Reel Views, Review

Hokum

Three features in, Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy seems to have found his niche. His first two films, Caveat and Oddity, are supernatural horror movies set in Ireland that intersect human folly and folklore to give the mystical elements a moral grounding. The filmmaker’s latest offering, Hokum, falls in line thematically with those two projects but by sticking with familiar narrative territory, McCarthy has refined how he tells his spooky story. This is his most narratively compelling and consistently unnerving effort to date, led by a familiar face and several others that may not be as familiar to American audiences. It’s also one you’ll want to see with a crowd, not only because it’s best enjoyed in a dark, distraction-free area but because there are different moments that may generate the biggest scares among the audience. Caveat and Oddity both had one jump scare that was clearly meant to be “the big one” but Hokum has a few that could qualify.

The film stars Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, a morose author of a popular book series involving a conquistador and his journeys. While drinking and writing late one evening, he has a nagging feeling of unfinished business in addition to writing the epilogue of his latest novel. His late parents requested that their ashes be spread at the hotel in rural Ireland where they honeymooned, so Ohm makes the trek to honor their wishes. He’s surly with the staff, including the desk clerk Mal (Peter Coonan) and bellhop Alby (Will O’Connell), but his interest is piqued when bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh) tells him the honeymoon suite has been locked off by the hotel’s owner Cob (Brendan Conroy). He claims that the room has been haunted by a witch for years and he doesn’t want to risk letting the evil out. After Fiona goes missing during his stay, Ohm suspects she may have gone missing in the haunted quarters and breaks in to confirm his theory.

Adam Scott is likely best known for his television work as sympathetic protagonists in Parks And Recreation and Severance but his character in Hokum is markedly pricklier. He brusquely refuses to sign one of his books for a fan and when Alby confesses he has aspirations to write, Ohm burns Alby’s hand with a hot spoon and mocks, “You’re gonna need thicker skin than that if you’re gonna make it as a writer.” During the initial part of his stay at the Bilberry Woods Hotel, you’re almost hoping some terrible creature of Irish myth comes out and devours this guy. But in time, we find out what drives him to drink: a tragic accident in childhood that permanently fractured his relationship with his parents. Scott does excellent work shifting Ohm’s arrogance and ego in the first act to a care and curiosity when the one person he opens up to at the hotel disappears without a trace. By the time he makes it up to the room, he’s about as petrified as we are.

Teaming up again with Oddity cinematographer Colm Hogan, Damian McCarthy does an outstanding job filling Hokum with mostly-static frames of dimly lit halls and rooms where we’re forced to reckon with what waits in the shadows. One reason McCarthy excels at delivering superlative jump scares is that he sets them up with patient shot selection where our eyes slowly adjust to differing levels of darkness. But for those wary of artsy “slow burn” horror that goes nowhere, believe that McCarthy knows how to pay off the moments of silence and stillness brilliantly. The overall pace of Hokum feels more brisk than McCarthy’s previous films but it reflects a confidence in storytelling rather than a director trying to rush through things. This is a filmmaker who’s honing his craft and refining the ways he can chill us to the bone.

True to its title, the otherworldly aspects of Hokum tend to be the most compelling and the more formulaic human-based mystery takes over a bit too much of the third act. There’s a specific sequence set around a ringing bell that’s tense for a time but ends up feeling more contrived as it plays out. But like the possessed wooden golem in Oddity, McCarthy again populates his tale with memorable ghouls to keep us up at night. Will O’Connell does double duty in a nightmare scene as Jack The Jackass, a demented children’s show host that sports Pennywise-like bulging eyes and surrealist anthropomorphization out of a David Lynch offering. If you’re someone who’s always looking for more things that go bump in the night, Hokum is happy to oblige.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Mortal Kombat II, starring Karl Urban and Adeline Rudolph, is an action sequel in which martial arts combatants from the Earthrealm battle in a high-stakes contest designed by the tyrannous emperor of the Outworld.
The Sheep Detectives, a comedy mystery starring Hugh Jackman and Nicholas Braun, follows a flock of sheep as they work together to solve a murder case after their beloved shepherd is found dead.
Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard And Soft: The Tour is a 3D concert film directed and produced by James Cameron, featuring performances from pop superstar Billie Eilish during the Manchester, England dates of her Hit Me Hard And Soft tour last year.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Mother Mary

It’s said that holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. As the new psychological drama Mother Mary opens, it’s clear that fashion designer Sam Anselm (played by Michaela Coel) has more than her fair share. After years of crafting bespoke costumes for pop singer Mother Mary (played by Anne Hathaway), their creative collaboration is cut short, leaving Sam shamed and stunned. She retreats to the English countryside and picks up the pieces, continuing to consult for clients who don’t perform for thousands of screaming fans but provide steady business nonetheless. Sam and her team are surprised to see Mary turn up at Sam’s home, rain-soaked and white as a ghost, years after their partnership ended. Desperate for Sam’s help, she says she needs a show-stopping dress for her comeback tour that kicks off in three days; it’d be a difficult request under normal circumstances but given the context, it’s more in the area of “unthinkable”.

