NEW THIS WEEK (8/14) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
THE BRINK OF WAR--History has a way of tamping down its sharpest edges, and this narcoleptic docudrama smooths them into the cinematic equivalent of an inspirational corporate retreat. The Cold War drama revisits the 1986 Reykjavík Summit, where Reagan and Gorbachev came tantalizingly close to a sweeping nuclear arms agreement. It's a fascinating episode in modern history, but director Michael Russell Gunn treats it as a reverent civics lesson. Jeff Daniels plays Reagan, an inspired bit of casting if only because the actor's progressive liberal politics are so well known. To his credit, Daniels never caricatures the 40th president. Rather than chasing Reagan's unmistakable cadence, he opts for a restrained approximation that emphasizes decency over ideology. Unfortunately his laudable performance is trapped inside a screenplay that's determined to turn every exchange into a History Channel sound bite. Across the negotiating table, Jared Harris lends Gorbachev the weary intelligence and emotional complexity the film desperately needs while Oscar winner J.K. Simmons brings his usual gruff authority to Secretary of State George Shultz. Hope Davis contributes a quiet dignity to her portrayal of Nancy Reagan even though the role scarcely extends beyond that of "Supportive Spouse." Gunn stages the summit as an almost real-time chess match with diplomats, advisers and intelligence officials hovering over every conversation as the possibility of nuclear disarmament hangs in the balance. The stakes are enormous, yet the drama rarely feels urgent because every conflict is telegraphed in advance. Angel Studios has recently broadened its ambitions beyond overtly faith-based releases, but "The Brink of War" still carries their preference for uncomplicated uplift. Reagan emerges less as a complicated politician than an avatar of moral certainty, leaving little room for the contradictions that made both the man and the era so politically divisive. There's certainly a worthwhile movie buried somewhere within this material, and Harris, Daniels and Simmons periodically suggest what it might have looked like. Unfortunately, Gunn mistakes solemnity for depth and historical importance for dramatic momentum.
THE CURRENTS--There's something willfully perverse in the way Argentine director Milagros Mumenthaler's third feature insists on withholding the very meanings it so painstakingly aestheticizes. A film of ravishing surfaces and hollowed interiors, it drifts rather than develops, circling its protagonist’s psychic distress without ever illuminating it. Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), a celebrated Buenos Aires fashion designer, impulsively plunges into an icy Swiss lake during a work trip. She survives, but returns home altered: estranged from her husband (Esteban Bigliardi), her child and, most crucially, herself. From there, the film traces her increasingly opaque withdrawal, punctuated by encounters with friends and family, none of whom can penetrate her silence. Mumenthaler, whose earlier work showed a sensitivity to emotional nuance, here seems to confuse ellipsis with depth. Scenes arrive as fragments—beautifully composed, often hypnotic in their sound design and glacial pacing—but they accumulate little insight. Lina’s trauma is treated less as an experience than an abstraction, a kind of conceptual vapor that excuses the movie from engaging with psychology, causality or even basic narrative coherence. The result is less an “existential puzzle” than an elaborate dodge. Mumenthaler's images (luminous interiors, bodies refracted through glass and water) possess an undeniable tactile allure, but they float free of consequence and remain untethered to any larger meaning. González Sola anchors the drama with a palpable tactile unease, registering Lina’s dissociation in minute facial shifts that suggest a richer film struggling to emerge. But for all its visual sophistication, Mumenthaler’s direction ultimately reduces the performance to another surface; something to be contemplated rather than understood. “The Currents” is never less than visually striking, but it strings the viewer along without ever clarifying where (or why) we're being taken. No bonus features on Kino Lorber's DVD. (C.)
THE END OF OAK STREET--David Robert Mitchell has spent the better part of a decade making movies that behave like half-remembered dreams. "It Follows" transformed suburban streets into corridors of existential dread; "Under the Silver Lake" disappeared down a rabbit hole of conspiracies, pop ephemera and Los Angeles mythology. So it comes as a mild disappointment that Mitchell's biggest studio production to date often feels as though he wandered into somebody else's sandbox. (Call it the J.J. Abrams effect.) That isn't to say the film lacks personality; it simply arrives with most of its stranger impulses stripped away. Set in an idyllic 1980's suburb, it follows Denise (Anne Hathaway) and her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) whose quiet family life is shattered after an inexplicable cosmic event transports their neighborhood into a terrifying landscape where prehistoric monsters suddenly roam free. Joined by their children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), the family struggles to survive while trying to understand precisely what happened--and whether home still exists somewhere beyond the end of their street. The pleasures come less from solving a mystery than watching ordinary people improvise in increasingly extraordinary circumstances. Mitchell stages suspense with his customary visual flair. Long, wide compositions allow danger to drift into the frame almost imperceptibly, and Michael Gioulakis' velvety cinematography gives even broad daylight an uncanny texture. Every now and then the old Mitchell reappears: a bizarre visual aside, an off-kilter joke, an unsettling pause that refuses to explain itself. Those moments remind you why his earlier movies have inspired such obsessive cult followings. Hathaway expertly balances maternal warmth with flashes of panic; McGregor supplies his usual rumpled charm; and Stella and Convery avoid the shrillness that often infects cinematic teens placed in apocalyptic situations. Despite extensive digital wizardry, the dinosaurs themselves are almost beside the point. It's less a creature feature than a family drama interrupted by impossible biology. Producer Abrams' mainstream instincts keep the storytelling brisk and accessible, but they also tame a filmmaker whose greatest strength has always been making audiences deliciously uncomfortable. Ultimately we're left imagining what gloriously peculiar whatzit Mitchell could have made if nobody had asked him to color between the lines. (B.)
MONEY FROM HOME--Although this 1953 comedy doesn't belong in the top tier of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis' Paramount collaborations, it's steadily grown in stature over the years thanks to its easygoing charm. Released during Hollywood's first great 3-D boom, director George Sidney takes only modest advantage of the new process. He's more interested in drawing viewers into a colorful carnival atmosphere than pelting them with objects flying through the air. Accordingly, it's less a technological curiosity than a showcase for two performers whose chemistry had reached an almost preternatural effortlessness. Adapted from Damon Runyon's "A Little Pigeon-Toed," the movie follows timid Herman Nelson (Lewis) who becomes entangled in the schemes of his bookie cousin "Honey Talk" Nelson (Dean Martin). Their misadventures eventually lead them into the world of crooked horse racing stables, gamblers and romantic complications before everything resolves itself with Runyon's characteristic blend of sentiment and whimsy. The film also represents an intriguing detour in the career of Sidney, one of MGM's most venerated craftsmen. Having already demonstrated a facility with musicals in "Anchors Aweigh," "Show Boat" and "Kiss Me Kate," Sidney brought his customary visual polish and buoyant pacing to this pay-for-play assignment. The camera remains unusually fluid for an early stereoscopic feature. Instead of treating 3-D as a carny gimmick, Sidney used depth of field to enrich the bustling racetracks, carnivals and crowded interiors. Within the Martin and Lewis canon, "Money" occupies a curious middle ground. While lacking the inspired anarchy of "Artists and Models" or satirical bite of "Hollywood or Bust," it manages to avoid the formulaic fatigue that occasionally crept into some of their latter vehicles. Martin's relaxed swagger contrasts beautifully with Lewis's elastic physical comedy, the duo functioning as complementary halves of a remarkably durable comic whole. Perhaps that's why it remains so much fun. "Money From Home" captures Martin and Lewis before their personal grievances dissolved one of Hollywood's most lucrative partnerships, preserving the illusion that their friendship would continue indefinitely. For that reason alone, it ranks among their warmest, most entertaining pairings. The KL Studio Classics' Blu Ray features two standalone audio commentary tracks with, respectively, historians Nathaniel Thompson and Howard S. Berger, and Mike Ballew and James L. Neibaur; three shorts ("Coming Back Home," "Dean's Disc" and "On the Set"); a Martin and Lewis Fox Theater promo; plus the original theatrical trailer. (B PLUS.)
NIMRODS--The sort of amiable, shaggy-dog road movie that knows precisely which chords to strike, even if it only hits about half of them. Loosely inspired by Green Day's pre-Dookie years, director Lee Kirk aims for the sweet spot between adolescent wish fulfillment and punk-rock mythology. Tommy (Mason Thames), an earnest Missouri teenager, receives what he thinks is an invitation for his fledgling band to open for Green Day. Unbeknownst to him, it's really just an elaborate prank orchestrated by his older brother, Wayne. Tommy promptly rounds up his equally naïve bandmates (Kylr Coffman and Ryan Foust), commandeers Wayne's car and heads to L.A., collecting multiple traffic violations and questionable life lessons along the way. Kirk displays a palpable affection for these kids' misplaced confidence, allowing them to remain lovably clueless without reducing them to cliches. That generosity gives the movie a warmth conspicuously absent from most contemporary teen comedies. Thames makes an engaging center of gravity, balancing Tommy's optimism with just enough insecurity to keep him relatable; Coffman and Foust supply the usual bantering chemistry every road flick requires; and former "Office" mates Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey bring their familiar, lived-in comic rhythms to otherwise thankless mom roles. Several gags overstay their welcome, and Kirk's affection for '80s coming-of-age movies occasionally slides into pastiche rather than homage. Still, "Nimrods" possesses something increasingly rare: an unforced sweetness. It never pretends to reinvent the road movie, nor does it confuse volume for energy. Like the garage bands it celebrates, it's rough around the edges and occasionally off-key, yet earnest enough that you don't mind humming along for the ride. (B MINUS.)
OUR HERO, BALTHAZAR--A darkly comic character study with a serrated edge, writer-director Oscar Boyson's disquieting and unexpectedly tender debut announces a filmmaker attuned to the queasy overlap between performance and sincerity in the digital age. Balthazar Malone (Jaeden Martell) is a wealthy, chronically online New York teenager whose public displays of grief--tearful videos about gun violence--are as much bids for attention as gestures of empathy. When an online antagonist, Solomon (Asa Butterfield), begins taunting him, Balthazar convinces himself he's uncovered a potential mass shooter and impulsively travels to Texas to intervene. Boyson’s premise flirts with provocation, yet what emerges is less satire than a mordant exploration of how identity is constructed in the online world. Martell gives a performance of exquisite calibration by portraying Balthazar as both absurd and oddly fragile, a boy who confuses visibility with virtue. Butterfield matches him with a jittery, inward turn that suggests both menace and yearning. Refusing easy distinctions between villain and victim, their uneasy rapport becomes the moral fulcrum. Boyson borrows from the grammar of social media (self-shot confessionals, abrupt tonal pivots), but never lets the aesthetic become gimmick. Instead, it accrues into something more unsettling: a portrait of a generation raised to broadcast its own trauma in real time. If the movie occasionally courts discomfort with its humor, it does so in service of a larger inquiry: who gets to claim the role of hero in a culture that rewards spectacle over substance? By the time "Our Hero, Balthazar" arrives at its quietly devastating conclusion, Boyson has crafted a work as morally slippery as it is emotionally precise. (A MINUS.) RENT OR BUY ON MOST STREAMING PLATFORMS
PAW PATROL: THE DINO MOVIE--There comes a point in every kidflick franchise when the creative meeting begins with, "What haven't we done yet?" The answer this time, apparently, was dinosaurs. So here comes the third theatrical outing for the relentlessly industrious rescue pups in which prehistoric reptiles are grafted onto a formula that has already survived superheroes, magical crystals and enough merchandising opportunities to stock a suburban Target for years. The movie strands Ryder and his indefatigable team--Chase, Marshall, Skye, Rubble, Rocky, Zuma and Liberty--on a tropical island where they encounter Rex, a dinosaur-loving pup. Naturally the ever-opportunistic Mayor Humdinger arrives with dreams of strip-mining the island, awakening a volcano and setting the stage for a succession of increasingly noisy rescue missions involving stampeding dinosaurs, collapsing cliffs and the sort of peril that remains reassuringly consequence-free. If that synopsis sounds interchangeable with the last two "PAW Patrol "movies, that's because it more or less is. The first film expanded the TV show's modest ambitions into feature length; "The Mighty Movie" inflated everything with superhero powers. "Dino" simply swaps capes for T. rexes without altering the machinery underneath. Every character dutifully gets a moment to shine, every crisis is solved with teamwork and every emotional beat arrives precisely on schedule. The animation is bright, polished and perpetually in motion, but visual slickness can only do so much when the storytelling is assembled from prefabricated parts. The series has always been less about surprise than dependable repetition, and the movies have faithfully duplicated that template on a larger canvas. Children who already know every pup's catchphrase will likely remain delighted. (Adults accompanying them may feel otherwise.) This isn't appreciably better or worse than its predecessors, or the endlessly looping cable series that spawned it. It's just another conspicuously risk-averse product from an IP that long ago mastered the art of giving its audience exactly what it expects and almost nothing it doesn't. (C MINUS.)
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DESPERATE LIVING--If there's a single film in John Waters’ career that can plausibly be described as both his most hostile and greatest work, it's 1977's "Desperate Living," a magnum opus so gleefully indifferent to audience comfort levels that even now it feels less like a cult movie than a dare. Made between the underground provocations of "Female Trouble" (1975) and the breakthrough appeal of "Polyester" (1981), it occupies a singular place in Waters’ body of work, the moment when his fascination with social outcasts, bad taste and institutional collapse achieved its purest, most uncompromising expression. The story follows neurotic suburban housewife Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) who murders her husband during a psychotic episode and flees with her morbidly obese Black maid/lover Grizelda (Jean Hill) to Mortville, a ramshackle shantytown populated by criminals, misfits, political revolutionaries and sexual reprobates. Mortville is ruled by the tyrannical Queen Carlotta, played by Edith Massey with a combination of bewilderment, conviction and comic majesty that no trained actor could ever hope to duplicate. Around them swirls a society in perpetual decay where authority is absurd, morality is meaningless and civilization itself appears to have been built from salvaged garbage. Waters had already spent years developing his cinema of bad taste, but "Desperate Living" pushes beyond mere outrage. Unlike "Pink Flamingos" or "Female Trouble" whose satirical targets remain discernible beneath the anarchy, "Desperate Living" often seems determined to sever every remaining tie to conventional entertainment. There's no reassuring protagonist, sentimental core or attempt to soften the grotesque edges. The visual ugliness isn't an accident of budget but an aesthetic choice. Waters creates a world in which degradation becomes a form of liberation, and the collapse of social order is treated not as tragedy but utopian possibility. What makes the film endure is the singular perfection of its performances. Waters’ Dreamlanders were never actors in any conventional sense: line readings wobble unpredictably, emotional registers shift without warning and any connection to "realism" is tenuous at best. Yet these qualities became expressive tools. Stole’s Peggy is the very incarnation of suburban hysteria; Hill gives Grizelda an unexpected sweetness beneath the character's nonstop vulgarity; and Massey achieves something close to immortality. As Queen Carlotta, she's simultaneously ridiculous, terrifying, pathetic and oddly regal--amateurism inseparable from genius. Within Waters’ oeuvre, it represents the culmination of his underground period before a gradual migration toward mainstream acceptance. Later films would become more polished, accessible and even humane. but none would ever achieve this level of feral artistic freedom. It's a vision untainted by compromise, a fairy tale assembled from refuse and deviance. A half century later, "Desperate Living" remains problematic, abrasive and frequently appalling. It's also quite possibly Waters’ undisputed masterpiece. The Criterion Collection's new box set includes both 4K and Blu-Ray copies of the film; an audio commentary with Waters and actor Liz Renay; "Back to Mortville," a featurette with Waters leading a tour of the movie's Baltimore locations; new interviews with actors Susan Lowe, Mary Vivian Pearce and Mink Stole; a conversation between Waters and film programmer Cristina Cacioppo; an interview with production designer Vincent Peranio; and "Mortville in Revolt," an essay by critic/author Grace Byron. (A PLUS.)
THE ELEPHANT MAN--David Lynch's 1980 masterpiece has long occupied an unusual place in his storied oeuvre. On paper, it seems almost anomalous: a period biography commissioned by a major studio, adapted from existing source material and based on the documented life of Victorian-era celebrity Joseph/"John" Merrick. There are no red curtains, no cryptic FBI agents, no uncanny doubles or dream logic to announce themselves in obvious fashion. Yet with each passing year, "The Elephant Man" has come to seem less like an outlier in Lynch's career than one of its purest expressions. That paradox began with one of Hollywood's most inspired leaps of faith. Mel Brooks--hardly a filmmaker associated with Victorian tragedy--recognized something extraordinary after seeing Lynch's micro-budget 1977 freak out "Eraserhead." Rather than dismissing it as the work of an eccentric provocateur, Brooks perceived an artist capable of rendering interior experience with startling emotional force. His decision to entrust Lynch with the material remains one of the great producer's gambles in American cinema, a reminder that genuine artistic patronage occasionally flourished within Hollywood's sausage factories. Brooks was wise enough to keep his own name largely out of the marketing, fearing audiences would expect a comedy. What emerged instead was a work of overwhelming compassion. Merrick's story had already passed into modern myth before Lynch arrived. Born with severe physical deformities and exploited as a carnival attraction before finding refuge under the care of surgeon Frederick Treves, Merrick became a symbol of both Victorian cruelty and human dignity. Lynch approaches that familiar narrative without sentimentality. His Merrick, embodied with astonishing delicacy by John Hurt beneath Christopher Tucker's extraordinary prosthetic makeup, is never reduced to an object of pity. Instead, he becomes the emotional and moral fulcrum of a world whose supposedly "normal" inhabitants are frequently revealed as the true grotesques. It's here that "The Elephant Man" unmistakably reveals itself as a Lynch film. His lifelong fascination with outsiders, hidden suffering, industrial landscapes and the fragile boundary separating civilization from barbarism was already fully formed. Freddie Francis's luminous black-and-white cinematography transforms smokestacks, steam and Victorian machinery into landscapes every bit as uncanny as the factories of "Eraserhead." Sound design--always one of Lynch's secret weapons--creates an oppressive, dreamlike atmosphere where mechanical noise becomes psychological music. Even moments of conventional narrative unfold with the strange dream logic that would later define "Blue Velvet," "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive." More than four decades later, it's lost none of its capacity to move audiences. The humanism never curdles into sanctimony nor does the visual beauty overwhelm the pain at its center. If anything the movie has only grown richer with time, revealing that Lynch's greatest subject was never mystery for its own sake but empathy. That may explain why this seeming curio now feels indispensable. It's not merely one of the finest biographical dramas ever made, but one of the essential works in the Lynch canon: a masterpiece whose tenderness proves every bit as radical as his nightmares. The Criterion Collection 4K Blu-Ray includes archival interviews with Lynch, Hurt, Brooks, Francis, Tucker, co-producer Jonathan Sanger and stills photographer Frank Connor; a 1981 audio recording of an interview/audience Q&A with Lynch at the American Film Institute; "The Terrible Elephant Man Revealed," a 2001 documentary about the film; a 2005 featurette, "Joseph Merrick: The Real Elephant Man," with archivist Jonathan Evans; Lynch and critic Kristine McKenna reading excerpts from their 2018 book, "Room to Dream;" excerpts from an interview with Lynch from the 2005 edition of Chris Roley's book, "Lynch on Lynch;" and an 1886 letter to the editor of the London Times concerning Merrick by the chairman of the London Hospital. (A PLUS.)
