Monday new releases: 18 August 2025

Nobody 2 and Jane Austen Wrecked My Life are in cinemas.

Firstly, I need to acknowledge the passing of the great Terence Stamp at the age of 87. He was from my part of the world — you could call it “my manor”. He went to school with the father of a pal I went to school with. Son of a tugboat stoker, he was working class but made it to grammar school and then a combination of his remarkable good looks and the socially mobile 60s meant he a chance to break out entirely and become one of the faces the era.

Despite being identified so completely with the 60s, Stamp only made nine films in the decade but what films they were: Academy Award-nominated for his first role, Billy Budd for Peter Ustinov, then The Collector (Wyler), early comic strip adaptation Modesty Blaise (co-written by Harold Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey!), Poor Cow for Ken Loach, Teorema for Pasolini.

After that he was constantly being rediscovered by new generations. General Zod in two Superman films in the 70s, then in the 80s he showed how his stillness could blow everyone off the screen in Stephen Frears’ The Hit. In the 90s he blew everyone off the screen with a feather boa in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and — my favourite of that period — The Limey for Stephen Soderbergh.

I recommended that film here back in October 2024:

The film is famous for using a Stamp performance from 1967 (in Ken Loach’s Poor Cow) for the flashbacks, and it works wonderfully well, but the device also serves to point up the parallels between Stamp’s ex-con Wilson and his target, Peter Fonda’s Valentine. For both of them, their heyday was the 60s. Indeed, Fonda tells his new young girlfriend at one point something like, “the 60s weren’t really the 60s, it was just ’66 and a bit of ’67". Both of them are out of their time for different reasons.

I’ve removed the paywall that usually goes up after 30 days so everyone can read it.

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Back to the present and Bob Odenkirk returns to the role that made him an action movie star, the ‘ordinary bloke who is also a retired hitman’ Hutch Mansell, in Nobody 2. It’s a simple but satisfying premise: take the most unlikely actor and put him at the centre of a John Wick-style bloodbath. Odenkirk famously only just survived a heart attack while working on Better Call Saul, so if I was him I’d be home with my feet up about now, but he seems intent on putting himself through the physical ringer once again.

In this new film, Mansell is on the kind of dreary professional treadmill that’s familiar to so many of us. The work is never ending, but not particularly satisfying. The boss (Colin Salmon) doesn’t understand — or if he does understand, he doesn’t care. There’s so much overtime, Mansell never gets to see his kids or hang out with his wife (Connie Nielsen).