This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
My secret shame as a satirist who also writes about film is that I’ve always admired This Is Spinal Tap more than I’ve actually enjoyed it. The mock-rockumentary following Britain’s loudest band on a failing tour of America is perfectly constructed, with every frame a knowing nod to one awful moment of music history or another. It is an inspired idea, brilliantly executed, and occupies a crucial space in the history of comedy. And yet.
Watching it again ahead of the sequel, I could see once again that it was note-perfect but I still didn’t actually laugh very much. Teenagers in the room wandered away. Perhaps, having been a little too young when it came out in 1984, I simply missed the moment.
I say all this so that you can decide for yourself what to make of the fact that I really enjoyed Spinal Tap II. A film about cashing in that is itself a cash-in, it is a reunion tour that’s a joy to behold.
After years without speaking to each other because of a mysterious rift, bandmates Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins and Derek Smalls are brought together by contractual obligations and the hope of some money. As they assemble in New Orleans for one last gig, documentary-maker Marty DiBergi is there to capture it all.
They are joined by a string of very good A-List cameos, including Paul McCartney and Elton John, but the film is stolen by Chris Addison playing a music promoter whose main idea is that the band should die on stage. This time, I did laugh, quite a lot, but I also found myself a little moved: as with the original, at its heart it is a story about friendship.
The film opens with something we haven’t seen in a long time: the logo of Castle Rock Entertainment, the production company set up by director Rob Reiner. During the 1990s, that logo promised a good time, gracing the titles of When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men, The Shawshank Redemption and many others.
Reiner took the company name from the fictional town in his hit film Stand By Me, about four teenage boys going on a walk to see a dead body, based on a novella by Stephen King, whose major books often make indifferent films, but whose minor books become terrific ones.
One of those minor books is The Long Walk, published in 1979 and finally making it to the screen this year. It too is about teenagers going on a journey that will feature corpses. But where Stand By Me spoke to the nostalgic, optimistic Reagan era, this is a film for a Trumpian time of delight in random public cruelty.
Set in an America that might be the future or the past, the film sees 50 young men competing for a huge cash prize — and the granting of any wish — by walking along a straight road at three miles an hour until only one of them is left. The catch is that those who fall out of line are killed on the spot.
It is strange to describe a film in which we see dozens of teenagers shot in the head as heartwarming, even sometimes funny, but like Stand By Me (and Spinal Tap) this captures something about male fellowship, the ease with which it can begin, the banter that sustains it and the heights it can achieve.
The two leads, Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, are excellent as desperate young men who form a bond that they know will end with one of their deaths. Francis Lawrence, the director, made four Hunger Games films, but it’s hard to see this launching a franchise. For that I’m grateful.
Back with stars approaching retirement age, in the space of a week this autumn we get two films in which a heavyweight actor plays someone coming to terms with bereavement by going on a journey to the place they first fell for their spouse.
Dead of Winter stars Emma Thompson as a widow in the frozen wastes of Minnesota, taking her husband’s ashes back to the lake where they fished together decades earlier. On the way, she stumbles across a kidnapping and, far from help, feels compelled to do something.
The accents and the blood in the snow inevitably evoke Fargo, but this lacks that film’s humour, offering instead a straightforward gripping tale. Shot in Europe with a tiny cast, it’s carried by Thompson. It’s not the sort of role we usually see her in, but she lifts it above the ordinary, completely believable both as someone grieving and as a resourceful woman of the icy north.
Mr Blake At Your Service is definitely the lesser film, though also the cosier watch. It’s a French movie starring John Malkovich as an Englishman who returns to the chateau where he met his wife 40 years earlier. He is, somewhat implausibly, mistaken for a butler, and over the course of the film he solves the various problems of the residents of the house without going on any real journey himself. It’s undemanding and occasionally funny but is in the end a feel-good Christmas movie that for some reason stars an Oscar-nominated actor more usually thought of as a villain.
