Lynne Ramsay isn’t a director who makes movies for the brittle of spirit. 2011’s We Need To Talk About Kevin depicts a mother reeling from unspeakable violence committed by her teenage son, while 2018’s You Were Never Really Here follows a mercenary tasked with finding the kidnapped daughter of a politician. Her latest psychological drama, Die My Love, is a similarly bruising tale of a young couple who seem to have an ideal life set out before them. We meet the pregnant Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) as they navigate around the dead leaves inside the rural house that belonged to the latter’s late uncle. It could use some fixing up and TLC to make it a proper home but they’ve decided they want to make the move, away from the hustle and bustle of the big city to raise their forthcoming bundle of joy.

Moving out to the sticks also means they’ll have help from Jackson’s mom Pam (Sissy Spacek) and her friends, all of whom make themselves frequent visitors at the residence, though not as chaotically as the
“guests” in the Jennifer Lawrence-starring mother!. Sadly, Jackson’s dad Harry (Nick Nolte) isn’t as much of a presence due to his worsening dementia that contributes to outbursts he has towards his son and his girlfriend. A different kind of crisis is brewing within Grace, who, to put it mildly, is struggling amid new motherhood. Yes, their son wakes them up in the middle of the night and, as with most new parents, Grace and Jackson both struggle with getting sleep. But the unease within Grace is something deeper, pointing to a deteriorating emotional state that threatens to unravel everything they’ve built as a family.

As with Joaquin Phoenix and Tilda Swinton in Lynne Ramsay’s two previous features, the strongest element of her films can be found in the lead performance and it’s certainly the case here with Jennifer Lawrence. Presumably drawing from her own experience as a new mom, she gives a fierce and relentless performance that feels like it’s crawled its way out of her onto the screen. An interrogation of a woman’s psyche might have caused most actresses to play things more insular but Lawrence puts everything out there, leaving no doubt about the primal instincts that are brewing within Grace. The physicality and emotional abandon of the role are impressive enough but I also appreciated the sardonic wit that she lets through as well. She’s short-tempered with pretty much everyone, from Jackson to friends at a party to the cashier at a local store. Yes, it’s sad that the lashing out points to mental health instability but Lawrence makes Grace’s moodiness quite funny nonetheless.

As good as Jennifer Lawrence is in the lead role, I wish Lynne Ramsay and her co-writers Enda Walsh and Alice Birch crafted a fleshed-out story that rises to the level of the acting. Ramsay’s movies typically have a disorienting sense of pacing and chronology, which also applies to Die My Love, but the rhythm this time feels jarring without actually lending itself to meaningful tension in the narrative. Working for the first time with editor Toni Froschhammer, Ramsay will forgo important events that would have a bearing on the plot but then focus on smaller moments for longer than necessary. Perhaps that’s the intent — to mirror the way the protagonist is trying to ignore consequential mile markers and accentuate minutia — but as such, it’s a deterrent to the dramatic weight of the material.

Much like 2024’s Nightbitch, another tale of a mother coping with the stresses of raising a child without much help from the father, Die My Love has a great ear for the kinds of goofy songs one plays to satiate a newborn. None of the needle drops here are quite as good as “Dare To Be Stupid” from that Amy Adams vehicle last year, but the movie nevertheless throws down early with a sped-up version of Chubby Checker “The Twist” and follows through with the Raffi classic “Apples And Bananas”. In another scene, Grace replays Toni Basil’s “Mickey” an inadvisable amount of times, enough to temporarily be possessed to scale the stairs like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Unfortunately, the movie ends with a dud of a final song choice over the credits, an underwhelming cover of a thuddingly obvious selection. Die My Love is another successful venture by Lynne Ramsay to get us in the headspace of the protagonist, even if it doesn’t give us enough to do once we’re there.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Running Man, starring Glen Powell and Josh Brolin, is a dystopian action thriller re-adapting the Stephen King novel about a game show where contestants, allowed to go anywhere in the world, are pursued by “hunters” hired to kill them.
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson, is a heist sequel in which the legendary Four Horsemen magicians recruit three skilled illusionists for a high-stakes diamond robbery.
Keeper, starring Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland, is a surrealist horror film about a romantic anniversary trip to a secluded cabin that turns sinister when a dark presence reveals itself, forcing a couple to confront the property’s haunting past.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Dwayne Johnson steps into a different kind of fighting ring in The Smashing Machine, a biopic covering the life and career of early UFC champion and MMA pioneer Mark Kerr. Johnson’s career in the WWE as one of the best-known professional wrestlers of all time inevitably invites comparisons to the real-life fighter he’s portraying and he certainly looks the part. Even compared to his typical action movie physique, Johnson has clearly put on even more muscle than he normally sports to convey Kerr’s domineering stature. He’s not an actor known for particularly nuanced performances and, perhaps by default, this is some of his best work, juxtaposing Kerr’s brutality in the ring with a soft-spokeness and vulnerability outside it. The film is strong showcase for his talents but never quite establishes itself as anything more than that.

The Smashing Machine tracks 3 years of Kerr’s MMA career, beginning in 1997 with Vale Tudo (literally Portuguese for “Everything Goes”) fighting in Brazil. His ruthless combat style draws the attention of UFC tournament winner Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader), who invites him to compete in several bouts for the organization. Looking for an opportunity to make more money, Kerr goes to Japan with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt) to fight for Pride Fighting Championships instead. The bloodthirsty battles there cause him to increase his dependency on opioids to numb the constant pain in which he finds himself. After a nearly lethal overdose, Kerr has to reconcile his dream of being a mixed martial arts legend with the massive toll that it’s taken on his personal life.

The Smashing Machine is the solo directing and writing film debut of Benny Safdie, half of the filmmaking duo responsible for anxiety-inducing crime thrillers like Good Time and Uncut Gems. This movie could take half of the urgency of those films and still be captivating but even outside the comparison, the storytelling here is stodgy and sedate. There’s even less of an excuse for that to be the case, given how much is adapted from a 2002 documentary of the same name covering the same stretch of time in Kerr’s career. It would be one thing to use the doc as a jumping-off point to further develop a dramatization but there are numerous scenes literally taken verbatim from the existing material. That the HBO Documentary Film is a bit tricky to track down — it isn’t currently available on any major streaming platform, including HBO Max — may be enough reason to include so much of it word-for-word in this fictionalized version, but the approach nevertheless feels unimaginative.

The augmentations that Benny Safdie applies to The Smashing Machine from its source material — the complete title of the documentary is The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr — primarily focus on the relationship between Kerr and his girlfriend Dawn. Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt certainly do what they can in front of the camera to bolster what’s on the page but both are ultimately hindered by underwritten roles. It’s curious that Safdie would choose to expand Dawn’s presence in his telling of the story if he didn’t have much compelling or original to say about her as a character. Another angle that could have potentially yielded more fruitful results is amplifying the depiction of Mark Coleman’s personal and professional relationship with Kerr. Ryan Bader is an MMA competitor in real life and even with limited screen time, he gives a naturalistic and, at times, magnetic performance.

Admittedly, I went into The Smashing Machine dreading what I figured would be little more than Dwayne Johnson prepping his Oscar reel. No matter this film’s critical or commercial reception, I expect him to campaign hard in the coming months for the Academy Award he seems to covet desperately. Save a few interesting choices here and there, he’s played things extremely safe when it comes to role selection since hitting the silver screen for the first time almost 25 years ago. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so cynical about his attempt to branch out here and engage with more fulfilling character work. Whether the choice was made mainly for accolade purposes or not, Johnson assuredly does some of the best acting of his career in The Smashing Machine. The movie around him isn’t as rock solid in its execution but it’s a suitable fill-in until the superior documentary surfaces again.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Tron: Ares, a sci-fi action movie starring Jared Leto and Greta Lee, following a highly sophisticated program who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind’s first encounter with A.I. beings.
Also coming to theaters is Roofman, a crime dramedy starring Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, telling the true story of a charismatic criminal who hides on the roof of a toy store and adopts a new identity while on the run from the police.
Premiering on Netflix is The Woman In Cabin 10, a psychological thriller starring Keira Knightley and Guy Pearce, about a journalist covering the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise ship who is convinced she has witnessed a passenger be thrown overboard.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

A corporate espionage thriller that stays sharp until its final act, Relay stars Riz Ahmed as Ash, a shrewd New York-based fixer who’s found a rather brilliant way to stay anonymous when brokering deals between clients. Communicating via the New York Relay Service, he sends messages electronically to relay operators and they read them to the third party on the line. They reply back, the operator types their response and Ash is able to read what they say. Of course it’s more cumbersome than a 1-on-1 phone call but has the crucial benefits of concealing Ash’s identity and being completely untraceable, thanks to protection from ADA laws. Whether he’s making demands of corporate goons or giving detailed instructions to the whistleblowers they’re trying to silence, Ash is able to type it all out from anywhere in the city with his portable teletypewriter and the person on the other end can’t even hear his real voice.

His newest contact is Sarah (Lily James), a research scientist who gets fired from biotech firm Cybo Sementis for asking too many questions about a disturbing report linking their insect-resistant crops to human side effects. While Ash’s clientele would typically request protection after the proverbial whistle is blown, Sarah instead wants his help to return the documents she stole after leaving the company. She says she’s followed everywhere she goes, she doesn’t feel safe in her apartment and she just wants her life back. To paraphrase Joseph Heller, it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you, and the company has indeed hired thugs, led by Dawson (Sam Worthington) and Rosetti (Willa Fitzgerald), to make Sarah’s life hell until she coughs up what she knows. Through his unique communication method, Ash parlays between Sarah and the henchmen while working diligently to operate as a ghost during the process.

Relay gets off to a bit of a slow start — spending too much time on the tail end of Ash’s previous case with not enough of a narrative justification for doing so — but it’s certainly gripping once it gets going. I was reminded frequently of two movies that incidentally both star George Clooney, the first being legal thriller Michael Clayton and the assassin slow-burn The American secondarily. While his manner of cajoling conglomerates and counselors in the former is face-to-face and his character barely says five words in the latter, both films follow protagonists living life in the shadows. Riz Ahmed obviously isn’t at Clooney’s level of fame but he certainly has the acting chops to pull off a captivating lead like this. In one scene, Ash communicates in ASL with a deaf document forger, recalling his spellbinding work in 2020’s criminally underseen Sound Of Metal.

The film works best when it’s operating as a streamlined cat-and-mouse and less so when it’s trying to work other dramatic angles. Hell Or High Water director David Mackenzie and his writer Justin Piasecki relish the opportunities to explore how Ash uses procedural loopholes to stay a step ahead but falter when they foist a romantic subplot on the two leads. It feels particularly inorganic in context and was clearly added to make the later scenes of peril hit harder given the burgeoning connection between Ash and Sarah. Relay‘s worst offenses come in the third act, which tries too hard to outdo itself with out-of-left-field plot developments that threaten to derail the good will that was built up before them. Without saying too much, there’s a poorly-edited climactic foot chase that makes little sense geographically and even less sense narratively.

Up to that point, the movie finds the most success in keeping its worlds small and stealthy: the interior of a crowded surveillance van, a dimmed shoebox apartment, the back of a bustling bodega. New York City is a perfect place for Ash to stay hidden in plain sight and as with a myriad of conspiracy nail-biters before it, this film gets the most out of an urban setting where unexpected distractions are plentiful. Relay‘s raison d’être revolving around segmented conversation also fits in nicely with the tenuous lines of communication that exist between passersby in an overcrowded metropolis. Though Mackenzie and his team sacrifice intelligence in favor of simpler storytelling down the stretch, this is a mostly taut thriller with a memorable hook and an engaging central performance.

Score – 3/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Eden, a survival thriller starring Jude Law and Ana de Armas, telling the true story of a group of outsiders who settle on a remote island only to discover their greatest threat isn’t the brutal climate or deadly wildlife but each other.
Also playing only in theaters is Trust, a horror thriller starring Sophie Turner and Rhys Coiro, following a Hollywood actress who hides in a remote cabin after a scandal, only to find herself betrayed and fighting for survival against someone she once trusted.
Streaming on Hulu is Eenie Meanie, a heist thriller starring Samara Weaving and Karl Glusman, centered around a former teenage getaway driver who is dragged back into her unsavory past when a former employer offers her a chance to save the life of her chronically unreliable ex-boyfriend.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

20th Century Fox comic book characters continue to make their way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the first film from Marvel Studios to feature the legendary superhero team. Like Superman earlier this month, this is a movie that already assumes you get the gist of these heroes and their powers, so it opts for a speed run through their origin story. Four astronauts — Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) — survive a cosmic ray blast while in space and come back to Earth with unique abilities. Reed is able to stretch his body into impossible shapes, while his wife Sue can turn invisible and project powerful force fields at will. Ben’s skin has transformed into rock and given him superhuman strength, while Sue’s brother Ben has the ability to manipulate fire and fly.

Together, they make up the Fantastic Four and are held in high esteem as celebrities to the general public, so the news that Reed and Sue have a baby on the way is met with an outpouring of excitement and support. But the hoopla isn’t long lived, as a creature known as Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) gives the Four a heads up that her planet-devouring boss Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) is hungry and Earth is next up on the menu. Attempting to reason with the gigantic cosmic being on behalf of humankind, the Fantastic Four discover that Galactus will spare their world in exchange for Reed and Sue’s unborn child. The pair rebuff the giant’s offer but after returning home, they find their adoring fans are much more willing to sacrifice the newborn if it means saving the lives of every other human. Desperate to find another way, the team works day and night to develop a plan to get rid of Galactus for good.

One of the primary ways The Fantastic Four: First Steps stands out both from previous on-screen iterations of this cosmically-converted crew and other MCU entries is its retro-futurist setting. Taking place in an alternate 1964 where flying cars exist alongside Volkswagen Beetles, every inch of the film is covered with rich details about what people in the past thought the future could look like. Production designer Kasra Farahani crafts immaculately-rendered props and sets that reflect the technological optimism and collectivist spirit of the early 1960s. It’s neat to see a Times Square that at once looks accurate to the period and is nevertheless peppered with technology that still doesn’t exist in 2025. An aerial chase scene midway through the film leverages this juxtaposition seamlessly, as a character wirelessly broadcasts audio signals to TV monitors within their breakneck pace proximity.

While I appreciate the whiz-bang zip of that particular sequence, I wish the pacing of The Fantastic Four: First Steps didn’t consistently try to match the velocity of the mid-flight superheroes. Director Matt Shakman forgoes the typical Marvel Studios production logo and goes right into a brisk catch-up montage on how the Fantastic Four came to be. But within the sub-2 hour runtime, it feels like Shakman and his quartet of screenwriters pack in too much incident and too few occasions for the characters to breathe. Shakman’s resume thus far is primarily within the realm of TV — including his work on the MCU series WandaVision — and had there not been 15 other MCU shows since that inaugural entry, perhaps Fantastic Four would’ve worked better within a television framework. This is our first time together with these performers as the Four and outside of an early dinner scene, in which Ben correctly deduces that Sue is pregnant, we don’t get enough of a sense of how their personalities colorfully bounce off one another.

The cast does what they can to punctuate their scenes with clues as to what makes their cerulean-sweatered superheroes tick. Pascal and Kirby have both romantic chemistry and tension as soon-to-be parents trying to reckon bringing a son into a world getting more cosmically horrifying by the day. I’m still not completely sold on Quinn as an up-and-coming star but he does his best bringing the brashness out of his hothead hero, even if it doesn’t quite top what Chris Evans did with the Human Torch in the past. Moss-Bachrach isn’t given much to do as The Thing but he shows a sweet side of the character we haven’t seen before and his naturalistic voice work is absent the obvious choice to go gravelly. The Fantastic Four: First Steps isn’t as marvelous as it could be but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, is an action comedy reboot about a detective following in the footsteps of his bumbling father, who must solve a murder case to prevent his police department from shutting down.
The Bad Guys 2, starring Sam Rockwell and Marc Maron, is an animated sequel reuniting the crackerjack criminal crew of animal outlaws, who are pulled out of retirement and forced to do “one last job” by an all-female squad of bandits.
Together, starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, is a body horror movie involving a couple who move to the countryside but find themselves encountering a mysterious force that horrifically causes changes in their bodies.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski endeavors to bring back that legacy feeling with F1, a viscerally engaging, if narratively bland, sports drama that finds another aging megastar in the danger zone. Instead of Tom Cruise soaring in the air, we’re along with Brad Pitt on the ground this time as he zooms around numerous Formula One tracks in an open-wheel single-seater. Kosinski’s modus operandi continues to be dedicating as much screen time as possible to our movie stars in action, proving that they didn’t just tap in the stunt doubles but actually had their hands at the controls. While I imagine Pitt had more backup help in this than Cruise has in just about all of his action extravaganzas these days, the illusion remains convincing in the final product.

As F1 opens, the glory days of Sonny Hayes (Pitt) seem to be in his rear view mirror. Carrying the scar of a near-fatal crash from the mid-90s, he’s given up Formula One racing for other sports car competitions like the 24 Hours Of Daytona. Before the bubbles in his popped champagne have time to fizzle out, Hayes is visited by his previous F1 frenemy Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), whose Apex Grand Prix team is in trouble. Their rookie driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) has yet to place top 10 in any of the season’s races and shareholders are antsy to clean house unless things get turned around. After a plot-mandated initial refusal, Hayes agrees to join the team and teach Pearce his ways of winning behind the wheel, with pit stops to strike up a romance with Apex technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon).

There’s really nothing F1 has in the storyline glove box that we haven’t seen before but most of what it pulls out tends to do the trick. Pitt and Idris go through the motions of the old gunslinger-young hotshot routine and generate a few sparks in the friction, most notably during a poker showdown. Elsewhere, Pitt has fireworks-caliber chemistry with Condon, whose Kate swears she doesn’t get involved with drivers but just can’t turn Sonny away. Tobias Menzies pops up as the closest thing to a human antagonist the film has to offer: a conniving Apex board member who doesn’t care whose head has to roll to get back in the green. Across a bloated 156-minute runtime, I’m not sure how Kosinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger couldn’t squeeze in a third driver character to develop as a mutual foil for Hayes and Pearce.

As with Top Gun: Maverick, the aim for Kosinski and crew with F1 is in creating a sensuously overwhelming experience designed to play better in the theater rather than the living room when the film streams on Apple TV+ later this year. Perhaps no composer is more synonymous with momentous movie music than Hans Zimmer, whose characteristic onomatopoeia “BRAAAM” is ubiquitous enough to garner its own Wikipedia entry. Zimmer’s score here is more of the same — mountainous synths and pounding percussion aplenty — but there remains enough gas in the creativity engine to underline the action. Besides an early introduction scene that gives the John Reid Bohemian Rhapsody scene a run for its money when it comes to cuts, editor Stephen Mirrione does a great job commanding the flow of sequences on and off the track.

The focus, so to speak, for cameraman Claudio Miranda is to find as many creative shots possible while mainly being constrained to the inside of an F1 car so we can see Pitt behind the wheel. While he does an admirable job with whip pans and short siding, there aren’t enough contrasting shots above the other cars where we can see how the drivers’ moves affect their position in the race. It’s surprising, given Kosinski’s “you’re in the driver’s seat” ethos, how few POV shots actually make it into the movie too. Yes, Brad Pitt is still very handsome, even with his face squished under a racing helmet, but it’s to the movie’s detriment that it includes an overabundance of reaction shots instead of action shots. Still, F1 is a fine racing movie that makes it over the finish line with its undeniable star power and convincing car choreography.

