Watched A Man Called Otto Tom Hanks version of A Man Called Ove completely fails at the black comedy inherent in the story, don't show him dangling then falling from a noose and play schmaltzy music. It's not sad, it's funny. Hanks is wrong for this remake, but the remake is just wrong

Watched Riverfront Romance She buys the house of her dreams but clearly gets the cheap survey cos she's woken up the day after by drilling He's the manager of the hydroelectric dam project The thing is we never really see the river/lake or the damage that'll be caused rending the plot moot

Watched Picking Peaches I liked the little animated drop-ins, and the slapstick action set pieces are good, but I am always a little disturbed when Harry Langdon plays a married character. It don't seem right.

Watched Grace And Goliath Hollywood superstar comes to Belfast to make a film, money gets pulled so he has to stay with his hotel cleaner and her family. Tone deaf, needlessly sentimental and particularly inaccurate about the NHS, would have benefited from an actual star in the lead

Watched The Astronaut Kate Mara has no fear of typecasting despite this being the second film where she plays an astronaut who has a traumatic re-entry into earth who is also the white adopted daughter of a black father. It is better than Fant4stic. It also has the same plot as ET.

Watched The Woman In Cabin 10 Have you seen The Lady Vanishes? That, but with slightly less courage in its convictions. And largely a waste of a bank holiday cast. Its nice to see Keira on the other side of a Guardian desk though

Watched The Lost Husband Weepy where Leslie Bibb's widow runs from her lousy Mom to her aunt's farm with her kids and slowly heals her trauma by singing to cows and getting locked in a cheese fridge overnight with a maturing-like-a-fine-wine Josh Duhamel. Even her kids know he's too good for her

Watches Oddity Smashing, properly creepy haunted house horror. A year after her sister is murdered, blind occult expert visits the house she died in where her bro-in-law lives with his new girlfriend. She also brings a wooden golem. Perfectly played with one killer jump scare and spot on final shot

Watched Pumpkin Pie Wars He is a chef and the son of a small town baker She is an accountant who does the books in her Mum's small town bakery. The parents have been feuding for years over a pumpkin pie competition, so this is Pie-Romeo and Pie-Juliet, without a pie-balcony and pie-double suicide

Watched Discontinued Boilerplate US snarky millenial snarks about for a day and then contemplates suicide just as Langston Fishburne (yes!) tells the world they are living in a simulation about to end. High concept, sloppy execution: it doesn't know what to do with its metaphysics so just snarks

Hearing even a *reference* to The Monster Mash ANY time of the year is infuriating. The song absolutely sucks and modern civilization shouldn’t even be aware of it. You should not and cannot and MUST NOT defend it. Let the worms of history finally have their feast.

Watched Love In Aruba He's a door-to-door travelling wind turbine salesman off to sell in Aruba She's a teacher who has taken the gig as a babysitter for his daughter Before you can say Aruba, Jamaica ooh I wanna take ya... They're into each other, snog and he gets a free babysitter

Watched 7 Footprints To Satan A silent transition film that has the feel of a whole serial in an hour and tropes of a dark house horror, without being scary. I sadly guessed the deal from the start, but Creighton Hale's double takes at the weirdness are still fun. Thelma Todd is icing on the cake

Watched Pumpkinhead a) it doesn't look anything like a pumpkin b) Stan Winston can make a grotesque looking creature but can he direct a film? (Technically yes, successfully, not so much) Kids in cabin accidentally kill a kid whose Dad messes with force wot not should mess. Its a mess, no kidding

Watched Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead(2024) Black family notwithstanding this remakes the original beat by beat, if having a more depressingly social reason for covering up June Squibb's death.The kids are a mixed bag,luckily Nicole Ritchie knows how to zhuzh up a comedy but broadly pointless

Watching High Flying Romance It's a competitive kite flying romance! Sadly it doesn't trust the drama inherent in competitive kite flying and so plays around with a bog standard widower dad and the babysitter plot and only occasionally sitting down and discussing aerodynamics and kite shapes

Watched The Portable Door Australian made stab at the Tom Holt magical whimsical work satire, set in a quite Brisbaney London. The Jim Henson shop does the fantasy stuff well, and a pretty stacked supporting cast commit but the lead couple never quite gels and its unclear who the audience is

Zohran Mamdani caught lying that he understood Plato’s allegory of the cave, yet when asked to explain it, he seemed to instead explain Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacra and Simulation where reality has been replaced by symbols and signs, which seems similar to Plato’s theory but is not the same

Watching Martin Luther The top pulse pounding theological epic of'53 is not a bad primer on the start of the Reformation even if it is inevitably lots of people standing in rooms and arguing.Despite being deemed a heretic at a number of points he doesn't even get burnt at the stake.Banned in Quebec

Watched My Perfect Romance It's a dating app romance where she is the smart app designer and he is the feckless boss who is constantly belittled by his Mum because he is feckless.It would be fun if there wasn't the certainty of the feckless man getting together with the smart woman hanging over it

Watched Satan's Triangle A Doug McClure TV movie of that makes the most of its'copter set. Rescue pilots answer a distress call in the Burmuda Triangle, only Kim Novak is left alive and she does a very long flashback. Has a good twist that renders the flashback pointless and is spoiled by the title

Watching Stiller and Meara Nothing Is Lost Ben Stiller is at his most self consciously insufferable telling the story of his parents (thus his own story).The story is interesting, but never considers Anne as the funny woman in a mixed double act. And would it hurt to just show one routine through?

Watched 28 Years Later There's always something exciting about a Danny Boyle film, good or bad, this wasn't going to be a standard sequel. The story it ends up being is almost incidental to the zombies, and quite poorly set up. Yet it is full of emotion while Dod Mantle lets loose with the visuals

Watching The Road Less Travelled She's a country singer about to get married who decides she wants her dead Mom's wedding dress.So she shifts her bachelorette from Napa to her home town where she deals with her grumpy gran and an old flame. Hard to be on her side as she only has 2(alcoholic)friends

Watching Make Mine Mink Not as sleezy as the poster suggests, it's a kooky flatmate heist movie. TT's Army vet,a nervous ninny,poor man's M.Rutherford and Hattie Jacques start doing fur coat robberies to cover for Billie Whitelaw's innocent ex-con who's from a different movie.Pretty good for its ilk

Watched The Return Of The Vampire Bela Lugosi does a proper Dracula sequel in all but name when his vamp Armand Tesla is revived due to a WWII bomb. Blitz setting and revenge motivation paper over the cracks and feels like a missing Universal not least as the emotional story really works

Watching Fear The Night So after WickerMan(2006)I thought I would check up on modern Neil LaBute: hence this pretty eipey home invasion movie from '23. Bachelorette party gets interrupted by gang of ne'er-do-wells. Maggie Q's ex soldier is fine but it takes forever to warm up and has minimal action

Watched Tulips In Spring She's an interior designer who grew up on a tulip farm He's the tulip agent for the tulip farm She comes home in the middle of a big job cos her Dad has hurt himself, and gets embroiled in the world of competitive tulip farming. Contains the absolute worst boss in the world

Happy International Crisp Sandwich Day from Andalusia, Haciendo (Mercadona own brand) Serrano Ham Crisps (slightly ruffled), hand-pressed. #crispsandwichday

Watched Ramrod Veronica Lake tries her hand at ranching but her neighbour wants the land and breaks the law ro intimidate her. Joel McRea is her ranch biis, enforcer and Ramrod and the moral get pretty murky. Fascinating with its proto-petticoat feminism that it doesn't quite know what to do with

Watched The Hole In The Wall Bonkers pre-code crine drama where Claudette Colbert who went to prison for a crime sge didn't commit, joins a gang as a faje medium if they will kidnap the grandkid of the woman who set her up. Much weirdness ensues: bonkers in that pre-code'what even is a story' way

Watched The Wicker Man (2006) He's made plenty of films since, but this Nic Cage version of TWM basically killed Neil LaBute's career. And whilst all the ingredients of the original are here, his script is laughably on the nose, and Cage is out of control. It really is risibly entertaining

Watched Love Unleashed She lost her dog He found her dog Perhaps if they had anything resembling personalities I might have cared more but the dog is livelier than these wet fish

Watched Millennium This was the straight to video sci-fi film that most divided my peers, and I see why. Shonky effects, but big ideas, fun conspiracy/time paradox underpinnings and a flat Kris Kristofferson performance. But Cheryl Ladd saves the film with terrific Halo Jones style 2000AD haircut

Watching Just My Type She is a lifestyle journo off on a break when she bumps into He is a reclusive mystery author (though hot unlike actual reclusive authors) She gets an interview, they fall in love and she gets the exclusive that he's giving up mysteries to write a kids book about an owl

Watching If You Could Only Cook Jean Arthur shines in this thin screwball where Marshall's car mogul befriends Arthur who is looking for a job. He pretends to also be jobless and they tag team as a married cook/butler combo for a mobbed up bootlegger.A bit short but the leads are delightful together

Watched Heroes Of The Underground Unusual Shaw Brothers Sino-Japanese war spy film, playing a typical resistance style story with the Japanese closing in, using their female Chinese operative who may also be a double agent. A little tight, but it keeps you guessing and has a decent action ending

Watching Jezebel Bette Davis is deliciously capricious in this slave era New Orleans fancy-em-up. Her crime is wearing red at a ball, and she pays for it in spades. Not sure what she sees in Henry Fonda though, and the ending doesn't ring true, but she's a delight to watch being bad

Watching Royal Hearts James Brolin stars and directs this King Ralph Ruritanian romance with rancher cum King Brolin giving himself a lover as well as his daughter. Solves the economy's problem by turning the palace into a ranch, then - in a turn for the genre - dissolves the monarchy for democracy

This is absolutely wild. The sheer power consumption the Kindle app must churn through to facilitate this wrong-headed decision to not let us own stuff. blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-d... via Corey Doctorow

Watched The Sunshine Boys Walter Matthau is terrific here as part of the double act who hate each other but the minute George Burns comes on screen his excellent old man makeup falls down. But Burns is rarely as funny as his script and it all looks a bit stagey and pat (final gag doesn't help)

Watching Marie Galante French Telegram Girl Marie gets trapped on a ship travelling the world, and then dumped in South America. Trying to work her way home via Panama she becomes a person of interest of four men, one of whom is probably an international terrorist and one is Spencer Tracy. Chewy

Damnit. Another blown fuse in my Mum's house in Spain. There wasn't much food in the fridge/freezer but enough to make it mildly grody again and an hour of deep cleaning, not what I want after a day of flying

Watching The North Witch Canadian women go to the woods to find the Barren Cabin, a mysterious, haunted shack that appears to move around and entraps, drives mad and kills anyone who finds it. Some of them find it: it entrap, drives them mad and kills them. Surprisingly entertaining despite that

Watched Tron: Ares In which a tech company CEO happily commits genocide over a newly discovered sentient life form of slaves, happy that she has set her own personal Jesus loose in the world so she can coin it in by 3D printing orange trees.

Watched Killing Faith aka The Devil In The Dust Guy Pearce and DeWanda Wise class up this bitty supernatural Western about a pilgrimage to try to cure a creepy child of her death touch. There are good set pieces and impressive bloody FX work but it doesn't quite hang together thematically

Watched John Candy, I Like Me When a biographical documentary starts with the loving speeches at the funeral you are probably in for a soft soap job,though Bill Murray tries to find bad things to say about Candy, no-one does. So very few revelations but not a bad celebration of this life and talent

Watched Vicious Stab at a mainly one handed supernatural or is it mental health horror when Dakota Fanning is delivered a box that will torment her and give us plenty of opportunities to look away(she cuts off a lot of her own toes).Starts well but gets repetitive searching for shocks over substance

Watched To The Devil A Daughter Satansploitation from the godless 70's, aka Christopher Lee loves some Dennis Wheatley. Lee and Kinski are good, and Denholm Elliot is properly antsy, only improbably blonde Widmark is off, and that doesn't spoil the slightly sleezy guff. Not The Omen, but close