Note: Despite ultimately abandoning my usual annual political rant, I’ve gone on a bit of one anyway and rattled on about a couple of things that really pissed me off in 2025 and continue to do so, as well as revealing in detail how I royally screwed up a UHD review. It goes on a bit, so if you just came for the film list, you can skip past all that by clicking the button to the right.
introduction
Okay, I know this is late, even by my usual shoddy standards, but I do have my reasons. Mid December through early January was a traumatic time for myself and my partner for reasons I have no intention of elaborating on here and which I genuinely wouldn’t wish on any of you reading this. As if that wasn’t enough, just after Christmas I caught a flu-like virus that absolutely floored me and that continues to linger almost a month after it first infected my throat, lungs, chest, nose, muscles and head. One small plus of the down time this enforced was that I was able to catch up on some of the movies that I’d wanted to see but had missed on their release earlier in the year. This at least allowed me to make a reasonably informed list of personal favourites, even if writing about them was delayed by the above mentioned disruptions to my mental and physical wellbeing.
By the end of the first week of January I had the list complete and most of the write-ups of the films themselves done, but as regular site visitors will doubtless recall, I’m an angry young man in an old man’s body and tend to start my annual wrap-ups with a heartfelt rant about the state of the world, and if ever there was a year for that, then 2025 was it. This is where I ran headlong into a puddle that quickly expanded into a muddy quagmire. Whereas in previous years there was always plenty going on both here and abroad to highlight and complain and be deeply concerned about, right now there’s such an avalanche of horror, corruption and state-sanctioned evil that it’s not about “where do I start?” but “where do I stop?” The problem is that took me of week of furious writing in my rare free moments for this to sink in, and it soon became clear that if I carried on at this rate, the intro would go on for so long that even the most loyal and tolerantly sympathetic visitor would likely tune out well before they got to the bit they came here to read and disagree with in the first place. Seriously, as a fast as I wrote a single paragraph, another slew of stories about the corruption, cruelty and amorality of those on the extreme right, both at home and across the pond, would come to my attention and demand comment (I could list at least five such outrages that have occurred just while I’ve been proof-reading this). So, despite having written a sizeable amount on this subject, I decided then and there to quit and focus instead purely on the movies that tickled my fancy in 2025, what’s been happening with the site, and where it’s likely to go from here. When I get the time, I may still attempt to complete my original rant, and if I do, I may upload it and add a link to it at the bottom of this page. Then, if you really want to know why I currently despair for America and its plunge into fascism, why I fear that the actions of that narcissistic and dementia-ridden paedophile-protecting convicted criminal currently residing in what’s left of the White House could ultimately lead to a third world war, why I despise Elon fucking Musk and his loathsome social media platform, why it seems clear that social media platforms are being weaponised to undermine democracy worldwide,1 and why I deeply admire and respect those millions of ordinary Americans who are standing up to government oppression and Trump’s personal ICE gestapo (and in the case of Renee Good, being callously murdered by them), then give me a couple of weeks and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to read more.
Yet having said all that, one thing I do need to quickly address, because of the speed with which things have been developing and changing (bit of foreshadowing there) and the potential for events to take a very serious turn, is Trump’s stated intention to steal the Danish territory of Greenland in the second stage of his mad old fuck ambition to bring the entire western hemisphere under his control before he croaks. This could well lead to America invading a fellow NATO country, which could then put it on a war footing with its supposed allies, as if a NATO country is attacked then the other member countries are required to come to its defence. As with Venezuela, the justification that the US needs to acquire the territory for reasons of “national security” is complete and utter rubbish. As a key NATO member, America is already perfectly able to defend what it regards as strategically important territory and indeed would have assistance from other NATO countries should the need arise. Thanks to a treaty it has had with Denmark for decades, it already has troops stationed in Greenland and is free to deploy more should it wish to do so. It could even reopen the many closed American military bases that it has had there for years. Of course, the fact that Greenland sits on a wealth of rare earth minerals that might soon finally be accessible due to the effects of global warming (which, ironically, Trump and his cronies like to claim is a hoax) is generally regarded as the true motivation behind Trump’s rhetoric. After all, why bother with trade talks if you can just have your army march in and steal another country’s resources? How much of the resulting profit would find its way into a private account held by Trump in Qatar is anybody’s guess, but that’s apparently where the first half-billion dollars made from stolen Venezuelan oil has ended up.2 Petulant snowflake that he is, Trump then pledged to impose tariffs on any country that opposes him stealing Greenland from its rightful owners, which are (oh, I’m sorry, were) due to take effect at the end of this month. This is the political equivalent of telling someone that you’ll restrict your family’s access to food if they try to stop you from sexually assaulting their daughter, an appropriate metaphor given the individual in question. This is not the action of a responsible leader of a major democracy but an ageing 1930s mobster (this, and his habit of dozing off to sleep during meetings, has earned him the witty nickname Don Snoreleone). And, of course, while all this is dominating headlines around the world, too few are now talking about the fact that the legal date for the release of the remainder of the Epstein files has come and gone with no sign yet of the two million plus documents in question. Is he really prepared to start a world war to avoid the public finding out what incriminating evidence lies within? Looks that way.
