FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Abd Alkader Habak and Janay Boulos in Birds of War

Hot Docs ’26: Birds of War

May 2, 20262026, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Lebanon, Syria, UK

***/****
directed by Janay Boulos & Abd Alkader Habak

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers It’s 2016. Aleppo is under siege. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has banned journalists to stymie coverage of his atrocities, so BBC reporter Janay Boulos, a London transplant from Lebanon, contacts Syrian videographer Abd Alkader, a.k.a. Habak, for boots-on-the-ground footage. The fomenting Syrian revolution inspired Habak to pick up a camera and document what he was seeing in the early 2010s. Branded an activist, he fled his humble village in Idlib for the ostensible security of Aleppo, which soon came under attack from Russian and Syrian forces. Habak resumed filming. Janay hears a rumour that Aleppo residents are growing food on their rooftops. Habak gets her video proving it, and the BBC posts it on their website. Eventually, Eastern Aleppo is evacuated. Habak returns to Idlib, another war zone. He reaches out to Janay, pitching her ideas for other human interest stories that highlight Syrian resilience.

Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson as a zombie in Thriller in Michael: "Yeah, you can totally tell he's had work done"

Michael (2026)

April 27, 20262026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jaafar Jackson, Nia Long, Miles Teller, Colman Domingo
written by John Logan
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw I didn’t want to review Michael because talking about this film recognizes this film. I wonder, though, if not talking about it also validates it, in the way you’re trained to be quiet about uncomfortable things when you’re a minority. It’s a tough position to be put in, particularly because the people putting others in this position are the ones who should be called to the carpet for their lazy ignorance and/or malicious bad faith. Shitty, broken people have a habit of scrambling the basic morality of everyone in their orbit. I’m speaking not of whether Michael Jackson was a serial predator who targeted young boys–a charge that dogged him for the last decades of his life, leading to a string of settlements and a highly publicized and scatalogically intimate trial–but rather of the dishonesty involved in creating a hagiography for one of the most galvanizing, indeed polarizing, figures in pop-cultural history by pretending none of that happened. That he was a transformative figure is undeniable, a transcendent talent who spent much of his social capital on songs that yearned to heal rifts between the races. He was one of one. That his legacy is tainted is similarly undeniable. If director Antoine Fuqua’s focus were Bill Cosby, this film would be about his success as the “I Spy” hero, kid-show icon, and pudding salesman and end right when the curtain rises on that first episode of “The Cosby Show”. If it were about Polanski, it’d stop at the premiere of Rosemary’s Baby.

Black Zombie still featuring a Black man in white drawing circles in chalk on the floor of a dark, cavernous room

Hot Docs ’26: Black Zombie

April 25, 20262026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Maya Annik Bedward

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Late in Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie, a cross-cultural survey of the zombie in Haitian folklore and horror cinema, a Vodou priest who’s served as an authenticity expert throughout the film derisively summarizes Western imaginations of West African culture as a history of voyeurism. “I hope this isn’t that,” he says of Bedward’s documentary, whose title explicitly subverts Victor Halperin’s 1932 pre-code horror film White Zombie, a foundational colonial narrative of white innocence besieged by the ostensibly monstrous threat of Blackness, and whose intellectual project seeks to dismantle that film’s corrosive source text, William Seabrook’s Haitian travelogue The Magic Island, which exported the zombie and Vodou to the West as figures of exotic superstition. A rigorous if somewhat segmented essay on the colonial violence inherent in the horror genre’s extraction of West African beliefs, Bedward’s work easily clears this admittedly modest bar. Though it will read a bit introductory for historians of the Haitian resistance movement, French colonialism, and genre cinema, it’s nevertheless a formally engaging and provocative piece that effectively re-situates the zombie in the context from which it’s been extracted: the belief among enslaved Haitian plantation workers that death might return their spirits to their ancestral home in Ghana, while further violence at the hands of colonial administrators and their proxies might render them zombies, undead and hopelessly rooted on the colony for the rest of their days.

Picture of a sarcophagus: "If Lee Cronin's The Mummy, who's the Daddy?"

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026)

April 24, 20262026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Ireland, Spain, Theatrical

The Mummy
***½/****
starring Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace
written and directed by Lee Cronin

by Walter Chaw Lee Cronin’s The Mummy feels like a lost Chicho Ibáñez Serrador joint, the completion of a loose trilogy (with Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? and The House That Screamed) comprising tough, thorny horrors centred on irresolvable grief and the excruciating suffering of children. The bulk of it even takes place in an old dark house like the one in The House That Screamed, and features one of Serrador’s countrywomen, Spanish actor Laia Costa, as half of an expat couple living in Cairo. Costa’s Larissa is pregnant. Her husband Charlie (Jack Reynor) is a journalist. They’ve been in the country for five months with their offspring, Katie (Emily Mitchell, then Natalie Grace as the older version (both are phenomenal)) and Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams, then Shylo Molina)–still resident aliens at a stressful moment in their lives. The theme of familial upheaval and unrest is the first of many teeming anthills The Mummy kicks over. (I almost want to say “literal cans of worms,” because the picture’s so overstuffed with disgusting images.) Another is the strain on a marriage when a child is lost, and the similarly unique strain when that child is recovered and requires constant supervision and care. Katie, see, is abducted. She’s the princess fair, the quarry of an evil witch. She’s spirited away through crowded city streets as her father gives chase. But Charlie’s hampered by supernatural interference. His vision narrows and he gets confused. And just like that, Katie’s gone.

Larry Fessenden glowering at us in a leather jacket: "Larry stories to tell in the dark"

Trauma or, Monsters All (2026)

April 21, 20262026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Horror, Theatrical, Vampire, Werewolf

***½/****
starring Laëtitia Hollard, Aitana Doyle, Addison Timlin, James Le Gros
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw There’s an immediacy to Larry Fessenden’s films, a lack of any intermediary between his characters and the viewer that can be exquisitely uncomfortable. Stories told through peepholes, they can feel like plays performed in a small venue, an intimate encounter ever threatening to spill over into the crowd. Credit his immersive, often suffocating sound design, an expertise demonstrated lately in his radio side project, “Tales from Beyond the Pale.” (I first saw Fessenden’s Habit on VHS, and the audio on its recent 4K upgrade is a revelation.) Credit also, of course, his sober, mature scripts, which deal with childhood, memory, and fear through the prism of fully formed, imperfect characters trapped in the amber of trauma that can’t be exorcised. For Fessenden, horror exists at the place where the visceral intersects with the philosophical–where the meat meets the mind. What happens to one when the other begins to develop fissures? When hairline cracks develop and let the sadness in? Consider the little boy (Erik Per Sullivan) in Fessenden’s masterful Wendigo, who learns one terrible winter that the shadow at the bottom of the stairs sometimes sees you even if you leap quietly, so quietly, across the top, where the light from the entryway paints a white square like a lepidopterist’s frame. Fessenden’s films are all variations on that species of terror, that variety of loneliness: its beginnings and endings and the long half-life in between, where fear metastasizes in unpredictable ways. He is a poet of the hard truth that being by yourself is the essential human condition.

Coel and McKellen in a cozy little room, McKellen standing in a doorway wearing a jean jacket: "Now I’m Gandalf the Denim."

The Christophers (2026)

April 18, 20262026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, UK

***/****
starring Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, James Corden, Jessica Gunning
written by Ed Solomon
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda “It wasn’t very good, that last one,” retired octogenarian visual artist Julian Sklar says of his most recent piece in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers. It’s tempting to read the self-deprecating remark, written by Ed Solomon and delivered with caustic wit by the 86-year-old Ian McKellen (here embracing his irascible old icon era in a role purpose-built for him), as a pithy meta-commentary on Soderbergh’s own low-stakes late period. Whatever one thinks of the video gamey perspective-play horror of Presence or the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-inflected couples spy therapy of Black Bag, Soderbergh needn’t make any excuses for The Christophers. It’s a puckish, intellectually rigorous two-hander about art, criticism, and influence that goes down as easily as his pop hits but lingers in the rearview like his deeper dramatic experiments.

