Tuesday new-ish releases: 23 September 2025

The Long Walk, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, Sketch, The Bad Guys 2 and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey are in cinemas.

Momentum is an underrated commodity. After taking a few days off last week to painstakingly rebuild some critical workflows (in order to preserve the value of decades of muscle memory) I now find myself having to get this caravan moving again from a standing start.

Here’s a summary of what I’ve seen at the cinema recently to get the typing fingers moving again. I’ve yet to catch up with Splitsville or three of the school holiday releases: Dora: Magic Mermaid Adventures, Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie or Kangaroo.

Reader RI of Auckland emailed to say that The Long Walk was a favourite Stephen King story of his and he was curious to hear what I thought. Rich — I expect you’ve seen the film for yourself by now but here goes.

It’s one of those classic King “What if” stories, a deceptively simple premise but one that gives him — and his adaptors, director Francis Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner — plenty of room to test its boundaries. What if, in an alternative post-some kind of conflict United States, a young man is chosen to represent each of the 50 states in an athletic contest that would provide a spectacle to unite a recovering nation. What if, indeed? We’ve seen versions of this before. King’s The Running Man (soon to be rebooted with Glen Powell), The Hunger Games franchise (which Lawrence himself looked after for all but the first film) and the recent John Cena/Awkwafina vehicle Jackpot! which played the concept for laughs.

Of course, this is a dystopic scenario and the Long Walk contest is a vehicle for reinforcing fascist control. One young man will win a fortune and the granting of a wish but the other 49 will lose their lives — pour encourager les autres.

Each contestant is chosen by lottery, supposedly, but entering the lottery does not appear to be voluntary and the selection appears to be loaded by the organisers, in the shape of “The Major”, played by Mark Hamill in his second King-related role this year.

The walk is non-stop — not for sleep, food or even calls of nature. Hour after hour, mile after mile, these young men walk and, while they make something akin to friendships, they all know that the odds are stacked against them and no alliances will survive to the end of the contest.

While all of the characters are well-drawn, our focus is on Cooper Hoffman as Ray — the only character whose backstory we see — and David Jonsson as Peter. Even thought they form a bond, their motives are very different, because their stories are very different. One is on a mission of revenge because of what the regime has caused him to lose. The other started life with nothing and therefore sees the walk as a way to do some good for others, provided he can actually win it.

Uncommented on — but clearly important to the central metaphor of the thing — is the absence of women to the scenario, except Judy Greer as Ray’s mother. Seeing him off with a sandwich at the start, helplessly witnessing his deterioration from the sideline.

The Long Walk is about as bleak a story as I’ve seen in years. Lawrence eschews the high camp of the Hunger Games’ Panem for an arid mid-western semi-rural wasteland. You can feel the poverty, of hope as much as anything material. The sudden bursts of violence are shocking and gruesome. I thought for a while that they were too much — we get the point — but there’s nothing gratuitous about the violence and the visuals are just as awful as the psychological and emotional torture these boys are put through.

A thoughtful and sobering watch.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale was my first exposure to a franchise that I could have sworn had been around for decades I’m was assured by the editor-in chief it has only been 15 years. Time appears to do funny things in Downton as this supposed swansong seemed to take forever and fly by at the same time.

Like a radio soap opera given the big screen treatment, Downton is full of people telling you who they are and what they are thinking, over and over again, but there’s no denying that there’s plenty of production value to focus on while you tune out all that exposition. There’s not much that’s any good about the film — certainly very little in the way of drama — but I found myself not hating it by the time screenwriter Julian Fellowes finally pays off his creaky structure.

If you have kids that are too old for Dora the Explorer and Gabby’s Playhouse this school holidays and they feel up to something that hints at something more grown-up, you won’t go wrong with Sketch, a high-concept but low-budget fantasy adventure from the ‘wholesome’ company Angel Studios. Atheists can feel confident that they aren’t dropping their kids into evangelical propaganda and the kids will get a kick out of some slightly edgier thrills and spills than they might be used to.

Taylor, Amber and Jack Wyatt are mourning the loss of their wife and mother respectively, but are doing it alone and ineffectively. Amber (Bianca Belle) is the youngest and she’s poring her grief, anger and fear into some pretty disturbing artwork. Taylor, their dad (Tony Hale), is trying to keep the family together by never talking about their mother, even to the extent of selling the home they all lived in together.