NEW THIS WEEK (8/28) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
BUDDY—Take a relentlessly cheerful, Barney-ish ’90s children’s television host, make him a giant orange unicorn, then watch him go spectacularly homicidal. The central premise is kind of obvious, but director Casper Kelly—making his feature debut after the wonderfully deranged Adult Swim short "Too Many Cooks”—manages to keep it intermittently amusing. The film begins inside "It's Buddy!,” a garish, aggressively wholesome kids’ show in which pre-pubescents sing, dance and absorb Buddy’s life lessons about happiness and good behavior. But when one cast member refuses to play along, the program’s sunny façade starts developing some very dark cracks. Soon the kiddies are prisoners of Buddy’s bizarre universe, scrambling to escape while their supposedly benevolent host turns into an axe-wielding monster. Back in the real world, Emmy winner Cristin (HBO's "The Penguin") Milioti plays a mom investigating the disappearance of her daughter who becomes increasingly convinced that something terrifying has happened to her family. Kelly has a terrific eye for the peculiar artificiality of children’s TV: the candy-colored sets, the canned cheerfulness, the maddeningly perky songs. He also knows that the sight of a cuddly unicorn committing bloody mayhem is inherently funny. Keegan-Michael Key, hidden inside Buddy’s absurd costume, supplies exactly the right combination of menace and idiotic enthusiasm. The conceit is clever enough for an extended short, but at feature length the cracks begin to show. Still, it's sufficiently weird and cheerfully nasty enough to earn its place in the Midnight Movie canon. It's not a killer unicorn masterpiece, but at least it dares to be different. (B MINUS.)
COLONY--Yeon Sang-ho, the South Korean director who made the zombie movie into an efficient form of social criticism with "Train to Busan," returns to the undead in this slick but disappointingly familiar exercise in bio-apocalyptic mayhem. The film, which premiered this May in Cannes, has plenty of reasons to be grateful for its 123-minute run time: there's rarely a moment when something isn't crawling, contorting, bleeding or exploding. What it lacks is a comparable reason to care. At a biotech conference in a Seoul high-rise, disgruntled scientist Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) unleashes a virus that turns its victims into grotesquely aggressive creatures. The building is sealed off, trapping a handful of survivors inside. Yeon has devised an appealingly nasty wrinkle on zombie lore: the infected aren't merely hungry; they're learning. They communicate collectively, adapt to failed attacks and acquire new physical abilities, effectively turning the horde into a single, evolving organism. The concept gives the movie some of its best sequences, particularly the unnerving choreography of bodies moving in synchronized swarms. Plus, the industrial setting allows Yeon to turn elevators, stairwells, offices and shopping areas into ingenious arenas for carnage. Unfortunately, the screenplay keeps announcing ideas it doesn't have much interest in developing. The film teases notions about corporate malfeasance, surveillance, collective intelligence and the contagious nature of information then scurries back to another zombie attack. The human characters, meanwhile, remain largely functional pieces on a game board. "Colony" ultimately feels less like an evolution of "Busan" than a well-tooled spin-off. (B MINUS.)
COYOTE VS. ACME--There's something deliciously apt about a movie in which an abused little guy takes on a vast corporation nearly being a corporate casualty itself. Three years after Warner Brothers shelved "Coyote Vs. Acme" for a tax write-off, Wile E. Coyote and director Dave Green get the last laugh. Green's film takes its inspiration from Ian Frazier’s wonderfully deadpan 1990 New Yorker story that imagined a lawsuit against the Acme Corporation. After another futile attempt to catch the Road Runner ends with the usual plethora of explosions, anvil droppings and bodily deformation, Wile E. hires down on his luck attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte) to sue Acme for defective merchandise. Forte's Kevin is an amiably schlubby sad sack whose professional humiliations parallel Wile E.’s endless physical humiliations, and the two make an unexpectedly touching odd couple. Lana Condor (Kevin’s idealistic niece) and John Cena (a slickster Acme lawyer) provide able human support, while Eric Bauza’s multiple Looney Tunes voices remind us that these characters still possess comic DNA that no corporate rebranding can ever vanquish. Green also understands an essential rule: don't over-explain Wile E. who remains silent throughout, communicating entirely through gestures and facial expressions. The slapstick shenanigans occasionally achieve the glorious lunacy of the Chuck Jones originals, and the integration of animation and live action is remarkably seamless. In fact, it may be the wittiest and arguably best live-action/animation hybrid since "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." It's not as revolutionary as that 1988 landmark, but it has something increasingly rare in family entertainment: jokes written for grown-ups that don't ignore children. Which raises the awkward question: who exactly was this movie intended for? Its natural audience
would seem to be Boomers who grew up with Looney Tunes and still regard Wile E. Coyote and Bugs Bunny as cultural touchstones. But they aren't exactly storming multiplexes in the post-Covid era. And the kids being courted by the ad campaign (who know the Paw Patrol pups and Minions intimately) will be left wondering why that skinny bird keeps going “Beep-beep.” And yet "Coyote vs. Acme" is too good to be reduced to a demographic problem. Like its indefatigable hero, it's been knocked off a cliff, blown to pieces, left for dead and somehow gotten back up. (A MINUS.)
THE DEVIL QUEEN--Long before Queer Cinema became fashionable and genre filmmaking learned to advertise its transgressions, Antônio Carlos da Fontoura's 1974 movie was already operating in a far stranger register: part gangster picture, part political allegory and part delirious fever dream of urban decay. Newly restored, it arrives not as a forgotten masterpiece but as one of those indispensable cult discoveries that remind us how much of world cinema still lies outside the accepted canon. Inspired by the notorious Rio de Janeiro crime boss João Francisco dos Santos, it centers on Diaba (Milton Gonçalves), an imperious drag queen and underworld kingpin who rules a sprawling criminal empire with theatrical flair and terrifying efficiency. When police pressure threatens one of her favored protégés (Stepan Nercessian), Diaba concocts an increasingly desperate scheme to redirect suspicion by setting rival gangsters, corrupt officials and assorted hangers-on into violent motion. Orbiting around them is Isa (Odete Lara), a coolly enigmatic woman who understands that power is often more seductive than love, and Catitu (Nelson Xavier), another player navigating Rio's unforgiving criminal landscape. To summarize the plot, however, is to undersell what makes it so intoxicating. Da Fontoura approaches his pulp material with the visual imagination of an art filmmaker, cramming every frame with lurid color, baroque costume design and an almost tactile sense of the city's moral entropy. The violence erupts suddenly, yet its lasting impression comes from the atmosphere--a decadent carnival where gender performance, criminality and social marginalization become inseparable. There's no trace of caricature in Gonçalves' performance; instead he creates a figure whose flamboyance masks profound loneliness and perpetual vigilance. The character dominates every scene through charisma rather than simple menace, making Diaba one of the most unforgettable antiheroes in Brazilian Cinema. Cult reputations are often built on eccentricity alone, but "The Devil Queen" earns its status because its idiosyncrasies serves a coherent artistic vision. It belongs alongside other international curios whose influence exceeded their original commercial fortunes, speaking simultaneously to exploitation aficionados, students of New Latin American Cinema and anyone fascinated by cinema's ability to reinvent genre from the margins. Seen today, it feels less like a rediscovered oddity than a missing chapter in the history of Queer and Latin American filmmaking, and a gloriously unruly work whose defiance has only grown more exhilarating with time. The Kino Cult Blu-Ray includes a booklet with introduction by filmmaker Kleber Mendonca Filho, an interview with Da Fontoura and notes by trailer cutter Jon Dieringer; film scholar Fabio Andrade's audio commentary track; the 2026 re-release trailer; and an alternate trailer edited by Dieringer. (A.)
THE DOG STARS--Ridley Scott has spent much of his career making films in which the end of the world is less an existential crisis than a production design opportunity (hello, "Blade Runner"). So it’s a pleasant surprise that his latest excursion into sci-fi is less interested in the apocalypse than in what might be worth saving afterward. Adapted from Peter Heller's 2012 novel, the
movie drops us into a depopulated America after a devastating flu pandemic. Hig (Jacob Elordi) lives with his dog and a former Marine (Josh Brolin’s Bangley) whose survival strategy begins and ends with a loaded weapon. Their Colorado homestead is less a house than a fortified arrangement: fly their plane, grow some food, shoot anybody who gets too close, repeat. Then Hig hears a mysterious radio transmission, and suddenly there's the tantalizing possibility that there might be something beyond mere survival at stake. Scott, at 88 years young working with the impatient energy of a director half his age, gives the film a lonely, tactile beauty. The empty landscapes, abandoned structures and battered aircraft are photographed with the grandeur you expect from the man who made "Alien" and "Gladiator," but the scale is oddly intimate. The world hasn’t ended with a bang so much as gone quiet. Elordi nicely conveys Hig’s mixture of melancholy and stubborn hope, and Brolin is terrific as the gruff, borderline-psychotic Bangley, a man who’s converted paranoia into a survival skill. Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce and Allison Janney bring added dimensions to a story that could have easily become a catalogue of dystopian clichés. What makes "The Dog Stars" unexpectedly affecting is Scott's refusal to assume that the bleakness of his premise requires bleakness of spirit. The film is violent, sometimes brutally so, but its real subject is connection: the irrational, impractical human impulse to believe that tomorrow might still be worth getting to. Scott has certainly made louder and certainly more visually dazzling movies, but this modestly scaled apocalypse could be his most humanistic film since 2015’s “The Martian.”
IDIOTS--Writer-director Macon ("I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore") Blair’s new movie--which premiered at Sundance this January under the considerably more pungent title "The Shitheads--begins with a premise that sounds like it was scribbled on a cocktail napkin. Two broke losers (Dave Franco and O'Shea Jackson Jr.) are hired by a shady transport service to drive a wealthy, deeply troubled teenager (Mason Thames) to a rehab facility. Franco and Jackson Jr. make a likable pair of misfits, and Thames is appropriately obnoxious without becoming entirely insufferable. The road trip structure gives Blair plenty of opportunities for escalating calamity: bad decisions compound, tempers flare and a supposedly simple job becomes increasingly complicated. There are laughs, particularly when Blair lets his characters’ pathetic circumstances speak for themselves rather than underlining every joke. In supporting roles, Kiernan Shipka, Nicholas Braun and Peter Dinklage briefly suggest a stranger, potentially more interesting film than it actually is. It's a genial, mildly profane comedy about people who made a mess of their lives before given a chance to make an even bigger one. But a movie called "Idiots" should have really been a little more reckless.
THE MARCHING BAND--French director Emmanuel Courcol packages class conflict, family reconciliation and civic uplift into a polished crowd-pleaser whose every emotional beat arrives exactly on cue. While handsomely performed and hard to dislike, it's frustratingly content to coast on goodwill instead of genuine insight. Benjamin Lavernhe plays Thibaut Desormeaux, a celebrated Paris orchestra conductor whose leukemia diagnosis sends him searching for a bone marrow donor. A DNA test reveals that he was adopted, leading him to Jimmy Lecocq (Pierre Lottin), the working-class brother he never knew existed. Jimmy spends his days serving lunches in a factory cafeteria and his nights playing trombone in a local marching band where music functions less as high art than neighborhood glue. As the initially awkward brothers grow closer, Thibaut begins conducting Jimmy's amateur ensemble while quietly discovering that talent, like family, has a way of ignoring social boundaries. Sarah Suco brings welcome warmth as Sabrina, Jimmy's practical, observant partner whose grounded presence steadies things whenever sentiment threatens to overwhelm it. Courcol clearly wants to bridge France's cultural and economic divides by contrasting elite concert halls with union halls and community centers. Yet the screenplay smooths away so much friction that the brothers' differing lives become little more than illustrative talking points. The film gestures toward questions of privilege, opportunity and inherited identity before retreating into a series of reassuring life lessons and swelling musical crescendos. Lavernhe and Lottin share an easy chemistry that survives the script's more manipulative turns. (Lottin manages to give Jimmy enough stubborn dignity to resist becoming a cliched working class foil.) Mistaking volume for depth, Courcol piles on inspirational speeches and tidy reconciliations until a finale that feels less earned than dutifully assembled. For a movie built around the transformative power of music, it plays an awfully familiar tune. (C.)
MARY OLIVER SAVED BY THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD--Mary Oliver spent much of her career avoiding the trappings of literary celebrity, preferring the company of ponds, birds and dogs to television cameras or lecture circuits. Yet Sasha Waters' luminous documentary demonstrates why this resolutely private poet has become one of America's most cherished public voices. It's less a conventional literary biography than an invitation to slow down long enough to notice the world. Waters wisely resists the urge to overdramatize Oliver's life. Instead, she assembles a quiet chorus of admirers whose testimonies illuminate her subject from different angles. Stephen Colbert movingly recalls the emotional hold of "The Summer Day" while Oprah Winfrey speaks about finding spiritual sustenance in Oliver's work. Steve Buscemi, Helena Bonham Carter, Maria Shriver and poets including Ada Limón, Nick Flynn, Mark Doty and Gabrielle Calvocoressi contribute thoughtful reflections on an artist who somehow managed to write poems that feel simultaneously intimate and universal. And longtime
Provincetown neighbor John Waters' dry wit gives way to genuine affection as he recalls a woman whose quietness concealed enormous reservoirs of strength and humor. His presence is one of the doc's unexpected highlights. The movie traces Oliver's journey from an abusive childhood through her longtime partnership with photographer Molly Malone Cook and eventual emergence as America's bestselling poet. Yet Waters never mistakes biography for hagiography. Oliver's poems remain the true subject here: deceptively plainspoken meditations on mortality, solitude and the sustaining grace of the natural world. They ask readers not to escape reality but inhabit it more fully, and recognize that wonder is available even amid grief. What distinguishes Oliver from so many contemporary poets is her remarkable accessibility. She writes without condescension or obscurity, trusting ordinary language to carry extraordinary emotional weight. That quality has earned her readers far beyond academia, people who might not otherwise open a volume of verse but find themselves returning to "Wild Geese" or "The Summer Day" as one returns to an old friend. Beautifully photographed and gently paced, "Saved by the Beauty of the World" understands that its greatest responsibility is not to "explain" Mary Oliver but leave us wanting to read her again. It succeeds magnificently. By the closing scenes, one feels an almost irresistible urge to step outside, look up at the trees and pay closer attention, a response Oliver herself would surely have considered the highest compliment. Kino Lorber's new DVD includes outtakes and the theatrical trailer. (A MINUS.)
TONY--The smartest thing about Matt Johnson’s exuberant, wonderfully scruffy account of Anthony Bourdain’s youthful pursuit of the culinary arts is that it really isn’t a biopic. Instead, Johnson--whose 2023 movie "BlackBerry" announced a filmmaker with an unusually intuitive eye for the comedy lurking inside American ambition--concentrates on one formative summer in 1975 when the 19-year-old Bourdain wandered into a Provincetown restaurant and almost accidentally discovered the kitchen as a place where his appetites (for food, danger, camaraderie and life itself) might actually have a purpose. This is less a conventional biopic than an origin story, and a particularly fine one because Johnson has zero interest in rushing his hero toward celebrity. There are no dutiful montages of future triumphs, no parade of famous names, no sentimental suggestions that the fully formed Bourdain was simply waiting inside the obnoxious, restless kid played by Dominic Sessa. It understands that becoming somebody usually involves first discovering how much of a nobody you really are. Sessa, so terrific in 2023's "The Holdovers," is sensational here. He gives Bourdain the contradictory qualities that make young Tony interesting: intelligence without wisdom, confidence without security, romantic idealism mixed with an adolescent capacity for preening self-importance. Sessa is in virtually every scene, carrying the film with a loose-limbed physicality and wonderfully alert comic timing. As a fellow restaurant worker, Leo (“Tuner”) Woodall possesses that rare movie-star quality that doesn't announce itself so much as leak through the screen. He can be funny, sexy, casually menacing and unexpectedly vulnerable within the same scene. Playing the older chef who becomes an early Bourdain mentor, Antonio Banderas lends the film a beautifully understated authority. The ensemble cast makes the kitchen feel less like a movie set than a rough little society with its own language, hierarchies and tribal rituals. Johnson's great achievement is to make Bourdain's culinary awakening feel like a spiritual awakening without turning it into mythology. "Tony" doesn't tell us where this kid will end up, it simply watches him take the first steps. For a film about beginnings, that's more than enough. (A MINUS.)
THE WAR WAGON--Burt Kennedy's 1967 oater distills several western tropes into an agreeable, unpretentious entertainment. Kennedy, who established himself as one of the genre's sharpest writer-directors with "The Rounders" and "Welcome to Hard Times," possessed an uncommon gift for balancing laconic humor with crisp narrative momentum. His films rarely announced themselves as major statements. Instead, they quietly demonstrated how much pleasure could be derived from economy, rhythm and the easy confidence of seasoned performers. John Wayne plays Taw Jackson, a rancher recently released from prison who intends to reclaim land stolen by ruthless cattle baron Frank Pierce (Bruce Cabot). Pierce's fortune is being transported inside an armored stagecoach--the titular "war wagon"--protected like a rolling fortress. Recognizing that brute force alone won't suffice, Taw recruits gun-for-hire Lomax (Kirk Douglas) whose mercenary instincts are matched only by his irrepressible wit. Joined by a colorful assemblage of thieves, they devise an increasingly elaborate plot to rob the seemingly impregnable convoy. If the screenplay occasionally feels content
to coast on familiar archetypes, it does so with remarkable ease. The movie's greatest strength is the relaxed chemistry between Wayne and Douglas. Wayne anchors the picture with his customary authority while Douglas supplies an almost contemporary mischievousness, undercutting heroic solemnity with a sly grin or self-interested quip. Their contrasting screen personas never clash; instead they generate precisely the sort of effortless star interplay that modern franchise filmmaking rarely capture. Kennedy stages the action with unfussy clarity. Gunfights are coherent, landscapes remain homespun rather than mythologized and the climactic assault on the armored wagon unfolds with mechanical precision that anticipates the structure of later heist flicks. There's little psychological revisionism here, no tortured deconstruction of frontier mythology. Yet that restraint has become one of the movie's unexpected virtues. In 2026, "The War Wagon" feels less like a forgotten throwaway than a graceful valedictory for the classical studio system. Its pleasures are modest but enduring: charismatic stars, lucid storytelling, dry humor and a director who understood that craftsmanship pursued without preening self-importance can still achieve a kind of quiet elegance. The KL Studio Classics' Blu Ray includes the original theatrical trailer and two audio commentary tracks with, respectively, western film historian Toby Roan and writers Peter Hankoff and Julie Kirgo. (B PLUS.)
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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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
---Milan Paurich