ICE CREAM MAN--For all its gleeful nastiness, Eli ("Hostel," "Cabin Fever") Roth's latest horror flick ultimately proves that even the most outrageous premise needs something sturdier than buckets of gore to hold it together. Written, directed and produced by Roth, it has the blunt-force confidence of someone determined to top his own reputation for excess. In the seemingly placid suburb of Bayleen Bay, a mysterious ice cream vendor (played with unnerving blankness by Ari Millen) begins handing out frozen treats that transform neighborhood children into homicidal monsters. As the town dissolves into paranoia and carnage, a troubled priest (Benjamin Byron Davis) struggles to make sense of the epidemic while everyone else tries to survive an increasingly surreal bloodbath. Roth has always understood the tactile pleasures of horror: the queasy anticipation, the extravagant makeup effects, the guilty laughter that follows an especially outrageous kill. "Ice Cream Man" certainly delivers on those terms. Limbs fly, strawberry syrup becomes an obvious visual joke and Roth stages setpieces with the kind of Grand Guignol gusto that will delight devotees of splatter cinema. But the screenplay circles the same ideas with diminishing returns, piling on carnage where sharper characterizations and genuine dread might have better served the material. Roth knows how to orchestrate audience gasps, though, and he seldom flinches from the grotesque. Yet for all its technical polish, the movie feels oddly flavorless beneath its sticky coating of blood and sugar. Like the kind of frozen novelty treat that looks irresistible in the wrapper but disappoints after a few bites, it's momentarily satisfying before melting into a forgettable puddle of excess. (C.)
MINIONS & MONSTERS--For a franchise built on the principle that more is always more, "Minions and Monsters" arrives with a deflating sense of exhaustion. Directed by Pierre Coffin, the latest installment in Illumination Animation's seemingly endless yellow empire once again mistakes frenetic activity for inspiration, piling gag upon gag in hopes that sheer velocity will compensate for the absence of novelty. The cobbled-together screenplay finds the Minions in 1920's Hollywood attempting to make their own creature feature. Naturally they unleash actual monsters in the process, triggering a globe-trotting chain of cataclysmic events that requires them to save the world from a disaster of their own creation. The starry vocal cast includes Jeff Bridges, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Zoey Deutch and Allison Janney, though most are given little to do beyond supplying fleeting audio recognition amid the ensuing chaos. The monster designs are colorful, the Hollywood period backdrop is rendered with impressive detail and the animation moves with the fluid efficiency one expects from Illumination. Yet the craftsmanship only underscores the film's central problem: every joke feels engineered rather than discovered. The Minions remain industrious little engines of slapstick, but after more than a decade of sequels, prequels and spin-offs, their anarchic charm has ossified into formula. Coffin clearly understands the
mechanics of the series he helped create. What seems increasingly elusive, though, is a reason for its continued existence beyond brand maintenance. Neither terrible nor offensive, it's merely overfamiliar--another installment that treats volume as a substitute for imagination. Small children will laugh and their parents may occasionally smile. But everyone else may find themselves wondering if these industrious yellow creatures have finally run out of places to go. (C.)
THE ODYSSEY--Christopher Nolan has never mistaken moderation for a virtue, and the Oscar-winning director scales Homer's foundational text with the grit and determination of a filmmaker convinced that every myth should be experienced at maximum volume (and length). The result is frequently spectacular, intermittently exhilarating and, at nearly every turn, exhausting: a monument to cinematic ambition that's easier to admire than love. Matt Damon brings a weathered
intelligence to Odysseus, the battle-scarred king of Ithaca whose decade-long voyage home after the Trojan War becomes a gauntlet of monsters, shipwrecks, seductive goddesses and divine interference. Back in Ithaca, Penelope (Anne Hathaway) fends off increasingly aggressive suitors while her son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), searches for news of the father he scarcely remembers. Around them swirl gods, kings and mortals played by a cast so lavishly stocked with marquee names (Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Charlize Theon, et al) that one eventually stops trying to keep score. Indeed, Nolan's parade of celebrity cameos becomes its own unintended spectacle. Every few minutes another recognizable face materializes for a scene or two before vanishing again, producing the same distracting effect as John Wayne turning up as a Roman centurion at the Crucifixion in George Stevens' "The Greatest Story Ever Told." Instead of enriching Homer's world, the procession of stars repeatedly nudges viewers out of it. No one stages large-format spectacle with Nolan's technical assurance, though. The sea battles roar, the cyclopean landscapes dwarf humanity and the practical effects possess a tactile grandeur that computer-generated fantasy often lacks. Yet the movie remains oddly resistant to emotional intimacy. Nolan is forever explaining destiny, honor and memory while rarely allowing his characters to inhabit them as flesh-and-blood people rather than ideas in armor. It's difficult not to be reminded of 2024's "The Return" in which Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche distilled the same source material into a lean, deeply human drama that proved more moving at a fraction of this film's budget (and nearly three-hour run time). For Nolan acolytes, "The Odyssey" will doubtless confirm his status as modern cinema's reigning architect of gigantism. For everyone else, it may feel like another reminder that bigger canvases don't automatically produce deeper emotions. Homer survives the treatment but just barely, emerging from beneath layers of IMAX grandeur and directorial self-regard nearly as formidable as the trials faced by Odysseus himself. (B MINUS.)
ONE NIGHT ONLY--Will Gluck has spent much of his career trying to convince filmgoers that the romantic comedy didn't need saving so much as a healthy dose of locker room humor. It was a dubious proposition in Gluck's "Anyone but You" where every genuinely charming moment eventually got buried beneath another round of anatomical punch lines, and "One Night Only" doubles down on the notion that the quickest route to romance is through the sort of humor best left in college frathouses. It's an odd fit for a genre whose greatest pleasures have traditionally depended on anticipation rather than consummation. Ernst Lubitsch's "The Shop Around the Corner" understood that longing is funny. Nora Ephron's Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan pairings knew that chemistry could be intoxicating without constantly reminding viewers that the characters possess functioning libidos. Sex comedies have their place, but rom-coms only work when they're buoyant enough to let audiences fall in love alongside the characters instead of wondering what bodily fluid joke is waiting around the corner. Gluck's latest imagines a near-future America where the government has somehow criminalized premarital sex, forcing unattached adults into an absurd bureaucratic maze of surveillance and romantic compliance. The premise collapses before the opening credits have even finished rolling. How exactly is this omnipotent government agency supposed to monitor every unattached citizen in the country? The screenplay treats this logistical black hole as a mere inconvenience, asking us to accept an authoritarian fantasy whose rules change whenever another gag requires them to. The attractive leads do what they can. Calum Turner plays Nick Moretti, the owner of a neighborhood pizzeria whose old-fashioned romantic streak makes him an unlikely rebel in this over-regulated future. Monica Barbaro is Sophie Vale, an aspiring singer whose debilitating stage fright has confined her to recording breezy radio jingles instead of pursuing the career she dreams about. Turner has an easy, unforced warmth that recalls the leading men who once anchored studio romances while Barbaro projects intelligence and vulnerability without pleading for our affection. Together they generate precisely the kind of low-key chemistry that a better movie would have trusted. Instead, Gluck keeps interrupting them with another wink, crude innuendo and reminder that he's less interested in romantic tension than proving he can get away with one more "R"-rated joke. The film mistakes crudeness for wit, cheapening a genre that has survived for nearly a century on timing and restraint. When a movie hangs out the "romantic comedy" shingle, the audience has every right to expect that romance will matter at least as much as the raunch. "One Night" wants desperately to be naughty when it might have been memorable simply by being romantic. (C MINUS.)
SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY--Destin Daniel Cretton’s "Brand New Day" arrives with the soft thud of a franchise refusing to acknowledge how tired it's become, and how tired we've become of it. Cretton, who brought a welcome tensile restraint to "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" (2021) again demonstrates a sure hand for staging action that actually registers as space rather than noise. But even his calm efficiency can’t fully counteract the sense that this is a series running on contractual obligation rather than narrative necessity.
Tom Holland returns as Peter Parker, and the performance--once spry, boyish, even genuinely affecting--now feels locked into a kind of unctuous autopilot: dutiful, perennially earnest and increasingly difficult to take seriously as anything more than Marvel’s most carefully managed mascot. The film leans hard on his supposed relatability, though it increasingly resembles a corporate talking point rather than a character trait. The story finds Peter attempting, once again, to reconstruct a life in fragments after the fallout of multiverse chaos and trying to reconnect with MJ (Zendaya) in a relationship strained into narrative convenience. Jacob Batalon returns as Ned, though the role has been reduced to a kind of narrative pressure valve to release jokes whenever the emotional circuitry starts to flicker. Cretton’s direction briefly steadies the machine. A sequence set in an abandoned transit hub has a clarity and spatial logic that suggests what these movies might look like if they trusted less in spectacle overload. But the script, assembled with the usual committee impersonality, keeps collapsing back into obligation: setup, quip, escalation, multiverse tease, repeat. What remains is a sequel that's competently made but emotionally airless, another entry in a saga that mistakes continuity for momentum. By the end, “Brand New Day” feels less like a promise than a corporate scheduling memo. (C.)
SUPER TROOPERS 2--You have to admire the Broken Lizard gang's stubbornness. 25 years after "Super Troopers" became a dorm room touchstone and eight years after the belated second installment, they're still polishing the same badges, grooming the same mustaches and hoping the same jokes will elicit the same giggly surrender. Familiarity may breed affection, but "3" mostly breeds déjà vu. Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar who again plays the unflappably smug Senior Trooper Arcot "Thorny" Ramathorn, the latest sequel concocts a plot so perfunctory it feels like an excuse scribbled on a cocktail napkin. Trooper Rodney "Farva" Farva (Kevin Heffernan) is preparing for an absurdly overblown engagement to Thorny's sister--much to Thorny's horror--while the Vermont State Police stumble onto a new designer drug operation that inevitably requires juvenile undercover antics and the usual avalanche of practical jokes. Along for the ride are Steve Lemme's prank-happy Mac Womack, Paul Soter's deadpan Carl Foster, Erik Stolhanske's earnest Rabbit Roto and Brian Cox as the perpetually exasperated Captain O'Hagen. The problem isn't that the movie repeats itself; repetition has always been part of Broken Lizard's comic metier. It's that the anarchy now feels dutiful. Every traffic stop, every screaming match and every improvised insult arrives with the air of performers revisiting a beloved sketch simply because the audience demanded an encore. A handful of gags land smoothly enough to remind you why these characters became cult favorites in the first place. But nostalgia isn't comic timing. "Super Troopers 3" offers another ride with old friends, yet even the most indulgent fan may find themselves wondering whether it's time to finally let these lovable lawmen pull over and park the cruiser. (C.)
TOY STORY 5--There's a moment in the latest "Toy Story" sequel when Woody and Buzz Lightyear find themselves contemplating a world in which children no longer need them. That question lands with unexpected force not merely because it concerns the fate of beloved toys, but because it hovers over the entire series. After five movies spread across more than three decades, one starts to wonder if Disney and Pixar have returned to this toy box once too often. Directed by Andrew Stanton who helped launch the franchise in 1995 and later helmed such Pixar landmarks as "Finding Nemo" and "WALL-E," the newest chapter serves up a clever contemporary premise. Bonnie, now older and increasingly absorbed by a frog-shaped tablet named Lilypad, abandons her old toys and leaves them struggling for relevance. Woody, Buzz, Jessie and the gang are forced to confront a challenge they've never faced before: technology itself. The vocal cast remains one of the IP’s greatest strengths. Tom Hanks brings his familiar warmth to Woody; Tim Allen supplies Buzz with a mixture of overconfidence and vulnerability; and Joan Cusack gives Jessie much of its emotional weight. Pixar animators continue to find new textures, lighting effects and visual gags within a universe that ought to feel creatively exhausted by now, and the screenplay contains flashes of the melancholy wisdom that made previous entries so resonant. Yet "Toy Story 5" never fully escapes the gravitational pull of its predecessors. While its themes remain heartfelt (the toys once again face obsolescence and reaffirm the value of loyalty, friendship and imagination), repetition has somewhat diminished their impact. The lingering query is not whether Woody and Buzz have another adventure left, but whether Pixar does. (B.)
---Milan Paurich
