Psychologically, there will always be something unsettling about being alone in a large space intended to play host to activity that isn’t happening and to people who aren’t there. It’s almost like these places shouldn’t exist unless there’s more than the hum of fluorescent lights to fill them. Backrooms, the debut feature from 20-year-old Kane Parsons, brilliantly keys in on the unease we feel when we enter areas that overwhelm with their stifling sense of vacancy. The decline of “third places” (a term for shared social environments besides one’s home or one’s workplace) was accelerated by the pandemic six years ago, though signs of communal fracture were in place before that. There are abandoned shopping malls, storefronts and, of course, movie theaters whose remaining function is the resounding reminder of what we’ve lost.

Set in San Jose in the early 1990s, Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, the hard-pressed owner of discount furniture store Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. Grimacing at the TV when ads for his competitor Big Wayne’s Furniture Barn come on, he dons a pirate outfit and makes employees Bobby (Finn Bennett) and Kat (Lukita Maxwell) shoot a commercial, but it seems unlikely to move the needle. Clark spills his guts about his business failings, dissolved marriage and alcohol troubles with his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), who attempts to navigate him to better emotional surroundings. Drawn to the basement after closing his store one evening, Clark discovers an entrance to a hidden wallpaper-covered room that serves as a foyer for a seemingly unending amount of adjoining spaces. After spending excessive time in the extradimensional area, Clark’s absence from the outside world inspires Mary to go in and look for him.

Adapting from a 4chan-inspired web series he began in January 2022, Kane Parsons is working with a reported $10 million budget and puts every dollar of it to marvelous use. As one may expect from the title and premise, the set design of Backrooms is effectively the star of the movie. Working with production designer Danny Vermette, who has collaborated with Osgood Perkins on his three most recent films, Parsons visually renders liminal spaces eerie in their prolonged sense of abandon and uncanniness. Furniture and props are sunken into the floor and walls, as if they’re being devoured by the fluidity of time and the persistence of memory. In addition to Dalí homages, the incredible sets also recall the impossible architecture found in the work of graphic artist MC Escher. Along with visual effects and an off-kilter music score co-composed by Parsons, the movie connotes the crushing cosmic horror of occupying a realm impossible in its vastness.

In terms of the story that forefronts these creepy interiors, screenwriter Will Soodik has the unenviable task of not spelling out too much about the titular locale but not withholding too much information either. It’s a difficult balance that he mostly pulls off, although the in-session dialogue between Clark and Mary fast tracks character development that would be better shown and not told. As well-realized as the unnerving aesthetic of Backrooms is, the script could have benefited from a similar level of detail when fleshing out who these people are and what draws them into this limitless otherworldly chasm. Nevertheless, Academy Award nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve fill in the gaps nicely with a pair of performances percolating with fear of the unknown. Their tête-à-tête within the confines of a provisional dining room recalls the tense interactions between Jack and Wendy in The Shining.

As for more contemporary touchstones, Backrooms most frequently reminded me of Alex Garland’s Annihilation, following a group of imperiled scientists while investigating a zone called The Shimmer. The film also contains echoes of fellow A24 mind-bender Enemy, which sports a similar sickly shade of yellow cinematography and deals with protagonists attempting to break themselves from detrimental patterns. Whether or not Backrooms likewise concludes with an oversized spider cowering in the corner of a room, I’ll leave you to discover. It’s no secret that movie theaters have been more sparsely inhabited as studios desperately shuffle to try and fill auditoriums across the world. There’s harmonious irony in the fact that a movie set in an unending array of empty rooms could so thoroughly fill spaces designed to bring us together.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Masters Of The Universe, starring Nicholas Galitzine and Camila Mendes, reboots the 1987 sword and sorcery film about a young man on Earth who discovers a secret legacy as the prince of an alien planet and must recover a magic sword to return home and protect his kingdom.
Scary Movie, starring Marlon Wayans and Shawn Wayans, reboots the horror parody franchise in which two friends once again find themselves caught up in mayhem involving killers, monsters and supernatural creatures.
Power Ballad, starring Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas, is the latest musical drama from John Carney in which a washed-up wedding singer and a fading boy band star create a song during a late-night jam session that the latter turns into a pop hit.

After releasing micro-budget chiller Milk & Serial for free on YouTube two years ago, 26-year-old sketch comedian Curry Barker has graduated beyond the confines of streaming with the new horror outing Obsession. Picked up by Focus Features at TIFF last September for a reported $15 million price tag, it’s the kind of high-concept buzzy title that competitors A24 and NEON may still be kicking themselves months later for not securing. At the same time, the fact that there are enough promising Gen Z filmmakers around to trigger these kinds of bidding wars among distributors with their projects is a good problem to have. It represents not just an investment in future cinematic storytellers but a commitment to creative forces that audiences have come to know through platforms like YouTube and Reddit.

