NEW THIS WEEK (8/21) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER--At some point, the "Insidious" movies stopped being a franchise and became a municipal service. Written and directed by Jacob Chase, the sixth installment concerns Gemma (Amelia Eve) who has the unfortunate ability to interact with spirits and bring them back into the mortal world. Soon enough, malevolent forces take advantage of the supernatural revolving door, and Gemma finds herself caught between the living and the dead. A woman who can inadvertently smuggle ghosts across the border
separating life from death is a reasonably good horror hook--particularly if you're willing to accept that the border in question has the security of a Motel 6. But Chase, who helmed 2021's "Come Play," treats the premise less as an opportunity for invention than as a mechanism for getting the by-now rickety "Insidious" tropes back into position. Creaking floors, portentous silences, things standing behind people who inexplicably don't notice them and eventually things that spring toward the camera because the supernatural has apparently embraced jump-scare technology. It's less interested in frightening you than reminding you that it knows where the scare button is. Eve brings a welcome seriousness to her role and Brandon Perea is enormously appealing as Gemma's cop boyfriend, but the most engaging presence is Lin Shaye whose Elise
has always possessed something increasingly rare in contemporary horror flicks: an actual personality. Shaye can suggest a history behind a glance and a private relationship with the supernatural that doesn't need to be diagrammed on a whiteboard. When she appears, "Out of the Further" briefly remembers that ghosts might actually be interesting. (C MINUS.)
JINSEI--Ryuya Suzuki's anime inspires admiration more than affection. The painstaking hand-drawn animation possesses an undeniable tactile beauty in an era dominated by digital slickness, and Suzuki's commitment to visual craftsmanship is never in doubt. Yet as the film drifts through an increasingly labyrinthine narrative, one begins to suspect that obscurity itself has become an aesthetic principle rather than the byproduct of an artistic vision. The story, insofar as it can be easily summarized, follows a man across the various stages of his existence, although each chapter assigns him a different name making it intentionally difficult to intuit where one identity ends and another begins. Voiced throughout by the Japanese rapper ACE COOL in a restrained, quietly affecting performance, he moves through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age as memories, dreams and alternate possibilities intermingle without warning. Scenes frequently dissolve into one another across decades with recurring locations and symbolic objects serving as the only reliable
guideposts through the increasingly fractured chronology. Suzuki appears less interested in conventional storytelling than in exploring how memory reshapes experience. Past and present coexist within the same emotional landscape while relationships seem to repeat themselves in altered forms, suggesting that identity is something perpetually rewritten rather than fixed. Those are compelling ideas, even if Suzuki often presents them with a severity that borders on the hermetic. Visually, however, the movie is consistently engaging. The hand-drawn artwork carries a warmth and texture that computer animation rarely equals, particularly in the quiet domestic scenes and luminous cityscapes. Suzuki demonstrates an impressive command of color and composition, allowing silence and stillness to communicate as effectively as dialogue. Whether "Jinsei"
ultimately rewards the effort it demands will largely largely upon your tolerance for narrative ambiguity. Some will undoubtedly find profundity within its shifting timelines and elusive symbolism; others may spend much of the run time simply trying to determine who the protagonist is at any given moment. Either reaction seems equally valid. Suzuki has crafted an earnest, intellectually ambitious work whose aspirations deserve respect even if its emotional rewards remain elusive. The Greenwich Kino Lorber Blu Ray includes a Suzuki short film, "Lawless Love." (B.)
THE MAGIC FARAWAY TREE--With their unapologetic British whimsy, Enid Blyton's beloved children's books have always seemed too quaintly retro to make an easy transition to 21st century multiplex screens. But director Ben Gregor's adaptation is a mildly pleasant throwback to the sort of old-fashioned family entertainment Disney used to make (think "The Gnome Mobile" rather than "Frozen"). After abruptly quitting a corporate job in London, Polly (Claire
Foy) reluctantly agrees to uproot her family to the English countryside so that hubby Tim (Andrew Garfield) can pursue his latest get-rich-quick scheme: growing tomatoes for a homemade spaghetti sauce. Their three children (Delphi Lawrence, Phoenix Laroche and Raphael Gane) are less concerned with the annoying lack of wi-fi after discovering the titular magical tree which leads them on a series of fantastical adventures. As a flamboyantly wicked fairy tale villainess, Rebecca Ferguson gives the sort of deliciously over the top, scene-stealing performance that makes even the rudimentary digital effects seem like part of the Old School fun. The film is sweet without being saccharine, old-fashioned without ever feeling stodgy and sufficiently eccentric to explain why Blyton's books have endured. It's no "Mary Poppins," but as a late-summer divertissement it has its charms. (B MINUS.)
MUTINY--Jason Statham doesn't so much appear in movies anymore as get installed in them like a piece of heavy machinery. Give him a bald head, bruised jaw and somebody unpleasant to punch out, and you have a Statham flick. In his latest throwaway actioner, Statham plays Cole Reed, an ex cop turned bodyguard whose
shipping magnate boss is murdered. After being framed for the crime, Reed chases the real killers onto a freighter where he uncovers an international human trafficking conspiracy. (Apparently avenging your boss' death isn't enough plot for 95 minutes.) Annabelle Wallis and Adrian Lester are along for the ride, presumably
to observe Statham's eyebrows communicate grave concern. The depressing thing isn't that "Mutiny" resembles "The Beekeeper" "A Working Man" or any other recent Statham vehicle, it's that the resemblance has become the product. He's effectively become his own genre, and director Jean-Francois Richet seems perfectly happy to keep the conveyor belt moving. Statham remains an appealing physical presence; when he throws a punch, you just know somebody is going to have a very bad day. But that isn't enough anymore. Action movies
once used stars to give their formulas personality. Now the formulas seem to be using Statham to give them a pulse. (C MINUS.)
SPA WEEKEND--There are worse ways to spend a weekend than at a spa, and there are worse ways to spend 97 minutes than with this genial, intermittently funny comedy from Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the brain trust behind "The Hangover" and "Bad Moms." While hardly a restorative experience, at least it doesn't leave you
feeling in need of one. The setup is familiar enough to have its own complimentary robe. A group of longtime friends gather for a weekend of pampering, drinking, oversharing and, inevitably, emotional excavation. Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, Anna Faris and Michelle Buteau play women whose various personal and romantic complications turn the spa into less sanctuary than pressure cooker. The jokes arrive on cue as do the reconciliations, revelations and assorted opportunities for women to say things they've been politely avoiding. Mann is the principal
reason to stay for the treatment. She has the rare comic ability to make a character's neuroses seem simultaneously ridiculous and completely reasonable, and even when the material is working from a familiar playbook she finds a fresh comic angle. Fisher, Faris and Buteau are appealing company, too, though the ensemble never quite achieves the combustible chemistry that made, say, "Bridesmaids" a landmark in female ensemble comedy. That comparison is perhaps unavoidable, but "Spa
Weekend" isn't another "Bridesmaids," nor is it even another "Girls Trip." Those movies turned the conventions of the female buddy comedy into occasions for genuine surprise and, occasionally, something resembling emotional truth. Lucas and Moore are content to keep things comfortable. Their screenplay is less interested in detonating its characters' lives than in gently rearranging the furniture. Still, there's something to be said for a comedy that doesn't
insist you declare it a masterpiece or major cultural event. It's amiable, professionally made and sporadically amusing with Mann providing the strongest evidence that a little more unruliness might have done everyone some good. It's pleasant enough, just don't expect the champagne to be vintage. (C.)
THE STRANGER--François Ozon undertakes what might seem at first glance an almost perversely ill-suited project: a faithful yet interpretive adaptation of Albert Camus' "The Stranger," the most interior of existential texts. And yet the result is one of the director’s most lucidly controlled, aesthetically rigorous works, a film that converts philosophical opacity into a kind of stark, shimmering cinematic language. Ozon’s oeuvre has long oscillated between mischievous artifice ("8 Women") and coolly observed melodrama ("Swimming Pool"), but here he strips his approach down to something more ascetic. Benjamin Voisin plays Meursault, a French Algerian clerk whose emotional indifference--to his mother’s death, to his lover Marie, to the social rituals that surround him--culminates in an impulsive killing on a sun-drenched beach. The ensuing trial, less concerned with the crime than with Meursault’s failure to display expected grief, becomes a moral theater in which society convicts him as much for his temperament as for his act. Voisin’s performance is a study in vacancy that never feels inert. Opposite him, Rebecca Marder lends Marie a fragile sensuality while Pierre Lottin’s volatile Raymond and Denis Lavant’s mournful Salamano populate a world at once banal and faintly nightmarish. Ozon uses them not as psychological counterweights but as social pressures closing in on his protagonist. Comparisons with Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation are inevitable. Where Visconti’s version starring Marcello Mastroianni and Anna Karina leaned into a kind of classical solemnity, Ozon’s movie feels more unsettled, more attuned to the colonial tensions that haunt Camus’s text. By granting a greater presence to the murdered man and his family, Ozon subtly reframes the narrative without dismantling its existential core by allowing the political to seep into the metaphysical. What emerges is not a definitive reading of the text so much as a compelling re-articulation. Cool, deliberate and at times hypnotically severe, Ozon's film honors Camus less by reproducing his prose than by discovering an equivalent cinematic stillness where meaning flickers in the gaps between action and affect. The Music Box Blu-Ray includes interviews with Ozon, Voisin and Marder; deleted scenes and outtakes; costume/ lighting tests; and a poster featurette. (A.)
TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA--Despite a title promising a raucous slasher spoof, director Jane Schoenbrun’s deliriously inventive follow-up to 2024's "I Saw the TV Glow" is really about the dangerous, intoxicating business of discovering yourself through movies--particularly the sort of movies you're embarrassed to admit you ever loved. "Hacks" Emmy winner Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a queer filmmaker hired to resurrect the moribund "Camp
Miasma" franchise, a trashy 1980's horror series whose sequels have progressively drained it of whatever life it once possessed. Hoping to restore some authenticity, Kris tracks down Billy (Gillian Anderson), the original film’s Final Girl who's been living as a reclusive ever since. What begins as research gradually becomes something far more complicated: a woozy collision of fandom, desire, trauma and the realization that pop culture detritus can burrow much deeper than anyone might expect. If Schoenbrun's "TV Glow" turned adolescent television obsession into a haunting metaphor for gender and self-discovery, "Camp Miasma" is looser, sexier and considerably funnier. The movie is stuffed with fake franchise lore, VHS-era junk, lurid slasher imagery and wonderfully ridiculous genre conventions, yet Schoenbrun never treats the material as mere camp. The jokes are always tethered to genuine feeling. Einbiner makes Kris a
fascinatingly awkward mix of cinephile confidence and emotional bewilderment while Anderson gives Billy the wounded, enigmatic gravity of someone who's spent decades trying to escape the character who made her famous. Their chemistry gives the film its peculiar charge. The result is a horror movie about horror movies that actually has something to say about why they matter in the first place. It's a welcome reminder that films can still be odd, intimate, funny, horny, personal and genuinely surprising. (A MINUS.)
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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.
(C MINUS.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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
