As niche holiday releases go, 100 Nights Of Hero is proudly about as niche as it gets. Based on the New York Times Bestselling graphic novel The One Hundred Nights Of Hero, itself a reworking of the timeless One Thousand And One Nights folktale, the film feels like it was made exclusively for those who already find themselves enamored with the text. It has the pomp and theatricality of a costume drama mixed with the romanticism and whimsy of a lovelorn fantasy; if Emerald Fennell was told she needed to tone it down and spin up a PG-13 period piece, this might be what she’d come up with. As such, the movie comes up with a few empowering moments and poignant exchanges but at 91 minutes, it feels curiously attenuated for something that’s derived from a retelling of an epic tale. When each of your Nights is less than a minute of average, it may be a sign that you don’t have enough for a feature-length project.

Taking place in the far-off land of Migal Bavel, 100 Nights Of Hero stars Maika Monroe as Lady Cherry, the waifish bride living in an opulent castle with the uncaring Lord Jerome (Amir El-Masry) and a bevy of armed guards. The only kindness in the kingdom afforded to Cherry comes from her loyal maid Hero (Emma Corrin), who carries a flame for her highness that she hides carefully. Feeling pressure from religious followers known as the Beak Brothers and their leader Birdman (Richard E. Grant), the wedded couple is to produce an heir but Jerome stubbornly refuses the obligation. In a gentleman’s wager with his best chap Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine), Jerome bets that he won’t be able to seduce Cherry, if given 100 nights of Jerome’s absence from the castle to do so. Manfred’s attempts to woo the fair lady come to a head when Hero attempts a seduction of her own in telling a seemingly endless story that keeps Cherry and Manfred waiting with bated breath.

In fashioning herself a Scheherazade, Hero weaves a convoluted and cliffhanger-ridden tale that Cherry and Manfred think they recognize as a fable of one of Jerome’s ex-wives, but Hero throws in enough specificities to differentiate it. The story involves three sisters, who have been learning to read and write in secret, which is forbidden in the patriarchal and oppressive Migal Bavel. One of the sisters is Rosa, played by Brat pop sensation Charli XCX in her film debut, who is pursued by a wealthy merchant that discovers her impropriety and endeavors to conceal it from the townspeople that would deem her a witch if they found out. Both the setting of 100 Nights Of Hero and the intentionally meandering allegory that Hero weaves within it point to the themes of female liberation and queer self-discovery that will ultimately serve as the movie’s raison d’être. It just all feels like window dressing for a room we’ve been invited into before.

Writer-director Julia Jackman lends some fun flourishes along the way, as with a droll recapping of Cherry’s hobbies of chess and falconry that would make Wes Anderson doff his beret. Similarly, a montage early on — with voiceover by Felicity Jones — details Jerome’s past doomed marriages with stained glass portraits captioned harshly, e.g. Janet The Barren and Sara The Unfaithful. But despite the nods to Migal Bavel as a place where women are either demonized and commodified, this doesn’t feel like a tangible place we can actually get lost in. Perhaps it’s a small budget or the limited scope of the story but we never truly get a sense of how this village actually runs and why things got to this place where revolution feels inevitable. It whiffs of a medieval mishmash of stately repression and rigid caste structures but the mythology here needed some fine tuning to feel less embryonic.

The direction of the acting is another aspect of 100 Nights Of Hero that felt underdeveloped, as most of the performers feel like they’re playing in separate projects. Emma Corrin and Nicholas Galitzine are both speaking in their native English tongue, which we’ve come to expect as “standard” for tales of lords and ladies, but California-born Maika Monroe isn’t even trying to deviate from her American accent. Following her brilliant breakthrough in It Follows ten years ago, she’s mostly stuck to horror projects that, frankly, don’t ask too much but when Monroe stars in elevated material like this, her blasé disposition sticks out like a sore thumb. She and Corrin have one scene that smolders but the rest never kindle into a romance that catches fire and is worth investing in.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Five Nights At Freddy’s 2, a horror sequel starring Josh Hutcherson and Elizabeth Lail, which reunites a security guard and his younger sister with the possessed animatronic cadre that haunts the defunct entertainment center Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza.
Streaming on Netflix is Jay Kelly, a dramedy starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler, following a friendship between a famous movie star and his manager as they travel through Europe and reflect on their life choices, relationships, and legacies.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is Oh. What. Fun., a Christmas comedy starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Felicity Jones, involving a beleaguered matriarch who makes the Christmas magic happen every year for her family but they don’t realize the effort it takes until she goes missing.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

True to its subtitle, 2010’s Tron: Legacy was a prototype for what we now consider the legacy sequel. Taking place 28 years after the groundbreaking original film, it follows the now-adult son of Tron‘s protagonist responding to a distress message sent by his dad from the virtual world introduced in the first movie. That makes the function of Tron: Ares, the latest in what is now a bit of an odd trilogy, within the franchise somewhat ponderous. Sure, it takes place within the same universe, and contains appearances (some longer than others) from a few familiar faces, but what exactly does it add to the series? As a spiritual successor, it certainly pulls off hallmarks of the previous two entries with another killer music score and terrific visual effects. But beyond those ephemeral pleasures, the movie never quite establishes its mission statement and reason for being.

The storyline of Tron: Ares centers around a pair of CEOs from competing tech companies racing to conjure digital concoctions into the real world. There’s Dillinger Systems head Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), who is able to laser-print out iterations of AI soldiers like Ares (Jared Leto) and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) at the touch of a button, but the manifestations can’t last a half an hour without crumbling. Knowing this limitation, the leader of ENCOM, Eve Kim (Greta Lee), is on the hunt for the “permanence code” that will allow programmed creations to exist without an expiration. In the midst of Dillinger and Kim’s high-stakes feud, the original versions of Ares and Athena, whose consciousnesses exist in a server known as The Grid, are beginning to develop complex feelings and yearn for a deeper purpose.

While action spectacles like this typically aren’t performance-first affairs anyway, the homogeneous acting in Tron: Ares does little to expand on the threadbare plot. Ironically, Jared Leto is a great choice for a robotic program created to obey straightforward prompts, but when his character is meant to evolve emotionally, his stilted performance doesn’t follow the same trajectory. Evan Peters is almost 40 but somehow, he still carries a boyish appearance that doesn’t do him any favors in a role like this where he has to bark orders at subordinates. Leto and Peters have been pretty plug-and-play in blockbusters like this before but the presence of Greta Lee is particularly depressing. After a revelation of a performance in 2023’s Past Lives, which should’ve gotten her an Oscar nod, she’s reduced here to running away from a legion of VFX munitions and looking sexy in leather on a futuristic motorcycle.

These Light Cycles, the central piece of iconography from the Tron series, are wisely featured again in Ares and in keeping with the central theme of bringing the digital world into the real world, the film makes a concerted effort to utilize practical effects. The best parts of the movie are the chase scenes where characters on Light Cycles, previously limited to the confines of the Grid, zoom and weave through traffic on busy city highways. These vehicles are, of course, enhanced by special effects and instead of leaning into the blue aesthetic of its predecessors, director Joachim Rønning opts instead for the more urgent and sinister hue of red for this chapter. The blending of the digitized and the tangible is outstanding — I didn’t see the movie in 3D but I’d avoid it, given its tendency to dim all on-screen colors — and thanks to cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, the entire production is handsomely mounted.

If one goes into Tron: Ares expecting nothing more than a pretty light show and a way to listen to the new Nine Inch Nails record in surround sound, they won’t be disappointed. But those looking for a sci-fi actioner that actually has a compelling narrative, or even a story that makes sense, will have to look elsewhere. The movie technically has protagonists but there’s barely a rooting interest in any of them, just enough for them to have any reason to run away from the villains. This is also the kind of movie where artificial intelligence is supposedly on the cusp of superseding humankind but its incarnations make fundamental tactical errors on the regular. Aside from contributing lucrative ideas to Disney’s theme parks, it’s hard to say what else Tron as a brand has to offer the world of cinema at this point.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Black Phone 2, starring Ethan Hawke and Mason Thames, is a supernatural horror movie in which the only known survivor of the serial killer known as The Grabber must put an end to his continued reign of terror from beyond the grave.
Good Fortune, starring Aziz Ansari and Keanu Reeves, is a supernatural comedy following a well-meaning but rather inept angel who meddles in the lives of a struggling gig worker and a wealthy venture capitalist.
After The Hunt, starring Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri, is a psychological thriller involving a college professor who’s forced to grapple with her own secretive past after one of her colleagues is faced with a serious accusation.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Scarlett Johansson sits in the director’s chair for the first time with Eleanor The Great, a saccharine melodrama whose heart is in the right place but whose brain is nowhere to be found. It’s a film that hinges on the sort of contrivance that could play fine in a 20th century romantic comedy but makes absolutely no sense in 2025 here on planet Earth. Working from an overwrought script by Tory Kamen, Johansson doesn’t do herself any favors by choosing a story with weighty themes and heavy subject material for her first time out as a storyteller. It’s commendable that she’s able to establish and mostly maintain a palatable tone with which to tell this tale and she manages to land a few hard-earned poignant moments along the way. The opening 5 minutes and closing 5 minutes are especially powerful but there’s too much in between that doesn’t pass the sniff test.

June Squibb is terrific as the titular nonagenarian, living the dream on the shores of sunny Florida with her best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar). During their weekly trip to the grocery store, Bessie faints and passes away soon afterwards, leaving Eleanor devastated. She decides to head back to New York City 40 years after leaving, staying with her divorced daughter Jess (Jessica Hecht) and her son Max (Will Price) in their apartment. Unsure what to do with her free time in Manhattan, Eleanor finds herself at the local Jewish Community Center, intending to attend a singing class but inadvertently stumbling into a counseling group for Holocaust survivors. Having heard many firsthand accounts from her recently departed best friend when she was alive, Eleanor tells Bessie’s harrowing story of survival as if it were her own.

Touched by Eleanor’s words, NYU student Nina (Erin Kellyman) approaches Eleanor after the group session and asks if she can be the subject of an article she’s working on for her journalism class. Reticent to dig deeper into her lie but desperate for friendship, Eleanor agrees to be interviewed and subsequently spends a substantial amount of time around Nina. Despite their 70-year age gap, the two have more in common than it would seem, most notably that Nina also recently lost someone close to her: her mother. Nina is doing her best to work through the grief, while her father Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a prominent news anchor, buries himself in his work and can’t even bring himself to say his late wife’s name. Can Eleanor help them process their loss while finding her own closure in the process?

Eleanor The Great gets off to a strong start, with a well-realized portrayal of two inseparable friends with a lifelong bond who play off each other beautifully. While Bessie is straight-laced and unassuming, Eleanor isn’t above the occasional white lie to keep things interesting. When Bessie is waiting for treatment in a hospital bed, Eleanor fibs to the nurse about her family owning the hospital to push along some speedy service. “You’re interesting enough, you don’t have to lie about who you are,” Bessie chastises with a sentiment that foreshadows the moral quandary upon which the movie is built. But after Eleanor tells one mistruth too many and ends up on Nina’s radar, it simply makes zero sense that a 20-year-old journalism student wouldn’t do a quick Google search to vet her source. When Roger inevitably gets drawn into Eleanor’s orbit, she technically ups her duped journalist count to 2.

Of course Eleanor is eventually found out and so we’re meant to slog through a third act packed with sappy monologues and untangling of misunderstandings. Through it all, Eleanor The Great ends on a final scene that doesn’t quite get the bad taste out of one’s mouth but at least brings home the movie’s message about connection and transference. Scarlett Johansson reportedly worked closely with the USC Shoah Foundation in order to impart sensitivity toward real Holocaust survivors who could understandably be put off by Eleanor’s deception. While Johansson’s intentions seem pure and Squibb does an outstanding job with a tricky protagonist, the film can’t overcome foundational lapses of logic that needed to be ironed out of the script earlier in production.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Smashing Machine, a sports biopic starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, telling the true story of former wrestler and mixed martial artist heavyweight champion Mark Kerr.
Also playing in theaters is Bone Lake, a horror thriller starring Maddie Hasson and Alex Roe, in which a couple’s vacation at a secluded estate is upended when they’re forced to share the mansion with a mysterious couple.
Premiering on Netflix is Steve, a drama starring Cillian Murphy and Tracey Ullman, following the headteacher in charge of a school for boys with societal and behavioral difficulties who faces his own demons while battling for the reform college’s survival.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

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

After having success adapting Stephen King novels Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep to the big screen, writer and director Mike Flanagan goes to the King well once more with The Life Of Chuck. Besides departing from the horror genre, what sets his third King film in a row apart from the previous two is that the source material this time is a novella, a part of the 2020 compilation book If It Bleeds. But just because the story is shorter doesn’t mean it’s short on big ideas and weighty themes, all of which Flanagan wrings out from the 100 or so pages for his cinematic rendering. With a sprawling cast filled with faces that have popped up throughout Flanagan’s oeuvre, it’s an existential drama that will land as life-affirming and soul-stirring to some but predominantly hit me hollow, despite its best efforts and intentions.

Told in three acts that move in reverse order, The Life Of Chuck opens things on a dire note, introducing us to high school teacher Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) trying to hold the attention of his students as the world seems to be falling apart. Constant news of cataclysmic weather events and a worldwide internet outage has folks more divided and scared than ever, prompting Marty to reach out to his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan) for comfort. As they join hands for what seems to be the end of the world, billboards and TV ads crop up everywhere, thanking a man dressed in accounting garb named Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) for “39 great years”. We then flash back to pivotal moments in Chuck’s life, those marked by love, loss and lighting up the dance floor with some electric moves.

Structurally, The Life Of Chuck begs us to ask the questions who is Chuck and how does his story relate to the end of the known universe but Flanagan seems content to let us stew for a while. The film’s first act — well, technically the story’s final act — is both portentous and pretentious, introducing myriad characters who wander around waxing philosophical in staid tones appropriate for dreary mood. I admire Flanagan starting this tale out on such unapologetically apocalyptic terms, rivaling the terror he brewed up with his The Haunting series on Netflix, despite this not overtly being a horror movie. But the unnerving pall cast over this opening chapter is completely at odds with the obstinately chipper demeanor of the two sections that follow.

The middle act of The Life Of Chuck might be the shortest of the three but is no doubt the linchpin of the film’s marketing and showcase for the film’s implicit “dance like no one’s watching” thesis. It also finds Nick Offerman filling us in on character detail via voiceover, initially helpful given the tonal switch-up but gradually doing too much of the heavy lifting that Flanagan should be doing as a storyteller. It turns out Chuck only has 9 months to live due to a brain tumor and while he’s away on an accounting conference, he’s taken to dance in front of a drummer busking on the streets of Boston. Thanks to La La Land and The Eras Tour choreographer Mandy Moore, the moves that Hiddleston puts on are genuinely impressive and mostly help us shake off the seemingly overwhelming sadness present in the segment previous.

That leads us to Act One, subtitled “I Contain Multitudes”, with all the professed profundity that Walt Whitman reference may connote. We learn of Chuck’s tragic loss of his parents at age 7, causing him to live with his grandparents, played by Mark Hamill and Mia Sara. What follows is effectively a montage of opportunities taken and paths unexplored as we see Chuck transition from boyhood into young adulthood. There are indeed some touching moments but the sentimentality is at odds with a narrative that feels conspicuously thin. I assume Flanagan wants his audience to come away with questions like “what does it all mean?” as opposed to “what was the point of that?” Stephen King novella adaptations Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption proved that the prolific writer’s shorter stories can work on-screen but The Life Of Chuck can’t quite find its own rhythm.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
28 Years Later, starring Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, is a post-apocalyptic horror film following a group of survivors from a zombie-like Rage virus as their carry out their lives on a small island until one of the group leaves the island on a mission into the mainland.
Elio, starring Yonas Kibreab and Zoe Saldaña, is a science fiction adventure involving a young space fanatic with an active imagination who finds himself on a cosmic misadventure where he must form new bonds with alien lifeforms and navigate a crisis of intergalactic proportions.
Bride Hard, starring Rebel Wilson and Anna Camp, is a female-led action comedy which finds a mercenary group taking a lavish wedding hostage but meeting their match with a maid of honor who is actually a secret agent ready to defend her best friend’s wedding at any cost.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Based on a 1981 film of the same name, the espionage tale The Amateur is a movie filled with smart characters who are trapped in a movie that isn’t as smart as they are. Our protagonist Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is said to have an IQ of 170 and we believe it. He works five levels below the ground floor of the CIA headquarters in Decryption And Analysis, scrolling through endless lines of code and finding connections that no one else would see. He chats with an anonymous source he believes is in Eastern Europe, with whom he exchanges eyes-only files; if the premise of the hit show Severance was real, Charlie would be a prime candidate for the titular procedure. Throughout the film, he is consistently multiple steps ahead of those pursuing them, so much so that he outpaces director James Hawes and his screenwriters Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli in the process.

The opening of The Amateur has Charlie seeing his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) off as she heads to London for a conference. The next day, Charlie’s boss Director Moore (Holt McCallany) shares horrible news with him: Sarah has been killed after being held hostage by terrorists. Moore swears those responsible for her death will be held to account but Charlie doesn’t trust that the agency will avenge Sarah’s death the way he feels she deserves. In a bold move, to say the least, he threatens to leak classified material unless the CIA trains him as a field operative so he can carry out his revenge. With his back against the wall, Moore tasks Colonel Henderson (Laurence Fishburne) with turning the cerebral and diffident Charlie into a cold-blooded killer.

Because of the nature of the premise, The Amateur asks us to believe that one man — albeit a highly intelligent one — could evade a manhunt from one of the most formidable government agencies in the world. As Charlie’s rogue mission finds him traveling from numerous European countries, it becomes more unlikely that he would actually be able to continue his pursuit unabated. Along the way, a couple characters reappear to coerce Charlie to give up his dangerous undertaking but this feels like a much more kid-gloves approach than the CIA would take in actuality. These tactics spur on subsequent plot holes and leaps in logic that begin to add up, especially in the movie’s last 15 minutes; a character moment towards the very end actually made me cock my head to the side like a dog hearing a strange noise.

All of the performances in The Amateur are convincing but at the same time, none of the actors are being asked to do much outside of their current capabilities. Malek is doing a slight variation on his lead character in the tech thriller series Mr. Robot, although he has to dial up a bit more emotion into the flashback scenes between Charlie and Sarah. Oddly, Brosnahan is relegated to a stock “dead wife” role, even though she’s going to appear as the much more pivotal Lois Lane in Superman this summer. Talented supporting players like Julianne Nicholson and Jon Bernthal, the latter of whom is only in two scenes, are only given sketches of actual characters. More prominently, Fishburne has some fun zingers in his training sequences with Malek; “at point blank range, you might have a 50/50 shot at hitting something,” he smirks in front of a shooting target at a gun range.

The Amateur isn’t a bad movie from a technical perspective. Despite some misjudged shaky cam, it’s well-shot and edited in a way that makes its 2-hour runtime move along briskly. It’s just not a film that distinguishes itself enough from other revenge or spy films we’ve seen already. Its release comes just a few weeks after Black Bag, already one of the year’s best, which also follows spies chasing spies but does so with much more panache and thematic heft. This movie feels like it never expands on its initial hook of taking a lab rat out of his environment and placing him in a more menacing setting where his technological skills don’t mean nearly as much as killer instinct. The Amateur is professional enough on its surface but could use some training in developing a more robust storyline.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Drop, a mystery thriller starring Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar, in which a widowed mother’s first date in years takes a terrifying turn when she’s bombarded with anonymous threatening text messages on her phone during their upscale dinner.
Also coming to theaters is Warfare, an action film starring D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and Will Poulter, which follows a platoon of Navy SEALs in real-time as they embark on a mission through insurgent Iraqi territory in 2006.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is G20, an action thriller starring Viola Davis and Anthony Anderson, which finds the U.S. President defending her family and fellow world leaders when terrorists take over the G20 summit in South Africa.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Both a satire with not quite enough bite and a creature feature without much of a proverbial bark, Death Of A Unicorn has promising aspects on paper but can’t translate them to movie magic. Alex Scharfman’s directorial debut is being marketed by A24 as an offbeat horror comedy, which isn’t totally misleading as much as it’s overpromising something that’s scarier or funnier than it actually is. Although there are some kills that could satisfy horror nuts and humor that could kill with the “eat the rich” demographic, the movie never fully commits to what it wants to be. To its credit, it puts forth better computer-generated effects than I would expect for a film with a $15 million budget, especially given that it also boasts a stacked cast too. It’s just too bad that all these people and unicorns weren’t brought together for something more impactful.

Death Of A Unicorn finds pharmaceutical lawyer Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his teenage daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) en route to a business retreat when they accidentally hit what turns out to be a unicorn with their car. Unsure how to handle the situation, Elliot stashes the mythical creature in the car and doesn’t mention it to their hosts when they arrive at their estate. Elliot’s cancer-stricken boss Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant) is considering moving him up to a VP position but wants the second opinion of his wife Belinda (Téa Leoni) and their son Shepard (Will Poulter) first. The still-alive unicorn makes a calamitous escape from the automobile and the group accidentally discovers the healing properties from the creature’s blood. The revelation puts Elliot at odds with the Leopolds’ desire to turn the magic substance for profit and Ridley’s conviction to restoring nature’s balance by returning the unicorn to its family.

Paul Rudd is an immensely amiable screen presence and has been an enduring talent for decades now but Death Of A Unicorn doesn’t make good use of either his comedic or dramatic sensibilities. He’s allegedly playing the movie’s protagonist but we can tell from the way he handles the initial car accident with the unicorn that he’s hardly the paragon of nobility. Elliot has a strained relationship with Ridley and he has numerous opportunities to do right by her that he eschews for career ambition. Not every lead character has to be likable in every sense but Rudd can’t make Elliot’s cowardly impulses come across as character flaws that we want to see him overcome; he simply comes across as a jerk who should get what’s coming to him.

With themes of parent-teenager strife and science meddling with nature, Death Of A Unicorn seems to take cues from Spielberg fables like War Of The Worlds and Jurassic Park. While it obviously doesn’t have the budget of effects-heavy projects like that, Scharfman’s script also isn’t as sharp as it needs to be from a character perspective to make up for the deficit. Fortunately, the actors playing the Leopolds — Will Poulter and Téa Leoni, in particular — make the most out of satirizing the greedy corporatists who are blinded to the obvious by the dollar signs in their eyes. They’re playing similar types to ones Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette took on for Mickey 17 recently but Poulter and Leoni wisely don’t go as over-the-top in their portrayals. Even when Shepard grinds a portion of a unicorn horn into powder that he proceeds to snort, Poulter finds some real laughs in the sheer enormity of his character’s arrogance.

The film’s trajectory is clearly leading to a showdown between the mansion-dwellers and the unicorn family angered by the capture of one of their own. The take-no-prisoners attitude of the unicorn clan is meant to fly in the face of the majestic image we tend to associate with the mythical creature, but it’s a one-note joke that’s not particularly bright in the first place. The rendering of the CGI is admittedly punching above its weight class and the kills at the hands — horns and hooves may be more fitting — of the unicorns generate some fun gore-soaked scenes; one character’s undoing atop a billiard table is perhaps the most inspired. Death Of A Unicorn just isn’t able to find a way to weave its tapestry of conflicting genres and tones together into one enchanting concoction.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is A Minecraft Movie, a fantasy adventure starring Jason Momoa and Jack Black, following four misfits who are pulled through a portal into a cubic world that thrives on imagination, having no choice but to master the world while embarking on a quest.
Also coming to theaters is Hell Of A Summer, a horror comedy starring Fred Hechinger and Abby Quinn, about a masked killer who begins picking off a group of camp counselors the night before their campers are set to arrive for the summer.
Premiering on Shudder is 825 Forest Road, a supernatural horror movie starring Joe Falcone and Elizabeth Vermilyea, involving a man who hopes to start a new life with his wife and sister after a family tragedy, but discovers the town he has moved to has a dark secret.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Dying is easy but comedy is hard in The Monkey, Osgood Perkins’ morbid, but not particularly mordant, follow-up to last year’s outstanding serial killer thriller Longlegs. That film had such an icy solemness to it that even morsels of humor felt like a filling meal but the balance is simply off in the recipe Perkins serves up this time. Liberally adapted from the Stephen King short story of the same name, The Monkey hammers home a monotonous drum beat of gallows humor absent from the source material. The movie certainly doesn’t skimp on any of the gory details — rather, it revels in them — but it barely maintains an air of suspense in between the string of over-the-top death sequences. It’s a horror movie devoid of true scares and a comedy whose best gags were already given away in the superb red-band trailer.

The Monkey centers around the Shelburn family circa 1999, with pilot Petey (Adam Scott) deserting his wife Lois (Tatiana Maslany) and twin sons Hal & Bill (both played by Christian Convery) one day. When rifling through their dad’s left-behinds, the boys find a wind-up toy monkey that seems to cause a random person to die horribly every time its key is turned. After several ill-advised turns and subsequent drum rolls, Hal & Bill attempt to destroy, and eventually bury, the simian souvenir before it can do any more damage. 25 years later, Hal & Bill (both played as adults by Theo James) are estranged from one another but when their aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) dies near where they trapped the monkey, they must reckon with the malevolent force for good.

Much of The Monkey delights in what kind of violent scenarios this evil device can supernaturally conjure from seemingly innocuous circumstances, similarly to how Death works in the Final Destination series. While not all the killings are fashioned with Rube Goldberg-like synergy, some involve multiple elements conspiring together for sudden carnage, like the one in the gut-spinning prologue set in a pawn shop. Others are such comic overkill, as when 67 horses trample on top of a camper in a sleeping bag, that we’re not meant to be terrified by the circumstances as much as amused that such random tragedy could even take place. To this end, Osgood Perkins does come up with creative enough demises to make The Monkey almost work as a tongue-in-cheek splatter film.

But Perkins wants to have his blood-battered cake and eat it too and there’s not enough else here to keep one’s stomach full. Much of the drama hinges on the fraught relationship between Hal and his son Petey (played by Colin O’Brien) but their story isn’t nearly interesting enough to hold as the centerpiece of the plot. The acting between Theo James and O’Brien is stilted and unconvincing, even given that they’re playing two characters who aren’t on good terms with one another. There are well-known actors who only pop up for one scene each, while there are others lesser known who stick around for much longer but aren’t exactly a welcome addition. Heading up the movie’s best running joke, Nicco Del Rio hits the sweet spot as a beleaguered young priest tasked with leading increasingly bizarre funerals on behalf of the small town.

The inevitability of death is certainly a weighty central theme for a horror film to tackle but the issue is that The Monkey really doesn’t bother exploring it in an especially nuanced manner. “Everybody dies and that’s life,” Lois laments — the phrasing in the film’s official tagline is decidedly more colorful — but the sentiment isn’t really unpacked beyond that in the text. It’s more intriguing to infer what Osgood Perkins, whose parents both had tragically notable ends to their lives, feels about the chaotic cruelty of the universe assigning each person an inescapable demise. Now that Oz got The Monkey off his back, here’s hoping he can return to the staid supernatural scares that seem to better speak to his sensibilities as a storyteller.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Last Breath, a survival thriller starring Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu, which tells the true story of seasoned deep-sea divers as they battle the raging elements to rescue their crew mate trapped hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface.
Also coming to theaters is My Dead Friend Zoe, a dramedy starring Sonequa Martin-Green and Natalie Morales, about a female Afghanistan Army vet who comes head to head with her Vietnam vet grandfather at the family’s ancestral lake house.
Premiering on Netflix is Demon City, an action movie starring Tomu Ikuta and Masahiro Higashide, telling the story of an ex-hitman out for revenge after he’s framed for his family’s murder and left for dead by masked “demons” who have taken over the city.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Between his collaborations with Guy Ritchie and last year’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Hugh Grant has seemingly had a ball playing villains recently. The trend continues with the new A24 chiller Heretic, in which Grant plays the deferential and droll Mr. Reed, who may not be as kindly as he initially appears. After reaching out to the LDS Church for more information about their cause, Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) are summoned to his house one rainy evening. While Mr. Reed says his wife is just in the kitchen making pie, the Sisters begin professing their faith in an attempt to convert but are met with prickly retorts about the nature of religion and belief. As the conversation between the three continues, Barnes and Paxton get the creeping feeling that they were invited into Reed’s home under false pretenses.

The writing and directing team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who were behind last year’s Adam Driver-fronted sci-fi stinker 65, at least start off with much better footing for Heretic. We spend a little time with Barnes and Paxton before arriving at Reed’s home, their candid conversations serving as a nice contrast to the professional front they have to put up when their duty begins. As we slowly learn, Reed is also putting up a front that gradually deteriorates and the three performers are terrific at guiding their characters believably through the transition. Grant, of course, rose to prominence playing coiffed charming leads in romance movies but here, he uses his charisma as bait for an elaborate trap that doesn’t fully reveal itself until late in the runtime.

Without giving too much away, the gist of Reed’s plan involves trying to get the missionaries to question their fundamental beliefs, which he does with Reddit-ready rhetoric about organized religion and philosophy. It’s perfectly okay that Grant’s character isn’t as clever as he thinks he is but the main problem with Heretic is that the movie itself isn’t as clever as it thinks it is. Some of the dialogue and the exchanges are thought-provoking and illuminating but when the talking stops and the time for action arrives, Beck and Woods can’t see the forest for the trees. The more convoluted the situation gets and the more plot elements that are introduced, the less interesting the initial gambit becomes. This feels like a story that Beck and Woods developed without having a conclusion in mind at the outset.

Faithful to its raison d’être, Heretic has an immediately alluring look courtesy of cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon. Once the Sisters spend a little time at the house, Reed informs them that his house has timed lights which can click off mid-conversation without warning. Despite the sudden changes in brightness, the faces of the three performers are always lit with just the right levels to exude dread and insecurity. The set design also aids in the illusion of a cozy living room that becomes more worldly and sophisticated as Reed’s machinations arise. While most of the editing works well, there are several cuts involving violence that seem oddly clipped and obscure their narrative impact. It’s possible Beck and Woods were at one point trying to skirt an R-rating but the confusing cutting during a few key scenes feels like it was left over from a PG-13 iteration.

For at least the first half, Heretic is watchable due to the trio of terrific performances that are ever-shifting to reveal new details about who these people are and what makes them tick. As Reed keeps making excuses as to why the two girls must stay in his house, Barnes becomes more suspicious of his motives than Paxton does. Where Paxton also tends to sidestep Reed’s barbs about the folly of religious practices, Barnes is more game to return the volleys and refute his points. As it turns out, Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East were both raised Mormon, although neither of the actresses are currently members of the church. Perhaps the film was developed with their shared past in mind but Heretic could’ve used more time in the oven before sharing it with the masses.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Red One, a Christmas adventure starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, following the North Pole’s Head Of Security and the world’s most infamous bounty hunter on an action-packed mission to rescue Santa after he’s been kidnapped.
Also coming to theaters is A Real Pain, a family dramedy starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, involving a pair of mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother.
Streaming on Netflix is Emilia Pérez, a French musical starring Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, telling the story of a feared cartel leader who enlists a lawyer to help her disappear and achieve her dream of transitioning into a woman.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

In the spring of 2020, popular YouTube comedian Julie Nolke started a sketch series called “Explaining The Pandemic To My Past Self”, in which a version of herself a few months in the future checks in with herself in the past. Being a tumultuous pocket of time, there’s a lot to go over and the comedic conceit is centered around just how much can change in a short period. The new coming-of-age dramedy My Old Ass from writer/director Megan Park, expands this premise out to feature length and in the process, stretches out the amount of time between the two versions of the same person. In doing so, it speaks more broadly to the desire everyone has to use fantastical foresight to have more control over the future of their personal lives. The potential poignancy of the scenario seems like it would be easy to mine for pathos, so it’s strange that this movie fumbles the weightier aspects of its story.

On her 18th birthday, Elliott (Maisy Stella) takes a boat with her friends Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) to a nearby island, where they plan on celebrating with psychedelic mushrooms. After drinking the spiked tea, Elliott’s friends go off on their own “typical” trips and while Elliott waits for the effects to kick in for her, a future version of herself (played by Aubrey Plaza) appears out of nowhere. Though initially skeptical, teenage Elliott soon feels convinced that she’s not just hallucinating but is actually being reached across time by her future self. After imparting some bits of wisdom about their family and their future career, the 39-year-old version of Elliott gives a vague but stern warning before she disappears to avoid anyone named Chad. Sure enough, a boy named Chad (Percy Hynes White) starts working at Elliott’s family’s cranberry farm and she has to decide whether to ignore her own advice or pursue a relationship with him.

One of My Old Ass‘s major miscalculations is in sidelining Aubrey Plaza for the majority of the movie, as younger and older Elliott primarily spend the story communicating via phone by voice or text. Even though they don’t look especially similar to one another, Plaza and Maisy Stella have a fun rapport with one another and I’m not sure why Megan Park doesn’t feature them on-screen together much. Oddly, Maddie Ziegler’s character isn’t present much in the film either, a shame since Park directed her and Jenna Ortega to great effect — drastically different subject material aside — in her previous feature The Fallout. Stella and Percy Hynes White certainly have enough chemistry to make the romantic thrust of the narrative work but there isn’t much about watching their mutual crush develop that feels unique to this movie.

Outside of the relationship between Elliott and Chad, Park also spends time fleshing out Elliott’s relationship with her family, particularly her mom and her younger brother (played by Maria Dizzia and Seth Isaac Johnson, respectively). While the screenplay does its best to imbue these bonding moments with heartfelt meaning, the sentiment just doesn’t land as well as it does in other coming-of-age tales like Dìdi from just a couple months ago. Where that film had a distinct sense of time and place that directs the protagonist’s evolution, My Old Ass grasps at millennial touchstones with era-specific music cues and a flashback sequence evoking a mid-aughts pop music heartthrob. It’s a cute scene but it doesn’t ultimately tell us much about the character or why this particular memory is important to her.

Despite this, My Old Ass is amiable enough and with a runtime under 90 minutes, it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome. There are nuggets of wisdom to be found about the passage of time and how Gen Z is dealing with growing up. My favorite scene involves Elliott confessing to Ro that she has a crush on Chad, when she’s previously only seemed to be interested in pursuing relationships with girls. The pacing of the conversation is considered but comedically compelling all the same; Ro reminds her that she told her to use labels when they’re useful but to ditch them when they no longer feel useful. I wish Megan Park was able to string more scenes like this one together to give the kick My Old Ass in the pants it needed to make a bigger impact.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Joker: Folie à Deux, a musical thriller starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, which finds the protagonist of Joker institutionalized while awaiting trial for his crimes and falling crazy in love with a fellow inmate.
Also playing in theaters is White Bird, a coming-of-age period drama starring Ariella Glaser and Orlando Schwerdt, about a troubled young student who is struggling to fit in at his new school after being expelled for his treatment of a disfigured student at his previous school.
Streaming on Netflix is It’s What’s Inside, a horror comedy starring Brittany O’Grady and James Morosini, following a group of friends who gather for a pre-wedding party that descends into an existential nightmare when an estranged friend arrives with a mysterious game that awakens long-hidden secrets, desires, and grudges.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup