It’s been 6 years since the last Deadpool movie but quite a bit has happened in that time gap, perhaps most consequentially for the franchise: the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney. For those unaware: Fox owned the film rights to Fantastic Four and X-Men characters like Deadpool, while Sony technically still retains the rights to Spider-Man and his affiliated characters. Moving past the mergers and acquisitions business talk, the effect on the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that it now has its first R-rated movie of the series in the fitfully amusing and mercilessly metatextual Deadpool & Wolverine. It’s a team-up that comic book fans will no doubt be giddy about, given the history between the characters on the page, but one that could leave casual superhero movie fans confused with how convoluted the plot has to get to finally bring them together.

6 years after Deadpool 2, Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) has retired his mercenary cowl and works as a used car salesman with his equally checked-out friend Peter (Rob Delaney). In the middle of a surprise birthday party, Wilson is abducted by agents of the Time Variance Authority and is brought to Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), a bureaucrat character similar to Mobius from the Disney+ series Loki. Paradox tells Wade that their universe is collapsing due to the death of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in another timeline, which prompts Wade to suit up once again and nab a Wolverine variant from the multiverse to save his world. During their mission, they run up against the powerful mutant Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), who seeks the power to destroy other universes at will.

In terms of plot mechanics, Deadpool & Wolverine is most akin to DC’s The Flash from last year, which expected viewers to not only know everything that’s happening in the DCEU but also have background knowledge of both completed and uncompleted projects involving the characters. Without spoiling anything, it’s enough to say that audiences going into this movie who don’t have a firm grasp on both the MCU and the Fox run of superhero films over the last 25 years will face challenges keeping up with this storyline. The amount of prerequisites for Marvel movies has been steadily rising since Nick Fury uttered those famous final words after the end credits of Iron Man in 2008 and the now collegiate-level requirements border on farce.

But behind the fourth-wall breaks and the winks to the camera — I mean those both literally, as self-referential humor is a big part of Deadpool’s schtick — there are fundamental story issues with Deadpool & Wolverine that the movie would prefer we laugh and shrug off. I doubt I caught every single Easter egg that director Shawn Levy and company threw my way but I never felt out of the loop with the multi-layered jokes that come at a machine gun pace. What I struggled with were fundamental questions like “why are the heroes doing what they’re doing right now?” or “what does this villain actually want?” I think Levy wants us to forget about pesky things like character motivation and narrative inertia but most MCU movies have excelled at prioritizing these basic filmmaking aspects while still including some laughs along the way.

Having said all of this, I laughed numerous times during Deadpool & Wolverine, which is packed with cameos that mostly don’t just last for a few seconds but actually figure into the plot in more consequential ways. There are plenty of profane one-liners that few in the business can rattle off with as much cheeky aplomb as Ryan Reynolds. Even some of the ironic needle drops worked for me, although some felt like they were straining too hard for laughs. It could be argued that the whole film strives too hard to get a reaction from the audience and borders on desperation at times. If this were a pure send-up of the superhero movie genre that wasn’t beholden to the obligations of being one itself, it could’ve worked as a pure comedy but as an entry in the MCU, Deadpool & Wolverine feels too shallow to leave an impact.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Trap, a psychological thriller starring Josh Hartnett and Ariel Donoghue, which involves a father and his teen daughter who attend a pop concert, only to realize they’ve entered the center of a dark and sinister event.
Also coming to theaters is Harold And The Purple Crayon, a fantasy comedy starring Zachary Levi and Lil Rel Howery, adapting the classic children’s picture book about an imaginative boy who is able to conjure up anything that he is able to draw with his magical drawing utensil.
Streaming on Netflix is Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie, an animated adventure starring Carolyn Lawrence and Tom Kenny, which further spins off the SpongeBob SquarePants series to give the subtitular Texas-based squirrel her own time to shine in the spotlight.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

After a months-long viral marketing campaign that put forth cryptic teaser clips and coded messages inspired by Zodiac Killer-esque symbology, the unholy and unforgettable horror-thriller Longlegs has crawled into theaters in its terrifying full form. It’s both a film that wears its influences —Silence Of The Lambs and Seven are givens — on its sleeve and one that keeps reinventing itself with every hairpin turn of the central mystery. Even with the presence of genre stalwart Maika Monroe and perhaps the most predictably unpredictable performer around in Nicolas Cage, there’s little comfort in the familiar here. There are horror movies that aim to scare audiences with spooky spontaneity and knee-jerk thrills and then there are those which actively work to unnerve and unsettle us. The latest from writer-director Osgood Perkins falls in the latter category.

Monroe stars as Lee Harker, a cloistered and committed young FBI agent whose next-level intuition helps her quickly break open an elusive case that compels her boss Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) to assign her to one that’s been even more beguiling. Over the span of multiple decades, a serial killer known as Longlegs (Cage) has seemingly been involved with numerous murder–suicides in the Pacific Northwest, with only coded messages left behind as evidence. Harker makes quick work of the seemingly indecipherable notes and finds a pentagram-predicated pattern within the clues, although there still aren’t precise signs who the killer’s next victim might be. Throughout her monomania in cracking the case, Harker maintains connection with her pious mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), who worries that Lee chasing a devil-devout deviant may cause her to lose herself in the process.

At the outset, Longlegs posits itself as more of a procedural thriller before slowly morphing into art horror by its conclusion, with some unexpected but much-needed chuckles peppered in. Four films in, Perkins seems to be most interested in telling scary stories from different subgenres, his I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House in the gothic ghost story tradition and Gretel & Hansel in the vein of dark fairy tale. His latest most closely resembles his 2015 outing The Blackcoat’s Daughter, a superb supernatural chiller about two students left behind a boarding school over winter break. While Longlegs is somehow even creepier than that film, it’s also Perkins’ most accomplished work so far, made of moments that exude ardent craft and nuanced precision.

Everyone in front of the camera is more than game for his vision, with Monroe as our audience surrogate into this twisted tale much in the way Jodie Foster was for Silence Of The Lambs. In films like It Follows and Watcher, she plays characters who just try to stay one step ahead of the evil forces stalking them but here, her Harker is much more capable in her ability to snuff out the nefarious forces at play. As we often see in movies about detectives whose job consumes their lives, Monroe taps into the social awkwardness that comes with someone whose head is always somewhere else. Mostly it’s underscored as a predominant personality trait among the most determined agents but sometimes it’s keenly played for laughs; when Agent Carter’s 8-year-old daughter asks Harker if she’d like to see her room, Perkins smash cuts to the agent sitting rigidly on the little girl’s bed through social obligation.

Underwood also puts forth easy-to-overlook work as Harker’s veteran superior but I imagine one of the main hooks for those drawn in by Longlegs this month will be Nicolas Cage, whose character’s full appearance has been withheld in promotional materials. Some may complain that Cage doesn’t appear in the movie more, while others may wish that he was used more sparingly but regardless, he predictably makes a meal of his deranged and haunting character. Perkins wisely gives us swift glimpses of the towering occultist figure before giving us the squirm-inducing close-ups of Cage’s face. While it’s only been out several days, Longlegs already seems to carry with it a staying power uncommon for the majority of current horror output.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Twisters, a disaster movie starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell following a retired tornado-chaser and meteorologist as they’re persuaded to return to Oklahoma to work with a new team and new technologies to track severe storms.
Premiering on Disney+ is Young Woman And The Sea, a sports biopic starring Daisy Ridley and Tilda Cobham-Hervey telling the true story of Gertrude Ederle, an American swimming champion who became the first woman to swim 21 miles across the English Channel.
Streaming on Netflix is Skywalkers: A Love Story, a documentary involving a daring couple that travels to Malaysia to climb a 118-story skyscraper, attempting a bold acrobatic stunt on the spire to salvage both their career and relationship.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Insofar as the covid pandemic turned everything inside out, fewer studios took a harder hit than Pixar. Onward‘s March 2020 theatrical run was abruptly cut short, their next three movies debuted on Disney+ and their theatrical return with Lightyear in summer 2022 drastically underperformed at the box office. Even Elemental‘s sleeper run last year after a weak opening weekend cast doubts on the Pixar brand as the money-making juggernaut that it’s been for almost 30 years. A sequel to one of their best films certainly seems a reasonable way to get things back on track and while I have no doubt Inside Out 2 will put Pixar in a better place financially, it’s a strong achievement artistically as well. This is the studio’s best follow-up to an original IP since Toy Story 2, one that unpredictably builds on the magic of its predecessor in exciting and enchanting ways.

Two years after Inside Out, our protagonist Riley (now voiced by Kensington Tallman) is officially a teenager, which spells trouble for the five anthropomorphized emotions in her head. Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (now voiced by Tony Hale), Disgust (now voiced by Liza Lapira) and Anger (Lewis Black) seem to have a good system down, until a “Puberty Alarm” on the mind console blares out the night before Riley heads to hockey camp. Suddenly, new emotions pop up in headquarters and start taking over, the most quarrelsome being Anxiety (Maya Hawke). Less bothersome but still impactful are others newcomers Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser). Anxious to take over, Anxiety banishes the original five from the control room, who spend most of the film working their way back to balance out Riley’s emotional state.

As much as Inside Out was a coming-of-age story about the value of the basic emotions in the human experience, Inside Out 2 examines the more complicated feelings that crop up as we get older. Anxiety, then, is something of a perfect antagonist this time around, as it’s not simply happy or sad as it’s ceaselessly energetic. Maya Hawke does a terrific job at capturing the manic and infectious timbre that approximates the sounds anxiety would make if it could be personified. Amy Poehler is excellent again as Joy, who tries to align her goals with Anxiety but demonstrates that the paths to get there are drastically different. Of course, the ideal would be to have a balance of all these emotions but the teenage years are all about things being thrown out of whack and the bustling power struggle between Joy and Anxiety is a superb cipher for this stage of life.

Just as Inside Out 2 makes room for more complex emotions and thornier narrative implications, it also deepens the original’s adroitness for visualizing psychological concepts. Building on the lessons learned from that chapter, Joy creates a “Sense Of Self” section of Riley’s head, where the multi-colored memory orbs introduced in Inside Out float on a translucent lake where elegant strands spring out of the water. When plucked, these strings echo affirmations like “I’m a good person” and analogize one’s self-esteem. After Anxiety takes the wheel, these threads turn jagged and contain thoughts like “if I make the hockey team, I won’t be alone.” Now, a more simple animated movie would have these be purely negative thoughts that obviously need to go but “if I’m good at hockey, I’ll have friends” isn’t a bad sentiment on its own. The issue is how Anxiety applies these thoughts to Riley’s psyche, beautifully capturing how logical fallacies, thought loops and cognitive biases can crop up in our brains.

Building upon the incredible “abstract thought” section of Inside Out, the sequel implements different animation styles for several new characters that pop up during Joy and company’s journey back to headquarters. 2D remnants from a TV show Riley watched when she was younger, Bloofy and Pouchy (voiced by Ron Funches and James Austin Johnson, respectively), toss out questions to a non-existent audience in the back of Riley’s mind. There’s also the Final Fantasy-influenced Lance Slashblade and ominous Deep Dark Secret, who incidentally looks like the Paul Walter Hauser-voiced character from this year’s Orion And The Dark. There’s also a frantic setpiece involving a house-of-cards cubicle farm of Projections that sneaks in clever references to both 1984 and the “distracted boyfriend” meme. As much as I love Inside Out, I didn’t expect to enjoy a sequel to it quite this much but Inside Out 2 is a fully-realized successor that delights and surprises with its imagination and ingenuity.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is The Bikeriders, a crime drama starring Jodie Comer and Austin Butler which tells the true story of the Chicago outlaw motorcycle club known as the Vandals MC as their club evolves over the course of the 1960s.
Also coming to theaters is The Exorcism, a supernatural horror film starring Russell Crowe and Sam Worthington about a troubled actor who begins to exhibit a disruptive — and possibly demonic — behavior while shooting a supernatural horror film.
Streaming on Netflix is Trigger Warning, an action thriller starring Jessica Alba and Anthony Michael Hall following a skilled Special Forces commando who takes ownership of her father’s bar after he suddenly dies and soon finds herself at odds with a violent gang running rampant in her hometown.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

This summer, one Shyamalan simply isn’t sufficient. While M. Night Shyamalan has the concert-set thriller Trap due out this August, his daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan has struck first blood with The Watchers, a supernatural horror offering based on A.M. Shine’s breakthrough novel. Though she’s worked as second unit director on her father’s recent films Old and Knock At The Cabin, while also writing and directing a handful of episodes for the Apple TV+ series Servant, this is Ishana’s first time writing and directing for the big screen. Her directorial debut displays promise from the outset with a tantalizing hook and properly spooky atmosphere but eventually comes undone with inconsistent pacing and telegraphed third-act developments.

The Watchers centers around Mina (Dakota Fanning), a young American stuck in the haze of her troubled past while working at a pet shop in Ireland. Tasked with delivering a prized parrot to a customer hours away from the store, Mina finds herself lost in the deep Irish forest with a broken down car. Soon night falls and worrisome noises draw her to the only building in the area and a woman called Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), who is standing by the open door offering Mina shelter. The situation doesn’t get any less strange when Madeline demands that Mina stand with her, along with two other lost forest dwellers Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), in front of a one way mirror so the quartet can be observed by an unseen entity. Can the four of them find their way out of the woods before the creatures they call “The Watchers” penetrate their bunker?

Like her father’s most memorable movies, Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers has a high-concept premise perfect for an enticing teaser trailer, which fittingly debuted before fellow Warner Bros release Dune: Part Two earlier this year. From a marketing perspective, it’s fortunate that the clip features the most accomplished stretch of filmmaking front-and-center. The four members of “The Coop”, the characters’ name for the enclosure they find themselves in, kill time playing records and DVDs until the sun goes down and ritual dictates that they gather in front of the glass to be “watched”. It’s a juxtaposition between mundane domesticity and paranormal ceremony previously employed by similarly grabby entertainments like Lost and 10 Cloverfield Lane.

It’s never an easy thing to follow up on such a persuasive pitch with a narrative that cleverly unpacks the opening gambit and that’s where The Watchers predictably falters. The more we learn about the titular observers, the less interesting the story at large becomes. Instead of focusing on the troublesome and tense aspects of sharing a confined living space with three other strangers, Shyamalan decides to press forward with the more generic horror elements of her tale instead. It’s not necessarily that the reveal of who The Watchers are is disappointing but as a director, Shyamalan can’t exactly figure out where she wants to take things from there. Once the bird flies the proverbial coop, it doesn’t land in territory we haven’t seen dozens of times before.

That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have appealing aspects. It’s exceptionally well shot by cinematographer Eli Arenson, who beautifully captures both the haunting beauty of the Irish countryside and the chilly interiority of The Coop. The shots of Mina and the others interacting with the one way mirror are aided by gorgeous computer-generated effects that gorgeously render reflections that point to the movie’s theme of doubles and competing halves of one’s identity. It’s also nice to see Dakota Fanning in a starring role again after a smaller part in last year’s The Equalizer 3. Even if her character’s personal journey isn’t quite as interesting as the supernatural elements at play, Fanning makes Mina a protagonist with whom it’s easy to sympathize. The Watchers isn’t the strongest start for Ishana Night Shyamalan but there are still seeds of a promising storyteller to watch for.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing exclusively in theaters is Inside Out 2, an animated sequel starring Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith following the personified emotions of a teenage girl as new feelings like Anxiety and Envy enter the mix.
Screening at Cinema Center is Tuesday, a fantasy drama starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Lola Petticrew about a mother and her terminally ill daughter as they’re visited by a size-altering macaw that’s the personification of death.
Streaming on Hulu is Brats, a documentary about the Brat Pack, a group of young actors who frequently appeared together in coming-of-age films in the 1980s, and the impact on their lives and careers.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Years ago, GEICO had an ad spoofing the stupidity of horror movie protagonists where a group of teens on the run from a killer opt to hide behind a wall of hanging chainsaws over hopping in a running car. Following their decision, we get a close-up of the killer standing right behind them, who lifts up his mask to reveal how befuddled and somehow disappointed he is by their idiocy. The new Canadian slasher film In A Violent Nature hinges on a hook left hanging by the ad: what if we spent a whole horror movie following the deranged murderer instead of the clueless campers? There have been so many Friday The 13th sequels, it’s a wonder they hadn’t tried it before but now that it’s finally here, I only wish that it had come sooner; it’s the best movie of its subgenre since last year’s Thanksgiving.

We open on a static shot of a locket hanging on a beam in a deep woods abandoned shed, where voices talk out of frame and a hand belonging to Troy (Liam Leone) reaches out to nab the jewelry. Little does he know, that necklace is all that was keeping the decades-old corpse of Johnny (Ry Barrett) buried in the ground and moments after Troy departs with his buddies, the zombified Johnny wriggles free from his earthy prison. We stick with him as he wanders through the forests of Ontario, silently watching over a campfire where the group of friends swap scary stories. They eventually bring up the White Pine Slaughter, an urban legend where an unseen force allegedly got brutal revenge on a group of loggers who covered up the murder of the “mentally hindered” Johnny when he was just a boy. Unfortunately for them, the revenge isn’t quite over yet.

After this bit of exposition, In A Violent Nature doesn’t bother to explain much more along the lines of character motivation as, in one sense, we’ve seen this movie before. Once Johnny claims his first victim, the survival instincts of the remaining campers reliably kick in and they attempt to take actions that won’t instantly doom them. By keeping the perspective on the zombified killer as he lumbers through nature, it could be said that Johnny is the closest thing the film has to a true protagonist. We aren’t exactly rooting for him to kill everyone in this group…but aren’t we? He’s modeled very similarly to Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked face of the Friday The 13th series who drowned as a boy at Camp Crystal Lake due to the negligence of the staff. If Jason can be seen as the “hero” of that franchise, then it’s not difficult to view Johnny in the same way here.

Though In A Violent Nature has long takes and a slower pace, don’t let that fool you into thinking that the movie takes itself too seriously. Some of the kills here are the most gloriously over-the-top that I’ve seen in a slasher, including a cliffside slaughtering that is so immoderate that it’s difficult not to chuckle. That’s not to say that this is a horror comedy but it certainly knows where it came from and leans into the camp of its predecessors. In his debut, writer/director Chris Nash has clearly done his homework, thought about what we’ve already seen before in these films and then commits to how to give us a new perspective. Plot-wise, this movie is hardly reinventing the wheel but in terms of direction, it’s pretty much one-of-a-kind.

Another way that In A Violent Nature carves out its own path is in its audio presentation, which forgoes a musical score for the eerie sounds of the deep forest and the detailed sound design during the slayings. It’s another way that the movie is a subtractive exercise, taking away the conventions upon which audiences typically rely to heighten the overall experience. In a brief sequence that is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project, one of the characters is running fast enough that her white shirt is barely visible and her screams are barely audible over the ominous symphony of cicada chirps. It sets up a denouement that is more tense and unnerving than the brutality that precedes it, capping off In A Violent Nature as appointment viewing for horror fans.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Bad Boys: Ride Or Die, a buddy cop action comedy starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence reuniting a pair of Miami PD’s finest as they investigate corruption in the department but subsequently find themselves on the run.
Also playing in theaters is The Watchers, a supernatural horror film starring Dakota Fanning and Georgina Campbell following a young artist who gets stranded in the forest and becomes trapped alongside three strangers, who are stalked by mysterious creatures each night.
Premiering on Netflix is Hit Man, a romantic action comedy starring Glen Powell and Adria Arjona involving a professor moonlighting as a hit man for his city police department who finds himself attracted to a woman who enlists his services.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup