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

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

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

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

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

Score – 2.5/5

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

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival two months ago, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell represents the Danish filmmaker’s return to the big screen after a ten-year detour developing streaming series for Amazon Prime and Netflix. Fortunately or unfortunately, he picks up right where he left off. His latest cinematic provocation plays like a woozy mashup of his Muay Thai saga Only God Forgives from 2013 and haute couture horror vision The Neon Demon from 2016. While those two movies weren’t the masterpieces Refn likely thinks they are, they at least had coherent storylines and tangible motivations to rise above their pretentious trappings. Even though it runs shy of two hours, Her Private Hell will test the patience of many going into the theater unacquainted with Refn’s lugubrious pacing and laconic characters.

The film opens on an impossibly foggy cityscape, settling at the street level of the neon-spined Tower Hotel, as the young actress Elle (Sophie Thatcher) enters its decadent lobby. There she meets Hunter (Kristine Froseth), a showbiz hopeful who says she lost her luggage upon arriving to the mist-muddled metropolis. Elle takes her in and introduces Hunter to Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), the seductive stepmom who’s slithered her way into the heart of Elle’s dad Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott). Elsewhere in the dystopian cityscape is the soigné soldier Private K (Charles Melton), traveling storefronts and pounding the pavement to look for his recently missing daughter. Tenuously uniting their stories is the presence of a serial killer known as “Leatherman”, a shadowy figure who’s been dispatching young women in gratuitously violent fashion ever since the supernatural haze engulfed their town.

While Refn’s works are far from narratively complex, Her Private Hell is his most intentionally bifurcated, split unevenly between psychosexual giallo fairytale and Yakuza revenge thriller. If he had committed to one of those two disparate genre fascinations, it’s possible the film could’ve worked, as the two distinct partitions have glimmers of hope in scenes that work on their own terms. A Rear Window-esque sequence, where Elle and Hunter watch helplessly from across the street as Leatherman claims a victim in her hotel room, tracks the same bead of tension Brian De Palma learned studying Alfred Hitchcock. Further cementing the connection is ravishing corresponding music from longtime De Palma collaborator Pino Donaggio, who delivers a riveting Bernard Herrmann-inspired score that’s one of the year’s finest.

The moments we spent with Private K, as he makes his way pursuing leads through the criminal underworld, tend to get redundant but happen upon their own moments of brilliance. Her Private Hell‘s best scene is a bravura fight setpiece that starts with K in an antique store surrounded by henchmen, gradually working its way out through an alley and finishing on the city streets. But when it comes time to intertwine Elle and K’s stories in a meaningful way, Refn comes up woefully short. The screenplay from Refn and co-writer Esti Giordani can’t justify why these characters would even meet in the first place, much less dedicate so much time to K without developing his character. The tense relationship between Elle and Dominique is the closest thing the movie has in terms of emotional connection, but their scenes of histrionic conflict don’t bring out the best in the performances by Sophie Thatcher and Havana Rose Liu.

In addition to Refn’s obsession with garish lighting — fittingly, this film is being distributed by NEON — and tight leather, Her Private Hell is also preoccupied with the mommy issues and bruised masculinity that Refn has more productively investigated before. More specifically, he returns to psychoanalytical symbolism regarding hands, foreshadowed by a glass sculpture in establishing shots of the city and paid off during the gauzy climax. 15 years after the release of his breathtaking breakout Drive, that thriller’s stylishly stellar interplay of film noir and car-centric action now registers as more of a happy accident than an announcement of Nicolas Winding Refn as a top-tier talent. At this point, it barely feels like he’s making movies for anyone besides himself, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he has difficulty finding funding for whatever private hells he comes up with in the future.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Premiering in theaters is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, a superhero sequel starring Tom Holland and Zendaya, which picks up after the events of No Way Home where the world has forgotten Peter Parker exists, finding him anonymously protecting New York City as the hero Spider-Man.
Also playing in theaters is I Want Your Sex, a comedic erotic thriller starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman, which follows a naïve young man who becomes the new assistant and muse for a renowned and provocative artist.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is The Devil’s Mouth, a survival thriller starring Kathryn Newton and Lana Condor, concerning a group of college friends’ Thailand adventure that turns deadly when they become trapped in submerged caves with a dangerous predator.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Cobbled together from a jettisoned fourth season of the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, the unmemorable The Mandalorian And Grogu hobbled into theaters this Memorial Day weekend. It’s the first theatrical Star Wars release in 7 years — incidentally, 2019 was also when the first season of The Mandalorian was released — but doesn’t arrive with the fanfare typically befitting an entry from the multi-billion dollar franchise. With 10 seasons of live-action Star Wars shows already available to stream at home, audiences understandably need to feel compelled to go out to the theater when there’s already so much to dig into on TV. Each Episode of the Sequel Trilogy, and even 2016’s Rogue One, cleared that bar but this cinematic adaptation of the saga about a helmeted bounty hunter and his adorable sidekick doesn’t pass the Knee-Crack Couch Test.

Picking up where the third season left off, The Mandalorian And Grogu finds Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his foot-tall companion Grogu working under Commander Ward (Sigourney Weaver) of the New Republic. She tasks the pair with finding Janu Coin (Jonny Coyne), a former Galactic Empire leader now operating as a crime lord somewhere on the dissolute planet Shakari. To get more specifics on his whereabouts, Ward consults with the Hutt Twins, descendants of Jabba from Return Of The Jedi who are looking for his son Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White). With the help of streetwise food stand vendor Hugo (voiced by Martin Scorsese), the Mandalorian discovers Rotta is working as a gladiator in a fighting pit run by Coin and endeavors to free the slug champion from his proverbial chains of servitude.

The film opens with a bleary setpiece victimized by the same style of concrete mixer color grading that has plagued Disney’s live-action output since 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and disproportionally affected 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. Thankfully, the rest of The Mandalorian And Grogu isn’t as dim and drab as its snowbound opener but it doesn’t exactly instill much confidence from the outset either. After the successful mission, The Mandalorian turns in a holographic bounty card to Ward, she hands him a new card for Coin and the movie’s titular pair scurry off for another adventure. From there, the main characters are shuffled around like playing cards flipping through a deck, hitting the barebones story beats required to keep things moving but doing so in dramatically inert fashion.

Like its corresponding series, The Mandalorian And Grogu has plenty of action scenes where “Mando” gets to show off his sharpshooting and hand-to-hand combat prowess; him stating “I try to avoid violence” at one point essentially counts as a laugh line. His fights with all manner of space aliens and Stormtroopers are undoubtedly the high points of the film, most notably a nocturnal skirmish with metal-brimmed assassin Embo. It’s a sequence that feels particularly indebted to Westerns like Once Upon A Time In The West and the “Man With No Name” Trilogy that inspired director and co-writer Jon Favreau when creating The Mandalorian. That the movie strings together several well-choreographed conflicts while avoiding Easter eggs and memberberries should be enough to put it in the “W” column as a Star Wars outing.

But like any suit of armor — even the protagonist’s beskar-crafted uniform — there’s always a weak spot, and the plotting and pacing of The Mandalorian And Grogu is undeniably its fatal flaw. There’s a narrative cohesion and sense of consequence missing from this movie that makes the proceedings feel perfunctory and dull. Nearly all scenes of dialogue simply feel like filler, akin to unskippable ads in between songs on the free tier of a Spotify membership. The closest Favreau and his co-writers Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor get to character development is with Rotta The Hutt but Jeremy Allen White’s voice work is so bland that the pathos lands with an intergalactic thud. As much as Baby Yoda mightily strains to lift the film up with the Force from his tiny hand, his precious efforts are all for naught.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Backrooms, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, adapts a sci-fi horror YouTube series in which a therapist ventures into an otherworldly dimension in search of her missing patient.
Pressure, starring Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser, follows General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Captain James Stagg as they face an impossible choice: launch the largest and most dangerous seaborne invasion in history or risk losing World War II altogether.
The Breadwinner, starring Nate Bargatze and Mandy Moore, finds a supermom switching roles with her breadwinner husband after she lands a Shark Tank deal and he struggles to adapt as a stay-at-home dad to their three daughters.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

As anyone who’s been in a serious relationship can attest, weekend retreats with significant others don’t always go as planned. More than one such plan goes awry in Over Your Dead Body, an action comedy from The Lonely Island alum and MacGruber director Jorma Taccone. The film’s couple, Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving), have been married for seven years but their seven-year itch has taken a turn for the deadly. We learn early on that Dan plans to kill Lisa during their trip out in the wilderness, prepping an alibi with his co-worker and his dad Michael (Paul Guilfoyle) by saying that Lisa is planning on partaking in a rigorous hike over the weekend. As he sneaks up on her in the cabin, she parries his chloroform-soaked rag with a stun gun; it turns out she’s been making plans as well.

We flash back to a few days earlier, where Lisa is preparing a fabricated story of her own, telling a friend that Dan plans to go hunting during their time away. It’s not clear exactly how Lisa thought out disposing of Dan and by the time the pair come to learn of their mutual murder plots, it’s obvious neither one is a criminal mastermind. As they scuffle for a shotgun, a blast hits the ceiling and a trio of interlopers falls from the attic. If things weren’t fraught enough, Michael’s cabin was serving as a temporary safe house for escaped convicts Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), along with their crooked CO accomplice Allegra (Juliette Lewis). They tie up the squabbling couple, whom they saw bickering from the attic, and try to patch up their dysfunction for long enough to shake them down for cash before they continue to evade capture.

Over Your Dead Body is an English-language remake of Norwegian Netflix offering The Trip and given the amount of twists and turns in both stories, your best shot at enjoying this American re-do is not being familiar with the original. The distributor IFC is wisely playing up the fact that the movie comes courtesy of 87North Productions, the company behind action comedies like Bullet Train and Violent Night. What starts out as a tale of desperation amid marital strife gradually gives way to a cheeky wam-bam fight for survival, where blood is spilled in mostly cartoonish and comedically-colored fashion. Since co-founding 87North in 2019 and producing the Bob Odenkirk actioner Nobody in 2021, David Leitch has seemingly cornered the market on a brand of bone-crunching action fare with yucks between the ruckus.

The primary reason Over Your Dead Body doesn’t work lies in director Jorma Taccone’s inability to find a tone that works for the material. Jason Segel and Samara Weaving are talented actors but they’re saddled with characters obnoxious and petty enough that we’d be okay with either one of them being offed, except that it means the other would succeed. Once they’re interrupted by the fugitives, it becomes easier to root for them as a couple with renewed purpose but the preceding domestic scenes, where they argue about Scrabble words and how to mince garlic, are torturous. In the way Pete and company serve as de facto marriage counselors for Dan and Lisa, Taccone seems to be shooting for an update of The Ref but lands on the timbre of a home invasion thriller. There’s a specific scene set around the basement billiards table that’s particularly icky and doesn’t mesh at all with the playful anarchic vibe that Taccone is going for.

He and his editor Jeremy Cohen put together fight sequences that feature laudable stunt work while also tracking with the bombast from other 87North projects. The best moments in the movie come not from the actual combat sequences but from characters trying to pick up the pieces — sometimes literally — after the fact. A scene where Allegra fruitlessly tries to reassemble fragments of her foot builds to the funniest punchline in the whole film, one that wouldn’t be out of place in a gorier The Lonely Island sketch. Like his troupe mate Akiva Schaffer, who helmed the hilarious The Naked Gun last year, Taccone has a killer grip on slapstick humor. But with Over Your Dead Body, he hasn’t proven to have nearly as high a command over darkly comic premises or action setpieces.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Michael, a music biopic starring Jaafar Jackson and Colman Domingo, covering the life and career of pop icon Michael Jackson, from his involvement in the Jackson 5 in the 60s to his early solo career in the 70s and 80s.
Also coming to theaters is Mother Mary, a psychological thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, involving the fraught relationship between a costume designer and an international pop star on the eve of her comeback performance.
Premiering on Netflix is Apex, a survival action film starring Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton, following an adrenaline junkie whose rock climbing expedition is thwarted by a fellow adventurer who’s made it his mission to hunt her in the wild.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Most pop culture geeks are familiar with the 20 Year Rule, a cyclical principle in which popular trends can enjoy rejuvenated relevance roughly 20 years after their initial emergence. It’s why mid-aughts nostalgia is everywhere now, from emo stalwarts helming major music festivals to sitcoms like Scrubs and Malcolm In The Middle getting rebooted. The latest Pixar film Hoppers is mired in a mid-2000s animal-crazy animated era, when box office beasts like Madagascar, Ice Age: The Meltdown and Open Season ran rampant. It’s a throwback to when all you needed was a bevy of fuzzy creatures to make families at the cineplex happy. But the standard is higher now, chiefly because of Pixar output like Ratatouille, WALL·E and Up from the later 2000s that raised the bar for all American animation.

