Three Films Make A Post: Revenge has never been sweeter.

You’ll Never Find Me (2023): There’s a lot to admire in Indianna Bell’s and Josiah Allen’s thriller about a stormy night in an Australian trailer park home, a nightly visitor, and a lot – and I mean a lot – of meaningful stares and portentous dialogue: the sound design is fantastic, the performances are focussed, and it has some genuinely interesting things to say about the violence some men love to inflict of women. However, for me, there’s not enough material here for anything longer than a forty minute short film, so at full length, things feel rather repetitive and drawn out, and everything seems to be restated thrice until the film can lumber to its excellently realized if obvious conclusion.

Thelma (2024): I am genuinely disappointed I didn’t enjoy Josh Margolin’s comedic variation on action movie themes and old age as much as everybody else appears to. It’s not that this is a bad movie, but it is (again!) also a very obvious one: its insights about old age, while played wonderfully by June Squibb and Richard Roundtree, are not exactly incisive – and do tend to the treacly – and the play with action movie tropes stays just as surface level. The humour, as well, never is all that involving.

Taken on the surface level the film actually operates on, it is a fun time and genuinely well done, just don’t go in expecting something that has ambitions beyond making you feel good about your own future of slow decay and dissolution, and everybody you know and love dying (which the film actually tries to make a joke of, because old age loneliness is funny, apparently).

Bad City (2022): Whereas Kensuke Sonomura’s violent cop movie holds more than the homage to classic Japanese V-cinema I was promised. In fact, for being that other movie, it’s not quite violent and crazy enough, and much too interested in character work.

Don’t get me wrong – the action is plenty violent (though, alas, rather MMA-based), pleasantly chaotic and balancing right on the edge of cartoonish fun and brutality appropriate for the material. But this is a film deeply interested in also giving characters proper motivations and relationships it then uses to drive the plot that in its turn is the engine that drives the action sequences. During this, it uses clichés and tropes, and discards them or revels in them as it finds most fitting. It thus actually manages to achieve – between funny-bad jokes and a bit of carnage – a series of emotional beats that actually work. Hell, I found myself caring for the characters as characters, and how often can you say that about an action movie?