Together (2025)

This debut feature of writer-director Michael Shanks is a decent concept that unfortunately doesn't go in any of the really interesting directions it could. It benefits from real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie in the lead roles, but the 102-minute runtime should have allowed for something more focused and interesting.

Tim (Franco) and Millie (Brie) seem to be in a bit of a stale place in their relationship, which means things get a bit strained when they move to the country. Millie has a teaching job lined up, but Tim has no such vocation. He tries to make music, but gigging with friends will be a bit trickier when he needs to rely on Millie for a lift to the train station. After a wander in the countryside around their home, Tim and Millie end up drinking some water from a pool that starts bringing about a strange transformation in them. They cannot be separate from one another for too long, and their bodies want to intertwine and fuse together.

Things start well here, presenting us with a couple of people who are denying the fact that they seem to have moved far away from the closeness they may once have had. There are also moments that impress when it comes to the body horror of the central concept. Ironically, Shanks doesn't weave the elements together well enough, especially when it comes to a finale that is as neutered as it is unsatisfying. There was so much more that could have been done here, even adding a third party to the central problem would have massively improved things, but it seems that I am in the minority for considering this a bit of a disappointment.

It's not actually bad, and both Brie and Franco deserve kudos for committing to the idea and the physicality of their performances, but it's simply not great, despite going to some places you wouldn't expect for something with these leads. It's not just a two-hander though, no pun intended, and Damon Herriman is very good in his supporting role. Mia Morrissey also appears for a couple of scenes, although the most impressive secondary characters are hidden away under some very impressive makeup.

Shanks does fine with his direction. It's unfortunate that the film feels stuck in some kind of limbo, for the most part. Interesting insights are hinted at, but then nothing is pursued. There isn't enough real horror, but the effects and shocks are effective when they happen. I've seen high praise for it from many other film fans though, which makes me think that it's been pitched just right to open it up to a wider audience than it otherwise would have reached. I wish there'd been a bit more depth to it, and I doubt I'll ever be in a mood to rewatch it, so I'll be interested to see how it's viewed when a bit more time has passed.

6/10

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Prime Time: Freelance (2023)

An action comedy that puts John Cena in the lead role, but forgets about giving him any decent action or comedy moments to work with, Freelance is the movie equivalent of a very wet raspberry blown in the face of unsuspecting viewers. I had already heard some negative opinions on it, but I made the common mistake of thinking "how bad could it be?" It was bad, very bad indeed.

Cena plays Mason Pettits, an ex-special forces man who takes on a routine job that should give him a large payday for very little effort. Yeah, like that always works out. He is escorting a journalist (Claire Wellington, played by Alison Brie) on her way to an interview with a dictator (Venegas, played by Juan Pablo Raba). Unfortunately, all three find themselves in trouble when they end up amidst a military coup. Pettits needs to keep people safe, despite wanting nothing more than deadly revenge against Venegas, due to the dicactor causing the death of a number of his military colleagues some time ago.

Although director Pierre Morel has been helming various action movies for the past two decades, he doesn't seem to have the ability to fix a weak script, and Jacob Lentz makes his feature film writing debut with one hell of a weak script. The characters are paper-thin (Pettits is unhappy with his later career choice while he is "just" a lawyer, and he has a wife and daughter to consider nowadays, while both Brie and Raba seem to have one main moment each, a point in their journey that changes the direction of their lives), the comedy is non-existent, and the plotting is lazy and careless. Not one of the action sequences impress, and it's generally impossible to care about main characters who seem quite invincible from their first moments onscreen anyway.

Cena is a fun and likable screen presence, and can also be very funny, but you wouldn't get that impression from this film. There are a lot more laughs gleaned from his role in the 2024 Oscar ceremony than there are gleaned from this. This is a laugh-free zone. Brie is someone I have enjoyed in a number of roles, but she struggles to do as well in feature films as she does on the small screen. Maybe I am forgetting some of her better work, maybe she just isn't a good fit for lead roles like this one. Raba is the most fun of the three, simply due to his character being so exuberant and unguarded, especially compared to how others expect hiim to be. Christian Slater has a couple of minutes of screentime, Marton Csokas is the coup leader, and Alice Eve and young Molly McCann play the wife and daughter, respectively, of our main character, with Eve reduced to being the kind of female who asks her husband to leave their home before spending most of their time worrying about when her husband might return safely.

Although I know that I'm exaggerating, I feel that I've taken at least just as much time and care writing this review as Lentz took in writing the script. It's not laughably incompetent, nor is it unwatchable. It's just thrown together, a collage of beige made from the paint samples left at the very back of the B & Q stockroom, and many viewers will struggle to even stay focused on it as it weaves a sleep-inducing spell.

3/10

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Prime Time: Get A Job (2016)

Written by Kyle Pennekamp and Scott Turpel, and directed by Dylan Kidd, Get A Job is, in many ways, exactly the standard comedy that you think it is. And yet, in other ways, it inadvertently stands out as a melting pot of attitudes and ideas that many people (myself included) want to see changing.

Miles Teller is Will Davis, a young man who thinks he has his life sorted. He has just graduated, his girlfriend (Jillian, played by Anna Kendrick) has got herself a great job, and his friends seem to be poised to fall upwards. Unfortunately, the job that he thought would be there for him, after a lot of hours put in as an unpaid intern, isn’t. Which means he has to decide between doing what he loves and doing what he has to do in order to earn a decent wage. And things get even worse for his father (Bryan Cranston), who finds himself unemployed for the first time in decades.

Work needs done. We al know that. Not every job is going to be fulfilling. But that doesn’t mean anyone should be undervalued. If anything, the “unskilled” jobs that are seen as less desirable should pay just as much as some of the more enviable, cushy, numbers that we see people striving for in movies. Get A Job doesn’t consider that though. It is too busy working with the motto of “find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” This is a fantasy film, basically, but it accidentally scatters some reality throughout it.

Here are the positives. You get a reminder of how crappy it is to have someone in an unpaid role. You get a reminder of how disposable you are to any big company (shown in the way that Cranston’s character so suddenly finds himself adrift with no idea of where he might be able to go next). You get to see someone applying themselves to fully show what they are capable of, albeit often in a way that also has them feeling a bit restricted and very bloody tired. And, arguably best of all, you get a nice mockery of that whole “I’ll make sure you never work in this town again” attitude that some employers still think can work. Having been on the receiving end of that line of bullshit myself some time ago, I can assure you that it’s very rarely a serious threat. It is the flailing claws of a wounded predator used to being at the top of the food chain, and you should never let fear of repercussions from an employer stop you from valuing yourself enough to move to a better position (for any reason, be it pay, location, working environment, etc).

The cast do well enough, although the supporting players are a very mixed bag. As the friends of our lead, Brandon T. Jackson is easily integrated into the awful world of stock market trading, Nicholas Braun is a teacher who would rather spend his time getting stoned and playing videogames, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse has a plot all about creating an app that is basically every stalker’s wet dream. These three aren’t great, but there are much better turns from Alison Brie, Bruce Davison, Jorge Garcia, Marcia Gay Harden, Greg Germann, and Iohn C. McGinley, all playing a variety of adults already established in their respective workplaces. Kendrick is completely wasted in her role, which amounts to little more than 5-10 minutes of screentime, but both Teller and Cranston are very good, with the latter having some great moments with a local barista (Cammy, played by Mimi Gianopulos) who turns out to be more supportive than any official employment advisors.

Predictable, cheesy, but also fun, I won’t ever feel the need to rewatch this, but I enjoyed it well enough while it was on. The technical side of things is competent enough, the plotting fits everything together in an amusingly snug way for the third act, and it at least serves as a reminder that you should give your loyalty and time not to a job you may feel worn down and frustrated by, but to the people you care about.

5/10

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Promising Young Woman (2020)

You're probably already familiar with Promising Young Woman, either after seeing the impressive trailer or just hearing about the excellence of the central performance from Carey Mulligan. If you have heard people heap lots of praise upon it then, trust me, it's all warranted. Promising Young Woman is an enjoyable thriller that manages to be as entertaining and satisfying as it is searingly damning.

Mulligan plays Cassandra, a young woman who dropped out of university after a traumatic event changed her life, and the life of her friend, Nina, forever. Always ready to assume the worst in people, Cassandra hangs around in various clubs, pretending that she is very drunk, and waits for some guy to come along and act as if he's being her saviour. When the man inevitably decides that sex is on the cards, Cassandra drops her charade and confronts them about their behaviour. Despite this being all well and good, and an important lesson for every man she meets, Cassandra also has a grand plan to get revenge on the main criminal who ruined Nina's life. But that plan may need some tweaking, especially as she connects with Ryan (Bo Burnham), a paediatrician who was also at the same university. Is Ryan different from other men she has encountered? Is he a good man? He certainly seems to be better than most.

Although she has a number of acting credits to her name, this is an incredible feature debut from writer-director Emerald Fennell (who also wrote a number of episodes for the highly-praised Killing Eve). The big plus is creating a central character who is such a determined and smart day of reckoning for those who are blissfully ignorant of her ongoing work. Although taking aim at the behaviour of many men, it also ensures that viewers are reminded of how society is still designed to support and enforce a patriarchy that allows that kind of behaviour to be justified, defended, or disbelieved, even in the face of clear and obvious evidence.

Mulligan gives what may well be a career-best performance here, and that is saying something. Her character is so often attempting to outwit and wrong-foot others that her performance needs to be made up of layers upon layers. Burnham is very good alongside her, someone who may be a good guy, patient and understanding, but who may also get in the way of the main plan. Alison Brie gives an enjoyably ugly turn as Madison, someone who disbelieved Nina back in university, and doesn't think of her reaction as necessarily something to be ashamed of, and Connie Britton is so detached in her role of Dean Walker that it would be funny if it wasn't so sad/horrible. Chris Lowell is Al Monroe, the top name on Cassandra's list, with good reason, and he's also very good. Nobody gives a bad performance at all, whether it's Adam Brody or Christopher Mintz-Plasse, playing two different types of awful men, Laverne Cox, as Cassandra's employer, or Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge, who play Cassandra's parents. You also get a fantastic couple of scenes featuring an uncredited Alfred Molina, a lawyer who bluntly lays out how the system works.

Considering the path this goes on, it's surprising that Fennell has kept it all so perfectly balanced. There are moments that will give you chills, scenes full of real potential nastiness, but they're often eventually reframed by a line of dialogue or an action that shows we, as much as anyone else around Cassandra, were being tricked into thinking the worst. Which is easy to do, because few people have as strong a moral compass as Cassandra has, and that says a lot about where we are with our world today.

9/10

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Happiest Season (2020)

Directed, and co-written, by Clea DuVall, Happiest Season is the LGBTQ+ Christmas movie that you never knew you wanted. And it's yet another great role for Kristen Stewart, who continues to prove herself with performances so often ignored by her detractors.

Stewart is Abby, a young woman excited by the prospect of spending Christmas with her partner, Harper (Mackenzie Davis), and Harper's family. She hasn't met any of them before, which makes the whole thing a very big deal. There's just one problem. Harper hasn't come out to her family. She asks Abby to play along for the time being, pretending to be just a flatmate, and assures her that she will tell everyone when the time is right. The expected shenanigans ensue, with Abby trying her best to please everyone.

A great blend of comedy, Christmas trimmings, and moments that feel painfully honest, Happiest Season really brings out the best in everyone involved. DuVall has been honing her directorial skills for a number of years, and shows just how good a match she is for this material (which feels very autobiographical at times, a personal movie that allows DuVall to share some of her own feelings/experiences from her life). There are moments that many viewers may think take things a bit too far, with people watching and insisting that if they were Abby then they would have left almost at the very start of things, but think back to your own relationships, to times when someone has asked you to just play along with a white lie, or to attend a function you didn't want to be at, and remember how long you would put up with it for the sake of someone you love. Meanwhile, your partner starts to relax, and forgets how uncomfortable, or neglected, you might be feeling. That's what happens here, but with the added tricky knot of sexuality, and someone being too afraid to show others who they really are.

Stewart is a great presence in what is arguably her best role yet, perhaps giving her moments she also already felt familiar with. Davis is also very good, and her casting in the role of Harper makes it a bit easier to tolerate her character as she continues to become a bit more selfish and insensitive. Alison Brie and Mary Holland play two very different sister, both competing alongside Davis for the affections of their parents (played by Mary Steenburgen and Victor Garber). Brie does her all-too-perfect act that she's done a number of times before, while Holland, who also co-wrote the movie, is a scene-stealer as someone who hasn't achieved as much as either of her sisters, but is at least relatively happy in her life. As for the aforementioned Steenburgen and Garber, both are excellent, with Steenburgen having much more of the screentime, and a number of moments in which she is snippy to people destabilising her planned perfect Christmas. Aubrey Plaza and Jake McDorman are two very different ex-partners, allowing Abby to find out more about the woman she loves, a woman she is now not sure she even knows, and Dan Levy is wonderful and hilarious as John, a gay BFF who spends a lot of the movie advising Abby over the phone.

The best thing about Happiest Season is that every different element feels genuine. There are genuine laughs, there's a genuine authenticity to the central premise, and the moments that bring the drama and heart of the film feel genuine, and serve as a constant reminder of what so many people still go through in far too many households. Oh, it's also very much always a Christmas movie, so don't think I am suddenly viewing this as cinéma vérité, but the many small moments that need to feel real DO feel real.

Highly recommended, and I hope DuVall has enough success with this to allow her to pick another project that she connects to just as strongly.

8/10

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Netflix And Chill: The Five-Year Engagement (2012)

Another offbeat rom-com from Nicholas Stoller (director and co-writer) and Jason Segel (star and co-writer), The Five-Year Engagement is a lot more fun, and a lot sweeter, than I expected it to be (considering the mixed opinions I had heard on it). The biggest problem it has, like so many other comedies from recent years, is a lengthy runtime. Having said that, I am not sure what I would cut out of it to slim it down. I just know that I was waiting for a suitable final act about thirty minutes before it was due to be delivered.

Segel and Emily Blunt play Tom and Violet, a couple who are very much in love, and so get engaged. As the title may suggest, things keep cropping up that extend their engagement again and again. They end up living in Michigan, which Tom resents, while others start to race forward with their own life plans (mainly Violet's sister, Suzie, and Tom's best friend, Alex). Nothing seems to get easier, which puts more and more strain on their relationship. Can they get through this problematic stage, or does such a lengthy engagement mean that it's just not meant to be?

The middle section of The Five-Year Engagement is the weakest part, as the film seems to relish piling on the misery for the two main characters and becoming far too sour for a rom-com (even for an anti-rom-com, which this seems to be for a while, before making amends in the final stages). There are still a lot of funny lines and moments, but everything is tinged with sadness, doubly so for viewers who like both of the leads (and I do).

Stoller directs capably enough. You get plenty of obvious, amusing, transitions, the soundtrack has some jangly guitar tunes on there, and he allows the cast to interact with one another in a way that feels natural without feeling like the extended improvisations you would get in a Judd Apatow film. But that's definitely the biggest problem here, the Apatow effect. There's just no need for a film like this to be over two hours long.

It's a good job that the cast are so enjoyable, making it easier to accept the inflated runtime. Segel and Blunt are fantastic in the lead roles, and you really root for them to stay together, and a lot of laughs come from Alison Brie and Chris Pratt, playing Suzie and Tom. Rhys Ifans is also good fun, playing a professor who supports Violet in a way that may creep beyond professional interest, and others joining in with the fun include Brian Posehn, Dakota Johnson, Mindy Kaling, Randall Park, Kevin Hart, Jacki Weaver, and more.

This is a fun film. It has enough laughs to be a good comedy. It has enough sweetness to be a good romance. It's a fantastic ninety minutes. Stretched to over two hours.

7/10

Pick it up here.
Americans can go buy it here.

The Disaster Artist (2017)

Oh hai everyone.

First of all, you cannot watch The Disaster Artist without first "treating yourself" to a viewing of The Room, a film which has grown to become arguably THE cult movie of the past two decades. The Room is, and I think this is a decent enough analogy, a large, tacky, cruise ship being steered towards every iceberg around by the bizarre captain known as Tommy Wiseau and, unsurprisingly, a number of people were left adrift in its wake. It had terrible acting, an awful script, strange unerotic sex scenes shoehorned in, and set decor that was bizarre, to say the least.

Greg Sestero, one of the people involved in the making of The Room decided to write a book about the experience, getting everything down in one volume co-written by Tom Bissell, and titling it "The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made". And that's how we eventually get to this film.

What could have easily been full of either easy laughs or more merciless digs at the walking oddity known as Tommy Wiseau has instead turned out to be quite a joy. It's a film that celebrates the strange, almost even admiring the fact that even the most misguided singular vision is still an undeniable . . . vision, and it allows Wiseau to remain an enigmatic figure while showing how everyone else ended up giving such uniformly poor performances.

The script, by writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (who have worked together for a number of years now), blends the background of the movie and Wiseau with a number of moments that viewers will know to expect. You don't go into a Saw movie without expecting some deathtraps that also test the morals of those caught up in them, right? And nobody would go into a film about the making of The Room without expecting to see a few of the most popular/infamous moments from that movie. Everyone involved knows that, and they deliver.

James Franco, who directed the film, stars as Wiseau, and he certainly has a lot of fun in the role. It's an impression, for the most part, but it's hard to fault, especially when you think of Wiseau himself always seeming to be putting on a performance for everyone around him. Dave Franco plays Greg Sestero, and he does well in the role, and there are substantial roles for Seth Rogen, Ari Graynor, Alison Brie, Jacki Weaver, and Josh Hutcherson, among others. Everyone does their best at recreating moments from The Room, yet they also all work well together when acting in the moments that don't show the acting, if you know what I mean.

You only ever have to watch The Room once, I hope (I have ended up seeing it twice now *shudder*), but an extra reward for enduring it is that you can now follow it up with this. So we should be thankful to everyone involved.

8/10.

The Disaster Artist can be bought here.
Americans can buy it here.

The Post (2017)

Based on real events of the 1970s, The Post shows viewers the battle that the newspapers, and specifically The Washington Post, went through as they attempted to publish extracts from classified documents that revealed damning details of politicians and presidents who led America, step by step, right into the folly that was the Vietnam War.

Lots of people are giving love to The Post, partly because it has a typical level of technical expertise you would expect from director Steven Spielberg and partly because the battle between the press and the White House resonates with a lot of people watching the current events that have given us terms such as "alternative facts" and "fake news". If ever there was a time for this movie then that time is now.

Unfortunately, and let me say I have thought about this long and hard, it really isn't that good a film.

It works as a statement, as a piece of art created specifically to fire a reminding warning shot to those who think that the press is just expected to relay soundbites without questioning people in positions of authority, but it doesn't work as a satisfying cinema experience, for two main reasons.

First, you have the script by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer. It's a strangely messy tangle of different strands, from the investigative journalist who first broke the story to boardroom meetings about The Washington Post moving from private ownership to a company with public shareholders, from the relationships between the various writers and staff to the truncated snippets of the trial that would prove so important for the freedom of the press.

Second, you have the cast. Meryl Streep is as good as ever, playing Katharine Graham, owner and publisher of The Washington Post, and Tom Hanks is also his usual reliable self in the role of Ben Bradlee, editor in chief at the paper, but the rest of the cast is either wasted (Sarah Paulson, Alison Brie, Jesse Plemons) or made up in a way that will take you out of the movie as you figure out who is under the heavy make up (Bruce Greenwood, David Cross, Bradley Whitford). Bob Odenkirk and Tracy Letts are two other exceptions, both given decent scenes without having to be heavily disguised.

Third, and perhaps most damaging of all, the film feels too busy being smug when it could be spending more time dissecting the core issue. Those who know the tale, or are aware of The Washington Post, should know the outcome, and they should know, considering the time period, what comes next, so that could have been the background to something looking more closely at how the battle built up on both sides of the divide. Replace all of the talk of the stock market with scenes instead showing meetings in the White House laying out their opposition, perhaps even spitballing ideas that they realised they wouldn't be allowed to follow through on, and the whole thing may have felt more intense.

Maybe it's just me. The film has already garnered a lot of love, and I might remain in the minority here. But I still advise people to approach with trepidation. It's a decent story, and there are some great performances, but Spielberg doesn't create the magic you would expect. Very disappointing.

4/10

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