Score – 3/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is M3GAN 2.0, a sci-fi sequel starring Allison Williams and Violet McGraw, finding the creator of the titular AI doll turning to it for help with a dangerous new military robot based on code that was used to make M3GAN.
Streaming on HBO Max is The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, an animated comedy starring Eric Bauza and Candi Milo, which follows Daffy Duck and Porky Pig as they try to save Earth from a chewing gum-based alien scheme.
Also premiering on HBO Max is My Mom Jayne, a documentary from actress Mariska Hargitay examining the life and career of her late mother Jayne Mansfield, who died in a car accident when Hargitay was three years old.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Following up a pair of memorable turns in the drastically different Oppenheimer and Trap, Josh Hartnett continues to stretch his leading man range with the delightfully dopey action comedy Fight Or Flight. Sporting a bleached blonde do and a tight pink T-shirt, he plays Lucas Reyes, a gun-for-hire lying low in Bangkok until he gets a call from his former handler Katherine (Katee Sackhoff). She’s not thrilled to make the call and he’s even less excited about receiving it but with no viable options left, Katherine asks Reyes to board a flight that’s about to take off for San Francisco. On board is a rogue hacker known as The Ghost, in possession of an all-powerful supercomputer that can’t end up in the wrong hands. Reyes takes the mission with assurances from Katherine that completing it will expunge his checkered past but once he’s on the plane, it becomes obvious he’s not the only one after the target.

I was worried when Fight Or Flight began with one of those obnoxious cold opens that concludes with the dreaded “12 hours earlier…” card but once it hits cruising altitude, it becomes fun of the unfasten-your-brain’s-seatbelt variety. The film recalls numerous recent action extravaganzas, most specifically John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum and Bullet Train, although the setting is more confined than the former and less try-hard in its humor than the latter. It’s effectively an ultra-violent live-action cartoon, with Josh Hartnett in a Daffy Duck role where he doggedly pursues his goal through an onslaught of physical punishment. At 6′ 3″, Hartnett certainly has the frame to register as a threat for the endless barrage of assassins that stand in the way between him and The Ghost, so much so that it’s a bit surprising he hasn’t starred in this kind of fight-frenzied actioner before.

Of course it makes no sense that a passenger airplane would stay airborne once fights between trained killers broke out, a plot wrinkle that Fight Or Flight barely tries to smooth over. Similarly, the jumbo jet in which the majority of the movie takes place is an impossibly large double-decker that would likely never make it off the ground in the first place. Fortunately for us aground in the audience, we get to observe close-quarters combat in first class, coach, cargo, a luxury restroom with a shower and basically every location that could exist on a plane. James Madigan, making his lead directing debut here after working second-unit on several action projects, also makes clever use of innocuous in-flight accoutrements as deadly props when wielded by assassins. Seatbelt strangulations and service cart stampedes are but a small sampling of the acts that willfully ignore the teachings of the pre-flight safety demonstration.

Fight Or Flight makes some bone-headed mistakes comedically — the aforementioned opener is set ironically to the immensely predictable “The Blue Danube” waltz — but finds its place in between the melee. The jokes are based more around minutia and mannerisms rather than manners mitigating machismo, as we tend to see in other action comedies where two people are duking it out and they have to pause in the presence of bystanders. It’s not that the humor is necessarily more sophisticated but it’s trying to riff on slightly more unique story beats as opposed to recycling tropes. The film is packed with all types of hitmen and hitwomen who bring their own color to the palette but wisely doesn’t try to make every one of them funny. Among the henchmen and henchwomen, Hartnett undeniably remains the star.

Not that it shares much in common with Nicolas Cage-starring airplane-set movies like Con Air or Left Behind but I did detect a bit of Cage’s influence on Hartnett’s performance here. He’s a good enough actor for you to buy him not only as a burnt-out mercenary but also as a wide-eyed patsy, comically overwhelmed by the odds against which he finds himself. There are cackles and guffaws he throws in sparingly that are calibrated right to Nic pitch, as is the “x” sound he holds onto at the end of the phrase “kill box” late in the film. Fight Or Flight concludes with an overly optimistic pitch for a sequel that doesn’t seem likely to get cleared for takeoff but as a chaotic one-way trip, it’s worth booking a ticket.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Final Destination: Bloodlines, a supernatural horror sequel starring Kaitlyn Santa Juana and Teo Briones, following a college student plagued by a recurring violent nightmare who returns home to save her family from the horrific fate that inevitably awaits them.
Also playing only in theaters is Hurry Up Tomorrow, a psychological thriller starring Abel Tesfaye and Jenna Ortega, wherein an insomniac musician encounters a mysterious stranger, leading to a journey that challenges everything he knows about himself.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is Deaf President Now!, a documentary which recounts the 1988 protests at the all-deaf Gallaudet University, after the school’s board of trustees appointed a hearing president over several qualified deaf candidates.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

In two months, Disney will release Lilo & Stitch, a live-action remake of an animated counterpart that’s barely 20 years old at this point. Next up is Moana, whose original version will not even be 10 years old upon the release of the “reimagining” in July of 2026. It remains to be seen how much — or how little — these redos will stray from the animated iterations but if the 2019 remakes of 90s classics Aladdin and The Lion King are any indication, they’ll stick to the lucrative “if it ain’t broke” formula. I’ve yet to read a compelling artistic rationale behind “refreshing” properties that don’t need to be modernized, which makes Snow White a welcome exception. Made in 1937, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs was Disney’s first full-length feature and an adaptation of Brothers Grimm fairy tale that was already over 100 years old upon the film’s release. At last, we have a Disney remake that actually justifies its own existence.

The setup here remains faithful to the traditional tale: an unnamed queen gives birth to a daughter named Snow White (Rachel Zegler) before falling ill and passing away. The king remarries and when he disappears in battle, the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot) takes the throne. Threatened by the presence of a potential heir, the Queen confines Snow White to the scullery and after the vainglorious Queen’s Magic Mirror deems Snow White as “fairest in the land”, the Queen tasks a Huntsman (Ansu Kabia) with Snow White’s execution. She flees the attempt on her life and finds refuge in a forest cottage, occupied by seven dwarfs who work in the nearby mines. Desperate to return to the kingdom and expose the treacherous Queen, she teams up with her septet of new friends and a charming young rebel named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) to end the Queen’s nefarious reign.

Unlike Beauty And The Beast and The Little Mermaid, two masterworks which have also received “updates” in the past 10 years, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs doesn’t have a bevy of Menken-penned songs. The familiar and friendly tunes “Heigh-Ho” and “Whistle While You Work” have been dusted off for Snow White but the majority of the music comes courtesy of The Greatest Showman songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. They craft a compelling “all skate” opening number in “Good Things Grow” and a juicy villain treatise “All Is Fair” but Pasek and Paul’s finest contributions here are the tête-à-tête duets between Snow White and Jonathan. The thorny and clever “Princess Problems” gives way to the sweeping and gorgeous “A Hand Meets A Hand”, co-written by the talented young singer-songwriter Lizzy McAlpine.

These new songs soar thanks to the harmonious blend between Rachel Zegler and Andrew Burnap but Snow White is primarily Zegler’s show and she does an outstanding job bringing the iconic Disney character to life. The seven dwarf characters are all computer-generated, so she doesn’t have flesh-and-blood screen companions for long stretches of the story, but she remains a magnetic screen presence all the same. Saddled with wardrobe and hair styling that’s perhaps too reverent to the original movie, Zegler nonetheless finds her own way into the character without trying to shake things up beyond recognition. On the reverse side, Gal Gadot benefits from more exquisite costume design but can’t find her way under the skin of this slippery sorceress; I still have yet to see her excel in a role outside of Wonder Woman.

Snow White suffers from some of the same issues that have plagued Disney’s recent live-action “reimaginings”: the lighting is flat due to the abundance of green screens, the blend of live and CG characters is often unconvincing and the vocal tracks are overly-processed. Frankly, I don’t see Disney changing any of these aspects for future endeavors. But in terms of straight-ahead Disney remakes —not counting spinoffs or sequels like Cruella or Mufasa — Snow White is one of their best since 2015’s Cinderella. If they insist on continuing to revisit their catalog as opposed to making originals, they’d be better served looking back to their output from the 1940s and 1950s rather than to films that have been released this century. Snow White may not be the fairest of them all but it certainly dwarfs most of the retreaded material coming out of the House Of Mouse.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is A Working Man, an action thriller starring Jason Statham and Michael Peña, about a construction worker whose experience as an ex-Royal Marines commando becomes useful when his boss’s teenage daughter is kidnapped by human traffickers.
Also coming to theaters is The Woman In The Yard, a psychological horror film starring Danielle Deadwyler and Okwui Okpokwasili, involving a mysterious woman who repeatedly appears in a family’s front yard, often delivering chilling warnings and unsettling messages.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is Holland, a mystery starring Nicole Kidman and Matthew Macfadyen, following a teacher in a small midwestern town who suspects her husband of living a double life but things may be worse than she initially imagined.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Warner Bros. bets big on Parasite auteur Bong Joon-ho with Mickey 17, the director’s first film since that historic Oscar night over 5 years ago. However, those going into his follow-up expecting the meticulously-crafted thrills of that Best Picture winner may do well to recalibrate tonal expectations closer to Joon-ho’s other English-language features Snowpiercer and Okja. Though the budget and scale are the largest that he’s worked with so far, the film tracks thematically with Joon-ho’s previous output, exploring subjects like class imbalance and mankind’s impact on the environment. This time around, he leans into other themes like the rise of authoritarianism and finding one’s humanity within a broken system, speaking more directly to our current political moment. When it’s all said and done, the movie is a maximalist mess that still ends up working, despite itself.

Our protagonist in this near-future madcap journey is Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a hapless entrepreneur who signs up for a space expedition to get off the planet where ruthless loan sharks are hot on his trail. His business partner Timo (Steven Yeun) joins him on the mission to the ice planet Niflheim but since Mickey lack’s Timo’s pilot skills, he has to sign up as an “Expendable”. This means that he’s treated like a human guinea pig, tasked with the most dangerous jobs onboard and in the event of his death, the crew simply prints up a new version of Mickey with his memories intact. After the 17th iteration of Mickey takes a nasty fall while researching cave-dwelling critters, he’s left for dead but when he ends up making it back to base, he finds that he’s already been replaced by a new clone.

This creates a conundrum that serves as Mickey 17‘s primary conflict, as the instance of multiple versions of the same individual is strictly against protocol and if 17 and 18 are discovered, both will be killed and their backed-up memories will be erased. The cloning technology has been outlawed on Earth and before politician and mission leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) take off for Niflheim, they agree to terminate any “multiples” that may crop up. Shortly after 17 and 18 meet, they both appear to Mickey’s on-board girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) but are soon after discovered by cadet Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei), who isn’t nearly as willing as Nasha is to keep the Mickeys’ secret.

So obviously Mickey 17 has plenty going on and it’s hard not to feel like Bong Joon-ho simply has too many plates spinning during this story. Subplots take over the entire narrative for stretches and then aren’t addressed again, while potentially intriguing avenues generated by the high concept premise are never explored. As he did with Okja, Joon-ho dedicates too much screen time to actors luxuriating in their characters’ quirks, without generating much insight or humor in the process. Collette is a talented actress but she could play this sort of generically manipulative type in her sleep and Ylfa’s odd fixation with sauces is, for some reason, given precedence late in the film. Ruffalo is playing things way too broad, taking a megalomaniacal role that may have been written with some finesse on the page, but loses any of its nuance in his scenery-chewing performance.

The engine that makes Mickey 17 run, despite its preoccupations and obstructions, is the work of Robert Pattinson in a demanding dual role. Even though 17 and 18 have the same genetic makeup, Pattinson finds ways to delineate the personalities between the two so we’re never confused who is who. While 17 has subservient and beleaguered demeanor, 18 is more stern and prone to act decisively — in some cases, violently. 17 remains the kind of hard-luck good guy it’s easy to root for in a tale like this but 18 represents the darker impulses that can reside in that same man. Also narrating the movie’s voiceover, Pattinson is all over Mickey 17 and with a lesser actor at the helm, the project wouldn’t work nearly as well. He makes it an intergalactic trip worth taking.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Novocaine, an action comedy starring Jack Quaid and Amber Midthunder, involving a mild-mannered bank manager with a rare disorder that prevents him from feeling physical pain who fights to rescue the girl of his dreams after she’s taken hostage in a robbery.
Also coming to theaters is Opus, a music-based mystery starring Ayo Edebiri and John Malkovich, following a young writer as she’s invited to the remote compound of a legendary pop star, who mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago.
Premiering on Netflix is The Electric State, a sci-fi adventure starring Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt, about an orphaned teen who hits the road to find her long-lost brother, teaming up with a mysterious robot, a smuggler and his wisecracking sidekick.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Billed as “a new kind of love story from the creators of Barbarian“, the tongue-in-cheek thriller Companion finds young couple Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid) arriving at a lake house for the weekend. There they meet Josh’s catty friend Kat (Megan Suri), her boyfriend and owner of the house Sergey (Rupert Friend), along with a third couple in Patrick (Lukas Gage) and Eli (Harvey Guillén). After swapping meet-cute stories over dinner and dancing to Book Of Love, things seem to be off to a good start but the next day brings with it a shocking incident of fatal violence. As the group scrambles to reconcile with the horrific event, revelations are made about the relationships between the houseguests that affect how they move forward.

If you haven’t seen the full trailer for Companion and don’t know anything else about the film, you will almost certainly enjoy the movie more if you don’t know any more going into it. However, the marketing from Warner Bros. has already let audiences in on the Companion‘s biggest twist: that Iris isn’t human but is actually a lifelike companion robot. After that reveal, which occurs around the 20-minute mark, the pace of the movie increases considerably and centers around Iris trying to make sense of her new reality. When she discovers that her settings can be adjusted by an app on Josh’s phone, she swipes it and runs into the woods to see everything that her programming allows, with Josh and company close behind her.

In his debut as both writer and director for the same project, Drew Hancock peppers his “robot on the run” tale with biting commentary about how we as a society treat (and mistreat) artificial intelligence. Specifically, Hancock focuses on lonely young men who view women as objects to the degree that they’d rather fashion objects around to resemble women than adjust their viewpoint. More broadly, Companion also wrestles with the classic sci-fi conundrum of the kinds of rights that should be afforded to AI mechanisms, particularly when they behave more humanely than the humans around them. Despite these heady themes, the movie makes room for pithy one-liners, as when Josh stifles a smirk after remarking “I know this must be a lot to process” to Iris during their conversation about her identity.

Though the script has some fun surprises in addition to the central development, Companion suffers from uneven plotting that could’ve been ironed out with another pass or two through the screenplay. The film isn’t exactly a horror movie — at least in a traditional sense — but it suffers from the logic questions we come to expect from entries in the genre. It’s one thing to think “why doesn’t this character do this instead?” when everyone is human but when supposedly super-intelligent beings are in play, it seems fair to expect them to make smarter choices. There’s also a subplot surrounding a large sum of money that feels like it’s out of a different movie about criminals getting in over their heads. Without giving away much about the ending, once Iris comes into focus as the protagonist, it becomes apparent there’s really only one way this story can conclude.

With starring roles in chillers like The Boogeyman and last year’s Heretic, Sophie Thatcher gives her most fleshed-out performance yet as the movie’s titular counterpart. She imbues Iris with obsequious mannerisms that gradually morph into crafty calculations as her deference to Josh dissipates. Following up on a bongo-banging supporting turn in Oppenheimer, Jack Quaid carries over his easy charm here for something decidedly less laid-back and more desperately controlling. Lukas Gage had a small but not insignificant role in Smile 2 and he brings just the right level of camp here as his character evolves during the storyline. It’s not the best version of itself that it could be but as is, Companion is a cheeky companion to hard sci-fi like Ex Machina and Blade Runner that examines relationships between humans and robots.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Opening in theaters is Heart Eyes, a romcom slasher starring Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding, following a pair of co-workers working late on Valentine’s Day, who are mistaken for a couple and sent running for their lives by the infamous Heart Eyes Killer.
Also playing only in theaters is Love Hurts, an action comedy starring Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose, telling the story of a successful realtor whose past as a violent hitman comes back to haunt him when his former partner reveals that his brother is hunting him.
Streaming on Netflix is Kinda Pregnant, a comedy starring Amy Schumer and Jillian Bell, about a woman who becomes jealous of her friend’s pregnancy and begins to wear a false pregnant belly, a ruse that’s complicated after she meets the man of her dreams.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Set during a particularly harsh winter in the Westfjords of Iceland, the new psychological horror film The Damned may not be the most comforting to watch this time of year but it might make you hug your space heater a little tighter tonight. Percolating with an icy dread at every turn, it’s a sparse and chilly evocation of how harsh conditions in nature can cause the humans braving them to create monsters that may not even be there. As the maxim from Game Of Thrones forebodes, “winter is coming” and at times, Thordur Palsson’s feature directorial debut almost plays like a spooky subplot from that series. Though the storyline sometimes moves at a glacial pace, even with a sub-90 minute runtime, The Damned is punctuated with a haunting conclusion that will be burned into my memory for some time.

Settled in a Arctic bay fishing outpost during the 1800s, the movie stars Odessa Young as Eva, who has led the crew since her husband Magnus passed several months prior. As her team of fishermen ready their longboat one morning, they see a large boat shipwreck on a set of jagged rocks in the distance. The group is split on what action to take, as Eva and helmsman Ragnar (Game Of Thrones‘ Rory McCann) deem that intervention could be dangerous, while other crew members feel it necessary to aid potential survivors. When a barrel of food washes up to their shore, Eva decides it’s worth the risk to venture out with the hopes that other capsized resources could be collected. The expedition yields unsettling results and the superstitious charwoman Helga (Siobhan Finneran) fears their actions may have caused evil spirits to travel back to their settlement.

Just as Eva has a large responsibility taking care of her people, Odessa Young is taking on quite a bit with this role and she does an excellent job holding the center during this dreary tale. We learned that Magnus died the previous winter while going out into unsettled waters, so decisions like the one Eva has to make about the capsized ship weigh heavily on her. Young displays an engaging combination of inherited resiliency and taciturn vulnerability, helping us get into her character’s headspace when the edges of her reality begin to blur. I don’t believe I’ve seen her in another film since the 2020 biopic Shirley, in which she plays a character about as different as Eva as is possible. Here, she proves she can handle a leading role with quiet command and I hope other directors will take notice.

Director Thordur Palsson, who also conceived of the story for The Damned before passing screenwriting duties to Jamie Hannigan, certainly knows how to set the mood for his frigid fable. But too often during its midsection, it feels like a film with a strong setup and an effective ending with too much blubber in the middle. Once a supernatural angle is introduced into the story, Palsson becomes a broken record with scares that don’t feel cheap but do feel redundant. There just isn’t quite enough incident here to fill a feature and I wish he had worked with Hannigan more to establish a story that takes advantage of the whole ensemble cast. The movie necessarily becomes more insular when it moves into a more subjective perspective through Eva but it suffers from succumbing to more familiar genre beats from then on.

What I appreciated most about The Damned in the final stretch is how it doesn’t get too esoteric for its own good and lets the narrative arrive at a chilling but still satisfying conclusion. Too often, I see “artsy” horror movies that don’t bother to resolve their otherworldly plot elements and simply scapegoat the protagonist’s disturbed psyche. In other words, this is not a film that falls back on an “it was all in her head the whole time” alibi. Yes, it’s still a horror movie and yes, there are scenes where the characters’ minds may be working against them, but the brutal conditions to which they’re being subjected certainly explain why things may not be quite as they seem. The Damned doesn’t completely reach its potential but it marks a solid start from a director with a knack for bone-chilling storytelling.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Better Man, starring Jonno Davies and Steve Pemberton, is a music biopic about the life of British pop singer Robbie Williams, who is portrayed as a CGI-animated chimpanzee because he’s always felt “less evolved than other people.”
Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera, starring Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr., is a heist sequel following two thieves from the original, who are now embroiled in the treacherous world of diamond burglary.
The Last Showgirl, starring Pamela Anderson and Dave Bautista, is an indie drama about a seasoned showgirl who must plan her future after the burlesque show she’s starred in for 30 years closes abruptly.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup