The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025): Suddenly, Tim Key is everywhere. Ok, he’s mostly here and in The Paper (2025), but his presence is so…presence-y, that it feels like a lot. This might also be the reason why some people will shy away from TBoWI, a movie about a loner widow who asks his favourite singer to perform for him on a small, remote island where he lives. Said loner, played by Key, intentionally stresses your patience nerves, but if you get over that, you’re in for a very sweet and endearing story. It’s all beautifully shot and emotionally resonant, even if it doesn’t do as much as it could to avoid genre templates. And talking of genre, it’s nice to see a British music-laden movie that’s not made by John Carney, haha. Director James Griffiths doesn’t dwell as much on the centrality of the music, but it is an essential element in allowing TBoWI to impress upon you. 8
The Running Man (2025): Seeing Edgar Wright be mediocre is very sad to me. He scraped by with Last Night in Soho, which at least had a memorable aesthetic and a good mix of leads (including, funny, Thomasin McKenzie once more). Why redo TRM, I kept wondering throughout. Sure, Glen Powell is an age-appropriate Tom Cruise action hero and fun to watch, but the storylines (risking his life to ensure the wellbeing of his family, dealing with a Machiavellian media network, setting up the new resistance movement) are just blasé. The whole concept of the show doesn’t sound like it would work, even if I did really like the idea that anyone can contribute to the demise of the protagonists. Just when I thought it would do a cool in-universe cross-over, the scenes featuring the Americanos were trimmed down to the bone and moralistic, leaving no room for anyone to have actual fun with them. That’s what the movie mostly lacks – a sense of actual entertainment. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the 1987 adaptation, but I remember it as being more camp and loose. Strange that they didn’t try to do more with this one. 6
Queens of the Dead (2025): The Romero legacy lives on, with daughter Tina Romero’s first feature length film – and a zombie one at that! As the title implies, we’re dealing with queer zombies and a lot of zombies in drag in this one, which is a spin I don’t think I’ve seen. It works well to begin with, walking the tight rope between comedy and creeps, doubled by an undercurrent of social commentary. But as the movie progresses, it becomes more tame, with beats so familiar that it transcends homage (nice makeup) and verges into tedious. That said, it does just about enough right to stand on its own, thanks in part to some lively performances, particularly from Jaquel Spivey and Tomas Matos. 6
Fackham Hall (2025): You look at the pieces of this one, and it should be one of the funniest movies of the year. Instead, it’s mostly a dud. Starring the likes of Damian Lewis, Katherine Waterstone, Thomasin Mckenzie and Tom Felton, directed by Jim O’Hanlon (of Your Christmas or Mine fame), this is a wannabe Downton Abbey x Naked Gun. Naturally, with so much talent on board, there will be some moments of actual fun to be had, but most of it is just tired set-ups and executions of familiar tropes. At no point did I feel like Fackham Hall tried to be ambitious or gutsy, settling for a lowest common denominator kind of approach. Shame. 5
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (2025): I didn’t much like the first movie of the now-franchise, to the point that I skipped the second one. The odds of me remembering it almost ten years later would’ve been low regardless. In this third installment we get the old-gen/new-gen crossover – Justice Smith is the only one I kind of liked. The rest were, well, as lifeless as this movie. How can this kind of flick be so humourless and devoid of chemistry? Having to juggle so many characters is probably why nobody gels with anyone else. Not even Rosamund Pike’s aggressive South African accent could distract from the series of set-ups and CGI magic that the plot wanted to befuddle us with. Strange to me that there are fans of these things. 5
tributary stu 
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