VOD: Hellboy The Crooked Man (dir: Brian Taylor, 2025)

"You getting the heebie-jeebies, friend?"
"I AM the heebee-jeebies!"

Yet another crack at bringing Hellboy to the big screen throws us into 1959, with Hellboy and two government agents transporting a demonic spider by train which does not end well, stranding him and Agent Song in the Appalachian forests where they encounter an isolated community beset by witches and a local legend of The Crooked Man.  The backwoods setting and feel is created well on-screen, and with the emphasis on dry humour and folklore, there are some interesting moments created amongst the rather slow-moving story, although the element of backstory with Hellboy's mother thrown in is not wholly successful.  Jack Kesy plays a rather weary and laid-back version of Hellboy here, with Adeline Rudolph a good foil as his special agent sidekick. The film so wants to be Sam Raimi but does not get there, and the third act in particular goes nowhere and is rather underwhelming.  Playing like an extended talky lesser episode of Supernatural or The X-Files, this is a rather low-key entry in the series that tries something a little different in tone with limited success.
 

VOD: The Twister - Caught In The Storm (dir: Alexandra Lacey, 2025)

"There was a sense in the air that something big was happening..."

This feature-length Netflix documentary recounts the extraordinarily sudden and hugely destructive 2011 Missouri tornado that ripped apart the town of Joplin on its annual graduation day through eyewitness accounts of largely then-teenagers and a remarkable mix of footage from the actual event itself.  Without any preamble, it gets straight to business, setting up the town of Joplin and the students of its high school whose graduation was taking place that fateful afternoon plus other residents in this combination of a Bible Belt and Tornado Alley community.  The combination of very direct personal accounts and raw POV phone and CCTV footage is engrossing and at times makes you forget to breathe when the massive tornado hits.  The occasional CGI/slo-mo recreation shots are a little jarring, but this does not undermine the powerful immediacy of the real-life footage.  This is not showing the glossy, distanced tornadoes of the movies, as it relates the very (terrifying) personal and human impact of the event both at the time and subsequently.  The last hour is perhaps the toughest to watch emotionally, with its mixture of great sadness and powerful hope for the future in this generally well-constructed documentary.

 

VOD: Wicked (dir: Jon M. Chu, 2024)

REVIEW No. 1,750!

"...let me tell you the whole story..."

The hugely successful stage version of Wicked could not be more of a traditional Broadway-style musical if it tried, and this epic reworking for cinema - the first part of two - retains its character and goes (very) big with expansive CGI worldbuilding, nuance of character and extraordinary attention to detail.  Cynthia Erivo is dazzlingly assured as Elphaba, Ariana Grande is surprisingly good and a very nice fit for G(a)linda (if a little shrill at times). with Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum adding veteran class and Jonathan Bailey making a mark with energetic swagger as the self-assured Prince Fiyero.  All aspects of design are exemplary, retaining essential cinematic iconography and also displaying some fun creative touches.  The film may be rather long - heading towards three hours - but it does not feel like it as it is slick, easy to watch and surprisingly funny whilst nailing the big dramatic moments with aplomb.  By the time Defying Gravity blows your socks off and the To Be Continued title card comes up, the set up for the darker sequel is promising indeed. 
 

VOD: Nightbitch (dir: Marielle Heller, 2025)

I'm the worst mother in the world!"

Amy Adams stars as an artist who goes back to full-time domestic life to look after her young son, trying to reconcile her joy of motherhood with her growing angry sense of futile boredom, her relationship with her oft-absent husband and her disturbing belief that she is turning into an actual dog.  Amy Adams is, of course, an absolutely mesmerising treat to watch, from her delightful scenes with her on-screen son to her excellent dramatic character work, with very strong supporting performances from Scoot McNairy as Husband and Jessica Harper as an intriguing librarian.  The script is whip-smart and very enjoyable from start to finish, and the themes of motherhood, (loss of female) identity and societal demands are developed in a clever way, with references to pop psychology and mythology woven into the mix.  Overall, not everything quite hangs together in terms of its central metaphor, but Nightbitch is nevertheless a bold, interesting and satisfying film.

 

VOD: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (dir: Tim Burton, 2024)

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable."

This long-threatened sequel to the minor 80s cult favourite finally emerges as both an affectionate throwback and a more contemporary self-aware comedy-thriller.  With Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) now a grown-up TV 'psychic mediator' with her show Ghost House and her similarly-sulky straight-talking teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) at boarding school, the dysfunctional family is brought together by the death of Astrid's grandfather, with SoulSucker (Monica Bellucci) on a revenge trip to find her ex-husband, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton, reliably slipping back into character), and inevitably the living/dead reunion awaits.   The film re-establishes the weird Beetlejuice concept swiftly early on, before the film becomes largely a touchstones box-ticking exercise that crucially sidelines the entire revenge story in favour of underworld quirkiness.  The cheap-and-cheerful aesthetic recalls the original, the Fall/Halloween setting looks good and is used well, and the eventual reveal of teen Astrid's emerging ability with a good twist is effective.  Feeling rather thin overall, like the original this film comes across as more of a hit-and-miss procession of ideas that is never as funny as it thinks it is (the extended MacArthur Park sequence feels interminable), rendering it a somewhat unnecessary commercial nostalgia-grab at this point. 
 

VOD: Moana 2 (dirs: Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller and David G. Derrick Jr., 2024)

"I don't do singalongs."
"We'll see about that!"

Moana 2 belongs to the 'bigger, busier, noisier' school of sequel-making, and whilst it offers little development from the first film, it still retains the colourful vibrancy and easy-going energy and charm of the original to a large extent.  Still grounded in the islanders' mythology, Moana (engagingly voiced by Auli'i Cravalho) and her motley crew go on a sea-faring quest to find other people beyond her home. with annoying comedy relief Maui the demi-god (Dwayne Johnson) pitted against evil god Nalo, who previously cursed their island destination.  The voice cast is strong throughout, the songs are relatively brief and effectively feel-good, the set pieces are lively and quite inventive - the coconut 'pirates' are fun - and the film trips along in a gently amusing manner.  Not so much constructed in acts but in episodes, this sequel offers little more than the original film, but as a 'further adventures of' episode, Moana 2 delivers pleasingly and effectively, with an ending that paves the way for the next chapter.
 

VOD: The Electric State (dirs: Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2025)

"You can't be heartless to things with no heart."
 

Based on a graphic novel, this enormo-budget Netflix sci-fi adventure from the Russo brothers offers an alt-history in which a robot uprising led to war with humans with a tech-fused victory for mankind.  Millie Bobby Brown is set on a cross-country quest to find her long-believed-dead brother with a kooky comic-strip sidekick robot and black-marketeer-with-a-heart Chris Pratt in tow.  Stanley Tucci does effective work as an understated villain here, Brown is her dependable self and Pratt delivers more of his roguish wisecracking.  The integration of the extensive and high-end CGI work is stunningly seamless in its worldbuilding and robot characters, again demonstrating what can be achieved on-screen with the big bucks, and the 1994-set tech influences works well.  The actual story, however, is very anaemic and stretched quite thinly over two hours plus.  It is visually rich and there is no doubting some of the imaginative/creative ideas on display, but the film itself is very scattershot in terms of both genre (thriller, comedy, sci-fi, speculative fiction, Western, coming-of-age) and audience targeting and - perhaps unforgivably for a film of this magnitude - it is also rather dull at times.  

VOD: Delicious (dir: Nele Mueller-Stofen, 2025)

"This is exactly why you shouldn't drink and drive, John."

Funny Games meets Parasite in this classy but nonsensical German Netflix thriller.  A well-off German family on holiday in rural France accidentally 'run over' a young woman while driving back from a restaurant one night and take her on as a housekeeper for the Summer to buy her silence, but as Teodora and her dead-eyed friends gradually insert themselves into the family's lives, events take a very dark turn.  There is an element of quietly brooding tension that builds from the start, with an eminently ominous soundtrack and a nice compositional stillness on screen, and the cast is solid.  Its class/elitism metaphor is clumsy, Idiot Plot abounds (especially in the actions and responses of the family), and a major clue to the 'shocking' twist is laid out very bluntly earlier in the film.  There are positives to be found in this film, but tightening up the screenplay would have been an advantage.
 

VOD: Venom - The Last Dance (dir: Kelly Marcel, 2024)

 

"I promise not to eat it!"

As we wave goodbye to the DCEU, a murky prologue sets up the vengeful villain of this piece, and what follows proves to be the most ambitious, daft and perhaps enjoyable entry of the trilogy, with a throw-everything-at-it attitude and an actual effective story that sees Eddie/Venom on the run from the authorities and an ancient alien threat.  This Venom movie offers a genuinely edgier tone as a counterpoint to the still-funny comedy antics, and the backstory creates an effective spine to the narrative.  Tom Hardy - the saving grace of these films - is so enjoyably invested and committed in the character that once again he carries the movie, with strong back-up from Chiwetel Ejiofor, Stephen Graham and a nicely-controlled turn from Juno Temple as the lead scientist on the symbiote programme.  The series' odd and unconvincing mix of hyper-real and cartoon styles is still evident, but the mad plethora of ideas at play gives this entry an undeniable energy.  Overall, The Last Dance falls just above a mid-level Transformers movie, but this is perhaps a much better and more positive send-off  to the Venom trilogy than the previous two films might have suggested.  Presumably the mid-credits and end-of-credits scenes are now redundant.  (Note to music supervisors: this film just about gets away with another play of an ABBA classic by the sheer silliness of the scene, but a particular Queen song is now way beyond overused in soundtracks).

VOD: Super/Man - The Christopher Reeve Story (dirs: Ian Bonhote and Peter Ettedgui, 2024)

"...and then, in an instant, everything changed."
 

This hugely warm and uplifting BAFTA-winning documentary on the life of (Superman) actor Christopher Reeve before and after his horrifying horseriding accident that left him almost completely paralysed is an exceptional account of human courage, hope, love and determination.  The extensive contributions by his family members, notably his wife, ex-wife and children, are open and emotional, made even more impactful by Reeves's own words and family footage.  In addition, Hollywood actors such as his great friend Robin Williams bridge his film-star life and that of the committed family man to good effect here.  The film flows beautifully, weaving together the two main parts of Reeves's life effortlessly.  Both heartbreaking and heartwarming and just the right side of oversentimentality, this superior documentary tells its powerful story very well indeed.