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Send Help (2026)

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Starring : Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien Directed By : Sam Raimi Where It’s available : Disney Plus (all territories) Sam Raimi’s ‘Send Help’ is unquestionably a *Sam Raimi film* - and people who appreciate his work will know exactly what that means - but it’s also a hodgepodge of different genres. It’s part survival film, part slasher film, part workplace comedy - but all the parts work in concert and the result is a film that is more than the sum of its parts. The 500 mile view seems simple enough - Rachel McAdams stars as Linda Liddle, an overworked, overlooked office drone who works in ‘strategy and planning’ at a Fortune 500 company. Dylan O’Brien plays her boss, Bradley Preston, an overbearing, entitled business bro. The two of them are the only survivors of a plane crash in the gulf of Thailand after their plane goes down en route to an acquisitions meeting in Bangkok. Thankfully, Linda is an avid study and reader of such books as The SAS Survival Guide, and a super fan of the t...
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Project Hail Mary (2026)

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Starring : Ryan Gosling, Sandra Huller, Lionel Boyce Directed by : Phil Lord, Chris Miller Where It’s Available : MGM+ (a special channel on Amazon Prime)  On the surface, Project Hail Mary is a simple premise - a sci-fi story about a ‘normal dude’ (Ryan Gosling) trying to save the earth from doom (the sun is slowly burning out - leading to a potential cascade as the earth cools and falls into a permanent ice age).  The ‘regular dude forced into becoming an astronaut’ trope has been done before (Armageddon and Space Cowboys come to mind) but for my money, it has never brought this level of thoughtfulness and heart along with it. Ryan Gosling’s Ryland Grace is an ex-scientist working as a science teacher in middle America when he’s recruited by Sandra Huller’s no-nonsense nameless-government agent, Eva Pratt, to assist with Project Hail Mary - the last-ditch attempt to save humanity by slinging a few astronauts across the cosmos in the hope that whatever they find out there is ...
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Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

  Starring : Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, et. Al Directed By : Rian Johnson Available on : Netflix Wake Up Dead Man is the third in the Benoit Blanc series of whodunnit stories - a film that once again showcases Rian Johnson’s gift with dialogue and clever plotting mechanics. It’s a film that, while not perfect, closes out what may be one of the highest-quality trilogies that you’ll see in modern film and also features a genuine starring turn by Josh O’Connor. It’s twisty, turny, timey-wimey and if you liked the first two films in the series you’ll almost certainly like this one as well. As is always the story with these types of films (the Agatha Christie-style murder mystery), we first meet the players - which this time around centres completely around a catholic church in upstate New York, including the rather-bullish priest (Josh Brolin), his new protege (Josh O’Connor), the head of the church booster program (Glenn Close) and notable parishioners - am...
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Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025)

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Starring : Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Odessa Young, Stephen Graham, et al. Directed By : Scott Cooper Where It’s Available : Disney Plus (all territories) Here’s something you may know about me - Bruce Springsteen is my favourite musician of all-time. His songs about working-class struggle and fighting through loss to see just a little bit of sunshine really resonate with my own lower-class upbringing. I’ve seen him in concert four times. I own at least 10 Springsteen vinyls. So when they announced a biopic for Bruce - specifically one with another personal favourite, Jeremy Allen White (of FX’s spectacular ‘The Bear’) - it was a foregone conclusion that I would watch this film. And it might be difficult for me to be truly objective about it. With that said, it pleases me to state that the stands as a solid - if a little rote and formulaic - biopic. Setting the film during a specific time period of Bruce’s life (late 1981 through mid 1982 - just after he finished his world tour...
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One Battle After Another (2025)

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Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Benito Del Toro, Sean Penn, Regina Hall et al. Directed by : Paul Thomas Anderson Where it’s Available : HBO MAX in the US and most territories, Crave in Canada. The first scene of PTA’s 2025 opus, ‘One Battle After Another’ literally involves a group of self-styled ‘revolutionaries’ breaking migrants out of an ICE internment camp. I texted a friend of mine, “Oh, so this film is POLITICAL political”. And it is. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Pat (later Bob), a bomb specialist of the ‘French 75’ revolutionary group. Their manifesto, while not explicitly stated on-screen, is clearly left-leaning (they protect immigrants and minorities, they threaten a senator’s campaign office because they voted for an abortion ban, etc). These are the film’s good guys. The primary antagonist is a white supremacist soldier with a fetish for powerful black women (played with sufficient malice and menace by Sean Penn). This is the playing field on which this film lives - which is why...
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2025 - A Year in Gaming

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In the Year of Our Lord 2025, I rolled credits on 11 games (okay, 10.5 anyway - you’ll see what I mean). That’s three fewer than last year. I blame the fact that I am still wasting a disproportionate amount of time playing Balatro (#2 from last year) and Baldur’s Gate 3 (#1 from 2023 and a top-5 all-timer). This year was ‘very’ strong overall in terms of product (you’ll notice the top two - and six of 11 overall - on my list were from this calendar year), but the state of the industry overall seems like it’s hanging by a thread. Let’s hope 2026 continues the quality output and steadies itself in terms of industry foundation (give talented people money to make games, folks. Please). 11. Night Trap (Limited Run Games - Originally Released 1992, 2017 ‘25th Anniversary Re-Release’) - Available on everything, played on Nintendo Switch. As someone of my vintage, this was more so I could say “I did it” than any real want or need to experience the deep narrative nuance of this infamous Sega CD...
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The Black Phone 2 (2025)

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  Starring : Mason Thames, Madeline McGraw, Ethan Hawke Directed By : Scott Derrickson Where It’s Available : A Theatre Near You, on-demand streaming at home digital rentals  The original ‘Black Phone’, released in 2022, was a rare beast in horror films - a truly original idea. Ghost stories have been around even longer than horror movies, but I don’t ever recall the ghosts being the ‘good guys’ in a slasher/horror genre picture before (we’re not talking about Casper here). In case you missed it (spoiler warning for the end of the original Black Phone - which is actually fantastic and well worth a watch if you have not seen it) - at the conclusion of the film, Finn Blake (Mason Thames) had escaped from the clutches of The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) thanks in no small part to his sister, Gwen (Madeline McGraw). In the course of the escape, Finn kills The Grabber (good riddance) and also helps avenge the five dead children who preceded him in being caught in The Grabber’s clutches. ‘...
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