The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants ★★★★☆
Directed by Derek Drymon. Starring Tom Kenny, Clancy Brown, Rodger Bumpass, Bill Fagerbakke, Carolyn Lawrence. G cert, gen release, 88 min
After 26 years of nautical nonsense, SpongeBob SquarePants remains a seaworthy vessel, cruising familiar waters yet continuing to fill the hold with plunder. Whatever Christopher Nolan has achieved with his upcoming The Odyssey, his Homeric stylings won’t compete with the titular invertebrate’s journey to the underworld, where a three-headed seagull stands in for Scylla, and Sirens lure Squidward, SpongeBob’s long-suffering colleague and neighbour, with smooth jazz. You could watch it twice and have 10 times the fun before Avatar: Fire and Ash trudged into its final 20 minutes. Set sail for Pants! Full review TB
The Six Billion Dollar Man ★★★★☆
Directed by Eugene Jarecki. Featuring Julian Assange, Stella Assange, Jennifer Robinson, Pamela Anderson, Edward Snowden, Rafael Correa. No cert, limited release, 129 min
Jarecki’s Julian Assange doc may be the most chilling film of 2025, not least because of its clinical take on the elaborate machinery of state power, media hostility and private opportunism. Assange remains a spectral presence throughout, more talked about than seen. The director uses that space to explore a bigger story: the vast, interconnected system that made his destruction a priority. The results are as rigorous as they are alarming. Even if the 12 years the subkect spent in confinement don’t bother you, the apparatuses used to pursue him will give you the heebie-jeebies. Full review TB
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Avatar: Fire and Ash ★★☆☆☆
Directed by James Cameron. Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Oona Chaplin, Stephen Lang, Kate Winslet, Jack Champion, Giovanni Ribisi, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement, Cliff Curtis. 12A cert, gen release, 197 min
Latest exhausting epic in the tale of blue aliens and their human colonisers. This time we get variations on The Jungle Book and on Drums Along the Mohawk. The point of these comparisons is that, at its heart, the Avatar project is a hugely expensive, hugely confusing, hugely huge mechanism for reprocessing stories we first heard long ago. But little has been gained; little has been enhanced. Watching the aerial wagon-train sequence, one finds oneself longing to see the actual western that Cameron will now probably never get to make. Very dull. Will make $1 billion. Full review DC
Breakdown: 1975 ★★★★☆
Directed by Morgan Neville. Featuring Albert Brooks, Bill Gates, Ellen Burstyn, Frank Rich, Joan Tewkesbury, Josh Brolin, Martin Scorsese. No cert, Netflix, 96 min
Hugely entertaining documentary that starts out as history of American cinema in 1975 and develops into an analysis of the nation’s wider discontents. Breakdown: 1975, like the best films of that period, never lets up on entertainment as it pursues a serious end. We don’t get just Network and Harlan County, USA; we also get The Towering Inferno and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All contribute to sharp analysis of a body politic apparently unaware of its own psychological instability. Dickens was really on to something with that “best of times … worst of times” stuff. Full review DC
