Hello, and welcome to this week’s Film Roundup! Each week we take you through the biggest new releases at the cinema and why you should be excited for them. This week we have one last dance with Venom and check out a couple of rooms.
Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these films. All of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.
Venom: The Last Dance
Closing out the trilogy after Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Venom: The Last Dance has Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and the Venom symbiote (also Tom Hardy) team up one last time when Venom’s creator invades Earth in an attempt to capture him.
Ever since Marvel managed to negotiate the rights to include Spider-Man in the MCU, Sony’s hold on the Spider-verse has been increasingly precarious. Every (non-animated) film they’ve put out has been panned by the critics, and Morbius and Madame Web were universally derided for their daft scripts and performances – the latter even being mocked in the Oscars. But despite also getting some early online ribbing (“like a turd in the wind…”) the Venom films have both done surprisingly well at the box office. With a budget of around $110 million each, they have collectively taken in over $1.3 billion – significantly more than the universally beloved Spider-Verse films. So in a way it’s a little surprising that this third film has been announced as their last Venom outing. Does this mean Sony are finally going to give the full rights to the web-slinger back to Marvel, after Kraven the Hunter and the Spider-Noir TV series? We can but hope…
The plot of the first two Venom films had Brock/Venom facing off against other symbiotes, and it looks like The Last Dance will be more of the same. It would have been nice to see something a little different, or a storyline that is more substantially tied in to the wider Sony universe or MCU (a Venom/ Spider-Man crossover was teased in the Carnage post-credits scene and then kiboshed in the No Way Home post-credits scene), but it’s hard to blame them for not wanting to mess with the formula. Hardy is great in the dual-role, and it is a lot of fun watching him bicker with himself. And Venom is such a powerful character it takes a similarly otherworldly force to actually pose a threat and create any stakes in the movie. It does mean though that, apart from a really metal looking Venom-horse and a welcome appearance from Juno Temple, there isn’t much to see here that we haven’t seen before.
The reviews have not been great – it currently has 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the general consensus being that it should have leaned more into the Tom Hardy buddy-movie angle instead of the slightly ridiculous plot. But the same could equally be said of the first two films (which have 30% and 57% critics scores on Rotten Tomatoes, respectively), and plenty of people went to watch and enjoy those. The audience score for both of the first two films is over 80%.
Essentially, if you liked Venom and Let There Be Carnage, you will almost certainly like The Last Dance too. If not, this would be one to avoid.
- Venom: The Last Dance on IMDB
- Venom: The Last Dance on Rotten Tomatoes
The Room Next Door
In The Room Next Door, two lifelong friends – Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton) reconnect under strange circumstances after years of living separate lives.
This is Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s first English language feature film. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion award. Almodóvar is an incredible director, and he’s assembled a wonderful central cast here – Moore and Swinton are both hugely watchable and talented actresses, and they’re bolstered by the similarly great John Turturro.
I haven’t heard a huge amount about this so don’t have much more to say. The reviews have been very positive, as you would expect given the talent on both sides of the camera, with particular praise for its optimistic and hopeful outlook on life despite the subject matter revolving so heavily around death. It wouldn’t surprise me if this comes up in conversations around Oscars season so it should be well worth a watch.
- The Room Next Door on IMDB
- The Room Next Door on Rotten Tomatoes
The Front Room
The second Room-based movie out this week and, surprisingly for the weekend before Halloween, the only horror movie on the list, The Front Room is a tale of a mother and her mother-in-law from hell. Brandy Norwood plays Belinda, a young mum who agrees to let her husband’s mother Solange (Kathryn Hunter) stay in their front room. Belinda and Solange do not see eye to eye, especially when the latter starts trying to use Belinda’s baby in strange rituals…
I remember seeing the trailer for this one ages ago but haven’t heard much about it since, so I was quite surprised to see that it’s only just coming out now. Although that isn’t a great sign (studios with confidence in a project tend to market it more heavily as the release date looms), there are some fun ideas here. The central concept is essentially: how much will you put up with for the sake of your family? The film starts asking that question even before the occult stuff starts, with Solange’s casual racism acting as a gateway for the audience – something that many people have had to put up with from an older generation that, we tell ourselves, doesn’t know any better. Hunter has had a lot of practice playing weird old ladies – she was a witch in Macbeth, the grizzled old brothel madam in Poor Things, and an overbearing Imperial mother in Andor. She looks like she’s having a great time here. Brandy is better known for her music than her acting, but she seems to be doing a good job too from the looks of the trailer. If she doesn’t tell Solange that “the boy is mine” at some point in the script as she reclaims her infant son then the writers were missing a trick…
All of that said, the reviews are not looking great. At 43%, this isn’t rated much higher than Venom: The Last Dance on Rotten Tomatoes (and, unlike that film’s predecessors, the audience rating is similarly low at 41%). If you’ve already burned through Smile 2, Terrifier 3, Carrie and Salem’s Lot and you need one more horror film to get you through Halloween then this could be the way to go.
- The Front Room on IMDB
- The Front Room on Rotten Tomatoes
If you only see one film this week…
Tough one this week. The Room Next Door is probably (definitely) the best film, but it is distinctly lacking in terrifying alien horses, at least as far as I know. For the daft wild spectacle and to give a send-off to the highlight of Sony’s Spider-adjacent universe, I’m going with Venom: The Last Dance.
Still in cinemas and worth a watch
Normally this feature is just a list of three bullet-points naming films that are still in the cinema, but starting this week I’m going to expand on it a little. If I’ve seen any of the films that I’m saying are worth a watch, and I haven’t reviewed them yet, I’ll add a brief mini-review to say what I thought of it. It will be *very* brief though – if I expand this too much I’ll never get time to actually go to the cinema and watch these films…
- The Wild Robot – every bit as beautiful and life-affirming as you’d want it to be, with a perfectly-written mother-son relationship at its core and some surprisingly detailed sci-fi ideas going on in the background that I hope will get fleshed out in the now-confirmed sequels. Plus it has a grumpy beaver voiced by Matt Berry. All films need a grumpy beaver voiced by Matt Berry.
- The Apprentice – Sebastian Stan’s performance as Donald Trump is spot on, with all his weird mannerisms gradually becoming more and more prevalent as the film progresses. Meanwhile Jeremy Strong’s Roy Cohn starts out as an almost demonically unpleasant presence before descending into a shell of a man that I actually felt sorry for.
- Joker: Folie a Deux – a reasonably compelling courtroom and prison drama with some effective musical sequences that, like everything in Arthur Fleck’s story, add to the madness of the world while making you question how much of it is real. Great performances from Phoenix and Gaga. The ending will prove to be the most controversial part of its legacy.
Trailer of the week
After a long hiatus from our screens, Ke Huy Quan has been in hot demand since he won the Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once – popping up in Loki, Kung Fu Panda 4, and now his new film Love Hurts, which has just dropped a trailer. Taking another opportunity to show off his martial arts skills, here he plays an estate agent and former hit man whose criminal past, and family, catches up with him. This comes out a week before Valentines Day next year and looks like the perfect antidote to the schmaltzy rom-coms it will likely be competing with.
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