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THE FIX--A band of disillusioned military veterans head to Tehran to stage a $25 million heist in this endearingly old-fashioned actioner. The hook is that an Iranian expatriate living in Paris knows where the money is hidden and offers the vets a deal: rescue her daughter and she’ll tell them where to find the loot. It’s a grabber of a premise although the politics are considerably more scattershot. The film seems to want to make a statement about the psychological wreckage left by America’s recent Middle Eastern wars while simultaneously treating an Iranian incursion as a grand adventure in armed robbery. The tonal schizophrenia can be jaw-dropping, but at least it’s rarely boring. (No small achievement given the egregious 142-minute running time). Director Guy Moshe keeps the action moving, and there are stretches when it achieves the comfortingly disreputable sensation of a straight-to-video military action flick that somehow wandered into a multiplex. As the team leader, Zachary Levi does a pretty decent Ben Affleck imitation, throwing himself into his bruised, macho role with unexpected conviction. Despite receiving top billing, Liam Neeson plays a supporting role as the C.I.A. operative who engineers the caper. Neeson can suggest gravitas simply by occupying a room, but anyone expecting another “Taken” will have to adjust their expectations. The bigger problem is that “The Fix” keeps reaching for seriousness
without ever deciding where it stands geopolitically. Its antiwar sentiments, military wish fulfillment and Iranian setting never quite gel. Still, there’s enough pulpy energy to keep it from becoming a slog. Trim 30 or 40 minutes, straighten out the politics, put Neeson in a few more scenes and there might be a nifty “B” movie lurking underneath all that excess.( C PLUS.)
HELL'S HIGHWAY: THE TRUE STORY OF HIGHWAY SAFETY FILMS—Once upon a time driver’s-ed films didn’t just advise teenagers to drive carefully, it threatened them with death. Not metaphorical death, but the spectacularly mangled, blood-spattered kind, preferably photographed in color and accompanied by a voiceover suggesting that your next bad lane change might leave you looking like hamburger. Originally released in 2003—and now receiving an impressive home video restoration courtesy of Kino Lorber—Bret Wood’s “Hell’s Highway” is a wryly affectionate, suitably appalled and occasionally hilarious excavation of this peculiar corner of American educational cinema. Its principal subject is the Highway Safety Foundation of Mansfield, Ohio whose notorious productions combined earnest traffic-safety instruction with imagery that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie. Wood smartly
resists the temptation to treat them as mere camp. He assembles archival clips and interviews with surviving participants, including cameramen and production personnel, allowing the people who made the pictures to explain what they thought they were making. The result is something more interesting than a collection of drive-in curiosities: a modest piece of cultural anthropology about an era when adults believed that terrifying children was a perfectly respectable educational technique. And the films themselves are extraordinary artifacts of a culture that apparently saw no contradiction between civic responsibility and skeevy voyeurism. Real accident footage sits alongside censorious narration and melodramatic reenactments. The movies are often unintentionally funny, but the laughter catches in your throat when Wood's camera lingers on the real consequences of the behavior being dramatized. The documentary wanders a bit, particularly when it follows urban legends surrounding the Highway Safety Foundation, but the digressions are part of its peculiar charm. Wood has the instincts of an archivist and the curiosity of a collector who discovered a locked basement and decided to inventory everything himself before bringing it to anyone else’s attention. 25 years later, it remains a remarkably good argument for the proposition that American film history is considerably weirder than anyone remembers. Wood didn't simply find these movies, he understood why they were worth discovering in the first place. Extras on the Kino Cult Blu-Ray include Wood’s audio commentary track; newly mastered prints of “Mechanized Death” (1961), “Wheels of Tragedy” (1963) and “Highways of Agony” (1969); extended excerpts from other highway safety films; the complete 2003 pre-restoration version; deleted scenes; and trailers. (A MINUS.)
HOPE—South Korean cult director Na Hong-jin’s latest is the kind of berserk genre-bender that makes you wonder whether anyone has ever told Na he doesn’t have to cram everything into a single movie. Of course, restraint has never been Na’s problem. The man behind “The Chaser,” “The Yellow Sea” and “The Wailing” returns after a decade-long sabbatical with a 156-minute sci-fi action thriller that begins as a small town murder investigation before mutating into extraterrestrial mayhem. After wildfires divert emergency forces and communications go down, police chief Beom-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and rookie officer Sung-ae (Hoyeon) are left to protect elderly residents of the isolated village of Hope. Meanwhile, Beom-seok’s cousin Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) leads a search party into the mountains to find what (or who) has been mutilating animals and people. The hunters soon discover three very strange visitors: Ma’veyyo (Michael Fassbender), J’aur (Alicia Vikander), Ai’dovor (Taylor Russell) and Va’migere (Cameron Britton). The less said about what happens next the better. Na
is at his best when withholding information, turning empty roads, wrecked buildings and patches of dark forest into zones of almost unbearable uncertainty. His action sequences have a wonderfully tactile, old-fashioned ferocity: people run, cars crash, guns fire and bodies hit the ground with gratifyingly little digital polish. The deliberately wonky FX, however, can make the creature effects look less otherworldly than merely unpolished. Yet it’s never dull which counts for plenty in an era when “epic” too often means just long and expensive.
Na’s Achilles heel is that he can’t resist adding another complication, another character, another escalation. The extraordinary opening hour gives way to something messier and ultimately fatiguing. But exhaustion is part of the experience, too. It may not be another “Wailing”-caliber masterpiece, but “Hope” confirms Na as one of contemporary cinema’s nonpareil choreographers of panic.
PRACTICAL MAGIC 2--There are bad ideas for movie sequels, and then there’s “Practical Magic 2.” The 1998 original was hardly some beloved classic awaiting rediscovery. It was actually pretty terrible: a tonally confused supernatural romantic comedy that failed to make much of a dent at the box office. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman reprise their roles as sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, and the always
welcome Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing return as their witchy aunts. The story picks up with the Owens women confronting another chapter in their family's centuries-old curse after Sally's daughter Kylie (Joey King) discovers secrets about the origins of their magic and begins evincing dangerous abilities of her own. The resulting quest takes the family from Massachusetts to Great Britain where apparently the solution to generations of supernatural dysfunction has been waiting all along. Susanne (“Brothers,” “After the Wedding”) Bier, a director capable of considerably more emotional acuity, seems hamstrung by a screenplay that substitutes mythology for character and CGI for atmosphere. New additions to the cast (King, Lee Pace and Maisie Williams) don’t leave much of an impression while Bullock and Kidman are left to manufacture chemistry on demand. The first movie at least had the advantage of being weirdly sincere about its sisterhood themes even if it was a schizophrenic mess. The follow-up seems less like a continuation than a corporate séance: summon two recognizable stars, exhume a quarter-century-old I.P. and hope that nostalgia will perform the magic the filmmakers didn't. Considering the dubious artistic quality and modest commercial legacy of the original, the most mysterious thing about this sequel is how it was ever conjured in the first place. (C MINUS.)
RUNNER--Hank Malone (Alan Ritchson), a former soldier turned delivery driver, is handed the task of transporting a life-saving liver to a sick little girl. Along the way, he’s obliged to escort Ben Bishop (Owen Wilson), the twitchy, mysterious fellow who brought him the precious cargo while a gang of mercenaries tries to make off with the organ. The liver, naturally, becomes the most valuable piece of luggage in the Western Hemisphere. Directed by former stuntman Scott Waugh who’s made a career out of turning kinetic mayhem into marketable concepts (“Act of Valor,” “Need for Speed,” “Hidden Strike”), “Runner” is professionally assembled but depressingly generic. The chases are loud, the bullets plentiful and the geography of the action semi-incomprehensible, but the movie never discovers the manic comic energy it promises. Instead it has the mechanical efficiency of a theme-park ride whose operator keeps checking his watch. Worse, the script treats its absurd premise with such solemnity
that you begin hoping someone will accidentally trip over the liver. As Hank’s reluctant partner, Wilson supplies some of his trademark deadpan eccentricity but seems stranded in a film that doesn't know what do with him. Ritchson remains an enormously appealing screen presence: handsome, physically imposing and blessed with the kind of easygoing affability that survives
even bad dialogue and worse explosions. He’s been knocking around for years, and this only reinforces the suspicion that Ritchson is still waiting for that one big screen role capable of turning him into a genuine movie star. Sadly, this ain’t it. (D PLUS.) https://youtu.be/iarSF_4epRg?si=jeJoy5np0EpSADo-
THE UPRISING--From “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93” to "Captain Phillips,” Paul Greengrass has developed a distinctive knack for turning large-scale political or historical events into visceral experiences of confusion, panic and momentum. His latest film, a muscular account of England’s 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, isn’t quite in the same league as his finest work, but it’s sturdy, intelligent entertainment. Andrew Garfield stars as the cryptically named Ploughman, a humble farmer who finds himself becoming the face of a popular rebellion against King Richard II. (Jamie Bell, Cosmo Jarvis, Thomasin McKenzie, Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander, Jonny Lee Miller and Katherine Waterston round out the top-notch cast.) The setup is almost irresistibly Greengrass-ian: a plague-ravaged society, crushing taxation, an increasingly furious lower class and a government that’s convinced itself that its authority is sacrosanct. The revolt is staged less like a pageant than an eruption with crowds surging through muddy medieval streets and the camera plunging into the middle of the violence. Greengrass’ handheld style, sometimes criticized as an arty mannerism, makes considerable sense here. The movie feels less like an illustrated history lesson than a portrait of an entire society losing its balance. What’s particularly interesting is that it never romanticizes rebellion. The peasants may have legitimate grievances, but righteous anger has a nasty habit of becoming something considerably less righteous once restraints disappear. That tension gives “The Uprising” more political bite than its fairly conventional good-guys-versus-the-Crown mechanics might suggest. Garfield, however, is the film’s weak link. He can be an appealing actor and is perfectly capable of conveying Ploughman's decency, but there’s something oddly callow about his performance, a quality that becomes more conspicuous as the character is elevated into a legendary populist leader. Garfield never quite convinces us he could become a mythical figure. The marketing briefly tried to sell “The Uprising” as “The Rise of Robin Hood” despite the fact that Greengrass made a historical drama about the Peasants' Revolt rather than a conventional Robin Hood origin story. In the wake of June's poorly received “The Death of Robin Hood” starring Hugh Jackman, perhaps everyone involved decided that a little less brand name recognition was a smart move. The irony is that Greengrass is less interested in the merry bandit than in the historical conditions that made an outlaw like him necessary. The result is bloody, energetic and politically savvy, if somewhat overextended at 128 minutes. Greengrass, however, remains one of the few mainstream filmmakers who can make history feel dangerous rather than merely decorous. (B PLUS.)
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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.)
BY ANY MEANS--History has a way of making strange bedfellows, and Elegance Bratton’s gripping historical drama has an epically odd couple at its core: an idealistic young Black F.B.I. agent and a Mafia hit man recruited to help investigate the murders of civil-rights leaders in 1966. (One has a badge while the other knows how to make people talk.) That difference hardly matters when the you-know-what hits the fan. The film is based on the real-life collaboration between federal agent Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Gregory Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), a Colombo crime-family enforcer whose expertise in violence makes him an unlikely arm of federal law enforcement. Their assignment places them in Mississippi where racial terror isn't simply a crime problem but part of the social and political fabric. The deeper they get into the killings, the more its central irony comes into focus: the government sent a Black agent to enforce the law in a place where the law had long been complicit in its evasion. Bratton, whose impressive 2022 debut “The Inspection” was an intimate study of institutional power and the people forced to navigate it, moves here into considerably more conventional territory. “By Any Means” has the familiar pleasures of the historical thriller—ominous back roads, corrupt authorities, secret meetings, men who need to be persuaded “the hard way”—but Bratton gives the material a welcome sense of moral unease. Scarpa is useful precisely because he’s so appalling. The F.B.I. can employ him because he operates according to rules that respectable institutions prefer not to acknowledge. Wahlberg plays Scarpa with a blunt, almost cheerful menace, making his character less a charismatic gangster than a blunt human instrument. Abdul-Mateen provides an interesting counterweight, giving Strider intelligence and restraint without making him seem messianic. Their uneasy chemistry supplies the movie with its true suspense. Every time Strider accepts Scarpa's help, the line between pursuing and outsourcing justice gets a little harder to see. The fact-based story is more compelling than some of its genre cliches, and Bratton doesn't always sell the most provocative layers of the story. Yet there’s something intrinsically bracing about a film in which a federal government faced with murderous racism decides that the man best equipped to fight crime is a criminal himself. That’s not exactly a comforting thought about American jurisprudence, but it's a considerably more interesting one. (B.)
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. (A 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 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.”
(B 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.)
FALL 2: DEADPOINT—There are only so many ways to make being stranded 3,000 feet in the air seem worse, but “Fall 2” is determined to find them all. A sequel to the surprisingly effective 2022 survival thriller “Fall,” it relocates the action to Thailand where grieving Jax Hunter (Harriet Slater) agrees to undertake a treacherous plank walk on Mount Kwan with her late sister’s adventurous friend (Arsema Thomas). A rockslide inevitably leaves them stranded at a terrifying altitude. Directed by Peter and Michael Spierig, the movie has the requisite vertigo-inducing imagery and no shortage of ingenious ways to threaten its protagonists. Unfortunately, it also lacks the original’s nasty simplicity. The first “Fall” understood that two people, one impossible location and the inability to get down were good enough. This follow-up keeps piling on complications, reversals and personal traumas as though escalation were automatically synonymous with suspense. Slater and Thomas are appealing, and the physical production is frequently impressive. But the Spierigs repeatedly strain to manufacture emotional stakes that the situation already provides. What begins as a reasonably effective nail-biter gradually turns into a mechanical amusement park ride with each new catastrophe arriving simply because the script mandates it. (C.)
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.)
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.)
ONSLAUGHT—After his recent excursions into Warner Brothers’ MonsterVerse franchise, director Adam Wingard returns to the scrappy, nasty pleasures of low-budget horror. No skyscrapers are being stomped here, and the biggest special effect is a woman trying to keep her daughter alive. Adria Arjona plays Celeste, a former Army sniper/single mother living quietly in a trailer park. Her attempts at an unremarkable domestic life are rudely interrupted by three genetically engineered super soldiers who escape from a secret military facility, leaving a trail of corpses behind. Soon the trailer park becomes a killing ground, and Celeste is forced to trade her hard-won anonymity for the combat skills she spent years trying to suppress. Defiantly old-fashioned, the premise could have been dreamed up during the video-store era when action movies and horror flicks routinely shared the same bloodstained shelf. It moves tersely, doesn't waste time explaining its monsters and understands that a good chase is more exciting than labored exposition. Wingard, whose “You’re Next” remains one of the sharper horror films of the past fifteen years, is clearly happier working at this modest scale than the gargantuan proportions of “Godzilla vs. Kong” and “Godzilla x Kong.” His work has a scrappy physicality and the violence lands with considerably more impact when the people being chased occupy an actual room rather than a digital landscape. The trailer park setting also gives the film a pleasingly grubby, boxed-in quality: nowhere to run, nowhere to hide and nowhere particularly nice to die. Arjona makes a tough but vulnerable heroine, while Dan Stevens, Reginald VelJohnson, Michael Biehn, Alex Pereira, Drew Starkey and Rebecca Hall add welcome character grace notes. The movie isn’t particularly interested in reinventing either the slasher or rogue-soldier genres, and some of its pulp mechanics are more familiar than frightening. But “Onslaught" knows precisely what it wants to be: lean, mean, funny in the right places and just a little bit deranged. (B.)
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.)
---Milan Paurich