In Obsession, reserved twentysomething Bear (Michael Johnston) slaves away at a local music shop and harbors a longtime crush on co-worker and childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette). It’s enough of an open secret among his other co-workers and trivia mates Tim (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless) that he practices spilling his guts to Nikki when they’re around. With hopes of replacing a necklace Nikki lost, Bear wanders into a gift shop and finds a One Wish Willow trinket that promises to grant the owner their greatest desire. After another frustrating night in the friend zone, Bear impulsively wishes that Nikki loved him “more than anyone in the entire world.” Much to his surprise, the magic behind the kitschy novelty toy kicks in but it doesn’t take long for her amorous affection to turn ominous and even dangerous.

In effect, Obsession is a suffusion of two well-worn tropes in the romantic and horror genres: a boy being too shy to tell the girl he’s pining after how he feels and the “be careful what you wish for” tale. In his writing and direction, Curry Barker uses these familiar starting points as a way to investigate the dark underpinnings behind these touchstones. When Bear casts his wish, it’s not as though Cupid shoots his arrow at Nikki and a romance slowly builds. Her entire personality turns on a dime and we learn that her real self is in essence a prisoner to this new possessed and obsessed version of Nikki. Some of the film’s scariest moments occur when the “real” Nikki pops back to the surface for terrifying interludes where we realize she’s essentially being held captive in her own body. It’s a horrifying concept that Barker explores within his take on the classic The Monkey’s Paw short story.

The quartet of young actors all add distinctive touches to their respective performances but Inde Navarrette’s work here is simply sublime. Under Bear’s seemingly innocuous spell, Nikki becomes unsettlingly possessive and violently co-dependent, erratically dithering between dewy-eyed obsequiousness and explosive neediness. As the affected version of Nikki for most of the movie, Navarrette hits notes of desperation and frustration that give Obsession a plethora of sustained uneasiness and well-earned beats of humor too. When Bear draws a Jenga piece at a party and is tasked with planting one on the person sitting to his left, Nikki’s remedy to the situation is both hilarious and creepy. I hadn’t seen Navarrette in anything prior to this but her commanding and unforgettable work here will rightfully open more doors for her in the future.

Though Curry Barker certainly pushes his story to gorier and more emotionally visceral lengths than we often get with typical tales of twisted wish fulfillment, its ending is telegraphed relatively early on. Interactions with both the employees where Bear procured the cursed charm and employees of the company that produces the One Wish Willow are marked by wickedly cavalier candor but serve to remind us of this film’s inevitable conclusion. But before that point, Barker sustains a timbre of absurdist tension that feels like a sketch from I Think You Should Leave and an episode from Tales From The Crypt got mutilated in a blender together. Like fellow YouTubers Markiplier and RackaRacka, who have also made the leap to theatrical horror filmmaking, Curry Barker has demonstrated that he won’t be ignored.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Mandalorian And Grogu, starring Pedro Pascal and Jeremy Allen White, continues the Star Wars saga of the titular bounty hunter and his cuddly companion as they traverse the galaxy to rescue the son of a powerful and notorious crime lord.
I Love Boosters, starring Keke Palmer and Naomi Ackie, is a crime comedy which finds a group of shoplifters (known as “boosters”) as they take aim at a cutthroat fashion maven after she steals their designs.
Passenger, starring Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell, is a supernatural horror film following a young couple who witnesses a gruesome highway accident and soon realizes they did not leave the crash scene alone, as a demonic presence won’t stop until it claims them both.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Three features in, Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy seems to have found his niche. His first two films, Caveat and Oddity, are supernatural horror movies set in Ireland that intersect human folly and folklore to give the mystical elements a moral grounding. The filmmaker’s latest offering, Hokum, falls in line thematically with those two projects but by sticking with familiar narrative territory, McCarthy has refined how he tells his spooky story. This is his most narratively compelling and consistently unnerving effort to date, led by a familiar face and several others that may not be as familiar to American audiences. It’s also one you’ll want to see with a crowd, not only because it’s best enjoyed in a dark, distraction-free area but because there are different moments that may generate the biggest scares among the audience. Caveat and Oddity both had one jump scare that was clearly meant to be “the big one” but Hokum has a few that could qualify.

The film stars Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, a morose author of a popular book series involving a conquistador and his journeys. While drinking and writing late one evening, he has a nagging feeling of unfinished business in addition to writing the epilogue of his latest novel. His late parents requested that their ashes be spread at the hotel in rural Ireland where they honeymooned, so Ohm makes the trek to honor their wishes. He’s surly with the staff, including the desk clerk Mal (Peter Coonan) and bellhop Alby (Will O’Connell), but his interest is piqued when bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh) tells him the honeymoon suite has been locked off by the hotel’s owner Cob (Brendan Conroy). He claims that the room has been haunted by a witch for years and he doesn’t want to risk letting the evil out. After Fiona goes missing during his stay, Ohm suspects she may have gone missing in the haunted quarters and breaks in to confirm his theory.

Adam Scott is likely best known for his television work as sympathetic protagonists in Parks And Recreation and Severance but his character in Hokum is markedly pricklier. He brusquely refuses to sign one of his books for a fan and when Alby confesses he has aspirations to write, Ohm burns Alby’s hand with a hot spoon and mocks, “You’re gonna need thicker skin than that if you’re gonna make it as a writer.” During the initial part of his stay at the Bilberry Woods Hotel, you’re almost hoping some terrible creature of Irish myth comes out and devours this guy. But in time, we find out what drives him to drink: a tragic accident in childhood that permanently fractured his relationship with his parents. Scott does excellent work shifting Ohm’s arrogance and ego in the first act to a care and curiosity when the one person he opens up to at the hotel disappears without a trace. By the time he makes it up to the room, he’s about as petrified as we are.

