Chapter 1: What films and TV shows are highlighted in this week's Watchlist?
Get in touch on WhatsApp 0870 32 32 32. You're all very welcome back. Well now, who needs movies and TV when you can make millions making videos about little diggers and lorries? But we're going to stick with TVs and movies because it is, of course, time for The Watchlist. And joining me today is Michael Dougherty, Movies Editor with the RT Guide and culture journalist Zara Hedman.
You're both very, very welcome. Thank you. There we go. Keanu Reeves, Zara, is one of the stars in Outcome. Tell me about it.
Yeah, so it's Jonah Hill's return to narrative based feature films. Keanu Reeves plays Reef Hawk, who had a breakthrough when he was six years old, tap dancing on the Johnny Carson show. He's now in his mid 50s and there is a bit of a scandal. His crisis lawyer, played by Jonah Hill, is telling him that there is a video that's coming out that
threatening to ruin his reputation in Hollywood and he's got this reputation as the nice guy. They're looking for 15 million so he goes on this like apology tour of trying to find out who in his life might have it out for him. So one of the people that he goes to visit is Martin Scorsese as his old childhood talent agent who's now working out of a bowling alley.
Then his mother who's like a real housewife star. So The premise is very interesting. Exactly. The premise is really good. It kind of fails to really grab you. I don't think Keanu Reeves is very right for this role. And also the direction is just a bit all over the place, especially in the kind of how he tries to satire the showbiz industry. It's just a bit trashy.
Fright or something, yeah. Michael, we were just chatting to her about kids and Netflix and everything, but there is a new movie based on a hugely popular video game, Exodate.
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Chapter 2: What is the premise of the movie 'Outcome' featuring Keanu Reeves?
Is that where Hollywood seems to be going for inspiration these days? Yeah, very much so.
Yeah, because you have a ready-made audience amongst the people who are cinema goers, you know, the 16 to 25. Now, I know nothing about the world of video games, so I was coming to this... It's a Japanese movie. It's a really interesting movie. It's part Kafka and part Black Mirror.
It's about a young guy who gets off at a tube station and he's distracted because his ex-girlfriend rings him and says, I'm pregnant, I'm in the hospital, we need to talk about what decisions are going to be made here in our lives. So he's very sort of You know, he's upset and he's out of kilter.
And as he's walking along the tube station, we notice that he seems to be going in a square, back to square one. And he's not exiting. He needs to exit at the aforementioned exit eight. And he can't get out. He keeps getting back to square one. And that's the premise of it. It's like a horror story. It's like a nightmarish scenario where you can't get out. You're in an eternal box.
Does it deliver? Is it as compelling as the premise?
It is actually. I didn't think it would be. I was thinking, well, how are they going to keep this going for 90 minutes? And it starts off, it's all first person point of view. So I said, oh God, you're going to turn it into like, you know, a VR first shooter type thing, video game. But actually it gets really interesting because you're sort of, you're putting yourself in his shoes.
How would I get out of this? And there are rules he has to obey. And if he disobeys them, he ends up staying in the box and it's frustrating. And there's all sorts of metaphors about life and being on the wheel and all the hamster wheel of life and it works very well it's a it's very simple tale but it's very effective and it's kind of a psychological horror drama that works
Yeah. Lee Cronin's The Mummy, Zara, is in cinemas now. It's got mixed reviews. The Guardian wasn't raving about it.
Yeah. And I saw it yesterday and I was really looking forward to it because I loved The Mummy franchise from the 90s version of Brendan Fraser. And obviously Lee Cronin has huge kind of reputation for like Evil Dead Rise, which was very successful. This one, though, it just felt a bit like he was trying to do an exorcist film.
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Chapter 3: How is the new video game movie 'Exodate' being received?
So it's basically, as you said, it's a ghost story. The ship, the aforementioned Rosa Nevada, suddenly turns up in port, having been missing for 30 years. And so the two young guys go on as deckhands and head off. And when they come back, they realise they're 30 years in the past. So it's a really interesting tale, really well shot by Jenkins because he's a masterly filmmaker.
And that sort of low budget filmmaking that he does lends itself to a ghost story because it's sort of staccato and because the sound isn't often perfectly in sync. I mean, it is, but it's not really. There's something about it because it's all been overlaid and overdubbed that adds to the spectral experience.
It's a limited release. I think it's in the Lighthouse. It is, yeah. Well worth seeing. 24th. Zara, I've never really got my head around Jennifer Lopez as an actress. You know, I've always kind of just have her in another box. And she always seems to kind of always be playing famous people. But Kiss the Spider Woman, this is her playing an iconic screen actress.
Yeah, and it's a remake of, there was a 1985 film by Hector Benvencho. William Hurt actually won an Academy Award for his part in it. So yeah, she plays this kind of fictional actress, Ingrid Luna, who one of our characters is obsessed with. So we have Diego Luna from Andor and Tontua, who is his cellmate in this film. It's set in Argentina in 1983. So there's great political upheaval.
There's kind of like a military running of the country.
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Chapter 4: What makes the Japanese film discussed a compelling psychological drama?
And the two of them are in this cell and they're very different people. But through Tontua's character, like telling his cellmate about this film and going through it, they start to build this friendship there.
And then we learn of kind of different dynamics between the cellmates as the film progresses, especially with how the like the police or the prison officials are trying to kind of maybe manipulate certain situations, get information. It's quite interesting. This adaptation initially, it was written for stage origin. You can really tell that like a lot of it just takes place in their cell.
And then they have these big kind of cartoons.
Which means you need to be able to carry that very well if it's very single location based.
Yeah, and the actors are very good. Like it did take about 10 minutes or so to kind of acclimatise to it. And then all of the cuts to the fictional film, they're really cartoonish, almost kind of made me think of like Singing in the Rain, how they have that technicolour kind of flatness, though, at the same time of depicting the studio system.
And another re-release or re-release is Akira, which I think was a cult favourite.
Yeah, a big one from 1988, cast Shiro Utama's film based on his manga of the same title. And it's just a really fascinating film to watch in 2026. So that film kind of jumps into the future for the 80s at the time. It's set in 2019 in Neo.
Oh, God, the future.
Yeah. In Neo Tokyo. And there's a bike gang. And you can see like the influence of this, especially when I was watching, I kept thinking of how like the Duffer brothers were drawing from this with Stranger Things. It's a really fascinating story of just like the projections of what they kind of imagined for the future and how.
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Chapter 5: What are the main themes in 'The Mummy' directed by Lee Cronin?
And he's absorbed within the community. And that became one of the great moments. And so it's him reflecting, Attenborough now, reflecting on those moments. And they follow what was called the Pablo. It's like the sort of Dan Fosse's group looked after those gorillas.
I think that would be something I will... Fantastic.
He is a great man. And this shows you why he became great.
Well, it is. And I actually am looking forward to watching that. But unfortunately, that is all we have time for.