PRIMETIME***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Day 5

Lance Oppenheim’s PRIMETIME is a lurid fever dream set in the early days of the internet and the dawn of reality TV. Ajon Singh’s slippery and skewering screenplay takes us inside the dark ambition of real-life TV presenter Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) and his fictionalised show producer Andie (Merritt Wever). Their hit TV show consisted of entrapping predators on camera and as the film opens they have just been given a coveted primetime slot going up against Damon Lindelof’s Lost. Suddenly Hansen has a shot at the prestige and acclaim that he craves but only if he can keep the gotcha moments coming. And if this means emotionally endangering the “teen”-looking actors he uses as bait or entrapping the predators in cahoots with law enforcement, so be it. 

All of this foreshadows the clickbait social media rage-bait algorithms that no longer just rule our TVs but also rule our politics. The very concept of “primetime” now seems quaint and anachronistic: an entire nation sitting down together to watch linear network TV. But the concept of intrusive, privacy-busting, legally-ambiguous bread and circuses is sadly all-encompassing now. The enshittification started with Chris Hansen and went via Mark Burnett and Andy Cohen to Donald Trump. 

PRIMETIME feels like a horror movie of our worst nightmares projected back in time to their origin point. The visual style, audio design and soundtrack all contribute to a feeling of nausea and corruption. And it’s anchored in co-lead performances of incredible power from Pattinson and Wever. But special mention has to go to SUPERMAN’s Skyler Gisondo as Decoy Dan - the vulnerable young actor sucked into Hansen’s world in desperation for his SAG card. I can see why this film has been hyped. It is so well considered in front of and behind the lens. I wouldn’t change a frame. And my goodness Robert Pattinson may well be the best cineaste of us all. His ability to ferret out interesting new directors and scripts is unparalleled. 

PRIMETIME is rated R and has a running time of 1hr 50m.  It played Venice and opened in the USA last month. It opens in the UK on October 30th.

22 JUMP STREET

I loved the Channing Tatum-Jonah Hill brom-edy 21 JUMP STREET.  The reboot was fun, clever, and I was genuinely rooting for the two buddies as they took down a nasty drug dealer by posing as kids in a local school.  Sure, the whole concept was hokey but the actors and directors seemed perfectly at ease with that hokiness.  I was trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the only patchily funny sequel, 22 JUMP STREET and I think it comes down two things. First off, there isn't enough warm-hearted bromance before we get to the debbie-downer homo-social break-up.  As a result the bickering to fun-stuff ratio is just off.  Second, we get it: you're smart and post-modern and meta-clever!  All those jokes about how sequels suck, and movie audiences just want the same dang thing over and over, and how the budget all goes on cheesy action shots just made me feel like the movie was poking fun at me for liking what I got in the original and wanting it again.  All that winking at the camera just undermined by ability to sympathise with the characters and that's fatal - because whatever else this movie has, it should have heart.

THE DICTATOR

THE DICTATOR is hands down the funniest, cleverest movie Sacha Baron Cohen has ever made.  I was always a bit uneasy at films like BORAT and BRUNO. I felt it was somehow exploitative to frame ordinary members of the public, and the humour too often descended to the most base level. I'm thinking in particular of the scene where Borat hands his charming Southern hostess a bag of what she thinks is his own shit. That isn't satire or even good physical comedy. It's just cruel and crass. Luckily, Sacha Baron Cohen is now so famous that he can't get away with that kind of stunt-movie. The result is his first fully scripted feature - a movie that I feel is more tightly written, better performed, and more politically on point than anything he's done to date. 

Cohen plays a dodgy African dictator in the mould of Gadaffi called Aladeen.  In the opening scenes we see him lording it up in his home state to great comic effect, before journeying to the USA.  His evil sidekick switches him out with his body-double, in order to get at the oil reserves, forcing Aladeen to live a "normal" American life until he can regain access to his entourage.  This allows Cohen to simultaneously take the piss out of Western greedy capitalists and hippie liberals.  The capitalists don't care who rules, or what promises of fake democracy are made, so long as they can get the oil rights. The hippie liberals are so busy being nice and not offended that they can't even take offence when they should, or recognise a fake offer of watered down democracy when they see it.  Everyone has a price.  Love conquers all but doesn't really.  And America is the biggest joke of all - "a country built by blacks and owned by the Chinese" where it's recent history of democracy - wealth redistributed to the rich through the developed world's only regressive tax system; a presidential election decided by judicial fiat; where its ethnic minorities are incarcerated at disproportionately high rates; and citizens are held indefinitely without trial. The skill is that Cohen can make all these subversive assertions but still keep the tone of the film light-hearted and have us consistently laughing out loud.  Kudos.

THE DICTATOR is on release in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the UK, the USA, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Turkey and Armenia. It opens in Hong Kong on June 7th, Singapore, Brazil, Italy and Taiwan on June 15th, France on June 20th, Spain on July 13th, Argentina, Greece and Colombia on July 20th, Cambodia on July 26th, Mexico on August 10th and Japan on September 7th. 

OBSERVE AND REPORT - the second "comedy" in a month to feature a rape scene*

Director Jody Hill seems to have a talent for taking talented comedians and putting them in deeply unsuccessful vehicles viz. Danny McBride in THE FOOT FIST WAY and now Seth Rogen in OBSERVE AND REPORT. Apparently, Hill's aim was to create a dangerously subversive black comedy that captured the tragic loneliness of human existence a la TAXI DRIVER (I kid you not.) Such a movie would've been superb, if not highly derivative of Scorsese and de Niro's own KING OF COMEDY. But Jody Hill's film is neither black comedy nor conventional comedy. It's just poorly written, ill-concieved and boring. It takes a special skill to make comedy that is truly bleak but still entertaining. Ricky Gervais pulled it off with his TV series THE OFFICE, and in film, IN BRUGES and BAD SANTA were funny but tragic at the same time. It takes a writer who can finely judge the balance of tone and who is unafraid to mine human vulnerability. No matter how self-interested and callow David Brent is, we have to still like him, still see ourselves and our own vulnerabilities in him, otherwise, he just becomes an unlikeable idiot and we switch the TV off.

The first problem is, then, that Seth Rogen's character isn't likeable or sympathetic. In fact, he is singularly unpleasant chap. Like Paul Blart: Mall Cop, he's an out-of-shape security guard who dreams of being able to use firearms and to win the hot blonde chick of his dreams. Unlike Paul Blart, he's demeaning to co-workers, lacks any self-awareness and drugs, then rapes the girl of his dreams. (Yes, she may drunkenly ask him to continue, but someone who has taken a bottle of pills and vomited on the pillow is in no position to give informed consent.)  Even if it weren't for this decidedly unpleasant plot turn, the movie would be a failure because it simply generates no laughs. I swear the only time I even smiled was when Aziz Ansari, playing a retailer, has an argument with the jumped-up mall cop and calls him out for his racist, bigoted attitude. The pacing is slow, Ray Liotta is on auto-pilot, there isn't enough of the brilliant Anna Faris, and there's too much offensive bullshit.

Jody Hill needs to watch THE OFFICE, BAD SANTA, IN BRUGES and KING OF COMEDY before being let near a script again.

*The first was THE BOAT THAT ROCKED. Because if trying to trick a girl to have sex with Boy Y when she thinks she's going to be fucking Boy X isn't attempted rape, what is?

OBSERVE AND REPORT is on release in the US, Canada, Iceland and the UK. It opens on May 8th in Estonia and Romania; on May 14th in Australia, Russia and Lithuania; on May 22nd in Norway; on May 29th in Finland and South Africa; on June 11th in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria; on June 18th in Germany; on July 10th in Italy; on September 4th in New Zealand and on September 25th in Sweden.

THE HOUSE BUNNY - dazed and confused

Anna Faris is a very likeable and talented comedienne and it's great to see her get a truly starring role in the teen comedy THE HOUSE BUNNY. What a shame it is, then, to see her given such a weak and confused script. Worse still, because this movie is written by the team that brought us LEGALLY BLONDE. The LB movies managed to skillfully balance their love for seeing chicks in bikinis acting like ditzes with an empowerment message. But THE HOUSE BUNNY fails miserably.

The plot sees Elle, sorry, Shelley, tricked into leaving her idea of heaven - the Playboy Mansion. In her search for a feeling of community she becomes a Sorority Mother to the geekiest, most tragic girls on campus. She gives them an extreme makeover and before you know it, their sorority has become super-popular. Meanwhile, Shelley undergoes the reverse transformation, reading up so that she can impress do-gooding potential boyfriend Oliver. The final message of the film is very confused. On the one hand, you should act sexy because boys like to see skin and don't like brains. But then again, you should respect individuality and intellect. Sitting on the fence like that must've been really painful.

I think LEGALLY BLONDE worked because Elle was seeking acceptance on her own terms: she wasn't trying to convert the masses to her ditzy ways. Moreover, the supporting characters were all fairly normal. But in THE HOUSE BUNNY their is no anchor anywhere near reality. Most of the girls in the sorority are freaks - blunt piss-takes with no more subtelty than Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. All of which makes this no better than a weak LB rip-off with a confused message, too few belly-laughs and amateurish direction.

THE HOUSE BUNNY was released earlier this year in the US, Canada and Australia. It is currently on release in Singapore, Venezuela, France, Germany, Portugal, Russia, Brazil, Iceland and the UK. It opens next week in Egypt and on October 29th in the Philippines. It opens in Finland and Sweden on November 28th and in Belgium, Argentina, the Netherlands and Spain on December 17th. It opens in Denmark on January 9th.

MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND - weak rom-com

MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND is a flaccid romantic comedy starring Luke Wilson and Uma Thurman. I say flaccid because it's not really that funny, but it is quite sweet and would serve as a mindless Friday night date movie. The deal is that Luke Wilson plays a nice, if slightly nerdy, architect who picks up a nerdy looking chick (Thurman) on the tube. It turns out that she's actually wild in bed and, more to the point, a super-hero called G-GIRL. (No ribald sub-text there, then!) Problems arise when the nice guy dumps the neurotic super-hero and she turns into a bunny-(well, goldfish)boiler. But, as the genre requires, it all ends up with everyone happy and loved up in their gorgeous designer apartments. In other words, this is a movie for those kind of dates wherein what is happening on screen is not of primary concern.....One final thing to mention is that a lot of the marketing for this movie focuses on the fact that it is directed by the man who gave us the seminal 80s comedy classic, GHOSTBUSTERS. This is a misleading signal.

MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND is already on release in Australia, Puerto Rico, the US and UK. It opens in France and Singapore on August 9th 2006; Argentina on August 17th and Egypt on August 30th. The movie opens in Estonia on September 1st; Greece and Portugal on September 14th; Belgium, Hungary and Finland on September 22nd and in the Netherlands on September 28th. It finally rolls into Germany on October 5th and Spain on October 20th.

WAITING - More painful than picturing John Prescott shag his secretary

It's hard to say *definitively* if WAITING is the worst film of 2006. Not because I am afraid of pronouncing on such subjective matters as though I were the oracle of cinematic Objectivity. Rather, because I have not yet seen CASINO ROYALE. What I can say is that despite featuring all the hallmarks of a Binatastic Low Rent night out, WAITING sucked ass. I set the bar pretty low when it comes to gross-out humour. I'll take Ryan Reynolds injecting a chocolate eclair with dog sperm and laugh my ass off. But this movie is just terrible. The basic premise is that a bunch of losers work in a crappy restaurent. To add purpose to their meaningless lives they adulterate the food. That's it! There is no humour, be it verbal witticism or just a chick slipping on some spilled pudding. I just give up. I cannot articulate how devoid of any entertainment value this movie is. And no, it is not so bad it is good. And it's not so "straight to video" that it will earn a cult following. So do yourself a favour, and Just Say No.

WAITING was released in the US last October and Australia last December. It opened in the UK yesterday and, I would imagine, will go "straight to video" everywhere else.

SCARY MOVIE 4 - less funny than just watching Tom Cruise

SCARY MOVIE 4 is not a satire on horror movies. It is a string of vague pastiches of recent films and events in popular culture that centre on the Tom Cruise vehicle, WAR OF THE WORLDS. It certainly isn't scary and spends little time spoofing the horror genre in the manner of the infinitely superior SHAUN OF THE DEAD. One of the sight gags consists of a cloud shaped like an arse farting lightning. If that makes you laugh, and good for you if it does, then you should check this movie out. To my mind, the chief targets of this movie - George Bush and Tom Cruise - are so easy to mock that the movie's writers have set themselves all too undemanding a target. What's worse, they have opted for low-grade funnies rather than anything more biting. Frankly, you can get a lot more malicious laughter from watching the actual Tom on Oprah footage or the banned episode of South Park, both of which are available on You Tube. A link to the first is underneath the title of this post. Enjoy!

SCARY MOVIE 4 is on global release.

JUST FRIENDS - not half bad!

JUST FRIENDS is really not as bad as the critics make out. Okay, so it won't win a Nobel, but as far as harmless, funny date flicks go, you can do worse. The flick stars Ryan Reynolds, otherwise known as Van Wilder: Party Liason, and the hot bod in Blade:Trinity. Ryan was a fat guy in school and accordingly never "boinked" his best mate, the hot chick cheerleader. Ten years later he returns to town, a slimmed down, rich music industry exec., ready to win back the girl of is dreams. Cue lots of holiday-related slapstick comedy involving incendiary Christmas decorations and ice hockey. Reynolds is really very funny, but the show is stolen by Anna Faris. She plays the ditzy blonde Paris-Hilton look-a-like wannabe pop star than Reynolds is managing. Like I said, this is not the best romantic-comedy ever made, but it is laugh-out-loud funny in parts and has a surprisingly sweet heart considering it was made by the guy who directed Cruel Intentions. One for dinner and a DVD, perhaps?

JUST FRIENDS is on general release in the UK and US. There are no scheduled release dates for Continental Europe.