scaryblog

Continuing my trip up Empire's  top 20 TV shows of 2025 #17 :     Film Club Sometimes life simply calls for the TV equivalent of a warm blanket draped over you on a Sunday evening. Well, look no further. Aimee Lou Wood and Ralph Davis’s sweet tale of two friends, Evie (Wood) and Noa (Nabhaan Rizwan), brought together by a love of cinema, is exactly that. In an on-screen relationship that is intelligent, empathetic, and full of yearning – note to creatives: bring back yearning! – the series serves as a love letter to everything from Alien to The Shawshank Redemption, and even Bridesmaids. From your dad showing you his favourite action film to that cheesy rom-com you watched on your first date, Film Club understands the connective – and ultimately empowering – comfort of sharing films with one another, and it wears that heart beautifully on its sleeve. I've heard this is good, but didn't watch it because I thought it might be a bit twee - but I like Aimee Lou Wood and Nabha...

Continuing my trip up Empire's  top 20 TV shows of 2025 #18 :     The Bear After the extended table-setting of Season 3, people started to wonder if The Bear had gone off the boil (insert other tortured food metaphors here). Thankfully in Season 4, the unwavering quality of writing, performance and filmmaker was bolstered by slightly more propulsive storytelling, and some more upbeat moments this time around; Carmy, at long last, is no longer trapped in the fridge (literally or metaphorically). There are some masterful episodes here – the Ayo Edebiri-penned ‘Worms’, in which her Sydney leaves the kitchen to look after a friend’s daughter, is a beautiful little slice of life; and ‘Bears’, the near-feature-length wedding episode, threatens to be another piece of near-unbearably tense familial arguing, until it blossoms into a great big warm hug. Hopefully this return to form continues into Season 5, with Carmy seemingly <spoiler alert>. After The Bear took the top spo...

Continuing my trip up Empire's top 20 films of 2025 #10 :     Pillion Yes, Pillion is a kinky dom-com in which Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling wrestle in assless lycra, get frisky at a Picturehouse (the sadly now-closed one in Bromley, film location fans), and don their fair share of leathers and chains. But Harry Lighton's remarkably assured directorial debut is also a brilliantly observed study in consent and connection, in the discovery of community and the path that creates to the actualisation of the self, and in not only how hard it can be to set boundaries but also how hard it can be to stick to them. Finding pathos amid all the PVC, Lighton's unconventional love story is as much about baring souls as baring butts, and all the more glorious for it. I've heard a lot of people be very nice about this, but I'm not convinced it's one I'd have chosen to watch under normal circumstances.  Colin (Harry Melling - a loooong way from Dudley Dursley here)...

Continuing my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2025 #11 :     Nickel Boys The 2019 book The Nickel Boys, from The Underground Railroad author Colson Whitehead, was already an acclaimed, accomplished, searing piece of storytelling: a fictionalised account of the real-life Dozier School in Florida which was exposed as an abusive and in some cases deadly institution for young African-American men. Filmmaker RaMell Ross — responsible for the hugely underrated 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening — somehow found a way to elevate the text even further, expanding on the interiority of the book by placing the camera inside the head of his two leads as they navigate the hellish Nickel Academy. The film is a technical and artistic feat, a genuinely innovative use of cinematography for character-based storytelling, but it is the tender, delicate way it approaches the harrowing story — and the humane performances, (sometimes off-screen) from the likes of Ethan He...

Continuing my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2025 #12 :     Hard Truths Mike Leigh's reunion with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the actor who led his 1996 Palme d'Or winning drama Secrets & Lies, was always going to be something special. What makes Hard Truths such a must-see however is how extraordinarily ordinary it actually is. Jean-Baptiste is on firebrand form as Pansy, a reclusive middle-aged woman whose world-weariness scorches all around her (to often hilarious effect — her babies-and-pockets rant is an all-timer), but whose pain and bone-deep misery is plain for all — especially sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) — to see. Not always the easiest of watches, especially as Leigh has no interest in curing Pansy's bitterness with a syrupy Hollywood ending, Hard Truths is nevertheless an essential watch. It's human, raw, real: pure Mike Leigh. I've taken quite a bit of time to get round to this one for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there's been some goo...

Continuing my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2025 #13 :     F1 It may not reinvent the wheel (sorry), but this nitro-boosted blockbuster is an old-school thrill-ride which successfully ports across much of Top Gun: Maverick’s vibes and style. One wonders if it was originally intended as a Maverick-style sequel to Days Of Thunder (’Days Of Thunder: Trickle?’), to star Tom Cruise. Instead, we get a laconic Brad Pitt as a 200mph underdog, vying against the cream of F1’s drivers — plus his own teammate, an excellent Damon Idris — and deploying all sorts of cunning tricks to out-velocity superior hardware. Bolting cameras onto 16 different parts of a car, Joseph Kosinski again delivers visceral spectacle, making you feel like you’re genuinely inside a modified Dallara F2 2018. But unlike Days Of Thunder, the off-track drama delivers too, with a bunch of likeable characters, and a hissable villain courtesy of Tobias Menzies. Plus, you get Martin Brundle and David Croft comm...

Continuing my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2025 #14 :     Bugonia The partnership between filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone continues to bear bonkers fruit – their remake of Korean satire Save The Green Planet! is as odd a concoction as you’d expect from the team behind The Favourite and Poor Things, laced with dark deadpan humour, bursts of gore, and an aching sadness underneath it all. Stone lopped off all her hair – on camera and all – as kidnapped CEO Michelle Fuller, whose captors (an excellent Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) are convinced she’s <spoiler>. The whole thing vibrates on an unusual frequency, as the power between Michelle and the conspiracy theorists shifts back and forth – all culminating in one of the most hilariously divisive finales of the year. Pure cinematic nectar. I enjoyed Poor Things but it was completely bonkers - I'd be surprised if we're not in for more of the same, whilst also being completely different. Yup - very...

Continuing my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2025 #15 :     The Naked Gun Easily the funniest — and, arguably, the riskiest — film of 2025, Akiva Schaffer's legacy spoof sequel/reboot lives or dies on Liam Neeson's ability to channel his inner Leslie Nielsen and play the straight man while delivering gag after gag at a rate of knots. Fortunately for us, Neeson is a bit of a deadpan comedy don (see also; Life's Too Short, Derry Girls) and, as Detective Frank Drebin Jr., he sets an exceptional standard of po-faced silliness that his co-stars handily match. Schaffer, too, shows he has a never-ending supply of so-dumb-it’s-smart and so-smart-it’s-dumb jokes on tap. At a moment where comedy's place in cinemas is being questioned, The Naked Gun — armed with infinite coffee cups, silly bits, and one mad snowman montage — makes one hell of a case for the communal chuckle's future. I remember enjoying the original but I've got no idea what I'd think about it ...

Continuing my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2025 #16 :     Black Bag Remember when films were sexy and cool? Steven Soderbergh does. The director responsible for some of the sexiest and coolest films of the ‘90s and ‘00s (Out Of Sight, the Ocean’s trilogy) returns to the kind of sharply written, glossily watchable fare that made his name, bolstered by the nuclear weaponisation of Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as a married couple who happen to be super-spies for the British National Cyber Security Centre. Tasked to find a leak in his team, Fassbender’s George is given a list of suspects, including – wouldn’t you know it – his good lady wife. David Koepp’s script luxuriates in fun espionage clichés (truth serums, spy satellites, world-ending MacGuffins) as well as spicy dialogue and scintillating sexual tension. Everyone looks impeccable and the ending is as satisfying as a murder mystery — like if Agatha Christie had a steamy affair with Ian Fleming. Sexy and ...

Continuing my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2025 #17 :     A House Of Dynamite Kathryn Bigelow made her long-awaited return this year with a razor sharp, race-against-the-clock real-time thriller that boldly imagines the desperate final minutes before a nuclear strike. Split into a triptych of interweaving perspectives, each climaxing moments before disaster strikes, Bigelow's movie — penned by Noah Oppenheim (Jackie, Zero Day) — is a breathless, almost unbearably intense affair driven by a constellation of heavyweight stars (Rebecca Ferguson! Jared Harris! Tracy Letts! Greta Lee!). It's a remarkable line-up, who all excel themselves playing out the minute-to-minute decisions and deliberations of a nation under unknown hostile attack right before our eyes. As explosive as The Hurt Locker without ever actually dropping its literal ticking time-bomb, A House Of Dynamite is a Bigelow banger. I enjoyed Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker and this felt to be in a similar...