For this reason, the Nobody movies frustrate me to a great degree. I was disappointed when I saw the original back in early 2021; like any fan, I expected to take delight in the actor’s first turn as an action star but instead found myself underwhelmed by poor writing and shocked by its bad messaging. Things only get worse in Nobody 2, as the script this time around is somehow even more rote, and it reveals Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell as a hero that is pretty damn impossible to root for, even with the actor’s special charms.

Like its predecessor, the prequel entirely hangs on the audience’s desire to see a talent like Bob Odenkirk take part in some brutal cinematic violence – but the simple novelty of the basic idea is gone now, and there is no effort to compensate with anything else. What results is watching an unlikable protagonist get locked into a plot that offers no stakes and what amounts to an unpleasant and unfulfilling cinematic experience.

After spending Nobody conquering his boring suburban life by reengaging his love of violence, Hutch is reintroduced in Nobody 2 stuck in another rut: he is forced to perform wetwork jobs in order to pay off a debt incurred when he set fire to the Russian cash stash in the first movie, and a consequence is that he becomes distanced from his wife (Connie Nielsen) and two children (Gage Munroe, Paisley Cadorath). He is in need of a break, and with bizarrely little pushback from his handler (Colin Salmon), he makes plans for a family vacation.

Leaning into the nostalgia of the one trip he took with his father (Christopher Lloyd) and brother (RZA) when he was a child, Hutch takes the Mansell clan to Plummerville – a tourist trap with a water park and various other activities. What the exhausted assassin doesn’t know is that the place is a secret hub of criminal activity orchestrated by a boss named Lendina (Sharon Stone), and when he gets on the bad side of the local sheriff (Colin Hanks) and son of the town’s founder (John Ortiz), he finds himself as a target and his family in danger.

Bob Odenkirk's Hutch Mansell is a lousy main character who only gets worse in the sequel.

The key issue that haunts Nobody 2 is the fact that the protagonist generates all of his own problems, and he doesn’t have the likability to make us appreciate his efforts to dig himself out of the hole. The world of the film doesn’t actually impose any problems on him: when Hutch wants a vacation from his debt-clearing assassin work, it’s granted without any protest or consequence, and despite all of his selfish and violent behavior, there is seemingly no line that he can cross to earn what would be deserved ire from his family (Connie Nielsen’s Becca does draft a “We need to talk” text in the first act when he becomes an absence in her life, but that’s quickly deleted and substituted for an “Okay love u,” and a proper confrontation never happens).

He repeatedly claims that his big motivation is to have a fun vacation with his family full of happy memories… but that comes while ignoring that he could easily do that by just going anywhere other than Plummerville and take his loved ones to a place where their lives aren’t in danger. To be fair, there are moments where he makes strong moral choices (like the decision to rescue a kidnapped teenager he discovers during a confrontation in a crime den), but the movie puts a much greater emphasis on his applications of rage in personal and petty moments, and it renders him consistently challenging to root for.

Director Timo Tjahjanto's action skills are apparent in Nobody 2, but don't enthrall as they do in his other movies.

This bad storytelling can’t help but have a negative impact on what drives Nobody 2, which is the action. Director Timo Tjahjanto is an exceptional talent when it comes to crafting chaotic and brutal fight scenes (2018’s The Night Comes for Us is so jaw-dropping that it should be pre-empted with a “might cause TMJ” warning), and there is some fantastic choreography executed – but it’s all empty calories when the main character’s journey is so pointless and the danger never feels substantial. I can appreciate the fun that the filmmakers had coming up with ideas for how to turn a waterpark into a slaughterhouse with various weapons, riggings, and explosives, but that translates to just moments of fleeting fun on the big screen.

It’s made exceptionally clear throughout the brisk 89 minute runtime that Nobody 2 is not a film meant to be taken too seriously (best exemplified in the ludicrous scenery-chewing done by Sharon Stone in her weirdly truncated, one-note performance as the main baddie). But just because a movie is silly doesn’t automatically make it fun, and I definitely didn’t have any fun. It does a lot of what its predecessor did, only worse, and without even being able to activate the well-established charms of Bob Odenkirk, it’s a bad time at the movies.

The three above-the-title stars involved are certainly all capable of delivering the goods, or even the greats. Eddie Murphy’s early career performances remain dynamic and influential enough to overshadow decades’ worth of lackluster projects, and his efforts in more recent projects like Dolemite Is My Name and Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F prove he’s still capable of unhinged magic. Pete Davidson is a slightly more acquired taste, but he excels at playing put-upon characters dealing with arrested development. And Keke Palmer… well, she’s just plain excellent in everything.

As such, even the most amateur mathematician would consider it a no-brainer to assume that Murphy + Davidson + Palmer would combine for a highly engaging modern crime comedy classic. Yet, that assumption gets almost violently upended by an abysmal script from co-writers Kevin Burrows and Matt Mider – arguably best known for the animated web series Gentleman Lobsters and sadly not for crafting worthwhile action-comedies.

Perhaps the writers aren’t fully at fault, however, since so many of the movie’s dead-on-arrival quips and one-liners appear to be ad-libbed by the actors, pushing the blame more on them and director Tim Story, whose hit-or-miss filmography includes the Ride Along movies, the Think Like a Man franchise, the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four blockbusters, and Barbershop. He also made the Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon vehicle Taxi, though — pun firmly intended — and that’s more in line with the armored truck-centric messiness of The Pickup.

Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson’s talents are 100% wasted, and this should have been Keke Palmer’s movie from top to bottom.

The Pickup opens with what can only be considered a meet-threat, with Pete Davidson’s Travis, an armored truck driver and complete social misfit, misguidedly pulling a gun on Keke Palmer’s Zoe as she attempts to flirt with him. They quickly take things to the next level, and it’s clear that Zoe has ulterior motives, because Travis is a wiffle ball of a human being: mostly transparent with zero depth.

Had Davidson made The Pickup as his first foray into cinema early into his Saturday Night Live run, Travis might not be as fingernails-across-the-chalkboard grating to the nerves. But at this point in the actor's career, we’ve seen the comedian deliver far better performances and deliveries, even with similarly dimwitted characters.

Travis is paired up for an all-important and financially irresponsible delivery with Eddie Murphy’s Russell, a longtime fellow driver with an eye on celebrating his anniversary and eventually pivoting into a different career. This duo could have been fantastic, but the actors have lacking chemistry, with Travis veering from nebbish and put-upon to overbearing and fawning, while Russell mainly sticks to passive antagonism throughout. At least Eva Longoria, who plays Russell's wife Natalie, is ready to deliver during her fleeting scenes.

To be expected, Zoe has plans to rob the very truck that Travis and Russell are responsible for, and she has two completely forgettable henchman in tow. Claws’ Jack Kesy plays the humorless sack of testosterone Banner, with The Rings of Power’s Ismael Cruz Cordova bringing a modicum of a sassy personality as Miguel. These two take on more villainous roles as the story goes on, but never feel like a truly formidable threat, which is another one of this movie’s big issues.

The movie also features underserved appearances from Andrew Dice Clay and Marshawn Lynch and breaks the streak of A+ cameos from the former NFL star by wasting his comedic skills on a couple of nothingburger scenes. The Diceman, meanwhile, is like a made-for-cable J. Jonah Jameson, playing Travis and Russell's crabby, loud-mouthed boss.

The only character worth watching in this movie is Keke Palmer's Zoe, since she's the only actor whose star power is present and accounted for. I don't know how much better The Pickup would be if it focused solely on Zoe's wheeling and dealing, but I know my throat wouldn't feel quite as prickly from all the disgruntled groaning.

Everything in The Pickup feels like a deleted scene from a better movie.

Several of The Pickup's biggest action sequences revolve around the armored car speeding down highways and through city streets, mostly with Pete Davidson behind the wheel and Eddie Murphy doing the more physical acting inside the vehicle. These scenes in particular felt like they were cribbed from one of Judd Apatow's line-o-rama productions, particularly in regards to Travis blurting out an endless barrage of reactions to anything and everything happening around him. I can just imagine Tim Story & Co. keeping the camera on Davidson as he improvised one line after another, with everyone confident they were mining gold.

But instead of using the best lines, The Pickup only included the ones that make Davidson look like an attention-addled child taking his first road trip. None of the jokes that made the final cut are actually funny or original or worth extending the runtime to include, and that observation can be stretched out and applied to the entire movie.

To be fair, Story and the stunt & VFX teams deliver some pretty hectic and enjoyable explosions and crashes, largely set to a Speed-lite score, but so many of those moments are also predicated on either nonsense or unexplained lines and character choices. It's enough so that it feels like we're watching a subjective version of the story that was snipped out of a more fully informed version where relevant motivations and facts were included.

Case in point: Travis and Russell's truck contains a highly important and expensive monkey-under-glass display that comes up multiple times as if it's inherently the most hilarious prop imaginable (even to the point of it getting a post-credits gag), but without a scene that actually clues audiences in on why we should care. That informative scene, I assume, would be included in the director's cut that no one will ever petition for.

The creative choices range from questionable to pure fucking garbage.

I certainly understand that The Pickup is meant to be a breezy movie that shouldn't be taken too seriously, and that choosing to hone in on all of the baffling and/or under-cooked moments requires an unhealthy amount of misery and cynicism. However, I often felt like this storyline was actively provoking me into complaining about it.

The most obvious faux pas is the conceit that Travis and Zoe would actively vie for an authentic romance after the aforementioned sexual duping that kicks the movie off. Zoe is far too cool, sophisticated, and capable a human being for Travis' eternal manchild. Davidson's character always appears to be far more invested in obsessing over her than surviving any of the movie's ill-plotted conflicts.

The second biggest WTF decision was to cast Eddie Murphy, once one of Hollywood's most electric comedians, as the fuddy-duddy straight man opposite Davidson. I can somewhat appreciate the Lethal Weapon-esque run of age jokes at Russell's expense, but he's not really part of the joke there. Only one moment in the movie truly calls back to Murphy's golden-age delivery (what I'll refer to as Russell's diner rant), and it just feels like an impersonation of Murphy more than the real thing.

Even beyond its unfortunate first-draft decisions, The Pickup is littered with choices and moments that might have been clipped out if it weren't for the already svelte 94-minute runtime – with action-movie logic on full display. Example: two vehicles smash into the same side of the same car, and instead of the rammed car just being demolished, the other two go flying over it with fiery explosions. Make it make sense, but without gaslighting me into thinking some cars have giant hubcap ramps.

Characters also often refer to events and details without a lick of insight into their importance and do things that would only come out of a writer's brain. This is a movie where, after one baddie is seemingly killed off in a blaze of glory, another character makes a point of joking about how glaringly obvious it is that anyone would be dead after suffering such an incident... only for the supposed victim to return without any kind of dibilitating injuries and without anyone asking how the fuck it happened. Because spoilers: yes, they definitely should have died.

If I were to put a hard number on the amount of times I actually laughed at The Pickup itself, and not one of my own snarky comments, I honestly couldn't go higher than two. I can say without a doubt that I had more laughs at both of my parents' funerals, respectively. So if The Pickup can't even live up to the "comedy" half of its subgenre with its talent involved, how did we even get to this point?

In regards to the latest of them, I’ve been anticipating Freakier Friday with trepidation ever since it was announced. The 2003 original Disney comedy is a staple of my childhood, and when I reflect on the original, I think it’s honestly one of the funniest family comedies of my generation. Now that I’ve seen the sequel, I’m so happy it actually lives up to it.

Freakier Friday reunites Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan at a time when both actors are having their own big (but very different) moments compared to when they first swapped bodies. Curtis became an Oscar winner just a couple of years ago at the age of 64, and the 39-year-old Lohan has been enjoying a comeback into Hollywood after almost a decade away from the industry. But it’s incredibly comforting to see these two come together and not miss a beat as they return to their roles as Tess and Anna Coleman: a mother and daughter who, like most mother/daughter duos, will always have issues to work through. It’s a blast to see them at it again for a more rambunctious, yet totally seasoned comedy dynamic that I can also see a whole new generation of young girls falling for.

If you’re a fan of the original Freaky Friday, Freakier Friday is absolutely for you.

One can’t help but do a double-take when it comes to the premise, as Lohan’s Anna is now a mother of her own teen, Julia Butters’ Harper, and she is getting ready to tie the knot to her own Mr. Perfect a.k.a. Eric (played by The Good Place’s Manny Jacinto) after Freaky Friday was about Curtis’ Tess getting married to Mark Harmon’s Ryan. This time around, there’s an added layer because Anna's fiancé has a teen daughter too in Sophia Hammons’ Lily – and the sisters-to-be really do not get along.

After grandma Tess, Anna, Harper and Lily all get their fortune read at Anna’s bachelorette party, Tess gets stuck in Lily’s body, Anna in her daughter’s, Harper in her mom’s and Lily in Tess’. Callbacks are a-plenty between a new mirror scene to rival the “I’m like the crypt-keeper” line and just about every cast member from the original making an appearance one way or the other. (Yes, even Anna’s all-grownup little brother!) Butters and Hammons are not featured in the movie as much as Lohan and Curtis are, but seeing all four of them together is actually a super welcome addition to the plot, and they have some really funny and heartfelt moments of their own.

Freakier Friday finds some quite hilarious reasons to take fans back down memory lane while providing a new story that feels worthwhile. Sure, if you weren’t impressed with the original Freaky Friday, I'm going to guess the new one probably won’t reel you in either. This sequel is for fans like me who laughed out loud time after time watching the original, appreciate the details, and now get to do so again in a completely new phase of life with this continuation.

I love seeing what Tess is like as a grandma and how Anna has become a lot more like her mom in adulthood than she probably would have guessed. (But becoming our parents comes for us all, doesn't it?) The way the plot lines are advanced are rather clever.

The sequel isn’t quite as punk rock as the original (especially due to the more complicated premise), but the movie’s heart is too big for that to be an issue.

The Freakier Friday script isn’t necessarily graceful when it comes to setting up the stakes for the sequel, but once things get freaky one fair Friday and Tess, Anna, Harper and Lily deal with another body-swap curse, the movie gets right on track. While it’s all about belly laughs in the first half, what really helps land the body-swap sequel is the movie's genuine soul. I was just about wiping away my tears during not one but multiple emotional scenes after getting into a laughing fit just 30 minutes earlier, and that’s exactly the kind of feeling I wanted from this movie.

One of Freakier Friday's secret weapons is Manny Jacinto’s Eric – who may be known for dishing out jokes in The Good Place, but in this movie as Anna’s new man, he brings a down-to-earth quality to the film (alongside his quite heartthrobb-y charms) that Harmon held down in the original. In many ways, Freakier Friday can feel like a romantic comedy flipped on its head, and it does so with a beaming confidence.

Another very welcome return in Freakier Friday is Chad Michael Murray’s Jake, who had a hilarious body-swap love triangle of sorts going on with Tess and Anna in the first movie. The sequel plays swiftly with that element in a hilariously believable and lovelably silly way that breathes extra life into the film. And then there’s Vanessa Bayer’s fortune teller character, who brings her SNL wiles to the cast, and makes every scene she is in funnier than the last.

Director Nisha Ganatra successfully helps bring the spirit of the original back with other great comedy experience under her belt, from helming 2019’s Late Night to doing episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Fresh Off The Boat and The Mindy Project. But, there’s something that is a little bit rough around the edges about the Mark Waters-directed original that is somewhat missing here. For example, Anna’s punk rock phase is over, as she now helps manage a pop star (played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), and the soundtrack has a more pop girly framework to it, playing the likes of Chappell Roan and Suki Waterhouse. Still, there are also some fun song choices from women-fronted rock bands, including The Linda Lindas and The Beaches.

There’s also a new Lindsay Lohan song “Baby,” which falls into the pop ballad territory. It makes sense given we’re at a time when female-fronted acts are a lot more hip then they were in 2003, but the new song isn't going to hit the levels "Ultimate" and "Take Me Away" had on my childhood. Perhaps the movie knows this, and thankfully it gives one of the songs an encore in the sequel. I was cheering at the sight of seeing Lohan back in Pink Slip, and yes, she still does that awesome guitar solo like it was yesterday.

Freakier Friday wins as a theatrical comedy for the whole family at a time when they just don’t exist anymore.

Overall, there’s certainly some generic filmmaking choices here that could have used a bit more umph. But we’re also talking about one of the few theatrical family comedies we’ve seen in movie theaters in some time. With that factored in, I’m really impressed it’s packed with a ton of soul as it is. This isn’t high-brow territory, but Jamie Lee Curtis running around Los Angeles in ridiculous teenage-geared outfits with Lindsay Lohan trying to tell her to flirt is one of my highlight moments going to the movies this year, and I know I won't be the only one.

When it comes to the original Freaky Friday, I always found that Jamie Lee Curtis getting to embody a teenager had all the fun, whilst a young Lohan impressively played the straight-laced Tess in a teen body. This time around, both actresses get to play teenagers together, as Anna’s daughter and Eric’s daughter get stuck in their bodies and decide to try to break up their parent’s upcoming marriage, and it’s simply a ball to see these two get into funny scenarios that also remain well-fitted for its PG, family-friendly rating.

Curtis is once again the real scene-stealer here, playing an even more unhinged role as a prim and proper British teen stuck in a grandmother’s body, while Lohan gets to both evolve for the present day and provide the nostalgia of embodying a teen again. With this new dynamic, Freakier Friday is also kind of a buddy comedy in a lot of ways, and that was absolutely the right move for fans like me who want to see more of the Freaky Friday magic.

At a time when other Disney sequels for Hocus Pocus, Disenchanted went straight to streaming and the studio has been stuck in live-action retreads after retreads the past few years, this is a rare legacyquel I’m not rolling my eyes at. It has the kind of fan service I'm looking for, and I'm already looking forward to a second viewing.

Arriving in theaters during a brilliant summer for original horror, the film doesn’t have the mesmerizing complexity of Danny and Michael Philippou’s Bring Her Back or the arresting scope of Zach Cregger’s Weapons, but it succeeds pairing a fairly simple narrative with big ideas and nasty execution that will be appreciated by sick puppy cinephiles. Married co-stars Alison Brie and Dave Franco are independently and collaboratively so excellent that you wonder about the stability of their actual relationship (it’s intense enough to make you question if simply taking this project on was an effort to test their marital bonds), and while it can’t be said that Together on the whole is full of unexpected twists, the finale is definitely a delightful shocker.

Millie (Alison Brie) and Tim (Dave Franco) are a long-term couple when we first meet them in the movie, and while the latter is reticent about getting married, they do make a commitment by moving together from the city to a new home in the countryside. Tim’s hopes to make it as a professional musician are fizzling, and his remote new zip code doesn’t exactly help, but Millie supports them with her job as a teacher at the local elementary school. Stress is high after the relocation, and helping nothing is that their relationship has become sexless.

In an effort to both try and reconnect and explore their new area, they decide to go on an afternoon hike together in the local woods… and as you can imagine given the genre, things take a bad turn. First they get lost, then it starts thunderously rain, and then they accidentally discover a new age church that has sunk into the ground – and by “discover,” I mean he falls into a hole and then pulls her in as she tries to help him get out. Temporarily trapped, thirsty and out of water, they opt to drink from a pool that has gathered in the cave, and they make camp for the night to wait out the downpour.

Needless to say, drinking the water was a big mistake. In the morning, the couple wakes to find that two of their legs are stuck together, and while they are able to tear apart and chalk it up to cave mildew, it’s just the start of their shared nightmare. I kind of biological magnetism slowly starts to build, and Millie and Tim find themselves drawn to each other with increasing magnitude, both psychologically and physically.

There is a simplicity in the story of Together that doesn’t get in the way of it being captivating.

Together unfolds with a straightforward narrative that has natural escalation and momentum, and while that doesn’t ultimately leave much room for surprise during the journey, one is nonetheless entranced in anticipation of seeing just how far the horror is going to go. The lesions left after Millie and Tim rip apart their calves in the early cave scene is just the start of the experience and effectively teases the nastiness to come, and – with the exception of one sequence that I won’t reveal in this spoiler-free venue – it delivers on that promise. You have an idea of what’s on the way, but it still successfully gets you more and more excited for the next level of the supernatural force that is constantly growing in power.

Along similar lines, the movie isn’t particularly coy when it comes to its themes about co-dependency, as it’s the principal source of conflict for the couple as they enter a new stage of their relationship, but understanding the subject matter doesn’t render the Millie and Tim as flat caricatures. They’re equally likable, flawed, and passionate – which makes their arguments and fights all the more interesting, as Together doesn’t take sides and you can understand their points of view. The film effectively keeps you going back and forth regarding whether or not these two people need to cut ties or never let one another go, and your emotional investment in them adds weight to all the horrors.

Alison Brie and Dave Franco both bring great range to a pair of complicated characters in a complicated relationship.

Obviously nothing is hurt by the film starring two talented and charismatic leads who make effective use of their demonstrated range. There is a terrific blend of sweetness, awkwardness, and anger that make up the relationship between the main characters, and Alison Brie and Dave Franco have the natural chemistry that makes it all feel very real. And not only is there plenty of heavy emotional material for the performers to explore, but there is also impressive physical work as they are both attracted to each other and fused with awesome movie magic.

Some amazing makeup and effects work in Together will have you gasping.

It’s somewhat unfair that Together has to live in the shadow of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, which blew minds late last year with its extremely gory, body horror madness, but for its scale and what it attempts to do, Michael Shanks’ movie will most certainly have more sensitive members of the audience averting their eyes and covering their mouths in extreme shock. Not only are brilliant special effects employed as hands gets slowly embedded into arms, but there is also chilling (and seamless) work from contortionist performers and the stomach-churning action of Millie and Tim making efforts to separate themselves. Casual movie-goers will squirm, and genre fans will cheer – with the standout sequence being a very… special bathroom stall encounter between the protagonists.

As far as my personal tastes are concerned, I’m always going to appreciate a gnarly horror movie with smart themes and complicated characters, and Together effectively checks all of those boxes. It has limitations, which can be excused by production resources, but it’s still a standout during a hot time for the genre, and it immediately establishes Michael Shanks, a filmmaker with a wicked vision, as a talent to watch.

Sometimes conventional wisdom needs to be heeded, and sometimes it needs to step aside and let Liam Neeson eat five chili dogs in the name of fighting crime, no matter the consequences. Well, this is definitely a time where that sort of “wisdom” can stuff it, as The Naked Gun is a pure and beautiful return to form – just over 30 years since the franchise last wore its badge at a theater near you.

You can’t really “spoil” a Naked Gun movie because the plot is pretty much the same thing for most of the films. Cop (Liam Neeson) meets Girl (Pamela Anderson), Cop meets Villain (Danny Huston), Villain has a plan that’s fishy enough for Cop to investigate, but covert enough to make the suspicious Cop look like a loose cannon.

Writers Dan Gregor & Doug Mand, along with co-writer/director Akiva Schaffer, don’t reinvent the wheel with their spin on the Zuckers-Abrahams-Zucker school of schtick. However, this isn’t your father’s Naked Gun (put that back where you found it!) While the silliness and slapstick are still present, this series has evolved with the times – which helps it stick the landing in delivering something familiar enough to watch with your parents but new enough to enjoy with your friends.

The “new version” of The Naked Gun knows when to update and when to stick to the classics.

Rebooting The Naked Gun would have been a fool’s errand, though admittedly an equally effective opportunity to sending up modern Hollywood. A legacyquel means that the story doesn’t need to compete or one-up its classic predecessors, but rather it just needs to update the humor for today’s sensibilities. That means the raunchy is toned down (a bit), and the off-color humor is refocused into other areas you can safely laugh along with at an NPR-sponsored screening.

More important than that is the fact that Liam Neeson’s turn at bat doesn’t forget to pack in jokes where other parodies may fear to tread: in the sight gags. The legacy trilogy and its six-episode source material (the short-lived TV series Police Squad!), were always chock full of offbeat background action, visual inconsistencies, and end credits packed with crazy jokes. In a slim and trim 85 minute running time, “the new version” packs as much humor as it can into every moment it can find, and it’s never forced.

Even something as typically “simple” as the soundtrack is maximized for chuckles thanks to veteran action composer Lorne Balfe combining touches from his time on films like Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning with the classic noir touches The Naked Gun requires.

There’s even a brand new version of Ira Newborn’s classic Police Squad! theme that enlists musician Gordon Goodwin to help bring its larger than life melody back to play. Considering he did the same for 2008’s Get Smart adaptation, you couldn’t have found better hands to put that baton in.

The Naked Gun stacks the deck with a cast ready for anything, and Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson’s comedic chemistry leads the way.

Comedy, especially that of the parody subgenre, needs an ensemble that believes in the cause from frame one and never breaks. With that criteria in mind, you could say that the cast of The Naked Gun are the most hardened jokesters this side of the camera – which begins with the electric pair that is Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson.

Neeson has been warming up for this gig over time with roles in The LEGO Movie and cameos in Ted 2; as well as studying Leslie Nielsen’s past works rather thoroughly. He doesn’t try to totally channel the stoicism that his predecessor possessed, allowing for a little more silliness to peek through in his Frank Drebin, Jr. It’s the sort of distance that’s needed when trying to execute a vision such as The Naked Gun.

Meanwhile, Pamela Anderson might be the actor that’s considered the “surprising standout” of the cast. I’d partially agree, as anyone who’s followed her career over the years will see that the only thing different with The Naked Gun is that the folks in charge gave her the largest comedy canvas she’s ever painted on here. Consider the woman Bob Ross, as Anderson is up for all of the shenanigans expected of her.

Rounding out this cast of crushers are veteran character actors like Danny Huston and Kevin Durand (who show off villainy that walks that fine line between silly and sinister), Paul Walter Hauser (continuing a run of scene stealing he started this summer with The Fantastic Four: First Steps), and CCH Pounder. The latter's casting is another case of how much this picture trusts its audience, as you’re expected to know her role from The Shield, but she’s not expected to offer a pale imitation of that dramatic piece.

A lean and mean reminder of why parody comedy is so beloved, The Naked Gun aims for big laughs and doesn’t miss.

What most surprised me about The Naked Gun is the fact that all involved were able to resurrect the ZAZ school of rapid fire comedy. The pacing in the dialogue is zippy, pithy, and able to convince you that Liam Neeson and Danny Huston’s riff on the Black Eyed Peas is really talking about high art. On top of the easter eggs, sight gags, and score, the frequency/hit rate on this saga hasn’t lost pace for a second.

The Naked Gun is put together with a love for the original property, a cutting sense of humor about modern times, and an impish smile permanently etched on its face. Comedy is back in theaters, and like a stand up comedian at a bridal shower, it’s as beautiful as it is hilarious.

If there was ever a movie that could convince you a beloved recording star would agree to a residency in an apocalyptic bunker in a cameo that pays off in the end credits stinger, it’s this one. Isn’t that what America, and the world, need right about now? (Outside of world peace, economic stability, and a Nintendo console with a controller doesn't drift right out of the box.)

This successful audacity has helped pave the path for Cregger’s second genre venture, which is not only even more audacious, but more successful – in that it’s not just “good” or even “great,” but phenomenal. We may now be only a little more than halfway through the year, but I am wholly confident that Weapons will be remembered as one of the best films of 2025 and regarded as one of its most spectacular big screen experiences. It weaves together in a way as to always keep you in the dark about what is coming next, unfurling a collection of character-centric, overlapping vignettes that each contribute to the epic larger picture. And as it keeps you on the hook, it jabs at you with spikes of terror and horror (along with some laughs) that will have you jumping and yelping.

Set in the fictional small town of Maybrook, the movie begins one month into a mystery that has devastated the local community. On a random weekday in the middle of the night, all but one of the children in a single third grade classroom arose from their beds, left their homes, and went running out into the night without leaving a trace. While authorities have some video footage courtesy of doorbell cameras – the kids seen creepily running at full tilt with their arms angled out at their sides – they are baffled by the development, as there is no evidence of any kind of coordination or planned abduction. The parents of the 17 boys and girls are all confused and scared, and a prime target of their angst is Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), their teacher.

Justine has a history of misconduct and, unbeknownst to anybody, an unaddressed drinking problem, but she cares about what happened to her students as much as anyone, and when she is put on administrative leave, she doesn’t stay at home and do nothing. She instead starts a bit of independent investigating, and shocking discoveries she makes see her story collide with those of Archer, a grieving father (Josh Brolin); Paul, an ex-boyfriend/beat cop (Alden Ehrenreich); James, a meth-addicted thief (Austin Abrams); Marcus, the school principal (Benedict Wong); and Alex, the only kid in Justine’s class who didn’t disappear (Cary Christopher).

As he did with Barbarian, Zach Cregger uses an unorthodox structure to tell a wicked and horrifying tale.

Weapons holds on dearly to its secrets and successfully maintains the answer to its core mystery until its closing act full of wild revelation, but the film’s brilliance is offering teases and stakes purely through its characters. It starts with Justine, who is a flawed individual, but the love she has for her kids is very real (made particularly palpable by Julia Garner's outstanding performance), and her investment and care becomes ours. She is stubborn and smart, and makes some key discoveries as she follows her instincts. And just as pieces are starting to slot together... Zach Cregger keeps you hungry by switching protagonists and adding whole new dimensions to the puzzle with different insights and clues unearthed by Archer – whose entire life has become background noise as he desperately hunts to figure out what happened to his son.

But what makes Weapons so cool and special is that it’s not simply a Rashomon-esque collection of perspectives on the same incidents; it can be more accurately described as an anthology film with a single continuity and linked characters. Paul is romantically entangled with Justine (and “entangled” is definitely the right word to describe their collective messiness), but he isn’t assigned to the case with the missing children and has his own disasters that he has to try and deal with. His story is great and compelling in its own right as he desperately tries to mop up conflicts of his own creation… but his narrative also gets sideswiped and caught up in the big picture chaos growing in Maybrook.

It’s all sewn together with remarkable panache and confidence, as Cregger delights in toying with his audience – perfectly evidenced by the excited gasps that are evoked each time one segment ends and the next one begins. It’s layered in a way as to have you constantly asking new questions to yourself and pondering how certain cliffhangers are going to be resolved, keeping you hooked at every second, and each answer it offers is blissfully satisfying.

There is a point in the final act where the pacing slows because the movie needs to fill in some vital gaps, but it’s in service of keeping an eye on the prize: the unholy and explosive finale is unequivocally one of the most magnificent things I’ve seen on the big screen in recent years. I hesitate to even describe the complex tone of the finale as to avoid spoiling anything about what audiences are going to experience, but I will tease it by saying that I can’t remember the last time I sat in a theater full of adults and witnessed such a wild reaction to a film.

Weapons is full of scary and unforgettable terrors.

You’ve probably guessed by this point, but Weapons is not just made with spellbinding story construction; it’s also beautifully scary and unnerving. In collaboration with cinematographer Larkin Seiple and editor Joe Murphy (the latter a Barbarian reunion), Zach Cregger demonstrates an adept eye for lingering horrific images and stabbing jump scares that lift you out of your seat but never feel cheap. Unflinching moments of brutality and gore will drop your jaw, but you’ll also be stunned by moments of extended stillness and silence. The cast deserves immense credit as well, as the genuine terror felt by the characters becomes our own (Josh Brolin delivers an all-timer “What the fuck?!” after being on the receiving end of a monstrous jolt), and while the less said, the better in this spoiler-free space, I am compelled to throw a special spotlight on the work of Amy Madigan, who will be REMEMBERED.

As a horror fan, I feel as though I am being blissfully spoiled thus far in 2025. From Drew Hancock’s Companion, to Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, to James Ashcroft’s The Rule Of Jenny Pen, to Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s Final Destination: Bloodlines, to Danny and Michael Philippou’s Bring Her Back, to Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, the genre has been the great cinematic highlight of the calendar year, and Weapons is the best new release yet. It’s intimate while also being epic, it’s scary while expertly utilizing humor as punctuation, and even the most dedicated cinephiles will be rocked by its surprises. It’s perfect and a must-see.

In the 1996 original Happy Gilmore, Sandler's title character is a failed hockey player who begrudgingly starts playing golf to save his grandmother's house. His ability to drive at a record-breaking distance put him above the rest, and after learning how to putt, he became a real contender. All sorts of shenanigans happened along the way, including falling in love with Virginia (Julie Bowen) and creating a bitter rivalry with Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald). So exactly how does the story continue?

Happy Gilmore 2 picks up 29 years after the events of the original, and we see what happened to Happy and the rest of the gang. It turns out that life has hit Sandler's protagonist hard, and he's struggling to provide for the family he and Virginia created together. After years of being retired from golfing, he once again takes up the club (and hockey stick) in an attempt to make enough money to send his daughter Vienna (Sunny Sandler) to ballet school in Europe. What results is a love letter to the original movie that will delight fans, featuring equal parts heart and comedy. While it hits nostalgic beats with a non-stop supply of laughs and easter eggs, there's also an emotional story its heart.

I don't want to give away any of Happy Gilmore 2's plot twists (of which there are many), but there are a ton of surprises throughout its 114-minute runtime. This is particularly true for the storylines involving Shooter and Virginia, with Julie Bowen and Christopher McDonald expertly jumping into their characters all the years later. Combine its story with the sheer amount of jokes in the sequel, and the sequel truly flies.

The laughs in the long-awaited sequel are constant and delightful.

Adam Sandler is first and foremost a comedian, even if he's able to pull off moving performances in projects like Uncut Gems and Click. And as such, Happy Gilmore 2 has a constant stream of hilarious moments, all of which feel specific to this burgeoning franchise. Sandler is able to once again show off his physical comedy talents, especially as Happy struggles when getting back into golf.

There are some solid running jokes that never get old in Happy Gilmore 2, showing just how much director Kyle Newacheck and writers Sandler and Tim Herlihy understand what makes these characters great. The latter two wrote and created the original movie, and they once again strike gold with their return to this zany universe.

Case in point: the wild lengths that Happy goes to hide liquor all around his home. Almost every piece of furniture is a secret flask, which he helps himself to while struggling in the first half of the movie. Happy's penchant for violent rage also returns... and is passed on to his rowdy group of sons. Seriously, the whole family needs to find their happy place. Overall, Happy Gilmore 2 is a comedic triumph, somehow managing to meet the high expectations left by the original's success.

Happy Gilmore 2 is a love letter to the original.

Happy Gilmore 2 goes out of its way to make itself accessible for those who have never seen the 1996 original. There are a number of quick flashbacks to the first movie, which provide context for some of the easter eggs that are included in the sequel. Still, it feels like Newacheck's comedy is truly for the fans, so don't expect any beloved reference or quotable line to be excluded: it's really all there.

From the very first frame of the sequel, it's clear that the spirit of the OG Happy Gilmore is there. Just like the first film, we open on Lynyrd Skynyrd's track "Tuesday's Gone" as Adam Sandler narrates his character's story. There are a ton of returning characters as well; in fact, just about anyone you can imagine from the 1996 comedy classic ends up popping back up throughout its runtime. This includes Ben Stiller's villainous Hal L., who is tormenting Happy by running his support group. Unsurprisingly he absolutely destroys this appearance, which comes shortly after Stiller reprised the same role in Hubie Halloween.

Despite being jam packed with cameos and easter eggs from the original, Happy Gilmore 2 somehow manages to squeeze it all in without weighing down the comedy. The movie is not too long, and delivers everything that hardcore fans like myself have been hoping for.

Decades later, Happy’s story is still chock full of heart.

While Happy Gilmore 2 is a silly comedy like its predecessor, it's also got a ton of heart to help buoy the movie in real feeling. Happy's love for his kids is palpable, and the whole reason he goes back to golf is to provide for his daughter. And the fact that Sandler's real-life daughter is playing Vienna only adds to its emotional impact.

Without giving away spoilers, the sequel also pays tribute to the various cast members who have passed away in the decades between the Happy Gilmore movies. This only adds to the overall movie's emotional impact, as fans are able to share their love for late icons like Carl Weathers, Frances Bay, Joe Flaherty, and more. The first movie is a title that means a great deal to both fans and the cast/creatives, so these nods to those who are no longer with us cut deep.

As funny as Happy Gilmore 2, this care for its history is quite moving. And while we we're treated to cameos from celebs like Bad Bunny, Margaret Qualley, Travis Kelce and more, it's the way that legacy characters are handled that helps to ground the story and give it a real emotional impact.

Overall, Happy Gilmore 2 is a total joy, and one deserving of another gold jacket. And after this, I'd trust Adam Sandler and company to bring sequels to more of his catalogue. I guess I've found a new happy place.

Macro judgement of the two is meaningless… but micro comparison is still totally fair game, and in the month of July 2025, both Marvel Studios and DC Studios are releasing features that are actually fascinating to compare. Director Matt Shakman’s Fantastic Four: First Steps and James Gunn’s Superman hold very different positions within their respective franchises (the former is the 37^th movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and technically set outside of the canon; the latter is the first blockbuster in the nascent DC Universe), but similar approaches have been taken for both: because of the immense pop culture status of the titular protagonists, filmmakers have felt the freedom to skip over traditional origin stories and instead opt to drop audiences into their already-in-progress lives as heroes.

It’s a logical approach for both – but it yields extremely different results for each, and what the difference comes down to is story vs. plot. In Superman, the personalities, motivations, and aspirations of all the main characters are drawn perfectly clear, and everything that develops is predicated on the actions that they take and the consequences that result. In Fantastic Four: First Steps, on the other hand, things just kinda happen. The whole world has a very specific aesthetic, and the heroes most definitely appear familiar, but there is never any kind of organic growth or natural depth. Everything feels overtly structured as a threat presents itself and impediments to protecting the world arise. Interesting personalities and arcs are non-existent, and it’s all so rote that it becomes boring (truly the last thing that I ever expected a MCU Fantastic Four movie to be).

With screenplay credits belonging to Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, and Ian Springer, Fantastic Four: First Steps begins as Marvel’s first family gets the news that it is adding a new member. Four years after a mission in space and an encounter with a cosmic storm that gave them superpowers, Reed Richards a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm a.k.a. The Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby) discover that they are expecting a baby – much to the joy of Johnny Storm a.k.a. The Human Torch (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm a.k.a. The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). One of the film’s multiple montages then zips through the months that follow, the time including baby proofing and various scientific experimentation, but soon before Sue’s due date, the team is confronted by a visitor from space.

Shalla-Bal a.k.a. Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) zooms down to Times Square and informs the Fantastic Four and the rest of the planet that Earth has been targeted by the world-devouring entity known as Galactus (Ralph Ineson), and their lives will soon be ending. In order to stop this catastrophe, Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben take their first trip to the cosmos since their fateful accident in order to try and negotiate with the voracious Celestial, and it’s there that they are given a choice: the only way that they can save their home and all of humanity is by giving up the unborn baby.

Fantastic Four: First Steps is so focused on its plot that it forgets about its characters.

To be fair to The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the plot points in the narrative are taken from the comics, but as they are collected together in this movie, it all feels artificial and shallow. Reed and Sue having a baby isn’t introduced so that we can see how its presence radically changes the lives of the parents; it only happens because it is a means toward setting up the offer to potentially save the world by sacrificing their child (perfect evidence of this: there isn’t even a conversation about the nine-month pregnant Sue sitting out the exceptionally dangerous trip into space because the plot needs Galactus to scan her womb and recognize the fetus’ potential).

It’s all built so rigorously that it dampens the stakes, and the extreme focus on the simple logline plot means that it never takes the time to create unique arcs for the protagonists that help us understand who they really are. It can be said that Reed gets his personal mettle tested as a new father, as it activates his need to intellectualize everything and spikes his anxiety, but that just leaves Sue to be relegated as “emotion-driven, caring mother” – and that’s not much of a part.

Johnny is the most charismatic of the group and suggested to be a committed bachelor – but the only way in which his personality is explored is by giving him a PG-rated crush on Silver Surfer (which feels like the only reason the film opted to feature Shalla-Bal instead of the classic Silver Surfer, Norin Radd). The movie has so little idea of what to do with him that his big task in the plot becomes translating Shalla-Bal’s language – which isn’t exactly the excitement you want from the Human Torch.

At the very least, however, it’s better than anything Ben gets to do, which is pretty much nothing. The Thing is a deeply emotionally rich character – the hero who looks at himself in the mirror and sees a monster – but The Fantastic Four: First Steps doesn’t make time for any of that. Instead, his solo scenes are almost entirely limited to just walking around his old neighborhood, impressing school kids with his strength, and flirting with their teacher (Natasha Lyonne), who doesn’t give his rocky appearance a second thought.

There is nothing to complain about when it comes to the cast and the performances, as the spirit of the characters are mostly represented, and there is a natural and effortless chemistry that is instantly recognizable and properly bonds them as a family. But the ensemble is begging for better material that is more focused on what makes them amazing individually and together instead of the flat, apocalyptic plotting that is the sole focus in this blockbuster.

Underwhelming CGI sequences aside, the look of Fantastic Four: First Steps is what makes it special.

There is far more creative energy poured into the look and feel of The Fantastic Four: First Steps compared to the script, and it is a delight unto itself. It doesn’t pack much of a punch when it comes to blockbuster action, as there is minimal effort to uniquely utilize the special abilities of the protagonists and give them standout signature moments, but the retrofuturism swing is the work’s best quality. Full of rounded edges and dynamic shades of blue, Matt Shakman creates a world that feels both cozy and shiny – the result of a wonderful collaboration in cinematography, editing, costuming and production design. And putting the perfect extra flourish on the aesthetic is the tremendous score by Michael Giacchino, driven by powerful strings and an epic chorus.

The throwback vibes are disrupted by sequences of visual effects overload, as beats with Galactus have the look of video game cutscenes, but the overall look of the film is still the best thing it has going for it. An unintended consequence: it’s a shame that we won’t get to see much more of the world, as it seems rich for further exploration, but it seems inevitably that the characters are going to find themselves flung across the multiverse into the main MCU canon.

To say that this is all disappointing would be a great understatement. The Fantastic Four is a beloved superhero group that has had an ugly and bad cinematic history, and when the rights to the characters returned to Marvel Studios via the completion of the Disney/Fox merger in 2019, the expectation was that the heroes were finally in proper creative hands and that a perfect movie would finally be crafted. But Marvel’s stature as an elite blockbuster machine has changed tremendously in the last six years, and that’s reflected in the film that is coming to theaters. Fantastic Four: First Steps has a dynamic look that sets it apart from other titles in the franchise, but it’s lack of depth stops it from feeling properly satisfying.

It’s not a great legacy, and it can’t be said that the new legacyquel generated personal anticipation by extension – if not especially because the franchise is once again riding the coattails of Scream following the successes of both 2022’s Scream and Scream VI. And the boring, first-thought title did absolutely nothing to help either. But sometimes minimal hope can end up the victor over low expectations, and here we have a fun example: director/co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s I Know What You Did Last Summer doesn’t do any mold-breaking as a 21^st century slasher, but thanks to a fun ensemble, an engaging mystery, and a killer third act, it’s a surprising mid-summer treat.

The film begins with protagonist Ava Brucks (Chase Sui Wonders) returning to her hometown of Southport, North Carolina to celebrate the engagement of her best friend Danica Richards (Madelyn Cline) and her fiancé Teddy Spencer (Tyriq Withers) – reuniting with the shy-but-flirty Milo Griffin (Jonah Hauer-King) and Stevie Ward (Sarah Pidgeon), who has been estranged from everyone since the end of high school. With a night of partying concluding with a big fireworks display, the group opts to drive to a special lookout point… and things go horribly wrong.

While waiting for the pyrotechnics to launch, Teddy steps out into the road in front of an on-coming car as a drunken prank, and while Milo pushes him out of the way, the car swerves, smashes through the guardrail, and then plummets to the ocean below. After the cops are called, Ava wants to stay, but everyone else convinces her to go, and she eventually acquiesces.

One year later, Ava once again makes a trip back to Southport, this time for Danica’s bridal shower – but she now has a new fiancé in Wyatt (Joshua Orpin) after her relationship with Teddy fell apart. Danica and Stevie have grown close as new best friends, and the vibe at the party is sunshine and rainbows. This changes when a gathering to open gifts sees Danica get a card that simply reads “I Know What You Did Last Summer” In days that follow, the friends see themselves terrorized by a mysterious figure in a black, high-collard rain slicker and hat, and when it’s understood that events are mirroring a series of slayings that happened in 1997, the protagonists hope to get help from two of the survivors: Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.).

I Know What You Did Last Summer has a familiar slasher story, but you’re drawn in by the characters.

As a slasher franchise, I Know What You Did Last Summer is built on pretty basic elements – a group of friends get hunted by “The Fisherman” as part of revenge plot stemming from an incident the previous year – and it doesn’t try to get much deeper than that. This is not Scream; there is no meta narrative layered on top of the story. It’s a simple whodunit, with the protagonists racing to figure out who the killer is before they all get slaughtered, and while that can be a boring disaster if improperly handled (with a collection of characters who are little more than cannon fodder), the script by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Sam Lansky and the talented ensemble cast keep everything afloat with a knowing sensibility and charming personalities.

Ava, Danica, Teddy, Milo and Stevie all fit into familiar boxes as characters – Danica, for example, being a ditzy trend-follower and Teddy being a bro-y rich kid – but their personalities are served with a wink and sense of humor that makes them likable, and the actors have terrific natural chemistry together. Most importantly, while it can’t be said that they are the brightest clan, they don’t anything so overtly dumb that you want to throw up your hands in frustration (principally at the laziness of the writing), and there is a logic to the way they go about finding the identity of who is hunting them. You like them enough that you don’t want to see them get brutally murdered… but another strong quality of the legacyquel is that it plays for keeps.

Jennifer Kaytin Robinson unleashes some slick and sick kill sequences.

I Know What You Did Last Summer has a clear and purposeful sense of humor, but it also never abandons the stakes of its story and delivers on the promise of Fisherman-centric mayhem. None of the characters ever feel safe, adding extra thrills to the attack scenes and chase scenes – which develop quickly and offer solid scares. As far as gore is concerned, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson shows that she is not Damien Leone, but her incarnation of The Fisherman certainly knows their way around a hook and a harpoon gun, and both are put to effective, bloody use.

The surprises in I Know What You Did Last Summer’s third act make the whole thing work.

What makes this review particularly difficult to write is that while I enjoy the majority of the ride on which I Know What You Did Last Summer takes the audience, it’s in the third act that the movie starts to really hit its best notes and truly answers the question why this franchise deserved a legacyquel. And, of course, I have zero interest in spoiling any of it for you. Without giving anything away or providing any kind of hints, let it just be said here that there are some smart and unexpected surprises (including one that made me audibly say, “Oh cool” in my screening); the mystery has a satisfying conclusion; and everyone should definitely hang around in the theater for a mid-credits bonus sequence.

With the film coming out in mid-summer, I fear that it’s a feature that may end up getting overlooked as greater attention is paid by audiences toward the big blockbuster titles of the season – but that would be quite unfortunate. While I wouldn’t have expected a month ago that I would be writing this, given my past perspective on the franchise, I Know What You Did Last Summer is a movie to see on the big screen and soon so that you don’t get spoiled. Later this year, it will be a cool treat to discover during spooky season when it hits the home video market, but I recommend you stay ahead of the curve and enjoy this surprising treat in theaters.

So in this evolved landscape, how does one go about properly launching a new superhero universe in 2025? With Superman, writer/director/DC Studios Co-CEO James Gunn has found a brilliant answer: forget about plot, and just focus on story. Gunn is a trainer waiting by a treadmill that is already cranked up to full speed when you get to the gym, knowing that you already know how to run. The movie doesn’t so much build a universe as much as it drops you into one, and the adventure it takes you on is equal parts thrilling, emotional, dramatic, and joyful.

Best of all, while there have been more than a dozen Superman movies before and the films have been a dominant force in modern blockbusters, it nonetheless delivers an experience unlike anything we’ve seen before.

There are no origins in this movie to the point that we join this story as it is already in progress. Superman (David Corenswet) has stirred up controversy by intervening in an international conflict involving a heavily militarized nation invading a neighbor in hopes of annexation, and we meet him moments after he is handed his first ever defeat since dedicating himself to heroism. With help from his delightfully chaotic canine companion Krypto and resources at his Fortress of Solitude, the Man of Steel is able to recover, but the trouble is only beginning for the hero after he flies back to his home in Metropolis.

His budding romance with fellow Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) is on shaky ground, as his superhero activities add unique complications to their relationship – but far more dangerous are the schemes of tech billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). In addition to having a hand in the international conflict that has purposefully put Superman in hot water, Lex also has his henchmen The Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría) and the mysterious Ultraman break into the Fortress of Solitude and go on a dirt-digging expedition. What they find and then expose to the whole world completely changes the way that humanity looks at the hero from Krypton, and he must find a way to prove to everyone what he truly stands for.

James Gunn instantly embeds us in the DC Universe with Superman, and it's a perfect way to introduce the world.

It’s not just that Superman doesn’t rehash the well-tread tale of an alien baby crash landing in Smallville, Kansas and being raised by a pair of loving parents who instill proper values; none of the characters are built with the traditional origin structure. Everyone in the audience has at least a vague impression of all of these heroes and villains, so the movie doesn’t waste time explaining who they are, where they come from, or what specifically motivates them. James Gunn skips all of the tired, extra exposition and simply tells the story he wants to tell with a collection of iconic and brilliant personalities, and it soars as he forgoes setup in favor of action.

Our understanding of who these characters are means that there is no heavy lifting in the narrative that sees a specific plan come together and then get executed: Lex Luthor is a wealthy, influential mogul with an outrageous ego who can’t stand the fact that an alien would receive the adulation from the world he feels that he deserves, and his immense resources allow him to execute a nefarious plan to ruin the alien – regardless of the immense cost. As a result of this, Superman is forced to question his own greater purpose, but his deeper understanding of who he is and what he stands for give him the fortitude to fight back. There are no MacGuffins or magic blood; everything emerges organically, and the ease with which it all flows is spectacular.

David Corenswet and Nicholas Hoult prove standouts in a Superman ensemble brimming with excellent performances.

A standout hurdle in successfully pulling off a story like this is the challenge of making sure that audiences recognize the characters from the get-go – which is why reboots like these tend to go the origin story route. Gunn fortunately has assembled a cast that has allowed Superman to effortlessly make that leap. David Corenswet has massive shoes to fill stepping into one of pop culture’s most iconic roles, but his transformation into the Man of Tomorrow is spellbinding in how effortless it is, as he captures the many dimensions of the protagonist: he has country boy charisma that pairs well with a powerful righteousness, but he can also never totally hide the vulnerability that comes with being an outsider and his desire to be accepted.

Nicholas Hoult, meanwhile, gives Lex everything this incarnation of the legendary villain needs, infusing the character with an immortal ego and palpable and unending rage that reads as exceptionally dangerous in combination with his intelligence.

The eternal battle between Supes and Lex takes center stage here, but Gunn’s script doesn’t scrimp when it comes to fleshing out the world, which provides instant depth and vibrancy to the DCU. Given the supervillain’s harnessing of hyper-advanced technologies and messing around in global politics, the movie operates in both supernatural and grounded realms that make effective use of a tremendously talented supporting cast. The former sees Nathan Fillion, Edi Gathegi and Isabella Merced come together as the superhero group dubbed the Justice Gang – Green Lantern, Mr. Terrific and Hawkgirl – and the stars beautifully harness Gunn’s sharp dialogue in their complicated collaboration (they are brought together by a common goal to do good, but their attitudes amusingly clash).

Meanwhile, Gunn also activates the editorial team at the Daily Planet, with Lois Lane recognizing that there is something not quite right at the center of the international conflict that spurred Superman to intervene, with an inside source at LexCorp feeding info to fellow reporter Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) and editor-in-chief Perry White (Wendell Pierce) backing the effort. Rachel Brosnahan brings Lois to life with a pitch perfect dose of enthusiastic bullishness; Gisondo nails the nerdy lady-killer vibe that this cinematic incarnation of Jimmy Olsen puts front and center; and I’m just tickled reflecting on the quick dose gravitas Pierce delivers as he green lights the publication of an expose while flying above an endangered Metropolis while in a ship piloted by his star reporter in the blockbuster’s exciting third act.

Naturally, there are a handful of scene-stealers woven into the mix as well. Anthony Carrigan is tremendous as the shapeshifting Metamorpho and Sara Sampaio is a trip as the ditzy Eve Teschmacher – but nobody holds a candle to the terror of super dog Krypto, whose hilarious enthusiasm is balanced by epically destructive tendencies.

Superman has an immense scope that is consistently delivering exciting action.

The successful ensemble casting of the movie is hardly a surprise given that has been a demonstrated talent of James Gunn’s since the early years of his directing career as an edgy indie filmmaker, but his visual style has continued to evolve as well, and Superman offers great opportunity for him to further flex his spectacle skills. The movie doesn’t feature what I would call a signature sequence that stands above everything else, but there is no shortage of scope, wonder and excitement, as the story explores the spellbinding grandeur of the Fortress of Solitude, a kaiju battle in the middle of Metropolis, the horrors of a pocket dimension constructed by Lex to be used as a super prison, and the simultaneous bedlam of war and a world-splitting fissure in reality.

There is a lot riding on this film on a big picture level, as it’s positioned as a table-setter for a burgeoning franchise and an introduction to James Gunn’s larger vision as a studio executive. It performs that function terrifically, as I am instantly excited for everything that will follow – but independent of all that, it’s simply an awesome movie. Superman brings eye-popping marvels in coordination with impressive depth and shockingly relevant themes, and it does so in ways we’ve never seen from superhero blockbusters before.

As produced by Amazon MGM — whose name is basically buddy branding in and of itself — Heads of State likely could have set Cena and Elba up with the dumbest story imaginable and their combined talents would have still made it worth watching. Thankfully, screenwriting duties were handled in part by veteran scribes Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec, whose most prominent addition to the action genre was unquestionably co-writing Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol.

Cena brings his WWE confidence as the relatively new President of the United States Will Derringer, who was a globally recognized action movie star prior to entering politics. Naturally, Will is the overly vocal and impulsive yin to the measured and clandestine yang of Elba's Sam Clarke, Britain's Prime Minister. Opposites initially don't attract as they're brought together to unveil a plot-driving plan to fellow NATO leaders, but a nagging terrorist threat forces them to see each other's strengths instead of just the faults. It's a classic set-up, and the two stars make both the clashing and vibing feel genuine throughout.

It's the third and biggest movie yet from director Ilya Naishuller, who is arguably responsible for injecting the biggest surprises and quirkiest moments that make Heads of State stand apart from the sea of overly serious political thrillers and lesser-than action-comedies that sacrifice wowzers stunts for ad-libbed one-liners.

Together, John Cena and Idris Elba are funny, charismatic and badass enough that I already want a sequel.

Idris Elba is the kind of actor who brings his A-game to every role, and he's quite polished at choosing projects that hit above a certain line of quality. Cena by and large shares that first trait, even if his body of work sits on a slightly lower echelon. Put the two together, and where one might expect to see two larger-than-life personalities fighting for screen-supremacy, and the result is instead perfectly complementary. The pairing worked in The Suicide Squad within a larger ensemble but fully thrives here.

Cena's Will Derringer is largely a caricature that mixes Donald Trump's political bravado and impulsive outbursts with former Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger's embrace of his Hollywood past. He's the kind of guy who loves to solve problems with easily digestible catchphrases, which initially puts him at odds with Elba's more stoic and contemplative Sam Clarke. Their argumentative dynamic creates a bit of a grind early on as everyone's personalities are spread out in full, but the pair's chemistry is locked in straightaway, making this way easier to watch than an actual political debate.

The two leaders are forced into teaming up aboard Air Force One after the flight gets targeted by a team of goons guided by Paddy Considine's shady mustachioed villain Viktor Gradov. Once the two heroes are free and clear of the plane crash, they're forced to go on the run to seek out a welcoming U.S. embassy, with plenty of expected and unexpected threats getting in their way. If you think it wouldn't get old watching Cena and Elba punch, kick and shoot enemies with gleeful aplomb, you'd be right.

Not that the two titular Heads provide the only star power. Priyanka Chopra-Jonas is every bit as badass as her co-stars while portraying MI6 agent Noel Bisset, whose prolonged absence during a chunk of the movie feels more like a scheduling issue than a story plus-up. The Boys and Novocaine's Jack Quaid pops in for some brazen and brutal delights, and might actually boast the most highlight reel-ready appearance of anyone.

Nobody director Ilya Naishuller gets his biggest budget yet, with lots of fun, unique, and explosive moments to show for it.

Russian filmmaker Ilya Naishuller made his mark on Hollywood and U.S. audiences with the 2015 action flick Hardcore Henry (budget: $2 million), which is infamous for being shot entirely from the first-person perspective of its main character. Next up, Naishuller turned Bob Odenkirk into a low-key action hero with 2021's Nobody (budget: $16 million), which was a big enough hit to spark a sequel (coming later this year).

With Heads of State, however, the director is working on a completely different level, and his ability to scale his talents up becomes quite evident during the first big action sequence onboard Air Force One. Actually, the moments that occur outside the plane are the best indicators of Naishuller's ability to shake up the norm. A couple of the most memorable shots in the film come from cameras that are attached to drone explosives aimed at the POTUS' plane, calling back to Hardcore Henry's P.O.V. approach.

Other stunts and shots peppered throughout the film also show off Naishuller's imaginative approach to camerawork – be on the lookout for a character who's missing his front teeth – which helps give Heads of State more personality than the majority of less playful releases. Even when explosive weapons aren't in use, Will and Sam's hand-to-hand combat scenes are somehow just as much fun and exciting to watch.

That applies fully to the main antagonist's top pair of hyper-violent enforcers, Sasha the Killer (Alexander Kuznetsov) and Olga the Killer (Katrina Durden), who seem to defy death as they continue chasing the two world leaders wherever necessary. The duo would have felt right at home in The Raid or Oldboy.

I admittedly expected more of those unique and unexpected moments throughout, and it's entirely possible that making such a big budget movie for Amazon MGM stymied some of Ilya Naishuller's wackier instincts in order to keep everything on a clear and understandable narrative path.

Despite early issues with plot and tone, Heads of State boasts a pretty flawless second half.

Had a version of Heads of State come out in the '80s alongside the comparable buddy action classics Lethal Weapon and 48 Hrs., the political exposition laid out in the first act likely wouldn't have inspired a second glance. But at a time when real-world news is affected by partisanship at every level, watching any kind of immature tête-à-tête between two global leaders – even a fictional comedic-minded one – can immedaitely become exhausting.

Beyond the politico murk, the film's opening sequences also have a lot of exposition and character introductions to get through, which is where audiences first meet Chopra-Jonas' Noel and Sarlto Copley's Agent Coop. Which leads to introductions for Will's Chief of Staff Simone (Sarah Niles), Sam's second banana Quincy (Richard Coyle) and Viktor Gradov's American quasi-henchman Arthur (Stephen Root). Let's also not forget Will's Vice President Elizabeth Kirk, though Carla Gugino makes her first appearance a bit later on.

After the stellar Air Force One sequence, however, John Cena and Idris Elba are removed from the bulk of the other main characters, and that's when things get cooking. Without anyone else yapping in their ears, Will and Sam are forced to meet in the middle and work together, which is the foundation of any great buddy action movie. The movie never loses sight of that kinship, either, throughout all the other bone-breaking brawls, bullet-hell gunfights, and twisty plot machinations.

With its surprisingly deft blend of high-stakes action and light-hearted comedy that bumps against the PG-13 rating, Heads of State is 100% the kind of guilt-free popcorn-chomping good time that Amazon MGM should be making, and is definitely worthy of a trip to the theater, as opposed to streaming at home. President John Cena's biceps deserve to be seen on the biggest screen possible... because America.

I was wrong to do that, because if this is supposed to be a declaration of love for that original movie, it veers far from the mark. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: the hubris of humanity led to the recreation of dinosaurs, which our species now wants to exploit in the name of profit.

What passes for novelty this time around is Rebirth’s new island location, a remote facility where mutated attractions were being created for the main park. This lost world is now hosting a mercenary team led by Scarlett Johansson’s Zora Bennett, with the goal being to recover genetic samples of the largest dinosaurs. The aim is to create a super drug that benefits cardiac health, and if that was the sole focus of this story, I might have been able to get on board.

That's not what happens, however, as a family unit (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono and Audrina Miranda) randomly shipwrecked by some dinosaurs is rescued by the aforementioned mercenary team – an effort to make the tale into something more "blockbuster" worthy. And that is where the greatest irony presented in Jurassic World Rebirth lies, as watching this movie didn't invigorate my dino loving heart; rather, it broke it into 65 million pieces.

Jurassic World Rebirth starts with intriguing ideas, but it never recovers from a baffling turn.

As well-cast as Jurassic World Rebirth’s mercenary mission plotline is, it should be the one and only plot this picture follows. Along with Johansson (a Jurassic superfan herself) are Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, and Mahershala Ali. That sort of roster almost makes you think you’re in for a Wes Anderson adventure, especially with Johansson and Friend being Asteroid City veterans.

I think I honestly would take a modest stop-motion Anderson film over what we have here, with all of the money and effects a mega franchise can buy. And that is what brings me to the heart of my disappointment: writer David Koepp’s script. Returning to the franchise for the first time since 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the scribe has given us a story that induces head-scratching.

There is literally a moment where this film finds its characters minutes away from Ile Saint-Hubert, the island at the heart of Rebirth, only to turn around and save the family that’ll give us our merchandising-friendly subplot. It’s a move that’s questioned by all but Zora and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) – her traumatized friend who offers her conscience a window to sneak in Jurassic World Rebirth’s unsubtle social messaging.

With past films offering spins on Michael Crichton’s thesis of scientific power being mishandled by humanity's hubris, director Gareth Edwards’ entry focuses on the class inequality inherent with such big pharma fortune seeking. But it never lands its ideas as well as the previous films, which leads to a promising story beat turning into a blunt instrument that beats us over the head.

As for the Jurassic part of this equation, Koepp’s pre-release promise to not change the series canon holds up. However, Rebirth doesn’t feel like a movie that’s interested in even touching the more recent stories at hand, as seen in the decision to wipe out most of the world’s dinosaurs at the start of the film.

If anything, this feels like a partial attempt to execute a Halloween 2018 style sequel in Jurassic World’s universe – selectively side stepping previous developments while eager to include legacy character name drops and callbacks. So I'd check those dino droppings for member berries, as I have a feeling they've poisoned what could have been a fun romp.

When your movie about prehistoric creatures makes it hard to root for the dinosaurs, you’ve got a problem.

For as much complaining as I’ve done about Jurassic World Rebirth’s human characters, I can see the promise that they represent. Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey in particular have fantastic chemistry as the characters that puzzle out the moral dilemma we’re supposed to be invested in. Mahershala Ali is left on the outside looking in, infusing as much personality as he can as an undeveloped figure of conscience. So with lackluster humans, you’d think the dinosaurs would pick the slack, right?

Instead, I am shocked at how dino-avoidant Rebirth actually is, especially with mutant creatures on the table. So much of the hype surrounding the fifth Jurassic sequel has been teasing the Distortus Rex, a dinosaur that’s literally designed with Alien’s Xenomorph and Return of the Jedi’s Rancor in mind. But we barely get to see the beast clearly, despite recent marketing not being very shy with the beast’s face.

As for the rest of our dinosaurs, we get what amounts to a legacy cameo from a T-Rex, bringing to life a long deleted scene from Jurassic Park’s original script. It’s not very long or terribly exciting, and the only benefit I can honestly claim is that we get to see a sleepy Rex roll over like an adorable house cat. That’s not exactly an adventure 32 years in the making.

Yet somehow, with Jurassic World Rebirth’s beasts mostly hiding in the background – save for Dolores, an adorable Aquilops – I still found myself once again rooting for the dinosaurs. The big difference this time out is instead of wanting inGen’s unwanted menagerie to teach us a lesson in why we shouldn’t play God, I wanted them to take me away from the uninteresting human characters.

This is where the Delgado family comes in, as their presence robs Zora Bennett and her team of any substantial development while also giving us an underbaked family unit meant to recall the emotional ride of Lex and Tim in Jurassic Park. It bothers me that the segment of Rebirth’s narrative giving people of color its focus feels like a last minute addition. I do not fault stars Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, Audrina Miranda or David Iacono for their portion of the movie being annoying, especially because I wanted them to work better in the overall structure of the story. Diversity in representation doesn’t only belong to the dinosaurs.

Audrina Miranda notably also has the skills to sell the CGI/puppetry mashup of Dolores as a mini-dino companion worthy of an actual plotline... but alas, Jurassic World Rebirth doesn’t even recognize what it has going for it long enough to really double down, as it flies towards an ending that can’t even decide what it wants to be.

The latest Jurassic World movie is so obsessed with Jurassic Park that it forgets why that first movie worked.

Some of the worst criticisms of nostalgic legacyquels apply to Jurassic World: Rebirth . Acting as a greatest hits compilation of locations, iconography, and visual beats that made for the most memorable Jurassic moments, there’s no heart behind the choices. It’s a movie that asks for “oohs” and “ahhs” without inspiring them to come from an organic or meaningful place.

If you’d asked me before seeing Rebirth if there’s such a thing as too many references to John Williams’ Jurassic Park theme, I may have said “No.” But the underwhelming score from composer Alexandre Desplat has proven me wrong, as the numerous deployments of the iconic tune are all I really remember from this would-be adventure picture’s score.

The greatest failing I think Jurassic World: Rebirth suffers from is an obviously rushed production schedule. I still remember the project being announced out of nowhere last year, barreling down with what seemed like a freight train’s worth of momentum to the finish line this summer. It’s a lesson we should have learned in the past, as 2001’s Jurassic Park III suffered a rushed production that yielded similarly disastrous results. I now feel I need to return to the only other entry I dislike in this canon, if only so I can decide whether I need to apologize for treating it so roughly.

Despite my criticisms, I still believe in the promise of the Jurassic franchise at large. For my own personal scorecard to only have two misfires in a canon of seven films (and two wildly entertaining animated series), that’s not a bad average to have. If there was a little more time and care given to Rebirth, I could see it being the lean and mean jungle adventure it's attempting to resemble.

If there’s a new entry announced tomorrow, I’ll be there without question. I just hope that if the Jurassic universe continues, it takes its time to let an idea worthy of trotting out these massive marvels dawn on its consciousness. But unfortunately for now, I cannot endorse this walk in the park.

There have been plenty of campy horror titles, with many great examples to point to in the late 20th century, but the jump-scare success of 2023’s M3GAN reaffirmed that audiences want to laugh and shudder at the same time. This phenomenon very much prevails with its sequel, M3GAN 2.0. But M3GAN also continues to prove that there’s more up her creepy little robot sleeves than your run-of-the-mill slasher programming.

Thanks to the clever writer/director Gerard Johnstone reuniting with Akela Cooper, the original’s screenplay writer, and the dream duo of horror franchise producers in James Wan and Jason Blum, I’m happy to report M3GAN was in very good hands for its second round. A different effort about a killer pre-teen A.I. doll could have really crashed and burned on a second go-around, but that’s not what happens here. Dare I say, the sequel is better? I think what I like the best is that they each offer different flavors I will want to return back to depending on my mood.

M3GAN 2.0 could have invented a ridiculous reason for why M3GAN’s creator, Allison Williams’ Gemma, might bring the titular android back to life only to have us doing a double take over more slasher-esque events – but the sequel goes a route reminiscent of Terminator 2: Judgement Day by going a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" route when a more advanced killer robot becomes a big threat. The result is less of a horror-focused than the first M3GAN was, but it’s actually all the better for it.

Writer/director Gerard Johnstone understood the assignment with his surprisingly action-heavy second M3GAN movie.

While developing sequels is often an uphill battle for filmmakers to recapture the magic of the original, M3GAN 2.0 effortlessly feels like it’s building upon what fans like myself loved about the original while also reaching for something fresh and new we haven’t seen from the world that was created in the previous movie. That has a lot to do with it starting off with its main characters being in very different places than they were last time. Gemma has learned from her mishandling of robotic technology with M3GAN to become a vocal advocate for the regulation of A.I., whereas her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) is four to five years older and a much more self-assured character.

And, M3GAN? She’s thought to be destroyed... until we learn of another killer robot made from the same stuff as her. This one is a military killer robot named AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), which stands for Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android. As a horror fan, I love the slasher elements, but it's a nice change of pace for the franchise to lean further into the science-fiction/action elements that has covertly been resting in the franchise's DNA (despite the Blumhouse of it all directing audiences otherwise).

M3GAN 2.0 operates on a larger scale with set pieces like a stylish car chase, multiple epic showdowns between M3GAN and AMELIA, and world-ending stakes. The more insulated storyline of the first movie is a fun ride, but seeing M3GAN 2.0 pull all the stops to match the iconic status of M3GAN feels like a step in the right direction.

The entrance of Ivanna Sakhno’s AMELIA offers unexpected depth and (more) fun to the M3GAN sequel.

This is all without mentioning how well executed the addition of AMELIA is to M3GAN 2.0. Sakhno’s electric and impressive robotic performance is the opposite of her counterpart in many ways. AMELIA is not goofy, immature or full of vagina-geared jokes; she sells her role as this cold metal killer. She’s not going to malfunction or dance before taking down her latest victim, and she’s coming for Gemma and Cady. In an effort to protect themselves from her, Gemma is then forced to rebuild M3GAN back to her former glory (with quite a few upgrades).

It’s a lot of fun to see Gemma and Cady interact with M3GAN following the events of the first movie, and to see the original killer doll take on a new and more sympathetic role in the series. We must not forget her programming all started with intentions to protect Cady, and that’s what she does. And obviously, there’s a dance break involved.

M3GAN 2.0’s plot can get convoluted and a bit too wacky but not enough to steer away from the fun.

There’s a lot of comedy that will have you cracking up in M3GAN 2.0 – especially thanks to the addition of Jemaine Clement as a tech CEO who is attempting to bring Gemma over to his company (to no avail). Gemma's actions seemed may have seemed simply ridiculous and misguided before, but Williams’ character is in on the joke this time around, and the movie is all the better for it. She and M3GAN also build an entertaining rapport whilst McGraw’s Cady operates to help ground it all.

Just like the first one, there’s a sweet PG-13 family flair to M3GAN 2.0 that feels a tad askew, and that doesn't really change here. And despite the fun, it does take its plot a bit too seriously when it doesn’t need to, with some convoluted lore and turning corners one can see coming. But there’s also a confidence that allows the viewer to shrug off a few dumb moments and still appreciate it for what it is. In other words, M3GAN is growing up to be a confident little killer doll who proves to be even more of a baddie as a heroine, and after this adventure, I cannot wait what crimes she digs into next.

As one would anticipate, F1 is an impressive technical achievement. It repeatedly offers the visceral experience of being strapped to the hood/side/back of one of the title sport’s speedy cars, with inventive cinematography and brilliant sound design working in tandem to create the powerful effect. I can say without any reservation that the film met all my expectations in that respect, as I felt like I could practically smell the burning rubber on asphalt. However, it also falls short in some key narrative and storytelling arenas, which very much hamper the 156 minute epic.

Brad Pitt is using every ounce of his star power playing driver Sonny Hayes, but the movie nonetheless fails to make it over two key hurdles: fast cars and crashes/explosions can’t disguise the fact that the script by Ehren Kruger is excessively trope-ridden and formulaic. For those who don’t know the various rules and regulations of the sport going in to the movie, it provides very little assistance and asks that you figure everything out via context (which I normally wouldn’t ding a film for, but the reality is that I felt confused more often than desirable for an entertaining big screen experience).

If you’re a veteran fan of sports movies, this is a tale you’ll probably recognize: Sonny Hayes is an aging, but still passionate driver looking for any excuse to get behind the wheel, and out of nowhere, he gets a golden ticket. His old friend Ruben (Javier Bardem) has a team that is desperate to win races and in need of a veteran to train hotshot rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). Sonny is far from the first choice, but he is the first one to say yes.

Things start off rocky as the team fails to synchronize and mistakes are made. But as Sonny and Joshua starts moving in the same direction toward the target goal, personality conflicts are overcome. And with the help of technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) using her knowhow to make the cars work best for the drivers in the tandem driving sport, they start to win.

F1 is basically a collection of sport movie cliches.

I don’t know if anyone has ever tried to calculate a golden “cliché to runtime” ratio, but F1 is certainly a film that goes far beyond what it would be. Stock characters and story can be fine if properly packaged into a breezy 90-minute feature, but the Formula One feature asks for an hour-plus more than that, and it’s too big an ask. Stakes and emotional investment dwindle when the moviegoer is left waiting for next obvious plot development to unfold, and that comes paired with disappointment as you consistently recognize that the work isn’t going to make any effort to try something new.

It can’t be denied that some people find comfort in a movie like this, as it’s a nostalgic throwback to a past era of filmmaking… but if I’m seeking that kind of comfort, I simply go back to watch the titles from the late 20^th century that originated it. Anyone’s desire to see the storytelling evolve and to get something sincerely fresh out of the experience will be wanting (those seeking a similar aesthetic thrill can also find it elsewhere, with recent titles springing to mind including James Mangold’s Ford vs. Ferrari and Neill Blomkamp's Gran Turismo).

If you're ignorant of Formula 1 racing, you may want to read up a bit on the sport before seeing F1.

As for the presentation of the eponymous sport, I will admit to being of two minds. I have vitriol for mindless exposition that gracelessly spoon feeds information to ensure that everyone in the audience understands everything that is going on, and I also understand that Formula 1 has a massive, worldwide fanbase that would be insulted if F1 tried to hold their hand through every racing sequence in the film. All that being said, I am a layman who struggled to fully understand certain mid-race events and found myself disengaged during my screening.

I get it: I would hate any baseball movie that felt the need to explain to me that three strikes equals a strikeout and/or what a home run is. But a little hand-holding isn’t the worst thing. A great baseball movie can get across the mechanics of the game and potentially turn a non-fan into a fan; after watching F1, I can’t say I feel any kind of motivation to learn more about Formula 1 (which offers a kind of disappointment unto itself). Die-hards will love seeing their favorite sport on screen, but newbies like myself are kept at arm’s length and won’t feel regarded as a target audience (a contrast with everything else about it that screams “mass appeal”).

Star power does a lot of favors for F1.

The various characters are as clichéd as the plot – from Kerry Condon’s “the only woman rebelling in a male-dominated field” to Tobias Menzies’ “slimy executive-type offering back-stabbing deals” – and there is exactly nothing unique about the dynamic between the grizzled veteran and egotistical rookie. F1 is a case of actors elevating material, though.

Brad Pitt isn’t exactly developing his range playing Sonny Hayes, but there certainly is a proper exploitation that has made him a star in the last 30+ years, and a great deal of credit is deserved for his work actually getting behind the wheel and driving at three-figure speeds. And while this is certainly a case of “The Brad Pitt Show,” it can be said that Bardem brings a lot of charm as the “good friend who is way out over his skis” and Damson Idris demonstrates impressive confidence as an up-and-coming performer going toe-to-toe with his A-list co-star.

F1 is a movie that seems to have a very clear idea of who it is for, but a consequence is that anyone on the outside of that target won't find much to love. It's a proper big screen experience, as you'll want to feel your chair rumbling from the sound mix and have your entire field of vision dominated by whizzing scenery and blurry asphalt, but thanks to its underwhelming script, its shelf life beyond cinemas is going to be questionable.

That sort of hype is what 28 Years Later has been up against since its announcement, and it’s something that makes any legacyquel a daunting prospect to produce (or even watch out of fear of disappointment). Now that the wait is over, I’m pleased to say that 28 Years Later is the epitome of what these sorts of follow-ups should aspire to achieve, as it honors the time-tested adage that slow and steady wins the race... provided, of course, you’re not racing against the Infected.

Decades after the initial Rage Virus outbreak, the UK is officially quarantined from the rest of the world. 28 Years Later’s first act wastes no time filling us in on how military patrols and an information blackout leave the country cut off from foreign populations. In this tale, our focus is on Spike (Alfie Williams), a child coming of age in the sequestered community of Holy Island.

As his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) tries to teach him to hunt the Infected on the Mainland, mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is suffering from an unknown affliction. As a turn of events sees Spike fleeing the island with his sick mom, he ventures into the world abandoned, encountering obstacles that will shape him into the man he wants to become.

While it arrives 18 years after the previous entry, 28 Years Later doesn’t waste time picking things up.

A long wait between sequels is always intimidating, especially with a genre like horror. What was once fresh and frightening can feel dated and unnecessary without a proper hook. That was never a problem with the movie that started it all, and 28 Years Later doesn’t succumb to that pitfall either. The Rage-plagued UK is a logical extension of what its predecessors (28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later) had done in the past, but remains timely as ever.

Writer Alex Garland’s potential trilogy of follow-ups is inspired by, among other things, the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit, but it’s never solely defined by those recent influences. As modern as 28 Years Later feels through its various upgrades, the poignant storytelling present in 28 Days Later isn’t abandoned at all. Instead, it uses the advantages available to heighten some aspects of the original vision for the franchise's seminal title – as seen in an early sequence where Jamie and Spike make a star pre-dawn run for safety against a super starry sky.

Director Danny Boyle’s eclectic style is still sharply present, and isn’t a mere nostalgic return to an aesthetic. Shooting on a fleet of iPhones with returning cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, Boyle is still capturing the apocalypse through his prosumer tech lens, giving the film an intimate look with which the audience is well-familiar. It also allows the 127 Hours filmmaker to include some pretty amazing bullet time shots, capturing the deaths of some Infected with a new twist.

Musical accompaniment by the hip hop outfit Young Fathers offers a non-traditional score that also bolsters Boyle’s unique view on the end of the world with a special flare. Though 28 Years Later is a visually crisp and refined product, it retains the lo-fi charm that made its progenitor a classic.

Even with a cast full of recognizable names and the aid of several modern technological advances, 28 Years Later doesn’t betray its indie horror roots.

Though I’m a fan of the 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later, one cannot deny that it’s definitely a more traditional Hollywood offering. So when it came time to mentally prepare for 28 Years Later, I was naturally a bit worried we’d be getting a course correcting legacyquel that simply “plays the hits” in order to recapture the magic of days gone by. I swear, if someone had said, “Somehow, Christopher Eccleston's Major West has survived,” I would have been acting like an Infected myself.

Fans can put that concern aside, as Alex Garland’s new chapter in this ongoing story does adopt familiar beats but also offers a much deeper examination of themes embedded since day one of the plague. That specific note shines brightest with the employment of a more A-list cast including Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, and Ralph Fiennes.

The fact that such marquee names are present this time around isn’t a distraction, as Danny Boyle’s direction allows all to be easily immersed into the 28 cycle’s existing world – which makes the story consistently tense, even outside of scenes where the running Infected pursue the leads. You're not watching familiar stars pretend to be terrified by the speedy or crawling masses that want to devour them; you're watching people in a horrific a slice of life.

However, there is a young breakout star that needs to be highlighted, and it’s young Alfie Williams. Playing Spike, Williams definitively holds his own among his veteran co-stars, looking poised to become one of their peers after 28 Years Later. The majority of the narrative rests on his shoulders, and it never loses its potency in his hands.

Alex Garland’s writing for this young innocent is as tight as it is for the seasoned adult cast, and Williams never takes that for granted. While he’s clearly in good hands with top tier talent on both sides of the camera, the actor emerges as a name to watch out for by the time we arrive at this first chapter’s exciting finale.

28 Years Later is a darkly beautiful examination of the desire to return to the past and the necessity to move into the future.

Many may have forgotten the emotional and dramatic weight that 28 Days Later carried upon its release. In the wake of a decades-long wait for more, 28 Years Later still proves that it hasn’t run out of things to say about the duality that is human nature facing the end of life on Earth. In its radically transformed world, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s horror homecoming revisits the themes it’s always held in its tender but frightening heart.

One pivotal moment (that I won't spoil here) acts as a reminder of that bittersweet terror, which may surprise some in the audience who came purely for the horror show. But long time fans will recognize that decades after seeing Cillian Murphy wander around a deserted London, the drama is as well preserved as the scares. The screams, as well as the tears, are back in fine form.

28 Years Later is a captivating return to form that casts away cheap nostalgia and doubles down on the powerful nature the first movie was known for. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland recognized that the message of empathy versus conflict still carries a charge, and pick things up in a sweeping epic that doesn’t miss a heartbeat.

The six month wait for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is now even more of an endurance test for fans who’ll be hungry for more. But I think we should all take comfort in one last drop of happiness that could spread into something greater: 28 Years Later already feels as rewatchable as 28 Days Later; which in and of itself is an awe inspiring feat.

And yet, I simply like Elio more than I love it.

It’s a case of a film not quite being able to click in a way that makes it greater than the sum of its parts – but it’s still passable because those parts are still plenty entertaining and impactful. Though it has a strong central concept for its high concept, protagonist-driven plot (a lonely boy wishes to be abducted by aliens and find new connections beyond the stars), it spins out as a relatively flimsy narrative that is only able to build spurts of momentum and stakes rather than consistently supply either.

Voiced by Yonas Kibreab, the titular Elio (side note: can we please, please, please put a moratorium on titles that are just first names?) is an eleven-year-old boy who is left feeling completely abandoned when his parents die and he is taken in by his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) – a Major in the Air Force who reluctantly putts her astronaut aspirations on hold when she becomes her nephew’s legal guardian. When he stumbles into a museum exhibit about Voyager 1 and learns about its famous Golden Record, he becomes obsessed with extraterrestrials and passionately works to try and call out to other worlds so that he can find others with whom he can connect.

It turns out to be an extremely well-timed obsession, as it is during this period that aliens from an interplanetary society called the Communiverse discover Voyager 1 and begin to make contact with Earth. Elio is sneaking around the Air Force base where Olga is stationed when the communication is heard but dismissed, and when he is left alone, he records a message to be sent back. This ends up helping him achieve his goal of being abducted and meeting aliens… but things quickly get out of control when he lies about being the leader of his planet and he puts himself in the position of negotiating with a hostile alien named Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), who is aiming to destroy the Communiverse after being rejected for membership.

While Elio has strong themes, its storytelling is choppy.

It can’t be denied that Elio has something to say about loneliness – a relatable feeling whether you’re a pre-teen who has been recently been orphaned like the protagonist or simply find yourself sans company on a Friday night. Its number one objective is to have the character find connections in the cosmos while understanding that he needs to forge them at home. The arc is clear, but the movie takes shuffling steps to traverse it, and not everything clicks together properly. For example, the big lie that he is the leader of Earth doesn’t feel like it fully jives with his desire to live among species from other worlds; it registers more as a “first thought” trope that easily generates needed conflict for the story.

Along the young hero’s journey, he develops a delightful friendship with Glordon (Remy Edgerly), the son of Lord Grigon who doesn’t share his father’s aggressive attitude, and it proves to be the highlight of the movie, but that strong plot development is outnumber by others that feel undercooked – including Elio having a weirdly quick stint at a boarding school, Olga becoming paranoid when Elio is replaced by a clone, and a negotiation that devolves into a fake kidnapping.

Elio has a wonderful vision of the cosmos distinct from WALL-E and Lightyear.

“Undercooked” is also the word I would apply to Elio’s efforts when it comes to world-building, as there is unfortunately a lot more telling than showing when it comes to the full scale of the Communiverse and the society ruled by Lord Grigon, but there is also no shortage of unique sci-fi spectacle from the same studio that brought us WALL-E and Lightyear. It certainly distinguishes itself from those movies with wild designs and cool ideas.

I walked out of Elio wanting to see more of the Communiverse in part because what is shown is a perfect blend of fascinating and beauty that inspires that kind of wonder – from the vast communal spaces to the massive waterfalls in what’s revealed to be the bathroom. Ooooo (Shirley Henderson) is an adorable, blue, gelatinous supercomputer with a fun quirkiness that helps the eponymous character adjust to the wild environment into which he has been thrust, and there’s nothing not to love about the floating Universal Users Manual (Bob Peterson) who would love to explain the meaning of life but instead has to field questions about gorillas fighting chimpanzees.

Kudos must also be offered for tremendous use of medium where alien biology and physicality are concerned, as animation frees the movie from being biped-heavy; the animators clearly took inspiration from the microscopic world, deep sea creatures, bugs and plant life, and pure imagination in creating a community of extraterrestrials that looks wild and bizarre but don’t cross the line into off-putting and gross (this is a film for kids, after all).

The experience of Elio is like sitting in a beanbag chair. It looks comfy and fun, but when you actually plop into it, there’s a struggle to find a comfortable position. It’s mildly disappointing as an original title from Pixar being released as sequels outnumber new ideas on the company’s upcoming slate, but a middle-of-the-road title from one of the best active studios is still pretty good.

This romance brilliantly plays with rom-com tropes and tells a brutally realistic yet romantic story that I think will be one for the ages thanks to the thoughtful script and direction from Song and the stellar cast she assembled.

Materialists follows a matchmaker named Lucy (Dakota Johnson) as she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a rich man who is working to woo her, and runs into John (Chris Evans), a very important person from her past. What follows is a deep and romantic tale about the materialistic things we desire and how they compete with our romantic and human instincts.

It’s a brilliant and real portrait of love in the modern age, and Celine Song manages to use the romance genre and its tropes to tell a new, refreshing, fierce and magical tale that left me swooning and pondering what I know about love and life.

Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans give career-best performances in Materialists.

This film centers around Dakota Johnson’s matchmaker Lucy and the juxtaposition of her work, which involves trying to find love for others, with her cynical view on romance and her own love life. Over the course of the movie, her mentality about the math of love is challenged and explained through her work as well as her relationships with John and Harry, and every step of the way, Johnson plays this flawed woman flawlessly.

Meanwhile, Chris Evans plays John, a down-on-his-luck actor who runs into Lucy while working as a cater-waiter at a wedding for one of her clients. He brings this character to life in such a vulnerable and thoughtful way that you can’t help but feel empathy for him as he struggles to figure out what direction to take. His best moments, however, come with Johnson.

Lucy and John share a past that requires undeniable chemistry, and Johnson and Evans have it. From quiet moments and longing looks to some of the best dialogue I’ve heard in a romance movie maybe ever, these two were made to share the screen. From the first moment when John walks up to Lucy with a Coke and beer in hand, there’s an unquestionable spark between them that had me on the edge of my seat while my heart burst out of my chest.

Overall, it’s impossible to deny the fact that through telling Lucy, John and Harry's cynical yet romantic story, Johnson and Evans turned in career-best performances.

Celine Song’s script uses rom-com tropes and structure to say something new and poignant.

I read and watch a lot of romance, and I was quick to clock how Celine Song uses rom-com tropes and structure to tell a story that is new and poignant. This movie is marketed as a rom-com, and in many ways, it is. The poster itself will tell you that this story focuses on a love triangle that is thoughtfully executed by Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal.

Along with your classic love triangle, Song also utilizes other trope-y devices like meet-cutes and love confessions with ease. Moments, like one character’s tearjerking love confession to Lucy, had me thinking about rom-com classics likeWhen Harry Met Sally. However, this film also uses these tools to tell an observant and thoughtful story about the commodification of ourselves and love in an effort to find a lifelong partner.

Song fearlessly uses her rom-com to address logical and practical issues that all relationships face – like money – in a way that is real and hard to swallow at times. However, it’s also what makes this movie brilliant.

We see that through Lucy and Harry’s relationship and how they treat each other. They both analyze their romance like a business deal, and that ends up impacting their relationship in a self-aware and critical way. Meanwhile, Lucy and John grapple with their history and present relationship while clashing over this issue and how it conflicts with their feelings for each other.

By all of this being boxed into a rom-com-shaped package, Materialists forces us to think about how we pick and choose partners and what we deem important. It also asks us to question the challenges we face with our partners and test the strength of love through them.

In the end, this film is about the balance between math and magic, and Song’s script illustrates that beautifully by using tropes, structure and devices that are commonplace in the romance genre.

Materialists directly calls out how love is being treated in modern-day society and asks viewers to reexamine it.

Overall, Materialists feels like it's holding up a mirror to modern-day society and how we view finding a partner. The film unabashedly focuses on the math of love, and Lucy works with her clients to find dates who fit their qualifications. From height to age to salary, Song calls out the superficial attributes we fixate on, whether we want to or not.

Dating apps and, in this movie’s case, matchmaking services, ask people to sell themselves and buy stock in others. In this world, we are like finance bros, buying and trading ourselves like we’re money. I’d never thought about relationships that way before, and Song forced me to in a thoughtful and provocative way.

However, she also shamelessly believes in love and lets that fact shine throughout this film. Like all great romances, Materialists left me in a lovestruck daze. While Lucy might proclaim that “marriage is a business deal, and it always has been,” she also experiences the unexplainable joys and challenges that come with love.

This math of relationships and magic of love is the central conflict of Materialists, and the way Lucy juggles them is what we witness and learn from throughout the film. Overall, through Lucy’s journey, we are forced to acknowledge that love isn’t a science. It’s not really explainable, no matter how hard we try. Sometimes, as much as we want to follow the numbers, math and logic, we have to surrender what we don’t know and just accept the magic of it all.

Going into my screening of the new live-action feature, I made a specific point of not revisiting the 2010 movie – which I probably last watched around the time that How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World was released. Without having the franchise-starter fresh in mind, my intention was to see just how much of the new blockbuster would feel new, different and like its own special thing. I gave it as long a leash as I possibly could to present itself as an independent cinematic experience.

The end result is that I walked away from director Dean DeBlois’ second crack at How To Train Your Dragon with a split perspective. On the one hand, the story is as sweet, fun and thematically strong as ever, and anyone who is taking it in for the first time (which will be a lot of people, given its young target demographic) will find a lot to be wowed by and take in emotionally. At the same time, though, as hard as I looked for something to make the film distinctive and necessary as a live-action interpretation of the animated original, I was left wanting.

If you’re familiar with the animated movie, you know the plot here, as nothing is done to alter the narrative – which is based on the book series by Cressida Cowell. Set in the Viking village of Berk, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III (Mason Thames) is the klutzy-but-smart son of local chieftain Stoick The Vast (Gerard Butler), and he has great ambitions to become a dragon slayer, but he is held back by his gracelessness and lack of killer instinct. Everything changes one night, however, when Berk is attacked and Hiccup is able to use one of his inventions to take down a mysterious dragon known as a Night Fury… though nobody is around to see him do it.

As a way of supporting his son before going out on a mission to find where the dragons nest, Stoic enlists his son in dragon-fighting training – where he joins a class with his crush, the brave Astrid (Nico Parker), the geeky Fishlegs (Julian Dennison), the wannabe brute Snotlout (Gabriel Howell) and the twins Ruffnut (Bronwyn James) and Tuffnut (Harry Trevaldwyn). But while Hiccup learns how to battle dragons under the instruction of the blacksmith Gobber (Nick Frost), he is able to simultaneously study and understand the Night Fury he injured. Forming a relationship with the dragon he comes to name Toothless, the young protagonist realizes that the creatures don’t have to be the enemies of humans, but convincing anyone else of that reality is a monumental challenge given past destruction and culturally engrained fear and hatred.

Everything you love about How To Train Your Dragon’s story is definitely still here.

In a vacuum, there is a great deal to love about How To Train Your Dragon. I wish I had written the CinemaBlend review of the 2015 movie, as I could have just copy and pasted my sentiments (I’m kidding, of course). The coming-of-age story and Hiccup’s adventure of self-discovery/hero’s journey are just as effective as ever. What it has to say about tearing down generationally entrenched false assumptions about others is arguably (and tragically) even more relevant now than it was a decade-and-a-half ago, and the dynamics between the main characters remains beautiful and relatable. Most of the personalities in the supporting cast are one dimensional, but just about any child and parent can see themselves in the clashing personalities of Hiccup and Stoic, and every pet-lover will understand the brilliant and adorable connection between Hiccup and Toothless.

There is a surprising and well-done translation of the animated design – with the great highlight being the dragons.

That same consistency can be found in the movie aesthetically, as a medium change from live-action doesn’t prevent a translation of the very specific style, as cartoony elements come to life as originally envisioned – from the extreme beardy burliness of Stoic (who could really only be portrayed by Gerard Butler) to Gobber’s swappable left hand. One might think that it would be more complicated when it comes to the creature design, but the reality is that a matching approach is taken.

The dragon types with which fans have become familiar are realized beautifully by How To Train Your Dragon’s visual effects artists, as their signatures are all directly translated but with more lifelike texture and weight. It can also be said that the blend of the live-action human characters and CGI beasts is seamless – a tribute to the VFX wizards in combination with smart direction and impressive performances. Simply put, the film doesn’t work if the bond between Hiccup and Toothless doesn’t click, but that’s a hurdle that the remake admirably clears.

Being told in live-action doesn’t add anything to the How To Train Your Dragon experience.

But does 2025’s How To Train Your Dragon accomplish anything that isn’t in 2015’s How To Train Your Dragon? I suppose there is a kind of extra thrill during the sequences where the audience is put in the perspective of Hiccup riding on his dangerous pet as he flies through gorges and dives alongside cliffs and mountain peaks – as having realistic looking rocks and water makes the experience all the more real. But it’s simply not enough to answer the blunt question of, “Why did this film need to be remade?” Fun and competently made as the movie may be, that lacking is a permanent and undeniable dint.

I keep envisioning a not-too-distant future where both titles are going to be featured right next to each other in a streaming service library and imagining a would-be viewer’s infinite indecision about which one to watch. Both offer the same level of entertainment, so it’s really just a coin flip – and it makes you question why there is even an option at all. As much as there is to like an appreciate, there is also an undeniable hollowness.

My experience watching director Len Wiseman’s Ballerina is a textbook example of this internal conflict. I am a big fan of the John Wick franchise that has birthed this spinoff, with an emphasized appreciation for both the stylized action and the surprisingly engaging worldbuilding – and that fanhood means that I have been acutely aware that this is a movie that went through principal photography nearly three years ago and has spent significant time since then undergoing major reshoots. When a movie gets constantly delayed because it needs to make serious pivots away from the vision that initiated its creation, the end result is not typically a feature that gets labeled with words like “masterpiece.”

As I sat and waited in the theater for Ballerina to start, my attitude amounted to “fear the worst, hope for the best.” I mentally set a low bar, and ultimately, it proved low enough for the action film to step over it. On a narrative and character level, the film skates on doing pretty much the bare minimum (perfect example: it never actually provides a name for the antagonist cult that the hero is targeting for revenge), but when it comes to the ass-kicking, it doesn’t skimp, and it provides satisfying thrills.

Weaving through the established John Wick canon, the film introduces protagonist Eve Macarro as a young girl (Victoria Comte) living on the run with her rogue mercenary father (David Castañeda), and she winds up seeing him killed by a mysterious man named the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne) and a group of trained soldiers who accuse him of betrayal. Orphaned, Eve is helped by Winston Scott (Ian McShane) – a friend of her father’s – and he has her initiated into the Ruska Roma assassin guild in New York City.

Twelve years later, Eve (Ana de Armas) is on the verge of completing her training, and after having an encounter with the legendary John Wick (Keanu Reeves) – a moment set during the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum – she is sent out for her first mission. Never far from her mind, however, is her desire to find the group responsible for her father’s murder, and when she finally gets a lead, her loyalty to the Ruska Roma is tested as she must seek vengeance without the guild’s approval.

Ballerina sports a too-basic revenge plot that never independently gets exciting.

Reaching for a comparison, I can say that Ballerina is the movie that I thought John Wick: Chapter 2 was going to be when I first saw it in 2017. With the action in the franchise’s seminal film receiving overwhelming acclaim, I was apprehensive that the sequel was going to put a much greater emphasis on cool set pieces and render the big picture dynamics of the assassin-filled world as an afterthought – and I was blissed out when that apprehension turned out to be needless.

It can be said that Ballerina doesn’t ignore the unique qualities of the John Wick world, and it does do some scope-expansion for the canon, but it’s also by far the most undercooked work in the franchise.

The movie’s best idea is the cult run by The Chancellor, which seems like an ordinary European mountain village community until it’s revealed that every man and woman is an armed killer, but it’s hung at the end of what is otherwise a flimsy and overly basic revenge plot. Because of the overt effort to fit Ballerina into the continuity like a puzzle piece, the story takes far too long to get on its feet (it’s not until about 45 minutes into the runtime that Eve starts on her big mission), and all of the twists the film attempts to employ feel like first thoughts and fail to carry any weight.

Ana de Armas shows off some serious skills in set pieces up to the John Wick standard.

Be it because of an unimpressive shooting script or because of the extensive reshoots, Ballerina doesn’t build much of a narrative, but it is able to successfully hang a bunch of on-brand action on to it, and that prevents walking away from the movie overly disappointed. Franchise trademarks provide the framework for the set pieces, with firefights playing out in hotel suites and neon-bathed dance clubs, and the skilled choreography is brilliant.

All 5’6” of Ana de Armas doesn’t make her much a physically imposing threat, but Eve is trained to take every advantage given to her in an altercation, and it’s a joy to watch her get creative – from crotch hits to smashing plates to unleashing the full fury of a flamethrower. Within the canon, it’s an ideal mix of familiar and new, and following the skills she previewed during her quick role alongside Daniel Craig’s James Bond in No Time To Die, de Armas proves herself to be an exceptionally capable action star in her own right.

Arriving a couple months after Lionsgate’s announcement regarding an ambitious expansion of the John Wick world (including John Wick: Chapter 5, a Donnie Yen-directed Caine spinoff, and an animated prequel), Ballerina isn’t quite a “best foot forward” feature arriving at a critical juncture, but the saving grace is that it’s not the disaster that many have fretted while it’s long been awaiting release. Like a battle featuring a flamethrower vs. a firehose, high franchise standards clash with low expectations and the result is tepid but fine.

I never thought this day would come, but with the new Lilo & Stitch, we’ve somehow reached the era of live-action Disney movies where the House of Mouse is remaking films from the 2000s… so, I officially feel old. The 2002 animated film came out at the perfect time for me. I was six years old, which is the exact same age Lilo is in the movie when she wishes on a “shooting star” for an angel, all the while an extraterrestrial convict known as Experiment 626 flees to Earth in hopes of escaping his sentence.

I’ve rewatched it more times than I count, and I would consider it not only one of the best Disney movies ever made, but my personal favorite. So, Dean Fleischer Camp’s remake had a lot to live up to here.

The results? Somehow, I’ve been pleasantly dazzled by the story all over again through a new medium. Not in a "I like this more than the animated version" way, but it’s pretty much impossible to scoff at a movie as adorable as this, especially when it’s pretty darn close to hitting the sweet and emotional beats that’s as affecting as ever two decades later.

When co-writers/directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders first brought Stitch into this world, it was an especially experimental time for the company following the much beloved Disney Renaissance. Movies like The Emperor’s New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet also came out during this more eccentric and adventure-filled era.

It’s fun to see the company go back over this movie in particular because it’s one of the most wholly original properties it has (i.e: It’s not based on a fairytale or anything like that), and the way it holds up in a new medium only highlights how special the idea was to begin with.

The latest live-action Disney remake thankfully doesn’t do CGI Stitch dirty.

Going into it, the biggest concern I had about this movie was how Stitch might translate in live-action, especially with him being a long-eared blue alien who passes himself as a dog throughout the story. It’s one of those things that works great in an animated movie, and is less believable when real people are involved. However, Disney has absolutely nailed the recreation of Stitch. A huge part of this can be credited to the voice of Stitch, Chris Sanders, coming back for another round, but the animation and effects departments clearly agonized over getting Stitch to be as cute and fluffy as he was in 2D animation.

At the same time, audiences might come out of this Lilo & Stitch feeling like the destructive alien has been a bit overshadowed by its human characters. There’s a few less gags for 626 to be part of in order to lean into the more realistic elements, and it can feel like the movie’s more so from the perspective of Nani and the adults in the movie instead of from the imaginative headspace of Lilo. You can’t have Stitch without Lilo, and newcomer Maia Kealoha brings a welcome new energy and delight to the six-year-old. There’s something about seeing an actual small child fall in love with a little alien that makes those tears flow easier than ever.

The undeniable highlight of Lilo & Stitch is how Lilo and Nani’s sisterhood storyline is elevated.

Other Disney remakes seemed to have gone into the process with hopes of updating it for a modern audience, from Snow White making its leading heroine more headstrong, to The Little Mermaid changing around some lyrics. In terms of this title, I, like many fans, didn’t see a reason for Lilo & Stitch to get this treatment. While I still stand by that on some fronts, the filmmakers do find a good reason for this movie to exist when it comes to strengthening the storyline between Lilo and her older sister, Nani.

Sydney Agudong fits right into her role as Nani, who is faced with parenting her following their mom and dad’s untimely death, all while going to school, holding a job and being a teenager. The movie adds a new social worker character, played by Nani's original voice actress, Tia Carrere, that helps ground the movie further. Courtney B. Vance’s Cobra Bubbles role feels like it isn't as prominent as in the original, but much like the rest of the movie, the actor has a more human approach than Ving Rhames’ cartoony origins as the undercover CIA agent.

The live-action movie makes some third act changes that don’t work as well as the original, but not all the shake ups are bad.

Most of Lilo & Stitch very much aims to pay tribute to favorite scenes, with tons of quotable lines and moments being recreated in a new medium. Oftentimes, it can feel like the movie is rushing through the original’s “greatest hits” and just needs to sit in the moment a bit more and allow for the audience to enjoy the Hawaiian views. But, the filmmakers do also take some creative liberties in order to better work for the live-action medium.

The results are mixed, but overall intriguing to see play out. For example, Jumba and Pleakley, the two aliens who are hired by the United Galactic Federation to retrieve Stitch from Earth, spend a lot less time in alien form and disguise themselves as humans while in Hawaii for obvious reasons. Honestly, these two aliens are kind of terrifying in live-action, so I get it. Zach Galifinakis and Billy Magnussen serviceably embody the roles, but it does feel like some goofiness from the animated form is lost this time around.

Pleakley specifically feels the most underutilized whilst Jumba is given a larger, but somehow flat role that expands into the third act. There’s definitely something refreshing about some of the turns the movie takes later in the film given most of it draws heavily from the original. The new Lilo & Stitch best changes only highlight the central message of “Ohana” throughout, and that makes it worth the ride.

As far as Disney remakes go, especially for a movie as good and well-loved as Lilo & Stitch, Dean Fleischer Camp’s movie tows a decent line of being a faithful remake and reintroducing a new generation and nostalgic longtime fans. It reminded me why I’ve loved the 2002 modern classic since I was a kid, and through many phases of my life, and also offered a new perspective to the story I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise if it hadn’t been made.

It’s because of this personal grievance that I have quickly grown an affection for the storytelling abilities of Danny and Michael Philippou. One of the things that I love so much about Talk To Me, their feature debut, is that the film doesn’t bend over backwards to explain the origins of the ceramic hand that allows an individual to summon and be possessed by the dead. They have a strict and remarkable command of the “show, don’t tell” philosophy, and it has led them to create another must-see horror movie in their sophomore effort Bring Her Back.

Last time around, the twin filmmakers had great fun splicing possession horror with the use of illicit party drugs. This time around, the material is far grimmer, but it’s no less mesmerizing. The movie is an examination of extreme grief (from that alone you can probably tell why it’s not as “fun” as its predecessor), and it is spellbinding. Brilliant performances bring to life dynamic characters, and while you’re compelled by the mysterious peril in which the protagonists find themselves, the work simultaneously conjures a macabre curiosity about the evil that is being deliberately kept esoteric.

Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) are step-siblings who begin the film experiencing the trauma of discovering the dead body of their father (Stephen Phillips) in the shower. The brother has hopes of taking guardianship of his sister, who is visually impaired, but he won’t be old enough to do so for three months, so they have to accept placement with a foster parent. More than happy to take them in is Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former counselor who has recently suffered the tragedy of losing her daughter.

From the outset, Laura’s favoring of Piper is a bit odd, but things quickly hit new levels when the newcomers to the house meet their new foster sibling Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) – who is selectively mute, sports a number of injuries, has violent tendencies and is kept locked in his room when nobody is home. It’s Andy’s hope to essentially wait out the clock so that he and his sister can have their own home together, but Laura has her own objectives and knows that his potential guardianship depends on her recommendation.

Bring Her Back is a mystery that demands your attention, and it's highly rewarding.

The Philippou brothers have followed their high concept feature debut with a methodical mystery, and they prove equally adept at handling both narrative forms. Bring Her Back keeps you in the dark about Laura is planning and how she is going about executing said plan, and suspense builds as we watch snippets of seem like VHS snuff films with supernatural overtones and Oliver’s behavior gets more and more bizarre. Getting you emotionally invested is the excellent character development on both sides of the story.

When I talk about navigating bad exposition, this is what I mean: when Andy and Piper have serious conversations, if one of them says, “Grapefruit,” it means that they are asking for the full, unvarnished truth. Nobody ever asks them what it means, and there is never a moment where they explain it to each other; it’s just implicit. And it’s also a perfectly subtle way of telling the audience about how close they are, and it connects you with them and make you care as their circumstances reveal themselves as increasingly dangerous and dark.

Talk To Me is scary, but Bring Her Back steps things up in a big way with its grimness and phenomenal practical horrors.

Paired well with the upped grimness is also upped grotesquerie. I won’t soon forget what happens to poor Riley in Talk To Me, the character repeatedly bashing his head against hard surfaces until copious blood flows, but that’s relatively tame compared to some of the imagery to which audiences will be exposed in Bring Her Back. I’ll state it plainly: this is not a movie for the faint of heart. If you’re not predisposed to liking horror, you will see things here that you will never unsee. If you’re a genre veteran, know that regardless of your watch history, this film is going to make you squirm.

Having already written about one exceptionally gnarly scene I got to witness a few weeks ago at a trailer launch event, I won’t reveal further details of the flesh-ripping, blood-pouring, body-transforming terrors that lie ahead for movie-goers, but I will say that the craftsmanship of the practical effects is masterful. There are exercises in violence and mutilation that border on looking too real, pushing hard on your fight-or-flight instincts. Kudos go all around to the various departments, from makeup to cinematography to sound design, but also deserving special mention is Jonah Wren Phillips, who does some special and bold transformation work for a child actor in what is his second feature. It's a shocking turn in every way from a performer his age.

Sally Hawkins is magnificent, and the Philippou brothers once again get tremendous work from young actors.

The youngest member of the cast has very different work to do compared to his fellow actors, but all of them deliver tremendous performances with the hyper-emotional material. Andy and Piper’s relationship is well-developed on the page, but Billy Barratt and Sora Wong give the characters true weight and make their love as siblings feel real – providing that necessary accentuation to the stakes. On top of everything else going on in the story, Barratt goes deep as Andy grapples with trauma stemming from his troubled relationship with his father, and Wong demonstrates real and impressive natural talent in her first screen appearance.

Meanwhile, Sally Hawkins is taking on a role unlike anything we’ve previously seen her in, and it’s going to further cement her place in genre history paired with her genius turn in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape Of Water (albeit in a totally different way). There are parts of the film where we see Laura as the loving and happy mother that Andy and Piper need – showing a free spirit side letting them both get drunk after their father’s funeral – but manic energy in Hawkins’ performance gives way to sinister intention driven by unyielding grief and pain, and the way in which the actress plays both sides of the character is remarkable.

Within the idea that a second feature is a true proving ground, showing that filmmakers aren’t flash in the pan talents with just one great movie in them, Bring Her Back is a major success. Danny and Michael Philippou are legit, and their success here following Talk To Me echoes Ari Aster doing Midsommar after Hereditary and Jordan Peele crafting Us as his follow-up to Get Out. To put it bluntly, they make horror that doesn’t fuck around, and there is real vision apparent that I’m excited to see grow and mature in the years ahead.

Two months after the events of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has once more gone into hiding. Refusing several requests to rejoin the fight against The Entity’s malicious A.I. antics, the governments of the world are on the brink of all out war. With Ethan's Impossible Mission Force team still assembled (Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Pom Klementiff, and Ving Rhames) and nemesis Gabriel (Esai Morales) also remaining on the board, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning boils down to a four-day window that could spell nuclear armageddon.

Anyone wondering if director Christopher McQuarrie’s fourth entry in the Mission lexicon can be enjoyed without prior knowledge is in for a bit of a paradox. While The Final Reckoning does have tons of callbacks, flashbacks, and exposition that gives you the Cliff’s Notes version of Ethan’s exploits up to this point, having experiencing those previous adventures does lend depth to all of the shocking turns.

That’s something very important to consider, as our eighth and final joyride with superspy Ethan Hunt tries to tie up a whole lot of loose ends in its almost three-hour running time. Which is both a blessing and a curse, due to all of the moving parts this continuity has integrated over the last three decades.

Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning gleefully flies through almost three hours of action, fan service, and intrigue.

Let’s just put some good news on the table right up front. As someone who’s followed Mission: Impossible’s movies from the beginning, I can confidently say that this is a proper finale to Tom Cruise’s spy game. Even better still, I’m very happy to report that The Final Reckoning is a vast improvement from Dead Reckoning, despite being cut from the same story cloth.

Following its slightly more convoluted predecessor, this picture starts in high gear, and doesn’t let up until it crosses the finish line – which is something I’ll always commend a nearly three-hour movie for being able to do. Perhaps it’s the supposed finality of this eighth Mission that inspired Christopher McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen in plotting what’s being billed as the swan song for this iteration of this espionage saga.

The former’s love for the 1996 franchise started is still clear throughout various choices in the narrative at work, with a gigantic hat tip to Mission: Impossible III poised to also give loyal IMF fans another moment to gleefully snap and point at the screen a la Rick Dalton. If you’ve missed the days of the more fleshed out team-based dynamic previous missions have contained, then consider that another jewel in The Final Reckoning’s crown.

Series newcomers Hayley Atwell and Pom Klemantiff get to land outstanding moments of quippy dialogue and intense action, while Simon Pegg’s return boosts his role in the team to a point where Benji Dunn even gets to throw hands. Wrapping it all together is a pleasant undercurrent of humor, which keeps our IMF agents moving in a style more akin to the halcyon days of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol.

Reintroducing that element also helps supporting cast members like Severance’s Tramell Tillman make the most of their limited screen time. But that also ties into a slight downside to what the past couple of outings have been trying to do.

While The Final Reckoning is a fitting finale, there are still some rough edges that could have been sanded out.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been invested in this series since the beginning that I find my own expectations for how Mission Impossible 8 would wrap to be slightly unfulfilled. Simultaneously, there are some instances where the dedication to the past is a little overzealous, with highlights featured in the opening montage being repeated at various points in the overall narrative. It’s minor, and probably more suited for casual viewers who haven’t owned a copy of Brian de Palma's original Mission: Impossible through three eras of physical media.

But if you’re a die hard for this saga, it really is a minor gripe when it comes to The Final Reckoning’s well-paced thrill ride. Whereas Dead Reckoning felt like it flew a bit too fast when it came to setting up its narrative, Christopher McQuarrie’s steady hand in co-writing and directing the sequel help right the ship. It's an apt metaphor considering Tom Cruise’s voyage to the sunken wreckage of the Sevastapol is a prime example of the pacing.

More recent Mission: Impossible adventures have made it a habit of advertising a massive practical stunt as the big draw, which has left the story a bit lacking in other places. There’s still a pretty huge feat on display with Cruise’s madness-inducing biplane chase sequence, and that moment is as fantastic as advertised. But the true star of the show is the submarine adventure, which pushes Ethan to even more extreme circumstances.

The Sevastapol sequence couldn’t have been placed at a more perfect point in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’s story either. Taking place in Act II, this moment galvanizes the final act with well earned urgency; which is only goosed along even further by the return of Angela Bassett as President Erika Sloane.

As we frequently cut back to the President and her advisors as the weigh their options to beat The Entity, the film shifts into a small-scale remake of Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe. Considering Christopher McQuarrie loves to reference classics like Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much as much as he enjoys connecting previous Missions, the result helped me forget the fact that this cadre doesn’t really get much development in the grand scheme of things. While the massive cast of players in The Final Reckoning don’t all get proper setups and payoffs, cast members like Holt McCallany and Nick Offerman do their best to keep us invested, through a combination of gravitas and shorthand.

A topical blockbuster that doesn’t squander its message, Mission: Impossible’s “final” entry is a blockbuster to be reckoned with.

If there’s any one thing that makes the “final” Mission: Impossible film worth seeing, it’s that it’s a timely story that doesn’t go too wild with its message. The Entity’s power of misinformation is better fleshed out in this conclusion, as we see the consequences it has on the larger world. Modern concerns over A.I., deep fakes, and fake news are reflected rather brilliantly here and in a way that doesn’t preach to the audience.

Once more, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie’s combined talents have given us a summer blockbuster worth showing up for. Come to think of it, the whole premise of rethinking reality and examining long held narratives a bit harder plays even better in The Final Reckoning, as one of the core questions asked in this tale cuts down to something the pickiest audience member may have asked long ago: is Ethan Hunt really good at his job?

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning has lit the fuse on summer movie season, and the resulting explosion is one that other legacy-adjacent titles are going to have to reckon with. The eighth outing for this action-adventure mainstay proves that stakes are back, humor is back, and Ethan Hunt has arrived for audiences to trust him… one last time. And to put a more familiar spin on things, I firmly believe that you should choose to accept this mission.

It’s a specific simplicity that I can get behind, and it’s why I’ve now counted myself as a fan of the Final Destination films for a quarter-century now (my appreciation for the full totality of the series only interrupted by the unfortunately awful The Final Destination). If a new chapter can tick all of those boxes, I’m going to be satisfied – grinning ear to ear as pieces of delicate Rube Goldberg-esque machinations fall into place and result in blood flying and body parts being eviscerated. Thankfully, that’s the darkly joyful experience offered for genre fans with director Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s Final Destination: Bloodlines.

For reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, the series has been in hibernation for the last 14 years, with 2011’s Final Destination 5 (a box office success) being a superlative installment with a brilliant twist and serving up a “leave them wanting more” vibe. That movie had previously been the title that I deemed to be the best sequel, but it has now been usurped. It’s not often that this is something you can say about the sixth chapter of a franchise, but Final Destination: Bloodlines offers up some clever and sinister ideas that blend beautifully with the familiar, and it makes bold moves that enrich the canon. It’s a work that feels organically grown from decades of fan appreciation on behalf of the filmmakers and wholly worth the wait.

As is tradition, the film begins with a devastating, intense, and violent disaster – specifically a deadly incident at the opening of a ritzy restaurant at the top of a skyscraper in 1968 – but in a twist, the event is not just a vision of the sequence’s central figure (Brec Bassinger). It’s also revealed as the recurring nightmare of Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college student who has no idea what dream means but knows that it has something to do with her mysterious never-discussed grandmother.

Taking a break from school to reunite with her family and get some answers, Stefani learns that her mother’s mother Iris (Gabrielle Rose) successfully stopped the skyscraper collapse in the late 1960s, but she has spent the decades since then convinced that Death is targeting not only her and everyone she saved, but also the descendants who never should have been born. The protagonist finds herself properly convinced of the danger and Death’s design, and she tries to convince her uncle (Alex Zahara), her cousins (Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner, Anna Lore), her brother (Teo Briones) and her estranged mother (Rya Kihlstedt) of the blood-soaked reality before it is too late.

Final Destination: Bloodlines finds an exciting and well-executed way into the franchise that fans will love.

The Final Destination movies have never really put a major emphasis on connecting threads between the sequels before (a side effect of each installment slaughtering its collection of characters), but it can be said that all of the right lessons were taken away from the surprise loop-back ending of Final Destination 5 in the making of the latest sequel. In Final Destination: Bloodlines, a specific effort is made by screenwriters Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor to connect dots in the franchise to create a bigger picture that was never really envisioned prior, and it’s a tremendous balancing act of both major revelation and maintaining mystery that works incredibly well. It adds dimensions to the “Death’s design” concept that are far more complex than what’s in the film’s predecessors, but it’s never so complicated that it sucks the fun out the endeavor.

There are easter eggs galore for fans to feast on – both in the story and in the props/production design, and it even manages to pull off what I would have previously thought would be impossible: it provides a satisfying backstory for the ever-mysterious William Bludworth, played by late genre legend Tony Todd, and it even packs some powerful emotion in the orchestration of a goodbye to the character. It answers a great number of big questions within the canon while also keeping the door open for the future.

Prepare to have everyday activities ruined with bloody chaos.

The new film’s “in” to Final Destination storytelling is rock solid, but what fans are inarguably looking for in Bloodlines are plenty of slow-building horror sequences, and once it lines up all of its potential victims, it doesn’t disappoint. It’s a hallmark of these movies to try and instill fear from every day activities (the ultimate example being that it’s impossible to drive behind/past a logging truck without thinking about the opening sequence of Final Destination 2), and it’s pulled off with disgusting aplomb again here. Backyard barbecues, tattoo parlors, MRI machines and more will all now inspire some subconscious wariness thanks to simple, ping-ponging circumstances that escalate to gnarly bloodshed on screen.

The practical special effects in Final Destination: Bloodlines are a gory delight.

Multiple sequences are downright disgusting, but Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein know that they are playing to a different breed of sick puppy than those who enjoy, for example, the Saw movies, and all of the horrific mayhem is properly pulled off with a funny flourish. The randomness of death in the real world is a cruel joke, but in the Final Destination universe, one is invited to be in tune with the devilish sense of humor, and Bloodlines perfectly gets that part of the assignment. It’s not an outright horror comedy, but it understands how these films wink at the audience.

Special effects are a perfect tool for getting this across, as there is a Raimi-esque understanding that a character getting a face full of blood splatter can be its own kind of hilarious. From the opening sequence where people are smashing through glass and being set on fire to sequences where characters are being impaled, cut to ribbons, and crushed, there is a lot of movie magic going on that is both disgusting and (for the right kind of audience member) enchanting.

I will never understand why the Final Destination franchise was kept on ice for as long as it was, but now that it’s back, I never want it to go away again. Bloodlines offers the precise blend of disgusting, fun, and clever that has made this series a favorite among horror fans, and while I still don’t love how long I had to wait, it can be said that it was worth it.

This excitement lasted until about halfway through my screening of Another Simple Favor. In the follow-ups first act, the principal players are introduced with fun new conflicts and relationships, tension is created as the movie successfully keeps the audience in the dark about what lies ahead, and the action is moved to a new and beautiful setting that accents all of the flashy fashion choices. But then the film finally starts dolling out hints about what it’s up to, and it’s from that point on that the whole thing completely falls apart.

If there is a sequel trap or trope development for Another Simple Favor to fall into or attempt to exploit, it does so, and the film unravels into a messy slog that feels like its 40 minutes longer than its predecessor instead of just four. The sharp dynamics that made the first movie shine are replaced with overly familiar ones that are a comparative snore, and it lacks anything unexpected; despite an attempt at building a new murder mysterious, it becomes far too clear where it’s all going halfway through the runtime, and it just coasts to the end.

Reintroduced at the start of the film, Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) has found both success as an investigator and popularity as a vlogger, but she has also written a book about her wild experience with Emily Nelson (Blake Lively) and copies aren’t exactly flying off the shelf. In a turn of events that turns out to be both terrifying and convenient, however, Emily first hires lawyers who successfully get her out of prison on appeal, and then she invites Stephanie to be her maid of honor at her extravagant wedding in Capri, Italy.

Stephanie is scared that she is being made the target of a revenge plot, but she needs the publicity for her book and material for a potential sequel, so she agrees to go, bringing her literary agent (Alex Newell) along for the ride as insurance. After arriving in Europe, she is not only surprised to learn that Emily is marrying a man named Dante Versano (Michele Morrone), who is the heir to a powerful crime family, but that Sean Townsend (Henry Golding), her and Emily’s ex, has been invited as well. Conflicts and emotions flare all over the place, and bodies eventually start to fall – but this time around, the number one suspect in the murders ends up being Stephanie.

Another Simple Favor peaks far too early and then becomes far too obvious.

When Stephanie gets on a private jet to Italy, surrounded by the ultra-wealthy who think she’s the help, the movie is at its high point. The martini-sipping Emily is a devilish mystery, her motives entirely hidden behind stinging one-liners and what may very well be honest expressions of affection for her “best friend,” and Stephanie having her guard up effectively puts her on her game both in terms of investigative instincts and retorts. Tension boils between the frenemies, as barbs are traded about incest and fratricide. The sequence is a perfect encapsulation of the unique energy that made the first movie so great, and I felt confident in that moment that the film was about to spin off another wild, beautiful treat.

But then the ball gets dropped – both in the script (penned by Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis) and in Paul Feig’s direction. While I won’t go into exact events and risk revealing too much in this spoiler-free venue, the wheels really fall off during a pre-wedding banquet with the bride and groom’s families and guests.

A combination of a failed subtle reveal and blatant glances that are meant to be furtive make everything that’s going to happen super apparent, and the stakes disappear as everything unfolds in service of a terrible twist that is ridiculously predictable for anyone who has watched the first movie (on that note: it’s probably best that you don’t make the same mistake I did and do a refresher screening of A Simple Favor before checking out the sequel, as its best to have certain details from the original be vague in your memory).

Far too much time is spent by the movie catching up to everything the audience already knows – and in the process, it even manages to torch the best aspect of the movies: the poisonous relationship between Stephanie and Emily.

Another Simple Favor biffs it on the story front, but at least the film is strikingly beautiful.

The mystery in Another Simple Favor is a big letdown and a big step down, compared to A Simple Favor, but one upgrade it can be said the film makes is trading the suburban Connecticut backdrop for the vistas of Capri, Italy. The production design and location scouting departments for the movie aced their work, and immense compliments also must be offered to costume designer Renée Ehrlich Kalfus, as even someone as fashion blind as myself can appreciate the bold choices made for the characters – with the greatest achievement being Emily’s white wedding dress that is accented with a bridal train that looks like its edges have been dipped in a pool of blood.

I imagine that fans of the first movie won’t be able to resist their curiosity in checking out how things turn out in Another Simple Favor, and for those compelled individuals, I will just say this: lower your expectations. It’s pretty to look at, but it’s also deeply frustrating due to its bad plotting. One hates to say it, but this is a sequel that was not worth the wait.

At this stage in the game, what Marvel Cinematic Universe fans really need from the latest blockbuster is a reminder of what made them fall in love with the franchise to begin with: a fun adventure, engaging and charismatic heroes, complex antagonists, and exciting action that highlights the specials abilities of the characters. Fortunately, the new movie checks those boxes… mostly.

There is a failure to properly incorporate all of the main players, and the plotting is paper thin at a number of key points, but its shortcomings are made up in part by both its charms and the fact that it actually has something to say with its themes, which has been in short supply in MCU titles in the last few years. Thunderbolts* isn’t a film that is going to definitively convince fans that the grandiose canon is fully back on track and running on all cylinders again, but it is successfully satisfying in ways that movies like Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania and the aforementioned Captain America: Brave New World haven’t been.

Finally paying off teases that have awaited conclusion since 2021 and the releases of Black Widow and the Disney+ series The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, the film begins with CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in serious hot water. Impeachment proceedings have begun along with investigations into some of her sketchier business dealings – with newly elected Congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) one of the parties aiming to take her down – and this means that she has to do some evidence torching before the shit hits the fan. This very much includes the hiring of independent agents and mercenaries to carry out wet work missions around the globe.

Hoping to eliminate all of her loose ends in one swift move, Valentina organizes missions for Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), John Walker a.k.a. U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ava Starr a.k.a. Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and Antonia Dreykov a.k.a. Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and has them all meet at a remote location with the intention of having them all kill each other. She doesn’t count on two things, however: 1) that these societal rejects will somehow manage to collaborate and work together, and 2) that they will come across Bob (Lewis Pullman), one of the subjects of a radical experiment who is very much supposed to be dead.

While billed as an ensemble film, the focus of Thunderbolts* is ultimately pretty narrow.

Thunderbolts* being a team story, the natural expectation is that the movie will find specific and entertaining ways to utilize its full ensemble, but instead, the Marvel blockbuster most definitely plays favorites, and it’s mildly disappointing. Those of you who are hoping that the film will be a time for Ghost and Taskmaster to shine should really start modifying their anticipation now, as neither character is given anything memorable to do and are basically additional bodies/notable faces in the cast. Only a half-step above them in this light is what the blockbuster does with U.S. Agent, as a mini-backstory incorporated and an attitude is firmly established (he’s a total asshole), but there is no arc to speak of or big payoff moment for the wannabe hero.

On this level also are Bucky Barnes and David Harbour's Alexei Shostakov a.k.a. Red Guardian. The former gets some cool action moments, and it’s interesting to see how far the character has come since his big screen introduction nearly a decade-and-a-half ago, but there isn’t any specific new growth to observe. As for the latter, “big, boisterous Russian” is once again used for little more than comedic relief, which wears out its welcome but doesn’t lose steam.

A far more accurate title for the movie would be Yelena Belova & Friends, as there is no questioning that the graduate from the Black Widow program is the standout presence in the feature – but it’s hardly a bad horse to bet on, both because of Florence Pugh’s immense talent and because there is a lot that is engaging about what the character is going through. Having spent years as a solo killer for hire, she is the victim of extreme ennui, as all of her days blend together and she struggles to keep her darker emotions at bay. She is in desperate need of fulfillment and raison d’etre, and she finally starts to find it via meeting the mysterious Bob.

Thunderbolts* has a strong emotional core with an effective message about living in the modern world.

It’s in the dynamic between Yelena and Bob that Thunderbolts* gets at the core of what it actually wants to say, and the socially relevant theme that the movie unfurls is extremely refreshing amid a dearth of them in MCU titles since Spider-Man: Far From Home (with some exception, the standout being Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3). Saying too much about Bob would venture a bit too far into spoiler territory for this non-spoiler venue, but he has his own dark past to parallel Yelena’s, and their stories harmonize well. Amid what are extremely dark times in the real world, the blockbuster is ultimately about not letting the darkness become so consuming that you can no longer see the light of life. Principally via its third act, the film preaches finding purpose, healthy emotional expression, and forging communal bonds, and it’s vital depth that gives the work personality in the ever-broadening canon.

Stylish cinematography and choreography come together for a number of exciting set pieces in Thunderbolts*.

Pairing well with the emotional resonance of the movie is plenty of compelling action that obfuscates the fact that Jake Schreier is a first-time blockbuster director. Collaborations with cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo and stunt coordinator Heidi Moneymaker shine from the very start – the opening sequence including a badass bird’s eye view tracking shot full of long shadows as Yelena battles her way through a hallway full of armed security guards – and there is a solid flow of fun set pieces. The film is somewhat hampered by lacking diversity in power sets among the main characters (it’s specifically acknowledged that the heroes are all of the “punch and shoot” variety), but that is supplemented by settings, stakes, and exciting choreography.

Thunderbolts* doesn’t quite reach highs that fans fondly remember from the Marvel Cinematic Universe salad days of Phase Two and Phase Three, but it does at the very least have a leg up on other recent titles in its lacking of slapdash “we’ll find it in post” energy. The movie is uneven in a number of notable ways and not fully a return-to-form title, but it effectively crafts its own identity and puts the franchise back on the right foot on the road to the next Avengers adventure (and hopefully director Matt Shakman’s Fantastic Four: First Steps can keep that trend going later this summer).

The Accountant 2 is set years after the events of the 2016 original, with Affleck's Christian Wolff once again involved in a high stakes adventure. He's contacted by Agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson, reprising her role from the original), and tasked with solving a murder. But this time around he's not doing the job alone... even if he wants to.

One of the big twists of the original movie was that Jon Bernthal's character Braxton was actually Christian's brother. With that reveal out of the way, director Gavin O'Connor and writer Bill Dubuque put these siblings at the front of the story and allow audiences to watch as they try to connect in as a violent buddy duo. And it's in this dynamic that I think the movie is surpasses the success of first film.

Ben Affleck’s Christian Wolff is endlessly charming.

Ben Affleck has had a long and wildly successful career as an actor, so it's well known that he's able to pull of moving and memorable performances. And while I loved his take on classics like Good Will Hunting and his jaded, hulking take on Batman, Christian Wolff is one of his very best characters. Despite the years in between Accountant films, he is able to perfectly slip back into character for the long-awaited sequel.

In both films, Wolff is portrayed as neurodivergent, with his specific form of autism offering him an analytical mind a unique set of skills. While he's wildly effective and a total badass, vulnerability and charm comes in the ways he struggles socially. Affleck's first scene in The Accountant 2 sees Christian attempt speed dating, with the audience treated to a montage of foibles.

While Affleck is known for playing badasses (and indeed, Christian knows his way around a shoot out), it's the way that he portrays the character's flaws that make him so lovable. Much of this happens in the way that he interacts with Jon Bernthal's Braxton. But more about that particular dynamic later.

The action and twists deliver and result in The Accountant 2 flying by.

In addition to Ben Affleck's acclaimed performance as the title character, The Accountant is primarily known for its plot twists and thrilling action. Gavin O'Connor once again hit it out of the park in this new chapter in both regards, and the movie's 132-minute runtime really moves quickly as a result.

There are a ton of action pieces in The Accountant 2, both gunfights and dizzying hand to hand combat. And while the fight choreography is like a thrilling dance, the violence feels very real and anxiety-induing. Characters, including major returning ones, take a serious beating as a result, allowing each of these sequences to have palpable stakes. And after one big plot twist in the opening sequence, it's clear that no one is safe.

The murder mystery at the center of this movie's story ends up connecting to a much larger ring of criminal activity including human trafficking. O'Connor and screenwriter Bill Dubuque methodically peel back this story in a way that's wildly satisfying by the time the third act comes to a close. Fear not fans of the original, there are still twists this time around, – and by the end of the film, all of its storylines are tied up with a neat bow.

The sibling story between Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal was genuinely moving.

While The Accountant 2 follows a giant mystery that extends across multiple countries, the real heart of the story is about the relationship between Affleck's Christian and Bernthal's Braxton. It's revealed early into the runtime that they haven't seen each other since the events of the first film, allowing audiences to pick up where they left off and see how the brothers' relationship works from the inside.

While Braxton is a brash and violent killer, he wants his family's approval like so many of us. While the brothers butt heads pretty immediately in the movie, we slowly learn just how hurt Bernthal's character is that his brother never reached out. He clearly wants a deeper relationship, while Christian has trouble understanding what it is his brother needs from him.

Of course, this storyline plays out as the duo are kicking ass and taking names, including some truly dazzling shoot-out sequences. Affleck and Bernthal are known for being excellent in these types of scenes, but they seemingly brought just as much care to the moments of stillness between Christian and Braxton. These two actors are really some of the best in the business, and they're able to expertly pivot between action, heart, and comedy throughout The Accountant 2.

The most apt way that I can sum up the film is as a riff on Drew Goddard’s The Cabin In The Woods with a time loop twist: a collection of characters find themselves caught in a classic horror movie setup, but instead of just dealing with a singular terror, a science-fiction plot device has them experiencing the same night over and over again with ever-changing results. The field is wide open to try and hit on a bunch of different subgenres and monsters, and there are a number of cool ideas that result in fun and freaky sequences, but the movie falls short of fulfilling the heights of its promise.

Reuniting Sandberg with Annabelle: Creation screenwriter Gary Dauberman, Until Dawn begins as a group of friends – Clover (Ella Rubin), Max (Michael Cimino), Nina (Odessa A’zion), Megan (Ji-young Yoo), and Abe (Belmont Cameli) – come together on the anniversary of one of their own – Clover’s sister Melanie (Maia Mitchell) – disappearing without a trace. Gathering together at the place where Melanie was last seen, they make a last ditch effort to try and solve the mystery, and they learn about a local mining town called Glore Valley where people have been going missing.

Driving through dense woods and through a torrential rainstorm that weirdly ends right at the border of Glore Valley, the protagonists arrive at what appears to be an abandoned visitor’s center that includes a number of notable features, including a guest book with the same names written over and over again, a giant hourglass embedded in the wall, and a tack board full of missing person flyers. It’s clear from the jump that something is very wrong, but circumstances only get worse as they find themselves repeatedly being killed and living the night over and over again. Their bodies left injured and changing through the time loops, they eventually understand that they only way that they can survive is by all of them managing to live until sunup.

Until Dawn offers tastes of fun horror but never feels like a full meal.

The jewel of Until Dawn is the fact that each time the characters die and get resurrected, there is a fresh opportunity to explore a different subgenre. The first “night” is a classic slasher riff, with a hulking, masked man hacking his way through the heroes with a hefty pickaxe, but that’s just a single flavor, as subsequent go-rounds hit Clover, Max, Nina, Megan and Abe with spiritual possession, witchcraft, creepy crawlies, and plenty of body horror. It’s unlikely to scare the more desensitized of movie-goers, but there is an inherent fun in waiting to see what terror is coming around the corner next.

The problem with this is that the film finds itself getting stuck in a kind of no man’s land. It’s like going to a cocktail party when you haven’t had dinner and you’re really hungry: the various appetizers coming around on cater waiter trays provide an enjoyable variety of tastes, but the bite-sized portions don’t leave you totally satisfied or fill you up. This is best illustrated in the fact that some of the best scares in Until Dawn are presented as a montage of footage that Abe discovers on his phone in the third act.

This isn’t to say that the movie doesn’t have some really great ideas. My favorite sequence in Until Dawn finds the characters trying to outsmart the central conceit by barricading themselves in a bathroom, but the plan backfires in spectacular fashion via an unexpected source and results in copious blood splatter. Not everything lands as solidly, however, and it results in the narrative feeling scattershot.

Until Dawn is a movie in need of a scene-stealer that it never reveals.

Similar sentiments can be shared about the ensemble of protagonists. There is a strong core developed linking the characters together with the disappearance of Melanie, and there are focused efforts to establish special personalities and connections: Clover is overwhelmed with guilt about her lost sibling; Max still has feelings for Clover despite their recent breakup; Megan has a spiritual side that has her experience a supernatural connection to the horrors; and while Nina loves her friends, Abe is her new boyfriend who fits awkwardly into the dynamic. These each end up giving the protagonists their own particular roles to play that add complexity to the story, particularly as the plot thickens and new rules are thrown into the nightmare.

What’s notably missing in the mix, however, is an identifiable scene-stealer. Everybody in the cast is good, but nobody is great, and this is a film that that could use that kind of special, memorable spark – either among the protagonist ensemble or on the antagonist side. It’s one familiar genre staple that the movie doesn’t check off the list, and it hurts the overall experience.

Coming out in a year that has already served up a number of other genre gems – including but not limited to Companion, The Monkey and Sinners – Until Dawn rates more as “solid” than “good” or “great.” Its flaws are more apparent than typically desirable, but it’s a movie made with plenty of love, making it easy enough to like.

The film is a multi-faceted period epic that is so good in so many ways that it’s actually a challenge to identify its singular best quality – which I suppose makes its greatest aspect the ability to confidently juggle so much so well. I love it as a Prohibition era gangster story, with its colorful-but-shady fraternal protagonists building the business of their dreams in their home town. I love it as a fierce and dark vampire film that sets up a horrific siege with a freaky collection of sinister bloodsuckers. I love it as a celebration of Black music, both for its incredible musical sequences and comment on its power in the culture. And I love everything that ties all those branches and more together.

In a dual performance, Michael B. Jordan stars as twins Smoke and Stack, who return to their hometown in Mississippi after spending years away building reputations and lives for themselves in Chicago. Upon their return, it’s their ambition to use a great deal of cash at their disposal to purchase a mill and transform it into a juke joint to serve the Black community in the segregated South. They have whiskey and beer supplies to really get the party started, and their ace in the hole is their cousin Sammie "Preacher Boy" Moore (Miles Caton), who has turned himself to a tremendously talented guitar player and blues singer.

Their personal connections in the area allow them to find local help for the endeavor: Smoke’s estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) does the cooking; Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) and Pearline (Jayme Lawson) agree to perform; business owners Grace Chow (Li Jun Li) and her husband Bo (Yao) provides supplies and signage; and Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) gets hired to watch the door. Amid this recruiting, however, conflict begins to brew – and not just because Stack’s former flame Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) discovers he is back in town. A vampire named Remmick (Jack O’Connell) arrives on the scene, and after doing a bit of recruiting of his own (Lola Kirke and Peter Dreimanis), he sets his sights on the opening night of Club Juke.

Ryan Coogler's Sinners introduces a rich world full of complex and wonderful characters.

It is long before vampires crash the party that Sinners successfully dazzles, as it doesn’t take bloodsucking monsters to invest the audience in the fates of the characters; the charisma and ambition they express takes care of that, as personality and spirit make you want them to succeed. There are shady actions behind the protagonist’s ability to purchase the mill and provide booze in light of the notorious laws of the era banning the production and consumption of alcohol (which itself adds to the stakes), but the non-capitalist goal of the juke joint is creating a safe space full of music and joy for a community in need of one, and it’s built on fantastic character dynamics in the Mississippi Delta.

Just when I thought I was getting a little fatigued of dual performances in 2025 (Sinners follows Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, and Barry Levinson’s Alto Knights employing this cinematic trick), in comes Michael B. Jordan to deliver the best of them all. The sharp costume design by the great Ruth E. Carter provides an assist to the audience in coloring the characters – Smoke accented with blue, Stack accented with red – but those contrasting shades highlight their respective ice and fire personalities that set them apart from each other beyond sartorial choices. Working from Coogler’s dynamite script, Jordan, one of the best actors of his generation, provides both roles with complexity that reflects individual lives while also maintaining the loving connection of twins who have spent their whole existences together.

Jordan’s work is supported by an outstanding ensemble of personalities, and there is an openness and comfort in all of them that make the world feel perfectly lived-in (it helps that there aren’t exposition potholes that feel like the characters are explaining themselves to the audience instead of speaking to one another). From the phenomenal musical talent of Miles Caton’s Sammie Moore, to the humorous drunken no-bullshit attitude of Delroy Lindo’s Delta Slim to the trauma and spiritualism of Wunmi Mosaku’s Annie, Sinners provides a look into a collection of rich lives – and when it becomes a real threat, you really don’t want to see any of them getting their throats ripped out by creatures of the night.

Sinners is a stunning work of art that you shouldn't deprive your eyeballs of.

Ryan Coogler reunited with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw shooting Sinners entirely in IMAX, and the collaboration and expansive format yields breathtaking images long before the main action kicks off. But when that time does come, it hits a new level and becomes heart-stopping wonder. A truly great on-screen party makes you want to jump out of your seat and join the revelry, and Coogler’s work understands that… but it becomes so much more. When we look back on the decade that we are presently half-way though, I can say with complete confidence that we will look back on Sammie’s performance at Club Juke being regarded as one of the most incredible cinematic achievements of the era – the camera gliding through the space in a oner and examining every era of Black music, from the past to the present to the future. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it demands to be seen on the grandest screen available. (And a special hat tip must be proffered to composer Ludwig Göransson, whose work on the music instantly convinced me to purchase both the soundtrack and score).

The fact that all of this magnificence unfurls before the vampires truly enter the plot is stunning – and there most certainly isn’t any kind of quality dip as the film makes its From Dusk Till Dawn-esque switch-up in genre. Horror is a new flavor for Ryan Coogler, but so were boxing movies and Marvel blockbusters prior to his last three features, and he proves equally adept at bearing fangs and letting the blood flow. Sinners abides by traditions, like nightwalkers requiring invitation and weapons like stakes and holy water, but Coogler also has his own vicious ideas that he employs as he crafts his own metaphor with monsters. It’s a tremendous and fascinating nightmare.

There are only a few filmmakers left in Hollywood with the proper clout to execute singular, original visions with substantial budgets, and I’m beyond hopeful that Sinners will be viewed as Ryan Coogler’s ticket into the echelon that includes Quentin Tarantino, Jordan Peele, and Christopher Nolan. It’s a remarkable achievement from every angle, and a blissful cinematic experience.

Remember what romantic comedies used to be? I love a cozy, sit-on-the-couch Netflix rom-com as much as anyone, but then a movie like The Wedding Banquet comes around and reminds one that the genre can feel big, funny and cinematic yet incredibly intimate and small. This new release is by no means a big studio title, given it came out of the Sundance Film Festival at the beginning of the year, but it has the kind of warm and fun quality that is instantly both a crowd-pleaser and ready to embrace you as a brand new comfort movie.

A few years ago, director Andrew Ahn made us feel all fluttery over Hulu’s Fire Island, as he brought a fresh spin on Pride & Prejudice with the backdrop of Long Island’s famously queer friendly vacation paradise from a script by Joel Kim Booster. For The Wedding Banquet, Ahn has co-written and directed his own update on Ang Lee’s 1993 comedy of the same name. Not only is this The Wedding Banquet a great and expansive remake that builds upon the spirit of the original, but it’s also its own achievement in the celebration of queer joy for the LGBTQ+ community and simply an entertaining flick.

I didn’t expect to see Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran in a romantic comedy, but here we are… and their dramatic backgrounds help ground The Wedding Banquet.

When it comes to romantic comedies, there’s usually a list of usual suspects of whom one might expect to see in the genre. Among them wasn’t necessarily Lily Gladstone coming off of her Killers Of The Flower Moon Oscar nomination or The Last Jedi’s Kelly Marie Tran. And yet, these two absolutely create something special in The Wedding Banquet by infusing their dramatic chops with their abilities to hit the right comedic beats. The actresses play a lived-in couple, Lee and Angela who’ve gone through all the first-time fireworks and such long prior to where the movie starts things off for them. They have been trying to use IVF to have their first child, but it’s proven not only to be unsuccessful but put them in significant debt.

Their doctor has suggested that Lee (Gladstone) only try once more, but at this point, they are so tired and stressed from their past attempts that they find themselves at a stand still. That is until their friend Min (South Korea’s Han Gi-Chan) becomes desperate for his green card and his longtime partner Chris (Bowen Yang) isn’t quite ready to say “I do.” There is, however, a proposal anyway: Min asks Angela to marry him so that he can stay in America and in exchange he will help them pay for their next IVF procedure. It's oddly the perfect plan for each of the main characters to get what they want... that is, until Min’s grandmother (played by Minari Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung) flies from South Korea to see the happy couple.

Not only are Tran and Gladstone the sweetest pair, but The Wedding Banquet also spends energy on giving Min and Chris a mix of hilarity and deep moments along with putting in time forwarding the relationship dynamics between Angela’s relationship with her very involved mother (Joan Chen) along with Min and his grandmother. It’s a given that Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang knows how to hit a mark when it comes to a joke, but Han especially shines when it comes to laugh count in his first English-language feature, too.

The Wedding Banquet balances a storyline about queer acceptance and joy with grace.

Considering The Wedding Banquet’s aim to be both a wedding comedy and a family drama that resonates with the LGBTQ+ community, things could have easily taken an awkward turn, but the movie’s beautiful balance of tone is part of what makes it so gratifying. While you definitely want to see those fun hijinks between the cast (and you do) where they are scrambling to pull off a straight and traditional Korean wedding in order for the stars to align for both couples, the fantastic script – written by Ahn and original The Wedding Banquet co-writer James Schamus – is just as interested in why these characters are going through with it in the first place, and it only heightens the narrative.

On Angela’s side, there’s a gorgeously memorable arc between Tran’s character and Chen’s May as they deal with an imperfect and bruised mother/daughter relationship that is only more exacerbated by Angela getting ready to make the decision to be a mother herself. And on Min’s side, there’s a real palpability to the emotion as the plotline moves forward. When it comes to storylines about LGBTQ+ acceptance, oftentimes movies can lean too far into the camp or seriousness, but The Wedding Banquet feels truly genuine and human.

Fire Island writer/director Andrew Ahn delivers another refreshing twist on a classic with this movie.

Andrew Ahn’s direction often finds the unique angles to portray his characters, and doesn’t have the ability to reduce the movie into any kind of cliché throughout its runtime. It feels nearly impossible not to feel with these characters and root for them as the pair of couples go through the motions of wedding traditions like photos, bachelor parties and family meet-and-greets. Jay Wadley’s score adds a gentle touch to the film as well.

As the movie floats its audience through its runtime, it’s clear statement about the importance of chosen family and imperfection is spoken to so beautifully that one wants to cry sad tears – but there’s a celebratory quality to how each of the characters come out of the plotline that turn its stingy emotion right around to happy tears and easy smiles. It’s the kind of feeling that reminds one why romantic comedies remain to be such a powerful genre when handled with care.

It’s not particularly complex or in any way post-modern, but it’s not equipped or expected to be. What it lacks in any standout angle is made up for in its promises as a slick, Hitchcockian thriller, and it’s within that box that it’s ultimately successful. It sets its stakes, establishes likable characters, and it builds well, culminating in an engaging and entertaining 100 minutes.

Meghann Fahy stars as Violet – a widowed survivor of domestic abuse who, after years of solitude, decides to be bold and leave her bubble of single motherhood for a night to go on a date. She meets Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a photographer with whom she’s been messaging for months, at a restaurant overlooking the city of Chicago, and things start out awkward due to Violet’s faded dating skills… but then quickly get far worse.

The protagonist starts getting mysterious AirDrop messages on her phone with playful but urgent memes, and while she ignores them at first, she recognizes that she isn’t being simply pranked when she is told to check her home’s security cameras: there is a masked man in the house with her son (Jacob Robinson) and her sister Jen (Violett Beane), who is babysitting. She is told that the only way to save the lives of her family is to follow explicit instruction, eventually discovering that the end goal of the demands is the murder of her date.

Drop has a clever mystery that never gets too big as to disappoint.

Drop isn’t the most advanced mystery that audiences will see on the big screen this year, as I would bet that somewhere in between 33-40 percent of people will be able to suss out the big secret before the movie is ready to reveal that information, but the story successfully circumvents that issue with a narrative that moves smoothly and logically; there are certain cinematic tells that I won’t identify in this venue, but they don’t undermine Violet’s actions.

The script by Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach is smart in its deployment of exposition and road blocks that inform the mystery and present interesting conflicts for the protagonist to work around (and I’ll note that it doesn’t cheat by giving the villain eyes and ears everywhere via some kind of super hacker either). Violet acts intelligently under duress, devises realistic and smart methods to try and get help, and works surreptitiously to suss out who within 50 feet is sending the drops– and it’s effectively disheartening when things don’t work out as hoped.

All of the weird behavior does outwardly make Violet a pretty terrible first date, as it is demanded that Henry not be aware of what she is doing, but even that ends up being well-addressed.

Meghann Fahy is truly the lynchpin of Drop.

It’s a film where it is vital that the audience fully connect with the protagonist, and that’s well done both through the character’s emotional backstory and thanks to a wonderful turn by Meghann Fahy. It’s a role that requires an equal balance of fear and fortitude, and the White Lotus star proves perfectly up for the task. The actress presents a terrific nervous energy from the jump, as she worries about leaving her young son at home for the first time, and that demonstrated love ends up feeding into the stakes as you question just what she will be willing to do to protect him. Fahy also projects a resilience that comes from the character’s history with an abusive partner and a fierce desire to never be controlled like that again.

Henry is the less demanding role, but Brandon Sklenar pumps the character with an ideal nice guy energy that proves vital for the story. Not dissimilar to a movie keeping a family bolting from a clearly haunted house, the potential design flaw in Drop is Henry not just throwing his hands up and telling Violet that her suspect behavior is freaking him out – but Sklenar has a gentle charm that makes his staying at the table realistic and a natural result of Henry’s personality.

In discussion of the cast, one actor who deserves a special shout-out is Jeffery Self. Playing an overly enthusiastic waiter who is thrilled to be serving a couple on their first date during his first shift at the restaurant, Self shoulders the weight of being the movie’s principal comedic relief, and emerges as a scene-stealer with a great “that guy” energy and a fun mirror for the audience as an outside party observing Violet and Henry.

For being set in a limited space, Drop delivers splashes of thrilling style.

Without time loops or body swaps this time around, the big creative challenge for Christopher Landon with Drop is its contained focus and simple setting, but he uses it well and gives the movie aesthetic character. Cinematography presents a smart geographical awareness of the limited space that has hero and villain confined together, the director keeping the camera moving, and tight angles are used to deliver feelings of tension, paranoia and claustrophobia (Fahy’s turn regularly providing the other half of the equation). The inelegance of sinister text on screen is never totally surmounted, but it’s paved over with the star’s performance.

Overall, it’s not a movie to obsess over and infinitely rewatch (too much thinking will lead you to recognize that AirDrop is more effective for creating a snappy title for the feature than as a plot device), but it’s a film made for Friday night fun at the movie theater. It doesn’t bit off more than it can chew and satisfies as a result – though while also never exactly making you feel full.

In 2025 alone, we’ve already seen two other examples of this. In February, Ke Huy Quan played the archetypal lead in Love Hurts (a lovable realtor with a dark past as a gangster), and Jack Quaid got his shot last month in Novocaine (likable assistant bank manager turns badass thanks to his inability to feel pain). Neither movie is great – the latter definitely better than the former – but what can at least be said is that both films had an interesting and unique hook to hang on. Director James Hawes’ The Amateur, on the other hand, has no hook to speak of, and the end result is that it is an absolute snore.

Academy Award-winner Rami Malek is the lead of this one, playing an introverted analyst who thirsts for revenge following the murder of his wife, and it’s a film that is lacking in both flavor and energy. It has 60 minutes of plot stuck in a 123 minute package, its action hanging on four mediocre set pieces (half of which have been heavily featured in the marketing), and it’s a persistent challenge to fend of the yawns as the protagonist slowly moves around Europe and you wait for anything interesting to happen. A great ensemble cast is wasted in a movie that has no idea what to do with any of them.

The movie based on the novel of the same name by Robert Littell, Malek plays Charlie Heller, a basement-dwelling decryption expert for the Central Intelligence Agency whose life is shattered when the woman he loves (Rachel Brosnahan) is killed by a cadre of terrorists (Michael Stuhlbarg, Barbara Probst, Marc Rissmann, Joseph Millson). Devastated and alone, he uses his resources and training to find the people responsible, but direct retaliation is ruled out by his superiors (Holt McCallany, Danny Sapani) due to larger scale operations.

Heller, determined and his life otherwise devoid of anything, opts to blackmail the CIA with evidence of a cover-up operation he conveniently discovers a couple days prior. His lone demand is permission for his vendetta and what ultimately amounts to a few hours of training with a veteran agent (Laurence Fishburne). While staying one step of his employers, who are looking for any opening to shut him down, he travels around the world hunting for vengeance.

The Amateur has nothing interesting to contribute to the underdog action thriller subgenre.

In an underdog action thriller, deception is an important ingredient. In Taken, Bryan Mills is a retired dad, but he is a consummate ass-kicker. In Love Hurts, Ke Huy Quan’s Marvin Gable is sweet and amiable, but he has a killer rage that he keeps bottled up. In Novocaine, Jack Quaid’s Nate has long lived a sheltered life because of his congenital condition, but not feeling pain means losing a key motivation to stop fighting. This important ingredient is absent in The Amateur. Charlie Heller understands and is repeatedly told that he has no killer instinct and no advanced physical skills, which render him a relatable protagonist, but there is also nothing special about him that makes him a compelling character.

It can’t be said that the guy isn’t intelligent or doesn’t have a knack for computers that allows him to access basically any information the plot requires – but that can also be said about the CIA informant with whom he connects and partners in the movie’s second act. His methods of tracking, interrogating and killing entirely lack dynamism or build, preventing the thriller from ever being effectively thrilling. A perfect example (that is heavily featured in the trailers): Heller confronts one of his wife’s killers as he swims in a rooftop pool bridging two buildings, but there is nothing clever about Heller’s plan and no tension generated with the antagonist’s fear in his precarious circumstances (neither in the script nor the cinematography); the guy denies being who Heller is looking for, a button is pressed, and the pool shatters and the guy plummets to his death.

I suppose one could say that Charlie Heller’s hook is that he is above being bloodthirsty… but that just doesn’t jibe with the entire premise of a revenge story, and it means that the movie actively avoids giving the audience what it is seeking from The Amateur.

Don’t make the same mistake I did: don’t expect The Amateur to be a spy thriller with twists.

Also helping absolutely nothing is how bizarrely linear the whole story is. Fair or unfair, there is an expectation that a movie about the world’s most famous spy agency would feature some big twists and turns that you never see coming, but that’s a spice that is left on the shelf. I kept waiting for some kind of reveal about the reason why Heller’s wife was killed and/or some extra nefarious detail about operations being run by the CIA that intersected with the plot, but those revelations never come. Everything is as it seems at all times, and the film becomes more and more underwhelming as you realize that.

The Amateur is the kind of movie that gets outfitted with pull quotes like “star-studded” and “a globetrotting adventure,” which aren’t so much positive marks as they are statements of fact. To be sure, there is a lot of talent on screen and the production did plenty of on-location shooting, but in would have been smarter to invest more of the effort in crafting an effective story. It’s neither smart nor exciting; it’s just boring.

Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Woman In The Yard is a feature that breaks that contract. It sports a high concept idea that is compelled by a singular haunting image, and it keeps you on the hook curious about what it all means – but for a film that is only 87 minutes with credits, it takes forever to get where it wants to go, and when it does actually arrive at the meat of what it wants to do, it spirals into nonsense that is neither meaningful or scary (both being pretty important in horror storytelling).

The talented Danielle Deadwyler stars as Ramona, a recent widow whose life is still very much consumed by missing her dead husband (Russell Hornsby), and the consequence of this constant sorrow is detriment to her home life living on a remote farm. She has a son, Taylor (Peyton Jackson), and daughter, Annie (Estella Kahiha), to care for, but things like paying the power bill and going food shopping get deprioritized as she heals a broken leg and gets lost in watching old videos on her phone.

Life is depressing and tense in the household, and things get worse when Taylor looks outside and notices that a woman wearing a black dress and a black veil (Okwui Okpokwasili) has mysteriously appeared on their property and sits still on a chair looking at the house. When approached, she doesn’t introduce herself and is cryptic about her intentions, but her energy is registered as sinister. Ramona and the kids bunker inside, keeping an eye on her through the window, and over the course of the day, they register her getting closer and closer.

There is a shocking amount of time in The Woman In The Yard dedicated to watching the main characters do nothing.

As the director of 2009’s Orphan, Jaume Collet-Serra successfully pulled off one of 21^st century horror’s weirdest twists, and having that knowledge at the back of my mind helped me give The Woman In The Yard a long leash to develop into something interesting, but there really is just no excusing how lifeless the film is through its first two acts. There is an obvious effort to create tension with a mix of the titular mysterious figure, Ramona’s melancholy, Taylor’s frustration at the situation, and Annie’s innocence, but the action taken by the family to try and remedy the spooky situation is to do absolutely nothing, and it’s a snore.

Trying to give the film the benefit of the doubt, my mind spent this extreme down time thinking about where it was all leading, what the woman in the yard represented, and how the characters could actually start confronting the creepiness… but that just led me to resent the movie for trying to get me to entertain myself instead of being properly engaging. It banks on audiences being terrified for 60-plus minutes by an ominous presence alone, and it’s a failure.

When things do finally start happening in The Woman In The Yard, it’s chaotic nonsense.

Unfortunately, once The Woman In The Yard does finally try to do something, the film doesn’t get better; it simply gets more chaotic. After spending most of the movie doing little more than being spooky and letting her black veil softly ripple in the breeze of the day, the eponymous antagonist’s abilities suddenly become specific and shadow-based; there is a revelation made that is heavily overplayed; and then the movie goes full off-the-wall with the introduction of a mirror universe where things are the same but slightly different.

The movie tries to make up for the lack of anything interesting in the first two-thirds of the story by going full kitchen sink in the climax, and it’s neither scary nor effective at communicating any deeper levels. It does ultimately make clear what the woman in the yard is meant to represent, and I can appreciate the darkness that it aims for with its big ideas, but the build-up to it doesn’t work properly and there is no satisfaction delivered from the conclusion. The cherry on top is an ambiguous ending that is wholly unearned; it tries to make you rethink everything that goes down in the third act and where things lead, but it’s both unclear and it doesn’t track logically. Confusing and toothless is a bad mix.

I give a lot of credit to Jaume Collet-Serra as a filmmaker who likes to mix things up and doesn’t like to tell the same kind of story twice – with this movie being his follow-up to Carry-On, his fun, Die Hard-esque thriller released by Netflix at the end of last year. However, that range is only meaningful when it’s being executed with quality storytelling, and in that respect, The Woman In The Yard is a significant disappointment. I exhibited patience with it, but my hopes for a quality payoff were dashed. If you’re a likeminded, ever-optimistic horror fan, don’t make the same mistake that I did.

A high-concept thriller based on a true story, the movie serves to take you back to the year 2006 and embed you with a group of soldiers operating during the Iraq War, and it’s an utterly transfixing 94 minutes that flies by as it nails you to your seat in suspense, terrified of what may happen next. It makes no apologies for reality, and it doesn’t go through the process of making everything specifically cinematic with dumbed-down jargon, sweeping narrative developments or constructed character arcs. It exists to be a recreation of actual events from the memories of co-director/co-writer Ray Mendoza, and in its impeccable verisimilitude and constant intensity, it’s an awesome piece of work.

After a perfect opening establishing the period setting, with gleeful soldiers gathering around a laptop to witness the audacious music video for Eric Prydz’s “Call On Me,” a unit of U.S. Navy SEALs executes maneuvers at night in Ramadi, Iraq – insurgent territory – to occupy a two-floor residence. In daylight hours, things are quiet but intense in the apartment building, as various positions are set up to keep an eye on locals and track enemy behavior. The streets are monitored through the lens of a sniper rifle… and when things go to hell, they get there quickly.

The unit is discovered and targeted, with shots fired and grenades thrown, but everything goes from bad to worse during an attempted evacuation. The SEALS try to make their way to an armored personnel carrier deployed to their location, but the activation of an improvised explosive device aborts the effort and leaves multiple dead and two badly injured. While enemy fire persists, a rescue operation is initiated, and the soldiers fight to survive while they await backup and extraction.

Story is kept simple in Warfare, but its intention is conveying an experience.

The power of Warfare is found in its focus and intensity, defying cinematic convention in the process. There are no overt efforts to create specific personalities or individually introduce characters and their independent roles, and there are no heart-to-heart conversations or meaningful dialogues about life back home to de-escalate action before ramping things back up again and forge familiar pacing. These are things that I might negatively criticize in other works, but Mendoza and Garland earn this minimalism with clear intentions that end up being extremely powerful and effective.

The film’s constant mode is realism, and the spell is never broken (which is actually somewhat strange considering that my method of recognizing characters was identifying the various actors in the ensemble from their other works). It never halts action to have soldiers clearly lay out missions and objectives to each other, and radio communication isn’t dumbed down as civilian speak. Casual exposition is blissfully non-existent, but everything is also perfectly clear via context and action, and this serves to simply grip you harder amid the action. Despite the familiar faces, you’re never specifically reminded that you are watching a movie, and it is hypnotizing and powerful.

Warfare is an impeccably crafted film in its cinematography – but especially its sound.

Set in and around a single location, the scope of Warfare is very small, but that also makes it intimate, and the visceral impact of the filmmaking is massive. Whether it’s via tight close ups within the limited confines of the Iraqi household or first-person looks through the scope of a sniper rifle, the cinematography strategically entrenches the audience alongside the film’s characters throughout the first act, and thus, when the shit hits the fan, you feel like you are trapped in the nightmare right alongside them.

Deserving particularly special mention is the sound design, as no aesthetic aspect of the movie better sells the hell. When the IED explodes and rocks the armored personnel carrier, I felt like my own body was launched 10 feet into the air, and the ratatat and whistling of gunfire practically has you expecting the feeling of plaster dust on your cheeks as your eyes stay fixed on the screen. More than just shocking and terrifying noise, however, the film is also able to lock you into the characters’ various perspectives with dangerous ringing silence and a wild sequence of overwhelming radio chatter. This is a movie that you feel.

While Alex Garland’s works are usually about big ideas – from the meditations on artificial intelligence in Ex Machina to the valor of journalism in Civil War – his collaboration with Ray Mendoza is relatively uncomplicated but equally powerful. Its aim is to convey an experience, and it does so with incredible skill and emotional impact: it immerses you in its terror and horror and actually hits at your fight-or-flight response. It’s an unconventional cinematic experience, but it’s a deeply effective one.

Thankfully, despite any arguable surface-level similarities shared, Death of a Unicorn is a madcap morality tale unto itself, mashing together two families with wildly differing ideologies on how to approach an accidental conundrum that could change the course of human history. It is perhaps unfortunate that one family — widower Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) and his thorny daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) — often feels ported from a more homogenized version of the script when sharing scenes with the magnificent Leopold clan.

The hyper-wealthy and otherwise oblivious Leopolds comprise the divergence point where Death of a Unicorn goes from emotional daddy-daughter drama to unpitying satire, and it’s during those most bonkers and bloody sequences where Scharfman’s efforts are most rewarding. Which is why it’s mostly unfortunate that Elliot and Ridley are the main characters we’re supposed to be rooting for.

Alex Scharfman crafted a brilliantly straightforward premise for Death of a Unicorn that’s weakened by Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd’s characters.

Rudd's Elliot Kintner is an attorney who is very clearly more comfortable dealing with occupational hazards than having an authentic conversation with his daughter Ridley (Ortega), and it's clear that his wife's death has weakened his parenting skills even more. To be fair, Ridley has all the hallmarks of an overdramatic on-screen teen, and doesn't provide the easiest route to kinship for her middle-aged father.

Road trips could and should be fun, but the pair are mostly at odds during their drive out to the lavish abode of Elliot's boss Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), whose declining health requires a meeting of the minds to avoid a total crisis. And it's that meeting that Elliot is obsessing over when he unwittingly smashes his car into a living, breathing (for now) unicorn. Ridley discovers the magical creature's glowing horn has a distinct impact when touched, making her the most empathetic and sympathetic character throughout all the chaos to come.

Without getting too deep into spoilers, the horn provides unexpected health benefits that the Leopold family is very keen to utilize and exploit, which is what drives a wedge between Elliot and Ridley. Despite some inherently funny and brutal moments caused by their imbalance, the duo's scenes are filled with avoidable sitcom-esque conflicts that could almost all be resolved with a single two-minute conversation. Rather than being a genuinely great father to his kid's face, Elliot thinks impressing his boss will lead to a more financially secure future, which would theoretically make him a great dad in the long run.

If the entire movie was a two-hander just between Rudd and Ortega, their story might not feel as cliché. But once the Leopolds' outlandishness is on display in full, Elliot and Ridley's inherently more important relationship gets completely overshadowed –despite the script continuing its attempts to strike that emotional chord.

Will Poulter and Anthony Carrigan are scene-stealing geniuses from start to finish.

Let's properly meet the Leopolds and their loyal staff, shall we? At the head is the bedridden Odell(Richard E. Grant) and his seemingly doting wife Belinda, with Téa Leoni bringing her signature edge to a character who seems like a doting wife and mother until she isn't. And Grant also plays into his performative strengths as Odell, who goes from sluggish and sickly to stoic and Shakespearean as he is introduced to the unicorn's medical benefits.

But it's the couple's endlessly pampered and spoiled son Shepard who earns the lion's share of Death of a Unicorn's laughs, with Will Poulter dishing out a career-best performance. Despite not having any of his father's ailments, Shep ends up taking advantage of the unicorn horn's mystical powers himself, which magnifies his own inflated ego and sense of self-worth. From his questionable fashion choices to his echoing screams into the night from a hot tub, nearly every one of Poulter's on-screen moments is a comedic highlight.

All that said, this film's comedy crown probably deserves to be shared with Barry and Gotham vet Anthony Carrigan, who makes a staff meal out of what might otherwise have been a forgettable character in a lesser actor's hands. He plays the Leopold's butler Griff, whose unyielding dedication to the family is clearly a detriment to his own mental health – which is stretched to a breaking point once dead unicorns and tales of mythological vengeance enter the picture.

For every crass and loud declaration uttered by Poulter's Shep, Carrigan's Griff sells a moment with just his longing and/or defeated eyes, and it's a testament to his skills that he earns as many big laughs as others do without an abundance of dialogue.

Both the film’s fantasy mythology and unicorn CGI veer between successfully captivating and awkwardly lacking.

Death of a Unicorn might not have been more than a short film if its antagonistic family was able to manipulate the unicorn horn's benefits without any opposing forces, and I applaud Alex Scharfman for drawing upon "real-world" mythologies to give the titular creatures their own arc within the movie. Ridley schools herself in such lore, and makes efforts to get everyone on her side, but to no avail.

But for all that I'm into with the introduction of such lore, the historical context presented is somewhat simplistic, and doesn't give Ridley much to work with when half-assedly trying to make others aware. I likely wouldn't have believed her either, and I know she's telling a movie-truth.

The same mix of appreciation and disappointment can be applied to the film's CGI unicorns. By and large, the close-ups of the creatures are awesome, especially as the movie's horror vibes are working overtime and their sharp teeth are on display. But the digital wizardry falls flatter in wider shots, where the hulking beasts gallop around with movements that are clearly non-organic and feel weightless within the settings.

Despite any lows tied to narrative explanations and visual effects, however, Death of a Unicorn is indeed wildly successful when viewed specifically for its horror-comedy elements. The laughs are sharp and plentiful, and the gore is gross and masterful, often coinciding during the same scenes.

Alex Scharfman has proven himself worthy of directing more quotable, splatter-tastic features in the future, and one can only hope that he gets to work with a similarly fantastic cast the next time around. But even if not everyone can make it, Will Poulter and Anthony Carrigan should be prioritized.

A Working Man, director David Ayer’s reunion with star Jason Statham, is a different case. It operates with the exact same hero arc – a retired elite badass gets pulled back into action when a person he cares about is imperiled – but it’s delivered this time without the energy. It’s a rote movie through and through built on tropes and lazy plotting, and unless you’re an extreme Statham apologist who simply loves it every time he is on screen punching dudes, you’re not going to find much of anything to appreciate.

Based on the novel Levon’s Trade by author Chuck Dixon, the movie features Jason Statham as Levon Cade, a retired Royal Marines commando living in Chicago trying to build a normal life for himself as a construction foreman so that he can earn full custody of his daughter (Isla Gie). Though he hopes to leave his violent past behind him, he is forced to reengage his deadly skills when Jenny (Arianna Rivas), the daughter of his employers (Michael Peña, Noemi Gonzalez), is kidnapped.

After a couple of dull and obvious scenes of Levon denying this call to action, he quickly begins his inquiry, and he begins fighting and torturing people on his way to finding out the truth about what happened to Jenny. His investigation leads him to discover that she has been abducted by a Russian organized crime outfit as part of a sex trafficking operation, and like every generic cinematic hero of the last few decades, he uses his special set of skills to shut the whole thing down.

A Working Man has two speeds: way too simple and way too complicated.

As far as putting together a story is concerned, A Working Man isn’t satisfied being dully simple or overly complicated; it manages to be both. The film’s hyper genetic opening is followed by a pattern of Levon finding a clue, torturing a person, getting another clue, and torturing another person – and in addition to being creatively uninspired, it also manages to be grisly and off-putting (Jason Statham’s particular brand of charisma is mysteriously never activated).

Then, there is oddly a point where it feels like the filmmakers realized how boring and repetitive the movie was getting and decided to make a mess of things just to suggest a creative effort. Discovering a bar with patrons who have ties to the Russian mafia, Levon orchestrates a plan that sees him pretend to be a dealer looking for a supply of blue meth (clearly script research didn’t go beyond watching episodes of Breaking Bad). To his credit, the strategy ends up working, as he ends up coming face-to-face with the villain for whom he has been searching, but the path of the narrative is ludicrous, and cut together with a minimal B-plot involving Jenny and the bungling couple that kidnaps her (Emmett J. Scanlan, Eve Mauro), the second half of A Working Man is a total mess.

The action in A Working Man is brutal but never fun.

For those who plan on going into the movie not expecting or looking for a competent story and just wanting to see some thrilling action, I have some bad news as well. It can’t be said that there is a shortage of punching, kicking, knives and guns, none of it is executed with any kind of flair or creativity – neither in the choreography nor the cinematography. It starts off on some good footing, with A Working Man leaning into its title and Levon first showing off his talents with the utilization of a bucket of nails and a pickaxe, but the notion of the blue collar ass-kicker doesn’t go beyond that. Statham handily wins every on-screen fight (leaving no stakes to speak of), and it’s all executed without any signature moments or clever one-liners.

Absent any kind of flash, A Working Man leans on brutality, but it gets stuck in a no man’s land in doing so. This is a movie that really could use visible broken bones, spurts of blood, and flying body parts to amp up its entertainment value, but David Ayer’s choice is to keep things grounded and real, and it has a cost: it’s only grim and never fun, and that feels like a cardinal sin in this genre.

I can’t say that A Working Man is totally without color, as there are some outrageously bad suits worn by Russian gangsters and there is one antagonist whose backroom lair is outfitted with an elaborate throne – but these are splashes that really on serve to accentuate what’s lacking in the majority of the film. It’s serious, but can’t be taken seriously, and it’s dumb but never fun. Jason Statham and David Ayer have both proven that they can do better, and this is very far removed from their best work.

But The Ballad Of Wallis Island isn’t a horror movie. In actuality, it’s as far from a horror movie as you can really get. Instead of trying to scare or haunt, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a sweet hug from a good friend trying to boost your mood when you’re feeling down. It’s beautiful, funny, and emotional without feeling overly sentimental or saccharine, and it has a special message to deliver about finding closure with your past and discovering and understanding your future.

Tom Basden, who co-wrote the film, stars as Herb McGwyer – a musician ready to embark on a new era of his career as a solo artist who gets invited to the remote Wallis Island at the behest of a strange lotto winner named Charles Heath (Tim Key, the movie’s other co-writer). Herb is being paid $500,000 to play an exclusive show, but there are two key parts of the plan about which he is kept in the dark: the only person in the audience will be Charles, and the host has also invited Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan), Herb’s ex-music partner and ex-significant other.

With lingering romantic feelings still very much a thing and Nell bringing along her husband (Akemnji Ndifornyen), Herb’s situation is the epitome of awkward, but his anxiety is quashed when he understands Nell knew that he was going to be on the island and is excited for the gig. The artists rehearsing together and Charles regaling them with stories about his deceased wife’s love of McGwyer Mortimer’s music cause old emotions to rise to the surface for everyone, but how they are handled ends up instigating conflict.

The corner of the world created in The Ballad Of Wallis Island is utterly delightful.

Given the horror movie-esque paranoia instigated by the plot setup, I think it’s fair to call The Ballad Of Wallis Island literally disarming, as hard feelings slip away amid the comical, musical drama. The isolation of the titular setting renders it as a funny alien planet with a healthy detachment from modernity, and there are sweet little quirks abound that ever-liven the atmosphere – from the faucet in Herb’s room that never stops running, to the hefty bag of coins that he has to lug around so that he can contact the outside world via payphone (there’s a great running gag about Herb’s mobile phone being waterlogged upon his arrival and confusion about how rice could be a solution to the problem).

Amplifying the warm energy that the film so effortlessly delivers is a tremendous soundtrack. The ace up the sleeve of The Ballad Of Wallis Island is its creation of McGwyer Mortimer, as the movie makes the band feel real in a multitude of ways. Part of this is that the original folk-rock music is lovely and revelatory about the emotions of the fictional artists who have written it; part of it is the tremendous chemistry between Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan (the latter having previously demonstrated a gift for folk music in Inside Llewyn Davis); and part of it is the effective sell of the duo’s in-world significance – including the passion demonstrated by Charles the super fan and a tremendous job by props and production design departments for the creation of concert posters, tickets, albums and more.

Amid the sweetness and great music, The Ballad Of Wallis Island also has something deep to say.

Gentle and nice as the film is (with the extreme pleasantness of Tim Key’s Charles and his genuine enthusiasm proving to be infectious among the ensemble), but it has effective messaging about making peace with the parts of your life that have ended and finding ways to move forward. All three of the main characters think that they have moved into new chapters of their respective lives, but the reunion of McGwyer Mortimer exposes that loss remains an important part of their lives: Herb may have his solo career and Nell may say her career in music is over, but their hearts are still very much in their work together, and Charles may try to live blissfully as an introvert, but he is still very much in pain after the death of his wife and missing true human connection.

Perhaps best of all in all this drama is that The Ballad Of Wallis Island takes story threads and traces them to unexpected places (and the one thread that goes into an expected directed is delightful nonetheless).

While the modern cinematic landscape is always looking for certain kinds of extremes – thrills, scares, excitement, twists, hysterics and outrage – The Ballad Of Wallis Island offers a different kind of experience, and though there is absolutely nothing wrong with all of those big screen ingredients, it’s nonetheless well-welcome. It’s simple and charming while having a universal message to share along with some fantastic original music, and I would challenge even the coarsest cynic to not be enchanted.

If this reflection feels familiar, it’s because it’s one movie-lovers analyzed a great deal relatively recently around the release of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. In 2019, the film ended up being worthy of the legacy talk, as it’s an epic on a tier with De Niro’s best – but six years later, Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights feels like a drop of poison in the well. You don’t want to think about the actor’s history in the genre in concert with it because it has no positive contributions.

On top of Robert De Niro starring in a new gangster movie, the gimmick here is that the star plays dual roles, but the fact that this ends up being a very badly executed gimmick is only part of the film’s problems. Constantly dumping out exposition and the story dragging at a snail’s pace, the narrative lacks even the most remote concept of energy and never delivers a single satisfying sequence (despite coming from two filmmaking greats in Levinson and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi). Practically every scene drags out two minutes longer than necessary, the dialogue so stilted and empty that it feels like bad improv, and while it occasionally tricks you into thinking something interesting is coming around the corner, nothing of the sort ever materializes.

Robert De Niro plays both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese – major New York City crime figures through the middle decades of the 20^th century. While the two men grew up together and long see each other as best friends, their dynamic changes when Vito flees the country to avoid criminal charges and leaves his criminal enterprise in Frank’s hands to control.

Everything in the underworld is running smoothly thanks to Frank’s leadership, but when Vito returns to the United States, the edgy, quick-tempered gangster not only wants his power back, but he wants to introduce hard drugs into the business. Amenable, Frank cedes some power, but their conflict continues to escalate – heat added by government investigations into organized crime – until the point where Vito puts out a hit on his childhood pal that ends up being botched.

In a year full of dual performances, Robert De Niro seriously underwhelms.

Between Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights, Theo James in The Monkey, Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, and Michael B. Jordan in the upcoming Sinners, audiences are seeing a lot of dual performances on the big screen in the first half of 2025. De Niro’s turn will not be remembered as a highlight of the trend.

Part of the problem is the general approach; unlike all of the other movies mentioned above, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese are not brothers or twins or clones, and as independent people, there is not enough distinguishing them to make the dual performance interesting. Vito is a hothead and wears dark glasses everywhere, and Frank is more relaxed and has a bit more hair. That’s pretty much the full extent of it. Mostly, you’re just actively aware of De Niro trying to pull off a dual performance and the job not getting done.

The forced scenes where the two characters interact one-on-one are wholly unreal – and not just because of the clear efforts to otherwise make the sequences as simple as possible (the two men generally sitting on opposite sides of restaurant tables and left undisturbed ). With editing sharing some of the blame, it’s never convincing that they having a natural conversation; the attempted dual performance is constantly transparent, and it never lets you engage with the content of the interaction.

The story in The Alto Knights is terribly uninteresting, and the dialogue is maddening.

To be fair, the distraction of De Niro’s double work is somewhat welcome in the sense that it’s something to actively contemplate as scene after scene of dull conversations unfurl. There are what feel like a dozen scenes that play out with this rhythm:

“He doesn’t trust you.”
“He doesn’t trust me?"
“He doesn’t trust you.”
“What do you mean he doesn’t trust me?
“He doesn’t trust you because of that thing you did.”
“How could he not trust me because of that thing I did? How dare he!”
“What can I say? He doesn’t trust you.”

If I’m being generous, I’d say that it’s a swing at natural, off-the-cuff dialogue, but they drag on excessively and are of so little substance that you find yourself mentally begging for the film to move on.

Adding insult to injury is the laziness of the storytelling. It’s bad enough that the movie takes the shortcut of an in medias res opening by starting the first act with the failed assassination of Frank Costello (easily the most interesting thing that happens in the two-hour runtime), but the story is also spoon fed to the audience with Frank providing constant voiceover narration explaining what is happening (the film also frequently cuts to shots of him telling his story directly into the camera that are ultimately given zero context). Like Robert De Niro, Nicholas Pileggi is a legend in the gangster genre – his credits including Goodfellas and Casino – but The Alto Knights is a title to be forgotten from his filmography.

While I don’t like to give away spoilers in reviews, this is a film where the big third act climax is a bunch of crime bosses fleeing a gathering when they spot police officers writing down license plate numbers; meanwhile, the protagonist is killing time going to roadside fruit stand on his way to the meeting. The Alto Knights looks like it had the potential to be a genre classic on paper, but the execution leaves one wanting in just about every respect, and I’m willing to bet that anyone who sees it on the big screen will be challenged to remember details from it in a year’s time.

It’s safe to say that 1937’s Snow White And The Seven Dwarves started it all for Disney. The studio’s first full-length feature was the dawn of an era to which the House of Mouse still holds tight 88 years later – both in its animated movies and with now six actresses across the past decade portraying Disney Princesses in live-action remakes. But now that Snow White is the latest to be retold, I know you’re curious to ask the mirror, mirror on the wall, where does Rachel Zegler’s Snow White stand among the fairest of them all?

I was a huge fan of Disney Princess movies growing up, but Snow White wasn’t a title I exhausted on VHS like the others. As such, I’m surprised to say the remake swept me off my feet with the kind of wholesome escapism that reminds me why fairytales should and are revisited generation after generation – with this one succeeding especially thanks to Rachel Zegler's casting.

The movie – helmed by (500) Days Of Summer and The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb from a screenplay written by The Girl On The Train’s Erin Cressida Wilson – is yes, yet another product of Disney’s successful run of making live-action blockbusters out of their animated gems. However, it feels like the filmmakers registered fans complaints about past remakes this time around and weren't too precious about the source material to the point of creating a straight-up imitation. The film offers an entertaining mash up of tribute and a new and (mostly) satisfying musical that builds upon Snow White’s Disney legacy for the better.

There’s been a lot of nearly carbon-copy Disney remakes, but Snow White finds a solid reason to revisit the studio’s first feature-length classic.

The Disney movie starts with an adorable sleeping CGI hedgehog laying over a storybook to “aww” at before the book opens and the Snow White's narrative starts off with the origins of her name. The princess starts with a happy life, both her parents providing her an encouraging and joyous upbringing, and the original soundtrack from La La Land and The Greatest Showman songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s begins with the heartwarming “Good Things Grow.” But as the princess cliché sadly goes, Snow is left under the supervision of her evil stepmother (Gal Gadot) as she grows up.

As the movie fast forwards in time to Rachel Zegler’s Snow, the iconic character doesn’t belt over a well, “I'm wishing for the one I love to find me;” she instead powerfully laments through another new tune “I’m Waiting On A Wish” about her hopes to “become my father’s daughter.” The princess remains feminine and soft in this iteration, but her characterization realistically reflects how a young woman might feel in moments to herself in the face of feeling alone, abandoned and powerless by her circumstances.

While other versions of not only Snow White but modern iterations of stories involving heroines have turned their leading ladies into action heroes or “I don’t need a man" types, Snow White does a solid job of updating her for modern audiences while also staying true to who the character is from her panicked venture into the dark forest to true love’s kiss. And as her origins dictate, Snow White’s defining trait is the purity and kindness she represents to all with whom she meets eyes. Being “nice” as her most key trait could have easily come off as ingenuine, but Zegler grounds Snow White with a humble and gentle nature that ultimately helps deliver a sweet and classic “good conquers all” message to audiences.

Snow is not waiting on a prince to save her, because she doesn’t have one. Instead, early in the film she meets a thief named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), who looks just like Snow White’s love interest in the original film and takes on a mix between a lowly Robin Hood and Tangled’s Flynn Rider in place of a classic prince. Their chemistry is fluttery and fun, and remains the heart of the movie throughout. It's perhaps one of the biggest surprises of the film.

The seven dwarves on the other hand, are cute, and yes, a tad creepy in their character design, which clearly draws from the original animation rather than going for realism, but they are somewhat sidelined to round out Snow White’s relationship with Jonathan and the Evil Queen. The character of Dopey is given the most attention and care, and his arc is rather adorable.

The music in Snow White is mostly a winner, thanks to Rachel Zegler’s infectious charm.

Rather than Snow White trying to be too much at once (something I feel recent princess movies like Frozen 2, Raya and the Last Dragon and Moana 2 have been victim of), Snow White is simply a fairytale and a musical. In terms of material from the original soundtrack, don’t expect to hear most of the songs from the original like “With A Smile And A Song” or “Someday My Prince Will Come.” The production holds on to just two from the classic – “Whistle While You Work” and “Heigh-Ho” – while offering five new songs (and a ton of reprises) to carve out its own experience from the original.

After leaving the movie, I chiefly had Snow White’s new “I want” song “Waiting On A Wish” along with the old beloved tunes stuck in my head, with a couple of new favorites to go home and revisit. Both of my new favorites have to do with Snow White’s romance plotline between Zegler’s Snow and Andrew Burnap’s Jonathan. In one funny tune, “Princess Problems,” Jonathan hilariously calls out Snow for her naivety, whilst “A Hand Meets A Hand,” which was beautifully co-written by Lizzy McAlpine, heightens their connection with a love song also reminiscent of Tangled, by way of “I See The Light”.

While Gal Gadot is at times delicious as the Evil Queen, it’s an overall uneven performance, and her song “All Is Fair” is the most easily skippable and most tonally off moment of the whole movie. Gadot is treading a dangerous line between playing one of the most terrifying villains in Disney history and trying to be “fun evil” for the kiddies. Thanks in part to the stunning costuming by Sandy Powell (who also did 2015’s Cinderella), it’s absolutely impossible to look away from Gadot’s vicious Evil Queen, but I wonder how the performance might have hit harder from a trained singer to match Zegler’s syrupy and Broadway-ready pipes.

Marc Webb directs a sunny live-action remake that works as a tribute, but it also has a stiffness to it.

Disney remakes have been criticized in the past for being visually a lot more dark and brooding than their originals, but Marc Webb’s Snow White has a bright, airy quality to its visual design that is most welcome. The production is clearly heavy on computer graphics, especially when it comes to the characters with whom Snow interacts – like the dwarves and woodland animals. The visual choices are at an uphill battle following the artistry of the classic, and the dwarves’ design is not as horrible as some might have thought (but will likely take you out of the escape upon the first few looks), but I will say the CGI animals are an absolute delight and are gorgeously created by the production’s visual effects teams.

Marc Webb and his crew do a solid job of playing tribute to the many famous shots from the iconic original (such as through Snow White’s fall after the apple bite), but there are some tonal problems when it comes to the live-action musical portion that does end up being rather formulaic. For example, some of the music numbers feel very staged and Broadway-like, while the rest of the movie doesn’t necessarily match this. As a result, the film can feel like it’s going through the motions of scene to song rather than organically moving through its narrative.

Early in this Snow White, Gal Gadot’s Evil Queen comments something to the likes of “I don’t remember you being this opinionated,” and that about sums it up when it comes to Disney’s retelling. But, for the purists out there, all the beats from the original story is very much intact: Snow White just has more to do this time around and more agency to explore. I know I’m not alone in getting frustrated with the studio for making their big releases retreads of old material, but I was surprised that in the case of Snow White, I found it to be the Disney remake I didn’t know I wanted. While this apple isn't without some bruises here and there, it's overall a welcome update for the classic for a new generation of Disney lovers.

Borrowing from sci-fi classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Plan 9 From Outer Space, director Pete Browngardt and his cadre of co-writers have given Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza) a new challenge: brotherhood. Reinventing the lore of these lads as a pair of adopted siblings, their lives become even more complicated in adulthood.

Not only do these Looney Tunes stalwarts have to save their family home, but thanks to a plot hatched by extraterrestrials, they’re apparently the best chance at saving Earth as well. The usual combination of hijinks, loving nods to recurring jokes, and modern commentary are all present within this tale, which makes for a solid foundation. But what might surprise people is that The Day the Earth Blew Up actually takes the opportunity to show Daffy and Porky as thematically driven characters, something they’ve never been seen as before.

The Day the Earth Blew Up is pure Looney Tunes mayhem that honors tradition but knows how to poke fun at today.

Much like the spirit of the original Looney Tunes shorts, The Day the Earth Blew Up has a lot of jokes to include in a fairly short amount of time. Clocking in at a breezy 91 minutes, this picture has no slack. Which is fitting as Spike Jones’ “Powerhouse,” one of the unofficial themes of Warner Bros.’ landmark cartoon institution, plays a very important part in a visually lush gag involving our animated protagonists.

Anyone who knows this universe also knows that there’s plenty of room for easter eggs and sly jokes in dialogue. You get both in The Day the Earth Blew Up, as plenty of businesses are named after legendary animators like Bob Clampett, and Daffy gets a rather fun line about animation executives that’s only noticeable if you listen closely during a scene set in a diner. As always, nothing is sacred, but there’s also no punching down at any of the subjects in the line of comedic fire.

I cannot stress enough how much fun this Looney Tunes adventure is for fans who have followed any or all eras of the franchise. At the same time, The Day the Earth Blew Up keeps things fresh by honoring the tradition of poking fun at the here and now.

An action set-piece showcasing Porky and Petunia Pig (Candi Milo) sending up the standard “heroes rally against the alien invasion” trope has them paying tribute to Mad Max style action, with R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)" acting as the musical lynchpin. Adults will be laughing at this moment for one reason, while children in the audience will be enjoying this moment for another, and your kids will ideally be asking you to play some R.E.M. on the way home from the theater.

You may be showing up for the laughs, but you’ll stay for the plot.

What strikes me as a unique decision is the fact that The Day the Earth Blew Up invests in emotional stakes with Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. The pair is one of the long standing double acts that has made Looney Tunes history what it is today, but the decision to expand the lore to turn these friends into adopted brothers is a novel change. So while Daffy gets to be screwy, and a new explanation for Porky’s stutter is a punchline worth some laughs, there’s an actual story being told in-between such antics.

Here’s how serious The Day the Earth Blew Up gets: Daffy Duck is allowed a subplot that involves personal growth, and it never sabotages the jokes. One of the reasons the first original animated film in the Looney Tunes legacy works so well is because it takes itself seriously in parts. Though comedy is the main thrust of this picture, this isn’t a mere ‘laugh-a-minute’ collage of jokes. There is a plot that matters, and you may be surprised by some of the other developments.

Through 11 credited writers and a modestly sized cast, the film is a well thought out tale of what it means to be a family and the importance of looking before we leap. None of it ever feels like a heavy-handed effort to “reinvent” the Looney Tunes, which allows comedic all-starts like Peter MacNicol, Wayne Knight, and Laraine Newman to play to all facets of Pete Browngardt’s picture. In the same breath, the rock star performance of Eric Bauza showcases just how experienced voice acting veterans such as himself have dug into this new front.

As a franchise vet since 2011, and the de factor Looney Tunes front man since 2020, Bauza knows these characters on a deep professional level. The Day the Earth Blew Up is a proper showcase for how an actor can grow with their characters. With his performances serving as the picture’s anchor, along with voice acting legend Candi Milo’s reprisal of Petunia Pig, this entire experiment is in good hand from start to finish.

Without sacrificing charm or laughter, The Day The Earth Blew Up proves that the Looney Tunes can still play in a more modern sandbox.

Comedy dynasties like the Looney Tunes or even Saturday Night Live thrive on loving tributes to the past, while not being afraid to try something new. The Day the Earth Blew Up marks what could be the first step forward into a new chapter of Warner Bros.’ animated powerhouse, which is all the more important when considering the last time the studio sent the Tunes to theaters was 2021’s Space Jam: A New Legacy.

You won’t find any Droogs standing on the sidelines, nor will you be advertised athletic apparel in The Day the Earth Blew Up. Instead, audiences will be treated to one of the few PG-rated movies that make it to theaters that doesn’t pander to kids. Walking the fine line between jokes you’ll get when you’re 10 and gags that’ll make more sense in adulthood, this is one of the finest examples of what a basic Looney Tunes movie should be.

We haven’t seen pure Looney Tunes fun in the theaters for some time, and The Day The Earth Blew Up proves why that needs to change. In the wake of the unresolved Coyote vs. Acme debacle, the release of this movie shows that there are parties out there that still believe in justice for toons.

In making the leap from the page to the screen as a 1990s-set adaptation that stretches the definition of “live-action” as much as some Disney’s modern-era remakes, The Electric State unfortunately falls short of matching the source material’s uniqueness and whimsy – despite boasting myriad talents both in front of the camera and behind it. It’d be no small feat for anyone to fully capture the book’s inherent charms, but one might think that Netflix’s seemingly depthless pockets would have allowed for something less fleeting.

Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, filmmakers who honed their talents with brilliant TV comedies before vaulting into big-budget Marvel Studios fare, The Electric State often feels like the equivalent of prettied-up meals in fast food commercials: a feast for the eyes, but lacking most of the caloric value that keeps one’s brain on track. This would be perfectly fine if we were all robots without functioning biologies, but my human tastes desire something more substantial.

Anthony and Joe Russo are as skilled as can be at directing CGI-filled spectacles.

The Electric State is set in a Jetsons-esque reality where household bots were the norm until a worldwide Us Vs. Them war destroyed all the good vibes, leaving the remaining automatons to congregate in the “Exclusion Zone,” in which humans are not welcome. Millie Bobby Brown plays the tech-rejecting teen Michelle, whose family was seemingly killed off years earlier during the big war, and she still mourns the loss of her brainiac brother Christopher (Woody Norman).

After the robotic avatar of a beloved cartoon character crosses paths with Michelle, she discovers that it somehow appears to contain the life essence of her brother, which ties into some deep-state conspiracy plotting involving a VR-esque company run by Stanley Tucci’s Ethan Skate that allows users’ to split their brainpower between functioning in a virtual realm and powering mecha-drones in the real world. Shades of Ready Player One and District 9 shine through the semi-frequent exposition dumps.

Having acquired the rights to Stålenhag’s book back in 2017, while still in post-production on Avengers: Infinity War, the Russos weren’t even originally planning to helm the adaptation themselves, despite their Marvel collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely handling the script. They officially signed on to spearhead the project in 2020 as a follow-up to their Chris Evans-starring actioner The Gray Man, with Netflix joining the fray in 2022.

All of this is to say that a lot of time was spent in preparation mode for this movie, which required a massive amount of pre-production design work for the multitudes of droids and mechanoids populating the Exclusion Zone, as well as a variety of touched-up landscapes and U.S. skylines. And it’s abundantly clear that vast amounts of meticulous efforts were made to guarantee the best-looking CGI creations and effects possible. In a soundless vacuum-bot, this certainly qualifies as one of the Russo brothers’ best looking movies to date.

For all the gorgeous visuals that honor the source material, The Electric State’s story and dialogue are entirely predictable and forgettable.

The eye-popping and personality-speckled assortment of digitally designed machinery is a wonder only made possible through modern means, but the same cannot be said for the screenplay credited to the Russos’ frequent collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. The Electric State’s big-picture themes of overcoming adversities and being skeptical of capitalist consumerism are timeless enough, the story beats and dialogue might as well have come from a 1993 screenplay that someone in this very movie finds near a busted printer in the EZ.

I’ve already seen plenty of iterations of the story that Brown’s Michelle is both showing with her performance, and also needlessly telling through clunky conversations. And I’m not even sure that Chris Pratt’s Keats has a story to be told, with a performance that’s a MAD Magazine fold-in of Star-Lord and Andy Dwyer. The excellent supporting cast of Stanley Tucci, Giancarlo Esposito, Jason Alexander and Ke Huy Quan are unfortunately saddled with one-dimensional roles that do nothing beyond further the plot, and a lot of their work is further hindered by being delivered through low-res face screens.

Too early into the runtime — like, barely past the opening chunk of exposition delivered by the late MTV News great Kurt Loder and a Bill Clinton impersonator — I wanted to ignore all the humans and take my time exploring the shapes, sizes and intelligence levels of every bot in this world, silently hoping to run into Futurama’s Hedonism bot somewhere. As Michelle’s sidekick, the Alan Tudyk voiced Cosmo Kid boasts a fixed expression and a limited number of pre-recorded phrases, and it’s just flat-out a better performance than what we get from the rest of the ensemble.

This version of The Electric State should have been a spinoff focusing entirely on imaginative creations like the stage-magician bot Perplexo (voiced by Hank Azaria), aging baseball-oriented droid Popfly (Brian Cox), do-good postal worker Penny Pal (Jenny Slate), and monocled local leader Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson). As Herman, the nesting-robot sidekick of Chris Pratt’s Keats, Anthony Mackie is the bot with the most amount of dialogue, and thus sounds the most like a Saturday Morning cartoon.

Perhaps the most baffling thing about this wildly expensive movie is that I can only remember a dozen or so instances where my brain actively recognized some form of humor being attempted, and at no point was I laughing at any of it. I suppose I can appreciate that Pratt isn’t horking quips the entire time, but one of the key verbally comedic sequences involves Keats instructing Michelle to temporarily go by the fake name “Veronica,” and she questions whether he said “Beronica.”

To be clear, that joke would only ever work in the very first issue of Archie Comics, which would have still been published 55 years before that hi-larious misunderstanding happened.

The Russos should always make memorable characters a bigger priority than complicated plots or special effects.

It's undeniable that Markus and McFeely's script could have used some exposition snips and an infusion of comedic festiveness. But I also think one of The Electric State's imbalances lies in Anthony and Joe Russo having come so far from their directing roots that high-effort splendor and magnificence seem to take precedence over creating memorable characters – at least outside the MCU.

To be sure, I fully understand that most of their past directorial efforts that I happen to love the most were part of TV comedies that are notorious for intentionally complicated plotting and boundary-pushing stories: Arrested Development and Community. But those are both also ensemble-driven affairs, and much like the Avengers movies, a ton of characters are able to shine in memorable ways that complement the surrounding chaos.

But for all the quirky CGI bits and bobs sprinkled throughout, The Electric State doesn’t give any of its living and breathing characters a single hero moment that feels destined to inspire any fan art, and there isn’t a single line of dialogue that I can imagine ever entering the pop culture lexicon. I honestly can’t remember if Pratt’s character had a purpose or a goal, and that’s not the kind of thing that fans of the Russos expect.

The brothers’ work within the MCU is not yet done, of course, but once they return to non-Marvel storytelling, I can only hope they find a way to return to character-first storytelling, and if the plots also happen to be amazing and full of digital effects wizardry, so be it. Now, somebody pass me one of those VR helmets.

With Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s Novocaine, my anticipation was satiated in the sense that Jack Quaid delivers another amusing performance full of quirk, humor, and affability – but it also ends up being a movie that hangs too heavily on its own hook: a protagonist who can’t feel pain. There is plenty of fun and a handful of clever moments, but much of it feels undercooked beyond its core idea, as building a strong narrative clearly took a backseat to inventing fun ways to take advantage of the hero’s rare medical condition.

Quaid stars in the film as Nathan Caine – a mild-mannered young man working as an assistant manager at a San Diego bank who lives a very sheltered existence as a result of living his life with congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA). After months of pining for Sherry (Amber Midthunder), he is finally able to come out of his shell when she invites him to attend an art gallery, and his entire worldview and attitude takes a shift toward the wonderful after they have a great night together.

Unfortunately, this emotional high is destroyed the very next day when a trio of thieves in Santa outfits (Ray Nicholson, Conrad Kemp, Evan Hengst) execute a heist and take Sherry as a hostage during their violent getaway. In love for the first time ever and fearing that the detectives on the case (Betty Gabriel, Matt Walsh) won’t be able to act quickly enough, Nathan decides to handle the crisis on his own and puts himself in harm’s way so that he can rescue his new girlfriend.

Novocaine is a bit empty beyond its one big idea.

Written by Lars Jacobson, the script for Novocaine has a lot more going for it than what movie-goers saw last month in Love Hurts – featuring a parallel premise about a seemingly ordinary guy discovering his inner badass – but what makes the film unique within the action subgenre also results in it being both overcooked and undercooked (like a microwaved snack that is scorching on the outside but frozen in the middle). It feels like the script was concocted starting with a list of everything that Nathan could endure, and those ideas were then plugged into what is otherwise a rote adventure.

Without saying too much and risking ruining the movie for anyone, there was a point about half-way through the film when I realized that a key aspect of the story didn’t make any sense, and while a narrative turn was then revealed a solution to the issue, it’s a narrative turn that has been executed countless times before. It’s the most egregious example but also part of Novocaine’s most consistent problem, and which there is that there is no true effort for innovation. It tries to sail on its best creative idea, but it’s like bound-together driftwood: it floats, but it doesn’t support much/any weight.

While the action is fun, it doesn’t take full advantage of the film’s hook stylistically.

Similar sentiments can be shared about the action – though it is also the best thing that the movie has going for it. Because he doesn’t feel pain, Nathan can do things that the majority of us cannot, and it’s nasty fun to see him make use of a scalding cast iron pan in a kitchen battle or load up his fists with shards of broken glass during a melee in a tattoo parlor. It balances out the fact that the protagonist’s lack of training means that the fights aren’t exactly packed with finesse and skill… but I will also say that the film doesn’t push as hard as it could.

While Nathan can’t feel pain, the audience naturally imagines how we would feel in matching circumstances, and Novocaine doesn’t do enough to take advantage of that fact. Dan Berk and Robert Olsen do indulge a bit (the standout example being a sequence with intense close-ups of Nathan’s fingernails being pulled out), but it’s a tool that spends too much time in the toolbox. The directors’ go-to move instead are bits of dramatic slow motion, which are used to fun effect but never with any unique flair.

Novocaine is a spotlight moment for Jack Quaid, and it’s a success in that respect.

The principal reason to check out Novocaine is really the turn by Jack Quaid and his continuing success as an entertaining leading man. Audiences spend a grand total of two whole days with Nathan in the movie, and we see his life go from 0 to 60 (from being afraid to eat solid foods to stealing a cop car to pursue a cadre of armed criminals), but Quaid has the charm to carry that transformation. He brings a magnetism that invests you in the character and has you rooting for positive change, and he’s also an adept comedic performer, as he gets laughs from being an innocent in dangerous waters and with physical bits. There are echoes of Huey from The Boys, but Nathan has his own energy.

Novocaine is not a bad movie, but it also suffers from not being able to go the extra mile and get the most out of its high concept premise. Moderated expectations going in are recommended and will help you get more out of the cinematic experience, but I already know it’s not a film that I’m going to be thinking a lot about come December when I look back at 2025 on the big screen.

The set up for Black Bag is beautifully simple. Married couple George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett) are devoted to two things: their marriage and their career as government spies.

Both are put to the test when a list of suspects in the theft of a top secret malware known as Severus goes missing. Woven into this tangled web are two couples they work with, each having their own quirks and proclivities that could point towards potential involvement.

With the clock ticking, and their terminally irate boss Arthur Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan) constantly demanding answers, George and Kathryn will have to keep a closer eye on their colleagues, but especially each other. That playing field was primed to make Black Bag something that was totally my bag, but its the surprises within that really made me appreciate this breath of fresh air in the espionage realm.

Black Bag is a smooth and sexy thriller that surprises with a healthy dose of sharp wit.

I absolutely did not expect Black Bag to be as cleverly funny as it is, and that’s honestly my own fault. Steven Soderbergh is a director that loves to experiment with the line between comedy and drama, as we’ve seen in less successful executions such as The Informant! and The Laundromat. With that baggage in tow, I cannot complain about how the balance was struck in writer David Koepp’s third teaming with the Ocean’s Eleven director. My expectation of a terminally moribund dissection of marriage, trust, and duty gave way to a well-dressed spy story that also possesses the wit of that heist movie.

A scene involving George’s clandestine surveillance of Kathryn during a satellite handover is still a tense affair that has a literal countdown clock in play. But what makes the Black Bag difference is the fact that SigInt expert/bad girl Clarissa (Marissa Abela) also uses the opportunity to attempt to flirt with her older co-worker.

While I’m loathe to support people that march onto social media with the declaration that we should “Make more 90 minute movies!” Black Bag is a case I’d make for that length being a perfect fit. Clocking in at 93 minutes with credits, Soderbergh and Koepp’s collaboration glides into its entrance and exit, and doesn’t lose a step at any point along the way.

Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett anchor a solid cast of talent, with all participants delivering multi-faceted portrayals.

As a contrast to the wide ranging scope of a James Bond movie, Black Bag is a relatively contained affair – both in its settings and its cast. Six of the seven top billed stars are the main focus, with some players weaving in and out when the occasion calls for it. And save for a couple scenes focused on a field operation, we’re mostly focused on the personnel at hand.

Every scene carries new clues and revelations that clarify the puzzle with which we’re presented, helping us try to suss out who the mysterious mole is. Though I have to admit that when it came to Black Bag’s plot, I didn’t spend too much time trying to work ahead, as I was having too much fun in the moment.

Case in point: there’s a briefing scene where a character is acting out of sorts, and they clearly dominate the focus on the scene for a good stretch of time. Part of me was questioning that aspect, but another portion was focused on how Pierce Brosnan’s Stieglitz was laying out the mission details, peppered with choice expletives and an exasperated tone of voice.

The same goes for Marisa Abela, as the previously mentioned flirtation between Clarissa and George extends to a polygraph scene with some very personal questions. A breakup scene between Regé-Jean Page and Naomie Harris opts for blunt comedy instead of any sort of upset, and Tom Burke’s sloppy spy gets to play some prime hands of observational contributions.

At the center of all of this is Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett, who are a perfect fit in this devilish wilderness of mirrors. Equally cool and commanding, they flawlessly sell their marriage and the strife that is put upon it during this trying time. Though George and Kathryn are visually depicted as a conservatively passionate couple, you can still feel the heat coming from their dialogue in the bedroom-based scenes.

Black Bag is a prime example of pastiche being used to create a project that sparkles alongside the sources it borrows.

I feel sorry for Steven Soderbergh in a sense, as Black Bag is such a resounding success that people are going to want him to throw his hat in the ring for 007’s next outing. (This concern is amplified in the best way possible thanks to a moment of the climax feeling like a nod to Daniel Craig’s debut in Casino Royale.) I wouldn’t say no to that possibility, but at the same time, the influences in this marvelous movie run so much deeper.

George Woodhouse is John Le Carre’s George Smiley from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but in a marriage that seems way more solid. David Koepp’s mystery is a playfully acidic Agatha Christie riff, right down to its bookended dinner party scenes being the main playground for solving this enigma. And with composer Dave Holmes reuniting with his Ocean’s Trilogy director, the score perches perfectly on the fence between those two influences with electronic infused glee.

I hate that Bond 26 is in what seems like an indefinite holding pattern about as much as I curse losing out on what could have been Steven Soderbergh’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. At the same time, those concerns aren’t so pressing after seeing Black Bag, as I’m already ready for seconds from this deliciously duplicitous dinner party. All movie-goers looking for some “fun and games” in the world of spies shouldn’t hesitate to accept this mission, as the pay off is much more than promised.

This would be the introduction of a villain in just about any other film, but the judge is actually our sympathetic protagonist. While that may seem like the movie giving itself an insurmountable hurdle over which to leap, it’s able to meet that challenge by eventually introducing us to the psychopathic nightmare that is John Lithgow’s Dave Crealy. Compared to Dave, the judge is a purring kitten.

The Rule Of Jenny Pen is a phenomenal exercise in character development, but that’s just one of the incredible tools that is utilized in crafting a bone-chilling cinematic experience that cuts, stuns, and leaves a scar. Phenomenal performances, unrelenting atmosphere and a tight story make it unforgettable and an early candidate to be declared the best horror movie of 2025.

The courtroom sequence described above ends when the judge suffers a debilitating stroke mid-rant and ends up being taken to Royal Pine Mews – a rest home where he hopes to rehabilitate before resuming his normal lifestyle. His venomous attitude in no way cured by his near-fatal episode, Stefan quickly alienates everyone in the facility, and he demonstrates nothing but contempt for activities and socializing. He incarcerates himself in his own bubble of misery. But then things take a sharp turn toward the extra horrible when he becomes a target of long-time resident Dave Crealy.

The staff of Royal Pine Mews treats Dave as a typical senility case, as he always has a baby puppet on his arm named Jenny Pen, and he spends much of his time in the common area hysterically laughing at anything that is playing on the television. The truth, however, is that Dave is very, very far from typical. He knows precisely what is he doing at all times, and what he loves more than anything is cruelty. He knows all the ways to get around the rest home unimpeded, and he strolls around night after night popping into rooms to practice his own special brand of psychological and physical torture.

Accustomed to authority and being in control, Stefan derides his bully at first and doesn’t take his behavior seriously, but it doesn’t take long for him to realize that he has dangerously underestimated the man, and as his health and faculties continue to deteriorate, Dave’s abuse only escalates.

The Rule Of Jenny Pen is a mind-ripper that successfully both terrifies and horrifies.

How can an elderly man explain that someone has dumped a bag of urine in his lap when the nurses think he’s probably just incontinent and embarrassed? How can he explain shin bruises are from kicks when bumping into low tables while riding in a wheelchair is equally possible? Dave is practiced in knowing the all of the buttons he can push and where he can go and when, and the end result is that he reigns over his own private hell, and it’s both brutal and fascinating. James Ashcroft’s direction and the skillful editing by Gretchen Peterson has you wincing with each spike of pain that the monster deploys – but his violence (which includes a sequence of him wrenching and tugging on a man’s catheter that will make you instinctively cross your legs) pales next to his manipulations and emotional malice.

The Rule Of Jenny Pen’s title comes from Dave’s perverse habit of demanding that his victims first recognize the “rule” of his baby puppet and then “lick her asshole,” which involves him presenting his wrist for a tongue bath. Sick as that sounds to read, it’s much worse to see play out on screen, and it’s just one of many horrible ways that Dave plays with the patients of Royal Pine Mews as he demeans, stares, steals, and spins lies. It’s diabolical and ultimately homicidal madness… so you may be able to understand at this point how Stefan becomes acceptable as a sympathetic protagonist.

And while the torture is one thing, James Ashcroft also crafts a dense and intense atmosphere that pushes all of the terror and horror to extreme heights. Not just a victim of Dave’s abuse, Stephan is trapped in a foreign environment, isolated without help, and without possession of a fully functioning mind –which is all visually communicated with unexpected framing, crafty use of depth of field and intense editing. There is clear inspiration taken from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in the crafting of The Rule Of Jenny Pen, as Ashcroft fills Royal Pine Mews with a wicked energy reminiscent of the notorious Overlook Hotel (albeit minus elements of the supernatural).

John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush give two of most phenomenal performances of their respective careers – which is saying a hell of a lot.

The material – the script co-written by James Ashcroft and Eli Kent based on a short story by author Owen Marshall – is brilliant, and the film is cast to get the most out of it. It takes a level of bravery to take on roles like Stefan Mortensen and Dave Crealy, as audiences will never see Geoffrey Rush and John Lithgow in the same way again, but it’s wholly worth it, as their turns are unforgettable.

Wretched and callous as the judge can be, Rush also provides a respectability and nobility that really keeps the audience from finding the character wholly repugnant; rude and cold as he can be, he is relatable in his fortitude to maintain his dignity. That being said, the actor also does spellbinding and powerful work when that fortitude is put under extreme stress – discovered not only when he is being violently harassed but also failing to recover following his stroke.

As for Lithgow… holy shit. Having previously seen his performance as Arthur Mitchell in the fourth season of Dexter, I was fully aware going into The Rule Of Jenny Pen that the actor was capable of going to some terribly dark places, but Dave Crealy’s evil is so potent it goes beyond human. Even the most jaded, desensitized horror fan is going to be shocked by what Lithgow does here.

It’s really an experience that needs to be felt rather than read about – and while the movie will be streaming within the year, it’s also one that is particularly great to see with an audience full of gaspers and screamers. The Rule Of Jenny Pen is the third truly great horror film that we’ve gotten so far in 2025 following Drew Hancock’s Companion and Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey and it’s must-see for any dedicated genre fan.

So allow this to be my formal complaint about director Alex Parkinson’s Last Breath and its genre classification. The new film certainly has markings of a thriller – it’s based on a true story of survival and has life-or-death stakes play out hundreds of feet beneath the ocean – but there are exactly zero thrills to offer. It adapts the details of a harrowing event and provides audiences with a look into the dangerous world of being a saturation diver, but it’s also shockingly boring in doing so and fails to translate the terrible tension of the reality on the screen.

Parkinson previously directed the documentary of the same name from 2019, and while I admit that I have not seen that feature, I’m left imagining that the feature adaptation must hone extremely close to the facts, as it’s the only logical excuse for why the new film is as dull as it is. It features some extremely talented actors in key roles, but their personalities never evolve beyond tropes, and the film is wholly lacking in compelling narrative developments after the inciting incident. Last Breath thankfully doesn’t overplay its hand, its final cut being a brisk 93 minutes, but it’s not an entertaining way to spend an hour-and-a-half.

Finn Cole plays Chris Lemons, a young man employed in one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. He is a saturation diver, which means that he is trained to perform long term deep-sea operations, and he is tapped for his first mission to do maintenance on an oil pipeline in the North Sea. He is teamed with Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson), a veteran and paternal figure who is being forced into retirement following one last job, and David Yuasa (Simu Liu), a stoic who keeps his colleagues at a distance. After days of preparing their bodies for the literal pressure of their job, they set off to the repair site.

While Duncan stays in a diving bell secured to a support vessel on the surface, Chris and David plunge to the ocean floor. Everything goes wrong when the support vessel’s dynamic positioning system fails during a storm, and as the ship begins to drift, it results in Chris’ umbilical tether being severed. David is able to make it back to the diving bell, but his colleague is left at the oil pipeline with an extremely limited air supply. Every minute counts in finding Chris and getting him to safety, which sounds thrilling… but it’s really not.

Reality is treated as a strength by Last Breath, but it’s very much a weakness.

When filmmakers discuss diversions from reality in the making of movies “based on a true story,” the general excuse is that they aren’t making a documentary; there should be a natural understanding from the audience in the making of any narrative feature that some liberties are taken. It’s kind of a cop out, but I very much wish that there was more of that energy in Last Breath, as this is a case of the details of the true story ultimately failing to be cinematic.

I went into my screening not knowing anything about the real events that the film is based on, but being the veteran moviegoer that I am, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to be watching a story about a man who, despite the best efforts of his colleagues, tragically died on the floor of the ocean as a result of a technical failure. This in mind, my hopes for entertainment instead rested on being surprised by the inventive and compelling maneuvers by the supporting characters that would result in the protagonist being saved. This expectation was never satisfied. The most “interesting” thing that happens in the rescue mission is a crew member of the support vessel (Josef Altin) going into a server room and rewiring some cables so that the dynamic positioning system will take seconds to reboot instead of an hour. It’s a snore.

Why cast Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu if you’re not going to let them do anything?

One would think that the casting of charismatic stars like Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu would be utilized as a remedy for this narrative issue, as any conflict can be compelling if you deeply care about the characters living through it – but this is just another one of Last Breath’s shortcomings. In describing Duncan and David above, I wasn’t being purposefully brief or tactful in saving surprises for the big screen; there simply isn’t anything else more to their presented personalities. One is a blend of affable and wistful as he mentors Chris and says goodbye to a profession he loves, and the other is emotionally cold, but reveals passion in the effort to save his colleague. Harrelson and Liu (not to mention Cliff Curtis, who plays the personality-less captain for the support vessel) are capable of much more, but there is nothing for them to do with the material.

Last Breath features some interesting cinematography at least.

In collaboration with director of photography Nick Remy Matthews, Alex Parkinson utilizes diverse cinematography that adds layers of realism, with mounted cameras inside the atmosphere-adjusted pods and video from diving suits, and there are some stellar-looking sequences. The best of the runtime is following Chris after he has been untethered and is making his way back to the oil pipeline repair site – his only source of light being a flare that illuminates the water with a nightmarish red shade. It’s beautiful… but also far too brief.

I have nothing but sympathy for the trauma endured by the real people depicted in this story and respect for the rescue efforts, but as harrowing as the true events must have been, that tension is simply not properly translated as a narrative feature in Last Breath. Not all tales of rescue and defying impossible odds are cinematic unto themselves, and this film exists as proof.

Some of the bigger, goofier swings don’t quite connect as desired, and structural issues end up having a negative impact on the pacing of the story, but the film succeeds with a goofy atmosphere, strong themes, and a game cast – led by Robert Pattinson in a terrific dual performance.

Based on the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, the movie’s eponymous protagonist is Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) – a loser living in the not too distant future who finds himself in a tight spot. An attempt at starting a macaron bakery with his shifty friend Timo (Steven Yeun) results in him owing a lot of money to some extremely dangerous people, and the only option he sees to try and stay alive is to get off the planet. Learning of a mission being launched by a failed politician named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) to colonize an icy, distant planet called Niflheim, Mickey makes a deal to join the trip by becoming an expendable… but he doesn’t actually know what he is signing up for.

As it turns out, being an expendable means that his consciousness is uploaded into a computer and he is repeatedly used as a lab rat for dangerous scientific experiments. He is exposed to space radiation, infected with diseases, sent on deadly missions and more, and when he dies, his body is disposed of and a new Mickey is printed out. The lone bright spot in his miserable existence is his gifted and aggressive girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie), but things go from bad to worse when the seventeenth Mickey miraculously survives one of his horrible adventures and returns to his quarters to find that an eighteenth Mickey was printed while he was gone and presumed dead.

Mickey 17 has some standout structural problems that make it hard to get into initially.

The most frustrating aspect of Mickey 17 is the decision to employ a non-linear narrative that stymies its growth. The film begins with the titular incarnation of Mickey ready to once again face death as he has fallen into an underground tunnel on the Niflheim surface and is seemingly about to be eaten by a swarm of giant, furry bugs referred to as Creepers, and then a voice-over guided rewind takes the story back to the beginning to explain the circumstances. Instead of naturally playing out, the first act registers more as an exposition dump, and one is left waiting for the movie to catch up with itself. It’s never boring – as it’s consistently funny, you’re invited to learn about a strange future with wild new technologies, and it clearly establishes the stakes – but it’s also never as compelling as it should be because of an imbalance between telling and showing.

This issue persists after we finally catch up with Mickey and see him survive his encounter with the Creepers and make his way back to the human colony. When Mickey 17 discovers that Mickey 18 has been printed, it initiates another flashback sequence that explains why duplicates are a serious problem and that the punishment is the execution of both/all versions. Again, it’s never not entertaining, as it offers a taste of what registers as a cool bit of futuristic true crime, but it also considerably hurts the movie’s pacing.

Once the story really gets going, Mickey 17 is a delight.

Mickey 17 creates its own considerable hump to climb over, but once it gets moving, it’s delightful. Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 have divergent personalities (the former nebbish and timid, the latter angry and aggressive) that add an extra spice to their pains to not be exposed as duplicates, but their efforts ultimately find them embroiled in what feels like Bong Joon Ho’s Starship Troopers. Kenneth Marshall’s despotic ideology, zealotry, and media obsession sees him view the Creepers as disgusting lower lifeforms that must be exterminated if the humans are going to properly colonize Niflheim, but the Mickeys and Nasha come to understand a vital truth about the alien species, and they fight to make that truth heard.

The satire is far from subtle – but let’s not forget that this is coming from the same filmmaker that brought us the brilliant Snowpiercer. Mark Ruffalo steps on the gas a touch too hard, but Toni Collette nails it (espousing the wonder of sauce as the pinnacle of civilization), and they are also the tone setters for the movie’s purposeful cold and weird examination of class warfare, colonization, and modern fascism opposite the proletariat protagonists. It’s macabre, goofy, and has something to say.

Bong Joon Ho has created another weird and beautiful sci-fi world.

The film is clunky when it comes to introducing audiences to its world, but the rendering of the world itself is remarkable. Tremendous production and costume design aesthetically contrast the lives of the rich and powerful compared to the grunts of the Niflheim colony, and the technological visions are wonderful and odd – from the sleek printer that creates new Mickeys (the little stutters in the process are a particularly funny touch) to the hard drives on which an expendables consciousness is stored (a literal brick). The dual performance is executed flawlessly, with proper credit due to Robert Pattinson for a pair of dynamic turns as Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, and the creature design of the Creepers finds an ideal middle ground between horrible and adorable.

Because of its structural issues, Mickey 17 may be a movie that some find it hard to get into, but it’s also the kind of movie that will age well thanks to its immense personality, the standout style of Bong Joon Ho, and its timely satire. It’s definitely not on the same level of excellence as Parasite, but it’s still excellent in its own way.

Let’s be honest here: when a beloved character reaches its third film, there’s not a lot of confidence the quality will hold, but Paddington In Peru is here to give us the giant bear hug we felt with every comfort watch of one of its other entries. Oh, and this time around he’s deliciously gone full Indiana Jones too.

It’s somehow been seven years since the last of Paul King’s two treasured Paddington movies was released to much love and glory. For this long-awaited third entry, the writer/director who helped bring these movies to life has stepped back (King is still involved with an executive producer and has a story credit) to give newcomer director Dougal Wilson the reins. Paddington In Peru is not a major departure from the franchise or anything aside from a very notable setting switch-up and does very much stick to a formula of what has worked for the series thus far. But, hey, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and Paddington In Peru gave me all the warm and fuzzy feelings I was looking for from his return. Yes, I was crying in the best way by the end after laughing out loud at various points throughout.

Paddington In Peru dodges sequel staleness by cleverly taking the Brown family out of London this time around.

Paddington Bear and the setting of London have been very much intertwined since the origin of the character itself was named after the city’s Paddington Station back in the 1950s. But it’s truly a blast to catch up with the Brown family, consisting of Hugh Bonneville’s Henry, Madeleine Harris’ Judy, Samuel Joslin’s Jonathan, Julie Walters’ Mrs. Bird and Emily Mortimer replacing Sally Hawkins as Mary, as they get to fall into some family vacation antics. Early into the 106-minute flick, it dives right into what sends them all to darkest Peru: the bear gets word that Paddington’s Aunt Lucy has been really missing him back at home and apparently acting oddly as of late.

The Browns venture off to Peru to visit Aunt Lucy where she resides at the Home For Retired Bears. However, once they get there, Aunt Lucy has mysteriously gone missing. She has, of course, left behind some clues that take the Browns on a South American jungle adventure that, yes, involves a treasure map. While a family adventure involving secret and high-coveted locations has very much been seen a time or two in Hollywood’s past, there is a genuine intrigue that Paddington In Peru builds throughout that bobs and weaves one’s attention and suspicions in a smart-enough way as the Brown family hurriedly tries to find poor Aunt Lucy.

While Paddington being in London is certainly missed, given another Paddington movie is teased by the end of the movie, it’s welcome to see the franchise take a twist in its storytelling and have the Brown family attempt to solve the mystery in a foreign setting. As the Browns do venture to Peru, the production does an impeccable job of immersing the audience in this elevated storybook world that Paddington lives in, where everything is a tad cartoonish and sugary but also visually believable. Paddington always feels like a bear who is walking around and fumbling alongside his human co-stars, which isn’t always the case with a CGI main character. And Ben Whinshaw’s sweet, but sincere performance as the bear continues to be a beautiful match.

The addition of Antonio Banderas and Olivia Colman add a particularly whimsical and fun feel to the Paddington sequel.

Two bright spots of the threequel that bring even more excitement to the flick is the addition of Olivia Colman and Antonio Banderas in new roles. Following in suit with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant’s villainous turns in the previous Paddington movies, these stars are absolutely delightful in a more whimsical font than we are used to seeing from them. Colman charms off the bat with her very own musical number at the Home of Retired Bears as the place’s Reverend Mother, who is more than the conservative outfit lets on. Colman’s character has a bright but quite creepy aura about her, that has one questioning where the alliances lie until it's ultimately revealed.

Antonio Banderas, on the other hand, plays the captain of the boat the Browns hire to look for Aunt Lucy, which he shares with his daughter Gina (Carla Tous). Banderas is most definitely having so much fun in the role, that also has more shades to him than meets the eye, and it feels like the kind of role that not only fits right into his filmography, but makes one appreciate his talent and range further. As the movie goes along its adventure, it also feels like a fun ode on the Indiana Jones movies –massive rolling boulder and all. It doesn’t pull on that franchise too vastly to feel like a parody, but very much follows some notes from those classics that will amuse previous generations looking to be wrapped up in a little blanket of nostalgia on top of the comfort that makes up a Paddington movie already.

The third Paddington movie makes for another sweet comfort movie about the power of family.

Since the Paddington films themselves started with the bear growing up in darkest Peru, bringing him back to his roots in the jungle after two adventures abroad is not only a smart choice to shake things up but to deepen the storyline and origin of the character. When it comes down to it, some of the intentions of Paddington In Peru can feel a bit on the nose, but it’s completely forgivable due to the sharp delivery of its hilarious dialogue, humorous gags and sweet and citrusy notes regarding the importance of family, especially as one grows up and branches outside the roots they started in.

Paddington In Peru ultimately feels like one of those movies that one can feel like the cup of warm and soothing tea one could use at any age or stage of life. It’s perhaps a tad simpler and less distinct than Paddington 2 is scale and scope, but a return to form from the original that cements the Paddington trilogy as a very solid run of family films.

That was over a decade ago, however, and now, the MCU is in a very different state. There have certainly been successes in the last five years, but the overall quality in the output has significantly changed, and there have been some major bumps in the road in the construction of the latest big picture plan. Director Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World arrives amid what is described in Deadpool & Wolverine as “a bit of a low point” for the franchise, and while one might hope that it would be the film that would help right the ship, it’s a mission that the blockbuster isn’t able to accomplish – mostly because it feels dedicated to providing more of “the same” without offering even an iota of “new” (rendering the title unintentionally ironic).

It’s a movie that feels desperate to capture the energy and intense magic of the aforementioned Captain America: The Winter Solider, but it’s a whiffed effort – both in the construction of its story and execution. The 2014 film shocked with its epic, canon-changing twists and dazzled with edge-of-your-seat action, but the latest MCU feature has none of that. Instead, the audience is perpetually way ahead of the characters on plot developments, rendering the pacing deathly slow, and there isn’t a single standout set piece (a symptom of uninspired fight choreography and an overreliance on visual effects).

Having accepted the mantle of Captain America following the events of Avengers: Endgame and the series The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) is reintroduced to audiences in a new costume leading missions for the United States military, and the film begins with him playing an outsized role in global affairs when he is able to retrieve and return highly valuable materials stolen from the Japanese government. It’s a key step in the efforts from President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford) to forge an international treaty that will facilitate the sharing of a rare resource discovered in the mining of the Celestial that has partially emerged from the Indian Ocean (if you’re confused, go rewatch the end of Eternals).

During a White House presentation in which President Ross states his case for the treaty, however, an assassination attempt is made with multiple gunman – one of whom is Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), the first man to ever receive the super soldier serum that turned Steve Rogers into Captain America back in the 1940s. Isaiah is arrested and potentially facing the death penalty for his actions, but he swears that he is innocent, and Sam makes it his mission to clear his name and find out what is really going on.

Captain America: Brave New World spoon-feeds what is a very basic story.

To give you an idea of how slow and dull Captain America: Brave New World plays things, despite the fact that there is a random song that plays in the room right before the assassination attempt and the fact that Isaiah has no recollection of the events that transpire it takes the film almost a full hour a.k.a. half of its runtime to bring up the idea that he was the victim of mind-control – and things definitely don’t get any smarter from there.

The target audience for it is ultimately oxymoronic: it’s a movie that demands remembrance of key details from The Incredible Hulk, The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, and Eternals (by themselves not exactly the most celebrated titles in the canon), but those same geeks must also be wholly ignorant about the movie itself (you can’t know who is in the cast or pay attention to any of the marketing). Simply knowing that Tim Blake Nelson is in it deflates any sense of mystery or suspense from the cinematic experience, and the full plot doesn’t offer any extra layers into which one can properly sink their teeth. Every story development is incredibly basic, a shallower version of something we’ve seen in a previous MCU film, spoiled in the trailers, or all of the above.

The action in Captain America: Brave New World is dulled by an over-reliance on visual effects.

When working with a script like this one, a tent pole blockbuster’s fallback for entertainment value should be high-powered action, but that’s another swing-and-a-miss for Captain America: Brave New World. There are a couple of hand-to-hand fights that give the stars opportunity to show off some skills, but there is also a notable lack of innovation or signature moments to provide unique flair (certainly nothing anywhere near the level of the jaw-dropping street battle between the titular characters in Captain America: The Winter Soldier). As unremarkable as they are, however, they at least feel somewhat real – which is more than can be said for the film’s bigger sequences.

What makes Sam Wilson different from Steve Rogers as Captain America is the fact that he is outfitted with a suit that allows him to fly, but his first solo movie not only lacks any interesting aerial cinematography, but feels far too artificial. Whether he’s dogfighting with some jets in a war zone or doing battle with Red Hulk in Washington D.C., photorealism proves not enough to add proper substance.

The characters and personalities are the highlights of Captain America: Brave New World.

The saving grace of Captain America: Brave New World is its characters: while one may not feel particularly hooked into the plot developments or the action, one at least doesn’t mind spending time with the protagonists. Anthony Mackie knows Sam Wilson perfectly at this point, and once again finds the right blend of affable, determined, and emotionally accessible. Harrison Ford gets to play new levels to Thaddeus Ross that William Hurt never got the opportunity to try. That MVP award, however, goes to Danny Ramirez as Joaquin Torres a.k.a. Falcon, who straps into a super suit for the first time and is a delight. As stale as the movie gets, Ramirez has a charisma that reminds audiences about the energy of the MCU with which fans originally fell in love.

Overall, Captain America: Brave New World is a film that significantly shakes my confidence in the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The canon hit lows in 2023 on both the big screen and the small with Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania and Secret Invasion, but with just a little over a year left until the arrival of the next Avengers blockbuster (namely Avengers: Doomsday), I was hopeful that the fourth Captain America movie would be able to set things on a solid path. It doesn’t. It’s so insistent on trying to recapture the MCU energy of the past that it fails to offer anything fresh, and it represents a wrong direction for the beloved franchise.

It has a distinct and welcomed flavor in the subgenre of “ordinary guy turns out to be an elite ass-kicker,” and it has an effective buoyancy that can in part be credited to the charisma of its two biggest stars, but it’s too brisk for its own good and leaves too much on the table. I surprise even myself bemoaning brevity in an age of bloat, but Love Hurts is also just too thin to do everything that it wants to do.

Doing a bit of well-earned post-Oscar strutting with his first lead role in a feature film, Ke Huy Quan stars as Marvin Gable, an infinitely affable and kind Wisconsinite realtor who finds true joy in his ability to help people find their perfect new home. It’s a life that he is passionate about… and one that is threatened to be completely torn down when he receives a very special Valentine’s Day card in the mail.

Years before, Marvin worked as a violent enforcer for his crime boss brother Alvin 'Knuckles' Gable (Daniel Wu), but he was given his freedom from the job in exchange for executing suspected traitor Rose Carlisle (Ariana DeBose). Marvin spared her life in exchange for a promise that she would disappear forever, but when she breaks her word while orchestrating her own mission of revenge, the protagonist sees himself targeted by his sibling so that Knuckles can get to Rose before Rose gets to him.

There is too much of the familiar in Love Hurts, and it outshines its doses of originality.

The biggest issue with Love Hurts can be described as a balance problem – which extends from the primary plot being a story that audiences have seen variations of dozens of times in the modern era since the release of Taken in 2009. At this point in the history of the action genre, I find it a challenge to get too excited about a likable, seemingly average guy proving himself a wild badass (even when that character is played by someone as disarming and wonderful as Ke Huy Quan).

But you know what I haven’t seen a lot of? An aimless and depressed assistant at a real estate firm (Lio Tipton) who reads a book of original poetry and thus falls in love with a knife-and-dart chucking assassin who has been hired to kill her boss (Mustafa Shakir). I’m likewise compelled by the crime boss goon who is distracted from his job because of the potential dissolution of his marriage. These are fun B-plots, but they don’t get the attention they deserve while the film focuses on the familiar.

Love Hurts gives Ke Huy Quan a role he was born to play, but I wanted more of Ariana DeBose.

Well-treaded as the main plot may be, Love Hurts does successfully get the most out of Ke Huy Quan. It’s a trope character in the genre, but it’s also the kind of role that the actor is too perfectly suited to play at this point in his career. In addition to his impressive physical skills (previously on display in Everything Everywhere All At Once), his enthusiasm is effervescent, expressed as Marvin finds absolute joy in the life that he has managed to create for himself after earning freedom from his brother. His emotional display after winning a realtor of the year prize could feel goofy or cynical from another performer, but Quan has a genuine quality that makes your heart swell (and making only sweeter is that the sequence is that the character receives the award from his boss played by former Goonies co-star Sean Astin).

Love Hurts knows exactly what it has in Ke Huy Quan, but it also doesn’t give us nearly enough of Ariana DeBose’s Rose, with the character operating from the shadows for most of the story. When we do get to spend time with her, there is a dangerous spirit that can be recognized (getting a little too excited when discussing chopping off a former associate’s finger, for example), but it’s not an element that gets nearly enough exploration.

Without anything mind-blowing, Love Hurts features a number of fun fight sequences featuring cinematic flair.

Being an 87North production, Love Hurts’ big overall draw is its stunt work and fight sequences. In this regard, it doesn’t disappoint, but it also doesn’t elevate the mediocre script. There is an amusing and well-executed evolution in Marvin’s physicality, as a defensive approach becomes more aggressive as he gets further pulled into his old world, and Jonathan Eusebio demonstrates flair as a first time director – his best idea coming during a second act combat in a kitchen with a camera angle from inside a refrigerator.

The simple existence of Love Hurts as an original action movie in the modern landscape is nice, with so much of the genre dominated by franchises, but it’s too lean and too safe to make the impact it wants to make. It’s entertaining but underwhelming, and breezy but limited.

In 49 years since the release of Brian De Palma’s Carrie, Stephen King adaptations have existed in wide variety of forms and genres, and I have personally seen them all. That being said, never before have we seen something like Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey: a terrific blend of pitch black sensibilities, a wickedly wry sense of humor, and epic body mutilation. It’s utterly bonkers and a wild riot.

It’s far from the most faithful take on King’s work, as details from the short story are picked and chosen to build what is a wholly original narrative, but like its source material, it’s a freaky tale chalk full of death. It trips up a bit in the third act as a result of the antagonist plot being on the thin side, but it’s otherwise so disgustingly delightful and entertaining that it’s easy to look past its shortcomings and appreciate everything it does well in its own crazy way.

The Monkey begins in the late 1990s and introduces Hal (Christian Convery) and Bill (Christian Convery), teenage identical twin brothers who live with their single mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany) and totally hate each other – with Bill being an obnoxious bully and Hal being a constant victim. While searching through their absconded father’s closet one day, they find a freaky wind-up monkey toy that comes with simple instructions: “Turn the key and see what happens.” They do, and they discover that the nightmarish trick to the thing is that whenever it activates, somebody dies a horrible death.

The cursed toy rips through Hal and Bill’s family, and while it’s contained for a time when its chained up and dumped down a well, it makes a triumphant, horrifying return a quarter century later. Now a traumatized adult, Hal (Theo James) is petrified of having anyone in his life – including his son Petey (Colin O’Brien), who he only sees one day a year. When he learns that Petey’s stepdad (Elijah Wood) is going to adopt him outright and sever ties, Hal agrees to take his kid on a road trip as a final hurrah to their relationship, but their adventure gets sidetracked when the protagonist gets word of a horrible accident and realizes that the monkey toy has somehow returned.

Osgood Perkins presents a fascinating mix of extreme horror and comedy with The Monkey.

Osgood Perkins’ filmography to this point has clearly demonstrated his affection for the macabre, but that interest is channeled in The Monkey in a way wholly different than last year’s Longlegs, and there’s a dark giddiness that’s infectious. While recognizing the deep emotional scars that death leaves, the movie is equipped with a blunt awareness that we all depart this mortal coil at some point, and the random chaos of it might as well be expressed in ridiculous Rube Goldberg-esque machinations that leave human beings looking like (to borrow parlance from the film) somebody drop-kicked a cherry pie. Bizarre circumstances repeatedly turn people into bloody piles of viscera, and it never stops being funny.

Orchestrating these unholy “accidents” is a deft hand. Perkins delights in showing the audience all of the puzzle pieces of horror and letting you mentally try to click them into place – and whether you get exactly what you expect or a curveball is thrown into the mix, you feel perfectly satisfied with its cleverness. It’s ridiculous enough to be funny, but grounded enough to feel twisted, and it’s a rare but delectable flavor.

The Monkey has wisdom about death to share amid all of the gory madness.

Principally, The Monkey is designed as an outrageous horror comedy, but it also slings a bit of depth in for good measure. Though the Bill side of the plot ultimately feels undercooked (fully explaining why would unfortunately breach into spoiler territory), the movie successfully wields commentary about the impact of childhood trauma with the diverting paths of its main characters: Hal has a life committed to running from the past, and his estranged twin is obsessed with running back to it. The story is about the former failing and the latter succeeding, creating a framework for growth and madness.

Pulling off such a dual role isn’t simple, but both Christian Convery and Theo James demonstrated awesome range in showcasing two extremely different personalities, and there is successful synchronicity in performances as Hal and Bill grow from teens to adults. The “twins” are the stars, but one of the many charms of the film is its casting: small characters quickly come in and out of the story but showcase eccentricities that make them effortlessly memorable – from Elijah Wood’s Ted, who is willing to gamble parenthood of Petey with an arm wrestling match, to Nicco Del Rio as a stoner pastor who, to put it gently, definitely doesn’t have the emotional bandwidth to address a church full of mourners during a funeral.

Various pieces of The Monkey feel reminiscent of everything from Final Destination to The Addams Family to Child’s Play, but when combined, it very much becomes its own thing, and audiences tuned into its disturbing/gross frequency are going to have a ball. Between it and Drew Hancock’s fantastic, twist-filled Companion, horror fans already have a great deal to celebrate in 2025, and we can only hope that all of the other Stephen King adaptations coming out this year match its awesome quality.

Save for its big ending, which does add some emotion and message into the mix, Dog Man is a wholly unserious film, but it’s also earnest and consistent in its ridiculousness. It’s not a font of wit or cleverness, and it principally functions on animal/police tropes for its humor, but it subverts those flaws with a diverting innocence. Its greatest quality is that it fully commits to its silliness, but it’s a silliness that feels exclusively for kids.

Based on author/artist Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants spinoff of the same name, the titular human-animal hybrid is created when police officer Knight and his trusty dog Greg are involved in a bomb detonation during a pursuit of the nefarious Petey The Cat (Pete Davidson). Surgeons attach Greg’s head to Officer Knight’s body to create the new super cop Dog Man (Peter Hastings). The protagonist is successfully able to catch Petey, but the orange-and-black feline is constantly able to find new ways to escape prison, and the blame for these escapes is nonsensically put on the hero who keeps catching him. Responding to outrage from the mayor (Cheri Oteri), the police chief (Lil Rel Howery) takes Dog Man off the case.

While hiding out in his lair, Petey devises all manners of trying to dispatch of his nemesis, from a robot that fires exploding squirrels to giant vacuum cleaner. But his principal plans come together with him first trying to clone himself to create a perfect assistant – resulting in the creation of the young, goodhearted Li’l Petey (Lucas Hopkins) – and then trying to reengineer and revivify Flippy (Ricky Gervais), a dead fish with telekinetic powers.

Dog Man is hyperactive in its storytelling, constantly flipping around and throwing around new ideas.

Crafting a simple story that young audiences can easily follow is one route a filmmaker can take, but Peter Hastings opts to go in the exact opposite direction – launching a constant barrage of ideas at the screen (if the kids don’t react to one bit, there’s another one coming seconds later). The various plots are built with backup plots that all stack on top of each other: Dog Man repeatedly find and capture Petey, who is simultaneously executing both the clone and Flippy plans, and while Li’l Petey ends up being cared for by Dog Man, who is deeply lonely, Petey gets put off his game by the arrival of his estranged dad (Stephen Root). And that’s without mentioning the conflict between Dog Man and Chief, who is in love with a local news report named Sarah Hatoff (Isla Fisher).

It’s a lot to throw at kids, particularly given that all of this is jammed into an 89 minute runtime – but I will say that it manages to mostly pull everything together in the third act to provide a satisfying conclusion.

Cute canine antics in Dog Man will delight younger audiences,

Young audiences may have a touch of trouble following along with everything that’s happening in Dog Man, but as they keep all of the puzzle pieces together in their minds, they will regardless find plenty to giggle at. If there’s a cute or funny thing that you love about our canine companions, you can be sure that it gets a joke or a reference in the film, from over-enthusiastic pouncing and slobbering to rolling around on dead things to antipathy towards postal workers. It’s akin to a PG version of the R-rated comedy Strays from 2023 in that way and it’s a well that dries up pretty quick for anyone who has spent multiple decades watching dogs get used for laughs in comedies.

Dog Man does a tremendous job adapting the artistic style of Dav Pilkey.

Devotees to the work of Dav Pilkey will certainly be pleased, as Dog Man is a wonderful cinematic explosion of his beloved, auteur style. While I’ll be upfront and note that I didn’t see 2017’s Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, my point of comparison would be The Peanuts Movie from two years prior, which likewise did a tremendous job translating a well-known aesthetic from 2D into 3D. Handwritten (and often misspelled) signs maintain the charm of Pilkey’s art while the animators delightfully render a world that in no way feels realistic – in design or physics – but has a wonderful tactile quality that provides vibrancy.

I recall seeing a number of movies like Dog Man when I was a kid. After seeing these titles in theaters and laughing like wild, it would become a light obsession: I’d cut out reviews and ads from newspapers and scenes would be recreated with my friends at recess. But then a month would pass, and I would find a new TV show or film to mildly obsess over. For kids, it won’t make a massive impact and become a modern classic, but it certainly will entertain.