We watched Rebel Ridge last night. Pretty much enjoyed it, but the missus did keep telling me off coz the sound was too hard for her to hear properly (and turning up the volume just meant that everything else was still muddying the dialogue). I thought it could have done with a little more of a comeuppance for the bad guys.

Apartment 7A (streaming). A brave prequel to Rosemary's Baby, set just before the events of that film. It's brave because it's set in the same building and features some of the same characters, so if you know your Rosemary you know exactly how this is going to end. It's reasonably well put together and almost manages to recapture the feel of the original, for a while. Julia Garner is decent in the lead, but doesn't convince the viewer of her motivations for doing what she does; and the rest of the cast is weaker. It gets quite dull by the end (see above), which is silly, unconvincing and uses a famous pop song unwisely. It fizzles out, leaving it all feeling like a pointless non-event. But we're talking Rosemary's Baby so the bar was set low - it just wasn't that good, but could have been far worse.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. (Note: with the possible exception of Frankenweenie I don't think Tim Burton has made a good film in about 30 years, so bear that in mind when I say later that I think this film is crap).

I think this film is crap. Burton started promisingly and managed very well for a while, but after Mars Attacks! (which I still can't fully make up my mind about) his films have been, in a nutshell, pretty-looking but boring. Planet of the Apes has been the exception in that it was flat-out misjudged, and dreadful. But Beetlejuice was fun so... Decades later, some of the surviving cast reprise their roles. Jeffrey Jones doesn't, and he appears only in a sore-thumb stop motion sequence, then a headless corpse with someone else's voice. The rest of his screen family is intact, just with wrinkles. And they do fine; it's not their fault. It's not Monica Bellucci's fault that she makes a splendid entrance (best bit of the film) and is then whittled down to a not-seen-enough presence. And it's not Willem Dafoe's fault that his smallish and pointless role is unfunny from the start. It's not even Winona Ryder's fault, for not being as appealing middle-aged as she was as a youth (in everything). And it's definitely not Michael Keaton's fault, who as you'd expect does exactly what he does in the first film. The whole thing is just as you'd expect - and very mediocre. It's all mediocre, because the script is. I can't even remember what the plot was, other than that they were all back in that town again. I almost stopped halfway through. It was all just uninspired and dull, and didn't raise a single giggle. It really should have tried harder.

So I'll just blame Tim Burton for all of it. Feel free to disagree if you like his films.

Deadpool and Wolverine. Two hours of Ryan Reynolds being Deadpool with loads of cameos and barely a plot to hold it all together (and it's fully aware of that - I'm sure there's even a mention of needing a MacGuffin). Much mickey taking of Marvel and Fox. Loved it. The Mrs said I could put it on but she was tired so probably wouldn't see it all. She loved it too. Might watch it again soon.

Two new ones on your favourite streamers*:

Woman of the Hour. (Netflix). A double whammy based-on-truth from Anna Kendrick who stars as a contestant on a dating show (the same thing that was Blind Date in the UK), with one of her potential suitors a prolific serial killer. Rampant in the 70s, Rodney Alcala's thing was strangling females, then reviving them so he could strangle them again. It never gets graphic, but it's intensely creepy at times as several of his murders are documented. But even the non-murderers are creepy; sympathetic male characters are thin on the ground, but we'll allow that given how many films there are with no female roles at all, or that feature women who exist only to be bedded by the hero (countless). Kendrick as director has a deft touch with the suspense and at one point I really almost yelled 'RUN ffs'. But I didn't. I'll watch this again.

Brothers. (Prime). While deciding whether or not to watch this I thought I'd give the trailer a peep, and laughed at a dwarf being thrown very hard into a bathtub. Yes, it had me at dwarf-throwing. Peter Dinklage and Josh Brolin are twins, but thankfully it doesn't dwell on getting cheap laughs with that joke. It's a comedy crime caper that's competently put together and well performed (with not-full-whale sized Brendan Fraser and a game Glenn Close chipping in)... but despite the JCB/golf cart chase it's not quite as much fun as it thinks it is. It's entertaining enough but I couldn't shake the feeling that if I turned it off I wouldn't really be missing anything. I think it just tries too hard, but there are worse ways to fill less than 90 mins.

* unless your favourites are BBC and Disney.

The Substance (MUBI). ‘The best Demi Moore has been’ and ‘from Coralie Fargeat, the director of Revenge’ were two phrases that pretty much flattened the expectation bar for me; I’ve never been a fan of the former and thought the latter’s chick-revenge flick massively overrated. However, I’m partial to a bit of body horror, so (we) thought we’d see what the critics raved about.

It starts excellently with the creation and decline of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and up until the last 15 or 20 mins it’s certainly an entertaining watch. An over-the-hill actress reduced to morning tv fitness workouts, and who is about to get the boot from Dennis Quaid’s magnificently slimy network boss, is offered the chance to unleash the ‘best version of herself’ via use of a mysterious substance. In effect the substance duplicates the user, and thankfully this better half is NOT a de-aged Moore, but another actress. Margaret Qualley is the young Ms Moore, and both actresses do just fine in their roles – though the use of obvious body prosthetics means they aren’t as ‘brave’ as the critics are claiming. It’s gaudy, funny, made me like Demi Moore for the running time, and I’d recommend it up to the ending.

About the ending: f##k me. Most fun I’ve had with a film in ages. Read nothing more about it, just watch it as soon as you can.

Posted by: @wowbagger

↑

Most fun I’ve had with a film in ages. Read nothing more about it, just watch it as soon as you can.

Great review, @wowbagger - I will move this up my list, post-haste!

Anyone else watched Joker 2 yet? I see it’s already steaming on Prime. I loved the first film but the 2nd one really dragged for me, I didn’t see the point in it, great performances again from the lead actors but that’s about it for me.

Far prefer The Penguin starring Colin Farrell on NoW TV 

Posted by: @bravoman

↑

Anyone else watched Joker 2 yet

Approached it cautiously, as I thought Gaga was awful in A Star is Born, and I'm not generally a fan of every fecking thing being turned into a musical (there's even one about the Post Office scandal, ffs). I enjoyed it more than expected - I thought the music (mostly) worked, and Gaga's acting has improved mightily. What I didn't like at all, though, was the ending.

Blitz. It’s The War, and a young scamp jumps off the train that’s evacuating him to safety and begins the trek home to his dear old mum Saoirse Ronan. It’s a tale that should have been full of excitement, but is not. It’s nowhere near blitzy enough for a start; air raids are shown only by very brief shots of falling bombs that look like they were done in 10 mins with an app. Performances really aren’t that good, even from Ms Ronan, surprisingly - but to be fair she’s struggling with weak material and a director out of his comfort zone. The kid made no impression on me and I was having to make an effort to care about what happened to him. There’s one awful, sore-thumb sequence when it turns into Oliver Twist, and Stephen Graham turns up channelling Oliver Reed from the 60s musical. And director Steve McQueen gets on his soapbox to deliver messages the film doesn’t need: in one sequence a Sikh man is confronting a racist whitey. A Jew adds support; you know he’s a Jew because he comes up and says so. Then a black man comes along to add his support. It reminded me of that scene in Airplane, with passengers queuing up to calm that hysterical woman – so much so that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see, behind the black man, Warwick Davis with a baseball bat. Now that would have been a scene!