"A gem of the early sound era, Chandu The Magician is also one of the purest attempts to conjure on the cinema screen the flavour of a certain kind of pulp storytelling..." - new (!) at This Island Rod: thisislandrod.blogspot.com/2026/01/chan...

New on This Island Rod - yes, you read that right - I look at the Citizen Kane of pulp adventure movies, William Cameron Menzies and Marcel Varnel's Chandu The Magician: thisislandrod.blogspot.com/2026/01/chan...

Here it is: Confessions of a Film Freak 2025, the biggest yet, featuring comments on 76 films and my Favourite Films of the Year list: filmfreedonia.com/2025/12/29/c...

Viewing: McG's Terminator Salvation. I started watching this once back when, didn't finish. I should have left it that way. Generic post-'poc shoot-em-up in Terminator skin.

Rewatch: Jack Smight's Midway. Apt follow-up viewing to Tora! Tora! Tora!. Patched together on the cheap but at least, unlike Emmerich's take, doesn't turn subject into Star Wars; finicky, nuts-and-bolts take on the agonies of this kind of warfare.

Rewatch: John Landis' Into The Night. "When you die you don't go to a Ramada Inn." "How do you know?"

Rewatch: Ken Hughes' Cromwell. As a timely reminder that even kings, eventually, can find themselves in the dock.

My review of The Force Awakens from just over 10 years ago. My lukewarm-ness on this felt out of step and exposed then; now of course it feels like I was far too kind. filmfreedonia.com/2015/12/17/s...

Rewatch: Fleischer-Masuda-Fukasaku's Tora! Tora! Tora! "There's your confirmation!"

I'm kind of pulling for Rose Byrne to win the Oscar now, in part because I still remember her getting patronised by Aussie critics at the time of Two Hands, as they all foamed at the mouth for Heath Ledger and Bryan Brown.

I always feel so intensely flattered and humbled when David Hudson includes me in these...

Too many people seem to be preoccupied with rescuing/restoring The Magnificent Ambersons and not nearly enough with actually watching The Magnificent Ambersons.

Viewing: Michael Lehmann's Hudson Hawk. At times hit the wiseguys-do-Losey's Modesty Blaise vibe it seemed to be aiming for, but nobody involved had anything like the finesse required. A serious mess, but still, by '90s bomb standards it was Andrei Rublev.

Viewing: George Cukor's Dinner At Eight. Shows it stage roots a little raw at points, but still works dynamite in surprisingly jagged oscillations of tragedy and comedy and a median of everyday angst.

It's very telling that the crux of the argument has been manufactured as whether Ross was defending himself in some manner, and not what gave him and his fellows any right to create that situation in the first place.

Finished The Terror. Generally a strong series, although some revisions of the book were baffling. Admittedly, Crozier joining a psychic shamanic cult who let Tuunbaq eat out their tongues and play them like human bagpipes would have been hard to visualise.

At all times, and in all places, one basic truth must be constantly spoken and enforced: the state is the servant of the people. The people are not servants of the state. The state exists for their good and welfare, not the other way around.

Started watching the TV adaptation of Dan Simmons' The Terror, 3 eps in. Beautifully mounted and generally faithful even if the direction's a bit mannered in places (bloody Edward Berger on the first two). Jared Harris customarily great.

Disgusting. And all the more disgusting for its inevitability. I hope the US realises what it's looking like more and more to the rest of the world.

Status update:

Not to play into fond fantasies but listening to Trump recently it's truly striking how old and tired and borderline coherent he seems. It took over three years doing the job to wear Biden down that much.

I hate this moment in time so deeply sometimes I can hardly breathe.

I once knew a man who'd been warned by doctors to stop drinking or he'd drop dead. He didn't and, of course, died. Trump supporters remind me of him - the pleasure of the night of drunken ecstasy is all that matters, no matter how it's rotting them out.

Rewatch: Mario Bava's Knives of the Avenger. Such a nifty movie, cunningly and artfully executed on a very tight budget, simple yet fascinatingly complex. Also, Cameron Mitchell was The Man. Even Space Mutiny couldn't defeat him.

Rewatch: David Bruckner's The Ritual. I'd half-forgotten what a little banger this one is - creepy, intense, exceptionally well-acted.

In other news, Operation Change The Subject was a brilliant success.

I'll always find critiquing the plots of comic book movies like they're serious sci-fi intensely silly. It's a mode of storytelling closer to the Brothers Grimm or Ovid than to Isaac Asimov.

Samuel Johnson was of course right about patriotism and scoundrels, but I doubt he knew how right...

Psychotic bullshit.

Rewatch: Wolfgang Petersen's Troy. So the plot's fresh in my head for when the sequel comes out later this year.

Rewatch: John McTiernan's The 13th Warrior. A very flawed film I still feel real love for. It's plainly patched together, but it has a great story attached to the last of the truly old-school epic film productions.

Happy new year, friends and fellows. I propose this as the anthem for 2026: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd6J...

The last sunset of 2025 here was a blazing promise peeking out from under the swirling cloud of a thunderstorm, which feels very apt and I'm taking it to be a good omen.

Confessions of a Film Freak 2025. A year of film comment in one place. 76 films. Dissent and devotion, argument and acclaim. filmfreedonia.com/2025/12/29/c...

I wrote about the book once, aeons ago: englishoneoworst.blogspot.com/2011/06/inco...

Rewatch: Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. Alas, I still find this a flatly directed and shticky take on a terrific novel, chiefly distinguished by a great cast having a blast.

Time-and-dimensional-travelling soldier and zeppelin pilot. Yes, sometimes it pays to read SFF.

Confessions of a Film Freak 2025. A year of film comment in one place. 76 films. Dissent and devotion, argument and acclaim. filmfreedonia.com/2025/12/29/c...

Viewing: Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power. One of those classed-up B-movies Clint did a few of late-90s-early-00s, and a good one, although the denouement's a bit weak. Seriously stacked cast.

...Vale Brigitte Bardot. No more words needed there. In memoriam, my look at her last starring role, Roger Vadim's fascinating Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were A Woman:

Here it is: Confessions of a Film Freak 2025, the biggest yet, featuring comments on 76 films and my Favourite Films of the Year list: filmfreedonia.com/2025/12/29/c...

Rewatch: Zoltan Korda's Sahara. "You dare to insult the Fuhrer?" "That would take an artist. I am only a mechanic."

Discussion of Stephen Lang's range elsewhere reminded me that my first point of reference for him, oddly perhaps, is Uli Edel's Last Exit To Brooklyn, as the doomed, closeted union hero.

This holiday season, freely indulge one of the greatest pleasures known to humankind - telling other people how and why they're wrong.

I think that just about does me for movies of 2025. I'm resigned to not catching The Secret Agent or Marty Supreme, the only likely award big-hitters I haven't caught.

Viewing: James Vanderbilt's Nuremberg. Gimmicky and overblown, but quite watchable, and has quite a bit of history's most heartwarming sight: arrogant Nazis shoved into small cells.

Is it just me or are those new Avengers trailers kinda shit?

Viewing: Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides. Both a bad Christmas movie and an ideal Christmas movie.

Christmas mood:

Viewing: Scott Cooper's Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Nice try, but becomes a death march of earnestness.