Seen in November

Two greats of British cinema don't always see eye to eye in Slow Horses.

It's been a busy month or so, when not much was watched or seen and finding time to post was difficult. Before the year ends, here's what was seen last month.

Slow Horses S05
Apple TV+
If this was the only show worth watching on Apple TV+, the subscription would still be worth it. It's a plot that feels ripped from our own conspiracy laced multimedia drenched world in which a few malevolent characters wreck havoc on a society preoccupied with its own reflection. Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his team of fallen MI5 agents are still in fine form, even if their form is never really that fine. In this season, a group of disaffected terrorists (which I guess is redundant to say) concoct a scheme using MI5 tactics against MI5. This season, Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) comes to the foreground as the honey-trapped agent, as does the eerily quiet Coe (Tom Brooke), who is the first to discern the strategy in play. Meanwhile, the most MI5-iest of the Slow Horses, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is at his worst. He makes mistake after mistake while still believing he's above the rest of the rabble. Despite some critics saying the show has lost a step, I disagree. I'm particularly fond of the agent Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), who is still the most effective Slow Horse while struggling with addiction, and the indomitable Diana Taverner, played with such confidence by Kristin Scott-Thomas.

Only Murders in the Building S05
Disney+
This unlikely murder mystery comedy starring Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, and Martin Short returns like a comfy old cardigan you don a few times a year. It's a little old, a bit musty and predictable, but you can rest easy knowing it's there for you. There are the usual outrageously underused cameos, a series of misdirections and red herrings, but it all works out in the end. What I find odd is that the comedy in the show is so much safer than Martin and Short's live shows, but that's fine.

The testosterone levels are almost as high as the body count in the original Predator

Predator (1987)
Disney+
The one that started it all with Arnold Schwarzenegger as "Dutch" (um… was the name “Dutch” an attempt to build a backstory for an American soldier having an Austrian accent?), Carl Weathers as Dillon, and Jesse "The Body" Ventura as Blain. It's a strangely compelling lunkhead of a movie. A group of military specialists is dropped into the Guatemalan jungle to rescue "assets" from a guerrilla group, but instead discover they are being hunted by a much more sophisticated alien predator.

Liam Neeson is having fun.

The Naked Gun (2025)
Prime Video
The new Naked Gun with Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson is faithful to its cop show parody predecessors. Liam Neeson is clearly having fun in this ridiculously funny and silly role. Forget about your troubles and just enjoy the nonsense. Director Akiva Schaffer (of Lonely Island fame; from SNL video shorts Lazy Sunday and many others) has brought a good deal of silliness back, and what the world needs now is a good amount of silliness.

Jack Kirby would be proud of this era-correct production design.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Disney+
It’s been some time since I’ve said this about a Marvel movie but this is good. It’s very good. Set in a 1960s futuristic New York City, the film foregoes the "origin story" of Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and Ben "The Thing" Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and starts with them established as Earth's protectors. I thought perhaps they had overshot their ambitions by starting with one of their best adventures pitting the foursome against The Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) and Galactus (Ralph Ineson), but I was wrong. The whole thing revolves around their family dynamic with all its fears, foibles and finery. Rather than feeling like a one-shot story, it recreates a world of Marvel comics as I originally knew them.

How "meta" is too "meta"?

Jay Kelly
Netflix
George Clooney is an aging Hollywood star playing an aging Hollywood star. It's a fine film and probably one of the best looking of Noah Baumbach's films, but as entertaining as it was, it is getting to be a bit of a trope to use an actor's aging as a metaphor for everyone else's realization they are getting older too. Laura Dern is great in her small but meaningful role as is Adam Sandler as Jay's only real friend and long suffering agent.