Three Films Make A Post: Welcome to a world of hurt.

Predator: Badlands (2025): Objectively, this film about a young, outcast Predator ending up with an RPG party, is a terrible mistake following returning director Dan Trachtenberg’s clever Prey. It’s silly, self-indulgently so, weirdly shaped and goes out of its way to rob the Predators of their last remaining mystique. However – and this is going to be a bit of refrain in this post – it is also a whole load of fun, following the rule of cool with such wild abandon critiquing it for a lack of substance would make me one of those people who eat puppies. Also also, Elle Fanning is much better as a funny, wisecracking sidekick than anyone could have ever expected.

Honey Don’t! (2025): The general tenor towards Ethan Coen’s solo films – or in actuality, his films made in co-operation with Tricia Cooke who happens to also be his wife – is harsh to a degree that nearly made me miss this lesbian noirish private eye comedy until it’s not thing, as it did with the film he made before. Sure, this is not a resounding, eternal masterpiece, nor a deep comment on the shape of the world (though the shape of the world is very much visible in it), but then, it’s pretty clear that’s simply not the kind of film Coen & Cooke set out to make. Instead, this is a film all about the filmmakers having fun with plot elements, ideas and tropes they like, namely Lesbians, hard-boiled private eyes, small evils that believe themselves to be big evils, noir, serial killers, and all kinds of weirdness. The result isn’t focussed, sometimes goes off on tangents that don’t quite pay off, but most of the time, is as fun as the filmmakers appear to be having with it. Plus, Margaret Qualley manages to go through all of the film’s tonal shifts in a way that makes it look easy.

Drive-Away Dolls (2024): Having had this amount of fun with Honey Don’t! did obviously lead me directly to also watching Coen & Cooke’s earlier film, also starring Margaret Qualley (among many other delightful thespians, of course), containing even more lesbians, even more off-beat humour, and rather less darkness. Being a road movie comedy, this does get even shaggier than Honey Don’t!, sinks its brow quite a few inches, and contains some ill-advised moments that point directly to The Big Lebowski, but keeps a sense of fun and a heart that can’t quite be cynical all of the time, which is the kind of heart I can identify with the most these days.

Honestly, if Cooke & Coen make films like these two for the – hopefully very, very long – rest of their lives, I’ll be there to watch them.

The Substance (2024)

Academy Award winning actress Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) – a character name that does signal this film’s idea of subtlety like the crapping elephant did the quality of Babylon – has aged down in the world. She’s done a TV fitness show for ages now, but exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid) really, really wants to replace her with a younger model of public aerobics instructor. Losing that gig is one of the final nails in the coffin of Elisabeth’s societally deprecated self-respect, so she jumps at the chance offered by a mysterious underground drug.

The substance doesn’t make her any younger, but instead creates a younger, supposedly more perfect version of herself by some sort of cell-replication. The old self and the new are supposed to trade active weeks, the inactive one lying in a coma during the other half’s week. The new version needs to feed on some of the old one’s fluids during its waking week.

Calling herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), Elisabeth’s other self – not a font of creativity – grabs Elisabeth’s old job, becoming an overnight sensation. Self-centred as she is, Sue begins stealing time and overmuch feeding fluid from the original. This isn’t great for Elisabeth’s body, and parts of her start aging and decaying with increasing rapidity. It will take some time until she decides to do something about her new self, though.

I can’t say I love Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance as much as most everyone else seems to do. There’s no discounting Fargeat’s abilities as a visual stylist, and certainly little to critique about Moore’s or Qualley’s performances, but to my eyes, the film has two major drawbacks.

Firstly, for a film that so clearly is about the very clear and specific theme of cultural ageism, it has very little to say about it. That it’s grotesque and wrong should be a given, but that’s where the film stops: there’s no subtlety, no interest in exploring its theme beyond the most obvious elements. Which is a particular problem in a movie that’s nearly two and a half hours long – repetition begins to set in, and the neat little body horror freak-outs are simply not enough to distract from this problem.

Secondly, for a film that’s so focused on two characters, there’s very little substance to Elisabeth or to Sue. This does of course make sense with the latter (and is part of her point), but Elisabeth seems to have led a life without any human connections, any interests, any internal life, really, which does make it difficult to feel any interest in her plight. The film’s entertainment industry setting doesn’t help there: in the end, Elisabeth’s stinking rich and independent even in a world that can’t cope with women aging publically, and her self-pity isn’t terribly interesting in this context.

In short: Death Note (2017)

It is rather interesting to compare Adam Wingard’s manga adaptation for Netflix with the Japanese live action version. Where the Japanese movies were apparently trying to copy the complete plot structure and include every pointless bit of minutiae from the (very good, for those who don’t know it) original manga without any thought for the needs of a different medium, and therefore ended up slow as molasses and very much on the tedious side, Wingard’s adaptation takes great liberties with the source material but races through the plot beats and characters it keeps with wild abandon. It’s enough to give anyone whiplash, so much so that the movie often feels not so much like an actual movie but like an attempt to cut the material of one or two whole seasons of a TV show into a film-like thing.

Consequently, everything about the film is superficial: there’s no time for characterisation, certainly nothing of the depth of ethical discussions of the manga (how much thought can you put into the thirty seconds you have before you need to race to the next plot point, after all?), and scenes that should have emotional impact never hit because the film never takes the time it would need to build an emotional (or intellectual) connection with the viewer.

Emotional connections aren’t the only things Death Note doesn’t bother to build: there’s no atmosphere because you’d need to spend time on building it; no suspense because again, you’d need to build it up; and no tension not based on characters acting like tropes instead of people because, surprise, the film never takes its time to establish anything about them beyond the barest clichés – and that of course as quickly as possible.

I’d criticize the acting, as well, but then, there isn’t anything in the script that gives the actors much to work with, and there’s – of course – no space in the film to let them breathe a little anyway. Only Lakeith Stanfield as L leaves any impression at all, and that’s more because the film keeps many of the behavioural tics and visual cues of the original character, which at least makes him interesting to look at, than on account of much actual acting; not his fault, obviously.


As a whole, the film doesn’t so much feel like a narrative but like the summary of one, and lacks any kind of tension, or any drive beyond hurtling from plot beat to plot beat to plot beat for no reason at all. Death Note is pretty to look at, at least, but if ever a film deserved the old cliché about nothing waiting beyond the pretty surface, it’s this one.