BITE-SIZED: Osiris (William Kaufman, 2025)

Kidnapped in the middle of combat, a team of special forces soldiers (led by Max Martini and LaMonica Garrett) find themselves defrosted on an alien ship being sent home as spoils of war.

With their captors hot on their tail, their soldiers flee through the maze of the ship, struggling to find a way out.

Will they survive? Can they get home?

I heard about this movie via the Action for Everyone podcast - I love a good genre hybrid (Predator, Horror Express), and this felt right in line with those films.

Sometimes you can tell a movie is going to work by its opening.

As the credits roll, we track the Voyager probe from Earth through the solar system until it is swallowed up by some kind of ship of unknown dimensions.

The fact this movie - a tight 108 minutes - takes the time to actually have a title sequence is notable. While it does convey a certain level of information with the final reveal, it is also an exercise in allowing the mood to build, and that final image of the probe being swallowed up is just vague enough in terms of showing the alien craft, that the viewer is barely in front of our heroes in terms of comprehending what has happened.

The camera plummets back to contemporary Earth; into a firefight involving our protagonists.

 

What I immediately loved about the movie was how earnestly mounted it is.

Kaufman is renowned for his focus on getting the basics of tactical action right, and that feeds into this film’s sense of virismiltude.

The action is clean and clear - you always know where everyone is, and the filmmakers do a good job of giving each character a sense of personality largely through body language.

While the film did not have a big budget, the action is varied, and takes place in a variety of environments (the best set-piece is a mid-film ambush in a maze of crates).

Osiris does not waste time introducing the aliens, but takes its time in terms of providing clarity about their motivations, and avoids showing them in full form for a while.

The film also manages to convey exposition visually, without info dumps.

Initially I was enjoying Osiris as a simple programmer, but it pulls off a few intriguing reveals about the situation which completely recontextualise our heroes’ plight - one being that the alien invasion was not just successful but was decades in the past.

It turns the team’s entire mission into a more existential conflict.

Boosted by an excellent cast (Linds Edwards is particularly notable as the most high-strung of the team), Osiris is a fine genre piece that deserves a look.

BITE-SIZED: Judgement Night (Stephen Hopkins, 1993)

When a group of friends (Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeremy Piven and Stephen Dorff) get lost on the way to a sports event, they end up getting chased by a local street gang (led by Denis Leary).

Judgement Night is the movie I thought Trespass was.

Like Trespass, it also had an extended gestation - it started out as an idea from a producer, with different scripts by multiple writers (including John Carpenter).

I heard it was meant to be something like an urban version of Deliverance.

 

As is, the film never seems sure of what it wants to be.

It took me a long while to figure out that Emilio Esteves is meant to be the reformed wild man of his friend group. And I spent the movie thinking Dennis Leary and his thugs were dirty cops.

When he mentions being in prison late in the piece, I realised how miscast he is. What is worse is that one of his thugs is played by Peter Greene, an actor who emits the kind of menace the film’s big bad is supposed to convey.

There are moments which work - his diplomacy with the younger gang leader is a great deviation from expectations - it also fits Leary as a guy who is too smart for the room. He just does not convince as a hardened criminal - he is too inherently square.

The one person in the movie who works is Jeremy Piven as the friend group’s resident bullshit artist.

While Judgement Night works up some tension, it is never as scary as it wants to be - and the attempt at a message (be a man?) is too basic to resonate.

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BITE-SIZED: Trespass (Walter Hill, 1992)

Two firemen, Vince (Bill Paxton) and Don (William Sadler) have stumbled on a map leading to a stolen cache of gold. The gold is stashed in a rundown industrial area that happens to be the stomping grounds of a gang led by King James (Ice T).

When the gang run into the firemen, they are forced into a standoff. 

Who will survive? And will anyone get away with the gold?

I used to get this movie mixed up with Judgement Night - yuppies/suburban white guys in an urban setting, having to fight their way out.

Trespass is closer to a siege thriller than a chase movie. It is largely set in one building in an industrial park.

Like Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as characters become aware of the gold, they turn on each other. Vince and Don, the two firefighters, start out as best friends, but the lure of the gold turns Don into a deranged killer. As the siege intensifies, the gangsters’ own personal conflicts are exacerbated, and various internal time-bombs are set between the characters.

Ironically, the one character who is the least affected by the gold is Ice T’s King James. In any other movie, he would be more of the central antagonist - here, he is almost a bystander.

As the two firemen are pitted against the local gang, an undercurrent of racial tension becomes more foregrounded. The characters are never explicit in their racism, but it runs through their every interaction.

Written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale back in the seventies, the script was ultimately brought to the screen by Walter Hill - his sturdy, no frills craftsmanship is perfect for the pair’s clockwork storytelling, adding a welcome sense of menace and stakes to what could have been a more blackly comic tale of avarice.

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OUT NOW: Supergirl (Craig Gillespie, 2026)

In the middle of celebrating her birthday with a galactic booze-up, Kara Zor-El (Molly Alcock) is roped into helping a young girl (Eve Ridley) seeking vengeance for the murder of her family.

I was in and out on reviewing this movie. I was underwhelmed by last year’s Superman. And I caught some early reviews which put me off.

It had been awhile since I had been out to the theatre, I had a free ticket and I had also heard some interesting news about the production of Superman 2, so I booked.

One can always be hopeful.

I am not the best at tracking story problems, but this movie is a mess.

Repeatedly during the first couple of scenes, I felt like context and structure were missing.

When we first meet Supergirl, she is waking up from a bender in the middle of her shit-heap of a space ship (her costume is shoved in a corner).

But beyond these aesthetic choices, and some poignant flashbacks, the character has no real character, and gets no real arc.

We are meant to leave this story feeling like something has changed - but the film has not done the work to establish her character, nor provided a real turn in the story.

In the lead, Molly Alcock is fine, but the script does not provide her with any structure to build off of.

What makes the film frustrating is that the film ignores the more immediate and compelling story - the snippets of Kara’s life and journey to Earth.

These scenes pack the most emotional impact - unlike Clark, Kara grew up with her family, with Kryptonian language and culture. While born after the planet died, she carries the trauma of watching the survivors die. 

And when she arrives on earth, Kara and Clark cannot communicate with each other. Her origin is a fascinating story, about an immigrant and a refugee grappling with her place in a new world.

The problem is the scenes have potential but they are so abbreviated. The film seems to think these moments amount to enough grounding, but they feel like a missed opportunity.

The film does not seem to recognise how important this material is, and how poorly integrated it is with the story this film wants to tell.

The film also gives no real arc to her relationship with Rutheye (Eve Ridley), the young girl who is supposed to ultimately help pull Kara out of her personal doom loop.

On top of this, the film is let down by its aesthetics. The film is so dark and under-lit, and there are a lot of random needle drops that feel like the filmmakers reaching for the James Gunn playbook but with no understanding for how they are supposed to function.

In its favour, the film has a lot interesting aliens and some fun sci-fi ideas (Supergirl having to catch the space equivalent of the Greyhound bus; a planet with a yellow and green sun). But the film is so deliberately colour-graded to negate and hide these elements.

The action scenes are poorly edited and - aside from a fight involving teleportation - lack any imagination or wit.

The biggest sin is how forgettable the movie is. Nothing about it stands out as particularly interesting or egregious.

It suffers from the same issues as other superhero movies - a generic villain, too much weightless CGI, and no real difference or definition to the respective power sets. Aside from one moment involving a green sun, I never really felt like Kara was in real danger.

It ultimately feels like a movie rushed into production.

Alcock - and the character - deserve better than this.

Related

Superman

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Prince - Sign O’ The Times (Prince, 1987)

All the concert docs I have covered featured some staged sequences - Sign O’ The Times plays like a full-on musical, with musical numbers linked by a story. 

It features live concert footage, but it is bracketed by vignettes featuring Prince becoming infatuated with a dancer called Cat (Catherine Glover).

Based mostly around the track-list from the same name, with a few tracks from other periods of his career (‘Housequake’ and ‘Little Red Corvette’), Sign O’ The Times is significant because it is the one directed by the artist himself.

It can be a little scrappy - there are some dirty edits in some of the live footage which are understandable - but it also manages some remarkable transitions, moving between live performance and staged sequences which turn the stage into a more fantastical space, where the music shatters any separation between live concert and the dreamlike artifice of a cinematic musical. I particularly enjoyed the camera going through Cat’s bedroom window out onto the stage.

The backdrop of sleazy neon signs and looming buildings is striking, and feels like foreshadowing for Prince’s involvement with Batman the year after this film’s release.

Despite the amazing musicians and the sheer scope of the stage setting, Prince’s knowing, teasing presence is the main attraction. There is something mischievous about the way he leads the viewer through the film.

Under-seen for years, it took Prince’s tragic passing a decade ago for the film to be rediscovered by a wider audience. 

Related

The Last Waltz

Stop Making Sense

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

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If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!