Heretic (Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, 2024)

Two young Mormon missionaries meet more than they bargained on when they knock on the door of a seemingly charming older Englishman, who engages them in discussion about their faith. They immediately prove no match for neither his verbosity, nor his ability to constantly keep them off balance. Then their discomfort grows more intense when it transpires that they can't leave the house until the morning and thy can't get a phone signal, and so we enter the realm of psychological horror. This does eventually descend into more standard horror, because current horror films simply demand bloodletting, which is a shame, but Hugh Grant is marvellous in the role of the host, veering from avuncular and self-effacing to truly menacing at the flick of a switch, and the intelligence of the dialogue is far, far beyond that of the modern genre norm. Also on the plus side, it clearly scared the shit out of countless reactionary U.S. Christians when it dissected their myths, and the pound of flesh they got with the full revelation of the captor's sociopathic egotism just wasn't enough for them.

7/10

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 2024)

After 36 years, Burton comes back with a sequel to his iconic comedy horror film, and takes basically the same approach as what Danny Boyle did with Trainspotting 2: continue the story with the same main characters and other elements. Granted, due to age and other commitments, the original ghost couple occupying the house aren't there (cheekily referred to in the dialogue as having left after finding a 'loophole'), but madcap fun is expected. This is duly delivered, although with unsurprisingly a lesser impact than the first time around, in a story where the teenage goth of Winona Ryder's Lydia has now become a haunted house talkshow host with a teenage daughter in the form of Jenna Ortega, not far removed at all from her current role as Wednesday Addams, attending the funeral of Lydia's father in the town where the events of the original film took place.

Naturally, it doesn't take too long before grand scale mayhem is unleashed as Michael Keaton's Betelgeuse is brought back by a Lydia desperate to get her daughter, abducted by a pychopathic ghost, out of the Netherworld. Betelgeuse has a problem of his own, with Monica Bellucci as his soul-sucking ex-wife out to kill him for good. So, lots of wisecracking by Keaton and ghoulish visions, ticking all the boxes and thereby satisfying all and sundry, even if adding nothing new as such.

7/10

Släpp taget (Josephine Bornebusch, 2024)

The mother of a disintegrating family decides to take them all on a trip across the country to her daughter's pole-dancing competition. Her husband, selfish and detached from his family, wants a divorce and is reluctant, but agrees on condition that they separate once back home.

Numerous fractitious conversations ensue, which is not unfamiliar to anyone with experience of Swedish relationship dramas, and neither is the fact that the parents are just too ready to indulge their children's ever whim, in sterotypically Scandinavian fashion. But what makes Let Go a shade better than the norm is not just its sense of realism, but the way the climb out of their collective rut, not least the husband's, is both convincing and positive.

6/10

The Thursday Murder Club (Chris Columbus, 2025)

Given the enormous success of Richard Osman's debt novel and the current vogue for murder mysteries with comical overtones, it was inevitable that it would be adapted onto the big screen. So, the unfeasibly plush retirement home (basically an even more palatial Downton Abbey) under siege from an unscrupulous property developer (David Tennant doing one of his evil turns quite convincingly), is the setting, and its residents are pretty much every big-name actor over 70 from the British Isles, led by Mirren, Kingsley and Brosnan. The plot of course involves a murder, namely that of one of the co-owners of the retirement home, and the trio of pensioners get to sleuthing. This is pretty formulaic, so you're really just watching it for the stars and the cosy comic interplay between them.

For once, it's not that lkely that all four of Osman's sequels (to date) will be adapted for the screen, since they involve the same lead characters and it's doubtful whether the actors even want to commit to such an extended series on the same theme at this advanced stage in their careers.

6/10

Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023)

After the convoluted sci-fi concoction Tenet, which strove so hard to wow and lost track of its own logic in the process, Nolan returns to safer shores with a real-life story with actual science that's more awe-inspiring and terrifying than anything that he's devised as fiction. Hence, the creation of the first atomic bomb by J. Robert Oppenheimer, both the fruit of his labours, the means to end WWII with the click of a switch and something that comes to torment him when the dust clouds have cleared and he finally realises what he's done, up to that point lost in the fog of  his creative frenzy: enabled the amoral U.S. Government to not only kill multitudes of civilians clinically but to start yet another war immediately after that.

Cillian Murphy is perfect in the role, consistently opaque, intellectually supercilious and racked with visions of what has been and what might come. Yes, the science has to be patiently explained to the lay audience and the visionary protagonist, while not openly ostracised or quite autistic,  is still detached from the mass of humanity (see A Beautiful Mind, The Theory of Everything, The Imitation Game) and the determination to go through every step of the process with all the players involved, particularly the kangaroo court the authorities set up against to discredit him once he's outlived his usefulness, leads to an unwieldy 3-hour running time. But even after that wait, the bomb comes with shocking dramatic force. Some critics have, of course, complained about the effects at ground zero in Japan not being shown, but that is quite irrelevant. We already know everything, and this is a film for adults.

8/10

Venom: The Last Dance (Kelly Marcel, 2024)

The last dance, eh? If wishes were horses...still, surely an actor of Tom Hardy's calibre must have made enough sponds from this by now to return to proper acting. As it is, instalment three of the franchise continues with more of the same, the human stuck with an alien symbiote inside him trying to evade both the U.S. military and also a host of monsters sent by an imprisoned evil deity to get a key to his prison from inside the protagonist. So, this means numerous chases and messy CGI fight after fight, and would be utterly joyless if it wasn't for the leavening effect of the continuous squabbling and banter between the tired human host and his hedonistic, casually brutal and foul-mouthed symbiote. It's enough to get you through, but only just.

5/10

Thunderbolts* (Jake Schreier, 2025)

Film number 36, and if it isn't stopped, the size of the MCU will eventually overtake that of the real universe. Taking a cue from the overall failure of Eternals, a team composed only of ridiculously superpowered individuals, Thunderbolts* instead serves up a bunch of bickering misfits with virtually no powers at all. The villain is also not powered, but the scheming director of the CIA, seeking to weaponise a mentally unstable man her researchers have imbued with godlike abilities so that he can serve both as a PR figurehead and a one-man replacement for the now defunct Avengers as Earth's protector. This also means doing away with the titular crew since they know all about her self-serving schemes.

Naturally a torrent of chases and blurry fight sequences must fill the bulk of the running time, but there is also plenty of humour deprecating genre cliches, a reasonable stab at drawing parallels between the villain's motives and Trump's world of toxic propraganda, and Florence Pugh, flavour of the month though she might be, again producing a commanding performance as the conflicted de facto leader of the protagonists.

Still a bit of a mess, but a step in the right direction at least.

5/10