★★½
“Run Gal Run”
Poor Gal Gadot. Her career since Wonder Woman has basically been one downhill slalom after another. From the disaster which was Wonder Woman 1984, through Heart of Stone, and now this. It feels like everything has been a critical and/or commercial disaster. Even when not the star, she has been catching strays, such as Red Notice and the misconceived (to put it mildly) live-action Snow White remake. It’s at the point where her presence in a project is almost more a warning. The reviews for this could be a new low. Worse than Heart of Stone? Surely not. I was braced though. And while I found this less actively annoying, it still certainly isn’t good.
It’s a script which would barely trouble the back of a beer-mat. On the day prosecutor Maia Marten (Gadot) is scheduled to appear in court for the trial of a crime boss, her son Noah (Wilmot) is kidnapped. Unless she does exactly what she’s told by a voice on the phone (Lewis), Noah will die. The end game is Maia shooting the key witness in the hotel where he is sequestered. But to get there, she must run across London, this being contrived required so that the kidnapper can monitor her. He has also hacked her phone, so she is unable to call for help. There’s also some stuff about Maia’s mother having murdered her father. It doesn’t serve much purpose, and can safely be ignored.
This is the perfect movie, if you’re interested in spending eighty minutes, watching Gadot in motion, slowly getting sweatier and more dishevelled. To be honest… There are probably worse things to look at. Heart of Stone and Wonder Woman 1984, to name but two. As someone who lived in London for more than a decade, I also enjoyed trying to work out exactly where they were. This was challenging, given I left twenty-five years ago, and quite a lot has changed since. Still, I got the lie of the land, and unlike some films (Sherlock Holmes having its hero run from Tower Bridge to the Houses of Parliament in two minutes, requiring a sprint speed of 60+ mph), the geography here seems generally to make sense.
But the fact that I was more interested in tourist landmarks, than the plot or the characters, is significant. You may even spend more of the film thinking of easier, less complex ways, for the voice on the phone to achieve the same end goal. For this is very much an example of an Amazon Prime streaming movie. You don’t need to think about the plot, or even pay attention to it. Everything is clear inside ten minutes, and the last five tidies everything up nicely, with a twist you will likely see coming – at least, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. In the middle? Running, taunting of Maia by the voice on the phone, and problem-solution on repeat. As Saturday night entertainment, it was… okay, I guess? Never going to watch it again though.
Dir: Kevin Macdonald
Star: Gal Gadot, Damian Lewis, Alfred Enoch, Rory Wilmot


This had a fair number of decent and well-done elements. However, it very much feels like these are balanced by the aspects which fall short of adequate. How you react to this will likely be determined by your ability to overlook the latter, and appreciate the former. The basic idea is lean and mean. Sisters Jas (Purvis) and Laura (Pauley) are on a country weekend, when they encounter a car-load of men led by the particularly sleazy Randy (North). This leads to a home-invasion, a dead Laura, and Jas going on a rampage of revenge through everyone Randy can throw at her. Fair enough there, with enough brutal violence to leave the most blood-thirsty satisfied.
This one is fairly fringey, in terms of qualifications for the site. But I do feel, any film where a woman picks up and wields a chainsaw with bad intentions… Yeah, that’s pretty much a golden ticket to inclusion. You will have to be quite patient though. Very patient. It begins with a car crash which leaves Magda (De Mol), very much the worse for wear and badly concussed, in a gully off the road. She is rescued by Guy (Breck), an elderly gentleman who lives nearby, and who insists on nursing Magda back to health. However, matters are complicated by some rather dubious people, including Justin (Mills), who are after Magda and/or something in her possession.
We have written about some of the women who worked behind enemy lines for British intelligence during World War II. Names like
This is a nasty and grim piece of work, after which you will probably feel like taking a shower. However, I actually mean this in a (grudgingly) complimentary fashion, because it’s clear that director and co-writer Hyett was aiming for exactly that. Well done, I guess. Doesn’t mean I have to like it though, and this is not a film I have any interest in revisiting. It takes place in an unnamed part of the Balkans (though my money is on somewhere in Serbia), during the ethno-religious wars which tore apart the region in the late nineties. All manner of highly unpleasant things went on: here, it’s a brothel in which kidnapped women are forced to service militiamen.
This is Broomfield’s second documentary around the topic of Aileen Wuornos, having previously made Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. It’s a glorious doc – one of my all-time favorites – but is more tangential, being about those around Wuornos, seeking to exploit her situation for their own personal gain. He thought he was done with the topic, but he was called as a defense witness during Aileen’s final appeal against the multiple death sentences, largely because among those exploiters was her lawyer at the time, Steve Glazer. But around appearing in the witness box, Broomfield decided to make a second documentary, this time focusing on the woman at the centre of proceedings, all the way up to her execution by lethal injection in October 2002.
What I love about Broomfield’s work is, he goes where the story leads him. Some documentarians – and I’m looking at
There’s an interesting idea here, which somewhat works. But it’s perhaps a little too grounded for its own good. It starts in a London flat, where senior citizen Anna Marshall (Walter) ambushes an intruder, handcuffing him to a radiator. Turns out he’s not just a burglar. He knows about her past, and wants the truth. So she tells him a story… At the very end of World War II, her identity was Brana Brodskaya (Vega). She was one member in a small group of Russian soldiers, who have been given a very important task: transport a box back from Berlin to Moscow. Oh, and bury it every night. Inevitably, their curiosity overcomes them, and the box is opened, to reveal Hitler’s corpse inside.
I was quite startled to read some of the scathing reviews this received. For I genuinely enjoyed it, to the point it likely came one element (which I’ll get to) from a seal of approval. Sure, it’s nothing particularly new overall. However, I found it consistently enjoyable, to the level I felt no desire to look at my phone at any point. These days, that’s high praise indeed. It takes place in a slightly alternate London, where gang bosses Frasier Mahoney (Charles Dance) and Mrs. Christina Vine (Krige) are on the edge of a war for control of the city. There’s also a rogue element, in the Mushka Gang, who have turned an East End estate into a no-go area.
The “erotic thriller” now seems almost as quaint a part of cinema history as beach party films. It feels partly as if the Harvey Weinstein scandal made nudity and sexuality taboo in Hollywood. The rise of the Internet also provides easy access to all the naked flesh anyone could possibly want. Regardless of the cause, there are no longer big budget films like Basic Instinct or Wild Things being made, let alone being #6 at the North American box-office for the year, as Instinct managed [that said, United Artists paid $2 million for the reboot rights earlier this year. We’ll see; I’m not optimistic]. So in some ways, this feels like a throwback, drawing influence from Brian de Palma and Paul Verhoeven.