All Change (2025)
Some films are hard to grade precisely because they do nothing wrong. Joe Molander's All Change is one of those, a four-minute short that is competent, well acted and perfectly sincere, and that I still cannot talk myself into rating as anything more than average. Two and a half stars, and I mean that as the gentlest kind of middling.
The whole thing is a single conversation. Two old friends, played by Shaun Dingwall and Alexi Kaye Campbell, catch up after a long gap, trading the usual updates on life and children and the years gone by. Then the talk drifts somewhere more tender, as they circle the question of why the two of them never became more than friends all those years ago. The answer, it turns out, is the oldest one there is: both of them were too scared to act, and neither ever said a word.
It is a nicely observed little moment, and the two performances are what hold it together. Dingwall and Campbell have an easy, lived-in rapport that makes you believe in the decades of history behind the chat, and the film is smart enough to keep its revelation understated rather than spelling out the regret in neon. The closing image, one of the men left alone on a train with his own thoughts for the better part of a minute, is the strongest thing here, and it lets the melancholy settle without a word of dialogue to prop it up.
The trouble, if it even counts as one, is simply that there is not much here. At four minutes the film has time for exactly one idea, delivers it cleanly, and stops, and while the missed-chance premise is relatable and gently affecting, it is also well-worn ground that the short does not find a fresh angle on. I was moved a little and then it was over, and I would struggle to tell you what separates it from a dozen other well-made shorts turning over the same wistful regret.
Two and a half stars. All Change is a tidy, warm-hearted and nicely performed four minutes that does precisely what it sets out to do and nothing it should not. It is not a film with any real flaws, it is simply a slight one, and sometimes that is just where a piece lands. Worth a few minutes of your time, if not much more than that.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Driver (1978), Pride (2014), The Muppet Movie (1979)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More drama: Macbeth in Compton (2026), Something Pointless (2026), Home (2026)
