Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025): Going mostly blind into this (even though I intended to watch the show, after “discovering” Matt Johnson), I wasn’t very sure where it was going to go. We meet Matt and Jay (McCarrol), who seem to be picking up where they left off twenty-ish years ago – with Matt proposing a boisterous plan for their two person band to gain the notoriety they need to finally concert their favourite venue. Matt is clearly the guy with the energy and the plans, whereas Jay is the talented one, just about tolerating his bandmate. Things take an interesting turn after they discover an unexpected mcguffin and we go on a romp that’s more about their friendship, than the greater achievements they might attain. The movie just has this fantastic energy and is a lot of fun to sit through, which is why I’ll wholeheartedly recommend it, even without any prior knowledge on it. 8
Power Ballad (2026): Is this my least favourite John Carney movie? I guess it is. Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas star in a story inspired by the Robbie Williams “scandal”, wherein the singer was accused of not properly crediting/rewarding Ray Heffernan for his contribution to the song Angels. This is a set-up that doesn’t lead to the familiar feel-good energy of previous Carney movies, and clearly closest to Begin Again (2013). But what bugged me more was that it wasn’t as musically rich or as narratively honest, preferring a curated trip down “getting one’s due” road, that never even tries to throw in a curveball. 6
L’Aventura (2025): Sophie Letourneur starred, wrote and directed this faux-reality family trip through Sardinia, which is the cinematic equivalent of spending more than an hour alone with someone else’s children. That said, just because parts of the movie aren’t at all pleasant to sit through and there’s no narrative arc to speak of, doesn’t mean L’Aventura is a failed experience. If anything, I kind of enjoyed the little editing tricks that conveyed the familiar sense of losing track of time and events during a family holiday, where days and meals and beaches just blend together. There’s no faulting Letourneur for the veracity of what she’s putting the viewer sit through, but I did find myself wondering whether this kind of cinema shouldn’t be best served in a shorter format. I mean, I’m no parent, so might be why I struggled to get beyond the annoyance of one hyperactive, unmanageable child, but that’s just me. 6
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere (2026): Watching this, I wondered why I never felt targeted by the manosphere. Slowly, but most assuredly, the bleak revelation came upon me: I am too old for this shit. But I have been hearing Scott Galloway & co. rumble about and against it for a while now, so I needed to know what was going on. Unfortunately, this Netflix documentary isn’t really the place to go to get this knowledge and understanding. Theroux ping-pongs between a few influencers of the manosphere, people I had naturally never heard of, and tries to poke at their philosophy of life. What’s hiding behind these misogynistic personas, how do their partners cope with their behaviour and is it really all because they all came from broken homes? These are questions there either aren’t very good answers to, or that fail to convey anything deeper about the docu’s subjects because there’s nothing to convey. I’m not sure how this topic could have been handled more compellingly, but I bet there would have been a way. 6
Remarkably Bright Creatures (2026): I can enjoy the oft-maligned mushiness of Netflix movies when they veer more towards romcom than Hallmark, but when it’s the latter case, I find myself challenged, in a place between “it’s ok” and some kind of fierce loathing. To be fair, though, there’s not much to loathe in RBC, where Sally Field plays a caretaker at an aquarium and teaches valuable life lessons to the flaky Lewis Pullman. Been there, done that, no? It’s all executed well enough to neither excite, nor insult. If you connect with it, odds are you won’t mind it doesn’t dare to do much, but if, like me, you end up on the outside looking it, you’ll grumble some. 6
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