4 new films: quick links
4 new films
1) Holland – Prime Video (27 March)
Film (2025). In this ‘wildly unpredictable mystery thriller’, Nicole Kidman is the meticulous Nancy Vandergroot, a teacher and homemaker whose picture-perfect life with her community pillar husband (Matthew Macfadyen) and son (Jude Hill) in tulip-filled Holland, Michigan tumbles into a twisted tale.
Nancy and her friendly colleague (Gael García Bernal) become suspicious of a secret, only to discover nothing in their lives is what it seems.
We’re hoping the slew of less-than-impressed reviews that accompanied its showing at the recent SXSW film festival become the real mystery here, and that Holland defies (somehow) that early consensus.
Directed by Mimi Cave. Watch the trailer.
2) The Rule of Jenny Pen – AMC+ & Shudder (28 March)
Film (2024). As far as psychological horror pitches go, ‘John Lithgow walking around day and night with a dementia doll’ is about all that’s needed here. Just that, 104 minutes of his and the doll’s faces, would be enough, really …
In this New Zealand film, arrogant Judge Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush) suffers a near-fatal stroke, leaving him partially paralysed and confined to a retirement home.
There, Mortensen clashes with a seemingly gentle (as if) resident named Dave Crealy (John Lithgow), who is actually secretly terrorising the home with a sadistic game called The Rule of Jenny Pen while wielding his dementia doll as an instrument of cruelty.
When Mortensen’s pleas to the staff go unanswered, he takes it upon himself to put an end to Crealy’s reign of terror. The director, James Ashcroft, won best director at the Fantastic Fest in Austin last September, while Lithgow and Rush shared the best actor award at the Sitges Film Festival in October.
3) Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Road Trip – Disney+ (28 March)
Film (2025). And the winner of the ‘hardest title to repeat six times in quick succession while chewing corn from the cob’ award goes to …
This family comedy (PG) follows 11-year-old Alexander and his family as they take to the road on a dream Spring Break vacation to Mexico City only to have all their plans go terribly wrong when they discover a cursed idol.
Will you be rolling around on the floor, clutching your sides, begging someone to hit pause before you literally die laughing? Probably not. Will it be a good film for all the family with fairly low stakes, providing blessed distraction from the multifarious horrors of contemporary existence? We hope so!
Starring Eva Longoria, Jesse Garcia, Paulina Chávez, Rose Portillo, Thom Nemer, with Cheech Marin. Watch the trailer.
4) Midas Man – Paramount+ (29 March)
Film (2024). When Brian Epstein (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) set foot in the Cavern Club in November 1961 to watch The Beatles perform, he saw something no one else could – a glimmer of gold. Sadly, he was mistaken though and … No, actually, he was right …
Sharply dressed and well-spoken, Brian was hardly the most obvious radical – but being Jewish, closeted and having grown up as an outsider who had failed at pretty much everything, he was a 26-year-old with something to prove and who wanted to tear up the rulebook.
His death at just 32, in 1967, is sure to imbue the story with an almost overwhelming sense of tragedy-in-waiting.