Though she’s shaken, Mary attempts to ingratiate herself with Sam by saying she hasn’t changed since they last saw each other; Sam insists that she has, shooting back, “You’ll see what the years have made of me.” She hasn’t listened to Mother Mary’s music since their relationship dissolved and she doesn’t plan on breaking the streak, making Mary perform the taxing choreography for her new song “Spooky Action” without backing music. Her jagged movements read as those of a woman possessed and as the two women move forward with their improbable joint effort, they confide in one another that they’ve each been haunted by a spectral figure adorned in elegant cloth. Their only chance of cleansing themselves from the lingering spirits is to navigate their turbulent shared past and find a way forward together.

Mother Mary is another moody, metaphor-laden affair from writer-director David Lowery, operating here in a similar vein of his other A24-distributed existential dramas A Ghost Story and The Green Knight. Quality-wise, his latest effort falls somewhere in between those two, occasionally labored in its personification of the central analogy but frequently stunning in its craft and execution. The movie has two very different locations that function as a pair of “home bases” for most of the runtime: the blindingly-lit packed arenas in which Mother Mary performs and Sam’s spare barn-turned-workshop. As the two women rehash their past, the set design brilliantly merges these vastly different locales seamlessly and in stunning fashion.

If Mother Mary isn’t quite a horror film and not exactly a music movie either, it’s best categorized as a tense two-hander between a pair of actresses operating at a mutually high level. Anne Hathaway does a great job belting out the film’s original tunes — penned by Charli XCX and Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff — but even aside from the music, this stands as one of her finest performances to date. It helps that she has the marvelously magnetic Michaela Coel, who flawlessly conveys Sam’s bitterness without making her seem cruel or petty, as a scene partner. Their work together is marked by restraint, a fierce determination by both characters to redirect their emotions and to delay words unsaid just a little bit longer. As good as the play-like production design is, Hathaway and Coel are the reason to see this movie.

The tête-à-tête angle of the film ultimately coheres better and is more psychologically compelling than the supernatural elements, which take hold around the halfway point during a séance sequence. David Lowery’s imagery, involving the ghost in fabric that haunts both Mary and Sam, can get redundant and heavy-handed down the stretch. The music score by frequent Lowery cohort Daniel Hart sets the quieter scenes well but there’s one particular montage where the composition was so bombastic that I actually had to stifle a chuckle. Seven features in, Lowery has proven himself to be a filmmaker who takes chances with his storytelling, in haunted tales like this and in his takes on fantasy adventures like Pete’s Dragon and Peter Pan & Wendy. Like Mother Mary wears a halo on her head for her sold-out performances, Lowery wears his heart on his sleeve when committing his vision to the screen.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Devil Wears Prada 2, starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, reunites a legendary fashion magazine editor-in-chief with a pair of her former assistants, who have since risen the ranks within the industry.
Animal Farm, starring Seth Rogen and Gaten Matarazzo, adapts George Orwell’s satirical fable of anthropomorphic farm animals as they rebel against their human master and hope to create a society where all animals can be equal, free, and happy.
Deep Water, starring Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley, follows a group of international passengers en route from Los Angeles to Shanghai as they’re forced to make an emergency landing in shark-infested waters.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Over Your Dead Body

As anyone who’s been in a serious relationship can attest, weekend retreats with significant others don’t always go as planned. More than one such plan goes awry in Over Your Dead Body, an action comedy from The Lonely Island alum and MacGruber director Jorma Taccone. The film’s couple, Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving), have been married for seven years but their seven-year itch has taken a turn for the deadly. We learn early on that Dan plans to kill Lisa during their trip out in the wilderness, prepping an alibi with his co-worker and his dad Michael (Paul Guilfoyle) by saying that Lisa is planning on partaking in a rigorous hike over the weekend. As he sneaks up on her in the cabin, she parries his chloroform-soaked rag with a stun gun; it turns out she’s been making plans as well.

We flash back to a few days earlier, where Lisa is preparing a fabricated story of her own, telling a friend that Dan plans to go hunting during their time away. It’s not clear exactly how Lisa thought out disposing of Dan and by the time the pair come to learn of their mutual murder plots, it’s obvious neither one is a criminal mastermind. As they scuffle for a shotgun, a blast hits the ceiling and a trio of interlopers falls from the attic. If things weren’t fraught enough, Michael’s cabin was serving as a temporary safe house for escaped convicts Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), along with their crooked CO accomplice Allegra (Juliette Lewis). They tie up the squabbling couple, whom they saw bickering from the attic, and try to patch up their dysfunction for long enough to shake them down for cash before they continue to evade capture.

Over Your Dead Body is an English-language remake of Norwegian Netflix offering The Trip and given the amount of twists and turns in both stories, your best shot at enjoying this American re-do is not being familiar with the original. The distributor IFC is wisely playing up the fact that the movie comes courtesy of 87North Productions, the company behind action comedies like Bullet Train and Violent Night. What starts out as a tale of desperation amid marital strife gradually gives way to a cheeky wam-bam fight for survival, where blood is spilled in mostly cartoonish and comedically-colored fashion. Since co-founding 87North in 2019 and producing the Bob Odenkirk actioner Nobody in 2021, David Leitch has seemingly cornered the market on a brand of bone-crunching action fare with yucks between the ruckus.

The primary reason Over Your Dead Body doesn’t work lies in director Jorma Taccone’s inability to find a tone that works for the material. Jason Segel and Samara Weaving are talented actors but they’re saddled with characters obnoxious and petty enough that we’d be okay with either one of them being offed, except that it means the other would succeed. Once they’re interrupted by the fugitives, it becomes easier to root for them as a couple with renewed purpose but the preceding domestic scenes, where they argue about Scrabble words and how to mince garlic, are torturous. In the way Pete and company serve as de facto marriage counselors for Dan and Lisa, Taccone seems to be shooting for an update of The Ref but lands on the timbre of a home invasion thriller. There’s a specific scene set around the basement billiards table that’s particularly icky and doesn’t mesh at all with the playful anarchic vibe that Taccone is going for.

He and his editor Jeremy Cohen put together fight sequences that feature laudable stunt work while also tracking with the bombast from other 87North projects. The best moments in the movie come not from the actual combat sequences but from characters trying to pick up the pieces — sometimes literally — after the fact. A scene where Allegra fruitlessly tries to reassemble fragments of her foot builds to the funniest punchline in the whole film, one that wouldn’t be out of place in a gorier The Lonely Island sketch. Like his troupe mate Akiva Schaffer, who helmed the hilarious The Naked Gun last year, Taccone has a killer grip on slapstick humor. But with Over Your Dead Body, he hasn’t proven to have nearly as high a command over darkly comic premises or action setpieces.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Michael, a music biopic starring Jaafar Jackson and Colman Domingo, covering the life and career of pop icon Michael Jackson, from his involvement in the Jackson 5 in the 60s to his early solo career in the 70s and 80s.
Also coming to theaters is Mother Mary, a psychological thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, involving the fraught relationship between a costume designer and an international pop star on the eve of her comeback performance.
Premiering on Netflix is Apex, a survival action film starring Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton, following an adrenaline junkie whose rock climbing expedition is thwarted by a fellow adventurer who’s made it his mission to hunt her in the wild.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Drama

Are any of us more than the worst thing we’ve ever done? The dark romantic comedy The Drama boldly posits “maybe not!” The film opens on a more mild transgression: seeing Emma (Zendaya) reading in a café, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) snaps a photo of the book she’s buried in so he can look it up and pretend he’s a fan before introducing himself. On the ensuing first date, he admits he hasn’t read the novel and manufactured the meet-cute so that he could seem interesting to her. Fortunately, it’s not a large enough deception to derail things and 2 years later, Emma and Charlie are engaged. The week of the wedding, Charlie runs the speech that he’s prepared for the reception past his best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie); “I love how you always turn my drama into comedy,” Charlie says of his bride-to-be.

A last-minute food tasting between Emma, Charlie, Mike, and Mike’s wife and Emma’s maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim) turns into a multi-bottle wine sampling to help take the edge off all the planning. Emma and Charlie relay a moral quandary that’s come up with their DJ, prompting Rachel to tipsily bring up an infraction from Mike’s past that she ribs him about periodically. He offers to spill the details if everyone agrees to share the worst thing each of them has done and the day-drinking session immediately gets more personally revealing. Mike and Rachel offer up dirty deeds about which they deservedly feel a measure of shame but Charlie can barely muster up an anecdote about how he cyberbullied a classmate who possibly moved away as a result. Emma brings them home with a secret so dark, it makes Charlie reconsider his entire relationship with her.

The Drama isn’t as much about what Emma did specifically — an act the film’s marketing cleverly conceals — but more about how fragile the bonds between significant others can be when they matter most. Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, whose previous film Dream Scenario found Nicolas Cage popping up in people’s nightmares, carries over a sense of dream logic and unreality to this intimate tale. After Emma’s confession, Borgli and his editor Joshua Raymond Lee intersperse scenes of the couple completing pre-wedding tasks with mordant reveries that reveal anxieties about where they stand with one another. While some are exaggerated enough to read as purely fantastical, others are more plausible and we’re forced to decide whether what we’re seeing actually happened or not.

