Category Archives: Review
Honey Don’t!
Following last year’s road caper Drive-Away Dolls, writer/director Ethan Coen continues his creative collaboration with wife Tricia Cooke in what is purportedly the middle chapter of a “lesbian B-movie trilogy”. Though the characters and story don’t overlap from its predecessor, Honey Don’t! once again stars Margaret Qualley, this time playing pertinacious private investigator Honey O’Donahue. She exchanges tips with dim-witted detective Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day), who informs her that one of her recent clients just died in a cliffside car accident. Working with police officer MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), Honey traces the client’s last whereabouts to the emergent Four-Way Temple, led by the charismatic Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans).
Too often, Honey Don’t! feels like a B-side to a B-movie — incidentally, the Carl Perkins song that gives the film its title was also a B-side — but more in the sense that it feels like leftover parts as opposed to a companion piece. Like many Coen Brothers movies, Drive-Away Dolls featured a labyrinthine mystery with colorful characters but the case here isn’t as satisfying in its resolution and the parts don’t feel as fleshed out. Talented supporting players like Billy Eichner and Talia Ryder pop in for a few scenes but their presence doesn’t end up affecting the plot in a meaningful way. Chris Evans certainly makes a meal of his pseudo-cult leader role but there’s not much on the page to his hypocritical holy man schtick that’s unique from what we’ve seen before. And even in a comedy, it’s hard to take Charlie Day seriously as an officer of the law.
The primary way Honey Don’t! distinguishes itself from Drive-Away Dolls is in how it treats the sapphic storyline between its primary protagonists. The relationship that develops between Honey and MG has a thornier (and a word that rhymes with “thornier”) dynamic to it than the more wholesome one shared by Jamie and Marian in Dolls. The film is comparatively even more sex-forward than the already unchaste previous entry and Qualley and Plaza certainly put all of themselves into these characters. In addition to the physicality of the acting, the pair get the lion’s share of the script’s pithy pitter-patter dialogue, as when Honey and MG discuss the differences between crochet and knitting over drinks and more at the local watering hole.
Individual scenes in Honey Don’t! have passable pleasures on their own terms but they just don’t add up to much when it comes to contributing to a cohesive and cogent story. Shuffling through tropes like hasty kidnappings and drug deals gone wrong, the crime aspects of the film play like a Coen kineograph of reliable plot elements rather than thought out narrative. Through lines about quirky behavior and running jokes are basically the closest thing resembling character development that the film has. The undercooked script falls apart most in the third act, which tries to stitch everything together with a would-be payoff that neither feels earned nor makes much sense.
As underwritten as it is, Honey Don’t! never drags and is rarely dull, mostly due to Coen’s snappy direction that, like Drive-Away Dolls, completes its mission in under 90 minutes. The movie is set in present-day California but there are loads of retro flourishes, from the sepia-toned set design in Honey’s office to the throwback costume design, that give off 70s flair. No word yet on what Go, Beavers!, the proposed trilogy-capper, will be about but my hope is that no matter what, Margaret Qualley will, as she does in the first two entries, get to drive a cool vintage car in it. Honey Don’t! has style and swagger for days but its titular PI needed a more worthwhile case to crack for her first time out.
Score – 2.5/5
New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Caught Stealing, a comedy crime thriller starring Austin Butler and Regina King, centered around a burned-out ex-baseball player who unexpectedly finds himself embroiled in a dangerous struggle for survival amidst the criminal underbelly of 1990s New York City.
Also coming to theaters is The Roses, a dark comedy starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, updating The War Of The Roses as a tinderbox of competition and resentments underneath the façade of a picture-perfect couple is ignited when the husband’s professional dreams come crashing down.
Premiering on Netflix is The Thursday Murder Club, a crime comedy starring Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan, following four irrepressible retirees who spend their time solving cold case murders for fun and find themselves in the middle of a whodunit.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup
Relay
A corporate espionage thriller that stays sharp until its final act, Relay stars Riz Ahmed as Ash, a shrewd New York-based fixer who’s found a rather brilliant way to stay anonymous when brokering deals between clients. Communicating via the New York Relay Service, he sends messages electronically to relay operators and they read them to the third party on the line. They reply back, the operator types their response and Ash is able to read what they say. Of course it’s more cumbersome than a 1-on-1 phone call but has the crucial benefits of concealing Ash’s identity and being completely untraceable, thanks to protection from ADA laws. Whether he’s making demands of corporate goons or giving detailed instructions to the whistleblowers they’re trying to silence, Ash is able to type it all out from anywhere in the city with his portable teletypewriter and the person on the other end can’t even hear his real voice.
His newest contact is Sarah (Lily James), a research scientist who gets fired from biotech firm Cybo Sementis for asking too many questions about a disturbing report linking their insect-resistant crops to human side effects. While Ash’s clientele would typically request protection after the proverbial whistle is blown, Sarah instead wants his help to return the documents she stole after leaving the company. She says she’s followed everywhere she goes, she doesn’t feel safe in her apartment and she just wants her life back. To paraphrase Joseph Heller, it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you, and the company has indeed hired thugs, led by Dawson (Sam Worthington) and Rosetti (Willa Fitzgerald), to make Sarah’s life hell until she coughs up what she knows. Through his unique communication method, Ash parlays between Sarah and the henchmen while working diligently to operate as a ghost during the process.
Relay gets off to a bit of a slow start — spending too much time on the tail end of Ash’s previous case with not enough of a narrative justification for doing so — but it’s certainly gripping once it gets going. I was reminded frequently of two movies that incidentally both star George Clooney, the first being legal thriller Michael Clayton and the assassin slow-burn The American secondarily. While his manner of cajoling conglomerates and counselors in the former is face-to-face and his character barely says five words in the latter, both films follow protagonists living life in the shadows. Riz Ahmed obviously isn’t at Clooney’s level of fame but he certainly has the acting chops to pull off a captivating lead like this. In one scene, Ash communicates in ASL with a deaf document forger, recalling his spellbinding work in 2020’s criminally underseen Sound Of Metal.
The film works best when it’s operating as a streamlined cat-and-mouse and less so when it’s trying to work other dramatic angles. Hell Or High Water director David Mackenzie and his writer Justin Piasecki relish the opportunities to explore how Ash uses procedural loopholes to stay a step ahead but falter when they foist a romantic subplot on the two leads. It feels particularly inorganic in context and was clearly added to make the later scenes of peril hit harder given the burgeoning connection between Ash and Sarah. Relay‘s worst offenses come in the third act, which tries too hard to outdo itself with out-of-left-field plot developments that threaten to derail the good will that was built up before them. Without saying too much, there’s a poorly-edited climactic foot chase that makes little sense geographically and even less sense narratively.
Up to that point, the movie finds the most success in keeping its worlds small and stealthy: the interior of a crowded surveillance van, a dimmed shoebox apartment, the back of a bustling bodega. New York City is a perfect place for Ash to stay hidden in plain sight and as with a myriad of conspiracy nail-biters before it, this film gets the most out of an urban setting where unexpected distractions are plentiful. Relay‘s raison d’être revolving around segmented conversation also fits in nicely with the tenuous lines of communication that exist between passersby in an overcrowded metropolis. Though Mackenzie and his team sacrifice intelligence in favor of simpler storytelling down the stretch, this is a mostly taut thriller with a memorable hook and an engaging central performance.
Score – 3/5
More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Eden, a survival thriller starring Jude Law and Ana de Armas, telling the true story of a group of outsiders who settle on a remote island only to discover their greatest threat isn’t the brutal climate or deadly wildlife but each other.
Also playing only in theaters is Trust, a horror thriller starring Sophie Turner and Rhys Coiro, following a Hollywood actress who hides in a remote cabin after a scandal, only to find herself betrayed and fighting for survival against someone she once trusted.
Streaming on Hulu is Eenie Meanie, a heist thriller starring Samara Weaving and Karl Glusman, centered around a former teenage getaway driver who is dragged back into her unsavory past when a former employer offers her a chance to save the life of her chronically unreliable ex-boyfriend.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup
Weapons
The chilling mystery Weapons, writer-director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to 2022’s out-of-nowhere camp hit Barbarian, finds the The Whitest Kids U’ Know alum following the sketch comedy-to-horror filmmaking path paved by Jordan Peele. It’s a formally and narratively more ambitious movie than his previous effort, telling its twisty-turny tale through the eyes of six different characters, each contributing their own fragments to the master narrative. At times, the chronology overlaps and we see the same scene from a different perspective but Cregger mostly uses the technique to parse out bits of information until the entire picture is filled in. While it falls victim to the logic gaps and plot holes that have plagued multi-layered stories before it, the film is a freaky fun puzzle box to unlock and contains some of the year’s best scares to boot.
Set in the fictitious small town of Maybrook, Weapons opens with elementary school teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) arriving at her classroom with only one of her 18 students, Alex (Cary Christopher), in attendance. The ensuing police investigation reveals that the other 17 kids all woke up at 2:17 AM the previous night and ran out of the respective houses, vanishing into the dark. As days and weeks go by with no further understanding of what caused this tragically bizarre event, the parents of the missing children like Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) gradually turn on Justine and press the school principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) for answers. Also feeling the pressure from desperate townspeople are police captain Ed Locke (Toby Huss) and his son-in-law officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), the latter of whom is looking to rekindle a flame with Justine.
Through creepy bookend voiceovers, the first of which sets up a story in which “a lot of people die in a lot of weird ways”, Weapons percolates with the unease we feel collectively when faced with the unimaginable. In the wake of tragedy, we can’t accept that there is no solution and no way to prevent its future occurrence. The fractured narrative underscores the social fissures that the disappearance creates between the people of Maybrook, who have a much more difficult time working the problem separately than if they had done so together from the start. As the storyteller, Cregger delights in patiently putting the pieces together while simultaneously including numerous terrifying moments designed to make us jump out of our seats. A night-set scene, in which Justine is asleep in her car, is a masterclass in how lighting, sound design and a petrifying performance can lend themselves to a perfect horror setpiece.
Like many horror outings, Weapons‘ spookiest scenes are set in the wee small hours of the morning, while the whole town should be asleep but its citizens are burdened by somnambulance and unshakeable nightmares. But even during the daytime moments, cinematographer Larkin Seiple is able to carry over a half-awake nerviness to the shot composition that makes everything feel that much more unpredictable. Much like DP Roger Deakins accomplished in 2013’s Prisoners — another small-town thriller centered around missing kids — Seiple drenches each frame with a visualized version of the dread and dreariness that fill our characters. If you can see this film in IMAX, it’s worth the upgrade to get a better glimpse into the shadows and darkness on the edge of town.
Given its story structure, Weapons doesn’t have quite as much time as I’d prefer to more deeply develop its characters but the talented ensemble does a great job imbuing their roles with ardor and unexpected bits of humor too. Josh Brolin and Julia Garner turn in reliably great work crashing up against one another as types they’ve played before, the former as a gruff everyman looking for justice and the latter as a troubled young woman looking for solace. Besides another actor whose presence is best left to be discovered, the movie’s secret weapon may be Austin Abrams as a drug addict who’s more credible than the rest of the community seems to think. Weapons doesn’t quite hit all the ambitious targets it’s shooting for but it shows that Cregger is anything but a one-hit wonder after Barbarian and has the chops to go the distance as a filmmaker.
Score – 3.5/5
New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Nobody 2, an action comedy starring Bob Odenkirk and Connie Nielsen, following a former lethal assassin whose violent past catches up with him once again, this time on summer vacation with his family.
Also playing only in theaters is Witchboard, a horror remake starring Madison Iseman and Aaron Dominguez, involving a cursed spirit board which awakens dark forces and drags a young couple into a deadly game of possession and deception.
Streaming on Netflix is Night Always Comes, a crime thriller starring Vanessa Kirby and Jennifer Jason Leigh, telling the story of a desperate woman who sets out on a dangerous odyssey, confronting her own dark past over the course of one propulsive night.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup
The Naked Gun
In some ways, a reboot/legacy sequel of the Naked Gun films makes sense. With humble beginnings as the short-lived ABC series Police Squad!, the franchise took off with the release of The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988 and generated two sequels that also hit big at the box office. To say that the movies don’t follow a strict narrative chronology or cohesion goes without saying, so you can basically go with just about any story upon which screenwriters can throw the most jokes. But since the complete original comic trio of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker and star Leslie Nielsen are no longer with us, it seemed unlikely that a remake could actually recapture the magic of the spoof comedy dynasty. So it’s quite surprising that not only is The Naked Gun as good as the 1988 original but it may even supersede it.
The film stars a fantastic Liam Neeson as Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr., son of Leslie Nielsen’s bumbling badge from the original trilogy. Kneeling before a plaque of his dad in the Police Squad station, Drebin Jr. remarks “I want to be just like you but, at the same time, completely different and original.” His investigation into a fatal car crash in Malibu brings the deceased driver’s sister Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) to his office, claiming that her brother’s death was no accident. The investigation leads Frank to tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston), whose electric car model is the same as the one found at the crash site. But Drebin uncovers an even more nefarious plot in the process, one involving a device that can beam an audio signal through cell phones that turns bystanders into barbarians with the hit of a button.
Where The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear and Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult were partially undone by plotlines that were needlessly complicated, The Naked Gun opts for a more straightforward storyline that even those under the age of the PG-13 rating could follow. These movies aren’t about developing compelling characters or generating thought-provoking themes; they’re about generating as many laughs as possible. This new entry not only succeeds at that goal but also does so at a laudably brisk pace. The 85-minute runtime is padded by a fourth wall-breaking mid-credit gag and end credits that pepper in phony acknowledgements e.g. Set Dressing as Ranch, Italian, French, Russian. There’s an under-appreciated craft to editing a comedy like this, keeping the pacing fast while still firing off more than enough comedic beats to keep the audience from feeling like they were cheated out of a longer production.
Director Akiva Schaffer, who also helmed more conceptual parodies like Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, doesn’t just get the timing right with The Naked Gun but he also nails the spirit and tone of the best ZAZ collaborations. There’s a vaudevillian energy not just in the pace of the comedy but the variety of comedic styles that Schaffer and his co-scribes Dan Gregor and Doug Mand employ throughout the film. While it mainly riffs on police procedurals and the tropes therein, the mechanics of getting those jokes to land travel through the gamut of comedy genres from the absurd to prop work along the way. Not only is the movie not afraid of potty humor but the best quote from the whole thing even has the word “toilet” in it.
As threadbare as the plot is, The Naked Gun doesn’t work unless you cast correctly for Drebin, given how inextricably linked Leslie Nielsen is with the original films. In fact, the project actually flailed for years when a direct-to-TV sequel starring Nielsen fell through and a re-work starring Ed Helms (thankfully) never manifested. Fortunately, co-producer Seth MacFarlane saw the potential of Liam Neeson after directing him back-to-back in comedies A Million Ways to Die in the West and Ted 2. Neeson is simply sensational in this role, his grizzled gravitas and presence in innumerable actioners over the years lending itself perfectly to deadpan deliveries and tough guy pratfalls. In a time when most straight-ahead comedies have been relegated to streaming services, it’s a joy to watch an uproarious comedy like The Naked Gun in the theater, laughing with strangers in the shared darkness.
Score – 4/5
New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Weapons, starring Josh Brolin and Julia Garner, is a horror mystery involving a community sent reeling when all but one child from the same classroom in town mysteriously vanishes on the same night at exactly the same time.
Freakier Friday, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, is a comedy sequel reuniting a mother and daughter who inadvertently switch places once again but this time, a daughter and stepdaughter are now mixed up in the body swap madness.
Sketch, starring Tony Hale and D’Arcy Carden, is a fantasy comedy about a young girl coming to terms with the death of her mother whose sketchbook falls into a strange pond and brings her drawings of strange creatures to life.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup
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
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
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
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.
M3GAN 2.0
M3GAN 2.0, the successor to the unexpectedly lucrative January release M3GAN from a couple years ago, is the cinematic equivalent of your phone prompting you to update an app that’s already functioning fine and when you open it back up, the experience is worse. It’s not as much a departure from its predecessor as last year’s wild swing Joker: Folie à Deux was compared to its preceding smash hit but different enough to categorize it as a “left turn” sequel. The closest analog would be Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which found the villain of the initial chapter reprogrammed to be the hero the second time around. Pivoting from campy horror to sci-fi action isn’t inherently a miscalculation but in this particular case, the idiosyncrasies of the first entry become lost in the homogenized genre swap.
Two years after her humanoid invention M3GAN goes haywire, roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams) continues to raise her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) while now advocating for regulation of artificial intelligence. They get a not-so-friendly visit from Colonel Sattler (Timm Sharp) of the Defense Innovation Unit, who informs them that AMELIA, a military robot based on M3GAN’s coding, has just gone violently rogue. Gemma thought M3GAN had been completely wiped out but it turns out she’s been hiding within the digital confines of their smart home, waiting for the right time to emerge. With no other viable options to stop AMELIA from her killing spree, Gemma reluctantly transfers M3GAN’s consciousness to a new robotic form, with combat upgrades to boot.
M3GAN 2.0 once again features Amie Donald portraying the sassy killer doll that gives this series its name, with her voice being provided once more with glitchy hiccups by Jenna Davis. The latter is featured more this time than the former, as M3GAN doesn’t get her body back until about halfway through the story, and Davis continues to excel with caddy witticisms in line with the spirit of the original film. Also carried over are musical moments for M3GAN to showcase her skills and while the dancing sequence this time is too contrived, the instance she breaks into song is even better than the singing scenes in M3GAN. There are running bits of humor too between Gemma and Cady, the latter of whom has taken up aikido and subsequently developed an affinity for the cinematic stylings of Steven Seagal.
Taking over screenplay duties from Akela Cooper, writer and director Gerard Johnstone seems to be channeling 90s tech-action movies like T2 for M3GAN 2.0 as much as his previous film was a 21st century riff on Child’s Play. Using the finest sci-fi actioner of all time as a blueprint certainly isn’t a poor strategy but the storytelling here is much more unwieldy and convoluted, relentlessly piling on subplots and side quests to an exhausting degree. AMELIA’s capabilities are also such that it barely seems like she would need to carry out any of her plan in the physical world as opposed to just maneuvering around cyberspace. Of course that would make for a much more boring movie, so it makes more sense instead to impose limitations on what M3GAN and AMELIA can do as characters. They’re both so overpowered that the humans are effectively nullified within the story, hardly a new bug when it comes to films involving evil AI.
M3GAN‘s social commentary on how technology affects modern parenting wasn’t anything groundbreaking but it worked well within the confines of its satirical horror. Comparatively, M3GAN 2.0‘s messaging around artificial intelligence is muddled at best. There are cyphers like a tech billionaire (played by Jemaine Clement) and a Center For Safe Technology rep (played by Aristotle Athari), who finds breaks between the fighting to lecture us about the moral quandaries associated with tech. Johnstone is sadly out of his depth not only with these dramatic moments but also with the action sequences, which get redundant and tedious due to uninventive staging that doesn’t make the best use of the robot characters’ mechanics. Like the latest model of a smartphone that jettisons useful features of the previous iteration, M3GAN 2.0 reinforces the concept that newer doesn’t always equal better.
Score – 2/5
New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Jurassic World Rebirth, a sci-fi action film starring Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, which finds a high-stakes expedition underway to extract DNA from three massive prehistoric creatures for a groundbreaking medical breakthrough.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is Heads Of State, an action comedy starring John Cena and Idris Elba, which follows the two world leaders who must set aside their rivalry to thwart a global conspiracy after becoming targets of a ruthless foreign adversary.
Premiering on Netflix is The Old Guard 2, a superhero movie starring Charlize Theron and KiKi Layne, picking back up with the group of immortal warriors as they grapple with the resurfacing of a long-lost entity who threatens their world.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup
F1
Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski endeavors to bring back that legacy feeling with F1, a viscerally engaging, if narratively bland, sports drama that finds another aging megastar in the danger zone. Instead of Tom Cruise soaring in the air, we’re along with Brad Pitt on the ground this time as he zooms around numerous Formula One tracks in an open-wheel single-seater. Kosinski’s modus operandi continues to be dedicating as much screen time as possible to our movie stars in action, proving that they didn’t just tap in the stunt doubles but actually had their hands at the controls. While I imagine Pitt had more backup help in this than Cruise has in just about all of his action extravaganzas these days, the illusion remains convincing in the final product.
As F1 opens, the glory days of Sonny Hayes (Pitt) seem to be in his rear view mirror. Carrying the scar of a near-fatal crash from the mid-90s, he’s given up Formula One racing for other sports car competitions like the 24 Hours Of Daytona. Before the bubbles in his popped champagne have time to fizzle out, Hayes is visited by his previous F1 frenemy Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), whose Apex Grand Prix team is in trouble. Their rookie driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) has yet to place top 10 in any of the season’s races and shareholders are antsy to clean house unless things get turned around. After a plot-mandated initial refusal, Hayes agrees to join the team and teach Pearce his ways of winning behind the wheel, with pit stops to strike up a romance with Apex technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon).
There’s really nothing F1 has in the storyline glove box that we haven’t seen before but most of what it pulls out tends to do the trick. Pitt and Idris go through the motions of the old gunslinger-young hotshot routine and generate a few sparks in the friction, most notably during a poker showdown. Elsewhere, Pitt has fireworks-caliber chemistry with Condon, whose Kate swears she doesn’t get involved with drivers but just can’t turn Sonny away. Tobias Menzies pops up as the closest thing to a human antagonist the film has to offer: a conniving Apex board member who doesn’t care whose head has to roll to get back in the green. Across a bloated 156-minute runtime, I’m not sure how Kosinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger couldn’t squeeze in a third driver character to develop as a mutual foil for Hayes and Pearce.
As with Top Gun: Maverick, the aim for Kosinski and crew with F1 is in creating a sensuously overwhelming experience designed to play better in the theater rather than the living room when the film streams on Apple TV+ later this year. Perhaps no composer is more synonymous with momentous movie music than Hans Zimmer, whose characteristic onomatopoeia “BRAAAM” is ubiquitous enough to garner its own Wikipedia entry. Zimmer’s score here is more of the same — mountainous synths and pounding percussion aplenty — but there remains enough gas in the creativity engine to underline the action. Besides an early introduction scene that gives the John Reid Bohemian Rhapsody scene a run for its money when it comes to cuts, editor Stephen Mirrione does a great job commanding the flow of sequences on and off the track.
The focus, so to speak, for cameraman Claudio Miranda is to find as many creative shots possible while mainly being constrained to the inside of an F1 car so we can see Pitt behind the wheel. While he does an admirable job with whip pans and short siding, there aren’t enough contrasting shots above the other cars where we can see how the drivers’ moves affect their position in the race. It’s surprising, given Kosinski’s “you’re in the driver’s seat” ethos, how few POV shots actually make it into the movie too. Yes, Brad Pitt is still very handsome, even with his face squished under a racing helmet, but it’s to the movie’s detriment that it includes an overabundance of reaction shots instead of action shots. Still, F1 is a fine racing movie that makes it over the finish line with its undeniable star power and convincing car choreography.
Score – 3/5
More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is M3GAN 2.0, a sci-fi sequel starring Allison Williams and Violet McGraw, finding the creator of the titular AI doll turning to it for help with a dangerous new military robot based on code that was used to make M3GAN.
Streaming on HBO Max is The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, an animated comedy starring Eric Bauza and Candi Milo, which follows Daffy Duck and Porky Pig as they try to save Earth from a chewing gum-based alien scheme.
Also premiering on HBO Max is My Mom Jayne, a documentary from actress Mariska Hargitay examining the life and career of her late mother Jayne Mansfield, who died in a car accident when Hargitay was three years old.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup