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Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass

2026-10-03 by Steve

Jon Slattery, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Zoey Deutch, Ken Marino and Ben Wang

So here’s the set-up for Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Gail (Zoey Deutch) is a hairdresser in smalltown Kansas who’s been having a conversation with fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) about which celebrity each of them would like to have as their celebrity sex partner – a free pass, all just a fun fantasy. Tom has gone for Tilda Swinton. Gail, at Tom’s prompting, has gone for Jon Hamm. All harmless nonsense until the pair of them go to a book signing by Jennifer Aniston, who’s promoting a cookbook full of joyless recipes. Tom decides Aniston might also be a worthy Sex Pass partner and instantly promotes her, dumping Tilda in the process. … Read more

Minions & Monsters

2026-09-25 by Steve

You know a film’s struggled a bit when the end credits are the best bit of it. Minions & Monsters is a case in point, a collection of individually brilliant scenes in search of a plot, exemplified by those end credits, which are the one-damn-thing situation distilled. Does anyone not know who the Minions are? This is the third outing for the little yellow animated servants away from their master, despicable supervillain Gru, whose own Despicable Me franchise has racked up four iterations, all of them also featuring the Minions. So that’s seven movies in all. Remarkably, all of the Minion movies have been written by Brian Lynch, and Pierre Coffin has directed … Read more

Anniversary

2026-01-302025-12-17 by Steve

Barely promoted by a studio wary of its political content, Anniversary has a Stepford Wives – reality-adjacent – quality that stops it being really incendiary. It is chilly and chilling enough, though its big message is so emollient it almost undoes all the good work director and co-writer Jan Komasa has put in to stir things up. It’s the story of a big, noisy and mostly successful family – liberal as you like – brought low by a regime change precipitated by a book the girlfriend of one of them has written. When we first meet girlfriend Elizabeth Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor) she is nervously prepping herself for the meeting with the parents of her guy … Read more

Juror No. 2

2025-06-20 by Steve

Juror No. 2 is a rare thing these days: a good old-fashioned courtroom thriller. Director Clint Eastwood, 93 when he made it, does it old-style, the way his mentor Don Siegel might have done it, and the result is a streamlined drama revolving around a central dilemma, just the sort of lean and fast second feature Siegel might have cranked out in the 1950s. It is a very neat plot, which I’m not going to ruin by explaining. What I can say is that Nicholas Hoult is the titular juror, a man who suddenly realises mid-trial that he can free the man accused of murdering his girlfriend at a stroke, but only if … Read more

The Outfit

2025-07-192022-05-31 by Steve

Why didn’t someone think of it sooner? The Outfit – could be a criminal organisation, could be something you’d wear. How about writing a drama that conflates and confuses the two, and make it about… er… a tailor who somehow gets caught up in the work of a criminal establishment. The conceit is worn transparent in Graham Moore’s debut as a feature director. Like a bespoke suit this is a handsomely assembled item, made from fine materials and put together with care and a conservative eye. It’s also more than slightly theatrical, and it would be easy to imagine events playing out in a darkened small theatre. Events? A bit of plot. We meet … Read more