April Films Update 1

Ten films I watched in 2025

**** 

1. Sherlock Holmes: Murder By Decree

Jack The Ripper has been murdering women so the authorities ask famous detective Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer) and his assistant Dr John Watson (James Mason) to investigate. There’s not a lot to go on, and strangely their best lead seems to be a vision from medium Robert Lees (real). Radicals are stirring up trouble with the police getting nowhere.

After some effort Holmes discovers that a connection between the murdered women was Annie Crook, who is now missing. Holmes tracks her down to a mental institution, but after interviewing her she and one of his informants vanish. There are politics involved; solving this will reverberate in the halls of power.

This has the problem of Sherlock Holmes investigating a real crime, along with all the various Jack The Ripper theories that have developed over the years. The period sets are good, though conversations in carriages are done as voiceover – presumably the background noise was too loud.

Watch This: Curiosity of Sherlock Holmes and Jack The Ripper story
Don’t Watch This: Holmes and Watson wander about, leaving the viewer almost more confused at the end than at the start

2. Doomwatch (1972)

DoomWatch, lightly revised into an explicitly ecological and pollution concerned government agency, makes the leap from TV to the cinema. New character* Dr Bel Shaw (Ian Bannen) is sent to the remote island of Balfe to investigate the aftereffects of an oil spill. The islanders are generally hostile, the only one who will speak to him is the schoolteacher, also from the mainland Victoria Brown (Judy Geeson). He can’t find much oil residue but there’s something wrong with the fish.

There’s a naval radioactive dumping ground off the island, and the fishermen all claim not to fish there. And there’s no radiation on the fish! He goes underwater to investigate, and finds the radiation canisters are intact, but also other canisters, which he reports back.

The middle section of the film has some of the TV Doomwatch team try to investigate what’s in the containers and how they ended up in a restricted naval dumping ground. Meanwhile things get tense on the island. Many of the islanders have odd appearances, or are housebound – generally believed to be a result of inbreeding. They are hostile when Dr Shaw tries to prepare them to evacuate, to the point of violence.

On the one hand this does feel like an episode of the show if they had the budget for some underwater scenes and tacked a final action sequence on to the end. On the other hand it loses some of the cerebral problem solving power, the dilemmas they have to resolve, and Dr Quist making some speech about profit or hubris or obsession.

Watch This: Doomwatch’s science-based thriller with more action
Don’t Watch This: Doomwatch thrived on the constraints of a TV budget, this has new uninteresting characters and drags without the tight episode time limits

* Probably – most of the last season’s episodes are lost

3. Blood Of The Vampire (1958)

In 19^th century central Europe Dr John Pierre is put on trial for medical malpractice that led to a death, by attempting a blood transfusion. Pierre’s defence was that the patient would die anyway, and that there have been advances in blood transfusion that made it worth the attempt and asks that Professor Meister of Geneva be called to give evidence. The judge reveals that he wrote to Professor Meister who claimed to have never heard of Pierre.

Pierre is unexpectedly sent to a prison for the criminally insane run by Dr Callistrus (with the assistance of his faithful and disabled servant Carl who hangs around doing dirty work for Callistrus and making people uncomfortable in the prison scenes). Callistrus has had him diverted there to help with his experiments with blood transfusion, especially his blood-typing, to help with some rare blood conditions. Obviously this prison is strange and spooky, in part because of the inmates. Meanwhile outside Pierre’s fiancée Madeline and her uncle travel to Geneva where Meinster claims not to have received the judge’s letter. They convince him to travel back with them, where they confront Auron the prison commissioner. It turns out Auron is in league with Callistrus, but with this evidence must re-open the case, though he attempts to delay things.

Pierre becomes more and more unhappy at events as inmates are forced to give blood and some die. Callistrus and Auron plot together; Callistrus tells Pierre his appeal is denied and Auron tells Madeline that Pierre and another prisoner Kurt were killed trying to escape. Madeline doesn’t believe this and goes undercover as Callistrus’s housekeeper. Pierre and Kurt actually try to escape but fail. Kurt seems to have been killed by the dogs. Pierre makes a breakthrough with the blood-typing.

