Bad Dads Film Review

This week, the Dads head into the Australian Outback to review Nicolas Roeg's mesmerizing and dreamlike 1971 survival drama, Walkabout . Dan kicks things off by admitting he completely confused this movie with A Far Off Place , spending the first hour waiting for a dog that was never going to appear. Once the confusion settles, Sidey, Dan, Reegs, and Cris dive deep into this visual masterpiec...

This week, the Dads pull out the red string and the newspaper clippings to review The Conspiracy (2012), a Canadian found-footage indie thriller written and directed by Christopher MacBride. With Pete away skiing (and tracking his WOD PRs), Sidey, Dan, Reegs, and Cris dive into a mockumentary that blurs the lines between actual historical psy-ops and deep web paranoia. In this episode: - Arsenal i...

It's conspiracies week at Bad Dads. All four dads — Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris — count down the Top Five Conspiracies before getting to Sovereign (2025), a devastating drama about a father and son in the Sovereign Citizen movement that made $63,000 at the box office and absolutely deserved better. In the Top Five: JFK — Oliver Stone's four-hour masterpiece of the grassy knoll, covered in...

This week Dan and Reegs review I, Swear — the 2025 BAFTA-winning film about John Davidson, the Scotsman with Tourette's syndrome who became an MBE, an advocate, and one of the most compelling biographical subjects in recent cinema. It's just the two of them this episode. There was also a hornet. In this episode: The BAFTA ceremony controversy — what actually happened, why the internet go...

This week the dads work late for Steven Shainberg's Secretary (2002) — one of the more unusual love stories in American independent cinema, and almost certainly the most interesting thing James Spader has ever worn a tie for. But first: a very thorough Top Five Secretaries list. Dolly Parton, Mad Men, Ghostbusters, Batman Returns, The Simpsons, Beetlejuice, Moneypenny through all her iteratio...

This week the dads tackle Paul Verhoeven's infamous erotic thriller — the fourth highest-grossing film of 1992 and quite possibly the most rewound VHS tape in rental shop history. Basic Instinct turns 33 this year, and it's still just as wild as you remember. In this episode: The legendary interrogation scene and the great Wayne Knight sweating debate Whether Sharon Stone knew — and whet...

 This week Sidey, Dan, and Cris fly solo — Simon's been called to Southampton on urgent business (he was spotted in a pub surrounded by tea cups, so make of that what you will).  The dads are reviewing Ballad of a Small Player (2024), the new Netflix film from Edward Berger — the director behind All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave — starring a very much on-form Colin Farrell.  The Fil...

This week's Midweek Mention takes us somewhere unexpectedly moving — Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters (1998), a fictionalized account of the final days of James Whale, the British director who gave the world Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein.  Sir Ian McKellen is extraordinary as the ageing, ailing Whale — a man whose health is failing, whose memories are fragmenting, and who has gro...

This week we go fully corporate: Top 5 Corporate & Tech Jargon — the phrases designed to sound like progress while delivering absolutely nothing. We’re talking circle back , take it offline , pivot , blue-sky thinking , synergy , and the whole “results-driven ecosystem” dialect spoken exclusively by people who describe themselves as “thought leaders” on LinkedIn. Then we hit the main feature:...

Bad Dads Film Review goes full courtroom chaos this week with My Cousin Vinny (1992) — the fish-out-of-water legal comedy where two broke New York kids take a wrong turn into the Deep South… and somehow end up charged with murder because of a misunderstanding that starts with a can of tuna . Sidey finally ticks off a long-standing gap (he’d never seen it), and we break down why this film still wor...

Bad Dads Film Review heads to the Italian Riviera this week for The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) — a sun-drenched, jazz-soaked psychological thriller where gorgeous people do terrible things, and the worst person in the room still somehow isn’t the guy committing the murders. We follow Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), a small-time grifter with big social ambitions, who’s handed a golden ticket: travel to It...

The premise (simple, but the film isn’t): A privileged but messy NYC teenager, Lisa (Anna Paquin) , causes a moment of distraction that leads to a bus hitting and killing a woman (Allison Janney) . In the immediate aftermath she lies to the police —claiming the light was green—helping the driver (Mark Ruffalo) avoid consequences. The rest of the film is Lisa spiralling through guilt, grief, anger,...

