12 of the best films to watch

30 days ago

Karate Kid: Legends

Cobra Kai began life as a YouTube series which picked up from where the 40-year-old Karate Kid franchise left off. In short, it didn't sound like essential viewing. But the series went on to be an Emmy-nominated, critically acclaimed, six-season hit, and it put the star of the 1984 film, Ralph Macchio, back in the limelight. Now Macchio is starring in a Karate Kid sequel, Karate Kid Legends, featuring Ben Wang as the new Kid on the block, a Chinese teenager who learns to fight bullies in New York. Confusingly, Legends follows the continuity of the original Karate Kid films, as well as the Cobra Kai series, but it also brings in Jackie Chan's Mr Han, who was in the 2010 Karate Kid remake. Still, Macchio promises that all the elements in this shared universe will be in balance – and as Mr Miyagi once explained, "Balance is key". "Once we were able to line that up, for the Cobra Kai story to lead into the new film – even though they're separate ecosystems – it all made sense for me," Macchio said in Variety. "Then, working with Jackie was just super exciting. I started this on the big screen. How cool is it to get it back to the big screen?"

Bring Her Back?

Danny and Michael Philippou are the Australian twins who made Talk to Me, a terrifically creepy indie horror film which was an international hit in 2023. It was such a success, in fact, that you might have expected the Philippous to move straight onto a sequel, or even to a Hollywood blockbuster. Instead, the brothers stayed in their hometown of Adelaide and made another low-budget horror film with an original story: Bring Her Back stars Sally Hawkins as a foster mother, Laura, who is trying to contact the dead. Thematically, this supernatural chiller is closely related to Talk to Me, although it's been given extra depth by a death in the Philippou family. "We were doing pre-production meetings, then we started shooting, and there was no time to properly sort through those emotions," Danny Philippou said in Den of Geek. "They sort of poured themselves out in the script and in conversations with Sally, so that bled into the character of Laura and scenes that were meant to be scary suddenly turned sad. I think there's a rawness in it that wasn't in Talk to Me."

Deaf President Now!

The co-director of Deaf President Now!, Nyle DiMarco, says that his documentary tells "the story of the greatest civil rights movement most people have never heard of". Its setting is Gallaudet University in Washington DC, the world's first university for deaf and hard of hearing students. Gallaudet was established in 1864, but for more than a century, none of its presidents was deaf. In 1988, when the board of trustees appointed yet another hearing president over two deaf candidates, the students wouldn't stand for it. Eight days of protests followed – and four of the protesters are interviewed in the film. Co-directed by Davis Guggenheim, who made the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth and Still: A Michael J Fox Movie, Deaf President Now! is "a firebrand historical documentary that is as crowd-pleasing and informative as it is innovative and inclusive", says Marya E Gates at RobertEbert.com.
* Final Destination: Bloodlines

There were five Final Destination films from 2000 to 2011, all with the same structure. First, there would be a spectacular catastrophe; then this sequence would be revealed to be someone's premonition; then the person who had the premonition would save a handful of people from the catastrophe when it actually happened; but then those people would be claimed by Death, one by one, usually via complicated accidents. Now the gleefully grisly franchise is back from the dead, so prepare to squeal and squirm at yet more ingeniously nasty killings. But Final Destination: Bloodlines has moved on from the previous films in one respect. According to the trailer, it turns out that all of the victims in the previous five films were descended from people who were saved from one particular catastrophe, decades ago. That means that the film isn't just about a group of strangers, but a family that is trying to break an inherited curse. "Suddenly, the five films are not just one fun, gory rollercoaster ride after another, but a series with a lot of interweaving emotional weight," says Shawn Van Horn in Collider. "Those stronger relationships are going to make the characters more three-dimensional, and we'll likely be rooting for their survival rather than relishing in the bloodshed." Well… maybe.
Final Destination: Bloodlines

Lilo & Stitch

Admittedly, the last of Disney's live-action remakes, Snow White, was (a) dogged by controversy, and (b) not very good, but Lilo & Stitch looks a lot more promising. The film retells the story a genetically engineered, blue-furred alien called Experiment 626, or Stitch. He is so destructive that he is condemned to be exiled to an asteroid, but he escapes from the interstellar authorities and crash-lands on Earth, where he is befriended by a Hawaiian girl, Lilo. The original 2002 film, then, was one of the few Disney cartoons to have a modern-day US setting, and one of the few to mix contemporary human beings with fantastical creatures – so, for once, a remake that has both live-action and CGI characters makes total sense. Another good sign is that the film is directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, who made the Oscar-nominated charmer Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. And a third key factor is that, in the trailers, Maia Kealoha, who plays Lilo, seems to have the most adorable chemistry with an alien since Drew Barrymore was in ET The Extra Terrestrial.
Roadside Attractions (Credit: Roadside Attractions)Roadside Attractions

The Surfer

Nicolas Cage doesn't appear in many subtle dramas these days, so you may not be surprised to hear that The Surfer is "a gloriously demented B-movie thriller", as Xan Brooks puts it in The Observer, or that Cage cranks "the acting dial from befuddled to vexed to outraged to volcanic". He plays an unnamed businessman who has returned to Australia after years in California, and who wants to buy the beachfront house where he grew up. But when he tries to surf in a nearby bay, he is harassed by a gang of locals led by a shamanic thug (Julian McMahon). Cage's character won't be put off, though, and camps out in the car park above the beach, sacrificing his possessions and his sanity in the process. "Crisply scripted by Thomas Martin and directed by Lorcan Finnegan with a pleasing, no-frills intensity," says Brooks, "The Surfer [is] a low-budget, hard-hitting comic bruiser of a picture: a midlife-crisis movie dressed up as a 1970s exploitation flick [with a] wild, roiling, hallucinogenic vibe."

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life

Jane Austen may be turning 250 in December, but film and TV directors are as smitten by her novels as ever. Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden are starring in a new Netflix adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and before that there is a French romantic comedy drama, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, written and directed by Laura Piani. Camille Rutherford stars as Agathe, who works in a bookshop in Paris, but dreams of becoming an author. With the encouragement of her friend Felix (Pablo Pauly), she accepts the offer of a writing residency in England set up by the Austen estate. Will she finish her novel at last? Will she come to see Felix as more than a friend? Or will she fall for one of the residency's organisers (Charlie Anson), a handsome toff who happens to be the great-great-great-great-nephew of Austen herself? "The film is a delightful ode to Jane Austen's novels, serving up a unique blend of humour and introspection that reflects both European sensibilities and the particular quirks of Austen's world," says Louisa Moore in Screen Zealots.

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