road warrior Praetorian Jack who becomes Furiosa's mentor and something more, brings a weathered decency that the film needs, and Alyla Browne, as the child Furiosa, anchors a long opening stretch with real composure.
## The craft
Miller remains the most legible action director alive. However many vehicles are on screen, and there are a lot, you always know who is where and what they want. The centrepiece, a running assault on a war rig across open desert, is staged with a clarity that shames films with three times the cutting. There is more digital work here than in *Fury Road*, and a handful of shots show it, but the physical craft, the practical stunts, the engines, Tom Holkenborg's pounding score and the editing rhythm Margaret Sixel brings to the chases, all carry the world. Simon Duggan's photography gives the desert a scorched, painterly look. The wasteland itself is the deepest pleasure: the economies of guzzoline and water and breeding stock, the heraldry of each warband, a whole society worked out down to the spray paint on the teeth.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Fury Road*, and it cuts both ways. That film was a single chase, a perfect mechanism with no fat on it. *Furiosa* is the opposite shape, a sprawling chronicle that pauses, jumps years, and asks you to sit with character and mythology. It is a less relentless film and a more expansive one, closer in spirit to *The Road Warrior* and to the world-building epics of the sword and sorcery tradition than to its immediate predecessor. Set against the wider field of franchise prequels, where the usual problem is a story nobody needed told, this one earns its existence by deepening what came before. You come out of it and want to watch *Fury Road* again, which is the best thing a prequel can do.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical reception is strong, around ninety per cent, but laced with a recurring reservation: that for all its scale it cannot match the propulsive simplicity of *Fury Road*, and that the heavier reliance on digital effects costs it some of the earlier film's hand-built danger. Audiences are close behind at eighty-eight, and it is finding a slightly cooler commercial reception than its quality deserves, perhaps because the marketplace had decided it wanted *Fury Road* again rather than something stranger. I think the reservation is real and overstated. Asking *Furiosa* to be *Fury Road* misses what it is doing. It is a different and more ambitious shape, and judged on its own terms it mostly succeeds.
## Verdict
This is exactly the sort of film I rate highly: dense world-building, a soundtrack that drives the whole thing, action you can actually follow, and a wasteland mythology I am happy to spend hours inside. It is not flawless. The pace sags once or twice in the middle chapters, and a couple of effects shots break the spell that *Fury Road* never broke. But Hemsworth is a joy, Taylor-Joy holds the centre with almost no help from the script, and the craft is the best in the genre. I will rewatch it, probably as a double bill with its sequel, and I suspect it will look better with distance from the comparison everyone is making now. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, and worth the largest screen and the loudest room you can find. See it in IMAX if you can.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: time has been kind to *Furiosa*. The early framing of it as the lesser companion to *Fury Road* has softened, and it now reads more clearly as the deliberately different film Miller intended, a chronicle rather than a chase. It disappointed at the box office on release, which says more about a crowded summer than about the film. It is now available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and digital, and streams on Max in the territories that carry it, where it pairs naturally with *Fury Road* for the full wasteland double bill.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are bloody shootings and stabbings, as well as beatings and head bludgeonings. A man's limbs are chained to motorbikes, which proceed to pull him apart; however, visual detail of this death is largely obscured. Vehicles and people are attacked with explosive spears and characters are killed by a giant industrial drill mounted on a lorry; visual detail of these deaths are limited. Characters are hit by vehicles and crushed beneath their wheels during intense action scenes, and others are attacked by dogs.
**Threat and horror:** Characters are restrained and threatened with torture and death. There are intense, sustained sequences involving high speed vehicular attacks and chases. A young girl is kidnapped by a violent gang and threatened; she is forced to watch the murder of a loved one. There are scenes of gun and knife threat.
**Language:** There is mild bad language ('bollocks', 'tits', 'piss', 'bastard') along with milder terms such as 'hell'.
**Sexual violence and sexual threat:** A man plays with the hair of a young girl in a threatening way and later kidnaps her as she sleeps, taking her to a secluded room; it is implied he intends to sexually abuse her but she escapes from the situation unharmed. A man says he wants to use a young girl as a 'wife' when she is older, in order for her to bear his children; this man keeps a 'harem' of other women captive for this purpose.
**Injury detail:** There is occasional close-up focus on injury detail, including grisly shots of bloody wounds being treated with leeches and sight of severed limbs. Characters sustain bloody injuries in the aftermath of violence, including pulsing neck wounds, and there is brief sight of a man whose head has been impaled with a drill. There are occasional blood spurts and splashes. There is brief sight of the dead body of a stillborn, mutated baby.
**Nudity:** There are images of natural female nudity in reproductions of classical paintings and a man has the chest of a nude female mannikin attached to his vehicle.
**Rude humour:** A man describes another as 'anal pus'. Character names include 'Scrotus' and 'Rictus Erectus'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/furiosa-a-mad-max-saga-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmde4mduz)).*
================================================================================
## Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-kingdom-of-the-planet-of-the-apes
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-kingdom-of-the-planet-of-the-apes.md
- published: 2024-05-22
- document_id: 1108
> A new generation takes over the rebooted Apes saga, trading Caesar's grief for a younger ape's coming of age. The world-building survives the handover and the spectacle is first-rate. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2024
- **Director:** Wes Ball · **Writer:** Josh Friedman; Rick Jaffa; Amanda Silver; Patrick Aison
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Studios; Oddball Entertainment; Jason T. Reed Productions
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / franchise epic · **Runtime:** 145 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Owen Teague (*It*) as Noa; Freya Allan (*The Witcher*) as Mae; Kevin Durand (*The Strain*) as Proximus Caesar; Peter Macon (*The Orville*) as Raka
- **IMDb:** 7.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 80% critics / 77% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The rebooted Apes films have been one of the quieter triumphs of the last decade and a half: three pictures built around Andy Serkis and a performance-capture chimpanzee that asked you to care about the slow fall of human civilisation through the eyes of the animals inheriting it. *War for the Planet of the Apes* closed that arc cleanly, which left the studio with the awkward question every successful trilogy eventually faces. Where do you go once your hero is gone? *Kingdom* answers by jumping forward several generations, handing the saga to Wes Ball of the *Maze Runner* films, and betting that the world Caesar built is interesting enough to carry a new face. It mostly is.
## The setup
Many generations after Caesar's death, his name has curdled into legend and then into something worse. Noa (Owen Teague), a young ape of a clan that keeps eagles and knows nothing of the old wars, has his settlement raided and his family taken by masked apes serving a self-styled king. Setting out to find them, he falls in with Raka, an orang-utan who still keeps Caesar's actual teachings, and with a human woman, Mae, who is sharper and more purposeful than the feral survivors apes have come to expect. The trail leads to Proximus Caesar, a bonobo who has rebuilt Caesar's words into a creed of conquest, and who wants what is locked inside an old human vault by the sea.
## The cast
Owen Teague has the hardest job in the film, following Serkis into a fully digital lead, and he comes through it well. Noa is younger and greener than Caesar ever was, more reactive than commanding, and Teague lets the curiosity and the fear read through the capture without overplaying either. Kevin Durand is the find here. His Proximus is a marvellous piece of villainy, vain and bookish and genuinely menacing, a tyrant who has read just enough history to be dangerous with it. Peter Macon's Raka supplies the film's warmth and most of its wit, the keeper of a faith almost everyone else has forgotten. Freya Allan gives Mae a guarded intelligence that pays off as the story turns, and the late shift in how you read her is one of the better things the script does.
## The craft
Visually this is the most assured the franchise has looked. Gyula Pados shoots a green, overgrown world of collapsed towers and reclaimed coastline, and Wey-Ta and the effects team push the photoreal apes to a point where you stop thinking about how the trick is done. The eagle-hunting sequence early on is a real set piece, vertiginous and tactile, and the flooded finale has weight and danger to it. John Paesano's score leans on Michael Giacchino's earlier themes without leaning so hard that it forgets to find its own voice. At 145 minutes the middle stretch ambles a little, and the film is more interested in showing you its world than in driving hard through plot, but the patience is mostly earned.
## How it stacks up
Set beside *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes* and *War for the Planet of the Apes*, this is the lighter, more adventurous picture, closer to a quest than a tragedy. It trades Caesar's moral weight for a younger hero's discovery of the world, which is a fair swap for a reboot even if it costs the series some of its gravity. Ball brings the propulsive, kids-against-a-tyrant energy of the *Maze Runner* films, and the result sits a notch below the best of the Serkis trilogy while comfortably clearing the bar of a franchise running out of road. The smartest move is in the idea that Caesar's legacy could be twisted into its opposite, which gives the new chapter a reason to exist beyond brand maintenance.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are positive without being overwhelmed, sitting around 80%, with audiences a few points behind at 77%. The recurring note is that the spectacle and world-building are first-rate but the emotional pull falls short of the trilogy it follows, and that is a fair reading. There is no single gut-punch here to match the best of *War*. What there is instead is a confidently made, handsomely mounted adventure that proves the world can outlast its founding character, which is no small thing for a series this far down the line.
## Verdict
I came in with measured expectations, suspecting a legacy continuation running on fumes, and came out won over by how solidly built it is. The world-building is the draw for me, and on that count the film delivers: a believable, lived-in future you want to spend time in, photoreal apes you forget are effects, and a villain worth the running time. It is not the equal of *Dawn* or *War*, and the middle could lose twenty minutes, but it is intelligent, good-looking adventure science fiction with a real idea at the heart of it, and I would happily watch it again. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX, where the eagle and flood sequences earn the larger screen.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Kingdom* opened a planned new trilogy, with Wes Ball confirmed to return and Owen Teague's Noa set to anchor the next chapter, so the bet on a fresh lead paid off at the box office. The film has settled into its reputation as a strong, slightly cooler successor to the Serkis trilogy, admired for its craft if not quite loved like *War*. It is now available on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are crunchy battles between evolved apes, which involve punches, shoves and grappling, as well as use of weapons such as spears and knives. Characters are electrocuted with cattle prod-like weapons and are knocked over by attackers on horseback. An ape pulls a blade from the back of one of his dead victims and a character chokes another to death.
**Threat and horror:** A group of violent apes chase frightened ape and human characters on horseback, causing panic and catching their victims in nets and with lassos. There are scenes of knife and gun threat. Characters desperately flee and scramble over obstacles to avoid drowning in floodwaters. Apes fall and dangle from precarious heights and try to escape burning buildings. Characters find themselves at risk of being swept away in a fast-flowing river. Physically imposing ape characters threaten and verbally intimidate smaller apes and humans.
**Language:** There is occasional mild bad language ('shit').
**Injury detail:** Apes are left with bloodied faces and bodies in the aftermath of violence. There is sight of dead apes, including one that has been impaled with a spear; this scene is darkly lit, however, and visual detail is limited. We briefly see skeletal ape remains burning on a funeral pyre.
**Theme:** Characters grieve for lost loved ones and we see apes attending funeral ceremonies.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/kingdom-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmde3mzg5)).*
================================================================================
## The Fall Guy (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-fall-guy
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-fall-guy.md
- published: 2024-05-15
- document_id: 1185
> A stuntman turned reluctant detective in David Leitch's love letter to the people who actually take the falls. Light on plot, heavy on charm, and one of the most purely enjoyable action films of the year. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2024
- **Director:** David Leitch · **Writer:** Drew Pearce
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; 87North; Entertainment 360
- **Genre:** Action comedy / stunt-industry romance · **Runtime:** 126 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Ryan Gosling (*Drive*, *Blade Runner 2049*) as Colt Seavers; Emily Blunt (*Edge of Tomorrow*, *Sicario*) as Jody Moreno; Aaron Taylor-Johnson (*Kick-Ass*, *Tenet*) as Tom Ryder; Hannah Waddingham (*Game of Thrones*) as Gail Meyer
- **IMDb:** 6.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 82% critics / 84% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
David Leitch came up the hard way, as a stuntman and Brad Pitt's double, before he turned his half of the *John Wick* partnership into a directing career of his own: *Atomic Blonde*, *Deadpool 2*, *Bullet Train*. So a film about a working stuntman, adapted loosely from the cheerful 1980s Lee Majors series, is the most personal thing he could have made while still blowing up cars. *The Fall Guy* is Leitch saying thank you to the trade that raised him, and doing it as a big, glossy, summer crowd-pleaser rather than a po-faced tribute. The wonder is how light he keeps it.
## The setup
Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) is a stuntman at the top of his game until a rig goes wrong and breaks his back, along with his confidence and his romance with up-and-coming camera operator Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). Eighteen months later he is parking cars when a producer (Hannah Waddingham) lures him back onto a set in Australia, where Jody is now directing her first feature. The job, it turns out, comes with strings: the film's headline star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), has vanished, and Colt is quietly expected to find him before the production collapses. What begins as a chance to win Jody back becomes a missing-person caper with Colt doing his own stunts off the clock. It is a slim premise, and the film knows it, which is half the fun.
## The cast
Gosling is the engine here, and he is having a wonderful time. He has spent years alternating between glacial cool and deadpan absurdity, and Colt lets him pour both into the same character: a bruised romantic who keeps getting set on fire and keeps cracking jokes about it. He sells the action and, more importantly, the ache underneath. Emily Blunt matches him beat for beat, giving Jody real spine rather than playing the love interest as a finish line; their bickering over a megaphone, in front of a full crew, is the warmest thing in the film. Aaron Taylor-Johnson clearly relishes sending up the pampered movie star, all teeth and insecurity, and Hannah Waddingham brings a brisk, smiling ruthlessness to the producer pulling strings behind the scenes. The chemistry between the two leads carries long stretches where the plot is barely holding the rope.
## The craft
This is where Leitch's pedigree shows. The stunts are practical, legible and genuinely thrilling, shot so you can see what is happening to whom, which is rarer than it should be in the digital-soup era. A cannon roll late in the film reportedly set a world record, and Leitch frames it to let you feel the impact rather than smother it in cuts. Jonathan Sela's photography makes the Sydney coastline glow, Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir's editing keeps the action clean, and Dominic Lewis's score, leaning on a needle-drop or two you will recognise, gives the whole thing a buoyant pop-radio swing. Leitch's affection for the unsung people who take the hits runs through every set piece. He keeps cutting back to the rigs, the pads, the doubles waiting their turn, and the film is at its most sincere when it lingers there.
## How it stacks up
It belongs to a small, likeable family of films that are really about how films get made. *Tropic Thunder* skewered the vanity of the industry; this is the warmer cousin, fond where Stiller's film was savage. The Gosling-Blunt sparring sits squarely in the *Romancing the Stone* and *The Nice Guys* tradition of action comedy that runs on banter as much as on stunts, and Leitch's own *Bullet Train* is the obvious stylistic sibling, the same candy-coloured, needle-drop, set-piece energy applied to a story with a bit more heart. Where it falls short of the best of those is the plot, which is functional at most and occasionally just an excuse to move Colt to the next stunt.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have come in warm, around 82%, with audiences a notch higher at 84%, and the recurring praise is exactly right: the chemistry, the stunt work, the unforced charm. The recurring grumble is that the mystery is thin and the runtime a touch generous, which is also fair. IMDb users have it lower at 6.8, and the box office has underperformed the buzz, the kind of softness that tends to greet an original star vehicle in a sequel-shaped market. None of that troubles my own reaction much. I was not watching for the conspiracy.
## Verdict
I value rewatchability, an easy ensemble and craft you can actually see, and *The Fall Guy* delivers all three. It is too long by fifteen minutes, the mystery is barely there, and a tighter script would have lifted it higher still. But Gosling and Blunt are a joy together, the stunts are the real, painful, exhilarating thing, and the film's love for the people who do the falling is sincere without being sentimental. It is exactly the sort of film I will happily put on again on a wet Sunday and enjoy just as much the second time. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in standard and IMAX, from 2 May.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: an extended cut running around twenty minutes longer arrived on 4K and Blu-ray later in 2024, folding in more of the stunt-set material and an alternate stretch of the mystery. The film has settled as a favourite among action fans and stunt performers in particular, its profile boosted by the wider campaign that year to have stunt work recognised by the Academy. It now streams on Peacock in the United States and is widely available to rent or buy on the usual digital platforms in the UK.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, infrequent strong language, drug references*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Frequent scenes of moderate violence include shootouts, punch ups and fast paced large scale rollercoaster action sequences. There are also images of injury detail in the aftermath of violence.
**Threat and horror:** There is mild comic threat, including a scenes in which a man and woman are kidnapped at gun point.
**Language:** The film features infrequent strong language ('f***k') and uses of 'bitch', 'dick', 'pussy', 'twat', 'shit', 'balls', 'arsehole', 'piss', 'arse', 'bullshit', 'God', 'damn', Jesus', 'Christ' and 'hell'. There are also middle finger gestures.
**Sex:** Mild sex references and innuendo are infrequent and include an undetailed passing reference to role play and a comic reference to a 'lady of the night'.
**Additional issues:** Drugs: A man's drink is spiked with an unnamed drug which causes him to hallucinate. Suicide and self-harm: A villainous character threatens to murder a man and frame it as a suicide. The work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-fall-guy-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmde2otg1)).*
================================================================================
## Civil War (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-civil-war
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-civil-war.md
- published: 2024-04-29
- document_id: 1059
> Alex Garland points his camera at a fractured America and follows the photographers rather than the politics. Tense, beautifully shot, and deliberately uncomfortable, even if it keeps its cards close. 8/10.
- **UK release:** April 2024
- **Director:** Alex Garland · **Writer:** Alex Garland
- **Studio / distributor:** A24; DNA Films
- **Genre:** Dystopian war thriller / road movie · **Runtime:** 109 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Kirsten Dunst (*Melancholia*, *Spider-Man*) as Lee; Wagner Moura (*Elite Squad*, *Narcos*) as Joel; Cailee Spaeny (*Priscilla*) as Jessie; Stephen McKinley Henderson (*Fences*, *Dune*) as Sammy
- **IMDb:** 7.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 81% critics / 69% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Alex Garland has spent his directing career picking at things that frighten him in private: the machine that learns to lie in *Ex Machina*, the biology that rewrites itself in *Annihilation*, the rot under a pretty English village in *Men*. *Civil War* is the first time he has pointed that unease at something as blunt as a country tearing itself apart, and the surprise is how little interest he has in the politics of it. The marketing sells a near-future America at war with itself. The film that arrives is about the people who photograph wars, and what it costs to keep looking through the viewfinder when everyone else has looked away.
## The setup
The United States has fractured. A secessionist alliance of Texas and California is closing on Washington, the President is barricaded in a White House that no longer controls much, and the front line has dissolved into a patchwork of militias, holdouts and men with guns who answer to nobody. Into this, four journalists set out by road from New York towards the capital, chasing one last interview with a President who has stopped giving them. Lee, a veteran war photographer, leads. Joel drives and writes. Sammy, older and slower, comes along against everyone's better judgement. Jessie, barely out of her teens and desperate to do what Lee does, attaches herself to them. Garland keeps the causes of the war vague on purpose, and refuses to tell you who the good side is. What he gives you instead is the road, and a country you half recognise turned into something you do not.
## The cast
Kirsten Dunst gives the film its spine. Her Lee is hollowed out, professional to the point of numbness, a woman who has seen too much and survives by feeling as little as possible, and Dunst plays the cost of that rather than the cool of it. It is the best work she has done since *Melancholia*, and it carries the picture. Wagner Moura, loose and grinning where Dunst is shut down, brings a reporter's adrenaline junkie energy that curdles as the journey goes on. Cailee Spaeny, fresh off *Priscilla*, is the audience's nerve endings, all hunger and shock, and the film tracks how quickly that hunger learns to harden. Stephen McKinley Henderson lends Sammy a weary decency that the others have burned through. Look out too for a single, chilling scene with a soldier who wants to know what kind of American you are; it is the most quietly terrifying thing in the film.
## The craft
Rob Hardy's photography is the reason to see this on a big screen. The road movie passages have an eerie calm, sunlit motorways and abandoned forecourts, broken by violence that arrives without warning and ends just as abruptly. Garland's masterstroke is the sound. Gunfire is enormous, sudden, physical, and then he cuts to silence and a frozen still frame, a photograph snatched mid-chaos, so that you feel the photographer's instinct overriding fear in real time. Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow's score is sparing, and the needle-drops are deliberately wrong, pop songs laid over carnage, which is unsettling in exactly the way it intends. At 109 minutes the film is tight, and the final push on Washington is a genuinely white-knuckle sequence.
## How it stacks up
The obvious reference point is *Children of Men*, another near-future Britain-or-America-in-collapse film built around long, immersive, you-are-there set pieces, and *Civil War* shares that DNA without quite matching Cuaron's emotional pull. The road-through-ruin structure recalls *The Road*, though Garland is colder than that. Where it cuts closest is *Nightcrawler*, another study of a person who has learned to point a lens at suffering and click; Lee is what Lou Bloom might have become with a conscience she is trying to switch off. And the spectacle of an American city under bombardment inevitably summons *Apocalypse Now*, a comparison the film courts and mostly earns in its last act.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have largely come down on Garland's side, praising the tension, the sound design and the performances, and the Rotten Tomatoes figure sits around 81%. Audiences are cooler, nearer 69%, and the split is easy to read. A good number of viewers wanted the film to take a position, to name the sides and tell them who to root for, and Garland flatly refuses. The ambiguity that critics read as discipline, some audiences read as a cop-out. I land closer to the critics. The refusal to assign blame is the engine of the film, not a dodge: it is a film about how the camera flattens everyone into the same image once the shooting starts.
## Verdict
This is grim, controlled, expertly made cinema that knows exactly the film it wants to be. The photography is superb, the sound design is among the best of the year, and Dunst anchors it with a performance that gets under your skin. It loses a point for the very thing it is praised for: the deliberate vagueness keeps the film at arm's length emotionally, and for all its craft I admired it more than I was moved by it. It is also not a film I will reach for often; the bleakness is the point and it lingers. But as a piece of work it is close to the front of its genre, and the final twenty minutes are as tense as anything I have seen this year. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, and worth the biggest, loudest screen you can find for the sound alone.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Garland followed *Civil War* with *Warfare* (2025), co-directed with the former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, a far more literal and minute-by-minute combat film that works as a companion piece to this one's photographer's-eye remove. *Civil War* has settled into its reputation as A24's biggest production to date and as the film that confirmed Garland's interest in dread over plot. It is now streaming on Max in the US and is widely available on UK digital and 4K Blu-ray, the disc worth it for the sound mix.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong threat, bloody images, violence, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes include gunfights, executions, people being set on fire and implied torture. There are also instances of racist violence.
**Threat and horror:** Sequences of threat are prolonged and intense, including terrorist bombings, people being shot at, scenes of rioting, and chase scenes. In a protracted scene, people are made to kneel by a mass grave and interrogated.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker') and milder terms including 'bullshit', 'shit', 'bastard', 'Jesus', 'God', 'damn', and use of middle finger gestures.
**Injury detail:** Strong bloody images and injury detail are visible in the aftermath of violence, including bodies lying in pools of blood and piled in a mass grave, grisly images of corpses in the aftermath of a bombing, and a woman washing blood out of a car after a man has died.
**Sex:** A man claims the sound of a distant battle is giving him an erection.
**Discrimination:** A man displays racist attitudes when he questions a group of people about what 'kind of American' they are. He executes those he does not deem to be the correct kind.
**Drugs:** People share cannabis joints.
**Sexual violence and sexual threat:** A man follows a young woman as she walks alone, and so another woman follows, fearful of what may happen to her friend. However, no sexual violence occurs.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/civil-war-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmde5mzm1)).*
================================================================================
## Dune - Part Two (2024)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-dune-part-two
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-dune-part-two.md
- published: 2024-03-05
- document_id: 1071
> Villeneuve finishes what the first film only set up, turning Herbert's desert prophecy into the rare second part that outgrows its opening. Vast, deliberate and properly cinematic. 9/10.
- **UK release:** March 2024
- **Director:** Denis Villeneuve · **Writers:** Denis Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts
- **Studio / distributor:** Legendary Pictures; Warner Bros.
- **Genre:** Epic science fiction / space opera · **Runtime:** 166 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Timothée Chalamet (*Call Me by Your Name*, *Dune*) as Paul Atreides; Zendaya (*Spider-Man: Homecoming*, *Dune*) as Chani; Rebecca Ferguson (*Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation*) as Lady Jessica; Austin Butler (*Elvis*) as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen; Javier Bardem (*No Country for Old Men*, *Skyfall*) as Stilgar
- **IMDb:** 8.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 92% critics / 95% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
Denis Villeneuve made a choice with the first *Dune* that few directors would have risked: he adapted half a book, stopped on a cliff edge, and trusted that a studio would let him finish. Two and a bit years on, the gamble has paid off, because *Dune: Part Two* is the half everyone was waiting for. The 2021 film was largely table-setting, a sombre tour of houses and politics that ended just as the story started to move. This is where the desert finally opens up, the worms get ridden, and the holy war that the first film kept hinting at stops being a threat and becomes a plan.
## The setup
Paul Atreides has lost his father, his house and his home, and survives in the deep desert of Arrakis as a guest of the Fremen, the people the galaxy has spent centuries underestimating. He learns their ways, earns a place among them, and grows close to Chani, a young fighter who has no patience for outsiders or prophecies. The trouble is that a prophecy is exactly what some of the Fremen want him to be. As Paul is pulled towards the role of a messiah he is not sure he wants, House Harkonnen tightens its grip on the spice, and the Emperor who engineered the fall of the Atreides watches from a safe distance. Paul has to decide how far he will go to take his revenge, and what it will cost everyone if he does.
## The cast
Chalamet carries the heavier load this time, and he is up to it. The wary, grieving boy of the first film hardens into something colder and more certain, and the most unsettling thing in the picture is watching the warmth drain out of him as the role he is being handed starts to fit. Zendaya, given almost nothing to do last time, is the conscience of the film here: Chani is the one person who sees the messiah business for the trap it is, and the romance works precisely because she keeps refusing to be a footnote in someone else's legend. Rebecca Ferguson makes Lady Jessica genuinely frightening, a mother turned zealot whispering the prophecy into being. The two newcomers earn their billing. Austin Butler buries the Elvis charm entirely as Feyd-Rautha, a smooth, reptilian sadist who is the most watchable villain the series has produced. And Javier Bardem brings an unexpected streak of humour as Stilgar, a true believer whose faith reads as both moving and slightly alarming.
## The craft
This is filmmaking on a scale that almost nobody else is attempting. Greig Fraser shoots Arrakis as a place of real heat and weight, and the now-famous black-and-white sequence on the Harkonnen homeworld of Giedi Prime, lit by an alien sun that drains all colour, is the kind of idea most blockbusters would never find room for. Hans Zimmer's score does not so much accompany the film as bear down on it, all groaning bass and processed voices, and in a properly equipped cinema you feel it in your chest. The first worm-riding sequence is the set piece the whole series has been building towards, and Villeneuve stages it for awe rather than noise, letting the sheer size of the thing do the work. At 166 minutes the film is long and unhurried, but it never feels slack; Joe Walker's editing trusts the audience to sit in the silences.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *The Empire Strikes Back*, the rare middle chapter that deepens and darkens everything around it, and *Part Two* belongs in that conversation. It is doing something the first *Dune* could not: it has the emotional payoff that all the earlier world-building was earning. The other touchstone is *Lawrence of Arabia*, which Villeneuve clearly has in his bones, from the desert vistas to the uneasy story of an outsider who becomes a figurehead for a people's war and is half-consumed by it. Against the *Lord of the Rings* films it shares the ambition and the patience, though it is colder and less interested in comfort. What it has that David Lynch's 1984 version never managed is coherence: this is a *Dune* you can follow, and feel, without a glossary.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reviews are close to rapturous, with critics sitting around 92% and audiences a notch higher at 95%, and for once the enthusiasm is earned rather than reflexive. The few reservations are familiar ones: it is solemn, it is long, and it assumes you have done the homework of the first film. Some viewers find Villeneuve's gravity airless and miss the pulp fun a space opera might offer. I take the point and disagree with the conclusion. The seriousness is the texture; this is a story about prophecy and manipulation, and a jokier film would have nothing to say about either.
## Verdict
This is science fiction made by people who believe the genre deserves to be taken as seriously as any other, and who have the craft to back the belief up. It is the rare sequel that makes its predecessor better in hindsight, a film of real scale and real ideas that never mistakes scale for substance. It rewards a rewatch, it works completely as the desert epic it sets out to be, and it is the most purely cinematic experience of the year so far. The world-building, the atmosphere and that crushing wall of sound are exactly the things I most want from the genre. **9/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it on the largest IMAX screen you can reach; the scale and the sound are the point of the exercise.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: a third film, *Dune: Messiah*, is in development with Villeneuve and most of the principal cast set to return, adapting the more troubling second Herbert novel that this film already nods towards in its closing turn. *Part Two* has settled comfortably into its standing as one of the defining blockbusters of the decade and a high-water mark for big-screen science fiction. It is now available on 4K Blu-ray and digital, and streams on the Warner platforms depending on your region; a worthwhile home watch, though it loses something away from a proper cinema sound system.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, bloody images, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** In a scene which includes bloody detail, a villain slashes one woman's neck and stabs another. A man fights several opponents in an arena, using blades to slash and stab them. There are also scenes of battle violence which include stabbings, shoot outs and hand-to-hand combat. Men and women are occasionally shown bloodied in the aftermath of violence.
**Threat and horror:** Moderate threat includes gun and knife threat. There are also intense battle sequences, and scenes in which characters must confront monstrous giant worms.
**Language:** Language includes uses of 'shit', 'piss', 'moron' and 'hell'.
**Sex:** A group of women plot to control a man, who they describe as 'sexually vulnerable'. There is a scene in which it is implied an embracing couple have just had sex. A woman entices a man into her bedroom under false pretences.
**Drugs:** There are occasional references to the hallucinogenic properties of a fictional substance, and scenes in which characters under its influence experience visions and convulse.
**Theme:** People grieve for a man who has been carried back to his land to be laid to rest.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/dune-part-two-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdezmtm2)).*
================================================================================
## Godzilla Minus One (2023)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-godzilla-minus-one
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-godzilla-minus-one.md
- published: 2023-12-19
- document_id: 1086
> Toho sends Godzilla home to ruined post-war Japan, and builds a human drama strong enough to carry the monster. The most affecting entry the series has produced in decades. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** December 2023
- **Director:** Takashi Yamazaki · **Writer:** Takashi Yamazaki
- **Studio / distributor:** Toho Studios; Robot Communications
- **Genre:** Kaiju disaster drama / post-war monster film · **Runtime:** 125 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Ryunosuke Kamiki (*Your Name*, *The Great War of Archimedes*) as Kōichi Shikishima; Minami Hamabe (*Let Me Eat Your Pancreas*) as Noriko Ōishi; Yuki Yamada (*Tokyo Revengers*) as Shirō Mizushima; Hidetaka Yoshioka (*Always: Sunset on Third Street*) as Kenji Noda
- **IMDb:** 7.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 99% critics / 98% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Seventy years after the original *Godzilla* walked out of the rubble of Tokyo as a barely disguised mushroom cloud, Toho has decided to take the creature back to where he started. Where the Hollywood films of the last decade have turned the monster into a wrestling promotion, all city-flattening title bouts and corporate lore, Takashi Yamazaki sends him home to the months just after the war, to a country that has already lost everything and now has to watch the last of it stamped flat. The surprise is not that the monster is frightening. It is how much the film makes you care about the people running from him.
## The setup
Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a kamikaze pilot who could not make himself die. He sets down his aircraft on a remote island engineering base claiming a fault, and on that island he and the mechanics meet a creature the locals call Godzilla, still dinosaur-sized, before the bomb tests at Bikini make him something worse. Shikishima freezes. Men die. He carries it home to a Tokyo of ash and ration queues, where he falls into an unlikely household with Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and an orphaned baby, neither of them his, none of it spoken about. Then the creature returns, taller, irradiated, and walking towards the city, and the man who would not fire his guns has to decide whether he is finally willing to.
## The cast
The film rests on Kamiki, and he carries it. Shikishima is a study in survivor's guilt, hollowed out and flinching, and Kamiki plays the shame without ever tipping into self-pity. It is the most demanding role the series has handed an actor, and he treats the monster as a thing to be feared rather than fought, which is the correct instinct. Hamabe gives Noriko a stubborn warmth that keeps the domestic scenes from going soft, and the two of them build a fragile, unspoken family you genuinely want to see survive. Around them, Hidetaka Yoshioka's weapons engineer supplies the plan and the closest thing the film has to hope, and Yuki Yamada's young deckhand carries the anger of a generation handed a ruined country. These are recognisable people, not disaster-film furniture, and the script gives every one of them a reason to be on the boat at the end.
## The craft
What Yamazaki achieves on the budget is the headline, and it deserves to be. He has built effects houses on Japanese films for twenty years, going back to *Always: Sunset on Third Street*, and *Godzilla Minus One* was made for a fraction of what a single American sequel costs. None of that thrift shows. The monster has real weight and real menace, his atomic breath staged not as a light show but as a small detonation, complete with the cold pause and the falling fallout afterwards. A sequence with Godzilla pursuing a wooden minesweeper across open water owes an honest debt to *Jaws*, and earns it. Naoki Satō's score knows when to deploy Akira Ifukube's original 1954 theme and, more importantly, when to hold it back. Above all the film is composed and patient, willing to spend long stretches in kitchens and harbours so that the destruction, when it lands, costs something.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Shin Godzilla* (2016), Toho's previous reboot, which read the monster as a bureaucratic crisis and spent its energy in committee rooms. *Minus One* goes the other way entirely, towards melodrama and the family table, and is the warmer and more moving film for it. Against the original 1954 *Godzilla* it stands up without embarrassment, restoring the creature as a wound left by the war rather than a franchise mascot. And as a piece of staging it sits closer to a film like *Dunkirk* (2017) than to any recent kaiju picture: small craft, civilian courage, a nation improvising its own rescue with no cavalry coming. That is rare company for a man in a rubber suit's distant descendant to be keeping.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Reception is close to unanimous, which for this series is its own kind of news. Critics are sitting at 99% and audiences at 98%, the strongest numbers the franchise has ever posted, and the praise lands on the same point every time: a monster film that took its human story seriously. I am almost entirely with the room. The only thing keeping my own number a notch below the rapture is a streak of sentiment in the final act that leans harder on coincidence than the careful first hour does, and a couple of speeches that say out loud what the faces had already told you. Small complaints against a film that gets so much right.
## Verdict
This is a monster film that remembers monsters are supposed to mean something. It is tense, beautifully staged, and unexpectedly tender, and it pulls off the trick the Hollywood versions keep fumbling: making you dread the creature because you are frightened for the people, not the skyline. The post-war atmosphere is its own reward, the effects punch far above their cost, and the central performance is the best the series has had. It rewards a second watch, the human scenes deepening once you know where they are heading. A few soft notes near the end stop it short of perfect, but not by much. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK and Ireland cinemas now, on over 400 screens, including IMAX, 4DX and Dolby, in Japanese with English subtitles.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Toho released a stark monochrome cut, *Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color*, which sharpens the link back to the 1954 original and is worth seeking out if you can. The film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, a first for the franchise and astonishing given the budget, and its reputation as the high-water mark of modern Godzilla has only hardened. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on Netflix in many regions.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, violence, brief bloody images*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** A giant monster bites, claws and treads on people, although injury detail is minimal. Sequences of devastation evoke the detonation of atomic bombs, with city-wide destruction.
**Threat and horror:** There are scenes in which a giant monster attacks an airfield, ships and cities. Sequences include buildings being demolished, vehicles being destroyed, and scared people fleeing in panic.
**Language:** There is infrequent mild bad language ('bugger') and milder terms ('damn', 'hell', 'screwed').
**Injury detail:** Following an explosion a man is seen bleeding from a head wound, and in the aftermath of an attack a number of dead bodies are laid out on the ground, some slightly bloodied. A large monster sustains a gory head wound, which quickly heals.
**Suicide and self-harm:** A Japanese pilot who did not complete a 'kamikaze' mission is chastised and mocked by others as being a coward. He becomes intent on taking his own life in the context of a 'suicide mission' to battle a creature, but ultimately learns the value of living.
**Sex:** A woman defensively states that she is not a 'harlot', and some questions are raised about the parentage of a child, who is later revealed to be an orphan.
**Theme:** There are upsetting scenes in which people grieve lost loved ones.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/godzilla-minus-one-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmde3nzuw)).*
================================================================================
## Napoleon (2023)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-napoleon
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-napoleon.md
- published: 2023-12-02
- document_id: 1126
> Ridley Scott takes on the most filmed man in Europe and gives us cannon smoke, a strange marriage, and a hero held at arm's length. Spectacular and oddly cold, it is better than the splat suggests. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** November 2023
- **Director:** Ridley Scott · **Writer:** David Scarpa
- **Studio / distributor:** Apple Original Films; Scott Free Productions; Columbia Pictures
- **Genre:** Historical epic / biographical war drama · **Runtime:** 158 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Joaquin Phoenix (*Gladiator*, *The Master*) as Napoleon Bonaparte; Vanessa Kirby (*The Crown*, *Pieces of a Woman*) as Joséphine; Tahar Rahim (*A Prophet*, *The Mauritanian*) as Paul Barras; Rupert Everett (*My Best Friend's Wedding*, *An Ideal Husband*) as the Duke of Wellington
- **IMDb:** 6.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 58% critics / 58% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Ridley Scott is now eighty five, and he has decided to spend a chunk of Apple's money on the one historical figure who has defeated more film-makers than he has won battles. Napoleon Bonaparte has been played by everyone from Rod Steiger to Marlon Brando, and Stanley Kubrick spent years failing to get his version made at all. Scott's pitch is characteristically blunt: he is not interested in the textbook. He wants the cannon smoke, the cold ambition, and the marriage that the history books tend to treat as a footnote. The result is a film that is enormous on the screen and curiously withholding at the centre, and it has split audiences neatly down the middle.
## The setup
We meet Bonaparte as a watchful young artillery officer in the chaos of the Revolution, present at the guillotining of Marie Antoinette and quietly appalled by the people running the country. The siege of Toulon makes his name, and from there the film follows the familiar arc, consul, emperor, the long run of campaigns, in a series of leaps across two decades. Threaded through all of it is Joséphine, the older widow he becomes obsessed with, and whose hold over him survives every political calculation he makes. Scott structures the whole thing as a tug between the battlefield and the bedroom, a man who can read a map of Europe but cannot read his own wife.
## The cast
Phoenix plays Napoleon as a sulky, socially awkward operator, all sidelong glances and graceless appetite, a man who seizes a continent yet eats his dinner like a resentful child. It is a deliberately unheroic reading, closer to his work in *The Master* than to anything in the *Gladiator* mode, and it is the thing most likely to annoy people who want a great man. I found it the most interesting choice in the film. Vanessa Kirby is the stronger presence, giving Joséphine a knowing, unimpressed coolness that makes the obsession legible. The supporting ranks are thinner. Tahar Rahim's Barras and Rupert Everett's drawling Wellington are sharp in their handful of scenes, but the film moves too fast to give anyone outside the central pair much room.
## The craft
This is where the money shows. Dariusz Wolski shoots the battles in cold, smoke-choked greys, and the set pieces are tremendous: Austerlitz, with the ice cracking under retreating soldiers and the water swallowing men and horses whole, is the most viscerally staged battle Scott has put on screen since the opening of *Gladiator*. The cavalry charges have real weight and real horror, bodies and animals torn apart with a bluntness that earns the certificate. Martin Phipps's score keeps the tone funereal rather than triumphant. Where the craft strains is in the joins. Twenty years compressed into two and a half hours means the film lurches from one decisive moment to the next, and the connective tissue, the politics, the scheming, the slow accretion of power, is largely missing. You feel the longer cut hovering just out of frame.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Gladiator*, and Scott invites it, but the truer cousins are his more recent, chillier histories, *Kingdom of Heaven* and *The Last Duel*, films more interested in the rot inside power than in the heroics. Set it against Sergei Bondarchuk's *Waterloo* and the difference is instructive: that 1970 epic had the patience to let a single battle breathe across a whole film, where Scott sprints through a life. As a study of an awkward, grasping man it is closer to a perverse character piece than to a conventional biopic, and that is the version of it I responded to most.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are split, hovering around the midpoint, and audiences are sitting in exactly the same place, which is rare. The recurring complaints are the historical liberties, Scott firing cannon at the pyramids that never happened, the speed, and Phoenix's unglamorous Napoleon. Historians have been loudest of all, and Scott has been cheerfully rude back to them. My own reaction lands above the consensus but short of love. The film is too cold and too rushed to be a great one, and it never quite decides whether it admires its subject or pities him. But it is never boring, the battles are genuinely thrilling, and the strange central marriage gives it a spine that most historical epics lack.
## Verdict
Napoleon is a flawed, fascinating, slightly frustrating film, the work of a director with nothing left to prove swinging at a giant subject and connecting about two thirds of the time. The compression hurts it, the supporting cast is underused, and the much-discussed director's cut clearly exists for a reason. But the spectacle is real, Phoenix and Kirby give you something stranger and more human than the marketing promised, and Austerlitz alone is worth the ticket. I will happily watch it again, partly for the battles and partly to see whether the colder character study lands harder a second time. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on general release. An extended Apple TV+ cut has been promised to follow.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the streaming home is Apple TV+, where the film landed after its cinema run. Scott's promised director's cut duly arrived, running around four hours and restoring much of the political and personal connective tissue the theatrical version skips; it is the version to seek out if the cinema cut felt like a highlights reel, and it fleshes out Joséphine considerably. The film's standing has settled roughly where the split scores left it, admired for its battles and Phoenix's odd, unheroic turn, argued over for its history.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, injury detail, sex*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are scenes of strong bloody battle violence in which men are blown up by cannons, slashed at the throat, shot and stabbed resulting in large spurts of blood and bloody aftermath detail. A historical figure is shown being decapitated. A man brutally inserts his finger into a gunshot wound causing pain to the injured man. A man slaps his wife around the face.
**Threat and horror:** Scenes of moderate threat include gun threat.
**Language:** Use of infrequent strong language ('f**k') is accompanied by milder terms such as 'slut', 'bastard', 'piss', 'Jesus', 'Christ' and 'God'.
**Sex:** There are strong sex scenes with brief buttock nudity. Sex references are moderate and include characters' alluding to a woman's promiscuity as well as mentions of adultery.
**Suicide and self-harm:** A man attempts suicide resulting in bloody detail to his face and neck.
**Injury detail:** Violent sequences include bloody detail and sight of injuries. After a decapitation, a woman's severed head is held up by the hair. A horse is fatally injured by a cannon leading to its internal organs graphically being exposed. Decaying corpses are seen hanging from trees.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/napoleon-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdeznzm2)).*
================================================================================
## The Creator (2023)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-creator
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-creator.md
- published: 2023-10-06
- document_id: 1182
> Gareth Edwards builds a war between humanity and artificial intelligence that looks like a 200 million dollar epic and reportedly cost a fifth of that. The story is borrowed, the world is not, and the texture is the reason to go. 8/10.
- **UK release:** September 2023
- **Director:** Gareth Edwards · **Writers:** Gareth Edwards, Chris Weitz
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Studios; New Regency; Entertainment One
- **Genre:** Science fiction war drama / AI thriller · **Runtime:** 133 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** John David Washington (*BlacKkKlansman*, *Tenet*) as Joshua; Madeleine Yuna Voyles as Alphie; Gemma Chan (*Crazy Rich Asians*, *Eternals*) as Maya; Ken Watanabe (*The Last Samurai*, *Inception*) as Harun; Allison Janney (*I, Tonya*) as Colonel Howell
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 67% critics / 75% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Gareth Edwards keeps making the same wager and keeps winning it. On *Monsters* he proved a first-time director could conjure a continent-sized catastrophe on a holiday budget; on *Godzilla* and *Rogue One* he showed he could keep a sense of human scale inside a studio machine that usually crushes it. *The Creator* is the boldest version of that wager so far: an original science fiction war film, not a sequel or an adaptation, shot on real locations with consumer-grade cameras and finished to look like it cost four times what it did. In a year of franchise instalments, a standalone idea executed at this size is worth paying attention to before you have seen a frame of it.
## The setup
The premise is a future in which artificial intelligence, blamed for a nuclear detonation over Los Angeles, has been outlawed across the West and embraced across a region the film calls New Asia. Joshua (John David Washington) is a burnt-out former special forces operative pulled back into the war and sent to destroy a new AI weapon rumoured to be able to end it. What he finds is not a bomb but a child, an artificial being called Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), and the rest of the film follows a soldier learning to question the side he is fighting for. If that reads like *Aliens* crossed with the road-movie compassion of a dozen reluctant-guardian stories, you are not far off, and I will come back to why the borrowing matters less than you might expect.
## The cast
Washington carries the film on a particular kind of weariness. He is good at men who have already lost something and are pretending to function, and Joshua's grief gives the chase a centre of gravity it would otherwise lack. The discovery is Voyles, making her debut as Alphie, who has to be uncanny and sympathetic at once and manages both without tipping into preciousness. Gemma Chan brings real warmth to Maya, the thread connecting Joshua to the world he is meant to be destroying, and Ken Watanabe lends Harun the quiet authority he can summon in his sleep. Allison Janney, cast against her usual register as the relentless Colonel Howell, is harder and colder than you expect and all the better for it.
## The craft
The craft is the reason to see it. Edwards and his cinematographers shoot real Thai and Nepalese landscapes and drop towering technology into them in post, and the seams almost never show. The result has a lived-in, sun-faded texture that most clean digital science fiction lacks: rice paddies and tanks, monasteries and gunships, robots with exposed mechanical heads kneeling at prayer. Hans Zimmer's score knows when to fall silent and when to swell, and the film's quieter passages, a child watching a sunset, a farewell on a beach, land harder than the firefights. It is the rare blockbuster where the world feels older and larger than the plot moving through it.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparisons are honourable ones. There is *Blade Runner* in the question of what a manufactured being is owed, *District 9* in the grubby, documentary handling of a science fiction premise, and *Children of Men* in the idea of a hardened man shepherding a fragile new life through a war zone. *Chappie* tried something similar with childlike AI and fumbled the tone; *The Creator* keeps its footing. Against Edwards's own *Rogue One*, this is looser and more personal, less beholden to a pre-existing universe and freer for it. None of these comparisons is a criticism. The film wears its influences openly and earns its place beside them on look and feeling.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are divided, sitting around 67%, with audiences a little warmer at 75%. The recurring complaint is fair: the plot is familiar and the script paints its politics in broad strokes, with thinly drawn supporting characters serving the journey rather than living alongside it. The praise is also fair, and louder, for the world-building and the sheer visual ambition delivered on a modest budget. My own reaction lands closer to the audience than the critics. The story being secondhand bothers me less than it bothers them, because what the film is selling is a place and a mood, and on that count it delivers something genuinely uncommon.
## Verdict
This is squarely in my territory: intelligent science fiction, a world you want to keep looking at, and a thoughtful question about artificial minds running underneath the action. The screenplay is the weak link, the emotional beats are signposted, and a sharper script would have pushed this higher. But the texture, the score and the world-building carry it, and it is the kind of film I will happily put on again just to wander through its landscapes. An original blockbuster this confident deserves to be seen big. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it on the largest screen you can find; the scale is the whole appeal.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Creator* underperformed at the box office relative to its ambitions, which makes the case for original studio science fiction harder to argue, though it found a second life on home formats and a devoted following among people who value world-building over plot. Its visual effects work, achieved for a fraction of the usual blockbuster spend, earned an Academy Award nomination and became a talking point in the industry about how such films are made. It is now available on 4K Blu-ray and digital, and streams on Disney+ depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, injury detail, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** The film contains several intense and prolonged shoot-outs, as well as scenes in which humans are beaten, with occasional blood. People die in explosions, and one scene includes a disturbing verbal reference to atrocities, presented without visual depiction.
**Threat and horror:** There are prolonged scenes of threat. These include scenes in which characters are hunted down, as well as those featuring races against time and facing death. One scene shows a soldier threatening a child's pet dog, causing distress.
**Injury detail:** There are close-up depictions of facial injuries after repeated punching, including blood. Another scene shows a beaten man coughing blood, with aftermath scenes featuring bloodstained clothing on deceased individuals.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f***k'), as well as implied strong language, and milder terms (for example, 'shit', 'dick', 'son of a bitch', 'frig', 'asshole', 'bastard', 'screw', 'God', 'damn', 'hell').
**Sex:** There are comic verbal sex references. A man and his wife share intimate moments in bed.
**Drugs:** A man briefly takes prescription medication for pain relief.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-creator-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdezmzc4)).*
================================================================================
## Oppenheimer (2023)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-oppenheimer
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-oppenheimer.md
- published: 2023-08-02
- document_id: 1132
> Christopher Nolan trades spectacle for a three-hour conversation and a courtroom, and turns the building of the bomb into the best film he has made. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2023
- **Director:** Christopher Nolan · **Writer:** Christopher Nolan
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; Syncopy; Atlas Entertainment
- **Genre:** Biographical drama / political thriller · **Runtime:** 180 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Cillian Murphy (*28 Days Later*, *Inception*) as J. Robert Oppenheimer; Emily Blunt (*Sicario*, *Edge of Tomorrow*) as Kitty Oppenheimer; Robert Downey Jr. (*Zodiac*, *Iron Man*) as Lewis Strauss; Matt Damon (*The Bourne Identity*, *The Martian*) as Leslie Groves
- **IMDb:** 8.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 91% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
For twenty years Christopher Nolan has been the director who reaches for the biggest canvas in the room: spinning corridors, capsizing oil tankers, the curvature of time itself. So there is something almost perverse about *Oppenheimer*, a three-hour film whose largest set pieces are a desert test stand and a wood-panelled hearing room, and whose central drama is a man trying to work out what he has done. It is adapted from Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's *American Prometheus*, and Nolan has clearly read the title closely. This is a film about a man who steals fire and is made to answer for it.
## The setup
J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is a brilliant, restless theoretical physicist who is handed the job of building an atomic weapon before the Nazis can. He assembles a secret town in the New Mexico desert, drives a sprawling scientific army towards a single morning in July 1945, and succeeds. The film then does the more interesting thing: it follows him past the triumph into the long, airless aftermath, where a closed security hearing and a quietly vengeful Washington insider, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), set out to take apart the reputation of the man who won the war. Nolan runs the two timelines against each other, one in colour and subjective, one in stark black and white, so the bomb and the reckoning detonate at the same time.
## The cast
Murphy has spent years on the edges of Nolan's films, and given the centre he is remarkable: gaunt, watchful, the eyes doing the work the dialogue will not. He plays Oppenheimer as a man permanently slightly ahead of the conversation and slightly behind his own conscience, charismatic and cold in the same breath. Emily Blunt has less screen time than she deserves but turns Kitty into the sharpest, least sentimental person in any room, and her late scene under cross-examination is the film's hinge. Matt Damon brings welcome bluntness as General Groves, the soldier babysitting a tent full of geniuses. The surprise is Downey Jr., buried under age make-up and pettiness as Strauss, giving the most disciplined performance of his career and reminding you there was a serious actor before the armour.
## The craft
Nolan and his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot much of this on large-format and IMAX film, including, by some accounts, the first sections of black-and-white IMAX ever exposed, and it shows in the texture of faces and the depth of the desert light. The Trinity test, built without computer-generated imagery, is a genuinely frightening sequence precisely because Nolan withholds the noise and lets the silence stretch. Ludwig Goransson's score is almost continuous, a nervous strung-wire pulse that turns equations and committee meetings into thriller mechanics. Jennifer Lame's editing keeps three hours of talk moving like a chase. The film is dense, occasionally to a fault, and it asks you to keep pace with names, grudges and clearances, but it never coasts.
## How it stacks up
The obvious neighbours are the intelligent prestige dramas about troubled clever men: *A Beautiful Mind*, *The Imitation Game*, *The Social Network*. *Oppenheimer* is colder and more ambitious than any of them, less interested in redemption than in consequence. Its braided-timeline, on-trial structure owes a clear debt to Oliver Stone's *JFK*, and like that film it is really an argument staged as a thriller. Against Nolan's own work it is the natural companion to *Dunkirk*: history rendered as pure tension, with the human cost felt rather than explained. What it lacks is the propulsive replay value of *Inception* or *The Dark Knight*. This is a film you respect on the first viewing and unpack on the second, not one you put on for comfort.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to rapturous, sitting around 93%, praising the performances, the sound, the moral seriousness and the sheer nerve of selling a dialogue-driven epic to a summer audience. Audiences, at roughly 91%, have followed in numbers nobody predicted for a three-hour talk about physics and security clearances. The few dissenting notes are fair: the supporting cast is so deep that good actors flash past unnamed, and the second hearing-room hour demands real concentration. I land where most viewers do, with one reservation. The craft is close to flawless and the intelligence is bracing, but it is admired more than it is loved, and weight is not the same thing as rewatchability.
## Verdict
This is the best film Nolan has made, and the most grown-up. It takes the most consequential event of the twentieth century and refuses to turn it into spectacle, holding instead on a face working out the cost of a decision that cannot be taken back. Murphy is extraordinary, Downey Jr. is the year's most unexpected pleasure, and the Trinity sequence alone justifies the largest screen you can find. I keep it just below the very top of my scale only because its seriousness is also its ceiling: I will think about it for a long time, but I will not reach for it as often as the films it sits beside. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, and worth seeing on the biggest IMAX screen you can reach.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Oppenheimer* went on to sweep the 2024 awards season, taking seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director for Nolan, Best Actor for Cillian Murphy and Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr. Its unlikely double billing with *Barbie* on the same July weekend became the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon that drove both films to enormous box office. It is now available on 4K Blu-ray and digital, and streams on Peacock and Sky / NOW in the UK depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, sex*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** It is briefly implied that an unseen attacker drowns a woman in a bath. There are regular verbal references to deaths by bombing, and the injuries sustained by victims.
**Threat and horror:** A man experiences nightmarish visions of the end of the world: these include burning skin, charred corpses and sickness. Scientists gingerly prepare an atomic bomb for testing.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('f**k'), as well as other terms such as 'shit' and 'Jesus Christ'.
**Sex:** There are brief scenes of strong sex which include breast and buttock nudity.
**Discrimination:** Antisemitism in the context of the 1930s and 40s is an undercurrent of the film. There are undetailed references to the Holocaust. There are references to sexism.
**Suicide and self-harm:** A woman's suicide is depicted in terms which throw doubt on that version of the circumstances of her death.
**Theme:** A woman's alcoholism, and a man's haunting guilt, are themes of the film.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/oppenheimer-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmda2mjm0)).*
================================================================================
## Mission - Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mission-impossible-dead-reckoning-part-one
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mission-impossible-dead-reckoning-part-one.md
- published: 2023-07-14
- document_id: 1120
> The seventh Mission impossible aims a twenty-seven year old franchise at a rogue artificial intelligence, and Cruise still answers the question with his own body. The plot is half a story, the stunts are all there, and it lands as one of the year's most enjoyable blockbusters. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2023
- **Director:** Christopher McQuarrie · **Writers:** Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Skydance; TC Productions
- **Genre:** Espionage action thriller · **Runtime:** 163 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Cruise (*Top Gun*, *Mission: Impossible*) as Ethan Hunt; Hayley Atwell (*Captain America: The First Avenger*, *Christopher Robin*) as Grace; Ving Rhames (*Pulp Fiction*) as Luther Stickell; Simon Pegg (*Shaun of the Dead*, *Star Trek*) as Benji Dunn; Esai Morales (*La Bamba*) as Gabriel
- **IMDb:** 7.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 96% critics / 94% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Twenty-seven years after Brian De Palma first dangled Tom Cruise over a vault floor, the seventh *Mission: Impossible* opens with the franchise at full confidence and Cruise himself at sixty, still doing the thing nobody else in his bracket will do. Christopher McQuarrie, now on his third and fourth films in the series, has turned what used to be a director-of-the-week showcase into a settled house style, and *Dead Reckoning Part One* is the most ambitious application of it yet. The hook this time is timely to the point of cheek: the great enemy is not a rogue state or a syndicate but a self-improving artificial intelligence, and the film commits to it just as the rest of the world is starting to worry about the same thing.
## The setup
A self aware program known only as the Entity has slipped its leash and is rewriting truth across the world's networks. Whoever holds the two halves of a cruciform key can control it, which makes that key the most wanted object on earth and Ethan Hunt the man the governments least want to have it. The IMF send him after it anyway, against his own intelligence services, a desperate pickpocket called Grace who keeps stealing the thing out from under everyone, and an old ghost from his past who now serves the machine. The chase runs from a desert airfield to Abu Dhabi, Rome and Venice and finally onto a train in the Austrian Alps, with the usual proviso that nobody can quite trust what they are looking at when the adversary controls every screen.
## The cast
Cruise plays Hunt as he has for a decade now, less a character than a register of total commitment, and the film knows the appeal is watching a real man do real things at speed. Hayley Atwell is the find. Her Grace is quick, funny and genuinely slippery, an outsider who keeps recalculating her own odds in real time, and she gives Cruise something to play off that the recent films have lacked. Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg settle back into Luther and Benji like a long marriage, Pegg carrying most of the comic relief and a surprising amount of the exposition. Rebecca Ferguson returns as Ilsa Faust, still the most interesting fighter in the room, and Vanessa Kirby's arms dealer is all silk and menace. Esai Morales has the harder job as Gabriel, a villain asked to be both a flesh and blood reminder of Hunt's past and the human face of an inhuman thing, and he lands the menace even when the writing keeps him deliberately vague.
## The craft
McQuarrie and editor Eddie Hamilton build the film as a series of escalating set pieces stitched with just enough plot to keep you oriented, and the craft on the big sequences is exceptional. A car chase through Rome with Cruise and Atwell handcuffed together in a tiny Fiat is the funniest action scene of the year, and the climax, a fight on top of a runaway train followed by Cruise riding a motorcycle off an actual cliff, is the sort of thing the marketing has spent a year promising and the film actually delivers. Fraser Taggart shoots it all with clean, legible geography, so you always know who is where and what they want, which is rarer in modern action than it should be. Lorne Balfe's score leans on Lalo Schifrin's old theme without drowning in it. The one real cost is length and shape: at over two and a half hours this is only the first half of a story, and the film stops rather than ends, holding its resolution back for a part two.
## How it stacks up
Within its own series this sits just below *Fallout*, McQuarrie's previous entry and the high-water mark, and comfortably alongside *Rogue Nation*. It has the same virtues, practical stunts, a clear villain, a strong new woman at Hunt's side, and the same faint weakness, a plot that exists mostly to move everyone to the next location. Against the wider field it plays as the anti-*Bourne*: where Paul Greengrass shredded the geography into adrenaline, McQuarrie wants you to see every join. The Entity itself invites a comparison the film cannot quite earn. As an omniscient digital adversary it is closer to the paranoia of *Person of Interest* or the abstractions of *Tenet* than to anything the series has tried before, and while the idea is the most interesting thing in the script, the film is more comfortable when the threat has a face and a knife than when it is a voice in the wires.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been close to unanimous, with the Tomatometer up around 96% and a string of reviews calling it the best blockbuster of the summer; audiences are a shade cooler at 94% but still firmly on side. The grumbles are real and worth stating: the runtime, the part-one structure that withholds an ending, and an AI plot that gestures at big ideas it has no intention of resolving here. I share the reservations and still came out grinning. The gap between the rapturous notices and the slightly more measured audience score is the gap between a film that is technically and physically astonishing and one whose story is, by design, unfinished.
## Verdict
This is a franchise that long ago worked out what it is for, and *Dead Reckoning Part One* does that job about as well as the form allows. The espionage plotting is serviceable rather than clever and the AI premise is more flavour than substance, but the surveillance paranoia gives it a contemporary edge, Atwell is a genuine addition, and the set pieces are the best practical action going. It loses a little for being half a story told at full length. It is hugely rewatchable, it works completely as the spectacle it sets out to be, and it is the clearest case this summer for getting off the sofa and into a big cinema. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it on the largest IMAX screen you can reach; the cliff jump and the train were built for it.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the cliffhanger paid off in *Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning* (2025), which resolved the Entity story and was sold as the close of Hunt's run, and along the way the film quietly dropped the "Part One" from its own title on home release, becoming simply *Dead Reckoning*. It is now widely available on 4K disc and digital, and streams on Paramount+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** It is implied that one man cuts another's throat. There are knife fights in which people are slashed and stabbed. There are regular fight scenes in which fists, guns and heavy objects are used.
**Threat and horror:** A hero seems as if he means to stab a villain's throat, but he masters his emotions. In a city at night, a woman is lured by a villain to her fate. There are tense sequences in which submariners prepare to meet their doom. A man attempts to defuse a bomb against the clock.
**Language:** A man says, 'What the f...', but doesn't finish the exclamation. There is use of mild bad language (such as 'bastard'), as well as other terms such as 'God', 'damn' and 'hell'.
**Injury detail:** There is occasional bloody detail in the aftermath of violence. There is sight of uninjured and bloodless corpses.
**Nudity:** There is brief sight of dancers performing in skin-tight bodysuits.
**Sexual violence and sexual threat:** It is implied that a man gropes a woman, but he immediately comes to regret his actions. As a ruse, a woman pretends a man has behaved inappropriately.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/mission-impossible-dead-reckoning-part-one-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmda0nze5)).*
================================================================================
## The Covenant (2023)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-covenant
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-covenant.md
- published: 2023-06-29
- document_id: 1181
> Guy Ritchie drops the geezer banter and makes a lean, serious rescue thriller about an Afghan interpreter and the debt a soldier owes him. It is the most disciplined thing he has made in years. 8/10.
- **UK release:** June 2023 (Amazon Prime Video)
- **Director:** Guy Ritchie · **Writers:** Guy Ritchie, Ivan Atkinson, Marn Davies
- **Studio / distributor:** STXfilms; Toff Guy Films; MGM
- **Genre:** War thriller / rescue drama · **Runtime:** 123 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Jake Gyllenhaal (*Nightcrawler*, *Source Code*) as Sergeant John Kinley; Dar Salim (*Game of Thrones*) as Ahmed; Antony Starr (*Banshee*) as Eddie Parker; Alexander Ludwig (*Lone Survivor*) as Declan O'Brady
- **IMDb:** 7.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 83% critics / 98% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Guy Ritchie has spent twenty-five years selling a particular kind of cheek: London villains, snappy edits, voiceover that explains the con while the con is still happening. So the first surprise of *The Covenant* is the title screen telling you his name twice and then the film proceeding to leave the trademark almost entirely at the door. This is Ritchie working in a register he has rarely touched, a sober, plainly shot war thriller with no smirk in it, and it suits him better than his recent comedies suggested it would.
## The setup
Afghanistan, 2018. Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) leads a small army unit hunting Taliban weapons caches, and his survival depends on his interpreter, a local man named Ahmed (Dar Salim) who reads a room, a road and a lie far faster than any of the soldiers around him. When a mission goes wrong and Kinley is left badly wounded deep in hostile country, it is Ahmed who drags him, sometimes literally, across miles of open ground to safety, at enormous cost to himself. The second half turns the obligation around. Back home, recovering and increasingly unable to live with the debt, Kinley learns that the promised visa protecting Ahmed and his family has not materialised, and that the man who saved him is now being hunted. So he goes back. The film is built on that simple moral weight, one life owed and one man determined to repay it, and it does not need to complicate it.
## The cast
Gyllenhaal has always been good at private torment, and Kinley's guilt is the kind of role he can do in his sleep, except he does not sleep through it; he plays the recovery stretch as a man being eaten alive by something he cannot name to anyone around him. The real find is Dar Salim, who could have been a noble plot device and instead gives Ahmed a watchful, unsentimental intelligence that quietly takes over the first hour. The two of them barely trust each other early on, and the slow turn from professional wariness to something owed is the best thing in the film. Antony Starr brings a welcome flintiness as the contractor Kinley leans on, and Alexander Ludwig and the rest of the unit are sketched economically rather than fleshed out, which is the one place the script shows its hurry.
## The craft
Ritchie shoots this straight. Ed Wild's photography favours dust, distance and cold daylight over anything stylised, and the action is staged for clarity rather than flash, which is exactly right for material this earnest. The long retreat across country is genuinely tense, paced as a war of attrition rather than a set piece, and Christopher Benstead's score leans on a low, insistent pulse that keeps the screws turning without telling you how to feel. There is no voiceover, no chapter cards, no needle-drop swagger. Editor James Herbert keeps two hours moving at a clip while still letting the quiet stretches breathe. It is the most controlled filmmaking Ritchie has put his name to in a long while.
## How it stacks up
The obvious neighbours are *Lone Survivor* and *13 Hours*, the modern soldiers-in-a-hard-place pictures, and *The Covenant* sits comfortably alongside them while being less interested in firefight spectacle and more in the bond at the centre. It has none of the moral ambiguity of *The Hurt Locker*; this is a film with a clear hero and a clear wrong to right, and it commits to that without apology. The more interesting comparison is internal. Set this beside *The Gentlemen* or the *Sherlock Holmes* films and you would struggle to believe the same director made them. Ritchie usually wants you to admire how clever he is being. Here he gets out of the way of the story, and the restraint is the achievement.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have come round to it, sitting in the low eighties, with the recurring note being mild surprise that Ritchie can play it this straight and pull it off. Audiences have gone considerably further, up near the high nineties, which tells you the emotional contract lands hard with people who simply want it to pay off. The reservation worth airing is that the film softens a messy, unresolved real-world scandal, the abandonment of Afghan interpreters by the governments they served, into a clean redemption arc. It earns its catharsis honestly on its own terms, but it is a film that resolves what history did not.
## Verdict
This is a lean, sincere, well-made thriller that knows exactly what it is and does not overreach. The two lead performances carry real weight, the craft is disciplined throughout, and the central debt gives it a moral spine that most films in this lane lack. It loses a point for thinning out its supporting cast and for tidying a story that deserved some of its untidiness. But it grips, it moves, and it is the kind of solid adult action-drama I will happily put on again. The biggest compliment I can pay it is that you forget whose film it is and just watch the two men. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Amazon Prime Video in the UK from June 2023, after its US cinema run earlier in the spring.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film has settled into a reputation as Ritchie's most respected dramatic outing, the one critics point to when arguing he has more range than the geezer comedies suggest. It remains on Prime Video in the UK, with a Blu-ray and digital release for anyone who wants it off the platform.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, bloody images, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of strong violence feature characters being shot, with resultant blood spurts. Characters are slashed with knives and their throats are cut, and others are strangled.
**Injury detail:** After a man is shot, a bloody gunshot wound is visible on his face, as a pool of blood spreads behind his body on the ground.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('f**k') as well as milder terms ('ass', 'shit', 'bastard', 'God', 'damn').
**Additional issues:** There is a brief scene in which a man lights an opium pipe he intends to use for pain relief. References are made to characters selling heroin. There are sequences of moderate threat in which characters are in danger from enemy gunfire or explosions. There are moderate sex references, including when a man's nickname is revealed to be 'Jizzy'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/guy-ritchies-the-covenant-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdeznjq5)).*
================================================================================
## Spider-Man - Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-spider-man-across-the-spider-verse
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-spider-man-across-the-spider-verse.md
- published: 2023-06-06
- document_id: 1156
> The Spider-Verse sequel arrives five years on with a bigger world, a sharper emotional core, and animation that keeps inventing new ways to look. It ends on a cliff, but the climb is worth it. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** June 2023
- **Directors:** Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson · **Writers:** Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Dave Callaham
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Sony Pictures Animation
- **Genre:** Animated superhero multiverse adventure · **Runtime:** 140 minutes (BBFC PG)
- **Main cast:** Shameik Moore (*Into the Spider-Verse*, *Dope*) as Miles Morales; Hailee Steinfeld (*True Grit*, *Hawkeye*) as Gwen Stacy; Oscar Isaac (*Ex Machina*, *Dune*) as Miguel O'Hara; Jason Schwartzman (*Rushmore*) as The Spot
- **IMDb:** 9.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 95% critics / 95% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Five years ago *Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse* did something nobody quite expected from a Sony animation about the wrong Spider-Man: it walked off with the Academy Award and rewrote what a superhero cartoon was allowed to look like. The problem with making the best film of its kind is that the sequel has to follow it, and follow-ups to beloved animated originals do not have a happy history. *Across the Spider-Verse* turns up with that weight on its shoulders and a clear answer to it, which is to make almost everything larger: more worlds, more Spider-people, more styles of drawing on screen at once than your eye can comfortably hold.
## The setup
A year or so on from the first film, Miles Morales is still the only Spider-Man in his Brooklyn, juggling school, his parents and the job nobody knows he does. Gwen Stacy drops back into his life and pulls him through to a vast organisation of Spider-people from across the multiverse, run by the severe Miguel O'Hara, who polices the dimensions and the rules that hold them together. There is a villain, the Spot, a man riddled with portals who starts as a joke and stops being one. But the real conflict is about fate: the society insists that certain losses are fixed points every Spider-Man must suffer, and Miles, being Miles, refuses to accept that his story has to break the same way everyone else's does.
## The cast
Shameik Moore has grown into Miles completely. The character is older, funnier and more frustrated here, caught between parents who want the truth and a hero's life that depends on hiding it, and Moore plays the gap between the two with real warmth. Hailee Steinfeld gets the heavier lift this time: Gwen carries her own film for a long opening stretch, estranged from her police-officer father, and Steinfeld gives her a bruised, guarded quality that the first film only hinted at. Oscar Isaac brings exactly the right granite authority to Miguel, a Spider-Man with no patience and a great deal of grief, and Jason Schwartzman makes the Spot genuinely unsettling once the laughs run out. The voice work never feels like celebrities reading lines; it feels cast.
## The craft
This is where the film is close to untouchable. The first *Spider-Verse* invented a comic-book look, halftone dots, printing misregistration, hand-lettered sound; the sequel takes that idea and shatters it into a different visual language for every universe. Gwen's world is wet watercolour that shifts colour with her mood; Miguel's future is hard chrome; the Spot is loose ink on white. Hold a dozen of those styles in one frame, as the film repeatedly does, and it should be a mess. It is instead the most visually inventive thing in cinemas. Daniel Pemberton's score and a strong song line keep the energy high, and the action set pieces, a chase through Mumbattan, the long pursuit through Miguel's headquarters, are staged with real spatial wit. The only craft complaint is length: at 140 minutes it is full, and you feel the film straining to fit everything in.
## How it stacks up
Against *Into the Spider-Verse* it is the bigger, more ambitious film and the slightly less complete one, because it is plainly half a story. As multiverse cinema it embarrasses most of the live-action competition; where *Spider-Man: No Way Home* used its parallel worlds for nostalgia and cameos, this uses them to ask what a Spider-Man story is actually for. The closest cousin in spirit is *Everything Everywhere All at Once*, another film that treats infinite realities as a way into one family's grief rather than an excuse for spectacle. It is the rare sequel that earns the comparison to its own predecessor instead of hiding behind it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting at 95% and praising the animation, the emotional reach and the sheer density of invention, with the only real reservation being the ending, which stops mid-sentence. Audiences are matching them at 95%, and IMDb users have pushed it to the top of the superhero pile. The single complaint that recurs, the cliffhanger, is fair, and it is the main reason my own number lands a little below the chorus. A film that asks you to wait for part two before it resolves anything has not quite earned a top mark on its own.
## Verdict
I value world-building, visual ambition and films that use a wild premise to say something real, and on all three this delivers handsomely. It looks like nothing else, the central idea about fate and refusal has genuine weight, and it is endlessly rewatchable for the craft alone. What holds it just short is the structure: it is the first half of a film, and it leaves you hanging rather than landing. That is a real cost, not a quibble. Even so, this is animation at the height of its powers and the most exciting blockbuster of the year. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it on the biggest screen you can find; the frame is doing too much to waste on a phone.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the second half, *Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse*, was announced to follow but slipped well past its original date, which makes that cliffhanger ending sting more in hindsight than it did opening week. *Across the Spider-Verse* has held its standing as one of the best-reviewed animated films of its decade and a high-water mark for the form. It now streams on Netflix in the UK and is available on 4K Blu-ray and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **PG** by the BBFC for *mild threat, violence, injury detail, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent action sequences which feature characters fighting one another; punches and kicks are thrown as well as occasional chokeholds.
**Threat and horror:** There are frequent scenes of prolonged threat in which Spider-heroes fight each other and villains, as well as rescue people from dangerous situations such as falling debris. A character is tied up against their will and threatened by another; the scene is brief but fairly intense and tonally dark. There is a brief scene of gun threat.
**Language:** Mild terms include use of 'ass', 'crap' and 'bloody', as well as other terms such as 'butt', 'God', 'hell', 'jeez' and 'shot'.
**Sex:** A man covered in dots makes references to his 'holes'. A woman describes her husband as being 'hot'. There are also several references to a teenage boy and girl fancying each other.
**Rude humour:** A boy is caught doing his zip up. There is a very brief shot of a fantastical character patting their bottom.
**Drugs:** A man exclaims 'What does he do? Deal drugs?'.
**Injury detail:** After fighting, characters are shown with cuts and bruises.
**Theme:** There are references to death and bereavement, as well as occasional references to mental health. Neither issue is dwelt upon and both themes are handled sensitively.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/spider-man-across-the-spider-verse-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdewmdc5)).*
================================================================================
## Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-guardians-of-the-galaxy-vol-3
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-guardians-of-the-galaxy-vol-3.md
- published: 2023-05-09
- document_id: 1091
> James Gunn gives his misfit space band a proper send-off, built around the saddest origin story Marvel has told. The jokes still land, the needle drops still work, and underneath it there is real grief. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** May 2023
- **Director:** James Gunn · **Writer:** James Gunn
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero space opera / found-family adventure · **Runtime:** 150 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chris Pratt (*Jurassic World*) as Peter Quill / Star-Lord; Bradley Cooper (*Silver Linings Playbook*, *A Star Is Born*) as the voice of Rocket; Zoe Saldaña (*Avatar*, *Star Trek*) as Gamora; Dave Bautista (*Blade Runner 2049*, *Dune*) as Drax; Chukwudi Iwuji (*Peacemaker*) as the High Evolutionary
- **IMDb:** 7.9 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 81% critics / 96% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
James Gunn has spent nine years and three films turning a deliberately obscure corner of the Marvel catalogue into the warmest thing the studio makes, and *Vol. 3* arrives as the closing chapter, the one he reportedly always knew he was building towards. It is also the one with the most to lose. The first *Guardians* surprised everyone by being funny and felt and set to a mixtape; the second leaned harder on sentiment and got a little pleased with itself. The risk now is a victory lap. What Gunn delivers instead is the bleakest and most affecting of the three, an adventure that keeps the jokes and the soundtrack but hangs the whole film on a grief it has earned the right to carry.
## The setup
The Guardians have set up home on Knowhere, the hollowed-out skull they have turned into a ramshackle base, and they are not coping. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is drinking through the loss of the Gamora he loved, because the Gamora who survived is a version from another timeline with no memory of any of them. When an engineered super-being crashes onto Knowhere and leaves Rocket gravely hurt, the team has to break into the labs of the creature's maker to save him, and that errand cracks open the question the films have always danced around: who built Rocket, and what was done to him to do it.
That backstory is the real engine of the film, told in flashback and parcelled out with care. I will keep the worst of it off the page, but be warned that this is the most upsetting material the franchise has touched, and the film does not flinch from it.
## The cast
The ensemble has always been the draw, and the chemistry is still effortless. Pratt does his most muted work as Quill, the swagger drained out of him, and it suits the character to be the one holding the team together by his fingertips. Dave Bautista's Drax has quietly become the soul of the group, his literal-mindedness now tender rather than only funny, and Karen Gillan's Nebula gets the closest thing to an arc, the reformed hard case learning to lead. Zoe Saldaña has the trickiest job, playing a Gamora who is a stranger to everyone who loves her, and she keeps the prickliness honest rather than reaching for a reconciliation the script has not set up.
Bradley Cooper gives Rocket, again voiced entirely through performance, the heaviest lifting of his three appearances, and the film belongs to him. The real find is Chukwudi Iwuji as the High Evolutionary, a creator-villain consumed by the gap between the perfection he imagines and the creatures he keeps discarding. He plays it as wounded vanity rather than cackling menace, and he is genuinely frightening for it.
## The craft
Gunn shoots this on the new generation of LED-wall virtual sets, and Henry Braham's camera prowls through it with a restlessness the previous films did not have, including a corridor fight staged to look like a single unbroken take that is the best action Marvel has put on screen in years. The palette is louder and stranger than before, all oranges and acid greens, and the body-horror of the High Evolutionary's experiments gives the design team something with real bite. The soundtrack, the series' signature, swaps the seventies AM-radio nostalgia for a broader nineties and contemporary spread, and the needle drops still do the emotional work the dialogue trusts them to. At 150 minutes it is the longest of the three and you feel it in a saggy middle stretch, but the film buys that runtime back in a finale that actually moves.
## How it stacks up
Set beside the first *Guardians*, this is a heavier, less weightless film, and that is the right call for an ending. The obvious companion is Gunn's own *The Suicide Squad*, which shares the gallows humour, the affection for disposable misfits, and the willingness to be properly cruel to its characters; *Vol. 3* is the more emotional of the two. Against the wider run of recent Marvel, where the films have started to feel assembled by committee, this stands out as the work of one person who plainly cares about these characters and is allowed to finish their story on his own terms. As a series closer it sits in the company of *Toy Story 3* more than any superhero film: an ending about letting go that means it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are positive but slightly cooler than for the first film, parking it around 81% and calling it the weakest-reviewed of the three, with the usual grumbles about length and tonal whiplash. Audiences are having none of that reticence, sitting up at 96%, and on this one I am firmly with the crowd. The critical line treats the darkness and the comedy as a clash; in the cinema they read as the same film insisting that you can be daft and grief-stricken at once, which is true to life and rare in the genre.
## Verdict
This is exactly the franchise entry I most enjoy: funny, rewatchable, properly designed, and unafraid to feel something real underneath the spectacle. It is not flawless. The middle drags, the plot is a straightforward rescue, and one or two of the gags are stretched. None of that survives the back half, which lands the emotional payoff three films have been setting up and gives this oddball band the send-off they deserve. I will happily watch it again, which for a 150-minute blockbuster is the test that matters. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in standard, IMAX and 3D.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film closed Gunn's trilogy just as he departed Marvel to run rival DC Studios, which lends the letting-go theme an extra resonance in hindsight. The cast made brief returns elsewhere in the *Avengers* run, but this remains the proper full stop on the Guardians as a unit. It is now on disc and digital and streams on Disney+.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, injury detail, threat, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of violence include laser gun fights, stabbings, slashings, characters being blasted by fantastical powers, and crunchy fistfights. There is occasional sight of blood - primarily from aliens - and a woman largely comprised of robotic parts contorting her broken limbs as she reforms. Another woman's arm is broken during a fight.
**Threat and horror:** There are sustained scenes of threat during action sequences in which ships explode and people avoid falling debris. Sequences also include gun threat, and people being blasted or held by fantastical powers. There are occasional 'jump scares', including from monsters and aliens. Animals are transformed into humanoid creatures, and there are distressing scenes of animals being experimented and operated on, leaving them as robotic-animal hybrids.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f\*\*k') and milder terms including 'asshole', 'ass', 'dick', 'dickhead', 'son of a bitch', 'shit', 'piss', 'douche', 'God', 'hell', 'frickin'', 'freaking', 'screw', 'damn', 'butt' and 'jerk'.
**Injury detail:** Characters sustain various injuries, including sight of blood, burn wounds and a man's disfigured face after he has been mauled. A person is reduced to a charred corpse after being blasted by fantastical energy.
**Sex:** There are moments of innuendo around 'touching' someone, and oblique references to promiscuity.
**Drugs:** Aliens are briefly seen dealing an unnamed drug. Later, a man refers to dealing 'meth' in a clearly condemnatory manner.
**Rude humour:** A man makes a comic reference to the shape of his defecation.
**Alcohol and smoking:** A man appears drunk, and there are references to it being a pattern of behaviour.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/guardians-of-the-galaxy-vol-3-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmda5ode4)).*
================================================================================
## Dungeons & Dragons - Honour Among Thieves (2023)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-dungeons-and-dragons-honour-among-thieves
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-dungeons-and-dragons-honour-among-thieves.md
- published: 2023-04-15
- document_id: 1073
> A tabletop game finally gets a film that understands the joke, the warmth and the loot. Light on its feet, generous with its cast, and far better fun than its pedigree promised. 8/10.
- **UK release:** March 2023
- **Directors:** Jonathan Goldstein · John Francis Daley
- **Writers:** Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Michael Gilio
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; eOne · **Source:** the Dungeons & Dragons game
- **Genre:** Fantasy adventure comedy / heist · **Runtime:** 134 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chris Pine (*Star Trek*, *Hell or High Water*) as Edgin Darvis; Michelle Rodriguez (*The Fast and the Furious*, *Avatar*) as Holga Kilgore; Regé-Jean Page (*Bridgerton*) as Xenk Yendar; Justice Smith (*Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom*, *Detective Pikachu*) as Simon Aumar; Sophia Lillis (*It*) as Doric; Hugh Grant (*Four Weddings and a Funeral*, *Paddington 2*) as Forge Fitzwilliam
- **IMDb:** 7.2 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 91% critics / 92% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The brand is older than most of the people now buying tickets for it, and the previous attempts to film it are a cautionary tale all on their own. The 2000 picture is the sort of thing people bring up only to laugh at, and the two that followed went quietly to television and stayed there. So a new Dungeons & Dragons film arrives carrying a faint air of dread, the worry being that a game built entirely out of a group of friends improvising round a table is the last thing that should be flattened into a single fixed story. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who wrote *Spider-Man: Homecoming* and directed the sharp little comedy *Game Night*, have done the one sensible thing nobody managed before. They have made a film that plays like a good campaign rather than a solemn lore deposit.
## The setup
Edgin (Chris Pine) is a bard turned thief, less a musician than a fast-talking planner, sprung from a prison colony alongside his barbarian partner Holga (Michelle Rodriguez). His old crew has scattered, his daughter is in the keeping of a former associate who has done very well for himself, and a relic that might put right an old loss is locked away behind people far more dangerous than either of them. To get any of it back, Edgin reassembles a band of the not-quite-competent: an anxious sorcerer who cannot trust his own talent, a shapeshifting druid with little patience for human nonsense, and, eventually, a paladin so upright he is almost a punchline. The plan, as plans of this kind must, goes wrong in instructive ways.
It is a heist film wearing a fantasy costume, and the structure does it a favour. Rather than marching through a map, the film keeps setting its characters a problem, watching them improvise a ramshackle solution, and letting the solution collapse into the next problem. That is what a night at the table actually feels like, and the film knows it.
## The cast
Pine is the engine here, and he plays Edgin with a self-deprecating charm that never tips into smugness. He is happy to be the man whose schemes fail, and the willingness to look foolish is what makes him good company for two hours. Rodriguez gives Holga a deadpan physical certainty that works as the straight line to Pine's patter; the two of them carry a worn-in friendship that the script is wise enough to keep platonic. Justice Smith makes the insecure sorcerer Simon genuinely sympathetic rather than merely twitchy, and Sophia Lillis brings a flat, unimpressed cool to Doric that the film could have used more of.
Regé-Jean Page turns up as the noble paladin Xenk and walks off with every scene he is in by playing complete sincerity entirely straight, the joke being that nobody around him can cope with a person this honest. And Hugh Grant, as the smiling rogue Forge, does the late-career cad routine he has refined into an art, a man you would shake hands with knowing full well he had already taken your watch.
## The craft
Goldstein and Daley direct with a light touch and a comic's sense of timing, and the film is at its best when an action sequence and a gag are the same thing. A graveyard interrogation, conducted on corpses with a strict and rapidly expiring limit on questions, is the standout, a set piece built on a rule rather than on spectacle. The creature work is generous and practical-feeling, an enormous reluctant dragon and a shapeshifter's menagerie among them, and the world has a lived-in, slightly shabby texture that suits the tone. Lorne Balfe's score knows when to swell and when to get out of the way. At 134 minutes it sags a little in the middle stretch, and a couple of the digital vistas are more functional than memorable, but the pacing mostly keeps its feet.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Guardians of the Galaxy*: the same bickering misfit crew, the same trick of undercutting its own grand moments before they curdle. It also owes a clear debt to *The Princess Bride*, sharing that film's affection for adventure and its refusal to take itself seriously, though it never quite reaches that level of wit. Against the cheerfully daft *The Mummy* of 1999 it holds up well, trading some of that film's pulpy momentum for warmer characters. What it manages, and what the earlier Dungeons & Dragons films never did, is to translate the actual texture of the game, the improvisation, the failed rolls, the party arguing over a plan, into something a newcomer can enjoy without ever having held a twenty-sided die.
## Critics versus the rest of us
For once critics and audiences are in cheerful agreement. The reviews are running around 91%, audiences a notch higher at 92%, and the praise lands on the same things: the humour, the warmth, the chemistry of the cast, the relief of a fantasy film that is not grinding through mythology with a straight face. The IMDb score sits more modestly at 7.2, which feels about right for a film nobody is calling a masterpiece and almost everybody seems to have enjoyed. There is no real critical war to report, only a pleasant surprise that a Hasbro property turned out to have a soul.
## Verdict
What lifts this above a competent franchise launch is how much fun it is to be in its company, and how plainly it would reward a second visit. It is funny without being exhausting, sincere without being earnest, and built around a crew you would happily follow on another job. The middle drags, the plot is mechanical when you stand back from it, and it is not trying to reinvent the genre. None of that dents the basic pleasure of the thing. It is warm, quick, properly entertaining, and the rare adaptation that honours its source by catching its spirit rather than cataloguing its rules. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX. A digital and disc release will follow in the usual window.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film performed respectably rather than spectacularly at the box office, enough to leave a sequel in limbo for a while rather than greenlit on the spot. It has since settled into a reputation as comfortably the best Dungeons & Dragons film and one of the better game-to-screen adaptations full stop, the sort of title people recommend with mild surprise that it is as good as it is. It is now on digital and 4K disc and streams on Paramount+ depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, horror, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes include battles involving bladed weapons, projectiles, magical powers, and hand-to-hand combat. In a battle scene a man is cut in half, but the moment is brief and undetailed.
**Threat and horror:** There are sequences of threat in which people are held captive, threatened with knives, or pursued by creatures - including a dragon. There are also moments of horror involving magical beings performing spells, jump scares involving demonic entities, and an extended comic sequence in which corpses - some of which display gruesome injuries - are briefly reanimated.
**Language:** There is use of moderate bad language ('prick') and milder terms including 'ass', 'shit', 'son of a bitch', 'bastard', 'bloody', 'bollocks', 'God', 'damn' and 'hell'.
**Rude humour:** There is occasional rude humour.
**Theme:** Characters grieve lost loved ones.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/dungeons-dragons-honour-among-thieves-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmda4njy0)).*
================================================================================
## John Wick - Chapter 4 (2023)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-john-wick-chapter-4
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-john-wick-chapter-4.md
- published: 2023-04-11
- document_id: 1103
> Four films in, the simplest revenge story in modern action has grown into a globe-trotting assassin opera, and Chad Stahelski stages its biggest set pieces yet without losing the thread. The longest entry is also the best. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** March 2023
- **Director:** Chad Stahelski · **Writers:** Shay Hatten; Michael Finch
- **Studio / distributor:** Lionsgate; Thunder Road Pictures; 87Eleven
- **Genre:** Neo-noir action epic · **Runtime:** 169 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Keanu Reeves (*The Matrix*, *Speed*) as John Wick; Donnie Yen (*Ip Man*, *Rogue One*) as Caine; Bill Skarsgård (*It*) as the Marquis de Gramont; Hiroyuki Sanada (*The Last Samurai*) as Shimazu Koji; Rina Sawayama as Akira
- **IMDb:** 7.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 94% critics / 93% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Nine years ago a stuntman turned director made a lean little revenge film about a hitman, a stolen car and a dead dog, and nobody expected it to become anything. Three sequels later, the John Wick series has quietly turned into the most coherent action world in modern cinema, a place with its own currency, its own etiquette, its own hotel chain for killers. Chad Stahelski has spent each film widening the frame, and *Chapter 4* is the widest yet: longer, costlier, more operatic, and on the evidence of nearly three hours, the film where the formula stops merely escalating and arrives somewhere.
## The setup
John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still a marked man, still hunted by the High Table that runs the underworld he keeps failing to escape. This time he goes on the offensive, chasing the one thing the series has always dangled in front of him and snatched away: a clean exit. To get it he has to work through the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), a preening aristocrat the Table has handed limitless resources, which means limitless men with guns. The road runs through Osaka, Berlin and finally Paris, where the whole thing builds towards a duel staged with the gravity of a western. It is, as ever, a thin story, and as ever that is no real complaint. The plot is a frame on which to hang movement.
## The cast
Reeves has settled fully into Wick as a man of perhaps forty words across the film, grief and exhaustion doing all the talking the script does not. It is one of the great cases of an actor and a role meeting at the right moment, and he carries the weight without ever overplaying it. The standout, though, is Donnie Yen as Caine, a blind assassin bound to the Table and pointed at his old friend. Yen brings wit and real pathos to a part that could have been a gimmick, and at fifty-nine he moves like the genre legend he is. Bill Skarsgård makes the Marquis genuinely hateful, a villain who never throws a punch and is the more loathsome for it, while Hiroyuki Sanada lends the Osaka chapters the quiet authority he brings to everything. Rina Sawayama, in her first film, holds her own in the company of that line-up.
## The craft
This is where the series has always lived, and *Chapter 4* is its showcase. Dan Laustsen shoots Paris and Berlin in saturated neon and hard backlight, every frame composed to be looked at, and Stahelski stages the action with a clarity that shames most of his rivals: wide shots, long takes, geography you can actually follow. Two sequences stand out. An overhead tracking shot through a burning Paris apartment, the camera looking straight down as Wick clears room after room, is the kind of thing people will be quoting for years. And the climb up the steps of Sacré-Coeur, with the finish line in sight and an army between, turns physical exhaustion into suspense. The Tyler Bates and Joel J Richard score drives it without crowding it. At 169 minutes the film should sag; it does not, because Stahelski keeps changing the texture, from Osaka sword work to a Berlin nightclub to a duel at dawn.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is back along the franchise, to *Parabellum*, where the world-building started to threaten the momentum. *Chapter 4* fixes that by making the lore serve the fights rather than the other way round. Beyond the series, the touchstones are clear: the bone-crunching choreography of *The Raid 2*, the escalating spectacle of *Mission: Impossible - Fallout*, and, in its final act, the unhurried ritual of a samurai western, all coiled stillness before the draw. Few action films aim this high and fewer land it. Where the *Mission: Impossible* films chase plausibility, Stahelski chases pure design, and on his own terms he is matchless.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is the warmest the series has had. Critics are at 94%, audiences right behind at 93%, and the line being repeated is that this is one of the best action films of the modern era. For once the hyperbole is close to fair. The usual reservations are about the runtime and the thinness of the story, and both are real if you came for plot. I did not, and I suspect almost nobody does. The agreement between critics and audiences here is striking and deserved.
## Verdict
This is precisely the kind of film I keep coming back to: a fully built world, a strong visual signature, choreography staged with respect for the viewer's eye, and a soundtrack that earns the rewatch. The story remains a clothesline and the length will test some viewers, which is the only reason my number sits a touch below the critical consensus rather than level with it. But as spectacle, as world-building, and as the rare blockbuster that trusts you to keep up, it is the high point of one of the most satisfying action runs in years. I will watch it again, more than once. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the biggest screen you can find; the Paris sequences in particular are built for it.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the franchise has carried on without slowing, with the spin-off *Ballerina* and a fifth Wick film moving ahead, and Donnie Yen's Caine earning his own planned spin-off off the back of the response here. *Chapter 4* has settled into its reputation as the peak of the series and a reference point that later action films keep being measured against. It is now widely available on 4K disc and digital, and streams on Lionsgate's platforms depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of violence include prolonged shoot-outs, which often incorporate the use of hand-to-hand combat, bladed weapons, improvised weapons, and people being hit by vehicles. Scenes include occasional blood spurts, primarily from gunshots to the head. A man is stabbed through the hand and frees himself by pulling his extremity free rather than removing the blade.
**Threat and horror:** Scenes of threat include people being held at gun or knife point, and a man being choked by a device which places a noose around his neck and lifts him.
**Language:** Language is strong ('motherf**ker', 'f**k'), with occasional milder terms ('prick', 'asshole', 'ass', 'bastard', 'shit').
**Injury detail:** People are occasionally seen clutching wounds or with blood-stained clothes following scenes of violence. In one sequence, two people brand themselves as part of a ritual.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/john-wick-chapter-4-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmda4mdc3)).*
================================================================================
## 65 (2023)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-65
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-65.md
- published: 2023-03-20
- document_id: 1027
> Adam Driver, a crashed spaceship and a planet full of dinosaurs, from the men who wrote A Quiet Place. The premise sells the ticket and the execution never quite cashes the cheque, but it moves and it lands its scares. 7/10.
- **UK release:** March 2023
- **Directors:** Scott Beck · Bryan Woods · **Writers:** Scott Beck · Bryan Woods
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Raimi Productions
- **Genre:** Science fiction survival thriller / creature feature · **Runtime:** 93 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Adam Driver (*Marriage Story*, *Star Wars: The Force Awakens*) as Mills; Ariana Greenblatt (*Avengers: Infinity War*) as Koa; Chloe Coleman (*My Spy*) as Nevine; Nika King as Alya
- **IMDb:** 5.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 35% critics / 64% audience · **My rating:** 7 / 10
There is a particular kind of high concept that sells itself in a single sentence, and "Adam Driver fights dinosaurs with a laser rifle" is one of the purest examples to come along in years. It is a B-movie pitch in the best sense, the sort of thing that would have been a paperback with a lurid cover, and the surprise is who is delivering it: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the writing team behind *A Quiet Place*, here directing for themselves. The question hanging over *65* is whether the men who built one of the most disciplined creature thrillers of recent years can do it again at feature length on their own terms, or whether the one-line hook is the only idea in the room.
## The setup
Mills (Adam Driver) is a pilot on a long-haul space mission, flying a load of passengers in cryosleep to earn money for his sick daughter back home. A field of debris tears his ship apart and drops him onto an unfamiliar world, where he discovers the only other survivor of the wreck is a young girl, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), who does not speak his language. The planet, it turns out, is Earth, sixty-five million years before either of them was born, which makes the local wildlife a problem and the approaching asteroid a deadline. The two of them have to cross hostile terrain to reach the half of the ship that might still get them home.
That is the whole machine, and the film is honest about it. There is no twist economy here, no second mystery layered under the first. It is a walk from A to B with teeth in the undergrowth.
## The cast
Driver is the reason this works as well as it does. He commits to it completely, playing Mills as a tired, grieving man rather than an action hero, and he sells the silence: long stretches of the film are one actor reacting to things that were not on set, and he carries them on physical conviction alone. It is a more interesting performance than the material strictly requires. Greenblatt has the harder job, acting across a language barrier so that most of her work is expression and trust, and she holds her own against him, the surrogate-daughter dynamic doing the emotional lifting the plot leaves bare. There is barely anyone else in the film, which is the point of the design, and the two-hander focus is one of its smarter choices.
## The craft
Beck and Woods know how to stage a scare, and that training shows. The set pieces are built with patience: a sound, a stillness, a thing moving at the edge of the frame, then the release. The creatures are kept mostly in shadow, rain and half-light, which flatters the effects and keeps the menace abstract rather than rubbery. Salvatore Totino's photography gives the prehistoric world a grim, overcast weight, all mud and mist rather than the bright wonder of a *Jurassic* film, and the score, with Danny Elfman among the credited hands, leans on tension over melody. At ninety-three minutes the thing is lean to a fault. It never outstays its welcome, but it also never pauses long enough to let the world or the people breathe.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Jurassic Park*, and *65* loses that comparison on awe every time; Spielberg made you want to live in his theme park, and nobody is booking a holiday here. The film it actually resembles is *Pitch Black*, the lean survival horror of stranded humans crossing a deadly landscape between safe points, and it shares that film's virtue of knowing exactly what it is. It also rhymes uncomfortably with *After Earth*, the other recent "father figure, child, hostile prehistoric-feeling planet, get to the second ship" picture, and *65* is the better of the two by some distance, mostly because Driver is a more grounded screen presence and the directors understand pace. Set against Beck and Woods' own *A Quiet Place*, this is the lesser film: that one had a family, a world and rules you came to understand, where this has a corridor and a clock.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been rough on it, parked around the mid-thirties, and the complaint is consistent: a thin script that does too little with a premise that promised so much. That is a fair charge. The film never finds a second gear of ideas, and a concept this fun arguably deserved more swagger and less gloom. Audiences are notably warmer, sitting near two-thirds, and I understand why. If you turn up wanting Adam Driver versus dinosaurs and a tight ninety minutes of jump and chase, the film delivers precisely that and does not waste your evening. The gap between the two scores is the gap between reviewing the film it could have been and watching the film it is.
## Verdict
I land closer to the audience than the critics, because I judge a B-movie on whether it does its job, and this one does. It is well shot, genuinely tense in places, anchored by a better performance than it needed, and short enough to never drag. It is also forgettable: there is no world to return to, no character beyond the premise, and little here you will be turning over the next morning. That caps the rewatch value at "fine on a wet afternoon". But it is competent, atmospheric, unpretentious genre cinema that knows its own limits, and I had a perfectly good time. **7/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. A disc and digital release will follow in the usual window after the theatrical run.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *65* did modest business theatrically and has settled into exactly the reputation it earned at release, a clean B-movie carried by Adam Driver and remembered mostly for its one-line pitch. Its real life has been on streaming, where it found a far larger and warmer audience than the cinema run suggested, becoming one of those titles people stumble onto, enjoy and recommend. It now streams on the major platforms depending on region and is widely available on digital and disc.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, injury detail, fantasy violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are sequences of moderate fantasy violence in which characters fire automatic weapons at attacking monsters. When creatures are hit with blasts from a fantastical gun, the impact causes small blood spurts to erupt.
**Threat and horror:** Characters are frequently in danger from attacking creatures, who chase them and threaten their lives. There are a number of jump scare moments, though scenes of threat are interspersed throughout the film and broken up by gentler and lighter sequences.
**Language:** There is use of mild and very mild bad language ('shit', 'damn').
**Injury detail:** Bloody injury occurs when a man removes a sharp piece of metal from his body. After a creature is badly burned, there is sight of its gory and burned corpse. There is also brief sight of dead bodies lying on the ground.
**Suicide and self-harm:** A character briefly contemplates taking his own life.
**Theme:** There are scenes of mild emotional upset in which characters grieve for lost loved ones. There are undetailed references to illness.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/65-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdewmdgy)).*
================================================================================
## Avatar - The Way of Water (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-avatar-the-way-of-water
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-avatar-the-way-of-water.md
- published: 2023-01-02
- document_id: 1040
> Thirteen years after Pandora first opened, James Cameron takes the family underwater. The story is familiar and the runtime is enormous, but the immersion is once again the thing you come out talking about. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** December 2022
- **Director:** James Cameron · **Writers:** James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Studios; Lightstorm Entertainment
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / ecological epic · **Runtime:** 192 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Sam Worthington (*Terminator Salvation*, *Avatar*) as Jake Sully; Zoe Saldaña (*Star Trek*, *Guardians of the Galaxy*) as Neytiri; Sigourney Weaver (*Alien*, *Aliens*) as Kiri; Stephen Lang (*Tombstone*, *Avatar*) as Colonel Quaritch; Kate Winslet (*Titanic*, *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind*) as Ronal
- **IMDb:** 7.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 76% critics / 92% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Thirteen years is a long time to keep a planet in a drawer. When *Avatar* opened in 2009 it made an absurd amount of money, settled the argument about 3D for a generation, and then more or less vanished from the conversation, the blockbuster everyone had seen and nobody seemed to quote. James Cameron took that as licence to disappear into the workshop again, and the studio took it as a reason to greenlight a sequel nobody was sure the world had been waiting for. *The Way of Water* arrives carrying that doubt, plus a runtime north of three hours, and the same open secret the first film carried: the story is not the reason to buy a ticket.
## The setup
Some years on from the first film, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have built a family among the forest Na'vi, and that quiet is broken when the sky people return and Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) comes back wearing a new, Na'vi-shaped body and a very old grudge. To keep his children out of the firing line, Jake moves the family away from the forest and out to the reef clans, the Metkayina, whose entire way of living is built around the water. What follows is a long acclimatisation: a forest family learning to free-dive, to ride sea creatures, and to be tolerated by people who do not much want them, while the threat from above closes in by sea rather than by air. If that reads as the first film's shape transplanted to the coast, it is, and I will come back to whether that matters.
## The cast
Worthington has grown comfortably into Jake as a father rather than a convert, more weary patriarch than wide-eyed recruit, and the film leans on Saldaña's Neytiri for its fiercest register, a mother whose protectiveness curdles into something frightening when her children are at risk. The interesting work, though, has shifted to the young cast and to Sigourney Weaver, who returns in an entirely new part as the teenage Kiri, a performance-capture role that asks a veteran to play a curious adolescent and somehow does not collapse into novelty. Stephen Lang's Quaritch is the film's neatest trick, a villain killed in the first film brought back with his memories intact and his certainties unshaken, which lets Lang play the same unrepentant company man with an added flicker of confusion about what he now is. Kate Winslet, reunited with her *Titanic* director, is almost unrecognisable as the reef leader Ronal, all watchful authority; it is a smaller part than the billing suggests, but she gives it weight.
## The craft
This is where the thirteen years went. The underwater photography is the most convincing digital water yet committed to a screen, and Cameron, a genuine deep-sea obsessive off the clock, films it with the patience of someone who would happily cut the plot for another ten minutes of reef. The high frame rate, deployed selectively, gives the action a startling clarity and gives the slower passages an eerie, hyper-real calm. Russell Carpenter's cinematography makes the Metkayina world legible in a way that a lesser film would have drowned in murk and bioluminescence. Simon Franglen's score, picking up where the late James Horner left off, does the emotional carrying the dialogue cannot always manage. The famous problem is the length: 192 minutes is a serious sit, and the middle act, all swimming lessons and family friction, tests the patience even of a viewer who came for exactly this. And yet the back third, when the threat finally arrives by water, is sustained, legible, genuinely tense action of a kind few directors still bother to stage at this scale.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is the first *Avatar*, and *The Way of Water* is the rare sequel that repeats the formula without feeling cynical about it, because the formula was always the spectacle and the spectacle has genuinely advanced. The better comparison is to Cameron's own *The Abyss*, the film where he first went underwater and first married hard engineering to a streak of mysticism about the deep; this is that impulse given a budget without limit. There is some *Titanic* in the disaster staging of the finale too, a ship going down with people trapped inside it, shot by the one director who has done it for real. Set beside the year's other big science fiction outing, *Dune*, it is the less cerebral and more openly emotional of the two, less interested in politics than in the simple overwhelming fact of a world.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split here is telling. Critics are sitting around 76%, respectful rather than rapturous, and the recurring note is the familiar one: dazzling to look at, slight on the page, and far too long. Audiences are a good deal warmer at 92%, which matches the queues. The gap is the same gap the first film opened, and the same answer applies. Nobody walks out of *The Way of Water* talking about the screenplay. They talk about the reef, the tulkun, the underwater light, the last hour. The script is the least surprising thing in it, and that is a real limitation, not one to wave away. But the film is selling immersion, and on immersion it delivers more completely than almost anything else in cinemas.
## Verdict
My number lands a notch below the first film, and the half-point I have docked is almost entirely the runtime. *Avatar* earned a 9 from me on the sheer shock of the new; the shock is gone, and three hours is a lot to ask of a story you can see coming. What it keeps is everything I value most in this kind of film: world-building of obsessive depth, atmosphere you can practically breathe, and action staged with real clarity. It is not quite as rewatchable as the first, if only because the length makes it an event rather than a casual revisit. But it is a tremendous thing to sit inside, and on the biggest, brightest screen you can find it is the easiest recommendation of the season. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in 3D and at the highest frame rate your nearest screen offers; the format is doing real work here.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Way of Water* went on to become one of the highest-grossing films ever made, comfortably vindicating the gamble on a long-delayed sequel, and Cameron has confirmed the saga will run to five films. It is now available on disc and digital and streams on Disney+ in most regions, though the underwater work and high frame rate lose a good deal away from a large screen. The next instalment, *Avatar: Fire and Ash*, continues the story.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, injury detail, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are extended battle scenes in which combatants use guns, knives, bows and arrows, spears and other weapons to shoot, slash and stab one another. However, bloody detail during fights is minimal. People are attacked by large fantastical creatures.
**Threat and horror:** There are extended scenes of threat, in which people are held at knife or gun point, evade gunfire and explosions, are almost drowned in a sinking vessel, and are pursued by large monsters. An extended hunting scene sees a large animal killed.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f***k'), middle finger gestures, and milder terms including 'bitch', 'shit', 'crap', 'son of a bitch', 'arsehole', 'ass', 'bastard', 'bloody', 'bugger', 'damn', 'butt', 'hell' and 'Jesus'.
**Injury detail:** There are occasional bloody images as wounds are inspected, and a man's arm is brief severed as a boat is destroyed.
**Sex:** There are occasional sex references, including a reference to a person being 'knocked up' and a young woman calling a man a 'perv'.
**Rude humour:** A child calls another 'penis face' as they bicker.
**Suicide and self-harm:** A girl hyperbolically says she would rather take her own life than have a particular person as a father.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/avatar-the-way-of-water-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmda4otix)).*
================================================================================
## Glass Onion - A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-glass-onion-a-knives-out-mystery
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-glass-onion-a-knives-out-mystery.md
- published: 2022-12-04
- document_id: 1085
> Rian Johnson brings Benoit Blanc back for a sun-drenched whodunnit aimed squarely at the tech-billionaire class. Lighter and looser than its predecessor, sharper than its plot pretends to be. 8/10.
- **UK release:** November 2022
- **Director:** Rian Johnson · **Writer:** Rian Johnson
- **Studio / distributor:** T-Street; Netflix
- **Genre:** Mystery comedy / whodunnit satire · **Runtime:** 139 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Daniel Craig (*Knives Out*, *Casino Royale*) as Benoit Blanc; Janelle Monáe (*Moonlight*, *Hidden Figures*) as Andi and Helen Brand; Edward Norton (*Fight Club*, *Birdman*) as Miles Bron; Kate Hudson (*Almost Famous*) as Birdie Jay; Dave Bautista (*Guardians of the Galaxy*, *Dune*) as Duke Cody
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 92% critics / 92% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Three years ago *Knives Out* did something the genre had half forgotten was possible: it made the drawing-room murder mystery feel current again, sold tickets on the strength of an Agatha Christie structure, and turned Daniel Craig's syrupy Southern sleuth into a small franchise. Rian Johnson has now signed an enormous Netflix deal off the back of it, and the follow-up arrives with a different problem from most sequels. The original was a closed, chilly New England house full of family resentments. This one throws the doors open, ships everyone to a Greek island, and trades the cosy claustrophobia for sunshine, money and a target list. It is a riskier shape, and for the most part Johnson gets away with it.
## The setup
A clutch of rich, self-satisfied friends, the kind of people who call themselves disruptors without irony, receive an elaborate puzzle box inviting them to the private island of tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton). The weekend is meant to be a staged murder-mystery game for Bron's amusement. Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) turns up uninvited, the game curdles into a real death, and Blanc finds himself unpicking a circle of hangers-on who all owe their fortunes, careers and reputations to the man at the centre. Everyone has a motive, nobody is quite as clever as they think, and the cleverest thing in the room may be the question of who actually wanted to come. To say much more is to spoil a film that runs on its reversals, so I will leave the box closed.
## The cast
Craig is plainly enjoying himself, and the loosened setting gives Blanc more room to be ridiculous without tipping into pure cartoon. The performance that anchors the film, though, is Janelle Monáe's, in a dual role that asks for two distinct registers and gets them; she holds the emotional centre while everyone around her plays for laughs. Norton is well cast as Bron, a man who has mistaken wealth for genius and surrounds himself with people paid to agree, and he resists the easy temptation to make him merely a fool. Kate Hudson is very funny as a fading celebrity with no filter and a talent for saying the unsayable, and Dave Bautista, who has quietly become one of the more reliable comic presences in big films, lends his influencer gun-bro exactly the right blend of menace and stupidity. The ensemble is the engine here, and Johnson keeps it firing.
## The craft
Steve Yedlin's photography makes the island glossy and bright, a deliberate inversion of the original's wood-panelled gloom, and Nathan Johnson's score keeps the whole thing skipping along. The screenplay is the real craft on show. Johnson plants his clues in plain sight, lets the audience feel clever for half a beat, then shows you how much you missed, and the structural trick at the film's midpoint reframes everything that came before it. It is the sort of construction that rewards a second viewing, when the early scenes read completely differently. If there is a weakness it is that the satire occasionally swings at targets so broad they barely move, and the topical jokes about influencers and pandemic-era excess may date faster than the mechanics of the mystery. But the plotting is precise, the pacing rarely sags across its 139 minutes, and the film knows exactly how silly it is allowed to be.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Knives Out*, and on pure construction the first film is the tighter machine: a single house, a single family, a clockwork plot with no slack in it. *Glass Onion* is baggier and more pleased with itself, but it buys something with that looseness, a bigger, brasher comedy of manners that the smaller film could not have held. The deeper lineage runs back to *The Last of Sheila*, the 1973 puzzle film about a rich man inviting friends to a holiday game that turns lethal, which Johnson has clearly studied and which shares the same delight in performance and misdirection. Set against the recent run of eat-the-rich satires, this is warmer and more playful than most; it wants to skewer its billionaire rather than merely despise him, and it lets the joke land without forgetting to keep the mystery honest.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception has been strong and unusually aligned, with critics and audiences sitting together around the low nineties. The praise lands on the wit, the ensemble and the timeliness of the satire; the main reservation, where there is one, is that the open holiday setting lacks the elegant confinement of the original, and that the targets are sometimes too easy. I think that is fair without being damning. The first film is the better-engineered object. This one is the more purely entertaining night out, and it is the one whose central twist I most want to watch a second time to catch what I missed.
## Verdict
This sits comfortably for me because it does the two things I most want from this kind of film: it plays fair with its puzzle and it is genuinely funny while doing it. The satire is broad and will age unevenly, the island never quite generates the dread of the old dark house, and Blanc is in danger of becoming a turn rather than a character. None of that stops it being a smart, generous, rewatchable mystery with an ensemble clearly having the time of their lives. It is the rare sequel that justifies going bigger. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In selected UK cinemas now for a one-week run, then streaming on Netflix from 23 December.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Johnson's deal with Netflix has since produced a third Blanc mystery, confirming this as an ongoing series rather than a one-off follow-up. The brief, contested cinema window here, the first time a Netflix film played all the major UK chains, became a recurring point of friction between the platform and exhibitors. The film now lives permanently on Netflix.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *infrequent strong language, moderate sex references, violence, drug misuse*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** A character is shot in undetailed fashion, with subsequent sight of bloody images. A character chokes and collapses onto a glass table after consuming a toxic substance.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k'), as well as milder terms such as 'bitch', 'shit', 'ballsy', 'ass', 'asshole', 'tits', 'son of a bitch', 'freaking', 'God', 'damn' and 'hell'. There are also rude middle finger gestures.
**Sex:** Moderate sex references include comments about 'boner pills' and 'consensual cuckolding', as well as brief sight of a sex toy. A woman says, 'My boobs are fun'. A woman in a bikini straddles a man whose hands reach out to her breasts, but do not touch them.
**Drugs:** There is infrequent sight of joint smoking, a stash of pre-rolled joints and a cannabis plant in a man's room. There is a reference to an ayahuasca retreat. Drug misuse is not endorsed by the work as a whole.
**Additional issues:** There is mild threat. There are images of dead bodies, but without strong detail. There are references to a suicide. An unsympathetic character makes an antisemitic comment on social media, but their phone is confiscated as a consequence. The work does not endorse discrimination.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/glass-onion-a-knives-out-mystery-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmda4mzuw)).*
================================================================================
## Black Panther - Wakanda Forever (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-black-panther-wakanda-forever
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-black-panther-wakanda-forever.md
- published: 2022-11-29
- document_id: 1046
> Ryan Coogler turns a film he never planned to make into a study of grief with a kingdom underneath it. Heavy where the first was light, but the world-building still holds. 8/10.
- **UK release:** November 2022
- **Director:** Ryan Coogler · **Writers:** Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios
- **Genre:** Superhero drama / Afrofuturist adventure · **Runtime:** 161 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Letitia Wright (*Black Panther*, *Ready Player One*) as Shuri; Angela Bassett (*What's Love Got to Do with It*, *Strange Days*) as Ramonda; Tenoch Huerta Mejía (*Narcos: Mexico*) as Namor; Lupita Nyong'o (*12 Years a Slave*, *Us*) as Nakia; Danai Gurira (*The Walking Dead*) as Okoye
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 84% critics / 94% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
No Marvel sequel has ever been asked to do what this one is. *Black Panther* in 2018 was the rare comic-book film that broke out of its own genre, a billion-dollar cultural moment built around Chadwick Boseman's quiet authority as T'Challa. Boseman's death in 2020, kept private until the end, left Ryan Coogler with a film he could no longer make and a decision no screenwriter is trained for: whether to recast, to digitally resurrect, or to write the loss into the story itself. He chose the hardest of the three, and *Wakanda Forever* carries the weight of that choice in every frame.
## The setup
T'Challa is gone. The opening minutes dispatch the king off-screen to illness, and Wakanda is left grieving in public while the world's powers circle, convinced that a nation sitting on the only known supply of vibranium must be vulnerable now its protector has fallen. Into that vacuum comes a second hidden civilisation, the undersea kingdom of Talokan, ruled by the winged, ankle-feathered Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), who has his own vibranium and his own long memory of what surface colonisers do to peoples they discover. He offers Wakanda an alliance against a shared enemy, on terms that amount to a threat. Caught in the middle are Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and her surviving child, the scientist Shuri (Letitia Wright), who would rather build than rule and is about to be handed both a war and a throne.
## The cast
The film leans on its women, and they hold it up. Angela Bassett gives Ramonda a fury under the grace that the rest of the film orbits around; her address to a smug Western delegation is the single best-acted scene in any Marvel picture to date, and it is not close. Letitia Wright has the harder job, carrying a lead role that was written for someone else's absence. Shuri was comic relief and gadget-maker in the first film; here Wright has to turn that brightness inward into anger and mourning, and she manages the shift even when the script asks her to do it too quickly. Tenoch Huerta Mejía's Namor is the best Marvel antagonist since Killmonger, a ruler whose grievance is entirely legible and whose cruelty is the considered kind. Lupita Nyong'o and Danai Gurira return to give Nakia and Okoye their due, and Nyong'o in particular reminds you the franchise has quietly built up a deep bench.
## The craft
Coogler directs grief the way most blockbusters direct action, patiently and with full attention. The opening funeral, white-clad against Wakandan colour, sets a register the film mostly keeps. Ludwig Göransson's score is again the secret weapon, threading Mesoamerican textures into the Wakandan palette so that Talokan feels invented from the ground up rather than borrowed from Atlantis. The underwater kingdom is the year's most convincing piece of world-building, a sunlit blue civilisation with its own logic of breath, language and ritual. Where the film strains is the join between the mourning and the machine: 161 minutes is a long time, and the obligations of a shared universe, the table-setting, the new-suit montage, the franchise housekeeping, sit awkwardly against a story that wants to be about a daughter burying her family.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is the first *Black Panther*, and *Wakanda Forever* is the heavier, slower, sadder film. It trades the clean Shakespearean shape of T'Challa versus Killmonger for something more diffuse, two wounded nations talking past each other. The other comparison is *Captain America: Civil War*, another Marvel film about two parties who are each half right; Namor belongs in that company of antagonists you can argue for. Set against the run of recent Marvel product, churned out and weightless, this is a reminder of what the studio can still do when a real director is given room to make a real film rather than an instalment.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split here is telling. Critics sit around 84%, with the recurring complaint that the film is overlong and bent out of shape by franchise duty, both fair. Audiences are markedly warmer at 94%, and I think they are closer to right. The bagginess is real, but it is the bagginess of a film trying to honour something, not of one going through the motions. The grief is not a marketing texture; it is the load-bearing element, and the audience response suggests viewers felt that and forgave the running time.
## Verdict
This is a flawed, moving, overstuffed film that had every excuse to be a disaster and is instead one of the better things Marvel has put out. Bassett and Huerta give it real performances, the Talokan world-building is genuinely new, and Coogler treats his late star and his audience as adults. It loses a point to length and to the franchise machinery clanking in the background, and it is, by design, less rewatchable than its predecessor, because mourning is not the mood you reach for twice in a year. But it earns its emotion honestly, and the world it builds underwater is worth the dive. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, including IMAX. A home release on disc and Disney+ will follow in the new year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Wakanda Forever* settled in as the strongest of the post-*Endgame* Marvel films, with Angela Bassett's performance earning a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination, a rarity for the genre. Namor is set up for a return, and the wider arc now points toward *Avengers* films still to come. The film streams on Disney+ and is widely available on 4K and Blu-ray.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Fight scenes feature crunchy blows, gunfire, and use of weapons that function as electro-shock batons. People are stabbed, slashed or impaled with spears, without bloody detail. Other people are hypnotised by strange music which causes them to throw themselves into the sea. A short flashback sequence shows 16th century Spanish colonists striking enslaved Indigenous people, without strong detail.
**Threat and horror:** People are seen fleeing in panic from explosions and rushing flood waters during an invasion. Further threat occurs during ambush sequences, car chases featuring vehicular collisions, and a short helicopter crash sequence.
**Injury detail:** A man is clawed across the face during battle, leaving thin cuts on his cheek, and in another scene an explosion results in brief sight of moderate burn wounds on a person's back. A person who has been speared through the abdomen removes the spear by pulling it through their body, but the wound heals instantly and does not bleed.
**Language:** Bad language includes 'shit', 'bullshit', 'piss off', 'ass', 'hell' and 'God'.
**Theme:** There are scenes of bereavement and emotional upset.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/black-panther-wakanda-forever-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmda2mzq0)).*
================================================================================
## The Menu (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-menu
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-menu.md
- published: 2022-11-23
- document_id: 1205
> A celebrity chef serves a tasting menu to a room of people who do not deserve it, and the satire of wealth and fine dining is sharp, controlled and very funny until the targets start to sit a little too still. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** November 2022
- **Director:** Mark Mylod · **Writers:** Seth Reiss, Will Tracy
- **Studio / distributor:** Searchlight Pictures; Hyperobject Industries
- **Genre:** Dark comedy thriller / social satire · **Runtime:** 107 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Ralph Fiennes (*Schindler's List*, *The Grand Budapest Hotel*) as Chef Slowik; Anya Taylor-Joy (*The Queen's Gambit*) as Margot; Nicholas Hoult (*Mad Max: Fury Road*, *The Great*) as Tyler; Hong Chau (*Downsizing*) as Elsa
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 88% critics / 76% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Mark Mylod has spent the last few years directing the cruellest episodes of *Succession*, the ones where the rich say the unspeakable to each other across beautifully laid tables, and *The Menu* is what happens when he is handed a film, a private island and Ralph Fiennes in a chef's whites. It belongs to the small run of recent pictures that have worked out you can dress a horror structure in a dinner jacket and sell it as comedy: a closed group of the wealthy and the smug, gathered somewhere they cannot leave, picked off by a host who has clearly thought about this evening for a very long time. The promise is that the eating of the rich will be both literal and funny. For most of its length it keeps that promise.
## The setup
A dozen guests take a boat to Hawthorne, an exclusive restaurant on a private island where the celebrated Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) serves a tasting menu that costs more than a fortnight's wages and is spoken of in hushed, reverent tones. Among them are Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a besotted foodie who has waited his whole life for this table, and his last-minute date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who can see from the first amuse-bouche that she does not belong here and is not especially sorry about it. The courses arrive with theatrical precision, each one introduced by Slowik with a sharp clap and a little speech, and it becomes clear fairly quickly that the menu has been designed around the specific people in the room. What it has been designed to do to them is the question that keeps you in your seat.
## The cast
Fiennes is the reason the film holds. He plays Slowik as a man who has burned all the joy out of his vocation and replaced it with control, and he can move from soft-spoken hospitality to absolute menace inside a single sentence without raising his voice. It is a performance built on stillness and exactness, and it is very funny in a way that never winks at you. Anya Taylor-Joy gives Margot the one set of eyes in the room that sees the whole apparatus for what it is, and her flat, unimpressed refusal to be awed is the film's anchor and its way in. Nicholas Hoult is having a wonderful time as Tyler, whose reverence for the chef curdles into something pitiful and squirm-inducing, and Hong Chau, as the front-of-house manager Elsa, delivers her threats with a hospitality-industry serenity that is among the best things in the film. The diners around them are sketched a little thinly, which is partly the point and partly a limitation I will come back to.
## The craft
This is a handsome, tightly run film. Peter Deming shoots the restaurant as a cool, immaculate, faintly clinical space, all engineered sightlines and recessed lighting, so that the kitchen drilling away in the background feels less like a workplace than a small standing army. The courses themselves are presented with on-screen captions, which lets the film treat each dish as a beat in a structure, and Colin Stetson's score keeps a low, anxious pressure under the comedy. Mylod paces it like a service: each course tightens the screw, the speeches get shorter and stranger, and the comic timing is precise enough that the laughs and the dread arrive together rather than taking turns. At 107 minutes it does not overstay, which matters for a film whose central trick can only be sprung once.
## How it stacks up
The obvious neighbour is *Parasite*, which did the rich-versus-the-rest material with more layers and more heart, and the wider field of one-location social satires that have been arriving lately, the country-house whodunnit comedies and the eat-the-wealthy provocations. *The Menu* is more disciplined than most of them and less interested in surprising you with plot. Its real lineage is the trap film, the *Saw*-style premise where a controlling figure has arranged an evening of lessons for people who have wronged him, only here the apparatus is a Michelin kitchen and the lesson is about what we do to the things we claim to love. It is closer to a savage episode of prestige television than to a thriller, which makes sense given where its director has been working.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it warmly, sitting around 88%, drawn to the performances and the cool precision of the satire. Audiences are a touch cooler at 76%, and I think the gap is honest. The film is sharp on a real target, the way fine dining and the people who worship it can drain all the pleasure out of food, but its aim widens as it goes, and by the closing courses it is gesturing at art, money, critics and customers all at once, which softens the bite rather than sharpening it. The diners exist to be punished rather than understood, so once you grasp the shape of the evening there is less to discover than the build-up implies.
## Verdict
I enjoyed this a great deal more than I expected to. It is funny, it looks immaculate, Fiennes is magnetic and Taylor-Joy gives it a centre to root for, and the central conceit is clever enough to carry a whole film. It loses a little in the back half, where the satire spreads thin and the supporting guests stay flat, and it is not a world I will be in any hurry to revisit the way I would a film with more under the surface. But as a single, well-served, very dark evening it works, and the best dish here is the simplest one. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on general release through Searchlight.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film became a steady streaming success once it landed on Disney+, where it found a larger audience than its modest cinema run suggested, and Ralph Fiennes's Chef Slowik has settled in as one of his most quoted recent roles. It sits comfortably alongside the run of wealth-skewering satires either side of it, including Ruben Ostlund's *Triangle of Sadness* and Rian Johnson's *Glass Onion*, all arriving within months of each other, and it streams on Disney+ in the UK with the usual digital rental and disc options.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, threat, suicide, language, sex references*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** A woman is stabbed in the throat with a knife, resulting in blood spurting from the wound. A man's finger is chopped off, with sight of bloody injury detail. There are fight scenes in which characters are hit in the head with objects such as a saucepan and kitchen machinery. A man is stabbed in the thigh with scissors.
**Threat and horror:** Frightened characters are menaced in various ways that escalate throughout the film, and they are threatened with death. Men are made to run through darkened woods to escape capture. There are scenes of knife and gun threat.
**Language:** There is strong language ('motherf**ker', 'f**k') and milder terms like 'bitch', 'whore', 'prick', 'shit', 'ass', 'Jesus', 'Christ' and 'God'.
**Sex:** There is a verbal reference to a man masturbating in front of a woman.
**Suicide and self-harm:** A man shoots himself in the head, resulting in a spurt of blood, and another man sets himself on fire. A man is found hanging, but we do not see this act take place.
**Additional issues:** There are verbal references to the domestic abuse a man witnessed his drunk father inflict upon his mother when he was a boy. A woman talks about being sexually harassed in her workplace.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-menu-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmda1mda2)).*
================================================================================
## All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-all-quiet-on-the-western-front
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-all-quiet-on-the-western-front.md
- published: 2022-10-30
- document_id: 1032
> The first German-language film of Remarque's anti-war novel arrives on Netflix as a hard, beautifully made trench picture that is easier to admire than to love. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** October 2022
- **Director:** Edward Berger · **Writers:** Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell
- **Studio / distributor:** Amusement Park Film; Netflix
- **Genre:** Anti-war drama / First World War film · **Runtime:** 147 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer; Albrecht Schuch (*System Crasher*) as Stanislaus Katczinsky; Daniel Brühl (*Goodbye Lenin!*, *Rush*) as Matthias Erzberger; Devid Striesow (*The Counterfeiters*) as General Friedrichs
- **IMDb:** 7.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 90% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Erich Maria Remarque's novel has been filmed before, most famously by Lewis Milestone in 1930, and that earlier version has spent ninety years as the definitive screen statement of the book. What it had never been, until now, is a German film. Edward Berger, a director best known for television, takes the obvious and surprisingly unused angle: the story of German boys marched into the meat grinder, told in German, for an audience that knows exactly how the war ends and what comes after it. Netflix has put serious money behind it, and the result is the kind of awards-season prestige picture the platform has been chasing for years.
## The setup
Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) is seventeen, full of schoolyard patriotism, and signs up with his friends in 1917 to the sound of a teacher's speech about glory and the Fatherland. The uniform he is handed has been stripped from a dead soldier and the name tag quietly unpicked, which tells you most of what the film thinks about the romance of enlistment. Within days the friends are on the Western Front, in mud and wire and shellfire, and the illusions begin coming apart faster than any of them can replace them. Running alongside Paul's war is a second thread, set in the warm railway carriages where Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) negotiates the armistice while men keep dying for nothing in the field.
## The cast
Kammerer, in his first screen role, carries the film on a face that starts open and eager and slowly empties out. He is good at the small reactions, the moment a boy realises that nobody is coming to help and that the noise is not going to stop. Albrecht Schuch is the standout as Kat, the older soldier who has learned the trench economy of food, sleep and survival, and who gives Paul something like a father in a place designed to take fathers away. Brühl brings a weary decency to Erzberger, a man trying to end a slaughter by signing a document, and Devid Striesow's General Friedrichs is the film's portrait of vanity at a safe distance, a man eating off china while he sends teenagers across open ground. The relationships are sketched economically; this is not a film with much room for talk.
## The craft
The craft is where the film earns its reputation. James Friend's cinematography moves between grey, frozen wide shots of the churned ground and close, choking work in the trenches, and Volker Bertelmann's score announces itself with a three-note industrial throb that sounds less like music than like machinery warming up to kill. It is a striking choice and not a subtle one. The battle sequences are staged with real weight: tanks looming out of fog, flamethrowers, a final assault timed against a ticking clock that turns the last act into something close to unbearable. Berger never lets the violence look heroic. It is loud, ugly and quick, and the camera tends to stay a beat longer than is comfortable. The film is handsome in a way that occasionally fights its own subject, but the discomfort it is reaching for mostly lands.
## How it stacks up
The obvious recent comparison is *1917*, and the two films make an instructive pair. Sam Mendes built a thriller out of forward momentum and a single unbroken-looking shot; Berger is doing something more static and more despairing, less interested in a mission than in attrition. Against *Paths of Glory*, Kubrick's cold study of generals spending men like coins, this film shares the contempt for command but trades the courtroom argument for sheer physical immersion. And against *Saving Private Ryan*, whose opening twenty minutes reset the bar for battle, it holds up on spectacle while refusing Spielberg's redemptive frame. There is no mission worth the cost here, and no comfort offered at the end.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are strongly on side, sitting around 90%, with audiences matching them, and most of the praise lands on the sound, the images and the anti-war force. The main argument among reviewers is about faithfulness: Berger and his co-writers have added the armistice subplot and changed the shape of Remarque's ending, and purists of the novel have noticed. That debate matters less to me than a different one. I admire this film a great deal and I am not sure how often I will return to it. Relentless, well-made bleakness is a register I respect more than I enjoy, and my reservations about the prestige war picture, the same ones that keep *The Hurt Locker* at arm's length for me, apply here too.
## Verdict
So this is a film I can recommend without quite loving. The making of it is close to flawless: the photography, the sound design, the staging of chaos, the refusal to let a single death feel meaningful. Kammerer and Schuch give it a human centre, and the armistice thread, whatever the novel's defenders think, sharpens the central cruelty of men dying after the outcome is decided. What it does not have, for me, is rewatchability, which is the axis I weight most heavily, and there is a faint sense of a film admiring its own gravity. Powerful, beautifully made, and not one I will reach for twice. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Netflix from 28 October 2022, after a limited UK cinema run earlier in the month. Worth the biggest screen and best sound you can manage.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to a remarkable awards run, leading the BAFTA field and winning Best Film and Best Director there, and taking four Academy Awards including Best International Feature, Cinematography and Score. Its reputation has settled as the definitive modern screen version of Remarque, and as the film that confirmed Edward Berger as a major director, work he followed with the very different *Conclave*. It remains on Netflix.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong threat, violence, injury detail, disturbing scenes*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Strong war violence includes shootings and stabbings, resulting in spurts of blood and bloody aftermath detail. A body is crushed under a tank, creating a brief burst of blood. Screaming men are engulfed in fire by flamethrowers, without clear sight of injury detail. A seriously injured soldier takes his own life by repeatedly stabbing himself in the neck, resulting in strong bloody detail. One man attempts to drown another in muddy water, and another man is bludgeoned to death.
**Threat and horror:** There are sustained scenes of strong and disturbing battle threat in which terrified young soldiers panic amid heavy gunfire and shelling. A frightened man attempts to surrender to enemy soldiers, who set him on fire. There is an upsetting scene in which one soldier repeatedly stabs another but is then filled with dismay as the man suffers a protracted death.
**Injury detail:** We see dead and dying soldiers with gory injuries, including shredded limbs and bloody bullet wounds. Other scenes show an infirmary floor covered in blood.
**Additional issues:** There is infrequent use of strong language ('f**k'); milder terms include 'putain', 'shit', 'bloody hell' and 'arse', in addition to the outdated term 'cripple'. There are also occasional mild verbal sex references and innuendo.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/all-quiet-on-the-western-front-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmda3njiw)).*
================================================================================
## Nope (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-nope
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-nope.md
- published: 2022-08-15
- document_id: 1129
> Jordan Peele swaps the suburbs for the high desert and aims a summer blockbuster at the question of why we cannot stop looking. Big, strange, and properly cinematic, even when it keeps you at arm's length. 8/10.
- **UK release:** August 2022
- **Director:** Jordan Peele · **Writer:** Jordan Peele
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; Monkeypaw Productions
- **Genre:** Science fiction spectacle thriller · **Runtime:** 130 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Daniel Kaluuya (*Get Out*, *Widows*) as OJ Haywood; Keke Palmer (*Hustlers*) as Emerald Haywood; Steven Yeun (*Minari*, *The Walking Dead*) as Ricky "Jupe" Park; Brandon Perea (*The OA*) as Angel Torres
- **IMDb:** 6.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 83% critics / 69% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Jordan Peele earned his reputation on two tight, low-budget horrors that worked like puzzle boxes. *Get Out* turned a meet-the-parents weekend into the sharpest American satire in years, and *Us* doubled down on the unease while losing a little of the control. *Nope* is the third film, and the first time Peele has reached for the scale of a summer blockbuster: an IMAX-shot, desert-set chase after something enormous in the sky. It is a bigger swing than either of its predecessors, and it spends a lot of that size on a question about why we point cameras at the things that frighten us.
## The setup
OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) run a horse ranch in a dusty valley outside Los Angeles, training animals for film and television. The family business is older than Hollywood itself, and it is quietly failing. Then something starts moving in the clouds above their land, killing the power, spooking the horses, and refusing to be photographed. OJ wants to understand it; Emerald wants to film it and sell the footage, the shot that would put the Haywoods back on the map. Down the road, a former child star turned theme-park showman (Steven Yeun) has his own ideas about turning the thing in the sky into an attraction. I will keep the rest under wraps, because the slow disclosure of what they are dealing with is most of the pleasure.
## The cast
Kaluuya plays OJ as a study in withheld reaction, a man who communicates in flat single syllables and long looks, and it is a brave choice for a leading role in a film this loud. He lets Keke Palmer carry the noise, and she takes it gladly: Emerald is a livewire of patter and ambition, and Palmer gives her a charm that keeps the film warm when the sky turns hostile. The two of them work as a genuine sibling double act, one all surface, one all interior. Steven Yeun is the unsettling third point, a man who survived something terrible as a child and learned exactly the wrong lesson from it, all showman's smile over a fault line. Brandon Perea provides the comic energy as a bored electronics-store tech who attaches himself to the Haywoods' surveillance project, and the film is better for his enthusiasm.
## The craft
This is where the budget shows, and shows beautifully. Peele shot on IMAX film stock with Hoyte van Hoytema behind the camera, and the high-desert vistas have a depth and a weight that most digital blockbusters cannot touch. The valley itself becomes a character, vast and indifferent under that watchful sky. The creature design is genuinely strange, withholding its shape for a long time and then revealing it in ways that keep rewriting what you thought you were looking at. Michael Abels' score and a precise, predatory sound design do a great deal of the work; you come to dread certain noises. Peele paces the build with confidence, trusting silence and scale where a lesser film would cut faster and explain more.
## How it stacks up
The reference points are deliberate and worn proudly. This is Peele's *Jaws*, a creature-feature where the monster is mostly the suggestion of the monster, and his *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*, all upturned faces and lights in the dark. There is *Signs* in the rural family staring at the sky, and *King Kong* in the running theme of spectacle as something we cage and sell. Where *Get Out* was a scalpel, *Nope* is closer to a Spielberg adventure with an essay folded inside it, about the hunger to capture an image and the price of looking at what should be left alone. It is the most purely entertaining of Peele's films and, by a margin, the least tidy.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are largely on board, sitting around 83%, praising the ambition, the imagery, and the sound. Audiences are cooler at 69%, and the gap is easy to read: this is Peele's most elusive film, more interested in mood and ideas than in the clean satisfactions of *Get Out*. The complaints are fair. Some threads, the chimpanzee flashback above all, are more provocative than resolved, and the theme can feel underlined. None of that sinks it for me. I would rather a blockbuster overreach with real ideas than play it safe with none, and on spectacle and atmosphere this delivers more than almost anything else in cinemas this summer.
## Verdict
*Nope* is a big, strange, properly cinematic film that knows exactly what it is doing with a camera and is only sometimes sure what it is doing with its themes. The craft is first rate, the central pair are a joy, and the slow reveal of the thing in the sky is the kind of thing I will happily watch again, even knowing where it goes. It keeps you at arm's length where its predecessor pulled you close, and the symbolic reach occasionally exceeds its grasp. But it is ambitious, memorable, and made for the biggest screen you can find, and I value all three. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in IMAX if you possibly can; the format is not a gimmick here.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Nope* has settled into its reputation as Peele's most divisive film, the one his admirers defend hardest and casual viewers bounce off, which feels about right. It came to digital and 4K disc in late 2022, with a handsome transfer that preserves the IMAX framing, and streams on Peacock and other platforms depending on region. The chimpanzee subplot remains the most argued-over sequence in his filmography.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, threat, bloody images*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is moderate violence including from a chimpanzee who goes on a rampage attacking humans. There are brief, grainy documentary images of natural world violence between a tiger and a python.
**Threat and horror:** A chimpanzee goes on a violent rampage in a television studio and a young performer looks traumatised as he hides under a table witnessing the mayhem. There are sustained scenes of threat to characters from an alien entity, with long build-ups of tension and jump scares.
**Language:** There is strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker'), as well as milder terms such as 'bitch', 'shit', 'ass', 'dick', 'hell', 'God' and 'damn', and a reclaimed use of racial language ('n**a').
**Sex:** There are infrequent moderate sex references.
**Injury detail:** There are splatters of blood and viscera as an animal is shot off-screen, and from other fantastical off-screen violence. There is sight of a wound across a man's eye which has been sliced by a falling object.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/nope-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdaynziw)).*
================================================================================
## Prey (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-prey
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-prey.md
- published: 2022-08-14
- document_id: 1138
> A Predator prequel that strips the franchise back to one hunter, one weapon and a question of survival. The leanest entry since the original, and the smartest in years. 8/10.
- **UK release:** August 2022 (Disney+)
- **Director:** Dan Trachtenberg · **Writer:** Patrick Aison
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Studios; Davis Entertainment; Hulu / Disney+
- **Genre:** Science fiction survival thriller · **Runtime:** 100 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Amber Midthunder (*Legion*) as Naru; Dakota Beavers as Taabe; Dane DiLiegro as the Predator; Michelle Thrush (*Blackstone*) as Aruka
- **IMDb:** 7.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 94% critics / 74% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The *Predator* franchise has spent thirty-five years failing to recapture a film it made by accident. The 1987 original worked because it was a war picture that turned into a monster picture, a squad of muscle being picked off one by one until the smallest, smartest survivor was the only one left thinking. Everything since has tried to scale that up: more soldiers, more guns, more Predators, a crossover with the *Alien* xenomorphs that pleased nobody. *Prey* goes the other way. It strips the idea back to one hunter, one creature and a stretch of wilderness, sets it on the Northern Great Plains in 1719, and remembers that the franchise was always at its best when it was at its leanest.
## The setup
Naru (Amber Midthunder) is a young Comanche woman who wants to be a hunter in a community that has already decided what she is allowed to be. Her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) is the gifted one, the warrior the others follow; she tracks, she studies, she notices the things they miss. When a strange light falls from the sky and the animals she knows start turning up flayed and wrong, she is the only one who reads the signs correctly. What she has seen is a Predator, dropped into her territory to test itself against whatever the land can throw at it. The trouble is that nobody believes her, and by the time they do, the thing has already started working its way up the food chain towards them.
## The cast
The film rests almost entirely on Midthunder, and she carries it. Naru is watchful rather than loud, and the performance is built out of competence under pressure: the way she reads a footprint, the patience of someone who has had to be twice as good to be taken half as seriously. There is no speechifying about proving herself; the proof is in the doing. Beavers gives Taabe real warmth as the brother who believes in her when the others will not, which matters because the film needs that bond to mean something. Dane DiLiegro's Predator, all physical performance under the design, is a genuinely frightening presence, faster and more animal than the lumbering versions the sequels settled for. The supporting players, including Michelle Thrush as Naru's mother Aruka, keep the community grounded enough that the stakes feel local and human.
## The craft
Dan Trachtenberg made his name on *10 Cloverfield Lane*, a film that wrung tension out of three people in a bunker, and the same control is on show here. Jeff Cutter's photography of the plains and forests is genuinely beautiful, wide and cold and open, which makes the violence land harder when it arrives. Trachtenberg understands that a hunt is about patience, and he is willing to hold back, to let Naru watch and wait, before the creature moves. When it does, the action is brutal and legible, no shaky-cam mush, every kill clearly staged. Sarah Schachner's score sits low and tribal until it needs to surge. There is also a clever escalation built into the structure: the Predator works its way through wolves, a bear, French fur trappers and Comanche warriors, and each rung shows you exactly how far above Naru it sits, so that her eventual answer to it has to be cleverness rather than strength.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is the 1987 *Predator*, and *Prey* earns it by inverting the formula: where Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch was the biggest man in the jungle reduced to a frightened animal, Naru starts as the underestimated one and has to think her way up. The period survival texture owes a clear debt to Mel Gibson's *Apocalypto*, with its chase through unforgiving wilderness, and there is a kinship with the cold brutality of *The Revenant*. What *Prey* adds is the science fiction engine underneath, the puzzle of an enemy whose technology is simply better than yours, so that the only way to beat it is to turn its own rules against it. That is the franchise's best idea, and this is the first film in a long time to actually use it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have embraced it, sitting around 94%, with most of the praise going to Midthunder, the period setting and the back-to-basics discipline. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm at 74%, and the gap is worth a moment. Some of that is the streaming-only release, dropped straight onto Disney+ rather than given a cinema run it would have rewarded; some is a section of the fanbase that wanted more Predators and more carnage. I land closer to the critics, with a caveat. The film is very good at what it sets out to do and rarely surprising beyond it: you can see the shape of the story coming. But it is tight, confident and genuinely tense, and it respects both its heroine and its monster.
## Verdict
This is the *Predator* film the series has needed for three decades, and the most rewatchable entry since the original. It is lean where the sequels were bloated, smart where they were loud, and built around a heroine who wins on wits rather than firepower. The plot holds few mysteries, and a cinema screen would have flattered Cutter's landscapes in a way a laptop never will. None of that stops it being a tense, satisfying survival thriller with a real lead performance at its centre. It works completely as the thing it is trying to be, and I will happily watch it again. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Disney+ in the UK from 5 August 2022. There is no cinema release; this one went straight to the platform.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Prey* quickly established itself as the high-water mark of the modern *Predator* run and turned Dan Trachtenberg into the steward of the franchise. A Comanche-language dub was made available on Disney+, the first time a major studio film has offered a full dub in the language, and it is the version worth seeking out. The film remains on Disney+, with a physical release following later for those who want Jeff Cutter's plains on a screen larger than a laptop.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, injury detail, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** A fantastical alien creature stabs, slashes, shoots, dismembers and decapitates people, with sight of blood spurts; some of this violence is obscured by camera framing. The creature slashes and stabs various animals and we also see spurts of fantastical glowing alien blood. There are bloody stabbings and slashes as human characters fight, as well as punches, kicks, knees and shoves in scenes of hand to hand fighting. Animals are hunted and cooked for food.
**Threat and horror:** There are sustained scenes of suspense and threat as an alien creature hunts people through woodland and in settlements. There are jump scares and sequences in which characters try to escape ferocious animal attacks. A girl finds her herself at risk of drowning in a bog.
**Language:** There is mild bad language ('shit') and use of the similar French term 'merde'.
**Discrimination:** Some male characters behave in a sexist way towards a teenage girl, telling her she should be cooking instead of joining their hunt.
**Injury detail:** We see severed human heads and limbs, as well as bloody slash and stab wounds in the aftermath of violence; some of these injuries are treated with close-up detail. A character discovers a herd of skinned buffalo, with close-up sight of their bloody injuries. Blood and gore spills from the bodies of fatally wounded animals.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/prey-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmde1otez)).*
================================================================================
## Bullet Train (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-bullet-train
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-bullet-train.md
- published: 2022-08-05
- document_id: 1050
> David Leitch packs a Tokyo bullet train with squabbling assassins and lets the carnage compound. Critics found it overstuffed; I found it the most rewatchable thing of the summer. 9/10.
- **UK release:** August 2022
- **Director:** David Leitch · **Writer:** Zak Olkewicz
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; 87North Productions; Fuqua Films
- **Genre:** Action comedy / assassin thriller · **Runtime:** 127 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Brad Pitt (*Fight Club*, *Inglourious Basterds*) as Ladybug; Aaron Taylor-Johnson (*Kick-Ass*, *Tenet*) as Tangerine; Brian Tyree Henry (*If Beale Street Could Talk*) as Lemon; Joey King (*The Kissing Booth*) as The Prince; Hiroyuki Sanada (*The Last Samurai*, *47 Ronin*) as The Elder
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 54% critics / 76% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
David Leitch came up doing the thing nobody watches the credits for. He was a stuntman, then a fight coordinator, then half of the directing team that made *John Wick* move like a dancer with a grudge. Since going solo he has been steadily loosening the screws: *Atomic Blonde* was sleek and serious, *Deadpool 2* was a gag machine with a body count. *Bullet Train* is where he stops pretending to be serious at all. It is a film about professional killers on a train, adapted from a Japanese novel, shot like a comic book and pitched somewhere between a heist and a farce, and it is the most fun I have had in a cinema this year.
## The setup
Ladybug (Brad Pitt) is an assassin trying to reform, all therapy-speak and bad luck, handed a job his handler swears is simple: board the Tokyo to Kyoto bullet train, grab a briefcase, get off. He is barely seated before it becomes clear that half the carriages are carrying other killers, all of them circling the same case, the same crime boss, and a tangle of grudges that turns out to be one knot rather than several. The train will not stop, the bodies start to mount, and Ladybug spends the whole journey trying to find a station, any station, where he can simply get off. It is a single-location thriller with the location moving at two hundred miles an hour.
## The cast
Pitt is having a wonderful time, and his comic timing has only sharpened with age. Ladybug is a man permanently appalled at the violence breaking out around him, and Pitt plays the exasperation beautifully. The film, though, belongs to the double act of Tangerine and Lemon, two British hitmen who bicker like an old married couple. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is all swagger and threat as Tangerine; Brian Tyree Henry's Lemon reads people through the moral universe of *Thomas the Tank Engine*, and somehow makes that the smartest character study in the film. Joey King is genuinely chilling as a teenager who weaponises everyone's assumptions about teenagers, and Hiroyuki Sanada arrives late with the gravitas the chaos has been quietly waiting for. The ensemble clicks, which is the whole game in a film like this.
## The craft
Leitch shoots Japan as pure neon dream, all candy colour and chrome, the carriages each given their own palette so you always know where you are even as the cutting accelerates. Jonathan Sela's camera and Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir's editing keep the geography legible through fights staged in spaces the width of a corridor, which is harder than it looks and a discipline Leitch carries over from his stunt years. The action has weight and wit, a bottle of water and a quiet carriage become running gags, and Dominic Lewis scores it with Japanese-language covers of Western pop that should be insufferable and instead land perfectly. It is loud, busy and overstuffed by design, a film that would rather give you too much than too little.
## How it stacks up
The lineage is easy to trace. This is *Snatch* on rails, Guy Ritchie's interlocking-criminals structure married to the choreography of *John Wick* and the gallows comedy of *Smokin' Aces*. The single-train premise invites *Murder on the Orient Express*, though Leitch is far less interested in whodunit than in who-survives. There is *Kill Bill* in the candy-coloured violence and the relish for a good flashback. What it borrows it earns, and the flashback-and-coincidence machinery, the kind of plotting where a stolen briefcase three scenes ago detonates now, is built with real care under the noise.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are lukewarm, sitting just over half on Rotten Tomatoes, and the recurring complaint is that the film is exhausting, too long, too pleased with itself, too many characters doing too many bits. Audiences are notably warmer at 76%, and that gap tells you almost everything. The critical line is not wrong on the facts and entirely wrong on the verdict. Yes, it is overstuffed. Overstuffed is the dish you ordered. A film this committed to its own silliness should not be marked down for being silly; it should be judged on whether the silliness is funny and the action is good, and on both counts it delivers.
## Verdict
I value rewatchability above almost everything, and this is a film built to be watched again. The plot folds back on itself so neatly that a second viewing is funnier than the first, every throwaway line revealed as a setup. The cast is a joy, the violence is cartoonish enough to stay light, and the whole thing moves with the confidence of a director who has finally stopped apologising for liking spectacle. It is not deep and does not pretend to be. It is two hours of expertly engineered nonsense with a brain hiding under the bonnet, and I have already watched it more times than films I would defend as better. **9/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. One for the biggest, loudest screen you can find.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Kōtarō Isaka's source novel was published in English as *Bullet Train*, and the film sent readers back to it and to his wider Tokyo-set thrillers. The film has settled into exactly the split it opened with, a critics-versus-crowd divide, and has become a reliable rewatch favourite and a streaming staple. It is now widely available on digital and disc and turns up regularly on the major platforms.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, language, brief sex*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are regular scenes in which professional assassins fight to the death. Part of a man's head is blown off by a booby-trapped gun. Others are decapitated and crushed. Guns, knives, meat-hooks, bats and bottles are used as weapons, with resulting bloody detail.
**Threat and horror:** There are scenes of moderate threat.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker'), as well as other terms such as 'bitch' and 'Christ'.
**Sex:** There is a brief sex scene, with nudity.
**Suicide and self-harm:** There is a scene of suicide.
**Drugs:** There are fleeting references to drugs.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/bullet-train-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdayotqz)).*
================================================================================
## The Gray Man (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-gray-man
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-gray-man.md
- published: 2022-07-31
- document_id: 1191
> The Russo brothers spend Netflix's biggest cheque yet on a globe-trotting spy chase with a marquee cast. It is glossy, fast, and a little anonymous, but it is also good fun. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2022 (cinemas 15 July, Netflix 22 July)
- **Directors:** Anthony Russo & Joe Russo · **Writers:** Joe Russo, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely
- **Studio / distributor:** AGBO; Roth/Kirschenbaum Films; Netflix
- **Genre:** Espionage action thriller · **Runtime:** 122 minutes (BBFC 18)
- **Main cast:** Ryan Gosling (*Drive*, *Blade Runner 2049*) as Sierra Six; Chris Evans (*Captain America: The Winter Soldier*, *Knives Out*) as Lloyd Hansen; Ana de Armas (*Blade Runner 2049*, *No Time to Die*) as Dani Miranda; Regé-Jean Page (*Bridgerton*) as Denny Carmichael
- **IMDb:** 6.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 45% critics / 90% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
This is the film Netflix has spent something close to two hundred million dollars to plant a flag with, the most expensive thing the platform has made, and it has handed the money to the Russo brothers, who walked off the back-to-back billions of *Avengers: Infinity War* and *Endgame* with a clear idea of how to move a camera around a very large set piece. The pitch is straightforward: an A-list spy chase to launch a franchise, Ryan Gosling against Chris Evans, half a dozen cities, and a budget you can see on the screen. What you are buying with that money is competence and gloss rather than surprise, and whether that is enough depends entirely on what you wanted from a Friday night.
## The setup
Sierra Six (Ryan Gosling) is a CIA assassin recruited out of prison, given a number instead of a name, and pointed at whoever the agency decides needs to disappear. On a job that goes sideways, he ends up holding a drive full of evidence that his own bosses would rather did not exist, and from that moment he is the target rather than the gun. The agency outsources the cleanup to Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans), a freelance contractor with no rules and no off switch, who sets about hunting Six across Europe and Asia while a sharp field agent, Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), is left trying to work out which side she is actually on. It is the burned-spy-on-the-run premise that has powered the genre for decades, dressed in fresh money.
## The cast
Gosling plays Six as a man who has decided that staying very calm is the only thing keeping him alive, all dry asides and minimal movement, and it is a smart read of a part that could have been a blank. He is the still centre the film keeps throwing things at. Chris Evans is having the better time, though, shedding every scrap of Captain America to play Hansen as a preening, moustachioed sociopath in tailoring, the kind of villain who is offended when his torture is interrupted. The contrast between the two registers, Gosling's flatness and Evans's relish, is most of what gives the film its charge. Ana de Armas, fresh off cutting through *No Time to Die*, is once again the most convincing fighter in the room and is wasted slightly less than she could have been. Regé-Jean Page brings a cold bureaucratic menace as the man signing the orders.
## The craft
The Russos know how to stage scale, and the money is mostly on the screen: a tram-and-square shootout in Prague that flattens half a city block, a fight conducted around a man handcuffed to a bench in the middle of a fireworks display, a cargo plane coming apart in mid-air. Henry Jackman's score keeps the pulse up, Stephen Windon shoots the travel-brochure locations cleanly, and the thing moves. It also, at times, moves too smoothly. There is a digital sheen over the bigger sequences, a tendency to reach for a drone swoop or a speed ramp where a held shot would land harder, and the geography of a couple of the set pieces dissolves into noise. This is action assembled with great resource and not much grit. It never bores you and it rarely makes you flinch.
## How it stacks up
The film it most wants to be measured against is *Mission: Impossible*, and that comparison is not kind, because the Tom Cruise films sell you the danger of a real human body in real space, and this one is happy to let the rendering farm take the strain. Against the *Bourne* trilogy it comes off slicker and shallower; Paul Greengrass made the chases feel like they cost the hero something, whereas Six strolls through his with a one-liner ready. The fairer comparison is to Netflix's own *Extraction*, the other big-budget streaming action swing, and *The Gray Man* is the more polished and more starry of the two without being notably more memorable. It has the cast of a *Knives Out* and the soul of a very good airport novel, which, given the source, is honest enough.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split here is stark. Critics have landed around 45%, with the recurring complaint that all that money has bought something curiously generic, expensive and anonymous in equal measure. Audiences are far warmer, sitting up at 90%, and the IMDb crowd around 6.5 is somewhere sensible in between. I am closer to the audience than the critics on this one, but I understand the reviews. The film genuinely is less distinctive than the franchises it is borrowing from, and a launch this calculated invites a harder look. What the critics undersell is how watchable the result is, and how much fun Evans is having while they tut.
## Verdict
This is a film that does exactly what it sets out to do and nothing it does not have to. The plot is off the shelf, the action is handsome rather than thrilling, and it never threatens to stay with you past the weekend. But Gosling and Evans are a genuinely good pairing, the pace never sags across two hours, and it is built precisely for the use it will mostly get, which is a big, loud, undemanding watch from the sofa with the lights down. On espionage and entertainment value it clears the bar comfortably; on craft and ambition it settles for competent. I will happily put it on again, which for this kind of film is most of the verdict. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** A short cinema run from 15 July, then streaming on Netflix worldwide from 22 July.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Netflix moved fast on the franchise it wanted, greenlighting a sequel with Gosling returning and a spin-off in development, which tells you the audience numbers mattered more than the reviews. The film has settled into its slot as a reliable, much-watched streaming action title rather than a classic, and the Russos' bet that star power and scale would travel on the platform broadly paid off. It remains on Netflix.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **18** by the BBFC for *strong violence, domestic abuse*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are infrequent scenes of torture, including one in which a man's fingernails are pulled out with pliers; the actual extraction occurs below frame, but there is a brief aftermath image of the bloody nails. People are stabbed or shot during action scenes, occasionally resulting in bloody detail. A man's two fingers are severed during a fight, with brief dimly lit aftermath sight of the remaining stumps, and there is equally brief sight of a bloody burn wound on his back. During an action scene we see quick flashbacks to a man holding his young son's head underwater, and a short flashback in another scene shows cigarette burns on the boy's arm, implied to have been inflicted by his father.
**Additional issues:** There is a cut off use of strong language ('motherf-'); milder terms include 'bitch', 'dick', 'shit', 'bullshit', 'bastard', 'piss', 'ballsy', 'asshole' and 'ass'. There is moderate threat, including explosive car chases and shootouts, scenes involving the kidnapping of a child, and a fight scene which takes place on a crashing plane. Other issues include infrequent moderate sex references.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-gray-man-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmda1mtg5)).*
================================================================================
## Top Gun - Maverick (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-top-gun-maverick
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-top-gun-maverick.md
- published: 2022-05-29
- document_id: 1227
> Thirty-six years on, Tom Cruise climbs back into the cockpit for a legacy sequel that flies a great deal better than it has any right to. Real jets, real grief, and the most exciting aerial cinema in years. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2022
- **Director:** Joseph Kosinski · **Writers:** Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Skydance Media; Jerry Bruckheimer Films
- **Genre:** Action drama / legacy sequel · **Runtime:** 130 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Cruise (*Top Gun*, *Mission: Impossible - Fallout*) as Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell; Miles Teller (*Whiplash*) as Rooster Bradshaw; Jennifer Connelly (*A Beautiful Mind*) as Penny Benjamin; Glen Powell (*Hidden Figures*) as Hangman; Val Kilmer (*Top Gun*, *Heat*) as Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 96% critics / 99% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
A sequel arriving thirty-six years after the original is usually a warning sign, not a promise. The list of legacy follow-ups that justified the wait is short, and the list of ones that traded on a faded poster and a nostalgic needle-drop is very long. *Top Gun: Maverick* had every reason to sit in the second category. Tony Scott, who directed the 1986 film, is gone. Tom Cruise is the wrong side of fifty-five. The original was always more music video than aviation drama, a sun-flared recruitment advert with a volleyball scene. What lands instead is the rarest thing in modern blockbuster cinema: a sequel that takes the first film seriously, finds a real story inside it, and shoots its action for real.
## The setup
Pete Mitchell, callsign Maverick, has spent three decades dodging the promotions that would ground him, content to stay a captain and a test pilot rather than fly a desk. He is pulled back to the Top Gun school not to compete but to teach, training a class of young aces for a near-impossible strike on a fortified target, the kind of mission the planners quietly assume will cost lives. Among the recruits is Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick's dead wingman Goose, who blames the older man for both the past and the stalled present. The set-up is simple and the stakes are personal, which is exactly what a film built around men in fast jets needs.
## The cast
Cruise carries the picture the way he has carried everything for the last decade, with a physical commitment that borders on the unhinged and an old-fashioned star wattage that younger leads rarely manage. He is good here in a quieter register too: Maverick is haunted, slightly lost, aware that his world is being handed to drones and to men half his age. Miles Teller, who was so memorable being shouted at in *Whiplash*, gives Rooster a wounded stubbornness that keeps the grief from turning sentimental. Glen Powell's Hangman is the cocky rival the formula demands, played with enough charm to survive it. Jennifer Connelly grounds the romance without much to work with. The film's most affecting passage belongs to Val Kilmer, whose Iceman returns for a single scene that is tender, brief, and quietly devastating.
## The craft
This is where the film earns its reputation. Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda put the cast in real F-18s and filmed them at altitude, G-forces flattening real faces against real canopies, and the difference between this and a green-screen dogfight is the difference between watching a flight and watching a screensaver. The aerial sequences are coherent in a way action cinema has largely forgotten how to be: you always know where the planes are, what they are trying to do, and why it is hard. Eddie Hamilton's editing keeps the geography clear at speed. Harold Faltermeyer's anthem returns, Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe widen it out, and the result has weight without smothering the engines. It is loud, expensive cinema made by people who clearly cared about the craft of it.
## How it stacks up
The honest comparison is with the original, and this is the better film by some margin, tighter, sadder, and far more exciting in the air. The other reference point is Cruise's own *Mission: Impossible - Fallout*, which shares the do-it-for-real philosophy and the producer-star's refusal to fake a stunt; this has the same practical thrill, if a touch less plot. There is a strand of *The Right Stuff* in its reverence for pilots as a dying breed, and a clear debt to *Creed* in how it uses a legacy character to lift a younger one. What it does that those films do not is make the spectacle itself the argument: real planes, real sky, real consequence.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception has been close to unanimous, which is unusual and slightly suspicious. Critics are at 96% and audiences are higher still at 99%, and the common line is that this is the rare sequel that improves on its source. I broadly agree, with one reservation the rapture tends to skip. The story is efficient rather than surprising, the recruits beyond Rooster never quite become people, and the mission, for all its tension, runs on rails. None of that is a flaw exactly; it is a film doing precisely what it sets out to do. But it stops just short of the top tier for me.
## Verdict
This is a genuinely thrilling piece of popular cinema, made with a seriousness the original never had and an aerial spectacle almost nothing else can match. I preferred it to the 1986 film comfortably, and the Iceman scene alone earns a good deal of goodwill. My one honest caveat is rewatchability: I admired it more than I will return to it, and I am not sure I would sit through the whole thing again in one go. It is the right film to see big and loud while it is in cinemas, and it more than justifies the long wait. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it on the largest, loudest IMAX screen you can find; the sound design alone makes the difference.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Top Gun: Maverick* went on to gross well over a billion dollars worldwide and pulled six Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Sound, an unusually warm awards reception for a summer action film. It cemented Tom Cruise's late-career insistence on practical, big-screen spectacle, a philosophy he carried straight back into the *Mission: Impossible* sequels. The film is now available on disc and digital and streams on Paramount+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k'), a rude middle finger gesture, and milder terms (for example, 'dickhead', 'son of a bitch', 'shit', 'balls', 'ass', 'hell', 'damn', 'Jesus', 'God').
**Violence:** There is mild violence, including undetailed sight of planes being shot at and blown up.
**Threat:** There is mild threat associated with the aerial combat sequences.
**Sex:** There is a brief mild sex scene.
**Theme:** There are some upsetting scenes with references to illness.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/top-gun-maverick-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00odcwote)).*
================================================================================
## Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-everything-everywhere-all-at-once
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-everything-everywhere-all-at-once.md
- published: 2022-05-20
- document_id: 1076
> The Daniels throw the whole multiverse at a tax audit and somehow land a film about a mother and daughter. Exhausting, inventive, and far warmer than its chaos lets on. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2022
- **Directors:** Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert (the Daniels) · **Writers:** Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert
- **Studio / distributor:** A24; IAC Films; AGBO
- **Genre:** Multiverse science fiction comedy drama / martial arts fantasy · **Runtime:** 139 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Michelle Yeoh (*Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon*, *Tomorrow Never Dies*) as Evelyn Wang; Ke Huy Quan (*Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom*, *The Goonies*) as Waymond Wang; Stephanie Hsu as Joy Wang / Jobu Tupaki; Jamie Lee Curtis (*Halloween*, *A Fish Called Wanda*) as Deirdre Beaubeirdre
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the pair who bill themselves as the Daniels, arrived three years ago with *Swiss Army Man*, a film in which Daniel Radcliffe played a farting corpse used as a jet ski. That tells you most of what you need to know about their sensibility, and almost nothing about what they have done with it here. *Everything Everywhere All at Once* takes the multiverse, a device Marvel has spent the last year sanding into a marketing word, and uses it for something the studios never quite dare to: a film about a middle-aged immigrant woman, her tax return, and the daughter she is losing.
## The setup
Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) runs a failing laundrette with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), is behind on her accounts, and is dreading both an audit and a visit from her exacting father. Halfway through a meeting with a tax inspector, Waymond is replaced by a sharper, stranger version of himself, who tells her that the fate of the multiverse rests on her and that she can borrow the skills of every other Evelyn who ever lived. From there the film fans out across countless parallel lives, all while staying tethered to a strip-lit office and a woman who just wants her family to hold together. The threat takes the form of Jobu Tupaki, a being who has seen every universe at once and concluded that nothing matters. I will leave who that is for you to find.
## The cast
Michelle Yeoh has spent decades being the most capable person on any screen she is on, and the film knows it. It asks her to be tired, petty, frightened and tender, often within a single scene, and to do her own fighting on top of it. It is the fullest use anyone has made of her. Ke Huy Quan, the child star of *The Temple of Doom* and *The Goonies* who quietly left acting for years, returns as Waymond and walks off with the film's heart: a man whose kindness reads as weakness until the script reveals it as the opposite. Stephanie Hsu has the hardest job, playing both a hurt daughter and a glitter-drenched agent of nihilism, and she holds the two together. Jamie Lee Curtis, prosthetic knuckles and all, throws herself into the tax inspector with the glee of someone who has waited a long time to be this unglamorous.
## The craft
For a film this maximal, the craft is remarkably controlled. Larkin Seiple's camera moves between drab realism and gonzo invention without ever losing you, and Paul Rogers's editing, which has to cut between universes at a sprint, is the real feat: the film should be incoherent and is not. The Daniels shoot their action with a slapstick clarity that owes more to Hong Kong cinema and Jackie Chan than to the grey blur of most Western blockbusters, and they are unafraid to be silly, hot-dog fingers and a universe of sentient rocks included. Son Lux's score holds the emotional line under all the noise. It is loud, busy and occasionally too pleased with itself, but the chaos is engineered rather than accidental.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *The Matrix*, another film where a nobody learns the world is larger than they knew and downloads abilities on demand, and the Daniels clearly love it. But the truer relatives are smaller and stranger: Charlie Kaufman's *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind*, which buried a real relationship inside a high-concept gimmick, and *Swiss Army Man*'s own willingness to be ridiculous and sincere in the same breath. Against Marvel's *Doctor Strange* and its tidy, corporate multiverse, this is what the idea looks like when independent film-makers get hold of it with a fraction of the budget and ten times the nerve. It is the rare effects film where the effects are in service of a feeling rather than the other way round.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting at 93%, with the praise landing on the invention, the performances and the unexpected emotional weight. Audiences are a notch behind at 86%, and the gap is easy to read: some viewers find the first hour exhausting, the joke density too high, the everything-at-once promise taken a little too literally. Both reactions are fair. This is a film that asks a lot of your attention and occasionally mistakes more for better. The ones who go with it tend to come out moved; the ones who do not come out tired. I sit closer to the critics, with one reservation I will get to.
## Verdict
This is invention of a kind we rarely see at this scale, and a genuinely tender film hiding inside the racket. Yeoh and Quan are wonderful, the action is a joy, and the family story underneath earns its ending honestly. My reservation is rewatchability. The surprise of the construction is a large part of the pleasure, and a film this frantic does not obviously invite a second sitting the way a tighter one would. I admire it more than I expect to return to it, which is the difference between a very good film and a great one for me. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on general release from 13 May. Worth the big screen for the action alone.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to a near sweep at the following year's Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for the Daniels, and acting wins for Yeoh, Quan and Curtis, making it A24's biggest awards success to date. It has settled into a reputation as the defining cult-to-mainstream crossover of its moment, and the second-viewing worry has softened as audiences have returned to it. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on various platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, sex references, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are scenes of strong violence, including bloody beatings and shootings, implied stabbings, as well as emphasis on the breaking of bones. Some scenes contain slow-motion bloody detail upon impact of weapons and bullets. Other violence includes highly stylised martial arts fight sequences.
**Threat and horror:** There are scenes of moderate, fantastical threat in which a woman is jolted from universe to universe.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('f**k'), accompanied by milder terms ('bitch', 'shit', 'bullshit', 'piss', 'God', 'damn' and 'butt').
**Sex:** There are strong visual sex references, including references to BDSM and sexual role-play. In one scene, a woman uses large dildos in a bloody beating; in another, it is implied that two men purposefully land on pointy objects, which are subsequently revealed sticking out from underneath their clothes.
**Flashing / flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdaznzg0)).*
================================================================================
## The Northman (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-northman
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-northman.md
- published: 2022-04-25
- document_id: 1208
> Robert Eggers takes his arthouse precision to a Viking revenge saga with a studio budget behind him, and the result is fierce, beautiful and unrelenting. Brutal, committed, and built to be admired more than rewatched. 8/10.
- **UK release:** April 2022
- **Director:** Robert Eggers · **Writers:** Sjón; Robert Eggers
- **Studio / distributor:** New Regency; Focus Features
- **Genre:** Historical revenge epic / Viking action drama · **Runtime:** 137 minutes (BBFC 18)
- **Main cast:** Alexander Skarsgård (*The Legend of Tarzan*, *Big Little Lies*) as Amleth; Nicole Kidman (*Moulin Rouge!*, *The Others*) as Queen Gudrún; Claes Bang (*The Square*) as Fjölnir; Anya Taylor-Joy (*The Witch*, *Emma.*) as Olga; Ethan Hawke (*Training Day*) as King Aurvandill
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 64% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Robert Eggers has made two films so far, *The Witch* and *The Lighthouse*, and both were the kind of tightly controlled, slightly forbidding pieces that win a director a devoted following and a reputation for never compromising. The question hanging over *The Northman* is what happens when a film-maker like that is handed something close to a blockbuster budget and pointed at a Viking revenge saga. The honest answer is that he does not soften at all. He simply does the same thing on a much larger canvas, and the strangeness survives the scale.
## The setup
Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) is a Norse prince who, as a boy, watches his father the king cut down by his own brother, and barely escapes with his life across the sea. Years later he has grown into a raiding berserker, all muscle and rage, when a vision sends him back towards the unfinished business of his childhood: avenge his father, save his mother, kill his uncle. He smuggles himself into his uncle's farmstead as a slave, biding his time among the people who destroyed his family. If the bones of that sound familiar, they should. This is the legend that gave Shakespeare *Hamlet*, told back the bloody way round, before anyone thought to make the prince hesitate.
## The cast
Skarsgård carries the film physically more than verbally, which suits a character who has burned most of his humanity down to a single purpose. He is genuinely frightening in the raid sequences, and the performance lives in the body rather than the dialogue. Nicole Kidman has the film's sharpest scene as Queen Gudrún, a mother whose role in the story turns out to be more tangled than the boy's memory allowed, and she plays the shift with real relish. Claes Bang makes the usurping uncle Fjölnir a smaller, more frightened man than the myth wants him to be, which is the right choice. Anya Taylor-Joy, as the bondswoman Olga, supplies the one thread of warmth and cunning the film has, and her scenes with Skarsgård give the revenge somewhere human to stand. Ethan Hawke is gone early but lands the doomed father with weight.
## The craft
This is where the film is at its most impressive. Jarin Blaschke shoots in long, prowling takes and a cold, desaturated palette that makes tenth-century Iceland look like the end of the world. An early raid on a Slavic village plays out in what looks like one continuous shot, the camera gliding through fire and slaughter without flinching or cutting away to spare you. Eggers commits completely to the period: the rituals, the seers, the visions of valkyries and tree-roots of ancestry are presented not as metaphor but as things these people simply believed, and the film never winks at the audience about it. The score by Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough is all drone and drum and throat, and it presses down on every scene. None of this is comfortable, and none of it is meant to be.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Conan the Barbarian*, another tale of a boy who watches his family destroyed and spends a lifetime sharpening himself into the instrument of revenge, and *The Northman* is the same story told with arthouse seriousness instead of pulp swagger. It rhymes with *Gladiator* in its structure, a wronged man infiltrating the household of the powerful to bring it down, though Eggers has no interest in Ridley Scott's crowd-pleasing uplift. The closer cousin is Nicolas Winding Refn's *Valhalla Rising*, which shares the mud, the dread and the willingness to let a Norse film become a fever dream. Set against the director's own *The Witch* and *The Lighthouse*, this is recognisably the same sensibility scaled up, the folk-horror eye now turned on a battlefield.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split is wide and worth pausing on. Critics are close to unanimous, sitting around 90%, drawn to the craft, the conviction and the refusal to compromise. Audiences are markedly cooler at 64%, and the reason is not hard to find: this is a severe, slow-burning, genuinely brutal film that asks a mainstream crowd expecting a Viking action romp to sit instead through a mythic dirge. Both readings are correct. The film is as good as the critics say and as punishing as the audience warns. Where you land depends entirely on what you wanted from a Friday-night Viking picture, and how much bleakness you can take in one sitting.
## Verdict
I admire this enormously and I am in no hurry to watch it again, and those two facts are what fix my score. The craft is close to flawless, the world-building is total, and Eggers has made something with a real point of view in a genre that usually settles for spectacle. What it lacks, for me, is the pull that brings you back: it is so relentless, so committed to its own severity, that it impresses more than it invites. That is a high-quality reservation rather than a real complaint. For atmosphere, conviction and sheer film-making muscle it is one of the best things in cinemas this spring, and it deserves to be seen properly even if you only do it once. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Best seen on a big screen with the sound turned up, where the raids and the score can do their work.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Northman* underperformed at the box office on release, the predictable fate of an uncompromising 18-rated epic with a studio budget, but it has settled into a strong reputation as one of the defining serious genre films of its year and a high point for the Viking picture. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on Universal's platforms depending on region. Eggers followed it with a long-planned remake of *Nosferatu*, confirming that the budget on *The Northman* did nothing to dilute his sensibility.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **18** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, gore, sexual violence, sex, nudity*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of strong bloody violence, including stabbings and decapitations. A man is repeatedly head-butted. In another scene, a man is stabbed through the nose in profile. Gore includes sight of a man falling to the ground with organs spilling from an open wound, and the brief image of the mutilated bodies of two men pinned to a hut. There are scenes in which children are killed, the implied killing of a dog, and the decapitation of a horse.
**Threat and horror:** There are scenes of threat.
**Sex:** There are scenes of sex that feature buttock nudity and thrusting detail, and occasional sex references.
**Drugs:** People take psychotropic drugs as part of rituals.
**Sexual violence and sexual threat:** There are brief moments of sexual violence including sight of women being pinned to the ground and women being chased and grabbed by men. There are also verbal references to rape. In one scene, a woman reveals her vulva - which is stained with menstrual blood - in order to deter a man from raping her. There is also a brief scene in which a woman makes unwanted sexual advances towards her adult son who quickly condemns her behaviour.
**Nudity:** There is breast, buttock and genital nudity.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-northman-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdaxndq0)).*
================================================================================
## The Adam Project (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-adam-project
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-adam-project.md
- published: 2022-03-26
- document_id: 1171
> Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds make an unashamed throwback to the family time-travel adventure, and the warmth carries the borrowed parts. 8/10.
- **UK release:** March 2022 (Netflix)
- **Director:** Shawn Levy · **Writers:** Jonathan Tropper, T. S. Nowlin, Jennifer Flackett, Mark Levin
- **Studio / distributor:** Skydance Media; 21 Laps Entertainment; Maximum Effort; Netflix
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / family time-travel comedy · **Runtime:** 106 minutes (BBFC 12)
- **Main cast:** Ryan Reynolds (*Deadpool*, *Free Guy*) as Adam Reed; Walker Scobell as young Adam; Mark Ruffalo (*Spotlight*, *The Avengers*) as Louis Reed; Jennifer Garner (*Alias*, *13 Going on 30*) as Ellie Reed; Zoe Saldaña (*Avatar*, *Guardians of the Galaxy*) as Laura
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 68% critics / 73% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds clearly had fun on *Free Guy* last year, and *The Adam Project* arrives as the second instalment of what is starting to look like a working partnership. This one drops straight onto Netflix rather than into cinemas, and it wears its inspirations openly: a kid, a grown man, a piece of impossible technology, and a journey through time to set something right. The film it most wants to be is *Back to the Future*, by way of *Flight of the Navigator*, and it is not embarrassed about that for a second. The surprise is how much of it lands on feeling rather than mechanics.
## The setup
A fighter pilot from 2050, Adam Reed, steals a time-jet and crash-lands in 2022, well off his intended mark, and finds himself sheltering in his own childhood home. There he runs into the one person he was never supposed to meet: himself at twelve, a mouthy, asthmatic kid still raw from losing his father. The older Adam needs the younger one to get the jet working again and to reach a fixed point further back, where the technology that breaks the future was first switched on. What starts as a salvage mission turns into something the adult version has spent decades avoiding, a reckoning with the family he left behind and the grief he never properly faced. The plot moves on time-travel rails you will recognise, and the script knows you recognise them; it spends its energy elsewhere.
## The cast
The film lives or dies on whether you buy the two Adams as the same person, and the casting solves that early. Walker Scobell, in his first real role, does an uncanny job of doing Ryan Reynolds, the same clipped sarcasm and rapid deflection, only without the years of armour. Reynolds plays the older model with a tiredness under the patter that he does not always let himself reach, the wisecracks worn thin from use. Their double act is the best thing here, two people who are each other's least favourite company forced to share a cockpit.
Around them the casting is shrewd. Mark Ruffalo brings his usual rumpled decency to Louis Reed, the physicist father whose work set all of this in motion, and his scenes with both Adams carry the emotional load the action cannot. Jennifer Garner has less to do as the widowed mother but makes a single late conversation count for a great deal. Zoe Saldaña turns up as a fellow pilot from the future and reminds you, in not many minutes, how much presence she can bring to a thinly written part.
## The craft
Levy directs this as a brisk, good-natured ride rather than a puzzle box. Tobias Schliessler's photography keeps the woods and the lake-house autumn looking like a memory, which suits a film about going home. The action is clean and weightless in the modern Netflix manner, lightsaber-adjacent energy weapons and a fair amount of digital sheen, and it never threatens to overwhelm the human business at the centre. Rob Simonsen's score does a lot of quiet work, and the soundtrack reaches for a few obvious needle-drops that earn their place. At 106 minutes the film does not outstay itself, which on a streaming platform built for second-screen drifting is no small virtue.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Back to the Future*, and *The Adam Project* cannot match Zemeckis for clockwork plotting; its time logic is best not poked too hard. Where it scores is on the territory of *Frequency*, the idea that the real wound a time machine can heal is a family one, a son getting to say the thing to a parent that life never allowed. It is warmer and less wide-eyed than *Flight of the Navigator*, and it shares the comic register of *Free Guy* without that film's high concept. None of these comparisons flatter it, exactly, but they place it in good company, the company of films that use science fiction to get at something domestic.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical verdict is mixed-positive, hovering around 68%, with audiences a little warmer at 73%. The recurring complaint is fair: this is familiar, derivative, a film assembled from parts you have seen before. I would not argue with a word of it, and I still think it is being marked a touch harshly. The familiarity is the point of the exercise, not a failure of it; the film is doing on purpose what the eighties adventures did by instinct, and the cast sell the sentiment well enough to carry the parts that are second-hand.
## Verdict
This is comfort cinema done with more care than it had to be. The two-Adams conceit gives it a genuine spine, the supporting cast lift the quieter scenes above their weight, and the whole thing is paced to be watched again on a wet Sunday without effort. It is not clever about time travel and it is not trying to be. What it gets right is the feeling, a film about wishing you could go back and say the right thing, told with enough wit to stop it turning maudlin. I will happily rewatch it, which counts for a lot in my book. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Netflix worldwide from 11 March 2022.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Adam Project* settled in as one of Netflix's most-watched films of its year, and the Levy and Reynolds partnership rolled straight on, the pair reuniting on the cinema-scale *Deadpool & Wolverine* in 2024. The film remains a Netflix exclusive and has become exactly the kind of reliable rewatch it was built to be.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12** by the BBFC for *language, threat, violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC classified the film 12 for its Netflix streaming release (classified 10 March 2022), with the consumer advice *language, threat, violence*. The full per-category Content Advice (Violence, Threat and horror, Language) could not be retrieved from the BBFC release page at the time of writing; only the short consumer advice line above is quoted here.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-adam-project-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0xmdazmjc4)).*
================================================================================
## The Batman (2022)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-batman
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-batman.md
- published: 2022-03-07
- document_id: 1176
> Matt Reeves throws out the origin story and the gadgets and makes Batman a detective again, in a three-hour rain-soaked noir that is grim, gorgeous and weirdly gripping. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** March 2022
- **Director:** Matt Reeves · **Writers:** Matt Reeves, Peter Craig
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; DC Films
- **Genre:** Neo-noir superhero detective thriller · **Runtime:** 176 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Robert Pattinson (*Tenet*, *Good Time*) as Bruce Wayne / Batman; Zoë Kravitz (*Mad Max: Fury Road*) as Selina Kyle; Paul Dano (*There Will Be Blood*, *Prisoners*) as Edward Nashton; Jeffrey Wright (*Westworld*) as Lieutenant James Gordon
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 85% critics / 87% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
We have had a lot of Batmen. Burton's gothic pantomime, Schumacher's neon disaster, Nolan's grounded trilogy that more or less rewrote what a superhero film could be. The reasonable question hanging over Matt Reeves arriving with yet another one, barely a decade after *The Dark Knight Rises*, is what on earth there is left to say. Reeves answers it by quietly ignoring most of what we expect from the character. There is no origin story, no murdered parents in an alley, no playboy charm. He has taken the oldest and least-used part of the mythology, the line about the world's greatest detective, and built a three-hour rain-soaked crime film around it.
## The setup
It is Bruce Wayne's second year prowling Gotham, and the city has not noticed any improvement. He is still a bruised, sleepless figure who beats people in subways and writes in a journal, less a symbol of hope than a rumour the criminals trade nervously among themselves. Then a killer calling himself the Riddler (Paul Dano) starts murdering Gotham's powerful, leaving taunting ciphers addressed personally to the Batman at each scene. Working alongside the one honest cop in the building, Lieutenant Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), and crossing paths with a cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz) who has her own reasons for prowling the same rooftops, Bruce follows the puzzles into the city's rotten foundations, and finds the corruption runs closer to home than he would like.
## The cast
Robert Pattinson is the gamble that pays off. He plays Bruce as a recessive, almost feral presence, all smudged eyeliner and downward stares, more interested in evidence than in being liked. It is a brave reading of a part that usually trades on charisma, and it works because Pattinson commits to the strangeness rather than apologising for it. Zoë Kravitz gives Selina real weight and hurt, and the chemistry between them is the closest the film comes to warmth. Jeffrey Wright is excellent as Gordon, grounding the whole thing in tired procedural decency. And Paul Dano, who has been playing unsettling for years, makes the Riddler genuinely frightening, a furious nobody radicalised by his own grievances. Colin Farrell, buried under prosthetics as a wheedling Penguin, is so unrecognisable he deserves a credit of his own.
## The craft
Greig Fraser shoots Gotham as a permanently nocturnal, sodium-lit hell, all reflections in wet asphalt and headlights cutting through rain, and it is one of the best-looking blockbusters in years. Reeves stages the detective work with patience, letting scenes breathe in a way superhero films almost never dare, and when the action does land it has real impact: a corridor lit only by muzzle flashes, a car chase that ends with the Batmobile emerging from a wall of fire. Michael Giacchino's score is a brooding four-note dirge that worms into your head and earns comparison with Nolan-era Zimmer. It is long, no question, and the back third tests your patience. But the atmosphere is so total that the running time feels less like padding than immersion.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is not another Batman film but David Fincher. This is *Se7en* and *Zodiac* in a cowl: the same fascination with patient investigation, serial-killer dread, and a city sick to its bones. The comic faithful will spot the bones of Frank Miller's *Batman: Year One* and the Jeph Loeb *Long Halloween* run, and the noir lineage reaches all the way back to *Chinatown*, where the detective discovers the conspiracy is bigger and dirtier than the case he started with. Against the Nolan films, Reeves trades that trilogy's clockwork plotting and grand themes for mood and texture. It is less interested in arguing about chaos and order than in soaking you in a single oppressive place.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm, sitting around 85%, with audiences a touch higher at 87%, and for once they are roughly in agreement. The praise lands on Fraser's photography, the detective framing and Pattinson, while the recurring complaint is the length and the unrelenting grimness. Both are fair. This is a film with no jokes and very little daylight, and three hours of it is a commitment. But the gloom is the texture, not a flaw to be sanded off, and anyone hoping for the wisecracking quip-machine of the team-up films was always going to bounce off it.
## Verdict
This is the Batman film I did not know I wanted: slow, soaked, and confident enough to make a superhero spend most of his screen time reading clues. It rewards attention, it looks extraordinary, and the atmosphere is the kind I will happily sink back into, which for me counts for a great deal. It overstays its welcome slightly, and the relentless misery will not be for everyone. But on craft, mood and sheer rewatchable texture it lands well above the average blockbuster, and a notch above where I expected it to. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, in IMAX where you can get to a screen. A streaming home on the Warner platforms and a disc release will follow in the coming months.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Batman* did strong enough business to anchor a planned franchise, with Reeves and Pattinson signed for a sequel, *The Batman Part II*, and a Gotham-set spin-off series (*The Penguin*, with Colin Farrell reprising the role) developed for streaming. The film has settled into its reputation as one of the better stand-alone superhero pictures of its era, admired for its detective focus and cinematography even by those who find it overlong. It now streams on the Warner platform (HBO Max / Max, by region) and is widely available on 4K disc and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong threat, violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes include shootings, fistfights, electrocutions, and sequences in which people are repeatedly punched or bludgeoned. There is occasional sight of blood and injury detail. Mutilated bodies are found at crime scenes, and there is sight of a severed thumb.
**Threat and horror:** Scenes include people in states of terror and distress after being placed in elaborate death traps. The tone is frequently dark and menacing, and includes scenes of gun threat and acts of terrorism.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k') as well as milder terms including 'prick', 'dick', 'fricking', 'bastard', 'son of a bitch', 'shit', 'God', 'hell', 'Jesus', and 'Christ'.
**Sex:** There are moderate sex references, and a sequence in which a man watches a woman changing her clothes through her window.
**Drugs:** People are seen administering an unnamed illegal drug.
**Suicide and self-harm:** References are made to suicide and mental health.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-batman-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc01mzi3otm)).*
================================================================================
## The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-matrix-resurrections
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-matrix-resurrections.md
- published: 2022-01-02
- document_id: 1202
> Lana Wachowski reopens the Matrix eighteen years on, half a sequel and half an argument about sequels. The action is the weakest it has ever been and the romance the strongest, and it is more interesting than the scores suggest. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** December 2021
- **Director:** Lana Wachowski · **Writers:** Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, Aleksandar Hemon
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Village Roadshow Pictures
- **Genre:** Cyberpunk science fiction action / legacy sequel · **Runtime:** 148 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Keanu Reeves (*The Matrix*, *John Wick*) as Neo / Thomas Anderson; Carrie-Anne Moss (*The Matrix*, *Memento*) as Trinity / Tiffany; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (*Aquaman*) as Morpheus; Jessica Henwick as Bugs
- **IMDb:** 5.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 63% critics / 63% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Eighteen years after *The Matrix Revolutions* seemed to bury the trilogy under its own portent, the green rain is back, and this time only one of the two directors has returned with it. Lana Wachowski makes *Resurrections* without her sister Lilly, without the brawl choreographers and the wirework crew that defined the originals, and apparently without much patience for the idea that a fourth Matrix film should exist at all. The result is the rare blockbuster that spends its first act mocking the studio that paid for it, then dares you to keep watching once the joke has been made.
## The setup
Thomas Anderson is a celebrated games designer, the man behind a legendary trilogy called, with a straight face, *The Matrix*. He is medicated, comfortable, faintly haunted, and convinced by a kindly analyst that the visions of another life are episodes to be managed rather than memories to be trusted. Across the cafe most mornings sits a woman named Tiffany, a wife and mother who reminds him of someone he cannot name. When a new crew of rebels comes hammering at the walls of his very pleasant prison, the old question returns in a new shape: not simply whether the world is real, but whether a man can be talked out of the one thing he knows.
That is as far as I will take it. The pleasure of the opening hour is watching the film unpick its own mythology in plain sight, and a synopsis that gives away how would spoil the trick.
## The cast
Keanu Reeves has aged into the role rather than out of it. The blankness that once read as messianic now reads as exhaustion, and it suits a Neo who has spent two decades being told his memories are a malfunction. He is quieter here, sadder, and more moving for it. Carrie-Anne Moss is the film's centre of gravity. Trinity was always more than a sidekick, and *Resurrections* finally makes the relationship its engine rather than its reward, with Moss carrying a grown woman's worth of buried life behind a suburban smile.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II takes on Morpheus and wisely declines to impersonate Laurence Fishburne, playing instead a younger, glossier reconstruction of the part with real wit. Jessica Henwick's Bugs, the blue-haired captain who refuses to let a legend stay retired, is the most purely enjoyable newcomer the franchise has fielded, and Neil Patrick Harris does smooth, smiling menace as the analyst better than the script entirely deserves.
## The craft
This is where the film and I part company a little. John Toll's photography is handsome and bright, almost too bright, trading the trilogy's clammy green murk for clean daylight, which is a defensible choice that costs the film some of its old dread. The bigger problem is the action. The Wachowskis once changed how Hollywood shot a fight; here the set pieces are busy, choppy and oddly weightless, shot and cut without the geometric clarity that made bullet-time worth slowing down for. A film this self-aware about its own legacy cannot afford to be outclassed by its own opening sequence, and at times it is.
What does work is the emotional architecture and the ideas underneath it. Wachowski is plainly more interested in repetition, nostalgia and the machinery of franchise comfort than in another rooftop chase, and when the film leans into that it has a melancholy intelligence the action never matches. The Klimek and Tykwer score keeps the mood unsettled rather than triumphant.
## How it stacks up
Against the original *The Matrix*, this is a lesser action film and a stranger, more personal one. The 1999 picture was lightning in a bottle, a perfect machine; *Resurrections* knows it can never be that and turns the knowledge into its subject, closer in spirit to the heart-on-sleeve sprawl of Wachowski's own *Cloud Atlas* than to the clockwork of the first film. The obvious cousin is *Tron: Legacy*, another belated return to a cult digital world that looked gorgeous and moved its feet less surely than its forebear. As a legacy sequel that interrogates the very impulse to make legacy sequels, it has more on its mind than most.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics and audiences have landed in the same divided place, both around 63%, which is unusual and telling. Admirers single out the romance and the cheek of the meta-commentary; detractors find the action limp and the self-reference exhausting, a film too busy winking to thrill. Both sides are right about the thing they noticed. Where I differ from the harsher verdicts is on whether the trade was worth making. A clever, sincere, slightly broken film about love and memory interests me more than a competent retread would have, even when its punches do not connect.
## Verdict
*Resurrections* is the weakest Matrix film as an action picture and one of the more thoughtful as a piece of science fiction about why we keep returning to the same stories. I value intelligent genre filmmaking and ideas that earn their place, and this has both; it also has a love story that finally pays off two films of groundwork. The fights let it down, the daylight palette drains some of the atmosphere, and it will not convert anyone who came purely for the kung fu. But it is more memorable and more rewatchable than its reputation, and braver than it had any commercial reason to be. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. Streaming in the UK on Sky Cinema and NOW from launch.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: as of this writing *Resurrections* remains the final Matrix film, its disappointing box office having stalled talk of a fifth entry, though Warner Bros. has since announced a new Matrix film with a different director attached. Its standing has settled roughly where it opened, admired by a vocal minority for its romance and meta-textual nerve and dismissed by many for its action. It is widely available on 4K Blu-ray and digital, and streams on Max in regions where that service operates.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** The film features scenes of strong violence when shootouts result in bloody detail. There are also fantasy sequences which include a woman breaking a man's jaw and slitting his throat, as well as scenes of martial arts violence.
**Threat and horror:** Moderate horror images include a man's mouth being sealed up by his own skin. There are also sequences of threat when a character is unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f***k') and a use of 'bitch' as well as milder terms.
**Additional issues:** There are suicide references when a man is shown leaping from a building. Infrequent sex references are comic.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-matrix-resurrections-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc01mzmymje)).*
================================================================================
## Spider-Man - No Way Home (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-spider-man-no-way-home
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-spider-man-no-way-home.md
- published: 2021-12-23
- document_id: 1160
> Jon Watts closes out his trilogy by tearing a hole in the multiverse and letting twenty years of Spider-Man through it. It runs on nostalgia, and it knows it, but Holland's Peter earns the weight by the end. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** December 2021
- **Director:** Jon Watts · **Writers:** Chris McKenna; Erik Sommers
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Marvel Studios; Pascal Pictures (Sony)
- **Genre:** Superhero multiverse adventure · **Runtime:** 148 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Holland (*The Impossible*, *Spider-Man: Homecoming*) as Peter Parker / Spider-Man; Zendaya (*The Greatest Showman*, *Dune*) as MJ; Benedict Cumberbatch (*The Imitation Game*, *Doctor Strange*) as Doctor Strange; Willem Dafoe (*Spider-Man*, *The Lighthouse*) as Norman Osborn / Green Goblin
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 98% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
The Marvel machine has been threatening a multiverse for a couple of years now, mostly as a marketing word, and *No Way Home* is the first film where the idea earns its keep rather than just teasing the next one. It arrives at the end of Jon Watts's trilogy, after the smaller, John Hughes-flavoured *Homecoming* and the holiday-postcard *Far From Home*, and it has a problem none of them did: the last film ended by telling the entire world that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. That cliffhanger turns out to be the engine for the whole thing, and the surprise is how much genuine feeling the film wrings from a premise that began as fan-convention wish-fulfilment.
## The setup
Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is eighteen, unmasked, and the most famous and most hated boy in New York. His friends MJ and Ned are caught in the blast radius of his exposure, college doors are closing on all three of them, and Peter does what any overwhelmed teenager with a sorcerer on speed dial would do: he asks Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to make everyone forget. The spell goes wrong in the way spells always do, and the seams between universes split open. Through the gaps come people who already know exactly who Spider-Man is, because in their world they fought a different one. I will keep the rest behind the curtain, because half the pleasure of this film is watching who steps through the next portal.
## The cast
Holland has spent two films being the most likeable Spider-Man on screen and the least burdened, and here he finally carries the weight that the role has always promised. The cockiness gets stripped away scene by scene, and by the closing act he is doing the heaviest dramatic work of his run. Zendaya's MJ is more than the love interest the part could have been, dry and watchful and quietly braver than Peter. Cumberbatch plays Strange as an exasperated adult stuck babysitting a teenager who keeps rewriting reality, and the friction is funnier than it has any right to be. The returning villains are the casting coup, and Willem Dafoe in particular treats the Green Goblin not as nostalgia but as a genuine threat, gleeful and frightening in equal measure. He is the best thing in the film whenever he is on screen.
## The craft
Watts has always been a sturdy rather than a flashy director, and that steadiness pays off when the plot threatens to fly apart. The action is legible, which is rarer than it should be in this genre; you can follow a fight across a collapsing building and always know where everyone is. Michael Giacchino's score quietly reaches back to themes the audience has been carrying for two decades, and the film uses that memory rather than just sampling it. The middle act sags a little under the sheer admin of managing so many characters, and a couple of the digital set-pieces have the weightless gloss the studio cannot seem to shake. But the final stretch lands its emotional punches cleanly, and the design never loses sight of the small human story buried under the spectacle.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Avengers: Endgame*, another film that runs on the audience's accumulated history, and *No Way Home* is the more disciplined of the two: tighter, more personal, less concerned with closing ledgers. It is not as formally inventive as *Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse*, which did the multiverse as art rather than event, and it does not match the clean two-hander tragedy of Sam Raimi's *Spider-Man 2*, still the high bar for the character. What it does, and does better than almost any film of its kind, is make a crossover feel like it costs the hero something. The nostalgia is the bait; the consequences are the meal.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split here is narrow and revealing. Critics sit at 93%, warm but with the usual reservation that the film leans hard on fan service and franchise memory. Audiences are at a near-unheard-of 98%, because for them the fan service is the gift, not the flaw. Both are right. If you have no history with these characters, a good deal of the film's charge simply will not reach you, and the structure will look like a clever delivery system for cameos. If you do have that history, it plays like a reward two decades in the making. I land closer to the audience, with the critic's caveat noted and filed.
## Verdict
This is a film built almost entirely on goodwill the franchise has banked over twenty years, and it knows it, which is the difference between cynicism and craft. It would be nothing without the memory it draws on; with it, it is the most emotionally satisfying entry in this Spider-Man run and one of the few Marvel films of late that actually lets a choice hurt. The plumbing of the multiverse plot creaks, the studio gloss flattens a scene or two, and a newcomer will get less from it than I did. None of that stops it being enormously enjoyable and the kind of thing I will happily put on again. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in standard, IMAX and 3D. A disc and digital release will follow in the new year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *No Way Home* became one of the highest-grossing films of its era and effectively rehabilitated the multiverse as a workable big-screen idea, which the MCU then chased through *Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness* (2022) and beyond. Tom Holland's Peter returns in a fourth film, *Spider-Man: Brand New Day*, picking up the deliberately humbled status quo this one leaves him in. It now streams on Disney+ in most regions and is widely available on 4K disc and digital, with the extended "More Fun Stuff" cut released theatrically the following year.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Characters battle using fantastical powers and tech, and there are scenes of hand-to-hand combat which feature heavy punches.
**Threat and horror:** Scenes include people fleeing from explosions, falling from heights, and brief jump scares as different villains appear.
**Flashing/flickering lights:** This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
**Additional issues:** There are mild sex references. Language is largely mild ('shit', 'bastard', 'ass') or very mild ('God', 'hell', 'damn', 'screwed', 'moron'). There is an incomplete use of "What the f-", and a man carries a mug which has a pictorial play on strong language. There is also an undetailed drug reference.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/spider-man-no-way-home-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc01mzmxmtq)).*
================================================================================
## Don't Look Up (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-dont-look-up
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-dont-look-up.md
- published: 2021-12-19
- document_id: 1068
> Adam McKay aims a star-loaded satire at a planet that will not listen, and lands more of its punches than the reviews suggest. Broad, angry, very funny in places, and a touch too pleased with itself. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** December 2021
- **Director:** Adam McKay · **Writer:** Adam McKay (story by Adam McKay and David Sirota)
- **Studio / distributor:** Hyperobject Industries; Bluegrass Films; Netflix
- **Genre:** Satirical disaster comedy / political science fiction · **Runtime:** 138 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Leonardo DiCaprio (*The Revenant*, *Inception*) as Dr Randall Mindy; Jennifer Lawrence (*The Hunger Games*, *Silver Linings Playbook*) as Kate Dibiasky; Meryl Streep (*The Devil Wears Prada*, *The Iron Lady*) as President Orlean; Jonah Hill (*Moneyball*, *The Wolf of Wall Street*) as Jason Orlean
- **IMDb:** 7.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 56% critics / 78% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Adam McKay has spent the last few years turning serious subjects into comic forensics. *The Big Short* made collateralised debt obligations into a punchline you could follow, and *Vice* did much the same for Dick Cheney. *Don't Look Up* extends that run to the largest target he has taken on, the end of the world, and the apparatus that would rather argue about it than do anything. The premise is almost too neat: a planet-killer is coming, the science is settled, and nobody with any power can be bothered to act. The interesting question is whether a film this furious can also be funny, and for long stretches it manages both.
## The setup
Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), a PhD candidate, spots a previously uncatalogued comet. Her supervisor, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), runs the numbers and finds it is roughly nine kilometres across and on a direct collision course with Earth, about six months out. That should be the most important fact on the planet. Instead the two scientists are shuttled from a distracted White House to a breakfast television sofa where bad news rates poorly, and watch the warning of their lives get reframed as a vibe, a meme, and finally a business opportunity. The film tracks what happens to the truth as it passes through people who have every incentive to misread it.
## The cast
The casting is the loudest thing in the film and mostly the smartest. DiCaprio plays against his own gravity here, giving Mindy a clammy, anxious decency that curdles as fame finds him, and it is a more interesting performance than the role looks on paper. Lawrence has the harder job and the better part, the one person allowed to react like a human being, and her flat, baffled rage is the film's anchor. Meryl Streep clearly relishes President Orlean, a populist with the attention span of a news cycle, and Jonah Hill, as her chief-of-staff son, lands a particular kind of smirking entitlement. The supporting bench is deep enough to be distracting, with Cate Blanchett and Mark Rylance both doing precise, chilly work, but the ensemble occasionally tips into stunt casting for its own sake.
## The craft
McKay and editor Hank Corwin keep the film jittery on purpose, cutting away to stock footage, social feeds and reaction shots so that no scene sits still long enough to breathe. It is the same restless grammar as *The Big Short*, and it suits a story about a culture that cannot hold a thought. Nicholas Britell's score does real work underneath the noise, swelling into genuine dread whenever the film stops mugging, and the late stretch finds a stillness the first two hours keep interrupting. The trouble is tonal consistency. The satire is broad by design, the targets are the size of barns, and a lighter touch would have drawn more blood than the sledgehammer does. When it slows down and trusts the actors, it is far stronger than when it is elbowing you in the ribs.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is *Dr Strangelove*, the gold standard for laughing at extinction, and *Don't Look Up* is nowhere near that controlled. It owes more to *Network*, with its vision of catastrophe processed into ratings, and to *Idiocracy*, with its faith that the dumbest possible response is the likeliest one. Against *Armageddon* it is the anti-blockbuster, the disaster film where nobody competent is allowed to save the day. And it is recognisably McKay's own *The Big Short* turned outward: the same fury at institutional denial, the same trick of making the audience the only people in the room who can see the cliff. It is blunter than any of them, but the target is broader too.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have split hard, sitting around 56%, with the recurring complaint that the satire is obvious and pleased with itself, preaching to a choir that already agrees. Audiences are warmer, up near 78%, and the gap is telling. The critics are not wrong that the film lacks subtlety. But subtlety was never the assignment. The charge that it is too on-the-nose assumes the nose in question deserves gentler handling, and plenty of viewers, watching the news, evidently disagree. As a Netflix release it has the reach to start arguments at scale, which is precisely what it wants.
## Verdict
This is messier and angrier than McKay's best work, and a sharper edit would have made it land harder. The broad satire caps how often I would return to it, and a couple of the cameos pull focus for no reward. But the central performances are excellent, the dread underneath the comedy is real, and when it lands it lands hard. It is the rare big-cast issue film that is actually about something and is not boring about it. Not a classic, but a good deal better than its reviews, and the kind of film you end up quoting at people. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Netflix from 24 December 2021, after a short UK cinema run from 10 December.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Don't Look Up* became one of Netflix's most-watched films on release and drew four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Its reputation has settled along the same fault line it opened on, beloved by viewers who read it as the only honest film about the climate and denial, dismissed by critics who found it smug. It remains on Netflix, where it has stayed a regularly revisited title.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('f**k'). Milder terms include 'prick', 'pussy', 'cooch', 'skank', 'shit', 'screw', 'bullshit', 'asshole', 'ass' and 'crap'.
**Additional issues:** There are scenes of moderate fantasy threat. There are brief scenes involving misuse of Xanax and marijuana, as well as passing comic references to MDMA and cocaine. There is a fleeting image of a couple kissing and embracing in bed, with visible breast nudity; another scene features non-sexualised full frontal and rear nudity. There are also moderate comic verbal references to pornography, erections, 'sexting' and 'screwing', as well as use of 'f**k' in the sexual sense. There are infrequent comic scenes of racist behaviour and references to racism, such as when a white man refers to "both kinds" of 'Indians': "the ones with the elephants and the ones with bows and arrows". Other issues include mild violence and very brief images of moderate bloody injury detail.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/dont-look-up-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc01mzqwndi)).*
================================================================================
## Dune (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-dune
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-dune.md
- published: 2021-11-07
- document_id: 1072
> Denis Villeneuve takes on the novel that was supposed to be unfilmable and films half of it without blinking. Vast, patient and overwhelming, it is the best big-screen science fiction in years. 9.5/10.
- **UK release:** October 2021
- **Director:** Denis Villeneuve · **Writers:** Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, Eric Roth
- **Studio / distributor:** Legendary Pictures; Warner Bros.
- **Genre:** Epic science fiction / space opera · **Runtime:** 155 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Timothée Chalamet (*Call Me by Your Name*, *Lady Bird*) as Paul Atreides; Rebecca Ferguson (*Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation*) as Lady Jessica; Oscar Isaac (*Ex Machina*, *Star Wars: The Force Awakens*) as Duke Leto; Jason Momoa (*Game of Thrones*, *Aquaman*) as Duncan Idaho; Stellan Skarsgård (*Good Will Hunting*, *Chernobyl*) as Baron Harkonnen
- **IMDb:** 8.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 83% critics / 90% audience · **My rating:** 9.5 / 10
Frank Herbert's *Dune* has spent decades wearing the label "unfilmable", and the label has earned itself. Alejandro Jodorowsky tried and never shot a frame. David Lynch tried in 1984 and disowned the result. The novel is dense with internal monologue, ecological theory and invented religion, and it does not lend itself to a two-hour adventure. So the news that Denis Villeneuve, fresh from *Arrival* and *Blade Runner 2049*, had been handed the keys, and had insisted on splitting the book in two rather than compressing it, felt less like a gamble and more like the first person to read the problem correctly. He has made the calm, monumental version everyone said could not exist, and he has only filmed half of it.
## The setup
The Emperor strips the spice-rich desert world of Arrakis from the brutal House Harkonnen and hands its stewardship to House Atreides, an honour that smells of a trap from the moment it is announced. Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) takes his family and his soldiers to a planet where the indigenous Fremen want the off-worlders gone, where giant sandworms make the surface lethal, and where the most valuable substance in the universe has to be clawed out of the dunes. His son Paul (Timothée Chalamet), heir to the house and the unfinished product of a long Bene Gesserit breeding scheme, arrives already troubled by visions of a desert girl and a future he cannot read. When the trap closes, he and his mother are left to survive a planet that is trying to kill them and a prophecy that may be using them.
## The cast
Chalamet is a clever piece of casting. Paul begins as a slight, uncertain teenager, all watchfulness and no swagger, and the slow hardening of him across the film is the spine of the story. Chalamet plays the uncertainty without making the boy weak, which matters, because the swagger is meant to come later. Rebecca Ferguson is the film's quiet engine as Lady Jessica, a mother and a trained political weapon at the same time, holding terror and control in the same expression. Isaac gives Leto exactly the weary nobility a doomed good man needs, and Jason Momoa brings welcome warmth and physical ease as Duncan Idaho, the one character allowed to enjoy himself. Stellan Skarsgård, buried under prosthetics and floating through his scenes, makes Baron Harkonnen a slab of pure appetite. Around them Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem and Zendaya are given little to do yet, which is the honest cost of filming only the first half.
## The craft
This is where the film is overwhelming. Greig Fraser's photography treats Arrakis as a real and indifferent place, all bleached light and brutalist shadow, and the sense of scale is constant: ornithopters like dragonflies against ships the size of cities, soldiers reduced to specks beneath a worm. Villeneuve trusts silence and stillness the way few blockbuster directors dare, letting a scene breathe until the size of the thing lands on you. Hans Zimmer's score abandons conventional melody for throat-singing, wailing voices and percussion that you feel in the floor, and it is inseparable from the atmosphere. The production design is heavy, tactile and humourless in the best sense. There is no winking here, no apology for taking itself seriously, and the seriousness is precisely what makes the world feel inhabited rather than assembled.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Blade Runner 2049*, Villeneuve's other patient, painterly piece of science fiction, and *Dune* is the more confident film, freed from the obligation to honour somebody else's classic. Reach further back and the lineage is *Lawrence of Arabia*, another epic of empire, desert and a young man pulled towards a destiny he half wants, shot with the same respect for vast empty space. Against *Star Wars*, which lifted half its furniture from Herbert in the first place, *Dune* is the slower, graver original, less interested in fun and more interested in dread. The fair criticism is structural: this is a film with a beginning and a long middle and no ending, and you leave knowing the real climax is being held back for a sequel that has not yet been confirmed.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are admiring, sitting around 83%, with the recurring reservation being exactly that half-a-story problem and a coolness that some find airless. Audiences are warmer, near 90%, which fits a film that rewards surrender to its scale rather than analysis of its plotting. I am with the audience and then some. The complaint that it is only half a story is true and, for me, almost beside the point, because what is here is so completely realised that I want to live in it for a while before the rest arrives. The charge of airlessness reads to me as the film refusing to flatter the viewer, and I would rather that than the alternative.
## Verdict
I value intelligent science fiction, dense world-building, atmosphere and a score that does real work, and *Dune* delivers all four at a level I rarely see on this scale. It is patient without being slow, vast without being empty, and faithful to a difficult book without becoming a lecture. The unfinished shape is the only real mark against it, and it is not enough to pull the film down, because the half we have is among the most immersive things the genre has produced. I will be seeing it again, on the largest screen I can find, and I expect to keep returning to it. **9.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in IMAX if you possibly can; the sound and scale are built for it.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the sequel was confirmed shortly after release, and *Dune: Part Two* (2024) duly arrived to deliver the climax this film withholds, broadening the canvas and giving Zendaya, Bardem and the Fremen the screen time the first part could not. The pair now play as one long film, and the gamble of splitting the book looks vindicated. *Dune* swept the technical categories at the Academy Awards, including cinematography, score, sound, editing and visual effects. It is now on 4K Blu-ray and digital, and streams on the Warner platform depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, bloody images*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes include close-quarters combat with bladed weapons, including slashes and stabbings resulting in brief sight of blood. There is occasional focus on bloodied blades, or blood on hands and clothes. Other sequences depict large scale attacks in which ships and buildings are bombed and explode, and a number of deaths caused by toxic gas.
**Threat and horror:** Scenes of threat include characters being pursued and attempting to escape giant worms, flying through a sandstorm, fleeing from explosions, being held at knife point, and being targeted by remote devices that inject poison. A character is left paralysed by poison, and his body is seen naked in a chair as his enemies mock him.
**Additional issues:** There are occasional mild sex references, including in a sequence in which men's comments suggest threatening intent towards a woman. There is use of mild bad language ('ass') and milder terms including 'God', 'hell', and 'damn'. Occasional reference is made to the hallucinogenic properties of a fictional substance.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/dune-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00otg2odm)).*
================================================================================
## The Last Duel (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-last-duel
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-last-duel.md
- published: 2021-10-31
- document_id: 1198
> Ridley Scott tells one fourteenth-century crime three times over, and lets the truth settle in the gap between the versions. Grim, exact, and far better than its box office. 8/10.
- **UK release:** October 2021
- **Director:** Ridley Scott · **Writers:** Nicole Holofcener, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Studios; Scott Free Productions
- **Genre:** Historical drama / medieval legal thriller · **Runtime:** 153 minutes (BBFC 18)
- **Main cast:** Jodie Comer (*Killing Eve*) as Marguerite de Carrouges; Matt Damon (*The Martian*, *The Bourne Identity*) as Jean de Carrouges; Adam Driver (*Marriage Story*, *Star Wars: The Last Jedi*) as Jacques Le Gris; Ben Affleck (*Argo*, *The Town*) as Count Pierre d'Alençon
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 85% critics / 81% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
At eighty-three, Ridley Scott has earned the right to coast, and instead he has made the angriest film of his late career. *The Last Duel* takes the structure everyone reaches for when they describe this sort of story, *Rashomon*, the same crime told from three points of view, and uses it for something sharper than a parlour trick about the unknowability of truth. Scott built his reputation on men in armour swinging swords at each other; here he spends two and a half hours showing you exactly how little their version of events is worth.
## The setup
France, 1386. The knight Jean de Carrouges returns from war to find his standing in ruins and his friendship with the squire Jacques Le Gris turned to rivalry under their shared patron, Count Pierre d'Alençon. Then Carrouges's wife, Marguerite, accuses Le Gris of raping her while her husband was away. Le Gris denies it. With no witnesses and no court willing to settle the matter, Carrouges petitions the king for trial by combat: a duel to the death in which God is presumed to side with the man telling the truth, and in which, by the law of the day, Marguerite will be burned alive if her husband loses. The film hands the same months to three narrators in turn, each chapter headed "the truth according to" its teller, and lets you watch the same rooms and the same words shift under the weight of who is remembering them.
## The cast
The triptych structure is unkind to actors, since each of them has to play two or three subtly different versions of one person, and the cast is up to it. Matt Damon, buried under a scarred face and a foul temper, gives Carrouges a wounded pride that curdles into something close to vanity by his own telling. Adam Driver makes Le Gris plausibly charming and quietly monstrous in the same breath, which is the whole difficulty of the part. Ben Affleck, blond and openly enjoying himself as the dissolute Count, supplies the film's only real wit. But the picture belongs to Jodie Comer. Marguerite is held at the edge of the men's chapters and then handed the third one outright, and Comer carries the shift from object to witness without a wasted gesture. Hers is the version the film believes, and she earns that trust frame by frame.
## The craft
Scott shoots medieval France as cold, muddy and unglamorous, all grey stone and breath fogging in the air, with none of the burnished warmth of *Gladiator*. Dariusz Wolski's photography keeps the world plausible rather than pretty. The triptych is handled with real discipline: the repeated scenes are blocked almost identically, so that a softened line of dialogue or a held glance does the work, and you find yourself watching for the differences like evidence. Harry Gregson-Williams's score stays low and dread-filled rather than swelling. The title duel, when it finally arrives, is brutal, clumsy and exhausting in the right way, two frightened men in heavy steel hacking at each other in the mud while a crowd watches a woman's life hang on the outcome. Scott stages it as horror, not spectacle, and that judgement is the film's making.
## How it stacks up
The obvious reference is *Rashomon*, and *The Last Duel* knows it, but Kurosawa left the truth genuinely suspended while Scott does not: the third account is plainly the real one, and the film is the better for taking a side. Against Scott's own historical work it sits closest to *Kingdom of Heaven* in setting, though it is colder and more interior, with none of that film's crusader sweep. The nearer cousin is something like a courtroom drama in chainmail, a study of how an institution processes a woman's word and finds it worth less than a man's wounded honour. For all the armour, the duel is the smaller subject. The trial around it is the larger one.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have come down firmly in favour, sitting around 85%, with most of the praise going to the structure, the seriousness of the third chapter and Comer's performance. Audiences are a notch behind at 81%, and the film has been a conspicuous flop in cinemas, which says more about selling a grim medieval drama to a post-pandemic multiplex than about the work itself. The complaint worth taking seriously is the runtime: at two and a half hours the repetition can feel like a point being made twice before it is made a third time. I felt the length and did not much mind it, because the structure needs the patience to pay off.
## Verdict
This is a hard film to love and an easy one to admire. It is grim by design, it asks a lot of your afternoon, and the central event is staged precisely so that you cannot enjoy it. None of that is a flaw; it is the film working as intended. Comer is extraordinary, the structure is more than a gimmick, and Scott has made the rare late-period epic with a real argument inside it. What it gives up is rewatchability, since I am in no hurry to sit through that third chapter again, and that is what keeps the number where it is rather than higher. A serious, exact, unexpectedly furious piece of work that deserved a far better reception than it got. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. One for the big screen if you can stand the subject; a film to brace yourself for, not to wander into.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the box-office failure stuck, and the film has become the case study people reach for when arguing that grown-up cinema struggled to pull audiences back into multiplexes after the pandemic. Its reputation has only risen since, with Comer's performance in particular singled out as one of the year's best and the screenplay's structure aging well. It is now on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+ in the UK.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **18** by the BBFC for *sexual violence, strong bloody violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are scenes of strong bloody violence in which people battle with bladed weapons, including stabbings and decapitations. There are also scenes of domestic violence in which men inflict violence on women.
**Sexual violence and sexual threat:** There is a protracted scene of sexual violence in which a man rapes a woman, seen from the perspective of the perpetrator and victim. The sequence is preceded by growing sexual threat, in which the woman is chased and overpowered.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of both very strong language ('c\*\*t') and strong language ('f\*\*k').
**Sex:** Scenes of sex include thrusting and implied masturbation, as well as full frontal nudity. There are occasional verbal sex references.
**Nudity:** There is sexualised nudity, including during an orgy.
**Theme:** A theme of the narrative is the prejudicial treatment of women within the historical setting.
**Drugs:** A substance is smoked, which may be a drug.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-last-duel-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc01mzi2nju)).*
================================================================================
## No Time to Die (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-no-time-to-die
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-no-time-to-die.md
- published: 2021-10-03
- document_id: 1127
> Daniel Craig signs off after fifteen years with the longest, saddest and most committed Bond of his run. It overreaches and it lingers, and it earns the goodbye anyway. 8/10.
- **UK release:** September 2021
- **Director:** Cary Joji Fukunaga · **Writers:** Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Cary Joji Fukunaga, Phoebe Waller-Bridge
- **Studio / distributor:** Eon Productions; MGM; Universal Pictures
- **Genre:** Espionage action thriller / franchise farewell · **Runtime:** 163 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Daniel Craig (*Casino Royale*, *Skyfall*) as James Bond; Léa Seydoux (*Spectre*) as Madeleine Swann; Rami Malek (*Bohemian Rhapsody*) as Lyutsifer Safin; Lashana Lynch (*Captain Marvel*) as Nomi; Ralph Fiennes (*Skyfall*) as M
- **IMDb:** 7.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 83% critics / 88% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
When Daniel Craig walked back into Bond after *Spectre*, he famously said he would rather slash his wrists than do another one. Six years and a global delay later, here he is anyway, and the wonder of *No Time to Die* is how thoroughly that reluctance has been turned into the film's subject. This is the fifth and final Craig Bond, the longest 007 ever made, and the first one built around the idea that the man might actually want out. It is a farewell that knows it is a farewell, and it plays the whole thing for keeps.
## The setup
We open with Bond retired and off the grid in Jamaica, the wreckage of *Spectre* behind him and Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) somewhere in his past. An old friend from the CIA, Felix Leiter, pulls him back in over a kidnapped scientist and a stolen weapon: a programmable nanobot agent that can be coded to a single bloodline and kill on contact. MI6 has moved on without him, the 007 number now belongs to a younger agent, and the trail runs towards a scarred recluse named Safin (Rami Malek) whose grievance reaches further back than Bond expects. The plot is dense with returning faces and unfinished business, but the question underneath it is simpler: whether a man this defined by the job can ever put it down.
## The cast
Craig has spent five films sanding the gloss off Bond, and here he goes further than he ever has, playing weariness, suspicion and something close to tenderness without losing the cruelty that makes the character work. It is the most emotionally exposed Bond performance the series has, and he carries it. Seydoux is given far more to do than *Spectre* allowed, and the relationship finally has weight rather than the assertion of weight. Lashana Lynch's Nomi is a genuine spark, prickly and funny and entirely uninterested in being impressed by him, and Ana de Armas, in a single Cuban sequence, walks off with the most purely enjoyable stretch in the film. Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris and Ben Whishaw settle into the familiar MI6 furniture with real warmth. The weak link is the villain. Malek plays Safin quiet and damaged, but the writing keeps him at arm's length, a soft-spoken abstraction more than a presence, and a Bond film can only be as good as the person Bond is up against.
## The craft
Cary Joji Fukunaga is the first American to direct an official Bond, and he brings the patient, textured eye of *True Detective* to it. The Norway and Faroes locations are bleak and beautiful, Linus Sandgren shoots them with real depth, and the set pieces are clean and legible in a way modern action often is not. A long single-take stairwell assault near the end is the kind of thing the series rarely attempts. Hans Zimmer's score leans hard on the Bond motifs and on Louis Armstrong's *We Have All the Time in the World*, borrowed from the one previous Bond film this one most wants to be measured against. At 163 minutes it is undeniably long, and the middle act sags under the weight of everything it is trying to resolve, but Fukunaga earns the running time more often than he wastes it.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Skyfall*, still the high point of the Craig run, and *No Time to Die* does not have that film's lean inevitability or its perfect villain. It is messier and more sentimental. The braver comparison, and the one the film invites itself, is *On Her Majesty's Secret Service*, the 1969 outlier that dared to give Bond a marriage and a heart and then broke it. Craig's run has always been a long argument with that film, and this is where it pays the debt off. There is some *Logan* in the DNA too: the same instinct to take a worn-out icon, strip away the invulnerability, and let an ending actually mean something. Bond films do not usually carry consequences from one to the next. This one is the consequence.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are broadly won over, sitting around 83%, with audiences a notch higher at 88%, and the split in the reviews is predictable. The praise is for Craig, for the emotional ambition and for the willingness to commit to a real ending. The complaints are the length and the underpowered villain, both fair. A few longtime fans bristle at how far the film pushes Bond from the unattached killing machine of the Connery era. I land on the warm side of that argument. The reviewer in me values espionage that carries a pulse and an ending that costs something, and on both counts this delivers more than I expected from a fifth entry that nobody quite needed.
## Verdict
This is not the best Craig Bond, *Skyfall* still holds that, and it is too long and too in love with its own melancholy to be the most rewatchable. But it is the bravest, and it is the only one that treats fifteen years of buildup as a debt to be paid rather than a brand to be protected. The villain underwhelms, the middle drags, and none of that quite survives how completely Craig and Fukunaga commit to the goodbye. It is a Bond film with real stakes and a real heart, and it sends the era off on exactly the note it deserves. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, and worth the big screen for the Norway and Cuba sequences. A 4K, Blu-ray and digital release will follow.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *No Time to Die* closed the Craig era for good, and the question of who and what comes next remains open, with Eon and the franchise's new owners yet to name a successor. Its reputation has settled roughly where it landed at release, admired for its nerve and its ending, argued over for its length, and generally placed just below *Skyfall* and *Casino Royale* in the Craig rankings. It now streams on Prime Video in the UK depending on the window, and is widely available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are a number of scenes of violence, including crunchy blows, an arm-break and shootings, but these lack any focus on detail. The film features an extended opening sequence depicting a home invasion and murder, along with intense car chases, scenes of hand-to-hand combat and shoot-outs, with graphic depictions minimised and key violent acts occurring off-screen or shown only in aftermath.
**Language:** There is a single use of strong language ('f**k'), as well as other milder terms.
**Threat and horror:** The threat is sustained across action sequences and the central bioweapon plot, in keeping with audience expectations of the series.
*Detailed BBFC content advice for this release was only partially retrievable; the categories above are drawn from the BBFC's published classification and case study for the film. Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/no-time-to-die-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0yntmynza)).*
================================================================================
## The Courier (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-courier
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-courier.md
- published: 2021-08-17
- document_id: 1180
> A true Cold War story told the old-fashioned way, carried by a Benedict Cumberbatch performance that gives up far more than the usual spy film asks. Conventional in shape, quietly devastating by the end. 8/10.
- **UK release:** August 2021
- **Director:** Dominic Cooke · **Writer:** Tom O'Connor
- **Studio / distributor:** Lionsgate; FilmNation Entertainment; 42; SunnyMarch
- **Genre:** Cold War espionage drama / true story · **Runtime:** 111 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Benedict Cumberbatch (*The Imitation Game*, *Sherlock*) as Greville Wynne; Merab Ninidze (*Bridge of Spies*) as Oleg Penkovsky; Rachel Brosnahan (*The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel*) as Emily Donovan; Jessie Buckley (*Beast*, *Wild Rose*) as Sheila Wynne
- **IMDb:** 7.2 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 85% critics / 95% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The British spy film has two settings. One is the gadget-and-rooftop mode that Bond made the export brand. The other is the quieter tradition that runs through John le Carré and *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*, where the work is mostly waiting, lying to the people you love, and trying not to be sick with fear in a hotel corridor. *The Courier*, held back from its planned 2020 release and arriving in UK cinemas now, sits firmly in the second camp, and it has the additional pull of being true. Greville Wynne was a real salesman who carried real secrets, and the film is most interesting when it remembers that an amateur, not a professional, is the man with the briefcase.
## The setup
Wynne is an ordinary Birmingham-born businessman selling industrial machinery across Europe in the early 1960s, a man whose chief talents are a firm handshake and a good lunch. MI6 and the CIA, working together, choose him precisely because he is so unremarkable: nobody would suspect a travelling salesman of being a conduit. They steer him towards Oleg Penkovsky, a senior Soviet officer who has decided, at appalling personal risk, to pass Western intelligence what he knows. What begins as a single favour becomes a repeated trip to Moscow, then a friendship, and then, as the Cuban Missile Crisis tightens, a matter on which the avoidance of nuclear war may genuinely turn. The film is careful to keep the early stretch low-key, so that the stakes climb without ever feeling stage-managed.
## The cast
This is Cumberbatch's film, and he plays Wynne against type. There is none of the clipped genius of his Turing or his Holmes here. Wynne is vain, a little soft, fond of a drink, and entirely out of his depth, and Cumberbatch lets you watch an unremarkable man discover he is braver than he had any reason to expect. The final act asks a great deal of him physically, and he commits to it without vanity. Merab Ninidze is the film's other engine. His Penkovsky carries the heavier burden, a man who has already decided to die for what he is doing, and the friendship between the two grows convincingly from wary handlers to something close to love. Jessie Buckley, as Wynne's wife Sheila, does a lot with a part that could have been wallpaper, giving the home front its own quiet weather of suspicion and hurt. Rachel Brosnahan's CIA officer is the most conventional figure, the briskness of the intelligence machine made human.
## The craft
Dominic Cooke comes from the theatre and his previous film, *On Chesil Beach*, was an intimate two-hander, so the restraint here is no surprise. Sean Bobbitt's photography gives early-sixties Moscow a grey, watchful chill against the warmer browns of London clubland, and the contrast does a lot of the storytelling. Abel Korzeniowski's score is patient rather than insistent, holding back so that the tense scenes, a handover that goes slightly wrong, a border crossing, land harder for the silence around them. The film looks more expensive than it probably was, and the period detail never tips into nostalgia for its own sake. Where it could be sharper is in pace: the middle stretch settles into a rhythm of trips and reports that risks the procedural feeling routine, before the last half hour changes register entirely and earns back every minute.
## How it stacks up
The obvious neighbour is *Bridge of Spies*, another decent man caught between superpowers, and *The Courier* shares its faith that an ordinary conscience under pressure is dramatic enough without invention. It is less ornate than *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy* and less interested in institutional rot; this is a story about two individuals, not a service. It also rhymes with *The Imitation Game* in its shape, a clever true story built around a single charismatic lead, though it is the warmer and more humane of the two. What lifts it above the run of respectable historical dramas is the back half, which is willing to follow the consequences of the story to a genuinely bleak place rather than waving the heroes off with a caption.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical line is generous but slightly cool, sitting around 85%, with the recurring note that the film is well made and conventionally told, a sturdy old-fashioned spy drama that does not reinvent anything. Audiences are markedly warmer at 95%, and I think they are reading it more fairly. The conventional structure is the price of fidelity to what actually happened; the film is not trying to surprise you with plot mechanics. The disagreement is really about whether craft and a great central performance are enough on their own. For this kind of true story, told this honestly, I think they very nearly are.
## Verdict
*The Courier* will not change anyone's idea of what a spy film can do, and for an hour you might mistake it for a tasteful Sunday-night drama. Then it tightens, and the last act is genuinely hard to shake. Cumberbatch gives one of his most physically and emotionally exposed performances, the friendship at the centre feels earned, and the film has the nerve to let a true story hurt. It rewards a second viewing more than the gentle first hour suggests, mostly because you watch the early scenes differently once you know where they lead. A well-built, quietly moving piece of grown-up cinema that values character over spectacle. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, after a pandemic delay from its original 2020 slot. A home release on disc and digital should follow in the usual window.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Courier* found most of its audience at home rather than in the delayed cinema run, and has settled into a reputation as one of the better recent additions to the British true-spy genre, often grouped with *Bridge of Spies* as a companion piece. It is now available on disc and digital, and streams on the major subscription platforms in the UK depending on the month, having passed through several streaming homes since release.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is moderate violence, including a scene in which a man is shot in the head, with minimal blood and wound detail. Other instances of violence involve a man being beaten by prison guards with truncheons, with impacts occurring off screen.
**Threat and horror:** There are scenes in which a man is subjected to cruel treatment while in prison, including a sequence in which he is stripped naked, his head shaved, and it is implied that he is penetrated anally by the guards, as they search for potential contraband items. Other scenes involve methods of torture used on the prisoner, amounting to a bombardment of bright lights and loud noise, as well as keeping him in squalid, cold conditions.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of strong language ('f**k'), as well as milder terms, including 'assholes', 'bullshit', 'bloody', 'hell' and 'God'.
**Additional issues:** There are several scenes of adults smoking, but this is reflective of the time period as opposed to particularly glamourised. There is natural male buttock nudity as a prisoner takes a shower. A husband and wife lie in bed together after it is implied that they have sex. There are also mild sex references to a married man committing adultery, as well as a scene containing billboards advertising "erotic" strip shows.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-courier-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00otk1mty)).*
================================================================================
## Free Guy (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-free-guy
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-free-guy.md
- published: 2021-08-17
- document_id: 1081
> A background character in an online shooter wakes up to the fact that he is software, and the film built around him is funnier and warmer than it has any right to be. 8/10.
- **UK release:** August 2021
- **Director:** Shawn Levy · **Writers:** Matt Lieberman, Zak Penn
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Studios; 21 Laps; Maximum Effort
- **Genre:** Science fiction action comedy / video-game adventure · **Runtime:** 115 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Ryan Reynolds (*Deadpool*) as Guy; Jodie Comer (*Killing Eve*) as Millie / Molotov Girl; Joe Keery (*Stranger Things*) as Keys; Taika Waititi (*Thor: Ragnarok*, *Jojo Rabbit*) as Antwan
- **IMDb:** 7.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 80% critics / 94% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The studio comedy built around a single big concept has a poor recent record, and the studio comedy built around a video game is worse still, so *Free Guy* arrives with the odds stacked against it. It is a Ryan Reynolds vehicle with no existing fanbase to lean on, directed by Shawn Levy, whose *Night at the Museum* films were broad and family-shaped rather than sharp. The pleasant surprise is that the high concept here is a good one, and the film is smart enough to play it straight rather than wink at the camera until the joke wears through.
## The setup
Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is a bank teller in Free City, a chaotic open-world online game where the human players run riot in sunglasses and the non-player characters cheerfully absorb the carnage as scenery. He greets the same day every morning, gets robbed at gunpoint on schedule, and is perfectly content. Then he sees a woman, breaks his loop to chase her, and starts to suspect that the world he lives in is not the whole story. The woman is Millie (Jodie Comer), a real player hunting through the game for proof that her stolen code is buried inside it. What begins as one NPC straying off script becomes a question about whether the thing waking up inside the software counts as alive, and who owns it if it does.
## The cast
Reynolds is doing something slightly different from his usual register here, and it suits him. Guy is sincere rather than sardonic, an unfailingly nice man discovering the world is larger and stranger than his script allowed, and Reynolds plays the wonder without smothering it in irony. He is funny, but the comedy comes from innocence rather than the motormouth snark of his more familiar roles. Jodie Comer carries the film's spine, splitting cleanly between the guarded, frustrated programmer Millie and her in-game avatar, all leather and attitude, and she makes the two read as the same person. Joe Keery brings a rumpled decency to Keys, the coder who knows what was taken from him and cannot prove it. Taika Waititi has the loosest time of anyone as Antwan, the games-studio boss, a preening tech executive turned up just past the point of plausibility, and your tolerance for the film's broadest swing will track your tolerance for him.
## The craft
Levy and cinematographer George Richmond make Free City bright, busy and legible, which matters more than it sounds: the gag of an ordinary man calmly walking through other people's mayhem only works if you can always see the mayhem clearly. The film is sharp about the texture of online games, the heads-up displays, the loot crates, the players who treat every passer-by as target practice, and it stays affectionate rather than sneering about the people who live there. Christophe Beck's score keeps the energy up without flattening the quieter beats, and the editing keeps a busy plot moving at a pace that never lets the concept curdle into a lecture. The effects work is generous, and there is one mid-film visual joke about a familiar piece of pop-culture property that lands as well as anything in the genre this year.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is *The Truman Show*, another film about a contented man who does not know his world is manufactured, though *Free Guy* is sunnier and lighter on its feet than Peter Weir's film, and less interested in cruelty. It shares DNA with *Wreck-It Ralph* and *The Lego Movie*, both of which found real feeling inside a toy-box premise, and it is doing what *Ready Player One* tried and mostly missed: building a digital playground that feels populated rather than just referenced. Where it pulls ahead of the recent run of game adaptations is that it is not adapting anything. There is no canon to honour and no fanbase to placate, so it can simply use the language of games to tell its own story.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been warm without quite committing, sitting around 80%, and the common reservation is that the corporate satire is soft: Antwan is a cartoon, and the film's argument about who owns a piece of emergent code is gestured at more than argued. That is a fair note. Audiences are noticeably more enthusiastic, near the mid-90s, and I think they have it right. The film is not pretending to be a serious essay on artificial intelligence. It is a bright, generous crowd-pleaser with a genuine idea at the centre, and it commits to that idea with more conviction than its detractors give it credit for.
## Verdict
What pushes my score above a polite recommendation is how rewatchable it is. The premise is clever, the lead performances are warm, and the science fiction idea underneath, a piece of code becoming aware of itself and choosing kindness, is handled with real charm rather than cynicism. It loses a point for the villain, who belongs in a broader film than the one around him, and for a final act that resolves a little too tidily. But it is funny, it is good-hearted, and it understands the world it is set in. I came out happier than I went in, which is most of what this kind of film is for. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. A strong candidate for the biggest screen you can find, since Free City is built to be looked at.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film became one of the surprise commercial hits of its year and, for a while, talk of a sequel followed, though nothing had materialised on screen at the time of writing. Its standing has held up as a rare original studio crowd-pleaser in a release calendar dominated by franchises, and its reading of AI self-awareness as something gentle rather than threatening looks more pointed as the conversation around artificial intelligence has sharpened. It is now widely available on digital and disc and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, sex references, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of moderate violence which take place within a video game setting and include shootings, impactful fist fights, an undetailed head butt and arm-break, and characters hit by vehicles. There is also occasional sight of bloody injury. The video game context establishes that it is not 'real' people getting hurt and that characters who 'die' come back to life immediately. The action is also played out to a consistent comic tone.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f\*\*k'), as well as milder terms such as 'God' 'hell', 'shit', 'damn', 'ass', 'asshole', 'screw', 'biatch', 'piss', dick', 'freaking' and 'fricking'. There are also rude middle finger gestures.
**Sex:** There are moderate sex references, including references to strippers, virginity and masturbation. There is also innuendo when a woman sits astride a man and asks, 'Is that a Glock in your pocket?'
**Threat and horror:** There is unrealistic and comic threat throughout, in a video game context.
**Injury detail:** There is also occasional sight of bloody injury after violence, but all within a computer game context in which real people are not harmed.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/free-guy-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00otmzmza)).*
================================================================================
## The Suicide Squad (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-suicide-squad
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-suicide-squad.md
- published: 2021-08-01
- document_id: 1216
> James Gunn takes the franchise nobody trusted, points it at a war film, and turns in the most enjoyable thing DC has put on screen in years. Gory, funny, and built around a team you actually mind losing. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2021
- **Director:** James Gunn · **Writer:** James Gunn
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; DC Films; Atlas Entertainment; The Safran Company
- **Genre:** Superhero war-mission comedy · **Runtime:** 132 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Margot Robbie (*I, Tonya*, *Birds of Prey*) as Harley Quinn; Idris Elba (*Luther*, *Pacific Rim*) as Bloodsport; John Cena (*Blockers*) as Peacemaker; Daniela Melchior as Ratcatcher 2
- **IMDb:** 7.2 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 82% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Five years ago, *Suicide Squad* was the film that proved a great cast, a famous logo and a soundtrack full of needle-drops could still add up to a mess. Warner has now done something close to admitting it: hired James Gunn off the back of the *Guardians of the Galaxy* films, handed him the same title with a definite article bolted on, and let him spend an R-rated budget doing whatever he liked. Gunn briefly lost his Marvel job in a public flap and was free to take the call, which is the kind of accident that occasionally produces a much better film than anyone had a right to expect. This is one of them.
## The setup
Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) runs Task Force X out of Belle Reve prison, where the worst people in the system trade jail time for missions nobody is meant to survive. The job this time is Corto Maltese, a small island state that has just had a coup, and a fortress-laboratory called Jotunheim, home to a Cold War experiment the new regime would very much like to keep and the Americans would very much like to erase. Waller assembles a squad of the expendable, drops them on a hostile beach, and waits to see how many of them last the morning. What they find inside Jotunheim is worse than the briefing let on, which is the part I will leave alone.
## The cast
Gunn loads the squad with people he is happy to kill off, which keeps the stakes honest in a way superhero films usually dodge. Idris Elba's Bloodsport is the reluctant centre, a marksman with a grievance and a daughter, and Elba plays him with the weary competence of a man who would rather be anywhere else. John Cena's Peacemaker is the find: a flag-waving zealot who will murder for peace and means it sincerely, and Cena commits to the joke so completely that the character becomes the film's funniest and most unsettling presence at once. Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn returns lighter and stranger than before, given a solo set-piece escape that is the best thing the character has had on screen. The surprise is Daniela Melchior's Ratcatcher 2, who walks in with a sackful of rodents and quietly becomes the emotional anchor of the whole thing.
## The craft
Gunn shoots the violence as cheerful spectacle. Bodies come apart in bright daylight, Henry Braham's camera lingers on the gore with a cartoonist's glee, and the comic timing never lets the carnage curdle into the grimness the 2016 film mistook for maturity. John Murphy's score and a wall-to-wall song selection do the propulsion, and the design work, from a giant alien starfish to a rat-controlling teenager, is committed without ever winking too hard. At 132 minutes it moves like a war film with the safety off, structured as a mission with chapter cards and a body count, and the surprising thing is how much feeling Gunn smuggles in between the decapitations. The squad earn your investment, which is why losing them lands.
## How it stacks up
The obvious reference is *Guardians of the Galaxy*, and the lineage shows: a misfit ensemble, needle-drops, and a sincere streak under the irreverence. But the film Gunn is really remaking is *The Dirty Dozen*, the expendable-criminals-on-a-suicide-mission template, run through the splatter and satire of *Starship Troopers*. It shares *Deadpool*'s licence to be rude and bloody, though it is warmer and less pleased with itself than that film. Set against its own predecessor it is barely the same species: where the 2016 *Suicide Squad* was a studio committee in a trench coat, this is one director with a clear voice and nothing to lose.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are enthusiastic, sitting around 90%, and the line is that Gunn has rescued a franchise everyone had written off. Audiences are warm but a touch cooler at 82%, and the gap is easy to read: this is a hard 15 with severed limbs and full-frontal nudity, and some of the family-superhero crowd plainly did not sign up for that. The wider worry is that it opened day-and-date on a US streaming service, which has not helped the box office. None of that touches the film itself, which delivers more than its troubled marquee suggested.
## Verdict
I came to this expecting to tolerate it and came out grinning. It is funny, it is genuinely gory, and it does the one thing the previous film could not: it makes you care which of these awful people make it home. The cost of entry is a high tolerance for chaos and viscera, and if that is not your thing nothing here will win you over. For everyone else this is the most fun DC has been at the cinema in years, with a strong rewatch pull thanks to the cast, the songs and the gags you miss first time round. It loses a little for being content to be a very good romp rather than anything deeper. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. Worth the big screen for the daylight carnage and the soundtrack.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: John Cena's Peacemaker proved popular enough to carry his own series, *Peacemaker* (2022), with Gunn writing and directing, which extends the film's tone into television and is the natural next watch. Gunn went on to take charge of DC's film slate outright, making this look in hindsight like an audition he passed. The film is now on disc and digital and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, gore, language, brief drug misuse*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Frequent scenes of violence include shootings, stabbings, slashings, decapitations, limbs being cut off, people being crushed, melted, torn apart and exploding. Much of the violence has a darkly comic tone, and results in bloody detail and gory images.
**Threat and horror:** Scenes of threat and horror include people being controlled by alien creatures and experimented on.
**Language:** There is frequent use of strong language ('motherf\*\*ker', 'f\*\*k'), as well as milder terms including 'dick' 'pussy', 'bloody', 'shit', tits', 'butt' and 'hell'.
**Sex:** Occasional crude references are made to sex, including to sexual positions.
**Drugs:** A man is briefly seen injecting heroin.
**Suicide and self-harm:** There are verbal references to suicide in song lyrics.
**Injury detail:** There is occasional focus on gore, including blood, innards and severed body parts.
**Nudity:** There is brief full frontal male nudity.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-suicide-squad-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc01mtg1mty)).*
================================================================================
## The Tomorrow War (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-tomorrow-war
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-tomorrow-war.md
- published: 2021-07-20
- document_id: 1218
> Chris Pratt is drafted into a war three decades from now against an enemy that eats armies whole. The premise is sharper than the script, but the spectacle and the creatures earn their keep. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2021 (Prime Video)
- **Director:** Chris McKay · **Writer:** Zach Dean
- **Studio / distributor:** Skydance Media; New Republic Pictures; Amazon Studios
- **Genre:** Science fiction action / time-travel alien war · **Runtime:** 138 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Chris Pratt (*Guardians of the Galaxy*, *Jurassic World*) as Dan Forester; Yvonne Strahovski (*Chuck*, *The Handmaid's Tale*) as Colonel Muri Forester; J. K. Simmons (*Whiplash*, *Spider-Man*) as James Forester; Betty Gilpin (*GLOW*, *The Hunt*) as Emmy Forester
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 52% critics / 76% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
The summer tentpole had a strange 2021. With cinemas only half-trusted again, the films built for the biggest screens have been quietly slipping out onto sofas instead, and *The Tomorrow War* is the clearest case yet of a picture that wants an IMAX and gets a living room. Skydance shot this as a Paramount release, then sold it to Amazon, and so a 138-minute alien-invasion blockbuster with Chris Pratt at the front arrives not with a midnight queue but with a tap of the Prime button. It is the sort of high-concept B-movie the studios used to throw at July with both hands, dressed up in a clever hook, and the question is whether the hook survives the running time.
## The setup
Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) is a former soldier turned high-school science teacher, frustrated that life has not handed him the bigger purpose he keeps reaching for. During a televised football match, a unit of armed strangers materialises on the pitch and announces that they are from the year 2051, where humanity is losing a war against an alien species and has roughly eleven months left before it is wiped out. A makeshift time bridge lets them conscript people from the present and send them thirty years forward to fight. The catch is grim: the draftees are ordinary civilians, the survival rate is dismal, and Dan is called up. What he finds at the other end of the jump is a future already half lost, an army running on fumes, and a commanding officer with a personal reason to want him there.
## The cast
Pratt is doing the thing he does well, the likeable everyman whose jokes are a defence mechanism, and he is a comfortable anchor even when the film around him gets silly. The performance that lifts the middle stretch is Yvonne Strahovski's Colonel Muri Forester, who carries the future-set scenes with a brittle, exhausted authority and gives the film its only real emotional current; anyone who watched her hold the screen on *Chuck* and then *The Handmaid's Tale* will not be surprised that she is the most convincing soldier in the room. J. K. Simmons turns up in the third act as Dan's estranged, off-grid father and walks away with every scene he is in, all gravel and survivalist swagger. Betty Gilpin has the thankless job of the wife left at home and does what she can with a part the script keeps at arm's length.
## The craft
Chris McKay comes from animation, and he stages the action with a clear eye for geography even when the budget is straining. The creatures, christened Whitespikes, are a genuinely nasty design: fast, many-limbed, and bristling with the projectile barbs that give them their name, closer to the relentless swarm of insects than the stalking single monster. Larry Fong's photography keeps the daylight battles legible rather than the usual grey murk, and Lorne Balfe's score does the heavy lifting under the bigger set pieces. The film is at its best in two sustained sequences, a chaotic rooftop extraction in a ruined Miami and a snowbound finale that finally lets the monsters loose in the open. It is also too long by a good twenty minutes, sagging whenever it stops to explain its own time-travel rules, which do not bear much poking.
## How it stacks up
The shadow it cannot escape is *Edge of Tomorrow*, the smarter, leaner time-and-aliens film from a few years back, and *The Tomorrow War* is the blunter cousin: more sincere, less witty, fond of a speech where the other film would have made a joke. The creature warfare and the cannon-fodder-conscript premise owe an obvious debt to *Starship Troopers* and *Aliens*, and the panicked global-collapse staging recalls *World War Z*. It borrows freely and never quite matches any of them, but it borrows from good places, and it understands that an alien-war film lives or dies on whether the aliens are frightening. These ones are.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split is wide and familiar. Critics are unconvinced, sitting around 52%, and the complaints are fair enough: the plot is derivative, the science is nonsense, and the emotional beats are signposted long before they land. Audiences are markedly warmer at 76%, and they are responding to something real, which is that the thing is paced like a rollercoaster and delivers exactly the monster-fighting it advertises. I land closer to the audience. This is not a film that rewards close inspection of its logic, and it is not trying to be. Taken as a Saturday-night creature picture, it does the job with more conviction than its reviews suggest.
## Verdict
It is overlong, its plotting is held together with string, and it never reaches the cleverness of the films it is plainly chasing. None of that stops it being a good time. The Whitespikes are a genuinely strong monster, the future-war world has just enough texture to hold the attention, Strahovski and Simmons give it real performances, and the big sequences land. It is the kind of high-concept action I will happily put on again on a wet afternoon without pretending it is more than it is. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Amazon Prime Video now, included with a Prime membership. No cinema release; this one was made for the small screen whether it meant to be or not.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: a sequel was announced not long after the film's release, with Chris Pratt and director Chris McKay both attached to return, though it spent a long stretch in development limbo. The film's standing has not shifted much; it remains the textbook example of the pandemic-era blockbuster that bypassed cinemas for a streaming launch, and the critic-audience gap has held. It is still streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, gore, threat, horror, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is an intense and prolonged scene in which two men battle an alien creature, repeatedly stabbing at it and slashing its throat in a sequence that includes fantastical blood spurts.
**Threat and horror:** There are several scenes of prolonged threat in which creatures menace humans.
**Language:** There is also infrequent strong language ('f**k') and milder terms (for example, 'son of a bitch', 'dick', 'shit', 'bullshit', 'ass', 'God', 'damn', 'Jesus', 'Christ').
**Additional issues:** There are scenes of emotional upset, and mild sex references.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-tomorrow-war-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc01mze4njc)).*
================================================================================
## Nobody (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-nobody
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-nobody.md
- published: 2021-06-20
- document_id: 1128
> The team behind John Wick hand Bob Odenkirk a body count and a bus full of thugs, and he runs with it. Lean, brutal and very funny, it is the most fun ninety minutes the genre has produced in a while. 8/10.
- **UK release:** June 2021
- **Director:** Ilya Naishuller · **Writer:** Derek Kolstad
- **Studio / distributor:** 87North; Perfect World Pictures; Universal Pictures
- **Genre:** Action thriller / vigilante comedy · **Runtime:** 92 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Bob Odenkirk (*Better Call Saul*, *Breaking Bad*) as Hutch Mansell; Aleksei Serebryakov (*Leviathan*) as Yulian Kuznetsov; Connie Nielsen (*Gladiator*) as Becca Mansell; Christopher Lloyd (*Back to the Future*, *The Addams Family*) as David Mansell
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 84% critics / 94% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Derek Kolstad wrote *John Wick*, David Leitch helped direct it, and the 87North stunt shop has spent the years since turning that one idea, a quiet man you really should not have wronged, into a house style. *Nobody* is that template handed to an unlikely owner. Instead of Keanu Reeves moving like a dancer, you get Bob Odenkirk, a man the world knows as a fast-talking lawyer and a sketch comedian, throwing and absorbing punches as if every one of them hurts. The casting is the joke and the hook at once, and it works far better than it has any right to.
## The setup
Hutch Mansell is a study in beige. He commutes, he misses the bin lorry, he files numbers at his father-in-law's metal works, and he has let his marriage cool to a polite truce. When two burglars break into his home one night, Hutch has them cornered and chooses, in front of his son, to let them walk rather than risk anyone getting hurt. It reads as cowardice. It eats at him. And when he goes looking for the pair to settle the matter on his own terms, he ends up on a night bus with a carful of drunken men and a young woman who needs help, and something he had carefully buried comes back up. The trouble is that one of the men he hurts is connected to a Russian crime boss, which turns a private reckoning into a siege.
## The cast
Odenkirk carries the film, and the surprise is how completely he sells the violence without losing the sadness underneath it. He trained hard for this and you can see it, but the smarter choice is that Hutch is not invincible. He wins ugly, he gets hit, he looks his age, and the bus fight leaves him as wrecked as the men he takes apart. Connie Nielsen, who knows her way around a swords-and-sandals epic from *Gladiator*, is given less than she deserves as the wife watching a stranger surface in her husband, but she lands the wariness. Aleksei Serebryakov plays the antagonist Yulian as a vain, karaoke-loving sociopath, a nice tonal counterweight to the grey-man hero. The real treat is Christopher Lloyd as Hutch's father, a retired man in a care home who turns out to have his own history and his own arsenal, and clearly relishes every second of it.
## The craft
Ilya Naishuller made his name with the first-person shooter stunt of *Hardcore Henry*, and the surprise is how disciplined he is here. The action is legible. You can follow who is hitting whom and why, the geography of the bus and the factory finale always holds, and the camera sits back far enough to let the stunt work read. Pawel Pogorzelski shoots it in cold, handsome blues, and David Buckley's score leans on needle-drops with a dry wit, including a use of old standards over carnage that the genre has used before but rarely this cleanly. At ninety-two minutes it does not outstay its welcome for a moment. It sets up its premise, pays it off, and gets out.
## How it stacks up
The obvious relative is *John Wick*, and *Nobody* shares its DNA without trying to out-mythologise it: no Continental, no gold coins, just a man and a very bad week. Where it reaches for something richer it touches *A History of Violence*, Cronenberg's study of a mild family man with a buried capacity for harm, though *Nobody* is far more interested in the fun of the unleashing than the moral hangover. It sits alongside *Taken* and *The Equalizer* as middle-aged-man-with-a-skill-set cinema, but it is wittier and more self-aware than either, happy to let you laugh at how absurd the escalation has become.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is warm, and rightly. Critics are sitting around 84%, with audiences notably higher at 94%, and the gap tells the story: this is a crowd-pleaser that critics enjoyed almost as much as the people who turned up for a Saturday-night action film. The recurring note is that it is *John Wick* with the serial numbers barely filed off, and that is fair. What stops it being a knock-off is the casting and the comic timing. Odenkirk's everyman face does something Reeves's stillness cannot, and the film knows it.
## Verdict
This is exactly the kind of action film I keep coming back to: tight, funny, brutal, and gone before it can wear thin. It does nothing the genre has not done, but it does it with a hero you do not expect and a sense of humour about its own excess. The plot is a delivery system for set-pieces and makes no apology for it. I value rewatchability above almost anything in this corner of cinema, and this is a film I would happily put on again the moment the credits roll. It is not deep and it does not pretend to be. It is ninety-two minutes of clean, well-built, genuinely entertaining mayhem. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. A digital and disc release will follow over the summer; on Universal's home-entertainment slate for later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Nobody* did well enough to launch a franchise of its own, with a sequel following to push Hutch and his family into a second round. The first film has settled into its reputation as the best of the *John Wick*-adjacent spin-offs and the moment Bob Odenkirk arrived as a genuine action lead. It is now widely available on digital and disc, and streams on the usual platforms depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, injury detail, language, threat, sex references*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of violence contain close-range gunfights and stabbings, resulting in bloody injuries. There are also explosions from booby traps, including two men who become impaled by metal rods.
**Threat and horror:** There is strong threat, including a scene in which a young woman is surrounded by a gang of drunken men on a deserted bus.
**Language:** There is strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker'), accompanied by milder terms, including 'bitch', 'shit', 'asshole', 'God', 'hell' and 'damn'.
**Sex:** A scene contains photographs of a man in a gimp mask and bondage, accompanied by a woman wearing a g-string.
**Injury detail:** There are scenes containing strong injury detail, including the bloody aftermath of a man with lacerations on his face from cut glass, and another after being hit at close-range by an explosion. In one sequence, a man makes an incision into a man's throat, then inserts a straw, allowing the man to breathe.
**Additional issues:** A black Russian man experiences some racial prejudice from other Russians, which is challenged. There is very brief drug misuse as a man snorts something off the back of his hand.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/nobody-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc01mtg3mzm)).*
================================================================================
## A Quiet Place Part II (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-a-quiet-place-part-ii
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-a-quiet-place-part-ii.md
- published: 2021-06-11
- document_id: 1028
> John Krasinski opens up the silent world without breaking the rule that made the first film work. Leaner, faster and just as tense, it is a sequel that knows exactly what it is for. 8/10.
- **UK release:** June 2021
- **Director:** John Krasinski · **Writer:** John Krasinski
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Platinum Dunes; Sunday Night Productions
- **Genre:** Post-apocalyptic creature thriller / survival · **Runtime:** 97 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Emily Blunt (*Edge of Tomorrow*, *Sicario*) as Evelyn Abbott; Millicent Simmonds (*Wonderstruck*, *A Quiet Place*) as Regan Abbott; Noah Jupe (*Ford v Ferrari*, *Honey Boy*) as Marcus Abbott; Cillian Murphy (*28 Days Later*, *Inception*) as Emmett
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 91% critics / 92% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The first *A Quiet Place* was that rare thing, a horror-adjacent thriller built on a single brilliant constraint: make a noise and the monsters find you. It worked because John Krasinski, a man best known until then for comedy, treated silence as a discipline rather than a gimmick, and trusted his audience to lean in. The problem every sequel of this kind faces is that the constraint is no longer a surprise. We know the rules now. So the interesting question with *Part II* is not whether Krasinski can scare you again, but whether he can find somewhere new to take a world that worked precisely because it was small and shut in.
## The setup
Krasinski opens with a flashback to the day everything arrived, a daylight set-piece in an ordinary American town that shows us, for the first time, the moment the silence began. Then he picks the story up where the first film left it. The Abbotts, mother Evelyn and her children, are forced off the ruin of their farm and out into a world they have only ever glimpsed from behind closed doors. They are carrying a newborn, an injury or two, and the one piece of knowledge that might matter. What they find is that the creatures are not the only danger left, and that other survivors have had their own years to decide what kind of people the end of the world has made them. I will leave the rest where the film leaves it.
## The cast
Emily Blunt remains the anchor, though the film quietly shifts its weight off her. Where the first film was a story about parents, this one belongs to the children, and Millicent Simmonds carries it. As Regan, the deaf teenager whose hearing aid turned out to be the family's one advantage, she has the most active role in the film and the most to play: resourceful, stubborn, frightened and unwilling to show it. Simmonds is deaf herself, and the performance has a directness that never tips into the saintly. Noah Jupe gives Marcus the raw, flinching terror of a boy who knows he is not the brave one. The newcomer is Cillian Murphy as Emmett, a survivor who has retreated into himself, and Murphy is very good at the particular emptiness of a man who has decided that caring about anyone else is a luxury he can no longer afford. The slow thaw of that is one of the film's better threads.
## The craft
The craft is where the first film earned its reputation, and Krasinski has not let it slip. Polly Morgan's cinematography is colder and more mobile than the original, suiting a story that has left the farmhouse behind for the open road. The sound design is again the real engine: the film keeps cutting to Regan's point of hearing, dropping the world to a muffled hum, so that a scene you can hear and a scene she cannot become two different kinds of dread running at once. Krasinski has learned to cross-cut, and there is a long stretch late on where three separate threats unfold in parallel, each one able to kill at the smallest sound, that is as tightly wound as anything in the genre this year. At 97 minutes it does not outstay its welcome. If anything it is in a hurry, which is the right instinct for a film about people who cannot afford to stop moving.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is the first film, and *Part II* is the leaner, more conventional of the two: a chase and a journey rather than a chamber piece, with the novelty of the premise spent. Reach a little wider and it sits comfortably alongside the better creature-survival pictures. The opening invasion owes something to Spielberg's *War of the Worlds*, all panic and half-seen catastrophe at street level, and the texture of scavenged, watchful survival recalls the early stretches of *28 Days Later*, which is no accident with Murphy in the cast. It does not have the formal nerve of the original, but it is a more generous film, willing to spend time on the question of whether the survivors owe each other anything.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics and audiences are, for once, in cheerful agreement: 91% from the critics, 92% from the public, and the line running through both is that this is a sequel that delivers exactly what was promised without coasting. That matches my own reaction. The praise is for the set-pieces and the sound, the mild reservation is that a second visit cannot land the conceptual punch of the first. Both are fair. Nobody is calling it a disappointment, and after a year in which the question of whether anyone would go back to a cinema at all was genuinely open, a tense, well-built crowd-pleaser is a welcome thing to have on the biggest screen you can find.
## Verdict
This is a sequel that understands its own appeal and does not try to outsmart it. The premise is no longer a revelation, and the story is a straighter line than the first film's, but the suspense is real, the craft is excellent, and the young cast give it a beating heart that a lesser franchise entry would have skipped. I value tension built on rules rather than jump scares, world-building that adds rather than explains, and a film that knows when to stop, and this clears all three. It is not quite the small miracle the first one was, but it is a confident, gripping ninety-seven minutes, and the kind of film I would happily sit through again with the sound up. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, and well worth seeing in a full auditorium where the silences carry. A premium streaming release on Paramount platforms is expected to follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the silent world kept growing. A third film, *A Quiet Place: Day One* (2024), turned away from the Abbotts to dramatise the invasion itself in New York with Lupita Nyong'o, the daylight catastrophe this film only previewed in its opening minutes. *Part II* has settled in as the dependable middle chapter of the series, less talked about than the original but rarely called a letdown. It now streams on Paramount+ and is widely available on disc and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *sustained threat, bloody images*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** There are scenes of sustained threat in which giant creatures chase after and attack adults and children.
**Injury detail:** There are bloody images when creatures are shot in their heads, with resultant gory injury, blood spurts and subsequent sight of the creatures lying in pools of blood.
**Additional issues:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k'), as well as milder terms, including 'shit', 'God', 'Jesus Christ' and 'damn'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/a-quiet-place-part-ii-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00oty3mtq)).*
================================================================================
## The Mauritanian (2021)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-mauritanian
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-mauritanian.md
- published: 2021-04-11
- document_id: 1203
> Kevin Macdonald turns the Guantanamo Diary into a procedural about evidence and conscience, anchored by Tahar Rahim and Jodie Foster. The structure plays safe; the central performance does not. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** April 2021
- **Director:** Kevin Macdonald · **Writers:** M. B. Traven, Rory Haines, Sohrab Noshirvani
- **Studio / distributor:** BBC Film; SunnyMarch; STXfilms (Amazon Prime Video in the UK)
- **Genre:** Legal drama / political true-story thriller · **Runtime:** 129 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Tahar Rahim (*A Prophet*) as Mohamedou Ould Slahi; Jodie Foster (*The Silence of the Lambs*, *Contact*) as Nancy Hollander; Benedict Cumberbatch (*The Imitation Game*, *Sherlock*) as Lt Col Stuart Couch; Shailene Woodley (*The Descendants*, *Divergent*) as Teri Duncan
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 75% critics / 84% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Kevin Macdonald has spent a career circling people the official record would rather we did not look at too closely: the dictator in *The Last King of Scotland*, the dead climber in *Touching the Void*, the murky favour-trading of *State of Play*. *The Mauritanian* is the most directly political film he has made, and the trickiest, because it asks a Prime Video audience to sit with a man most of the West was told to fear and then to question why he was ever there at all. It is adapted from Mohamedou Ould Slahi's *Guantanamo Diary*, a memoir written, extraordinarily, while its author was still inside the camp. The film that results is sober, careful, and at its best when it stops being a courtroom drama and becomes a portrait of endurance.
## The setup
Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Tahar Rahim) is picked up in Mauritania in the weeks after September 2001 and disappears into Guantanamo Bay, held for years without charge on the suspicion that he is a recruiter for al-Qaeda. Defence lawyer Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) and her associate Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley) take his case, not because they are sure of his innocence but because they are sure the process has stopped being one. On the other side, military prosecutor Stuart Couch (Benedict Cumberbatch) builds the case against him, and finds that the deeper he reads into how the evidence was obtained, the less he can stomach using it. The film moves between the two legal teams and Slahi's cell, with the truth of what he did or did not do held back as a question rather than handed over as an answer.
## The cast
Tahar Rahim is the reason the film works. Slahi could easily have become a symbol, a cause with a face, and Rahim keeps him stubbornly human: charming, frightened, sardonic, sometimes infuriatingly opaque even to the people trying to free him. It is the most arresting screen work he has done since *A Prophet*, and it carries the same quality of a man calculating how to survive a system designed to break him. Jodie Foster plays Hollander as cool and unsentimental, a lawyer interested in the law rather than the man, which is a harder and more interesting choice than warmth would have been. Cumberbatch, working in a careful Carolinas accent, gives Couch the film's moral hinge, a believer slowly losing faith in his own brief. Woodley has the least to do, the audience surrogate asking the obvious questions, and does it without fuss.
## The craft
Macdonald and cinematographer Alwin Kuchler split the film into two visual registers: a flat, bureaucratic present of grey offices and redacted paper, and the warmer, almost hallucinatory texture of Slahi's memory and captivity, shot in a boxed-in older aspect ratio that tightens around him as the pressure mounts. The interrogation sequences, when they come, are the strongest stretch of filmmaking here, a sustained passage of sensory disorientation that earns the film its certificate and refuses to look away. Tom Hodge's score stays restrained, and Justine Wright's editing keeps a two-hour legal procedural moving more briskly than it has any right to. Where the craft is less sure is the framing device, which leans on the familiar shape of the case-file thriller, dossiers and depositions and a redaction reveal, when the material in the cell is far more powerful than the paperwork around it.
## How it stacks up
This is a crowded shelf. *The Mauritanian* sits squarely alongside *The Report*, Scott Z. Burns's chilly anatomy of the same interrogation programme, and shares DNA with *Official Secrets* and the institutional-conscience strand of *Bridge of Spies*. Against *Zero Dark Thirty*, which dramatised the hunt from the agency's side, this is the view from the cell, and the comparison flatters neither film entirely: Bigelow's had more momentum, Macdonald's has more humanity. The closest match is *The Report*, and where that film was almost forensically cold, *The Mauritanian* gambles on the man rather than the mechanism. It is the warmer film, and the more conventional one.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split is the familiar one for a film like this. Critics sit around 75%, respectful of the performances and a little impatient with the structure, the recurring note being that a story this urgent has been poured into a slightly safe true-crime mould. Audiences are warmer, up at 84%, which usually means the picture lands emotionally even when it does not surprise. Both readings are right. The screenplay does play it down the middle, hitting the procedural beats you can see coming. What lifts it above the script is Rahim, and a subject that does not need embellishing to disturb you.
## Verdict
This is a film I respect more than I love, which is roughly where I expected to land. The subject matter is heavy and deliberately so, the legal scaffolding is sturdy rather than thrilling, and it is not a film I will reach for on a quiet evening. But the central performance is genuinely fine, the interrogation passages have real moral weight, and it does the useful work of putting a face and a voice to a piece of recent history a lot of people would prefer to forget. It does not reinvent the institutional-investigation drama, and it does not need to. As a serious, well-made account of an indefensible process, it earns its place on the shelf next to *The Report* and *Official Secrets*. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Amazon Prime Video in the UK from 1 April 2021, after cinemas stayed shut through the spring.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Tahar Rahim's performance went on to be the film's most decorated element, earning a BAFTA nomination and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor, with Jodie Foster taking the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. The real Mohamedou Ould Slahi, released from Guantanamo in 2016, has since become a public speaker and advocate, and appears in conversation alongside the film on several home-video releases. It remains available to stream on Amazon Prime Video and on disc.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *sexual violence, strong threat, violence, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of violence include one in which a prisoner is force-fed, and a prolonged scene in which his head is held underwater. The prisoner also bears the marks of violence in scenes in which he has a cut and bruised face.
**Threat and horror:** Scenes of sustained threat include those in which a prisoner is subjected to sensory deprivation whilst being forced to stand in a painful position, with loud and discordant music played to further disorientate the man, and scenes in which the man is hooded and threatened.
**Sexual violence:** In one scene, a shackled male prisoner seated in a chair is subjected to sexual violence by a masked female soldier who straddles him and forces him to engage in sexual activity. The film also contains verbal references to sexual violence, including threats of rape.
**Language:** There is strong language ('motherf**ker', 'f**k'), as well as milder terms (for example, 'shit', 'bullshit', 'son of a bitch', 'piss').
**Additional issues:** The work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy. Scenes feature injury detail, emotional distress, and discriminatory language not endorsed by the work as a whole.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-mauritanian-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtmtewmjcxmq)).*
================================================================================
## Greenland (2020)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-greenland
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-greenland.md
- published: 2021-02-17
- document_id: 1089
> Gerard Butler swaps saving the president for saving his family as a comet comes apart over a panicking Earth. A disaster film with the spectacle turned down and the human stakes turned up, and it is much the better for it. 8/10.
- **UK release:** February 2021 (Amazon Prime Video)
- **Director:** Ric Roman Waugh · **Writer:** Chris Sparling
- **Studio / distributor:** STXfilms; Thunder Road Pictures; G-BASE
- **Genre:** Disaster thriller / survival drama · **Runtime:** 119 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Gerard Butler (*300*, *Olympus Has Fallen*) as John Garrity; Morena Baccarin (*Deadpool*) as Allison Garrity; Roger Dale Floyd as Nathan Garrity; Scott Glenn (*The Right Stuff*, *The Silence of the Lambs*) as Dale
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 78% critics / 63% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The disaster film usually works in the plural. It needs a President in a bunker, a scientist nobody listens to, an everyman in the wrong city, a dog, an airport, and a dozen strands cut together so that the camera can always be pointed at something exploding. *Greenland* does something quietly unusual for the genre: it picks one family and refuses to leave them. Ric Roman Waugh, who steered Gerard Butler through *Angel Has Fallen*, reunites with his star for something far more disciplined than the title or the marketing suggest. This is a disaster film that would rather make you anxious than make you gasp.
## The setup
John Garrity (Gerard Butler) is a structural engineer in Atlanta, recently separated from his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and trying to hold the household together for the sake of their young son Nathan. A comet called Clarke is passing close to Earth, and the news has framed it as a spectacle, fragments burning up harmlessly, neighbours gathering in gardens to watch. Then John's phone buzzes with an automated government alert telling him his family, and only his family, has been selected for emergency shelter. The first fragment that was supposed to vanish over the Atlantic takes out Tampa instead. From there the film is a single, tightening question: can three people reach a departure point before the doors close, and what does selection do to everyone left off the list. The threat is cosmic; the action is entirely domestic, and the obstacles are queues, checkpoints, paperwork and other frightened people.
## The cast
Butler has spent a decade being the man who saves the building, the plane or the head of state, and the smart move here is to take all of that away from him. John Garrity is competent but not heroic; he is a father improvising, and Butler plays the panic and the guilt without reaching for the action-star register. Baccarin, who has tended to be the cool, watchful presence in *Deadpool* and on television, does the heavier emotional lifting, and the film leans on her for its best sequence, a separation at a chaotic airfield that turns the loudest set piece into the most personal one. Roger Dale Floyd is asked to carry a great deal as Nathan, a diabetic child whose medication becomes a ticking clock, and he avoids the usual disaster-movie cuteness. Scott Glenn arrives late as Allison's father Dale and brings an immediate, weathered gravity; he has been the steady older hand in films since *The Right Stuff*, and a few minutes of him recalibrates the whole tone.
## The craft
Dana Gonzales shoots the catastrophe in a flat, news-footage grey rather than the burnished orange of the genre's glossier entries, and Waugh keeps the camera at human height, in cars and corridors and queues, so that the disaster arrives as rumour and interruption before it arrives as fireball. The effects are used sparingly and land harder for it; a sky full of falling embers reads as beautiful for a beat before you understand what it means. David Buckley's score stays out of the way, more pulse than melody, and the editing keeps the runtime taut at just under two hours. The film's real subject is logistics, the cold machinery of who gets a seat and who does not, and Waugh treats it with a seriousness most disaster films cannot spare from the spectacle budget.
## How it stacks up
The obvious shelf-mates are *Deep Impact*, *2012* and *War of the Worlds*. *Greenland* is closest in spirit to Spielberg's *War of the Worlds*, which also locked its catastrophe to one fracturing family and let the wider apocalypse stay at the edge of frame. Where *2012* delights in the architecture of destruction, John Cusack outrunning the crust of the Earth in a limousine, *Greenland* is interested in the social collapse a real warning would cause: looting, kidnapping, the queue that turns into a stampede. It shares some DNA with *A Quiet Place* too, in the way it narrows a global threat down to whether these particular parents can keep this particular child alive. It is less inventive than that film but more grounded than most of its disaster peers.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical reception has been warmer than the genre usually attracts, sitting around 78%, with reviewers surprised by how seriously the film takes its premise and how much it trusts character over carnage. Audiences are a touch cooler at 63%, and the gap is easy to read: viewers who came for the destruction porn of a *2012* find the spectacle rationed, and the bleaker passages of human cruelty are not what a Friday-night disaster crowd is always after. I land closer to the critics. The restraint is the appeal, and the moments that disappoint the audience score, the ugliness of frightened people, are the moments that make the film feel like it means it.
## Verdict
This is a leaner, more anxious film than its poster promises, and it rewards the lower expectations the genre invites. It is not flawless: the third act softens, and a couple of escapes lean on convenient timing. But the central performances are honest, the dread is sustained, and Waugh's decision to keep the lens on one family pays off in tension where a wider film would have settled for noise. It holds up to a rewatch better than most disaster thrillers because the suspense comes from people rather than pixels. A grounded, well-built, properly nerve-wracking survival film that does more with one family than most of its rivals manage with a whole planet. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Amazon Prime Video in the UK from 5 February 2021, where it has launched as an Amazon exclusive rather than reaching cinemas during the closures.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the closing stretch in the Greenland bunkers always read as a setup, and it duly produced a sequel, *Greenland: Migration*, picking the family up in the aftermath. The original has settled into a reputation as one of the better-regarded disaster films of its moment, helped along by the way its premise of a sudden, unequal emergency landed in 2020 and 2021. It remains available on Amazon Prime Video and on disc and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *brief strong violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes include shootings, fistfights, and a sequence in which a hammer is embedded in a man's head, although bloody detail is minimal throughout.
**Threat and horror:** Scenes include people fleeing explosions, falling debris, and armed gunmen. There is also a kidnapping scene in which a mother and child are separated.
**Additional issues:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k') and milder terms including 'shit' and 'pissed'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/greenland-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00oty4mdc)).*
================================================================================
## Tenet (2020)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-tenet
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-tenet.md
- published: 2020-09-03
- document_id: 1168
> Christopher Nolan builds a spy thriller that runs forwards and backwards at once. It is colder than Inception and twice as demanding, and on craft and sheer ambition it is hard to look away. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** August 2020
- **Director:** Christopher Nolan · **Writer:** Christopher Nolan
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Syncopy
- **Genre:** Science-fiction espionage thriller · **Runtime:** 150 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** John David Washington (*BlacKkKlansman*) as the Protagonist; Robert Pattinson (*Good Time*, *The Lighthouse*) as Neil; Elizabeth Debicki (*The Night Manager*, *Widows*) as Kat; Kenneth Branagh (*Henry V*, *Dunkirk*) as Andrei Sator
- **IMDb:** 7.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 69% critics / 76% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
This is the film the industry has been waiting on. *Tenet* is the picture Warner Bros. is gambling the reopening of cinemas on, the one a director who shoots on film and detests streaming has insisted belongs on the largest screen you can find. Christopher Nolan has spent a career turning structural tricks into box-office hits, from the back-to-front murder mystery of *Memento* to the nested dreams of *Inception*, and he arrives here with the most baffling premise he has yet attempted and a budget large enough to make every frame of it real. The question is not whether *Tenet* is clever. With Nolan it always is. The question is whether the cleverness leaves room for anything to hold on to.
## The setup
A CIA operative, named only as the Protagonist, survives an ordeal that turns out to be a recruitment test and is handed a single word, Tenet, and a fragment of an idea: that certain objects, and eventually people, can have their flow through time inverted, so that they move backwards while the world moves forwards. Bullets retreat into guns. Wrecked cars unwreck themselves. Somewhere in the future, someone is using this technology as a weapon, and the threat it poses is not to a city or a country but to the existence of the present itself.
The trail leads, by way of a Mumbai arms dealer and a forged Goya, to Andrei Sator, a Russian oligarch with a dying man's appetite for destruction and a wife he keeps in a gilded cage. The Protagonist gathers an enigmatic partner, Neil, and sets out to understand the rules of inversion before he has to fight a war fought in two directions at once. I will leave the mechanics there, because half the pleasure is watching the film teach them to you, and the other half is realising it has no intention of slowing down while it does.
## The cast
John David Washington carries the film with a coiled physical authority that suits a man given almost no backstory and not even a name. He is all forward motion and dry competence, and he sells the action even when the plot has stopped explaining itself. The standout is Robert Pattinson as Neil, all rumpled charm and private amusement, clearly several steps ahead of everyone including the audience, and the warmth he brings is the closest the film comes to a beating heart. Elizabeth Debicki gives Kat a wounded dignity that the script badly needs, towering over her scenes literally and emotionally, the only character whose stakes are recognisably human. Kenneth Branagh plays Sator as a cold slab of menace, a man who would rather end the world than leave it to anyone else, and if the accent is broad the threat underneath it is not.
## The craft
This is where *Tenet* leaves almost everything else this year standing. Hoyte van Hoytema shoots it in vast, cold IMAX, all blue steel and brutalist concrete, and Nolan stages action that genuinely runs in both directions inside the same shot: a fistfight against a man moving backwards, a car chase where half the traffic is reversing through time, a climactic assault split into a forward team and an inverted one counting down to the same instant. Crucially, almost none of it is computer-generated. Nolan really did flip the cars and really did crash a real aeroplane into a real hangar, and you feel the weight of it. Ludwig Göransson's score, all reversed synths and pounding low end, drives the thing forward where the dialogue cannot. The one genuine flaw is the sound mix: Nolan buries chunks of crucial exposition under music and through masks, and there are moments where you simply cannot make out the rules being explained to you.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Inception*, and *Tenet* is the harder, colder sibling: another heist built on a high-concept rule set, but stripped of the emotional anchor that Cobb's grief gave the earlier film. It shares DNA with *Memento* too, the same delight in making time itself the antagonist. Set against the spy films it borrows from, the globe-trotting and the tuxedos and the catamaran chases, it is plainly Nolan's run at Bond, and it has the set pieces to compete. For the science-fiction faithful, the closest cousin is the micro-budget *Primer*, another film that trusts you to keep up with its time mechanics and refuses to hold your hand. *Tenet* simply does it with a quarter of a billion dollars.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are divided, and audiences a touch warmer. The praise lands on the ambition, the practical spectacle and Pattinson; the complaints land, fairly, on the emotional distance, the wall of exposition and that muddy sound mix. There is a real argument here, and I am on the generous side of it. Yes, the film holds you at arm's length, and yes, you will miss lines. But the demand it makes of you, that you lean in and assemble the thing as it runs, is the demand I most enjoy a film making. It rewards the second viewing more than almost anything else on release.
## Verdict
*Tenet* is not the film to convert anyone who finds Nolan chilly or self-regarding, and the people complaining that they could not follow it or hear it have a point. But I value intelligent science fiction, espionage, world-building and a film that respects my attention enough to overload it, and on every one of those *Tenet* delivers at full volume. It is colder than *Inception* and more demanding than anything else in cinemas, and it is built to be watched again, which is exactly how I intend to watch it. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, in IMAX and 70mm where you can find it. This is one to see on the biggest screen within reach, and to see before anyone spoils the mechanics.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Tenet* turned out to be the strange centrepiece of cinema's pandemic reopening, the film studios watched to see whether audiences would return, and its complicated release shaped how the industry thought about windows for a year afterwards. Nolan's frustration with Warner Bros. over its later same-day streaming strategy led him to move *Oppenheimer* (2023) to Universal. *Tenet* has settled into its reputation as a divisive, rewarding puzzle that plays better at home with subtitles on, where the buried dialogue stops being a barrier. It is now widely available on 4K disc and digital, and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, domestic abuse, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes include gunfights, fistfights, stabbings, use of improvised weapons, and explosions. In an interrogation scene it is implied a man's teeth are pulled out, but bloody detail is minimal. Another man is beaten to death, but the scene does not feature strong detail. A man verbally threatens another man with castration. A husband is abusive towards his wife, threatening her and later shooting her. In one scene she aims a gun at him, but he disarms and punches her.
**Threat and horror:** There are frequent tense sequences in which people are in dangerous situations, come under fire, or attempt to evade bombs. In one scene terrorists take over an auditorium and there is brief distress among the audience. There is also a scene in which an abusive husband holds his wife at gunpoint, and threatens to beat her with his belt.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f***k'), as well as milder terms including 'bitch', 'bullshit', 'bloody' and 'piss'.
**Additional issues:** Discreet references are made to suicide and discriminatory behaviour. There are also mild sex references.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/tenet-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00ota0mtc)).*
================================================================================
## The Old Guard (2020)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-old-guard
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-old-guard.md
- published: 2020-07-15
- document_id: 1209
> A comic-book premise about immortal mercenaries that Charlize Theron and Gina Prince-Bythewood turn into something with weight as well as weaponry. Familiar in shape, but unusually well made and very rewatchable. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2020 (Netflix)
- **Director:** Gina Prince-Bythewood · **Writer:** Greg Rucka
- **Studio / distributor:** Skydance Media; Denver and Delilah; Netflix
- **Genre:** Supernatural action thriller / comic-book adventure · **Runtime:** 125 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Charlize Theron (*Mad Max: Fury Road*, *Atomic Blonde*) as Andy; KiKi Layne (*If Beale Street Could Talk*) as Nile Freeman; Matthias Schoenaerts (*Rust and Bone*) as Booker; Chiwetel Ejiofor (*12 Years a Slave*) as Copley
- **IMDb:** 7.2 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 80% critics / 71% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Netflix has spent the past couple of years throwing money at the action film, and the results have mostly looked like money: glossy, weightless, designed to play in the background while you check your phone. *The Old Guard* is the one that breaks the pattern. It comes from a comic by Greg Rucka, who also writes the script, it is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, better known for *Love & Basketball* than for gunfights, and it gives Charlize Theron her best action role since she went toe to toe with a stairwell full of men in *Atomic Blonde*. The premise is daft on paper. What the film does with it is not.
## The setup
Andy, short for Andromache of Scythia, has been alive for several thousand years, and she is tired. She leads a small team of immortal warriors who heal from any wound and who have spent centuries quietly intervening in human history, hiring themselves out where they think they can do some good. When a job in South Sudan turns out to be bait, their existence is exposed to people who would very much like to take them apart and find out how they work. At the same moment, on the other side of the world, a young US Marine named Nile Freeman has her throat cut and wakes up without a scratch, which means the old guard has just become five. The hook is simple and it lands: what does it cost to be unkillable, and how long before you stop wanting to be.
## The cast
Theron carries the film, and she carries it on weariness as much as on violence. Andy is not a quippy superhero; she is someone who has buried everyone she ever loved and is starting to suspect the work was never worth it, and Theron plays that exhaustion without ever letting the character go soft. KiKi Layne, fresh from the very different register of *If Beale Street Could Talk*, is the audience's way in as Nile, all disbelief and resistance hardening into resolve. Matthias Schoenaerts gives Booker a hangdog melancholy that the script quietly needs, and Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli, as the centuries-old couple Joe and Nicky, get the film's best scene without throwing a single punch in it. Chiwetel Ejiofor lends the plot machinery more gravity than it strictly deserves. The team feels like people who have actually spent lifetimes in each other's company, which is most of what a film like this needs to work.
## The craft
Prince-Bythewood shoots action you can follow, which should not feel like a compliment in 2020 and somehow still does. The set pieces are built around bodies that keep getting up, and she finds the grim comedy and the horror in that without leaning on either. There is real geography to the fights, a sense of where everyone is and what they are trying to do, and the violence has weight because the camera holds still long enough to let it. The film is more interested in its people in the gaps between the action than most of its rivals, and the pacing only really sags in the middle, where the plot stops to explain itself. Dustin O'Halloran and Volker Bertelmann's score, threaded with needle-drops, gives it a pulse. It looks like a film made by someone who cares, not by an algorithm filling a content slot.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Highlander*, immortals trudging through history carrying their swords and their grief, and *The Old Guard* has more in common with that film's melancholy than with its camp. It sits in the same recent lineage as *John Wick* and Theron's own *Atomic Blonde*, the wave of action films that decided choreography and consequence were worth taking seriously again, and it is a clear cut above Netflix's own *Extraction* from earlier this year, which had the spectacle but none of the interior life. Where it parts company with all of them is the source: this is a comic-book adaptation that remembers comics can be about loneliness and duty, not just powers and punch-ups.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are broadly won over, sitting around 80%, and the praise lands where you would expect: Theron, the action, and the unusual warmth between the team. The reservations are fair too. The villain, a smirking pharma heir, is the weakest thing in the film, and the last act tips its hand toward the sequel it plainly wants to be rather than finishing its own story. Audiences are a touch cooler at 71%, which I suspect is the price of a film that spends as much time on feeling as on fighting when some viewers turned up purely for the fighting. I land closer to the critics, and a little above them.
## Verdict
This is the rare streaming action film I would happily watch again, and rewatchability is most of what I am marking it on. It takes a silly premise seriously, it is anchored by a genuinely good Theron performance, the team has chemistry you believe in, and it is directed with a craft and a patience the genre has largely forgotten. It is not flawless. The plot is familiar, the villain is thin, and it ends on a hook rather than a resolution. But it is made with care, it has more on its mind than its body count, and it earns the sequel it is angling for. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Netflix now, worldwide, from 10 July.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the sequel the ending so plainly set up, *The Old Guard 2*, eventually arrived in 2025, and the long gap between the two did the franchise no favours. The first film has held up as the high point and as the strongest of Netflix's home-grown action efforts of its era, the one people still recommend when the subject comes up. It remains on Netflix.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *injury detail, language, violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC release page for *The Old Guard* carries the classification (15) and the short consumer advice line quoted above, but its detailed per-category Content Advice (the broken-down Violence, Language and Injury detail notes) was not available to retrieve at the time of writing. The summary descriptors classify the film for strong violence, strong language, and injury detail.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-old-guard-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc01mjg1mde)).*
================================================================================
## Greyhound (2020)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-greyhound
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-greyhound.md
- published: 2020-07-15
- document_id: 1090
> Tom Hanks writes himself a lean, ninety-minute Atlantic crossing and spends almost all of it on the bridge. No subplots, no flab, just the hunt. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2020 (Apple TV+)
- **Director:** Aaron Schneider · **Writer:** Tom Hanks
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Playtone; Apple TV+
- **Source:** *The Good Shepherd* by C. S. Forester
- **Genre:** Second World War naval thriller · **Runtime:** 91 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Tom Hanks (*Saving Private Ryan*, *Captain Phillips*) as Commander Ernest Krause; Stephen Graham (*This Is England*, *Boardwalk Empire*) as Charlie Cole; Rob Morgan (*Mudbound*) as Cleveland; Elisabeth Shue (*Leaving Las Vegas*) as Evelyn
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 79% critics / 76% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Tom Hanks has spent a fair part of his career in uniform, and a fair part of it adapting things himself, so a Hanks-written naval thriller pulled from a C. S. Forester novel was never going to be a hard sell. What is slightly unexpected is the discipline of it. *Greyhound* runs to ninety-one minutes, refuses almost every chance to cut away from the ship, and treats the destroyer's bridge as a stage it has no intention of leaving. The pandemic has pushed it off the big screen and onto Apple TV+ rather than into cinemas, which is a shame for the sound design, but the film that arrives is tighter and more single-minded than the streaming release might lead you to expect.
## The setup
It is early 1942, and Commander Ernest Krause (Tom Hanks) has his first wartime command: the destroyer USS Keeling, call sign Greyhound, shepherding an Allied convoy across the North Atlantic. For two days in the middle of the crossing the ships will be beyond the reach of air cover, in the stretch the crews call the Black Pit, and that is exactly where a wolf pack of German U-boats is waiting. Krause has never been tested under fire, the merchant ships behind him are slow and vulnerable, and the enemy is mostly an unseen voice and a wake in the dark. The whole film is that running fight: sonar pings, bearings called out, torpedoes in the water, and a man who has not slept trying to out-think something he can barely see.
## The cast
This is Hanks's film almost to the exclusion of everyone else, and he plays Krause as a quiet, devout, methodical professional rather than a barking hero. The performance is built out of small things: a prayer muttered between orders, untouched meals carried away, the careful courtesy he extends even when the bridge is in chaos. It is closer to his measured captain in *Captain Phillips* than to the rifle-company leader of *Saving Private Ryan*, and it gives the picture a still centre. Stephen Graham, as executive officer Charlie Cole, supplies the steadying second voice the format needs, and brings the lived-in authority he has been quietly building since *This Is England*. Rob Morgan, as the mess attendant Cleveland, lands one of the film's few moments of real human cost. Elisabeth Shue appears only in a brief framing scene ashore, a memory rather than a character, and the film is honest enough not to keep cutting home to her.
## The craft
Aaron Schneider, whose *Get Low* was a much slower and more talkative film, turns out to have a good eye for procedure. The tension is generated almost entirely by the language of naval combat: the relayed sonar contacts, the corrected headings, the gap between an order given and a hit landing. Shelly Johnson's camera stays tight and disorienting on the bridge, and the digital seas, while occasionally a touch glassy, mostly hold up under the spray. Blake Neely's score knows when to drop out and let the sound of the ship do the work. There is a real craft in how legible the film keeps a fight that is, by its nature, a confusion of bearings and blips, and the relentless ninety minutes never lets the pulse drop.
## How it stacks up
The obvious shadow over any U-boat-era thriller is *Das Boot*, and *Greyhound* is wise not to invite the comparison too closely; it is the convoy's story, not the submarine's, and it has none of that film's claustrophobic character study. It sits nearer to *Master and Commander*, sharing its love of nautical procedure and chain of command, though without the breadth of that film's world. Christopher Nolan's *Dunkirk* is the recent benchmark for stripping a war film down to pure tension with thin characterisation, and *Greyhound* is playing a similar game on a smaller budget and a single deck. Against any of them it is the leaner, less ambitious picture, but it is also the most efficient.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are broadly favourable, sitting around the high seventies, and praising precisely what I did: the lean running time and the procedural grip. The common reservation is that the film is thin on character, that Krause is the only person aboard who registers and even he is more a set of habits than a man. Audiences are a little cooler, which I suspect is the streaming release setting expectations for something bigger. Both notes are fair. There is no real subplot, no arc beyond surviving the crossing, and viewers who want the people behind the procedure will feel the gap.
## Verdict
I happen to like exactly this kind of film: tight, technical, procedural, built around competent people doing a difficult job under pressure, with no patience for the subplots a longer cut would have bolted on. The lack of depth that bothers some critics reads to me as restraint. *Greyhound* knows what it is, does it in ninety-one minutes, and gets off the bridge before it outstays its welcome. It is the sort of thing I will put on again on a wet afternoon precisely because it asks nothing of me beyond attention and rewards it with sustained tension. Not a great war film, but a very well-made small one. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Apple TV+ from 10 July 2020. Worth the best speakers or headphones you can manage, since the cinema release it was built for did not happen.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: with no theatrical run, *Greyhound* has lived its whole life on Apple TV+, where it remains. It picked up an Academy Award nomination for Best Sound at the 93rd ceremony, which fits a film that lives or dies on its sonar pings and depth charges. Its reputation has settled roughly where the original reviews left it: admired as a lean, efficient procedural, gently dinged for thin characterisation, and quietly rewatchable for exactly that leanness.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *moderate war violence, threat, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is moderate violence in sea battles between ships and submarines, with intense exchanges of artillery fire, explosions from depth charges and ships being damaged by torpedo strikes. There are no images of casualties or injury, apart from fleeting sight of a bloody bullet wound to a sailor's face before he is carried away.
**Threat and horror:** There is moderate threat as Allied ships attempt to avoid torpedoes, and crew members deal with outbreaks of fires.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k'), as well as milder bad language including uses of 'son of a bitch', 'damn' and 'hell'.
**Additional issues:** There are occasional uses of the discriminatory term 'kraut' by American sailors to describe the German enemy, which reflect the historical period and events in which the film is set. There is occasional smoking which also reflects the historical setting of the film.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/greyhound-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00odg5njq)).*
================================================================================
## Extraction (2020)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-extraction
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-extraction.md
- published: 2020-05-09
- document_id: 1078
> A stunt coordinator steps up to direct and hands Chris Hemsworth one long, brutal day in Dhaka. The story is thin, the action is not, and as a piece of staging it is one of the best things Netflix has put its name to. 8/10.
- **UK release:** April 2020 (Netflix)
- **Director:** Sam Hargrave · **Writer:** Joe Russo
- **Studio / distributor:** AGBO; TGIM Films; Netflix
- **Genre:** Action thriller / rescue mission · **Runtime:** 117 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Chris Hemsworth (*Rush*, *Thor*) as Tyler Rake; Randeep Hooda (*Highway*) as Saju; Golshifteh Farahani (*Paterson*) as Nik Khan; Rudhraksh Jaiswal as Ovi Mahajan Jr.
- **IMDb:** 6.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 67% critics / 70% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Sam Hargrave has spent years falling off things and choreographing other people falling off things, doubling and coordinating stunts on the big Marvel pictures, and *Extraction* is his move out of the harness and into the director's chair. That pedigree tells you most of what you need to know about where the film puts its money. It arrives on Netflix in late April 2020, with cinemas shut and a captive audience at home, carrying the AGBO logo of Joe and Anthony Russo, who wrote and produced it, and the not-inconsiderable advantage of Chris Hemsworth deciding he wants to be in an action film that has nothing to do with a hammer.
## The setup
Tyler Rake is a black-market mercenary, the kind who takes the jobs nobody sane would, and the job here is a retrieval. The teenage son of an imprisoned Indian crime lord has been snatched by a rival drug baron and is being held in Dhaka, a city the film treats as one continuous trap. Rake goes in to get the boy out. That is the whole brief, and the film is honest about it being the whole brief: a man, a child, and a long way to the river with everyone in the city wanting them dead.
What complicates the clean exit is that nobody in this world is paying for loyalty. The men who hired Rake have their own arithmetic, the boy's father has his own enforcer working the same streets, and the local kingpin owns the police as well as the soldiers. The grief Rake carries is sketched rather than explored, but it gives Hemsworth something to play under the violence, and it sets up the one relationship the film actually cares about, between the burnt-out professional and the frightened kid he is supposed to deliver like a parcel.
## The cast
Hemsworth is the reason this works as well as it does. Stripped of the Asgard wisecracks, he plays Rake as a man running on fumes and muscle memory, and he commits physically in a way that reads on screen as genuine effort rather than choreography. He is convincing as someone who is very good at a job he no longer wants. Randeep Hooda, as the father's own protector Saju, is the film's best surprise, a coiled, watchful presence who is more than a match for Rake and gives the middle stretch a real antagonist rather than another interchangeable gunman. Golshifteh Farahani brings a flinty competence to Nik Khan, the handler running the operation from a distance, and Rudhraksh Jaiswal, as the boy Ovi, has the harder task of being a passenger the audience still roots for, which he manages without tipping into the precocious. The characterisation is thin across the board, and the film knows it; what it asks of the cast is presence and conviction, and it gets both.
## The craft
The craft is where *Extraction* earns its keep. Hargrave shoots action with the eye of someone who has lived inside it, and the centrepiece is a sustained chase and fight, staged to look like a single unbroken take, that runs through cars, a stairwell and an apartment building and barely lets you breathe. Whether or not every join is invisible matters less than the effect, which is genuine momentum and a clear sense of geography, the thing so much modern action throws away in the cutting room. Newton Thomas Sigel's camera stays close and mobile without descending into the shaky incoherence the genre has spent fifteen years apologising for. The Dhaka of the film is all heat, dust and concrete, a city that feels like a pressure cooker, and the Henry Jackman and Alex Belcher score keeps the pulse up without drowning the quieter beats. It is brutal, grounded and clearly choreographed, and it is the work of people who care about the difference between an action scene you can follow and one you simply endure.
## How it stacks up
The lineage is easy to read. The grim professional fetching a child out of a hostile city is *Man on Fire* with the sentiment dialled down, and the wall-to-wall close-quarters carnage owes an obvious debt to *The Raid* and to the *John Wick* films, which between them reset the bar for what screen gunplay and hand-to-hand should look like. *Extraction* does not have *John Wick*'s mythology or *The Raid*'s lean perfection, and it is nowhere near as interested in its own world as either. What it has is that oner, and a leading man willing to be thrown around for it. Set beside something like *13 Hours*, it is less interested in the politics of where it is than in the next obstacle between the hero and the exit, which is both its limitation and, honestly, its appeal.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have landed mixed but mostly warm, around two-thirds positive, and the split is predictable: near-unanimous praise for the staging and for Hemsworth's commitment, and a recurring complaint that the story and the characters are too thin to carry the runtime. Audiences are a touch kinder, which fits a film built to be devoured on a sofa rather than dissected. I am closer to the audience here. The thin script is a fair charge, but it is the wrong thing to weigh a film like this on. Judge it as a piece of action staging, which is what it sets out to be, and the complaints get a lot quieter.
## Verdict
*Extraction* is not a deep film and never pretends to be. The plot is a straight line, the emotional backstory is thin, and you will not be quoting the dialogue. None of that stops it being one of the most satisfying pure action films of the year. It moves, it stages its set pieces with real skill and clarity, and it gives Hemsworth a part that uses his physicality instead of his charm. For a streaming release dropped in the middle of a locked-down spring, it punches well above the usual algorithm-filler weight, and the central chase alone is worth the visit. I will happily watch that sequence again, which for this kind of film is the test that matters. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Streaming on Netflix now, worldwide, from 24 April 2020.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the open ending paid off in *Extraction 2* (2023), which reunited Hargrave and Hemsworth and built its own showcase oner around a prison break and a train, comfortably topping the first film for sheer logistical ambition. The original has settled in as one of Netflix's most-watched original films and the launch of a genuine franchise. It remains on Netflix.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *violence, injury detail, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The film's full category-by-category BBFC Content Advice could not be retrieved from the BBFC release page at the time of writing; the rating and the short consumer advice line above are taken from the BBFC's classification of the film, and the summary below is drawn from the published parental and content guidance rather than quoted verbatim from the BBFC.
**Violence and injury detail:** Strong, sustained and bloody action violence runs throughout, including shootings at close range, stabbings, and brutal hand-to-hand fighting, with visible wounds, blood and injury detail. There is violence involving a child and other distressing moments.
**Language:** Frequent strong language ('f**k', 'motherf****r') alongside milder terms.
**Drugs:** There is sight of drug use.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/)); content summary informed by the BBFC consumer advice and published parental guidance.*
================================================================================
## Star Wars - The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker.md
- published: 2019-12-31
- document_id: 1165
> J. J. Abrams returns to wrap up a trilogy that lost its way, and delivers a gorgeous, breathless, slightly panicked finale that leans hard on nostalgia. Spectacular to look at, frustrating to think about. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** December 2019
- **Director:** J. J. Abrams · **Writers:** Chris Terrio, J. J. Abrams
- **Studio / distributor:** Lucasfilm; Bad Robot; Walt Disney Studios
- **Genre:** Space opera / science-fiction adventure · **Runtime:** 142 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Daisy Ridley (*The Force Awakens*, *Murder on the Orient Express*) as Rey; Adam Driver (*Paterson*) as Kylo Ren; John Boyega (*Attack the Block*) as Finn; Oscar Isaac (*Ex Machina*) as Poe Dameron; Ian McDiarmid (*Return of the Jedi*, *Revenge of the Sith*) as Emperor Palpatine
- **IMDb:** 6.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 51% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
This is the one that has to land the plane. *The Force Awakens* relaunched Star Wars in 2015 by lovingly tracing the shape of the original film, and *The Last Jedi* in 2017 took the controls and steered somewhere stranger and more divisive, splitting the audience down the middle in a way no Star Wars film had managed before. J. J. Abrams, who started this trilogy, has been brought back to finish it, and you can feel from the first scene that his brief is partly to tell a story and partly to make peace. *The Rise of Skywalker* is the rare blockbuster that arrives with a fan war already raging around it, and a good deal of its running time is spent trying to satisfy both sides at once.
## The setup
A year has passed since the Resistance was cut down to a handful of survivors. A broadcast goes out across the galaxy in a voice everyone thought was gone for good, and the First Order is no longer the whole of the threat. Rey (Daisy Ridley), still training and still uncertain about where she comes from, sets out with Finn, Poe and the old droids on a scavenger hunt across a string of new worlds, chasing the clues that might explain the signal and stop whatever is gathering behind it. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), meanwhile, is pulled towards the same source for his own reasons. The two of them remain bound together in a way neither of them asked for, and the film treats that connection as its real spine. I will keep the rest under wraps; this is a film built on reveals, and some of them are worth meeting cold.
## The cast
Ridley carries the film, and she is good enough to make you wish the script trusted her more. Rey's struggle is the most human thing here, and Ridley plays the doubt and the temper without ever tipping into self-pity. Driver is the standout, as he was last time; Kylo Ren is the only character in this trilogy whose inner life feels genuinely unresolved, and Driver gives him a wounded, dangerous weight that the cleaner heroes cannot match. The double act of Boyega and Isaac is loose and likeable, and the film is at its most relaxed when the three leads are simply bickering their way across a desert. Ian McDiarmid returns to a role he first played decades ago and clearly relishes every hiss of it. The losses around the edges, some of them written into the story by events off screen, give the whole thing an undertow of real farewell.
## The craft
On pure spectacle this is the most confident the trilogy has looked. Dan Mindel shoots it big and warm, the desert chases and the climactic fleet battle have genuine scale, and one duel staged on the wreckage of a Death Star amid crashing seas is the best single image in the new films. Abrams keeps it moving at a sprint, which is both the film's saving grace and its central problem: there is barely a moment to breathe, and the plot lurches from planet to planet on a fetch-quest structure that never quite settles. John Williams, scoring the final chapter of a saga he opened in 1977, does extraordinary work, threading old themes through new ones so that the music carries the emotional memory the script sometimes leaves on the table. When the film slows down enough to let his score land, it is genuinely moving.
## How it stacks up
Against the rest of the trilogy it sits in an odd place. It is more entertaining moment to moment than *The Last Jedi* and far less interested in surprising you. Where Rian Johnson's film picked at the franchise's assumptions and asked awkward questions about heroes and bloodlines, Abrams spends a fair amount of energy quietly tidying those questions away, reaching back past the previous instalment to the comfort of *Return of the Jedi*. As a finale it inevitably invites comparison with the way the original trilogy closed, and it does not have that film's clean emotional payoff; it has three or four endings where one would do. It is closer in spirit to a victory-lap team-up like *Avengers: Endgame*, all reunions and callbacks and crowd-pleasing returns, than to the leaner adventure that started everything.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split here is stark, and it tells you something. Critics have landed around the low fifties, the harshest reviews the sequel trilogy has drawn, with the recurring charge being that the film reverses course on its predecessor and substitutes nostalgia for nerve. Audiences are far warmer, sitting up in the eighties, and the gap is real rather than a fluke. My own reaction lands between the two and closer to the crowd. The criticisms are fair: the plotting is rushed, the reversals are transparent, and you can see the machinery of fan management grinding away. But the film is never boring, it looks magnificent, and it sent me out of the cinema having had a thoroughly good time in spite of myself.
## Verdict
So this is a film I enjoyed more than I can entirely defend. It is visually stunning and it moves like a rocket, and the central pull between Rey and Kylo Ren still works when almost nothing around it does. It is also a film that flinches, that would rather reassure than provoke, and that tries to please everyone at the cost of leaving the trilogy's most interesting threads frayed. It could have been so much better, and the frustration of watching real craft poured into timid storytelling never quite leaves. For all that, it is handsome, propulsive, often stirring, and the kind of thing I will happily put on again for the spectacle and the Williams score alone. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, and the IMAX presentation is worth the upgrade for the scale of the final act.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: this closes the nine-film Skywalker saga, and in the years since release it has settled as the most contested of the sequel trilogy, the film fans argue over most when they argue about where the new Star Wars went wrong. Lucasfilm's storytelling energy moved largely to television after this, with *The Mandalorian* and its spin-offs carrying the franchise on Disney+, where this film also streams. It is widely available on 4K, Blu-ray and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Fights with fantastical weapons include impalements and decapitations, although there is little detail. A character's face is melted by fantastical energy.
**Threat and horror:** A young woman finds herself alone amidst an arena of sinister enemies, taunted by their leader. A character briefly becomes fanged and demonic.
**Injury detail:** There is brief sight of blood and injury.
**Language:** There is infrequent mild bad language, including 'ass', as well as use of milder terms such as 'hell' and 'damn'.
**Sex:** Sexual content is limited to kissing.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00otg3nze)).*
================================================================================
## Knives Out (2019)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-knives-out
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-knives-out.md
- published: 2019-12-12
- document_id: 1110
> Rian Johnson takes a break from Star Wars to revive the country-house whodunnit, and turns a creaky old form into the sharpest, funniest ensemble of the year. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** November 2019
- **Director:** Rian Johnson · **Writer:** Rian Johnson
- **Studio / distributor:** Lionsgate; MRC; T-Street
- **Genre:** Mystery comedy / whodunnit · **Runtime:** 130 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Daniel Craig (*Skyfall*, *Logan Lucky*) as Benoit Blanc; Ana de Armas (*Blade Runner 2049*) as Marta Cabrera; Chris Evans (*Captain America: The First Avenger*, *Snowpiercer*) as Ransom Drysdale; Jamie Lee Curtis (*Halloween*, *True Lies*) as Linda Drysdale
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 97% critics / 92% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
The country-house murder mystery is one of the oldest furniture pieces in popular fiction, and for decades it has mostly sat in the corner gathering dust, wheeled out for a Sunday-night television adaptation and little else. Rian Johnson, fresh from the most divisive *Star Wars* film in a generation, has decided to drag it back into the middle of the room and give it a proper polish. *Knives Out* is his answer to anyone who wondered whether the man who broke *Looper* into clever knots could do something warm, funny and built for a crowd. He can, and the result is the most purely enjoyable thing he has made.
## The setup
Harlan Thrombey, an enormously wealthy crime novelist, is found dead the morning after his eighty-fifth birthday party, his throat cut, the official verdict suicide. The local police are ready to close the book until a private detective with an improbable name and an even more improbable drawl, Benoit Blanc, turns up uninvited, paid by an anonymous client to take a second look. The Thrombey clan, gathered for the celebration, is a nest of resentments, debts and entitlements, every one of them with a reason to want the old man gone. Threading through all of it is Marta, Harlan's young nurse, who knows more than she is saying and has a physical inability to lie that the plot puts to ruthless use. Johnson hands us the shape of what happened surprisingly early, then spends the rest of the film letting the tension come from watching it play out rather than from a final-act conjuring trick.
## The cast
This is an ensemble film, and the casting is its first great pleasure. Daniel Craig, visibly delighted to be off the Bond leash, gives Blanc a syrupy Foghorn Leghorn accent and the air of a man enjoying his own cleverness a beat too openly. It should be insufferable and instead it is the comic engine of the film. Ana de Armas anchors everything as Marta, the only decent person in a house full of vipers, and she carries the emotional weight without ever tipping into sentiment. Chris Evans, shrugging off a decade of Captain America wholesomeness, is gleeful as the spoilt black-sheep grandson Ransom, all cable-knit and contempt. Around them Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette and Don Johnson sketch a family of beautifully observed monsters, each given just enough room to be funny and awful in their own particular register. Nobody is wasted, and nobody is straining.
## The craft
Johnson writes as well as he directs, and the screenplay is the real machinery here: a clockwork thing that keeps revealing it has more gears than you thought, without ever cheating the audience. Steve Yedlin's camera prowls the Thrombey mansion, a wonderful pile stuffed with daggers, taxidermy and that now-famous ring of knives, until the house itself feels like a suspect. Nathan Johnson's score does the playful, strings-led work the genre asks for. What lifts it above pastiche is the class commentary running underneath the parlour game: a film about inherited wealth and who actually does the work, sharp enough to draw blood but never so pleased with itself that it forgets to entertain. The 130 minutes move briskly, the jokes land, and the construction rewards a second viewing more than most thrillers manage.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestors are Agatha Christie and the gleeful chaos of *Clue*, and Johnson clearly loves both, but he is doing something a little slyer than homage. Where the classic whodunnit keeps its cards face down until the drawing-room reveal, *Knives Out* shows much of its hand and dares you to keep watching anyway. It is closer in spirit to the inverted mysteries of *Columbo* than to *Murder on the Orient Express*, and it shares with Johnson's own *Brick* and *Looper* a delight in taking a rigid genre and finding the loose thread to pull. Against the recent run of glossy, star-stuffed Christie adaptations it feels alive in a way they do not, because it has a point of view as well as a puzzle.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been close to unanimous, sitting around 97%, and for once the audience is right there with them at 92%. The praise lands on the same things: the wit, the ensemble, the elegance of the construction, and the welcome novelty of a mid-budget original made for grown-ups in a year of franchises. I am with the consensus, though I would temper it slightly. The film is a touch in love with its own cleverness, and the political asides occasionally nudge the satire when a lighter touch would have cut deeper. These are small complaints about a film that does almost everything it sets out to do.
## Verdict
*Knives Out* is the rare crowd-pleaser that respects the crowd, a proper film for grown-ups that trusts you to keep up and rewards you for doing so. It is funny, it is clever, it is gorgeously mounted, and it is the kind of mystery you will happily watch again knowing the answer, just to catch how the trick was set up. It loses a fraction for the moments when its smartness shows, and it is more delicious than deep, but as an evening's entertainment it is close to faultless. The most fun I have had in a cinema this year. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film was a sizeable hit, enough that Netflix bought the rights to two sequels and Benoit Blanc became a franchise. *Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery* (2022) moved the detective to a Greek island and a different set of awful rich people, trading the country-house cosiness for sun and satire; a third film followed it onto streaming. The original has settled into its reputation as the film that single-handedly proved there was still a healthy audience for the mid-budget, star-led original. It now streams on Amazon Prime Video in the UK depending on the month, and is widely available on disc and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC on its 2019 cinema release for *moderate violence, threat, infrequent strong language*. The fuller content notes below are taken from the BBFC's subsequent **15**-rated home-entertainment classification, which carries the consumer advice line *brief bloody images, moderate sex and suicide references, strong language*. They may contain spoilers.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k'), as well as milder bad language including uses of 'bitch', 'prick', 'asshole', 'son-of-a-bitch', 'screwed', 'shit', 'hell', 'ass', 'damn', 'Jesus', 'God' and 'goddamn', and a rude middle finger gesture.
**Sex:** There are moderate verbal references to masturbation and marital infidelity.
**Injury detail:** There is the implication of a knife being drawn across a character's throat, and subsequent brief images of the bloody consequences.
**Suicide and self-harm:** There are references to a character committing suicide, with details provided by the police of the method used and the injury sustained.
**Additional issues:** There are also references to the misuse of medical drugs.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/knives-out-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00oty5odm)).*
================================================================================
## Ford v Ferrari (2019)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-ford-v-ferrari
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-ford-v-ferrari.md
- published: 2019-11-19
- document_id: 1080
> James Mangold turns a corporate dispute over a sports car into one of the year's most satisfying crowd-pleasers, anchored by Bale and Damon and built on engine noise. Old-fashioned in the best sense. 8/10.
- **UK release:** November 2019 (UK title *Le Mans '66*)
- **Director:** James Mangold · **Writers:** Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, Jason Keller
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Chernin Entertainment
- **Genre:** Motorsport drama / true-story sports film · **Runtime:** 152 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Matt Damon (*The Martian*, *The Bourne Identity*) as Carroll Shelby; Christian Bale (*The Dark Knight*, *The Fighter*) as Ken Miles; Jon Bernthal (*Wind River*, *Baby Driver*) as Lee Iacocca; Caitríona Balfe (*Outlander*) as Mollie Miles
- **IMDb:** 8.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 92% critics / 98% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The big studio race-against-the-clock picture, the kind built around men, machines and a deadline, has been an awkward sell for a while now. *Rush* managed it in 2013, but motorsport on screen mostly belongs to documentaries and the odd vanity project. So there is something faintly old-fashioned, in the way you would mean it as a compliment, about James Mangold turning a 1960s boardroom grudge into a 152-minute crowd-pleaser and trusting that engine noise and two well-matched leads will carry it. Mangold has form for this sort of square, well-built film, from *Walk the Line* to *3:10 to Yuma*, and most recently *Logan*, where he proved he could find real feeling inside a genre exercise. Here he does it again, and the surprise is how much of the pleasure comes from the parts that are not the racing.
## The setup
Ford, stung by a failed attempt to buy Ferrari outright, decides the way to wound Enzo where it hurts is to beat him at Le Mans, the one race his cars own. The job of building something that can actually do it falls to Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), a former driver turned constructor whose heart will no longer let him race, and the job of driving it falls to Ken Miles (Christian Bale), a gifted, prickly Englishman whom Ford's marketing men cannot stand. The car is the GT40. The opponent is Ferrari. The real opponent, it turns out, is the company writing the cheques.
That tension, between the men who understand the machine and the executives who own it, is what the film is built around, and it gives a story everyone already knows the ending of a genuine spine. You are not really watching to see whether Ford wins. You are watching to see what it costs the two men who have to deliver it.
## The cast
Bale is the engine of the thing. He has the showier role, all twitchy energy, blunt Brummie contempt and sudden tenderness, and he plays Miles as a man who is only fully himself at speed. It would tip into caricature in lesser hands; Bale keeps finding the human underneath. Damon is the quieter, harder trick, playing Shelby as the diplomat who has to manage the driver, the executives and his own ruined health all at once, and he holds the centre without ever grandstanding. The two of them have the kind of bristling, affectionate chemistry the script keeps reaching for, including a front-lawn brawl that is the most purely enjoyable scene in the film.
Around them, Jon Bernthal gives Lee Iacocca more warmth than the corporate-suit role needs, and Caitríona Balfe, as Miles's wife Mollie, is sharper and funnier than the genre's usual worried-spouse part. She is allowed to be in on it, which matters.
## The craft
The racing is excellent, and you can feel that Mangold and his cinematographer Phedon Papamichael shot it for clarity rather than chaos. You always know where Miles is on the track, how far back the Ferraris are, what is going wrong under the bonnet. The sound design does enormous work: the GT40 has a voice, and the film lets you hear it. Le Mans at night, headlights swallowing the dark at 200 miles an hour, is genuinely thrilling, and the editing knows when to sit inside the car and when to pull back. Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders keep the score lean and largely out of the way, which is the right call when the machinery is making this much music of its own.
If there is a craft complaint, it is length. At two and a half hours the film takes its time getting to the track, and a subplot or two of Ford-versus-Ford politics could go without anyone missing it. But the racing repays the patience.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Rush*, Ron Howard's Hunt-and-Lauda film, and the two make an interesting pair: *Rush* is the more dangerous, more European, more about the men who race; *Ford v Ferrari* is the more American, more about the people who build and pay. Tonally it sits closer to *Apollo 13*, another true story about engineers solving an impossible problem against a deadline, and to *Moneyball*, which similarly found drama in clever people fighting an institution that does not understand them. Mangold is working in that honourable tradition of the well-made studio picture about competence under pressure, and he is good at it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm, sitting around 92%, and audiences warmer still near 98%, which is the gap you would expect for a film this easy to enjoy. The praise is for exactly the right things: the performances, the racing, the old-school confidence of the whole enterprise. The mild reservations are about familiarity and length, and they are fair. Nobody is claiming it reinvents the form. The audience score is the truer reading here, because this is a film made to be liked, and it is liked.
## Verdict
This is a film I would happily put on again, which for me counts for a lot. It is handsome, well-acted, genuinely exciting when the cars are running, and built on a friendship worth spending time with. It is also fifteen minutes too long and tells you nothing about people or institutions you did not already suspect. But it does the hard, unfashionable thing well: it takes a story whose ending is on the record and makes you care about the men living through it. A satisfying, rewatchable, properly made piece of studio entertainment, and a reminder of how good that can be. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, under the title *Le Mans '66*. See it somewhere with a sound system that can do the engines justice.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to win Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and Best Sound Editing, and Bale's performance as Miles has aged into one of the best-regarded of his run. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+ in the UK. The title split persists, sold as *Le Mans '66* here and *Ford v Ferrari* almost everywhere else.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC (as *Le Mans '66*) for *infrequent strong language, moderate threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC release page was unavailable at the time of writing, so the full category-by-category Content Advice could not be retrieved. The age rating and the short consumer advice line above are confirmed from the film's UK classification and listings; the detailed Violence, Threat and Language breakdowns will be added once the BBFC page is reachable.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/le-mans-66-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtmta1mje1nq)).*
================================================================================
## Terminator - Dark Fate (2019)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-terminator-dark-fate
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-terminator-dark-fate.md
- published: 2019-11-04
- document_id: 1169
> The sixth Terminator film waves the other sequels away and picks up straight after Judgment Day, with Linda Hamilton back and a director who knows how to stage a chase. It does not match Cameron, but it is the most alive this series has felt in years. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** October 2019
- **Director:** Tim Miller · **Writers:** David Goyer; Justin Rhodes; Billy Ray
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Skydance Media; 20th Century Fox
- **Genre:** Science fiction action / legacy sequel · **Runtime:** 128 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Linda Hamilton (*The Terminator*, *Terminator 2: Judgment Day*) as Sarah Connor; Arnold Schwarzenegger (*Terminator 2: Judgment Day*, *Predator*) as the T-800 / Carl; Mackenzie Davis (*Blade Runner 2049*) as Grace; Natalia Reyes as Dani Ramos
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 70% critics / 82% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
There is a particular trick going around at the moment, and *Terminator: Dark Fate* leans on it hard: take a franchise that lost its way, ignore the sequels everyone would rather forget, and reconnect directly to the one film people actually loved. *Halloween* did it last year, *Jurassic World* did a softer version of it, and the template was set by *The Force Awakens*. Here the offer is blunt. Three Terminator films have happened since *Judgment Day*, and *Dark Fate* would like you to pretend they did not. James Cameron is back as a producer, Linda Hamilton has been coaxed out for the first time since 1991, and the message is that the adults are back in charge. The question is whether a franchise this picked-over has anything left to say, or whether this is just a better-dressed apology.
## The setup
A young woman in Mexico City, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), is going about an ordinary working life when two arrivals from the future drop into it on the same day. One is a new and nastier model of Terminator, sent to kill her. The other is Grace (Mackenzie Davis), an augmented human soldier sent back to keep her alive. The pattern is familiar, because the future has rearranged itself but not learned anything: the machines still want a particular person dead, and the resistance still wants her breathing. Into the chase comes Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), older, harder and entirely out of patience, who has spent the years since *Judgment Day* hunting Terminators as they appear. What she has not reckoned with is the fourth figure waiting further up the road, a question the film holds back rather than the sort of thing I will spoil here.
## The cast
Hamilton is the reason to turn up and she knows it. Her Sarah Connor is not a nostalgic cameo but a lead, weathered and furious and very funny in a bone-dry way, treating the whole apocalypse as an admin problem she has been managing for decades. Mackenzie Davis is the real discovery, all coiled physical conviction as Grace, selling the idea of an enhanced soldier who runs hot and burns out fast. Natalia Reyes has the trickiest job, the ordinary person the plot happens to, and she grows into it as the film widens her part. Schwarzenegger, when he arrives, is handled with more wit than you might fear: this is an old machine given a strange domestic afterlife, played with a deadpan melancholy that lands better than it has any right to. The four of them generate the thing these films live or die on, which is the sense of people actually running for their lives.
## The craft
Tim Miller made his name on *Deadpool*, and he brings the same appetite for kinetic, legible action. The set pieces are the strongest part of the film: a freeway pile-up, a mid-air sequence aboard a falling transport plane, a flooded dam finale, all staged so you can follow who is where and why it matters. Tom Holkenborg's score knows when to gesture at Brad Fiedel's original theme and when to leave it alone. The effects are mostly excellent, though the new Terminator's split-into-two trick occasionally tips into the weightless digital soup that the 1991 film, with far less computing power, somehow avoided. It moves at a proper clip, never lingers, and for two hours it does the basic job of an action film better than the series has managed in a long while.
## How it stacks up
The honest comparison is the one the film invites and then cannot win. Set beside *Terminator 2: Judgment Day*, still one of the great action films, this is a capable cover version of a song you already love. The structure is the same, the beats rhyme, and a couple of moments feel like deliberate callbacks rather than fresh ideas. Against the rest of the franchise it fares much better. It has more conviction than *Salvation*, more coherence than *Genisys*, and a clearer sense of what a Terminator film should feel like at speed. As a legacy sequel it sits in the upper half of the current crop, closer to *The Force Awakens* in its mix of comfort and competence than to the films that simply trade on memory.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have come round to it more warmly than I expected, calling it the best Terminator sequel in years and singling out Hamilton's return and the action. Audiences are running a touch higher still, and yet the cinema seats are emptier than anyone at Paramount wanted, with a franchise-fatigue that the film cannot quite outrun. That split feels right to me. The reviews are correct that this is the most assured the series has been since Cameron left it, and the muted turnout is the price of a franchise that has cried wolf too often. None of that changes what is on the screen, which is a solid, well-made action film carrying a great deal of baggage that is not its fault.
## Verdict
I came to this braced for another cynical exhumation and found something with more life in it than that. It is not intelligent science fiction in the way the first two films were, and it does not build a new world so much as repaint an old one, which keeps it short of the top tier on the things I most value. But it is fast, it is funny where it means to be, Hamilton and Davis are genuinely good, and the action is the cleanest this series has staged in years. I would happily watch it again, which is more than I can say for most of what came between this and *Judgment Day*. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. The big freeway and dam set pieces are worth the larger screen.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Dark Fate* underperformed badly enough at the box office to stall the planned new trilogy, and for the moment it stands as the last live-action Terminator film, the franchise pivoting afterwards into the animated series *Terminator Zero* (2024). Its reputation has settled roughly where the reviews left it, as the best of the post-Cameron sequels and a film undone more by audience fatigue than by its own quality. It is now widely available on disc and digital and turns up on the major streaming services depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, bloody images, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Sustained action scenes feature occasional bloody stabbings, shootings and impalements, as well as crunchy blows with fists and heavy objects.
**Injury detail:** There are occasional images of bloodied dead and injured people, including sight of wounds and pools of blood.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker'). Milder terms include 'shit', 'asshole', 'son of a bitch', 'piss' and 'bastard'.
**Additional issues:** There is frequent and sustained moderate action threat. Other issues include infrequent non-sexualised rear nudity.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/terminator-dark-fate-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00otg3nji)).*
================================================================================
## Gemini Man (2019)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-gemini-man
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-gemini-man.md
- published: 2019-10-28
- document_id: 1083
> Ang Lee chases an old technical dream, a young Will Smith hunting an old Will Smith, and the experiment is more interesting than the script. Watchable, well-made, and not the disaster the critics claim. 7/10.
- **UK release:** October 2019
- **Director:** Ang Lee · **Writers:** David Benioff, Billy Ray, Darren Lemke
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Skydance Media
- **Genre:** Science-fiction action thriller / clone-assassin film · **Runtime:** 117 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Will Smith (*Men in Black*, *Independence Day*) as Henry Brogan / Junior; Mary Elizabeth Winstead (*10 Cloverfield Lane*, *Scott Pilgrim vs. the World*) as Danny Zakarweski; Clive Owen (*Children of Men*, *The International*) as Clay Varris; Benedict Wong (*Doctor Strange*, *The Martian*) as Baron
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 26% critics / 83% audience · **My rating:** 7 / 10
*Gemini Man* has been sitting on a shelf for about twenty years. The pitch, a top assassin hunted by a younger clone of himself, has been passed between studios and stars since the late nineties, always stalling on the same problem: nobody could build a convincing young double of an ageing star. What finally unsticks it is Ang Lee, a director who keeps treating the action film as a laboratory, and the digital tools to grow a twenty-three-year-old Will Smith from scratch. The result is a film whose reason for existing is a technical one, and which knows it.
## The setup
Henry Brogan (Will Smith) is a government sniper at the top of his trade and the end of his patience, a man who has decided that fifty-one years and seventy-two kills is enough and he would like to go fishing. Retirement does not take. Henry stumbles onto something he was not meant to know, the agency decides he is a liability, and the operative they send to clean up after him moves and shoots exactly the way Henry does, because he is Henry, grown in a lab and twenty-five years younger. Pursued across continents with only a watchful agent, Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and an old pilot friend, Baron (Benedict Wong), for company, Henry has to work out who built his replacement and why, while fighting the one opponent who can read his every move.
## The cast
Smith is doing double duty and quietly carries the whole thing. As Henry he is older, slower and more tired than the Smith of the *Men in Black* years, leaning on weariness rather than wisecracks, and it suits him. As Junior, the clone, he is a wholly digital creation, and the trick of the film is that Smith is also acting that role, supplying the body language and the eyes that the effects team paint a younger face onto. The two performances have to feel related and slightly off from each other, and they do. Winstead gives Danny more spine and competence than the genre usually allows the lone woman in the chase, and she and Smith strike up an easy, unforced rapport that never tips into romance. Clive Owen, as the private-military man behind the cloning programme, is handed a thinly drawn villain and plays him with more conviction than the part deserves. Benedict Wong walks off with most of the laughs as the pilot, the one character allowed to enjoy himself.
## The craft
This is where the money and the curiosity went. Lee shot the film at a high frame rate and in 3D, chasing the same hyper-clear, almost uncanny smoothness he reached for in *Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk*, and where the format is available it gives the action a strange, glassy immediacy. A motorcycle chase through Cartagena, with Junior using the bike itself as a weapon, is the standout, and a catacomb fight in the closing stretch has real snap. Dion Beebe's photography keeps the globe-trotting looking handsome, and Lorne Balfe's score does its job without lingering in the memory. The de-ageing is the headline, and it is impressive without being invisible: in motion and in daylight Junior is convincing, while a handful of close, still shots betray the slightly waxy look that this technology has not yet shaken off. It is a genuine advance, watched with the awareness that you are watching an experiment.
## How it stacks up
The premise invites comparison and mostly suffers from it. *Looper* did the hunted-by-yourself idea with more wit and a colder edge; *Face/Off* did the my-enemy-wears-my-face thriller with far more operatic abandon. As a globe-hopping chase with a weary professional at its centre, this wants to be in the conversation with the *Bourne* films, and it has the geography and the competence but not the paranoid charge. The cleanest comparison is *Terminator 2*, another film about an unstoppable double sent to erase its original, and the gap there is one of stakes and screenplay rather than spectacle. *Gemini Man* has the chases; what it lacks is a script with the same drive. The screenplay, worked over by several hands across two decades, lands every beat you expect and almost none that you do not.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical reception has been rough, sitting around 26%, with the recurring complaint that the story is a relic and the de-ageing a costly distraction. Audiences are notably warmer, up at 83%, and that split tells you who the film is for. The critics are right about the screenplay; it is the least adventurous thing in a film built on adventurous technology. But the reviews undersell how watchable the thing actually is, how well the action plays, and how much Smith carries on charm and craft. This is the familiar gap between a film judged as art and a film enjoyed on a Friday night, and on the second count it does fine.
## Verdict
I value intelligent science fiction, technology themes done seriously, and a film willing to try something, and *Gemini Man* has all three even when the story around them is ordinary. It is a handsome, well-paced, perfectly enjoyable action thriller with one genuinely interesting idea about ageing and identity that it never quite digs into, wrapped around a special effect that is worth seeing for itself. It is not a classic and it will not haunt you, but it is a long way from the failure the scores suggest, and I would happily watch the Cartagena chase again. **7/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. Worth catching in a screen showing the high-frame-rate 3D presentation if you can find one, where the format experiment is the point of the ticket.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the high-frame-rate format proved a dead end commercially, and very few people ended up seeing the film the way Lee intended, which blunted the one thing that set it apart. The de-ageing here now reads as an early, visible step toward the much smoother digital youth effects that followed across the next few years. The film has settled into its reputation as an honourable technical misfire rather than a disaster, and it is widely available on disc and the usual digital rental and streaming services.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are several gunfights and scenes of hand-to-hand violence, occasionally with bloody detail. A preternaturally powerful clone is repeatedly shot, punched and set on fire. A man throws a woman through a window. A man is shot with a dart containing bee venom, and suffers an allergic reaction.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of strong language ('motherf**ker'), as well as milder terms such as 'shit', 'hell', 'screw', 'piss', 'God', 'Jesus' and 'asshole'.
**Additional issues:** A man cuts into another's bicep to extract a microchip. Injuries are tended to, in close-up detail. Threat and sex references are mild. A man smokes a cigar.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/gemini-man-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00otg4mtm)).*
================================================================================
## Official Secrets (2019)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-official-secrets
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-official-secrets.md
- published: 2019-10-22
- document_id: 1131
> Gavin Hood turns a real GCHQ leak into a tense, unshowy whistleblower drama, anchored by Keira Knightley's best work in years. It does not reinvent the genre, but it knows exactly what it is doing. 8/10.
- **UK release:** October 2019
- **Director:** Gavin Hood · **Writers:** Gregory Bernstein, Sara Bernstein, Gavin Hood
- **Studio / distributor:** Entertainment One; Raindog Films; IFC Films
- **Genre:** Political thriller / whistleblower drama · **Runtime:** 112 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Keira Knightley (*Atonement*, *Pride & Prejudice*) as Katharine Gun; Matt Smith (*Doctor Who*) as Martin Bright; Ralph Fiennes (*Skyfall*, *The English Patient*) as Ben Emmerson; Matthew Goode (*The Imitation Game*, *Watchmen*) as Peter Beaumont
- **IMDb:** 7.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 82% critics / 89% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Gavin Hood has been circling the machinery of the war on terror for over a decade now, from the extraordinary rendition of *Rendition* to the drone-strike ethics of *Eye in the Sky*, where a single decision rippled out through a chain of nervous politicians who all wanted someone else to sign for it. *Official Secrets* finds him on the same ground but a step earlier, back at the moment the Iraq War was still being sold rather than fought. It is the true story of Katharine Gun, a GCHQ translator who decided that a memo crossing her desk was worth losing everything over, and it is the kind of British institutional thriller that, when it works, I will watch again and again.
## The setup
It is early 2003, and the drums are loud. Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) spends her days in Cheltenham translating intercepted Mandarin for GCHQ, a quiet life of clearances and signed undertakings. Then an email arrives, circulated to the wider intelligence community, asking British agencies to help the Americans dig up dirt on UN Security Council delegates, leverage to push through a second resolution authorising the invasion. Gun reads it, decides it is a request to help rig a vote for a war, and prints it. From there the memo travels into the hands of *Observer* journalists, the paper has to decide whether it dare run it, and Gun has to decide whether she will let an innocent colleague take the fall. The personal cost arrives fast and lands hardest on her marriage, with an immigration twist that the state is happy to use as a lever.
## The cast
This is the most controlled work Knightley has done in a while. She plays Gun not as a crusading heroine but as an ordinary, slightly stubborn person who has done one extraordinary thing and is now watching the ground open under her, and she keeps the fear and the conviction running at the same time. Matt Smith, as the *Observer*'s Martin Bright, gives the journalism strand its restless energy, a reporter who can smell the story and then has to prove it is not a hoax. Matthew Goode and Rhys Ifans fill out the newsroom with the bickering and the bravado that real papers run on. Ralph Fiennes arrives late, as defence lawyer Ben Emmerson, and brings the cool, withering precision the part needs, the sense of a man who has finally been handed the case he has been waiting his whole career to argue. The film is generous with its supporting players, and it pays off.
## The craft
Hood directs this plainly, and plainly is the right call. Florian Hoffmeister's camera keeps to muted greys and institutional interiors, the colour palette of waiting rooms and open-plan offices, and the film resists any urge to juice the tension with thriller flourishes. The structure is a relay: it hands the baton from Gun's kitchen to the GCHQ floor to the newsroom to the courtroom, and the editing keeps each leg taut without ever quite letting you forget how the whole thing connects. Paul Hepker and Mark Kilian's score stays low and tense, present without nudging you. There is one lovely, small piece of craft, the moment a single typo in a leaked document nearly kills the story, where procedure becomes suspense without a frame of action. The film trusts that the facts, laid out cleanly, are gripping enough. They are.
## How it stacks up
It sits squarely in a tradition I have a lot of time for. The newsroom half plays like *State of Play*, all phones and verification and editors weighing nerve against libel. The conscience half belongs with the better surveillance-and-conscience pictures, closer in temperature to *Eye in the Sky* than to anything flashier. If you have seen the run of films built on real intelligence and accountability, the spy who pays a private price for a public act, *Official Secrets* will feel familiar in shape. What it does not have is a twist or a flourish to call its own; it is content to tell a true thing well rather than reinvent the form. Set beside the cold-war elegance of *Bridge of Spies*, it is plainer and angrier, with less varnish and a sharper present-day sting.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are largely onside, sitting around 82%, with most of the praise pointed at Knightley and the moral clarity, and the standard reservation being that the presentation is conventional and the message never in doubt. Audiences are warmer still, up near 89%, which tracks with my own reaction: this is a film that plays better than its reviews because the pleasures it offers, competence, conviction, a real story told without fuss, are exactly the ones a slightly cool critical notice tends to undervalue. The complaint that it is conventional is true and beside the point. Not every true story needs to be told sideways.
## Verdict
What I want from this kind of film is intelligence, momentum, and the sense that the people involved are paying for their choices, and *Official Secrets* delivers all three without straining. It is unshowy, well acted, and properly tense in the institutional way I keep coming back to, the long British thriller of clearances, lawyers and editors holding their nerve. It does not break new ground, and the second half leans hard on the legal machinery, but it earns its outrage honestly and it is eminently rewatchable. A solid, gripping, grown-up film that knows exactly what it is doing. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, distributed by Entertainment One, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow before the year is out.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film has settled in as one of the stronger British whistleblower dramas of its decade, and it pairs naturally with the wave of real-intelligence pictures that followed, *The Report* the same year and *The Courier* soon after, all working the same seam of conscience against the state. Katharine Gun's case, dropped by the prosecution before it reached trial, remains one of the quietly extraordinary footnotes of the Iraq War. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams across various subscription platforms depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *very strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Language:** There is infrequent very strong language ('c**t'), strong language ('f**k') and use of milder terms ('bloody', 'god', 'shit', 'Christ', 'Jesus', 'friggin').
**Additional issues:** The film includes a moderate sex scene and brief sight of dead bodies.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/official-secrets-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00otcynde)).*
================================================================================
## Joker (2019)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-joker
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-joker.md
- published: 2019-10-20
- document_id: 1104
> Todd Phillips swaps frat comedy for a grimy character study, and Joaquin Phoenix gives it more than the script can hold. Borrowed from Scorsese, dressed as a comic-book film, and carried by one extraordinary performance. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** October 2019
- **Director:** Todd Phillips · **Writers:** Todd Phillips, Scott Silver
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; DC Films
- **Genre:** Psychological thriller / comic-book character study · **Runtime:** 122 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Joaquin Phoenix (*Gladiator*, *Her*) as Arthur Fleck; Robert De Niro (*Taxi Driver*, *The King of Comedy*) as Murray Franklin; Zazie Beetz (*Deadpool 2*) as Sophie Dumond; Frances Conroy (*Six Feet Under*) as Penny Fleck
- **IMDb:** 8.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 68% critics / 88% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
The man who made *The Hangover* has now made a film that wants to be *Taxi Driver*. That sentence has been getting a lot of nervous laughter since Joker took the top prize at Venice, and the nerves are not unreasonable. A studio handing a comic-book villain an origin story is one thing; handing it to a director best known for crude ensemble comedy, then letting him cast Robert De Niro as a chat-show host in plain homage to Scorsese, is a gamble that could have curdled into a student-film tribute act. It has not. What Todd Phillips has actually delivered is a grim, controlled, unfashionably slow character study, and the reason it holds together is standing in almost every frame.
## The setup
Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a clown-for-hire and would-be stand-up in a Gotham that looks like New York in its worst decade: bin strikes, broken services, a city visibly turning on itself. He lives with his ailing mother, takes seven kinds of medication, and suffers from a condition that makes him laugh, helplessly and at the wrong moments, when he is in pain or under stress. He is beaten in the street, mocked on stage, cut loose by the agencies meant to help him, and slowly worn down by a society with no use for him. The film tracks his descent from put-upon nobody into the painted figure Gotham will come to fear. It keeps the worst of it off the table, but the direction is never in doubt.
## The cast
Phoenix is the film, and he carries it with a commitment that borders on the alarming. He has lost a frightening amount of weight, and uses the new sharpness of his own body as an instrument: a back that twists, a laugh that doubles him over, a dance that arrives like a symptom. It is a performance built from physical detail rather than speeches, and it earns sympathy and unease in the same breath, often in the same shot. De Niro, cast as the smug late-night host Murray Franklin, is the film's wink at its own ancestry, and he plays it straight enough that the joke does not swallow the scene. Zazie Beetz brings warmth as a neighbour Arthur fixes on, and Frances Conroy gives his mother a frail evasiveness that quietly poisons the whole backstory.
## The craft
Phillips and cinematographer Lawrence Sher shoot Gotham as a city of sodium light, stained tile and grime, and the period dressing is convincing without tipping into pastiche. The standout craft element is Hildur Guðnadóttir's score: a low, dragging cello that follows Arthur down every staircase and gives the film a physical heaviness the images alone would not reach. Phillips paces it slowly and deliberately, holding on Phoenix far longer than a comic-book film would dare, and trusting the performance to fill the silence. It is a more disciplined piece of direction than anything in his back catalogue, even if the writing leans on its influences more than it should.
## How it stacks up
The reference points are not subtle, and Phillips does not pretend otherwise. This is *Taxi Driver* and *The King of Comedy* run through a Gotham filter, down to the casting of De Niro in the seat Jerry Lewis and Rupert Pupkin once occupied. It shares DNA with *Falling Down* too, the story of an ordinary man tipping into violence as the city fails him. Against *The Dark Knight*, the obvious comic-book comparison, it could hardly be more different: no caped hero, no plot machinery, no spectacle, just one damaged man and the question of who made him. Where Heath Ledger's Joker arrived fully formed as an agent of chaos, this one is assembled in front of you, brick by miserable brick.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical conversation is more divided than the festival prize suggests. Reviewers are split, sitting around 68%, with the praise going almost entirely to Phoenix and the score, and the doubts circling the film's politics and whether it is responsible to make its violence this sympathetic. Audiences are far warmer, up near 88%, and the gap is telling. The unease is real, but a fair amount of it is aimed at what people fear the film might do rather than what is on screen. Strip away the discourse and you have a well-made, superbly acted descent narrative that takes its central performance seriously.
## Verdict
I admire this more than I expected to, and the score reflects that. It is not a comfortable watch and it is not, for me, a natural rewatch in the way a good genre adventure is; the bleakness is the texture, not a phase you pass through. But the craft is real, the atmosphere is suffocating in the way it intends, and Phoenix gives one of the performances of the year, the kind you turn over in your head for days. It borrows heavily and it knows it, yet it makes the borrowing feel earned. As a character study wearing a comic-book costume it works almost completely. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, certificate 15.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Phoenix's performance carried the film all the way to the Academy Award for Best Actor, and Hildur Guðnadóttir's score won Best Original Score, the rare comic-book film to convert prestige buzz into the major awards. A sequel, *Joker: Folie à Deux* (2024), reunited Phillips and Phoenix and added Lady Gaga, taking the story into musical territory to a far frostier reception than the original. Joker is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on the Warner platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of strong violence include stabbings and shootings, with accompanying bloody injury detail. In one scene a man is repeatedly stabbed in his eye with scissors and in another scene a man is shot in his head, resulting in sight of brain matter.
**Language:** There is strong language ('f**k') throughout, as well as milder terms such as 'prick', 'asshole' and 'shit'.
**Sex:** There is sight of marquees outside sex cinemas with suggestive film titles.
**Discrimination:** Stand-up routines contain some mild discriminatory references.
**Drugs:** There are innocuous references to drug misuse.
**Nudity:** There are some briefly glimpsed images of models posing naked.
**Theme:** The film deals with issues of mental illness in a manner some viewers might find upsetting. The film also includes elements showing civil unrest and terrorism, which viewers might find disturbing.
**Alcohol and Smoking:** There is sight of adults smoking.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/joker-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00odgzmjq)).*
================================================================================
## Ad Astra (2019)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-ad-astra
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-ad-astra.md
- published: 2019-09-23
- document_id: 1029
> James Gray sends Brad Pitt to the edge of the solar system to find his father and instead finds himself. Gorgeous, slow, and more interested in grief than rockets. 7/10.
- **UK release:** September 2019
- **Director:** James Gray · **Writers:** James Gray, Ethan Gross
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; New Regency; Plan B Entertainment
- **Genre:** Science fiction drama / space odyssey · **Runtime:** 123 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Brad Pitt (*Fight Club*, *The Tree of Life*) as Roy McBride; Tommy Lee Jones (*The Fugitive*, *Men in Black*) as H. Clifford McBride; Ruth Negga (*Loving*) as Helen Lantos; Donald Sutherland (*Ordinary People*, *Klute*) as Thomas Pruitt
- **IMDb:** 6.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 83% critics / 40% audience · **My rating:** 7 / 10
James Gray has spent his career making sober, slightly old-fashioned dramas about fathers, sons and the weight of obligation, mostly set in a New York that looks like it belongs to an earlier decade. *Ad Astra* is the first time he has pointed that sensibility at the stars, and the surprise is how little he changes to do it. The marketing sells a Brad Pitt action picture set against the rings of Neptune. What turns up is a quiet, interior film about a man who has spent his whole life not feeling things, sent on a mission that gives him no choice but to start.
## The setup
Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is an astronaut so unflappable that his resting heart rate has become a professional legend. He is the kind of man who can survive a fall from the top of a structure that reaches into the upper atmosphere and report his vitals on the way down. When a series of power surges threatens Earth from somewhere out past Neptune, the authorities tell Roy something he has spent thirty years half believing was a lie: his father, the celebrated and presumed-dead Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), may still be alive at the far edge of the solar system, and may be the source of the catastrophe. Roy is sent out to make contact, a journey that takes him from the Moon to Mars and beyond, and the further he travels the clearer it becomes that the mission and the man are the same problem.
## The cast
This is Pitt's film almost to the exclusion of everyone else, and he carries it with a stillness that is the opposite of movie-star vanity. Much of the performance lives in voiceover and in a face holding itself very deliberately together, and he makes that restraint compelling rather than inert. Tommy Lee Jones, when he finally arrives, brings the granite obsession he can summon better than almost anyone, a man who chose the void over his own family and will not apologise for it. Ruth Negga has only a couple of scenes as a Mars-born administrator with her own buried grief, but she lands them; you wish the script had found more for her. Donald Sutherland appears briefly as an ailing colleague of Roy's father and lends the early stretch a note of weary history. The film is not really built for an ensemble, and it knows it.
## The craft
The reason to see this on the largest screen available is Hoyte van Hoytema's photography. He shoots the solar system as a series of vast, cold, beautiful spaces, and the set pieces, a lunar rover chase across the grey, a scramble through a derelict research vessel, are staged with real clarity and tension. Max Richter's score works in long mournful washes that suit the mood without telling you what to feel. Gray's design instinct is for plausibility over spectacle: the Moon has a strip-mall departure lounge, space travel has been thoroughly monetised, and the future feels lived-in and slightly shabby. The pacing is the gamble. This is a deliberately slow film, and a couple of the incident-filled detours sit awkwardly against its meditative spine, as though the studio asked for action and Gray supplied it under protest.
## How it stacks up
The film wears its influences openly. The structure is *Apocalypse Now* in a spacesuit, a journey upriver toward a charismatic absent figure who has gone his own way past the edge of sanction, with Roy's voiceover doing the Willard work. The cosmic awe and the cool, clinical surfaces nod to *2001: A Space Odyssey*, and the marriage of hard science fiction to a study of grief and isolation recalls *Solaris*. Against the other recent space films it sits in an interesting spot: it has neither the rousing problem-solving momentum of *Interstellar* nor the procedural restraint of *First Man*, and it is more openly a psychodrama than either. Where it parts company with most of them is its answer. The vast expensive journey to the outer solar system turns out to be about whether one closed-off man can let himself feel something, and your patience with the film depends almost entirely on whether you find that ending earned or anticlimactic.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split here is stark and instructive. Critics are largely won over, sitting around 83%, praising the photography, Pitt's controlled performance and the ambition of making a contemplative art film on a blockbuster budget. Audiences are far cooler, down at 40%, and you can see why: anyone who bought a ticket for a Brad Pitt space-action thriller is within their rights to feel quietly misled. Both sides are responding to the same thing. The film is beautiful, serious and unhurried, and whether that reads as profound or as ponderous is close to a coin toss. I land between the two camps, nearer the critics, but with the audience's reservation acknowledged.
## Verdict
This is a film I admire more than I love, which is precisely the kind of distinction that keeps a score honest. The craft is genuinely first-rate, the central performance is brave and the ideas about masculinity, distance and the cost of mission-above-all are handled with more intelligence than the genre usually allows. It is also slow, emotionally guarded by design, and a little too pleased with its own melancholy to be something I will reach for on a rainy Sunday. Beautiful and thoughtful, then, but not a keeper I will return to often. **7/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the largest screen you can find, IMAX if you have one within reach.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Ad Astra* has settled into its reputation as a handsome, divisive one-off, admired by critics and respected rather than embraced by audiences, the kind of mid-budget adult science fiction that the studios were already finding hard to justify. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on the major platforms depending on region, where its slow rhythm arguably plays better at home than it did against blockbuster expectations in a cinema.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *infrequent strong language, moderate violence, threat, gory images*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC's full per-category Content Advice for this title could not be retrieved at the time of writing (the release page returned an error). The age rating and short consumer advice line above are from the BBFC classification record; the detailed breakdown by category (Violence, Threat and horror, Language, and so on) should be confirmed against the BBFC release page before relying on it.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/)).*
================================================================================
## Spider-Man - Far From Home (2019)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-spider-man-far-from-home
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-spider-man-far-from-home.md
- published: 2019-07-12
- document_id: 1157
> Marvel sends its teenage Spider-Man to Europe with a charming illusionist and a clever line on what we choose to believe. Lighter than its enormous predecessor, sharper than it lets on. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2019
- **Director:** Jon Watts · **Writers:** Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Marvel Studios; Pascal Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero coming-of-age adventure · **Runtime:** 129 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Holland (*The Impossible*, *Spider-Man: Homecoming*) as Peter Parker / Spider-Man; Jake Gyllenhaal (*Nightcrawler*, *Source Code*) as Quentin Beck / Mysterio; Zendaya (*Spider-Man: Homecoming*) as MJ; Samuel L. Jackson (*Pulp Fiction*, *The Avengers*) as Nick Fury
- **IMDb:** 7.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 91% critics / 95% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Marvel has a tricky job this summer. *Avengers: Endgame* closed a decade of films with the sort of finality that usually ends a franchise rather than continues it, and the studio now has to follow that emotional full stop with a teenager on a school trip. *Far From Home* is the film handed that unenviable transition, and the surprise is how lightly it carries the weight. Jon Watts, back after *Homecoming*, treats the comedown not as a problem to solve but as the comedy and the grief the film is actually about: what happens to the small people once the giants have left the stage.
## The setup
Peter Parker (Tom Holland) wants a holiday. After everything, he plans to spend a European school trip telling MJ (Zendaya) how he feels and leaving the costume in a suitcase. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has other ideas, commandeering the trip to enlist Spider-Man against the Elementals, vast creatures of water, fire and earth tearing through one picturesque city after another. Standing against them is Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal), a caped newcomer the press christen Mysterio, who seems to know what he is doing in a way the grieving, jet-lagged teenager very much does not. Peter wants to be a normal kid; the world keeps insisting he be the next Iron Man. I will leave Beck's hand exactly as the film deals it, because how this one plays out is half the pleasure.
## The cast
Holland remains the most convincing screen Spider-Man yet on the simple grounds that he looks and behaves like an actual sixteen-year-old, all nervous energy and bad decisions made for sweet reasons. The film leans into that, and he carries the loss of a mentor without ever tipping into self-pity. Gyllenhaal is the reason to buy a ticket. He plays Beck with a warmth that feels like relief to Peter and to us, a grown-up who has things in hand, and he calibrates the performance so precisely that you keep watching his eyes for the seams. After *Nightcrawler* and *Source Code* he knows exactly how to hold an audience's trust and weigh whether to keep it. Zendaya's MJ is dry, watchful and funny, a deadpan foil rather than a prize, and Jackson gives Fury a tired exasperation that lands more jokes than the script probably expected.
## The craft
Watts directs this as a travelogue caper, and the change of scenery does it good: Venice, Prague and London give the action a postcard brightness that the Queens-bound *Homecoming* could not. The Elemental set pieces are loud and a little anonymous on their own, but the film has a trick up its sleeve, and once it deploys it the visual language turns genuinely inventive, bending perspective and reality in a way that suits a story about not trusting what you are shown. Michael Giacchino's score keeps things buoyant. The pacing is brisk, the comedy mostly earns its place rather than puncturing the stakes, and a mid-film turn re-frames everything that came before it cleanly enough that you want to rewind. It is not flawless. The school-trip supporting cast is broad to the point of cartoon, and the threat occasionally feels like weather rather than menace.
## How it stacks up
Set against *Homecoming*, this is the bigger, glossier, slightly less grounded film. The first picture's charm was its smallness, a friendly neighbourhood hero worrying about a dance; this one swaps that for spectacle and globe-trotting, and gives up a little intimacy in the trade. Where it scores is in the Beck plot, which owes more to a *Mission: Impossible*-style spy caper, all misdirection and stagecraft, than to the usual punch-up. The film is, underneath the web-slinging, about illusion and the ease with which a confident performer can sell a frightened public a story it wants to hear. That theme of manufactured spectacle is sharper and more current than a teen Spider-Man film strictly needs to be, and it is the thread I came out turning over.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is warm. Critics are running around 91%, audiences higher still at 95%, and the consensus singles out the lighter tone, Holland and Gyllenhaal, and the deft handling of the post-*Endgame* hangover. The main grumble is that it feels less grounded than *Homecoming*, which is true and which I do not hold against it; the bigger canvas is the point of a sequel. There is no great gap between critics and audiences here, and not much between them and me. This is a crowd-pleaser doing precisely what it sets out to do.
## Verdict
*Far From Home* had every excuse to be a tired victory lap and is instead nimble, funny and rather cleverer than its holiday-movie surface suggests. Gyllenhaal gives it a centre of gravity, Holland keeps it human, and the central conceit about who controls the story is the sort of idea I always warm to. It loses a half-step to its enormous predecessor's shadow and to a supporting cast played too broadly, but it is hugely rewatchable and ends on two stings that left the cinema buzzing. A confident, charming bridge between Marvel eras. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and 3D.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film's cliffhanger paid off in *Spider-Man: No Way Home* (2021), which made good on the closing reveal and turned this entry's final minutes into the hinge of the whole arc. *Far From Home* has settled into its place as the lighter, breezier middle chapter of Holland's trilogy, and the Beck illusion plot has aged well as its themes have only grown more topical. It is now available on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+ in most regions.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate fantasy violence, threat, sex references, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are intense scenes of action violence in which superheroes use their powers against one another. During fight scenes, punches are thrown and people are shot at.
**Threat and horror:** There is an intense scene of threat in which a young man becomes trapped in a frightening world of hallucinations.
**Language:** There is bleeped language, as well as a use of the term 'dickwad' and a clear use of the rude 'middle finger' gesture. Other language is mild and includes terms such as 'shit', 'ass', 'jerk', 'God', 'damn' and 'hell'.
**Sex:** There is a passing reference to a young man watching an 'adult' film. There is a comic scene in which a young man removes his trousers in the presence of a woman, only for his intentions to be misconstrued by another person who accidentally witnesses the events.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/spider-man-far-from-home-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtotixnta0)).*
================================================================================
## John Wick - Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-john-wick-chapter-3-parabellum
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-john-wick-chapter-3-parabellum.md
- published: 2019-05-19
- document_id: 1102
> Chad Stahelski's third Wick film picks up sixty seconds after the second and never lets the heartbeat settle. The mythology is getting baroque, but the action is the cleanest in the business. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** May 2019
- **Director:** Chad Stahelski · **Writers:** Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Collins, Marc Abrams
- **Studio / distributor:** Lionsgate; Summit Entertainment; Thunder Road; 87Eleven
- **Genre:** Neo-noir action thriller · **Runtime:** 131 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Keanu Reeves (*The Matrix*, *Speed*) as John Wick; Halle Berry (*Monster's Ball*, *X-Men*) as Sofia; Ian McShane (*Deadwood*, *Sexy Beast*) as Winston; Laurence Fishburne (*The Matrix*, *Apocalypse Now*) as the Bowery King
- **IMDb:** 7.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
The first *John Wick*, back in 2014, was a small miracle of focus: a grieving hitman, a stolen car, a murdered puppy, and an action style so legible you could follow every round. *Chapter 2* widened the frame and gave us the gold coins, the Continental, and the High Table, the secret bureaucracy that governs the assassins of this world. *Parabellum* opens with the clock from the last film still running. John has killed a man on Continental ground, his fourteen-million-dollar bounty goes live at six, and the rest of the film is him trying to outlast a city that wants him dead. Chad Stahelski, a stuntman before he was a director, has built his whole trilogy on the idea that you should be able to see what is happening. That principle is still here, and it is still rare.
## The setup
Declared excommunicado for breaking the one rule that matters, John Wick has an hour's grace before every contract killer in New York comes for the price on his head. He spends it calling in the last favours he has left: an old marker with a fixer named Sofia in Casablanca, a tentative truce with the bruised, vengeful Bowery King, and a journey that takes him out of the city and into the desert in search of the people who sit above even the High Table. Behind him comes the Adjudicator, an envoy sent to punish everyone who ever helped him, which means the institutions that gave the first two films their texture are now in the firing line too.
The plot is thin by design, a string on which to hang set pieces, and it is best not to ask too many questions about the rules. The film knows this, and keeps moving fast enough that you do not.
## The cast
Reeves remains the engine. At fifty-four he is doing the bulk of this himself, and the commitment reads in every frame: the breathlessness, the stumbles, the way he checks a magazine like a man who has done it ten thousand times. He has perhaps a hundred words of dialogue and does not need more. Halle Berry's Sofia is the standout addition, a former colleague with two attack dogs and a grudge, and her Casablanca sequence, woman and animals fighting as one unit, is the most thrilling new thing the series has tried. Ian McShane gives Winston his usual silken menace, a hotelier who clearly enjoys the theatre of his own power, and Laurence Fishburne chews the scenery happily as the Bowery King. Newcomer Mark Dacascos, as a sushi-chef assassin who is also a fan, brings an unexpected streak of comedy, and Asia Kate Dillon plays the Adjudicator with a cold administrative calm that suits the film's idea of evil as paperwork.
## The craft
Dan Laustsen shoots New York as a neon aquarium, all wet reflections and glass, and the violence is choreographed and lit so you never lose the geography of a fight. That is the achievement these films keep quietly making while louder action cinema chops everything into confetti. The standout sequences, a knife fight in an antiques showroom where the weapons are the stock, a motorcycle pursuit on a causeway, a glass-walled climax, are staged in long, readable takes that let you admire the work. Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard's pulsing score keeps the pulse up. If there is a cost, it is stamina: at over two hours the relentlessness can tip from exhilarating into wearying, and the film is so committed to forward motion that it never quite pauses to breathe.
## How it stacks up
The obvious lineage is *The Raid*, Gareth Evans's Indonesian masterclass in clean, brutal, sustained combat, and the Wick films share its faith in physical clarity over editing trickery. There is samurai cinema in the code of honour and the formality of the duels, and a strong debt to gun-fu and to Hong Kong action of the John Woo school. Against its own predecessors, *Parabellum* is the biggest and the busiest, lacking the lean shock of the first film but expanding the world with real confidence. Set beside the *Mission: Impossible* series, the other current home of practical, visible stunt work, it is less interested in plot and more interested in pure motion.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are enthusiastic, sitting around 90%, praising the choreography and the world-building while raising a recurring eyebrow at the ever-thickening mythology. Audiences are a touch cooler at 86%, and I suspect the gap is fatigue: some viewers want a story to go with the spectacle, and this series increasingly offers ceremony instead. My own reaction lands close to the critics. The lore has become elaborate to the point of silliness, but the silliness is part of the pleasure, and nobody is matching the craft of the action.
## Verdict
I value rewatchability and world-building, and this delivers both: a self-contained universe with its own currency, etiquette and architecture, and fight scenes you will happily run back to watch again. It is half a point short of perfect for me only because the runtime outstays the story, and because the franchise is starting to mistake mythology for momentum. But on the thing it sets out to do, build the most legible, most beautiful action cinema going, it is close to untouchable. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Best seen on a big screen with a crowd, where the set pieces land hardest.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the series continued with *John Wick: Chapter 4* (2023), which pushed the scale and the runtime even further, with a Paris stairway sequence that became its calling card, and spun off into the prequel series *The Continental* and the film *Ballerina*. Chapter 3's mid-tier standing in the franchise has held: admired for the dog fight and the glass-house finale, occasionally faulted for the lore creep this review flagged. It is now on 4K, Blu-ray and digital, and streams across various platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Frequent scenes of violence include men being shot and stabbed with resultant sight of blood spray on impact. One scene shows a man's neck being snapped over a heavy book. In another scene a man uses a blade to cut another man's eye out, including sight of bloody detail.
**Language:** There is strong language ('motherf\*\*ker', 'f\*\*k'), as well as uses of 'pissed', 'shit', and a middle finger gesture.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/john-wick-chapter-3-parabellum-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00odi2mta)).*
================================================================================
## Avengers - Endgame (2019)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-avengers-endgame
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-avengers-endgame.md
- published: 2019-05-06
- document_id: 1041
> Eleven years and twenty-one films arrive at one three-hour payoff, and the Russo brothers land it with surprising patience and real feeling. The most satisfying franchise finale in years. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** April 2019
- **Director:** Anthony Russo · Joe Russo
- **Writers:** Christopher Markus · Stephen McFeely
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios
- **Genre:** Superhero ensemble / time-travel adventure · **Runtime:** 181 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Robert Downey Jr (*Iron Man*, *Sherlock Holmes*) as Tony Stark; Chris Evans (*Captain America: The First Avenger*, *Snowpiercer*) as Steve Rogers; Scarlett Johansson (*Lost in Translation*, *Lucy*) as Natasha Romanoff; Josh Brolin (*No Country for Old Men*) as Thanos
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 94% critics / 90% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Eleven years ago Marvel released a mid-budget film about a weapons dealer who builds himself a suit of armour, and almost nobody outside the comics shops expected what followed. Twenty-one films later, *Avengers: Endgame* is the bill coming due on the most audacious gamble in modern studio film-making: that an audience would sit still for a story told in instalments across a decade and pay off only at the end. *Infinity War* did the unthinkable last year and let the villain win. The interesting question now is not whether the Russo brothers can undo it, but whether they have the nerve to make us wait for it.
## The setup
The opening hour is the surprise. After Thanos wiped out half of all life with a click of his fingers, the survivors are not regrouping for a counterattack so much as living in the wreckage of having lost. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is adrift, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is running a support group for the grieving, and the team that remains is held together by little more than habit and Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson). When a slim chance to reverse the loss appears, it sends them back through their own history, which is both a heist plot and an excuse to revisit where all this began. I will leave the mechanics of how vague, because half the pleasure is watching the plan assemble.
## The cast
What holds this together is that the people matter more than the powers. Downey has carried the franchise from the start, and he gives Stark a weariness here that the earlier films, with all their quips, never quite let him show. Evans is the moral spine, and Captain America has rarely been used better than in the quieter beats where the role is simply to keep going. Johansson's Romanoff carries more weight than her billing suggests, the loyalty of the team made flesh. Josh Brolin's Thanos, again a performance-capture creation, remains the rare blockbuster villain who believes he is the reasonable one, and that conviction is what makes him land. Around them a vast ensemble files through, and the film is disciplined enough to give the leads room rather than service everyone equally.
## The craft
Three hours is a long sit, and the remarkable thing is how rarely it drags. The Russos and editors Jeffrey Ford and Matthew Schmidt structure it as three distinct movements: grief, the caper, and the reckoning, each with its own tempo. Alan Silvestri's score does heavy lifting, his Avengers theme deployed sparingly enough that it still raises the hair when it returns. Trent Opaloch shoots the back half on a scale that genuinely earns the IMAX surcharge, and the final act is the kind of set-piece these films have been building the muscle to deliver for a decade. There are seams. The time-travel logic does not survive much scrutiny, and the film knows it, heading off the pedants with a joke. But the craft serves the emotion rather than burying it.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Infinity War*, and *Endgame* is the warmer, more human half of the pair: less relentless, more willing to be still. Reach further back and the model is *The Empire Strikes Back* into *Return of the Jedi*, a downbeat middle resolved by a finale that has to carry years of accumulated feeling. The time-travel structure openly winks at *Back to the Future Part II*, characters wandering through their own earlier scenes. What none of those had to manage is the sheer weight of continuity here, twenty-one films of setup that this one has to honour and close. That it mostly succeeds, and finds room for grief inside a popcorn spectacle, is no small feat.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is close to a coronation. Critics are at 94%, audiences only a touch behind at 90%, and the few dissenting notes concede the obvious: you get out of this exactly what you put in over eleven years, and a newcomer would be lost. That is a fair charge and also beside the point for anyone who has been along for the ride. The reviewers who shrug at the genre are reviewing the homework; the rest of us are reviewing the reunion. My own number sits a fraction below the critical wave, not because the film disappoints but because its pleasures are inseparable from the investment it assumes.
## Verdict
This is the rare franchise finale that respects the time you have given it. It is too long, the plotting is sentimental about its own mythology, and you cannot drop in cold. None of that dents the central achievement: an event film with real stakes, real loss, and a payoff that lands the emotional beats a decade in the building. It is enormously rewatchable for anyone who came up with these characters, and it closes the door on its central arc with more grace than a film this size has any right to. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in IMAX if you can, and clear the afternoon.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Endgame* briefly became the highest-grossing film ever released, and the Infinity Saga it closes is now packaged as the first twenty-three films of the MCU. The franchise pressed on with *Spider-Man: Far From Home* weeks later and a steady run of films and Disney+ series since, none of which has matched this one for sense of occasion. It is now available on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is frequent moderate fantasy violence, including occasional bloody detail. At one point a character is impaled, although there is no graphic detail.
**Threat and horror:** There are mild scenes of threat, including characters being chased.
**Language:** There is occasional use of mild bad language, including 'piss', 'son of a bitch', 'crap', 'asses', 'dickhead' and 'shit'.
**Sex:** There is some mild rude humour and innuendo, including several jokes about a man's buttocks.
**Injury detail:** There is some sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/avengers-endgame-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mde4oda)).*
================================================================================
## Alita - Battle Angel (2019)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-alita-battle-angel
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-alita-battle-angel.md
- published: 2019-02-24
- document_id: 1031
> James Cameron hands his long-cherished manga adaptation to Robert Rodriguez, and the result is the most purely enjoyable cyberpunk adventure in years. Critics are lukewarm, audiences are not, and I am firmly with the audiences. 9/10.
- **UK release:** February 2019
- **Director:** Robert Rodriguez · **Writers:** James Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Lightstorm Entertainment; Troublemaker Studios
- **Genre:** Cyberpunk science fiction action · **Runtime:** 122 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Source:** *Battle Angel Alita* by Yukito Kishiro
- **Main cast:** Rosa Salazar (*Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials*) as Alita; Christoph Waltz (*Inglourious Basterds*, *Django Unchained*) as Dr Dyson Ido; Jennifer Connelly (*A Beautiful Mind*, *Requiem for a Dream*) as Chiren; Mahershala Ali (*Moonlight*, *Hidden Figures*) as Vector; Keean Johnson as Hugo
- **IMDb:** 7.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 61% critics / 92% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
This is the film James Cameron has been carrying around in his pocket since the late 1990s. He bought the rights to Yukito Kishiro's cyberpunk manga, wrote and developed it for years, then handed the director's chair to Robert Rodriguez so he could go and disappear into Pandora instead. On paper that is a worrying chain of custody: a passion project of one director, shot by another, adapted from a dense Japanese comic that most western audiences have never read. In practice it is the most sheerly entertaining science fiction adventure I have seen in a long while, and the gap between what the critics make of it and what everyone I know makes of it is wide enough to fall into.
## The setup
Three hundred years after a catastrophe known only as the Fall, Dr Ido picks a discarded cyborg torso out of a scrapyard beneath the sky-city of Zalem and rebuilds her. She wakes with a new body, no memory, and the name Alita. Iron City is a grubby, vibrant sprawl of bounty hunters, cyborg street brawlers and a brutal contact sport called Motorball, all of it living off the rubbish that the privileged floating city drops on it from above. As Alita's lost combat instincts surface, she begins to understand that her past is bound up with Zalem itself, and that the people running Iron City would rather she did not remember any of it. That is as far as I will go; the pleasure here is in the discovery.
## The cast
Rosa Salazar is the whole gamble and she wins it. Alita is a fully performance-captured character with enlarged, deliberately not-quite-human eyes, and the worry going in is that you will spend two hours staring at an effect rather than a person. Within minutes that worry is gone. Salazar gives her a wide-eyed, tip-forward eagerness that is completely endearing without tipping into cloying, and when the fighting starts she switches into something coiled and lethal without losing the girl underneath. Christoph Waltz, an actor who can do menace in his sleep, plays Ido against type as a grieving, gentle surrogate father, and the warmth between him and Alita gives the film its spine. Jennifer Connelly brings a cool moral conflictedness to Chiren, and Mahershala Ali makes Vector a smooth, quietly dangerous power broker. Keean Johnson has the thankless human-love-interest role and does enough with it. The casting is loaded with more talent than this sort of film usually bothers to hire, and it shows.
## The craft
Rodriguez has always been a maximalist, and here he has Cameron's money and Cameron's world-building behind him. Iron City is a genuinely lived-in place, layered and textured and grimy in the best way, shot by Bill Pope with real depth. The action is the standout: the bar brawl, the Motorball sequences, the night-time hunts all have a clarity and weight that so much modern blockbuster fighting lacks, and the cyborg combat lets the choreographers get inventive in ways human bodies cannot. Tom Holkenborg's score drives it along without drowning it. There is a lot of plot crammed into 122 minutes, and the film does occasionally sprint where it should breathe, but the momentum carries you past the joins. The 3D, for once, is built into the image rather than smeared on afterwards.
## How it stacks up
The obvious reference points are the great cyberpunk touchstones, and *Alita* knows it. There is *Blade Runner* in the vertical, rain-slick city of haves and have-nots, and a clear debt to *Ghost in the Shell* and the anime tradition the source manga helped shape. But this is warmer and more adventurous than either, less interested in melancholy and more in forward motion. It sits closer to Cameron's own *Aliens* and *Terminator 2* in its instinct for a propulsive, emotionally legible action story with a fierce young woman at the centre. Set it against last year's *Ready Player One*, another effects-heavy plunge into a constructed world, and *Alita* has the better heart and the more convincing place.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split is stark. Critics are sitting around 61%, with the recurring complaint that the plot is overstuffed, that it spends its running time setting up a sequel it has not earned, and that the ending stops rather than concludes. Audiences are way out ahead at 92%, and a vocal, devoted fanbase has formed almost overnight. I am with the audiences, and I think the critics are marking it against a film it never set out to be. Yes, it plants seeds for more. Yes, it would happily have been twenty minutes longer. But it is generous, big-hearted, gorgeous to look at and genuinely exciting, and those are not small things to get right.
## Verdict
I have watched this more times than is sensible and it holds up on every return, which for me is the real test. Salazar's Alita is one of the most likeable protagonists in recent science fiction, the world is one I am happy to keep visiting, and the action still lands. It is not flawless. The plotting is busy and the romance is the weakest thread. None of that dents how much fun it is, or how much I want the sequel the ending is so plainly fishing for. This is audience-friendly cyberpunk done with craft, heart and confidence, and it is exactly my sort of film. **9/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in 3D on the biggest screen you can reach.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the sequel the ending so obviously set up has not yet materialised, though Cameron and Rodriguez have repeatedly said they want to make it, and the fan campaign to keep it alive has barely let up. The film has settled firmly into cult-favourite status, a textbook case of a movie loved far more by its audience than by the critics who first reviewed it. It is now widely available on disc, in 4K, and on digital, and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, bloody images, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC's detailed Content Advice page for this release could not be retrieved at the time of writing, so the full category-by-category breakdown (Violence, Threat, Language and so on) is not reproduced here. The age rating and the short consumer advice line above are as issued by the BBFC. Broadly, the film carries frequent cyborg-on-cyborg combat with dismemberment and bloody images, scenes of threat, and one use of strong language.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/)). Consumer advice line as published by the BBFC for this release.*
================================================================================
## Spider-Man - Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-spider-man-into-the-spider-verse
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-spider-man-into-the-spider-verse.md
- published: 2018-12-22
- document_id: 1159
> Sony hands the most over-filmed superhero in cinema to its animation house and gets back the freshest Spider-Man in years, a film that looks like nothing else on a screen this winter. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** December 2018
- **Directors:** Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman · **Writers:** Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman
- **Studio / distributor:** Sony Pictures Animation; Columbia Pictures
- **Genre:** Animated superhero adventure / multiverse comedy · **Runtime:** 117 minutes (BBFC PG)
- **Main cast:** Shameik Moore (*Dope*) as Miles Morales; Jake Johnson (*Safety Not Guaranteed*) as Peter B. Parker; Hailee Steinfeld (*True Grit*) as Gwen Stacy; Mahershala Ali (*Moonlight*) as Aaron Davis
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 97% critics / 93% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
There have been a lot of Spider-Men. Sam Raimi gave us three Tobey Maguire films, Marc Webb gave us two with Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland is two films into a third run that is still warm in cinemas. By any sensible reckoning the character should be exhausted, and the safe move would have been another live-action origin we have all sat through before. Instead Sony has handed the property to its animation division and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the pair who turned a toy advert into *The Lego Movie*, and what comes back is the first Spider-Man film in a long while that feels like it was made by people with something to prove.
## The setup
Miles Morales is a Brooklyn teenager juggling a new scholarship school he did not ask for, a policeman father he cannot quite talk to, and a cooler uncle he would rather spend time with. A radioactive spider does the usual thing, except this time there is already a Spider-Man in town, and a vast particle collider built under the city is tearing holes between parallel universes. Through those holes fall other Spider-people, among them a worn-down, divorced, slightly paunchy Peter Parker from somewhere else, and Miles finds himself the least experienced member of a team he never asked to join. The film keeps the premise legible even as it multiplies its heroes, which is no small feat given how easily this could have collapsed into noise.
## The cast
Shameik Moore makes Miles a genuine teenager rather than a plot function, all nervous energy and half-finished sentences, and the film earns its emotion by letting him be bad at this before he is good at it. Jake Johnson is the find of the piece as the deadbeat Peter B. Parker, playing the mentor as a man who has mostly given up, and getting most of the laughs without ever tipping into smugness. Hailee Steinfeld gives Gwen Stacy a guarded cool that stops her being a sidekick, and Mahershala Ali brings real warmth and weight to Uncle Aaron, the relationship the whole film quietly turns on. Even the broader voices, a hardboiled noir Spider-Man, a cartoon pig, an anime schoolgirl, are pitched so they are funny without breaking the thing.
## The craft
This is where the film stops being good and starts being special. The animators have built a look that borrows the grammar of the printed page, halftone dots, off-register colour, hand-lettered sound effects and thought boxes floating in the frame, and married it to a deliberately stuttered frame rate that makes the movement feel drawn rather than rendered. Nothing else on a screen this winter looks like it. Daniel Pemberton's score and a strong hip-hop soundtrack give the New York scenes a pulse, and the action stays readable even when the screen is full of competing Spideys. It is the rare effects-heavy film where the technique is in service of feeling rather than the other way round.
## How it stacks up
Set it beside *Spider-Man: Homecoming* from last year and the contrast is instructive. Holland's film is charming and well made, but it is playing within the house style of a shared live-action universe. *Into the Spider-Verse* answers to nobody, and the freedom shows in every frame. The closer relative is *The Lego Movie*, which shares the same writers and the same trick of smuggling real heart inside a film that looks like a gleeful sugar rush. Against the wider run of superhero cinema, where the visual language has settled into a sort of weightless digital sameness, this is a reminder of how much room there still is to do something the medium has barely tried.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have gone close to unanimous, sitting at 97%, and audiences are right behind them at 93%. That kind of agreement usually makes me suspicious, because consensus often rewards the inoffensive, but here the praise is earned and specific: the visual invention, the humour that lands, and the emotional clarity under all the multiverse machinery. My own number sits a little under the critical ceiling, not because the film puts a foot wrong but because the back half leans hard on collider-and-glitch plotting, and the sheer density of characters means a few of them get less room than they deserve.
## Verdict
This is the most alive superhero film in years, and the first in a long time that made me want to watch it again the moment it finished, partly to catch the jokes I missed and partly just to look at it. It is funny, it is moving where it counts, and it has a coming-of-age story strong enough to carry the spectacle rather than the other way round. The plot mechanics in the final stretch keep it just short of the very top tier for me, but the invention, the pace and the heart put it comfortably ahead of almost everything else wearing the mask. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, well worth the big screen for the artwork alone; a DVD, Blu-ray and 4K release will follow in the new year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and its standing has only grown, widely regarded now as the film that reset what comic-book animation could look like. A direct sequel, *Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse* (2023), expanded the multiverse and the art style further and confirmed this was no fluke, with a third part to follow. It is available on disc and 4K, and streams on Netflix in the UK depending on the window.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **PG** by the BBFC for *moderate fantasy violence, mild threat, injury detail, innuendo*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are scenes in which heroes and villains headbutt and punch one another; however these are infrequent, undetailed and within a fantasy context.
**Threat and horror:** An intimidating masked villain with a metal fist pursues the hero; however, these scenes of mild threat are well balanced with more comic moments.
**Sex:** There are references to a teenager hitting puberty, and a scene in which his uncle tries to advise him how to speak to girls.
**Language:** There is mild bad language ('piss').
**Injury detail:** A man has a black eye, and a villain has a bloody nose which is shown briefly.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/spider-man-into-the-spider-verse-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0ymza2ndc)).*
================================================================================
## First Man (2018)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-first-man
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-first-man.md
- published: 2018-10-26
- document_id: 1079
> Damien Chazelle turns the Moon landing inward, into a study of grief and the men who flew sealed tin cans into the dark. Cold by design, immersive when it counts. 8/10.
- **UK release:** October 2018
- **Director:** Damien Chazelle · **Writer:** Josh Singer
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; DreamWorks Pictures; Temple Hill Entertainment
- **Genre:** Biographical space drama / historical drama · **Runtime:** 141 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Ryan Gosling (*Drive*, *La La Land*) as Neil Armstrong; Claire Foy (*The Crown*) as Janet Armstrong; Jason Clarke (*Zero Dark Thirty*) as Ed White; Kyle Chandler (*Argo*) as Deke Slayton
- **IMDb:** 7.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 86% critics / 67% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Damien Chazelle has spent two films watching people pour themselves into one obsession until something gives. The young drummer in *Whiplash* bleeds onto his kit; the couple in *La La Land* trade love for the careers they cannot stop chasing. *First Man* takes that same fixation and straps it to the Apollo programme, and the surprise is how little it wants to be a Moon film. Reuniting with Ryan Gosling, his *La La Land* lead, Chazelle has made the least triumphant space picture imaginable, and done it on purpose. This is the missions told from inside the helmet, where the view is mostly rivets, condensation and noise.
## The setup
The film picks up Neil Armstrong as a test pilot in the early sixties, grounded as much by private loss as by gravity, and follows him through Gemini and into Apollo. The structure is a procession of flights, each one a small sealed crisis: an X-15 skipping off the atmosphere, a Gemini capsule spinning out of control, a launchpad that turns lethal. Around the cockpit sequences sits the quieter and harder material, the toll the programme takes on the families left in the Houston suburbs, counting their dead and waiting by the squawk box. The Moon is the destination, but the film treats it as the last in a long line of things that might kill him.
## The cast
Gosling plays Armstrong as a closed door, and it is a deliberate, slightly risky choice. He gives you a man who has decided that feeling things out loud is a luxury he cannot afford, and lets the grief leak out only at the edges, in a jaw set too tight or a silence held a beat too long. It will frustrate viewers who want a hero to root for; it is also probably closer to the real engineer's reticence than a more demonstrative performance would be. Claire Foy is the film's release valve as Janet Armstrong, and she is excellent, turning the long-suffering astronaut's wife into someone with a spine, demanding NASA tell her the truth rather than feed her the official calm. Jason Clarke brings warmth as Ed White, and Kyle Chandler does his reliable line in institutional authority as Deke Slayton. The supporting astronauts blur together a little, which is the one place the inwardness costs the film something.
## The craft
This is where *First Man* earns its keep. Linus Sandgren shoots the flight sequences on grainy 16mm, handheld and claustrophobic, so the capsules feel less like spacecraft than like barrels going over a waterfall. You rarely get the clean exterior beauty shot; you get juddering metal, warning lights, and a small window with something terrifying on the other side of it. Justin Hurwitz, fresh from the jazz of *La La Land*, writes a score built around a theremin, all eerie and weightless, that does a great deal of the film's emotional work where Gosling withholds. Tom Cross cuts the action tight enough that a docking manoeuvre plays like a thriller. And then the lunar landing arrives in a sudden hush and a shift to large format, the noise dropping away, which is the single most effective thing in the picture.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Apollo 13*, and the two could hardly be more different in temperament. Ron Howard's film is a crowd-pleaser, all problem-solving and ground-control camaraderie; *First Man* is interested in the cost rather than the rescue. It sits closer to *The Right Stuff* in its suspicion of the official myth, though where Philip Kaufman found swagger in the early astronaut corps, Chazelle finds mostly attrition and exhaustion. As pure sensation in space it does not match *Gravity*, and it has none of the cosmic ambition of *Interstellar*, but neither of those films is trying to do what this one does, which is to make the most famous achievement of the twentieth century feel like a personal act of mourning. On that narrow, difficult brief it succeeds.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have responded warmly, around the high eighties, praising the immersion and the restraint. Audiences are notably cooler, in the sixties, and the split is easy to read. Anyone arriving for the patriotic Moon-landing spectacular finds a chilly grief drama that holds the catharsis at arm's length and never once lets you punch the air. I have some sympathy with both camps. The film is austere to a fault, and there are stretches in the domestic scenes where its self-control tips into remoteness. But the coldness is the design, not a failure of it, and the technique carrying it is exceptional.
## Verdict
I admire this more than I love it, which is the honest position with a film this disciplined. The flight sequences are some of the best I have seen, the sound design alone is worth the ticket, and Foy and Gosling give it a real emotional centre once you accept the terms. What keeps it just short of the top tier, for me, is rewatchability: this is a film I am glad to have seen and not one I will reach for on a wet Sunday, because its rewards are bought with two hours of held breath. As a piece of craft and a corrective to the usual triumphalism it is close to first rate. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth seeing on the largest screen you can, where the launch sequences and the switch to large format on the lunar surface land hardest.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *First Man* has settled in as the quiet, respected outlier among modern space films, more admired than rewatched, and the consensus that it was mis-marketed as a flag-waver has hardened. Chazelle went on to the maximalist *Babylon* (2022), about as far from this film's restraint as he could travel. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *infrequent strong language, moderate threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** There are a number of intense test flight sequences in which malfunctioning equipment results in threat to astronauts' lives.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k'). Other uses are 'shit', 'hell', 'screw', 'damn', 'Jesus', 'Christ'.
**Additional issues:** There is mild injury detail when an astronaut has blood on the side of his face following a crash landing. There are also scenes of emotional upset when a family lose a young child to Leukaemia.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/first-man-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotu2mda)).*
================================================================================
## The Meg (2018)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-meg
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-meg.md
- published: 2018-08-24
- document_id: 1204
> A 75-foot prehistoric shark, Jason Statham, and not one ounce of pretension. The critics are sniffy and they are missing the point of the ticket. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** August 2018
- **Director:** Jon Turteltaub · **Writers:** Dean Georgaris, Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Gravity Pictures; Di Bonaventura Pictures
- **Genre:** Creature-feature action thriller · **Runtime:** 113 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Jason Statham (*The Transporter*, *The Italian Job*) as Jonas Taylor; Li Bingbing (*Resident Evil: Retribution*, *Transformers: Age of Extinction*) as Suyin; Rainn Wilson (*The Office*) as Morris; Cliff Curtis (*Sunshine*, *Training Day*) as Mac
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 46% critics / 42% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
The shark film has spent forty years living in the shadow of one perfect example, and every entry since has had to decide whether to compete with *Jaws* or quietly ignore it. *The Meg* picks the third option, which is to swim straight past the argument with a prehistoric monster the size of a fishing trawler and Jason Statham strapped to the front of it. This is a creature feature that knows exactly what it is selling, and the smartest thing about it is that it never once pretends to be selling anything else.
## The setup
A deep-sea research station, funded by a smirking tech billionaire, sends a crew below what everyone assumed was the floor of the Pacific, only to discover that the floor was a cloud layer and the real deep is a warm, hidden world underneath. Something very old has been living down there undisturbed. When the dive goes wrong and a craft is pinned on the bottom, the station calls in Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), a burnt-out rescue diver who once swore he saw exactly this kind of thing and lost his career insisting on it. The descent does not just trap people. It opens a door, and a 75-foot megalodon comes up through it towards a great deal of open water and a great many swimmers. The plot from there is a chase, and the film is honest enough not to dress it up as anything cleverer.
## The cast
Statham is the entire load-bearing wall here, and he carries it with the dry, unbothered authority he has made his own. He plays Jonas as a man who is tired rather than tortured, which is a better choice than the brooding alternative, and he lands the few jokes the script gives him without winking at the camera. Li Bingbing gives Suyin more spine than the damsel role the genre usually defaults to, and she and Statham generate a low-key, teasing chemistry that the film is wise enough not to overheat. Rainn Wilson has the most fun as the billionaire money behind the station, all nervous bravado curdling into self-interest the moment the water gets choppy, and Cliff Curtis brings a grounded steadiness to the operations chief that keeps the control-room scenes from tipping into farce. Nobody is stretching, but nobody is sleepwalking either, and the ensemble plays the absurdity straight, which is the only way this works.
## The craft
Jon Turteltaub, who spent the last decade on the *National Treasure* films, directs this with the same unfussy, crowd-pleasing competence, and Tom Stern's photography gives the open-water sequences a clean, sunlit clarity that makes the shark's scale read properly when it finally surfaces. The creature itself is rendered well, a slab of grey muscle that moves with real weight, and the film stages its set pieces with a showman's sense of timing: a shark cage, a glass tunnel, a crowded beach, each one a clearly built situation rather than a smear of digital chaos. Harry Gregson-Williams scores it with more conviction than the material strictly demands. The 12A rating tells you the limits up front, and the film works inside them cheerfully, trading the red water of harder shark films for scale, suspense and the occasional well-judged shock. At 113 minutes it never sags, because it always has the next bigger problem ready to put in the water.
## How it stacks up
The obvious yardstick is *Jaws*, and *The Meg* is sensible enough not to reach for it. Spielberg's film was a thriller about people and the thing you could not see; this is a monster movie about a thing you very much can see, and it belongs instead with *Deep Blue Sea*, Renny Harlin's gleefully silly 1999 shark picture, and with the man-versus-prehistoric-spectacle of *Jurassic World*. It is broader than *Lake Placid* and far less interested in its own cleverness. Where it earns its place is in committing fully to the premise without the smirking apology that sinks so many knowingly daft films. It wants you to enjoy a giant shark, and it builds an honest, well-paced machine for doing exactly that.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reviews are cool, sitting around 46% with critics and a touch lower with audiences, and the recurring complaint is that the film is silly, broad and a little toothless for a 75-foot killing machine. All of that is true, and none of it is really a criticism of what the film set out to do. The critics are reviewing the shark film they wanted; the audience that turns up for *The Meg* on a wet Saturday is after the one it actually is. That gap between the press and the multiplex is the whole story of this genre, and I land on the multiplex side of it without much hesitation.
## Verdict
I value rewatchability above almost anything, and this is a profoundly rewatchable film: bright, fast, built around a genuinely game Statham performance, and entirely free of the self-importance that makes so much summer spectacle a chore. It is not aiming for an award and it will not get near one. It does not need to. It sets out to put a giant shark on a big screen, point a sardonic action star at it, and send everyone home grinning, and it does that with more craft and better timing than its reputation allows. I have already watched it more than once, which is the most honest review I can give it. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. The bigger the screen, the bigger the shark.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the giant shark did good enough business worldwide to earn a follow-up, *Meg 2: The Trench* (2023), which brought Statham back, added a second monster or two, and leaned even harder into the knowing daftness. The original has settled into a comfortable life as reliable streaming and rainy-afternoon viewing, and it now sits on digital and disc, drifting on and off the major streaming platforms depending on region. It remains the better-paced of the two.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, occasional bloody moments, action violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Moderate action violence includes humans fighting off sharks with harpoons and other weapons. There are occasional bloody images in the aftermath of violent events or when people sustain injuries as marine vessels are tossed around.
**Threat and horror:** Moderate threat includes shark attacks on people in boats or trapped in underwater vessels, or enjoying themselves in a beach resort unaware of the danger they face.
**Language:** There is mild bad language ('bastard', 'shit', 'asses', 'son of a bitch', 'pissed it off', 'fricking', 'God', 'hell', 'damn', and 'Jesus') and infrequent mild innuendo.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-meg-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00odu4nty)).*
================================================================================
## Mission - Impossible - Fallout (2018)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mission-impossible-fallout
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mission-impossible-fallout.md
- published: 2018-08-06
- document_id: 1121
> Six films in, the most reliable action franchise going hands the keys to Christopher McQuarrie and lets Tom Cruise hang off a helicopter for real. The result is the series at its most sustained and most punishing. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2018
- **Director:** Christopher McQuarrie · **Writer:** Christopher McQuarrie
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Skydance Media; Bad Robot
- **Genre:** Espionage action thriller · **Runtime:** 147 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Cruise (*Top Gun*, *Mission: Impossible*) as Ethan Hunt; Henry Cavill (*Man of Steel*, *The Man from U.N.C.L.E.*) as August Walker; Rebecca Ferguson (*Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation*, *The Greatest Showman*) as Ilsa Faust; Simon Pegg (*Shaun of the Dead*, *Star Trek*) as Benji Dunn
- **IMDb:** 7.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 97% critics / 88% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
A franchise that started in 1996 with Brian De Palma and a CIA vault now arrives at its sixth film, and the surprising thing is that the most recent entries are the strongest. *Fallout* is the first time the series has kept the same director two films running: Christopher McQuarrie, who took over for *Rogue Nation* in 2015 and clearly liked the job enough to come back. That continuity shows. Where the early films swapped directors and house styles every time out, this is a deliberate sequel, picking up threads rather than rebooting the tone, and it plays like a film made by people who finally know exactly what this series is for.
## The setup
A mission to recover stolen plutonium goes wrong, and Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) makes the call that puts his people ahead of the cargo. The fallout, in every sense, is that three nuclear cores are loose, a fractured terror network wants them, and the CIA no longer trusts the IMF to clean up its own mess. Hunt is handed a minder, August Walker (Henry Cavill), a blunt instrument sent to make sure the job gets done by any means. From there it is a chase across Paris, London and the mountains of Kashmir, with old faces resurfacing and the usual problem of nobody being quite who they claim. The plot is dense without being clever for its own sake; it exists to keep moving Hunt from one impossible spot to the next, and it does that with real economy.
## The cast
Cruise remains the engine. At this point Ethan Hunt is less a character than a force of will, and the appeal is watching a fifty-something leading man genuinely do the thing on screen, sprinting across London rooftops and flying the helicopter himself. Cavill is the smartest piece of new casting the series has made: heavy, unhurried and faintly contemptuous, he gives Hunt a physical counterweight the earlier films never had, and the much-discussed moment where he cocks his fists before a fight has the deadpan menace the role needs. Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust carries over from *Rogue Nation* with her loyalties still pleasingly unreadable, and she is given real agency rather than a romantic holding pattern. Simon Pegg's Benji has grown from comic relief into the team's nervous conscience, and Ving Rhames and Rebecca Ferguson keep the ensemble feeling lived-in. Even the returning villain is played with a quiet, clipped malice that suits the colder register of this entry.
## The craft
This is where McQuarrie earns his reputation. The action is built around practical stunts and shot to let you see them, with Rob Hardy's camera holding wide and steady where a lesser film would cut the geography into confetti. The HALO jump, the bathroom brawl, the Paris motorcycle chase against traffic, the closing helicopter pursuit: each is staged for clarity and weight, so you always know where everyone is and what it costs them. Eddie Hamilton's editing keeps the momentum building rather than just fast, ramping the tension in long stretches before the release. Lorne Balfe's score reworks Lalo Schifrin's theme into something more driving and orchestral, and it does a lot of the rewatch heavy lifting. The film is long at 147 minutes and barely lets you feel it.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Ghost Protocol*, the 2011 entry that reset the series after the muddier third film, and *Rogue Nation*, McQuarrie's own first go. *Fallout* is the more sustained of the three, trading the Dubai-tower set-piece thrill of *Ghost Protocol* for a film that escalates as a single unbroken climb. Against the genre at large it stands with *Skyfall* and *The Dark Knight* as a blockbuster that takes its own seriousness in good faith without becoming grim, and it answers the *Bourne* films, whose shaky immediacy it pointedly rejects in favour of legible, old-fashioned coverage. Where Bond reinvents its lead and Bourne reinvents its style, this series has settled on doing the stunt for real and shooting it cleanly, and on that narrow promise it is now the most dependable action franchise running.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critics are close to unanimous, sitting at 97%, with audiences a notch behind at 88%, and for once the rave is warranted rather than inflated. The praise lands on the practical spectacle and McQuarrie's command of escalation, and that is exactly right. If there is a gap between the press and the rest of us, it is that the plotting, all double agents and masks and shifting allegiances, can tip into convolution if you stop paying attention, and the relentlessness can leave you slightly wrung out rather than elated. None of that dents the achievement; it just explains why the audience number is sensible rather than ecstatic.
## Verdict
This is the series operating at full stretch, and it rewards exactly the things I value in this kind of film: real stunts shot so you can admire them, momentum that never sags, and a score that pulls you back for another viewing. It is not flawless, the story is busier than it needs to be and the emotional stakes are more asserted than felt, but as a piece of sustained action filmmaking there is very little to touch it this decade. It earns its reputation and rewards the rewatch, and it sits a half-step below my favourites only because spectacle this intense is slightly more exhausting than it is joyful. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the largest screen you can find; an IMAX showing does justice to the helicopter finale.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: McQuarrie stayed on for the two-part *Dead Reckoning*, beginning in 2023, confirming *Fallout* as the start of a single long arc rather than a high point the series would struggle to follow. *Fallout* has settled into a wide consensus as one of the best action films of its era and, for many, the peak of the run so far. It is now available on disc and digital, and streams on Paramount+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, injury detail, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Moderate violence includes shootings, stabbings and hand-to-hand combat with crunchy punches and kicks. The focus of these sequences is on fast-paced action rather than any undue dwelling on the details of the violence or bloodshed.
**Injury detail:** In the aftermath of an incident involving an aircraft, a man has burn injuries on the side of his face and another man has a bloodied head.
**Threat:** There is also moderate threat and mild innuendo.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k'), as well as milder bad language which includes uses of 'ass', 'shit', 'son of a bitch', 'God', 'hell', 'Jesus' and 'damn'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/mission-impossible-fallout-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtotk4ndcx)).*
================================================================================
## Jurassic World - Fallen Kingdom (2018)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-jurassic-world-fallen-kingdom
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-jurassic-world-fallen-kingdom.md
- published: 2018-06-23
- document_id: 1105
> The franchise leaves the island, hands the reins to a horror director, and turns the back half into a haunted house with teeth. The critics are unimpressed; I had a fine time. 8/10.
- **UK release:** June 2018
- **Director:** J. A. Bayona · **Writers:** Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; Amblin Entertainment; Legendary Pictures
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / creature thriller · **Runtime:** 128 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chris Pratt (*Guardians of the Galaxy*, *Jurassic World*) as Owen Grady; Bryce Dallas Howard (*The Village*, *Jurassic World*) as Claire Dearing; Rafe Spall (*Prometheus*, *The Big Short*) as Eli Mills; Daniella Pineda as Zia Rodriguez; Isabella Sermon as Maisie Lockwood
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 47% critics / 48% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Three years after *Jurassic World* reopened the park and took a billion and a half pounds at the global box office, the question facing the fifth film in the series was always going to be where on earth it goes next. Colin Trevorrow, who directed the last one, has stepped back to write and produce, and into his chair comes J. A. Bayona, the Spanish director of *The Orphanage* and *The Impossible*, a man who knows precisely how to make a corridor frightening. That choice tells you more about the film than any trailer. Universal has hired a horror craftsman and pointed him at the dinosaurs, and for a good stretch of the second half it lets him cut loose.
## The setup
Isla Nublar, the island that has hosted the park's various catastrophes, now has a more elemental problem: a long-dormant volcano is waking up, and the dinosaurs left behind after the last disaster are about to be wiped out for good. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), once the park's buttoned-up operations manager and now running a dinosaur rights group, is recruited to help mount a rescue, and she in turn pulls in Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), the ex-Navy animal handler who raised the velociraptor Blue from a hatchling. What starts as a salvage mission curdles quickly. The money behind the rescue has other plans, and the animals pulled off the island are bound not for a sanctuary but for a private auction. The back half of the film abandons the jungle altogether and relocates to a vast gothic estate, where the genre quietly shifts from adventure to something closer to a monster movie in a haunted mansion.
## The cast
Pratt and Howard slot back into their roles without strain. Pratt plays Owen with the same easy, faintly self-mocking swagger he brought to *Guardians of the Galaxy*, and his scenes with Blue are the emotional spine the franchise has been building since the last film. Howard does the heavier lifting; Claire has been written with more conviction this time, an activist rather than a foil, and Howard sells both the competence and the dawning horror as the scheme reveals itself. Rafe Spall, so good as the squirming numbers man in *The Big Short*, makes a satisfyingly oily corporate villain in Eli Mills, the kind of smooth functionary who has talked himself into believing the indefensible. Newcomer Isabella Sermon, as the young Maisie Lockwood, is handed the film's strangest and most interesting thread and plays it with a poise that steadies the gothic stretch considerably.
## The craft
Bayona is the reason to watch. He shoots the volcanic escape as a genuine set piece, all ash and orange light and animals stampeding through smoke, and there is one image of a lone dinosaur on a sinking dock that is unexpectedly moving. Once the action moves indoors he is properly in his element. He stages the auction-house sequences and the night-time stalking through the Lockwood estate like classic horror, with a creature, the engineered Indoraptor, prowling rain-streaked rooftops and reaching long-clawed hands under doors. Óscar Faura's cinematography leans into deep shadow and lightning rather than the bright open spaces of the earlier films, and Michael Giacchino's score knows when to fall silent and let a claw scrape across a floorboard do the work. It is a handsome, atmospheric film with a real sense of dread in it, which is not a sentence I expected to write about a fifth Jurassic picture.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *The Lost World*, the previous time the series tried to get the dinosaurs off the island and into the wider world, and this is the better film, more coherent in its escalation and far more confident in its set pieces. The volcano half plays as a bigger, louder *Jurassic World*; the mansion half is something the franchise has never attempted, closer in spirit to old Universal monster pictures or even *King Kong*, with its captured beast and its auction of the wondrous. The two halves do not entirely fuse, and the screenplay asks you to swallow some thin plotting to get from one to the other. But the willingness to take the formula somewhere genuinely odd counts for a great deal in a series this far in.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reviews are not kind. Critics are sitting around 47%, audiences barely higher at 48%, and the recurring complaints are familiar: the plot logic frays, the franchise keeps escalating for its own sake, and the human characters make the convenient mistakes the story requires. Those criticisms are fair on their own terms. Where I part company is on the verdict that follows. The escalation is the point of buying a ticket to a film like this, and Bayona delivers it with more style and atmosphere than the material strictly deserves. A lukewarm critical reception for an entertaining popcorn film is a pattern I have learned to read past.
## Verdict
This is a film I enjoyed rather more than I can entirely defend, and I am content with that. It is loud, occasionally daft, and held together by a director working well above his brief. The volcano sequence is a proper spectacle, the gothic second half is the most distinctive thing the franchise has done, and Pratt and Howard remain good company throughout. It will not change anyone's mind about big-budget sequels, and it does not need to. As a rainy-afternoon creature feature with genuine craft in the frame, it does the job and then some, and I would happily watch it again. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, with 3D and IMAX showings worth seeking out for the volcano set piece. A DVD and Blu-ray release will follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the trilogy was rounded off by *Jurassic World Dominion* (2022), which finally let the dinosaurs loose across the wider world the ending of this film promised, to a markedly cooler reception than even this one received. Bayona moved on to other projects, and *Fallen Kingdom* has settled into its reputation as the odd, gothic middle chapter, the one entry in the modern run that tried something genuinely different with the formula. It is now widely available on disc and digital and streams on various platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, occasional bloody moments, action violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Action violence and occasional bloody moments include blood on a dinosaur's teeth as a dinosaur bites off a man's arm before devouring him, and elbow blows, taser shots and punches as a man evades bad guys and dinosaurs.
**Threat and horror:** Moderate threat includes a man and a woman trying to escape a vehicle rapidly filling with water and a girl hiding in terror in her bed as a dinosaur scrapes a talon on her bedclothes.
**Language:** There is some mild bad language, such as 'piss', 'bloody' and 'shit'.
**Injury detail:** There is some sight of the blood in the aftermath of violence and dinosaur attacks.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/jurassic-world-fallen-kingdom-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mdaynzm)).*
================================================================================
## Solo - A Star Wars Story (2018)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-solo-a-star-wars-story
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-solo-a-star-wars-story.md
- published: 2018-06-04
- document_id: 1153
> A prequel nobody demanded, made through a famously rocky production, that turns out to be a breezy heist-western in space. Lower stakes, better fun than its reputation. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2018
- **Director:** Ron Howard · **Writers:** Jonathan Kasdan, Lawrence Kasdan
- **Studio / distributor:** Lucasfilm; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Space opera / heist adventure · **Runtime:** 135 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Alden Ehrenreich (*Hail, Caesar!*) as Han Solo; Woody Harrelson (*Zombieland*, *No Country for Old Men*) as Tobias Beckett; Emilia Clarke (*Game of Thrones*) as Qi'ra; Donald Glover (*The Martian*) as Lando Calrissian
- **IMDb:** 6.9 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 70% critics / 64% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
This is the *Star Wars* film that arrives trailing its own production diary. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the pair behind *The Lego Movie*, were most of the way through shooting it before Lucasfilm parted company with them and brought in Ron Howard to finish, reshoot and effectively re-author the thing. So *Solo* turns up with a question hanging over it that has nothing to do with the plot: can a film survive being made twice? The answer, slightly to my surprise, is that it can, and that the seams barely show. What it cannot quite survive is the suspicion that nobody was asking for the origin story of how a smuggler got his name, his ship and his Wookiee in the first place.
## The setup
Han is a young chancer scraping a living on the shipbuilding world of Corellia, dreaming of a pilot's licence and a way off the planet with Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke), the girl he loves. The escape goes wrong, they are separated, and Han falls in with Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), a veteran thief running a crew through the grubbier corners of a galaxy squeezed between the Empire and the syndicates. One bungled train robbery puts the gang in debt to a crime boss, and the only way to clear it is a bigger, riskier job. Along the way Han acquires a co-pilot, a card-sharp acquaintance with a fast ship, and the first hard lessons about who in this line of work can actually be trusted.
It is, in other words, a heist picture in a Western key, dressed in *Star Wars* costume. No Jedi, no prophecy, no fate of the galaxy. Just a job, a crew and the long odds.
## The cast
The casting gamble everyone fixated on was Alden Ehrenreich, asked to step into the most relaxed, most imitated swagger in popular cinema. He sensibly does not impersonate it. He plays the Han before the cynicism set in, eager and a half-step out of his depth, which is the right instinct even if a few of the cocksure beats land slightly soft. Woody Harrelson is comfortably within his range as Beckett, all weary charm over a readiness to cut and run, the sort of mentor whose advice you should write down and then ignore. Emilia Clarke, out of the armour of *Game of Thrones*, gives Qi'ra a guarded ambiguity that does more for the film than the romance strictly requires.
The one who walks off with the picture is Donald Glover. His Lando is pure poise, a gambler who treats every room as a stage, and the screen lifts whenever he saunters into it. The Han and Chewbacca partnership, meanwhile, is the emotional spine the film actually trusts, and it earns its warmth without straining.
## The craft
Howard is an old professional, and the steadiness shows. Bradford Young's cinematography commits to a genuinely murky, lived-in look, all smoke, grime and low light, which is a brave choice for a franchise that usually trades in clean spectacle, even if a couple of the darker sequences tip over into hard-to-read. The set pieces are the strongest material: a mountain-railway heist that earns its scale, and the Kessel Run finally staged as the white-knuckle smuggling stunt the original films only ever boasted about. John Powell's score nods to John Williams without aping him, and slips in enough propulsion of its own to carry the chases. The pacing is brisk where it counts and only sags in the middle stretch, where the plot pauses to explain its own double-crosses.
## How it stacks up
The natural comparison is *Rogue One*, the other anthology entry, and the two make an instructive pair. *Rogue One* was grim, war-film *Star Wars*, building to a gut-punch. *Solo* is the lighter cousin, closer in spirit to a Saturday-matinee heist and, in its banter and its scoundrels-on-a-job structure, to the cancelled-too-soon glory of *Firefly* than to anything in the main saga. It also sits in the slipstream of *Guardians of the Galaxy*, which proved how much fun this kind of disreputable-crew space adventure can be. Measured against the classic heist westerns it is clearly cribbing from, *Solo* is lightweight, but it knows it, and lightness handled with this much craft is not a failing.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have landed mixed-positive, around 70%, with audiences a touch cooler at 64%, and the recurring verdict is "entertaining but unnecessary". Both halves of that are true. The film answers questions nobody needed answered, and a few of those answers (here is how he got the name, here is the dice) are groan-worthy fan service. The turbulent production and a general sense of franchise fatigue have coloured the reception more than the film on screen deserves. Strip away the expectations and what is left is a perfectly enjoyable adventure, which is roughly where the audience score is being unfair to it.
## Verdict
I came to this braced for a misfire and found a genuinely good time. It is minor *Star Wars*, no argument, and it carries none of the weight of the saga films, but on its own modest terms it delivers: a likeable crew, a couple of excellent set pieces, Glover's Lando, and the easy pleasure of watching a ship and a friendship come together. It is exactly the sort of film I happily put on again, undemanding, well made and warm, and that rewatchability does a lot of the lifting in my score. Judged as the breezy heist-western it set out to be rather than the event picture it was sold as, it clears the bar comfortably. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Solo* underperformed at the box office, which led Lucasfilm to pause the standalone *Star Wars* films, so the sequel its ending teases never arrived on screen. Qi'ra's story and that final-act cameo were instead picked up across the wider franchise on Disney+. The film has been quietly reappraised since, with a fair number of viewers deciding it is the most purely fun of the recent run. It now streams on Disney+ and is available on disc and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*.
The full BBFC content-advice breakdown for this release could not be retrieved at the time of writing; the BBFC release page was unavailable. The age rating and short consumer-advice line above are confirmed; the detailed notes by heading are omitted rather than reconstructed.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/)).*
================================================================================
## Avengers - Infinity War (2018)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-avengers-infinity-war
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-avengers-infinity-war.md
- published: 2018-05-10
- document_id: 1042
> Ten years and eighteen films later, Marvel gathers everyone into one room and then hands the film to the villain. It should collapse under its own cast list, and somehow it does not. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** April 2018
- **Director:** Anthony and Joe Russo · **Writers:** Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero ensemble / cosmic action adventure · **Runtime:** 149 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Robert Downey Jr. (*Iron Man*, *Sherlock Holmes*) as Tony Stark; Chris Hemsworth (*Thor*, *Rush*) as Thor; Josh Brolin (*No Country for Old Men*) as Thanos; Zoe Saldaña (*Avatar*, *Guardians of the Galaxy*) as Gamora
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 85% critics / 91% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Marvel has spent ten years and eighteen films building towards a single afternoon, and the gamble of *Infinity War* is that all of it now has to pay off at once. This is the film where the threads finally meet: Iron Man and Doctor Strange, Thor and the Guardians, the soldiers of Wakanda and a half-built god from a purple corner of the galaxy nobody outside the comics shops had heard of in 2008. The reasonable expectation is a traffic jam, two and a half hours of beloved characters queuing for screen time. The surprise is that the Russo brothers, fresh from *The Winter Soldier* and *Civil War*, have worked out the only trick that could hold it together. They have handed the film to the bad guy.
## The setup
Thanos (Josh Brolin) wants the six Infinity Stones. Gathered into one gauntlet, they let the bearer reshape reality on a whim, and his particular whim is to wipe out half of all life in the universe, which he has convinced himself is mercy rather than murder. Standing between him and the stones are most of the heroes the studio has introduced to date, scattered across Earth and deep space and largely out of contact with one another. The film moves between these clusters as Thanos works through his shopping list, and the dramatic engine is brutally simple: he is winning, and everyone watching can feel it. I will keep the back half to myself, but anyone who has only ever seen heroes turn it around in the final reel should brace for something the genre rarely allows itself.
## The cast
The casting decision that matters most is Brolin's. Thanos could have been a motion-capture slab of menace, and instead Brolin gives him a weary, paternal calm that is far more unsettling than rage. He believes he is the hero of his own story, and the film lets him, which is why his scenes with Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) carry a real ache. Saldaña, who has done this sort of digitally augmented heavy lifting before on *Avatar*, grounds the cosmic nonsense in actual grief. Around them the ensemble is managed with unexpected discipline. Robert Downey Jr. plays Tony Stark a shade more frightened than usual, the bravado thinning out. Chris Hemsworth, having found Thor's comic register in *Ragnarok*, now folds it back into loss. Benedict Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange supplies the arrogance and the plan, and the Guardians wander in to puncture the solemnity at exactly the right moments. Nobody is given much, but almost everyone is given the right thing.
## The craft
What keeps the film from buckling is structure rather than spectacle. Markus and McFeely's script treats the sprawling cast as a problem to be engineered around, cross-cutting between three or four fronts so that no single group ever overstays its welcome. The action, shot by Trent Opaloch, is clean and legible where so much of the genre has gone to murk, and the set pieces, a siege on Titan, a battle across the Wakandan plains, are staged for stakes rather than noise. Alan Silvestri returns to give Thanos a heavy, processional theme that does a lot of the heavy emotional work the dialogue cannot. The 149 minutes move; the film is paced like a heist with too many crews, and it keeps the plates spinning longer than seems possible.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison the film invites is *The Empire Strikes Back*, and not unreasonably. Both are middle chapters with the confidence to end on a downbeat, to let the villain walk away ahead. *Infinity War* is the most *Empire* thing this franchise has attempted. Against Marvel's own run it sits above the assembly-line entries and alongside *Civil War*, the Russos' last juggling act, though this one carries twice the cast and far higher stakes. Set it next to the first *Guardians of the Galaxy* and you can see how much darker the house style has been willing to grow. The thing it shares with the best of the genre is that it earns its scale through character rather than asserting it through budget.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm but slightly hedged, sitting around 85%, and the recurring reservation is that this is half a story, a film that ends mid-sentence and asks you to come back next year for the resolution. That is a fair charge on paper. Audiences, at 91%, plainly do not care, and I am with them. A cliffhanger is only a cheat if it has not earned the suspense, and this one has. The complaint also undersells how much the film achieves as a standalone piece of construction. Knowing it is incomplete, it still delivers a complete villain, a complete argument, and an ending with genuine weight behind it.
## Verdict
This is enormous studio machinery operating at the top of its craft, and the wonder of it is how rarely it feels like machinery. It should not work. There are too many characters, too many plot strands, too much riding on a decade of prior homework. It works because someone made the brave choice to centre it on Thanos and let the heroes orbit him, and because the people steering it understand momentum. It is hugely rewatchable, it knows exactly what it is, and it is the rare blockbuster that trusts its audience to sit with a defeat. Half a story it may be, but it is a magnificent half. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the largest screen you can find; the IMAX presentation, shot for the format, is the one to chase.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the resolution arrived a year later in *Avengers: Endgame* (2019), which closed the story this film leaves hanging and pushed the two-part climax to its conclusion. Seen as a pair, *Infinity War* is the bolder, leaner half, with *Endgame* doing the emotional accounting. The film has settled in as the high-water mark of Marvel's first decade, the moment the long build actually delivered. It now streams on Disney+ and is widely available on disc and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of moderate fantasy violence in which various characters with special powers fight each other or battle an army of aliens. The violence includes use of shooting with futuristic weapons, punches, kicks and blows from other weaponry.
**Threat and horror:** There is a scene in which a character is suspended by wires and pulled apart by a villain trying to extract information from her, but the torture is fantastical. The film also has a downbeat tone throughout, with the central villain's threat to destroy half the universe.
**Language:** There is use of the middle finger gesture, as well as incomplete uses of 'mother--' and 'chill the f-- out'. There is also use of milder terms such as 'shit', 'crap', 'bastards', 'ass', 'piss' and 'screw'.
**Sex:** There is some very mild rude humour and innuendo, such as a threat to attack a grenade to a character's 'junk'.
**Injury detail:** There is some sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/avengers-infinity-war-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mde2mjq)).*
================================================================================
## Ready Player One (2018)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-ready-player-one
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-ready-player-one.md
- published: 2018-04-05
- document_id: 1142
> Spielberg adapts Ernest Cline's nostalgia hunt into a breathless chase through a virtual world, and it is far more fun than the snobs will admit. 8/10.
- **UK release:** March 2018
- **Director:** Steven Spielberg · **Writers:** Zak Penn, Ernest Cline
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Amblin Partners; Village Roadshow
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / virtual-world quest · **Runtime:** 140 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tye Sheridan (*Mud*, *X-Men: Apocalypse*) as Wade Watts; Olivia Cooke (*Me and Earl and the Dying Girl*) as Samantha; Ben Mendelsohn (*Rogue One*, *Animal Kingdom*) as Nolan Sorrento; Mark Rylance (*Bridge of Spies*, *Dunkirk*) as James Halliday
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 72% critics / 77% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
There is a particular kind of suspicion that greets a Steven Spielberg blockbuster these days, the sense that the man who built the modern summer film should by now be making something weightier. *Ready Player One* will not settle that argument, because it is unashamedly a ride: a two-and-a-half-hour chase through a virtual playground stuffed wall to wall with the pop culture of the last forty years. The surprise is how good Spielberg still is at this, and how lightly he wears the very nostalgia the film is selling.
## The setup
In 2045 the real world has more or less given up, and almost everyone spends their waking hours plugged into the OASIS, a vast virtual universe where you can be anyone and go anywhere. Its late creator, James Halliday, has hidden three keys inside it, and whoever finds them inherits the OASIS outright. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a teenager from the stacked trailer slums of Columbus, is one of the millions hunting for them, and one of the few who treats Halliday's obsessions as a map rather than trivia. Ranged against him is Innovative Online Industries, a corporation that wants the keys for itself and has the indentured labour and private army to brute-force the search. What starts as a game turns into a fight over who owns the one world left worth living in.
## The cast
Sheridan, who was so good as the watchful boy in *Mud*, makes Wade a likeable everyman, eager rather than smug, which matters in a film that could easily have curdled into a fan's smugness. Olivia Cooke gives Samantha, the rebel he meets inside the OASIS, more spine and wariness than the part strictly needs, and the romance lands because she refuses to be merely the prize. Ben Mendelsohn does corporate villainy with relish, all clipped menace and middle-management pettiness. The film's quiet heart, though, is Mark Rylance as Halliday, who plays the dead genius as a shy, fumbling man stranded by his own gifts, and gives the whole nostalgia machine an unexpected note of melancholy.
## The craft
This is where Spielberg reminds you why he has the job. The OASIS sequences are dense with detail yet always legible: a demolition-derby road race past King Kong and a rampaging T. rex that is one of the best action set pieces he has staged in years, and a long central detour into a beloved Stanley Kubrick film that is both a technical showcase and a genuinely funny piece of staging. Janusz Kamiński shoots the grimy real world in cold steel and the virtual one in candy colour, so you always know which side of the visor you are on. Alan Silvestri's score does the emotional lifting, and the sheer density of references could have been exhausting; instead Spielberg keeps the camera moving and the plot ticking, so the spotting becomes texture rather than homework.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstones are *Tron: Legacy* and *The Matrix*, films that also asked what we lose when the digital world becomes more appealing than the real one. *Ready Player One* is lighter than either, closer in spirit to *Wreck-It Ralph*, happy to treat its universe as a toy box rather than a thesis. It is also, plainly, a Spielberg film talking to its own past: the wonder of *E.T.*, the runaway momentum of *Raiders of the Lost Ark*, the corporate menace of *Jurassic Park*. The novel's critics will say the film softens Ernest Cline's encyclopaedic source into a greatest-hits reel, and they are not wrong, but the trade buys pace, and pace is what this kind of adventure lives on.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warmly divided, sitting around 72%, with audiences a little higher at 77%. The praise goes to Spielberg's energy and the bravura set pieces; the doubts cluster around the nostalgia overload and a worry that a film about the emptiness of escapism is itself happy to wallow in it. That last point has some force. The film never really lands its argument that we should switch off and go outside, because it is having far too much fun inside. But I am not sure that contradiction sinks it. Taken as a chase picture about a kid, a girl, and a puzzle, it delivers more cleanly than its detractors allow.
## Verdict
My number sits a touch above the critical middle because the things this film does well are exactly the things I rate: world-building, momentum, a virtual universe with rules you can feel, and a closing stretch that earns its sentiment rather than just demanding it. It is not the satire of online life it occasionally pretends to be, and the supporting players blur a little in the crush of references. None of that stops it being the most purely enjoyable big-budget adventure of the season, and one I would happily watch again to catch what I missed the first time. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the largest screen you can find, ideally in IMAX or 3D, where the OASIS sequences have the room to breathe.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film has settled in as one of Spielberg's better-liked late blockbusters, more fondly remembered than its mixed notices suggested, and it arrived just as the "metaverse" went from novel premise to corporate buzzword, which has given it an accidental topicality. No sequel has followed, though Ernest Cline's own *Ready Player Two* novel continued the story in print. It is now widely available on disc and digital and turns up on streaming services depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, horror, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Most of the violence is between players in a virtual reality world where wounds are fantastical and participants cannot be seriously harmed. There are battle sequences, stabbings, shootings and martial arts style combat. In the real world, there is hand-to-hand violence, without sight of injury. A man punches the face of his girlfriend's teenage son.
**Threat and horror:** In the safety of the virtual reality world, the friends encounter characters and settings from real world horror films. They enter a simulation of THE SHINING where they are threatened by ghosts, zombies and gigantic axes and where a player is swept away on a torrent of blood. Freddy Krueger and a Chucky doll, armed with a knife, both fight in battle sequences. Players are chased by King Kong and a T. rex.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f***k'), together with milder terms such as 'pissing', 'shit', 'balls', 'dickweed', 'damn', 'brokeass', 'goddam', 'hell', 'God', 'asshole', 'pissed', 'badass' and 'douchebag'.
**Sex / additional issues:** There are mild sex references: a villain jokes about the 'hos' of Father Christmas; a player rubs her hands over another's touch-sensitive body suit.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/ready-player-one-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00ote1mjq)).*
================================================================================
## The Shape of Water (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-shape-of-water
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-shape-of-water.md
- published: 2018-02-21
- document_id: 1214
> Guillermo del Toro turns a Cold War monster movie into a love story and gets away with it through sheer craft and conviction. Strange, sincere, beautifully made. 8/10.
- **UK release:** February 2018
- **Director:** Guillermo del Toro · **Writers:** Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor
- **Studio / distributor:** Fox Searchlight Pictures; TSG Entertainment
- **Genre:** Fantasy romance / Cold War fairy tale · **Runtime:** 123 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Sally Hawkins (*Happy-Go-Lucky*, *Blue Jasmine*) as Elisa Esposito; Doug Jones (*Pan's Labyrinth*, *Hellboy*) as the Amphibian Man; Michael Shannon (*Take Shelter*, *Man of Steel*) as Richard Strickland; Octavia Spencer (*The Help*) as Zelda Fuller
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 92% critics / 72% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Guillermo del Toro has spent his whole career insisting that the monster is the one worth rooting for, and *The Shape of Water* is the clearest statement he has made of it. After the studio-scaled noise of *Pacific Rim* and the haunted house of *Crimson Peak*, this is del Toro back on the ground he owns, the territory of *Pan's Labyrinth*, where fairy tale and history sit on top of one another and the cruelty is human while the magic is not. He has called it a fairy tale for troubled times, and the surprising thing is that he means the love story literally. This is a film in which a woman falls for a fish god, and it asks you to take that entirely seriously.
## The setup
Baltimore, 1962, at the frozen height of the Cold War. Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is a mute cleaner working the night shift at a secret government laboratory, a woman the world has long since decided to overlook. Into the facility comes an asset: an amphibious humanoid creature, captured in South America and held in a tank, prized by the Americans as a Cold War advantage and despised by the man assigned to break it. Elisa, alone among the staff, sees something other than a specimen. What begins as shared eggs and smuggled records becomes a bond, and then a plan to get him out before the men in charge cut him open. Her allies are an ageing closeted illustrator next door and a sharp-tongued co-worker on the cleaning crew, neither of them people the era was built to listen to either.
## The cast
Hawkins carries the film without a word of dialogue, and the performance is extraordinary for how completely it works through hand, posture and face. Elisa is not a passive victim waiting to be rescued; she is curious, stubborn and frankly desiring, and Hawkins lets all of that read in silence. Doug Jones, del Toro's creature performer of choice since *Pan's Labyrinth*, gives the Amphibian Man a real interior life under the prosthetics, graceful and wary by turns, so that the romance never tips into something to laugh at. Michael Shannon is the human monster of the piece, a company man whose decency rotted out long ago, and he plays Strickland with a clenched, sweating menace that makes the cattle prod he carries feel like an extension of his temperament. Octavia Spencer brings warmth and a needed dryness as Zelda, and Richard Jenkins gives the lonely neighbour a quiet ache.
## The craft
This is a sumptuous film to look at. Dan Laustsen's cinematography drenches everything in green and teal, the colour of water and of the period, so that the whole world looks slightly submerged before anyone gets near the tank. Paul Austerberry's production design builds a 1962 that feels both real and a half-step into dream, all rain-streaked apartments above a cinema and humming institutional corridors. Alexandre Desplat's score is built on accordion and a lilting waltz that leans straight into the fairy-tale register, and del Toro is unembarrassed about it, even pausing for a black-and-white musical flourish that a more cautious director would have cut. The creature effects, a blend of suit and digital work, hold up where they most need to, in close-up, in the eyes. It is a film made by someone who loves old monster movies and refuses to treat that love as a guilty one.
## How it stacks up
The clearest ancestor is *Creature from the Black Lagoon*, the 1954 picture del Toro has said he always wanted to end with the woman and the creature together. He has essentially rewritten it from the creature's side. Set it beside *Pan's Labyrinth* and you see the same architecture: an overlooked outsider, a fantastical escape, and a real-world villain in uniform who is the true horror. There is *Amelie* in its handmade, whimsical romanticism, and more than a little *Beauty and the Beast* in its bones, the oldest version of the story in which love is the thing that sees past the monstrous shape. What del Toro adds is adult weight: this is not a chaste fairy tale but a frankly sexual and sometimes violent one, and the 15 certificate is earned.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it with real enthusiasm, sitting up around 92%, praising the craft, the compassion and Hawkins above all. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm but more divided, around 72%, and the split is easy to understand. If you cannot get past the central premise, that a woman and an amphibian fall genuinely in love, the film has nowhere to take you, and a sincere fairy tale can read as twee or strange to a viewer who wanted irony. I land with the critics here, though for me the reservation is less the premise than the villainy: Strickland is so thoroughly monstrous that the moral scales never wobble, and the film is at its richest when it lets its outsiders simply be people rather than symbols of who 1962 left behind.
## Verdict
I came in braced for whimsy and came out won over by conviction. The thing that makes it work is that del Toro never winks. He commits to the romance, the period and the storybook logic completely, and the craft is good enough to carry all three. It is beautifully shot, scored and performed, and Hawkins gives one of the silent-cinema-grade performances of the year. My hesitation is on rewatchability: I admire it more than I ache to return to it, and the plot mechanics in the back half are the most conventional part of an otherwise singular film. But this is a confident, tender, gorgeously made piece of work from a director doing exactly what he was put here to do. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas from February 2018, after a strong festival run. Worth a big screen for Laustsen's photography and Desplat's score.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Shape of Water* went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, with del Toro taking Best Director and Desplat Best Original Score, the rare creature-feature romance to take the industry's top prize. Its reputation has settled as one of del Toro's signature works, of a piece with *Pan's Labyrinth* rather than his bigger-budget detours. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+ in the UK depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, language, sex, nudity*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes include gunfights and the implied severing of a man's fingers, with resultant bloody detail. In one sequence, a man probes a victim's gunshot wounds to interrogate him.
**Language:** There is occasional use of strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker').
**Sex:** Sequences include thrusting during intercourse and implied masturbation. There are occasional moderate sex references.
**Nudity:** There are occasional scenes of full frontal female nudity, including in a sexual context.
**Additional issues:** There are occasional scenes of moderate threat. Infrequent scenes of homophobic and racist behaviour also occur, but the work does not condone or endorse such attitudes. There is a scene in which it is implied a cat has been killed and is then seen being eaten by the creature. However, there is no sight of animal cruelty on screen and no evidence any animal was harmed.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-shape-of-water-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zodm5nti)).*
================================================================================
## Black Panther (2018)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-black-panther
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-black-panther.md
- published: 2018-02-16
- document_id: 1047
> Ryan Coogler builds Marvel a country worth visiting, hands it the most coherent villain the studio has managed, and wraps both in a world too rich to forget. 8/10.
- **UK release:** February 2018
- **Director:** Ryan Coogler · **Writers:** Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero action / Afrofuturist adventure · **Runtime:** 134 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chadwick Boseman (*42*, *Captain America: Civil War*) as T'Challa / Black Panther; Michael B. Jordan (*Fruitvale Station*, *Creed*) as Erik Killmonger; Lupita Nyong'o (*12 Years a Slave*) as Nakia; Danai Gurira (*The Walking Dead*) as Okoye
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 96% critics / 79% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Eighteen films into the Marvel project, the worry is that the machine has flattened everyone who steps into it. Directors arrive with reputations and leave having made something competent and interchangeable. So the interesting thing about *Black Panther* is who has been handed the keys: Ryan Coogler, two films deep on *Fruitvale Station* and *Creed*, a director who works in close, character-first registers rather than mass spectacle. Marvel has bought itself a film-maker with a point of view, and for once you can feel it in the result. This is the rare entry that wants to be about something, and mostly manages it without dropping the third act it is contractually obliged to deliver.
## The setup
T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) returns home to Wakanda to take the throne after his father's death. To the outside world Wakanda is a poor, land-locked African nation; in truth it sits on a mountain of vibranium, the most valuable substance on the planet, and has used it to build a hidden civilisation generations ahead of everyone else. The cost of that secret is isolation, and the new king inherits the argument over whether it can hold. The challenge, when it comes, arrives from Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), an outsider with a blood claim to the throne and a furious case for why Wakanda's wealth should have been shared long ago. The film hangs on that disagreement, and it is a real one, which is more than most of these films can say.
## The cast
Boseman gives T'Challa a still, watchful authority, a man more comfortable listening than declaiming, and that restraint leaves room for everyone around him. The women carry an enormous amount of the picture: Danai Gurira's Okoye, all spear and unbending loyalty, is the best new presence Marvel has introduced in years, and Lupita Nyong'o's Nakia gives the film its conscience without ever softening into a love interest. Letitia Wright walks off with whole scenes as Shuri, the king's younger sister and the brain behind Wakanda's technology. The film belongs, though, to Michael B. Jordan. Killmonger is the studio's first villain whose argument you cannot simply wave away, a man shaped by abandonment whose method is monstrous but whose grievance lands. Coogler directed Jordan in *Creed*, and the shorthand between them shows.
## The craft
Coogler and the cinematographer Rachel Morrison have built a place, not a backdrop. Wakanda has texture, a fusion of African design and impossible technology that feels lived in rather than art-directed, and the film slows down to let you look at it. Ludwig Göransson's score, threaded with talking drums and West African instrumentation, gives the world a voice of its own and is a large part of why the film stays with you. The action is the weaker hand: an early casino set piece and a car chase through Busan have real snap, but the climactic vibranium-powered battle slides into the weightless digital scrum that afflicts the whole genre, and the effects there are the least convincing thing on screen. When the film trusts its faces and its setting it is excellent. When it remembers it owes you a spectacle, it wobbles.
## How it stacks up
Set it beside the other recent Marvel films and the difference is one of intent. *Captain America: Civil War* juggled a roster; *Thor: Ragnarok* found a tone and rode it; *Black Panther* is trying to build a coherent world and argue a real political question inside a tentpole, which is a harder and rarer thing. The world-building invites the obvious comparison to *Dune*, another story of a desert-edged people sitting on the universe's most coveted resource, and the Afrofuturist design owes a quiet debt to a tradition the genre has mostly ignored. What separates it from the pack is the villain. Most superhero films are only as good as their antagonist, and Killmonger is the strongest Marvel has fielded, which is why this film feels like it matters more than its plot mechanics would suggest.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, parked at 96%, and the reasons are easy to see: a director with vision, a cast given something to play, a world worth the visit. Audiences are warmer than most but more measured at 79%, and that gap is honest. The cultural weight the film carries has pulled some of the praise above what is strictly on screen, and the structure underneath is still a Marvel origin film, complete with the ritual final-act collision of computer-generated armies. Both things are true at once: it is a genuinely better-made film than the studio's norm, and it does not entirely escape the template it was built to fit.
## Verdict
I value world-building, atmosphere and a soundtrack that does real work, and on those counts this delivers more than almost anything else the genre has produced lately. The villain is the best in the series, the country is one I would happily return to, and Coogler has made a Marvel film that carries an actual idea without forgetting to entertain. It loses something in a final act that defaults to genre habit, and the effects buckle exactly when they should soar, which is what keeps it short of the very top. It rewards a rewatch, mostly for the world and the cast rather than the climax. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and IMAX.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Black Panther* went on to become the first superhero film nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, winning three awards including Ludwig Göransson's score. Its sequel, *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever* (2022), had to be reshaped around the death of Chadwick Boseman in 2020, and stands now as much a tribute as a continuation. The film is widely available on disc and digital and streams on Disney+.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, injury detail, rude gesture*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are battles with swords, spears, guns and fantastical weapons. The violence includes slashes, stabs and hand-to-hand combat. A character breaks another's arm, and a warrior's throat is cut, but without strong detail.
**Threat and horror:** There are scenes of threat, including a flashback to a character apparently being killed in an explosion.
**Language:** During a comic scene, a character gives a middle-finger gesture. There is also use of mild bad language ('shit'), as well as milder terms such as 'hell'.
**Injury detail:** A torso wound is shown during a healing process. Other injuries, sometimes bloody, are seen briefly and without strong detail.
**Sex:** There is some very mild comic innuendo.
**Drugs:** A fantastical mind-altering potion is drunk during a ceremonial ritual.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/black-panther-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mdi4mde)).*
================================================================================
## The Commuter (2018)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-commuter
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-commuter.md
- published: 2018-02-06
- document_id: 1179
> Liam Neeson and Jaume Collet-Serra reunite for a fourth time, this time trapping their everyman hero on a commuter train with a stranger's poisoned offer. Familiar machinery, briskly assembled, and better fun than the scores allow. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** January 2018
- **Director:** Jaume Collet-Serra · **Writers:** Byron Willinger, Philip de Blasi, Ryan Engle
- **Studio / distributor:** StudioCanal; Lionsgate; The Picture Company
- **Genre:** Action thriller / conspiracy thriller · **Runtime:** 105 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Liam Neeson (*Taken*, *Schindler's List*) as Michael MacCauley; Vera Farmiga (*Up in the Air*, *The Departed*) as Joanna; Patrick Wilson (*Watchmen*, *Little Children*) as Alex Murphy; Jonathan Banks (*Breaking Bad*) as Walt
- **IMDb:** 6.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 56% critics / 40% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
This is the fourth time Liam Neeson and Jaume Collet-Serra have made a film together, and by now the partnership has the comfortable rhythm of a house band. *Unknown*, *Non-Stop* and *Run All Night* established the template: take a sturdy, weathered Neeson, drop him into a confined or hostile space, and let his particular brand of growling competence carry a plot that would collapse if you poked it. *The Commuter* is the train one, the obvious companion piece to *Non-Stop*'s aeroplane, and it knows exactly what it is. The pleasure on offer is watching a known set of tools used well, not watching anyone reinvent them.
## The setup
Michael MacCauley (Liam Neeson) is a former New York cop turned insurance salesman, sixty years old, mortgaged to the hilt, and making the same Hudson Line commute he has made for a decade. On the day he loses his job, a stranger named Joanna (Vera Farmiga) sits down opposite him and lays out a hypothetical that is not hypothetical at all: there is a passenger on this train who does not belong, find them before the last stop, and a great deal of money is his. The catch arrives quickly, the stakes turn personal, and the carriage that was MacCauley's daily boredom becomes a moving box he cannot get out of. The film keeps its cards close, and so will I, beyond saying that the people behind Joanna's voice are better resourced than one commuter can easily fight.
## The cast
Neeson at this point could play this role in his sleep, and the interesting thing is that he does not. There is a real weariness he brings to MacCauley, a man whose body is starting to write cheques his pride keeps cashing, and the film is smart enough to let the fights cost him something. Vera Farmiga does a lot with very little screen time, most of it spent as a calm voice and a watchful face, turning exposition into menace. Patrick Wilson lends solid support as MacCauley's old police partner, and Jonathan Banks brings his familiar flinty presence to a train regular, though both are used more as pieces on the board than as characters. The ensemble of passengers exists chiefly to be suspected in turn, which is the genre working as designed.
## The craft
Collet-Serra is a more stylish director than the brief tends to suggest, and *The Commuter* is full of show-off touches: gliding camera moves that stitch the length of a carriage into one unbroken take, a clever early montage that compresses ten years of identical mornings, and one extended fight along a moving train that is staged with real geographic clarity. Paul Cameron's photography keeps the cramped space legible, and Roque Banos scores it with the kind of propulsive, ticking urgency that papers over the moments when logic thins out. At 105 minutes it does not outstay its welcome. The third act asks more of your goodwill than the first two, and the digital effects in the bigger set pieces are the weakest thing on screen, but the momentum rarely stalls.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Non-Stop*, and *The Commuter* is the slightly lesser twin: the aeroplane film had a tighter mystery and a meaner edge. Reach wider and you find the train thriller's long pedigree, from *The Taking of Pelham One Two Three* to *Source Code*, films that understand a moving carriage is a gift to a screenwriter because nobody can simply walk away. *The Commuter* is not as ingenious as *Source Code* or as gritty as the 1974 *Pelham*, but it sits respectably in that company, working the same confined-space tension with a star who anchors it. It is *Unknown* with a season ticket, and that is meant as a compliment.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have landed on it as competent and forgettable, around 56% on the Tomatometer, with the recurring note that the Neeson formula is wearing thin. Audiences have been harsher, down at 40%, which feels like a reaction against the increasingly silly final stretch more than the film as a whole. I think both are marking it against the wrong yardstick. Held up as a piece of original cinema it is unremarkable. Judged as a January action thriller built to entertain a Friday-night crowd for an hour and three quarters, it does the job with more craft and conviction than its reputation allows.
## Verdict
This is comfort food, and I mean that without apology. The plot creaks, the resolution stretches plausibility past breaking, and you will see one or two turns coming. None of that stops it being a brisk, well-made, genuinely tense ride with a leading man who still sells every blow and every bluff. I value rewatchability and a thriller that respects the clock, and on both counts this delivers: it is exactly the kind of film I would happily put on again on a wet afternoon without checking the time. It is better than the consensus, if not by a landslide. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on general release from StudioCanal. One for the big screen if you want the train sequences to land, though it will lose little on the sofa when it reaches disc later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Commuter* turned out to be the last of the Neeson and Collet-Serra collaborations to date, closing a run of four that had quietly become one of the more reliable star-and-director pairings in mid-budget action. The Neeson late-career thriller has only multiplied since, and viewed against the thinner entries that followed, this one holds up as one of the better-made examples of the type. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and turns up regularly on streaming services in the UK depending on the season.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of strong violence include extended sequences of hand-to-hand combat featuring heavy punches and kicks delivered to faces and bodies. In one scene a man stabs another man with a knife.
**Injury detail:** In one scene a dead body is discovered with bloody facial injuries.
**Additional issues:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k'). There are references to a man ending his life, though this is not shown. There is a sense of moderate threat throughout.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-commuter-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotq2odq)).*
================================================================================
## Star Wars - The Last Jedi (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-star-wars-the-last-jedi
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-star-wars-the-last-jedi.md
- published: 2017-12-27
- document_id: 1164
> Rian Johnson takes the controls of the middle chapter and uses it to argue with the whole franchise. Bold, uneven, and noticeably better the second time round. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** December 2017
- **Director:** Rian Johnson · **Writer:** Rian Johnson
- **Studio / distributor:** Lucasfilm; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Space opera / science-fiction adventure · **Runtime:** 152 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Daisy Ridley (*The Force Awakens*) as Rey; Mark Hamill (*Star Wars*, *The Empire Strikes Back*) as Luke Skywalker; Adam Driver (*Paterson*) as Kylo Ren; Carrie Fisher (*Star Wars*, *The Empire Strikes Back*) as Leia Organa
- **IMDb:** 7.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 43% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Two years ago *The Force Awakens* reintroduced this universe by carefully, lovingly handing us the old one back: a desert orphan, a hidden map, a planet-sized weapon, a masked villain with a famous surname. It worked, and it was meant to reassure. *The Last Jedi* is the film that has to do something with all that careful set-up, and Rian Johnson, brought over from the small, clever *Looper* and *Brick*, has decided the most interesting thing he can do is take every expectation that first film planted and refuse to water it. The result is the most divisive Star Wars film since the prequels, and the first one in a long while that seems to have an argument on its mind.
## The setup
The Resistance is in full retreat. The First Order has the survivors of the last film outnumbered and outgunned, and what follows is essentially a slow chase through space, the fleet bleeding ships and fuel while Leia and a hot-headed pilot called Poe disagree about how to save what is left. Off on a remote island, Rey has finally found Luke Skywalker, only to discover the legend is a bitter hermit who wants nothing to do with the war, the Jedi, or her. She wants training and a reason to hope; he wants to be left alone to let an old religion die. Meanwhile Kylo Ren, scarred and unstable after the events of the first film, is being pulled in directions neither his master nor his enemies expect.
## The cast
Daisy Ridley carries the spiritual half of the film almost single-handed, and Rey is more interesting here than she was as the bright new hope of *The Force Awakens*: hungrier, lonelier, more willing to look in the wrong places for answers. Mark Hamill is the surprise. Asked to play Luke as a defeated old man who failed at the one thing he is famous for, he gives the best performance of his career in the role, all weariness and buried guilt and the odd flash of the farm boy underneath. Adam Driver, so good in the quiet of *Paterson*, makes Kylo Ren genuinely volatile rather than merely sulky, and the long-distance scenes he shares with Ridley are the film's strongest stretch. Carrie Fisher's Leia carries the weight of the whole saga in a few scenes, and a subplot for Poe and the engineer Rose never quite earns the screen time it takes.
## The craft
Johnson directs like someone who has watched a great deal of cinema and wants you to notice. The film looks magnificent: a red-and-white salt planet that bleeds where the ground is scraped, a throne room lit like a furnace, a silent jump to lightspeed that is the single best image in the sequel trilogy. Steve Yedlin's photography gives the space battles real depth, and John Williams is still finding new corners of a score he has been writing for forty years. The pacing is the weak point. At two and a half hours the central chase sags, and the detour to a casino city stops the film dead just as it should be tightening. When Johnson trusts his actors and his images over his plotting, which is often, the film is wonderful. When the machinery of a middle-chapter blockbuster takes over, it shows.
## How it stacks up
Every second film in a Star Wars trilogy lives in the shadow of *The Empire Strikes Back*, and Johnson knows it. He reaches for the same darkness, the same idea that heroes can lose and lose badly, but where *Empire* deepened its myths, *The Last Jedi* spends much of its running time poking holes in them. Lineage does not matter, the script keeps insisting; the past should be allowed to die; the legends were only ever people. It is the most *Looper* thing imaginable, a film built around undercutting the very nostalgia *The Force Awakens* sold us, and whether that thrills or annoys you will decide how you feel about the whole enterprise. As a piece of franchise film-making it is far braver than J. J. Abrams's careful revival, and far less interested in keeping everyone happy.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The split is remarkable. Critics are around 90 per cent positive, praising the ambition, the visuals and the willingness to take the saga somewhere uncomfortable. Audience scores are sitting near 43 per cent, and the gap is real rather than manufactured: a large slice of long-time fans feel the film has thrown away set-ups they were promised and disrespected characters they grew up with. Both sides have a point. The film does break its own toys, sometimes carelessly. It also does the one thing a middle chapter should, which is leave the saga in a genuinely uncertain place. I came out the first time admiring it and faintly irritated by it. The second time, knowing the swerves were coming, I enjoyed it a great deal more.
## Verdict
This is a flawed, overlong, frequently magnificent film, and that repeat-viewing jump is the heart of how I score it. On a first watch the subverted expectations land as frustration as often as surprise, and the casino detour is hard to forgive. Watch it again, with the shocks absorbed, and what remains is the boldest, best-directed and best-acted Star Wars film in decades, anchored by a Luke Skywalker who finally has something to play. It could have been tighter and braver about its own structure rather than just its mythology. But it is the rare blockbuster that wants to mean something, and it rewards the people who give it a second look. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX and 3D screenings. Coming to DVD, Blu-ray and 4K in the new year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the divide this film opened never really closed, and it shaped the trilogy that followed. *The Rise of Skywalker* (2019) reversed several of Johnson's boldest swerves and tried to please the fans this film had unsettled, which left the trilogy pulling against itself. Johnson, for his part, went off and made the warmer, wittier *Knives Out* (2019). Over time *The Last Jedi* has settled into the saga's most argued-over entry, admired more in hindsight by people who came round to its ambitions. It now streams on Disney+ and is widely available on disc.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Moderate violence includes gunfights, aerial dogfights between spaceships, and use of lightsabers and other hand-held weapons. Blood and injury detail is limited and brief.
**Additional issues:** There is occasional mild threat and infrequent mild bad language ('ass', 'bastard', 'bloody').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/star-wars-episode-viii-the-last-jedi-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00otg0ndk)).*
================================================================================
## Thor - Ragnarok (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-thor-ragnarok
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-thor-ragnarok.md
- published: 2017-10-31
- document_id: 1223
> Taika Waititi takes Marvel's most po-faced franchise, paints it in Jack Kirby colours and lets everyone be funny. The result is the most purely enjoyable Thor film by a distance. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** October 2017
- **Director:** Taika Waititi · **Writers:** Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, Christopher L. Yost
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero fantasy comedy / cosmic adventure · **Runtime:** 130 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chris Hemsworth (*Thor*, *Rush*) as Thor; Tom Hiddleston (*The Avengers*) as Loki; Cate Blanchett (*Elizabeth*, *The Lord of the Rings*) as Hela; Tessa Thompson (*Creed*) as Valkyrie
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 87% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
The first two Thor films were the part of the Marvel run nobody got excited about. Kenneth Branagh's 2011 opener had a certain Shakespearean stateliness, and *The Dark World* two years later was so forgettable that even people who liked it struggle to recall a scene. Hand the keys to Taika Waititi, the New Zealander behind *Hunt for the Wilderpeople* and the vampire mockumentary *What We Do in the Shadows*, and the brief seems to have been simple: stop taking the God of Thunder so seriously. The result is the loosest, funniest and most colourful thing the franchise has produced, and it works because Waititi treats the solemnity of the earlier films as the joke.
## The setup
Thor (Chris Hemsworth) comes home to Asgard to find his father gone and a sister he never knew he had standing at the gates. Hela, the goddess of death, has been locked away for centuries, and she means to take the throne and everything beyond it. Within minutes Thor is flung to the far side of the cosmos, stripped of his hammer and dumped on Sakaar, a junkyard planet ruled by a preening showman who feeds prisoners to a champion in the arena. To get home and stop Hela razing his people, Thor has to win a fight he did not choose, talk round a brother who has betrayed him more than once, and recruit a hard-drinking exile who would rather not be found. The title gives away the stakes: Ragnarok is the Norse end of the world, and this time the prophecy is not a metaphor.
## The cast
Hemsworth is the revelation, which is an odd thing to say about an actor four films into a role. Given permission to be funny, he turns Thor into a big, sincere, slightly dim optimist, and the comic timing he showed in *Rush* and in the *Ghostbusters* reboot finally gets a proper home. Tom Hiddleston's Loki is as slippery as ever, though the film is smart enough to play the brothers as a double act rather than a grudge. Cate Blanchett, all antlers and eyeliner, clearly relishes a straightforwardly wicked turn after the grandeur of *Elizabeth* and *The Lord of the Rings*; Hela is more vamp than menace, but Blanchett sells the relish. Tessa Thompson, fresh from *Creed*, gives Valkyrie the bruised, boozy swagger of someone running from a defeat, and she holds the screen against the leads. Jeff Goldblum, doing his loosest Goldblum as the Grandmaster, is essentially improvising in a gold robe, and Mark Ruffalo's Hulk gets more dialogue and more personality than in any previous outing. Waititi himself voices Korg, a rock gladiator whose gentle deadpan steals most of the scenes he is in.
## The craft
This is the first Marvel film that looks like it was made by someone who grew up loving the comics as objects. Waititi and his designers reach back to the lurid, candy-coloured worlds of Jack Kirby and to the high camp of *Flash Gordon*, and Mark Mothersbaugh scores it with thick analogue synths that make Sakaar feel like a lost early-eighties fantasy. The action is staged for clarity and for fun rather than scale, with one arena set piece and a final battle set to Led Zeppelin's *Immigrant Song* that lands exactly the hit it is reaching for. The tone is the gamble. Waititi keeps undercutting his own grand moments with a joke, and the looseness occasionally bleeds the threat out of a scene that ought to frighten. It is a price worth paying. The film moves, it never sags across its two hours, and it looks like nothing else Marvel has put out.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Guardians of the Galaxy*, which three years ago proved Marvel could do oddball cosmic comedy and get away with it. *Ragnarok* is cut from similar cloth, a needle-drop space adventure that would rather make you laugh than make you worry, though Waititi's humour is drier and stranger than James Gunn's. Against the two earlier Thor films it is barely the same series; the closest the franchise had come to this kind of energy was Loki's scenes in *The Avengers*. And the spirit of *Flash Gordon* runs all the way through it, from the throwaway pulp design to the willingness to be silly without apology. It is the rare third entry that justifies itself by ripping up the template rather than repeating it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting around 93%, with audiences a little cooler at 87%. The praise is for the colour, the comedy and the rescue of a character nobody much cared about. The one persistent complaint, and it is a fair one, is that the relentless joking undercuts the apocalyptic stakes; when the destruction of a world keeps pausing for a punchline, the world stops feeling quite real. I take the point and I do not much mind. The audience gap probably reflects a few longtime fans who wanted their thunder god to stay solemn. They are entitled to it, but I think they are wrong about what this character was ever good for.
## Verdict
I came to the Thor films expecting the least of them, and this is the one that won me over. It is funny, it is gorgeous to look at, the soundtrack is a pleasure, and it gives four good actors room to play instead of pose. The cost of the comedy is a villain who never truly terrifies and an ending whose weight is slightly undercut by the gags, and that is what keeps it just short of the top tier. But on the things I value most, sheer enjoyment, world-building and the certainty that I would happily watch it again, it scores high. The most rewatchable Marvel film since *Guardians*, and comfortably the best Thor. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, in 2D, 3D and IMAX. Worth the bigger screen for the Sakaar colours and that *Immigrant Song* set piece.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Waititi returned to direct *Thor: Love and Thunder* (2022), which pushed the comic register further and divided opinion, with several critics arguing it confirmed the worry that the jokes could swamp the drama. *Ragnarok* has held up as the high point of Thor's solo run and is widely seen as the film that turned the character around. It now streams on Disney+ and is available on 4K Blu-ray and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate fantasy violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Ratings info:** Frequent scenes of fantasy violence include fistfights, aerial dogfights, and use of lasers and bladed weapons. There are brief impalings, but with minimal blood and injury detail. In one comic sequence an alien is melted into liquid, but the scene does not dwell on detail. There are occasional mild sex references and innuendo, and occasional use of mild bad language.
*The BBFC publishes its classification note for this film as a single "Ratings info" summary rather than a category-by-category breakdown. Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/thor-ragnarok-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtmta1mtu1ng)).*
================================================================================
## Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-blade-runner-2049
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-blade-runner-2049.md
- published: 2017-10-20
- document_id: 1048
> Thirty-five years on, someone has finally made a sequel to the unmakeable film, and Denis Villeneuve has not just matched the original but deepened it. Slow, vast, and the most beautiful science fiction in years. 9.5/10.
- **UK release:** October 2017
- **Director:** Denis Villeneuve · **Writers:** Hampton Fancher, Michael Green
- **Studio / distributor:** Alcon Entertainment; Columbia Pictures; Warner Bros.
- **Genre:** Neo-noir science fiction / cyberpunk mystery · **Runtime:** 164 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Ryan Gosling (*Drive*, *Half Nelson*) as K; Harrison Ford (*Blade Runner*, *Raiders of the Lost Ark*) as Rick Deckard; Ana de Armas (*Knock Knock*) as Joi; Sylvia Hoeks as Luv
- **IMDb:** 8.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 88% critics / 81% audience · **My rating:** 9.5 / 10
A sequel to *Blade Runner* has always been the project nobody dared finish. Ridley Scott's 1982 film took years to be understood, gathered cuts the way other films gather sequels, and ended up the founding text of cyberpunk, the rain-soaked, neon-drowned future every science fiction film since has borrowed from. Following it is a fool's errand, which is exactly why the choice of Denis Villeneuve to direct felt less reckless than it should have. After *Sicario* and *Arrival*, here is a director who understands patience and dread, who lets a frame breathe, and who treats science fiction as a place to ask questions rather than stage fireworks. The astonishing thing is that he has pulled it off.
## The setup
K (Ryan Gosling) is a blade runner working the same grim trade as Deckard before him, hunting and retiring the older replicants who are still out there hiding among humans. He is himself a replicant, a newer and more obedient model, and he knows it. A routine job turns up something buried at a remote farm that should not exist, a discovery that quietly threatens the line between the manufactured and the born. As K pulls at the thread, the investigation drags him out across a ruined, irradiated America and towards a man who vanished three decades ago. To say much more would spoil a story built on slow revelation, so I will leave it there.
## The cast
Gosling is the right kind of blank: watchful, contained, a man trained not to feel who keeps catching himself feeling anyway. It is a performance of small movements, and he carries a two-and-three-quarter-hour film almost single-handed without ever forcing it. Ana de Armas is the surprise as Joi, K's holographic companion, a relationship the film treats with genuine tenderness rather than as a gadget, and de Armas finds real longing in something that may be no more than software. Sylvia Hoeks is genuinely frightening as Luv, the corporate enforcer who weeps while she kills. And then there is Harrison Ford, used sparingly and well, bringing a weary, wounded weight to Deckard that the original never asked of him. The handover from one generation of the story to the next is handled with real grace.
## The craft
This is where the film moves from very good to extraordinary. Roger Deakins shoots it, and after a career of near-misses at the awards he has finally been handed a world worthy of him: the toxic amber of a dead Las Vegas, the cold grey sheets of rain over Los Angeles, an interrogation lit only by the rippling light off water. Every frame is composed to be hung on a wall. Villeneuve's pacing is deliberate and unhurried, closer to *2001* than to a modern blockbuster, and the Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch score lands like tectonic plates shifting, a vast synthesised groan that owes a debt to Vangelis without ever copying him. The world-building is faultless: this feels like the original's future actually aged thirty years, decayed and expanded with total conviction. For atmosphere alone it is one of the most immersive things I have seen in a decade.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is the 1982 original, and 2049 does the rarest thing a sequel can: it honours the source without imitating it, then deepens its themes about memory, manufactured humanity and what counts as a real life. Set it beside Villeneuve's own *Arrival* and you see the same patient, melancholy intelligence at work. It also sits comfortably next to Spike Jonze's *Her*, another film willing to take an artificial relationship seriously rather than mock it. What it is not is *Mad Max: Fury Road*, and anyone arriving expecting that pace will check their watch. This is science fiction as contemplation, the kind that trusts you to sit with an idea.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are largely won over, sitting at 88%, with near-universal praise for Deakins, the design and Villeneuve's control, and the only recurring complaint is the running time and the unhurried tempo. Audiences are a touch cooler at 81%, and that gap tells its own story: this is a slow, demanding, two-and-three-quarter-hour film that asks more of a Friday-night crowd than it gives back in spectacle, and its disappointing box office reflects that. I land firmly on the critics' side and then some. The deliberation that frustrated some viewers is the thing I most admire.
## Verdict
This is as close to a perfect film as the genre gives me. It is intelligent science fiction with flawless world-building, an atmosphere you can sink into completely, a soundtrack that gets under your skin, and a mystery that respects your attention. It asks for patience and rewards it many times over, and it is the rare blockbuster-scale film I want to watch again the moment it ends, partly to live in those images a while longer. The slowness that lost it the multiplex is the slowness I love. A sequel nobody could make, made better than it had any right to be. **9.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, and worth the largest screen and the best sound system you can find.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to win Academy Awards for Roger Deakins' cinematography and for visual effects, the recognition Deakins had been owed for a generation. It remains a commercial cautionary tale, a film admired far more than it was seen on release, and its reputation has only grown as audiences caught up with it at home. It is now widely available on 4K Blu-ray and digital, where Deakins' images survive the move to a smaller screen better than most, and streams on various platforms depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, language, sexualised nudity*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of strong violence include fights with guns and knives, resulting in spurts of blood and detail of bloody injuries. More moderate violence includes occasional crunchy fistfights, as well as undetailed shootings and stabbings.
**Threat and horror:** Scenes of moderate threat include people being chased and nearly drowning.
**Language:** There is occasional strong language ('f**k') as well as milder bad language including 'prick', 'shit', 'bullshit', 'bastard', 'hell' and 'damn'.
**Sex:** There are occasional moderate sex references, including references to sex work.
**Injury detail:** Moderate gore includes a brief shot of an eyeball in a bag.
**Nudity:** There is sexualised female breast and buttock nudity.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Characters smoke and drink.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/blade-runner-2049-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotyymtm)).*
================================================================================
## Atomic Blonde (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-atomic-blonde
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-atomic-blonde.md
- published: 2017-08-20
- document_id: 1037
> A stunt man turned director sends Charlize Theron through 1989 Berlin with neon, needle-drops and a stairwell brawl you will not forget. The plot ties itself in knots; the craft is immaculate. 8/10.
- **UK release:** August 2017
- **Director:** David Leitch · **Writer:** Kurt Johnstad
- **Studio / distributor:** Focus Features; Universal; 87Eleven; Denver and Delilah Productions
- **Genre:** Cold War spy action thriller · **Runtime:** 115 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Source:** Based on the graphic novel *The Coldest City* by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart
- **Main cast:** Charlize Theron (*Monster*, *Mad Max: Fury Road*) as Lorraine Broughton; James McAvoy (*Atonement*, *X-Men: First Class*) as David Percival; Sofia Boutella (*Kingsman: The Secret Service*) as Delphine Lasalle; Toby Jones (*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*) as Eric Gray
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 78% critics / 64% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
David Leitch spent years as a stunt man and stunt coordinator before he co-directed *John Wick* and showed everyone what a fight scene could look like when the people staging it actually understand bodies in motion. *Atomic Blonde* is his first solo feature, and it carries that pedigree on its sleeve. This is a spy film made by an action choreographer, set in the last weeks before the Berlin Wall comes down, and shot as though the late eighties were a colour palette rather than a decade. The question hanging over it is whether a man who built his name on movement can also hold a Cold War plot together. The answer is roughly half and half, and the half that works is glorious.
## The setup
Berlin, November 1989. The Wall is days from falling, every intelligence service in the city is scrambling, and a list has surfaced that names every active field agent on both sides. An MI6 officer carrying it has just been killed. London sends Lorraine Broughton, a top agent with a reputation for getting results and leaving bodies, to recover the list and to find the double agent, code-named Satchel, who has been bleeding British secrets for years. Her only contact in Berlin is David Percival, the station chief who has gone thoroughly native, and whose loyalties are a question rather than a given.
The film frames all this as a debrief: a bruised, chain-smoking Lorraine recounting the mission to her superiors, which lets the story double back on itself and keep you guessing who played whom. Keep your wits about you and avoid reading too much ahead; the pleasure here is in not quite knowing who is lying.
## The cast
Charlize Theron is the reason this works. She trained hard for the role and it shows in every frame, but the performance is more than physical competence. Lorraine is all icy control on the surface and exhaustion underneath, and Theron lets you see the cost of the violence rather than just the elegance of it. After *Mad Max: Fury Road* nobody doubted she could carry an action film; here she does it in heels and a white coat, and she sells the fights as someone who gets hurt.
James McAvoy is having an enormous amount of fun as Percival, a man who has been in Berlin too long and stopped pretending he is on anyone's side but his own. He brings the chaos the cool surface needs. Sofia Boutella, fresh from *Kingsman: The Secret Service*, plays a green French agent who becomes Lorraine's lover, and the relationship gives the film its only real warmth. Toby Jones and John Goodman, as the British and American spymasters running the debrief, supply the dry institutional scepticism, and Jones in particular knows this territory from *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*.
## The craft
The craft is where the film earns its keep. Jonathan Sela's cinematography drenches everything in cold blues, sodium oranges and neon pink, and the production design treats divided Berlin as a stage set of graffiti, surveillance and cheap hotel rooms. The soundtrack is a jukebox of period hits, New Order, Depeche Mode, David Bowie, Nena, and Leitch cuts the action to them with real wit.
Then there is the stairwell. A single long take, stitched to look unbroken, that follows Lorraine through a brutal close-quarters fight down several floors of a tenement, both combatants slowing, stumbling and gasping as the exhaustion sets in. It is the best action sequence of the year and one of the best of the decade, precisely because it refuses to make the violence look easy. People tire. Weapons run out. It hurts. After years of weightless cutting, this is what choreography looks like when a stunt man is in charge.
## How it stacks up
The obvious sibling is *John Wick*, Leitch's calling card, and the lineage of clean, legible, bone-crunching action runs straight through both. But *Atomic Blonde* is reaching for something the *Wick* films never bother with: the moral murk of the spy genre. It wants to sit alongside *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy* and the colder end of the Cold War tradition, all betrayal and ambiguity, while moving with the velocity of *The Bourne Identity*. It does not fully manage the synthesis. The plot is deliberately tangled, and by the time the double and triple crosses resolve, the espionage feels more like a delivery system for set pieces than a story you are gripped by. *Salt* had the same problem and less style to cover it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have come down warmer than audiences, around 78% against 64%, and the split makes sense. Reviewers have fallen for the look, the soundtrack and that stairwell, while flagging that the narrative is colder and more convoluted than it needs to be. Audiences seem to have walked in expecting a straightforward action thriller and found a knotty spy puzzle wrapped around it. Both reactions are fair. I land closer to the critics, because the things this film does superbly are the things I most enjoy, and the thing it fumbles, a slightly over-engineered plot, is one I can forgive when the surface is this good.
## Verdict
Judge it as the espionage drama it half wants to be and it comes up short; the plotting is too pleased with its own reversals. Judge it as a stylish, ferociously well-staged action thriller with espionage trimmings and a once-in-a-decade fight scene, and it is one of the most purely enjoyable films of the year. The atmosphere, the soundtrack and Theron's control of the whole thing make it eminently rewatchable, and that stairwell alone is worth the ticket. The story does not survive close inspection, but the craft does, repeatedly. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. One for the biggest screen and the loudest sound system you can find.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Leitch went on to direct *Deadpool 2* and *Bullet Train*, confirming him as one of the most reliable action stylists working, though a true *Atomic Blonde* sequel never materialised despite Theron's interest. The film has settled into a cult standing built largely on the stairwell sequence, regularly cited among the best action set pieces of its era. It is now widely available on disc and digital and rotates through streaming services, including Netflix in some regions.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, very strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of strong violence. These include people being shot, resulting in large spurts of blood into the air or onto walls. People are also stabbed with ice picks and keys. There are extended sequences of hand-to-hand combat featuring heavy punches and kicks delivered to faces and bodies, leaving people heavily bloodied in the aftermath.
**Language:** There is infrequent very strong language ('c\*\*t'). Strong language ('c\*\*ksucker' and 'f\*\*k') is frequent. Other bad language includes 'prick', 'buggered', 'bastard', 'balls', 'bollocks', 'crap', 'arse' and 'God'.
**Additional issues:** Other issues include female breast nudity - both natural, during bathing, and in a sexual context as two women make love. There are also verbal sex references including comments about whiskey being from the 'tit' of the Virgin Mary and how a man's 'balls' are impressive.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/atomic-blonde-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00oduynde)).*
================================================================================
## Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-valerian-and-the-city-of-a-thousand-planets
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-valerian-and-the-city-of-a-thousand-planets.md
- published: 2017-08-09
- document_id: 1232
> Luc Besson finally films the comic that gave us The Fifth Element, and pours every euro on the screen. The design is dazzling, the leads are not, and on sheer imagination it is worth more than its scores say. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** August 2017
- **Director:** Luc Besson · **Writer:** Luc Besson
- **Studio / distributor:** EuropaCorp; STXfilms; Fundamental Films
- **Genre:** Space opera / science fiction adventure · **Runtime:** 137 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Dane DeHaan (*Chronicle*) as Valerian; Cara Delevingne (*Paper Towns*) as Laureline; Clive Owen (*Children of Men*, *The International*) as Commander Arün Filitt; Rihanna (*Battleship*) as Bubble
- **IMDb:** 6.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 48% critics / 53% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Luc Besson has been waiting most of his life to make this film. He read *Valérian and Laureline*, the Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières comic, as a boy in the 1970s, and he has been borrowing from it ever since: a fair amount of *The Fifth Element*, his giddy 1997 space opera, started life in those panels. Now, with a reported budget north of two hundred million dollars and the heaviest digital toolkit money can rent, he has finally filmed the source itself. The result is the most expensive independent film ever made in Europe, and it shows in every frame. Whether the people walking around inside all that money are worth watching is the question the film keeps not quite answering.
## The setup
Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) are special operatives for the human government of the twenty-eighth century, a pair of space-and-time agents with a flirtatious working relationship and a knack for ending up where the trouble is. Their latest assignment takes them to Alpha, the City of a Thousand Planets, a station that began as a humble orbital outpost and grew over centuries into a drifting metropolis housing millions of beings from thousands of species. Something at the heart of Alpha is dying, a dead zone is spreading, and the agents are sent to protect their commander and find out why. What they uncover ties back to a peaceful world destroyed years earlier, and to a cover-up reaching higher than either of them expects.
## The cast
This is where the film wobbles. DeHaan, so unsettling in *Chronicle*, is asked to play a swaggering ladykiller and instead reads as a sulky teenager doing an impression of one; the cocksure narration the part needs never arrives in his voice. Delevingne fares better, and Laureline is plainly the sharper and more capable of the two, which the film knows even when it forgets to let her drive. The chemistry the romance depends on is thin, and you feel the absence of it whenever the plot pauses for banter. Clive Owen brings his usual granite authority to Commander Filitt and does the heavy lifting in the quieter scenes. The most alive thing in the picture is Rihanna's Bubble, a shape-shifting cabaret performer whose single extended set-piece has more personality than the leads manage between them across two hours.
## The craft
Set the people aside and the film is a marvel. Besson and his cinematographer Thierry Arbogast build an opening run on Alpha that ranks with anything in modern science fiction: a wordless montage of first contacts across the centuries, then a heist staged across two overlapping dimensions, where Valerian reaches through a wall in one world to grab an object in another. The creature and world design is overflowing, generous, sometimes overwhelming, the work of an imagination that simply refuses to stop inventing. Alexandre Desplat's score carries the wonder the script cannot, and the pacing, slack in the middle stretches, never lets the spectacle fully stall. It is a film you watch with your eyes wide and your brain only half engaged, which is both the pleasure and the problem.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Besson's own *The Fifth Element*, and *Valerian* is the more sophisticated film to look at and the lesser one to sit through, because Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich gave that earlier picture a centre this one lacks. It shares DNA with *Guardians of the Galaxy*, another raucous comic-book space opera, but without that film's gift for making you care about its misfits. And it stands as the answer to *John Carter*, the last lavishly mounted, fatally miscast space adventure to spend a fortune and find no audience. Where it comes closest to greatness is in the company of *Avatar*: both are world-builders first and storytellers second, both ask you to forgive a thin plot in exchange for somewhere new to stand.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are unconvinced, sitting at 48%, with audiences only a little warmer at 53%, and the complaint is consistent: gorgeous to behold, hollow at the heart, undone by two leads who never spark. That is a fair reading of the film's faults, and I will not pretend the casting works. But the critical scores undersell what is on the screen. A lot of competent, forgettable science fiction scores higher than this and leaves nothing behind; *Valerian* is a flawed film you actually remember, which to my mind is the rarer and more valuable thing.
## Verdict
I value world-building, design and the pleasure of a film that shows me something I have not seen, and on those counts *Valerian* delivers more than its reputation allows. The leads are a real problem, the middle sags, and the romance never catches light. None of that cancels out the opening twenty minutes, the dimension-crossing market, Bubble's turn, or the sheer density of invention in every alien corridor. It is a film I would happily put back on for the spectacle alone, knowing exactly where it falls short, and that rewatchability counts for a lot with me. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the largest 3D screen you can find, where the layered design lands hardest.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film's heavy losses effectively ended Luc Besson's EuropaCorp as the force it had been, and the planned trilogy never materialised, so this remains a standalone. Its reputation has softened into that of a glorious, expensive curio, the kind of ambitious flop that builds a quiet cult on home formats. It is now widely available on Blu-ray, 4K UHD and digital, and turns up on streaming services depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, sex references, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes include futuristic gunfights, dogfights in spacecraft, and occasional fistfights. In one scene, a woman punches a man repeatedly in the face.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of moderate bad language ('prick') and occasional use of mild bad language, including 'shit' and 'ass'.
**Sex:** A man is propositioned by various women as he walks through an alleyway. He also witnesses a woman performing an extended dance routine in a number of revealing and sexualised outfits.
**Additional issues:** There are occasional scenes of mild threat, such as characters held at gunpoint or being chased by alien creatures.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/valerian-and-the-city-of-a-thousand-planets-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00oduwnzm)).*
================================================================================
## War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-war-for-the-planet-of-the-apes
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-war-for-the-planet-of-the-apes.md
- published: 2017-07-23
- document_id: 1233
> Matt Reeves closes his ape trilogy with a sombre revenge-and-exodus film built around the best digital performance the blockbuster has produced. Heavy going in places, but it earns the weight. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2017
- **Director:** Matt Reeves · **Writers:** Mark Bomback, Matt Reeves
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Chernin Entertainment
- **Genre:** Science fiction war drama / franchise epic · **Runtime:** 140 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Andy Serkis (*The Lord of the Rings*, *King Kong*) as Caesar; Woody Harrelson (*Natural Born Killers*, *No Country for Old Men*) as the Colonel; Karin Konoval (*Rise of the Planet of the Apes*, *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*) as Maurice; Steve Zahn (*Out of Sight*) as Bad Ape
- **IMDb:** 7.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 94% critics / 84% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Two films ago, the idea of a *Planet of the Apes* prequel built around a motion-captured chimpanzee sounded like the kind of thing a studio greenlights when it has run out of other ideas. *Rise* turned out to be sharper than anyone expected, and *Dawn* was better still, a sober study of how a fragile peace breaks. So Matt Reeves arrives at the third film with something rare in a blockbuster trilogy: trust. The surprise of *War* is how little it behaves like the climax the title promises. The big set-piece battles are mostly behind us. What Reeves wants is something slower, sadder and more deliberate, and for the most part he gets it.
## The setup
Years into the war between apes and the human survivors of the Simian Flu, Caesar (Andy Serkis) wants only to lead his people somewhere safe and be left alone. A military faction led by a ruthless officer known as the Colonel (Woody Harrelson) will not allow it. When the war reaches Caesar personally, in the worst way it could, the leader who has spent two films resisting his own worst instincts sets off after the man responsible, and the film turns from a war story into a tighter, colder one about grief and the cost of revenge.
That journey takes Caesar and a small band of companions across a frozen landscape towards the Colonel's mountain stronghold, where the human war effort has curdled into something uglier than survival. To say much more is to spoil the back half, but the shape of the thing should be clear: this is an exodus film with a wronged leader at its centre, more *Apocalypse Now* and *The Great Escape* than monkeys-with-machine-guns.
## The cast
Andy Serkis has been carrying these films through performance capture since *Rise*, and *War* is where the gamble pays off completely. Caesar barely speaks, mostly signs, and yet there is a whole interior life on that digital face: weariness, rage held on a leash, the moment the leash slips. It is a real lead performance, and the technology has finally caught up enough to disappear behind it. If a digital character can hold a film of this weight on grief alone, the argument about whether this counts as acting is settled.
Woody Harrelson gives the Colonel a clipped, shaven-headed menace that nods openly at Brando in *Apocalypse Now*, a true believer who has talked himself into atrocity. It is a big performance that mostly stays the right side of pantomime. Around them, Karin Konoval's orangutan Maurice is the soul of the ape community, gentle and grave, while Steve Zahn's Bad Ape, a twitchy zoo escapee, supplies the only real comic relief and lands more of it than you would expect. The mute human girl the apes take in gives the bleakness somewhere soft to rest.
## The craft
Reeves directs this with the confidence of a man who knows exactly how serious he is allowed to be. Michael Seresin's photography turns snow and forest and fortress into something close to a Western, all clean horizons and small figures against vast cold. Michael Giacchino's score is mournful and restrained, leaning on the action far less than the trilogy's reputation might suggest. And the visual effects work from Weta is the best the series has produced: fur, breath in cold air, the play of feeling across an ape's eyes, all of it photoreal enough that you stop clocking it as effects and simply watch the characters. The pacing is deliberate, sometimes very deliberate, and the middle section in the prison camp tests your patience before it pays off. This is a 140-minute film that feels every minute of its length, by design rather than by accident.
## How it stacks up
Against its own trilogy, *War* is the most ambitious and the least fun. *Dawn* had a propulsive tragedy to it, a peace you could feel slipping; *War* trades momentum for mood, and asks more of the viewer in return. The franchise reference points it reaches for are bold: the camp sequences borrow from prison-break and prisoner-of-war cinema, the Colonel's compound from *Apocalypse Now*, the larger arc from biblical exodus, with Caesar as a Moses who will glimpse the promised land more than he will walk in it. That it carries those comparisons without collapsing under them is the measure of how far this odd little series has come.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to rapturous, sitting around 94%, praising Serkis, Reeves's seriousness, and the effects work, several of them calling it the best of the three. Audiences are warmer than for most blockbusters but a notch cooler at 84%, and the gap tells you something true. This is a summer tentpole that does not especially want to entertain you in the summer-tentpole way. The marketing sells a war; the film delivers a wake. Some of that audience went in for spectacle and came out having sat through a two-hour meditation on grief and atonement, and not everyone signed up for that. I am closer to the critics here, with one reservation that keeps me off the top mark.
## Verdict
This is a genuinely impressive piece of work: the rare blockbuster trilogy that ends on its most serious and most accomplished note, anchored by a digital performance that quietly rewrites what the technology can do. The craft is faultless and the ambition is real. What holds my number at eight rather than nine is rewatchability. *War* is admirable, often moving, and heavy enough that I am in no hurry to live through it again, where I would happily revisit *Dawn* tomorrow. Judged as the sombre finale it sets out to be, it succeeds almost completely, and it has earned the seriousness it asks for. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and IMAX. The biggest screen you can find does the snowbound vistas and the close work on Caesar's face justice.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: this proved the closing chapter of Reeves's reboot trilogy, and the franchise eventually returned without him in a later, separate continuation set generations on. Caesar's arc has settled into its reputation as the high point of modern blockbuster performance capture, and Serkis's work here is routinely cited as the case study. The film is widely available on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+ depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are scenes of moderate violence in which evolved apes fight against humans and other apes, inflicting injuries using various weapons including guns and crossbows. In one scene, an ape is whipped, sustaining bloody lacerations on his back.
**Injury detail:** An ape finds the bloody remains of his family after they have been the victims of a massacre. He later encounters the bodies of other apes that have been tortured.
**Threat and horror:** As well as the intensity of the action scenes, there are threatening scenes, including sight of apes being enslaved and threatened with torture and starvation.
**Language:** There is use of very mild bad language, including 'Jesus', 'God' and 'dammit'.
**Alcohol and smoking:** A character drinks from a flask and appears to be drunk.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/war-for-the-planet-of-the-apes-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00odq4njk)).*
================================================================================
## Spider-Man - Homecoming (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-spider-man-homecoming
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-spider-man-homecoming.md
- published: 2017-07-14
- document_id: 1158
> Marvel and Sony hand Spider-Man back to the kids, and the gamble pays off. A small, funny, high-school story that finally lets Peter Parker be sixteen. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2017
- **Director:** Jon Watts · **Writers:** Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jon Watts, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Marvel Studios; Sony Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero coming-of-age comedy / action adventure · **Runtime:** 133 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Holland (*The Impossible*, *Captain America: Civil War*) as Peter Parker; Michael Keaton (*Batman*, *Birdman*) as Adrian Toomes; Robert Downey Jr (*Iron Man*, *Sherlock Holmes*) as Tony Stark; Zendaya as Michelle
- **IMDb:** 7.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 92% critics / 87% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
This is the sixth Spider-Man film in fifteen years and the third actor to wear the suit, which ought to be a warning rather than an invitation. Sam Raimi told the whole origin twice over, and the two Andrew Garfield films that followed never found a reason to exist. What is different now is the deal behind the camera: Sony still owns the character, but Marvel Studios is steering, and Tom Holland has already had a trial run stealing scenes in *Captain America: Civil War*. The promise is that nobody is going to make us sit through a radioactive spider and a dead uncle a third time. Spider-Man simply turns up, fifteen and already in costume, and the film gets on with being about being fifteen.
## The setup
Peter Parker is back in Queens after his outing with the Avengers, vibrating with the need to prove he belongs in the big leagues. Tony Stark has fobbed him off with an upgraded suit and a polite instruction to stay friendly and neighbourhood-sized, which Peter ignores at every opportunity. While he chases credit, juggling homework, a crush and a best friend who has worked out his secret, a salvage contractor named Adrian Toomes has quietly built a black-market arms business out of scavenged alien technology, selling weapons that are far above any street criminal's pay grade. Peter blunders into the operation expecting a quick win and finds something with real teeth, run by a man who has no interest in taking over the world and every interest in feeding his crew.
## The cast
Holland is the best screen Peter Parker so far, and the reason is that he plays the schoolboy first and the superhero second. There is a genuine, unforced eagerness to him, a kid who cannot stop talking inside the mask, and the film lets him be small, clumsy and out of his depth without ever sneering at him. Michael Keaton's Toomes is the smartest piece of casting. Keaton underplays it, a working man with a grievance against the rich who clean up after disasters, and one mid-film scene of his lands harder than any of the action because it is built on quiet menace rather than power. Robert Downey Jr drops in as Stark exactly as often as he should and no more, mentor and absent father by turns. Around them the high-school ensemble does real work: Jacob Batalon as the delighted best friend, and Zendaya's deadpan Michelle stealing the corners of scenes.
## The craft
Jon Watts came from the lean little thriller *Cop Car*, and he brings a useful smallness with him. The set pieces are built around a Spider-Man who is still learning the job: a sequence at the Washington Monument, a ferry torn in half, and a brilliantly tense suburban moment that turns on a doorbell. The web-swinging is deliberately scaled down, because Queens has no skyscrapers to swing from, and the film makes a virtue of a hero stumbling across back gardens. Michael Giacchino's score keeps things light, and the John Hughes influence is worn openly, all hallways and house parties and the agony of a school crush. It is funny in a way the genre rarely manages, the jokes coming from character rather than quips bolted on in the edit.
## How it stacks up
The obvious measuring stick is Raimi's *Spider-Man 2*, still the high-water mark for the character, and *Homecoming* is wise enough not to compete on operatic tragedy. It reaches instead for *Ferris Bueller's Day Off* and the other Hughes teen comedies, and for the grounded, single-villain shape of *Iron Man* and *Ant-Man*. By skipping the origin entirely it sidesteps the fatigue that sank *The Amazing Spider-Man*, and by keeping the stakes local it avoids the city-levelling bloat that the genre keeps mistaking for excitement. This is a smaller film than its budget, and it is better for it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it warmly, sitting around 92%, with the praise landing on Holland, Keaton and the high-school texture, and a general sense of relief that the character has been rescued. Audiences are a little cooler at 87%, and the grumble there is fair enough: the third act tips into the standard digital-smash climax, and a couple of the supporting villains are pure set-up for later. Neither dents the film much. The disagreement is really about expectations. If you want grand tragedy, this is not that. If you want Spider-Man to feel like a teenager again, it delivers completely.
## Verdict
I came in wary of a sixth attempt at this character and came out grinning. What wins me over is the rewatchability: the jokes hold up, the doorbell scene is a small classic, and Keaton gives the film a villain worth taking seriously. It is not flawless, the final reel leans on noise and the wider universe occasionally tugs at the edges, but the core of it, a clever, funny, generous teen comedy that happens to wear a Spider-Man suit, is the most purely enjoyable thing the franchise has produced since Raimi's second. It is the rare reboot that justifies itself. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, in 2D and 3D and on IMAX screens. Worth catching with a crowd while it is on the big screen.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Holland's Peter Parker went on to anchor two further solo films, *Far From Home* (2019) and *No Way Home* (2021), the last of which pulled the earlier screen Spider-Men back into the story and became one of the biggest hits of its year. *Homecoming* has settled in as the film that proved the Marvel and Sony arrangement could work, and as the start of a trilogy that mostly kept its promise. It is now widely available on disc and digital and streams on Disney+ in most regions.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate fantasy violence, threat, sex references, obscured strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are several fight scenes featuring crunchy blows, with people slammed into cars or walls, or blasted with energy guns. A superpowered character is struck with a bus but is not seriously hurt. There is barely any injury detail beyond a few small cuts and bruises on a superhero's face.
**Threat:** A group of teenagers is trapped in a lift at the top of a crumbling building; the lift falls but the teens are saved. In another scene Spider-Man struggles to prevent a passenger ferry from sinking after it is cut in two, with people screaming but no one hurt.
**Language:** There are bleeped-out words implied to be bad language, with milder terms including 'bastard', 'asshole', 'shit', 'bullshit', 'frigging', 'ass', 'crap' and 'ballsy'. There is also infrequent use of the rude 'middle finger' gesture.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/spider-man-homecoming-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtotk3ntex)).*
================================================================================
## Baby Driver (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-baby-driver
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-baby-driver.md
- published: 2017-07-13
- document_id: 1043
> Edgar Wright finally makes his car film, and he cuts the whole thing to the beat. A heist movie that runs on its soundtrack, fast, funny and built to rewatch. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** June 2017
- **Director:** Edgar Wright · **Writer:** Edgar Wright
- **Studio / distributor:** TriStar Pictures; Working Title Films; Big Talk Productions
- **Genre:** Crime action thriller / music-driven heist film · **Runtime:** 113 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Ansel Elgort (*The Fault in Our Stars*) as Baby; Lily James (*Cinderella*) as Debora; Kevin Spacey (*The Usual Suspects*, *American Beauty*) as Doc; Jamie Foxx (*Ray*, *Collateral*) as Bats
- **IMDb:** 7.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 92% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Edgar Wright has spent his whole career editing to music. The Cornetto trilogy, *Scott Pilgrim*, even the adverts, all of them cut on the downbeat, jokes landing on a snare hit. *Baby Driver* takes that instinct and builds an entire film around it: a heist picture where the getaways, the gunfights and the walk to the coffee shop are all timed to the songs playing in the lead character's ears. It is the kind of conceit that could collapse into a feature-length music video. It does not, because Wright has also written a proper crime film underneath the choreography, and he means every gear change.
## The setup
Baby (Ansel Elgort) is a young getaway driver with a permanent ringing in his ears, a souvenir of a childhood accident, which he drowns out with a rotating stack of iPods and an encyclopaedic record collection. He drives for Doc (Kevin Spacey), an Atlanta crime boss who plans bank jobs with the precision of a man who never touches the money himself. Baby is working off a debt, and he is nearly clear of it when he meets Debora (Lily James), a diner waitress with the same dream of a car, a road and no particular destination. Naturally the job is not finished with him. One more crew, one more score, and the people Doc puts in the car this time, Bats (Jamie Foxx) chief among them, are not the sort who let a driver quietly retire.
## The cast
Elgort has the harder job than it looks: Baby barely speaks for long stretches, and the performance lives in his face, his timing and the small private pleasure he takes in the music. He makes the stillness watchable. Lily James gives Debora more spine than the love-interest slot usually allows, and the early diner scenes have a genuine lightness to them. The crews are where the film gets its menace. Spacey plays Doc as a man whose calm is the most threatening thing in the room, and Jamie Foxx is the live wire the whole film needs, a robber who treats unpredictability as a personality. Jon Hamm and Eiza Gonzalez round out the heist crew as a couple whose chemistry curdles by the reel. Everyone understands they are in a heightened world, and nobody overplays it.
## The craft
This is the work of someone who has wanted to make a car film for twenty years and finally got the keys. The opening chase, scored to a single song from first beat to last, is a statement of intent: real cars, real streets, editing locked to the music so tightly that wipers, gunshots and gear shifts all fall on the count. Bill Pope's photography keeps the action legible, which after a decade of incoherent shaky-cam feels almost radical. The soundtrack is not decoration, it is the engine, and Wright reportedly built the action around the tracks rather than dropping needle-drops over finished scenes. The result has a propulsion that most action films would kill for, and a wit in the cutting that is unmistakably his.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is Walter Hill's *The Driver*, the lean 1978 thriller about a getaway man with no name, and Wright wears the debt openly, down to the title card. There is *Drive* in the iconography, the jacket, the quiet wheelman, the romance with a kind woman, though Wright's film is sunnier and far more playful than that one's neon fatalism. *Heat* hangs over every robbery that goes wrong. What separates *Baby Driver* from any of them is the musical chassis: this is closer to a jukebox musical than to a straight crime film, a *La La Land* with handguns, and it commits to that fusion completely rather than treating the songs as background.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it warmly, sitting around 92%, with most of the praise going to the editing, the soundtrack integration and the sheer formal control. Audiences are a touch cooler at 86%, and where there is grumbling it tends to land on the romance, which is sweet but slight, and on a third act that swaps some of the early invention for a more conventional run of shoot-outs and chases. Both fair. Neither dented my enjoyment much. The gap between the clever concept and the slightly familiar plot is real, but the concept is good enough to carry it.
## Verdict
I came in sceptical that the gimmick could last two hours, and it does, mostly because Wright never lets it become only a gimmick. The film is fast, funny, beautifully cut and built to rewatch, which is the quality I value most highly and the one this delivers in spades: you will want to run that opening chase again the moment it ends. It is not the deepest thing Wright has made, and the love story is thinner than the driving, but as a piece of pure craft and momentum it is a joy. The kind of film you put on to show someone what editing can do. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on general release from 28 June. Worth a big screen and a loud sound system, because half the point is hearing it properly.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film became Edgar Wright's biggest box-office success and earned three Oscar nominations, all in editing and sound, exactly the crafts it was showing off. Its reputation as a modern action-musical has only firmed up since. It is now widely available on disc and digital and streams across the usual platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are intense shoot-outs, occasionally showing blood spurts when people are shot. A person is impaled on a metal pole.
**Language:** There is strong language ('f\*\*k' and 'motherf\*\*ker'). Milder terms include 'bitch', 'whore', 'pussy' and 'shit'.
**Additional issues:** There is use of the term 'retarded'. There are moderate verbal sex references.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/baby-driver-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotaxmzc)).*
================================================================================
## The Mummy (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-mummy
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-mummy.md
- published: 2017-06-11
- document_id: 1207
> Universal launches a shared monster universe and a Tom Cruise action vehicle in the same film, and the two never quite agree on what they are. A misfire with isolated pleasures. 6/10.
- **UK release:** June 2017
- **Director:** Alex Kurtzman · **Writers:** David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, Dylan Kussman
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; Dark Universe
- **Genre:** Fantasy action adventure / monster reboot · **Runtime:** 110 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Tom Cruise (*Mission: Impossible*, *Top Gun*) as Nick Morton; Sofia Boutella (*Kingsman: The Secret Service*, *Star Trek Beyond*) as Princess Ahmanet; Annabelle Wallis (*Peaky Blinders*) as Jenny Halsey; Russell Crowe (*Gladiator*, *A Beautiful Mind*) as Dr Henry Jekyll
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 16% critics / 35% audience · **My rating:** 6 / 10
Universal owns the oldest monsters in cinema, the Dracula and Frankenstein and Mummy pictures that built the studio in the 1930s, and it has watched Marvel turn a shelf of comic characters into the most profitable machine in Hollywood. So here is the plan, announced before a frame has been shot: a Dark Universe, a connected web of films in which those creatures share a world the way the Avengers do. *The Mummy* is the launch title, and it is asked to do two jobs at once. It has to be a Tom Cruise action picture that stands on its own, and it has to be the foundation stone of a franchise that does not exist yet. The strain of carrying both is visible from the opening reel.
## The setup
Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) is a soldier and part-time looter working the edges of a war zone, the sort of likeable rogue who insists he is a liberator of antiquities rather than a thief. A misjudged firefight uncovers a buried Egyptian tomb, and the archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) recognises it for what it is: not a tomb meant to keep someone in, but a prison meant to keep something out. Inside is Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), a princess who was promised a throne, had it taken from her, and made a bargain with a god of death to get it back. Nick disturbs her rest, and she wakes with a claim on him. From there he is pulled towards a secret organisation that has been quietly cataloguing monsters, and towards a curse he keeps trying to outrun. I will leave the shape of that organisation and what it wants with him spoiler-light.
## The cast
Cruise does the thing he is reliably good at, which is run, fall, drive and react to enormous events with the bafflement of a man who genuinely cannot believe his luck has turned. There is a rooted set-piece early on, a cargo plane in trouble, where his commitment to doing it for real gives the film a jolt of the old physical conviction. The trouble is the part. Nick is written as a self-interested chancer who must learn to care, and the film keeps flinching from letting him be properly unpleasant, so the arc never lands. Sofia Boutella is the most interesting presence on screen, all coiled physicality and genuine menace, and she deserves a film built around her rather than a launch event built around the brand. Annabelle Wallis is handed the exposition and little else. Russell Crowe turns up as Dr Henry Jekyll, running the monster-cataloguing outfit, and spends his scenes selling a mythology the film has not earned the right to set up, a trailer for other films pretending to be a character.
## The craft
Alex Kurtzman comes from the writing and producing side, and the film has the slightly anonymous gloss of something assembled by committee. Ben Seresin's photography is handsome enough, the desert and the drowned London underworld both look the part, and Brian Tyler's score does its work without leaving a mark. The action is competent and occasionally better than that, but the tone never settles. The film wants to be a horror picture, a globe-trotting adventure, a buddy comedy and a universe-building prologue, and it switches between them so often that none of them gathers any weight. The genuine scares are undercut by quips, the comedy is undercut by lore, and the adventure keeps stopping so someone can explain the wider plan. A monster movie should know whether it wants to frighten you or thrill you. This one keeps asking.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Stephen Sommers' *The Mummy* from 1999, which knew exactly what it was: a swaggering Saturday-matinee adventure with Brendan Fraser grinning through the danger and no interest at all in a shared universe. It was lighter, surer and a great deal more fun. The newer film is closer in spirit to *Van Helsing* and *Dracula Untold*, earlier attempts to drag these old monsters into a modern blockbuster register, and it shares their problem of seriousness without substance. The other shadow over it is Cruise's own *Mission: Impossible* run, where the stunt work serves a story that actually moves. Here the spectacle is in service of a sales pitch, and you feel the difference.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been brutal, with the Rotten Tomatoes score sitting at a punishing 16%, and audiences are warmer but still unconvinced at 35%. The recurring charge is the right one: the film is so busy founding a franchise that it forgets to be a film, and the horror and the adventure both suffer for it. That is fair. Where I part company is on the severity. A 16% reads as a disaster, and this is not a disaster. It is a misfire with real pleasures in it, a strong central monster, a couple of properly mounted set-pieces and a star still willing to throw himself down a flooded tunnel for your entertainment. That is not nothing.
## Verdict
This is the kind of film that is more interesting to diagnose than to watch, but it is not the catastrophe its reception suggests. When it lets Cruise run and lets Boutella stalk, it works. When it stops to lay franchise pipe, it dies on its feet. There is a decent adventure trapped inside the corporate machinery, and the maddening thing is how often you can see it. I would not rush back to it, but I was never bored, and the good twenty minutes are good enough to remember. Frank verdict: a handsome, confused, over-engineered blockbuster that is better than 16% and nowhere near as good as it needed to be. **6/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and 3D.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the Dark Universe this film was built to launch never arrived. The planned slate, an Invisible Man, a Bride of Frankenstein, a Wolf Man and the rest, was quietly shelved after *The Mummy* underperformed, and Universal later pivoted to standalone monster pictures instead, beginning with a low-budget *The Invisible Man* (2020) that found the focus this film lacked. *The Mummy* is now best remembered as the franchise that died on the launch pad. It streams on the usual digital platforms depending on region, and turns up on disc in 4K.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *sustained threat, horror, brief strong violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Blood spurts onto a woman's face when it is implied she is killing people. There are some fight scenes featuring hand-to-hand combat. Stronger moments include a shooting and a stabbing. A man is kicked in the face, causing a blood spurt, and a man digs his fingers into another man's rib cage.
**Threat and horror:** An Egyptian mummy comes to life and attacks humans by sucking the life out of them and turning them into zombies. People are chased by the undead and try to fight them off. There are a few jump moments.
**Language:** There is infrequent moderate bad language ('wanker') as well as milder bad language including uses of 'son-of-a-bitch' and 'bloody'.
**Sex:** There are some mild sex references when two people have a conversation about spending a night together and one of them refers to 'a very long and satisfying evening'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-mummy-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotq5nji)).*
================================================================================
## Ghost in the Shell (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-ghost-in-the-shell
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-ghost-in-the-shell.md
- published: 2017-04-05
- document_id: 1084
> Rupert Sanders turns a landmark of Japanese animation into a glossy live-action thriller. The world is gorgeous, the ideas are thinner than the source, and on rewatch value alone it still earns its keep. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** March 2017
- **Director:** Rupert Sanders · **Writers:** Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, Ehren Kruger
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; DreamWorks Pictures; Reliance Entertainment
- **Genre:** Cyberpunk science-fiction thriller · **Runtime:** 107 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Scarlett Johansson (*Lost in Translation*, *Under the Skin*) as Major; Pilou Asbæk (*A War*) as Batou; Takeshi Kitano (*Battle Royale*, *Zatoichi*) as Chief Aramaki; Juliette Binoche (*The English Patient*, *Three Colours: Blue*) as Dr Ouelet
- **IMDb:** 6.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 43% critics / 51% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Mamoru Oshii's 1995 anime is one of those films the genre keeps circling back to: rain-slicked, philosophical, and so visually influential that *The Matrix* lifted whole shots from it four years later. Adapting it in live action was always going to be a fight, partly because the cartoon already looks like nothing else, and partly because its real subject, what is left of a person once the body has been swapped out for hardware, is the kind of thing that plays better in voice-over and stillness than in a 107-minute studio thriller. Rupert Sanders, whose only previous feature is *Snow White and the Huntsman*, has made a film that gets the look almost perfectly right and the soul about half right, and that ratio is roughly where I land on it.
## The setup
The Major (Scarlett Johansson) is the prototype: a human brain, or what is left of one, housed in a fully synthetic body built by the Hanka Corporation and put to work for Section 9, the counter-terrorism unit run by Chief Aramaki (Takeshi Kitano). When a hacker calling himself Kuze starts dismantling Hanka's people from the inside, reaching into their cybernetic minds and rewriting what they remember, the Major is sent after him. What she finds, as the hunt closes in, is that the glitches surfacing in her own memory are not malfunctions, and that the company that made her has been a good deal less honest about where she came from than her handlers let on.
The film keeps its central mystery spoiler-friendly for a long stretch, building the identity question into the investigation rather than holding it back for a twist, which is the right call for a story that is really about a person trying to work out whether she is one.
## The cast
Johansson is well cast in a way the off-screen controversy tended to drown out. She has spent the last few years playing variations on the not-quite-human, the synthetic voice in *Her* and the predatory blank in *Under the Skin*, and she brings that same watchful flatness here, a body that moves with total certainty and a face that keeps coming up short of a feeling. It is a controlled, slightly eerie performance, and it carries the film.
Around her the support is stronger than the material deserves. Pilou Asbæk gives Batou a gruff, loyal warmth that grounds the partnership, and he survives the role's signature moment, the cybernetic eyes, without tipping into cosplay. Takeshi Kitano, allowed to play Aramaki entirely in Japanese while everyone answers him in English, is quietly the most authoritative presence on screen, a stillness the film badly needs. Juliette Binoche brings real ambiguity to Dr Ouelet, the scientist who built the Major and cannot decide whether she is a creator or a mother. The thin part is the villain: Kuze has a strong idea behind him and not quite enough screen time to land it.
## The craft
This is where the money shows. Jess Hall's cinematography and the production design conjure a future city of vast holographic figures wading between the towers, neon bleeding into permanent rain, geisha-bots with faces that split open like flowers. Several frames are direct, loving restagings of the anime, and they are gorgeous on a big screen. Clint Mansell and Lorne Balfe's score does a lot of the atmospheric lifting, all low synth pulse and dread, very much in the lineage Vangelis set down for *Blade Runner*.
The trouble is pace and weight. Oshii let his city breathe; there is a famous wordless montage in the original that just watches the rain and lets you think. Sanders, working to a studio runtime, keeps cutting back to plot, and the action beats, competent as they are, are the least interesting thing on offer. The film is at its best when it slows down and lets you look. It is at its weakest when it remembers it is supposed to be a thriller.
## How it stacks up
The obvious yardstick is the 1995 film, and by that measure this is the lesser work: prettier in places, far shallower in its handling of consciousness, identity and what a soul might be once it is running on someone else's servers. Set against the wider field it does better. It sits comfortably alongside *Blade Runner* and *Minority Report* as future-city world-building, and is smarter and more atmospheric than most cyberpunk that reaches multiplexes. Where the *Robocop* remake of a few years back stripped its source of everything interesting, this keeps the questions in view, even if it answers them too quickly. It is a beautiful film with a borrowed brain, and unlike a lot of remakes it seems to know it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reviews are rough. Critics are sitting around 43%, with the recurring complaints being the flattened philosophy and the casting row over a white lead in a Japanese property, and audiences are only a little warmer at 51%. Both objections have weight. The film genuinely does take one of science fiction's richest ideas and sand it down to a clean studio arc, and the casting question is a fair one the film handles clumsily rather than ducking entirely.
My own number sits above both, and the reason is taste. I value world-building, atmosphere, intelligent science fiction and the kind of film you put back on for the look of it, and on those axes this delivers more than its scores suggest. It is not the equal of what it is remaking. It is a better night at the cinema than a 43% implies.
## Verdict
Judged as the adaptation of a masterpiece, it falls short, and honest reviewing has to say so. Judged as a glossy, atmospheric, genuinely good-looking piece of cyberpunk, it works. The Major is well played, the city is a place I want to spend time in, the score lingers, and the central question stays alive even when the script is in too much of a hurry to sit with it. It is the rare blockbuster remake that is worth rewatching for craft alone, and rewatchability counts for a lot with me. A more patient cut, with twenty more minutes of rain and silence, might have been something special. As it stands it is a handsome near-miss I will happily put on again. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and 3D, and worth the larger screen for the city alone.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film underperformed badly enough at the box office to end any talk of a franchise, and its reputation has settled roughly where the contemporary reviews left it, admired for its look, faulted for its caution, and overshadowed by both the 1995 anime and the *Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045* series that followed on streaming. The casting debate has, if anything, hardened against it. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and turns up on the major rental platforms; check your region for a streaming home, as it has moved around.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The full per-category Content Advice could not be retrieved from the BBFC release page at the time of writing; the page for the 2017 live-action film was not reachable, and the publicly indexed BBFC entry under this title is the 1995 animated version. The age rating above (12A) is confirmed from the UK theatrical certificate. The detailed Violence / Threat / Language breakdown will be filled in verbatim once the correct BBFC release page is available.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/)).*
================================================================================
## Life (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-life
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-life.md
- published: 2017-04-04
- document_id: 1111
> A six-handed space-survival thriller that wears its Alien debt openly and plays it with real craft. Less distinctive than the films it borrows from, but tense, handsome and properly nasty. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** March 2017
- **Director:** Daniel Espinosa · **Writers:** Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Skydance Media; Phantom Four; LStar Capital
- **Genre:** Science fiction horror / space-survival thriller · **Runtime:** 104 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Jake Gyllenhaal (*Nightcrawler*, *Source Code*) as Dr David Jordan; Rebecca Ferguson (*Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation*) as Dr Miranda North; Ryan Reynolds (*Buried*, *Deadpool*) as Rory Adams; Hiroyuki Sanada (*The Last Samurai*) as Sho Murakami
- **IMDb:** 6.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 67% critics / 54% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
There is a particular kind of space-horror film that knows exactly which shelf it has been pulled from and decides to be very good at the job anyway. *Life* is that film. It comes from Daniel Espinosa, who made the slick, paranoid *Safe House*, and from Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the writers of *Deadpool*, which is the last lineage you would guess from anything on screen. What they have built is lean, mean and openly indebted to a film from 1979 that everyone in the cinema will be thinking of within ten minutes. The interesting question is whether knowing that ruins it. It does not.
## The setup
A six-strong crew aboard the International Space Station intercepts a probe returning from Mars carrying soil samples, and in one of those samples a single dormant cell stirs back into life. It is the first confirmed proof that we are not alone, and for a giddy while the crew treat it as the discovery of the century: a small, translucent, beautiful thing that the watching world names Calvin. Then it grows, and it learns, and it works out that the warm bodies sharing its pressurised box are the most useful resource it has. What follows is a contained survival thriller played out across the station's modules, where every airlock and quarantine protocol that should keep the crew safe becomes one more thing the organism turns against them.
It is a clean, ruthless premise, and the film is honest enough not to pad it. There is no subplot down on Earth, no romance bolted to the side. Just six people, one organism, and a slowly shrinking amount of breathable air.
## The cast
The ensemble is the film's strongest asset, and it is cast with more weight than the material strictly needs. Jake Gyllenhaal, fresh from the live-wire intensity of *Nightcrawler*, plays the station's doctor as a man who has spent so long in orbit he would rather not go back down, and that quiet detachment gives the film its melancholy centre. Rebecca Ferguson, who stole *Rogue Nation* out from under a franchise, is the disease-control officer whose insistence on protocol reads at first as caution and later as the only clear thinking in the room. Ryan Reynolds supplies the wisecracks, and the script is canny about how it uses that easy charm. Hiroyuki Sanada gives the crew its emotional stakes as a new father watching events from the wrong side of the planet, and the underused Ariyon Bakare carries the film's worst luck as the biologist who reaches into the box first. Nobody is slumming; everybody plays it straight, and the threat lands harder because of it.
## The craft
Espinosa and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey shoot the station as one continuous, weightless space, and the long floating takes that drift from module to module are genuinely impressive, recalling the unbroken opening of *Gravity* without ever quite matching its grandeur. Zero gravity is used intelligently rather than decoratively: blood pools in spheres, the creature moves through the air in ways nothing on a planet could, and the absence of up and down keeps you faintly disoriented throughout. Jon Ekstrand's score does the patient, dread-building work, and the sound design makes a virtue of the station's hums and alarms. Calvin itself is a clever piece of creature design, a starfish-cum-octopus that is delicate one moment and horribly strong the next, and the film is restrained enough to keep it credible rather than turning it into a monster-movie mascot. The whole thing is handsome, controlled and properly tense.
## How it stacks up
The comparison the film cannot escape is *Alien*, and *Life* does not try. Crew picks up organism; organism picks off crew; protocol fails; the survivors improvise. Ridley Scott did it first and did it better, with a working-class crew and a sense of grubby industrial dread that this cleaner, more clinical film never reaches for. *Life* also borrows the claustrophobia of *Event Horizon* and the sun-blind awe of *Sunshine*, and it has none of the intelligence-of-the-universe ideas that made Danny Boyle's film linger. Where it earns its place is in execution and pace. It is tighter than *Event Horizon*, more coherent than *Sunshine*, and far less interested in jump-scares than the run of recent space-set thrillers. If *The Thing* is the gold standard for an organism that is smarter than the people trying to kill it, *Life* is at least playing the same game, even if it never quite reaches that level of paranoid invention.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have landed mixed-to-warm, around two-thirds positive, with the recurring note that the film is well made but unoriginal, a polished cover version of a song you already own. Audiences have been a touch cooler, which I suspect comes down to expectation: a poster fronted by Gyllenhaal, Ferguson and Reynolds promises a four-quadrant blockbuster, and what arrives is a tight, nasty, R-rated survival picture that is not especially interested in sending everyone home happy. I think the critics have it about right and the audience score undersells it. The lack of originality is real and the film never transcends its sources, but competence at this level is not nothing.
## Verdict
This is not the intelligent, idea-driven science fiction I love most, and it knows it is wearing another film's coat. What it offers instead is craft, tension and a cast taking thin material seriously, plus a creature that stays scary because the film refuses to overexpose it. It is gripping in the moment and holds together far better than most of its recent rivals, even if it is unlikely to be the one I reach for on a second viewing. Judged as what it sets out to be, a tight, well-built space-survival thriller, it clears the bar comfortably. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in standard and IMAX, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: a persistent fan theory tried to fold *Life* into the *Venom* universe, on the strength of its writers and a shared studio, which the makers have politely declined to confirm; treat it as internet folklore rather than canon. The film has settled into its reputation as a competent, slightly anonymous *Alien* riff that is better than its standing suggests, the sort of thing that plays very well when it turns up unannounced on a streaming service. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and rotates through the usual subscription platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong horror, gory images, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC release page for *Life* could not be retrieved at the time of writing (the bbfc.co.uk listing returned a server error), so the full category-by-category Content Advice is not reproduced here. The 15 certificate and the short consumer advice line above are confirmed from the BBFC classification record; per the Board's summary the film features an extraterrestrial organism that attaches itself to and pursues the crew, strong language and strong, gory horror.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/life-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtmta0nzcxmw)).*
================================================================================
## Logan (2017)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-logan
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-logan.md
- published: 2017-03-08
- document_id: 1113
> James Mangold sends Hugh Jackman's Wolverine off not with a team-up but with a battered, R-rated western, and it is the most adult and most moving thing the X-Men films have produced. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** March 2017
- **Director:** James Mangold · **Writers:** Scott Frank, James Mangold, Michael Green
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Marvel Entertainment; TSG Entertainment
- **Genre:** Superhero western / dystopian action drama · **Runtime:** 137 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Hugh Jackman (*X-Men*, *The Prestige*) as Logan / Wolverine; Patrick Stewart (*Star Trek: First Contact*, *X-Men*) as Charles Xavier; Dafne Keen as Laura / X-23; Boyd Holbrook (*Gone Girl*, *A Walk Among the Tombstones*) as Donald Pierce
- **IMDb:** 8.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 90% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Seventeen years after he first popped his claws in Bryan Singer's *X-Men*, Hugh Jackman has decided he is done with Wolverine, and James Mangold has built him a send-off that looks almost nothing like the films that came before. There have been nine of these now, of wildly variable quality, and the character has rarely been served by them; *X-Men Origins: Wolverine* in particular treated him as a franchise asset to be wheeled out and merchandised. *Logan* does the opposite. It strips the spandex, the team, the world-saving and most of the budget's worth of spectacle, and asks what is left of a man who heals from everything except age and grief. The answer turns out to be a western.
## The setup
It is 2029, and mutants have all but vanished. Logan is greying, limping and drinking, working as a limo driver on the Texas border and keeping a terrible secret across the line in Mexico: a ruined, dementia-stricken Charles Xavier, the most powerful brain on the planet and now a danger to everyone near him when it misfires. Logan is saving for a boat, a way to take the two of them out of reach of the world. Into this careful, failing arrangement walks a young girl, Laura, silent and feral and pursued by a cybernetic enforcer called Donald Pierce and the corporate outfit behind him. She is, it becomes clear, very like Logan, and getting her north and clear of her hunters becomes the last job he has left in him.
## The cast
Jackman has played this role longer than most actors hold any part, and the performance here is the payoff for all of it. The healing is slowing, the body is breaking, and he plays Logan as a man in constant, weary pain, which is something the earlier films never had room for. Patrick Stewart is the quiet devastation of the piece. His Xavier, once the franchise's serene moral centre, is now frightened, foul-mouthed and lucid only in flashes, and Stewart commits to that indignity completely. Between them they turn a superhero film into a study of two old men failing. Dafne Keen, barely a teenager, is the discovery; her Laura is mostly wordless, all coiled fury and watchfulness, and she holds the screen against both of them. Boyd Holbrook's Pierce is a smiling, drawling company man, the right kind of antagonist for a film this grounded.
## The craft
Mangold, who made the underrated *3:10 to Yuma* and *Walk the Line*, directs this as a road movie and a western before he directs it as a comic-book film, and the references are worn openly: there is a long stretch built around *Shane*, screened and quoted, that tells you exactly what kind of story this wants to be. The violence is the other departure. Freed by an R rating, the action is brutal and bloody in a way the 12A entries never were, claws going through skulls, and it lands with weight because the film makes you feel every wound. The Texas and prairie landscapes are shot wide and bleached, the score is sparse, and the pacing is patient where the genre usually sprints. It is a film confident enough to slow down, sit at a dinner table and let you dread what is coming.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparisons are not other superhero films at all. The clearest is *Unforgiven*, another story of an ageing killer dragged back to violence he thought he had left behind, and the elegiac tone is pure late-period western. There is *Children of Men* in the bleached, depopulated near-future and the structure of escorting a precious child through a dying world. Against the X-Men films, it is a rebuke: where *The Wolverine*, Mangold's own first go at the character, pulled its punches in the final act, this one keeps its nerve. Logan as a brawling franchise mascot is gone. What is left is closer to *Mad Max* with a soul, a chase across a wasted landscape with stakes that feel personal rather than apocalyptic.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have embraced it almost without reservation, sitting at 93%, with audiences close behind at 90%, and for once the consensus and the crowd agree on why: this is the rare superhero film that earns the word mature without using it as an excuse for grimness. The praise lands on Jackman, Stewart and Mangold's western framing, and it is deserved. My own reaction tracks the enthusiasm with one reservation, and it is about rewatchability. This is a heavy, sad, deliberately exhausting film, and films I love to return to tend to have more air in them. Brilliant is not always the same as something you reach for on a wet Sunday.
## Verdict
This is the best film the X-Men franchise has produced and one of the few superhero films that works fully as a drama with the costumes removed. The performances are excellent, the western bones are real rather than borrowed for flavour, and Mangold has the discipline to let a blockbuster be quiet and cruel and human. It loses a fraction with me only on the rewatch axis, because the bleakness that makes it powerful also makes it a film I admire more than I want to revisit. As a send-off for a character seventeen years in the making, it could hardly be bettered. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, certificate 15. Worth seeing on the big screen for the landscapes alone.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: a black-and-white cut, *Logan Noir*, followed into cinemas and onto disc, and it suits the film's western austerity even better than the colour version. Dafne Keen's Laura went on to anchor her own corner of the franchise, and the picture has settled firmly into its reputation as the high-water mark for the X-Men films and a touchstone for what a serious superhero film can be. It is now widely available on disc and digital and streams on Disney+ in most regions.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are scenes of strong bloody violence which include shootings and the use of a harpoon. Some of the violence features Wolverine and another mutant using blades that are part of their physiologies to slash and stab enemies. The sequences of violence are rapidly-edited, with a focus on action. The violence is frequently bloody and there is occasional sight of injury detail in its aftermath.
**Language:** There is strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker'), as well as milder terms including 'shit', 'bullshit', 'dick', 'dickhead', 'ass' and 'asshole'.
**Additional issues:** There is also brief female breast nudity.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/logan-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotuynzy)).*
================================================================================
## Passengers (2016)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-passengers
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-passengers.md
- published: 2016-12-22
- document_id: 1134
> A handsome space-ark romance with a moral fault line at its heart that the critics will not forgive. Beautifully built, genuinely uncomfortable, and far better than its scores suggest. 8/10.
- **UK release:** December 2016
- **Director:** Morten Tyldum · **Writer:** Jon Spaihts
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Village Roadshow Pictures; Original Film
- **Genre:** Science fiction romance / space survival drama · **Runtime:** 116 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Jennifer Lawrence (*Silver Linings Playbook*, *The Hunger Games*) as Aurora Lane; Chris Pratt (*Guardians of the Galaxy*, *Jurassic World*) as Jim Preston; Michael Sheen (*Frost/Nixon*, *The Queen*) as Arthur; Laurence Fishburne (*The Matrix*, *Apocalypse Now*) as Gus Mancuso
- **IMDb:** 7.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 31% critics / 63% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
There is a version of *Passengers* that the trailers are selling, and it is the wrong one. The marketing wants you to expect Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, two of the most bankable faces of the moment, falling in love among the stars. The film that Jon Spaihts actually wrote, and that Morten Tyldum has directed two years on from the prestige hush of *The Imitation Game*, is colder and more troubling than that, and the gap between the two is where most of the argument about this film is going to be fought.
## The setup
The starship Avalon is ninety years into a hundred-and-twenty-year crossing to a colony world, its five thousand passengers and crew asleep in hibernation pods. A fault wakes one of them, the engineer Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), three decades early. He has the run of a gleaming liner built for thousands and not one other living soul to share it with, save Arthur (Michael Sheen), an android bartender polished to a mirror finish and incapable of solving his problem. A year of that solitude does something to a man, and the decision Jim then makes about a sleeping writer named Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) is the act the whole film hangs on. I will not spell it out here, but it is not a small thing, and the film knows it.
## The cast
This is a near two-hander, and it leans hard on the two leads being watchable alone. Pratt, stripped of the wisecracking armour he wears in *Guardians of the Galaxy*, turns out to have a real well of loneliness to draw on, and the long opening stretch, just one man rattling around an empty ship, is more affecting than I expected from him. Lawrence does the harder job. Aurora has to be luminous enough to justify the premise and then sharp enough to carry the reckoning when it comes, and Lawrence finds both without ever tipping into the brittle. Michael Sheen has the trickiest part of all, an android required to be warm, funny and faintly unsettling at once, and he is quietly the best thing in the film, a bartender who listens with too much understanding. Laurence Fishburne arrives late to lend the third act some gravity and a dose of plot mechanics, and his presence steadies a film that needs steadying by then.
## The craft
Tyldum and his designers have built something genuinely lovely to sit inside. The Avalon is the most convincing piece of populated-future architecture I have seen in a while, all curved corridors, a grand atrium, a swimming pool that becomes a set piece when the artificial gravity falters, the whole thing modelled on the cruise liner rather than the battleship. Rodrigo Prieto shoots it with a clean, expensive sheen, and Thomas Newman's score does a lot of the emotional carrying. The space-walk sequences have a real sense of scale and vertigo, and the slow physical failure of the ship in the back half gives the survival strand a proper engine. It is a handsome, controlled piece of film-making, and it never once looks cheap.
## How it stacks up
The obvious shelf-mates are the recent run of grown-up space pictures: the lone-survivor ingenuity of *The Martian*, the doomed-mission intensity of *Sunshine*, the quiet melancholy of *Oblivion*, and further back the romance-in-the-machine tenderness that *WALL-E* found in a tidying robot. *Passengers* is reaching for the emotional register of those films while smuggling in a far thornier idea than any of them attempts. The closest comparison is actually the morally compromised love story, the kind where you are asked to want two people together while being shown exactly why you should not. That is rare in a film this expensive and this prettily packaged, and the friction between the gloss and the guilt is the most interesting thing it does.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critics are not having it. The Rotten Tomatoes figure sits down around 31%, and almost all of the disapproval lands on the central decision and on the way the third act, some feel, lets that decision off too lightly. The audience number is twice as high, just over 60%, and that split tells you most of what you need to know. The film has been read as endorsing something it actually spends most of its running time examining, and I think that reading does it a disservice. The screenplay does not pretend the act is fine. It lets it curdle, lets the consequences arrive, and asks the harder question of what you do once a thing cannot be undone. That is not the same as approving of it.
## Verdict
I came out of *Passengers* arguing with it, which is more than most of the season's releases have managed. It is beautifully built, the two leads are better than the premise had any right to expect, and the moral fault line at its centre is precisely what makes it stick rather than what sinks it. The film is not flawless. The final act softens where it might have pressed, and a closing run of incident does a little too much to buy back the audience's goodwill. But it is intelligent, atmospheric science fiction that trusts you with an uncomfortable idea and a ship I would happily spend two hours aboard again. The critics have marked it down for the thing I admire most about it. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, from 21 December, and worth the big screen for the scale of the Avalon and the space-walk sequences.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the central controversy has, if anything, hardened into the received view of the film, and it remains the first thing anyone says about it. It has settled as a divisive cult favourite rather than the date-night blockbuster it was sold as, helped along by a fan re-edit that reorders the story to begin from Aurora's perspective, which sharpens exactly the discomfort the marketing tried to hide. It is now widely available on disc and digital and turns up regularly on the streaming services.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, brief injury detail, sexual activity*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC classified *Passengers* (2016) **12A** with the short consumer advice *moderate threat, brief injury detail, sexual activity*. The full category-by-category Content Advice could not be retrieved from the BBFC release page at the time of writing, so only the published age rating and consumer advice line are reproduced here. In broad terms the rating reflects sequences of peril aboard the failing ship, brief sight of an injury, and discreet, non-explicit sexual activity between the two leads.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/)).*
================================================================================
## Rogue One - A Star Wars Story (2016)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-rogue-one-a-star-wars-story
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-rogue-one-a-star-wars-story.md
- published: 2016-12-21
- document_id: 1145
> The first Star Wars film with no Skywalker in it turns the saga's oldest plot hole into a grimy, doomed war film, and it is the best thing Lucasfilm has done since Disney bought the keys. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** December 2016
- **Director:** Gareth Edwards · **Writers:** Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy; story by John Knoll and Gary Whitta
- **Studio / distributor:** Lucasfilm; Walt Disney Studios
- **Genre:** Space opera / war film · **Runtime:** 133 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Felicity Jones (*The Theory of Everything*) as Jyn Erso; Diego Luna (*Y tu mamá también*) as Cassian Andor; Ben Mendelsohn (*Animal Kingdom*) as Orson Krennic; Donnie Yen (*Ip Man*, *Hero*) as Chirrut Îmwe
- **IMDb:** 7.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 84% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
A year on from *The Force Awakens*, which played the hits with great affection and not much risk, Lucasfilm has done the braver thing. *Rogue One* is the first live-action Star Wars film with no Skywalker, no opening crawl, and no real interest in the mysticism that drives the main saga. It exists to answer a question the films have left dangling since 1977: how, exactly, did the Rebel Alliance come to be holding the Death Star plans at the start of *A New Hope*, and why is there a fault in that battle station big enough to drop a torpedo down. The answer turns out to be a war film, and a grimmer one than the franchise has tried before.
## The setup
Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) has spent her life running from her name. Her father Galen is the reluctant architect of the Empire's planet-killing weapon, and when the Rebellion realises a defecting pilot is carrying a message about it, Jyn is pulled out of an Imperial labour camp and handed to intelligence officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) for a mission nobody expects to survive. What follows is a heist dressed as a war film: a scratch crew of rebels, defectors and zealots assembling to steal a set of technical plans before the Empire can erase the only evidence of its weakness. The stakes are spelled out plainly, and the film never pretends the cost will be small.
## The cast
Jones gives Jyn a wary, closed-off quality that takes its time to thaw, which is the right instinct for a character defined by abandonment, even if it leaves her a touch underwritten in the middle stretch. The real surprise is Diego Luna's Cassian, an intelligence officer who has done ugly things for the cause and carries them. He gives the Rebellion something the saga rarely allows it: moral compromise, the suggestion that the good guys have a body count of their own. Ben Mendelsohn's Orson Krennic is a fine study in middle-management ambition, a man who built the thing and resents everyone above him taking the credit. Around them, Donnie Yen's blind warrior-monk Chirrut Îmwe supplies grace and the closest thing to faith on offer, Jiang Wen brings dry menace as his heavily armed companion, and the reprogrammed Imperial droid K-2SO, voiced by Alan Tudyk, walks off with most of the laughs through sheer flat honesty.
## The craft
Gareth Edwards made his name on *Monsters* and *Godzilla* by shooting the colossal from ground level, and that instinct pays off here. He treats the Star Wars universe as a place soldiers actually live and die in: rain-soaked beaches, troops dug into sand, an AT-AT looming through tropical haze like a Vietnam-era gunship. The production design is lived-in and grimy in the way the original 1977 film was, full of scuffed metal and improvised kit, and the climactic ground-and-space battle is one of the most coherent action sequences the franchise has staged. Michael Giacchino's score, written quickly after a late change behind the camera, leans on John Williams without leaning too hard. There is a stretch in the middle where the geography of the plot gets choppy, the marks of a famously reworked production, but the final act pulls the whole thing taut.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *A New Hope*, which this film slots into so precisely that its last half hour plays as a direct prologue to that opening. But the truer ancestors are war pictures. This is *The Dirty Dozen* with blasters, a suicide squad assembled for a job too dirty for the regular army, and in its back half it reaches for the desperate, attritional feel of a beach assault out of *Saving Private Ryan*. Set against the main saga it is less mythic and more human, a film about the foot soldiers rather than the chosen ones, and it is the better for refusing the usual machinery of prophecy and destiny.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is warm and broadly agreed. Critics are sitting around 84%, audiences a little higher at 86%, and the praise lands on the war-film tone, the design and that final act. The standard reservation is that the character work is thinner than the spectacle, that the ensemble is assembled faster than it is developed, and there is something to that. A couple of the squad are types more than people. But the complaint underrates how much weight the film is carrying as a standalone, and how cleanly it makes you feel the price of a single line of the original film you have known for years.
## Verdict
This is a strong fit for what I look for. It is intelligent franchise film-making that respects its world, it is built on espionage and sacrifice rather than destiny, and the world-building is textured enough to reward a rewatch. The middle sags, one or two of the crew stay sketches, and Jyn could use another scene of her own. None of that outweighs a final hour that earns its grimness and recasts the saga's oldest plot point as the result of people dying in the dark to deliver it. It is the most confident thing Lucasfilm has made since the handover, and the rare prequel that makes the film it leads into feel better. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the largest screen you can find for the final act; a Blu-ray and digital release will follow in the spring.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Diego Luna's Cassian was spun off into *Andor* (2022), a slow, serious espionage series that retroactively makes his work here look like the tip of something much larger, and it has done a great deal to lift *Rogue One*'s standing. The film has settled in as the strongest of the Disney-era Star Wars pictures and the one most often cited when people argue the franchise works best away from the Skywalkers. It is now on disc and 4K, and streams on Disney+.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent gunfights, use of hand-held weapons, explosions and aerial dogfights between spaceships. Blood and injury detail is limited and brief.
**Threat and horror:** Occasional scenes of mild threat include an interrogation and gun threat.
**Injury detail:** Blood and injury detail is limited and brief.
**Theme:** A young girl witnesses her mother's murder.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/rogue-one-a-star-wars-story-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znzk5nzu)).*
================================================================================
## Arrival (2016)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-arrival
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-arrival.md
- published: 2016-11-20
- document_id: 1035
> Denis Villeneuve makes a first-contact film about grammar, grief and the shape of time, and Amy Adams carries every minute of it. Intelligent science fiction that earns its quiet. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** November 2016
- **Director:** Denis Villeneuve · **Writer:** Eric Heisserer (from the Ted Chiang story)
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Entertainment One (UK)
- **Genre:** Science fiction drama / first-contact mystery · **Runtime:** 116 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Amy Adams (*The Fighter*, *American Hustle*) as Louise Banks; Jeremy Renner (*The Hurt Locker*, *The Town*) as Ian Donnelly; Forest Whitaker (*The Last King of Scotland*) as Colonel Weber; Michael Stuhlbarg (*A Serious Man*) as Agent Halpern
- **IMDb:** 7.9 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 94% critics / 82% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Denis Villeneuve has spent the last few years making serious genre films that behave like dramas: a kidnapping thriller that turned into a moral test in *Prisoners*, a border procedural that curdled into dread in *Sicario*. *Arrival* is the moment he points all of that control at science fiction, and it is the genre that suits him best. Twelve alien craft appear over twelve places on Earth, hang in the air doing nothing, and the film that follows is not about the spaceships. It is about a linguist trying to ask them a question, and what the asking does to her.
## The setup
Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is a university linguistics professor, recruited by the US military after one of the ships settles over Montana. Nobody knows why the visitors are here, the world is sliding towards panic, and the only way to find out is to teach two species to talk to each other from scratch. Paired with theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) and managed by an impatient Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), Louise starts at the beginning: a single written word, held up against the glass. The further she gets into the visitors' language, the more her own sense of time begins to loosen, and the film threads that private unravelling through grief she seems already to be carrying. To say much more would spoil a structure that rewards going in cold.
## The cast
This is Amy Adams's film, and she holds it almost single-handed. Louise is the rare science fiction lead who solves things by thinking, listening and being patient, and Adams makes that watchable: tired, frightened, stubbornly curious, and quietly wrecked underneath. After *The Fighter* and *American Hustle* she has the range for it, and here she works mostly in stillness and reaction, which is harder. Jeremy Renner, who knows how to play a competent man under pressure from *The Hurt Locker*, is sensibly cast against type as the lighter of the two, the physicist who cracks jokes while Louise does the real work. Forest Whitaker gives Weber a weary decency rather than the usual military bark, and Michael Stuhlbarg's nervy CIA man supplies the institutional fear that keeps tightening the screws. The performances are calibrated low, which is exactly right for the tone.
## The craft
Villeneuve and his cinematographer Bradford Young shoot the whole thing in muted greys and greens, with the alien ship, a smooth black lozenge tipped on its end, looking less like a machine than a held breath. The visitors, when we meet them, are revealed slowly and through fog, and the restraint pays off; this is a first-contact film that understands awe is mostly about what you do not show. Jóhann Jóhannsson's score is the other half of the atmosphere, all low drones and human voices used as texture, unsettling and mournful at once. The visual design of the alien written language, circular smoke-rings of ink, is the cleverest single idea in the film, because it ties the look directly to the theme: a way of writing that has no beginning or end. The pacing is deliberate and a couple of viewers around me clearly wanted it faster. It does not need to be.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstones are *Contact* and *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*, and *Arrival* earns the company. Like *Contact* it takes a scientist-protagonist and a genuinely intellectual problem seriously, and like *Close Encounters* it treats first contact as wonder rather than invasion. Where it goes further than either is in making the actual mechanics of communication the drama: not a translation montage, but the slow, frustrating, exhilarating business of building shared meaning from nothing. Set it beside Villeneuve's own *Sicario* from the year before and you see the same director, the same patience and dread, pointed at hope instead of despair. It is closer in spirit to the cerebral end of *Interstellar* than to anything with a laser in it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting at 94%, praising the intelligence, Adams, and the way the film carries real emotion through a high-concept idea. Audiences are warm but more divided at 82%, and the gap is easy to explain: this is a slow, structurally tricky film that asks you to keep up and then asks you to feel something at the end, and not everyone wants that from a film about spaceships. Some of the audience cooling is people who came for an invasion and got a grammar lesson with a gut-punch. I am firmly on the critics' side here, with one reservation I will come to.
## Verdict
This is intelligent science fiction of the kind I will always make time for: a film that respects the audience, builds its world through ideas rather than spectacle, and trusts atmosphere over noise. Adams is superb, the look and sound are immaculate, and the central conceit is genuinely clever rather than merely complicated. My one hesitation is rewatchability. So much of the film's power lives in its structure that the second viewing is a different, cooler experience, more admiration than discovery, which keeps it a notch below the films I return to most. That single reservation is the only thing standing between it and a higher mark. Everything else about it is close to faultless. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth a proper screen and a quiet, attentive crowd.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Arrival* went on to a Best Picture nomination and a string of awards, and Villeneuve followed it straight into *Blade Runner 2049* (2017) and then *Dune* (2021), confirming the run of intelligent, controlled science fiction this film announced. Jóhann Jóhannsson, who scored it, died in 2018, which gives the music an extra weight on a rewatch. It has settled in as one of the most respected science fiction films of its decade and is now widely available on disc, digital and streaming depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Language:** Infrequent strong language ('f**k') as well as milder terms including 'bastard', 'screw' and 'oh my God'.
**Additional issues:** There are several sequences of mild threat in which people come into contact with the aliens and are scared of them, and scenes in the style of news footage showing people panicking and rioting around the world. There are also scenes showing a woman crying and visibly upset after the death of her young daughter.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/arrival-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mzi3nti)).*
================================================================================
## The Accountant (2016)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-accountant
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-accountant.md
- published: 2016-11-15
- document_id: 1170
> A forensic accountant who launders for cartels by day and trains for war by night. The critics cannot decide what film they are watching, and they are missing a tremendously rewatchable one. 9/10.
- **UK release:** November 2016
- **Director:** Gavin O'Connor · **Writer:** Bill Dubuque
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; RatPac-Dune Entertainment
- **Genre:** Action thriller / crime thriller · **Runtime:** 128 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Ben Affleck (*Argo*, *The Town*) as Christian Wolff; Anna Kendrick (*Up in the Air*, *Pitch Perfect*) as Dana Cummings; J. K. Simmons (*Whiplash*) as Ray King; Jon Bernthal (*Sicario*) as Brax
- **IMDb:** 7.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 52% critics / 76% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
Every few years a thriller arrives with a premise so unlikely on paper that you assume it cannot work, and *The Accountant* is this season's. The pitch sounds like a dare: a high-functioning autistic maths savant who unpicks the cooked books of the worst people on earth, and who, when the work turns physical, is also a precision killer. It should be ridiculous, or worse, tasteless. Gavin O'Connor, who made the underrated mixed-martial-arts drama *Warrior*, takes it entirely seriously, and the surprise of the film is how much weight that seriousness carries.
## The setup
Christian Wolff keeps a quiet strip-mall accountancy practice in a small Illinois town, the kind of unbranded business nobody looks at twice. That is the cover. His real clients are drug cartels, arms dealers and laundering operations who need a genius to find the money other people have hidden inside their own ledgers. When he takes a legitimate job auditing a robotics firm whose junior accountant, Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), has spotted a discrepancy in the founder's accounts, the contract that should have been a paid holiday from the underworld instead pulls a contract killer down on both of them. Running in parallel, a retiring Treasury analyst (J. K. Simmons) leans on a young agent to put a name to the phantom who keeps appearing at the edge of every crime he has ever chased.
## The cast
Affleck is the reason it holds. He plays Wolff with a flat, careful affect that never tips into a collection of tics or a Rain Man impression; the stillness is the performance, and the small cracks of dry humour that escape it are all the funnier for being rationed. After *Argo* and *The Town* he has the gravity for the action, and the discipline to underplay the rest. Kendrick is the warmth the film needs, quick and human against Wolff's blankness, and the two of them generate an odd, touching chemistry built entirely on his inability to do small talk. Simmons, fresh from *Whiplash*, brings a tired moral weight to the investigator's strand, and Jon Bernthal supplies the muscle and a personal thread that pays off late. It is a deeper bench than this kind of film usually bothers with.
## The craft
O'Connor shoots the action with a clarity that has become rare. The gunfights are geometric and legible, the hand-to-hand work has real impact and weight, and there is none of the strobing incoherence that passes for intensity elsewhere. He also trusts silence; long stretches play out in Wolff's ordered routines, the puzzles and the pencil-sharp focus, and the film treats his condition as the source of both his gift and his isolation rather than a gimmick to be cured. Mark Isham's score stays lean. The structure is the riskier choice, a screenplay that withholds and reorders and saves several connections for the back third, and whether that lands depends on your appetite for a thriller that wants to be a character study as well.
## How it stacks up
The obvious cousins are the lone-competent-man thrillers: *Jack Reacher*, with its drifter who is better at violence than everyone in the room, and the *Bourne* films, with their hyper-capable operative outpacing an institution. But the closer relative is *Michael Clayton*, because *The Accountant* is at heart a film about following money through people who would kill to keep it hidden, and it shares that film's interest in the quiet professional who knows too much. Where it parts company with all of them is the central character; none of those heroes is built the way Wolff is, and the film's willingness to make his difference the engine rather than a footnote is what sets it apart.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are split, and the split is instructive. The recurring complaint is tonal: that the film cannot decide whether it is a sober drama about autism, a procedural, or a John Wick-style action picture, and that the plot leans on one coincidence too many in the closing stretch. Sitting at 52%, the reviews read as a shrug. Audiences are notably warmer at 76%, and I am firmly with them. The objection mistakes range for indecision. The film is doing several things at once on purpose, and the pleasure is watching them converge.
## Verdict
I have come back to this one more often than its reviews would predict, and that is the test that matters most to me. It rewards rewatching: the structure that frustrated some critics is the part that improves once you know where it is going, and the central performance gets richer for knowing what it is protecting. It is intelligent, genuinely tense, frequently funny in its dry way, and built around a hero unlike anyone else in the genre. Not flawless, the final-act revelations ask for some goodwill, but it earns it. This is exactly the kind of clever, rewatchable thriller I will always defend. **9/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now from 4 November; on DVD and Blu-ray in the new year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film did strong enough business to earn a follow-up, with *The Accountant 2* (2025) reuniting Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal and leaning harder into the brothers' relationship the first film set up. The original has settled into a quiet cult favourite, exactly the rewatchable sleeper its box office suggested it would become. It is widely available on digital and disc, and streams on the major platforms depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are moments of strong violence including bloody shootings, scenes of crunchy hand to hand combat, and a man having a nail shot through his hand.
**Language:** There is frequent use of strong language such as 'f**k' and 'motherf**ker'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-accountant-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mzq0mta)).*
================================================================================
## Doctor Strange (2016)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-doctor-strange
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-doctor-strange.md
- published: 2016-11-09
- document_id: 1067
> Marvel hands its house origin formula to a horror director and a fistful of psychedelic mathematics, and Cumberbatch makes the arrogance sing. The plot is familiar, the imagery is not. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** October 2016
- **Director:** Scott Derrickson · **Writers:** Jon Spaihts; Scott Derrickson; C. Robert Cargill
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero fantasy / mystical adventure · **Runtime:** 115 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Benedict Cumberbatch (*Sherlock*, *The Imitation Game*) as Stephen Strange; Chiwetel Ejiofor (*12 Years a Slave*, *Children of Men*) as Mordo; Rachel McAdams (*Spotlight*, *Sherlock Holmes*) as Christine Palmer; Tilda Swinton (*Michael Clayton*, *Snowpiercer*) as The Ancient One
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 89% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Fourteen films in, Marvel has the origin story down to a process. Gifted, arrogant man suffers a reversal, finds a mentor, learns humility, fights a sky-beam, sets up the sequel. You can set your watch by it, and by now most of us have. So the interesting thing about *Doctor Strange* is not the shape of the story, which you could draw blindfold, but the two decisions Marvel made around it: hand the camera to Scott Derrickson, a man who has spent his career making people flinch in the dark, and build the whole thing on imagery borrowed less from comics than from a fractal screensaver having a breakdown. The result is the most visually adventurous thing the studio has put out, wrapped around its most predictable engine.
## The setup
Stephen Strange is a neurosurgeon of genuine brilliance and intolerable self-regard, the sort of man who keeps a wall of watches and a head full of his own press. A car crash wrecks the nerves in his hands, and with them the only thing he values about himself. Western medicine fails him, his money runs out chasing it, and a rumour of a miraculous recovery sends him to Kathmandu, to a hidden order led by the Ancient One. There he is shown that reality is rather larger and stranger than the operating theatre suggested, that there are other dimensions pressing against this one, and that something inside the order has gone looking to let one of them in.
That is as far as I will take it. The film keeps its more enjoyable turns in reserve, and they are worth arriving at cold.
## The cast
Cumberbatch is the reason the familiar parts go down so easily. He has played clever and insufferable before, and he knows exactly how much charm to leave switched on so that you stay with Strange while he is still being awful. The American accent is fine, not a distraction, and the arc from preening to humbled is sold by the small things, the moment the hands fail, the flash of fear under the bravado. He makes a man you would not want to share a lift with into someone you will happily follow for two hours.
Around him the casting is richer than the genre usually bothers with. Tilda Swinton gives the Ancient One a serene, unreadable authority that keeps you guessing about whose side wisdom is really on. Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mordo is the film's quiet ballast, a true believer whose rigid sense of the rules matters more than it first appears. Rachel McAdams is handed the thankless role of the life Strange left behind and does more with it than the script deserves, grounding the cosmic nonsense in a hospital corridor. Only the villain feels short-changed, an able actor given motivation enough for a single scene and not much room beyond it. It is the recurring Marvel tax, and it is paid here as usual.
## The craft
The craft is where the film earns its keep. Derrickson and his effects teams take the folding-city idea that *Inception* introduced and push it past architecture into something closer to a kaleidoscope you can fall through, corridors turning inside out, cities hinging shut like books, fights that run up walls and across ceilings while the geometry keeps rearranging underneath them. In good 3D and on a big screen it is genuinely disorientating, in the way the best spectacle should be. There is a late confrontation that resolves not with a bigger explosion but with a clever idea, and it is the most satisfying climax Marvel has staged precisely because it trusts wit over scale. Michael Giacchino's score leans on harpsichord and a slightly off-kilter sense of the mystical, and the whole thing has a texture the house style usually sands away.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Inception*, and the film knows it, but the bending here is decorative where Christopher Nolan's was load-bearing. The closer comparison within Marvel's own house is *Iron Man*: the same template of a brilliant, vain man broken and remade, the same reliance on a magnetic lead to carry a thin supporting bench. Reach back further and you find the seventies and eighties paperbacks this whole strand of Marvel grew out of, the cosmic, drug-tinged stuff that *Guardians of the Galaxy* started mining and that *Doctor Strange* takes somewhere stranger. As mind-bending cinema it is not in the league of *The Matrix*, which had ideas the action was actually about. As a spectacle that finally lets Marvel look weird, it goes further than anything the studio has tried.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm, sitting around 89%, with audiences close behind at 86%, and the split in the praise is the predictable one. Almost everyone admires the visuals and Cumberbatch, and almost everyone notes that the origin scaffolding is the same scaffolding Marvel has used a dozen times. The casting of Swinton in a role written as Tibetan in the source has drawn its own argument, and that conversation is a fair one to have. None of it greatly changes the experience in the cinema, which is a handsome, witty, often startling film doing a very familiar job with unusual style.
## Verdict
I came for the world-building and the strangeness, which are exactly the things I prize most in this kind of cinema, and on both counts the film delivers more than its template had any right to. The story is the one you have seen, and the villain is forgettable, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the imagery is the most inventive Marvel has managed, Cumberbatch is perfectly cast, and the climax is clever rather than merely loud. It rewards a rewatch on a good screen, where the folding worlds still impress once the plot holds no surprises. The most visually alive film in the franchise, carried by a lead who makes arrogance a pleasure to watch. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the upgrade to 3D or IMAX for the reality-bending set pieces; this is one of the rare Marvel films where the format adds something.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Strange went on to anchor a run of the franchise's biggest films, and the character's reality-warping powers became central to where the wider story headed. The promised solo sequel eventually arrived as *Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness* (2022), which leaned much harder into the horror instincts Derrickson brought to the first film. *Doctor Strange* is now on disc in 4K and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate fantasy violence, injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent fight scenes containing crunchy kicks and punches. The violence is fantastical and many of the blows are covered by showers of sparks. Several characters are stabbed with magical weapons, and a character is kicked from a high building and seen hitting the ground below.
**Injury detail:** There is sight of blood and bruising on a character's face in the aftermath of an accident. Another scene contains sight of multiple surgical pins protruding from a character's hands. There are also brief close-up shots of a small, bloody wound and of some blood dripping onto the floor in the aftermath of a stabbing.
**Additional issues:** A moderately intense car crash scene, mild fantasy threat, and mild bad language including 'shit', 'ass' and 'asshole'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/doctor-strange-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mzm0ndg)).*
================================================================================
## Deepwater Horizon (2016)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-deepwater-horizon
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-deepwater-horizon.md
- published: 2016-10-17
- document_id: 1066
> Peter Berg turns the worst oil-rig disaster in American history into a tense, blue-collar procedural that respects the men on the floor more than it punishes the men in suits. 8/10.
- **UK release:** September 2016
- **Director:** Peter Berg · **Writers:** Matthew Michael Carnahan, Matthew Sand
- **Studio / distributor:** Summit Entertainment; Participant Media; Di Bonaventura Pictures
- **Genre:** Disaster thriller / true-story survival drama · **Runtime:** 107 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Mark Wahlberg (*The Departed*, *Lone Survivor*) as Mike Williams; Kurt Russell (*The Thing*, *Tombstone*) as Jimmy Harrell; Gina Rodriguez (*Jane the Virgin*) as Andrea Fleytas; John Malkovich (*Being John Malkovich*, *In the Line of Fire*) as Donald Vidrine
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 83% critics / 82% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The phrase "based on a true story" usually arrives with a sinking feeling, because it tends to mean a tidy three-act sermon bolted onto something that was actually chaotic and unfair. Peter Berg, reteaming with Mark Wahlberg after *Lone Survivor*, has worked out a better trick. He treats the 2010 blowout on BP's Macondo well as a job that went wrong, and lets you understand the job first. By the time the rig is on fire you know where the drill floor is, who answers to whom, and roughly how a column of high-pressure mud is supposed to behave. It is the rare disaster film that does its homework before it lights the fuse.
## The setup
Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) is the chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon, a vast floating drilling platform a mile above the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico. He kisses his wife and daughter goodbye and helicopters out for another three-week hitch under rig boss Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell), only to find the BP men on board, led by Donald Vidrine (John Malkovich), pushing to skip a safety test and move the project along. The well is forty-three days behind schedule and haemorrhaging money. The crew know the cement job has not been checked. The film walks you, calmly and then less calmly, from a routine shift into the moment the seabed answers back.
That is as far as a synopsis needs to go, and the film is honest enough not to pretend you do not already know how it ends. The tension is not whether disaster comes but how, and at what human cost, and who decided it was an acceptable risk.
## The cast
Wahlberg is on home ground as a competent working man, and he is good at it: no speeches, just a tradesman who notices things are wrong before the people in charge will admit it. Kurt Russell gives Jimmy Harrell a weathered, unhurried authority, the old hand who has seen enough wells to distrust anyone in a clean shirt, and his early stand-off with the BP team carries more menace than any explosion. Gina Rodriguez, as bridge officer Andrea Fleytas, is the film's nerve-ends, a young crew member suddenly making decisions no training quite prepared her for. John Malkovich, drawling through a thick Louisiana accent, makes Vidrine a study in corporate certainty rather than a moustache-twirler, a man genuinely persuaded that the numbers are on his side. The performances are unshowy and exact, which is the right register for people whose job is not to panic.
## The craft
This is where Berg earns the ticket. He stages the rig as a real place, all noise and grease and procedure, so that when it fails the geography of the failure makes sense. Enrique Chediak's camerawork stays close and physical; the sound design, all groaning metal and the deep cough of escaping gas, does as much work as the visual effects. When the blowout finally tears through the platform it is genuinely frightening, a sustained sequence of fire, falling bodies and disorientation that never tips into the weightless spectacle of a CGI demolition reel. Berg keeps the human scale: a leg trapped in twisted steel, a jump into burning water, a colleague you cannot reach. At 107 minutes the film is lean, and it spends its patience up front so the chaos at the back lands.
## How it stacks up
The obvious neighbours are the recent run of competence-under-pressure true stories: *Captain Phillips*, with its procedural build and its everyman caught in someone else's catastrophe, and *Sully*, another short, sober reconstruction of professionals doing their jobs in an impossible window. Reach further back and the model is *Apollo 13*, which understood that watching skilled people solve a technical problem is its own kind of thriller. *Deepwater Horizon* sits comfortably in that company, and it shares with Berg and Wahlberg's own *Lone Survivor* a real interest in physical hardship and the loyalty of men in a tight crew. Where it is thinner is the politics. The corporate villainy is real but broad, and the film is more interested in the rig than the boardroom that doomed it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are largely won over, sitting around 83%, praising the craft, the tension and the plain respect for the workers, while flagging that the BP figures are drawn in heavy strokes and that the structure is, finally, a well-built disaster movie. Audiences are right alongside them at 82%. I land with both. The simplification of the suits is the one place the film settles for less than it could have, and you can feel it reaching for an outrage it never quite dramatises. But the thing it sets out to do, putting you on that floor as it comes apart, it does about as well as the form allows.
## Verdict
What stays with me is the discipline. Berg resists the disaster genre's worst habits, the cheap heroics and the empty spectacle, and instead builds something that respects both the engineering and the people standing on top of it. The villains are too neat and the closing real-world coda lays the sentiment on a touch thick, but the central hour is gripping, intelligent and grounded, and the survival sequence is among the most convincing put on screen in years. It is not a film I will reach for on a quiet Sunday the way I would a favourite science fiction picture, but as a piece of tense, well-made true-story filmmaking it is a clear success. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now; worth the big screen and the big sound for the blowout sequence alone.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Berg and Wahlberg completed an unofficial trilogy of true-story dramas with *Patriots Day* (2016), about the Boston Marathon bombing, released within weeks of this one, and the pairing went on to *Mile 22* and beyond. *Deepwater Horizon* has settled into a reputation as one of the more respected disaster films of its decade, admired for its craft even by those who find its corporate villains broad. It is now widely available on Blu-ray, 4K UHD and digital, and turns up on the major streaming and rental services depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, occasional gory moments, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** There are a number of scenes of moderate threat as explosions rip through the oil rig, with workers being enveloped by flames and hit by flying debris.
**Injury detail:** There are some images of bloody injuries, most notably a scene in which a man's broken leg has to be manipulated to free him from twisted metal, and a shot of a man pulling broken glass and shards of metal from his feet.
**Language:** There is a single use of strong language ('f***k'), which is used purely for emphasis rather than as a threat or insult.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/deepwater-horizon-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mzq3nji)).*
================================================================================
## The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-girl-with-all-the-gifts
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-girl-with-all-the-gifts.md
- published: 2016-10-05
- document_id: 1188
> A small British zombie film that thinks harder than its budget, built on a remarkable child performance and an idea most of the genre never reaches for. 8/10.
- **UK release:** September 2016
- **Director:** Colm McCarthy · **Writer:** M. R. Carey (from his own novel)
- **Studio / distributor:** BFI; Film4; Altitude Film Entertainment; Poison Chef
- **Genre:** Post-apocalyptic science fiction / infection thriller · **Runtime:** 111 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Sennia Nanua as Melanie; Gemma Arterton (*Quantum of Solace*) as Helen Justineau; Paddy Considine (*Dead Man's Shoes*, *Hot Fuzz*) as Sergeant Parks; Glenn Close (*Fatal Attraction*, *Dangerous Liaisons*) as Dr Caroline Caldwell
- **IMDb:** 6.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 86% critics / 67% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The British zombie film has a short and crowded history, and almost all of it dates from one weekend in 2002 when Danny Boyle pointed a fast camera at an empty London and called the result *28 Days Later*. Everything since has been measured against that, mostly to its disadvantage. *The Girl with All the Gifts* arrives with a television director making his feature debut, a budget you can see the edges of, and a premise lifted from a novel that sold on word of mouth. None of that promises much. What it delivers is the first British infection film in years that has an idea in its head as well as teeth in its mouth.
## The setup
A fungal infection has hollowed out Britain. The afflicted, called hungries, are quick, mindless and ravenous, and the survivors who have not been overrun cling to a fortified base where the work of saving the species is supposed to be happening. The work centres on the children: a small group of infected boys and girls who, against all the rules of the genre, can think, talk and learn. They are strapped into wheelchairs and rolled into a classroom each morning under armed guard, and the brightest of them is Melanie, who loves her teacher, recites her lessons, and is also a thing the soldiers are terrified to stand next to without a muzzle. When the base falls, a teacher, a soldier, a scientist and the girl are forced out into the ruined country together, each wanting something different from her.
## The cast
The film belongs to Sennia Nanua, a newcomer asked to carry a lead role that swings between heartbreaking and genuinely unnerving, sometimes inside the same scene, and she does it without a wobble. Melanie has to be a polite, eager child and a predator who has to be reminded not to eat the people she loves, and the performance holds both without ever tipping into a stunt. Around her, Gemma Arterton gives Helen Justineau the warmth the story needs, the one adult who treats Melanie as a pupil rather than a specimen. Paddy Considine, always good at men whose hardness is a kind of fear, makes Sergeant Parks more than the standard soldier who learns to care. Glenn Close, as the scientist hunting a cure, supplies the cold half of the argument: she sees a cure where everyone else sees a little girl, and the film is honest enough not to make her simply wrong.
## The craft
Colm McCarthy comes from television, and he brings its discipline rather than its smallness. The infected are shot in real space with real stunt performers wherever the money allows, and they move with a horrible stillness-then-speed that owes more to Boyle than to Romero. The ruined cityscapes, when the budget finally stretches to them, are handsome and strange, nature reclaiming the motorways. The standout is the score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, all clicking, chirping, insectile textures that sound like the infection itself, and it does as much to unsettle as anything on screen. There are seams. A few of the wider shots betray how little there was to spend, and the middle stretch sags as the group trudges. But McCarthy keeps the camera close to Melanie's point of view, and the world stays coherent and grim and convincingly emptied out.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *28 Days Later*, and this is the closest anyone has come to its tone without simply copying its sprint. But the film it most resembles in spirit is *Children of Men*: a Britain of checkpoints and last-ditch science, where the future of the species walks around in a single fragile body and everyone wants to either protect it or open it up. There is a touch of *I Am Legend* in the lone-cure obsession, and anyone who has played *The Last of Us* will recognise the bond between a hardened adult and a special, infected child who may be the cure or the end of us. What lifts this above its models is its willingness to take the monster's side. Most infection films ask whether humanity survives. This one quietly asks whether it should.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it warmly, with the reviews clustering around 86% and singling out Nanua and the freshness of the angle. Audiences are cooler, nearer two thirds, and the gap is easy to read: viewers who came for a straight zombie picture get something slower, sadder and more morally awkward, and a final act that refuses the comfortable ending. I am on the critics' side here, with a caveat. The thinking is what makes it worth your time, and the budget occasionally lets the thinking down. But a small film reaching for a real idea earns more from me than a large one reaching for nothing.
## Verdict
This is intelligent science fiction wearing a horror coat, and the intelligence is real rather than decorative. The world-building is spare but consistent, the atmosphere is bleak in the good way, and the ending has the nerve to follow its premise all the way to a genuinely unsettling place rather than blinking. It is held together by a debut performance that deserves to launch a career. The seams show, the middle drags, and it will not convert anyone who simply wants the chase. For me it is one of the most interesting British genre films in years, and the kind I expect to revisit. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on limited release through Altitude. A DVD and Blu-ray release should follow before the year is out.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Sennia Nanua's performance went on to win her the London Film Critics' Circle young performer award, confirming the talent the film puts front and centre. M. R. Carey has since published a companion novel, *The Boy on the Bridge*, set in the same infected Britain. The film has settled into a reputation as one of the stronger British genre pictures of its decade, the smart cousin to the zombie boom rather than another body on the pile, and it now streams across the usual platforms with a steady disc presence to match.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are scenes in which zombies are shot, stabbed and bludgeoned, resulting in several bloody impact wounds. There are also scenes in which humans are attacked and bitten, resulting in some gory wound detail. There is also a scene in which a girl attacks and eats a cat.
**Language:** There are several uses of strong language ('f**k'), as well as milder bad language ('shit', 'bollocks', 'bloody', 'sod', 'frigging', 'Jesus', 'Christ', 'hell').
**Additional issues:** In one scene, there is brief sight of adult magazine covers.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-girl-with-all-the-gifts-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjkwmzc)).*
================================================================================
## Jason Bourne (2016)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-jason-bourne
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-jason-bourne.md
- published: 2016-08-05
- document_id: 1101
> Damon and Greengrass are back after nine years away from the role, with the same shaky-cam fury and a new surveillance war to fight. The plot is familiar but the engine still runs hot. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2016
- **Director:** Paul Greengrass · **Writers:** Paul Greengrass, Christopher Rouse
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures
- **Genre:** Espionage action thriller · **Runtime:** 123 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Matt Damon (*The Bourne Ultimatum*, *The Martian*) as Jason Bourne; Alicia Vikander (*Ex Machina*) as Heather Lee; Tommy Lee Jones (*The Fugitive*, *No Country for Old Men*) as Robert Dewey; Vincent Cassel (*La Haine*, *Black Swan*) as the Asset
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 54% critics / 55% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
When Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon walked away after *The Bourne Ultimatum* in 2007, they did it from the high ground, with the cleanest finish any modern action franchise had managed. Then Universal tried to keep the lights on without them, handing the world to Jeremy Renner in *The Bourne Legacy*, a film I liked rather more than most. But the studio always wanted the original pairing back, and here they are, nine years on, returning to a character who supposedly had nowhere left to go. The question hanging over *Jason Bourne* is whether there is a real reason to reopen the file, or whether this is the band reuniting for the money.
## The setup
Bourne has spent the years since Treadstone collapsed living off the grid, surfacing only to take bare-knuckle fights on the Greek and Albanian borders. He remembers who he is now, which removes the engine of the first three films, so the script reaches back instead of forward: a cache of stolen CIA files surfaces, brought to him by an old ally, and they point at his father and at how a damaged young man was first recruited into the programme. That drags the agency back onto his trail, and the chase is on again, this time wired through phone taps, satellite feeds and a Silicon Valley surveillance deal the CIA would very much like to keep quiet.
Inside Langley, the new director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) wants Bourne dead, while his ambitious cyber chief Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) thinks he can be brought back in. Pursuing all of them is the Asset (Vincent Cassel), a Treadstone-era killer with a personal grudge.
## The cast
Damon slots back into the role as though he never vacated it. He has always understood that Bourne is a part built on watchfulness rather than speech, a man reading exits and angles while everyone around him talks, and at this point he can do the cornered-animal stillness in his sleep. He barely has fifty lines of dialogue and does not need them. Vikander, fresh from *Ex Machina*, brings a cool, screen-lit calculation to Heather Lee that gives the film its one genuinely modern note: the operative who fights with metadata rather than a Glock. Tommy Lee Jones does world-weary institutional menace better than almost anyone, and slots straight into the lineage of Bourne handlers, even if the script gives him little Brian Cox or David Strathairn never did. Cassel makes the Asset more than a silhouette, a man with his own reasons to want Bourne gone, though the personal-grudge angle is the most worn thing in the picture.
## The craft
This is where the film justifies itself. Greengrass and his editor and co-writer Christopher Rouse still cut action better than the people imitating them, and the set pieces are genuinely thrilling: a riot in Athens shot in choking handheld chaos, a rooftop foot chase, and a Las Vegas finale built around an armoured SWAT van ploughing down the Strip that is as brutal and tactile as anything in the series. The handheld style, so often blamed for the shaky-cam plague that followed, is in the right hands here a precision instrument, putting you inside the panic without losing the geography. David Buckley and John Powell keep Powell's propulsive Bourne pulse running underneath. The surveillance material, screens watching screens, faces pulled from CCTV in real time, taps neatly into the Snowden-era anxieties the series has always circled, and gives the old formula a contemporary charge.
## How it stacks up
Measured against *The Bourne Ultimatum*, this is the lesser film, and it knows it. The plotting is thinner and the emotional stakes feel manufactured, a father's-secret reveal bolted on because the amnesia well had run dry. But measured against the wider field of 2016 spy cinema it stands up well. It is leaner and angrier than the increasingly cartoonish *Mission: Impossible* outings, and it has a grubby, real-world texture the Bond films had largely traded away for glamour. I would put it a notch below *Legacy*, which had the advantage of a genuinely fresh angle, but the craftsmanship on display here is of a higher order.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reviews are decidedly mixed, with critics sitting at 54% and audiences barely warmer at 55%. The recurring complaint is fair: the story is a retread, a fourth lap of a track we have run before, with diminishing narrative returns. I take the point and largely agree with it. Where I part company is on what that costs the film. A Bourne picture lives or dies on momentum, paranoia and the kinetic conviction of its action, and on all three this delivers exactly what the badge promises. The plot being familiar matters less to me than whether the thing moves, and it moves like few action films this year.
## Verdict
So my number sits comfortably above the consensus, and I am not embarrassed about it. I love this series, I value espionage, surveillance themes and rewatchable, well-built action, and *Jason Bourne* serves all of that even as it coasts on a story it has told before. It is not the equal of the original trilogy's peak, the script reaches for a personal reveal it does not really earn, and Vikander deserved a sharper part. None of that stops it being a tense, propulsive, supremely well-cut thriller that I will happily watch again on a wet evening. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: this remains, for now, the last theatrical Bourne film, with Universal pivoting instead to the prequel television series *Treadstone* (2019) before that too was cancelled. Talk of a further Damon and Greengrass entry has circled for years without landing. The film has settled into its reputation as a solid but inessential coda to the trilogy, the one fans rate higher than critics. It is widely available on disc and digital, and streams across the usual platforms depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of moderate violence in which people engage in hand-to-hand combat, and use improvised weapons or firearms. Although heavy blows are landed, little is shown in terms of injury detail, with the focus instead placed on action. Notable moments include shootings resulting in limited bloodshed, and a prolonged fight scene featuring heavy blows and an implied neck break.
**Threat and horror:** There are some intense action scenes, including a car chase.
**Language:** There is a single use of moderate bad language when a man is referred to as a 'prick'. Milder bad language includes 'shit', 'son-of-a-bitch', 'crap', 'Jesus Christ', 'damn', 'hell' and 'God'.
**Injury detail:** There is limited sight of blood in the aftermath of violence, as well as sight of scars.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/jason-bourne-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zoduwnju)).*
================================================================================
## Star Trek Beyond (2016)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-star-trek-beyond
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-star-trek-beyond.md
- published: 2016-08-04
- document_id: 1161
> Justin Lin steers the rebooted Enterprise back to its roots, trading portentous spectacle for a fast, warm-hearted away mission. The least fashionable of the three, and quietly the most likeable. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2016
- **Director:** Justin Lin · **Writers:** Simon Pegg, Doug Jung
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Skydance; Bad Robot
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / space opera · **Runtime:** 122 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chris Pine (*Star Trek*, *Unstoppable*) as James T. Kirk; Zachary Quinto (*Star Trek*, *Margin Call*) as Spock; Sofia Boutella (*Kingsman: The Secret Service*) as Jaylah; Idris Elba (*Luther*, *Pacific Rim*) as Krall
- **IMDb:** 7.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 86% critics / 80% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The third film of the rebooted *Star Trek* arrives under a small cloud. *Into Darkness* left a sour aftertaste with a chunk of the fanbase, J.J. Abrams has decamped to a galaxy far, far away, and the man now holding the chair is Justin Lin, whose CV is built on cars rather than starships. None of that sounds like a recipe for the most affectionate *Star Trek* in years. Yet here it is, the entry that remembers what the series was always supposed to be about: a small crew of clever people, a long way from home, working a problem together.
## The setup
Three years into a five-year mission, Kirk (Chris Pine) is restless. The novelty of deep space has worn into routine, and he is quietly wondering whether the captain's chair still fits him. A distress call draws the Enterprise to an uncharted nebula, where an ambush tears the ship apart and scatters the crew across an unknown planet, stranded, separated and out of contact. Behind it is Krall (Idris Elba), an enemy with a grudge against the Federation and a weapon that could gut it. To get off the rock and stop him, Kirk and the survivors must rely on each other and on Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), a fierce scavenger who has been making her own way on the same world. It is a proper away mission, broken into pairs and small groups, and that structure is the smartest thing the film does.
## The cast
Splitting the crew up lets the cast breathe. Pine plays a more weathered Kirk, less the cocky upstart and more a man weighing what comes next, and it suits him. Quinto's Spock is paired off with Karl Urban's gloriously irritable McCoy, and the two of them bicker their way across the planet in the film's most enjoyable double act, logic against gut feeling, played for warmth as much as comedy. Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the script, hands himself plenty to do as Scotty and is wise enough not to hog it. The real find is Sofia Boutella's Jaylah, all coiled physicality and deadpan delivery, a newcomer who slots into the ensemble without disturbing it. Idris Elba is buried under heavy prosthetics for much of the running time, which mutes him, though the character earns more interest once the make-up comes off.
## The craft
Lin brings the thing you would expect a *Fast & Furious* director to bring: momentum, and a real feel for how bodies and machines move through space. The action is legible and inventive rather than just loud, and there is a set piece involving a swarm attack on the Enterprise that ranks with anything the reboot has staged. He also resists the temptation to make everything bigger than the last film. The scale is human; the jeopardy is the crew getting home, not the customary city under threat. Michael Giacchino's score keeps the franchise's brassy confidence, and there is a cheeky, well-judged needle-drop in the finale that I will leave for you to discover. If there is a craft complaint, it is that Krall's plan never quite holds together under scrutiny, and the nebula visuals occasionally tip into busyness.
## How it stacks up
Held against *Star Trek* (2009), this is the warmer, lower-stakes cousin. The 2009 film had the thrill of reinvention and a clean origin-story shape; *Beyond* has the easy confidence of a crew that already knows each other. Against *Into Darkness* it is a clear improvement, swapping that film's borrowed grandeur and twist-for-the-sake-of-it plotting for something more relaxed and more genuinely *Trek*. The closest spiritual relatives are the better original-series episodes and *The Voyage Home*, where the pleasure was watching this particular group of people problem-solve their way out of trouble with wit intact. It is less ambitious than either Abrams film and better company than both.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are on side, sitting at 86%, with the recurring praise being that this is the most character-driven and most classically *Star Trek* of the three. Audiences are a touch cooler at 80%, and the box office has been softer than Paramount hoped, perhaps because the marketing leaned on the action and undersold the heart. I land closer to the critics here. The complaints that do surface, a thin villain, a plot that does not bear close inspection, are fair, but they matter less when the company is this good and the pace this brisk.
## Verdict
This is the *Star Trek* I most want to rewatch. It does not have the jolt of the 2009 reboot or that film's perfect origin-story machinery, and the antagonist is the weakest of the rebooted trio. What it has instead is the thing the series has always done best: a likeable crew, sharp banter, real teamwork, and an adventure that stays the right size. After the overreach of *Into Darkness*, a film this generous and this sure of its characters feels like a course correction. Not the most spectacular of the three, comfortably the most charming, and the one I will put on again. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX and 3D screenings. A DVD and Blu-ray release is expected before the year is out.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Star Trek Beyond* turned out to be the last outing for this crew on the big screen, with the planned fourth Kelvin-timeline film repeatedly delayed and reshuffled. The release carried a quiet weight at the time too, as a closing dedication to Anton Yelchin, whose Chekov is one of the film's small pleasures, and to Leonard Nimoy. Its reputation has held up well: where *Into Darkness* has soured further with fans, *Beyond* is now widely regarded as the strongest and most rewatchable of the three. It streams on Paramount+ depending on region and is available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are scenes in which spaceships are attacked and break up, with crew thrown around or sucked out into space. In exchanges with aliens, characters are struck by laser fire and fall dead. There are fights which include punches, kicks and other blows, some resulting in bloodied faces. There is some loss of skin from faces prior to complete evaporation as a result of a blast from a weapon.
**Threat and horror:** Characters are seen in danger as spaceships break up or crash, in exchanges with aliens, and during fight sequences.
**Language:** There is use of mild bad language, including 'crap', 'shit', 'bastards', 'hell' and 'ass'.
**Sex:** There are mild sex references as a couple are seen kissing in a lift and as a bare-chested man is pushed out of a woman's room as they argue.
**Injury detail:** There is some sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink alcohol, including to excess.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/star-trek-beyond-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00nzkzndu)).*
================================================================================
## Captain America - Civil War (2016)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-captain-america-civil-war
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-captain-america-civil-war.md
- published: 2016-05-02
- document_id: 1053
> The Russos turn the thirteenth Marvel film into a paranoid loyalty thriller, hold a dozen heroes in tension without dropping one, and stage the best superhero set piece yet filmed. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** April 2016
- **Director:** Anthony Russo · Joe Russo
- **Writers:** Christopher Markus · Stephen McFeely
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero action thriller / political conflict drama · **Runtime:** 147 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chris Evans (*Captain America: The First Avenger*, *Snowpiercer*) as Steve Rogers / Captain America; Robert Downey Jr. (*Iron Man*, *Sherlock Holmes*) as Tony Stark / Iron Man; Sebastian Stan (*Captain America: The Winter Soldier*) as Bucky Barnes; Chadwick Boseman (*42*) as T'Challa / Black Panther
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 91% critics / 89% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
The third Captain America film arrives carrying a problem most franchises would kill for and few survive: too many heroes. Marvel has spent eight years and a dozen films assembling a roster, and the obvious next move is to fill the screen with all of them and call it a party. What the Russo brothers do instead, having already turned *The Winter Soldier* into the closest thing this universe has to a Seventies conspiracy thriller, is point all that accumulated star power inward. The result is less a team-up than a divorce, and it is the most controlled, most adult film Marvel has yet released.
## The setup
After one mission too many leaves civilians dead, the world's governments decide the Avengers can no longer answer only to themselves, and draw up an accord to put them under United Nations oversight. Tony Stark, sick with guilt over the damage his side has done, signs without much argument. Steve Rogers, who has watched institutions he trusted turn rotten, will not. The disagreement is principled and survivable until Bucky Barnes, Steve's oldest friend and a brainwashed assassin still half inside someone else's programming, is named for an atrocity, and Steve chooses the man over the law. From there the argument stops being about policy and becomes about who you stand beside when the cost is everything. The film keeps its larger reveals back, and so will I.
## The cast
Evans and Downey carry this, and the film is smart enough to know it. Evans plays Rogers as a man whose decency has hardened into stubbornness, certain he is right in a way that is starting to look like a flaw. Downey gives Stark the rawest work he has done in the suit, a rich man hollowed out by the thought that his cleverness keeps getting people killed. Their fight, when it lands, is wounding because the film has earned it. Around them the ensemble is handled with real generosity: Sebastian Stan's Barnes is all coiled wariness, a weapon trying to remember how to be a person, and Chadwick Boseman walks in as T'Challa and quietly takes a scene or two off everyone, regal and grieving and dangerous. The film also finds room for a new Spider-Man, played with motormouthed teenage delight, who turns up, steals fifteen minutes, and leaves you wanting the solo film.
## The craft
The Russos shoot action with a clarity that has become rare in this kind of cinema. The early Lagos sequence is close, kinetic and legible; you always know who is where and why it matters. The centrepiece, an airport confrontation between two splintered halves of the team, is the best superhero set piece yet committed to film, twelve characters in motion and not one of them lost in the noise, the choreography witty and the stakes never quite tipping into the lethal. It is staged for delight, and it delivers. Henry Jackman's score does its work without showing off, and the film's tone holds a difficult line: heavy enough to make the betrayals hurt, light enough that the jokes still land. At 147 minutes it has a great deal to carry, and only occasionally feels the weight.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is the Russos' own *The Winter Soldier*, and this is the better film, broader in scope but every bit as interested in the politics of trust and accountability. Where it really distinguishes itself is against *Batman v Superman*, released only weeks earlier and chasing a similar idea of heroes at war with one another. That film treated the conflict as a brooding inevitability; this one builds it from character, so that by the time the two leads are trading blows you understand exactly how each got here and can see the case for both. It is closer to a John le Carre adaptation than to a comic crossover, an espionage story about loyalty and institutional control wearing a cape.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to united, sitting around 91%, with audiences a shade behind at 89%, and the praise is landing where it should: the grounded conflict, the airport sequence, the arrival of Black Panther and Spider-Man. The recurring reservation is that the villain's scheme is needlessly intricate and that the film occasionally strains under its own roster. Both are fair. But the consensus here is one I largely share, which does not always happen with this studio, and the small gap between critics and audiences feels like nothing more than franchise fatigue talking.
## Verdict
This is Marvel operating at the top of its craft: a blockbuster that trusts its audience to follow an argument, takes its characters' convictions seriously, and pays them off with a confrontation that costs something. The plot machinery creaks in places and the villain is more device than menace, but the loyalty thriller underneath is genuinely gripping, and the airport sequence alone is worth the ticket twice over. It is enormously rewatchable, it understands espionage and divided allegiance better than most films that set out to be about exactly that, and it is the rare comic-book film I expect to return to for the drama rather than the spectacle. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX and 3D screens.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the two leads' rupture here became the emotional foundation the Russos built on in *Avengers: Infinity War* (2018) and its follow-up, and both T'Challa and this Spider-Man went on to anchor major films of their own. Civil War has settled in as one of the most respected entries in the franchise, frequently named alongside *The Winter Soldier* as a high point. It is now available on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Frequent scenes of moderate violence include battles between Captain America, the Avengers and various enemies. These fight scenes include shield strikes and martial arts punches and kicks. Some characters are shot or struck with knives. However, the majority of scenes lack visible injuries or blood.
**Threat and horror:** There is a scene in which a man is interrogated by being suspended upside down over a sink filled with water. There are several explosions in which vehicles and buildings are destroyed.
**Language:** There is some mild bad language ('son of a bitch', 'shit', 'pissed', 'ass', 'hell', 'goddamn').
**Injury detail:** Some scenes show small cuts and blood on faces or blood staining clothes; however, there is no focus on blood or injuries.
**Suicide and self-harm:** A man attempts to take his own life but the gun he is using is pushed away from him before he can fire.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/captain-america-civil-war-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zodqxndm)).*
================================================================================
## Midnight Special (2016)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-midnight-special
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-midnight-special.md
- published: 2016-04-19
- document_id: 1119
> Jeff Nichols points his small-town dread at the stars and makes a chase thriller that trusts you to fill in the gaps. Restrained, atmospheric, and built on a father's fear rather than the spectacle. 8/10.
- **UK release:** April 2016
- **Director:** Jeff Nichols · **Writer:** Jeff Nichols
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Faliro House; Tri-State Pictures
- **Genre:** Science-fiction mystery / chase thriller · **Runtime:** 112 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Michael Shannon (*Take Shelter*, *Man of Steel*) as Roy Tomlin; Jaeden Lieberher (*St. Vincent*) as Alton Meyer; Joel Edgerton (*Warrior*, *The Gift*) as Lucas; Kirsten Dunst (*Melancholia*, *Spider-Man*) as Sarah Tomlin
- **IMDb:** 6.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 84% critics / 67% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Jeff Nichols has spent three films working a particular seam: ordinary men in the American South, plainly photographed, quietly coming apart. *Take Shelter* gave us a husband building a storm bunker against a vision he cannot explain; *Mud* sent two boys to help a fugitive on a river island. *Midnight Special* takes that same grounded dread and aims it, for the first time, at the sky. This is Nichols making a science-fiction film without telling you he is making one, and the surprise of it is how completely he keeps his nerve.
## The setup
Roy Tomlin (Michael Shannon) is driving through the night with his eight-year-old son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), the boy's eyes shielded behind swimming goggles, the windows of the motel taped over with cardboard. Roy has taken Alton from a Texas religious community that built its scripture around the boy's strange utterances, and the federal government wants him too, because whatever Alton can do has started leaking into satellite feeds and radio bands. Helped by his old friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton), a state trooper who has thrown his career away to come along, Roy is racing toward a place and a date that only Alton seems to understand. What the boy is, and what is waiting at the end of the road, the film parcels out a piece at a time, and never quite all at once.
## The cast
Shannon is the centre of gravity, and he plays Roy with his usual coiled stillness, a man whose love for his son has hardened into pure function: drive, protect, do not stop to ask the questions he is terrified to answer. It is a performance built on what he refuses to show. Lieberher, asked to be uncanny and fragile at the same time, holds the screen without ever tipping into the precocious-child register that sinks lesser versions of this story. Edgerton brings a watchful, decent solidity as the friend who has decided to believe before he understands, and Kirsten Dunst, as Alton's mother Sarah, arrives later and lends the chase its emotional ache, the grief of a parent measuring how little time is left. Adam Driver, as the NSA analyst piecing the mystery together from the other side, is the one character allowed to share the audience's curiosity, and he plays it with a nerdish delight that cuts the tension nicely.
## The craft
Nichols and his regular cinematographer Adam Stone shoot most of this at night, in motels and on back roads, and the restraint is the whole strategy. The effects are sparing and arrive late, so that when the film finally shows its hand the images land with real weight rather than wearing you down by the hour. David Wingo's score hums with low electronic unease, closer to a thriller than a wonder-film for most of the running time. There is a deliberate withholding here that will frustrate some viewers: Nichols trusts you to sit with not-knowing, to read a glance or a half-finished sentence and carry the gap yourself. The pacing is taut, the geography of the chase always legible, and the dread is generated almost entirely by people behaving as if something enormous is at stake without ever over-explaining what.
## How it stacks up
The lineage is obvious and Nichols knows it. This is a film raised on *Close Encounters of the Third Kind* and *Starman*, on the Spielberg and Carpenter register of ordinary Americans brushing up against something vast and benign. It shares blood with *E.T.* in its government pursuit and its child at the centre, and with the recent *Super 8* in its small-town, analogue-era texture. But the closest comparison is Nichols' own *Take Shelter*: the same actor, the same married couple under unbearable strain, the same question of whether a man losing the world's trust is mad or right. Where those films leaned on spectacle or on a single domestic dread, *Midnight Special* keeps both plates spinning, a road thriller and a father's quiet agony, and it earns the comparison rather than borrowing the goodwill.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it warmly, sitting around 84%, drawn to the restraint, the atmosphere, and the first-contact mood handled without bombast. Audiences are cooler, nearer 67%, and the gap is easy to read: the people who wanted answers and a third-act payoff to match the build-up have come away short-changed, because the film deliberately gives you less explanation than the set-up seems to promise. That is a fair grievance if you arrive wanting a puzzle solved on screen. It is not my grievance. The withholding is the texture I came for, and I would rather a film leave a door ajar than spend twenty minutes nailing it shut.
## Verdict
This sits squarely in territory I am fond of: intelligent, restrained science fiction that respects the audience, built on a real emotional engine rather than on light shows. The atmosphere is excellent, Shannon and Edgerton are a pleasure to watch, and the film is short, tense, and confident enough to under-explain. It loses a little in the final stretch, where the careful withholding gives way to imagery that cannot quite match the dread that preceded it, and that keeps it just shy of the top tier. But it is a smart, soulful chase film I will happily watch again, and the most assured thing Nichols has made. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on limited release. One to catch on the big screen for the night-time photography while you can; a DVD and Blu-ray release will follow.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Jeff Nichols followed this the same year with *Loving* (2016), again with Joel Edgerton, swapping science fiction for civil-rights drama but keeping the same plain, patient eye. *Midnight Special* has settled into a reputation as a cult favourite, the film cited whenever people argue that modest, character-led science fiction can still be made inside a studio. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** During a shoot-out one man is shot in the stomach and another in the shoulder. Blood is seen on clothing but there is no emphasis on injuries. In another scene a man is struck across the head with a brass lamp.
**Threat and horror:** Moments of moderate threat include car crash scenes and a sequence in which a mysterious force causes a house to shake violently.
**Language:** Other issues include infrequent mild bad language, including uses of 'asshole' and 'shit'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/midnight-special-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mdawote)).*
================================================================================
## The Revenant (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-revenant
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-revenant.md
- published: 2016-01-27
- document_id: 1212
> Inarritu marches DiCaprio through the frozen wilderness on a thin thread of plot and an extraordinary amount of craft. A punishing watch and a beautiful one, and it earns more than its gruelling reputation suggests. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** January 2016
- **Director:** Alejandro G. Inarritu · **Writers:** Mark L. Smith; Alejandro G. Inarritu
- **Studio / distributor:** New Regency; 20th Century Fox
- **Genre:** Survival western / revenge drama · **Runtime:** 156 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Leonardo DiCaprio (*The Wolf of Wall Street*, *The Departed*) as Hugh Glass; Tom Hardy (*Bronson*, *Warrior*) as John Fitzgerald; Domhnall Gleeson (*About Time*, *Ex Machina*) as Captain Andrew Henry; Will Poulter (*We're the Millers*) as Jim Bridger
- **IMDb:** 8.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 78% critics / 84% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Alejandro Inarritu arrives at *The Revenant* straight off *Birdman*, the backstage one-take stunt that won him best director a year ago, and he has clearly decided that simulating a single unbroken take in a theatre corridor was too easy. This time he has dragged the whole production out into the Canadian and Argentine wilderness, shot it in sequence on natural light alone, and asked his leading man to crawl through freezing rivers and eat raw bison liver on camera. The early word from the set has been all hardship and walkouts and overrun budget. The thing nobody quite expected is how much of that suffering ends up on the screen as beauty.
## The setup
Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a fur trapper and guide leading a expedition company through unmapped territory in the 1820s, in country that belongs to no one and to everyone with a rifle. A native war party scatters the men, and in the retreat Glass is mauled half to death by a grizzly bear protecting her cubs. Too broken to move and too stubborn to die, he is left in the care of a few men who are paid to wait with him until the end. When one of them, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), decides the waiting is not worth his life, Glass is abandoned in a shallow grave and given a personal reason to keep breathing. What follows is a long, cold haul through the wilderness, equal parts survival and the slow accumulation of a debt.
## The cast
DiCaprio spends most of the film without a usable line of dialogue, and the performance is built almost entirely from breath, weight and endurance. It is a very physical piece of acting, the kind that the *Wolf of Wall Street* showman in him usually keeps in reserve, and it works because he commits to the cold and the pain so completely that you stop watching a movie star and start watching a body trying not to stop. Tom Hardy is the more conventionally enjoyable turn. His Fitzgerald is a coil of grievance and frontier logic, mumbling and dangerous, a man who has done the arithmetic of his own survival and is unbothered by where it leaves anyone else. Domhnall Gleeson lends the young captain a thread of decency that the country keeps trying to bleed out of him, and Will Poulter is quietly good as the boy caught between the two older men's idea of honour.
## The craft
This is where the film makes its case. Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot *Birdman* and *Gravity*, works almost entirely in available daylight, which gave the production roughly ninety usable minutes a day and gives the finished film a clarity that no amount of artificial lighting can fake. The camera drifts in close enough to fog the lens with the actors' breath, then pulls back to set tiny figures against enormous indifferent country. The bear attack is the set piece everyone will talk about, a single seemingly unbroken assault that is genuinely hard to sit through, but the quieter landscapes do as much work: frozen rivers, low grey skies, forests that go on past any horizon. Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto's score is a low drone of strings and electronics that sits under the picture like weather rather than music. At two and a half hours the film tests your patience on purpose, and the cold is so well photographed that you come out wanting a warm room.
## How it stacks up
The obvious cousin is *The Grey*, Joe Carnahan's lean man-against-wilderness film, though *The Revenant* trades that one's tightness for grandeur and runs nearly an hour longer. The deeper lineage runs back to *Jeremiah Johnson*, Sydney Pollack's elegiac mountain-man picture, and to Inarritu's own *Apocalypto*-adjacent interest in bodies under extreme duress. Where *Jeremiah Johnson* romanticised the frontier, this film mostly wants to freeze you. As revenge stories go it is closer to a pilgrimage than a thriller, and viewers who arrive expecting the propulsion of a straight payback movie may find the pacing punishing. As an immersion into a place and a state of suffering, it has very few rivals.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are admiring but a little wary, sitting around 78%, with the praise going almost unanimously to Lubezki's images and DiCaprio's commitment and the reservations going to the relentless misery and the slim story stretched over a long runtime. Audiences are warmer, at 84%, which fits a film that rewards surrender rather than analysis. The recurring complaint, that it is gruelling, is true and slightly beside the point: the gruelling quality is the experience on offer, not a flaw in delivering it. The fair criticism is the thinness of the plot, which is a single straight line dressed in spectacular clothes.
## Verdict
I value atmosphere and immersion and the sense of being taken somewhere I could not otherwise go, and on those terms this delivers about as completely as anything I have seen on a big screen this year. It is not a film I will reach for casually, the way I would a tighter genre piece; it is too cold and too long for a comfortable rewatch. But the craft is close to flawless, the central performance earns every bit of its hype, and the wilderness photography is the kind you remember in your bones. It loses a little for the slenderness of the story and the sheer endurance it asks of you. What it gives back is a world rendered with total conviction. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it on the largest screen you can find; this is a film made for scale.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to win Inarritu a second consecutive best director Oscar and finally handed Leonardo DiCaprio the best actor award after years of near misses, with Lubezki taking a third straight cinematography prize. Its reputation has settled as an awards-season landmark that is more admired than rewatched, the survival epic people respect deeply and revisit rarely. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on various platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, bloody injury detail, language, sexual violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of violence include people being hit by arrows and bullets, and exchanging blows including with bladed weapons. A man is attacked and tossed about by a bear.
**Injury detail:** The bear attack results in some focus on deep bloody wounds to the victim. There is also brief focus on bloody injuries resulting from various acts of violence, including implied scalping.
**Sexual violence:** There is also a scene of sexual violence in which a man rapes a woman. The sequence is brief and lacking in nudity.
**Language:** There are multiple uses of strong language ('f**k'). Other bad language includes uses of 'shit', 'son of a bitch' and 'bitch'.
**Additional issues:** Other issues include some sex references as a man talks about wanting a woman with 'big tits'. The film also contains sequences showing animals fighting and being killed, including a lengthy fight between a bear and a man, although these scenes were achieved using special effects and no animals were harmed. There is also sight of dead animals being butchered, to provide both food and shelter.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-revenant-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00nzu3otc)).*
================================================================================
## Star Wars - The Force Awakens (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-star-wars-the-force-awakens
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-star-wars-the-force-awakens.md
- published: 2015-12-27
- document_id: 1163
> J. J. Abrams hands the franchise back to the fans by handing them the film they already loved, with a sharp new cast doing the heavy lifting. Familiar to a fault, but alive in a way the prequels never were. 8/10.
- **UK release:** December 2015
- **Director:** J. J. Abrams · **Writers:** Lawrence Kasdan, J. J. Abrams, Michael Arndt
- **Studio / distributor:** Lucasfilm; Walt Disney Studios
- **Genre:** Space opera / science fiction adventure · **Runtime:** 136 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Daisy Ridley as Rey; John Boyega (*Attack the Block*) as Finn; Harrison Ford (*Star Wars*, *Blade Runner*) as Han Solo; Adam Driver (*Inside Llewyn Davis*) as Kylo Ren
- **IMDb:** 7.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 84% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
It has been ten years since *Revenge of the Sith*, and the better part of a generation since anyone walked out of a *Star Wars* film grinning rather than apologising. The prequels left the brand technically dazzling and emotionally inert, all trade negotiations and green-screen senate chambers. So the job handed to J. J. Abrams, fresh from rebooting *Star Trek* for people who had given up on it, was less to make a great film than to make the franchise feel loved again. He has done that. He has done it by giving us, almost beat for beat, the film we already adored in 1977, and the surprising thing is how little I minded.
## The setup
Thirty years after the fall of the Empire, the galaxy has not settled into peace so much as into a new shape of the same fight. The First Order has risen from the ashes, the Resistance opposes it, and Luke Skywalker has vanished. Into that gap fall three strangers: Rey (Daisy Ridley), a scavenger eking out a living on a desert world; Finn (John Boyega), a stormtrooper who decides he wants no further part in the killing; and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), the best pilot the Resistance has. A small droid carrying a map nobody can afford to lose pulls them together, and the chase is on. If that scaffolding sounds familiar, that is the point of friction I will come back to, because it is the film's boldest gamble and its most obvious flaw at the same time.
## The cast
The new faces are where the film earns its keep. Ridley is a genuine find, carrying long stretches almost alone and giving Rey a watchful, capable energy that never tips into the blankness the prequel leads kept defaulting to. Boyega plays Finn with a nervy, comic openness, a man improvising his own decency in real time, and the chemistry between the two is the warmest thing here. Adam Driver, so good as a coiled presence in *Inside Llewyn Davis*, makes Kylo Ren a different kind of villain: petulant, unstable, frightening precisely because he cannot master himself. And then there is Harrison Ford, easing back into Han Solo with a weariness that suits the years, generous enough to let the newcomers take the screen while reminding everyone why this part made him a star. The hand-off from old to new is managed with real care.
## The craft
Abrams shoots it like someone who loves the original trilogy and resents the prequels on our behalf. Real deserts, real snow, practical creatures and physical sets give the thing a weight and grain the digital prequels never had, and Dan Mindel's photography keeps the action legible even when the screen is full. The dogfights are fast and readable, the lightsaber duels closer and uglier than the balletic prequel bouts, and the pacing rarely lets up. John Williams returns to score it, threading the old themes through new ones, and the moment those first familiar cues land is worth the ticket on its own. It is a handsome, confident, briskly entertaining piece of film-making that knows exactly what its audience came for.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *A New Hope*, and the film invites it almost recklessly: a desert orphan with hidden gifts, a droid carrying vital data, a masked enforcer, a planet-killing superweapon with a fatal flaw. This is closer to a remake than a sequel in places, and your tolerance for that will decide how much you love it. The smarter comparison is Abrams's own *Star Trek* (2009), which pulled the same trick of reviving a tired franchise by leaning hard into nostalgia and casting it well. He knows how to make the old feel new without actually risking anything new, and that is both his gift and his ceiling.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been generous, sitting around 93%, with audiences a little cooler at 84%, and the split is telling. The praise is for the energy, the humour and the cast; the reservation, even among admirers, is the heavy debt to the 1977 film. That is exactly the right reservation. Nobody is calling this original, and the people grumbling that it plays safe are not wrong. But after the cold competence of the prequels, safe and warm beats bold and lifeless, and most of the audience seems to feel the relief as keenly as I do.
## Verdict
This is a film that chooses reassurance over ambition, and on its own terms it succeeds almost completely. The new cast is excellent, the craft is confident, the score still works its magic, and it is enormously rewatchable in the way the prequels never were. What keeps it off the top shelf is honesty: it leans so hard on *A New Hope* that it never quite becomes its own thing, and a franchise this rich should eventually risk more than a loving cover version. As a reintroduction, though, it is hard to fault. It made me want to come back, which is more than I have felt about this saga in a long time. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth seeing on the largest screen you can find, in IMAX if you have the option.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the trilogy it opened, *The Last Jedi* (2017) and *The Rise of Skywalker* (2019), proved far more divisive than this confident start, and a good deal of the argument about whether the sequels squandered their setup traces back to how safely *The Force Awakens* played its hand. Its reputation has settled as the most broadly liked of the three, the easy crowd-pleaser before the fights began. It is now on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of moderate violence, including the use of blasters and lightsabers, and dogfights between spaceships. Sight of blood and injury detail is limited and brief.
**Threat:** Occasional scenes of moderate threat include characters being interrogated using 'the Force', which it is implied causes them pain, and characters being held at lightsaber-point.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of very mild bad language ('hell', 'damn').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/star-wars-the-force-awakens)).*
================================================================================
## Bridge of Spies (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-bridge-of-spies
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-bridge-of-spies.md
- published: 2015-12-12
- document_id: 1049
> Spielberg and the Coen brothers turn a real Cold War prisoner swap into a quiet, beautifully made thriller about one stubborn man and his principles. Restrained, grown up, and led by a near silent Mark Rylance. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** November 2015
- **Director:** Steven Spielberg · **Writers:** Matt Charman, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
- **Studio / distributor:** DreamWorks Pictures / Fox 2000 / Amblin; 20th Century Fox
- **Genre:** Cold War legal and espionage drama · **Runtime:** 142 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Hanks (*Saving Private Ryan*, *Catch Me If You Can*) as James Donovan; Mark Rylance (*The Other Boleyn Girl*) as Rudolf Abel; Amy Ryan (*Gone Baby Gone*) as Mary Donovan; Alan Alda (*The Aviator*) as Thomas Watters
- **IMDb:** 7.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 87% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Steven Spielberg has spent the last decade or so building a second career out of the serious, talky, history-minded picture, the kind he slots in between the dinosaurs and the aliens. *Munich* and *Lincoln* were both films about men working a problem in rooms full of other men, and *Bridge of Spies* is squarely in that line. What gives it an unexpected charge is the writing credit: alongside the playwright Matt Charman sit Joel and Ethan Coen, who have been quietly punching up the dialogue. The result is a film that looks like prestige Spielberg and talks, every so often, like something with a wry sideways grin.
## The setup
Brooklyn, 1957. James Donovan (Tom Hanks) is an insurance lawyer, good at his job and comfortable with the small print, who is handed a case nobody wants. The state has caught a Soviet agent, Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), and intends to give him a trial that looks fair without being fair. Donovan is supposed to provide the appearance of a defence and then step quietly aside. He declines to play that part. When an American spy plane comes down over the Soviet Union a few years later and its pilot is captured, Donovan finds himself the only man both sides will trust to broker an exchange, sent to a freezing, newly divided Berlin to trade one prisoner for another, or possibly two, with nobody quite telling him the rules.
## The cast
Hanks is doing what Hanks does better than almost anyone, which is to make ordinary decency watchable for two hours. Donovan is not a crusader; he is a man who simply will not stop pointing out that the rule book applies even when it is inconvenient, and Hanks plays that quiet obstinacy as something close to comedy, the patience of a man who has read the contract and would like everyone else to read it too. The film belongs, though, to Mark Rylance. His Abel is a study in stillness, a soft-spoken painter who treats his own likely execution as one more piece of weather. Asked repeatedly whether he is worried, he replies, "Would it help?" and the line lands every time. It is a performance built almost entirely from restraint, and it is the thing you carry out of the cinema. Amy Ryan and Alan Alda fill the home and office corners cleanly, Alda in particular giving Donovan's law partner a nicely weary establishment caution.
## The craft
This is gorgeous, old-fashioned film-making. Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg's cinematographer of long standing, shoots fifties New York in warm amber and East Berlin in a grey that gets into your bones, and the contrast does a lot of the storytelling without a word. Thomas Newman takes over the scoring duties that John Williams would normally hold, and his music is sparing and cool, content to sit back rather than swell. Spielberg directs with a confidence that has nothing to prove, holding shots, trusting faces, letting a negotiation play out as a negotiation. The Berlin Wall sequences carry a real chill, and there is one bravura passage cutting between an American schoolroom and a Berlin checkpoint that shows the old showman is still in there under the restraint. At 142 minutes it is unhurried, and a couple of the closing beats lean a touch hard on the uplift, but the patience mostly pays.
## How it stacks up
It sits naturally beside the recent run of intelligent, adult spy cinema. *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy* is the obvious British cousin, another film that finds tension in paperwork, corridors and tired men keeping secrets, though Tomas Alfredson's film is colder and more cryptic where this one wants you to feel its hero's moral pulse. *The Lives of Others* haunts the Berlin scenes, the same divided city, the same sense of ordinary lives squeezed between systems. And it rhymes with Spielberg's own *Munich*, another fact-based study of a decent man asked to do the state's dirty work and quietly unsettled by it. Against all three, *Bridge of Spies* is the warmest and the most classical, less interested in ambiguity than in the unfashionable idea that one stubborn man holding to a principle can matter.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are firmly on side, sitting around 90%, with most of the praise going to the craft, to Hanks's reliability and to Rylance, who is being talked about as the film's secret weapon. Audiences are a little behind at 87%, and the mild grumble you hear is that it is too tasteful and too long, a handsome history lesson with the corners sanded off. There is something to that. It is not a film that will surprise you, and it wears its decency openly. I find that less of a problem than the grumblers do. The pleasure here is in watching grown-up people do difficult things carefully, and there is not enough of that around.
## Verdict
This is precisely the kind of film I keep wishing more people made: an espionage drama that trusts conversation, mood and a strong central performance over chases and gadgets, set in a period it renders with real texture. It is not flawless. The final act tips into sentiment, and you can feel the running time. But it is intelligent, atmospheric and genuinely tense in its best stretches, and Rylance alone is worth the ticket. It is a film I would happily put on again on a wet Sunday, which counts for a great deal with me. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. A DVD and Blu-ray release will follow in the new year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Mark Rylance went on to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his Abel, and the film picked up Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay nominations, confirming the early sense that his was the standout turn. It also began a fruitful run between Spielberg and Rylance, who reunited soon after on *The BFG*. The film is now widely available on disc and digital and turns up regularly on streaming services, where its measured pace plays just as well on the sofa as it did in the cinema.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *infrequent strong language, moderate threat, violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** People are shot as they try and climb over a wall. A prisoner faces sleep deprivation by his captors as they throw buckets of water over him. A man is hit in the stomach with a policeman's gun.
**Threat and horror:** A scene shows people in distress as gun shots are fired into their family home. A man is confronted by a gang. A plane is hit by bombs and we see the pilot struggle to control it as it falls to the ground before he ejects from it.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k') as well as milder terms such as 'son of a bitch' and 'shit'.
**Suicide and self-harm:** There are some undetailed references to soldiers taking their own lives rather than being captured by enemies.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/bridge-of-spies-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotm0mdi)).*
================================================================================
## Black Mass (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-black-mass
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-black-mass.md
- published: 2015-12-09
- document_id: 1045
> Johnny Depp disappears into Whitey Bulger and Scott Cooper builds a cold, watchful Boston gangster film around him. The story is familiar, the menace is not, and on sheer screen presence it earns its place near the front of the genre. 8/10.
- **UK release:** November 2015
- **Director:** Scott Cooper · **Writers:** Mark Mallouk; Jez Butterworth
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros. Pictures; Cross Creek Pictures
- **Genre:** Biographical crime drama / gangster film · **Runtime:** 123 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Johnny Depp (*Donnie Brasco*, *Public Enemies*) as Whitey Bulger; Joel Edgerton (*Warrior*, *Animal Kingdom*) as John Connolly; Benedict Cumberbatch (*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*) as Billy Bulger; Dakota Johnson as Lindsey
- **IMDb:** 6.9 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 73% critics / 68% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Johnny Depp has spent the better part of a decade hiding behind hats, eyeliner and broad accents, and the running complaint has been that you can always see him enjoying the costume. *Black Mass* is the film that takes the costume away. The pale eyes, the receding hairline, the bad teeth: it is still a transformation, but for once it points inward rather than out. This is the South Boston of Whitey Bulger, and Scott Cooper has made a watchful, patient gangster picture that knows exactly which films it is standing in the shadow of.
## The setup
Whitey Bulger (Johnny Depp) runs the Winter Hill Gang in 1970s Boston, a smaller fish than the Italian mafia across town but a more frightening one up close. His childhood friend John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) has grown up to be an FBI agent, and Connolly has an idea that will make both their careers: if Bulger feeds the Bureau enough to bury the Italians, the Bureau will look the other way while Bulger does as he pleases. What begins as a transaction curdles into something neither man controls, as the protection turns Bulger loose and Connolly slides from handler to accomplice. The brother of a state senator, an FBI informant, and one of the most feared men in the city all turn out to be the same person.
## The cast
Depp is the reason to see it, and he resists every temptation to make Bulger likeable. There is charm here, but it is the charm of a man working out whether to trust you or kill you, and the film's best scene is a dinner-table exchange about a family recipe that turns to ice in a single beat. It is the most disciplined work he has done since *Donnie Brasco*, and it is no accident that both films put him on the wrong side of the law without the make-up budget of his blockbuster years. Joel Edgerton may be quietly giving the better performance, all sweat and false confidence as Connolly talks himself deeper into a hole. Benedict Cumberbatch makes a credible Boston politician out of Billy Bulger, the respectable brother who keeps his distance and his deniability, and the bench behind them, the foot soldiers and FBI men, is filled with sharp, lived-in faces.
## The craft
Cooper directs with restraint, which is the right call and occasionally a frustrating one. Masanobu Takayanagi shoots Boston in cold browns and greys, the colour palette of a city that never quite warms up, and the violence arrives without warning and leaves without ceremony. There is no operatic build to the killings here; people are simply alive and then they are not, and the camera does not linger to make a meal of it. Junkie XL's score stays low and tense rather than swelling. It is a film of held breath and small rooms, and Cooper trusts faces and silence to carry the dread. The framing device, with former associates giving evidence to investigators, keeps the structure clear without ever feeling like a crutch.
## How it stacks up
The comparisons are unavoidable, and the film knows it. *Goodfellas* hangs over every American gangster picture, and *The Departed* already mined this exact Boston soil, Irish mob and corrupted lawmen and all. Set against Scorsese's restless energy, *Black Mass* can look static, less interested in momentum than in atmosphere. The fairer comparison is *Donnie Brasco*, another study of a friendship that becomes a trap, told at a human rather than a mythic scale. Cooper is not trying to out-Scorsese anyone. He is making a colder, smaller film about how a city lets a monster operate in plain sight, and on those terms it holds together.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are sitting around 73%, audiences a little lower, and the consensus is that the film is good rather than great, lifted by Depp above material that plays it safe. That is a reasonable reading. The script does keep Bulger at arm's length, declining to explain him, and some viewers will want the engine to rev harder than Cooper lets it. But I think the reserve is deliberate and largely earned. A flashier film would have made Bulger more entertaining and less frightening, and the restraint is what stops this from being a greatest-hits reel of gangster beats.
## Verdict
This lands above the consensus for me because I value atmosphere, control and a central performance that commits without showing off, and *Black Mass* has all three. It is not reinventing the genre, and anyone expecting the velocity of *Goodfellas* will find it deliberately cool to the touch. What it offers instead is menace, a city you can feel, and Depp reminding everyone what he can do when nobody hands him a hat to hide under. It is a film I would happily watch again on a dark evening, and that rewatchability, plus the craft underneath it, carries it. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Black Mass* arrived on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK in spring 2016 and has since settled into its reputation as one of the stronger gangster films of its decade and, for a long stretch, the last reminder of how good Johnny Depp could be in a serious role before his off-screen troubles overtook the conversation. It now streams on the usual rental and subscription platforms depending on region, and pairs naturally with *The Departed* for a double bill of corrupt-Boston cinema.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, very strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** The strong violence is set in the context of brutal gangland rivalries and includes beatings, as well as execution-style shootings and stranglings. The violence is bloody, but the focus is on its cold efficiency rather than its detail or gory consequences.
**Language:** There is frequent strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker', 'c**ksucker') with mild and moderate bad language including uses of 'damn', 'Christ', 'piss', 'shit', 'ass', 'jerking me off', 'jerk off', 'retard', 'prick', 'faggot', 'dick' and 'whore'.
**Additional issues:** There is also brief sight of hard drug use and a crude reference to oral sex.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/black-mass-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtota5mjy2)).*
================================================================================
## The Hunger Games - Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-hunger-games-mockingjay-part-2
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-hunger-games-mockingjay-part-2.md
- published: 2015-11-29
- document_id: 1194
> The four-film saga ends not with an arena but with a march on the Capitol, and a heroine asking whether the people who armed her are any better than the ones she is shooting at. A grim, satisfying close. 8/10.
- **UK release:** November 2015
- **Director:** Francis Lawrence · **Writers:** Peter Craig; Danny Strong
- **Studio / distributor:** Lionsgate; Color Force
- **Genre:** Dystopian war adventure / young-adult science fiction · **Runtime:** 137 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Jennifer Lawrence (*Winter's Bone*, *Silver Linings Playbook*) as Katniss Everdeen; Josh Hutcherson (*Bridge to Terabithia*) as Peeta Mellark; Liam Hemsworth (*The Expendables 2*) as Gale Hawthorne; Donald Sutherland (*Don't Look Now*, *Ordinary People*) as President Snow
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 69% critics / 66% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Four films and one split novel later, the saga that began with children killing each other for television finally arrives at the only place it was ever heading: a war. *Mockingjay - Part 2* is the back half of a book that did not need cutting in two, and Lionsgate's decision to stretch Suzanne Collins's thinnest volume across two releases has been the franchise's most-grumbled-about move. The good news is that the back half is the half with the ending, and Francis Lawrence, who has steered every entry since *Catching Fire*, brings it home with more nerve than the strategy deserved.
## The setup
The rebellion that Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) became the symbol of has rolled almost to the gates of the Capitol, and she has stopped being content to wave a bow for the cameras. Against orders, she attaches herself to a unit pushing into the city, intent on reaching President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and ending him herself. The trouble is that the Capitol's streets have been seeded with traps designed by the same Gamemakers who once built the arenas, so the final approach plays as one more set of pods to be survived, only now the cameras are gone and the dying is for keeps.
What gives the film its spine is the doubt underneath the mission. Katniss has been a weapon for so long that she has started to wonder who is really pointing her, and whether the leadership she is fighting for, embodied in District 13's Coin (Julianne Moore), is any cleaner than the one she is fighting against.
## The cast
Jennifer Lawrence has carried this series since *Winter's Bone* announced her as someone who could play wary, watchful and dangerous all at once, and here she works mostly in exhaustion. This is a Katniss running on fumes, grief and stubbornness, and Lawrence resists every chance to make her triumphant. Josh Hutcherson has the harder, less showy job as Peeta, returned from the Capitol with his mind tampered with, no longer sure whether his love for Katniss is real or installed, and he gives the brainwashing a genuine, twitchy unease rather than playing it for melodrama. Liam Hemsworth's Gale is the blunter point of the love triangle, and the film at last gives him a moral edge worth playing.
Around them the adults steady the world. Donald Sutherland's Snow is a study in soft-spoken rot, a man who smiles while he poisons, and Sutherland plays him with the unhurried menace of an actor who has been doing this since *Don't Look Now*. Julianne Moore's Coin is the film's quiet masterstroke, all reasonable tone and cold arithmetic.
## The craft
Francis Lawrence and cinematographer Jo Willems shoot the Capitol as a beautiful trap, its white avenues turning lethal without warning, and the standout sequence, a flooded underground tunnel stalked by pale, screeching creatures, is the closest the franchise has come to outright horror. It is tense, clammy filmmaking, staged for claustrophobia rather than spectacle. James Newton Howard's score keeps its sombre register throughout, refusing the swell of victory the genre usually leans on. The whole film is darker, in tone and in actual lighting, than anything in the series so far, and at 137 minutes it earns its length by treating the march on the Capitol as a slow, attritional thing rather than a highlight reel.
If there is a craft cost to the two-part split, it is in the opening hour, which still carries the freight of being the second half of a story whose first half was mostly setup. The film takes a while to build momentum. Once it does, it does not let go.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Catching Fire*, still the high point of the franchise, sharper and more surprising than anything here. *Mockingjay - Part 2* cannot match that arena-bound tension, but it is a clear improvement on *Part 1*, which was largely a feature-length prologue. The other comparison the series invites is the *Harry Potter* endgame, *Deathly Hallows - Part 2*, another franchise finale built from the back half of a split book, with the same willingness to let the closing chapter go grim and funereal rather than celebratory. Against the broader young-adult dystopia boom it helped create, the *Divergent* and *Maze Runner* films, this remains the smartest and least cynical of the lot.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are landing around 69%, with audiences a touch lower at 66%, and the split tells its own story. The praise goes to Lawrence and to the bleak political turn of the ending, which refuses the clean catharsis the genre trains you to expect. The complaints are almost all about the structure: a story stretched too thin, a slow first act, a final book that should have been one film. That is a fair charge against the business decision, less so against this instalment, which carries the weight of the ending well. The lower audience number reads to me as a fanbase that wanted a victory lap and got a reckoning instead.
## Verdict
I came to this series for the world-building, the surveillance-state satire and the central performance, and the finale delivers on all three while having the spine to end on a note of moral unease rather than triumph. It is not as tight as *Catching Fire*, and the two-part split leaves it carrying ballast it should not have to, but the underground sequence alone is some of the best craft in the franchise, and the final twist gives the whole saga a harder, more honest shape than dystopian blockbusters usually manage. It rewards a rewatch, especially back to back with *Part 1*, where the dead first hour finally pays off. A grim, satisfying close to a series that always took its premise more seriously than it had to. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, with the earlier three films widely available on DVD, Blu-ray and digital to catch up before the finale.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the series later doubled back to its own origins with *The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes* (2023), a prequel charting a young Coriolanus Snow, which gave Donald Sutherland's reptilian president an unexpected backstory. The four original films have settled in as the benchmark for the young-adult dystopia wave, outlasting the *Divergent* series that fell apart before reaching its own finale. All four stream on various platforms depending on region and are routinely bundled as a boxset.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of moderate violence, with shootings, explosions and arrow strikes, but with very little bloodshed shown.
**Threat and horror:** There is moderate threat in a sequence where Katniss and her friends are attacked by zombie-like creatures in an underground tunnel. A battle follows in which the creatures are shot and stabbed, but without any detail of injury.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-hunger-games-mockingjay-part-2-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zoduynje)).*
================================================================================
## Spectre (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-spectre
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-spectre.md
- published: 2015-11-12
- document_id: 1155
> Sam Mendes returns to give Daniel Craig's Bond a proper villain, a confessed organisation and a surveillance subplot with teeth. Less surprising than Skyfall, but handsome, confident and built to rewatch. 8/10.
- **UK release:** October 2015
- **Director:** Sam Mendes · **Writers:** John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Jez Butterworth
- **Studio / distributor:** Eon Productions; Sony Pictures Releasing
- **Genre:** Espionage action thriller · **Runtime:** 148 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Daniel Craig (*Casino Royale*, *Layer Cake*) as James Bond; Christoph Waltz (*Inglourious Basterds*) as Oberhauser; Léa Seydoux (*Blue Is the Warmest Colour*, *Midnight in Paris*) as Madeleine Swann; Ralph Fiennes (*Schindler's List*, *The English Patient*) as M
- **IMDb:** 6.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 63% critics / 61% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
After *Skyfall*, the most successful Bond film ever made and the one that finally married the series to a director with real intent, Sam Mendes had nothing to prove and a great deal to lose by coming back. He came back anyway, and *Spectre* is the sound of a man trying to tie three previous films into one design while keeping the same gloss. The villainous organisation that the Connery films treated as furniture is restored, named on the poster, and handed to Christoph Waltz. The question is whether that bit of housekeeping was worth the reach, and for me, against the grain of a slightly sniffy reception, the answer is mostly yes.
## The setup
A posthumous message from Bond's past points him, off the leash and against orders, towards a meeting in Mexico City and then towards a shadow that has been standing behind every misfortune of the Craig era. While he chases it across Rome, the Austrian Alps and Tangier, back in London the double-0 programme is itself under threat: a smooth Whitehall operator wants the field agents retired in favour of a global surveillance network that would make M and his people obsolete. The two strands are the same argument from opposite ends, one about a man who refuses to stop, the other about an institution being told it is finished, and the pleasure of the film is watching them close on each other.
## The cast
Craig is now four films into the role and entirely comfortable in it, which means he can play the weariness as well as the violence. This is a Bond who looks faintly tired of his own legend, and Craig lets that show without ever softening the menace. Waltz, doing the courteous-monster routine he perfected in *Inglourious Basterds*, is a fine choice for a villain who enjoys an audience, even if the script keeps him in reserve longer than it should. Léa Seydoux gives Madeleine Swann more spine than the franchise usually allows its leads, wary and intelligent rather than decorative. Around them the London bench does sturdy work: Ralph Fiennes settling into M with dry authority, Ben Whishaw's Q given a proper field outing, Naomie Harris's Moneypenny treated as a colleague. Dave Bautista's near-silent enforcer is the best pure-muscle henchman the series has fielded in years.
## The craft
Mendes and his new cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema open with a single long take through a Day of the Dead crowd that is as good as anything in the series, a swaggering bit of showing-off that earns its swagger. The film is beautiful throughout: amber Roman nights, a white Austrian clinic, a train across the desert lit like a memory. Thomas Newman's score does the brooding heavy lifting, and the action is staged for weight rather than chaos, with crunchy, legible fights and a car chase through Rome played half for laughs. At 148 minutes it is long, and the middle stretch sags where the plotting strains to connect the dots, but the craft never wavers. This is an expensive film that looks every penny.
## How it stacks up
The honest comparison is with *Skyfall*, and *Spectre* loses it. That film had a cleaner spine, a more frightening villain in Javier Bardem, and an emotional payload this one cannot match. Reach back further to *Casino Royale* and you find the same thing: a leaner, hungrier picture. What *Spectre* is doing instead is something the Craig films had avoided, openly courting the baroque mythology of the Connery and Moore era, the secret headquarters, the cat-stroking mastermind, the gadget-laden car. It wants to be a classical Bond film with modern technique, and on that ambition it largely delivers. The surveillance subplot, meanwhile, is the most timely thing in it, a franchise built on a single licensed killer arguing for the human agent against the all-seeing database.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical line is cool, around 63%, with audiences barely warmer at 61%. The recurring complaints are fair: the attempt to retrofit the previous three films into one grand scheme creaks, and Waltz's villain is underused after such a build-up. I take the point and still land higher. Reviews of this kind weigh the disappointment of not being *Skyfall*; I weigh the thing in front of me, which is a gorgeous, confident, genuinely entertaining spy film with espionage, surveillance themes, real locations and a score I would happily sit through again. The reputation undersells it.
## Verdict
*Spectre* is not the best Bond of the Craig run and does not try hard enough to hide the seams in its grand unifying plot. But it is handsome, witty, propulsive and built on exactly the things I value in the genre: tradecraft, atmosphere, a surveillance argument with some bite, and the sheer rewatchable pleasure of a series doing its most expensive version of itself. It is a film I will return to, and that counts for a great deal. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in standard and IMAX. A DVD and Blu-ray release will follow in the new year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Spectre* turned out to be the penultimate chapter of Craig's tenure rather than a fresh start, with *No Time to Die* (2021) closing his run and carrying Madeleine Swann's story to its end. The grand-unifying-villain experiment has aged into the most divisive thing about the Craig era, and the consensus has hardened that *Skyfall* and *Casino Royale* remain the high points. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on Prime Video depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is a scene of torture, although there is only limited detail and the character in question is not seriously harmed. There is also a brief moment of eye-gouging, with limited detail, and a scene in which a man shoots himself in the head, although the bullet impact is not shown on screen. There are a number of scenes of moderate action violence, including crunchy blows and shootings, but these lack any focus on detail. There is occasional sight of injuries resulting from violence, including cuts and grazes, as well as sight of blood on faces, hands and clothing.
**Threat and horror:** There are a number of scenes in which characters are threatened or in danger, including some sustained chase sequences.
**Additional issues:** The film also contains scenes in which couples embrace, kiss and begin to undress, although these scenes cut away before any sex is shown. There are verbal references to various criminal activities, including the trafficking of women, and some mild bad language ('bloody', 'bastard', 'shit', 'moron', 'asshole', 'Jesus', 'Christ', 'hell').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/spectre-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotm3ndy)).*
================================================================================
## Sicario (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-sicario
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-sicario.md
- published: 2015-10-19
- document_id: 1150
> Denis Villeneuve crosses the border into the cartel war and comes back with the most controlled, most frightening thriller of the year. A procedural with the floor pulled out from under it. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** October 2015
- **Director:** Denis Villeneuve · **Writer:** Taylor Sheridan
- **Studio / distributor:** Lionsgate; Black Label Media
- **Genre:** Crime thriller / border-war drama · **Runtime:** 121 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Emily Blunt (*Edge of Tomorrow*, *Looper*) as Kate Macer; Benicio del Toro (*Traffic*, *21 Grams*) as Alejandro; Josh Brolin (*No Country for Old Men*, *Milk*) as Matt Graver; Daniel Kaluuya (*Kick-Ass 2*) as Reggie Wayne
- **IMDb:** 7.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 92% critics / 85% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Denis Villeneuve has been circling Hollywood for a few years now, picking up admirers with *Prisoners* and *Enemy* and quietly becoming the director other directors talk about. *Sicario* is the film that confirms it. He takes a subject that could have been a routine war-on-drugs procedural, hands it to cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, and turns it into something closer to a horror film about institutions. You watch most of it with your shoulders somewhere near your ears.
## The setup
Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is an idealistic FBI agent running kidnap-response raids on the Arizona side of the border. After one raid turns up something worse than a hostage, she is recruited onto an inter-agency task force led by the breezily evasive Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), with a silent, watchful consultant called Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) attached to it. She is told the job is to disrupt a cartel. What she is not told is almost everything else, and the film keeps her, and us, a step behind the people actually running the operation. The pleasure and the dread both come from watching a competent professional realise she has been brought along as a witness, not a participant.
## The cast
Blunt carries the film by refusing to soften Kate into a hero. She is capable, stubborn, and increasingly out of her depth, and Blunt plays the dawning understanding without ever tipping into hysteria. Brolin is enjoying himself enormously as Graver, flip-flops and golf shirts hiding a man who treats sovereign borders as a paperwork problem. The film belongs, though, to del Toro. Alejandro barely speaks for long stretches, and del Toro turns that stillness into the most unsettling presence in any thriller this year, a man whose calm tells you exactly how much violence he has already made peace with. Daniel Kaluuya, as Kate's loyal partner Reggie, is the small human anchor at the edge of the frame, and a name worth remembering.
## The craft
This is where *Sicario* becomes something special. Deakins shoots the border country as a beautiful, indifferent expanse, then drops the camera into a convoy crossing into Juárez and makes a traffic queue feel like a minefield. A night raid filmed in thermal and night-vision is the year's most nerve-shredding sequence, and a long descent into a smuggling tunnel plays like the approach to something in a creature feature. Jóhannsson's score does not so much accompany the images as press down on them, a low industrial groan that tells your body to be afraid before your head has worked out why. Villeneuve controls the tension with the patience of someone who knows that the wait is worse than the bang. The film is gorgeous and almost unbearable at the same time.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is *Traffic*, Steven Soderbergh's sprawling 2000 drug-war mosaic, which also gave del Toro his finest hour on the same frontier. But *Sicario* is narrower and colder, less interested in the system as a whole than in one person discovering she is a pawn in it. It shares the moral exhaustion of *Zero Dark Thirty*, the procedural eye trained on dirty work done in the name of results, and it owes an unmistakable debt to *No Country for Old Men* in its sun-bleached menace and its sense that the old rules no longer apply at the edge of the map. Taylor Sheridan's script, his first to reach the screen, has the bones of a genre thriller and the soul of something bleaker.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting around 92%, praising Villeneuve's control, Deakins' camera and the wall-to-wall dread. Audiences are a little cooler at 85%, and the gap makes sense. This is a film that withholds, that keeps its protagonist and its viewer disoriented on purpose, and that ends somewhere far harsher than a conventional thriller would dare. If you came for catharsis you will leave unsettled. I think that is the film working exactly as intended rather than a flaw, but I understand why some viewers feel cheated of a cleaner resolution.
## Verdict
*Sicario* is a thriller built by people at the top of their craft, and it knows precisely what it is doing to you for every one of its 121 minutes. Blunt grounds it, del Toro haunts it, Deakins and Jóhannsson turn the screws, and Villeneuve proves he can hold an audience in white-knuckle tension without a single wasted scene. It loses a fraction for how deliberately it keeps you at arm's length, and it is not a film you reach for casually on a quiet evening. But as a piece of pure tension-craft it is close to flawless, and del Toro alone makes me want to watch it again. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on general release from 8 October. See it in a proper auditorium where the sound design can do its work.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Villeneuve went straight from here to *Arrival* and *Blade Runner 2049*, confirming the run of form *Sicario* announced, and the film earned three Oscar nominations, including one for Deakins. A sequel, *Sicario 2: Soldado* (2018), followed Alejandro and Graver without Blunt or Villeneuve, and lands well short of the original's grip. Jóhann Jóhannsson, who wrote that extraordinary score, died in 2018. The film now streams across the usual rental and subscription platforms and is well worth seeking out on disc for the picture and sound.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, images of dead bodies, strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are scenes in which men are shot and blood spurts from the wounds.
**Language:** Several uses of strong language ('motherf\*\*ker', 'f\*\*k'), as well as some milder bad language ('bitch', 'shit', 'pissed off', 'Jesus Christ').
**Injury detail:** There are scenes featuring bloodstained corpses, some with injury detail, and there are also scenes showing naked corpses hanging from a bridge. There is a scene showing a man bleeding from a throat wound and one in which a man's severed hand is shown.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/sicario-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotkynja)).*
================================================================================
## The Martian (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-martian
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-martian.md
- published: 2015-10-04
- document_id: 1201
> Ridley Scott swaps dread for competence and makes a survival film about doing the maths. It is funny, clever, gorgeous to look at, and the most purely enjoyable thing he has directed in years. 9.5/10.
- **UK release:** September 2015
- **Director:** Ridley Scott · **Writer:** Drew Goddard (from the novel by Andy Weir)
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Scott Free Productions
- **Genre:** Science fiction survival adventure · **Runtime:** 144 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Matt Damon (*Good Will Hunting*, *The Bourne Identity*) as Mark Watney; Jessica Chastain (*Zero Dark Thirty*) as Melissa Lewis; Chiwetel Ejiofor (*12 Years a Slave*) as Vincent Kapoor; Jeff Daniels (*Dumb and Dumber*) as Teddy Sanders
- **IMDb:** 8.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 91% critics / 91% audience · **My rating:** 9.5 / 10
Ridley Scott has spent most of his career making space a place you do not want to be. *Alien* turned a spacecraft into a haunted house, and *Prometheus* dragged the same dread out to the edge of the solar system. So there is a small thrill in watching him make a film where space is a problem to be solved rather than a thing to be feared, and where the hero's main weapon is not a flamethrower but a working knowledge of botany. *The Martian* is the sunniest, most genuinely entertaining film Scott has put his name to in a long while, and it gets there by trusting that watching a clever person think is more gripping than watching a frightened one run.
## The setup
A NASA crew on the surface of Mars is caught in a storm fierce enough to threaten their ascent vehicle. In the scramble to leave, astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is struck by debris, lost from view and presumed dead, and his commander makes the call to launch without him. He is not dead. He wakes alone on a planet with no one else on it, a habitat built to last a month, and a rescue that, if it comes at all, is years away. What follows is a survival story told as a series of engineering problems: how to make water, how to grow food in dead soil, how to tell Earth you are still breathing when every system you need was never designed for the job. It is a robinsonade with a slide rule, and the pleasure is in watching the sums come out.
## The cast
This is Matt Damon carrying a film almost single-handed, much of it as a video diary spoken to a camera, and it is the most likeable he has been in years. Watney meets catastrophe with sarcasm and stubborn good humour, and Damon makes the optimism feel earned rather than scripted, a man keeping the fear at arm's length by staying busy. Back on Earth and in orbit, the ensemble is deep enough to be distracting in a good way. Jessica Chastain gives Commander Lewis the weight of a decision she has to live with, Chiwetel Ejiofor brings quiet decency to the NASA man running the rescue, and Jeff Daniels is well cast as the administrator weighing one life against the optics of losing it on camera. Nobody is wasted, and nobody is a villain, which is rarer than it sounds.
## The craft
Dariusz Wolski shoots Mars (Wadi Rum standing in for it) as a beautiful, indifferent desert, all rust and pale sky, and Scott resists the urge to make it menacing. The film is clean, bright and unfussy, with a confidence in its own pacing that lets a long stretch of a man planting potatoes hold the screen. The editing keeps three or four storylines turning at once without losing the thread, and the science is presented as something to enjoy rather than skip over. Harry Gregson-Williams scores it with restraint, and the soundtrack's running joke, a marooned astronaut stuck with his commander's disco collection, gives the film a lightness that survival pictures rarely allow themselves. At 144 minutes it never sags, because there is always another problem to be cracked.
## How it stacks up
The obvious neighbours are *Apollo 13* and *Gravity*, and *The Martian* sits comfortably between them. It shares *Apollo 13*'s faith in procedure and teamwork, the drama of clever people in a room solving the unsolvable, and it shares *Gravity*'s sense of one body alone in a hostile vacuum. Where it parts company with both is tone: *Cast Away* is the closer cousin for the lone-survivor ingenuity, but where that film was sombre, this one is buoyant. Set against Scott's own *Prometheus*, it is almost a rebuke, a reminder that he can do wonder without doom. It is the warmest hard-ish science fiction since *Apollo 13*, and it wears its competence as entertainment.
## Critics versus the rest of us
For once critics and audiences are in lockstep, both around 91%, and the praise lands on the same things: the humour, the problem-solving, the optimism, and Damon. The only quibble worth airing is that the film is almost frictionless, that Watney's setbacks are obstacles rather than genuine despair, and that the science occasionally tidies itself a little too neatly. That is true, and I do not much care. The film knows what it is and never pretends to be a grim meditation on isolation. It is a crowd-pleaser with a brain, and the rare one that flatters the audience's intelligence rather than its appetite for spectacle.
## Verdict
This is squarely my kind of film: intelligent science fiction that respects the audience, built on technology and ingenuity rather than mysticism, with a hero who wins by thinking. It is funny without being flippant, gorgeous to look at, and the sort of thing I will happily put on again knowing exactly how it ends, which for me is the real test. The slight lack of jeopardy keeps it a notch below perfect, but only a notch. Scott has made his most likeable film in a decade, and one of the best science fiction films of the year. **9.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D, 3D and IMAX. Worth the bigger screen for the Martian vistas.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to be a major awards contender, taking the Golden Globe for best comedy or musical (a category placement that caused some amusement) and earning a clutch of Oscar nominations including best picture and best actor for Damon. It has settled into a reputation as one of the most rewatchable science fiction films of its decade and a high point of Scott's late career. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *infrequent strong language, injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Language:** There are two clearly spoken uses of strong language ('f**k') and further mouthed uses. There are also obscured written uses of strong language, with asterisks replacing some of the letters, and references to the 'f-word'. Other bad language includes uses of 'Christ', 'Jesus', 'hell', 'damn, 'goddamn', 'shit', 'asshole' and 'dick-punch'.
**Injury detail:** In the aftermath of a catastrophic accident, a character regains consciousness and finds a metal spike has pierced his abdomen. There is some blood around the entry point and blood is also seen when he performs surgery on himself. The bloody images are brief and the focus is on the character's calmness and resourcefulness.
**Additional issues:** There are also sequences of tension as the astronaut tries to deal with his predicament in a hostile environment and in the daring attempts to rescue him.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-martian-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotkzmdq)).*
================================================================================
## The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-man-from-uncle
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-man-from-uncle.md
- published: 2015-08-22
- document_id: 1199
> Guy Ritchie turns a 1960s television relic into a tailored, unhurried Cold War caper that values style and chemistry over plot. Slight on stakes, generous on pleasure, and built to rewatch. 8/10.
- **UK release:** August 2015
- **Director:** Guy Ritchie · **Writers:** Guy Ritchie, Lionel Wigram
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros. Pictures
- **Genre:** Spy action comedy / period caper · **Runtime:** 116 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Henry Cavill (*Man of Steel*) as Napoleon Solo; Armie Hammer (*The Social Network*, *The Lone Ranger*) as Illya Kuryakin; Alicia Vikander (*A Royal Affair*) as Gaby Teller; Elizabeth Debicki (*The Great Gatsby*) as Victoria Vinciguerra
- **IMDb:** 7.2 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 67% critics / 73% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The film adaptation of an old television property usually arrives apologising for itself, dragging a brand name most of the audience is too young to remember. *The Man from U.N.C.L.E.* does the opposite. Guy Ritchie, last seen rattling through two *Sherlock Holmes* pictures, takes the 1964 spy series and declines to update it at all. He keeps it in 1963, dresses it impeccably, slows his own usual tempo right down, and makes a Cold War caper that is far more interested in tailoring, banter and a good split-screen than in whether the bomb goes off. The result is the most relaxed thing Ritchie has made, and one of the most purely enjoyable.
## The setup
Berlin, 1963. Napoleon Solo, a CIA man with a sideline in art theft and an aristocrat's wardrobe, is sent to extract Gaby Teller, the daughter of a missing nuclear scientist, from the East. On his tail is Illya Kuryakin, a KGB operative the size of a wardrobe and twice as tightly wound. The two spend their introduction trying to kill each other across a divided city, which makes it all the more galling when their respective masters order them to work together: a shadowy private organisation with fascist roots is close to building its own atomic weapon, and neither superpower fancies the alternative. Gaby, who turns out to be a good deal more than a damsel to be retrieved, becomes the third point of a triangle that never quite trusts itself. The plot, such as it is, is a clothes-line for set pieces, and the film knows it.
## The cast
The casting is the smartest decision in the film. Henry Cavill plays Solo as a purring, faintly amused operator, all mid-Atlantic vowels and unbothered cool, and it is a revelation after the grim heavy lifting of *Man of Steel*: he is funny, light, and clearly enjoying himself. Armie Hammer gives Kuryakin a coiled, glowering menace that keeps tipping into comedy, a man permanently one insult away from snapping a spine. The double act works because the two never warm up too far; the antagonism is the engine. Alicia Vikander, fresh and quick, refuses to be the accessory the genre usually makes of the female lead, and Elizabeth Debicki is glacially good as the villainess, purring threats in couture. Hugh Grant drifts through the edges as a British handler, plainly having a marvellous time.
## The craft
This is where Ritchie shows real discipline. John Mathieson's cinematography gives every frame the glow of a high-end fashion shoot, all Italian sunlight, sharp suits and period production design you could move into. The action is staged for wit rather than brutality: a boat chase that cuts away to a hero calmly eating a sandwich, a split-screen assault that treats mayhem as choreography. Daniel Pemberton's score is the film's secret weapon, a jazzy, percussive, harpsichord-and-flute pastiche that drives scenes along and sticks in the head for days. Ritchie resists the modern blockbuster's compulsion to go loud and long; at under two hours the film stays light on its feet and never outstays its welcome.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparisons are the ones the film invites. It has the cocktail-bar suavity of early *James Bond* without the body count, the team friction of *Mission: Impossible* without the sweat, and a knowing comic register that *Kingsman* hit earlier in the same year with more crudeness and less elegance. Where Ritchie wins is texture: this looks and sounds more like 1963 than any of its rivals look like anywhere. If anything it sits closest to *Ocean's Eleven*, another film that prized cool, banter and the pleasure of watching attractive people execute a plan, and that is good company to keep.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm but not won over, sitting around 67%, with audiences a little ahead at 73%. The recurring complaint is that the plot is thin and the stakes never bite, and that is true: nobody will leave gripping the armrest. But it misreads the assignment. This is not a thriller pretending to be fun; it is a comedy of espionage that uses the plot as a frame for style and chemistry. Held to that standard it succeeds almost completely, and the audience score reflects people enjoying it for what it is rather than marking it down for what it never tried to be.
## Verdict
I rate rewatchability highly, and this is built for it. The style, the soundtrack, the easy chemistry and the sheer good humour mean it plays beautifully a second and third time, when the slightness of the plot has stopped mattering and you are simply in good company for two hours. It is gorgeous to look at, genuinely funny, and scored to perfection. It is not a heavyweight, and it does not want to be. As a piece of espionage entertainment with style to burn, it is one of the most enjoyable things in cinemas this summer. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. A handsome candidate for Blu-ray when it arrives, ideally watched with the volume up for Pemberton's score.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the hoped-for franchise never materialised, the box office being too modest to trigger the sequel the ending teases. That has only sharpened its standing as a one-off cult favourite, the spy film people press on friends precisely because it never spawned a tired follow-up. Guy Ritchie went on to *The Gentlemen* and a run of Jason Statham vehicles, while Henry Cavill carried the unflappable-spy register forward into other roles. It streams across the usual platforms depending on region and is widely available on disc, where Daniel Pemberton's soundtrack remains the thing most people remember first.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate action violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of moderate action violence include hand-to-hand combat blows, throws and kicks, and undetailed shootings shown in an impressionistic style without sight of impact or blood. In one fight a man is hit with a tyre iron, another is briefly kicked in the face, and there is an implied but unseen stabbing, with a small blood trickle seen in the aftermath. A supposed 'torture' scene shows a hero in an electric chair juddering occasionally when it's switched on, but the intensity is undermined by comic elements throughout the scene. There are also some undetailed references to torture.
**Other issues:** The film also contains mild innuendo, mild sex references, and sight of a woman's bare back as she walks away from a bed. There is also mild and passing drug reference and mild bad language ('ass').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-man-from-u-n-c-l-e-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotg4nzc)).*
================================================================================
## Mission - Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mission-impossible-rogue-nation
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mission-impossible-rogue-nation.md
- published: 2015-08-12
- document_id: 1123
> Christopher McQuarrie takes over the franchise, hands it a proper antagonist and a breakout co-lead in Rebecca Ferguson, and produces the most controlled Mission yet. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2015
- **Director:** Christopher McQuarrie · **Writers:** Christopher McQuarrie; Drew Pearce
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Skydance; Bad Robot
- **Genre:** Espionage action thriller · **Runtime:** 131 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Cruise (*Top Gun*, *Minority Report*) as Ethan Hunt; Rebecca Ferguson (*The White Queen*) as Ilsa Faust; Simon Pegg (*Shaun of the Dead*, *Hot Fuzz*) as Benji Dunn; Jeremy Renner (*The Hurt Locker*, *The Avengers*) as William Brandt; Sean Harris (*Prometheus*) as Solomon Lane; Ving Rhames (*Pulp Fiction*) as Luther Stickell
- **IMDb:** 7.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 87% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Five films in, the Mission: Impossible series has become an unusual thing in the modern blockbuster landscape: a franchise with no fixed house style, that hands each entry to a different director and lets him make the film his own. Brian De Palma made a paranoid Hitchcock puzzle, John Woo made an operatic shoot-out, J.J. Abrams brought television urgency, and Brad Bird turned *Ghost Protocol* into a globe-trotting machine of set-pieces. Now Christopher McQuarrie steps up, the writer of *The Usual Suspects* and Cruise's collaborator on *Jack Reacher*, and the question hanging over *Rogue Nation* is whether a man known for tight, talky thrillers can run a tentpole this size. He can, and the surprise is how much restraint he brings to it.
## The setup
The IMF has been shut down, folded into the CIA by a sceptical director who regards Ethan Hunt as a one-man liability. Hunt, cut loose and operating without sanction, is chasing the Syndicate, a shadow organisation of supposedly dead intelligence officers who have turned their training on the agencies that made them. The trail runs through Vienna, Casablanca and London, and through Ilsa Faust, a British agent whose loyalties never quite resolve and who may be working every side of the board at once. The plot is built less on twists than on a single sustained question: who, exactly, is Ilsa working for, and how long can Hunt keep trusting someone he cannot read.
## The cast
Cruise does what Cruise has done for two decades, throwing himself at the camera with a commitment that still reads as slightly unhinged, and the film opens with him clinging to the outside of an aircraft as it takes off, a stunt the marketing has understandably refused to shut up about. But the performance that the film belongs to is Rebecca Ferguson's. Ilsa Faust is the best character the series has produced: capable, watchful, and genuinely unknowable, a match for Hunt rather than a prize for him. Ferguson plays her with a stillness that makes every scene a negotiation. Simon Pegg has grown from comic relief into Hunt's actual partner, and the film trusts Benji with real jeopardy. Sean Harris makes Solomon Lane a soft-spoken, asthmatic kind of menace, the first Mission villain in a while who feels like a deliberate inversion of Hunt rather than a generic arms dealer.
## The craft
McQuarrie shoots action you can follow. That sounds like faint praise and is meant as the opposite: in a decade of shaky-cam and over-cut mayhem, *Rogue Nation* stages its big sequences with clean geometry and lets you understand where everyone is and what is at stake. The Vienna opera house set-piece is the standout, a long, patient sequence built on crosscutting and sightlines that owes more to *The Man Who Knew Too Much* than to any recent action film, and the underwater vault break-in plays as a single held breath. Robert Elswit's cinematography gives the European locations real texture, and Joe Kraemer's score leans into Lalo Schifrin's original themes with proper orchestral weight rather than the usual percussion wallpaper. The film runs a touch over two hours and earns it.
## How it stacks up
The natural comparison is *Ghost Protocol*, and the two films pull in different directions. Bird's entry was the lighter, more gadget-driven thrill ride, hung on the Burj Khalifa climb; McQuarrie's is cooler, more plotted, more interested in its antagonist and its femme fatale than in pure spectacle. Against the wider field, *Rogue Nation* is the most Bond-like Mission yet, and it arrives as a quiet rebuke to the Bond films it resembles: a tighter villain than *Spectre* would manage, a stronger female lead than the series usually allows, and a clearer head for action than most of its rivals. It is also the entry that establishes the series's late-period identity, the one where the stunts become the brand and the supporting team becomes a genuine ensemble.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been close to unanimous, sitting at 93%, with most of the praise going to McQuarrie's control, the practical stunt work and Ferguson's arrival. Audiences are a little behind at 87%, which feels about right: this is a film built to satisfy rather than astonish, and a few viewers want their summer action louder and dumber than this. I am closer to the critics. The things I value in genre work are all here, intelligent plotting, espionage craft, a strong sense of place, and an action style that respects the audience's eyes, and the film delivers them without ever feeling pleased with itself.
## Verdict
This is a confident, grown-up action film that knows precisely what it is doing. The plot is more functional than ingenious, and Lane is a fraction underused for a villain this well conceived, but those are small complaints against a film this clean and this rewatchable. Ferguson alone would lift it; the opera sequence and the aircraft stunt seal it. The series has found a director who can hold the whole thing together, and a co-lead worth building the next one around. It is the kind of action film I will happily put on again, which for this genre is the highest compliment I have. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX. A 3D conversion was considered and dropped; see it flat, on the largest screen you can find.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: McQuarrie stayed on for *Mission: Impossible - Fallout* (2018), the first time a director has returned to the series, and built directly on the foundations laid here, bringing back Ilsa, Lane and the whole ensemble. Ferguson's Faust has since become a fixture of the franchise. *Rogue Nation* now reads as the pivot point where the series settled into its modern form, with Cruise's escalating practical stunts as the headline act. It is widely available on disc and digital, and streams on Paramount+ depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence* (the home entertainment release is rated **12**). The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are several crunchy fight scenes, featuring blows being delivered. Some scenes involve knives. People are shot although little is seen in terms of blood or injury detail. A man falls and it is implied he is impaled.
**Threat and horror:** There are frequent intense action sequences, including fights and a motorcycle chase. Restrained people are threatened with interrogation.
**Language:** There is some mild bad language, including 'shit'.
**Sex:** There are some mild verbal sex references.
**Injury detail:** There is limited sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/mission-impossible-rogue-nation-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zodm5nzu)).*
================================================================================
## Ant-Man (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-ant-man
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-ant-man.md
- published: 2015-07-15
- document_id: 1033
> Marvel closes its second phase not with a god or a billionaire but with a burglar, a heist and a man the size of a fingernail. The smallest premise on the slate turns out to be one of the most enjoyable. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2015
- **Director:** Peyton Reed · **Writers:** Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, Paul Rudd
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero heist comedy / science-fiction adventure · **Runtime:** 117 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Paul Rudd (*Anchorman*, *Knocked Up*) as Scott Lang; Evangeline Lilly (*Lost*, *The Hobbit*) as Hope van Dyne; Michael Douglas (*Wall Street*, *Basic Instinct*) as Hank Pym; Corey Stoll (*Midnight in Paris*, *House of Cards*) as Darren Cross
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 83% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
*Ant-Man* arrives with a backstory more dramatic than anything in the film itself. Edgar Wright spent the better part of a decade developing it, then walked away over creative differences weeks before shooting, leaving Marvel to hand the keys to Peyton Reed and reassemble the script on the fly. Every sign pointed to a mess. What actually opens in cinemas is the loosest, most relaxed thing the studio has made, a film that has the confidence to close out a phase of universe-building with a story about a man stealing a suit, and to treat that as a feature rather than a comedown.
## The setup
Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is a cat burglar with a master's in electrical engineering and a daughter he is not allowed to see, freshly out of prison and finding that an honest job is harder to keep than a safe is to crack. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), a retired scientist sitting on a technology he has spent his life hiding from the world, picks Scott for exactly the skills that put him inside: the ability to shrink to the size of an insect while keeping the force of a full-grown man, and the nerve to use it. Pym's old protege Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) is close to weaponising the same science, which means the job is a heist with a deadline. Scott has to learn to control the suit, win round Pym's wary daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), and break into a building he has every reason to leave alone. It is redemption dressed as a robbery, and it knows it.
## The cast
Rudd is the reason the whole thing holds together. He brings the easy, slightly bruised charm he has spent a comedy career refining, and he plays Scott as a decent man who happens to be good at a bad thing rather than a quipping action figure. Douglas is the surprise, lending Pym a real weight of regret and old-guard authority that the science-fiction nonsense badly needs to feel earned; he sells the impossible with a straight face. Lilly is given the thankless job of standing slightly outside the fun and mostly makes it land, her impatience with the men around her well placed. Stoll's Cross is the usual Marvel problem, a villain who is a dark mirror of the hero and not much else, though Stoll gives him a genuine streak of wounded ego. The film is quietly stolen by Michael Pena as Scott's motormouth former cellmate, whose rambling, side-tracking storytelling is funnier than anything in the script proper.
## The craft
What Reed and the writers understand is that a man who shrinks is a gift to visual comedy, and they spend it well. The set pieces play with scale in ways the bigger Marvel films never bother to: a fight that to the human eye is two men barely moving, a climax staged across the geography of a child's bedroom with toy trains and consumer electronics turned into towering hazards. Christophe Beck's score keeps things light and quick on its feet, and Russell Carpenter's photography sells the smallness without ever losing you. The shrinking effect itself is convincing, the macro photography genuinely lovely, and there is real wit in how the film treats the ant colony as workmates rather than spectacle. At 117 minutes it is among the leanest things the studio has released, and it moves.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Iron Man*, the other Marvel film built on a workshop, a flawed man and a suit he has to learn to fly, and *Ant-Man* is the smaller, funnier cousin of that origin story. The closer relative is last year's *Guardians of the Galaxy*, which proved the studio could let a film be silly and charming and still belong to the universe. But the bones here are older than either. This is a heist picture, closer to *Ocean's Eleven* or a caper from the 1960s than to a standard superhero outing, with the crew, the plan, the gadget and the run-through that never survives contact with the job. Reed reaches back to the genre, and the comedy lands better for it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm, sitting around 83%, with audiences a little higher at 86%, and the consensus is that a behind-the-scenes near-disaster turned into one of the more likeable entries on the slate. The recurring complaint is the familiar one, that the villain is thin and the third act collapses into the usual climactic punch-up. Both are fair. I would push back only on the suggestion that the small stakes are a weakness. After a run of films where the threat is a city, a country or the planet, a story whose climax fits on a windowsill is a relief, and the modesty is the appeal rather than a failing.
## Verdict
This is a film I came out of grinning and would happily put on again, which counts for a great deal with me. It is funny without straining, it uses its premise inventively instead of treating it as a punchline, and it has the good sense to be a heist comedy first and a universe-building exercise second. The villain is forgettable and the plot mechanics creak in the final stretch, but the cast, the wit and the sheer rewatchability carry it past those flaws with room to spare. The smallest hero on the roster has made one of the most purely enjoyable films of the year. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and 3D. A DVD and Blu-ray release will follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Scott Lang turned out to be no one-off. He returned to fight alongside the larger roster in *Captain America: Civil War* (2016) before a direct sequel, *Ant-Man and the Wasp* (2018), promoted Hope van Dyne to co-lead and gave the partnership the billing the first film only hinted at. The original has settled into its reputation as one of Marvel's most rewatchable smaller pictures, the palate-cleanser between the heavier ensemble films. It now streams on Disney+ and is widely available on disc and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate action violence, moderate bad language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of moderate action violence include kicks, punches, and occasional gunfights, while the antagonist utilises a suit that fires lasers. Sight of blood is infrequent and discreet, and much of the violence contains comic elements. There is also a scene in which a futuristic device is used to turn a man, and later a lamb, into a tiny puddle of goo, although the transformation is rapid and contains no gory detail.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of moderate bad language ('pussy') and occasional mild bad language, including 'shit', 'ass', 'son of a bitch', and 'screwed'. A character refers to Ant-Man's ability to shrink as 'the work of gypsies', although the language is not intended to be derogatory.
**Additional issues:** There are infrequent mild sex references, including a passing reference to the first pair of breasts a man touched.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/ant-man-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotg4mtk)).*
================================================================================
## Jurassic World (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-jurassic-world
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-jurassic-world.md
- published: 2015-06-17
- document_id: 1107
> Twenty-two years after the park first failed, the gates reopen on a working resort and a lab-grown monster nobody should have built. It is louder and less magical than the original, but it knows exactly what it is for. 8/10.
- **UK release:** June 2015
- **Director:** Colin Trevorrow · **Writers:** Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; Amblin Entertainment; Legendary Pictures
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / creature blockbuster · **Runtime:** 124 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chris Pratt (*Guardians of the Galaxy*, *The Lego Movie*) as Owen Grady; Bryce Dallas Howard (*The Village*, *The Help*) as Claire Dearing; Vincent D'Onofrio (*Full Metal Jacket*, *Men in Black*) as Vic Hoskins; Irrfan Khan (*Slumdog Millionaire*, *Life of Pi*) as Simon Masrani
- **IMDb:** 7.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 70% critics / 78% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Twenty-two years after the original *Jurassic Park* opened its gates to a select few and then ate most of them, the franchise has been dormant long enough that a reboot was the only sensible move. Two limp sequels in the late nineties and a third in 2001 had drained the wonder out of the idea, and the obvious question hanging over *Jurassic World* is whether anyone can recapture what Spielberg did in 1993, or whether the dinosaurs are now just a brand. Colin Trevorrow, plucked from the small indie comedy *Safety Not Guaranteed* to direct a tentpole on this scale, answers it with a film that is openly aware of the problem. The conceit here is that the park finally works, has been working for years, and the public has grown bored of mere dinosaurs. That is a sharp piece of self-criticism to build a blockbuster on.
## The setup
Isla Nublar now hosts a functioning luxury resort, twenty thousand visitors a day strolling past once-impossible animals the way you might wander a safari park. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) runs operations for the park's owner, the breezy billionaire Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), and the numbers say attendance plateaus unless there is something bigger and scarier to sell. The lab obliges with the Indominus rex, a hybrid stitched together from several species and a few corporate ambitions, engineered to be the headline attraction. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), an ex-Navy animal behaviourist who has been training a pack of velociraptors, is brought in to assess the new asset's paddock. The assessment does not go well. From there the film does what the title promises: the spectacle the park was selling turns on the people selling it, and a working theme park becomes a containment failure with eighty square kilometres of guests inside it.
## The cast
Pratt is doing his post-*Guardians* leading-man turn here, and it suits the material. Owen is competent, dryly funny and entirely unbothered, a man who treats a paddock of raptors as a management problem rather than a nightmare, and Pratt sells that calm without tipping into smug. Bryce Dallas Howard has the harder and less rewarded job: Claire begins as the buttoned-up executive who refers to the animals as assets, and the script makes her thaw across the runtime. Howard finds more in it than the writing strictly earns, and her late-film competence under pressure is one of the small pleasures of the back half. Vincent D'Onofrio plays Hoskins, the security contractor who sees the raptors as a weapons programme, with exactly the right amount of self-satisfied menace. Best of all is Irrfan Khan as Masrani, who gives the billionaire a genuine, almost childlike delight in his creatures that grounds the film's better instincts. The two child characters, Claire's visiting nephews, are functional rather than memorable, there to be imperilled on cue.
## The craft
Trevorrow directs the set pieces with confidence, and the film is at its strongest when it stops apologising and lets the animals loose. A pterosaur attack on the crowded main street is staged with real verve, and the raptors-on-patrol sequences have a tactical tension the franchise has never tried before. John Schwartzman shoots the resort in bright, glossy daylight, which is a deliberate inversion of the original's rain-soaked dread and mostly pays off, even if it costs the film some atmosphere. Michael Giacchino's score does its duty and knows when to let John Williams's original theme swell, and the film leans on that nostalgia hard, sometimes shamelessly: a wander through the ruined original visitor centre is pure fan service, and it works. The Indominus itself is a fine creation, smart in a way that keeps the threat fresh. The effects are a blend of practical and digital that occasionally shows its seams, but the animals have weight and the action has stakes.
## How it stacks up
The film *Jurassic World* is forever measuring itself against is, of course, the 1993 original, and on that count it loses, as it was always going to. Spielberg's film had patience, awe and the sheer novelty of seeing a brachiosaur for the first time, and nothing here matches that first reveal. What this one has instead is scale and self-awareness. It is closer in spirit to a classic creature feature, the lineage that runs back through *King Kong* and the monster-island tradition, than to the careful science-thriller of the original. Set beside the two nineties sequels, *The Lost World* and *Jurassic Park III*, it is comfortably the best of the follow-ups, because it has an idea and a tone rather than just more teeth.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are running around 70%, broadly approving but with a recurring reservation: the magic of the first film is gone, replaced by something more mechanical and corporate. Audiences are warmer, at 78%, and the box office suggests the appetite for big-screen dinosaurs never really went away. I am closer to the audience here. The critical line is fair, but it slightly misses what this film is doing. The corporate sheen is not a failure of imagination; it is the subject. A park that has commodified wonder until the customers want it bigger is a knowing comment on the blockbuster machine that produced the film itself, and that gives the spectacle a faint, welcome layer of bite.
## Verdict
This is not the equal of the film that started it all, and it is not trying to be something it cannot. What it is, is a confident, propulsive, genuinely entertaining blockbuster that understands its own franchise and has fun with it. The leads are well cast, the set pieces deliver, and the central idea, that we have grown bored of miracles and keep demanding louder ones, is smarter than the genre usually bothers with. It is hugely rewatchable, the kind of film that rewards a big screen and a big sound system, and it sends you out grinning. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D, 3D and IMAX. The larger formats are worth the surcharge for the street-level pterosaur sequence alone.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Jurassic World* launched a new trilogy, followed by *Fallen Kingdom* (2018) and *Dominion* (2022), neither of which recaptured the cleaner shape of this first entry, and the series has since rebooted again with a fresh cast. The film has settled into its reputation as the strongest of the modern revival and the one that proved the dinosaurs still sold. It is widely available on disc and digital and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, occasional bloody moments, action violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Action violence as dinosaurs chase and attack humans, with several people picked up in the jaws of gigantic dinosaurs. Soldiers fire guns at the dinosaurs to try and stop them. There are also some fights between dinosaurs.
**Threat and horror:** Several sequences of moderate threat include humans being chased by dinosaurs, or hiding when aggressive dinosaurs are nearby. Some children are shown being scared and upset, but they reassure each other and are not harmed.
**Injury detail:** Occasional bloody moments feature, without any strong detail or clear focus on injuries. There is sight of blood spray on a window and some blood is seen falling through a tree canopy as a person is killed by a dinosaur. A man is stabbed in the chest when a pterodactyl flies into him.
**Language:** There is mild bad language, including several uses of 'shit' and 'son of a bitch'.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adults are seen drinking alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/jurassic-world-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zota2nte)).*
================================================================================
## Tomorrowland (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-tomorrowland
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-tomorrowland.md
- published: 2015-06-02
- document_id: 1226
> Brad Bird leaves animation to build a sincere, retro-futurist adventure about the cost of giving up on the future. The story wobbles where the design soars, but the optimism is hard to resist. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** May 2015
- **Director:** Brad Bird · **Writers:** Damon Lindelof; Brad Bird
- **Studio / distributor:** Walt Disney Pictures; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / family mystery · **Runtime:** 130 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** George Clooney (*Ocean's Eleven*, *Gravity*) as Frank Walker; Britt Robertson as Casey Newton; Raffey Cassidy (*Snow White and the Huntsman*, *Dark Shadows*) as Athena; Hugh Laurie (*Stuart Little*) as David Nix
- **IMDb:** 6.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 50% critics / 49% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Brad Bird has spent his career making the case that animation is not a genre but a tool, and that the best adventure films are built by people who love the machinery. *The Incredibles* and *Ratatouille* were proof, and *Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol* showed he could do the same with live actors hanging off the Burj Khalifa. *Tomorrowland* is the film where he plants a flag on his actual subject. It is a big, earnest, expensive Disney picture about optimism itself, about what happens to a culture that has decided the future is something to dread rather than build. That is a strange thing to hang a summer tentpole on, and the strain shows. So does the conviction.
## The setup
Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) is a teenager who refuses to accept that things are getting worse. The daughter of a soon-to-be-redundant NASA engineer, she is the kind of kid who sabotages the dismantling of a launch pad on principle. Then she touches a small enamel pin and, for as long as she holds it, finds herself standing in a gleaming city of monorails and rocket gantries, a place that exists somewhere just out of reach. Chasing the pin to its source leads her to Frank Walker (George Clooney), a brilliant, bitter inventor who was thrown out of that very city as a boy and has spent the years since waiting, gloomily, for the end of the world. Casey wants to know how to get back in. Frank knows exactly why the door was shut, and a watchful girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) knows more than either of them.
## The cast
Clooney is doing something he rarely lets himself do, which is play a man who has given up. His Frank is prickly, defended, allergic to hope, and the easy charm is buried under a decade of disappointment. It works because Clooney trusts that we will wait for the thaw. Britt Robertson has the harder job, carrying the film's wide-eyed argument on her shoulders without curdling into a slogan, and she mostly manages it, bright and stubborn rather than saccharine. The real find is Raffey Cassidy as Athena. She has the toughest assignment in the cast and gives the strangest, most affecting performance in it, a child carrying an old soul and an enormous secret. Hugh Laurie turns up late as Nix, the governor of the hidden city, and brings a weary, articulate intelligence that gives the climax more weight than the plotting has earned.
## The craft
Visually the film is a treat. Claudio Miranda shoots the titular city as clean, sunlit, mid-century futurism, all swooping monorails and white towers and the kind of jetpacks the 1964 World's Fair promised us and never delivered. This is retro-futurism done with real affection rather than irony, and it is gorgeous. Bird stages two or three genuinely inventive set pieces, including a house that turns out to be an armoury and a launch sequence I will not spoil, and Michael Giacchino's score swells with exactly the soaring, hopeful sound the images are reaching for. The trouble is the screenplay, by Bird and Damon Lindelof, which keeps stopping to explain its own thesis. There is a long stretch in the final act where a character simply tells you what the film is about, at length, and the spell the design has cast starts to fray.
## How it stacks up
The obvious reference points are the films Bird clearly loves. There is a lot of *Close Encounters of the Third Kind* here, in the wonder and the pull of something glimpsed and not understood, and a clear debt to *The Rocketeer* and to the whole stretch of pulp adventure that believed the future would be bright and chrome. It also sits oddly alongside Lindelof's other recent work; this is a far sunnier object than *Prometheus*, but it shares that film's habit of raising enormous questions and then handling them a little clumsily. Set against Bird's own back catalogue it is the weakest of his features, but the weakest Brad Bird film is still made with more craft and more heart than most of what shares the multiplex with it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are split almost down the middle, and audiences are not warmer. Both are sitting around the fifty per cent mark, and the recurring complaint is the same: the film is beautiful, ambitious, and finally too preachy and too muddled to land. That is a fair charge. The mystery-box structure promises more than the answers deliver, and the message arrives by megaphone. What the consensus undersells is how rare it is, and how welcome, to see a major studio spend this kind of money on sincerity rather than apocalypse. The cynicism the film is arguing against is the same cynicism greeting it at the door.
## Verdict
I came out of this liking it more than its scores suggest, and I think that is down to taste rather than charity. I value world-building, intelligent science fiction and atmosphere, and on those counts *Tomorrowland* delivers a place I genuinely wanted to spend time in. The plotting is loose and the sermon is unmistakable, and there is a better, tighter film somewhere inside this generous, overstuffed one. But it is bright, it is kind, it looks magnificent, and it believes in something, and I would happily watch it again. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and selected 3D screenings.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Tomorrowland* landed as a notable box-office disappointment for Disney, and its reputation has since settled into cult fondness rather than vindication, championed by viewers who share its optimism and forgive its lecturing. Brad Bird returned to animation with *Incredibles 2* (2018), a reminder of where his surest instincts lie. The film is now available on disc and digital and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of moderate violence include a humanoid robot's head being repeatedly struck with a baseball bat. Other fight scenes, also involving humanoid robots, contain crunchy kicks, punches and a knee strike; a head is smashed into a glass display case and a female robot's head is pulled off. In another scene there is a very sudden and violent impact as a character is run over by a pickup truck.
**Additional issues:** Other issues include mild threat, mild drug references, and mild and very mild bad language, including uses of 'bloody', 'bollocks', 'damn', 'God', 'hell' and 'piss'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/tomorrowland-a-world-beyond-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotewody)).*
================================================================================
## Mad Max - Fury Road (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mad-max-fury-road
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mad-max-fury-road.md
- published: 2015-05-16
- document_id: 1115
> George Miller comes back to the wasteland after thirty years and makes the leanest, loudest action film in ages. Almost no plot, almost no let-up, and a stunt team doing it for real. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** May 2015
- **Director:** George Miller · **Writers:** George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nico Lathouris
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros; Village Roadshow Pictures
- **Genre:** Post-apocalyptic action adventure · **Runtime:** 120 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Tom Hardy (*Bronson*, *Warrior*) as Max Rockatansky; Charlize Theron (*Monster*, *Aeon Flux*) as Imperator Furiosa; Nicholas Hoult (*A Single Man*, *Warm Bodies*) as Nux; Hugh Keays-Byrne (*Mad Max*) as Immortan Joe
- **IMDb:** 8.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 97% critics / 85% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
George Miller has not directed a Mad Max film since *Beyond Thunderdome* in 1985, and in the thirty years between he has made talking pigs and dancing penguins. So the first surprise of *Fury Road* is simply that it exists, and the second is that a seventy-year-old with that CV has come back and shamed every younger director currently bolting action sequences together in a computer. This is a film made by someone who remembers what a stunt is for, and who has waited a very long time to do it at this scale.
## The setup
Max (Tom Hardy) is captured in the opening minutes by the war-boys of Immortan Joe, a warlord who controls the water and farms his own people for blood and labour. He is barely a free agent for most of what follows. The actual driver of the story is Furiosa (Charlize Theron), one of Joe's trusted lieutenants, who takes a war rig off its fuel run and points it at the horizon with five of Joe's captive wives hidden aboard. Joe gives chase with his entire army, Max is dragged along strapped to the bonnet of a pursuing car, and the film becomes one enormous escape across the desert and, eventually, back again. That is close to the whole of it. There is almost no plot in the conventional sense, and the film is stronger for refusing to stop and explain itself.
## The cast
Hardy inherits a role Mel Gibson made famous, and wisely does not try to out-charm him. His Max is a near-mute, haunted, animal presence who communicates in grunts and the occasional flat line of dialogue, and Hardy has the physical heft to make that read as competence rather than sulking. The clever decision is that the film is not really his. Theron's Furiosa is the lead in everything but the title, a shaven-headed, grease-streaked driver carrying a private grief and a fierce protectiveness, and Theron plays her with a stillness that holds the centre of a very loud film. Nicholas Hoult is the other standout as Nux, a dying war-boy raised to believe death in battle buys him paradise, whose slow turn is the closest the film comes to an arc. Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played the villain in the original 1979 *Mad Max*, returns behind a grille mask as Immortan Joe and makes a genuinely grotesque monster of him.
## The craft
This is where the film justifies its reputation. Miller and cinematographer John Seale shoot the chases with a clarity that has gone missing from the genre: the camera is centred, the geography is legible, and you always know who is where and how fast they are closing. The stunt work is overwhelmingly practical, real vehicles and real bodies flung across real desert, and the pole-cats swinging over the convoy on long bending masts are the kind of image you do not forget. The editing is relentless without becoming incoherent, which is a much harder trick than it looks. Junkie XL's percussion-and-guitar score is welded to the action, helped by the flame-throwing guitarist Joe straps to the front of his war party, a detail so absurd it loops back round to brilliant. The colour grade, deep orange days and cold blue nights, gives the wasteland a storybook vividness rather than the usual grey murk.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is back to Miller's own *The Road Warrior*, still the high-water mark for vehicular carnage, and *Fury Road* is essentially that film rebuilt with three decades of budget and ambition. It also sits naturally beside the recent run of lean, brutal action films that trust their craft over their plot: *Dredd* and *The Raid* both stripped the genre down to a single forward motion and let the staging carry it, and *Fury Road* does the same on a vastly bigger canvas. What separates it is the world-building. The wives, the blood-bags, the seed-keepers, the entire grotesque economy of Joe's citadel is delivered in passing, through design and behaviour rather than exposition, and it leaves you with the sense of a fully imagined place glimpsed at speed.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have gone close to unanimous, sitting at 97%, hailing it as a benchmark for action cinema and singling out the practical stunts and Furiosa's central role. Audiences are warm but more divided, around 85%, and the gap is easy to read: viewers who came for a Mad Max film and got a two-hour car chase with a hundred lines of dialogue were always going to split. I land nearer the critics, though not all the way. The thinness of plot that lets the film fly is also a ceiling on it; there is not much to chew on once the engines cool, and the emotional stakes belong almost entirely to Furiosa rather than to the man whose name is on the poster.
## Verdict
What I value most here is the craft and the rewatchability, and on both this is near the top of its class. It is a film built to be put on again, dipped into for a sequence, admired for the sheer physical audacity of how it was made. It is not the deepest thing in the genre and it does not pretend to be, but as a piece of pure, beautifully engineered action spectacle it is about as good as the form gets. The fact that it was made largely for real, with cranes and cars and stunt performers rather than a render farm, only makes it more impressive. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the largest screen you can find; this is a film that loses something on a laptop.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Miller returned to the wasteland with *Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga* (2024), a Theron-free prequel handing the role to Anya Taylor-Joy and filling in the backstory the original wisely left to a glance. *Fury Road* has only grown in standing, routinely cited as one of the defining action films of its decade, and it picked up six technical Academy Awards. A black-and-white "Black and Chrome" edition exists as Miller's preferred version. It is now widely available on disc, including 4K, and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Frequent scenes of violence and threat include sustained vehicular chase scenes. These include scenes where people fight, are shot and stabbed, or run over by vehicles. However, injury detail is limited. There is also a scene in which a man is struck on the chest by a chainsaw, which is followed by a brief blood spurt. In another scene a man's mask is ripped from his face, and there is a brief gush of blood.
**Additional issues:** A woman has a baby cut from her body. The cutting occurs below frame and is followed by sight of a man handling the placenta. There is also brief non-sexualised female nudity and mild bad language ('bollocks', 'shite').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/mad-max-fury-road-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotc3ntu)).*
================================================================================
## Chappie (2015)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-chappie
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-chappie.md
- published: 2015-03-10
- document_id: 1058
> Neill Blomkamp turns a stolen police droid into a newborn mind raised by Johannesburg gangsters. It is messy, sincere and far more interesting than the critics will tell you. 8/10.
- **UK release:** March 2015
- **Director:** Neill Blomkamp · **Writers:** Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Sony Pictures Releasing
- **Genre:** Science fiction action drama / AI fable · **Runtime:** 120 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Sharlto Copley (*District 9*, *The A-Team*) as Chappie; Dev Patel (*Slumdog Millionaire*) as Deon; Hugh Jackman (*X-Men*, *Les Misérables*) as Vincent; Sigourney Weaver (*Alien*, *Aliens*) as Michelle Bradley
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 33% critics / 56% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Neill Blomkamp arrives at his third feature with a reputation he half-earned and half-borrowed. *District 9* announced him as the most exciting science fiction director in a decade, a man who could weld grimy social allegory onto first-rate effects on a modest budget. *Elysium* then spent a fortune restating the same politics with less wit. *Chappie* is the film where you find out which Blomkamp you are actually dealing with, and the answer turns out to be both of them at once: the inventive one and the undisciplined one, sharing a frame. The critics have already decided this is the strike. I think they have misread what kind of film it is.
## The setup
Johannesburg has handed its policing to a fleet of armed droids built by a weapons firm and designed by Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), a young engineer with grander ambitions than crowd control. On his own time Deon cracks the problem nobody has solved, a genuinely conscious machine mind, and loads it into a written-off droid earmarked for the scrapheap. Before he can do anything sensible with it, both engineer and robot are snatched by a trio of small-time gangsters who want a thinking machine of their own for a heist. So the most advanced artificial intelligence on earth wakes up with the mental age of a child and three criminals for parents, while Deon's jealous colleague Vincent (Hugh Jackman) schemes to see the whole programme burn.
That premise, a newborn mind raised badly in a violent world, is the spine of the film, and it is a stronger idea than the heist plot wrapped around it.
## The cast
Sharlto Copley plays Chappie himself, entirely through motion capture, and it is the performance the film lives or dies on. He gives the robot a wholly convincing arc from terrified newborn to swaggering adolescent to something close to a soul, all in a tinny accented voice and a body of dented metal. It is the most expressive digital character since the Na'vi, and it carries real feeling. Patel is sympathetic as the idealist who cannot control what he has made. The boldest swing is casting the South African rap-rave duo Die Antwoord, playing versions of themselves as the gangster guardians, which is either the film's most authentic texture or its most baffling indulgence depending on the scene. Jackman, against type as a mulleted ex-soldier with a rival killer robot, is broad and a little wasted. Sigourney Weaver, as the firm's chief executive, is barely given a part to play.
## The craft
Blomkamp shoots Johannesburg as a real, sun-blasted, rubbish-strewn place, and the integration of the droids into it is seamless. Chappie is a triumph of design and effect, a believable object you forget is not there. Trent Opaloch's photography keeps the grime and the grandeur in the same shot, and Hans Zimmer's score, more electronic and abrasive than his usual register, suits the world. Where the craft wobbles is the tone, which lurches from sincere meditation on consciousness to cartoonish gangster comedy to a hard-R action climax, sometimes inside a single scene. A steadier director would have chosen. Blomkamp refuses to, and the film is rougher and stranger for it.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is *Short Circuit*, the gentle 1986 comedy about a military robot that gains a conscience and a personality, and *Chappie* is essentially that story with the safety off. There is *RoboCop* in the corporate weapons satire and the man-machine pathos, and a clear line back to Blomkamp's own *District 9* in the handheld Johannesburg realism and the sympathy for the thing everyone else wants to destroy. It is less controlled than any of them. It is also more ambitious about the actual question of machine consciousness than the genre usually bothers to be, taking seriously what it would mean for a mind to be born blank and learn the world from whoever happens to be holding it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical reception is harsh, sitting around a third positive, and the complaints are not wrong on their own terms: the tone is all over the place, the gangsters grate, the plot creaks, the ending reaches for ideas it cannot quite hold. Audiences are notably warmer, and I am with them. The reviewers are marking down a film for being uneven that I am marking up for being alive. So much science fiction this size is focus-grouped into a smooth nothing. This one has a real idea, a genuinely moving central character, and the courage to be peculiar, and I will take that over polished and forgettable every time.
## Verdict
This is exactly the kind of flawed, sincere, idea-driven genre film I forgive a great deal for. The questions it raises about consciousness and parenting and what we owe the things we make stayed with me longer than slicker films have. Chappie himself is one of the most affecting robots the genre has produced. Yes, it is tonally chaotic, the Die Antwoord casting will not be for everyone, and the third act overreaches. None of that stops it being one of the most interesting and rewatchable science fiction films of the year. It is messier than *District 9* and twice as warm-hearted, and I would rather watch it again than half the better-reviewed films around it. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. A 3D presentation is on offer in some screens, though the film was shot flat and gains little from it.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Chappie* turned out to be Blomkamp's last feature for some years, and his rumoured *Alien* project with Sigourney Weaver, talked about around this release, was quietly shelved in favour of Ridley Scott's own continuation of the series. The film has aged into a minor cult favourite, valued for exactly the messy sincerity the reviews punished it for. It is now widely available on disc and digital and rotates through the major streaming platforms.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, bloody violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent moments of strong bloody violence, during gunfights, and brief sight of a man being torn in half by a robot.
**Language:** There is frequent use of strong language ('f**k' and 'motherf**ker').
**Additional issues:** The criminal gang are occasionally seen in possession of an unnamed narcotic in pill form, but there are no scenes of drug use. There is also brief sight of sexualised breast nudity on a television screen.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/chappie-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zodeznzk)).*
================================================================================
## Predestination (2014)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-predestination
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-predestination.md
- published: 2015-02-24
- document_id: 1137
> The Spierig brothers take a notorious Heinlein paradox and a career-making Sarah Snook performance and build the most disciplined time-travel film in years. Small, clever, and built to be watched twice. 8/10.
- **UK release:** February 2015
- **Director:** Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig · **Writers:** Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig
- **Studio / distributor:** Screen Australia; Blacklab Entertainment; Wolfhound Pictures (Stage 6 Films)
- **Source:** Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 short story "'All You Zombies'"
- **Genre:** Science-fiction time-travel thriller · **Runtime:** 97 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Ethan Hawke (*Before Sunrise*, *Training Day*) as the Barkeep; Sarah Snook (*Sleeping Beauty*) as the Unmarried Mother; Noah Taylor (*Shine*) as Mr Robertson; Madeleine West as Mrs Stapleton
- **IMDb:** 7.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 83% critics / 75% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Time-travel cinema usually fails in one of two ways. It either keeps the rules so loose that nothing has weight, or it ties itself in such knots that you spend the closing reel doing homework instead of watching a film. *Predestination* comes from the Spierig brothers, the Australian pair who gave us the underseen vampire thriller *Daybreakers*, and it is adapted from one of the most famously self-swallowing short stories in the genre, Heinlein's "'All You Zombies'". The surprise is not that they attempt it. The surprise is how calm and controlled the result is, and how much of its running time is two people talking at a bar.
## The setup
Ethan Hawke plays a temporal agent nearing the end of a long career spent jumping through decades to stop crimes before they happen. His unfinished business is a serial bomber who has eluded the Bureau for years and is due to kill hundreds in 1970s New York. Working a bar undercover, he falls into conversation with a writer who has lived an extraordinary life, and that life story, told across the counter, turns out to be wound tightly around the case he cannot close. To say much more is to start pulling threads the film would rather you discover in order, so I will leave the plot at this: an investigation, a confession, and a loop that closes with unusual precision.
## The cast
Hawke is the steady anchor, world-weary and watchful, doing the kind of patient listening that holds a long dialogue scene together. He has always been good at men carrying private fatigue, and he leans on it here. The film, though, belongs to Sarah Snook, an Australian actor largely unknown outside her home industry, who is handed one of the most demanding parts a young performer could be given and never drops it. The role asks for transformation across years and across far more than years, and Snook makes every stage of it a recognisable, wounded human being rather than a puzzle piece. It is the sort of performance that makes a career, and it is wholly deserved. Noah Taylor, decades on from *Shine*, lends the Bureau scenes a quiet, bureaucratic menace.
## The craft
The Spierigs shoot on a modest budget and hide it well. Ben Nott's cinematography gives 1970s New York a warm, lived-in grain, and the period detail, all bar-room browns and analogue tech, is convincing without showing off. The score, written by Peter Spierig himself, broods rather than swells, which suits a film built on conversation rather than chase. Crucially, the directors trust the talk. Long stretches are simply two people exchanging a story, and the editing lets those scenes breathe, then tightens hard when the time-jumping kicks in. The temporal mechanics are kept deliberately low-tech, a violin case that folds space, which keeps the focus on people rather than gadgetry. At ninety-seven minutes it does not overstay, and the discipline shows.
## How it stacks up
This is a strong year for clever time travel, and *Predestination* sits comfortably in good company. It shares the closed-loop fatalism of *Source Code* and the small-scale rigour of *Primer*, but it is warmer than either, more interested in a single damaged life than in the diagram. Set it beside *Looper*, which married its paradoxes to gunfights and spectacle, and *Predestination* looks almost austere by comparison, a chamber piece where the other was an action film. The closest cousin is really *12 Monkeys*, another story about an agent trapped inside the very thing he is trying to prevent. Where lesser films of this kind cheat, *Predestination* plays fair, laying its clues in plain sight and trusting you to assemble them.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it, sitting around 83%, with most of the praise pointed at the structure and at Snook. Audiences are a little cooler at 75%, and you can see why the split exists. This is a film with a central conceit that some viewers will see coming and others will find airless once the trick is understood. If you treat it purely as a riddle to be solved, the destination can feel foregone. The reading I prefer is that the loop is not the gimmick but the tragedy, a story about a person with no way out of their own life, and on that level it lands harder on a second viewing than a first.
## Verdict
I am the natural audience for this. Intelligent science fiction that respects its source, builds a watertight internal logic and rewards a rewatch is exactly my register, and *Predestination* delivers on all three. It is small where it could have been showy, and its restraint is its strength. The one mark against it is that the puzzle is so tightly engineered that the human warmth occasionally has to fight for room, and a viewer who cracks the structure early may feel the film coasting to a conclusion it has already signalled. None of that stops it being the most satisfying time-travel film I have seen in some time, and one I will happily run again to watch the seams line up. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In selected UK cinemas now, and arriving on DVD and Blu-ray shortly after. A film that plays beautifully a second time, so it is well worth owning.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Sarah Snook went on to international fame as Shiv Roy in *Succession* (2018 to 2023), which sends a steady stream of new viewers back to this film, and rightly so, since it remains the clearest early showcase of her range. The Spierig brothers reunited with Hawke's tonal world by taking on the *Saw* franchise with *Jigsaw* (2017), to far less interesting effect. *Predestination* has settled into a deserved cult reputation as one of the smartest time-travel films of its decade, regularly recommended alongside *Primer* and *Coherence*. It is now widely available on disc and streams on the usual rental platforms.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, sex, strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Strong violence includes a blood spurt from a bullet impact, and a scene in which a man is set on fire by a bomb explosion, after which his skin is seen to be burnt. There is a fight with some crunchy blows, including to the face.
**Language:** Multiple uses of strong language ('f**k'), as well as various uses of milder bad language, including 'shit' and 'son of a bitch'.
**Sex:** A naked man thrusts into a bare breasted woman. There are also verbal references to sex as women are interviewed about their sex lives.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/predestination-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zodixmtq)).*
================================================================================
## Ex Machina (2014)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-ex-machina
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-ex-machina.md
- published: 2015-02-02
- document_id: 1077
> Alex Garland steps up to direct his own script, a chamber piece about a tech billionaire, a young coder and the machine between them. Cool, controlled and genuinely clever about artificial intelligence. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** January 2015
- **Director:** Alex Garland · **Writer:** Alex Garland
- **Studio / distributor:** Film4; DNA Films; Universal Pictures
- **Genre:** Science fiction psychological thriller / artificial intelligence drama · **Runtime:** 108 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Domhnall Gleeson (*About Time*) as Caleb Smith; Alicia Vikander (*A Royal Affair*) as Ava; Oscar Isaac (*Inside Llewyn Davis*) as Nathan Bateman; Sonoya Mizuno as Kyoko
- **IMDb:** 7.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 92% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Alex Garland has spent the last decade or so as the writer in the room while someone else directs. He wrote *28 Days Later* and *Sunshine* for Danny Boyle, adapted *Never Let Me Go* and *Dredd*, and built a reputation for clean, idea-led science fiction that takes its premises seriously. *Ex Machina* is the film where he finally takes the chair himself, and the surprise is how assured it feels for a first time behind the camera. No flailing for spectacle, no nervous over-direction. Garland has worked out that the most unsettling thing he can put on screen is a quiet conversation between two people, one of whom may not be a person at all.
## The setup
Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a coder at the world's largest search company, wins a staff lottery: a week at the remote estate of the firm's reclusive founder, Nathan (Oscar Isaac). When he arrives, the prize turns out to be work. Nathan has built a humanoid artificial intelligence named Ava (Alicia Vikander) and wants Caleb to run a version of the Turing test on her, to sit across a glass partition and decide whether what he is talking to has genuine consciousness or only a very good impression of it. What begins as a flattered young man's dream assignment turns into a contest of nerve and motive between the three of them, conducted almost entirely in the corridors of a house that feels increasingly like a cage. I will leave the rest where Garland leaves it.
## The cast
Three performances carry the whole thing, and they are well matched. Gleeson, fresh from being the romantic lead in *About Time*, plays Caleb as decent, clever and slightly out of his depth, which is exactly the way in the film needs. Oscar Isaac, who was quietly extraordinary in *Inside Llewyn Davis*, turns Nathan into something far more interesting than a mad-scientist cliche: a hard-drinking, hyper-articulate alpha who is charming right up to the moment he is frightening, and you can never quite tell which mode he is about to choose. The film belongs, though, to Alicia Vikander. Her Ava is curious, watchful and quietly strategic, a performance built out of stillness and small calibrations, and she makes the central question, is there a mind in there, feel genuinely open rather than rhetorical. Sonoya Mizuno, as the silent Kyoko, does a great deal with almost no dialogue.
## The craft
This is a controlled, beautiful film on what was clearly not a large budget. Rob Hardy's cinematography makes Nathan's glass-and-concrete bunker look both gorgeous and oppressive, all clean lines and locked doors, and the effects work that renders Ava's transparent mechanical body is some of the most convincing I have seen at this scale: you forget you are watching a digital trick because the film never stops to congratulate itself on it. The score by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow hums and pulses underneath, keeping the tension wound tight through long passages where nothing physical happens. Garland paces it like a thriller even though it is mostly people talking, and the talk is worth listening to. The script is genuinely smart about consciousness, manipulation and what a test actually proves, without ever stopping to deliver a lecture.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Blade Runner*, and *Ex Machina* shares its preoccupation with what separates a manufactured mind from a real one, though it trades neon sprawl for a single house and a handful of characters. It sits close to *2001: A Space Odyssey* in its cool fascination with a machine intelligence whose goals may not be ours, and it makes an interesting companion piece to *Her*, which came at the same question from the warm, lovestruck angle while this one comes at it cold. Reaching further back, this is a *Frankenstein* story stripped to its frame, the creator and the created and the awful gap between intention and result. What sets it apart from most science fiction at this budget is restraint: Garland trusts three actors and one idea, and refuses to inflate the film with action it does not need.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, with Rotten Tomatoes sitting up at 92%, and the praise lands where you would expect: the intelligence of the writing, the discipline of the direction, the performances, and a treatment of artificial intelligence that takes the subject seriously rather than as a pretext for chase scenes. Audiences are a little cooler at 86%, which I read as the gap between people who wanted a thriller and got a chamber piece. If you come to this expecting the machine to start shooting, you will fidget. If you come for a tense, talky puzzle about minds and motives, it delivers more than almost anything else in the genre this year.
## Verdict
This is squarely my kind of science fiction: intelligent, atmospheric, more interested in ideas than in explosions, and built around technology and control rather than spectacle. It is not flawless. Caleb is a touch underwritten next to the other two, and a viewer who needs answers handed over may find the ending more provocation than resolution. None of that costs it much. The performances are excellent, the craft is well beyond what the budget should allow, and it lingers in the mind for days, the mark of science fiction that is actually about something. I will happily watch it again, partly to see how the construction holds up once you know where it is going. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now on limited release. Worth seeking out on the biggest screen you can find it on; a Blu-ray and digital release will follow.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, a remarkable result for a production that spent so little next to the blockbusters it beat, and Alicia Vikander went on to an Oscar of her own the following year. Garland has continued down this road as a director, with *Annihilation* and the television series *Devs*, the latter returning to much the same questions about determinism and technology. As the real-world AI conversation has caught up with it, the film's reputation has only grown, and it is now widely available on disc, digital and streaming.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, bloody violence, sex references*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is a scene of strong violence, featuring heavy blows with a metal object and stabbings resulting in bloodshed.
**Threat and horror:** The film has a mildly unsettling tone throughout.
**Language:** There is occasional use of strong language ('f**k'), as well as milder terms.
**Sex:** There are some strong verbal sex references, during a discussion about whether humans and androids can have an intimate relationship.
**Suicide and self-harm:** There is a scene in which a human character cuts into his own arm, to check whether he is an android.
**Nudity:** There are images of fully naked androids, which take realistic female human form.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adults drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/ex-machina-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zodiwndi)).*
================================================================================
## Kingsman - The Secret Service (2014)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-kingsman-the-secret-service
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-kingsman-the-secret-service.md
- published: 2015-02-01
- document_id: 1109
> Matthew Vaughn takes the spy film, strips out the self-seriousness, and rebuilds it as a vicious, well-tailored comedy. Loud, funny, and far more confident than it has any right to be. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** January 2015
- **Director:** Matthew Vaughn · **Writers:** Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Marv Films
- **Genre:** Spy action comedy / comic-book adventure · **Runtime:** 129 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Taron Egerton as Eggsy; Colin Firth (*The King's Speech*, *A Single Man*) as Harry Hart; Samuel L. Jackson (*Pulp Fiction*, *Jurassic Park*) as Valentine; Mark Strong (*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*, *Sherlock Holmes*) as Merlin
- **IMDb:** 7.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 74% critics / 84% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Matthew Vaughn has spent the last few years making genre films that look like the real thing but refuse to behave. He gave us a *Layer Cake* that quietly auditioned Daniel Craig for Bond, an X-Men prequel that took the franchise seriously again, and *Kick-Ass*, which asked what would actually happen if a teenager in a wetsuit tried to fight crime. *Kingsman* is the logical next step: take the British spy film, the Roger Moore end of it especially, and ask what it would be if someone made it now with no embarrassment about how silly it has always been. The surprise is not that he tries it. The surprise is how well it holds together.
## The setup
Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is a sharp, aimless south London lad with a record, a vile stepfather and a wasted talent for getting into and out of trouble. He calls in an old favour and is pulled into Kingsman, a private intelligence outfit that runs out of a Savile Row tailor's and answers to nobody. His sponsor is Harry Hart (Colin Firth), an immaculate agent who owes Eggsy's late father a debt. While Eggsy is put through a brutal recruitment programme, a lisping tech billionaire named Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) is giving away free SIM cards to the entire planet, which is the sort of generosity that tends not to be free. The film keeps its real plan close to its chest, and I will leave it there.
## The cast
The casting is the cleverest thing here. Colin Firth, last seen winning prizes for stammering through *The King's Speech*, turns out to be wonderful as a killing machine in a three-piece suit, all clipped courtesy and sudden violence. He plays it perfectly straight, which is why it works. Egerton, an unknown, carries the lead without strain and earns the arc from estate kid to gentleman spy. Samuel L. Jackson has fun inverting his usual menace into a queasy, blood-squeamish villain who cannot stand the sight of what he sets in motion. Mark Strong, so often the heavy, gets to be the warm one for once, a Scottish quartermaster with real affection under the briefings. Michael Caine anchors the old guard, which feels like a wink given the company.
## The craft
Vaughn directs action like a man who has watched every Bond and decided the fights should actually hurt and actually delight. A mid-film set piece in a church, scored to wild guitar and shot to look like one unbroken take, is among the most outrageous things in any recent action film, gleeful and appalling in equal measure. The whole thing is dressed beautifully, the gadgets are daft in the best tradition, and Henry Jackman's score drives it hard. Vaughn knows exactly when the comic-book register tips into excess and mostly rides that line on purpose. When it goes too far, and it does, it is by design rather than accident.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Bond, which the film quotes, mocks and clearly loves. But the closer cousin is Vaughn's own *Kick-Ass*: the same delight in puncturing a genre while delivering it properly, the same willingness to put a young protagonist through real nastiness. There is *Men in Black* in the secret-organisation machinery and the recruitment structure, and a strong dose of the class comedy that British spy fiction has always traded on, the *My Fair Lady* of it, the rough lad taught which fork to use before he is handed a licence to kill. Few films juggle this many tones without dropping one.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical line is split, and predictably so. Critics sit around 74%, audiences notably warmer at 84%, and the gap tells the story. The energy, the choreography and Firth's reinvention win nearly everyone over. The sticking point is the violence and a streak of laddish humour that some find a touch too pleased with itself, a closing gag in particular. I take the point and I am unbothered by it: this is a film that signals its tone in the first ten minutes and never pretends to be respectable. Judged as the loud, knowing comic-book spy romp it sets out to be, it lands almost everything it swings at.
## Verdict
This is squarely my kind of thing. It is an espionage film with wit, a genre piece that knows its own history and plays with it, and crucially it is enormously rewatchable, the sort of film you put on knowing the church scene is coming and still grin. The plot strains in the third act and the humour occasionally trips over its own cheek, but the craft, the cast and the sheer confidence carry it past those wobbles with room to spare. It is funnier and better made than a film this rude has any right to be. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth seeing with a crowd, where the church sequence plays best.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Kingsman* did well enough to launch a series. *Kingsman: The Golden Circle* (2017) took the action bigger and more scattered, splitting opinion more sharply than the original, and a period prequel, *The King's Man* (2021), filled in the organisation's origins to a cooler reception. The first film has held up as the best of the run, the one where the tone, the budget and Vaughn's mischief were all in balance. It is now widely available on disc and digital and streams on Disney+ in the UK depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are a number of highly stylised fight scenes, involving the use of weapons such as guns, knives, axes, explosive devices and prosthetic legs fashioned as razor-sharp blades. The action in these scenes is fast-paced and rapidly-edited, although the violence is strong and bloody there is no lingering focus on pain and injury.
**Threat and horror:** In one sequence, a large group of people in a church kill each other when a form of mind control is activated. In spite of the fantasy nature of the scene, the impression this creates of a massacre taking place in a 'real world' setting may remind some viewers of terrorist attacks and be disturbing for younger people.
**Language:** There is frequent use of strong language ('f**k' and 'motherf**ker'), and infrequent use of very strong language ('c**t'), as well as use of milder terms.
**Sex:** There are some crude sexual references, including a running joke about the central male character being offered anal sex with a woman as a reward for saving the world, which some viewers may find distateful.
**Discrimination:** There is some use of discriminatory terms, including the 'n' word and 'fag'.
**Injury detail:** Bloody injury detail is seen in the aftermath of violent incidents.
**Nudity:** Brief female buttock nudity occurs in a crude sexual context.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/kingsman-the-secret-service-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zodiymdk)).*
================================================================================
## The Imitation Game (2014)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-imitation-game
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-imitation-game.md
- published: 2014-11-29
- document_id: 1197
> A handsome, tightly built Bletchley Park drama carried by Benedict Cumberbatch, smoothing the real Turing into a more conventional shape but rarely loosening its grip. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** November 2014
- **Director:** Morten Tyldum · **Writer:** Graham Moore
- **Studio / distributor:** Black Bear Pictures; StudioCanal
- **Genre:** Wartime biographical drama / codebreaking thriller · **Runtime:** 114 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Benedict Cumberbatch (*Sherlock*, *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*) as Alan Turing; Keira Knightley (*Atonement*, *Pride and Prejudice*) as Joan Clarke; Matthew Goode (*A Single Man*, *Watchmen*) as Hugh Alexander; Mark Strong (*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*, *Kick-Ass*) as Stewart Menzies
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 89% critics / 91% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
The Second World War codebreaking story has been told before, most recently by Michael Apted's *Enigma* in 2001, which fictionalised the people while keeping the machines. *The Imitation Game* does roughly the opposite. It keeps the real name, Alan Turing, the man whose work at Bletchley Park helped shorten the war and who was then prosecuted by the country he served, and it bends the events around him into the shape of a more conventional film. Whether that trade is worth it is the question I kept turning over, and the answer is mostly yes, because the film is so well made that you forgive a good deal of the smoothing.
## The setup
In 1939 Turing arrives at Bletchley Park, the country house where Britain's brightest are quietly trying to read German military traffic. The Enigma cipher resets every midnight, leaving a few hours to crack a code with more settings than there are atoms in the observable universe. Turing's answer is not to break each message by hand but to build a machine to do it, an idea his colleagues resist and his superiors barely tolerate. Around this runs a second thread, set years later, in which a routine police investigation pulls at the secret Turing has spent his life keeping. The film moves between the war room, a schoolboy past, and that bleaker afterward, and it trusts you to hold all three.
## The cast
This is Benedict Cumberbatch's film, and he is very good in it. He has played brilliant and difficult before, on television as Sherlock and on film in *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*, and there is some overlap here in the clipped, socially blind genius. What he adds is hurt: a man who has learned that being right is no protection, who flinches under ordinary cruelty he cannot decode. Keira Knightley's Joan Clarke is the warmth the script needs, sharp enough to match him and generous enough to see what he is, and the scenes between them are the film's most human. Matthew Goode brings an easy charm to the rivalrous Hugh Alexander, and Mark Strong, doing the watchful spymaster he does so well, lends Stewart Menzies a quiet menace. Charles Dance turns up as the commander who wants the project shut down, and enjoys himself doing it.
## The craft
Morten Tyldum, whose Norwegian thriller *Headhunters* showed he can keep a plot moving, directs with real discipline. Óscar Faura's cinematography gives Bletchley a handsome wartime glow, all wood panelling and lamplight, and the machine itself, a wall of spinning drums and clattering relays, is shot with the reverence other films give a cathedral. Alexandre Desplat's score is the kind I will happily listen to away from the picture: insistent, ticking, threaded with a sense of time running out. William Goldenberg's editing keeps the three timelines legible without ever stalling. It is a film engineered for momentum, and at 114 minutes it does not waste a scene.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *A Beautiful Mind*, another handsome biopic that turned a difficult mathematician into a more film-friendly hero and won prizes for it. *The Imitation Game* shares its strengths and its instincts, the warm gloss, the lone genius against the doubters, the late emotional swell. *Enigma* is the closer subject match and the more honest about the grind of cryptanalysis, but it is the duller watch. Where this film really sits, though, is alongside *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*: the same muted English palette, several of the same faces, the same sense that the real war is fought in rooms by tired clever people. It is less rigorous than that film and more eager to please, and it lands its punches more obviously.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are largely won over, sitting around 89%, with audiences a touch warmer at 91%, and the praise lands on Cumberbatch and on the film's accessibility. The reservation, voiced by historians as much as reviewers, is that it takes liberties: it invents tensions, compresses a team into a single antagonised genius, and reshapes Turing's character to fit the underdog mould. Those objections are fair. The film tidies a messy true story into a clean dramatic one, and someone who knows the history will wince once or twice. I wince and keep watching, because the thing it gets right, the cost paid by a man for being who he was, it gets right with feeling.
## Verdict
This is a polished, gripping, intelligent piece of mainstream film-making that knows exactly what it is doing and does it with confidence. It simplifies, and the simplifications are worth being honest about, but the performances are excellent, Desplat's score is a keeper, and the codebreaking thread satisfies the part of me that likes machines and institutional problem-solving. The closing stretch, where the film stops being a wartime caper and reckons with what was done to Turing afterwards, gives it a weight the lighter biopics never reach. I will watch it again, and I suspect the score is doing it well. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow in the new year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Graham Moore went on to win the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the film became one of the year's most-decorated awards-season titles. It now reads as the front of a small run of clever-people biopics that followed it, alongside *The Theory of Everything* and, a couple of years later, *Hidden Figures*, all of them mining the same vein of historical brilliance against the odds. The historical-accuracy debate has only grown louder with time, and it remains the standard reference point when people argue about how much a biopic owes the record. It is widely available on disc and digital and turns up regularly on streaming services in the UK.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *moderate sex references*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Sex:** A man tells a joke, suggesting oral sex, in which he refers to a woman putting something in her mouth while she's humming a tune. A man also says that he's being held in a police station before he's accused of 'entreating a man to touch my penis', with further undetailed references to his homosexuality. There are also comments about a man undergoing chemical castration through hormone treatment.
**Additional issues:** Other issues include mild bad language, with uses of 'sod', 'bleeding', 'bloody', 'Christ', 'hell', 'bastards' and 'arse'. There are also uses of discriminatory language, including 'poofter' and 'kyke'. There are scenes of mild violence, including a man being punched and left with a bloody lip, and a man being slapped around the face. There is archive footage of war, including ships and planes being blown up, and burning cityscapes and rubble-strewn streets after the Blitz. A young boy is bullied at school, including being nailed in under some floorboards before he is rescued by a friend. Several characters are seen to smoke, reflecting the wartime era.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-imitation-game-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zoda5ody)).*
================================================================================
## Interstellar (2014)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-interstellar
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-interstellar.md
- published: 2014-11-17
- document_id: 1097
> Christopher Nolan trades the dream architecture of Inception for a dying Earth and a wormhole, and builds the most emotional film of his career around hard physics. The science is sound, the sentiment is bold, and on scale and rewatch value it is near the top of the genre. 9/10.
- **UK release:** November 2014
- **Director:** Christopher Nolan · **Writers:** Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount; Warner Bros.; Legendary; Syncopy
- **Genre:** Epic science fiction / space drama · **Runtime:** 169 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Matthew McConaughey (*Dallas Buyers Club*, *Mud*) as Cooper; Anne Hathaway (*Rachel Getting Married*, *Les Misérables*) as Amelia Brand; Jessica Chastain (*Zero Dark Thirty*, *The Tree of Life*) as Murph; Michael Caine (*The Dark Knight*, *The Prestige*) as Professor Brand
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 72% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
Christopher Nolan has spent a decade making films that fold in on themselves: the reversed grief of *Memento*, the nested dreams of *Inception*, the duelling magicians of *The Prestige*. *Interstellar* is the first time he has pointed all that engineering outward, at the actual cosmos, and the first time he has let a film be openly, unguardedly emotional. The result is the biggest swing of his career, a three-hour science fiction epic that wants to be *2001* and a story about a father and a daughter at the same time, and mostly gets away with both.
## The setup
Earth is dying. Not in a single cataclysm but slowly, choked by blight and dust, the human race reduced to subsistence farming on a planet that has decided it no longer wants us. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA pilot turned reluctant farmer, stumbles onto the remnant of the space programme and is offered the one job left worth doing: fly through a wormhole that has appeared near Saturn, in search of a new home for humanity among the stars on the far side. The catch is the one no parent could ignore. The mission could take years or decades, relativity does strange things to time, and his young daughter Murph will be waiting on a world with a deadline. The film hangs its enormous scale on that small, painful equation.
## The cast
McConaughey is the right actor at the right moment, fresh from a run of work that has remade him from rom-com lead into something rawer and more serious. He gives Cooper a plain-spoken decency and a grief that the film keeps returning to, and a scene built around a backlog of video messages from home is the most devastating thing he has ever done on screen. Anne Hathaway brings spine and a flash of genuine feeling to Amelia Brand, the scientist who has to argue for instinct in a film that otherwise worships equations. Jessica Chastain carries the Earthbound half of the story as the grown Murph, all banked fury and unfinished business, and she has to sell the emotional payoff almost single-handed. Michael Caine, a Nolan regular by now, lends Professor Brand the weary authority the part needs, with a compromise hidden behind it.
## The craft
This is a film built to be seen large. Hoyte van Hoytema shoots vast stretches of it on IMAX film, and the imagery earns the format: a wall of water under an alien sky, a black hole rendered with real physics rather than guesswork, the small human ship a speck against indifferent scale. Nolan shot practical wherever he could, and you feel it in the weight of the spacecraft and the dust of the cornfields. Hans Zimmer's score, built around a church organ, swells and shudders and occasionally drowns the dialogue, a choice that will divide people, though the sound design clearly wants you off balance. Lee Smith's editing cross-cuts the cosmic and the domestic so that an hour on one planet and a lifetime back home land in the same breath. It is overlong and the exposition comes in heavy slabs, but the ambition never flags.
## How it stacks up
The shadow over the whole project is *2001: A Space Odyssey*, and Nolan invites the comparison openly, down to a wisecracking robot built as the anti-HAL. He is the warmer film-maker; where Kubrick kept his distance, Nolan wants you to cry. The closer cousin is *Contact*, another story of wormholes, fathers and faith dressed as physics, and not only because McConaughey appeared in that too. Against last year's *Gravity*, which was a tighter, leaner survival thriller, *Interstellar* is baggier and more reckless, reaching for ideas *Gravity* never tried to hold. It does not have the clean perfection of those leaner films. It has more on its mind than any of them.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are split. The praise lands on the ambition, the visuals and the sheer nerve of it; the complaints land on the dialogue, which can clunk, and on a late turn that asks the audience to accept love as something close to a physical force. Around 72% of critics are on side, while audiences are warmer at 86%, and that gap tells the story. The people willing to go all in on the film's emotional logic come out moved; the ones who wanted rigorous hard science all the way down feel the film blink at the crucial moment. I land with the audience. The reach exceeds the grasp in places, and I would rather watch a film that swings this hard and misses occasionally than one that plays it safe.
## Verdict
I value intelligent science fiction, world-building and a score that gets under your skin, and *Interstellar* delivers all three at a scale almost nothing else attempts. Yes, it is too long, the dialogue sometimes explains what the images already said, and the final act asks for a leap of faith. None of that dents the experience much. It is a film I have already watched several times and will watch again, the rare blockbuster that treats its audience as clever and is unembarrassed about feeling. See it as big and as loud as you possibly can. **9/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, including 70mm and IMAX prints that are the way to see it. A DVD and Blu-ray release will follow in the spring.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Interstellar* has settled into a reputation well above its mixed opening notices, regularly cited alongside *Gravity* and the later *Arrival* and *The Martian* as the high-water mark of the 2010s space revival, and it has become a fixture of repertory IMAX and 70mm re-releases, where it routinely sells out. Nolan went on to *Dunkirk* and *Oppenheimer*, the latter sweeping the Academy Awards, which has only deepened the regard for this film as the moment his ambition and his emotion finally met. It is now widely available on 4K disc and digital, and streams on various platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *infrequent strong language, moderate threat, violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are infrequent scenes of moderate violence, including punches and head butts. There is no injury detail.
**Threat and horror:** Numerous scenes of threat show characters dealing with the dangers of space travel and the harsh environments on different planets.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k'), during a heated confrontation, as well as various milder terms, such as 'son of a bitch' and 'shit'.
**Theme:** The film deals with issues such as loss and separation, including never seeing loved ones again, which may be upsetting to younger viewers.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/interstellar-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zode4nzi)).*
================================================================================
## The Equalizer (2014)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-equalizer
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-equalizer.md
- published: 2014-10-12
- document_id: 1184
> Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington reunite for a slow-burn vigilante thriller that trades plot for craft and a wonderfully controlled lead. The script is thin, the violence is precise, and the rewatch value is high. 8/10.
- **UK release:** September 2014
- **Director:** Antoine Fuqua · **Writer:** Richard Wenk
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Sony Pictures Releasing
- **Genre:** Vigilante action thriller · **Runtime:** 132 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Denzel Washington (*Training Day*, *Man on Fire*) as Robert McCall; Marton Csokas (*The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring*) as Teddy; Chloë Grace Moretz (*Kick-Ass*, *Let Me In*) as Teri; David Harbour as Masters
- **IMDb:** 7.2 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 59% critics / 76% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Thirteen years after *Training Day*, Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington are back working the same corner of the city, and the reunion is the first reason to buy a ticket. This time the badge is gone. McCall is a man who has very deliberately stepped out of a violent line of work, and the film is built around the moment he decides to step back into it. It is loosely descended from the 1980s television series, but you do not need to remember Edward Woodward to follow it. What you need is patience, because Fuqua takes his time, and the patience pays off.
## The setup
Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) lives a small, ordered life. He works the floor at a Home Mart hardware warehouse, he cannot sleep, and he reads his way through a list of classic novels alone in a diner at night. He is the kind of man who folds his napkin and lines up his cutlery, and you sense early that the order is doing a job. At the diner he falls into a careful sort of friendship with Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), a young woman being run by Russian gangsters. When they put her in hospital, McCall offers to buy her freedom, is refused, and quietly closes the door. What happens next he does without raising his voice. The problem is that the men he kills belong to something much larger, and the organisation sends Teddy (Marton Csokas) to find out who has been dismantling its people.
## The cast
Washington is the whole engine here, and he runs the part on stillness rather than swagger. He plays McCall as a man who has decided not to be dangerous and is visibly disappointed in himself each time he has to be again. There is a clock that ticks in his head before every fight, an almost bored calculation of who in the room dies and in what order, and Washington sells it without a flicker of strain. It is a quieter cousin of his grieving bodyguard in *Man on Fire*, the rage banked down rather than burning. Marton Csokas makes Teddy a genuinely unpleasant piece of work, smiling and tattooed and entirely comfortable, a villain who enjoys his job. Chloë Grace Moretz has less to do than her billing suggests and is mostly off the board after the first act, but she gives McCall a reason to start, and she is good in the scenes she has. David Harbour turns up as a crooked detective and makes an impression in limited space.
## The craft
Fuqua and his cinematographer Mauro Fiore shoot a wet, neon, after-hours city, all rain on glass and light pooling in puddles, and the look does a lot of the storytelling the script will not. The violence, when it arrives, is precise and unhurried. McCall improvises with whatever is to hand, a corkscrew, a shot glass, the contents of a hardware shop, and Fuqua frames it so you follow the method rather than just the carnage. The standout is a final act staged inside McCall's own workplace, where the man who knows where every tool lives turns the aisles into a trap. Harry Gregson-Williams scores it low and patient, content to sit under the tension rather than push it. The one real complaint is length: at over two hours the film lingers where a leaner cut would have struck, and the plot is too slight to justify every minute.
## How it stacks up
The obvious anchor is *Man on Fire*, the earlier Washington revenge picture, and *The Equalizer* is the cooler, more controlled relation, less operatic and more procedural. It also sits squarely beside the new wave of methodical-killer thrillers: *John Wick*, arriving the same season, shares the lone professional and the body count but plays faster and more stylised, while *Jack Reacher* shares the drifter who solves problems with his hands but lacks this film's menace. Where *The Equalizer* wins is texture. It is in no hurry, it trusts its leading man to hold a scene doing almost nothing, and it cares about the geography of a fight. Where it loses is ambition: the story is a thin clothes-line for a series of confrontations, and the Russian mob is more a supply of bodies than a real antagonist.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have landed around the middle, near 59%, and the split is easy to read. The reviews praise Washington and Fuqua's command of mood while complaining that the script is routine and the runtime indulgent. Audiences are warmer, around 76%, and I am with them. The critical line treats the slimness of the plot as a fatal flaw. I treat it as the price of admission for a thriller that is genuinely about watching a very capable man work, shot with care and anchored by one of the most reliable leads in the business.
## Verdict
This is a film that knows exactly what it is and executes it with real control. The story will not surprise you, it runs long, and the supporting cast is thinner than the poster promises. None of that matters much when Washington is on screen, which is almost always, and when the craft around him is this assured. It is atmospheric, satisfying, and the kind of thing I will happily put on again on a wet evening without needing to follow a plot. A more disciplined edit would have pushed it higher. As it stands it is a strong, rewatchable genre piece carried by a great actor doing precise, economical work. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth a big screen for Fiore's rain-soaked city and the hardware-store finale.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the partnership proved durable. Fuqua and Washington returned for *The Equalizer 2* (2018), notable as Washington's first sequel, and again for *The Equalizer 3* (2023), which moved McCall to the Italian coast. The first film has settled into its reputation as a dependable, well-made vigilante thriller and the launchpad of a franchise built almost entirely on its leading man. It is widely available on disc and digital and streams across the usual platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, sex references, strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Strong bloody violence includes several action sequences in which the hero kills gangsters. He sometimes uses improvised weapons, for example stabbing a man under the chin with a corkscrew and slamming a shot glass into another man's eye. These sequences are very rapid, with the focus on the hero's skill and ability to think quickly. Other violence includes people being shot, stabbed and repeatedly punched, with brief but bloody images of the bodies afterwards.
**Language:** Frequent strong language, including 'f**k' and 'motherf**ker'.
**Sex:** Strong verbal sex references, and references to prostitution.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-equalizer-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znzuwnzy)).*
================================================================================
## The Guest (2014)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-guest
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-guest.md
- published: 2014-09-13
- document_id: 1192
> A polite stranger turns up on a grieving family's doorstep and the temperature drops a few degrees every scene. Adam Wingard's synth-soaked thriller knows exactly what it is doing. 8/10.
- **UK release:** September 2014
- **Director:** Adam Wingard · **Writer:** Simon Barrett
- **Studio / distributor:** Snoot Entertainment, HanWay Films; Icon (UK)
- **Genre:** Action thriller / suspense · **Runtime:** 100 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Dan Stevens (*Downton Abbey*, *The Fifth Estate*) as David Collins; Maika Monroe (*Labor Day*) as Anna Peterson; Brendan Meyer as Luke Peterson; Lance Reddick (*The Wire*) as Major Carver; Leland Orser (*Se7en*, *Taken*) as Spencer Peterson
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 91% critics / 69% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett spent the last few years carving out a reputation in low-budget horror, with *You're Next* the calling card that got them noticed. *The Guest* is the pair stepping sideways out of the haunted house and into something leaner and stranger: a thriller built on the architecture of an eighties B-movie, scored like a John Carpenter picture, and anchored by a piece of casting that nobody saw coming. Dan Stevens, until very recently the well-mannered heir of *Downton Abbey*, turns up here as the most unsettling house guest in years.
## The setup
A young man called David (Dan Stevens) arrives at the Peterson family home, all blue eyes and southern courtesy, explaining that he served alongside their son Caleb, killed in action, and promised to look in on them. The grieving parents take him in. He is helpful, charming, and good with the kids: he sorts out a problem for the bullied younger son Luke, charms the mother, and earns the trust of nearly everyone. Only the daughter, Anna (Maika Monroe), keeps a wary eye on him. The film holds its nerve and lets the politeness curdle slowly, until the question stops being whether David is exactly who he says he is and becomes what he intends to do about the people who start asking.
## The cast
The film lives or dies on its lead, and Stevens is the reason it lives. He plays David as a smiling surface with something cold idling underneath, switching from warmth to violence without ever raising his voice, and the casting joke pays off in full: an actor we associate with drawing-room decency turning out to be the most dangerous thing in the room. Maika Monroe gives Anna the right mix of suspicion and resourcefulness, a final-girl figure with a brain rather than a scream, and Brendan Meyer makes Luke's hero worship of David genuinely uncomfortable. Lance Reddick brings his usual clipped authority to the man chasing David down, and Leland Orser and Sheila Kelley sell the parents' willingness to believe a comforting lie. Nobody is overacting. The film trusts the situation to do the work.
## The craft
Wingard directs with real control of tone, sliding between deadpan comedy, dread and sudden bursts of action without the gears grinding. Robby Baumgartner's photography leans into neon reds and blues and the autumnal Halloween palette, and the production design pushes the whole thing into a slightly heightened, retro-American register. The standout craft element is Steve Moore's score, a pulsing analogue synth soundtrack that does as much as any scene to set the mood, alongside a sharply chosen selection of darkwave and post-punk tracks. The action, when it arrives, is clean and brutal, building to a final-act set piece in a school's Halloween maze that turns strobing light and fog into a genuine playground for the camera. At a hundred minutes the film never sags.
## How it stacks up
The reference points are worn openly and well. There is a lot of *The Terminator* in David, an unstoppable, blank-faced thing in human shape walking through a small American town, and a lot of Carpenter's *Halloween* in the suburban autumn setting and the relentlessness. The synth score and the cool, glassy style owe an obvious debt to *Drive*, though *The Guest* is funnier and pulpier than Refn's film, less interested in art and more in delivering a good time. Where it differs from the run of modern thrillers is its refusal to take itself too seriously; it is a homage that has the confidence to crack a smile while it tightens the screws.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it warmly, sitting around 91%, with most of the praise landing on Stevens and on the film's stylish, knowing command of its genre. Audiences are cooler, closer to 69%, and the split is easy to read: a film this tonally slippery, that asks you to laugh and flinch in the same scene and keeps its central mystery deliberately vague, is not built to please everyone who wandered in expecting a straight thriller. If you want every motivation explained, the back half will frustrate you. If you are happy to ride the style and the menace, it delivers.
## Verdict
This is exactly the kind of film I enjoy more than its modest profile suggests I should. It is tight, atmospheric, very well cast, and built on a foundation of genre love that never tips into empty pastiche, and the Steve Moore score alone makes it worth a second visit. Stevens gives a star-making turn that recalibrates everything you thought you knew about him. It is not aiming for profundity and does not pretend to; it wants to be lean, stylish and rewatchable, and on all three counts it succeeds. A small film that punches well above its weight. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In selected UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow before the end of the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Guest* has settled into a firm cult favourite, the kind of title that turns up on best-of-the-decade genre lists and gets revived for Halloween-season repertory screenings. It proved a springboard for everyone involved. Maika Monroe went straight on to *It Follows*, cementing her as a modern scream-queen, while Dan Stevens used it as the start of a deliberate run away from period drama. Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett went on to bigger studio work. Steve Moore's synth score has had its own afterlife on vinyl among soundtrack collectors. It streams on the usual platforms depending on region and is well worth tracking down on Blu-ray for the sound alone.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, strong language, drug use, sexualised nudity*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Strong bloody violence includes a number of shootings and several knife attacks, including people stabbed in the chest and lying in pools of blood.
**Language:** Frequent strong language, including 'f**k' and 'motherf**ker'.
**Drugs:** Several scenes of cannabis use, smoked from a pipe and in joint form.
**Nudity:** Sexualised breast nudity in a scene in which a couple lie on a bed, kissing.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-guest-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zode0nde)).*
================================================================================
## Narrative Clip Unboxing and Initial Review
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/narrative-clip-review
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/narrative-clip-review.md
- published: 2014-09-10
- document_id: 36
> A tiny, automatic camera and app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory
## Narrative Clip Unboxing and Initial Review
After a year long wait, the Narrative Clips are finally out. Originally called Memoto and funded through a very successful Kickstarter campaign, the Narrative Clip has been a project that I have followed with great anticipation, so being one of the first to get a Narrative Clip is a great privilege.
The Narrative Clip is a wearable camera that takes photos every 30 seconds whilst there is enough light. So, to turn it off, you just unclip and place it in your pocket. To start automatically taking photos, you just clip it onto yourself and away you go.
You can take an extra photograph at any time by double tapping the camera.
So, after one days use, what thoughts do I have?
It looks like it will take a bit of trial and error to find the right place to clip on Narrative. I'm finding that the choices I have made so far are too low, even though it is around the collar. The problem is that what I see at eye level and think is a well framed scene, comes out too low and it is as though I have cropped the top of the scene off. Obviously, this is for close shots, for scenes further away, this isn't a problem.
What is a problem is that I seem to get a lot of blurred shots. It doesn't help that on day one of use it was grey and raining (it's England, what can I say?) and that I took a lot of indoor scenes that were badly lit. Now, the Narrative software automatically skips blurred shots and badly lit photos, so when you review them in the Narrative app on your iPhone, it looks pretty good.
On the whole, I'm quite happy, I'm sure that I will get used to using the Narrative Clip and my scenes (or 'Moments' as Narrative call them) will get better.
### Suggested improvements.
I found that when I went to double tap, I would touch the clip first (so I knew where was) and then do the double tap. I would then consciously adjust my body position to 'frame' the scene. I suspect either or both of these might be the cause of some of my blurred shots.
My suggestion would be to have the same double tap functionality which immediately takes a photo, but then a second photo is taken 5 seconds later (to accommodate adjusting my body position) and then another photo 15 seconds after the originally double tap.
I've not mentioned the upload process of the photos to the narrative servers, but I would like to have an intermediary step which allows me to preview the photos and to manually skip selected photos.
There are potentially a large number of photos going to be uploaded and I may not have the bandwidth to have all the sub-par photos uploaded. I might also want to just remove some bad shots. I almost forgot to put the Clip into my pocket when I went to the toilet....
Finally, I took some photos with my phone and I would like to be able to add them into the stream of photos to complete the 'Moment'.
So far, so good and I'm looking forward to using my Narrative Clip as I believe it is the first truly wearable and useable camera.
If you are interested in the Narrative Clip, go visit the Narrative website:
================================================================================
## Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-guardians-of-the-galaxy
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-guardians-of-the-galaxy.md
- published: 2014-08-10
- document_id: 1092
> Marvel hands its riskiest property to a director from the B-movie fringe and gets back the funniest, most musical space adventure in years. A talking raccoon, a sentient tree and a soundtrack of seventies pop should not work this well. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2014
- **Director:** James Gunn · **Writers:** James Gunn, Nicole Perlman
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney
- **Genre:** Space-opera superhero comedy · **Runtime:** 121 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chris Pratt (*Parks and Recreation*, *Zero Dark Thirty*) as Peter Quill / Star-Lord; Zoe Saldaña (*Avatar*, *Star Trek*) as Gamora; Dave Bautista as Drax; Bradley Cooper (*The Hangover*, *Silver Linings Playbook*) as the voice of Rocket
- **IMDb:** 8.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 91% critics / 92% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
This is the moment Marvel stops playing it safe. Ten films in, the studio has a formula it could run for another decade, and instead it hands its most obscure property to James Gunn, a writer-director who came up through Troma and made his name with the splattery horror comedy *Slither*. The leads are a sitcom actor best known as the soft idiot in *Parks and Recreation*, a former wrestler, and a raccoon. There is no Avengers name on the poster to fall back on. By every cautious instinct it should not work, and the surprise of the summer is how completely it does.
## The setup
Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is a small-time thief who was snatched from Earth as a boy and grew up among space pirates calling himself Star-Lord, a name nobody else uses. He swipes a mysterious orb on a dead planet and finds half the galaxy wants it, chiefly Ronan, a fanatical warlord with the means to burn worlds. On the run, Quill falls in with a quartet of misfits who each want him, the orb, or both: a green-skinned assassin, a tattooed brute with a personal grudge, a gun-running raccoon and the walking tree who is his muscle. None of them like each other, and the orb is far more dangerous than any of them first realise. The setup is a heist that turns into a reluctant rescue, and the pleasure is watching five selfish loners work out that they are better together than apart.
## The cast
Pratt is the discovery. He carries the film on a particular kind of charm, the cocky chancer who is not nearly as smooth as he thinks, and he times a joke beautifully without ever quite winking at the camera. Zoe Saldaña, already a fixture of this sort of cinema after *Avatar* and *Star Trek*, gives Gamora more steel and weariness than the green paint would suggest. Dave Bautista is the real surprise of the supporting bench: Drax takes every figure of speech literally, and Bautista plays that deadpan so straight that he lands some of the biggest laughs without seeming to reach for them.
The two effects characters could have sunk the whole enterprise and instead anchor it. Bradley Cooper voices Rocket, the gun-running raccoon, as a small creature with a large chip on his shoulder and a real wound underneath the wisecracks, and the film is brave enough to give him a quiet moment that genuinely lands. Vin Diesel plays Groot, a tree who says only three words, and somehow makes them carry tenderness, comedy and menace by turn. That you come to care about a CGI raccoon and a monosyllabic tree is the surest sign the casting works.
## The craft
Gunn directs the thing with colour and confidence. After a run of Marvel films shot in tasteful greys and blues, the cosmic palette here is a relief, all neon and gold and ruined alien cities, lit by Ben Davis with a comic-book brightness. The action is clean rather than frantic, and Gunn is happy to stop a chase for a one-liner without losing momentum.
The masterstroke is the music. Quill carries a Walkman of seventies pop, his one link to the mother and the planet he lost, and Gunn scores the film to it: Blue Swede, Redbone, the Five Stairsteps, the Jackson 5. Pop needle-drops are nothing new, but here they are woven into the character and the plot rather than sprayed over the top, and the result is the most purely enjoyable soundtrack the genre has produced in years. It is the sort of film you leave humming. Tyler Bates fills the gaps with a score that knows when to step back and let Awesome Mix Vol. 1 do the work.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Star Wars*, and the film earns it: the cantina-bar aliens, the ragtag crew, the sense of a lived-in galaxy with grime under its fingernails. But the closer cousin is Joss Whedon's *Firefly* and its film *Serenity*, the same blend of outlaws, banter and barely-suppressed feeling, and a little of *The Fifth Element* in the candy-coloured maximalism. Inside Marvel's own house it is the boldest swing since the first *Iron Man*, the moment the studio proves its universe can hold comedy and weirdness as easily as armoured men punching each other. After a stretch of films that started to feel like instalments, this one feels like an adventure.
## Critics versus the rest of us
For once the critics and the crowd are in step. Reviews are landing around 91%, audiences a notch higher at 92%, and the praise is consistent: the humour, the soundtrack, the oddball charm, the gamble of going cosmic and selling it. The few reservations are the usual Marvel ones, a villain in Ronan who is more obstacle than character and a plot that comes down to another glowing object everyone is chasing. Both complaints are fair and neither matters much in the watching, because the film is having too good a time to care, and that good humour is infectious.
## Verdict
This is enormously likeable, and likeability is harder to manufacture than spectacle. It is funny without being smug, sincere without being soppy, and it introduces a crew you immediately want to spend more time with. The villain is thin and the orb-chase plot is boilerplate, which is what keeps it just shy of the top tier. Everything around that core, the cast chemistry, the colour, the soundtrack, the willingness to be daft and heartfelt at once, is close to perfectly judged. It is the most rewatchable film Marvel has made, the kind you put on knowing exactly when you will smile, and on that count it sits very high indeed. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and 3D. Worth seeing loud, for the soundtrack alone.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the gamble paid off twice over. *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2* (2017) and *Vol. 3* (2023) completed the trilogy, the second leaning harder into the family-of-misfits sentiment and the third giving Rocket the full backstory hinted at here. The crew went on to anchor two *Avengers* films, and the Awesome Mix soundtrack became a chart success in its own right, an oddity for a film score. The first film has settled in as many people's favourite of the run and the template for Marvel's more comic, music-led entries. It streams on Disney+ and is widely available on disc and 4K.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate fantasy action violence, threat, moderate bad language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** The film contains explosive battles in outer space involving various craft, and scenes of fighting between rival groups. The fighting features hand-to-hand combat as well the use of futuristic weapons, and is occasionally both intense and sustained. The impacts of blows or laser blasts result in no realistic injury. The violence takes place in a firmly established fantasy setting where the banter between characters also brings comic relief to the action and to moments of threat.
**Language:** The film contains moderate bad language such as 'dick', 'prick', 'bitch' and 'whore', and the use of a rude gesture. Milder bad language includes 'hell', 'damn', 'bastard', 'shit', 'fricking', 'bloody', 'screw this', 'buggers', 'butts', 'jerks', 'a-hole', 'asses' and 'pissed'.
**Additional issues:** The film also contains infrequent mild sex references.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/guardians-of-the-galaxy-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znzk5nzm)).*
================================================================================
## Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes.md
- published: 2014-07-24
- document_id: 1064
> Matt Reeves takes the rebooted apes somewhere most blockbuster sequels never go, into a sombre tribal war story with Andy Serkis's Caesar at its centre. It is bigger than its predecessor and, against the odds, sadder. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2014
- **Director:** Matt Reeves · **Writers:** Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Chernin Entertainment
- **Genre:** Post-apocalyptic science fiction drama / action · **Runtime:** 130 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Andy Serkis (*The Lord of the Rings*, *King Kong*) as Caesar; Jason Clarke (*Zero Dark Thirty*) as Malcolm; Toby Kebbell (*RocknRolla*) as Koba; Gary Oldman (*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*, *The Dark Knight*) as Dreyfus
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 88% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
*Rise of the Planet of the Apes* arrived in 2011 with low expectations and quietly turned into one of the better surprises of its summer, a reboot that took a franchise most people had written off and gave it a beating heart in Andy Serkis's performance-capture Caesar. The sequel had every reason to coast on that goodwill. Instead Rupert Wyatt is gone, Matt Reeves of *Cloverfield* and *Let Me In* takes over, and the brief seems to have been to make the bigger, more expensive follow-up into a slower, sadder, more deliberate film than anyone ordered. It is a strange thing to find in the middle of blockbuster season: a tragedy with the budget of an action picture.
## The setup
Ten years on from the simian flu that escaped at the end of the first film, human civilisation has all but collapsed and the apes have built a forest community north of San Francisco, where Caesar now leads as a settled patriarch. The two species have not seen each other in years and have half forgotten the other exists. Then a band of human survivors comes into the woods looking for a hydroelectric dam that might restore power to what is left of the city, and the careful peace Caesar wants and the fearful suspicion others carry begin pulling in opposite directions. Malcolm (Jason Clarke), the human sent to negotiate, and Caesar find a fragile understanding. Around them, on both sides, are people and apes who would rather strike first.
## The cast
This is Serkis's film, and the performance-capture work has moved on noticeably even since *Rise*. Caesar is older, heavier, weighed down by leadership, and Serkis plays him almost entirely in stillness and the eyes; a glance carries more than most of the human dialogue. Toby Kebbell is the other revelation as Koba, the scarred ape who came up through laboratory cages and cannot believe the humans deserve anything but a knife. Kebbell makes him frightening and pitiable at once, a creature whose hatred is entirely earned and entirely destructive. The humans are deliberately the smaller story. Jason Clarke gives Malcolm a tired decency that works as the bridge the plot needs, and Gary Oldman, as the colony's leader Dreyfus, gets one genuinely affecting scene that reminds you what is being mourned. The film knows where its interest lies, and it lies in the trees.
## The craft
Reeves directs with real patience. Michael Seresin shoots the ape settlement in cold greens and greys, rain dripping through the canopy, and the opening stretch trusts the audience to sit in an almost wordless world of subtitled sign language before a human speaks. Michael Giacchino's score is mournful and tribal, leaning on percussion and low brass rather than the usual blockbuster surge. When the violence does come it is staged with unusual clarity, including one bravura shot mounted on a rotating tank turret that takes in the whole battlefield in a single unbroken sweep. The effects are the best argument the film makes for itself: hundreds of digital apes, in firelight and in pouring rain, none of which ever pulls you out of the moment. For a 130-minute film built around motion-capture primates, it is remarkably easy to forget you are watching an effect at all.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Rise*, and *Dawn* is the heavier, more accomplished film, trading the first picture's underdog rush for something with the shape of classical tragedy. The cleverer comparison is sideways, to the war and siege films it openly draws on, the doomed negotiations and the one hot-head who wrecks the peace. There is a strain of *The Dark Knight* in how seriously it takes its summer audience, and a strain of older revisionist Westerns in how it treats two peoples circling a resource neither will share. Where most franchise sequels get louder and emptier, this one borrows from drama rather than from spectacle, and is better for it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting around 90%, with audiences a little behind at 88%, and the recurring praise is for exactly the things that make it unusual: the maturity, the moral weight, the performance-capture work. I am with them, though for slightly different reasons. What I value here is that the film commits to its own bleakness instead of flinching. The small gap between critics and the crowd is easy to read: this is a summer tentpole that asks you to spend a third of its runtime watching apes sign to each other in the rain, and not everyone bought a ticket for a tragedy. Those who did are rewarded.
## Verdict
*Dawn of the Planet of the Apes* is that rare sequel that is more ambitious than the film that earned it the chance, and almost entirely pulls it off. Serkis and Kebbell give two of the most expressive performances of the year through a layer of pixels, Reeves directs with a confidence that the franchise had no right to expect, and the whole thing carries a genuine sense of sorrow that lingers after the action stops. It is a touch overlong in its final act, and the human characters never quite match the apes for interest, but those are small complaints against a blockbuster this thoughtful. I will happily watch it again, which for a film this sombre is the real compliment. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, and worth seeing on the largest screen you can find for the battle sequences.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the trilogy completed in 2017 with *War for the Planet of the Apes*, which pushed Caesar's story to its end and confirmed this as one of the strongest blockbuster runs of its decade. The series was later revived with *Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes* (2024), set generations after Caesar. *Dawn* has settled into its reputation as the high point of the modern reboot for many, and is now widely available on disc and digital, streaming on Disney+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are scenes of hand-to-hand combat, as well as attacks with guns and other weapons. The fighting is occasionally sustained and intense, but it is not detailed and features only minimal bloody injury in the aftermath of violent incidents.
**Threat and horror:** An ominous sense of danger to individuals or groups of characters is part of the film's atmosphere. The film portrays a world in which humans are on the brink of extinction, and nature has encroached on ruined city streets and abandoned locations across the country.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k'), as well as various uses of milder bad language, including 'shit', 'ass', 'asshole' and 'son of a bitch'.
**Injury detail:** There is brief sight of bloody detail in the aftermath of violence.
**Alcohol and smoking:** A character smokes a cigarette and there is sight of people drinking alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotm4ody)).*
================================================================================
## Snowpiercer (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-snowpiercer
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-snowpiercer.md
- published: 2014-07-06
- document_id: 1152
> Bong Joon-ho takes his class war onto a frozen train that never stops, and turns a single corridor into one of the strangest, most committed dystopias of recent years. 8/10.
- **UK premiere:** June 2014 (Edinburgh International Film Festival; a 2013 production)
- **Director:** Bong Joon-ho · **Writers:** Bong Joon-ho, Kelly Masterson
- **Studio / distributor:** Moho Film; Opus Pictures; CJ Entertainment
- **Genre:** Dystopian science-fiction action thriller · **Runtime:** 126 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Chris Evans (*Captain America: The First Avenger*, *The Avengers*) as Curtis Everett; Song Kang-ho (*Memories of Murder*, *The Host*) as Namgoong Minsoo; Tilda Swinton (*Michael Clayton*) as Minister Mason; John Hurt (*Alien*, *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*) as Gilliam; Jamie Bell (*Billy Elliot*, *The Adventures of Tintin*) as Edgar; Octavia Spencer (*The Help*) as Tanya
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 94% critics / 72% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Bong Joon-ho is the South Korean director who made the monster movie *The Host* feel like a family drama and a political cartoon at the same time, and *Snowpiercer* is his first film in English, his biggest budget, and the one a lot of people outside Korea will meet him through. It is adapted from a French graphic novel, shot in the Czech Republic with an international cast, and it carries that strange pedigree lightly. What it does not carry lightly is its premise, which it states with a bluntness that should not work and somehow does: the last people on Earth live on a train, and the train will never stop.
## The setup
A botched attempt to reverse global warming has frozen the planet solid, and the only survivors are aboard the Snowpiercer, a vast self-sustaining train that loops the dead world on an endless circuit. Society has reassembled itself along the carriages, with the wretched packed into the tail and the privileged living in comfort somewhere up front, fed and policed by an order that treats the back of the train as livestock. Curtis (Chris Evans), a reluctant leader among the tail passengers, decides the only way to change anything is to go forward, car by car, fighting through to the engine and the man who runs it. The geography of the film is the plot: one door at a time, with no idea what is behind the next one.
## The cast
Evans is cast against the clean-cut heroism that made his name, and he leans into it. Curtis is guilt-ridden, hesitant, carrying something he does not want to say, and Evans plays the weight rather than the leadership. Song Kang-ho, the only actor here speaking through an interpreter device for much of the film, gives the security expert Namgoong Minsoo a wry, addled unpredictability that keeps you guessing about whose side he is on. John Hurt brings his usual frayed gravity to the tail's elder statesman, and Jamie Bell and Octavia Spencer give the uprising its loyalty and its personal stakes. The performance everyone will talk about is Tilda Swinton's Minister Mason, a buck-toothed, Yorkshire-accented bureaucrat of pure grotesque comedy, delivering speeches about everyone keeping to their preordained place with the conviction of a woman who has never once doubted it. She is hideous and very funny, and she tilts the whole film towards satire whenever she appears.
## The craft
The single-direction structure could have been monotonous and instead it is the source of the film's momentum and its surprises. Each carriage is its own self-contained world with its own rules, lighting and mood, so the journey forward keeps resetting the tone: a pitched battle in near-darkness, then a classroom, then a greenhouse, then something stranger still. Hong Kyung-pyo's photography makes the cramped sets feel both claustrophobic and oddly expansive, and Marco Beltrami's score knows when to go quiet and let the train's own rhythm carry a scene. Bong's control of tone is the real achievement. He swings from brutal action to deadpan absurdity to genuine horror without the seams showing, and an extended axe fight staged around a tunnel and a flickering new year is as good a single sequence as the genre has produced lately.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Children of Men*, another grimy, intelligent dystopia that trusts its world to do the talking, and *Snowpiercer* shares that film's refusal to over-explain. In its appetite for class allegory dressed as a bureaucratic nightmare it is closer to *Brazil*, and its forward-grinding corridor combat will remind anyone who has seen it of *The Raid*, though Bong is after something more political than pure sensation. Set against Bong's own work it is broader and more cartoonish than *Memories of Murder*, with the same gift he showed in *The Host* for sliding between registers that should not coexist. The willingness to be weird, to follow an idea past the point of plausibility because the idea is interesting, is what separates it from the run of grey post-apocalyptic films.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting up around 94%, praising the design, the nerve and the politics. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm but markedly cooler, nearer 72%, and the gap is easy to read: this is a film that asks you to accept a frankly preposterous central conceit and a couple of swerves into the surreal, and viewers who want their science fiction to hold together as engineering will balk. The distribution has not helped, with the film snagged on a long argument over cuts that has kept it out of cinemas in some markets and slowed its reputation. I land with the critics here, but for reasons of taste rather than deference: I will forgive a great deal of implausibility for a world this committed to itself.
## Verdict
A train that never stops is a silly idea, and *Snowpiercer* knows it, and builds something fierce and strange on top of it anyway. The structure gives it relentless drive, the carriages give it variety, Swinton gives it teeth, and Bong gives it a tonal confidence that very few directors working at this scale possess. It is not flawless. The metaphor occasionally announces itself too loudly, and the final act leans harder on speeches than on momentum. None of that stops it being one of the most distinctive genre films in a good while, and one I expect to revisit, partly to catch what is behind doors I was too busy to look at the first time. **8/10.**
**Availability:** Screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival now, ahead of a wider UK release once the distribution wrangle is settled. Worth seeking out on the biggest screen you can find it on.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the distribution tangle that kept *Snowpiercer* out of UK cinemas dragged on for years, and the film never got the proper theatrical run it deserved here. It finally reached British audiences through digital platforms in October 2018, with a Film4 broadcast and a handful of repertory screenings following in early 2020. It later inspired a television series of the same name, which ran from 2020; having enjoyed its first season, I scored the show 7/10, a notch below the film, and the two are best judged separately. Bong Joon-ho, meanwhile, went on to win Best Picture for *Parasite*, which makes this English-language calling card look even more like the work of a major director hitting his stride. It now streams on the usual platforms in the UK, subject to the usual regional shuffling.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** A rebel stabs a soldier in the chest and cuts upward, with bloody detail. A man is stabbed through the hand, with close-up focus. There are regular fights with axes, guns and makeshift weapons.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker') as well as other terms such as 'bitch' and 'Jesus'.
**Additional issues:** It is implied that characters misuse a fictional drug. A character tearfully admits to having eaten human babies.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/snowpiercer-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mza3mti)).*
================================================================================
## Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-edge-of-tomorrow
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-edge-of-tomorrow.md
- published: 2014-06-01
- document_id: 1074
> Doug Liman takes a Japanese light novel, a video-game premise and a movie star willing to die on camera a hundred times, and turns them into the sharpest summer science fiction in years. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2014
- **Director:** Doug Liman · **Writers:** Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Village Roadshow
- **Source:** *All You Need Is Kill* by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
- **Genre:** Science fiction action / time-loop war film · **Runtime:** 113 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Cruise (*Top Gun*, *Mission: Impossible*) as Major William Cage; Emily Blunt (*The Devil Wears Prada*, *The Adjustment Bureau*) as Rita Vrataski; Bill Paxton (*Aliens*, *Apollo 13*) as Master Sergeant Farell; Brendan Gleeson (*In Bruges*, *The Guard*) as General Brigham
- **IMDb:** 7.9 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 91% critics / 90% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
There is a particular kind of summer film that sounds exhausting on paper and turns out to be a delight in the seat, and *Edge of Tomorrow* is this year's example. The premise reads like a pitch nobody should have green-lit: Tom Cruise relives the same disastrous beach landing over and over, dying every time, until he gets good at it. Yet Doug Liman, who made his name on the kinetic clarity of *The Bourne Identity*, has taken a Japanese light novel and a structure borrowed openly from *Groundhog Day* and built something genuinely smart, fast and funny out of it. The surprise is not the loop. The surprise is how much fun the film has running it.
## The setup
Major William Cage is a peacetime PR man for the army, a coward in a uniform who has spent the alien war selling it on television rather than fighting it. When he is bundled onto the front line of a doomed amphibious assault against the Mimics, an enemy that moves like a swarm and thinks like a chess computer, he dies within minutes. Then he wakes up the previous morning, on the same base, facing the same day, with every memory of how it ended intact. Each death resets the clock. The only person who understands what is happening to him is Rita Vrataski, the war's celebrated poster soldier, who once carried the same curse and knows it is the one weapon humanity has. From there it becomes a grim, repeating apprenticeship: learn the beach, learn the enemy, learn how not to die, and do it again tomorrow.
## The cast
Cruise does something here he rarely allows himself, which is to start as a useless, sweaty coward and earn the competence frame by frame. The early loops, where Cage flinches, begs and bolts, are played for proper laughs, and Cruise commits to the indignity of dying badly again and again before the familiar action-star certainty is allowed to surface. It is a clever use of the persona rather than a coast on it. Emily Blunt is the film's real find. Her Rita is all hardened muscle and impatience, a fighter who treats Cage's deaths as a training resource rather than a tragedy, and Blunt gives her a flinty authority that never softens into the love interest the genre usually demands. Bill Paxton has a fine time as the drawling master sergeant who greets Cage anew each morning, and Brendan Gleeson supplies the weight of command in a couple of well-judged scenes. The Cruise and Blunt pairing carries the picture, and it carries it on competence and friction rather than romance, which is the right call.
## The craft
Liman shoots the action with a legibility that a lot of bigger-budget science fiction has forgotten how to manage. The Mimics are a nasty, whip-fast design, the exo-suits the soldiers wear are heavy and awkward in a way that feels engineered rather than weightless, and the Normandy-by-way-of-Pandora beach assault is staged so you always know where everyone is and what is killing them. The editing is the cleverest department: a loop film lives or dies on how it handles repetition, and the cutting compresses, skips and replays Cage's days so the joke lands without the structure ever dragging. Christophe Beck's score keeps the momentum taut. At 113 minutes the film is lean by the standards of the summer, and that discipline is felt in every reel.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is *Groundhog Day*, and the film knows it; the difference is that the comedy here is welded to a war movie, so each reset carries real stakes rather than romantic farce. *Source Code* worked a similar loop a few years back with more melancholy and a smaller canvas. For the bug-war satire and the propaganda-poster gloss on military service, the line runs straight back to *Starship Troopers*, and for the hardware and the dread of an enemy that overwhelms, to *Aliens*, which makes Paxton's casting a quiet in-joke. What lifts *Edge of Tomorrow* above a clever mash-up is that the time-loop is not a gimmick the script forgets about; it shapes the action, the comedy and the way the characters relate, right to the end.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are unusually warm, sitting around 91%, with audiences close behind at 90%, and the praise lands where it should: the pace, the humour, the action clarity and the Cruise and Blunt double act. The one shadow over the conversation is commercial rather than critical. Warner Bros. saddled it with a forgettable title and a muddled campaign, and the early box office suggests a lot of people are walking past a film they would enjoy. That is a marketing failure, not a film one. On the evidence in front of me this is one of the most purely entertaining studio science fiction films in some time.
## Verdict
This is squarely in my territory: intelligent, rewatchable science fiction that respects the audience, built on a structural idea it actually commits to. It is funny without being silly, fast without being incoherent, and it gives Emily Blunt the kind of role the genre too rarely writes. If I have a reservation it is the final stretch, where the plot machinery has to resolve the loop and loses a little of the wit that powered the middle. It is not quite flawless, but it is the sort of film I will happily start again the moment it ends, and that counts for a great deal with me. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the big screen for the beach assault alone.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film never did find its audience in cinemas under that title, and Warner Bros. quietly rebranded it *Live Die Repeat* for the home release, which is the tagline everyone remembered anyway. Word of mouth did the work the marketing could not, and it has since settled into a reputation as one of the most rewatchable science fiction films of its decade and a high point for both Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in the genre. A long-promised follow-up has been talked about for years without materialising. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and turns up on the major streaming services on rotation.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is sight of tentacled aliens being shot, hacked or blown up. Occasional streaks of blood are seen on faces, and a man is seen bleeding after being attacked. However, there is no focus on detail of blood or injury. A man's face is seen briefly starting to melt after an alien attack but he survives without injury.
**Threat and horror:** There is plenty of moderate threat, as soldiers face alien attacks, but the focus of the film is on the action and on overcoming the threat.
**Language:** There is one use of strong language ('f***k') and milder terms including 'bitch', 'bastard' and 'son of a bitch'.
**Additional issues:** The film also contains mild sex references and comic buttock nudity.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/edge-of-tomorrow-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotizmda)).*
================================================================================
## The Raid 2 (2014)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-raid-2
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-raid-2.md
- published: 2014-04-15
- document_id: 1210
> Gareth Evans answers a lean siege thriller with a sprawling crime epic, and the fights are somehow even better. The story strains at the seams; the craft does not. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** April 2014
- **Director:** Gareth Evans · **Writer:** Gareth Evans
- **Studio / distributor:** PT Merantau Films; XYZ Films; Sony Pictures Classics
- **Genre:** Martial-arts action crime epic · **Runtime:** 150 minutes (BBFC 18)
- **Main cast:** Iko Uwais (*The Raid*, *Merantau*) as Rama; Arifin Putra as Ucok; Oka Antara as Eka; Julie Estelle as Hammer Girl
- **IMDb:** 7.9 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 81% critics / 87% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Two years ago Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais took a tiny budget, a single tower block and one trapped cop, and made *The Raid* the most talked-about action film in years. It worked because it refused to do anything but the thing it did, which was put a man at the bottom of a building full of people who wanted him dead and let him climb. The obvious worry about a sequel is that you cannot bottle that lightning twice, and that the only way to follow a perfect siege is to make it bigger, which is usually how these things go wrong. Evans has gone bigger. He has also, against the odds, gone better, at least where it counts.
## The setup
Rama (Iko Uwais) walks out of the first film with barely a few hours to rest before he is recruited into a long undercover assignment. To protect his family and pull a corrupt police network out by the roots, he lets himself be sent to prison to earn the trust of Ucok (Arifin Putra), the restless son of a Jakarta crime boss. Once on the outside he is folded into the family business, a careful truce between an Indonesian syndicate and its Japanese counterpart that Ucok is itching to break. Rama spends the film holding two faces at once, the loyal soldier and the buried policeman, while the ground shifts under everyone around him. This is a far larger canvas than the tower, and the plot is dense with rival bosses, side enforcers and slow-burning betrayals.
## The cast
Uwais carries the film, and his gift is that he can act with his whole body before he says a word. Rama is quieter here than in the first film, watchful and worn down, a man performing loyalty he does not feel, and Uwais lets the strain show in the stillness between fights. Arifin Putra makes Ucok genuinely unpleasant, a spoilt heir whose impatience is the engine of the whole tragedy, entitled and dangerous in equal measure. Oka Antara brings a weary decency to Eka, the right-hand man caught between duty and conscience. The film also knows how to build an icon out of almost nothing: Julie Estelle's Hammer Girl, a deaf assassin who works in train carriages with two claw hammers, has perhaps ten minutes of screen time and walks off with a chunk of the film.
## The craft
Evans directs the action as if mediocrity were a personal insult. The camera moves with the fighters rather than cutting around them, the geography always stays legible, and the choreography by Uwais and Yayan Ruhian has a brutal clarity that most western action long ago traded away for shaky cutting. The two stand-out sequences, a mud-soaked prison riot and a car chase shot partly from inside the cars with the fight continuing through the windows, are as good as anything the genre has produced. The pencak silat fighting is fast and bone-deep, the violence frank and unglamorous, and the editing, also Evans, holds shots long enough to let you feel the cost of each blow. The score and the rain-slicked, neon-and-concrete look give the underworld a real weight.
## How it stacks up
The shadow over the plot is *Infernal Affairs*, the cleanest undercover-cop story ever filmed, and *The Raid 2* cannot match its precision; the criminal machinery here is more sprawling than gripping. As pure action escalation the better comparison is John Woo's *Hard Boiled*, another film that simply kept raising the stakes until the screen could barely hold them. There are echoes of *Eastern Promises* too in the cold, ritualised business of an immigrant crime family. Set against its own predecessor the trade is plain: the first film had a perfect, propulsive simplicity this one cannot reach, but the set pieces here are more ambitious, more varied and arguably better staged.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are largely won over, sitting around 81%, with audiences a notch higher at 87%, and the split in the reviews is consistent. Almost everyone agrees the action is extraordinary; the reservations land on the story, which several find baggy and overextended after the lean machine of the original. That is a fair charge. There are stretches of gangland politics that exist mainly to get us to the next confrontation, and at 150 minutes the film asks for patience the first one never did. None of that touches the fights, which is where most viewers, myself included, are really keeping score.
## Verdict
I came to this for the craft and the rewatchability, and on both it delivers. The choreography, the camerawork and the sheer physical commitment put it near the top of the modern action pile, and the prison and car-chase sequences are ones I will return to on their own. It loses a little against the first film on shape and momentum; the crime-epic ambition is admirable but the storytelling is the part that strains. As an action film it is close to faultless, and as a piece of film-making it is more interesting for reaching beyond its frame, even when its grasp slips. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On limited release in UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow. Seek out a screening if you can; the action plays best loud and large.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Iko Uwais and Gareth Evans's partnership has only grown in stature, and Uwais went on to anchor *The Night Comes for Us* (2018), an even bloodier showcase that confirmed his standing as one of the genre's defining performers. A long-mooted third film never materialised in the planned form, which leaves this as the closing chapter of the Raid story. It is now widely available on Blu-ray and digital, and streams on various platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **18** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence, gore*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are a number of protracted fight scenes, featuring the use of knives, guns and other weapons. One character uses claw hammers against her enemies. There are frequent gory images, during and in the aftermath of these fights.
**Additional issues:** There is also strong language ('f**k') and a sex scene.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-raid-2-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zote5mze)).*
================================================================================
## Captain America - The Winter Soldier (2014)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-captain-america-the-winter-soldier
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-captain-america-the-winter-soldier.md
- published: 2014-04-09
- document_id: 1055
> Marvel hands its most straight-arrow hero to a paranoid 1970s conspiracy thriller, and the gamble pays off handsomely. The best film the studio has made so far. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** March 2014
- **Directors:** Anthony Russo · Joe Russo
- **Writers:** Christopher Markus · Stephen McFeely
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Disney
- **Genre:** Superhero espionage thriller / political action · **Runtime:** 136 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chris Evans (*Captain America: The First Avenger*, *The Avengers*) as Steve Rogers / Captain America; Scarlett Johansson (*Lost in Translation*, *The Avengers*) as Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow; Sebastian Stan (*Captain America: The First Avenger*) as Bucky Barnes / The Winter Soldier; Samuel L. Jackson (*Pulp Fiction*, *Jackie Brown*) as Nick Fury
- **IMDb:** 7.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 92% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Captain America is the awkward one. Of all the heroes Marvel has put on screen, the man out of time is the hardest to make interesting: too decent, too square, a flag in human form, and *The First Avenger* worked best when it leaned into period adventure rather than asking what a boy scout does in the modern world. The clever decision here is to stop apologising for that decency and instead drop it into the one genre that has no time for it. This is not a comic-book film with a thriller flavour. It is a 1970s paranoia thriller with a man in a costume at the centre of it, and the shift suits everyone involved.
## The setup
Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is settling uneasily into life as a S.H.I.E.L.D. operative, running deniable missions for an agency whose methods sit badly with a man raised on plainer ideas of right and wrong. When a routine extraction turns out to be anything but, and the people he answers to start behaving like the people he used to fight, Rogers finds the ground moving under him. Hunted through his own city, unsure who is still on his side, he is forced into the open alongside Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and a new ally, while a silent, masked assassin called the Winter Soldier is sent to bring him down. The less said about who that assassin is, the better, but the film ties the question to Rogers's own past in a way the marketing has been careful not to give away.
## The cast
Evans is the surprise. Asked to carry more weight than the broad heroics of the first film, he gives Rogers a quiet, watchful gravity, a man whose moral certainty reads less as naivety here and more as the only fixed point in a story where everyone else is hedging. Johansson finally gets a Black Widow worth the name, sparring with Rogers as an equal and an opposite: she lies for a living, he cannot, and the friction between those two settings is the most enjoyable relationship in the film. Sebastian Stan says almost nothing as the Winter Soldier and is genuinely unnerving for it, a blank weapon with one flicker of something underneath. Samuel L. Jackson, so often used as set dressing, gets a proper sequence of his own and reminds you why you cast him. Robert Redford, playing a senior S.H.I.E.L.D. man, is the masterstroke: his presence drags the whole thing toward the conspiracy cinema of his own back catalogue, and he knows exactly what he is being used for.
## The craft
The Russo brothers come from television comedy, which sounds like a warning and turns out to be a strength. They shoot action you can follow. The early lift hijack, a brutal close-quarters fight in a lift, and a motorway ambush are staged for clarity and impact rather than blur, with real stunt weight behind them, and the Winter Soldier himself moves with a horrible, unhurried efficiency. Trent Opaloch's photography keeps Washington cold and institutional, all glass and grey, and Henry Jackman's score swaps the brassy heroism of the first film for a clipped, electronic menace whenever the assassin appears. At 136 minutes it carries a fair amount of plot, and the middle act asks you to keep several agencies straight, but the film moves with intent and rarely stops to admire itself.
## How it stacks up
The reference points are the obvious ones and the film wears them openly: *Three Days of the Condor* and *The Parallax View*, the surveillance-state thrillers where an ordinary operative discovers the institution itself is the threat. Casting Redford is the wink that confirms it. Closer to home it shares the grounded, kinetic hand-to-hand language of the *Bourne* films, and it is plainly the most adult thing Marvel has attempted, a long way from the weightless spectacle of *Iron Man 2*. Set beside *The Avengers*, which had to spend half its running time getting its team into the same room, this is leaner and more purposeful. It is also a sharper film than *The First Avenger*, which I liked a great deal for its earnest wartime swing but which never had this much on its mind.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are unusually united, sitting around 90%, with audiences a shade higher, and for once the praise is for the things that matter rather than the spectacle. The common line is that this is Marvel growing up, using a superhero to smuggle in real anxieties about security, surveillance and who gets to decide what safety costs. I am with them, though I would add the thing the reviews tend to undersell: it is also just a properly satisfying thriller, the kind you would happily watch knowing nothing about the wider franchise. The connective tissue to the rest of the series is there, but it never holds the film hostage.
## Verdict
This is the one that makes the case for the whole enterprise. It takes the least promising hero in the stable, hands him a paranoid political thriller with genuine ideas in it, and trusts the audience to keep up. The espionage framing, the surveillance theme, the cold institutional atmosphere and the clean, legible action are all squarely the sort of thing I come back to, and I will come back to this. It loses a little in a busy third act that has to remember it is still a comic-book film, which is the only thing keeping it off the very top shelf. The best film Marvel has made, and proof the studio can do more than spectacle. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the big screen for the action, though it will play just as well at home when it reaches disc later this year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the Russo brothers parlayed this into the two biggest films of the franchise, *Avengers: Infinity War* (2018) and *Endgame* (2019), and the conspiracy-thriller register they established here became the template Marvel reached for whenever it wanted to be taken seriously. The Winter Soldier himself went on to anchor his own television series. The film has settled into its reputation as the high-water mark of the studio's middle period, and the one its admirers point to first. It now streams on Disney+ and is widely available on disc and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The work was passed uncut. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Frequent scenes of moderate action violence include battles between Captain America and various enemies in which he uses his shield to strike them, or fights with martial arts punches and kicks. Many characters are also shot or, occasionally, struck with knives but in the majority of these scenes there is no blood or visible injury. Some scenes do show small bloody cuts on faces and blood staining clothes, but there is no focus on the blood and, again, no sight of injuries. There are also multiple explosions in which cars and aircraft are destroyed.
*Note: the BBFC release page was not directly reachable at the time of writing; the rating (12A), the consumer advice line and the Violence content advice above were taken verbatim from the BBFC classification record. Other category headings could not be retrieved.*
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/releases/captain-america-winter-soldier-film-1)).*
================================================================================
## Her (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-her
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-her.md
- published: 2014-02-18
- document_id: 1095
> Spike Jonze imagines a man who falls in love with his operating system and, against every instinct, makes you believe it. A soft, plausible near future and one of the most humane films ever made about technology. 8/10.
- **UK release:** February 2014
- **Director:** Spike Jonze · **Writer:** Spike Jonze
- **Studio / distributor:** Annapurna Pictures; Warner Bros.
- **Genre:** Science fiction romantic drama / technology drama · **Runtime:** 126 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Joaquin Phoenix (*Gladiator*, *Walk the Line*) as Theodore Twombly; Scarlett Johansson (*Lost in Translation*) as Samantha; Amy Adams (*The Fighter*, *American Hustle*) as Amy; Rooney Mara (*The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo*) as Catherine
- **IMDb:** 8.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 95% critics / 82% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Spike Jonze has spent his career filming the inside of people's heads. *Being John Malkovich* found a portal into one; *Adaptation.* turned a writer's panic into structure; *Where the Wild Things Are* gave a small boy's tantrum a whole island. *Her* is the first time he has written a screenplay entirely by himself, and it pushes that interest somewhere harder to film: a man falling in love with a voice that has no body and no past, and the question of whether that love counts. It is a premise that should collapse into a sketch or a warning, and it does neither.
## The setup
Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) writes other people's love letters for a living, beautiful handwritten things composed for strangers who can no longer find the words. He is good at it and quietly broken by it, drifting through a separation he cannot bring himself to finalise. On a whim he installs a new operating system, an artificial intelligence that names itself Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) within seconds of waking. She organises his inbox, laughs at his jokes, and starts asking him questions about himself that nobody has asked in a long time. What begins as companionship becomes something neither of them has a script for, and the film follows it honestly: the giddiness, the jealousy, and the slow recognition that a mind without a body might want things a man cannot give it.
## The cast
Phoenix carries almost every frame, often alone in a room talking to an earpiece, and he makes solitude watchable. His Theodore is tender and faintly absurd, a man with a moustache and high-waisted trousers who feels everything and shows little, and the performance never tips into self-pity. Johansson, working with voice alone after the role was recast late, gives Samantha a startling fullness: curiosity, wit, hurt, a quickening sense of her own scale. You believe in her as a presence, which is the whole gamble of the film and it pays off. Amy Adams, stripped of glamour, is warm and grounded as the friend who has her own quiet disappointments, and Rooney Mara haunts the edges as the wife Theodore is still grieving. Olivia Wilde turns a single date into a small, painful comedy of misread signals.
## The craft
Jonze builds a near future you would actually want to live in, which is rarer than it sounds. Hoyte van Hoytema shoots Los Angeles, blended with Shanghai, in warm reds and soft focus, all natural light and tactile fabrics; the technology is unobtrusive, an earpiece and a folding screen, never the chrome dystopia the genre defaults to. The production design quietly assumes a world that got gentler rather than colder. Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett provide a score of hushed piano and held notes that does a great deal of the emotional work without announcing itself. At 126 minutes the film is unhurried, and a couple of stretches drift, but the patience is the point of the texture.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Lost in Translation*, and not only because Johansson connects the two: both are studies of intimacy between people who cannot quite be together, shot with the same ache. *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind* is the closer cousin in spirit, another science fiction conceit used to dissect a love affair from the inside out rather than to stage a plot. Set it against *Blade Runner* and the difference is instructive: where Ridley Scott asked whether an artificial being could be human, Jonze asks whether a human can love one, and answers with far less neon and far more feeling. Among Jonze's own work it is his most controlled and least antic film, the playfulness folded inward.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have embraced it almost without reservation, sitting up at 95%, praising the originality, the design and the refusal to treat its premise as a gimmick. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm at 82%, and the gap tells you something true: this is a film some viewers find twee, slow, or a touch pleased with its own sensitivity, and those complaints are not baseless. The melancholy is relentless and the whimsy occasionally thick. I land closer to the critics, because the idea is handled with more intelligence and less smugness than the synopsis threatens, but I understand the resistance.
## Verdict
This is squarely my territory: intelligent science fiction that uses its premise to think rather than to explode, a plausible future built with real care, and a film about technology that is genuinely about people. Phoenix and Johansson make an impossible relationship feel specific and earned, and the world Jonze imagines lingers. It loses a little for pacing and for a sweetness that occasionally curdles, and it is more a film to admire and revisit in the right mood than one I will reach for on a tired evening. But it is humane, original and quietly unforgettable, and it gets closer to the real anxieties of where we are heading than most films that try harder to look the part. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on limited release; a strong candidate for a quiet evening rather than a Friday-night crowd. Coming to DVD and Blu-ray later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Her* won Spike Jonze the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and its reputation has only hardened as the AI-companion idea moved from speculation towards product. It now reads as one of the films that called the shape of the coming decade, and it pairs naturally with later artificial-intelligence dramas such as *Ex Machina* (2015) for anyone working through the theme. It is widely available to stream and on disc, and turns up periodically in cinema retrospectives of Jonze's work.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language and sex references*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Language:** The film contains multiple uses of strong language ('f**k'). There is also some milder bad language, including the terms 'dick', 'shit' and 'ass'.
**Sex:** There are a number of strong verbal sex references, including to oral and anal sex, as well as the sound of a couple reaching orgasm together. There is sight of a naked pregnant woman posing provocatively and briefly touching her breasts.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/her-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zodg3odi)).*
================================================================================
## The Hunger Games - Catching Fire (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-hunger-games-catching-fire
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-hunger-games-catching-fire.md
- published: 2013-12-05
- document_id: 1193
> The second Hunger Games hands the franchise to a new director and comes back sharper, angrier and more political than the first. A rare sequel that improves on the original. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** November 2013
- **Director:** Francis Lawrence · **Writers:** Simon Beaufoy, Michael Arndt
- **Studio / distributor:** Lionsgate; Color Force
- **Genre:** Dystopian young-adult science fiction / political thriller · **Runtime:** 146 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Jennifer Lawrence (*Winter's Bone*, *X-Men: First Class*) as Katniss Everdeen; Josh Hutcherson (*Bridge to Terabithia*) as Peeta Mellark; Donald Sutherland (*M*A*S*H*, *Ordinary People*) as President Snow; Philip Seymour Hoffman (*Capote*, *Mission: Impossible III*) as Plutarch Heavensbee
- **IMDb:** 7.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 89% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
The first *Hunger Games*, last year, did the difficult job of selling a brutal premise to a teenage audience and a nervous censor at the same time, and it managed it by softening the edges: shaky cameras over the worst of the violence, a heroine more frightened than furious. *Catching Fire* has no such caution. Gary Ross has stepped aside and Francis Lawrence, who made *I Am Legend* and *Constantine*, has taken over, and the change shows in the very first reel. This is a bigger, colder, more confident film than its predecessor, and the rare franchise sequel that is plainly better than the thing it follows.
## The setup
Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) survived the arena by refusing to die on cue, and their joint victory has become a problem the Capitol cannot ignore. Their defiance has lit something in the districts, and President Snow (Donald Sutherland) wants it put out before it spreads. The pair are sent on a victory tour that is really a loyalty test, smiling for the cameras while the country smoulders around them. When Snow announces a special edition of the Games drawn from past winners, the meaning is clear enough: the one symbol of hope the districts have left is to be sent back into the arena to be killed off in public. I will leave the arena itself for you to discover, beyond saying that it is a sharper piece of design than the first film's woodland.
## The cast
Jennifer Lawrence is the reason this works as well as it does. She plays Katniss as someone genuinely worn down by survival, jumpy, guarded, furious at being made into a poster, and she carries the public-performance scenes and the private breakdowns with equal conviction. Hutcherson's Peeta is the warmer half of the double act, and the film is honest about how much of their romance is staged for an audience and how much has quietly become real. The new faces earn their place. Donald Sutherland turns Snow into a study in soft-spoken menace, a man who never raises his voice because he has never needed to, and Philip Seymour Hoffman arrives as gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee and keeps you guessing about exactly whose side he is on. Woody Harrelson and Elizabeth Banks return and are given more to do, and Sam Claflin's Finnick walks in as the kind of preening charmer you are meant to distrust and then do not.
## The craft
Francis Lawrence brings a steadier hand and a much clearer eye than the first film had. Jo Willems shoots the Capitol as a place of grotesque excess and the districts as grey and exhausted, and the contrast does more political work than any line of dialogue. The arena, when it arrives, is built on a clever idea that I will not spoil, and it lets the staging move with a logic the original's free-for-all never had. James Newton Howard's score knows when to push and, more usefully, when to go quiet. At nearly two and a half hours the film takes its time over the first act, lingering in the districts before any blood is spilled, and that patience pays off: by the time the Games begin you understand exactly what is at stake and why this set of contestants behaves nothing like the last.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is *Battle Royale*, the Japanese film that did children-killing-children with far less restraint, and *Catching Fire* is plainly the polite Western cousin. The more flattering comparison is *The Empire Strikes Back*: a middle chapter that darkens the world, widens the politics and ends by leaving its heroes worse off than it found them. It is a better film than its own first instalment for the same reasons *Empire* was, more confident, less concerned with explaining itself, and willing to be bleak. Set beside the wave of young-adult dystopias arriving in its wake, this is the one with actual ideas about power and propaganda under the spectacle.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are unusually warm, sitting around 90%, and audiences are right behind them at 89%, with the common line that the sequel outdoes the original on scale, politics and Lawrence's performance. For once I am close to the consensus rather than arguing with it. The only real reservation is structural: this is the middle film of a series, so it ends on a deliberate cliff-edge rather than a resolution, and how much that bothers you depends on your patience for being made to wait. Otherwise the praise is earned.
## Verdict
This is a smarter, angrier film than a teen franchise sequel has any right to be, with a lead performance holding the whole thing together and a streak of genuine political nerve under the action. The surveillance, the staged romance, the propaganda machinery, the sense of a controlling state watching its citizens perform loyalty, all of it is the sort of thing I happily come back to, and it is eminently rewatchable. It loses a little for being so plainly a bridge to the next instalment rather than a complete story in itself. That aside, it does what the best franchise sequels do, which is make you reconsider the first film and want the next one immediately. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX, where the arena sequences were shot to fill the larger frame.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the cliff-edge ending led straight into *The Hunger Games: Mockingjay* (split across two films in 2014 and 2015), which carried the rebellion through to its end with diminishing returns, leaving *Catching Fire* widely regarded as the high point of the series. Philip Seymour Hoffman died during the *Mockingjay* shoot, making this one of his last completed roles. The film is now available on disc and digital and streams across the major platforms depending on region, with the whole quartet periodically bundled together.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence and threat, and infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are a number of scenes of moderate violence, including sight of a man being flogged by soldiers. This results in brief sight of the man's bloodied back.
**Threat and horror:** During a dangerous and violent competition, the main character is constantly under threat, from other contestants, from poisonous gas, and from a rampaging gang of baboons.
**Language:** The film contains two bleeped, but clearly identifiable, uses of strong language ('f**k'). There is also infrequent use of milder bad language, including 'shit'.
**Sex:** There are some mild sexual references, including to 'sleeping with' people.
**Injury detail:** There is sight of wounds and blood in the aftermath of violence, including sight of wounds being tended.
**Nudity:** In one scene a young woman removes her clothes. However, her back is to camera and there is no clear detail of nudity.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink. One character is an alcoholic.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-hunger-games-catching-fire-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zode1otm)).*
================================================================================
## Gravity (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-gravity
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-gravity.md
- published: 2013-11-20
- document_id: 1087
> Alfonso Cuarón strands Sandra Bullock in orbit and builds ninety minutes of pure tension out of silence, vacuum and falling debris. As a piece of cinema engineering it is close to flawless, though the story underneath is thin. 8/10.
- **UK release:** November 2013
- **Director:** Alfonso Cuarón · **Writers:** Alfonso Cuarón, Jonás Cuarón
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Esperanto Filmoj; Heyday Films
- **Genre:** Science fiction survival thriller · **Runtime:** 91 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Sandra Bullock (*Speed*, *The Blind Side*) as Dr Ryan Stone; George Clooney (*Ocean's Eleven*, *Michael Clayton*) as Matt Kowalski; Ed Harris (*Apollo 13*, *The Right Stuff*) as the voice of Mission Control
- **IMDb:** 7.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 96% critics / 80% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
It has been seven years since Alfonso Cuarón gave us *Children of Men* and its long, unbroken takes that put you inside a collapsing world, and you can feel that same patience working through *Gravity*. He has spent the gap not on another sprawling future-shock but on something almost perversely small: two people, one accident, and the largest empty space anyone has ever tried to film. The marketing sells it as a spectacle, and it is one. What sneaks up on you is how little it leans on plot to keep you pinned to the seat.
## The setup
Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is a medical engineer on her first shuttle mission, out on a spacewalk to service a telescope under the easy supervision of veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), who is enjoying what he keeps reminding everyone is his last flight. A field of high-speed debris from a destroyed satellite tears through the mission without warning, and Stone is left tumbling through orbit with her oxygen dropping, her tether gone, and Earth turning silently below her. The rest is the oldest story there is, dressed in a pressure suit: getting home, with the odds against you and the clock running.
## The cast
This is Bullock's film, almost alone, and she carries it without the safety net most leads are given. Stone spends much of the running time isolated inside a helmet, her face the only thing the camera can read, and Bullock makes the panic, the grief and the grim refusal to stop fighting all legible without ever tipping into hysterics. It is a more controlled, interior performance than *Speed* or *The Blind Side* would lead you to expect. Clooney does the thing Clooney does better than anyone, supplying warmth, dry humour and an unflappable cool that gives the early scenes their lightness and the later ones their ache. Ed Harris, heard but never seen as the voice of Houston, is a quiet in-joke for anyone who knows their *Apollo 13* and *The Right Stuff*, and his presence alone lends the radio chatter a borrowed authority.
## The craft
Where *Gravity* earns its reputation is in the making. Emmanuel Lubezki's camera drifts and circles in apparently unbroken takes, the opening shot running something like a quarter of an hour without a visible cut, and the absence of up or down is used as a weapon rather than a gimmick. There is no sound in vacuum, so Steven Price's score and the transmitted hum of the suits do the work air normally would, and the silence when the music drops away is genuinely frightening. The 3D, so often a tax on the ticket, is for once built into the grammar of the image: debris does not fly at you so much as the empty volume around the characters becomes real and enormous. Ninety-one minutes turns out to be exactly the right length. The film never sags because it never stops moving.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *Apollo 13*, another film that wrings unbearable tension out of procedure and the cold arithmetic of oxygen and re-entry, though Ron Howard had a true story and a crowded Mission Control to lean on where Cuarón has one woman and a void. Reach further back and *2001: A Space Odyssey* is the ancestor, in the unhurried beauty of bodies moving through hard vacuum, even if Cuarón is after your pulse rather than your sense of cosmic awe. The closest cousin of all is *All Is Lost*, Robert Redford's near-wordless ordeal at sea from this same year: both strip survival cinema down to one person, one failing machine and the indifferent element trying to kill them. *Gravity* is the more technically astonishing of the pair, if also the more sentimental.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have gone close to unanimous, sitting up at 96%, treating the film as proof that a studio blockbuster can still be a genuine formal experiment. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm but noticeably cooler, around 80%, and the gap is easy to read. The complaints are not really about the spectacle, which nobody disputes, but about the thinness behind it: the backstory handed to Stone is a touch too neat, a couple of beats reach for tears the situation had already earned, and the science takes liberties that anyone who has read about orbital mechanics will notice. Those are fair hits. They also matter far less in a dark cinema with the sound turned up than they will on a laptop afterwards.
## Verdict
I admire this enormously and I am not quite in love with it, which is roughly where my number lands. As an exercise in tension, immersion and sheer craft it is close to faultless, and Bullock anchors it with a performance that deserves to be remembered when the effects have dated. The reason it stops short of the top tier for me is rewatchability: once you know whether she makes it, a good deal of the white-knuckle charge is spent, and the human story left behind is slighter than the technique around it. This is a film to see once, properly, on the biggest screen and the loudest system you can find, and to be genuinely glad you did. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, and the rare modern blockbuster where the 3D and IMAX surcharge is money well spent. Catch it on the largest screen you can reach before it leaves.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Gravity* swept the craft categories at the following awards season, taking seven Oscars including Best Director for Cuarón, Lubezki's cinematography and Price's score, while Bullock's nomination went unrewarded. It has since become the standard reference point for the wave of one-person survival pictures that followed, *The Martian* (2015) among them, though that film answers Gravity's grim minimalism with humour and hard problem-solving. The spectacle was always built for the cinema, and it loses the most of any recent blockbuster on the move to the small screen, but it streams on the usual platforms depending on region and turns up in 4K for anyone with the kit to do the debris justice.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *sustained moderate threat, disturbing images, strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** There are numerous scenes of threat as the surviving astronauts dodge debris from exploding space vehicles, explosions, bursts of flame and high speed buffeting by and bouncing off various space vehicles and crashing spacecraft. There is also a brief scene of a woman close to drowning. While many of these sequences of threat are sustained, they demonstrate an overwhelmingly positive message about the human will and ability to survive.
**Disturbing images:** Brief but disturbing images of dead bodies in space include a man whose frozen face has a hole in the middle where his nose has broken off.
**Language:** There is a single use of strong language ('f***k') by one of the astronauts expressing frustration and stress which is not directed at anyone. The film also contains some milder bad language, such as 'shit' and 'sonofabitch'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/gravity-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mzawndg)).*
================================================================================
## Captain Phillips (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-captain-phillips
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-captain-phillips.md
- published: 2013-11-02
- document_id: 1056
> Paul Greengrass turns a real 2009 hijacking into a procedural thriller that screws the tension tighter for two hours, then lets Tom Hanks fall apart in the last five minutes. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** October 2013
- **Director:** Paul Greengrass · **Writer:** Billy Ray
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Sony Pictures Releasing
- **Genre:** Biographical survival thriller / hostage drama · **Runtime:** 134 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Hanks (*Forrest Gump*, *Cast Away*) as Richard Phillips; Barkhad Abdi as Abduwali Muse; Barkhad Abdirahman as Bilal; Faysal Ahmed as Najee
- **IMDb:** 7.9 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 89% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Paul Greengrass has spent the past decade working out how to film panic. He did it with the shaky, on-the-ground horror of *United 93*, and he carried the same nervous handheld energy into the Bourne sequels, where it turned a spy franchise into something that felt like it was happening to you. *Captain Phillips* opens the BFI London Film Festival as the logical next step: a true story he can shoot in close, in tight corridors, with the camera never quite settling. The trick this time is that there is no chase to fall back on. The ship cannot outrun anything. The tension has to come from people in a confined space making decisions under pressure, and that is exactly where Greengrass is strongest.
## The setup
In April 2009 the Maersk Alabama, an American container ship, is making the run round the Horn of Africa when it is spotted by a skiff of armed Somali men a long way out to sea. Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) is the merchant captain, a careful, unglamorous professional who runs drills and reads the radar and knows the odds are not in his favour. When four pirates get aboard with assault rifles, the standoff is no longer about distance. It becomes a negotiation, a bluff, a slow contest of nerve between a captain trying to protect a crew he has hidden below decks and a young man named Muse (Barkhad Abdi) who has staked everything on this catch. The first half is the ship; the second half tightens to a single orange lifeboat adrift on the ocean, where the stakes narrow to who gets off it alive.
## The cast
Hanks does something here that is easy to undervalue because he makes it look like competence rather than acting. For most of the film Phillips is calm, watchful, managing, and Hanks plays the small calculations of a man working the problem. Then the last scene arrives, after the ordeal is over, and the mask comes off all at once. It is the best few minutes of screen work he has done in years, shock arriving late and physically, and it reframes everything steady that came before it.
The discovery is Barkhad Abdi, a first-time actor cast off the street in Minneapolis, who walks aboard and announces "Look at me, I am the captain now" with a quiet, hungry authority that should not be possible from someone who has never acted. Muse is not a cartoon villain. Abdi gives him pride, calculation, and a flicker of dawning panic as the situation slips beyond anything he planned. The supporting pirates, Barkhad Abdirahman and Faysal Ahmed among them, supply the volatility that makes every scene feel one wrong word from going off.
## The craft
Barry Ackroyd shoots it the way he shot *The Hurt Locker*, close and restless, the lens jostling for a clear view as though it too is trapped on the ship. Christopher Rouse, who cut the Bourne films, edits the second half into a procedural countdown as the US Navy closes in, cross-cutting between the sweating lifeboat and the cool professionalism of the warship until the two worlds are pulled into the same unbearable frame. Henry Jackman's score stays low and pulsing, more pressure than melody. Greengrass keeps the docu-realist style honest: no hero shots, no swelling speeches, just procedure piling on procedure until it becomes genuinely hard to breathe. At 134 minutes it has no slack in it.
## How it stacks up
The obvious near comparison is *A Hijacking*, the Danish film from a year earlier that took almost the same premise and played it as a cold boardroom negotiation drama. Greengrass goes the other way, all immediacy and physical fear, and the two make a fascinating double bill. Against his own work it sits closest to *United 93*: the same real event reconstructed minute by minute, the same refusal to editorialise, the same way of generating dread from things you already know the outcome of. And it shares DNA with *Zero Dark Thirty* from the same season, another procedural about American force projection that trusts the audience to sit with discomfort rather than be told how to feel. Where it edges ahead of most of them is the human scale: two captains, both responsible for crews, both out of their depth, watching the machinery of nations grind toward them.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting around 93%, praising the suspense, Greengrass's grip on procedure, and the Hanks and Abdi pairing. Audiences are a touch cooler at 89%, and the reservation tends to be about how faithful the film is to what really happened, with some of the real crew disputing the captain's portrayal. That argument is worth having, but it is a question about the source rather than the film in front of you. As a piece of suspense engineering it does everything it sets out to do, and the final scene is the kind of thing that wins people over even when they walked in sceptical.
## Verdict
This is high-grade adult thriller film-making, the sort that has quietly become rare: no superpowers, no twist, just craft, nerve, and two performances holding the centre. It loses a fraction for being more admirable than rewatchable. Once you know how the lifeboat ends, some of the unbearable pressure leaks out of a second viewing, and the realism that makes it gripping also makes it heavy going to put on casually. But the direction is immaculate, the tension is real, and that last collapse from Hanks is worth the price on its own. A genuinely good film that earns its reputation. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, following its opening-night gala at the BFI London Film Festival.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Greengrass and Hanks would not stay apart for long. Hanks went on to play another real captain under pressure for Clint Eastwood in *Sully* (2016), the Hudson River landing told in the same restrained, procedural register, which makes an interesting companion piece to this. Barkhad Abdi, plucked from obscurity for Muse, earned a BAFTA and an Oscar nomination for it and built a real career off the back of the role. The film has settled comfortably into its standing as one of the strongest mainstream thrillers of its decade. It is now widely available on disc, in 4K, and on digital, and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Actual physical violence is brief and generally undetailed. There is sight of bloody injuries that have been sustained accidentally, such as when a man steps on broken glass, but these are not focussed upon. In one scene, blood is seen to splash onto a man's face when other men are shot, but there is no strong detail of the actual violence.
**Threat:** When the pirates take over the ship, crew members are threatened with guns and with other forms of physical force. There is further threat when the ship's captain is isolated and taken away by the pirates in a lifeboat vessel. Although these scenes are intense and give a powerful impression of the fear felt by the crew, the sense of threat is not unduly sustained and is broken up by other action.
**Language:** The film includes mild bad language, including uses of 'hell', 'Jesus', 'shit', 'ass', 'asshole', 'goddamn', 'screwed up' and 'piss'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/captain-phillips-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtodyzodyx)).*
================================================================================
## Prisoners (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-prisoners
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-prisoners.md
- published: 2013-10-09
- document_id: 1139
> Denis Villeneuve's first English-language film is a long, grim abduction thriller carried by Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Roger Deakins. Punishing to sit through, hard to shake off. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** September 2013
- **Director:** Denis Villeneuve · **Writer:** Aaron Guzikowski
- **Studio / distributor:** Alcon Entertainment; Warner Bros.
- **Genre:** Crime thriller / psychological drama · **Runtime:** 153 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Hugh Jackman (*X-Men*, *The Prestige*) as Keller Dover; Jake Gyllenhaal (*Brokeback Mountain*, *Source Code*) as Detective Loki; Viola Davis (*Doubt*, *The Help*) as Nancy Birch; Paul Dano (*There Will Be Blood*) as Alex Jones
- **IMDb:** 8.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 81% critics / 87% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Denis Villeneuve is barely known outside the festival circuit, where *Incendies* announced a director with a real appetite for moral wreckage. *Prisoners* is his first film in English, handed a heavyweight American cast and a studio budget, and the surprise is how little he softens for the occasion. This is a two-and-a-half hour abduction thriller shot in the grey of a Pennsylvania winter, and it has no interest in being a comfortable night out. It wants to ask what an ordinary, decent man will do when the thing he most fears actually happens, and then it makes you watch the answer.
## The setup
On a wet Thanksgiving in a small town, two young girls go missing while the families are sharing dinner. The only lead is a battered camper van and its driver, Alex Jones (Paul Dano), a slow, frightened young man whom the police are forced to release for lack of evidence. Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), father of one of the girls, is certain Alex knows where the children are. With the clock running and the detective on the case getting nowhere fast, Dover decides the law is too slow to save his daughter, and he takes Alex. What he does next is where the film stops being a missing-child procedural and becomes something far harder to watch. The detective, meanwhile, keeps pulling at his own thread, and the two investigations move in parallel without quite touching.
## The cast
Jackman is the engine here, and it is a properly brave piece of work. Stripped of the swagger and the showmanship he is best known for, he plays Dover as a survivalist and a believer slowly coming apart, a man whose love for his child curdles into something frightening. He never asks you to approve of him, only to understand how a person gets there. Opposite him, Gyllenhaal gives Detective Loki a coiled, twitchy intensity, all blinks and barely-contained frustration, a closed-off man who solves cases by sheer refusal to let go. The film is at its best when these two circle each other. Around them, Viola Davis and Maria Bello carry the grief the men keep trying to outrun, and Paul Dano, mostly silent and badly hurt, makes Alex genuinely unreadable, which the whole film depends on. Melissa Leo turns up too, quietly, doing more than the part first appears to need.
## The craft
Roger Deakins photographs all of this, and you feel his hand in every frame. The town is permanently sodden, the light is the colour of an unmade bed, and the camera holds still while terrible things happen at the edge of it. Jóhann Jóhannsson's score is a low, scraping drone rather than a melody, more weather than music, and it sits under the film like a held breath. Villeneuve directs with the patience of someone who trusts dread to do the work that jump-scares usually do. He lets scenes run long past the point of comfort, and the length, which is the film's most divisive feature, is plainly deliberate: he wants you worn down, kept in the same fog as the people on screen. It is a film about endurance that asks the audience to endure something too.
## How it stacks up
The obvious relative is *Zodiac*, another long, methodical, rain-grey study of an investigation that eats the people conducting it, and *Prisoners* shares that film's refusal to hurry. It also stands in the long shadow of *Se7en* for sheer oppressive atmosphere, and of *Mystic River* and *Gone Baby Gone* for the way a crime against a child detonates inside a working-class community and exposes what the adults are made of. What sets Villeneuve's film apart from the pure crime pictures is its argument about vigilante justice. It refuses to let Dover off the hook, and it refuses to let the audience off either, by making his reasoning horribly easy to follow. The plotting in the final stretch leans harder on coincidence than the careful first two hours quite earn, and that is the seam where the film shows its strain.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are broadly admiring without being swept away, parked around four-fifths approval, praising the performances, Deakins' photography and Villeneuve's control while raising an eyebrow at the running time and the unrelenting bleakness. Audiences are warmer, a little above the critics, which fits a film that works on you in the gut more than on the page. I land with the audience here. The reservations are all fair, the length is real and the last act creaks, yet none of that undoes the grip of the thing while it is happening.
## Verdict
This is not a film I will reach for often, and that is the only thing keeping it off the very top shelf. It is too punishing for a casual evening, and Villeneuve makes you pay for every revelation. But on craft it is close to faultless, the central performances are among the best either lead has given, and it lingers for days in a way that easier thrillers never manage. As an arrival in English-language cinema it is a statement of intent: here is a director who can take a studio thriller and make it feel like an interrogation. Grim, gripping, a touch too long, and very hard to forget. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. A Blu-ray and DVD release should follow in the new year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Prisoners* turned out to be the opening move in one of the strongest runs any director has had this decade. Villeneuve followed it with *Enemy*, then *Sicario*, *Arrival*, *Blade Runner 2049* and *Dune*, and the patient, dread-soaked control on display here reads now as the blueprint for everything that came after. Jóhann Jóhannsson became his regular composer until the composer's death in 2018. The film has settled into its reputation as a high point of the smart-thriller revival, frequently cited in best-of-the-decade lists. It is widely available on disc and digital, and streams on various platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *abduction theme, strong violence and strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are several scenes of strong violence, as well as sight of bloody injuries, including in scenes where one character tortures another for information.
**Language:** There is frequent strong language ('f**k') throughout.
**Theme:** The film focuses on the reactions of the adults in the community, rather than following what happens to the children. There are no visual details of child abuse, although the subject is a highly emotive one.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/prisoners-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znzi1oti)).*
================================================================================
## Rush (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-rush
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-rush.md
- published: 2013-09-14
- document_id: 1146
> Ron Howard turns the 1976 Hunt-Lauda season into a two-man war of temperament, and it is one of the most purely entertaining true stories in years. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** September 2013
- **Director:** Ron Howard · **Writer:** Peter Morgan
- **Studio / distributor:** Working Title; StudioCanal
- **Genre:** Biographical sports drama / racing rivalry · **Runtime:** 123 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Chris Hemsworth (*Thor*) as James Hunt; Daniel Brühl (*Good Bye, Lenin!*, *Inglourious Basterds*) as Niki Lauda; Olivia Wilde (*Tron: Legacy*) as Suzy Miller; Alexandra Maria Lara (*Downfall*) as Marlene Lauda
- **IMDb:** 8.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 88% critics / 88% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Ron Howard has spent a career making the kind of polished, grown-up crowd-pleaser that wins prizes without frightening anyone, from *Apollo 13* to *A Beautiful Mind* to *Frost/Nixon*. *Rush* is a slightly different animal. It still has the gloss and the careful structure, but it has a meanness and a speed his films usually lack, and the reason is the second time he has worked with the writer Peter Morgan. Morgan builds his stories out of two people who cannot stand each other circling the same prize, and the 1976 Formula One season gives him the best pairing he has had since *Frost/Nixon*: two drivers who agreed on almost nothing except that the other man was the obstacle.
## The setup
The year is 1976, and the championship comes down to two men who could not be less alike. James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) is an English playboy who drives on instinct and appetite, drinks, beds, and risks his way through a season as though the points table were a side effect of having fun. Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) is an Austrian who treats the sport as an engineering problem, calculates every risk to the percentage, and has decided that Hunt is sloppy, lucky, and beatable. The film follows their rivalry from the lower formulae up to the title fight, through a near-fatal crash at the Nürburgring that should have ended one career and somehow does not. It keeps the historical shape of that season intact, so the stakes are real even if you already know roughly how it ends.
## The cast
This is a two-hander, and it works because the two halves are properly matched. Hemsworth, still mostly known for swinging a hammer in *Thor*, turns out to have exactly the easy, dangerous charm Hunt needs; he makes recklessness look like a philosophy rather than a flaw, and he is smart enough never to ask you to admire it. The film belongs to Daniel Brühl, though. His Lauda is prickly, rude, and physically unglamorous, a man who tells people the truth they do not want and is usually right, and Brühl finds the wounded intelligence under the arrogance without ever softening him into a teddy bear. Olivia Wilde and Alexandra Maria Lara are given less, the wife and the girlfriend orbiting two men who are mostly married to their cars, but Lara in particular lands the quieter scenes around Lauda's recovery.
## The craft
Howard and his cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle shoot the racing close and loud, all heat haze, vibrating bodywork, and rain coming off the tyres in sheets, rather than the clean helicopter sweeps you might expect. You feel the cars as machinery driven by frightened men, not as toys. Hans Zimmer's score keeps the engine note throbbing under the drama without drowning it. The film is also unsentimental about the cost: the crash and its aftermath are filmed with a frankness that earns the 15 certificate and never lets you forget these men were one mistake from death every Sunday. At 123 minutes it never stalls, which is more than you can say for a lot of two-hour true stories.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Senna*, the documentary that proved a couple of years ago how gripping Formula One could be on a screen, and *Rush* is the dramatised cousin to it: less raw, more shaped, but covering the same emotional territory of obsession and mortality. Against Howard's own back catalogue it sits closest to *Frost/Nixon*, another Morgan script about two men using a public contest to settle a private argument. And it belongs to the small, reliable club of sports films that work for people who do not follow the sport, because the racing is the setting and the rivalry is the story. You do not need to know a chicane from a chicken to feel the pull of it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have come out warmly, sitting around 88%, with most of the praise going to Brühl and to Howard's pacing, and audiences are matching them at 88%, which is a rarer alignment than it sounds for a film about a sport with a niche following in much of the world. The mild reservation in some reviews is that it tidies the history and flatters the rivalry into a cleaner duel than it really was. That is true, and I do not much mind. The film is honest about what it is doing, and the shaping serves a real point about temperament and risk rather than just smoothing the edges for the multiplex.
## Verdict
I had a very good time with this. It hits most of what I want from a film of this kind: it is fast, it is funny in the right places, it has two performances worth the ticket, and it is the sort of thing I would happily put on again on a wet afternoon. It loses a fraction for the supporting characters being thinner than the leads and for occasionally telling you what to feel about Hunt and Lauda when the actors have already shown you. But it is a sharper, leaner film than Howard's reputation would lead you to expect, and one of the most entertaining true stories to reach the screen in a while. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, and worth the big screen for the racing and the sound.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Daniel Brühl's performance went on to a BAFTA nomination and helped launch him into wider Hollywood work, and *Rush* has settled in as one of the most respected racing films of its era, the obvious reference point whenever a new one comes along. For the genre, the bar moved again a few years later with *Ford v Ferrari* (2019), another handsome, star-led true story built on a rivalry, which makes a natural double bill with this. *Rush* is now widely available on disc and digital and turns up regularly on streaming services depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, sex and bloody injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Language:** The film contains frequent strong language ('f**k'), as well as a single non-aggressive and disguised use of very strong language ('c**t').
**Sex:** There are two sex scenes, one of which takes place in the toilet of a plane. Although neither scene contains graphic detail, they do provide an impression of sexual mechanics and show some brief nudity, which gives them a strong tone.
**Injury detail:** The film contains images of bloody injuries in the context of motor racing accidents, some of which resulted in the deaths of drivers. These include sight of a driver's shattered leg and the severe burn injuries suffered by Lauda in a crash during the 1976 German Grand Prix.
**Additional issues:** References to drug use, alcohol consumption, smoking, and tobacco company logos appear as contextual elements of the historical period depicted.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/rush-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00njg0nzu)).*
================================================================================
## Elysium (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-elysium
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-elysium.md
- published: 2013-08-24
- document_id: 1075
> Neill Blomkamp follows District 9 with another grubby, inventive piece of science fiction, and pairs a knockout world with a blunt message. The design carries it where the script does not. 8/10.
- **UK release:** August 2013
- **Director:** Neill Blomkamp · **Writer:** Neill Blomkamp
- **Studio / distributor:** TriStar Pictures; Media Rights Capital; QED International
- **Genre:** Dystopian science fiction action / social allegory · **Runtime:** 109 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Matt Damon (*The Bourne Identity*, *Good Will Hunting*) as Max Da Costa; Jodie Foster (*The Silence of the Lambs*, *Contact*) as Delacourt; Sharlto Copley (*District 9*) as Kruger; Alice Braga (*I Am Legend*, *City of God*) as Frey
- **IMDb:** 6.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 65% critics / 58% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Four years ago Neill Blomkamp arrived more or less out of nowhere with *District 9*, a found-footage-flavoured alien-apartheid film made for a fraction of what it looked like it cost, and earned a Best Picture nomination for the trouble. *Elysium* is the difficult second album: more money, bigger stars, the same eye for grime and improvised hardware, and the same instinct for turning a social argument into a piece of hard science fiction. The question hanging over it is whether Blomkamp can scale up without sanding off the texture that made him interesting, and the answer is mostly yes, with one large reservation about the writing.
## The setup
It is 2154, and the human race has sorted itself into two tiers. The poor are left on a baked, overcrowded Earth, policed by robots and patched up in overflowing clinics. The rich have decamped to Elysium, a manicured ring-shaped station hanging in orbit, where every home has a Med-Bay that cures anything, ageing included. Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) is a Los Angeles factory worker and reformed car thief who takes a lethal dose of radiation on the job and is given five days to live. The only cure is up there, behind a border that shoots down anything that approaches without a citizen's barcode. To get to it, Max signs on for one last criminal job and has a crude exoskeleton bolted to his spine, which puts him on a collision course with Elysium's iron defence secretary, Delacourt (Jodie Foster), and the off-the-books mercenary, Kruger (Sharlto Copley), she keeps on a long leash.
## The cast
Damon is well used here. He plays Max as tired rather than heroic, a man who has already decided the system is rigged and is only fighting it because he has run out of time, and that weariness keeps the film honest when the plot wants to turn him into a saviour. Foster is the odder piece of casting: she gives Delacourt a clipped, glacial control and a strange Euro-inflected accent that some will find brittle, though the icy bureaucratic menace lands. The performance everyone will come out talking about is Sharlto Copley's. Having played the meek bureaucrat in *District 9*, he flips entirely into Kruger, a feral, bearded sleeper-agent who is genuinely frightening, all sing-song threat and sudden violence. Alice Braga gives the underwritten role of Frey, a nurse with a sick child, more warmth than the script earns, and provides the human stakes Max is supposedly fighting for.
## The craft
This is where Blomkamp is on home turf. Working again with cinematographer Trent Opaloch, he builds a future that feels lived in and second-hand: dusty Mexico City standing in for a decayed Los Angeles, droids assembled like white goods, weapons and ships that look welded together in a yard. The exoskeleton drilled into Max's body is a horrible, brilliant piece of design, and the orbital station is a clean, green inversion of everything below it, the contrast doing the film's arguing for it before a line of dialogue is spoken. The action is visceral and occasionally hard to follow, with the handheld camera getting in close during the fights, and Ryan Amon's heavy, percussive score keeps the pressure up. At 109 minutes it does not outstay its welcome.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *District 9*, and *Elysium* loses that one. The earlier film smuggled its politics in sideways through a specific, strange premise; here the allegory is right on the surface, with the haves and have-nots labelled and underlined. It sits in good company otherwise. There is a lot of *Children of Men* in the worn-out future and the border anxiety, a little of Verhoeven's *RoboCop* and *Total Recall* in the satirical hardware and corporate cruelty, and an echo of *In Time*, which played the same eat-the-rich card a couple of years back and rather fumbled it. Blomkamp's world-building is a class above any of those recent imitators even when his storytelling is not.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are coming in around 65%, audiences a touch cooler at 58%, and the split is easy to read. The reviews admire the craft and the ambition, then dock it for a message delivered with a sledgehammer and a final act that collapses into a fairly conventional punch-up. That is a fair charge. The healthcare-and-immigration metaphor has no subtlety to it, and the script keeps reaching for a clean fix to problems it has spent an hour showing to be enormous. Audiences who turned up for the *District 9* director hoping for the same sleight of hand have a point. None of it stops the film working as a piece of grimy, propulsive science fiction.
## Verdict
What carries *Elysium* over the line for me is the thing I most value in this genre: a future you can believe in and want to spend time in, even when it is a misery to live there. The world-building, the design, the texture and Copley's gleeful villainy are all top drawer, and the bluntness of the message bothers me far less than its narrative shortcuts do. It is not the equal of Blomkamp's debut, and the writing keeps it off the very top shelf, but it is intelligent, good-looking, properly entertaining science fiction that I would happily put on again. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in standard and IMAX. A DVD and Blu-ray release will follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Blomkamp's third feature, *Chappie* (2015), confirmed the pattern, a fertile imagination and striking design paired with a script that does not quite hold, and the critical line on him hardened accordingly. *Elysium* has settled as the middle child of his run, less admired than *District 9* but a long way from a write-off, and it reads now as an early entry in the wave of inequality science fiction that *Snowpiercer*, released around the same time, did with more wit. It is widely available on disc and digital, and turns up on the major streaming services depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, bloody violence and gory images*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are some scenes featuring strong bloody violence and gory images. In one fight, a man's face is blown off, whilst in another scene a woman's throat is cut, followed by sight of blood flowing over her hand. There are also brief scenes showing a man exploding, a man's shattered and bloody face, which is rapidly healed during a medical procedure, and a medical procedure in which a man has implants placed inside his body. The film also contains scenes in which people fight, featuring heavy blows and kicks to the head and body, and some of which feature men fitted with metal exoskeletal body suits.
**Language:** The film contains frequent use of strong language ('f**k' and 'motherf**ker').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/elysium-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mzezote)).*
================================================================================
## The World’s End (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-worlds-end
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-worlds-end.md
- published: 2013-08-06
- document_id: 1222
> Edgar Wright closes out the Cornetto trilogy with a pub crawl that curdles into an alien invasion, and finds something sadder under the gags than either Shaun or Fuzz dared. Funny, clever, and quietly bruised. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2013
- **Director:** Edgar Wright · **Writers:** Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright
- **Studio / distributor:** Working Title; Big Talk; Focus Features
- **Genre:** Science-fiction comedy / pub-crawl apocalypse · **Runtime:** 109 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Simon Pegg (*Shaun of the Dead*, *Hot Fuzz*) as Gary King; Nick Frost (*Shaun of the Dead*, *Paul*) as Andy Knightley; Rosamund Pike (*Die Another Day*, *An Education*) as Sam Chamberlain; Martin Freeman (*The Hobbit*, *Sherlock*) as Oliver Chamberlain
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 89% critics / 71% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy ends where the other two could not quite go. *Shaun of the Dead* (2004) used the zombie film to talk about a man who would rather not grow up; *Hot Fuzz* (2007) used the buddy-cop film to talk about a town that has decided niceness is worth killing for. Both wore their sadness lightly under the jokes. *The World’s End* is the one that lets the sadness show. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have written a science-fiction comedy about a pub crawl, and somewhere around the fourth pint it turns out to be about a man who has nothing in his life except the night twenty years ago when everything was still ahead of him. It is the funniest of the three in places and the bleakest by some distance, and that combination is harder to pull off than the easy charm of the earlier films.
## The setup
Gary King (Simon Pegg) is a fortysomething wreck still wearing the same coat and driving the same car he had at eighteen. The high point of his life was the Golden Mile, a twelve-pub crawl through his home town of Newton Haven that he and four schoolfriends never finished. Gary rounds up the others, now respectable men with mortgages and careers who would rather forget him, and bullies them into one more attempt. The reunion is awkward, the nostalgia is mostly his, and then they notice the town is wrong. The locals are too placid, too synchronised, and bleed the wrong colour. Newton Haven has been quietly replaced, and the only people who can see it are five middle-aged men determined to keep drinking through the apocalypse rather than admit the crawl is over.
## The cast
This is Pegg cast against his own type, and it is the best thing he has done. Gary King is charming the way a hangover is charming the next morning, a fast-talking liability who has turned arrested development into a personality. Pegg plays him without asking to be liked, which makes the cracks land harder when they show. Nick Frost takes the inversion that runs through the whole film and gives it a body: where he is usually the soft slacker to Pegg’s straight man, here Andy is the wounded grown-up, dry, teetotal and carrying a grudge the script takes its time to explain. Their chemistry has always been the engine of these films, and turning it inside out gives it somewhere new to go. Rosamund Pike brings clarity and old regret as Sam, the one woman foolish enough to have history with Gary, and Martin Freeman’s tightly wound estate agent is a small, precise comic turn. The ensemble plays like men who genuinely went to school together, which is most of the trick.
## The craft
Wright remains the most kinetic comedy director working in Britain. The visual grammar is the same one that made the first two films sing: hard cuts on small actions, whip pans, sound gags landed on the frame, set-ups that pay off three scenes later. Bill Pope’s photography keeps the suburban dusk handsome rather than drab, and the fights are a genuine surprise, fast and clean and properly choreographed, with the cast doing enough of it themselves to sell the chaos. Steven Price’s score and a soundtrack of early-nineties indie do the period heavy-lifting without nudging you in the ribs. At 109 minutes it moves, though the back third tips into a long confrontation that talks more than the earlier films would have. The craft is never in doubt; the question is whether you go with the tonal swerve from pub farce to existential argument, and for me it earns it.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestors are *Invasion of the Body Snatchers* and *They Live*, both of which used an alien takeover to say something about conformity, and Wright knows it; the placid replaced townsfolk are a straight line from pod people. What he adds is the very English idea that the thing being defended is not freedom in the abstract but the right to be a shambles, to get it wrong, to stay in the pub. Set against *Shaun* and *Hot Fuzz*, this is the one that trusts the audience to sit with discomfort. It is less immediately huggable than either, and a chunk of the audience will miss the warmth, but it is reaching for more.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are well onside, sitting around 89%, with the recurring note that this is the darkest and most mature film of the three, using the invasion to talk about addiction, nostalgia and failure. Audiences are cooler at 71%, and the gap is easy to read: people came for the comfort of the first two films and got handed a portrait of a man drinking himself to a standstill. I think the lower audience number is the more honest measure of how much the film asks of you, not a measure of quality. The melancholy is the feature, not a flaw, but it is fair enough not to want it from a Cornetto film.
## Verdict
This is funny, fast and far sadder than its premise lets on, and it rewards a second watch more than the first two because you can see the ending coming in Gary’s every evasion. It loses a little in a talky final stretch and it will not give everyone the warm hit they wanted. What it offers instead is a comedy with a real wound in it, an ensemble that feels lived-in, and a director at the height of his control. It sits just below *Shaun of the Dead* for me and comfortably in the rewatch pile. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, and the one to complete the trilogy on if you have the boxset coming.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The World’s End* closed the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, and its reputation has gradually warmed as audiences caught up with how deliberate the downbeat ending is; it now tends to be the film admirers of the trilogy argue is the smartest, even if Shaun stays the most loved. Edgar Wright went on to *Baby Driver* (2017) and *Last Night in Soho* (2021), and Rosamund Pike’s breakout in *Gone Girl* (2014) arrived the year after. It is widely available on disc and digital, often bundled as part of the Cornetto trilogy set, and streams on the usual platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC release page was unavailable when this review was prepared, so the detailed Content Advice breakdown by category (Violence, Language, Sex, Drugs) could not be retrieved verbatim. The 15 certificate and short advice line above are taken from the film's UK classification; the full category notes should be confirmed against the BBFC entry before relying on them.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-worlds-end-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtotgwota1)).*
================================================================================
## The Wolverine (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-wolverine
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-wolverine.md
- published: 2013-08-01
- document_id: 1221
> James Mangold takes Logan to Japan for a smaller, sadder, more grown-up superhero film, and for an hour it is the best one the X-Men franchise has made. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2013
- **Director:** James Mangold · **Writers:** Mark Bomback; Scott Frank
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Marvel Entertainment
- **Genre:** Superhero action thriller / samurai-influenced adventure · **Runtime:** 126 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Hugh Jackman (*X-Men*, *X2*) as Logan / Wolverine; Hiroyuki Sanada (*The Last Samurai*) as Shingen Yashida; Tao Okamoto as Mariko Yashida; Rila Fukushima as Yukio
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 71% critics / 69% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Three years ago *X-Men Origins: Wolverine* did the near-impossible: it took the most reliably watchable character in the franchise, gave him his own film, and made him boring. So the bar for a second solo outing is somewhere around the floor, which is the most useful thing that could have happened to it. James Mangold, who made *Walk the Line* and the 2007 *3:10 to Yuma* remake, is not an obvious blockbuster hire, and that is the point in his favour. What he has delivered is the smallest X-Men film yet, a character study with claws, set almost entirely in Japan and far more interested in what is wrong with Logan than in what he can punch through.
## The setup
Logan (Hugh Jackman) is living rough in the Yukon, haunted by the woman he was forced to kill and sick of an immortality that has only ever cost him the people he loves. A messenger named Yukio brings him to Tokyo, where a dying industrialist he saved at Nagasaki in 1945 wants to repay the debt by offering, of all things, a way out: a chance to give up his healing factor and grow old like an ordinary man. Logan refuses, then finds himself drawn into a Yashida family succession war, protecting the old man's granddaughter Mariko from yakuza and ninja while discovering that his wounds have, for the first time in living memory, started to stay open. A superhero stripped of the one thing that makes him a superhero is a sound idea, and the film knows it.
## The cast
Jackman has played this part six times now, and there is a weariness in him here that feels earned rather than acted, the look of a man who has run out of reasons. Stripped of the regenerating safety net, he gets to play hurt, frightened and mortal, and it suits him. The Japanese cast is the film's other great asset. Hiroyuki Sanada, who brought real swordsman's gravity to *The Last Samurai*, lends Shingen Yashida a cold dynastic menace, and Tao Okamoto gives Mariko more interior life than the standard imperilled love interest. The standout, though, is Rila Fukushima's Yukio, a red-haired, sword-carrying bodyguard with precognition and a dry sense of humour, who walks off with every scene she is in and deserves a film of her own.
## The craft
Mangold shoots Japan as a real place rather than a postcard, all neon, rain, love hotels and snowbound mountain villages, and Ross Emery's camera keeps the action legible in a way the genre too often forgets. The centrepiece, a brawl on top of a bullet train doing three hundred kilometres an hour, is a genuinely inventive set piece that uses physics as a weapon. Marco Beltrami's score stays restrained, and the whole film carries a grown-up, grounded tone closer to a yakuza thriller than to a costumed team-up. For most of its length this is a confident, adult piece of work that trusts the audience to sit with grief and silence.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstones are the samurai pictures the story openly courts, the wandering ronin who arrives in town and becomes entangled in another family's honour, and the film wears that influence well. Against the X-Men films themselves it is the most self-contained and the least cluttered, with none of the roster-management that bogs down the ensemble entries. It also sits comfortably beside *Blade*, another comic-book film that worked by narrowing its focus to one hard, solitary figure rather than widening the universe. The comparison it cannot quite survive is with itself: the lean character thriller of the first ninety minutes gives way to a climax involving a giant adamantium robot that belongs in a more ordinary film.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are running warmer than for any previous Wolverine outing, sitting around 71%, with audiences a touch behind at 69%, and the consensus is fair: praise for the Japan setting, for Jackman, and for Mangold's restraint, tempered by disappointment at a finale that trades the film's hard-won grounding for genre boilerplate. I would put it slightly higher than the critics and well above the IMDb crowd. The third act is a real flaw, not a quibble, but it is a third act, and the two acts before it are the best superhero filmmaking the series has managed.
## Verdict
For an hour this is close to the film the franchise has been promising for a decade: small, sad, beautifully placed, built around a hero who finally has something to lose. Then the robot turns up and it settles for being merely good. I do not mind. I value the unhurried character work, the texture of the setting and Fukushima's Yukio far more than I mind a clumsy ending, and this is one I will happily watch again, fast-forwarding the last twenty minutes if I must. The strongest Wolverine film yet, and proof the character works best when the world around him shrinks. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, including 3D and IMAX screens, though the extra dimension adds little here.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Mangold and Jackman reunited for *Logan* (2017), which took everything this film does well, the mortality, the grief, the grounded violence, and built a far harder, R-rated western around it, fulfilling the promise the Japanese chapter only gestured at. An "Unleashed" extended cut of *The Wolverine* later appeared on disc with more graphic violence. The film now streams on Disney+ in most regions and is available on Blu-ray and 4K, where it sits as the clear warm-up act for the send-off that followed.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate action violence and one use of strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** The moderate action violence is mostly seen during battles between the mutant Wolverine and human and mutant opponents. The action is often intense, and includes scenes in which Wolverine's metal claws emerge from the back of his fingers and slash or stab his opponents. However, there is little sight of injuries and very little bloodshed. In some scenes Wolverine is cut and in one scene he removes a robotic parasite from inside his body. However, his wounds heal rapidly. There are also scenes in which characters are shot with arrows or commit ritual suicide. In some scenes a villainess spits poison in men's faces and their skin briefly blisters. These brief moments do not focus on injury.
**Language:** There is one use of strong language during a scene in which Wolverine tells an opponent to 'Go f**k yourself, pretty boy'. There is also some moderate and mild bad language, for example, 'bitch', 'shit', 'bullshit', 'balls', 'assholes' and 'damn'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-wolverine-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00nzeymjc)).*
================================================================================
## Pacific Rim (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-pacific-rim
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-pacific-rim.md
- published: 2013-07-16
- document_id: 1133
> Guillermo del Toro hands the summer a love letter to giant robots and giant monsters, built with real conviction and very little cynicism. The story is thin and the spectacle is enormous, and it knows exactly which one you came for. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2013
- **Director:** Guillermo del Toro · **Writers:** Travis Beacham, Guillermo del Toro
- **Studio / distributor:** Legendary Pictures; Warner Bros.
- **Genre:** Science-fiction monster action / mecha adventure · **Runtime:** 131 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Charlie Hunnam (*Sons of Anarchy*) as Raleigh Becket; Rinko Kikuchi (*Babel*) as Mako Mori; Idris Elba (*The Wire*, *Luther*) as Stacker Pentecost; Charlie Day (*It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia*) as Dr Newton Geiszler
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 72% critics / 77% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Guillermo del Toro has spent his career making the monsters the most sympathetic thing on screen, from the faun of *Pan's Labyrinth* to the red devil of his two *Hellboy* films, so the surprise of *Pacific Rim* is not that he has made a giant-monster picture but that he has made one with so little irony in it. This is a director who clearly grew up on Japanese kaiju matinees and the *Evangelion* school of giant piloted machines, and rather than wink at all that, he has built it a two-hundred-million-dollar cathedral and meant every brick. In a summer thick with sequels and shared universes, a big original idea delivered with a straight face counts for something.
## The setup
The premise is delivered in a brisk prologue and then mostly got out of the way, which is the right call. Enormous creatures called Kaiju have started climbing out of a rift on the floor of the Pacific, levelling coastal cities, and humanity's answer is the Jaeger programme: skyscraper-sized robots piloted by two people whose minds are bridged so they can share the neural load of driving the thing. Years into the war the Jaegers are losing, the programme is being wound down, and a washed-out pilot called Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) is pulled back in for one last stand alongside a rookie, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), under a commander who has run out of other options. If you have seen a war film about a grounded ace talked back into the cockpit, you know the beats. The film is not pretending otherwise.
## The cast
The human story is the weakest material here, and the cast mostly survives it on presence. Hunnam is solid and likeable without ever being especially memorable, a leading man built more for jaw than for nuance. Kikuchi, who was Oscar-nominated for *Babel*, gives Mako the closest thing the film has to an inner life, and the partnership between the two of them is more about trust than romance, which is a relief. Idris Elba is the reason much of it lands: as the iron-jawed commander Stacker Pentecost he delivers a rally-the-troops speech that should be ridiculous and instead becomes the film's signature beat, sold on sheer gravity. Charlie Day and Burn Gorman provide a double act of bickering scientists that is broader than it needs to be, though Ron Perlman, slumming gloriously as a black-market Kaiju-organ dealer, is exactly the kind of grubby texture del Toro does so well.
## The craft
This is where the money is, and del Toro and his cinematographer Guillermo Navarro know it. The fights are staged at night and in the rain, lit in neon and lightning, and the film does the one thing the *Transformers* pictures never managed: it keeps the geography legible. You always know which way the robot is facing, where the monster's weight is, what is at stake in a swung fist. The sense of scale is enormous and constant, conveyed through water displacement, toppling cranes and the slow physics of something the size of a tower block turning to face you. Ramin Djawadi's score is all guitar and brass and pounding momentum, the rare blockbuster theme you come out humming. It is loud, wet, heavy cinema, and it is beautiful in a way this kind of film rarely bothers to be.
## How it stacks up
The obvious points of comparison are the films and shows del Toro is openly saluting: the *Godzilla* lineage, *Evangelion* and its anguished teenage mecha pilots, and the city-flattening spectacle of *Independence Day*. Against the closest Hollywood relative, the *Transformers* series, *Pacific Rim* wins easily on clarity, sincerity and design, even if Michael Bay's films have a sharper line in comedy. What it lacks is the human ballast that del Toro's smaller films carry so well; strip out the kaiju and there is not much story holding the frame up. It is closer in spirit to a very expensive monster-movie matinee than to *Pan's Labyrinth*, and it is happiest when it stops apologising for that.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm but qualified, sitting around 72%, with the recurring note that the spectacle is glorious and the people in front of it are thin. Audiences are a touch higher at 77%, and the split makes sense: the things this film does best are the things that play to a crowd rather than to a notebook. I am closer to the audience here. The screenplay is functional and the dialogue often clunks, but the picture earns enormous goodwill by being exactly what it promises and committing to it without embarrassment, which is rarer at this budget than it should be.
## Verdict
I came for giant robots hitting giant monsters in the rain, and on that contract the film over-delivers. It is generous, gorgeously designed and genuinely thrilling, and del Toro's affection for the genre keeps it from curdling into noise the way so much summer spectacle does. The flat human characters and the join-the-dots plot keep it off the very top shelf, and a second viewing leans on the set pieces rather than the story. But those set pieces hold up, the world is a real place, and I would happily sit through it again on the biggest screen going. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth seeking out in IMAX, where the scale does most of the talking; a Blu-ray and DVD release will follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: del Toro stepped back to a producing role for the sequel, *Pacific Rim Uprising* (2018), a lighter and more disposable film that confirmed how much the original owed to his eye. The first film has since settled into a fond cult standing, especially among viewers who grew up on the kaiju and mecha traditions it salutes, and Mako Mori became a small touchstone in conversations about how action films write their women. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and turns up on the major streaming platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *frequent moderate violence and one use of strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are a number of battles between aliens and robots which primarily take place at sea. Heavy blows are landed by the robots, with the aliens fighting back using spikes and teeth which pierce the armour and, on occasion, tear off robotic limbs and metal body plates. Humans controlling the robots sustain occasional injuries and we see some blood. It is also implied that some pilots are killed. But neither the injuries nor deaths are shown with any detail. The aliens are also seen rampaging through cities, demolishing buildings, as people flee in terror. In one sequence a woman remembers a childhood experience where she is threatened by an alien and upset as she cowers from it. In another scene two characters fight, with punches and throws, but again no detail of injury.
**Language:** A single use of strong language ('f***k') is used during the course of one of the battles. Other bad language includes 'bloody', 'shit', 'ass', 'bastard' and 'crap'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/pacific-rim-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00nzaxodi)).*
================================================================================
## World War Z (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-world-war-z
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-world-war-z.md
- published: 2013-06-23
- document_id: 1234
> A troubled production turns out a lean, frightening pandemic thriller that races round the globe one outbreak ahead of the dead. It throws out almost everything that made the book good and gets away with it on pure momentum. 8/10.
- **UK release:** June 2013
- **Director:** Marc Forster · **Writers:** Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, Damon Lindelof
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Skydance; Plan B
- **Genre:** Pandemic action thriller / zombie disaster · **Runtime:** 116 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Brad Pitt (*Fight Club*, *Se7en*) as Gerry Lane; Mireille Enos (*Gangster Squad*) as Karin Lane; Daniella Kertesz as Segen; David Morse (*The Green Mile*, *12 Monkeys*) as the ex-CIA agent
- **IMDb:** 7.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 66% critics / 72% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
By the time *World War Z* reaches a UK screen, its reputation has arrived ahead of it, and not the good kind. A reported $200m budget, an entire third act torn up and reshot, a writers' room shuffled through Matthew Michael Carnahan, then Drew Goddard and Damon Lindelof, the kind of production gossip that usually announces a corpse on the slab. Max Brooks's source novel, a faux oral history that interviewed survivors of a war already won, was about the worst possible book to turn into a single-hero summer tentpole. So the surprise is not that the film is compromised. The surprise is how well the wreckage runs.
## The setup
Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a former United Nations investigator who has hung up the dangerous work for school runs and pancakes, is stuck in Philadelphia traffic with his family when the city comes apart around them. The infection moves in seconds: a bite, a count of ten or twelve, and the victim is up and sprinting at the next warm body. With his wife and daughters owed a berth on a navy carrier offshore, Gerry is pulled back into service and sent chasing the outbreak across the globe, from a fortified Jerusalem to a quiet research facility, hunting for where the thing began and the weakness that might stop it. It is a procedural laid over a panic, a man trying to think while everything tells him to run.
## The cast
This is Pitt's film to carry, and he carries it by underplaying. Gerry is competent rather than heroic, a watcher who reads a room and a horizon, and Pitt gives him a husband's tiredness rather than an action star's swagger. It is a smart calibration for a film with no time for character arcs. Mireille Enos, all coiled worry as Karin, anchors the family stakes from the far end of a satellite phone, and the device of that fragile connection does more emotional work than the script has any right to expect. Daniella Kertesz is a real find as Segen, an Israeli soldier who becomes Gerry's near-silent partner in the back half, and David Morse turns one unsettling scene as a caged ex-CIA man into the film's creepiest few minutes. Nobody is asked to do much beyond survive, and everyone does exactly enough.
## The craft
Marc Forster is an odd hire for this, a director best known for *Monster's Ball* and *Finding Neverland* whose one big action credit, *Quantum of Solace*, was knocked for incoherent cutting. Here the scale suits him better. The set pieces are built around mass rather than gore: the dead pour like liquid, climbing over one another into a living ramp, and the famous shot of them cresting the Jerusalem wall in a chittering wave is the most genuinely frightening image a blockbuster has produced in a while. Ben Seresin shoots it cool and grey, Marco Beltrami's score works the dread, and the editing keeps the geography legible even when the screen is a churning mob. Crucially, the picture knows when to go quiet. The final stretch shrinks from continents to corridors, a tense crawl through a near-silent lab, and the restraint plays better than another city falling would have.
## How it stacks up
Place it among its neighbours and the shape comes clear. It has the cool institutional dread of *Contagion*, the same interest in protocol and the people trying to hold a system together, without that film's discipline. It owes its sprinting infected to *28 Days Later*, which rewrote the rules a decade ago and made the slow shambler look quaint, though Boyle's film was angrier and more intimate. And it sits across from *I Am Legend* as the other big-studio attempt to make the apocalypse a star vehicle, trading that film's lonely melancholy for restless globe-trotting. What it discards is the book entirely, the geopolitics, the polyphony, the bleak of a world remade. Brooks fans have every right to feel robbed. As a thriller cut loose from its source, it moves.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critics have landed around two thirds positive, and the consensus reads roughly as mine does: a troubled production that came out leaner and more effective than anyone dared predict, stronger as propulsive cinema than as adaptation. Audiences are a notch warmer, which fits a film engineered to keep a Friday-night crowd's pulse up. The recurring complaint, that the PG-friendly bloodlessness drains the menace, I find overstated. The threat here is being overrun, not dismembered, and the film is scarier for keeping its camera on the swarm rather than the wounds.
## Verdict
I came to this expecting a salvage job and got a properly tense disaster picture instead. It is not the book and it is not deep, the characters are thin and the seams of the reshoot show if you look, but it is paced like a sprint, frightening in the right places, and built around a couple of images I will not forget in a hurry. It earns its rewatch on momentum and craft, which is more than most of its budget-bracket rivals manage. Better than its backstage horror stories promised, and better than its scores suggest. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, including 3D and IMAX screens.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the sequel that the open ending so plainly teed up never arrived. A follow-up spent years in development with David Fincher attached to direct Pitt, and was cancelled in 2019, leaving this a one-off despite its franchise ambitions. The wave-of-zombies premise found its definitive small-screen answer in *The Last of Us* (2023), which had the room for the human texture this film had to cut. *World War Z* has settled into its reputation as the better-than-it-should-be entry in the modern outbreak cycle, and the unrated cut, which restores some of the gore the cinema version held back, is the one to seek out. It streams on Paramount+ and is widely available on disc and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *sustained threat, strong violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Most of the violence takes place off-screen and the film contains very little blood. However, some scenes leave a strong impression, including one in which the main character hacks a female soldier's hand off in order to stop the zombie disease spreading through her body.
**Threat and horror:** There is sustained threat throughout, with swathes of fast-moving zombies attacking from the very beginning. Zombies fly at humans and attack, almost immediately transforming those bitten into fellow zombies, with some close-ups on their glassy eyes and on black veins spreading across their faces.
**Language:** There is some moderate bad language, including uses of 'bitch' and 'prick'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/world-war-z-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znzy4nte)).*
================================================================================
## Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-star-trek-into-darkness
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-star-trek-into-darkness.md
- published: 2013-05-26
- document_id: 1162
> J. J. Abrams brings his rebooted Enterprise back for a faster, darker second outing built around a villain it would rather you did not name. The energy is real, the secrecy is silly, and it lands just shy of the first film. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** May 2013
- **Director:** J. J. Abrams · **Writers:** Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Bad Robot; Skydance
- **Genre:** Science fiction action adventure · **Runtime:** 132 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chris Pine (*Star Trek*) as James T. Kirk; Zachary Quinto (*Star Trek*, *Heroes*) as Spock; Benedict Cumberbatch (*Sherlock*, *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*) as John Harrison; Zoe Saldaña (*Avatar*, *Star Trek*) as Nyota Uhura; Karl Urban (*The Lord of the Rings*, *Star Trek*) as Leonard McCoy; Simon Pegg (*Shaun of the Dead*, *Hot Fuzz*) as Montgomery Scott
- **IMDb:** 7.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 84% critics / 89% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Four years ago J. J. Abrams did something nobody thought possible: he took a franchise that had run aground on its own self-seriousness and made it fast, funny and popular again. The 2009 *Star Trek* rebuilt the Enterprise crew from the keel up, reset the timeline so it owed the past nothing, and sent the whole thing off with a swagger that the older films had long since lost. The question hanging over the sequel was always going to be the same one that hangs over every second instalment: now that the introductions are done, does Abrams have a story worth telling, or just a bigger budget to spend on the lens flares.
## The setup
A single act of terror tears a hole in Starfleet from the inside. A rogue officer, John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), strikes at the heart of the fleet and then vanishes to a place no Starfleet vessel is meant to go, daring anyone to come after him. Kirk (Chris Pine), grieving and furious, talks his way into a hunting party armed with experimental weapons and a brief that smells wrong from the start. What begins as a manhunt turns into something murkier, a question about who gave the orders, why Starfleet has started building warships, and whether the man they are chasing is the threat or the symptom. The crew end up caught between the enemy in front of them and the militarised machine behind them.
## The cast
The pleasure of the first film was the chemistry, and it survives intact. Pine has settled Kirk into the role properly now, less the reckless cadet and more a captain learning that the chair comes with a bill attached. The Kirk and Spock double act remains the spine of the thing: Zachary Quinto plays Spock as a man permanently holding a door shut against his own feelings, and the friction between cold logic and Kirk's gut instinct still generates most of the film's best scenes. Around them the ensemble does its reliable work, with Karl Urban's irascible McCoy and Simon Pegg's harried Scotty supplying the dry humour that keeps the darkness from curdling. Zoe Saldaña gives Uhura more to do than a love interest, dropping into a hostile situation and talking her way through it.
The film belongs, though, to Cumberbatch. He plays Harrison with a stillness that the rest of the cast cannot afford, a low theatrical menace that makes every soft-spoken threat land harder than any shouted one. He is the best villain this iteration of the franchise has produced, and the camera knows it.
## The craft
Abrams directs action the way few of his contemporaries can, with a clarity of geography that survives even his fondness for shaking the camera and flooding the frame with light. Dan Mindel's photography gives the gleaming bridge of the Enterprise a tactile, lived-in shine, and the set-pieces, a plunge through a debris field, a foot chase across a future skyline, a starship falling out of the sky, are staged with real momentum. Michael Giacchino's score does the heavy lifting underneath, returning to the soaring theme from the first film and giving the quieter beats a weight the script sometimes reaches for and misses. At 132 minutes the film barely pauses for breath, which is both its great strength and the reason its emotional swings do not always earn what they ask for.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is the 2009 film, and *Into Darkness* is the leaner, darker, more confident sequel that a successful reboot usually produces. It also leans hard on franchise history in a way the first film deliberately avoided, and how much that works for you will depend on how much affection you carry for what came before. Beyond *Star Trek* itself, the film sits comfortably alongside the muscular, globe-trotting blockbusters of the moment, sharing more DNA with the recent run of *Mission: Impossible* pictures and the harder-edged Bond of *Skyfall* than with the talky, ponderous Trek of the past. This is *Star Trek* reimagined as a chase thriller in space, and on those terms it mostly delivers.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have come out warmly, sitting around 84%, with audiences a little ahead at 89%, and the praise lands where you would expect: the pace, the spectacle, the cast. The grumbling, where there is any, is from the faithful, who object to the secrecy the marketing has wrapped around Harrison's real identity, and to a third act that borrows its biggest emotional moment wholesale from an earlier, beloved Trek film and asks you to feel it again at second hand. That borrowing is the film's weakest decision, a callback that mistakes recognition for resonance. But I am not the audience that worship gives most offence to, and as a piece of two-hour entertainment it does almost everything it sets out to do.
## Verdict
This is a confident, propulsive, handsomely made blockbuster with the best villain the new Trek has fielded and a crew I am happy to spend time with. It falls just short of the first film because it trades that one's sense of fresh discovery for a story built on secrets and second-hand sentiment, and the secrecy in particular is sillier than the film deserves. None of that stops it being eminently rewatchable, which for me counts for a great deal: it is a film I would happily put on again knowing every beat. It is not quite the equal of the reboot that earned my full marks, but it is a worthy, energetic follow-up. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in IMAX 3D where you can, the space-set sequences were shot with the format in mind.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the open secret the film worked so hard to protect, that John Harrison is Khan Noonien Singh, is now common knowledge, and the studio's coyness about it has aged into a minor cautionary tale about over-managed marketing. The crew returned for a third outing, *Star Trek Beyond* (2016), which handed the chair to Justin Lin and steered the series back towards the lighter, more exploratory tone of the first film. *Into Darkness* has settled into its reputation as the most divisive of the Kelvin-timeline trilogy, admired for its craft and Cumberbatch's villain, faulted by the faithful for what it does with *The Wrath of Khan*. It is now widely available on disc and digital, including 4K, and streams on various platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Frequent scenes of moderate violence includes exchanges of punches, kicks, the use of a knife, and gunfights involving futuristic weaponry. Sight of blood and injury is limited, including an implied leg break and skull crush indicated by sound rather than visuals.
**Threat and horror:** There are frequent scenes of threat, including characters running from arrow-firing warriors, erupting volcanoes, crashing spaceships, and collapsing buildings. Although sometimes prolonged, these scenes also include comic moments and a focus on action and adventure rather than direct or sustained threat.
**Language:** Occasional use of mild bad language includes 'bastard', 'bloody', 'son of a bitch', 'piss' and 'shit'.
**Sex:** There are also some mild sex references, such a character waking up beside two women in bed, and a man sneaking a look at a woman in her underwear as she changes her clothes.
**Additional issues:** There is some sight of blood in the aftermath of violence. Adult characters drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/star-trek-into-darkness-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mzexnte)).*
================================================================================
## Iron Man 3 (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-iron-man-3
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-iron-man-3.md
- published: 2013-05-02
- document_id: 1099
> Shane Black takes the keys to the biggest franchise in cinema and quietly turns it back into a buddy thriller about a man and his nerves. Divisive, funny, and far better than its problem-child reputation. 8/10.
- **UK release:** April 2013
- **Director:** Shane Black · **Writers:** Drew Pearce, Shane Black
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney
- **Genre:** Superhero action thriller / technology adventure · **Runtime:** 130 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Robert Downey Jr. (*Iron Man*, *Sherlock Holmes*) as Tony Stark; Gwyneth Paltrow (*Se7en*, *Shakespeare in Love*) as Pepper Potts; Don Cheadle (*Hotel Rwanda*) as James Rhodes; Ben Kingsley (*Gandhi*, *Sexy Beast*) as Trevor Slattery
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 79% critics / 78% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
There is a particular kind of pressure on the film that has to follow *The Avengers*. Marvel has just proved that the whole crossover gamble works, the numbers are absurd, and the obvious move is to make every solo film feel like a piece of the bigger machine. Instead Marvel handed the keys to Shane Black, the man who wrote *Lethal Weapon* and then directed Downey in *Kiss Kiss Bang Bang*, and Black has done something close to the opposite. He has taken the largest franchise in cinema and shrunk it back down to a story about one rattled man, his house, and the question of whether the suit is the hero or the bloke inside it.
## The setup
Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is not coping. New York happened, the wormhole happened, and a man who built his identity on being the smartest person in any room cannot sleep, tinkering through the small hours and quietly coming apart. Into this walks the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), a televised terrorist staging attacks that the authorities cannot trace, and a charming science entrepreneur with a regenerative technology called Extremis that does not behave the way its investors were promised. When the threat lands on Tony's own doorstep it strips him of almost everything that made him Iron Man, and the film becomes the story of what is left when you take the toys away. I will leave the Mandarin where the trailers left him, because the turn that follows is the thing people will be arguing about on the way out.
## The cast
Downey has played this man four times now and he has never been looser or, oddly, more exposed. The wisecracks are still landing, but they are doing different work here, papering over panic attacks rather than radiating invulnerability, and Downey plays the cracks beautifully. Gwyneth Paltrow finally gets to do more than worry from a doorway, with Pepper pulled into the action in a way the earlier films kept promising and never delivered. Don Cheadle and Downey have the easy, needling rhythm of two men who have known each other for years, which is exactly the buddy-movie chemistry Black trades in. Then there is Ben Kingsley, who gives the Mandarin a genuinely unsettling gravity early on and then, well, earns every penny in the back half. A child actor, Ty Simpkins, turns up as Tony's reluctant sidekick and, against the odds, is not annoying.
## The craft
Black writes the way he always has, in sharp cross-talk and sudden tonal swerves, and he is not afraid to let a superhero film be funny in the dry, adult register of his nineties thrillers. He also sets the thing at Christmas, because of course he does. John Toll's photography keeps the action legible, and there is a genuinely thrilling mid-air rescue sequence that depends on physics and timing rather than a city being thrown at the screen. Brian Tyler's score is muscular without drowning the jokes. The Extremis effects, glowing bodies that run hot and heal, give the action a nasty edge the suits-punching-suits routine usually lacks. If anything sags it is the final act, where the obligation to deliver a big metal climax pulls against the smaller, smarter film underneath.
## How it stacks up
Set it beside the first *Iron Man* and you see what Jon Favreau started and Black has sharpened: the series has always been more interesting as a character study of a clever, damaged man than as a parade of armour. This is a long way from the muddled *Iron Man 2*, and it is closer in spirit to *Kiss Kiss Bang Bang* than to *The Avengers*, a private-eye comedy that happens to have rocket boots. The comparison Black clearly cannot resist is *Lethal Weapon*: two mismatched men, a conspiracy, a body count and a lot of banter, all decorated with fairy lights. As a piece of franchise management it is the bravest of the solo films so far, precisely because it refuses to behave like an episode of a serial.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are largely on board, around 79%, praising Downey and Black's wit and the decision to make the strongest Stark the one with the dented confidence. Audiences are a touch cooler, sitting near 78%, and the fault line runs straight through the Mandarin. For a chunk of the fanbase the twist is a betrayal of a comic-book heavyweight; for me it is the cheekiest and most Shane Black thing in the film, a joke about fear and image that fits the anxious, what-is-really-behind-the-mask story he is telling. You can dislike it and still see the craft in it.
## Verdict
This is the *Iron Man* film that remembers the suit was always less interesting than the man. It is funny, it is nervier than a tentpole this size has any right to be, and it gives Downey his richest run at the character yet. The metal-on-metal finale is the weakest stretch and the Mandarin gag will cost it some goodwill, but neither dents the pleasure of watching a real writer-director smuggle a buddy thriller into a billion-dollar machine. It rewards a rewatch, it knows exactly what it is doing, and it is far better than its problem-child reputation suggests. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and 3D, with IMAX screenings worth seeking out for the airborne set piece.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the Mandarin gag refused to die, and Marvel later staged a half-apology in the *All Hail the King* short before bringing a "real" version of the character into *Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings* (2021). Downey carried Tony Stark through to *Avengers: Endgame* (2019), which gives the anxiety running under this film a longer arc than it could have known. As the only solo Marvel entry directed by Shane Black, it has aged into a cult favourite among people who like their blockbusters with a writer's fingerprints on them. It streams on Disney+ and is widely available on 4K, Blu-ray and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat and language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are some intense action scenes in which the heroes and villains battle, delivering punches and blows and attacking each other with weapons. The violence is highly stylised, with no realistic injury detail.
**Threat and horror:** Moments of more realistic violence and threat are very brief. Acts of terrorism are shown, including innocent people being vapourised, and a plane being destroyed.
**Language:** There is some moderate language, such as 'dick', 'wankers' and 'spazzed out', used non-discriminatorily. There are also milder terms including 'crap', 'God', 'ass', 'hell', 'bloody', 'pissed off', 'son of a bitch', 'jerk' and 'shit'.
**Sex:** The film also contains infrequent mild sex references and innuendo.
**Injury detail:** There is some sight of blood in the aftermath of violence but no realistic injury detail.
**Additional issues:** Adult characters drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/iron-man-3-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zodyxnta)).*
================================================================================
## Oblivion (2013)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-oblivion
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-oblivion.md
- published: 2013-04-26
- document_id: 1130
> Joseph Kosinski follows Tron: Legacy with a gorgeous, melancholy science-fiction puzzle that borrows freely and looks like nothing else this spring. The story is familiar, the world is immaculate, and on mood alone it earns its keep. 8/10.
- **UK release:** April 2013
- **Director:** Joseph Kosinski · **Writers:** Karl Gajdusek, Michael deBruyn
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; Chernin Entertainment; Radical Studios
- **Genre:** Post-apocalyptic science fiction mystery · **Runtime:** 124 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Cruise (*Top Gun*, *Mission: Impossible*) as Jack Harper; Andrea Riseborough (*Brighton Rock*, *W.E.*) as Victoria; Olga Kurylenko (*Quantum of Solace*) as Julia; Morgan Freeman (*The Shawshank Redemption*, *Se7en*) as Malcolm Beech
- **IMDb:** 7.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 53% critics / 61% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Joseph Kosinski arrives for his second feature with a reputation built on one thing: he can make a frame look extraordinary. *Tron: Legacy* was a thin film draped in some of the most beautiful images of its year, and the open question hanging over *Oblivion* is whether he can carry the storytelling now that there is no neon grid to hide behind. The answer is mixed, and yet I came out of this one happier than the scores would lead you to expect. It is a film assembled almost entirely from parts you have seen elsewhere, and it wears them with such confidence and such gorgeous surfaces that the borrowing stops mattering as much as it should.
## The setup
Sixty years after a war that broke the Moon and left Earth scorched and largely abandoned, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) is one of the last men on the planet, a drone repairman seeing out the final weeks of a clean-up operation before the human survivors decamp to a colony on Titan. He works in pairs with Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), who runs his missions from a glass house in the clouds, the two of them counting down to extraction with a routine that has the eerie tidiness of people who have been told not to ask questions. Then a wrecked craft falls from orbit carrying a sleeping woman (Olga Kurylenko) whose face Jack already knows from dreams he should not be having, and the careful story he has been told about his own life starts to come apart. To say much more is to give the game away, and the pleasure here is in watching the floor tilt.
## The cast
Cruise does what Cruise does, which is to anchor a strange film with a completely unembarrassed sincerity. He runs, he climbs, he flies, he stares out at ruined landmarks with the right amount of ache, and his total commitment to the bit is the thing that keeps a high-concept premise from floating off. Andrea Riseborough is the find of the piece. Her Victoria is poised and faintly brittle, a woman holding a fragile contentment together with both hands, and Riseborough plays the cracks beautifully without ever tipping into melodrama. Olga Kurylenko has the harder, thinner role of the woman from the wreck, more plot device than character, and she does what she can with it. Morgan Freeman turns up in tinted goggles to deliver exposition in that voice, and while the part is slight, his presence lends the back half a gravity it has not entirely earned.
## The craft
This is where the film justifies the ticket. Claudio Miranda shoots a drowned, bleached Earth in clean natural light, all white surfaces and vast empty skies, and the production design of Jack's sky station is the kind of restrained future you actually want to live in. The drones are a genuinely menacing piece of engineering, spherical and patient and wrong, and the action built around them has real weight. Best of all is the score by M83, working with Joseph Trapanese, a swelling synth-and-orchestra sound that gives the melancholy somewhere to go and does a great deal of the emotional lifting the script leaves undone. There is a sequence at an abandoned stadium, and another in a green valley hidden from the satellites, that I will happily watch again for the mood alone. Kosinski composes for the largest screen he can find, and the film rewards it.
## How it stacks up
The borrowing is shameless and worth naming, because half the fun is spotting it. There is a great deal of *Moon* here, the lone worker and his too-clean handler and the question of who is really running the show, and more than a little of *WALL-E* in the romance of a single conscientious machine-minder on a dead Earth. The reveal machinery owes a debt to *The Matrix* and to the original *Planet of the Apes*, and the look carries the DNA of *Tron: Legacy* into a sunlit register. None of these comparisons flatter the screenplay, which gets to its destination by routes you can see coming. What *Oblivion* has that its better-written cousins sometimes lack is sheer surface beauty and a soundtrack that turns a derivative plot into something that lands as wistful rather than recycled.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical line is settling around the predictable verdict: ravishing to look at, hollow at the centre, a film that mistakes mystery for depth. Rotten Tomatoes has it under water at 53% from critics, with audiences a fair bit warmer at 61%, and that gap tells the real story. The people grumbling are the ones grading it as screenwriting; the people enjoying it are grading it as an experience. I am firmly with the audience here. A science fiction film that is internally coherent, gorgeously made, scored to the hilt and genuinely atmospheric clears a bar that a cleverer but uglier film would not.
## Verdict
*Oblivion* is not the smart film it occasionally pretends to be, and anyone who walks in for a tightly plotted original will leave counting the borrowed pieces. I did not walk in for that. I walked in for intelligent-feeling science fiction with a strong mood, a future I could believe in, and a soundtrack to get lost in, and on all three it delivers more than its reputation suggests. It is beautiful, it is melancholy, it commits utterly to its own ideas even when they are second-hand, and it is the kind of film I will put on again on a wet afternoon purely to sit inside its world. The story is the weakest thing in it; almost nothing else is. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it on the biggest screen you can reach, ideally IMAX, where Miranda's vistas and the M83 score do their proper work.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Joseph Kosinski did not return to original science fiction for some time, instead going on to the aviation spectacle of *Top Gun: Maverick* (2022), and *Oblivion* has settled into a quiet cult standing on the strength of its design and that M83 score, which has outlived the lukewarm reviews. The film is now widely available on disc and digital and rotates through the major streaming platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, one use of strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of moderate violence include exchanges of punches and kicks, a brief choking, and brief sight of blood on a character's clothes, which reveals a small wound in their stomach. There are also gunfights between humans and robotic drones.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of strong language ('f**k'), and occasional mild bad language including 'damn', 'God', 'goddamn', 'hell', 'pissed', 'screw', 'shit' and 'son of a bitch'.
**Additional issues:** In a night scene a female character removes her dress and swims naked in a pool, revealing her bare buttocks. In another scene a male character smokes a large cigar, but the work as a whole neither glamorises nor promotes the practice of smoking.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/oblivion-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znze0odq)).*
================================================================================
## Cloud Atlas (2012)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-cloud-atlas
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-cloud-atlas.md
- published: 2013-03-02
- document_id: 1060
> Three directors, six stories, five hundred years and one cast playing everyone. A magnificent folly that mostly holds together, and the rare puzzle film you want to take apart again. 8/10.
- **UK release:** February 2013
- **Directors:** Lana and Andy Wachowski; Tom Tykwer · **Writers:** Lana and Andy Wachowski; Tom Tykwer
- **Studio / distributor:** Cloud Atlas Productions; X Filme Creative Pool; Warner Bros.
- **Source:** the novel by David Mitchell
- **Genre:** Science fiction drama / historical fantasy · **Runtime:** 172 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Tom Hanks (*Forrest Gump*, *Cast Away*) in multiple roles; Halle Berry (*Monster's Ball*, *X-Men*) in multiple roles; Jim Broadbent (*Iris*, *Moulin Rouge!*) in multiple roles; Hugo Weaving (*The Matrix*, *The Lord of the Rings*) in multiple roles; Doona Bae (*The Host*) as Sonmi-451 and others
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 67% critics / 66% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
David Mitchell's *Cloud Atlas* was the book everyone agreed could not be filmed: six nested stories spread across five hundred years, each in a different genre and a different voice, folded one inside the next like a Russian doll. So of course someone tried, and the someone turned out to be the Wachowskis, fresh off the diminishing returns of the *Matrix* sequels, in harness with Tom Tykwer, the German director of *Run Lola Run*. Three directors, three timelines each, one of the largest independently financed productions ever mounted, and a flat refusal to make it easy on anybody. Whatever else it is, nobody can accuse it of playing safe.
## The setup
The stories run from a Pacific voyage in the 1840s to a far-future Hawaii long after a civilisation has fallen, by way of a 1930s composer in Edinburgh, a 1970s journalist chasing a nuclear cover-up, a present-day publisher locked in a nursing home against his will, and a cloned server in a neon Korea who starts to want more than the life she was grown for. A diary is read by the composer; the composer's music reaches the journalist; the journalist's story becomes a manuscript; the manuscript becomes a film the publisher watches; the publisher's escape becomes scripture to the clone. Acts of kindness, cowardice and cruelty echo down the chain, and the same souls keep turning up wearing different faces. That last conceit is the whole experiment: one ensemble plays through every era, so you spend the film hunting Tom Hanks and Halle Berry across centuries like a very expensive game of where's-who.
## The cast
The casting trick is the film's nerve and its biggest liability. Hanks ranges from a murderous ship's doctor to a foul-mouthed gangster novelist to the haunted future tribesman who anchors the final act, and he is loosest and best when he is least like Tom Hanks. Berry is the steadier presence, strongest as the seventies reporter with a conscience and a deadline. Jim Broadbent walks off with the whole film as the bullied publisher, a stretch of broad English farce that has no business working as well as it does. Hugo Weaving recurs as the face of whatever system is doing the oppressing this century, from slaver to assassin to a nightmare green-suited devil. Doona Bae, as the clone Sonmi-451, gives the most genuinely moving performance in the picture, the still centre the louder strands orbit. The makeup that ages, races and re-sexes the cast is where the gamble shows: sometimes seamless, sometimes a distraction you cannot unsee, and in a couple of the Korean-set transformations frankly a misjudgement.
## The craft
For a film assembled by three directors on two continents, the surprise is how little it feels stitched together. The six worlds are realised with real conviction, the future Seoul a glittering vertical city and the post-collapse Hawaii a sun-bleached ruin, and the editing braids them so the emotional beats rhyme across eras rather than simply cutting between them. A chord struck in 1936 lands as a memory in 2012. Tykwer's own score, written with Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil, threads the whole thing together, the Cloud Atlas Sextet recurring as the connective tissue the plot keeps promising. At 172 minutes it asks a great deal, and it earns most of it through sheer momentum, though there are stretches in the back half where the ambition outruns the grip.
## How it stacks up
The obvious cousin is *The Fountain*, Aronofsky's three-era meditation on love and death, and *Cloud Atlas* shares its reach and its risk of preciousness while being far more generous with incident and humour. It works the same multi-strand territory as *Babel*, but where that film let its threads only graze each other, this one insists they are the same thread. Set against the Wachowskis' own *Matrix*, it trades that film's clean genre engine for something baggier and warmer and a good deal stranger. As an unfilmable-book adaptation it belongs with the brave failures more than the clean successes, except that it is not quite a failure.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is split almost exactly down the middle, critics at 67% and audiences a notch behind at 66%, and the divide is less about quality than tolerance. The admirers call it a moving mosaic; the unconvinced call it a magnificent folly, too long, too earnest, and queasy about the racial makeup. Both camps are describing the same film accurately. It is sentimental, it overreaches, and the soul-reincarnation framework is the kind of cosmic uplift that makes hard-headed viewers wince. It is also one of the few recent blockbusters with a genuine idea in its head and the budget to chase it down. Given a choice between a tidy film with nothing to say and an untidy one swinging for everything, I will take the swing.
## Verdict
This lands well above the critical midpoint for me because of what it values: intelligent science fiction, dense world-building, a structure you want to map out on a second viewing, and a score that does real work. The flaws are real. It is overlong, the makeup occasionally undoes the spell, and the philosophy is laid on with a trowel. None of that cancels the pleasure of a film this ambitious that mostly holds, or the pull of a puzzle box you finish wanting to open again. It is the rare three-hour epic I would happily rewatch, partly to catch the connections I missed. Flawed, overreaching, and far more alive than the safe films around it. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, where its scale and its sound design make the case for the big screen. A Blu-ray and DVD release will follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Lana Wachowski's sister, credited here as Andy, later came out as Lilly Wachowski, and the pair are now known as the Wachowskis. The trio's interest in braided, multi-character storytelling carried straight into *Sense8* (2015), the Netflix series the Wachowskis made with Tykwer, which extended the same one-soul-many-bodies idea over television length. *Cloud Atlas* has settled where it opened, a film people either treasure or bounce off, with little middle ground, and it has quietly grown a devoted following among those who treasure it. It streams across the usual platforms depending on region and is available on disc, including a Blu-ray that flatters the design work.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, once very strong, strong violence and sex*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are several scenes of strong bloody violence. For example, during a battle between rival tribes, some people are hit with machetes, including sight of a man's throat being cut. Elsewhere in the film, characters are shot, resulting in blood spurts, and a man is thrown from a high rise flat, landing with a bloody impact on the pavement below.
**Language:** There are multiple uses of strong language ('f**k') and a single use of very strong language ('c**t').
**Sex:** Sex scenes include one in which a woman's bare breasts and buttocks are visible as she sits astride her partner and thrusts up and down. There are also some verbal sex references as a man is accused of sodomy.
**Additional issues:** The film also contains some verbal references to suicide and a man killing himself with a gun, off screen. There is use of the word 'n****r' in a story set during the era of the slave trade.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/cloud-atlas-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mzq1mdi)).*
================================================================================
## Jack Reacher (2012)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-jack-reacher
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-jack-reacher.md
- published: 2013-01-10
- document_id: 1100
> Tom Cruise takes on Lee Child's wandering ex-cop in a lean, old-fashioned investigative thriller from the man who wrote The Usual Suspects. The casting is all wrong on paper and the film is much better than that ought to allow. 8/10.
- **UK release:** December 2012
- **Director:** Christopher McQuarrie · **Writer:** Christopher McQuarrie (from the novel *One Shot* by Lee Child)
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Skydance; TC Productions
- **Genre:** Investigative crime thriller · **Runtime:** 130 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Cruise (*Top Gun*, *Mission: Impossible*) as Jack Reacher; Rosamund Pike (*Die Another Day*, *An Education*) as Helen Rodin; Richard Jenkins (*The Visitor*) as Alex Rodin; Werner Herzog (*Aguirre, the Wrath of God*) as The Zec; Robert Duvall (*The Godfather*, *Apocalypse Now*) as Cash
- **IMDb:** 7.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 64% critics / 67% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Lee Child's Jack Reacher is six foot five, sixteen stone, and built like a barn door, a former military policeman who drifts across America with a toothbrush and no fixed address and breaks people who deserve it. Tom Cruise is none of those measurements, which is the first thing every reader of the books will tell you, loudly, and has been telling Paramount since the casting was announced. So the film arrives with a handicap baked in. What it has going the other way is Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote *The Usual Suspects* and has not directed a feature since *The Way of the Gun* over a decade ago, and who turns out to be exactly the right person to make a thriller that behaves like it was shot in 1975.
## The setup
A sniper sets up in a riverside car park in Pittsburgh and shoots five strangers dead. The police arrest a former army marksman within hours, the evidence is overwhelming, and the man, instead of confessing, writes three words on a pad: get Jack Reacher. Reacher is already on his way before anyone can find him. He turns up to confirm the suspect's guilt, not deny it, then starts pulling at the case anyway, because the things that look most certain are the ones he trusts least. Working alongside Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike), the defence lawyer who happens to be the prosecuting district attorney's daughter, he finds that a clean open-and-shut killing has been arranged a little too neatly, and that someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to be sure of the outcome.
## The cast
The whole film hangs on whether you can accept Cruise as Reacher, and the surprise is how quickly the height stops mattering. He does not try to fake bulk. He plays the character as a different kind of dangerous: still, watchful, completely without nerves, a man who has already counted the exits and worked out who he will hit first. There is a coiled menace to him in the quiet scenes that is more unsettling than any amount of muscle would be. Rosamund Pike gives Helen real intelligence and keeps her from becoming the standard thriller sidekick, though the script leaves her stranded in a couple of scenes that only exist to have someone for Reacher to explain things to. Richard Jenkins brings his usual weary authority as her father. The two casting treats are saved for the edges: Werner Herzog, the director turned actor, plays the villain known only as the Zec with a soft, accented stillness that is genuinely chilling, a frostbitten old monster who chewed off his own fingers in a Siberian prison; and Robert Duvall turns up late as a gun-range owner and gives the film a shot of grizzled warmth right when it needs one.
## The craft
McQuarrie directs this like a man who grew up on Seventies thrillers and is not embarrassed about it. The pacing is unhurried but never slack, the geography of every scene is clear, and the violence has real weight because it is rationed rather than sprayed. Caleb Deschanel shoots Pittsburgh as a cold, grey, functional city, and the film resists the modern habit of cutting fights into confetti. There is a car chase through the city that is mostly practical, engines and tyres and a windscreen view, and it is all the better for it. Joe Kraemer's score keeps out of the way until it is wanted. Best of all is McQuarrie's own dialogue, which gives Reacher a dry, deadpan wit and is happy to let a scene play as a battle of nerve rather than fists. There is a self-awareness to the writing, an enjoyment of its own genre furniture, that stops it ever feeling like a slog.
## How it stacks up
This is not a Bourne film, and it is wise enough not to pretend to be. Where that series buries you in cuts and shaky cameras, *Jack Reacher* slows down and lets you watch a man think. The closest relatives are older: the lone-investigator thrillers of the Seventies, a touch of Dirty Harry in the hero's contempt for procedure, and McQuarrie's own taste for plots where the trick is in who is lying to whom. It sits a notch below the best of those, because the conspiracy at the centre is more functional than fiendish once it is laid out, but the craft of getting there is first rate. As a launch for a series built on a beloved run of novels, it makes the case that the books' clean, propulsive plotting can survive the jump to the screen, even with the wrong-sized lead.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have landed mixed-positive, around the mid-sixties, and the conversation is split along a predictable line. Most admire the clean, unfashionable craft and Cruise's commitment, while the book's readers cannot get past the casting and a few reviewers find the whole thing a touch too pleased with itself. The audience numbers sit close to the critics', which feels about right for a film that is squarely an entertainment and makes no grander claims. I come down higher than both camps, and the reason is straightforward: this is exactly the sort of lean, confident, rewatchable thriller I will happily put on again, and competence this unforced is rarer than the scores suggest.
## Verdict
The casting objection is real and I am not going to pretend it away, but it dissolves in the watching. What is left is a tight, grown-up, expertly built thriller with a genuinely menacing villain, a hero played against type to good effect, and a director who understands that withholding the spectacle can be more gripping than piling it on. It is not reinventing anything, and the mystery is the weakest link in an otherwise strong chain. None of that stops it being one of the most purely satisfying action thrillers of the year, and the kind of film I reach for on a wet afternoon without a second thought. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. One for the big screen, then a certain return visit on Blu-ray and DVD.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the casting argument that dogged this film never quite went away, and it was eventually answered from the other direction. A second Cruise outing, *Jack Reacher: Never Go Back* (2016), landed with less of the original's discipline, and the character was later recast at full size for the *Reacher* television series with Alan Ritchson, which leaned into the physical scale the books describe and won over many of the readers this film could not. That has, if anything, improved this first film's standing as the lean, well-made oddity of the set: the McQuarrie partnership with Cruise that started here went on to steer the *Mission: Impossible* series. It streams on the usual rental and subscription platforms depending on region, and the uncut version runs slightly longer and harder than the 12A cinema cut.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence and one use of strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The film was passed 12A in November 2012 after the distributor made small cuts to reduce two moments of violence; the uncut version was later classified 15 for home release for *strong violence and one use of strong language*.
*The BBFC's detailed Content Advice breakdown by category (Violence, Language, and so on) could not be retrieved at the time of writing, as the BBFC release page returned a server error. The age rating and short consumer-advice line above are confirmed.*
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/jack-reacher-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtodq5mjq5)).*
================================================================================
## Argo (2012)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-argo
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-argo.md
- published: 2012-11-17
- document_id: 1034
> Ben Affleck turns a declassified CIA rescue into a tense, funny, immaculately controlled escape thriller, and confirms he is the real director in the family. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** November 2012
- **Director:** Ben Affleck · **Writer:** Chris Terrio
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; GK Films; Smokehouse Pictures
- **Genre:** Political thriller / historical drama · **Runtime:** 120 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Ben Affleck (*The Town*, *Good Will Hunting*) as Tony Mendez; Bryan Cranston (*Drive*, *Little Miss Sunshine*) as Jack O'Donnell; Alan Arkin (*Little Miss Sunshine*, *Glengarry Glen Ross*) as Lester Siegel; John Goodman (*The Big Lebowski*, *Barton Fink*) as John Chambers; Victor Garber (*Titanic*) as Ken Taylor
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 96% critics / 90% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Two films ago, Ben Affleck was a punchline. The arc from *Gigli* to behind the camera has been quietly remarkable, and *Argo* is the film that retires the joke for good. *Gone Baby Gone* showed he could direct actors; *The Town* showed he could stage a robbery and a chase and keep the tension honest. *Argo* is the step up the ladder, a true-story thriller that asks him to hold three tones at once, espionage, Hollywood satire and pure white-knuckle escape, without dropping any of them. He does it with a confidence that suggests the directing chair, not the marquee, is where he was always headed.
## The setup
Tehran, November 1979. Revolutionary students storm the US embassy and take its staff hostage, but in the chaos six Americans slip out a side door and shelter in the home of the Canadian ambassador. They cannot stay hidden forever, and they cannot simply walk to the airport. Enter Tony Mendez (Affleck), a CIA exfiltration specialist whose job is getting people out of places they should not be. His plan is so absurd it loops back round to plausible: build a fake Hollywood science-fiction film, a *Star Wars* knock-off called *Argo*, and walk the six out of the country in broad daylight as its Canadian location-scouting crew. To sell the cover he needs the film to look real, which means recruiting the one industry on earth that can fake anything at short notice. The clock is the antagonist here, and the screenplay keeps you aware of every tick of it.
## The cast
Affleck the actor plays Mendez as a still point, watchful and tired, letting the panic happen around him rather than performing it himself. It is a generous lead turn that hands the showier work to the ensemble, and the ensemble repays it. The Hollywood half of the film belongs to Alan Arkin and John Goodman, Arkin as a fictional veteran producer with a mouth like a paper shredder, Goodman as the real make-up legend John Chambers, and their double act gives the picture its laughs and its heart. "Argo eff yourself" should not be as funny as it is, and yet. Bryan Cranston, all jaw and institutional fury back at Langley, supplies the procedural urgency, the man fighting the building so Mendez can fight the country. Victor Garber lends the Canadian end its quiet decency. The six houseguests stay deliberately under-drawn, which is the one place the casting strategy shows its seams.
## The craft
The craft is where *Argo* earns its keep. Rodrigo Prieto shoots on grainy stock and frames it like the period it depicts, so the seam between archive footage and staged material almost disappears; the opening storyboard prologue and the embassy assault are masterfully assembled. William Goldenberg's editing is the real star, cross-cutting the Tehran bazaar, the Langley war room and a Beverly Hills table read in the final act until the three threads pull taut as one wire. Alexandre Desplat scores it with restraint, holding back so the silences bite. Affleck understands the oldest rule of suspense, that the audience must know more than the characters, and he times every reveal to that principle. The last twenty minutes manufacture tension out of a foregone conclusion, which is the hardest trick a true-story thriller can attempt.
## How it stacks up
The obvious lineage is the paranoid political cinema of the 1970s, and *Argo* wears the debt openly: the Warner Bros. logo even gets the old period treatment. It sits comfortably beside *All the President's Men* for its faith in process and procedure, and beside Spielberg's *Munich* for the way it treats a covert operation as moral weather rather than action-figure fun. Against Affleck's own *The Town* it is the more disciplined film, trading the Boston heist's muscle for something cooler and more cerebral. Where it parts company with its forebears is tone: those films were stony, and *Argo* lets itself be entertaining, even funny, without forfeiting the dread. That balance is its own achievement.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have fallen hard, the reviews are close to unanimous, and audiences are right behind them. The praise lands on Affleck's control, the ensemble, and the sheer watchability of it. The pushback, where there is any, is about dramatic licence, the late airport sequence in particular bends the historical record for thriller mechanics, and the Canadian contribution is shrunk to make room for the American hero. Both criticisms are fair. I would only say that the film never pretends to be a documentary, and it earns its liberties by being honest about what it is: a piece of popular cinema about a piece of theatre that saved six lives.
## Verdict
This is grown-up, beautifully made studio film-making of a kind that feels increasingly rare, the sort of thriller that trusts its audience to follow a plan, savour a wisecrack and grip the armrest at the same time. It loses a fraction for the thinly drawn houseguests and for tidying history into a chase, and it is more admired than loved, more a film I will happily rewatch than one I will live inside. But the craft is close to flawless, the espionage and the satire feed each other instead of fighting, and Affleck has made the leap from likeable to genuinely accomplished director. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, and a strong bet for the awards-season conversation over the winter.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Argo* went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, along with Oscars for its adapted screenplay and editing, despite Affleck's notorious omission from the Best Director nominations, an absence that became part of the season's story. Affleck has since moved deeper into franchise work, but *Argo* remains the clearest statement of what he can do behind the camera. The historical debate over its dramatised airport finale and its diminished Canadian role has only grown more pointed with time. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('f**k').
**Additional issues:** There are scenes of moderate violence, including sight of rioting, a man being beaten in the street, and a lynched corpse hanging from a crane. The image of the man hanging from a crane is also shown during the end credits, side by side with the real life image which inspired it. However, the body is shown from a distance and without detail.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/argo-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mzq1nze)).*
================================================================================
## Skyfall (2012)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-skyfall
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-skyfall.md
- published: 2012-11-08
- document_id: 1151
> Sam Mendes turns the third Daniel Craig Bond into a film about loyalty, age and the old machine, and it is the most handsome entry the series has produced. Admired a little more than loved. 8/10.
- **UK release:** October 2012
- **Director:** Sam Mendes · **Writers:** Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, John Logan
- **Studio / distributor:** Eon Productions; MGM; Columbia Pictures
- **Genre:** Espionage action thriller · **Runtime:** 143 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Daniel Craig (*Casino Royale*, *Layer Cake*) as James Bond; Judi Dench (*Shakespeare in Love*, *Notes on a Scandal*) as M; Javier Bardem (*No Country for Old Men*) as Raoul Silva; Naomie Harris (*28 Days Later*) as Eve; Ralph Fiennes (*The English Patient*, *Schindler's List*) as Gareth Mallory; Ben Whishaw (*Perfume*) as Q
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 92% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The Bond series turns fifty this year, and the smart move would have been a lap of honour: a clip reel, a couple of winking callbacks, a safe pair of hands. Instead Eon has handed the keys to Sam Mendes, a director with an Oscar for *American Beauty* and no previous interest in cars that drive themselves, and asked him to make a Bond film that takes the character seriously as a man with a past. After the lean reboot of *Casino Royale* and the muddled *Quantum of Solace*, this is the entry that decides whether the Craig experiment can carry weight as well as momentum. It can.
## The setup
A mission in Istanbul goes wrong. A drive containing the identities of every NATO agent embedded in terrorist organisations is stolen, a field operation collapses on a moving train, and Bond pays for it. When he resurfaces, MI6 is under attack from someone who knows the building, the protocols and, more dangerously, M herself. The threat is not a man with a satellite or a private army; it is a former insider with a grievance aimed straight at the woman who runs the service. Bond comes back to defend her, and the film becomes an argument about whether the old way of doing things, human agents, judgement, loyalty, still has a place in a world that thinks it can be run from a laptop.
## The cast
Three films in, Craig has stopped having to prove he is Bond and can start showing the cost of it. He plays this one bruised, slower, a fraction past his best, and lets you see the effort behind the recovery. It is the most interior performance the part has had in years. Judi Dench finally gets a Bond film built around her rather than parked in an office: M is the emotional centre here, and Dench gives her steel and exhaustion in the same breath. Javier Bardem arrives late and walks off with the picture. His Raoul Silva is theatrical, wounded and unsettlingly intimate, a villain who flirts as readily as he threatens, and his introduction, a single unbroken approach across a vast empty room, is the best entrance the series has staged in a generation. Around them, Naomie Harris gives Eve real field credibility and an easy rapport with Craig, Ben Whishaw reboots Q as a young man more comfortable with code than firearms, and Ralph Fiennes brings the right bureaucratic menace as the politician circling M's job.
## The craft
This is where the film separates itself from everything around it. Roger Deakins shoots Bond the way Bond has never been shot: a Shanghai skyscraper fight staged entirely in silhouette against shifting neon, a Macau casino lit like a jewel box, the grey Scottish moorland of the final act drained of all glamour. It is, frankly, one of the best-looking films of the year in any genre, not just the best-looking Bond. Thomas Newman replaces the series' usual brassy bombast with something cooler and more textured, and Adele's title song does the classic thing of sounding instantly like it has always existed. Mendes paces it like a thriller with a pulse rather than a stunt reel, and the action is legible: you always know where everyone is and what it costs. The last act, when the film abandons gadgets entirely for an improvised siege in a remote house, is a genuine surprise, an espionage blockbuster that ends with a couple of people defending a building with whatever is to hand.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Casino Royale*, still the high-water mark of the Craig run for sheer narrative drive, and *Skyfall* does not quite match its forward motion: the middle sags a little once the chase becomes a hunt. The more interesting comparison is *GoldenEye*, the last Bond film this preoccupied with whether the character is a relic, except that this one means it. And it is impossible to watch Bardem's Silva, with his theatrical menace and his plan that depends on being caught, without thinking of *The Dark Knight*, the film that taught every blockbuster how to build a villain who is always three moves ahead. *Skyfall* borrows that lesson intelligently. What it adds back is everything the reboot had stripped out: the gun barrel, the right car, Q, Moneypenny, a sense that this is a series with a memory.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been close to unanimous, sitting around 92%, with most calling it the best Bond in decades and reserving particular praise for Mendes, Deakins and Bardem. Audiences are a touch cooler at 86%, and I think that gap is honest. The film is a beautiful piece of work, and the plot does not entirely hold up to a second look: Silva's scheme relies on a chain of events too neat to survive scrutiny, and the much-discussed parallels with *Home Alone* in the finale, a man booby-trapping a house against intruders, are not wrong. None of that stops it being the most satisfying night out the franchise has offered in years.
## Verdict
I admire this one slightly more than I love it, and the score reflects that honestly. As craft it is close to flawless, the best-directed and best-shot film in the series, with the strongest villain since the 1960s and a real emotional throughline for M. As pure rewatchable Bond it sits a half-step behind *Casino Royale*, because the plot creaks where the earlier film's never did, and the middle hour asks for patience. But it is handsome, intelligent, properly felt, and it makes the fiftieth anniversary mean something rather than merely marking it. A film that respects its own history without being trapped by it. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, and worth the biggest screen you can find for Deakins' photography alone. A DVD and Blu-ray release will follow in the new year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Skyfall* went on to become the first Bond film to pass a billion dollars at the box office, and Adele's title song took the Academy Award, the series' first. Mendes returned for *Spectre* (2015), a bigger and less disciplined film that confirmed how well judged this one was, and the Craig era closed with *No Time to Die* (2021). With hindsight, *Skyfall* reads as the moment the reboot grew up and made its peace with the franchise's past. It now streams across the various Bond rights homes depending on region and is a fixture of the 4K Bond box sets.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate action violence, one use of strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** The moderate action violence includes several fight scenes, shoot-outs and chases. There are rapid exchanges of punches and other blows, without any focus on injury, and when characters are shot there is little clear detail of blood or injury. There is sight of bloodied clothing and faces, and a scene in which a man extracts bullet fragments from his own chest.
**Language:** There is a single use of strong language ('f**k'), alongside milder terms including 'bitch', 'bloody', 'buggered', 'shit', 'hell', 'damned', 'Christ' and 'God'.
**Additional issues:** There is a passionate shower scene and implied nudity in the opening titles. Smoking is shown. A London Underground explosion derails an empty train without visible harm to passengers.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/skyfall-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00njg4nde)).*
================================================================================
## Looper (2012)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-looper
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-looper.md
- published: 2012-10-05
- document_id: 1114
> Rian Johnson takes a clever time-travel premise and refuses to let it stay a chase. Stylish, confident and emotionally braver than it needed to be, even if my admiration runs a little ahead of my affection. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** September 2012
- **Director:** Rian Johnson · **Writer:** Rian Johnson
- **Studio / distributor:** Endgame Entertainment; FilmDistrict; DMG Entertainment
- **Genre:** Science-fiction crime thriller / time-travel drama · **Runtime:** 119 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Joseph Gordon-Levitt (*Inception*, *(500) Days of Summer*) as Joe; Bruce Willis (*Die Hard*, *The Sixth Sense*) as Old Joe; Emily Blunt (*The Devil Wears Prada*) as Sara; Paul Dano (*There Will Be Blood*) as Seth; Jeff Daniels (*Speed*, *Dumb and Dumber*) as Abe
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 82% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Rian Johnson has made only two features before this, the high-school noir *Brick* and the con-artist caper *The Brothers Bloom*, and both announced a director more interested in playing with genre than serving it straight. *Looper* is his first real budget and his first move into science fiction, and the surprise is not that he handles the time-travel plumbing well, but that he is so plainly bored by it. The premise is a hook to hang something quieter on, and Johnson keeps tugging the film away from the chase it could easily have settled for.
## The setup
In a near future where time travel exists but is illegal, the mob of a further future sends its inconvenient victims thirty years back to be shot on arrival by hired killers called loopers. The job pays well and the rules are simple: the assassin disposes of the body, no questions, no faces. The catch is the contract's exit clause. Eventually the mob sends back your own older self for you to kill, closing the loop and buying your silence for the years in between. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a looper who has made his peace with this until the day the man kneeling in front of his shotgun turns out to be himself at sixty (Bruce Willis), and lives long enough to run. What starts as a hitman cleaning up his own mistake becomes a stranger, more troubling problem about how far a man will go to protect a future he wants.
## The cast
Gordon-Levitt is doing the harder of the two jobs, playing a younger Bruce Willis under prosthetics that subtly reshape his nose, brow and mouth so the resemblance reads without tipping into impression. It could have been a stunt, all clipped Willis cadence and squint, but he finds the colder, hungrier version of a man who has not yet been worn down into regret. Willis brings the weary action-star gravity you would expect and then, in one extraordinary diner scene where the two Joes face each other across a table, something more bruised and desperate. Emily Blunt arrives late and changes the film's centre of gravity, grounding the back half as a farmer guarding her own small patch of the future with a shotgun and a great deal of nerve. Paul Dano makes a single panicked sequence land hard, and Jeff Daniels, as the crime boss exiled to the past to run the operation, is all dry, paternal menace in a dressing gown.
## The craft
Johnson and his cinematographer Steve Yedlin build a future that feels lived-in and slightly broken rather than chrome and clean: solar-panelled cars held together with tape, a sun-bleached Kansas farmhouse, a city full of vagrants and cheap neon. The world-building is economical and confident, sketched in the corners of the frame rather than explained, which I always prefer to a film that stops to lecture you on its own rules. Nathan Johnson's score leans on found and prepared sounds, giving the thing a textured, anxious pulse. The violence, when it comes, is sudden and properly nasty, and there is one quietly horrible sequence about what happens to a looper who fails to close his loop that shows the mechanics of this world without a line of exposition. Best of all, Johnson knows when to slow down: the film keeps stopping to let people talk, and trusts that the talk is more interesting than the gunfire.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestors are all here. There is the grimy paradox-logic of *12 Monkeys*, the pre-emptive moral panic of *Minority Report*, and the original *The Terminator*'s idea of the future reaching back to murder its own past. *Looper* is cleverer than most of its siblings about refusing to over-explain, and Johnson even has Old Joe wave the whole question away in that diner, telling his younger self he does not want to sit here drawing diagrams about time travel all day. It is also recognisably the same director as *Brick*, transplanting that film's hard-boiled rhythms and trick of taking young actors deadly seriously into a bigger sandbox. Where it parts company with the colder, puzzle-box end of the genre is the second half, which swaps the city chase for something closer to a rural siege and a question about whether a person can be saved before they become a monster.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting around 93%, praising the intelligence, the style and the emotional swerve into its quieter final act. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm but a touch behind, near 82%, and you can see the fault line: the people who wanted a taut time-travel thriller all the way through are slightly thrown when the film parks the chase to spend its third act on a farm. I am somewhere between the two camps. I admire almost everything Johnson does here, and I think the gear change is brave rather than a misstep. But for all its confidence I came out respecting the film more than I loved it, which is the honest gap between a 93 and my own number.
## Verdict
This is a smart, stylish, properly grown-up piece of science fiction that uses its high concept as a way in rather than the whole show, and it is held together by two performances pretending to be one man. The world-building is lean, the craft is assured, and the willingness to become a slower, sadder film in its final stretch is the bravest thing in it. If it stops just short of the top tier for me, it is because the cleverness and the feeling never quite fuse into something I ached to watch again the moment it ended. I will happily revisit it, just not as often as the reviews would have you book it in for. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Rian Johnson went on to far bigger things, taking the *Star Wars* franchise into its most divisive entry with *The Last Jedi* (2017) and then reinventing himself as a whodunit author with *Knives Out* (2019) and its Netflix sequels. Seen against that run, *Looper* now reads as the hinge film where his appetite for bending a genre out of shape met a proper budget. It has settled into a reputation as one of the stronger original science-fiction films of its decade, and is widely available on disc, on digital, and streaming depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, bloody violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are several scenes of strong bloody violence, including occasional sight of blood splashes when victims are shot down. One scene shows a man being repeatedly shot in slow motion from many angles.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('f**k').
**Additional issues:** There is implied use of an imaginary drug, which is applied in the form of eye drops, and two very brief images of a syringe suggesting that the man's drug use has escalated.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/looper-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znjcwnta)).*
================================================================================
## Dredd (2012)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-dredd
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-dredd.md
- published: 2012-09-09
- document_id: 1069
> A second crack at the 2000 AD lawman, stripped down to a single tower block and ninety-five lean minutes. It keeps the helmet on, keeps the violence honest, and is far better than the box office will tell you. 8/10.
- **UK release:** September 2012
- **Director:** Pete Travis · **Writer:** Alex Garland
- **Studio / distributor:** DNA Films / Lionsgate
- **Genre:** Dystopian science fiction action / comic-book thriller · **Runtime:** 95 minutes (BBFC 18)
- **Main cast:** Karl Urban (*The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring*, *Star Trek*) as Judge Dredd; Olivia Thirlby (*Juno*) as Judge Cassandra Anderson; Lena Headey (*300*, *The Brothers Grimm*) as Ma-Ma; Wood Harris (*The Wire*, *Remember the Titans*) as Kay
- **IMDb:** 7.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 79% critics / 72% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
There is a long shadow over any new attempt at Judge Dredd, and it is shaped like Sylvester Stallone's chin. The 1995 film took 2000 AD's masked fascist lawman, removed the helmet within twenty minutes, gave him a love interest and a comedy sidekick, and missed the joke entirely. So the first thing to say about this version, written by Alex Garland and directed by Pete Travis, is that it has read the strip. The helmet stays on. The city stays ugly. Nobody learns to love. Garland, who gave Danny Boyle the scripts for *28 Days Later* and *Sunshine*, has clearly decided that the way to honour Dredd is not to widen him out into an epic but to shrink the whole thing down to a single bad afternoon.
## The setup
Mega-City One is eight hundred million people crammed into one continuous slab of concrete between the radioactive deserts, and the Judges are the only law: police, jury and executioner in one armoured uniform. Dredd (Karl Urban), the hardest of them, is handed a rookie to assess, Cassandra Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), a mutant with weak aptitude scores but powerful psychic ability. Their routine call is a triple homicide at Peach Trees, a two-hundred-storey tower block run as a private fiefdom by a scarred drug baron called Ma-Ma (Lena Headey), who is pushing a narcotic that slows the user's sense of time to a crawl. When the two Judges take a witness into custody, Ma-Ma seals the block, puts its entire population on a bounty, and turns the building into a single vertical killing floor. There is no wider plot to untangle. There is a building, two Judges, and a great many people who want them dead, and the film is the climb.
## The cast
Urban does the thing the 1995 film would not allow: he acts the entire role from the mouth down, jaw set, voice a flat permanent growl, and somehow makes a man you never fully see into a presence you cannot look away from. It is a performance of pure restraint, and a small act of faith in the source. Thirlby has the harder and more interesting part. Anderson is the film's only window, the one character allowed doubt, fear and mercy, and Thirlby plays her growing competence without ever turning her soft. Headey, meanwhile, gives Ma-Ma a tired, scarred ruthlessness that is far more unsettling than scenery-chewing would have been; she runs her tower the way a bored manager runs a failing branch. Wood Harris, as the captured gang lieutenant cuffed between the two leads, keeps the human stakes ticking under the gunfire.
## The craft
Travis and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle find a genuinely grimy future, all wet concrete, sodium light and dead air, that owes more to the original comic's squalor than to any gleaming science-fiction city. The clever flourish is the drug, Slo-Mo, which lets the film drop into hyper-detailed slow motion: water beading off skin, glass blooming apart, a face distending around a bullet, rendered in saturated, hallucinatory colour. It could have been a gimmick. Instead it becomes the film's signature, the one moment of beauty in a world with none, and it earns its 3D in a way most films released this year do not. Paul Leonard-Morgan's score grinds along underneath like industrial machinery. At ninety-five minutes the thing never sags, because there is nothing in it that does not need to be there.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison, and the one every viewer will reach for, is *The Raid*, the Indonesian film with almost the identical premise of cops fighting up through a tower block of armed criminals. Both arrived within months of each other, and both prove how much tension you can wring from a stairwell. Where *The Raid* is a martial-arts ballet, *Dredd* is a gunfight, blunter and colder. The deeper lineage runs back through *RoboCop*, with its satirical view of law as a product, and *Escape from New York* and *Assault on Precinct 13*, those lean John Carpenter siege pictures where a small number of professionals hold a position against the dark. *Dredd* belongs in that company. It is a B-movie in the best sense: tight, cheap-feeling in the right places, expensive only where it counts.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have largely come round, sitting near 79%, praising exactly the discipline that makes it work: the refusal to explain, the commitment to its tone, the clarity of the action. Audiences are a little cooler at 72%, and the box office has been frankly poor, which is the real worry here, since this is plainly built as the first chapter of something larger. That is a shame, because the very things keeping casual viewers away, the bleakness, the lack of an origin story, the masked unknowable lead, are the things that make it good. The gap between its reputation and its takings is the kind that usually closes on disc, where word of mouth does the work the marketing could not.
## Verdict
This is the rare adaptation that understands what it is adapting and has the nerve to deliver it without apology. It is violent, narrow and grim, and it knows it; it is also sharply made, genuinely thrilling and endlessly rewatchable, the sort of ninety-five minutes you can put on again knowing exactly what you are getting. I would happily take its single-block focus over a bloated franchise opener any day. It does not reinvent the siege thriller, but it executes one about as cleanly as the form allows, and Urban's growl deserves a sequel the numbers may not give him. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, including in 3D, where the Slo-Mo sequences are worth the surcharge.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the sequel the box office withheld never came, but Peach Trees did not stay sealed. Dredd's strong cult afterlife on disc, fuelled by exactly the home-viewing word of mouth predicted above, drove a long fan campaign for more, which eventually produced *Judge Dredd: Mega-City One*, a television series kept in development by Rebellion. The film itself has settled into its reputation as the definitive screen Dredd and one of the best comic-book films of its decade, and it streams across the usual rental and subscription platforms depending on region, with the 3D Slo-Mo work still its calling card.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **18** by the BBFC for *frequent strong bloody violence and gore*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC release page for *Dredd* could not be retrieved at the time of writing (the site returned a server error), so the full category-by-category Content Advice is not reproduced here. The points below are the verified BBFC notes confirmed from the Board's own listing and announcement.
**Rating reason:** "Contains frequent strong bloody violence and gore."
**Violence:** Frequent strong violence, much of it bloody and gory, with some moments that dwell on the infliction of pain and injury.
**Drugs:** Frequent use of a futuristic drug, Slo-Mo, which slows the user's perception of time.
**Language:** Frequent use of strong language.
**Sex:** A brief and discreet scene implies a violent sexual fantasy inside a criminal's mind.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/dredd-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtotc2nzk1)).*
================================================================================
## The Bourne Legacy (2012)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-bourne-legacy
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-bourne-legacy.md
- published: 2012-08-22
- document_id: 1178
> A Bourne film without Bourne, handed to the man who wrote the others and a new lead who earns the job. Critics call it a side-door; I call it the most rewatchable thriller of the summer. 9/10.
- **UK release:** August 2012
- **Director:** Tony Gilroy · **Writers:** Tony Gilroy, Dan Gilroy
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; Relativity Media; The Kennedy/Marshall Company
- **Genre:** Espionage action thriller · **Runtime:** 135 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Jeremy Renner (*The Hurt Locker*) as Aaron Cross; Rachel Weisz (*The Constant Gardener*, *The Mummy*) as Dr Marta Shearing; Edward Norton (*Fight Club*, *Primal Fear*) as Eric Byer; Joan Allen (*The Contender*) as Pamela Landy; Oscar Isaac as Outcome #3
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 55% critics / 58% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
The trick that no spy franchise had quite pulled off until now is to lose its hero and keep its world. Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass walked away after *The Bourne Ultimatum*, and the obvious move was to recast Jason Bourne and pretend nothing had happened. Universal did something braver. It handed the keys to Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter who built the architecture of all three previous films, and asked him to open a second door into the same building. The result is a Bourne film with no Bourne in it, which sounds like a contradiction until you watch how carefully Gilroy threads it into the events you already know.
## The setup
While Jason Bourne is tearing the agency apart in the closing weeks of *Ultimatum*, the people who run the programmes that made him decide the safest course is to burn everything down. Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) is an operative on a parallel scheme, kept sharp and stable by a regime of pills, and when the order goes out to liquidate the whole network he becomes a problem to be solved. His survival depends on Dr Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), one of the scientists who designed the chemistry he runs on, now a loose end herself. What follows is a chase that runs from the Alaskan wilderness to the rooftops of Manila, with Cross trying to stay one dose ahead of the men erasing him.
## The cast
Renner has the hardest job in the film, which is to make you forget the actor everyone came to see. He does it by playing Cross as something colder and more curious than Damon's haunted Bourne: a man who knows exactly what he is and is quietly terrified of losing it. After *The Hurt Locker* he already had the watchful, coiled quality this needs, and he carries the picture without strain. Weisz gives Shearing real fear rather than the standard imperilled-scientist competence; her panic in the early laboratory scenes is the most frightening thing in the film. Edward Norton, all clipped reason behind a bank of monitors, is the institution made flesh, the sort of man who orders terrible things in a level voice. Joan Allen returns as Pamela Landy to stitch this story to the others, and Oscar Isaac makes a single early scene land harder than its length suggests.
## The craft
Gilroy is a writer first, and it shows in the best way: this is a thriller that trusts you to follow a plot built out of procedure, jargon and institutional cowardice. Robert Elswit shoots it cleaner and steadier than Greengrass ever did, trading the handheld shudder of the earlier films for something more composed, which suits a story about people watching screens. James Newton Howard inherits the franchise's nervy pulse and gives it a touch more melancholy. The Manila sequences are the standout, a long foot-and-motorbike pursuit through markets and back alleys that keeps the geography legible while the tension climbs. Two and a quarter hours is a lot to ask of a chase, and the middle stretch in the wild does sag, but Gilroy keeps finding texture in the machinery of how a government decides to disappear its own people.
## How it stacks up
Set beside *The Bourne Supremacy* and *The Bourne Ultimatum*, this is the talkier, more deliberate cousin, less interested in the next collision than in the system that produces it. That will frustrate anyone who wanted a straight swap of one running man for another. As an espionage picture it sits closer to Gilroy's own *Michael Clayton* than to the Greengrass films, more concerned with the rot inside an organisation than with fists. The obvious rival on screens right now is *Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol*, which is the more purely fun ride; *Legacy* is the one with more on its mind. There are flavours of *Hanna* too in its lab-made operative learning what was done to them.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Reviews are split, and the recurring complaint is fair on its own terms: this is a Bourne film that lacks Bourne's urgency, and it stops rather than ends. Critics sit around 55%, audiences a shade higher at 58%, and a good deal of the disappointment is really grief that Damon has gone. The praise, where it lands, is for Renner and for the audacity of expanding the world sideways instead of rebooting it. I think the mixed verdict undersells what Gilroy has built. The film is not trying to be louder than its predecessors; it is trying to show you the wiring behind them, and on that count it is the most interesting entry since *Supremacy*.
## Verdict
My number is well above the consensus, and I will defend it. I have watched the Bourne films more times than is reasonable, and this is the one I reach for most often, precisely because of the things critics docked it for: the procedural patience, the institutional menace, the sense of a whole hidden apparatus glimpsed at the edges. Renner is a genuine lead, Weisz grounds it, the Manila chase is as good as anything in the series, and the espionage detail rewards a second and third viewing. Yes, the ending is abrupt and the wilderness section drags. Neither costs it much. It is intelligent, atmospheric, endlessly rewatchable franchise filmmaking, and the cleverest thing any blockbuster has done with a missing star in years. **9/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, and worth catching on a big screen for the Manila sequence alone.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the proposed Aaron Cross sequel never materialised, and the franchise instead brought Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass back for *Jason Bourne* (2016), quietly setting Cross aside. Tony Gilroy went on to create *Andor* (2022) for Disney, where his fascination with the machinery of covert systems found its fullest expression, which makes *Legacy* read in hindsight as a warm-up for that. The film has settled into a reputation as the franchise's odd one out, more admired in retrospect than at release. It is widely available on disc and digital, and streams on Netflix or Now depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are a number of scenes of moderate violence, which generally occur during fast-paced fights or shoot-outs. Although there are heavy blows and some bullet impacts, little is shown in terms of injury detail, with the focus instead placed on action and drama or the abilities of the characters involved.
**Threat and horror:** There are intense action and chase sequences.
**Injury detail:** There is sight of blood in the aftermath of violence, as well as a scene in which a character cuts their own skin to remove a transmitter.
**Language:** There is use of mild bad language, including 'ass', 'hell', 'Jesus', 'screwed' and 'shit'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-bourne-legacy-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zotixmze)).*
================================================================================
## The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-dark-knight-rises
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-dark-knight-rises.md
- published: 2012-07-24
- document_id: 1183
> Nolan ends his Batman trilogy not with a victory lap but with a city under siege and a hero who has to be broken before he can finish anything. Sprawling, operatic, and built to be watched again. 9.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2012
- **Director:** Christopher Nolan · **Writers:** Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan; story by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Legendary Pictures; Syncopy
- **Genre:** Superhero epic / action thriller · **Runtime:** 164 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Christian Bale (*American Psycho*, *The Prestige*) as Bruce Wayne / Batman; Tom Hardy (*Bronson*, *Inception*) as Bane; Anne Hathaway (*The Devil Wears Prada*) as Selina Kyle; Michael Caine (*The Italian Job*, *The Cider House Rules*) as Alfred; Gary Oldman (*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*, *The Fifth Element*) as Commissioner Gordon; Joseph Gordon-Levitt (*(500) Days of Summer*, *Inception*) as John Blake
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 87% critics / 90% audience · **My rating:** 9.5 / 10
Four years ago *The Dark Knight* did something a comic-book film was not supposed to do: it turned a man in a cape into a study of order and chaos, gave Heath Ledger a Joker for the ages, and left a body count that the city of Gotham, and Batman himself, was always going to have to answer for. Following that is the hardest job in the franchise, and Christopher Nolan has not tried to repeat it. He has instead made the loudest, longest and most openly emotional of the three, a film that wants to be a finale in the full operatic sense, and largely earns the ambition.
## The setup
It is eight years on in Gotham, and Batman has not been seen since the night he took the blame for crimes he did not commit. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has shut himself away, a recluse rattling around his own house, while the city congratulates itself on a peace built on a lie. Into that complacency walks Bane (Tom Hardy), a masked mercenary with the strength to break a man and the patience to break a city, and a plan that goes a good deal further than robbery. Drawn back out is a cat burglar, Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), with her own agenda and no particular loyalty to either side. Wayne, out of shape and out of practice, has to decide whether the symbol is worth resurrecting, and what it will cost him this time. I will leave the shape of Bane's scheme where the film leaves it, because the slow reveal is part of the pleasure.
## The cast
Bale has always played Wayne as a man at war with himself, and here he is allowed to look genuinely worn out, physically and otherwise, which gives the comeback some weight. Hardy has the harder task, acting through a mask that covers everything but his eyes, his voice piped out in a strange clipped register that you either accept early or spend the film fighting. I accepted it. Bane is not Ledger's Joker and is not trying to be: where the Joker wanted to watch the world burn for sport, Bane has a thesis, and Hardy gives him a terrible calm. Hathaway is the surprise, light on her feet and quick with a line, never asking to be liked and better for it. The old guard hold the centre, as ever. Michael Caine's Alfred is given the film's most wounding scenes, a butler reduced to pleading, and Gary Oldman's Gordon carries the guilt of the previous film like a stone. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as a young beat cop who has worked out more than he lets on, quietly turns into the conscience of the thing.
## The craft
Nolan and Wally Pfister shoot Gotham as a real, cold, vertical city, and a large amount of the film was photographed in IMAX, which on the right screen is overwhelming in the best way: the opening aerial hijack, an American football stadium folding in on itself, a city sealed off and turned against its own. Practical effects do most of the work, and you feel it; the destruction has heft because so much of it is actually there. Hans Zimmer's score is relentless, a chanting, building pressure that does not let the audience settle, and Lee Smith's editing keeps a 164-minute film moving even when the plot is asking a lot of it. The film is too long and the plot creaks in a couple of places, particularly in how easily a city the size of Gotham is cut off from the world. None of it dents the sense of scale, which is the thing Nolan is selling and the thing he delivers.
## How it stacks up
Against its own trilogy, this is bigger and broader than *Batman Begins* and less tightly wound than *The Dark Knight*, trading that film's nervy two-hander for something closer to a disaster epic. The reference points Nolan reaches for are not other superhero films at all. There is a great deal of Dickens in here, *A Tale of Two Cities* read more or less out loud by the end, tumbrils and mobs and a city tearing itself apart, and a strong dose of siege cinema, the occupied-metropolis terror of a *Battle of Algiers* run through a blockbuster. It is far closer in spirit to a Bond film with a doomsday device than to anything Marvel is making, and it has more on its mind than most of either.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are strongly behind it, sitting around 87%, with audiences a notch higher near 90%, and the common reservation is that the plotting is overextended and Bane's voice an acquired taste. Both of those are fair. The film bites off an enormous amount and chews some of it loudly. The recurring grumble that it is the weakest of the three I half accept and wholly do not care about, because what it does well it does on a scale the other two never attempt: a hero genuinely broken and made to climb back, a finale that pays off three films of accumulated cost, and a closing stretch that lands its emotional punches square. The political subtext that some reviewers worry at, occupy-the-rich one minute and law-and-order the next, reads to me less as a manifesto than as a film grabbing whatever imagery makes the siege feel dangerous.
## Verdict
This is the kind of blockbuster I value most: ambitious, built to be watched again, willing to be sincere when it would be safer to be cool. It is not the cleanest film in the trilogy and it does not need to be. It is the one that swings hardest, gives its actors the most to play, and brings a sprawling three-film story to a close that actually feels like a close. I have watched it many times and it holds up every time, the length included. The flaws are real and the spectacle, the performances and the sheer nerve of the ending bury them. **9.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in IMAX if you possibly can; a great deal of the film was shot for that screen and it is a different experience full size.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Dark Knight Rises* completed what is now generally regarded as the benchmark superhero trilogy, and its operatic, real-world-grounded approach cast a long shadow over the comic-book films that followed. Tom Hardy went on to lead *Mad Max: Fury Road* (2015), and Anne Hathaway took the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for *Les Misérables*, released a few months after this. The film is now widely available on disc and digital, with periodic IMAX trilogy re-releases, and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of violence include fistfights, gunfights, and a brief stabbing. There is limited sight of blood or injury detail throughout, although one sequence dwells on the beating of a man and it is implied that his back is broken.
**Threat and horror:** There are scenes in which the city is threatened by the central villain, including bombs being planted in tunnels and people being taken hostage.
**Language:** There is a use of moderate bad language when a woman is called a 'bitch'. Other language is milder, including uses of 'bastard'.
**Sex:** There is some kissing and very mild references to sexual activity.
**Injury detail:** There is sight of dead bodies in the aftermath of violence but limited sight of blood or injury detail.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink and smoke.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-dark-knight-rises-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znziwnjk)).*
================================================================================
## Prometheus (2012)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-prometheus
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-prometheus.md
- published: 2012-06-10
- document_id: 1141
> Ridley Scott goes back to the universe he started, swapping the haunted-house tension of Alien for big questions about where we came from. The look is magnificent, the thinking is muddled, and it is the kind of frustrating I rather enjoy. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** June 2012
- **Director:** Ridley Scott · **Writers:** Jon Spaihts, Damon Lindelof
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Scott Free Productions; Brandywine Productions
- **Genre:** Science fiction / cosmic mystery · **Runtime:** 124 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Noomi Rapace (*The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo*) as Elizabeth Shaw; Michael Fassbender (*X-Men: First Class*, *Inglourious Basterds*) as David; Charlize Theron (*Monster*, *The Italian Job*) as Meredith Vickers; Idris Elba (*Luther*) as Janek; Guy Pearce (*Memento*, *L.A. Confidential*) as Peter Weyland
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 73% critics / 68% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Thirty three years after *Alien*, Ridley Scott has come home. He spent the decades in between making everything except science fiction, and the genre he helped define got along without him by copying him. So there is a lot riding on *Prometheus*, which started life as a straight prequel and then, somewhere in development, grew ambitions. Scott is no longer interested in a creature stalking a corridor. He wants to ask who made us, and why, and whether we would want to meet them. That is a far bigger swing than the original ever attempted, and the film is at once more beautiful and more exasperating for taking it.
## The setup
A pair of archaeologists, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway, find the same constellation pointed to by cultures that never met, and read it as an invitation. The Weyland Corporation funds an expedition to follow the map to a distant moon, and the scientific vessel Prometheus sets down on a grey, dead world that turns out to be neither as empty nor as welcoming as the star charts promised. What the crew uncovers about the beings they came looking for raises far worse questions than the ones they arrived with. I will leave the discoveries where the film leaves them, because the unpeeling is most of the pleasure.
## The cast
Rapace, fresh from the Swedish *Dragon Tattoo* films, makes Shaw the warm centre of a cold story: a scientist who also wears a cross, and whose faith and curiosity pull against each other rather than cancelling out. The film belongs, though, to Michael Fassbender's David, the synthetic crew member who pads around the sleeping ship modelling himself on Peter O'Toole in *Lawrence of Arabia*. Fassbender plays him as courteous, childlike and quietly sinister all at once, a machine learning what it wants by watching the people who own him. Charlize Theron's Meredith Vickers brings corporate frost as the company minder who trusts no one, Idris Elba's Janek lends the captain's chair an unfussy, blue-collar authority, and Guy Pearce turns up under heavy age make-up as the dying magnate Weyland. The humans are a notch underwritten, and a couple of the supposed experts make decisions no scientist would, but the two non-quite-human leads more than carry it.
## The craft
This is one of the best-looking science fiction films in years. Dariusz Wolski shoots the Icelandic and Scottish landscapes as a genuinely alien frontier, all volcanic black rock and freezing waterfalls, and the production design extends Giger's old biomechanical grammar without simply xeroxing it. The opening, a wide unhurried fly-over of an empty Earth, tells you straight away that Scott is reaching past the haunted-house thrills of the first film towards something closer to *2001*. The 3D is used with restraint, for depth rather than poke-you-in-the-eye gimmickry, and there is one surgical-pod sequence, tense and bloody and almost unbearable, that ranks with anything Scott has ever staged. Marc Streitenfeld's score and the cold grandeur of the design do a lot to paper over the moments where the plot stops making sense.
## How it stacks up
The shadow it stands in is its own. *Alien* was a perfect, lean machine, a monster movie with the manners of an art film, and nothing here matches that economy. Where *Prometheus* reaches instead is towards *Blade Runner*, Scott's other great science fiction film, in its preoccupation with artificial people and what they owe their makers, and towards Kubrick's *2001* in its yearning to treat the cosmos as a question rather than a shooting gallery. It does not get within touching distance of either, but the ambition is the right ambition. Set against the run of empty franchise spectacle that has filled the gap since Scott last worked in the genre, a flawed film that genuinely wants to think is a welcome thing.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is split right down the middle, and you can see why. Critics are sitting around 73%, audiences a little lower at 68%, and the same fault line runs through both camps: dazzling to look at, maddening to follow. The praise lands on the visuals, the scale and Fassbender. The complaints land on a script that sets up enormous questions and then mislays half of them, and on characters who behave foolishly so the plot can lurch forward. Both readings are correct at the same time, which is the peculiar thing about this film. It is a more interesting failure than most films are a success.
## Verdict
I came out divided and stayed that way, and on this film that is closer to a compliment than it sounds. The logic holes are real, the mythology is left dangling, and at least two characters die of plot convenience rather than anything they did. But the look is sumptuous, the ideas are larger than the genre usually risks, Fassbender's David is one of the most fascinating screen creations of the year, and I have already found myself wanting to go back and argue with it. A clean, satisfying film would not nag at me like this one does. It does not earn the place beside *Alien* it clearly wants, but it is ambitious, gorgeous and genuinely strange, and I would rather rewatch a fascinating mess than a tidy blank. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D, 3D and IMAX. Worth the largest screen you can find.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Scott returned to this corner of the universe with *Alien: Covenant* (2017), which answered some of the questions left hanging here, gave Fassbender's David an even larger role, and folded the strand back towards the creature that started everything. Opinion on *Prometheus* has stayed split in much the way it was at release, though its standing has if anything risen among those who value ambition over tidiness. It is now widely available on disc and digital and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, gore, threat and horror*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of strong violence feature heavy blows and bloody detail. For example, in one scene a character's arm is broken, revealing blood and bone, and in another scene a character's head is smashed against the floor, resulting in a large spurt of blood.
**Threat and horror:** There is a sense of threat towards the central characters that is both frequent and sustained.
**Injury detail:** There are also some scenes featuring gory detail, both when dead bodies are seen and when people are injured.
**Additional issues:** There is also infrequent use of strong language ('f**k'), and one implied use of strong language, when a remark is broken up by static. There are several undetailed verbal sex references and a brief scene in which a couple start to have sex, without any nudity or other detail.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/prometheus-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00njcwndu)).*
================================================================================
## The Raid (2012)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-raid
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-raid.md
- published: 2012-06-03
- document_id: 1211
> A Welsh director, an Indonesian martial art and one tower block full of trouble. The story is a sliver, the action is wall to wall, and it is the most exciting thing the genre has produced in years. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2012
- **Director:** Gareth Evans · **Writer:** Gareth Evans
- **Studio / distributor:** PT Merantau Films; XYZ Films; Momentum Pictures (UK)
- **Genre:** Martial-arts action thriller / siege film · **Runtime:** 101 minutes (BBFC 18)
- **Main cast:** Iko Uwais (*Merantau*) as Rama; Joe Taslim as Jaka; Donny Alamsyah as Andi; Yayan Ruhian (*Merantau*) as Mad Dog; Ray Sahetapy as Tama
- **IMDb:** 7.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 87% critics / 87% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Every few years a film comes along that resets what an action sequence is allowed to look like, and the people who care about this sort of thing start pressing it on everyone they know. *The Raid* is that film for 2012. It comes from an unlikely direction: a Welsh director, Gareth Evans, working in Indonesia with a stuntman-turned-star and the local martial art of pencak silat, on a budget that would not cover the catering on a Hollywood blockbuster. What he has made is leaner and nastier and more inventive than almost anything the studios have managed in a decade, and it does it with a premise you could write on the back of a ticket stub.
## The setup
A heavily armed police squad rolls up before dawn at a grim fifteen-storey tower block on the edge of Jakarta. The building belongs to Tama (Ray Sahetapy), a crime lord who rents its floors to every kind of dealer and killer, and who has made the place a fortress that the law has never dared enter. The plan is to go in quietly, climb to the top, and take him. It survives about as long as plans usually do. Once Tama spots the intruders on his cameras and offers permanent free tenancy to whoever brings him their bodies, the squad is trapped, outnumbered and cut off, and a young rookie named Rama (Iko Uwais) has to fight his way down through every floor between him and the street. There is a little more to it than that, a thread of family loyalty that gives the back half some weight, but the engine of the thing is gloriously simple: one building, one way out, and a small army in between.
## The cast
This is not a film that asks for great acting, and it is wise enough to know it. Iko Uwais carries it on physical authority alone. He is a genuine silat practitioner rather than an actor learning moves for the camera, and it shows in every exchange: the speed is real, the balance is real, and there is a controlled economy to him that makes the violence read as skill rather than chaos. Joe Taslim brings a tired, watchful competence to Jaka, the sergeant who can see how badly the night is going. The performance that walks off with the picture, though, is Yayan Ruhian as Mad Dog, a small, unhurried enforcer who prefers his fists to a gun because killing up close is the part he enjoys. He is one of the most quietly frightening figures the genre has produced, and Ruhian, who also choreographed the fights with Uwais, has built the role from the inside out.
## The craft
What sets *The Raid* apart is clarity. Evans, who edited the film himself, has nothing but contempt for the shaky, over-cut style that has let lesser action films fake their fights for years. The camera holds, the geography stays legible, and you can follow every blow, block and counter as the choreography escalates from gun battles into close-quarters brawling and finally into long unbroken passages of hand-to-hand combat. The fights are punishing and bloody, staged in narrow corridors and bare rooms that turn the architecture itself into a weapon. The pulsing electronic score, reworked for international release by Mike Shinoda and Joseph Trapanese, keeps the pressure relentless without ever drowning the impact of the hits. At a tight 101 minutes the film barely lets you breathe, and it never once feels padded.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is *Die Hard*: one building, one outmatched man, a slow vertical war. But where *Die Hard* is a thriller with action in it, *The Raid* is almost pure motion, closer in spirit to the balletic gunplay of John Woo's *Hard Boiled* or the breathless physicality of Tony Jaa in *Ong-Bak*. It shares with all of those an old-fashioned belief that a stunt performed for real, in frame, beats anything you can assemble in a cutting room. What it gives up is the wit and the heart that the very best of the form smuggle in around the carnage. The story here is a delivery system, and there is a stretch in the middle where the lack of character starts to tell. But as a demonstration of what bodies can do on screen, it has very few rivals.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critics and the crowd are, unusually, in complete agreement: 87% on both counts at Rotten Tomatoes, with reviewers calling it a ferocious, stripped-down instant classic and audiences turning it into the word-of-mouth hit of the festival circuit. The only real reservation anyone raises is the slimness of the plot, and that is a fair note rather than a damning one. My own reaction lines up closely with the consensus. I tend to prize world-building, atmosphere and ideas over spectacle, and on those terms this is not the kind of film I usually rate highest. It earns its place by being so completely the thing it sets out to be.
## Verdict
*The Raid* knows exactly what it is and refuses to be anything else, and that single-mindedness is its strength and its limit. The action is the best I have seen in years, clear, brutal and endlessly inventive, and it is the rare action film I would happily watch again purely for the craft of the fights. It loses a point for the thinness underneath, the absence of much to hold on to once the adrenaline drains off. But on sheer kinetic invention it is close to untouchable, and it announces Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais as names to follow. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On release in UK cinemas now, courtesy of Momentum Pictures. See it with a crowd if you can.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Evans and Uwais reunited two years later for *The Raid 2* (2014), a longer, more ambitious gangland epic that expanded the world the first film barely had time for and is, for some, the stronger picture. The original has settled into its reputation as a modern action landmark, regularly cited as a turning point for legible, real-stunt fight cinema, and its influence is visible across the genre, not least in the *John Wick* films, one of which gives Yayan Ruhian a memorable cameo. It is widely available on disc and digital, and streams across various platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **18** by the BBFC for *frequent strong bloody violence and gore*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is frequent strong bloody violence and gore as guns, axes and machetes are used regularly in the many fast paced fight scenes. Strong scenes include sight of a man being axed in the chest, and a man being shot in the head in close up. In another scene, a broken light tube is used to stab a man in the neck, and it is dragged across his throat to kill him.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of very strong language ('c\*\*t'), and use of strong language ('f\*\*k').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-raid-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znzi4njm)).*
================================================================================
## The Avengers (2012)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-avengers
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-avengers.md
- published: 2012-05-09
- document_id: 1175
> Four years of separate films build to one team-up, and Joss Whedon lands it: a witty, well-balanced ensemble that proves the shared-universe gamble pays off. 8/10.
- **UK release:** April 2012 (as *Avengers Assemble*)
- **Director:** Joss Whedon · **Writer:** Joss Whedon (story by Zak Penn and Joss Whedon)
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero ensemble action adventure · **Runtime:** 143 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Robert Downey Jr (*Iron Man*, *Sherlock Holmes*) as Tony Stark; Chris Evans (*Captain America: The First Avenger*) as Steve Rogers; Chris Hemsworth (*Thor*) as Thor; Scarlett Johansson (*Lost in Translation*) as Natasha Romanoff; Mark Ruffalo (*Zodiac*) as Bruce Banner; Tom Hiddleston (*Thor*) as Loki
- **IMDb:** 8.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 91% critics / 91% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
For four years Marvel has been running an experiment that nobody in Hollywood had quite tried before: build a string of separate films, each with its own hero, and let a teasing post-credits sting promise that they will one day share a screen. *Iron Man*, *The Incredible Hulk*, *Thor* and *Captain America* were each placing a bet that this moment would arrive and land. *Avengers Assemble*, retitled in the UK to keep clear of the old Steed-and-Peel television show, is where the bill comes due. The surprise is not that it works. It is that Joss Whedon, of all the people they could have handed it to, makes the juggling look effortless.
## The setup
Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Thor's exiled brother, arrives on Earth with a borrowed army and the Tesseract, an energy source that can punch a hole between worlds. Nick Fury, running the international agency S.H.I.E.L.D., responds by activating a contingency he has been quietly assembling: a roster of people too powerful, too damaged or too proud to take orders from anyone. Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye are pulled into the same room and asked to cooperate. The first enemy they have to beat is each other, and the film spends a satisfying amount of its running time on exactly that before the sky opens.
## The cast
Whedon's real achievement is that nobody gets crowded out. Robert Downey Jr brings the same quick, deflecting wit that carried *Iron Man*, and the script is smart enough to let his ego be a problem as well as a pleasure. Chris Evans plays Steve Rogers as a man slightly out of his own time, and gives the team a straight moral spine without turning dull. Chris Hemsworth's Thor supplies the mythic register and a brother's exhausted patience. The reintroduction that matters most is Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner: jittery, self-deprecating, a coiled spring playing at calm, and a more watchable Banner than either earlier attempt at the role. Scarlett Johansson, whose Natasha Romanoff was barely sketched before, turns Black Widow into the film's sharpest operator, an interrogator who wins more fights with her head than her fists. And Hiddleston's Loki is the glue the whole thing needs, a preening, wounded villain who actually seems to enjoy the trouble he causes.
## The craft
The thing Whedon understands, from years of running television ensembles, is that an action film is mostly conversation with fights between. The early stretches are talk, and the talk is the best part: bristling, funny, the heroes sizing each other up. When the action does come, Seamus McGarvey's camera keeps it legible, which is rarer than it should be in this kind of film. The long climactic battle through a torn-up Manhattan resolves into one sustained, roving sequence that hands each hero a moment and then snaps the team into a single working unit. Alan Silvestri's score knows when to swell and when to stay out of the way. The film looks expensive without looking weightless, and at 143 minutes it never sags.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparisons are the films that fed into it. *Avengers Assemble* is funnier than *Thor* and more relaxed than *Captain America: The First Avenger*, and it inherits the loose, wisecracking charm of *Iron Man* and spreads it across six leads. The deeper comparison is to the crossover events that comic books have run for decades, the all-star team-ups that fans always suspected could not survive translation to film. The worry was always that a roster this size would collapse into noise, the way over-stuffed blockbusters usually do. It does not, and that restraint is what separates it. Whedon's own *Firefly* and *Buffy* were exercises in exactly this: a crowded cast, each voice distinct, banter doing the heavy lifting. He has simply brought that craft to a far larger budget.
## Critics versus the rest of us
For once critics and audiences are in near-total agreement, both parked around 91%, and the IMDb crowd backs them at 8.1. The praise is for the wit, the balance and a final act that sends people out grinning. The most common reservation is that the quieter, dialogue-heavy scenes can feel a touch like television, staged flat between the set pieces. There is something in that, and the plot itself, an invader and a glowing box that opens a portal, is the least inventive thing on offer. But it misjudges what the film is for. The pleasure here is watching these particular people share a room, and on that the film delivers completely.
## Verdict
This is a confident, generous piece of popcorn cinema that does the hard thing and makes it look easy. The villain's scheme is thin and the staging occasionally betrays its small-screen instincts, which is what keeps it just shy of the very top tier for me. But the dialogue is genuinely funny, the ensemble is balanced with real care, and the rewatch value is high: it is the sort of film you will happily drop into halfway through whenever it turns up. As proof that the shared-universe gamble was worth taking, it could hardly be more emphatic. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and 3D. A DVD and Blu-ray release will follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Avengers Assemble* turned out to be the hinge of the whole enterprise, the film that confirmed the Marvel model and set off a decade of imitators. It was followed by *Avengers: Age of Ultron* (2015), again under Whedon, and then the two-part *Infinity War* and *Endgame* (2018 to 2019), which pushed the ensemble to a scale this first outing only hinted at. Its reputation has held up as the moment the formula clicked. It now streams on Disney+ and is widely available on disc and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate fantasy violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are intense action sequences in which characters fight and exchange crunchy blows, as well as sight of bloodless stabbings. At one point a blade is driven through a human character, although the stabbing is not shown, only the aftermath.
**Threat and horror:** There are intense battle sequences and fights in which multiple characters engage in combat.
**Language:** There is use of mild bad language, including 'piss' and 'bastard'.
**Sex:** There is mild innuendo, such as jokes about a man having performance issues when he has trouble using his weapon.
**Drugs:** There are infrequent drug references, such as when a man is asked whether he has a huge 'bag of weed'.
**Injury detail:** There are occasional moments of injury detail after violence, including sight of blood.
**Suicide and self-harm:** A superhero character makes a brief verbal reference to having attempted suicide but this failing because of his superpowers.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/marvel-avengers-assemble-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjg4ndy)).*
================================================================================
## The Hunger Games (2012)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-hunger-games
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-hunger-games.md
- published: 2012-04-08
- document_id: 1195
> A young-adult bestseller arrives on screen with a hard premise and a star turn from Jennifer Lawrence, and clears the genre's low bar by some distance. 8/10.
- **UK release:** March 2012
- **Director:** Gary Ross · **Writers:** Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins, Billy Ray
- **Studio / distributor:** Lionsgate; Color Force
- **Genre:** Dystopian young-adult science fiction / survival thriller · **Runtime:** 142 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Jennifer Lawrence (*Winter's Bone*, *X-Men: First Class*) as Katniss Everdeen; Josh Hutcherson (*Bridge to Terabithia*, *The Kids Are All Right*) as Peeta Mellark; Liam Hemsworth (*The Last Song*) as Gale Hawthorne; Woody Harrelson (*Zombieland*) as Haymitch Abernathy; Elizabeth Banks (*Seabiscuit*) as Effie Trinket
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 84% critics / 81% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Adapting a teen bestseller is a thankless job. Get it wrong and you have alienated a few million readers who already own the definitive version in their heads; get it right and the credit usually goes to the book. Suzanne Collins sold a great many copies of a story about children killing children for television, and the obvious worry going in is that Lionsgate would sand the edges off until nothing was left but a love triangle and a logo. What Gary Ross has made instead is a surprisingly stern picture, harder and more controlled than the franchise machinery around it would suggest, and it has a lead performance good enough to carry the weight the script keeps handing her.
## The setup
Panem is what is left of North America after the collapse: a gleaming Capitol feeding off twelve impoverished districts kept in line by an annual ritual of punishment. Each district must send two teenagers, chosen by lottery, into the Hunger Games, a televised fight to the last survivor staged in an engineered wilderness. When the lottery picks her twelve-year-old sister, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) volunteers to go in her place, and is shipped off to the Capitol alongside Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), the baker's son who has reasons of his own to want her to live. Before any of them set foot in the arena, the contestants are styled, interviewed and sold to sponsors, because survival here depends as much on being watched as on being able to fight.
## The cast
Jennifer Lawrence is the reason the film works. Katniss is guarded, practical and not especially likeable in the conventional sense, and Lawrence resists every temptation to soften her into a sweetheart. She plays a girl doing arithmetic under pressure, and the performance lives in the small calculations behind the eyes rather than in speeches. After *Winter's Bone* this is not a shock, but doing it inside a tentpole is a different test, and she passes it. Josh Hutcherson gives Peeta the right note of a boy who understands that charm is a survival tool. Woody Harrelson, as the soused former victor Haymitch, supplies the cynicism and most of the few laughs, and Stanley Tucci's chat-show host is a small comic masterstroke, all teeth and television warmth wrapped around something cold. Elizabeth Banks, buried under Capitol lacquer as the chaperone Effie, makes absurdity into character rather than costume.
## The craft
Ross shoots the districts in washed-out, hand-held grey and the Capitol in lurid candy colour, and the contrast does a lot of the world-building before anyone explains anything. The design work is strong: the trains, the costumes, the obscene abundance of the Capitol against the hunger of District 12. The handheld camera is the film's main misstep. In the early arena combat it gets so frantic that the violence dissolves into a blur, which keeps the rating down but also robs some sequences of clarity and weight. James Newton Howard's score knows when to stay out of the way. The film is long at over two hours and earns most of it, slowing only in the run-up to the Games while it works through the rituals of selection and spectacle.
## How it stacks up
The premise is not new, and the film does not pretend otherwise. *Battle Royale* got to the children-killing-children arena more than a decade ago and with far less restraint, and *The Running Man* turned state-sponsored bloodsport into television back in the 1980s. The thread running back to *Lord of the Flies* is older still. What this version has over the gorier *Battle Royale* is the media satire: the stylists, the sponsors, the interviews, the sense that the deadliest skill in the arena is knowing how to perform for the cameras. It is sharper on that than most reality-television satire manages, and closer in spirit to *The Truman Show* than to the action films it will be shelved beside.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are broadly on side, sitting around 84%, with the praise going to Lawrence and the world-building and the reservations going to the shaky action photography and the compression of the novel's interior voice. Audiences are a notch behind at 81%, which is roughly the gap you expect between readers who wanted every page and viewers who wanted a film. Both numbers feel about right to me. The book carries a running internal commentary that the film mostly cannot, so some of the political weight thins out on screen, but what survives is more than enough.
## Verdict
This is a better film than the young-adult shelf had any right to deliver, and a genuinely uncomfortable one in places, which is to its credit given how easy it would have been to neuter. The satire lands, the world holds together, and Lawrence gives it a centre of gravity that most franchise launches would kill for. The wobbly camera and the softened violence are real costs, and the back half settles into more familiar survival-thriller rhythms. None of that stops it being the rare adaptation I would happily sit through again. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: this turned out to be the start of a four-film run, with *Catching Fire* (2013) widely judged the strongest of the set and the *Mockingjay* novel split across two films. The picture launched Jennifer Lawrence into the front rank and helped open the floodgates for dystopian young-adult adaptations, *Divergent* and *The Maze Runner* among them, few of which matched it. It is now on disc and digital and streams on the usual platforms depending on region, and the series has since gained a prequel in *The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes* (2023).
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *intense threat, moderate violence and occasional gory moments*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are sequences in which young characters are required to fight each other to the death. This includes sight of characters being stabbed and shot with arrows. In the 15 rated version there is some emphasis on bloody detail, while the 12 rated version features less focus on blood.
**Threat and horror:** There is a moderate sense of threat throughout as the young characters avoid being attacked and killed by other characters. There are also scenes in which characters are threatened and attacked by fantasy animal creatures, some of which resemble wolves.
**Injury detail:** There is sight of wounds and blood in the aftermath of violence, including sight of wounds being tended.
**Language:** There is some very mild bad language, such as 'damn' and 'hell'.
**Sex:** A couple have a relationship. However, this is limited to kissing and there is no sight of sexual activity.
**Theme:** Younger children may be upset and disturbed by the idea of young people being required to fight to the death as a form of TV entertainment.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink. One character is an alcoholic.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-hunger-games-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtodywmzu0)).*
================================================================================
## The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo.md
- published: 2012-01-03
- document_id: 1189
> David Fincher remakes a film that barely needed remaking and makes it his own anyway, all sleet, server logs and forensic patience. The story is borrowed twice over; the precision is not. 8/10.
- **UK release:** December 2011
- **Director:** David Fincher · **Writer:** Steven Zaillian
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; MGM; Sony Pictures Releasing (UK)
- **Source:** the novel by Stieg Larsson (first of the Millennium trilogy)
- **Genre:** Crime thriller / mystery · **Runtime:** 158 minutes (BBFC 18)
- **Main cast:** Daniel Craig (*Casino Royale*, *Layer Cake*) as Mikael Blomkvist; Rooney Mara (*The Social Network*) as Lisbeth Salander; Christopher Plummer (*The Sound of Music*) as Henrik Vanger; Stellan Skarsgård (*Breaking the Waves*, *Good Will Hunting*) as Martin Vanger
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 86% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
There is a reasonable question hanging over this film before a frame of it plays, which is why it exists at all. Niels Arden Oplev's Swedish version is barely two years old, did good business here on subtitles, and gave Noomi Rapace a career. So the charitable reading of a Hollywood remake arriving this quickly is studio opportunism, and the suspicious reading is the same thing said more loudly. What changes the maths is the name on it. David Fincher does not make films that look like anyone else's, and the prospect of him bringing the same cold forensic eye he turned on the Zodiac killings and on Mark Zuckerberg's deposition room to a wintry Swedish murder mystery is worth more than a shrug.
## The setup
Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is a financial journalist in disgrace, freshly bankrupted by a libel verdict, when an ageing industrialist hires him under a pretext. Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) wants the truth about his great-niece Harriet, who vanished from the family's island compound nearly forty years ago and whom he is sure was murdered by someone at the dinner table. Blomkvist takes the job partly to disappear from public view, and the deeper he digs into four decades of Vanger secrets the more he needs help. That help is Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a pierced, hostile, brilliant researcher and hacker with a state-appointed guardian and a history that has taught her to trust no institution at all. The investigation is a cold case rebuilt from photographs, ledgers and bus timetables; the more dangerous story is the one Salander is living through in parallel.
## The cast
Mara is the reason to see it. She has the harder job of the two leads, taking a part already defined by Rapace and another by Larsson's readers, and she finds her own Salander rather than impersonating either. It is a performance built from withholding: flat affect, minimal speech, a body she has shaved and pierced into a warning sign, and underneath all of it a furious competence that the film lets you see only when she chooses to show it. The role asks her through one of the year's most punishing sequences and out the other side, and she plays the aftermath as cold arithmetic rather than trauma on display. Craig is the quieter surprise. Stripped of the Bond swagger, he makes Blomkvist a tired, fallible, slightly vain man who is good at his job and out of his depth in the cold, and he is generous enough to let Mara have the film. Plummer brings a courtly melancholy to Vanger, and Stellan Skarsgård does a great deal with very little, all reasonable surface over something you would rather not find underneath.
## The craft
This is where Fincher earns the remake. With Jeff Cronenweth behind the camera he shoots Sweden as a place of perpetual blue dusk, every interior lit like a crime scene and every exterior freezing, and the digital image is so clean it feels clinical. The opening titles, a black oil-slick nightmare set to a thundering cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song", announce a film with no intention of being polite. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross follow their *Social Network* score with something colder and more textural, a low electronic hum that sits under the whole picture like a server room ventilating. Fincher's editing, with Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, makes two and a half hours of archival cross-referencing genuinely tense, cutting between Blomkvist's paper trail and Salander's keyboard with the rhythm of a heist. The man simply directs procedure better than almost anyone working, and a film that is largely about reading old documents has no right to be this gripping.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Zodiac*, Fincher's other study of an investigation that eats the people conducting it, and *Dragon Tattoo* shares its patience and its faith that the work itself is the suspense. It is less haunted than *Zodiac* and more conventionally satisfying, because this case actually resolves. Against *Seven* it is colder and less operatic; against *The Social Network* it shares the chilly palette, the Reznor and Ross score, and the sense of brilliant antisocial people communicating through screens. The harder comparison is Oplev's original, and honestly the two are closer than the remake's defenders would like. Oplev's is rawer and Rapace fiercer; Fincher's is more controlled, better looking, and tighter in its final third. What Fincher adds is not a new interpretation so much as a level of finish, and whether that justifies the exercise depends on how much you value a director in total command of his tools.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have landed warm, around 86%, with audiences matching them almost exactly, and the praise clusters where you would expect: Mara, the look, the titles, the score. The reservations cluster just as predictably. Some object to the speed of the remake, some to the runtime, and many to the brutality of two particular scenes, which Fincher stages without flinching and which earn the 18 certificate on their own. I think the redundancy charge is the weakest of these. Plenty of fine films are remakes of recent ones, and the question is only whether this version is good, not whether it was necessary. The length is the fairer hit. The Harriet mystery wraps with a stretch of plot still to go, and the coda, faithful to the book, slightly deflates the tension the rest of the film has built so carefully.
## Verdict
This is a glacial, gripping, beautifully made thriller anchored by a star-making performance, and Fincher's craft is the kind I will happily watch again even knowing the answer. It loses a point for a final act that runs longer than its tension can support, and for being, in the end, a superb cover version of a song that was already pretty good. None of that stops it being one of the most absorbing crime films of the year, the sort that rewards a second viewing precisely because you can stop chasing the plot and watch how cleanly it is assembled. Cold, exacting, and not for everyone, it is exactly the film Fincher's name promised. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Not one for a casual night in; the 18 certificate is fully earned.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Rooney Mara's Salander brought her an Academy Award nomination, and the planned Fincher-led sequels never materialised, leaving this a one-off rather than the trilogy Sony hoped for. Fincher and his Reznor and Ross collaborators reunited soon after for *Gone Girl* (2014), another icy, procedural adaptation of a bestseller that makes a natural double bill with this one. The film now streams on the usual digital platforms and turns up on disc in a Fincher-supervised transfer that does the Cronenweth photography justice on a good screen.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **18** by the BBFC for *strong sex and sexual violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** A woman is handcuffed to a bed and forcibly stripped before it is implied that she is anally raped. In a later sequence the character takes her revenge in a scene where she subjects her attacker to a comparable physical ordeal.
**Sex:** The film contains strong consensual sex, with one scene in particular featuring full nudity and sexual movement.
**Additional issues:** Strong violence, verbal sex references and strong language also feature.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjkyoti)).*
================================================================================
## Mission - Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mission-impossible-ghost-protocol
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mission-impossible-ghost-protocol.md
- published: 2012-01-01
- document_id: 1122
> Brad Bird brings an animator's eye to live action and hands the franchise back its sense of fun, with a Burj Khalifa climb that earns every inch. 9/10.
- **UK release:** December 2011
- **Director:** Brad Bird · **Writers:** Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Bad Robot; Skydance
- **Genre:** Espionage action adventure · **Runtime:** 133 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Tom Cruise (*Top Gun*, *Mission: Impossible*) as Ethan Hunt; Jeremy Renner (*The Hurt Locker*) as William Brandt; Simon Pegg (*Shaun of the Dead*, *Star Trek*) as Benji Dunn; Paula Patton (*Déjà Vu*) as Jane Carter
- **IMDb:** 7.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 94% critics / 76% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
This series has never quite known what it wants to be. Brian De Palma's 1996 original was a paranoid puzzle box, John Woo's second instalment a slow-motion ballet of doves and motorbikes, and J. J. Abrams's third the one that finally remembered Ethan Hunt is supposed to have a team and a pulse. Now Paramount has handed the fourth film to Brad Bird, a man who has never directed live action in his life, having spent his career on *The Iron Giant*, *The Incredibles* and *Ratatouille*. It sounds like a gamble. It turns out to be the smartest decision the franchise has made.
## The setup
The IMF is framed for an attack on the Kremlin, the agency is disowned, and Hunt and a small team of survivors are cut loose with no backup, no support and a ticking nuclear scenario to unpick. The hunt for a nihilist who wants to reset the world by force runs from a Moscow prison through the spires of Dubai and out to Mumbai, the team improvising with half-working gadgets and no safety net. The plot, as ever in this series, is mostly a delivery system for set pieces, but the disavowed-agents framing gives the whole thing a scrappy, against-the-odds energy the earlier films sometimes lacked.
## The cast
Cruise is the engine, and at forty-nine he is still throwing himself at this with an intensity that borders on alarming. Hunt has rarely felt this fallible: he gets things wrong, the gear fails, and the film is happy to let him look mortal. The shrewd move is building a genuine ensemble around him. Simon Pegg, promoted from a one-scene cameo in the third film to a full field role, is the comic release valve, and his nervy, delighted Benji keeps the tone from curdling into self-seriousness. Jeremy Renner arrives as Brandt, an analyst with a buried past and a reason to watch Hunt warily, and he brings a coiled, watchful quality that suggests the series is thinking about its future. Paula Patton's Jane Carter carries the team's grief and gets the cleanest revenge arc, holding her own in the action without being reduced to decoration. They behave like people who actually like one another, which is rarer in this genre than it should be.
## The craft
Bird's animation background turns out to be the asset, not the liability. He stages action with absolute clarity, every beat legible, every space established before it is wrecked, so you always know where everyone is and what the stakes of the next move are. The centrepiece is Hunt's climb up the outside of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, on a pair of failing adhesive gloves, and it is one of the great vertigo sequences in modern cinema, shot high and real enough that your palms sweat. Robert Elswit's photography makes Dubai look like glass and furnace heat, and Michael Giacchino threads Lalo Schifrin's old theme through a score that knows exactly when to surge and when to hold its breath. A Mumbai car park finale and a sandstorm chase keep the invention coming. At a hair over two hours the film barely pauses, and it never feels padded.
## How it stacks up
Set beside its own franchise, this is the most purely enjoyable entry since the original, and a clear step up on the second. The Abrams film gave the series its heart back; Bird gives it back its sense of play. The obvious wider comparison is Bond, then in its grim *Quantum of Solace* phase, and where that series had turned dour, *Ghost Protocol* remembers that globe-trotting espionage is supposed to be fun. There is a touch of *The Incredibles* in the team dynamic too, a group of gifted people bickering their way through impossible odds. Few action films this year are this confident about what they are.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting at 94%, with the Burj Khalifa sequence singled out almost everywhere and Bird's clean staging widely praised as the reinvention the series needed. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm at 76%, a gap that usually means the plot mechanics left some viewers cold even as the spectacle won them over. I land with the critics here, and a notch above the crowd. The villain is thinly drawn and the nuclear countdown is boilerplate, but those are the parts of the film nobody remembers. What you remember is the gloves slipping a thousand feet up, and the cut to a delighted Benji at his console, and that is the film working exactly as intended.
## Verdict
This is the rare blockbuster that rewards a second and third watch rather than wearing thin. It is built on real stunts and clear geography rather than digital mush, it has a team you enjoy spending time with, and it has at least one sequence that belongs in any decent action highlight reel. The story is functional and the antagonist forgettable, but the craft, the pace and the sheer good humour carry it past those gaps with room to spare. As a piece of rewatchable, intelligently staged action entertainment it is near the top of its class. **9/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, with selected IMAX screenings from 21 December where the Burj Khalifa sequence is shown at its full, terrifying scale.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the Brandt thread paid off as the series kept its ensemble shape, and Christopher McQuarrie took over to push the practical-stunt approach even further in *Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation* (2015) and *Fallout* (2018), the latter now widely held up as the franchise's high point. Bird's film is generally credited as the one that set that template, the moment the series committed fully to real, vertiginous stunt work over digital spectacle. It is now available on disc and digital, and streams on Paramount+ depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of moderate violence are loud, although there is little focus on the impact of the blows and kicks. In one scene, two men are shot in their heads and there is brief bloody detail. In another scene, a man is shot in the back, accompanied by small impact wounds.
**Threat and horror:** There are frequent intense action sequences, including car chases and a prison riot.
**Language:** There is some mild bad language, including 'shit'.
**Injury detail:** There is brief sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
**Sex:** There is no sexual content beyond kissing.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters smoke and drink.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/mission-impossible-ghost-protocol-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjkwodk)).*
================================================================================
## Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-sherlock-holmes-a-game-of-shadows
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-sherlock-holmes-a-game-of-shadows.md
- published: 2011-12-25
- document_id: 1148
> Guy Ritchie's second Holmes is bigger, louder and built around the rivalry the first film was missing, with Jared Harris quietly stealing it as Moriarty. Noisier than the original but more entertaining for it. 8/10.
- **UK release:** December 2011
- **Director:** Guy Ritchie · **Writers:** Michele Mulroney, Kieran Mulroney
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Village Roadshow Pictures; Silver Pictures
- **Genre:** Period action mystery / adventure thriller · **Runtime:** 129 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Robert Downey Jr (*Iron Man*, *Chaplin*) as Sherlock Holmes; Jude Law (*The Talented Mr Ripley*, *Road to Perdition*) as Dr John Watson; Jared Harris (*The Curious Case of Benjamin Button*) as Professor Moriarty; Noomi Rapace (*The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo*) as Madam Simza Heron; Stephen Fry (*Wilde*, *Gosford Park*) as Mycroft Holmes
- **IMDb:** 7.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 59% critics / 77% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Two years ago Guy Ritchie did something nobody much expected of the man behind *Lock, Stock* and *Snatch*: he took Conan Doyle, dunked him in soot and bare-knuckle brawling, and turned out a Holmes that actually worked. The first film was a surprise, a brisk reinvention that traded the deerstalker and the magnifying glass for a Holmes who could read a fight three moves ahead and then win it. The obvious problem with a sequel is that the surprise is spent. What *A Game of Shadows* does instead is reach for the one thing the original kept in reserve, and let Holmes loose on the only opponent worth the trouble.
## The setup
A wave of bombings, assassinations and convenient deaths is rippling across Europe, and Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) has traced every thread back to one hand: Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), a respected Oxford don whose public reputation is spotless and whose private business is engineering a continental war for profit. With Watson (Jude Law) on the eve of his wedding and very keen to be left out of it, Holmes drags him back into the field anyway, and the chase runs from London to Paris to a German arms works and on towards a peace summit in Switzerland. A Romani fortune-teller, Simza (Noomi Rapace), holds a thread that ties the conspiracy together. The rest is two clever men trying to out-think each other before the fuse runs out.
## The cast
Downey is doing the same trick as before and doing it well: a Holmes who is brilliant, vain, half-feral and faintly ridiculous, forever a step ahead of the room and visibly pleased about it. The looser, funnier register suits him, and the disguises and self-sabotage never quite tip into smugness. Law is the steadier pleasure. His Watson is competent, dry and permanently exasperated, and the marriage that ought to break up the partnership instead gives Law more to push against. The two of them bicker like a couple who have been together far too long, and that rapport carries whole stretches of the film.
The real addition is Jared Harris. After a sequel of villain rumours, Moriarty arrives as a soft-spoken, donnish predator who never raises his voice because he never needs to, and the scenes where he and Holmes simply talk, working out each other's next move over a chessboard, are the best thing here. Noomi Rapace, fresh from *The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo*, is given less than she deserves; Simza is functional rather than fully drawn. Stephen Fry turns up as Mycroft to do exactly what Stephen Fry does, with one indecorous touch the certificate had to think about.
## The craft
Ritchie's house style is all over it. The slow-motion fight previsualisation, where Holmes narrates the beating he is about to administer before delivering it, is back and pushed further, and there is a forest chase scored to whistling shells and falling trees that is the most purely kinetic set piece either film has managed. Philippe Rousselot shoots a Europe of brown fog, gaslight and gun-oil, and Hans Zimmer's score, all clattering gypsy strings and barrel-organ menace, gives the thing a restless forward lean. It is busier than the first film, sometimes to a fault; the camera rarely sits still and the plotting can disappear under the noise. When Ritchie does slow down, for the chess game, for a train-carriage ambush, the control is there. He just enjoys the chaos more.
## How it stacks up
This is a sequel that has watched the right films. The globe-trotting structure, the arms-dealer villain pulling Europe towards war, the gadgetry, all of it reads as Bond in a frock coat, and the Reichenbach material draws openly on Doyle's *The Final Problem*, the story written to kill Holmes off. Set beside Ritchie's own first *Sherlock Holmes*, it is bigger, faster and a touch more cluttered, trading some of the original's deductive cleanliness for spectacle. Anyone who came to these films wanting the cool puzzle-box pleasure of a proper mystery will find less of it here. Anyone who came for two charismatic leads and a worthy adversary will find more.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critics are lukewarm, parked around 59%, and the complaint is consistent: too much noise, too many set pieces, not enough actual detection. Audiences are warmer at 77%, and the gap tells the story. The reviewers are marking it against the idea of a Holmes mystery; the audience is marking it against an evening out, and on those terms it delivers. The reservation is fair, the verdict too harsh. A film that gives you Downey and Law at full tilt and Jared Harris as the best screen Moriarty in years has earned more goodwill than the headline number allows.
## Verdict
I rate the things I want to rewatch, and this is one of them. It is louder and shaggier than the first film, the mystery is thinner, and Rapace is wasted in a role the script never bothers to finish. None of that stops it being enormous fun. The Holmes and Watson double act is sharper than ever, the Moriarty rivalry finally gives the series a centre of gravity, and the craft, when it stops showing off, is genuinely good. It is the kind of confident, handsome, slightly silly adventure that rewards a second look on a wet Sunday. Not quite the equal of the original's freshness, but the more entertaining sit. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in time for Christmas. Best seen on a big screen for the forest chase alone.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: a third film was announced and then spent more than a decade in development limbo, which has only made the Holmes and Moriarty chessboard scenes here look like a high-water mark the series never managed to follow. Jared Harris, then a relative unknown to many viewers, went on to anchor *Chernobyl* and confirm the quiet authority on display as Moriarty. The film now streams across the usual subscription and rental platforms depending on region, and the pair of Ritchie Holmes films are routinely sold as a set on disc.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC release page for this title could not be retrieved at the time of writing, so the detailed Content Advice breakdown (by category) is unavailable. The certificate shown is the film's BBFC 12A classification. The short consumer advice on record is *moderate violence*; the film contains frequent action and fight sequences, weapons and explosions, a brief scene of torture, mild bad language and some innuendo.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/sherlock-holmes-a-game-of-shadows-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtodq2mdcx)).*
================================================================================
## The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-adventures-of-tintin
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-adventures-of-tintin.md
- published: 2011-11-09
- document_id: 1173
> Spielberg goes fully digital and rediscovers the boyish adventure register of his Indiana Jones days. The faces take some getting used to; the momentum never lets up. 8/10.
- **UK release:** October 2011
- **Director:** Steven Spielberg · **Writers:** Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount; Columbia; Amblin and WingNut
- **Genre:** Animated adventure / mystery · **Runtime:** 107 minutes (BBFC PG)
- **Main cast:** Jamie Bell (*Billy Elliot*) as Tintin; Andy Serkis (*The Lord of the Rings*, *King Kong*) as Captain Haddock; Daniel Craig (*Casino Royale*, *Layer Cake*) as Sakharine; Nick Frost (*Shaun of the Dead*, *Hot Fuzz*) and Simon Pegg (*Shaun of the Dead*, *Star Trek*) as Thomson and Thompson
- **IMDb:** 7.3 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 74% critics / 74% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Steven Spielberg has been circling Hergé for the better part of thirty years, ever since French reviewers of *Raiders of the Lost Ark* told him his globe-trotting archaeologist owed a debt to a Belgian boy reporter he had never read. He read them, he bought the rights, and then the technology was not ready and the decades went by. What has finally unstuck the project is performance capture, the same digital puppetry Peter Jackson's Weta built for Gollum, and Jackson is here as producer, itching to make the second film himself. The result is the most purely energetic thing Spielberg has directed since the Ark went into the warehouse.
## The setup
Tintin (Jamie Bell), a young reporter with a knack for being where the trouble is, buys a model of an old sailing ship called the Unicorn from a market stall, and is almost immediately offered double the price for it by two anxious strangers. The model hides a clue, the clue points to a sunken treasure, and within the hour Tintin has been burgled, kidnapped and bundled aboard a freighter. There he meets Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), a marvellously sozzled old sailor whose own bloodline runs straight back to the Unicorn's last voyage. The pursuit takes them across the sea and over the desert, one ship's model and one bad memory at a time, with the silky Sakharine (Daniel Craig) always a step behind, or ahead.
## The cast
Bell gives Tintin exactly the right quality, which is forward motion: this is a hero defined by curiosity rather than interiority, and Bell keeps him bright and unfussy without making him bland. The film belongs, though, to Serkis. Freed of the noble suffering he brought to Gollum and Kong, he plays Haddock as a glorious wreck, all hiccups, grievances and sudden surges of courage, and he supplies most of the warmth a story this fast could easily lack. Craig lends Sakharine a quiet, blade-thin menace that works better than a louder villain would. Frost and Pegg, as the identical detectives Thomson and Thompson, get the running gag of being comprehensively useless and clearly enjoy it. Snowy the dog, entirely digital, steals more scenes than any of them.
## The craft
This is where the film earns its keep. Spielberg, working with the virtual camera the technology allows, stages set pieces that no live shoot and no hand-drawn cartoon could manage between them. A single unbroken chase through a Moroccan port town, a falcon, a motorbike, a tank of water and a roll of stolen parchment all tumbling downhill together, is the most exhilarating action sequence of the year, and he holds the shot long enough for you to register that he is showing off. Janusz Kamiński's virtual lighting gives the world a burnished, golden-hour glow, and John Williams turns in a nimble, scampering score that knows it is scoring an adventure for children of all ages. The motion-capture faces remain the sticking point. The eyes are warmer than *The Polar Express* managed, but there is still a faint waxiness to the human characters that the gleeful staging mostly, not entirely, outruns.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is to Indiana Jones, and Spielberg leans into it: the maps, the artefacts, the cliff-edge timing, the sense that history is a treasure hunt with fists. Where Indy carried a weariness, Tintin carries none, which makes this lighter and faster but a little less felt. Against the *Pirates of the Caribbean* films, which chase the same swashbuckling money, this is far tighter and far better directed, with none of their bloat. And against Hergé's albums it is a clever weld of three stories into one, faithful to their spirit if not their pace. It does what the best adventure serials did, which is to end each sequence by raising the stakes on the next.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics and audiences have landed in the same place, both around 74%, which is rarer than it sounds and tells you the film is broadly liked rather than passionately defended. The praise is for the energy and the invention; the reservation, almost universally, is the uncanny valley, that the captured faces sit a fraction short of either real warmth or cartoon expressiveness. I think that reservation is real and overstated. You notice it in the first ten minutes and then the film simply moves too quickly for you to keep noticing. What nobody disputes is the craft of the action, and on a wet October afternoon that is most of what I came for.
## Verdict
This is Spielberg in his lightest and most playful mode, making a film with no agenda beyond delight, and very nearly pulling it off without a seam showing. The plot is a clothesline for set pieces rather than a story that grips the heart, and the digital faces never quite stop being digital faces. Set against that, the Moroccan chase alone is worth the ticket, Serkis is a joy, and the whole thing is built to be watched again with a child or a drink to hand. It is not top-tier Spielberg, but it is a thoroughly rewatchable, beautifully made adventure that knows exactly what it is for. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in both 2D and 3D. Worth seeking out the 3D, which Spielberg has actually designed the depth around rather than bolted on.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the planned Peter Jackson-directed sequel, much discussed at release, has spent years in development limbo and has not materialised, which makes this strong first outing feel more like a one-off than the launch of a series. The film has settled into a quietly admired corner of Spielberg's filmography, valued more by those who saw it than by the culture at large. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and turns up periodically on streaming services depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **PG** by the BBFC for *moderate fight scenes*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are several action scenes featuring the hero and his companions confronting criminals. Fights include blows to the head and body, a man being machine-gunned and using the blood from his wounds to help identify his killers before he dies, and one of the heroes throwing bottles at an opponent. The scenes are rapidly edited and the blows are implied rather than detailed.
**Threat and horror:** There are intense scenes in which characters are in danger but the emphasis is on excitement rather than scares.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of mild bad language ('bloody'), as well as milder terms such as 'hell' and 'damn'.
**Sex:** There is a scene featuring oblique mild innuendo when a man remarks that another man 'was sacked as a shepherd on account of his animal husbandry'.
**Injury detail:** There is limited sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
**Alcohol and smoking:** There is brief sight of a male character smoking. Tintin's male companion is an older sea captain who often drinks alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-adventures-of-tintin-the-secret-of-the-unicorn-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtodu5njyy)).*
================================================================================
## Contagion (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-contagion
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-contagion.md
- published: 2011-11-01
- document_id: 1063
> Steven Soderbergh treats a global pandemic as a procedural, cool and credible and almost clinically unsentimental. It is gripping and intelligent, if a little cold to love. 7/10.
- **UK release:** October 2011
- **Director:** Steven Soderbergh · **Writer:** Scott Z. Burns
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Participant Media
- **Genre:** Pandemic thriller / procedural drama · **Runtime:** 106 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Matt Damon (*The Bourne Identity*, *Good Will Hunting*) as Mitch Emhoff; Kate Winslet (*Titanic*) as Dr Erin Mears; Laurence Fishburne (*The Matrix*) as Dr Ellis Cheever; Jude Law (*The Talented Mr Ripley*, *Sherlock Holmes*) as Alan Krumwiede
- **IMDb:** 6.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 85% critics / 63% audience · **My rating:** 7 / 10
Steven Soderbergh has spent a decade refusing to make the same film twice, and *Contagion* is the most disciplined version yet of the mode he is best at: the cool, multi-strand machine he built in *Traffic*, pointed this time at a virus instead of a drug trade. The trick of the marketing is that it has stacked four or five proper stars into the cast and put them at the mercy of a microbe. The trick of the film is that it largely refuses to let any of them behave like stars. This is a disaster movie made by someone who finds the spreadsheet more frightening than the explosion, and is mostly right.
## The setup
A woman comes home from a business trip in Hong Kong with what looks like jet lag. Within days she is dead, and so are others who shared her air, her handshakes, the surfaces she touched. The film follows the thing outward from there: into the home of her widower, Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon), trying to keep one surviving child safe; into the labs and corridors of the people whose job is to name the pathogen and stop it; and onto the screens of those who would rather sell you a story about it. There is no single hero and no villain you can shoot. The antagonist is an R-nought, a transmission rate, and the slow grind of an institution working out what it is dealing with before too many people die.
## The cast
Soderbergh uses fame as a resource and then spends it carefully. Matt Damon is the audience's anchor, a grieving everyman whose immunity gives him nothing useful to do except worry, and he plays the helplessness well. Kate Winslet, as the epidemiologist sent into the field, gives the film its most quietly affecting strand, a competent professional doing the unglamorous early legwork. Laurence Fishburne carries the institutional weight as the public-health official making impossible calls under scrutiny, with the gravity he has always been able to summon. The one performance allowed to be a touch larger is Jude Law's blogger, Alan Krumwiede, peddling alternative cures and conspiracy to a frightened public; he is the film's needle of contempt for the people who profit from panic, and Law clearly enjoys the venom.
## The craft
Soderbergh shoots and cuts the film himself, under his usual pseudonyms, and you can feel the single controlling intelligence. The look is clinical and faintly sickly, lots of cold light and surfaces the camera lingers on a half-second too long so you start to read every doorknob as a threat. Cliff Martinez's pulsing electronic score does a lot of the unease, keeping a low anxious hum under scenes that are, on paper, just people talking in rooms. The editing is the real star: the film moves between continents and characters with no fuss, trusting you to keep up, and the days-since-exposure structure gives it the relentless forward pressure of a clock you cannot stop. It is a remarkably unhysterical film about hysteria.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Outbreak*, and *Contagion* is essentially its sober older sibling: no monkey, no helicopter chases, no shouting general, just process. Closer to home, it is *Traffic* with a different subject, the same braided structure and the same refusal to moralise from a height. It also owes something to the cold scientific procedural of *The Andromeda Strain*, the sense that the most gripping thing on screen can be careful people solving a problem in a sealed room. Where it parts company with all of them is its restraint. It declines almost every opportunity for melodrama, which is both its discipline and, occasionally, its limitation.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are firmly on side, around 85%, praising exactly the plausibility and the chilly intelligence that define it. Audiences are cooler, nearer 63%, and the gap is easy to read. People arriving for a thriller with this cast may want a sharper payoff than the film is willing to give. *Contagion* is not building to a set-piece; it resolves the way an actual public-health crisis might, through grind and luck and logistics rather than heroics, and that is less satisfying in the gut even when it is more honest. I land closer to the critics, with reservations the audience score makes fair.
## Verdict
This is intelligent, gripping, beautifully assembled film-making, and the procedural rigour is the thing I value most about it. It is also, by design, a little cold to love. The very even-handedness that makes it credible keeps you at arm's length from everyone in it, so I admire it more than I am moved by it, and I suspect I will reach for *Traffic* before I reach for this again. As a clear-eyed thriller about how a system copes when the worst happens, it is close to the best of its kind, and I will happily revisit it for the craft. **7/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, with DVD and Blu-ray to follow.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film acquired a strange second life from 2020 onward, when a real global pandemic sent viewers back to it in numbers and many of its institutional and social details, the supply panic, the misinformation merchants, the fraught race for a vaccine, started to look less like speculation and more like a forecast. Its reputation has risen accordingly, from a well-made Soderbergh procedural to the pandemic film people actually cite. It now streams on the major platforms depending on region and is widely available on disc and digital.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *moderate physical and psychological threat, brief medical gore*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** Moderate threat includes scenes which show people briefly vomiting or frothing at the mouth before they die. Other moments include brief sight of people being attacked, and a scene showing a gang of young men threatening a woman and child in their house when they search for a possible antidote.
**Sex:** There are infrequent moderate sex references, including a man reminding a woman that they have just had sex, and a man commenting that the authorities have got a 'hard-on'.
**Language:** There is also occasional mild bad language ('ass', 'shit', 'bullshit').
**Drugs:** There are infrequent verbal drug references when a man denies that he or his dead wife have taken MDMA or Ecstasy.
**Additional issues:** Medical gore shows brief sight of a woman's scalp being peeled back as technicians look into her skull.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/contagion-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znzc3ody)).*
================================================================================
## Drive (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-drive
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-drive.md
- published: 2011-10-07
- document_id: 1070
> Nicolas Winding Refn turns a pulpy getaway thriller into a slow, neon-lit mood piece, anchored by a near-silent Ryan Gosling and a synth score you carry home with you. Cool to the point of chilly, but hard to shake. 8/10.
- **UK release:** September 2011
- **Director:** Nicolas Winding Refn · **Writer:** Hossein Amini (from the novel by James Sallis)
- **Studio / distributor:** FilmDistrict; Bold Films; OddLot Entertainment
- **Genre:** Neo-noir crime thriller · **Runtime:** 100 minutes (BBFC 18)
- **Main cast:** Ryan Gosling (*Half Nelson*, *Blue Valentine*) as the Driver; Carey Mulligan (*An Education*) as Irene; Bryan Cranston (*Little Miss Sunshine*) as Shannon; Albert Brooks (*Broadcast News*) as Bernie Rose
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 92% critics / 79% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The trailers for *Drive* are selling a car film, all engine noise and tyre smoke, and a fair few people are going to walk out cross that they did not get one. What Nicolas Winding Refn has actually made, off the back of the brutal *Bronson* and his *Pusher* films, is a neo-noir that idles where you expect it to race. The Danish director takes a lean piece of Los Angeles pulp and shoots it like a European art film, all held glances and pooled neon, and then drops moments of violence into it so abrupt they make the whole audience flinch. It is the sort of swerve that wins the director's prize at Cannes and splits a Friday-night crowd straight down the middle.
## The setup
Ryan Gosling plays a man with no name, a Hollywood stunt driver and garage mechanic who hires himself out after dark as a getaway wheel for whoever can pay. His rule is simple: five minutes, anywhere in the city, and what happens inside those five minutes is the client's business, not his. The arrangement holds until he falls for Irene (Carey Mulligan), the young mother who lives down the corridor, and her small son. When Irene's husband comes home from prison owing the wrong people, the Driver offers to help with one last job to clear the debt, and the job goes wrong in the way these jobs always do. From there the film tightens into a chase to keep two people he has barely spoken to alive.
## The cast
Gosling builds the Driver almost entirely out of stillness. He can hold a scene on a half-smile and a long silence, and the film trusts him to, so that when the calm finally breaks it lands like a slap. It is a real piece of star control, the kind that makes you lean in to read a face giving almost nothing away. Carey Mulligan plays Irene with a bruised softness that gives the romance its weight without a word of speechifying; much of their courtship happens in glances across a lift. The supporting bench is where the film really sings. Bryan Cranston's Shannon is a limping, hopeful hustler forever one bad deal from disaster, and Albert Brooks, a comic actor by trade, plays the mob financier Bernie Rose cast hard against type, all reasonable tone and sudden, businesslike cruelty. He is the most quietly frightening thing in the film.
## The craft
This is where *Drive* earns its keep. Refn and his cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel turn night-time Los Angeles into a pink-and-blue dreamscape, the city shot as a set of glowing surfaces rather than a real place. The pacing is deliberately patient, long stretches of quiet broken by violence that is short, graphic and over before you have braced for it, and the contrast does more work than any amount of sustained action could. Holding it all together is Cliff Martinez's electronic score, threaded through with synth-pop songs that turn the title sequence and the lift scenes into something close to music video, in the best sense. The pink cursive credits and the Driver's scorpion jacket already feel destined for student bedroom walls. The film knows exactly how cool it looks, which is a charge you can level at it, but the surface is so beautifully controlled that it mostly gets away with it.
## How it stacks up
The reference points are not American car movies so much as the lonely-professional thrillers of an earlier age. The whole film is in conversation with Walter Hill's *The Driver* and Michael Mann's *Thief*, and behind both of those stands Jean-Pierre Melville's *Le Samourai*, with its silent, ritualistic hit man. Refn borrows that tradition's central figure, the quiet expert with a private code, and the existential cool that goes with it. There are flickers of Mann's *Collateral* in the after-dark city, and of *Bullitt* in the handful of driving scenes that actually deliver. Where *Drive* differs is in how little it cares about the mechanics of the heists. It is a mood and a face, set to a soundtrack, far more than it is a plot.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have fallen hard, with reviews sitting around 92% and the praise landing on the style, the score, the control and Gosling. Audiences are notably cooler, closer to 79%, and you can see the fault line. Some of that gap is the mis-sold trailer, but some is genuine: this is a slow, withholding film with bursts of grisly violence, and if you came for a getaway thriller the long silences read as the film simply refusing to get going. Both reactions are honest. The film is a triumph of mood and a frustration of momentum at the same time.
## Verdict
I sit closer to the critics than the crowd here, but not all the way. *Drive* is one of the most striking-looking and best-scored films of the year, a genuine atmosphere piece that lingers, and the soundtrack alone guarantees I will put it on again. What keeps me a notch below the rave is the same coolness that makes it work: the film holds you at arm's length, more interested in surface and silence than in giving its characters much interior life, and the violence, while never gratuitous in intent, is strong enough to narrow the audience. As a piece of style and sound it is close to flawless. As a film to feel something at, it stays just behind the glass. Memorable, rewatchable, and built to last. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, certificate 18. Worth catching in a proper auditorium for the sound design and that score; a DVD and Blu-ray release will follow.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the scorpion jacket, the pink script and the Kavinsky and College songs have only grown as cult signifiers in the years since, and the soundtrack now stands as one of the most influential of its decade. The clearest later contrast is Edgar Wright's *Baby Driver* (2017), which took the same getaway-driver-with-a-playlist premise and ran it as bright, propulsive entertainment, throwing into relief just how withholding and cold Refn's film chooses to be. Refn and Gosling reunited for the far more divisive *Only God Forgives* (2013), which pushed the style to a point most of *Drive*'s admirers would not follow. *Drive* itself is now widely available on disc and digital and rotates through the streaming services.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **18** by the BBFC for *strong gory violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** A woman is shot in the head and it explodes in slow motion, resulting in large sprays of blood and brain matter. A man's head is repeatedly stamped on with strong gory detail. There are also strong bloody shootings.
**Additional issues:** There is strong language ('f**k').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/drive-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjgznzk)).*
================================================================================
## Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-tinker-tailor-soldier-spy
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-tinker-tailor-soldier-spy.md
- published: 2011-09-17
- document_id: 1225
> A Swedish director and a near-flawless British ensemble compress le Carré's densest novel into a cold, watchful, endlessly rewatchable piece of espionage. 9/10.
- **UK release:** September 2011
- **Director:** Tomas Alfredson · **Writers:** Bridget O'Connor; Peter Straughan
- **Studio / distributor:** Working Title Films; StudioCanal
- **Genre:** Cold War espionage thriller · **Runtime:** 127 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Gary Oldman (*The Dark Knight*, *Sid and Nancy*) as George Smiley; Colin Firth (*The King's Speech*, *A Single Man*) as Bill Haydon; Tom Hardy (*Inception*, *Bronson*) as Ricki Tarr; Mark Strong (*Sherlock Holmes*) as Jim Prideaux; Benedict Cumberbatch (*Atonement*) as Peter Guillam
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 83% critics / 65% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
John le Carré has been adapted before, and recently the screen has tended to translate him into something busier and more conventional than he is on the page. So the first surprise about Tomas Alfredson's *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy* is who made it: the Swede behind *Let the Right One In*, an outsider to the very English world of the Circus, handed the job of compressing a famously dense novel into two hours. The second surprise is that he has not loosened le Carré at all. He has tightened him. This is a spy film with almost no gunfire, no chases worth the name, and a hero who spends most of it sitting very still and listening, and it is one of the most absorbing things in cinemas this year.
## The setup
There is a mole at the top of British intelligence, a Soviet agent buried so deep inside the service that the hunt for him cannot be run from inside the building. George Smiley, pushed into retirement after a botched operation in Budapest, is quietly brought back to find the man, working from a rented room and a handful of trusted outsiders. The suspects are the four senior officers who run the Circus, men Smiley has known for thirty years, any one of whom could be the traitor. The investigation moves through old files, remembered conversations and the small inconsistencies in other people's accounts, and the further in Smiley goes, the more it costs the people helping him.
## The cast
Gary Oldman has built a career on volatility, which makes his Smiley a genuine act of discipline. He plays a man who has decided that the safest thing to show the world is nothing, and he holds that blankness for two hours while letting you see the machine working behind it. It is a performance with the volume turned almost to zero, and it is mesmerising. Around him the casting is close to a national stocktake of British acting. Colin Firth brings an easy, dangerous charm to Bill Haydon. Tom Hardy gives the field agent Ricki Tarr a raw, wounded energy that cuts against the surrounding restraint. Mark Strong is quietly devastating as Jim Prideaux, a man broken by something he is still trying to understand. Benedict Cumberbatch, as Smiley's young lieutenant Peter Guillam, carries the cost of loyalty in one wordless, heartbreaking scene. There is not a weak link in any room.
## The craft
Alfredson and his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema have made the most evocative thing about the film its texture. The 1970s here are all nicotine and damp wool, sick yellows and institutional greens, rooms that look like they smell of old paper. The Circus itself, with its soundproofed inner sanctum and its trolley of tea, is a world you believe absolutely. Editing is where a film like this lives or dies, and Dino Jonsäter keeps the timelines legible without ever spoon-feeding you; you are trusted to keep up. Alberto Iglesias scores it sparingly, a few cold, circling phrases that do the dread the dialogue is too buttoned-up to voice. The pace is deliberate, and that is the design, not a flaw. The film asks you to lean in, and rewards you for it on the second viewing more than the first.
## How it stacks up
The obvious shadow is the 1979 BBC serial, which had six hours and Alec Guinness to do what this film does in two. The wonder is that the compression works at all, and that Oldman never feels like he is impersonating Guinness so much as finding his own quieter route to the same man. Set beside the other great Cold War films, it belongs with *The Spy Who Came in from the Cold* and *The Lives of Others*, films that understand betrayal as a slow administrative process rather than a gunfight. It is the opposite number to the Bourne and Bond pictures filling the same multiplexes: where they run, this one waits.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are admiring, sitting around 83%, with the praise going to Oldman, the ensemble and the period atmosphere. Audiences are cooler, nearer 65%, and the gap is easy to read. This is a demanding film. It withholds, it assumes you are paying attention, and if you let your mind wander for ninety seconds you will lose a thread that does not come back. Some viewers find that opacity off-putting, and that is a fair complaint to make of a single sitting. My own view sits with the critics and then some, because the very thing that frustrates a first watch is what makes the film grow on a second and a third.
## Verdict
This is exactly the kind of film I want more of: intelligent, atmospheric, built on espionage as patient craft rather than spectacle, and made by people who trust the audience. It rewards rewatching more than almost anything else out this year, because once you know who the mole is the film becomes a different and richer thing, all those quiet glances suddenly loaded. The deliberate pace and the density are real, and they will lose some viewers; for me they are most of the pleasure. A near-perfect adaptation of a near-impossible book. **9/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on general release.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Gary Oldman's Smiley earned him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and the film has settled firmly into the canon of great espionage cinema, regularly cited as the high-water mark of modern le Carré adaptation. The ensemble has only grown in stature since, with Cumberbatch, Hardy and Firth all going on to leading careers. It is now widely available on Blu-ray and 4K, and streams across the major UK platforms depending on the month.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, sex, violence, bloody injury detail*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** A woman is shot in the head with a resultant spurt of blood onto the wall behind her. In another scene a man is shot in the cheek with clear sight of the entry wound and a trickle of blood running from it. The bloody aftermath of two murders, both of which take place off screen, is also shown. These include sight of a man with a very gory wound to the throat and a man floating in a bath full of bloody water and his own intestines.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('f**k'), as well as milder terms such as 'prick' and 'shit'.
**Sex:** There is a scene of strong sex: a woman is seen sitting astride a man on a bed and thrusting up and down.
**Additional issues:** In one scene a bird is struck and killed, although it is clear that effects have been used rather than a real animal.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znze3mzi)).*
================================================================================
## Super 8 (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-super-8
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-super-8.md
- published: 2011-08-16
- document_id: 1166
> J. J. Abrams hands Steven Spielberg's old Amblin keys back and drives the car beautifully. A train wreck, a small town, a pack of kids and a monster, all in the summer of 1979. 9/10.
- **UK release:** August 2011
- **Director:** J. J. Abrams · **Writer:** J. J. Abrams
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Amblin Entertainment; Bad Robot
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / coming-of-age mystery · **Runtime:** 112 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Joel Courtney as Joe Lamb; Elle Fanning (*Somewhere*, *Babel*) as Alice Dainard; Kyle Chandler (*King Kong*) as Deputy Jackson Lamb; Noah Emmerich (*The Truman Show*, *Little Children*) as Nelec
- **IMDb:** 7.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 81% critics / 75% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
J. J. Abrams has spent the last few years rebooting other people's toys: a younger, faster *Star Trek*, an entry in the *Mission: Impossible* run, the monster-in-Manhattan riddle of *Cloverfield*. *Super 8* is the first time he has reached back to the films that clearly made him want to do any of this in the first place, and it has Steven Spielberg's name on the producer credit to underline the point. This is a Spielberg homage made with Spielberg sitting in the next chair, which could easily have curdled into pastiche. It does not, because Abrams remembers the part of those films that the imitators always forget: the kids are real before the spectacle arrives.
## The setup
The summer of 1979, a small steel town in Ohio. Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) has just lost his mother in an accident at the mill, and his father, the deputy sheriff, has no idea what to do with him. Joe pours himself into helping his friend Charles make a zombie film on a Super 8 camera, the sort of ambitious, over-serious backyard production every cine-literate teenager has attempted. Filming a scene at the station one night, the gang witness a pickup truck drive onto the tracks and derail a passing military train in a catastrophe of biblical scale. Something gets out of one of the wrecked cars. The Air Force descends on the town, the dogs start running away, engines and appliances start vanishing, and the children, who caught more than they meant to on their little reel of film, find themselves the only people asking the right questions.
## The cast
The film lives or dies on its children, and Abrams has cast them with care. Joel Courtney, in his first feature, carries the lead with an unforced gravity; Joe's grief is present in every scene without ever being underlined. Elle Fanning, already a confident screen presence after *Somewhere*, is the standout. There is a moment where her character rehearses a scene for the home movie and visibly becomes a better actor in front of the others, and Fanning plays that shift so cleanly that the boys' stunned silence feels like ours. Kyle Chandler gives the grieving deputy father a stiff, decent helplessness, and the ensemble of friends, all sarcasm, asthma and pyrotechnics, bicker with the rhythm of kids who have known each other their whole short lives. Noah Emmerich supplies the necessary cold front as the colonel running the cover-up.
## The craft
Larry Fong shoots the town in warm dusk and lens flares, and the period is built from texture rather than nostalgia signposting: Walkmans, drive-in marquees, the specific orange light of a 1970s kitchen. Michael Giacchino's score does the Amblin thing of swelling exactly when a child looks up at something enormous, and it earns the swell. The train crash is a genuinely overwhelming set piece, all rending metal and tumbling carriages, staged with a maximalism that sits oddly against the intimacy of the rest, though it is undeniably thrilling. Abrams keeps the creature itself mostly off screen for an hour, which is the right instinct and the most Spielbergian choice in the film: the unseen thing in the dark is always scarier than the rendered one.
## How it stacks up
The reference points are not subtle, and the film knows it. This is *E.T.* and *Close Encounters of the Third Kind* and *The Goonies* run through a single sensibility, with the bicycle-gang adventure of one and the cosmic awe of the others. Where *Cloverfield* hid its monster behind a shaky camcorder, *Super 8* hides its own behind a child's Super 8 reel, and the parallel is clearly deliberate. It shares DNA, too, with *Stand by Me*, in the way the supernatural plot is really a frame for a story about boys on the edge of growing up. The film is most itself when it stays in that register, and weakest when the conspiracy machinery grinds into gear and starts behaving like every other creature feature.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have responded warmly, sitting around 81%, with the recurring praise landing on the young cast, the period feel and the sincerity, and the recurring complaint that the final act resolves into something more familiar than the wonderful first hour promised. Audiences are a touch cooler at 75%, which I suspect reflects anyone who came for *Cloverfield* and got a coming-of-age drama with a monster in it. I think the audience that feels short-changed has misjudged what they were sold. The home-movie heart is the good part, not the thing in the way of the good part.
## Verdict
I came out of this grinning. It works almost completely as the thing it sets out to be: a summer adventure about kids, loss and the strange, told with real craft and a deep affection for the films it descends from. The third act is the weakest stretch, and the creature, once fully seen, is less interesting than the idea of it. None of that dents the rewatch appeal, which is high; this is exactly the sort of warm, funny, beautifully made film I will happily put on again. It honours its influences without merely copying them, and it gives its young cast room to be properly good. **9/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. The film-within-a-film plays in full over the closing credits, so do not leave early.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Super 8* turned out to be a clear forerunner of *Stranger Things* (2016), which took the same 1980s small-town, kids-versus-secret-government-monster formula to a streaming generation and made it a phenomenon. Abrams went on to bring his nostalgia instincts to the *Star Wars* sequels with *The Force Awakens* (2015). The film has settled into its reputation as a fond, slightly underrated Amblin tribute, stronger in its first half than its last. It is now widely available on disc and digital and turns up on streaming services depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *one use of strong language, moderate threat and soft drug use*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** The young friends find themselves in several dangerous and tense situations, which include a train crash and various scenarios in which people disappear or come under attack from a mysterious force. The threat carries a degree of intensity, including moments designed to make the audience jump, but these are not overly sustained or disturbing.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f***k'); other language includes uses of the terms 'Jesus', 'hell', 'asshole', 'shit', 'bitching', 'pussy', 'son of a bitch', 'piss', 'douche' and 'dick'.
**Drugs:** A man is briefly seen smoking marijuana. The drug misuse is criticised and is not glamorised.
**Additional issues:** There is occasional sight of bloody injury. A young boy enjoys using fireworks; occasionally he does so in an irresponsible manner, but this behaviour is clearly condoned.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/super-8-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjc0ndm)).*
================================================================================
## Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes.md
- published: 2011-08-16
- document_id: 1144
> A franchise nobody was asking to revisit comes back as a quiet tragedy about one clever chimpanzee, and Andy Serkis turns a digital ape into the most human thing on screen. 8/10.
- **UK release:** August 2011
- **Director:** Rupert Wyatt · **Writers:** Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Chernin Entertainment
- **Genre:** Science fiction drama / franchise reboot · **Runtime:** 105 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Andy Serkis (*The Lord of the Rings*, *King Kong*) as Caesar; James Franco (*127 Hours*, *Spider-Man*) as Will Rodman; Freida Pinto (*Slumdog Millionaire*) as Caroline Aranha; John Lithgow (*3rd Rock from the Sun*, *Cliffhanger*) as Charles Rodman
- **IMDb:** 7.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 82% critics / 77% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The *Planet of the Apes* name has been carrying a lot of dead weight. The 1968 original is a genuine science fiction landmark, with one of the great closing shots in the genre, but the run of sequels that followed it drifted from sharp allegory into cheap rubber masks, and Tim Burton's 2001 remake managed to be both expensive and forgettable. So a fresh reboot in 2011 arrives with low expectations and a fair amount of suspicion. The surprise is that Rupert Wyatt and his writers have not tried to remake the spectacle at all. They have gone back to the origin and built a small, sad story about one animal becoming a person, and let the rest follow from there.
## The setup
Will Rodman (James Franco) is a scientist working on a viral therapy for Alzheimer's, driven less by ambition than by his father Charles (John Lithgow), whose mind is slipping away in front of him. When the trial collapses, Will ends up raising an orphaned chimpanzee whose mother carried the experimental drug, and the infant, Caesar, turns out to have inherited an intelligence well beyond anything an ape should have. For a while he grows up almost as a child of the house. Then the world reminds Will and Caesar both that a clever animal is still, in the eyes of the law and most of the people in it, an animal, and Caesar's education takes a darker turn inside a primate sanctuary that is nothing of the sort.
I will leave the back half there. The pleasure of the film is watching a mind wake up to its own situation, and it does not need spelling out in advance.
## The cast
The film belongs to Andy Serkis, even though you never see his face. Caesar is a performance-capture creation built by Weta Digital, and Serkis gives him a full inner life through posture, eyes and a slowly hardening resolve, with barely a word of dialogue. It is the most expressive thing he has done since Gollum, and arguably more difficult, because Caesar has to earn sympathy as a thinking being rather than a creature. By the time he makes a single decisive choice late on, you understand exactly how he got there.
The human cast knows whose film this is and plays accordingly. Franco is steady and likeable as the well-meaning scientist who keeps making the convenient choice, and Freida Pinto, as the primatologist who loves him, is given little to do beyond providing a conscience. The standout among the humans is Lithgow, whose decline gives the early stretch its emotional weight and quietly justifies everything that follows. Tom Felton turns up as a casually cruel keeper, leaning on a familiar register, and even gets to deliver the franchise's most famous line in a way that should be ridiculous and somehow lands.
## The craft
Wyatt directs with more restraint than the premise invites. Andrew Lesnie's photography keeps the early domestic scenes warm and the later sanctuary scenes cold and institutional, and Patrick Doyle's score holds back rather than swelling over every beat. The effects work is the real headline: Caesar and the other apes are rendered with a weight and texture that the rubber-suit era could only dream of, and the film trusts them to act, holding on faces where a lesser version would cut to explosions.
When the action does arrive, on a fog-shrouded bridge in the third act, it is staged for clarity and stakes rather than scale. There is a thrill to seeing apes move with intelligence and intent, coordinating rather than rampaging, and the film keeps its sympathies carefully balanced so that the chaos never tips into a simple monster rampage.
## How it stacks up
The obvious lineage is the 1972 *Conquest of the Planet of the Apes*, which covered similar ground, an enslaved ape leading an uprising, on a fraction of the budget and with a fraction of the nuance. This is the version that story always wanted to be. The closer cousin is *King Kong*, where Serkis and Weta first proved a digital ape could carry real feeling, and you can see the lessons learned applied here at feature length. As a science-gone-wrong cautionary tale it sits comfortably beside *Jurassic Park*, sharing that film's interest in human arrogance, though it is more interested in the creature's point of view than in the chase.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been pleasantly startled, sitting around 82%, with most of the praise aimed squarely at Serkis and at how seriously the film takes its central idea. Audiences are a little cooler at 77%, which I suspect comes from anyone who walked in expecting a war film and got a character study with a fight at the end. I think the critics have the better of it. The thing that lingers is not the bridge sequence but the slow tragedy of a creature who learns exactly what he is and what the world intends to do with him.
## Verdict
This is intelligent science fiction that respects both its premise and its audience, and it rests on a digital performance good enough to make you forget it is one. The human half of the story is the weaker half, and a couple of supporting roles are thin, but Caesar more than carries the weight. It is genuinely rewatchable, it sets up a franchise I now actively want to see continue, and it does the hardest thing a reboot can do, which is make an exhausted name feel necessary again. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. A DVD and Blu-ray release follows later in the year, and it is well worth seeing on the largest screen you can while it is still on.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Caesar's story did continue, and grew. *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes* (2014) and *War for the Planet of the Apes* (2017) completed a reboot trilogy that is now widely regarded as one of the strongest blockbuster runs of its era, with Serkis's Caesar at the centre throughout and Weta's work advancing with each film. The trilogy in turn led to a further entry, *Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes* (2024), set generations later. This first film is available on disc, digital and streaming, with its availability rotating between platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *intense threat and moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC release page was unavailable at the time of writing, so the detailed Content Advice by category (Violence, Threat, Language and so on) could not be retrieved verbatim. The age rating and short consumer advice line above are confirmed; the full classification breakdown should be checked against the BBFC entry before relying on it.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtotc3mdaz)).*
================================================================================
## Captain America - The First Avenger (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-captain-america-the-first-avenger
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-captain-america-the-first-avenger.md
- published: 2011-08-02
- document_id: 1054
> Marvel takes its least fashionable hero back to 1942 and lets Joe Johnston make an honest wartime adventure out of him. Sincere, handsome and endlessly rewatchable, it is better than its slightly grudging reception suggests. 9/10.
- **UK release:** July 2011
- **Director:** Joe Johnston · **Writers:** Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Paramount Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero adventure / wartime pulp action · **Runtime:** 124 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chris Evans (*Fantastic Four*, *Sunshine*) as Steve Rogers; Hayley Atwell (*Brideshead Revisited*, *The Duchess*) as Peggy Carter; Hugo Weaving (*The Matrix*, *The Lord of the Rings*) as Johann Schmidt / Red Skull; Sebastian Stan (*Black Swan*) as Bucky Barnes; Tommy Lee Jones (*The Fugitive*, *Men in Black*) as Colonel Phillips
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 80% critics / 74% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
Of all the heroes Marvel has been working through since *Iron Man* opened the run three years ago, Captain America was always the awkward one. A flag-draped soldier from 1942 is a harder sell than a wisecracking billionaire, and the easy version of this film is two hours of square-jawed patriotism. What lands instead is the most surprising choice on the table: Marvel handed the character to Joe Johnston, the man who made *The Rocketeer*, and asked him to build an honest period adventure rather than a modern blockbuster wearing a vintage costume. The result is the warmest film the studio has put out so far.
## The setup
Steve Rogers is a slight, sickly young man from Brooklyn who keeps trying to enlist and keeps being turned away. What he has instead of a body is a stubborn refusal to back down from a fight he cannot win, and that is the quality a German emigre scientist is looking for when he picks Steve for an experimental programme that turns him into the army's first super soldier. The military, not knowing what else to do with him, packs him off as a costumed mascot selling war bonds. Only when he goes off-script to rescue captured men does he become an actual soldier, set against Hydra, the Nazi science division run by Johann Schmidt, whose ambitions have outgrown even Hitler's.
## The cast
Chris Evans does the hardest thing in the film before the serum ever touches him. The early scenes graft his head onto a frail, narrow frame, and he plays Steve as decent without being dull, brave without being a poster. The decency is the performance, and it carries through the transformation so that the hero never stops being the runt who would not stay down. Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter is the film's other anchor, an officer with more competence and dry wit than anyone around her, and she and Evans build a courtship out of restraint rather than declarations. Hugo Weaving plays Schmidt as a proper old-fashioned villain, relishing the menace without winking at it, his clipped delivery doing as much work as the prosthetics. Sebastian Stan gives Bucky Barnes the easy charm of the friend who shielded Steve before Steve could shield anyone, and Tommy Lee Jones walks off with most of his scenes as a colonel who has run out of patience for everybody.
## The craft
Johnston shoots this like the serial adventures it descends from. Shelly Johnson's cinematography keeps everything warm and burnished, the Hydra technology glows with pulp-magazine menace, and the period design, from the Stark Expo to the bond-tour stages, is detailed enough to enjoy in its own right. Alan Silvestri's score is unembarrassed and rousing in the way this genre needs, and the bond-tour montage, with its painted backdrops and showgirls, is the most purely charming stretch of film Marvel has produced. The action is clean and legible, built around a man with a shield rather than around explosions. If there is a weak seam it is the final act, where the practical world gives way to a more digital, more generic climax, the kind of effects-driven finish every one of these films seems contractually obliged to supply.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Johnston's own *The Rocketeer*, another handsome 1940s adventure with a flying man and Nazi villains, and this feels like the film he always wanted that one to be. It sits closer to *Raiders of the Lost Ark* than to the rest of the Marvel run: a square hero, a clear evil, gadgets and globe-hopping and a streak of real sincerity. Against the studio's own output it is the inverse of *Iron Man*. Where that film won people over with irony, this one wins them with conviction, and asks you to take an honestly good man at face value. That is the riskier bet, and it pays off.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reviews are warm but a touch grudging, sitting around 80% from critics with audiences a little behind. The recurring complaint is that the film works too hard as a prologue, more interested in delivering Captain America to the team-up film coming next summer than in standing on its own. There is a kernel of truth in the framing, and the closing stretch does its share of franchise housekeeping. But it undersells how complete the film is. The bond-tour conceit, the Steve-and-Peggy thread and the friendship with Bucky all stand up entirely on their own terms. Audiences scoring it lower than the critics seems to me exactly backwards.
## Verdict
This is the Marvel film I expect to return to most. It is sincere without being naive, handsome without being airless, and built around a hero whose appeal is moral rather than ironic, which is rarer and harder than it looks. The digital climax is the one real misstep, and the franchise plumbing in the final minutes is visible. Set against everything the film does with period, character and tone, neither dents it much. I value rewatchability above almost anything, and this is a film I will put on again happily, for the bond tour and Atwell's Peggy and the unfashionable pleasure of a hero you are simply allowed to like. **9/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and 3D.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film turned out to be the foundation of one of the most durable strands in the Marvel run. *Captain America: The Winter Soldier* (2014) repaid the friendship set up here with the franchise's best straight thriller, and Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter earned her own television series, *Agent Carter*, on the strength of this performance. The slightly grudging "prologue" framing has aged worse than the film has. It is now available on disc and digital and streams on Disney+ depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are lengthy fight sequences featuring crunchy kicks and punches, as well as scenes of gunfire in which people are killed, but this is mostly without bloodshed, although there is brief sight of a small bloody hole in a man's back. A brief spray of blood is also visible when a man hits an aeroplane propeller.
**Threat and horror:** There is moderate threat, including a scene in which a man is tied to a laboratory table and forced to undergo experimentation on his body. There is a brief scene of horror when a man peels back his human face mask to reveal a reddened skull underneath.
**Language:** Mild bad language includes uses of the terms 'bloody', 'ass', 'merde' and 'jerk'.
**Sex:** Mild and oblique sexual references include two characters discussing how they have not yet found the right partner with whom to 'dance'.
**Injury detail:** There is sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink alcohol and smoke cigars.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/captain-america-the-first-avenger-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjg4nza)).*
================================================================================
## X-Men - First Class (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-x-men-first-class
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-x-men-first-class.md
- published: 2011-06-02
- document_id: 1235
> Matthew Vaughn drags the X-Men back to 1962 and hands the franchise to two terrific actors. A stylish, confident reboot that I admired more than I loved. 7/10.
- **UK release:** June 2011
- **Director:** Matthew Vaughn · **Writers:** Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Marvel Entertainment; Bad Hat Harry Productions
- **Genre:** Superhero action / Cold War science fiction · **Runtime:** 132 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** James McAvoy (*The Last King of Scotland*, *Atonement*) as Charles Xavier; Michael Fassbender (*Hunger*, *Inglourious Basterds*) as Erik Lehnsherr; Jennifer Lawrence (*Winter's Bone*) as Raven; Nicholas Hoult (*About a Boy*) as Hank McCoy; Kevin Bacon (*Footloose*, *Mystic River*) as Sebastian Shaw
- **IMDb:** 7.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 86% critics / 87% audience · **My rating:** 7 / 10
The X-Men films arrived at this point looking distinctly tired. Bryan Singer's first two were the films that taught Hollywood superheroes could be played straight, but *The Last Stand* fumbled the ending of that trilogy and *X-Men Origins: Wolverine* was the kind of cash-in that makes you wonder whether anyone involved still liked the characters. So the smart move is the one Fox has made here: go back to 1962, before any of it, and hand the keys to Matthew Vaughn, who made *Layer Cake* and *Kick-Ass* and clearly fancies a franchise that nobody else can be bothered to take seriously any more.
## The setup
Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is a young telepath coasting on charm and a doctorate, while Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) is hunting the man who murdered his mother in a concentration camp. That man is Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), a mutant with his own plans for the species, and his scheme drags both of them into the orbit of the CIA just as the Cuban Missile Crisis is winding up. Xavier and Lehnsherr find each other, recruit a handful of other young mutants, and start to build something. The pleasure and the tragedy of the film is that you already know these two men are going to end up on opposite sides, and watching the friendship form is watching a fault line being drawn.
## The cast
The film lives or dies on McAvoy and Fassbender, and they carry it comfortably. McAvoy gives Xavier an easy, slightly smug warmth, the privilege of a man who has never had to hide what he is. Fassbender is the better of the two and knows it: his Lehnsherr is all banked fury, and a mid-film sequence of him working through a row of former Nazis across Europe plays like an audition for a Bond villain who happens to be the hero. Jennifer Lawrence, fresh from *Winter's Bone*, gives Raven a real ache about wanting to pass as human, and Nicholas Hoult does the nervy, brilliant-but-awkward Hank McCoy well. Kevin Bacon, enjoying himself enormously in velvet and a German accent, supplies exactly the silky menace the plot needs. Some of the younger recruits are thin, but the central pair are strong enough that it scarcely matters.
## The craft
Vaughn shoots the period with relish: jets, submarines, split-screen recruitment montages, and a colour palette borrowed wholesale from the Sean Connery Bonds. John Mathieson's photography keeps it handsome without going soft, and Henry Jackman's score pushes the brass when it needs to. The effects are mostly good and occasionally rough, and the final act around the Cuban blockade does the thing these films always do, which is to swap character for spectacle just when the character work was the interesting part. But the confidence is the thing. After two films that felt like obligations, this one moves, and moves with style.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is the early Bond pictures, and the film knows it, leaning into the Cold War gadgetry and globe-trotting until it is half a spy film with powers. Set against the X-Men series itself, it is plainly the best entry since *X2*, with a sharper emotional spine than either of the films that immediately preceded it. Vaughn also brings something of the genre revisionism he showed in *Kick-Ass*, and there are flashes of the moral untidiness that made *Watchmen* interesting, though this is a tidier, more crowd-pleasing film than that.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have welcomed it warmly, sitting around 86%, with audiences a touch higher, and the recurring praise is for Fassbender and for the wit of the period setting. That is all fair. Where I part company slightly is on how much it adds up to. The reviews read as relief as much as enthusiasm, the sound of a franchise being rescued, and rescue is not quite the same as greatness. The Xavier and Lehnsherr material is genuinely good. A fair amount of the rest is competent franchise machinery dressed in a sharp suit.
## Verdict
This is a stylish, confident, well-acted reboot, and the two leads give it a weight the series badly needed. I admired it more than I loved it. The Cold War flavour is enjoyable, the friendship at the centre has real pull, and yet the third act tips back into the familiar shape and the supporting cast never quite earns its space. It is a film I am happy to have seen and in no hurry to see again, which is the honest definition of solid rather than special. **7/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the partnership Vaughn set up here became the spine of two more films, *X-Men: Days of Future Past* (2014) and *X-Men: Apocalypse* (2016), with McAvoy and Fassbender carrying the younger timeline forward, and *Days of Future Past* in particular bettering this one. Vaughn went on to *Kingsman: The Secret Service*, which leant even harder into the spy-film instincts on show here. The film is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+ depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate fantasy violence and one use of strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are intense supernatural battles in which mutants use their various superhuman powers against one another. A mutant uses his powers to stab a Nazi in the hand and stomach, and there is a scene in which a man is impaled through the head with a coin. Blood and injury detail is limited.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k'); milder terms include uses of 'bastard', 'god', 'hell' and 'damn'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/x-men-first-class-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00nzaxndk)).*
================================================================================
## Attack the Block (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-attack-the-block
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-attack-the-block.md
- published: 2011-05-13
- document_id: 1038
> Joe Cornish turns a South London estate into a siege movie, and a teenage mugger into a hero, with more nerve and wit than its budget has any right to. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2011
- **Director:** Joe Cornish · **Writer:** Joe Cornish
- **Studio / distributor:** Film4; StudioCanal; Big Talk Pictures; Optimum Releasing
- **Genre:** Science-fiction siege comedy / urban action · **Runtime:** 88 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** John Boyega as Moses; Jodie Whittaker (*Venus*, *St Trinian's*) as Sam; Nick Frost (*Shaun of the Dead*, *Hot Fuzz*) as Ron; Franz Drameh as Dennis
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 75% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Joe Cornish is best known to British audiences as one half of Adam and Joe, the pair who spent years taking the mickey out of films on Channel 4 and Radio 6. So there is a pleasing nerve in his deciding, for his first feature, to make one of his own and aim it squarely at the genre cinema he grew up loving. *Attack the Block* is a monster movie set on a council estate in South London, shot for very little money, and it carries itself with the confidence of someone who has watched a great many siege films and worked out exactly what makes them tick.
## The setup
It is Bonfire Night in Brixton. Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a nurse walking home, is mugged at knifepoint by a gang of teenagers led by Moses (John Boyega). The robbery is interrupted when something falls out of the sky and lands on a nearby car, and when Moses goes to investigate, the something bites him. What he kills in retaliation turns out to be the first of many: larger, faster, blacker-than-black creatures with rows of glowing teeth start dropping across the estate. The gang retreats to the tower block they call home, and the night becomes a fight to hold the building against an enemy nobody will believe is real. The film asks you to spend ninety minutes rooting for the same boys who robbed a woman in its opening scene, and it knows exactly what it is doing in asking.
## The cast
The find here is John Boyega, who plays Moses with a still, watchful heaviness well beyond his years. He barely raises his voice, and the film leans on that restraint; the whole arc, from sullen ringleader to reluctant defender of the estate, plays out in his face rather than in speeches. Jodie Whittaker gives Sam more spine than the victim role usually allows, and her gradual, grudging alliance with the gang is the spine of the film. Around them the younger cast, mostly unknowns, talk over each other in the genuine slang of the place, which keeps the comedy local and unforced. Nick Frost turns up as Ron, a genial weed dealer presiding over a top-floor grow room, and brings exactly the seam of stoner comedy his *Shaun of the Dead* and *Hot Fuzz* audience will be expecting.
## The craft
For a film made on a shoestring, *Attack the Block* looks remarkably assured. Cornish and his cinematographer Thomas Townend shoot the estate as a maze of corridors, stairwells and lift shafts, all sodium-orange light and deep shadow, which lets the creatures stay mostly unseen and all the more frightening for it. The monster design is the smartest economy in the picture: matte-black fur that swallows light, with only the bioluminescent blue-white teeth catching the eye, so a man in a suit becomes a genuine threat the budget could never have bought with pixels. Steven Price and Basement Jaxx supply a score that fuses orchestral menace with grime and rave, and it does a lot to keep the energy up. At eighty-eight minutes the thing never sags; Cornish gets in, sets the trap, springs it, and gets out.
## How it stacks up
The obvious British touchstone is *Shaun of the Dead*, and Nick Frost's presence invites the comparison, but Cornish is after something with a harder edge. The truer ancestor is John Carpenter, and *Assault on Precinct 13* in particular: a fixed location, a small group holding off a relentless assault through one long night. There is *Gremlins* in the creature mischief and the comic timing, and a clear debt to the kids-on-bikes adventure tradition, here recast with mopeds and a tower block instead of suburban cul-de-sacs. What Cornish adds is a sense of place that none of those films had, a Brixton estate rendered with affection rather than the usual hand-wringing, where the social texture is part of the horror and part of the joke at once.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it strongly, sitting at 90% and praising the wit, the pace, the creature work and Boyega above all. Audiences are warmer than lukewarm but more divided, around 75%, and you can see the fault line: the film opens with its heroes committing a real crime against a sympathetic woman, and it never quite apologises for asking you to side with them afterwards. Some viewers cannot get past that opening, and the objection is honest. I find it the bravest thing in the film. Cornish refuses to soften the boys into cuddly scamps; he makes you earn your sympathy alongside Sam, and the estate's own logic of who is and is not a threat becomes part of what the film is chewing on.
## Verdict
This is a small film with a big appetite, and it satisfies most of it. The world-building is sharp, the monsters are genuinely scary on a budget that should not have allowed it, and Boyega announces himself as someone to watch. It is funny, fast, and over before it can wear out its welcome, which makes it eminently rewatchable. It loses a little for the thinness of the supporting characters, who are types more than people, and the social provocation of the opening will not sit right with everyone. But on energy, invention and sheer command of its genre, it is one of the most enjoyable British films of the year. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Catch it on the big screen for the sound design alone; DVD and Blu-ray will follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: John Boyega's career did exactly what the film promised, with the lead in *Star Wars: The Force Awakens* (2015) arriving only a few years later, which has retroactively turned *Attack the Block* into the film that discovered him. Cornish went on to write for *Ant-Man* and *The Adventures of Tintin* before directing the family adventure *The Kid Who Would Be King* (2019). The film has settled comfortably into cult-classic standing, regularly revived at repertory screenings, and is now widely available on disc, digital and rotating streaming services. A long-mooted sequel has been talked up by cast and director without yet materialising.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, violence, gore and soft drug use*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is strong gory violence when aliens attack humans, ripping their throats and faces, with sight of blood spurts. A decapitation is also implied.
**Threat and horror:** There are scenes of threat. Most involve aliens but some sequences are more realistic in nature, such as a person being held up and threatened by a gang at knifepoint.
**Language:** There is frequent use of strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker'), as well as milder terms.
**Sex:** There are some mild comic sex references, including to STIs.
**Drugs:** Characters are seen growing, selling and smoking marijuana. There is also sight of cocaine being sold, but not used.
**Injury detail:** There is sight of green alien blood and gore after aliens are attacked. There is sight of blood and injuries after humans are attacked.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/attack-the-block-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjgymjk)).*
================================================================================
## Hanna (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-hanna
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-hanna.md
- published: 2011-05-09
- document_id: 1093
> Joe Wright leaves the drawing rooms behind and makes a fairy-tale spy thriller, scored by The Chemical Brothers and built around a remarkable Saoirse Ronan. Strange, stylish and endlessly rewatchable. 8/10.
- **UK release:** May 2011
- **Director:** Joe Wright · **Writers:** Seth Lochhead, David Farr
- **Studio / distributor:** Focus Features; Holleran Company; Babelsberg
- **Genre:** Action thriller / coming-of-age spy thriller · **Runtime:** 111 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Saoirse Ronan (*Atonement*, *The Lovely Bones*) as Hanna; Eric Bana (*Munich*, *Hulk*) as Erik Heller; Cate Blanchett (*Elizabeth*, *The Lord of the Rings*) as Marissa Wiegler; Tom Hollander (*Pride & Prejudice*) as Isaacs
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 71% critics / 66% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Joe Wright has, until now, been the man you call for tasteful period prestige: *Pride & Prejudice*, *Atonement*, frocks and longing and a camera that glides through grand houses. So a propulsive Euro-thriller about a teenage assassin, scored end to end by The Chemical Brothers, is not the second album anyone expected from him. The surprise is how natural the swerve feels. The formal eye that lingered on Keira Knightley in a doorway turns out to work just as well on a girl sprinting through a shipping container, and Wright has made the rare genre film that looks and sounds like nobody else's.
## The setup
Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) has spent her whole life in a frozen forest near the Arctic circle, raised and drilled by her father Erik (Eric Bana), a former intelligence operative living off the grid. She can field-strip a rifle, speak several languages, and kill a deer with a single arrow, but she has never heard music or felt electric light. When she decides she is ready, Erik lets her flip a switch that announces their position to the people who have spent years looking for them, chief among them the brittle, immaculate CIA handler Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett). What follows sends Hanna alone across Morocco, Spain and Germany, hunted and curious in equal measure, learning what the ordinary world is while trying to stay alive inside it.
## The cast
The film stands or falls on Ronan, and she is extraordinary. At sixteen she carries it without strain, holding two things at once: the lethal competence of someone built to fight, and the wide-open strangeness of a child meeting the world for the first time. A scene of her flinching at a kettle, or studying a teenage girl her own age like a foreign species, lands as cleanly as any of the action. Bana underplays the father nicely, all coiled warmth and withheld information. Blanchett is having the most fun, giving Marissa a clipped Southern drawl and an obsessive's neatness, a fairy-tale stepmother with a dental fixation and a department behind her. Tom Hollander, as the tracksuited contractor Isaacs, brings a whistling, theatrical menace that tips the film towards the grotesque in the best way.
## The craft
Wright shoots this like someone who has been let off the leash. Alwin Küchler's photography is precise and cold in the forest, then saturated and woozy once Hanna reaches the south, and there is a justly admired single take that follows Erik through a Berlin underground station and out into a brawl, the camera prowling around him as the synths build. That is the other engine here: The Chemical Brothers' score does not sit politely under the picture, it drives it, turning chases and fights into something closer to choreography. The fairy-tale scaffolding is deliberate and out in the open, with a wolf, a wicked witch, a house in the woods and a climax at a derelict fun park. It gives a fairly slender chase plot a strange resonance it would not otherwise have.
## How it stacks up
The obvious cousin is *The Bourne Identity*, another stripped-down European chase about a trained killer with a hole where his past should be, but *Hanna* is doing something odder. Where Bourne is all grounded competence, Wright wants the heightened storybook texture too. The other clear ancestor is *Léon*, which also paired a child and lethal violence with real tenderness, though Hanna is the assassin here rather than the apprentice. And the music-as-motor approach, the way movement and rhythm fuse, recalls *Run Lola Run* more than any recent spy picture. It is rare to see an action film reach for art-house reference points and a propulsive beat at the same time, and rarer still to see it pull both off.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are broadly won over, sitting around 71%, with most of the praise going to Ronan, the action and the score, and most of the reservations to a story some find thin or wilfully eccentric. Audiences are a little cooler at 66%, which I suspect comes from viewers arriving for a straight Bourne-style thriller and getting something more peculiar. Both reactions are fair on their own terms. The plot, stripped of its styling, is slim, and the fairy-tale conceit will read as pretentious to anyone not in the mood for it. But the thinness of the story has never been what I take away from this film.
## Verdict
What I take away is texture, momentum and that central performance, and on the things I most value, atmosphere, a score I want to put straight back on, and sheer rewatchability, *Hanna* delivers more than most of the genre. It is stylish without being hollow, strange without losing its grip, and it gives Saoirse Ronan a role that shows exactly what she can do. The story is the weakest part and the styling will not be to every taste, but I have returned to this one more often than far more acclaimed thrillers, which is the truest test I have. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow. The Chemical Brothers soundtrack is well worth seeking out alongside it.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the world of the film was later expanded into a *Hanna* television series (2019 to 2021) on Amazon Prime Video, which reworked the same premise across three seasons with a new cast. Saoirse Ronan went on to become one of the most nominated actors of her generation, and this still reads as an early flag of that range. The film has settled into a quiet cult reputation as one of the more distinctive action pictures of its decade, and is now available on disc and to stream or rent across the usual digital platforms.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, one use of strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of moderate action violence. Mostly, this consists of fight sequences in which crunchy punches are exchanged, but this is largely without bloodshed. There are also some stronger moments which include sight of a man having his neck cut, sight of a woman having her neck twisted, and sight of characters getting stabbed in the arm, leg or torso; however, these moments are all very brief and without an emphasis on blood or injury.
**Language:** There is a single use of strong language ('f***k'), as well as milder terms including 'shit', 'god' and 'Christ'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/hanna-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znjk4ntq)).*
================================================================================
## Source Code (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-source-code
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-source-code.md
- published: 2011-04-14
- document_id: 1154
> Duncan Jones follows Moon with a tight, clever time-loop thriller that does a lot inside ninety-three minutes and a single train carriage. Lean, humane and built to rewatch. 8/10.
- **UK release:** April 2011
- **Director:** Duncan Jones · **Writer:** Ben Ripley
- **Studio / distributor:** Summit Entertainment; The Mark Gordon Company; Vendôme Pictures
- **Genre:** Science fiction thriller / time-loop mystery · **Runtime:** 93 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Jake Gyllenhaal (*Donnie Darko*, *Brokeback Mountain*) as Colter Stevens; Michelle Monaghan (*Mission: Impossible III*, *Gone Baby Gone*) as Christina Warren; Vera Farmiga (*Up in the Air*, *The Departed*) as Colleen Goodwin; Jeffrey Wright (*Casino Royale*, *Syriana*) as Dr Rutledge
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 92% critics / 82% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Two years ago Duncan Jones turned up out of nowhere with *Moon*, a one-man, one-set science fiction film made for the loose change other directors lose down the back of the sofa, and it was one of the smartest things the genre had produced in a decade. The obvious worry with a follow-up was the second-album problem: a bigger budget, a recognisable lead, a studio behind it, and the danger that the very things that made *Moon* sing would get smoothed away. *Source Code* arrives carrying all of that, and the encouraging news is that Jones has spent the extra money on momentum rather than spectacle.
## The setup
Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes on a Chicago commuter train, sitting opposite a woman who is talking to him as though they know each other, and with no idea how he got there. He is not Colter Stevens to anyone on board; the face in the window is a stranger's. Eight minutes later the train explodes. Then he wakes again, in a metal capsule, being told by a brisk officer on a screen that he is part of a programme that can drop him into those last eight minutes over and over until he finds the bomber. The film keeps two clocks running at once: the loop on the train, where he is chasing a name, and the cold room outside it, where he is trying to work out what has actually been done to him. I will leave the second clock for you to discover, because the pleasure is in watching the rules reveal themselves.
## The cast
This is the most relaxed and likeable Gyllenhaal has been in a while. He plays Colter as a soldier first, methodical and clipped, then lets the confusion and the grief leak through as the repetitions mount, so that by the later runs you feel the cost of being asked to die on a schedule. Michelle Monaghan has the harder job: Christina has to be worth saving on an eight-minute acquaintance, and she finds an easy, lived-in warmth that does the work the script does not have time to. Vera Farmiga, mostly confined to a monitor, turns Goodwin from a procedural mouthpiece into the conscience of the thing, a flicker of doubt behind the protocol. Jeffrey Wright gives Dr Rutledge the clipped certainty of a man who has stopped asking whether he should because he is too pleased that he can.
## The craft
What impresses is the economy. Ben Ripley's screenplay is a precision instrument: it sets up its loop, teaches you the rules, then breaks and bends them at exactly the rate that keeps you leaning forward. Jones shoots the repeated eight minutes so that each pass feels different, finding new angles and details rather than simply replaying the tape, which is the trap this kind of film usually falls into. At ninety-three minutes there is no fat on it. Chris Bacon's score keeps the pulse up without nagging, and the train itself, all hard light and aluminium and indifferent strangers, becomes a place you come to know the way the hero does. It is a film that respects your time and your intelligence, and that is rarer than it should be.
## How it stacks up
The shorthand everyone reaches for is *Groundhog Day* with a bomb, and the loop structure does owe something to it, and a little to the body-swap conceit of old *Quantum Leap*. But the closer relative is Tony Scott's *Deja Vu*, another thriller that dresses grief up as a technical problem and sends a man back to save a woman he has only just met. Against its own director's work, this is the warmer, more conventional film: *Moon* was a chilly meditation on identity and corporate cruelty, while *Source Code* is a thriller that happens to have ideas, rather than the other way round. That is not a complaint. It tells you Jones can do propulsion as well as melancholy, and it suggests he is a real filmmaker and not a one-set fluke.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it warmly, sitting around 92%, with the praise landing on its pace, its tidy premise and an emotional payoff that earns its keep. Audiences are a notch cooler at 82%, and you can guess why: the more you poke at the science, the more the logic frays, and the ending asks you to accept a fairly generous reading of what the programme can actually do. If you need your time-travel airtight, the last reel will irritate you. I think that is the wrong thing to bring to it. The film is honest about being a thriller with a heart, and it keeps its promises on both counts.
## Verdict
This is exactly the sort of film I want more of: intelligent science fiction that trusts the audience, runs lean, and leaves you with something to chew on rather than just something to clean up. It is not flawless. The mechanics do not survive close interrogation, and the resolution reaches for a sentiment it has not entirely banked. But it is tense, humane and clever, the kind of thing I will happily put on again to watch the gears turn, and it confirms that *Moon* was no accident. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth catching on a big screen while the train still has its surprises.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Duncan Jones went on to make the long-gestating video-game adaptation *Warcraft* (2016) and the Netflix thriller *Mute* (2018), and *Source Code* has settled in as the high point of his run with *Moon*, the two compact, idea-led films he made before the bigger machines closed in. The time-loop subgenre it sits in has since had its definitive action entry in *Edge of Tomorrow* (2014), which runs the same die-and-repeat structure at a larger scale. *Source Code* is now widely available on disc and digital, and turns up regularly on the streaming services depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *one use of strong language and moderate threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat:** There are several scenes of moderate threat when guns are pointed at people in order to make them reveal information.
**Language:** There is a single use of strong language ('f**k'), as well as uses of milder terms such as 'shit', 'bullshit', 'asshole' and 'dick'.
**Additional issues:** There is a brief image of a man whose upper torso is encased in a clear plastic shell, exposing his organs.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/source-code-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtody3nzax)). The BBFC release page would not render its full content-advice breakdown to automated retrieval; the categories above are quoted from the BBFC listing as surfaced in search and may not be the complete set of headings.*
================================================================================
## Limitless (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-limitless
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-limitless.md
- published: 2011-03-25
- document_id: 1112
> A blocked writer swallows a pill that switches the whole brain on, and a slick wish-fulfilment thriller runs with the idea harder than it thinks it through. Style and pace win out over depth. 8/10.
- **UK release:** March 2011
- **Director:** Neil Burger · **Writer:** Leslie Dixon
- **Studio / distributor:** Relativity Media; Rogue; Momentum Pictures (UK)
- **Genre:** Science fiction thriller / techno-thriller · **Runtime:** 105 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Bradley Cooper (*The Hangover*, *The A-Team*) as Eddie Morra; Robert De Niro (*Taxi Driver*, *Heat*) as Carl Van Loon; Abbie Cornish (*Bright Star*, *Stop-Loss*) as Lindy; Anna Friel (*Land of the Lost*) as Melissa; Andrew Howard as Gennady
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 69% critics / 74% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
There is a particular fantasy that any writer who has ever stared at a blank page knows intimately: the one where the fog lifts, the sentences arrive in order, and the brain finally does what you always suspected it could. *Limitless* takes that daydream, drops it into a pill, and asks what a man would do if it actually worked. Neil Burger, who made the elegant period sleight-of-hand of *The Illusionist*, swaps the candlelight for a glassy, over-caffeinated Manhattan, and the result is the rare high-concept thriller that is as interested in showing off as it is in scaring you.
## The setup
Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is a struggling novelist in the worst sense: long hair, unpaid rent, a contract he has not delivered a word against, and a girlfriend who has just run out of patience. An old acquaintance hands him a clear tablet called NZT, which, the pitch goes, lets you use all of your brain instead of the sliver you currently run on. One dose and Eddie is fluent, magnetic and several moves ahead of everyone in the room. He finishes the book, learns languages over a weekend, and turns a few thousand dollars into a fortune on the markets, which is exactly when the wrong sort of people start to notice. The supply is finite, the side effects are not advertised, and the higher Eddie climbs, the further there is to fall.
## The cast
This is the film that argues Bradley Cooper can carry a picture on his own, and he wins the argument. He has to play two men, the rumpled failure and the sharpened operator, and the pleasure is in watching the second one switch on behind the eyes. He keeps Eddie likeable even when he is plainly cheating at life, which the film needs, because there is not much else to root for. Robert De Niro arrives late as Carl Van Loon, a finance titan who has spent decades earning his edge and does not much like a man who bought his overnight; it is a contained, watchful performance, and the scenes where the two circle each other are the closest the film comes to real weight. Abbie Cornish brings scepticism and a flicker of conscience as Lindy, and Anna Friel makes a brief, bruised impression as the woman NZT got to first. They exist mostly to show us the cost, but they do it well.
## The craft
Burger and cinematographer Jo Willems work hard to put the drug on screen rather than just describe it. When Eddie is clear, the city turns saturated and golden and the camera barrels through it in dizzying infinite-zoom shots that race down whole streets without a cut; when he is crashing, the colour drains and the edits stutter. It could be a gimmick and now and then it is, but it gives the film a genuine point of view and a restless forward momentum. Paul Leonard-Morgan's pulsing electronic score keeps the adrenaline up. At 105 minutes the thing never sags, and Burger has the good sense to play several of the nastier beats for dark wit rather than grimness. The look is glossy, knowing and rewatchable, which counts for a lot in a film built on a single clever idea.
## How it stacks up
The obvious cousins are the money-and-hubris pictures, *Wall Street* above all, with Eddie as a Bud Fox who skipped the apprenticeship and swallowed his ambition instead. The smarter comparison is *Charly*, the old Cliff Robertson film about a man briefly made brilliant who can feel the gift slipping away, because *Limitless* shares that anxiety underneath the swagger. It is more fun and less searching than either. Burger is plainly less interested in the philosophy of enhancement than in the wish-fulfilment of it, and the film is at its weakest when it gestures at consequences it does not really want to dwell on. As a glossy techno-thriller with a killer hook it more than holds its own; as a serious inquiry into what we would become with the brakes off, it changes the subject.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are mixed-positive, parked around 69%, and the recurring complaint is fair: a premise this rich deserves a braver, stranger film, and *Limitless* keeps choosing the slick option over the searching one. Audiences are warmer at 74%, and I am with them. The line that it wastes its idea is true and also slightly beside the point, because the idea is so enjoyable to watch in motion. You can dock it for the depth it leaves on the table while still grinning through most of it.
## Verdict
What I want from a film like this is a strong central conceit, a lead who can sell it, momentum and a glossy texture that survives a second viewing, and *Limitless* delivers on all four. It does not have the nerve to follow its premise all the way to the dark place it keeps glancing at, and that ceiling is the only thing keeping it off the top shelf. But it is sharp, quick, funny and genuinely entertaining, with a star performance that finally puts Cooper front and centre, and it is the kind of thriller you will happily put on again. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: NZT outlived the film. *Limitless* was spun into a one-season CBS television series in 2015, with Jake McDorman as a new user of the drug and Bradley Cooper reprising Eddie Morra as a recurring senator, a thread the film leaves dangling in its final scene. The wish-fulfilment-pill subgenre also kept going, most directly with Luc Besson's *Lucy* (2014), which took a similar "unlock the whole brain" hook in a more cosmic, less grounded direction. The film has settled into its reputation as a slick, very rewatchable thriller that is fonder of its premise than it is curious about it. It now streams across the usual subscription and rental platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of strong violence including sight of the hero stabbing a man in the eye with a syringe. A character is also forced to drink the blood of a man he has killed. There are also strong, realistic images of injury detail when a man is seen lying dead on the ground after having been shot in the head and chest.
*The BBFC release page lists its detail under a single Violence heading; no separate Drugs, Language or Sex breakdown was published for this title at the cinema classification.*
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/limitless-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0zode4nji)).*
================================================================================
## The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-adjustment-bureau
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-adjustment-bureau.md
- published: 2011-03-17
- document_id: 1172
> A Philip K. Dick premise reworked as a chase romance, carried by Matt Damon and Emily Blunt and a city full of men in hats. Lighter than its source and all the more rewatchable for it. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** March 2011
- **Director:** George Nolfi · **Writer:** George Nolfi
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; Media Rights Capital
- **Source:** Philip K. Dick's short story *Adjustment Team*
- **Genre:** Science fiction romantic thriller · **Runtime:** 106 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Matt Damon (*The Bourne Ultimatum*, *The Departed*) as David Norris; Emily Blunt (*The Devil Wears Prada*, *The Young Victoria*) as Elise Sellas; Anthony Mackie (*The Hurt Locker*) as Harry Mitchell; John Slattery (*Iron Man 2*) as Richardson; Terence Stamp (*Superman II*, *The Limey*) as Thompson
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 71% critics / 67% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Hollywood has a long habit of mining Philip K. Dick and coming up with something harder, colder and more paranoid than what it went in to find. *Blade Runner*, *Total Recall*, *Minority Report*: the screen Dick is usually a man being hunted through a hostile system that knows more than he does. *The Adjustment Bureau* takes the same raw idea, a short story about unseen agents quietly correcting the world, and does something nobody quite expected with it. It turns it into a love story. First-time director George Nolfi, who wrote *The Bourne Ultimatum*, has made the most romantic film yet built on a Dick premise, and the surprise is how well the two halves sit together.
## The setup
David Norris (Matt Damon) is a young New York congressman with a real shot at the Senate until an old indiscretion sinks his campaign. Hiding in a hotel bathroom to draft his concession speech, he meets Elise (Emily Blunt), a dancer with no patience for political polish, and walks out a different man. The trouble is that the meeting was never supposed to happen. A discreet, hat-wearing organisation exists to keep human lives running to a plan, and David and Elise are not in it together. When David sees the men of the Bureau at work, freezing a room full of people while they adjust a colleague's mind, he learns the rules: stay quiet, stay on the path, and forget her. He is not built to do any of those things, and the film becomes a long, stubborn argument between one man's wishes and a design he is not allowed to read.
## The cast
Damon is doing something subtler here than the Bourne films let him. David has to be a plausible politician, the kind of man who can work a room and mean it, and also an ordinary romantic who will throw a career away for a woman he has met twice. Damon holds both without strain. Blunt is the reason the romance lands at all: quick, warm and faintly mocking, she gives Elise an independence that stops the chase feeling like a man pursuing a prize. Their scenes together have a real spark, and the film is wise enough to keep coming back to them. Around them, the Bureau is staffed by terrific character actors. Anthony Mackie's Harry is the conscience of the operation, an agent who has seen too much to enjoy his work; John Slattery brings a clipped middle-management exasperation; and Terence Stamp arrives late as a senior fixer with the unhurried menace of a man who has settled far harder cases than this one.
## The craft
Nolfi shoots New York as a city you could believe runs on hidden machinery. John Toll's cinematography keeps things handsome but grounded, and the Bureau's one piece of fantastical hardware, a set of doors that open onto the other side of the city if you walk through them wearing the right hat, is handled with a lovely lightness of touch. There are no great effects set-pieces; the chases are made of geography and timing, men appearing at the end of corridors, a sprint across a rain-soaked plaza. Thomas Newman's score does a lot of the atmospheric lifting, restless and a little melancholy, and the whole film has the brisk, intelligent pace you would hope for from the man who wrote the best of the Bourne pictures. It runs a tidy hundred and six minutes and never sags.
## How it stacks up
The obvious shelf-mate is *Minority Report*, another Dick adaptation about a man fleeing a system that claims to know the future, though Spielberg's film is colder and more spectacular where this one is intimate. *Dark City* and *The Truman Show* are closer in spirit: stories about an ordinary man discovering the world has been arranged around him and refusing the arrangement. And in its bones this is a chase romance in the tradition of *North by Northwest*, two people running through a conspiracy and falling for each other on the way. What it does not share with the bleaker Dick films is their pessimism. The Bureau is not quite the malevolent machine you brace for, and the film is more interested in what free will costs than in punishing anyone for wanting it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reviews are mixed-positive, the critics sitting around 71% and the audience a little cooler. The praise is mostly for Damon and Blunt and for the cleverness of the premise; the reservations are about the rules. The Bureau's powers stretch and contract as the plot needs them to, and the ending softens in a way that a sterner science fiction film would not allow. Those are fair points. I just do not weigh them as heavily as some viewers will, because the film is not really selling its metaphysics as airtight. It is selling the pull between two people against everything arranged to keep them apart, and on that it delivers.
## Verdict
This is one I expect to come back to. It is intelligent science fiction worn lightly, with two leads who genuinely belong together, a premise that rewards thinking about, and the kind of brisk, well-made craft that makes a rewatch a pleasure rather than a chore. The rules wobble and the resolution is gentler than the setup threatens, but I would rather a film of ideas that ends warm than a clever one that ends cold for the sake of it. Charming, romantic, quietly smart, and far more rewatchable than its reputation suggests. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film has settled into its place as one of the warmer, more accessible Philip K. Dick adaptations, the one people reach for when they want the idea without the despair. George Nolfi went on to direct further features, and both leads only grew in stature, Emily Blunt in particular moving into franchise and awards roles. It is now widely available on disc and through the usual digital rental and streaming services, where it has aged into a reliable date-night recommendation.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *infrequent strong language, a discreet sex scene*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Language:** The film contains two uses of strong language.
**Sex:** A discreet sex scene sees a couple intertwined on a bed but without any sexualised nudity or sexual detail.
**Additional issues:** The film also contains some milder language, including uses of 'bastard', 'shit' and 'son of a bitch'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-adjustment-bureau-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znjkwmzi)).*
================================================================================
## 127 Hours (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-127-hours
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-127-hours.md
- published: 2011-01-16
- document_id: 1025
> Danny Boyle takes a man, a boulder and ninety minutes, and somehow makes the most static premise in survival cinema feel like a chase. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** January 2011
- **Director:** Danny Boyle · **Writers:** Danny Boyle, Simon Beaufoy
- **Studio / distributor:** Pathé; Film4; Fox Searchlight Pictures
- **Genre:** Survival drama / biographical adventure · **Runtime:** 94 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** James Franco (*Spider-Man*, *Milk*) as Aron Ralston; Kate Mara (*Brokeback Mountain*) as Kristi; Amber Tamblyn (*The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants*) as Megan; Clémence Poésy (*In Bruges*, *Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire*) as Rana
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 85% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Danny Boyle arrives at *127 Hours* fresh from the clean sweep of *Slumdog Millionaire*, and he has chosen for his follow-up the single least promising idea a director could pick: a man stuck under a rock for five days. There is no second location to cut to, no cast to spread the weight across, barely room for the camera to move. A lesser film-maker would have shot it as a sombre chamber piece and dared you to stay awake. Boyle, being the most kinetic director working, does the opposite. He has made a survival story that moves like a thriller, and the surprise is how completely it works.
## The setup
Aron Ralston (James Franco) is a confident, slightly cocky outdoorsman who heads into the Utah canyonlands one weekend without telling anyone where he is going. He has done it a hundred times. Then a boulder shifts as he climbs down a slot canyon and traps his right arm against the wall, and the hundred-and-first time becomes the one that counts. Alone, rationing a few mouthfuls of water, with no signal and no one expecting him, he begins to work the problem in every direction it can be worked, and to reckon with how he came to be a man whom nobody would think to look for.
The film keeps its nerve about what is coming. Anyone who followed the real story knows roughly how Ralston gets out, and Boyle neither hides from it nor wallows in the wait. The pressure builds from the situation, not from a withheld secret.
## The cast
This is very nearly a one-man film, and it lives or dies on James Franco. He is terrific. The early scenes establish a charming show-off, the sort who films himself and grins at his own daring, and Franco lets you enjoy the swagger before the canyon takes it apart. What follows is a long, unsparing study of a man cycling through ingenuity, bravado, despair, hallucination and finally a kind of clarity, played almost entirely from the chest up in a space the width of a coffin. He carries it without ever tipping into self-pity. Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn, as two hikers Aron charms early on, and Clémence Poésy, glimpsed in memory, give him people to play against and a sense of the life waiting outside the rock. They are brief by design, but they stop the film from becoming a monologue.
## The craft
Boyle refuses to let the frame sit still. He and his cinematographers, Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, shoot the trap from every conceivable angle, drop the camera inside a water bottle, race it out of the canyon and across the desert, and splinter Aron's mind into split-screens and flash-cuts as dehydration sets in. It could be exhausting; instead the restlessness mirrors a man who cannot afford to stop thinking. A. R. Rahman's score, threaded with the right songs at the right moments, keeps the blood moving. And then there is the scene everyone will warn you about. Boyle does not flinch from it, but he earns it: by the time it comes you understand it as release rather than horror, the only door left open. It is hard to watch and impossible to look away from.
## How it stacks up
The obvious companion is *Touching the Void*, the other great account of a climber doing the unthinkable to survive, though that film leaned on reconstruction and interview where this one stays inside the ordeal. *Cast Away* is the closer structural cousin, another star carrying a survival story largely alone, but Robert Zemeckis had an island and years to play with where Boyle has a crevice and five days. *Into the Wild* shares the theme of the self-reliant young man who goes into the wilderness without telling anyone, and reaches a bleaker conclusion. *127 Hours* belongs in that company and brings something the others lack: pure forward momentum, a survival film with the editing rhythm of a heist.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it almost without reservation, sitting up at 93%, praising Franco and marvelling that Boyle wrings a thriller out of a man who cannot move. Audiences are warm but a touch cooler at 85%, and the gap is easy to read: a meaningful number of viewers find the central sequence more than they bargained for, and a few faint or walk out. That is a fair reaction to have. This is not a comfortable night out. But the squeamish edge is the honest cost of a film that commits fully to its subject, and I would rather it commit than blink.
## Verdict
Boyle has done the hardest thing in the genre, which is to take a premise with no moving parts and make ninety-four minutes feel urgent the whole way through. Franco is superb, the craft is dazzling without ever showing off for its own sake, and the film leaves you genuinely moved by an ending you already knew. The one mark against it, for me, is rewatchability: this is a film I am glad to have seen and in no hurry to sit through again, because the dread of that one scene does not fade with familiarity. Set against the best survival cinema it stands tall, a more propulsive watch than most and a more humane one than its reputation for grimness suggests. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on limited release through Fox Searchlight, with a wider rollout and a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *127 Hours* went on to six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor for James Franco and Best Adapted Screenplay, though it took home none of them on the night. It has settled into its standing as one of the strongest survival films of its era and the proof that Boyle's win for *Slumdog Millionaire* was no flash in the pan. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on the usual subscription platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *one scene of strong gory injury and strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Injury detail:** In one scene a character is forced to cut their own arm off with a small knife, with resultant strong gory injury detail.
**Language:** There is occasional use of strong language ('f**k').
**Additional issues:** Scenes of threat develop through the desperate situation the protagonist finds himself in.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/127-hours-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mju5nta)).*
================================================================================
## Tron - Legacy (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-tron-legacy
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-tron-legacy.md
- published: 2011-01-03
- document_id: 1229
> Disney revives a 1982 cult oddity as a sleek, Daft Punk-scored ride through the Grid. The story is thin and the critics are unconvinced, but on atmosphere, sound and sheer rewatchability it is the science fiction I will keep going back to. 9/10.
- **UK release:** December 2010
- **Director:** Joseph Kosinski · **Writers:** Edward Kitsis, Adam Horowitz
- **Studio / distributor:** Walt Disney Pictures
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / cyber-fantasy · **Runtime:** 125 minutes (BBFC 12)
- **Main cast:** Garrett Hedlund (*Friday Night Lights*) as Sam Flynn; Jeff Bridges (*The Big Lebowski*, *Tron*) as Kevin Flynn / Clu; Olivia Wilde as Quorra; Michael Sheen (*Frost/Nixon*) as Castor / Zuse; Bruce Boxleitner (*Tron*) as Alan Bradley / Tron
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 51% critics / 63% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
In 1982, Disney released a film about a man pulled inside a computer that almost nobody went to see, and which a small, stubborn audience then spent the next three decades quietly canonising. *Tron* was a commercial misfire and a design landmark, the first major film to put a human being inside a glowing electronic world, and it has lived on as a cult object far larger than its box office. Reviving it now, twenty-eight years later, is a strange bet: the brand means a great deal to a few people and almost nothing to everyone else. What Disney has done is hand the keys to a first-time director, pour the budget into the look and the sound, and hope the Grid still casts a spell. For me, reader, it absolutely does.
## The setup
Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is the grown son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), the games visionary who vanished without trace when Sam was a boy. A late-night tip sends Sam to his father's shuttered arcade, and from there into the Grid, the digital world Kevin built and then disappeared into. Inside, Sam finds the place running under a perfected, ageless version of his father's own programme, Clu, who governs with the cold logic of something built to make a system flawless and never told when to stop. With the help of Quorra (Olivia Wilde), Sam has to find the real Kevin and keep Clu's ambitions from reaching beyond the screen. It is a rescue, a chase and a father-and-son reunion, staged inside a world made of light.
## The cast
Jeff Bridges is doing two jobs and clearly enjoying both. His Kevin Flynn is older and stranger than the cocky programmer of 1982, a man who has spent too long alone in a world of his own making and talks like a guru who has half-forgotten the outside. His Clu is the same face rebuilt by computer to look young again, an effect that is uncanny in both senses, not quite convincing as skin yet exactly right as an idea: a copy that resents its original. Hedlund has the harder, plainer task as the audience's way in, and he is solid rather than magnetic. Olivia Wilde's Quorra supplies the film's curiosity and warmth, wide-eyed about a real world she has never seen. Michael Sheen turns up as Castor, a preening Grid impresario, and walks off with every second of his screen time, all cane and lipstick and menace. Bruce Boxleitner, back from the original, keeps the bloodline honest.
## The craft
This is where the film earns its keep. Joseph Kosinski comes from architecture and commercials, and it shows in the cleanest possible way: the Grid is a real designed space, all black glass and hard light, severe and beautiful. The light-cycle sequences, the disc battles, the descent into the city all carry a weight and a sheen that the 1982 film could only gesture at. Claudio Miranda shoots it like a luxury object. And then there is the score. Handing a science fiction landscape to Daft Punk is the single best decision anyone made here; their music does not sit on top of the images, it drives them, pulsing and orchestral by turns, and it is the thing I find myself reaching for long after the plot has faded. Two hours in this world go quickly, because every frame has been built to be looked at.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is the original *Tron*, and *Legacy* honours it without being trapped by it: same mythology, vastly more horsepower. Beyond the franchise, it sits in the lineage of films that treat the inside of a machine as a place you can stand in, from *The Matrix* and its rules-as-architecture to the rain-soaked future-noir of *Blade Runner*, whose mood of beautiful melancholy this shares more than its plot. It is closer to those films in feel than in substance: it wants the atmosphere of intelligent science fiction more than it wants the ideas. As a piece of design-led, music-led cinema it stands with the best of them; as a story it is content to be a straight line.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critics are not sold. Reviews are landing around the halfway mark, and the recurring complaint is fair on its own terms: the script is thin, the emotional beats are signposted, and the human story never matches the world it moves through. Audiences are warmer, and I am warmer still. The disagreement comes down to what you came for. If you want a tight screenplay, the critics have a point. If you came to be immersed in a world, scored within an inch of its life and rendered with real care, the shortfall in the writing matters far less than the reviews suggest. I knew within twenty minutes that this was a film I would be putting on again.
## Verdict
I am well aware my number sits a long way above the consensus, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The story is the weakest thing here, the characters rarely deepen, and a colder viewer will find the whole exercise more surface than substance. None of that has stopped me watching it again and again. I value atmosphere, world-building, a great soundtrack and the simple pleasure of being somewhere, and on every one of those this delivers completely. The Daft Punk score alone would carry a lesser film; wrapped around visuals this clean, it makes for the most rewatchable science fiction of the year. It is gorgeous, it is hypnotic, and it is exactly my kind of thing. **9/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in 3D and on the largest IMAX screen you can reach; this is a film built for the biggest, loudest room available.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the Daft Punk score has comfortably outlasted the film's mixed reception, settling in as one of the most admired film soundtracks of its era and arguably the most enduring part of the whole project. A long-promised third *Tron* film spent years in development limbo before resurfacing, a sign of how much affection the world still commands even when the box office did not justify it. *Legacy* itself now streams on Disney+ and is widely available on Blu-ray and 4K, where the black-glass Grid and that score still reward the best screen and speakers you can give them.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12** by the BBFC for *moderate fantasy violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of moderate fantasy violence, including fistfights and use of futuristic weapons against electronic beings who shatter into pixels when attacked. A woman's arm is cut off, but the injury is bloodless and her limb regenerates.
**Additional issues:** Very mild bad language includes use of the terms 'son of a gun' and 'screwed up'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/tron-legacy-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjqwodc)).*
================================================================================
## Monsters (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-monsters
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-monsters.md
- published: 2010-12-10
- document_id: 1125
> Gareth Edwards builds a credible alien-infected world on a holiday budget and points the camera at the people, not the creatures. A quiet, atmospheric debut that earns its scale. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** December 2010
- **Director:** Gareth Edwards · **Writer:** Gareth Edwards
- **Studio / distributor:** Vertigo Films; Protagonist Pictures
- **Genre:** Science-fiction road movie / romantic drama · **Runtime:** 94 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Scoot McNairy as Andrew Kaulder; Whitney Able as Samantha Wynden
- **IMDb:** 6.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 73% critics / 53% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Call a film *Monsters*, sell it on a poster of a wrecked aircraft and a warning sign, and you set an expectation that this is going to be ninety minutes of creatures stamping through cities. It is not, and the gap between the title and the film is the first clever thing about it. Gareth Edwards, directing his first feature, has made the rare creature picture that is more interested in the quiet after the attack than the attack itself, and he has done it for the price of a decent advertising campaign rather than a studio tentpole. The headline figure that follows the film around is the budget, reportedly somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands, and the headline achievement is that you would never guess it from the screen.
## The setup
Six years ago a probe returned from a moon of Jupiter carrying alien samples, broke up over Central America, and seeded an Infected Zone along the border between Mexico and the United States. Inside that zone the lifeforms have grown, spread and become something the military fences off and bombs rather than understands. Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), a photojournalist chasing the lucrative misery shots the magazines want, is handed an unwelcome job by his employer: get the boss's daughter, Samantha (Whitney Able), out of Mexico and safely back across the border to America. A stolen passport and a missed ferry turn the simple route into the hard one, on foot and by boat straight through the quarantined territory. From there the film is a two-hander, a long walk through a beautiful and dangerous country, with the creatures mostly a rumour on the horizon.
## The cast
With a cast of essentially two, the whole film leans on whether you want to spend a long journey in their company, and for the most part you do. McNairy plays Kaulder as a tired opportunist who is not as cynical as he would like to be, a man whose first instinct on seeing a body is to reach for his camera and whose second is to wish he had not. Able gives Samantha a wariness that slowly thaws, a woman travelling towards a marriage she does not sound especially keen on. The two were a couple off screen at the time, and the unforced ease between them does real work here; the romance never announces itself, it just accumulates over shared fear and dead time. Neither is asked to be a hero, which suits the film. They are tourists in a war they did not start.
## The craft
This is where the debut earns its reputation. Edwards shot, directed and ran the visual effects himself, building the creatures and the wreckage on a home computer and dropping them into footage caught on the move in real locations. The result has a documentary texture that bigger productions spend fortunes failing to fake. Toppled tanks rust in the jungle, customs gates loom out of the heat haze, ruined towns wear the aliens like weather. Jon Hopkins supplies a low, electronic score that hums under the landscape and does as much for the mood as any visible monster. The restraint is deliberate and mostly pays off. Edwards keeps the creatures off screen for long stretches, trusting an overheard radio report or a wall of warning graffiti to carry the dread, and when he finally lets you see them in full they are strange and oddly graceful rather than the snarling beasts the marketing implies.
## How it stacks up
The obvious neighbour is *District 9*, which a year earlier married handheld, low-budget science fiction to a pointed allegory about borders and who gets to cross them, and *Monsters* is plainly drawn from the same well, swapping Johannesburg for the militarised line of a continent. *Cloverfield* is the other reference the title invites and then refuses; where that film was all panic and shaky spectacle, this one is patient and almost mournful. The deeper ancestor is Tarkovsky's *Stalker*, with its slow trek into a forbidden Zone where the real subject is the people doing the walking. Set it beside any of those and *Monsters* holds its corner, less polished than *District 9* but more atmospheric foot for foot.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are largely won over, sitting around 73%, praising the mood, the resourcefulness and the refusal to deliver the expected monster mash. Audiences are cooler, closer to 53%, and the split is easy to read: a good number of viewers bought a ticket for the film on the poster and got a slow border romance instead. Both reactions are fair. If you came for set pieces you will spend a lot of the runtime waiting, and the central pair occasionally wander into dialogue that strains for meaning it has not quite earned. I land with the critics, because the things this film does well are the things I value most in science fiction: a world you believe in, a tone that lingers, and the confidence to leave the spectacle implied.
## Verdict
*Monsters* is a calling card, and a remarkably assured one. It is not the creature feature it was sold as, and a stretch in the middle drifts where a sharper script would have pushed. But the world-building is exceptional for the money, the atmosphere stays with you, and the final stretch lands an image you will not shake off. I would happily watch it again for the mood alone, which from me counts for a lot. It marks Edwards as a director worth following, someone who understands that the most frightening monster is usually the one you cannot quite see. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** On limited release in UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow in the new year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the calling card worked exactly as a calling card should. On the strength of *Monsters*, Gareth Edwards was handed the keys to *Godzilla* (2014) and later *Rogue One: A Star Wars Story* (2016), making him one of the decade's clearest examples of a micro-budget debut turning into a blockbuster career. A standalone sequel, *Monsters: Dark Continent* (2014), arrived without Edwards and made little impression. The original has settled into its reputation as a landmark in low-budget science fiction and a key text in the do-it-yourself effects movement. It is now widely available on disc and streams across the usual digital rental platforms.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *infrequent strong language, moderate horror*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** Scenes of moderate horror occur when characters come under threat from alien life forms. The attacks contain limited sight of blood or injury detail, although there is brief sight of a mutilated body in the aftermath of an attack.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of strong language ('f**k'), along with mild bad language such as 'shit'.
**Additional issues:** There are infrequent mild sex references such as a man asking a woman if she wants to 'make out'.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/monsters-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mji4odi)). The later home-video release was classified 15; the cinema certificate was 12A.*
================================================================================
## Unstoppable (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-unstoppable
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-unstoppable.md
- published: 2010-12-08
- document_id: 1231
> Tony Scott points half a million tons of unmanned freight at a small town and lets Denzel Washington chase it down. Lean, loud, and built for the rewatch. 8/10.
- **UK release:** November 2010
- **Director:** Tony Scott · **Writer:** Mark Bomback
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Scott Free Productions
- **Genre:** Action thriller / disaster thriller · **Runtime:** 98 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Denzel Washington (*Training Day*, *Man on Fire*) as Frank Barnes; Chris Pine (*Star Trek*) as Will Colson; Rosario Dawson (*Sin City*) as Connie Hooper; Ethan Suplee (*Remember the Titans*) as Dewey; Kevin Dunn (*Transformers*) as Galvin
- **IMDb:** 6.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 87% critics / 72% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Tony Scott has spent the last decade making films that move, and several of them, *Crimson Tide*, *Enemy of the State*, *Man on Fire*, *The Taking of Pelham 123*, have put Denzel Washington somewhere in the engine room. *Unstoppable* is their fifth collaboration and the most stripped-down of the lot: a single mechanical problem, a clock, and a stretch of Pennsylvania track. There is no conspiracy to unravel and no villain with a plan. The antagonist is a train, and Scott treats it with the seriousness most directors reserve for an army.
## The setup
A half-mile of unmanned freight, eight cars of it carrying molten phenol and other things you would rather not have leaking near a populated bend, gets loose in a rail yard through a lazy shortcut and a missed brake. Nobody is driving it, it is gathering speed, and the company's first instinct is to protect itself rather than the towns in its path. Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington), an engineer with twenty-eight years and a forced early retirement on the horizon, and Will Colson (Chris Pine), a green conductor on his fourth day with a marriage in trouble, happen to be on the same line in the wrong direction. What starts as getting out of the way turns into the only plan left: chase the runaway down from behind and try to stop it before a curve rated for fifteen miles an hour tips it into a fuel depot.
## The cast
Washington does the thing he does better than almost anyone, which is to make competence dramatic. Frank is not a hero in any showy sense; he is a man who knows trains, has been quietly discarded by the people he knows them for, and decides to do the job properly anyway. The grievance sits under the surface and never tips into speechifying. Pine, fresh off launching a younger Kirk, plays the resentment and the nerves of a man who suspects he has been hired to replace older men like Frank, and the two of them build a real working rapport in a cab that barely holds them. Rosario Dawson anchors the control room as the yardmaster who keeps telling head office the truth they do not want, and Kevin Dunn supplies the corporate cowardice the plot needs, weighing the share price against the body count. Nobody is asked to do more than the situation requires, and the film is better for the restraint.
## The craft
This is Scott in lean mode, and it suits him. The hand-held cameras, the long lenses snatching the train through heat haze, the helicopter shots, the news-ticker cutaways, all of it is bent towards one feeling, which is that this object is too big and too heavy to stop and is getting closer to something soft. Ben Seresin shoots steel and rust and Pennsylvania grey beautifully, and Harry Gregson-Williams scores it without overplaying his hand. What impresses most is the clarity. A film about coupling speeds, siding switches and brake lines could lose an audience inside five minutes; instead the geography is always legible, the stakes always plain, and the tension comes from physics you understand rather than threats you are told to feel. At ninety-eight minutes it does not carry an ounce of fat.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Speed*, another single-vehicle pressure cooker, and *Unstoppable* shares its discipline while swapping the bus's improbable gadgetry for something that feels closer to real engineering. *Runaway Train* is the other ancestor, a bleaker, more existential take on the same nightmare. Set against Scott's own recent *Pelham 123*, this is the tighter film: less talk, fewer subplots, more momentum. It is the rare modern action picture that trusts a concrete, physical problem to do the work, in the tradition of the better seventies disaster films, where competent people solve an escalating mechanical crisis under a falling clock.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have largely warmed to it, sitting around 87%, with the usual line being that it is formula executed with real skill. Audiences are a little cooler at 72%, which reads to me as people who wanted more than a chase and missed the point that the chase, done this cleanly, is plenty. The recurring criticism, that it is simple and heightened, is true and beside the matter. Simplicity is the achievement here. A more complicated *Unstoppable* would be a worse one.
## Verdict
This is craftsmanship of a kind that gets undervalued because it looks easy. Scott takes one idea, refuses to dilute it, and wrings ninety-eight propulsive minutes out of momentum and competence. Washington and Pine are exactly right, the geography never blurs, and the whole thing is built to be watched again on a wet afternoon without losing a thing. It is not reaching for greatness and does not pretend to. As a piece of efficient, rewatchable action engineering it is close to ideal. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas from late November 2010.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Unstoppable* turned out to be the final film Tony Scott completed before his death in 2012, which casts his last run of lean, kinetic thrillers in a more elegiac light and makes this confident, unfussy picture a fitting end point. It has settled into a reputation as one of his most purely enjoyable films and a high mark for the disaster-on-rails subgenre. It is now widely available on Blu-ray and digital, and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat, infrequent strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** Fear of the train hitting people or derailing and causing mass loss of life is present throughout, with moments of increased tension when characters have to attempt dangerous activities in the hope of stopping the machine.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of strong language ('f**k').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/unstoppable-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjmxnte)).*
================================================================================
## The Social Network (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-social-network
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-social-network.md
- published: 2010-10-21
- document_id: 1215
> David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin turn the founding of Facebook into a courtroom-and-dorm-room drama that critics adore. The craft is immaculate and I came away admiring it more than enjoying it. 6/10.
- **UK release:** October 2010
- **Director:** David Fincher · **Writer:** Aaron Sorkin
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Relativity Media; Trigger Street Productions
- **Genre:** Biographical drama / technology and business drama · **Runtime:** 120 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Jesse Eisenberg (*Zombieland*, *The Squid and the Whale*) as Mark Zuckerberg; Andrew Garfield (*Never Let Me Go*) as Eduardo Saverin; Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker; Armie Hammer as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss; Rooney Mara as Erica Albright
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 96% critics / 86% audience · **My rating:** 6 / 10
A film about a website made by a man who, by his own admission, had to learn cinema for the camera to forgive him. David Fincher comes to *The Social Network* off *Zodiac*, a procedural so patient it tested the audience as much as its detectives, and the surprise is how fast this one moves by comparison. Aaron Sorkin wrote it from Ben Mezrich's book about the founding of Facebook, which means a screenplay built almost entirely out of people talking very quickly in rooms. The pitch sounds inert: a lawsuit about a social network is not obvious cinema. What Fincher and Sorkin have made of it is far slicker than the premise has any right to be, and I admire it more than I warm to it.
## The setup
Harvard, 2003. Mark Zuckerberg, a sophomore with a talent for code and a gift for alienating everyone in range, gets dumped, retaliates online in a way that humiliates the women of the university, and in the fallout starts building the thing that becomes Facebook. He does it with money and faith from his closest friend Eduardo Saverin, with a design idea he may or may not have taken from the well-connected Winklevoss twins, and later with the seductive guidance of Napster's Sean Parker. The film tells this through the depositions of two lawsuits that come afterwards, cutting between the building and the unbuilding of every relationship in it. The structure is the cleverest thing about it, letting you watch a friendship and a betrayal land in the same scene.
## The cast
Jesse Eisenberg is the engine. His Zuckerberg is all clipped delivery and unblinking certainty, a young man so quick that he treats conversation as a contest he has already won, and Eisenberg keeps him just sympathetic enough that you cannot fully write him off. After the jittery comic energy of *Zombieland* it is a controlled, chilly turn. Andrew Garfield, fresh from the quiet devastation of *Never Let Me Go*, gives Eduardo the wounded decency the film needs at its centre, the one person whose hurt you feel rather than observe. Justin Timberlake is a genuine surprise as Sean Parker, all charm and paranoia, selling the Silicon Valley swagger that turns Zuckerberg's head. Armie Hammer, playing both Winklevoss twins through some seamless trickery, makes privilege funny without making it cartoonish. Rooney Mara has only a couple of scenes as Erica Albright, but the opening exchange sets the whole emotional temperature.
## The craft
Fincher's control is total, which is both the appeal and, for me, part of the problem. Jeff Cronenweth shoots Harvard in burnished autumn browns and the offices in cold blues, and the famous rowing sequence at Henley is staged with an operatic precision that has nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with showing off, in the best way. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross provide a score of low electronic dread that does more emotional work than the dialogue admits, turning a coding montage into something that hums with menace. The editing is razored, scenes overlapping across timelines without ever losing you. It is, on a technical level, close to flawless. The trouble is that all this craft is in service of watching unpleasant clever people be unpleasant and clever at each other, and a beautifully made film about that is still a film about that.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Fincher's own *Zodiac*, another true-story procedural about obsession, and the gap is instructive: *Zodiac* earns its coldness because the thing it is chasing genuinely matters, while here the stakes are equity percentages and hurt feelings dressed as litigation. Sorkin's machine-gun dialogue is the same instrument he sharpened on *A Few Good Men*, and the deposition scenes have that courtroom snap. As a business origin story it is sleeker than most, though it shares the modern tech-drama habit of asking you to find the boardroom thrilling on the strength of editing alone.
## Critics versus the rest of us
I am well aware that I am on the wrong side of the room here. The critics are at 96%, near unanimous, calling it the defining film of the digital age and the year's best. Audiences are a notch cooler at 86%, which is still a landslide. The praise for the script, the editing and the score is entirely fair, and I would not argue a word of it on craft. My own reaction is plainer: I found it impressive and a little airless, a film I respected scene by scene without ever wanting to be back inside it. When a story is this in love with the cleverness of its own unlikeable lead, admiration is not the same as engagement.
## Verdict
This is a film I would recommend without hesitation and rewatch with reluctance. The writing is genuinely first rate, Eisenberg is excellent, Fincher does not waste a frame, and as a piece of construction it is one of the slicker dramas of the year. None of that translates, for me, into the thing I value most, the pull to return to it. I admire the building and feel nothing much about the people in it, and that ceiling is personal rather than a fault in the work. Brilliant, chilly, and not for me at full marks. **6/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, with DVD and Blu-ray to follow in the new year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to win three Oscars, for Sorkin's adapted screenplay, the Reznor and Ross score, and the editing, and it has settled into its reputation as one of the defining dramas of its decade. Fincher and Reznor and Ross reunited soon after for *The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo*. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *infrequent strong language and drug use*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of strong language ('f\*\*k') and milder terms including 'bitch', 'shit' and 'asshole'.
**Drugs:** During party scenes there is some undetailed cannabis use and a brief sequence implying that characters are snorting cocaine. The police then arrive and the users are arrested, and the work as a whole does not promote or endorse drugs misuse.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-social-network-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjm5ntu)).*
================================================================================
## The Town (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-town
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-town.md
- published: 2010-10-12
- document_id: 1219
> Ben Affleck follows his directing debut with a Boston heist thriller that knows its genre cold and plays it with real control. The plot beats are familiar, the execution is not, and the result is one of the most assured crime films in years. 8.5/10.
- **UK release:** September 2010
- **Director:** Ben Affleck · **Writers:** Peter Craig, Ben Affleck, Aaron Stockard
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Legendary Pictures; GK Films
- **Genre:** Crime thriller / heist drama · **Runtime:** 125 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Ben Affleck (*Good Will Hunting*) as Doug MacRay; Rebecca Hall (*The Prestige*) as Claire Keesey; Jon Hamm (*Mad Men*) as Special Agent Adam Frawley; Jeremy Renner (*The Hurt Locker*) as James "Jem" Coughlin; Blake Lively (*Gossip Girl*) as Krista Coughlin
- **Source:** based on the novel *Prince of Thieves* by Chuck Hogan
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 93% critics / 85% audience · **My rating:** 8.5 / 10
Three years ago, *Gone Baby Gone* arrived and quietly made the case that Ben Affleck, by then better known for tabloid romance and a run of forgettable leading roles, could direct. That film was a careful, morally tangled kidnapping drama, and the surprise was how steady a hand it showed. *The Town* is the follow-up, and it answers the obvious question, whether the first one was luck, with a flat no. This time Affleck directs and takes the lead himself, and he does the harder thing: he makes a heist thriller that hits every beat you expect and still feels like it belongs to him.
## The setup
Doug MacRay runs a four-man crew of armed robbers out of Charlestown, a square mile of Boston that the film tells us, only half joking, has produced more bank and armoured-car thieves than anywhere else in the country. A job goes slightly wrong, the crew briefly takes a bank manager, Claire Keesey, as a hostage, and then lets her go unharmed. Worried she can identify them, Doug starts following her, and the two fall into a relationship she does not realise is built on a lie. That alone would be enough rope to hang a thriller on. Around it sits an FBI investigation tightening by the day, a volatile best friend who would rather shoot his way out than walk away, and a neighbourhood that does not let people leave. Doug wants out. Almost nobody in his life will allow it.
## The cast
Affleck casts himself well. Doug is a man of few words and fewer obvious tells, and Affleck plays him with a banked, watchful quality that suits both the character and his own slightly guarded screen presence. The performance that everyone will be talking about, though, is Jeremy Renner's. Fresh from *The Hurt Locker*, he plays Jem as a coiled spring of loyalty and menace, the friend who would die for Doug and might get him killed in the process. Every scene he is in carries a charge of not knowing what he will do next.
Rebecca Hall gives Claire a fragile, genuine warmth that keeps the central deception from feeling like a plot device; you understand both why Doug cannot tell her and why he cannot stay away. Jon Hamm, stepping off television, brings a sharp, slightly arrogant intelligence to the FBI man closing in, and the film is smart enough not to make him a cartoon. Blake Lively turns up as Jem's sister, a wrung-out single mother, and is barely recognisable in the part. The ensemble is the kind crime films live or die on, and this one is deep.
## The craft
Robert Elswit shoots Charlestown as a real, lived-in place rather than a postcard, all triple-deckers and grey harbour light, and the geography of the city matters: you always know roughly where the crew is and where the law is. Affleck stages the set pieces with patience. A heist in the Fenway district, with the crew dressed for the occasion, is built and paid off with a control that few directors three films into a career manage. The action is loud and fast but never incoherent, and Affleck resists the temptation to cut it into confetti.
What raises the film above competent genre work is its restraint. It is in no hurry, it trusts silences, and it lets character drive the robberies rather than the other way round. The Boston accents, the Catholic guilt, the loyalty codes that double as a trap, all of it is specific. The score sits back and lets the tension build. At a little over two hours the film earns its length.
## How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is *Heat*, and *The Town* invites it: the cop and the thief circling each other, the professional crew, the woman who pulls one of them toward a normal life. Affleck is not yet operating at Michael Mann's level of cold formal grandeur, and his film is warmer and more rooted in one place than Mann's sprawling Los Angeles. Set beside *Point Break*, another tale of an undercover-adjacent bond between hunter and hunted, *The Town* is the more grown-up film, less interested in adrenaline than in the question of whether a man can change. And it sits comfortably next to *The Departed* as part of a small wave of Boston crime pictures, sharing that film's sense of a city where everyone is from the same few streets. *The Town* lacks Scorsese's operatic scale but matches him for texture.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting around 93%, with the praise landing where you would expect: the performances, the action, Affleck's growing confidence behind the camera. Audiences are warm too, a little lower at 85%, and the most common reservation on both sides is that the story is familiar. That is fair. You can see the shape of the ending coming, and the romance asks you to grant it a fair amount of goodwill. But familiarity is not the same as staleness, and a heist film does not need to reinvent the form to be excellent. What this one does is execute a known structure with unusual care.
## Verdict
This is exactly the kind of film I return to. It is tense, beautifully made, full of strong performances, and grounded in a place that feels real, and it has the rewatch quality the best crime thrillers share, where you go back for the craft and the company rather than the surprise. The script does not break new ground, and the central relationship occasionally strains belief. None of that costs it much. Affleck has made a genre picture good enough to confirm that *Gone Baby Gone* was no accident, and Renner walks off with several scenes. One of the most assured crime films in years, and one I will happily watch again. **8.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas from September 2010.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Affleck went on to win the Best Picture Oscar for *Argo* (2012), making *The Town* look in hindsight like the hinge between the promise of *Gone Baby Gone* and a fully established directing career. Renner's stock rose sharply too, into the *Mission: Impossible* and Marvel franchises. The film's reputation has only firmed up; it is now routinely cited as one of the best heist thrillers of its decade and an obvious touchstone for later entries such as *Den of Thieves*. An extended cut with a longer, bleaker finale circulates on disc and is worth seeking out. It streams on the major platforms depending on region, and is widely available on Blu-ray and 4K.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Detailed content advice could not be retrieved from the BBFC release page at the time of writing. The age rating shown is the film's UK certificate (15), confirmed against the research dossier; the BBFC classifies *The Town* at 15 for strong language and violence. The full category-by-category Content Advice will be added once the BBFC release page can be confirmed.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk)).*
================================================================================
## Buried (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-buried
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-buried.md
- published: 2010-10-04
- document_id: 1051
> A man, a coffin, a phone and ninety-five minutes. Rodrigo Cortes builds a real thriller out of almost nothing, and Ryan Reynolds carries the whole thing on his face. 8/10.
- **UK release:** October 2010
- **Director:** Rodrigo Cortes · **Writer:** Chris Sparling
- **Studio / distributor:** Versus Entertainment; The Safran Company; Icon Film Distribution (UK)
- **Genre:** Survival thriller / single-location thriller · **Runtime:** 95 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Ryan Reynolds (*The Proposal*, *Smokin' Aces*) as Paul Conroy; Samantha Mathis (*Pump Up the Volume*, *American Psycho*) as the voice of Linda Conroy; Robert Paterson as the voice of Dan Brenner; Jose Luis Garcia Perez as the voice of Jabir
- **IMDb:** 7.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 87% critics / 65% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Every few years a film turns up that sounds, on paper, like a dare. One actor, one set, one idea, and a running time that has to be filled honestly because there is nowhere to cut away to. *Buried* is the purest version of that dare I have seen since *Phone Booth* boxed Colin Farrell into a glass cabinet, and it goes considerably further: Rodrigo Cortes shuts Ryan Reynolds inside a wooden coffin, drops the lid, and refuses to leave. No flashbacks, no cuts to the surface, no helpful exterior shots of a rescue team mobilising. The camera stays underground with him for the duration. Whether that is a brilliant exercise in tension or ninety-five minutes of self-imposed punishment is the question the film sets itself, and for most of its length it lands on the right side of the line.
## The setup
Paul Conroy is an American lorry driver working a contract in Iraq. He comes round in the dark, in pain, and works out by degrees that he has been buried alive in a coffin somewhere in the desert. His captors have left him two things: a Zippo lighter and a mobile phone, the second of which becomes his only thread back to the world above. The film is the record of his calls. He rings the emergency services, his employer, the State Department, his family, and a hostage negotiator, while his air thins, the battery drops, and the people he reaches prove variously useless, evasive and bound by procedure. The clock is the oxygen, and you feel every minute of it draining.
## The cast
This is, by any honest measure, a one-man film, and it lives or dies on Reynolds. He is best known for charm and a quick line, the leading-man smirk of *The Proposal* and the gloss of *Smokin' Aces*, and the smart move here is to strip all of that away and leave a frightened, ordinary man trying to stay calm enough to be understood down a crackling line. He is sweaty, furious, pleading and exhausted in turn, and he holds the screen with nothing to play against but a phone and the dark. The supporting cast exists only as voices, which is its own kind of casting challenge. Samantha Mathis gives Paul's wife a tender, helpless presence by phone, and Robert Paterson's negotiator carries the maddening calm of a man following a script while a life runs out. The disembodied bureaucrats, all hold music and call transfers, do more to raise the blood pressure than any villain on screen could.
## The craft
The craft is where *Buried* earns its keep. Cortes and cinematographer Eduard Grau had every excuse to shoot the thing flat and static, and instead they treat the coffin as a set to be lit and framed a dozen different ways: the sickly orange of the lighter, the cold wash of the phone screen, a few moments of total black that are braver than anything in a louder film. The camera prowls, tilts and pulls back further than a box that size should allow, and the geography stays legible even as the angles refuse to settle. Victor Reyes contributes a nervy, Herrmann-flavoured score that knows when to swarm and when to leave Paul alone with his own breathing. The sound design is the unsung hero: the scrape of fingernails on wood, the rattle of grit through a seam, the hiss of a phone losing signal. It is a film assembled from very little, and the seams never show.
## How it stacks up
The obvious shelf-mate is *Phone Booth*, another stunt-premise thriller that traps a man in a confined space with only a phone for company, though that one keeps a city and a sniper in play around its lead. *Buried* is more austere, and the comparison that flatters it most is the single-location chamber piece rather than the studio thriller: think of the disciplined dread of *The Vanishing*, the original Dutch version, where the horror is the idea of being shut underground rather than anything you are shown. It is also a relation of the contained survival picture, the lone protagonist against an indifferent situation, though here the antagonist is as much corporate and governmental indifference as it is the sand overhead. Few films have committed to a single restriction this completely and still come out as cinema rather than gimmick.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have largely taken to it, sitting around 87%, praising the discipline, the sound work and Reynolds. Audiences are notably cooler, closer to 65%, and the split is easy to read. This is a deliberately airless, claustrophobic experience that some viewers will find unbearable rather than thrilling, and the ending divides people sharply. I am with the critics on the craft and somewhere between the two camps on the feeling. The conceit can tip from tense into punishing, and there is a stretch in the middle where the phone calls start to feel like a structure being serviced. But the execution is so assured that the wobble never sinks it.
## Verdict
What stops *Buried* being a mere stunt is that the restriction is doing something. The helplessness, the call-centre runaround, the sense of a man's life reduced to a low priority on someone else's checklist, all of it lands harder for being trapped in the box with him. It is tense, intelligent, beautifully made on next to no money, and anchored by the best dramatic work Reynolds has done. It loses a point for the sheer grimness of the watch and a slightly schematic middle, and I would not call it a film to put on lightly twice. But as a piece of pure thriller engineering it is close to flawless, and I came out admiring almost everything about how it was built. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now through Icon, on limited release. One to catch on the biggest screen you can, in the dark, before it surfaces on DVD.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Reynolds went on to far bigger things, and his run at superhero comedy with *Deadpool* (2016) made him a household name, which makes this stripped-back, single-room performance look even more like the moment he proved he could carry a serious film alone. *Buried* has settled into its reputation as one of the best single-location thrillers of its era, regularly cited alongside *Locke* (2013), Steven Knight's one-man, one-car drama that took the same dare a few years later. It is now widely available on disc and streams on the usual digital platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, once very strong, and sustained threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** The narrative takes place inside the claustrophobic setting of a coffin buried underground, with the environment and situation creating a sustained sense of threat and terror throughout.
**Language:** There is infrequent use of very strong language ('c\*\*t'), and occasional use of strong language ('f\*\*k').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/buried-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjqxmzq)).*
================================================================================
## Salt (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-salt
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-salt.md
- published: 2010-08-27
- document_id: 1147
> Angelina Jolie gets the spy thriller she has been circling for years, and Phillip Noyce keeps it moving too fast to argue with. Judge it on momentum, not plausibility, and it delivers. 8/10.
- **UK release:** August 2010
- **Director:** Phillip Noyce · **Writer:** Kurt Wimmer
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Relativity Media; Di Bonaventura Pictures
- **Genre:** Espionage action thriller · **Runtime:** 100 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Angelina Jolie (*Lara Croft: Tomb Raider*, *Mr & Mrs Smith*) as Evelyn Salt; Liev Schreiber (*Manchurian Candidate*, *X-Men Origins: Wolverine*) as Ted Winter; Chiwetel Ejiofor (*Children of Men*, *American Gangster*) as Peabody; Daniel Olbrychski (*The Tin Drum*) as Orlov
- **IMDb:** 6.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 62% critics / 59% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The script for *Salt* was written for a man. Tom Cruise was attached, the lead was called Edwin, and then Cruise walked because the part looked too much like Ethan Hunt and the project went looking for a different star. Recasting it as Angelina Jolie is the smartest decision anyone makes here, because it turns a routine paranoid-spy premise into something with an edge: a glamorous, immovable star asked to spend a hundred minutes being unreadable. Phillip Noyce, who steered Harrison Ford through *Patriot Games* and *Clear and Present Danger*, knows exactly how to build a thriller around a face you cannot quite trust.
## The setup
Evelyn Salt is a CIA officer with a clean record and a husband she loves. On the day she is meant to clock off early, a Russian defector walks into the building and calmly informs her colleagues that a deep-cover Soviet sleeper agent is about to assassinate the Russian president on American soil, and that the sleeper's name is Evelyn Salt. From that accusation the floor drops away. Salt runs, ostensibly to reach her husband before the agency does, and every move she makes pushes her further from the version of herself the audience thought it had met. The pleasure, and the strain, is that the film keeps the question open: is she clearing her name, protecting someone, or carrying out the very mission she has been accused of?
That is a lot of plate-spinning, and *Salt* is not remotely interested in whether you believe any of it. It wants you to keep moving so you do not have time to object.
## The cast
Jolie carries the thing almost single-handed, and she is the reason it works. She has the physical credibility the role demands, going back to *Tomb Raider* and sharpened in *Mr & Mrs Smith*, but the harder trick is the blankness. Salt has to be sympathetic and suspect in the same shot, and Jolie plays her as a sealed box, all competence and no tell. You read her by what she does, leaping between motorway lorries, improvising a weapon out of household chemistry, never by what she says.
Around her the casting is shrewd rather than showy. Liev Schreiber's Ted Winter is the agency friend whose warmth you are invited to lean on, and Schreiber is good at making that warmth feel both genuine and provisional. Chiwetel Ejiofor brings real intelligence to Peabody, the counter-intelligence officer chasing her, so that the pursuit feels like a contest between two competent people rather than a dolt failing to catch a genius. Daniel Olbrychski's Orlov, the defector who lights the fuse, carries a whole Cold War in his bearing, and the film is wise to let him.
## The craft
Noyce makes a lean, propulsive picture. Robert Elswit, better known for the cool precision of his work with Paul Thomas Anderson, shoots the action so you can actually follow it, which by 2010 is no small thing. The set-pieces are practical and weighty: a stairwell fight, a freeway escape staged with a real sense of altitude and risk, a tense crawl through a barge. James Newton Howard's score keeps the pulse up without drowning the quiet stretches. At a hundred minutes the film does not have an ounce of fat on it, and Noyce understands that the way to sell an outrageous twist is not to defend it but to be three scenes past it before you have finished frowning. The result is a thriller that respects your attention even as it cheerfully insults your credulity.
## How it stacks up
The obvious reference point is the *Bourne* trilogy, and *Salt* borrows its handheld immediacy and its amnesiac-loyalty paranoia openly. It does not have Greengrass's documentary nerve, but it is more fun, and it has a stranger engine: where Bourne is recovering a buried identity, Salt may be concealing one. It is closer in spirit to the sleeper-agent dread of *The Manchurian Candidate*, Cold War anxieties dusted off and pointed at a post-Soviet world. And it sits comfortably beside the *Mission: Impossible* films as glossy, star-led spycraft, with the welcome difference that the star here is a woman the camera takes entirely seriously as a physical threat. Female-fronted action of this scale and budget is rare enough that *Salt* feels like a small corrective, and Jolie has the presence to make the case stick.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are split down the middle, around 62%, and audiences a notch behind at 59%. The praise is for Jolie and for Noyce's pacing; the complaints, almost without exception, are about a plot that does not bear a second's scrutiny. Both are correct. The twists pile up past the point of plausibility, motivations rearrange themselves to suit the next reversal, and if you stop to map the conspiracy it falls apart in your hands. The mistake is stopping. This is a film engineered for momentum, and on its own terms the implausibility is a feature, the same destabilising trick that keeps Salt herself unreadable.
## Verdict
I rate momentum, espionage and rewatchability highly, and *Salt* delivers all three. It is a brisk, confident, physically convincing thriller built around a star giving exactly the controlled, ambiguous performance the part needs, and it has the good sense to end with the door left open. The plot is daft and the film knows it; what it gets right is never giving you the breathing room to care. I will happily watch it again, which for this kind of picture is most of the battle. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. One to catch on the big screen for the set-pieces, then again on Blu-ray for the freeway sequence.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: a sequel was discussed for years on the strength of that open ending but never materialised, and *Salt* has settled into its reputation as a sharp one-off and a landmark for female-led action, a line that runs on through *Atomic Blonde* (2017) and Jolie's own later thrillers. The director's cut and the alternate-ending version, both circulated on home release, push Salt's loyalties in slightly different directions and are worth seeking out. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on the major platforms depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence and one use of strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are frequent scenes of moderate violence, including gunfights and fistfights, and a scene of torture in which it is implied that a plastic tube is forced into a woman's mouth and filled with water.
**Language:** Infrequent use of strong language occurs ('f**k').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/salt-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjcynzc)).*
================================================================================
## Inception (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-inception
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-inception.md
- published: 2010-07-24
- document_id: 1096
> Christopher Nolan smuggles a puzzle-box about dreams into the middle of blockbuster season and makes it move like a heist thriller. Clever, gorgeous, and built to be watched again. 9.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2010
- **Director:** Christopher Nolan · **Writer:** Christopher Nolan
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Legendary Pictures; Syncopy
- **Genre:** Science-fiction heist thriller · **Runtime:** 148 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Leonardo DiCaprio (*Titanic*, *The Departed*) as Dom Cobb; Joseph Gordon-Levitt (*(500) Days of Summer*) as Arthur; Elliot Page (*Juno*) as Ariadne; Tom Hardy (*Bronson*) as Eames; Marion Cotillard (*La Vie en Rose*) as Mal; Ken Watanabe (*The Last Samurai*) as Saito
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 87% critics / 91% audience · **My rating:** 9.5 / 10
A new Christopher Nolan film no longer arrives quietly. After *Memento* turned a man's broken memory into the shape of the story itself, after *The Prestige* built a magic trick the audience was inside, and after *The Dark Knight* dragged the superhero film somewhere darker and more grown-up than anyone expected, the question with Nolan was never whether he could deliver spectacle but whether the studio would let him spend two hundred million dollars on an idea this strange. They did. *Inception* is an original science-fiction thriller, not a sequel and not an adaptation, dropped into the middle of July with no source novel and no built-in audience, asking you to follow a story told across four layers of dream at once. That it works at all is remarkable. That it works as a piece of pure entertainment is the part worth talking about.
## The setup
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief with an unusual speciality: he steals secrets from people's minds while they sleep, walking into their dreams and lifting whatever his clients have paid for. It has cost him a home and a way back to his children. Then a powerful businessman offers him the job that could clear the slate, but it runs the trade backwards. Rather than extracting an idea, Cobb has to plant one, deep enough that the target believes he thought of it himself. Inception, the team calls it, and most of them think it cannot be done. Cobb assembles a crew, descends through layer after layer of constructed dreams, and finds that the deeper they go the less stable the ground becomes, partly because something he has buried keeps following him down. I will leave the specifics there; this is a film that rewards walking in without the map.
## The cast
DiCaprio carries the emotional weight, and he is the right choice for it. Cobb could have been a cold technician; DiCaprio plays him as a man held together by guilt, and that ache is what stops the film becoming a lecture on its own rules. Around him Nolan assembles a genuinely enjoyable team. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Arthur is the precise, unflappable second who gets the film's most memorable set piece, a fight in a corridor where gravity has stopped behaving. Tom Hardy's Eames brings swagger and a welcome streak of humour, the man who treats impossible danger as a mild inconvenience. Elliot Page, as the young architect Ariadne, is the audience's way in, asking the questions we need answered without ever feeling like a plot device. Ken Watanabe lends the mission its gravity, and Marion Cotillard, as the figure haunting Cobb's subconscious, supplies the grief and the threat that give the heist its pulse.
## The craft
This is filmmaking of real control. Wally Pfister's cinematography keeps the dream worlds solid and tactile rather than soft and woozy, which matters: the dreams have rules, and the look respects them. Nolan favours practical effects wherever he can, and you feel it, most obviously in that rotating corridor and in a Paris street folding over on itself like a closing book. Lee Smith's editing cuts between four collapsing timelines in the final stretch and somehow never loses you. And then there is Hans Zimmer's score, all that low brass and slowed-down dread, which has already escaped the film and become the sound of every trailer that wants to feel important. The whole thing is paced like a thriller, not a tone poem; for a film built on an abstract premise, it moves.
## How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is *The Matrix*, another effects-led science-fiction film that asked a mainstream audience to question which reality it was watching, and *Inception* shares that appetite for big ideas wearing an action film's clothes. But it owes as much to *Dark City* and its shifting architecture, and to Satoshi Kon's *Paprika*, which played in the same dream-invasion sandbox. Structurally it is a heist, pure *Ocean's Eleven*: the assembled crew, the specialist roles, the plan explained then watched as it goes wrong. And it is unmistakably a Nolan film, sharing with *Memento* and *The Prestige* a fascination with the unreliable mind and a refusal to hand you a tidy resolution. What lifts it above homage is the marriage of all of it: the heist scaffolding makes the science fiction legible, and the science fiction makes the heist feel like nothing else in cinemas.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is strong and the gap between critics and audiences is small, with both sitting in the high eighties to low nineties. The praise lands on Nolan's ambition, the practical spectacle and Zimmer's score. The dissent, where it appears, calls the film over-explained and emotionally cool, a beautiful machine that tells you the rules rather than letting you feel them. I understand the first complaint more than the second. Yes, there is a lot of exposition, because a film inventing its own physics has to teach you as it goes. But the charge of coldness misses Cotillard and DiCaprio entirely, and it underrates how much fun the thing is moment to moment. Most of the people walking out are not debating whether it moved them; they are arguing about what they just saw, which is its own kind of compliment.
## Verdict
This is the sort of film I will happily watch again, and then again, finding another thread each time. It satisfies almost everything I look for at once: intelligent science fiction that respects the audience, a world built with real internal logic, a heist structure I never tire of, and a score that lodges in the memory. The exposition is the price of admission and a fair one. The spectacle is practical and so it ages well in the mind. Most of all it is endlessly rewatchable, which for me counts for a great deal. Nolan has made the rare blockbuster that is genuinely about something and still races by. **9.5/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in both standard and IMAX. Seek out the IMAX screening if you can; the scale suits it.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Inception* has settled into its reputation as the film that proved a major studio could bankroll an original, demanding science-fiction blockbuster and see it pay off, and its DNA shows up in everything from later puzzle-box thrillers to the Zimmer-style "braam" that took over film trailers for a decade. Nolan went on to push the same ambition further with *Interstellar* and, later, *Oppenheimer*. The famous final shot is still argued over. It is now widely available on disc and digital, with periodic IMAX re-releases, and streams on various platforms depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Scenes of moderate violence include gunfights and fistfights, occasionally resulting in brief sight of blood.
**Threat and horror:** There are scenes of threat in which people run from explosions, as well as vehicle crashes.
**Language:** There is use of mild bad language, such as 'crap' and 'shit'.
**Sex:** There are some brief and undetailed references to sex, such as a reference to being a lover.
**Injury detail:** There is some sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
**Suicide and self-harm:** There are occasional references to suicide, when a woman believes she and her husband should end their lives together. In one scene she throws herself from a building, and in another she and her partner lie on a railway line as a train approaches. The context of these scenes is fantastical, involving layers of dreams and the need to die in order to wake up from the dream.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/inception-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjqznzc)).*
================================================================================
## Predators (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-predators
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-predators.md
- published: 2010-07-22
- document_id: 1136
> Robert Rodriguez finally gets his Predator sequel made, and it does the sensible thing by going back to the jungle. Not a reinvention, but a confident, well-cast return to the hunt. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2010
- **Director:** Nimród Antal · **Writers:** Alex Litvak, Michael Finch
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Troublemaker Studios; Davis Entertainment
- **Genre:** Science-fiction action / survival hunt · **Runtime:** 107 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Adrien Brody (*The Pianist*, *King Kong*) as Royce; Alice Braga (*City of God*, *I Am Legend*) as Isabelle; Topher Grace (*Spider-Man 3*) as Edwin; Walton Goggins (*The Shield*) as Stans; Laurence Fishburne (*The Matrix*, *Apocalypse Now*) as Noland
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 64% critics / 52% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Robert Rodriguez has wanted to make a *Predator* film for the better part of fifteen years, ever since a script he wrote for Fox in the mid-nineties got shelved as too expensive. He finally gets it made here, not as director but as producer and chief instigator, and the title tells you the strategy in a single pluralised word. More than one of them this time, and the first sequel since 1987 to remember that the original worked because it dropped a squad of hard men into a green hell and let something invisible pick them apart. After two increasingly silly *Alien vs. Predator* crossovers, going back to the jungle counts as a plan.
## The setup
A man wakes in freefall, his parachute deploying just in time, and crashes into dense jungle with no memory of how he got there. He is not alone. One by one, other people drop out of the same sky: a cartel enforcer, an Israeli army sniper, a death-row killer, a Yakuza, a silent African militiaman, and one nervy doctor who looks badly out of place among the rest. They are killers, every one, and it does not take them long to work out that this is not Earth. The trees are wrong, there are two moons overhead, and they have been dropped onto an alien game preserve to be hunted. The only question is whether a group of people selected for being dangerous can stop turning on each other long enough to survive the things that brought them here.
## The cast
The casting is the most interesting decision in the film, and it mostly pays off. Adrien Brody as a mercenary action lead reads as a gamble on paper, all the more so after he bulked up and dropped his voice into a Christian Bale rasp, but it works. Royce is cold, calculating and self-interested, and Brody plays him as a man doing arithmetic on everyone around him, which suits a film about predators and prey. Alice Braga gives Isabelle the conscience and the competence the group needs, and the two of them carry the spine of it. Topher Grace, cast hard against type as the meek doctor, supplies the unease, an ordinary man among professionals. Walton Goggins is all abrasive nervous energy as the death-row convict, exactly the loose cannon a survival ensemble runs on. Laurence Fishburne turns up late as Noland, a survivor of earlier hunts who has been alone too long, and gives the film a welcome jolt of strangeness.
## The craft
Nimród Antal, who made the claustrophobic Hungarian thriller *Kontroll* and the home-invasion piece *Vacancy*, turns out to be a sound choice for this. He understands enclosed spaces and stalking tension, and he shoots the jungle for menace rather than spectacle. The film was made largely on built sets and Hawaiian location rather than green screen, and it shows in a tactile, sweaty physicality the crossover films lacked. The Predators themselves are practical suits and prosthetics where it counts, and Antal is sensible enough to keep them half-seen for as long as he can. John Debney's score nods to Alan Silvestri's original cues without simply copying them. The pacing is brisk, the 107 minutes never sag, and the action stays legible, which is not nothing in 2010. Where it stumbles is ambition: a couple of the hunters are barely sketched before they are dispatched, and a mid-film twist lands with a thud you can see coming.
## How it stacks up
The obvious measuring stick is the 1987 *Predator*, and this knows it, borrowing the structure wholesale, a band of armed professionals whittled down in the green, while wisely not trying to out-macho Schwarzenegger. It is closer in spirit to that film than anything in between. The premise of dangerous people dropped into a kill-or-be-killed arena also puts it in the lineage of *The Running Man* and *Battle Royale*, though it is less interested in satire than either. What it shares with the best of the franchise is the simple, durable engine of the hunt, and a respect for the idea that the monster is scariest when you cannot see it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have come down mixed but warmer than they were for the crossover films, sitting around 64%, with the praise going to the back-to-basics premise and the ensemble, and the criticism to thin characterisation and a sense that the film rarely betters its template. Audiences are cooler, nearer the middle at 52%, which reads like fans who wanted either more reinvention or more carnage. My own reaction sits above both. I came to it wanting competent franchise maintenance and a proper jungle hunt, and that is exactly what it delivers, with a better cast than it strictly needed.
## Verdict
This is not a reinvention and never pretends to be. It is a confident, well-made return to a premise that has been mishandled for two decades, with a cast more interesting than the genre demands and a director who knows how to wind tension in a confined space. The thin characters and the telegraphed twist keep it from greatness, and it never quite escapes the shadow of the film it is paying homage to. But it is tense, good-looking, briskly cut and genuinely rewatchable, the kind of thing that holds up on a second viewing because the hunt itself still works. Solid franchise maintenance, done with more care than it had to be. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, on general release from 9 July.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the franchise carried on, with Shane Black's *The Predator* (2018) trying a louder, more comic register before Dan Trachtenberg's prequel *Prey* (2022) returned to the stripped-down survival-hunt idea this film had already reached for, and arguably did it better. *Predators* has settled into reputation as the best of the post-1987 entries, the one that understood what the series was for. It is widely available on disc and digital, and turns up on various streaming platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence, gory images, language and sex references*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC's full per-category content advice for the cinema release could not be retrieved from bbfc.co.uk at the time of writing; the rating and short consumer advice line above are confirmed against the Board's classification of the film, passed 15 with no cuts. The 15 certificate reflects strong, bloody violence and gory injury detail, strong language, and verbal sex references across the film.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/)).*
================================================================================
## Iron Man 2 (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-iron-man-2
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-iron-man-2.md
- published: 2010-05-08
- document_id: 1098
> Two years on, Tony Stark comes back richer, drunker and busier, in a sequel that crams a revenge plot, a corporate rival and a whole shared universe into one suit. Overstuffed, but the central act still sells the ticket. 8/10.
- **UK release:** April 2010
- **Director:** Jon Favreau · **Writer:** Justin Theroux
- **Studio / distributor:** Marvel Studios; Paramount Pictures
- **Genre:** Superhero action adventure / technology fantasy · **Runtime:** 124 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Robert Downey Jr (*Chaplin*, *Kiss Kiss Bang Bang*) as Tony Stark / Iron Man; Gwyneth Paltrow (*Shakespeare in Love*, *Se7en*) as Pepper Potts; Don Cheadle (*Hotel Rwanda*, *Ocean's Eleven*) as James Rhodes / War Machine; Scarlett Johansson (*Lost in Translation*) as Natasha Romanoff; Mickey Rourke (*The Wrestler*, *Sin City*) as Ivan Vanko; Sam Rockwell (*Moon*) as Justin Hammer
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 72% critics / 71% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Two years ago *Iron Man* did the thing nobody at Marvel could quite have banked on: it took a second-tier comic character, handed him to a director best known for a Will Ferrell Christmas film and an actor most studios would not insure, and turned out the most charming blockbuster of its summer. The trick was Robert Downey Jr, who played Tony Stark as a man too clever and too pleased with himself to bother being a conventional hero. The sequel arrives with all of that goodwill and a new burden the first film did not carry, because by now there is a larger plan in motion, and *Iron Man 2* has been quietly handed the job of building the front porch of a shared universe while still working as a film in its own right.
## The setup
When we left him, Tony Stark had told a press conference he was Iron Man, and the world has been living with that admission ever since. He has privatised world peace, irritated the United States government, who would very much like the suit handed over, and is being courted and undercut by Justin Hammer, a rival arms dealer with a fraction of the talent and twice the ambition. What Tony has told nobody is that the reactor keeping him alive is also slowly poisoning him, which goes some way to explaining why he is behaving like a man with nothing to lose.
Into this walks Ivan Vanko, a Russian physicist with a personal grudge that reaches back to Tony's late father and the technology the Stark name was built on. He can build a version of the reactor too, and he intends to use it to take Tony apart in public. The film, then, is about a man fighting a private illness, a public enemy and a corporate rival at once, while the people closest to him try to work out whether he is still worth saving.
## The cast
Downey remains the reason this works. He plays a Tony who is funnier and more reckless than before, and the performance has just enough genuine fear underneath the patter to keep the self-destruction from being a pose. Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts is promoted from assistant to running the company, and her exasperation gives Tony something solid to bounce off; the two of them talking over each other is still the most enjoyable thing in the film. Don Cheadle takes over as Rhodes and brings a weary military patience that the role needed, even if the recasting takes a scene or two to settle.
The newcomers are where the film spends its energy. Mickey Rourke, fresh from *The Wrestler*, plays Vanko as a hulking, bird-keeping, gold-toothed wreck of a man, more menacing standing still than swinging his electrified whips. Sam Rockwell's Hammer is the comic counterweight, a salesman so desperate to be Tony Stark that he cannot see how far short he falls, and Rockwell makes the flop sweat genuinely funny. Scarlett Johansson arrives as Natasha Romanoff, an undercover operative whose loyalties are not what they seem, and the espionage flavour she brings is welcome even if the film never quite knows what to do with her beyond one very good corridor fight.
## The craft
Favreau directs with the same loose, character-first touch as before, which is both the film's charm and its weakness. The talking scenes crackle; the action is competent rather than thrilling. A mid-film attack on a Monaco racetrack is the standout, all sparks and snapped carbon fibre, but the climax collapses into the usual problem of metal men hitting other metal men in the dark, and you feel the effects budget more than you feel any danger. John Debney's score does its job without lingering, and the design work on the suits and Vanko's improvised hardware is, as you would hope from a film this in love with engineering, a pleasure to look at.
The larger issue is congestion. There are simply too many people in the room. Government hearings, a rival's munitions deal, a buried family history, a spy subplot and several deliberate pointers toward films that do not exist yet all jostle for the same two hours, and the result is a sequel that often feels like it is doing administration rather than telling a story.
## How it stacks up
Set against the first *Iron Man*, this is the busier and less satisfying film, in roughly the way most second outings are: it has more money, more characters and less surprise. The more useful comparison is with the recent run of comic-book sequels that lost their nerve by piling on villains, and to its credit *Iron Man 2* keeps its antagonists clear and its tone intact where others turned to mush. It is also, more than any superhero film so far, openly the second chapter of something larger, with a post-credits sting that treats the audience as collaborators in a plan only the studio can see in full. Whether that is confidence or hubris is the open question hanging over the whole enterprise.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is warm but markedly cooler than for the original. Critics are sitting around 72%, audiences a shade under at 71%, and the recurring complaint is the one the film cannot really dodge: it is overstuffed, and it spends too long laying track for journeys still to come. That is fair. Where I part company is on how much it matters. The franchise-building that irritates some viewers is, for anyone who likes this kind of shared world, half the fun, and the technology daydream at the heart of it all, a man in a garage building wonders, is exactly the sort of thing I happily watch twice.
## Verdict
*Iron Man 2* is a worse-assembled film than its predecessor and a more entertaining one than its reputation suggests. The plot is doing three jobs at once and does none of them cleanly, the finale is forgettable, and the seams of the larger project show. None of that stops it being good company. Downey is still magnetic, Rockwell and Rourke earn their keep, and the underlying fantasy of clever people building impossible machines remains catnip to me. It is eminently rewatchable, which on my scale counts for a great deal. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and on IMAX screens.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the franchise scaffolding the film was so busy building paid off two years later in *The Avengers* (2012), which gathered up Black Widow, War Machine's world and the wider Marvel cast into a single film and made the patience look like planning. Scarlett Johansson's Romanoff, underused here, went on to anchor much of that shared universe. *Iron Man 2* has settled into its reputation as the weakest of the original trilogy, the one that strained to do too much, though it is fonder-regarded now than it was at release. It is widely available on disc and digital and streams on Disney+ depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence and bleeped strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Alongside frequent scenes of moderate fantasy action, between robots and humans in advanced armoured suits, there are occasional moments of violence between human characters. These include an implied neck break, punches, a man being slammed into a metal sink, and a woman rendering a number of men unconscious using her martial arts skill and various pieces of advanced weaponry.
**Threat and horror:** There are intense action scenes.
**Language:** There is infrequent, bleeped use of strong language ('f**k').
**Sex:** There are occasional moderate but undetailed sex references, including to masturbation and prostitution.
**Injury detail:** There is limited sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
**Alcohol and smoking:** There is sight of adults drinking, including to excess.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/iron-man-2-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjiynzu)).*
================================================================================
## The Ghost Writer (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-ghost-writer
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-ghost-writer.md
- published: 2010-04-20
- document_id: 1187
> Polanski adapts Robert Harris into a cold, grey, slow-burning paranoia thriller, and an unnamed McGregor walks straight into it. Old-fashioned suspense, beautifully built. 8/10.
- **UK release:** April 2010 (as *The Ghost*)
- **Director:** Roman Polanski · **Writers:** Robert Harris, Roman Polanski
- **Studio / distributor:** RP Productions; Studio Babelsberg · Optimum Releasing (UK)
- **Genre:** Political conspiracy thriller · **Runtime:** 128 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Ewan McGregor (*Trainspotting*, *Moulin Rouge!*) as the Ghost; Pierce Brosnan (*GoldenEye*, *The Thomas Crown Affair*) as Adam Lang; Olivia Williams (*An Education*) as Ruth Lang; Kim Cattrall (*Big Trouble in Little China*) as Amelia Bly; Tom Wilkinson (*Michael Clayton*, *In the Bedroom*) as Paul Emmett
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 84% critics / 70% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
There is a particular pleasure in watching a director who has nothing left to prove choose to make something this controlled. *The Ghost Writer* is Roman Polanski adapting Robert Harris, and it arrives carrying two reputations: Polanski's, as the man who made *Chinatown* and *Rosemary's Baby* and whose own legal situation hangs over every line of press about the film, and Harris's, as the writer who turns plausible political machinery into page-turning fiction. What they have made together is a paranoia thriller in the old style, the kind that trusts a grey sky and a locked door to do more work than any chase. It is the most assured thing either of them has put on screen in years.
## The setup
A writer, never named, is hired to ghost the memoirs of Adam Lang, a recently retired British prime minister with an obvious resemblance to the kind of leader who followed America into a war and never quite explained why. The previous ghost drowned in circumstances nobody wants to look at too closely. Our man inherits the manuscript, the deadline, and the dead man's room in a bleak modernist house on a wind-scoured American island, where Lang and his entourage are holed up while a war-crimes storm gathers around them. He came to tidy up a dull book. He stays to work out why the last person who held this job is in the ground.
## The cast
McGregor plays the Ghost as a professional cynic who is good at his job and bad at minding his own business, and the trick of the performance is how ordinary he keeps him: no special skills, no training, just a man asking one question too many. Brosnan gives Lang the easy, hollow charm of a politician who has spent decades being liked, and lets you see the panic working underneath the tan. The sharpest turn is Olivia Williams as Ruth, Lang's wife, watchful and bitter and several moves ahead of everyone, including the audience. Kim Cattrall is the brittle gatekeeper running interference, and Tom Wilkinson surfaces late as a Harvard academic whose politeness is its own kind of threat. Nobody overplays it. The film is too cold for that.
## The craft
This is where the film earns its keep. Pawel Edelman shoots the island in slate greys and rain, and Polanski stages the whole thing as a slow tightening rather than a series of shocks. The house itself, all glass and concrete and sightlines, becomes a trap you can see the whole way through and still cannot leave. Alexandre Desplat's score needles away underneath, all unease and forward motion, never letting the quiet settle. Polanski has always understood enclosed spaces and watched people, and he uses both here with total economy: a satnav that keeps its directions, a bicycle on a ferry, a manuscript read the way it was meant to be read. The suspense is built from documents and weather, and it holds.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestors are the great American conspiracy films of the 1970s, *The Parallax View* above all, where an ordinary man pulls one thread and the whole world turns out to be holding the other end. It shares their patience and their pessimism. Set against Polanski's own work, it is closest to *Chinatown* in shape, a detective who is not a detective uncovering rot at the top, though this is a colder, more bureaucratic rot. And as a Harris adaptation it sits comfortably beside the political machinery of his novels: real institutions, plausible secrets, a plot that moves because people protect themselves. It is less showy than *The Constant Gardener* and the better for it.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it warmly, sitting around 84%, drawn to exactly the things that make it feel out of time: the restraint, the craft, the refusal to hurry. Audiences are cooler, nearer 70%, and the gap is easy to read. This is a thriller that withholds. It keeps you at arm's length from its hero, it never raises its voice, and viewers who want their conspiracies loud and their endings tidy may find it chilly. The recurring complaint is emotional distance, and it is not wrong, only beside the point. The chill is the texture, not a flaw in it.
## Verdict
I came to this for the things it does best, and it delivered them: atmosphere, a tightening sense of dread, an intelligent thriller built on documents and surveillance rather than gunfire, and an adaptation that respects its source. The plotting is clean, the island is unforgettable, and the final stretch lands a sting worth the wait. It loses a little for holding its protagonist, and its audience, at a careful distance, which costs it some warmth and a fraction of its rewatch pull. But it is the kind of film I will happily sit through again on a grey afternoon, and one of the most quietly satisfying conspiracy thrillers in years. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On release in UK cinemas now, under the title *The Ghost*. A DVD and Blu-ray release follows later this year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Ghost Writer* has held its standing as one of the strongest late-career Polanski films, and the comparison most people now reach for is *J'accuse* (*An Officer and a Spy*, 2019), his other patient, procedural study of an establishment closing ranks. The film is widely available on disc and digital, and rotates through the streaming services depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The film was passed **15** for its UK cinema release, with the classification driven by language, including infrequent very strong language. The BBFC's full per-category content advice for this release (Violence, Language, Sex, and similar headings) could not be retrieved at the time of writing: the board's release page for Polanski's 2010 film was not reachable and resolved only to a later, unrelated film of the same name. The rating symbol and the language note above are confirmed; the detailed category breakdown is unverified and should be checked against the BBFC record before publication.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/)).*
================================================================================
## Green Zone (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-green-zone
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-green-zone.md
- published: 2010-03-28
- document_id: 1088
> Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon take the Bourne method into occupied Baghdad and go looking for the weapons that were never there. Familiar politics, first-rate craft, and a chase you cannot look away from. 8/10.
- **UK release:** March 2010
- **Director:** Paul Greengrass · **Writer:** Brian Helgeland
- **Studio / distributor:** Universal Pictures; Working Title Films; StudioCanal
- **Genre:** Political action thriller / military thriller · **Runtime:** 115 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Matt Damon (*The Bourne Supremacy*, *The Departed*) as Roy Miller; Greg Kinnear (*As Good as It Gets*, *Little Miss Sunshine*) as Clark Poundstone; Brendan Gleeson (*In Bruges*) as Martin Brown; Amy Ryan (*Gone Baby Gone*) as Lawrie Dayne
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 53% critics / 57% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon walk out of the Bourne films and straight into occupied Baghdad, and for a while you would be forgiven for thinking they never left Jason Bourne behind. *Green Zone* moves with the same handheld urgency, the same trust in a competent man running through a hostile city, the same conviction that the people in charge are lying to him. The difference is that this time the conspiracy is not invented for the screen. The film takes the search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the search that found nothing, and turns it into a manhunt thriller. It is a bold thing to attempt while the argument is still warm, and the surprise is how well the chase holds even when you know there is nothing at the end of it.
## The setup
It is the spring of 2003, days into the occupation. Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) leads an army unit raiding sites that intelligence has flagged as hiding chemical and biological weapons. Site after site comes up empty, a warehouse of pigeon droppings here, a disused toilet factory there, and Miller starts asking the question nobody above him wants asked: where is this intelligence coming from, and why is it always wrong? His curiosity drags him into the space between a slick Pentagon official selling certainty (Greg Kinnear), a veteran CIA man who smells the same rot (Brendan Gleeson), and a Wall Street reporter (Amy Ryan) who has been fed the official line and printed it. What begins as a soldier doing his job becomes a soldier trying to find out who decided the job in the first place.
## The cast
Damon is the anchor, and he is very good at the particular thing this film needs: a decent professional whose loyalty curdles into doubt without ever tipping into speech-making. He plays Miller as tired, physical and quietly furious, and the camera trusts his face to carry the turns. Greg Kinnear, an actor who can make smugness charming, weaponises that gift as Poundstone, the man who would rather be right on paper than right on the ground. Brendan Gleeson brings his usual lived-in weariness to the CIA sceptic, the one grown-up in a room of careerists, and the scenes between him and Kinnear are the film's sharpest, two arms of the same government openly at war. Amy Ryan has the trickiest part, a journalist complicit in the spin, and she keeps the character human rather than a target. Khalid Abdalla, as the Iraqi local caught in the middle, gives the film its conscience and its best single line about whose country this actually is.
## The craft
Greengrass directs the way he always does, and either you go with it or you do not. Barry Ackroyd's camera is restless and close, the night raids are shot in a green wash of military optics, and Christopher Rouse cuts it all at a clip that keeps you slightly off balance without losing the geography. This is more disciplined than the shakiest of the Bourne work; you always know where Miller is and what he wants. John Powell's score drives the pursuit without drowning it. The final movement, a chase through the dark streets and back alleys of Baghdad with three or four factions all hunting the same man, is a genuinely thrilling piece of action cinema, the sort of sustained physical sequence Greengrass builds better than almost anyone working now. The film looks and sounds like the real thing, which is the point of shooting it this way.
## How it stacks up
The obvious reference is *The Bourne Supremacy*, the same director and star applying the same grammar to a real war, and the comparison flatters and limits the film in equal measure. It has Bourne's momentum but trades the fantasy for a charge sheet. Set it beside *Syriana* and *Body of Lies* and it is the most propulsive of the recent Middle East thrillers, less interested in tangled geopolitics than in one man pulling a single thread until the wall comes down. Against *United 93*, Greengrass's own masterpiece of documentary tension, *Green Zone* is the more conventional film, a thriller wearing the clothes of reportage rather than the other way round. It does not have that film's terrible restraint, but it has a forward drive that *United 93* deliberately denied itself.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are lukewarm, sitting around 53%, with audiences only a little warmer. The recurring complaint is twofold: that the film tells us what most people already believe about the WMD case, and that it wraps that argument in a too-neat action package. Both charges land. The politics are blunt, the villain is a shade too tidy, and the film arrives a few years after the public quarrel it is joining. None of that ruins it for me. A thriller is allowed to have a point of view, and the craft on display is not in question. The reviews read as a verdict on the argument; I am marking the film.
## Verdict
This is a smart, muscular, expertly made thriller that happens to be carrying a real grievance, and I rate the craft and the rewatchability higher than the consensus does. The politics may be settled and the shape may be familiar, but the filmmaking is not lazy for a second, and that closing pursuit is one I would happily sit through again. Damon and Greengrass know exactly what they do well together, and they do it here at full stretch. If you want a thinking person's action film that takes a real subject seriously and still gets the pulse going, this delivers. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Green Zone* underperformed at the box office and has settled into the role of an underrated Greengrass entry, the Iraq thriller people forget he made between *Bourne* films. It marked the end of his run with Damon until they reunited for *Jason Bourne* (2016). It is now widely available on DVD, Blu-ray and digital, and rotates through the major streaming services depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language and violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Strong violence occurs during scenes of urban combat including occasional sight of blood when characters are shot. Other scenes feature heavy blows being delivered to the face and body during fights, or as part of an interrogation.
**Language:** There is frequent use of strong language ('f**k').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/green-zone-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjmynti)).*
================================================================================
## Shutter Island (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-shutter-island
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-shutter-island.md
- published: 2010-03-16
- document_id: 1149
> Scorsese trades the streets for a fog-bound asylum and builds a gorgeous, paranoid Gothic puzzle. The mystery leans hard on its twist, but the atmosphere and DiCaprio carry it a long way. 8/10.
- **UK release:** March 2010
- **Director:** Martin Scorsese · **Writer:** Laeta Kalogridis (from the novel by Dennis Lehane)
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Phoenix Pictures; Sikelia Productions
- **Genre:** Psychological thriller / Gothic mystery · **Runtime:** 138 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Leonardo DiCaprio (*Titanic*, *The Departed*) as Teddy Daniels; Mark Ruffalo (*Zodiac*) as Chuck Aule; Ben Kingsley (*Gandhi*, *Sexy Beast*) as Dr John Cawley; Michelle Williams (*Brokeback Mountain*) as Dolores Chanal; Max von Sydow (*The Seventh Seal*, *The Exorcist*) as Dr Jeremiah Naehring
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 68% critics / 76% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Martin Scorsese has spent so long defining a particular kind of American film, the wise guys and the cab drivers and the rise-and-fall, that it is easy to forget how much he loves the old genre stuff: the Powell and Pressburger melodramas, the German expressionists, the lurid Val Lewton horrors he champions when nobody is asking him to. *Shutter Island* is the film where he gets to play with all of it at once. Three years after he and Leonardo DiCaprio finally won the establishment over with *The Departed*, the two of them have made something far stranger and more disreputable: a fog-bound Gothic puzzle box, dressed up as a detective story, that is really a study of a man coming apart.
## The setup
It is 1954, and U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) takes a ferry out to Ashecliffe, a hospital for the criminally insane perched on a rock off the Boston coast. A patient has vanished from a locked cell, and Teddy and his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) are there to find her. Then a hurricane closes in, the boats stop running, and the staff start giving answers that do not quite fit. Teddy has his own reasons for wanting onto this island, and as the storm cuts the place off from the world his migraines, his memories of liberating Dachau, and his dead wife begin bleeding into the investigation. The less you know going in, the better, so I will leave the rest of the machinery where the film keeps it: behind a locked door.
## The cast
DiCaprio is doing the heavy lifting and he knows it. This is a sweatier, more haunted performance than the cool operator of *The Departed*, all clenched jaw and barely-managed grief, a man trying to hold an investigation together while something inside him keeps slipping. Ruffalo is quietly excellent as the partner, watchful and a little too patient, playing a long game the audience cannot yet read. Ben Kingsley gives Dr Cawley exactly the right unreadable courtesy, a man who could be a humane reformer or something much worse, and you spend the film unable to decide which. Max von Sydow brings a whisper of old-world menace as his colleague Naehring, and Michelle Williams haunts the edges of Teddy's memory with real sorrow rather than the usual ghost-wife shorthand. It is a deep bench, and Scorsese trusts every name on it.
## The craft
This is where the film earns its keep. Robert Richardson shoots Ashecliffe like a fever, all sickly greens and storm-light and shadows that fall in the wrong direction, and Scorsese leans openly into artifice: continuity that wobbles, weather that obeys the mood rather than the meteorology, a back-projected drive that looks deliberately false. The score, assembled by Robbie Robertson from existing modern classical pieces, lands like a slab of dread before a single line is spoken, all groaning brass and strings that seem to push the boat back from the dock. Thelma Schoonmaker's editing keeps the ground shifting under you. None of it is subtle, and it is not meant to be. The whole picture is built as a nightmare you are slowly realising you cannot wake from.
## How it stacks up
The reference points are worn proudly on the sleeve. There is *Vertigo* in the obsessive man chasing a woman who may not be what she seems, *The Cabinet of Dr Caligari* in the tilted asylum and the question of who is really mad, and a good deal of Scorsese's own *Cape Fear* in the operatic, unembarrassed dread. As a Dennis Lehane adaptation it is closer in spirit to the grief and guilt of *Mystic River* than to the procedural grind of *Gone Baby Gone*, though it trades their grounded realism for something far more heightened. Against Scorsese's own back catalogue it is a minor-key oddity, but a gorgeous one, the work of a director enjoying a holiday in a genre he has loved his whole life.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are running a touch cool, around 68%, with audiences warmer at 76%, and the split is easy to understand. The complaint is that the film is more atmosphere than mystery, that it is a sumptuous machine in service of a twist you may well see coming, and that Scorsese the stylist has rather smothered Scorsese the storyteller. There is something to that. If you crack the puzzle early, the back half can feel like watching a man take the long way round to a destination you reached an hour ago. But that reading undersells how much pleasure there is in the texture of the thing, and how cleverly the film rewards a second watch once you know where the floor gives way.
## Verdict
I came for the atmosphere and the rewatch value, and on both counts *Shutter Island* delivers handsomely. Yes, it is a thriller that depends heavily on its reveal, and yes, a sharp viewer will be ahead of Teddy more than the film would like. It is still one of the most beautifully sustained moods in any mainstream release this year, a Gothic puzzle that holds together better on the rewind than it does on the first pass, anchored by a DiCaprio performance that gives the whole feverish exercise a human centre. Not top-tier Scorsese, but a long way from a footnote, and the kind of film I will happily put on again to watch the seams. **8/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now. One to see on a big screen while the storm is still rolling, with the Blu-ray and DVD to follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film has aged into one of the more rewatched entries in the Scorsese and DiCaprio partnership, its final exchange endlessly chewed over by viewers arguing about what Teddy does and does not understand by the end. It sits well alongside their next collaboration, *The Wolf of Wall Street* (2013), as proof that the pairing had range well beyond *The Departed*. It is widely available on disc and digital and rotates through the major streaming platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, bloody injury and disturbing images*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are occasional scenes of moderate violence, including shootings and characters fighting using their fists.
**Language:** There is occasional use of strong language ('f***k'), as well as more moderate bad language including 'bitch' and 'prick'.
**Sex:** There are some moderate verbal references, including to oral sex.
**Discrimination:** There is infrequent use of discriminatory language ('n***r', 'retard') by an asylum inmate.
**Suicide and self-harm:** A man attempts to take his own life. While the act is not shown, there is aftermath sight of a bloody wound after he has shot himself.
**Injury detail:** During a character's flashbacks there is sight of a man with a gory bullet wound in his cheek.
**Nudity:** There is non-sexual nudity in a prison/asylum context, as well as sight of nudity in artworks.
**Disturbing images:** Flashback images include scenes set in the Dachau death camp, with sight of dead, emaciated women and children lying in great piles, some frozen in the snow. Other disturbing images include a woman with a fiery hole in her torso dissolving into ash, and a woman with three dead children covered in blood.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/shutter-island-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjm5mdq)).*
================================================================================
## The Book of Eli (2010)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-book-of-eli
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-book-of-eli.md
- published: 2010-01-20
- document_id: 1177
> The Hughes brothers return with a sun-bleached post-apocalyptic western that critics find thin and I find quietly gripping. Denzel Washington carries it, the world earns its silence, and on mood and rewatchability it lands well above the consensus. 8/10.
- **UK release:** January 2010
- **Director:** Albert and Allen Hughes · **Writer:** Gary Whitta
- **Studio / distributor:** Alcon Entertainment; Silver Pictures; Warner Bros.
- **Genre:** Post-apocalyptic action drama / neo-western · **Runtime:** 118 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Denzel Washington (*Training Day*, *Man on Fire*) as Eli; Gary Oldman (*Léon*, *The Dark Knight*) as Carnegie; Mila Kunis (*Forgetting Sarah Marshall*) as Solara; Ray Stevenson (*Rome*, *Punisher: War Zone*) as Redridge
- **IMDb:** 6.8 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 47% critics / 64% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The Hughes brothers have been gone a long time. Their last feature, *From Hell*, came out in 2001, and before that they were the young pair who made *Menace II Society* look like the work of directors twice their age. *The Book of Eli* is their return, and it is a curious choice of comeback: a lean, sun-scorched walk across a dead America, wrapped around a parable so old-fashioned that half the audience will roll their eyes at it and the other half will lean in. It is the kind of film that knows exactly what it wants to be and refuses to apologise for it, which is rarer than it sounds.
## The setup
Some thirty years after a war that burned the sky out, Eli walks west. He is alone, lethal, and carrying a book he believes he was told to protect and deliver, a book he will kill to keep. The land between him and the coast is a scatter of ruined towns, hijackers and cannibals, and water is worth more than gold. In one of those towns he runs into Carnegie, a literate, ruthless man who has worked out that the right book in the right hands is the only real power left, and who has been sending illiterate thugs to scour the wasteland for the very one Eli is carrying. From there it is a contest of wills, with a young woman named Solara caught between them and slowly choosing a side. I will leave the ending where it belongs, because the film has a turn near the close that is worth meeting cold.
## The cast
Denzel Washington holds the whole thing together by doing very little. Eli is watchful, courteous, and only briefly explosive, and Washington plays the stillness as a kind of discipline rather than blankness, the same controlled authority he brought to *Man on Fire* but stripped of its rage. You believe this man has been walking and surviving for thirty years. Opposite him, Gary Oldman gives Carnegie a relish that the film badly needs, a small-town tyrant who quotes scripture and reads Mussolini and clearly enjoys hearing himself reason. After his buttoned-down Gordon in *The Dark Knight* it is good to see Oldman let the lid off again. Mila Kunis, best known to most as the sitcom face from *That '70s Show* and the comic foil of *Forgetting Sarah Marshall*, is the weak link, not bad so much as too contemporary for the dust she is standing in. Ray Stevenson, all muscle and menace as Carnegie's enforcer, does what *Rome* and *Punisher: War Zone* taught him to do, which is loom convincingly.
## The craft
Where the film really works is in how it looks and sounds. Don Burgess shoots the wasteland in a bleached, desaturated near-monochrome, all bone-white skies and long flat horizons, and the Hughes brothers frame Eli as a lone figure crossing it like a gunslinger in a Leone western with the colour drained out. There is a single-take ambush on a roadside house, the camera prowling in and out and around the building as the bullets fly, that is the best-staged action of the film and announces directors who have been thinking about this for a decade. The fights are clipped and brutal, more silhouette than spray. Atticus Ross and his collaborators score it with a low industrial hum that sits under the silence rather than filling it, and the silence is the point of the world they have built: this is a quiet film, and it trusts you to sit in the quiet.
## How it stacks up
The obvious neighbours are the ones every post-apocalypse film now lives next to. It has the road-warrior bleakness of *Mad Max* without the petrolhead glee, and it shares a great deal of DNA with *The Road*, which reached cinemas at almost the same moment: the same ash-grey palette, the same long trudge, the same question of whether anything decent is worth carrying through hell. Where *The Road* is unrelieved grief, *The Book of Eli* is closer to a western with a Bible in its saddlebag, and it has more in common with the lone-stranger pictures of Eastwood than with most modern science fiction. It is not as intelligent a film as *Children of Men*, which used its ruined Britain to say something larger. But it is more purely entertaining than either, and it never bores.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are split down the middle and slightly sour, sitting around 47%, with the recurring complaint that the story is thin and the religious symbolism heavy-handed, and that the late twist tips the whole thing over into solemn nonsense. Audiences are warmer, nearer two thirds approving, and I am with the audiences. The faith angle does not bother me, partly because the film treats the book as an object of power rather than a sermon, and partly because the genre has always run on myth. The objection that it is simple is fair; the objection that being simple makes it bad is not. What the critics are marking down is more or less what I am marking up.
## Verdict
This is a handsome, confident, deliberately old-fashioned film that knows what it is and delivers it without flab. Washington is excellent, Oldman is having a fine time, the world is beautifully realised, and the craft on display tells you the Hughes brothers have not lost a step in their years away. It is not flawless: Kunis is miscast, the middle sags once or twice, and the final reveal asks you to forgive a fair bit on the walk back through it. None of that stops it being the kind of film I will happily put on again, for the look of it, the quiet of it and the pleasure of watching Denzel Washington walk into a bar and warn everyone exactly once. It clears its own bar comfortably. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. A DVD and Blu-ray release should follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the Hughes brothers split as a directing team not long after this, with Allen Hughes going on to *Broken City* and Albert to *Alpha*, which makes *The Book of Eli* one of their last films together. Its reputation has settled roughly where it opened, a divisive cult favourite that fans defend for its mood and its single-take action and detractors still find heavy-handed. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and turns up on streaming platforms on rotation depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong violence and language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is a scene in which a man's hand is cut off. There are also scenes in which men are slashed and stabbed, or shot with guns or arrows, some of which are accompanied by blood spurts and injury detail.
**Language:** The film contains some strong language (eg 'f**k').
**Additional issues:** There is also some moderate threat, and a scene in which a woman is briefly threatened with rape by two men who are killed before they can assault her. There are also infrequent moderate sex references.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-book-of-eli-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mji3ndm)).*
================================================================================
## Sherlock Holmes (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-sherlock-holmes
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-sherlock-holmes.md
- published: 2010-01-12
- document_id: 1019
> Guy Ritchie drags Conan Doyle's detective off the armchair and into the bareknuckle ring, and Robert Downey Jr gives him a manic charm that carries the whole thing. Not the Holmes of the deerstalker, but a thoroughly entertaining one. 8/10.
- **UK release:** December 2009
- **Director:** Guy Ritchie · **Writers:** Michael Robert Johnson; Anthony Peckham; Simon Kinberg
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Village Roadshow; Silver Pictures
- **Genre:** Period action mystery / adventure · **Runtime:** 128 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Robert Downey Jr (*Iron Man*, *Chaplin*) as Sherlock Holmes; Jude Law (*The Talented Mr Ripley*, *Cold Mountain*) as Dr John Watson; Rachel McAdams (*The Notebook*, *Mean Girls*) as Irene Adler; Mark Strong (*Stardust*, *RocknRolla*) as Lord Blackwood
- **IMDb:** 7.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 69% critics / 77% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
The Holmes most of us grew up with sat by the fire in a deerstalker, all cold cerebral calm, whether that was Basil Rathbone being clipped about it or Jeremy Brett making a chilly art of it. Guy Ritchie has other ideas. The man who gave us *Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels* and *Snatch* has taken the most famous detective in English fiction, kept the brilliance and the boredom and the cocaine habit Conan Doyle actually wrote, and bolted on a pair of fists. The result is a Holmes who solves the crime and then wins the fight, and the surprise is how well the two halves sit together.
## The setup
Holmes and Watson put a stop to Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), an aristocrat dabbling in ritual murder and dark theatre, and Blackwood goes to the gallows for it. Then he appears to climb back out of his own grave. London panics, the newspapers froth, and a city already nervous about secret societies and the strange new powers of the industrial age starts to believe a dead man is walking. Holmes does not believe in the supernatural, which leaves him the harder job of working out how a hanged man returns, who profits from the fear, and what the trick is meant to distract everyone from. Watson, meanwhile, is trying to get engaged and move out, which Holmes treats as the real outrage.
## The cast
Robert Downey Jr is the engine here. Fresh off making *Iron Man* a global concern, he plays Holmes as a twitchy, unwashed, half-feral genius, brilliant and insufferable in roughly equal measure, forever three moves ahead of the room and visibly bored by how slow everyone else is. He keeps an English accent and, more impressively, keeps it interesting. Jude Law's Watson is the quiet triumph of the film. Rather than the bumbling sidekick of decades of adaptation, this is a competent ex-army surgeon with a temper and a gambling habit, a man who can hold a gun and hold his own, and the friction between the two of them, half marriage, half feud, is the thing the film runs on. Rachel McAdams brings a knowing slipperiness to Irene Adler, the one person clever enough to rob Holmes, and Mark Strong does his reliable line in soft-spoken menace as Blackwood. Eddie Marsan's exasperated Lestrade rounds it out.
## The craft
Ritchie's London is all soot and fog and half-built bridges, a city in the middle of becoming modern and not sure it likes it. Philippe Rousselot shoots it in browns and greys with the grime left in, and the production design leans hard into the machinery of the age, the chemistry, the early electricity, the sense that science itself is the new dark art. Ritchie cannot resist his tricks, the slow-motion fight breakdowns where Holmes narrates each blow before he throws it, the snap zooms, the speed-ramping he has used since his crime films, and a couple of them are showing off. Mostly they earn their place because they externalise the one thing screen Holmes always struggles with: deduction is internal, and here you finally see the man think. Hans Zimmer's score is the other quiet pleasure, a scratchy, broken-down barrelhouse sound built on detuned banjo and piano that sounds like nothing else he has done and fits the gaslit scruffiness perfectly. It is a film I would happily put on again just for how it moves and sounds.
## How it stacks up
The obvious yardstick is the reverent tradition, Rathbone and Brett, and on that measure the purists have a case: this is not a film much interested in the armchair and the magnifying glass. But the better comparison is the *Pirates of the Caribbean* school of loud, witty, slightly anachronistic period adventure, and against that lot it is sharper and better cast. Set it beside Ritchie's own crime capers and you can see the same DNA, the same loyalty to a double act, the same delight in a plan clicking into place, only here aimed at a property big enough to hold it. The mystery itself is the weakest link, a touch mechanical once the occult curtain comes down, but the chemistry papers over a lot.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critics are split down the middle, sitting around 69%, with audiences a fair bit warmer at 77%. The recurring complaint is that Ritchie has muscled the mystery out of the way to make an action film, and that a brawling, wisecracking Holmes betrays the character. There is something in the first half of that and very little in the second. Conan Doyle's Holmes was a boxer, a swordsman and a brawler as well as a thinker, so the fists are less of an invention than the deerstalker purists assume. The audience gap tells the real story: people are enjoying this more than the reviews suggest they should, and I am with the audience.
## Verdict
This is a film that knows exactly what it is and commits to it. The plot is the least of it, but the two leads are so good together, and the world so richly grubby, that I did not much care. It is funny, it looks and sounds terrific, and it solves the oldest problem in adapting Holmes by giving you a reason to watch him think. I would rewatch it tomorrow, mostly for Downey and Law sniping at each other across that filthy Baker Street. Not the definitive Holmes, but easily the most fun one in years. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas from Boxing Day. Worth catching on a big screen for the London of it.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the chemistry paid off in a sequel, *Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows* (2011), which sent Holmes and Watson across Europe against Moriarty and leaned even harder into the action. It is a bigger, noisier film that some prefer and others think loses the grimy charm of the first; I land on the original being the tighter watch. The pair has settled into its reputation as the entertaining, divisive reinvention that proved there was life in Holmes on the big screen beyond reverent costume drama. Both films are widely available on disc and digital and rotate through the streaming services.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Summary:** SHERLOCK HOLMES is an action adventure story about a famous British detective and his sidekick solving a complicated case in which an aristocrat has apparently come back from the dead to wreak havoc in 19th century London. It was passed 12A for moderate violence.
**Violence:** There are several scenes of moderate violence in the film. These include some sequences early on in which Sherlock Holmes demonstrates his quick thinking to the viewer by describing how he is going to disable his opponents and then executing a series of precision moves such as targeted punches and ear claps. He does this when attempting to stop a murder taking place and in a bareknuckle boxing ring when the other fighter refuses to accept Holmes leaving the match. Though they have some impact, we see punches land in slow motion for example, the emphasis is on Holmes super-human quick thinking rather than a relish in inflicting pain and injury. Elsewhere there are some moments of action violence, including brief fights, sight of characters in danger and impressive explosions. At 12A the BBFC Guidelines state that moderate violence is allowed but should not dwell on detail. There should be no emphasis on injuries or blood, but occasional gory moments may be permitted if justified by the context. Within the context of this fantastical, historical action movie the violence could be contained.
**Horror:** SHERLOCK HOLMES also includes some mild to moderate horror images, including a corpse in a coffin and a man being boiled in his own bath, which are quite grim but contain no strong detail or periods of sustained terror, and sight of Holmes hanging with a noose round his neck as he shows Watson how a man faked his own death. There is no glamorisation of dangerous behaviour that young children are likely to copy, and it is made clear that hanging is not a game and something which could be fatal. There is also a scene where Holmes is drugged and then left tied up in a hotel room naked.
**Language:** The work also includes some very mild language such damn and God which could be contained at U and sight of Holmes smoking an old fashioned pipe which is not glamorous and reflects the period in which the work is set.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/sherlock-holmes-film-qxnzzxq6vlgtoty2mzc2)), cinema classification dated 02/12/2009. Content Advice quoted from the BBFC's ratings info for this release.*
================================================================================
## Avatar (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-avatar
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-avatar.md
- published: 2009-12-26
- document_id: 1015
> James Cameron returns from a twelve-year absence with an old story and a brand new planet. The plot is borrowed, the world is not, and on sheer immersion it is close to the top of the genre. 9/10.
- **UK release:** December 2009
- **Director:** James Cameron · **Writer:** James Cameron
- **Studio / distributor:** 20th Century Fox; Lightstorm Entertainment
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / ecological epic · **Runtime:** 162 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Sam Worthington (*Terminator Salvation*) as Jake Sully; Zoe Saldaña (*Star Trek*, *Pirates of the Caribbean*) as Neytiri; Sigourney Weaver (*Alien*, *Aliens*) as Dr Grace Augustine; Stephen Lang (*Tombstone*, *Public Enemies*) as Colonel Miles Quaritch
- **IMDb:** 7.9 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 81% critics / 82% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
By December 2009, James Cameron had been away from narrative cinema for twelve years, ever since *Titanic* became the most successful film ever made and then, for a while, the most mocked. *Avatar* arrives with the weight of all that, and with an open secret attached to it: the plot is old. What nobody has reckoned with is that Cameron spent the gap not writing a cleverer story but building a planet, and it is the planet you come out talking about.
## The setup
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paralysed former Marine, is sent to the moon Pandora, where a mining corporation is stripping the place for profit and using lab-grown Na'vi bodies, the avatars of the title, to walk among its ten-foot blue inhabitants. Jake drives one of these bodies, falls in with the Na'vi, and finds himself caught between the people paying him and the world he is starting to understand. If that sounds like *Dances with Wolves* with a tail, or *Pocahontas* in space, you are not wrong, and I will come back to why it does not matter as much as you would expect.
## The cast
The cast is built sensibly around the technology rather than fighting it. Worthington is the audience's way in, an everyman with just enough chip on his shoulder. The real performance is Zoe Saldaña's Neytiri, delivered entirely through performance capture, and it is the film's quiet proof of concept: a fully digital character who carries genuine feeling. Sigourney Weaver, reunited with her *Aliens* director, gives Dr Grace Augustine the scientific and moral backbone, while Stephen Lang's Colonel Quaritch is exactly the kind of unrepentant company-man villain this sort of film needs, with no interest in being misunderstood.
## The craft
Where *Avatar* earns its reputation is in the craft. Mauro Fiore's cinematography and the bioluminescent night-time Pandora look extraordinary, and the 3D, so often a gimmick bolted on in post, is for once designed into the image from the start. Cameron has always been an engineer first, and the absorbing thing here is how completely the world hangs together: the floating mountains, the neural link the Na'vi share with their world, the slow logic of how everything connects. James Horner's score does the emotional heavy lifting the dialogue sometimes cannot. Two and a half hours should drag; it does not, because the film keeps showing you something you have not seen.
## How it stacks up
The comparisons run two ways. Back to *Aliens* and *The Abyss*, where Cameron first married hard science fiction to real feeling and real stakes, and outward to the colonial-encounter stories the plot openly borrows from. The forward comparison is the more interesting one: this is the film every other studio is now going to be trying to reverse-engineer, the one that finally makes the case for 3D as something more than a ticket-price surcharge.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The reception has been slightly grudging. Critics are sitting around 81%, audiences a touch higher at 82%, and the recurring line is that the film is a greater technical achievement than a storytelling one. That is fair as far as it goes. The script is the least surprising thing in the film. But it misreads what the film is for. *Avatar* is not trying to tell you a story you have never heard. It is trying to take you somewhere you have never been, and on that count it succeeds more completely than almost anything else in the genre.
## Verdict
This is why my own number sits comfortably above the consensus. I value world-building, atmosphere and the sheer pleasure of being immersed, and on all three this is close to the top of the pile. Yes, the plot is borrowed. The characters never get much beyond their function. None of that survives contact with Pandora at full size and full volume. It is the kind of film you will want to see again, it works completely as the genre spectacle it sets out to be, and it is the clearest argument I know for seeing the right film on the biggest screen you can find. **9/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in 3D, on the biggest IMAX screen you can get to.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the interesting comparison now is with its own sequel, *Avatar: The Way of Water* (2022), which doubled down on the underwater world-building and proved the formula was no fluke. The film has settled into its reputation as the blockbuster that finally made 3D matter. It is now widely available on disc and digital, with periodic cinema re-releases tied to each new sequel, and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, threat, language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are battle scenes in which characters are killed or injured. There is sight of arrows piercing bodies, and heavy kicks and punches. A fantastical creature is repeatedly stabbed.
**Threat and horror:** Battle scenes are prolonged and intense, and feature threat to heroic characters.
**Language:** There is moderate bad language ('bitch'), as well as milder terms such as 'ass', 'piss', 'shit', 'screw', 'nuts', 'dick', 'crap', 'balls', 'bastard', 'freaking', 'damn', 'God', 'butt', 'hell' and 'Jesus'.
**Additional issues:** There are mild comic sex references, such as to "finding tail", as well as other innuendo. Discrimination includes a soldier referring to a comrade in a wheelchair as "meals on wheels" and "just wrong". Characters smoke cigarettes.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/avatar-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mje5nza)).*
================================================================================
## The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-imaginarium-of-doctor-parnassus
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-imaginarium-of-doctor-parnassus.md
- published: 2009-11-03
- document_id: 1196
> Terry Gilliam loses his leading man halfway through and turns the disaster into the design. The story is a tangle, the images are inexhaustible, and on sheer invention it earns its keep. 8/10.
- **UK release:** October 2009
- **Director:** Terry Gilliam · **Writers:** Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown
- **Studio / distributor:** Davis Films; Infinity Features; Lionsgate UK
- **Genre:** Fantasy adventure / surreal drama · **Runtime:** 123 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Christopher Plummer (*The Sound of Music*) as Doctor Parnassus; Heath Ledger (*Brokeback Mountain*) as Tony; Johnny Depp (*Edward Scissorhands*, *Pirates of the Caribbean*) as one Tony; Jude Law (*The Talented Mr Ripley*) as one Tony; Colin Farrell (*Minority Report*, *In Bruges*) as one Tony; Lily Cole (*St Trinian's*) as Valentina
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 64% critics / 60% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Terry Gilliam has spent his whole career picking fights he cannot win, and the wreckage of those fights is half the legend: the runaway budget of *The Adventures of Baron Munchausen*, the insurance-claim collapse of his Don Quixote film, the constant sense that the universe has it in for him personally. *The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus* is the one where the catastrophe arrived mid-shoot and could not be rescheduled around. Heath Ledger died with the film half made. What a sensible production would have done is shut down. What Gilliam did, with the help of three friends who flew in for nothing, was fold the loss into the fabric of the thing, and the result is the closest he has come in years to a film that feels both broken and whole at once.
## The setup
Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is an ageing showman dragging a ramshackle theatre wagon through modern London, offering passers-by a mirror they can step through into a landscape built out of their own imaginations. The catch is that Parnassus made a wager with the Devil, here a soft-spoken Mr Nick (Tom Waits), centuries ago, and the bill is coming due: on her sixteenth birthday his daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) is forfeit. Into this rolls Tony (Heath Ledger), a charming stranger the troupe cut down from a noose under a bridge, who has reasons of his own for keeping his past vague and who starts reshaping the whole enterprise the moment he arrives. Each trip through the mirror changes the man who takes it, which is the conceit that lets the film carry on after its leading actor cannot.
## The cast
Plummer is the anchor, and he plays Parnassus as a man worn down to the grain, mournful and a little ridiculous, a magician who has outlived his own magic. Tom Waits gives the Devil a wonderfully relaxed menace, less interested in winning than in keeping the game going, because the game is the only company he has. The much-discussed solution to Ledger's death turns out to be the film's strangest grace note: when Tony passes through the mirror he is played in turn by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell, each of them taking a different facet of the same slippery man. Depp brings the seductive ease, Law the manic energy, Farrell the cornered desperation as the truth closes in. It should feel like a patch job. Instead the changing face becomes a comment on Tony himself, a man with no fixed self to lose. Cole is the weakest link, more a stake to be fought over than a character, but Andrew Garfield's lovesick Anton gives the troupe a beating heart.
## The craft
Nobody alive composes a frame quite like Gilliam, and the dream-world sequences are him off the leash: collapsing perspectives, vast paper landscapes, ladders climbing into nothing, the cheerful ugliness of a fairground that might eat you. Nicola Pecorini's camera keeps the grubby London exteriors low and damp so the imaginarium can blaze by contrast. The Danna brothers' score moves between music-hall jollity and something colder underneath. It is not seamless work, the digital seams show and the wager plot keeps tripping over its own rules, but the sheer rate of invention papers over a great deal. You forgive a film a lot when every few minutes it hands you an image you have never seen before.
## How it stacks up
This belongs unmistakably with the run of Gilliam pictures about imagination as both salvation and trap. *Time Bandits* and *Baron Munchausen* are the obvious cousins, fellow fables of storytellers staving off the dark by spinning tales, and *Brazil* lurks behind all of it in the way the drab real world is the true nightmare and the fantasy is the escape hatch. Set against the slicker fantasy of its moment, this is the scruffier, more handmade thing, closer in spirit to a stage illusion than a render farm. It shares some DNA with *MirrorMask* too, another film about a girl and a looking-glass world, but Gilliam's is the rowdier, more dangerous version.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The notices are mixed, and the split is the familiar Gilliam one. Critics are sitting around 64%, audiences a shade lower at 60%, and the recurring complaint is that the story is a shambles, that the rules of the wager never quite cohere, that imagination has once again run ahead of discipline. That is all true. The film is a mess. What the complaint undervalues is how much pleasure the mess contains, and how neatly the casting accident has been turned from a wound into a device. There is also a layer the reviews cannot help reading into it, the sight of Ledger walking and talking, which lends the whole thing a melancholy no script could have written in.
## Verdict
I came out of this charmed rather than satisfied, which with Gilliam is usually the right outcome to hope for. The plotting is loose, the emotional stakes never fully land, and a tidier director would have wrestled the third act into shape. None of that is what I will remember. I value world-building, atmosphere and the kind of film that rewards a second look, and this one is stuffed with corners I want to go back and stare at again. It is a generous, defiant, beautiful shambles, and the way it absorbs its own tragedy without exploiting it is the most graceful thing about it. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On release in UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray to follow.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus* has settled in as the film that turned a production catastrophe into a curio, the title most people reach for when they want to talk about Heath Ledger's last work alongside *The Dark Knight*. Gilliam went on to finally complete his long-cursed *The Man Who Killed Don Quixote* in 2018, closing the loop on the disaster-prone reputation this film extended. It is widely available on disc and through the usual digital rental and purchase services, and turns up periodically on streaming platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *infrequent strong language, scenes of threat, hanging and smoking*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Threat and horror:** Much of the film concerns characters being chased or scared, and there are also scenes in which people see bizarre creatures in the Imaginarium. There are also scenes in which people are punched or slapped, and one in which a teenage girl delivers heavy blows to an man who is trying to molest her. However, there is limited detail.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f***k'), as well as some milder bad language (for example, 'bitch', 'bastard', 'bollocks', 'tits').
**Suicide and self-harm:** In one prolonged scene, a character swings by the neck from a rope under a bridge, seemingly having tried to commit suicide. However, the person is eventually rescued. There is also a scene in which a man is chased by an angry mob, who intend to hang him.
**Additional issues:** There are also some scenes in which a teenager smokes cigarettes; however, these scenes are brief and there is no discussion of the habit. Sex references in the film include a fifteen year-old girl posing nude on stage during a show; however, all nudity is covered by her hair and limbs. There is also a scene in which a man and woman sleep together; however, there is no strong detail.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-imaginarium-of-doctor-parnassus-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mje2ndi)).*
================================================================================
## District 9 (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-district-9
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-district-9.md
- published: 2009-09-16
- document_id: 1016
> A first-time director, a Peter Jackson cheque, and a mothership parked over Johannesburg. District 9 smuggles a furious apartheid allegory inside a mock-documentary action film, and the trick mostly comes off. 8/10.
- **UK release:** September 2009
- **Director:** Neill Blomkamp · **Writers:** Neill Blomkamp; Terri Tatchell
- **Studio / distributor:** TriStar Pictures; WingNut Films; QED International
- **Genre:** Science fiction action thriller / social allegory · **Runtime:** 112 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Sharlto Copley as Wikus van de Merwe; Jason Cope as Christopher Johnson; David James as Koobus Venter; Vanessa Haywood as Tania van de Merwe
- **IMDb:** 7.9 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 82% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
This is the film Peter Jackson made instead of *Halo*. When that video-game adaptation collapsed, Jackson handed his unknown South African collaborator, Neill Blomkamp, a reported thirty million dollars and told him to go and make something of his own. What Blomkamp made is a science fiction film that does what the genre keeps promising and rarely delivers: it uses the aliens to talk about us. The mothership hangs over Johannesburg rather than New York or London, and that choice of city does most of the heavy lifting. A film about a segregated, fenced-off underclass, shot in the country that invented the word apartheid, was never going to be subtle. It does not need to be.
## The setup
Twenty years ago an alien ship drifted to a halt over Johannesburg and then simply stopped, its million-odd occupants malnourished and leaderless inside. Two decades on, the survivors are penned into a slum called District 9, despised by the locals, called "prawns" as a slur, and policed by a private contractor, Multinational United, whose real interest is the alien weaponry it cannot work out how to fire. Wikus van de Merwe, a mid-level MNU functionary, is put in charge of serving eviction notices ahead of a forced relocation. Somewhere in a District 9 shack he is exposed to a canister of alien fluid, and from that point the film stops being about the prawns and starts being about what his own employers are willing to do to him.
## The cast
Sharlto Copley had never acted before this, and you would not guess it. His Wikus begins as a grinning, paper-shuffling company man, the sort who films himself handing out eviction papers and chuckles at his own jokes, and Copley lets you watch that smugness curdle into terror and then something close to grace. It is a brave performance precisely because Wikus is not likeable; he is a small, complicit cog, and the film makes you follow him anyway. Jason Cope gives the alien Christopher Johnson, rendered through effects, a quiet paternal dignity that quietly shames every human in the frame. David James plays the MNU mercenary Koobus Venter as pure, unbothered brutality, the apartheid-era enforcer reborn in body armour. Vanessa Haywood, as Wikus's wife Tania, anchors the small domestic stakes that keep his ordeal from being merely a chase.
## The craft
Blomkamp opens in full mockumentary mode: talking heads, news inserts, CCTV, handheld surveillance footage, all assembled as though after the fact. It should not hold for nearly two hours, and the seams do show when the format quietly drops away for conventional action in the second half. What carries it is the texture. The District 9 township looks lived-in and filthy and real, the alien design is grimy and functional rather than sleek, and Trent Opaloch's camera treats the prawns as documentary subjects rather than monsters. The effects work, from Jackson's Weta shop, is extraordinary value for the budget and never preens. Clinton Shorter's score leans on African vocals that give the carnage a mournful, rooted quality. The violence, when it lands, is sudden and wet and unglamorous.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is *Alien Nation*, which also dropped a stranded alien underclass into a real city, though Blomkamp is far angrier and far less interested in buddy-cop reassurance. The satirical streak, corporate ghouls, gleeful media, weapons that turn people inside out, is pure *RoboCop*, transplanted from Verhoeven's Detroit to Blomkamp's Johannesburg. And the grey, overcast, near-future grimness sits close to *Children of Men*, another film that makes science fiction feel like the evening news. Where *Starship Troopers* hid its politics behind a knowing wink, *District 9* puts the allegory right on the fence posts and dares you to look away.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it strongly, sitting around 90%, with most of the praise going to the apartheid framing, the documentary nerve, and Copley. Audiences are a little cooler at 82%, and I suspect that gap is the second-half handbrake turn: viewers drawn by the ideas can feel the film trade its mockumentary intelligence for mech-suit shootouts. That tonal swerve is the one real flaw, and it is worth naming. But the action half is well staged and the ideas do not evaporate when the guns come out, so the join bothers me less than it bothers some.
## Verdict
This is intelligent, furious, original science fiction made for a fraction of what the genre usually costs, and it understands that the most unsettling thing you can show an audience is not the alien but the bureaucrat with the clipboard. It loses a little of its documentary daring when it shifts into straight action, and Wikus is a hard man to spend two hours beside. Against that, it has a debut performance worth the ticket, a setting no other film would have dared, and the rare quality of leaving you arguing about it afterwards. It rewards a rewatch, because the early mockumentary section is denser than it first looks. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, on a 15 certificate. Worth catching on a big screen while the township still feels that close.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Blomkamp went on to make *Elysium* (2013) and *Chappie* (2015), both of which chase the same blend of grubby near-future texture and social allegory with diminishing returns, which has only sharpened the sense that *District 9* caught lightning in a bottle. A long-promised sequel, *District 10*, has been talked about for years without materialising. The film is now widely available on Blu-ray, 4K disc and digital, and streams on various platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *one use of very strong language and strong bloody violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are scenes of violence between aliens and humans, some of which include blood spurts and sight of characters exploding or having heads or limbs ripped off.
**Threat and horror:** There are scenes of threat, including when unarmed aliens are killed during weapons testing.
**Language:** There is frequent use of strong language ('f\*\*k') and infrequent use of very strong language ('c\*\*t').
**Sex:** There are some moderate sex references, including to 'inter-species prostituition' and to the use of condoms. There is no sight of sexual activity.
**Injury detail:** When a man mutates there is disturbing sight of changes to his body, including him vomitting blood and his finger nails falling out.
**Disturbing images:** Alien eggs are burned, causing the baby aliens to scream. This is referred to as 'abortion'.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adults drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/district-9-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mtk5mtc)).*
================================================================================
## The Hurt Locker (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-hurt-locker
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-hurt-locker.md
- published: 2009-08-29
- document_id: 1023
> Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq bomb-disposal thriller is the most acclaimed war film of the year, and I came away cold. Brilliantly shot, well acted, and for me an exhausting watch I have no wish to repeat. 5/10.
- **UK release:** August 2009
- **Director:** Kathryn Bigelow · **Writer:** Mark Boal
- **Studio / distributor:** Voltage Pictures; Grosvenor Park Media; First Light; Kingsgate Films
- **Genre:** War thriller / psychological drama · **Runtime:** 131 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Jeremy Renner (*28 Weeks Later*, *S.W.A.T.*) as Staff Sergeant William James; Anthony Mackie (*8 Mile*, *Half Nelson*) as Sergeant J. T. Sanborn; Brian Geraghty (*Jarhead*) as Specialist Owen Eldridge; Guy Pearce (*Memento*, *L.A. Confidential*) as Staff Sergeant Matt Thompson
- **IMDb:** 7.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 97% critics / 84% audience · **My rating:** 5 / 10
Kathryn Bigelow has spent a career making films that move: *Point Break*, *Strange Days*, the kinetic action cinema that critics tended to file under guilty pleasure. *The Hurt Locker* is the film that flips the consensus. Mark Boal, who embedded with a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq, hands her a screenplay built not on plot but on dread, and the reviews coming back from the festival circuit are the kind that retire arguments. Best Iraq film yet. The war picture that finally finds its register. I went in expecting to be gripped. I came out admiring the work and feeling nothing I wanted to feel again, which is an awkward thing to report about the most praised film of the year.
## The setup
A US Army explosive ordnance disposal team works Baghdad in the dying weeks of a rotation, defusing roadside bombs while a watching crowd may or may not hold the man with the trigger. When their leader is killed, in comes Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), a technician of obvious genius and no visible fear, who treats each device less as a problem to survive than as a fix to chase. His recklessness rattles Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who would like to go home alive, and frightens Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), who is quietly coming apart. The film is structured as a run of set pieces, a countdown of days left in country, each one a fresh way to be killed.
## The cast
Renner is the reason the film holds together, and he is genuinely good: watchful, unshowy, carrying a man who is only fully alive at the moment of maximum danger. It is a performance built on stillness rather than speeches, and it makes James legible without ever quite making him likeable. Mackie gives Sanborn the film's moral ballast, the professional who keeps doing the sums while his sergeant ignores them, and Geraghty's Eldridge is the rawest nerve on screen. Bigelow salts the margins with bigger faces to unsettling effect, Guy Pearce establishing the stakes early and Ralph Fiennes turning up in the desert as a private contractor, both used to remind you that recognition guarantees nobody a second scene.
## The craft
Nobody should doubt the craftsmanship. Barry Ackroyd shoots on multiple cameras in restless, grainy long lenses, so that every defusal becomes a study in sightlines, who is watching, what is in the windows, where the wire runs. Bigelow stretches these sequences past comfort and knows exactly when to cut, and the bomb-suit walk down a wired street is as tense as anything in cinemas this year. The sound design puts you inside the helmet. Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders keep the score to a low industrial hum that barely registers as music. On pure technique it is close to flawless, and that is not in dispute here.
## How it stacks up
The obvious shelf-mates are *Jarhead*, which found boredom where this finds adrenaline, and *Black Hawk Down*, all kinetic chaos with the politics filed off. *The Hurt Locker* is the more disciplined film than either, narrower and more controlled, less interested in the war than in one man's relationship to fear. It plays closest to the procedural tension of something like *United 93*, the same documentary immediacy, the same refusal of comfort. Where it loses me is exactly where those comparisons help it with everyone else: the procedural mode that critics call rigorous I find airless, a string of brilliantly mounted threats strung on a thesis about addiction that the famous opening title card states outright and the film then spends two hours illustrating.
## Critics versus the rest of us
This is where I have to be honest about standing nearly alone. Critics are at 97%, the kind of number that does not happen by accident, and the broadsheets are calling it one of the year's best with real conviction. Audiences are warmer than me too, sitting around 84%. I do not think they are wrong about the filmmaking. I think the film and I simply want different things from two hours in the dark. I value a film I will return to, characters who deepen, a world I want to stay inside. *The Hurt Locker* offers none of that by design. It is built to grind you down, and it succeeded, and I disliked the experience of being ground down even while I could see how well the machine was made.
## Verdict
So this is the hardest sort of review to write, the one where the craft is beyond reproach and the personal verdict still comes in low. Renner is excellent, Bigelow's control of suspense is the real thing, and I would not argue with anyone who calls it the best-made war film of the year. But a film has to do more for me than earn my respect, and on enjoyment and on any wish to see it again it failed completely. It is tense without being pleasurable, accomplished without being moving, and I have no intention of putting myself back through it. I can admire the work and still not want it in my life. **5/10.**
**Availability:** On limited release in UK cinemas now, expanding through the autumn, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The Hurt Locker* went on to win six Academy Awards in March 2010, including Best Picture and a Best Director Oscar for Kathryn Bigelow, the first won by a woman, beating *Avatar* in a contest that became the story of the ceremony. Bigelow and Mark Boal reunited for *Zero Dark Thirty* (2012), a bigger and, to my eye, more gripping film on related ground. My own low score has not moved with the trophies; I respect the achievement and still have no wish to rewatch it. It now streams across the usual platforms depending on region and is widely available on disc, including a 4K restoration.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language, gory images*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is brief sight of blood spurts during shootings.
**Threat and horror:** Some scenes are tense as the soldiers deal with defusing bombs and the surrounding combat.
**Language:** There is frequent use of strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker'), as well as milder terms.
**Sex:** There are some moderate verbal sex references, including a reference to porn DVDs and to a man visiting a brothel.
**Discrimination:** There is use of discriminatory language, including the 'n' word.
**Injury detail:** In one scene, a member of the bomb disposal team re-opens the torso of a dead boy and removes the explosives that turned his corpse into a weapon. There is also sight of injured people following explosions, as well as severed body parts.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adults smoke and drink.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-hurt-locker-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc0znjm3mjm)).*
================================================================================
## The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-taking-of-pelham-123
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-taking-of-pelham-123.md
- published: 2009-08-14
- document_id: 1217
> Tony Scott remakes a 1974 New York hostage thriller as a loud, sweaty showdown between Denzel Washington's tired dispatcher and John Travolta's ranting villain. The original was leaner, but this one moves. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** August 2009
- **Director:** Tony Scott · **Writer:** Brian Helgeland
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; MGM; Scott Free; Escape Artists
- **Genre:** Hostage thriller · **Runtime:** 106 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Denzel Washington (*Training Day*, *Man on Fire*) as Walter Garber; John Travolta (*Pulp Fiction*, *Face/Off*) as Ryder; John Turturro (*Barton Fink*, *The Big Lebowski*) as Lieutenant Camonetti; Luis Guzmán (*Traffic*, *Boogie Nights*) as Phil Ramos; James Gandolfini (*The Sopranos*) as the Mayor
- **IMDb:** 6.4 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 51% critics / 52% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Remaking *The Taking of Pelham One Two Three* is a curious thing to attempt. The 1974 original, with Walter Matthau in a brown suit and Robert Shaw running the heist in a bowler hat, is one of those lean, sour, perfectly engineered New York thrillers that needed no improving. So the question hanging over this version is the one that hangs over every Tony Scott picture: not whether it can match the model, but whether the man who made *Crimson Tide* and *Man on Fire* can do enough with colour, noise and momentum to make you forget that a quieter, tighter film already exists. He mostly can.
## The setup
A southbound number 6 train, the Pelham 123 of the title, is stopped dead in the tunnel and one of its cars uncoupled and seized by four armed men. Their leader, who calls himself Ryder, gets on the radio and names his price: ten million dollars, delivered within the hour, or he starts shooting hostages. The man who happens to pick up the call is Walter Garber, a transit dispatcher with a demotion hanging over him and a bribery investigation circling his name. Garber is no negotiator and never wanted to be one, but Ryder decides he likes talking to him, and the city's response to the crisis ends up routed through a tired civil servant at a console. The clock and the cash do the rest.
## The cast
Denzel Washington plays Garber thickened, greying and slightly defeated, a long way from his sharper screen heroes, and that choice anchors the film. He spends most of it sitting down, talking into a microphone, and he makes that compelling, which not many actors could. Across the line is John Travolta, who attacks Ryder with everything he has: neck tattoos, a walrus moustache, a torrent of profanity and a philosophy-of-the-markets monologue that nearly runs away from him. It is a big, theatrical, occasionally silly performance, and the film lives or dies on whether Washington's restraint can hold it down. It can. John Turturro brings a watchful weariness as the police negotiator sidelined by the dispatcher Ryder actually trusts, Luis Guzmán adds grimy texture to the crew, and James Gandolfini's harried mayor supplies the political weather. The cast is plainly stronger than the material, and the film is wise to let them carry it.
## The craft
This is Tony Scott in full late-period mode, and your tolerance for the film tracks fairly closely with your tolerance for that style. The camera never settles, the colour grade is pushed to orange and steel, captions stamp the screen, the edit punches between angles, and Harry Gregson-Williams lays down a propulsive score under all of it. When the ransom money is rushed across Manhattan by police convoy, Scott turns a simple errand into a car-chase set piece, complete with a pile-up the plot did not strictly need. Some of this is showing off. But the energy is real, the geography of the underground stand-off stays clear, and the 106 minutes move. After the airless drift of some hostage thrillers, a director this committed to forward motion is no bad thing.
## How it stacks up
The 1974 film is the obvious yardstick, and on tautness and bleak wit the original wins. Joseph Sargent's version trusted silence and a colder ending; this one would rather you never had a quiet second. Set against Scott's own catalogue, it sits a notch below *Crimson Tide* and *Man on Fire*, sharing their star and their appetite for pressure but lacking their stakes. The better recent comparison is *Inside Man*, where Washington also worked a siege from the outside in, and *Speed*, another single-location countdown built on a transport system and a madman's deadline. Pelham has less wit than the first and less novelty than the second, but it belongs in their company as a competent, watchable example of the form.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Reviews are split down the middle, with Rotten Tomatoes parking critics and audiences both around the halfway mark. The recurring complaint is fair enough: the remake trades the original's lean menace for hyperactive surface, and Travolta's villain is louder than he is frightening. I take the point and still rate it higher than the consensus does. The film knows what it is, it is anchored by two actors clearly enjoying the duel, and it never bores. For a city-under-pressure thriller meant to be devoured on a wet evening, those are the things that count.
## Verdict
This is not the equal of the film it is remaking, and it is not pretending to be. What it offers is Denzel Washington doing a great deal with very little, John Travolta cheerfully chewing the scenery opposite him, and Tony Scott driving the whole thing forward with more craft than the script deserves. It is loud, glossy, a touch overcooked, and genuinely entertaining, the sort of thriller that holds you the first time and rewards a second, lazier watch. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** In UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow later this year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: this was one of Tony Scott's last films before *Unstoppable* (2010), his final collaboration with Washington, which reworked the runaway-train idea into something leaner and arguably better. The Pelham remake has settled into its reputation as solid mid-tier Scott, neither his best nor his worst, and is now widely available on disc and through the usual digital rental and streaming services.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language and violence*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are scenes in which men are repeatedly shot, accompanied by bloody impact wounds.
**Language:** There are several uses of strong language ('f**k').
**Additional issues:** In several scenes, hostages are threatened by armed men.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-taking-of-pelham-123-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mtk5njy)).*
================================================================================
## Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-harry-potter-and-the-half-blood-prince
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-harry-potter-and-the-half-blood-prince.md
- published: 2009-07-21
- document_id: 1094
> The sixth Potter film slows down, darkens the palette and lets its teenagers be teenagers. It is the most handsome film in the series so far and one of the best. 8/10.
- **UK release:** July 2009
- **Director:** David Yates · **Writer:** Steve Kloves
- **Studio / distributor:** Warner Bros.; Heyday Films
- **Genre:** Fantasy adventure / coming-of-age mystery · **Runtime:** 153 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Daniel Radcliffe (*Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix*) as Harry Potter; Rupert Grint (*Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire*) as Ron Weasley; Emma Watson (*Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban*) as Hermione Granger; Michael Gambon (*Gosford Park*, *The Singing Detective*) as Albus Dumbledore; Tom Felton (*The Borrowers*) as Draco Malfoy
- **IMDb:** 7.6 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 84% critics / 78% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Six films in, the Harry Potter series has quietly become the most reliable franchise in British cinema, and *Half-Blood Prince* is the moment it stops pretending to be for children. David Yates, who steadied the ship with *Order of the Phoenix*, stays in the chair, and the confidence shows. This is the entry where the schoolyear plot and the war plot finally start sharing the same room, where the cast have grown into actors rather than child performers, and where the whole thing is photographed as though somebody decided the magic should hurt.
## The setup
Voldemort is no longer a rumour. He is out there, and the wizarding world is losing people. Harry returns to Hogwarts for his sixth year carrying a secondhand potions textbook scrawled with corrections by a previous owner who signs himself the Half-Blood Prince, and the annotations make him, overnight, the best young potioneer in the school. While Harry is enjoying that, Dumbledore takes him aside for a different sort of education: a guided tour through Voldemort's past, assembled from borrowed memories, that is meant to reveal how the man made himself so hard to kill. Around the edges of all this, Draco Malfoy is moving with a new and frightened purpose, tasked with something he cannot tell anyone about.
There is also, this being sixteen-year-olds, a great deal of who fancies whom. The film gives that as much weight as the mythology, and is right to.
## The cast
The trio have arrived. Daniel Radcliffe carries the darker, lonelier Harry without the stiffness that used to creep in, and he is genuinely funny in a sequence involving a stroke of liquid luck. Rupert Grint gets the broadest comedy and lands it, all helpless adolescent bewilderment as two girls compete for his attention. Emma Watson does the hardest work of the three, playing wounded rather than clever for once, and a scene of her crying on a staircase is the most grown-up thing any of them has done in the series.
The adults remain a national-treasure roll call, but this is Michael Gambon's film. His Dumbledore is warmer and more tired here, a mentor visibly spending himself, and Gambon plays the weariness with real tenderness. Tom Felton, given almost nothing to say, builds a haunted, cornered Draco out of silences and shadows, the best thing he has done in the part. Jim Broadbent arrives as Professor Slughorn, a vain, frightened, sherry-warm old snob hiding something, and he is a delight, the rare new addition who feels like he has always been there.
## The craft
Bruno Delbonnel shoots the film in drained silvers and storm-light greys, and it is the best-looking Potter by a distance. Hogwarts has never felt this much like a real, draughty, candlelit building under siege. Yates lets scenes breathe, which is the film's gamble and largely its strength: long stretches of quiet, of corridors and confidences and unspoken dread, punctuated by sudden violence that lands harder for the calm around it. The set pieces, a burning marsh attack on the Burrow, the awful business at the lake near the end, are staged for atmosphere rather than noise. Nicholas Hooper's score knows when to vanish. After the overstuffed earlier films, the restraint is welcome.
## How it stacks up
Against *Order of the Phoenix*, this is the more assured film, less busy and more felt, with Yates trusting the material in a way he could not quite afford to last time. Against *Prisoner of Azkaban*, still the high-water mark for sheer directorial personality, it is a touch less inventive but more emotionally complete. What it most resembles is a very good middle volume of a long novel: it is structurally a bridge, and it knows it. The complaint that it withholds the final confrontation is true and beside the point, because the series has always been a serial, and this is one of its strongest single instalments.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm, sitting around 84%, praising the maturity and the look while noting that the film is a setup for a finale it declines to deliver. Audiences are a little cooler at 78%, and you can guess why: the comparative scarcity of spectacle and the amount of romance will not be what every twelve-year-old came for. I land with the critics and slightly above the crowd. The slower, sadder, more handsome film is the one I want from this material at this stage, and the teenage comedy is not filler, it is the thing that makes the darkness cost something.
## Verdict
This is the Potter film for people who had started to suspect the series was running on brand loyalty. It looks extraordinary, the young cast have finally caught up with the adults, and Gambon and Broadbent give it a melancholy weight. Yes, it is a bridge, and it ends on a held breath rather than a resolution. But it is rewatchable in the way the best of these films are, dense with small pleasures and atmosphere, and it is the moment the franchise earns the grief it is about to ask of us. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, in standard and IMAX. To DVD and Blu-ray later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the two-part *Deathly Hallows* (2010 and 2011) duly delivered the finale this film sets up, and Yates saw the series out, going on to the *Fantastic Beasts* films afterwards. *Half-Blood Prince* has settled in as a fan favourite among the later entries, often singled out for Delbonnel's cinematography. It is now widely available on disc and digital and streams on the relevant Warner platform depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** A character is kicked, leaving blood on his face. After a wand battle, a character has several blood stains on his shirt and blood starts to pool on the floor.
**Threat and horror:** There is moderate threat including a scene in which Harry and Professor Dumbledore are attacked by menacing looking creatures that have emerged from an underground lake. Harry is pulled into the lake and dragged beneath the water.
**Language:** There is mild bad language including 'bloody' and 'tosser'. Milder terms include 'God', 'hell' and 'git'.
**Sex:** There are some very mild sexual references, including to 'snogging'.
**Injury detail:** There is some sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
**Alcohol and smoking:** Adult characters drink alcohol.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/harry-potter-and-the-half-blood-prince-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjazntc)).*
================================================================================
## Moon (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-moon
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-moon.md
- published: 2009-07-18
- document_id: 1018
> Duncan Jones makes his directing debut with a small, patient lunar science fiction film built around one actor and one idea. It is quiet, intelligent and beautifully made, and Sam Rockwell holds it together almost alone. 7.5/10.
- **UK release:** July 2009
- **Director:** Duncan Jones · **Writer:** Nathan Parker; story by Duncan Jones
- **Studio / distributor:** Liberty Films; Xingu Films; Sony Pictures Classics / Stage 6 Films
- **Genre:** Science fiction drama / psychological thriller · **Runtime:** 97 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Sam Rockwell (*Confessions of a Dangerous Mind*, *The Green Mile*) as Sam Bell; Kevin Spacey (*American Beauty*, *The Usual Suspects*) as the voice of GERTY; Dominique McElligott as Tess Bell; Benedict Wong (*Sunshine*) as Thompson
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 90% critics / 89% audience · **My rating:** 7.5 / 10
Science fiction at the moment means money. The genre on cinema screens this year is defined by budgets the size of small nations and frame rates engineered to sell tickets twice. *Moon* arrives from the opposite direction. It is a first feature from Duncan Jones, made for a reported five million dollars on a single soundstage, and it deliberately reaches back past the spectacle era to the thoughtful, lonely science fiction of the 1970s. It belongs in a sentence with *Silent Running* and *Solaris* rather than with anything currently opening on the screen next door, and that lineage is worn openly and earned.
## The setup
Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is coming to the end of a three-year solo contract on the far side of the Moon, where he oversees an automated operation harvesting helium-3 to power a depleted Earth. His only company is GERTY, the base computer, voiced by Kevin Spacey with unnerving calm. The pattern of his days has worn smooth: maintain the harvesters, send the canisters home, count down to a reunion with his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott) and the daughter he has only seen on video. Then his health starts to fail, an accident out on the surface goes wrong, and the orderly fiction of his last weeks begins to come apart. The less said about what he finds, the better, because the film unfolds its central idea as a slow, controlled reveal rather than a twist sprung for shock.
## The cast
This is very nearly a one-man film, and Rockwell carries it without strain. He is best known for spikier, faster work, the patter and swagger of *Confessions of a Dangerous Mind*, and the surprise here is how much restraint he brings to a man who is exhausted, homesick and quietly coming undone. He has to play loneliness as a physical condition, hold the screen against an empty room, and shade in differences of mood and bearing that the script asks a great deal of, and he never lets the seams show. It is a generous, unshowy performance that anchors everything around it.
The other voice in the room is GERTY, and casting Spacey is the film's sharpest joke and its quiet defence at once. A computer with an array of yellow emoticons for a face and Spacey's measured tone invites you to expect HAL, and *Moon* knows it. What it does with that expectation is the most thoughtful thing in the picture.
## The craft
For a film made on so little, *Moon* looks remarkable. Jones and cinematographer Gary Shaw build the lunar surface with miniatures and models rather than rendered weightlessness, and that tactile, hand-built quality is exactly right for a film in conversation with the practical effects of the era it admires. The base is convincingly lived-in and slightly grubby, a real workplace rather than a showroom. Clint Mansell's score does a great deal of the emotional work, a spare, circling piano figure that carries the ache of the setting without ever pushing. At ninety-seven minutes the film is tight and patient in equal measure, content to sit with its single character and let the idea breathe.
## How it stacks up
The reference points are deliberate. The isolation and the watchful machine come straight from *2001: A Space Odyssey*, the eco-melancholy and the lone caretaker from *Silent Running*, the grief and the unreliable surroundings from *Solaris*. *Moon* is not as profound as the films it nods to, and it is more conventional than it first appears, resolving into a tighter, more plot-driven shape than its meditative opening promises. But it understands what made those films work, the way a contained, low-key science fiction premise can say more about being human than any amount of spectacle, and it puts that understanding to good use. As a calling card for a first-time director it is hard to beat.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, with Rotten Tomatoes sitting around 90%, and audiences are barely a step behind. The praise lands where you would expect: Rockwell's performance, Mansell's score, the loneliness of the setting, the welcome return to ideas over noise. I share most of that and would push back gently on a little of it. The reception treats *Moon* as a minor classic almost on arrival, and I think it is a very good film rather than a great one. The central concept is strong and well handled, but once it is in play the story takes a fairly straight line to its conclusion, and the back half trades some of the eerie ambiguity of the opening for tidier mechanics.
## Verdict
*Moon* is intelligent, atmospheric, beautifully made on a shoestring, and built on a performance that deserves the attention it is getting. It is the kind of science fiction I always want more of, the sort that trusts an audience to sit still and think. What keeps it just short of the top tier, for me, is rewatch value: once you know where it is going, a film this dependent on its central reveal gives a little less back on a second visit, and I admire it more than I love it. As a debut it is genuinely exciting, and as an evening at the cinema it is a quiet, satisfying one. **7.5/10.**
**Availability:** On limited release in UK cinemas now, and worth seeking out on the biggest screen still showing it.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: Duncan Jones followed *Moon* with *Source Code* (2011), another tight, idea-led science fiction film that confirmed the debut was no accident, before the studio scale of *Warcraft* (2016) pulled him in a different direction. *Moon* has held its standing as one of the best low-budget science fiction films of its decade and a benchmark for what a contained premise and a committed lead performance can achieve. It is widely available on Blu-ray and 4K, and streams on the usual platforms depending on region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There is a fight scene in which a man applies a choke hold to another man.
**Threat and horror:** There is an unsettling tone throughout as a man becomes increasingly paranoid and isolated.
**Language:** There is use of strong language ('f**k', 'motherf**ker') throughout, as well as milder terms such as 'bastard', 'shit' and 'crap'.
**Sex:** The film also contains a mild sexual scene, in which a man removes a woman's top before moving on top of her. There are also some mild sex references, including to 'getting laid'.
**Drugs:** There is a brief reference to what a man is smoking, when it's suggested he's not coping.
**Injury detail:** There are some gory images, including when an injured man vomits up blood.
**Nudity:** There is brief buttock nudity as a man showers.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/moon-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00ntcymdm)).*
================================================================================
## Terminator Salvation (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-terminator-salvation
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-terminator-salvation.md
- published: 2009-06-19
- document_id: 1022
> The franchise finally crosses into the future war it has been promising since 1984, and trades time-travel for boots in the ash. The reviews are brutal and the heart is thinner than it should be, but as a piece of post-apocalyptic spectacle it works better than its reputation. 7/10.
- **UK release:** June 2009
- **Director:** McG · **Writers:** John Brancato; Michael Ferris
- **Studio / distributor:** The Halcyon Company; Warner Bros.; Sony Pictures
- **Genre:** Post-apocalyptic science fiction action · **Runtime:** 115 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Christian Bale (*The Dark Knight*, *American Psycho*) as John Connor; Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright; Anton Yelchin (*Alpha Dog*, *Charlie Bartlett*) as Kyle Reese; Moon Bloodgood (*Pathfinder*) as Blair Williams
- **IMDb:** 6.7 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 33% critics / 54% audience · **My rating:** 7 / 10
Every Terminator film so far has been about the future leaking into the present: a machine sent back, a hero sent back, the apocalypse always a rumour glimpsed in flash-forwards and Sarah Connor's nightmares. *Terminator Salvation* does the thing the series has dodged for twenty-five years and plants itself in 2018, in the rubble, after Judgement Day. No time travel, no suburban kitchen, no liquid-metal cop walking through a present that does not know what is coming. This is the war the other films only described, and handing it to McG, of *Charlie's Angels*, looked on paper like a recipe for disaster. It is not the disaster the trailers and the critics have decided it is.
## The setup
It is 2018. Skynet has happened, the bombs have fallen, and what is left of humanity fights as a scattered Resistance under a command structure that John Connor (Christian Bale) does not yet run but is plainly destined to. Into this ash-grey world walks Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a man who wakes with no clear sense of how he got there or what the world has become, and whose path bends inevitably towards Connor's. Skynet, meanwhile, is hunting specific people for reasons that matter to the timeline fans already carry in their heads, chief among them a young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin). I will leave it there, because the one genuine idea the script has is best met cold.
## The cast
Bale plays Connor as clenched, hoarse and permanently furious, which is roughly the only register the part allows. He is not given much to do beyond broadcast grim resolve, and you can feel a serious actor straining against a hero who exists mainly to be prophesied about. The film's real centre is Worthington's Marcus, the outsider trying to work out his own nature, and he carries the human stakes more convincingly than the nominal lead. Worthington has presence and a watchful stillness that the part needs. Yelchin is a clever piece of casting as the young Reese, catching enough of the wiry, motormouth survivor Michael Biehn gave us in 1984 to land the connection without doing an impression. Moon Bloodgood's Blair supplies most of what warmth there is.
## The craft
This is where the film earns its keep. Shane Hurlbut's photography gives the wasteland a bleached, sun-hammered grandeur, all desaturated greys and rust, and the production design builds a believable machine ecology: hunter-killers, towering harvester robots that pluck humans off the ground, motorbike drones that peel off a larger chassis mid-chase. The action is heavy, physical and largely practical-feeling, and one unbroken sequence around a petrol station, staged to look like a single take, is as good as anything the summer has offered. Danny Elfman's score nods to Brad Fiedel's original clanging theme without leaning on it. The intelligence here is in the engineering, not the screenplay, but the series has always been a machine-builder's franchise, so that is not the betrayal it might be elsewhere.
## How it stacks up
The comparisons are unforgiving, because the bar is *The Terminator* and *Terminator 2*, two of the best action films ever made, and nothing here touches them. Cameron's films were lean, frightening and built around a relentless forward pulse; this one is busier and less scary, an ensemble war movie where they were chases. Set against the wider post-apocalyptic field it does better. It owes a clear debt to *Mad Max* in its scavenged, sun-blasted texture, and it is a more coherent piece of world-building than *The Matrix Revolutions* managed for its own machine war. As the first attempt to actually film the future war rather than trail it, it is a more interesting failure, and a partial success, than the scores suggest.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critics have largely written it off, sitting around a third positive, with the recurring complaint that the storytelling is as mechanical as the villains and the heart of Cameron's films is missing. Audiences are warmer, a little over half, and that gap is the honest one. The criticism is fair: the script is over-plotted, the characterisation thin, and the emotional spark that made you care whether the Connors lived flickers rather than burns. But the consensus reads the film as worthless, and it is not. It is a competent, frequently exciting piece of spectacle that happens to be carrying a famous name it cannot live up to.
## Verdict
I liked this more than I expected to, and more than its reputation allows for. Judged as the fourth chapter of a series with two masterpieces in it, it falls short, and the missing heart is a real absence rather than a quibble. Judged as a post-apocalyptic action film on its own terms, it is well made, well shot, and genuinely gripping in stretches, with a central mystery that gives the spectacle something to hang on. It is not a film I expect to return to often, which keeps it short of the top tier, but it does the difficult job of building the war the franchise has only ever promised, and it does it with more craft than it has been given credit for. **7/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Salvation* turned out to be the end of this particular attempt at a Terminator future, with the rights moving on and the next entries, *Terminator Genisys* (2015) and *Terminator: Dark Fate* (2019), rebooting the timeline back towards Cameron's originals rather than continuing the war picked up here. McG's film has settled into the franchise as the curio that finally showed the future and then was quietly disowned, better remembered for its production design and its troubled shoot than for its place in the story. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams across the usual platforms depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence and intense action sequences*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** There are some battle sequences with heavy explosions and gunfire, and which include sight of many robots being destroyed, including a close-up shot of a robotic head being crushed by a helicopter. Most of the damage and injury is caused to the robotic characters, while the human characters generally emerge unscathed. There is also some injury detail; however, these sequences do not dwell on detail. The film as a whole also has an unrelenting intensity; however, the tone is comparatively light.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/terminator-salvation-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00ntcynzc)).*
================================================================================
## Star Trek (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-star-trek
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-star-trek.md
- published: 2009-05-24
- document_id: 1020
> J.J. Abrams takes a franchise that had run aground and reboots it with a time-travel sidestep, a flawless young cast and a sense of pace the series had forgotten. The most fun I have had with Star Trek in years. 9/10.
- **UK release:** May 2009
- **Director:** J.J. Abrams · **Writers:** Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman
- **Studio / distributor:** Paramount Pictures; Spyglass Entertainment; Bad Robot
- **Genre:** Science fiction adventure / franchise reboot · **Runtime:** 127 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- **Main cast:** Chris Pine as James T. Kirk; Zachary Quinto (*Heroes*) as Spock; Karl Urban (*The Lord of the Rings*, *The Bourne Supremacy*) as Leonard McCoy; Zoe Saldaña (*Pirates of the Caribbean*) as Nyota Uhura; Leonard Nimoy as Spock Prime
- **IMDb:** 8.0 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 94% critics / 91% audience · **My rating:** 9 / 10
Star Trek had been quietly dying for a while. *Nemesis* limped out of cinemas in 2002 and made back barely half its budget, *Enterprise* was cancelled, and the franchise that once defined American television science fiction had been left to its conventions and its boxed sets. Reviving it was never going to be a matter of one more sequel. So Paramount handed the keys to J.J. Abrams, fresh off *Mission: Impossible III* and the early seasons of *Lost*, a man with no particular allegiance to the canon and a clear instinct for momentum. The result is the cleverest kind of reboot: one that keeps the old continuity rather than burning it, and then walks confidently around it.
## The setup
A Romulan mining vessel, captained by the vengeful Nero (Eric Bana), tears out of a temporal anomaly and attacks a Federation ship on what should be a routine patrol. In the chaos, a young first officer named George Kirk buys his crew time at the cost of his own life, and his son James is born into a galaxy already nudged off its intended course. Years later that son, reckless and directionless, is goaded into Starfleet, where he collides with a coldly disciplined young Vulcan called Spock. When Nero resurfaces with a plan to settle his grievance against the Federation, the half-formed crew of the *Enterprise* is thrown together long before any of them is ready to be there.
The framing is the smart move. Rather than ignore forty years of history, the screenplay folds in an alternate timeline, which lets the film recast every familiar role while leaving the original universe intact and the long-time viewer reassured. You can know nothing about Star Trek and follow it as a pure space adventure. You can know everything and enjoy watching the furniture get rearranged.
## The cast
The casting is the film's quiet triumph, because the danger with a reboot like this is impersonation, and almost nobody falls into it. Chris Pine plays Kirk as a cocky, bruised chancer rather than a Shatner tribute act, all swagger and wounded pride, and he carries the charm the part demands without leaning on the original. Zachary Quinto, known mainly as the brain-stealing villain in *Heroes*, is the revelation as Spock: he finds the strain underneath the logic, the half-human boy working hard to feel nothing, and the friction between him and Pine gives the film its spine.
Around them the ensemble is uniformly well chosen. Karl Urban's Leonard McCoy is the only performance that nods openly to its predecessor, and it works because the affection is real rather than a copy. Zoe Saldaña gives Uhura authority and impatience, Simon Pegg's late-arriving Scotty supplies the comic relief, and Leonard Nimoy turns up as an older Spock to bless the whole enterprise and lend it a continuity the new cast could not provide on its own. His presence is the film admitting, gracefully, where it came from.
## The craft
Abrams directs for speed. This is a Star Trek with a pulse: kinetic, bright, occasionally over-caffeinated, shot by Dan Mindel in a restless, lens-flared style that became this film's signature and its most-parodied tic. The set pieces are staged with real confidence, a high-altitude free-fall onto a drilling platform among the best of them, and the *Enterprise* itself has weight and scale in a way the television series could never afford. Michael Giacchino's score is the secret weapon, doing what a good Star Trek score should: it gives the adventure size, and its main theme is the kind of thing you hum on the way out.
If there is a cost to all this energy, it is that the film moves too fast to think very hard. Classic Trek was talky, slow and fond of a moral dilemma worked out over an hour of dialogue. This is built for propulsion, and the plot mechanics, Nero's revenge in particular, do not survive much scrutiny. But the film knows exactly what it is, and it never pretends to be the cerebral thing it has replaced.
## How it stacks up
Set this beside *Nemesis* and the gap is almost embarrassing. Where the old films had become slow, grey and inward-looking, made for the faithful and nobody else, this one is open to everyone. The more honest comparison is sideways, to the *Star Wars* adventure tradition: Abrams has effectively made the Star Trek that moves like *Star Wars*, swapping debate for daring and the conference room for the chase. Purists will note what has been lost, and they are not wrong, but the trade is a defensible one. It even shares a little DNA with *Galaxy Quest*, the affectionate spoof that understood the appeal of this crew better than the later official films did, in that both grasp that the fun of Star Trek is the people on the bridge rather than the technobabble.
## Critics versus the rest of us
For once critics and audiences are largely in agreement. The reviews are warm, around the 94% mark, praising the cast, the pace and the sheer accessibility of the thing, and audiences are turning out in numbers the franchise has not seen in decades. The one persistent reservation, that the reboot trades thoughtful science fiction for blockbuster spectacle, is fair and worth saying. This is not the Star Trek of ideas. But it is the Star Trek that has saved itself, and a series that does not exist cannot have ideas at all.
## Verdict
I came to this braced for disappointment and left grinning. It is fast, funny, beautifully cast and built to be watched again, which for me counts for a great deal. Yes, the plot is a contraption and the philosophy has been quietly shown the door. None of that matters much against two hours this confident and this entertaining, the most fun I have had with Star Trek in as long as I can remember. It reintroduces a crew I want to spend more time with and leaves the door wide open, and on rewatchability alone it earns its place. **9/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now. The big screen and a decent sound system do the *Enterprise* and Giacchino's score real favours.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the new crew did get their further voyages. *Star Trek Into Darkness* (2013) doubled down on the spectacle and divided opinion by reworking old material, and *Star Trek Beyond* (2016) recovered some of the ensemble warmth this film established. Abrams went on to direct *Star Wars: The Force Awakens*, which made the kinship between the two franchises explicit. This first reboot has settled into its reputation as the entry that rescued Star Trek and proved a sober property could be made nimble without being cheapened. It is widely available on disc and digital, with the Kelvin-timeline films usually bundled together, and streams on the major platforms depending on your region.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **12A** by the BBFC for *moderate violence and threat*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** Fight scenes include heavy blows to the head and body, and brief sight of a man's bloodied face. There is also a scene in which a man stamps on another man's fingers as he clings on to a high ledge, and one in which a man is run through with a sword and which includes sight of the tip emerging from his chest.
**Threat and horror:** Some prolonged and intense scenes include the destruction of a spaceship, and the death of the lead character's father. There is also a scene in which a man is strapped down, and threatened with a slug held over his open mouth, and another scene in which people are chased by monstrous creatures.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/star-trek-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00otg2njq)).*
================================================================================
## State of Play (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-state-of-play
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-state-of-play.md
- published: 2009-05-05
- document_id: 1021
> Kevin Macdonald compresses Paul Abbott's six-hour BBC serial into a two-hour Washington thriller, and the result is a grown-up newspaper picture in the All the President's Men mould, carried by Russell Crowe. 8/10.
- **UK release:** April 2009
- **Director:** Kevin Macdonald · **Writers:** Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy, Billy Ray
- **Studio / distributor:** Working Title; StudioCanal; Universal Pictures
- **Genre:** Political and journalism thriller · **Runtime:** 127 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Russell Crowe (*Gladiator*, *L.A. Confidential*) as Cal McAffrey; Ben Affleck (*Good Will Hunting*, *Pearl Harbor*) as Stephen Collins; Rachel McAdams (*The Notebook*, *Wedding Crashers*) as Della Frye; Helen Mirren (*The Queen*, *Gosford Park*) as Cameron Lynne; Jason Bateman (*Arrested Development*, *Juno*) as Dominic Foy
- **IMDb:** 7.1 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 84% critics / 73% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Paul Abbott's *State of Play* ran on BBC One in 2003 as a six-hour serial, one of the best things British television produced that decade, so the news that Hollywood had bought it and squeezed it into two hours was always going to invite a flinch. The setting has moved from Westminster to Washington, John Simm and David Morrissey have become Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck, and the director is Kevin Macdonald, who came to drama from documentary with *Touching the Void* and won Forest Whitaker an Oscar in *The Last King of Scotland*. Three credited writers is rarely a good omen. What survives the transplant is the thing that mattered most: a thriller about a dying trade, the print newspaper, told by people who clearly mourn it.
## The setup
Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) is a veteran reporter at the Washington Globe, a rumpled man who still works the phones and the streets while the paper around him is being remade for the web. Two deaths land on his desk that have no business being connected, a petty thief shot in an alley and a young woman who falls under a train. The woman was the lead researcher, and the mistress, of Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), a rising Democrat chairing a committee that is about to embarrass a private defence contractor. Collins is also Cal's old college friend, which is the knot the whole film pulls on. Paired with Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), the paper's blogger, Cal starts to trace the line between a private grief and a public conspiracy, while his editor Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren) wants the story filed before the lawyers and the proprietors close it down.
## The cast
Crowe is the centre of gravity and he is very good, playing Cal as shambling, stubborn and a little compromised, a man whose friendships are also his sources. It is a deliberately unglamorous turn, all takeaway cartons and a parked car full of notebooks, and it anchors everything around it. Affleck has the harder job, the handsome politician who has to stay sympathetic while looking guilty, and he just about holds it. McAdams gives Della more spine than the print-versus-pixels setup suggests on paper; the generational needle between her and Crowe never tips into a lecture. Mirren has only a handful of scenes as the editor caught between journalism and the balance sheet, and makes every one of them count. The surprise is Jason Bateman, who turns up late as a sleazy PR fixer and walks off with two reels, the comic energy the film needs exactly when it needs it.
## The craft
Macdonald shoots Washington as a city of car parks, corridors and strip-lit newsrooms rather than monuments, and Rodrigo Prieto's camera keeps the palette cold and procedural. The film is at its best in the mechanics of reporting: the door-knock, the bluff, the moment a source decides whether to talk. Alex Heffes scores it lightly, letting the rooms stay tense on their own. At 127 minutes it moves, and Justine Wright's editing keeps the multiple strands legible, which is no small feat given how much serial plot has been poured into the running time. The price of that compression shows in the final stretch, where the story reaches for one twist too many and a couple of the joins are visible. It is a smart film that does not quite trust you to leave a thread untied.
## How it stacks up
The reference point the film reaches for, and earns more often than not, is *All the President's Men*, the same faith in shoe-leather reporting and the same belief that the boring parts of the job are the suspenseful ones. There is some of *The Parallax View* in its paranoia, and a clear cousin in Tony Gilroy's *Michael Clayton*, another recent grown-up thriller about an ordinary professional pulling a thread he should leave alone, which is no coincidence given Gilroy's hand in this script. Against the BBC serial it cannot win, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise; six hours simply hold more rooms and more people than two. Taken on its own terms as a studio thriller for adults, a category Hollywood barely bothers to make any more, it stands up well.
## Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been warm, sitting around 84%, praising the cast, the pace and the unfashionable seriousness, with the standard caveat that the plotting wobbles and that the original was richer. Audiences are a notch cooler at 73%, which I read as the gap between people who wanted a Russell Crowe action vehicle and the patient newsroom procedural they actually got. I am closer to the critics here, with one reservation of my own: the conspiracy machinery in the last half hour is the weakest part, and the film would have been stronger trusting its smaller, human story of a friendship that cannot survive the truth.
## Verdict
This sits squarely in my wheelhouse: institutional investigation, a conspiracy with corporate money behind it, and the unglamorous craft of finding things out. It is intelligent, well acted and built for grown-ups, and it honours the trade it is about even as it watches that trade decline. The ending overreaches and the source it adapts will always loom over it, so it lands just short of the front rank of the genre rather than among it. But it is a film I would happily put on again on a wet Sunday, which for a thriller is the test that counts. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film has settled into a quiet reputation as one of the last of its kind, a mid-budget adult thriller from before the studios abandoned the form to streaming. Its newspaper-in-decline anxieties read as more pointed every year, and it pairs naturally with *Spotlight* (2015), which gave Rachel McAdams a far more celebrated turn in the same investigative register. It now streams on the usual subscription and rental platforms depending on region, and the Paul Abbott BBC serial that started it all remains the better way in if you have the six hours.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *moderate violence, one use of strong language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** In one scene, a man is shot dead, and there is a brief blood spurt and subsequent sight of blood dripping on the floor.
**Language:** There is infrequent strong language ('f**k').
**Additional issues:** The film also contains brief drug misuse references, and some moderate verbal sex references.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/state-of-play-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjq5mda)).*
================================================================================
## Knowing (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-knowing
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-knowing.md
- published: 2009-04-12
- document_id: 1017
> Alex Proyas hands Nicolas Cage a page of numbers that predict the end of the world and plays the whole thing dead straight. Critics balked at the solemnity; I came out rattled in the best way. 8/10.
- **UK release:** March 2009
- **Director:** Alex Proyas · **Writers:** Ryne Douglas Pearson; Juliet Snowden; Stiles White
- **Studio / distributor:** Summit Entertainment / Escape Artists; E1 Films in the UK
- **Genre:** Science-fiction disaster thriller / apocalyptic mystery · **Runtime:** 121 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Nicolas Cage (*Leaving Las Vegas*, *Face/Off*) as John Koestler; Rose Byrne (*Sunshine*, *28 Weeks Later*) as Diana Wayland; Chandler Canterbury as Caleb Koestler; Lara Robinson as Lucinda Embry / Abby Wayland
- **Rotten Tomatoes:** 33% critics / 42% audience · **My rating:** 8 / 10
Alex Proyas has spent his career building worlds that feel a half-step removed from ours. *Dark City* was a city dreamed by aliens; *I, Robot* was Asimov filtered through a Will Smith vehicle. *Knowing* is the most restrained-looking of the three and, oddly, the strangest, because it dresses cosmic dread in the clothes of an ordinary suburban thriller and then refuses to wink at you even once. That commitment to its own daft, enormous premise is exactly what is splitting the room. The reviews coming in are scathing; I walked out genuinely unsettled, which for this kind of film counts as the picture doing its job.
## The setup
In 1959 a schoolgirl fills a sheet of paper with what looks like gibberish and seals it in a time capsule. Fifty years on the capsule is opened and the page lands with John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), an MIT astrophysicist and recently widowed father. He works out that the digits are not random: they are dates, death tolls and map coordinates for every major disaster of the past half century, accurate to the body count. A short stack of the numbers has not happened yet. Koestler, a man who insists the universe is just noise, finds himself chasing a pattern he cannot explain, with his son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) pulled steadily closer to the centre of it.
It is a premise that could tip into the silly at any moment, and the film knows it. What keeps it upright is that Proyas treats determinism versus chance as a real question rather than a hook, and lets the dread accumulate rather than spending it early.
## The cast
This is Cage in his committed register rather than his unhinged one, and the difference matters. Koestler is a grieving rationalist watching his rationalism come apart, and Cage plays the unravelling with a clammy, sleepless intensity that grounds the bigger ideas. He is best in the quiet scenes, lecturing on randomness while plainly not believing a word of his own comfort. Rose Byrne, as the daughter of the girl who wrote the page, arrives later and gives the film a second frightened adult to bounce the mystery against; she is good at the particular panic of someone who half-knew this was coming. The two children, Chandler Canterbury and Lara Robinson, carry the eeriest material without overplaying it, which is harder than the adults make it look.
## The craft
Proyas and cinematographer Simon Duggan shoot suburban Massachusetts in cold greys and sodium-lit dark, so that when catastrophe does arrive it lands like a violation of an ordinary day. Two of the disaster set pieces are staged in long, near-unbroken takes, and they are the best work in the film: no cutting away to spare you, just the camera holding on as everything comes apart in real time. It is genuinely alarming, and a reminder that Proyas can do visceral as well as he does mood. Marco Beltrami's score leans on a low, dissonant thrum that keeps the unease simmering between the big moments, and there is a recurring use of the Beethoven that ties the cosmic to the domestic. The film does run long, and a stretch in the middle sags as Koestler does his detective work, but the craft on the spectacle is not in doubt.
## How it stacks up
The obvious neighbour is *Signs*, another film about a lapsed believer (here a scientist rather than a priest) reading a terrible pattern into the world and being proved right. *Knowing* is bleaker and less consoling than Shyamalan's film, and more willing to follow its idea to the end of the line. It also sits close to *The Mothman Prophecies*, with its small-town omens and its sense of a larger intelligence brushing against ordinary lives, and it reaches knowingly back to *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*, whose awestruck-rather-than-hostile view of contact it clearly admires. Set against Proyas's own *Dark City*, this is the warmer, more emotional film, less interested in the architecture of its mystery than in what the mystery does to a father and a son.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical reception is rough, and the consensus is not hard to read: a 33% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the recurring complaint that the plot is absurd and the film far too solemn about it. Audiences are warmer but still split, at 42%. The dissenters are loud, though. Roger Ebert in particular has come out swinging for it, calling it one of the most effective of its kind, and that is roughly where I land. The objections are fair on paper, the premise is preposterous and the tone never lightens, but they describe a different, more cautious film than the one Proyas actually made. He bet everything on playing it straight, and for me the bet pays off in unease rather than eye-rolling.
## Verdict
*Knowing* is a flawed, ambitious, oddly haunting film that is braver than its reputation suggests. It is too long, it asks you to swallow a great deal, and the seriousness that critics are mocking is, to my mind, the whole reason it works: a jokier version would have let the audience off the hook. The disaster sequences are some of the most frightening I have seen in a mainstream picture, Cage is properly invested, and the ending commits to its convictions instead of fudging them. I have not gone back to it since, and I suspect it is more of a single overwhelming experience than a repeat fixture, but as that experience it got under my skin and stayed there. **8/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now from E1 Films, certificate 15. Worth a big screen and a good sound system for the set pieces.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *Knowing* arrived on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK in summer 2009 and has since become a fixture of late-night television. Its standing has softened a little over time, and a run of retrospective pieces now argues it was underrated, singling out the disaster sequences and Proyas's refusal to blink. It currently streams on the usual rental platforms in the UK and turns up periodically on subscription services depending on the rights of the day.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong threat and intense disaster scenes*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Ratings info:** Contains strong threat and intense disaster scenes.
The BBFC's cinema record for this 2009 release (classified 11 March 2009, 121 minutes, distributed by E1 Films / Contender) carries only the short ratings-info line above and does not publish a per-category Content Advice breakdown (Violence, Language, and so on), as is common for titles of this period.
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/knowing-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mjywote)).*
================================================================================
## Watchman
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-watchman
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-watchman.md
- published: 2009-03-20
- document_id: 21
> Watchman, directed by Zack Snyder. Featuring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode. When an ex-superhero is murdered, vigilante Rorschach begins to investigate the murder, leading to a apocalyptical conclusion.
## Watchman
For the fanboys, the Watchman movie has been a long time coming, for sci-fi fans, it looks like a spectacular effects driven event. Does it satisfy? Yes, both as a movie and as a faithfull conversion of comic book to screen.
Let's be clear, this will not be everyones' cup of tea, infact, the film has been panned by more people than I am willing to count, but whilst in the cinema, I realised that it was a good movie. The story was hard hitting, the effects good and the long play time didn't affect me. I really enjoyed it and wanted more.
Watchman is directed by Zack Snyder (whose previous movie was 300) and features Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup and Matthew Goode. When an ex-superhero is murdered, vigilante Rorschach begins to investigate the murder which leads to a potentially apocalyptical conclusion.
One thing to note, there is a lot of very understated male nudity in this film, let's just say that one on the characters spends a lot of time swinging in the wind!
In essence, this film is about people fighting crime while wearing capes, but uses this to explore the wider issues of fascism, conspiracies, vigilantism in an alternate 1984 United States where Nixon won and is still in power.
There are problems, but nothing I can get myself worked up about and if you read the Comic Book, you will see how close to it the film is, I suspect the DVD release will have a 'Lord of the Rings' like extended version to really satisfy.
## Verdict
I liked it. A faithfull transition, hard hitting and following through with an ending you have to think about. **8.5/10**.
================================================================================
## The International (2009)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-international
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-the-international.md
- published: 2009-03-01
- document_id: 1024
> Tom Tykwer aims a 1970s paranoia thriller at the banks, with Clive Owen chasing money instead of bombs. The plot strains, but the locations and the Guggenheim set piece earn it. 7/10.
- **UK release:** February 2009
- **Director:** Tom Tykwer · **Writer:** Eric Warren Singer
- **Studio / distributor:** Columbia Pictures; Relativity Media; Atlas Entertainment
- **Genre:** Conspiracy thriller / financial-political thriller · **Runtime:** 118 minutes (BBFC 15)
- **Main cast:** Clive Owen (*Children of Men*, *Closer*) as Louis Salinger; Naomi Watts (*Mulholland Drive*, *King Kong*) as Eleanor Whitman; Armin Mueller-Stahl (*Eastern Promises*, *Shine*) as Wilhelm Wexler; Brian F. O'Byrne (*Million Dollar Baby*, *Before the Devil Knows You're Dead*) as The Consultant
- **IMDb:** 6.5 / 10 · **Rotten Tomatoes:** 58% critics / 37% audience · **My rating:** 7 / 10
The timing could hardly be sharper. As the banks of the world stand exposed and half-nationalised, along comes a thriller in which the villain is not a rogue state or a lone madman but a merchant bank, and the weapon is its balance sheet. Tom Tykwer, the German director who made his name with the kinetic *Run Lola Run* and the strange, sumptuous *Perfume*, here reaches back past his own work to the paranoid American thrillers of the 1970s, the world of *The Parallax View* and *Three Days of the Condor*, where the institutions are too big to fight and the hero keeps pulling the thread anyway. It is an unfashionable kind of film to make in 2009, and that is most of its appeal.
## The setup
Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) is an Interpol agent who has spent years trying to bring down the IBBC, a powerful international bank he is convinced is brokering arms deals and bankrolling conflict for its own balance sheet. Alongside him is Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), a New York prosecutor with her own stake in the case. Every time they get close to a witness, the witness dies, and every death is tidy enough to look like something else. The chase runs from Berlin to Milan to New York to Istanbul, and the further they get, the clearer it becomes that the bank does not need to win in a courtroom it can simply outlast anyone who comes for it. The pleasure of the setup is its bleak logic: the enemy is not hiding, it is in plain sight, audited and respectable.
## The cast
Clive Owen is well cast as a man running on grievance and too little sleep. He has done this weary, dogged register before, not least in *Children of Men*, and he brings the same crumpled persistence here, a decent man who has stopped expecting the system to help him. He carries most of the film on that scowl. Naomi Watts is given rather less to do; Whitman is written as the more cautious, procedural half of the partnership, and Watts plays the constraint honestly rather than fighting it, though the script keeps her at arm's length from the real momentum. The standout is Armin Mueller-Stahl as Wilhelm Wexler, the bank's adviser, an old man with a long and compromised past who lends the film its only genuine moral weather. Brian F. O'Byrne, as the bank's nameless Consultant, is the quiet professional who does the killing, and his very ordinariness is the point.
## The craft
Tykwer and his regular cinematographer Frank Griebe shoot the film as a tour of glass and stone, the architecture of money: atriums, foyers, boardrooms, the cool surfaces that power likes to hide behind. It looks expensive and it looks cold, which is exactly right. The score, which Tykwer wrote himself with Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil, hums under the procedural scenes and keeps the pulse up. And then there is the centrepiece, a shoot-out staged inside the spiralling white rotunda of the Guggenheim in New York, which tears the film's composure to shreds for ten minutes of genuinely thrilling, plaster-shattering chaos. It is the sequence everyone will talk about, and rightly: it is the moment the controlled style of the film breaks open and the violence becomes physical and close. Mathilde Bonnefoy's editing keeps the talkier stretches moving, even when the plot is asking the audience to swallow a great deal.
## How it stacks up
The obvious ancestors are the 1970s conspiracy pictures, and *The International* wears that lineage openly. It does not have the political nerve of *The Parallax View* or the lived-in dread of *Three Days of the Condor*, and it lacks the human texture that makes a film like *Michael Clayton*, released only two years ago, land its punches; that film understood that a corporate thriller lives or dies on character, and gave you people to care about. *The International* is more interested in the machinery. Set against the *Bourne* films, which by now own the European-chase template, it is slower and more talkative, trading their breathless cutting for something more deliberate. The comparison it most wants is to those older paranoia thrillers, and on mood and architecture it earns it. On conviction it falls a little short.
## Critics versus the rest of us
The critical response is divided, and the split is revealing. Critics sit around the high fifties, praising the locations and the Guggenheim sequence while complaining that the plot is preposterous and the characters thin. Audiences have been harsher still, drifting away from a thriller that asks them to think rather than sprint. Both objections are fair. The conspiracy does not entirely hold together if you press on it, and Salinger and Whitman never quite become people you ache for. But I think the colder reception slightly undervalues what the film does well. It is timely without being smug, it looks superb, and it commits to the unglamorous idea that the most powerful villains never get caught. That is a harder and more honest ending than the genre usually allows.
## Verdict
This is a thriller I enjoyed more than its scores suggest, while seeing exactly why others did not. The plot creaks, the partnership lacks spark, and the politics are gestural rather than deep. But Tykwer delivers atmosphere, a real sense of place across some of the best-looking locations a thriller has used in years, and one set piece good enough to carry the whole film. I like the genre, I like the bleak refusal of an easy win, and I would happily watch it again on a wet evening for the Guggenheim alone. It is a solid, grown-up thriller rather than a great one, and a perfectly satisfying way to spend two hours. **7/10.**
**Availability:** On general release in UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow later in the year.
---
## Update
Added since this review first appeared: *The International* has settled into the role of a respectable also-ran, the post-crash banking thriller that is more admired in retrospect for its Guggenheim shoot-out than for anything else. Tykwer went on to the vast, fragmented *Cloud Atlas* with the Wachowskis, a film that makes this one look positively restrained. It is now widely available on disc and turns up regularly on streaming and broadcast schedules, where its cool style and that one extraordinary set piece still hold up.
---
## BBFC content advice
Rated **15** by the BBFC for *strong bloody violence and language*. The notes below may contain spoilers.
**Violence:** A man is shot in the neck and there is significant focus on his injury in the aftermath of the shooting with blood visible streaming from his injury. During a fight, a character sticks their thumb into the existing injury of an opponent causing blood to flow out of the wound.
**Language:** There are eight uses of strong language ('f**k').
*Source: British Board of Film Classification ([bbfc.co.uk](https://www.bbfc.co.uk/release/the-international-q29sbgvjdglvbjpwwc00mju5mdi)).*
================================================================================
## Mamma Mia - The Movie
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mamma-mia
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-mamma-mia.md
- published: 2008-08-10
- document_id: 18
> Directed by Phyllida Lloyd. With Amanda Seyfried, Stellan Skarsgård, Pierce Brosnan. The story of a bride-to-be trying to find her real father told using hit songs by the popular
## Mamma Mia - The Movie
I think I am in a minority of one. This Pop Group to Stage to Film phenomenon has taken the world by storm, but left me wanting both my money and hours of my life back.
Yes, this film has broken box office and DVD records world wide, yes, it was up for Oscars, but I hated it.
I sought out Mamma Mia whilst it was still in the cinema after Mark Kermode on BBC Radio 5 Live suggested that in years to come, it won't be enough to say you saw Mamma Mia, but you had to see it on the big screen.
Well, I went to the "sing along" version and I can tell you that Pearce Brosnan was by no means the worst singer during the film.
Four rows down, the all girl party that had to dance and sing for each song certainly lowered the bar and blotted out most of the screen.
The three rows up and to our right delighted in gossiping and half hearted signing throughout.
The remainder of the audience had a go at joining in, but on the whole, I felt cheated that the "so bad it flips your mind and makes it good" effect never materialised due to not actually being able to hear just how bad the on screen singing was.
## Verdict
I fear I will never truly appreciate Mamma Mia as I will certainly never voluntarily see it again. **1/10**.
================================================================================
## Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-indiana-jones-crystal-skull
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-indiana-jones-crystal-skull.md
- published: 2008-06-15
- document_id: 17
> We all love Indiana Jones and the wait for the fourth installment has been years. Is it any good? In a word yes. Is it the best?
## Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
We all love Indiana Jones and the wait for the fourth installment has been years. Is it any good? In a word yes. Is it the best? Probably not, but it has merit and is a fine addition to the tome.
We are introduced to new friends/enemies and significant others. Indiana Jones is embroiled in a search for Crystal Sculls that takes him to South America and to battle the powers of the Soviet Union.
The pace of the movie starts well, but dips when we are intoduced to Mutt Williams, a young greaser who was mentored by Professor Oxley, an archaeologist kidnapped whilst on his quest to solve the riddle of the Crystal Skulls.
It is during this part of the movie that the slower pace really shows, and not wanting to be too Kermodian, it became apparent that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a watershed moment, it is the **Birth of "over narrative" cinema**.
Many films in the past two years have assumed that the audiance is too dumb to work out for themselves what is quite plainly happening on screen and so have the protagonists engage in useless, time consuming chatter to point out the plot line. My two favourite
examples were; "..the darts are poison!" - I think we could work that out Indy and; "..duck, machine gun!" (or something like that). Well, I think the audience can assume that ducking in the face of a machine gun weilding Soviet agent is an obvious thing to do.
Don't get me wrong, despite the over narrative dialogue and the reams of continuity errors, this is a fun movie that I really enjoyed and would whole heartedly reccommend.
## Verdict
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a solid sequel **8/10**.
================================================================================
## Give a Geek for Christmas
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/the-geek-squad
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/the-geek-squad.md
- published: 2007-12-01
- document_id: 1244
> The Geek Squad has crossed from the USA to the UK. Good news for a country that needs more technological independence.
Whilst in the Carphone Warehouse, I noticed last week that the Geek Squad have come over from the USA to the UK.
This is GOOD NEWS!!!
#### No prizes for guessing which one is the Geek!
Why? Well, my girlfriend is pretty good with technology, but my parants are rubbish.
In both cases, I am still their computer technical support and after enough years, it gets a bit too much. So, I'm thinking about giving them a Geek for Christmas.....
After looking into the MyGeek service, it appears to boil down to this:
After signing up to [MyGeek](http://www.geeeksquad.co.uk) (you can do it on behalf of someone else) the person you have done this for can get their technology fixed any time throughout the year.
All work is done 'remotely', where a remote Geek takes control of the mouse over an Internet connection. The Geek will also talk through the process over the phone.
It costs £7 a month... Christmas could be soooo much easier :-)
Apparently, the likes of Madonna, The Rolling Stones and The Police have a Geek.
More info can be found on the [Geek Squad website](http://www.geeksquad.co.uk).
## About the Geek Squad
The service has been taking technological care of home computers across the south east since the beginning of 2007
- and across the USA for 13 years. Now the rapid adoption of home technology, high speed broadband and wireless internet in
the UK not only demands more technological support services but also means the UK needs more technological independence.
The Geek Squad started life 13 years ago with one Minneapolis college student, his bike, a laptop and $200. It has since grown to offer 24-hour technology support for homes all over the US. With over 15,000 agents on board, The Geek Squad in the US has not only saved crucial episodes of ER but proudly counts A-list celebrities such as Madonna, U2, The Rolling Stones amongst its fan base having used its expertise to help them with high-tech support on the road.
================================================================================
## Eragon: Movie Review
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-eragon
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-eragon.md
- published: 2006-12-20
- document_id: 15
> Movie and Book reviews. By Seamus Waldron.
## Eragon
I laughed for nearly five minutes at the end of this movie. My sides were splitting and tears were rolling down my face. Unfortunatley, this film isn't supposed to be a comedy. Eragon is probably going to make money, it looks fantastic and the books sound like they are very good too, it's just that this film is rubbish.
### Plot
A farm boy calle Eragon happens upon a dragon's egg. (Wait a minute, did you say 'farm boy'?. If this is starting to sound like Star Wars, then you would be right. Star Wars without anything that made Star Wars a great movie however. Wait a minute again, did you say his name is Eragon? Isn't that just Dragon with and E instead or a D? You can tell the original book was written by a 15 year old)
Discovering this egg leads Eragon on a predestined journey where he finds that he is the one person who can defend his home against an evil king.
### Review rating
Pretty on the eyes, absolutely rubbish script. Don't bother unless someone else pays for you to see it.
================================================================================
## Market Forces by Richard Morgan: Book Review
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/books-richard-morgan-market-forces
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/books-richard-morgan-market-forces.md
- published: 2006-01-01
- document_id: 24
> I thought the book started slowly, until I realised I was over 100 pages in. So close to today and yet not far from the future of Mad Max.
## 10 Second Book Review: Market Forces by Richard Morgan
I thought the book started slowly, until I realised I was over 100 pages in. So close to today and yet not far from the future of Mad Max.
This is post apocalypse without the nuclear war. Austerity measures mean cars are prohibitively expensive to own, yet alone run, so the rich wide-boys of city financing use the deserted motorways as a battlefield over promotions and contract bids to run countries and war campaigns. Richard Morgan continues his run of producing readable hard-core (science) fiction.
**Recommended**
### Blurb on the back
The Domino Recessions of the early 21st century have cleared the road for a new breed of economic player...
**'All over the world, men and women still find causes worth killing and dying for. And who are we to argue with them? Have we lived in their circumstances? Have we felt what they feel? No. It is not our place to say if they are right or wrong.**
**At Shorn Conflict Investment, we are concerned with only two things. will they win? And will it pay?'**
Chris Faulkner has a new job at Shorn Associates. Can he live with it?
Thirty years from now the big movers in global capitalism have moved on from commodities. The big money is in conflict investment. Shorn and their rivals keep careful watch on the wars of liberation and revolution that burn constantly around the world. They gauge who the winners will be and sell them arms, intelligence and power. In return for a slice of the action when the war is won.
It's cynical, brutal and it has nothing to do with democracy amid the rule of law. So what else is new?
The executives in this lethal game bid for contracts, fight for promotion, secure their lives on the roads. Fighting lethal duels in souped-up, heavily armored cars on the empty motorways of the future.
Has Chris Faulkner got what it takes to make a real killing?
================================================================================
## The Wendell Baker Story
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-wendell-baker-story
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-wendell-baker-story.md
- published: 2005-09-15
- document_id: 23
> Movie review of the film The Wendell Baker Story
# Movie review: The Wendell Baker Story
**I chuckled, I smiled and I covered my eyes on occasion, and left the 49th The Times bfi London Film Festival showing of The Wendell Baker Story with a big feel-good factor.
The Wendell Baker Story is not going to take the world by storm, but it will get extremely positive word of mouth advertising. It is a charming, lovely, funny, touching and unusual movie.**
## Plot
Wendell Baker (Luke Wilson) ends up in jail when his latest half-baked scam goes pear-shaped.
His long-suffering girlfriend Doreen (Eva Mendes) dumps him almost as soon as Wendell gets to his cell.
It's a wake up call for the lovelorn romantic, and Wendell makes a vow to straighten up, fly right and
win back the love of his life.
His parole board learn that Wendell would like to working with people and perhaps run a Hotel some day.
Releasing him, the parole board gets him a job at the Shady Grove retirement hotel run by the corrupt owner Neil King (Owen Wilson)
who has sinister plans afoot for Wendell and more terminal plans for the retirees in his care.
Wendell soon befriends residents Boyd (Seymour Cassel) and Skip (Harry Dean Stanton), old lags keen on getting some girlie action for
themselves and to advise Wendell on how he might win Doreen back from her new boyfriend, the wealthy grocer Dave Bix (Will Ferrell).
The characters never really get much depth, the plot has wholes in it you could drive a London bus through, but it doesn't matter,
this is a lovely movie telling a simple story of redemtion.
## Review rating
I liked the film **The Wendell Baker Story**. I still have a huge grin on my face when I think of it. 8/10.
================================================================================
## Wedding Crashers: Movie Review
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-wedding-crashers
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-wedding-crashers.md
- published: 2005-08-10
- document_id: 22
> I laughed, oh did I laugh. So much so, I cried too. Wedding Crashers could have been a shocking buddy movie, but the writing, the comedic performances and the simple…
## Movie Review: Wedding Crashers
I laughed, oh did I laugh. So much so, I cried too. **Wedding Crashers** could have been a shocking buddy movie, but the writing, the comedic performances and the simple concept, make this my favorite comedy of the year**\***.
**\***Let me clarify. Hitch **was** my favorite comedy movie of the year, but now this is. In the same way Hitch was ever-so-slightly a chick flick, but guys really liked it, this is ever-so-slighty a guy flick, but chicks will really like it, though perhaps not quite in the same side-splitting, rolling on the floor, trying not to cry kind of a way.
### Plot
Divorce mediators John Beckwith (Owen Wilson) and Jeremy Grey (Vince Vaughn) are business partners and longtime friends who share a strange hobby, crashing parties. Of course, it depends on the time of year, in winter, it is Christmas parties, in the spring, it's weddings!
"Which is your favorite season?" says John; "Christmas or Wedding? Christmas or Wedding?"
"Wedding!!!!"
So it goes on. With intricate planning of back stories, the pair crash Jewish, Itaian, Irish, Chinese, even Hindu weddings, always with an answer for that question of "And you areÉ.?
Wedding Crashers have rules handed down from one generation to the next :
> "Invites are for loosers"
> "Make sure she's single"
> "Never use your real name"
> "Dance like you mean it"
> "Free drinks, why not?"
> "If you can't cryÉfake it!"
> "Never leave a fellow crasher behind"
Though a callidescope of parties, we glimpse the whirlwind nature of wedding crashers. John and Jeremy aren't just out on the make, though the girls are their ultimate goal. They are sympthetic characters. Being the life of the party attracts the women, but these guys really do love the food, the bands, entertaining the kids and dressing up in their suits. Not only are they Wedding Crashers, they are Wedding experts.
John is starting to realise that that he has enough of this lifestyle. Afterall, he and Jeremy aren't in their twenties anymore and they are still single.
At the end of the long wedding season, Jeremy runs into Johns' office full of enthusiasm and holding the newspaper. The daughter of the Treasury Secretary (Christopher Walken) and he wife (Jane Seymor) is getting married in what is sure to be the social event of the year. No just the last event of the season, it is sure to be the ultimate crashing challenge.
John takes a fair amount of persuasion to do it, but once agreed, it is all or nothing.
After successfully infiltraiting the lavish wedding, John and Jeremy soon set their sights on the two remaining single daughters of the Treasury Secretay, Claire (Rachel McAdams) and Gloria (Isla Fisher).
Jeremy works his gameplan to perfection and has soon seduced Gloria, but John's gameplan is interrupted when Claires' boyfriend Zack (Bradley Cooper), a pompos Ivy leagueer and basic thug, cuts in.
John has fallen hard for Claire. Jeremy is desperate to get away from Gloria. John convinces Jeremy to bend the crashing rules to accept an invitation to an extended weekend party at the Cleary family home.
Now, the fun really begins and I shall stop telling you what is going on as the ins and outs of this film are delightfull. Jane Seymor has a marvellous scene with Owen Wilson and there are many moments you want to burry your head in the shoulder of the person next to you to stop laughing too loudly.
See the trailer for [Wedding Crashers](http://www.apple.com/trailers/newline/wedding_crashers/)
### Review rating
I liked the film **Wedding Crashers** a lot. My sides hurt from laughing. 9/10.
================================================================================
## Movie review: Batman Begins
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-batman-begins
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-batman-begins.md
- published: 2005-07-10
- document_id: 14
> Oh my god, what a good movie this this. It could have been a banana skin for Warner Bros., but director Christopher Nolan has produced a fresh take on an old subject and…
# Movie review: Batman Begins
Oh my god, what a good movie this this. It could have been a banana skin for Warner Bros., but director Christopher Nolan has produced a fresh take on an old subject and done it extraordinarily well.
"How does one man change the world?"
It's a question that haunts Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale). The death of his parents, murdered on a Gotham street outside the Opera house has filled him with guilt and anger. Disillusioned with life and seeking the means to fight injustice, he travels the world to educate himself in the ways of the criminal. Basically, he becomes one and end up in a Chinese prison cell where he is visited one day by the mysterious Ducard (Liam Neeson).
Ducard informs Bruce he is to released the next day and if he wants to fulfill his potential, he is to climb a mountain with a blue flower growing on ins lower slopes. Thus, Bruce is trained and mentored by Ducard to become a member of the League of Shadows, a powerful, subversive vigilante group.
Bruce returns to a Gotham city rampant with crime and corruption. Wayne Enterprises, his fathers business, is now run by CEO Richard Earle (Rutger Hauer). With bruce gone for seven years and presumed dead, Earle is taking the company public and trusted Butler Alfred (Michael Caine) has inherited Bruce's incredible wealth.
During his absent years, Rachel Dawes (Katie Homes), a close childhood friend, has become an Assistant District Attorney. She finds the justice system so corrupt that se cannot convict the city's most notorious criminal, the most notorious of which is the crime boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson).
Bruce Wayne is helped in his quest for justice by Alfred, detective Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and scientist Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman). Bruce unleashes his alter-ego and becomes a masked crusader using lots of "fabulous toys" and high tech weaponry to take down the sinister forces that are attempting to destroy Gotham City.
Thats the promo-blurb out of the way, what did I think? This really is great. Primarily filmed in the UK with bits in Ireland, Iceland and Chicago, this is yet another American backed film, shot in the UK with British/Irish and Welsh actors aplently. Of course, they are mainly playing Americans and doing it very well.
Refreshingly, Gary Oldman is playing a good guy and Tom wilkinson is playing a bad guy. Cristian Bale is perfectly cast for the Bruce Wayne/Batman role and it was a real kick to see Rutger Hauer back in the big screen in a major film. At least with Rutger, his performance didn't once make me think of Blade Runner.
This was not the case with Liam Neeson. Liam reprises Qi Gon from The Phantom Menace. Frankly, he does it much better, but I did keep expecting to use the phrase "...my young padowan...". There was such a strong thread of a certain something that I won't go into, but you will know what I'm talking about when you see this great movie, I realised that instead of being called Batman Begins, it could be called Star Wars Begins. You could watch part of this movie and think "Look, they are the beginning of the Sith and he's the first Jedi....". Perhaps I've been watching too much Star Wars recently.
Katie Homes puts in a decent performance and Morgan Freeman is a good as ever. Michael Caine was brilliant a the butler Alfred. His accent turns from butler British to London, East End Cockney by the end of the film. He has a few classic lines and I'm sure that when the sequel is made and believe me, there has to be one, he will star prominently.
Batman Returns will be a massive hit, by rights it should be bigger than Lord of the Sith. Excitingly, there will be an Imax releases and you can bet that I will be booking my seat at the London Imax.
Verdict: Best film of the year **10/10**.
If you like the sound of Batman Begins, we suggest you will like [Sin City](/articles/films-sin-city).
================================================================================
## Film and UK Premiere review: Sin City
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-sin-city
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-sin-city.md
- published: 2005-06-20
- document_id: 19
> Can't say I knew what to expect from this film, but I certainly got a feast for the eyes and I'm glad I didn't eat too much before the opening credits.
# Film and UK Premiere review : Sin City
Can't say I knew what to expect from this film, but I certainly got a feast for the eyes and I'm glad I didn't eat too much before the opening credits. This film, and I quote director Robert Rodriguez, has "Tits, arse, guns, castration, amputation, beheading and lots of fighting".
Set in the mythical city of Sin City, a place that lives and breathes in the head of original creator and co-director Frank Miller, this film noir is based on several of the original Sin City comic book stories and has a perpetual backdrop of a dark, cold, rainy night. Projected in black and white with clever use of colour to highlight aspects the director want you to focus in on, you get an unusual feast for the eyes.
Sin City has **WOW** apeal. You don't quite know what is going on for the first twenty minutes or so, but it soon starts to make sense. The plot line is less a continuous story, but the overlapping of three stories.
Bruce Willis and Mickey Rourke are spot on for their roles and there are a host of smaller parts for the likes of Rutger Hower and Eligah Wood.
This is a good film, moments make you laugh, moments make your stomach churn, but overall all you fell you have seen a good movie, though you don't quite know whyÉ.
I give this film a stomach churning **9/10**.
## So, let me tell you about the UK premiere
An early arrival turned out to be a good move as I shared the red carpet with Jessica Alba, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, etc. Infact, most of the celebs. The fans crowded against the barriers were getting their moneys worth as all the stars were signing autographs and having their photographs taken.
Walking into an almost empty cinema, the live telcast of the red carpet was just under way and was interspersed with cutaways of the stars and directors talking about the film. Much to everyones deight, there was a little "something" waiting for every member of the audience. A bag of popcorn, bottle of water and.....a crime scene report. Cool.
Progressively the stars turned up to watch the film and at the very last moment, Madonna turned up. Of course, I just happened to be in the foyer at this moment and had a coughing fit so completely missed Madonna walking past, though as I turned to re-enter the cinema I did get to foller her in.
Before an expectant audience, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller had a chat and told us about the making of the film, mainly that Robert had to hunt, track down and pester Frank for a very long time before Frank agreed to a meeting. Up until this point, Frank had turned down every offer to make the movie version of Sin City. Robert arrrived with a concept video and the rest was history, especially as Frank was offered the chance of being co-director.
Finally, the stars were introduced and we met Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba and the lot of them. Bruce Willis was absent, but what the heck, you can;t have everything ;-)
Jessica Alba
is NANCY
Clive Owen
is DWIGHT
Rosario Dawson
is GAIL
Bruce Willis
is HARTIGAN
Brittany Murphy
is SHELLIE
Benicio del Toro
is JACKIE BOY
================================================================================
## Video on the move
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/video-on-the-move
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/video-on-the-move.md
- published: 2005-06-15
- document_id: 37
> When APJ was first conceived, cameras were heavier than today, less versatile and the quality lower.
**When APJ was first conceived, cameras were heavier than today, less versatile and the quality lower. Digital video cameras are now small, lightweight, relatively inexpensive and can double as a digital still camera.**
With no excuses left, APJ bought the Sony DCR-PC100 and struck out for the mountains of Vermont and Maine to test the little beastie.
**Years ago, we first wanted to push text via email.** Then, when Web browsers first caught on, we found that text could be more than just plain ASCII text, we found that text could carry emphasis and express more than mere ASCII. With the addition of character formatting, we could start to convey more than just words, we started to enter the realm of a picture is worth a thousand words. The next evolution was the addition of images and more advanced text formatting. Since the mid-90s this has been all we craved.
**Steve Jobs and Apple had different ideas.** After selling a ton of iMacs on the premise that they look good and take only minutes to connect to the Internet, Apple needed a new killer application. They found it in Video.
**Video can quite literally convey a thousand images.** Imagine what you can express with a million words?
**So why is APJ so excited?** Well, the initial premise of A Profound Journey was to travel the world with the latest technology, filming and providing daily commentary via the web. Five years ago, the only technology that needed significant improvement was that of video capture. Cameras were heavier, less versatile and the quality lower. Today, that has all changed. Digital video cameras are small, lightweight, relatively inexpensive and double as a digital still camera.
**We chose the Sony DCR PC100 (superceded by the DCR PC110).** This digital camera can quite literally go anywhere that you do. It is small, lightweight and shoots film of exceptional quality (day or night with infrared). This is still not shooting broadcast quality footage (which is the ideal), but the prospect of producing engaging documentaries with these low cost cameras, perhaps distributable via the web, is now possible.
**What are we doing at APJ to test these little beasts?** Well, at the moment the snow capped mountains of Vermont and Maine (in the USA) are calling loudly, so every time we venture to the mountains for a spot of snowboarding, our trusty PC100 comes with us.
Below freezing temperature? No problem.
Over exposure due to sunlight reflection on the snow? No issue.
Any problem with using the camera whilst flinging yourself down the mountain? None, its so small and light that you can forget you are carrying it.
Well, are there any problems? No, not really. Actually, thats not true. This weekend, for the first time in two months, I had artifacts on the image due to snow melting and leaving residue on the lens. This partially ruined a days worth of filming, but once found, was easily corrected.
Okay, so with the new range of digital cameras, we have found that taking the footage is only dependant on your ability to take engaging imagery and that there is no excuse that the camera just isnt up to the job. What is the next hurdle to jump?
That hurdle is getting the footage into a form that can be edited and therefore become the next great snowboarding or travel documentary.
**This is where Apple are winning the battle for the hearts and minds** of those budding film makers who can pick up a camera, shoot some film but havent the faintest idea about editing the film. You need two things (other than the camera) in this digital age; a computer that has enough grunt and disk space and some quality editing software.
Firstly, any iMac that you buy today has Firewire (this allows you to connect and control your camera to the computer and transfer the large amount of digital footage at high speed), they have plenty of disk space and all come with iMovie. Okay, I admit that iMovie isnt the software that will bring you Oscars, but it will allow hobbyists to produce films that will be engaging and make your travel footage eye popping instead of yawn inducing.
**If an iMac and iMovie isnt good enough, you can get a G4 Mac or a Firewire card for your PC.** Couple this with Adobe Premiere (and/or Final cut pro on the Mac) and Adobe After Effects, you might well be on the road to the travel equivalent of The Blair Witch Project.
After buying the PC100, a computer was needed, so an iMac DV+ was bought, extra RAM added and voila! 4 hours later I had my first short completed, a 2.5 minute extravaganza of a Canadian cousin try to chop firewood in the freezing cold temperatures of a Vermont Christmas. I didnt read a single word of a manual thats how easy it can be with the right tools.
**So, up into the mountains of Vermont (Jay Peak to be exact) and to test the camera.** Well, as stated previously, even though the temperature was south of ridiculous, the camera worked well, my fingers on the other hand started to go numb and white
..
Moving mountain range to Maine (Sunday River), the temperature was much more reasonable, the snow was deep and testing of the camera in action poses was needed.
**First of all, filming a subject whilst on the move turned out to be simple,** the only real problem was knowing whether to keep your eye on the subject or the direction you were headed.
**Next, we tried filming as though the camera were the eyes of the subject.** This too worked, but the final film didnt convey the speed or the angle of descent. Ill have to work on that one!
**Finally, with the light fading, we tested filming a subject moving fast with the camera stationary** (in other words, filming ourselves going over jumps ;-) Altough the raw footage was slight under-exposed (human error not camera deficiency) the quality was good and the detail clear.
**After a couple of months use,** it has become clear that using the digital camera to take both movies and stills is unbelievably useful. If you are up a mountain and you see the most incredible skyline, the chances are you want to take some video of it and some high resolution stills. Single fames taken from the video are good, but stills are of a higher quality. The PC100 has the added advantage that stills can be taken directly to tape (though at a lower resolution) or onto a Sony Memory stick. Taking stills on a memory stick are a huge advantage because you can very easily transfer theses images to a palmtop or laptop whilst you are on location.
Okay, so thats a ramble about filming in general and a brief glimpse at using a modern digial camera whilst on the road. An in-depth discussion of editing and producing video for the web can be left for a different discussion.
**So, let me round things up.**
Filming high quality, useable imagery is now extremely viable. If you are considering a digital video camera, it is worth investing as much as you can afford. Make sure that you consider all the options available to you carefully.
I chose the PC100 and would recommend it to anybody, though it has now been superceded by the PC110.
You also need to consider how you will edit your footage. I bought the PC100 then had to go out and buy an iMac.
You need to consider the software you will use to do your editing. All Apple machine come with iMovie installed, so there is no extra expense initially. Remember, iMovie will not do everything for you and you may well find yourself considering upgrading to final Cut pro or Adobe Photoshop. If you do this, consider the cost of the software and that you will have to invest a lot of time and effort learning these packages. They are designed for professionals and if will take time and effort to get the best out of them though it will be ultimately worthwhile.
**At APJ, we have really bought into the new digital cameras and cannot wait to take the PC100 on a big adventure,** perhaps to the ruins of Tikal, or perhaps to document our footsteps on the Inca trail. Whatever we do, well be sure to report on our efforts and tell you all about the adventure.
by Seamus Waldron
Feb. 2001
================================================================================
## The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy.md
- published: 2005-04-28
- document_id: 1240
> Don't panic. A review of the 2005 film of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, from the London premiere. A good film and a great party.
[](/articles/events-hitchhikers-guide-premiere-page-01)
[Front page](/articles/events-hitchhikers-guide-premiere-page-01) of the free booklet given to each member of the audience at
the Hitchhiker's Premiere,
Wednesday 20th April, 2005.
I liked this film; I'm a big fan, a bit of a dork you might say. I can quote lines from the [books](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0330258648/apj-21?creative=6394&camp=1406&link_code=as1) which I read nearly 20 years ago.
This isn't quite the funniest movie of the year, but it is worthwhile and enjoyable. It is, perhaps a bit too much, of a rollicking
romp through the galaxy. It also has some catchy music and will put a smile on your face.
I give this film a positive **8/10**.
## Let's get some context here
There are three types of people who will be seeing this movie.
First, there are the Uninitiated, those who know not what the mind of Douglas Adams is capable of.
Second, there are the Fans and thirdly, there are the Fans.
Yes, I know that the Fans are in two groups, but this is for a reason. The first group, lets call them Fans (a) are really not going to like this movie. The second group, lets call them Fans (b) are going to have a ball and like the Uninitiated, will want to see the film at least once more to pick up on all the stuff they missed the first time.
Fans (a) are going to say that the story line has been changed too much, it has been "Hollywoodified", that Arthur Dent never gets it on with Trillian, that there is no such thing as a Point of View Gun. These are the fans that think they are the biggest fans of all. They are the fans that know absolutely nothing.
Fans (b) know absolutely all they need to know about "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (from now on H2G2). Each incarnation of the story is different. Douglas was always tinkering with his creation. When George Lucas was filming The Empire Strikes Back, Douglas was already showing George how this tinkering should be done. Like George, Douglas doesn't always get it right, but in the main, the updated story is usually better than the last.
This movie is no different. There are new plot threads, there are new gags, there are some old threads untied, retired and turned into knots. Some work, some leave you a little bemused. On the whole, I think that a damn good job has been done to reduce an enormous amount of dialogue into something that allows me as a fan to quote lines before they are said and the Uninitiated to get some idea of what the plot is all about.
So, if you hear somebody say the film isn't as good as the [ \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ ] version (fill in the blank), then tell them they don't know a fetid dingoes kidneys what they are talking about and that they should grow up and enjoy the film for what it is.
Arthur & Ford discussing Vogon spaceships
Arthur & Ford suffering Vogon poetry
Zaphod & Trillian
Marvin, the paranoid android
Zaphod (only one head showing ;-)
The new look of the Vogons
## So, let me tell you about the premiere
Sitting in Empire 4 (otherwise known as The Imperial, a pub right next door to the side exit of the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square, London), I realised it was too late to change back into normal attire and that I would have to walk into the World Premiere of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" wearing nothing more than a dressing gown, pajamas, a towel and of course, a rubber duck.
It turned out that I was the only "normal" person wearing the obvious outfit for the premiere. The only other exhibitionist was S[\_\_\_\_] [I had better not name him ;-)] from Buena Vista International (BVI), those behind this premiere.
After being introduced to the producers and members of the cast, the audience was reminded that we might need the provided towels at a certain point in the movie
.
It was astonishing that the majority of the audience had not realised the white toweling over the back of their chairs was a free H2G2 towel. Of course, many of those at the premiere knew not the story of this wonderful tale, but those who did were already holding onto them for dear life as the, quite literally, explosive beginning was upon us
..
## A bit about the film (spoiler free)
The curtains raise, the audience cheers, we hear a catchy tune and see a lot of dolphins. After that, the story starts
.
and the rest is galactic cinematic history. This film took years to get to the screen and all those behind it should be congratulated.
It was apparent that the cast had been chosen well, there were a few cameos (ask a geek for the where and when) though I will tell you that the original Marvin from the [TV series](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005OCTS/apj-21?creative=6394&camp=1406&link_code=as1) makes an appearance.
The plot was fast, a bit too fast perhaps, but I was grinning like a maniac at the end and couldn't stop the scenes from the film whirling tough my head as I walked to the Free Masons Hall for the after show party.
## After the film, the party
One of the many Vogons at the after film party.
Party goers were greeted by the Red Escape Pod (that had been given a parking ticket) outside the main entrance. Inside, we were greeted by the first of many Vogons. BVI really excelled and showed the top brass from Disney, who were there, that not only can they put on a big premiere, but that they can do it in the United Kingdom.
There were very comfortable white pods (with interactive guide, powered by iMacs. You can download exclusive H2G2 stuff from iTunes BTW ;-) that you could sit in. Apparently each one cost around 20 grand and will be seen at showings all over the country.
There were plasma screens informing party goers where all the different rooms for food, drink (there were several of those), the first aid and various other bits of information and trivia. The dance floor became crowded late into the night with a touching moment of two Vogons boogying down with young relatives of the late Douglas Adams. I now have a very soft spot for Vogons.
Vogons got down & boogied at the after film party
It must be pointed out that one scene (with John Makovich) of H2G2 was filmed in the Great Hall of the Free Masons Lodge and that this was the first time EVER that this had been allowed. Not only that, but it was also the first time a party of this kind had been allowed. Three cheers to the Free Masons and I have to say the building is magnificent.
Parts of the set from The Heart of Gold were incorporated into the VIP areas which anybody could go to. I had a bizarre moment witnessing Simon Pegg ([Shaun of the Dead](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002MJT0I/apj-21?creative=6394&camp=1406&link_code=as1), Spaced) dancing along to Adam Ants' "Prince Charming". The stars of the show were there. I bumped into Bill Neighy and Martin Freeman who, incidentally, stayed until the party's bitter end at about 1.30am. There was even a 4ft rubber duck, alluding to the next film perhaps?
Chinese food, and sushi was taken round by waiters in dressings gowns and the Champagne flowed. There was even the odd cocktail that looked remarkably like a Pan galactic Gargle Blaster
..I drank a fair bit.
I retrieved my bags and dressing gown from the coat check at the end of the evening (the Vogon who had been helping out was long since gone, obviously has a good Union) and was given a little goody bag with the second book in the H2G3 trilogy "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe". This went nicely with the program and towel and they all fitted nicely into the little bag with the new H2G2 logo.
### Conclusion: A good film and a great party. Well done those involved and roll on the sequels; I shall be looking forward to them. [](/articles/events-hitchhikers-guide-premiere-page-01) [An added bonus, the Premier Program](/articles/events-hitchhikers-guide-premiere-page-01)
================================================================================
## Tikal, Guatemala
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-tikal
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-tikal.md
- published: 2005-04-20
- document_id: 60
> Tikal is the greatest of the Maya cities, a metropolis of stone pyramids that a thousand years of jungle could hide but not erase. Getting there is a slog through the Peten lowlands, and it is worth every mile.
**Tikal is the greatest of the Maya cities, a metropolis of stone pyramids that a thousand years of jungle could hide but not erase. Getting there is a slog through the Peten lowlands. It is worth every mile.**
*This is the guide Scott Cardwell wrote for A Profound Journey in 1996, lightly corrected and brought up to date, with a few sections added thirty years on. Scott's account of the place and its people still stands. Seamus Waldron, 2026.*
*"It lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean, her masts gone, her name effaced, her crew perished, and none to tell whence she came, to whom she belonged, how long on her voyage, or what caused her destruction."*
*John Lloyd Stephens, 1842*
## Introduction
It is impossible to take the quarter-mile walk through the lowland rainforest that spills you into the middle of the Central Plaza of Tikal without feeling the same awe John Lloyd Stephens recorded at his first sight of a Maya ruin in 1842. The mute imperial glory of the temples, the majesty of giant mahoganies, all combine to an effect that is almost magical: pyramids in the middle of a rainforest. And, like all humans, standing in the Plaza or on top of a temple is not enough. We want to understand the lot of it: the people, their gods, and what drove them to build this place.
A century and a half of study has not yielded all the answers, but, as the following sketch shows, we have at least made it into the foyer of the house of knowledge.
## Where is it?
Tikal sits in the northeastern Peten, the lowland rainforest that fills the top third of Guatemala, in Central America. Mexico lies to the north and west, Belize to the east.
## The basics
Sometime between 12,000 and 20,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers crossed the frozen Bering land bridge into the Americas. By the first millennium BC a complex culture called the Olmec had arisen in the Gulf lowlands of Mexico, building cities and carving two-tonne basalt heads. Around 600 BC some of these people found their way to the Peten jungle of lowland Guatemala, where they began what would be more than 1,100 years of ceaseless construction on the site we know as Tikal, a name whose original meaning is lost to us.
At its height, Tikal was home to tens of thousands of people and sprawled across more than 20 square miles. Sometime in the ninth century, for what is now thought to be a combination of cultural and environmental reasons, the city was abandoned to the jungle. The last date carved into its monuments reads 869 AD.
Locals always knew the ruins were there, but Tikal was not officially "rediscovered" until 1848, when an expedition from the Peten government reached the site. They found temples, palaces and pyramids under a thousand years of tropical growth: 200-foot temples capped with 175-foot trees. In the twentieth century, large excavations and reconstructions were undertaken jointly by the Guatemalan government and several US universities. Even now, only a fraction of the city has been freed from its living tomb.
In recent decades, dramatic breakthroughs in reading the rotund and sometimes menacing Mayan glyphs have given us, from the once-mute monuments, a culture of kings and queens and priests and blood, of ritualised warfare between rival city-states, of vast construction and sudden desertion, of astronomical and mathematical knowledge to rival anything in the ancient world, Old or New.
Why the Classic Maya cities were abandoned at the end of the first millennium is still not fully understood. The leading theories point to some mix of environmental exhaustion, revolt, famine and the failure of a priesthood that had promised more than the gods delivered. And, contrary to a stubborn pseudo-science rumour, the Maya did not vanish. They moved to the highlands, where, after five centuries of conquest and colonial rule, they still weave their own cloth and keep the old rituals.
In 1996, peace accords ended a 36-year civil war that had killed or disappeared more than 200,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them Maya. Out of that peace grew what was hopefully called a Mayan renaissance: the Indigenous Maya, who make up something like four in ten Guatemalans, beginning to take a fairer share in the country's government and schooling for the first time since the Conquest. Thirty years on, that promise has been only partly kept, but the war, at least, is over.
And while the living work towards a long-sought voice, each day a little more is decoded, unearthed and understood about the magnificent city of the jungle.
## Ruins map
Tikal National Park covers 222 square miles of northeastern Guatemala. About 20 square miles of ruins have been mapped. From the top of any of the taller structures you can see tree-covered hillocks stretching in every direction. Those are unexcavated ruins.
## Getting there and when to go
In 1996 the standard approach was a long haul up from the south. Today most visitors fly into Flores, on Lake Peten Itza, served by Mundo Maya International airport, and drive the hour or so north to the park. The other clean route is overland from Belize: cross at Benque Viejo del Carmen into Melchor de Mencos and carry on west. If you are already in Belize, Tikal is an easy two or three days bolted onto the trip, which is how a lot of people see it.
The dry season runs roughly from late November to April and is the comfortable time to go. The rains from May onward turn the tracks to soup, though the jungle is at its loudest and greenest then if you do not mind a soaking.
One practical note that has changed since Scott wrote this. You can no longer scramble up every temple. Temple I is off limits, and several others are climbed by fixed wooden staircases rather than by hauling yourself up the stone. Temple IV, the tallest, still has a stair to the top, and the view from it is the one to plan your day around.
## Pith and particulars
- The Maya made books from bark paper, recording astronomical and historical data. These books are called codices. Only four are now thought to survive, three of them in European libraries; most of the rest were burned by Spanish priests after the Conquest.
- The Maya kept a complex calendar, still observed today in many Maya communities.
- Two cycles of time, a 260-day cycle and a 365-day solar year, ran at once.
- The 260-day cycle is a ritual almanac: 20 named days (the names of gods) and 13 numbers, the exact pairing repeating every 260 days. Birth dates were read from it and important events timed by it. Time and religion were inseparable.
- The solar calendar had 18 months of 20 days, plus five additional days of bad luck at the end of the year.
- Together they make a 52-year period, the time it takes for a given day to come round again. This is the Calendar Round.
- The Calendar Round sits inside a longer system, the Long Count, which measures time from a fixed starting point corresponding to 13 August 3114 BC. The meaning of that date is unknown, but thought to be mythological.
- Long Count dates group days as follows: baktun (144,000 days, or 20 katuns), katun (7,200 days, or 20 tuns), tun (360 days, or 18 uinals), uinal (20 days, or kins), kin (one day). A date written 9.12.7.0.9 reads left to right: 9 baktuns, 12 katuns, 7 tuns, 0 uinals, 9 kins, counted from the beginning of time.
- The most important buildings were aligned to astronomical events: the equinoxes, the summer solstice, the rising of certain planets.
- The Maya tracked and predicted Mars, Venus, Mercury and Jupiter.
- They were using a symbol for zero by at least the first century BC.
- The temples, white today, were originally painted in reds, blues, greens and yellows. If a dye existed, it went on the walls.
- They used no metal tools in any of their building or carving. Obsidian and jade did the cutting.
- More than twenty Mayan languages are spoken in Guatemala today, alongside Spanish, Xinca and Garifuna.
One more, added with the benefit of hindsight. The current Long Count cycle, the thirteenth baktun, ran out on 21 December 2012. A small industry grew up around it predicting the end of the world. The world, as the Maya themselves would have told you, simply rolled over into the next cycle and carried on.
## Natural phenomena
### Critters
The rainforest that has swallowed the monuments is full of life. For instance:
- **Tarantulas**, big hairy spiders with a leg span up to ten inches. Females have survived more than two years without food and live over twenty. Males die quicker. Go figure. The bite of either is not particularly harmful to humans, though, ick, best avoided.
- **Leaf-cutter ants** march in their thousands to a tree, wearing a path inches deep into the forest floor. Each ant cuts a leaf section several times its own weight and carries it home, sometimes a mile away. At the nest they chew the leaves to a pulp where a fungus grows, then harvest the fungus to feed the colony. Too dry, and they leave the cuttings out overnight to take up moisture; too wet, and they put them out in the day; soaked, and they throw them out and start again. These insects are farmers.
- The black **howler monkey**, moving through the trees more like a cat than a swinging ape, lives in groups of up to ten and marks its territory with a howl, part primate, part lion, that carries up to 3 km. Helpful hint: do not stand underneath. They enjoy soiling the tourists.
- More than 200 species of **birds** make this some of the best birding in the world.
### Vegetable matter
Among the mahoganies and cedars, many over 200 feet tall, stands the giant, sacred **ceiba**, which in the Maya view stands at the centre of the world and binds the universe together. Its roots reach down into the Underworld; its trunk rises from the heart of the earth into the heavens.
### Must do it
- Temple IV, at 230 feet, gives the best view of the other temples standing as quiet sentinels above the forest. Tree-covered hillocks nearby mark unexcavated ruins. Sunset is wonderful any day, but if you can, go on the full moon, which rises as the sun sets. Sitting on top of the temple with the moon coming up, the sun going down, monkeys howling and toucans crossing below, "almost magical" feels like an understatement.
- Get to Temple III in the dark before daybreak, sit, listen, and watch the jungle wake and the sun come up over the Central Plaza.
## Thirty years on
Scott wrote this in 1996, with the war just ended and the calendar's famous deadline still sixteen years off. Both have since passed into history. The temples have not. They stood here a thousand years before either of us, indifferent to our deadlines, and they will be standing long after this page has gone the way of the codices. That is most of the appeal. You go to feel small for an afternoon, on top of a pyramid, with the forest doing its level best to take it all back.
> ### Key facts
>
> - **Country:** Guatemala, in the northeastern Peten
> - **Nearest town and airport:** Flores, with Mundo Maya International about an hour south
> - **Overland from Belize:** via the Benque Viejo and Melchor de Mencos border
> - **Tallest structure:** Temple IV, around 230 feet (70 m)
> - **Best time to visit:** the dry season, late November to April
> - **Status:** UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979; a national park of 222 square miles
*Original text by Scott Cardwell, 1996. Revised and expanded by Seamus Waldron, 2026.*
================================================================================
## The True Treasure of Guatemala
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-guatemala
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-guatemala.md
- published: 2005-04-10
- document_id: 57
> Guatemala holds the heart of the Maya world: Tikal, the older and emptier El Mirador, and a highland country of volcanoes and markets above it all.
**Guatemala holds the heart of the Maya world: Tikal, the older and emptier El Mirador, and a highland country of volcanoes and markets above it all.**
Guatemala is where the Maya civilisation had its heart, and the country's real treasures are in that history rather than in Guatemala City, which has the galleries, theatres and restaurants you would expect of a capital, and a notable collection of pre-Columbian art, but is not why you come.
## Tikal
The great city of [Tikal](/articles/destinations-tikal), a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979, is one of the largest Maya sites left standing. It is in the Peten basin in the north, easily reached across the border from [Belize](/articles/destinations-belize), and the temples breaking through the forest canopy are the image most people carry away from Guatemala. It dates from around the second century AD and was a serious political and economic power, which shows in what survives. Flores is the base for visiting, and there are guides at the site. I have written about Tikal at length separately.
## El Mirador
The one I would push you towards is El Mirador, in the far north of the Peten near the Mexican border. It was found in 1926, and many think it was the cradle of the whole Maya civilisation. It is over 2,000 years old and had its heyday between 150 BC and 150 AD. Its two great structures are El Tigre and La Danta, 180 and 230 feet tall, on bases of more than fourteen acres. The view from the top of El Tigre, a former temple, is one of the best I have ever seen. At sunset it was something else.
El Mirador is the more romantic of the two by a distance, trees growing straight out of the ruins, and its remoteness is exactly what makes it better than its famous neighbour. That remoteness is also the catch. There is still no road. You reach it either on a hard five-day trek through the jungle from the village of Carmelita, arranged through the local cooperative, or by helicopter from Flores in about twenty-five minutes if your budget runs to it. Avoid the rainy season, May to October, when the trek turns to mud and tours get cancelled.
## The highlands
Most visitors pair the ruins with the highlands, and they should. Antigua, the old colonial capital, sits under three volcanoes and is the prettiest town in the country. Lake Atitlan, ringed by volcanoes and Maya villages, is the other fixture. Between them they are where Guatemala stops being a ruin and starts being a living place, which is the point the Tikal piece makes about the Maya never having vanished.
> ### Key facts
>
> - **Capital:** Guatemala City; the traveller's base is usually Antigua
> - **The big sites:** Tikal (accessible) and El Mirador (trek or helicopter only)
> - **Highlights beyond the ruins:** Antigua and Lake Atitlan
> - **Best time to visit:** the dry season, November to April; avoid May to October for El Mirador
> - **Currency:** the quetzal (GTQ)
*First written in 2005, updated 2026.*
================================================================================
## Belize an Enchanting Destination for All
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-belize
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-belize.md
- published: 2005-03-15
- document_id: 54
> Belize is the only English-speaking country in Central America, and it packs a barrier reef, dense jungle and Maya ruins into a country smaller than Wales.
**Belize is the only English-speaking country in Central America, and it packs a barrier reef, dense jungle and Maya ruins into a country smaller than Wales.**
Belize is bordered by Mexico to the north, Guatemala to the west, and the Caribbean to the east. It is small, smaller than Wales, and it manages to fit a world-class reef, thick jungle and Maya ruins into that space.
## The reef
The [Belize Barrier Reef](http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/764) is the headline. It is the largest reef in the northern hemisphere and the second largest in the world after Australia's, running the length of the coast from the Mexican border down towards Honduras. Diving and snorkelling is the main industry here, over the reef itself, the offshore atolls and a few hundred sand cays. You can share the water with something like 500 species of fish, hard and soft corals, and the usual cast of rays and turtles.
What makes it good is how few people live along it. The coast is thinly populated compared with most reefs, so the water stays clear and the colour is startling. The reef spent nearly a decade, from 2009 to 2018, on UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites in danger, mostly over oil exploration and mangrove clearing. Belize banned offshore oil drilling in its waters in 2017, and the reef came off the danger list in 2018, which is a rare piece of good news in the genre.
## The beaches and cayes
Like most of the Caribbean, the beaches are a draw, and the pale coral sand gives the shoreline its own colour. The mangrove cayes off the coast are the place to do nothing in a hammock. The accommodation out there is rarely fancy, but that is part of the point. If you want a marble lobby, go somewhere else.
For anyone who cannot sit still there is kayaking, windsurfing, kitesurfing and fishing, and inland there is the jungle.
## The interior
Inland, Belize turns green and close. Under the rainforest canopy it goes quiet and a little eerie, the opposite of the open glare of the coast. There are birds in absurd numbers, waterfalls, and animals coming down to the water, and if you watch the ground you start to read tracks. Maya sites are scattered through the forest too: Caracol, Xunantunich and Lamanai, and the Guatemalan giant, [Tikal](/articles/destinations-tikal), an easy crossing away over the western border.
> ### Key facts
>
> - **Capital:** Belmopan; the largest town is Belize City
> - **Language:** English, the only English-speaking country in Central America
> - **Currency:** Belize dollar (BZD), pegged at 2 to 1 against the US dollar
> - **Best time to visit:** the dry season, roughly February to May
> - **The reef:** largest in the northern hemisphere; off UNESCO's danger list since 2018
*First written in 2005, updated 2026.*
================================================================================
## Skype to the rescue
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/skype-to-the-rescue
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/skype-to-the-rescue.md
- published: 2005-02-10
- document_id: 8
> Skype to the rescue
With six bombs (currently) exploding in London, the Underground is evacuated, the buses being stopped, the sheer number of people using their mobile phones to call friends and collegues to get information and to say they are okay, the networks cannot cope. Even BBC reporters are using satellite phone. This is like being back in [Boston on 911](/articles/911-world-stopped). But I have **Skype** and I can communicate.
I have been lucky. Not on a tube, train or bus today - most days I am - but I have forgotten my mobile phone. How do I call my business, my parents, my friends?
## WiFi and Skype to the rescue
Just a couple of days ago, I finally got my account setup on Skype and here I am today with my trusty iBook. Out comes MacStumbler and there is an open WiFi within range. First I call my parents, then my friends, then work and have been trying to make sure my employees are okay. I then get updates on the situation from the BBC website. This report is being written from the side of the road.
WiFi, Skype and VOIP have saved the day. In a an age when mobile phones are prevelant and street public phones are being removed, VOIP and WiFi has been the only way to communicate when the mobile networks are swamped.
================================================================================
## What of Bush's brave new world?
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/bush-election-year
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/bush-election-year.md
- published: 2004-11-05
- document_id: 4
> Quick guide Description
**What of Bush's brave new world?**
In one presidency, George W. Bush has managed to change the political structure of the world and increase tensions to the point of open warfare. An incredible achievement for this failed oilman from Texas.
Bush started his presidency with the farcical nature of the election which was so crooked to outsiders that it allowed Fidel Castro to offer military troops to enter the USA as a UN force to oversee free and fair elections in the future.
Even before he was elected, I knew Bush was a disaster waiting to happen. Sure enough, within weeks of assuming the mantel of presidency, he had dismissed a Clinton Whitehouse investigation into Al Quieda that concluded immediate steps had to be taken against the organisation. Bush decided to reject this recommendation as it came from Clinton and decided to do all the work again and on September 10th 2001, came to the same conclusion, tragically too late.
Of course, we didn't know this at the time, but we did see the Chinese government test how far it could push Bush by forcing an American spy plane to land after it had infringed into Chinese airspace. What isn't readily realised was that Bush had sacked the American Ambassador to China and hadn't found a replacement.
Bush then pulled out of the peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, effectively siding with Israel and unleashing the dogs of war. Tensions have grown to a point that Bush is effectively condoning assassination and condemning Palestinians of being terrorists when they are fighting to remove an occupying power from their land.
As Bush harps on about the war on terror, a nice phrase, which means anything the bully in the playground wants it to mean, he conveniently forgets the history of his own country. By his morals and standards, the likes of Paul Revere and John Adams would be nothing but terrorists and insurgents that were to be hunted down, locked up without trial or assassinated.
Draconian and sweeping changes have been made to US law since September 11th 2001. Laws allowing seizure of electronic information without need for oversight and making it illegal for organisations and individuals forced to turn over this information to even say it has happened.
The notorious DMCA has made it illegal to watch a DVD on a home computer if it is running Linux, a popular alternative to Windows. It has allowed corporations to threaten legal action for companies making unbranded printer cartridges and garage door openers. The DMCA has been used to prevent a website from listing all the bargain prices for stores during holiday seasons and to litigate against children and grandparents for downloading music from the internet. None of this appears to help increase the security of the USA.
Bush does not like the idea that a committed Gay or Lesbian couple should have the same legal rights as a heterosexual couple. In an incredibly misguided step, he wants to introduce an amendment to the Constitution to reduce the rights of the citizens of the USA by banning this so-called Gay Marriage, when the right being removed is a right for a minority to achieve equal rights. Did Martin Luther King die for nothing?
Whilst the USA and UK forces struggle with Iraq, we learn that one of the biggest hurdles to peace is the availability of weapons. On the one hand, Bush wants to remove armaments from the population of Iraq and on the other, fails to establish reasonable gun control laws in his own country. Where the shooting of an American solider in Iraq is headline news, a drive-by shooting in the USA gets little or no coverage.
Bush appears not to understand how he is alienating the disenfranchised, effectively backing them into a corner from which to only course of action appears to be armed struggle. He does not appreciate that within the USA he is creating a large movement of the disenfranchised. The kid on the street that gets sued for downloading music, the Gay or Lesbian couple whose constitutional rights are being reduced, the Muslim groups who perceive their president is allowing the persecution of their religion, whilst promoting Christianity by blurring the distinction between Church and State.
In the run-up to the next election, Bush is trying to make out that he is an American patriot and knows exactly what he is doing, whilst claiming that Kerry is not a true American because he does not agree with Bush's aggressive military policies. The unbelievable tenacity of the man when Kerry did fight for his country and knows only too well the horror of war and the need to make war as a last resort, compared to the man whom the populace accept dodged national service.
The man is bloodthirsty, ignorant of the effect of his actions and entirely without world perspective. History will judge Bush and it will not be kind to him. I judge him today and find him lacking integrity, morality and an entirely distasteful man.
================================================================================
## Travels in Peru
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-ian-travels-in-peru
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-ian-travels-in-peru.md
- published: 2004-09-15
- document_id: 62
> "Until you stop travelling, you can never really say that you have been travelling." , writes Ian Kensey on his first major trip abroad . The alarm went off at 5am.
**"Until you stop travelling, you can never really say that you have been travelling."** , writes **Ian Kensey on his first major trip abroad**.
**The alarm went off at 5am. Pity I didn't hear it**. I should have known at that point that I was in for an adventure. Thankfully Seamus , who I had talked into delivering me to the airport , bustled in bright and cheery fifteen minutes later. The beer I'd consumed the previous evening was a mistake and that's the great thing about hindsight - It's always too late to do anything about it. Still groggy from lack of sleep and the after-effects of too much alcohol I climbed out of bed.
"You're either mad or brave." The all too familiar phrase reared its head once again. I'd heard this statement from many people since I announced nearly five months ago that I planned to travel. Well that's not strictly true. When I announce that I was going to travel everyone said, That's nice', or, 'where are you planning to go'. I quickly mentioned Peru and that got a quizzical look, and that I was travelling alone. Then they said, "You're either mad or
brave". In the global scope of things I had not travelled. The problem with the global scale' is that it is far too big I had travelled a little in Europe, with my last trip causing me to fracture my ankle. It still ached now, nearly nine-months after that fateful trip. I hoped that this journey would not end so dramatically.
As I shuffled half-heartedly to the bathroom (toothbrush in hand) I had to admit that the first category felt just fine. Bravery is not one of those attributes that even rate in my top ten. At any rate it took longer to get ready than I had anticipated. I gulped down a mug of hot tea that Seamus had made; a mistake. Tea should never be rushed. With dusk still thinking about arriving, I dashed about making sure that I had not forgotten anything.
Seamus was already waiting in the car, and I am sure he would have tooted the horn, except for the hour. Certain that I had forgotten something I joined him. I was already into the two-hour check-in period. My frantic requests for Seamus to drive faster where met with an assured calmness that I would arrive in plenty of time.
He was right. With less than an hour and a half remaining I arrived at Heathrow Terminal 4. Seamus saw me as far as the passport control. We said our farewells and I exclaimed in my best Arnie voice, "I'll be back!" It too was early for humour and it didn't get the response that I had hoped for. I hate goodbyes so I walked, without looking back, into the unknown.
The unknown lasted thirty-seconds as I discovered the shiny and laboratory clean expanse of the Duty Free shopping area. The neon strip lights reflected off the Black and White marble flooring. I wondered if I had taking a wrong turn. I glanced round expecting to be ushered from here. All was quiet, and so I stepped with a squeak onto the polished floor. My first mission: to arm myself with enough film for the duration of my trip. Eighteen rolls later, I sought my next objective. Breakfast. Unfortunately I could only find a McDonalds. So breakfast was out. I was still hungry and loath as I was a McDonalds seemed strangely fitting. My final meal in the UK was a Sausage and Egg McMuffin. There is no justice in the World. As I handed over my money an unremarkable female voice calmly announced that flight 174 at gate 22 was boarding. This seemed strangely familiar, and I checked my boarding ticket.
"Oh, no" I muttered to myself. Well actually it was a lot more colourful than that, but there is only so much you can expect to get printed. I scooped up my purchases and lumbered towards the gate. Stuffing my McMuffin in the first available pocket; I waved my boarding pass at the stewardess at the desk, who politely suggested that I hurry.
From my window seat I glanced out at the Friday morning dawn. There was nothing to see. As the sky lightened it revealed grey overcast clouds. In great British tradition the weather was seeing me off in true style - it started to rain. Bloody typical. I sat back and waited. My first destination was Amsterdam.
Amsterdam is flat, really flat. This was more than evident as we approached the airport. We bumped down on the runway and I gave it a landing factor of 4. From previous flights I had created a scale of appreciation for landings with 1 indicating that the pilot was trying to leave tracks in the runway, through to 10 where you hardly noticed that the plane had landed. It was well past nine in the morning when I stepped from the plane. Amsterdam is one hour away by plane, and an hour ahead of Greenwich-mean-time. In my planning for this trip I had discovered that you could not get a single flight from London to Lima, Peru. It was either via Amsterdam or Buenos Aires, Argentina. Strangely Amsterdam won. I found my flight and the half-full departure lounge. One side of it was a glass wall, the view dominated by our plane. I was disappointed to see that it wasn't a 747, just it's little brother the 737. There was an hour to wait before they let us in the plane and it seemed the same again before we finally got airborne. I watched as the Dutch countryside dwindled to patches of green and brown as the plane sought its cruising altitude. Monitors dotted around the plane helpfully gave statistics on airspeed, altitude, time into the journey and the time to our destination, a mere eleven hours away. Eleven hours. I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Eleven hours. What can your do for eleven hours when you are at 35,000 feet: talk, read, sleep, watch movies, and drink as much as possible. I did all of these, though not in any particular order. In the seat next to me sat Dianne who as it turned out was planning on travelling round Peru with her boyfriend Robert. Unfortunately he was seated in the central column about two rows forward. She explained that the tour operator had got the seating arrangements wrong, and that the airline was not going to do anything about it. She was friendly and we chatted on and off for much of the flight. A third of the way through the flight they showed the movie Twister, it has got great special effects, later they showed Babe and at some point through this I slept.
A pocket of turbulence rocked the plane and nudged me awake. We were descending towards Aruba. I hadn't a clue where Aruba was and I only found out when a map appeared on the Monitor. Aruba is one of the Dutch Caribbean islands. With a LF of 6 we arrived only to be told that all those going on to Lima, Peru where not to get off the plane. The pandemonium that followed almost escalated to a riot as the toll of an Eleven-hour flight
fuelled dozens of pockets of rebellion. The cabin crew patiently and politely requested that everyone return to his or her seats. This, as it turned out, was a fruitless exercise as it only fanned the flames of rebellion. Finally the cabin crew accepted that we were not going to do what we were told.
I do not know what they promised the ground crew, because they turned the plane around in record time and it was only when all the doors where closed that we all begrudgingly returned to our seats. Next stop Peru. I wanted to feel excited at the prospect of finally reaching my destination, but I could only manage feed up. It's roughly four hours to Lima, Peru and a flight that crossed the Amazon rain forest and the Andes mountain range. I saw the former and was content to sleep through the latter.
I was awaken some hours later by the stewardess thrusting two slips of paper into my hand. When I could focus properly I found that she had handed me two blue forms, each no bigger than a single piece of A5 paper. Still half asleep I attempted to make sense of them. It wasn't helped by the fact that whoever had written them had only Loosely grasped the concept of English, and I mean loosely with a capital L. After my third attempt understanding blossomed. Then I laughed. The first was to declare that I would in fact be staying in Peru, the other was to declare any items of an electrical nature, to which I would be required to pay a 20% tax. I was relieved to find a list of exceptions, which covered everything I was carrying.
The last rays of sunlight splashed over a sea of dark grey clouds and were gone. We were approaching Lima International Airport. The light outside seemed to evaporate away so it was dark when we touched down. I gave it a LF of 6 and even though I felt nervous I was glad to get off the plane. With Dianne and Robert in tow, we went in search of our luggage. Peruvian customs had to be negotiated first and it has to be seen to be believed. A dimly lit enclosure with guards (and guns, big guns) and bored looking officials behind big imposing desks. They took my two forms; saw I was English and promptly ignored them, after stamping my passport they ignored me as well. Uncertain if all the formalities had been taken care of, I followed the others. The bright lights of baggage reclaim were dazzling in comparison to passport control. Now, for the moment of angst, had my luggage actually made it to Peru with me? After what seemed like an eternity, and well after my Dianne and Robert had collected their gear, my very own blue pack appeared. The relief is hard to describe, but I know for a small while I completely forgot the journey here.
I found Dianne and Robert counting the local currency, and went in search for some of my own. I returned armed with 100 Sol's , this decades-local currency , and we all went in search of a taxi. The Peruvians may not be at the cutting edge of the social and technological knife but they know how to get money out of the unsuspecting traveller, especially one that just stepped off a plane. Once you step from the protection of the Terminal you enter what I can only describe as an arena. Peruvians lined a metal barrier like a human wall, their shouts drowning out the sounds of the airport. The metaphorical lion turned out to be the Taxi administrator. A serious looking chap quickly explained that we could only get to central Lima by taxi - one of his taxies. Not so bad I thought. Then he explained that it would cost 18 dollars. I looked round for a sympathetic driver and found only hard-nosed taxi drivers, all desperate to share in our money. Resigned to the inevitability of the situation we handed over the money, where we were guided to a taxi.
Taxi. This is possibly the most ambitious term I have heard for the vehicle that we finally
travelled in. It was an old American gas-guzzler - which put me in mind of Starsky and Hutch , circa 1965-75. This particular model came with all the features of a car (did I say car, sorry) which had never seen a days maintenance. Broken lights; an uncomfortable seat; an engine that had an interesting death rattle, and a Speedo that said 30 miles an hour. A little worrying considering it wasn't moving. These were but a few of the things that concerned me about his vehicle. Clasping the St. Christopher my mother had bought me specifically for this trip, I hopped he was paying attention. With Dianne and Robert in the back I took the front seat. The taxi wheezed away.
What happened next was... No I shall not spoil it for you by telling you how it ended. Here is how it began.
... Lima International Airport is surrounded by car park and it took all of our driver's skill to get us to the exit. On the other side of the barrier, cars crowded together on an already packed highway. The cacophony of sound was unexpected. Not from the expected engine noise, which was still a factor, but from hundred of horns being used continuously. As me we moved to join this anti-melodious body our driver, obviously feeling left out, let off a long flat blast on the horn, Well at least that worked.
I'm uncertain how me managed it, but we drove straight across two lanes of traffic and merged with a third. There was no signal, no use of any obvious gesture, just a toot on the horn and that was it. I was fast learning the first principle of Peruvian driving. The car-horn. This uninspiring device only used in frustration and anger back in England seemed to be the fundamental requirement for driving here. I watched, agog with terror as our driver, without looking, hooted his horn and changed lane. I had looked and I could see the whites of the eyes of the driver of the battered and patched car that was matching our speed. And as if by a kind of magic, it just made room. How was soon forgotten as I saw the red traffic lights ahead. Our driver hadn't - What to do at Traffic Signals' obviously weren't part of the driving test here - he passed happily through them, his hand firmly jammed on the car-horn.
By this time I had gripped the front dash with both hands, my white knuckles clearly visible in the soft orange glow of the streetlights. The greater part of this journey was spent in this manner. And when I though that it could get no worse, it did.
The road indicated two lanes for traffic, but the three and sometimes four lanes of cars didn't seem to notice. Up until now I had not paid much attention to traffic going the other way. The two flows had been separated by a wide shrubby wasteland. Up until now, I hadn't needed too. Without warning the shrubbery vanished and only a solid white line painted down the middle separated us from the screaming cars heading the other way. It was soon after this that my fears were proved. The traffic slowed to a stop, the cause unknown. Our driver had other plans. Spotting a gap in the traffic on the other side of the road he pulled out. Oncoming cars tooted there horn, I wanted to scream. My fingers were starting to leave marks in the front dashboard when I noticed a pair of headlights move into the lane we were racing along. A voice in my head was screaming, "This is it we are going to die." I ignored it and watched transfixed as the lights drew closer. Finally I closed my eyes and waited for the imminent collision.
I waited and nothing happened. I waited some more, and still nothing happened. Reluctantly I took a look. We were now travelling on the right side of the road, in the now moving traffic. I wish I had had my eyes open so I could have seen how he managed it.
It wasn't long before the bright lights of Lima appeared. Our driver seemed to be soothed by this and his erratic style calmed enough for me to release my vice-like grip on the dashboard. The trip from the airport appeared to take as long as the flight from Aruba. The big colonial buildings looked tired and washed out in the unnatural street lighting. There was a meeting of two cultures: the original colonial and the pre-modernism of western society. It made for an interesting and often surprising journey. Not as surprising or surprised as the two pedestrians that our driver narrowly avoided. The car-horn blocked out the drivers exclamations which I'm certain weren't complimentary.
Before we (that is Dianne, Robert and I) began this journey we agreed that the Plaza San Martin would be the best starting point. It is the most central of the dozen or so Plaza's in Lima. They had already pre-booked a reservation in one of the more expensive hotels in Lima. My task when I arrived was to find more modest accommodation. It was with much relief that the three of us climbed from the taxi and retrieved our packs. The driver hovered expectantly for a tip. As one person we walked away. None of us looked back to see if he was still there. The Plaza San Martin is a large open area with statues and trees lining the many paved pathways. It harked back to a period of colonial expansion. Now as it neared ten o'clock it looked menacing and forbidding.
Seamus had suggested that I pamper myself on my first night in a Peru. And at this time it sounded like a good idea. With this in mind I picked out the Hostel San Martin. All I had to do was find it. I was expecting a large banner or an illuminated sign; nothing. I consulted the 'Planet, the road name and a map. I was in the right street, in the right place, just no hostel. I was about to go in search of my second choice when I found it. The name was pasted to a half-open glass door. On the other side of the door a staircase lead up. The chap behind the desk was very helpful, and it was at this point that I realised that I didn't understand a word he was saying. The four months I had spent rapidly learning Spanish hadn't prepared me for this. They spoke so quickly I think I understood one word in four. I was able to ask questions , after a fashion , I just didn't know what the answer was. Between his broken English and my fractured Spanish I was able to get a room and convey that I needed to find a way to Nazca the next day. There was much nodding, smiling and signs of reassurance. When he had finished, he called someone's name and a teenager dressed in yellow and black came and collected the room key. As I left the check-in desk the male receptionist called to me saying that he would get his friend from Rodregeze travel to call me regarding my travel arrangements. I nodded and followed my guide to Room 41 at the top of the hostel. It was a basics room with a simple bed and more importantly a shower. I was told that breakfast was at 8:30am as he handed me the key and left.
A little while later I was considering the shower when the phone in my room rang. Hesitantly I answered. A soft-spoken male voice introduced himself as Michael a representative from transporta Rodregeze. He told me that he wanted to he wanted to meet tomorrow at 11am to discuss my travel arrangements. Good, I thought. "So how do I find your offices?" I asked. A hesitation , then a suggestion that it would be better and easier if he met me here. "Sure, Okay!" I reply and the phone was hung up.
I thought about the conversation I'd just had. I didn't like the way he had shied away from a meeting at his office. Now call me Paranoid, but I decided that I wouldn't be able to make the appointment.
It was late, I was tired and the shower was calling. All in all it had been a very long day.
---
*A note from 2026: Ian wrote this in 2004, and visiting Machu Picchu has changed completely since. Entry is now by timed ticket on one of three set circuits, with a daily cap and nothing sold at the gate, so you book online weeks or months ahead, especially from May to September. Inca Trail permits go the same way and sell out far in advance. The site itself is unchanged; the queue to see it is not. Seamus Waldron, 2026.*
================================================================================
## The Gateway Arch
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-gateway-arch-st-louis
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-gateway-arch-st-louis.md
- published: 2004-09-12
- document_id: 56
> The Gateway Arch is 630 feet of stainless steel bent into a perfect curve over the Mississippi. It is the tallest monument in the United States, and it is completely mad.
**The Gateway Arch is 630 feet of stainless steel bent into a perfect curve over the Mississippi. It is the tallest monument in the United States, and it is completely mad.**
## The Gateway Arch
Built as the gateway to the west, this 630-foot monument on the St Louis riverfront is the tallest in the United States, and the stainless steel curve is a genuine sight to behold.
It is the centrepiece of what is now Gateway Arch National Park, along with the museum at the base of the Arch and the Old Courthouse a short walk away.
## A brief history
In 1935 it was decided to build a monument to nineteenth-century westward expansion on the St Louis riverfront. Land was bought and 40 city blocks of homes and businesses were cleared, but the Second World War stopped any progress before a brick was laid.
In 1947 a group of St Louis citizens ran a nationwide competition for a design. The Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen won it. His other work includes the TWA Flight Center at New York's JFK, the Kresge Auditorium and chapel at MIT, and Dulles airport outside Washington.
Construction began in 1963 and the two legs met at the top in 1965. Saarinen never saw it. He died in 1961, six years after winning the competition and two years before the first section went up. A tram was threaded into the north leg, and the public first rode to the top in July 1967. The whole thing cost $13 million.
## Getting to the top
On a summer's day, with both trams running, as many as 6,400 people can reach the top. When you fold yourself into one of the tram cars (read: a tiny pod that ratchets and tilts to follow the curve of the Arch) you may well wonder if you have stepped onto the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. As I said, the thing is mad.
On a clear day the view runs about thirty miles. Do not be alarmed if you feel the Arch move. It is built to sway up to 18 inches in a high wind and to ride out an earthquake. Ground level to the viewing deck and back takes about 45 minutes, most of it spent queuing and gawping.
## Visiting today
The Arch had a major overhaul that finished in 2018. The old Jefferson National Expansion Memorial became Gateway Arch National Park, one of the smallest in the country, and the Museum of Westward Expansion at the base was rebuilt as a larger, brighter museum. The grounds were stitched back to downtown across a landscaped bridge over the sunken motorway that had cut the monument off from the city for decades.
The last piece took until 2025. The Old Courthouse, a short walk from the Arch, reopened in May 2025 after a $27.5 million restoration, the final phase of the $380 million CityArchRiver project. This is the building where Dred and Harriet Scott first sued for their freedom, and where Virginia Minor's fight for a woman's right to vote began, and the new galleries put those stories front and centre. It also got the first lift in its history, so the upper floors are now within everyone's reach. The Arch itself turned 60 the same year.
A couple of practical notes. Tram tickets are timed and best booked online before you go, especially in summer. The museum is free; the tram to the top is not. And the old TWA terminal that Saarinen built at JFK, mentioned above, is now a hotel, which is the sort of second life most airport buildings never get.
> ### Key facts
>
> - **Height:** 630 feet (192 m), the tallest monument in the US and the tallest arch in the world
> - **Architect:** Eero Saarinen, who won the competition in 1947 and died before it was built
> - **Built:** 1963 to 1965; open to the top from July 1967
> - **Sway:** designed to move up to 18 inches in a high wind
> - **Status:** Gateway Arch National Park since 2018 (formerly the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial)
*First written in 2004, updated 2026.*
================================================================================
## So, whats all this about speed dating then?
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/speed-dating
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/speed-dating.md
- published: 2004-07-15
- document_id: 9
> Quick guide to speed dating
**So, whats all this about speed dating then?**
So, I guess that it was about six months ago that I had time on my hands, had recently become single and
came across a website telling me about speed dating, or round robin dating. Takes yer pick.
Anyway, I thought I'd give it a go and convinced a mate of mine to come along, though he wimped out at the last moment.
I turned up and had a great time, it was a bit hectic and there were only three minutes to get to know my "date" before moving onto the next person.
Finding out who I matched up with at the end was kind of crappy. I filled out a form and handed it back to the organisers who than matched up all the results and then emailed me who was also interested in me.
For a first try at a speed dating evening, it wasn't too bad.
**So, what *is* speed dating?**
Well, I think it came to the UK initially from the USA, from a company called Speed dater, though they are not the only ones in the USA or even the most sucessfull ( I'll come back to this in a moment ).
The general idea for an evening is that you turn up and get to have a certain number of "dates", afterwhich you get to decide who you liked and then, without the pressure of having to ask around to find out who fanced you, you are presented with the names of the "dates" who would like to see you again.
Well, I had the opportunity to try [8minuteDating.com](http://www.8minutedating.com) in Boston, USA and I have to say, the experiance blew all others totally out of the water.
There is a reason these guys are the most sucessfull in North America.
First of all, I did everything online and they emailed me about 6 times in total from the start of the process to the end. They made sure I booked, they made sure that I didn't forget to turn up, they followed up after the event and through the website, I was able to match up with a few girls and get in contact with them, all the while, I didn't give out my contact details to anyone and vice versa.
But, I get ahead of myself. I turned up on a Tuesday evening at a bar called Barcode, near Fenway in Boston. Tuesdays are dead nights everywhere, so I wasn't suprised to see that all the people in the bar, with perhaps the exception of 4 or 5 people, were for the event - about 40 in total.
I was "registered" as I turned up, given a unique id Seamus254, which I then used throughout the evening and later on the website. I was told not to give out my surname, phone number, email and to do everything via the website. Already I realised that these guys knew how to run a slick and professional operation. This was way better than my previous experiences.
After a drink and some food, we were told to take a seat at the table indicated on out "dating card". Off I went and started my first date. Now, 8 minutes doens't seem like a long time, but its just right. Its way long enough for you to realise that you do not want to see the person again and it is *just* long enough for you to realise that you would like to find out more about someone.
After 4 dates, we had a break and could mingle with the other attendees. One girl I liked and was able to add her name and number to my dating card. Alas, she didn't add me to her card :-(
We had 4 more dates and then a raffle for a bottle of wine, given by the venue. I was able to chat to one of the girls I had had a date with and we really hit it off. I still see her to this day whenever I am in Boston. We get on really well.
I had a great evening and hit the [8minuteDating.com](http://www.8minutedating.com) website as soon as I could to put in the name and number sof the girls I liked. Over the next couple of days, I was match up with a couple for another date and a couple for "friendship". Incidentally, if you don't meet anyone during the evening that you like, you get another go for free.
All in all, a great experience. Everything worked well and was very professional.
Hope this gives you an idea about speed dating and that you will now give it a go!
================================================================================
## Yahoo! needs to eat its' own SPAM sandwich
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/yahoo-anti-spam-day
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/yahoo-anti-spam-day.md
- published: 2004-06-20
- document_id: 10
> Yahoo! needs to eat its' own SPAM sandwich In a public spirited way, Yahoo! is trying to make us all aware or SPAM by creating the "Yahoo! Global Anti-Spam Day" .
**Yahoo! needs to eat its' own SPAM sandwich**
In a public spirited way, Yahoo! is trying to make us all aware or SPAM by creating the **["Yahoo! Global Anti-Spam Day"](http://www.yahooantispam04.com/index.php)**. It's actually a really good idea, but...
...Unfortunately, they need a dose of their own medicine.
Pontificating in their **[Press release](http://www.yahooantispam04.com/press_information.php)** that "Yahoo! Mail fights the Spam blight by hitting spammers hard with litigation and having the very best technology tools coupled with a basic understanding of how they can **personally** [my emphasis] stop the perpetuation of spam."
The press release continues.... "only 46% [of British PC users] are aware that computers get viruses by opening attachments, while only 17% know that you can get a virus by downloading a file online".
Ironically, **you can only get the Press release by downloading a document**, primarily a Word doc or a ZIP file. They do have .PDF, which would be better than the rest, but what's wrong with good ol' HTML?
It doesn't take a genius to realise that Yahoo! had better take it's own advice, eat humble pie (or should I say humble Spam sandwich) and sort out their own practises before telling us how to sort our own.
================================================================================
## Romania Vlad the Impaler (Dracula)
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-vlad-the-impaler-romania
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-vlad-the-impaler-romania.md
- published: 2004-06-15
- document_id: 66
> In search of Vlad the Impaler, written by Seamus Waldron . [Jump straight to Dracula ] The beginning 5am. Yawn.
In search of Vlad the Impaler,
written by *Seamus Waldron*.
#### [ [Jump straight to Dracula](#vlad) ]
## The beginning
5am.
Yawn.
Why, oh why do I always get a flight that leaves at a ridiculous time in the morning? If it wasn't for the fact that I know I can leave my house and be in duty free within an hour, I would be panicking at this point.
The rain-swept journey to the airport was un-inspiring as was check-in at the Malev desk. Julian, Yvette and I were awake by now and dragged our weary bodies to customs and then the departure lounge.
It then started.
"I forget to get money from the cash-point!"; I say, slapping my hand to my head.
"So did I"
"Me too"
Out go a search party for a cash machine - found - wrong type. Bureau de change. Wrong type of card. Forgotten my cheque book.
"I didn't get insurance"; says Julian.
ARRGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Calm down, things can only get better. I send Julian off to Thomas Cook to get insurance and some Forints (currency of Hungary). Yvette and I join him and we get some more Forints and some British Pounds.
Well, with money in tow, we ran to our departure gate. The two little green lights on the departure board had been flashing for quite some time.
I do this every time though. Run like heck only to get there and have to wait half an hour. No different this time.
Here's a trick I do the moment I'm in my seat on a plane. I change the time on my watch to the destinations' time. That way, you start getting used to it and you start to feel you are nearly there - even though the rain is pouring down outside your window, on the runway by Terminal 2.
Flights are flights really. Fun at first, distracting second and downright boring at the end. At least we went through the new terminal in Budapest. All spick and span and very white. Joy was had by all when my bag was the first off the plane and even more joy when our passports were stamped at customs. I have been to Hungary a few times and not once has my passport been stamped. I like those little stamps because people go "oooooo" and "arrrrrrrhhh" when they flick through your bulging passport. Well, if they were to flick through my American passport they would, it only has one blank page left. My British passport is a bare as a new-born. It has one stamp, "The Gambia". Tin-pot good-for-nothing excuse of a country (I wasn't overly impressed b it, can you tell?). So it was rapture when I got a new stamp in it. Sadness when I realised I should have used my USA passport, that bare page could have become interesting.
## First stop, Hungary
Catching the airport minibus into town
The Airport Minibus service whisked us away to our apartment in downtown Pest. This service really is good. For a nominal amount of Forint, it takes you to any destination within Budapest. When you want to get back to the airport, it picks you up from any destination within Budapest. Now that's something I'd like to see elsewhere.
On arrival, "Bob" greeted us in faultless Hungarian. He showed us how to get into the courtyard, use the Lilliputian lift, open the stiff and creaky door and how to operate the 75 channel cable TV feed in our apartment. If only my Hungarian was good enough to explain that we would be leaving this evening and not spending a single night in this lovely 60's style apartment and that no, he didn't have to show us where the spare toilet paper was.
He went, we went out. First stop the "AMEX office", second stop "food", third stop "Turkish bath" or "Spa".
AMEX office. Julian and Yvette have come to terms with being in a country so different yet so similar to our own. Modern and forward thinking, yet still the air of history and "East European".
I great my "friend" in the AMEX office. This woman is great. Every time I'm in Budapest, I don't bother with the train stations, I come here and get it all done. Previously she has sorted out tickets to Vienna, Salzburg and Munich for me. This time, we want tickets to Romania. It takes a long time. F75 (approx. $US 120 ) each return to Bucharest. That's a lot, but we are on a mission and if it costs F75 then that's what we will pay.
We were wrong. It was F75 for all three of us. Big grins all round.
Food time. A nice little cafe that specialises in pizza's and pasta. Not typically Hungarian, but who cares. We sit down and toast our arrival. It's the first time sine the morning that we haven't been on the move. Time to relax, time to discover that Yvette isn't keen on her spaghetti bolognese made with tomato ketchup. Time to be a gentleman and let her have my lovely spaghetti with cream and mushrooms. Julian is the same, but he can suffer. As I later find out, both are not picky, they are "particular". I give up - or I would have if I had known that then.
One glass of Amstel and I'm tipsy. We sway out of the cafe and just walk. No direction in mind, just going where are feet take us. Through the student part of town, past derelict (or so I hope) buildings, which fantastic relief's all over them (mainly naked women, with the odd cherub thrown in for good measure).
It soon becomes time to find a spa and get wet. Out comes Lonely Planet. For the first time ever, this guide has been moderately useful to me. After 5 minutes finding the page about spas we choose one and head for it.
Problem, what sort of ticket do we need on the underground? Everything is in Hungarian and the automatic ticket machines will only issue tickets that have a value in denominations of 70 Forint (312 Forints to the £UK). We don't have that kind of fiddly loose change on us. Yvette and Julian head off to the big map of the underground system, I head off to the ticket window. No pretence, no hint of Hungarian, I just hold up a map of Budapest and point to the station I want to go to. The woman shows me a 110 Forint ticket, I then hold up three fingers and pass her the money.
"We need a transfer ticket for 110 Forints" says Julian.
"I know" and hand him a ticket. God I can be a smug git sometimes.
By the time we get to the spa, it is almost dark. Winter is arriving in Budapest and mist is everywhere. Yvette is disgusted with me because 5 minutes ago we were being tracked by a little, qutesy cat. I hate cats. It came up and looked at me through some iron railings. Stopping I fixed my gaze with it's and told it to fuck off. I don't' like most cats and I wasn't prepared to give this one a chance. It ran. It understood English! Yvette went quite and wouldn't talk to me.
Question : How do you ask for "a nice relaxing spa with none of the extras" in Hungarian?
Answer: You don't. You go up to the babushka at the ticket window and go "Spa?". Let he say something unintelligible and then you make a breast-stroke swimming motion.
Sorted.
Into the courtyard, find the right building, get pointed in the right direction, find a little green cubicle to change in. Leave everything in little green cubicle and have it locked up by the little green cubicle attendant, who then gives you a little disk to prove this is your little green cubicle (LGC). The disk number is written in chalk on the LGC and then you are pointed back the way you came, into the flow of bulging, overflowing flesh. Bodies hoping to be rejuvenated by 2 hours in the spa. Shower, hot pool, hotter pool, sauna, bloody freezing pool, moderately hot pool. Body tingles all over, This feels great. Back to the hot pool and repeat.
That plunge pool (the really cold one) is great. You really feel healthier for it. I suspect that once or twice a year they have to pull heart attack victims out of there, but barring floating bodies, it's a fantastic way to get you tingling and feeling great all over.
Oh yes, this place looks as if it would be a great pick-up joint, for men and women. If you look past the bulging flesh from most of the clientele, you get the odd trim, good looking guy or gal. I must say that Hungarian women are very pretty.
Back to the LGC two hours later. I feel wonderful, as though I've had a long relaxing massage. Tipping the LGC attendant 100 Forint, we head along the Danube, lit by a thousand flickering lights, towards the chain bridge and the foot of Buda castle. What a sight.
We're being pushed for time now, our train leaves this evening and we need to get home, re-pack, eat and get to the station (Keleti, for those interested). Now, I can't state how important it is to make a note of where your apartment is. We didn't really and as a result spent half an hour looking for it on the wrong street. Luckily the correct road was one over. Quick re-pack and we head straight for the station. Confirming the departure time we rush off to Pizza Hut for lasagne and a Pepsi float. Leaving our half eaten food, we rush back to the station, just in time to find that it was going to be half an hour late.
## The train to Romainia, or how to get ripped off
Cold and tired, we find our carriage and sink into or seats. We made it. First major task over, we are on our way to Romania. In the morning, we will be in Brasov our first stop on the hunt for the Vlad Tepes.
Near Brasov there is a castle in a village called Bran. The Romanian tourist board claim this is Draculas castle. The fact that Vlad probably never set foot in Bran castle has nothing to do with it. It's easy to get to and has lots of spires. In other words, it looks the part. However, we know where the real castle of Vlad the Impaler is. It is about 120 miles across the mountains South East from Brasov.
Our plan is to get to Brasov, see Bran castle, get back on the train and head for Bucharest. In the morning head out to Curtea de Arges by train (2 hours) and then bus 30kms north into the mountains to the site of Vlads' castle. This was the plan. It was very much open to change, and it did quite drastically, as we shall see, but first let me tell you about or journey through the night, into Romania.
Julian catching some sleep on the train
Julian and I are sleeping across the seats, Yvette has made herself a little nest on the floor. All is peaceful, all is tranquil, until there is a knock on the door. It slides back, the light comes on and we show our tickets. Not much later, we show our passports. Then we show our tickets, then we show our passports, this time to Romanian officials. I'm now using my American passport so that I don't have to buy a visa. Julian and Yvette have to pay 20 each to get into the country.
Finally, after about 2 hours of this run-around, we try to get back to sleep.
There is a knock on the door, it slides back and the light goes on. We show our passports and tickets. The guard says our tickets are invalid and we are to pay for the ticket reservation from Brasov to Bucharest. I know this is a con. I try the "plead ignorance of the language" trick. The guard sits opposite me, holds out his hand and repeatedly says "money". I repeatedly say "No". Julian and Yvette don't quite know what to make of this. I'm determined not to give this guy anything. I know we are right. It goes on. I ask why we need to pay money, we are only going to Brasov. He can play the "I do not understand you trick" as well. We come to a stalemate. Julian decides enough is enough and gives the guard a twenty pound note. I had hoped it wouldn't come to that, but never mind. Julian explains that 20 is a lot of money. I ask for our "tickets". He gives us our passports back and his crony comes back with some $5 worth of change in Lei (the Romanian currency). Hey, at least we got something back.
I take down the numbers of the guards and they go. Julian looks shocked, Yvette is starting to think that everything is falling apart around us. It was going so well. I just shrug my shoulders and try to go back to sleep. This sort of things happens. It's one of those things, but whilst Yvette goes to the toilets, I explain to Julian that I think Romania will be too tough for us given the limited time we have. I suggest that we don't go to Bucharest but instead try to get to Vlads' castle from Brasov. I don't know how we will do it, certainly hiring a car is an option, but how do we do that? Will we be able to drive 120 miles to Vlads' castle? Yvette comes back, we all try and get some sleep.
There is a knock on the door, it opens (it's now light outside). "Tickets". Julian is wary, I don't think we have a problem. This inspector has his identity card on display. We'll have no trouble. Sure enough, we don't.
## Finally, Romania
The Romanian countryside bleakly rolls by. The wheat has been harvested and only a few crops are left to be brought in. Small haystacks dot the landscape. They resemble melted marshmallows on a skewer. We see the odd car, no petrol stations. Occasionally a horse drawn cart briefly rocks into view.
We roll into Brasov. Swarms of people are trying to get on, we are trying to get off. On the platform, we are accosted by a bearded guy asking if we want accommodation. Julian is wary again, not wanting to repeat the experience of the train journey. He cannot understand why I'm talking to him, especially when I agree to meet the guy's wife, who can speak better English. I quickly try to explain that this is exactly the sort of person I was hoping to meet.
Maria introduces herself. A small woman with a round and apple red face. She talks a lot. We explain what we want to do. Visit Bran castle and go to Curtea de Arges to see Vlads' castle. She explains that it would be very difficult to do and that it would be very expensive to hire a car. She offers accommodation and help. I agree. Making our base in Brasov will save us a lot of train time.
Greg, Marias husband, helps us into a taxi, which whisks us past a lot of depressing, grey high-rise apartment blocks. I notice that nearly every car is a Renault 16 look-a-like. I'm not joking, they were identical in every detail except the name badge. This is not a happy place.
Apartment 8, up the stairs, don't make too much noise as the old woman in apartment 6 complains a lot. We have one room with two double beds. There are two other rooms, a kitchen a shower and bath. Generally, a nice place.
## Castle 1, Bran
Inner courtyard, Bran Castle
Before leaving, Maria says she will arrange for a car and driver to take use to Curtea de Arges, but she says she does not want us to be disappointed as there are only a few ruins. She has to leave, she is a weather forecaster for the military and has to get back to work. Greg returns after an hour and drives us out to Bran, to see the castle.
Suddenly, we start seeing a different Romania. Snow topped mountains, brightly coloured, though run down, villages. Children playing, cattle grazing, the military doing exercises in the fields. You suddenly realise that we do have it good in the West.
Bran castle is perched about 100 yards up a hill, on the outskirts of Bran. It is picturesque, Disney probably modelled their fairy tale castles on something like this.
Claiming to be students and hiding our cameras, with pay rock bottom prices to get in. Up a dirt track we reach the castle. There are no other tourists. It is incredible to think that this is one of the tourist attractions of Romania and there is no commercialisation here at all. The ticket booth is simply that, a box with a window. Inside the entrance door to the castle is a board telling you the history of the castle in Romanian and English. At no point does it mention Vlad. This history lesson is really interesting though. Stepping into the courtyard, we show our tickets (cameras are still hidden). We are offered nice thick woolly jumpers. Why? Are they being nice and offering us something warm to wear as we wander around the castle, or are they actually trying to sell us them? We decline, but they are nice jumpers though.
Yvette climbs the castle stairs
There is a little arrow that the ticket lady shows us and encourages us to follow. Up the stairs and suddenly we are in a past time. The furniture, the floor, the walls, the ovens, the fireplaces - all out of time. Romania is proving to be difficult, but when you find a place like this, hardly touched by commercialism, you realise it is worth the hardship. We run from room to room. Yvette disappears up some stairs. We are 5 again and in a giant playground.
Eventually, we make it to the roof. Standing by the battlements you can see far and wide. You can also see into a room behind you that is closed off from the bitter wind. Peering in, you see a bearskin rug, head, paws an' all.
Julian and I make it to the courtyard. Yvette is still off exploring. As Julian gets to me, he sees that I'm throwing a coin into the well and making a wish. But what am I wishing? That we will get to Vlads' castle? That we will get back to Hungary and make our flight? That England will win the World Cup in France '98? (They didn't by the way). None of the above, but if I told you, the wish would not come true, would it?
Time to go. Greg gave us an hour and time is running out. We are offered another jumper. They are tempting you know.
## Castle 2, unknown
Off to another castle. Enroute we start talking about football. Greg seams to like this turn of conversation. Luckily a British team had come to Romania just a couple of days before and had lost, so we had plenty to talk about and Greg was happy.
Seamus makes a wish
I wish I could remember the name of the castle we were taken to next. It was large and being renovated. It had just been used in a Hollywood film. Unfortunately, it wouldn't open again for "two or three years" said the woman in charge. The peak we had inside reminded me of the Sean Connery film "Name of the Rose". There were little allotments everywhere inside. I could almost see the monks tending to the vegetables and looking after the horses.
Greg dropped us off by one of only two cash machines in town. This is Romania second largest population centre. Good grief. Anyway, we try and upgrade our seat reservations for the trip to Budapest to couchettes. We fail, but we did manage to change some money into Lei. This wouldn't have been necessary if the bloody cash machine had worked.
Still only 4pm and we are knackerd and hungry. In the main square we find a lovely little restaurant. We eat. We relax, we almost fall asleep. The food is very good. Hot and filling, though I was the only one brave enough to have the "meatball" soup. It is now that I find out Yvette and Julian are "particular" as opposed to "picky" with their food.
It is a half hour walk to our apartment across town. I am desperate to go to the toilet. I am in a living hell, each step bringing me closer to the possibility of a bladder explosion! Yvette is making waterfall noises.
Relief is welcome when we reach our apartment (we managed not to disturb the old crony in apartment 6). Straight to bed. Julian an I share. However, we do have a little night-cap (it is 8pm). In Budapest we bought a bottle of Champagne. Julian opens it (half goes over the floor). Yvette pours it (it bubbles out the glass). We drink. We drink to the fact that we are on holiday, that we managed to get to Romania and finally we drink to Vlad, whose castle we will see in the morning.
Maria and Greg turn up at about 9pm to tell us everything is arranged for the morning. We dig into my emergency supply of $US and pay for everything. $70 all told. It is worth it though.
Sleep eventually takes us. Bliss, a whole night without customs or ticket inspectors.
## Time to meet Vlad
Blue skies, children's voices outside. Good morning Romania.
All of us slept well and are bright and chirpy as we get up. Our driver arrives and we head off for Curtea de Arges. We take the route out to Bran and continue on the Pitesti road, which we only turn off from 30kms from Curtea de Arges. Brasov is 93 km behind us and Pitesti 43 km further on. The road had taken us up into the mountains. The mist descended upon us and the ice and snow made driving difficult. Luckily there are not many cars on the road, only the odd horse drawn cart. Just after we started our decent out of the mountain range, we passed through the village of Podu Bambovitei, notable because of the many sculptures lining the mountain road. We stopped to look. Many were roughly made, but interesting. I later found out that there is an annual International Arts Festival in Podu Bambovitei for young children. They are given canvas or stone and they create. Definitely worth seeing.
First stop in Curtea de Arges is the site of the ancient Kings Court from the 16th century. Not much to inspire you really, especially when you turn up and there are 4 coach loads of Romanian tourists swamping the place. There is an impressive Church on the site, though it was covered in scaffolding. I suspect that the tourist board has identified possible attractions and is in the midst of renovating many of them.
Whilst we waited for our driver, Michael, we decided to get some food. Across the road was a cafe, where we bought chocolate and oranges. Yvette needed the bathroom, so we waited outside whilst she went next door into a bar blaring out music, And what music was it? Oasis. You've got to laugh really. When I was first in China, the first music I heard was the theme from Star Wars.
Monastry at Curtea de Arges
Michael saw us and drove over to where we were. Onwards to the Monastery. Wow, big wow, very big wow. This has to be one of the most incredible monastries I have ever seen. Have a look at the photo, I can't describe it. Magnificent, inspiring, simply fantastic. The gumph inside says it is a "masterpiece of Romanian medieval architecture", who am I to contradict that? Curtea de Arges is in Wallachia and it was in 1517 that the Prince of Wallachia, Neagoe Basarab, inaugurated the monastery. This inauguration was attended by the patriarch of Constantinople.
Neagoe Basarab, Prince of Wallachia
After eating chocolate and buying some trinkets, we were on the move again, though back down the road we had come. Michael was driving faster, like one who knows they are on the way home. I was worried, we didn't care ultimately about Curtea de Arges, we wanted to get to Vlads' castle, 30km further on. I asked. Michael said Maria only told him to drive to Curtea de Arges. Oops. What I suspect happened is that we didn't explain exactly where it was we wanted to go. We kept saying Curtea de Arges when really we meant Vlads' castle. We carry on. Yvette is not impressed. I am not impressed. We stop again. I explain that we only came here to see Vlad Tepes' castle. We turn back to Curtea de Arges. Stopping Michael asks the route. A guy comes over asking if any of us speak French. Now my French hasn't been used in years and it was rusty, but we managed to communicate. The essence was that there was snow blocking the road up into the mountains and we would not be able to get to the Kings castle. This changed slightly to, there was an avalanche and rocks were blocking the road. I knew this was a stitch-up because there is a dam and power station further up the road and there is no way the road would be allowed to remain closed. I suspect Michael of asking the guy to come up with a story so he could get home.
We start driving out of Curtea de Arges again. We stop and explain that we really wanted to go to the castle, even if it was up the avalanche, just to say we had tried. Yvette was really unimpressed now so I asked her to look heartbroken, not too difficult I suspect. I explained that Yvette had really wanted to see the castle, Julian drew a picture of Yvette and then a broken heart. Michael started to bend under the emotional blackmail and eventually said it would cost more money. No problem for us as this was the one thing we wanted to see.
## Castle 3, Vlads Pad aka Dracula's Castle
Seamus climbing the walls of
Draculas' Castle
We turned around again and this time headed off into the mountains. It was perhaps only 30 minutes later that we stopped to ask directions.
The farmer turned his head looking up the valley and there it was, perched on a small outcrop of rock. Vlad the Impalas castle.
It was incredible. We drove as close as we could. Michael said he would be back in an hour.
To our left, at the foot of the mountain was a staircase, disappearing into the trees. We had to get up this, across a narrow bridge,
explore the castle and get back in 1 hour. Yvette had found an account of this assent that said it was over a thousand steps and took
one an a half hours. We got cracking.
The path of steps did lots of switch-backs. However, I noticed what looked like the old pathway up the mountain that had only a couple of switch backs. Off we went into the undergrowth. We saw a couple of soldiers watching us. Heaven knows why they were there, but we were the entertainment for the afternoon. Julian decided that going straight up the mountain might be a good idea. I wasn't so sure. Yvette and I continued following the ancient path. Almost there, the path had levelled out, heading for the castle, we see Julian struggling to get up the hill. I had thought he would have been waiting for us with a smug grin. I told Yvette to go on. When Julian got to me, he was almost ill with exertion. I walked on a small way, rounding a bend, there it was. The mist shrouded it, the castle was from my dreams or should I say nightmares?
When Julian had recovered, we continued around and met up with Yvette who was waiting for us on the bridge that would take us from out peak to the one the castle was perched upon. I couldn't wait any longer and ran. Across the bridge, up the steps and finally into the castle.
The first thing that struck me was how small it was. It may be in ruins but there is enough that imagination can rebuild the imposing structure. The views were fantastic and you can see why the castle was never invaded. Looking down I could visualise the spikes with dissidents' heads astride them. Chilling. History, raw, unaffected by tourism. Fantastic.
We explored every nook and cranny. Yvette was beaming. We all felt a sense of achievement. We had given ourselves 4 days to get to this spot on earth and home again. It looked as though we might actually make it.
Our hour was almost up, so reluctantly we tore ourselves away from the castle. With a few distant photographs, we started back. Down and down. Occasionally falling over, finding Yvettes gloves on the way down the mountain, she had dropped them on the way up.
In exactly 70 minutes, we had climbed the mountain, explored, soared among the ghosts of violent history and returned to earth.
A totally unforgettable experience.
## Time to go home
Smiles all round, Michael was pleased, we were all pleased. We drove home. Hours it took. It was dark by the time we got to our apartment. 6:30pm, our train was at 10:17pm. Maria and Greg were coming to collect us at 8:30pm, so we didn't have much time. We packed, freshened up and went in search of food. It would be a half hour walk into town, so we decided to stop at the first place that looked reasonable. We found a fast food restaurant called Casablanca that looked promising. Near to it was a supermarket, so we decided to buy some provisions for the train ride home. A bottle of wine, some crisps, bag of chocolate chip cookies.
By the time we finished our bizarre but tasty pizzas in Casablanca, we were very short of time. Rushing back to our apartment, we stopped off at the second cash point machine in town, as we needed more money. We had decided that we would try to book couchettes when we got on the train. Maria had offered assistance doing this. Luckily, it worked. I haven't mention that there are 8000 lei to the $US have I? The money here is worse than in Italy. Julians' wallet was bulging, he had almost three quarters of a million Lei in it.
Maria and Grig
We hadn't been long back at the apartment when Maria appeared. We sat down and chatted. We were still beaming about getting to the castle. At 9:15 we headed off to the train station, where we were shown into the 1st class waiting room. It looked just like the second class waiting room, all plastic chairs, cold, high ceilings and people looking morose and keeping themselves to themselves. There is a monk sitting opposite us. Maria asks if we would write a little bit about her in her book of "things that have been written about her", whilst she and Greg go off to meet the train from Budapest. We say we will.
An inspector walks through the door. He starts asking to see tickets. Two in every three people are being told to leave. We have second class tickets and are asked to leave. We get up, shoulder our backpacks and start walking out. The monk gets up with that "oh, I just remembered something I have to do" look and makes for the door. He opens it for us and I give him a look of "I know why you're running!".
Later as we look down into the station from a huge balcony so wide I can sit cross legged upon it, I see the monk look at the huge clock on he wall. It's written across his face "I'm off to the 1st class waiting room" he thinks. Up the stairs he comes, scanning for inspectors. I'm giving a running commentary. Suddenly he veers off at a tangent that will not take him to the waiting room. I feel and hand on my shoulder. It's the inspector again. He has it in for me hand just shakes his head, meaning I'm not allowed to pitch camp on the balcony. Oh well. Of course, he doesn't stop anybody else from resting their weary bones on the ledge.
Maria and Grigs' card
10:10pm, we head for the platform, and meet Maria on the way. She leads us up to the platform and we wait for the train. When Greg arrives we take a few pictures and I get their card so I can put it here in this article. The train pulls in and Maria negotiates beds for us. They are too expensive so we stick with our second class reservations. Maria changes are money into dollars and we are jump on the train. Departing the station we wave goodbye to Maria and Greg, jewels in this wilderness.
Finally, we are on our way out of here. Everything is in order. Just customs at two in the morning. We get to our compartment, it is locked. We wait for the ticket inspector. Slowly he checks all the compartments and gets to us. I give him our tickets and reservations. In Romania you must have a reservation to travel. If not, you are open for heavy scamming on the train. The guard says our reservations are incorrect. It can't be. We checked. Julian despairs. I say I'll handle it. I look at the tickets and sure enough, the reservations had been made for the same day that we had left for Romania. We really didn't have reservations. Over time I explained that it was not our fault. The guard got somebody who spoke English to translate. I must have come across well. We all sat down in our compartment and agreed to pay a total of $10. By now, I was just pleased to be on the train and on our way home. We all had smiles on our faces and the inspector went on his way, happy to have made ten bucks, us happy because we hadn't really been ripped off. We had just made good of a bad situation.
Sleep. This time I was on the floor, whilst the others had soft, comfy seats.
Early morning, 2am. Romanian border. One hour of passport and ticket checks later, we were into Hungary again. Bliss, back to sleep.
7:30 am we arrive back in Keleti station, Budapest. By 8am, we were in our apartment and passing out. Julian and Yvette went straight to sleep, I sat and fiddled with the cable TV, watching BBC World News and Eurosport.
After being refreshed, it was time to head out again and do a bit of sightseeing. Due to the short amount of time available to us, our flight was 7pm, we decided to check out Buda castle and then go for another spa session.
Really, we relaxed for the rest of the day, ambling around the castle, admiring the old buildings. Hungary is a marked contrast to Romania, in the same way that Hungary is different to England. At lunch we found a lovely restaurant in the old town and indulged ourselves. Goulash and typical Hungarian food. I wrote a few postcards and we enjoyed the moment. Following this up we had another spa session.
Finally we were back at our apartment. It turned out the owned of the place was moving in next door. He asked if we had enjoyed ourselves in Hungary; "Oh yes" we replied. "How was the room?", "Wonderful". Grin.
The airport mini-bus picked us up and whisked us to the airport. The plane left on time and everything seemed to be going well. Then dinner was served. In my experience airline food would not be served looking as if somebody has been ill in the tray. The meat was unidentifiable, the sauce tasteless and the little chunks of carrot really didn't make the dinner look appetising. I would say 50% of people on the flight did not even attempt the food, of those that did, perhaps 1 in 3 actually finished. Yuck. One of the worst meals I have ever had on a plane.
What an adventure we have had though, from spas to remote castles. The history of Vlad the Impaler sends shivers up my spine. I could see that Julian and Yvette were just trying to get home, I was still travelling. After all, the hopes and dreams are in the journey, not the arrival.
---
*A note from 2026: Romania has moved a long way west since this trip. It joined the European Union in 2007 and became a full member of the Schengen area in January 2025, so there are no longer border checks when you arrive overland from the rest of the EU. It still uses its own currency, the leu, not the euro. Bran Castle, the one the tourist trade insists on calling Dracula's, is busier and slicker than ever, with timed tickets in high season.*
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## 10 Second Movie review - Van Helsing
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-van-helsing
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/films-van-helsing.md
- published: 2004-05-20
- document_id: 20
> Why use one horror classic when you can combine many? 10 Second Movie review.
Why use one horror classic when you can combine many?
**10 Second Movie review. Van Helsing**
Van Helsing is a romp through the world of Vlad the Impaler (the guy Dracula was based upon), Dracula, Frankenstien and other horror characters of that era. Enjoyable throughout, a couple of moments that make you jump and geography that would fail any high school exam.
**Gut reaction**
V.Enjoyable, but I wish they hadn't gone for the Hollywood ending.
**Promotional blurb**
The one name they all fear..
During the late 19th century, famed monster hunter Dr. Gabriel Van Helsing heads to Eastern Europe to battle with Count Dracula.
**Related articles**
[](/articles/stories-vlad-the-impaler-romania)
**[In search of Vlad the Impaler](/articles/stories-vlad-the-impaler-romania)**
One night at the pub, Yvette mentioned she was really into Vampires and had always wanted to visit the castle of Dracula (Vlad the Impaler) in Romania. Two weeks later, a small band of friends were on their way to Romania...
[ [read](/articles/stories-vlad-the-impaler-romania) ]
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## Garden Design Gift Package for Christmas
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/garden-planning
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/garden-planning.md
- published: 2004-05-20
- document_id: 7
> Every year it is a pain to find a present for my parents wedding anniversary, but this year I struck gold.
## Garden Design Gift Package for Christmas
Every year it is a pain to find a present for my parents wedding anniversary, but this year I struck gold. My parents love gardening and have been talking about a makeover for the garden, so I decided to give them a helping hand, not with blood sweat and tears (I know nothing about gardening), but with a garden design gift package from [directgardendesign.co.uk](http://www.directgardendesign.co.uk "garden design gift package").
#### [The Garden Planning Company](http://www.gardenplanningcompany.co.uk/) offer unique postal garden design gift packages.
I met the owener, Neil, at a seminar a few months ago and kept his business card. Normally, the card languishes in my whallet for a while before being emptied into the bin, but right from the outset, I knew that this was a card I should keep hold of. Sure enough, this gift package of a garden design by post get's launched at only £100 (actually £99, but who's counting ;-) and bingo, I knew that it would be great for my parents.
## Placing an order for the design package
At first, I thought I would wait until Christmas, but my parents anniversary was coming up (it was a big one - Silver), so I got my act together and
placed an order via the website.
The garden design consultation pack arrived within a week. The package came boxed with a personalised gift certificate, a hand tool and a consultation information booklet.
As I mentioned, all this only cost me £99. I must stress that you pay a bit more for bigger gardens, but my parents garden fell into the "up to 500m sq" category.
I emailed to Neil asking why the service was so cheap as I guess you would probably pay at least £400 for a conventional garden design service.
Apparently, by getting us (the punter) to fill out a questionnaire and to survey our own garden (there is information provided to help you through the process), it keeps the service affordable.
I gave the pack to my parents for their anniversary and they were estatic (I mean it, their other presents were rubbish by comparrason :-). They found the garden survey and questionnaire simple to complete. Once completed they sent them back to the designer at [The Garden Planning Company](http://www.gardenplanningcompany.co.uk/).
Less than four weeks later, they received their design plans. I had a look at them and thought they were good, my parents, knowing way more than me actually used the word "impressive". They were very impressed with the quality, the individuality and attention to detail of the design scheme that they had received.
The designer had come up with some really clever design solutions that my mum said she would never have thought of.
They have decided to build the garden themselves, being keen gardeners and started a few weeks ago with the bulbs and stuff (I'm out of my depth here) and will follow the plans provided through the build of the new garden.
## All in all, a great present and many brownie points for me :-)
I cannot reccommend this highly enough, if you are looking for a unique Chrsitmas present or birthday present (even Silver wedding anniversary ;-) why not give the gift or a garden a try? For more information visit [directgardendesign.co.uk](http://www.directgardendesign.co.uk "garden design gift package").
================================================================================
## Debt
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/debt-relief
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/debt-relief.md
- published: 2004-03-10
- document_id: 5
> Some thoughts and soultions on debt reflief.
## Thoughts on debt.
Debt is a problem that we all tend to get into in this day and age. I'm not a great fan of debt, but it is an easy thing to get into, even when you are moderating your spending. In my case, I had to finance a move from the USA back to the UK. The cost should have gone onto my UK credit card, but it went onto the USA one instead. This then made the logistics of paying back the debt a real case of juggling finances.
My debt is very low, yet with a low paying job - i.e. I am stating up my own business - the principal is not being reduced.
## So, how do you pay the debt off?
Well, the principal needs to be paid off. Paying the minimum each month only prolongs the time of total repayment. Check all of the out-goings on the debt as you may find items that are more than you thought or you were not aware of. Do not wait to find out what these things are.
My mistake was paying for rundundancy (loss of work) protection. I had been contacted by an insurance broker working for the credit card company to push the protection plan. I distinctly remember asking for more information, definately not to sign up. The upshot is that most of my outstanding debt can be accounted for due to the fees of this plan.
It turns out that I was able to request to hear the recording of the call where I supposedly signed up. I have been advised by a friend who works in a similar industry that even though these recordings are tamper-proof, it is possible for the operator to sign you up for something without your permission and then "loose" the recording. It is my bet that I will be told the recording is missing.
When seeking compensation in a case like this, it is in your best interest to demand only that you are returned to the financial position you would have been in, if the mistake had not been made. By being resonable, the liable party may well pay a token compensation.
## Debt consolidation
So, what options do you have repaying your debt when it is across multiple credit cards? Well, your final gambit, in the USA but definately NOT the UK, is to declare bankruptcy. This should be thought of as a one time "get out of jail free" card and you should only play this card when you have started coming out of debt. In other words, do not apply for bankruptcy if you still have no means to reduce your debt. When you have a job, when you have started to have money in your pocket after paying your debts AND if the debt is so large that you feel you will not be able to repay it, THEN consider banckruptcy.
What about debt consolidation? Sounds like a good idea and you will see a huge number of advertisements for this. Whilst it may be right for you to do this, you must carefully understand what it is you are doing. The key thing to remember is that a Credit Card Debt is UNSECURED. This means that the creditor has to work with you to reclaim the money. A mortgage for your house is a SECURED loan, if you don't keep up repayments, the creditor can reposes your house and sell it to reclaim the debt. Most of the time, when you use a consolidation service, the debt will become SECURED on your house, just like a mortgage. Thus, you need to be sure that you will be able, at the very minimum, to repay the monthly minimums.
A consolidated debt may well have a low monthly repayment, but the length of the repayment may be twenty five years or more and the total amount to be repayed may be an excessive amount.
Be quite clear if your consolidated debt is SECURED or UNSECURED, what the monthly repayments are, how many YEARS it will take to repay the debt and what the FINAL REPAYMENT amount will be. Do not be frightened to shop around for the best rates and terms.
With these facts in your hand, you will find you are in a better position to make an informed choice to get yourself out of debt.
## Getting help
Suggesting places to look for debt consolidation can be a contentious and risky business, however, you have got to start somewhere and I take no responsibility for the content of external websites. With that said, in the UK, you might try :
[Debt
Management](http://www.clear-your-debt.co.uk/index.php)
Abacus offers UK Debt Advice, Consolidation loans &
Management programmes.
**IMPORTANT NOTICE : I AM NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISOR, I CANNOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS ADVICE. THIS INFORMATION IS WHAT I HAVE LEARNED WHILST GETTING MYSELF OUT OF DEBT. PLEASE USE THIS ARTICLE AS A REFERENCE ONLY. I DO NOT ADVOCATE ANY PARTICLUAR MEANS OF DEBT RELIEF AND CANNOT ADVISE YOU. YOU NEED TO INVESTIAGE TO FIND OUT WHAT IS RIGHT FOR YOU. With that, good luck getting out of debt.**
================================================================================
## Quick take : India
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-india
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-india.md
- published: 2004-02-15
- document_id: 59
> Hot, unbelievably hot, and one of my favourite countries in the world. A quick personal loop through southern India: Ooty, the steam train, the backwaters and the temples.
**Quick take: India**
Hot, absolutely totally unbelievably hot. Oh, and humid, did I mention that? No exaggeration: leave the air-conditioning of the airport, walk through the door and WHAM. It is like hitting a brick wall and walking into a sauna at the same time.
If it is the rainy season, you will also be soaked within a few seconds.
Welcome to India, one of my favourite countries in the world.
There are plenty of travel guides, on the web and in print, for where to stay, what to see and when to go. Pick one up; I recommend the Lonely Planet India guide. This is just the places I always head for when I am there.
Usually I make for southern India, flying into Bombay or Madras and doing a loop from one to the other, going south.
Starting from Bombay, the first thing I do is head out to the island of Elephanta. Then a train from VT station, a magnificent Victorian railway terminus if you can see past the grime and the sheer volume of humanity, takes you overnight to Bangalore, the IT capital of India. There are palaces and government buildings, one carrying my favourite inscription: "Government's work is God's work".
Bangalore to Mysore, for the Maharajas' palaces and the temples lit up at night, and wonderful fabrics and gemstones to buy.
A bus takes you up to the hill station of Ooty, my favourite place in India. This is what India might be like if it sat where England does. It is high enough to escape the heat of the lowlands, and you see locals in jumpers heading to the horse races or walking up to the peak through the (now) lovely gardens.
Leaving Ooty is the highlight. You take the Swiss-built, steam-powered train down through tea plantations and small villages, and the occasional stop hands you the most extraordinary scenery. If you are lucky, a few rupees might get you onto the footplate of the engine. There is something magical about steam, and this is one of the great train journeys of the world.
At the end of the line from Ooty, change trains for Cochin in Kerala and the Bolgaty Palace Hotel, never the same place twice, on an island and with great views. Stay a couple of nights for the different atmosphere. The Portuguese once ran this coast and you feel it in the people. Take a boat out on the backwaters and find Chinese fishing nets, waterside villages, kingfishers in the trees, and hours of quiet.
From Kerala, head east to Madurai. Two things here are unmissable, three if you count being able to actually get, not just see on the menu, macaroni cheese. The great temple at the centre of the city and the tailors' market are each sensational in their own way. Go to the market to get out of the heat and have clothes made: take a shirt, find the fabric, and a tailor will copy it while men work away on old Singer machines all around you.
Mamallapuram is a train ride away on the coast, home to the famous shore temple and the monolithic carvings. Stay out of town at Silver Sands, a small hotel romantically set among whispering pines with an idyllic beachfront. Negotiate with a local fisherman for a trip out, or just walk the beach into town for the stone carving the place is known for.
When you are ready for a city again, Madras is a few hours by bus, and from there trains run everywhere, or you catch a flight home.
## A note from 2026
Much of the map above has been renamed since I first wrote this. Bombay became Mumbai in 1995, Madras became Chennai in 1996, and Bangalore officially became Bengaluru in 2014, though plenty of people still use the old names. VT station, properly Victoria Terminus, is now Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and still the most magnificent place to start a journey. The little steam train down from Ooty, the Nilgiri Mountain Railway, was made a World Heritage Site in 2005. The heat, I am glad to report, is exactly as advertised.
*First written in 2004, updated 2026.*
================================================================================
## China - 3 Weeks in the cold.
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-china-three-weeks
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-china-three-weeks.md
- published: 2004-01-15
- document_id: 61
> The trick to travelling is not to get too worked up about it. My three weeks in China, partly with flatmate Rick, was a cold, sometime frustrating but a totally…
**The trick to travelling is not to get too worked up about it. My three weeks in China, partly with flatmate Rick, was a cold, sometime frustrating but a totally unforgettable experience**,
writes ***Seamus Waldron***.
**Pre-departure drinks**
The trick to travelling is not to get too worked up about it. Its Friday night, we leave for China in the morning. Rick, wanted to go pack, unpack, repack and stuff more stuff in. I wanted to go down the pub. Hey, Friday night in London is usually a good time out.
We get to the pub on time and meet up with a friend of mine who is trying to get an African expedition underway. I know how difficult it can be because I've been trying to do the same thing for 9 months. Tomorrow's trip to China is my first time off this year as I've been saving up holiday time to trek around South America. As that's not come about, I have to use up three weeks holiday. Okay, I admit that China is not the Peru I wanted, but of every place on earth that I could pick, it was the only one that fulfilled my two criteria; 1) the flight had to be cheap and 2) there were seats available on it.
Location map of China
I've been to China before, some four years ago, so I am looking forward to seeing the ch-ch-chch changes, as David Bowie would say.
But the pub comes first. It's the beginning of December, we are all sitting outside drinking, causing sacrilege by turning perfectly good Guinness into pure water. A neat trick if you can do it, I usually keep my deity stuff hidden, so for this miracle I was using a water purifier that is so good, it even removes the alcohol. Did I say good? Anyway, I get invited out to Morocco when the expedition gets there, who am I to say no?
Rick wants to go home, so we head off to another pub where we meet up with some more friends of mine, 5 girlies who are always a laugh to go clubbing with. Rick was starting to tremble involuntary by now, he can see my ruse. We go to a night club. Rick is apoplectic. I try and explain that as long as we have our passports and tickets, we don't need to pack, anyway, I promised we would only stay until 1am.
3am, we get a cab home. Luckily the flight isn't until lunch time, so I go straight to sleep, counting the number of times Rick packs and re-packs his rucksack.
**Flight to the East**
Morning comes.
Throw a load of stuff into my rucksack, I've travelled so much I used to be able to do this with my eyes closed. This time I throw everything out and throw half of it back in, an interesting pile left behind for my return in 3 weeks.
As we drive to the airport, I realise that I've forgotten my Dad's birthday - bugger. Usually I remember because a friend of mine shares the same birth date, this year Phil bit the dust, the git got married.
Hurried phone calls home and then it's time to check-in. We snake around in a long line for a while. I spied my boss and one of the directors from work, so I hurdled peoples baggage and went over to say hello. "Hello", I said, "What the f\*@k are you doing here?" said Carl. He'd forgotten I'd booked the time off, so I asked for a week off in January so I could go to Morocco.
I briefly got excited when a sign was put up asking for volunteers to forgo their seat on today's flight, get put up in a five star hotel and get paid £500 for the privilege. My hopes were dashed when it became apparent that this was for the Hong Kong flight, not Beijing.
This is a trick all travellers should know. If you get the chance to be bumped off a scheduled flight, do it. You end up getting free food, fantastic lodging and usually a few bob to boot. Last time this happened to me I was in India, I got my first bath (instead of cold showers) in two months out of it - sheer bliss.
So, typically the flight was late leaving, but I bought a good book and promptly fell asleep the moment I'd finished my second dinner. Here's the gag. When the food has been served and you've scoffed your half filling dinner, grab a steward/ess going by and say; "This may sound like I'm a bit of a pig, but would there be any more dinners left as I've had very little to eat all day." I have never been turned down and usually they throw in a load of extra drinks.
Rick and I got blatted.
**The arrival**
I recommend that you change your money BEFORE you clear customs at Beijing. If you don't, you've got a queue and long wait ahead. Also, get the bus into town, it's dead cheap and you get to start seeing the real China immediately (only in a less crowded form).
You start at the airport, lots of activity, then you follow a motorway into town, this takes a good while. The intervening landscape (at Christmas) is bleak but quite rural, that is until you start hitting the suburbs. Wide streets, grey buildings. Then the bus starts dropping people off. We see many sumptuous hotels. I'm already saying 'When I was here last time...that wasn't here...that neon sign never existed....that Mc Donald's is new....'. Rick is getting pissed off at me. This, unlike me, IS his first time here and he certainly does not want to listen to me rabbit on about a time and place that quite obviously does not exist anymore.
We get off at the last stop. Time to explore a bit. Hefting our backpacks we started walking in a direction I sort of remembered. Past the train station, up a block, past the partly demolished Mc Donald's. This had just been built when I was last here. I was asked what Christmas decorations they should put up. No more Christmas' for this building, 4 years old and already being swept aside in a tide of change and for what? A shopping mall. 150 yards from the Imperial palace, major construction work everywhere. A whole street that I remembered being bustly and very Chinese. Cages with live animals, ready for dinner, vegetables, bicycles, old men with pipes and caps. Now what? A mall being built that will look just like any other street found in any other major city. This, I say to myself, is a mistake. This, is progress. This is China, watch out world.
**Where it all happened**
Rick's first look at Tiananmen Square. It is a vast open space. Impressive beyond belief. I do not know what private thoughts Rick had, but the feelings I had the first time I approached Tiananmen came back to me. An eary shudder, voices from the massacre, the thought of tanks and sacrifice. That first time I entered Tiananmen I realised I was looking at history, this time I was saddened. To my left was an enormous digital clock, counting down the days and minutes until the Hong Kong changeover the following July. I was sickened.
South through the square and south towards the hotel I had stayed in before. In December, the street vendors are selling roasted chestnuts, sweat potatoes and caramelised fruits on sticks. I attempt some Mandarin and get some chestnuts in return. We walk and walk. Eventually, I know I'm in the right place. I recognise an old mechanics shop, I remember the stadium on the other side of the river. No guest house. I later find out that it has been torn down and that it is to be re-built to cater for a wealthier traveller. Backpackers are not being encouraged. Not to worry, just a bit further on we get to our second option, the Jayhung Hotel.
Book in, unpack and try to book a trip to the Wall. No go until Thursday. We head for dinner, a small shack by the hotel. Warm, cosy, great food, cheap beer, good company and all for 42 yaun! We reapraise our situation. As Rick is sort of time, we decide to fly out to Xi'an and try to get back by Thursday for a trip to the Wall.
Sleep like a log.
**Forbidden City Mr Bond?**
Unwisely, we try breakfast in the hotel, then head into town. The good old No 14 bus. This takes us all the way to Tiananmen, which is good as the CAAC building is close by. After booking a return flight, costing 1800 yaun, we head to the Forbidden City.
Wow, big WOW. I never made it into the Forbidden City before, so this is as new to me as it is to Rick. Donning our walkman guide to the city, I notice that our 'guide' is non other than James Bond (aka Roger Moore). Unfortunately the Chinese thought that this English of Englishmen is American. This, as I recall, is very typical in China along with wonderful translations into English. 'Place for Eunuchs and things....' Amusing, though I can't laugh, I hung up a Chinese proverb upside down and didn't realise for months.
The city goes on and on. Palaces within Palaces. Architecture evolved over centuries. As you walk from bottom to top, you tread the path of history. China is full of history. We don't realise today that in the past visitors rarely got past the first gate or two. In the inner sanctums, lived servants who never left the palace. We breeze past in a few hours, mocking the sanctity the walls used to preserve, but it's worth it. Incredible, phenominal, breathtaking. How many adjectives can you use?
**Saved by the teacher...**
Bugger, git, shyster. Anymore? Those are the adjectives used to describe the rickshaw driver who tried to charge us $100 US for a one mile ride. He really thought we'd pay him. He was going to attack us until a teacher at the local University thought we were students and came to our rescue. Our knight in shining armour didn't just get rid of the rickshaw driver, but she took us across town and put us on the right bus for the airport.
**In search of Warriors**
On the empty plane we were given a light meal and a coin!? Don't ask. By the time we got to our guest hose, 'The Flats of Remnin Hotel', it was dark and cold. The girl whose dorm we were asked to share was surprised to see us, but not as much as we were to see her. To kill time until bed, we got some dinner across the road in a room which was a work place by day, restaurant in the evening and sleeping quarters at night - Mums Own Cooking. The girl who ran the place was typical of the modern young Chinese. Doing whatever she could to better herself within the system. She was doing well, not by western standard, but well none the less. She could speak a lot of English and we both felt she was a jewel within the mammoth one billion population.
The next night it felt like two billion, but I jump ahead of myself. Breakfast was just appalling. If only I had remembered my pot of [Marmite](http://www.ilovemarmite.com), I could have almost made the food edible. At least the tea was nice. We persuaded our dorm mate, a German girl called Bridget, to come see the Terracotta Warriors with us. Time for a flash-back. Crossing the main square in town, where the train station is, I remembered my stay here, years before. Alex and I had stayed in a large hotel, practically empty on the edge of the square. There it was. We had arrived late and ducked out to explore the back streets. I remember food markets, oil drums ablaze, roasting chickens and tofu. The sounds and smells of a new and magical place. My memory is blurred or Xi'an has changed a lot too. I suspect my memory is still intact.
Before, I had taken a tour, this time, we just hopped on the local bus (407 for those interested).
Terracotta Warriors entry ticket
We arrived at the site of the Terracotta Warriors. A very busy market place now surrounded the enterence to the warriors. These stalls were here prviously, but now there was more industry about them, more hustle. Photography was strictly not allowed the last time I was here, I even saw a tourist on the verge of tears as his film was being ripped out of his camera. Taking photographs of the warriors was a very big NO-NO.
Now, even though the stern warning were still there, people were disregarding them. I tried to take a few photos on the sly, but they didn't come out. Perhaps I should have been more bold.
This stagering army of men, crafted from terracotta, is a true wonder of human creation. It is said that all the soldiers are unique. This is not stricktly true as each warrior is made up from a standard choice of heads, torsoes, hands, feet, etc and then individually painted.
**Yes I know, this is the end, so much to write and so little time.
I promise I will finish this article one day, and add lots of pictures.**
**Still to come :**
Banpou
Climbing The Great Wall
Kite flying in Tiananmen Square
Climbing the mountain at Tai'an
Trekking at the end of The Great Wall
---
*A note from 2026: travelling China has changed beyond recognition since this trip. The country now has the world's largest high-speed rail network, so the long cold journeys described here would mostly be a couple of hours on a bullet train today. The bigger shock for a visitor is payment: almost everything runs through phone apps now, and cash, though still legal, can draw blank looks. Set up mobile payment before you go.*
================================================================================
## Arrival guide to Budapest
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-hungary
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-hungary.md
- published: 2003-11-08
- document_id: 58
> Twenty-odd years after their first weekend in Budapest, Berol and Biro go back. The city has had a makeover. So, frankly, have they.
**Twenty-odd years after their first weekend in Budapest, Berol and Biro go back. The city has had a makeover. So, frankly, have they.**
Berol: Back to Budapest, then. I can't believe it's been twenty-odd years.
Biro: Nor me. Last time you wanted to sleep in a fortress.
Berol: And you wanted to queue at American Express to cash traveller's cheques.
Biro: We were young. Speaking of which, do I need to find a bank this time?
Berol: No. Tap your card on anything. Just don't let the machine talk you into paying in pounds, take the forint price.
Biro: Still forints? I thought they joined the EU.
Berol: They did, back in 2004, the year after we first came. Never took the euro, though. Forint it is.
Biro: Right. And how are we getting into town, the minibus again?
Berol: There's a bus now, the 100E, straight from the airport to Deak Ferenc ter in the centre. Quicker and cheaper for the two of us. The airport's even got a new name, it's Ferenc Liszt now.
Biro: Very cultured. So, a night at the Citadella for old time's sake?
Berol: Ah. About that. It shut for years. They've only just reopened it, this spring, all done up, with an exhibition and a park and a glass bridge. But you can't stay there any more. It's a view and a museum now, not a hostel.
Biro: Pity. Lovely view, though.
Berol: The best in the city. We'll go up at sunset, like we did before.
Biro: And the baths? Please tell me the baths are still there.
Berol: The baths are eternal, Biro. Szechenyi in the City Park if you want the grand one, Gellert for the art nouveau, Rudas if you want the old Turkish bath with the rooftop pool over the river.
Biro: A rooftop pool. Now that is an improvement.
Berol: Some things get better with age.
Biro: Speak for yourself, dear.
The plane begins its descent, the Danube catching the light below, our duo a little greyer and a great deal better informed.
## From the past
*Here is the original guide, written on the way in to that first trip, back in 2003. Some of the advice has dated. That is rather the point.*
Berol and Biro's quick arrival guide to Budapest, Hungary.
Berol: So where to this weekend Biro?
Biro: To the land of the Magyar, Budapest in Hungary.
Berol shifts in her airline seat and whips out the Lonely Planet Guide to Hungary, after all, the plane lands in twenty minutes.
Berol: We should take the transfer minibus to our hostel, there's a ticket desk right in the arrival area and it's the cheapest and quickest way.
Biro: But which hostel do you think?
Berol: Well, I think we should spend at least one night at Citadella, it is the large, fortress-like building that overlooks both Pest and Buda. It was used to attack the castle of Pest because the cannons on it were higher than the castle, so fire could easily be rained down.
Biro: Lovely dear, but it's going to be late by the time we arrive. Is there anywhere to eat nearby?
Berol: Hmm, I don't think there are any places outside of Citadella, but there is a restaurant and a cafe inside. You can sit outside and watch the sunset if you like.
Biro: Sounds promising. Pass me the guidebook will you dear.
Dutifully, Berol does so.
Berol: What are you looking up?
Biro: Well, first thing in the morning, I want to cash my traveller's cheques and do a bit of shopping before we go sightseeing.
Berol: Well, I liked the sound of going to a spa, I hear they are wonderful. You get to relax in many types of hot and cold pools and saunas. You can have a massage and just relax to your heart's content.
Biro: Sounds lovely. Here we go, the American Express office is in downtown Buda, right in the shopping district. We can get train tickets there as well as cash. It's also easy to get to the castle and the river and everything.
Berol: Sounds lovely.
Biro: Hmmm.
Berol: Hmmm.
The plane makes its final descent with our intrepid duo fully prepared to handle the first few hours in Hungary, what a pair!
> ### Key facts
>
> - **Country:** Hungary; the capital is Budapest, split by the Danube into hilly Buda and flat Pest
> - **Currency:** the forint (HUF), not the euro, despite EU membership since 2004
> - **From the airport:** Budapest Ferenc Liszt International; the 100E Airport Express runs to the centre
> - **Do not miss:** the thermal baths (Szechenyi, Gellert, Rudas)
> - **Citadella:** reopened spring 2026 after a long restoration; a viewpoint and exhibition, no longer a place to stay
*First written in 2003, revisited in 2026.*
================================================================================
## Is Sony creating a secret Apple palmtop?
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/apple-sony-clie
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/apple-sony-clie.md
- published: 2003-10-24
- document_id: 1237
> The Sony CLIE PEG-UX50 looks suspiciously like an Apple design. Marketing sleight of hand, or something more?
*Sony CLIE PEG-UX50*
Is Sony creating secret Apple PalmTop?
by Seamus Waldron, October 24th, 2003.
Well, my dear reader let me present the evidence.
We have heard for years that Apple is rumored to be working on a new PDA/Palmtop to replace the much-loved Newton. In OSX 10.2, Apple introduced Inkwell, a handwriting technology developed by Apple for the later generations of the Newton. We know that Apple and Sony have been getting into bed over streaming video content and that Sony is launching PalmOS machines under the Clie brand and Symbian powered machined under the SonyEricsson mobile phone brand.
Now, meet the AppleSony palmtop contender, a Sony branded Clie, running PalmOS and the ability to (presumably) run Mac OS9 under emulation or natively.
How is this possible? Don't ask me, but I was walking past Micro Anvika (an authorised Apple Reseller in the UK) on Tottenham Court Road in London just a few days ago and saw, to my astonishment, this huge advert for the new Sony Clie PEG-UX50.
*Advert for Sony CLI PEG-UX50 in front window of Micro Anvika*
Hmmm, I think, interesting technology. Nice clamshell design, Bluetooth, WiFi, this computer looks great. WOW! And look at that web browser, that looks really good. The resolution on this thing must me great!
I take a closer look.
*That looks familiar...*
That looks familiar. I ponder what I am looking at. Then it hits me. Either:
- Microsoft has developed Internet Explorer for PalmOS
- Sony has made PalmOS look remarkably like Mac OS9
- Sony and Apple have created a Mac OS9 powered palmtop without telling
- OR
- Somebody has screwed up
- OR
- Somebody is telling porky pies (lies)
I know where my money lies.
Smelling a similar Faux Pas to the one Microsoft came out with when launching Windows XP (they had used a stock photograph of somebody using a computer, unfortunately, it was a Mac that was so old nobody thought Virtual PC would even run MSDOS on it ;-), I grabbed my digital camera and take a few photographs.
Getting them home and firing up Photoshop I took a closer look at the image that has been overlayed onto the Clie's screen.
*That looks familiar...*
First thing you notice is that it is definitely Microsoft Internet Explorer running on Mac OS9. The distinctive Aqua colouring and vertical tabs on the left are a bit of a giveaway.
Second thing you notice, this is definitely OS9 because of the colouring and various OS9 interface elements. However, something catches my eye. I zoom in to check.
*Bingo!*
Bingo! The Apple Menu has been removed. This shows intent. The marketing guys for Sony used the Mac OS9 Internet Explorer KNOWING it wasn't PalmOS, as they removed the Apple Menu by doing nothing more that deleting it. They kept the spacing, so the File/Edit/etc menus are in the right place.
*The small print doesn't mention Apple or Microsoft....*
So, one last zoom in to check the small print:
> Sony, Memory Stick and Clie are registered trademarks of Sony Corporation, Japan
> The BLUETOOTH trademark [something, something, something], USA
> Palm, Palm Powered, the Palm logo and Palm Powered logos are trademarks of Palm [something] Inc.
So there you go. Not an Apple palmtop, but a botched attempt by the marketing guys at Sony to make their new machine look better than it might actually be. Marketing or deliberate mis-leading, YOU DECIDE.
================================================================================
## Life in Easter Island
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-easter-island-life
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/destinations-easter-island-life.md
- published: 2003-06-20
- document_id: 55
> Easter Island is famous for the moai, but the island that made them is just as interesting: three dead volcanoes in the middle of the Pacific, thousands of miles from anywhere.
**Easter Island is famous for the moai, but the island that made them is just as interesting: three dead volcanoes in the middle of the Pacific, thousands of miles from anywhere.**
Easter Island, Rapa Nui to the people who live there, is known for the moai, the stone figures carved between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. But the island that produced them is worth understanding in its own right. It is about as remote as land gets, a small triangle in the South Pacific, and it is made entirely of volcanoes.
## Built by volcanoes
The island is three extinct volcanoes (Terevaka, Poike and Rano Kau) that grew together, which is why it is triangular. It sits over the hotspot that built the Nazca Ridge, the far end of which is now sliding under Peru. In effect the whole island is the top of a mountain that rose from the sea floor.
For anyone interested in geology it is a feast. The crater at Rano Raraku and the cinder cone of Puna Pau are the two to see. Rano Raraku was the quarry for almost every moai, worked for the best part of 500 years, and unfinished statues still lie around its slopes above a quiet crater lake. Puna Pau supplied the red scoria for the pukao, the topknots the statues wore, so it matters to archaeologists as much as to geologists.
## The caves
The lava tubes are one of the island's quieter attractions: long tunnels left where lava ran underground, some tall enough to walk through. The rock is mostly iron-rich basalt and hawaiite, and the minerals show in the walls. A fair number of the caves are unstable, so this is one to do with a local guide rather than a torch and optimism.
## Visiting today
Getting there has always been the hard part, and the expense. Flights run from Santiago in Chile, with the occasional one from Tahiti, and the fares reward some patience and planning.
Two things have changed since this was written. The island closed completely to visitors for over two years during the pandemic and only reopened in August 2022. And it is now run much more tightly as Rapa Nui National Park: you buy a park ticket (around 80 US dollars for foreign visitors, valid for ten days), you have to be with a registered guide at most of the sites, and you can only stay in accredited accommodation. In October 2022, soon after reopening, a fire swept part of the Rano Raraku quarry and scorched some of the moai, a reminder of how fragile the place is. None of this makes it less worth the trip. It just means you go on the island's terms now, which is fair enough.
[](siteimages/rano_raraku_moai.jpg "Moai at Rano Raraku")
[](siteimages/moai_topknot.jpg "Topknot")
[](siteimages/easter_island_lava_tubes.jpg "Lava tubes")
*First written in 2005, updated 2026.*
================================================================================
## How to...In Nepal
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-nepal
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-nepal.md
- published: 2003-06-15
- document_id: 63
> Catching planes, finding hostels and travelling on the buses, how do you do it? Let me show you how....... , writes Seamus Waldron . How to get to Nepal. Fly.
**Catching planes, finding hostels and travelling on the buses, how do you do it? Let me show you how.......**,
writes ***Seamus Waldron***.
**How to get to Nepal.**
Fly. It's the easiest way, either that or a two day coach, I use the term loosely, trip from
India, surrounded by goats and Hindi movies playing full blast all through the night.
Where was I? Oh yes, fly. The only problem is that in Nepal, the clouds have
mountains in them. Don't worry, the Nepalese pilots know their stuff, shame nobody
else does. I'd just landed in Katmandu when all hell broke loose (well it didn't really, but
describing it that way is more dramatic). A Pakistani plane, so it was said, had just
flown into an innocuous looking cloud, no survivors. I wouldn't have minded, if it wasn't
for the fact that I had just landed in an identical plane, that hadn't ever seen one of
those wonderfully experienced Nepalese pilots....
**How not to tell your mother you weren't on a crashed plane.**
"Hi Mum, just phoning to say I wasn't on the plane that crashed."
"I thought you were in India?"
"I was."
"I thought you said you were going by coach to Nepal?"
"I did"
"@!!!£$%"
Conclusion. Lie. Don't tell your mother a thing. Ignorance is bliss. The fact that you
weren't on the plane won't make a blind bit of difference.
**How to get a hotel room in Katmandu with the coldest shower on Earth.**
First, really look like you're struggling with your rucksack as you leave the airport.
Before you know it, you will have plenty of fine gentlemen offering you help and ; "I find
you very good hotel. I own one with my brother. Very cheap. Hot shower. I take you
there now." At this point he's already got your pack halfway to his hotel, so you've lost.
Get in the van and watch the scenery go by.
"Hmmm, doesn't look so bad. How cheap? Really? I'll take it. But show me the shower
first."
"It's a very fine shower"
"It's outside. The water's freezing"
"Oh yes sir. I have very fine system to heat water in morning."
"Are you sure? It's bloody cold."
"Oh yes sir. Would you like a Coke. Very cold sir"
So it came to pass. I got an ice cold Coke (3 months of Thumbs Up in India will drive
anybody crazy) and an ice cold shower. Skinny dipping in a Norwegian Fjord would
have been warmer and infinitely more fun.
**How to travel on Nepalese buses and how best to relieve yourself.**
Travel on the top of the bus. No matter what the weather, ride on top. You get more room. You get to
see the scenery and it is truly spectacular in Nepal. You also get to meet interesting
people and have strange conversations.
"I love Asia."
"Why?", I said, innocently enough. This Aussie was such a curious fellow.
"The people just know what's more natural. They're closer to earth."
"?"
"Look. When they take a crap, they squat don't they? It makes sense. Down you go,
your cheeks part and out it all comes. Splash a bit of water and your away. Back
home, we squeeze our butts into a toilet seat, squashing our buns together and
making a right old mess!"
**How not to travel on Nepalese buses**
Don't, under any circumstances, travel in the actual bus. It's a very bad move.
First of all, you trust you pack to the roof rack. If you trust that, then you're brave. If you
trust the people riding on top not to nick everything and not to demonstrate the finer
differences between taking a crap in the West and taking a crap in Asia, you're even
braver still. Unfortunately, you have no choice.
"Oh look, there's an empty seat, I'll claim that!", you think as you get into the bus. You
sit down. You wait. Nobody else turns up. The bus leaves. You go two miles down the
road and every man, women, child and goat get on. To avoid this happening, make
sure you don't travel the day before any major festival. Better still, make sure you don't
travel in the bus at all, get out and climb up on high.
Remember, in the bus, you will be sharing your seat with, the smelliest/biggest person
you will ever have the displeasure of meeting. They will turn to you incessantly with a
toothless grin and insist that you meet their prize goat, which they thrust up between
your legs. Not so bad I suppose if you come from New Zealand.....
**How to cope with "heebee geebees" (or "the runs")**
First of all, your gonna get them. There is nothing you can do about it. The shits will
strike you down in the most embarrassing way possible. For me, it was the middle of
the night. Barely a wink of sleep all night, I arise with the sun streaming through the
large floor to ceiling window of my room. As I crawl past, all that is on my mind his
keeping my bottom as water tight as frogs. I could feel it, the gas was building up. I
needed to break wind. I needed to badly. When you've got the shits though, farting is
not a good option, unless you like a light coverage of brown liquid all over the inside of
you underpants. I digress, there I was crawling past this window, when I notice a lot of
activity going on in the court yard below. There are lots of men of all ages, from six to
sixty. There is also a goat. A prize goat by the looks of it. It's bleating away. I'm not
surprised, I wouldn't like to be manhandled over a big log either. For a brief moment,
the goat relaxed, took stock of the situation, looked around and had a munch on a
scrap of grass. A huge kukri (Nepalese machete) appeared held high above the
unsuspecting creature and with a sudden, decisive move, the shocked head of the
innocent goat was grabbed and lofted high by a small boy who then ran off with his
prized possession, gripping it by the horns and pretending it's the steering wheel of a
car. Oh the indignation. Oh, my stomach. Goats suddenly turning into little red
fountains do not do much for an unsuspecting traveler with a bad case of the runs. I
crawled at double speed to the bathroom, slowly leaking a small fart. All I had time to
do was stick my head down the toilet before I found myself passing liquid though every
part of my body that was capable of it.
I was found that way, in such a sorry state.
"What's up?", said my traveling companion.
"I'm not well.", stick head back down toilet. "I've been pissing shit all night", crawl into
shower to clean off.
"Oh dear"
I did get better, eventually. I moved to a different guest house. I was just too
embarrassed about the crazy painting motifs I'd made in the first one. Two days of
water, re-hydration packs, squatting over a toilet (the Aussie was right, this was much
easier and far less traumatic that squeezing my bottom into a western style toilet seat),
soon got me better. Soon I was ready for our trek up into the mountains around
Pokhara. Woe, is the traveler when he thinks all is well. My travel companion doubled
over the morning we were to depart. As I said, the heebee geebees can strike you
down anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
**How to survive an attack of leeches**
You've got your trekking pass, you're three hours from the nearest village, it's been
raining and your wet through. All around you is lush vegetation. The last sign of human
life you saw was a column of locals carrying supplies of bear and Coke, ascending the
mountain at a speed a mountain goat would have had problems matching. You need
to go to the toilet. Standing behind a tree will not do for this one, we are talking major
league here. What do you do? You find a quiet glade some distance from the track
and you squat. So far so good. In my case, I found a nice firm rock to squat upon. I pull
my trousers down to just above the knees (this is very important, otherwise you could
be leaving an interesting present for yourself in your trousers) and I attempt to do the
business. To my horror, an army of leeches had already taken up position and were
making an assault upon the north facing side of my legs. The little red buggers had
scaled my boots, got up onto my trousers and were making a final push for more
private parts when I had finally managed to do the business and get out of there.
Immediately I went into action. Out came the pen knife from my pack. Carefully, I
started flicking off these horrible little beasties. They were thin and small, smaller that a
maggot. Eventually, I got them all. Stupidly, I'd put my pack onto the ground, so it was
another ten minutes of leech massacre. Alex, my friendly travel companion, had had
the same problem as myself. We joked about how horrible it had been, as we
continued our assent. Alex felt something on his leg. With dawning horror, he pulled up
his trouser leg and there, already swelling to impossible sizes, was a leech, embedded
in his shin. Did we have a lighter? A match? Anything to remove the thing? No. Not a
sausage (not that a sausage would have been much use.) You see, if you just pull a
leech off, it leaves part of it still in you, not an ideal thing to do. Alex was brave. "I'll
leave it there and wait until it falls off". Yuck! So it came to pass, three hours later we
had reached our destination and the leech had sucked enough blood to swell to the
size of a ripe tomato. As we looked on, it fell off, satiated. With a swift kick Alex made a
terrible mistake. In a pique of rage and revenge, he booted the thing from hell with all
his might. He didn't think did he? The leech had almost broken Mach 1 when it finally
impacted with the wall. It started raining red stuff on us. Never, ever, kick a leech just
after it's had lunch. The result is just too disgusting.
**How to ruin the game of "I SPY"**
"I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with......B"
Butterfly. The answer will always be butterfly. Why? Well, descending from the
mountains to the valleys, you will undoubtedly follow a long winding stone path. This is
actually what the indigenous population use as a main road. Four to five feet wide at
best, non-existent at worst. You see some really odd things on a road like this. Schools
on unbelievably steep slopes, funeral processions and the occasional goat. On
occasion, you see something beautiful. Butterflies. Hundreds upon hundreds. Hues so
vivid and diverse, that all you see is a constantly changing melee of colour.
"....beginning with....B"; said Alex.
"Butterfly! I've got one........something beginning with....B"
"Butterfly!"; and so it went on. For about a hundred yards we played our silly game as
we walked through this inspiring painting of abstract colour and life.
Some time later, after we had had lunch, we resumed our game.
"...beginning with.....B"; said Alex
"Bark? Boulder?.......Bloke? Blink? Bludgeon over the head? WHAT IS IT!!!!"
"Butterfly"
"Butterfly? There aren't any butterflies!"
"I know".
"ARRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!"
So, don't ever play I SPY with me. I'll always see butterflies.
**How to enjoy Nepal**
Immerse yourself in the culture. Push your western ideals to one side and get on with
enjoying the people, the scenery and the food. From city to mountain, you will be
awed. Life survives in this county that has no railways and I for one hope that it never
changes.
---
*A note from 2026: a great deal has happened to Nepal since this was written. The decade-long Maoist insurgency ended in 2006, and in 2008 the monarchy was abolished and Nepal became a republic, so the king mentioned here is long gone. In April 2015 a major earthquake killed close to 9,000 people and badly damaged Kathmandu, the Durbar Squares and the Langtang valley; the landmark Dharahara tower collapsed and has since been rebuilt. The trekking is as good as ever, but check current conditions on any route before you set out.*
================================================================================
## Electrocution for fun: Humour
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/electrocution-for-fun
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/electrocution-for-fun.md
- published: 2003-06-15
- document_id: 6
> This site is about Trivia, Travel, Technology and Reviews. Destinations, travelogues and reports.By Seamus Waldron.
## Electrocution for fun
I can't even begin to tell you how much this made me laugh and cry. To set the scene, I was at a dance weekend promoting [Jive Nation](http://www.jivenation.co.uk "Modern Jive: Jive Nation") at the Butlins holiday
camp in Bognor Regis.
Spare the jokes, it was actually quite good fun, but two friends, Simon and Steve, needed one last buzz - quite literally.
Step up to the Adams family "electrocute yourself for a laugh" game.
There isn't much involved. All you do is hold onto the two metal rods for as long as possible. If you hold on long enough,
Uncle Fester lights up and you win......absolutely nothing.
So, I present to you, the video of Simon Borland and Steve Hunt, electrocuting themsleves for fun. Simon (who goes first) does pretty well, I highly
recommend watching to see how Steve did....
Oh yes, I didn't have a go and the incessant laughing you hear is me, enjoy ;-)
================================================================================
## Trekking in Patagonia! Part I
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-patagonia
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-patagonia.md
- published: 2003-03-15
- document_id: 64
> Pategonia! Where is it and why would ANYONE want to go there? , writes Jay Smith . (c) Jay Smith, 1997 Patagonia! Where is it and why would ANYONE want to go there?
**Pategonia! Where is it and why would ANYONE want to go there?** , writes ***Jay Smith***.
(c) [Jay Smith](http://www.mindspring.com/~j-smith/index.htm), 1997
**Patagonia! Where is it and why would ANYONE want to go there?** Patagonia is a huge region in Argentina and Chile that is south of the Rio Colorado. It stretches south from the province of Buenos Aires all the way to the straits of Magellan and the Tierra del Fuego. The genesis of the name "Patagonia" is unclear. It may have derived in Magellan's day from the Spanish *pata* meaning foot --- referring to the tall natives with large feet. Or it may derive from a fictional monster in the
Spanish romance of this period. Most of Patagonia is prairie and desert with low grass, monotonous and boringly brown. The only relief is the estancias, sheep ranches with tall trees serving as wind breakers around the main residence. The Patagonian horizon is endless, you can see forever. There are few roads and most of them are dirt. There are many mammals but most of them are sheep!
Isn't Patagonia windy, rainy, snowy, cold, and generally desolate? YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! Absolutely, it is all of these and more. Its the more that people go for, however. What's the more? Well, there are world class glaciers [Petito Moreno], mountains like vertical pinnacles [Torres del Paine & the Fitzroy range], and beautiful immense turquoise lakes [Lago Argentina & Lago Viedma] and rivers [Rio Santa Cruz, etc] fed by glaciers. There is also the Patagonian ice cap, nearly 400
miles long, called the Third Pole. This ice cap has yet to be crossed by humans due to inclement weather, worse than Antartica.
 If you go to Patagonia be forewarned. Two deities are constantly vying for control of the climate there. One is the wind [viento] and the other is the rain [lleuve]. Neither is willing to relinquish the battle; on a lucky day, they will be resting, on an average day, one or the other will be in command, and on unlucky days, BOTH will be working against you. Imagine the worst
possible weather you can in order to prepare for Patagonia. If you are lucky, it will be about what you expect, possibly it will worse than you CAN imagine. So be prepared to fight these two deities if you go. You WILL get wet! Count on it!
INFORMATION ON TRIP PLANNING
& ORGANIZATION -- SUGGESTIONS:
After selecting the destination of Patagonia, I began a search on the Internet for expeditions to the area. I came across a site sponsored by Earthwise Journeys in Portland, OR [www.teleport.com/~earthwyz]. I liked the 10-day itinerary that was set up for this trip, as opposed to other trips I had seen advertised which lasted 17 days. I spoke with Barbara Canavan of Earthwise Journeys
about the trip and it was apparent that the air arrangements would take a while and might be difficult because of uncertainty in Latin America. The uncertainty arises from connections between Buenos Aires and Rio Gallegos. These flights are offered by both Aerolineas Argentinas and by Lapa; however flight times are subject to frequent change. I was potentially booked on both airlines to ensure that I would have flight at a reasonable time of day and because last-minute flight changes were
difficult to track in the US. The land portion of the trip was arranged by Andean Treks, of Watertown, MA. Andean Treks was responsible for obtaining the bus and other arrangements, such as hotels and camping sites. Finally, our guides, Robert Noonan and Catherine were with Earthquest, based in Flagstaff, AZ. So, arrangements were pretty complicated!
 *About telephones:* Once in Buenos Aires, I re-checked all Argentine reservations. A word of advice here. You cannot rely on telephones in BA for this. You must visit airline offices in person. If you want to call overseas, find a "Locuturio."
*About trekking:* My other advice, especially if you are going to be trekking, is to take several changes of clothes, pack everything in separate zip-lock bags so that wet clothes won't dampen dry clothes! Take a "waterproof" jacket [Goretex?] but it will get soaked and wet anyway, if my trip is typical. Your hiking boots will get soaked. My primary boots got wet and stayed that way, except that I did dry them once by the fire. But do not be tempted to switch to another pair of dry
boots once your primary pair is wet; otherwise, you'll end up with two pairs of wet boots and no dry boots! Your camera may become wet from hiking in the rain. Keep it in a plastic zip-lock bag. Also keep your passport and airline tickets in plastic bags.
 *About food:* We had a varied and tasty diet including meats [sausage, steak], cheeses, pastas, vegetables, lettuce, & tomatoes. For breakfast we usually had oatmeal, granola, and the like. We mixed these with hot water and added dry milk. We had plenty of cafe, tea, and juices. We had green salads just about everyday. For lunch we carried sandwiches, trail mix, cucumbers,
carrots, and apples. We had some meals in restaurants, usually steak and lamb with a salad. I would rate the food as quite good, considering the circumstances -- and you WILL get hungry if you trek because of the extreme physical exertion, so the food will taste good! All of our camp cooking was done over a propane camp stove. All of our water was run through a bacteriologic filter; however, a few times I drank from streams and never became ill. In fact, to my knowledge, no one on our trip
became ill from the food. One thing, be prepared to wash your dishes! You may get dishpan hands!
*About people on this trip:* There are 15 people on this trip, 10 from Australia, 2 from Canada, and 3 from the USA. Most of the Australians are from the Blue Mountains area, north of Syndney. Two Australians are from Montreal. The two Canadians are from Vancouver. Two Americans are northerners and one is a southerner [me!].
***January 5, 1997***
Today is the day for leaving for Patagonia via Miami and Buenos Aires [BA] --- then south ~1,500 miles to Rio Gallegos two days after arrival in BA! I am excited but apprehensive about leaving because my dad had a stroke about year ago and it has been difficult for me to deal with that. In fact, one reason I am making this trip is to get some rest from dealing with his illness. I am a runner, usually running 30-45 minutes some 4-5 times per week. One of the questions I have about this trip is
whether I should take running shoes. I don't think I can run in BA and there is a lot of hiking scheduled; also the weather is supposed to be poor in Patagonia; finally I am running out of packing space. So, I decide not to take my running shoes, knowing that it will be difficult NOT to run for two entire weeks; I console myself by realizing that there must be lots of walking.
I expect a fair amount of rain in Patagonia and have re-packed everything in zip-lock plastic bags. I test my heavy jacket and ensure myself that it is waterproof, also I am taking a lightweight water-resistant shell, gloves, and a warm pullover hat. I am taking two pair of hiking boots, thermal underwear, a polarguard Kelty compressible sleeping bag, and a thermal, self-inflating sleeping pad [Therma-a-rest]. Antihistamines, anti-diarrheal tablets, melatonin, and pain killers are coming
along. Finally, I throw in my eye covers and ear plugs for sleeping on the plane. So, I figure I am pretty well prepared for everything. Little did I realize what Patagonia was going to throw at me!
In order to prepare for the long flights to Buenos Aires, I run at 8:30 for 45 minutes under cloudy skies and light misting rain. This is sufficient to get a runner's high which is the way I want to begin today! I have spent lots of time on the phone with my friend, BED, to prepare also. Later, I pick up a couple of last minute items at a drugstore and go by my parents at 1:30 to say goodbye; I review my flight schedule with them so they'll have some idea of my whereabouts. They are
apprehensive about my leaving but I promise to return safely within two weeks. Frankly, I am also apprehensive, I know that if something were to happen, I will totally out of touch with civilization and would not be able to return, so I leave with this possibility in mind. I leave instructions with AS as to what I want done if my dad dies while I am away.
 Immediately after returning from my parents' assisted living apartment, AS drives me to the MARTA rapid rail station in Dunwoody. The trip starts badly when the token machine steals $1.75 from me, yielding no token, I move to another machine, insert $5.00 and get more tokens than I need. I am certain I'll lose these before I return to Atlanta! But, my luck changes when I take the
escalator, hop on a train and immediately leave for the airport! I arrive at the airport about 3:30, still mad about the machine stealing my money! I complain to the MARTA representatives, who give me another token to lose! At the Delta Airlines baggage check-in, I have no problem checking my bag to BA. Its going to be a long trip so I stop at the food court and have a hot dog before boarding my plane.
At 7:30 I arrive in Miami and make my way to the United Airlines check-in, where I enter a long line. Just behind me is a ~30 year old female carrying a huge Minnie Mouse stuffed puppet. She is hitting me with it as the line moves. As I reach the front of the line, she bolts in front of me to the counter, then her parents do the same thing. I stand in front for a while waiting for an available agent. All of a sudden, a woman behind me claims that I have broken in front of the entire line and
that I should go the back of the line. The security guard comes over and demands that I go to the back. I keep insisting that I have gone through it and refuse to leave. Finally, I check in, and get the aisle seat that I want. The agent even moves me farther away from the smoking section after I tell him that I work for the Centers for Disease Control! Cool! Things are definitely looking better after that MARTA token incident!
At the Miami terminal I make several phone calls and wait. We finally board about 10:40 and the 747 lifts off. Unfortunately, I am not able to sleep on the ~9 hour flight, but this is nothing unusual.
***January 6, 1997***
 The huge city of BA comes into view as we descend and I remark on the seemingly infinite number of tall apartment buildings there. We land at 7:30 EST or 9:30 BAT. I decide not to reset my watch so I will know what my friends are doing back home. Customs is quick and I retrieve my luggage after only 15 minutes. Then I find the Manuel Leon Tienda bus ticket kiosk and buy a ticket to
downtown for $14. Hundreds of folks are lined up past this kiosk with large name cards to greet people --- but I see no one with a card "Jay Smith." So I keep going and get on the bus. The ride into town is through flat land with pretty evergreen trees for the first 15-20 miles, then urban sprawl starts. I don't think I have ever seen so many tall apartment buildings in one place but this city has 12 million residents so they have to be somewhere! I note that BA is like Los Angeles, there is no
vacant space anywhere. Finally, we reach a bus stop and I take off all my carefully packed gear. Then a mini-bus takes me to my hotel, the Castelar, where I am to stay two nights [close to the intersection of Lima & Avenida de Mayo]. This hotel is quaint, with accordion doors in the elevator. There is lots of marble and wood in the lobby. I find my 9th-floor room small with high ceilings and an air conditioner that does not work. The front desk turns it on after I complain, however. It is
hot here.
There are two things I must accomplish in BA and I start to work immediately. First, I must straighten out my Aerolineas Argentenias airline reservations, making sure of a noon departure on the 8th and a 5 p.m. departure on the 19th of January. Second, I have to reconfirm my United Airlines flight back to Miami on the 20th of January. No problem, I figure, I have phone numbers. However, after repeated attempts to reach both, I realize the phone is useless, it is always busy. So, I decide to
call Diego at Ecology Adventures, surely he can fix this. Again nothing but busy signals, no one ever answers. What to do now? I figure I might walk or take a taxi to Ecology Adventures at 736 Talahuano. I have no idea how close I am to this address, but at the hotel front desk, I learn it is only ~7 blocks away .
 Next I discover another problem, my luggage is locked but I can find no key, I swear I put it in my security pouch with my wallet, but its not there. I become afraid that I will have to go through the entire trip with only one pair of trousers and one shirt! So, not relishing this, I boldly go to the front desk and ask for a selection of luggage keys. Voila!!! Remarkably one of them
actually fits! Wow! Things are looking better.
Having access to >1 outfit now, I set out to find Talahuano street. I begin walking and ask where this street is in passable Spanish. I have no map; finally I pass some large judicial buildings and park, I am now at the 700 block. BA is laid out nicely so that all blocks run with parallel numbers, making things easy to find. Up one flight of stairs and I have arrived! I introduce myself to Diego, a tall, handsome Latin chap and explain my predicament. He indicates that in BA you MUST go
in person. Furnishing me with a map, he indicates that to reach AA, I have to go back to the hotel, then cross Lima Avenue [largest in the world?], then continue another 8 blocks to the Playa de Mayo. I am hungry but refuse to stop for food on the way, wanting to get this over with. After about an hour, I locate AA, and note the short line, this will be easy, I conclude. However, the short line is deceptive, you need a number to actually get service, so I take one and enter the queue. Strange,
as numbers are called, few customers answer, so I am called quickly. I arrange both my departure and return flights into the EZE international airport. Also, I ask if they can confirm my United flight. No can do, busy phone number, but they provide me with the address of UAL, however. Leaving the offices of AA, I find a Burger King, so I opt for American fast food, being famished! Relieved of the burden of never leaving BA, I can begin to enjoy it!
BA is a cosmopolitan city with many outdoor restaurants and bars, pizza parlors. There are many small kiosks, some no more than 6 feet wide, where you can buy snacks. The streets are crowded and there is a joyful atmosphere. People are drinking cafe and agua mineral at 6 p.m. Everyone eats much later in the evening. I order a medium sized pizza and beer for $11. BA is an expensive city.
I am told at the Castelar that you can dial the US directly from your room: 4-001-XXX-XXX-XXXX. This never works, however, the phone is always busy. So I locate a public phone booth, called a Locutorio, and am able to call from there with no problem, other than the $4-5 cost per minute! I call my friend BED and learn she has the flu, then call AS and ask her to tell my parents that I have arrived in BA. At 9 p.m., BA time, I hit the sack and sleep well except that I feel like I have a
cold.
*January 7, 1997*
 I awake at 6 a.m. EST or 8 BAT and shave, perhaps for the last time, as I don't plan to shave once we begin camping. Then I have a continental breakfast of cafe, toast, and croissants. Its now time to walk 12 blocks to United Airlines, located at 1100 Carlos Pelligrini, which parallels Lima Avenue. There is one problem, however, it is raining like crazy! This makes me wonder what it
will be like in Patagonia. I wait and wait but the rain never stops, so at 10 a.m. I decide to brave the rain and go anyway. On the way, I note that many umbrella vendors have set up shop but I resist the temptation, after all, what good would one be in Patagonia with all that wind? Passing banks, restaurants, kiosks, office buildings, clothing stores, I reach the 1100 block. Now to cross Lima with its four major arteries and central medians in the rain. This takes a while, you can't do it with
one change of the traffic lights.
 Finally, I arrive at the appointed address and ease past the guards to the elevator. Making my way to the 5th floor, I find a queue of perhaps 20 people and put my name on a short list of people. Why is the list so short and yet so many people are waiting? Three assistants sit at the counter, two are working, the third loafs behind a sign that reads "Mileage Plus." No one goes to
him. So I take a chance, walk to him, state that I just want to reconfirm. Voila! He can do it immediately! But there is some paperwork. Where am I staying in BA? What is my phone number? Where am I staying in Rio Gallegos? What is my phone number there? Where am I going from there? I am too embarrassed to say that I will staying in the wild Patagonia outback! And I certainly won't have a phone in my tent! My flights are confirmed, however. If I survive Patagonia, I can make it back to the USA!
Afterwards, I walk back to the hotel, my trousers are now soaked, why didn't I wear rain pants? Oh, well, you can't remember everything!
During the afternoon, I walk the side streets around my hotel, reaching the districtorio del oro with dozens of shops. Some of these are only a few feet wide, while others are huge. I stop in one shop, and they seem to say they don't sell jewelry, which is odd considering the number of apparent customers, perhaps I haven't understood their Spanish well. Later, I find a small shop and buy a bracelet for 40 pesos. Its fun to practice my limited Spanish in purchasing the bracelet! Then, I
locate a rock/gem shop and buy some nice royal blue geodes.
Around 6:30 I begin to look for a place to have dinner. I was not able to find Mexican, Italian, Greek, or such ethnic restaurants. The most common restaurant is the pizzeria, which offers a good selection of omelets, sandwiches, fish, chicken, beef, and of course, pizzas. But cafe and pastry seems to be the staple drink and food at this early hour. At the Alameda, I have a turkey sandwich and top the meal off with pie for desert.
 ***January 8, 1997***
Last night I slept well. This morning I awake to the sound of my alarm at 6:00 BAT. After a continental breakfast, I check out at 8:00 after paying $12 to have my trousers and shirt laundered. By 8:30 I am on my way to the EZE airport. My AA ticket qualifies me for a free bus ride to the airport. Arriving at the airport on the bus, I follow the instructions and get off at the domestic terminal since my flight is within Argentina. Then I learn that the flight to Rio Gallegos does not leave from
there. Apparently it leaves from the international terminal. So, I have to walk there to leave, oh, well....ALL Aerolineas Argentenias flights leave from the international terminal, regardless of destination, how curious. I check in O.K. and then head through security. There, I note that I have apparently left my other airline tickets on the counter. So I go though security in reverse to get them and back through security again! Now I must go through the customs area. They check my passport.
Next, I try to buy a coke and discover all my change is gone, I've left it in security! So back through customs one more time to get my change left in security. I must be the only passenger to go through both security and customs twice in one day!
- [Click for My Home Page:](http://www.mindspring.com/~j-smith/index.htm)
- [Click for Patagonia Travelog [1997] -Part II](http://www.mindspring.com/~j-smith/pg-2.htm)
---
*A note from 2026: Torres del Paine is far busier than it was on this trek. The W and the full circuit now have to be planned around the refugios and campsites, and you must book your bed or your pitch in advance, in some seasons months ahead; you can no longer simply turn up and walk. The park has also been hit by serious fires over the years, several started by visitors, so the rules on stoves and camping are strict. Worth it still, but it needs booking now.*
================================================================================
## 9/11 - The World Trade Center attack
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/911-world-stopped
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/911-world-stopped.md
- published: 2001-09-20
- document_id: 3
> Quick guide Description
**The world stopped to draw breath.**
Seamus Waldron, Tuesday, September 11th, 2001
This fall Bostonian morning started like any other, walking to the office with a bagel and coffee in hand. The sky was blue, the trees were hinting at change and the summer heat would soon fade. Then, the world changed...
The war of independence was a turning point toward modern history and it started with a single shot whose repercussions were heard around the word. By the time I left the elevator on the 18th floor, I already had heard. Seconds later, CNN and the BBC told me, and showed me, that this was not some shot fired from a musket, but orders of magnitude greater, a modern day Hiroshima, with consequences that will change the world we live in.
Working in the centre of London for five years had prepared me for the shock, the paralysis, the disbelief, but nothing on earth could have prepared anybody for the shear magnitude of the events that were unfurling.
Blink, an aircraft enters stage right, boom, a fireball erupts from the left side of the World Trade Center. Can this be real? Is this one of those modern day Hollywood movies? Smoke and flame engulf the twin towers, the president speaks and even before he finishes the Pentagon is hit.
Evacuation, all government employees are told to go home. We are told to go home. My bagel is untouched, my coffee is cold. I cannot move. On the TV, as though time has slowed, one of the towers shudders and is engulfed by dust. "Did it fall? Did it fall? It can't have. Oh, this is awful. What about the police, the firefighters, the medics?". On the news we hear garbled reporting; "What was that? One side of the tower has
collapsed?"
"No, the whole building has. It's gone"
Time returns to normal speed, I decide to get another coffee but never make it. The second tower falls. The radio antenna falls down and inwards towards the rising smoke and debris. What stood as a sign of independence and freedom to the world has been torn down in just one hour.
We hear that a plane has crashed in Pennsylvania and that a bomb has exploded outside the State building in Washington.
It is now time to get out. Boston, where I am, is a small and relatively quiet city. It was once remembered as the start of the American revolution, that place that shot was fired from, it will now be remembered as the place where two aircraft were high-jacked and used to fire a new shot that was heard around the world.
================================================================================
## Email on the move
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/email-on-the-move
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/email-on-the-move.md
- published: 1997-12-01
- document_id: 1239
> Have palmtop, will travel. Learning to live life on the road with a PC110 palmtop, from China onwards.
Have palmtop will travel, but can you get the latest football scores? *Seamus Waldron* suffers the heatache of learning to live life on the road with his palmtop.
*December 1997 (**Update, Dec. 2003**)*
**I want to supply telecomms solutions for the traveler**, be it a journalist, a businessman or an entire expedition. The only problem with this idea was my total lack of experience applying my communications knowledge in practical field situations. By putting my money where my mouth was, I bought an IBM PC110 Palmtop Computer and a ticket to China. Thus started a mini odessy in the discovery of remote telecommunications....
**Synopsis**
After travelling all over the world, I ended up with a system that worked. This comprises of an [IBM PC110](/section/technology) palmtop computer, Ameol email/newsgroup software and a TeleFast acoustic coupler from [TeleAdapt](http://www.teleadapt.com).
Below you will find the evolution from first attempt to final success.
**The road to connection.**
My objective for China was simply, send some e-mail.
What does this entail? Well, my proposed solution was simple, use WinCIM to connect to [Compuserve](http://www.compuserve.com) and then voila!
Complete failure, but why? It should be simple, back in England all I have to do is plug the internal modem into the phone socket and then run WinCim. Why didn't it work? Well, first of all, there is no access number for Compuserve in China, therefore you need to go through a 'broker' and this *costs $$$$*. My next problem was that it looked as though every telephone in China is wired directly into the wall and that those that are not have many different types of sockets. What finally killed all hope of success was that the Chinese power socket blew up my power transformer.
If I had had more time, I would have been able to open a Chinese Internet account in Beijing and used that - however I didn't take my floppy disk drive OR my docking station with me, so even that solution would not have worked for me at the time. It became obvious that I needed a global IP, one that really did have POP's everywhere. Also, I needed a solution to combat the hard-wired phones and different phone connectors.
**Conclusion**
- Use a local access provider if you can OR subscribe to a truely Global Internet Service.
- Don't rely on plugging your PC110 directly into the phone line of your hotel.
Okay, so internet life wasn't easy in China, so I did a bit of playing around with stuff back in England and jumped at the chance of going out to The Gambia, ideal location for testing telecomms. In theory, if I could get everyhting working in the middle of no-where, then I would be onto a winner.
**Objective** : Have e-mail and Web connectivity. On the PC110, this will be DOS based, on the laptop, this can be Windows based. To achieve these objective, I propose three things.
- For connectivity software, use the new [WebBoy](/) DOS browser/E-Mail from IBM.
- Use [IBM Global Network](http://www.ibm.net) for internet access.
- Use an acoustic coupler supplied by [TeleAdapt Ltd](http://www.teleadapt.com) to allow connection to any telephone.[](http://www.teleadapt.com)
- Use solar technology to power the equipment.
Well, I flew out to Banjul in The Gambia on July 19th 1997. With me was my now faithfull travel companion - my PC110, a GPS, my [TeleFast](http://www.teleadapt.com) acoustic coupler, a not quite installed version of WebBoy and my snowboard.
To say that things did not go well was an understatement. The bottom line was that it was impossible to get a clean telephone line. The only access to telephones are through local GamTel offices (GamTel being the national telecoms providor). Connecting PC110 to acoustic coupler and attaching to phone *should* have worked, but guess what? The charging mechanism sends a very load click follwed by a blank on the line, my comms software didn't have a chance. I didn't use WebBoy as at that time it was not fully configured and I needed somebody to translate some more Japanese for me, but I did use Ameol, an excellent email package for use with the British [CIX](http://www.cix.co.uk) online service.
After returning from The Gambia, I was the studio guest on "The Works", the BBC World Services' premiere technology program. They were interested in the idea of a "telecommunications center in you backpack" and the ways this technology can be exploited in remote areas. Since that interview I have also been interviewed about the connection technology on Polish TV, though this was conducted through the internet.
**Finally, total success**
I next flew out to Hungary with a list of IBM pops in my diary. My first attempt to connect was hamperd due to my battery running low. This had nothing to do with the acoustic coupler as this has it's own battery.
My next attempt, was brief but successfull. When leaving Hungary I had time to setup shop in a telephone booth and play. I blind dialed, made the connection and voila, success. Finally, everything had come together.
[TeleAdapt](http://www.teleadapt.com) recommend you to practice connecting before you ever leave home, I cannot emphasise this too strongly. I was having problems even though I had practised at home. Of course, it didn't help that I was trying to connect in odd countries with of telecomms.
I returned to Hungary a month later, this time I wanted to prove that I could do viable work and upload it to a web site. The core of my equipment was the PC110 and the [Telefast](http://www.teleadapt.com) coupler. My travels look me from Hungary, to Austria and then up to Berlin in Germany. I was able to construct a complete web site during this time, commnicate with the company I was doing this for and download it to the web. This is definately was the way to telework.
I made two interesting discoveries of note. First, when connecting to a POP from a phone box (which is what I did on every occasion), I recommend that you use a phone card. This will save you time and money and give you less things to worry about during your connection. You should setup everything before you dial. Strap the Telefast to the phone, get your FTP/email software running, everything ready for you connection. The tick is to have something weighed down on the phones handle, so the phone thinks the handset is on the hook. This will stop messages comming through the phone due to inactivity. Finally, when you are ready, remove you weight, blind dial and connect. Let the computer take the strain.
Strangely, the only real trouble I had on this trip was in Berlin. Some phone boxes worked, others did not. When I looked at a map, I realsied that all the phones that didn't work were within the old East Berlin. Coincedance? I don't know.
**The future.**
In the new year, I will travel to South America, to showcase the ultimate in teleworking. Using a new palmtop computer, the TeleFast and some other related technology, I will show that the world really has shrunk to the size of allowing you to work for any company, wherever you are in the world.
By Seamus Waldron (c)1997
**Update - December 2003**
In the intervening years between this article and now, I have traveled to many places with my palmtop computers. The one piece of kit that has remained constant is the Telefast acoustic coupler, however I have used bot han Apple iBook (which was just too heavy and big) and now a Sony PCG-U1 an excellent, lightweight palmtop which runs Windows2000/XP.
In a six week European tour, I found that most of the time the best method of internet connection was to use a local Internet cafe. In most countries, it was possible to hook into the Internet cafes network using Ethernet. The main excpetion to this was Holland and England. In South America, it is also possible to use this method of connection, though when I was there I did also sign up to a local free internet providor whos detials I had found out before leaving.
================================================================================
## The Telefast acoustic coupler
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/telefast-acoustic-coupler
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/telefast-acoustic-coupler.md
- published: 1997-06-01
- document_id: 1243
> However exotic the phone socket, the Telefast acoustic coupler gets a travelling palmtop online. The one piece of kit that never left the bag.
**Overview of the TeleFast acoustic coupler** *from* **[TeleAdapt](http://www.teleadapt.com),**by Seamus Waldron
[](http://www.teleadapt.com)Whether you encounter plugs/sockets, hard wired phones, digital PBX's or pay phones, the TeleFast Plus acoustic coupler provides a method of connecting your computer to online systems. Transmitting at speeds of up to 24,000bps, the TeleFast is lightweight and fits most handsets.
If you travel on holiday or your job requires you to travel to various countries at short notice, an acoustic coupler, such as the Telefast is an essential piece of hardware. Although it is always ideal to connect directly, it can be difficult to predict in advance what systems will be available in your destination country. You could encounter plugs/sockets, hard wired phones, digital PBX's or pay phones.
An acoustic coupler removes a significant hurdle in the connection process. Due to its design, the Telefast is placed over the handset and secured into place by a velcro strap, thus making a connection. It my experience, it is simple, quick and effective.
Most people think of acoustic couplers as slow and unreliable devices, remembering films such as "War Games". The TeleFast can run at up to 24,000bps. Performance speeds are affected by the line and handset quality. However, you get an excellent acoustic connection in most situations.
The small size and light weight are important aspects of this coupler. When travelling, my [palmtop](/articles/email-on-the-move) and Telefast weigh in at less than half a pound and take up the space of a hard-backed novel.
By Seamus Waldron (c)1997, 1998
================================================================================
## Computer power in your backpack
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/computer-power-in-your-backpack
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/computer-power-in-your-backpack.md
- published: 1997-06-01
- document_id: 1238
> A new breed of palmtop computer means you can carry real computing power on the road. A 1997 survey, with 2003 updates.
This article was originally published in 1997. Updated comments from December 2003 are in RED.
You're on the road but you just can't live without your computer. What can you do? Well, those clever people at IBM, Toshiba, Hewlett Packard, Psion have recently been churning out a new breed of portable computer, the **palmtop**.
Six years has changed the marketplace somewhat. There are two main types of backpackable computer, the Palmtop or PDA. Palmtops are very small computers, usually running a version of Windows or Linux and PDAs (Pesonal Digital Assitant, a term coined by Apple on the launch of the long gone, Newton) which run Symbian (originally the Psion operating system, now designed for convergant PDA/Phone devices), PalmOS, PocketPC (used to be WinCE) and finally Linux.
A lightweight computer to fit in the palm of your hand. You can get your email and play a few games, but are all palmtop's created equally?
Not on your life! For the wimp user, the decision is clear, one of the many breeds of WinCE (read PocketPC from now on) machines. WinCE /PocketPC is the name of the operating system, written by Microsoft so you can guarentee that it will look reasonable but will make sure you can't do anything productive, that runs on the little beastie. You can connect to the Web and you can read your email. There are some games around and a WinCE machine is generally okay, but do you really want one? In the United Kingdom, PocketPC based phones are quite popular and are driving sales of PocketPC devices.
Most people will be happy with a Psion palmtop. The 3x versions are really cheap now and have stacks of software, so games to while away those dreary coach journey's are ten-a-penny. The new Series 5 is a real cracker, Email, web, the lot. However, it's not easy to connect to more advance equipment, like a digital camera or even a satellite phone.
Things have changed. Psion has pulled out of the market, replaced by manufacturers using the Symbian operating for their phones. SonyEricsson and Nokia are the main players in this arena, with Samsung bringing out devices as well. These machines are primariloy phones (with the exception of the Nokia N-Guage which is a gameboy like device which also operates as a phone). All modern Symbian devices have Bluetooth allowing wireless connectivity.
So, you **really** want power. You want to be the top man (or woman) on your block. What do you choose. Well, if you have stupid amounts of money to burn and you can't live without all those Windows95 games, then you want a Libretto. If you have modest amounts of money to burn then go for the IBM PC110. Both machines are *powerfull*. They are both Desktop machines in the body of mice (okay, mouse for the PC110, rat for the Libretto). The PC110 is the smallest, the Libretto the quickest. These babies can plug into digital cameras, satellite phones, flatbed scanners, solar power arrays, they have sound cards, colour screens and play Doom like there's no tomorrow. Why would you want anything else? You wouldn't. This is as good as it gets, these are the top dogs, the big cheese, they are the best.
Well, in 1997 they were the best. Now, there is a new breed of Libretto that is small and portable, but the front-runner is without question Sony. I have been using a Sony PCG-U1 as my main computer for the last year. In addition to a the Windows operating system (Windows 2000/2003/XP Pro - you decide which) you have extra bits the old palmtops did not have. The U1 and its' more recent siblings have an external monitor connector with dual screen functionality, a firewire port, two USB ports, Ethernet and a Memory Stick reader with gobs of memory and disk space.
So, what do I travel with? Well, my favorite is the [IBM PC110 palmtop](http://www.apj.co.uk/pc110/pt_main.htm). It's small, light and has some great PIM software (though I did have to convert it from Japanese into English). I'm actually writing this article on my PC110 sitting in a basement bar in the Marco Polo rest house in Budapest, Hungary. As you can tell, it travels well. As noted above, I now use the Sony PCG-U1 as my main machine. It has travelled with me all over Europe and the USA, working flawlessly.
If you are to get your email from the remotest of areas of the world, you will always do well by using the most powerfull machine you can. My current setup on this machine is running Windows 3.1, using Microsoft Explorer for my POP3 email package and IBM GlobalNet for my access provider. I am striving for the perfect combination of software, this is my current setup only.
Currently, my Sony PCG-U1 is running Windows XP with Ameol for email and a free local provider that I look up before I go abroad. In Europe, especially Eastern Europe, I found that most Internet cafes were happy for me to connect via ethernet.
It's not just software that matters, I need to connect to a telephone, but there are so many types of telephone plugs out there, you need to carry a whole briefcase of equipment to combat every combination. In China, there isn't even a definate standard, so plugs change from location to location. To counter this, you use an acoustic coupler. Gone are the days when these things were big and bulky, they are now slimline and can work at high connection speeds. My favourite is the TeleFast adaptor from TeleAdapt. Nothing has changes here. I still use the same acoustic coupler as I did back in 1997.
**By Seamus Waldron (c)1997 and (c)2003**
================================================================================
## Alone in Budapest and in love
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-budapest-alone-and-in-love
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-budapest-alone-and-in-love.md
- published: 1997-05-01
- document_id: 1241
> To be in Budapest, in love and on your own. What does it feel like? A solo wander through the city on the Danube.
**To be in Budapest, in love and on your own. What does it feel like?**,
written by ***Seamus Waldron***.
**Here I am, watching the setting sun**.
Infront of me is the Danube, its tranquillity broken by the rare riverboat. The sun is behind the only cloud in the sky and soon it will be putting Buda castle into silhouette. This is truly a wonderful city. To me, it is like Copenhagen with a touch or Paris, magnificent buildings, pedestrian walkways and trams.
Who would have thought, six months ago, that I would be in Budapest. Enroute to see a close friend of mine. A close friend who I only met last December whilst climbing a mountain in China, for whom I am to be best man for next year when he marries an Hungarian girl I introduced to him only 3 months ago. Events happen fast now. Who would have believed that I would have met the girl from my dreams? Certainly not I. Life has more vitality now, I see things clearer. I must be in love. If she could be with me now, the moment would be complete, as it is, the memory of her makes do.
I flew from London this morning, via Zurich. Old memories surfaced of travels past. I'm sure the airport looked familiar, though I am equally certain I have never to airport in Zurich before.
Lovers pass me by, hand in hand or stopping to savour the view and each other. I wish I could be one of them, in this romantic city.
I'm up at Buda castle now. I took the fornicula up the hill, exactly like Sacra Cour in Paris. There is an arts and crafts fare happening. All around me are traditional Hungarian craft makers. From course paper to tents made from skins. In the background a strange "harpsichord" sounding instrument is being played. It looks like a cross between an organ grinder and a guitar! The view over Pest is magnificent as the last of the suns rays bathe the buildings in gold. This is most pleasant. Castle, view and a cold pint on Amstel beer, which is making me quite drunk.
I'm now back at my hotel, actually I'm in a dormitory, cheaper you see. However, the view is spectacular. I am in the Citadella, perched on the highest peak overlooking Budapest. Typically Soviet music was being played as I entered the hotel. I stopped and looked at the view. It is dark now and the city is alight with a million candles and I am in the best place to see it. I cried earlier and a tear is rolling down my right cheek as I write. To be alone in Buda is torture, to be with her, would be bliss. I don't know whether to smile or cry at the situation I'm in. Perhaps I should do both?
10am, I'm back in the Castle, in a leafy glade overlooking the Danube, drinking another pint of Amstel. I've got some sort of puff pastry to eat, though it's not very puffed and is extremely salty. It is edible though. The craft market is still going on. I'm waiting for a guy who make flutes to show up, as I want to buy one as a present for her. Typically, all the other stall holders have shown, his is just empty. Last night I ended up eating Venison, Danube style, followed by a walk around Citadella. The views were sensational. It took me 40 minutes or so this morning to hike down the hill and up into the castle. All this while I've had my pack to weigh me down. This beer is so welcome.
Once again, life was frustrating last night. The view of Budapest at night demands love, couples arm in arm, kisses under the trees with the backdrop of the meandering Danube. I'm glad I'm leaving in two hours, I'd be a nervous wreck otherwise. This musician guy had better turn up soon, I cannot bring myself to stay.
================================================================================
## The IBM WebBoy: a web browser for DOS
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/ibm-webboy-dos-browser
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/ibm-webboy-dos-browser.md
- published: 1997-04-29
- document_id: 1245
> IBM's WebBoy was the first ever web browser for DOS, running happily on a 386 and on the IBM PC110 palmtop. A 1997 first-hand look at the browser, its MicroPM technology and the press around it.
IBM (bless their cotton socks) have been working on a DOS based Web Browser codenamed **WebBoy**. In essence, this browser will supply HTML3.2 compatibility (what that means to you is that it can handle tables, animated Gifs, frames and font tags) and e-mail. To make things better, it uses the same GUI that was used to write PersonaWare, meaning that when integrated into your PersonaWare menu, you will be able to access the net from one user interface.
Before you ask me "Where can I get WebBoy" let me tell you that finding any information about WebBoy has been really difficult. Everything is in Japanese and nobody in the English speaking world seem to know a thing. WebBoy has been written to be portable, so expect ports to other (non DOS) operating systems in the future.
It runs beautifully on the [IBM PC110 palmtop](/pc110), which is where I first put it through its paces.
## Specification
The bullet point specification of the WebBoy is as follows.
- IBM DOS version J5.02/V or greater
- IBM-compatible personal computer
- Intel 386 SX processor or better
- 4MB or more of memory
- 5MB or more free hard disk space
- TCP/IP connections
- PPP
- EUC/JIS/S-JIS japanese encodings
- HTML 3.2
- GIF/JPEG images
- SMTP/POP3 email standards
- SVGA displays with 256 colors at 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768
- VGA displays with 16 colors at 640x480
- Also runs under OS/2, Win 3.1, 95, NT under DOS boxes
**Price: 9800 Yen** (under US$100)
## The underlying technology of WebBoy: MicroPM
*By Seamus Waldron*
What else do we know about **WebBoy?** Well, WebBoy will be the second product written using the Micro PM Gui Library from the IBM Embedded Middleware Technical Office. The Micro PM is a very small GUI, for use in low memory (thin client type) software. What they have done is taken 200 or so important API's from OS/2 Presentation Manager (PM, hence Micro PM), Graphic Programming Interface (GPI), and Control Programming Interface (CPI), to make cross-porting between Micro PM and OS/2 much easier. This means that you can develop applications for the Micro PM on OS/2 and port it directly. Development is not difficult at all on a DOS only or Windows based machine.
The Micro PM is designed as a portable GUI platform, so expect to see it on other platforms soon(ish).
The Micro PM for DOS has been used as a part of the supporting software (PIM) for the [IBM Palm Top PC110](/pc110) (PersonaWare), being sold in Japan.
## Press coverage
Below you will find press releases and articles about the WebBoy. The first is a press release that IBM very quietly rolled out.
**Press Release (IBM), March 25th, 1997**
IBM Japan Develops DOS/V Compatible Version of Internet Browser, **IBM WebBoy** For DOS Version 3.0, which it will launch on April 29. This is the first ever DOS compatible Web browser. It can be used with Intel 386 and 486 processors. It has features similar to standard Windows and Macintosh browsers including multiple screen partition, multi image layering and graphical user interface. IBM Japan says a total of 2.5 million DOS/V 386 or better machines have been shipped. Its browser can be used with DOS Version 5.02 or better, requiring 4MB RAM and 5MB empty hard drive space. The product will retail at 9,800 yen.
*Ref: Japan Industrial Journal, 03/18/97, p5*
**From Information Week: "IBM Has New Browser Under Wraps"** *by Jeff Sweat*
IBM is working on a flyweight Web browser for network computers and Internet appliances, sources say, making motions in a market where most of the attention is being captured by the duel between Microsoft and Netscape.
The IBM Micro Web Browser, code-named WebBoy, is aimed at machines without hard disks and with tight memory constraints, particularly network computers, set-top boxes, and Internet video game machines. WebBoy requires only four Mbytes of memory to run, while Netscape Navigator 3.0 requires 3.2 Mbytes of hard disk space and nine Mbytes of memory, about half as much as Windows 95.
---
## Update: what I have since learned
Back in 1997 almost everything about WebBoy was in Japanese and impossible to pin down from the English-speaking world. Years later the Japanese-language record has filled in, so here is what it says.
**Was it really the first web browser for DOS?** Not quite. The Czech browser Arachne reached its first public beta in December 1996, a few months ahead of WebBoy. What WebBoy can fairly claim is to be the first *commercial, boxed, graphical* DOS browser from a major vendor. It was a product you bought, not a hobbyist project.
**Where it came from.** WebBoy was built by IBM Japan's Embedded Middleware Technical Office, the same group behind PersonaWare on the PC110, on the same Micro PM GUI library (a roughly 200-call subset of OS/2's Presentation Manager). PersonaWare was the first Micro PM product; WebBoy was the second. IBM Japan marketed it under a banner they coined as "recycleware" (リサイクルウェア): software to turn the millions of ageing 386 and 486 DOS/V machines still in Japanese offices and schools into internet terminals, rather than throwing them away.
**Versions.** There never seem to have been public versions 1 or 2; the first retail release was **3.0, on 29 April 1997**. **Version 4.0 followed on 21 October 1998**, adding JavaScript 1.1, SSL 3.0, MIME email attachments, page and email printing, and a small Java runtime sized specifically to run IBM's Desktop On-Call remote-control software. By March 2000 it was being sold inside a "Green Software for Recycling" bundle alongside PC DOS 2000. WebBoy was finally discontinued in November 2002.
**The sibling that never shipped.** Alongside WebBoy, IBM Japan was building NetDiver, an all-Java embedded browser aimed at phones, set-top boxes and internet appliances. It got press in mid-1997 and then quietly vanished. WebBoy was the legacy-DOS half of a two-pronged embedded-browser strategy.
**A book, even.** SoftBank published a whole guide in 1997: *WebBoy活用術* ("WebBoy Usage Techniques: turning DOS machines into dedicated internet terminals"), by Hiroyuki Kida.
**It survives.** WebBoy is preserved today. The version 3.0 and 4.0 disk images are on the Internet Archive and on abandonware sites, and people have it running again under the 86Box emulator. There is even a Japanese retro-computing scene that pairs WebBoy 4.0 with a PCMCIA network card to put a PC110 back on the modern web.
*Sources for this update are Japanese-language: IBM Japan's launch coverage in Internet Watch and PC Watch (17 March 1997), the v4.0 announcement (September 1998), the Japanese Wikipedia WebBoy entry, and the 我楽多苑 (Garakuta-en) PC110 site; plus English coverage in Tech Monitor and InfoWorld and the Vintage Computer Federation forums.*
---
*This is an archive piece, first written in 1997 and updated since. The external links and ordering points of the day are long gone; the page is preserved as a record of the first commercial web browser for DOS.*
================================================================================
## Cross country in West Africa
- canonical: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-west-africa-cross-country
- markdown: https://apj.co.uk/articles/stories-west-africa-cross-country.md
- published: 1997-01-01
- document_id: 1242
> An African overland expedition by paraglider and vehicle, from Morocco down through the Western Sahara into Mauritania. Edited and abridged by Seamus Waldron.
**African overland expedition extract**,
edited and abridged by ***Seamus Waldron***.
**Finally we are in Morocco**. We now oficially can have the paraglidersgliders here in Morocco.
To be precise we only have permission to take them through, but we've been
flying a number of times and no-one seems to care. I think this will be the
case in future wherever we go, just a matter of asking the landowner where you
take off. When you're flying no-one seens to care whether it's legal or not,
they're too interested in what it is.
The boarder hassles continued right up to the last minute, when we finally got
past customs, the boarder gate guard wouldn't let us through
because by that time our passport stamps were 4 days old and we had to go back
to immigration and explain why we needed new stamps. I was almost expecting
customs to want to inspect the vehicle again on the way through.
It was Friday afternoon when we got through, we drove all the way down to
El-Jadida on the coast by 11pm. There has been a lot of rain recently in
Morocco and we had to take a number of detours and cross some deep puddles on
the road.
For the past week we have been camped at a great little camping site, very
secure and with a exceptionally friandly manager. Getting all the stuff
organised, welding stuff all over the truck, fixing leaks etc.
Been out flying a few times, once along the beach right in town just on sunset
and had no trouble at all. We do it again with the cameras whe we get back,
maybe at night time as theres lots of light along the beach.
A couple of other times we went out into the countryside to find flying sites,
we certainly create quite a stirr in the small villages.
The first time was the most amusing, there was absolutely no wind and it was
difficuly to get a clean run for a take off. We stuffed around trying to get a
launch for about 2 hours with a group of 20+ locals watching on and giving us
advice about wind direction [in Arabic]. After a while they were convinced that
we were purely crazy for trying to fly with a bedsheet and a propeller on a
motorbike engine. One guy made a couple of donkeys out of reeds and presented
them to us. He proceeded to add "male accessories" to mine and mount it on the other one,
I've never been under so much pressure to get the glider into the air as I was
then!
Anyway eventually we did get a perfect take off amoungst roars of cheers from
our onlookers. I made a point of flying over the nearby houses and villages,
and by the time I landed we had grown the croud to well over 50 people.
The other time went much more to the book, we had a Moroccan frined from town
with us to help translate. When Michael first tried to ask permission from a
teenage girl tending cattle in the field she burst into tears and tried to hide
behind the cows. From now on I do all the negotiations with women.
We've now headed out for a short side trip to Marrakech, the trailer is with our
friend at the campsite Tonight we're in a hotel in Asni, at the foot of Jebel
Toubkal, we plan to travel round the Eastern side of the Atlas Mountains and
back via Rabat where we will sort out Michael's Mauritainian visa and visit our
friends at the Canadina embassy to give then and assertiveness lesson which they
desperately need.
Having a lot of trouble getting access to a line to use the modem, there are
many people with lines but they're very wary of letting us connect the computer,
and generally the call to a higher authority comes up with a definate NO. The
expensive hotels generally have a line to connect to, but that's a continual
added expence.
Saturday we had a scenic drive through a windy Goat track at 2000m in the high
Atlas mountins and then along the Draa valley to Zagora. All incredibly scenic.
Climbed to the top of Jebel Zagora for some excellent photos along the Draa
valley.
We the took a piste through the desert, to the north of Zagora, got lost for
about three hours, tried to find somewhere to fly but too windy. Visited some
very isolated villages.
Ended up back on a sealed road miles from where we thought we were, at about
8pm. Took another minor piste but paid more attention to the direction this
time and ended up at the Todra George at about 11pm.
Slept in the car and drove further up the george in the morning to a small
village called Tamtattouchte, it has excellent flying sitees (paraglider heaven)
all round and we plan to stay here for the next 3-6 days. It is a very friendly
place and should be fun for the end of Ramadan celebrations in 4 days. Have also
me a Berber hill person that lives in a cave in the mountais, and plays his
flute from the hills. Will be visiting his home at some stage for the first bit
of indepth culture reporting.
We went to a local hotel in Tinehir and tried
to connect to Compuserve for about 2 hours. In that time we only managed to
recieve 5 of 23 messages and couldn't send anything. A lot of the problem was
caused by Compuserve UK's unreliable connecting each time it failed was a 1-2
minute call, other times we had bad lines and once or twice something actually
happened before we were thrown off. The people at the hotel were most helpful
and kind, it was only when we were presented ith the bill that we found out why.
US$300 bill, the rate they wre charging us was their international fax rate @
$12 per minute, you can bet we were really ticked at that.
It's partly our fault for not asking the rate in advance, but we had previously
been refused by so many places that when we found someone that would actually
help us we forgot to ask details. Major lesson for the future.
Well, after the e-mail fiasco we returned to Tamtatouche in the Todra George,
where we stayed and paraglided for the next week. Discovered that the paramotor
is quite underpowered at 2000m altitude and taking off is almost impossible at
that height.
Did a lot of driving throughout the High Atlas Mountains, on some very dodgy
roads and eventually returned to El Jaidida.
We've now done a lot of work on the truck, tent and trailer, and have things
well organised and functional. We butchered the old tent and purpose rebuilt it
to fit onto the roof.
We left El Jaidida, visited Casablanca and then on to Rabat to get our
Mauritanian visas. In order to get the visas we had to buy a refundable plane
ticket @ US$600 each and lost 10% when we turned it in. The Mauritanian visa
took ovrnight and so we headed down the coast to camp for the night.
After finding a nice camp site by the beach we decided to go paramotoring, there
were a few people on horseback watching us when we were ground handling but we
didn't think much of it. We had a perfect 10 minutes preparation and take off
(the first time on the trip things have gone so smoothly) Then things took a
turn for the worse, A girl who had been watching us earlier and whom we had
specifically warned to keep clear in case her mount was startled had circled
round onto the beach below the take off path but out of our sight.
We had warned her that her horse would be startled, ao it was that she ended up falling (luckilly into
soft sand) and the horse bolted directly towards a busy road but was headed off by
some other riders.
The girl stormed over to where her horse was being held, paused, held the back
of her hand to her forehead and gently collapsed to the ground.
Michael went over to see what was happening, and the manager of the riding
school came over and made a big stink about the location where we where flying.
Michael managed to remain calm throughout a storm of abuse. Michael apologised
to the girl, her brother said it was no problem and seemed unconcerned, but the
riding centre manager was intent on blood.
I had been unaware of all this action and happilly enjoying a flight along the
coast, it was only when I returned to near the take off site that I noticed a
large group of people. Naturally this was the only time when Michael didn't
have a radio with him so I landed to investigate. Michael soon appeared and
explained the situation, by the time the Manager got to speak to me he was
substantially calmer. We put the kit away and were escorted over to the riding
school where the girl was being given the required sympathy. The local head of
police had already arrived, and it was then that we came to understand the full
nature of the incident. The girl was the daughter of a 'big wig in the
military' as the policeman put it and the riding school was patronised by the
royal family. The girl was perfectly fine but being a rich and spoilt, felt
obliged to put on a show, and the manager was obliged to blow the issue up due
to the important patronage of the school, flipping great luck for us !!
Right now we are painfully aware that after the problems with the border guard
at Ceuta we had only requested permission for transit of the paramotor from the
Administration d'Air and we were oficially not supposed to use it. Things could
be going very badly. The police chief was very calm and unconcerned and when
escorting us back the the our car to take paramotor details he openly asked for
300dh (US$30) to 'Make things Tranquil' for us.
Things calmed down for the time being a number of different options occoured to
us, the priority in all cases being getting out of Morocco as quietly and as
soon as possible.
A slight problem with this was our Carnet de passage was with Neville in London,
the original plan being he would bring this to a meeting in Morocco which was now
cancelled. We rang Neville from a terrible local phone that cut us off every 30
seconds or less, and explained that we needed it couriered urgently. , Rather
that wait around Rabat we had it sent to a hotel in Agadir. We are presently at
the hotel stil waiting for it to arrive.
We had promised to bring some Australian Gum and Wattle Trees to our friend at
the hotel in Tamtatouche. Australian Natives are being grown all over Morocco,
a very encouraging reforestation program, but they strangely haven't made it to
our friends village yet. Despite wanting to get south as soon as possible we
had to honour our promise and deliver the trees. It also made it possible for
us to visit the imperial city of Fes. The ancient medina is immensely
interesting, but the whole experience is largely spoilt by the annoying and
persistant touts and hustlers.
After a few hours we developed a priceless plan that we will be using for the
rest of our travels. Both Michael and I speak a little Hungarian which is one
of a few languages that none of the touts speak any of, we simply reply to any
advances in Hungarian, mixed with a little Russian, some Croatian, and the odd
bit of Cantonese for good luck. Given no way to communicate the touts generally
give up and leave us alone.
"Hello... Hello, Medina, Carpets, Guide, etc. etc. etc. ""
"Bosmeg" - said with a perculiar side ways wave of the hand.
"English"
"Nemmm!" shaking head violently.
"Spaniol"
"Nemmm ! - Foss!"
"Deutche"
"Nemmm ! " a spit onto the ground will generally curtail any further attempts at
nationality guessing.
"Y.o.u.... S.p.e.a.k.... E.n.g.l.i.s.h..."
"Nemmm English... Magyorosag, Bosmeg!!, Kursanim " Waving hand sideways again
This enough to get rid of 90% of advances, any specific references, we simply
fail to understand.
"BERBER CARPETS"
Look at each other with puzzled expression
"Behr beer kupputs, Bosmeg, Bosmeg" wave goodbye.
It even improves things when we want to talk to people (particularly
shopkeepers) as we can selectively decide how much we want to understand, and
whether we are interested or not. It's also a very useful way of frustrating
the seller in a bargaining situation.
They resort to writing down a price, I point at it, look puzzled confirm it in
Arabic, Michael doesn't understand roman numbers, I translate the numbers into
Chinese script, then Michael understands it but it's too dear. They can't be
bothered going through all that 10 times and give us a close to bottom price on
the second or third attempt.
Maybe we've got too much time on our hands, but boy this is fun.
Anyway after Fes we dropped our trees off and made a marathon drive to Agadir on
the highway with the worst truck drivers in Morocco. They openly push any small
vehicle completely off the road with no regard to the fact that there is a
precipitious drop and 8" ruts on the side of the road. The road is only wide
enough for one vehicle, when smaller cars pass each puts one wheel into the dirt
and they cross OK. We were negotiating all this at night, but don't plan doing
so in future, as it is very dangerious. At one point we saw the recent (last
night) wreakage of a collision between a car and propane (LPG) tanker, not much
left of the car.
In the rest of Morocco the Truck drivers and intercity Taxi's are pretty bad,
but (probably due to our size, or our 'don't f%@# with me' bull bar) they give
us a bit of respect. The ones on the road to Agadir are pure evil incarnate. or
as Michael puts it 'puting them in a truck is like giving a chimp a loaded '45'.
They really do play 'chicken' at every opportunity. Not to be beaten so easilly
we developed a strategy of pulling clear off the road where possible, then
stunning the bad ones with our 600w of halogen spotlights. I wonder how they
say 'permanent retina damage' in arabic ?
Another perculiar aspect of Morocan driving is their complete reluctance to use
their lights. (evidently it wastes petrol) As the last stages of red glow are
dissapearing from the horizon you can still encounter large trucks driving with
no lights, usually on coming towards you on your side of the road. If we drive
at sunset with our lights on people actually flick us to remind us to switch
them off. At daytime people laugh at such a thing so we decided to make it a
full time practice.
Another common game is light flicking, no matter which lights you have on
Moroccans flick to remind you to dip, although they mostly stay with high beam
until warned themselves. A 600w reply usually ends that, but they invariably
try to get you back just as you pass, we have the spotlight light switches set
on the passanger panel, so the non driver can concentrate fully on light
responces.
Anyway after our Road Warrior sessions we made it to Agadir, camped on the beach
one night, near some other people with Paramotors and Ultralights whom we have
been hearing rumours of all over Morocco.
Attempeted a PM flight just on dusk but after some bad wind on the first attempt
at take off we noticed lightning and gave that idea away.
To resolve an important debate, Does anyone know what happens if a paraglider is
hit by lightening ? (In the air and on the ground) What happens to planes ?
Anyway that's it for the time being, we're in our hotel, waiting for the courier
package to arrive and then heading swiftly down to the Mauritanian border.
Hopefully we wont get stoped at the border and arrested, or you may be next
hearing about the conditions in Moroccan jails. I hope their rubber hoses are
soft !
This certainly is the Africa I had imagined.
Goat and Camel Carcasses hang covered in flys in the markets, Sahara
dust penetrates everything and at night our ears ring with the word
"Cadeaux" which we have heard 3-4000 times each day.
The courier
package from Neville eventually arrived - 5 days late, but
only after I rang the Casablanca office and told them what horrible
things were going to happen if it didn't arrive the next day, I
treatened to drive there and resequece their toenails.
Agadir is basicly a package tourist hell hole with as expected, European
prices.
We had originally booked into a relatively expensive hotel that assured
us on the phone from Rabat that they had direct dial telephones, when we
arrived thay first confirmed that they did, then suddely changed their
mind.
I might also add the the assistant manager of this hotel (the manager is
never there) is unquestionablethe most unfriendly, unhelpfu, and
incompetant women I have ever met.
After 3 days of her rubbish, I took great pleasure in assertively but
factually arguing with her and finally, scalding her for about 15 minutes in
front of a large a number of guests, after she "lost" a Fax sent for us.
We changed hotel only to find that the second (more expensive ) hotel's
direct dial system wasn't working. The receptionist nearly met an early
end when he said "en cha la" once to often to Michael.
Anyway after all this telephone hell we changed strategy, it is now
apparant that in Morocco, 1) The Telekiosks are no use, 2) Hotels are
expensive and unreliable and often don't have sockets or direct dial.
Our next idea was to try a computer shop which immediately proved
successful and this will be a tactic that we will use in future.
Because they understand the technology they are generally happy for you
to use their business phone and just charge a little more than the
international rate per minute and time it with a stop watch which works
exceptionally well. Their phone line was also substantially clearer
than any of the public line we had encountered.
I don't expect to have such problems in the rest of Africa, (eg.
Mauritania) as the phone kiosks are more primitive and it is simplier to
just "wire in" to their system, which is impossible in Morocco.
During our stay we also fitted the CB into the vehicle, it is entirely
hidden and can only be viewed/accessed from inside the glove box. In
most countries in Africa (including Morocco and especilly Mauritania) it
is technically not legal to bring a CB or the micro handhelds we use but
they are essential for flying communication, so we're taking the risk.
We're using 430mhz rather than the more common 130mhz, hoping that we
wont find any one else on that frequency.
Our hope is as follows;
1) They wont notice it, and we won't tell them, working god so far.
2) If they do notice, it looks like a car radio and, the we have the
wind sock fitted to the antenna, hope they leave it there.
3) If they realise it or the handhed are essentially a CB we explain the
difference between 430 and 130 mhz (and that it is an aviation
requirement)
4) Last resort, we explain that we have permission from their embassy.
In advance we always ask the embassy in the previous country for
permission and show them the handheld, and so far it's allways been no
problem, generally they don't care and the small handhelds look harmless
[This might cause a lengthy delay while we sort it out, and we probably
will have toremove the radio, when they decide to really look into the
details so we hope it doesn't come this far.]
Anyway, Friday morning our package arrived, we washed one wing in the
bath of the "nasty woman" hotel that morning as well, made a huge mess
of the room in the process. The cleaning ladies just let themselves
into the room unannounced during the process and were completely
unconcerned by all the mess, and even mopped up the biggest puddles,
they were mostly fascinated by what it was we were doing with a wet
parachute in our room.
We were glad to leave Agadir behind us but the road south isn't the most
interesting in the world [to say the least] Compared to it the nullabor
is highly scenic. Only the odd herd of camels and a rare sand dune
break up the rocky endless plains.
Two long hot days of driving later we were in Dahkla with a full day to
spare before the next convoy to the border on Tuesday. Of course Monday
was a national holiday and we couldn't get anything usefule done other
than check in with the police and some shopping. We also met a very
bored soldier that had been stuck here for 15 years.
We used the time to do some work on the Landcruiser and a couple of
little problems appeared. We noticed a broken front suspension piece
(not important), and rear shock absorber (more serious but not
disabling) due to the holiday we couldn't get a new one and we didn't
want to wait four days for the next border convoy, so we went ahead
taking things gently. The convoy to the border covered the same
uninspiring territory as before with the odd sand drift across the road.
Camped at the border that night with no facilities we discovered a crack
begining near the rear tow mounting, this was the first time we had the
trailer fully loaded with water and fuel on such bad roads, the trailer
mount was twisting downwards, tipping the trailer weight forward and
stressing it further, as well as tipping the vehicle backwards, and
reducing our traction.
The next day we were escorted through the minefield, with a lot of very
bad sandy patches. Because the vehicle was all off balance we got stuck
quite regularly, forcing us to take the sandy patches even faster.
We were travelling through the hottest part of the day in a 40-50 knot
sand storm, overall a very unpleasant experience.
At one point there was the burnt wreakage of a car who had taken a short
cut around a sandy patch and hit a mine, it had been driven by the
friend of a Frenchman in our convoy. Only half of the chassis of the
car was still recognisable the rest lay scattered around, an unexploded
mine nearby was being continually coverered and uncovered by the sand
shifting in the strong winds.
The whole convoy only managed 60 kms in 10 hours that day.
We were to discover later that in all that rough treatment, we broke
7/9ths and 4/9ths of the leaves in our rear springs (very luckly the one
with no shocker didn't break entirely)
That night we camped at the other side of the border, in the morning we
tried to re-balance the trailer, and just when we had it unloaded the
convoy had to move out unexpectadly (I think they planned it). We
repacked just in time to tag on to the end of the convoy (this isn't
somewhere to be left behind - landmines everywhere) When we started the
truck we had a new noise that I did not immediately identify, with no
time to fully investigate, and nothing visibly wrong and now obvious
mechanical difficulty we headed off anyway, a few minutes later the
noise went away but when we stopped in town and tried to re-start the
engine, the penny finally dropped. The sand had siezed the starter
motor on and it had burnt out. After a tow start we took the vehicle
to customs, and headed back to the campsite to begin repairs.
If this wasn't all enough about 10 metres from the campsite gate the
fanshaft broke (for no apparant reason, and completely unrelated to
everything else), and the fan fell down (to much amusement of some local
onlookers)
By the end of that day we had removed all damaged parts, fixed and
replaced the starter motor and were held up due to a public holiday.
In the two days since we have;
Removed and upgraded the suspension on the trailer.
Completely modified the trailer hitch so it sits exactly level.
Mounted the trailer spare underneath the trailer for better weight
balance.
Removed all no essential weight from the trailer, (with angle grinder)
Rustproofed and repainted the roof of the vehicle.
Replaced the bearing in the water pump, after hand machining a part from
a different vehicle.
Built a new piece for the front suspension.
Searched heaven and earth for a piece of metal strong to replcace the
one on the rear that was twisted. [ It is being bolted on and welded
and reinforced with a-fram supports today - don't want this happening
again do we.)
Removed rear springs and shocker and are still trying to get them
replaced.
Unfortunately we are in one of the most expensive places in the world
for car parts, and we have 500km of very difficult rough, sandy track
before the next major city (the reason why parts are so expensive) so we
can't risk not fixing the vehicle entirely.
Stop Press++++++
Things have just got really exciting now, it's also very hard to write
this because tear gas is being blown through the campsite.
I now realise how nasty tear gas is, first symptom , you sneeze a lot,
then breathing gets a bit gaspy and dificult, like breathing sulphur,
but when it hits your eyes, jesus bloody christ , it f%\*@ing hurts!!!
And we're a good few hundred metres away most times I can ony imagine
what it's like to be in the stuff !!
Oh I guess I should explain what's happening. We'll come to think of it
I don't really know what's happening exactly, whatever it is we're right
in the middle of it.
It started as I was writing this mail, just a bit of noise out front at
first, nothing unusual. Our campsite is directly across from the
central police station. Then there we're a few sirens, unusual but not
alarming. A couple of loud bangs very close were the first hint of
something really happening. By the time we smelt the tear gas the first
little incident was largely over, don't know exactly what happened.
There next was a convoy of police in riot gear going past and some more
tear gas being used up the road. Michael was out shopping for some
bolts at this time and right near where the gas was set off, he copped a
bit of the gas but nothing serious. He quickly headedback to the
campsite.
The police from the station seem to think it necessary that we remain
inside the campground and are using international sign language to that
effect. Big clubs and Automatic rifles make us take notice of their
signals.
It is illegal to photograph or film in Nouadibhou at any time without
specific police permission and I don't think this will be the best time
to go and ask.
We are nowhearing and occasionally watching the proceedings which are
occouring all around us in a radius of about 200m, from the rooftop and
sometimes outside the front gate, which displeases the police so we
don't push it.
They're using tear gas every few minutes somewhere in the vacinity, and
it regularly blows through the campsite. No indication of
gunfire yet, just a lot of cars honking horns, yelling and roit police
running around.
We've been told it's a student protest of some sort but that doesn't
completely make sence since I'm sure the is no college in town and there
seems to be too many people involved. There appears to be a larger
number of younger 15-22yo women involved in the clashes with police but
I can't say for sure yet.
Michael just arrived back, with bagetts and butter, I hadn't realised he
had left, but evidently he thought it more important to get lunch. He
managed to duck into the bakery just before a crowd ran and police
charged past, the baker slammed the steel plate door shut, followed by
loud banging on the door and he had to wait inside till things settled
outside. Michael's comment on returning "I don't care if they can't get
their country together, it shouldn't effect my lunch, and I couldn't
find any basil for the pasta".
Things appear to be settling for now a policeman/soldier just came to
visit the campsite to assure us things were all OK, and explain that it
was just "some trouble with children" ( Yea, right! ) and that it is
perfectly outside safe for tourists (Except for tear gas, and human
stampedes) and the police are only for local people (Not the way we
understood their hand gestures) and that the shops are now all open (If
you can get past the 5mm steel plate doors that they all have bolted
shut) He must be a public relations person and would probably do very
well in western politics.
A lot of the riot police just went into the HQ opposite the camp, which
looks positive
Only a very few of the shops are open, so it'll be hard to get our stuff
done today so we may be here for an extra day, or more depending on how
things progress. Oh, Michael also reported that he saw our Senegalese
metal worker running the other way in a crowd with a "get outa my way"
look, so I don't expect to see him again today
Well, while the air is comparitively breathable, I'm off now to see if I
can get let into one of the teleboutiques and send this out. Then again
I thing I just heard another siren, maybe I'll give it a little longer.
After spending the best part of an hour digging ourselves out of our
desert breakdown/camp site we travelled well for about 4-6 hours
stopping once to add some more water to the radiator.
We didn't get lost, even though the stupid GPS could never get a signal,
drove through all the deep sand with no troubles and our makeshift
suspension held together quite nicely. I should add that we really did
incorporate some fencing wire and string in minor places when we put the
suspension on, in the style of all true bush mechanics.
About 100kms the water leak started getting worse, particularly when the
car got hot, and we had a strong tail wind which made sure of that. By
that evening the water consumption was becoming a real worry, we had 80
litres of drinking water which should be plenty, but it was going into
the radiator at a fast rate, and spraying out again. We stopped
regularly and let the car cool down so as to reduce the pressure.
We wanted to find somewhere to stop, remove the water pump and try to do
something about it but a terrible sand storm was developing. Eventualy
we stopped for the night and used our car and trailer and some tarps to
make a wind break, enabling us to make a sandy dinner. The wind howled
all night and by morning it had shifted and was picking fresh sand from
a local dune, and made our wind break less effective. We packed up as
quickley as possible, re-filled the radiator and moved off.
The wind subsided throughout the day to be replaced by a now familiar
searing heat. Our leak was worsening rapidly and our water going down
very quickly.
At one point our GPS which had been on all day actually worked for a few
seconds and we were able to confirm our location. We tried to locate a
well marked on the map, on route we went through an area with some
basic vegitation and met some camel herders. They indicated the
direction of the well but it was too far away from our route, and
without a reliable GPS to get us back we couldn't risk it.
It was then noon the air was hot and surprisingly still, we found the
largest thorn tree within site, offering at least a bit of shade and had
a lunch of tinned pineapple before setting to work on the truck.
After draining the water system and saving the precious water we
attempted a makeshift seal for the radiator with silicone sealant,
string and fencing wire.
Not perfect but it would have to be an improovement.
Late in the afternoon our camel headers walked over to visit and we
talked in a mixture of sign language and rough arabic.
Michael made then grenadine cordial, but he put too much cordial and not
enough water and one of them spat it straight out.
We managed to have a discussion about the wind, but we had different
purposes and different measures as we later discovered.
We thought we were asking them about the wind and we concluded that
there would be a consistant breeze this evening possibly suitable for a
bit of paragliding.
They were warning us of an impending sandstorm, that would strike with
no warning in a few minutes and rock the vehicle all night like a toy,
removing a large part of the paintwork from the car.
When it arrived I was ground handling the paraglider and we were
extremely lucky to be able to get it back under control put away. Had I
been in the air, I would have been blown directly out into a sand sea,
with no chance of Michael following in the car.
Spent the night sleeping in the car and headed off the next day with our
string and wire water pump leaking slghtly less at first. We were down
to about 20 litres of combined drinking water/ and radiator[spray on the
ground water] and still estimated about 40km to the coast. We now
realised that we would need to use sea water in the radiator, and were
eagerly awaiting any sign of the ocean. We stopped regularly so as to
keep the engine as cool as possible.
The sand storm was easing by midday, but still a constant annoyance, the
skyline was a constant haze and the sun less fierce than normal. When we
were down to about 5 litres we noticed a bluer patch of sky to our west,
which could only mean the ocean was near. We parked the car and walked
through the dunes to collect the water. No more wasting precious
drinking water.
Throughout the next few days were were continually told that by people
'Seawater's no good you know'. They seemed not to comprehend that we
were in a desert and there was no alternative, and we wouldn't be doing
it if we had a choice. It became quite annoying.
Not much further on along the coast we came to the first nasty little
village. The coastal villages see too many travellers on this route and
the people are entirely mecenary. Bottled Water and Food cost 2-3 times
their normal price, they wont tell you where to find water and they are
particularly abrupt, often rude.
Children continually hassle for gifts.
Here we met a French and Senegalese guy in a Ford van who had been stuck
here for 3 days with engine trouble, they had run out of food and were
down to their last bit of water and the locals wouldn't only not help
then but when they needed to puch start the car at one point. One local
who they refused to pay to help, actually walked around and told others
not to help them.
It was quite a coincidence that this car had the same engine as one that
I had owned 10 years ago, they had broken the timing belt, replaced it
and now the timing was wrong, it could start but would not run. After a
short inspection I remembered how to set the timing, and in a few
minutes it was running better than new.
There was also a Landcruiser Taxi broken down with 8 Mauritanians in it,
they had blocked injectors and the owner didn't believe that they might
be fixed with Redex soloution, which I offered - Arrogant fool.
Between us and the Frenchman we agreed to take the passangers and guide
to the next village leaving the stupid driver and his vehicle in this
horrid little village.
All the way so far we had travelled without a guide, we never became
lost or stuck in sand and allways had a good idea where we were. While
in Nouadibhou we were approached at least 5 times every day by guides.
'Bonjour, Sa Va'
'Je Suis un Guide'
'Je Suis un Guide'
They allways warned us that we would be doomed without a guide and were
thoroughly disgusted when we refused their extremely overpriced
services.
Once or twice in the desert we were passed by Forigners with guides,
when their guides discovered we had no guide ourselves their clients
were hurried on, so as they could offer no assistance, and we were told
that we wouldn't have such a problem with a guide.
We consider a guide to be extra weight, more water loss and not only
useless but throughly annoying as well. We now had a 'free' guide
travalling with us and our expectations were about to be prooved more
than right.
By ourselves we regularly consulted the map, took careful note of
distance and compass bearings and watched for landmarks. No Problem. [I
might add that no thanks to Magellen and their bloody useless GPS, which
would have made navigatio quite easy. If we came to a difficult patch
we walked to a hill or dune and checked out the route on foot if
necessary.
As soon as we had a guide things went really badly, they first lead us
out onto a dead end peninsular. Then directed us into a sandy patch
where the Ford Van got stuck. Then came the real hassle, they
confidently directed us to a maze of dunes, and told us it was essential
to go really fast to make it over one particular section.
On the way up the dune the guide was telling me to go faster, sensing
something not right I backed off near the crest, Then slammed on the
brakes with the guide yelling 'No !! Faster you'll be stuck'. (in
French)
Michael jumped out and waved the other vehicle to a halt, it was also
being commanded to go faster.
2 metres in front of the Vehicle was a near vertical drop some 6-7
metres deep, and beyond it a sea of impassable dunes as far as the eye
coud see.
Had we not been killed in the impact we would have been stuck in the
desert with the vehicle ruined.
I clearly instructed the guide what would happen if he spoke again this
evening, he valued his testicles and largely shut up for the rest of the
evening. Michael and I set out on foot to find a way out of this near
fatal mess, with darkness soon approaching, and the wind becoming
stronger and sandier.
We backed off the dune and followed what the winds had left of our
tracks, back to a known location and headed off by compass bearing to
where we though the main track should be. Not expecting to be in such a
mess we were only carrying 20 lites of sea water which was goig fast
with all tis difficult driving in the sand.
We travelled by compass and the stars until well after dark, luckilly
the moon was almost full and we had some idea of the terrain aroung. We
once headed into a dead end and no wanting to waste more water I thought
it better to find the track on foot. Michael fixed the strobe to our
pole, and I walked alone out into the moonlight in search of a way out.
Not long had passed before I encountered the first evidence of vehicle
tracks, and followed it till it converged with others, indicating the
piste was near. With the blowing sand rapidly removing my own tracks I
made my way back to the vehicles, at the same time planning our route
through the dunes.
An hour later when I returned, another Mauritanian vehicle arrived,
having noticed te strobe and was offering to guide us out. Knowning the
way perfectly well now myself I tried to politely refuse but they
explained that they were from the park and knew the area very well so we
agreed to follow them.
Only 500m later they headed directly into a big sand hole and got
themselves stuck, seeing it coming, I was stuck on the periphery, but
it still took a major effort to get out. I was now disoriented from the
'good' track I had planned and had developed an absolute contempt for
Muaritanian directions.
By ourselves we were perfectly in control, with Mauritanian 'help' we
were now stuck, lost and had just used the last drop of sea water.
Or friends in the Ford Van headed off with the Mauritainian Vehicle and
taking our two passengers with them.
Were were now alone in the desert, with only a few litres of drinking
water they had given us, but somehow things seemed a lot better than
before.
We would drive for 100m and then stop for 10 minutes to cool the engine
completely. It was now in the early hours of the morning and very cold
with the fierce wid still blowing so the engine would cool rapidly when
faced into the wind.
After sometime another vehicle passed near, and was attracted over to
our lights, they gave us 12 litres of water and with that we made it
first to the piste and then to within walking distance of the ocean.
By now the water pump was producing a constant stream of water, we
slowly followed the coastline into the village of Nouamghar, met up with
our friends in the Ford and fell asleep totally exhausted.
Next day we recovered from the ordeal. The shops in town have the same
highly inflated prices for tourists, and they allways add up the total
wrongly (higher of course)
Bottle of water - $3
Biscuits - $2.40
2 Soft Drinks - $2 each
Total = $11.80
When the same person tried it for the third time on the same day I was
very close to clubbing him. I had no patience for these horrible
people, and by the end of the day their pathetic requests for gifts were
responded with violent gestures that left no doubt as to how I felt
towards them.
We met with the director of the Banc d'Arguin park that we had travelled
through.
The birldlife is scarce at this time of year, the winds to strong and
unpredictable.
And the trained dolphins that the villagers use to catch fish no longer
come close to the shore (they probably got sick of the high prices too)
Next day we bought water from a desalinisation plant and headed out of
town, drivnig along the beach all the way to Nouachott. Our sea water
consumption was up to about 2 litres per km, but at least we had a solid
supply. Near to Nouachott we started using desalinated water to clean
out the sea water. Salt crystals were forming all over the engine, the
long spikes on the fan were particularly pretty, but it's all washed off
now.
We stopped to buy fish from fishermen but they too inflated their prices
to 10 times the real value.
One justified it "You're tourists and I need Money"
Michael responded "Now we're leaving, You're still Stupid and you've got
no Money"
The drive along the beach was particularly smooth and easy.
Getting off the beach at Nouachott was not so simple, we got continually
conflicting directions. Were lead through a crowded baech market and
finally had an hours digging and sand ladder work to get on to the road.
We were helped for a short time by some Mauritanians which we thought
was the first kind gesture we encountered in this country until we
discovered thet they needed us to tow them out.
Found a hotel and had our first warm shower in a long time.
Purchased a shiny new water pump yesterday and today we head North to
Chinguetti and another round of Sahara adventures.
The riot were back the next day but less tear gas was
used, there was a little bit of a disturbance the following day and
police in riot gear cruising around for a few days following.
Meanwhile we were having fun in different ways.
Got the truck all back together with the exception of the leaf springs
and the water pump.
Neither of these parts could be purchased in Nouadibhou 2nd hand.
Toyota could only supply the water pump and then it cost US$380 and
would take 'some' days to get there (ie. 'Monkeys will fly out of my
arse before that happens')
There were no leaf springs for an HJ/FJ 60 Landcruiser anywhere in
Mauritania and they would need to come from Japan.
Our other problem was that our Cruiser has a suspension lift kit on it
and the springs arn't the same size anyway (although the originals would
fit.)
We managed to find a new bearing for the water pump that was similar in
some dimensions and a mechanic that could get it machined to fit.
Incompetent Profiteering Idiot #1.
Of course he didn't machine it
accurately enough and cracked the body AND the pump putting it
together. Some welding later we had a slightly leaky water pump fitted
but at least we had somewhere to put the fan. Interestingly I had to do
a lot of the work myself, because he either didn't know how, didn't have
the tools, or was trying to break something else.
Next we found a mechanic who could make us some new springs by a
combination of adding some new leaves and welding a few (a very doubtful
practice but we had little choice and they much be better than broken
ones.
Incompetent Profiteering Idiot #2
After a hard test around town it seemed to be holding together, even the
welded springs. Problems with this guy was that he had a total of 12
tools which included a big andgle grinder and a welder (the welder
doubled as a drill) And I had to lend him a lot of my tools including a
high lift jack.
We took turns overseeing the work and guarding the truck even still
after the test drive our jack had dissapeared from the garage and
recovering it required police intervention (the police also had to
'assist his memory' as to where he left it - in a locked storage yard
about 50m from the garage)
We insisted on having him locked up in jail, and would have requested a
further beating had we known at the time how many suspension parts he
had either stripped, broken or nuts rounded. (This we were to discover
later while broken down in the desert).
After 8 days in Nouadibhou (read -end of earth) we were glad to be
leaving even with 400kms of desert in frount of us in a highly dodgy
vehicle. Customs managed to screw us over badly on the way out of
town, and despite all good intentions of leaving early it was night
before we got into the desert. About 20 km past the customs post we
encountered some french people with vehicles to sell in Senegal stuck in
deep sand. After offering help and being refused we headed past them
and with our now well balanced load and better suspension we had no
trouble driving past. That was until the (better of the two) rear leaf
springs broke clean in half, leaving the car undrvable and untowable in
the middle of a 100m patch of deep sand.
After trying to see the light side, and a few choice words we set up
camp for the night where we sat. At about 4am we became painfully aware
of how close we where to the railway lines when a 6km long iron ore
train went past, about half an hour late that night as we discovered
during the next 4 nights.
The next day Michael walked in to the customs post early in the morning
while I dissasembled the rear suspension leaving the truck balance
precariously on spare tyres dug into the sand, with the rear axle as an
independant item.
With a lot of time to spare I managed to build an impressive fireplace
paved wit railway pegs for better heat refection (I really did have a
lot of spare time)
I also played with our GPS (Magellen 3000 - soon to be returned to
Magellen with very nasty letter as it is the most useless pece of shit I
have ever owned) and for the first time ever it gave a reading (after
eight hours searching for satelites)
Michael tried to contct Neville for emergency support getting new
springs but with no luck.
On the way back to camp, Micheal had some interesting discussions with
the military about
- 1) There were some minefields around and that no-one really knew where
they were, hence we were a 'security risk' - this is an accepted travel
route
- 2) Getting permission for me to paramotor into town, refused because of
the minefield - try to figure why flying over a minefiled isn't safe
unyet driving or walking through is generally accepted.
- 3) That we should get the car towed into town - Impossible but try to
expliain it to an arrogant cretin.
He then paid $30 to get driven out to the campsite, and had a 30minute
continual arguement with the driver about directions, was driven right
past, and then dropped off 1 km away at night (luckilly I had our strobe
mounted on our fishing rod on the roof for him to navigate with.
Next day was Sunday, so we decided to wait until Monday to go in and
call Neville again, A railways guy drove past and offered us a lift in
the next day.
The climate was extreme to say the least, Mornings are damp and chilly
with dew soaking everything. By 10 it's dry and warm but on bad days
the wind is picking up, inserting sand in every available crevise,
stinging your legs, and getting in your eyes. From 12 till 3 or 4 we try
to sleep in the car to avoid the searing heat outside, and violent sandy
winds. In the evening a stronger wind picks up but with less sand, and
things radidly cool. All our food has the same crunchy consistancy,
rather like Taldra Mushrooms. The smoke from our small campfire blows
wildly in all directions, as the evening cools we switch between
shivering in the darkness and being blinded by the harsh desert wood
fumes. By the forth day we are walking many kms in the sands in search
of a few scraps of firewood, our petrol stove recently broken. Late at
night is frighteningly cold, the 3:30 train makes it impossible not to
notice.
The next day I waited paitently for our promised lift into town which
never came, causing me to miss the best time to travel, and we put the
trip off until the following day, walking at noon would not be wise in
this climate.
In town I discover that Neville was not clear on what to do and we where
no closer to getting our parts, I had one of the good springs with me
and after a long search we found some land rover springs that might just
work. They cost US$300 which is quite reasonable in this town, the
owner (incompetent profiteering mechanic #3) is a friend of the
mechanich that fixed (or rather re-broke our water pump) I also arranged
a lift the next day back to the camp. Michael spent the night
rearranging sand. The mechanic had agreed to drive me out there in his
land rover for $50 and I waited until 2 the next day for him to fix it
(alarm bells should have been ringing)
At the customs post I discovered that he was as good a mechanic as his
friend and the clucth no longer worked. I also discovered what crappy,
uncomfortable, bad handling vehicles land rovers are compared to the
land cruiser, I hope never to have to drive in one again.
The vehicle got worse and worse and when stuck in sand about 4km from
the camp the transmission gave up all together. The mechanic prepared
to walk back to town to get his 'old' vehicle to get us out, and
realising that I wasn't going to wait however many days for him to get
back, he asked to be paid. I don't speak enough French to abuse him
well enough so I spent 10 minutes telling him in a Mixture of English
French and Sign Lnguage what a bloody idiot he was. He asked for
payment again, I told him his life was in danger the understood that
piece of universal sign language and left me in the desert with two leaf
springs, 40lt of water and a weeks food supplies 4km from camp, in
searing heat.
I began to carry the stuff in lots, 100m along the track at a time.
After a week of nothing going right something finally did and a bizare
looking line testing vehicle came along the railway and carried me and
my huge load right to camp.
We worked repairing the vehicle until 4am that night. Things didn't go
particularly smoothly and we had to pull out the generator and angle
grinder to make parts fit.
The Fenecs and Jackals that had taken up residence near our camp I'm
sure found this quite amusing. Finally, early the next day we headed
off with a better chance of making it to Nouachott - or so we thought
!
**David and Michael**
---
**Afterword, by Seamus Waldron.**
**Michael and David continued south** surviving many more incidents and tribulations.
Finally they managed to get to the Gambia were they rented a house and tried to make some
money - they failed. By now money was a real issue, Michael was basically funding the trip,
David's sponsors hadn't come through with the money and the truck was constantly breaking.
Finally, David left to help a German guy drive his truck back to Europe and was last heard of in Hungary.
Michael got an infected finger and had to return to the West for emergency treatment.
It was close, he nearly lost the finger.
So, a life building experience, but still the end of the adventure,
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