Three Films Make A Post: Blood, sweat and tutus.

Pretty Lethal (2026): A small troupe of perpetually quarrelling ballerinas – I’d be thankful if someone could explain the minor ballerina genre movie wave of the last twelve months or so to me – get on the bad side of some Hungarian gangsters and ex-ballerina Uma Thurman and thus have to apply their skills rather differently from their usual norm. Though, it turns out, ballet is a martial art.

For easy direct-to-streaming cinema, Vicky Jewson’s little film is a decent enough watch, pleasantly short and clearly sure of the kind of thing it wants to be. I’d rather have preferred it to have taken its own silly set-up a little more seriously instead of going the lazy route of being ironic about it, but of the three “ballerinas doing violence” movies I’ve seen in the last year or so, this is at least the most entertaining. Which doesn’t say too much, but hey, I take what I can get.

Afterburn (2025): A solar flare destroyed the Eastern hemisphere, leaving Europe a mess of minor warlords and grey ruins. Treasure hunter Jake (Dave Bautista) works for the perhaps not quite as terrible would-be king of Britain (Samuel L. Jackson), somewhat unwillingly, and is tasked to liberate the Mona Lisa from the continent. The plot will involve an evil Russian general (Kristofer Hivju) with fascist world (or what’s left of it) domination on his mind, as well as a beautiful freedom fighter (Olga Kurylenko). Also, a plot twist concerning the Mona Lisa nobody will ever have seen coming (ha).

I genuinely admire both Bautista and Kurylenko quite a bit, and always feel a bit sad when they waste their talents on something like this deeply uninspired action movie by J.J. Perry. Their presence, as well as Jackson’s willingness to put some effort into even the lamest nothing of a role, do their job of pulling this from being completely uninteresting into the realm of the vaguely watchable. Though for a guy coming from stunt and action work, Perry’s not terribly adept at directing stunts and action.

Raw File (2025): I found this piece of low budget POV horror about an investigator (Monica Oprisan) and her trusty cameraman (the voice of Alexander Bishop and the camerawork of director Aaron Dobson) having a very bad night in a large apartment complex while looking into a curious suicide to be a pleasant surprise. Once this gets going, the film shows some actual ambition: neat bits and pieces of lore and worldbuilding that cross ideas of the demonic with those of high strangeness are slowly revealed, some actual action is staged, and everything is presented without overstaying its welcome, leaving me pretty happy.

Close (2019)

Warning: Vague spoilers about the film’s ending ahead!

Sam Carlson (Noomi Rapace) is a bodyguard who apparently typically works in war zones. She grudgingly (though I suspect she does everything grudgingly) takes the job of protecting poor little rich girl Zoe (Sophie Nélisse) for a week of London nightlife and then transport her to a safe house belonging to Zoe’s mother Rima (Indira Varma) in the desert near Morocco. Zoe’s father has just died, and she has – very much to the surprise and anger of her mother – inherited a considerable amount of shares in her mother’s and father’s company, so she would make a lucrative target for kidnappers.

After their arrival at the house, in Sam’s last night on the job, they are attacked by a well-armed group of men who know suspiciously much about the place’s security system. Sam saves Zoe, and they both end in the hands of the police. Alas, these cops are clearly on someone’s payroll, and Zoe kills one of them while Sam is putting two others down rather less lethally. So, now the two are going on the run together. And yes, of course, the shared experience will see Sam not only killing quite a few people but also working through her relationship with her own daughter and her trouble with opening up to people, and Zoe will learn valuable lessons, too. Yawn.

Yes, yes, I know, the writers of Hollywood thrillers and action movies are bound by some kind of eternal law to always include this sort of “emotional grounding” in their scripts, but it’s such a been-there, done-that sort of thing I’d actually be all too happy to encounter a film whose heroine is saving the rich teenager because she’s a decent human being instead because of some vague psychological connection to a daughter. And since neither Sam nor the audience ever actually gets to meet her daughter, this so-called emotional core is particularly weak; who cares about a characters relationship to some off-screen name? It’s all very perfunctory and exactly how you’d expect it, and also absolutely unnecessary.

The film’s case when it comes to its supposed emotional core isn’t exactly helped by Zoe being a particularly boring example of the poor rich girl type, with little personality showing, and therefore little weight to Sam’s and her growing connection. Which wouldn’t be much of a problem if the film weren’t hell-bent on foregrounding this stuff, putting the time in but not the actual writing work necessary to keep the relationship interesting.


The film’s other big script problem is how often it cuts back to the villains of the piece, destroying every bit of tension director Vicky Jewison’s often deft handling of the action business has managed to build up despite the general weakness of her and Rupert Whitaker’s script. For most of the film’s running time, I was rather puzzled why we spend so much time with Indira Varma’s character. After all, the parts of her scenes actually useful for the rest of the plot could have been handled in one cell phone conversation. In the end, it turns out the film ruins its pacing and drags its audience through badly written business meetings to prepare a last act plot revelation regarding the true identity of the villain. Too bad that change only makes even the tiny bit of sense it does make because these draggy scenes were indeed meant to be cleverly ambiguous instead of tedious and vague – if only they actually were. Also, replacing the evil mother trope with the one about evil Chinese corporations isn’t exactly exciting.