I didn’t vibe with Idiots because I didn’t like any of the characters in Idiots. Sometimes that works. Sometimes you’re not supposed to like the people in a movie, and you can have something like The Drama or The Invite where most everybody involved is an asshole to one degree or another and the movie still works. The problem here is that none of these people were relatable to me and none of them were interesting or fun enough to make up for it. Dave Franco plays a stoner loser type, a middle-aged guy who’s basically a bum. He’s working with O’Shea Jackson Jr., and the two of them are supposed to transport a delinquent kid, played by Mason Thames, to where he needs to go. Then everything goes wrong. The kid is an asshole, and not in some fun movie way. He does really awful things to a lot of people and I kept waiting for the movie to give me a reason why I was supposed to overlook it or empathize with him. I didn’t. I think the kid needs to go to jail, and honestly the guys transporting him probably need to go to jail too. By the end the movie seems to want some kind of solidarity among these people because they’ve all been through this experience together, and I didn’t understand that at all. Everybody in this movie needed to go to jail as far as I was concerned. I didn’t like any of them, I didn’t vibe with any of them, and I didn’t enjoy spending time with them. This is competently shot, the acting isn’t bad, and these are professional actors doing what they’ve been given to do. I just think the story is bad and the characters are bad. I don’t understand why this story needed to be made, and I don’t understand what I was supposed to get out of it. I didn’t like it.

I liked this, though probably not as much as everybody else in my group, and part of that is that I was never very tied to Wile E. Coyote. I was not one of those kids watching the cartoons hoping the Coyote finally won. I thought he deserved to lose. He’s the one relentlessly trying to murder the Road Runner, who isn’t bothering him. Wile E. decides over and over again that he’s going to dedicate his entire existence to catching this bird, and then every Acme product he buys blows up in his face. That always seemed fair enough to me. The movie takes the position that maybe Acme bears some responsibility for selling this guy all these defective products, so Wile E. hires a struggling attorney, played by Will Forte, and sues the company. This is one of those live-action and animation combinations Hollywood used to make a lot more often. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the obvious classic. You had Space Jam. You had all sorts of movies where actors stood around interacting with things that weren’t actually there. I like that kind of movie, and this one was well done. I’m also glad it finally got released, because there was that whole battle with the studio when Warner Bros. decided it might make more money on a tax write-off than on actually putting the movie out. The finances are the finances, and the people putting up the money get to make decisions about their property, but it still sucks for everybody who spent years making the thing. So I’m glad it escaped and people got to see it. The basic premise is interesting. What I wanted was more of the larger Looney Tunes world. I don’t know what kind of access they had to these characters or what restrictions there may have been, but if you’re already putting me in this universe, give me more Bugs Bunny, give me more Daffy Duck, give me Porky Pig, let all of them wander through the thing. The movie would have benefited from having more going on than just the Coyote. I also didn’t feel particularly tied to Will Forte or Lana Condor here. They’re fine. I just didn’t care much about their characters. And I’m really not sure why John Cena needed to be in this movie. He’s playing the Acme lawyer and he sticks out like a sore thumb to me. Every time he showed up I was very aware that John Cena was in my Looney Tunes movie, and it threw me off. I enjoyed this anyway. We had a good time. I’m glad it finally made it out there and I recommend that you go see it.

This is another entry in what has become a pretty consistent genre of South Korean horror movies, specifically South Korean zombie movies. Obviously, everybody is going to compare these things to Train to Busan at some point, and this one has an even more direct connection because Yeon Sang-ho directed both. But this is trying to pick up some of that Train to Busan energy without really having the intellect or character work that made Train to Busan so good. This is a zombie movie. They’re fast zombies, which is already my preferred kind of zombie. These zombies can also learn and coordinate their behavior, so that gives the movie a little something extra to work with. If the humans figure out how to defend themselves one way, the zombies can start figuring out how to deal with that. That’s fun. But there’s really not much more to the movie than it being another zombie movie. South Korean films tend to be competently shot and well choreographed, and this is no exception. The action looks good. The zombies look good. When people are running around trying not to get eaten, everything works the way it’s supposed to work. The characters are just not very deep. They’re mostly playing different familiar tropes. You’ve got your evil scientist, your conflicted scientist, your corporate people, your people losing family members, your people making sacrifices. They hit the emotional beats that you’d expect them to hit without really doing a lot more with the characters. There’s a brother and sister pair here who probably have the strongest emotional material in the movie. That’s the one relationship that might actually pull a tear or two out of you by the time this thing is over. Other than that, it’s just competently done. And I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s perfectly fine. If you’re expecting greatness out of this, you’re not getting greatness. If you’re expecting goodness, there’s plenty of goodness here. It’s well shot, well choreographed, the zombies are fun, and it moves along. If you like zombie movies, I recommend it. Just don’t go into it expecting another Train to Busan.

I really liked It Ends. You’ve got a group of friends in their early twenties, several of them away at college, all together in a car heading home and reconnecting with each other. They have their own weird dynamic. You can tell that two of them have dated. One of them is basically the asshole of the group, and he stays the asshole. I’ve seen people criticize the movie because they wanted him to have some sort of transformation, and I don’t really need that. Sometimes your asshole friend just stays your asshole friend. That’s how he is. They’re driving home and eventually realize they cannot actually reach their destination. They can’t get off the road. They try different things, they keep driving, and the road just keeps going. That’s your movie. They’re trapped on an endless road with nothing but each other, and after a while it becomes really existential. At first everybody is trying to figure out how to escape. They drive for hours, then days, and eventually the amount of time they’ve spent out there just becomes absurd. There’s another part of the conceit that prevents them from simply stopping indefinitely, and I’d leave that out of any plot description because it’s better to find out when they do. The important thing is that they have to keep moving. So the question gradually stops being how to get off the road and becomes how long you personally could do this. How long could you sit in a car with the same three people, alternating drivers, talking, sleeping, waking up and realizing the road still doesn’t end? At what point would you just accept that you’re never getting off? I thought that was really smart. The actors have a lot of interpersonal chemistry, which is absolutely necessary, because the entire movie depends on you being willing to sit in that car with these people. Alexander Ullom wrote and directed this and I think he did a really good job. This is another one of these Gen Z productions that feels a little different from how established Hollywood probably would have handled the same premise. It has that youth vibe and it fits the cultural moment really well. We’ve been getting more of that recently with things like Backrooms and Obsession, where younger filmmakers are making things that actually feel like they come from their own generation rather than somebody older trying to write young people. I like seeing that. It Ends isn’t operating on the same scale as some of those movies, and it doesn’t need to. The other thing they got right was the length. It’s about an hour and a half, which is exactly what this needed to be. There’s an inherent monotony to a movie where the entire conceit is people driving endlessly along a road. Make this two hours and 20 minutes and eventually I may personally want to get out of the car. They don’t do that. Things keep rolling along just enough that I never got bored with it. The conversations change, the relationships change, and the way the characters understand what’s happening changes. I know critics really liked this and audiences have been more mixed. I understand why some people are going to find the whole thing monotonous, because that’s inherent in the premise. I didn’t. I thought this was thoughtful and really well done, and I recommend it a lot.

I saw The Dog Stars in Dolby Cinema on Sunday evening. If you’re going to see this movie, you really should try to see it in Dolby Cinema. It is beautifully shot. Whatever problems I have with the story, the movie itself looks gorgeous. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and you’re following Jacob Elordi as Hig as he goes about his post-apocalyptic business. He and Josh Brolin’s character, Bangley, live together on what is basically a ranch slash airfield, and they defend it from scavengers and anyone else who tries to encroach on their land. Usually they deal with those people pretty violently. The first part of the movie is mostly Hig and his dog going around doing Boy Scout-like activities. He’s helping out this local Mennonite group, delivering resources to them, letting their children play with his dog, and just generally trying to maintain some connection to other people. Hig and Bangley are really your two-man world at this point, and Brolin is playing sort of a mentor to him. I have to mention the Mennonites because this may be the most diverse Mennonite community I’ve ever seen in my life. Benedict Wong is apparently their leader, and this group looks like they stepped directly out of a Benetton ad after the apocalypse. I thought that was hilarious. They’re also about the least overtly religious Mennonites I’ve ever seen. I don’t know what they were going for there. Maybe somebody wrote “Mennonite community” into the script and then casting just decided to go sideways with it. Benedict Wong is a great actor, but he has almost nothing to do here, so I don’t really know why they needed him for this. Eventually something traumatic happens and Hig decides he needs to leave the little world he has built with Bangley and find out whether civilization actually still exists somewhere. He believes there may be something around Grand Junction, Colorado, so he gets into his plane and goes looking for it. On the way, he ends up crash-landing and runs into Margaret Qualley and her father, played by Guy Pearce, who are doing basically the same thing Hig and Bangley are doing. They’re living a closed life on their farm and defending themselves from scavengers. Then, of course, you have Jacob Elordi and Margaret Qualley standing next to each other in a world where there apparently aren’t many young adults left. So you know where that’s going. There’s nothing wrong with the acting here. Elordi is good. Qualley is good. Josh Brolin is good. Guy Pearce is good. Everybody is doing their damnedest. Ridley Scott is doing his damnedest. The script is the problem. There’s just not very much here that I found compelling. I understand the story. I understand that it’s based on a book. But it’s mostly hitting the basic post-apocalyptic beats that we’ve seen a lot of times. You’ve got scavengers, isolated survivors, people wondering whether civilization still exists, people trying to protect their little piece of land, and eventually the two attractive young survivors finding one another. The most interesting action in the movie is probably Josh Brolin dealing with these roving bands of meth-addled tattooed white people who are behaving almost like zombies. They’re not zombies. They’re apparently just people. But they behave enough like animals that we’re all supposed to be perfectly comfortable with Brolin killing tons of them. There is a very high body count in this movie. At times it’s almost like somebody wanted a little John Wick in their post-apocalyptic drama, except the movie doesn’t really live in the violence or have as much fun with it as the Wick movies do. Some of the violence is fun, but that’s not really what the movie is. Toward the end, when Hig actually reaches the place he’s been trying to get to, the movie takes a pretty wild left turn involving Allison Janney. I’m not going to get into that because it would spoil it, but that whole stretch is probably the strangest and most entertaining part of the movie. It’s also fairly predictable once you understand what is happening. I know this movie has gotten pretty poor reviews. I’m not giving it a poor review. I think this is a competently made movie that is beautifully shot and based around a weak story. That’s different. And honestly, this has been an issue with some Ridley Scott movies recently. Give the man a good script and he’ll give you a good product. But he’s not improving a weak script for you. If the script comes in weak, he can make an incredibly beautiful version of that weak script, but it’s still going out weak. I liked The Dog Stars enough to watch it. I’m not going to tell you that you need to rush out and see it. But if you have an opportunity to see it in Dolby Cinema, then I do think that’s worth doing because this thing is gorgeous there.

Boy meets girl and spends most of the movie failing to notice which girl he’s actually supposed to end up with. That’s the classic ‘90s and 2000s rom-com engine we all know from Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually, and it’s no accident Finding Emily comes out of that same tradition. We don’t get these much anymore. Everything has to be sophisticated now, and apparently you can’t just give us a romance. Well, that’s what this is. Spike Fearn plays Owen, a dopey young guy working around a university. He goes out, meets the girl of his dreams at a loud party, and hits it off with her before her friends start dragging her somewhere else, so she gives him her number on the way out the door. The next morning he wakes up and the number is missing a digit. He knows her name is Emily. That’s all he’s got. So the first stretch is him trying to find her. He tries different numbers. He puts up signs. Eventually he finds a way to get access to the university email records and decides he’ll write every Emily at the school, and instead of BCCing them he CCs them. Now every Emily on campus has every other Emily’s address, all of them have been conscripted into one idiot’s search for a woman he met once, and he has accidentally started a mass group conversation he cannot shut down. It goes about how you’d expect from there. The search follows him around campus. There’s the privacy problem, there’s the humiliation, and it starts eating into his life and his career, because now everybody knows exactly who he is and what he did. Somewhere in there he meets another Emily, Emily Raine, played by Angourie Rice, a psychology researcher who takes up his cause partly because she can get research out of it. She starts helping him look. I’m not giving anything away by telling you the movie begins nudging at something between Owen and the Emily standing right next to him while he hunts for the other one. That’s the movie, and that’s fine, because that’s what I came for. You know where it’s going. Watching them get there is the point. Fearn and Rice are charming together and I had a good time with this. It doesn’t need to reinvent the romantic comedy. That’s not what I wanted from it anyway. If you like rom-coms at all, this is a good one. I’m glad to see the genre isn’t dead altogether.

First half was stylish with beautiful cinematography, beautiful women looking beautiful, and some interesting fights with Yash killing everything. Despite those shiny positives, the 1st half overall was boring and trite. I was checking my watch an hour in. The interval was interesting enough to keep me from walking out. Finally something substantive happened. After that though… The second half was just a hot mess. I would call it AI slop, but I think that'd be an insult to AI. AI would give you a basic derivative plot that made sense. That's not what this second half was. There are no words really. I defy anyone to give a coherent explanation of what they were trying to do after the interval. And finally, of course, clown ninja paratroopers. If you nodded off midway through the second half and woke up to them, no, we can't explain it either. Three hours man...😮‍💨

My thought while I was watching was that the original must be a lot of fun for children and that the movie must follow enough of the material closely enough that fans enjoy seeing it brought to life. That would explain why it gets some love. Not a lot of love. But some. For me, I just could not happily spend nearly two hours doing this. I nodded off during the movie, and honestly I enjoyed the nap. It wasn’t a long nap, a few minutes here and there, but still. There’s not enough going on here for the amount of time they make you spend with it. I love Andrew Garfield. That’s my boy. Claire Foy does a good job and the adult actors are generally good. I don’t think the child actors were that great, so I guess I’m walking back the “all the actors were good” thing a little bit. The whole thing was boring and tropey to me. It does look nice. It actually looks very nice. So if you’re a kid, or you have children who have read The Magic Faraway Tree and already love this world, then by all means go see it, because there’s probably a lot more here for you. It just wasn’t worthwhile to me.

This is a horror movie built around a creepy children’s-show vibe. Keegan-Michael Key plays Buddy, this giant children’s television character, and the whole thing uses that bright, happy, slightly creepy kids-show energy as the foundation for the horror. I initially thought Black Mirror while I was watching it, although I’m not even sure Black Mirror is the right comparison. Everybody here accepts the basic rules of the world they’re in, and once you understand the structure of the movie, it’s actually a pretty straightforward horror film. The premise is interesting. I got what they were doing. The problem is that I got it pretty early. And then they kept doing it. There are twists and different things happening, but some of it just kept going longer than I thought the script itself justified. At some point, it stopped being interesting and started becoming tedious. Honestly, I think this would have worked better as something like a web series or a long episode of television. Give me about 40 or 50 minutes with this premise and I probably would have enjoyed it more. Spending an hour and a half with it was just too much. The obvious problem is that you can’t really put a 45-minute movie into theaters. So maybe this simply wasn’t the right format for the idea. I don’t dislike Buddy. There are interesting things here. I thought it was okay. But by the end, I was getting tired and getting close to nodding off, and that’s really not where you want me during your horror movie. It’s mediocre to me mostly because of the length. There just wasn’t enough premise here to support the amount of movie they made out of

I’ve seen SIX the Musical Live! a couple of times in theaters over the last few weeks and I really enjoyed it. This seems to be something they’re going with now, bringing popular theater productions and proshots into movie theaters, and I’m completely good with that. Hamilton did it. Hadestown did it. Now we’ve got SIX. If you don’t know the premise, the six women are playing the six wives of Henry VIII, and basically they’re a girl group. They’re competing with each other over which one of them had it worst being married to Henry, so each Queen gets her chance to make her case, her solo, her turn as the star. While one of them is having her moment, the other five have to turn around and become her backup singers and dancers. I really liked that. All six have good voices, all six have a lot of energy, and they’re doing an awful lot of dancing throughout this thing. The dynamic where everybody gets her chance to shine and then has to be willing to step into the background and support one of her sisters when it’s her turn is probably the thing I enjoyed most. They really do start feeling like an actual girl band. The Queens. The musical itself isn’t particularly long. It’s basically just enough time for all six women to get through their material without dragging the premise out. My one complaint about the movie presentation is that they put a documentary about the musical before the actual musical, around 20 or 25 minutes of it. Why? That is so strange. Normally you show me the performance first and then, if I want to stay afterward and watch everybody talk about how they made it, I’ll do that. Putting the behind-the-scenes material ahead of the thing I’m actually there to watch feels backwards. Bad choice. Once the musical starts, though, I had a great time, and I still feel the same way I did after Hadestown. I want more of these. I don’t know exactly what the economics are and I don’t want to advocate for something that ends up hurting Broadway or live theater, but there has to be some way to take productions that have had their run, preserve really good casts and performances, and make them available to people all over the country and all over the world who are never going to get to New York or London to see them. SIX is another example of why I think that’s worthwhile. If you like musicals at all, I really recommend this. It’s very well done.

This is s as biopic of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavik Summit in 1986 trying to negotiate major reductions in the nuclear weapons programs of the United States and the Soviet Union. This wasn’t actually their first face-to-face meeting. They’d met in Geneva the year before, and Reykjavik was the follow-up where they got remarkably close to some extremely ambitious reductions before the negotiations broke down. This was obviously a huge moment in history, the two of them sitting down and basically feeling one another out. The background is that the Soviet Union under Gorbachev was under enormous financial pressure. Trying to keep up with American defense spending was killing them, their economy was struggling, and Gorbachev had very good reasons for wanting to reduce the burden of the arms race and move those resources somewhere else. The Americans did not fully understand how much pressure the Soviet system was under. So neither side entirely knows where the other side is coming from. They don’t know how serious the other side is, they don’t know whether somebody is trying to trick them, and nobody wants to be embarrassed publicly or walk out of the room looking like a fool Most of the movie is Reagan and Gorbachev talking through all of that. It’s told more from Reagan’s point of view, although you do get some sense of what Gorbachev is trying to accomplish. The wives become your B plot. Nancy Reagan stays home while Raisa Gorbacheva travels to Iceland with her husband and gets a lot of attention. Nancy had originally wanted to go, but she and Ronald decided it might be a distraction, and then Raisa shows up and makes a spectacle of herself, at least from Nancy’s perspective, and now Nancy is sitting at home watching all of it happen. It turns into this strange little competition between the wives. Then you’ve got the C plot with the CIA and KGB people in the basement basically sharing office space while their bosses negotiate upstairs, which I thought was amusing. Overall this is well done. My problem is that I already knew most of the underlying history, so it played dry for me. If this material is new to you, I think you get considerably more out of it, because you don’t know where the negotiations are going or what everybody is trying to accomplish. I already knew the basic facts, I knew where the sticking points were, and I knew they weren’t going to walk out of Iceland having abolished nuclear weapons. There wasn’t much here that surprised me. The other thing hanging over the movie for me is where we are now. A lot of the nuclear arms-control framework that developed during and after this period has been walked back. The United States and Russia are not in a particularly cooperative place right now, arms control has broken down in a lot of ways, and we’re back to talking about expanding nuclear capabilities. So you’re watching Reagan and Gorbachev sitting there 40 years ago seriously discussing whether they might dramatically reduce or even eliminate whole categories of nuclear weapons, while knowing that we’re moving in the opposite direction again. That makes the whole thing feel less like a victory. Maybe it makes it more important historically. It just doesn’t feel triumphant. This is a good movie. The characterizations are good and the actors are good. If you’re interested in historical drama or political negotiation you’ll probably like it. I just found it a little boring because I already knew where all the roads led.

I really did not know what to make of this going into it. Even from the trailers, I could not get a good read on what Jane Schoenbrun was trying to do. Was this going to be a generic slasher? Some kind of body-horror thing? Body dysmorphia? Gross-out horror? I don't particularly like gross-out movies, and even the word "miasma" makes me think of something gross, slimy and icky. So I went in hesitant. I liked this very much. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a filmmaker brought in to resurrect the fictional Camp Miasma slasher franchise, which has been run into the ground by years of sequels. Gillian Anderson plays Billy, the original film's final girl, now an aging and deeply reclusive movie star who has essentially disappeared. Kris becomes convinced that she needs Billy in order to understand what this franchise actually was and what a new movie should be. From there, the movie turns into something much stranger than a straightforward movie about making a horror movie. Gillian Anderson is phenomenal in this. Oscar-level performance to me, period. I did not know she could pull off this Southern accent either, but she does. Billy is really the center of the movie for me because you're never entirely certain how much of what she is telling Kris should be taken literally. The movie moves between reality, fantasy, movie mythology, sexuality, memory, psychosis and whatever else is happening here without always drawing a clean line around any of it, and I liked that. Kris comes into this with her own interpretation of Camp Miasma. These movies played a formative role in her own sexuality and her understanding of herself as a queer woman, so naturally she looks back at the franchise and sees all of those things inside it. Billy keeps pushing back. As far as Billy is concerned, Kris is trying to turn the movie into something it wasn't. The story was about Little Death. Stop trying to rewrite it into something else and understand the story that was already there. That push and pull was fascinating to me. There are also hints, and then considerably more than hints, of attraction between Billy and Kris. They have fun chemistry together, but the movie is doing more with that than simply setting up a relationship. It's dealing with horror movies as formative experiences, what they mean to teenagers, sex and fear getting tangled together, and the way some movie you watched when you were 14 or 15 can attach itself permanently to the way you understand yourself, even though the people who made the damn thing may insist it wasn't about what you think it was about at all. There are layers to this, and I don't really like jumping on the bandwagon just because everybody else says some art-house movie is brilliant before most people have even had an opportunity to see it. That's not particularly interesting to me. But in this case, I get it. I think this is one of the most well-done films of the year. If you're interested in horror, see it. If you're interested in art-house movies, see it. Honestly, if you just want to go to the theater and see something interesting that gives you something to think about afterward, see it. Gillian Anderson alone is worth the ticket, but there's a lot more here than Gillian Anderson. I thought this was really, really good.

Tony is about Anthony Bourdain before there was really an Anthony Bourdain anyone would have cared about. It starts with him at 19 years old and follows him into the summer that first puts him into a restaurant kitchen. Young "Tony" starts out thinking he's going to be a writer, or at least he likes telling people he's going to be a writer. He tells everybody he's gotten this writing fellowship in Provincetown. We know he's not actually the guy who got it. But the girl he's chasing is going to be there, and he's determined to go anyway, so off he goes. He shows up unannounced in Provincetown and spies her kissing some other guy. Tony flips out, gets drunk, starts a fight at a restaurant, gets thrown out, gets his ass kicked, robbed, then somehow manages to go back, apologize and worm his way into a job washing dishes. And thus begins Anthony Bourdain. What I like about this movie is that it does not pretend young Anthony Bourdain was secretly this wonderfully evolved, insightful guy just waiting for the rest of the world to notice him. Bourdain himself certainly did not describe that kid that way. He described his younger self as spoiled, narcissistic, self-destructive and badly in need of an ass-kicking. That's basically the movie. Tony is a narcissistic little teenage prick, and that is both what makes the movie interesting and what makes it irritating. He's an asshole. He lies to people. He builds relationships and then fucks people over. He goes after women and I frequently don't know why any of these women should want anything to do with him. He thinks he's smarter than everyone else in the room when he very clearly doesn't know what the hell he's doing. He thinks he can cook. He can't. He thinks he's socially sophisticated. He isn't. He thinks he has skills. He is basically useless. That's where Antonio Banderas comes in, and Banderas is phenomenal here. His character gives this random obnoxious kid who has already gotten drunk and started a fight in his restaurant a chance anyway. He puts Tony to work. He tries to teach him skills. He tries to teach him responsibility. He tries to get him to understand that you actually have to do something before you can spend your life telling everybody how good you are at doing it. Banderas is the warm beating heart of the movie. Every time he's on screen, I wanted good things for this man. There is just this warmth Antonio Banderas can bring onto a screen when he wants to. He's got that quality, that star quality. He can play someone sinister and make you feel entirely differently about him, but when he's asked to bring warmth into a character, he can practically heat the theater. He's fantastic. Then you've got Leo Woodall as Sal. Sal is older than Tony, but not that much older. He's the guy Tony looks at and thinks, "That's what a man is supposed to be," which is unfortunate because Sal is also kind of a prick. He's just a much cooler prick. He's good with women. He's confident. He says whatever the hell he wants. He does whatever the hell he wants. He pushes people around. He gets away with shit. Naturally, Tony thinks this guy is awesome. So Tony has these two competing models of adulthood sitting around him. Banderas' character is trying to teach him discipline, responsibility and an actual craft. Sal is demonstrating that if you're sufficiently charming, you can apparently run around doing whatever the fuck you want. Guess which one the 19-year-old narcissist finds more interesting? Leo Woodall is very good here. I've been impressed with him over the last year or so. He has this natural energy and charm that works on screen. We've seen another version of that recently, and I think at this point he's demonstrated that he can carry more than just supporting parts. He's got enough charisma to lead movies. This year has obviously been dominated by people like Zendaya, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson and Timothée Chalamet popping up everywhere, so Woodall isn't getting quite the same "this is his year" narrative. But he's had a hell of a year too. I think we're going to see a lot more of him. Dominic Sessa also has a difficult job here because Tony is the protagonist but the movie does not make him particularly likable. You can understand him. That's different. He's 19. Nineteen-year-olds are allowed to be idiots. There's plenty of room for somebody that age to fuck things up and become a completely different person later. And obviously, because we know who Anthony Bourdain eventually becomes, we know this useless little asshole eventually turns into a skilled chef, a great writer, an exceptional conversationalist and one of the more interesting cultural figures of his era. We also know all of the edge never completely disappeared. Bourdain could still be abrasive as an adult. Some people still thought he was an asshole. So the question throughout Tony becomes how much progress this kid is actually going to make. You keep waiting for it. You want somebody to knock some sense into him. A parent, a chef, some random guy on the street, anybody. There were multiple times during this movie when I just wanted somebody to punch Tony in the face. Considering Bourdain's own assessment that he badly needed a good ass-kicking, maybe that means the movie has characterized him perfectly. But it gets tiresome. There's only so much bandwidth I have for watching a rich white kid fuck everybody over and somehow keep getting another chance. That's not really an experience I identify with, so I could see somebody getting exhausted with him before the movie is over. I did not. I was irritated by him, but I really enjoyed the movie. Maybe that's the best thing Tony does. It gives you Anthony Bourdain without turning Anthony Bourdain into a saint. He's not the guy from Parts Unknown yet. He's not the great writer. He's not the beloved traveler who could sit down almost anywhere in the world and talk to somebody over a bowl of food. He's a 19-year-old prick washing dishes in Provincetown, and somebody has to start somewhere. This is really good. Watch it.

Spa Weekend is a comedy-drama for the wine-mom crowd. That's not an insult. That's just very clearly who this movie is for. Leslie Mann, Michelle Buteau, Anna Faris and Isla Fisher play four longtime friends who end up together at a luxury spa weekend. The basic gag is that three of them are trying to have a relaxing adult-girlfriend getaway and their trainwreck friend shows up and blows everything apart. This was specifically coded for white women. Again, that's not even necessarily criticism. I've seen versions of this exact movie made for Black women. I've seen versions made for Asian women. This is the white-woman version. Wine, spa, husbands, ex-husbands, careers, kids, old resentments, and one friend everyone secretly can't stand but somehow they've remained friends for 30 years anyway. Okay. I did not enjoy this. I can't even really say I disliked it. I was bored, and there were parts where I started nodding off. Michelle Buteau is fun. I generally like seeing her in things anyway, and her relationship drama gives her something to play with. Anna Faris is Anna Faris. I love Anna Faris, and she is funny here because she is basically always funny when somebody gives her comedy to do. She's the friend who gets run over by everybody else, doesn't really stand up to her friends or her boss, and Faris does what she can with it. Isla Fisher plays the trainwreck friend, and apparently the assignment was to have Isla Fisher be gorgeous while doing increasingly obnoxious things that should make everyone in the group stop inviting her places. She's very good at the gorgeous part. The rest of that character I don't particularly understand. These women love her because the script says these women love her. Fine. Leslie Mann is basically the central character, and she's doing Leslie Mann things. She's perfectly capable. Everybody here is capable. I just don't understand why I needed to see this in a movie theater. This is a Netflix movie. This is precisely what Netflix is for. Sunday afternoon, you're sitting around, you've got absolutely nothing to do, maybe you've got a wine cooler if you're the type of person who drinks wine coolers. I am not that person. Put this on in the background. I don't wish I hadn't seen it. That's too strong. I just don't think I should have bothered.

This is a Jason Statham movie. That's basically the review. I could barely even remember the title while I was writing this review. Had to stop and check. It's Mutiny. Why is it called Mutiny? I don't know. There was no mutiny. There is a ship, so... okay. Jason Statham plays a former Special Forces/NYPD guy now working private security who gets framed for murdering his billionaire boss and eventually ends up on a cargo ship uncovering an international conspiracy. But none of that really matters. Jason Statham is Jason Stathaming. There's an entire class of movie now that I would just call the Jason Statham movie. Some woman or group of people is in danger. Usually there is an international component. Frequently there are Asian characters involved. Somebody has done something they should not have done. Jason Statham must now punch, kick, stab and shoot everybody between himself and the resolution of that problem. That's it. He's going hand-to-hand, gun-to-gun, knife-to-knife, whatever we've got. I don't understand how they keep making these, although I suppose the answer is obvious. Guys like me keep paying to watch them. It was at least nice that the American military gets to play relatively straight heroes here instead of discovering in the third act that the evil conspiracy was secretly a government conspiracy. So there's that. The twist is that there's no twist. But this is not good. It's also not offensively bad. It's just Jason Statham. There is no reason to watch this unless you specifically want to watch Jason Statham do Jason Statham things. You could ask ChatGPT or Claude, "Give me a Jason Statham script involving a billionaire, a conspiracy and a cargo ship," and I promise you, you'd get Mutiny. I'm fairly certain that AI actually wrote this movie tbh. No thought. No character study. Nothing particularly interesting happening with the choreography. Jason shows up. Jason beats people up. Movie ends.

I saw The Wrong Girls. I know I saw The Wrong Girls. I remember physically going to the theater to see The Wrong Girls. Beyond that, I've got bupkis. Apparently Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat play two aimless women who accidentally ingest an experimental drug, develop telepathic abilities and end up being chased by people who want the same substance. Reading that description back now, I'm like, "Oh yeah. I guess that happened." I vaguely remembered somebody getting mistaken for somebody else's girlfriend and drugs being involved and the two women getting dragged into increasingly ridiculous shit together. That is apparently not even really the plot. That's how little impression this made on me. Usually when I don't remember a movie, I at least remember whether I slept through it. I don't remember having a good nap during this one, so apparently I was awake. I couldn't tell you what I was awake for. Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat are doing a stoner-buddy-comedy thing. They fight each other, they fight everybody else, they stumble through whatever conspiracy they're trapped in, and eventually the movie ends. I saw this on the 19th. This isn't something I saw six years ago. It was four days ago. Zero impression. I'm sorry to everybody involved. Maybe if I had reviewed it that night, I would have had something intelligent to say. I didn't. Two stars. I'm out.

This is Matthew McConaughey being very Matthew McConaughey-y for a good half of the runtime, which is either going to work for you or it isn't. It mostly worked for me. McConaughey plays Amziah King, a beekeeper, honey producer, folk musician and charismatic little Pied Piper of his rural Oklahoma community. He has this group of people around him who work with him, play music with him, follow him around and generally seem willing to go wherever Amziah tells them to go. He's also a relatively recent evangelical Christian, and that becomes another part of the strange collection of things that make up this guy. Angelina LookingGlass plays Kateri, his former foster daughter, who comes back into his life and gradually becomes part of the honey business. The first half of this movie is extremely folksy, and I mean that literally. There is a lot of folk music, a lot of people sitting around, and a lot of McConaughey bringing everybody together. There are funny little set pieces around the beekeeping operation, including one involving bees getting somewhere they absolutely should not be. There are oddball characters floating in and out. Kateri discovers that she seems to have the same natural affinity for the bees that Amziah does, and you spend a lot of time just watching these two reconnect and him teach her the business. I liked all of that. Then something happens and the movie basically becomes a different movie. Suddenly we're in a revenge story. Then we're flirting with a gangster movie. The tone changes considerably, and the friends I saw it with thought the second half was where the thing really picked up. I don't know that I agree completely because I liked the first half for what it was, but the second half certainly has more plot. The problem for me is where the movie ultimately goes with some of its characters and the decisions they make. I'm not going to spoil that because a lot of the fun here is not knowing exactly what kind of movie you're watching until it turns into that movie. But there are choices toward the end that I don't think work, either morally or in terms of the characters the movie has spent all this time building. I could understand what the writers wanted me to accept. I'm just not sure they earned it, and that's frustrating because I think they had a chance to make something really good here. Not great, but really good. Instead, I think it lands a little flat because the movie's own sensibilities get in its way. Still, I enjoyed it. McConaughey carries the first half on pure McConaughey energy. If you can take two hours of folk music, beekeeping and Matthew McConaughey being Matthew McConaughey, you're probably going to have a pretty good time. If that sentence sounds exhausting to you, then the first hour may feel like it's 14 hours long. The second half is going to depend much more on whether you get attached to these people and whether you can ride with the choices they make once things get ugly. I could not entirely. But this is fun. It's interesting. It's different. I'm going to tell you to see it. I'm not going to tell you it's great. It's pretty good.

I went into Nimrods skeptical because I don't even particularly like Green Day. I know their music. Of course I know their music. I'm an elder millennial. Green Day has basically been playing somewhere in the background for my entire life. I know the singles. I know the hits. There are two or three songs basically everybody my age knows. But I'm not sitting around listening to Green Day albums. So when you tell me somebody made a Green Day movie, that's not an automatic sell. This turned out to be one of the better band movies I've seen in a while. The setup is that three teenagers in a garage band manage to hand Green Day a demo at a record-store appearance. A prank then convinces them that Green Day has invited them to open a New Year's Eve show in Los Angeles. The kids believe it and set off from Kansas City for California. That's your movie. Three teenage idiots in a band believe they're about to get their big break, so they get on the road and go chase it. Classic coming-of-age band movie, and it works. The Green Day music is used really well. Obviously, Green Day was deeply involved with the project, so whenever one of their songs comes in, it's there because somebody understands exactly what that song means and where to put it. The kids worship these guys. Green Day is basically their Beatles. The whole thing is an ode to garage bands, to getting together with your friends and playing music badly until maybe eventually you play it well, to believing when you're 17 that your shitty little band could somehow become the biggest thing in the world. Then the credits connect that back to pictures of Green Day when they were basically those kids themselves. That all works. Here's my problem. None of these are 2026 teenagers. Absolutely not. These are 1998 teenagers who have somehow been dropped into 2026 and nobody told them. The way they talk is wrong for now. The way they dress is wrong for now. The way they interact is wrong for now. The amount of time they spend physically together without staring at their phones is wrong for now. Their entire relationship to music is wrong for now. These are millennial kids. Maybe late Gen X. Maybe very early 2000s. But this culture where a bunch of teenagers are just milling around smoking, drinking, listening to albums, starting garage bands and physically existing together for hours without everything being mediated through their phones does not exist like this anymore. I wish it did. Maybe that's part of why I liked the movie. The filmmaking even reinforces it. The texture of the thing feels old. Not 1960s old. It feels 1995-to-2005 old. The whole thing feels like America somewhere around 1997, and apparently we're supposed to be in 2026. So the movie operates in this weird space that is almost magical realism, except the magical world is just America 25 years ago. It's a millennial dream of what teenagers still are, or maybe what wealthy millennials who made it through that period wish teenagers still were. These filmmakers grew up around this particular musical culture, became successful, and appear to have preserved the world they remember in amber. Then they populated that world with modern kids without realizing modern kids do not actually live there. That's fascinating to me, and it's also a lot of criticism for a movie I'm giving four stars because I really enjoyed it. Whatever reality this is supposed to exist in, I had a good time there. If you like band movies, see Nimrods. This is a great addition to the genre.

Damien Chazelle takes two people trying to make something of themselves in Los Angeles and turns their relationship into a classic movie musical, a love story and basically a love letter to Los Angeles all at the same time. The music is great. The visuals are great. The performances are great. I love everything about it. There are movies where the musical numbers feel like interruptions from the movie, and then there are actual movie musicals where the music is the movie. This is the latter. Gosling and Stone are just ridiculously charming together, which of course we already knew from the other movies they had done together, but this is the movie that uses that chemistry best. I think there's something about the ending and the larger relationship here that makes this more than just a pretty musical. It's about the people who become part of your life while you're becoming whoever you're going to be. Sometimes those relationships are permanent and sometimes they aren't, but that doesn't make them meaningless. It's a love letter to human relationships just as much as it is a love letter to Los Angeles and old Hollywood musicals. Obviously, this was a huge movie. It was a box-office success, an awards success and a major moment for both Gosling and Stone, although neither one particularly needed La La Land to prove they could act. Ten years later, it still works. I saw Train to Busan and La La Land in the same week because AMC brought them both back for their 10th anniversaries. 2016 was apparently doing okay. I managed to drag people with me to the rerelease of Train to Busan. I could not get them to La La Land. Their loss.

This is basically Jurassic Park 2 as far as I'm concerned. I know there have already been approximately 47 Jurassic Park movies. I'm skipping over all of those. This is Jurassic Park 2. A suburban American neighborhood gets ripped out of the present and dumped into a prehistoric world full of dinosaurs. The family at the center of it, led by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, has to figure out how to stay alive and whether there is any way home. This is the best dinosaur movie I've seen in quite a while. Anne Hathaway is good. Ewan McGregor is good. They're playing a marriage that was already in trouble before the dinosaurs showed up, which is probably not the ideal time to work through your marital issues. Hathaway's character is the pragmatist. McGregor's is the optimist. She's already unhappy with their life and their marriage at the beginning, and there's this idea that she wants to leave all of this behind and go pursue her own ambitions. Then suddenly the entire neighborhood is sitting millions of years in the past, and whether you were contemplating moving to New York seems substantially less important. He believes they'll find a way home. He's religious. Their son shares some of that faith and optimism. Hathaway and the daughter are much more skeptical. I liked that dynamic. My biggest problem with the movie is actually the neighborhood. Where the hell is everybody? Your entire American suburban neighborhood has just been transported into dinosaur land, and everybody apparently decides the best survival strategy is to stay in your individual paper house until something with 80 teeth comes through the wall. Human beings are social animals. That's basically our superpower. We survived things vastly stronger than us because we organize. If Oak Street got transported into the Jurassic period, I promise you by about hour three somebody would have formed a neighborhood association with guns. Somebody's dad would be standing outside saying, "Okay, these six houses cover the north side." There would be food pooling. There would be watches. There would be arguments. There would absolutely be one guy insisting he is now in charge because he owns the largest grill. Something. Instead, the family barely engages with anybody. The daughter gets one neighbor girl whose primary reason for existing appears to be that the movie needs her to have a love interest. So we're doing the old '80s/'90s coming-of-age trope where the teenager finds romance in the middle of catastrophe, except this time the teenager is a girl and the crush is another girl. Okay. You changed the gender. The trope is still the trope. There's nothing wrong with the character. She's just poorly written because the movie barely gives her a reason to exist outside of being the daughter's love interest. Then there is the obnoxious neighbor, and naturally he receives dinosaur justice. Dinosaurs are extremely judgmental in these movies. You are obnoxious? A dinosaur will find you. That's just how it works. Despite all of that, I really liked this. It's a good dinosaur movie. It looks good. The family works. The survival stuff works. Hathaway and McGregor work together. The movie understands that seeing normal suburban things suddenly surrounded by prehistoric predators is inherently entertaining. I'd see it again. That's basically my baseline for whether a movie is good. I'd see this again.

I saw the 10th-anniversary rerelease of this last week, and this is still phenomenal. A father gets on a train with his young daughter to take her to Busan to see her mother. Somewhere around the time they're boarding, an outbreak begins. One infected woman makes it onto the train, and then you're off. Zombies on the train, zombies outside the train, zombies following them through the train, zombies everywhere. This is the day-zero zombie movie done about as well as I think it can be done. Honestly, I think it's the best version. Everything works. It's well shot. It's well cast. You have protagonists worth cheering for. You have antagonists on the train who you absolutely want to see get what is coming to them. You've got Ma Dong-seok as Sang-hwa, who remains one of the great "I want that guy on my zombie team" characters ever put on screen. And you've got fast zombies. Fast zombies are the best zombies. But importantly, they're dumb fast zombies. That's the only way fast zombies make logical sense. If the zombies are faster than you, stronger than you, tireless and intelligent, everybody is dead in 12 minutes. Movie over. These zombies are terrifying because they move like hell, but they're still stupid enough for human beings to have a fighting chance. Perfect. There aren't a bunch of clever twists just for the sake of having twists. You know who the good people are. You know who the asshole is. You know what everybody wants. Then you sit back and enjoy the ride. South Korean cinema obviously did not begin with Train to Busan, and it's hardly some rarity for them to get movies exactly right. Parasite is the obvious more recent example of the rest of the world noticing just how good that industry is, but Korean movies and television have been putting out incredible work for a long time. Train to Busan is one of the best examples. Ten years later, no notes.

If you liked Super Troopers, I imagine you'll probably like Super Troopers 3. I did not like Super Troopers 3, and I don't know why this movie was made. The Broken Lizard crew is back doing the same basic Super Troopers thing again. I don't care. I wanted to walk out. The only reason I stayed was because I was bored with work that day, and the alternative to finishing Super Troopers 3 was going back to the office. I wasn't doing that. So I finished Super Troopers 3. I have apparently seen the first Super Troopers. I barely remember it. I definitely did not see Super Troopers 2, which in retrospect probably should have been useful information before buying a ticket to Super Troopers 3. There are people who like this. God bless you. This is your movie. It is not mine. It's hot garbage. Don't watch it unless you really liked the first one. Then I guess do whatever you people do.

This review may contain spoilers. The short and sweet and unoriginal take on this is that it's basically a rom-com version of The Purge. The premise is that a few years back the government outlawed premarital sex, and now there's one twelve-hour window a year when unmarried people can have sex with whoever they want. So it's The Purge, except you don't get to break every law. You get to break the law about screwing each other. That's the movie. There's been some kind of authoritarian shift in America. Everybody's tagged with tracking tech that tells the government when they're performing sexually, so the government can step in if you're having premarital sex or having sex without a condom or doing anything else this society doesn't allow. Unprotected premarital sex is still off the table all three hundred sixty-five days. The movie doesn't spend much time on how we got here. It tells you in title cards in the first few seconds and then moves on. It mostly wants to get you to the fun part of the premise. You've got one night. What would you do? Would you spend it with the person you're already with? Would you go out and screw around? Would you try to find somebody? Could you actually meet the one on what the movie calls the least romantic night of the year? That's what it's interested in. It's a big party night, the whole city is out trying to make something of their one shot, and Will Gluck plays it as a New York City summer romp. Callum Turner is Owen, who runs a pizza shop and was planning to propose to his girlfriend Malika until she told him she'd rather spend her night with somebody new and then sent him out with her blessing to do the same. Monica Barbaro is Allie, a jingle singer who's already single and wants the real thing rather than an annual appointment. So the two of them spend the night bouncing into and out of each other's lives, and the question is the same one romantic comedies have always asked. Will they or won't they? Despite how sexual that premise sounds, this really is just a straightforward romantic comedy. The movie itself isn't particularly lewd. It's not The Purge with an orgy instead of murder. It's two attractive people moving around New York while the movie asks whether they should end up together. A lot of people are going to get hung up on the premise. Would Americans really let the government outlaw premarital sex, tag everybody with monitoring tech, and then mostly go along with it? I tend to think people accept a surprising amount of what their government tells them to accept once it becomes normal, and even I think this is a stretch. But whatever. I can accept a premise for the sake of a movie. That part I can get past. My problem is the romance. I never understood why these two characters should find each other charming or why I should want them together beyond the obvious fact that they're both extremely attractive people. Monica Barbaro is beautiful. Callum Turner is a handsome guy. They keep running into each other. Apparently that means they should have sex and/or fall in love. Okay. But why these two people? That's where the movie never sold me. And I've seen much worse movies pull this off. Hallmark and Lifetime pump out romantic movies constantly that aren't any good in the abstract, but they understand the whole thing collapses if you can't convince the audience these two people belong together. You can have a ridiculous setup. You can have mediocre writing. If the chemistry works and you build the characters toward each other correctly, the romance still lands. I don't think it landed here. Which is frustrating, because this movie should be directly in my wheelhouse. The Purge is one of my favorite franchises. I've liked every single movie in that cycle. I also like romantic comedies. I don't know how many people are out there saying they love The Purge and also love a good rom-com, but apparently I'm one of them. This movie was made for me. If they'd gotten the romance right, they would have had me. I still enjoyed it. The premise is worth watching play out and I thought it was a solid effort. I saw this one by myself on a free afternoon, and I'm trying to organize an event so I can see it again with friends next week, so obviously I didn't dislike it. It just didn't work in the one place a romantic comedy absolutely has to work.

This review may contain spoilers. This is a Gregg Araki movie, and it feels like forever since this man made one. He's been doing television, but this is his first feature in over a decade. I'm here for the Gen X revival!  👴🏻 😄 If you know Araki, you know roughly what you're getting. His movies have always had this quirky energy. He's sex-positive. He puts sex right there on the table and lets his characters do whatever weird shit they're going to do. This is definitely that. There's all the sex you could want in this movie. It's not exactly vulgar, though some of it is, and honestly I think it's more vulgar linguistically than visually. You still see plenty. This is absolutely not coy about what it is. Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, a young guy in his early twenties who goes to work as an assistant for Erika Tracy, played by Olivia Wilde. She's a famous artist and provocateur, she's older, she's successful, and she's his boss. She decides she wants a dom/sub relationship with him. She's the dom. He's the sub. And he's down for it. He does what she asks him to do. She brings him into her sexual games, and it spills over into his relationship with his girlfriend, his roommate, his work and the rest of his life. He gets into increasingly ridiculous situations because of it, and the movie keeps playing with the question of what these two people are actually doing to each other. Is she using him? Is he using her? Is this a relationship? Is it just sex? Where can this thing possibly go? I found that interesting from beginning to end. I was never bored. Both of these people seem broken to some extent, although Elliot considerably less so. He mostly seems like a young guy screwing around and screwing some people over while he figures himself out. That's what people in their early twenties do. However you cut it. Erika is where I have the problem. Not because she likes sex. Not because she's kinky. Not because she's roughly twice his age. I don't care about any of that. She is his BOSS. That changes the whole thing for me, and the movie sort of wants you to forgive it for the sake of the film. Now, I'm also not going to pretend Elliot is a helpless victim. He isn't. He wants to participate. He enjoys a lot of what they're doing. He's a strong enough presence to say no when he really means no, and when he really means it, he does. At no point was I sitting there thinking somebody needed to call the cops and rescue poor Cooper Hoffman from Olivia Wilde. He could have gotten himself out of this. He's a willing participant in these games. But she is still his boss. If Erika were a man, this is a Harvey Weinstein situation and everybody would know it immediately. You don't even have to flip the genders all the way. Make it an older man doing this to a younger man. Still awkward. Still problematic. Araki actually wrote it the other way around first, with a male dom and a female sub, and then swapped them. Which tells me he knows exactly what he's doing here, and it makes me more curious about why some people watching this seem to sail right past the power dynamic. I don't get it. The whole thing is problematic. In real life, this is a walking, talking, breathing lawsuit. People in my industry make a lot of money when things like this happen. And things like this actually happen, particularly with the genders in reverse. So I can't completely ride with the movie to the extent it wants me to treat all of this as fine. I'm willing to play along. I'm willing to watch broken people make bad decisions. I'm willing to watch problematic shit in a movie. I don't need my characters to be good people, and I don't need a filmmaker standing over my shoulder telling me what to think about them. Araki doesn't judge these people and he dint want you to either. He puts them out there, lets them be weird and damaged and selfish, and lets you react to what you're seeing. I'm fine with that. I just don't want to pretend the power imbalance isn't problematic the whole time because Olivia Wilde is charismatic and Cooper Hoffman is enjoying himself. All that aside, Wilde understands exactly what movie she's in. Erika has to be charismatic and magnetic enough that Elliot keeps making worse decisions for her, and Wilde sells it. Hoffman works too, because he never plays Elliot as somebody being dragged around. He's making choices. Bad ones, but they're his. That's part of why the movie held me. I never quite settled on what to make of these two, and I don't think it wants me to. I liked this. I thought it was good. And for whatever it's worth, this is better than One Night Only. If you're choosing between the two, see this one first. There's also the small matter that this movie actually has sex in it and One Night Only mostly doesn't. But that part is only for this review. Don't tell anybody going to see ONO. Let them believe what they want to believe going in. 😄

This review may contain spoilers. I thought this was phenomenal, but I have a few notes about how this came to us and the format... You know, especially since nobody was going to let us see this thing properly in a theater... I watched this in the big theater room at a friend's complex with about fifteen other people. We had fun with it, and at least we gave it something approaching the presentation it deserved. I still don't understand the decision. Paramount spends this kind of money bringing Avatar back and then makes it a Paramount+ release. There was a theatrical run, technically. One week, three showtimes a day, in Los Angeles and New York, basically so it qualifies for awards. I'm in Atlanta. So that did nothing for me. If this had been playing anywhere in this metro that I knew about, I would have gone. If they put it in theaters tomorrow, I'll still go. The movie picks up in that gap between Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, with Aang and the rest of Team Avatar as adults roughly a decade after the war. Aang learns about an Airbender who has been lost to time, and that discovery opens into a larger story about an ancient power that could keep Air Nomad culture from disappearing entirely. That works particularly well because we already know where history goes. We've seen Korra. We know Airbending comes back. What we don't know is what Aang and the people around him tried to do in those years to make it possible, or how the people who eventually help the Airbenders came to be. This fills in some of those blanks. I really liked the story. I liked what they did with the characters. I liked being in this world again. Eric Nam is the adult Aang, with Jessica Matten as Katara, Roman Zaragoza as Sokka, Dionne Quan as Toph, Steven Yeun as Zuko, and Dave Bautista as Tagah. The animation is good. Everybody still feels like themselves. I don't have any real negative thoughts about the movie itself. My complaint is that I wanted more movie. Why isn't this thing two hours? We've been waiting years, decades really, to spend time with these characters again. People grew up with Aang, Katara, Sokka, Toph and Zuko. You finally give them back to us as adults and then you're looking at your watch trying to get us out of there before the hour and forty mark. Take your time. This isn't even primarily a theatrical release where you can argue you're worried about showings per day or a five-year-old getting restless. You put it on streaming. I'm already sitting on my couch. Make it two and a half hours. Make it three. Make it a six-hour epic. I'll watch it. Hell, make another series. The thing studios sometimes miss about characters this beloved is that we don't need them doing something important every minute. I don't need Aang saving the world every time I see him. I want Sokka. I want Katara. I want Toph and Zuko. I want to watch these people be adults around each other after everything we watched them survive as kids. Let them wander their world. Let them hang out. Let them talk. That's enough. I had the same problem with Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Sometimes the chemistry between characters becomes one of the things you love about the franchise itself. Once that's true, separating everybody or constantly pushing them through plot is less interesting than just letting us spend time with them. The story they gave us is good. The animation is good. Everything they actually gave me worked. They just didn't give me enough of it. That's literally my complaint: I wanted to keep watching. If you love Avatar, you're going to love this. I thought it was fantastic. I wish it had gotten a real theatrical release, and I wish it had been considerably longer. Next time, stop rushing me out of the room.

This review may contain spoilers. I've now seen Hadestown four times since it came out. Four. This thing was supposed to be in theaters for five nights. We're going on three weeks now, and I keep finding another group of friends to go see it with. So I'm doing a second review, because I need to correct the first one where I gave it four and a half stars. I cheated this movie. Five stars. I knew I really liked it the first time I saw it. What I didn't know was that I was going to go back three more times and love it every single time. I like musicals, so I'm obviously a sucker for this stuff, but I haven't had this much fun with a musical since Hamilton. I'm not saying it's better than Hamilton. Hamilton is ridiculous. But Hadestown is as good as anything else out there, and the more I watch it the more impressed I am with how well written the whole thing is. The music is wonderful. The cast is wonderful. Reeve Carney and Eva Noblezada have all the charm you need at the center of this thing as Orpheus and Eurydice. Amber Gray is great as Persephone. Andre De Shields and Patrick Page are fantastic. Those two just own Hermes and Hades at this point. I wish I'd seen this original cast on Broadway when the show first came out. Freaking COVID effed up a lot of things over the last half decade, including my ability to get up to New York and see some of these productions when I wanted to. I missed this one. This proshot gives some of that back. They brought the five original Broadway principals over to the West End production and filmed them at the Lyric in London doing the roles they originated, and now I can walk into a movie theater in Atlanta and watch it with my friends. That's fantastic. It also makes me want more proshots in theaters. I don't know what that does to Broadway economically, and I'm not going to sit here advocating for something that ends up hurting musical theater. If putting shows in movie theaters too early means people stop buying tickets, then obviously there's a problem. But there has to be some middle ground. Hadestown has been running on Broadway for seven years. It's still running at the Walter Kerr. The original cast moved on a long time ago, and most of the world never had a shot at seeing those people do those roles. Why not preserve that? Most Americans are never getting to Broadway. Most people on Earth are never getting to Broadway. That doesn't mean they shouldn't have access to great musical theater. World culture deserves it. American culture deserves it too. And this was done correctly. Nobody stuck a camera in the back of the house and recorded a stage. They turned the theatrical experience into a real movie experience without losing the fact that you're watching live theater. Brett Sullivan did a great job with it. I want more of this. Again, assuming I'm not accidentally advocating for the destruction of Broadway. As for Hadestown itself, I don't have some new complicated analysis after a fourth viewing. I just love this movie. I've paid to see it four times. I've brought different people with me. I've loved it every time. If you're reading this and still wondering whether you should go see Hadestown, just go see it. I'm correcting the record.

This review may contain spoilers. I've seen this twice now, and it's a solid follow-up to No Way Home. Probably the most important thing to understand going in to this is what No Way Home took away from Peter Parker. At the end of that movie, Peter loses Aunt May. Then, to fix a universe he broke, he has to wipe the memory of Peter Parker out of existence. His girlfriend forgets him. His best friend forgets him. His mentors and everyone connected to the Avengers forget him. He basically gives up his identity because that's the only way to fix the world. He has the opportunity afterward to reintroduce himself to MJ and Ned. He realizes that walking back into their lives means walking the danger of Spider-Man back into their lives too. He doesn't have the heart to do that to them just so he won't be alone. So his friends go off to MIT, and Peter stays in New York and becomes Spider-Man full-time. By the time this movie picks up, he's been doing that successfully. Crime in the city is as low as it's ever been. Peter's an adult now, working his city on his own, and MJ and Ned are coming back from Boston as college graduates who've lived the life Peter wanted for all three of them. That's where the story starts. That's all you need to know going in. Visually, I liked it. It's a little less colorful and more drab than I normally expect from Spider-Man, but there are some visually stunning scenes, and the rooftop action is great. Honestly, parts of it reminded me of the Spider-Man video games. Watching him move through New York, basically flying through the city, is still awesome. Destin Daniel Cretton took over directing this one from Jon Watts, and the darker, more grounded look is clearly a choice rather than an accident. It fits where Peter is. The movie also just keeps rolling. There was never a point where I was bored. I loved The Odyssey, but even in a movie I loved that much there were stretches where I could feel it slowing down. I don't remember anything here feeling slow. It runs two hours and twenty-five minutes and I didn't notice. Some of that is that the threats are the right size. He's not saving the universe. He's not fighting interdimensional anything. He's fighting New York criminals. Some of them are superpowered or technologically superpowered, because this is still Spider-Man, but nothing out of the ordinary for the character. This is basically everyday neighborhood Spider-Man again, and that was the right call after No Way Home. My problem with this movie is something I don

This review may contain spoilers. I just realized that I never actually reviewed The Drama in the spring. I saw it at least three times in theaters, bought it when it first came to streaming, and have watched it any number of times since then. I love this movie. I think this is really well done, and that Robert Pattinson and Zendaya started a big year for the both of them off better than anyone would have guessed going into the year. Pattinson plays Charlie as this neurotic, bumbling, handsome guy who is just a little bit of a fool. He is almost like Clark Kent without the superpowers. Zendaya plays Emma as his charming, beautiful, empathetic, seemingly perfect fiancée. Mamoudou Athie plays Charlie’s best man, Mike, while Alana Haim plays Emma’s maid of honor, Rachel. All four of them fit their roles extremely well. The premise is fairly simple. The four of them are sitting down over food and wine after the wedding rehearsal, talking about their pasts and sharing the worst things they have ever done. Most of the stories are relatively harmless or obnoxious, and then Emma drops an absolute bomb on them. The whole movie spins out from there: Charlie’s reaction, their friends’ reactions, their families’ reactions and the way everyone begins treating Emma after what she revealed. That is about as much as I can say without giving away the movie. Most people probably already know the general gist of it by now, but I still do not want to spoil it. Despite the subject matter it ultimately delves into, I just found this movie incredibly charming. The characterizations and relationships are on point. Pattinson and Zendaya have exactly the right chemistry, but Athie and Haim are equally important because so much of the movie depends upon how Mike and Rachel respond and how their reactions affect the couple. The film is really just playing off the interpersonal chemistry among these four people and what happens when one revelation completely destabilizes all of their relationships. I also thought the musical choices were very good. “Inside Out” by Jesse Rae becomes a theme of sorts for the movie, and it is a perfect choice. The song is an earworm and a whole vibe in itself. Whoever was responsible for the music picked something that was just spot-on. That is how I feel about the entire film. There are a lot of small choices here, and they all turned out to be the right choices. The casting, the performances, the music and the way the relationships are portrayed all hit the right notes. To me, this is a bit like Obsession in that it is a movie that makes you feel extremely uncomfortable at times, but it is worth seeing because it is so well crafted. I thought it was a really good movie when I first left the theater. I probably would have given it four stars then. As the year went on and I kept watching it, I realized that I liked it much more than that. I do not really like changing my ratings because I prefer to stick to my guns, but I am moving this up to four and a half stars. Honestly, it may be my favorite film of the year, and I cannot leave it sitting in the four-star range when I am clearly feeling four and a half. This is also another part of what has become the epic year of Zendaya. She began the year here with everyone around her judging her every move, fairly or unfairly. Now the meme from The Odyssey is Zendaya as Athena silently looking over everyone’s shoulder and judging them. There is something funny about the way that came full circle. Pattinson is having a big year too. He has had a recent run of success playing absolute pricks, and Charlie is certainly capable of being a prick, but this is probably the most likable role he has had this year. He is always good, and he is especially good here. I have now seen The Drama at least three times in theaters and any number of times since buying it. It has only improved for me. This quietly became one of my favorite films of the year, and it may ultimately be my favorite.

This review may contain spoilers. I'm a huge Nicolas Winding Refn fan. Drive is one of my favorite movies, so I'm willing to give him a lot more rope than most directors. If he wants to get weird, experiment, or sacrifice conventional storytelling for style, I'm usually on board. I don't care that some of his movies divide critics. I'd much rather watch a filmmaker with a distinct vision take a big swing than another anonymous studio product. This time, though, I think he missed. Her Private Hell feels less like a movie than a two-hour perfume commercial. I saw that comparison floating around online before I watched it, and I honestly thought people were exaggerating. They weren't. That's exactly what it feels like. It's gorgeous. Every frame is meticulously composed. The lighting is beautiful. The production design is incredible. The costumes are striking. The camera is constantly finding something visually interesting to look at. But after nearly two hours, I still couldn't tell you what the movie was actually trying to say. Charles Melton has one of the lead roles, and he certainly looks the part. Refn shoots him the same way he shot Ryan Gosling in Drive: silent, impossibly cool, almost mythic. He spends much of the movie looking intimidating, taking his shirt off, walking through beautifully lit environments, and striking poses that would look incredible in still photographs. It's undeniably stylish, but I never felt like I got to know the character underneath the image. The rest of the cast gets similar treatment. Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, and several Japanese actors all look fantastic on screen, but they're often reduced to pieces of Refn's visual design rather than fully realized people. That's ultimately my biggest criticism of the film. I don't mind ambiguity. I don't mind symbolism. I don't even mind a movie refusing to explain itself. What I do mind is spending almost two hours watching beautiful imagery without ever feeling like it adds up to something emotionally satisfying. About forty-five minutes in, I convinced myself I understood what Refn was doing. I thought he was trying to make a live-action anime. The pacing, the heightened performances, the neon-soaked imagery, and the dream logic all felt like they belonged in some slow-burning arthouse anime where atmosphere matters more than plot. I actually liked that idea. I was willing to meet the movie on those terms. Then it just kept going. Eventually it became less like watching a story and more like watching disconnected ideas drift past each other. Scenes happen. Images happen. People move from one gorgeous location to another. There are moments of violence, sexuality, horror, and surrealism, but very little narrative momentum holding everything together. By the end, I genuinely wasn't sure whether certain events were taking place in reality, inside a movie, inside someone's imagination, or somewhere in between. That may very well be intentional, but intentional confusion isn't automatically compelling. I completely understand why this became one of the year's most divisive movies. Critics who connected with its dreamlike style praised it as hypnotic visual art, while others dismissed it as self-indulgent and incoherent. I found myself much closer to the second camp, even though I desperately wanted to be in the first. Ironically, I think the best way to experience Her Private Hell might be through clips. If you chopped this movie into thirty-second segments and scattered them across Instagram or YouTube, I'd probably stop and watch every single one. Almost every individual moment is visually fascinating. It's only when those moments are assembled into a feature-length film that they stop working for me. I admire directors who refuse to compromise their vision, and I hope Refn never becomes a filmmaker who chases mainstream approval. But this is the first time I've walked away from one of his movies feeling like the style completely overwhelmed the substance. I didn't hate it. I was mostly just bored. And that's something I never expected to say about a Nicolas Winding Refn film.

This review may contain spoilers. I wasn't very familiar with Hadestown going in, but I came away impressed. This is one of those rare opportunities to see a professional Broadway production on the big screen without actually making it to Broadway, and I wish we got more releases like this. I understand why we don't—putting these productions into theaters cuts into the exclusivity of the stage experience—but every time it happens, I'm reminded how much I enjoy them. The musical blends the stories of Hades and Persephone with Orpheus and Eurydice into a single narrative, using jazz, folk, blues, and New Orleans influences to create a score that feels unlike most Broadway productions I've seen. Rather than feeling like two disconnected myths, the stories complement one another, each reflecting a different side of love, sacrifice, longing, and devotion. The biggest standout for me was André De Shields as Hermes. He doesn't just narrate the story—he guides the audience through it with incredible charm and charisma. He has the kind of stage presence that immediately commands your attention without ever feeling forced. He's effortlessly funny, warm, and engaging, and every time he stepped forward to address the audience I found myself drawn right back into the production. He's the glue holding the entire thing together. Patrick Page is equally impressive as Hades. His deep, booming voice absolutely dominates the stage whenever he speaks or sings. I couldn't take my eyes off him. What made it even more impressive was noticing that he appeared to be performing while wearing a large medical boot. Watching someone at his age continue dancing, singing, and commanding the stage despite an obvious injury only made the performance more remarkable. Every appearance felt larger than life, and I honestly can't imagine better casting for Hades. The score was consistently enjoyable. There really wasn't a point where I found myself waiting for the next good number. The songs carry the story naturally, and because the production was filmed so well, it never felt like I was watching a distant recording of a stage play. It still retained the energy of live theater while taking advantage of the intimacy that cameras can provide. This also reminded me why I enjoy professionally filmed stage productions so much. I had the same feeling watching Hamilton and Newsies. They're not replacements for seeing these shows live, but they preserve performances that most audiences would never otherwise experience. Being able to see the original casts perform these roles is something I hope becomes more common, even if I understand why Broadway has to be selective about making these productions widely available. I'd absolutely see this again, especially with friends. It's charming, beautifully performed, wonderfully staged, and one of the better theatrical experiences I've had this year, even though it technically isn't a movie at all. It serves as a reminder that great storytelling doesn't depend on elaborate sets or cinematic spectacle. Sometimes a stage, a phenomenal cast, and an outstanding score are more than enough.

This review may contain spoilers. I don't really know how to review Jana Nayagan because it barely feels like one movie. It feels like somebody had four or five completely different screenplays sitting on a desk and decided to mash them together into a single three-hour film. I spent most of the runtime trying to figure out what kind of movie it wanted to be, and every time I thought I had an answer, it turned into something else. The first half is a fairly conventional Tamil family drama. Vijay plays a man who ends up raising his niece after tragedy strikes the family. The conflict centers on the choices she wants to make with her own life versus the future he has imagined for her. There are hints that his character has some mysterious past and that he isn't just an ordinary father figure, but the movie is surprisingly restrained about revealing any of it. It spends almost the entire first half building relationships, introducing family dynamics, and teasing something bigger beneath the surface. Then the intermission ends. From that point forward, the movie completely loses its mind. I'm not saying it gets more over-the-top. I'm saying it changes genres every twenty minutes. Family drama turns into political thriller. Political thriller turns into action movie. Action movie turns into science fiction. There are massive gun battles, elaborate hand-to-hand fights, giant action set pieces, and eventually the movie reaches a point where I honestly felt like I'd wandered into Terminator 2. At one point I seriously wondered whether Judgment Day had started while I wasn't looking. I don't even mean that as a joke. It honestly feels like the filmmakers kept asking themselves, "What if we also added this?" without ever asking whether any of it belonged together. Now, I fully recognize that I'm judging this as someone outside the culture it was made for. I watched it in Tamil because I'd rather hear the original performances than a dub, and I was surrounded by what was almost certainly a predominantly Tamil audience. They were clearly connecting with things that weren't landing for me. That's always worth acknowledging. Sometimes a movie depends on cultural references, political context, or genre conventions that don't fully translate to an outsider. Vijay's transition from cinema into politics hangs over the entire production, and that context clearly means something to his fans. But even taking all of that into account, I don't think this works. The biggest problem is that nothing has time to breathe. Every interesting idea gets abandoned almost as soon as it's introduced because the movie is already sprinting toward the next one. Characters who seem central early on disappear for long stretches. Emotional moments are immediately interrupted by gigantic action scenes. The tonal whiplash becomes exhausting instead of exciting. That's frustrating because there are flashes of a much better movie hiding inside this one. H. Vinoth occasionally finds compelling ideas about family, responsibility, leadership, and political power, and Vijay still has enough screen presence to carry almost anything. Even when the material around him falls apart, he never stops feeling like a movie star. It's easy to understand why audiences have spent decades following him and why this film was treated as a major event before his retirement from acting. I also understand why reactions have been so mixed. Fans seem happy simply getting one last opportunity to watch Vijay on the big screen, while many critics have argued that the movie collapses under the weight of trying to be both a farewell and a blockbuster. I found myself much closer to the critics than the fans. Maybe this just wasn't made for me. That's entirely possible. I don't have the same relationship with Vijay's career that his longtime audience does, and I certainly don't have the same familiarity with Tamil political cinema. But I do know movies, and I know when one feels like it's trying to tell six different stories at once. Jana Nayagan never stopped throwing ideas at the screen. I just wish it had settled on one of them.

