Sam Raimi

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

31/07/26

Cineworld, Edinburgh

The Odyssey may have stopped a lot of cinematic vessels from making it safely to shore, but Ol’ Webhead is back in town and nothing is big enough to halt the new Spider-Man from having his er… Brand New Day – even if, instead of IMAX, he’s had to settle for Screen X and 4D Real 3D. Me, I’m happy to watch it on a standard screen. There are a whole lot of Marvel products that I have enjoyed in the cinema, but Spidey is the only one I keep coming back for – and I’m really not alone. At the showing I attend there’s a veritable crowd of cinema-goers eagerly awaiting their next fix.

As a teenager in the 1960s, I adored the comics of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko – and, in 2002, I went along to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man at my local multiplex and fell in love with the character (as portrayed by Tobey Maguire) all over again. And through all the following iterations, I’ve returned for another helping, always finding new things to enjoy. Andrew Garfield? Yeah, okay, his two films were darker than what had gone before, but still perfectly watchable. And then, in 2016’s Homecoming, Tom Holland stepped confidently into the role, shepherding the series fully into the MCU and I was hooked once more. Lest we forget, somewhere in the midst of all this, there were two Spiderverse animations that were nothing short of masterpieces, but which existed alongside Holland’s films without causing a ripple. We were told that Holland’s contributions would be limited to a trilogy – but No Way Home left the story on such a cliffhanger it was clear there would have to be more.

Brand New Day finds Spidey in uncertain territory. Yes, he’s now been accepted as New York City’s friendly neighbourhood superhero and, between him and Detective Jean De Wolff (Liza Colón-Zayas), the city streets are being systematically scoured of criminals. But, as chronicled in No Way Home, a pesky mind-wipe by Dr Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) has added a new complication. Both Peter’s girlfriend, MJ (Zendaya), and his best buddy, Ned (Jacob Lees), have completely forgotten he even exists. He feels totally alone – and to make things worse, he’s also going through a major change in his DNA, the arachnid side of his personality growing in power and threatening to completely overcome him. And that web fluid he used to shoot from specially designed gadgets? It’s now squirting directly from his wrists – sometimes at very inopportune moments!

What’s more, a new threat is beginning to assert its influence on New York City – an invisible being that is able to leap from one unsuspecting victim to another in order to achieve its mysterious goals…

There is so much packed into this film that, even with a running time of 2 hours and 25 minutes, it seems to positively race by. (Some may argue that it could be cut back to two hours, but I would not want to be the one to decide which scenes should be considered expendable.) The characterisations of the key players have never been so astutely drawn. Nor has there been such emotional depth: there’s a real tone of sadness and regret in the early scenes, as Peter observes his former friends from a distance, as he suffers in silence.

Though several key MCU characters are afforded obligatory guest appearances – Florence Pugh’s Black Widow, Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner – none of them is allowed to overstay their welcome. Indeed, John Bernthal’s Frank Castle makes a particularly welcome addition to the story, forming an unlikely alliance with Peter, as the two former adversaries join forces to take on the aforementioned mysterious presence (I won’t reveal who or what this is, but it’s well worth the wait to find out).

Of course, there must also be action set-pieces in a film like this. New director Destin Daniel Cretton and cinematographer Brett Pawlak do not disappoint, amping up the visual flourishes with absolute control and ensuring that every single shot looks ravishing. The way the journey of the invisible ‘presence’ is shown is breathtaking, achieved simply with perfectly-timed choreography (you’ll need to see it for that line to make sense). Furthermore, an extended battle between Spidey and a whole team of red-garbed, sword-wielding martial artists is frankly jaw-dropping, one of the most accomplished special effects sequences I’ve ever seen.

What else can I tell you? Brand New Day somehow manages to locate the teenage kid lurking deep within me and offer him things that he still – after all these years – finds genuinely enthralling. Those who insist on stubbornly remaining in their seats for the inevitable post-credit sequence should be warned that this time out it simply amounts to a brief video game image and a promise that ‘Spider-Man will return.’

Don’t know about you, but I’m already looking forward to it.

4.7 stars

Philip Caveney

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

25/03/26

Cineworld, Edinburgh

2019’s Ready or Not was one of those plucky little films that made a big impression. It introduced Samara Weaving as Grace, a young woman who unwittingly marries a Satanist (it happens) and then spends the rest of the film playing a bizarre game of Hide and Seek with her new husband and his family, all of whom are doing their level best to murder her with an array of vintage weapons. It was a deceptively simple concept, played through with great flair and absolute precision – and it worked like a charm.

