Tags: tv, blog, sci-fi, thriller, 2025, essential
Author: KickingK
Date: Tuesday May 20th, 2025
There's an episode of the tv series Spaced that features the greatest depiction of clubbing in cinema history. It's greatness is that it understood that a truly great night out isn't just about the club you go to. It's what you're running from, to get to where you end up. It spends most of the episode detailing the tensions and problems of the cast, the bit in the club is literally just a few minutes. But because of the time spent on the tensions and anxieties and problems and fears, you get the release of an epic night out.
Anyway...part way through the second series of Andor, fifteen episodes into a relentless narrative equivalent of a Shepard tone, there's a wedding party scene. And it goes OFF
And maybe Spaced doesn't have the best club scene anymore.
I don't think I can add much to the conversation regarding Andor's greatness, other than my slightly shonky Spaced comparisons. Pick an element: music, costumes, acting, script, anything at all, it's all superb. However, I do want to mention a couple of personal highlights.
Firstly, the brokeneness of the antagonists. Every single character working for the empire is a shell of a human being, living half a life. Too many movie and tv villains are hyper-competent, charismatic, sexy bastards. When the reality is these kind of people are deeply pathetic, emotionally limited turds.
Secondly, all of them are punsished for their loyalty and competence. Literally every single one of them is crushed by the weight of the system they are trying to uphold. If any of them had just clocked in, did the bare minimum and clocked out again they'd have been fine. But the one thing fascism absolutely demands is comformity. Stick your head up too high and it's going to get scythed off.
And lastly, if there's one point that Andor hammers home relentlessly, it's that fascism contains within it the seeds of it's own destruction. Fascism won't work, can never work, will never work because it will always create the conditions that will bring it down. The harder the Empire pushes, the more the people push back.
To go back to that G.K. Chesterton "quote"
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.
Andor tells us that whilst that victory is long, painful and must be fought for, it is inevitable.
Tags: blog, film, thriller, 2024
Author: KickingK
Date: Wednesday April 10th, 2024
Sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes
The ever excellent Thomasin McKenzie plays a mousy, plain young woman in 1960’s Massachusetts, working in a prison for young offenders. She gradually becomes obsessed with the prison’s glamorous new doctor, the occasionally excellent Anne Hathaway.
As we were talking about plot twists last time, this one has an absolute belter. A proper eyes-wider-sit-back-in-your-seat-mouth-agog sideswipe.
Unfortunately, the script can’t quite tie anything together after that. Everything feels a little off and the ending is deeply unsatisfactory.
It’s a shame as the film as a whole is thoroughly enjoyable. Both leads are superb, the period details are excellent (it wrings a lot out of ‘smoking in inappropriate moments’) and the script trusts the audience enough to ask their own questions in order to build the tension. I really wanted everything to add up to more.
Tags: blog, film, thriller, 2024, essential
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday April 06th, 2024
Lean, mean and electrifying
A violent homophobic assault leaves Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) traumatised. Only for a chance encounter that reveals that his attacker, Preston (George MacKay), is a closeted gay and leads him to plot his revenge.
Clocking in at just a smidge over ninety minutes, this electric little thriller doesn’t waste a single second of its run time. The tension starts to crackle within the first few minutes and refuses to abate until the credits roll.
Oddly enough, it reminds me a lot of the Michael Caine/Laurence Olivier film Clue 1. But where that film’s plot twists and role plays were the result of devious plotting, here it’s down to the shifting sands of the emotional state of the characters.
Perspectives change and turn as the characters learn and grow, leading to a sense that you can never quite put your finger on what, exactly, is happening and where it’s going to go.
Absolutely top draw stuff. Film of the year.
1. They are not similar films, this is just how my brain works sometimes) ↩
Tags: blog, film, thriller, 2024, essential
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday April 28th, 2024
Most disturbing hair piece since Anton Chigurh
Oh, this is absolutely blistering. A tale of love, lust, domestic violence, revenge, steroid abuse and family legacies.
There’s a whole load of things going on here with the film knowing exactly where the lines are between comedy, horror, erotica, tension and thrills, and knows exactly how to dance around them. The level of control the director, Rose Glass, has over both the story and the audience is magnificent. By the end of the film you feel like your emotions and expectations are being played with like a cat teasing a mouse. And. It. Is. Great.
There’s Cronenberg-ian body horror, toxic masculinity satire, some genuine shocks, a little slapstick comedy, an ever escalating, ratcheting tension, terrific cinematography and Ed Harris’ hair.
Something this versatile shouldn’t be this focused or this good. But it is and it’s an absolute blast.
Tags: blog, film, thriller, 2024
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday April 07th, 2024
Classy, comic heist movie
Abel, mourning the loss of his wife, can’t bring himself to welcome his mother’s new husband, freshly released from jail, into his life. Convinced he hasn’t renounced his criminal past Abel sets out, with the aid of his wife’s best friend, to find out the truth. Setting in motion a bizarre chain of events that could have dire consequences for everyone.
This is a bit of a delight. Frothy, funny and heartfelt, the whole thing zips along at pace. Every character is engaging and likeable, even when they’re being arseholes.
The heist, which the entire film is built around, is brilliant and (a rare thing for the heist movie genre) moving.
A lot of fun.