Monthly Archives: September 2026

Reel Views, Review

Primetime

He breaks through the curtains, like a superhero. He knows his lines, he hits his mark. His name is Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC, and since he’s played in the compulsively watchable thriller Primetime by Robert Pattinson, it’s hard not to think of Batman as he proceeds down the stairs of a Long Beach home in 2006. The low camera angles and deliberate pace of his steps connote dominance but Pattinson’s not dealing with the Rogues Gallery he squared off against in 2022’s The Batman. Instead, it’s a would-be child predator (played by Tony Revolori), who has a seat, right over there, helpless as Hansen slowly reveals the trap he’s walked into. Anyone familiar with To Catch A Predator, the hidden camera phenomenon that ran for three seasons in the mid-aughts, has seen this scene before but you’ve never seen it quite like this.

Given the response from the real-life Hansen, who has predictably made quite the stink about Primetime in the press, perhaps the biggest surprise director Lance Oppenheim offers in his narrative feature film debut is parity in screen time for the numerous forces behind Predator machine. There’s Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), the show’s executive producer, who manages the delicate logistics behind the sting operations that make up the climax of each episode. We meet Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), an actor looking for his first real credit so he can score that SAG card, who gets more than he bargained for when he’s cast as a “decoy” to lure in potential pedophiles. Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), the founder of the vigilante group Perverted-Justice, poses as a minor in online chat rooms to get the perverts to agree to meet in real life.

What Primetime isn’t is an exposé about how everyone who worked on this show, which took on the tricky task of attempting to thwart sexual criminals before they could act, is bad and wrong. I think it’s fair to say a film that moralized that unambiguously would seem foolish and somewhat pointless. Instead, Oppenheim and his screenwriter Ajon Singh (adapting from the Luke Dittrich article “Tonight On Dateline This Man Will Die”) use the pursuit to make To Catch A Predator a hit an allegory for the corrupting influence of fame and money on ridding the world of evil. Much like the reality series it’s covering, the movie gradually becomes less interested in punishing pedophilia through the justice system and more attuned to the insatiable bloodlust of network execs and viewers alike. A conversation Hansen has with a plane passenger, played by a face that will be familiar to those who watched sitcoms around the Predator era, highlights how audiences came to desire violence for the perps over their day in court.

Like Marty Supreme last year, which incidentally sported Robert Pattinson in an uncredited voice cameo, Primetime features audacious casting choices that further bolster its bonafides as an ensemble piece. Bokeem Woodbine is a hoot, as always, as a Texas sheriff who is so revved up to catch him a pederast that he brandishes a comically oversized pistol and promises to do the job himself. Singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers proves she could have more cinematic roles in her future with a nice turn as a decoy that schools Dan in the ways of vocal manipulation for phone calls with the creeps. Somehow, Oppenheim even convinced NBCUniversal executive Jeff Zucker to portray an exaggerated version of himself as he pushes Hansen and Bender to compete against ABC’s Wednesday night juggernaut LOST.

Even though it’s an important meeting, Hansen is actually a few minutes late to it, sparring with his wife (played by Anna Faris) over the phone while glaring at a dangling Rice Krispie Treat in the vending machine in front of him. He hangs up on her, not to run to the face-to-face, but to call the vending service number and protest that one of their machines stole from him. It’s a perfect encapsulation of Hansen’s twisted sense of priority when it comes to right and wrong in the universe and Pattinson plays his pomposity perfectly. Merritt Wever is stellar as his collaborating producer who sees his talent and knows how to wrangle his savior complex but slowly reveals her exasperation at having to constantly smooth over his smug demeanor. Primetime isn’t the measured look at To Catch A Predator that last year’s spellbinding documentary Predators is but it’s certainly an electrifying white whale tale.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Digger, starring Tom Cruise and Riz Ahmed, finds a power-mad wealthy oil tycoon embark on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.
Verity, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, follows a ghostwriter hired to complete the work of a bestselling author who’s unable to continue her successful book series due to a mysterious accident she’s kept from the public.
Opening at Cinema Center is The History Of Concrete, an idiosyncratic documentary from the creator of How To With John Wilson that turns into a humorous and philosophical exploration of urbanism, the built environment, and the mundane textures of American life.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Forgotten Island

A vibrant and lightning-paced ode to female friendship and Filipino folklore, Forgotten Island is the latest from DreamWorks Animation, which has built an impressive resume in the 25 years since Shrek first hit theaters. While the animation quality of its primary competitor, Pixar, has gotten exponentially crisper and more detailed since their debut in the mid-90s, the actual style itself has largely remained the same. It certainly hasn’t held them back and, in many ways, remains their calling card; when you ask AI to generate an image of your cat, there’s a reason the result looks like a frame from a Pixar movie. But DreamWorks has been evolving the aesthetic of their output over the past few years with films like The Bad Guys and The Wild Robot, moving past Pixaresque photorealism and instead favoring hand-drawn influences.

Set in the Philippines sometime during the 90s, Forgotten Island anchors on the tight-knit friendship between a pair of high school seniors: the rambunctious Jo (H.E.R.) and the brainy Raissa (Liza Soberano). Through countless sleepovers over the years, they’ve become enamored with stories told by Jo’s grandmother Lola (Dolly de Leon) about the magical island of Nakali that she claims to have visited as a child. Though their respective friendship bracelets are heavy with charms to commemorate their shared experiences, circumstances conspire to separate them when Raissa gets accepted to CalTech in the States. Spending one last night near the ocean together, the two discover a glowing sand dollar that transports them to the mystical land they spent much of their teen years hearing about in Lola’s tales.

Jo and Raissa wake up on a Nakali beach with no memory of the past 12 hours and questions like “what happened last night?” and “why does Raissa have a set of wings latched on her shoulders?” From there, we meet mythical creatures like the lively were-aspin Raww (Dave Franco) and the cherubic demon Bungi (Manny Jacinto) who endeavor to help our best friends regain their memories and get home. If you were to put Dude, Where’s My Car? and Booksmart in a blender with dashes of Japanese anime and American action cinema, Forgotten Island is what you’d get when the blade assembly stopped spinning. As someone who appreciated its disparate influences, I confess the film from Puss in Boots: The Last Wish co-directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado is occasionally too hyperactive for its own good.

But as the film zig-zags back and forth to piece together Jo and Raissa’s lost time, it continues to find clever ways to pay off and recontextualize narrative bits set up early in their journey on the mysterious island. With Polaroids that assist in clearing the fog of memory and Raww’s declaration that he, Jo and Raissa are now a part of “The Wild Pack”, Forgotten Island also cribs a bit from the conceit of The Hangover, albeit in a more family friendly manner. Along those lines, the movie leans on spirited characters who untangle the convoluted plotline, like the Handsome Squidward-like Kataw named Prince Mermahn, voiced by Kevin McCann. Raww, who grows concerned that too many folks are interceding on The Wild Pack, dubs the merfolk prince “The Creature From The Crap Lagoon” at one point.

The influence of anime pillars like Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon on American animated output can be detected in exceptional projects like The Mitchells Vs. The Machines and Turning Red and while Forgotten Island might not be up to that level, it’s a strong continuation of the trend. The movie also merges the sensibilities of both shōnen and shōjo manga, making room for epic action scenes and sparkly facial reactions. Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, who also wrote the script together, find nuggets of inspiration from more unlikely sources, shifting the muscular focus of the Dutch-Dillon handshake from Predator to a running visual metaphor about the unbreakability of friendship. Forgotten Island is the kind of kinetic animated offering that I could imagine young people making memories watching (and re-watching) together for years to come.

Score – 3.5/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Heart Of The Beast, starring Brad Pitt and J. K. Simmons, follows a Special Forces officer and his retired combat dog after a plane crash leaves them stranded in the middle of the vast and dangerous Alaskan wilderness.
Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson and Merritt Wever, tells the true story of journalist Chris Hansen and his role in making the NBC reality crime series To Catch A Predator an infamous piece of television history.
Opening at Cinema Center is Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, starring Rinko Kikuchi and Alberto Guerra, which finds a passionate competitor in the Tokyo ballroom dance scene withdrawing into isolation due to personal tragedy but developing an infatuation with a new instructor when she returns.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Weight

Set in the Depression-era Pacific Northwest, the new quasi-Western The Weight stacks the cards against its protagonist quite heavily in its opening moments. We’re introduced to God-fearing mechanic Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke), joyriding his Ford Model 18 through the Eugene countryside with his daughter Penny (Avy Berry) in the backseat, but the good times don’t last. The two return to their apartment, where they’ve just been evicted and while going into town trying to sort things out with the bank, Samuel gets into an altercation with undercover cops and is sent to prison as a result. Months later, he’s transferred to a labor camp in Deschutes, where Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe) breaks inmates in while they’re forced to break rocks on the rough landscape. When Samuel is dubbed “Hercules” after leading an effort to dislodge a particularly difficult boulder, Clancy has another job in mind for him.

Along with Samuel’s fellow prisoners Rankin (Austin Amelio), Singh (Avi Nash) and Olson (Lucas Lynggaad Tonnesen), Clancy tasks Samuel with a dangerous mission to recover government gold and sneak it through the treacherous wilderness. Under the intense supervision of Clancy’s lackeys Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and Letender (George Burgess), the crew is flown up to the Black Hawk Gold Mines and charts out on a five-day trek back to Clancy’s outpost. With bag straps dug deep into their shoulders from the heavy cargo, the quartet of convicts with their two babysitters maneuver around the tricky terrain and accrue Indigenous runaway Anna (Julia Jones) along the way. Samuel has a guarantee from Clancy that once the job is done, he’ll sign his release papers and Samuel will be reunited with his Penny but the gold in tow is bound to generate the wrong kind of attention.

Working from a sturdy script by Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines, seasoned editor and first-time director Padraic McKinley is a bit like Samuel, metaphorically making his way through a forest of storytelling rife with obstacles. During the journey, he indeed gets tripped up by artistic choices that are over-calculated for the kind of movie this is. Given McKinley’s long career in editing, it’s disappointing that The Weight feels fussed-over when it comes to how certain sequences are cut. It’s a sword that cuts both ways, as certain takes feel like they go on too long and others are rushed, to the extent that the action in some of the latter can be difficult to track. There’s a storm-set scene at night, lit by lightning flashes several seconds apart, where it’s difficult to discern exactly what’s happening until the sun comes up the next day. Some of the intentional long takes, particularly one where Rankin and Singh discuss socialism, don’t benefit from a conversational pace or the accompanying wide shot.

The cinematography from Matteo Cocco often favors a depth of focus so shallow that it obscures most of the lush nature surrounding our beleaguered smugglers. It plays great for close-ups, especially on Ethan Hawke as our harrowed hero, but the intensely fuzzy edges don’t work as well in medium shots and certainly not in wider shots. Some of the handheld sequences, like a grueling riverside skirmish late in the film, are thrilling in the way we’re thrust into the action, but another such scene shortly afterwards falls victim to a camera so shaky that it misses a crucial gunshot. Cocco’s reliance on natural lighting certainly tracks, given how much of The Weight takes place in the woods, although it means that the nighttime shots have to rely too much on campfires and lamplight with limited visibility.

Despite these technical aspects, the movie works overall due to the elemental endurance of what a parent will overcome to be reunited with their child. Ethan Hawke wears the conflict of the scenario beautifully, conveying Samuel’s knowledge that once this task is complete, Clancy could go back on his word and keep him imprisoned. Russell Crowe makes a meal of his brow-beating overseer and Julia Jones brings a grace to her Anna that contrasts well with the rough-and-tumble cons and cronies in her midst. Like the rickety rope bridge at the center of The Weight‘s most tense setpiece, Padraic McKinley’s latest effort is not the most structurally sound piece of cinema but it gets its point across nonetheless.

Score – 3/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Resident Evil, starring Austin Abrams and Zach Cherry, reboots the horror video game franchise wherein a hapless courier is tasked with delivering a package to a remote hospital and soon finds himself caught in the middle of an mutated creature outbreak.
Shaun The Sheep: The Beast Of Mossy Bottom, starring Justin Fletcher and John Sparkes, is a stop motion animated comedy following the titular sheep as he attempts to save Halloween when the flock’s farmer suddenly goes missing while a beast wanders the woods.
Opening at Cinema Center is The Samurai And The Prisoner, starring Masahiro Motoki and Masaki Suda, which tells the true story of a warlord who rebels against a ruthless unifier by barricading himself and his clan inside Arioka Castle in 16th century Japan.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

It Ends

Between the surprise blockbuster Backrooms and the video game adaptation Exit 8, liminal horror has been all the rage this season and at summer’s end, we get one more entry with It Ends. Though the source of the specific scares from these three films varies, each is set in its own unnerving purgatorial in-between place where the laws of nature and physics don’t apply. From an allegorical sense, these movies all use seemingly endless corridors of repetition to represent anxieties about crushing monotony and being unable to change one’s current state. It’s also a subgenre that conveniently dovetails with independent cinema, as minimal spaces typically translate to a sparse number of shooting locations that can work nicely with smaller production budgets. In his feature debut, director-writer Alexander Ullom has the subtext down but doesn’t have quite enough in the narrative gas in the tank to fill up 90 minutes.

It Ends centers around three recent college graduates Day (Akira Jackson), James (Phinehas Yoon), and Fisher (Noah Toth) as they’re picked up by for a fast food run their friend Tyler (Mitchell Cole) in his Jeep. While the passengers bat around an animal-based thought experiment about which options would be best for attack or defense, Tyler misses a turn on his GPS. When he circles back, it’s clear he didn’t overlook anything, as the road remains sandwiched between tree lines and goes straight as far as they can see. Confusion soon turns into paranoia when it becomes clear to all four that no matter how they got on this road, it appears they’re stuck on it with no end in sight. Days turn into weeks as the group attempts to navigate off the impossibly unending highway without feeling hungry or tired in the process. Naturally, they ponder over the philosophical possibilities that led them to this terrifying predicament and try to keep their psyches intact as they search for their way home.

Structurally, It Ends settles into the rhythm of a time loop movie à la Groundhog Day or Palm Springs, where characters are trapped within a temporal snow globe and must find a way to escape. Where those films become typified by the variations in their Möbius strip-like plotlines, Ullom’s existential thriller becomes stubbornly defined by its repetition. Aside from the dazzling action scenes, what makes a movie like Edge Of Tomorrow work is that Tom Cruise’s soldier tries a smorgasbord of tactics on the battlefield that would get him killed, if he weren’t stuck in a “live, die, repeat” cycle. Exit 8, which hinges on the unnamed protagonist’s ability to spot “anomalies” within levels of a looping subway corridor, similarly realizes that the audience craves these breaks in the pattern to break up the malaise. While I can appreciate the likelihood that Ullom is intentionally omitting these footholds from his screenplay, there’s not enough on the page to keep the film engaging on its own terms.

Out here in the real world, time marches on and as I age, so becomes clearer the disturbing reality that I’m no longer in my twenties and there’s now a whole generation of adults who were born after 9/11. Whatever Millennial-Zoomer gap that exists in my brain doesn’t typically preclude me from enjoying the output of young filmmakers but it’s fair to say the characters in It Ends weren’t exactly folks I’d want to be stuck with on a road trip. Given the scenario, perhaps no group of people wouldn’t wear on me psychologically across thousands of “motionless” miles but the manicured sociolect between these four grated on me. Making memes so you don’t lose your marbles is as fair a coping strategy as any but the precious dialogue, particular a scene where three characters volley around “fair, but” statements, made me want to reach for a sick bag.

The quartet of twentysomething actors certainly do their best with the sparse storyline and carve out archetypes that allow us to note the personality differences as they pile up. While Tyler and James air on the side of practicality and outthinking the problem, Day and Fisher become more resigned to their fate and seek a moral repentance for absolution. Akira Jackson is the standout in terms of performance, as she’s given the most fleshed-out character of the four and also has the funniest line reads of the film. If Jean-Paul Sartre had been born 100 years later, perhaps No Exit would’ve included the line, “You have negative drip, and you get no [ladies], and you [freaking] stink.”

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Practical Magic 2, starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, reunites a multi generational family of witches, cursed to be loveless for centuries, as they attempt to break the spell by confronting dark secrets and sacrificing for each other.
Runner, starring Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson, finds a former soldier and his unlikely partner becoming the targets of a ruthless cartel while racing to complete a critical medical delivery and save the life of a little girl.
The Uprising, starring Andrew Garfield and Jamie Bell, tells the true story of the Peasants’ Revolt that inspired the legend of Robin Hood, as a rebellion leader forms an army of the people to face against the tyranny of King Richard II of England.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Midwest Film Journal

Woo!: Broken Arrow

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

For many years, the only thing I knew about Broken Arrow, John Woo’s second Hollywood swing after 1993’s Hard Target, is that it was the only movie about which Roger Ebert convinced Gene Siskel to change his mind. The “thumb twist” occurs on a glorious February 1996 episode of Siskel & Ebert & The Movies, in which Siskel also admits to an envious Ebert that he walked out early on the Chris Farley comedy Black Sheep. Siskel opines first on Broken Arrow, citing high-energy action scenes for his admitted half-hearted endorsement, but Ebert’s rebuttal, outlining his disappointment around story and characters he found to be boring, led Siskel to confess, “it doesn’t work.” While I appreciate that Ebert put together a convincing enough argument to get Siskel to go from “thumbs up” to “thumbs down”, I wish one had convinced the other to join their “thumbs up”. Broken Arrow isn’t Woo’s strongest work but it remains, as Siskel originally observes, “simply a lot of fun.”

The movie stars John Travolta and Christian Slater as rival Air Force pilots Major Vic “Deak” Deakins and Captain Riley Hale, respectively. The pair spar in a boxing ring over intense opening credits, with Deak schooling Hale on all things “rope-a-dope”, before receiving their next top-secret mission. They’re tasked with flying a pair of nuclear weapons through the Utah desert on a stealth bomber to determine if the radiation on-board can be detected by external instruments. As Deak and Hale fly under cover of darkness, we cross-cut to scenes introducing park ranger Terry Carmichael (Samantha Mathis) as she heads home from her shift, and henchmen completing on-ground misdeeds at the command of Members Only jacket-wearing Mr. Pritchett (Bob Gunton). It turns out Deak is working with Pritchett to steal the nukes and threaten the US government with them to secure a huge payday and, naturally, it’s up to Hale and Carmichael to foil the blackmail plot.

The title of Broken Arrow is derived from the flagword for when a nuke goes missing; as a DoD agent, played by Frank Whaley, points out, “I don’t know what’s scarier: losing nuclear weapons or that it happens so often, there’s actually a term for it!” Whaley and Travolta had briefly squared off two years prior in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the iconic indie that served as an adrenaline needle to the heart of Travolta’s stalled career. Tarantino helped Travolta get on John Woo’s radar in more ways than one, as the Hong Kong action aficionado screened a copy of Woo’s The Killer for the Vincent Vega actor. As great as that film is, watching a subtitle-free version while Quentin Tarantino translates the lines from Cantonese to English in real time sounds like a nightmare to me. Nevertheless, Travolta was gung ho for the gun fu gem, declaring “I want to be Chow Yun-Fat!” upon the movie’s conclusion. Get in line, Johnny.

I can’t say I detect much Yun-Fat in what Travolta is serving up as Deak — Hale not referring to him as “Deak The Freak” at any point feels like an oversight — but he’s certainly channeling something. Clearly relishing his first time playing an outright villain, Travolta gets to flick cigarettes and bark through clenched teeth at Bob Gunton, whose Warden in The Shawshank Redemption was an even bigger SOB than Deak. It’s also fitting that he spends a fair amount of screen time rubbing his face and chin, as if to contemplate contingencies in his high-stakes plan. Unarmed nukes travel by air, land and water in Broken Arrow, with the payload traveling via helicopter, Humvee and hydroplane at various points in the story. Deak’s evil scheme accounts for a hilarious amount of wrinkles and obstacles but fortunately, Woo settles on a train as the setting for the majority of the movie’s climax. Even more fortuitously, a character falling far out of the locomotive triggers use of a stock sound nicknamed the “Howie Yell”, a legendary guttural scream superior to the done-to-death Wilhelm Scream.

Sonically, Broken Arrow offers its own legacy, with excerpts of the chest-puffing music score by Hans Zimmer that went on to pop up later in sequels to Scream and Speed. “Deakin’s Theme”, which Zimmer describes as “big man” music, is spearheaded by a vibrato-heavy guitar lead set to the sinister strut of its titular character as he enters a locker room. The Morricone moment brings home the Western influence on Woo’s Utah-set actioner, although the film undoubtedly feels of a piece with the action auteur’s oeuvre. No scene is packed tighter with a panoply of Wooisms than the cockpit duel where Hale and Deak wrestle for control of the B-3 bomber. Between gun tussling, intense eye close-ups and an operatic choral score, the only thing that’s missing is a flock of doves to strike the plane’s windshield and engines.

Fairly or unfairly, Broken Arrow has gotten left in the dust compared to 90s action contemporaries like The Rock, which came out a few months later in the summer of ’96, and Face/Off, Woo’s follow-up that arrived just a year later. It shares a similar plot with the former, involving a decorated military man ransoming the United States with their own covert weaponry, and a star with the latter, as Travolta returns to the baddie territory he established with Deak. Both of those movies also feature Nicolas Cage, who, it needn’t be said, is a much more manically magnetic screen presence than Christian Slater. Then again, neither of those movies feature Slater attempting to whitesplain the Ali-Foreman Rumble In The Jungle match to Delroy Lindo.