Movie Review: Oh. What. Fun. (2025)

Genre: Christmas Comedy  

Director: Michael Showalter  

Starring: Michelle Pfeiffer, Felicity Jones, Chloë Grace Moretz, Denis Leary, Jason Schwartzman, Eva Longoria  

Running Time: 108 minutes  

Synopsis: Every year, Houston housewife Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer) hosts the perfect Christmas family gathering, but she does all the work and feels under-appreciated, including by her husband Nick (Denis Leary). Eldest daughter Channing (Felicity Jones) has a family of her own and is emotionally neglected by her mom. Middle daughter Taylor (Chloë Grace Moretz) cannot sustain a relationship, while youngest child Sammy (Dominic Sessa) has just been dumped. Claire's family ignore her hints to nominate her for a "mother of the year" television show award, and when they all rush to a Christmas event and leave her behind, she snaps.

What Works Well: The focus on the often unsung work that mothers do to organize and host family events is laudable, and a few laughs work their way into this dysfunctional family's antics. The high quality cast is well above the bland material.

What Does Not Work As Well: The script leans into multiple vacuous cliches, from "keeping up with the Joneses" (Claire has impossibly perfect neighbours) to a grown woman craving recognition on a cheesy television show (Eva Longoria is the host). The family members cannot communicate without arguing, shouting, or insulting each other, and the absence of any genuine warmth or love undermines all the pat and predictable "hug it out" resolutions.

Key Quote:

Claire: Why does Saint Nick get all the credit?

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Movie Review: Train Dreams (2025)

Genre: Drama  

Director: Clint Bentley  

Starring: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, William H. Macy, Kerry Condon  

Running Time: 102 minutes  

Synopsis: In rural Idaho of the early 1900s, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is a soft-spoken and observant logger. He marries Gladys (Felicity Jones), they establish a modest home by the river, and have a daughter Kate. Robert is frequently away at logging camps and occasionally on railroad projects. He witnesses acts of violence that start to haunt him, but also makes lifelong friends, including the crusty Arn (William H. Macy). Grainier maintains a strong bond with Gladys whenever he returns home, until a tragedy changes everything.

What Works Well: This is a haunting and lyrical exploration of one quiet man's soul. Director Clint Bentley co-wrote the script with Greg Kwedar, and the focus is on a nation's growth causing nature's destruction, balancing income with family, and finally a deep commitment to love. The boxy 1.46:1 aspect ratio allows the towering trees to become silent but essential co-stars, creating Grainier's home away from home. In the forest camps he forges long-lasting friendships, witnesses the worst of human behaviour, and experiences great beauty but also participates in its ruin. Embodying one character's journey over multiple decades, Joel Edgerton excels in a lived-in, observant, and often emotionally tortured role.

What Does Not Work As Well: The pacing is leisurely, and a few of the secondary characters could have benefited from additional depth.

Key Quote:

Grainier: Do you think that the bad things that we do follow us through life?

Arn: I don't know. I've seen bad men raised up and good men brought to their knees. I reckon if I could figure it out, I'd be sleeping next to someone a lot better-looking than you.

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Movie Review: The Brutalist (2024)

Genre: Epic Drama  

Director: Brady Corbet  

Starring: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Alessandro Nivola  

Running Time: 201 minutes  

Synopsis: After the end of World War Two, renowned Hungarian architect Laszlo Toth (Adrian Brody) immigrates to the United States, leaving behind his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsofia. A nobody in his new country, Laszlo settles in Philadelphia, where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) owns a furniture store. A period of struggle ensues, including a falling out with Attila, addiction to opium, and homelessness. Local tycoon Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) learns of Laszlo's pre-war achievements and retains him to design a monumental cultural centre in memory of Harrison's mother. But many difficulties await on the journey from vision to reality.

What Works Well: This is grandiose storytelling with magnanimous cinematography, patient scene-building, and evocative music. Through the travails of one man, director and co-writer Brady Corbet explores the scope and scale of the post-war immigrant experience, here with a focus on a fractured Jewish family. Adrien Brody exudes an exhausted combination of resignation and frustration, Laszlo Toth's prior professional record and the horrors of his wartime experiences counting for nothing in the new world. He is reduced to shoveling dirt and sleeping in a shelter while subjected to the dichotomy of discrimination and wary acceptance. The winding pathway back to self-respect and achievement passes through Van Buren as a complex counterpoint and establishment representative, a wealthy but short-fused and deeply flawed power broker with the potential to both make and break the newcomer.

What Does Not Work As Well: Despite the mammoth length, several key narrative milestones are skipped, leaving behind a sometimes frustrating fill-in-the-blanks structure. The script appears to intentionally zoom in on distractions (the sexual frustrations between the Toths, once reunited; endless admiration of an Italian marble quarry), while dangling then abandoning foundational plot threads (Harrison's grown children are prominent until they are not; Toth's architectural achievements are an exercise in talk a lot but show little).

Key Quote:

Laszlo: Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?

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Movie Review: The Last Letter From Your Lover (2021)

A romantic drama, The Last Letter From Your Lover interweaves timelines in an unabashedly old-fashioned celebration of love.

Two related stories are set in London and take place decades apart. In 1965, Jennifer Stirling (Shailene Woodley) is stuck in a loveless marriage with frequently absent and dismissive businessman Laurence (Joe Alwyn). After a car crash Jennifer suffers from memory loss, but she uncovers letters that help her remember the past and flashbacks reveal her love affair with financial journalist Anthony O'Hare (Callum Turner). They met on the French Riviera and fell deeply in love, and over several months exchanged passionate letters as they considered starting a new life together.

In modern day London, journalist Ellie Haworth (Felicity Jones) is still recovering from a difficult ending to a long relationship. While researching a story in the archives of the London Chronicle, she stumbles upon one of the letters between Jennifer and Anthony. Ellie teams up with archivist Rory McCallan (Nabhaan Rizwan) to dig up more of the letters and uncover the full extent of the long-ago love story. Meanwhile, Ellie and Rory also start to grow close, although she may not be ready for another relationship.

An adaptation of the Jojo Moyes book with a screenplay by Nick Payne and Esta Spalding, The Last Letter From Your Lover is irresistibly committed to tried-and-true romantic concepts. As both sets of lovers navigate familiar ups-and-downs, Augustine Frizzell directs with a welcome breeziness, brisk pacing and irony-free attitudes, helped by an attractive cast and grounded performances.

Packaged into a two-romances-in-one-film structure, the 1960s drama is stronger and features an unhappy wife finding the perfect man and having to grapple with the trade-off involved in abandoning her privileged life. The modern story is fuelled by the letters of the past, and offers an initially mismatched couple in Ellie and Rory, starting on opposite sides of a bureaucratic process before bumping against her lack of readiness for a new relationship.

None of the elements are new, but Frizzell tackles both stories with confidence and has two time eras to play with. In particular, the mid-1960s settings in London and the French Riviera provide rich opportunities for glamorous costumes and locations, recalling the jet-set lifestyle afforded to elites like the Stirlings. Ellie's modern context is less visually alluring, but her story is part romance, part journalistic snooping, both enlivened by sprinkles of humour.

Memory loss, men's demeaning behaviour towards women, a classic race against the clock, and an untimely car crash all pour into a final act that merges the two stories. The Last Letter From Your Lover is written in recognizable but quite elegant script.



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Movie Review: The Midnight Sky (2020)

A visually spectacular science fiction drama, The Midnight Sky combines an end-of-the-world scenario with a crisis-in-space and personal torment, but gets distracted by multiple survival misadventures.

Earlier in his career, astronomer Augustine Lofthouse (Ethan Peck) identified Jupiter's moon K-23 as possibly life-sustaining. Around the same time he started an intense relationship with Jean Sullivan (Sophie Rundle), but eventually he neglects her and she leaves him.

Now in 2049, the Earth is being rendered uninhabitable by an unknown cataclysmic event. The ailing Augustine (George Clooney) elects to stay behind at an Arctic research station while everyone else evacuates. Seemingly alone and terminally sick, he stumbles upon a seven year old girl he calls Iris (Caoilinn Springall), who barely speaks and appears to have been left behind. She becomes his companion as he attempts to make contact with the space craft Aether travelling back to Earth from K-23.

On-board Aether are Dr. Sullivan (Felicity Jones) and Commander Adewole (David Oyelowo) along with other crew members, returning from a two year mission to test K-23's viability to support life. Unaware of the situation on Earth and unable to communicate with anyone, the Aether crew members also have to deal with a navigation malfunction.

Undoubtedly ambitious and bathed in beauty, The Midnight Sky tries to tell too many stories at once but suffers from ponderous pacing in addition to fragmented focus. Working from the Mark L. Smith script adaptation of a book by Lily Brooks-Dalton, director George Clooney does establish an intriguing premise. A debilitated last-man-on-a-dying-Earth attempting to connect with astronauts grappling with an unexplained communications blackout carries exquisite early promise.

But for too long the stories of Augustine and the Aether crew remain disconnected and divergent, squandering the early momentum. To reach an Arctic station with a more powerful antenna Augustine and the curious but silent Iris trudge across the hazardous ice and snow, and suddenly The Midnight Sky becomes a bland survive-the-elements trek. Meanwhile Aether encounters navigation issues and strays into dangerously unmapped space, and soon the crew are embroiled in an emergency repairs drama. By the time Clooney gathers up all the stray pieces for the final eloquent 15 minutes, it's well too late to salvage the original intentions.

The sequences in space are delivered with a sometimes majestic artistry, Aether a particularly elegant creation both inside and out. Clooney's performance is all existential broodiness, while Oyelowo, Jones and the other space travellers (Kyle Chandler, Tiffany Boone, and Demián Bichir) each get a couple of scenes to reflect on their predicament.

The Midnight Sky launches with a bang, but is soon drifting in both space and snow.



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The Movies Of Felicity Jones

All movies starring Felicity Jones and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Theory Of Everything (2014)

Inferno (2016)

Rogue One (2016)

On The Basis Of Sex (2018)

The Midnight Sky (2020)

The Last Letter From Your Lover (2021)

The Brutalist (2024)

Train Dreams (2025)

Oh. What. Fun. (2025)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: On The Basis Of Sex (2018)

A biographical drama, On The Basis Of Sex recounts the story of the remarkable Ruth Bader Ginsburg as she starts challenging archaic laws preventing gender equity.

It's the late 1950s, and Ruth (Felicity Jones) is one of the few women first-year students at Harvard Law School. She clashes with the sexist attitudes of Dean Griswold (Sam Waterston) and Professor Brown (Stephen Root). Ruth is married to second-year law student Martin Ginsburg (Armie Hammer), who supports her career ambitions, and together they are raising baby daughter Jane. The couple deal with a health scare and relocate to New York City when Martin lands a corporate position specializing in tax law.

Ruth graduates first in class from Columbia, but because she is a woman corporate doors slam in her face, and she reluctantly accepts a professor position teaching sex discrimination and the law. By 1970 the anti-war and women's rights movements have translated into street protests, with Jane (Cailee Spaeny) an active participant. Martin notices a tax case involving gender-based discrimination against a male caregiver; he reignites Ruth's passion for practicing law, and she starts assembling a court challenge with far reaching implications.

Inspired by real events, On The Basis Of Sex has a terrific story to tell. The fight to free women's social rights from a myriad of discriminatory laws written by men and upheld by various court rulings over many years was a daunting undertaking. Ginsburg combined clarity of thought with astonishing determination to start the task of chipping away, and found the perfect opening in a case involving tax benefit discrimination against men.

As directed by Mimi Leder from a script by Daniel Stiepleman, the film does occasionally threaten to descend into standard-fare hagiography territory, and a few moments of gotcha triumphalism cheapen the narrative. Much better is the depth provided to Ruth's character. She is presented with well-rounded flaws, including an owly disposition and an inability to empathize and easily connect at a human level, traits that place her at odds with the teenaged Jane.

Also contributing to the film's appeal are supporting characters with key roles. Martin Ginsburg is much more than a supportive husband. He plays a crucial role as father and partner in legal strategy, the struggle for women's right much stronger when enlightened men join the battle. Mel Wulf (Justin Theroux) of the American Civil Liberties Union is another important part of the story, and helps to highlight the cross-currents of tension between pragmatism and academia.

On The Basis Of Sex earns respect for not shying away from several thorough but still accessible discussions of legal intricacies. Reversing the recent trend of biographies cowering away from explaining the relevant subject matter as in The Theory Of Everything and The Imitation Game, here Leder fearlessly wades into an admirable level of discourse about legal cases, briefs and process.

Felicity Jones as Ruth adopts an indomitable attitude of walking through walls until others suggest that maybe she needs to sometimes try and walk around. Her performance energizes the film, despite being short of nuance for stretches. Fighting discrimination On The Basis Of Sex required a new kind of warrior. Maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not smile enough, but only because she was busy altering the course of history.

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Movie Review: Rogue One (2016)

A spin-off story from the Star Wars universe, Rogue One slots in as a prologue to Episode 4. The story of the team that stole the Death Star plans is intermittently entertaining but also over-orchestrated.

Scientist Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) is forced by the Empire's director of weapons development Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) to work on the massive Death Star, a planet-destroying weapon. Years later, Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed) defects, carrying a secret message from Galen to the rebels, letting them know that he is designing a vulnerability into the Death Star. The rebels recruit Galen's daughter Jyn (Felicity Jones) to try and steal the plans that expose the weakness.

Jyn teams up with rebel soldier Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and reprogrammed droid K-2SO, and through contact with master smuggler Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) they recruit blind warrior Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) and his companion Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen) to the cause. The ragtag group have to launch a dangerous mission deep in enemy territory to try and obtain the vital files.

Directed by Gareth Edwards, Rogue One is a sometimes rollicking space adventure, and in its second half occasionally rises to good levels of glossy excitement, Star Wars style. But this is also a story unnecessarily overstuffed with characters, names, events and locations, seemingly for the purpose of setting up additional future spin-off-worthy material for various peripheral people with exotic names.

Despite the good intentions and high production values, Rogue One carries the strong nagging sense of a lost opportunity. This could have been a smaller, more intimate and character-driven spy story, more about covert action and smart infiltration techniques as they could exist in the Star Wars universe.

Instead Edwards and screenwriters Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy can't help themselves. After throwing a bewildering number of new names onto the screen Rogue One builds up to a typical and overly-familiar Star Wars climax, dogfights in the sky featuring hundreds of rebel and imperial fighters, massive battleships dominating the skyline, and on the ground the usual multiple breathless cliffhangers, impossible physical feats and running laser battles involving hordes of star troopers. Subtle, this is not.

Jyn and Cassian are the most prominent characters, and they have to work hard amidst the overpopulated script to carve out any time and space to emerge as people worth caring about. They get to exchange a few lines of dialogue about sacrifice and personal choices, but then it's quickly onto the next close escape and brush with death. From among the many secondary characters Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen leave the best impression, with Yen's portrayal of a warrior with some affinity to the Force carrying both humour and poignancy.

Elsewhere, some familiar names make token late appearances, including Darth Vader, R2-D2 and C-3PO. Much less successful is the disconcerting decision to revive via CGI the long-dead Peter Cushing and superimpose his image onto the role of Grand Moff Tarkin. The image of a young Carrie Fisher is also briefly computer manipulated back onto the youthful Leia.

Rogue One offers a familiar space adventure, ticking the usual boxes and choosing the safe and corporately expedient option at every turn.

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Movie Review: Inferno (2016)

The third film adaptation of a Dan Brown novel, Inferno reaches a new low in the series: mechanical, plodding and lacking in both logic and intensity.

Harvard University symbologist Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) wakes up in a Florence hospital, with evidence of a bullet having grazed his head, suffering from short term memory loss and horrific hallucinations of a hell-on-earth. Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) administers care, but soon she is helping him flee the hospital when assassin Vayentha (Ana Ularu) shows up, seemingly intent on killing Langdon. At Sienna's apartment they discover a miniature image projector in Langdon's possession depicting Sandro Botticelli's Map of Hell, a visualization of Dante's Inferno. The image has been slightly modified to contain clues.

The hidden text in the image suggests that recently deceased billionaire Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) has arranged for a catastrophic virus to be unleashed on humanity to solve the overpopulation problem, and it's up to Langdon to discover the virus location and stop its release. Langdon and Sienna chase down a series of art-based clues in Florence and Venice, hotly pursued by the assassin Vayentha, World Health Organization officials Christoph Bouchard (Omar Sy) and Elizabeth Sinskey (Sidse Babett Knudsen), as well as Harry Sims (Irrfan Khan), the head of a secretive private security agency.

Directed by Ron Howard, Inferno is a soulless connect-the-dots exercise. While the book was already suffering from formula fatigue, the film manages to conclusively erode any lingering interest by defaulting to the worst kind of chase movie, where every other scene has to feature dozens of police cars, helicopters and drones, but none of it creates any sort of tension or engagement. The intricate puzzles supposedly at the core of Langdon's skill set are presented and solved within about a minute each, reducing the main character to a lumbering professor huffing across a couple of European cities in a perfunctory sprint to a stock climax.

Making matters worse is a plot that ultimately defies all logic. The film changes the book's challenging final twist in favour of a really dumb Hollywood ending. This is not only a weak-kneed surrender to the worst tendencies of an industry often afraid to provoke debate, but in this case also undermines the entirety of Zobrist's carefully constructed plot.

The few flashback scenes to Zobrist ironically emerge as the most interesting thing that Inferno has to offer: a movie about the billionaire would have been much more interesting, but only in the hands of a more astute director.  As for Inferno, it's neither cerebral nor kinetic; just an irritatingly inconsequential burn-out.

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Movie Review: The Theory Of Everything (2014)

A biopic about scientist Stephen Hawking, The Theory Of Everything is a romance highlighting a couple's unglamorous struggle against a vicious disease before Hawking achieved fame for his theories about space and time.

At Cambridge University in the 1960s, a young Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is an awkward but brilliant physics student. He gains an interest in the origins of time, and starts a romance with Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones). Just as Stephen is setting his research direction and getting serious about Jane, he is diagnosed with a motor neuron disease, a condition that will atrophy his body but keep his brain intact. He is given two years to live. Jane insists on marrying him anyway, and they start a family which eventually grows to include three children.

Stephen's condition does not prove to be fatal, but he gradually loses control of most of his muscles, although he keeps on working and developing groundbreaking scientific theories. Jane holds the family together as best as she can, but with Stephen permanently confined to a wheelchair, she finally realizes that help is needed. Local church choir leader Jonathan Jones (Charlie Cox) volunteers to share the physical and emotional load, and he and Jane develop feelings for each other. Meanwhile, tarty nurse Elaine Mason (Maxine Peake) starts to play a larger role in Stephen's life. With the help of revolutionary computer-assisted technology Stephen writes and publishes A Brief History of Time, achieving scientific celebrity status but also fundamentally changing the household dynamic.

A mass entertainment biographical film about Stephen Hawking was never going to be about theoretical physics, and The Theory Of Everything steers as far away from the topic as possible without ignoring it all together. The film is based on the book Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen by Jane Wilde Hawking, and so has it roots in an exploration of the family man rather than the scientist. The smatterings of physics and astronomy that do make it into the film revolve around the most superficial conversations about black holes and the origins of the universe, with most of subtext invested in whether the role of God in the creation of the universe can be consistent with emerging scientific theories.

With the science that made the man pushed to the edges of the story, The Theory Of Everything settles down to portray a romance, a familial struggle against disability, and finally two people drifting apart as Hawking's work propels him into the spotlight of what passes as celebrity in the scientific community. Many of the film's elements are familiar from previous fare such as A Beautiful Mind (scientist battles illness with help from wife and achieves peer recognition) and My Left Foot (artist battles handicap and achieves fame). The Theory Of Everything never reaches the emotional heights of Ron Howard' classic, but neither does it get consumed by the disability angle. Director James Marsh finds the space where real people live and struggle to stay alive and relevant, and creates a film that quietly celebrates the human spirit.

Eddie Redmayne gets half a film to act and half a film confined to a wheelchair, severely contorted and with limited ability to verbally communicate. He provides Hawking with a sparkling humanity and humour that transcends his deteriorating physical state. As storytelling the film does suffer from the main subject slipping first into incomprehensibility and then immobility, but Redmayne's greatest feat is keeping a glint in the eye as a reminder that while the body is almost totally failing, the brain is fine, beavering away to theoretically ponder the mysteries of the cosmos.

With a central character who gradually descends into a non-communicative state, the emotional centre was always going to be held by Jane, and the film is a tribute to the woman who saved Hawking from himself, gave him the will to live, and supported him through the years of obscurity. As often is the case when playing opposite a dominant physical performance (Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind, Tom Cruise in Rain Man), Felicity Jones has the more difficult role to remain relevant and grounded, and her performance is a joy. From college student to hardened wife balancing her needs with an impossibly demanding husband, Jones shines as a woman who devotes her life to her love but remains on the real side of saintliness.

The Theory Of Everything uncovers the man behind the theories, and more importantly, the great woman who fell in love with a broken man and saved his soul.

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