Monday new releases: 9 June 2025

Editor’s Note: In addi­tion to the three big screen releases, we’ve watched four (or is it even more) new doc­u­ment­ar­ies at home this week but they’ll get a news­let­ter of their own later on.

The expan­sion of the John Wick fran­chise into four Keanu Reeves-led fea­ture films, a tele­vi­sion series about The Continental (the mys­ter­i­ous hotel chain that arranges the con­tracts for this shad­owy world of hired killers), a com­ic book pre­quel, an anim­ated film and now a spin-off fea­ture called Ballerina, feels like the least desired “uni­verse” in mod­ern pop­u­lar cul­ture. At the very least, it is the fran­chise that has failed to under­stand what made the ori­gin­al so suc­cess­ful in the first place, fol­low­ing a film that was made with taste and care with an over­stuffed con­cen­tra­tion on lore and irrel­ev­ant but nerdy details.

Taste is some­thing we don’t talk about enough in this busi­ness. I’m not talk­ing about the dif­fer­ence between your taste and my taste (which is super­i­or obvi­ously) but when a film demon­strates good taste when it didn’t have to.

The first John Wick was taste­ful in that way, des­pite the body count. Director Chad Stahelsky – a former stunt­man – shot the action in longer takes than we are used to and from fur­ther away, allow­ing the cho­reo­graphy to flow, and for us to appre­ci­ate the skills of the per­formers. And DOP Jonathan Sela bathed it all in a glor­i­ous neon glow. I described it as more akin to watch­ing mod­ern dance than choppy 21^st cen­tury action cinema and Reeves’ Zen-quality as Wick – single-minded, regret­ful, unemo­tion­al apart from the eyes – was haunting.

It was nev­er inten­ded to set up a fran­chise but it made too much money. And Lionsgate decided that what people loved was that whole cool-Hotel Continental thing and that all we needed for a spin-off to suc­cess­fully imit­ate the ori­gin­al was to have Ian McShane, Lance Reddick and a brief Reeves cameo. They asked Underworld hack Len Wiseman to dir­ect it so, clearly, taste wasn’t what they thought they needed and wasn’t what they were going to get.

I hated Ballerina. Ana de Armas plays a young woman who has been take under the wing of the afore­men­tioned Mr. McShane and trained as an assas­sin after the murder of her fath­er when she was a young child. When she is old enough, she decided to take that train­ing and use it to find the men who killed him and extract her bloody revenge. When she gets to the top of the plot, she dis­covered an unlikely child abus­ing cult led by Gabriel Byrne in a beau­ti­ful and his­tor­ic Alpine vil­lage. Lots of amaz­ing vis­tas but no taste.

In Ballerina, sev­er­al char­ac­ters don’t have names, just func­tions: Anjelica Huston is The Director (of the assassin/ballet school), Byrne is known as The Chancellor. In Thomas Martin’s script for The Surfer (dir­ec­ted by Lorcan Finnegan and star­ring Nicolas Cage), most of the char­ac­ters also go unnamed. Cage him­self is The Surfer and Finn Little is The Kid (The Surfer’s son). But oth­er char­ac­ters are giv­en names or nick­names – Julian McMahon is Scally, the vil­lain­ous cult-leader and oth­ers in his gang are named Pitbull, Curly or Blondie.

The Surfer – the char­ac­ter – is a stressed-out busi­ness­man, sep­ar­ated from his wife, try­ing to build a rela­tion­ship with his teen­age son as well as buy back the house on the beach that the fam­ily lost when his fath­er died tra­gic­ally many years before. The exist­en­tial weight is crush­ing him and when the ‘loc­als’ refuse him and his son’s access to the beach – “not from here, can’t surf here” –the humi­li­ation pushes him into the kind of men­tal health crisis that only an act­or of Cage’s bravery can portray.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Over the next hour and a half, indig­nity on top of indig­nity is added until break­ing point is reached. The grow­ing real­isa­tion that this simple car park with a view­ing area, cinder block toi­let, barista and pub­lic tele­phone con­tains the seeds of a Wicker Man (orWake in Fright)-type des­cent into tor­men­ted folk-horror is expertly handled by Finnigan and Cage but The Surfer loses a star for me because I don’t think they quite knew how end it as well as they star­ted it and middled it.

Finally, Chuck Chuck Baby is the name of the chick­en pack­ing fact­ory in North Wales where a group of women toil away on the night­shift. Actually, it’s more banter than toil as they man­age to inter­rupt the mundan­ity of their lives with lip-synching ses­sions to their favour­ite pop songs.

Louise Brealey is mousy Helen, nurs­ing the dying moth­er (Sorcha Cusack) of her ex-husband dur­ing the day and keep­ing a low pro­file on the fact­ory floor by night. He (Celyn Jones) is a crush­ing boor with a teen­age girl­friend who has giv­en him the child that Helen was unable to. Helen’s great teen­age crush was the glam­or­ous and free Joanne (Annabel Scholey) who escaped from the oppress­ive hous­ing estate before she s trapped forever like Helen and her workmates.

When Joanne returns to clean up her late father’s stuff, the mutu­al crush is rekindled and love itself is kindled. Will these two man­age to rise above the social expect­a­tions or will the pop songs of their youth inspire them to romantic fulfilment?

While the song choices – includ­ing Janis Ian, Minnie Ripperton, Neil Diamond and Northern Lights by Renaissance — are both inher­ently great and per­fect for the char­ac­ters the inter­ludes go on too long and help pad the film out by about 15 minutes longer than the story can really justify.