While we still aren’t at the point where I am recommending anything, these next twenty-five films all have at least one redeeming feature. In fact, several of these are objectively good films that just weren’t for me.

200: The Toxic Avenger Unrated

This is a film that is firmly aimed at teenage boys so it shouldn’t be a massive surprise that it wasn’t for me.

199: The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants

Six films in and I’m still not convinced SpongeBob was intended for long-format. Also, the move to 3D animation was a mistake. This film looks like shit. They did manage to sneak Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys onto the soundtrack though, so points for that.

198: Ziam

A Muay Thai fighter verses a zombie army. It should have been a lot more fun than it was. I want heads kicked off or my money back.

197: Maria

Bit boring. Soz.

196: Guns Up

Kevin James plays a cop who becomes a mob enforcer, but like, in a nice way? He’s actually a good guy who only got involved in organised crime because he’s saving up to start a family restaurant. And besides, he works for a nice mafia. They have a code of honour or everything.  Look. It’s better you don’t think about the moral implicatiobs. No one who made the film thought about it. Do you really think you’re better than them?

And anyway, the set up is less important than the guns. This film really likes guns. Check the title. It’s Guns Up, not Guns Down, buddy. This film likes guns so much that you start to question the gun stance of other action movies. Was Death Wish woke? Spoiler alert: they get the restaurant.

195: David Bowie: The Final Act

It was brave to attempt a Bowie documentary so soon after the magnificent Moonage Daydream, and the idea to focus on the latter part of Bowie’s career is a smart one, but unfortunately the film spends a lot of time on the earlier stuff we already know and a lot of time on talking head interviews with people who are either just happy to be there (if you are hoping that Jayne Middlemiss is going to provide some new way at looking at Bowie’s work you are going to go away disappointed) or the fantasies of hangers on (nobody says “and Bowie was like, I’m going to paint a circle on my face, and I said, David, what about a lightning bolt?” but a few people get pretty close).

Some of the Tin Machine stuff was interesting though.

194: The Pickup

Bit underwhelming. Eddie Murphy is basically the straight man to Pete Davidson which, in my opinion, was a mistake. There’s a reason Mike Myers plays Shrek, not Donkey. You don’t make your funniest actor the straight man.

193: Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

A really lazy attempt to cash in on the nostalgia for the original. Instead of new jokes or songs, every thing from the first film is mined for any remaining humour. Not even mined. Fracked.

192: Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

If you had asked me to list the films I was most looking forward to in 2025, this would have been at the top of it. Mission Impossible: Fallout was a perfect action film. I loved Dead Reckoning Part One. That train scene. Oh my. Cruise seemed to have moved to a stage in his career where the only thing that mattered was the screen and the audience. Pure action. Pure cinema. All the time.

And then we get this. Three hours of Cruise being praised like a demigod. Old characters were needlessly killed. New characters were introduced just so they could shake their heads and say, “Ethan Hunt, you crazy son of a bitch”. Everyone. Explained. Everything. Sure, there are a couple of decent action scenes but the makers of this film spent so much time devising them they forgot to write a story to put between them. It doesn’t matter how nice the plates are in a restaurant if the chef forgets to put food on them.

191: Hot Milk

I like Deborah Levy’s work, but what makes her stand out is not so much what she writes but how she writes it. It is her prose style that makes her work shine. It wasn’t a huge surprise then, that an adaptation of Hot Milk would struggle. There wasn’t anything wrong with the direction or the acting or the writing, but there was something missing. There was no spark.

190: The Running Man

I have never been convinced by the argument that Hollywood is trying to make Glen Powell a thing. That they need a new matinee idol to save, or revive, a model of film-making that worked for them in the past. I think that Glen Powell is a talented actor with leading-man good looks and a lot of charisma who is trying to cement himself as an A-lister and various people at various studios agree with his assessment and think they could make some money from the situation. The interesting thing about the ‘Glen Powell as saviour of the star system’ narrative is that he often does his best work when he is sharing the billing (Twisters, Anyone But You) rather than leading it (Hit Man, and now this).

And while I do think this was the first genuine bad choice for Powell, I’m not sure the film’s biggest problem is its star. The film seems to be determined to never stray toward the cartoon-like set up of the Schwarzenegger version, but equally unwilling to give a gritty, dystopian view of a near future society that would create a public-murder-spree reality tv show. That need to keep things light, but not too light, led to weird decisions, like having five boss-level baddies that are just four normal men and one man in a mask. You need to either have five wild-looking baddies in fun costumes (ideally with Lee Pace, your best actor, not in a mask) or one baddy in a mask. The other four guys aren’t doing anything, which you know, because you kill three of them in one fight.

What we got then, was a film that is objectively better than the Schwarzenegger version but by being consistently ok instead of a bit naff with great moments.

189: War of the Worlds

Absolute garbage, clearly, but I went in with low expectations, and some of Ice Cube’s facial expressions are quite funny.

188: The Choral

Far be it from me to call into question the integrity of a national treasure, but Alan Bennet’s script for The Choral felt to me like a cut-and-shut of two old plays that he hadn’t been able to get to work on their own. There are two films worth of characters, many of whom are introduced and then forgotten. The mood switches between a maudlin storyline about an injured soldier returning to a town that has moved on without him and a knockabout sex comedy. Edward Elgar turns up for no discernible reason. The whole thing is a mess. Lovely location work though, and some world class one-liners.

187: Hallow Road

Oscar Wilde said that, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” I felt the same way about the ending of Hallow Road. 

The idea of Hallow Road is quite smart. A student is involved in a road crash: ninety percent of the film is her parents driving toward her. As they get closer, things get spookier. Unfortunately, the story itself is really stupid. Totally unbelievable nonsense. The worst kind of trash.

I’m going to give you the full story now, so stop reading if you want to watch the film without spoilers.

Alice is driving through a forest. She hits a girl who runs out from the trees. She stops the car and rings her parents. As her parents drive toward her we learn that she hasn’t called an ambulance, or the police, because she has taken MDMA. At this point the film steers firmly into the ‘wouldn’t you do anything to protect your children?’ territory, as Alice’s father plans to pretend he was driving the car and take the legal repercussions of her actions.

And no. As a parent, no. I would move heaven and earth to make my daughter’s life better but the second she gets behind the wheel of a car under the influence of drink or drugs she is, legally speaking, on her own. Anyone who risks other people’s lives in that way… jail. Here’s an idea for you, Alice. You need to get somewhere so badly, why not ring your parents? Your dad is willing to do a five year stretch because you killed someone while drinking under the influence. I reckon he will give you a lift to Aldershot.

A spooky lady turns up at the scene and…

Actually, no, can we discuss the forest first. The film leans heavily on Alice being in a giant expansive forest in the middle of nowhere, and I’m sorry, those don’t exist in England. There are no giant wildernesses left. There is no country road in England that doesn’t pass through a small village every two or three miles. As a nation we build everywhere and on everything. We don’t give a fuck. The government is literally in the process of passing a bill to allow crap housing estates to be built on what tiny fragments of protected countryside we have left. They are planning on putting a nuclear reactor on an RSPB reserve. Wherever Alice hit that girl, whatever woodland she was passing through, she will be within walking distance of a Tesco Express. That’s just England. That’s who we are. The film needed to be set in Canada.

Anyway, a spooky lady turns up and takes Alice’s phone and, it is implied, swaps her body with the dead girl’s, or something. The spooky lady is, mostly, really well written. Halfway through threatening Alice she says, “we say pardon, not what,” and I thought that was a really nice moment, giving her creepiness a particular brand of Englishness. I say mostly well written because when Alice tells her she hit a deer, not a girl, the spooky lady tells her that there aren’t deer in the area. 

THERE ARE DEER EVERYWHERE IN ENGLAND, ESPECIALLY IN THE BLOODY FORESTS.

I’m missing quite a lot out here but we then get three endings, only one of which made me hoot with laughter. 

I’m being mean. I’m sorry. I like the actors. I thought the dialogue in the script was good and that a simple change of location and a few tweaks to the plot would have made this a really tight thriller. I think Babak Anvari’s debut film, Under the Shadow, is a masterpiece. But boy oh boy, I hated this film.

186: Star Trek: Section 31

It’s a pilot for a tv show that clearly wasn’t going to work. I paid £6 for the dvd so I could watch it. Fucking livid mate.

185: Jurassic World: Rebirth

Since the end credits ran at the Jurassic Park premiere, nearly 22 years ago, nobody, not even Steven Spielberg has had a clue what to do with the franchise. Unfortunately/fortunately, whatever you do with it, no matter how misguided, it will turn a profit, so these things keep coming. This was neither the best or the worst of the bunch but as with all of them it forgot that what made the original stand out wasn’t the big dinosaurs, or the little dinosaurs, it was its charm, and its wit. Jurassic Park wasn’t a big movie made great by its special effects, it was a small movie that just happened to be set in a theme park full of dinosaurs that looked great because of world class special effects.

Next time lucky, maybe?

184: Plankton: The Movie

Like all SpongeBob movies, it could have been a shorter, but there is a decent Devo reference in one of the songs.

183: Red Sonja

A film hampered largely by its budget and the fact that by following the model of Gladiator quite closely you notice that it isn’t as good as Gladiator. With the budget they had, they might have been better going for a quest narrative, letting the location do a lot of the heavy lifting.

182: Marching Powder

Do you remember that episode of the Simpsons where Homer brings the thirty-foot sandwich home from the work’s summer party and continues to eat it for days afterward, even as it starts to fester and mould. When he can’t go to Duff Gardens because he has given himself food poisoning he says, “Stupid sandwich, this is all your fault! Oh, how can I stay mad at you?”

Well, swap ‘thirty-foot sandwich’ for ‘cocaine’ and ‘Homer Simpson’ for ‘the makers of this film’.

Marching Powder really does seem to be reaching for a story in which a man deep into his forties and still regularly taking cocaine before getting involved in casual violence is given an ultimatum by his wife to clean up his act or clear out. But no, her glimpse of an escape, her chance to go back to school and better her family’s life is thrown away when her husband decides he will do slightly less cocaine and get into slightly less violence. “You’re a cunt, but you’re my cunt,” she actually says as she gives up on having anything in her life except picking up after a selfish piece of shit. And that’s it. That’s your happy ending.

181: Snow White

I’m just going to say it. Making this film was a bad idea. One way or another they managed to upset everyone. Proper horrorshow.

180: The Electric State

This got absolutely destroyed by the critics which I thought was a little unfair. Sometimes critics seem to act collectively, smell blood and try to outdo each other in their takedowns. The Electric State isn’t a very good movie but I thought it was more of a heroic failure than an absolute turkey. Sure, they spent a lot of money that could have been spent better elsewhere but that’s literally true of any transaction under capitalism.

179: Schmeichel

Ever wondered what retired millionaire footballer Peter Schmeichel is up to now? Wonder no more. He’s happy.

178: Kenny Dalgleish

Quick run through of a career which, the film implies, was like playing FIFA on easy until it hit the hard wall of having to deal with Heysel and Hillsborough and their aftermaths. Really good on the serious stuff but I couldn’t care less about his playing career.

177: Hedda

Rich people doing rich people stuff. Not my sort of thing.

176: Harvest

One of those slow, dreamy films you have to be in the mood for, I think. I wasn’t in the mood for it.