Monday new releases: 17 February 2025

Captain America: Brave New World, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and Heart Eyes are in cinemas, The Gorge is streaming on Apple TV+ and Elevation is streaming on Prime Video.

Captain America: Brave New World was – until very recently – supposed to be named New World Order until someone at Marvel/Disney saw the direction the real world was headed and thought better of it. Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson has officially graduated from Falcon (in the Avengers films) to Captain America after a Disney+ miniseries (Falcon and Winter Soldier) in which the powers-that be did everything they could to give the job to loyal blond-and-blue-eyed but temperamentally ill-equipped career soldier (Wyatt Russell) instead of the already proven African-American man anointed by Steve Rogers himself.

But this Captain America has come a long way from the fascist-fighting origins of the character and is now a tool of a United States régime led by former enemy of the Avengers, Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford), whose change of heart may not be reliable.

Whether an African-American man is acceptable as Captain America – either to the American public in the films, American audiences for the films or to African Americans themselves who are used to having their patriotism taken for granted and abused in equal measure – is the key subtext that has been set up for this film but it goes virtually unaddressed, leaving Mackie with almost no personal stakes in the story.

A mysterious island has been formed in the Indian Ocean (the result of the much-maligned MCU film Eternals in 2021) and it contains vast quantities of an extra-terrestrial super-element called Adamantium. Ross is attempting to negotiate a global pact that would share this new wealth rather than have it fought over, but someone is derailing his diplomatic efforts.

There are two things about this film that distinguish it from the pack and I’m not sure that either are enough for me to actually recommend it. One is that it actually looks like a film – there’s abundant grain and Kramer Morganthau’s cinematography brings this aspect of the MCU back to the slightly grittier political thriller roots of Civil War and Winter Soldier. Secondly, Ford (stepping into a role inhabited for five films by the late William Hurt) is giving it everything, treating this green-screened comic book movie with all the gravitas at his command. He looks like he’s having fun but at the same time he’s not winking at the camera. He’s present.

Nigerian-American director Julius Onah’s action sequences – especially the ones on the ground make sense but for a long time I’ve treated these as punctuation between the human bits that I’m more interested in, rather than the raison d’être of the films that Disney think they are.

Heroes are defined by courage and – since the arrival of a multiverse that has decimated the stories by eliminating risk for the characters – the Marvel movies have shown very little. Brave New World doesn’t change things much.

I had to confess to my commissioner at RNZ that I hadn’t actually seen any of the previous Bridget Jones films, thus taking me out not the running to produce a paid review for them. Of course, I’m aware of the cultural impact of all three, it’s just that my response to Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is as a film, not a Bridget Jones film.

And it’s a very pleasant couple of hours centred around a character who is roughly my age and dealing – comedically – with not-unrelateable concerns. Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is now a widow with two young children. She’s disorganised but doting but all three are still struggling with their grief. Contradictory advice from her friends is not helping but eventually a decision is made that Bridget should get back out in the dating pool and into the tired old cliché of “the apps”.

Romantic success (with a handsome young “garbologist” played by man-of-the-moment Leo Woodall) transfers itself to workplace confidence and things start looking up, except Woodall’s character may not be the best long-term replacement for her paragon of a former husband, Darcy (played in a ghostly cameo by Colin Firth).

The sentimentality works, as does most of the humour, except that they don’t feel like they come from the same film. The jokes don’t emerge from the characters and situations as much as are imposed on them by a team of writers who constantly need to remind us what the ‘com’ in romcom stands for.

As he is in most things days, MVP is Hugh Grant as the cad Cleaver. Not only is Grant crushing it in performance, the scriptwriters clearly know who this character is and write him accordingly. Not something that can be said for many of the others.

The parade of horror films into cinemas is the least edifying aspect of this job as I find myself unenthused to say the least at all of that gleeful murderous violence. Suffusing it with irony or satire doesn’t really help as I’m still left with the conclusion that these films aren’t made with the love of people at heart.

Talking of heart, the latest is a Valentine’s-themed slasher called Heart Eyes in which a masked serial killer finds ever more gruesome ways to dispose of happy couples celebrating romance.