Film Roundup 24/04/2025

Hello, and welcome to the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup – bringing you the week’s biggest new cinema releases and running through why you should be excited for them. This week, we have horror, fairytales, legends, and an accountant…

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.

The Accountant 2

I have a very vague memory of watching 2016’s The Accountant, in which Ben Affleck played an autistic accountant hired by various criminal organisations to identify if anyone has been skimming money from their accounts. It was a fun little thriller with a good cast (also including Ana Kendrick, J K Simmons, Jon Lithgow and Jon Bernthal), and the autism element helped set it apart from other action-crime-thrillers. I didn’t expect it to get a sequel, but it obviously did well enough for one to be greenlit.

The Accountant 2 sees Affleck’s Christian Wolff team up with his brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) after they were reintroduced in the first movie. Braxton’s unpredictability serves as a nice foil to Christian’s rigidity and discipline, and it’s clear from the trailer that they are having a lot of fun with that dynamic. The plot kicks off when J K Simmons’ character, the former director of the Treasury Department’s financial crime investigators, is murdered, and Christian is hired to look into who might have done it. Expect the same mix of number crunching and baddie punching as the first film, so if you enjoyed that then you’ll probably like this too. If you haven’t seen the first one I’d recommend tracking it down before heading to this – it looks as though several plot elements will carry over and you might find that it spoils some of the twists. This should be a fun couple of hours though.

• The Accountant 2 on IMDB
• The Accountant 2 on Rotten Tomatoes

Until Dawn

Set in the universe of the Playstation game of the same name (but not a direct adaptation), Until Dawn sees a group of friends stranded in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, after a local shop owner has warned them of mysterious disappearances in the area. That night they are attacked and murdered by a masked maniac with a knife. So far, a pretty standard slasher film. But then an hourglass on the wall of the cabin resets, and the group finds themselves alive and well earlier in the evening, with their memories of their brutal deaths intact. The cycle then repeats itself, with each night bringing a different horror to slaughter them as well as some fresh clues to their salvation. Can they find a way to survive until dawn and break the loop?

Until Dawn combines the genre-riffing creativity of Cabin In The Woods with the time twisting antics of Groundhog Day. I haven’t played the game so I don’t know how closely this captures its tone or crosses over with its mythology, but there are likely to be some easter eggs for fans (Peter Stormare, who plays the local shop owner, also had a voice role in the game). This looks like a lot of fun, especially for horror fans.

• Until Dawn on IMDB
• Until Dawn on Rotten Tomatoes

The Ugly Stepsister

Disney’s takes on classic fairytales famously shy away from some of the darker plot points. Ariel does not collapse into seafoam at the end of The Little Mermaid, Prince Charming does not impregnate Aurora in her sleep in Sleeping Beauty, etc. New Norwegian movie The Ugly Stepsister, on the other hand, appears to have taken one of the darker parts of Cinderella – the stepsisters maiming their feet to try and get the glass slipper to fit – and used it to set the tone for the whole story.

Playing out like a period version of last year’s The Substance, The Ugly Stepsister follows Elvira, who is competing with her stepsister to be the most beautiful girl in the family. To achieve this goal she is subjected to all manner of primitive and brutal forms of cosmetic surgery, which the film presents as a Cronenbergian body horror. Many films have lashed out at society’s expectations for female beauty and the pressures that this puts on women, but this looks like a particularly original and twisted take on that theme. It looks like this is set to the classic plot beats of Cinderella, but the focus here is very much on the lengths its characters will go to not to be remembered as the Ugly Stepsister.

This premiered at Sundance and has had some great reviews, so if you can stomach the surgery scenes it should be well worth a watch.

• The Ugly Stepsister on IMDB
• The Ugly Stepsister on Rotten Tomatoes

The Legend of Ochi

I’m including this film on the list this week as I’ve been looking forward to it for a while and everything I can find is saying that it’s released tomorrow in the UK, but I have yet to find anywhere that’s actually showing it. I’m hoping that the release has been delayed and it’s not just skipping the cinemas altogether, because this looks like a really sweet family film that deserves to be shown on a big screen.

A24 movie The Legend of Ochi is set on a remote Carpathian island where the locals whisper stories of a terrifying woodland creature called the Ochi. But when a young girl (Helena Zengel) finds and befriends one, she has her work cut out to persuade her family (including her father Willem Dafoe and her brother Finn Wolfhard) that it’s not as harmless as it appears.

This might not be the most original plot – it’s ET but with a cute forest spirit instead of a wrinkly alien – but it looks incredibly well put-together. When the trailer first came out there was a lot of online criticism that the Ochi appeared to have been rendered with AI, but in fact it’s entirely practical effects – when you look at some of the facial expressions it pulls there is some spectacular puppetry going on there. The setting looks stunning too. Apparently it was so remote that the crew had to put disco lights around some of the sets overnight to discourage bears from coming and eating the styrofoam props. And there’s Willem Dafoe in a silly suit of armour, which should be more than enough to sell the film on its own.

A24 have always been a sign of quality, and this is probably the first of their films that you might want to take your kids to. Keep an eye out for this one and catch it if you can.

• The Legend of Ochi on IMDB
• The Legend of Ochi on Rotten Tomatoes

If you only see one film this week…

If anywhere was actually showing it I’d probably go for The Legend of Ochi, but in its apparent absence I’ll pick Until Dawn.

Still in cinemas and worth a watch

• Sinners – One of the best films of the year so far. Sinners manages the rare accomplishment of presenting a fresh and original take on the vampire mythos, with an absolutely incredible soundtrack, great performances (especially from newcomer Miles Caton), and some bold filmmaking choices. One standout musical sequence in particular feels quite silly when it starts and you realise what they are doing with it, but director Ryan Coogler doubles down and the longer it goes on, the more utterly spellbinding it becomes. Don’t leave when the credits start, as an epilogue scene a few minutes into the credits ties up some loose ends (while also leaving the story open for a sequel). I can’t recommend this film enough.
• The Penguin Lessons
• Warfare

Trailer of the week

Dan Trachtenberg’s 2022 film Prey, which pitted the famous Predator against Comanche warriors, was a refreshing and thrilling new take on the franchise that was popular with audiences and critics. His follow-up to that film, Predator: Badlands, has just dropped its first teaser, and although the setting is wildly different it looks like it will continue in the same exciting vein. Moving the action to the Predators’ homeworld, this movie will follow a young warrior as he seeks to prove himself to the rest of his clan, with the aid of Elle Fanning’s android Thia (whose presence also hints at a possible crossover with the Alien franchise). While Prey was confined to a Disney+ release, this will be getting the Imax treatment it deserves when it hits cinemas in November.