Shelter (2026)

Mason, a man with a mysterious violent past because he’s played by Jason Statham, is hiding away alone on a pretty pathetic fallacy-prone Scottish island (actually portrayed by an Irish island, perhaps caused by a bout of whisky-based confusion). His only contact to the outside world are supply runs a man we’ll later learn to be an old friend makes for him. Said old friend also tends to bring his niece, the otherwise orphaned Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) with him on these runs. Not that Mason interacts with them, mind you – he stays in his former lighthouse, looking down, drinking, and being manly and sad.

Then, two catastrophes follow shortly after one another to shake up everyone’s life: First, Mason’s buddy is killed in a storm, and he saves and takes in Jessie, if she wants to or not. While the two are slowly warming to each other, the hermit’s former boss, publicly disgraced MI-5 boss Manafort (an evil Bill Nighy!), gets wind of our hero’s location and uses his old contacts, some manipulation, and his illegal electronic surveillance network to get Mason and the inconvenient as a witness Jessie killed. Clearly, their working relationship didn’t end on great terms.

The thing is, Mason is rather more difficult to kill than Manafort might like, particularly when he’s also needed to protect a child from harm, and does have some old contacts of his own.

Historically, I have never really loved Jason Statham’s body of work, but like an old, comfy, hairless, shoe, he has grown on me during the years. There’s a highly likeable quality to an actor who understands his strengths and his limitations in range and just proceeds to work inside them, at least from my perspective. Of course, the last two Statham vehicles, the insufferably stupid The Beekeeper and the MAGA-hat-wearing A Working Man, were still terrible movies with little entertainment value.

Shelter is more like it. Directed by variable journeyman director Ric Roman Waugh, this is a very standard back to basics “hardass protects young girl” kind of film, with a few accidental (?) jibes against the surveillance state, and a good handful of straightforward and effective action sequences. I found myself particularly enjoying the action here because it isn’t attempting to be crazy, or big, or particularly loud, but looks and feels like the product of a kind of sure craftsmanship that fits an aging Statham better than any attempt to get back to Crank.

And, though the Stat is a limited actor, a mix of experience with this kind of material, actual screen presence and some great chemistry with his young co-star Breathnach, do sell the relationship between these two, even if it is built on clichés. So much so, I found myself caring about the action not just because I like to watch action scenes in my action movies (who’d have thunk) but because I also bought into the film’s emotional stakes. More people directing Statham should try this approach.

As it stands, to me, this is a return to form for Statham. Or perhaps I should say a return to making the kind of movies I like to see Statham in.

Three Films Make A Post: They were divided by war. He united them in song.

The Choral (2025): This is the sort of very competently made, somewhat life-affirming drama that appear to only be made in the UK anymore. Some of its elements do strain historical believability a little – surely, the climactic choral performance is too modern(ist) in this context? – and there are a couple of scenes that don’t have the emotional impact they are supposed to have on me – the compassionate masturbation bit particularly comes to mind.

Otherwise, director Nicholas Hytner and writer Alan Bennett evoke a time and a place and use this evocation to tell us something about people in times of social upheaval without it ever feeling didactic. Rather, this is done with grace, compassion, a sense of humour, and populated by actual characters brought to life by a brilliant cast – Ralph Fiennes really has quite a couple of years right now.

H Is for Hawk (2025): Staying in the UK, Philippa Lowthorpe’s adaption of an autobiographical book about a female academic (Claire Foy) who is avoiding coping with her grief about the death of her father (Brendan Gleeson) by hyperfocusing on training a goshawk contains one of the most believable portrayals of a real depressive episode I’ve seen in cinema – at least the kind of depression I have experience with (your symptoms may vary). Foy’s performance here is quite brilliant, nuanced and very human indeed.

Even though the film gets a bit too third act dramatic for real life in (surprise) its third act, this turns out not to be a film about a woman “getting over” mental illness by getting close to a bird as you’d probably expect, but something much messier, more complicated and more real that feels much closer to actual mental illness and the ways we cope with it than the easier version would have been. Which doesn’t mean this isn’t also full of perfect footage of a goshawk doing goshawk things, for just because the bird won’t save your life doesn’t mean it is of no import to it.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025): Belgian filmmakers Hélène Cattet’s and Bruno Forzani’s project of reflecting and intensifying the beautiful surfaces of European genre cinema of mostly the 60s and 70s – though in this one, there’s also quite a bit of Louis Feuillade added to the mix – until they turn even more abstract and weird than they already are continues. As with any good reflective surface, these films can be used as a mirror of whatever thematic interest or interpretative approach you prefer – I’m particularly fond of reading this one as a critique of the gender politics of European super spy films that still really likes looking at swankily dressed or nude, hot people; or as a meditation on the aesthetical losses of aging.

Though, honestly, I mostly prefer to fall into these films as dreams of exceeding, perhaps excessive, beauty.

Species (1995)

Some years before the start of the movie, SETI actually did get an answer from an alien source. Following some goodwill plans for a clean, inexhaustible energy source (still waiting on that one here), the aliens sent genetic information to be implanted in human egg cells to grow, well, who knows?

The government decided creating a human alien hybrid was worth a crack, so scientists under the leadership of one Fitch (Ben Kingsley) created a girl from the alien DNA plans – because women are more docile, donchaknow. Sil (as a young girl played by Michelle Williams), as they call her, grows up at a rapid tempo and appears to be exceptionally strong and agile. She does seem pleasant enough for someone growing up in a cage, however. Yet when she also develops the disturbing habit of growing H.R. Giger-style mutations under her skin, the decision is made to kill her and end the perhaps ill-advised experiment. Because who could have expected alien DNA to be alien! Obviously, the girl makes a dramatic escape.

On the run, while committing the occasional murder, Sil turns into a rather attractive young woman (Natasha Henstridge), who, as is tradition in certain cultures, goes to Los Angeles to procreate and thereby create who knows how many more aliens.

The government throws together a team consisting of Fitch, assassin style fixer Press (Michael Madsen), molecular biologist Laura (Marg Helgenberger), computer guy Arden (Alfred Molina) and empath Dan (Forest Whitaker) to catch and kill Sil before it is too late for humanity.

Leave it to the 90s to cross the genes of the erotic thriller with gigeresque alien ickiness on a mainstream budget, give it to not always inspired yet highly competent journeyman Roger Donaldson to direct, and make a commercial success out of it.

On the plot level, this is of course pulpy nonsense, but it’s the kind of pulpy nonsense that moves from one hormonal high and one great set piece to the next, has – apart from the badly aged CGI – absolutely great effects and sells every awesome bit of nonsense that comes to its mind with complete seriousness.

Of course, you can read the whole thing as a misogynist tractate about male fear of being seduced into fatherhood but occasionally murderous women (or something of that manner). You can also, if you want to, put a very different reading on the whole thing, and read it as the story of a young woman crushed by forces she has no control over whatsoever – one of them her own biology, the other parents whose only answer to her awakening sexuality and/or difference is to hunt and kill her when she steps out of line.

In any case, on this re-watch, years after I last saw the film, I’ve also realized how good Henstridge’s performance is, quite apart from her willingness to undress. The way she shifts from Sil’s childish naivety into ruthless predator mode, the little notes of regret and desperation – it’s probably more than the film’s script asked of her. Otherwise, the impressive cast doesn’t care they are in a pretty silly kind of science fiction/horror/action exploitation flick, and though there’s little substance to the characters, everyone offers presence, the small actorly notes that bring these kinds of roles to life and a sense of taking their craft seriously.

The older I get – and, perhaps ironically, the less important a generous heaping of nudity becomes to me – the more I’ve learned to appreciate Species. Make of that what you will.

Dracula: A Love Tale (2025)

In a more honest world, this would be titled “Luc Besson’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula By Yet Another Guy Who Didn’t Read The Damn Book”.

Given how much this attempts to rip off Coppola’s version of Dracula in places, this should be a nice way for the old vintner to recoup some of those Megalopolis losses. But then, I wouldn’t want to be connected to Besson’s movie-shaped object either, even for a lot of money, so Besson is probably save. When I say Besson rips off Coppola, I actually mean to say he tries to remake Coppola’s Dracula, but apparently can’t recreate anything of that movie’s idiosyncratic vision of never contained horniness, mood of gothic excess, or visual and stylistic pull.

Everything taken from other sources here is like a bad xerox copy, a shadow that only reminds us of other films that made the same thing but with artistic intent and vision, or at least a hold on simple craftsmanship.

The things Besson adds are goofy, inane and just plain stupid – I’ve been arguing that Besson simply either isn’t very bright or believes his audiences aren’t for years – to a degree that should actually make the film enjoyable as the product of someone’s rampaging Id (somewhat like Argento’s version of Dracula, which I genuinely enjoy and thus prefer to this one). After all, this is a film that replaces the standard sexy vampire brides with crappy CGI gargoyles, has a time-skipping montage during which Dracula invents a rape, sorry, seduction perfume that causes women to find Dracula irresistible and to break out in musical numbers you have to see to believe, and features a tower of horny nuns, so it should at least be more than a little entertaining. Unfortunately, apart from the few moments of insanity, this is simply dull, leadenly paced – there’s no reason for this to be more than two hours long, seventy minutes feel about right – and for most of its running time simply lacks what saved some of Besson’s other, just as deeply stupid, films from being boring: visual imagination.

Three Films Make A Post: It's Light… It's Bright… It's 100 Proof!

Ghost Train (2025): YouTuber Da-kyeong (Joo Hyun-young) revives her ailing horror channel with stories about Korea’s most haunted subway station as told to her by one of the men working there. At first, these stories seem like disconnected tales, but eventually, they entwine with Da-kyeong’s own life in ways she probably didn’t hope for.

For an anthology movie, the single tales in director Tak Seo-woong’s film can feel a little slight at first, particularly since they do tend to go for the standard tropes and shocks of Korean horror, with more than a smidgen of the Japanese 2chan style. However, each episode here does feature at least one strong, creepy image, and the way everything eventually comes together is pretty satisfying as well, so things are far from being as bland as the film’s beginning – or its title - would suggest.

Hue and Cry (1947): Directed by Charles Crichton, this film about a bunch of older boys in post-War London spoiling the plans of a master criminal did put British Ealing studios on the road to the sort of comedy we now know as the Ealing style of comedy, following the more traditionally comedian-centred efforts they made before. There’s a sharp eye for darkness and human foibles here, yet also a subversive sense of the little guy (in this case young men and boys somehow manoeuvring the direct post-war world), mostly ignored by the powers that be, sticking up for themselves as a community.

In this case, the kids are up against robbers who use not-Sexton Blake Brit pulps for children to message one another, as well as various forms of grown-up cowardice and hypocrisy. More importantly, the film is paced like race car, still genuinely funny in many regards, and makes great use of the rubble of the post-war years.

Whisky Galore! (1949): Speaking of Ealing comedies, in this one, directed by by Alexander Mackendrick, a Scottish island population, dried out of the Water of Life, attempts to steal many cases of whisky from a stranded government ship transporting it. Along the way, the film pulls at stiff upper lips, puritanical religion, and even solves two different romances with a sense of humour that goes from silly to subversive to the outright bizarre. There’s a bit concerning the power of a good bagpipes blow-out you really have to see to believe.

Only, there are very few Scotspeople involved here, so expect many a risible fake accent – I’m convinced Joan Greenwood doesn’t know the difference between Scotland and Wales, though her Welsh accent is really dreamy – and ideas about Scottish national identity that might not stand the sniff test. On the other hand, this is still a movie about a Scottish island getting one over the Brits in the name of alcoholism, so…

The Discarnates (1988)

Original title: Ijin-tachi to no natsu

TV movie writer Hidemi Harada (Morio Kazama) has been having rather a hard time of it at the beginning of the movie. He might be very successful at his job, but he has just gotten divorced, his relationship to his teenage son is basically non-existent, and he has reached the point in life where one takes a good long look in the mirror and can’t lie to oneself anymore about one’s flaws of character or conduct. He’s also thinking a lot about the past, especially the loss of his parents when he was just twelve years of age.

Harada has moved into a nearly empty apartment building, where only one other apartment appears to be rented out. The inhabitant of that apartment, a woman we’ll later learn is called Kei (Yuko Natori), would really rather get to know Harada very closely, but her first, weird, nightly attempt at throwing herself at him is harshly rebuffed by him.

A summer night or so later, Harada ends up in Asakusa, the quarter of town where he spent his early childhood when his parents were still alive. Here, he meets his father (Tsurutaro Kataoka), looking the same age he was when he died, and acting as if their meeting were a completely normal occurrence. Invited home to what looks a lot like their old place, Harada is also reintroduced to his mother (Kumiko Akiyoshi), also looking very lively and very young.

Because spending time with these two brings back an amount of happiness he can barely remember ever having felt, Harada returns to spend time with the couple again and again. At the same time, he also starts on a romance with Kei, who has some curious hang-ups about showing him her breasts, which he respects in a way you’d not at all expect from Japanese man in the 80s.

It would be a happy time all around, if not for the fact that Harada’s typically good health starts to fail rapidly. Why, looking in a mirror, he looks rather like one would imagine one of the walking dead.

One of my movie plans this year has been to watch more of the body of work of Nobuhiko Obayashi beyond the glorious Hausu, and by now, it has become clear that thematically rich insanity is only one of the strains of Obayashi’s work. Another one is that of a knowing nostalgia, a nostalgia that is perfectly clear about how memories are constructed and re-shaped into stories we tell ourselves, yet treated in a way that’s also not willing to simply discard these stories, or their impact upon one’s life, as foolishness.

If he wants to, Obayashi can be a deeply controlled director, and so much of The Discarnates consists of dramatically heightened yet precisely observed scenes of human interaction; until very late in the film, where a short yet wonderful freakout is accompanied by some choice Puccini, the supernatural is suggested through colour scheme rather than special effects. Specifically, the colours of the world Harada steps into with his parents are, like the colours of remembered childhood, richer, more intense and warmer – certainly, this is what the idealized happiness of the past must look like (though Obayashi prefers sepia tones for this sort of thing in many of his others films).

Eventually, the film does take on darker shades, when melancholia and guilt become dominant shades and textures, but these, Harada (eventually) and the film accept as an organic part of the world, and the way it shapes people. There’s nothing cruel about Obayashi’s treatment of Harada, here or anywhere – like Harada, he’s conscious of failings but also believes in growth, and a kind of change that is strengthened by being rooted in the past instead of eternally living in it.

So, like much of Obayashi’s work, this is a film about growing up, just this time around the growing beyond we do in adulthood, when we’re lucky.

Return to Silent Hill (2026)

Having received a letter from his dead wife Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson), artist James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) returns to Silent Hill, the place where they were once happy (or actually weren’t more often than not going by later flashbacks), but that is now consumed by recurring quotes from the videogame this adapts, which appear with little rhyme or reason and are completely divorced from the rich metaphorical quality they had in the game. Also, lots and lots of these flashbacks, establishing things that don’t need to be established, while also showing us things that make the idea of James returning to Silent Hill for any reason utterly preposterous.

Despite the amounts of harsh criticism thrown at Christophe Gans’s return to the Silent Hill franchise (sorry), I went into this one with a degree of optimism. Gans’s first foray into the world of Silent Hill did take some years to be appreciated, after all, and this does attempt to adapt an absolute masterpiece of a game rich in suggestion and ambiguity which also manages to be richly metaphorical in every part of its design.

However and alas, I can’t imagine any reappreciation happening to this abomination, a film that manages to at once overexplain everything and be nearly completely incoherent, that attempts to squeeze in every single bit of iconic imagery of the game – there are way too many shots that attempt to reproduce damn cut scenes – while clearly having not the faintest idea what that imagery actually means. As an adaptation, this seems to have been created by someone without any comprehension of the material they are working with – which is curious since this is made by the same guy who clearly did show such comprehension two decades ago.

But then, this doesn’t feel at all as if it was made by the same Christophe Gans who made Brotherhood of the Wolf or Silent Hill – or hell, even Crying Freeman. There’s none of the visual flair on display here that once was the director’s strength, nor of his ability to present bullshit with such conviction it becomes utterly captivating and even rather convincing. Instead, this version of Gans can’t even handle simple establishing shots properly.

Though, it has to be said, Doppelganger-Gans and his Return to Silent Hill do manage to provoke the kind of reaction in me that doesn’t happen all that often these days when it comes to movies – they make me genuinely angry.

Three Films Make A Post: Dangerously close to human.

Primate (2025): In some of the circles I move in, Johannes Roberts’s rabid chimpanzee movie has caught a decent amount of praise as a throwback to the better animal attack movies of our pre-CGI past.

Alas, I don’t really see it. Sure, there are some nice enough gore gags – though they never go quite as far as you’d hope for, so a face may be ripped off but isn’t in danger of being eaten by a rabid chimpanzee – but a bit of the old blood and guts isn’t enough to distract from the film’s massive pacing problems, the characters’ lack of interest, or the general generic blandness of the script when there’s nothing else to get excited about.

My Learned Friend (1943): The last comedy Will Hay made for Ealing Studios before his death, directed by Hay and Basil Dearden, does put the comical duo of Hay and posh straight man Claude Hulbert against a serial killer (Mervyn Johns), prefiguring the dark humour to be found in later Ealing outings like Kind Hearts and Coronets. There’s not as much subversion as you’d hope for if you’re coming to the film from later Ealing comedies, and it does drag a little even with a short runtime of 74 minutes, but there are a couple of moments of genuine inspiration here, and whenever inspiration fails, always the basics of good filmmaking to fall back on.

Oily Maniac (1976): I’d love to enjoy Shaw Brothers exploitation maestro Ho Meng-Hua’s tale of a lowly, handicapped lawyer (Danny Lee Sau-Yin in one of his better performances) turning into the titular Oily Maniac to murder various assholes like an oily, murderous Hulk more than I actually do. But this one seems so fixated on rape, and loves to stop the little plot it has for side-tracks that are simply not terribly interesting, I really only love the scenes where Lee empties oil over his head to transform, and the monster suit does its monster suit business. The rest of the film is either too unpleasant or just a little bit dull – a curious yet deadly combination.

The Vampires of Coyoacán (1974)

Original title: Los vampiros de Coyoacán

Warning: there will be some third act spoilers!

A horrifying elderly luchador known as El Espectro (Nathanael León aka Franquestain) kills his opponents in the ring, despite moving as slow as an old man, um, zombie. Apparently, making a habit of this sort of thing is okay per Mexican law as of 1974 as long as it happens in the ring.

While the elderly threat is hanging in the background, lucha heroes Mil Máscaras (Mil Máscaras) and, alas, Superzan (Superzan) are called in by one Dr Thomas (Carlos López Moctezuma) to help him out with a little family problem: his daughter Nora (Sasha Montenegro) is suffering from a strange illness. How strange? The good doctor is utterly convinced she is being targeted by a vampire, who regularly visits her to slowly suck her dry. Mil and Superzan are easier convinced of the supernatural threat than the more sceptical El Santo or Blue Demon would have been, so they are soon staking out creepy mansions, watching a group of little people vampires carrying a coffin through the darkness and wrestling said little people vampires (because this is an Agrasánchez production), as well as hipster vampires. They are ably assisted by paranormal investigator Dr Wells (Germán Robles, cast as a vampire hunter instead of a vampire, probably to confuse us).

And what of El Espectro? He is obviously part of the vampire problem.

If you are into the joyfully cartoonish side of lucha cinema – or like me, into all of its sides, except the one featuring mostly filler or comedians whose shticks don’t translate – Arturo Martínez’ Vampires of Coyoacán is a rather wonderful experience. That is, unless you’re wrestles into submission by its beginning, which features a fifteen minutes lucha sequence with no importance to the film’s plot at all, shortly followed by another one, that at least kicks off the El Espectro subplot. Though it has to be said that the cut-able lucha sequence is dynamically choreographed enough not to put one to sleep, which isn’t always that way in Agrasánchez films.

Following that, it’s all acid rock driven joy: rubber bats, cheap but cheerful Mexican 70s gothic production design lit in all the colours of horror as instituted into law by Maestro Bava in Italy, shot by Martínez with surprising enthusiasm, borrowings from Dracula as well as from Doctor Mabuse, the usual luchadores versus vampires battles, little people that are indeed vampires this time around, luchadores versus younger more gothy/hipsterish vampires (who are even somewhat creepy) business. Whatever you can ask of this sort of thing, the film offers it in spades, all driven by a huge amount of pulpy energy that isn’t always a given at this developmental stage of the lucha genre.

It does of course help that Mil and his funky wardrobe are among the liveliest presences in lucha cinema – that man can dress as well as move – so much so even the dreaded Superzan doesn’t manage to annoy me.

From time to time, the film even makes clear that it is indeed a product of the more downbeat 70s, so you also get elements of a decidedly unhappy ending, where a young vampire woman first murders here father and then, realizing what she’s done, sets herself on fire and dies screaming. Which is quite the thing in a silly movie about luchadores fighting vampires.