The hero of Hoppers is Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda), a peppy sophomore at Beaverton University whose love of nature stems from time spent as a kid with her grandmother by a tranquil glade nearby. Ever the activist, she frequently petitions against Mayor Jerry Generazzo (voiced by Jon Hamm) and his efforts to expand the town at the expense of the local forests and their inhabitants. Jerry’s latest plan involves demolishing the very glade Mabel loved as a child to make way for Beaverton Beltway but when Mabel goes to revisit it, she discovers a particular beaver is acting strangely. It turns out that it’s actually a beaver-appearing robot that Mabel’s biology professor Dr. Sam (voiced by Kathy Najimy) has zapped her consciousness into so she can study the habitat. Against Dr. Sam’s wishes, Mabel “hops” into the robotic animal to help the glade flourish with wildlife once again before it’s too late.

Marketing for Hoppers has leaned heavily into an interaction Mabel has with Dr. Sam when she first finds out about the body-swapping tech; “Guys, this is like Avatar!” Mabel gawks, while Dr. Sam protests, “This is nothing like Avatar!” Since Disney now owns 20th Century Fox, the exchange counts not only as a cross-promotional effort but a meta way to get ahead of the film’s flimsy and derivative premise. The storyline is most reminiscent of FernGully: The Last Rainforest (which Avatar incidentally cribbed from as well), Happy Feet and other environmentally-conscious animated efforts. Messages about corporate interests poisoning the natural world remain depressingly relevant, but there have already been so many kid’s films with those themes that you have to broach the subject with more nuance than what’s on display here.

A member of Pixar’s senior creative team since 2022, Daniel Chong has his first shot here at directing a full feature for the studio and developed the story with fellow Pixar mainstay Jesse Andrews. He recruits a talented comedic ensemble of Saturday Night Live alum like Bobby Moynihan, Melissa Villaseñor and Ego Nwodim to voice cute animals that reside in the woods. Meryl Streep and Dave Franco fill out the dramatic side as an insect mother and son duo that seek to use the “hopping” technology for revenge against constantly interloping humans. Their sinister plot gives way to a third act that’s surprisingly menacing for a Pixar movie but even the darker turns don’t fully make up for a story whose stakes are largely superficial up to that point.

Between a montage set to “Working For The Weekend” where fuzzy creatures rebuild a dam and lines like “flock around and find out!” from a goose character, Hoppers feels tossed-off and regressive for a studio that knows better. Even if you’re going to populate your movie with myriad woodland dwellers, you can still write them with a sophistication that makes them memorable in addition to being adorable. With the exception of Mabel, the human characters are similarly underwritten and mainly just relied on as props to keep the action moving. The nature animation, particularly of the beaver’s Superlodge community, is predictably awe-inspiring from an animation house that is second to none when it comes to crafting intricate digital worlds. But in terms of storytelling, Hoppers feels like a hop backward in time to an era when simply compiling “wacky” animated critters was enough to win the day.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Bride!, a gothic crime movie starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, in which a companion is created for a reanimated creature and the pair spark up romance, police interest and radical social change.
Also playing in theaters is Dolly, a horror film starring Fabianne Therese and Seann William Scott, involving a young woman who fights for survival after being abducted by a deranged, monster-like figure who wants to raise her as their child.
Streaming on Netflix is War Machine, a sci-fi action movie starring Alan Ritchson and Dennis Quaid, which follows the final recruits of a grueling special ops boot camp who encounter a deadly force from beyond this world.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

English writer-director Emerald Fennell puts the “more” in Yorkshire Moors with “Wuthering Heights”, her torrid but tawdry take on the oft-adapted Emily Brontë novel. Based on Fennell’s two previous efforts, Saltburn and Promising Young Woman, one may go into this movie expecting something similarly sinful and transgressive as her other features. But the filmmaker’s penchant for empty provocation is largely eschewed for a period piece that looks every bit the classic Hollywood romance, with only flashes of racier on-screen explications of licentious longing. Even though Romeo And Juliet is discussed at length during one scene in Fennell’s film, her version of an ostensibly similar romantic tragedy isn’t a radical reinterpretation à la Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and, given how many times Brontë’s classic has already been seen on screen, is worse off for it.

In late 18th-century England, Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington) and her father (played by Martin Clunes) take in a destitute young boy (played by Owen Cooper) without a name, whom Cathy dubs “Heathcliff”. Through the years, the two become close as Cathy teaches Heathcliff how to read and Heathcliff handles chores around the estate. As adults, Cathy (played by Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (played by Jacob Elordi) share an inseparable bond but looking to improve her situation, Cathy sets her sights on their wealthy new neighbor Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). Soon after an arranged run-in, Cathy accepts Edgar’s proposal for marriage and a heartbroken Heathcliff flees after what he sees as a betrayal of their inextricable bond. A year later, he returns to find Cathy is with child and well cared for at Linton’s manor, but she’s still secretly yearning to make an impossible affair with Heathcliff work.

Though “Wuthering Heights” isn’t the most revelatory telling of this tale, make no mistake that this is a first-rate production, where every dollar of its $80 million budget is well-represented on-screen. The production design is consistently stunning, harkening back to Golden Age theatrical opulence when the costumes and sets worked in concert to become characters in the story. One piece of gothic set design that’s particularly striking is a fireplace surrounded by melted plaster handprints, a haunting homage to the theme of reaching out for something incendiary and ill-advised. Linus Sandgren, whose cinematography in Saltburn was one of that film’s highlights, makes an absolute meal out of lavish nature settings where every moor is perpetually fog-enveloped and every sunset is blood red.

There aren’t any performances in “Wuthering Heights” that stand out as subpar but with the exception of Alison Oliver in an eccentric supporting role, not much of the acting here feels especially adventurous either. Much has been made about how star and co-producer Margot Robbie has promoted the film by waxing poetic about her off-screen “codependent” connection with Jacob Elordi. While I don’t doubt there were some sparks, I’d mostly chalk all the talk up to a marketing stunt so auditoriums could fill up for Valentine’s Day weekend. Regardless, the pair sell the love like the pros they are and indulge the darker sides of lust and obsession as well. But in a movie rife with BDSM undertones, it’s most disappointing that Cathy and Heathcliff’s mutual kink is treating everyone outside of their relationship horribly.

“Wuthering Heights” is hardly the first romantic drama to underscore an “us vs. the world” mentality but in Fennell’s cynical translation of this material, love means never having to say you’re sorry to bystanders you’ve treated with derision and contempt. There’s a mean streak in this movie’s Cathy and Heathcliff — primarily in how they manipulate others and dispose of them afterwards — that tracks with the callousness present in Fennell’s cinematic output thus far. A negative worldview comports better if you’re making a vigilante thriller or a dark comedy but when you’re tackling classical romance, it just feels like the wrong attitude to bring. Climbing these Heights wouldn’t feel as daunting if we had better footholds for character motivation beyond the doomed lovers imposing their will, no matter who they burn along the way.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
How To Make A Killing, starring Glen Powell and Margaret Qualley, is a black comedy thriller involving a young man disowned at birth by his ultra-wealthy family who will stop at nothing to reclaim his $28 billion inheritance.
I Can Only Imagine 2, starring John Michael Finley and Milo Ventimiglia, is a faith-based sequel following the lead singer of Christian band MercyMe as he struggles with his beliefs and inner demons while seeking a path through adversity.
Playing at Cinema Center is The Voice Of Hind Rajab, a docudrama nominated for the Best International Feature Film at next month’s Academy Awards about Red Crescent volunteers responding to an emergency call from a 6-year-old girl trapped in a car.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

At this point, there have been so many cinematic attempts at adapting Bram Stoker’s immortal vampiric tale that filmmakers shouldn’t bother cracking that coffin open unless they have something new to say. Romanian rabblerouser Radu Jude certainly had an original and outrageous take on the mythos with last year’s Dracula and now French director Luc Besson’s vision of the archetypal vampire arrives in US theaters. Developed with the working title Dracula: A Love Tale, this version focuses on the romantic angle between the titular Transylvanian and who he believes to be the reincarnation of his long lost love. Despite the added amorous angle and a dash of theater and whimsy to the typical Dracula proceedings, this newest telling is basically the same undead Count in a slightly different cloak.

We begin in 15th century Wallachia, where Prince Vladimir (Caleb Landry Jones) is away in battle when his wife Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu) is ambushed and killed by Ottoman troops. As punishment for renouncing God, whom Vlad blames for Elisabeta’s death, he becomes the undead Count Dracula and is made to languish for centuries without his eternal bride. Flash forward to the late 1800s and real estate solicitor Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid) travels from Paris to the Count’s creepy castle in Transylvania. After keeping Harker there longer than he’d prefer, Dracula finds that his fiancée Mina (also played by Zoë Bleu) is the spitting image of his beloved Elisabeta. He sets out on a quest to find Mina with designs to turn her into a fellow vampire, so the pair can live eternally, as Vlad and Elisabeta never could.

Though it’s not quite as erotically charged and poorly acted as Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 iteration of Bram Stoker’s book, Besson’s Dracula nevertheless feels indebted to it stylistically and tonally. Melodramatic dialogue, as when Dracula relays to Harker that “life without love is the worst disease of all,” would not feel at all out of place in Coppola’s winner of 3 Academy Awards. Besson employs moody overlays and evocative montages that also recall the mise en scène of the Coppola effort, as when a dolorous Dracula hurls himself out of a castle window repeatedly, with death never coming. Sadly, Tom Waits must not have been available to reprise his role as the deranged Dracula familiar Renfield, a secondary character omitted from this new film altogether.

A considerable presence who’s more than welcome here is Christoph Waltz, who plays a priest hot on Dracula’s cape with a closely-clutched cross and wooden stake. He’s having a great time here, bringing his studious diction — hearing him pronounce “hematophagous” is a joy its own — and signature wit to the role; when a guard intimates, “A coffin, that’s the last place I’d want to sleep!” to the priest, he smirks back, “We all will one day.” Newcomer Zoë Bleu, the daughter of actress Rosanna Arquette, does well for her first time out in a dual role where her work is the lynchpin for the film’s emotional thrust. She has an off-kilter chemistry with Caleb Landry Jones, who isn’t a traditional leading man by any means but turns on the seductive charm where it counts. He’s also in the unenviable position of stacking up to Bill Skarsgård and his towering performance as the Dracula-adjacent Count Orlok in Nosferatu a little over a year ago.

For every inspired narrative choice Besson makes to differentiate his revamp from the coven of fellow Dracula renditions, there’s another that’s equally as ponderous. The most glaring example is the decision to include poorly-rendered CGI gargoyles that serve as underlings within Dracula’s fortress. A sequence where they chase an imprisoned Harker as he attempts to escape on the ice below the castle looks laughably bad, and lands on such a bathetic beat that I’m shocked it didn’t end up on the cutting room floor. There’s also a ridiculous montage where the stony henchmen zoom around Dracula and pile riches up high while the Count sits stone-faced at the end of an elongated dining room table. Those who prefer their vampire tales to have more romance than scares may fall for this Dracula but most will want to sink their fangs into a more balanced take on Stoker’s story.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Strangers: Chapter 3, starring Madelaine Petsch and Gabriel Basso, is a horror sequel concluding the slasher trilogy wherein the final girl squares off against the titular masked killers one last time.
Solo Mio, starring Kevin James and Alyson Hannigan, is a romantic dramedy in which a groom stranded at the altar for his destination wedding embarks on his planned honeymoon across Italy by himself.
Whistle, starring Dafne Keen and Sophie Nélisse, is a supernatural horror movie where a misfit group of unwitting high school students stumble upon an ancient Aztec Death Whistle that summons their future deaths to hunt them down.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

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