Written and Directed by George Jaques Starring Bella Ramsay, Neil Patrick Harris, Jessica Gunning, James Norton, Earl Cave, James Blunt Embankment Films – in Cinemas now
As a survivor of the disease myself, I’m always wary about ‘Cancer’ movies, which in the past have fallen prey either to god awful sentimentality, ham fisted metaphor, or ‘noble death warrior’ syndrome. Refreshingly, Sunny Dancer is none of these. Cancer is shit, the movie says, and if you get it, it’s plain bad luck and you just have to do your best to live with the little bastard… and that’s drama enough.
Centred on Bella Ramsay as Ivy, ten months into remission from Leukaemia, the drama follows her to a Scottish summer camp for teen cancer survivors dealing with PTSD from their treatment and the disruption of their respective childhoods. You could pick all sorts of holes in the film’s episodic and sometimes bumpy linear structure, but it survives those occasionally potholes through the commitment of its excellent young ensemble – not just Ramsay (who’s always brilliant) but Earl Cave (son of Nick), Conrad Khan, and Daniel Quin-Toye, not mention Jessica Gunning, James Norton and Neil Patrick Harris all on top form, along with a fun cameo from James Blunt.
Bella Ramsay leading the excellent ensemble cast of Sunny Dancer
George Jaques’s direction and dialogue is light touch stuff – often very funny, and the tear jerks when they come feel genuine enough not to mawk the viewer.
At the heart of the movie is that rare thing – a properly character driven sex scene, without an iota of voyeurism, that I’m sure will touch the hearts or pretty much everyone who sees it. I absolutely dread film and TV sex – 99 times out of a hundred it is simultaneously excruciating, emotionally implausible and physically impossible. Here, it isn’t just tasteful but truthful – and, more importantly, hopeful, in an age when the narratives around teenage sex are unremittingly negative.
Or maybe I was particularly moved by this because I’m getting old – and my own youth is barely discernible in the rear view mirror. If that is clouding my judgement then that’s something for which there is absolutely no cure. 8/10
Written by Eli Roth & Noah Belson Directed by Eli Roth Starring Charlie Zeltzer, Ari Millen, Sarah Abbott. The Horror Section / MCT Studios – in Cinemas now
On the eve of the summer vacation, a seemingly idyllic town descends into madness when a mysterious ice cream man arrives, serving kids addictively sweet delights… with horrifying results.
First things first. Welcome.
That’s a fluffy marmoset welcome to anyone who has endured – or even enjoyed – my reviews for the wonderful Sci-Fi Bulletin which, sadly, closed its doors to new content earlier this week (but remains available for its vast and invaluable archive). I’ll save the Ninja for another day.
Having picked up the reviewing bug (with the help and guidance of editor Paul Simpson), I’m going to see how it rolls, back here with the Ninja Marmoset, on my own site, which I have happily neglected in recent years. The wild parties at SFB Towers were a lot more fun. I’ll cast my net a little wider than the horror, sci-fi and fantasy I was covering from Sci-Fi Bulletin’s secret bunker, but to kick things off how about 86 minutes of blood-spattered, intestine squelching, brain-mushing gross out comedy gore from Eli Roth?
I can’t say I’ve been particularly enamoured of Roth’s particular brand of horror over the years. Back in 2023 Thanksgiving got off to a decent satirical start but soon descended into aimless gore and the joke soon wore off. In Ice Cream Man Roth has a more coherent story to tell, with its roots in the sorts of Pied Piper mythologies where a corrupt, complacent community is punished by the theft of its children. Although in the case of Ice Cream Man they don’t just go dancing off into a cave; the little darlings are rendered a tad more pro-active than that.
Think Roald Dahl’s Matilda, but re-imagined by George Romero and Hieronymus Bosch… on a bad day.
If Roth succeeds here, it’s because his central conceit carries through to the very end and what he has to say is a bit more substantial than ‘people are greedy’ which was all he had to underpin Thanksgiving. And, unlike Zach Cregger’s Weapons – which also had shades of 18 certificate Dahl – the shifts from humour to something far darker are more assured. The funny stuff is far funnier (if you’ve got the stomach for weapons grade gross-out gore, and don’t try to take it seriously in any way) and so the darker turns land with a greater impact.
He’s also assembled a terrific cast of child actors for his central Goonies style gang, headed up by the phenomenally talented Charlie Zeltzer as Jared, as a sort of hapless Charlie Brown, charged with defeating his crazed zombie-like contemporaries.
Where the movie falls short is with its cardboard adult protagonists, albeit soggy and limp cardboard from the amount of blood and guts flying everywhere. Plus if you’re going to nod to a truly great movie like The Birds then have the patience to do it properly, and at least demonstrate that you understand why Hitchcock’s set piece became as iconic as it did.
Ari Millen as the Ice Cream Man
Ice Cream Man definitely isn’t for everyone. The cranial misuse of an ice cream scoop isn’t everybody’s idea of laugh out loud funny – it’s tacky and tasteless in spades and there were a couple of walk-outs in my auditorium – but I had a ball. 7/10
There’s a reason that the marmoset hasn’t been blogging this year. When it comes to creating online content, I’ve been focusing my energies on the excellent Sci-Fi Bulletin where I get to write critically (and, hopefully, entertainingly) about the joys, or otherwise, of science fiction, fantasy and (my favourite of the three main genres) horror, on both big and smaller screens. Our esteemed managing editor, Paul Simpson has been facing health challenges, so it has galvanised our little gang to keep the motor running. It’s a wonderful space, writing for an informed and interested audience without fear or favour who (I tell myself!) will appreciate me taking a long view (I’m getting on a bit) of the latest twists and turns of genre entertainment.
There are always patterns, as I explore in my latest round-up of the year’s best Big Screen genre offerings observing that science fiction seems to have taken something of a back seat to horror in 2025 and hazarding a guess as to quite why that might be the case. Click here to read the full article.
In my piece for Sci-Fi Bulletin I explore why Bring Her Back is my film of the year
But, as a jobbing script writer, my viewing habits go far wider than my main critical brief. I’m still producing work covering comedy, satire, fantasy, science fiction, historical drama, not to mention the occasional police procedural and odd smidgeon of children’s TV. Basically I watch a bit of everything, trying my best to catch at least one episode of any new series on the telly-box and spending possibly more time than is healthy in the darkness of my local movie theatre.
So, what did it amount to, all this ogling? Indeed, critical essays aside (enough opinions already!) what, if anything, do the numbers tell me? I’ve watched 133 movies over the last 12 months – 118 of them new releases. It may not be exactly scientific but at more than two films a week it’s surely a decent and at least reasonably representative data sample. Of course on their own the numbers are just numbers, they only take on meaning when you start to compare them over time when the trends appear to be striking.
There are doubtless far more authoritative industry stats available, but the first thing that struck me was that compared to 2024, the proportion of female film directors helming the new releases I saw had more than halved from 19% to 7%. Directors of colour had also dipped from 19% to 13%. US movies – mainly directed by white men – had reasserted themselves jumping from 50% in 2024 to 59% in 2025. Yes, it’s only a one year comparison but nonetheless the differences are striking, suggesting a retraction of diversity in terms of who is (literally) calling the shots, just as on screen representation seems, superficially, to be healthier than ever. While drawing correlations between identity, talent and authorship are contentious, it’s hard not to infer that white men have simply got better at telling more diverse stories. Whether that is a good or a bad thing, is a matter for ‘heated debate’ as Caroline Aherne’s Mrs. Merton might have said.
Meanwhile, British movie originations using these crude metrics appeared to have dipped from 34% of what I chomped my popcorn to in 2024, down to just 18% (although plenty of the US sponsored titles were shot over here, obviously) – and it’s worth adding that I make a special effort to catch as much homegrown product as I can.
But, perhaps counterintuitively given those figures, it was a fun and intriguing year in the cinema. While so many big releases seemed to falter (Mickey 17, Snow White, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, After the Hunt, Christy, Superman, Fantastic Four, The Smashing Machine, Elio and the abysmally titled Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere) and those that didn’t (notably Wicked For Good, Lilo and Stitch, A Minecraft Movie) weren’t for me there seemed to be a resurgence of small to mid-sized movies just intent on telling great stories that left me wiser about the human condition. Indeed some of them were in no way the best movies ever made, but they have stayed with me and I was not only entertained but was glad they were there in a world where there’s a growing belief that art can be reduced to an algorithmical function. Amongst those I would include – going by their UK release date – in only a vague order:
September 5th – a compelling, if workmanlike, account of the 1972 Munich olympics terrorist attack cleverly focused on the sports TV production unit who found themselves covering the events and facing hitherto unheard of editorial challenges.
From Hilde With Love – a little known and deeply affecting story of anti-Nazi dissidents in Germany during World War II.
Sketch – surprisingly edgy and inventive children’s fantasy that came and went under the radar but is well worth searching out, if you missed it.
Pillion and Lurker – explored controlling and abusive relationships from different angles and had me squirming in my seat… in a good way.
Companion – a smart, witty ‘B’ movie tech thriller about an android girlfriend gone rogue, which in its own way also explored ideas around coercive control.
Roofman – Channing Tatum proves he can really act in this funny and affecting biopic of a small time hustler holding out in a Toys’r’Us department store.
Good Boy – haunted house horror from the POV of an adorable Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. What’s not to like?
Blue Moon – Ethan Hawke gives a career best performance as diminutive alcoholic American lyricist Lorenz Hart.
One Battle After Another – perhaps the ‘biggest’ movie in this list (along with Sinners) and while I might have been less wowed than others (it’s headed for a few Academy Awards no doubt) it was a hugely enjoyable ride full of character and fun, not least for its highly original car chase finale.
Santosh – a fascinating Hindi police procedural following a young female constable encountering police corruption in rural India.
The Choral – From the trailers this looked like yet another piece of cheesy British heritage cinema. In reality it was far sharper with Alan Bennett back on form, drawing on themes he explored successfully in earlier works such as A Day Out as far back as 1972, and the original Talking Heads from the 1980s.
It Was Just An Accident – managed to throw a chilling light on Iranian state oppression while squeezing out genuine humour and humanity along the way. Just getting it made was a remarkable statement in itself.
The Rule of Jenny Pen – John Lithgow terrorises fellow care home resident Geoffrey Rush in a movie designed to scare the willies out of anyone contemplating the ever approaching immediacy of their declining years… (i.e. me).
Warfare – Alex Garland finally makes a movie that works in every respect from start to finish. A visceral (literally), truthful and horribly immersive war movie.
House of Dynamite – the most terrifying movie of 2025 as we watch Sir Idris Elba lead us into nuclear war in 19 minutes of real time seen from different perspectives.
Oscar winning Latvian animation – Flow – had its UK release this year, and is a soul stirring animated masterpiece contemplating a drowned world from the perspective of a small black cat and its animal friends.
I Swear – was classic British film making at its very best as Robert Aramayo staked his claim on being the next hot UK acting talent with his depiction of Turette’s trailblazer John Davidson. Just close your ears to Maxine Peake’s iffy Scottish accent.
The amazing Robert Aramayo as John Davidson in I Swear
Sinners – top drawer vampire action acted as a conduit for a thoughtful essay on the Americanisation of the US’s migrant communities. In that respect, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is surprisingly close to The Brutalist, only shorter, more entertaining, less pretentious and actually more culturally astute… plus it has a score to (un)die for… literally.
A Real Pain was also a 2025 release in the UK and similarly soul stirring, unless, like a surprising number of my friends, you simply look at at and think: ‘Isn’t Kieran Culkin just really annoying?’ without asking why.
The Ballad of Wallis Island – I laughed, I cried, I laughed again in this flawless, life affirming romcom-with-a-twist featuring a standout central performance from Tim Key.
Australian horror Bring Her Back – blew my socks off as Sally Hawkins made us sympathise for a woman with the most evil of intent. Horror movies are rarely truly scary, but this had me cowering in my seat and peeping through my fingers, but managed to touch my heart as well. My film of the year by a very long way.
Jonah Wren Phillips and Sally Hawkins still haunting my dreams in Bring Her Back
So, what, if anything, can one conclude from this mish-mash of unscientific data and thumbnail impressions? On the one hand we see diversity seemingly on the retreat and identity politics taking a back seat. Arguably it was left to Wicked to do all the heavy lifting on that front this year – and very successfully too by all accounts, including the box office ones. But as the other big franchises seemed to sputter, this left the medium of film to get back to what it does best, which is to tell a far more diverse range of stories taking us to corners of the human experience that we might otherwise never see.
While the dictum ‘no stories about us, without us’ might seem hard to argue with, I often find myself wondering whether it is in fact little more than a glib and counterproductive truism. Surely the heart of much that it is great in art comes when creatives use our imaginations precisely to explore ideas and situations we have not, nor could ever experience. I have a vague memory that this frowned upon phenomenon is actually called empathy. As anyone who has ever filled in a funding application to Arts Council England will know, it can feel at times that we have turned the empathetic imagination into an artistic crime. It might explain in part why we have, as a society become so polarised and absolutist and binary and intolerant. Artists have boxed themselves into a corner where it is essentially an offence to claim to know anything about anyone that isn’t you. We talk a lot about ‘lived experience’ (or ‘experience’ in old money) but as a curious and hopefully empathetic creative it’s written into my artistic DNA to want to write about things I haven’t experienced at all. We have quite literally taken the art out of art.
Thankfully, in 2025, I have felt, perhaps intangibly, that this horrible, stifling absolutism is on the retreat. To be fair, perhaps, as I suggested earlier, we have learned something positive from this period of artistic insanity. We see the world with a wider lens and that’s a good thing, but crucially, it feels as if we are being allowed to imagine again, and get back in touch with the real world…
…just in time for a war and global collapse when we simply won’t have time for such trivia, nor, as Mr Freud once said, for ‘the narcissism of our (extremely small) differences’.
NB. There’s no way of talking about this without spoilers, although the film largely based on a true story, so it’s up to you.
Holy Spider is a tough watch. It’s a fictionalised account of the serial killer Saeed Hanaei, who murdered 16 women in Iran, all or most of whom were sex workers, in 2000-2001. He was ultimately caught and executed, but along the way, Hanaei became a folk hero of the religious right because of his claim that his killing spree was a divinely inspired mission to cleanse the streets of ‘corrupt women’.
Zar Amir Ebrahimi as Arezoo Rahimi in pursuit of the Holy Spider serial killer
In light of today’s protests by women in Iran against the strictures of the ‘Morality Police’ the story feels important and prophetic, suggesting that Hanaei’s twisted mentality is now enshrined in a state sanctioned murderously misogynistic DNA.
I should start by saying that I think Holy Spider is a very good film in many ways. It’s brilliantly made, utterly gripping, with superb acting all round. The director, Ali Abbasi, is himself Iranian (although he lives in Denmark now) and some might remember him from the very bizarre Border which came out a few years ago about a Troll working as a customs officer.
If you haven’t seen Border, dig it out. It’s VERY weird, completely original and utterly compelling.
But… But….
On the one hand Holy Spider follows an incredibly determined brave woman journalist, Arezoo Rahimi, who finally entraps Hanaei by posing as a sex worker and pursuing justice on behalf of his victims, on the other it endeavours to explore Hanaei’s psyche (embittered war veteran, religious zealot etc), following him as he commits murder after murder, which he gets away with because, as with Peter Sutcliffe, there is little sympathy for his sex worker victims who are seen as largely responsible for their own fate.
Hanaei is brilliantly and believably portrayed by Mehdi Majestani but is that part of the problem?
Here lies the problem. To tell this part of the story, Abbasi decides we need to watch not one, not two, but three very brutal murders, dwelling in graphic detail on highly disturbing images of their strangulation. While there is some attempt, certainly with two of the victims, to give them a hinterland and depth beyond being simply cinematic murder-fodder, there is clearly justification for the accusation that Abbasi is being unnecessarily voyeuristic. Wendy Ide in The Observer was particularly scathing, suggesting that this aspect of the film perpetuated precisely what it was attempting to critique and it was therefore only worthy of two stars. She has a point.
But… But…
I found myself very conflicted. In recent years, especially in the writing community, the consensus has been that we should aim to give far less narrative air time to perpetrators, and where possible make our stories about those who suffer at their hands. In 2021, in The Investigation,a brilliant Danish dramatisation around the murder of journalist Kim Wall in a wealthy entrepreneur’s private submarine, the perpetrator was neither named or featured at all. It was an incredibly affecting and powerful drama.
Danish drama The Investigation resolutely denied the perpetrator airtime
The thing is, while I was blown away by the power of that Danish series, I can’t in all honesty bring myself to believe that this is the only way of respectfully telling these stories, after all sometimes it is our duty as writers to dig down into why people transgress in the way they do. In the case of Iran, where Abbasi is making a broader political point about ingrained cultural, political and religious misogyny, not to explore who Hanaei believes himself to be would be to render the whole enterprise utterly pointless.
Indeed, although Hanaei was caught after a potential victim managed to escape, the journalist’s brave, empowering entrapment story, gripping though it is, appears to be little more than worthy wish fulfilment. The truth of the film – and truth is what we’re about as writers and directors – lies in the parts of the film about which well-meaning, politically astute critics are so righteously critical.
So, could the film have been made without forcing us to watch those murders? Would one or two murders have been enough? The answer to that is yes, but I seriously doubt it would have been anywhere as powerful a statement as it is. It could reasonably – if uncomfortably – be argued that to do so would be less respectful of those victims, not more so, because in narrative terms the crimes would be sanitised for the audience, and Abbasi is addressing an audience who, he believes, simply do not take the issue of violence against women seriously. If there are people – sometimes controlling entire nations – who see violence against women as an abstract justified by a higher force, as divine retribution, then showing it as cold, brute, murderous evil done, repeatedly, by men (not gods), is thematically and politically justified. After all, that is the truth of the world.
When we meet the parents of one of the murdered women, torn apart by grief and shame, it is a hair-raising moment, precisely because we have lived the young woman’s terrible death with her. When Hanaei’s son coolly, proudly re-enacts his father’s crimes with his toddler sister, as if playing a children’s game, we flinch precisely because we have borne witness to the full horror of the deed as it happened.
And in a brilliant and shocking final act, the execution of Hanaei is seen to be equally brutal, the audience forced to watch in grim detail just as they have the murders of his female victims. We could equally ask do we really need to see that in all its horror? The answer for me is yes, because it exposes the suffocating pointlessness of any culture driven by retribution, divine or human.
In its brilliant conclusion, Holy Spider dramatises Hanaei passing his misogynist beliefs down to his son.
It has become easy to eschew voyeurism, and often there is good reason to be wearily impatient with tropes where women feature primarily as corpses, but equally there are times when those stories need to be told, and when perhaps those images need to be seen.
Whether the balance is right here, and whether a woman director would have made this differently, or as effectively, or better, I genuinely have no idea. All I can say is that Holy Spider is an extremely powerful and disturbing film which I shall be thinking about for days if not weeks if not years, where a more discreet cinematic style might have been a good deal more forgettable.
It made me rightfully angry at the crime, not at the film maker, and I’ve never been one for blaming the messenger.
(If you’re new to the Marmoset and interested in anything you read on the blog page please find out more by clicking here and having a little explore)
I wasn’t in a hurry to see She Said, as, on paper, it sounded heavy going. Two hours and ten minutes of earnest New York Times journalists trying to nail the Harvey Weinstein story? Don’t we already know what happened? Perhaps this is why it has struggled at the Box Office, although numerous news items about how the movie has bombed but is ‘terribly good really’ haven’t helped. But then a friend posted emotionally about going to see it and it spurred me on to make the effort.
Well… for a movie where we do indeed know what happened, and where 80% of the running time is people on their phones, or reporting off-screen action, this is not only edge-of-the-seat gripping stuff, but incredibly moving. I went with my wife and we were both moved to tears (Gail’s from Sheffield and she’s dead hard!).
The genius of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s script is that it’s the tangential detail that acts as the emotional sucker punch. A Skype call where a child reveals the extent to which sexual violence has been normalised is painfully upsetting. A woman about to go into theatre for a mastectomy making a crucial choice to cast off decades of fear and oppression – and more like this – dramatise how it isn’t simply the sorry tale of Harvey Weinstein being brought to book; it isn’t about bringing down one dysfunctional and evil individual. It’s about forcing a long overdue tectonic cultural shift.
On a personal level, while I never witnessed anything on this scale, having worked in theatre and broadcast media for forty years, I’ve encountered a good deal of sexist bullying and intrusive behaviour… and, I’m sorry to say, turned a blind eye to a good deal of it, especially when I was younger in the 1980s, telling myself (wrongly) that as long as I wasn’t a participant, my hands were clean. Of course, all I did, along with pretty much everyone else, male and female, is help to perpetuate a toxic, abusive culture. I mention this, because, if you get anything from seeing this film it shouldn’t be to consider the problems it identifies as ‘other’.
If All The President’s Men is about journalists exposing a conspiracy in the highest echelons of power, She Said is about ending a conspiracy where really rather a lot of quite ordinary people have been complicit as well.
Mulligan and Kazan are both terrific as journalists Twohey and Kantor, and who wouldn’t want Patricia Clarkson as your editor???? There’s a great cameo from Samantha Morton and an incredibly moving supporting performance from Jennifer Ehle. This is a film that could so easily have been ‘worthy’ in a bad way, but it manages to be angry and passionate, and while I haven’t checked the historical accuracy yet, it certainly feels truthful (which is something different). I guess it’s ‘worthy’ in the best way possible, as in leaving me feeling that I’m not worthy… just blown away.
(If you’re new to the Marmoset and interested in anything you read on the blog page please find out more by clicking here and having a little explore)
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