Three Films From 2025 I Didn’t Care For Still Make A Post

Ballerina (2025): I’m of two minds about the John Wick movies – no, really, I think half of them are pretty brilliant, the other half very much not – and alas, spin-off Ballerina, as directed by Len Wiseman belongs to the very much not  part of this equation. Featuring pointless cameos, not a single interesting (or just fun) idea and an interminable number of action sequences that are technically very accomplished but also bland and empty as these things get (one might suggest the term “soulless”), this is a joyless example of franchise “content” nobody involved seems to actually wanted to create. Why we are then supposed to want to watch it is anyone’s guess.

Drop (2025): In the case of Drop, the problem may be as much me as the film. It is not exactly director Christopher Landon’s fault that I find US dating culture as presented in movies not just difficult to relate to but aggressively boring. Nor is it his fault that I find twisty thrillers generally a bit of a hard sell.

What is Landon’s fault is that most of the twists here are painfully generic, the surprises perfectly unsurprising, and much of what is presented too absurd to work in the way it is presented. Stylistically, this often feels like a show reel for its director instead of a movie, something you can get away with when you are Brian DePalma; Landon, as much as I enjoyed some of his earlier movies, is not.

Murder at the Lighthouse (2025): This little Lifetime movie at least has an excuse for not being any good – it being a Lifetime movie comes with a decided lack of budget as well as a dearth of talent before the camera – although everybody including the crazy stalker cop ex-boyfriend looks absurdly well groomed.

Director Eric D. Howell clearly liked Misery, so much so he’s eventually getting up to turning this into a decidedly lesser version of the King adaptation (or the King novel). On the plus side, this lacks the painful camp and irony of too many Lifetime thrillers, so at least Howell was trying instead of just throwing his hands up going “it’s all ironic, you see”.

In short: Voice from the Stone (2017)

Eric D. Howell’s gothic romance about nurse Verena (Emilia Clarke) -  apparently specialised in nursing children with mental problems back to health only to leave them behind crying afterwards - and her misadventures with little Jakob (Edward Dring), his hot, dark and brooding sculptor father (Marton Csokas) and what may or may not be the ghost of Jakob’s dead mother communicating through the stone walls made from the material that made her family rich is if nothing else a very attractive looking film.

It is shot in appropriately moody colours and style and makes visually often arresting use of the setting in the Tuscany of 1950. The acting is on the good side, too, if rather melodramatic, even for a genre that by nature needs to go a bit bigger than life. Alas, the film really feels more “interesting” (in the negative connotation of that term) than artistically successful.


I think the largest part of Voice from the Stone’s problem is pacing. For a long time, it is very slow – even for me as a viewer who usually enjoys slow movies even if only as an opportunity to really take in the sights – but I don’t believe it actually needs to be quite this slow; as it stands, it seems a bit too much in love with showing us all the pretty sights it has than in using these sights for anything much. On the other hand, once the film decides it’s time for Verena to get to her operatic mad scene, it suddenly pulls her from being a bit frightened yet also drawn by the strangeness of her new surroundings and experiences into becoming raving mad in the classic gothic style without much of a transition between these states, which is the sort of thing it might have set up during the slow bits it didn’t do much at all in. I think the ending is pleasantly ambiguous – either it is quietly horrific or a real happy end – but I don’t think either of the two choices is as well prepared by the film as it should have been, again mostly because it has spent half of its running time dragging its feet looking pretty instead of using its prettiness in a meaningful way for its narrative.