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This week, there are EIGHT new films out for you to choose from, led by Terminator: Dark Fate. Here are the titles, with more info below:Terminator: Dark Fate
Countdown
By the Grace of God
Black and Blue
Monos
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
The Beach Bum
The Addams Family 2019
Terminator: Dark Fate is finally here. Sarah Connor has returned from far away, and she’s gearing up with a team of agents who will fight against a T-1000.
Thankfully, this new film does away with the godawful cut-down 12-certificate rubbish, so looks like a full-on f-word frenzy with violence to satisfy a 15-certificate (yes, the first two films were 18-certificate when uncut in their full versions, but they were later reclassified as 15-certs uncut).
Director: Tim Miller
Story: James Cameron, Charles H Eglee, Josh Friedman, David S Goyer, Justin Rhodes
Screenplay: David S Goyer, Justin Rhodes, Billy Ray
Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Linda Hamilton, Brett Azar, Gabriel Luna, Natalia Reyes, Diego Boneta, Alicia Borrachero
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Hit!
Countdown looks like one of those cool concepts, a la Happy Death Day, where this time, you download the Countdown app to your phone, and it tells you in how many years (or days, sometimes) you have left before you kick the bucket. But is it fake? Or if it’s true, can you cheat death, like with the Final Destination series?
I certainly love the look of it from this trailer.
Writer/Director: Justin Dec
Stars: Anne Winters, Elizabeth Lail, Charlie McDermott, Peter Facinelli, Talitha Eliana Bateman, John Bishop
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Hit!
By the Grace of God
The three men, friends of childhood, will cross, compare their personal experiences and question their life of couple, family and professional.
The last Denis Ménochet film I saw, Custody, was far from perfect, but also certainly had its moments, so I’ll put this down as a maybe.
Writer/Director: François Ozon
Stars: Melvil Poupaud, Denis Ménochet, Swann Arlaud
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Maybe!
Black and Blue is an action thriller about a rookie cop (Naomie Harris) who inadvertently captures the murder of a young drug dealer on her body cam. After realizing that the murder was committed by corrupt cops, she teams up with the one person from her community who is willing to help her (Tyrese Gibson) as she tries to escape both the criminals out for revenge and the police who are desperate to destroy the incriminating footage.
Not only does this look like “predictable trash movie of the week” – where you can work out the entire film based on the trailer, but when you release another ‘action thriller’ in the same week as the first proper Terminator movie in 28 years, it’s clear you’re dumping an early Xmas turkey.
Director: Deon Taylor
Writer: Peter A Dowling
Stars: Naomie Harris, Mike Colter, Frank Grillo
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
Monos
Teenage commandos perform military training exercises by day and indulge in youthful hedonism by night, an unconventional family bound together under a shadowy force know only as The Organisation. After an ambush drives the squadron into the jungle, both the mission and the intricate bonds between the group begin to disintegrate.
Well, I watched the trailer for this film, which has had critical acclaim, but I couldn’t get a handle on it whatsoever.
Director: Alejandro Landes
Screenplay: Alejandro Landes, Alexis Dos Santos
Stars: Sofia Buenaventura, Moises Arias, Julianne Nicholson
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
A young man searches for home in the changing city that seems to have left him behind.
This has a lot of plaudits, but based on the trailer, it’s not a film I can particularly grasp.
Director: Joe Talbot
Screenplay: Joe Talbot, Jimmie Fails
Stars: Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, Rob Morgan
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
The Beach Bum centres around Matthew McConaughey (Interstellar) as a rebellious stoner named Moondog, who lives life by his own rules, but all the promotion appears to be on Zac Efron as Captain Wack.
It comes from writer/director Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers) who has reportedly said that some cinemas in los Angeles have agreed to show the movie while spreading curls of marijuana, given what everyone else is puffing away on in the movie.
Also stars: Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Stefania LaVie Owen, Martin Lawrence, Jonah Hill
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
The Addams Family 2019 shows that the well of ideas in Hollywood is still dry as a bone, as they’ve resorted to resurrecting this age-old I.P. and, after the two films in the ’90s, we now have a CGI-heavy version, almost 30 years later.
And there’s nothing much else I can say about it, as the teaser is truly uninspiring.
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.