Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Mando and Grogu flying: "Yoicks, and away!"

The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)

May 31, 20262026, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
½*/****
starring Pedro Pascal, Jeremy Allen White, Sigourney Weaver
written by Jon Favreau & Dave Filoni & Noah Kloor
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw The Mandalorian and Grogu (hereafter ManGro) is awful. Was a time I would’ve simply ripped this movie apart, but there’s no real sport in it. It wouldn’t feel cathartic, just mean. If I spent much time talking about how ugly it looks, how poorly it’s written, how boring it is, I would be picking on something that couldn’t defend itself. Everyone sees that. The people who like it see that. It will have its admirers, because this product has been extruded for the maximum, frictionless comfort of its most vocal defenders. The ones who demand their entertainment validate their sense of who they are. If ManGro were a bath, the water would be body temperature; you’d scarcely feel it. What’s the point of picking on it? I figure if you’re watching this film, that’s two hours and change that I don’t have to worry about running into you. The problem for me, and it may be no problem at all, is that Star Wars is suddenly synonymous with those labels in our culture for things that are beneath contempt, as unworthy of respect as its naysayers have always insisted. It is the appendix in the body politic. The coccyx. They shout, “It’s for kids!” when a movie is unwatchable. There’s almost no way to be more dismissive in our culture. Now we can say, “It’s just a Star War” when a show is made for a niche audience of the pathetic and emotionally stunted. I still remember how angry I was after George Lucas came out in defense of his prequels, saying these movies were always “just for kids.” I’ve come to realize I was angry because I was afraid he was right.

Saccharine's Midori Francis lying on a table in stark black and white with tinges of blue. A red stripe covers her eyes, over which is the title "Body and Soul by Walter Chaw" in bloody letters, the words alternating in black and white

Body and Soul: FFC Interviews Natalie Erika James

May 26, 20262026, Authors: Walter Chaw

by Walter Chaw Natalie Erika James doesn’t have a filter between herself and what she makes. She’s an artist. She’s working through the contents of her shadow with a palette of indelible images. She’s telling the history of her pain in passages that are often wordless, mapping the geography of trauma with a vocabulary of archetype. All of her work to date involves daughters lost and wayward, disappointments to themselves and their mothers. All of it is a cry to be seen without judgment in a culture where judgment is the only thing guaranteed young women. With just three features under her belt–her claustrophobic 2020 debut Relic, the Rosemary’s Baby prequel Apartment 7A, and her raw body-image/self-loathing treatise Saccharine–James has quickly become one of my favourite living directors. Not merely for the tightly-crafted scripts (which she also writes) or the technical beauty of her films, but for her unwavering determination to communicate an uncomfortably personal, uncompromisingly feminine, unapologetically other vision.

Midori Francis staring at a spoon in Saccharine: "Uri Geller, don't fail me now"

Saccharine (2026)

May 25, 20262026, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Robert Taylor
written and directed by Natalie Erika James

by Walter Chaw The bad guy in Natalie Erika James’s Saccharine is self-loathing. Self-loathing the ego-killer, the murderer of confidence, the enemy of joy. Saccharine completes a loose trilogy for James, with each entry to some extent exploring the monstrous mutation of self-hate under the tectonic effort required to repress it. It is a fog and the fire in which we burn. Relic detailed the guilt of a daughter who has lost sight of her dementia-ridden mother. Apartment 7A dealt with a young woman who has made socially unacceptable choices to achieve fame (recontextualizing Rosemary’s Baby, and Roman Polanski, in the process). Now Saccharine puts body image under the microscope. Her films are blueprints of the bans imposed on women by multiple, often conflicting (if uniformly brutal), cultural standards. Over three films, James has shown herself to be blunt but not didactic–a trick that’s harder to pull off than it seems. Hers is a voice for any person trapped in a liminal space between communities that would reject them. She’s a mixed-race person living in a predominantly white country (Australia). She’s a woman in a male-dominated industry who has, so far, only helmed projects centring women. With her third film, she’s taking on queer desire, the Asian diaspora, and what it feels like to be trapped in a body that doesn’t align with how you’ve been programmed to perceive yourself. The pain of dislocation in Relic, Apartment 7A, and Saccharine is crystalline and pure, aided by lead performances from Emily Mortimer, Julia Garner, and Midori Francis, respectively, that are naked, ugly, and raw. James is an artist. I feel seen by her work.

Little Sasha standing over a horizontal Jeremy in front of a house in Blue Heron: "O Brother, When Art Thou?"

Blue Heron (2026)

May 21, 2026****/****, 2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Hungary, Theatrical

****/****
starring Eylul Guven, Iringó Réti, Ádám Tompa, Amy Zimmer
written and directed by Sophy Romvari

by Walter Chaw I don’t know if others will talk about it this way, but Blue Heron, the debut feature of writer-director Sophy Romvari, is the finest, most subtle, most incisive horror film I’ve seen this year. Watching it gave me the same feeling as watching The Exorcist as an old man who has had children and still wakes up in a cold sweat thinking of those times when the kids were sick and I didn’t know why, or in trouble and there was nothing I could do. It’s horror not as jumps and gross-outs (those things don’t really work on me anymore), but as existential helplessness to slow entropy as it claims us and shapes us. The scariest scene in The Exorcist for me now is when a little girl is subjected to a series of medical tests that feel to the worried parent like an inquisitor’s panel of torture devices: useless, sadistic, based on faith in a flawed and fanatical belief system. Love is limited in its ability to heal, see. Having children is reckless. It’s madness. It’s an investment in a mortal commodity that will break you, should it predecease you. It can be a responsibility trap, too, tethering you to this earth when you’d rather cut the straps and float into the sweet, insensible black. My kids are the greatest thing in my life, the only significant contribution I have ever made to a world that doesn’t deserve them. Sometimes it feels like it was a selfish act. Sometimes, when I see them express compassion and kindness to others, it feels like a generous one.

A shark fin poking out of the water, a plane about to crash: "Here comes my DoorDash, right on time."

Thrash (2026) + Deep Water (2026)

May 14, 20262026, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, Horror, New Zealand, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

THRASH
*/****
starring Phoebe Dynevor, Whitney Peak, Djimon Hounsou
written and directed by Tommy Wirkola

DEEP WATER
***/****
starring Aaron Eckhart, Angus Sampson, Molly Belle Wright, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Pete Bridges and Shayne Armstrong & SP Krause and Damien Power
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw If the first stories we told each other in those caves were warnings–horror by any other name–then it’s a good idea to wonder what kind of warning our horror entertainments are desperate to communicate. Since they’re expressions of the subconscious surfing the (literally) bleeding edge of the zeitgeist, they must reveal something about our common fears. Why was The Exorcist a box-office phenomenon? Or The Blair Witch Project? We think it’s our choice, what we make and what we want to see, but it’s not. Not entirely. When we speak of the scale of time in human evolution, we are after all just a flicker of an eyeblink removed from hunting and gathering in a primal night. That being said, monsters in movies are reliable bellwethers indicating a specific pollutant in the collective swamp, and the classic ones resurface when the environment is most conducive to their survival. The latest Frankenstein riffs reframe Mary Shelley’s story as the first salvo against the hubris-driven creation of artificial intelligences. Recent adaptations of Dracula couldn’t help but be allegories for evil foreigners buying up real estate and perving on our women. Now, a couple of new films join last year’s Dangerous Animals, the upcoming Chum, the deathless Sharknado franchise, and still others in asking the question: why have so many shark movies arrived in a toothy school all at once?

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

The Long Walk (2025) – 4K Ultra HD

December 23, 20252025, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Stephen King

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A–
starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Mark Hamill
screenplay by JT Mollner, based on the book by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. My least favourite thing is to go after something I mostly agree with, made by people who seem well-intentioned despite failing to recognize their dangerous biases. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk nails who we are right now: a nation that leads the world in pride and trails the field in things to be proud of. A nation crowdfunding life-saving healthcare while bankrolling genocide. A nation where dozens of billionaires control the same amount of wealth as the millions of everyone else. Last I checked, the thing America laps every other industrialized country at is the percentage of our adult population that believes in angels. Throughout The Long Walk, the cartoonish Major (Mark Hamill), channelling the spirit of Sgt. Rock, lets loose with jingoistic statements about the greatness of these United States and how it will one day, through a baptism of blood and the violent suppression of generations of hope and self-worth, be great again. It’s “IRONIC” spelled out in blazing letters across a dystopian sky, like the fireworks that greet our heroes after their long walk–but what is irony when it’s just the facts? What is satire when we are beyond satire?

Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)

December 21, 20252025, 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.