The humor in The Drama doesn’t come from minimizing Emma’s past actions but in seeing ourselves in the way that Charlie summarily unravels after learning about them. Every little detail — be it the messaging on an old coffee mug or the way that their photographer lays out the order in which family members will line up for photos — reveals hilarious fissures in Charlie’s psyche. Borgli doesn’t treat the characters or the audience with moral absolutes about how they should feel but he delights in depicting how one’s code can shift out of desperation. This is a comedy of discomfort, to the degree that some viewers may be repulsed by its subject material and possibly find it distasteful. As someone whose paranoia and uncertainty can dictate pointless rumination for embarrassing lengths of time, I felt seen by Charlie and found comfort in watching him scramble to resolve his dilemma.

Borgli personifies this struggle with a below-the-knee shot of Charlie pacing back and forth while trying out fancy shoes and socks, following up with a close-up of Emma unable to take him seriously due to the dainty sound of his feet shuffling. It’s a brief interaction that sums up the movie nicely; some fights and problems in a relationship should rightly be taken seriously but others can get so blown out of proportion that all it takes is a small discrepancy or distraction to render them comedic. It should be easy to tell the difference between the two, but as anyone who hasn’t been on the same page as their partner can tell you, it’s not. Sharing your life completely with someone else is both the most intimidating and the most rewarding act one can participate in. The Drama honors both the reverent and the ridiculous parts of the process.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is You, Me & Tuscany, a romcom starring Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page, in which a free-spirited young cook makes a brash decision to become a squatter in an abandoned Tuscan villa and strikes up a romance with the homeowner’s cousin.
Also coming to theaters is Hunting Matthew Nichols, a found footage horror movie starring Markian Tarasiuk and Miranda MacDougall, involving a documentary filmmaker who sets out to solve her brother’s missing person’s case twenty-three years after his disappearance.
Streaming on Apple TV is Outcome, a dark comedy starring Keanu Reeves and Jonah Hill, which follows a Hollywood star as he is forced to confront his problems and atone for his past after being threatened by a bizarre video footage from his past.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Forbidden Fruits

The campy supernatural tale Forbidden Fruits is, as I’m told the kids say, a lot. Adapted from the 2019 Lily Houghton play *big breath* Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die, the big-screen treatment opts for a snappier title but maintains the verbose spirit of the source material. The snarky screenplay, co-written by Houghton with director Meredith Alloway, is littered with allusions to female-facing millennial mainstays like The Devil Wears Prada and Mean Girls. That the film’s narrative so obviously mirrors the latter at the outset seems to be by design, luring us in with a familiar story of yore to develop into something more dangerous and deadly. While it never reaches the subversiveness of titles like Heathers or The Virgin Suicides, it’s a pastiche ripe with themes about how hard it can be for young women to stick together.

Forbidden Fruits takes place almost entirely within the confines of fictional Texas shopping center Highland Place Mall, where the supercilious Apple (Lili Reinhart) and her fellow Free Eden employees Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) rule the roost. When they arrive at the food court, other mall workers scurry to leave them at what now becomes the popular kids’ table. It doesn’t quite scare off Pumpkin (Lola Tung), a new hire at the Auntie Anne’s fill-in Sister Salt’s, who offers them pretzel bite samples and piques their interest in the process. Pumpkin subsequently applies to work at their Urban Outfitters-like store and when she passes the interview with flying colors, she not only joins their clique but also their secret coven, where they perform rituals in the basement of Free Eden after-hours.

It’s when things get witchy — and a word that rhymes with “witchy” — that feminist fable Forbidden Fruits feels free to let its freak flag fly. Once Pumpkin is in the group, she discovers how controlling Apple is over Cherry and Fig’s lives, blocking off their personal calendars for them and casually lobbing barbs like, “that’s another unattractive quality we need to work on.” She also learns of a hex that befell ex-employee Pickle (Emma Chamberlain), so catatonic as a result of the witch’s curse that she’s seen literally banging her head against windows of outlets in the mall. There’s obviously something rotten at the root of this supposed paradise atop Apple’s guise of sisterhood and the more time Pumpkin spends with the trio, the more resolved she feels to expose the extent of the performative friendship they have in place.