Teaming up again with Oddity cinematographer Colm Hogan, Damian McCarthy does an outstanding job filling Hokum with mostly-static frames of dimly lit halls and rooms where we’re forced to reckon with what waits in the shadows. One reason McCarthy excels at delivering superlative jump scares is that he sets them up with patient shot selection where our eyes slowly adjust to differing levels of darkness. But for those wary of artsy “slow burn” horror that goes nowhere, believe that McCarthy knows how to pay off the moments of silence and stillness brilliantly. The overall pace of Hokum feels more brisk than McCarthy’s previous films but it reflects a confidence in storytelling rather than a director trying to rush through things. This is a filmmaker who’s honing his craft and refining the ways he can chill us to the bone.

True to its title, the otherworldly aspects of Hokum tend to be the most compelling and the more formulaic human-based mystery takes over a bit too much of the third act. There’s a specific sequence set around a ringing bell that’s tense for a time but ends up feeling more contrived as it plays out. But like the possessed wooden golem in Oddity, McCarthy again populates his tale with memorable ghouls to keep us up at night. Will O’Connell does double duty in a nightmare scene as Jack The Jackass, a demented children’s show host that sports Pennywise-like bulging eyes and surrealist anthropomorphization out of a David Lynch offering. If you’re someone who’s always looking for more things that go bump in the night, Hokum is happy to oblige.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Mortal Kombat II, starring Karl Urban and Adeline Rudolph, is an action sequel in which martial arts combatants from the Earthrealm battle in a high-stakes contest designed by the tyrannous emperor of the Outworld.
The Sheep Detectives, a comedy mystery starring Hugh Jackman and Nicholas Braun, follows a flock of sheep as they work together to solve a murder case after their beloved shepherd is found dead.
Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard And Soft: The Tour is a 3D concert film directed and produced by James Cameron, featuring performances from pop superstar Billie Eilish during the Manchester, England dates of her Hit Me Hard And Soft tour last year.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

It’s said that holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. As the new psychological drama Mother Mary opens, it’s clear that fashion designer Sam Anselm (played by Michaela Coel) has more than her fair share. After years of crafting bespoke costumes for pop singer Mother Mary (played by Anne Hathaway), their creative collaboration is cut short, leaving Sam shamed and stunned. She retreats to the English countryside and picks up the pieces, continuing to consult for clients who don’t perform for thousands of screaming fans but provide steady business nonetheless. Sam and her team are surprised to see Mary turn up at Sam’s home, rain-soaked and white as a ghost, years after their partnership ended. Desperate for Sam’s help, she says she needs a show-stopping dress for her comeback tour that kicks off in three days; it’d be a difficult request under normal circumstances but given the context, it’s more in the area of “unthinkable”.

Though she’s shaken, Mary attempts to ingratiate herself with Sam by saying she hasn’t changed since they last saw each other; Sam insists that she has, shooting back, “You’ll see what the years have made of me.” She hasn’t listened to Mother Mary’s music since their relationship dissolved and she doesn’t plan on breaking the streak, making Mary perform the taxing choreography for her new song “Spooky Action” without backing music. Her jagged movements read as those of a woman possessed and as the two women move forward with their improbable joint effort, they confide in one another that they’ve each been haunted by a spectral figure adorned in elegant cloth. Their only chance of cleansing themselves from the lingering spirits is to navigate their turbulent shared past and find a way forward together.

Mother Mary is another moody, metaphor-laden affair from writer-director David Lowery, operating here in a similar vein of his other A24-distributed existential dramas A Ghost Story and The Green Knight. Quality-wise, his latest effort falls somewhere in between those two, occasionally labored in its personification of the central analogy but frequently stunning in its craft and execution. The movie has two very different locations that function as a pair of “home bases” for most of the runtime: the blindingly-lit packed arenas in which Mother Mary performs and Sam’s spare barn-turned-workshop. As the two women rehash their past, the set design brilliantly merges these vastly different locales seamlessly and in stunning fashion.

If Mother Mary isn’t quite a horror film and not exactly a music movie either, it’s best categorized as a tense two-hander between a pair of actresses operating at a mutually high level. Anne Hathaway does a great job belting out the film’s original tunes — penned by Charli XCX and Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff — but even aside from the music, this stands as one of her finest performances to date. It helps that she has the marvelously magnetic Michaela Coel, who flawlessly conveys Sam’s bitterness without making her seem cruel or petty, as a scene partner. Their work together is marked by restraint, a fierce determination by both characters to redirect their emotions and to delay words unsaid just a little bit longer. As good as the play-like production design is, Hathaway and Coel are the reason to see this movie.

The tête-à-tête angle of the film ultimately coheres better and is more psychologically compelling than the supernatural elements, which take hold around the halfway point during a séance sequence. David Lowery’s imagery, involving the ghost in fabric that haunts both Mary and Sam, can get redundant and heavy-handed down the stretch. The music score by frequent Lowery cohort Daniel Hart sets the quieter scenes well but there’s one particular montage where the composition was so bombastic that I actually had to stifle a chuckle. Seven features in, Lowery has proven himself to be a filmmaker who takes chances with his storytelling, in haunted tales like this and in his takes on fantasy adventures like Pete’s Dragon and Peter Pan & Wendy. Like Mother Mary wears a halo on her head for her sold-out performances, Lowery wears his heart on his sleeve when committing his vision to the screen.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Devil Wears Prada 2, starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, reunites a legendary fashion magazine editor-in-chief with a pair of her former assistants, who have since risen the ranks within the industry.
Animal Farm, starring Seth Rogen and Gaten Matarazzo, adapts George Orwell’s satirical fable of anthropomorphic farm animals as they rebel against their human master and hope to create a society where all animals can be equal, free, and happy.
Deep Water, starring Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley, follows a group of international passengers en route from Los Angeles to Shanghai as they’re forced to make an emergency landing in shark-infested waters.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

The campy supernatural tale Forbidden Fruits is, as I’m told the kids say, a lot. Adapted from the 2019 Lily Houghton play *big breath* Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die, the big-screen treatment opts for a snappier title but maintains the verbose spirit of the source material. The snarky screenplay, co-written by Houghton with director Meredith Alloway, is littered with allusions to female-facing millennial mainstays like The Devil Wears Prada and Mean Girls. That the film’s narrative so obviously mirrors the latter at the outset seems to be by design, luring us in with a familiar story of yore to develop into something more dangerous and deadly. While it never reaches the subversiveness of titles like Heathers or The Virgin Suicides, it’s a pastiche ripe with themes about how hard it can be for young women to stick together.

Forbidden Fruits takes place almost entirely within the confines of fictional Texas shopping center Highland Place Mall, where the supercilious Apple (Lili Reinhart) and her fellow Free Eden employees Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) rule the roost. When they arrive at the food court, other mall workers scurry to leave them at what now becomes the popular kids’ table. It doesn’t quite scare off Pumpkin (Lola Tung), a new hire at the Auntie Anne’s fill-in Sister Salt’s, who offers them pretzel bite samples and piques their interest in the process. Pumpkin subsequently applies to work at their Urban Outfitters-like store and when she passes the interview with flying colors, she not only joins their clique but also their secret coven, where they perform rituals in the basement of Free Eden after-hours.

It’s when things get witchy — and a word that rhymes with “witchy” — that feminist fable Forbidden Fruits feels free to let its freak flag fly. Once Pumpkin is in the group, she discovers how controlling Apple is over Cherry and Fig’s lives, blocking off their personal calendars for them and casually lobbing barbs like, “that’s another unattractive quality we need to work on.” She also learns of a hex that befell ex-employee Pickle (Emma Chamberlain), so catatonic as a result of the witch’s curse that she’s seen literally banging her head against windows of outlets in the mall. There’s obviously something rotten at the root of this supposed paradise atop Apple’s guise of sisterhood and the more time Pumpkin spends with the trio, the more resolved she feels to expose the extent of the performative friendship they have in place.

Diablo Cody, who penned high school-set comedies Juno and Jennifer’s Body, serves as executive producer here and it’s fair to say that if she had written a reboot 30 years removed from The Craft, it could’ve come out very similarly to Forbidden Fruits. Even though this movie is seemingly set in the present day, it certainly maintains the late-aughts veneer of Cody’s most notable efforts; depicting a shopping mall as bustling in 2026 is arguably more anachronistic than featuring smartphones in a film set 20 years ago. What feels fresh in this film is how it angles against Apple’s brand of false feminism, wherein she can assert poisonous control over her friends’ lives by labelling any male interloper as part of the patriarchy. She feels so threatened by the suggestion that these ladies talk through their feelings at therapy that she forces them to confess their sins to the spirit of “ultimate femme martyr” Marilyn Monroe in a designated dressing room.

It may be too much to ask Forbidden Fruits to be more of anything but I wish it had committed to the edginess of its very first scene — involving a hot latte and a lecherous man’s crotch — in its storytelling. Meredith Alloway also delays the peripheral horror trappings to the degree that the violent final 20 minutes and mid-credit scene almost feel like they belong in a different movie. But the film’s more crucial aspect is the satirical heightened reality that she and her quartet of young actresses establish before the conclusion. Everyone here is on the same page aesthetically and tonally, down to Lili Reinhart’s ostentatious amber wig that seems to have been snatched from Nicole Kidman’s character in Practical Magic. Just as fashion is never finished, films like Forbidden Fruits about women navigating the tricky territory of burgeoning bonds will always be en vogue.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Beginning in theaters on Wednesday is The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, an animated adventure starring Chris Pratt and Anya Taylor-Joy, continuing the saga of the Super Mario Bros as they team up with Yoshi and Princess Rosalina to take on Bowser’s son Bowser Jr.
Also coming to theaters is The Drama, a black comedy starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, in which a couple’s relationship is shaken days before their wedding when one partner discovers unsettling truths about the other.
Premiering on Hulu is Pizza Movie, a college comedy starring Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone, following a pair of psychoactively-inhibited students who face an unexpectedly epic journey when they must navigate two flights of stairs to retrieve their pizza delivery.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

After his terrific feature debut Emily The Criminal, writer-director John Patton Ford returns with another desperate-times-desperate-measures thriller in How To Make A Killing. A loose adaptation of the dark comedy Kind Hearts And Coronets, the film makes another strong case for rising star Glen Powell as a leading man on the heels of Twisters and The Running Man. His devilish charisma has been put to great use in effects-heavy sequels and remakes like those, but in a comparatively smaller budget indie like this, watching Powell work his way around a stacked ensemble feels like its own special effect. The movie marries the one-percenter bloodlust of last year’s Death Of A Unicorn with the satirical roll-up-your-sleeves gumption of recent release No Other Choice, and while it doesn’t reach the transcendent heights of the latter, it’s assuredly a better time at the movies than the former.

Powell stars as Becket Redfellow, a menswear associate making his way in New Jersey after his mother was cast out of their obscenely wealthy family as a teenager for having Becket out of wedlock. His childhood crush Julia (Margaret Qualley) pops into the shop one day and as they catch up on old times, she asks him about the fantastical family fortune he routinely mentioned when they were kids that he would eventually inherit. It turns out that even though he’s estranged from the Redfellows, seven living family members are all that stand between him and billions of dollars. “Well, call me when you’ve killed them all,” Julia jokes as she leaves, but after Becket is ousted from his job to make room for the owner’s son, he hatches up a precarious plan to knock off each of the affluent obstacles one by one.

It’d be hard to tell a sympathetic story of a reluctant serial killer, even in a black comedy, if his victims were virtuous, so How To Make A Killing makes sure to play up the pomposity of the relatives on Becket’s hit list. His youngest cousin Taylor (Raff Law) is introduced almost doing Becket’s job for him, jumping out of a helicopter and miraculously not breaking his neck as he lands in a pool surrounded by partygoers. Elsewhere, cousins Noah (Zach Woods) and Steven (Topher Grace) squander their money and status with hipster photography and vainglorious preaching, respectively. But Becket’s plan hits a snag when his uncle Warren (Bill Camp) takes him under his wing and gets him a job in the banking business. His scheme gets put on hold further when he also takes a shine to Noah’s schoolteacher girlfriend Ruth (Jessica Henwick).

Where John Patton Ford’s previous effort was committed to solely being a lean-and-mean crime thriller, How To Make A Killing stretches itself thinner in terms of genre convictions. The emergence of a love triangle puts portions of the plot in romantic territory, while the dynamics of the crime storyline recall the film noir archetypes of the hard-luck everyman and femme fatale. Ford bites off a bit more than he can chew narratively as well, front-loading too many flashbacks and utilizing an ironic framing device that renders the ending preposterous. But Ford’s sharp writing finds the absurdity in Becket’s situation and even when he’s in peril, Powell makes the zingers zing. “There’s a rumor out there that money doesn’t buy happiness,” he smirks. “Money does buy happiness. We’re all adults here. Let’s move on.”

Handsome and brimming with confidence, Powell could just as easily be playing one of the WASPy schmucks that Becket targets but he plays up the character’s underdog qualities to the degree that we can root for him. Conversely, Topher Grace and a typically brilliant Zach Woods make their characters so hilariously despicable in their self-centeredness and vapidity that we simply can’t wait for them to get it. Jessica Henwick makes the most of an underwritten cypher for Becket’s morality and Margaret Qualley radiates sex appeal with a dash of danger as the unhappily married Julia. Even when the plot swerves in more directions than is advisable, this killer cast makes How To Make A Killing worth getting your hands into its risky business.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Opening in theaters is Scream 7, a slasher sequel starring Neve Campbell and Isabel May, in which a new Ghostface killer emerges in the town where Sidney Prescott has built a new life and her darkest fears are realized as her daughter becomes the next target.
Also playing in theaters is EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert, a documentary and concert film of the titular King Of Rock And Roll featuring newly restored and never-before-seen footage from long-lost 1970s Las Vegas residency footage.
Streaming on Hulu is In The Blink Of An Eye, a sci-fi drama starring Kate McKinnon and Rashida Jones, weaving together three storylines, spanning thousands of years that intersect and reflect on hope, connection and the circle of life.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a man walks into a busy LA diner and says he’s from the future. It’s not, per se, the setup for a joke but rather the starting point for Gore Verbinski’s daffy and deliriously delightful genre mashup Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Dressed in a clear poncho adorned with myriad jerry-rigged gizmos, the “future man” (played by Sam Rockwell) warns the patrons that the future is not as bright as they may think it is. Even a haphazard bomb threat is barely enough for the folks there to unglue their eyeballs from their smartphones but a select few choose to join the purported time traveller in his quest to save the future. We learn their motivations to stop an out-of-control artificial intelligence stem from unnerving tech run-ins that point to things heading down the wrong path.

There’s Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), dressed like a Disney princess in a corner booth, whose allergic reaction to any tech device puts a strain on her relationship with her boyfriend Tim (Tom Taylor) when he gets addicted to a VR world. Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz) are married schoolteachers whose students lumber towards them like zombies when they’re separated by their phones, which are hypnotizing them with an ominous pyramid symbol. But the first to volunteer for the world-saving mission is Susan (Juno Temple), a grieving mother who, following the death of her ninth-grade son in a school shooting, resorts to having a not-quite-right clone of her son created to cope with the loss. Unaware of what the night has in store, the recruits follow the man from the doom-and-gloom future for an adventure that will hopefully correct the course for all of humanity.

After a nine-year hiatus following the 2017 head trip A Cure For Wellness, it’s great to have Gore Verbinski back in the director’s chair for something as go-for-broke and unvarnished as Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Best known for helming the first three Pirates Of The Caribbean movies, Verbinski proves he doesn’t need a Kraken-sized budget to effectuate his “yes and” ethos of filmmaking. In the backstory vignettes he intersperses through the storyline, he introduces satirical sci-fi concepts that feel descendant from the British era of the tech-paranoid series Black Mirror. Though they’re telling stories that feel specific to each of the characters, they bolster the overall feeling that this world is extremely close to a tipping point into oblivion.

The cheekily apocalyptic tone is embedded in screenwriter Matthew Robinson’s outstanding script, which brilliantly synthesizes the anxieties that have crept up over the past few years around AI and the overwhelming pace of technovation. When the central characters sneak through neighborhood backyards for their covert mission, there isn’t much fear about being discovered because all the residents are so mesmerized by their touchscreens; “Nobody sees anything they don’t want to see,” Rockwell’s weary time-traveller tells them. As with any scribe who includes social commentary about tech-induced anti-intellectualism, Robinson runs the risk of coming across like a scold who’s been beaten to the punch by other movies and TV shows that have tapped into similar themes. But in this case, the biting humor fits right in.

Ever the wild card, Sam Rockwell is a perfect vessel for Verbinski’s zealous storytelling sensibilities and Robinson’s sharply comic screenplay, the latter of which gives him one-liners like “I didn’t mean to punch him that hard, I have apocalypse strength!” The extended opening sequence, in which Rockwell’s madman rambunctiously works his way around the diner, is a masterpiece of magnetic acting by Rockwell and superb blocking by Verbinski. Down the stretch, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die goes down narrative avenues that some will find too goofy to indulge and the movie, admittedly, has too many endpoints tacked on. But in a world where existing IPs and unnecessary sequels continue to rule the multiplex, it’s hard not to admire a film that flies in the face of convention with this much confidence.

Score – 3.5/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
“Wuthering Heights”, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, is a romantic drama loosely inspired by Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel involving a passionate and tumultuous love story set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire moors.
Crime 101, starring Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo, is a crime thriller in which the paths of a disillusioned insurance broker and an elusive thief eyeing his final score intertwine, while a relentless detective trails them in hopes of thwarting their heist.
GOAT, starring Caleb McLaughlin and Gabrielle Union, is an animated sports comedy in which a small goat with big dreams gets a once-in-a-lifetime shot to play professional Roarball, a full-contact sport dominated by the fastest and fiercest animals in the world.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

There’s technically only been a four-year gap between director Sam Raimi’s two most recent projects — 2022’s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and his newest release Send Help — but in many ways, it feels like the first true “Sam Raimi” movie we’ve gotten since 2009’s Drag Me To Hell. Untethered by franchise restraints, be they Marvel or Oz-imposed (as with 2013’s Oz The Great And Powerful), he’s able to get back into the gleeful gross-out groove he’s perfected over the past 45 years. Those who have been waiting patiently for the director’s return to the world of unrepentant gore, squishy sound design and manic close-ups should find plenty in Send Help to scratch the itch. It may not quite be one’s top desert-island movie pick but it’s a ruggedly raucous remedy to a historically slow stretch of the movie year.

Rachel McAdams turns in delightfully unhinged work as Linda Liddle, a strategy and planning manager at Preston Strategic Solutions, who’s been quietly holding out years for a VP promotion. Her odds for advancement worsen when the CEO’s knavish son Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) takes the reins from his late father. The two are en route to Bangkok for business when their corporate jet crashes near a desert island somewhere in the Pacific. As luck would have it, Linda is an experienced survivalist and proves much more useful in their stranded state than Bradley, who sustained a leg injury during the crash. He makes the mistake of assuming the power dynamic the pair had at their company, and it’s enough to say that Linda doesn’t take too kindly to Bradley’s chauvinistic demeanor and pushy attitude as they attempt to secure rescue.

Once Linda sets up camp for them, Send Help turns into a tense two-hander that recalls captivity thrillers like Misery and Hard Candy, even if Raimi’s film is markedly less subdued in its operation by comparison. Bradley’s entitled and arrogant personality more or less remains the same after the accident but once Linda washes ashore, a switch flips and the meek underling transforms into a confident outdoorswoman. A less repugnant boss would see her leadership skills as an asset but he’s stuck in the mentality that he wields power over her, even though org chart-hierarchy means nothing this far away from headquarters. An early montage, wherein Linda leaves Bradley to fend for himself after he insults her, portends the nastiness to transpire between them; “We’re not in the office anymore, Bradley,” she sternly reminds him upon her return.

Rachel McAdams has been superb in both comedic and dramatic realms over the past 20+ years but what she gives in Send Help has a exuberant ferocity and manic energy that we haven’t quite seen from her before. Not only is Linda more self-assured once she and Bradley are deserted but she lords her newfound power over him in a way that can turn our sympathy against her, even knowing how horribly she had been treated previously. In a more straight-laced rendering of this setup, Linda would turn into a heroine who overcomes her resentments but McAdams plays things more ambiguous morally, so the gulf between protagonist and antagonist isn’t large as one might expect. She and Dylan O’Brien also have believable romantic chemistry too, which lends itself to tonal textures that can shift from one moment to the next.

If anything, Sam Raimi stays in the “psychological game of wits” territory a bit too long before Send Help inevitably gets violent and he finally goes gonzo with the thing. The pacing before then feels a bit off, there’s a corny jump scare that seems included only to check the “horror” box on the genre list, and a couple of the plot developments are telegraphed a bit too obviously. But few directors revel in nasty practical effects more than Raimi and he certainly lets the blood and guts fly when it counts. Co-scribes Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, who put their heads together for slashers Freddy Vs. Jason and 2009’s Friday The 13th, are likely more comfortable in that area too, although they do a nice job developing the stakes here beforehand. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait another 17 years for the next Raimi film that actually feels like a product from his cheerfully demented brain.

Score – 3.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Iron Lung, a sci-fi horror film starring Mark Fischbach and Caroline Rose Kaplan, adapts the submarine simulation video game in which a convict explores a blood ocean on a desolate moon using a watercraft to search for missing stars and planets.
Also coming to theaters is A Private Life, a comedy mystery starring Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil, following a renowned psychiatrist as she mounts a private investigation into the death of one of her patients, whom she is convinced has been murdered.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is The Wrecking Crew, an action comedy starring Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa, in which two half-brothers, one a loose cannon cop and the other a disciplined Navy SEAL, must work together to unravel a conspiracy behind their father’s murder in Hawaii.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

After a detour on Hulu, with two entries that streamed exclusively on the platform, the Predator franchise is back on the big screen for the first time since the 2018 dud The Predator. Those direct-to-Hulu movies, Prey and Predator: Killer Of Killers, and this latest theatrical release, Predator: Badlands, are all headed up by 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg, who has effectively taken over the series for 20th Century Studios. Reteaming with his Prey scribe Patrick Aison, Trachtenberg continues to delve deeper into this treacherous universe and reconsider what a Predator movie can even be. This particular chapter explores more about the Yautja extraterrestrial species, who typically act as the “Predator” villains in most of the other films but essentially serve as the main characters this time out.

On the planet Yautja Prime, we meet the brothers Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) and Kwei (Mike Homik) as they spar to train and prove themselves to their bloodthirsty tribe. As the runt of their clan, Dek is even most desperate to assert his dominance and ventures to the deadly planet Genna in order to win the respect of his father Njohrr (Reuben de Jong). There, he intends to hunt the “unkillable” Kalisk creature and bring it back as a trophy, as their kind is wont to do. On other planets, the Yautja may be considered “predators” but on Genna, they’re lower down on the food chain and about as vulnerable as the humans were in the original ’80s actioner that kicked things off 38 years ago. Fortunately, Dek finds help in the form of Thia (Elle Fanning), a bisected android whose knowledge of Genna and its perils can help Dek on his mission.

Reframing a Predator movie as one where the titular creature is on the run as opposed to running things lends itself to a hero’s journey and Badlands makes a proper protagonist out of Dek. Thanks to stellar motion-capture work by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, this is the most expressive and vulnerable a Yautja alien has looked in the franchise thus far. Sure, they may not be much more glamorous than how Arnold memorably described them in Predator, but Dek’s eyes adequately convey the emotions we need to relate to his struggles. There are other tweaks to the design that help too, like leaving Dek without the typical Yautja armor and giving him one tooth that’s shorter than the other three to drive home his underdog state. As his peppy sidekick, Elle Fanning sometimes lays it on a bit thick but Thia’s wide-eyed optimism generally plays well against Dek’s fierce determination.

Predator: Badlands is rated PG-13 but it certainly doesn’t skimp on the sci-fi action that we’ve come to expect from these movies; apparently the MPA goes easier on bloodletting when the blood in question is bright green. Thia isn’t exaggerating when she tells Dek that everything on the planet is designed with death in mind. Not two minutes after crash landing on Genna, branch monsters are out to kill the new visiting Yautja. With spontaneously exploding caterpillars and fields of grass so sharp that it can cut flesh just by grazing it, this is clearly a planet that woke up and chose violence. The ways that Dek and Thia battle back implement creative creature design and inventive choreography, as when Dek first tangos with the Kalisk to find that it can regenerate limbs at an alarming rate. Another terrific fight scene finds Thia’s disconnected top half and bottom half simultaneously duking it out with fellow Weyland-Yutani synthetic robots.

In attempting to expand this universe, Trachtenberg and his team have dug deeper into the mythology behind the Yautja creatures and have woven themes about how they live into Predator: Badlands. “The Yautja are prey to no one, friend to no one and predator to all,” an opening card reads, but Dek’s tale of rugged determination intentionally calls these core tenets into question. It turns out the lone wolf strategy doesn’t work so well when you’re this far away from home field advantage and, as Thia reminds Dek, the alpha wolf isn’t necessarily the strongest but the one who best protects the pack. It’s a long way from macho contras getting picked off one by one in a Central American rainforest but, perhaps improbably, Trachtenberg is 3 for 3 in telling unique stories from this initially myopic Predator world.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Wicked: For Good, a fantasy musical starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, continuing the tale of Oz citizens Elphaba and Glinda as they embrace their new identities of Wicked Witch Of The West and Glinda The Good.
Also playing in theaters is Rental Family, a family dramedy starring Brendan Fraser and Takehiro Hira, centering around an American actor living in Tokyo who starts working for a Japanese “rental family” service to play stand-in roles in other people’s lives.
Premiering on Netflix is Train Dreams, a period drama starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones, following a logger who works to develop the railroad system across the US, causing him to spend time away from his family as he struggles with his place in a changing world.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos continue their creative collaboration with Bugonia, their third project together in as many years. This time, the two-time Academy Award winner plays Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a powerful player in the pharmaceutical space called Auxolith. She’s the kind of well-paid boss babe who gets up at 4:30 in the morning to run on a treadmill that probably costs more than most people’s cars and has table ornaments with platitudes like “let’s kick impossible’s [butt]” inscribed on them. Her routine of power striding into the office and confusing subordinates with corporate doublespeak is interrupted by the presence of cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) at her house after work. They’re there in Jennifer Aniston masks and they’re there to abduct her.

Michelle is drugged and when she wakes up, her head is shaved, she’s chained up in a basement and is accused by Teddy of being the queen of an “Andromedan” alien species. Why Teddy and Don are so convinced Michelle isn’t actually human, and the lengths to which she will go to prove that she is, are best left for viewers to discover for themselves. Bugonia is a remake of a South Korean movie called Save The Green Planet!, though they’re both so seemingly singular that it’s hard to imagine either one has ties to anything else. Even more surprising is how closely Lanthimos and his scribe Will Tracy follow the narrative beats of the bugnuts predecessor, to the extent that seeing the original may actively ruin the experience of seeing this reimagining. Still, the pair do enough to distinguish this tonally and thematically from Jang Joon-hwan’s film to justify the refresh.

Stone gave what is likely the best performance of her career a couple years ago in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and even though her work in Bugonia likely won’t score her another Oscar, it’s another perfectly-calibrated piece of acting. The CEO character in Save The Green Planet! is actively awful and spends the majority of his captivity mocking the kidnappers. He even brags about his IQ at one point, a go-to for the intellectually insecure. By comparison, Michelle is much more sympathetic, still calloused and condescending in a way she can’t seem to help — her correction of Teddy’s pronunciation of “shibboleths” is so impulsive that it’s basically a sneeze — but nonetheless someone who doesn’t deserve what she’s being put through. As her eyes dart around the musty basement when she comes to, you can practically see her desperately attempting to recall hostage negotiation techniques she was likely taught at some point.

A way that Lanthimos and Tracy most meet our moment with Bugonia is in tapping into how much of a communication breakdown we’ve sustained by siloing ourselves off from one another. Jesse Plemons does an outstanding job as Teddy, a man who’s been done dirty enough that he’s retreated to the conspiracy-ridden internet to find meaning when the real world simply doesn’t make sense. He wants to turn the tables, to act as though he’s in control of the situation with power over someone who would have power over him in any other scenario, but he’s ultimately scared and confused. He wants to be right in his theory that Michelle is from another planet but he won’t accept her just telling him what he wants to hear either. The lack of direction makes things difficult for Don too, who’s blindly accepts just about everything that comes out of Teddy’s mouth but develops moral scruples when contradictions arise.

Bugonia is powerfully acted, sharp-tongued and, for all its peculiarities, is probably Lanthimos’ most approachable work since The Favourite — if you haven’t seen any of his movies, I’d consider this as strong a starting spot as any. Still, I wish he had done more to depart from the existing text and made this tale his own, not from a stylistic sense but from a narrative one. He carries over a police character, here played by Stavros Halkias, that could’ve just as easily been converted into a different plot device that forces Teddy and Don to scramble. Teddy’s backstory is better implied than directly shown, with black-and-white flashbacks that work too hard to spell out his motivations. There’s also a scene at a hospital that makes absolutely no sense. But as a darkly funny cat-and-mouse game set against the backdrop our divided times, Bugonia has plenty in it worth buzzing about.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Predator: Badlands, starring Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, is a sci-fi action film following a young Yautja Predator outcast from his clan who finds an unlikely ally on his journey to find and defeat the ultimate adversary.
Christy, starring Sydney Sweeney and Ben Foster, is a sports biopic chronicling professional boxer Christy Martin’s rise to becoming America’s most well-known and successful female pugilist in the 1990s.
Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, is a historical drama involving a World War II psychiatrist tasked with evaluating Nazi leaders before the Nuremberg trials, growing increasingly obsessed with understanding evil as he forms a disturbing bond with Hermann Göring.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup