Pressure (Anthony Maras, 2026)

Sunny with a chance of rain 

Anthony Maras' Pressure (2026)-- based on a 2014 play by David Haig-- answers a question no one thought to ask before: can a riveting thriller be made out of weathermen? Not storm chasers (looking at you Twister); not disaster flicks involving climate change (You too Day After Tomorrow and Geostorm)-- I mean weathermen, folk who pore over isobaric maps and stare at thermometers and take windspeed readings. The science nerds.

Apparently the answer is yes if-- big if-- 1) We're talking Operation Overlord, 160,000 troops launched on 7,000 ships supported by 12,000 aircraft, arguably the largest seaborne invasion in history; and 2) Landing point's on the Normandy coast in France, at the center of one of the most unpredictable weather systems on the planet. 

Lord of the Flies (1954) v Lord of the Flies (1963) v Alkitrang Dugo (Clotted Blood, 1975) v Lord of the Flies (1990) v Lord of the Flies (Netflix, 2026)

Pig hunt

(Warning: plot and surprise twists in book and TV series discussed in explicit detail)

I remember reading William Golding's 1954 debut novel as a teen and having nightmares about running through the jungle with other boys in pursuit, waving sticks sharpened at both ends-- did not help the development of my socialization skills, lemme tell you. 

The book comes off as a fable, the characters barely sketched-in symbols, the theme clear enough and neat enough for literature majors to milk for their theses: humans have this ingrown tendency to violence, and we flirt with or ignore it at our peril. Really that simple, the novel's chief virtue and key weakness, and folks who seek to adapt it flirt with this fact or ignore it at their peril. 

"Wuthering Heights" (Emerald Fennell, 2026)

Doddering Heights

(WARNING: story and plot twists discussed in explicit detail!)

Wouldn't condemn Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" for taking liberties with Emily Bronte, but would condemn the film for making such weak tea out of her novel.

Agreed the Byronic protagonist should be darkskinned-- though every Heathcliff in most every adaptation has been white (Olivier, Fiennes); agreed taking out Hindley is a grievous wound (combining the man who adopts Heathcliff with the man who most hates Heathcliff makes for a veddy confusing character); agreed cutting out the novel's second half truncates much of the story's power (though most every version including the classic 1939 William Wyler adaptation does just that)-- Fennel coulda woulda shoulda but didn't and if we hew to the principle that adaptations must have leeway for the art to breathe life in another medium then she didn't haveta.

What I do find unacceptable is the softening of the main characters. Emily's Catherine to put it bluntly is a bitch, Emily's Heathcliff a sonfabitch, and their relationship has a strong whiff of incest about it (implied but never stated that Heathcliff is likely Mr. Earnshaw's bastard child-- and Catherine likely his half-sister). I'd even object to Fennell's turning Nelly (Hong Chau) into an underhanded villain, tho there are hints here and there-- the crucial scene in the novel when Heathcliff eavesdrops (why didn't Nelly warn Catherine?) comes to mind. I've heard criticism that the whole course of the novel depended on such a little thing-- a man listening and leaving at just the right moment-- but truth of the matter is anything could have split the two up: a punch in the gut, a slap in the face, a trivial spat. Catherine and Heathcliff are what you'd call 'compelling'-- characters you'd love to read about in a gothic novel but hell to actually live with day to day. They're so stubborn they'd find the slightest excuse to fight; they're their own worst enemies. Shifting the blame on Nelly as Fennell does absolves them of what they've done to each other, lessens the tragedy of their relationship.   

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia Dacosta, 2026)

The numbing of the beast

Saw The Bone Temple and thought it far better than the first movie. No, I'll go further: in my book the best by far 28...Later movie to date. No, I'll go even further; best film of the entire franchise, and yes I haven't seen the as yet nonexistent third installment-- calling it here and now, a year or so early. 

No-- backtrack. I'll go even further than that: Bone Temple is the first movie in the entire franchise that I actually like. 

Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh, 2025)

Lies like us

Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag-- his second feature released in the first three months of 2025-- is arguably his best in years: a stylish, sexy thriller that of all things celebrates the bond of marriage, a relationship espionage writer John Le Carre might have once characterized as a significant weakness in an intelligence officer.

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)

Pride of Frankenstein

Yorgos Lanthimos' latest has an early scene of Bella (Emma Stone) holding a scalpel at an alarming angle and stabbing a corpse's eyeballs multiple times while her horrifically disfigured father Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe in heavy makeup) looks up fondly from the patient he himself is cutting-- and yet I agree with the assessment that the film is a comedy-- possibly Lanthimos' warmest most cheerful most wholesome work yet. 

Sight and Sound's Greatest Films of All Time -- my list

Sight and Sounds' The Greatest Films of All Time-- my list:

Chimes at Midnight (Campanadas a medianoche, 1965) 

Orson Welles' Shakespearean tragedy-- fashioned around the Bard's most famous comic relief!-- tells of an old man with old-world lusts and loves who resists the newer world of ascetic appetites and steely fascism. It's also a retelling of Welles' own story with his father, a figure of Falstaffian proportions, who loved not wisely but too well. 

The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960)

The crack of a whip in Ritwik Ghatak's most famous work says it all: Neeta (Supriya Choudhury) must support her family, flog her another mile! One of the most unforgettable portraits of female oppression on film, made more memorable by the fact that when she finally cries out-- in defiance of society and in defiance of her own expectations as the melodrama's martyr heroine-- it's too late.

No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021)

Time enough for love

(Plot twists and story discussed in explicit detail)

Latest of a longrunning franchise, last to feature latest Bond Daniel Craig. Best of the lot tho I'm not a fan of of the series from Roger Moore onwards. Craig I'll admit is one of the better actors in the role, second to Connery (who didn't do his best work in this series). I trust I make myself clear as mud. 

1917 (Sam Mendes)

Nonstop

Sam Mendes' 1917--about a pair of soldiers crossing No Man's Land to deliver a crucial message--is reportedly the odds-on favorite to win big at the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony this coming Sunday. Does it deserve the frontrunner status? Well let me put it this way:

The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg, 2019)

Portrait of a Young Lady

Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), heroine of Joanna Hogg's latest film The Souvenir, is a freshfaced youth whose every emotion registers as loudly as a fork dragged across rice paper; the film on the other hand is like obsidian glass, dark in tone and emotionally opaque--run a fingernail across its polished gleam and you leave not a mark.

Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Silk purse

Have to admit this straight out: know nothing about fashion or clothes. I'd repeat that in Andrew Sach's approximation of a Basque accent but for the record and to get it out of the way when it comes to couture and textile and clothing design I know nothing. Nada. 

Imagine my relief when Paul Thomas Anderson declares that his latest feature Phantom Thread isn't about fashion either; it's about obsession, about an artist's insistence on the primacy of his work, and a woman's need for space and significance (In relation to a man? Knotty question), about the constant struggle within a man to be either an inspired creative mind or a total pain in the ass. Probably a combination of or variation on both. 

Annihilation (Alex Garland)

Affliction

Meteor flashes across the sky strikes base of lighthouse; Special Forces husband presents himself to wife after an absence of two years; heavily armed scientific expedition walks into the light-and-time distorting perimeter of a jungle afflicted by a mysterious alien force, the twelfth such effort after the previous eleven (save for one notable survivor--the aforementioned Special Forces soldier) failed to return. 

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to Alex Garland's second feature--a loose adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's novel that is if anything more bizarre and ruinously ambitious than his first (the wicked sexy Ex Machina).

Dr. Who Christmas Special: Twice Upon a Time

Double jeopardy

(WARNING: plot twists throughout new Who's timeline discussed in close detail!)

It's the thirteenth Doctor Who Christmas Special; it's the Twelfth Doctor meeting the First (or as he prefers to put it the 'original') Doctor; it's Peter Capaldi's final bow; it's Steve Moffat's last word on the subject.

A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies, 2016)

The premature burial 

Attempt something often enough and sooner or later you get it right. Attempt the biopic often enough and someone was bound to hit the bullseye sometime, not so much telling a subject's story with reasonable accuracy as using said subject's life as grist to express the filmmaker's obsessions on his own stylistic terms--thinking Wong Kar Wai's lush narratively wayward The Grandmaster or Jane Campion's austere Bright Star with its focus on the female protagonist (John Keat's great love Fanny Brawne). Terence Davies' A Quiet Passion does something as interesting if not more so: cast Emily Dickinson--one of America's greatest poets--in what essentially reads as a horror film.

Baby Driver (Edgar Wright 2017)

Wheel fast

Edgar Wright's Baby Driver is like a little go-cart that whizzes by lickety-split; the action scenes are reasonably coherent with little visible CGI effects unlike some recent fast-car movies I can think of (Fast Five anyone?) cut to the rhythm of a catchy if not genuinely eclectic sound track.

Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan 2017)

Brexit

Christopher Nolan's latest deals for the first time with an actual event, massive in scale and complex in nature--the mass exodus of over 300,000 soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk, arguably the greatest retreat (some might prefer the term 'escape') in history.

The Devils (Ken Russell)

An obscenity

I think The Devils, Ken Russell's fifth big-screen feature, is a culmination of previous works dealing in history (Pop Goes the Easel, The Debussy Film) literary fiction (Women in Love) surreal and sustained passages of cinema (The Music Lovers), the same time it casts a shadow--or glimmers and flashes if you like--over subsequent films: the slippery nature of reality (Altered States) the link between sexual and religious mania (Crimes of Passion) the exploration of mythic origins (Gothic)--here the true story of an entire convent of nuns reportedly possessed by demons in the small town of Loudon. Or put another way: he's explored and experimented throughout his career and thrown everything he's tried and wanted to try into this project, and whenever any film he's directed needs a scene of surpassing strangeness or shock value, he's gone back to this film (or deepwell or treasure chest--or cesspool if you like) for inspiration.

Love & Friendship (Whit Stillman)

Fast & furious

I remember one night picking up a copy of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice--waded unenthusiastically through the pages wondering what was the author's appeal, why anyone would care about the machinations and intricacies of 18th century English society. Then somehow somewhere along the way--I think about the time of Darcy's spectacularly wrongheaded proposal to Elizabeth--I got hooked; finished the book some time in the early morning. That Austen, she moves fast when the mood hits you.

High-Rise (Ben Wheatley, 2015)

The high life

Ben Wheatley's version of J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel is I suppose as good an effort as any to bring to the big screen an in my opinion unadaptable untranslatable writer.

The BFG (Steven Spielberg)

Big deal

Spielberg has lost something and I'm not quite sure what it is--energy, zest, maybe chutzpah. Whatever it is you can't help but think that's exactly what was needed for his latest, The BFG--originally a slim Roald Dahl children's book, now a tired lumbering superproduction by the once-New Hollywood's former boxoffice whiz kid.