Diablo Cody, who penned high school-set comedies Juno and Jennifer’s Body, serves as executive producer here and it’s fair to say that if she had written a reboot 30 years removed from The Craft, it could’ve come out very similarly to Forbidden Fruits. Even though this movie is seemingly set in the present day, it certainly maintains the late-aughts veneer of Cody’s most notable efforts; depicting a shopping mall as bustling in 2026 is arguably more anachronistic than featuring smartphones in a film set 20 years ago. What feels fresh in this film is how it angles against Apple’s brand of false feminism, wherein she can assert poisonous control over her friends’ lives by labelling any male interloper as part of the patriarchy. She feels so threatened by the suggestion that these ladies talk through their feelings at therapy that she forces them to confess their sins to the spirit of “ultimate femme martyr” Marilyn Monroe in a designated dressing room.

It may be too much to ask Forbidden Fruits to be more of anything but I wish it had committed to the edginess of its very first scene — involving a hot latte and a lecherous man’s crotch — in its storytelling. Meredith Alloway also delays the peripheral horror trappings to the degree that the violent final 20 minutes and mid-credit scene almost feel like they belong in a different movie. But the film’s more crucial aspect is the satirical heightened reality that she and her quartet of young actresses establish before the conclusion. Everyone here is on the same page aesthetically and tonally, down to Lili Reinhart’s ostentatious amber wig that seems to have been snatched from Nicole Kidman’s character in Practical Magic. Just as fashion is never finished, films like Forbidden Fruits about women navigating the tricky territory of burgeoning bonds will always be en vogue.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Beginning in theaters on Wednesday is The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, an animated adventure starring Chris Pratt and Anya Taylor-Joy, continuing the saga of the Super Mario Bros as they team up with Yoshi and Princess Rosalina to take on Bowser’s son Bowser Jr.
Also coming to theaters is The Drama, a black comedy starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, in which a couple’s relationship is shaken days before their wedding when one partner discovers unsettling truths about the other.
Premiering on Hulu is Pizza Movie, a college comedy starring Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone, following a pair of psychoactively-inhibited students who face an unexpectedly epic journey when they must navigate two flights of stairs to retrieve their pizza delivery.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come

Though directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett collectively go by the pseudonym Radio Silence, they’ve been anything but silent in the world of horror over the past several years. Since breaking out with Ready Or Not in 2019, the pair have gone on to helm two films in the Scream franchise and even dabbled in Dracula lore with Abigail in 2024. Now the duo follow up their breakthrough with Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come, a sequel that follows the mold of upping the stakes of its predecessor while attempting to replicate the surprise factor of the original as well. This one succeeds more in the former camp than the latter but with another game cast and bloody fun setpieces, it’s another winner from two filmmakers who simply know how to have a good time within this genre.

We’re reintroduced to Grace (Samara Weaving) moments after her hellish night of hide-and-seek with the devil-worshipping Le Domas family inside their opulent mansion. When she arrives at the hospital, her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) reluctantly appears as her emergency contact and Grace does her best to explain the insane events of the prior movie. All the while, members of the uber-wealthy cabal known as the High Council are notified of the Le Domas massacre, triggering a mad scramble for power. Grace and Faith are kidnapped and awakened by an unnamed lawyer (Elijah Wood) working on behalf of the demon Le Bail, who informs them of a new “game” that Grace’s survival has now put into motion. Since the “High Seat” of the Council is now vacant, members from the four remaining families must hunt down Grace to claim the top position within the ultra-powerful committee.

On the villain side of things, we spend the most time getting to know the Danforth family, represented by twin siblings Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy). Though their relationship isn’t quite as complex as the one between the miserable — and miserably rich — step-siblings in the Gellar-starring lark Cruel Intentions, it’s enough to say they don’t see eye-to-eye. Among the other armed-to-the-teeth participants in the deadly play for world domination are bloodthirsty billionaires played by Néstor Carbonell and Olivia Cheng. Their attire isn’t much different from how they would dress for a day of stag hunting or skeet shooting, fashion that could be dubbed “preppy tactical”. It underscores a key difference between Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come and its predecessor, which is the more expansive setting of a vacated mountain resort compared to the confines of the Le Domas manor.

One aspect of Ready Or Not that’s not possible to replicate in this follow-up is the transition of Grace’s character from doe-eyed bride-to-be to shotgun-wielding warrior. The sequel’s stand-in for character development is her strained relationship with Faith, who’s 3 years younger than Grace and resentful of what she perceives as an abandonment years prior. At the commencement of the “game”, the two wake up handcuffed to one another and while they’re on the run from their captors, they begrudgingly make up for lost time, despite the dire circumstances. Faith calls Grace out for marrying into an affluent family just for what Faith perceives as a status bump but Grace says she’s not much better for shacking up with a “finance bro” on the west side of Manhattan. Radio Silence regulars Weaving and Newton are a perfect fit for bickering sisters who have learned to take what’s theirs in a world that hasn’t dealt either of them the best hands.

But when it comes to these two action-heavy horror comedies, the main “hands” that matter are the fisticuffs in the combat between the unwitting “hide-and-seek” participants and their hunters. Like Ready Or Not, this successor features showdowns that make entertaining use out of antiquated weapons and rich folks who aren’t as prepared in close-quarters contact as they should be. The most memorable scenes of conflict this time feature locations like the washing machine area of the resort and the dance floor of an abandoned wedding reception, the latter set to a too-familiar needle drop. Thanks to other eat-the-rich romps like The Menu and Saltburn that its predecessor spawned 7 years ago, Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come doesn’t have the same bite as a satire but still delivers on gory delights.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is They Will Kill You, an action comedy starring Zazie Beetz and Tom Felton, about a young housekeeper who takes a job in a New York City high-rise, not realizing she is entering a community that has seen a number of disappearances over the years.
Also coming to theaters is Forbidden Fruits, a horror comedy starring Lili Reinhart and Lola Tung, following a secret witch cult run in the basement of the mall store after hours as their newest member challenges their performative sisterhood.
Streaming on Hulu is Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, a sci-fi comedy starring Vince Vaughn and James Marsden, in which two friends navigate the dangerous world of organized crime, testing their loyalty and survival skills as they get deeper into the criminal underworld.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Project Hail Mary

When Ridley Scott accepted the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Musical Or Comedy ten years ago for his adaptation of the Andy Weir novel The Martian, he almost immediately blurted out, “Comedy?” with a quizzical hand turned upward. If directing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller should happen to win for Project Hail Mary, their take on another Andy Weir novel about an astronaut stranded in space, it’s unlikely they’ll be as bemused by the categorization. The protagonists of both tales certainly use smart aleck humor to deflect from their dire situations, but the newest of the two space epics has both a mirthful touch and sense of wonder in its storytelling that make it a lighter lift. The film gets off to a slow start but once it hits ignition, it’s a joyous sci-fi spectacle that counts as a high point for the cinematic year so far.

Project Hail Mary centers on Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle school science teacher whose PhD in molecular biology makes him uniquely qualified for a top-secret space mission. He’s visited by government higher-up Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), who needs help understanding the “astrophage” material that is slowly eating away at our sun. Initially, Grace’s work is intended to be here on Earth but when the team discovers a line near Venus filled with the nefarious particles, the decision is made to put Grace on board with Hail Mary crew members Yáo (Ken Leung) and Olesya (Milana Vayntrub). Sadly, he’s the only one to wake up on the spacecraft when it finally arrives at the destination and Grace has to do his best impression of an astronaut while attempting to save the galaxy from a solar extinction.

It sounds like as much — if not even more so — of a bummer than The Martian on its face but the secret to the levity behind Project Hail Mary is that Grace gets by with a little help from his extraterrestrial friends. The appearance and nature of the alien life is best for audiences to discover on their own, but once that element is introduced into the story, the movie moves in the direction of a cosmos-set buddy comedy. Drew Goddard’s script balances the scientific jibber-jabber with humor that stems from Grace trying to bridge the communication gap with his new interstellar cohort. Ryan Gosling is effortlessly engaging even on his own but his game is elevated by the exceptional work of James Ortiz, who voices the creature Grace encounters in his journey. Chief among their hilarious exchanges is one invoking a fist bump to celebrate a win, which I assume comes from Andy Weir’s original text but registers as an instant classic regardless.

While co-director Chris Miller stated earlier this month that Project Hail Mary doesn’t have any green screen shots, the movie obviously utilizes visual effects heavily to depict its outer space settings. But the production design of the Hail Mary ship itself is immaculate, a fully-realized interior down to every last control panel light blinking peril at the stand-in space traveller. Everything outside the windows of the spacecraft is breathtaking to behold as well, whether it’s luminous planets suspended in the vast darkness or stars whizzing past at impossible speeds. Blockbuster filmmaking doesn’t get much more exhilarating than the scene above the moon of Tau Ceti, with Grace dangling precariously by a wire to collect material for an experiment. As the title of the film suggests, this mission is humanity’s last shot to save itself from catastrophe and watching our hero lay it all out on the line is why we return to the movies.

Besides The Martian as an obvious point of reference, Project Hail Mary readily recalls exemplars of the science fiction genre like Arrival, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and 2001: A Space Odyssey, among others. It may not live quite up to the standard set by those classics but it’s certainly an improvement on Spaceman, the Netflix clunker from a couple years ago with a similar premise. Lord and Miller, perhaps best known for producing the animated Spider-Verse franchise, continue to excel at synthesizing their influences into pop confections that don’t jettison their braininess along the way. At 156 minutes, the editing isn’t as judicious as it could’ve been and the storyline has a few different spots that would’ve properly sufficed as a fitting endpoint. But this film’s canvas and candor is so optimistic and open-hearted that it’s easy for me to overlook even its most apparent flaws.

Score – 4/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, a comedy horror sequel starring Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton, in which the sole survivor of a brutal “game” that resulted in the deaths of her husband and in-laws is forced to participate in a new deadlier game.
Also coming to theaters is The Pout-Pout Fish, an animated fantasy comedy starring Nick Offerman and Nina Oyama, which follows two aquatic misfits as they embark on an impossible journey to save their home.
Premiering on Netflix is Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, a crime drama starring Cillian Murphy and Rebecca Ferguson, continuing the story of an infamous gangster as he returns to a bombed Birmingham in 1940 and becomes involved in secret wartime missions.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Midwest Film Journal

Kurt Response: The Thing

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

Released the same day as fellow sci-fi classic Blade Runner on June 25, 1982, The Thing may be the coldest movie to ever hit the summer box office. Not only is it set in Antarctica during the winter but the opening shots after the title card depict parka-clad Norwegians chasing an Alaskan Malamute across snowy vistas. But chillier interactions are taking place inside a US research station, where pilot R.J. MacReady (played by Kurt Russell) dips his hand in a bucket to grab ice for his glass of J&B. He’s about to beat the Chess Wizard computer with a move he’s so sure will ice the game, he even taunts the program, smirking, “Poor baby, you’re startin’ to lose it, aren’t ya?” When it responds with a checkmate move, he wastes no time pouring his chilled scotch over the motherboard and calling the Chess Wizard a “cheating bitch”. Ice cold.

Based on both the novella Who Goes There? and its adapted 1951 film The Thing From Another World, The Thing finds MacReady and his team up against something far scarier than a chess-competing computer. The Norwegian scientists trying to shoot the escaped dog end up crashing their helicopter and as a result, Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) accompanies MacReady to their base to figure out what went wrong. Clark (Richard Masur), the American crew member in charge of their sled dogs, kennels the rogue Malamute and the crew is horrified when they find that the canine-appearing creature is not man’s best friend. An inspection of its flamethrower-charred remains leads biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley) to determine it’s an alien lifeform that can perfectly imitate other organisms. Paranoia grows as the team surmises that the extraterrestrial could have already assimilated into their group undetected.

When the villain of your story is a space monster that can replicate the appearance of any of the men trapped in an isolated outpost, director and horror maestro John Carpenter understands there needs to be one character on whom we can always rely. Kurt Russell wasn’t Carpenter’s first choice for the lead; in fact, several actors, including Nick Nolte and Jeff Bridges, were considered before Carpenter finally settled on Russell the day before filming. The pair had worked together twice before The Thing and Russell turned out to be the perfect choice for R.J. MacReady. A war vet who flew choppers in Vietnam, he becomes the team’s de facto leader who, despite getting upset losing to a computer in the opening, gradually embodies the “cooler heads prevail” ethos. To Russell’s chagrin, Carpenter insisted that MacReady wear a sombrero but it was Russell’s idea for MacReady to sport what’s become a legendary cinematic beard.

Look, there’s just no other way to say this: Kurt Russell’s hair in The Thing is nothing short of miraculous. Does it actually make sense that a helicopter pilot in an arctic research facility would be this well-groomed? No, not really. As someone who can’t grow a beard, am I jealous that Russell can grow one this luminous? Yes, yes I am. According to the DVD commentary track, it took the star almost a year to grow it out along with his slightly longer than usual hair. Whether it’s intentional or not, there are a couple wardrobe decisions (in addition to the aforementioned sombrero) that attempt to make MacReady not look like the coolest guy possible. While incinerating one of the “Thing” clones outside the base, MacReady wears clear lab goggles stretched over a hoodie working mightily to stifle his coiffed mane. But it doesn’t last long, as the frost gradually makes its way to the luscious hair on his face and atop his head.

Besides the impeccable hairstyling, one of the primary joys in watching Russell’s performance in The Thing is watching MacReady ascend from just one of the guys to the man in charge. He makes some risky moves along the way to prove his humanity but after he successfully talks station command Garry (Donald Moffat) and radio operator Windows (Thomas Waites) down from a standoff, MacReady becomes the most reliable of the bunch. Shortly after a speech where he establishes how he means to handle things moving forward, he records a message into a tape machine, in case nobody makes it out alive. “Nobody trusts anybody now,” he concedes, “And we’re all very tired.” In that crucial scene, one of the few where a character is alone with their thoughts, Russell has a resignation in his eyes that makes his heroics in the third act all the more impressive.

In addition to his work on-screen, Russell had a major contribution behind the scenes too, working with to Carpenter shore up an ending they both felt would work best serve the story. When the two reportedly weren’t satisfied with the original conclusion, which definitively proved that MacReady is still human after all, Russell reportedly wrote the last scene that appears in the film. It’s understandable why producers would want a horror movie marked by distrust and insecurity to leave audiences with a measure of relief as opposed to more uncertainty. But at the same time, closing on a conversation that percolates with fear of the unknown is the perfect send-off. Like Blade Runner, which was originally released with a studio-mandated “happy ending” that was omitted from future cuts, The Thing works better with a more ambiguous final note.

Reel Views, Review

The Bride!

Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal taps her The Lost Daughter star Jessie Buckley for The Bride!, the second classic literary adaptation from Warner Bros this season designed to turn heads. Though “Wuthering Heights” shares this monstrous reimagining’s penchant for titular punctuation, Gyllenhaal’s sophomore effort in the director’s chair is even more “extra” in its execution. As Frankenstein author Mary Shelley (played by Jessie Buckley) tells us at the outset, this story is also one of tortured romance but is dedicated to a tortuous framing conceit that sinks the whole movie. In monochromatic interludes, Shelley breaks the fourth wall and cackles as she teases unfinished business from her landmark novel. In this context, this tale isn’t a “reinvigoration” — to borrow a descriptor from the film — of 1935’s Bride Of Frankenstein but the feminist follow-up Shelley never got to write.

From beyond the grave, Shelley possesses Ida (also played by Buckley), a young harlot living in 1930s Chicago who makes herself available to mob associates like Clyde (John Magaro) before she takes a fatal fall down a flight of stairs. At the same time, the reanimated creature “Frank” (Christian Bale) beseeches mad scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) for a female companion to ease the loneliness of his existence. They dig up Ida’s corpse and reanimate her in Euphronious’ laboratory but the memory of her past life is wiped out in the process, leaving Frank to fill in the gaps with fanciful untruths. His temper turns deadly towards a pair of agitators who attempt to assault his Bride and the couple heads east as fugitives, with Detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz) hot on their trail.

For a film that posits itself as a manifesto of female liberation, The Bride! can’t seem to decide what it’s trying to say with its titular protagonist. Buckley’s frenetic performance doesn’t help either, as her character periodically gets possessed by Shelley and spits out writerly rants in Queen’s English before reverting back to a Great Lakes dialect. I’ve no doubt she’s doing what Maggie Gyllenhaal had in mind but her volatile manner of acting doesn’t allow us a way into the interior life of this heroine. The story contrives scenarios wherein Ida can be heralded as an iconoclast but if one zooms out on the narrative, it’d be difficult to say she actually has much agency here. Frank’s actions and motivations guide the vast majority of their journey and his Bride is, literally and figuratively, along for the ride as they hit the road.

If this sounds very Bonnie And Clyde, it’s safe to assume The Bride! luxuriates in the comparison, as it gleefully forefronts its cinematic references whether in-period or anachronistic. Maggie Gyllenhaal recruits her brother Jake to play a song-and-dance star à la Fred Astaire that Frank idolizes on the silver screen. Frankly, I’ll take any opportunity to see the younger Gyllenhaal sibling croon and tap dance in fictitious black-and-white talkies with names like Heartbreak Holiday and The Dubious Detective. Astaire’s frequent cohort Ginger Rogers is name-checked and even used as an alias for a time, as Ida communes with Shelley about finding her true identity. There’s an odd Young Frankenstein musical tie-in and an even odder closing credit choice in song that doesn’t even sound like a good idea on paper but is much sillier in execution.

Buckley’s the favorite to win Best Actress this weekend and it’s hard not to see the influence that projects by two-time Oscar winner Emma Stone had on this movie. Poor Things was its own uninhibited riff on Bride Of Frankenstein but that film took the effort to put its regenerated heroine through a meaningful arc and made her tale of discovery unforgettable. The Bride! also revels in the female-fronted punk-lite provocation of Cruella, which itself borrowed heavily from the mythology recontextualization of Todd Phillips’s Joker. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Gyllenhaal called on that film’s cinematographer Lawrence Sher and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir to closely emulate that box office smash’s towering presentation. “Never was there a tale so fine as The Bride and her Frankenstein,” Shelley bellows at one point but on the basis of The Bride!, I can’t say I’m convinced.

Score – 2/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Reminders Of Him, a romantic drama starring Maika Monroe and Tyriq Withers, following a woman recently released from prison who attempts to reconnect with her young daughter and finds love while trying to escape her troubled past.
Also playing in theaters is Undertone, a supernatural horror movie starring Nina Kiri and Adam DiMarco, telling the story of a host of a popular paranormal podcast who becomes haunted by terrifying recordings mysteriously sent her way.
Streaming on Shudder is Bodycam, a horror film starring Jaime Callica and Sean Rogerson, in which two police officers attempt to cover up an accidental shooting after investigating a domestic dispute but find the cameras aren’t the only things watching them.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

My thoughts on the movies