Prey is easily the second-best Predator movie. As a former Totally Rad Show head, I know Director Dan Trachtenberg has seen his share of the Predator catalog and knows what makes these movies work: seeing the Predator use his camo and futuristic tech to outsmart and overpower hapless victims.

This go round, there seems to be an inevitable but purposeful nerfing of the Predator’s abilities, but I think it works because (1) this is set in the 1700s, and (2) the film is constantly mirroring Predator and Naru to show how they are both young hunters on their coming-of-age survival adventure.

On this second watch for me, for most of the runtime, I thought the film, while sporting some nice, on-location photography, was mostly just competent. Polished, professional, considered, if a shade slow in the opening half. Trachtenberg keeps the dialogue minimal, so there is lots of time for the snaps, crackles, and pops of Predator-ese. Right around the time Naru gets cornered by her brother’s goons, the movie takes it up a level and doesn’t relent through the finale.

There’s another 80s/90s-ness dimension to this film exclusively in the vein of Jack London, Hatchet, and the like and similar 90s adventure films like Wild America and Far from Home: Adventures of Yellow Dog. A kid and a dog wandering around in the woods with a hatchet, rope, com. It’s a perfect encapsulation of a very specific subgenre mixed with the hard-R brutality of a space alien garroting morons with his bifurcated sling blade. Really good mix.

I really liked this, sue me. While not as New Hollywood/Three Days of the Condor as the trailers would suggest (try Winter Soldier, if you want more of that), this does sport an old-fashioned gumshoe, government potboiler vibe that I really dug. Cap-Falcon (and his Avenger-in-training sidekick Torres) is out here following leads, roughing up hoods, and sticking it to the man, while a larger conspiracy closes in around him.

The biggest compliment I can give this movie is that it had some of the best action scenes I’ve seen lately. (I just do not care for the relentless hysteria of Wick, even if I can it it’s cool for spells). The balance of cool sequences, downtime to let it breath, establishing shots, decent CGI, and a good scene length without too much overload was just what I was looking for. The aircraft carrier/battleship jet duels with Cap-Falcon, Torres, and some MiGs (or whatever) was great. And while I don’t generally watch trailers or read reviews ahead of time, it was hard to miss the negative groundswell of disappointment around this (and Red Hulk, specifically), but I thought it was pretty good. I think some of the CGI of Red Hulk is way imperfect (the eyelines between Cap-Falcon and Red Hulk are all over the place sometimes, and just like Thor: Love and Thunder, some of the sequence around the pink trees had this very rectangular-square look – like the tech can’t anything in the periphery), but generally I was a fan of Red Hulk’s presentation. And Harrison Ford rocked here.

The best way to enjoy this movie is not to compare it to the Chris Evans’ Cap movies, but to take it on its own merits. It’s only going to touch on the larger MCU and Cap-Evans history in the most surface-level and briefest ways possible: Bucky makes an appearance and Cap-Falcon doubts himself and whether he’s deserving of Cap-Evans’ blessing to take his shield and such. (We do get some sweet “previously-on” montage to remind us of the 2009 Hulk movie where he fights Abomination in NYC, but that feels sweaty as hell as they try to imply that some bystander that just happened to be there and was scapegoated by a giant Hulk vs. Abomination disaster. I guess, right?).

Instead, Cap-Falcon is working on creating his own legacy, mentoring Torres, battling Sidewinder, protesting for Isaiah Bradley, and ing up with but still keeping Thaddeus Ross honest. He seems to get his ass kicked way easier than Cap-Evans (no super soldier serum and all, but this is mentioned to humor effect more than once), but has boss-ass Vibranium wings that can cut practically anything.

Overall, this is the fourth best Cap movie (in what is the best standalone franchise in the MCU, right? Iron Man is the only one even in contention, but I don’t think it’s really close), but still probably my favorite of the latest tentpole MCU releases.

A joyous journey through the 60s and a fresh-faced band’s trip to the top of the (fictional) charts. Great cast, great vibes, great ing Tom Hanks performance, and great and catchy songs written specifically for the film. I know this movie like the back of my hand, but I don’t think it ever hit me until this viewing how everyone in the “Playtone galaxy” is already one-hit wonders who are either enjoying their newfound success or hate their popular songs from years ago. Mr. Downtown can’t bear to hear the lyrics from Guy he sings seconds later and Diane Dane’s lounge singer act has been going on since the Wonders were in tighty whiteys. A perfect “slice of cake” film.

Final Destination 6 (Bloodlines), where have you been all my life? A perfectly cromulent sequel without all of the legacy-ing to show that, yes, Virginia, there is room for more horror sequels. See, somewhere along the line, Hollywood got the idea to kneecap lengthy franchises (I’m particularly thinking of horror here). Diminishing box office returns? Corporate tastes shifted? Whatever it was, sequels are back and en vogue like never before. All hail the corporate overlords as long as they provide more Jason, Freddy, Halloween, and the like. (Another schism of this groupthink is that the sequels must be DIFFERENT, and while Bloodlines is marginally different enough qualify under that wing, some things, like say Mission Impossible or Fast and Furious, don’t need to be different and are better off left alone, but I digress.)

Another awestruck group of knuckledraggers are in Death’s (definitively not Tony Todd to end that fan theory, but RIP to the legend who gets a bittersweet goodbye here) crosshairs as they start getting knocked off during increasingly improbable and suspicious “accidents.” And special bonus, this time, “it’s your kids, Marty.” Can they break the cycle or will the family tree get pruned via a plane crash/giant log truck/roller coaster or the like?

What works here is what has always worked – the premise. Everyone has been alone at night and heard the loud cranks, ticks, grinds, and whirs of appliances in a quiet abode and thought, What the FUCK was that? And wondered if something was amiss. Well, here, the answer is always, of course, yes, but it’s a relatable premise. And more than that, it’s endless FUN to watch these bozos get annihilated thanks to Rube Goldberg deathtraps and this convey is capable of yet more endless repetition.

This go round, we spice things up a bit as we get an opening headfake dream of a catastrophe as a Space Needle-esque restaurant in the 60s, but wake up from the present nightmare of the granddaughter of one of the survivors. She’s flunking out of school and must corral her entire family into understanding the basic idea of her dream and how it relates to Final Destination conceit plus the obvious addition of ancestors being fair game now. Yada yada, you know the drill.

Primo kills this go round (and tons, tons, TONS of gore – most of it is CGI globs but it’s still everywhere) including that PERFECT teaser trailer bit. No huge spoilers there, but that’s how you do a trailer – not too much of the movie and in fact, when you see the movie, the trailer fits in neatly without giving away the movie. There’s also fan service and winks to the in-crowd who the previous entries (most of this is conveyed via a franchise “bible” of a scrapbook that has all the secrets to surviving the franchise). There’s also a great bit where the main girl tries following around her relatives and predicting everything that could go wrong and then thing unfold… in a related fashion. And lastly, good humor and vibes throughout. I was honestly impressed how much I was enjoying the characters and their relationships, despite the paper-thin characterizations.

A quality entry in a really-hard-to-screw-up franchise. Been a while since a series rewatch, but I’d go somewhere in the middle with 1, 5, and 3 near the top and 2 and 4 bringing up the rear.

In my pop culture-addled brain, Rambo in this movie is an iconic archetype – the vengeful Angel of Death who lives only to rescue his fallen comrades and mete out revenge on those who left them behind. In my mind’s eye, he stands there in a blank void, perpetually caked in mud with his hand extended waiting for his exfil, while the enemy closes in all around him. Like Death playing chess (or Twister or Battleship), he is emotionless (except when he’s bellowing aloud as he’s firing a machine gun into all the hi-tech gadgets – clearly a bit perturbed there, I’ll grant you) and yet undeniable and unstoppable. None of that stops this movie from sucking ass for much of its runtime, but it’s still worth noting.

Stallone is back as Rambo for his second foray into First Blood as he’s bailed out from his prison rock-mining, demolitions class (?!) by Colonel Troutman and his beret. He’s dangled with a presidential pardon if he’ll only go save all the POWs left in Vietnam. “This time, you get to win,” he’s told in bullshit-ese by Troutman, but practically as soon as he lands in Nam, he’s told by a suit and his handpicked goons that the mission is smokescreen for all the Washington fat cats. Will Stallone get crucified for the war’s sins or will he make it back to HQ to MURDER EVERYONE?

This movie is terribly light on good action and long on watching Stallone slowly make his way through bamboo camps and jails, rice paddy fields, loud-ass crickets, and jungle sweat (and getting tortured in gratuitous Jesus imagery as he’s hung up while getting electrocuted and thrown into a leech-infested mudpit). All this while HQ props their feet up with ice-cold Coke (TM), hoagies, and every NASA computer in existence. Jerry Goldsmith is sprucing up the t with his synthy soundboard growls and twists, but it’s not enough to justify the 70-ish minutes where the film is banking on Stallone’s stoic monosyllabic commentary and no-selling beatdowns and his tragically short tryst with (checks Wikipedia) Co to entertain you. (And none of that is even getting into the idiotic plan where Stallone is recruited for a non-mission, so he can MURDER EVERYONE??? Did these morons not watch the first movie?)

If you’re like me, you’re here for Stallone Jason Voorhees-ing motherfuckers with a serrated Bowie knife (in later years, referred to, of course, as a Rambo knife), an M60 mini gun, and a bow and arrow complete with explosive tips. On the heels of Stallone getting left for dead in hell (by John Kreese’s sorry ass, no less), the movie takes off and vaults into the stratosphere right around the time Stallone grunts into the radio that he’s coming for Murdock’s sorry ass and Goldsmith’s score flares as Stallone MURDERS EVERYONE. We’ve got choice bits with Stallone throwing a goon into a frontflip out of a helicopter, playing possum long enough to RPG another helicopter to shit, and taking down the main VC soldier in a waterfall wake with an explosive arrow and he is blown to literal human shrapnel. Glorious.

It's handled fairly humorlessly as Stallone clearly feels some obligation to the real-world political battle lines surrounding Vietnam (in a script co-written by Stallone and James Cameron). But like a typically perfect Cosmatos-Stallone pairing, at film’s end, everything is blown to shit and ablaze including all nearby vehicles, leaving Stallone no choice but to thumb it back home.

Cruise’s intended victory lap shows him finally meeting his match (and his maker?) in the ultimate battle for supremacy between dodgy AI algorithms and old-school analog tech. Can Cruise pull enough spare parachutes and fake cyanide capsules out of his ass to outsmart Skynet or will he get drowned and left for dead at the bottomless pit at the end of the ocean?

You’d think with 7 prior movies including a 2.5 hour part one with retconned backstories galore that this movie wouldn’t need a ton of table setting, and you’d be dead (reckoning) wrong. We’ve got an extremely unruly, hairy pre-title sequence that’s just making a mess all over the place. Cruise gets a VHS mission briefing from current-president, former-CIA director Angela Bassett that includes a clip show of the franchise’s highlights like this is the Seinfeld series finale. We also get an entirely unrelated montage from the Entity’s perspective showing that it is a combination of all of the franchise’s prior villains. (I appreciate all of these efforts to work in MI3 and the antigod, but what are we doing here? This kind of thing is also super TV finale like in the finale season of Buffy, for one thing and also in the wildly mixed bag of Rise of Skywalker – how the First Evil and Palpatine are just reiterations of all prior big bads). These are the kinds of sequences and choices that defy all conventional filmmaking technique and logic but still work from some strange, “mult-part franchise finale” alchemy.

Things get sweatier as the film seems determined to be a joyless, morose affair. Cruise is getting overpowered, his mask bits and fakeouts are failing left and right, and he’s looking… old. Everything is drably monochromatic and still moving a thousand miles per hour with cross-cutting to scenes from prior movies and just tons and tons of narration and expo dumping. Poison pills and all and core team are getting threatened with death or killed off like it, again, is a TV series finale. Don’t know what they were thinking here. And again, this is all in the cold open with another 2.5 hours to go. Easily the worst beginning of one of these movies… ever? (Only other ones even in conversation are the beginnings to two and four). (The movie gets considerably better right around the time Cruise is interrogated by Bassett and crew, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the first 10-ish minutes are a hard, convoluted, but necessary coda from Dead Reckoning. We even drop Gabriel out of the movie until the final act.)

Other widespread aspects. This is a very claustrophobic movie that, again, seems determined to be visually unappealing and bleak (until we get to the beautiful plane stunts). Lots of time spent in tunnels, sewers, subways, caves, caverns, and the bottom of the ocean. A lot of dark environments that are backlit. We’re almost never seeing the sky or anything interesting to look at. (The whiteout snow commandoes are boss, but that’s such a minor win for this larger of a structural problem/choice.) Coupled with that, this is a movie that just loves The Hunt for Red October, and The Abyss. And as much as I dig those movies, it is severely limiting to stick Cruise in a wetsuit and have him scuba dive through 15 minutes of the franchise closer. (And I still maintain that there largely has never been a good underwater action scene ever put to film as the logistics and CGI just don’t allow for it.)

Another thing is that this is a very serious and self-serious movie. Akin to decades of cold war/nuclear paranoia thrillers like Dr. Strangelove (in a movie so clearly in conversation with Strangelove, it’s a puzzling oddity to have like 75 tables and giant maps in the biggest WAR ROOM ever constructed and never make any kind of joke with it), Fail Safe, Star Trek VI: Undiscovered Country, By Dawn’s Early Light, Watchmen, and others, this movie is constantly acting like EVERYONE CAN DIE AT ANY MINUTE. All this weighty mood in a movie where Cruise mind-melds with a hyperbaric chamber that feeds him visions to sooth his subconscious and drain his lifeforce in a subplot highly reminiscent of The Riddler’s green popcorn, mind control gadget (and also the alien villain in Oblivion, also starring Cruise).

There is plenty to like here – Dunlow hasn’t been seen in 30 years and just comes in with a full salt-and-pepper beard and is CARRYING THIS MOVIE with his Inuit bride; Tramell Tillman (terrific in Severance) is pitch perfect as the proxy Scott Glenn “wise but distrusting sub captain;” the editing, especially the lack of dialogue or music in the biplane stunt, is phenomenal; the group dynamics work well and there’s a lot of wrought tension (even if this runs counter to the inanity of the film’s plot); and Gabriel's fate is an all-timer.

But even in all this we’re relying a lot on how proximity to super spies means any recent adopted team can do ANYTHING the team requires. And, of course, Tom Cruise is 2025’s Snake Plissken because he doesn’t care about your iPhone/Twitter bubbles of red pill insanity. (He even yells at one attacker to “get off the internet.”) And the ending buttons just go all in on the self-serious moralizing – Angela Bassett’s president has an invented son just because she needs someone to cry for when an impending nuke is threatening and Ving Rhames tells everyone the key to happiness and the meaning of life is to “be nice.” (Everyone revolted when “Leave the World Behind” had the same, overly simplistic prescriptive, but I doubt anyone cares here.)

Maybe on successive viewings I’ll warm to this more, but this feels like a film that mistakes somber heaviness for “important,” worthwhile drama to end a franchise.

Dead Reckoning is making such sweaty leaps that it ought to fail on principle but somehow it survives, thrives, and (yes) multiples into one more final chapter. We’re inventing a new backstory whole cloth (Cruise’s old flame is gunned down in her prime) and weighing everything down with this “final phase of the franchise” world weariness, while also attending black-tie raves hosted by a fucking computer virus(!). The movie is so damn sincere at trying to make the fate of the world come down to groaners like, “What if that’s what the entity wants you to think?” “It’s afraid” and suitcase nukes unlocked by Da Vinci Code-esque pinwheel, Chinese finger cuffs. And McQuarrie and Co. are doing this strange intercutting multiple times where the VO is NOT matching what’s on screen, or at least not obviously – (at least twice with the opening Russian sub captain narration overlaid on top of footage of the entity and again when the military brass are describing the entity and we intercut with Not-Cody Rhodes coming into the West Wing; This could be meant to show how the entity is so sneaky that even the film’s editors are trying to make you doubt everything, but I digress).

Still, I find this marginally more satisfying than Fallout. I find the battle lines more clearly drawn and the plot, while stupider, more digestible and not as rampant with “You can’t kill me because you need me for XYZ.” Also, Shea Whigman’s task force makes for a nice addition. The motorcycle jump is amazing, Lorne Balfe’s score is a smidge better this go round, and we have Ving Rhames’ finest hour. In the aftermath of Ilsa’s demise and asked if they were close, Rhames shreds with a simple, “In our way.”

A worthy penultimate entry.

There is nothing more impossibly Mission Impossible than a glazing footchase through tourist landmarks that ends with Cruise unnecessarily hanging off an elevator, while he and the villain agree that they can’t kill each other…. YET! AHA! Because more tense standoffs culminating in never-arriving revenge must transpire, you see. It’s also almost deeply comical that Cruise can’t help but avert his eyes when Rebecca Ferguson is giving him the stinkeye for how convoluted and stupid the finale is: “You see, we must let the bombs start before they can stop! INGENIUS!”

On my fifth watch or so, this finally washed down a bit better. The good is absolutely tremendous. The beginning is just a brilliant five minutes of wrought anxiety from a nightmare and then a knock, a gun, and an empty apartment with no guests expected. Most movies spend hours trying to create the spark of magic that this movie creates with just a simple knock on a door and a face cast in shadow in a rainy anonymous night. It is beautiful stuff. And, of course, the storm is coming, No, I am the storm, and all. Wolf Blitzer face-swapping. Oner halo jump through a lightning storm. Bathroom fight (way undersold this on other viewings – great stuff with the toss through the mirror and incorporating the plumbing of all things). Vanessa Kirby. Reincorporation of Solomon Lane. Motorcycle chase through Paris. Good good good.

Still, it’s just a very tiresome experience to endure the constant, start-stop footsy with Ilsa (She can’t tell you that), Solomon (I’m going to kill everyone, just not now), Baldwin (I’m on Cruise’s side, except when I’m trying to get him arrested), and John Lark (also going to kill everyone and frame you for it, just not now). Just constant expo dumps with endless swapping of allegiances. Pretty sure Alec Baldwin dies and the movie CAN. NOT. STOP. No 21-gun salute or crisply folded flags or taps or even a solemn salute. Just a nod for Cruise get back to the chase that culminates of course with another blue ball standoff.

The movie does try to pause for small character moments – Cruise not wanting to let the French female cop get gunned down (even if this is basically stolen from The Town, who probably got it from somewhere else). And the overall anxiety of Fallout is brilliant, even if undelivered. (It’s like a horror movie promising that a lead character will be killed off.) It feels earned because of Cruise’s dream, the title, and the constant looming specter of the end of the world in every single one of these movies. 24 even played this card when it actually had a nuke go off in one of its seasons, but this franchise is too light for that kind of mindless heavy lifting.

But ultimately, the movie is too damn long as I tap out before we even get to Kashmir. (Paradoxically, I don’t feeling this way about Dead Reckoning, but we’ll see on rewatch. Of course, this is coming from the guy who also thinks John Wick lost the plot years ago no matter how much actual plot and imaginary rules they throw you in-between constant gun fu.) The setpieces and stunts in the finale are good, but just cut out like 10 minutes from Paris where Cruise and team are ferrying Lane back and forth between safe houses.

Loading of Superman’s arm cannons ain’t enough to vault this to the best of the franchise. I put 1 and 3 at the top and demoted 4 a tad on rewatch and had it in a dead heat with 5, 6, and probably 7.

A tale of two movies – a patient, engaging first half with a super active, inventive camera and a more droll, conventional, jump scare second half that has to actually follow through on the story with protagonist “research” and “I’m not crazy” meltdowns. More compelling for the potential contained within than the sustained quality of the whole.

Sosie Bacon (bit role as Clay’s girlfriend in 13 Reasons Why) is an overworked psych ward doctor who starts losing her grip after a particularly contentious interaction with a patient who was cursed with the “smile.” Can she navigate her absent fiancé (Jessie Usher), bougie sister (Gilian Zinser, really good in just a scene or two), disengaged therapist (Robin Weigert), interested ex-boyfriend cop (Kyle Gallner, age has helped his chops and given him a jawline and cheekbones), traumatic upbringing, and her crumbling psyche or will she get eaten by an Amazonian force ghost of her dead mom?

This feels like the perfect audition to helm a Nightmare on Elm Street remake, but it could have been so much more. The first hour has the juice of the best prestige, elevated horror. Longlegs, It Follows, Babadook, Talk to Me, The Witch, Hereditary, Get Out. Painstakingly patient camera work with these knowing pans and long takes holding the effects in the frame. Interesting camera angles (though I’m not always sure there’s a particular agenda or perspective being conveyed through the different camera shots – like say the inverted cloud shots or how everything is at a right angle or off-center but head-on dialogue shots [borrowed from Jordan Peele who got it from Jonathan Demme and so on]). Aided by some truly nightmare fuel visuals (people tearing the flesh off their faces) and one of the most uncomfortable scenes ever put to film (the kid’s birthday party is like PEAK cringe second-hand embarrassment and blows the doors off other daylight horror scenes), we’re just getting top shelf work.

And then the movie kills all of that momentum, because it has to slow way down and try to explain all of this. (I’m getting more and more of the mindset that, despite how “necessary” succinct, digestible backstories and mythologies are for mainstream, four quadrant films, the best genre work flat out. Does. Not. Need it. Art the Clown, among other horror icons, is a force of nature and shows that true horror comes from the inexplicable id and not grounded reality or straightforward stories. Is everything explained in Midsommar or Talk to Me? Of course not, but I digress.) You see, we don’t really know what “Smile” is but it’s akin to a Denzel Washington-Fallen-esque demon/entity that infects your mind and takes the form of other people and also is contagious to those around you (and you won’t last a week, akin to The Ring).

This is all delivered via (what I’m generously positing as) a sneaky commentary on anti-vax “doing your own research” of sneaking around and interpreting scribbled charcoal drawings, conducting unwelcome interrogations of victim’s families, and discerning the whispers of the prison rumor mill. This is all super typical of the genre (every exorcism movie on record has the hero go to the library and read apocryphal literature and Paradise Lost or some shit even though in modern times this has been reinterpreted as blogs and YouTube vlogs – talk about a step down), but for once, I wish the protagonist would just spill the beans to the 5 most important people in their life at the exact same time and be done with it.

In the second half, most of the creative shot choices are gone (other than a floating time-lapse dissolve through the cop’s circular window) amid a few token nightmare jump scares to keep you on your toes (but again with choice face-melting) and a lot of tacky “I’M NOT CRAZY” outbursts of insanity. And the last act, which opts for emotional resonance over creativity, is unfortunately devoid of anything interesting beyond another jump scare, another face-melting (gnarly but this is like the third time), and a spooky giant figure (like say, the spooky giant figure from It Follows). And we kind of end right in the middle of things for a bit of sequel bait.

As I said, the movie is trying (and not entirely succeeding) to walk this line between patient elevated horror AND a complete Nightmare on Elm Street riff (virtually every supernatural “boogeyman” horror film of the last 40 years is just ripping off Wes Craven’s original – an evil being with unlimited powers that are only confined to the protagonist’s POV). But as much as I love OG Nightmare on Elm Street, the series is mostly known for batshit creative kills and Krueger’s standup routine. (You see a lot of echoes of this in another Freddy-inspired hash of It: Chapter 2). This film (and probably Smile 2) would benefit from less backstory and more mood OR just going wholesale into elaborate wild theatrics.

Super good with some really average parts.

80s dark fantasy-sploitation with equal parts George Lucas and Tolkien. Val Kilmer and James Horner out here throwing a zillion MPH in a kids movies. KIDS MOVIE. We're talking about murdering a baby through black magic, and parents of gen X kids were like, "Yep. Let's do it." And none of that backstory, midiclorians horseshit. Just a guy in a skull helmet/mask throwing a ball-and-chain flail going against the hair metal hero fresh out of a gibbet cage. Where's my Willow sequel you bastards?

Like a Burg Khalifa trapeze artist, Ghost Protocol dizzies by scaling the franchise to new heights. Those thinking that McQuarrie had some uniquely magic touch in bringing big-scale stunts to the forefront of the franchise have lost their minds as Brad Bird lives, eats, and shits on that terrain. First 90 minutes of this thing are air-fucking-tight, maybe the best extended stretch of the entire franchise, and the film has a respectable last act, but the magic is in the first ¾.

