Category: Film

There are a fair few Australian authors kicking around in genre spaces these days, and the question is always: are they going to set their books in Australia (Jane Harper), their author’s native land like Ireland (Dervla McTiernan & Adrian McKinty), a remote island that doesn’t exist somewhere off Scotland (Laura McCluskey) or … America (Dervla McTiernan & Adrian McKinty)? Brisbane-based Shailee Thompson has decided to go for the United States approach, which is the most logical choice for her combination of those two complementary genres, the rom-com and the slasher film. It really helps to know what you’re in for with How To Kill A Guy in Ten Dates, lest you be surprised that the blood starts spurting at 12%.

Jamie Prescott is writing a dissertation on the intersection between rom-coms and slasher films, and her roommate, Laurie, is an acolyte of documentaries. Having given up on dating apps, Laurie and Jamie go to monthly singles events. On the night that they go to a speed dating event at a labyrinthine club that they attended in their misspent youth (ie five years ago), things go wrong when the lights go out and Jamie’s date’s throat is slit. After that it’s a race for the survivors, shorn of their phones and locked in, to survive the night. But could Jamie maybe find true love on the way, even as the bodies pile up around her?

It feels like at some point over the years it became harder to find a slasher that isn’t self-aware than one that is. This may be even truer of novels, which are not only not films, but often have a stream of consciousness first person narration which means that the lead character can make their commentary on the situation without having to shoehorn it in to dialogue. The book opens with a list of rules for how to survive a slasher, and Jamie refers to them throughout, if only so that other characters can scoff at her.

The problem with having such rigid rules in place is that Thompson is in trouble every time she tries to break one. If you’re even vaguely “up” on the genre then you’ll probably realise a couple of things that Jamie either ignores or discounts, and some of the narrative twists are easily discernible well in advance of their reveals. And then Laurie can say “oh, of course! Just like in [x movie which made hundreds of millions in the nineties, which I have definitely referenced textually]. Why didn’t I see it sooner?” Of course the reader is in a better position to think clearly than Laurie is, but the thing is that Laurie is in a confined space and seems to have a lot of time to think throughout the night — like the multiple instances where she spends ten minutes hiding in silence.

Thompson makes a couple of other uneasy concessions to her second genre, the modern romance novel feeling required to have sexual content no matter how awkwardly inserted it is, so to speak. In one of the moments of quiet contemplation, there is a sexual encounter that is mercifully brief but also you’d have to be there to understand how it’s a sensible thing to do at that juncture (you would also, correctly, guess that this is against Laurie’s rules). It’s not gratuitous, and if you have to do that in this situation, it’s handled sensibly enough. Yet that button didn’t necessarily need to be pressed; sometimes writing within genre is about confounding expectations rather than meeting them.

However, Thompson is right: there are overlaps between Laurie’s genres of choice. It’s not like no one has contemplated the relationship between sex and violence before. Without actors to anchor the ensemble cast to a place and time, it’s difficult to ascribe any characteristics to most of them before they die; Thompson compounds the matter by having separate characters named Drew and Stu, and Laurie frequently accidentally calls Stu by Drew’s name — a problem that doesn’t really resolve itself even after Laurie discovers Drew’s corpse — and the other women beyond Jamie are described as mostly nice except for the very standoffish one (maybe she will become narratively significant?). 

The vagueness continues to the club itself, which has a helpful map provided at the front of the book. Apart from it being clearly not up to fire safety code, it’s difficult to get a sense of what its labyrinthine interior is really like. The map doesn’t illuminate much, and it doesn’t seem like there’d be much room to hide from a knife and cleaver wielding maniac in its halls. Yet the ability of a venue to expand and contract as the story demands is thematically appropriate. If ever a scenario crumbles in the face of cold logic, a slasher is the perfect model. No matter the metatextual levels at play, slashers have to respect at least some rules, and here Thompson has made a wise choice.

How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates is like a slasher itself: some ideas are executed and others escape the page without proper implementation. It’s a better concept than it is an actual novel, but the idea should at least have a market, and Thompson can likely be trusted to write another. 

HOW TO KILL A GUY IN TEN DATES | By Shailene Thompson | Atria Australia | 368 Pages | AU $34.99

An ARC was provided by Simon & Schuster (Australia) through Netgalley in exchange for review.

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

A lot of people do both, and a lot of people write or draw for both, but I think that the general reader is either DC brained or Marvel brained. Like many things, it can be rectified with study, but often the sheer volume can get to you. Over the years I have learned a lot about DC through sheer osmosis, but Marvel doesn’t penetrate my mind the same way, and the MCU, with its increasingly sanded edges, doesn’t really match up with the comics.

I’m sure that at some point that I’m going to read an X-Men run that will explode my mind, and I am well aware that my stances on comics are even more wildly subjective than those on written literature. But I said what I said.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is an iconic run, and it bears very little resemblance to the 2014 film of the same name. It also may not be helpful to read in isolation, because if you dig a little bit further it seems that there was some sort of soft(?) reboot somewhere along the way, and there’s a copious amount of Captain America lore to accommodate for all of the times he was or wasn’t defrosted over the years.

Technically, the Winter Soldier arc is only considered to be issues 8-9 and 11-14 of Volume 5 of Captain America. Mercifully, Marvel collected Issues 1-6, Out of Time and issue 7, The Lonesome Death of Jack Monroe, which go a long way both to contextualising all of this and suggesting that maybe arcs and numbering can be inherently arbitrary.

Russian businessman Aleksander Lukin has taken possession of the Cosmic Cube, and has been using it to bend the world to his whims. Steve Rogers is tracing the apparent death of Red Skull and is constantly one step behind in foiling a series of terrorist plots launched by A.I.D., the Skull’s true believers. 

When a mysterious assassin known only as the Winter Soldier shows up to do the bidding of Lukin, Nick Fury investigates his identity while hiding his suspicions from Steve.

Something you’ll notice about this is that Steve Rogers, when he’s not being a cipher, is something of a dick. He’s a decorated war hero who fought in actual campaigns, so he’s not a wide-eyed naif. However, without that character point, Brubaker’s Captain America is something of a drab character. He shows up, he reacts, he gets things wrong. Most of the time Brubaker seems to be treating him as a blunt object to be aimed at an incoming threat and, even when it’s Steve’s own idea, he almost feels like he has as little agency as the Winter Soldier himself. Apparently this is due to residual guilt from the just completed Disassembled arc of The Avengers, which would go on to birth House of M, all of which is designed to give someone trying to unpick this twenty years later a headache.

But where The Winter Soldier does shine is in the construction of that entity’s identity, from the origin story to his own version of being a Man Out of Time. This Winter Soldier  has a rebellious streak and, even under mind control, almost seems more of his own person than Steve does here.

Steve Epting’s art often doesn’t help, frequently reinforcing the stereotype that many artists can’t draw women’s faces. Otherwise, much of it is serviceable; special mention goes to the flashbacks, drawn by Michael Lark, which really do stand apart from the modern-day storytelling.

The Lonesome Death of Jack Monroe, drawn by John Paul Leon, is perhaps the single strongest entry in the story, detailing as it does one of the fill-in Captain Americas (Captains America?) who suffered from a degraded batch of super soldier serum. It helps to contextualise the gaps in Captain America history in a way that it’s safe enough to wave away, it tells its own story, and it ties in thematically to the larger run. It’s somewhat similar, but not really, to “Made of Wood” outshining The Man Who Laughs in the collection of the same name — thus far (in my experience), Brubaker works best in the macro.

The Cosmic Cube itself is a well utilised artefact, with actual repercussions for the use of its powers. It’s always been a cool looking device despite its simplicity, and it is justifiably fearsome here. Thanks to its presence, it also means that everything can be set up and resolved in a far less prosaic way than anything you see in the cinema. The final battle between Captain America and the Winter Soldier ends with two actions that could be considered — and are — hard core. It’s the sort of thing that you sign up for; when technology is indistinguishable from magic, call that cosmic.

A fun thing to note is that this came out a few years before the MCU canonised Tony Stark, so the Iron Man here has limitations as to what he can do before he has to answer to a board of investors, and he can’t be seen to be engaging in (literal) corporate warfare. He’s even allowed to cut something of a pathetic figure. There used to be a different orthodoxy, and Stark got way worse from here before Jon Favreau rehabilitated him.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier takes a bit of getting your head around, but it also serves as a good jumping off point if for whatever reason you do want to start following Captain America. The confusingly named Captain America Volume 5 comprises Brubaker’s entire 50 issue run, said to be among the finest work ever to bear the character’s name. In the issues comprising this volume, almost every element is more interesting than the title character himself, who only comes into something approaching his own for the explosive finale.

It’s also hilarious that they took a month off partway through the run for a House of M tie-in. Comics! You have to laugh. Or hold your head in your hands and pray that someone’s drawn you a map.

December 2025 Update: Since writing this, I know a lot more about comics and have some very different feelings about so many of them. I know if I read Winter Soldier again, I would have a completely different read on it – and I probably wouldn’t read it in such isolation. It’s funny how a year changes you – and now I understand “volumes” in comics. It’s one word that means so many different things.

In France, things are quite different to the Anglosphere. Over there, a literary author can still be a meaningful part of the commentariat, work the TV circuit, and be a cultural touchstone. This foreign character is our entrée to Lie With Me, a movie that elegantly juggles the past and present while completely eliminating any element of coincidence or chance.

Stéphane Belcourt (Guillaume de Tonquédec), in the grip of a bout of writer’s block, returns to his hometown to promote cognac through a new novella and a commencement speech at the anniversary of the distillery. His wandering attention almost immediately latches onto distillery representative Lucas Andrieu (Victor Belmondo), who he quickly realises is the son of his first love. As Stéphane struggles with how much to reveal to Lucas, he considers the heartbreak of his school years, when his younger self (Jérémy Gillet) spent a season with Thomas (Julien De Saint Jean, The Lost Boys).

Adapted from Philippe Bresson’s book, the more literal title is “Stop With Your Lies” (the English title is a legacy of book translator Molly Ringwald). Stéphane is famous for autofiction, that most peculiarly European genre, and has been lax at covering his tracks to the point that multiple of his novels have had characters named Thomas, and one was directly called Thomas Andrieu. In the original book, this extends as far as the narrator character himself being named Philippe. It’s not difficult to see the parallels.

Yet Lie With Me operates at a remove as a film; writer/director Olivier Peyon is steering, rather than Besson, and the film’s split structure offers a dynamic character study of Stéphane across decades. Peyon chooses to focus mainly on de Tonquédec and Belmondo, with the past used as background to inform the present. The two leads bounce off each other in an alternately cordial and antagonistic way, and there is a genuine back and forth that keeps the movie buoyant. The cognac focus allows for unusual developments, as the lead character is near teetotal; when it comes time for the grand speech to commence it has dramatic impact for the theatrical audience but, on a pragmatic level, you have to wonder what the guests at the cognac event were making of it.

Lie With Me has a particular Frenchness that sticks to its walls, despite the universality of its lost love ricochet backdrop. Though it helps, you don’t need a degree in French literature to unpack the meta to get something out of it; aided by strong performances from de Tonquédec and Belmondo, Peyon has taken Bresson’s work and made it his own.

Lie With Me is still pending an Australian release date.

Directed by: Olivier Peyon

Starring: Guillaume de Tonquédec, Victor Belmondo, Jérémy Gillet, Julien de Saint-Jean and Guilaine Londez

Henry Cavill has not had much luck as the face of franchises. Between non-starters like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., re-cast leads like The Witcher, and whatever trainwreck the DCEU has ended up with, there was a time when the man didn’t have a franchise to his name. This all changes in 2024, with Matthew Vaughn’s (The King’s Man) new flagship, Argylle. Cavill plays the titular hero, he’s front and centre on the poster, and … he’s barely in the movie. There’s a marginally different movie behind this artifice, but it’s one that you’ve already seen before. There’s barely a mind here, let alone a twisted one.

Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) is an acquired taste, to say the least. Even if he’s presenting a relatively mundane story, there’s a sense of unease hanging around proceedings. Poor Things, however,is not a mundane film. It is a nightmarish and outré work delivered under the dark cover of having a name cast. Whether audiences are suspecting or not is up to them, but they really should have learned their lesson by now: Lanthimos has made a hypnotising tour de force that demands you get with its rhythms or die. 

Choose life.

The One Man Army has been a respected, and well trod, genre for many years. In recent times there’s been an influx of flair and personality into what can tend to be somber and bloody affairs. The Beekeeper looks like it might just be another run and gun, but there are times when it rises above itself to become heightened cinema. Adam Clay might not have personality, but The Beekeeper does.