“Wild Horse Nine” – Movie Review

Directed and written by:  Martin McDonagh

Starring:  John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Mariana di Girolamo, Ailin Salas, Steve Buscemi, and Parker Posey

Runtime:  118 minutes

Gallop, don’t trot to McDonagh’s ‘Wild Horse Nine’, the most enjoyable movie experience of the year (so far)

“We’re the CIA.” – Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich)

“We’re not the CIA.” – Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell)

Chris and Lee have been friendly colleagues and also pals for years, and yes, they are Central Intelligence Agency operatives, despite Lee’s protest after Chris gladly blurts out their chosen line of work to two young women – Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailin Salas) – at the Santiago, Chile airport.  

CIA officers should not announce their profession to a pair of strangers in such a location or anywhere, for that matter, but Chris – in his 70s – is not all that concerned about keeping an air of secrecy these days.  It’s either due to his willful disregard for proper protocols after many decades on the job or because of recent episodes of forgetfulness that could be a sign of something more dire.

The year is 1973, and Chris and Lee are flying off to Easter Island, a remote but gorgeous locale in the South Pacific, about 2,200 miles west of the Chilean coast, about the same distance between Hawaii and California.  

It’s difficult to imagine that CIA operatives are immediately needed on Easter Island, a popular vacation spot with over 100,000 visitors every year, but these spies land on the famous backdrop, known for nearly 1,000 Moai (statues), averaging about 13’ in height, for a purpose of some sort. 

Director/writer Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine” places Chris and Lee on an unknown (at first) mission, which is embraced by this pair of A-list actors.  

Malkovich and Rockwell soak up McDonagh’s hilarious, clever script, which features a heavily dialogue-driven story for two edgy, dangerous types with the vibes of casual, relaxed buddies.   Chris and Lee are accessible, affable, welcoming charmers, but they could also pull out a handgun and fire upon a suspecting baddie or an unsuspecting bystander, if given the order.  In this case, their superior, MJ (nicely played by Steve Buscemi), would be that someone. 

Hence, McDonagh’s delightful cinematic trademark of combining comedic gold with sudden bursts of violence in his movies - like “In Bruges” (2008), “Seven Psychopaths” (2012), “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017), and “The Banshees of Inisherin” (2022) – gloriously continues with “Wild Horse Nine”.   

For this critic, McDonagh’s funniest film is a photo finish between “Wild Horse Nine” and “Seven Psychopaths”, and please don’t make me choose.  The difference between the two is that the comedy confidently rests primarily with our two on-screen secretive cops (rather than a large ensemble in “Psychopaths”), as the 118-minute narrative is filled with warm moments and playful (but real) quarrels between the pair. 

They chat over past assignments, their number of kills over the years, the pleasures of morphine, and the origins of the Molotov cocktail, to name a few, and the informal but riveting banter keeps our eyes glued to the screen while the stresses of the job, MJ’s frequent demands, and the possibility that they are being followed keep us guessing.  

And can Chris trust Lee or vice versa? 

Meanwhile, in this soothing paradise, Chris and Lee nicely fall into tourist mode and tread all over the island to view the “big heads.”  McDonagh and his longtime cinematographer (since “Seven Psychopaths”) Ben Davis absolutely capture the untouched beauty of the shores and grasslands, and a herd of wild horses might occasionally gallop (or sometimes) stop by.  

The stunning opening shots of Easter Island are also reminiscent of Davis and McDonagh’s camerawork in Ireland (in “Inisherin”), and this visual splendor spills into celebrated territory on another island on the opposite side of the world.   

The lovely space that surrounds these two government employees still can’t soften their attitudes into politically correct vernacular, as they verbally stamp out a couple of moments to be agreeable with their fellow tourists, and Lee and his wife, Margie (Parker Posey), bicker nearly every second that they converse on the phone as their resentment pours off the screen in buckets. 

Squabbles between spouses are a universal in any time, but costume designer Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh’s masterful gifts make every character on screen look groovy, out of sight, and “dyn-o-mite” in dazzling threads.  Look back at your polaroids from the 70s and compare those photos with the garments in “Wild Horse Nine”, and you’ll swear the difference is night and day.  

Well, “Wild Horse Nine” isn’t night and day from McDonagh’s previous movies.  This film isn’t a return to form for McDonagh because the man has never been out of form.  

The world is a better place when a Martin McDonagh movie hits theatres. Gallop, don’t trot to “Wild Horse Nine”, the most enjoyable movie experience of the year (so far).

Jeff’s ranking

4 / 4 stars

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“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” – Movie Review

Directed and written by:  Noah Segan

Starring:  John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Karina Arroyave, Victoria Moroles, Will Price, Tatiana Maslany, and Giancarlo Esposito

Runtime:  88 minutes

‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’: The Academy may offer Turturro an Oscar nomination.   He delivers one of the year’s best performances.

Harry Lehman (John Turturro) has lived and worked in New York City his whole life.  

He enjoys his job, and after decades of reps, Harry has mastered his trade.  

Harry’s dedicated, chosen profession is called out in the title of director/writer Noah Segan’s “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.”

A career criminal, he pays the bills for his Bronx apartment – which he shares with his wife, Rosie (Karina Arroyave) – by striding across the streets and subways of The Big Apple and looking for marks.   

In the opening scene, Segan, cinematographer Sam Levy, and Turturro demonstrate a prime example - an effective, establishing moment - of Harry’s aptitude for covert theft and the consequences for a victim.   

The man has skills! 

And so do Segan, Turturro, and the rest of the cast and crew of “Pickpocket”, a captivating crime story that is both a pleasant cinematic stroll and a stressful race against time. 

As far as strolls and races, Segan and Levy’s camera follows Harry all over the city with newsstands, subway stops, chain-link fences, the fronts of blue-collar shops, small sets of stairs leading into apartment buildings, and one reach into the suburbs as a big-city backdrop.  

It’s just a guess, but Harry’s traveling-by-foot trips may run 20 or 30 minutes on-screen out of the movie’s 88-minute runtime.  He walks with intention and purpose in NY, and the effect reaches nostalgic feelings of Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) in “Tootsie” (1982), Ratso (Hoffman again) in “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), and, more recently, Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) in “Uncut Gems” (2019).

(Speaking of nostalgia, composer Gary Lionelli pairs Harry and the rest of the cast with a catchy throwback ‘70s score reminiscent of “Shaft” (1971) or “Starsky & Hutch” (1975-1979), even though “Pickpocket” is set in the present day.  And note that the year 2026 and its current technologies may be the prime reason why Harry is the only living pickpocket in New York or anywhere else.) 

The Safdie brothers’ “Uncut Gems” certainly shares similar vibes.  Still, that flick is more stressful than trying to land a 747 without a driver’s license, let alone a pilot’s license.  “Pickpocket” doesn’t reach that height of anxiety, but we still feel stress for Harry.  

While Howard, in “Gems”, frequents jewelry stores to look for deals, Harry pops into questionable pawn shops with daily catches of loot and hopes to cash in, including his longtime pal Ben’s (the always reliable Steve Buscemi) establishment.  Even though Ben must make a buck too, Harry and he share a sturdy friendship after years of trading stolen merchandise for cash.  

An outside force, however, disrupts this routine:  Harry steals from the wrong person (Will Price), and harsh consequences could await him.  Hence, this interruption creates the aforementioned race against the clock, and our casually sly but always deliberate thief becomes hurried in his movements and intentions.  

Harry is a flawed human being.  He commits larceny (nearly) daily, and he’s made plenty of mistakes over his 60-something years on Planet Earth.  However, he’s a soft-spoken, pacifist (at least as we see him now), and he deeply cares for Rosie.  

Rosie is a key character to help develop audience empathy for Harry, even though the man wouldn’t think twice about swiping your wallet.  He does not seem to have many friends.  The movie’s cast numbers are slightly lean, but Ben and his granddaughter, Eve (Victoria Moroles), love him, and a police detective (Giancarlo Esposito) and a nurse show him respect.  

He’s lived a life of crime with regrets, but it is his only money-making path.  The years weigh on him, and we see the long, heavy toil circle around his eyes and the grey paint his healthy thatch of hair.  In addition to the effective long shots of Harry marching across the city, Segan and Levy offer frequent close-ups of him, as his eyes lock on his next victim, he pleads for a better deal, or he seems weary with the grind.

Turturro is here for all of it, seemingly giving every bit of himself to Harry.  

Naturally, Harry is willing to take it, and in turn, The Academy may offer Turturro an Oscar nomination.  John delivers one of the year’s best performances. 

Jeff’s ranking

3.5 / 4 stars

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“A Talent for Murder” – Movie Review

Directed by:  Anton Corbijn

Written by: Joanna Murray-Smith

Starring:  Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich, Olivia Cooke, Juliet Stevenson, Brid Brennan, and James Faulkner

Runtime:  106 minutes

‘A Talent for Murder’ skillfully honors Highsmith’s work, while the gifted Mirren and Ehrenreich successfully devour a new story

Patricia Highsmith (1921 – 1995) was a talented writer.  

Born in the Lone Star State, Patricia became a literary star by penning over 20 novels, including “Strangers on a Train”, which Alfred Hitchcock adapted in 1951, and five “Ripley” books that starred the infamous character, Tom Ripley, a devilish sociopath who is best known these days in director Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999).  Matt Damon played the title character in that movie, and other actors brought Ripley to the silver screen, including Dennis Hopper in “The American Friend” (1977) and John Malkovich in “Ripley’s Game” (2002).  

Highsmith certainly left her mark on 20th-century and 21st-century pop culture. 

In 2026, director Anton Corbijn (“A Most Wanted Man” (2014) and “The American” (2010)) and screenwriter Joanna Murray-Smith place Highsmith as a character in “A Talent for Murder”, a nifty crime flick that celebrates this Texas native’s work and unapologetically features her apparently cantankerous persona. 

The gifted, Oscar-winning Helen Mirren plays Highsmith in the 1990s, a recluse living in a spacious home in Switzerland, when Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich), a New York representative from her publisher, travels lengthy distances to pay Patricia a visit to convince her – in a cheerleader, you’ve-got-this manner - to write one more Ripley novel. 

Patricia, however, has no intention of composing another Ripley book.

Mirren and Ehrenreich lean into this conflicted pairing, where an aging, frustrated-with-the-world immovable object has built up decades of emotional calluses to resist a plea from anyone, let alone a young upstart sent on an errand.  She remarks on his youthful, inexperienced appearance with vocal daggers about being fresh out of “kindergarten” and “braces.”  Meanwhile, Edward gushes over Patricia’s work, like her biggest fan, to convince her to write.  

This first-act sequence seems to last 10 or 15 minutes, as Patricia and Edward volley between snippy insults and heaps of praise inside Highsmith’s residence, one with a gun collection, an eerie portrait of the famous homeowner, and poison in the pantry.  

Think of Jonathan Harker entering Count Dracula’s castle, as Patricia playfully gives Edward good reason to fear for his life.  Mirren is an intimidating force as Highsmith, slinging a never-ending arsenal of slights and grievances, while Ehrenreich’s Ridgeway keeps up nicely by absorbing her verbal assaults and sending back empathy and hope.  

They eventually make a pact that she could be convinced to write a new Ripley novel if her protégé can conjure a worthy, murderous story during his brief stay at Chateau Highsmith, set in a gorgeous, mountainous Swiss spot.

The film then shifts to Highsmith and Ridgeway’s exchanges of book ideas that shuttle their imaginations to Rome, and Ehrenreich essentially becomes Tom Ripley on the big screen.  His mark is Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke), a well-read American visiting her wealthy grandfather.  

“A Talent for Murder” then grows into a new novel within Corbijn’s film.  Not only does Edward double into another role, but the inspiration for Clementine came from his chance meeting with the “real-life” Clementine en route to Patricia’s home.   Ms. Balfour, also an American, is visiting family in Switzerland.  

It’s easy to fall into Corbijn and Murray-Smith’s connected story within a story, especially with the intriguing foundation Mirren and Ehrenreich build in the first act.  

However, the movie also becomes a distracting stutter step.  

Highsmith and Ridgeway beautifully whisk the audience to Italy as cinematographer Robbie Ryan lavishes the screen with a striking backdrop of the iconic city that offers “The Great Beauty” (2013) vibes.  Edward’s alter ego diabolically pursues a fictional Clementine with monetary goals in mind.  But rather than let this new Ripley yarn spin uninterrupted, Corbijn and editor Andrew Hulme repeatedly return to Highsmith’s home as this new two-person authoring team sorts out the particulars, and the frequent revisits to Switzerland pull us out of the budding, potentially murderous fantasy in Italy.  

Have no fear. 

There’s a method to the filmmakers’ madness.  

The screenplay shifts in another direction that blurs make-believe and Ridgeway’s existence in the here and now, and this second angle drives intrigue with Edward’s state of mind and his backstory.   This initial frustration with the start-again-stop-again nature of Ridgeway and Highsmith’s new literary chronicle melts away with the aforementioned new wrinkle about Edward’s present-day happenings, while Patricia finds fascination with this welcome break from her solitary monotony.  Alden is a thriving on-screen partner with Helen, and he reaches impressive thespian heights as Corbijn and Murray-Smith challenge him.  

It’s a blast to watch Ehrenreich and Mirren operate in this new twist on Highsmith’s literary gifts, and “A Talent for Murder’ also skillfully honors the woman’s work.

Jeff’s ranking

3 / 4 stars

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"Wildwood" - Movie Review

Directed by: Travis Knight

Written by: Chris Butler

Starring: Peyton Elizabeth, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, and Mahershala Ali

Runtime: 132 minutes

Stop-motion ‘Wildwood’ a triumph of craftsmanship 

Go see “Wildwood” on the biggest screen you can find. I beg you, Take a child. Heck, take ten children. Then go see it again. Throw your money at Laika Studios, please, so we can get more handcrafted films made with precision and love, so we can show AI-obsessed executives and tech ghouls that human artistry is not dead despite all their efforts to kill it. 

It starts, as so many great children’s adventure tales do, with a precocious girl. Green-eyed Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth) is itching to spread her wings, straining against the protectiveness of her two well-meaning, granola-eating, beanie-wearing Portland parents. When they leave her in charge for a day of her baby brother Mac with explicit instructions that they not leave the house, Prue has no intention of following orders. She heads out into the city on her bike, her bouncy brother trailing behind in a wagon, in search of adventure. 

Adventure finds her when a murder of crows swoops in and steals her baby brother, whisking him into what Prue’s father calls the “impassable wilderness,” a misty thicket of Pacific Northwest forestry she was told never, ever, under any circumstances, to enter. Undeterred, headstrong Prue – joined by a stammering, bespectacled boy named Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), who understandably has a bit of a crush on her – goes in search of her brother.

The impassable wilderness, she finds, hides magic – real magic. A whole kingdom with warring factions, talking animals, a magic tree and a bandit king. “I don’t know whether this is terrifying or adorable,” Prue says, taking in the anthropomorphic animals. The answer is both, because real magic also means dark magic. An exiled witch, Alexandra the dowager governess (Carey Mulligan), has gone mad with grief at the death of her son, and she will stop at nothing to get him back – even sacrificing Prue’s stolen brother to the dark arts. 

On a pure craft level, “Wildwood” is a marvel. Adapted from the YA novel of the same name, scribed by Decemberists musician Colin Meloy and illustrated by his wife Carson Ellis, “Wildwood” is bursting with world-building, brought to life by stop-motion animators who crafted hundreds of practical puppets with changeable 3D-printed faces to capture the minutia of expression, frame by painstaking frame. Directed by Travis Knight, who also helmed Laika’s excellent Oscar-nominated feature “Kubo and the Two Strings,” with cinematography by six-time Oscar nominee Caleb Deschanel (“The Right Stuff,” “The Passion of the Christ”), “Wildwood” looks incredible, its created universe full of both wonder and menace. Prue bursting through the clouds on the back of an eagle, its feathers glittering in shafts of sunlight, is breathtaking in its beauty. 

This film is also at times shockingly dark, the way kid’s movies used to be. The film maximizes its PG-13 rating with bursts of violence, snarling wild animals, even dead children. There’s peril here, and real stakes – and with that the trust that the children watching will be able to handle it. If the story lacks a little in emotional connection, or if the magical world at times distractingly busy, it can be forgiven for the quality of craftsmanship and ambition on display. This recalls the great moody children’s films of the 1980s, like “Labyrinth” and “The NeverEnding Story” in its ease with magic and darkness; and Hayao Miyazaki too, films like “Princess Mononoke” and “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” with their reverence and terror of the natural world. 

At the risk of waxing melodramatic, “Wildwood” isn’t just a very good movie, it’s an adrenaline shot of hope straight to the heart that something like this can still get made. In a world awash in dead-eyed CGI and AI slop designs, “Wildwood” stands as a monument to human creativity.

Barbara’s ranking

3.5/4 stars

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“Whalefall” – Movie Review

Directed by:  Brian Duffield

Written by: Brian Duffield, based on Daniel Kraus’ novel

Starring:  Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue, and John Ortiz

Runtime:  106 minutes

‘Whalefall’ is a stressful, frightening experience for those who buy the story hook, line, and sinker

Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) is in trouble!  

Not in a 10-minutes-late-for-work kind of trouble, but a colossal case of death-seems-certain trouble! 

In an attempt to find his late father’s (Josh Brolin) remains, the college-aged Jay straps on scuba gear, walks onto a Monterey, Calif. beach, and steps into the bay.  His dad, Mitt (Brolin), and he struggled with a contentious relationship before Mitt committed suicide, but Jay feels compelled to locate his dad while home from school.  

Jay attends the University of Iowa, just about the farthest college from the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean that one could find to leave his past (and his father) behind.  Mitt was passionate about the sea.  

Dealing with regret and grief, Jay scuba dives in the bay for only a few minutes of screen time, when he unceremoniously confronts a giant squid and then a sperm whale.  In a sequence filled with unbridled terror, the whale swallows Jay whole, and this Iowa Hawkeye is still alive and faced – along with the movie audience - with an impossible circumstance of catastrophic proportions. 

How can Jay stay alive?   How can he escape? 

These are raw, visceral questions that director Brian Duffield poses in the immensely stressful thriller “Whalefall”, also written by Duffield and based on Daniel Kraus’ 2023 novel of the same name. 

Sperm whales can reach 60 feet in length, but without any anatomy training of the said marine mammal, the audience has no exact idea of Jay’s location within the whale (and for the sake of this review, let’s call the whale “Murphy”) other than he’s uncomfortably situated with Murphy’s digestive tract.

Kudos to the film’s set decorators, art department, special and visual effects teams, cinematographer Aaron Morton, Duffield, and anyone else on the crew who helped engineer a terrifying, claustrophobic setting inside Murphy.   

The same applause should go to Abrams, who is completing convincing as a man in shock that he has suddenly become Murphy’s breakfast. 

Jay, horrified beyond belief, frantically looks around this unreal, cramped setting.  He is surrounded by misshapen, moving, soft, fleshy innards that are covered with clammy enzymes and juices.   Without context, it looks as though our young hero is trapped in a cave, but we know better, as strange crevices and openings randomly appear. 

Which direction is toward Murphy’s mouth, and which way is his other end?   It’s impossible to know, and with his oxygen tank only having enough breathable air for an hour, Jay is forced to think against the clock and Murphy’s bodily functions.  

This critic bought this unnerving premise hook, line, and sinker.  If you do as well, expect to squirm, hold your breath, and throw your hands in the air while fidgeting in your theatre seat during a vast majority of the time Jay spends inside Murphy. 

To give the audience some needed reprieves from Jay potentially becoming a krill substitute, Duffield intermittently reaches back into Mr. Gardiner’s memory with flashbacks of his overbearing, demanding dad.  

Brolin – who was a volunteer fireman in real life – is perfectly cast as a gruff, no-nonsense alpha male, and these repeated, troublesome callbacks aren’t easy to witness, as Mitt did not win any Father of the Year awards during Jay’s childhood.  Still, Jay remembers moments of Mitt’s wisdom about ocean life, boating, scuba diving, and whales.  Mitt deeply endears this oceanic habitat, and through Jay’s race to survive, memories of this combative relationship include valuable morsels that could prevent him from becoming one. 

This effective cinematic device to repeatedly flashback – during Jay’s predicament - is reminiscent of Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours” (2010), which featured the true-life story of Aron Ralston (James Franco), who was trapped by a boulder in Utah.  

In “Whalefall”, Jay Gardiner is a fictional character, but thoughts about truth or fiction may be thrown out the window/coughed up during the 106-minute runtime. 

On the other hand, Duffield leans into Jay and Mitt’s relationship a bit too often, especially during the last act, which drives the narrative into some eye-rolling stretches of oversentimentality.  While hoping for Jay’s ultimate survival, one might also wish to dodge some of Mitt’s recurrent words from beyond the grave in a case where less of Mitt’s wisdom would be a better fit for the movie. 

Then again, we are talking about a whale of a story here, so “Whalefall” earns some leeway while also frightening those willing to believe it.  

Jeff’s ranking

2.5 / 4 stars

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"You Can See Everything" - Movie Review

Directed by: Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim

Starring: Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, and Billy Evans

Runtime: 174 minutes

Two lunatics meet their match in miraculous ‘You Can See Everything’

The irresistible force paradox asks what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. It’s less a question than a thought exercise because both things could not simultaneously exist in the same universe: an irresistible force by definition cannot be resisted, and an immovable object by definition unfailingly resists. Two such objects could therefore never meet, or else one would not be irresistible or the other would not be immovable.

And yet “You Can See Everything” exists.

It shouldn’t. Two brains as divergent and personalities as unbudging as Nathan Fielder’s and Elizabeth Holmes’ shouldn’t exist in the same universe, never mind in the same film frame. That Holmes, the disgraced Theranos tech entrepreneur currently serving a sentence for fraud in a federal penitentiary, should invite Fielder, a prank comic who blurs the line between fact and fiction for laughs, into her home in her waning days of freedom to tell her side of the story after years of silence is incomprehensible. 

Yet this three-hour-long A24 documentary sends Fielder and co-director Lance Oppenheim (who also directed this year’s excoriating “To Catch a Predator” drama “Primetime”) to Holmes’ beachside Del Mar house 34 days before she’s scheduled to go to prison. Holmes gives Fielder, of all people, intimate access to herself and her family – her grieving parents, her manic husband Billy Evans, and her two agonizingly young children, one of whom is an infant – as she makes her peace and says her goodbyes… and hatches plans to launch Theranos 2.0 from behind bars, with Evans running the show. 

Don’t come to “You Can See Everything” looking for smoking guns or definitive answers about Holmes and her whole deal, because you won’t find them. “You Can See Everything” is more a documentary about the making of itself and the battle royale of Fielder and Holmes realizing they’ve met their match, each trying to get the other to blink. Because as different as their lives are, they have a shared superpower: the ability not to break character under the greatest stress and scrutiny. 

Fielder has used that power for good in shows like “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal,” which puts his preternatural powers of self-control to work getting laughs as he creates increasingly awkward situations with deadpan precision. He creates vacuums of cringe that feel like dread and never rushes to fill the space, as if he were born without the chip in his brain that registers embarrassment. 

“What did she have to gain from me?” Evans says, waxing rhapsodic about his deep spiritual connection to Holmes, claiming they fell in love at first sight. 

“Well, isn’t your family rich?” Fielder deadpans. 

Holmes’ character is less entertaining for those who lost everything investing in the Stanford dropout’s sham startup Theranos, a portmanteau of “therapy” and “diagnosis” that claimed it was revolutionizing the medical industry with a device that could test for innumerable illnesses with a single drop of blood. The character Holmes played contributed as much to her celebrity as the invention on which she built – and then lost – her wealth in a dizzying fall from grace as she cosplayed as a tech genius, artificially lowering her vocal register, donning Steve Jobs-inspired black turtlenecks, and hypnotizing investors with her disquieting million-yard stare. 

But is it a character? She swears unflinchingly in her too-deep voice that it isn’t. She insists still that the device she invented works, despite all evidence to the contrary. Her parents say she was never the same after she was raped at Stanford, that the trauma caused her to seek romantic solace in controlling men like former Theranos president Sunny Balwani, who is also serving time in prison. Is Evans, with his twitchy paranoia, controlling behavior, hair-trigger temper, and tech bro aspirations just another Sunny? Is it possible that Holmes is just a very damaged, vulnerable woman? 

Or is she the greatest con artist in the world? 

The cameras keep rolling after Holmes goes to prison, and there’s a second-act twist I won’t spoil here – it deserves the delight of discovery. But that twist is what makes an otherwise fascinating meeting of the minds into a miracle of a documentary that turns the camera on itself in its desperate bid to overcome the fundamental unknowability of other people. 

Holmes and Evans let Fielder get so close: into the shower as Evans scrubs his naked body, at the table where Holmes takes a breast out to feed her infant child, into the bedroom where husband and wife hold one another and cry, Holmes’ nose dripping snot. It’s a disquieting intimacy, shot like a horror film, faces peering around shadowed corners where monsters lurk. 

You can see everything, but still see nothing at all. 

Barbara’s ranking

4/4 stars

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“The Social Reckoning” – Movie Review

Directed and written by:  Aaron Sorkin

Starring:  Jeremy Allen White, Mikey Madison, Jeremy Strong, Billy Magnussen, Betty Gilpin, and Bill Burr

Runtime:  112 minutes

‘The Social Reckoning’:  The message is important, but this pedestrian corporate drama doesn’t quite earn a ‘Like’

In 2019, “The Wall Street Journal” hires investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) for a social media beat in their San Francisco bureau.  He looks around and comments that the office seems quiet.  It’s relatively empty and free of the boisterous bustle that one would associate with a newspaper’s workplace, but that’s the business these days or, in this case, seven years ago.  The industry is in decline and peppered with a never-ending parade of cutbacks.  (Just ask anyone in the newspaper biz.) 

It’s smaller.

Compared to “The Social Network” (2010), its sequel, “The Social Reckoning”, is a smaller film.

“Reckoning” follows a narrow, true-life path of Facebook’s impact on its users by the platform encouraging more frequent use and recommending pages or groups with extremist views.  

This combination can manipulate human behavior. 

Director/writer Aaron Sorkin – who co-wrote “Network” – steers this social media whistleblower story, as Horwitz tries to work with Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a Facebook employee on the Civic Integrity Team, who wants to release the truth about her employer’s questionable practices.  

Much of the movie’s runtime follows Jeff and Frances’ push-pull dance to retrieve the damaging information.  The Emmy-winning White and Oscar-winning Madison are top-notch actors, and they play (for the most part) their roles well, as a determined journalist and a sometimes-reluctant, sometimes-steadfast informant.  White is well-suited – and nicely dressed by costume designer Susan Lyall – as a resolute journalist, and the 27-year-old Madison convincingly plays a junior staff member of this 1.83 trillion-dollar (in 2026) social media corporation.  

Frances is an office professional who isn’t taken seriously when speaking up to her supervisors or co-workers about concerning matters.   A director-type (Billy Magnussen) and Frances’ colleague (Anna Lambe) treat her like a kid in a way, where children should be seen and not heard.

Hence, when Jeff reaches out to Frances, she responds. 

She needs to be heard. 

Haugen often dives into an “Are you getting all this, Jeff?” vibe as a form of concern but also teasing with Horwitz, and these exchanges lighten the mood on occasion, but other times, the act wears thin.  These are spots when the unlikely pair attempts to share chemistry, but with mixed results.   

Additionally, throughout Frances’ attempts to covertly share corporate data, there might be one moment in nearly two hours where suspense somewhat registers.  So, the cloak-and-dagger narrative feels more like a pedestrian curiosity than an eye-popping race against corporate masters, as opposed to a classic white knuckler like Sydney Pollack’s “The Firm” (1993).  

If only Madison and White sported a Tom Cruise-like running scene through Menlo Park, Calif. 

Speaking of corporate masters, Jesse Eisenberg – who earned an Oscar nomination for playing Mark Zuckerberg in “Network” (2010) – did not return for the sequel, but Jeremy Strong steps in and is fascinating as the socially (pardon the pun) awkward but brilliant, feared, and resolute CEO.  

Strong is so convincing and brings his own robotic-like twist to Zuckerberg, one might completely forget Eisenberg’s portrayal during the 112-minute runtime.  This critic did!

What is forgettable is an awfully lengthy exchange between Zuckerberg and Facebook/Zuckerberg detractor Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr), where the two argue incessantly.   It all takes place during a planning session for Mark’s congressional hearing, and whether that squabble occurred at that moment or not, the incident feels like a forced, tired, and ineffective plot device to portray Zuckerberg and his mindset.  

However, during an altogether different moment, a 5-minute delicious scene, a small collection of Facebook employees – including Frances – enter Mark’s office, and an executive makes a proposal that is shot down by Zuckerberg faster than a French Foreign Legion firing squad.  The said manager might feel like she is dead...or wish she was.  

That moment alone is all that Sorkin needed to depict Mr. Zuckerberg. 

Sorkin, of course, is a masterclass screenwriter, and he nicely shifts the on-screen events back and forth between 2019, 2020, and 2021, and he pens an incredibly powerful and disturbing opening scene that conveys the warped impact social media can have on the human psyche.  

He then bookends the opening with an infamous event in our nation’s history.  The latter historical sequence drives home social media’s reach from one person’s radicalization to a mob scene to a significant portion of the country.  Then again, the two scenes feature one political view, and social media’s impact can influence any partisan stance, not just one.

Well, here’s one stance that almost everyone – who doesn’t have a financial investment in social media – can agree upon:  We should spend less time on our phones and more time touching grass and chatting with our friends, neighbors, family, colleagues, and guests the old-fashioned way…in person.  

Jeff’s ranking

2 / 4 stars

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Digger - Movie Review

“Digger” – Movie Review 

Directed by:  Alejandro G. Inarritu 

Written by:  Alejandro G. Inarritu, Sabina Berman, Jez Butterworth, Alexander Dinelaris 

Starring:  Tom Cruise, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sandra Huller, and Jesse Plemons 

Runtime:  129 minutes 

‘Digger’: The frustrating screenplay digs an enormous hole that the impressive cinematography, big ideas, and Cruise’s passion cannot fill. 

“Everything’s bigger in Texas.” 

Well, Texas oilman Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) faces a colossal conundrum that impacts the global community. 

This billionaire’s company, Rockwell Corporation, creates an environmental catastrophe that could cause massive displacement, death, and financial ruin to the tune of trillions of dollars.    

And how was your Monday?  

One of Rockwell’s employees, Sandy Clarkson (Danny Kirrane), tries to deliver the bad news to Digger, while our CEO wears his pajamas during an otherwise ordinary morning after feeding his geriatric cat, Maggie.   

The devastating message kicks off a hurricane of events in director/co-writer Alejandro G. Inarritu’s grandiose production, “Digger”, a dark comedic look at short-sighted, big-business postures and their incompatibility with ecological tranquility.    

Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki – who worked with Inarritu on “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” (2014) and “The Revenant” (2015) – impressively paints a bleak, dystopian present day or near future similarly to his work with director Alfonso Cuaron’s “Children of Men” (2006).  Instead of the constant gray tones in “Children”, Lubezki fills the screen with pale greens, browns, chalky whites, and grays (too) that cast a depressing, muted vibe of our human existence, one that compares to director Roy Andersson’s satirical, drab take on modern society in “About Endlessness” (2019). 

Unlike Andersson’s low-key approach to observing our world’s anthropological imperfections, Inarritu dons an Armani suit or a plaid, flannel shirt and jeans (take your pick) and rips the cord of a chainsaw that cuts sarcastic, hazardous teeth into this disaster scenario and rips filmmaking conventions through over-the-top performances and Dennis Gassner and Richard L. Johnson’s wild production designs.   

“Digger” is a purposely stormy and provocative theatrical experience, one to be admired for its effort, big ideas, and messaging.  However, Inarritu and the screenwriters take their enthusiasm too far with bizarre decision-making that could spark audience celebration or scorn.   

For this critic, it was the latter, in a case of “Why on Earth would you ruin a good thing?”  

In that respect, “Digger” becomes frustrating.  Sitting through the film became a restless chore, like being seated in a 5-star restaurant with an incompatible blind date for two hours, staring at the clock on the far wall, and begging God (or name your deity) to move the second hand faster than its current plodding pace.  

Granted, “Digger” has a fabulous cast, including John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sandra Huller, and Jesse Plemons.  This thespian crew often hyperactively plays in a manic edition of “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964), where the U.S. President (Goodman) and Vice President (Stuhlbarg), a scientist (Ahmed), a reverend, and high-ranking generals surround a table, attempt to digest the implications of the horrible calamity, and spitball suggestions.  

(Incidentally, there’s an obvious reminder of Major ‘King’ Kong (Slim Pickens) famous scene in “Strangelove”, although – admittedly – not as dramatic.)  

Anyone watching Coach Inarritu’s movie can see that his players are giving 110 percent, but whether it was the movie’s tone, the screenplay, or off comedic timing, “Digger” is flat-out unfunny.  This critic remembers laughing out loud once.  Then again, my memory isn’t what it used to be, and yes, comedy is in the eye of the beholder.  

What is indisputable, however, is Cruise’s outright passion in the title role.  He is a transformative whirlwind as Digger Rockwell, a paunchy, aging man who obsessively and deeply cares for his kitty cat, Maggie, but proudly exhibits big-game taxidermy trophies all over his mansion.  He’s a businessman who pushes “it’s my way or the highway” and talks over subordinates to avoid uncomfortable discourse.  Digger strolls into a public square and delivers a frank sermon from his billionaire oil-baron perspective with a pro-wrestling bravado that would animate any audience into a raucous mob.   

Cruise delivers the seemingly 15-minute aforementioned sermon in (again, seemingly) one continuous take that is nothing short of mesmerizing.  Granted, this critic didn’t time the oration or discern if it was actually spoken in one take.  This incredible moment may have taken 10 minutes with several cuts, but it doesn’t matter.  Thank you, Tom Cruise.  

Unfortunately, the frustrating screenplay digs an enormous hole that the impressive cinematography, big ideas, and Cruise’s passion cannot fill.  

Jeff’s ranking  

1.5 / 4 stars 

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“Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!” – Movie Review

Directed by:  Josef Kubota Wladyka

Written by:  Josef Kubota Wladyka and Nicholas Huynh

Starring:  Rinko Kikuchi, Alberto Guerra, Alejandro Edda, You, and Yoh Yoshida

Runtime:  116 minutes

‘Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!’ steps into quirky, rewarding, and charming spaces

“Ah, everybody, get on the dance floor and let’s dance.  Don’t fight your feelings, give yourself a chance.” – “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty” by KC and the Sunshine Band (1976)

Haru (Rinko Kikuchi) loves to dance, and she has the best supportive partner: her husband, Luis (Alejandro Edda).  Even though the title of director/co-writer Josef Kubota Wladyka’s film, “Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!”, might call to feelings of 70s disco, Haru and Luis enjoy (and thrive with) ballroom dancing.  

On the other hand, their sprawling vinyl collection on display in their gorgeous Tokyo home might include KC and the Sunshine Band, Bee Gees, and ABBA records. 

However, in heartbreaking fashion, the music stops for this happy couple early in the movie’s first act, and Haru suddenly becomes a solo dancing queen.  This devastated 45-year-old must learn to live without her adoring partner and work through her grief.  Luckily, her close kin - Yuki (Yoh Yoshida) and Hiromi (You) - encourage our depressed heroine to raise her spirits with dance lessons at a local studio.  She then meets Fedir (Alberto Guerra), a “Dancing with the Stars” alumnus, and with his handsome looks and commanding style, he could be the spark to cure Haru’s agonizing blues. 

Wladyka and co-writer Nicholas Huynh’s movie title suggests an exuberant comedy, and yes, the 116-minute runtime includes high-flying whimsy, dives into the supernatural, and sudden overtures into a few musical numbers, where leads and supporting characters break away from the happenings on screen and bounce into dance.  

Still, Haru is also a devastated soul.  Our lead acting and dancing performer must overcome the loss of Luis, so her arc of a hopeful, colorful rainbow of joy, song, and a collection of cross-body leads, reverse spins, quick-quicks, and box steps is also laced with sorrow, longing, and jealousy.  

Kikuchi is here for all of it, delivering a graceful, engaging, and nuanced performance that also delves into dark, morose territory.  Haru, who is also an elegant dancer, wears her heart on her sleeve throughout all the steps on her emotional journey and convinces the audience of her convictions of adoration for Luis and (later for) Fedir, frustration with Yuki and Hiromi, and a mixture of hope and confusion where mystical passages at home take hold and disbelief wins the day.  

Haru suffers authentic loss here, and empathy cascades in waves in the form of figurative hugs from the audience, as she struggles to drag herself from her contemporary single-story house where memories of Luis are everywhere and reach out to humanity through the contact of conversation and the dance floor.  

Wladyka includes plenty of stretches of delight, romance, and daydreams, and at times, we wonder if the kinetic, flamboyant flashes are fixtures of Haru’s imagination or tried-and-true.  Rather than guess, sit back and enjoy the splendor and surprises, as cinematographer Daniel Satinoff and the choreography team lavish the screen with creative, enchanting framing, the joys of dance, and bliss, including one scene that calls back to an all-time American classic from 1987. 

Set in Tokyo, the characters speak Japanese, English, and Spanish, and the flick is divided into chapters recited in both English and Japanese as a subtle, thoughtful gesture to broaden the experience for audiences.  This rated-R movie seems like a PG-13 affair that can be enjoyed by teens and adults alike, but “Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!” – at its core - is a ladies’ night-out event with quirky sensibilities, the gravitas of loss, and the treasures of dance and romance.  

“Ah, everybody, get on the floor and let’s dance.”  

Don’t fight your feelings.  Give this rewarding, charming film a chance. 

Jeff’s ranking

3 / 4 stars

"Primetime" - Movie Review

Directed by: Lance Oppenheim.

Written by: Ajon Singh.

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, and Skyler Gisondo.

Runtime: 110 minutes

Chris Hansen drama ‘Primetime’ gazes into the moral abyss of American media 

“You see how this looks, right?”

Robert Pattinson nails the phrase, capturing Chris Hansen’s unctuous news anchor cadence and his knowing smirk as he gets an unwitting would-be pedophile dead to rights on camera for his hit series “To Catch a Predator.” 

It’s gratifying the first time you hear it and watch a grown man squirm at having his twisted fantasies exposed. But that question takes on greater weight over the runtime of “Primetime,” a film that dramatizes the spectacular rise and fall of the infamous hidden-camera “Dateline NBC” reality program that was one big sting operation built to entrap adult men seeking sex with underage girls and boys – for our entertainment. 

“You see how this looks, right?” begins to feel like a question being asked not just of the perpetrators, but of Hansen, and possibly even us. 

Pattinson is unnerving as Hansen, dead-eyed and emotionally opaque even as he relishes the game, going from city to city setting up trap houses and luring lustful men on the internet to their televised doom, using adult actors posing as teens. Off-camera, Pattinson’s Hansen talks less like a journalist and more like an avenging angel, a man who sees himself as the wrath of the Lord come to visit judgment on the unclean. “You’re cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” he tells Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), an eager but uneasy new recruit to the cause who’s less interested in catching child sexual predators than he is in getting is SAG card. Plumb’s diminutive stature, bright eyes, wide smile, and freckled face make him look young enough to be the pubescent boy he plays to ensnare an increasingly grotesque series of men. 

Merritt Wever is particularly fantastic as Andie Bender, the show’s ambitious, unflappable, gum-smacking producer, who thrusts wide-eyed Plumb into an escalating series of scenarios in search of higher ratings now that their show is in the same timeslot as ratings giant “Lost.” What they need is a big score, to capture not some mewling, basement-dwelling pervert, but someone with social clout. 

“Who gave you permission to do this?” one of Hansen’s marks asks him as the camera zooms in on his reddening face. 

Nobody needed to. The aughts were a lawless time in media, with the internet and reality TV both in their relative infancy and few guardrails or best practices in place. “To Catch a Predator” appeared that decade alongside some truly abhorrent reality programming, wretched shows like “The Swan,” which put ordinary “ugly duckling” women under the knife to chase unobtainable beauty standards, and “The Anna Nicole Show,” which put cameras in the house of an unwell woman clearly in distress until both she and her son were dead of a drug overdose while we gawped and chuckled. 

In “Primetime,” director Lance Oppenheim makes a chilling argument that “To Catch a Predator” deserves to be considered alongside those moral failures, in which human suffering and ritual humiliation were staged for our entertainment. Shot in a surveillance-style 4:3 ratio that feels like TV in the era of early digital photography, “Primetime” has a sickly, gritty feel, as if the camera lens were coated in grime. It’s an effective enough aesthetic that one begins to feel unclean watching it. It will be fascinating to see how Oppenheim’s other 2026 film, the documentary “You Can See Everything” co-directed with Nathan Fielder about Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes that just took the Telluride Film Festival by storm, serves as a companion piece to this. 

“You see how this looks, right?” Oppenheim seems to ask us at the end, but which time it’s impossible to see it any other way. 

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"Resident Evil" - Movie Review

Director: Zach Cregger

Starring: Austin Abrams, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser, and Zach Cherry

1h 30m

A few months ago, I asked a fellow movie critic friend, "Did you see the new Resident Evil trailer?" The response was quick: "Don't we have enough of those already?" Fair enough. However, writer-director Zach Cregger, a self-proclaimed lifelong gamer, isn't just recycling old zombie lore with this updated Resident Evil; he's tapping into the cultural impact of a thirty-year franchise and viewing it through the lens of a fan of the iconic survival horror game. Cregger coordinates the material less like a traditional screenplay and more like an interactive campaign found in the game, with level transitions, power-ups, and boss encounters. The result is a bold, unique film rendition that showcases why these games are so fiercely addictive.

The film's narrative development resembles a controller-style progression but not in an obvious way. It opens with an atmospheric, slow-burn exploration, forcing the viewer to lean into and absorb the creepy atmosphere and shadows moving in the distance, before naturally scaring its way into gruesome monster encounters. As a nod to experienced gamer fans, it also delivers a satisfying achievement progression that scales authentically from a standard, low-ammo handgun to heavy-duty, fully automatic firepower. While the narrative occasionally collapses under the weight of its own video game logic, Creeger skillfully sidesteps franchise fatigue by ditching the overused zombies of the past. Instead, he introduces a far more visceral, genuinely grotesque new breed of monster that fits the franchise's eerie, unpredictable vibes.

Progression dictates the rhythm of the scenes throughout the film. The movie moves forward like a series of levels, introducing harder environments with numerous dead ends and padlocked gates, escalating monster fights, and evolving threats that grow more unhinged and dangerous with every turn. It inevitably culminates in a massive showdown that leans hard into the outlandish, gory, zany spectacle. Creeger layers these structural beats with precision, perfectly capturing the video game setups and enhancing them with visual flair.

Through the sprawling chaos and gory mayhem, the human element anchors the carnage through our protagonist, Bryan (Austin Abrams), a dedicated medical courier hauling a classified bag to Raccoon City while trying to stay connected by phone with his girlfriend back home. As the world quite literally falls apart around him, Creeger contrasts the fragile domestic stakes with the relentless, blood-pounding pursuit, keeping the character grounded and empathetic. Austin Abrams manages the tricky tightrope walk between genuine terror and humor with keen comedic timing, injecting a necessary levity that keeps the relentless dread from becoming exhausting.

The narrative struggles to break free from its visual structure, and the mystery is lost as minor characters drop in for a quick burst of exposition or serve as inevitable monster bait to raise the stakes. But as a cinematic adventure of interactive horror, Resident Evil is a high creative achievement. It delivers a thrilling, chaotic ride that easily satisfies horror and gaming fans while finally injecting the aging franchise with a fresh, pulsing, joystick-inspired heartbeat.

Monte's Rating 

3.50 out of 5.00

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“Practical Magic 2” – Movie Review

Directed by:  Susanne Bier

Written by:  Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett, and Kelly Marcel

Starring:  Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing, Dianne Wiest, Joey King, Maisie Williams, Xolo Mariduena, and Lee Pace

Runtime:  130 minutes

‘Practical Magic 2’ does not conjure much enchantment   

“No magic is stronger than sisterhood.” 

Twenty-eight years ago, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman – before they both won the Best Actress Oscar in 2010 and 2003, respectively - starred in director Griffin Dunne’s “Practical Magic” (1998), a comedy/fantasy flick about a pair of sisters coping with a 300-year-old curse started by their ancestor, Maria Owens.  The said supernatural whammy from the 1660s (perhaps?) jinxes any female descendant of Maria (an honest-to-goodness witch) who falls in love, because their dearest sweetheart will soon perish.   

Ooof.  

One would hope Sally (Bullock) and Gillian (Kidman) would mention this fact on their dating app profiles, as well as the vital bit of information that they are both witches, as is any other female descendant of that troublemaker, Maria.  

In 2026, director Susanne Bier resurrects the Owens’ big-screen story for a follow-up on their adventures in dodging amorous feelings, chilling with their favorite aunts, Aunt Jet (Dianne Wiest) and Aunt Franny (Stockard Channing), raising Sally’s 20-something daughters, Kylie (Joey King) and Antonia (Maisie Williams), conjuring an occasional spell, and making margaritas.  

Even though life has flown by for almost three decades, “Practical Magic 2” is set – maybe – 10 years after the first film.  We discover that Sally’s love interest from the first movie, Gary (Aidan Quinn), died, and she decided to cast a spell on her girls to forget that witchcraft runs in their family.  

However, her plan blows up when Kylie falls in love with her boyfriend, Gideon (Xolo Mariduena).  He’s a character that the audience barely knows (like scrolling by for .5 seconds on social media), but Gideon is struck by a car and falls into a coma.  

Sally comes clean, and Kylie feels betrayed, but she discovers a mystical book that could remove her family’s dreaded curse, and this distraught college student heads off to England to hopefully save her beloved.

So, Sally and Gillian – like any responsible mother and aunt would - follow Kylie across the pond.  The sisters connect with Professor Ian Wright (Lee Pace) to help these two strangers in a strange land, while Maisie stays with Gideon in the hospital.  

One of the problems with the original “Practical Magic” is that the unfocused and crowded screenplay doesn’t spend enough time – under a limited 104-minute runtime - with the best aspects of the movie:  hijinks with our two leads and their magical spells.  

(And for the record, Wiest won two Oscars and Channing was nominated for one!)

Based on Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel, the 1998 film asks us to follow the siblings through childhood, young adulthood, and their dating lives, their relationship with their aunts, coping with magic and the curse, and Sally’s two romantic rendezvous.  Then, the movie gets trapped in a police drama due to Gillian’s terrible choices in men and a lame investigation by the aforementioned Gary.  

To top it off, Sally has Kylie and Antonia in the original film, and they’re elementary-school aged.  Dunne and the screenwriters insisted on including kids’ inconsequential whimsy and naïve observations, which burned valuable on-screen minutes that should have stayed squarely on Bullock, Kidman, Wiest, and Channing.   

The sequel then focuses more of its attention on Kylie and Antonia, as the former zips off to the not-so-jolly UK, while – admittedly – the latter is relegated to sit with Kylie’s unresponsive boyfriend.  

The 130-minute runtime offers more celluloid runway for all the actors and actresses, but the extra 26 minutes seem devoted to Kylie and her struggles, conflict, and an uninspiring international adventure. 

Granted, the Owens saga should pass down to a younger generation, but then “Practical Magic 2” becomes Kylie’s journey to a significant extent.  King and Williams will hopefully go on to great things in the movie industry, and King has a nice moment with Bullock when Kylie confronts Sally about witchcraft and the curse.  However, just about every other moment with Kylie and Antonia carries the cinematic gravitas and interest equivalent to taping up the edges of ceilings and floor moldings for 2 hours and 10 minutes before one begins rolling paint in the living room.  Well, that’s not exactly accurate, because taping off those areas is crucial to a painting project. 

Meanwhile, Aunts Jet and Fanny fall one generation behind, and Sally and Gillian are on a cobbled-together rescue mission.  The theme of Gillian’s more promiscuous persona compared to Sally’s more selective choices continues here, but we don’t meet any of Gillian’s boyfriends, as she only briefly mentions a dreamboat named Chad in a throwaway line in the first act. Naturally, the British professor could be a potential love interest that picks up where the deceased Gary – the worst detective in human history – left off all those years ago, a predictable plot device.   

Bullock and Kidman aren’t given clever banter to chew on, as the two – especially Kidman – are seemingly asked to improvise random thoughts while bouncing around the kitchen or on the road, as screenwriters Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett, and Kelly Marcel may have taken a holiday during the UK shoot or during their original writing process.  

As far as a sequel goes, those nostalgic for the 1998 movie will hopefully enjoy it.  Margarita pours continue to splash on-screen, and in place of Faith Hill’s “This Kiss”, audiences are treated to a Fleetwood Mac classic sung by Ms. Stevie Nicks.

Look, generally speaking, I buy that “no magic is stronger than sisterhood.” 

Unfortunately, “Practical Magic 2” doesn’t conjure much enchantment. 

Jeff’s ranking

1.5 / 4 stars

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"Onslaught" - Movie Review

Dir: Adam Wingard

Starring: Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, Eric Wareheim, Michael Biehn, Drew Starkey, Alex Pereira, Reginald VelJohnson, and Rebecca Hall

Adam Wingard plunges straight back into the chaotic, blood-soaked battlefields of his early days with Onslaught, an adrenaline-fueled kinetic action, horror, sci-fi mashup. Wingard channels the gritty grindhouse stylings of the 1970s and the straight-to-video DNA of fast action films from the 1980s. It’s easy to see the influence of films like Assault on Precinct 13, Universal Soldier, and The Terminator throughout the scenes and among the characters. Wingard bypasses modern style and polish to resurrect an era when wild cinematic premises and unhinged characters ruled the midnight movie screen.

The story begins in an isolated trailer park where a traumatized former soldier (Adria Arjona) and her young daughter (Blake Kennedy) find themselves trapped under a nighttime siege. Three experimental super-soldiers, dragged back from death to serve as modern military technology, tear into their desert community. One lugs a roaring chainsaw, another brandishes an oversized butcher's cleaver, and the third a tactical rifle; together they turn a quiet rural night into a visceral slaughterhouse.

Wingard leans hard into this nostalgic aesthetic, packing the frame with a pulsating synth soundtrack, splattered practical gore, and a keen sense of slasher-cinema characteristics. Dan Stevens, a consistent collaborator of Wingard, chews the scenery as a deranged scientist complete with a Friar Tuck tonsure haircut and a dead-eyed stare, sharing space with an amusing high-on-drugs operative (Drew Starkey), and everyone’s favorite 90s TGIF dad Reginald VelJohnson playing a supportive veteran to everyone in the trailer park. Adria Arjona anchors the violence as Celeste, a sniper battling severe PTSD who struggles with the tender demands of motherhood while operating entirely on primal survival instinct when the moment calls for it. Arjona shines in the quiet family moments and in the big action moments when she takes confident control. Add in three physically intimidating super-soldiers, including UFC heavyweight Alex Pereira, and Onslaught has enough personalities to carry its underwhelming script. 

Problems surface when the director tries to stretch this tight, B-movie siege into a sprawling government conspiracy that introduces too many ideas and a few too many characters. The manic corporate cleanup operative, played with style and charm by Drew Starkey, is an interesting character, but he is left to float in and out of scenes with little purpose. The widening mythos tied to Wingard’s earlier cult thriller The Guest ties a great movie into this one, but it never fully connects the dots. Eventually, the pacing stumbles as it tries to juggle too many moving ideas and themes, leaving the final act scrambling to contain a universe that has grown far too big for its runtime.

Even as this film stumbles to find its narrative footing, the sheer gleeful energy and style of Onslaught carry it across the finish line. We rarely see studios support unapologetic, genre-blending midnight movies like this anymore. While everything in Onslaught certainly doesn't work, the film succeeds at creating a genre mashup with bizarre characters and unleashes action sequences with chaotic, gory energy.

Monte’s Rating

3.00 out of 5.00

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“The Dog Stars” – Movie Review

Directed by:  Ridley Scott

Written by:  Mark L. Smith, based on Peter Heller’s novel

Starring:  Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Benedict Wong, and Allison Janney

Runtime:  118 minutes

‘The Dog Stars’:  The cinematic stars do not perfectly align, but the performances and pacing make this post-apocalyptic tale worth a look

Stars. 

The last word in the title of director Ridley Scott’s new movie is apropos.  

Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Benedict Wong, and Allison Janney play roles in Scott’s post-apocalyptic presentation.  

What a cast!  

This regal acting ensemble does not lend their voices to play animated canines.  Their characters are humans in a live-action story – along with one dog named Jasper - set in a world where a cataclysmic virus has decimated humanity.  The year is 2035, and the few who survived this unknown flu-like tidal wave must fight to continue their individual existences. 

Scott’s film – based on Peter Heller’s 2012 novel – feels like a combination of few genres.  “The Dog Stars” carries the primal, rabid danger of “28 Days Later” (2002) and “The Road Warrior” (1981), pays homage to classic westerns where an isolated ranch can always be vulnerable to strangers, like in “The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976), and wades into a deliberately casual pace where the leads try to find meaning in their current state of affairs, such as in “The Postman” (1997). 

The threats are horribly real, but they appear in a few different forms from the aforementioned genres.  It’s tricky to pin down the nature of the antagonists.  Some act zombie-like or are first cousins to the maniacs from “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015).  Additionally, an aggressive, but not fanatical, assembly rides on horseback, and filmmakers conjure a couple of other villainous twists, so it’s a bit confusing.  

However, if Scott, Heller, and screenwriter Mark L. Smith wanted to communicate that peril can appear in any form, then mission accomplished.  

Meanwhile, the protagonists attempt some semblance of normalcy with a few creature comforts and try to avoid the said creatures. 

You see, food, electricity, gasoline, and medical supplies are worth more than their weight in gold (that is, if any modern currency existed).  One would stand a better chance of winning a pre-pandemic Powerball windfall than discovering a bottle of penicillin.  

If one possessed such a medicinal luxury, then prepare to face the ongoing problem of keeping it.  Outsiders could burst into view or silently sneak onsite, shoot you and your loved ones dead, and then rob you blind while they step over your corpses.   

Hig (Jacob Elordi) and Bangley (Josh Brolin) are on constant high alert, as the two pals live on an abandoned multi-acreage airfield in rural Erie, Colo.

(The film is set in Colorado, but cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt films gorgeous mountainous rigor in Italy.)

Bangley, a pragmatist, frequently perches from a tower as a sniper. 

“Shoot first and never ask questions” could be Bangley’s motto.  

Hig had a pragmatic occupation before life went to hell.  He was a mechanic and a pilot.  

Still, Hig is an idealist at heart and wonders if life could be better outside his and his pal’s discouraging but effective reality, especially when he occasionally communicates with a friendly voice in Grand Junction, a town just over 250 miles away. 

“The Dog Stars” street cred leans into the actors championing their characters.  

Hig and Bangley share a congenial “The Odd Couple” vibe, and Pops (Guy Pearce) and Cima (Margaret Qualley) are a welcome sight for Hig and the audience, as this father/daughter team doesn’t share Bangley’s decree.  Although, Pops patience towards strangers has been worn thin – off-screen – in recent years.  His trigger finger could prove itchy if provoked.  

Still, he hopes for peace, but Pops protects Cima and their spot of nirvana, as she attempts to balance a positive outlook while coping with a painful backstory.  Curiously, Hig’s upsetting history – which Scott and Elordi frequently revisit - did not resonate as much as Cima’s 60-second mention.  Still, these two survivors’ past experiences do effectively draw them together. 

This critic cared about these characters, and Scott’s and editors Sam Restivo and Claire Simpons’ choices to spend long stretches in casual, everyday moments of grace that are sometimes interrupted by unpredictable violence made the 118-minute runtime seem regrettably too short.  This is especially true when those same filmmakers wrapped up the third act too quickly, as if they were under some unforgiving edict of limiting the film to a two-hour theatrical runtime.   

Wanting “The Dog Stars” to run longer is a good sign, and while the cinematic stars do not perfectly align, the performances and pacing make this post-apocalyptic tale worth a look. 

Jeff’s ranking

2.5 / 4 stars

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“Mutiny” – Movie Review

Directed by:  Jean-Francois Richet

Written by:  Lindsay Michel and J.P. Davis

Starring:  Jason Statham, Annabelle Wallis, Ramon Tikaram, Roland Moller, Adrian Lester, Chaneil Kular, and Simon Kluth

Runtime:  87 minutes

‘Mutiny’ doesn’t stay afloat

In “Mutiny”, Cole Reed (Jason Statham) leads a one-man uprising on a cargo ship, called the Artemis, against a crew of 20 (plus one captain and an additional small group of newcomers).  For anyone who has enjoyed Statham – a Bona fide action-movie star – raise fisticuffs and firearms fury against a collection of baddies before, one knows that the antagonists are in deep trouble.  Yes, deep trouble of the ocean-depth kind, especially since director Jean-Francois Richet’s and screenwriters Lindsay Michel and J.P. Davis’ movie is primarily set on the said vessel that sails from the Gulf of Thailand and then somewhere into the great beyond. 

For diehard Statham fans, “Mutiny” navigates a chance to see the ever-ready, British-born bruiser dispose of villains in the most merciless manner, including Cole utilizing a pair of handy props readily found on a boat as deadly weapons.  

Granted, Richet and the writers conjure up four or five kills that will elicit audible exclamations from movie theatre audiences, but there are not enough of these gleefully violent moments to offset the paper-thin, cliché revenge plot.  

“Mutiny” feels like the filmmakers’ sole goal is to simply ask Jason to do his thing (i.e., dispense brutality) at sea during a shallow 87-minute runtime (according to this critic’s watch), which he does, as opposed to on land or in the air.

After a brief opening scene – that could be a flashback or flashforward – the film’s next couple of minutes show Mr. Reed scouting out a skyscraper’s lobby, located in Bangkok, Thailand, for potential trouble.  He works for Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram), the head of KMG, a leader in the shipping industry.  Cole, a former police officer, now works as Tibu’s head of security.  Still, Cole is more than an employee.  Tibu thinks of him as family!  This billionaire-and-bodyguard family/friendship is legit. 

Cole would lay his life on the line for Tibu, and Mr. Reed is put to the test during the first act.  Mercenaries ambush Cole and Tibu on Bangkok’s streets with an avalanche of gunfire.  Let’s not divulge if KMG’s CEO passes away or not, but Cole effectively shoots back.  After the ruckus abruptly ends, Cole seeks to discover who attempted to murder his employer/friend/figurative kin.

One of the gun-popping scoundrels is a crewman for a KMG ship.  You don’t say!  Since the aforementioned outlaw is bald, Cole decides to assume his identity, board the ship, and do some police work!  

Although Cole doesn’t take advantage of his follically-challenged condition and inexplicably wears a hat when trying to board.  Why?  Perhaps, he wears a ballcap to hide his appearance because the crewmates know his alter ego?  It’s a bit confusing. 

What’s not confusing is that Cole attempts to mow down the crew, including Captain Marko Madsen (Roland Moller), especially after Mr. Reed discovers that the ship is being used for human trafficking.  

Luckily, Cole finds an ally in the form of the ship’s third mate, Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis), who is a recent KMG hire and not at all part of the crew’s nefarious plans.  Cole and Angie are outraged over this unconscionable development, and Ms. Ellis states that there are a few dozen victims on board.  But Richet and cinematographer Brendan Galvin’s camera never shows more than about a dozen (at the very most, and it’s more like nine) unfortunate souls that are held in one shipping container.

Obviously, one victim is too many, but this is a massive ship, and one would think that Angie’s math and the number of actual individuals would agree or at least land within the same ballpark.

Despite Angie’s (or the filmmakers’) challenges with calculations, she and Cole make a positive, workable team.  The film adds a few mentions of Angie’s daughter waiting at home to help gain our sympathy, but Angie is physically capable in a fight and seems to have learned some weapons training in the past.  Still, Cole does most of the killing, while Marko repeatedly jumps on the walkie-talkie and orders his men – who might as well be cardboard cutouts - to finish the job with this stowaway, but when it comes to slaying a Statham action-hero character, well…good luck! 

The crew members feel disposable, and so does the story, and Statham’s four or five particularly vicious kills over almost 90 minutes doesn’t make for a worthwhile theatrical experience.  

Admittedly, Statham and Tikaram share some nice foundational moments that develop a palpable on-screen bond with their characters, but Cole’s eventual trek to jettison around a ship – where we often don’t realize where he is in relation to the bridge - to eliminate the degenerate crew is about as paint-by-numbers as it gets, and the color is a dull gray. 

Cole is all business but doesn’t possess a colorful personality.  He could have used Adam Clay’s (Statham) lines from “The Beekeeper” (2024), a Statham action-hero vehicle, which frequently causes smiles (or eye rolls, depending on your perspective) when he says the following puns in relation to the movie’s title: 

“Sometimes, when the hive is out of balance, you have to replace the queen.”

“When someone hurts an older person, sometimes they’re left to face the hornets alone.”

“I need to take care of the hive.”

“Mutiny” doesn’t really have any dialogue sweeteners, as noted with Stratham’s 2024 film, and unfortunately, the human trafficking element doesn’t pull on our heartstrings like it should, even though the script – a couple of times - refers to a little girl needing medical attention.   

Well, by paying a little attention, you can decipher the ultimate reason for the attempted assassination of Tibu eons before it’s revealed in the third act, and it’s about as predictable as a proficient ship successfully mastering buoyancy. 

Unfortunately, the movie has problems with buoyancy.  “Mutiny” sinks. 

Jeff’s ranking

1.5 / 4 stars

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Movie Review - "Tony"

Directed by: Matt Johnson.

Written by: Matt Johnson, Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, and Matthew Miller. 

Starring: Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, and Emilia Jones. 

Runtime: 106 minutes

Anthony Bourdain biopic ‘Tony’ will have audiences asking for seconds

I’m ready to call it: Dominic Sessa is a star.

The 23-year-old actor returns with a headlining role and proves his winning performance in 2023’s surprise Christmastime charmer “The Holdovers” was no one-off. The stakes are higher here, wish Sessa slipping into the role of beloved and dearly missed celebrity gourmand, writer, and connoisseur of life, Anthony Bourdain.

“Tony” sticks to Bourdain’s early years, taking inspiration from his 2000 memoir “Kitchen Confidential” to offer a portrait of the artist as a young man at a crossroads: Will he end up just another college dropout with thwarted literary ambitions, toiling unseen in kitchens until his body gives out under the strain and drug use, or will he chart his own path outside the narrow confines offered him? 

Sessa’s Tony has plenty of dreams, he just can’t see how to reach them. A wry, rangy boy in a Stooges T-shirt with “A Clockwork Orange” poster on his bedroom wall, Tony wants to be the next Hunter S. Thompson, a writer with literary chops and no respect for the establishment. But he needs the establishment’s support: an unserious Vassar student, he applies for a cushy writing fellowship that would send him to New York City to craft what he’s certain will be the Great American Novel, if only someone would recognize his genius. 

Alas, it’s not to be the fellowship committee at Vassar, which soundly rejects his proposal, leaving Tony in a lurch, as he cannot bear to tell his family of his failure – nor can he bear to tell Nancy (Emilia Jones), his high school crush whom he’s desperate to impress. So, in a fit of desperate impulsivity, he tells a fib, claiming to have gotten the fellowship, and unbeknownst to Nancy, follows her to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she’s spending the summer. 

He’s got no money, and he’s got no plan, but a drunken, angsty night at local seafood joint The Flagship lands him an unglamorous job washing dishes. Scrubbing butter and clam juice in an industrial sink is quite the tumble from Vassar and an all-expenses-paid writing fellowship in New York City, but it’s in this cramped, greasy kitchen that Tony finds what he was so desperately missing. 

Like a familiar, well-made dish you’ve eaten a thousand times before, “Tony” satisfies. It hits the predictable beats of a coming-of-age story: there’s the girl of his dreams, just out of reach; the bad boy sidekick and poor influence, Sal (Leo Woodall), a fellow restaurant worker with a cocaine habit who takes him under his wing; and most importantly, there’s his reluctant mentor, the Flagship chef (Antonio Banderas) who teaches Tony that food and its preparation is about so much more than mere sustenance, even as he himself has forgotten that truth. Banderas is wonderful, by the way, mysterious and reserved but as hinting of depth as the ocean; I’d happily watch a whole second film just about him. 

It feels greedy, then, to wish that “Tony” was a touch less pleasing. As beloved as Bourdain was and as missed as he is since his death by suicide in 2018, he was a complicated man, imperfect and foul-mouthed with the kind of rock star swagger and disregard for niceties that characterized so many of the artists he openly admired. “Tony” is a perfectly charming movie, but is “perfectly charming” what we want from an Anthony Bourdain movie? 

Maybe. Death has a way of gilding memories in gold, and “Tony” has such shine to it. Who knows what Bourdain would think of this cuddly depiction of himself, but one has to imagine him pleased with its understanding of kitchens as a place of community, its cooks a band of brothers in the trenches of social life.

Barbara’s ranking

3/4 stars

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“Nimrods” – Movie Review

Directed by:  Lee Kirk

Written by:  Lee Kirk and Green Day

Starring:  Mason Thames, Kylr Coffman, Ryan Foust, Jenna Fischer, Mckenna Grace, Keen Ruffalo, Ignacio Diaz-Silverio, Billie Joe Armstrong, Tre Cool, and Mike Dirnt

Runtime:  107 minutes

‘Nimrods’ is a fun road-trip flick that celebrates freewheeling, hazardous teen id

Tommy (Mason Thames), Fred (Kylr Coffman), and Chad (Ryan Foust) are suburban high school kids who escape from their realities with their punk band, Analog Dogs.  

Now, their lives in Kansas City are not dreadful nightmares or anything.  The boys have “normal” existences and work through scholastic drudgeries like other teens.  Although Tommy – the guitar player and lead singer – lost his dad.  Tommy, his mom, Jodi (Jenna Fischer), and his older brother, Wayne (Keen Ruffalo), miss him terribly, but the band is a glorious garage-gathering pastime.      

The rock trio shares groovy chemistry when they play and offers playful adolescent banter when not picking or strumming guitars (Tommy and Fred) or striking the drums (Chad), including Tommy scolding Chad for arriving at practice on time, as he explains that punk-band artists should show up late!  

Come on, Chad.  Get with the program!  

They have serious dreams of filling and rocking arenas someday but do not possess the know-how or the funds to reach a rock-and-roll promised land.  However, their fortunes dramatically change when Green Day stops in KC during their tour, and the high schoolers mistakenly believe that GD invited Analog Dogs to open for them at the Hollywood Palladium in La La Land on New Year’s Eve.   

(For the record, the Palladium is a fabulous venue!)

This is Analog Dog’s path, and director/co-writer Lee Kirk’s “Nimrods” is a fun road-trip flick that celebrates freewheeling, hazardous teen id with frank humor and superb buddy vibes from our young actor trinity.

For three 17-year-olds – with only $27 and no car keys in their pockets and zero adult life experience - traveling 1,620 miles from KC to LA seems as unimaginable as stumbling upon a rocket ship and flying it to Mars, but our heroes attempt to find a way. 

I mean, Tommy, Fred, and Chad will open for Green Day!   Well, they believe it anyway.

“Nimrods” channels the goofy hijinks of Todd Phillips’ “Road Trip” (2000) with the impossibilities of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’ tour in Peter Farrelly’s “Dumb and Dumber” (1994).  Granted, Thames, Coffman, and Foust don’t reach the comedic heights of the stars in Farrelly’s all-time classic comedy.  However, they embrace a close collaborative comic harmony as Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse did in “Superbad” (2007).  

Tommy – as the lead singer - is the leader of the troupe, while Fred frequently applies fuzzy logic, and Chad attempts to be the constant voice of reason.  Their dynamic elicits belly laughs and smiles throughout the picture, including when Fred attempts to pool their funds together at a diner, overindulges in hallucinogens, and causes a gasoline mishap.  

These boys try their absolute best to reach the Left Coast while dodging parental figures back home and on-the-road perils in front of them.  Tommy, Fred, and Chad have less than a week to get to Cali, and Kirk often feeds the audience with the days on the calendar on the big screen, giving us a countdown to the kids’ potential glory or doom, but we have no idea the individual cities in which they encounter.  The screenplay doesn’t provide a map of their progress, and that works just fine. 

The movie’s location management department and cinematographer David Robert Jones seem to always present a setting in some Nowhereland that feels like either a Midwestern Burning Man or a lonely small-town exit off Highways 335 or 40.  Our heroes barely know where they are located, and the audience feels this driving-by-the-seat-of-their-pants tone as well.  

However, Tommy, Fred, and Chad don’t carry all the screen time alone, as Kirk and the casting department hired complementary supporting actors to share the runtime who meaningfully add emotional and amusing elements to the journey.  Mckenna Grace gives a charming performance as a potential love interest, and Ruffalo builds tangible brotherly moments with Thames.  Meanwhile, one of Fischer’s “The Office” (2005-2013) co-stars delivers a memorable cameo, and a pair of Gen X comedians pop in out of nowhere to successfully lend their hilarious gifts to the film’s cause.  

Speaking of causes, Green Day legends Billie Joe Armstrong, Tre Cool, and Mike Dirnt make on-screen appearances through grounded everyday discourse and music!  

This flick is a labor of love for Green Day, as the band has writing credits for the movie.  It’s based on an initial idea from Billie Joe, and Kirk spoke with the Northern California band about their real-life adventures on the road as inspiration for Tommy, Fred, and Chad’s trek.  

“Nimrods” is a must-see for Green Day fans, and it lands with a similar pronounced cinematic punch as “I Love You, Man” (2009) did for RUSH fans, and full disclosure, I love both bands.   Still, you don’t have to be a Green Day fanatic to enjoy this entertaining ride. 

“Do you have the time” to catch “Nimrods”?   Well, I recommend making the time.  

Jeff’s ranking

3 / 4 stars

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"The End of Oak Street" - Movie Review

Directed by: David Robert Mitchell

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Anne Hathaway, Christian Convery, Maisy Stella

Run Time: 1h 39m

David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street wears its vintage Amblin inspirations on its sleeve, pulling straight from the late-80s and early-90s playbook of Steven Spielberg and Joe Dante. Think the spectacle of Jurassic Park, the scrappy charm of The Goonies, and the mean streak of Gremlins. The premise is pure pulp science fiction: an ordinary suburban neighborhood is plucked from the grid and dropped into an untamed prehistoric jungle, with a smoldering volcano in the backdrop! It’s a throwback sci-fi premise that balances domestic stakes against sudden, lethal creature mayhem.

Before the first dinosaur even enters the frame, the Platt family is already in freefall. Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise (Anne Hathaway) are quietly tiptoeing around an impending divorce. He copes by avoiding conflict at all costs; she leans on realistic expectations while writing a book in her basement that longs for the life choices she abandoned. Their kids, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), read the room better than their parents realize, absorbing the silence that fills the halls and the fights that echo through the thin walls. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell sets this up with inspired visual choices, incorporating the picture-perfect family structure with an adorable dog amid glowing streetlamps in a charming neighborhood, thrilling creature creations that sustain suspense, and even a crisp split-diopter framing that traps the couple’s emotional distance in sharp focus. It all works in building an aesthetic that feels safe, perfect for unexpected shocks when the neighborhood is turned upside down. 

The film's most fascinating, and jarring, quality is Mitchell’s willingness to get vicious. This isn't a sanitized family adventure. The dinosaur encounters hit hard and fast, occasionally lingering on the brutal, prolonged fates of unlucky neighbors. That violence leads to wild tonal swings that feel straight out of 1980s genre cinema; one minute a raptor pack is tearing through backyard swing sets, and the next, Greg and Denise are giggling at the mating rituals of two long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs. It’s distracting and, at times, absurd, but also entertaining; the film maintains a narrative that is consistently trying to keep the audience uneasy at every turn. The creature designs, a pleasant surprise also, lean heavily into contemporary paleontology, with feathered raptors, a slithering Titanoboa, and tiny herbivores that feel genuinely threatening.

The time-traveling mechanics behind the jump make almost no sense, and individual character beats occasionally get steamrolled to get the cast to the next set piece. But the cast carries the weight. McGregor and Hathaway give the marital friction real texture, moving naturally from terrified protectors to exhausted spouses clinging to what’s left of their bond. The neighborhood's monsters embody their relationship: destructive, in a state of survival, and leaving a trail of hurt people in their wake. Maisy Stella and Christian Convery also nail the sibling dynamic, trading aggressive banter before snapping into fierce cooperative survival mode when the moment breaks.

The End of Oak Street prioritizes audacity over much of its logic, just like many of the big summer popcorn movies that came before it. It’s inventive, messy, and surprisingly aggressive in all the right, surprising ways. It’s a summer creature feature that recaptures the eccentric magic of the classics it borrows from.

Monte’s Rating

3.00 out of 5.00

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“Olmo” – Movie Review

Directed by:  Fernando Eimbcke

Written by:  Fernando Eimbcke and Vanesa Garnica

Starring:  Aivan Uttapa, Diego Olmedo, Andrea Suarez Paz, Rosa Armendariz, Melanie Frometa, and Gustavo Sanchez Parra

Runtime:  79 minutes

‘Olmo’ is an engaging, empathetic 1970s coming-of-age tale with timeless and rare teenage challenges  

“Why change your shirt?  Why even get dressed at all?” – Olmo (Aivan Uttapa) says to his father, Nestor (Gustavo Sanchez Parra)

Olmo is a struggling teenager.  This 14-year-old isn’t old enough to drive or secure a job that would merit a proper income.  He daydreams about Nina (Melanie Frometa), the girl across the street, but with zero dating experience, Olmo hasn’t mastered the art of boy-girl conversation to win her over.  

His family has money issues looming over their head, while Olmo’s dad is immobilized and cannot work.  Olmo’s mom, Cecilia (Andrea Suarez Paz), and his older sister, Ana (Rosa Armendariz), manage Nestor’s care at home.  Our teenage lead is asked to pitch in now and then, but suddenly, he’s asked to help now.  

(Thankfully, Olmo can turn to his best friend, Miguel (Diego Olmedo), for solace, or as much as this fellow teen can muster.) 

However, a ray of sunshine cuts through the malaise and beams down on our adolescent hero when Nina requires Olmo’s immediate assistance.  How about that?

She needs a stereo to bring to a party and says to Olmo and Miguel, “So if there’s no stereo, there’s no party.  Could you lend me your stereo?”

Finally, Olmo has found a way to potentially capture Nina’s heart through resourcefulness, while he and Miguel can party the night away!   How will our hero make out…and will he make out with Nina?  

This is the plot of director/co-writer Fernando Eimbcke’s “Olmo”, an engaging coming-of-age indie that’s set in southern New Mexico during the 1970s, a time when Gen X kids could not temporarily scroll their troubles away for a few minutes at a time on social media or search for solutions on Google or YouTube.  During the 1970s, one was left to their own devices, imaginations, and nearby immediate means to solve problems and answer questions. 

Teenage years are already difficult to navigate, and Eimbcke throws the added hurdle the size of the 8,900’ Organ Needle in front of Olmo:  his dad’s medical problems.  

Not at the very, very beginning, but extremely early into the first act, Eimbcke (“Duck Season” (2004), “Lake Tahoe” (2008), “Club Sandwich” (2013)) launches the audience into the aforementioned (nearly) 9,000’ difficulty, where dreams of bliss are trodden with reality.  

This introduction earns empathy for Olmo, Nina, and Cecilia, but for Nestor most of all.  Parra lives and breathes Nestor’s despair and frustration of his bedridden condition.  He’s a man who can no longer support his family, and every molecule of his thin frame and despondent gaze exclaims hopelessness.  Parra’s Nestor floods the screen with this gloomy tone, and it’s up to the other three kin to lift the home’s spirits and raise economic sustenance.  

Since Olmo is in line within this domestic patriarchy, he feels the weight on his narrow adolescent shoulders.  

So, a party nirvana with Nina is the godsend he didn’t even know was a possibility until she asked Miguel and him that momentous question.  

Of course, our hero faces shirking his responsibility, breaking a rule or two, and figuratively tripping over his lack-of-life-experience blind spots to reach the promised festivities, as writers Eimbcke and Vanesa Garnica scribe moral tests for Olmo and Miguel to confront during the second and third acts.  

“Olmo” has a “Superbad” (2007)-like premise with a quirky, small-town “Napoleon Dynamite” (2004) production design and on-location vibe.  Eimbcke’s movie doesn’t reach the comedic heights and associated performances of those previously mentioned 21st-century classics and iconic casts.  

It’s a dramedy with plenty more drama than comedy, but “Olmo” hooks you straight away with its premise and establishes an irresistible will to follow the title character on his hopeful and faulty journey while also wishing happy endings for his three family members too.  

Eimbcke doesn’t (seem to) ask Uttapa and Olmedo to do too much other than embrace the characters and follow their on-screen alter egos on this winding path, which is all the two young actors need to grant audience buy-in.  The most memorable performances are a pair of supporting ones.  Armendariz demands a non-negotiable emotional distance with everyone within Ana’s sight, and Parra heroically hoists Nestor’s burden that resonates like a magical spell both on-screen and off-screen.  

Although “Olmo” doesn’t rely on magic.  With a family facing so much reality, the film’s authenticity, a catchy soundtrack, and flashes of hope can reward those who get dressed, change their shirt, and seek out Olmo journey and his timeless and rare teenage challenges.

Jeff’s ranking

2.5 / 4 stars

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“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” – Movie Review

Directed by:  Destin Daniel Cretton

Written by:  Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers

Starring:  Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Mark Ruffalo, Jon Bernthal, Liza Colon-Zayas, Tramell Tillman, and Sadie Sink

Runtime:  145 minutes

‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ feels like a busy yet uneventful Monday 

“I will remember you.  Will you remember me?” – Sarah McLachlan (1995)

During the last act of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021), Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) casts a spell so that Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is wiped away from everyone’s memories, including Peter’s girlfriend, MJ (Zendaya), and best friend, Ned (Jacob Batalon).  

New York City residents (as well as inhabitants all over the planet) continue to recall and rely on Spider-Man, but no one can recollect a teenage Peter Parker.   

It’s a brand-new perspective for a suddenly anonymous Peter Parker, and this is where “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” picks up.  MJ and Ned move away to Boston to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Peter dives, sprints, and swings into his work as your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, cleaning up New York City while in frequent communication with Detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colon-Zayas).  

During the film’s first act, Spidey works overtime chasing down criminals - like Scorpion (Michael Mando), Tombstone (Marvin Jones III), and more – with some exciting urban battles.  These snippets and montages feel like odes to the old-school Spider-Man comics, and director Destin Daniel Cretton and cinematographer Brett Pawlak capture some stunning first-person imagery, especially when Peter hangs upside-down from a girder and simply drops (maybe) 80 floors before shooting out one of his trusty webs.  

Before you can say, “My Spidey-senses are tingling,” it’s four years later, and MJ and Ned have moved back to NYC and are ready to take on the world after school, while Peter continues his nonstop days and evenings fighting crime and tending to his constant array of cuts and bruises.  

Will Peter reconnect with his old girlfriend and BFF?  

This plot point becomes the emotional center for “Brand New Day”, as Cretton (“Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings” (2021) and “Short Term 12” (2013)) grabs the webs…err, reins of Holland’s fourth Spider-Man film.  

Writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (who co-wrote all four Holland Spidey flicks) scribe plenty of mental strife for Spidey.  Mr. Parker learns to cope without friends or family as a support system, ponders a possible reunion with MJ and Ned, wrestles with the long hours while taking a constant physical beating on The Big Apple’s streets, suddenly deals with new physiological changes to his body (What?), and investigates the mystery of an unknown villain frequently attacking a research agency called Damage Control headed by William Metzger (Tramell Tillman). 

Holland spins his best, most nuanced performance as Peter in the series with moments of self-reflection, tending to his wounds, and facing MJ and Ned as the MIT grads have no high school memories of him at all, and Tom is there for all of it.  And why not?  He’s been playing this role since “Captain America: Civil War” (2016), and his on-screen Peter carries the heft of years of baggage, including Aunt May’s (Marisa Tomei) death.  Tom and Zendaya share obvious chemistry in all their on-screen moments.  Surely, life as a real-life couple has its advantages.  Tom and Jacob share some glimpses into their on-screen former bestie status.  

Unfortunately, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” sometimes feels like we’re slogging through a two-and-a-half-hour therapy session.  Normally, superhero inner conflicts can work exceedingly well to add indispensable character development.  For example, just turn to Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) facing their struggles in “Guardians of the Galaxy” (2014) and “Avengers: Endgame” (2019), respectively.  

“Guardians” and “Endgame”, however, have compelling stories with gigantic stakes, like Ronan (Lee Pace) acquiring the power stone and attempting to destroy an entire planet and the Avengers trying to reverse Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) universe-shaking snap from “Avengers: Infinity War” (2018).  

“Brand New Day” takes an altogether different approach.  Cretton, McKenna, and Sommers introduce a mystery villain, the individual behind the aforementioned Damage Control attacks.  It’s up to Spider-Man to act as a detective and reveal the big baddie.  Obviously, one doesn’t need an interplanetary battle in a Spider-Man movie, but the film’s second largest conflict – where Spidey plays Sherlock Holmes – is flawed.  Even though the actual disclosure is a take-your-breath-away moment, the resolution in the third act is a letdown for reasons that will not be revealed in this review.  Sigh.   

Once one knows the revelation and the played-out events afterward, the film’s rewatch factor is infinitesimal compared to “No Way Home”, a movie with countless big moments that absolutely earned its 1.9 billion-dollar take in theatres. 

Granted, the stunt, visual effects, and special effects departments do draw up some sticky situations and glorious superhero skirmishes, including Spidey’s tangled on-again/off-again alliance with Punisher (Jon Bernthal) and some intriguing scenes with Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and his alter-ego, Hulk.  Bernthal and Ruffalo should star in every MCU movie.  Oh, let’s not forget that Peter’s DNA is changing too!   There’s a lot to unpack here.  

Despite Holland’s and the supporting cast’s worthy thespian efforts, the overall film is the least satisfying in the series.  Rather than resolving all the given questions, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” feels like a busy yet uneventful Monday while the MCU schedules the next day’s movie. 

Then again, your enjoyment of “Brand New Day” could be directly proportional to your investment in Peter, MJ, and Ned over the three previous movies since 2017.  Maybe that’s enough.  Maybe not.  

Either way, we do remember their friendship and “weep not for the memories.” 

Jeff’s ranking

2 / 4 stars

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