Wait, hang on a second. Remember what I said about the rapidly changing news cycle in the second paragraph? Well here’s a perfect example. I had all of the above written, had checked it through twice, it had been proof-read by Camus, and I’d set the text set on this page and was just in the process of adding the posters to the reviews, and what pops up on my desktop? The news that Trump has now ruled out military action to take Greenland, and a short while later had cancelled the threatened retaliatory tariffs. Given that he lies about just about everything and changes his mind on the most preposterous of whims, I’m not quite ready to breathe easily yet, and as far as I’m concerned, all of the above still stands.
One segment from my original rant that I will include here relates to my hatred of AI, and if you’re somehow wondering what’s behind this antipathy, here’s a few of my reasons: the harm that the gargantuan data centres required to run it are doing to the environment and the projected increase in the cost of electricity for us ordinary consumers due to their huge energy requirements; how the massive demand for memory and processing chips has led to an increasing shortage that is going to make a whole range of electronic and electrical goods more expensive for the everyday consumer; the way these LLMs (that’s Large Language Models for the uninitiated) are trained by stealing the work of talented artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers without acknowledgment or compensation; how LLMs are undermining education by writing essays for students that teachers are then using the very same programs to grade, resulting in graduates who know precious little about the area in which they are technically qualified to work; the increasing number of jobs now being replaced by AI or robotics; the sheer amount of AI generated slop on social media and in society at large, from images to videos and even music. That last one initially caught me by surprise but caused considerable anger in the music world last year when the country song Walk My Walk, which was created on an LLM that was trained on (for that, read ‘stolen from’) the work of talented human musicians who had spent years perfecting their art, actually topped the US Billboard chart.3 And don’t get me started on the depressing revelation that the lonely and confused are now treating Chat GTP as their friend and confident, a friend whose misplaced encouragement has already been linked to several suicides, and in at least one case, murder. And do I really have to bring up the Hitler-loving Elon Musk chatbot Grok, which recently added a feature that allows you to create non-consensual and photorealistic pictures of actual people, including children, in a state of undress?4 And we’re now told that the very AI platform responsible for this is now being fully integrated into the American defence system. Am I the only one who remembers The Forbin Project? So pissed off does this all make me that I refuse to use AI in any of its current forms and will not even look at an AI generated picture or the increasing deluge of AI slop videos infecting YouTube. Pleasingly, I am far from alone in my views. Just a couple of days ago, a close friend just last week echoed my views almost to the letter, while the more widespread backlash has seen home cinema enthusiasts boycott UHD titles on which AI has been used to ‘enhance’ the image, and the music streaming service Bandcamp announced that it will be kicking any AI generated music from its platform.5 It even resulted in the highly praised video game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 having is Indie Game of the Year and Indie Debut Game prize wins at the 2025 Indie Game Awards disqualified when it was discovered that generative AI placeholder textures were used in the game (they have since been patched out, it should be noted). I’m fully aware that AI isn’t going anywhere (although the projected AI bubble burst could inflict some serious damage), and with the use of AI in the film production likely to increase in a way that will impact a range of industry jobs and the creative process in general, this is perhaps a topic for a whole separate blog.
