Monday new releases: 26 May 2025

Back in the day, when I obsess­ively watched and wrote some­thing about every new release, I would have included Fountain of Youth which dropped this week­end on Apple TV+. Directed by Guy Ritchie and star­ring Natalie Portman and John Krasinski, I might have felt duty bound to pass on a opin­ion or two on some­thing that will be watched – or at least star­ted – by many thou­sands of people.

But Ritchie seems to put­ting out plenty of “con­tent” on vari­ous stream­ing chan­nels that is prov­ing ines­sen­tial or worse. The buzz on Fountain of Youth has been very low key and I’m still feel­ing burnt by Apple’s last for­ay into star-driven romantic com­edy adven­tures. So, I chose not sac­ri­fice anoth­er Saturday night and instead we watched Bong’s Mickey 171, a film that I was luke­warm on when it arrived in cinemas back in March but that at least has some ori­gin­al­ity about it (and the edit­or in-chief and read­er SBM of Silverstream hadn’t yet seen it).

Turns out it plays like gang­busters at home – SBM gave it 10 to of 10 – and we all felt that this was a Bong film that – like Snowpiercer – audi­ences will find and enjoy over time. Pattinson is an abso­lute hoot.

Anyway, if you did watch Fountain of Youth this week­end, please let me know what you thought in the com­ments. It may not be too late for me to pass actu­al judgement.

Meanwhile, Disney’s recyc­ling of their anim­ated intel­lec­tu­al prop­erty con­tin­ues apace with Lilo & Stitch, a remake of their hand-drawn fam­ily favour­ite from 2002. The choice of dir­ect­or felt pos­it­ive – Dean Fleischer Camp cre­ated the charm­ing Marcel the Shell With Shoes On stop-motion films so there was a strong pos­sib­il­ity that this ver­sion of Lilo & Stitch would arrive with its heart intact.

I’m sorry to say that isn’t, in fact, the case. It tries hard enough and there has clearly been an attempt to reverse engin­eer what made the ori­gin­al work but it feels engin­eered, the res­ult of check-box film­mak­ing rather than any­thing truly inspired.

Stitch starts life as Experiment 626, a genet­ic­ally engin­eered super-weapon made by a galactic mad sci­ent­ist (Zach Galifianakis). He’s so dan­ger­ous that he is con­sidered to be an abom­in­a­tion and is exiled by the Grand Councilwoman (Hannah Waddingham). (By the way, has any­one from the Ted Lasso-verse made as much hay as Waddingham? She’s also on the big screen at the moment com­mand­ing an US Navy air­craft car­ri­er in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and was a vil­lain­ous movie pro­du­cer in last year’s The Fall Guy remake.)

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

That exile proves to be in Hawai’i where Stitch attempts to go under­cov­er as a cute but untrain­able puppy in the care of six-year-old Lilo (Maia Kealoha), her­self still reel­ing from the Disney-loss of her par­ents and looked after by her big sis­ter Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong).

Both Lilo and Stitch have major impulse con­trol prob­lems and trouble seems to find them every­where, but even­tu­ally they form a deep bond just at the moment that author­it­ies (law enforce­ment, social agency and galactic coun­cil) arrive on the scene to tear them apart.

One of the prob­lems I found with the con­ver­sion to pseudo-live action is that the rel­at­ive poverty of Nani and Lilo, the reck­less­ness of Lilo and Stitch’s adven­tures and the jeop­ardy they end up in, are much less charm­ing than when they look real. There’s an ick-factor now that the ori­gin­al car­toon nev­er got close to. By being more groun­ded, this film is much less fun.

Aiming lower but hit­ting its tar­get more suc­cess­fully, the Irish lan­guage feel-good sports movie Tarrac is as pleas­ant a way to pass an hour and a half as I’ve seen recently. Aoife (Kelly Gough) returns to the small Kerry fish­ing vil­lage from her big city fin­ance job in Dublin so that she can look after her wid­owed fath­er, Bear, who has just had a heart attack (Lorcan Cranitch). He’s not much inter­ested in being looked after and, with all this spare time sud­denly, Aoife recon­nects with the ama­teur row­ing team she was part of as a youngster.

They’ve made it to the All-Ireland quarter-finals but – with no track record to speak of and not much in the way of tal­ent or organ­isa­tion – Aoife takes over as cap­tain and they start to believe in themselves.

Sometimes, an utterly pre­dict­able story can work because of the unique­ness of the envir­on­ment it takes place in and a sense of place is what Tarrac has in spades.