Three Films Make A Post: Welcome to a world of hurt.

Predator: Badlands (2025): Objectively, this film about a young, outcast Predator ending up with an RPG party, is a terrible mistake following returning director Dan Trachtenberg’s clever Prey. It’s silly, self-indulgently so, weirdly shaped and goes out of its way to rob the Predators of their last remaining mystique. However – and this is going to be a bit of refrain in this post – it is also a whole load of fun, following the rule of cool with such wild abandon critiquing it for a lack of substance would make me one of those people who eat puppies. Also also, Elle Fanning is much better as a funny, wisecracking sidekick than anyone could have ever expected.

Honey Don’t! (2025): The general tenor towards Ethan Coen’s solo films – or in actuality, his films made in co-operation with Tricia Cooke who happens to also be his wife – is harsh to a degree that nearly made me miss this lesbian noirish private eye comedy until it’s not thing, as it did with the film he made before. Sure, this is not a resounding, eternal masterpiece, nor a deep comment on the shape of the world (though the shape of the world is very much visible in it), but then, it’s pretty clear that’s simply not the kind of film Coen & Cooke set out to make. Instead, this is a film all about the filmmakers having fun with plot elements, ideas and tropes they like, namely Lesbians, hard-boiled private eyes, small evils that believe themselves to be big evils, noir, serial killers, and all kinds of weirdness. The result isn’t focussed, sometimes goes off on tangents that don’t quite pay off, but most of the time, is as fun as the filmmakers appear to be having with it. Plus, Margaret Qualley manages to go through all of the film’s tonal shifts in a way that makes it look easy.

Drive-Away Dolls (2024): Having had this amount of fun with Honey Don’t! did obviously lead me directly to also watching Coen & Cooke’s earlier film, also starring Margaret Qualley (among many other delightful thespians, of course), containing even more lesbians, even more off-beat humour, and rather less darkness. Being a road movie comedy, this does get even shaggier than Honey Don’t!, sinks its brow quite a few inches, and contains some ill-advised moments that point directly to The Big Lebowski, but keeps a sense of fun and a heart that can’t quite be cynical all of the time, which is the kind of heart I can identify with the most these days.

Honestly, if Cooke & Coen make films like these two for the – hopefully very, very long – rest of their lives, I’ll be there to watch them.

Prey (2022)

1719, in the territory of a tribe of Comanche on the Great Plains. Mid-20s teen Naru (Amber Midthunder) wants to become a warrior rather badly. She certainly has at least half the skill set and double the brains to do it, but not surprisingly, what we see of the rest of her tribe is less than happy to see a young woman trying to become a warrior.

It doesn’t make things easier for Naru that she has many of the character traits of a typical YA heroine, so she’s stubborn when compromise could get her further, capable but not as insanely capable as she seems to believe herself – which is to say, she’s human – moody and broody, and not at all great with people. She’s also in something of a competition with her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers). Taabe’s not always unsympathetic to his sister and her capabilities, but he’s also the star young warrior of the tribe, and clearly doesn’t quite get how much harder his sister has to work for the same gain, or just doesn’t want to see it.

All these problems become rather dangerous for everyone involved once a young warrior is killed by something. Taabe and most of the others believe he has been killed by a puma, but Naru finds tracks and hints that suggest something more dangerous. Like, for example, one of the hunting-mad aliens of the other Predator movies.

Eventually, of course, it will fall to Naru to conquer the alien killer.

There are moments, quite a few even, when Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey is a great, tight, survival thriller about a young, capable, and rather deadly young woman in a fight for her life and her tribe’s respect against a technologically superior force, her own people’s failings, and some of those other alien invaders that will historically be their downfall. Some of the action set pieces are very clever indeed, using the by now well-known traits of our alien menace and the historical situation in inventive and very exciting ways.

There are other moments when Naru is saved by the hero’s death exemption rather than her own abilities or even just luck (which is the thing that saves most of us sooner or later, or just doesn’t); moments when the film’s feminist messaging feels the need to hammer its point home in the most unnecessary way when it would be much more effective to simply show instead of tell us by seeing Naru prevail as well as the things she prevails over; and moments when Naru and the rest of her tribe act so much the contemporary YA characters, it can become difficult to care about her or them, or believe they are actually members of a tribal community from the 18th Century.

The good parts of the film definitely prevail, certainly enough to make this a film well worth watching as well as the second best movie in the Predator franchise (which sounds like a bit of a back-handed compliment, but isn’t meant to be in this case). Prey’s problem is simply that its good parts are exquisite, while the bad parts are nothing which could not have been fixed by a little more subtlety and care in the script. So this could have been a real classic, yet can’t quite get away from its flaws enough for that, and merely ends up being pretty great.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Warning: if you haven’t seen this yet – and my perfect imaginary reader really should have - mild structural spoilers are inevitable (though I’ll not outright spoil a certain important plot point).

Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has perhaps chosen a bad night for starting a long drive through the American South northwards. A car crashes into hers, and when she wakes up, she finds herself chained in what looks like some sort of underground prison cell.

Her captor (John Goodman), a man we will later learn is named Howard, seems appropriately unhinged. As far as he tells it, he saved Michelle’s life when he grabbed her out of the wreck of her car and brought her to his private underground fallout shelter, for there’s supposedly been some sort of chemical or biological attack which supposedly killed everyone on the surface. Which doesn’t really explain the chain around Michelle’s ankle if you ask me, but what do I know about etiquette?

After a time, and some grumbling about a lack of proper thankfulness, Howard does let her free. Turns out there’s another man down in the shelter too. Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) did some work for Howard and happened to be at the right place at the right time to be let in when something he isn’t clear about but that looked dangerous to him happened. For a time, Michelle plays house with Howard and Emmett, but the situation and Howard are too off, and there’s too little information for her to ever lose her distrust. The question is, what kind of crazy is Howard? The harmless lonely, type who just happens to be paranoid about catastrophes and is for once right? The kind who kidnaps people and pretends to save them from something terrible? And even if there’s something going on outside – what exactly is it?

Dan Trachtenberg’s 10 Cloverfield Lane is a rather wonderful film. For most of its running time, it is a thriller realized as a chamber play, carried by a sharp script that is very good at suggesting terrible as well as perfectly harmless explanations for a lot of things going on, and by performances as good as you’ll find them in a genre movie. Winstead (whom I’ve never seen give a bad or even a mediocre performance) not just makes Michelle’s confusion, anger, and panic palpable but also perfectly realizes the moments when Michelle stops being the person things are done to and finds the strength and determination to act until a decision she makes in the last scene that should be way too over the top heroic to be believable feels like the natural consequence of her growth. She and Goodman’s (right now in a big late career high when it comes to the consistency and quality of his work) sad, frightening, crazy, frightened and mysterious Howard are perfect foils for each other, neither ever attempting to overbear the other actor. Gallagher’s performance isn’t quite as obviously great, but he’s so on point in his interactions with the other two it’s difficult to find any fault in his performance.


For the first hour or more, Trachtenberg escalates the tension in the bunker expertly, with stakes and scale of the proceedings subtly escalating until things come to a head and the film turns into a very different, bigger kind of story (whose precise nature shall remain undisclosed) the director and his lead actress convey just as well. To me, this is exactly how the sort of twisty thriller so many films try to be right now should be directed and written, with a big twist that doesn’t turn everything that came before into nonsense but gives it an additional dimension.