Rumours of a sequel started soon after its release and now here it finally is, bigger, louder and (inevitably) bloodier than its predecessor. It picks up right where the last film finished off with a wounded and dishevelled Grace stumbling from a blazing building and being rushed to hospital. She’s had a close call but it’s all over now. Except, of course, it isn’t (that incredibly redundant 2 in the title is the clue).

She is soon informed that, because she’s managed to despatch an entire family in the Satanist hierarchy, she must now play the same game all over again, this time pitted against the heads of several different households. Whoever manages to kill Grace will be the new Satanic leader, taking over from Chester Danforth, played by esteemed horror director David Cronenberg. He’s glimpsed only briefly before he’s erased – as the rules dictate – by his two children, Titus (Shawn Hatosy) and Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar). And naturally, Chester’s twin kids both feel that they should be the one to inherit the kingdom.

To further complicate matters, Grace is now accompanied by her estranged younger sister, Faith (Kathyryn Newton), who has turned up at the hospital because she’s still listed as Grace’s next of kin. Now the two of them, handcuffed together, must take on seemingly insurmountable odds…

The old rule of sequels is as reductive as ever. Directors Guy Busick and R Christopher Murphy give it their best shot, working from a screenplay by Radio Silence (Marc Bettenelli-Olpin and Tyler Gilett), but they’re in a game of diminishing returns, no matter how much gusto they employ. Most of the running time features that kind of Sam Raimi-esque slapstick horror, where the impulse is to laugh out loud as people quite literally explode. The problem with that is that the reasons for Satanists exploding are quite convoluted and I’m still unclear about a couple of examples – but maybe that’s just me.

Both Weaving and Newton are strong in their roles and their habitual bickering as they flail from one disaster to the next is often more entertaining than the carnage. Elijah Wood gives the film one of its strongest cards as ‘The Lawyer,’ managing to stay straight-faced and erudite as the bodies pile up around him. The film itself runs out of steam long before its ridiculously protracted conclusion and the old adage about ‘less is more’ has rarely felt more apt.

This isn’t terrible, but neither is it a patch on it’s leaner, meaner progenitor. There’s already talk about a third instalment, but I sincerely hope that everyone has the good sense to leave it here. There are only so many exploding Satanists a fellow can take.

3 stars

Philip Caveney

Send Help

07/02/26

Cineworld, Edinburgh

After a somewhat muddled attempt to helm a Marvel film (2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), Sam Raimi heads back into the kind of territory that’s a better fit for his directorial skills. If Send Help initially seems like an odd choice of vehicle, it nonetheless features the kind of perfectly-judged horror tropes that he’s founded his reputation on. And if it’s vaguely reminiscent of JM Barrie’s 1902 play, The Admirable Crichton – with the gender roles reversed – well, that may just be coincidental.

Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) has worked for years as a strategist for an American financial institution and has become the right-hand woman of the company’s CEO. She’s confidently expecting a hard-earned promotion when his son, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), takes over the business, but it’s clear from the outset that the smug new boss has a low opinion of Linda with her sensible shoes and her tuna salad sandwiches. He informs her that the role of Vice President will go to his bestie, Donovan (Xavier Samuel), who plays golf with him and knows not to take things too seriously. The fact that Don has even less business acumen than Bradley seems not to bother the latter one jot.

But Bradley is sensible enough to keep Linda on the team for an important trip to Thailand, where he fully expects her to use her skills to finalise the company’s upcoming merger with their Eastern counterparts. On the flight over, Donovan chances on an old audition tape that Linda has made for the survival reality show that she watches in her leisure time. He gleefully shows it to the others. The all-male team take great delight in mocking her ambitions… and then the plane is hit by a sudden storm and suddenly, nobody’s laughing any more.

Come morning, Linda and Bradley are the sole survivors of the crash, stranded on an apparently uninhabited island. Bradley has suffered a leg injury. And the tables are beginning to turn…

Raimi has always had a knack of leavening his horror tropes with well-timed gags and that’s a quality that’s very much to the fore here. The screening I attend is punctuated by gales of laughter and gasps of horror in pretty much equal measure. Okay, so a late stage ‘revelation’ may not be quite the surprise that screenwriters Damon Shannon and Mark Swift were presumably aiming for, but there are nonetheless plenty of other unexpected twists and turns in the narrative that I really don’t see coming.

Both McAdams and O’Brien supply impressively nuanced performances (the film is essentially a two-hander) and, whenever I start to warm to one or the other of them, something happens to push me back in the opposite direction. But the overarching message about toxic masculinity comes through loud and clear and, no matter how devious Linda Liddle becomes, I can’t help rooting for her – even when she’s puking in the face of the person she’s attempting to deliver the kiss of life to.

Raimi aficionados will need to keep a very sharp eye out for the inevitable Bruce Campbell cameo – blink and you’ll surely miss it – but it is there.

Send Help is fast, frenetic and perfectly paced. It’s good to have the veteran director back in the driving seat with his foot on the accelerator.

4.4 stars

Philip Caveney

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

06/05/22

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Another Marvel, another Multiverse – and am I the only one who’s growing a little weary of this device? It worked wonders in the Spider-Man franchise, but can it do the same for my other old go-to comic favourite, Doctor Strange? Well possibly, but I have to admit the main thing that draws me to this is the presence of Sam Raimi in the director’s chair.

Raimi has released some great movies over the years: The Evil Dead and its super-charged sequels, as well as A Simple Plan and Drag Me to Hell – but it’s a while since he’s had a chance to strut his cinematic stuff. While he’s always been a director who dances to his own tune, can he successfully apply those considerable talents to Marvel’s famously constricting template?

The answer is, ‘sort of.’

DSITMOM starts, appropriately enough with a dream sequence, where Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) witnesses a twisted, evil version of himself attacking a teenage girl. But is it a dream? When, shortly afterwards, Strange encounters the girl in real life, she turns out to be America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), who has the ability to travel across the multiverse with ease, though (rather conveniently) she doesn’t know how she does it. Or, for that matter, why. Nor can she explain why she’s being pursued by a giant one-eyed octopus. But hey, these things can happen, right?

Sensing that she’s in danger (no shit, Sherlock), Strange seeks help from Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), only to discover that she’s not going to be any help at all. Demented by the recent death of her partner and terrified she might lose the two children she loves so much (the ones who don’t actually exist), Wanda decides to steal America’s power for her own wicked ends, an action that will cause the girl’s death. (Incidentally, for someone who’s supposed to be a genius, Strange seems to be very adept at putting his foot in things. He’s the one who messed everything up in No Way Home – and now this.)

I’m not going to relate any more of the plot because, frankly, it’s as mad as a box of frogs (I suppose the title should have warned me), but the more important question is, can this nonsense hold together as a movie, and the answer is ‘just about.’ DSITMOM is essentially a series of frantic action set-pieces, loosely strung together. Though they are occasionally eye-popping and sometimes make me feel that I’ve inadvertently dropped a tab of acid, they never really gel into a convincing story arc.

Different versions of popular Marvel characters keep popping out of the woodwork and in many cases are actually killed, but because we know they’re not the real McCoy, there’s no real sense of threat here. Cumberbatch gets to portray several different Stephens, which was probably more fun for him than it proves to be for an audience. The parts that work best for me are the Sam Raimi moments, the few scenes where he’s allowed to employ the tropes of low budget horror – and of course there’s the inevitable cameo from Bruce Campbell, which is always welcome. But too often Raimi’s singular vision is swamped in the sturm und drang of state-of-the-art special effects.

Elsewhere, actors of the the calibre of Benedict Wong, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Patrick Stewart are called upon to utter some truly naff dialogue, courtesy of screenwriter Michael Waldron.

The usual post-credits sequence suggests that Strange will be even stranger in the next instalment, if and when it happens. The enthusiastic applause from the mainly teenage audience at the end of this screening suggests that I may well be in the minority here.

Doctor Strange (and possibly Mr Raimi) will be back. Watch this space.

3.4 stars

Philip Caveney

The Unholy

19/05/21

It’s a red letter day for B&B. We’re back in a genuine cinema for the first time since September 2020!

Naturally, we’re excited for the event and, it must be said, a little apprehensive too. We’re still intent on taking all necessary safety precautions. But the main problem is one we haven’t really anticipated: there isn’t a great deal of quality content to choose from. Having sat grimly through Peter Rabbit back in the day, we’re in no great hurry to watch its sequel. Judas and the Black Messiah is very good, but we’ve already seen that online. And Mortal Kombat? Hmm, thanks, but no thanks.

In the end we decide on The Unholy. Based on a novel by the late James Herbert and produced by the ever dependable Sam Raimi, this does at least seem to offer the kind of frissons that a big screen will help to amplify – and, for the most part, we’re pleased with our choice.

Down-on-his luck journalist Gerry Fenn (a gloriously rumpled Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is out chasing stories for the two-bit publication he currently works for. Back in the day, Gerry was a big name in journalism, but was caught fabricating stories and publicly disgraced. Nowadays, he’s reduced to chasing a rumour about a cow with some alleged satanic graffiti on its rump. However, his luck seems to change dramatically when he stumbles across what might just be the scoop of his career.

