McPixel (2012)

Hoping this will be short, sharp fun.

Well, it's short, anyway.
This is just a series of single screens where there are two or three things to click on and you either have to click on the right one or click on two in the right order. That's it. It's very basic bland pixel art and very basic repetitive chiptune music. The only other thing people seem to like is that it's funny because if you click on the wrong thing you get to see some tits or some piss or a cow getting fucked or whatever. And half the stuff doesn't do anything at all, they couldn't even be bothered to have a reaction for every thing! This is just about passable as a game-jam entry (which it started as). It's a little depressing that the 'full' game is so well-liked and successful, costs £3, and has a sequel that costs £9, to be honest.

Blame (2017)

Strong performances and characterisation carry a competent composition of high school tropes with a too-tidy ending.

Rating: Good.

Dave Made A Maze (2017)

A really cool concept brimming with great ideas and amazing production design, but it boils down to 72 minutes of actual content and even that feels too long because there's no real story or structure here, the performances, dialogue and characters are all shaky and any humour that doesn't come directly from the production design falls flat. It's a typical pitfall for zero-budget debut features, but one that some (Evil Dead, say) overcome and this one doesn't. This really needed a Wright/Pegg or Rogen/Goldberg punch up.

Rating: Cool but empty.

Licorice Pizza (2021)

I haven't really liked a PTA film since Magnolia, after which he got into this affected 'everything's really slow and boring and stilted so it must be art' phase. This one is just a 15 year old and 25 year old drifting through a series of barely connected events, all the while hovering on the edge of fucking (literally at one point, the boy holds his hand just above the woman's breast as she sleeps). Nothing particularly interesting or exciting or funny or touching happens.

Rating: Dull.

Tenet (2020)

The first Nolan movie I've ever had trouble following. It just doesn't make the most of its premise or make things clear enough about who's doing what and why. I was really enjoying having to work to keep up with it right up to the point where you see two Branaghs in that room with the window then I just couldn't keep track (even though I'd spotted certain set-ups from much earlier immediately). For the last 40 mins or so I had pretty much tuned out.

Rating: too complicated, not cool enough.

Clerks 3 (2022)

SPOILERS BELOW

Not J&SB Reboot bad, but still in his new mode of 50% lazy callbacks and 50% trying to make the audience cry. The two modes clash a lot and it's not even that funny or well written.

Oh, and he makes a dig at the 'rat' shot from The Departed, a shitty take from shitty-era Simpsons thoughtlessly repeated by idiots online and lazily stolen here, and the happy ending is that the day is saved by crypto profits. Blech.

Rating: Pretty bad.

Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)

Enjoyable no-nonsense thriller, with a bunch of good actors giving clenched-jaw performances and some solid action, but there's a bit too much going on and it never really gets out of third gear. Instead of 'grim hitmen vs survivalists' or 'grim hitmen vs firewatcher', it's both of those and fire and a lightning storm, and the threads never quite coalesce into a climactic whole. Plus everything feels fairly contrived - the endangered kid is on his way to his uncle who is not only a sheriff but also a survivalist and then runs into not just a firewatcher but a firewatcher who is dealing with the trauma of not having saved some endangered kids the year before, but she can't just let hi use her radio because it just got struck by lightning an hour ago.

Rating: Solid but a little messy.

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

Looks gorgeous, strong central performances, inventive and very engaging, though it does kind of peter out in the last section - the stories are a lot stronger than the framing narrative.

Review: Very good.

Men (2022)

Effectively weird and creepy, with lots of effective nightmare imagery, but I'm not particularly fond of this strain of modern horror where it's basically the 'weird creepy stuff starts happening' first act stretched out for the whole movie, and the whole thing does just end up being an extended metaphor and not much else.

Rating: interesting but slight

Willy's Wonderland (2021)

One of those fake B-movies that doesn't actually understand the style and isn't half as well made as the real deal, like a copy of a copy of a copy with no bite. File alongside Snakes On A Plane, Drive Angry, Shoot Em Up etc etc.

Rating: Utterly shit, gave up about half an hour in.

The Bad Guys (2022)

Very irritating, smug movie with an incredibly confusing and overworked premise yet no actual story. Yeah yeah, Ocean's Eleven, very clever.

Rating: gave up after half an hour.

65 (2023)

A movie that is pretty much purely 'sci-fi guy stranded on dinosaur planet' lives or dies on its execution and there was just nothing surprising or audacious here. Reminded me more than anything else of the Skull Island segment of King Kong '05.

Rating: Disappointingly bland.

It Follows (2014)

Cool concept (though quite Ringu-ish), and very well made, though it was irritating how often characters who absolutely knew this thing was real weren't half as careful as they should have been, and it just doesn't have an ending so it goes with the standard Freddy Krueger one (looks like you killed it! But did you?!?!). Also, it's not the film's fault, but I think the thematic resonance has been severely overstated by critics who want to sound clever (it's a supernatural STD, so it must be a metaphor for STDs! And that's about the extent of it.)

Rating: Pretty good.

Matilda The Musical (2022)

SPOILERS BELOW

Really enjoyed it! A few little nitpicks (when there was a whole kid chorus singing the lyrics occasionally got lost, Trunchbull's defeat didn't feel quite as cathartic as it should, and it was a bit weird going with the 'fat kid who constantly eats' and making him wear a fake belly), but overall really good performances, songs, direction. Really ambitious with the amount of acting, singing and choreography required from so many kids, too.

Rating: Great.

Dungeons And Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves (2023)

Really enjoyed it. You can feel it straining against its budget the whole way through, but it's charming, funny, inventive and exciting. What I really loved about it was how expansive and deep it made the world feel - every chance it got there was a quick flashback to a whole new place and adventure, everywhere you look there's some little creature sitting in the corner scratching itself or whatever.

Rating: Very good.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

I enjoyed it very much, though it did (again) feel a little bit like more of the same, but with not as many stand-out memorable sequences, and a little compromised by being part one of a two-parter. I reckon it'll work better watched in a marathon with part 2 once that comes out, but honestly after that I kind of hope they start mixing things up again, bring some new characters in (or at least swap out some of the old characters for other old characters - I want the Aussie pilot from M:I 2 to come back!). It'd be fucking great if they repeated the Jim Phelps trick from the first movie (which never quite worked because of the recasting) and made Ethan the villain. Imagine if they'd revealed that at the end of this movie and had him kill off Benji, Luther etc - people would have flipped their lids!

Rating: Good solid MI fun, not one of the best.

The Flash (2023)

SPOILERS BELOW

It starts out surprisingly well, lots of comedy bits that work, some moderately good Flash action, and then a fun Calvin & Hobbes feel when he starts interacting with a slightly younger and much more irritating version of himself. It all zips along nicely. But then halfway through they start with the multiverse stuff and it just completely throws the film off-balance. In good multiverse movies like the Spiderverses and (imo) No Way Home, the multiverse stuff is central and integral to the plot, in messy ones like this and Dr Strange 2, they're just slung in to a different story with no real thought for the novelty of it. It gets worse and worse in Flash until finally it feels like Space Jam 2, just all these IPs on a conveyor belt trundling past the camera. And then the movie just exhaustedly falls into an ending - the obvious reveal of the purple time guy's identity, the way that apparently Barry is able to change his dad's past without messing anything up after all (is it because it's not a nexus event or whatever? Very flimsy if so.), and no resolution to the mystery of his mother's death (even if we were getting a sequel, which I assume is off the cards now, this movie spends its first half setting that mystery up - it's a terrible decision to just drop it). The Clooney cameo was good fun, though. But then the Momoa cameo was dreadful.

The CG humans are fairly terrible throughout - it feels like you're watching one of those Resident Evil CG movies a lot of the time. In the 'Speed Force Bowl', they do put a load of filters over it in a commendable attempt to make it feel like a stylised choice but this is undone by the facts that a) it still looks ugly and b) the rest of the movie is filled with plasticy faces too. It's just something you have to accept watching this movie - sometimes the people just won't look like people. Along with the tacky set-up, it really scuppers the IP cameo section.

As for Keaton Batman - he just doesn't feel right outside of a Burton movie. They tried, you can tell they did, but it just didn't work. The same goes for the whole movie, really.

Rating: some promise subsumed by messy IP manipulation.

They Cloned Tyrone (2023)

Half an hour too long, and the weird Death Proof fake-70s thing they were doing just felt distracting and unnecessary and not really a great choice for a film that already has so much conceptual overlap with Black Dynamite and the flashback sequences in the Watchmen show. All the actors are good though they're all in slightly different movies.

Rating: Okay.

Bullet Train (2022)

Didn't think much of it, felt very much like a Tarantino knock-off without any of the wit or charm. A few of the fight scenes were good, though.

Rating: Meh.

Cyrano (2022)

Looks great, Dinklage is great and everyone else is good, and it's snappily told. Unfortunately, it succumbs to the post-Frozen habit of musicals to make most of their numbers sound like modern pop ballads and hence bland, broad and forgettable. Cyrano's on-stage duel and the soldiers' farewell are stronger, but the rest feel like listening to Taylor Swift singing in the shower. If they'd cut the songs completely they would have had a bit more time for some sharper characterisation.

Rating: respectable but misguided.