Towards the end of 2024’s Kraven The Hunter, the sixth (and, God willing, final) chapter in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, the titular supervillain’s half-brother is revealed to be Chameleon, capable of assuming the appearance and voice of whomever he chooses. It’s a strange choice for Clayface, the third film in the recently rebooted DC Universe, to not only reach across the comic book aisle and grab the anti-hero baton from that franchise but to specifically run with the shapeshifting thread it unintentionally left open. Sony at least had the excuse that they couldn’t use Spider-Man in that spin-off series, as they leased the rights to the webslinger to Marvel Studios, but Warner Bros has access to DC Comics’ full roster of characters right now. Why they followed up Superman and Supergirl with a full feature on a Batman villain, when Batman hasn’t appeared in the DCU yet, is beyond me.

At the opening of Clayface, things seem to be going great for actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries). He watches alongside his best friend Corey (Joshua James) and his manager Frank (Eddie Marsan) as Academy Award nominations are announced and, sure enough, he’s received a nod for Best Actor. To celebrate, Matt and Corey fly home to Gotham, cut the line at a packed nightclub and the Oscar nominee cuts a rug with Mia (Joana Ribeiro) on the dance floor. It turns out Mia has a boyfriend — crime lord Markos Szabo (David Dencik) — and as punishment for Matt cutting in with his girlfriend, Szabo cuts up the movie star’s face. Desperate to repair his carved-up moneymaker, Hagen looks to nanotech scientist Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), who is working on a treatment that could heal his recently-mutilated skin, put him back on the A-list and get Matt his life back.

Clayface reportedly opens “Chapter One” of the DCU’s set of Gods And Monsters projects and without knowing much about what James Gunn and his team have planned, I would assume Clayface fits into the “Monsters” category. It would explain why the film, at times, resembles the story arc of a classic Universal Studios Monster; The Invisible Man would seem to be the closest analog. But director James Watkins zooms by the necessary character foundation for us to care about Matt Hagen first before his inevitable decline into the monstrous. The movie’s opening 15 minutes are ludicrously paced; the consequential events that lead to Matt’s downfall aren’t comical but the effort to cram them in before we can even take a breath is. Once Matt meets Dr. Corr, the film settles into a predictable rhythm of the two working to solve his condition, similar to Jared Leto and Adria Arjona from the SSU’s Morbius.

What keeps Clayface from reaching even Morbius-level quality kicks in around the halfway mark, when Matt decides the treatment is working well enough and he’s ready to carry out his revenge on those who betrayed him. But those pesky nanocells — there’s a line about how they’re controlled by AI that’s never explained or addressed again — they act up when Matt gets angry and cause his face to change into the person who’s drawn his ire. The actual “transformation” effect is goofy enough but the development leads to numerous scenes that trade the body horror tenor of the film’s first half for body swap hijinks in the back half. A third act sequence set in a club has Matt changing into about a dozen different strangers, even though it makes no strategic sense for him to do that. This is all after he corrals the crowd into a choreographed dance that all of these people randomly know somehow.

Speaking of music, the actual score, composed by Volker Bertelmann, is mainly stock superhero gravitas but does distinguish itself with an unsettling violin motif when Hagen explores his dark powers as Clayface. But the soundtrack choices are bizarre, mainly soul tracks from the likes of The Supremes, The Temptations and The Four Seasons that clash with the dread and portent of the story Watkins is telling. There’s also a Chicago song, used as a setup and callback, that’s so maudlin and unearned that I actually laughed during the reprise. Just as jarring was the funky strut of “Golden Years” by David Bowie playing over the film’s title card, which looks like it lifted its typeface from Shaft. Perhaps the attempt at camp or chest-puffery would’ve landed better in the Venom trilogy, whose biggest asset was Tom Hardy going gonzo in a dual role. In case it needs to be said, Tom Rhys Harries is no Tom Hardy.

Score – 1/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Mosquito Bowl, starring Nicholas Galitzine and Bill Skarsgård, follows four top American football players who enlist in the United States Marine Corps after the attack on Pearl Harbor and play the titular match before being deployed in the Battle of Okinawa.
The Only Living Pickpocket In New York, starring John Turturro and Giancarlo Esposito, involves an aging career street thief, clueless about modern technology, as he steals and then loses possession of a device belonging to a young member of a major crime family.
Fjord, starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, finds a conservative immigrant Romanian family living in Norway being subjected to scrutiny and an investigation after moving to the wife’s progressive remote Norwegian hometown.

Filmmakers — and certainly studios — may not like to hear this but bad movies have value in the way they can make great movies even better. Take Night Patrol, the latest release from Shudder. It’s a political horror film that coincidentally possesses overlapping themes with two of last year’s best films: Sinners and One Battle After Another. But the way that it so badly mangles a story, one which also contains vampires and ex-revolutionaries forced back into action due to loved ones in peril, makes one appreciate the sterling pair of 2025 Warners releases even more. I’m not sure if revealing that the titular task force is comprised of vampires is even a spoiler. The trailer hinges on it, the poster has fangs on it but in the film itself, director and co-writer Ryan Prows treats it like a mind-blowing third act revelation.

Further establishing himself as a horror mainstay, Justin Long stars as Ethan, an LAPD cop putting his new partner Xavier (Jermaine Fowler) through his paces out on their patrol routes. While he pursued law enforcement as a career path to transcend his gang-affiliated past, Xavier’s mom Ayanda (Nicki Micheaux) and younger brother Wazi (RJ Cyler) have reasons to distrust the police. The latter was just witness to a murder committed by an officer trying to gain his way into Night Patrol, a secret squad within the department that carries out off-the-books operations under cover of darkness. But what Ethan doesn’t know is that there’s more than one reason Night Patrol hunts at night: its members, led by Sarge (Dermot Mulroney), are part of a vampiric order that has literally been draining blood from the community.

Along with his three co-scribes, Prows attempts to reframe the decades-long gang wars in Los Angeles not between rival human factions like the Bloods and Crips, but between vampires and those who practice Zulu sorcery. Even attempting this type of narrative within a horror framework requires a deft hand, given that it’s tackling tricky themes like systemic racism and police brutality while also developing its own supernatural lore. Not only does Prows not give the political material the nuance and sensitivity it deserves, he doesn’t lay out the monsters vs. magic groundwork until well into the film’s third act, when we should already have a clear understanding what’s happening. Strangely, he plays coy with who Night Patrol is and what they’re looking to accomplish for far too much of the narrative, which makes for a muddled story as opposed to lending it an air of mystery.

Had Night Patrol announced its genre intentions from the get-go, perhaps it could’ve been enjoyable at least as a campy horror mashup that invokes the real-life horrors of gang violence in LA. But Prows plays things deadly serious, presenting his project as a gritty cop thriller with unclear stakes and ambiguous character motivation for most of the runtime. There are numerous scenes — a particularly egregious one shot in monochromatic infrared and set to heavy metal music — that depict Black characters we’ve never met getting terrorized and/or murdered by Night Patrol for seemingly no reason. Given their correlation to tragedies we’ve seen play out in the real world time and time again, these upsetting images require some serious justification for their inclusion in the movie but instead, they just feel exploitative and wrong.

It’s a shame that Night Patrol is so dreary and distasteful because there are some fun casting choices that could’ve led to moments that really click with audiences. Rapper Freddie Gibbs, who has only popped up in a few TV series before this, is a commanding screen presence as a gang leader pressing Wazi on the details of the killing he saw firsthand. Multi-hyphenate Flying Lotus, who directed and scored the cosmic horror film Ash last year, has all-too-brief time on-screen as a Zulu member who takes a beat to school his compatriots on monster mythology. They deserve better material that doesn’t crib from regressive stereotypes in an attempt to address the harsh realities of lethal street violence. Night Patrol needs to be called into its police chief’s office to have its badge and gun taken away before being forced into a leave of absence.

Score – 1/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Mercy, a sci-fi mystery starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson, finds an LA detective on trial for the murder of his wife, with 90 minutes to prove his innocence to an advanced AI judge.
Also coming to theaters is In Cold Light, a crime thriller starring Maika Monroe and Troy Kotsur, follows a young woman who’s trying to lay low after her recent prison stint but is forced on the run after she witnesses her twin brother’s murder and is framed for it.
Streaming on HBO Max is Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, a 2-part documentary covering the life, career, friendships, and loves of legendary writer, director, producer, and performer Mel Brooks, chronicling his early experiences and rise to superstardom.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Writer-director Alex Russell is best known as a writer and producer for acclaimed TV series Beef and The Bear but based on his feature debut film Lurker, I would’ve assumed he worked heavily on HBO’s The Idol. As terrible as that show was, at least it grasped the concept of how the music business works and had ideas about the corresponding pitfalls of fame and greed. This movie wants to treat the industry as window dressing for a character study about the lengths one will go to for their 15 minutes of fame but it’s so clueless about the context that the story rarely feels believable. You can certainly make the tale of someone trying to con their way to the top work — see the numerous adaptations of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” for evidence — but in their deceitfulness, the central character must be compelling.

Our titular toady here is Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), who clocks the presence of pop star Oliver (Archie Madekwe) in the store where he works and quickly switches the song playing on the speakers. Oliver’s ears perk up and he asks who put it on, to which Matthew nonchalantly fesses up, saying it’s music to which he grew up listening when it’s actually a pick he made based on a post on Oliver’s Tumblr. Matthew further ingratiates himself to Oliver’s crew, making nice with pseudo manager Shai (Havana Rose Liu) and offering to help videographer Noah (Daniel Zolghadri) shoot footage of Oliver and his blokes on tour. Matthew’s friend and co-worker Jamie (Sunny Suljic) is intrigued by the networking and accepts an invite to party with Oliver and company but Jamie’s rise in the ranks among the posse quickly draws Matthew’s ire. What will Matthew do to stay top-of-mind for Oliver?

The screenplay for Lurker is very inconsistent in its depiction of how famous its mononymous musician actually is. Oliver performs the kind of melancholy R&B made popular by major artists like The Weeknd and Frank Ocean but the crowds for which he performs aren’t arena-sized. It’s noted that he has one album and is probably taking too long to come out with a follow-up, which would put him more in a category with acts like Jai Paul or Miguel. But after Matthew’s spent some time shooting video for Oliver, he’s spotted by two girls in the boutique where he works and asked what it’s like being in Oliver’s entourage. Why a pair of strangers would recognize a music video director for an up-and-coming singer is a one of many details about Oliver’s cultural cachet that’s glossed over. Even in Los Angeles, I doubt people who work alongside an enormous star like Taylor Swift would get noticed in public. Without looking it up, do you know who directed Miss Americana? Neither do I.

Even people, like myself, not in the music industry understand the general social structure and syndicate surrounding artists like Oliver. Even for smaller signed acts, there are managers, there are assistants, and a bevy of other roles assigned by the record label to protect their investment. Besides Shai, there are literally no corporately-mandated folks that seem to be around Oliver running the business side of things. The closest thing to antagonistic pressure Matthew gets in his slippery scheme to infiltrate Oliver’s retinue is in the form of one of Oliver’s closest mates, played by Zack Fox, who presses Matthew during their green room introduction. Beyond that, Matthew barely gets any pushback from anyone until things have properly gone off the rails and up to that point, his influence on Oliver’s creative output grows exponentially for no discernible reason.

Despite their faults, recent portrayals of sociopathy like Not Okay and Saltburn (the latter of which, incidentally, also stars Archie Madekwe) understand we have to commiserate with some aspect of these protagonists. Even though Alex Russell and his editor David Kashevaroff spend loads of time on Théodore Pellerin’s face, desperate for reaction shots of Matthew that will somehow endear him to us, his character remains a cold creep. Save Jamie, everyone in Lurker is either stupid, staggeringly self-involved or simultaneously both. Oliver is a fool for bringing a stranger like Matthew into the fold so quickly, Matthew’s plan to maintain control isn’t particularly well-thought-out and all the people around them seem too dim to care. If sociopaths are neither smart nor sympathetic, they don’t belong as the main character in your story.

Score – 1/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Long Walk, starring Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, is a dystopian horror thriller centered around a group of teenage boys competing in an annual contest where they must maintain a certain walking speed or get shot.
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, starring Hugh Bonneville and Laura Carmichael, is an historical drama concluding the cinematic trilogy of the aristocratic Crawley family as they navigate financial trouble and potential public scandal as they enter the 1930s.
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, starring Christopher Guest and Michael McKean, is a mockumentary sequel that sees the titular hair metal band getting back together 40 years after the initial film for one legendary final show.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Last year saw the release of Trap and Smile 2, two thrillers about fictional pop stars in peril. Hurry Up Tomorrow, the latest ego stroke from real-life megastar The Weeknd, instead signals a perilous potential pivot in profession for the artist formerly known as Abel Tesfaye. Purportedly a companion film to his album of the same name released in January, it’s neither an anthology of segments inspired by songs from the record, nor is it a concert movie or extended music video. Reportedly inspired by an on-tour incident where Tesfaye/The Weeknd lost his voice while performing, the movie uses this inciting incident to spin a tired tale of obsessive fandom and self-destruction. It feels more of a piece with Tesfaye’s disastrous HBO series The Idol, in which he plays a seedy drifter attempting to hijack the career of a troubled pop singer. Just because his character isn’t quite as deplorable this time around doesn’t make the end result any less odious.

In Hurry Up Tomorrow, Tesfaye plays a fictionalized version of his The Weeknd alter ego, who we meet in the haze of a world tour under the guidance of his overzealous handler Lee (Barry Keoghan). Despite his success, The Weeknd remains unhappy, on the tail end of a romantic relationship that ended with vicious voicemails and emotional evisceration. The psychological stress leads to a muscle tension dysphonia diagnosis and a Halloween performance cut short due to the performer’s strained vocals, but not before he locks eyes with the alluring Anima (Jenna Ortega) in the crowd. She inexplicably barges her way backstage and finds The Weeknd, consoling him after the cancelled show and proposing they spend the night together instead. Despite their connection, the harsh light of day reveals that the pair have very different ideas about which direction each of them would like the relationship to go.

Generously, Hurry Up Tomorrow could be described as Tesfaye’s investigation into the The Weeknd façade he created after first releasing music anonymously back in 2009. He’s teased for months and years that he’d like to lay the moniker to rest and the film does connote the “burn it all down” posturing of someone eager to end an era. If it turns out this movie is the final project Tesfaye completes as The Weeknd, it’s a dissatisfying denouement to a music career filled with impeccably-produced pop songs. If it’s his audition reel for future film work, he needs to hurry up and put the brakes on that plan right now. Put bluntly: Tesfaye is not a believable actor in any capacity. When he’s not morosely mugging for the camera, he’s lashing out with the verisimilitude of a vexed chipmunk. I’m not sure I’ve seen a performer struggle this hard to play what’s ostensibly a version of themselves.

Unfortunately, Tesfaye has roped the otherwise reliable writer/director Trey Edward Shults into this shameless star vehicle, which indulges the talented young filmmaker’s worst impulses. Though the composition of shots from cinematographer Chayse Irvin are fleetingly striking, Shults simply has no idea what kind of story he wants to tell here. The threadbare script by Tesfaye, Shults and Reza Fahim only contributes sketches of characters and shadows of motivation when it’s not busy with platitude-laden dialogue. The direction is somehow even more meandering, stacking up pointless scenes of insipid impressionism for the first hour before settling on a horribly derivative storyline involving celebrity kidnapping. When Anima proceeds to fansplain the meaning of The Weeknd’s songs to the tied-up star, it’s as torturous for us in the audience as it is for the supposed protagonist.

Die hard fans of The Weeknd will no doubt be desperate to parse misunderstood meaning out of Hurry Up Tomorrow but its ostentatious pretensions couldn’t be more obvious. All the tired symbolism and vapid interactions point to an ego addict who wants us to feel bad for how rich and successful he is; “Save Your Tears” would’ve been good acting advice to take from one of his song’s titles. The climactic moment is both a stunningly shallow bit of self-aggrandizement and a tragic reminder of how misused Tesfaye’s talent is here. He has a powerful and compelling singing voice, even if he doesn’t quite know how to make the best use of it at this point in his career. If tomorrow holds more promising things for his artistry, it can’t come quickly enough.

Score – 1/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, an action sequel starring Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell, extending the journey of IMF agent Ethan Hunt as he continues his mission to stop a master assassin from obtaining an AI program known as The Entity.
Also coming to theaters is Lilo & Stitch, a live-action animated remake starring Sydney Elizebeth Agudong and Billy Magnussen, which finds a lonely Hawaiian girl befriending a dog-like runaway alien, unaware that the visitor is genetically engineered to be a force of destruction.
Streaming on Netflix is Fear Street: Prom Queen, a slasher film starring India Fowler and Suzanna Son, centered around the popular girls of a high school in 1988 who begin to vanish one by one prior to their highly-anticipated prom night.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

The plot of Here, the dreadful new formal experiment from director Robert Zemeckis, is fixated on a plot itself — a plot of land, to be more specific. The film begins millions of years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and as their extinction comes to pass and the ice age takes hold, the camera stays fixed on that location as large swaths of time come and go. The bulk of the Zemeckis’s focus is on a house that’s built on the land around the turn of the 20th century, which is eventually purchased by Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose Young (Kelly Reilly) after World War II. We see their lives unfold, specifically as their oldest of three children Richard (Tom Hanks) grows up and takes the house over for his parents as he and his wife Margaret (Robin Wright) raise children of their own.

Based on a groundbreaking 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, Here is a feature-length movie that could have worked as a short film or even a Super Bowl commercial. At 105 minutes, it’s positively intolerable. If Robert Zemeckis wanted to make this concept of an unmoving camera work, he could have at least composed his vignettes linearly. We start at the chronological beginning in the first few minutes but after that, Zemeckis and his Forrest Gump co-writer Eric Roth choose to interrupt the story of the Youngs with other periods of time. There are scenes of Native Americans roaming the land hundreds of years before and sequences with other inhabitants of the house before and after them. There are even brief moments in colonial times outside the estate of Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son William. Instead of Zemeckis treating each of these sections as their own chapters, he opts for a nonlinear storyline where we spend no more than a handful of minutes at a time in each era.

Not only does this method of storytelling undercut any sort of narrative momentum but it also corners the characters into paper-thin caricatures who only get a few minutes to share who they are and what they want. Worse yet, Here makes copious use of digital de-aging (courtesy of new generative AI tech) to make the actors playing the Youngs match whatever age they’re supposed to be. We’ve seen this technique and face swapping and other visual effects of the like pop up in recent blockbusters but because of the story he’s telling, Robert Zemeckis forces himself to put this CG effect front and center. Even though this isn’t nearly the worst de-aging effects I’ve seen, the amount of screen time that utilizes it eventually draws attention to how much the effects are being used and deteriorates the illusion.

As unconvincing as the AI-assisted effects can be, they’re nothing compared to what Zemeckis and Eric Roth have brewing in their cliche-riddled screenplay. Thankfully, some of the chronologically early segments play out wordlessly, with Alan Silvestri’s overbearing music score doing the heavy lifting instead. If the golden rule in screenwriting is “show, don’t tell”, the pair of scribes break it early and often. It’s not enough for Zemeckis to set the scene for each of these vignettes; the characters have to loudly explain when and why we are in any given point of time. It’s an enormous disservice to the actors, who are doing their best to establish their roles while having to spew weapons-grade pablum about how quickly time passes, how important it is not to have regrets and other hoary platitudes.

It’s not like Zemeckis has been immune to cornball sentiment in the past but in the case of previous winners of his like Forrest Gump or The Polar Express, at least we can be distracted by the creakier elements of the presentation. Here, there’s nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. Locking the camera down in a fixed position of course is both compositionally dull — no matter how often you try to switch out the set design — and emotionally unengaging. Potentially poignant moments and mundane glimpses of domesticity are treated with the same exact framing and thus, their dramatic impact is dulled. The camera is unmoved and so are we. Compelling camerawork isn’t always about lush cinematography or showy hyperactivity; it can crucially aid the filmmaker in telling smaller stories-within-stories through close-ups, two shots and really everything else that isn’t just a static shot. Here’s hoping Here is the last time Zemeckis chooses to limit himself with ostentatious obstructions.

Score – 1/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Heretic, starring Hugh Grant and Sophie Thatcher, is a horror thriller about two Mormon missionaries who are drawn into a game of cat-and-mouse in the house of an Englishman while trying to convert him to their faith.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, starring Judy Greer and Pete Holmes, is a Christmas comedy adapted from the 1972 novel of the same name about a group of juvenile delinquent siblings who inadvertently find themselves starring in the town’s Christmas pageant.
Small Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh, is a historical drama about a devoted father who discovers disturbing secrets kept by the local convent in his small Irish town and uncovers shocking truths of his own.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Blumhouse made almost $300 million last fall with the sinister bear-fronted Five Nights At Freddy’s and they return to theaters on Oscars weekend with another bear in mind. The would-be frightfest Imaginary tries to wring creeps out of a stuffed teddy bear named Chauncey, who I fear will not go down in the annals of anthropomorphic animals out for blood. On the other hand, a teddy may actually be a perfect mascot for a horror movie that’s this limp, familiar and full of stuffing. After heading up back-to-back bro beatdowns Never Back Down and Kick-Ass 2, director Jeff Wadlow has more recently been behind Blumhouse-backed duds like Truth Or Dare and Fantasy Island. Sadly, Imaginary is just more of the same.

The film tells the story of children’s book illustrator Jessica (DeWanda Wise), working hard to form meaningful relationships with her stepdaughters Taylor (Taegen Burns) and Alice (Pyper Braun). With her musician husband Max (Tom Payne) out on tour, Jessica moves the girls into her childhood home after her father’s move to an assisted living facility. It’s there that Alice begins communing with an imaginary friend through a teddy bear she calls Chauncey, who seems to be helping her cope with the new living situation. But Jessica becomes concerned when Chauncey seems to command Alice to gather items in a scavenger hunt that gradually takes a turn for the disturbing. Alice’s dark imagination eventually ties into dark secrets from Jessica’s childhood that will take a collective journey through the metaphysical to resolve.

From its confused and confusing cold open, Imaginary borrows liberally from specific story beats of better horror fare from Poltergeist to It. In fact, Shudder put out a similarly-plotted horror film a few years back called Z about a child’s imaginary friend that was by no means a masterpiece but is The Shining by comparison to Imaginary. For much of its running time, this movie labors under the misapprehension that a glum looking stuffed bear could be scary. After some time, it teases shots of the bear moving on its own but, predictably, that’s still not frightening. Later on, it tries to pull out the big guns with a CGI bear creature that’s much larger than a normal teddy but the effects aren’t rendered coherently and thus, the moments of supposed terror simply don’t land. There’s also a twist involving the actual presence of the bear that’s so wrongheaded that I’m tempted to spoil it here but I won’t.

Wise does her best with the only character in the movie who seems to have any agency or plausible motivation but she can’t come close to solving Imaginary‘s myriad of problems. I’m not exactly sure why Payne is billed so high when he’s in the film for a total of maybe ten minutes and I certainly don’t know what the point of having his character here was in the first place. As for the young actresses Burns and Braun, I’m sure they’re doing their best but their performances are downright awkward and amateurish. Veteran actress Betty Buckley also turns up as a leering next door neighbor that the movie can’t determine if it wants to take seriously as an antagonistic threat or comedically as generational juxtaposition for the young stepdaughters. I laughed at several interactions she had with the kids, although I’m not sure Wadlow intended the lines to have humor in them.

There’s all sorts of ponderous dialogue scattered throughout Imaginary that’s made all the more head-scratching when you realize it took a trio of credited screenwriters to come up with it. This film is distributed by Lionsgate but Bing Bong, the imaginary friend character from Disney’s Inside Out, is name-checked half a dozen times at various points. I could understand maybe once or twice for a reference point that Alice might use to tie to Chauncey but the reprises made me half-suspect the filmmakers are on the take from the House Of Mouse. But the movie’s biggest issue is that it takes itself far too seriously. I’m not suggesting strained comic relief but fellow Blumhouse production M3GAN was also about a killer doll but had a much more dialed-in mix of camp and fun. Imaginary is an unbearable horror effort that ironically lacks any sense of imagination.

