Monthly Archives: July 2025

Reel Views, Review

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

20th Century Fox comic book characters continue to make their way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the first film from Marvel Studios to feature the legendary superhero team. Like Superman earlier this month, this is a movie that already assumes you get the gist of these heroes and their powers, so it opts for a speed run through their origin story. Four astronauts — Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) — survive a cosmic ray blast while in space and come back to Earth with unique abilities. Reed is able to stretch his body into impossible shapes, while his wife Sue can turn invisible and project powerful force fields at will. Ben’s skin has transformed into rock and given him superhuman strength, while Sue’s brother Ben has the ability to manipulate fire and fly.

Together, they make up the Fantastic Four and are held in high esteem as celebrities to the general public, so the news that Reed and Sue have a baby on the way is met with an outpouring of excitement and support. But the hoopla isn’t long lived, as a creature known as Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) gives the Four a heads up that her planet-devouring boss Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) is hungry and Earth is next up on the menu. Attempting to reason with the gigantic cosmic being on behalf of humankind, the Fantastic Four discover that Galactus will spare their world in exchange for Reed and Sue’s unborn child. The pair rebuff the giant’s offer but after returning home, they find their adoring fans are much more willing to sacrifice the newborn if it means saving the lives of every other human. Desperate to find another way, the team works day and night to develop a plan to get rid of Galactus for good.

One of the primary ways The Fantastic Four: First Steps stands out both from previous on-screen iterations of this cosmically-converted crew and other MCU entries is its retro-futurist setting. Taking place in an alternate 1964 where flying cars exist alongside Volkswagen Beetles, every inch of the film is covered with rich details about what people in the past thought the future could look like. Production designer Kasra Farahani crafts immaculately-rendered props and sets that reflect the technological optimism and collectivist spirit of the early 1960s. It’s neat to see a Times Square that at once looks accurate to the period and is nevertheless peppered with technology that still doesn’t exist in 2025. An aerial chase scene midway through the film leverages this juxtaposition seamlessly, as a character wirelessly broadcasts audio signals to TV monitors within their breakneck pace proximity.

While I appreciate the whiz-bang zip of that particular sequence, I wish the pacing of The Fantastic Four: First Steps didn’t consistently try to match the velocity of the mid-flight superheroes. Director Matt Shakman forgoes the typical Marvel Studios production logo and goes right into a brisk catch-up montage on how the Fantastic Four came to be. But within the sub-2 hour runtime, it feels like Shakman and his quartet of screenwriters pack in too much incident and too few occasions for the characters to breathe. Shakman’s resume thus far is primarily within the realm of TV — including his work on the MCU series WandaVision — and had there not been 15 other MCU shows since that inaugural entry, perhaps Fantastic Four would’ve worked better within a television framework. This is our first time together with these performers as the Four and outside of an early dinner scene, in which Ben correctly deduces that Sue is pregnant, we don’t get enough of a sense of how their personalities colorfully bounce off one another.

The cast does what they can to punctuate their scenes with clues as to what makes their cerulean-sweatered superheroes tick. Pascal and Kirby have both romantic chemistry and tension as soon-to-be parents trying to reckon bringing a son into a world getting more cosmically horrifying by the day. I’m still not completely sold on Quinn as an up-and-coming star but he does his best bringing the brashness out of his hothead hero, even if it doesn’t quite top what Chris Evans did with the Human Torch in the past. Moss-Bachrach isn’t given much to do as The Thing but he shows a sweet side of the character we haven’t seen before and his naturalistic voice work is absent the obvious choice to go gravelly. The Fantastic Four: First Steps isn’t as marvelous as it could be but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, is an action comedy reboot about a detective following in the footsteps of his bumbling father, who must solve a murder case to prevent his police department from shutting down.
The Bad Guys 2, starring Sam Rockwell and Marc Maron, is an animated sequel reuniting the crackerjack criminal crew of animal outlaws, who are pulled out of retirement and forced to do “one last job” by an all-female squad of bandits.
Together, starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, is a body horror movie involving a couple who move to the countryside but find themselves encountering a mysterious force that horrifically causes changes in their bodies.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Midwest Film Journal

Dafoe? Dafriend: Wild At Heart

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

When we lost David Lynch earlier this year, it felt like a flame that would never stop flickering was suddenly snuffed out. Suffering from emphysema, the 78-year-old director’s health reportedly took a turn for the worse when the Sunset Fire’s proximity to his house necessitated that he evacuate. There’s a tragic irony in the fact that some of Lynch’s most evocative images prominently involve immolation, like the shack burning in reverse in Lost Highway and the candle flickering monstrously in Jeffrey’s nightmare in Blue Velvet. There’s that infamous on-set photo of him filming The Straight Story where he’s smoking in front of a house on fire and one of his short films is even titled Fire (Pożar). But of his features, flames can be found most prominently in his twisted romance road movie Wild At Heart, which opens with a title card ablaze and peppers in numerous close-ups of stricken matches and cindering cigarettes.

The film tells the love story of snakeskin jacket-wearing bad boy Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and his vivacious sweetheart Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) as it finds itself through various stages of tumult. The main source of obstruction for the star-crossed lovers is Marietta (Diane Ladd), Lula’s viciously overbearing mother who has never approved of Sailor and even goes far enough to send men after him. After Sailor spends almost 2 years in prison for killing one of the attackers hired by Marietta, the couple decide to hit the road to be free from her controlling menace. Plotting a spontaneous trip from North Carolina out to California, Sailor and Lula have the future in their eyes but Marietta hires seedy detective Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton) to track them down and bring Lula back home safely.

This being a David Lynch movie, there are plenty of strange detours, mercurial pitstops and eerie non-sequiturs in the journey that make this anything but a traditional road trip. Its manic-depressive push-pull tone is perhaps best typified by the range in soundtrack choices from speed metal band Powermad and The King himself, Elvis Presley. In a five minute stretch, Lula pounds her feet on a motel bed as we crossfade to her dancing shoes bouncing to heavy guitar chugs but after a scuff-up with an interloper, Sailor belts out “Love Me” in the mosh pit. Another standout on the soundtrack is Chris Isaak’s moody masterpiece “Wicked Game”, whose initial release didn’t garner much attention but shot up to number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 after its inclusion in Wild At Heart.

Of all the wayward and wild weirdos Sailor and Lula meet along the way, the most chillingly memorable is the criminally creepy Bobby Peru, played indelibly by Willem Dafoe. While at a string light party in Big Tuna, Texas, Sailor and Lula cross paths with Bobby as he slithers across the yard behind three topless women hootin’ and hollerin’. He’s dressed in all black with slicked back hair, his mustache as thin as the strings of his bolo tie. But his most defining characteristic are his undersized teeth, which we first get a glimpse of as he bites on a cigarette while cheekily clarifying to Lula and Sailor that his last name is the same as the country. Lynch wrote in the script that Bobby was to have grubby and stubby chompers but Dafoe didn’t expect to have dentures molded and created for the character. Once he had them in, he later explained that they unlocked something primal and lascivious within him and became “the key to the character”.

Lynch lingers on Bobby’s creepy smile the longest after Lula responds that she’s 20 years old; we can see the hostile lust in his eyes, even if poor Sailor can’t. Scored by a slowed-down version of Chris Isaak’s “In The Heat Of The Jungle”, Bobby bitterly recalls his Marine days before vulgarly excusing himself to go to the restroom. If that wasn’t off-putting enough for Lula, he barges into her motel room the next day to finish the job, loudly urinating with the bathroom door open. Things only get uglier from there, as Bobby takes advantage of Sailor’s absence and violently coerces her into asking him for sex. It’s a repulsive act and even though he involves Sailor in different criminal pursuits, Bobby does get what’s coming to him and then some by the end of Wild At Heart.

Across hundreds of wide-ranging film roles, Willem Dafoe has made a permanent mark on film history with his impressively expressive face and turn-on-a-dime theatrics. Lynch utilizes Dafoe’s talents perfectly in this fever dream of a film that is still one of the master filmmaker’s more straightforward accounts. Bobby Peru has echoes of Dennis Hopper’s horrid villain Frank Booth from Blue Velvet but Dafoe gives Peru a sort of twisted sex appeal that makes it all the more horrifying when sexual assault is introduced into the story. It can be hard to watch someone behave so repugnantly in a movie and yet the fact remains that you can’t take your eyes off them. As such, Bobby Peru remains one of Dafoe’s most magnetic performances.

Reel Views, Review

Eddington

Anxiety-addled auteur Ari Aster strays even further from his horror foundations with Eddington, a satirical contemporary Western set during the heat of the covid pandemic in May of 2020. For a filmmaker who’s never shied away from provocation, his latest epic may be his most superficially provocative to date but the attempt to instigate this time around feels markedly impersonal and hollow. Going into this movie, I certainly wasn’t expecting Aster to have a panacea for our perpetually divided country but I was at least hoping he’d have some nuance within his lockdown-era lectures. What I found instead were cartoon characters and soft targets from a filmmaker uninterested in giving voice to the majority in the middle and choosing instead to give even more attention to the loudest mouthpieces on either end of the political spectrum.

Reuniting with Aster from the 2023 tragicomedy Beau Is Afraid, Joaquin Phoenix stars as Joe Cross, the in-over-his-head sheriff of the fictional town in New Mexico that gives the film its name. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, their mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) has enforced a masked mandate that has been embraced by some in town but ruffled the feathers of others. Cross is decidedly in the latter camp and after a showdown with Garcia at the supermarket, Cross spontaneously announces a bid to challenge him in the upcoming mayoral race. The announcement comes as a shock to Cross’ wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who’s been living with the Crosses since the beginning of the year. As Joe ramps up his campaign, tensions within the community rise amid growing social and political movements that the sheriff and his office attempt to stave off.

If Aster wanted to make a more biting satire of American life, he could have filled Eddington with characters that at least have degrees of subtlety and more closely resemble how real people struggled in the early days of covid. But there’s very little shading in the way that the citizens of Eddington are rendered across two and a half hours, even though time certainly allows for more characterization. We spend the majority of the runtime with Phoenix, obviously a tremendous actor stuck mumbling through one of his least compelling roles to date. From go, Joe Cross is a blowhard and a dunderhead, even though he’s nominally the film’s protagonist. Perhaps by design, it’s difficult to root for anyone in Eddington but as Cross’ political strategy veers into overtly criminal activity, he becomes even less sympathetic.

On the periphery, storylines about conspiracy theorists and social justice warriors come and go as Aster takes drive-by pot shots as members of both groups. Austin Butler turns up as a cultish life coach seizing the instability of the moment to indoctrinate folks into his grift but he barely sticks around long enough to make much of an impression. Character actor Clifton Collins Jr. pops in as an incoherent vagrant resembling the hostile drifters that attacked Beau outside his apartment building in Beau Is Afraid. I realize Aster seems to be terrified by a lot of things but the way he depicts homeless people as perpetually dangerous and violent in his movies makes it seem like he especially has issues with that particular demographic. Only Micheal Ward, portraying a trainee in the sheriff’s office, registers as an actual person capable of thoughtfulness and acuity before the plot dictates he be shuffled around the chessboard.

If Aster wants to make a divisive movie about divisive times, I have no problem with Eddington carrying a prevalently pessimistic tone but if you’re going to be this cynical about human nature, you have to be smart about it too. From time to time, we’ll get glimpses of the social media echo chambers being fed to our characters through their phones and we can glean insight as to why everyone is so fractured and unwilling to trust one another. But when the characters put their devices away and outwardly express themselves, it almost always goes to the most obvious point of caricature. Aster has stated that he wrote Eddington while “living in hell” doomscrolling during lockdown and the results certainly point to someone terminally online trying and failing to make sense of their feelings. Had he baked sourdough bread or gone for a walk instead, perhaps we would’ve gotten a worthwhile movie out of it.

Score – 1.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Fantastic Four: First Steps, a superhero film starring Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby, involving a quartet of astronauts-turned-superheroes as they protect the Earth from a planet-devouring cosmic being and his herald.
Also playing only in theaters is Oh, Hi!, a romantic dramedy starring Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman, following a young couple in the midst of a situationship on their first romantic weekend getaway as it goes awry in a most unexpected way.
Premiering on Netflix is Happy Gilmore 2, a sports comedy sequel starring Adam Sandler and Julie Bowen, bringing back the titular golfer as he comes out of retirement 30 years after winning his first Tour Championship so he can pay for his daughter’s ballet school.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Superman

After bringing his unique voice to the Guardians Of The Galaxy and Suicide Squad series, writer/director James Gunn now takes on one of the most iconic superheroes ever conceived. Superman is an exceptional comic book movie, clearly the product of someone who deeply respects the source material and truly understands what makes the central character special. Like the Spider-Verse films, it distills decades of on-page lore and storylines into one cohesive tale that is not only relentlessly entertaining but also artistically gratifying and a testament to the genre’s staying power. Gunn’s clearly studied Superman’s on-screen legacy — from Christopher Reeve’s outstanding portrayal in the 1978 original to Henry Cavill’s misbegotten cameo in the final seconds of Black Adam — and avoids every potential Man Of Steel-shaped pitfall along the way.

A brilliant set of title cards thrusts us right into the action, which finds Superman (David Corenswet) up against the ropes while fighting a new foe being instructed by maniacal billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). All the while, he operates under a human alter ego as Clark Kent, an unassuming reporter working alongside Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) in the newsroom. While Superman is occupied in Metropolis, Luthor and his nanotech-fueled henchwoman The Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría) break into the Fortress Of Solitude and steal his superpowered dog Krypto. Aided by Justice Gang members Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi) and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), Superman sets out to retrieve his canine companion and weave around Luthor’s insidious masterplan in the process.

Gunn knows what we’ve seen before when it comes to this character (and superhero movies in general) and instead generates countless comedic and dramatic beats that feel fresh and rewarding. Besides forgoing an origin story — who’s unfamiliar with Superman at this point, honestly? — he makes other bold creative choices that pay off with stunning consistency. Often the films lean into the dichotomy of Clark Kent and Superman, depicting him as perpetually switching between the two and desperate to keep his true identity a secret from others. In Superman, several characters know they’re both the same person and the narrative conflict is instead focused on how Superman actually thinks and feels. He works tirelessly to save everyone everywhere and takes it to heart when he can’t. To quote The Smiths, “it takes strength to be gentle and kind” and in that way, this Superman flexes different muscles than we typically see from cinematic heroes.

Given how many performers have played these roles before, Superman is a difficult film to cast but casting director John Papsidera has done a super job top to bottom here. As the man in red and blue, David Corenswet taps into an earnestness and altruism that we haven’t seen from this character in a very long time. Somehow, he makes Superman’s underlying corniness compelling and finds a unique sense of humor that works perfectly for this modern iteration. Nicholas Hoult is likewise excellent as the follically-challenged foil pulling all the strings around Supes, bringing proper intellectual menace to his portrayal. Rachel Brosnahan has a kind of romantic spark with Corenswet that is desperately needed in a genre that’s been considerably chaste the past 10 or 15 years. They have a breathtaking scene in front of the Metropolis skyline at the beginning of the second act that’s more heartfelt than what we typically get from most full-blown romantic dramas.

Superman, being a superhero film, is naturally an effects-heavy affair and the CG work here is as great as you’d expect it to be. Gunn particularly has fun with the abilities of the lesser-known Justice Gang and Superman fights a fun variety of enemies from kaiju to robots and everything in between. The action is terrific but it’s not what makes this movie soar so much higher than the majority of its cohorts. It’s how physically and emotionally vulnerable the film makes its protagonist, who is typically depicted as indestructible unless someone has Kryptonite in their pocket. The heroism on display here isn’t just a superhuman carrying out extraordinary feats; it’s conveying a worldview that is genuinely stirring and oddly radical. In a world that has so normalized hate and cynicism, empathy is the new counterculture.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
I Know What You Did Last Summer, starring Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders, is a slasher reboot about another hook-wielding killer who appears and begins targeting a group of friends one year after they covered up a car accident in which they supposedly killed someone.
Smurfs, starring Rihanna and James Corden, is a musical reboot which finds Papa Smurf mysteriously taken by evil wizards Gargamel and his brother Razamel, causing Smurfette to lead the Smurfs on a mission into the real world to save him.
Eddington, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, is a modern Western set during the COVID-19 pandemic where a standoff between a small-town sheriff and a mayor sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in small town New Mexico.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Review

Jurassic World Rebirth

Jurassic World Rebirth is the follow-up to 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion, the film that normalized the absence of a colon to separate the name of this series and the respective subtitle, though that’s the least of this franchise’s problems. The movie’s tagline promises “A New Era Is Born” but aside from some new faces and a minor plot tweak here or there, what exactly is “new” about this “era”? This entry follows the same formula that every one of the 6 sequels to 1993’s still-superlative Jurassic Park has abided by, though the proceedings come across as markedly haphazard and clunky this time out. It’s unclear at this point if Rebirth is meant to set up a trilogy, as Jurassic World did in 2015, but my hope is that audiences will finally let these dinosaurs get some rest so we don’t have to keep waking them up every few years for a crummy cash-grab.

Following a ludicrous cold open, Jurassic World Rebirth picks up 5 years after the events of Dominion. The majority of the remaining dinosaur populations have shuffled off to equatorial islands for a more favorable tropical environment. Not content with leaving well enough alone, pharmaceutical rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) comes to mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) with an 8-figure offer to head up a high-stakes mission. Along with paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), she’s tasked with collecting blood from three de-extinct dinos to fuel an in-development drug that can prevent heart disease. Their journey sends them to Ile Saint-Hubert, an island home to a research facility where experiments in “engineered entertainments” led to mutated dinosaurs that have thrived in isolation.

While cruising through the Atlantic, the team receives an SOS signal from a group of 4 civilians whose boat is capsized by rogue seafaring prehistoric creatures. After the crew picks up the survivors, it makes zero sense that they would continue their covert operation without dropping them off for safety first, but then Jurassic World Rebirth wouldn’t be able to hamstring its narrative by dedicating time to this new faction. Director Gareth Edwards and scribe David Koepp, the latter of whom co-wrote Jurassic Park, are most likely attempting to recapture the family-in-peril aspect of the original. But once the two camps are inevitably split up when they land, their stories really have nothing to do with one another and there’s little narrative consequence for the group evading the dinosaurs compared to the one tracking them down.

Everyone simply looks lost here and it’s not just because they’re on an unfamiliar island. Scarlett Johansson is already the highest-grossing box office actress of all time, so why is she here? Is she collecting appearances in big-budget fare from every major studio like Infinity Stones? Mahershala Ali has two Oscars; in Jurassic World Rebirth, he’s mainly relegated to howling like a fool every time Zora lands a shot with blood-capturing darts. Jonathan Bailey made a splash on the silver screen in Wicked last year but he’s completely anonymous here in a role that jettisons his considerable musical talents. Together, their efforts to establish pathos are about as discreet as a T-Rex trying to maneuver around a glass of water without making waves. While we’re on the subject, these Jurassic World movies need to quit with these cutesy sidekick dinosaurs like the one in Rebirth nicknamed Dolores. The creatures in this franchise can be terrifying, they can be majestic, but they are prohibited from being adorable.

During Loomis’ introduction scene, he spouts meta-commentary about how paltry sales for his dinosaur exhibits are now compared to 5 years ago, when people would wait hours in line for tickets; “nobody cares about these animals anymore,” he laments. It’s hard not to read this as studio chatter about how difficult it is to get general audiences back to the theaters for tentpole movies. But, fundamentally, it’s not wrong of us to expect more from our blockbusters. Certainly not every big release has to measure up to the all-time classics but just because a film costs $200 million to produce doesn’t mean it’s automatically worthy of overwhelming box office success. Jurassic World Rebirth is a prime example of vacant, IP water treading that Hollywood needs to make an endangered species.

Score – 1.5/5

New movies coming next weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Superman, a superhero movie starring David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan, retelling the tale of a superpowered being raised by an adoptive human family in Kansas before moving to the city of Metropolis to work as a reporter.
Also coming only to theaters is Skillhouse, a horror film starring Bryce Hall and Hannah Stocking, following ten influencers who are lured into a sinister content house and forced to compete in potentially lethal social media challenges.
Streaming on Shudder is Push, a home invasion thriller starring Alicia Sanz and Raúl Castillo, involving a pregnant realtor who is attacked by a sadistic killer at her open house, sending her into premature labor and forcing her to escape before she gives birth.