This week’s pick is Train Dreams : a quiet, meditative Netflix drama adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella, following the life of Robert Grainer (Joel Edgerton) — a logger and railroad worker drifting through early 20th-century America. It’s the kind of film that feels like a memory: sparse dialogue, heavy atmosphere, and a sense of time moving faster than any one person can keep up with. The openi...

This week we head into full remake territory with Doug Liman’s glossy, bone-crunching update of Road House . Jake Gyllenhaal steps into Patrick Swayze’s boots as Dalton: a drifter, ex–UFC fighter, and walking concussion who takes a job cleaning up a Florida Keys bar where violence isn’t a possibility — it’s a nightly guarantee. From the opening underground fight circuit to the neon chaos of the Ro...

This week Sidey watched Roof Man on a flight—and it turned out to be a surprisingly breezy true-crime oddity: part heist caper, part rom-com, all built around one ridiculous (but real) idea. What it’s about Channing Tatum plays Jeffrey Manchester , a struggling Army vet and dad who turns his “situational awareness” into a criminal superpower. His method is brutally simple: hammer through roofs, dr...

A gritty, twisty one-night siege thriller that actually looks great (yes, you can see what’s happening). The RIP throws Matt Damon and Ben Affleck into a paranoid, internal-corruption nightmare where everyone feels suspicious and every conversation sounds like it has a second meaning. The setup Miami PD captain Jackie Veles is executed by masked hitters after sending one last message and ditching...

We went in expecting a messy anthology and came out with a genuinely original love letter to Oakland, 1987 — four stories that start as separate vibes and then click together in the final act like a mixtape that suddenly makes sense. The setup is pure mood: people spilling out of a cinema after The Lost Boys , a bright green “something in the air” glow hanging over the city, and a pulpy, comic-boo...

This one starts the way all great cinema analysis starts: Dan’s birthday sandwich (father-in-law today, Dan tomorrow, Mrs the day after), a bit of life admin, and then straight into neon sci-fi with Tron: Ares . If your Tron knowledge is basically “glowing lines, lightbikes, and that vibe,” you’re fine — this film mostly plays in the real world , and asks a simple question: what happens when progr...

We start this one the only way we know how: Pete quits his job (casually), we open a bottle of potentially corked wine (possibly poisonous), and then—somehow—end up reviewing Avatar 3 , despite half the room not even watching Avatar 2 . Pete’s approach is simple: he’s not here to defend or attack Avatar. He’s here to report back from the front lines of three hours and ten minutes of James Cameron...

This week’s episode begins in full “Bad Dads” mode: we’re recording with barely any gear in sight, arguing about blinking lights, and realising—mid-flow—that “Island Week” might have scrambled everyone’s brains. But the chaos is fitting, because the film we tackle is The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) … a movie so famously cursed it feels like it was assembled in a panic from whatever footage survive...

This episode begins, as ever, in total disarray: missed jokes, football updates, wine anxiety, and the creeping realisation that the best material always happens before the mic is on. Then Dan drops a bombshell: The Night Manager is so tense he physically struggled to finish it. And that’s the hook. Based on John le Carré’s novel, The Night Manager is a six-part espionage thriller starring Tom Hid...

This episode begins the only way we know how: absolute chaos. We veer from wills, tits, and Stranger Things before eventually remembering we’re meant to be talking about a film. If you’re new here, that’s the show. The film in question is Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare — a swaggering WWII caper based on a real black-ops unit hand-picked by Churchill and Ian Fleming. Set in 194...

Benoit Blanc is back — but not in the way you might expect. In this episode, we dig into Wake Up Dead Man , the third entry in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series, and quickly realise this isn’t just another playful, sun-drenched whodunnit. The tone is darker, stranger, and far more morbid than Knives Out or Glass Onion , leaning hard into religious imagery, guilt, confession, and moral rot. Set arou...

Die Hard is the kind of “comfort violence” film that never gets old! It’s a Christmas film for structural reasons, not vibes. Christmas isn’t just background dressing. The party only happens because it’s Christmas, the building is half-staffed because it’s Christmas, McClane is only in LA because it’s Christmas, and Hans’ whole timing depends on a holiday lull. Remove Christmas and the plot collap...

Homoeroticism, honour codes, and the least festive “Merry Christmas” ever recorded. This week’s pick looks like a seasonal warm hug by title alone, but it’s actually a POW-camp psychodrama where Christmas is basically just another opportunity for humiliation, beatings, and cultural misunderstanding . The core triangle Lawrence (Tom Conti): the cultural bridge. He respects Japan’s traditions more t...