Jeremy Irons smoking and looking officious in Palestine '36: "An Irons curtain has descended across the continent"

Palestine ’36 (2026)

April 3, 20262026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Denmark, Drama, France, Jordan, Norway, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UK, War

***/****
starring Hiam Abbas, Karim Daoud Anaya, Yasmine Al Massri, Jeremy Irons
written and directed by Annemarie Jacir

by Angelo Muredda “A new page in history is written today,” a stodgy Englishman pronounces at a launch for the first state-sponsored radio broadcast in so-called Mandatory Palestine early on in Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine ’36. Although the boast is met with eye-rolls from the few well-to-do Palestinians in the mostly colonial British audience, one of whom jokes to her partner that “this is the part where they elevate us,” the line ironically serves as a good encapsulation of Jacir’s project to make something significant and new out of a familiar form. A mainstream historical epic that hits its dramatic beats with energy if not freshness, and which demonstrates classical filmmaking chops if not revolutionary aesthetics, Palestine ’36 can’t help but feel like a turning of the page in spite of its modest aesthetic choices. In the frankness with which it dramatizes the Great Revolt of the late 1930s against the British occupation and its military support for the Zionist project, the film is a rebuke to the representational lacunae that make up Western depictions of the history of the Middle East and the Palestinian liberation movement, which usually gets barely named at all.

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson in The Drama: "Resistance is futile"

The Drama (2026)

April 3, 20262026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Alana Haim, Mamadou Athie
written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli

by Angelo Muredda SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The high-concept marital satire of Force Majeure meets the prosaic celebrity home tours of ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST in Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama, a dark comedy about a promising young couple undone on the eve of their wedding by a revelation from childhood. The film follows in the tradition of Borgli’s earlier works like Dream Scenario and Sick of Myself, which revel in the destructive force of abrupt, foundation-shaking status shifts between partners in a relationship. It’s good to have a thematic calling card, and The Drama expertly mines the talents of its cast where the prior Dream Scenario merely coasts on the audience’s pre-existing parasocial relationship with Nicolas Cage. But for all of the film’s conceptual wirework–not to mention the rich extratextual discourse surrounding the filmmaker’s recently recovered edgelord essay about dating a teenager when he was 26–The Drama is ultimately too timid to earn its bona fides as a provocative text.

Ryan Gosling floating in a tin can: "Astronaut Ken"

Hoppers (2026) + Project Hail Mary (2026)

March 31, 20262026, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Pixar, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

HOPPERS
**½/****
screenplay by Jesse Andrews
directed by Daniel Chong

PROJECT HAIL MARY
**½/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Milana Vayntrub, Ken Leung
screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir
directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

by Walter Chaw I have great affection for Pixar, even Pixar of late. I think for the most part they do their best with representation, and although their films often feel viciously engineered for maximum emotional devastation now, they’re at least skillful at honouring their role as catalysts for tangible cathexis and catharsis. They’re not all for me–you can keep, for instance, the profit-motive-driven Cars trilogy, the bowdlerized Elio, and the reckless-seeming Inside Out movies, but I still recognize the impact those films have on their audiences as similar to the lasting pull of stuff like WALL·E and Elemental on me. One criterion of good art is if it continues to evolve, nay, metastasize as one revisits it over the years. I will say that Pixar’s worst, most rote films seem aimed at younger audiences, with lessons that are essentially uncomplicated screeds about friendship and acceptance. To that end, I do wonder if their best days, when they consistently delved into real philosophical and/or existential complexities, are behind them. Maybe it’s only time that turned Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and Toy Story 3, all from the Aughts, into masterpieces in my mind. Maybe, but I don’t think so.

Close-up of a harried Samara Weaving: "Coming back to where you started is not the same as never Weaving"

Ready or Not (2019) + Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

March 27, 20262019, 2026, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

READY OR NOT
***½/****
starring Samara Weaving, Adam Brody, Mark O’Brien, Andie MacDowell
written by Guy Busick & Christopher Murphy
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME
**/****
starring Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elijah Wood
written by Guy Busick & Christopher Murphy
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw There’s an old chestnut that you can always tell who we’re going to war with next by the villains in our mass entertainments. I hope that’s true, because over the past few years, the bad guys in movies have been explicitly and almost exclusively the rich. No warfare except class warfare, amiright? That’s one of the reasons I loved Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s 2019 thriller Ready or Not, a key example of the dam breaking in the proletariat’s tolerance for the excesses of the bourgeoisie. It’s also a crackerjack horror contraption that establishes fresh lore without making lore the purpose of its existence, and it minted a genre superstar in Samara Weaving following years of strong showings in cult triumphs (like The Babysitter, Mayhem, and Guns Akimbo). Should the Evil Dead series get another reboot, Weaving is the natural heir to Bruce Campbell’s throne, possessed of the same A-list good looks, the same elastic expressiveness, the same gift for slapstick and self-effacing sense of humour.^* Ready or Not really feels like a modern screwball classic–a genre metastasis of the marriage comedies of the 1940s, starring the new Carole Lombard and a few gallons of blood.

Jesse Buckley/The Bride hooked up to wires on an examination table: "Buckley's mixture"

The Bride! (2026)

March 17, 20262026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Penélope Cruz, Annette Bening
written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

by Walter Chaw I can’t tell you how excited I was for this. I love the Frankenstein myth for how malleable it is, how easily it slots into various syndromes and traumas. How contemporary it is, always, in its dissection of the masculine will to power. It can be told from the perspective of the pain of Icarus or the agony of Daedalus. Fathers and sons, husbands and wives; unwholesome desires, lost weekends. Frankenstein author Mary Shelley was, of course, the shit, a true progressive two centuries ahead of her time who likely helped a transgender man assume his new identity and kept a piece of her drowned husband’s heart in a folded copy of his poem Adonais. That poem is an elegy for John Keats. It’s arguably the best thing Percy Shelley ever wrote, not the least for the slight undertone of disingenuousness in its profusion. It’s like a Smiths song. This is my favourite line from it: “He is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely.” I don’t think Percy liked how Keats was a genius while he, Percy, was not. I know that Keats, at least, was leery of Percy’s attention, especially as Percy began their relationship by dismissing his work. It doesn’t matter. I love how Mary Shelley chose Adonais as the shroud for her husband’s pickled heart. She was as good a literary critic as she was an author–and she was a phenomenal author. Mary would’ve torn Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! apart.

Ghostface wielding a knife: "Like I said, some people will die."

Scream 7 (2026)

March 6, 20262026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

*/****
starring Neve Campbell, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Courteney Cox
screenplay by Kevin Williamson and Guy Busick
directed by Kevin Williamson

by Walter Chaw Follow me for a second: If you were of limited morality, you would make the decisions that went into Scream 7. And as a person of limited morality, it’s very possible, nay, probable, that you lack some of your factory-allotted share of human empathy. Depending on the kind of asshole you are, you may even lack empathy altogether, thus qualifying you for corporate management and elected positions. Likely, you’ve become quite wealthy on the backs of others. But without empathy, you’re incapable of creating or understanding art, and so you make the decisions that went into Scream 7. Your cultural analogue is the bad guy from The Incredibles, Syndrome. You, who pray for machines to do what others do naturally, so that others will look at you the way they look at them. You, who are arrested at the point in childhood when you watched gifted but otherwise less-privileged kids outpace you in every measurable category. Still, it’s not the same, is it? You know you weren’t born exceptional, and your jealousy makes you shrunken and vile. Now everyone else suffers for your mediocrity.

All the President’s Men (1976) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

February 28, 2026****/****, 1970s, 2026, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Thriller

Please note, the film and Blu-ray portions of this review were originally published on October 7, 2012.-Ed.

****/****
BD – Image A Sound B Extras A
4K UHD – Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Warden, Jason Robards
screenplay by William Goldman, based on the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
directed by Alan J. Pakula

by Walter Chaw The final film in director Alan J. Pakula’s loose “paranoia trilogy,” All the President’s Men does the impossible by making heroes of newspaper reporters and a thriller out of telephone calls and follow-up interviews. Based on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s exposé of the Watergate Scandal and President Richard Nixon’s involvement in felonious dirty tricks, it’s more than just a cunningly-crafted docudrama–it’s a key film in the best era of the medium’s history. It’s a picture that highlights the period’s mistrust in our leadership while establishing highly unconventional heroes for whom the stakes couldn’t possibly be higher. And though we know how it all works out, it seems more poignant for our knowing how everything works out.

Steve Carell wearing a Hello, My Name is Andy nametag

The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) [Unrated] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

February 18, 20262026, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance

The 40 Year Old Virgin
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen
written by Judd Apatow & Steve Carell
directed by Judd Apatow

by Bill Chambers Revisiting Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year Old Virgin for the first time in over 20 years is an experience in cognitive dissonance, as it features actors who haven’t really lost any of their currency in a world that has lost all of its currency. In 4K Ultra HiDef super-duper resolution, that world is maddeningly tactile, but it slips through your fingers, as it did in reality. The 40 Year Old Virgin was about one wide-eyed innocent; today, it’s about several. People who don’t know that plagues are coming in the form of smartphones, MAGA, COVID, and AI. Who’ve never used Tinder. Who can’t tell the difference between Aquaman and Iron Man. The ignorance must be bliss. This is not to gloss over the poorly aged edgelord humour–which is very likely inextricable from that ignorance–or frame Bush II’s second term as a utopia. (For starters, the theatrical release of The 40 Year Old Virgin coincided with Hurricane Katrina.) Still, the year before Twitter launched wouldn’t be a bad choice for a Restore Point. Watching The 40 Year Old Virgin in 2026, I envied everybody’s lightness of being. The fear and loathing that settles on us like dust now is absent here.

Crazy-looking Sam Rockwell accosting young men at a diner: "Have you heard the good news?"

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)

February 13, 20262026, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Time Travel

**/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Juno Temple
written by Matthew Robinson
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a mess. After a long hiatus, Verbinski has resurfaced with an artificial-intelligence horror story told through a high-concept time-travel plot so cluttered, so undisciplined, that whatever usefulness it might have as sociology or satire is lost in the noise. It’s good enough that you wish it were better. Terry Gilliam’s films can feel like this. Even his broadly acknowledged masterpieces haven’t aged well because of Gilliam’s twitchiness and the puerility of his distractions. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die lands somewhere between Time Bandits and The Fisher King: technically proficient films plagued by attention-deficit discursions and peppered with occasionally profound interludes of visual poetry. There’s a scene here where an army of screen-zombified teens follows the dictates of a digital god while massing for attack–sort of a Birnam Wood with cellphones glued to its trunks. It’s a tableau as inspired as The Fisher King‘s impromptu waltz in Grand Central Station–yet Verbinski doesn’t know what to do with the image once he’s conjured it. “Yes, this is a good idea. Now what?” Too often, the “now what” for Verbinski is turning up the volume without ramping up the innovation. Why not have these zombies TikTok dance people to death instead of the usual shuffling around and smashing farmhouse windows?

Rachel McAdams looming with a spear: "Abolish ICE"

Send Help (2026)

January 30, 20262026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sam Raimi, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Dennis Haysbert
written by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw It’s broad. Obvious broad. So broad that I suspect if you got too close to it, holes would start to appear, like graphics in a 16-bit video game. But for a year that’s started this dismally, this inhumanely, this dominated-by-the-little-men-who-rule-us, who respond to any perceived humiliation–especially from the women they’re trained to fear and despise–with deadly tantrums, Sam Raimi’s Send Help has the benefit of being bang on the nose. Its central manbaby is failson nepo-CEO Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), a hissable villain who likes to sexually harass women at work while elevating old frat buddies into powerful positions within the business his father founded. It’s hard to suss whether Bradley’s company is meant to have a real-world analogue because, in truth, it could be a vicious skewering of any number of companies run by little princes who inherited the role, then used every one of their bad traits to maintain their position as petty kings of a shit castle. A tiny-dicked morlock exactly like Bradley convinced me to stop climbing the ladder and start questioning the way our society programs us to believe that salaries and titles are tantamount to morality and accomplishment, when in reality they’re more often evidence of the opposite. Capitalism is WOPR’s conundrum: the only way to win is not to play the game.

Vicky Krieps and Cate Blanchett reading the opening pages of a book as Charlotte Rampling looks on: "Aw, it says, “I can’t wait to watch you grow up and decide whether to cancel us from the right or the left”"

Father Mother Sister Brother (2025)

January 21, 20262025, 2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, UK

**½/****
starring Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Angelo Muredda When Alexander Payne’s Venice jury awarded Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother the Golden Lion last fall, Reddit and Twitter prognosticators and amateur sleuths combing through his fellow jurors’ Instagram posts and likes theorized that Payne must not have responded to either the politics of audience favourite The Voice of Hind Rajab or the formalist fireworks of No Other Choice. More likely, he meant it as a gesture of goodwill from one endangered independent American filmmaker of a certain age to another, using his influence as jury chair to invest in Jarmusch’s latest understated comedy-drama, which is about as slight as major international prize winners get. A late-style checklist of Jarmusch’s aesthetic predilections–from the laconic tone to the episodic anthology structure to the recurring motif of deep conversations in cars to the appearance of Tom Waits–the film is an amiable but decidedly minor work about the common and unique ways families communicate, talk past each other, and either play into or subvert their parts in one another’s life stories.

“The 50 Best Films of 2025,” by Walter Chaw

January 10, 20262025, 2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

by Walter Chaw We will never stop gathering to hear stories, because stories are how we’ve survived as a species. Stories are where we’re the strongest, and where we’re the most vulnerable. We make cults of stories, we attach religion and ritual to them. We sit with them in the dark with others of our people. We are evolved to pull nourishment from them like sucklings to the cathode teat–like lampreys on a silver shark suspended between red, cavern-height curtains, flickering there in perpetual, antic motion. There’s nothing wrong with the movies. There’s something wrong with audiences that are conditioned to dismiss the central importance of stories in their lives, taught to treat them with disrespect–especially the stories made for children or in genres relegated to a lower class. That’s not how it started. All stories used to be horror stories. All stories were for children. There’s nothing wrong with the movies. The movies are fucking amazing. The movies are always fucking amazing. They’re one of the last things you can count on anymore.

Black and Rudd in a Jeep looking flustered: "We are two wild and crazy guys!"

Anaconda (2025)

January 5, 20262025, 2026, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Theatrical

*/****
starring Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton
written by Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten
directed by Tom Gormican

by Walter Chaw The pitch must’ve sounded like: “Picture it! Tropic Thunder, but for Congo. A mashup of Jungle Cruise and Three Amigos! in the tradition of Spies Like Us!” Or, more likely, given how sloppy and unaware it is for a “meta” comedy, the entire pitch went: “We got Jack Black.” Would that they had a script, too. Would that it were actually as funny and imaginative as a sequel to Anaconda that acknowledges Anaconda is a movie promises instead of an awkward redux of Wild Hogs somehow: same aging cast and weird Latino panic, just more CGI snake and desperate improv–all of it adding up to something equally listless and dull. Is it a millennial nostalgia grab for the generation reared on Never Been Kissed and High Fidelity? Is it their turn already? Has this been going on for a while? Once it starts slipping, it’s astonishing to mark how quickly one’s cultural relevance circles the drain. Before Anaconda, I also hadn’t considered Jack Black and Paul Rudd to be in the last act of their respective careers, but here we are: Old men cashing a check drawn against shtick they’ve been milking for almost thirty years. This is the “me so solly” routine Krusty should have retired in the 1950s. There’s a layer of dust on it about an inch thick.

Hudson and Jackman performing on stage: "Girl, You’ll Have an Oscar Soon"

Song Sung Blue (2025)

December 26, 20252025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Musical, Theatrical

*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson, Fisher Stevens, Jim Belushi
based on the documentary Song Sung Blue by Greg Kohs
written and directed by Craig Brewer

by Walter Chaw I wonder sometimes about movies like Craig Brewer’s Song Sung Blue, the “live-action” version, if you will, of a documentary about a popular pair of Wisconsin wedding singers and the surprisingly “VH1 Behind the Music”-friendly arc of their career. What I wonder is: Who wants this? Is there still pleasure in patronizing yokel-sploitation? Still meat left to worry on this feature-length Marty and Bobbi Mohan-Culp bone? It’s the Golden Corral of movies: emotionally un-taxing and mentally affordable, a determinedly middlebrow bellwether for class-coded nostalgia that reassures no matter how bad things are going for you, they’re going worse for some other good, hard-working, God-fearing folks out there. It’s not that one’s taking pleasure in the suffering of Thunder (Kate Hudson) and Lightning (Hugh Jackman), see, it’s that one’s taking pleasure in the fact that their suffering is not only more humiliating, protracted, and public than our own, but also inspiring. Always that.