Ben Whishaw lounging in bed and smoking: Marmalade and cigarettes, baby

Peter Hujar’s Day (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Spain, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall
screenplay by Ira Sachs, based on the book Peter Hujar’s Day by Linda Rosenkrantz
directed by Ira Sachs

by Angelo Muredda Celebrated New York portrait photographer Peter Hujar becomes the subject of a distinctive portrait himself in Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, a gentle, minor-key experiment in memorializing the everyday. Anchored by a puckish performance from Ben Whishaw, who spends most of the time platonically seducing his interrogator–Hujar’s friend, author Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall)–and, by extension, the spectator listening in like a fly on the wall, the film lovingly recreates not a day in Hujar’s life but his languid recalling of it the day after.

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.

Jennifer Lawrence holding a baby while sitting on a porch with Robert Pattinson: "Little JD here just loves the couch for some reason"

Die My Love (2025) + Keeper (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

DIE MY LOVE
***½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek
screenplay by Enda Walsh & Lynne Ramsay and Alice Burch, based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz
directed by Lynne Ramsay

KEEPER
***½/****
starring Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Birkett Turton, Eden Weiss
written by Nick Lepard
directed by Osgood Perkins

by Walter Chaw A woman’s body is the battleground we savage, collateral damage in the litigation of collective fear: battered, bloodied, stripped of dignity and individuality. Every religion is founded on the control of it, and most secular bans are, too. A woman is blamed for our knowledge of good and evil, a woman’s beauty for the Trojan War. The opening of a woman’s “box” unleashes all the evils of the world. It is the incubator of our anxieties, the beginning and the end, the salvation and the sin. Her body is the rich, fertile black of the richest loam, and when blood and semen fall upon it, monsters grow. It’s always a trap, and very seldom a person; always a fatale, never merely a femme. It is the Grail, and men, the knights errant in thrall to it. Small wonder that so many of our horror films are about a woman’s body and the florid, manifold violations men visit upon it. More still are about women proving both stronger and stranger than men could ever begin to imagine. No wonder the malleability of flesh, the perverse elasticity of skin, like a scrim stretched between states of being, is where we centre our notions of identity and nurse our fetishistic fascinations. We magnify and romanticize their difference. We make a woman’s body an object of worship, a golden calf that, if we regard it as such, suddenly becomes the core of four of the ten Old Testament Christian Commandments instead of only three. Six, if we also consider her body property to be coveted and stolen.

Jeremy Allen White as the Boss: "I’m a fancy-ass chef, what’s a boy to do?/Locked myself in the freezer, at the end of season two"

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham
based on Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, by Warren Zanes
written and directed by Scott Cooper

by Walter Chaw There are a handful of untouchable albums; Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska is one of them. It’s a record that didn’t make a lick of sense to me until it did, and then, once it did, burrowed in, insinuating and close. It occupies a place in my heart with Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones and Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush: chronicles of broken men adrift in cold shoals constructed from their own inadequacy, in love with women who deserve better. If you alternate Nebraska with Suicide‘s self-titled debut (itself an all-timer), they play like a double album, given how deeply the one influenced the other. A couple of tracks on the Boss’s project function as sequels to tracks on Suicide‘s masterpiece; another even sounds like a remake. That’s what Nebraska is: a masterpiece–and a conversation. It’s this dark postcard from the edge where Springsteen teetered for a while. He would have fallen in, I think, if he didn’t have this project tethering him to the earth. Nebraska is a chronicle of depression delivered directly from a battered Gibson J-200 into a four-track TEAC 144 Portastudio cassette recorder in the Colts Neck, New Jersey bedroom of some guy who’s at once the most miserable and most successful he’s ever been.

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:

After the Hunt group setting: Garfield and Friends

After the Hunt (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edibiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg
written by Nora Garrett
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Angelo Muredda SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. “It happened at Yale,” an onscreen caption proclaims at the start of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, a handsomely-mounted but undisciplined culture-war sampler platter. The film is the unruly if rarely boring child born of the intellectual marriage between the Guadagnino who saw Dario Argento’s Suspiria and imagined a 150-minute adaptation about postwar Germany and longtime actor and first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett, who told BUSTLE that After the Hunt was inspired by her time in a pair of online philosophy courses in the early days of the pandemic about “how to live morally in what often feels like an immoral world.” What exactly happened to inspire a feature-length reflection on morality is not defined with much precision in After the Hunt, which prefers to raise an assortment of questions about race, gender, and privilege in higher education with the nuance of an edgelord podcaster thinking out loud rather than look directly at a concrete example of those mechanics at, say, Yale. But if a low-stakes psychological thriller about well-dressed academics in immaculate cream suits and rumpled chambray shirts with not one but two beautiful minimalist apartments is what you’re after, you could do worse.

Rebecca Ferguson on the phone: “No, I don’t want gluten-free crust, we’re all about to be incinerated anyway.”

A House of Dynamite (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris
written by Noah Oppenheim
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw Stanley Kubrick tried to tell the story of Dr. Strangelove straight until he realized how funny the end of the world is, especially as it will inevitably be ushered in by the stupidest people on the planet. See, playing a game where the only winning move is not to play defines its contestants as idiots. Indeed, there’s an essential hilarity, a baked-in hyperbolic overreaction, to just the idea of a nuclear apocalypse that makes it surprisingly difficult to frame the premise as serious drama. The movie that might come closest is Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days, but only in its DVD incarnation under the short-lived “infinifilm” imprimatur, which branched to extracurricular documentary or archival materials that made watching the film very much like attending an entertaining and informative seminar on the Cuban Missile Crisis. By itself, it’s light in the britches: a Kennedy-impersonation contest with a stolid Kevin Costner along for the ride. Yes, the made-for-television movies The Day After, The War Game, Threads, and Testament are uniformly excellent, but they’re focused on the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse. Ditto the not-made-for-TV When the Wind Blows, The Quiet Earth, and On the Beach.

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.

David Jonsson and Cooper Hoffman, fg, in The Long Walk

The Long Walk (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical

**½/****
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?

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.

Little boy in clown makeup at the back of an underlit classroom: "There's always a class clown."

Weapons (2025)

Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

****/****
starring Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan
written and directed by Zach Cregger

by Walter Chaw Zach Cregger’s Weapons is joy. It’s nostalgia without an obvious antecedent, capturing the phenomena of “hiraeth” for a sensibility raised on weird pulp and Halloween. If nostalgia is the last deposit with cultural veins still rich enough to mine, this is the way to do it. Weapons is the best Ray Bradbury adaptation there has ever been; while it’s not actually based on any of his stuff, one could argue it shares roots with 1962’s “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!”, 1948’s “The October Game”, and 1952’s “April Witch”. There are infernal images here snatched from modern sources as well. In its general (sub)urban chaos scene, it rivals the incomparable opening 10 minutes of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead reboot. In its after-hours-in-familiar-places dread, it mirrors Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot and the indelible midnight classroom set-piece from Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks. But the engine driving it, that coalesces these tantalizingly familiar bits and pieces into a toothsome meal, is the same thing that animates Stephen King’s work: a clever and nimble manipulation of the uncanny. Comedians (Cregger co-founded the comedy troupe “The Whitest Kids U’Know”), the good ones, boast that same gift for inserting the absurd into the mundane. The line between horror and laughter is so slight, there almost isn’t one. In Weapons, it’s the clown where your wife should be, dinner guests who don’t ever speak and refuse to leave, the obvious witch showing up for a parent/teacher conference. Terrifying in the moment, but funny…should you survive. Weapons made me feel like I was a seventh grader ripping through It over a long weekend in the fall of 1986 again. As with most things made only for me, I suspect it has delights for everybody.

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.

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.

Elio lying on a beach with a colander for a hat: "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.”

Elio (2025)

Posted in2025, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Pixar, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*/****
screenplay by Julia Cho & Mark Hammer & Mike Jones
directed by Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi

by Walter Chaw Elio, from Coco co-director Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian (animator, Turning Red), and Domee Shi (director, Turning Red), is a derivative oddball-kid/buddy comedy space adventure of the middle-aspiring family-programmer variety Pixar now uses to pad its roster between increasingly flaccid and uninspired franchise tentpoles. How the mighty have fallen. Boasting three directors and three writers (Julia Cho (Turning Red), Mark Hammer (Shotgun Wedding), and Mike Jones (Soul and Luca)), it’s a mosaic of borrowed bits designed to geek chafed pleasure centres, thus ensuring the relative placidity of your children for a couple of hours. That is, if the shot-for-shot “live-action” remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon have run their course…which they haven’t. Maybe the inevitably tepid word-of-mouth damning praise–the “you know, for kids!” and “the whole family will like it” kind, or even the classic “it’s not great, but I cried”–will help it reach whatever goals it’s meant to before assuming its proper place as anonymous streaming filler for a content-voracious delivery service. It’s the sort of movie Common Sense Media and other censorious sites for terrible parents adore, if that gives you an idea. It’s funny because it’s not like I even dislike Elio; it’s just that if you ask me to think about it, I start to realize how much of my life I’ve wasted.

Low angle of an emaciated zombie against a blue sky: "And now a word from Senator Rick Scott"

28 Years Later (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Zombie

*½/****
starring Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes
written by Alex Garland
directed by Danny Boyle

by Walter Chaw At its best, Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later is alive with the speculative cultural anthropology of the due-for-revision Reign of Fire. At its worst, it’s Ren Faire: The Movie, a guided LARP through a fantastical post-apocalypse, replete with unnecessarily elaborate lore, feasting scenes, braids for miles, and paste-thick accents. It’s almost entirely humourless sociology drunk on its own gravid religiosity, ending at a neo Sedlec Ossuary complete with mad curator who explains very carefully what a “memento mori” is. If my inner 16-year-old’s hormones could operate a typewriter, they would produce exactly this script, written by the returning Alex Garland. I did appreciate a flash of wit in a “SHELL” station sign vandalized to say “HELL”–shades of the spray-painted “S” before “LAUGHTER” on the side of The Joker’s semi rig in The Dark Knight (and of course Catwoman’s “Hell Here” in Batman Returns)–but that kind of gallows humor, evident even in Boyle’s own 28 Days Later, is conspicuously absent in this intensely self-important/self-serious piece. I was tempted to look at it more favorably as an epitaph for the human race–a companion piece to the Philippou Brothers’ Bring Her Back that likewise boils down to rituals of grief and remembrance–but comparing things to Bring Her Back ultimately does those things no favours.

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.