Three Films Make A Post: Blood, sweat and tutus.

Pretty Lethal (2026): A small troupe of perpetually quarrelling ballerinas – I’d be thankful if someone could explain the minor ballerina genre movie wave of the last twelve months or so to me – get on the bad side of some Hungarian gangsters and ex-ballerina Uma Thurman and thus have to apply their skills rather differently from their usual norm. Though, it turns out, ballet is a martial art.

For easy direct-to-streaming cinema, Vicky Jewson’s little film is a decent enough watch, pleasantly short and clearly sure of the kind of thing it wants to be. I’d rather have preferred it to have taken its own silly set-up a little more seriously instead of going the lazy route of being ironic about it, but of the three “ballerinas doing violence” movies I’ve seen in the last year or so, this is at least the most entertaining. Which doesn’t say too much, but hey, I take what I can get.

Afterburn (2025): A solar flare destroyed the Eastern hemisphere, leaving Europe a mess of minor warlords and grey ruins. Treasure hunter Jake (Dave Bautista) works for the perhaps not quite as terrible would-be king of Britain (Samuel L. Jackson), somewhat unwillingly, and is tasked to liberate the Mona Lisa from the continent. The plot will involve an evil Russian general (Kristofer Hivju) with fascist world (or what’s left of it) domination on his mind, as well as a beautiful freedom fighter (Olga Kurylenko). Also, a plot twist concerning the Mona Lisa nobody will ever have seen coming (ha).

I genuinely admire both Bautista and Kurylenko quite a bit, and always feel a bit sad when they waste their talents on something like this deeply uninspired action movie by J.J. Perry. Their presence, as well as Jackson’s willingness to put some effort into even the lamest nothing of a role, do their job of pulling this from being completely uninteresting into the realm of the vaguely watchable. Though for a guy coming from stunt and action work, Perry’s not terribly adept at directing stunts and action.

Raw File (2025): I found this piece of low budget POV horror about an investigator (Monica Oprisan) and her trusty cameraman (the voice of Alexander Bishop and the camerawork of director Aaron Dobson) having a very bad night in a large apartment complex while looking into a curious suicide to be a pleasant surprise. Once this gets going, the film shows some actual ambition: neat bits and pieces of lore and worldbuilding that cross ideas of the demonic with those of high strangeness are slowly revealed, some actual action is staged, and everything is presented without overstaying its welcome, leaving me pretty happy.

In short: Oblivion (2013)

Warning: at least structural spoilers are inevitable when talking about this one

For the first hour or so, this is a fun SF adventure flick with light elements of the mind-bender sub-genre, a plot twist that is so honestly prepared by the film it’s pretty easy to see where the film’s going for the genre savvy much earlier, and decidedly enhanced by some really beautiful digital work on the post-apocalyptic Earth. Unfortunately, neither director Joseph Kosinski (who also directed that dreadful Tron sequel, so is clearly rapidly improving by making a movie that doesn’t completely suck) nor his script are in the end prepared to go anywhere interesting with the melange of weaponized clones, drones, and mind-wiping on offer. Instead, we get the usual stuff with an over-complicated alien plan to steal something (water) they could acquire on a lot of planets where they didn’t need to wipe out the local population, Tom Cruise, superhero, and a heroic suicide bombing to dreadful poetry. Though it’s not much of a heroic sacrifice, really, seeing how the film then just puts all questions about the nature of identity it nearly asked aside to not only get its heroic sacrifice cake but eat a happy end, too.

Other problems are the film’s determination to keep its female characters deep in the 1950s (wasting perfectly good actresses Olga Kurylenko and Andrea Riseborough), Morgan Freeman’s usual lazy special effects movie performance (because there’s nothing better than an actor who doesn’t put any work in but still cashes the check), and Tom Cruise being Tom Cruise, which is to say, in turns blandly professional and vain. Well, there’s also the strict conventionality of a plot and structure that the film doesn’t manage to hide well enough behind the spectacle, which in itself is a bit too conventional.

It’s still a perfectly watchable big dumb Hollywood SF movie, mind you, and at least a particularly pretty one.