I always love weird, inventive games and that this one is in the underserved investigative genre makes it a must try for me. The issue with the genre is that cases are usually handcrafted and the process of solving them plays out like a linear adventure game with a small cast of characters. What makes Shadows of Doubt stand out is that it’s all procedurally generated. The city, the hundreds of people who live in it and of course the cases. The downside is that the procedural generation isn’t perfect, resulting in all kinds of issues, and there is a lot of jankiness in the mechanics. It’s one of a kind and great at what it does but you do have to put up with a lot of frustration.
The first Zootopia was a pleasant surprise but that this sequel was a far bigger success was even more surprising being the top grossing film in the US for 2025. To me this is almost the same film with the same core message, except bigger, more frenetically paced and almost painfully vibrant. The attempt to create a new source of conflict between the two leads is cringeworthy and the last minute betrayal is clunky. I don’t doubt that this is a spectacular experience for kids but it’s too shallow to be satisfying for me.
My wife insisted on watching this in the cinemas, believing that we ought to give local directors a chance. This is the directorial debut of Tham Wai Fook, who is arguably a friend of a friend, and he has apparently been wanting to turn his script into a film for over a decade. This is a clearly a passion project based on elements that are at least partially autobiographical, such as his strange obsession with circuses. Unfortunately just because someone feels strongly for something doesn’t mean that they’re capable of turning it into good art. This film is too long, too unfocused and too self-indulgent. It was so actively bad that I had difficulty watching it to the end.
We’ve seen so much of the work of Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Delon that it would have been criminal to miss this one. Even those of a certain age who haven’t seen Le Samouraï will certainly be famliar with Delon’s iconic look here with his hat and trenchcoat. It’s a gorgeous, slick film of competence on all sides put on display. The title is pure cultural appropriation however meant only to evoke a particular mood. Similarly the plot is more style than substance and the ending is the usual unsatisfying death, Melville-style. I wouldn’t call this a particularly deep film but it sure is cool.
As promised, I’m on the second book of Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy and with the entire Confederation now aware of the crisis, it’s action-packed right from the start. I’d complained earlier that my main issue with the first book was the character of Joshua Calvert being set up as the stereotypical action hero. He does get a little less of the limelight but unfortunately we also get another copy of him? While still very entertaining, I like this somewhat less than the first book, partly because the Confederation is rather smart about containing the possessed, so they don’t turn out to be as large-scale a threat as they initially seemed. Plus, I strongly dislike the new possessed leader characters such as Al Capone. I mean, really?
I only knew of this film recently when I read it being described as having Dark Souls vibes. Indeed the styling of the armor seen here, the ickiness of the monsters and the general atmosphere of this dark fantasy world seems to have been inspired by multiple video games. Unfortunately the overall look is all that we get because the budget is so low that we don’t even get any decent action scenes. I commend director Jordan Downey on executing a specific vision well but this is too small in scope and too cheaply made that it should have been a short film.
Whatever the results of the awards circuit, critics were more or less unanimous in pronouncing Sirāt to be the best film of last year. Freely shifting between Spanish, French, Arabic and English, this film defies genre expectations and has been described both as a road trip drama and science-fiction. To me, it is one thing above all, as pure a religious experience as you can achieve on film, without being explicitly about any religion in particular. It’s a stroke of genius on the part of its director Óliver Laxe to interpret the rave scene in this manner and I would agree that it’s the most outstanding film of 2025.
