I thought you hated films.

I don’t tend to watch many films but planning to watch Project Hail Mary soon. Anything clever I could say afterwards appreciated. I’ve heard it’s a bit Red Dwarf.

I haven’t seen Digger yet but I’d like to.

I still haven’t caught up on a lot of this year’s big releases in general – as someone who went to the cinema a huge amount in my teens and twenties, I have a lot less time and opportunity to go to the cinema these days, so it pains me that I have become a “wait for streaming” guy on so many movies. So I still haven’t seen lots of stuff I wanted to this year, like The Drama, Obsession, Backrooms, Primetime, The Invite and more.

I did manage to see the Odyssey (great) and Spidey (OK) over the summer though. And loved Project Hail Mary earlier in the year – my kids have become somewhat obsessed with it, leading me to recommend The Martian to them which they also loved.

Other favourites from earlier in the year are Evil Dead Rise (nicely nasty) Mortal Kombat II (stupid but fun), Toy Story 5 (surprisingly solid) and Coyote v Acme (not Roger Rabbit, but then what is), while the major letdown of the year was Wuthering Heights (although the production design was good and Martin Clunes turns in a great supporting performance).

Over the next week I have an unusually packed cinema schedule though, having already booked tickets for Street Fighter, an advance screening of The Debut and the Ghosts movie, all of which I’m looking forward to.

The last film I saw in the cinema was Oppenheimer, which was pretty good. The friend I took along to it turned to me about 2/3rds of the way in and said he couldn’t wait for it to be over, though. It probably could have been shorter, but I was decently gripped throughout. Robert Downey Junior proving he can still act after a decade plus of Iron Man is quite notable. I thought the scene where they wait 101 seconds for the sound of the explosion to hit was a bit wanky, yes it’s realistic but the wait is just a little too long to actually be effective, because everybody starts getting listless and murmers amongst themselves and at least I became disengaged by the time it finally hit.

Last film I watched was Nobody with Bob Odenkirk because we just finished the astounding Better Call Saul. It’s a perfectly fine, engaging, funny and forgettable action flick. Really not much to say about it. 6.5/10 sounds harsh but 7/10 feels like giving it too much credit.

We also watched El Camino, the movie epilogue to Breaking Bad. I liked it, a nice look into how completely fucked up Jesse would be following the events of the show, and a darkly funny performance from a noticeably plump Jesse Plemons. I understand why people might not rate El Camino, because it’s more of a tone poem, a character piece where not much really happens in terms of action, and when they do throw in a gratuitous action scene towards the end it feels like exactly what it is — a gratuitous action scene thrown in just in case some members of the audience have nodded off. Like they were afraid of leaving the movie without one.

I watched all of the X-Men movies up to Apocalypse last year and really enjoyed them, not high cinema by any means but I liked the retro (yes, early 2000s is retro) feel of it all and how there was none of that post-ironic, ashamed-of-itself bullshit you get in modern superhero flicks. It felt honest. Even if they actually were afraid of using the comic accurate costumes, I think it probably would have helped people take it more seriously, at least back then. Days of Future Past was brilliant, James McAvoy and Micheal Fassbender somehow manage to outplay Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. Apocalypse was extremely forgettable and I didn’t realise it was Oscar Isaac until the credits.