Tags: blog, film, drama, 2025, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday November 22nd, 2025
Why So Serious?
A free-spirited, fiercely independent black woman with a sexually promiscuous and lesbian past, with a wealthy husband in a loveless marriage in patriarchal 1950’s England. And when we first meet her at the start of the film she’s contemplating suicide.
That character description of Hedda Gabler, magnificently played by Tessa Thompson, gives you an inkling as to what you’re about to watch.
The film very, very quickly disabuses you of that notion. This is absolutely not that kind of film. And Hedda is not that character.
Movie villains tend to exist in one of three categories: The plotting Machiavellian, the agent of chaos who just wants to ‘watch the world burn’ or the opportunist for whom events spiral out of control.
As the film progresses over the course of a single party, held at their preposterous country mansion, Hedda somehow manages to be all three.
Her character is complicated and not at all straightforward, but still nasty, self destructive, unlikeable and utterly magnetic. A human wrecking ball you can't take your eyes off.
None of the other characters come out of this particularly well either. Only Thea comes away with any sympathy and she’s a complete drip.
The film does an excellent job of portraying the straight-laced, stiff upper lipped puritanism of the fifties and how it melts at first contact with the upper classes attitudes towards, well, literally anything that will get in the way of them getting what they want. This film’s opinion of rich people is as black as a hat and revels in giving them enough rope.
The pleasure in the film is in feeling the revulsion for their actions whilst also enjoying the electric tingle at the shock of it all.
The final shot of the film is one of the best super villain inception moments you’ll ever see. Nia da Costa’s previous work for Marvel implies this is entirely deliberate.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Author: KickingK
Date: Tuesday November 11th, 2025
Viva Macau
Colin Farrell plays Lord Doyle, a Baccarat player, mired in debt, trying to play himself out of a hole. Fala Chen plays Dao Ming, a hostess and loan shark who helps out addicted gamblers with their short term liquidity problem.
Set in Macau, the scenery and cinematography is stunning. The grandeur of the tackiness, the beauty of the monuments to gaucheness. This films captures the concept of greed better than anything I’ve seen. The gluttony, the hunger, to consume, to win, to ingest, constantly, infinitely, never satisfied, never sated, always chasing, always needing.
Volker Bertelmann's music is terrific. Playful and propulsive. It’s the sound of Satan getting behind you and giving you a shove in the back.
Unfortunately, the film pivots around the relationship between Doyle and Dao Ming. But her character is little more than a thumbnail, a sketch. Her story isn’t fleshed out or explained. So their relationship never makes sense, either financially or emotionally.
Consequently, when the revelation happens, it carries no weight.
If the film had been more of a double hander, focusing equally on Fala Chen and Farrell, it could have worked. But now I’m tilting into reviewing the film I’d wish I’d seen.
The film I actually watched is stunningly presented but missing a core.
One quick coda to this review: I'm really appreciating the extra mile that some film makers are going with their end credits. Both this and the recent Caught Stealing have added small amounts of well thought out animation to the credit reel at the end. Mix in a terrific choice of music and it ends the film on a little flourish. Given the turgid state of tv opening and closing credits, where every show has the exact same lazy formula, it's a little point of differentiation. A nice way to show that a little extra care was taken.
It feels like the end credits have been reclaimed after the Marvel era where they were just a thing that added gaps between the 'to be continued' sections.
Not only that, but in this case, somebody in the crew has clearly watched Medusa Deluxe (otherwise known as the film with the greatest end credit sequence ever1) and thought "We'll have some of that". Cracking stuff.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
1. Seriously, watch Medusa Deluxe, the film is weird and wonderful and the end credits are incredible.
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Tags: blog, tv, animation, drama, recommended, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday November 08th, 2025
It's business as usual for privately-owned taxi driver Odokawa as he drives a variety of passengers around the city.
A misanthropic taxi driver gets in way over his head in a tangled web of mysteries and messy lives.
Each of the the passengers that Odokawa ferries around becomes another thread that spirals out, weaving around the other stories, eventually looping back round to arrive at Odakawa's taxi door.
The whole thing kicks off with a mystery about a missing teenager but then, Katamari-like, rolls ups stories of corrupt and incompetent cops; social media influencer vigilantes; wannabe comedians; a pop group and their controlling manager; competing gangsters; a thieving nurse; a mobile-game addicted teen; a debt ridden janitor; a caring but intrusive doctor; a catfishing extortion scheme and an otaku lottery winner.
The use of anthropomorphic animals as characters serves two functions. Firstly, with such a huge cast, it allows every character to be distinctive and immediately memorable. It's easy to remember the cast of pop group Mystery Kiss as they're all cats. You can't get any of them mixed up with Miho as she's an alpaca.
Secondly, and conversely, it highlights the deeply human nature of the characters and their stories. The animation style strips each character back to only the qualities needed to tell us who they are. Each character gets their own back story, their own motivations and their own vulnerabilities. There are no purely good guys here, but then even the worst characters here are relatable. You end up rooting for them when they have a chance at redemption or realisation.
The biggest mystery is Odakawa himself. He's obviously highly intelligent, an early scene where he masterfully diverts his prying doctor's conversation onto the subject of Bruce Springsteen is comedy gold, but he only shows that guile in brief spurts. Other times he struggles to get to grips with what's unfolding around him. He's no mastermind, which means that when the web he's helped to spin begins to tighten, the way it shakes out is believably messy, but also beautifully poetic.
There are some criticisms. There's a Tarantino-esque propensity for characters to monologue their backstory, or recite a wikipedia article that introduces a plot element. This is not helped by the perfunctory-at-best translated subtitles. And the subtitles are at their worst for the character of Yano, a character who raps every line. They technically work but they're unbelievably clunky and clash badly with the original audio. Every scene he's in is almost painful to watch.
But overall this is a genuine one-of-a-kind tv show. A magnificent blend of empathy and intricacy, noir and kitchen sink.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, film, horror, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday November 02nd, 2025
The little guy, squeaky voice
After enjoying Bet's direct and in-your-face approach to addressing social issues, here's another example of simply telling your audience how you feel about something.
Focusing on the lives of the patrons of a small queer bar, who find themselves in the midst of an alien invasion of sorts as the local population of cis, straight men find themselves taken over by a parasite that turns them into violent zombies who eat gay and trans people. The film almost literally tells you that Jordan Peterson is a glossy turd turning men into raging neanderthals. Garth Marenghi, eat your heart out.
Lets start with the positives. The lighting technicians absolutely understood the assignment. Despite the lack of budget1 the interior shots always look interesting and arresting. The film has it's own neon-noir style which I loved. It hides the basic set design and really makes the parasite/blood effects pop. The ooze and gloop is really slick and slithery.
And the cast are interesting and their interactions believable. They make the broader social themes relatable on a personal level. There's wit and zing here.
Sadly, it all falls apart with the plot structure. It just doesn't understand how a zombie horror movie should work. It introduces the parasitic element near the start, then spends most of the movie on the casts social life. A character is murdered early on and, seemingly an eternity later, somebody idly wonders where they've been. By the time the film handbrake turns into the zombie-killing section, I'd stopped caring about it and the film didn't put the effort into explaining the sudden shift into (mild) violence and gore.
Which brings me to the 'action' sequences which are just terrible. Managing to be both basic and unclear, nothing has any weight, sense of drama or threat. Bad, bad, bad.
And there's an attempt to add a meta-narrative through the use of found footage and genre aware characters that falls completely flat. To make this kind of thing work you have to really commit to it. But here it's so half hearted and inconsequential that when it does happen it's jarring to the point I was questioning why I was even watching this.
It brings me no pleasure to dunk on such a small budget indie film. Nobody makes this kind of movie without really caring about what they do and that much is clearly evident here. But sadly I though this was really poor.
Weirdly, this kind of genre movie is usually a case of weird and whacky effects and plot elements holding your interest even though it lacks a decent script or acting. But this is almost the reverse. I'd actually be interested if the film makers dropped all the 'genre' elements and just made a straight up kitchen-sink drama.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
1. I actually think this may have had a lower budget than The Paragon. Is it possible to have a budget less than zero?
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Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday November 01st, 2025
I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards
At what point does a metaphor or allegory get so on-the-nose that is stops being a metaphor/allegory and simply becomes the thing that you are talking about? Sometimes, Bet feels like it's attempting to explore that question.
Set in an ultra-exclusive private school for the kids of the mega-mega-mega-rich, where status is entirely defined by money and the only way to gain (or lose) money is to gamble. The winners get to literally own the losers as their personal slaves and the very, very top ranked players form the school council, setting the rules and rigging the games in their favour.
It's not exactly subtle, is it?
Enter Yumiko, a compulsive gambler who's parents (also compulsive gamblers) were assassinated when she was a tiny child, who's on a secret mission to find out who was responsible and get revenge. She shakes up the whole school order by being really good at gambling and also weirdly unaffected by peer pressure and school norms.
The series is at it's best when it treats the school as the beginning and end of it's world building, highlighting the inherent weirdness of forcing a bunch of kids into close proximity, whether they like it or not. This has the side effect of making it feel like a kids tv show, but rather than try and hide that it leans right into it, flatly treating the absurd as normal whilst simultaneously treating the juvenile trials and tribulations as completely valid and worthy of drama.
It's view of the world is bleak as hell. Nobody escapes the story with the audiences full sympathy. Yumiko's gambling gradually tips into self-destruction before her lust for revenge tips into manic violence. Every other character is given an empathetic background but each steadfastly refuse any redemption that's offered to them by the plot. Only Ryan comes away without a stain on his character and that's mostly because he's too wet for anything to stick.
So it's a dog eat dog world with everyone trying to knife each other in the back (and the front, side and any other angle they can get) in order to claw their way up the ladder.
At times it's breathtakingly good as it hammer's you in the face with it's absurdist indictment of capitalism. And the next moment you question what on earth you're watching as high school drama aimed at pre-teens directly references BDSM.
Sadly, it falls at the final hurdle. The last two episodes take place after school term and outside school grounds. The central problem the story has is that in making every character absolutely awful, we don't really care about any of them. Consequently, the mystery of Yumiko's parents simply isn't engaging. It's fine as a macguffin that moves the plot forward, but fails completely when we're asked to invest in it.
I'll probably watch the second series though. There's not much out there like it.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, film, comedy, action, recommended, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Thursday October 30th, 2025
Peachy Keen, Avril Lavigne
Going on holiday is a cliche of British sit-coms. Once the show has reached a peak of popularity, the time is ripe to cash in and make a movie. This almost always coincides with the show having run out of ideas. The solution: Take the cast abroad. All the characters you love but in a new, exotic, more expensive looking locale. It never works, it's always terrible.
So here's Baby Assassins 3, a series that struggled for ideas in it's second outing and oh look, they're going on holiday!
Except, Oh, the Baby Assassins crew have ideas. Big ones.
This time around, there's a much stronger focus on the action. The comedy is still there, producing laughs on a pretty consistent basis. Chisato and Mahiro are as adorable and goofy as ever. But it doesn't lounge around in their everyday attempts at adulting. Instead, these are the scenes that knits the action together.
And there's a concerted attempt to beef1 up the fight scenes. It's starts off quickly with an absolutely blistering early set piece. It then builds via a burgeoning cast and variety of locations. Well thought out characterisation creates a believably cruel and nasty antagonist, cranking the tension as we get closer to the end.
And when we get there it explodes. There's a sense of real, palpable danger at the heart of the ending. Built up by growing affection for the duo over three whole films, which is then juxtaposed and threatened by a genuinely vicious bastard, the stakes feel real. You care.
The fight choreography is loose and scrappy. But not in the 'Jason Bourne' way of quick editing to hide the fact that these are stunt men instead of highly trained martial artists. Here, the director and fight choreographer trust that their actors are skilled enough to properly go for each other and make it look good on the fly. You can feel the air woosh past you as rapid punches narrowly miss their mark. Ones that do land look like they hurt. It has one of the best depictions of severe concussion I've seen in this genre.
The result is thrilling, exciting, brutal and scary.
Next up, in a reversal of the British sit-com cliche, Baby Assassins Everyday! the tv series. I can't wait.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
1. Spicy Miyazaki beef
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Tags: blog, film, comedy, action, 2025, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Monday October 27th, 2025
More Babies
The babies are back. This time their inability to manage their finances get’s them suspended from the assassins guild, forcing them to look for alternative forms of employment to pay their bills.
This instalment sticks largely sticks to the same formula as the first one but leans a little more into the comedy. The action scenes are more overtly comedic, a set piece brawl in a bank setting an early inventive tone. Later, a squabble between the pair whilst dressed as fur-suited mascots overspills into a full on fight scene. It’s uproariously funny.
The script writers have clearly realised how well the chemistry between the two teenage slackers works. And so, as antagonists, they get in two more teenage slackers.
The plot, such as it is, is that two wanna-be assassins find out that the only way to get into the assassins guild is if another pair ‘retire’. So they set their sites on Mahiro and Chisato. But they’re both as big a loveable pair of goofballs as the titular assassins, so we end up with double the levels of doofus bickering and teenage awkwardness.
Sadly, the final fight scene follows the same set up as the first film but can’t come close to the same level of intensity. By this point the film has run out of ideas, but the laughs to get us here make it more than worth the while.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, tv, animation, sci-fi, 2025, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday October 25th, 2025
Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan! Dan!
What am I doing here? Watching anime as a middle aged man is a deeply weird experience. When I was younger I was witness to the original UK anime/manga boom of the early nineties. Akira, Appleseed, Manga Mania. It was always weird but... It was a kind of weird that was curated towards a young western audience. It was a slice of Japanese culture carefully selected for the kind of teenagers who'd be receptive to it.
Now though? There's so much of it, so many different styles, so many different genres, such a wide audience. And, seemingly, for this audience it's all so normalised. When I was reading Gunsmith Cats as a teen I knew, right from the get-go, that this was something a little out there. That was what I wanted. But it seems like Attack on Titan is as standard to today's kids as Stranger Things.
Which, conversely, makes the act of watching this stuff when you're not completely immersed in this culture even more weird. I have no way of understanding it as part of a wider culture.
Is DanDaDan normal? Is this level of bizarreness de rigueur? Or does it stand out even amongst the, quite frankly, impenetrable field of anime weirdness?
I have no idea. And I have no idea how to critically evaluate it or, ~waves hand at the entire, diverse field of anime~ how to evaluate that. I once watched two episodes of Attack on Titan and they were the worst two episodes I've ever watched of anything, in my entire life.1 So I clearly don't know what I'm talking about.
But I do know that DanDaDan manages to capture teenage friendship and crushes in a way that's delightfully endearing. The whole show is deeply, deeply horny but in that oddly innocent, early teens way of having deeply intense longings and not having a clue what to do with them. And even though there are whole episodes where all the characters are fighting demons whilst stripped to their underwear, it never leers or objectifies.
The most intense, and most affecting, moments are when they're just trying to navigate the fact that they think they've been stood up during lunch, or their fingers touch whilst sat next to each other in the car. It's oddly sweet for a show where the main running plot-line is about trying to recover a characters genitals.
Sorry, yes, the plot. Two senior school nerds meet and argue about the merits of the occult vs UFO's. Momo was raised by her (absurdly hot, ridiculously cool, seemingly barely older then her) Grandmother who's a witch and dares Okarun, an introverted sci-fi junkie, to visit a haunted underpass to see a ghost. In return, he dares her to go to a notorious UFO sighting spot. Obviously, he gets possessed by the spirit of a demon-witch and loses his balls, she gets abducted by aliens.
That's episode one. It get's rapidly more grandios and unhinged from there.
It does do some of the stuff that turns me off of a lot of anime. Characters start shrieking at each other for no reason. In the rush to the next plot device, nothing ever gets completely resolved. And whilst it's attitude to gender and sex is mostly positive, series one is bookended by threats of sexual assault. The fact that these are kind of played for laughs makes it even more of an incongruous miss-step.
But somehow, it has a charm and vibe that's infectious. Two series in and I'm looking forward to a third.
Where to Watch
1. I only watched the second one because I couldn't believe that anything could possible be that bad. It was.
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Tags: blog, film, thriller, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Monday October 06th, 2025
Caught Napping
It's rare to see a film that manages to add up to so much less than the sum of it's parts. There's nothing here that, taken in isolation, can be criticised. Pick any element of the film: it's fine, good even.
But the actual film as a whole? It's a nothing burger. A standard sized bowl of regular, unflavoured porridge, made with skimmed milk. It made one hour and forty five minutes slide past. I doubt I'll remember any of it by next week.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, film, thriller, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday October 05th, 2025
Not as good as the Wikipedia page
It's a bit unfair to watch this straight after the magnificent Relay, but there you go. This is the story behind the biggest art theft in Irish history, spearheaded by Rose Dugdale, an English woman from an incredibly wealthy background, for the cause of the IRA.
The first mistake the film makes is by spending so much of it's runtime on the heist itself. Stealing stuff is the easy part, the boring part. Anyone can steal something, the trick is to get away with it. Relay doesn't even bother to show the theft, it's already happened before the film even starts.
The problem here is that the main characters don't seem to realise this and their getaway plan is staggeringly dumb, full of holes and badly implemented. It's difficult to empathise with them when they keep making schoolboy errors that we can see coming a mile off.
Which leads to the second mistake the film makes which is to focus on the art theft in the first place. A quick read through Rose Dugdale's Wikipedia entry is jaw dropping. She led a truly extraordinary life which the film shows snapshots of but never enough to show how committed she truly was. You could come away from this film with the idea that she was something of a dilettante, where as I think the the lack of commitment is from the film makers, not Rose.
The film has a lot of interesting ideas and tries to knit everything together in an attempt to create something that's more than the sum of it's parts. The way it uses the artworks themselves to explore aspects of Rose's characters is a good idea. Unfortunately it doesn't use the rest of the script to really dig deep and so everything is little more than a scratch on the surface.
Which is a shame as if anyone's life is interesting enough to make a movie of, it's Rose Dugdale. It's just a shame that this one doesn't do it justice.
