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)

Posted in2026, 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. 

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

The Drama (2026)

Posted in2026, 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)

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.

Steve Carell wearing a Hello, My Name is Andy nametag

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

Posted in2026, 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)

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?

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.

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.

Mackey smiling in a limo: "Well, my next one will be better!"

Ella McCay (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kumail Nanjiani, Woody Harrelson
written and directed by James L. Brooks

by Walter Chaw I wonder if there’s an easy answer to the question of what the fuck happened to James L. Brooks. The James L. Brooks who created “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Taxi”. Who never made a movie in which I couldn’t at least see bits of the Brooks I have always loved, up to and including the one that started out as a musical. Even motherscratching Spanglish–which is terrible, sure, but has its virtues in retrospect–or How Do You Know, which, although I’ve largely blocked it out, didn’t rub me wrong like his latest does. What happened to the man behind Broadcast News, my favourite film of the 1980s while I’m watching it (a thing I try to do at least once a year)? That James L. Brooks. Ella McCay, Brooks’s first movie in well over a decade, is dreadful. It’s his Megalopolis: an elderly attempt at reckoning with the fall of the American Empire that is neither sharp enough to fully recognize the gravity of the current moment nor stout enough to deal with it meaningfully even if it were. It’s like trying to cut a garden hose with a soup spoon. Maybe whatever pixie dust Polly Platt sprinkled on her collaborators to make them almost as brilliant as she was finally wore off. Maybe it’s just time, the great equalizer. We’re bound to lose with age not only physical vigour, but also the edge of wit and the ability to ken when you’ve lost the thread–and the room along with it.

Lee Byung-hun raising a plant pot over his head: "But can you do *that*, RFK Jr.?"

No Other Choice (2025)

Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller

어쩔수가없다
****/****
starring Lee Byung-hun, Son Yejin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min
screenplay by Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, Jahye Lee, based upon the novel The Ax by Donald E. Westlake
directed by Park Chan-wook

by Walter Chaw I was a fan of Donald Westlake from a young age. It was his Parker books, of course, the gateway drug to his other meticulously crafted crime novels. I always liked him more than Ed McBain and Elmore Leonard, admiring his invisible prose, that magical ability he shares with Stephen King to write things that read as if they were written without the intermediary of text. Straight into the vein and doesn’t leave a mark. I kept up with Westlake through college and beyond. I read The Ax the year I moved in with the girl who became my wife. Based on the title, I was expecting Westlake’s inevitable transition into splatterpunk–a hardcore slasher, perhaps. What I got was a wry takedown of capitalism uncomfortably close to the reality I was choosing by settling down, getting married, and getting a job working for someone else. I didn’t see the connection then, but I’ve thought about The Ax off and on over the past 28 years. Still married, two kids college-aged, several recessions, bailouts, disastrous administrations… A series of jobs where I shot up the ladder before stepping off because I couldn’t reconcile what was required to succeed with the image I had of myself as a person. Every time I hit rock bottom, The Ax was waiting with that shit-eating, “toldja so” grin.

Colman Domingo in Dead Man's Wire/Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen in Eternity

TIFF ’25: Dead Man’s Wire + Eternity

Posted in2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

DEAD MAN’S WIRE
**/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Cary Elwes, Al Pacino
written by Austin Kolodney
directed by Gus Van Sant

ETERNITY
*½/****
starring Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph
written by Patrick Cunnae & David Freyne
directed by David Freyne

by Bill Chambers Bill Skarsgård finally butts up against the limits of his versatility as he lamely channels Michael Shannon in Dead Man’s Wire, Gus Van Sant’s first feature since 2018’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. (Most recently, he worked on Ryan Murphy’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”, directing six of its eight episodes.) Both are based on true stories, an enduring kink of Van Sant’s going back to 1995’s To Die For, which riffed on the Pamela Smart case with a satirical bent that hasn’t really resurfaced in his docudramas since. But when, late in the game, Dead Man’s Wire develops something like a comic edge, it feels like Van Sant might be heckling the material out of boredom, if not something more problematic. The film dramatizes the 1977 kidnapping of mortgage broker Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery) by Skarsgård’s Tony Kiritsis, who tied a 12-gauge shotgun to Dick’s neck and held him hostage for three days at his rathole apartment in Indianapolis. He believed that Dick and his wealthy father, M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), were waiting for him to fall behind on his mortgage payments so they could poach a valuable piece of property he owned, and he demanded the Halls give him $5 million in damages as well as–and this was the sticking point, according to the film–a full-throated apology in exchange for Dick’s life.

