NEW THIS WEEK (9/4) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL--David Kittredge’s enthralling documentary is a lively, intellectually curious defense of John Boorman's "Exorcist II: The Heretic”(1977), one of Hollywood's most notorious flops, Despite having been dismissed as a punchline at the time of its release, Kittredge approaches the film not as an act of damage control but as a genuine work of criticism. He dares to ask the provocative question of whether audiences and critics simply judged the wrong movie. Kittredge also revisits the impossible circumstances surrounding the making of "The Heretic." Warner Brothers, desperate to capitalize on the blockbuster success of William Friedkin's "The Exorcist," handed the reins to Boorman whose mystical temperament and visionary instincts were almost diametrically opposed to Friedkin's hard-nosed realism. Rather than manufacture another exercise in Catholic horror, Boorman pursued something stranger: a metaphysical fantasia about empathy, consciousness and the evolutionary struggle between good and evil. The result bewildered anyone expecting spinning heads and pea soup vomit. Kittredge assembles a chorus of historians, critics and collaborators who explain why Boorman's film may have been decades ahead of its audience. Seen today and divorced from impossible commercial expectations, "The Heretic" emerges as an audacious piece of speculative cinema whose dream logic has more in common with the late Russian visionary Andrei Tarkovsky than conventional horror. Kittredge doesn’t insist that everything Boorman did works. Instead, he argues that failure and ambition aren't mutually exclusive, and that some movies require the passage of time before viewers can catch up to their wavelength. Among the doc’s most irresistible anecdotes is an infamous Pasadena sneak preview where the audience reacted with such hostility that Warner executives reportedly fled the theater before the screening ended, fearing the enraged crowd might physically assault them. Whether an urban legend or merely an industry cautionary tale, it perfectly captures the toxic collision between audience expectation and artistic intention that doomed the picture before it had a chance to breathe. What makes “Boorman and the Devil” so fascinating is that it never mistakes rehabilitation for revisionism. Kittredge isn't arguing that "Exorcist II" is a stealth masterpiece. He's making the subtler, ultimately more persuasive case that history has room for glorious cinematic misfires whose virtues only become visible after years of accumulated antagonism have faded. Watching the film through Kittredge's generous, probing lens, I didn’t see the "worst sequel ever made" but one of the boldest studio experiments of the '70s: eccentric, hypnotic, intermittently sublime and wholly unlike anything Hollywood would dare finance today. If the movie doesn't quite redeem Boorman's haunted opus once and for all, it comes thrillingly close, leaving even skeptics eager to revisit a cinema maudit that spent nearly fifty years waiting for a passionate advocate like Kittredge. (A.)
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.)
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.)
ONCE UPON A TIME N A CINEMA--Before multiplexes turned moviegoing into a choice among screens, cinemas had personalities of their own. They were slightly shabby, wonderfully impractical gathering places where the machinery could break down and the audience might misbehave, yet the same people returned week after week anyway. David Gleeson’s film lovingly resurrects one of those places and the vanished world around it. Set in Limerick, Ireland in 1984, it follows one increasingly
calamitous Friday night at a fading single-screen movie house where practically everything that can go wrong does. Earl Clancy (Colin Morgan) runs the family business, a battered neighborhood theater inherited from his father. He’s also its manager, chief repairman, troubleshooter and the reluctant proprietor of a life that seems to be slipping away. His brother Gerald (Calam Lynch) thinks that selling to a local businessman is the sensible answer, but Earl isn’t convinced. Then the pipes burst, a rat appears, the projectionist is too soused to do his job and a prospective buyer arrives just in time for the opening night of Jim McBride’s “Breathless” starring. Richard Gere. The movie unfolds in real time with the changing reels providing an increasingly literal deadline. Gleeson, who grew up in a family of cinema operators, has made a film that understands the picture show as something more than a business. It’s a civic space, a refuge and for Earl an extension of his entire family history. “Once Upon a Time” is nostalgic without being sentimental: it remembers the inconveniences (the worn equipment, the unruly patrons, the primitive technology) as fondly as the magic. Morgan’s Earl initially seems merely irritable: a man whose devotion to the theater has hardened into resentment, gradually revealing the sadness beneath his prickliness. Earl isn't simply afraid of selling a building; he's afraid of conceding that the world that gave the building meaning has passed him by. Gleeson occasionally oversells the Gaelic whimsy, and the tidy resolution feels a tad predictable. But sincerity is its saving grace. Shot inside Limerick's old Royal Cinema, it has a tactile authenticity that no amount of production design could manufacture. What makes this more than a genial nostalgia trip is its understanding that moviegoing was never simply about movies. It was about being somewhere in the dark and sharing an experience with people you didn't necessarily know. Gleeson knows exactly what’s been lost in the megaplex era; he also knows why some of us still miss it. No extras on Kino Lorber’s DVD. (B PLUS.)
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 PLUS.)
THE SUN NEVER SETS—Writer/director Joe Swanberg has always been interested in the moment when people realize that the life they’ve chosen may not be the life they want. His first feature in nearly a decade revisits that theme with a little more gloss and considerably less of the old mumblecore sprawl. Set in Anchorage, Alaska, the film stars Dakota Fanning as Wendy, a construction
manager whose relationship with Jack (Jake Johnson), an older divorced father of two, has settled into something comfortable but increasingly complicated. Jack, worried that Wendy is sacrificing too much of her independence, proposes that they take a break and she should date other people. This being a romantic comedy (more or less), the plan goes about as well as expected, especially after Wendy reconnects with an ex (Cory Michael Smith’s Chuck), who seems to have finally matured. Swanberg is less interested in romantic destiny
than the messy negotiations that precede it. His characters talk, backtrack, rationalize and occasionally behave like idiots; in other words, like real people. The dialogue sometimes announces feelings the actors have already conveyed, but Fanning and Johnson are such emotionally transparent actors that the movie's gears rarely show. Fanning is particularly impressive, giving Wendy an engaging mix of confidence and uncertainty. Johnson, a Swanberg regular, intuitively understands the filmmaker's particular comic wavelength: the humor comes less from punch lines than from watching a basically decent man make increasingly dubious decisions while insisting that he knows what he's doing. Swanberg’s 2013 “Drinking Buddies” remains the gold standard for his
particular brand of romantic improvisation; it was looser, funnier and more surprising. “The Sun Never Sets” is tidier and occasionally too pleased with its own emotional wisdom. But the Alaskan setting (beautifully photographed on 35mm) gives the familiar material some breathing room, and the cast keeps things grounded when the plotting threatens to drift into romantic-dramedy autopilot. In an era of glossy, woozy Colleen Hoover adaptations, Swanberg’s intimately scaled
romantic mess feels almost rebellious. It isn't great Swanberg, but it is very good.
VIRGINIA WOOLF’S NIGHT AND DAY—Turning a 1919 Virginia Woolf novel into a period rom-com sounds like the sort of idea that might have seemed perfectly reasonable in a pitch meeting, but increasingly dubious around page 20 of the screenplay. Director Tina Gharavi was certainly entitled to give it a try. It’s just that Woolf, with her inwardness, intellectual restlessness and stubborn resistance to the tidy mechanics of romantic fiction, is a somewhat reluctant participant. Set in 1910
London, the story follows Katharine Hilbery (Haley Bennett), a brilliant, headstrong young woman whose parents would rather see her married than studying astronomy at Cambridge. A pragmatic if passionless engagement to a childhood friend, her friendship with the suffragette Mary Datchet and Katherine’s increasingly complicated attraction to working-class editor Ralph Denham unsettle her carefully organized existence. Bennett gives Katherine a disarming combination of intelligence, wit and exasperation while Timothy Spall brings his customary rumpled authority to her long-suffering father. Gharavi’s film is good-natured and suitably decorous, as if everyone involved was reminded not to raise their voice. The problem is that “Night and Day” keeps trying to squeeze Woolf’s gnarly prose into the template of a Jane Austen style romantic comedy. That isn’t necessarily sacrilege, but it is something of a fool’s errand. Still there are worse cinematic sins than being tasteful and well behaved. At a gratifyingly lean 94 minutes, the movie never has time to become oppressively stuffy. It’s a pleasant enough diversion, even though one suspects that Woolf herself might have preferred less frivolity and more psychological nuance. (B MINUS.)
NOW AVAILABLE IN THEATERS, HOME VIDEO AND/OR STREAMING CHANNELS:
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
---Milan Paurich