Tom Cruise breaks out of a Russian prison thanks to Dean Martin, Benji, and Paula Patton as he has to save the world from nuclear annihilation again and Jeremy Renner’s attempts at franchise-stealing. When he is disavowed for the first/next/last time, can he reverse enough Springsteen shirt-and-jacket combos and zipline enough telephone wires to evade the Politburo thugs, the terrorist henchmen, and Uncle Sam’s boys or will he and his potato whiskey mustache get buried at the bottom of Red Square?

The genius of this movie lies not in skyscraper rappelling (though that too) but in the little things. Cruise’s introduction where he is basically silent while playing rock pinball and pole vaulting onto a stair landing. Gimme believable but still incredible practical stunts like this and the hospital, shirtless zipline all day long over the Kremlin explosion. And Cruise just slays here and in the Kremlin heist with just looks and gestures for the most part. Terrific straight man to Benji’s high-strung prattle. And the Kremlin iPad projector screen gag is like the best prowling scene in the entire franchise, right?

Bird also has a perspective as he shows that technology is patently unreliable. From the very first phone booth scene where the message does not explode, we repeatedly get faulty tech just exploding into crappola. The Kremlin computers taking a few extra seconds to their hacking. The blue is glue gloves dissipating into red is dead albatrosses. The mask generator malfunctioning. Benji’s pathfinder hoverboard thing overheating and damn near killing Renner. And of course, the biggest successes are practical and tactile – Cruise sketching Cobalt on his hand (and Tom Wilkinson landing a haymaker in like 2 minutes of screen time), Cruise using a flare as a distraction, Cruise and Renner having to get on the train without colliding into the polls, and the aforementioned zipline and parkour bits. Just countless examples of expertly conceived and executed bits.

I have the most minor kinds of criticisms possible. You could cut the Russian nuclear scientist, the Russian cop (though I kinda like his bits), and most of the footsy with Bogdan without missing a beat. And while I ire the attempts to give screentime to Sawyer and Paula Patton some motivation, it is also fairly trite and unnecessary. Lastly, it is truly idiotic how Cruise is effortlessly able to navigate Russian markets shoplifting phones, clothes, and shoes. Why not just have him steal a car and a gun and maybe stumble upon a suitcase with Cobalt’s entire plan? And Cruise is given nothing to do through basically all of the last act (that is full of a lot of nebulous countdowns and uplinks and satellites and what not) until he has a cool, (again) practical fight with Cobalt in a car elevator parking garage.

If OG MI lit the fuse and MI2 threw the bomb into a flying motorcycle duel with Dougray Scott and MI3 gave the film a grounded humanity, Ghost Protocol shows that it’s going to have the most clever, slick stunts of any major franchise.

Just too much textureless CGI sets and mid hijinx and “anyone can be a hero” for my taste. It sucks because you can feel a lot of what once made the MCU charming right there (great villain performance, good lead performance, good heavyweights in ing cast, interesting world-building), and the film is just too unfocused to make it work. Jonathan Majors was excellent here, but that’s likely the last of him we’ll see in this franchise. Kathryn Newton doesn’t do it for me, and Corey Stoll being reduced to a wretched CGI Krang is all kinds of batshit stupid (even if it is chapter and verse from the comics). And the film’s treatment of indigenous genocide seemed token and haphazard. It’s kind of amazing that Michael Douglass is still sneakily the best part of these movies.

A compelling but almost beat-for-beat sequel/soft reboot. Hell, it even looks like Ridley is "homaging"/stealing shots from himself – I’m particularly thinking of the camerawork inside the coliseum or overlooking the territory arena. The battle scenes, gladiator fights, and special effects (werewolf baboons aside) remain elite, but the palace intrigue with the brother emperors is a step away from Mel Brooks/Monty Python. Denzel owns (obviously) and the whole thing is super (re)watchable.

Novocaine is troublingly a movie that gets worse as it goes along, but the goodwill from the first act is almost enough for a recommend on its own. Almost. Jack Quaid (showing a smidge of range beyond just Hughie) is a quiet introvert of a bank manager with the disability/superpower of feeling no pain when fate comes a-knockin’ (in a sneaky Christmas vehicle) in the form of Amber Midthunter’s manic pixie-adjacent dream girl. Can their troubles amount to a hill of beans or will they remain star-crossed but unrequited?

Excellent excellent first act. Great chemistry between the main leads and their quirks and playing off Jack’s condition. I know it’s backwards and very “500 Days of Summer” ish to just posit that this should be the movie. A level meet-cute rom-com with just these two would be perfect. But even if we’re going action movie, I would have loved that the movie keep it in this gear and level. Alas, twas not to be.

Once we get to the second and third acts, the movie has to balance the whiplash tonal incongruities between the light rom-com and body horror action beats of a bank robbery gone wrong. Oh yeah? Yeah, because of Jack’s condition, we’ve got decaying flesh, compound fractures, and oodles of blood like it’s about to get tariff’d into the sun. Call it the Deadpool-David Leitching of America. Quippy one-liners with the hardest of R-rated bloodlust and carnage. YMMV. The fight scenes are fine but nothing special. If you’re loving the premise and the characters, then the action gets you there, but if you’re questioning the schism, then it might fall a bit flat.

There’s double and triple crosses and character moments with dead meat cops and Jack’s online gamer friend (Jacob Batalon who has never been as good as he was in the first couple new Spider Men movies). But the cliches and script contrivances start piling up scene by scene and it never regains that magic of the first act.

After 30 minutes, I loved this movie. After 60 minutes, I liked this movie. After it was over, I still liked it but felt a tad underwhelmed and disappointed.

Pleasantly bland. Coasting considerably on 80s needle drops (except for the title track unless I missed it?!), fashion, and décor, Take Me Home Tonight is like a ton of high school, “nerd hero must have sex with the crush lead before sunrise or else” comedies you’ve seen before.

Despite that setup, set roughly FIVE YEARS after high school graduation on the eve of Chris Pratt’s yearly LABOR DAY rager (doesn’t everyone have those?) in the Los Angeles hills, Topher Grace’s disgraced MIT graduate who slums it at Suncoast Video must sink his teeth into some good ol’ fashioned cocaine and Teresa Palmer’s (dead ringer for Kristen Stewart) “it girl” starlet. He’s ed by Dan Fogler’s best Chris Farley impression, Anna Farris as his sister, Michael Biehn as his cop pops (barely a couple of scenes), and Bob Odenkick in a wordless cameo as a car lot manager.

I wish he had more, but Topher is kind of the bland center to the better things in his orbit. Palmer oozes charm in her fairly stock role as the put-upon damsel-in-distress ish. With major Bradley Cooper in Wedding Crashers/Hangover energy, Pratt is just slaying in just a few scenes including crying his ass off when Farris breaks up with him, and he’s basically stealing the movie wholesale. He’s so good we basically side with him when she kicks him to the curb. (And what happened to him? He’s just PERFECT in this gear and rode it into Guardians and Jurassic World money and just closed up shop for stern robo-acting, but I digress). As said, Fogler has the most zany and biggest bits of the movie (stealing cars, pratfalls picking up women, a breakdancing showdown, and the like), but it’s hit-or-miss even if he has the right energy.

There’s a party or three and Topher lying his ass off at every turn to bed said chaste maiden and of course she forgives him before the credits rolls. Fun enough but not much here. Skip unless an absolute completist and instead watch Hot Tub Time Machine, Superbad, Can’t Hardly Wait, or an Apatow number.

Dead Sailors Society AKA “O Captain, My Captain” for real. Perhaps you say to yourself, “I’m a Ridley Scott completist and just must seek them all out. Duelists (good). Black Rain (oh yeah). GI Jane (good-ish). Exodus (meh). Give them all to me including White Squall (ehhhhh).” White Squall, however will likely disappoint as it’s coming-of-age, Oscar bait-y malarkey that you’ve seen before – a star playing a renegade who uses his unorthodox methods to lead a WASPY, all-boys boarding school into manhood. There’s usually an accidental death or three and a pseudo show trial that ends in someone yelling, “No, you’re out of order!” and the gallery clapping as the hero walks out into the credits. Very Dead Poets Society, Scent of a Women, and such.

This go round, Jeff Bridges is a stern, domineering sailing boat captain entrusted with Ivy League washouts and the like of Scott Wolf, Ryan Philippe, Jeremy Sisto, and others as they sail (around the world? or something? and ) learn about life, love, and toxic masculinity hazing disguised as rites of age.

The film has the basic screenplay acts correct – unruly, immature gents don’t trust each other or the captain’s mysterious ways; they band together through bonding under the captain’s harsh, mysterious but pure and effective ways; they face adversity from outsiders who don’t “get it”; and they must stick up for what they believe in. But it just doesn’t have the necessary scenes or heart to make you believe in the journey or to escape inevitable second-guessing. E.g., if Bridges is all-knowing, why the hell is he letting recruits who can’t swim or are afraid of heights or are depraved sadists on board the ship in the first place? And even if (as posited) it’s his second-in-command’s fault, why doesn’t he kick them off the ship altogether? (And don’t gimme that espirit de corps horseshit because Bridges throws Sisto off for way less than sadist gets way with.)

Another variation of this is how the film has difficulty with how it treats all manner of personal issues the same when they should be differentiated. Bridges (and I’m sure the original source material and the real-life proxies based on prevailing dogma) basically treats being afraid of heights, screwing up, and being a nutcase as evidence of defiance that needs yelling, public embarrassment, and, if necessary, an asskicking to right. And if anything is even hinted at as being a deeper, mental problem, it can surely be cured through (tough) love and a bromance sunset. For obvious reasons, this reminds one of the equally problematic, and partially affective Men of Honor with Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding, Jr.

The performances are fine for this kind of material with the babyfaces faring decently and Bridges coming off the best as he’s given the most classic-y role. (Caroline Goodall, the wife in Hook and the pilot in Cliffhanger, does great as Bridges’ wife with basically nothing.) Ridley doesn’t exactly make hay out of a real sailing boat on the open water and everything just feels very conventional, but the titular White Squall sequence is expectedly pretty masterful.

When the film arrives at a few key climatic moments (the roll call, some demises, and the replay of the names written down in a book), it’s easy to get mildly swept up in the cliched poetry of it all, but ultimately, I find this surface-level.

A real split personality movie, trying to be both a pleasing, dramatic tome on death, relationships, and parenthood and also another glam rock/hair metal cosplay adventure extravaganza. If that weren’t hard enough, the film also has the, by-now, usual problems of franchise bloat and IP brain that yields script problems and annoying “necessities.” A mixed bag, to say the least.

Hemsworth is back as Thor and this time he’s battling Christian Bale’s God Killer, while trying to re-establish civic duty in New Asgard and no-sell cancer with Natalie Portman and (rather than fuck dem kids) save dem kids from being stuck in a Tim Burton/Beetlejuice-esque modern art prison. Can he kick ass to enough G’n’R or will he get sidelined for Bale’s quest for revenge?

We’re just trying to serve too many masters here. The first 15 minutes tells you everything – the great, solemn parable of Bale’s Moses-esque desert exodus that ends in god-icide owns but feels like it’s from an entirely different movie than basically every scene with Thor or the marketing which was heavy on pink neon graphics and “Paradise City.” (And Bale owns as a demonic Assassin’s Creed protagonist and is likely the best part of the movie altogether.) Then, we get not one but two quippy retellings (“previously on”s) of Thor’s backstory – one from Korg (who is just everywhere in this movie) and another from Matt Damon’s cameo Punch and Judy theater including a way two-dimensional “funny” destruction of an indigenous temple by Thor just to shed the GOTG for another day. I dig both to varying degrees, but I don’t think both are necessary and again, they feel like they are from a different movie. The beginning with Bale is so dour and patient that, as much as I like it, I’m not sure I would begin there, but it’s an inherent paradox with no easy answer.

It might be different if the movie could maintain these parallel arcs well, but instead, Bale mostly disappears from the movie except for like 5 minutes in a few climatic scenes and we’re treated to Russell Crowe as Zeus pasta-ing his way all over a fake god conclave and all of this nonsense with the children of New Asgard. (I can’t be bothered to even try and understand [and neither can the movie be bothered to explain] the hierarchy, logistics, or basic ABCs of having all these gods together and why Crowe is seemingly Italian as Zeus or how all of this is also in SPACE. It’s never been entirely clear and it still isn’t. Crowe is a locked-and-loaded ham sandwich at all times and does, likely, exactly what was asked of him, but the scenes do not work.)

And the kids of it all. The explanation for where they are going when captured, how long it will take to get there, etc. All of this is handwaved away for more relationship hijinx with Thor and Portman. (Portman does well with the dramatic-ish stuff but can’t do well/isn’t trying against all that CGI in the other scenes.) And Idris Elba’s son is shoehorned in as another gatekeeper to Thor’s mind-melding horseshit. Then, the movie goes full bore as seemingly Thor can superpower the kids (and presumably anyone else???) with god lightning and theatrics and voodoo whenever he wants. It’s all very undefined and ill-defined (including who all can pick up these fucking hammers,) And, of course, in true Sean Archer fashion, Thor adopts a kid at the end with a nod of the head.

For a guy who can power up and drop magic nukes whenever he wants with the help of lightning/thunder and other nebulous forces, you wonder why Thor continually lets himself get his ass kicked for pieces while he jokes around. (And literally no one dies, ever. All can be resurrected or internally injured back to the hospital or welcomed as gods in Valhalla or whatever. )

I can’t quite get there with this one even though I still dig it.

As a diegetic radio news report informs us, big winds and choppy waters of hurricanes are rolling in to Miami which means it’s THE MEAN SEASON! Kurt Russell is a semi-successful reporter on the murder beat who is having a mid-life crisis and contemplating giving it all up to move in with his in-laws to a quiet, peaceful life in Colorado when a serial killer Zodiacs him into the limelight. He puts everything on hold to engage in a never-ending game of phone tag with the killer which goes about as expected.

Biggest stars of this film are peak Kurt Russell and the singular Miami setting with its neon downtown, stormy everglades and skiffs, and everything caked in AC-less sweat. We get primo Kurt Russel here, though he’s in my least favorite mode of his, even if he still rules at it: straight man in over his head. (See also, Breakdown, Backdraft, Executive Decision, Vanilla Sky. By contrast, his best modes are obviously charmer or badass as seen in The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Overboard, Deathproof.) And he’s hamstrung with a domestic storyline with Mariel Hemingway that feels like a nag from hell as she’s constantly telling him to quit the movie and move to Colorado. I get that in real life, she’s right and Russell is being a heartless dick (he’s paying zero attention to her, doesn’t foresee that his private home and homelife might be pulled into the serial killer’s sights, doesn’t demand protection for his wife, doesn’t carry a gun or get one for his wife, and on and no) but who wants a movie about Russell being a decent guy and pulling away from the drama?

In of a police procedural or journalism riff, the investigation is nonexistent. We get pretense of police involvement (Andy Garcia before De Palma figured out the best version of Andy Garcia and an excellent Richard Branford – rules in Legend of Billie Jean and Night Game of all things) and journalism oversight (Richard Masur as Kurt’s editor and Joey Pants as his photographer but both disappear at the drop of a hat), but it’s mostly window dressing except for a few key scenes. We don’t even get the requisite scenes of “This killer leaves no clues and is a pro.” It’s just scenes of a phone call with Kurt and the killer, a montage of Russell sweating his way through the news story and the coverage, a domestic squabble, and then the next murder scene. Also, the violence, gore, and like is extremely tame here as it’s a murder by handgun and it’s virtually all implied (except for a very specific scene I won’t spoil).

There’s a few nice inversions and twists on the basic formula that would later be set by Manhunter, Silence of the Lambs, and Seven. (Interestingly, this movie predates all of those but is after the Red Dragon book and again owes a debt to the real world Zodiac killings.) But it’s also kind of empty as we never get much of a clean explanation for why all of this is happening, though we do get plenty of red herrings.

A solid, atmospheric thriller.

Despite looming large over culture and the skies (like a bird, no, a plane…), Superman has never been my bag. I think the brilliance of OG Christopher Reeves’ casting and performance and pretty much everything about Superman 2 is well-settled by now, but it always felt like I missed it and was just a smidge too young. Instead, save for vague awareness of Superman IV through it being on constant rotation on HBO, Superman Returns was basically my real cinematic introduction to this franchise, and it too never set my world on fire.

Brandon Routh (totally solid here) is Superman and apparently returning from a journey he began a long time ago to venture to a galaxy far, far away. He must try to slide back into his Brooks Brothers, horn rims, and loafers’ lifestyle as Clark Kent to rekindle the flame with Kate Bosworth’s Lois Lane and evade Kevin Spacey’s evil scheming and miniature train model destruction.

The film’s opening struggles to setup a clear timeline as we appear to cut back and forth between rebooting the entire franchise (we see the fate of Krypton, Superman as a kid, and Lex Luther’s origins) but also jumping into this new timeline where Supes has been gone for five years. I’ll confess I never really made heads or tails of it, but at least, it stopped being a narrative issue after the first 15 minutes when the film basically just stayed in the present and set the stakes: Superman left everyone high and dry, Lois Lane moved on and got married and had a kid, and Lex got off on a technicality and inherited billions of equity but apparently the only assets to his name are a boss-ass train set and a yacht w/ helicopter.

Whenever Superman is Supermanning set to John Williams’ iconic theme, the film rules – the bank heist (what kind of Boondock Saints psychos use a minigun from the roof?), the 747/space shuttle setpiece, and…. that’s kind of it. Those scenes rule, but the bulk of the first 90 minutes is a lot of everyone telling Clark Kent how much Superman sucks for going on a vacation. It’s kind of a drag and Bosworth is fine, but doesn’t have that spark with Routh (or new hubby James Marsden for that matter) to sell the emotional core. The other main problem is we have a 45-minute setpiece on the Agro Crag AKA Kryptonite Island, and it’s just very static, repetitive, and visually uninteresting.

The cast carries the load, especially Spacey and Parker Posey almost single/[double?]-handedly saving the movie with the right balance of camp and sincere. Also, different than modern superhero templates, Superman actually gets to save people on a regular basis. The setpieces at the bank and with the airliner are just great. (Love seeing Superman get shot in the eye and the bullet bounces right off him.) Other nice scenes are with the train set and the henchmen with a tattoo on the back of his head.

But it definitely is a movie where you have to sit around and wait 20-30 minutes for the next good scene.

If there is an art to the slasher, even auteur-less, “lightning in a bottle” happy accidents of fortune-type art, Death Screams is almost entirely bereft of all aspects of it. Fresh off Spring Break, a gaggle of horny 20-40 somethings (seriously, a couple of guys here that had to be teenagers when Kennedy got assassinated) descend upon a quaint carnival and some “production value” train tracks as the Macheted Menace hacks them off one by one.

The film is competent in most basic respects (acting, shots, blocking in regular scenes), but any time there’s an artistic choice, it seems like the wrong one. The opening alone feels like a fever dream of miscalculations. A biker and his girlfriend try having sex on his motorcycle right next to the train tracks when somehow they get tied up, sliced up, and thrown in the river. I say “somehow” because it’s dark as shit and framed super close to make sure you can’t see ANYTHING. (The movie returns to this well seemingly a dozen times as repeatedly YOU CAN’T SEE SHIT in the kill scenes and seems to repeatedly introduce audio zingers when NO KILLER IS STALKING IN THE BACKGROUND. I’ll it I could be missing things due to the presumably poor quality of the stream on Tubi, but I doubt it.)

Then, after the great title credits with the pulse on the audio equalizer of SCREAMS intercut with the titular death screams, we get this wildly, tone-deaf operatic horseshit of an orchestral theme like this is a 1970s Bond picture with Shirley Bassie wailing away. AND it’s set to the agonizingly slow-motion sinking of the biker and his girlfriend’s corpses. (We cut back to the corpses repeatedly throughout the movie in a nice bit as it plays into the movie later.) You could turn off the movie right there and have a tale worthy of telling your grandkids.

It gets worse as the movie takes 40 FUCKIN’ MINUTES of character and relationship drivel (including a bit of moral majority commentary from granny and other button-down types) before we even get another kill. (Real sight to see this bozo, like he’s deer hunting, use a bow and arrow to wing his female victim before slitting her throat on an abandoned carousel that is presumably very far away from the very active carousel at the busy carnival??? I mean, she goes for a jog or whatever and gets to the memorial water fountain and THEN gets killed but somehow makes it to another merry-go-round???)

The movie comes alive when all of the main clique make it to the river for a bonfire and ghost stories at the spooky cemetery/farmhouse. We get what’s EASILY the best scene of the movie as the local prude tells an amazing “ghost story” that is intercut with the POV’d killer getting closer and closer and a thunderstorm nears as well. Everyone piles into the farmhouse and finally, the kills start coming fast and furious including a girl who gets her entire body cut in half after she falls through a hole in the stairs. (Real puzzling physics there.) But almost all of the violence is implied or off-screen – e.g., someone is alive and then we cut back and they are all bloody, strung upside down, and decaying after only minutes dead). Some decent chases through the woods and backlit photography of the woods and cemetery. When the killer is finally revealed, he falls out a window and is dead and the local sheriff plugs his dummy head full of another half dozen slugs until it explodes for good effect between quick cuts to the credits.

Not a lost classic or anything, but fun and at least the women are hot.

“Identity theft is not a joke, Jim”: The Motion Picture. Total Trading Places/Prince and Pauper-ish variation in the wake of Midnight Run as Jim Belushi and his rattail fake a prison riot, so he can make it out to Candlestick and slide into Charles Grodin’s tennis shorts, Lotus turbo, and white-collar lifestyle on his way to see his favorite Cubbies in the World Series. Can Belushi (or an unrecognizable stunt double) pirouette around a foul pole or will his antics lead to martial law?

A tale as old as time when the world was ruled by data planners (Filofax must have paid handsomely for the right to have their product condemned endlessly as the trademarked piece of shit product that ruined Grodin’s life) and giant cell phones. [And of course, no one knows at all what Grodin looks like, so Belushi can effortlessly himself off as someone else.] There’s something welcomely stupid about Jim Belushi and his bizarre likeability, despite his haggard incompetence. He just likes being a lazy bum felon who likes big tits. Men of culture, yada yada.

The movie is unabashedly moronic. [A goofy prison riot? These guys would have been Attica’d in no time flat. The warden doesn’t care about Belushi’s mother disappearing? Belushi’s girlfriend is enthralled with his nice guy act even though he’s broke, lying, and a felon? And, of course, he gets a golden parachute job poormouthing home goods?] People must have been so sick of Reagan corporate types that they instead embraced Reagan shitbag everymen as every hayseed interaction from Belushi is played like genius populism. He steals, lies, “charms,” and “smooths” his way into every guy’s wallet and every woman’s heart/pants. The Beverly Hillbilly GTA version of Hal Ashby’s Being There.

It's almost insulting to it that the movie does work on the most basic, meat and potatoes way possible. I’d seen this easily 20 times and it’s watchable trash.

3 O’Clock High is the High Noon-inspired high school, parking lot showdown between Casey Siemaszko’s neo, maxi, zoom dweebie and Richard Tyson’s stern convict masquerading as a super senior. It comes at the tail end of meatball romps and heartfelt teen dramedies but bears all of the hallmarks – sex-crazed and -starved teens (with absentee or antagonist adults) that are all miniature adults with a screenplay that has no chance of ing the Bechdel test and wild camera movement and snazzy edits right out of TV commercials (also seen in something like the perfect License to Drive).

The film is basically one day in the life of Casey’s nerdlinger, school paper writer, school store manager who aspires to be more. He runs afoul of the Tyson’s legendary badass (some of the movie’s best parts are the way it shows rumors and gossip spread like wildfire through a crowd) who doesn’t like to be touched and now must clock-watch until the titular 3 O’Clock High beatdown.

The script is nothing special but does have subplots to keep it moving – Casey tries various things to avoid the fight including cutting class and going home, planting evidence, getting detention, getting thrown in jail, paying off another big shot to fight in his place, and paying off the bully himself. He has episodes with any number of stock characters from films like Weird Science, Ferris Bueller, and more – asshole security guards, domineering principals, suspicious teachers, and a motley crew of high school cliches – performed by a good ing cast – Jeffrey Tambor, Philip Baker Hall (totally dress rehearsing Seinfeld’s Bookman), Mitch Pileggi (Shocker and Skinner), John P. Ryan (immortal as the NASA spokesman from The Right Stuff). And nothing raunchy but Casey’s hero gets his choice of female callers including the heavenly model, the manic pixie sidekick girl, and the randy, “Ms. Jacobs” English teacher.

Nothing special here but it’s very fun and a nice spin on the usual (including how there is another version of this movie where Tyson is the hero because no one will leave him alone) and peep the Utah mountains in the background.

Rocky III is the flossy thoroughbred of the Italian Stallion’s saga – the best parts of the 80s cocaine cinema (and last remnants of 70s New Hollywood) with none of the drawbacks. Fresh off a stellar opening montage/recap/”previously on” of Rocky II and a new car smell courtesy of “Eye of the Tiger,” Sly is back as Rock, the people’s champion with a host of title retentions from friendly challengers when Mr. T’s Clubber Lang comes knockin’ to knock him on his ass, take his title, his woman, and spiritually kill off Mick for good. Can Rock regain the renowned Eye of the Tiger or will Clubber’s prediction of “pain” reign true?

This movie is perfect right off the bat from the opening bravado montage to crashing to Earth, showing Paulie unable to live with himself due to Rock’s empty gloves/trunks/boots and the constant commercial reminders in the dregs of Philly that Rock’s gone soft. (Wonder why sorry-ass racist Paulie that Rock carries through alcohol poisoning and property damage until he’s put on the payroll doesn’t yell about Philly’s urban decay but can’t shut up about the “sterno bums” in LA?)

It's amazing that rock ‘n’ roll wrestling didn’t take off for another YEAR but there’s heel Hogan (perfect, absolutely PERFECT in like 5 minutes of screen time, though the “almost 7 feet tall and nearly 400 lbs” might be the biggest lie of his career) from his AWA days and Sly just showing a masterful understanding of basic babyface/heel psychology. (Ali and Inoki and Monsoon did this whole bit first, but it’s still pre-Hulkamania and deserves a nod for its prescience.) And Mr. T is otherworldly as a rage-fueled machine that will haunt your nightmares and your CTE PTSD flashbacks. (Love the two-fight structure and hook of it all, but worth noting is how shitty it is that Mr. T/Clubber just disappears from the franchise after this. It’s like in losing, he died/retired to never be seen again.)

And Sly has the perfect eye for the kitschy hoopla of bullshit that comes with cults of personality. The marching band, the iconic statue (put that shit back up on the stairs), the self-playing piano, the Warhol art deco portrait, the gaudy yellow ring cover (beautiful overhead shot when Rock is counted out in the first fight), and training camp with cheerleaders and adoring, bought-and-paid-for fans. And that brings us to the immaculate Burgess Meredith who is knocking it out of the park with only a few scenes to show his love (and distrust!) for Rock and Man o’ War (always knew Mick had a soft spot for the ponies).

You’ve also got perfect dose of Apollo Creed with his effortless babyface turn and lateral move into being a contentious manager. (Love the teased standoff between Creed and Clubber.) And these oiled/greased/coked up montages with the impossible task of teaching Rock unheard-of concepts like jabbing, dodging, and circling away from his opponent’s power. Part of the movie’s beautifully stupid perfection is that it embraces head-on that even with these newfound, cutting-edge strategeries and such, Rock STILL can’t beat this motherfucker (in the second round) and must resort to thinking on his feet and besting this brute the old-fashioned way: getting his ass blown up.

Lastly, regardless of your thoughts on realism in sports movies, these boxing scenes are the bee’s knees. It’s Batman, after having his spirit and back broken, trying to hack down Bane. Fuck realism. (And besides, have you not seen Tommy Hearns/Marvin Hagler 1985? Granted, Sly does this style in every movie and edits these films like Rock had his brains and interior mind palace replaced with a video feed of the evil shit M. Bison was pushing on Blanca, but that’s another story for another day.)

Perfection. Can’t be questioned or improved upon.

The ant fools you by being better than it has any right to be which makes you complain about the most genre-y parts that require the most suspension of disbelief. Ben Affleck is an autism-superpowered assassin mathematician who splits his time between Good Will Hunting-ing equations on mirrors/windows, beating his shins bloody with a stick set to NIN and epilepsy, and red misting cantaloupes with a howitzer. Can he help uncook John Lithgow’s corporate books, get the girl (Anna Kendrick), and cross swords with Jon Bernthal?

There’s no use running from that plot description of autism as a superpower or the equally outlandish omitted parts. Affleck’s super hero origin story of tough love via being forced to fight in the Kumite by his Navy SEAL/black hat father. (Interesting how if the father was fistfighting his kids we automatically are out on him but because he hires a reluctant sensei to Bruce Leroy their asses, we kind of allow it). How Affleck knows where every surveillance photographer is. How Affleck has a seemingly motion-activated minigun in his living room for security against prowlers and the like. (I hope no kids ever egg or TP his house on Halloween). How Affleck is never reported to the authorities for being a super genius who clearly is also the world’s best sniper. How Affleck has no hobbies or social skills except when he keeps vintage comic books and famous pop art and his autism disappears when necessary.

A lot of what smooths over the movie’s inherent insanity is the professional polish on it. Director Gavin O’Connor seems like a talented guy who just works when he wants. He directed Miracle (excellent Kurt Russell Lake Placid hockey docudrama), Warrior (writer also, good but tad overrated Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton MMA flick), Pride and Glory (writer also, underrated and underseen cop drama with Ed Norton and Colin Ferrell). He knows his way around action scenes, masculine subjects, and gets good stern but nuanced performances from his leads. And we’ve got music by Mark Isham (ton of good credits) and cinematography by Seamus McGravey (worked with a lot of good directors and two Oscar noms for Joe Wright pictures). Just pros.

O’Connor’s auteur-ish fingerprints are here with a few expertly handled action scenes (the farmhouse siege/shootout, the apartment scene with Kendrick, and the final shootout – and this continues another pet project of mine in arguing that you don’t need a ton of action scenes for a great action movie; the later John Wick movies are good but way overstuffed and mistake nonstop volume for overall quality). We also get a very good performance from Affleck who is generally and appropriately blank and awkward but occasionally cracks the slightest of smiles. (Kendrick is good here in her typical performance but Bernthal is AMAZING in barely 10 minutes of screen time.) And this tone of being super serious with only mild hints of humor feels like O’Connor’s staple as his protagonists are brooding, borderline-suffering introverts who punish themselves because it’s the only way they know how to survive and function.

Because all of that is so above average, your initial reaction is to groan at the inanity of the film’s dense plotting, theatrics, and showy structure. But, after multiple viewings, I think the film gels very well (except for maybe that rustic heartswings attempt with the country music [Sean Rowe] playing off Affleck and his camper moving to West Virginia or whatever).

Leigh Wannell’s Wolf Man can’t capitalize on what it does right to overcome what it doesn’t. Whether Universal is slowly trying to reignite the doomed Dark Universe solely through Wannell properties or not, this movie seemed like a natural enough fit of director-to-material, especially in the wake of Wannell’s terrific Invisible Man. Wannell can do grit and grime (Saw), jump scares (Insidious sequels), or psychological/elevated horror (Invisible Man). But this movie has problems almost everywhere – casting, writing, conceptually, special effects, the ending.

Julia Garner and Chris Abbott are mom and dad to a precocious pre-teen (Matilda Firth) who venture out to the forested hills and backwoods of Oregon to check on their grandpappy’s country house. Before they can even unload the U-Haul, they are under siege from a beast lurking in the woods. Hijinx ensue.

From the very beginning, I had a problem with almost every scene in the movie. The cold open is moody and evocative with a great location and those perfect “hiding in plain sight” jump scares, but the child actor playing young Abbott had difficulty getting across shell-shocked, dreamy, and introvert all at the same time. Also, the timing is a bit askance as we get title cards about a man roaming the woods in 1995, then the cold open, and then dissolve to the present (and we have a natural question of, “Wait. Did I miss something? What happened?” The movie wants us to ponder why the dissolve and it ultimately does provide answers, but the execution isn’t sharp enough to make us content to happily wait). All of this is easy enough to follow, but a tad clumsy.

In the present, we meet Abbott and daughter in NYC and it’s just all wrong. Firth is dangerously close to traffic, and Wannell just can’t help but throw in a DANGEROUS, WOLF-LIKE HOBO to ratchet up things (I hate/love this all the same). And Abbott is yelling and the scene calls for Firth on the verge of tears and it’s just…. not there. Firth is very good for the most part (and the perfect amount of wide-eyed but street smart) and her bond with Abbott is the heart of the movie, but she obviously can’t sell the near-tears bit and Abbott is miscast and just generally way too dreary and bland to sell this bond. (For reasons I won’t entirely explain, Abbott’s role is thankless and likely drew little interest from anyone “bigger.”)

Then, we get a domestic scene with Garner where her and Abbott are so openly hostile over dumb stuff that they are playing like they are already divorced people who make nice for their child. Even though they were just staring daggers at each other, in the next scene, Garner and Abbott have a heart-to-heart and then question whether they are in love. It just doesn’t make any sense. They quickly to egress to Oregon where they meet a sneaky local (Benedict Hardie who is absolutely perfect for his brief screen time that is unfortunately too short) who is a little too imposing and grim. And then there’s a horror movie on and all, so expect the usual.

More global thoughts. There are entirely too few wolf attacks in this movie. It’s less a movie about a werewolf attacking people and more a movie about a guy becoming a werewolf. Wannell shows he’s got the blood thirst (and even some Saw flashbacks) as the titular wolf man is eating his own arm and gnawing off his own leg in gruesome fashion. But these touches are just seasoning and there’s no entrée (unless you count a brooding introvert slowly walking about a cabin as meat on the bone).

We do get some terrific wolf-vision (which is just everything lit by black lights and looking like shroom posters but it’s great) and just OUT-FUCKING-STANDING sound design. A++ there especially with the spider reveal. But the wolf transformations are a real letdown. I know everyone isn’t Rick Baker (or Rob Bottin), but a 45-year-old movie kicks this one’s ass in the effects department.

And conceptually, there being no physical wolf superpowers like jumping really high is bananas and leads to bullshit like the scene where everyone hides in a greenhouse. It’s like FIVE FEET OFF THE GROUND and the fucking wolf man SAW THEM GO THERE but because they pull a ladder up, he’s confused and shit out of luck??? Pure insanity.

Lastly, with all of the casting, writing, and performance issues, the movie has a natural tone problem as well. It really wants us to buy into the trauma of how these relationships are affected by the wolf man… in a movie where a guy gnaws his own arm off in gruesome fashion. Rather than elevate both the drama and the horror, it results in an less-than-stellar scary movie with a tremendous downer of an ending.

I just wanted to see a wolf stalk and eat some people and somehow this movie couldn’t deliver that.

If you can vibe with the idea that it’s hard, REALLY hard for employed, successful, independently wealthy Meryl Streep to leave philandering Jack Nicholson and his bosom of dinner party quips, then this is the movie for you. Otherwise, you’re likely to find this periodically charming but puzzling and infuriating time capsule from titans (Mike Nichols, Nora Ephron, Carly Simon doing the music) a disappointment.

Streep and Nicholson, both divorcees and nebulously successful as “columnists” who never write or report or do jack shit other than drink wine and bullshit, lock eyes across a wedding reception then it’s on to the sex on the first date and tying the knot within the first five minutes. We dip in and out of their relationship as the months and years elapse and their bonds and priorities shift around. Pretty soon, their pair is a trio with a quartet on the way as their affection wanes. Can they hold to their vows or will they sever the ties that bind?

One of the movie’s biggest problems is, despite a wealth of recognizable faces with happy, charming-ish performances (unsurprisingly fantastic Nicholson and Streep here) in pleasant scenarios of dinner parties, weddings, receptions, hardly anyone feels like a real person with interiority. The script, written by Ephron and adapted from her own book and based on her own personal life, chooses this vignette structure of just dropping in on the characters and their relationships periodically, but it is missing the glue to make us believe in these people or their relationships. (And this is hardly a unique structure for Nichols who also made Carnal Knowledge and the later Closer, both of which use a similar vignette structure, but it feels particularly empty here making the movie feel unrealistic and the people unsympathetic.)

The first act is, again, quite charming with little characters moments and intimacy (the caterers’ discussion, the pasta bedroom scene is to die for), but we hit a natural wall as Nicholson’s character is underwritten.

Also, I just can’t get down with this movie as it feels 30 years antiquated, like something from 1956 rather than 1986. Perhaps, it’s just a very personal and specific story and commentary on certain attitudes prolific in NYC and DC social circles of the time, but it feels downright extra terrestrial at times. Why the fuck is everyone so heartless to Meryl Streep the entire movie? She drops everything to be with cheating shitbag Nicholson and gets pregnant, and when he cheats, no one cares. Her strange group therapy is full of narcissists and the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (fitting given the presence of Nicholson and Milos Foreman as a guest star) who can’t be bothered to care. Her father (DA Adam Schiff), fresh off taking a bath, courtesy of his sugar mama, on the ponies and blackjack at Atlantic City, rattles off some quip about how she’s better off telling Nicholson he can have the kids. Then, he’s off to remake Singing in the Rain with Gene Kelly, and he’s OUT OF THE MOVIE?! Streep is robbed at gunpoint by frosted-tips hustler Kevin Spacey in a traumatic experience that is played for LAUGHS and is HER FAULT?! And then days late, Nicholson shows up and just shrugs his shoulders and tells Streep to come home, and she ACCEPTS?!

Only Stockard Channing shows glimpses of and even that feels again domesticated, restrained, and backwards. Apparently, the only hope for, again, Streep’s white collar, wealthy woman with a job whenever she wants it (what in the fuck is Jeff Daniels’ boss/editor character doing here anyway? He’s just there to be an open door of income and romance that Streep turns down at every step?) is to fantasize about her cheating-ass husband dying in a plane crash? For a movie ostensibly from the woman’s perspective, almost everyone is such a disastrous caricature.

(There’s also this unspoken, I’d wager unintended Marxist commentary on how Streep’s jetsetting between DC and NYC, Eastern Seaboard marriage with her children is only possible through the seemingly live-in au pairs and nannies. She’s so busy trying to keep herself together that it’s only through her minority maids that it is even possible for her to exist. However, when given the chance to have one of this essential components speak, Streep’s Hispanic maid with Nicholson says she knew Nicholson was no good from day one because he’s “messy,” showing that she has a simplistic analysis through the only lenses she has: manual labor. Such an insulting shallow characterization. But I digress.)

I enjoyed this movie while watching it (tremendous Nicholson with the singing about baby names and one-liners about dinner and recounting the plot of B-horror flicks and raging against contractors, good but at-times melodramatic Streep, great baby/child interactions), but the film’s core is battling against such an imaginary, reactionary foe that had to have been gone by 1986.

Winchester ’73 has a creative hook of being both a series of literally gun-centric vignettes (in a sense from the titular gun’s POV but more truthfully using the gun as a transition device) and a cohesive narrative about the perils of the way of the gun. Jimmy Stewart and Shelley Winters are the focal points as we drift between the cavalry, outlaws, Indian raids, shooting contests, bank robberies, and fiery sieges.

The film’s basic conceit is that word has gotten around that Custer had his goose cooked due to Apaches using repeater rifles, but no one, not even the vaunted Apaches, can stand up to the majesty of the one-of-a-kind, “one-in-a-thousand” perfect Winchester 1873. And Jimmy Stewart rides into Dodge City hot on the trail of an outlaw who shares a common past. They have a terrific shootout with a prized Winchester as trophy and then our perspective floats as we follow the rifle all over the territory. We also get other terrific scenes with the Indian trader at Riker’s and Steve’s attempts to make nice with Waco Johnny. And we muddy the waters as Stewart isn't the typical white hat who gets the girl and saves the day.

And we dabble in lore such as Wyatt Earp and his brother Virgil and their “no guns” policy and get some great shots of the marshal’s office unrealistically slap full of thousands of weapons. Not even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Commando K-Mart has this many handguns, rifles, and rounds of ammunition. If Dutch Henry and the boys were smart, when they were low on weapons, they’d stage a break in of Dodge City’s armory masquerading as a civic center.

Director Anthony Mann and Cinematography William Daniels (Oscar winner for The Naked City) move and spin the camera around for some nice pans. The entry into Tascosa is particularly beautiful. They also make impressive use of real scenery and it’s not the usual towering Monument Valley skyline. And there’s terrific lighting of the campfire scenes with the cavalry and nice, extreme closeups of Jimmy Stewart. And the score has the requisite rousing themes in chase scenes and the like.

The film isn’t the most progressive about male-female dynamics or Native American three-dimensionality or humanism (the Indians are shown on par with, if not worse than, goons who kill just to acquire), but the unique structure and entertainment value is so high that it overrides these other concerns.

The Negotiator is a smart gem of an action thriller with a great premise and a loaded cast of great ing character actors. On the tail of Pulp Fiction and Usual Suspects, the starring ers of those respective films, Sam Jackson and Kevin Spacey are pitted opposites in this two-ish hander about an expert hostage negotiator becoming an entrapped hostage taker amid allegations of corruption and murder. Can Jackson clear his name or will he get gutshot and left for dead?

Jackson is like an 8.0 on his yelling obscenities tirade scale (I love his immediate deadpan about some incriminating evidence, “Y’ALL PLANTED THIS SHIT!”), but he still has enough quiet moments to make this a layered, if not exactly nuanced performance. Killer ing cast – JT Walsh, Paul Giamatti, John Spencer (Leo from West Wing), David Morse, Paul Guilfoyle, Michael Cudlitz, Dean Norris and several more that you will recognize.

And before he made a dozen Purge properties, James DeMonaco wrote this clever screenplay. It’s a bit sweatier than I (Jackson interacts with a few key cops in an early scene and tosses off their unnecessary names too neatly, the early expo dump with Jackson and partner in the smokey car is thick but fine, Chekov’s steam pipes of it all, and how fortuitous for our entrenched hero that the DA gives him a day before he sends him to death row and the entire police squad drops off their smoke grenades, bullets, guns, and handcuffs on their way out of the building), but the script still sports a great core idea and plenty of good follow-up scenes.

The script keeps you guessing as to who to trust, and Director F. Gary Gray appears to have used pickups to insert some needed red herring scenes in select spots. We get a really solid, memorable cold open to set up the personalities and stakes. And a clever bit of business between Sam Jackson and Farley in a nice character scene.

The Spacey of it all isn’t a dealbreaker because he’s only there for half the movie and there’s a deep cast to keep you invested in others. The movie has like an extra tacked-on ending that could have been handled better as it seems clear the movie loses steam when Jackson is out of the skyscraper. And I wonder if the movie would have been better if we didn’t KNOW Jackson wasn’t the corrupt killer from the very beginning.

All told, these are minor concerns, and the film’s strengths greatly outweigh its caveats.

High Noon takes The Gunfighter’s focus on clocks, timelines, and scheduled showdowns to the highest degree and wields it as a political weapon. As a commentary on Hollywood and society’s response to the Red Scare and blacklisting, when Gary Cooper’s newly-married, retiring marshal is faced with three black hats of doom toiling away the day at the training station, he tries but fails to raise a good guy posse to quell any shootouts. We watch as the minutes tick away on the everpresent clocks in the 90-ish minutes leading up to the titular High Noon, but no one answers the call. Cooper is too honest and standup to accept help from kids or drunks or to keep those volunteered from backing out. The screenplay smartly populates the film with brutally realistic people, who despite their apparent decency, have legitimate fears about being involved, including a sight at early Lloyd Bridges And Fred Zinneman’s camera and Floyd Crosby’s cinematography make exquisite use of shadows and framing and symbolism including a judge and his American flag riding out of town.

A healthy dose of cynicism and self-awareness for a time and place that needed it.

The Gunfighter (1950) is a moving story of the fastest gun in the West who just wants to settle down and move on, but his past and reputation won’t let him. Gregory Peck is Jimmy Ringo – a famed gunslinger who chose the thug life over settling down with his beloved and now he’s paying the price as he can’t even get out of the opening credits before some loudmouth is throwing a drink in his face and challenging him to quick draw.

Peck, of course, is impeccable here with anything that conveys wisdom and dignity (including scenes like the incredible mistaken identity with the town busybodies in the marshal’s office). He’s less adept at fake gunfighting, requiring the film to constantly cut away whenever he has to draw down and instead achieve lightning fast reflexes in-between edits. He also just seems generally uncomfortable holding a gun.

Director Henry King (born in the 1880s and like many early directors was a studio journeyman directing dozens of pictures) worked with Peck several times and was nominated for Best Director a couple of times in the 1940s. Here, he utilizes large crowds and extras well like for the scenes outside the saloon and inside the church. Also pre-dating High Noon, we have an impeding deadline and lots of cuts to clock-watching as the minutes tick away. (It gets a shade annoying as we keep hearing, “Just one more minute and I’m out of here” but adds to some of the later poignancy).

There are great character moments, giving the film extra personality - like the random rancher that walks in or the marshal tossing out a couple of drunks fighting for the stragglers' entertainment. And we’ve got a great head fake with some goons watching from a barn loft at a critical moment. We even get some quality riding off into the sunset, no matter how we got here. (This ending shot is absolutely essential because it shows the titular gunfighter’s job is never done.)

Terrific, prime Western.

The first and greatest early “modern” Western and an early showcase for a young John Wayne. Just a perfect vehicle with the simplest script conceit possible, getting from point A to point B without dying. Picturesque Monument Valley and contributions from recurring actors in the genre Thomas Mitchell (terrific as the drunk but wise doctor) and Andy Devine (the Gomer Pyle comic relief). Also, beautiful black and white photography with things like Luke’s face cast in shadow as he stands up from the Aces ‘n Eights dead man’s hand. A Hays Code purity that allowed for great character moments like Doc Boone standing up to the Big Bad. And a great, tense, climatic standoff between John Wayne and the bad guy gang.

Not sure how I owned this and watched it like 30 times, but Celtic Pride is dull and generally uninteresting and unfunny (aside from Shooter McGavin and Lurch who own [giving the DEATH ROW SHIT] in their brief appearances), but only Dan Aykroyd comes out the worst for wear in a near record-setting second career killer of a performance (other than the mindfuck he gives Damon Wayans on the dance floor). After he was left for dead with Nothing but Trouble, he miraculously recovered with great but ing bits in Sneakers, Tommy Boy. And somehow this turkey didn’t skin him alive either as he sidestepped into a network TV success riding the coattails and lead-in of Home Improvement with Soul Man and is still working today though mostly with Ghostbusters properties. A near-complete miss that is still watchable.

The Eagle Has Landed is an easy sell – have the Great Escape director in his farewell film do his thing in an even sweatier WW2 heist flick with another stacked cast (Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland, Donald Pleasance). But screenplay drawbacks keep the film from entirely succeeding.

German military command (definitely not Nazis or anything) gets wind that Winston Churchill will be isolated for a brief window and susceptible to kidnapping. One-eyed Robert Duvall and his band of conscientious objectors to the Holocaust (Caine) and amoral ruffians (Sutherland) is ordered to enact said plan based on a letter from Hitler giving him carte blanche over EVERYTHING in a last ditch effort to win the war or bring the Allies to the negotiation table. Can the Germans (again, how dare you suggest these are Nazis?) win one for their commander or will the Allies win WW2?

This movie has the hallmarks of a certain kind of WW2 movie – opening big drawing room scenes where a generic middleman discusses logistics and orders a recognizable face into the Lion’s Den, accentless and adored American and English actors playing sympathetic German soldiers who resent Hitler and the Nazis and their incompetence, etc. Of course, usually, the movie isn’t asking you to root for the American/British-as-Germans to actually make any real progress. And that’s the film’s biggest problem is it can’t figure out how to thread the needle of having your protagonists be Germans doing “heroic” things that you want your audience to sympathize with even though you ultimately want them to lose. The film isn’t based on a true story and you don’t really want the protagonists to succeed (even though you wouldn’t mind an entertaining yarn about their failure).

The film is crystal clear that this head of state abduction plot (1) isn’t in service of the Nazis or the Holocaust, (2) won’t actually help win the war or anything, and (3) is based on lying commanders. But you’re still supposed to root for each level of this operation: Duvall’s HQ efforts to whip up a workable plan, Caine’s on-the-ground efforts to clear his name and regain his reputation, and Sutherland’s efforts to, I shit you not, get laid and punch out of the Irish resistance. And again, other than a decent Duvall attempt, there isn’t an accent in the bunch of them and instead, the film broadly and geniusly declares, “Yep, isn’t it amazing that these German soldiers played by Americans and Brits remarkably don’t have an accent in the lot of them?”

The other problems are that (other than a great train sequence that introduces Caine’s character) the movie is fairly boring until everyone lands in Ireland for the big plot to unfold, JR of Dallas (Larry Hagman) gives a real slapsticky, one-note performance as an idiot commander sure to get all of the American soldiers killed, and Donald Sutherland occasionally parachutes and motorcycles in from another movie to frolic around the scenic Ireland coast to woo chaste maidens and bare-knuckle brawl with cagey locals. Even if Sutherland’s performance is one of the movie’s highlights, you could drop every scene with him and chop 20 minutes off and streamline this thing. (Except for the scene where he visits a local bar and asks the bartender to suck his thumb. That one stays.)

If you can somehow get past all of THAT, the movie has some effective shootouts and action scenes and allows each of the star leads to get in at least one scene where they get to show their stuff. Sturges can seemingly do the back half of this movie in his sleep, but it just meanders too much getting there.

Broadcast News feels like something Aaron Sorkin watched 100 times and thought to himself, “I could do that.” Lovable and condescending snobs who demand better of flakes and the world that champions them. Coming from James L. Brooks after he just made of Endearment and won all the Oscars, this follow-up film bears the hallmarks of a genius gone awry amid a blank check and carte blanche as it is a bit too in love with itself to know or do better.

Holly Hunter is a demanding, charming but discontent network news producer who has crying fits due to loneliness. She is on a semi-crusade against infotainment to maintain journalistic integrity but is simultaneously pulled between her brain’s synchronicity with Alberts Brooks, a nebbish, grousing misanthrope of a news correspondent and her libido’s drive toward William Hurt, a decent mimbo who doesn’t know how many federal cabinet departments there are. Will she choose crossword puzzles with a curmudgeon or cocktails with the natural character – “an incredible flake”? [A bit of Reality Bites for the Big Chill crowd.]

That plot description is cleaner than Brooks’ typically unconventional narrative structure which isn’t an inherent problem, but his screenplay struggles to let you know where these characters stand. Beyond the terrifically simplistic character origins of each main lead, the first fifteen minutes or so stumbles to neatly lay out the basic plot dynamics and dilemma: these are all accomplished news professionals in a burgeoning love triangle. And the scene where everyone walks out of Hunter’s presentation feels hyperbolically callous.

Most of my grievances can be summed up with me finding the “heroes” more unlikeable and the “villains” more likeable than the movie does. If you don’t align with a movie’s emotions or politics or allegiances, then the “charming” stunts and choices seem cruel. Hunter is stringing both these guys along way too much as it’s clear that she’s dishonest with Brooks who is friendzoned to hell and harsh with Hurt who seems like a good-natured and talented guy. (The whole reveal that he made a Machiavellian edit to his date rape story is a bunch of tacked-on horseshit.) She needs to just get over herself and tell Brooks that she’ll talk to him tomorrow. (and not before or during her dates? What kind of sick monster does that? “Excuse me, William Hurt, I know we’re on a date, but before we head over to your place, I need to drop by and dangle myself in front of Albert Brooks and then call you and pretend I can’t make it??? And he’s not blameless as why the hell did he go to her room in the first place and flirt with her if he just wanted a news tutor of all things???). And because the script forces these contrived nonsensical scenarios into being, the characters are forced to be frighteningly and unnecessarily mean to each other when a little bit more restraint, honesty, and judgment would help everyone all around.

I know the film (and Brooks?) has a slant about how the eventual Datelines and 20/20s (and Jack Nicholson stunt-casted anchormen and multimillion dollar salaries) of the world suck and are going to distract our culture for the worse and bleed it dry (and boy was he right). But that movie (you know, the one where we CARE about Joan Cusack’s minor character getting fired???) is so different from the inhuman romance that you wish it all could have gotten cleaned up better.

If somehow these issues (friendships and relationships that feel strained and forced into unrealistic scenarios on a fundamental level) are not a dealbreaker for you, the film is often very funny and has beautiful and resonant moments. Brooks can populate a movie with wonderful characters (enlivened by wonderful performances) and put them in entertaining situations and force them to exist and interact in ways you wish more drama would. But in this specific movie, it feels like these characters wouldn’t make these choices or even be in these situations in the first place.

A movie I liked with considerable reservations but probably need to watch at least one more time.

Mostly charming thanks to beautiful black-and-white cinematography and quality performances (best is the lead young boy, his mother [Caitriona Balfe, a dead ringer for Cate Blanchett], and Ciaran Hinds and Judi Dench as the grandparents, both of whom feel like they were a monologue away from Oscar wins). The perpetual Van Morrison bit doesn’t consistently work and at times, feels like it’s detracting from the film’s tone. And there’s a smidge too much refrain of “and then everyone had a romantic dance party.” But this is a quality, well-made, resonant film. (Power of the Dog and Nightmare Alley still feel like the clear best films of this year.)

Peter Berg’s Patriots Day is about as good as you can get for a docudrama of a terrorist attack. Berg is perfect at balancing blue-collar heroics with quiet decency without resorting to (what feels like) fake theatrics. Expect a lot of teary-eyed phone calls from warzones set to Explosions in the Sky instrumental, wistful prog ambiance in his oeuvre. This go round, Marky Mark is a hothead Boston cop working the marathon at the time of the bombing. Also present are John Goodman, Kevin Bacon, JK Simmons, and a wealth of unknowns to play real people or fictional proxies.

Only than a strange beginning and shoehorning in (we must see that Marky Mark doesn’t put up with any shit here and elsewhere) and a few grandstanding moments for Boston personalities (yelling from actors playing locals, the mayor, and the governor about not letting the FBI and other Feds tell them what to do – a smidge of jurisdictional nonsense but the film makes it work), the film is very button-down and treats the occasion with the right mixture of sincerity and thriller tropes. The film’s attempts at incorporating real or realish survivors into the story is commendable and grounds the film appropriately.

The neighborhood pipe bomb attack is the film’s most action-y part and works well (perhaps a little too well for a solemn retelling).

A very good treatment of a tragedy.

Lost World shows that even genius, generational talents can’t easily churn out sequel masterpieces. Short of writing it himself, Spielberg does his damnedest to pull this together, but even he can’t crack the second half woes as almost everything after the T-Rex RV extravaganza is just marking time until the credits.

A mulletless, Roy Orbison-less Goldblum returns this time as a main character to fend off pterodactyls and the like in yet another island misadventure in a race against the clock to save his newfound love (Julianne Moore) from certain death and spoilation of her research subject. Can they hide high enough and far enough away from terrible lizards or will they get Keyser Soze’d in their pursuit for lysine deficiency evolutionary models?

It's easier to say what this movie gets wrong than that it gets right. Goldblum rules as a side character and suffers as the main character (though plenty of this is a drag of a domestic squabble and single-parenting gymnastics horseshit subplot). But in hindsight, it’s not the best idea to introduce Goldblum
as a shrugging, yawning discontent wasting his way through everyday doldrums when he is pulled back into Sequel Ville. And the movie really feels the loss of Hammond, Satler, and Grant. Also, all of the boss merchandising and swag is just gone as instead awash in monochromatic browns and greens and camouflaged. I get the practical reasons for the lack of red and yellow Ford Explorers and lunch boxes, but it’s just so much more inviting and kitschy than random, nondescript jungles.

And the script is just rampant with godawful exposition, cliches (why the fuck aren’t they answering the phone in the RV???), and a terrible backhalf. “They meander around with Postlethwaite’s Muldoon brother from another mother until Peter Stormare gets eaten by little dinos just like Newman. And then cue Mama and Papa Rex and the Raptors for some Friday the 13th-level hijinx and bullshit at an abandoned building until Papa Rex destroys a dock, doghouse, and bus in San Diego.” Yikes. And that Stormare nonsense is so incredibly dumb (and again, another slasher cliché like plenty during that stretch – wandering away from the woods, tent bloopers, and attacks in a cornfield). It might be the worst scene Spielberg has ever put to film, but that’s obviously a ton of footage.

You can feel Spielberg trying his bag of tricks to beef up the second half with misdirects (I’m thinking of not showing where the raptors are, having a character assure us they are gone, and then voila, the raptor is right there), situational irony (“Is the T-Rex still behind us?” or “There are dinosaurs out my window.”), or just cool ideas (the overhead shot of all the raptors converging in the cornfield). But the movie has been trying your patience for way too long at this point.

But we’ve got an excellent setpiece with the two T-Rexes and the RV (though it plays extremely fast and loose with the logistics and locations of various elements). And there is tremendous Postlethwaite who is just shredding his lines and one-liners left and right and even manages to sell his boneheaded “let me, an expert big game hunter, put down my trusty rifle/shotgun to check on Julianne Moore, so Vince Vaughn can commit corporate espionage” as pathos. And also excellent Richard Schiff (pour one out for Eddie and his unappreciated tech and badass vehicles). And lastly, some elite CGI with the stegosaurus intro and the interplay between SFX and practical like with the T-Rex busting into a bus or the like.

There’s like an hour, maybe 90 minutes of a great movie here and otherwise roughly 45 minutes of sequel bloat that was better left for dead.

Past their primes David Mamet and Val Kilmer can’t quite elevate Spartan, a (in typically Mamet fashion) opaque thriller, past its budgetary constraints. Kilmer is a cagey secret service agent (but good luck expecting the movie to spell that out for the first 30 minutes) who follows orders, no questions asked, when he gets fresh intel that throws his whole worldview into question.

With Mamet, it’s always the script. Misdirection, sleight of hand, eloquent profane bastards. With Spartan, this is decidedly not Mamet’s best work (That’s probably Glengarry or House of Games.) and is lacking in eloquent profanity, has only mild sleight of hand, and has a lot of annoyingly concealed bits to no end. He’s got the bones and skeleton of a decent spy story, but there’s not much there past the second act.

We spend the first act in the dark as it’s clear that Kilmer is an unnamed military type, helping out largely unnamed newbs in green fatigues. We don’t readily get names, organizations, titles, or identifying marks, and Kilmer is particularly assholish and brutal in his apparent disregard for his recruits or their safety (though he does keep calling them all “baby” in a bit that goes on for the entire movie???) But those hoping that this vagueness leads to anything interesting in the rest of the movie (maybe they are the bad guys or working for another country or a rogue element?) will be disappointed.

In of production and action beats, the movie looks like it was made on a shoestring budget (a lot of bland interiors and small-scale exteriors, but we do get a boat house and a military hangar!), and action scenes are over in a heartbeat as our expert killers are gunned down and sniped to their deaths in seconds after leaving cover. It’s not bad; it just consistently left me wanting.

Kilmer (and his character) is the glue, holding this all together. He’s all business and has always played a thorny genius well. The rest of the cast (William H. Macy, Ed O’Neill, Kristen Bell, Derek Luke) are fine, though my (least) favorite bit is Mamet expecting us to buy Macy as a stone-cold killer. (That only works in Coens and Fargo-ese.)

As a reflection of pretty much anything real-world or a relevant commentary on the Clinton-Bush years and the White House infidelities or the War on Terror, I’d say this fails, but it’s worth a watch or two just for a few random, unexpected “twists.”

Paul Newman is undeniable, but the sincere Nobody’s Fool (1994) has messaging issues. It’s all heart and no brains. Set amidst a particularly snowy Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years in upper Maine, Newman is a diehard lovable loser who is being dragged kicking and screaming into decency and making amends for his past mistakes. Can he redeem himself or will he remain irascibly charming but uncouth?

It’s hard not to feel like this another dying pang of the Greatest Generation trying to teach everyone else to toughen up a bit and stop being so foolhardy, whether it’s helicopter sons who bleed the town dry from the bank, the police (Philip Seymour Hoffman, but idiot police who fire off “warning shots” is still terribly relevant and topical today), or his own abandoned children. (Shockingly, Newman never apologizes for walking out on his own son.) Newman is naturally so electric and has usually gravitated toward charming, talented, but tortured fuckups, and this is another in that line. (Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, The Sting, Hud, etc.) (That said, this movie would make for an interesting pairing with Gore Verbinski’s Weather Man to see things from the son’s perspective.)

A more traditional narrative would dictate that NEWMAN is the one that turns over a new leaf, but consistently the film seems to be saying, “Don’t you see he’s right and everyone else is wrong?” His semi-philandering, sidewalk-driving, snow blower-stealing, late-handrail-fixing is all handwaved away because Bruce Willis is a cheater and Jessica Tandy’s son unknowingly sold the town out for a theme park pipe dream. Newman minimally addresses said abandonment by trying to do better by his grandson and not walking out with Melanie Griffith, but it’s clearly meant as the most, not the least he could do. Don’t you see, he’s the one secretly holding everything together and thus is the true bedrock of this town?

