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

Hoppers (2026) + Project Hail Mary (2026)

Posted in2026, 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)

Posted in2019, 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.

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?

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.

The flamboyant Varang tribal dancing before a bonfire in Avatar 3: "All right, who dosed Jeff Probst?"

Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet
screenplay by James Cameron & Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
directed by James Cameron

by Walter Chaw I think, for white Americans, the Indigenous peoples they displaced to colonize what would become the United States aren’t real people. Instead, they are supplemental creatures in a myth of American exceptionalism: the wolf that eats grandma; the wind at the door. They are props for enlightenment, triggers of guilt. Once conquered through disease, genocide, broken treaties, and other nasty tricks born of avarice and cupidity, Indigenous peoples became objects of pity and romanticization, transitioning from boogeyman to avatar of a gentle, mystical, maternal, natural world without once passing through “human being.” From marauding savage to mourner of litter and butter saleswoman in less than a generation. What would happen, do you suppose, if white men finally thought of Indigenous peoples as men and women with the same complexity, desires, and fears as them? What if they suspected Indigenous peoples loved their children and didn’t want them taken from them to be buried beneath strange “schools” in unmarked graves? How would it affect their sense of self, to suddenly understand the unimaginable suffering they have justified and continued to celebrate under the aegis of their undead cannibal god and this beautiful stolen country they’re destroying in His name? Would they have to experience shame? Would that shame force them to grow? Unacceptable. How dare the dead hope their passing had meaning for their murderers.

Aziz Ansari and a winged Keanu Reeves outside a Denny's: "No one can be told what Denny's is, you have to see it for yourself."

Good Fortune (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari, Keke Palmer, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Aziz Ansari

by Walter Chaw Comedians can be great educators. They speak truth to power. They needle inconsistencies and hypocrisies to light like splinters coaxed from the body politic. Charlie Chaplin. George Carlin, of course. Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore–just the beginning of a roll call of storied court jesters attached to naked emperors. There are good modern examples, too, even ones who didn’t perform in Riyadh at the discretion of a homicidal regime fond of public beheadings, dismembering American journalists, and, you know, brutally punishing women who dare to challenge the status quo. And then there’s Riyadh headliner Aziz Ansari, who has made a career of playing the most irritating side character in other people’s stuff, parlaying whatever fame that earns a person into the smart, at times surprisingly raw three-season dramedy “Master of None”. There’s some depth to Ansari, it appears, despite his being the weakest part–whinging, facile, fast-talking, insincere–of his own strong project. Orson Welles famously said about Woody Allen:

The Ugly/The Furious

TIFF ’25: The Ugly + The Furious

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, China, Crime, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

THE UGLY
*½/****
starring Park Jeong-min, Kwon Hae-hyo, Han Ji-hyeon, Shin Hyeon-bin
written by Yeon Sang-ho, based on his graphic novel Face
directed by Yeon Sang-ho

火遮眼
**½/****
starring Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yang Enyou, Brian Le
written by Frank Hui, Lei Zhilong, Tin Shu Mak, Kwan-Sin Shum, Aidan Parker
directed by Kenji Tanigaki

by Angelo Muredda In his 2007 book Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, Ato Quayson suggests that disability “short-circuits” the protocols of representation, throwing into crisis all kinds of formal and thematic properties as a text struggles to account for its disruptiveness. If there’s a prize for the most aesthetic nervousness, or for a text whose nervousness about how to depict disability all but causes it to self-destruct, it ought to go to Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho’s dispiriting The Ugly. A slow-burn procedural mystery-thriller about a documentary crew and a son in arrested development getting to the bottom of a historical murder, The Ugly is thrown into a full-blown panic attack by the aesthetic challenge posed by something as simple as depicting its disabled characters moving through the world.

