Tuesday new releases: 9 December 2025

Films about rules abound this week, or at least films that rely heav­ily on rules, some­times to their cost.

The most arbit­rary set of rules can be found in David Freyne’s Eternity which sets up a con­vo­luted and illo­gic­al col­lec­tion purely to try and raise the stakes of a clas­sic screw­ball love tri­angle to break­ing point.

First rule: every­one who dies goes to a hold­ing pen that looks like a cross between a rail­way sta­tion wait­ing room, hotel lobby and con­ven­tion centre in trade show mode. This place is called The Hub and every­one gets to spend sev­en days there adjust­ing to their new real­ity and decid­ing where of the many resorts/lifestyle choices we get to spend forever.

Second rule: Seven days appears to be a min­im­um. If you can’t decide after a week, you can choose to hang around The Hub but you have to make your­self useful.

Third rule: Everyone gets to choose an etern­ity exper­i­ence. Even Hitler can lie one a beach forever if he wants to. This rule is made expli­cit early on solely to pre-empt any ques­tions about wheth­er this is heav­en or not. No judge­ment, no awk­ward ques­tions, let’s just quickly move on.

Fourth rule: If you change your mind and leave the exper­i­ence you have chosen, you will be ban­ished to a void, to noth­ing­ness. This seems harsh but, again, the rule is there to arti­fi­cially increase the stakes for the char­ac­ters, not to provide any philo­soph­ic­al consistency.

Old man Larry (Barry Primus) chokes on a pret­zel at the gender reveal party for his new grand­child. Knowing that his cancer-stricken wife of 65 years, Joan (Betty Buckley), is not long for our world he elects to stay at The Hub until she can join him and they can decide where to go together.

Fifth rule: You will spend etern­ity in the body you were hap­pi­est in. This allows for our cent­ral couple to be played by Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen.

What Larry doesn’t real­ise is that Joan’s first hus­band Luke (Callum Turner) — who was killed in the Korean War — has been wait­ing 67 years for Joan to arrive and wants to pick up where they left off. The two men have entirely dif­fer­ent vis­ions for where they want which Joan away to and — I now real­ise that this might be a more con­scious attempt to reflect their gen­er­a­tion­al atti­tudes — neither seems ter­ribly bothered about what Joan her­self might want.

At no point does any­one con­sider that someone might want to spend the after­life alone or with someone oth­er than a spouse. Larry asks how the kids are doing but no one has any interest in, maybe, wait­ing for them to turn up so the fam­ily can be togeth­er again.

Eternity is a clas­sic example of a tor­tu­ous scen­ario depart­ing swiftly from logic and nev­er return­ing, just so two egot­ist­ic­al men can bick­er over a woman. There’s decent chem­istry among the char­ac­ters (Olsen is per­fect) and the look and feel of the thing works well, but it’s a philo­soph­ic­al ques­tion that no one has been cry­ing out to have answered.

The rules of Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 might be more appar­ent to fans of the video game (or people who paid more atten­tion to the first film) but they felt just as ‘make it up was you go along’ as in Eternity.

The haunted animat­ron­ics of the first film or miss­ing pre­sumed broken and the pizza par­lour where they wreaked their hav­oc is even more aban­doned. Luckily, we dis­cov­er that it was just a fran­chise of the ori­gin­al Freddy Fazbear’s where there are more of these spooky machines, if only the film could find a way to get there.

Which Scott Cawthorn’s script does, along with all sorts of oth­er use­ful things — wire­less con­trol of the animat­ron­ics that works across the city along with handy geo­loca­tion tech­no­logy, all inven­ted back in 1982 appar­ently — to provide a hor­ror story that the kids of today will buy¹.

Too stu­pid for words.

Nuremberg is about justice so courtroom rules are appro­pri­ate — and com­pre­hens­ible and his­tor­ic­ally accur­ate — in this case.

At the con­clu­sion of World War II’s European cam­paign, lots of Nazis had missed the oppor­tun­ity to take the easy way out via sui­cide. The Allies were torn between sum­mar­ily execut­ing them as war crim­in­als or try­ing some­thing a bit more elev­ated. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) is tasked with work­ing out wheth­er these men could be tried in a courtroom — evid­ence was just emer­ging of the Holocaust atro­cit­ies and this would be a way to have it become his­tor­ic­al record for the rest of the world to know about.

Herman Göring (Russell Crowe) was the most seni­or Nazi left alive and there was con­cern that giv­ing him a plat­form might eli­cit sym­pathy instead of con­tempt. It was a high-wire act for pro­sec­utors who had nev­er done any­thing like this before, and James Vanderbilt’s film hews closely to my under­stand­ing of what actu­ally went down.

Back in October, review­ing the epic British doc­u­ment­ary series The World at War, I said that the young people of today really need to know what happened in the con­cen­tra­tion camps and that the Holocaust was real. I’m pleased to say that Nuremberg spends quite a bit of time in its final third doing just that, using the same archive film foot­age, the only prob­lem being that the kids of today will be climb­ing the walls with bore­dom before we ever get there.

The film is mostly inter­ested in the long battle of wits between the nar­ciss­ist­ic Göring and his court-assigned psy­chi­at­rist (Rami Malek), the under­ly­ing ques­tion being, were the Nazis mon­sters or were they just like us. Or rather, are we just like them, equally cap­able of atro­cit­ies in the wrong circumstances?

The best scene doesn’t fea­ture Crowe. It’s between the U.S. Army trans­lat­or (Leo Woodall) who has been assist­ing Malek through­out as he reveals his own con­nec­tion to the whole awful business.

I reviewed Bolero back when it was part of the French Film Festival in May this year:

Much more frus­trat­ing to try and fol­low is the music­al biop­ic Bolero, about the cre­ation of the fam­ous piece of music by early 20^th cen­tury com­poser Maurice Ravel (Raphaël Personnaz). The open­ing titles make innov­at­ive use of the piece’s ubi­quity since its debut in 1929 but you may end up becom­ing as sick of it as the actu­al Ravel was before the film ends. Bolero is only 17 minutes long and I feel sure we heard the whole thing mul­tiple times, des­pite Ravel him­self sug­gest­ing that the piece “con­tained no music”.

The long sec­tions of the film devoted to Ravel scratch­ing out notes – either in his study at the piano or in his (real-life) garden, only con­firmed to me what I’ve always thought about com­pos­ing music. That the com­poser simply finds a note that they like and then tries every oth­er note – one after the oth­er – until they find one that goes with it, and so on and so forth.

(There’s more includ­ing reviews of The French Job and How to Make a Killing.)

Finally, Noah Baumbach’s Netflix vehicle for George Clooney, Jay Kelly, doesn’t even fol­low its own rules, or per­haps it doesn’t con­cern itself much with intern­al con­sist­ency, drift­ing between tired old Hollywood behind-the-scenes satire, absent­ee fath­er tropes and some occa­sion­ally insight­ful obser­va­tions about what hap­pens when someone sells their soul for fame and fortune.

Jay Kelly is an age­ing top rank movie star. He goes nowhere without an entour­age (co-writer Emily Mortimer on hair, Laura Dern on PR and Adam Sandler is his long-suffering man­ager), affects an air of being an every­day human when he has entirely for­got­ten what that’s about and he’s real­ising — after far too long — that he misses it.

Clooney is aways watch­able, of course, but Sandler steals the film even if he doesn’t need very deep pock­ets to do so.

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1. Which they are. My screen­ing was well atten­ded and the film ends with three sep­ar­ate con­firm­a­tions that the fran­chise will con­tin­ue. ↩︎