Netflix And Chill: Remarkably Bright Creatures (2026)

A film based on a book (written by Shelby Van Pelt), there have been very few films in the past few years that I have realised were based on a book from the very opening moments. The main conceit here, a story presented, and sometimes narrated, by an octopus (voiced by Alfred Molina, no less) practically screams "THIS WORKS A LOT BETTER IN CUTE AND QUIRKY BOOK FORM". There's a cosy feeling here, but it's definitely a cosiness that I would appreciate more in a book than in a film, and the talented cast cannot do enough to make up for the lack of any real substance in the material.

Sally Field plays Tova, an elderly woman who spends a lot of her time being very good at her job, a cleaner at a local aquarium. That's where she has developed a bond with an elderly octopus named Marcellus (voiced by Molina). Things start to change when Tova is injured, forcing her to take some time off work just as Cameron Cassmore (Lewis Pullman) rolls into town in a van that breaks down. Cameron needs a job, which means that he needs to spend quite a bit of time with Tova. 

Directed by Olivia Newman, who also co-wrote the screenplay with John Whittington, this is a film I would only recommend to people who are fans of anyone involved. As well as Field, Pullman, and Molina, you have decent screentime for Colm Meaney and Sofia Black-D'Elia. While they're not given the best material to work with, they're given enough to make spending some time with them a pleasant enough experience.

In fact, all of the main performances are pitched exactly where they need to be. Field is sweet and caring, for the most part, but also has moments in which she is abrasive and lashing out at anyone close to her, and Pullman continues to display the same kind of likability and easygoing demeanour as his famous father. Meaney is a lot of fun as a source of local knowledge for Pullman's character, as well as someone with more than a passing interest in our leading lady, and Black-D'Elia is introduced in an amusing enough meet-cute moment that signifies how she may become an integral part of the storyline. Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, and Beth Grant are members of the wonderfully-named "Knitwits", and there are one or two other individuals who do well enough with very small amounts of screentime.

I cannot say I disliked this. But a large part of that was tied to how much I like Pullman onscreen. I also cannot say that I liked it though. The script is a bit flat, and that's before you consider the horribly predictable and clumsy way in which everything is tied together neatly in the third act, and Newman doesn't do anything that supports the cast, aside from some nice shots of octopi and some other marine creatures.

And I should end this review by admitting that it took an observant comment from a friend to make me realise how enjoyably meta and cute having Molina voicing Marcellus was. He has a good voice for the role anyway, but Doc Ock delivering the ock talk feels like a deliberate extra treat.

5/10

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Mubi Monday: Bring Them Down (2024)

I really wanted to like Bring Them Down, an Irish drama featuring a number of actors that I have liked in many other movies. Sadly, it feels like many other films I've seen over the past few years, although it's not as good as any of them. It's particularly irritating to see such a great cast being slightly wasted in something that could have been much better.

Christopher Abbott plays Michael, a young farmer who is trying his best to keep the family business afloat while being overlooked by his father, Ray (Colm Meaney). Times are tough, so tough that a nearby farming family becomes a bitter enemy when young Jack (Barry Keoghan) steals a couple of animals and claims that they died. That lie is revealed when Michael sees the animals displayed at a market, which leads to a confrontation between himself and Jack's father, Gary (Paul Ready). Things start to get worse from there.

Co-written by Christopher Andrews and Jonathan Hourigan, with Andrews also making his debut as a feature director after getting a few shorts under his belt, it's hard to really pin down how this fails. I think it's just too many moments that we've seen before without enough added to the material to make it seem really fresh or worth our time. This is a patchwork movie, and some of those patches are almost identical to other films that you could either revisit or watch for the first time.

Abbott does okay in the lead role, even if he suffers in comparison to almost everyone else onscreen. This is definitely time for people to try to make him a thing, but I'm not sure he's truly deserving of the push. Keoghan, on the other hand, deserves all of the positive attention and praise he's been getting over the past few years, and he delivers yet another effortlessly mesmerising turn here. Meaney is fantastic, Ready is very good indeed, and a couple of excellent supporting turns come from Aaron Heffernan and Nora-Jane Noone.

There's a lot being mixed in to a big melting pot here (family pressure, problems handed down through generations, the difficulties of making ends meet in a vocation where profit margins can depend on one good animal), but none of it is able to come through clear enough. To overuse the analogy, a lot of the flavours overwhelm one another, and you're just left with a load of bland mush. Even the non-chronological presentation of events, we get shown things and then taken back to see them from another perspective, doesn't really add the impact and tension that it should.

If you want some great Irish-set movies then I can give you a good half dozen or so. If you want films set against the harsh life of farming then I can probably recommend a few of those too. Great Barry Keoghan films? Easily done. Better roles for Colm Meaney? Just as easy. There may not be anything here that's awful, but it's shocking that so much of it feels so disappointingly average.

5/10

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Prime Time: No Way Up (2023)

As someone who is not good on aeroplanes, and also someone who is terrified of the idea of ever being in the same space as sharks, I have long joked that my biggest fear is to be involved in a plane crash that leaves me floating in the sea, surrounded by sharks. No Way Up takes that idea and tries to add a slight twist, by putting the plane underwater and having the shark able to nose inside. Uh oh.

Things start in the expected way. We meet a variety of people we will then watch try to survive a perilous situation. The three bright young things who seem to be the leads are Ava (Sophie McIntosh), Jed (Jeremias Amoore), and Kyle (Will Attenborough). They are accompanied by Ava's bodyguard, Brandon (Colm Meaney). There are also a pair of grandparents on board with their granddaughter, Rosa (Grace Nettle). Add at least one air steward (Danilo, played by Manuel Pacific), and you may have enough potential snacks for a curious shark. If not, don't worry, a rescue team will soon send down some divers.

If I had recognised the name of director Claudio Fäh before pressing play on this then I may not have taken the chance. Although they have since helmed a number of what may well be enjoyable and entertaining non-theatrical movies, I last experienced their work when I sat through the dire Hollow Man 2. They've definitely improved over the years though, even if this is very standard and predictable stuff.

Writer Andy Mayson only has this screenplay to his credit, so far, but he does enough to show that he knows what kind of formula to work with. None of the characters are particularly great, which is down to the performances not helping the lacklustre writing, but people get their little bit of character development as they start to become more afraid and figure out ways to avoid becoming shark food.

Meaney is the standout, as expected, but the fact that his name looms so large over the others in the cast list means that his storyline feels very obvious. Still, it's a pleasure to have him onscreen. McIntosh also does well, and the film isn't so bad when it focuses on her finding her strength and courage. Phyllis Logan is a sweet grandmother, with Nettle doing okay as the scared little girl, but the rest (Attenborough, Amoore, Pacific, etc) were all just people that I wanted to see turned into chum as soon as possible. Whether that happened or not, and whether any of it was satisfying enough, is something I will leave you to discover for yourself.

This works hard around what I am assuming is a relatively low budget, and it gets more right than wrong. There's a general good sense of the geography of the plane, in terms of the interior layout and where it is perilously placed under the water, the cinematography from Andrew Rodger is clean and clear (aside from the times when shark attacks require some choppy editing), and it's a disaster movie that follows a well-used template, with added fins. It sadly never quite hits the heights it should though, due to the quality and quantity of the potential victims, but it does enough to sit in the mid-tier of modern shark movies.

5/10

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Netflix And Chill: In The Land Of Saints And Sinners (2023)

I'm not one to usually worry about films being offensive. Nothing much bothers me, I'm in the main demographic for characters who aren't used as punchlines, and I've watched far too many Troma movies to be bothered by tastelessness or mishandling of potentially sensitive issues. So I hope you understand how much thought I gave it before I decided that In The Land Of Saints And Sinners feels offensively bad in the way it uses the Troubles in Ireland as a backdrop for what becomes yet another standard Liam Neeson thriller. It didn't personally bother me, but I have a lot of friends over the water I can imagine may be a bit irked by this, to put it mildly.

Neeson plays Finbar Murphy, a man who lives in County Donegal, working as a contract killer for a local crime boss (played by the superb Colm Meaney). Murphy starts off a violent chain of events when he voluntarily helps an abusive prick shuffle off this mortal coil. Unfortunately, that abusive prick was the brother of a strong-willed terrorist (Doireann, played by Kerry Condon), which leads to her, and her accomplices, working to find the killer, no matter who else gets caught up in the crossfire.

While this feels like an accomplished debut from director Robert Lorenz, it isn't. He may not have too many credits to his name, but Lorenz has been around long enough to hone his skills. The same can be said of writer Terry Loane. It's co-writer Mark Michael McNally who is the first-timer, which makes me wonder if he was the person who came up with the sorely-misjudged main premise (although maybe I am just viewing it that way because it feels a bit closer to home than other films that have used similar backgrounds for some kind of redemption story arc).

The cast all do good work, with both Condon and Neeson on top form, and emanating an undeniably powerful energy in the scenes that have them facing one another. Meaney is always a great presence onscreen, Jack Gleeson does a great job in the role of a young man who doesn't consider how he might end up one day regretting his actions, and Ciarán Hinds is a friendly local Garda officer. There are also good performances from Desmond Eastwood, Niamh Cusack, Michelle Gleeson, Sarah Greene, and everyone else filling out the cast of supporting characters.

I'd be very interested to hear from others who watched this, and especially any of my pals over on the Emerald Isle. Am I wrong for wanting this to have been better, for wanting it to justify the use of the events used as the background to the story? It could have been tweaked so easily, and I don't think there would have been anything lost (especially if Neeson had the same background to his character). In fact, it could have possibly even been improved by setting it in the here and now, showing people who refused to let go of some old tactics while the older and wiser heads remembered how many lives were shattered and destroyed by their actions.

Competent, technically-speaking, but fairly incompetent when you consider the decisions made at the writing stage, this is somehow more egregious than the dozen or more Neeson movies that simply try to replicate the success of the Taken series. Or maybe it's just me thinking that way.

4/10

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Unwelcome (2022)

Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) and Jamie (Douglas Booth) are a young couple who we see going through a terrible ordeal at the start of this movie. So when Jamie is informed that he has inherited a house in Ireland it seems as if things are looking up. There’s only one catch, explained to them by a local woman. An offering has to be left out every night for the little people. A bit of liver or some other raw meat, making it a blood offering. Maya and Jamie roll their eyes at this idea, but decide to go along with it. They have just been given a house, it’s the least they can do. And it may end up saving them when they end up inadvertently hiring the wrong family of builders to work on renovating their home.

Directed by Jon Wright, who once again worked with Mark Stay on the script (the two also co-wrote Robot Overlords), Unwelcome is a horror movie laced with moments of comedy that sadly fails to get the balance right. And it’s not as if Wright shouldn’t be able to handle the mix, given how well he did with the wonderful Grabbers. 

The problems start with the script, which spectacularly fails to give you anything that feels plausible, as well as making the main characters too annoying to root for. But you have to root for Maya because she’s pregnant. Okay, the themes of motherhood and protection run through the entire the film, but I still cannot help feeling that making a main character pregnant is an easy and lazy way to force viewers to be on their side.

Things aren’t helped by the weak acting from our leads. I have seen John-Kamen and Booth give decent performances in other works, but they are both quite poor in this, with the latter suffering from the script going too far to show his inability to be the protector that his partner needs. In fact, almost every decision that is made by Booth’s character makes any situation worse, and I spent a lot of the movie hoping to see him be killed off, which I don’t think was the intention of the film-makers. The antagonists do a much better job though, headed up by a fun Colm Meaney. He is the patriarch (“call me Daddy”) and has fun as he weaves between being jovial and menacing. His children are played by Kristian Nairn, Chris Walley, and Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, with the latter being the best of the bunch, and getting away with a bit more inappropriate behaviour as she toys with the new man in the village. Niamh Cusack also has a small role, but she is leading a supporting cast of players who all seem to have been pulled from the “to be sure, to be sure, shamrocks and shillelaghs, every green-eyed Irish stereotype casting company”. The dialogue and character types populating the rest of the movie will have many cringing with embarrassment.

There’s a 5-10 minute segment in the third act that hints at how good this could have been. It feels fun, there are some entertaining bits of bloodshed, and the effects work well enough for what the film wants to show. That’s all you get though, and that glimpse of something better just makes the rest of the film all the worse. It’s really bad. I sincerely hope that Wright gets back on track with whatever he directs next. 

3/10

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Layer Cake (2004)

Layer Cake is an important movie for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's the film that saw the hugely talented Matthew Vaughn step out from the shadow of Guy Ritchie (he'd previously been producer on Ritchie's movies). Secondly, it showed Daniel Craig's leading man potential and even, yes, gives him a Bond moment. Third, it showed that British crime movies could still be fresh and entertaining without coming across as some pale Lock, Stock-wannabe. Fourth . . . . okay, I'm not sure if there are any more reasons so I'll stop there. But Layer Cake is certainly more, thanks to what it achieved, than just another UK gangster movie.

The story revolves all around Daniel Craig's smart drug dealer, a man who wants to make his million and get out of the business. Of course, anyone who makes the big shots a lot of money will always struggle to extricate themselves from the criminal lifestyle and that's exactly the case here. Avoiding the police, trying to stay alive and setting up a deal involving a million stolen pills, Craig really has his work cut out for him.

Mixing a smart script with great performances (Craig is superb but he's more than capably supported by the likes of Kenneth Cranham, Colm Meaney, Michael Gambon and everyone else who appears alongside him), cool visuals and an ideal soundtrack this film may not cover any new ground but it gives everything a fresh coat of paint with it's easygoing, effortless air of . . . . cool. This film has style in abundance. That's not to say that it glorifies the lifestyles shown or any of the violence we see, hell no. There are people here we'd never want to meet in real life and when things erupt into violence they do so with absolute brutality, impacting on the lives of those involved. There are no consequence-free, thoughtless actions here. Everything is weighed up and accounted for, even if it's after the fact.

It's an absolute corker of a film that has grown on me with each subsequent viewing. I'm sure that many others will still simply cast it aside as "yet another British gangster flick" but that's not the case and I hope that others give it a chance and end up enjoying it as much as I do.

9/10

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The Dead (1987)

Based on the short story by James Joyce, the final tale in "Dubliners", The Dead is a handsome and well-acted movie that nevertheless just left me cold. It's also the final film to have been directed by the great John Huston (the story was adapted into screenplay form by his son, Tony).

The plot is all about a Christmas dinner being held by a couple of old spinsters (Cathleen Delany and Helena Carroll). The ladies have invited a mixture of friends and family and everyone gets a chance to make an impression on the crowd, be it with a rendition of poetry or song or a loud debate during the main meal. Two guests in particular, Gabriel and Gretta Conroy (played, respectively, by Donal McCann and Anjelica Huston), find that the evening gives them plenty to think about, cause to reflect on their lives and wonder about past events that led them to become their present selves.

I'm actually explaining the film very badly, and misrepresenting it somewhat, so I can only apologise to those who have already seen the movie and who may be wondering if I even watched the damn thing. I did watch it, I enjoyed it, but it's a very difficult film to pin down, in my opinion. It's the film equivalent of a cloud of damp mist that seems to move through your pores when you walk through it.

I'm not even sure why I didn't like it more than I did. The script was a great mix of lively chat and sombre introspection, with a couple of pieces of very beautiful poetry in there too, and the direction from Huston (who was very near the end of his life and, sadly, died before the film was released) is solid and keeps the naturalistic performances and material always watchable. The cast is pretty flawless. McCann and Huston are very good in their roles but they're more than matched by Delany, Carroll, Donal Donnelly (as the ever-so-slightly drunk Freddy Malins), Dan O'Herlihy (as the ever-so-slightly antagonistic Mr. Browne) and everyone else, including the ever-reliable Colm Meaney.

John Huston deserves a lot of praise for capping a fantastic directorial career with a movie that never reflects just how his health was failing while it was being made but I can't lie, there was something about this movie that left me unengaged. Perhaps just the beauty and the nature of the material left it all feeling slightly too artificial for me to lose myself in. Perhaps.

The Dead is certainly worth your time but whether you end up loving it or not is another matter entirely.

6/10

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Under Siege (1992)

Also known as . . . . . . . the best movie that Steven Seagal ever managed to star in, Under Siege is a brilliantly entertaining action movie with wit, thrills and some genuinely fantastic performances from Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey. It’s basically Die Hard on a boat. And it has Erika Eleniak jumping out of a cake while topless. Which automatically adds two points.

Seagal plays ship’s cook Casey Ryback, the one man who may prove problematic when the ship that he’s on is taken over by baddies who want to have fun with nuclear weapons and make lots of money. Ryback isn’t JUST a cook though. He is actually a former Navy SEAL. If you can’t stand any heated action then stay the hell out of his kitchen.

Andrew Davis directs Seagal for the second time and shows a much better grasp of action entertainment this time round. His next movie would be The Fugitive, featuring a number of cast members from this film, but Under Siege is a damn fine slice of fun by anyone’s standards. 

J.F. Lawton has the writing duties and mixes in some amusing one-liners with a number of great character moments. Tommy Lee Jones gets most of the best lines but Gary Busey raises a smile on more than one occasion and even Seagal gets some decent quips, as well as some enjoyable exchanges with the gorgeous Erika Eleniak (playing a beauty who has been flown onto the ship as part of a surprise birthday party).

The plot is, unsurprisingly, easy to follow and any twists and turns are easy enough to spot but everything is raised up by the quality of the supporting cast: Jones, Busey, Colm Meaney, Glenn Morshower and many other familiar faces flesh out either the crew in danger or the baddies placing the crew in danger.It may not be the best Die Hard riff (that would be Speed AKA Die Hard on a bus) but it’s certainly near the top of the pile and a modern classic of entertaining action cinema. 

9/10. 

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