A full year behind, but I’ll get caught up. 6 movies for September!

Highest 2 Lowest

Highest 2 Lowest is something of a mixed bag. It’s stylish, creative, and the first half moves forward at a fair pace. Sadly, it begins to really drag in the back half. A$AP Rocky is genuinely awful as the villain, which takes a real toll on the movie as he gets more screen time. It’s hard to care about the plot when you don’t care about any of characters.

There are places where this works, but I’d skip it.

The Naked Gun

It shouldn’t work as well as it does but The Naked Gun is a surprisingly good, wonderfully stupid comedy.

Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson work well together as the deadpan detective and femme fatale. The story… barely matters. It’s basically a bunch of setups for the mixture of visual gags and silly wordplay the series specializes in.

Far from perfect, but entertaining enough.

The Long Walk

As a kind of dystopian horror, The Long Walk really works.

Starting as a grounded but odd story, we see the substantial cast of 50 boys share stories as they take on the bizarre trial of endless walking. As ordeal continues, the mood shifts to be dislocated from time; like The Platform or Beau Was Afraid.

While the main cast are great, some of the supporting actors are a little too earnest. And yes, you’ll likely see most of what happens coming, it’s still a neat, weird light horror.

Good.

Night Always Comes

Night Always Comes is the story of a woman, already struggling and scheming to make ends meet, put beyond her means with a single night to fix it.

Vanessa Kirby is excellent as the lead, scrambling around to find a way through her situation - not exactly likeable, but understandable. Everything else is… mixed. It looks very generic. You’ve seen this low-mid budget streaming thriller before. It also ends about 5 minutes too late. The conclusion has been reached and the epilogue adds nothing.

Meh.

Honey Don’t

Honey Don’t should work a lot better than it does: Margaret Qualley as a fast-talking private investigator, Aubrey Plaza as a gruff love interest, some plot threads that end up being a shaggy dog story. It has all the makings of a modern, light detective movie, yet it fumbles.

Plaza goes a bit too melodramatic, the pacing is all over the place, and nothing really happens - which would be fine if the individual parts were entertaining.

Not worth it.

Together

Finally, Together is a body horror about a couple who, after a hiking accident, start to meld into a single person.

The movie plays it relatively lightly, mostly nailing the tone. The horror elements are creepy but not overwhelming, and the humour doesn’t turn the entire thing into a joke.

Good.

The September Winner

While there was nothing amazing, I think I’d watch Together again.

Six films for August and they’re mostly good!

Bring Her Back

Bring Her Back is a creepy supernatural horror that digs its claws in very early, with some unsettling VHS footage.

The main plot follows a pair of orphans being moved around the foster care system, and their new foster parent, played fantastically be Sally Hawkins. It’s not a spoiler to say that not everything is as it seems in her home.

This is the kind of horror that you remember.

Very good.

The Pickup

Prime seem intent to shove out a terrible action film every month. This month it’s The Pickup.

The movie follows to armored van drivers who are pulled into a heist. None of it really makes sense, none of the action really works, and you’ll be bored quite quickly. While it’s good to see Eddie Murphy get back to acting, he deserves better than this.

Skip

Nobody 2

Nobody 2 takes the surprising sequel route of not trying to go bigger and better. If anything, this feels like a slightly smaller film with a few slightly bigger action set-pieces.

Bob Odenkirk is, once again, good as the former-agent and now downtrodden dad, as he takes his family on a vacation to the amusement park he spent his childhood at. Trouble inevitably catches up with him and the plot plays out how you’d expect.

It might not do anything new, but it does a very solid job of playing the hits.

Sovereign

Nick Offerman is excellent as a father who has gone off the deep-end in Sovereign, a look into the murky world of the sovereign citizen movement.

It humanizes the desperation that these people come from, while not letting them off the hook for their disconnect with reality. Jacob Tremblay is great as Offerman’s teenage son, pulled along in his father’s wake.

Affecting.

F1

F1 delivers a masterclass in big, summer blockbuster movies.

The racing action is gripping, the pace is maintained through the lengthy runtime, and no-one lets the side down. It’s a very easy watch, if entirely predictable. The most popcorny of popcorn movies.

Good.

Weapons

Zach Cregger’s followup to Barbarian was always going to be one to watch, and Weapons doesn’t disappoint.

We jump between multiple tellings of the story of a class of missing children, slowly learning more about what might have happened. The very strange goings-on build up to something unexpected, but satisfyingly creepy. To say more would be a spoiler. If you like horror, you’ll already have seen this.

Very good.

The August Winner

Some good contenders, but I think Weapons is the best of the bunch.

A fairly busy July with 8 films!

Heads of State

Heads of State is a cliche-ridden, slop action film by Prime.

Idris Elba and John Cena play the British Prime Minister and US President respectively. Circumstance takes them from not liking each other to friends over the course of the runtime. There’s very little new or interesting here, a couple of action sequences aside.

Bad.

The Old Guard 2

The first Old Guard was a fun two hours, with some heavy-handed world building. The Old Guard 2, meanwhile, is a lot of heavy-handed world building, with maybe one good action sequence.

In trying to pad out the world and bring in new threats, the film is left feeling entirely unfinished. The main plot stops long before any kind of conclusion is reached, as they clearly want to build out an even bigger franchise.

Fairly boring.

Warfare

Alex Garland’s most intimate film to date is about war. Warfare is kept almost entirely within a single building under siege, and the soldiers trapped inside.

The tension is a slow build that never becomes a full-blow crescendo, instead focussing on small moments. Very good for both the action, and the human moments.

The Surfer

I’m hit or miss on Nicholas Cage, but The Surfer is definitely a hit for me.

It’s a fever dream of a film: a man goes to buy his childhood home near the beach he used to surf in, but a gang makes it clear he doesn’t belong. The world shifts around him, and you’re left not knowing what’s real and what’s him simply losing his mind.

Very good.

Superman

The latest attempt to build a cinematic universe to rival Marvel appears in DC’s Superman.

It’s… fine. It smartly skips all of the origin story that we’ve seen too many times, but doesn’t spend a lot of time replacing it with a particularly interesting plot. Nicholas Hoult is great as Lex Luthor, but that’s maybe the high point. Everything else is one disconnected sequence after another, with a bunch of cameos crammed in to pad things out.

Mindless spectacle.

Fantastic Four: First Steps

It’s not high praise to say that Fantastic Four: First Steps is the best Fantastic Four film we’ve gotten, so poor were the other attempts.

Setting the movie in a 60s Americana universe was a smart choice, helping us move passed the goofiness inherent in the characters. The story is a fairly straight forward FF story: the Silver Surfer heralds the coming of Galactus as Sue Storm is about to have a child, so the heroes have to come up with a plan to stop a world-eating god.

Honestly, it’s what you’d want: enormous, sugary spectacle. The plot slows down a lot around the 2/3rds mark, but it has enough good will to get you to the end.

Decent.

Happy Gilmore 2

Making a sequel to a (somewhat dated) classic is difficult, and the makers of Happy Gilmore 2 seem to think the best way of tackling that is mostly a bunch of references to the original.

Like many legacy sequels, this lacks any kind of originality or character. It’s a pale shadow of the original, and absolutely cannot stand on its own.

Avoid.

Megan 2.0

Megan 2.0 makes the regrettable choice of switching genres from horror to action-tinged comedy. Or maybe it was supposed to be comedy-tinged action. It’s not really successful at either.

I genuinely can’t remember a great deal about this film, other than feeling bored and checking the remaining runtime.

Meh.

The July Winner

The July winner is The Surfer. I don’t know if I’d reach for it again soon, but it left a lasting impression.

Turns out life got in the way and I’m now almost a year behind in Film Fights. Oh well. June 2025 has 9 films.

Mountainhead

Mountainhead is a well-pitched, barely satirical look at a group of narcissistic tech bros taking over the world. While the characters are a little shallow, given both their nature and the runtime, they serve the story well - as they blunder through geopolitics.

The cast is strong, with Steve Carell a slight standout. Funny, worryingly prescient, and terrifying. Worth seeing.

Sinners

The world of Sinners is bathed in music and blood, an affecting horror story about family and ties to tradition.

Twin brothers (Michael B. Jordan) open a backwater bar in deep South, and are soon visited by multiple unwanted guests. The film revels in its soundtrack as much as it does gore, with extended musical sequences a welcome distraction from the brewing horror.

Very good.

The Amateur

In The Amateur Rami Malek plays an analyst turned agent after something unfortunate happens to his wife. The film doesn’t quite live up to the threat it tries to portray. Malek, even after training, isn’t credible as a vengeful agent, and the movie fails to reflect his words in his actions.

Fine, but forgettable (in that I have now forgotten significant portions).

Ballerina

Or to use it’s full name From The World of John Wick: Ballerina.

Ana de Armas is sufficiently engaging as the titular ballerina, from one of the Wick franchise’s crime families. The plot itself is nonsense, leaning heavily on the Wick name to keep it propped up, and at a little over 2 hours feels very long.

The action, however, is very good. The flamethrower battle in the last act is pretty incredible by itself.

Worth seeing.

The Accountant 2

I don’t think we needed a sequel, but The Accountant 2 turned up anyway.

Given I was between indifferent and bored by the original on first viewing, I wasn’t expecting much here, but I was entertained. There are day’s I’d roll my eyes at how utterly stupid this film is, but it hit the spot on the night I watched it.

Some good action, nonsense plot, but fun.

(I also rewatched the original shortly after and found it a bit more enjoyable second time.)

Good Night And Good Luck

Clooney’s live version of Good Night, and Good Luck is something of a marvel. It adapts the source material for the stage, pinging between scenes and locations at breakneck speed, and captures it as a movie.

It does have the feel of being compressed for the medium: characters and moments don’t get time to breathe.

Okay.

Final Destination: Bloodlines

Silly, bloody, messy: Final Destination: Bloodlines takes a revival tour around the franchise and does something big. It has spectacular set pieces, over the top gore, and stays just on the right side of ridiculous.

This was a lot of fun, even if the final scenes did feel forced.

The Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson isn’t for everyone, but I’m not convinced that even the most arden fans will love The Phoenician Scheme. Sure, I laughed at certain moments, but the whole thing felt tired. No real driving forced, nothing new. We’ve seen this movie several times before, and far better.

Meh.

28 Years Later

A return to the fast zombie franchise, 28 Years Later moves us forward to a Britain that has been isolated by the world, as the Rage virus continues to mutate. The world building works well: isolation, corruption, madness, but with a thematic theme of kindness.

At it’s heart, this is about a son’s love for his mother, and his inability to accept losing her (and not in the way you might think).

Good.

The June Winner

Some very strong contenders this month, but I think Sinners wins for building such a vibrant world

For May, there are 7 films in the fight.

Thunderbolts

Thunderbolts is a mixed bag. It’s a Marvel film (for good and bad) that tries to do something different, particulary with the villain. However, in bringing together the characters that it does, it forces tension that really shouldn’t be there.

Some good moments, definitely a breezy popcorn film, but only looks good in comparison to their recent output.

The Cleaner

The Cleaner sees a former solider turned high-rise window cleaner take on some terrorists attempting to… honestly, who knows? The plot here isn’t really notable. I actually forgot the ending by the next day and had to rewatch it. The action doesn’t even make up for it.

There’s not much to really like here.

Skip.

Summer Of 69

Summer Of 69 is a teen comedy that sees an awkward teen hire a stripper to help her gain the skills she thinks she needs to get a guy.

While the specifics are unique, you’ve definitely seen movies like this before - and ones that are done a little better. That’s not to say it’s bad, I definitely laughed at points, but it’s not great.

Fine.

Drop

Drop is a fixed location horror about a women tasked with killing her date at a fancy restaurant, or face repercussions against her family.

It is, at times, ridiculous but mostly manages to build tension effectively, ratcheting up the pressure nicely.

Definitely one worth seeing.

The Ballad Of Wallis Island

The Ballad Of Wallis Island follows the fictional reunion of a folk duo for a superfan.

Mulligan, Basden, and Key all play their parts well. It’s sad and resentful as much as it is funny, but it all works.

Good.

Opus

Opus sees a former popstar (played by John Malkovich) reappear after decades of being a reclusive cult leader, promising his best album yet. Ayo Edebiri plays a journalist sent to review it - and find out what’s been happening.

While the last act will have you rolling your eyes, there’s fun to be had on the way there. There are enough moments of cult weirdness to draw a smile.

Okay.

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is a lengthy action movie that tries to wrap up and tie-in far more of the previous entries than it really should have attempted to.

Bloated storytelling aside, it does what you’d expect: some of the biggest action sequences committed to film done as practically as possible. There are some genuinely excellent set pieces in here, that are worth the runtime.

Good.

The May Winner

Not the strongest month but I think the winner is Drop - a very solid horror thriller that does most things just right.