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

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)

Posted in2026, 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)

Posted in2026, 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)

Posted in2025, 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 (background is a partial look at the monkey from THE MONKEY; text is white on black)

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

Posted in2025, 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)

Posted in2025, 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.