Film Roundup 02/07/2026

Hello and welcome to the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup! Each week we take you through the biggest new cinema releases and why you should be excited for them. This week: henchmen, swingers and singers…

Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these movies yet so all of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.

Minions & Monsters

When the minions were first introduced in Despicable Me, their anarchic love for destruction made them an immediate hit. Their attitude has softened over the course of several more Despicable Me movies and a couple of their own outings that lean increasingly into their more lovable side, and their appearance in endless gifs and memes on social media has sanded down a lot of their edges. But they are still a fun creation with a lot of appeal for little kids and plenty of ability to get some laughs out of the adults too.

This is the third Minions film, and the first not to involve Steve Carell’s Gru in any capacity. In 1920s Hollywood, the minions are movie stars and want to make a monster movie – but the special effects needed to bring a suitably menacing beast to life don’t exist yet. Instead they decide to summon a real monster, and unleash Goomi (South Park’s Trey Parker) – a tiny green Cthulhu-like being who isn’t scary enough to play the monster himself, but has some friends who are. In true minions fashion, it all escalates out of control and chaos quickly ensues from there.

This reminds me a lot of the Dreamworks film Monsters Vs Aliens, in that it’s clearly seeking to homage classic movie monsters like the Blob and the Mummy but present them in a very kid-friendly way. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen a U-rated film that references Cthulhu so directly. But it’s also a bit of a love letter to the Golden Age of Hollywood filmmaking, and watching the minions run around on studio backlots while director Max (Christoph Waltz) tried to corral them into a cohesive scene should be magnificently silly.

The cast also includes Jesse Eisenberg, Allison Janney, Jeff Bridges, Phil LaMarr, Bobby Moynihan, and George Lucas (playing himself, which is intriguing given the film is set two decades before he was born). It currently has 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is pretty impressive for a threequel to a spin-off.

• Minions & Monsters on IMDB
• Minions & Monsters on Rotten Tomatoes

The Invite

Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Olivia Wilde) are a married couple whose relationship is going through a bit of a rough patch when they decide to invite their neighbours Hawk (Ed Norton) and Piña (Penelope Cruz) over for a dinner party. As the atmosphere starts to get a little strange, Hawk and Piña make a suggestion that could reignite the spark between Joe and Angela or be the final thread that causes the whole thing to unravel.

The Invite is set almost entirely within the confines of a single flat and doesn’t have any credited cast beyond the central foursome, which gives it a slightly theatrical feel. The cast may be small but it’s perfectly formed – Seth Rogen has had a really successful run lately on both the big and small screen, and has just the right combination of comic talent and everyman sympathy to nail Joe’s reactions to this new couple intruding into his life. Olivia Wilde is pulling double-duty as star and director, adding to her increasingly impressive resume behind the camera after Don’t Worry Darling and the excellent Booksmart.

This film is getting very solid reviews, with a 94% critics’ rating and a 95% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing. The trailer does just enough to set up the tone and premise without revealing anything about where the film is ultimately going – it feels like it could have a happy ending or a thoroughly depressing one, and I would expect a few twists and surprises along the way.

• The Invite on IMDB
• The Invite on Rotten Tomatoes

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol are Nirvanna the Band – a Canadian musical act who are desperate to book a gig at the renowned Toronto music venue the Rivoli (despite never having actually recorded a song). Rather than speaking to anyone at the Rivoli, they perform a series of stunts and schemes in Toronto to try and grab the venue’s attention. One such stunt sees them building a fake time machine out of their RV based on Back to the Future’s DeLorean, but when it turns out they’ve accidentally built a working time machine, they find themselves in 2008.

The movie is a continuation of TV series Nirvanna the Band the Show, which isn’t available in the UK, which is in turn adapted from a web series named Nirvana the Band the Show (the extra ‘n’ having been added for legal reasons when they moved to TV). Both series and the film are presented as mockumentaries, filmed on location and in public with the stunts being performed in real life. Like Olivia Wilde in The Invite, Matt Johnson is both star and director here – this is his second feature film behind the camera after 2023 docudrama Blackberry.

As I’m not familiar with either of the series it’s hard to know exactly what to expect, but this is getting incredible reviews (97% on Rotten Tomatoes) with critics saying it’s one of the funniest and cleverest comedies to come out for a while. It’s silly but also heartfelt, and hard not to be caught up in the duo’s very specific dream (my favourite bit in the trailer is Matt’s reaction to having invented time travel being “how can we use this to get a gig at the Rivoli?”). Hopefully if it’s a success we’ll get to see the TV show one day soon too.

• Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie on IMDB
• Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie on Rotten Tomatoes

If you only see one film this week…

It’s a tough call this week, but I think I’m going with The Invite.

Still in cinemas and worth a watch

• Supergirl – Not a perfect film but nowhere near as bad as a lot of the internet would have you believe. Milly Alcock is fantastic and there are some great fight scenes, with director Craig Gillespie finding enough ways of de-powering Kara to introduce some stakes, even though her survival is never really in any doubt. Krem isn’t a particularly memorable villain, but he does just enough dastardly deeds (poisoning Krypto, kidnapping women to sell as slave-brides, and the genuinely tragic murdering of a few side-characters) to generate some catharsis at his inevitable comeuppance. Lobo is a little unnecessary, and occasionally threatens to undermine the girl-power theme that the film is otherwise going for, but it’s still fun to watch him do his thing. Ultimately this hits the same beats as a lot of superhero films that have come before it, for better and for worse. Hopefully we’ll get to see more of Kara, Krypto and Lobo in more interesting projects in the future.
• Toy Story 5
• Disclosure Day

Trailer of the Week

Vampires and werewolves have a long history of sharing cinema screens – from the classic Hammer Horror films to the likes of Underworld, Twilight and What We Do In The Shadows, where one appears the other will often follow. And so, having brought one of the great movie vampires back from the dead in Nosferatu, Robert Eggers has now revealed the trailer for his next movie, Werwulf. Set in medieval Britain, the film stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp, Kate Dickie, and Eggers stalwarts Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe as a group of villagers stalked by a terrifying supernatural threat. With its (mostly) black-and-white palette, earthy imagery and sinister old-English voiceover, this is unmistakeably a Robert Eggers film, and I can’t wait to see his interpretation of the beast itself – something noticeably absent from the trailer. Werwulf will be stalking to our screens on 25 December (because of course, the first thing you think of when you watch this is Christmas).