Wahlberg. The caption reads, "Make this quick, I have a 4am shower and then prayer and then a 4:30 shower and then family time"

Play Dirty (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Streaming, Thriller

½*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Tony Shaloub
written by Charles Mondry & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw It took me 72 hours to finish Shane Black’s Play Dirty, his long-gestating take on Donald Westlake’s Parker novels (written under his nom de plume, Richard Stark), which adapts no particular one of the 28 published but rather attempts to transplant the general vibe of the series into a complex, violent heist concept set in the current day. I can maybe get behind the idea of it. Especially since it began life as (or at least shares a title with) the legendary–and legendarily discarded–script for Lethal Weapon 2. You know, the one that Black, after getting paid a then-record six figures to write it, was asked to make less sadistic. A skosh lighter on the misanthropy, perhaps; a soupçon more likely to support a burgeoning franchise by, oh, not killing off the star, let’s say. I like Shane Black, for all his lapses in judgment and vile bedfellows. I think he has a way with hard-R action, and I’m a fan of his patter, his dense verbal humour, whose frat-boy sensibility I could rationalize until now. I’m starting to think it’s a reflection of someone not entirely capable of growing up. In other words, Black is feeling like an indictment of me, this child of the Blockbuster, holding on too long to my affection for one of my obnoxious uncles.

DiCaprio on a pay phone in sunglasses: "Hello, ICE tip hotline? Baba Booey!"

One Battle After Another (2025)

Posted in****/****, 2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw One Battle After Another feels like contraband. It’s the sort of movie the Ministry of Culture would ban before offering the position of Head of the Ministry of Culture to its director. A Fritz Lang situation, if you will, where a nation-under-siege’s Best shoot their shot before being silenced or recruited–or they escape in the last crepuscular years before the curtain finally drops. It’s impolite. It’s outraged about what’s obviously outrageous and outspoken at a time when most everyone else is stunned into silence or cowed into surrender. It’s as sick of the bullshit as you are. A miracle, then. Or it feels like a miracle, anyway. Depending on how things go, we could eventually be talking about it the way we talk about Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise. Do I exaggerate? If I do, it’s only by degrees. We are all in this pot together, and it’s hotter than you think. Not noticing has brought us to where we are: bright red and just south of parboiled. Do you notice? Paul Thomas Anderson does.

Emily Blunt and The Rock taking a nighttime stroll in The Smashing Machine

TIFF ’25: The Smashing Machine

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Canada, Film Festivals, Japan, Sports, TIFF

**/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten
written and directed by Benny Safdie

by Angelo Muredda The early narrative on Dwayne Johnson’s starring role as veteran mixed-martial artist Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine was that it was sure to mark an overdue career reinvention for the wrestler turned actor turned annoying social-media poster. After years of his star power waning in terms of prestige as well as audience appeal–the decline measured in cringe posts about how the “hierarchy of power in the DC universe is about to change” thanks to his appearance in Black Adam (which bombed) and unflattering headlines about how his character in the Fast & Furious franchise was contractually forbidden from losing a fight onscreen (which made him seem not invulnerable but narcissistic)–finally Johnson would develop both the deft comic touch and dramatic depth he’d shown in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales and Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. That Johnson is every bit as good as was promised by the PR campaign, as vulnerable and bruised onscreen as he has been aloof and guarded in real life, comes as something of a monkey’s paw situation, given that his fluid and charming performance is one of the only things worth unreservedly recommending in the otherwise fairly standard film. Despite the outcome at the Venice Film Festival, which saw Johnson go home critically lauded but empty-handed while Safdie took the Best Director prize, Johnson’s ascent comes at the expense of his director’s first real draw as an artist–a slightly spiky but mostly unremarkable sports biopic worthy of being in the awards conversation, in the derogatory sense.

Krypto the Dog: Oh no I'm a Krypto bro

Superman (2025)

Posted in****/****, 2025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi
written and directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw I’m in the bag for Superman, I admit it. I grew up in a small town, Golden, CO, in an environment some would describe as Norman Rockwellian. Before the bullying started in earnest, before I spoke English, I would earn pennies at the corner barbershop and spend them at the 5 & 10 across the street on Silly Putty, gum, and comic books. Superman comic books, Wonder Woman, too. Superman, for me, is the superhero we should most want to be. I’m not talking about the superpowers, I’m talking about being a decent person who genuinely cares about others. He’s also the one I most wished were real–who, although he had unimaginable advantages, still cared about me. I no longer believe that anyone with more power than me is interested in whether I live or die if it serves them no profit. Do you? When did you stop? I realized somewhere along the way that Superman is my Jesus. When people talk about their Jesus, they use the same words: righteous, just, generous–the Sermon on the Mount, you know? I see a lot of fascist functionaries who want the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament God posted in schoolrooms in order to frighten children into obedience under an omniscient surveillance state. I see no Christians pushing to get their New Testament God’s Beatitudes posted in those same rooms; why? Oh, hey, did you ever notice how you’ve given Santa Claus the same power as your Christian God? What is your God, now, with the threat that bad behaviour will be punished with inferior Christmas gifts?

Jurassic World: Rebirth

Jurassic World: Rebirth

Posted in2025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, India, Malta, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Taiwan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Jurassic World Rebirth
**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend
written by David Koepp
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw Our first film about hyper-normalization, Jurassic World Rebirth presents a world that has grown tired of dinosaurs, and it’s buoyed not only by that topicality but also by Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and a steadfast refusal to give a good shit. About anything. Which is not to say the craft is poor (this was an expensive production, and looks it), but that the picture is more a collection of vignettes–vignettes that replicate how children play with dinosaur toys–than it is a legible narrative. It’s a rack of Scrabble tiles arranged at random, or a completely fucked-up Rubik’s Cube you’re on the verge of stripping of its stickers. That it’s not awful is a testament to stars who know the assignment, a new director who isn’t Colin Trevorrow, and a script, by professional populist screenwriter David Koepp (returning to the franchise for the first time since The Lost World), that takes it easy on the last film’s memorably ugly misogyny and autocritical metaphors for the bankrupt intentions driving franchise filmmaking. I’m not saying Jurassic World Dominion is wrong about the cynical commodification of everything, just that it made dinosaurs eating people not fun.

M3gan 2.0 looking apologetic: “'I’m sorry for MeToo-ing your Teddy Ruxpin but he had it coming.'”

M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Horror, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Jenna Davis, Jemaine Clement
written and directed by Gerald Johnstone

by Walter Chaw Gerald Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 feels like one of those 1980s teensploitation sci-fi adventure flicks. D.A.R.Y.L., for instance–D.A.R.Y.L. exactly, let’s face it. Given that D.A.R.Y.L. hardly set the world on fire, this does not bode well for M3GAN 2.0. To its credit, it takes a wild swing at relevance, M3GAN 2.0 does, in a way that’s at complete odds with what drove the first film’s safe swing at relevance, pushing this sequel into Spies Like Us/Volunteers territory. Or Best Defense, why not? All those musty Cold War artifacts of the Reagan era that looked for humor in entrenched doomsday scenarios; closed-system satires that don’t have much to say because there’s no way out–that don’t have much room to satirize anything because you can’t make the “stupid Apocalypse” any stupider than the idiots heralding it have already made it. M3GAN 2.0 plays a lot like a Naked Gun prologue, in fact, one that opens with a spybot assassinating a brown baddie in a ridiculous stalking and ends in a bump-off that’s just a little too violent to be horrible. It’s a joke everyone’s in on, told with an arched eyebrow and a whiff of “the call is coming from inside the house,” The Matrix Resurrections-style. This is payback for all the notes. This is payback for thinking this is a franchise.

F1 (2025)

F1 (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical

F1: The Movie
***½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Joseph Kosinski

by Walter Chaw The first movie I saw in a theatre was Star Wars, in 1977. I had just turned four and didn’t speak a word of English. The 45rpm read-along storybook my parents subsequently bought for me helped me take my first steps towards learning the language. And the sense of exhilaration I felt watching Star Wars that first time? I’ve never equalled it, and never will. There are highs in life you experience once; though you may chase that feeling for the rest of your life, you chase it in vain. The problem with a film like Joseph Kosinski’s F1 is that it is very much like hundreds, if not thousands, of other films that have come before, in stark contrast to the average film, which only has, like, several dozen antecedents. F1 is a tried and true assemblage of complementary parts: an old warrior and a young warrior, gladiatorial contests, mentors, romance, the Big Game; think Bull Durham, for instance. It’s so familiar archetypally that it’s easy to identify as such (as opposed to other films that are equally derivative but draw from more obscure sources), and it’s such a notoriously lavish undertaking that it’s tempting to strike at it for its swaggering confidence and what some would call unearned arrogance. Greek Tragedies are about elevated personages because their fall is greater, you see: we love slaying giants, deservedly or not.

Benicio Del Toro and Mia Threapleton in front of a plane crash: "If only the pilot and the first officer had communicated with each other"

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

By Angelo Muredda Midway through Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), a stateless arms dealer and industrialist hated by any number of governments, drops everything to visit Marty (Jeffrey Wright), a shipping magnate from Newark, to muscle him into upping his investment in the titular scheme: a dicey Middle Eastern infrastructure deal. Physically tethered to Marty in the middle of a blood transfusion that’s necessitated by a gunshot wound he acquired in the course of securing his share from a sketchy French ally named Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), Korda pushes the deal by pulling the tab of the hand grenade he brought Marty as a peace offering (the way some might bring chocolate), insisting he’ll put it back only if his pal increases his share. Unfazed by the threat of mutually assured destruction, Marty, a universal donor who’s already pushing blood from his body into Korda’s with a hand pump, pledges to give his financial share and more, “just to watch the grand finale.”

Ana de Armas besting a cop: "You can't win if you don't plié!"

Ballerina (2023) + Ballerina (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Hungary, Martial Arts, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller

발레리나
**/****
starring Jeon Jong-seo, Kim Ji-hoon, Park Yu-rim, Shin Se-hwi
written and directed by Lee Chung-hyun

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
*/****
starring Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Keanu Reeves
written by Shay Hatten
directed by Len Wiseman

by Walter Chaw At the end of Lee Chung-hyun’s 2023 film Ballerina, its hero, a badass master of weaponry on a mission of vengeance, uses a hilariously overpowered flamethrower to incinerate a serial rapist/killer and his Lamborghini on a neon-lit beach in South Korea. At the end of Len Wiseman’s Ballerina (2025), a badass master of weaponry on a mission of vengeance uses a hilariously overpowered flamethrower to incinerate a dozen or so Shemps in a neon-lit CGI mock-up of an alpine snow globe. The hero of Lee’s Ballerina, Ok-ju (Jeon Jong-seo), is a former bodyguard upset because her (probably) lover–Choi Min-hee (Park Yu-rim), a ballerina–has killed herself over the abuse suffered at the hands of the aforementioned charcoal briquette. Wiseman’s hero, Eve (Ana de Armas), is upset because as a child she witnessed the assassination of her father (Caleb Spillyards) at the hands of baddies collectively called the “Schmorga-Borga” or some other Swedish Chef nonsense, led by the mysterious Chancellor (uncanny-valley youthened Gabriel Byrne). Eve has spent her life [deep breath] training to be a ballerina-slash-assassin in the house of “Um Chop Chop Um Pluck Pluck”–led by the Director (Anjelica Huston), who manages to sneak the word “family” into every single line of her dialogue like a refugee from another exhausted and ludicrous franchise–just to avenge her dear, departed da. Rest assured, it’s as trite and terrible as it sounds. But thanks to escapism being in short supply these days, not to mention the illusion of sunk-cost fallacy, you’re probably going to see it anyway.