This review may contain spoilers. Motor City is a vibe. I do not know a better way to describe it than that. This reminded me of the famous story about Rambo: First Blood. Sylvester Stallone has said that the original version was overloaded with dialogue, and the movie was improved by cutting much of it and allowing the action and Stallone's performance to carry the story visually. I feel like somebody took that principle and decided to build an entire movie around it. Motor City goes out of its way not to let its characters speak. You get almost no real exposition. You simply see things happening to them. Alan Ritchson, the big hulking behemoth who plays Jack Reacher on television, plays John Miller, a working-class ex-con trying to walk the straight and narrow in 1970s Detroit. He falls in love with Sophia, played by Shailene Woodley, who was previously involved with Reynolds, a powerful drug dealer played by Ben Foster. John proposes to Sophia, she accepts, and almost immediately the police raid their home after finding a large quantity of drugs planted in the trunk of his car. Reynolds has used a corrupt police officer to frame John because John took Sophia away from him. John is sentenced to 25 years in prison. Reynolds then appears and throws Sophia's engagement ring at him, making it clear both that he arranged the frame-up and that Sophia is no longer waiting for him. Later, John learns that Reynolds and Sophia have married. He is devastated. He is abused by the guards in prison. His entire life falls apart, and you slowly watch him rebuild himself. Then the movie becomes a revenge flick. Ritchson turns out to be a man with a particular set of skills, and the rest of the movie sets him loose against the people who destroyed his life. That was all interesting, but the most interesting thing about Motor City is that there is almost no talking. They show you everything. To me, this movie almost feels like a direct response to a complaint I have made for years—to friends, family and anybody else who would listen—about movies giving us exposition instead of showing us what is happening. Do not tell me a character's motivations through a freaking monologue. Show me their motivations through how they act, perform and react to other characters. I want modern movies to get away from being so exposition-heavy. Film is a visual art form first and foremost. That is how it started. Movies could not talk when the industry began, so how did we get to a place where filmmakers do not want to show us anything and instead insist on telling us everything? They want to tell us who is a good guy, who is a bad guy or that a man loves a woman by having him repeatedly say that he loves her. You can actually show us those things. You do not have to tell us. I have complained about this quite a bit to anyone willing to listen, so it would be hypocritical for me to turn around and complain that Motor City trusts visual storytelling too much. They show you everything. If you do not understand it from what they show you, then you just do not understand it. That does not mean I think this is a great piece of filmmaking. It is not great like First Blood, although it is quite a bit like First Blood. It is simply a fairly tight piece of filmmaking. Everyone does a good job in their roles, and I do not have any real complaints about it. It is not a great movie, but it is pretty good. It is watchable and rewatchable, and I would see it again if I could talk some other people into going. I definitely recommend it, but know what you are walking into. This is a straightforward action movie. It gets bloody. There is not going to be much talking. You are simply going to get what you get. So whether you loved First Blood or hated First Blood, consider yourself warned.

This review may contain spoilers. This movie is fantastic. Christopher Nolan has reached a point where every new movie feels like another argument for him as the best director working. I put him ahead of Spielberg right now, whose strongest run is probably behind him, and James Cameron, who spent most of the last two decades living inside the Avatar franchise. I'm not gonna settle the all time question off one movie, but this definitely strengthens Nolan's case. It's gorgeous, emotionally powerful, and beautifully made. Matt Damon is fantastic in this from beginning to end. He embodies Odysseus, and personally, going forward, when I picture Odysseus, I'm probably gonna picture Matt Damon. He makes his character feel like the smartest and toughest man in every room, but also a flawed man, a man exhausted by his own decisions. He's smart enough to outthink his enemies, proud enough to challenge men, monsters, and gods, but guilty enough to keep sabotaging the journey home he claims that he wants. This isn't just a man trying to survive. This is a man carrying the weight of what he did in Troy, everything that happened because of his own choices, and his own hypocrisies. Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, Odysseus's wife, and she does a fantastic job. She carries most of the emotional weight back in Ithaca after twenty years of waiting for her husband to come home. Tom Holland plays his son Telemachus, and he's very good here as well. He comes across as passionate, fundamentally decent, and clearly his father's son, but without his father's strength or authority. He knows what should be done, but nobody ever taught him how to command a room or take control of his life and his kingdom. His father was gone for his entire development into adulthood, so he never got the training or guidance that might have prepared him to stand in Odysseus's place and become the next king. That becomes a serious problem here, because Ithaca is falling apart while everyone waits for Odysseus to return home or be declared dead and replaced. The setting is that Penelope's suitors have basically occupied the palace. They eat Odysseus's family's food, they drain the kingdom's resources, they mistreat the household, they abuse the animals, they abuse the staff and the slaves, and they act like at any time one of them is going to inherit everything. The whole situation is a rolling embarrassment for the family. Robert Pattinson plays Antinous, the most aggressive of the suitors, and he makes clear this situation can't go much longer after twenty years. Telemachus sees exactly what's happening. He knows he needs to do something to stop it, but he can't think of a way to stop it. He can't fight these men, the laws of Zeus in terms of hospitality won't allow him to kill them, and he doesn't have a real easy way to throw them out. The whole kingdom seems to turn on whether his father returns or his mother decides to marry. The longing for Odysseus's return from his son and his wife is necessary for this movie to work. You have to feel Penelope's pain and frustration. You have to feel Telemachus's impatience and his need for the presence of a father he barely knows. You also have to understand that Odysseus isn't just being kept from home by outside forces. The film heavily suggests that some part of him may be delaying his return because he doesn't feel he deserves it yet. The story of The Odyssey picks up after the events of The Iliad, where the Greeks have sacked Troy. Odysseus was the mastermind behind the Trojan Horse plan that got them inside the city. They presented the horse as a gift, counted on the Trojans accepting it and taking it into their gates, hid the Greek soldiers inside of it, and then weaponized that gift and act of trust to destroy the people who received it. Nolan treats that as more than a brilliant military trick. In the moral framework of this movie, it's a violation of the sacred rules of hospitality that were supposed to separate civilized men, such as the Greeks, from savages. The Greeks enter Troy through deceit and then ransack it. They kill, rape, pillage, and destroy. Odysseus wins the war, but Nolan makes you question what exactly he's won and what that victory did to him. The journey home becomes punitive, and this is probably my favorite interpretation in the movie. Odysseus says he wants to go home, but his choices keep suggesting that he can't allow himself to get there until he's suffered for what he did in Troy. He keeps wandering and putting himself and his men in danger because some part of him doesn't believe he deserves to walk through his own door without being punished first. His wife needs him, his son needs him, his kingdom needs him, but he can't fully commit to coming home until he feels like he's paid for what he did in Troy. This reminded me of the biblical story of the Israelites wandering for forty years after leaving Egypt. The journey to the Promised Land should have been much shorter, but distrust, disobedience, and judgment stretched it across an entire generation. Here, Odysseus's trip home shouldn't take ten years after he's already spent ten years at war, but he's not ready to go home. The difference here is that the judgment doesn't seem to come only from the gods. A lot of it looks like it's coming from Odysseus himself. Nolan makes an interesting choice with the supernatural material here. He doesn't strip the mythology out of the story, but he also doesn't stop to explain every intervention. There are gods, monsters, visions, and events that look magical, but we're never really told whether the things they're suffering are divine punishment or Odysseus's conscience exerting itself. The gods may be keeping him from getting home. His guilt may be making him sabotage himself and his men. Both things could be true at once. I like that Nolan leaves it up to us instead of explaining it definitively one way or the other. Watching this made me feel like I wish we'd gotten Nolan's version of The Iliad first. The Trojan War, its execution and its outcomes, carries enormous moral and emotional weight throughout this movie, but Nolan can only give us fragments of it while also telling the story of Odysseus's voyage home. We hear the famous names and see enough of Troy to understand the horror of what happened, but Odysseus is the only participant in the war that we really get to know. I understood what Troy did to him, but I sometimes wish the other people involved were more than brief appearances. Lupita Nyong'o plays Helen, and Nolan doesn't present her primarily as the great beauty whose face launched a thousand ships. She shows up here as someone altered by the war, by her abduction, and by the men around her. She's somewhat tragic rather than glamorous. Jon Bernthal plays her husband Menelaus, and the two of them present a damaged and seemingly complicated relationship I wish the movie had more time to explore. There are a lot of other strong performances here, but I have to shout out John Leguizamo as Eumaeus and whoever trained the dog playing Argos. I'm not gonna spoil the moment, but the one scene that had me tearing up from sadness rather than passion involved that dog. Anybody who has ever loved a dog will understand immediately. Argos had been waiting a very long time. Most of the other times I felt myself tearing up came from passion. The final act turns the homecoming into a revenge saga, and it feels like the template for every revenge story that came after. A man's home has been violated, his family has been threatened, and his kingdom has been eaten alive by people who believe he's never coming back. He survives a brutal journey to get back there and put things right. When Odysseus finally acts, Nolan doesn't soften the blow. The movie spent hours making you want these men out of his home, and the payoff is as definitive as it needs to be. The final stretch is phenomenal because the action has earned emotional weight behind it. We understand what Odysseus has endured, what his wife has endured, what Telemachus has endured, and what the suitors have done in his absence to his family and his kingdom. Nolan by this point has given you the hunger for justice that makes the brutal action feel justified and cathartic. If I had one bone to pick, the movie runs nearly three hours, and while the first hour is phenomenal and the final hour is phenomenal, the middle hour drags just a bit in comparison. The second hour never lost me, but that's the stretch where I became most aware of the runtime. That's about the only real criticism of this I have. Visually, this movie is gorgeous. I saw it in digital IMAX rather than a full 70mm presentation, and it still looks incredible. Everything here looks beautiful. The landscapes, the ships, the monsters, the battle sequences, and the family moments back in Ithaca all have the beauty and size and weight that this story requires. I'm seeing it again this weekend in Dolby Cinema, and I'm looking forward to experiencing it with a group of friends. I expect this to be a major awards contender. It should be in line for Best Picture, Nolan should be in line for Best Director, and Matt Damon should be in the conversation for Best Actor. Anne Hathaway also gives a controlled and emotionally difficult performance here that deserves serious consideration and respect, perhaps as Best Supporting Actress. Anyone into Christopher Nolan, Greek mythology, action movies, or a great revenge saga is gonna have a great time here. This is outstanding filmmaking, and I can't imagine another major adaptation displacing it anytime soon. This is going down as the definitive version of The Odyssey going forward.

This review may contain spoilers. The Isolate Thief is a traditional Western, and I mean that as a compliment. It is short, straightforward, beautifully shot, and not particularly interested in reinventing the genre. It gives you a vulnerable person trapped in a dangerous place, a group of obvious bad guys, a hidden prize everybody wants, and a clear understanding of who you are supposed to be rooting for. The film takes place during a bitter winter near the end of the Civil War. Mackenzie Foy plays Ada Horn, a young woman living with her father at a remote Union outpost that provides shelter and supplies to soldiers passing through. When her father dies, she is left alone to maintain the station despite being nowhere near old enough or experienced enough to handle that responsibility safely. Before she can leave, a stranger arrives, takes supplies and her father's coat, and disappears back into the wilderness. Soon afterward, several men wearing Union uniforms show up claiming to need provisions, but Ada has no way of knowing whether they are actually soldiers, deserters, thieves, or something worse. That is essentially all anyone needs to know going in. The movie is only about ninety-five minutes long, and so much of its appeal comes from watching the characters reveal who they really are and what they actually want. Everyone seems to know slightly more than they initially admit, and the alliances and motivations keep shifting just enough to maintain the tension without turning the story into something unnecessarily complicated. What I appreciated most is that Ada is not written as some superpowered Western action hero. She is not secretly the greatest shot on the frontier, and she does not suddenly start defeating grown men because the story needs her to. She is a normal young woman forced into an unfair and dangerous situation. She survives by paying attention, thinking quickly, understanding the people around her, and using whatever limited advantages she can find. Mackenzie Foy carries the movie well because she keeps Ada vulnerable without making her helpless. The supporting cast includes Sean Bean, Joe Pantoliano, Odeya Rush, Jack Kesy, Ty Simpkins, and Martin Sensmeier, and the movie uses those recognizable actors effectively without allowing any of them to take the story away from Ada. Sean Bean brings the kind of worn-down authority that fits naturally into a Western, while Pantoliano is nearly unrecognizable and immediately makes his character feel nervous, suspicious, and potentially dangerous. The acting across the board is solid, and even the characters who fit familiar Western types are given enough personality to remain interesting. This is fundamentally a white-hat, black-hat Western. There is never much confusion about who the real villains are, and the movie does not need moral ambiguity to make the conflict compelling. The bad men are dangerous, greedy, and willing to abuse the power their weapons give them. Ada is simply trying to stay alive and keep control of the only home and responsibility she has left. That simplicity works because the filmmaking is confident enough not to bury it under unnecessary twists or speeches. The winter setting also gives the movie much of its personality. The outpost feels truly isolated, and the cold makes every threat more dangerous because escape is not as simple as walking out the door. The cinematography emphasizes that loneliness and gives the film a clean, harsh beauty. This is not a large production, but it looks considerably better than its scale might suggest. I liked that it never overstayed its welcome. It sets up the station, introduces the danger, gradually reveals what everyone is after, and then moves toward a satisfying conclusion. There are shifts in loyalty and motivation, but the movie never becomes difficult to follow. It remains a straightforward story about a young woman trying to outthink violent men who assume they can dominate her because she is alone. This is not a revolutionary Western, and it does not need to be. It is simply a well-made, good-looking, satisfying genre movie with a strong young woman at its center. It does not turn her into a superhero or pretend she is unaffected by what is happening. It lets her remain frightened, inexperienced, and human while still allowing her to become the driving force behind the story. The Isolate Thief is short, sweet, and fulfilling. Anyone who enjoys traditional Westerns should give it a chance. It will probably reach streaming quickly, so missing it in theaters would not be a tragedy, but I am glad I saw it on the big screen. I definitely recommend it.

This review may contain spoilers. The first half is a straightforward movie about a woman finding internet success through an online cooking show. Some of it is a little charming, but the entire time I was struggling with the fact that Maddie is played by John Early, who also wrote and directed the movie. He does a good job, I guess, of looking female, but he is also clearly a man playing a woman. Because the movie is called Maddie's Secret, I naturally assumed that was the secret. I kept waiting for it to come up or for Maddie's husband to discover that the woman he married was biologically male. That never happens. The movie simply plays Maddie as a straightforward woman, without making gender identity or cross-dressing part of the character's story at all. That is certainly John Early's choice to make. It is his movie, so he is not really taking the role away from anyone. But I never understood why the choice was necessary. It draws attention to itself constantly while the movie refuses to acknowledge it. I spent most of the first half waiting for the film to address the most obvious thing happening on screen, only to realize it had no intention of doing so. Then the second half veers into some sort of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest redux. Maddie's actual secret turns out to be an eating disorder. Just as her internet cooking career begins taking off, she checks herself into a psychiatric facility, and the movie abandons most of what it had been doing to become a strange institutional drama about treatment, control, psychological trauma and recovery. It is such a sharp change in direction that it feels like an entirely different movie took over at the halfway point. That was actually a potentially good take. There is something interesting about borrowing the structure and imagery of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and applying it to a woman voluntarily entering treatment for an eating disorder. Unfortunately, the writing is not smart enough to do much with the idea. The movie gestures toward institutional cruelty and psychosexual trauma, but I never felt that it developed those ideas into anything coherent or especially insightful. That is the larger problem with Maddie's Secret. If John Early had been replaced by an actual woman and everything else remained exactly the same, I don't think anyone would find this movie particularly interesting on any level. It would come across as a mediocre B-movie about an internet cooking personality who develops an eating disorder and enters treatment. The fact that a man is playing Maddie in a completely straightforward way is what draws attention to the film, but the film itself insists that this choice has no meaning. The writing isn't particularly smart. The acting isn't particularly good. The filmmaking is competent, and a few scenes have some charm, but there just isn't much to it beyond the novelty of John Early playing the lead. The movie does not interrogate that novelty, explain it or even really use it. It is simply there. I know critics have been much kinder to this than I am, and perhaps they were more willing to accept the central conceit without questioning it. I couldn't. I kept wondering what the purpose of any of it was, and the movie never gave me an answer. I didn't hate Maddie's Secret. Mostly, I found it annoying. It presents something that seems deliberately provocative, refuses to address it, and then halfway through turns into an eating-disorder remake of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That description is considerably more interesting than the movie itself.

This review may contain spoilers. I had a really good time with The Invite. This is Olivia Wilde's latest film as a director, and she also stars alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton. It's basically a chamber piece, meaning almost the entire movie takes place in one apartment and lives or dies on the dialogue and performances. I think they absolutely pull it off. The setup is pretty simple. You have a middle-aged couple with a twelve-year-old kid whose relationship has gone stale. They're not really having sex anymore, they're constantly picking at each other, and they're just sort of existing together instead of really living together. Upstairs are their neighbors, who have an extremely active sex life that everyone in the building can hear. The husband wants to complain. The wife seems a little too interested in what's going on upstairs. Eventually she invites the neighbors over for dinner, and from there hilarity ensues. I think this movie is very funny. It's stressful, it's awkward, it's cringey in ways that are actually relatable, and there's a lot of oversharing from all four adults. As dinner goes on, people start revealing things about themselves and about what's been happening in the building, and the tension just keeps building. It reminded me a little of Obsession in that way. Obviously they're completely different movies, but this one keeps you engaged by continually upping the ante. You're always wondering where this is going and what is actually motivating these characters. One thing I really liked is that they're not trying to convince you that you're watching a good guy and a bad guy and a good girl and a bad girl play things out. Everybody has their own motivations. Everybody has flaws. Nobody comes across as an awful person, but nobody comes across as perfect either. I think the movie actually encourages you to like everybody who's participating, even when they're making questionable decisions. That reminded me of The Drama, except in The Drama I thought most of the people were actually kind of terrible. Here, they're just flawed adults trying to navigate complicated relationships. Seth Rogen is the star of this movie for me. I was talking with friends afterward, and honestly I don't think anybody else could have played this role as well as he did. He's basically the voice of the audience. Whenever things get incredibly tense or awkward, he's the one saying what everybody else is thinking. He keeps the movie funny without ever becoming the hero or the villain. He's just reacting to the insanity unfolding around him, and so much of the humor comes out of his mouth. If not Seth Rogen, then Penélope Cruz. She's always charismatic on screen, but she really seemed to be enjoying herself here. Olivia Wilde also deserves a lot of credit. Her character is completely stressed out, neurotic, insecure, and doesn't really know what she wants anymore. She reminded me a lot of Rose Byrne's performance in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You last year, where she plays a mother who's slowly being driven insane by the pressures of her family life. It's that same manic energy where somebody is just barely holding themselves together, and I thought Olivia Wilde did an excellent job with it. Edward Norton is good here too. I just don't think he stands out the way the other three do. Olivia Wilde is doing the most work dramatically, Seth Rogen is the most indispensable character in the movie, and Penélope Cruz is absolutely perfect in her role. I also think the marketing oversold how risqué this movie is. They talk about sex a lot because that's what the movie is about, but there's really nothing graphic here. Nothing pornographic. Nothing visually over the top. The R rating comes almost entirely from the dialogue and the subjects they're discussing. This is really a comedy for adults because it's about adult relationships, not because kids and teens need to be protected from it. The resolution here reminded me a lot of The Drama, in that it doesn't try to explain everything neatly at the end. It leaves enough possibilities open that you can imagine where these characters go from here. I think filmmakers have gotten better about trusting audiences to finish the story themselves instead of spelling everything out, and I like that. I enjoyed this from beginning to end. I came away eager to see whatever Olivia Wilde does next because I think she just has good instincts as a filmmaker. She brings good energy, good ideas, and she knows how to keep you engaged for two hours. I look forward to her next project Naughty, whenever that arrives.

This review may contain spoilers. If you've seen the original, you already know what this is. It's a shot-for-shot remake of the animated film. Catherine Laga'aia does a solid job as Moana, and Rena Owen absolutely steals the show as Gramma Tala. The songs are great because they were great the first time around. I think there's one new song in here, but for the most part you're getting the same music that made the original work. As for Maui, Dwayne Johnson is playing Dwayne Johnson with tattoos, and that's still the character. He's got the charisma, he's still in ridiculous shape at 50, and if you liked him the first time, you're going to like him here too. Nothing surprising about the performance, but nothing needed to be. He knows exactly what this character is. What I still don't understand is why Disney keeps making these live-action remakes. I honestly think we'd have been better off getting Moana 3 after the success of Moana 2. The animated movies already look incredible, and this doesn't improve on that. Like most of these "live-action" remakes, it's really just another animated movie with real actors standing in front of green screens. Everything else is CGI anyway, and maybe that's part of why this one isn't connecting the way Disney hoped. When I saw How to Train Your Dragon, there was something exciting about seeing those dragons brought into a live-action world. It gave you a reason for the remake to exist. Moana doesn't have that same advantage. The animated version already looked fantastic, so this version doesn't give audiences a compelling reason to revisit the story beyond seeing real actors play the parts. That said, I don't fully understand why this movie is struggling at the box office either. I know people are comparing it to Lilo & Stitch, which became a billion-dollar hit, but I think the timing hurt this movie as much as anything. You've got Toy Story 5 and Minions & Monsters fighting for the exact same family audience at the same time, plus Moana 2 came out not that long ago. Family movies don't exist in a vacuum, and this one got squeezed. I also think there are people who are just rooting for these big Disney remakes to fail before they even come out. Whether that's remake fatigue or people wanting to take shots at the big studios, I don't know. I just don't see any reason to celebrate this movie struggling, because I thought it was pretty good. One thing I really appreciated was the representation. It's nice seeing Pacific Islander actors carrying a major Disney film, and I was happy to see Disney stick with that casting rather than moving away from it. Catherine Laga'aia has a lot of screen presence, and she did exactly what the role asked of her. Again, if you liked the original, I don't see a reason not to see this one. Kids will get a kick out of it, parents already know what they're getting, and it's faithful to the movie people already love. I just wish Disney would put this energy into new animated stories instead of remaking the ones that already worked.

My problem is that I’m not convinced I understood it while I was watching it. The whole thing looks like a weathered VHS recording of some forgotten British movie from the 1980s, and that’s exactly what Mark Jenkin was going for. Every scratch, every washed-out frame, every distorted sound is intentional. It’s an impressive technical achievement. I just spent most of the runtime looking for a plot to grab onto. As best I can piece it together, the Rose of Nevada is a fishing boat that vanished thirty years before the film starts, taking its crew with it. The loss devastated this small Cornish fishing town, and it never recovered. Then one day the boat simply returns, looking untouched by time. Two younger men from the village sign on as its new crew, head out to sea, and somehow end up in the early 1990s, where everyone believes they’re two of the fishermen who disappeared. They don’t just visit the past, they inherit these men’s lives. One has a wife and daughter waiting for him. The other has a family overjoyed to have him back. The interesting part is how differently they react. One can’t let go of the life he left behind in the present. The other had almost nothing waiting for him at home, so he slips into the new identity almost effortlessly. That contrast is the emotional core of the film. After reading interviews with Jenkin and some of the critical writing, I understand this isn’t really a time travel movie. It’s about grief, and about what happens to communities built around a single way of life when that way of life dies. The ghost ship, the repeating dialogue, the dream logic, all of it is collective memory and loss. I get that intellectually. I never felt it emotionally. Part of that is just who I am. I don’t come from a community whose identity is tied to one profession. My family doesn’t have generations of fishermen or miners or farmers stretching back centuries. Frankly, my ancestors weren’t free long enough for that to happen. My family’s history is one of adapting because there was no other choice. So when this village mourns the decline of its fishing culture, I understand it, but my instinct is that if the industry dies, you move on and find something else. That’s a very different perspective from the one the film is asking me to inhabit, and it’s probably why the movie never fully landed for me. None of this means the movie fails. Jenkin accomplished exactly what he set out to accomplish, and every creative decision feels deliberate. I’m just not an art-house guy. I want stories with a clear narrative, characters chasing tangible objectives, and plots that build toward resolutions. Rose of Nevada is much more interested in making you experience a feeling than telling you a story. If that’s your thing, I completely understand the critical acclaim. It just isn’t mine.

This review may contain spoilers. I saw this twice in one week and I liked it a lot more on the second viewing. First viewing I walked out a little underwhelmed, and I honestly don't know if that was the movie or just me being tired. Second time I saw it with friends and the whole thing clicked. Comedy is just better in a crowd, and this one benefits from it. This is the strongest Minions movie they've made, and I think it's the best film in the entire Despicable Me franchise. I didn't walk in expecting to say that, but after two viewings I'm comfortable with it. The movie centers on James and Henry, who are basically a buddy-comedy duo, and their chemistry carries the film. Previous Minions entries always felt like comic relief in search of a plot. These two actually have an arc. The best idea in the movie is dropping the Minions into Hollywood history. They can't speak any human language, so during the silent era they're huge stars. Physical comedy is literally their native tongue. Then talkies arrive and overnight they're unemployable because nobody can understand a word they're saying. It's such an obvious joke in hindsight that I'm surprised nobody thought of it sooner. The whole movie is stuffed with silent film and old Hollywood references, so it works on two levels: kids get the slapstick, adults get the film history. And then the Minions do what Minions always do, which is go looking for an evil boss to serve. That's still the enduring joke of these characters. They desperately want to work for the biggest villain they can find, and they're so incompetent they destroy their own master's plans without ever realizing they did anything wrong. Chaos, never malice. There's even a bit confirming the Minions were frozen during World War II, so no, they weren't working for Hitler. That joke has floated around online for years and I laughed that the filmmakers addressed it head-on. What surprises me most is how badly this is doing at the box office, because I genuinely don't get it. My theory is the Minions became victims of their own popularity. The memes were everywhere a decade ago, people burned out on them culturally, and I think that's coloring how audiences see this movie now. Judged on its own merits, this is one of the best things Illumination has ever done. If you like Despicable Me, easy recommendation. If your kids like Despicable Me, even easier.

This review may contain spoilers. Rao Bahadur was excellent. This is another Telugu film that came out here recently, and it’s one of the better movies I’ve seen this year in any format, in any language. It’s told from the point of view of an old man who’s dying, and has been dying for a while, but who’s also been essentially insane since the death of his youngest son. The movie slowly unpacks how he got there through flashbacks and magical realism, and underneath all of it is a story about race and class and caste and culture wrapped up in one family tragedy. The old man had two sons. The older one was lighter-skinned, taller, and looked like him. Then the younger boy was born much darker than either parent. Honestly, I thought the baby on screen was just a Black baby. From that moment the father convinced himself the child couldn’t be his. Between the skin color and his obsession with family legacy, he decided his wife must have cheated, and he never came back from it. He refused to acknowledge the boy as his son, treated his wife horribly, sided against the kid in every conflict, didn’t want him educated, and spent the child’s entire life treating him like he didn’t belong in his own family. The mother spent that same life standing up for her son. Eventually the younger son dies under circumstances I won’t spoil, and that’s what destroys the family. The father loses his mind, the mother shuts herself away from the world and won’t even interact with her surviving son. When we enter the story in the present, the family has already fallen apart, and the oldest son is talking about leaving because he can’t take it anymore. The movie then walks backward to show exactly how they got here. One thing I really liked is that the father wasn’t always this person. As a young man he was a world traveler who spent his life screwing around until his own dying father shamed him into coming home. He settles down, pursues the woman who becomes his wife, and for a while they’re genuinely happy. Then the younger son is born and everything rots. What makes it work is that this isn’t a simple jealousy story. It’s about how racism, bigotry, class, caste, tradition, and family legacy all combine to poison the way this man sees his own family. The magical realism reinforces that. His ancestors appear throughout the film and weigh in on his life, encouraging his obsession with legacy and bloodlines, then later forcing him to confront the consequences. They’re basically the embodiment of the traditions that made him, and those scenes fit naturally instead of feeling self-indulgent. Satyadev Kancharana carries this film. He plays the young version, the old version, the dying version, the insane version, and everything in between, and it’s all believable. Like a lot of Indian films it runs close to three hours, but I never felt it drag, because every flashback adds another piece to the puzzle of why this family destroyed itself. As a Black American, I could vibe with how race and culture and history were being handled here. India’s history isn’t America’s history, but I recognized a lot of the ideas. The lighter-skin preference, the assumptions people make based on appearance, the way prejudice gets tangled up in family expectations. There was a lot for me to connect with even though the setting is completely different. They didn’t miss a note. If you’re open to foreign-language films, go see it. If you’re into Indian films, and Telugu films specifically, this is a must. I saw Maa Inti Bangaaram not long before this and thought that was very good too. Telugu cinema is having a moment right now, and Rao Bahadur is one of the best examples of why.

This was just a money grab. There was no need for this to be in theaters. It's not bad because this is the show we love, but everybody in the theatre I was with was disappointed when it cut off at the 66 minute mark with little accomplished. Just wait a month and watch on tv.

This review may contain spoilers. After loving Superman last year, I went into Supergirl hoping DC had found its footing. I wanted more of the same: colorful, optimistic superhero storytelling with strong characters and a sense of fun. Instead, I mostly found myself bored. That’s actually the biggest criticism I can make. Not angry. Not offended. Just… bored. About an hour into the movie, I actually caught myself nodding off and had to get up for more soda. The frustrating part is that there are good ideas here. This version of Kara Zor El is intentionally contrasted with Clark Kent. Clark arrived on Earth as a baby and never really experienced the loss of Krypton. Kara remembers everything. She watched her civilization die. She remembers her family, her culture, and the life she lost. That’s fertile ground for a character. The movie introduces her as someone coping with severe trauma by drinking, picking fights, neglecting herself, and generally drifting through life without purpose. It’s an interesting premise. Unfortunately, I don’t think the movie knows what to do with it. Milly Alcock spends much of the runtime playing Kara as perpetually half drunk and emotionally detached. I don’t blame Alcock. I’ve seen enough of her work to know she’s an excellent actress. This feels more like a problem with the direction than with the performance. The script mistakes trauma for personality, and after a while the character just stops being interesting. The central plot doesn’t help much either. Kara ends up accompanying a young girl seeking revenge against the men who murdered her family and kidnapped other girls into slavery. It’s obviously intended to give Kara a chance to rediscover her heroism, but the emotional arc never landed for me. The turning point isn’t really that Kara decides innocent people are worth saving. It’s that her dog gets threatened. That’s an odd choice because it makes her eventual heroism feel reactive rather than transformative. The young girl herself never develops into much more than a plot device. I understand why she wants revenge, but I never became invested in her as a character. Since she’s powerless and Kara is essentially a god whenever she has access to a yellow sun, we already know the outcome depends entirely on Supergirl’s choices. That leads into what has always been one of the biggest challenges of writing Kryptonians. They’re overpowered. Every Superman story eventually arrives at the same place. Introduce Kryptonite. Introduce a red sun. Or invent some reason why the Kryptonian can’t simply end the conflict in five seconds. Supergirl is no exception. Half the movie finds ways to depower Kara. The other half asks us to believe she has to slug it out with enemies who shouldn’t remotely be on her level. From a comic book standpoint, that just doesn’t work for me. When she’s depowered, she’s still taking apart trained opponents. When she’s fully powered, she’s suddenly trading punches with ordinary soldiers like she’s in a boxing match. That’s backwards. A fully powered Kryptonian shouldn’t be a brawler. She should be a force of nature. The movie never establishes consistent rules for what Kara can and can’t do, and that inconsistency constantly pulled me out of the story. Krypto, who was one of the highlights of Superman, barely has anything to do here beyond serving as a plot device. That’s a missed opportunity because audiences already liked the character. Instead of letting him continue being fun, the movie sidelines him almost immediately. Visually, I also found the movie surprisingly drab. One of the things I loved about Superman was how bright and colorful it was. Supergirl feels like it swings back toward the muted, gray CGI aesthetic that superhero movies have spent years trying to escape. One of the film’s biggest shortcomings is its world building. We’re supposed to be traveling across an interstellar civilization, but every planet feels dingy and tiny. Most of them have only a handful of people wandering around, which makes the galaxy feel oddly empty. I suspect a lot of that comes down to the CGI budget. Instead of spending that money making these worlds feel populated and alive, the movie appears to spend a significant amount of it on unnecessary Mos Eisley style cantina scenes filled with random CGI aliens. It feels like they’re trying to convince us we’re watching Star Wars instead of building out the DC Universe. Ironically, all of that expensive CGI makes the universe feel smaller, not bigger. I also found myself wishing the movie trusted its audience a little more. At times it felt like the story was trying very hard to make broad thematic statements instead of simply telling the best Supergirl story it could. I don’t think female superheroes need stories built around proving why female superheroes matter. Wonder Woman never needed that. It simply gave Diana a compelling story and let her character carry the film. Black Widow worked for similar reasons because its themes grew naturally from Natasha’s own history. Here, some of the thematic choices felt imposed on the character rather than emerging from who Kara is. I wanted to spend more time exploring her trauma and her relationship to Krypton than watching the movie make broader statements that didn’t feel unique to her story. All of that said, I don’t hate this movie. There are flashes of the DC Universe I want to spend more time in. Milly Alcock has the potential to become an excellent Supergirl, and the cast is generally solid. I still want this new DC Universe to succeed, which is probably why I walked away disappointed more than anything else. Superman made me excited about where DC was headed. Supergirl made me wonder whether they’ve already started slipping back into some of the habits that caused superhero fatigue in the first place. It’s not a bad movie. It’s just… mid. And that’s probably more disappointing than if it had simply been terrible.

Saw this twice over the last 2 weeks. When did the catch it again before I reviewed it because I wasn’t really sure what I thought after my first viewing. I couldn’t tell whether I genuinely liked it or whether it was just hitting every nostalgia button I have. I grew up loving He-Man. Like a lot of kids from that era, I always wished we’d gotten a better movie than the Dolph Lundgren version. After seeing it a second time, I think I have an answer. While I enjoyed it both times, the second viewing convinced me that I actually like the movie. Importantly, I think 10yo me would have absolutely loved this. I can easily see a generation of kids growing up with this as one of their favorite movies, in much the same way my generation grew up with Hook. Critics may not love this, but I think it hits the notes that matter for its core audience. The movie embraces exactly what He-Man has always been: a gloriously corny fantasy world that originated as an ‘80s toy line. Like Transformers, G.I. Joe, and so many other franchises of that era, the whole thing existed to sell toys. That’s part of its DNA. Trying to judge it as if it were some profound novel based fantasy epic feels unfair. Even you have no attachment to the IP, at its core this is still a fairly straightforward fantasy adventure about a chosen one hero fighting an evil overlord. So you can watch this without knowing any of the lore. But if you have any affection for He-Man, there’s a lot here to enjoy. Nicholas Galitzine makes for a very likable He-Man. Ironically, Adam/He-Man himself is probably one of the less interesting characters in the movie, but Galitzine has exactly the kind of earnestness the role needs. Camila Mendes is a perfectly good Teela. She doesn’t have the most interesting material to work with, but she does fine, and yes, she’s ridiculously attractive. Idris Elba throws himself into the role of Man-at-Arms and clearly looks like he’s having a great time, but I had a hard time buying the character’s backstory. The movie asks us to believe that this legendary military commander simply spent fifteen years drinking after his king and queen disappeared and the prince vanished into another world. If he was really as capable as everyone says he was, as us fans believe he is, I feel like he would’ve spent those fifteen years trying to rescue them instead of drowning his sorrows in alcohol. That felt like a missed storytelling opportunity, ie showing him actually trying and failing and honestly, there’s enough space there that you could build an entire prequel around it. I bet Idris would up for that. On the Jared Leto of it all…A lot of people love to dunk on Jared Leto, but this is probably the ideal way to use him. His face hidden behind CGI, his voice is heavily altered, and him completely committing to the camp reputation on Skeletor that has developed overtime. He knows exactly what movie he’s in, and he seems to be having an absolute blast playing Skeletor. The same goes for Alison Brie as Evil-Lyn. On my first viewing I wasn’t entirely sold, but the second time around I appreciated just how much she was leaning into the character. She’s hamming it up every bit as much as Leto, and that actually works in this universe. The movie even pokes fun at itself, joking that all of these ridiculous character names that sound like they were invented by a ten-year-old basically were. That's Canon now. It’s a funny acknowledgment that everyone involved understands exactly what this franchise is. Random note, James Purefoy shows up here as King Randor. I have no idea how they convinced him to take what amounts to a fairly insignificant role, but he’s great because James Purefoy is almost always great. The biggest question going forward is whether audiences show up. We'll see. The film clearly wants to launch a Masters of the Universe cinematic universe, and it certainly leaves the door open for more. At one point it teases a She-Ra spinoff. Personally, I’d rather they just make He-Man 2 first. Spend more time with these characters before branching out into a shared universe. This isn't a great movie, but strip away the nostalgia and you’re still left with a solid, familiar fantasy adventure that doesn’t bore or offend. It’s colorful, sincere, unapologetically goofy, and never embarrassed by its own premise. For me, that’s worth at least 2.75 stars, which I'm rounding up to 3 cause it's MY childhood we're reevaluating here after all. 😄 Go and have fun.

Maa Inti Bangaaram is just a good movie. Not a good Telugu movie or a good Indian movie with an asterisk. Just a good movie. The story follows a woman hiding an entire previous life from the family she married into. She’s an orphan, so when she marries her husband she essentially marries his whole family, because she doesn’t have one of her own. The problem is they never fully accept her. They don’t know where she comes from, they don’t know her people, they don’t know her class or caste, and that matters to this family far more than she’d like. So she spends her days trying to prove herself. The first half plays like a family comedy. She’s competing with her sister-in-law for the unofficial title of favorite daughter-in-law and losing badly. The sister-in-law cooks better, prays better, knows every tradition, and the family leans on her for everything. Eventually our protagonist gets desperate enough to call in her best friend from the orphanage, and that stretch was one of my favorite parts of the movie. She basically guilt-trips this poor woman into leaving her own husband’s household to help her fake being the perfect homemaker while the extended family is in town. The friend is a beast in the kitchen, they’re up before dawn producing these elaborate meals, and the family starts warming up because they think she transformed into an incredible daughter-in-law overnight. Then the movie shifts into something else entirely. Before she ever met her husband, she got caught up in what she believed was a revolutionary movement fighting for justice. It was actually a violent criminal organization led by a man she trusted, and who eventually fell in love with her. He trained her, taught her to fight, and turned her into an absolute badass. When she realized who he really was, she betrayed him and set him up to be arrested. He never stopped suspecting her, and once he confirms she’s alive and living under a new identity, he becomes obsessed with finding her. From there it’s a full-on action movie, except now she’s not trying to impress her in-laws. She’s trying to protect them. That structure is what I liked most. The family comedy in the first half isn’t wasted time. It gives you a reason to care about these people before the bullets start flying, so by the time her past catches up with her, she’s fighting for the family she worked so hard to join. Samantha Ruth Prabhu carries this thing. She has to be funny, awkward, emotional, convincing as someone completely out of her depth in a traditional household, and then completely believable once the action starts, and I bought all of it. The movie knows exactly what it wants to be. It’s not reinventing Telugu action cinema, it’s taking a familiar hidden-past story and putting a woman at the center, and it works remarkably well. If you’re open to foreign-language films, I recommend it. If you’re already into Indian cinema, and Telugu cinema especially, this is an easy call.

When I first heard Young Washington was being distributed by Angel Studios, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Angel has built a reputation that’s more complicated than people give them credit for. Some dismiss anything with the Angel label because they assume it’s going to be political or overtly religious. I don’t think that’s fair anymore. Some of their best work has been historical dramas like Cabrini and Truth & Treason, Films that are more interested in relating compelling true stories than preaching to the audience. Fortunately Young Washington fits squarely into that recent positive trajectory for them. This film follows George Washington before he became the indispensable man of the American Revolution. Ambitious from the beginning, he desperately wants to earn a British military commission and prove himself, only to run headfirst into the rigid class system of the British Empire. You know where this story is headed. The question is how he becomes the man history remembers. What I appreciated most is that this isn’t a hagiography. Washington isn’t portrayed as a born leader. He’s overconfident, makes poor decisions, loses men under his command, and is ultimately forced to learn through failure. The movie understands that greatness isn’t inherited, it has to be earned. Fundamentally, this is an adventure movie set against real history. The expeditions into the Ohio Country, the frontier warfare, and the French and Indian War give it a real sense of momentum. I never found myself checking my watch. The acting is solid across the board. Little known actor William Franklyn-Miller does a decent job as young Washington, and veteran actors like Ben Kingsley, Andy Serkis, Kelsey Grammer, and Mary-Louise Parker add a lot of credibility without ever taking over the film. I appreciate what this movie isn’t. It isn’t a sermon. It isn’t a political lecture. It isn’t an attempt to canonize George Washington. It’s simply an engaging historical drama about an important period of his life. I walked in knowing the broad outlines of these events but very few of the details. I walked out wanting to learn more. That’s about the highest compliment I can give a historical film. Angel Studios has carved out a niche identifying and distributing earnest historical dramas and family-friendly films that aren’t cynical, and Young Washington continues that trend. I know some people will skip this simply because of the Angel Studios logo. I think that’s a mistake. I promise you, if I didn’t like this movie, I’d say so. I just genuinely enjoyed it. I hope this is only the first chapter. Washington’s life is far too interesting to end here, and this movie lays an excellent foundation for what could become a really enjoyable series. If you enjoy historical dramas or biographies, I think Young Washington is well worth your time. I highly recommend it.

This review may contain spoilers. This is a positive review. I promise. But… …I think I’m suffering from a little franchise fatigue with Toy Story, and that isn’t really the movie’s fault. It’s mine. I wasn’t excited about this one going in. Thirty years and five movies will do that. At some point every big franchise starts carrying the weight of its own legacy, and fortunately for all of us, this one handles that about as well as it possibly could. The premise is genuinely clever. Instead of pretending kids still play with toys the way they did in 1995, Pixar asks the obvious question: what happens when the toys aren’t competing with other toys anymore, they’re competing with screens? The villain, if you can even call her that, is basically an iPad named Lilypad. Bonnie slowly stops playing with her toys, not because she doesn’t love them, but because that’s how kids socialize now. Her classmates live through their devices, and if you’re not in that world, you’re left out. That’s a very real anxiety for modern parents, and Pixar taps into it well. What I appreciated most is that it never becomes a “technology bad” lecture. It’s about balance. Kids still need imagination and unstructured play and each other, and that’s a worthwhile story to tell in 2026. Ironically, the movie also highlights why this franchise doesn’t hit me emotionally anymore. The original Toy Story was already nostalgic. It was about old toys being replaced by new ones. Now we’re thirty years past that movie and these same toys are still fighting to stay relevant, and the problem is I don’t have nostalgia for their nostalgia. My generation didn’t grow up with pull-string cowboy dolls or Space Ranger action figures. Those toys felt old-fashioned when I was a kid. Asking me to feel wistful about them decades later just doesn’t land. None of that makes it a bad movie. The direction is strong, the pacing works, and the screenplay modernizes the franchise without betraying it. Jessie steps naturally into a bigger leadership role. I did miss Woody, though. I understand why he was sidelined after Toy Story 4, but he’s my favorite character, and any Toy Story movie is a little less special when he isn’t driving the story. I’m also not convinced every Buzz subplot needed to exist. Some of it felt engineered to sell a specific version of the Buzz toy. But that’s kind of the joke, isn’t it? People love pretending franchises like Transformers, G.I. Joe, He-Man, and Toy Story exist in some artistic vacuum. They’ve always been tied to toys. So if Pixar wants to introduce a drone Buzz Lightyear that kids immediately beg their parents for, that’s on brand. And honestly, drone Buzz is kind of badass. It’s the fantasy the original Buzz always thought he was living. I’ll admit I’m probably not the ideal audience anymore. I’m not a kid and I don’t have kids, and I suspect this movie hits much harder if you’re watching Bonnie’s relationship with screens play out in your own house instead of observing it from the outside. Parents will see themselves in it, and that’s exactly what this franchise needed. Personally I enjoyed Minions & Monsters a little more, but Toy Story 5 is probably gonna the bigger hit, and it does exactly what it sets out to do.

The Death of Robin Hood is a beautifully shot movie. The cinematography is gorgeous, Hugh Jackman gives a terrific performance, and the cast generally does excellent work with the material they’re given. My problem is the same problem I’ve had with a lot of movies lately: the script. I’m honestly not sure why this movie was made. The film presents Robin Hood as a weary, violent killer haunted by his past, then spends more than two hours waiting for someone to kill him. It’s basically Logan set in medieval England, minus the mutants and superhero mythology. Robin wanders through a world of brutality, guilt, and death while looking for some form of redemption, but I never found the journey particularly interesting. What I found most frustrating is that this movie barely engages with the Robin Hood mythology at all. And when I say barely, I mean almost not at all. There is, without exaggeration, very little here that connects to the Robin Hood legend beyond the character names. If this had been released under a different title with different names, no one would have identified it as a Robin Hood story. Robin Hood is one of the most enduring folk heroes in Western culture. Whether the legends are true, exaggerated, or completely fabricated, there are fascinating questions you could explore. This movie isn’t interested in any of that. Instead, it gives us an ultraviolent opening sequence filled with gruesome acts of violence, then shifts into a slow meditation on guilt and mortality. I understand what Sarnoski was aiming for. People on social media have compared it to Logan, and in that same way it seems less interested in adventure than in an aging killer confronting his own death. But for me, the film never develops enough of a story, theme, or character arc to justify following that journey. Jodie Comer is very good here as Sister Brigid, a character who seems to exist somewhere between an abbess, a nun, a mystic, and a witch. I never quite understood what the movie wanted her to be. Hugh Jackman is excellent, as always. Those two performances aren’t the issue. The problem is that the characters are trapped inside a story that never gives them much to do beyond discussing death, regret, and violence. There is a young girl here who appears to function largely as an audience surrogate, witnessing horrifying acts while being powerless to stop them. In that sense, she reflects the audience’s experience of the film itself. We sit and watch violence unfold, unable to do anything about it. What surprised me most was how little fun the movie is. That’s not necessarily a criticism by itself. Many great films are unpleasant experiences. But unlike something like Logan, which has compelling characters and a clear emotional destination, The Death of Robin Hood often felt aimless. I was bored more than disturbed. If you’re someone who enjoys grim, brutal, ultraviolent medieval dramas where men spend much of the runtime tearing each other apart, there is definitely an audience for this. The first third of the film in particular delivers plenty of that. But if you’re looking for a Robin Hood movie, I don’t think this is one. In fact, I suspect I would have liked the movie more if it had been completely disconnected from Robin Hood altogether. As a Robin Hood movie, I think it fails. As a standalone movie, it still needs a stronger story and a clearer point than it ultimately provides. The acting is excellent. The cinematography is beautiful. But by the time the credits rolled, I felt like I had spent over two hours watching a man search for death without ever giving me a compelling reason to care whether he found it. I hope someone makes another good Robin Hood movie soon. This isn’t it.

I've seen The Furious twice now, once by myself and once with a group of friends, and I enjoyed it just as much the second time. In fact, I think I appreciated it even more. This is one of those rare action movies where you immediately want to watch it again because you're still processing everything you just saw. I honestly can't remember the last time I saw fight choreography this consistently inventive and beautifully executed. A lot of people are going to compare it to The Raid, and I understand why. Joe Taslim is here, the movie has that same relentless momentum, and the action is similarly brutal. Personally, though, I think The Furious is even better. It may not have quite the same architectural elegance as The Raid, but the fights are more varied, more creative, and somehow even more satisfying to watch. Every major set piece feels like the filmmakers sat down and asked themselves, "How do we top the last one?" Then they actually did. The setup is refreshingly simple. Wang Wei, played by Xie Miao, is a mute handyman whose daughter Rainy has come to visit him from overseas. The two have developed their own way of communicating, and those early scenes do a surprisingly good job of establishing their relationship. Rainy wants to stay with her father, but Wei insists she has to go back because he doesn't think she's safe where he lives. Of course, she's kidnapped before she can leave, and the movie wastes absolutely no time turning into the greatest "dad with a particular set of skills" story since Taken. From that point forward, it's basically one man dismantling an entire criminal organization one body at a time. The brilliance of the action isn't just that Wang Wei wins. It's how he wins. He's smaller than many of the people he fights, but he methodically works his way through them with incredible efficiency. The movie makes a point of showing that he doesn't immediately resort to weapons. He fights with his hands until circumstances force him to improvise, and when he finally does pick up a weapon or even an ordinary tool, it's over. The man becomes an absolute nightmare. Every object within reach turns into something lethal. Along the way he crosses paths with Navin, Joe Taslim's character, an investigative journalist searching for his missing wife. Naturally, they fight before realizing they're after the same organization. Their first encounter is one of the highlights of the movie. It's beautifully choreographed, establishes that both men belong in the same league, and gives each of them a chance to shine before they become reluctant allies. From then on, having two protagonists instead of one only makes the movie better. The villains deserve just as much credit. Brian Le is fantastic as the ambitious son in law trying to climb the ranks of the criminal organization. Unlike a lot of action movie bad guys, he's every bit as physically capable as the heroes. He's not sitting behind a desk giving orders. He gets into the fights himself, and he's legitimately dangerous. His contract killer is equally entertaining, but the real scene stealer is the hulking adopted son of the crime boss, played by Guo Junqian. He's basically an unstoppable force of nature. Every time you think he's finally down, he gets back up again. Watching him absorb punishment and keep coming was one of the most entertaining running gags in the entire movie. The final act somehow finds a way to top everything that came before it. By the end, Wang Wei, Navin, the son in law, the adopted son, and the contract killer all end up colliding in one massive fight where allegiances are constantly shifting. At certain points it's almost impossible to tell who's attacking whom because everyone has a reason to hate everyone else. Meanwhile, Rainy refuses to simply escape once she's found because she wants to rescue the other kidnapped children as well. The result is an absolutely glorious, bloody mess that somehow remains easy to follow despite the chaos. What impressed me most is that the movie never forgets what people came to see. It doesn't bog itself down with unnecessary mythology or melodrama. It gives us two heroes worth rooting for, villains we genuinely want to see lose, and then lets some of the best martial artists working today go to work. The physicality on display is extraordinary. Every punch, throw, kick, and broken bone looks like it hurts. If you're looking for a great martial arts movie, stop looking. This is it. It's raw, vicious, unapologetically violent, and feels like a modern evolution of the classic Hong Kong action films I grew up loving. It's absolutely not for kids, but it's exactly the kind of movie I would've obsessed over as a teenager. This is one of the best movies I've seen all year, and easily the best pure action movie of 2026.

This was really funny. This is a successful attempt to revive the David Zucker/Mel Brooks style of farcical humor that Liam Neeson's The Naked Gun was trying for(unsuccessfully JMO) last year. The same genre space Scary Movie fumbled it's way through this year. This does that genre better than either of those. There's just a ton of humor and charm packed into this. You've even got fun original songs and dance routines in there. I had no intention of seeing this one, I switched to it only because I got there too late in the afternoon for Ponyo. But I really enjoyed this. I'm down for the sequel if RuPaul reups. I recommend this one for any looking for a few laughs.

Disclosure Day is one of the strangest movie experiences I've had in a while because I kinda enjoyed watching it and kinda disliked it while thinking about it afterward. First, the good. Spielberg is still Spielberg. Technically, this thing is immaculate. The direction is confident, the pacing mostly works, the visuals are gorgeous, and John Williams delivers exactly the kind of score you want from a Spielberg alien movie. On a pure experience level, I was entertained. We brought more than two dozen people from my movie group, and nobody looked bored. The problem is the script. The movie wants to be a grand statement about disclosure, religion, empathy, humanity, and our place in the universe. Instead, it feels like a collection of half-developed ideas that never survive contact with basic questions. The central assumption of the film is that the aliens are benevolent. Not just benevolent, but morally superior to humanity. One character practically says they are closer to God than we are and that empathy is their highest value. Fine. But the movie never earns that conclusion. These beings abducted children. They altered memories. They apparently manipulated human biology or consciousness so these people could later serve some grand communicative purpose. How is this okay? If a government did this, it would be monstrous. If a corporation did this, it would be monstrous. If a cult did this, it would be monstrous. But because the aliens are framed as spiritually advanced and emotionally evolved, the movie seems to expect us to glide past it. I cannot glide past it. The film keeps insisting, directly or indirectly, that these aliens are better than us. But better beings do not steal children in the night, experiment on them, erase or distort their memories, and then use them decades later as tools in a disclosure campaign. That is not benevolent. They are treating other sentient beings as means to an end. And the frustrating thing is that the movie never seems interested in interrogating that. It treats suspicion of the aliens as fear, ignorance, or government paranoia. But suspicion is the rational response. These entities have been operating outside consent, outside accountability, and outside human knowledge for decades. Why should I assume they are good? Because they say empathy matters? That is not enough. A person can talk about empathy and still dominate you. A person can claim moral superiority and still use you. A person can frame itself as peaceful while quietly deciding that your autonomy is expendable. Being an alien does not change any of that. That is what Disclosure Day never reckons with. The aliens may believe they are benevolent. Spielberg may believe they are benevolent. But the conduct shown in the story does not establish benevolence. It establishes power and influence without accountability. Likewise, the religious angle feels strangely undercooked. One of the primary voices representing faith is essentially a former nun who abandoned her vocation years earlier. For a movie that wants to explore how disclosure would affect religious belief, the actual religious perspective is surprisingly absent. Compare it to Contact, which at least allowed competing worldviews to exist in meaningful tension with one another. Here, there isn't much tension. The movie clearly has an answer and spends most of its runtime nudging the audience toward accepting it. The result is a film that feels intellectually one-sided. Not because it takes a position, but because it never seriously entertains alternatives. Even beyond the thematic issues, the plotting is messy. Colin Firth's government faction is repeatedly forced to act like idiots so the story can continue. The protagonists escape situations they shouldn't escape. Important questions go unanswered. The script often feels less interested in logic than in arriving at the next emotional beat. As for the performances, Emily Blunt has the most fun role and gets the most memorable moments. Josh O'Connor is solid, as he usually is, though I'm starting to wonder whether he's become so good at playing earnest, idealistic believers that I'm no longer sure where the actor ends and the typecasting begins. In the end, I enjoyed the experience. I liked being in the theater. I liked the score. I liked the performances. I liked the spectacle. I loved the released "government" footage at the end. But I honestly think it's kind of dumb, kind of problematic, terminally morally confused, and I don't want to watch it again.

Pressure is one of those movies that's perfectly competent and completely unnecessary.

The film follows the lead-up to D-Day, focusing primarily on the meteorologists trying to determine whether the invasion can proceed. One side is represented by James Stagg, played by Andrew Scott, who wants to forecast the weather through emerging meteorological science. The other is Irving Krick, played by Chris Messina, who relies more heavily on historical analogues and pattern matching. That's the central conflict.

The problem is that we already know how this story ends.

Everybody in the theater knows D-Day happened on June 6. Everybody knows the invasion went forward. Everybody knows the broad outcome. So the movie has to generate drama through the characters, and I don't think it succeeds.

The meteorologist we're asked to care about spends most of the movie acting like an asshole. There's an attempt to humanize him through family drama, but it feels synthetic because we simply don't spend enough time with him. The same problem applies to most of the cast. Kerry Condon's Kay Summersby is clearly supposed to provide the emotional center of the story, but I never really understood why I was supposed to be invested in her beyond the fact that the movie kept insisting that I should be.

Brendan Fraser plays Eisenhower. Maybe it's accurate. I honestly don't know. But the entire time I felt like I was watching Brendan Fraser wearing an Eisenhower costume rather than Eisenhower himself.

The movie isn't bad. That's the frustrating thing. It's professionally made. The performances are fine. The production values are solid. I just found myself checking my phone repeatedly because I didn't care.

World War II movies have to clear a very high bar to be interesting given the proliferation of them. This one doesn't clear it. It isn't bad. It's perfectly fine. I'd just rather stream this on a lazy weekend afternoon than see it in theaters.

I loved this movie.

Tuner is basically a heist movie wrapped inside a slice-of-life drama about music, loss, and finding a purpose after your life doesn't go the way you planned. The setup is great. Niki White is a former piano prodigy with extreme auditory sensitivity and hearing that is so good he can crack safes by ear. Naturally, this eventually leads him into a life of crime.

What makes the movie work isn't really the heist plot, though. It's the characters. Leo Woodall is incredibly charismatic as Niki. Harry Horowitz, his mentor in the piano tuning business, is funny and warm. Marla is charming. The romance between Niki and Ruthie develops naturally and gives the movie a lot of heart. I enjoyed spending time with all of these people.

The music is a huge part of why this works. Classical music, jazz, discussions about music, people arguing about music, people falling in love through music. Herbie Hancock showing up was a nice surprise. The soundtrack and the performances give the entire film a warmth that carries it through even when the plot isn't doing anything particularly surprising.

One thing I really liked is that Niki doesn't get drawn into crime because he's greedy. Harry loses his insurance, the bills start piling up, and Niki starts using his unusual talents to help Harry and Marla keep their heads above water. It gives the heist elements a lot more emotional weight than they otherwise would have had.

What I liked most is that the movie gradually reveals that Niki's greatest loss wasn't really losing his parents. It was losing his ability to be an artist. Everything else in the story grows out of that wound, and it gives the character more depth than you initially expect.

There isn't anything revolutionary here. You can see most of the plot developments coming. But sometimes a movie doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes it just needs to be well-made, charming, funny, and emotionally honest.

This is one of the best movies I've seen this year. If you like heist movies, New York City movies, jazz, classical music, or just spending time with likable characters, I highly recommend it.

Backrooms is a weird movie. I'm not entirely convinced I understand what happened, and I'm not entirely convinced the movie cares whether I understand it or not. The setup seems to involve a man who is only loosely attached to reality finding comfort in an alternate world that feels more controllable than his actual life. The deeper the movie goes, the more it starts to feel like you're wandering around inside somebody else's damaged psyche. Whether that's literally what's happening or not, I couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is that it's creepy. This isn't really a jump-scare movie. There are a couple of those, but most of the horror comes from the atmosphere. The visuals are unsettling. The spaces feel wrong. The logic of the world feels wrong. There is a chase sequence that felt like pure nightmare fuel. My understanding is that this is based on an internet phenomenon that I know very little about. Maybe people familiar with that material will get more out of it than I did. As a newcomer, I found it interesting but frequently confusing. The biggest problem for the producers of this is that it comes out so soon after Obsession, which is playing in a lot of the same territory while being a significantly stronger film. If someone asked me which of them to see first, I'd tell them Obsession without hesitation. Still, this is worth watching. I don't think it fully works. I don't think it entirely makes sense. But it stuck with me, and that's more than I can say for a lot of horror movies.

Mandalorian and Grogu basically feels like three or four episodes of The Mandalorian stitched together and blown up onto an IMAX screen. Luckily, The Mandalorian is a pretty good show, so it still works for the most part.

The movie looks great. The CGI is solid, the action scenes are fun, and the production values are exactly what you’d expect from modern Star Wars. I had a pretty good time with it overall. But the story itself feels oddly held back. You can tell they had to spend a lot of time reintroducing these characters for casual audiences, so the movie barely moves them forward at all.

Mando and Grogu basically start the movie as the same characters we already know and end it in pretty much the exact same place. Nothing really changes. Nobody learns much of anything. It’s two and a half hours long and sometimes still feels a bit smaller storywise than some of the better episodes of the show.

That said, there’s a ton of action. Mando fights basically everyone. Cad Bane shows up for the Filoni fans, which I’m sure people who loved the animated shows went nuts for. I was never super into the cartoons myself, so that stuff didn’t really hit me emotionally, but it all fits together well enough.

The thing that stood out most to me is that Grogu feels kind of stuck as a character now. It’s starting to feel like the Bumblebee problem from Transformers. Bumblebee couldn’t talk in the first live action Transformers moviebecause of the  proportion voice malfunction that they worked into the script for humor and then they were locked into that gimmick forever because audiences connected the character with it. Grogu feels similar. He’s basically this intelligent fifty-year-old baby who can only communicate through little noises and head tilts. It’s cute, but eventually that starts to limit the character. If they ever give him a real voice, part of the charm disappears. But if they don’t, how much more can they really do with him?

I enjoyed this a lot. I’d definitely watch it again. But it never really justified being a movie instead of just another half season of TV. And since I think the show at its best is honestly a four or even four-and-a-half star series, this slightly watered-down big-screen version lands more around 3.5.

I was pretty much only here for Naomi Ackie and Keke Palmer, and honestly? They carried this thing on pure charisma. They’re both incredibly funny, effortlessly watchable, and have the kind of chemistry where I could’ve sat through another two hours of them getting into nonsense. It almost felt like the movie underused them. Half the time they’re just being charming and stealing stuff, and that alone is entertaining enough.

The whole crew had good chemistry too, especially with Poppy Liu and Taylour Paige. Meanwhile LaKeith Stanfield shows up looking like Prince playing some kind of pussy vampire. Just deeply unserious Boots Riley nonsense. Which, to be clear, I’m completely on board for. If you go to a Boots Riley movie expecting ideological subtlety, that’s your own fault. What you’re getting is anti-capitalist absurdism blasted directly into your face through comedy, and the movie commits to the bit.

I just don’t think the actual narrative fully comes together. The movie wants you to root for this boosting operation robbing a fashion mogul blind because she’s an exploitative capitalist exploiting factory workers. Fine. I get the broad point. But the logic gets shaky if you think about it for more than thirty seconds. The stores still have employees. The factories still have workers. “Everyone stealing everything” is not exactly a coherent labor solution. But whatever.  That's just the Boots Riley of it all. Sorry To Bother You was the same, albeit a better film. Absurdist capitalist critique is just his vibe.

And honestly? The vibe worked for me. This was a lot of fun. I’ll watch it again eventually, but I’m not exactly dying to revisit it. That's what keeps it 3 1/2 instead of four for me.

The tagline for this movie is "When billions get stolen, they are the pros who steal it back."

Who gets the money back when Guy Ritchie steals it from a major studio to do this? Guy should make a movie about that.

Call it: "Operation: Ruse de Première" When millions get stolen by Guy Ritchie, they’re the pros who explain it to the shareholders - <i>A team of accountants, tax lawyers, and insurance adjusters race against time to recover the budget from the last Guy Ritchie movie.</i>

There. I spent as much time working on that plot as Guy spent writing this movie.

I want Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal as an odd couple pair of accountants, Eiza González as a fast talking tax attorney, and Jason Statham as an insurance adjuster with a particular set of skills which include indiscriminate murder in service to the studios' accounts.

I don’t know what I expected from this, but by the end my heart was pounding. It starts out almost like a rom-com about a weak-willed guy who has been friends with a girl for six or seven years without ever telling her how he feels. He keeps trying to work up the nerve, and you can see him get right up to the edge of saying it, then never do it. And she pretty clearly does not feel the same way.

Then he finds a magical way to force her to fall in love with him, or so he thinks. And it goes very wrong, in a very twisted way.

It’s basically a movie-length Twilight Zone episode: someone gets exactly what they want, and then gets punished by the thing they wanted. There are a lot of jump scares, and they got me. There is graphic violence. Terrible things happen to animals.

Honestly, I came out of this feeling traumatized and exhilarated. This was excellent, but I don’t think I want to see it again soon. I think it may have changed me in some way. Not really, obviously, but rhetorically speaking. I don’t want to go through experiences like this often.

But the movie is very well done. It’s everything you want from this kind of horror movie. I’m famous for not finding horror movies scary or even interesting. Usually I just find them funny.

This wasn’t funny. This was disturbing. And this was very interesting.

Go see this if you like horror on any level. It won't disappoint. Just don’t walk in all casually thinking you’re just going to have a good time and move on. Some of this stuff is gonna get to you.

I really liked this a lot. Don't have a lot of deep thoughts about this one.

Frank Grillo stars as a former marine and elite biophysicist who fights to save his family from a supermoon-induced global werewolf pandemic. As a biophysicist/marine, Grillo's character works to find a cure while battling werewolves often capitalizing on his real-life martial arts training in boxing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

That's the premise.

I want to see this with my mom for Mother's Day and she fell asleep 30 minutes in so I woke her up and we left early. I went back to see it again myself a couple days later and I fell asleep 15 minutes and woke up with five minutes left in the movie. The magic of counting sheep I guess. I have no way of evaluating this movie. The beginning and the end seem OK. 😆

Hokum is another one of those horror movies from this year that deserved a much bigger audience than it got. There have been a surprising number of really good horror movies in 2026, and I&#039;d put this one right up there with the better entries. It&#039;s directed by Damian McCarthy, who made Oddity, and it stars Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, a successful novelist who travels to a remote seaside hotel in Ireland to scatter his parents&#039; ashes and finish the last chapter of his latest book. From the moment he arrives, things start going sideways. Part of what makes the movie work is Adam Scott, because I&#039;ve never really seen him play a character like this before. Most of the time he&#039;s the lovable, awkward guy you&#039;re naturally rooting for. Here, he gets to go full asshole, and there&#039;s really not much about him that&#039;s redeeming. He&#039;s arrogant, he thinks he&#039;s the smartest person in every room he walks into, and he condescends to everybody around him. The interesting thing is that the movie doesn&#039;t seem to care whether you like him or not. It isn&#039;t trying to make excuses for him. That&#039;s just who he is, and that&#039;s who you&#039;re following through the story. In a way, it reminded me of Obsession. You may or may not like the protagonist, but it&#039;s pretty clear the writer doesn&#039;t really care whether you do. They aren&#039;t trying to write somebody who&#039;s easy to root for. They&#039;re writing the person they want to put through this nightmare. As the movie goes along, you&#039;re never really sure what kind of horror film you&#039;re watching. Is this a murder mystery? Is this supernatural horror? Are there really mystical things happening here, or are there just very bad people involved? The movie keeps you guessing for a long time, and I appreciated that. It doesn&#039;t immediately show its hand. Instead, you follow Ohm as he slowly digs himself deeper into whatever is happening at this old Irish hotel, and the more he investigates, the stranger things become, and the less certain you are about where the line between folklore and reality actually is. Irish folklore hangs over the entire movie, and because of that setting you&#039;re almost primed to believe something supernatural is waiting around the corner. One of my favorite things about the movie is watching this hyper-skeptical, hyper-rational guy slowly reach the point where even he can&#039;t explain what&#039;s happening anymore. He&#039;s constantly trying to out-think everything. Every strange event has to have a logical explanation, every creepy story has to be nonsense, and watching him decide, little by little, whether he actually believes any of it becomes just as interesting as the mystery itself. The movie still delivers what you want from a horror film. There are jump scares, there are some escape-room style sequences once he finally decides to figure out what&#039;s really happening, there are plenty of creepy images, and there are a couple of surprises toward the end that I won&#039;t spoil. If you&#039;ve seen a lot of horror movies over the last few years, you may figure out part of what&#039;s happening before the movie reveals it, but I don&#039;t think that&#039;s really the point. The fun is watching everything unfold and seeing how the pieces fit together. Adam Scott really impressed me here. This is such a different role for him, and I thought he completely committed to it. The supporting cast all do solid work as well, especially the strange collection of people working at and around the hotel, who constantly leave you wondering whether they&#039;re hiding something or whether they&#039;re just eccentric. This deserved better than becoming one of those movies that quietly disappears into video-on-demand a month after release. If you&#039;re into horror, I definitely recommend it. It&#039;s fascinating, it&#039;s well done, and it deserves to be seen.

Not good. Not smart. But never boring,

Good, good. I can&#039;t with the make out session at the end though. Just can&#039;t. Y&#039;all know.

Two things work in this film. First: Jaafar Jackson. The kid is phenomenal. His dancing, his physicality, his embodiment of his uncle is genuinely uncanny. LaToya said watching him felt like watching Mike, and I understand that completely. He deserves recognition for this performance, even if the movie around him doesn’t deserve him. Second: the music. It’s Michael Jackson. That’s never going to be a problem.

But there are a ton of problems with this.

This is a greatest hits playlist with no liner notes, no insight, no interior life. You watch a character move through the events of Michael Jackson’s life without ever understanding why he’s doing any of it. The controlling father is the film’s one and only explanation for everything. That’s where the analysis begins and ends. The script reads like it was generated by an AI prompted to write a Michael Jackson biopic in the most generic, inoffensive way possible. Every single line. Janet Jackson chose not to participate, and the film simply erased her from existence. Not reduced her, erased her. The closest sibling he had, a star in her own right with a decades-long television and music career, and she just doesn’t exist in this story. I understand she declined to be depicted. I don’t understand why that decision led to her complete removal from a story she was demonstrably part of. The family is running this production, and apparently that gave her sufficient say over her own exclusion, which is extraordinary.

The brothers are essentially props. They’re supportive of Michael. That’s the extent of their characterization. The estate’s fingerprints are all over this thing.

Michael has no relationships here. No romantic life, no real friendships with any chemistry, no real bonds with anyone outside his family, and even those bonds are surface level. His relationship with his manager, his driver, his bodyguard, presented as meaningful but never actually felt. Nobody in this film seems to know him. That disconnect reminded me of Bohemian Rhapsody, but that film at least had chemistry and some genuine feeling underneath it. This has less. Considerably less.

The Pepsi burn sequence was graphic and uncomfortable, which is appropriate given how traumatic that event actually was. That’s one moment where the film earns its reality. The controversy surrounding children is essentially untouched, which is probably a function of the legal constraints this production was operating under more than any artistic choice. The film depicts him loving children, visiting hospitals, forming connections with kids. It cuts off around 1988, so much of the more controversial bits of his life are outside of the scope. Make of that what you will.

This is a biopic built to protect a legacy rather than illuminate a human being. Those two goals are fundamentally incompatible, and this film is the proof.

Go watch this if you like Michael Jackson. Watch Jafar be great. He's the reason I'm giving this three stars. But then after that go watch Thriller. Go watch Smooth Criminal, Billie Jean, Beat It, Remember the Time. His own music videos were cinematic masterpieces. If he had been able to make a movie about his own life it would've been epic. If you wanna know Michael the superstar go watch the things that Michael made and the things that Michael did. They're all online now with easy access for everyone. That's gonna give you way more insight than this.

Justice for abuelita!

Dude included a Latin family just to do that with a rosary. No sir. Do that to your own people Mr. Cronin. You're Irish, throw some work to one of your own. Write an elderly religious Irish Catholic woman in there for you to disrespect and abuse.

I was OK with all of the dumb. I caffeinated my way through the boredom. But fuck that. Walked out with 20 minutes left. I'll ask Grok to tell me how it ended if I ever care to know.

Kind of like Ready or Not with more of a Kill Bill vibe but not as smart as the latter. Was a bloody good time.

Feels like you’re getting an inside view of someone else’s existential anxiety attack. I don’t know whether it’s all that informative or enlightening, but I was interested and entertained. I hope he gets some help with that. Counseling or something. Tuner and Navalny were outstanding. Go watch those after this. Roher’s evident out of control neuroticism doesn’t seem to be a hindrance in his work.

Hot green garbage. Walked out 8 years ago. No regrets. Revisiting this just to give it the formal disrespect it deserves. The half star is just to give it an actual rating, so there's no question or whether I intended to rate it. It deserves no stars.  Even the "stars" who were in it, Taron and Jamie, don't deserve to be attached to it.

This was more like a part B than an entirely new film. Still fun.

I feel like the movie kind of glazes the science making it more Oppenheimer than Interstellar/The Martian as far as the hard SF comparisons go. And the back half was a little slow. But I really enjoyed it. It's an alien/human buddy comedy where they risk their lives to try to save their planets and become besties along the way. It's like MIB 5.

Also I want Sandra Hüller to win best supporting actress just based on the one song.

This is everything I want Pixar to be visually and the story was fine, but the old charm just isn't there anymore. Kids should like this, but take them to see Goat first if you haven't already.

Not stylish enough, not mean girl enough, not fun enough, not funny enough, not witchy enough. The whole thing was just a slog until Gabrielle showed up. Don't watch this. I'm sure there's something better in your theater.

Pegasus 3 looks good for the most part, and the racing scenes and landscapes are impressive, but that’s about where the praise ends for me. The acting is poor, the writing is poor, and the characters are paper-thin. The movie leans heavily on CGI to the point that none of the vehicles feel real and none of the driving feels real. It’s all spectacle without much substance behind it. It’s also basically a two-hour boys’ club centered around cars. I honestly can’t remember a single meaningful female character, or really any female presence at all. If you’re looking for strong characters, believable performances, or an engaging story, I don’t think this delivers. If all you want is pretty scenery and racing sequences, you may get more out of it than I did.

This review may contain spoilers. This is another one of those horror movies from this year that slipped under the radar. It had the backing of A24, but it never generated the same level of buzz as some of the studio horror films, and that&#039;s a shame, because I think this is one of the better horror movies I&#039;ve seen this year. The setup is really interesting. The movie follows Evy, who co-hosts a paranormal podcast with her friend Justin. He&#039;s the believer, she&#039;s the skeptic, and their whole dynamic is built around him bringing in creepy videos, recordings, and stories from the internet while she tries to explain why none of it is actually supernatural. It&#039;s almost like an NPR-style podcast, very calm voices, very conversational, very low-key. For one episode, they receive a series of recordings made by a married couple. The wife had begun talking in her sleep and saying disturbing things, so her husband started recording what was happening, and the deeper the recordings go, the stranger they get. That&#039;s all I&#039;ll say about where that thread leads. Evy is listening to these recordings while she&#039;s alone in her childhood home taking care of her mother, who&#039;s in a coma. Because Justin is in Europe, they have to record the podcast in the middle of the night to make the time difference work. So she&#039;s sitting by herself in a dark house, headphones on, listening to this increasingly disturbing audio while her mother lies upstairs, and the movie wrings an unbelievable amount of dread out of that simple situation. That&#039;s what I loved about this movie. It&#039;s basically a chamber piece. Most of it is just one woman sitting in a dark room talking quietly into a microphone, listening to audio, and reacting to what she hears. It shouldn&#039;t work, and it absolutely does, because this movie understands that what you hear can be scarier than what you see. It doesn&#039;t constantly jump out and scare you. It lets you sit there with Evy. You start questioning what&#039;s real right around the time she does. Since she&#039;s the skeptic, she keeps trying to rationalize everything, and you&#039;re right there with her wondering what your own breaking point would be, at what point you&#039;d stop listening, at what point you&#039;d decide something supernatural was actually happening. In a way it reminded me a little of The Ring. Every time she continues to another recording, she&#039;s making a conscious decision to keep going even though she knows something is wrong, and you keep asking yourself whether you would. What really got to me was how relatable the setting is. Everybody has been alone in a quiet house at night, heard something they couldn&#039;t immediately explain, and had that moment of wondering whether they actually heard it or their mind was playing tricks on them. This movie lives in that feeling. It doesn&#039;t rely on elaborate monsters or huge special effects, just sound, silence, darkness, and your own imagination. I honestly found it more disturbing than a lot of the bigger horror movies this year. Outside of Obsession, this may have been the horror movie that stayed with me the longest afterward. It&#039;s one of those movies where you almost want to leave a light on after you get home. Nina Kiri does a really good job carrying almost the entire movie by herself. Adam DiMarco is really only a voice for most of the film, but he works well as the believer to her skeptic, and their chemistry keeps the podcast feeling authentic even though they&#039;re never in the same room together. I also think people who are already into paranormal podcasts, true-crime podcasts, or found-footage horror are going to get even more out of this than I did. The movie understands why people like sitting in the dark listening to creepy stories, and then it turns that experience into the horror movie itself. You&#039;re never quite sure where it&#039;s going until you get there, and I appreciated that. If you&#039;re a horror fan, I definitely recommend it, just not in the middle of the afternoon. Watch it alone, in the dark, and I think it&#039;ll hit a lot different.

She said blow that s*** up. 😮‍💨 And so it was. 😕

I love the fact that they just ran with the premise instead of spending 15 to 20 minutes of screen time trying to explain to us how it works.

No pseudoscience, no link the exposition, no expensive and distracting CGI. Just give us a set of rules for your universe and tell your story.

I might have a few notes on the ending, but this is a lot of fun. Go see it.

Let me save you all some time...

Scene: “Internal Review”

INT. CONFERENCE ROOM – NIGHT

A sterile room lit by harsh fluorescent light. A long table. Identical folders stacked in precise rows.

A red light blinks on a recorder.

At the head sits THE DIRECTOR. Around the table: THE DEPUTY, THE JUNIOR SUPERVISOR, several ANALYSTS, and THE INTERN.

Silence.

THE DIRECTOR We think there is a mole.

(beat)

THE DIRECTOR Are you the mole?

THE DEPUTY No. Are you the mole?

THE DIRECTOR I asked first.

THE DEPUTY Then I am definitely not the mole.

ANALYST #1 If he says he’s not the mole, that is exactly what the mole would say.

THE DIRECTOR Correct. Someone here is the mole.

Everyone nods seriously.

THE DIRECTOR We must question everyone in the organization.

(turning)

Junior Supervisor… are you the mole?

THE JUNIOR SUPERVISOR No, Director. Are you looking for a mole!

ANALYST #2 flips open a file.

ANALYST #2 Employee records show people updating each other constantly. Could they be the mole?

ANALYST #3 Collectively?

ANALYST #2 Possibly.

THE DIRECTOR A collaborative mole.

Everyone writes this down.

THE DEPUTY They all went to school together.

THE DIRECTOR Suspicious.

ANALYST #1 And before that they were from the same hometown.

THE DIRECTOR Very suspicious.

THE INTERN Lots of people are from the same hometown.

Everyone slowly turns to stare at THE INTERN.

THE DIRECTOR Noted.

ANALYST #3 Some of them went to Europe or North America after college.

THE DIRECTOR International exposure.

THE DEPUTY Was he the mole?

THE DIRECTOR Which he?

THE DEPUTY The one who went abroad.

ANALYST #1 Several went abroad.

THE DIRECTOR Then several could be the mole.

THE JUNIOR SUPERVISOR Or none.

The room freezes.

THE DIRECTOR Explain.

THE JUNIOR SUPERVISOR If everyone could be the mole… then the mole could hide among everyone… by being no one.

Long silence.

THE DEPUTY That sounds like something a mole would say.

THE DIRECTOR nods.

THE DIRECTOR Write that down.

THE INTERN scribbles quickly.

THE DIRECTOR Let us begin again.

(beat)

THE DIRECTOR We think there is a mole.

THE DEPUTY Are you the mole?

THE DIRECTOR No. Are you the mole?

THE DEPUTY No.

ANALYST #2 Someone here is the mole.

THE DIRECTOR We must question everyone in the organization.

(turning, same cadence)

Junior Supervisor… are you the mole?

THE JUNIOR SUPERVISOR No. Are you the mole?

THE DIRECTOR I already answered.

THE JUNIOR SUPERVISOR That is exactly what a mole would say.

A beat.

The recorder’s red light blinks faster.

THE INTERN Sir… what if the mole is just… the process?

Everyone stops.

THE DIRECTOR slowly smiles.

THE DIRECTOR Now we are getting somewhere.

He presses the intercom.

THE DIRECTOR Security. Seal the building.

(beat)

THE DIRECTOR No one leaves until we find the mole.

The red light continues blinking.

FADE OUT.

This was fun. Maybe my standards are too low. 😆 The only major issue was the pacing, they child maybe trim about 20 minutes off of this as it gets a little too talkie. Less talking more knife work for the sequel. Maybe show lady hitman how to hold a gun next time. 🔫

Nope. None of this. Don't make me watch anything like this again.

If you haven't seen the show, you probably don't wanna see this.  I know the rating is confusing, all of the fans of these guys are giving it five stars. This is not a bad movie. It's whatever. It's funny if you're young Gen X or old Millenial and get the references and like this kind of humor. Otherwise odds are you're gonna hate this.  You're gonna feel hard-core one way or the other. That's why I'm giving it 2.5, dead middle.

Nosferatu was a much better looking version of this just last year. This was fine.

Not really much here if you don't know the show. Looks cool. I could tell a lot of the audience who did know it were having a moment. I'm giving this three for them.

I did not realize that Jodie Foster spoke French. Learn something new every day. So this movie was mostly in French. And this movie basically has the same premise as a 2018 French film with the exact same title. Psychiatrist. Patient suicide. Suspicion of foul play. Independent investigation. Psychological unraveling. Identical narrative engine.

And yeah as far as I can tell no one is willing to admit that this is a remake. Or explain why a French film in French needed to be remade into an American film mostly in French. 😆

I am not saying it is a shot for shot clone. But yeah, it's the same movie. Weird AF.

I saw this again with a bigger audience and that made all the difference. They enjoyed it so much, I bought into it more. I'm gonna give it that extra half star.

Not for me. I’m logging this because I saw it. I don’t recommend it. Imagine a documentary where a time traveler gets to place a single camera at the site of a historical event. It sounds more interesting in theory than it would be in reality. That’s what watching this feels like. Going in, you think, “Fascinating.” In reality, not much is happening, and it’s just not that interesting.

Excellent. Good story, excellent acting, charismatic lead actors doing good work on a modest budget. Really, really, enjoyed this.

Not to spoil it…

But really, why spend years in counseling when you can work out your childhood trauma with your work spouse in your dreamscape? I think we'd all opt to do it this way if we had a choice.😆

I liked this well enough. I’m not sure why it attracting so much hate and angst, nor do I  understand why it’s being spammed with War of the Worlds comparisons here. Given how many awful movies skate through letterboxd with three stars based on rep alone, yall gotta be kidding  with some of these half stars. 🤣 if you've got some free time go for it in IMAX. It looks great if nothing else.

I will not rate this before my friends have had a chance to see it, so this is just a placeholder. But why does Christopher Abbott keep taking roles where women will go to any lengths to not have sex with him. 🤣 I mean starting your own religion and pretending that you're Jesus just to not have sex with Christopher Abbott is bold even given his sad dramatic history.

This was diverting, and that’s about it. Ralph Fiennes is basically going through the motions, which feels like a real waste of his talent. It’s even more noticeable when you’ve just seen Bone Temple a couple days earlier where he's a freakin' rockstar.

Jacob Dudman here though, can actually sing. Credit where it’s due. Also his character comes back from the war missing an arm and finding his girl moved on to another man thinking him dead, and somehow <i>that</i> reunion was not the most uncomfortable conversation he has with his ex in this movie.

I’ll give it three stars, mostly for Dudman and Amara Okereke who can also really sing.

Was even better the second watch. Giving it that half star I withheld previously because I was surprised at how dark it went.

At one point Gerard Butler says “you’ve got to be kidding me” while standing on a rope bridge suspended over a hollowed-out canyon that apparently used to be the English Channel before all the water in the Atlantic Ocean evaporated, apparently.

Post-comet humanity has somehow forgotten how to build a rope bridge, so the movie spends fifteen full minutes watching grown adults fall off one like some sort of disaster epic medieval TikTok challenge. Then we get a second bridge, this one made out of lashed together ladders, because obviously escalation was required to keep us engaged.

Civilization has allegedly collapsed into dark-age chaos, yet London and Paris still have electricity. Not roads, not stability, not engineering competence, but fully functioning power grids. I'm not rating this because I'm walking out. I hope they eventually make it to the crater of life though. Or die trying. Or whatever.

Primate feels like someone tried to make a Planet of the Apes redux but stripped out the heart, and the social commentary, and left nothing but senseless brutality. This is eighty minutes of an animatronic-looking evil monkey raging through a house and tearing people apart, a bare-bones survival setup that never grows into anything more.

It reminded me of Death of a Unicorn, which has a similar “trapped in a house with a rage-driven beast” premise and is also gory and ridiculous, but at least Unicorn is trying to be a dark fantasy horror comedy, with satire and actual jokes built around its killer-creature concept. Primate feels like the joyless version of that idea, all blood and no brains, as if someone saw the creature chaos in Death of a Unicorn and said, “What if we did this without any of the fun or personality?”

By the midpoint it basically turns into a snuff film, with nothing edifying or interesting about sitting through it. I wouldn’t recommend this.

This is a stronger film from beginning to end than the current Oscar favorites Sinners and One Battle After Another. Timothée Chalamet once again delivers an outstanding performance as our lovable yet hateable hustler protagonist. The script is well written, the performances across the board are sharp, and the cinematography is genuinely impressive. Even Mr. Wonderful is in there killing it.

I loved this movie and would happily see it again. At this point, it feels like the narrative around One Battle After Another being a lock for best picture is set in stone, but this movie is better. The Secret Agent with Wagner Moura is better too. Honestly, I even think Sinners, which I did not entirely love, is better than OBAA. But it is what it is.

Hopefully things shift a bit as we get closer to the big day, because this film deserves to be in the conversation for the big award.

I liked this. I don't have a lot of notes or criticisms. It was just very long. And I don't really know that much new material was added story wise to part 2.

Granted there might've been new stuff that I missed because I nodded off during the whale council I had to get up to take a five minute personal intermission walk around for a bit to come back and finish.

Can't give anything 4 stars if it can't keep me awake for three hours. That's why I dinged it.

The was is a lot of fun, and it wound up being smarter and more thoughtful than I was expecting. It begins as a tense domestic back-and-forth between a woman and her housekeeper, and that stretch is very entertaining, with both characters testing boundaries and trying to gain the upper hand. As it goes on, the tone gradually shifts into something more of a psychological thriller.

The characters here have more depth than you usually get in a film like this, and Sweeney and Seyfried both really shine in their roles.

Amanda Seyfried gives her best performance in years. It was satisfying to watch her anchor a story like this alongside Sydney Sweeney, and the two of them really carry the film’s uneasy, domestic tension.

Brandon Sklenar plays and looks the part of the handsome Hallmark-movie/dime-store-novel husband archetype here, essentially the film’s designated thirst trap for the female leads to fight over, although it does not ultimately play out the way you might expect from that genre.

I highly recommend this one. If you plan to see it, try to avoid spoilers ahead of time. The twists are part of the experience, and the movie rewards going in with as little advance detail as possible.

This is a well done movie. Jackman and Hudson were both solid here.

Like many musical biopics a lot of whether you'll enjoy this depends on your familiarity with and taste for the music itself. I thought this was a well done movie, but I don't care for Neil Diamond at all. For me, the musical set pieces were tedious outside of multiple game renditions of sweet Caroline. As a counterpoint to that general rule for this, I did find Hudson's performance of song sung blue at the end beautiful and moving.

I feel like they're throwing a lot of musical biopics at us this year, but unfortunately for this one in comparison, Springsteen and Bob Dylan are just more interesting figures than a Neil Diamond interpreter. And their music is better. JMO.

This was bad. This was so inhumane, unnatural, and disconnected that I honestly believe this is the first example of an AI-written script being used in a major production.

I honestly question whether James L. Brooks is even still alive. And I honestly believe that someone literally fed a prompt like this into an AI:

Write an original political comedy-drama screenplay about an earnest, idealistic state official unexpectedly elevated to a major leadership position in a generic, mid-sized, Democratic-leaning state. Focus on quiet political realities, personal relationships, and the protagonist’s internal life rather than dramatic external conflict. Set scenes in offices, constituent meetings, family homes, and quiet political events, with realistic dialogue driven by subtext and everyday priorities. Prioritize character psychology and thematic nuance over plot twists. Construct the protagonist’s emotional arc around repeated, understated disappointments from male figures in her life. These failures should not be dramatic betrayals, but cumulative letdowns that reveal self-interest, emotional cowardice, or conditional support. Explore how ideals clash with political constraints, how personal history shapes choices, and how relationships survive the pressures of public life. Tone should be grounded, slightly humorous, and emotionally subtle, with an ending that emphasizes insight rather than final resolution.

I gave this one and a half stars because I actually liked the extended scene between Ayo and Spike. That was it. The rest was garbage.

I really enjoyed this. I thought it was really well done. It genuinely made me respect George Clooney more as an actor, and Adam Sandler did a great job in this as well.

Clooney’s character has so much personal charisma akin to Clooney himself, but the movie also helps you understand why he feels isolated and why no one really feels close to him. That combination makes him compelling rather than distant. You can see how his life has pushed people away, even as he remains likable and magnetic to the public.

By the end, you’re cheering for him to have a real connection with someone/anyone in his life. At the same time, you can also understand his sacrifice, or at least begin to understand it, especially through the way the fans react as he scans their faces at the tribute that's one of the major plot points for the film.

I definitely recommend this one

Awful. This takes excellent source material and turns it into a dumbed-down, discount version of The Handmaid’s Tale. All the mythic depth, structure, and worldbuilding of the original source material is stripped away until the movie is basically running on fumes.

There’s a simmering lesbian romance at the core, which could have been compelling, but the film surrounds it with a bizarre attempt at broad appeal: a handsome, shirtless guy wandering through most of the runtime covered in sweat and blood, killing things and carrying things, for anyone who’d prefer that flavor instead. It’s a strange, unfocused mix, and none of it works.

The end result feels like someone took a rich, imaginative story and reduced it to the simplest possible ingredients: “a little lesbian yearning, a little patriarchy, a shirtless guy for contrast.” That’s not an adaptation. That’s a flattening.

Very murdery.

This was so pointless. I'd rather watch the second season on legit fast forward than sit through that hour recap again. Once the actual content started it was good, but not worth the money. I feel like a sucker for spending $20 to watch a one episode preview of the next arc.

They should be embarrassed releasing this into theaters in the same year that we get Demon Slayer - Infinity Castle and Chainsaw Man - The Reze Arc.

I went into this expecting another round of the playful Knives Out energy we’ve had so far and that is not what this movie is doing. It is really well made and really well acted, but the tone is much heavier than I thought it would be. Easily the darkest of the series.

What surprised me most was how rough the world of this movie feels. Almost every character is morally awful in one way or another. The Catholic Church does not come out looking great here either, which, fine by me since I am not Catholic, but it is still a pretty harsh portrayal. The only people I felt any genuine warmth toward were Blanc and the young priest. Everyone else was on a sliding scale between shady and straight up unpleasant.

Even Blanc feels a little different this time. Still the anchor of the story, but the charm and lightness from the earlier films is toned way down. You can feel that shift in every scene. This one does not give you the same sense of fun as the first movie or even Glass Onion.

And despite the PG 13 rating, I was not comfortable watching this one with the kids in my family over the holidays. Other folks can make their own decisions, but it just doesn’t have the family friendly vibe the earlier movies managed to pull off even when dealing with murder.

All that said, I did think it was a very good movie. It kept me engaged the whole time, just not joyful the way I usually am after one of these.

I was sitting on a 3-3.5 star review of this until the last 15 minutes. The pacing made this a bit of a slog in parts. That being said, it really came together at the end, and Noah Jupe earned his damned money. Getting Noah to play Hamlet after his brother's turn as Hamnet was genius by Chloé Zhao. It all just worked. If you aren't moved by the end, you can't be moved.

This wasn’t boring. This wasn’t good. The movie tries to scale itself into a big ensemble event, but that formula falls apart when you cram seven principal characters into a thin plot without any real character work or world building to make us care.

You can pull something like that off with the Avengers, because Marvel spent six movies and half a decade earning the payoff. Here, the new characters show up with no setup and no emotional weight. There is nothing to invest in, so nothing really lands the way it should.

All that said, I enjoyed it well enough in the moment. It has a few scenes that work and it moves quickly, but it is forgettable.

You should probably just wait to catch this one streaming. Or better yet just watch the first one again, or maybe just go watch the Prestige or the Illusionist.

Justice!

Saw this screen unseen Monday, it’s a banger. I was worried it might be too cringe given the premise, but it turned out to be fun and thoughtful. Solid acting, sharp direction, and good writing. I really enjoyed this one.

I was really bored. The  cinematography was amazing though.

This is basically a meditation on existential angst. Which I guess is great if you spend a lot of your time ruminating on such things.

Those who have read the novella say this was a perfect rendering of the book on screen. So there's that. Nothing about this makes me want to go back and read the novella, but my guess is that this will be good fan service for those of you who did and enjoyed it.

I enjoyed this lot more than the critics apparently. I feel like if you like shows like Justified and Sons of Anarchy, you would like this. Messy family crime drama.

I'm upgrading this to 3.5 after watching it in a normal non-4DX theatre.

What a mess. It was well acted, sure. But that's the minimum you should expect from a cast like this. But the movie itself? A confused mess.

The writers are trying to mash together an upper-middle-class family drama, a fascist takeover story, and a political allegory that refuses to admit it has politics. It wants to be about everything and ends up about nothing.

It’s impossible to make this movie without offending someone, but instead of taking a stance, it just hides behind ambiguity and tone-deaf symbolism. Basically, this is a warning about a fascist takeover of milquetoast suburban basic b*tches.

If you want to make this film, take a political stand. Make it a takeover of crazy Trumpy people or radical leftists. There was no need to try to sit the fence. Obviously political partisans will read their fever dreams into this either way. But the point of taking a stand is that your narrative will make more sense, it's not that you'll have a certain set of political partisans flocking to see it. This story just felt inauthentic and disconnected all the way through.

Who is this for, exactly? I’m not sure even the filmmakers know, but not me for sure.

Still good.

At intermission I'm thinking he kills himself to get his one night with her. It's the only reason I'm staying to watch the rest of this mess...

...actually no. And I liked the way it ended enough to give it the second star.

This is a Hallmark movie. And I like hallmark movies, but there was no need for this to be in theaters. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Colleen Hoover... still.  There's nothing fundamentally wrong with it you'll have as good a time with it as you would with any Hallmark movie if you like Hallmark movies.

Waste of time.

This is an absolutely gorgeous film, which is I guess what you would expect from Guillermo Del Toro given the material. Just a little overly long. The original story was 71 minutes. I'm not sure why they needed two hours and 30 minutes here to  present the same story. There's a great two hour movie in here with better editing. But as it is, it's just really good. I think the story would've benefited from demonstrating more of an emotional connection between Frankenstein and his monster, but that's an artistic decision.

I'm giving  this three stars, because what I could see the movie was really good, but I missed a lot of it because I think Regal's 4DX was trying to kill me and my attention was taking up holding on for dear life. I may see this again in Dolby cinema over at AMC and reevaluate.

I really enjoyed this. I think it's a good film despite the mixed reviews. Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri all did outstanding work here.

I think a lot of the negative criticism I’ve seen isn’t actually about the film itself, but about the fact that it refuses to take a side. It doesn’t side with the perpetrator, and it doesn’t fully side with the protagonist who’s caught in the middle either. Guadagnino just lays everything out and lets us sit in the uncertainty. There’s no clear moral compass or narrative push telling you who to root for. You never know what happened for sure.

To me, that ambiguity is the point. These kinds of situations are messy, and the film’s unwillingness to simplify that is what makes it compelling. I think some of the critical pushback comes from the perception that the movie is “anti–cancel culture,” but I read that more as a reflection of the protagonist’s perspective rather than any heavy-handed agenda from Guadagnino.

Anyways, if you've read all of this, I think this is a good film. I think you should watch it.

What a slow, meandering waste of time. Don’t subject yourself to this in theaters. Just wait until it’s playing on HBO on a lazy Sunday afternoon, perfect background noise for a solid nap. Screen unseen fail.

This was really good — one of the best faith-motivated movies I’ve seen. The story was heartfelt and really well done. Had me tearing up at times with what the kid went through. What I appreciated most is that it wasn’t too heavy-handed with the religious message like many faith-centered films can be. It felt genuine and grounded while still delivering a strong message of redemption. Honestly, it’s the best of this type of film I’ve seen since I Can Only Imagine. Highly recommend it for anyone looking for a good life affirming story but who also doesn't mind a little light touch religious messaging.

Minor spoilers...

Really enjoyed this overall. Bigelow’s direction and tone for this are on point, and there’s a lot of tension baked into every moment. But I didn’t enjoy the conceit of replaying the same story from multiple perspectives. It's been done better many times before. After a while it started to feel repetitive, and since none of the versions ever moved past a certain point, the suspense kind of fizzled instead of paying off.

The ending doubled down on that — it raised the stakes without really delivering on them. If the goal was to leave us shaken about nuclear stockpiles and weapons development, then I think Bigelow missed a real chance to make us feel that dread. Still, there’s something fascinating about what it tries to do, even if it never quite "detonates" the way it could’ve.

The acting was good. The direction was good. It looked great visually. I just don't think this is a story worthy of being put to film. Instead of a compelling sports film, this is basically just a slice of life into the lives of very boring people in a toxic relationship.

This was really good. Funny and fascinating. Well acted and directed. Another screen unseen win.

I liked it well enough, but this is one I’d definitely wait to catch on streaming. It’s well made for what it is, drawn-out suspense, lots of teasing and emotional manipulation, all leading to a bloody ending. It’s pretty to look at and clearly well constructed, but honestly… just kind of boring. The "bones" are there for a good movie, but the tension doesn't lead to a good payoff. You kinda see where this is going other than a creepy twist at the end.

This was so unbelievably dumb. This was boring. This wasn't funny. This wasn't scary. This was an entirely pointless waste of time.

I think the point of this movie, if there was one, was that Hollywood kinda sucks, and wastes money on an endless stream of nonsense and should consequently be torn apart by wolves (coyotes here)  and/or burned to the ground. Agreed, if this movie is all we have to go on.

This was fantastic. I hate that it was limited release because of the Apple fight with the big chains. People should really experience this on the big screen. Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera were fantastic in this. I was tense throughout, and by the end of this I was exhausted, I honestly felt like I I had been on the bus in the fire myself. It's been a while since a movie have me stressed out like this. Fantastic filmmaking.

This was a lot of fun. There's nothing complicated or sophisticated about it. You know pretty much was gonna happen after the trailer but it was well executed. And I defy you to figure out who ends up with whom, so that part was fun. 😆

This was really well done. The dog is an amazing actor! There were a few good jump scares in there as well.

Minor spoilers…

Title fits. I clocked at least eight battles. The bank robbery, the crew getting arrested, the school dance, the fuckery with him and the sensei and the ill considered parkour, the showdown at the Nunnery, the native bounty hunter versus the white supremacist compound, lockjaw versus the evil Christmas guy, and then the car chase... might be missing one or two.

Edited to add additional thoughts from another forum:

The film tries to contrast the narcissistic nature of French 75’s activism revolutionary activism with Benicio’s more community-driven activism which is portrayed as more effective, but I’m not sure that message is delivered clearly by the end, especially with Willa seeming to jump right back into her parent’s legacy without a lot of reflection. Also the white supremacist characters are so farcical in this that their presence undermines the stakes, making the underlying conflict less compelling, IMO.

Billy Zane did a wonderful job bringing Marlon Brando back to life, but otherwise this was just not a good movie.  I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about this, but there are just so many things about this that made me uncomfortable. IMO, this is basically a hagiographic paean to champagne liberalism at its most indulgent. Brando's vision for his island sounds noble on the surface— giving people (those with financial means) a way to escape to a sustainable paradise—but the movie glosses over the messy realities of a wealthy star pouring millions into a private playground on a colonized Third World island. It's all played for laughs and heartwarming bromance, mythologizing Brando as a tortured visionary with the locals as friendly exotic backdrop, and "spontaneous" escapades between the Zane and Heder characters that feel more like ego trips than fun stories of their bonding. It's often a bit tiresome.

I don't want to dwell only on the flaws because, frankly, Zane's Brando alone makes it watchable, but this was a miss as an actual movie project.

This was gorgeously shot. And well cast. But I don't think the cast had a lot to work with as far as the script goes.  It was a good time.

The first half dragged a bit slowed by ill considered romantic elements. The second half relief began to pick up and introduced a lot of fun more interesting elements that they probably should've leaned into early on. It was a solid effort and I'd be down to see a part two.

This was excellent. A fitting ending to a great series.

This was absolutely amazing animation. Absolutely outstanding. There wasn't much of a plot, just the playing out of about three or four episodes of show content, but this is as awesome as it's ever looked. We fans were definitely served.

I don't understand why people like this so much. It was boring and never went anywhere with such promising premise. It would've helped if the boys ever had anything interesting or thoughtful to say. And if one of the leads didn't have a mush mouth fake American accent.

The kids walked for days over boring terrain while cursing their fascist overlords and occasionally getting shot in the head until only the most boring characters remained. That's it, that's all that happened until the end. Ugh.

I don't like Stephen King's books and I don't like things based on Stephen King's writing. Still somehow I convince myself that this would be good. It was not.

Tinā is a deeply moving drama that hits all the right emotional chords, offering a heartfelt exploration of grief, resilience, and the power of music to heal. Anapela Polataivao delivers a outstanding performance as Mareta, a Samoan teacher struggling after the loss of her daughter in the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes. Her journey from reluctant substitute teacher at an elite private school to a mother figure for her students is both authentic and inspiring. The choir scenes, infused with Samoan choral music, are a highlight, with young Antonia Robinson’s beautiful voice as Sophie stealing the show.

The film’s strength lies in its emotional depth and cultural resonance, crafting a narrative that feels like a tearjerker Samoan Sister Act . The plot is designed to make you feel Mareta’s pain from the opening act and then take you through a series of highs and lows for her and it succeeds, highlighted by the vibrant choral performances that carry the story’s heart.

That said, I couldn’t help but wish for more Samoan representation in the cast to fully reflect the culture at the story’s core. Additionally, the absence of Māori-Samoan interactions felt like a missed opportunity, given New Zealand's demographics. These gaps don’t detract from the film’s impact but left me curious for a deeper dive into the community dynamics.

Tinā is a story that will resonate with anyone who appreciates a well-crafted emotional journey and/or has a soft spot for choral music. Go see it.

I don't have any notes. Hamilton is the best. And this is the only way to see it with the original cast other than actually being there a decade ago. And that original cast, I mean come on, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., Renée Elise Goldsberry, Daveed Diggs,  Jonathan Groff, etc, etc? Good grief. Amazing all the way around.

I really liked this, but I'm embarrassed to say that this was a lot gayer than I expected. At least early on. I'm not sure what I expected, but I don't think I expected an all in gay sex scene from Dylan O'Brien.  😆 But whatever. Sex of any sort is not a big part of this movie, so don't let that take throw you off.  The movie is not really about sex or sexuality. It's about loss and loneliness and PLATONIC male friendship and brotherhood in the most unlikely circumstances. This is one of the best smaller films I've seen this cycle. Dylan O'Brien plays a pair of twins, one outgoing extroverted smart and gay  and one introverted kind of simple and straight and he makes you believe both characters. He's gonna win awards for this one. Maybe not the biggest ones but he'll get recognition.

This was substantially better than I thought it was gonna be. It had multiple opportunities to go the straightforward rom-com route and it chose not to.

I enjoyed it, and I wasn't sure how it would all work out until the end, so that's pretty good.

Is it just me or does it seem like there are a lot of films this year with premises based on a half assed understanding of psychological trauma? This is a fun watch and there's a lot of good action, so don't take this criticism too harshly, but the plot is so weak and lazy. You have a protagonist whose motivations are clear cut because they're written into the script as a reaction to his history of personal trauma.  And then you have his love interest who intentionally re-traumatizes him to encourage him risk his life as a neighborhood superhero with no supernatural powers. Basically he's going to get himself killed risking his life to save people because of his history of trauma and the woman who "loves him" thinks that it's a good idea for him to ceaselessly relive that trauma for the rest of his life until he dies. How was this OK with the writers?😄

I don't have any extended deep thoughts on this one. They're just all so mean to each other. That's my take away from watching this. This is definitely not a "romantic" comedy. None of these people should be married. Every interpersonal relationship between them is toxic. This is kind of like watching an Apatow film from a decade or 2 ago, but not as funny or charming. I enjoy this, but it would've been a more enjoyable movie if the writers and director had given us at least one character to empathize with.

Hot garbage. Walked out. Only lasted the first hour because Qualley is interesting to watch. Terrible otherwise.

If you liked the originals. You'll enjoy this. It's more of a sequel than a reboot in that they use the exact same formula point for point and do a good job.

100% they just found two attractive young models for their protagonists, taught them a handful of dance moves, then found a cheap and available Bollywood actress (Natasha Fernandez) to be the antagonist and generated a script and few songs using AI.

Thoughtless, cheesy and formulaic. 2.5 stars because I was not bored and Aakaisha and Natasha are beautiful, but this is not good.

No one on here seems to like this one very much, so I had very low expectations. But i like this. I thought it was fun and diverting. The plot was unnecessarily convoluted and the resolution requires an extreme suspension of disbelief,  but the main cast is likable, the songs are fun and you get a happy, albeit implausible, ending. It's not high cinema, but take your elders out for an evening, they'll like this.

Shoshana is a interesting dive into 1930s/1940s British Mandatory Palestine, anchored by a love story between Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum) and British officer Tom Wilkin (Douglas Booth) set against the tense hunt for Zionist militant Avraham Stern. The film’s strength lies in its straightforward historical clarity, laying out the era’s complexities with a steady hand. The romance is the core, but the pursuit of Stern crackles with tension, especially in jolting scenes of terrorist attacks that left me rattled. The cinematography and period settings were well done.

All of that said, the film stumbles in scope. While it captures the socialist Zionism-British rule clash well, the absence of Arab Muslim and Christian voices leaves a one-sided portrait of the conflict. I wish the film had spent less time with the romance and more time with the disparate Zionist elements to flesh out their motivations—Stern’s character in particular felt underwritten. The film satisfies, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that broader perspectives, were underexplored. In sorry Shoshana is a visually striking, well acted, emotionally engaging drama that’s worth a watch for its historical insight and poignant love story. A good film that's not quite great.

EVERYTHING HAS A PACE.

And this one is slow. I was told going in that this would be a bit of a slow burn.  Well, it is that. It's just that it's a slow burning fuse with no explosive at the end. It just burns and burns and ultimately fizzles out.

I tried to find something in this that justifies the  positive noise, but I just don't see it. I found myself nodding off and looking at my watch several times during this one.

I didn't understand the motivations of anyone in this film other than the protagonist and even for him it's only when he's engaging his business that I understand what his motivations are.

It almost seems like this entire movie was a set up for a better and potentially more interesting movie with the surviving characters, one that we will probably never see.

Anyways, see it and decide for yourselves.

"She Rides Shotgun" is a gritty action-thriller that delivers a decent punch but doesn’t quite stick the landing for a rewatch. Taron Egerton impresses as Nate, a freshly released ex-con on the run with his estranged 11-year-old daughter, Polly (Ana Sophia Heger). The premise—a father-daughter duo dodging corrupt law enforcement and a ruthless gang leader—sets up an intense, Bonnie-and-Clyde-esque dynamic, except Bonnie’s a kid and Clyde’s her rough-around-the-edges dad.

The storyline is gripping, with a solid setup that keeps you hooked as Nate and Polly navigate their dangerous predicament. Their evolving bond carries the emotional weight of the film. However, the pacing drags at times, making the 120-minute runtime feel a bit overstretched. I wanted to care more about the characters, but they felt somewhat flat, and the performances, while convincing enough, didn’t leave a lasting impression. Supporting characters didn’t stand out, and the plot twists were predictable and lacked impact.

Visually, the movie is appealing, with solid cinematography that captures the tense, gritty vibe. The score complements the action decently, though it’s not particularly memorable. The themes—family, survival, redemption—are there but feel shallow, and while the movie stirred some emotions, it didn’t hit hard enough to be deeply moving.

Overall, I enjoyed it and it met my expectations based on the teaser, but it’s not something I’d revisit. It’s a solid one-and-done action flick with a unique father-daughter spin, but it could’ve been tighter and more impactful.

I did not like this movie. I was not bored. I was actively involved in disliking it throughout. That's all I've got. Didn't hate it, or I'd have walked out. That's the best I can say.

"Kingdom" is a thrilling 150-minute action flick that dives into the chaotic life of Suri, an impulsive police constable with a knack for trouble. The story follows his undercover mission in Sri Lanka for the Indian government, driven by a personal quest to find his long-lost brother, Seva.

I enjoyed this movie, rating it an 7.5 for overall enjoyment. It exceeded my expectations with a gripping storyline that’s engaging and easy to follow. The pacing feels just right, keeping you hooked without dragging or rushing. The plot twists are effective, delivering some shocking moments that elevate the experience.

Suri and the main characters are well-developed and their performances are convincing, though I didn’t find them particularly relatable. The motivations are clear, but the supporting characters didn’t stand out much. The movie’s themes are present but lack depth, yet it still packs an emotional punch, especially in its cathartic, bloody climax.

Visually, "Kingdom" is stunning, with impressive cinematography that captures the chaos beautifully. The soundtrack complements the action well, and the special effects are seamlessly integrated. At 150 minutes, the length feels justified, holding attention throughout.

The first half sets up a fantastic premise—an undercover cop infiltrating a cult with his own hidden agenda—but the second half weakens until its bloody finale, which was fun, but which culminates in an annoying cliffhanger that feels unnecessary. Still, it’s a fun, action-packed ride that I’d recommend. If you’re into intense, visually striking thrillers, "Kingdom" delivers.

"Together" is a haunting, well-crafted body horror thriller that surprised me in the best way possible. Dave Franco and Alison Brie deliver as Tim and Mills, a couple who relocate to the country, only to face a mysterious force that threatens their nature and existence. Despite my usual aversion to body horror, this film won me over with its gripping storyline and effective execution.

The plot is engaging and easy to follow, with a near-perfect pace that keeps you hooked through its 102-minute runtime. The twists were a standout, delivering shocking and impactful moments that genuinely caught me off guard—especially the ending, which I won’t spoil. The main characters are relatable and interesting, with convincing performances, though their development felt slightly underdeveloped. Motivations were clear and believable, but supporting characters didn’t leave much of an impression.

Thematically, the movie’s message isn’t overtly clear, but what’s there feels meaningful enough. It provoked a decent emotional response, leaning more on tension than deep sentiment. Visually, the cinematography is impressive, capturing the eerie vibe well, and the special effects are convincingly integrated. The soundtrack, however, was forgettable, not adding much to the experience.

The film’s length felt just right, holding my attention consistently and fitting its R rating perfectly. I’d recommend this to others, especially those who enjoy a creepy, character-driven thriller. Positive feedback from friends pushed me to give it a chance, despite my aversion to the genre, and I’m glad I did—this is a solid, unsettling gem that balances horror and heart without being overly gross.

Really enjoyed this movie—it’s like getting two solid films for the price of one. The first half hooked me as a buddy travel story, with a young criminal trying to pull one over on an old man with Alzheimer’s. Their dynamic is engaging, with just the right mix of humor and heart as they bumble along together. You can’t help but root for them, even when it’s messy. Then the second half shifts gears into a classic revenge tale, where the protagonist turns into a quiet, calculated force, picking off the scum involved in a child sex trafficking ring. It’s dark, intense, and satisfying in that gritty, justice-served way. Both parts work surprisingly well, even if they feel like totally different vibes. The switch might not click for everyone, but I was all in for both the heartfelt road trip and the ruthless payback. Worth a watch!

I saw the scream unseen on 7/21. I did not like this at all. I don't have any deep thoughts on this. I guess it has something to say about boomers sucking the life out of the younger generations. Literally.

But whatever. Don't waste your time.

This was somewhat charming. It was exciting to watch the young autistic woman achieve more and more as she was given a chance to learn.  On the other hand, this was almost like an advertising campaign for the Indian military, which is weird because we know that she would not be allowed to join the Indian military and that fact was clear to the audience and everyone in the movie but the protagonist the entire time. So positive and pro military, but the military was the biggest obstacle in our protagonist's path.

Anyways. I enjoyed watching this, but I wouldn't watch it again.

For the entire first half of the film pre-intermission the movie floats by on the young lead's personal charisma. Just as that was starting to get tiresome, the entire tone of the movie changes and becomes more of a traditional piece about an independent young son taking on family responsibility in trying to protect his sister and show proper respect to his long suffering father. After watching the second half I feel like I enjoyed the first half more when it was just smiling and dancing. I did appreciate the ending when the various strands come together.

The songs are decent and Kireeti's dancing is excellent.

I didn't tear up at the end, I swear… there was just ...a lot of dust in that theater...

Honestly this was really good.

It's not as bad as the reviews say. Mildly diverting kids movie. Natasha Lyonne is Mama Poot. Worth it just for that.

This was sooo bad. Like so bad. Missed the assignment on a 90s slasher reboot entirely. Not crazy, not sexy, not cool. This wasn't funny or scary, the cast lacked charisma, the writing was poor. The most fun part of all of this was the post credit scene.

I wanted to like this more. I'm interested in the subject matter and in seeing it from a different POV. But I just found the little kid annoying and the characterizations of the adults around her, very superficial. There is little insight here on what the whites or blacks were thinking or feeling during this period. No exposition about the politics involved or details regarding the armed conflicts and roles the adults were playing. I get that this was based on a true story from the young white girl's POV, so maybe we don't get more insight than she had at that time, which is fair if it's true to her experience, but it's ultimately just a bit boring. How do you make the fall of Rhodesia and the rise of ZANU-PF boring?

I love this movie. The best way to enjoy it is to just buy into Audrey Hepburn's vibe and let that carry you past some of the more annoying things which come across as harsh anachonisms today. I can't make Mickey Rooney's "Mr. Yunioshi" okay, for instance, but it's only a few minutes of annoyance over the course of two hours of consistent charm. Aubrey's performance of Best Original Song Oscar winner "Moon River" was just one many iconic moments here.

I almost no starred this, but the half of the movie prior to the intermission wasn't as awful as the rest of the film. There were also two good songs and I'm a huge fan of the part near the end when the protagonist(?) loses control and turns into an unkillable bulletproof rage monster.

I really enjoyed this. This is just a really fun and engaging action film.I never even thought to watch it until the second one came out. They did a good job of establishing their own cinematic universe if they want one. Charlize Theron was was believable as the old soul lead protagonist.

I know this was supposed to be a rom com that transitioned into a humorous over the top farce, but it felt creepy at times throughout and I can't help but think that the laughs here would whither away and die very quickly if the gender roles had been reversed. Still I enjoyed this a lot and the acting performances were good by the two leads. Two wins in a row for me for the screen unseens.

This is one of my favorite movies of all time.

Bad parents, bad child, bad music, bad writing. Decent cinematography.

Bored child acts out by trying to get himself and/or his parents killed and is never punished lest he throw a tantrum. Imagine thinking this is a healthy and amusing situation.

All the time spent in 1960s was delightful, all of the time spent in the present dealing with our protagonist's issues with her identity and her mother's religious hang ups was a drag. I get that there's probably no more enjoyable way to present this material but that's how I experienced it.

I enjoyed this for the most part, though it sort of meanders aimlessly through the protagonists lives. There are a lot of moving parts here, some enjoyable, some not so much. Ali Fazal and Fatima Sana Shaikh's relationship was the most interesting sub plot. But it gets lost in all the other clutter here and I'm not really sure I understand the choice to repeatedly use abortion as a plot device. Overall, worth my time.

They were trying to do too much with this in too little time. I really don't understand the script here. I have a hard time believing the director and writer intended the younger brother to be so unlikable here. It was worth watching, a few laughs here and there.