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:

Xin in The Sun Rises on Us All, Johnston in Obsession

TIFF ’25: The Sun Rises on Us All + Obsession

Posted in2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF

日掛中天
***½/****
starring Zhilei Xin, Songwen Zhang, Shaofeng Feng
written by Shangjun Cai, Nianjin Han
directed by Shangjun Cai

OBSESSION
***/****
starring Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless
written and directed by Curry Barker

by Bill Chambers In Shangjun Cai’s masterful The Sun Rises on Us All, Meiyun (Zhilei Xin, deservedly feted at the recent Venice Film Festival) is a wannabe influencer who sells dropship clothing out of a crappy little outlet in a Guangzhou mall. Newly pregnant by her married boyfriend Qifeng (Shaofeng Feng), she’s a woman in her late thirties with the lifestyle of someone considerably younger, suggesting an interruption in the past that will soon be confirmed. While at the hospital for a prenatal checkup, Meiyun spots a man she recognizes, Baoshu (Songwen Zhang), who’s recovering from gastrointestinal surgery after being diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. There is palpable tension between them, but Meiyun cares about him, and as he needs somewhere to convalesce, she makes room for his dour ass in her cramped one-bedroom. He’s such an unpleasant guest that it’s easy to feel sorry for Meiyun, whose romance with Qifeng is complicated enough. Indeed, you could go so far as to call Baoshu and Meiyun’s on-screen dynamic S&M, although it’s not always him doing the S and her doing the M. (When Baoshu goes on a mini-hunger strike, for instance, Meiyun literally slaps sense into him.) But as the details of their shared history come to light, our sympathies begin to shift–or, more to the point, even out.

Bald white Emma Stone leashed around the neck and wrists

Telluride ’25: Bugonia

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Ireland, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Telluride, UK

**½/****
starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Alicia Silverstone
screenplay by Will Tracy, based on the screenplay by Jang Joon-hwan
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

by Walter Chaw I don’t know what it’s like to come to Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia fresh, given that it’s a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s gonzo, lacerating Save the Green Planet!, a film about wild conspiracy theories and the people who drink deep from them that seemed considerably more novel in 2003 than it does in 2025. Now, some pathetic incel white supremacist dufus doing a terrorism is a weekly–soon to be daily–occurrence, making Bugonia a lot like Ari Aster’s Eddington: too late to be a warning and too directionless to offer solutions. What is it, then? Well, it’s sort of like Idiocracy, if Idiocracy came out today instead of 20 years ago, when it was a terrifying prophecy of unusual prescience. I guess the proper term for this exercise would be “past its sell-by date,” but what I think it is, mostly, is a very fine vehicle for Jessie Plemons and possibly a test of how close we are to Lanthimos and Emma Stone finally pushing their luck a little too far and launching themselves into the land of the terminally overexposed. I love that they continue to inspire each other and stuff, though their collaboration is starting to feel like a party where everyone else has left and I have to work in the morning, you guys, please.

Tall Margaret Qualley holding flowers and short Ethan Hawke holding court in Blue Moon

TIFF ’25: Blue Moon

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Film Festivals, Ireland, Music, Romance, TIFF

***½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott
written by Robert Kaplow, inspired by the writings of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Contrasting epitaphs set the tone for Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a melancholy tribute to the self-destructive genius of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, a not especially handsome guy played by Linklater’s decidedly handsome long-time muse, Ethan Hawke. Moments before we see the man’s lonesome onscreen death from pneumonia on a rainy street, a title card offers Hart’s posthumous characterization from a pair of observers: his contemporary Oscar Hammerstein II, who hails him as “alert and dynamic and fun to be around,” and cabaret performer Mabel Mercer, who pronounces him “the saddest man I ever knew.” Hawke’s Hart is both–a charming but embittered barfly in a personal and professional crisis who loves conversation as much as he resents having to make it with perceived dullards like Hammerstein, who, in the film’s timeline, has just replaced him as Richard Rodgers’s creative partner on the verge of their major commercial breakthrough, Oklahoma!.

Devilishly handsome George Clooney standing a few feet away from a giant George Clooney poster

Telluride ’25: Jay Kelly

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Italy, Telluride, UK

*/****
starring George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Riley Keough, Laura Dern
written by Noah Baumbach & Emily Mortimer
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Walter Chaw Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly wants to be two things. It wants to be Cinema Paradiso, and it wants to be George Clooney’s All That Jazz–a hagiography for the temple of film on the one hand, a self-lacerating reflection on the cost of stardom on the other. A tightrope, in other words, requiring an abiding, all-consuming, some might even say sloppy love of movies paired with a genius-level creator. You see the problem. I have admired many of Baumbach’s works, both individually and in collaboration with Wes Anderson, but I’ve never found any of them to be particularly in rapture over the transformative potential of film as a medium. I have admired much of George Clooney’s work, but have never found him to be a once-in-a-lifetime talent with a deeply troubled backstory like, say, Bob Fosse. The closest analogue to Jay Kelly is actually Mr. Holland’s Opus.

Honey Don’t! (2025)

Honey Don’t! (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, Chris Evans
written by Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke
directed by Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke have a mission, and that mission is apparently to make affected, arch neo-noir “comedies” showcasing angry cunnilingus and the sense of humour that, in tiny doses, gave Ethan’s collaborations with his brother Joel a soupçon of bitterness. Without what seems to be Joel’s humanism to leaven what appears to be Ethan’s misanthropy, the residue left at the bottom of this cup is bitter to the point of repugnant. Flying solo, Ethan comes across as the kind of kid who inflates a toad to pop it with a slingshot for yuks. In some ways, Honey Don’t! is a definitive film for our era of nihilism, this generation of people becoming dead inside. It’s an endurance challenge, our Freddy Got Fingered, a sociopath by any other name. Remember that scene in Fargo where the wife tries to run away from her captors with her hands tied behind her back and her head covered by a hood? How she stumbles around in a confused circle before tripping and falling, causing kidnapper Steve Buscemi to laugh uproariously? Imagine an entire movie that is just that. Cruel. Mean. Tying-tin-cans-to-a-dog’s-tail mean. It’s aggressively nasty in a way I find punishing, and it’s scary because I suspect Coen and Cooke have enrichment on their minds. I think they’re doing this to force the “normies” to put some respect on alternative lifestyles. I think they’re doing it because they think the way to do that is to push our noses into our own sick.

Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal arguing: "'Now, now, I think you'll find it tastes great.' 'No, it's less filling!'"

Eddington (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical, Western

***/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Emma Stone
written and directed by Ari Aster

by Walter Chaw The problem I have with Ari Aster movies is that Ari Aster is contemptuous of his characters. He gives them anxieties he then maximalizes into catastrophes so extreme they’re funny. (How else does a cake allergy turn into a telephone-pole beheading?) And once he creates an unbearable situation, he scoffs. It’s tempting to draw a corollary between his work and that of post-Raising Arizona Coen Brothers, but however bleak the Coen Brothers can be, however barbed their humour gets, there is always a redemptive element. Not hope, exactly, but dignity, whereas Aster’s films feel like audience punishment and only that. He’s confirmed his desire to troll: In a 2018 interview with FILM COMMENT, Aster described Hereditary as a hybrid of Peter Greenaway, whom he sees as “maybe our most authentic misanthrope,” and Douglas Sirk, whose heightened emotions and forced artificiality Aster found horrifying. His 2011 short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons was his answer to the question, “What is the worst”–as in most offensive–“thing I could make at AFI?” Aster fancies himself the great gadfly, the wizened stirrer of a pot left too long on the burner.