Score – 1/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Arthur The King, starring Mark Wahlberg and Simu Liu, is an adventure following a group of mountain climbers who compete in an endurance race and meet a surviving stray dog who becomes attached to the head of the climbers during their trek.
The American Society Of Magical Negroes, starring Justice Smith and David Alan Grier, is a satire about a young Black man who is recruited into a magical society of African Americans to follow their lifelong cause: to make the lives of white people easier.
One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter, is a biographical drama depicting a young London broker who, in the months leading up to World War II, rescued over 600 children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Sony’s Spider-Man Universe — the one that, confusingly, doesn’t actually have Spider-Man in it — crawls forward with Madame Web, another ode to a tertiary comic book character that didn’t need the silver screen treatment. So poorly put together that it made me yearn for the comparative structural soundness and formal rigor of Morbius, the latest SSU entry doesn’t even seem interested in being a superhero movie in the first place. The lead character barely has superpowers and the character’s clairvoyance only seems to annoy everyone around her, including us in the audience since it’s confusingly rendered on screen. Throw in a ridiculously hokey villain and dialogue that sounds like it was translated to English from a dead language and you have one of the biggest afterthoughts in the modern superhero era.

After an Peruvian prologue set in 1973, we flash forward 30 years later to meet Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), a New York-based paramedic who works alongside her longtime friend Ben Parker (Adam Scott). While rescuing an injured driver from their car, Cassie falls into a river below and, when under the water, has strange visions of the future before Ben revives her. After several instances of memory overlap and visceral déjà vu, she discovers she can now see into the future, which is consistently being haunted by a violent man in a web-patterned costume. Cassie uses her power to save three teenagers — Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Anya (Isabela Merced) and Mattie (Celeste O’Connor) — before the figure can attack them on the subway and vows to keep the trio safe under her watch.

We’ve seen the reluctant superhero arc before, where an average person who doesn’t want the responsibility of heroism eventually accepts their position, but Madame Web is such an awkward contortion of that familiar storyline. Whether it’s in Johnson’s performance or how Cassie is written in the script, she barely seems interested in helping these girls and when the moment of transformation is supposed to come, it feels completely inauthentic and unearned. Because the three girls who are targeted by the shadowy figure don’t know Cassie or understand her ability, they spend most of the movie trying to get away from her and even try to get her arrested for kidnapping. Director S.J. Clarkson desperately tries to spin the narrative into one where Cassie takes on a maternal role for these three pupils but the effort feels hopelessly contrived.

It’s been said many times that superhero movies are only as interesting as their villains and the baddie this time around — Ezekiel Sims, as played by Tahar Rahim — is simply a terrible antagonist. He feels the need to dispose of these three kids because he says he has visions that they will one day team up in spider suits and kill him. Using technology that barely existed in 2023, much less 2003, he’s able to effortlessly track the teenagers down but gets thwarted in the most comically perfunctory ways. This character is supposed to have super speed and strength, in addition to the same kind of foresight that Cassie has, and yet he demonstrates a perpetual inability to evade moving cars. Of course it doesn’t help that he’s saddled with laborious lines like “each day that goes by, my appointment with death gets closer!”

Madame Web is also another Sony superhero slog that feels like it was ripped to ribbons in the editing room. The way that Clarkson depicts Cassie’s power is similar to the way it’s portrayed in Edge Of Tomorrow, although using the awful Nic Cage sci-fi actioner Next as an analog is more apt. But both of those movies were able to visually delineate what was really happening and what was in the protagonist’s head, where this film sadly doesn’t give us the luxury. That means it doesn’t really matter when something bad happens to the characters, because then we can assume the filmmaker will just roll it back like Funny Games and get a re-do. Perplexing psychic ability aside, there are basic composition issues throughout the movie, where the camerawork and cutting conspire to collapse whatever visual coherence the film barely has in the first place. Though it may look tempting from a “so bad it’s good” perspective, it’s not worth getting wrapped up in the tangle of Madame Web.

Score – 1/5

New movies coming this week:
Coming to theaters is Ordinary Angels, a drama starring Hilary Swank and Alan Ritchson telling the true story of a hairdresser who single-handedly rallies an entire community to help a widowed father save the life of his critically ill young daughter.
Also playing only in theaters is Drive-Away Dolls, a comedy road movie starring Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan about two young women in search of a fresh start who embark on an unexpected road trip to Tallahassee but things quickly go awry when they cross paths with a group of inept criminals.
Streaming on Netflix is Mea Culpa, a legal thriller starring Kelly Rowland and Trevante Rhodes which follows an ambitious criminal defense attorney that, in his aspiration to be named partner, takes on a murder case of an artist.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup