Deep Cover (2025): It’s so rare to have actual, genuine, laugh your head off fun at a movie. For my pretentious mug, at least. But when a movie walks the line of cringe to perfection, it produces something that can only be described as hilarity. Deep Cover is one of those flicks that just clicked. An excellent cast, with Bryce Dallas Howard, Nick Mohammed and a delightful Orlando Bloom (amongst other very familiar faces) make their way from actors playing actors to actors playing actors playing undercover criminals. It might not be the most original idea ever, but it all comes together so incredibly well, that you can’t really hold it against director Tom Kingsley & co. I think there’s a low ceiling to ratings these kind of movies, but in lieu of a higher rating, it gets movie of the week. 7
28 Years Later (2025): It hasn’t been too long since I rewatched the first two movies of the series, in preparation for this one. With Danny Boyle and Alex Garland reunited, the hopes were high. The result…is satisfactory. As I’ve said many times, there is little untreated ground in the zombie apocalypse genre. 28YL assembles familiar elements to create a familiar story – father initiates son in the “kill to survive” world, to become of service in their small, faith-based-conservative looking community. But, really, this movie is made up of two parts, one for the father and one for the mother. It’s the latter that makes 28YL interesting, even if you do have to accept parts of it as fairy-tale, not gritty, unflinching realism of the first half. It’s all fine, sounds good, has moments of haunting tension, but these are interspersed with less compelling sequences and some highly questionable character motivations that take you out of it too much for my taste. 7
F1: The Movie (2025): I think filmmakers feel this obligation to make popcorn movies longer in order to justify trips to the cinema. There’s no other obvious reason why this softcore F1 flick would otherwise be more than two hours thirty long. It’s not a hassle, because there’s some entertainment to be had, just that there’s always a better movie lying there, beyond excess runtime. To be fair, though, I don’t think the runtime is what put me off this one. I’ve followed F1 religiously for my whole life and thought Drive to Survive was painfully vanilla, and this really takes it up a notch as far as anything pertaining to the actual racing goes. The inaccuracies are painful to sit through – you can’t tell me that two cars, supposedly running 15th and 22nd, have bad pit-stops one after the other, but at a delta of just two seconds, and somehow they come out next to each other on track. I can shut off my brain for a lot of the ridiculous and implausible stuff that happens, but it really broke the immersion for me. This was always going to be a product, of the ever-growing portfolio of products that F1 owners Liberty Media have put together to promote the sport, so I was resigned to that. I’ll bet clear: for an F1 fan, this is almost unredeemable. It’s a bit of a shame, because some of the unusual vantage points during the race are fun to watch, and the cast does a good job to keep this entertaining, particularly Bardem and Condon, who complement Pitt’s easy charm. But – I’ll take a step back here – I reckon for someone who has no idea how F1 works, this by-the-numbers, dramatic and kind of entertaining movie might actually be an OK watch. Far from Rush (2013), close to Gran Turismo (2023). 6
Candy Land (2022): It starts with a bit of a bang, depicting some intimacies of the lives sex workers lead in a seedy truck stop. The movie treats its subjects with a healthy dose of humanity, even as it proves to ambitious in the number of characters it tries to flesh out. A newcomer challenges the status quo, even if the move is obvious within the genre template, which makes the second half of the movie straightforward. Some nice performances, led by Olivia Luccardi, ultimately make Candy Land a decent stop. 6
The Dictator (2012): Talking of suitable and timely things, I rewatched this one a few days ago. I didn’t like it much on first viewing and I can’t say it grow on me very much on the second one. Baron Cohen’s character is, in typical fashion, crude and preposterous, but without the semblance of reality to his interactions, there’s a safety to the whole thing that takes away its edge. Then again, maybe it’s just that the jokes aren’t good enough, with the result a series of mild moments of amusement interspersed with flat and uninteresting set-pieces. 5
tributary stu 