Tuesday new releases: 9 December 2025

Eternity, Bolero, Five Night at Freddy's 2 and Nuremberg are in cinemas and Jay Kelly is streaming on Netflix.

Films about rules abound this week, or at least films that rely heavily on rules, sometimes to their cost.

The most arbitrary set of rules can be found in David Freyne’s Eternity which sets up a convoluted and illogical collection purely to try and raise the stakes of a classic screwball love triangle to breaking point.

First rule: everyone who dies goes to a holding pen that looks like a cross between a railway station waiting room, hotel lobby and convention centre in trade show mode. This place is called The Hub and everyone gets to spend seven days there adjusting to their new reality and deciding where of the many resorts/lifestyle choices we get to spend forever.

Second rule: Seven days appears to be a minimum. If you can’t decide after a week, you can choose to hang around The Hub but you have to make yourself useful.

Third rule: Everyone gets to choose an eternity experience. Even Hitler can lie one a beach forever if he wants to. This rule is made explicit early on solely to pre-empt any questions about whether this is heaven or not. No judgement, no awkward questions, let’s just quickly move on.

Fourth rule: If you change your mind and leave the experience you have chosen, you will be banished to a void, to nothingness. This seems harsh but, again, the rule is there to artificially increase the stakes for the characters, not to provide any philosophical consistency.

Old man Larry (Barry Primus) chokes on a pretzel at the gender reveal party for his new grandchild. Knowing that his cancer-stricken wife of 65 years, Joan (Betty Buckley), is not long for our world he elects to stay at The Hub until she can join him and they can decide where to go together.

Fifth rule: You will spend eternity in the body you were happiest in. This allows for our central couple to be played by Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen.

What Larry doesn’t realise is that Joan’s first husband Luke (Callum Turner) — who was killed in the Korean War — has been waiting 67 years for Joan to arrive and wants to pick up where they left off. The two men have entirely different visions for where they want which Joan away to and — I now realise that this might be a more conscious attempt to reflect their generational attitudes — neither seems terribly bothered about what Joan herself might want.

At no point does anyone consider that someone might want to spend the afterlife alone or with someone other than a spouse. Larry asks how the kids are doing but no one has any interest in, maybe, waiting for them to turn up so the family can be together again.

Eternity is a classic example of a tortuous scenario departing swiftly from logic and never returning, just so two egotistical men can bicker over a woman. There’s decent chemistry among the characters (Olsen is perfect) and the look and feel of the thing works well, but it’s a philosophical question that no one has been crying out to have answered.

The rules of Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 might be more apparent to fans of the video game (or people who paid more attention to the first film) but they felt just as ‘make it up was you go along’ as in Eternity.

The haunted animatronics of the first film or missing presumed broken and the pizza parlour where they wreaked their havoc is even more abandoned. Luckily, we discover that it was just a franchise of the original Freddy Fazbear’s where there are more of these spooky machines, if only the film could find a way to get there.