Written (and adapted from a book) and directed by Robert Benton (writer of…. gasp… Bonnie and Clyde, Superman, Kramer vs. Kramer – multiple-time Oscar winner and nominee), this still feels a bit like lesser James L. Brooks. An occasionally sappy, bittersweet, three-dimensional human drama, but not up to that level. You can see where a better script ties up these threads (the larger fate of the town, Newman and his work buddy, Jessica Tandy’s health, etc.) and loose ends with a few more punchup scenes and monologues, but this is very shaggy dog and freewheeling. But when it hits (the poignant scene where Newman’s grandson delivers Newman’s attorney’s prosthetic leg that Newman won from his lawyer during strip poker) (yes, that’s right), look out.

A great cast and a shmaltzy Howard Shore score with a standout Newman performance elevates this inconsistent but heartfelt drama.

Triple 9 is loaded with dye-packed bills and a great cast that take turns mangling a Southern accent. Right after Inside Man and Dark Knight reminded everyone that bank heists make for cool movies, several entries were out there – The Town, The Place Beyond the Pines, Den of Thieves, Marauders, and this one. While not the definitive post-Heat masterpiece, 999 still gets enough right to warrant mention.

Chiwetel Ejiofor runs a robbery crew of former commandoes (himself, Norman Reedus), current cops (Anthony Mackie, Cliff Collins) and burnouts (Aaron Paul)… and there’s so much more plot to get to. Casey Affleck is Mackie’s new partner in the rough sides of Atlanta, and also Woody Harrelson’s nephew (who has his own subplot as a dope fiend robbery detective). And Chiwetel is also hooked up with the Russian mob via his ex-girlfriend (Gal Gadot) and his son and his overbearing mob boss sister-in-law (Kate Winslet). And the cops are also investigating decapitated cartel leaders including a massive, spectacular shootout in the projects. And Omar from the Wire is a crossdressing prostitute. And the titular Triple 9 is code for a murdered cop that will surely get them enough time for a robbery and might as well stop now because it just keeps going.

With a cast this big and a plot this dense, it’s hard to edit this thing together and make it feel like everyone is getting a chance to shine, while still ensuring that the movie isn’t falling apart and hopelessly bogged down under the weight of it all. But this movie mostly succeeds even if it is significantly darker (and still dumb) than other films in this genre and for murdering bank robbers, that’s saying something.

Everything with Chiwetel, Mackie, Affleck, and Collins is an easy home run (and ripe with “Well, I do declare” horseshit, even if minor). The stuff with Aaron Paul is fine but just a bit too “disheveled, drug addict/fuckup” cliché for my taste. Otherwise, I get why this other stuff is here, but I could cut literally everything with Woody Harrelson and merge Winslet and Gadot into one character and trim like 20 minutes off this easy. Winslet is massively overqualified for this material and somehow still feels like she can’t figure out how to make this character work - going way too broad and too big. She should have been told to drop the husky coat perm (wig?) and dial it back like 20%.

But more importantly, the movie’s Atlanta-ness gives it a special spark and feels like it was filmed on-location and with lots of authentic local extras. And the robbery scenes are very good, if not the genre’s best. But that project shootout is spectacular. Just an amazing action scene out of nowhere. A scene that would make Walter Hill proud.

Though not as good as either Den of Thieves 1 or 2, this movie is still a great heist, crime thriller, if a bit unsatisfying.

Mulholland Drive is the (possibly) dying dreams of a disenchanted would-be ingénue, jilted by her romantic lead/lesbian lover’s heartless actions and who can only take solace through reimagining herself as a stifled star that woulda, coulda, shoulda been a silver screen idol. It’s only fitting that her dream is filled with the artifice (“It’s all a tape recording.”) of Golden Age Hollywood cliches and facile namedrops (jitterbug dances, Rita Hayworth, Bette Davis, Sunset Boulevard, stoner surfers, bumbling assassins, meddling producers, adulterous wives, and literal hats with no cattle) and bright-eyed wonder and blameless naivety.

She reconceives of herself as a brand new, second chance victim (only capable of shades of darkness when she’s reading lines for an audition), and instead every poison pill and at-arms-length unknown from her (possibly) real life is recast as a player in her Spellbound fantasy. In her vision, her lover is wronged, clueless, and unseen (and really just a personality-less projection of her own psyche, hence the matching bobs and all) but still a ripe tableau to follow her heart for a meet-cute. It is only unnamed money marks and made men that are keeping both of them from being stars and being together. After we go through the looking glass (of a Burlesque variety show and a bottomless hatbox), we see the truth and that she’s (probably) not dying or dead (though full of regret and still haunted by the expectations of her aw shucks Canadian roots and the mercurial but everpresent Denny’s vagrant) and just wishes she was.

Bit overlong and purposely esoteric but amazingly evocative and tense for the briefest of spurts. (Love those synth chords, reminds me of David Julyan’s great Memento score.) You’ll never forget seeing it.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is the backpacking through the continent with a Eurail , “Rules of Attraction” Kip Pardue montage (deep cut for some), boarding school cousin to the original. All non-essential ties to the first film have been dropped via off-screen divorce decrees, custody orders, and istrative leave and replaced with techno and ecstasy. Also, expect lots of vaguely Eurasian themes in this score (Are those clarinets I hear trying to sound like Zimmer’s Black Hawk Down score set in Somalia? Or is that more Oriental Japan in its rhythms? This movie gives no fucks.) and other shortcuts (everyone, literally EVERYONE watches soccer, no exceptions) in what is easily a successful sequel even if it is still hella dumb but masquerading as a powerful, brotherhood drama. All movies should aspire to be this sincerely dipshit heroic.

Gerard Butler (freshly lathered in cigarette tar, motor oil, and pomade) and Ice Cube, Jr. are back for another round of “overly trusting of potential backstabbers” and “FBI’s most wanted but still showing our face everywhere we go.” This time, Fraulein, along with former sheriff, fresh turncoat Butler, is stealing (and then returning?) the Sicilian mob’s blood diamonds. Can they get back to the old country in one piece or will they get soccer kicked by any number of MMA fighter cameos?

The first Den of Thieves expertly stole from Heat, while still being thrilling and effective enough to stand on its own. (I'm also due for a rewatch of Triple 9 which might secretly be better than both of these.) Good setpieces, good performances from a good cast, and a gritty “realism.” (I know nothing about robbing banks, but a good movie makes it feel like it’s giving you the 411 on how to take down the Fed.) This one amazingly enough manages almost the same magic trick with a completely new cast, new set and setpieces, and new story. It even has a few decent Pacino-De Niro diner scene proxies (one w/ Butler and O’Shea trading backstories and another w/ Butler and Hugo comparing their visitation rights).

This movie doesn’t have the first film’s raw red meat testosterone of F150s, barbells, and banana clips in a downtown shootout but instead is more studied and patient as a nighttime shimmy across rooftops. The cinematography, score, performances, and main setpieces (only 2 but they rule) are all on-point. Butler is just electric as an uncompromising shitbag. A lot to like here.

But there’s also enough stupid tripe to remind you that you are watching a sequel to a Heat knockoff. These bozos are the best in the world but didn’t notice a GPS TRACKER?! And all of that prattle about croissants and the meeting should be at 1:00 instead of 1:30 is present for obvious reasons, but is still awkward. Of course, you have a couple of fired goons who are just there to be last-minute spoilers. And the plot requires at least a few untenable leaps of logic – no way all of these people just buy right into Butler and what exactly are the crew trying to steal the second time because it can’t be the mob’s diamond (that’s the secret goal of Butler and Cube, Jr., not the actual goal).

But I’d by lying if I didn’t say this movie ruled and delivered exactly what a Den of Thieves sequel should: Bushido nonsense, good heists, along with a few unexpected but shockingly compelling character beats. LET’S RIDE FOR DEN OF THIEVES 3: STONE TEMPLE PILOTS!

Rampage (not the one with the giant gorilla and Rock) (1987, 1992) is a dour docudrama detailing a string of very realistic (but fictionalized) murders in LA in Michael Biehn’s jurisdiction. It gets super soapbox-y about insanity as a defense and the morality of the death penalty.

Written and directed by William Friedkin, this movie never elevates from the first moments where we are witness to an upsetting, disturbing, senseless murder and then see more of that intercut with the psychotic visions of the killer smearing himself with blood in the audience of an ominous tiger. It’s very suburban and restrained except when showing shrills screams of female or child victims or the killer’s aforementioned visions. Just unfun in every way. Even the courtroom scenes have zero extras in the background and are cast in shadow presumably to hide just how empty the room is.

Biehn is strong here and has a good cross-examination of a crooked psychologist who is trying a little too hard to tip the scales in the defendant’s favor. But it’s just so straight-laced and stream-lined that it is practically devoid of entertainment and feels more like a PSA on steroids than any kind of human drama.

I’ve never seen Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer but pretty much all of the commentary I read about that, I would apply wholesale to this. Just a depressing drag all the way through including the recut ending for the 1992 cut which is a great commercial for the death penalty if I ever saw one. Pure nightmare fuel. (FWIW, it’s not realism because Zodiac is extremely realistic, but it is not this upsetting even the sunstreaked, daytime murder scene at the lake. And it can’t be the basic package here, because this movie is similar to The Stepfather which is a ton of fun and rules.)

Is it a compliment to say that a serial killer movie was so effective that it was extremely unpleasant and I never want to watch it again? That’s this one.

In this OK-ish but complete braindead mush, a couple of Wayne Szalinski deathrays beam a singularity into not-so-abandoned barn that was host to a Scream-esque bloodbath 20 years ago and send our heroine back into the Bush era to try to save her older sister from Happy Death Day-ing. Other than a decent cold open and some pleasant disregard for time paradox paranoia, we have any number of dunderheaded conceits – No one noticed the dead sister’s obviously loose floorboard and stash of material clues for TWENTY FUCKING YEARS?! Her parents have a veritable fountain of youth as they haven’t aged a day. All white males are varying degrees of evil. (Even the killer’s mask is generic white guy.) Everyone has neon bar lights everywhere. Peep all that Olive Garden and Butterfinger product placement. But not since Source Code has a movie had this kind of blisteringly, blissfully illogical ending.

Like cinematic amnesia or a railroad spike to the dome, I saw Truth or Dare (2018) (not to be confused with Truth or Dare ((2017)) the one with a Heather Langenkamp cameo) once upon a time and then it vanished without a trace from my frontal lobe. A revisit was not much kinder.

You see, even turn of the century nuns liked Spring Break benders and party games as a rando has the skinny on the after-hours rager at a haunted monastery in the Mexican desert. Pretty soon, these paper-thin assholes are declining to hang dong and falling to their death off a pool table and walking the plank off a rooftop while 3 sheets to the wind. Can they stop smiling so much (proto-Smile concept?) and lift the curse?

I know all of these movies have that stupid magical concept of a vague evil that can control anything and its purpose is usually just to slowly but surely annoy the shit out of the main clique rather than say kill them. But this movie is particularly annoying this way. The Big Bad would rather cajole these coeds into cuckoldry and compromising conversations than anything much of note.

There’s like a couple of decent “accidental” deaths and a welcome twist on the “conventional parent hates his gay son” trope, but this is totally missable. Of course, the movie’s stakes are random as the rules change and the consequences drop due to script necessity. Some key characters don’t make it, but the ending is total unworkable nonsense.

V for Vendetta has always left a better aftertaste but never gone down that smoothly. It’s full of important principles extolled opposite cartoonish villains who rape, rendition, and in the case of one priest, cattily yell, "YOU BITCH!" when denied pedophilia at our heroes. It's like George Washington in an exploitation, vigilante drama. (And none of that has anything to do with the innate limiting factors of V’s X-Men origin story or his glamorizing of [attempted] regicide.)

There barely feels like an authentic person or human emotion in the whole enterprise, even if I dig the film’s general one-sentence thesis; its parallel, mirror imagery showing how Evey’s parents, V, and Stephen Fry are all proxies for each other; and V’s theatricality, “karate gimmicks,” and armed resistance with Raphael’s sais no less.

Enjoyable less as poetry or a civics lesson and more as swashbuckler against Bill O’Reilly.