When Auron comes to visit Callistrus he recognises Madeline. Rather than reveal her secret he tries to blackmail her, then forcibly tries to rape her. She’s rescued by Carl, but with her identity revealed by Auron to Callistrus the end game and the reveal of Callistrus’s secrets begins. This film was inspired by Hammer’s early period horror films (they hired the writer of The Curse Of Frankenstein and The Horror Of Dracula) and you would be hard pressed to differentiate it from one of those. Which I guess tells you if you want to see it or not.

Watch This: Period horror with a certain style to it
Don’t Watch This: Period cliches and prejudices on full display and disappointing use of the idea of the vampire

4. Cactus Flower

Toni Simmons (Goldie Hawn) attempts to commit suicide by gassing herself; she’s saved by her neighbour Igor. She’s been stood up by her boyfriend Julian Winston (Walter Matthau), a dentist. She’s decided this means it’s all over, especially as he’s told her he’s married with three children. This is not true; this is what Julian has told every woman he’s had a relationship with so that it doesn’t get too serious. When he learns that she’s tried to kill herself he decides it’s time to get serious and proposes marriage. But she hates dishonesty so he has to invent a fictional divorce to go with the fictional marriage.

He turns to his nurse, Stephanie Dickinson (Ingrid Bergman). She initially refuses, his various shenanigans at the dental clinic enough for her. But she is, in fact devoted to him, so agrees and meets Toni who has insisted to make sure the divorce is by mutual consent. Unfortunately Toni likes her too much, and feels sorry, so Julian invents a boyfriend of hers, roping in a friend of his.

This is a farce, a screwball comedy, based on a play (the American version based on a French play). Which may be why it cuts a bit near the knuckle sometimes with the dark comedy of the suicide attempt at the start, and the casual assumption of adultery as normal. It gets excruciating at times, and every bizarre plan inevitably has one more unlikely twist to it going on and on, milking the most from every situation. Which does help to earn the surprisingly sweet, if predictable ending.

Watch This: Funny romance that skates lightly over some dark parts
Don’t Watch This: Some of those dark parts are pretty grim

5. Thieves’ Highway (2025)

Frank Bennet (Aaron Eckhart) is a cow cop, part of the Oklahoma Department Of Agriculture. He has to do his job armed because cattle ranchers use guns to protect their cattle, so rustlers etc are also armed. (In the prologue one of his colleagues confronts some people moving cattle suspiciously in the middle of nowhere and is beaten; he reappears at a cattle auction retired and disabled).

After meeting up with an old flame he and his partner (about to take a desk job) notice some odd trucks carrying cattle. They’re in the middle of nowhere with no cell phone or radio coverage. The last stop, the café where they failed to have dinner, has a phone. They head after the suspicious trucks to discover they are rustlers. Bennet succeeds in capturing one truck, but the rustlers follow him back to the café. To his dismay it turns out the woman who works there is the partner of one of the rustlers.

This is a slightly awkward combination old school western, cop story, and modern action film. Trucks filled with cattle handle awkwardly and are huge when people get out of them (there’s a long gunfight along one as they’re starting from a distance and are still at quite a long range when one gunman is at one end and the other at the other). The film itself has a tendency to lay out one thing at a time (a rancher talking about frontier justice, the phone thing etc) then leave it and bring it back up one thing at a time though at least in a different order. Competent at what it attempts, which isn’t very ambitious.

Watch This: Gunfights, tricks, trucks, cattle
Don’t Watch This: Men steal cattle, get violent about it

6. Mickey 17

Mickey (Robert Pattinson) and Timo (Steven Yuen) join an interstellar colonisation expedition to avoid being killed by a loan shark. Most of the expedition are fanatical followers of failed American politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) who intends to make the ice planet of Niflheim in his own image. Timo manages to get aboard as a shuttle pilot but Mickey signs up as an expendable. What this means is that he’s scanned, then tested to destruction, then cloned. Because the first cloning experiment was used by the inventor to murder people, the technology is banned on Earth, and only one clone at a time is allowed.

On Niflheim there are strange creatures, Creepers. When the 17^th Mickey is sent to try and capture one he falls in a crevice. Unable to escape Timo takes his flamethrower then leaves, assumes he dies and back at the ship they print a new Mickey (Mickey 18). However the Creepers cover him, rescue him and return him to the surface where he comes back to discover there are now two of him. Mickey 18 is much more aggressive and tries to kill him but is interrupted when they discover Timo selling flamethrower fuel as drugs.

They attempt to hide the two Mickeys but inevitably their security guard girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) finds out. Mickey 17 is invited to dinner with Marshall, his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), and sympathetic security guard Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei) where he is poisoned by the vat grown clone meat. Kai prevents them killing him and he recovers but Mickey 18 decides to kill Marshall. At a ceremony to inscribe a stone he makes the attempt, but is interrupted by two baby creepers in the rock. One is killed and the Mickeys and others are locked up.

Creepers surround the ship, and Marshall plans to kill them all. Nasha realises from Mickey’s description that they’re sentient so they escape, but things don’t go well and there’s a violent, complex and occasionally funny final sequence.

Funny? This is a dark science fiction comedy, as becomes clear with the voiceover of Mickey 17, who is one of the gentler, more passive Mickeys. Casting Robert Pattinson as a pathetic loser seems a bit of a stretch, but he’s not completely inadequate, almost immediately hooking up with Nasha. And of course it comes into it’s own when Pattinson plays the identical-in-looks but completely-different-in-personality Mickey 18. Some acting! The idea of human expendability it played for tragedy as well as comedy, meanwhile it’s implied that only fanatics would go on a space colonisation mission, and that those who lead it would inevitably be appalling self-obsessed monsters.

Watch This: Cloning laughs, dark futures
Don’t Watch This: Robert Pattinson gets killed a lot, no one cares

7. The Last Jedi

At the end of The Force Awakens the Resistance destroyed the First Order’s Starkiller Base. Fleeing the First Order fleet, Poe Dameron leads an attack against orders that destroys a dreadnought at the cost of the destruction of the bombing squadron. He’s demoted and reprimanded by General Leia Organa for this. This is one of the themes of the film that is stated out loud several times – it’s not about the damage you do, it’s about who you save. They jump to lightspeed but to their surprise the First Order fleet follows them. Unable to escape, Leia injured, they begin a long chase.

The other thing that happened at the end of The Force Awakens is that Rey found Luke Skywalker on an ancient and remote Jedi hideaway. Initially he refuses to return, or train her, or explain anything. Eventually she convinces him to tell her about the force and she goes through several strange mystical initiations.

Believing the fleet doomed, and knowing Rey will attempt to return to it, Finn tries to leave, only to be stopped by Rose Tico, mourning the death of her sister in the bombing run. Realising they need to stop the fleet being tracked, they link up with Poe, who determines they need a master codebreaker to board the lead First Order ship. To find him they leave the fleet for the luxury resort of Canto Bight. Poe, not trusting Admiral Holdo who has taken command, keeps this secret.

Amongst Rey’s visions are her seeing Kylo Ren. They talk, drawn to each other, Rey considering his offer to train her, thinking she can turn him away from the dark side of the force. Eventually, realising that remaining there will lead Kylo Ren to her, and that if she stays the Resistance fleet and all her friends will die, she returns to confront Kylo Ren and his master Supreme Leader Snoke. At the same time Finn and Rose return with a different codebreaker, and attempt to board the ship to stop the tracking. Poe, learning that Holdo intends to leave the fleet in unarmed transports, attempts a mutiny.

Again I ask, do I have more to say than last time? This film meanders*, it doesn’t efficiently get us from action set piece to confrontation to Star Wars homage to character moment. That’s related to an interesting aspect, where characters, especially Luke Skywalker, describe what’s going to happen, and being proved completely wrong. Did you think he was going to walk out with a laser sword and face down the whole First Order? Well he does. There’s a level of irony to this film, to saying things and showing something different.

Watch This: Some good space opera that makes a few points about space opera
Don’t Watch This: Star Wars is for nerds

* I use this word intending description rather than condemnation 

8. The Proud And Profane (1956)

In 1943 Lee Ashley comes out to New Caledonia as a Red Cross volunteer, running classes and clubs for the troops. Her husband was killed in Guadalcanal, which made the Red Cross boss Kate Connors not want to let her come. But Kate needs every pair of hands, and is the scavenging queen as well.

A marine unit led by Colonel Black returns after fighting. Colonel Black disapproves of the Red Cross club, thinking that this womanly treatment makes men soft. There are “skirts” men chase and “sweethearts” back home and this club mixes things up*. Lee tries to talk to him about her husband and he tells her some stories, though it’s fairly clear even at the time he doesn’t really remember him, and later it’s even clearer. They are getting along well, but when he visits some of his wounded men he demotes a sergeant. The chaplain had been leading a prayer group and a Japanese soldier had thrown a grenade; he blames the sergeant who ought to have known better rather than the soft chaplain. The chaplain is consumed by guilt.

Lee comes to terms with this, but when Black takes her to dinner aboard ship she meets an officer she knows and the two spend the evening talking about life in New York. Black later explains his background; half-Native American he was an outcast until he found his home in the US Marines. The two get engaged before he and his battalion go out for more fighting. Lee discovers she’s pregnant and worse, a wounded soldier reveals that Black is already married. Confronting him on his return he admits it, and says it’s impossible to get a divorce as his alcoholic wife is committed to a mental institution, for which he blames his neglect of her. Lee attempts to throw herself off the cliff, is stopped by Black but the struggle causes her to have a miscarriage.

Eddie, a marine who is an old friend of Kate and has been Lee’s protector, attacks Black in revenge; learning the truth Black doesn’t press charges. He goes out into battle again. News comes that his wife has died, but too much has happened; Lee finally goes on to Guadalcanal and visits her husband’s grave where she meets a marine who was at the battle. Not realising she’s the wife, he tells her that although her husband had only good things to say about her, the men thought she was a blood-sucker who had dominated him and stifled his work as an architect. Shocked, she then learns that Black has been injured, and is in a daze saying “forgive me” all the time. Lee goes to him and decides to wait it out, hoping he will recover.

Perhaps peculiarly it seems that Black is right; the womanly touch of Lee Ashley has made him vulnerable. This melodramatic romance engages with real problems as well as injuries of war slightly harder than I expected.

Watch This: Tougher and smarter war-romance film
Don’t Watch This: Not that smart or that tough

* A dichotomy sometimes called Madonna/whore

9. Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)

Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates), a shepherd in Hardy’s Wessex* who is running the first flock of his own sheep, proposes to Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie), a neighbour. She refuses him, as she believes she has better prospects. It appears she’s correct; firstly she inherits a farm near Weatherbury** and leaves to take it over. Then Gabriel’s dog runs mad and drives the sheep over the cliff; he shoots the dog, declaring “thank god I haven’t a wife” and ruined, goes looking for a job.

Times are hard; firstly no one wants to hire Gabriel as a bailiff***, when he sets aside his pride and tries to hire on as a shepherd no one wants a shepherd who lost his own sheep. He gets a lift to the next town to try there, but on the way spots a fire. The people at the farm are at a loss; he rallies them to put it out. It’s Weatherbury Farm and Bathsheba hires him as a shepherd, and discovering her own bailiff trying to escape with sacks of seed corn, takes over management of the farm herself.

Bathsheba makes something of a stir, including attracting the attention of neighbour William Boldwood (Peter Finch). In a moment of impulsive high spirits Bathsheba sends him a valentine and he falls for her, courting her obsessively to mixed feelings from her. Meanwhile one of her maids Fanny Robin (Prunella Ransom) plans to marry her lover Sergeant Frank Troy (Terrence Stamp); due to a misunderstanding she goes to the wrong church and he spurns her. Troy is sent across country; she vanishes trying to follow him. When he comes back he finds her gone from Weatherbury, where he instead meets Bathsheba who falls for him.

Bathsheba asks Gabriel’s opinion and he gives it; that Troy is not a reliable man. Angry, she fires Gabriel, only for the sheep to come down with bloat and all the farmhands saying Shepherd Oak is the best man to cure it****, so they reconcile. Not reconciled is Boldwood who offers Troy money to leave Bathsheba alone; Troy then humiliates him by revealing they got married that morning.

Troy spends money on gambling and high living; at Harvest Festival he gets all the men drunk on brandy. Gabriel tries to tell him that a storm is coming up but he dismisses him; Gabriel and Bathsheba cover the hay ricks. Fanny returns, ill and pregnant. Troy sends her into town, promising to follow; she dies and the coffin returns to Weatherbury. Gabriel rubs off the chalk bit about the child, but Bathsheba listens to rumours and opens it up. Confronting Troy he claims he only ever loved Fanny then vanishes, leaving his clothes on the beach.

Bathsheba is courted by Boldwood, who becomes more obsessive, packing away presents for the seven years before Troy can be declared dead without a body. Troy however survives and is now part of a show with a traveling carnival. In that part of the country he has to perform his Dick Turpin act in front of people who know him but manages to pull it off.

At a party Boldwood holds for Bathsheba Troy arrives, declares he’s still alive and wants Bathsheba back. Boldwood shoots him and Bathsheba is overcome. With Troy dead and Boldwood arrested Bathsheba realises that this could all have been shortcut if she’d just married Gabriel at the start. “When you look up there I’ll be, and when I look down, there you’ll be.”

Like most adaptions a streamlined one, so we skip months and years to actual plot events. All the characters have to deal with failure and tragedy, Bathsheba most of all. People make impulsive decisions that echo down the years. The countryside is well shot, the actors generally good. And if people misunderstand and make stupid choices, that’s also life. That the farm hands are useless without leadership, become industrious with it and barely show any character or ambition of their own is not a good look, though one that does reflect class prejudice of the time the novel was written.

Watch This: Long film of rural life and love
Don’t Watch This: Long film of rural life and love

* Thomas Hardy set a series of novels in the south-west of England, and for a variety of reasons named this region Wessex, re-naming the counties, towns and villages, and other geographic features. His reasons were multiple (he wrote poetry by preference, novels to make money, and “Wessex” was at least in part a marketing brand), but include taking the region slightly out of real time and space.

** Puddletown in Dorset

*** Pronounced “bailey” in the local dialect

**** By deflating them! This is real, the instrument is a trocar!

10. The Karate Kid Part II

Following the events of The Karate Kid, Daniel LaRusso graduates high school, and his girlfriend Ali Mills breaks up with him. His karate sensei Mr Miyagi gets a letter from Okinawa telling him his father is dying and decides to visit. Daniel volunteers to go with him. Mr Miyagi explains his backstory. His father was a karate teacher, and Mr Miyagi and his best friend Sato were the best students. Sato was the son of the wealthiest man in the village, and it was arranged that he would marry Yukie. Yukie and Mr Miyagi fell in love and Sato challenged him to a fight to the death. Instead Mr Miyagi left Okinawa on the next ship and went to America.

Daniel and Mr Miyagi are picked up at the airport and driven to one of Sato’s warehouses where they are threatened by Chozen, Sato’s nephew. Sato then arrives and demands Mr Miyagi fight him, which he refuses. Daniel and Mr Miyagi go to the village, which is under pressure. An American military base has taken some of the land next to it, and Sato’s trawlers have made fishing difficult. Sato owns the deed to the village so the villagers have to pay him. He also has a karate dojo because of course he does. In the village Mr Miyagi discovers that Yukie never married, and has been caring for his father. Daniel meets Yukie’s niece Kumiko so he has someone his age to show him around and get him into trouble.

Trouble occurs; Chozen is cheating people when they buy and sell food, and Daniel confronts him. They vandalise the Miyagi family property. Mr Miyagi’s father dies and Sato gives him three days of mourning. Mr Miyagi explains a little about where his family’s karate comes from, which includes a drum whose rhythm is the timing of a karate move or something like that. They decide to leave before things get worse but Sato threatens to destroy the village and sell the land. Mr Miyagi reluctantly agrees, if Sato will hand over the deed to the villagers.

They are interrupted by a typhoon. Sato’s dojo collapses and Daniel and Mr Miyagi rescue him; when a child is in danger Daniel goes to help. Sato tries to send Chozen to assist, and he refuses, so Sato helps instead. He shames Chozen, who runs away. The next day Sato hands over the deed, declaring the feud over. They hold a festival in the nearby ruined castle.

Chozen decides to make his move, grabbing and threatening Kumiko, demanding Daniel fight him. Daniel does, mostly losing until the village uses the drums to remind him of the new move he’s learned, which he then uses to win the fight. Mirroring a scene from the start of the film it looks like he might attack the defeated Chozen, but instead humiliates him comically.

I’m no expert on Okinawan culture – any more than I am on American for that matter. So let’s just say that this film doesn’t delve very deeply into it’s setting. On the one hand it’s very much The Karate Kid again, bullying adults creating bullying kids, and it takes inner spiritual strength to defeat them – that and the special move you picked up in a montage earlier. On the other it does raise the stakes. Sato has held this grudge for more than forty years and is willing to destroy an entire village for it. On the other hand he also recognises there are more important things than winning! The sensei is the noble, virtuous enemy, the student the brutal thug here.

Watch This: Kid and sensei solve problems through martial arts
Don’t Watch This: Maybe learn something about Okinawa and Karate instead