As for the site, well, it’s been an interesting year, positive in some respects but less so in others. Even though I elected to keep working beyond when I needed to in 2025, the appeal of retirement is growing by the day, not least due to the ridiculous constrictions that our IT department’s new security software has put on the computer and the software I need to do my job, disabling key features of Photoshop and slowing my M2 Mac Studio down to the speed of the 10-year-old iMac it replaced. The thing is, when I do leave, I lose access to all Adobe software (there is no way I’m paying its ridiculous subscription fee myself), which includes Dreamweaver, the program on which the site was built and on which it has been run for many years. I’ve known for some time that this day was coming and that I really needed to learn how to use WordPress to create a whole new version of the site, but at my age the prospect was intimidating enough for me to repeatedly put it off. In the summer I finally decided to take the plunge. I registered the cineoutsider.co.uk domain, took out a WordPress account with the hosting company I have been using for some years, and started watching endless instructional YouTube videos in a bid to get my head around a platform that I initially found completely bemusing. I was quickly steered towards the Elementor plug-in, and it soon became evident that I was going to need to subscribe to the pro version to shape the site into the one I had envisioned, which for the record costs per year less than half of what an Adobe subscription costs for a single month. I knew from the start that it was going to be a lot of work but still seriously underestimated just how much it would entail, and it effectively swallowed up all of the free time that I had previously been devoting to writing reviews for a period of almost four months. As a result, during that period I made only token contributions to the writing on the site, with what little free time I did have being devoted to formatting and posting reviews by Gary or Camus or news stories about upcoming releases.
Then, in September, this workload led to me making the most egregious error I’ve yet made in the 22 years this site has now been in existence. In retrospect it was inexcusable, but also symptomatic of how foolishly over-focussed I was on getting the technical glitches of the by-then live new site ironed out. As regular visitors will no doubt be aware, Gary covers all of the BFI Blu-ray and DVD releases (and yes, the occasional DVD still makes an appearance) but does not yet have the equipment required to view 4K UHDs. I have on occasion agreed to take the odd BFI UHD release on, but doing so swallows time that I should really be spending on discs from the likes of Indicator, Radiance, Eureka and Second Run that have piled up in my living room, and once work started on the new site, I simply didn’t have the time. This is why four Kurosawa UHD titles have gone unreviewed on the site despite how much I love those films. Occasionally, Gary would review the film and the majority of special features by working from the previous BFI Blu-ray release and leave the technical specs of the disc for me to cover. That is where this particular story begins. Buckle up, because this is going to be a long ‘un.
Before I start I should note that, unlike me, Gary is a diligent reviewer who almost always has his review completed by or before the release date of the discs he covers. I deeply respect his ability to deliver reviews so promptly, sometimes at short notice and in considerable detail, and when he sends one through I tend to make a point of dropping everything to format and post them. This will become relevant soon. When it was first announced, Gary asked if I could cover the technical specs of the UHD release of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre to accompany his review. I was initially reluctant, but work on the new site was going well by then and I suspected it might be complete by the release date of this disc. Almost everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and then some. When Gary’s review landed in my inbox a month or so later, I’d completely forgotten that I’d agreed to cover the tech specs of this release and thus had also failed to ask our BFI contact for a review disc. With the release date now a mere five days away, I emailed our contact and was told that a disc would be winging its way to me by first class mail the following day. It did not arrive. By this point, work on the new website had hit a whole series of technical snags that I was working long hours to try and iron out and that were frustrating the hell out of me, and as the site had gone live in this unfinished state, I was focussed entirely on urgently correcting the problems. The release date of the disc came and went with still no sign of the review disc, so I gave in and coughed up for the release version instead. When I popped it in my UHD player, however, it froze up as soon as the menu tried to load. Given that this had occurred a few times in recent weeks but ultimately cleared, I kept trying with no luck, then popped a few more discs in and the exact same thing happened. This was the “you have to be fucking kidding me!” moment of this particular saga. Not having the cash to splash out for a replacement player, I consulted a local firm that specialises in repairing electronic devices and was assured that they could fix it, so I took the player in and left it with them. The next day they called me – it needed a replacement something-or-other, which I was assured would arrive sometime in the next week or so. Oh great.
Unsure what to do and not wanting to let Gary down after the work he had put into the main review, I approached a work colleague who I knew had a home cinema setup. While happy to help, he currently did not have a UHD player or a 4K TV. My heart sank again. But wait! He did have friend who owned a UHD player and was sure he wouldn’t mind me using for a couple of hours. The meeting was arranged and I went to this guy’s house (I’m tactfully avoiding mentioning names here), and it quickly became evident that he had been talked into something that he wasn’t really happy about but had agreed to anyway. My plan to watch the whole film was also quickly quashed. “How long will you need?” he asked. “About two hours should do it,” I told him. He pulled one of those faces. “It’s just that I have to pick the kids up from school in twenty minutes, and…” Oh, fabulous. Making matters worse, his setup was a long, long way from what I regard as ideal, a UHD player linked to a 32” LCD (seriously, what’s the point?) whose settings were probably all still set to the factory default. With him standing over me oozing impatience, I thus had to skip through a few chapter stops of the disc, scribble some notes on the brief sections I watched and get out of the house that I know I shall never be invited to visit again.
It’s here that, in retrospect, I made my biggest mistake. With my daytime workload high and the evenings still dominated with trying to get my head around the latest WordPress quirks, it was a couple of days before I remembered I had to complete the review. If it seems that forgetfulness is becoming a thread that runs through this entire tale, then know that I have reached an age when my short-term memory is effectively shot and I have to leave physical reminders around my house to remember to complete even daily tasks. Thus, when I did get around to completing the review, I had only my notes and a foggy memory of my short time with the most unwelcoming person I visited all year to draw on. Not enough. What I should have done here was profusely apologise to Gary and just live with the fact that the review was going to be posted way later than promised. Instead, keen to get back to the urgent business of the new site issues, I foolishly elected to wing it based on my notes and the snippets of the disc that I had watched in far from ideal conditions on unsatisfactory equipment. I gave the transfer largely positive coverage, though did note that some shots seem to have been subjected to what looked like digital enhancement. My hesitance to fully commit to this observation was due in part to the high standard I’ve come to expect from BFI disc releases (I completely forgot that I took issue with the image quality of the BFI’s Blu-ray release of Kitano Takeshi’s Brother), and the fact that I had viewed shots on a TV that probably had those awful picture enhancement settings switched on that I always disable. I also still recalled the time that I claimed in a review that one short film in a BFI collection had been digitally enhanced, only to have the restoration team contact me directly to ensure me that this was not the case, and that what I was seeing was a quirk of a rarely used film stock of the period. I thus erred on the side of caution in my writeup and returned to my work on the site. Only later, when I received stinging criticism of my coverage, did I realise that I had royally fucked up. Once my UHD player was returned in flawlessly working condition, I revisited the film on my correctly calibrated 55” OLED screen and was genuinely jolted by what I saw. Here, the digital enhancement was blatantly obvious on a whole range of shots, wiping out the grain, artificially smoothing out skin, and in one case rendering a face almost as a computer game graphic. With my head hanging down around my knees in shame, I returned to the review, admitted my error, and replaced my previous comments with a more accurate assessment of the transfer.
Here’s the thing. I’ll freely admit that none of us at Outsider are experts on the technical ins and outs of disc transfers (in an ideal world I’d only review the films and leave the technical details to a specialist in that field), but we’ve always tried out best to give an accurate assessment of the image and sound quality of any disc we cover, and this represented an unacceptable lapse on my part. Since then I’ve been as vigilant as I do believe I had been previously, and if there’s something else going on in my life that conflicts with reviewing a disc then the reviews will have to wait, hence the absence of disc coverage on my part for the past few weeks. If this failure on my part means we lost a few readers, well, that’s justified, and something I’ll have to live with. Fuck me, that went on a bit, didn’t it? Right, let’s get to the bit you probably came here for in the first place.
the films
2025 was another good year for film and especially for horror, though as a genre devotee, I’m more than a little biased on that score. Given my decision to start boycotting American goods and services in protest at Trump’s empire-building, I probably should stick to my guns and kick all of the American films off of my list, but this was drawn up at the end of 2025 before the whole Greenland madness and resulting tantrum tariffs kicked off, and some of these films are slyly (and in one case not so slyly) critical of aspects of Trump’s America, and in that respect can be seen as being part of the resistance. Whether the 2026 list will be bereft of American movies only time and politics and cinema will tell.
As ever, there were a whole slew of titles released last year that I have still yet to see, including Steven Soderberg’s Black Bag, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (I really want to see this), Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, and the Stephen King double of Edgar Wright’s The Running Man and Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, and this is just a small sampling of films that are still on my watchlist. As ever, I’m making no claims that my chosen titles are the year’s greatest films (there are no facts on this score, only opinion), they’re just the ones I enjoyed most of the titles that I saw. That many will have cropped up on other lists is not that surprising, but I’m not about to kick a film off of my list because its inclusion seems obvious or predictable. As with last year, I’ll begin with a few honourable mentions, films that I greatly enjoyed that were just kept off the top slot by one small element or other but that by this time next year may well have been promoted, just as subsequent viewings might see a couple on the A list demoted. As ever, I dislike the whole idea of having an order of preference and of sticking to a round number, so the films on both lists have been covered in alphabetical order, and there are 16 on the A list (one of which is not a film) and seven honourable mentions.
Before I get going, I should perhaps mention that there are three streaming series that I can’t in all good faith include on either list because I’ve not watched even half of the episodes of any of them so far, largely due to cancelling all subscriptions of US company-owned services in protest at Trump’s recent actions regarding Greenland and tariffs. This is something I’d encourage all people of conscience to do until that idiot leaves office one way or another, and come on football fans, you could give this year’s World Cup a miss as many have already decided to do. Seriously, if even a third of all citizens of Britain and the European Union (oh, how I wish we were still part of that) started boycotting American goods and services in general it could have an instrumental economic impact. Remember how the mass cancellations of Disney+ subscriptions following the corporation bowing to Trump and pulling Jimmy Kimmel off the air led to that decision being reversed? Just saying.
Anyway, two of the streaming titles that appeared on my 2024 list both moved into their second seasons in 2025, but I’m not yet in a position to properly judge either, having only watched the first three episodes of each. Season 2 of Fallout has so far matched the look and tone of its predecessor, and the regular cast members are delivering the hoped-for pleasures, but for me it’s yet to show the same level of narrative development and wit that made the first series such a must-watch from the off. We shall see.
When it comes to The Last of Us, the quality of what I’ve seen from season 2 easily matches that of season 1, and the only reason I’ve not yet gobbled up the rest of the series is a personal one. I loved the first The Last of Us game enough to have played it through both on the PlayStation 3 original and its PS4 upgrade, but as someone who likes playing video games but dislikes paying out full price for them, I was really late coming to The Last of Us, Part II, and to be honest only completed it a short while before the series directly based on it was released on disc (when your free time is restricted, games can take months to play through). Despite a few small changes to characters and events, the series has so far proved impressively faithful to the narrative the game. The unfortunate knock-on effect of this for me is that scenes that have had non-gamers chewing their fingernails in fear – such as when a desperate Abby is trapped behind a wire fence that is collapsing under the weight of a hoard of angry infected – did not have the same effect on someone who knew precisely how this scene would play out and what it would ultimately lead to. And that pivotal sequence, the one that so shocked and horrified us gamers when we played the original… I hate to say it, but really well handled though it is in the series, it doesn’t deliver quite the same gut-punch as it did in the game, being more clearly telegraphed and accompanied with a long personal justification justified by Abby that reveals backstory details that did not become evident until later in the game, which I personally think was more effective. I will get back to it soon (I have the whole series on UHD) and will be interested to see whether Bella Ramsey can capture the murderous hatred that so drives Ellie as convincingly as Ashley Johnson did in the game.
And then there’s The Studio, a superbly directed and deliberately cringe-inducing comedy drama about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the Hollywood studio system that I’ve also only seen the first three episodes of so far. This is a tough one for different reasons, being laugh-out-loud funny in places but really leaning into the comedy of embarrassment to a degree that is as admirable in its commitment as it is simultaneously funny and entertaining and wincingly uncomfortable to watch.
the B list (honourable mentions)
28 YEARS LATER
This long-awaited second sequel to director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s rightly celebrated twist on the zombie movie, 28 Days Later (2002), really split opinion even within the ranks of horror fandom, being different in tone to both the original film and its Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directed sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), despite the return of Boyle and Garland to the franchise. Here, Britain has been quarantined from the rest of the world for almost three decades, and this isolation, in conjunction with the virus-inflicted reduction in the human population, has resulted in societal and technological stagnation. One group has established a community on a small, walled off and tidally isolated island, in which a young boy named Spike lives with father and his unwell mother, to whom the boy is devoted. What clearly irked some viewers really resonated with me, as what unfolds is not the expected survival horror but a compelling coming-of-age story in which Spike is transformed by circumstance from an apprehensive kid being pushed to make his first kill to a determinedly self-reliant adventurer willing to risk all for the chance of finding medical help for his sick mother.
Some intriguing encounters and genuinely tense sequences, a sly bit of commentary about the technological changes that would have passed an isolated Britain by, and a nicely timed late-film appearance by Ralph Fiennes all climax in an emotionally charged scene that really got to me and had me wiping tears from my all-too empathic eyes. Were it not for an ending that – seriously creepy Jimmy Saville overtones aside – plays like a “to be continued” title card (the follow-up, The Bone Temple, has just been released to rave reviews), this may have sneaked its way onto the A list.
FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES
Despite the inventiveness of the premise of the first Final Destination film, it and its sequels have all had the same basic storyline – a group young people narrowly avert being killed in a major disaster thanks to an accurate premonition experienced by one of their number, only for them each to then be slaughtered in creatively gory ways as fate catches up with those who have previously dodged it. In essence, these are slasher movies with the twist that Death itself is the (invisible) monster stalking the teens. The thing is, there are only so many ways you can spin such a yarn, and by the time we reached the lacklustre 2009 The Final Destination I’d had my fill, and it took some persuading from a close friend to get me to give this latest spin a look. To my very real surprise, Final Destination: Bloodlines proved to be the best entry in the series since director James Wong’s original, being inventively plotted by screenwriters Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, from a story by themselves and Jon Watts, slickly directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, and boasting well defined and likeable characters, spectacular effects, as well as a very nice line in jet-black humour.
THE MONKEY
A man attempts to return a clockwork drumming monkey doll to the shopkeeper from whom he bought it, and we soon discover why when the monkey grins demonically and starts to bang its drum, and the shopkeeper is killed in absurdly spectacular fashion. The man reacts by taking the monkey outside and furiously burning to a crisp with a flame thrower he finds in the store. A few years later, this man has either died or departed (I failed to catch which), and his twin sons Hal and Bill Shelbourne are being raised by their mother. When looking through their father’s possessions one evening, the boys find a hat box in which the very intact clockwork monkey now resides. Curious to see it in action, Bill winds it up, and a short while later their babysitter is beheaded by a sushi chef. A second activation sees their mother die in an explosive accident in their kitchen, and a third results in the colourful death of the uncle who has become their guardian. Convinced that the monkey is evil incarnate, the twins bury it in a deep hole in the middle of nowhere, but 25 years later it enters their lives again and starts wreaking deadly havoc.
Director Osgood Perkins (who also plays the uncle) follows up his creepily atmospheric (and curiously audience dividing) Longlegs with an altogether more blackly humorous confection that may not be as hauntingly unsettling as its predecessor but is still a whole lot of sometimes gory fun. The titular monkey is suitably creepy (its set of human teeth is a nice touch), and the comically outrageous nature of the deaths make the film feel at times like a Final Destination movie with the chance and horror factors cranked up to 11. There’s a whiff of Nakata Hideo’s Dark Water in the way the monkey keeps showing up no matter what its owners do to bury or destroy it, and the plot touches on a whole range of themes, including sibling rivalry, bullying, fate, and the impermanence of human existence, even if that favourite genre cliché of estranged family members reunited by trauma gets another outing here. It’s aided by a solid pair of performances from Theo James as the adult Hal and Bill, and from Christian Convery as their younger incarnations, and I’ll also give a shout out to Colin O’Brien as Hal’s son Petey, and to Nicco Del Rio in a small but hilarious role as a novice priest. One of four films based on Stephen King stories to hit cinemas this year, only two of which I’ve so far seen.
SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE
Renowned for its explosive, over-the-top and sometimes gloriously absurdist action and violence, the 2022 Finnish wartime actioner Sisu pitted grizzled and middle-aged Aatami Korpi, a former commando with a fearsome reputation, against seemingly every Nazi on Finnish soil during WWII after they ambush him and steal his gold. Three years later, this sequel, once again from writer-director Jalmari Helander and starring Jorma Tommila as Aatami, picks up the story after the war has ended, and in what can’t help but feel intended a slice of modern geopolitical commentary, has Aatami relentlessly pursued by the former Russian commander who slaughtered his family.
Essentially, Sisu: Road to Revenge is more of the same, with logic and the laws of physics taking a back seat to some absurdly spectacular set-pieces, including a late film gag involving a missile ride that leads directly to a fist fight that is so outrageous but so beautifully executed that I actually laughed out loud and applauded. What again gives the action an unexpected emotional grounding is Jorma Tommila’s word-free but facially and bodily expressive performance as Aatami, which communicates his inner pain, physical suffering, anger and grim determination so vividly that he had me urging him forward at every seemingly impossible turn.
THE LOST BUS
In 2018, a school bus driver named Kevin McKay became trapped in the middle of a raging inferno with his 22 young passengers and two of their teachers during the deadliest wildfire in California’s history.
If you’re going to recreate a true story and give it a genuine feel for how things must have played out at the time, there are few directors more qualified than Paul Greengrass, he of United 93 (2006), Captain Phillips (2013) and 22 July (2018). His style is instantly recognisable here, particularly in the documentary-like coverage of the coordination efforts of the emergency and rescue services, many of whom are playing themselves, and in cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth’s relentlessly twitchy camera, an aspect that some others have found a little distracting. While it might have been nice to have McKay played by an unknown, Matthew McConaughey proves a solid choice for the role, as does America Ferrera as the teacher (her colleague is curiously excluded from the film) who reluctantly accompanies him on what should have been a straightforward evacuation, but which quickly transforms into a descent into hell. The CG recreation of the resulting inferno was vivid enough to almost have me wheezing along with the terrified occupants of the bus.
THE SHROUDS
Despite being the latest work from one of my favourite directors, it took me some considerable time to steel myself up for David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, primarily due to a central premise that touched a discomforting nerve in someone who has reach an age when the death of a loved one is no longer an abstract concept. The fact that this was Cronenberg’s cinematic response to the loss of his wife Carolyn only deepened my fear about where the director would take me. As it turned out, the frankly disturbing notion of graves that provide a video feed of the decaying corpse within for curious relatives to observe proved merely a trigger point for an intriguing slow-burn conspiratorial thriller that harks by to Cronenberg’s earlier work. With his narrow, drawn features and combed-back white hair, an arrestingly low-key Vincent Cassel can’t help but feel like a stand-in for Cronenberg himself, and it’s through his character that the film explores the experience of loss and grief, which it intriguingly and troublingly ties into the increasing modern reliance on AI as a substitute for human companionship.
TOGETHER
Not all is rosy with seemingly happy couple Tim and Millie as they prepare to relocate from their previous city home to a countryside region where Millie has landed a new teaching job – she’s all for lifelong commitment, and Tim’s hesitant reaction to her very public proposal at their farewell party drives a small but noticeable wedge between the two. Once installed in their new home, they decide to take advantage of the countryside location and follow a hiking trail into the woods, during which they get caught in a rainstorm and become hopelessly lost, then fall into an underground cave in which they elect to shelter until the weather improves. The thirsty Tim decides to quench his thirst by drinking from a nearby freshwater pool, and after sharing a bottle of wine that the hopeful Tim had brought with him, the two fall asleep by a makeshift fire. When they wake the following morning, they discover that they are mysteriously stuck together where their legs have touched each other in the night. With effort, they are able to prise themselves apart, then make their way out of the cave and back to their home but later discover that physical contact between them can cause their bodies to start melding.
What begins as an initially suggestive low-key body horror work (the image of two dogs staring motionlessly at each other during the opening scene is seriously creepy) later develops a wickedly humous streak. This first surfaces in a scene in which the two get the hots for each other and grab a quick shag in the students’ toilet at Millie’s school (take a guess which body parts start to meld here), and later when a confident Millie tapes a terrified Tim to a chair with the aim of separating their melded flesh with what I tagged from the moment I saw it as Chekov’s reciprocating saw. The subtext about relationships, commitment and the whole “you complete me” thing is impossible to miss, but it’s handled here with wit some nicely gloopy makeup effects and CG by first time feature director Michael Shanks, and it boasts winning lead performances from real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie.
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/22/experts-warn-of-threat-to-democracy-by-ai-bot-swarms-infesting-social-media[↩]
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-venezuela-oil-revenue-qatar-bank-b2901312.html[↩]
- https://www.nme.com/news/music/ai-generated-country-track-walk-my-walk-tops-us-billboard-chart-3908829[↩]
- https://youtu.be/TYNHYIX11Pc?si=ldyXr8hcDDVUIZCZ[↩]
- https://www.nme.com/news/music/bandcamp-has-banned-all-music-made-with-ai-3923071[↩]