Monday new releases: 7 July 2025

As a kind of thought exper­i­ment – and because I haven’t bothered to watch either of the last two Jurassic World films – I decided to approach Jurassic World Rebirth as if it was a stand alone film. Regardless of its her­it­age, does this film engage me? Do I care about its char­ac­ters? Are the set-pieces excit­ing and well made? The answer, dear read­er, may sur­prise you.

My answer is yes! Rebirth is one of the most enter­tain­ing after­noons I’ve spent in front of a big screen so far this year. It looks like a film for start – shot on Kodak cel­lu­loid – and it’s writ­ten by David Koepp who wrote (or co-wrote) Spielberg’s first two. And the dir­ect­or is Gareth Edwards, whose approach to big spe­cial effects is to eschew the green screen – or the Volume – and actu­ally go out­side and pho­to­graph the world and then com­pos­ite his mon­sters, or space­craft in the case of The Creator a couple of years ago, in after­wards. This gives his films atmo­sphere and tex­ture, mak­ing him the per­fect dir­ect­or for a film that asks you to believe that pre­his­tor­ic anim­als have been brought back to life.

(Edwards has been doing this suc­cess­fully for years. Monsters (2010) was bril­liant low budget sci-fi and, after being crim­in­ally hard to find for too long, is now avail­able to rent at AroVision.)

Back to my thought exper­i­ment – what if this was the first and only Jurassic Park film you saw? Luckily, there’s enough explan­a­tion for you to appre­ci­ate why there are dino­saurs roam­ing around, but not so much that it gets loaded down with ref­er­ences and fan ser­vice. The dino­saurs that were rein­tro­duced to the world as a theme park attrac­tion are mostly dying out as our cli­mate has evolved bey­ond the capa­city to sus­tain them. Except that they are thriv­ing in equat­ori­al zones that – because of the danger they present – are now off limits.

A shady Big Pharma exec­ut­ive (Rupert Friend) employs a jaded mer­cen­ary (Scarlett Johansson) to lead a team into one of the for­bid­den zones in order to extract some potent dino­saur DNA that will fuel a break­through heart dis­ease pre­ven­tion drug, poten­tially extend­ing mil­lions of lives. Along with a nerdy dino­saur expert (the excel­lent Jonathan Bailey) and boat cap­tain Mahershala Ali, they make their way to an aban­doned secret labor­at­ory on a remote island, try­ing unsuc­cess­fully to steer clear of all the pissed-off creatures want­ing to do them in.

Also dragged into this adven­ture are an inno­cent Latino fam­ily, sail­ing from Florida to Cape Town, who are res­cued after their boat is cap­sized by one of the giant seago­ing beast­ies. I really liked these char­ac­ters (played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono and Audrina Miranda) and their adven­tures after they become sep­ar­ated from the main char­ac­ters were lots of fun.

In fact, I’d watch all of this team again which I couldn’t – and didn’t – say for Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in the last three. But there I go, mak­ing com­par­is­ons when I said I wouldn’t.

It’s been a big week­end for Malta at the movies. The Mediterranean island joined Thailand to play equat­ori­al Caribbean in Jurassic World Rebirth and it did its more usu­al job of por­tray­ing 19^th cen­tury Marseilles in The Count of Monte Cristo, the latest epic Dumas adapt­a­tion from Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière who brought us two Three Musketeers films last year. Rather than split the story into two films, this one just runs for three hours but the time goes fly­ing by.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Young sail­or Edmond Dantès (Pierre Niney) res­cues a beau­ti­ful woman from a ship­wreck only to be framed by his cap­tain (Patrick Mille), his best friend (Bastien Bouillon) and the loc­al pro­sec­utor (Laurent Lafitte) for being a Bonapartist counter-revolutionary. Jailed for life in Marseille’s notori­ous Château d’If, he is pre­sumed dead by his fam­ily and his fiancée Mercédès (Anaïs Demoustier) who, in her grief, mar­ries the dupli­cit­ous best friend.

After many years, Dantès escapes with the loc­a­tion of the Knights Templars’ secret treas­ure vault on the island of Monte Cristo. He had been giv­en the loc­a­tion by anoth­er pris­on­er (Pierfrancesco Favino) with the instruc­tions to use the riches for good but instead he seeks an elab­or­ate revenge on every­one who has crossed him.

This swash­buck­ling story was incred­ibly influ­en­tial and the film ref­er­ences those influ­ences in enter­tain­ing ways. There’s a bit of Jules Verne, Dickens, Agatha Christie, Batman and Mission: Impossible in there, but the heart belongs to Dumas.

The editor-in-chief, as pre­vi­ously men­tioned, is a cos­tume pro­fes­sion­al and she was very impressed with that depart­ment. A smash hit at the recent French Film Festival, our ses­sion yes­ter­day was packed and I reck­on this should run and run.

The only longev­ity on offer in The Great Lillian Hall is that of its star, Jessica Lange. She plays the tit­u­lar char­ac­ter, a Broadway legend rehears­ing a pro­duc­tion of The Cherry Orchard when she dis­cov­ers that her prodi­gious powers are fading.

It’s a sol­id premise but the script (by Elisabeth Seldes Annacone) is so under­cooked that the heavy­weight cast – includ­ing Kathy Bates, Lily Rabe and Pierce Brosnan – go all out to try and sal­vage things, to the extent that they all try a bit too hard and some scenes are not a com­fort­able watch.

Another under-developed premise with the cast com­ing to its res­cue, Heads of State is actu­ally one of the bet­ter examples of a straight-to-streaming star-driven action enter­tain­ment in recent months. John Cena is a pop­u­lar movie action hero recently elec­ted pres­id­ent of the USA. Idris Elba is an embattled six-year prime min­is­ter of the UK. On a shared ride on Air Force One to a NATO con­fer­ence, ter­ror­ists shoot the plane down and the two lead­ers are the only survivors.

They have to bick­er their way across Eastern Europe to get to that meet­ing, stop the alli­ance from fall­ing apart and save the world. The rap­port between the two stars is good, Amazon favour­ite Priyanka Chopra Jonas is the CIA agent play­ing third banana, and there’s some enter­tain­ment value to be mined from see­ing great power being undermined.

What does offend me though is that it looks like crap. The digit­al effects are ropy, everything is flatly over-lit like a tele­vi­sion sit­com and unlike Jurassic World Rebirth – and prob­ably not cost­ing much less – there’s no atmo­sphere, tex­ture or any­thing else that might resemble the cine­mat­ic arts.