Shalini Langer

When a regular-Joe film is titled just Fall, you can be pretty sure it will be about a rise. When it is followed by a Fall 2, you can swear by it. The first Fall released to decent success in 2022, and achieved some bigger highs via social media reels. In that, two best friends climbed up a desolate TV tower to bury their grief, and encounter heartbreak and vultures. Fall 2 substitutes the tower for a fictional Mount Kwan in Thailand, but can’t resist the grief, betrayal or vultures still, with an over-the-hilltop ending that suggests our survivor is headed for Fall 3.

On paper, this should come easy to screenwriter Simon Farnaby, with the Paddington movies and Wonka behind him, and Enid Blyton’s beloved The Magic Faraway Tree book series the source. But magic is hardly as easy as a fruit picked off a tree. It is either there, or it is not. And the more this film juggles its many British thespians, two known faces in Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy, and a very modern message about a childhood lost to electronic devices, the less and less it seems magical.

Celeste (Adria Arjona) is a troubled ex-Marine roughing it out in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by similar misfits and discontents, and guns, loads and loads of them. When others shoot the breeze, she literally takes her guns out and does target practice, on carved Halloween pumpkins. Having her ex drop their young daughter (Blake Kennedy) for the weekend to this trailer park is a dangerous enough proposition. But that’s not the half of it.

In his memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Anthony Bourdain writes, “Good food very often, even most often, is simple food.” From what we know of what followed in that celebrity chef and writer’s life, and all that has been spilling out lately from the closets of famous restaurants plus successful TV shows (The Bear), kitchens are anything but simple. Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, who has also co-written Tony, takes Bourdain’s advice – telling simply the story of a not-too-complex young man figuring out his way in the world. And who, but for one black eye and bucketfuls of water poured down on him to wake him up every morning, doesn’t have it all that bad.

If the thought of lying defenceless on a chair as a dentist pokes around inside your mouth leaves you queasy, you are in kindred company. This latest chapter in the Insidious franchise does draw on teeth, the full rotting spectrum of them, to add bite to its howls. And who better than beings suspended between life and death (the “Further” world, in the film’s words) for a specimen of ghastly pearly whites)? However, as and when it pulls out, the film is only passingly effective. It’s only so many ways that you can take this story about the Further farther, told as it has been in four films before. And the effort to do that shows, though as mother and daughter, the pair of Amelia Eve (in the role of Gemma) and Island Austin (Maya) are pretty good.

In One Night Only, Allie (Monica Barbaro) says it’s the “build-up” that is the best part of sex for her. Owen (Callum Turner) says it’s the “after”. Quite like those predictable responses, this latest film by Will Gluck (with other bawdy modern romances behind him, such as Anyone But You, Friends with Benefits, Easy A) is a nice-enough rom-com that pretends very hard to be somewhat radical. And while it is beating about the bush, the film’s “build-up” — despite all the kissing and petting and lovemaking going on around the two leads — is hardly a turn-on. While the “after” is not the movie’s concern.

For the foreseeable future, dinosaurs will not be going extinct in Hollywood. The challenge now is how to make this era meet that era. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell (with the impressive It Follows behind him), has half an idea to pull this off. Since it involves a wormhole, and “ripples in space”, it’s just as well that he doesn’t labour the point too much. But then, labouring isn’t the strength of The End of Oak Street.

It’s the seventh film Tom Holland is in as Spider-Man, the fourth as a solo superhero. And while the 30-year-old actor who began this a decade ago can still pass as just-past-teens, the Marvel franchise shows a tear in its spandex. Less Brand New Day, more New Branding Day. Director Destin Daniel Cretton and old Spidey hands Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers could have actually made something of ‘been there, done that, and moving-on’. However, except for some mild stretching and a mention that he is no longer in high school, there is no suggestion that Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tom Holland) needs anyone or anything. That, in fact, is one of the premises driving Brand New Day – can Peter really continue as he insists he can, ridding New York city of crime and returning home to a garage-like room, only to fiddle with machines and science (he handles this too on his own), with no one to talk to but a virtual assistant, and nothing to entertain him but videos posted by old friends Ned (Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Zendaya).