In the remote town of Banfield, a teenage girl called Alice (Cricket Brown), mute since birth, has suddenly discovered the power of speech after experiencing a vision featuring a woman called ‘Mary.’ A miracle? Alice’s guardian is Father Hagen (William Sadler), who is somewhat sceptical about the whole thing, but it isn’t long before Alice is summoning others in the local community to stand in front of an ancient tree near her uncle’s church to pledge their allegiance to this ancient spirit. Gerry milks the opportunity and forms a close bond with Alice, a girl who every newspaper in America wants to interview… and then the Catholic church gets involved in the form of Bishop Gyles (Cary Elwes) and Monsignor Delgarde (Diogo Morgado). Suddenly, Gerry is back in demand.

But of course, as is usually the way with these theological horrors, Mary isn’t the benign creature she initially appears to be (a fact that doesn’t come as a great surprise to viewers as we’ve already been tipped off in a grisly pre-credits sequence). It transpires that she is pretty quick to mangle anyone who stands in her way and what she wants for starters is the adoration of the entire community of Banfield.

The Unholy, written and directed by Evan Spiliotopoulis, is decently handled, wielding nicely-timed jump-scares and featuring a delightfully conceived supernatural adversary, with a distinctive limb-twisting method of moving about. There’s some dark humour in the mix too, with local businesses getting in on the act offering everything from ‘We Follow Mary’ T-shirts to bottles of ‘Miracle Girl’s Tears.’

My only real issue with the film is that the ending attempts to have its theological cake and eat it. I’d respect it more if it stuck to its guns and went a little bleaker.

But hey, the main thing here is that cinemas are open again! Hurray!

Returning viewers should note that, at present, the trailers and adverts are taking up rather less time than we’re used to, so please ensure you get to your chosen showing for the advertised time, or risk missing the film’s opening stretches.

You’re welcome.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Spider-Man: Homecoming

09/07/17

Of all of Stan Lee’s famous superheroes, Spider-Man was always my favourite when I was growing up. While I dipped in and out of many of the other comics, this was the one I kept coming back to.

On the big screen, Spidey has had a somewhat chequered career. Sam Raimi managed to knock out a couple of decent films with Tobey McGuire in the red suit, but most people would agree that his third installment didn’t really work. Then of course there was the appropriately named Mark Webb’s attempt at a reboot with Andrew Garfield brooding in the title role. Webb gave us two movies, neither of which really brought anything fresh to the party, so the news that the team at Marvel were finally getting the opportunity to give their most celebrated creation a canter around the paddock didn’t exactly fill me with enthusiasm. (The rights to the character belonged to Sony for those earlier pictures – here they’ve agreed to a co-production with Marvel.)

Happily I was wrong. This is easily the best Spiderman movie so far and, arguably, one of the best superhero movies ever, made doubly enjoyable largely by virtue of the fact that director Jon Watts has jettisoned the usual grim and grimy approach in favour of something lighter, fresher, and a lot funnier. And thankfully, he’s skipped the ‘Spiderman origin’ aspect completely, because by now we all know it by heart, right?

Fifteen year old Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is working hard on his ‘internship’ with Tony Stark/Ironman (Robert Downey Junior), which pretty much means that he’s left to his own devices, patrolling his local neighbourhood in his spare time, taking care of petty criminals and the like, under the supposedly watchful gaze of Stark’s chauffeur, Happy (Jon Favreau). But when, as Spiderman, Peter comes up against Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton) and his gang, things become a lot more complicated. Toomes has made use of salvaged alien technology left over from the last Avengers dust-up and, utilising that, has restyled himself as super villain The Vulture. The trouble is, Peter’s attempts to alert Happy to this new threat largely fall on deaf ears… and meanwhile, he has to negotiate the kind of problems that every teenager goes through – passing his exams, fitting in with his peers and dealing with a powerful crush on a classmate – in this case, Liz (Laura Harrier).

What this new film gives us, finally, is a credible teenage hero. Neither McGuire nor Garfield managed to really convince as high schoolers. Holland, such a powerful presence in The Impossible a few years back, is incredibly appealing here, displaying an almost puppylike eagerness to please his mentor, Stark and also pulling off some expertly-timed slapstick pratfalls. And the credibility extends in other directions. At last, in Toomes, we have a believable villain, a man motivated not by some obscure desire to destroy the world, but simply to better himself and his family after being screwed over by the big corporations. Aunt May is not the white-haired elderly widow we’ve come to expect but, as played by Marisa Tomei, she’s a gutsy, interesting character, doing her very best to bring up her nephew.

Despite the involvement of six screenwriters, the sprightly script keeps us guessing and, at one point, even manages to throw a great big googly ball at us that I really didn’t see coming.

Homecoming has the kind of chutzpah that should keep everybody happy, from devoted comic book fans to parents simply looking to give their kids a fun ride at the cinema. Make sure you stay in your seats until the end credits have rolled – the film has one last, very funny scene, to send you out of the cinema with a great big smile on your face.

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney