The silver screen shield has officially been passed from Steve Rogers to Sam Wilson with Captain America: Brave New World, the first MCU movie with Anthony Mackie in the titular role. It’s been almost four years since the Disney+ miniseries The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, which set up the transition, and any inertia or excitement that show built up has largely been dissipated in the time since. It’s perhaps not a surprise, then, that this movie feels like it’s been pulled in a thousand different directions through its development and the result is about as inorganic an artistic endeavor as Marvel Studios has put in theaters thus far. Despite its subtitle, there’s very little “brave” or “new” about this film and whatever emerging “world” it’s ushering us into isn’t particularly enticing.

After stopping a sale of classified materials in Mexico, Captain America/Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) is invited to the White House by newly-elected President Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford, replacing the late William Hurt in the role). He tells Sam he’d like to form a new group of Avengers but that plan is put on hold when an attempt is made on Ross’ life later that same evening. Despite Ross’ insistence that he wants his team, led by security advisor Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas), to investigate the assassination attempt, Sam goes poking around with the help of the new Falcon (Danny Ramirez). Their efforts put them in the crosshairs of the special ops team Serpent Society, led by the ruthless Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito), but their mission uncovers an even deeper conspiracy.

It’s a shame that Brave New World is such a mess of plot holes and logic gaps because Anthony Mackie steps up to the challenge dutifully and gives his best performance so far as Sam Wilson. One of the film’s many themes and throughlines is about the pressure of taking over the mantle of an iconic hero and the imposter syndrome that Wilson feels in the process. There’s a muted subtext about the added pressure that is placed on Black artists when they enter the spotlight that applies to both Wilson the character and Mackie the actor. He more than holds his own in his scenes with Harrison Ford but is even better building rapport with Danny Ramirez and Carl Lumbly, the latter of whom plays a superpowered war vet who is mistreated by the government. I wish the movie had more time for them as a trio.

Instead, director Julius Onah and his four credited co-screenwriters are busy dredging up storylines from subpar MCU outings like Eternals and The Incredible Hulk in addition to the already convoluted political thriller plotline. Like Thor: Ragnarok before it, not only has the marketing for Brave New World spoiled the inclusion of a Hulk character in the film but the ads have leaned into a Captain America vs. Red Hulk showdown as much as possible. It’s deflating that we’re already seen much of the climactic battle, especially when we realize the film doesn’t have much else to offer in terms of story or spectacle. Given that, my favorite action sequence involves Captain America and Falcon intercepting two rogue pilots as they fire missiles at a Japanese fleet, which deftly captures the exhilaration of aerial combat.

If you look at a film like Captain America: The First Avenger, which also has the titular hero squaring against a red baddie, it took the time to develop who Steve Rogers was before and after taking the super soldier serum. Captain America: Brave New World doesn’t have the same obligation to an origin story but ultimately, Sam Wilson feels secondary to the plot machinations. In other words, this doesn’t feel like a project that had Captain America at its center during its development. It’s more concerned with resolving loose ends that no one cares about and setting up prospects for future episodes, including one subplot that hints at a revision of X-Men’s Wolverine. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has produced worse films than Captain America: Brave New World but I can’t think of one more fragmented or scatterbrained.

Score – 2/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Monkey, a horror comedy starring Theo James and Tatiana Maslany, about a pair of twin brothers who witness a string of horrifying deaths unfolding around them, seemingly at the hands of their father’s vintage toy monkey.
Also playing in theaters is The Unbreakable Boy, a drama based on a true story starring Zachary Levi and Meghann Fahy, telling the tale of a young boy with both a rare brittle-bone disease and autism, whose life-affirming world view that transforms everyone around him.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is The Gorge, a sci-fi action movie starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy, involving two elite snipers who are assigned a mysterious mission: to guard either side of a deep and impenetrable chasm, without knowing what actually lies beneath them.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Arriving just in time for Valentine’s Day, the romcom slasher Heart Eyes succeeds most by staying true to its unique combination of subgenres. It’s genuinely romantic, consistently funny and certainly has the gory coups de grâce one would expect from a straight-ahead serial killer horror movie. There are plenty of horror comedies, there are even several slashers set on Cupid’s favorite holiday, but this film is clever enough to carve out its own niche. Co-written by Christopher Landon, who’s shaken up the horror comedy genre with Freaky and the Happy Death Day series, this outing does poke fun at romantic comedy tropes but mainly wears its heart on its sleeve. All of director Josh Ruben’s features thus far, including Scare Me and Werewolves Within, have been horror comedies and good ones at that.

Opening with a botched proposal at a winery that turns into a gruesome double murder, Heart Eyes introduces us to its titular baddie, a masked murderer the news media has dubbed the Heart Eyes Killer. Every February 14th, the HEK terrorizes couples in a different metropolitan area and this year, Seattle is on their list. There, advertising designer Ally (Olivia Holt) produces a jewelry campaign that hits a sour note with her boss Crystal (Michaela Watkins), prompting the latter to hire freelancer Jay (Mason Gooding) to play clean up. Forced to work together on the most romantic night of the year, Ally and Jay meet for dinner to exchange ideas but their personalities clash immediately. HEK spots them leaving the restaurant and mistakes them for significant others celebrating, sending Ally and Jay’s night in a deadly new direction.

Like its central characters, Heart Eyes wrestles with the notion of what old-fashioned romance can look like in a tech-saturated world where a new date is just a touchscreen swipe away. Originally wanting a career in nursing but settling for advertising, Ally has always put her career first and often snuffs out flickers of romance before they can kindle. Jay, on the other hand, is more of a softie, falling in love fast and hard before really getting to know them first as a person. Their backgrounds put them in prime position to butt heads on their first “date”, Jay trying and failing to open Ally up with questions about her life in Seattle. Of course we’re seen this trope before — two opposite personalities getting off on the wrong foot but eventually warming to one another — but the actors sell it all the same.

As we know, romance movies live or die on the strength of the chemistry between the leads and Heart Eyes certainly has an excellent duo at the heart of its story. Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding both have experience in the slasher genre, the former in 2023’s Totally Killer and the latter in the past couple Scream entries. In between bouts of peril with the Heart Eyes Killer, Ally and Jay find themselves gradually falling for one another while running for their lives. Hiding in a van watching His Girl Friday at a drive-in theater, the two tenderly unpack how their respective upbringings informed their views on relationships and romance. We don’t just want these two to survive the night; we want them to thrive as an unlikely couple who got off on a rocky start.

Lest one think that Heart Eyes collapses under the weight of excessive mushiness, the movie delivers both in terms of killer wit and creative kills at the hands of the HEK. The late 90s country hit “Amazed” is utilized in an early scene that pokes fun both at the awfulness of Lonestar’s song and at how men sometimes opt for bottom shelf originality when it comes to romantic gestures. Ally’s best friend Monica, played by Gigi Zumbado, gets off quite a few zingers, as when she tells Ally “you look like a ‘before’ photo” before her meet-up with Jay. Elsewhere, two detectives, played by horror veterans Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster, end up on the receiving end of an unexpected Fast & Furious homage. Slashers aren’t typically thought of as date night movies but Heart Eyes is a solid pick for couples looking for something to watch after a candlelit dinner this weekend.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming only to theaters is Captain America: Brave New World, a Marvel movie starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford, in which the titular superhero finds himself at the center of an international incident involving the newly-elected President Of The United States.
Also playing in theaters is Paddington In Peru, a family comedy starring Hugh Bonneville and Emily Mortimer, which finds Paddington returning to Peru to visit his beloved Aunt Lucy and a thrilling adventure ensues when a mystery plunges them into an unexpected journey.
Premiering on Peacock is Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, a romcom starring Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant, about a widow and single mom whose dating life is thrown through a loop when she’s pursued by a younger man but also has feelings for her son’s science teacher.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

The new Steven Soderbergh film Presence is a ghost story, albeit an unconventional one. It can’t be neatly described as a horror movie or even a thriller, genre-wise fitting in most closely to a supernatural family drama. The events of the film are shown entirely from the perspective of what we come to find is a displaced spirit that seems to reside within a house built in the early 20th century. As is the case for the past dozen or so projects that Soderbergh has directed, he also serves as editor and, especially important this time around, as cinematographer as well. Regardless of what one thinks of Soderbergh — candidly, he’s one of my favorite living filmmakers — it’s difficult to deny he’s one of the hardest-working storytellers in Hollywood.

Though Presence isn’t a scary movie, it does start out like traditional horror fare. We see a real estate agent, played by Julia Fox, arrive at a newly listed house just ahead of a family interested in snatching it off the market. Soon, Rebecca (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) arrive with their two teenage children Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang) and before long, they’re all moved in. As we spend more time with the family, we see fractures in the relationship between Rebecca and Chris, while Chloe has become more reclusive after the unexpected death of her best friend. Eager to become popular at their new school district, Tyler invites swim teammate Ryan (West Mulholland) over to sneak drinks from mom’s liquor cabinet and he soon takes interest in Chloe.

Presence is the second collaboration between Soderbergh and blockbuster screenwriter David Koepp, their first being the excellent covid-era thriller Kimi and their next being Black Bag, set to release this March. Since the visual storytelling is limited to the vantage point of the titular “presence”, Koepp’s script is crucial in filling us in on what’s going on with this family and how this poltergeist fits into it. Though the dialogue can seem a bit too forced or on-the-nose at times, it nevertheless gives us what we need to attach ourselves to these characters. There are also several exchanges whose resonance doesn’t fully land until after the film’s ending; “there is an excellent man inside of you, Tyler; I would love to see him soon,” Chris chides his son after the latter mistreats his sister.

Another Soderbergh staple is working with smaller casts that are mixed with both recognizable faces and actors with more limited resumes. The latter, in this case, applies to Eddy Maday and West Mulholland, who give performances that initially read as “slack-jawed jock” but are given layers as the story progresses. The standout of the better-known actors is Chris Sullivan, playing a father at his wit’s end trying to remedy his daughter’s sadness and his son’s arrogance. I wish that Lucy Liu’s character had a bit more development — there are implications that whatever her character does for work isn’t on the up-and-up but never explicitly told what it is — but she gets a scene of walloping emotion towards the end.

Compared to other releases from the distributor Neon over the next few months, Presence is much more subtle and subdued. During the pre-roll for the movie, trailers played for upcoming titles The Monkey and Hell Of A Summer, both bombastic splatterfests that fit in better with the brand of iconoclastic product Neon tends to put out. In an effort to market Soderbergh’s latest, they’ve mimicked competitor A24’s style with off-kilter violin stabs and pull quotes that pitch it as a terrifying horror film and even “one of the scariest movies you’ll see this year”. Anyone who goes into Presence with that expectation will be disappointed but if you’re up for a quietly haunting tale about regret and redemption, then you’ll want to be present for this one.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Companion, a horror film starring Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid, that follows a weekend getaway among friends at a remote cabin, which unravels into chaos after one of the guests has a startling revelation about themselves.
Also playing in theaters is Dog Man, an animated superhero comedy starring Pete Davidson and Lil Rel Howery, following a faithful police dog and his human police officer owner who are injured together on the job but a life-saving surgery fuses the two of them together.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is You’re Cordially Invited, a romcom starring Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon, about two weddings that are double-booked at the same venue, causing the father of one bride and the sister of the other bride to try and preserve the wedding weekend.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Released right before the pandemic shut theaters down worldwide, Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man was a smart, suspenseful and successful reimagining of the 1933 Universal Monsters classic. Five years later, Whannell has adapted a similar tack for Wolf Man, a redo of the lycanthrope-centric chiller from 1941. While updating horror properties from that era isn’t necessarily a bad plan, this latest entry proves that having the same filmmaker continue to refresh them may not be the best way forward. Originally, this project was to star Ryan Gosling, with his two-time collaborator Derek Cianfrance to direct, and while it’s difficult to know how that would’ve turned out, it’s not hard to imagine a comparatively more challenging result creatively.

Wolf Man centers around the San Francisco-based Lovell family, with Charlotte (Julia Garner) working long hours in the city as a journalist, while Blake (Christopher Abbott) serves as stay-at-home dad to their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). Blake gets word that his estranged father Grady (Sam Jaeger) has been officially declared dead after going missing near his home in rural Oregon and in an effort to settle his affairs, the three make the trip up north together. En route, their moving truck crashes in the woods and though everyone makes it out alive, Blake sustains a scratch from an unseen creature while in the wilderness. The Lovells make it on foot to Grady’s secluded house but as the night goes on, Blake gradually turns into something monstrous and dangerous for Charlotte and Ginger.

A prologue that depicts a younger Blake and Grady on a hunting trip in the mid-90s seems to set up Wolf Man‘s would-be thesis about parental responsibility and cycles of generational emotional damage. Unfortunately, Leigh Whannell and his co-scribe Corbett Tuck aren’t able to marry those themes to the material nearly as well as Whannell did previously in The Invisible Man. Instead, most of the movie falls into tired body horror tropes as Blake loses human trappings like fingernails and teeth, while Charlotte and Ginger look on wide-eyed and worried. Whannell throws in the occasional curveball, as when Blake’s hearing is amplified to the degree that a spider crawling on a wall comes through to him as thunderous thumping sounds, but there aren’t enough of those to keep his transformation interesting.

The majority of Wolf Man is in the hands of Abbott, Garner and Firth while they’re holed up in the farm house and while they’re all doing their best, the script gives them very little much to work with. Abbott is a talented actor but even he can’t find a way to make his character break through as his speech breaks down and the werewolf prosthetics pile on. Garner is even more underserved here, saddled with an underwritten wife role that completely squanders the commendable range she displayed in much better movies like The Assistant and The Royal Hotel. Though Abbott and Garner are portraying characters who are struggling with a strained marriage, it doesn’t help that the actors really don’t have any chemistry with one another that makes them worth rooting for.

Once Blake goes full lupine, Wolf Man crawls through familiar horror beats where mother and daughter run and hide from the scary monster that has emerged. While there are occasionally tense moments, Whannell and his cinematographer Stefan Duscio too often opt for dimly-lit scenes that don’t clearly present the characters’ struggle. There are certainly interesting ways to use lighting — or an absence of light — in horror movies, but nearly every scene in the second half of this movie made me want to crank the screen’s brightness slider to the right. It’s possible this could’ve been intentional to cover up the stodgy and stilted computer-generated effects, which don’t look nearly as convincing as the laudable makeup work. Universal will no doubt keep reviving their Classic Monster lineup but this Wolf Man would’ve been better left in its cage.

Score – 2/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, is a period drama about a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and immigrates to the United States, where he struggles to achieve the American Dream until a wealthy client changes his life.
Inheritance, starring Phoebe Dynevor and Rhys Ifans, is an espionage thriller about a young woman who is drawn into an international conspiracy after discovering her father is a spy.
Flight Risk, starring Mark Wahlberg and Topher Grace, is an action film about a pilot who transports an Air Marshal and a fugitive to trial but they cross the Alaskan wilderness, tensions soar as not everyone on board is who they seem.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Filed neatly between Cruel Intentions 2 and Dumb And Dumber To in the “Unexpected Sequels” drawer, Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera comes seven years after the Gerard Butler-fronted action thriller Den Of Thieves. It seems time has mellowed the now-franchise a bit, as the first entry was a much more brash and bawdy bank robbery saga, while Pantera generally plays things a bit cooler and more collected. A change of setting could be mainly responsible for the shift, the predecessor a gritty cops and robbers tale out of Los Angeles and the successor a Rififi riff centered in France’s World Diamond District. Crucially, returning players Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. get much more screen time together and mine terrific chemistry with each other. I didn’t know I needed a Den Of Thieves sequel but after seeing Pantera, I’d certainly welcome another.

As teased at the end of Den Of Thieves, Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera finds wheelman-turned-criminal mastermind Donnie Wilson (Jackson Jr.) overseas on the hunt for world-class jewelry. His latest hold-up at an Antwerp airport puts him back on the radar of “Big Nick” O’Brien (Butler), still out to find the culprits of the Federal Reserve robbery from the previous film. A trip across the pond confirms Nick’s suspicion that Donnie has indeed moved his operation to Europe but when the two meet, Nick claims he’s left the LA Sheriff’s Department behind and wants in on Donnie’s latest score. After some initial reluctance, Donnie invites Nick to join his band of “Panthers” to knock off the vault of the World Diamond Center in a heavily guarded sector of Nice, France.

An area that Den Of Thieves largely falters that the superior sequel streamlines is in the character development between the beats of planning the central heist. Donnie was very much a side character in the first movie, while Nick’s character moments were couched in cop clichés, exemplified by a lengthy scene where he drunkenly confronts his soon-to-be ex-wife about recently-served divorce papers. Pantera finds more success in having these two characters initially parlay with hesitancy but gradually find partnership in their shared experiences on opposite sides of the law. Does it really seem likely that Nick would team up with Donnie after the events of Den Of Thieves? Put frankly: not really. But Butler and Jackson Jr. make their time together electric enough that it doesn’t matter much.

Writer/director Christian Gudegast also lets us in more this time when it comes to the details of how the thieves are going to go about their mission. While dazzling, the extended robbery sequence in Den Of Thieves gets quite convoluted and it can be easy to lose track of what exactly is going according to plan and what isn’t. Pantera‘s major setpiece occurs around the hour-and-a-half mark and by that point, we’ve been treated to numerous insert shots and voiceovers relaying how the Panther crew is intending for things to go down. The break-in is either very quiet or completely silent but thanks to the groundwork established by Gudegast and terrific editing from Roberth Nordh, the heist is both easy to follow and unbearably tense at the same time.

Although it doesn’t always feel its length, Pantera almost scrapes up against the two-and-a-half hour runtime marker and could certainly have some fat trimmed to make the rest of the movie as exciting as the climactic burglary. Den Of Thieves had a similar issue at 140 minutes but the extraneous scenes there — most obviously one where Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s character shakes down his daughter’s prom date — seem much easier to pick out. Pantera certainly isn’t without the occasional macho posturing carried over from the original but on the whole, it’s a more mature and thoughtfully-constructed crime caper that ends with another cliffhanger. The Den might not have felt as cozy on the first go ’round but with Pantera, Christian Gudegast has welcomed in action aficionados the world over with open arms.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Opening in theaters is Wolf Man, a horror film starring Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner, following a family at a remote farmhouse who is attacked by an unseen animal and as the night stretches on, the father begins to transform into something unrecognizable.
Also playing only in theaters is One Of Them Days, a buddy comedy starring Keke Palmer and SZA, about a young woman and her roommate who race against the clock to avoid eviction and keep their friendship intact when the former’s boyfriend takes their rent money.
Streaming on Netflix is Back In Action, an action comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx, revolving around a duo of former CIA spies who are pulled back into the world of espionage after their secret identities are exposed.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup