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.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, film, thriller, 2025, essential
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday October 04th, 2025
Credit or Debit?
Riz Ahmed plays a middle man who works on behalf of whistle blowers and the corporations they've stolen from to ensure that they both get what they want out of a deal.
To do this he uses a relay service for deaf people, typing messages into an old-fashioned computer modem that is then read out by a call centre operative. Nobody hears him speak and the service is untraceable.
So in every tense conversation, every high stakes negotiation, the 'Jason Bourne' character is played by a random call centre person who is literally phoning it in. One staggeringly tense, life or death scene is finished off with a jaunty "Thank you for using the tri-state relay sevice, have a wonderful evening".
This deadpan approach to tension building is carried over to much of the rest of the film. Outside of the occasional (and decent) needle-drop the soundtrack is barely noticeable. The cinematography is restrained and un-showy, not a single trace of camera shake. The acting is similarly pared down, Riz Ahmed has about two lines of dialogue in the entire first third of the film.
This is a film that lets the plot and the characters drive the tension. And boy is this film tense. It starts at a level of 'gripping the arms of the sofa', rapidly escalates to 'fitness tracker heart-rate warning' before gradually climaxing to 'choking claustrophobia'.
Like director David Mackenzie's previous film, Hell or High Water, Relay draws from the real-world effects of late-stage capitalism to bury it's characters in impossible choices. There's no 'good guys', just people trying not to drown. There are antagonists, but the real villains are out of site, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Untouchable but inescapable. As the 'heist' begins to fall apart in the latter stages of the film, there's a growing realisation that there's no way to not lose this game. Even if you win, it'll cost you your soul. A single answer phone message breaks your heart and you know the game is rigged every single way.
This film stands along side the previously mentioned Hell or High Water and the more recent How to Blow Up a Pipeline at the absolute pinnacle of the modern heist movie genre.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, film, drama, 2025, essential
Author: KickingK
Date: Thursday September 25th, 2025
Yes it really, really, really could 'appen
It's often forgotten, but you have to go through an awful lot of Shawshank before you get to the Redemption. It's A Wonderful Life is mostly a film about a man being driven to suicide.
Much of writer/director Andrea Arnold's Bird is similarly difficult to watch. More so as the lead character, Bailey, is a twelve year old girl. Watching her living in such poverty and squalor, lacking any real control over anything in her life is painful. It's heightened, at least for me, by the fact that this is filmed a stones throw1 from where I live. I know areas like this. I know kids like this.
Writer/director Andrea Arnold manages to make this coming of age tale watchable by crafting something that is supremely beautiful, where hope is everywhere when you look for it. Growing in the cracks in the broken pavement, scrawled on the walls of a piss-stained stairwell, in the scavenging eyes of an urban fox. Even, and I can't believe I'm going to write this, in the lyrics of a Verve record.
Hope is a gradual, building constant in this film. When everything gets too much and threatens to crush and overwhelm Bailey, the film breaks it's own narrative constraints in order to make the point that there's still hope. Still a way for things to be better, still a way to see beauty everywhere.
So when that hope builds to the point of a crashing wave, it hit's like a tidal wave of joy and grief and love.
Out of the movies of the past few years, only Aftersun has had an ending that hit's as hard as this. A masterpiece.
A bloody masterpiece.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
1. Well, a short swim.
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Tags: blog, film, comedy, sci-fi, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday September 21st, 2025
I am a Hyper Dimensional Being
Dutch seeks to learn the secrets of Psyonic power, in order to seek out the perpetrator of a hit and run that left him partially crippled.
This is almost-zero budget fantasy/sci-fi movie is a lot of fun. Especially if you enjoy dialogue like "We are seekers, from another plain of existance", delivered earnestly. The whole thing is just the right amount of silly whilst still having a message of reconciliation that hits just the right spot. There's also a nice little commentary of the corruption of power and absolute power as well.
Everybody involved in this understood the assignment. Especially Florence Noble, who plays her character exactly like the thespians who play guest characters in early Red Dwarf. Dead straight, let the audience enjoy the absurdity for themselves.
Add a 'recommended star' to the top there if you love eighties synthwave. The soundtrack is an absolute banger.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, film, comedy, 2025, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday September 20th, 2025
Aunt, A u n t
This film: It doesn’t know what it wants to say, doesn’t say much of it, and even that it doesn’t say with it’s whole chest. This should be terrible and I can imagine some people bouncing off this completely.
But I still recommend it because it has a sense of freedom. Like everyone has a bunch of ideas that sound interesting so have a go at making them work. See what’ll happen.
Take for instance Margaret Qualley’s lead character, Honey O’Donahue, who is simultaneously both the hardboiled gumshoe and the femme fatale. Does it work? Absolutely! She’s magnificent, ably abetted by a Barbarella paced series of costume changes, every single one of which is just *chef’s kiss*.
But also only kind of. The plot kind of burbles along, things happen which criss-cross the paths of the ensemble cast, but nothing drives it. So even though she’s magnificent, she doesn’t get to do much of significance.
Every character has that kind of twist to it. What if we took that character from film noir but played it like this instead. The whole cast is great, but special mention goes to Charlie Day who plays the archetypal sexist, incompetent police detective who makes the P.I.’s life difficult. Except he only hits on her because he knows she get’s a kick out of knocking him back; knows full damn well she’s better at the job than he is so keeps giving her leads; and is only a pain in the ass when he really needs to be sure that something’s going to stick.
It’s fun. It’s funny.
The whole thing wraps up in less than ninety minutes and doesn’t amount to much. I really wanted more from it. But, having said that, I would love to watch another ninety minutes of these characters.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, film, horror, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday September 13th, 2025
Well Weapon
Sometimes I think I just have to accept a film isn't made for me. The premise of Weapons, revealed in the trailer and, admirably, laid out within the first few minutes of the film, is that one night, at the exact same time, seventeen children from the same class at school get out of their beds and run away, never to be seen again. Only one boy from the class is left.
The implications are obvious: as inconceivable as those events are, it's equally inconceivable that the classes teacher, Justine, doesn't know something about it. Her class is the only thing connecting all those kids.
And so, in the absence of literally anything in the way of explanation or closure, the parents start to lash out, at the school and at Justine. It's an excellent premise: what happens to a town when an inexplicable tragedy occurs? How do they cope with that? It's a perfect theme for horror stories to explore.
Sadly for me, the film isn't interested in exploring those ramifications at all. It does just enough to make a juicy set up, full of tension, and then instead starts to focus on what actually happened that night.
It does a pretty good job of that. It utilises a structure that keeps switching the character that we're following. Building tension to breaking point with one character before switching to another. Releasing the tension a little before building it right back up again and repeating the process.
The sense of dread is palpable, the jump scares are well done and used sparingly, the violence is shocking and gruesome. Everything works really well...until it doesn't.
After a few time-line switches, we start to receive diminishing returns. As the characters get more and more peripheral, it starts to get frustrating. Instead of advancing the plot we're now following characters who matter less and less to the story. One character could be cut completely and it wouldn't make any difference.
When we eventually do snap back to the core characters it's run out of steam and worse, stops making sense. It turns out that what happened that night isn't all that interesting.
Or at least to me. See, I wanted to watch the film that the opening implied we were going to get. I wanted to watch a film about a small town tearing itself apart with grief and suspicion. I wanted to watch a horror with subtext, that gets under your skin and questions your relationships with your community.
What I actually watched was a reasonably well done, gruesome horror story about magic and scary kids1. It wasn't for me.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
1. VERY MINOR SPOILER: If you find kids scary that is. I, for the record, do not. Which meant that the ending was howlingly funny. My wife and I disagreed with the intentionality of this. She thought it was supposed to be funny, I thought it was inadvertent. It's certainly memorable, I'll give it that.
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Tags: blog, film, action, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Thursday September 11th, 2025
And figured this out and no one gets hurt
The first film is a pretty ropey film with some decently violent fight scenes that really explodes at the end into an orgy of Looney Tunes scale ultra violence. John Wick re-written by Rick Mayall and Adrian Edmondson. The surprise of the sheer scale and glee of that final fight glossed over how threadbare the rest of the film was.
The second film is pretty much exactly the same except it’s on holiday and the final fight is rubbish. Everything is sign posted, nothing is a surprise. No wit, no style, no panache.
Celebrity guest cameos:
- RZA’s does his watered down Ghost Dog impression. He’s decent again.
- Sharon Stone doesn’t so much chew the scenery as rip it to pieces with her bare teeth. Sadly, the script is dull and lifeless and she’s wasted.
- Christopher Lloyd turns up. He doesn’t do anything, at all, but he does turn up.
- The dog gets the best laughs of the film but is only in it for a minute.
On the plus side, it’s only 90 minutes long, doesn’t outstay its welcome and clips along at such a brisk pace that it’s never boring. But I kind of feel like that’s the bare minimum for an action movie. It’s like praising a pop song for having a catchy tune. Yes, that’s the point. You’ve done the absolute bare minimum that’s expected of you, now what?
In Nobody 2’s case: absolutely nothing.
