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The Flash (2023)
I loaded up this film with a presentiment that it would be silly. I can’t remember how it was reviewed at the time, but I had a feeling that it wasn’t good. Is it any good? Well, yes and no. The actual plot gets very silly very quickly; that’s something that almost always happens when you do time-jumping stories. The philosophical and physical problems created can’t easily be done away with. What saves the movie is that it very much plays for laughs, and I confess I did laugh in places. The final twist to the film is also well done (in fact there are two twists). In short, I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from watching this film... just don’t expect a masterpiece.
The King
This is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, which I didn’t immediately recognise. It’s very well done. The cast are excellent (featuring a young Timothee Chalamet as Henry), and the plot, as you might expect, is tightly knit and believable. I only had a couple of niggles. One was that the locations seemed too clean, clothes rather unimaginative. Maybe that’s just me being picky. And a couple of jump cuts were a bit abrupt... but that really is just me being picky. It’s a very good film. Well worth a watch.
Copycat
This is a tale of a serial killer copy-catting what other serial killers have done. An expert in serial killers gives a speech early on to students, and near the end of the film everyone suddenly realises that the new spate of killings exactly follows the order in which she listed earlier killers in her speech. It’s not awful. It’s not great. It’s very derivative and it’s not too difficult to guess how it’s all going to play out. I’d give it 5 out of 10.
Coherence
This is a very weird film which gradually gets even weirder. A group of partygoers find themselves trapped in a sort of inter-dimensional vortex in which other groups of identical partygoers are also stuck. The groups seem not to like each other. A book about the inter-dimensional stuff is conveniently to hand and... well, the groups start to get muddled up, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident. It didn’t quite convince, but I watched it to the end. I’m not sure I can really recommend it, though.
Demon City
Ivy was out, which gave me the chance to watch a ‘silly film’. Well, they don’t come much sillier than Demon City, a Japanese film in which a top assassin emerges from a 12-year coma and promptly starts killing anyone remotely connected with putting him in it (and murdering his wife) in the first place. He’s shot, knifed, bludgeoned... you name it... but he keeps on coming and kills, oh, at least 100 extras en route. It’s very silly. I don’t really recommend it.
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