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.

Finn Little and Nicolas Cage holding surfboards: "They look board"

The Surfer (2025)

Posted in2025, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Ireland, Nicolas Cage, Thriller, UK, VOD

**½/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell
written by Thomas Martin
directed by Lorcan Finnegan

by Walter Chaw A time or two during Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer, I wondered if it wasn’t at least a spiritual cousin to Frank Perry’s The Swimmer, seeing as how both films offer an overarching metaphor of going home while examining an aimless, tortured masculinity on the existential skids. Indeed, there’s a literary quality to The Surfer that smells like the leather and furniture polish of John Cheever spiced with the postmodern detachment of Alex Garland’s The Beach–which is to say I was never really engaged with The Surfer so much as I was trying to figure out its thesis and its sources as though it were an essay question. Not unlike a test. In demanding an active viewership, it creates disengagement; it’s an irony I haven’t been able to untangle entirely. I’ve felt similarly detached from Finnegan’s recent work: His carefully crafted but arguably airless Vivarium and its follow-up, Nocebo, are so explicitly and dedicatedly about something that the only way out for me is through analyzing them. Here’s the thing: I don’t think they’re complicated. They’re like escape rooms in the sense that it’s possible to exist in a room without wanting to escape it, unless it’s clear the only point of the room is to escape from it. Finnegan’s best work doesn’t do this. His 2011 short film Foxes, in which a woman finds her inner nightbitch in the midnight ritual of wild foxes outside her carefully manicured suburban existence, is About Something, too, of course, and dry critical analysis is a way through it, yet there’s a freedom about it that doesn’t immediately demand a close critical reading. It can just be.

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.

Christopher Abbott with a flashlight peering through a barred window in Wolf Man

Wolf Man (2025) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Posted in2025, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, Horror, Ireland, New Zealand, Werewolf

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger
written by Leigh Whannell & Corbett Tuck
directed by Leigh Whannell

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In his 2020 book Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film, author Craig Ian Mann charts the evolution of werewolf mythology from the Middle Ages on to show how the metaphorical purpose of werewolves shifted with each new epoch. In medieval times, they were sinners wearing their transgressions on the outside; during the Inquisition, they were presented as witches in disguise. Enlightenment dismisses the werewolf as religious hokum, but it comes roaring back in the Romantic period as a psychological concept indicating our tempestuous natures, and cinema is born soon enough afterwards to freeze this take in amber. In movies, werewolves are typically a Jekyll-and-Hyde conceit in which the bestial side of some hapless schmo is temporarily unleashed. The particulars change, of course. Sometimes, a bite portends a transformation, one usually governed by the lunar cycle. Sometimes, the werewolf infection is an inherited curse. Sometimes, as in Sam Katzman’s ten-cent wonder The Werewolf, it’s a matter of science gone awry. The zeitgeist, too, can alter our perception of the werewolf, and periodically renew its currency. 1957’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf, for instance, reflected the moral panic over juvenile delinquents, as Mann notes, while 1985’s Teen Wolf was, in its incoherent way, another of the decade’s cautionary tales about getting high on your own supply.

A bloody hand pressed against a window: "The Brothers Grim: by Walter Chaw"

The Brothers Grim: FFC Interviews Danny & Michael Philippou

Posted in2025, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

by Walter Chaw Australia-born Danny and Michael Philippou are on the vanguard of a new extreme cinema. We are Batman and they are Bane, raised in the outer dark of the Internet while we, Gen-X, the builders of this digital Pandora’s Box, are merely the idiots who made it possible. I don’t entirely understand how the Philippous do what they do, just as I don’t understand how modern culture has metastasized archetypes, exposition, video editing, et al. into the viral, mob sentience of an Internet that already better represents how we imagined “artificial intelligence” than the hallucinating algorithms of generative harvesters.

Hiddleston and partner dancing in the street: "Dance like Stephen King’s watching."

The Life of Chuck (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Stephen King, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tom Hiddleston, Annalise Basso, Mark Hamill
written by Mike Flanagan, based on the short story by Stephen King
directed by Mike Flanagan

by Walter Chaw I admit it: I have an allergy to sentimental treacle. I get that this shit is like mother’s milk to some–that fading stars and, indeed, entire cable channels have tied their strings to the “shameless tearjerker” to great if niche fame and fortune; it’s a “me” problem, and I accept that. I reject being force-fed platitudes as meaningful life lessons. I break out in hives in the presence of humpy-bo-dumpty scores thick on strings and a sense of wonder, maybe a wistful tinkle of the keys when an angel earns its wings or dies of cancer. I dislike it enough that not even Macaulay Culkin getting stung to death by bees could save My Girl for me. I confess I haven’t read the Stephen King short story upon which Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck is based, though I do remember a lovely piece King published decades ago in his collection Night Shift, “The Last Rung on the Ladder,” that, sans any supernatural elements, managed to bring a tear to my eye. So it’s not King’s variety of sentiment I’m immune to (I weep my eyes out still at the last “I love you, man” in Christine), only the bad faith kind that traffics in broad stereotypes dedicated to milking those fucking tear ducts like Amish grandfathers speed-bagging the herd’s teats before dawn.

Bring Her Back (2025)

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

****/****
starring Billy Barratt, Sally Hawkins, Mischa Heywood, Jonah Wren Phillips
written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman
directed by Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou

by Walter Chaw Danny and Michael Philippou are on the vanguard of a new wave. It doesn’t have a name–or if it does, I don’t know what it is. But I would include as its finest practitioners Jane Schoenbrun, Kyle Edward Ball, Charlotte Wells, and Demian Rugna. Generally working in horror, their work is often confounding to me at first glance: I don’t always understand the source of their anxieties. They occupy a shared universe, however, with the same colour of sky, the same certain thickness of air that makes it tough to breathe while I’m in there. I have begun to suspect I might be the cause of it all, somehow–my generation, I mean, as it passes from middle age into decrepitude, skipped over for leadership by a gerontocracy that has proved itself incapable of standing against the fall of the American Empire. Is that it? Or is it the Internet? Or is everything connected? Is it the proverbial assault rifle we gave to the chimp, who is us? A deadly gizmo we shaved apes couldn’t begin to understand but could, and do, gleefully wield with deadly consequences? Bad enough, but then we gave it to our children, hooked them on it, made the world impossible without it, and told them to be afraid of it, yet didn’t tell them why. Because we didn’t know. I watch these movies and wonder if this is what Crowther saw when he watched Bonnie and Clyde and refused to recognize the bounty of crop his generation sowed.

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

Karate Kid: Legends (2025)

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

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

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

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

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)

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

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

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

Zhao Tao in Caught by the Tides; petting a robot: "Hello, member of Daft Punk"

Caught by the Tides (2024)

Posted in2024, 2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, China, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Zhao Tao, Li Zhubing
written and directed by Jia Zhangke

by Angelo Muredda While some spent their COVID lockdowns making sourdough starters and boning up on the medicinal properties of horse dewormer, Jia Zhangke retraced two decades’ worth of cinematic memories, from 2002’s Unknown Pleasures to 2018’s Ash is Purest White, weaving them into a singular new project about urban alienation and the passage of time. Caught by the Tides is the formally playful product of that act of pandemic creative stir-craziness. Conceived and partially shot in the final days of China’s COVID-Zero policies in 2022, the film takes the real-life constraints of social distancing and contact tracing as an aesthetic inspiration to burrow into the past before standing firmly on the present. The strange times, and their restrictions on film shoots, prompt Jia to revisit and reposition the actors, characters, and settings of his oeuvre into a contemporary mosaic. Inspired, as he said at the film’s NYFF festival premiere, by ukiyo-e art from the Edo Period, a tradition of Japanese woodblock prints of transient urban life and folk scenes, he’s fashioned a singular floating world portrait of 21st-century China.

Brec Bassinger in a burning restaurant: "Another fondue party turns deadly."

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Theatrical

***/****
starring Brec Bassinger, Richard Harmon, April Telek, Tony Todd
screenplay by Guy Busick & Lori Evans Taylor
directed by Zach Lipovsky & Adam B. Stein

by Walter Chaw I love the Final Destination franchise that James Wong started with writing partner Glen Morgan–all six films, but particularly the two Wong directed. Wong and Morgan were, of course, instrumental in the creation of “The X Files” and its stickier, gloomier spiritual brother, “Millennium”. I love the absolute nihilism of Final Destination‘s premise and its suggestion that Death is a mysterious force more interested in contriving incredible machines to complete its dread duty than in, you know, just giving someone a heart attack. But is it Death in a playful, Ingmar Bergman sense, playing chess on the beach in the middle of a mass-casualty event with a survivor of a genocidal campaign who’s come home to find he’s brought the plague with him? What kind of person must one be for Death to want to hang out with them? The type of person who’s very good for business. No, Final Destination is more Death as an artificial intelligence, I think–an algorithm fed vaguely conflicting instructions that labours to maintain this corner of the Matrix of which it’s in charge: fix glitches but, and here’s the rub, don’t let the subjects know there’s been a glitch and that it’s being fixed. So it’s not a sentience, exactly, but a subroutine in a larger system. A celestial calculator. The biggest twist left for the series would be the identification of the being that made our lives an accounting problem it sent a somewhat limited clockwork to manage in the first place.

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

Fight or Flight (2025)

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

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

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

Life After still featuring Elizabeth Bouvia surrounded by men in suits

Life After (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Documentary, Hot Docs

***½/****
directed by Reid Davenport

by Angelo Muredda “I’ve done what I can, and the quality of my life is over,” 26-year-old disabled woman and assisted dying cause célèbre Elizabeth Bouvia says in archival footage of her 1983 legal fight to refuse medical care in the opening moments of Reid Davenport’s Life After. Bouvia, Davenport shows us through a montage of the media frenzy around her case–which largely evaporated once her petition proved unsuccessful–became a rallying point for the assisted dying cause, represented by an activist attorney from the Hemlock Society (whose more palatably named successor group, End of Life Choices, is later seen clashing with disabled activists in Congress) and given fawning news coverage for her frequently cited physical attractiveness and disarming affect. That the frank, direct, and relatable Bouvia made for good TV, as evidenced by a condescending “60 Minutes” update from 1998 in which Mike Wallace casually muses about the tension between her lingering prettiness and the ongoing cost to the taxpayer of her daily care, is not in dispute. But to what extent, Davenport wonders, can a disabled euthanasia activist who didn’t die, whose WIKIPEDIA page cryptically lacks either new details about her life or a conclusive date for her death, as Bouvia’s does when Davenport sets out to find her, truly be said to have no quality of life if she continued to live it?

Hailee Steinfeld in Sinners: "Children of the night. What music they make."

Sinners (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Horror, Thriller, Vampire

***/****
starring Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell
written and directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw Movies used to make me feel all kinds of ways. Usually, it was Adrian Lyne’s fault. Fatal Attraction was unapologetic. Flashdance was unashamed. 9½ Weeks? Brothers and sisters, 9½ Weeks was a sin. Movies were everything to me once: friend, secret sharer, father confessor, mother, and, yes, lover, participating in the formation of my object choice and foundational in the encouragement of my onanism. I still feel a butterfly in the pit of my stomach thinking of the curtained room at the back of the video store–the stolen, lidded glances as I pretended to peruse the “Foreign” section. I think about how VHS brought the forbidden pleasures of grindhouses and peepshows into the middle-class living room of otherwise “traditional” nuclear families, tucked behind rows of hardbound books on respectable bookshelves or in the leather-clad storage ottoman set in the middle of the party, holding drinks and hiding corpses, perversely, in plain sight. “Help yourself to another cocktail wiener off the tray there, Father O’Shaughnessy.” Did you see No Way Out in a theatre when you were 14? How about Angel Heart? No? How about The Big Easy or Sea of Love? Ellen Barkin? No? I’m sorry to hear that.

Meghann Fahy looking at her phone slightly harried in Drop: "More like Ay Yi Yi Phone!"

Drop (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Ireland, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Reed Diamond
written by Jillian Jacobs & Chris Roach
directed by Christopher Landon

by Walter Chaw The distaff version of last year’s Carry-On, which was itself the umpteenth redux of Phone Booth, Christopher “Son of Michael” Landon’s Drop does the “I can see you/have you checked on the children?” mambo in a high-rise restaurant setting with young widow and single mother Violet (Meghann Fahy), who’s wading back into the dating pool with app match Henry (Brandon Sklenar). Her hipster sister Jen (Violett Beane) is holding down the fort at home, babysitting Violet’s adorable but deeply traumatized–in an adorable way–son, Toby (Jacob Robinson), who, we learn through a series of flashbacks, once had a gun pointed at him by his mentally unbalanced, now-dead dad. Is this a surprisingly dark development for a breezy, moth-eaten, high-concept entertainment that is otherwise as smooth and frictionless as a baby’s ass? Sure!