Jackie Chan looking off into the distance as Ralph Macchio and Ben Wang lock fists: "When you realize you forgot to pick up Jaden Smith from summer camp 15 years ago"

Karate Kid: Legends (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Family, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Sports, Theatrical

*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, Joshua Jackson, Ralph Macchio
written by Rob Lieber
directed by Jonathan Entwistle

by Walter Chaw I have a complicated relationship with John G. Avildsen’s The Karate Kid. I saw it in the theatre multiple times when I was 11 and dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times more on VHS. I did not know that Noriyuki “Pat” Morita spoke without an accent in reality, didn’t trouble myself with the damage this type of sensei character did to my minority in this country, didn’t sense that this was any kind of cultural appropriation, because as an Asian-American kid born and raised in a predominantly white backwater of Colorado, this was and remains ground zero of my culture. Appropriation? Of what? Not Okinawan culture, surely–what’s left of it after our now-eighty-year occupation of it. No, this is American culture, for good and for bad; don’t blame someone else for it. The Karate Kid was my Rocky. (Same director and composer, even.) Mr. Miyagi, together with Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles, both from the same year as The Karate Kid (1984), formed this foundational trilogy of Asian tokenism in the heart of the Reagan administration/Blockbuster Generation, during which I was reared. Perhaps not inconsequently, it’s this same period that sowed the seeds for our current neo-conservative Ragnarök. It was like they emerged at the same time on purpose, the Three Wise Men attending Evangelical Christ’s Young Life presumption to the reins of American Empire: the father (Miyagi), the son (Shorty), and the holy ghost (Long Duk Dong) constituting a thesis statement for the only way Asian-American men in their native film industry could be portrayed with the enthusiastic consent of anyone with an opinion. Can I get an “A(sian)men?”

Upside-down yellow biplane with Tom Cruise hanging on for dear life: "Elon's FAA is going great."

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)

Posted in****/****, 2025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise, UK

****/****
starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Angela Bassett
written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There is a brief period in most of our lives where we feel as though we are part of a large, maybe operatic melodrama that is barely comprehensible to us, but of which we are a vital component. If the world is lucky, we grow out of it. As part of the brain’s formation, it seems, as part of Freud’s or Lacan’s self-recognition, there is this wet gulf during which we believe that everything matters. It has to be an evolutionary response–the last gasp of profound weltschmerz on the way to nihilistic self-interest. On the one side is the self-righteousness of adolescence; on the other, a dangerous megalomania. And then there’s Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible film franchise, which is fundamentally a clinical dissection of the martyr complex that drives the myth of American exceptionalism. At the core of it all is a serious unpacking of movie stardom–of movies themselves as an essential conduit to the primal core of our monkey makeup. They tickle every pleasure centre. When Mission: Impossible movies are exciting, few movies were ever as exciting. When they’re sexy–the yellow dress, my god–they are as sharpened and drowsy as an autumn pheromone. They’re funny, they’re puzzles, and they’re an approach to understanding George Eliot’s quote about how the good of the world depends on the valour of hidden lives lived with virtue and courage. You don’t have to be Ethan Hunt (Cruise) to fix the world, you see. You don’t need to be a superhero, but you do need to be a good person when it’s easier not to be.

Guy being sucked through hole in an airplane: "No ticket!"

Fight or Flight (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Charithra Chandran, Marko Zaror, Katee Sackhoff
written by Brooks McLaren & D.J. Cotrona
directed by James Madigan

by Walter Chaw I remember the thrill I felt when I heard the premise: a plane full of murderers is freed to go hog on one another with impunity. Maniacs and assassins, right? Hannibal Lecters and spree killers and cons and bounty hunters. Fuck, I thought, it’s gonna be like one of those Universal Monsters “rally” movies where Frankenstein fights the Wolf Man or some shit; imagine the possibilities! The mayhem! I remember it like it was yesterday because it was 1997, and when you get old, things that happened almost 30 years ago seem like they happened the day before. Man, oh man, it’s good to talk. Anyway, James Madigan’s Fight or Flight is about a plane full of murderers who go hog on one another with impunity. It’s got the same frenetic energy as David Leitch’s Bullet Train, which is about a train full of murderers who go hog on one another with impunity. To be fair, Leitch’s film is centred around a handsome white guy with a secret everyone is after, whereas Fight or Flight hinges on a handsome white guy everyone is after but there’s also a young woman (Charithra Chandran) who is more than she seems. No, wait, that’s Bullet Train, too.