Author: Alex Doenau

Thirty two years. Three Jurassic Park movies. Now four Jurassic World movies. Seven movies about the inadvisability of bringing dinosaurs back, and no lessons have been learned. Diegetically, we’re still playing God; creatively, we’re taking massive expensive steps backwards towards meaninglessness.

After humanity brokered an uneasy peace with dinosaurs in Jurassic World: Dominion, the terrible lizards have started reacting to the Earth’s changing climate and have largely died out except for those who live on a series of islands around the equator. Mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson, The Phoenician Scheme) is hired by pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend, The Phoenician Scheme) to escort dinosaur expert Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, Wicked) to the forbidden quarters of the planet to harvest the blood of the largest dinosaurs of the ocean, land, and sky to create a cure for heart disease. Once their boat runs aground on the island that InGen used to genetically engineer new and exciting hybrid dinosaurs, they have a 48 hour window to get the data they need and escape with their lives. 

David Koepp (Black Bag), writer of the original film, has returned to the franchise for the first time since The Lost World to provide gravitas to a concept that, like the newly winged velociraptors contained herein, should never have got off the ground. Koepp knows how a script works, but the state of modern franchising is such that it feels like a collection of pieces that are haphazardly assembled into a 134 minute work. The twist is that Johansson plays the traditionally male role and Bailey plays the role that would normally given to a woman, and that’s as far as that goes. There’s a vague attempt at a maybe romantic spark between them, but the fact is that Johansson is near permanently stuck in a droll register and Bailey has infinitely more chemistry with Mahershala Ali (Leave the World Behind), one of the other mercenaries on the trip. 

There’s a family of three and a stoner boyfriend who get thrown in as the B plot, so director Gareth Edwards (The Creator) can periodically cut away from Bennett’s team to show something else. They don’t add much humanity to the movie beyond giving Ali a motivation related to the one non-expository scene he is afforded with Johansson, but they do get an action highlight in a t-rex scene cut from the original Jurassic Park. Every element of this movie is a tool, but none of them are used effectively.

Jurassic World: Rebirth has such a small ensemble that it doesn’t have enough characters to spare to be unceremoniously eaten, or rended in twain, or dropped from a great height. You get a quick feeling for which characters have been marked “safe” by Koepp, because while we’re unable to feel any tenderness towards them, we know that he wouldn’t dare kill them. The few deaths the audience are treated to satisfy in none of the essential ways: they’re too tame to entertain, and the characters are so thin that you don’t care if they get swallowed.

It’s not franchise fatigue speaking to say that the new dinosaurs are ugly and poorly integrated; the distortus rex is a bizarre cross between a t-rex, a beluga whale, and a xenomorph, and it is more weird than scary. It is shrouded in shadow, not so much to create atmosphere as to obscure the gaps in the design. Worse than that, the equivalent to Jurassic Park’s brontosaurus scene, despite Jonathan Bailey’s clarinet solo on the score, falls so flat that you feel like you’re no longer capable of feeling wonder at creation. 

There is one moment of unambiguously interesting production design, and that is in the raid on the quetzalcoatlus nest, set in an arena that none of the characters can explain. In a movie that is hellbent on providing answers to questions that no one would think to ask, this one moment of mystery is allowed to sit. The questions that you will see answered include: why does this abandoned dinosaur island have a commercial gas station on it? And the answer is that the movie hasn’t had any new product placement since the party left the boat, and they need to show all of the branding that they can to subsidise the $180 million budget.

Director Gareth Edwards (The Creator), no stranger to creature features, does little to differentiate this movie from any other set on a remote island where death lurks around every corner. There are multiple King Kong films that do it better. There are multiple Jurassic movies that do it better, for that matter but, like the abominable distortus rex that powers the climax of this movie, Jurassic World: Rebirth is composed of the junk DNA harvested from far more impressive blockbusters. Despite its big name actress star and Oscar winner in support, it is potentially the most anonymous Jurassic film to date. By the time we reach the final cascade of events that are basically James Cameron’s Aliens, it barely even resembles a Jurassic film at all.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is a movie that damns the world for losing interest in dinosaurs, a notion as ridiculous as closing the zoos of the world because no one cares about animals anymore. With its vague environmental and universal healthcare messaging, Jurassic World: Rebirth is about as right on as a movie can get without actually caring about anything that it has to say. It may be ironic to complain that there’s nothing new in a movie about creatures that have been dead for 65 million years, but there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before and better.

Jurassic World Rebirth opened in Australian cinemas on July 3, 2026

Directed by: Gareth Edwards

Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ed Skrein

The Australian crime boom continues apace, but not everyone is happy to keep their crime restricted to regional Australia or the big cities. Some, like Dervla McTiernan or Adrian McKinty, expats who found themselves on the island’s shores, became hooked on writing about their Irish homeland before branching out to America with mixed success.

Laura McCluskey has done something slightly different: she’s Melbourne (or Naarm) based and presumably Australian born, but she has Scottish grandparents. The Wolf Tree, her debut novel, is set on a remote island off the Scottish coast. It bears the lack of specificity that you can get away with from such a setting, and it promises the sort of insularity you get when everyone knows everyone else and there’s only one way off … or two, if you count the reason the police are there in the first place.

Months after sustaining a catastrophic injury on the job, George Lennox is trying to get back into police business. She and her partner, Richie Stewart, are eased back into it by investigating the seemingly open and shut suicide of an eighteen year old on the island of Eilean Eadar. The locals, under the thumb of the priest Father Ross, are not keen to talk, and while George battles her own demons she starts to almost believe the island is haunted by wolves. If George can last five days on the island and rule the death a suicide, perhaps she can make it out alive.

Crime novels often come down to the strength of their lead characters, and George Lennox is not the most sympathetic person. Eilean Eadar is the sort of place that has its own authority, which means that you have to come at it from a soft power angle; unsurprisingly, George has none of that to offer. She is a blunt instrument that isn’t even tempered with a preternatural talent for policing, with a primary talent for baseline rudeness.

The strongest element of George comes from without, in the form of her foil. Richie’s levelheaded veteran officer who does a special line in not being mad, but disappointed, doesn’t break any new ground, but he’s a nice contrast whose solidity helps to make The Wolf Tree not entirely by the numbers.

Partially inspired by the Flannan Isles Lighthouse mystery of 1900, the wisest choice in the construction of this book is that it sticks to a single timeline. Not for these readers alternating chapters 125 years apart, but rather flavour and texture that give a homeopathic tinge of history to the proceedings. It only sort of ties in to the book as a whole — one character keeps asking George “have you read the lighthouse keepers’ logs yet?” — but it informs it never the less.

Eilean Eidar is a more interesting locale than McCluskey strictly gives it credit for, and George’s bluntness acts as a smokescreen for their insularity. McCluskey briefly touches on the idea that children can be sinister, but doesn’t take it very far. She is more interested in the concept that people who reject the other have in fact othered themselves; this late revelation that George possesses an empathy that many of the citizens of Eilean Eadar are incapable of are really what seals the fate of the book, and prevents it from the delicate tipping point of policing as an act of colonisation.

Obviously it was never going to be a clearcut case of suicide (it is only on the odd occasion that you get the double blind of an open and shut case actually being open and shut despite the investigators’ attempts to convolute it), but quite how far McCluskey chooses to take it is something to boggle at.

There has to be a degree of suspension of disbelief at play here, because the outcome will have you wondering how the police could ever hope to prosecute any of it. Even if you’re not in law enforcement, you’d be glad this case isn’t yours.

The Wolf Tree is a confident, if semi-anonymous, debut novel. George Lennox is interchangeable with many other tortured detectives, with the added bonus of a mentor that she intermittently chooses to listen to. Despite the scale of the conclusion, the book isn’t neat. It is unclear whether George can return — although it would be pretty funny if she got assigned a new beat investigating murders on a series of lonely islands — but if she does, there’s enough here to bring readers back.

The Wolf Tree released in the US on February 11, 2025, and is set for release in Australia on February 28, 2025.

An ARC of The Wolf Tree was provided by HarperCollins Publishers Australia in exchange for review.

It’s always¹ advisable, when you’re not feeling one book, to stop it at a quarter in and then go to the author’s previous title. Time of the Child, one of the picks for Christmas 2024, seemed difficult to get into; the chapters were very long, the breaks were few, and the narrative kept referring to earlier events in the village. Picking up This Is Happiness, to see what Niall Williams had previously written about the Irish village of Faha, is an instantly rewarding experience.²

Of course, eventually you will figure out that this is the second Faha novel. The first is called History of the Rain, and the entirety of the first chapter of This Is Happiness is “The rain had stopped.” But you don’t feel like you’ve lost any important information by starting here.

In 1958, the town of Faha sees sunshine for the first time in years. Seventeen year old seminary drop out Noe Crowe is visiting with his grandparents, Ganga and Doady, when the coming of the electricity is announced. Enlisted into helping lodger Christy collect signatures to allow the power poles to be constructed, Noe goes through the warm season feeling the old world inching towards the new — all from the vantage point of someone who has lived with electricity in Dublin all his life.

Told exclusively from Noe’s first person point of view at a sixty year remove, This is Happiness boasts the omniscience of age rather than of someone who knows and perceives everything. This is a folk tale told by someone who lived through part of it and gathered the rest. Noe’s surmise is the engine that powers the telling, and he is a charming host. 

This means that the parts of the novel that are explicitly “seventeen”, like his dalliances with the Troy sisters, are ill-considered and awkward. They ring true enough, but there is a largely baffling chunk about visiting the cinema in town and what ensues in the dark. Perhaps because you already know that it’s a fruitless endeavour, that Noe is merely embarrassing himself, you want to elide it; the juxtaposition of Noe’s amateur hour longing with the endurance of Christy’s throws their relative significance into relief.

What it really shows is that, in This is Happiness, Noe is primarily an observer and reporter. We feel for him and the reason for his loss of faith, but we’re more interested in him in relation to his family and to Christy than to his openly admitted hopeless romances. A Spring season spent attempting to mend a love gone for half a century, and chasing after an elusive master musician, is always going to be more interesting than a fumble in the dark — and you can tell, ultimately, which had more impact on the boy and the man.

Through Noe, Williams captures a moment in Irish history with charm and wit. With the rain gone, Faha can breathe and so too can the reader. This Is Happiness is generous and expansive, amusing and quietly touching. There is event, but it is largely defined by character; it is rare to see a novel with such exquisitely defined start and end points.

This is Happiness is such a satisfying piece that it gives strength for one to reconsider tackling Time of the Child, which was instantly denser, less inviting in its composition. Not once does it feel like homework, but rather something that might have been nice to read years ago. Still, there’s no time like the present, or like Ireland in 1958, when the crackle of electricity was in the air and young love was as foolish as it ever was.

1. Rarely. ↩︎
2. But also, and this is truly objective: maybe the lead up to Christmas and wind down of the working year isn’t the best headspace for reading. ↩︎

I don’t think we’re allowed to call Molly the Maid “autistic”, or “neurodivergent” or even “autistic coded” – she’s just another in a long line of protagonists with undiagnosed brain chemistry, something that became excessively popular when a certain sitcom that shall remain nameless inexplicably took over the world.

But I can call The Mistletoe Mystery cruel. Which it is. After the strong showing of The Maid, Nita Prose has treated her heroine as a plaything to be batted around, written as if by a child. Nobody dies, so the mystery is in Molly’s head, and every reader can see what the solution is before she even begins to get suspicious.

In the lead up to Christmas, the dearly departed Gran’s favourite time of year, Molly becomes increasingly suspicious of Juan, who is uncharacteristically keeping a secret from her, is running around at all hours, and asks her questions about her stance on diamond rings.

Of course Molly takes all this the wrong way, and her coworkers try to convince her to ignore the evidence of her own eyes. It doesn’t take much for the not-particularly-eagle-eyed reader to piece it together, but the onus is not on Molly for her misunderstanding; but on everyone in her life who knows her intimately, who knows how her brain works and how she takes everything literally and doesn’t cope well with subterfuge, for putting her through this.

There are some unexamined factors in play here, like the fact that Molly and Juan are apparently not really paid a living wage by the Regency Grand, and that they live in penury. Prose’s prose pays special attention to the squalor and tatters that her protagonists find themselves living in, shakes it out of its head, and carries on to studiously ignore it.

The one legitimately hilarious element of this is Molly’s run-ins with her nemesis who she chose not to have fired in The Mystery Guest. A regret that she was entirely within her power to prevent, and no reader would have protested. Sometimes you don’t have to be nice for niceness’ sake.

In all honesty, this review already feels longer than The Mistletoe Mystery itself did. It is understandable what Prose wanted to achieve, but there was almost certainly a way to reach the final result while having Molly investigate a different non-mystery that it is not so distressing to her and offensive to all that she stands for.

The Mistletoe Mystery is for die-hards and completists. There is no real way to justify its Australian price tag, and it puts the “stuffed” in stocking stuffer. If The Mystery Guest already put a sour taste in your mouth, this will not help in the slightest.

Dervla McTiernan’s Australian-set story is much better than her American tales, but it does smack of the grift that a series of Australian authors seem to have with Audible at the moment (more power to them) and isn’t as fleshed out as a full novel – even if it’s only 25% shorter than the execrable Nina.

Two separate narrators tell the stories of Flynn and Noah, who basically have a parade of misfortunes thrown at them in their respective youths, the sort of tribulations that would have seemed gratuitous to Job. When their stories dovetail, very, very late in the piece (seriously, by the time you get to anything in the blurb, it’s almost over), McTiernan goes into overdrive and puts in one detail too many about the web our heroes found themselves entangled in.

Sterling work from Ben Chapple and Harriet Gordon-Anderson grounds the story somewhat, but you do have to wonder how bloodthirsty and sensational the modern McTiernan is. There are some absolute clunker sentences that would never make it on a page, but The Fireground is keen and some of the characters eventually make somewhat sensible decisions. Really, how long can the silliness last?

It’s hard to say if writers still have origin stories. TJ Newman wrote Falling, the jingoistic thriller about getting blackmailed into terrorism that almost displayed cognisance of the USA’s complicity in the shambolic state of the modern political atmosphere, in the downtime on long haul flights as a flight attendant. A variation of this was cribbed for the insulting fictional story for “Elly Conway”, who “wrote” Argylle between waiting tables. (I will fully admit that I spend a lot more time thinking about Argylle than most people, especially Matthew Vaughan)

Falling was a success in a time when no one was flying anywhere, let alone attempting to crash their plane into America’s beating heart. Two years later, Newman returned with Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421, a different aviation disaster: a plane sinking into the ocean and the people racing against time to save the few passengers who remained aboard. Frankly, it’s a budget version of The Poseidon Adventure for people who either haven’t seen or can’t remember anything about it (there was a song; Shelley Winters was there). It’s the sort of book that you maybe don’t regret reading, but you also can’t bring yourself to think that it was very good. And it’s awfully convenient.

Finland is a very dry country. Droll, if you will. This, at least, is the impression that writer-director Aki Kaurismäki (The Other Side of Hope) would like you to get from Fallen Leaves, the fourth film in his Proletariat trilogy. The last one was in 1990, and he claims to have retired in 2017, so you know he’s been cooking this up for a while. This is the sort of movie that you see if you enjoy two people coming together very slowly over a relatively short run time, filled with tiny delights and small victories.

Ansa (Alma Pöysti, Tove) is a supermarket worker reduced to eating expired food; Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) is an industrial site worker who drinks on the job. A couple of chance encounters between the two sparks a mutual interest between the two, but between Ansa not leaving her name and Holappa instantly losing her number, will chase ever allow them to meet again?

Fallen Leaves is a tight 81 minutes. It almost completely lacks event, and when something happens it’s so understated that you almost have to ask if it actually did. This is all part of the charm, as the dialogue is delivered in complete deadpan, declarative statements with almost no emotion backing them up. 

Near equal time is given to Ansa and Holappa, but it’s easy to think that Pöysti is the star of the movie. She is a woman without much, but she knows exactly what she wants and how much she will tolerate. Her ambitions may be small, but you want a win for her; it’s hard not to respect a woman who knows her rights and won’t allow herself to be cowed by petty tyrants.

For Vatanen’s part, he gradually makes you care about Holappa’s quiet tragedy. What is initially played for laughs eventually becomes apparent as a legitimate problem. Most importantly, when all hope seems lost for the whatever number time, you still want things to work out for him, and you want Ansa to find him again if she can.

Fallen Leaves sounds like it should be depressing by any metric, but it is actually very gently funny. Holappa’s wingman Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen, The Other Side of Hope) has an entire sideline at karaoke where he argues with Ansa’s wingwoman Liisa (Nuppu Koivu, The Other Side of Hope) about how his face lies about his age. Holappa is accused of being four minutes late for the third time in a week by his boss, and the only retort, handily ignored, is “it’s Monday”. The way that Ansa and Holappa dance around each other is so otherworldly that you have to wonder if they’re aliens, but of course it’s not that sort of movie. It is the sort of movie that features deadly earnest karaoke delivered in multiple languages, and a repertory theatre playing the most sincerely random films.

Kaurismäki litters the film with rituals and signifiers that mean everything and nothing, and highlights the drudgery of piecemeal work that his characters subsist on. It’s a world devoid of dignity, but Ansa, at least, won’t surrender her self-respect. Any despair that it makes you feel is counterbalanced by the thought that maybe some light will shine into our fated pair’s lives, and you have to have faith in Kaurismäki that it will. It’s not a vocally political movie, but it definitely is a statement piece.

It’s difficult to say if a Kaurismäki film would be thought of as odd in his native country or if that’s just what Finland is like. To an international viewer, it’s the eternal question. Fallen Leaves is a delightful oddball, an unorthodox love story between two nice people barely scraping by on the economical underbelly of their country. Its quiet, lackadaisical pace won’t appeal to everyone, but Kaurismäki has cultivated such a specific feel to this movie that is intoxicating if you get swept into it. 

Fallen Leaves opened in Australian cinemas on February 14, 2024

Directed by: Aki Kaurismäki

Starring: Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen