KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Back at it in cinemas, doing the after-work movie thing. The goal is to have an average once a week in theatres for the year (so 52), and currently I'm behind pace (27 screenings, 2 rewatches, 1 rep screening over 30 weeks). I'm going to have to push myself out of my comfort zone, like I did this week, and just try something out, rather than going by critical response or leaning into genre films, or basing desire on trailers I might have seen. It's nice to have a project I guess.
This week:
Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026, d. Destin Daniel Cretton - in theatre)
Rose of Nevada (2025, d. Mark Jenkin - in theatre)
The Dink (2026, d. Josh Greenbaum - AppleTV)
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Brand New Day starts with an montage of what Spider-Man and Peter have been up to across a four year span, which is basically fighting super-villains (we see quick glimpses of a half dozen or so of Spider-Man's plentiful rogues gallery here) and following Ned and M.J. on social media, but keeping his distance. They were all supposed to attend M.I.T. and dorm together, and Peter has missed all that. The death of his Aunt May in the prior film has him thinking that, if he's going to do the superhero thing then he needs to do it alone, or else the people he cares for might get hurt. His only meaningful connection is with a detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas, The Bear), whose innate compassion and empathy find her unwittingly playing as an Aunt May substitute for Peter.
The plot of Brand New Day, kicks off with a runaway tank heading for the headquarters of Damage Control, the governmental organization responsible for cleaning up after superhero battles and alien incursions. Spider-Man stops the tank only to find inside not a hardened criminal or military wing-nut, but a janitor who suddenly doesn't know where they are nor how they got there. Spidey tracks that someone is hopping bodies, and is after something within Damage Control. Spidey manages a meeting with Bill Metzger, head of Damage Control (Tramell Tillman, Severance) who, somehow, Peter doesn't clock is maybe doing more nefarious things beyond his department's mandate.
Peter's attempts to track down whomever this new supervillain is (with a bit of assistance from New Avengers Yelena Belova (an always welcome Florence Pugh, Thunderbolts)) prove difficult, in part because he's distracted by the fact that his body is mutating, deeply affecting his emotions. (He consults Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) for help on how to control his mutation). His fight with this new, unseen villain escalates, and they discover his secret identity and also his affection for M.J. and Ned. Threats on their life put them right back into the mess he was trying to avoid, but, he also finds the connections in his life that he's been so desperately missing.
The promise of the end of No Way Home was street-level Spider-Man, a guy with no connections to Tony Stark and all his resources, a guy with nothing but a spandex suit and web shooters doing his best to help out his city. Sony had been handed the perfect opportunity to detach itself from the flagging MCU, to have Spider-Man stand on his own, the golden goose of Marvel's pantheon. What's utterly clear with this film is that the Peter, M.J. and Ned dynamic is its emotional core and its greatest strength. If you just have those three in a Spider-Man film, it's going to work.
But instead producer Amy Pascal chose to continue the partnership with Marvel producer Kevin Feige and so Brand New Day not only keeps Spider-Man firmly tied to the great Marvel world, and also is used as a strategic launch point for yet another wing of the MCU (one which Sony has zero stake in). Here we get, as mentioned, appearances from Hulk and Black Widow as well as, surprisingly, teaming Spider-Man up with Frank Castle, the Punisher (Jon Berenthal, The Bear), which winds up turning into a sort of buddy cop-style dynamic of bickering and opposing world views, but also respect and fraternity. Plus, Peter still has a high(er) tech computer set-up with an AI (voiced by Naomi Watts) and a head's up display in his mask helping him out.
There's a totally spoilery element I can't talk about without spoilering, but its revelation (which will only be a surprise to anyone who doesn't watch or read about MCU speculation) threatens to derail the entire picture into some half-baked backdoor launch for more Marvel stuff. The character who winds up being Peter's adversary here is not much, if at all, a part of the Spider-Man real of Marvel comics, and soon could very cynically denounce the character's involvement in this film. But, credit to writers Chris McKenna and Eric Sommers whose script manages to thematically pull together this character's emotional arc with Peter's, and to use that character to accelerate Peter's naval gazing into action.
Would Brand New Day have been a better film had it found a way to tell the same story without the trappings of involving so much Marvel world building (which are just as often distracting as they are exciting)? Absolutely. But at the same time every incursion here of the MCU into Spider-Man's friendly neighbourhood has purpose. There's set-up and payoff to all of it. Plus, I'm still a comics nerd, and this connect universe shit I eat up with a spoon.
Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi) takes over the Spider-Man franchise from Jon Watts and...wow. It's not that Watts did a bad job at all. Far from it. Each of Watts' entries were supremely enjoyable, but Cretton uses his extensive budget to really, really push the visuals storytelling of how Spider-Man engages with the world. The web-slinging scenes add geometry to the equation which really give you the sense of Spidey's reaction time. We feel how fast the world moves by, the velocity of the swing and the spring of Spidey's webs. It builds upon what Mark Webb was attempting with POV webslinging in the Andrew Garfield Amazing Spider-Man and goes much much further. And with Spidey's wall-crawling ability it's like Cretton watched the Spider-Verse movies and questioned why that kind of camera work couldn't be done in live action.
It's visually an exceptionally playful movie, and its stars are all very game. Holland seems even more invested in the franchise now that Watts has moved on. He seems like he's very much committed to taking the lead here. No doubt he was the champion of the four-year time jump, as Holland, while still very youthful, does now look like a man. Zendaya is one of those performers for whom everything seems effortless. She can convey so much with so little and while much of M.J.'s character here rests on what came before, Zendaya gives everything you need to know where this character is (and more) without really any verbal confirmation. The Punisher here is toned down to PG-13 levels, so his severity from the Netflix/Disney+ runs is tamped down quite a bit, but this gives Berenthal a chance to be playful in the role in a way not afforded to him otherwise, and he's a damn delight. I've never enjoyed Frank Castle even half as much as I do here. Besides a few other MCU mainstays, the rest of the main cast is filled out with amazing performers from hit streaming series, and they all deliver.
The sum is a very entertaining, surprisingly emotionally grounded movie that fits with what came before but also pushes forward.
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The opening minutes of Mark Jenkin's latest film are a montage of static images of the remote Cornish fishing village, its derelict docks, and run-down vibes. We see extremely brief glances at some of the characters in our films, and nobody looks happy. The first half of the first act is somewhat perplexing, as we're slowly let in on the connective threads of the images we've seen, but even then, there's a real lack of exposition. Wherever in Cornwall this is, the people don't talk much.
The score, intense with it's low registers tones, implies that there's something...haunted about this place, and there's just a whiff that something ever so slightly sinister is afoot. The images don't corroborate the tone, but the intention is there. It's like those youtube videos where someone recuts a trailer to a comedy or drama with new music to make it a horror film. This is low-key British drama that carries something else with it.
Jenkins films in a grainy 4:3 aspect ratio, so the movie looks like 1970's era British television, and it has to be intentional. Jenkin leans into the aesthetic with framing and lighting that seems like it would be at home on Coronation Street. And yet, it's not at all a made for TV production and very much feels like a film that yearns for some nostalgic trappings of times past. There's an etherial quality to the camera choice, the editing, and the shot composition. Maybe it's recency bias, but I couldn't stop comparing it to Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, which would make for, tonally, an apt double feature.
The problem with even providing a loose plot of the film, it doesn't convey the equally fascinating and perplexing way in which the story is assembled and told. What I write herein is pretty straghtforward, but most of what's even laid out here is doled out in nuggets in the film's telling.
The gist of the story is that this small town survived almost entirely on the service of a small fishing trawler named Rose of Nevada. It went missing about 30 years ago, its two crewmen lost at sea. The ship, however, has returned. The very same ship, barely the worse for wear. Mike (Edward Rowe) has been the longstanding money man and organizer for the town, is stunned by its arrival, and does everything to disguise the fact that it's the Rose. The only person who's in on it is Tina (Rosalind Eleazar, Slow Horses) whose husband was one of the lost crew.
Mike wastes no time setting up a crew to send the ship back out and get to work, and this includes handsome vagrant Liam (Callum Turner) and struggling father Nick (George MacKay), as well as a mysterious old salty dog named Murgey (Francis McGee) who takes on captaining the boat and teaching the boys the trade.
Their three days at sea go fairly smoothly (though there's continued intensity in the soundtrack as well as the editing and penchant for cut ins that make you think anything can go wrong any second). The ship arrives to shore to find a party of people waiting, ready to get to work off-loading the haul and processing it. But, Nick realizes, he's not home. He's 30 years in the past. His neighbours, whom in the future were still grieving the loss of their son, in 1993 think him to be their son returned from his fishing sojourn. He panics about being apart from his wife and child. Liam, meanwhile, is believed to be Tina's estranged husband, and given his vagrant and solitary life from before, he's ready to settle into.
But the sea beckons, and the town can only survive if the fish come in. Everyone has a role to play, and so Nick and Liam are back out to sea for days on end. Each time, Nick hopes to return home, only to find himself in the past...where he has a role to play in the survival of this town if he can accept it.
It's a time travel story unlike any other I've seen, the fantasy aspect serving only as a mechanism to highlight how entire cultures have dwindled in the past 30 years. Here, the profession was what the community gravitated around, but it hasn't been like that since the disappearance of the Rose, and the community has suffered for it.
It's a methodically paced film, uninterested in the hows or whys, but instead focused on what it means not just for a character or two, but for the community and maybe society in macro. I still can't tell you if I truly liked it, but at least I'm certain I didn't not like it. I was captivated and intrigued constantly, unsure of whether Jenkin would drop the other shoe or not, or escalate the scale of the story at all.
It's definitely different, and just as different doesn't have to mean bad, it also doesn't have to be good. But I'm pretty sure, at the very least, Rose of Nevada is good. I'll have to tell my friend.
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The Dink has no aspirations of being awards bait, so it wasn't going to get one of Apple's token limited releases, but I would still be curious if a small-but-enjoyable little comedy like this could have gotten any traction in cinemas.
The set-up is fairly standard sports-comedy fare: Dustin "The Hammer" Boyd (Jake Johnson, Let's Be Cops) was once a promising junior tennis champ who lost it all when, in his first big pro tournament, supposedly, Andy Roddick (also in his first big pro tournament) sabotaged the match, causing The Hammer a wrist injury costing him his career. Now he's a tennis pro at the racquet club his father runs. The club is getting hit with demand to increase their pickleball presence, to cede more courts to the low-impact racquet sport.
Most sports comedies, though, tend to be about that one final shot at glory, about the protagonist getting another shot at the fame that they lost. Here though, Dustin's just reaching for his father's acceptance. Chuck Boyd (an overqualified Ed Harris) has barely any affection for his son. He's mostly embarrassed by him, sees him as a failure, and doesn't trust him. Dustin always wants to prove himself, but he's never given the opportunity. But Chuck, in trying to ward off the pickleball plague has found a by-law in the club's charter that allows decisions to be decided by a duel on the courts. Dustin, desperately, wants to be the guy in that duel, only to be ruled out after he injures himself trying to show off jumping over the net.
Dustin's doctor (Ben Stiller) prescribes him pickleball as a low-impact rehab treatment, and also some dating service called Sticky Honey that he seems pretty intent on. Hiding his shame, Dustin joins some septuagenarians on the pickleball court and makes fast friends with Candace (Mary Steenburgen).
Their unlikely friendship is the core of the film, less so tennis or pickleball. It's a sweet and funny quasi-May-December that, for all the sillier bits, remains pretty emotionally grounded. This isn't a Will Ferrell or Ben Stiller sports comedy like out of the 2000s, it's not going to extremes or pushing the plausibility of what can happen to absurd levels. Its characters don't lack self awareness, and their actions don't contradict their emotional intelligence. I hesitate to call it a smart comedy, but it's certainly not dumb.
The surprise here is that this is a film at all, that AppleTV didn't ask to have this rather tightly constructed 90-minute script turned into a 8-or-10 episode TV series. The tide winds are changing. Maybe there's hope for more comedy movies, and more comedies in theatres coming.
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