Over the years, my relationship with the surprisingly durable Jackass franchise, in which Johnny Knoxville and his crew of miscreants perform an array of dangerous stunts and pranks that are either a.) idiotic, b.)disgusting or c.) idiotic and disgusting. I never watched the MTV series and when I saw Jackass: The Movie (2002), I did not laugh once at any of the antics. For reasons that escape my mind, I was somehow inveigled into seeing Jackass Number Two (2006) and inexplicably found myself laughing my head off at gags—no pun intended—not manifestly different from those found in its predecessor. As for Jackass 3D (2010) and Jackass Forever (2022), I have absolutely no memory of whether I saw them or not and while I did see the spinoff Bad Grandpa (2013), which tried putting the usual outrageous gags into more of a Candid Camera-style context, the results were okay but felt at times as if it was trying to ape the success of Borat a few years earlier than in being its own thing. I mention all of this because now we have Jackass: Best and Last, the fifth and what Knoxville claims is the finale of the franchise and if you are looking for a nuanced examination of the film and how it compares to the others, you should probably go elsewhere because I am not the guy for such things. (Think of this as the critical equivalent of the warnings shown at the front of the films admonishing viewers from even thinking about trying to replicate any of the stuff they are about to see on their own.)

Like the previous installments, the film is simply a collection of outrageous stunts and practical jokes, this time combining classic bits rarities from throughout its history along with new bits that show that Knoxville and the crowd are still willing to do pretty much anything within reason (and far beyond) in order to get laughs from audiences and each other—the main difference this time around is that after the more brutally violent bits, the participants are perhaps a bit slower to get back up on their feet than before. I wouldn’t dare reveal the details of the various bits, of course, but this time around, I will say that there are a number of sequences that had me laughing out loud (though a number of them were clips of older bits), some of them were just gross, tedious and repetitive (I probably could have lived with about 34% fewer jokes involving various things entering and/or exiting various rear ends) and there is one bit that I might have deemed to be among the most horrifying and revolting things that I have ever seen on the big screen in a moviegoing career that has encompassed everything from Pink Flamingos to Rock of Ages if I hadn’t literally closed my eyes until I was certain that the film had moved on. Oddly enough, the film actually manages to flirt with a genuine sense of poignance as the group find themselves trying to come to terms with the fact that they are indeed getting too old for this shit, though not before a climactic bit that tries to prove otherwise. While younger viewers who have been raised on people posting videos in which they do stupid stuff may wonder what the big deal is, older viewers (including the guy at the screening I attended who brought his two young children along) may find the laughs tinged with a bit of melancholy, though they will be happy to know that when Jackass Best and Last comes to an end, both the film and the oddballs behind it make sure to go out in a literal blaze of glory that is, like the franchise at its best, simultaneously idiotic and triumphant

.Following up on her brief appearance in the final reels of last summer’s Superman, Supergirl starts off with Kara Zora-El (Milly Alcock), having still not adjusted to the loss of her home planet of Krypton and her relocation on Earth nearly as well as her cousin (David Corenswet), venturing off into deep space with her loyal dog Krypto to spend her 23rd birthday getting blitzed on planets with red suns that lower her invulnerabilities and allow her to feel things that she cannot experience on Earth. Along the way, she crosses paths with Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a young girl whose family was slaughtered by Krem (Matthias Schoenarts), the monstrous leader of a band of intergalactic human traffickers. Determined to kill Krem in revenge for his misdeeds, Ruthye asks Kara for help and while she initially refuses, a confrontation with Krem leaves Krypto clinging to life forces her to reluctantly team up with her so that they can track him down. Along the way, there are plenty of battles with all sorts of extraterrestrial creatures, numerous flashbacks to the various traumas that have made Kara the hard-hearted cynic that she has become, several conversations in which she nevertheless counsels her young charge about the psychological dangers of seeking revenge and occasional drop-ins from another famed DC character, the mercenary antihero Lobo (Jason Momoa).

Having liked the teasing of the character in Superman—indeed, I thought it was the highlight of an otherwise iffy film—I was actually kind of looking forward to seeing her in a vehicle of her own. (If nothing else, it almost had to be better than the previous 1984 screen attempt, in which a chipper Helen Slater battled a beyond-camp Faye Dunaway for control of both a powerful orb and the guy who would later play Ellis in Die Hard.) However, while the film is not nearly as bad as some of the boo birds out there may be suggesting, Supergirl as a whole just does not work, too often feeling like just a bunch of random elements thrown together in the hopes that audiences would be willing to overlook the often slapdash nature of the proceedings. Although adapted from the acclaimed 2021 graphic novel Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, the tale of a traumatized heroine doing battle with human traffickers dealing primarily in young women deemed “brides” ends up coming across as little more than a rehash of the great Mad Max: Fury Road, lacking such things as a compelling narrative, interesting characters (the villain is especially dire and not in a good way) and a director capable of staging both outlandish action beats and quieter character-driven moments with equal skill. (The film was directed by Craig Gillespie, who has done some interesting things in the past like Lars and the Real Girl and I, Tonya but who never quite finds his footing here, especially in regards to the clunky staging of the fight scenes.) The screenplay by Ana Nogueria tries very hard to present itself as edgy but it is only in the same sense that Spencer’s Gifts is edgier than the other stores in the mall—that may be true but it is only of a cosmetic nature that is still ultimately determined to sell you the same shit as everyone else.

Even stranger, for a film about Supergirl, the story seems oddly uninterested in her at times—most of the big dramatic moments revolve around Ruthye and her journey (which is not particularly interesting) and the film also steals focus from her with the occasional and mostly unnecessary appearances from both Superman and Lobo, who seem to be there only in the hopes of not frightening off those who might worry that watching a film revolving solely around a female superhero might give them cooties or something. And yet, even though Supergirl seems strangely determined to avoid focusing on Supergirl, the best thing about it is the performance by Alcock, who brings a lot of fire, wit and attitude to the proceedings, at least during the times when she is given the chance, and even though we can figure out early on that her character will most likely overcome her inner darkness before the end credits kick in, she manages to chart that development in a reasonably convincing manner. She is good enough here that even though I can’t quite recommend that you go out and see Supergirl, there is a part of me that hopes that enough of you disregard that opinion so that a follow-up film gets made with a screenplay more deserving of both the character and the actress playing her.

Released in 1995, the original Toy Story proved to be both a technological leap forward in the history of cinema on the level of 2001 in terms of its then-groundbreaking use of CGI animation and an enormously entertaining and inspired work that may have been ostensibly aimed at younger viewers but which was immediately beloved by both kids, who adored the bright colors, fast action and cheerful humor, and adults, who liked all off that stuff but also found themselves moved by the sophisticated storytelling and its willingness to embrace headier ideas about the meaning of one’s existence as well. At first glance, the inevitable Toy Story 2 (1999) might have appeared to be just another sequel designed to cash in on the success of its predecessor—it was even originally contemplated as a direct-to-video prospect until saner heads prevailed—but it proved to be a smarter, funnier and deeper experience that would almost instantly become enshrined as one of the greatest sequels ever made—not exactly the stiffest competition, of course, but still pretty impressive. Although those two films set the artistic bar at an almost impossibly high level—they were essentially seen by many as the Godfather/Godfather II of animation—Toy Story 3 (2011) once again not only cleared it but exceeded it by a wide margin with a narrative that found new things to do with its characters and say about the existential relationship between toys and their humans that resonated with both younger and older viewers alike (including those who were themselves kids when the first film came out) and found such a perfect note to conclude on that most observers just assumed that, at least as a feature-film enterprise, was coming to an impressively graceful conclusion.

That is why when it was announced a few years later that Disney and Pixar would be going forward with a fourth entry, even those who wholeheartedly loved the previous films were a bit skeptical. Sure, pretty much all of the key players involved had signed on but having completed one of the most spectacular hat tricks in cinema history, why risk tarnishing things with another go-around? As it happened, Toy Story 4 (2019) was perfectly fine—it was smarter and funnier than most of the animated films of that time that were trying to replicate the magic of the films that Pixar put out during their heyday (including some put out by Pixar themselves)—but it was never more than that, leaving longtime viewers with the discomfiting sensation of experiencing a Toy Story film that was ultimately less than essential. Therefore, when it was revealed that a fifth entry in the franchise was in the works, not even the fact that it once again managed to bring back the key members of the voice cast—including Tom Hanks, Tim Allen and Joan Cusack—and put Pixar mainstay Andrew Stanton, who worked on the other films and notably directed WALL*E, one of the few films from the studio ranked as highly as the original Toy Story films, in the director’s seat was enough to offset a certain level of consternation among moviegoers, who worried that perhaps the series should just quit while it was still reasonably far ahead and avoid further damage to its reputation. (Like most of society, we are going to pretend that the oddball spinoff Lightyear never happened.)

Happily—and perhaps I should have simply led with this and saved you some time and prevented you from having to wade through a couple of overwritten paragraphs, Toy Story 5 is not just a considerable improvement over its predecessor, it is a real winner that more than lives up to everything that the franchise has represented to so many people over the years. Little kids, ones who have only seen the earlier films at home on television or perhaps not at all, will adore the colors, the comedy, the action and the delightful cast of characters, both the old favorites and the new additions, and perhaps subliminally soak up the life lessons that it presents in a quietly effective manner. Older viewers—perhaps even the parents or grandparents of those younger eyes—will find it to be a spectacularly effective and occasionally moving summation of all the ideas that the films have offered over the years on the concepts of love, loss, the meaning of existence and other heady topics that even most adult films tend to shy away from these days. While it may not quite top the original trilogy when all is said and done, it is good enough to deserve comparison with them, which is more than you can say about most of the films that have emerged in the 15 years since the release of Toy Story 3. (Yes, typing the last few years of that last sentence has pretty much made me feel like David Bowie in the waiting room in The Hunger.)

You will recall that at the end of Toy Story 3, the now-grown Andy, the child owner of the various toys that the films would focus on, passed on his treasured playthings, including affable cowboy doll Woody (Hanks), cheerful cowgirl Jessie (Cusack) and space-age goofball Buzz (Allen), to a little girl named Bonnie. As this film opens, the now 8-year-old Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) is still playing with her toys, using them as an outlet for her boundless creativity and enthusiasm. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be translating into making actual friends for her to play with—her attempt to reach out to the twin kinds next door is particularly heartbreaking to witness—and when Jessie and her trusted steed, Bullseye (Alan Cumming), venture out to investigate, they discover to their horror that kids seems to have largely forsaken traditional toys and notions of play for high-tech devices that leave them staring at screens for all hours and making friends mostly in the virtual sense. (Even when they are together, they do nothing but gaze blankly at their own devices.) In despair, Jessie makes contact with Woody, who took off to roam the land as an itinerant counselor for newly abandoned toys, and summons him for help, which inspires no small amount of consternation in Buzz, who is struggling to figure out a way to propose to Jessie himself.

In the hopes that it will help her break out of her shell and make some friends, Bonnie’s well-meaning parents buy her a talking kid-friendly tablet known as Lilypad (Greta Lee) and, much to the chagrin and horror of Jessie, she takes to it immediately and begins spending all of her time on it. When Jessie tries to confront Lilypad about this, the device points out that times have changed and that it is only trying to help Bonnie as well, proving her point by getting her set up on a chat group with kids from her dance class and invited to a sleepover in about five minutes flat. Suspicious, Jessie and Bullseye stow away in her bag to see what is up and when the other girls see that Bonnie still plays with old-fashioned toys, it goes about as well as most sleepovers from your own youth, leading to Bonnie going home more despondent than ever and Jessie and Bullseye, through various machinations, winding up at the same farmhouse where she once lived with her first owner and which is now inhabited by Blaze (Mykolaiv-Michelle Harris), a 9-year-old who seems to be right on Bonnie’s unique wavelength. While Jessie is trying to get Bonnie and Blaze together for a play date, even resorting to use some of the latter’s outdated tech toys—GPS hippo Atlas (Craig Robinson), kid-friendly camera Snappy (Shelby Rabara) and potty trainer Smarty Pants (Conan O’Brien, in the role he was born to voice)—to make the connection, Woody and Buzz are off trying to find Jessie and bring her home. While all of this is going on, a virtual army of Buzz Lightyears, the contents of a shipping crate that washed up on shore, have come to life and are marching en masse to find their leader as well.

It could be argued that Toy Story 5 is not exactly breaking new narrative ground this time around—the conflict between venerable old toys and flashy new playthings was one of the basic concepts of the original film and Jessie’s existential crisis over the possibility of being abandoned by her child and if that means her entire existence was meaningless was at the heart of Toy Story 2. What makes this film so fascinating is how the screenplay, penned by Stanton and Kenna Harris, takes ideas that the franchise has focused on in the past and spun them off in new and ultimately rewarding directions. A lazier screenplay, for example, might have placed most of the focus on the schism between legacy toys like Woody, Jessie and Buzz (recall how the latter was considered to be state-of-the-art back in the day) and new forms of playthings represented by the likes of Lilypad and made the latter some kind of villain (a notion that might have been somewhat untenable considering that Disney is going to be selling Lilypads as part of the accompanying merchandising onslaught). Here, the film is much more clever in the way that it deals with this particular premise by presenting Lilypad as a toy that, despite its technical advances, loves and cares for Bonnie as much as Jessie and the others but unfortunately fails to calculate just how cruel kids can be to anyone they perceive as stepping outside of the norms, even at a young age. Likewise, the notion of observing Jessie confronting her abandonment issues for a third time might seem like a bit of a non-starter but by making her essentially the central character of the story this time around, it gives us a chance to get to know her on a deeper level so that when the hurts and epiphanies involving her kick in, they pack a genuinely emotional punch that should resonate with the kids while causing older viewers to wonder why the theater is so darn dusty.

And yet, what continues to astound about the Toy Story films is that they are able to layer in these heavier concepts without them coming across as forced and heavy-handed by balancing them with a lot of humor and action along the way. In theory, the film may seem a little overstuffed for a narrative that essentially boils down to whether two girls will be able to come together for a play date and it could be argued that elements such as the oncoming army of Buzz Lightyears and perhaps even Woody himself are perhaps extraneous to the central story. Perhaps, but the film manages to work them into the fabric of the story with surprising deftness—Woody may no longer be the focus but the character is still entertaining to watch, particularly in the ways that his bromance with Buzz continues to evolve, and the stuff involving the multiple Buzzes ends up paying off beautifully when that thread eventually ties in to the main story. Stanton keeps everything moving along at a nice pace and the whole thing is as stylish-looking as ever. (The scenes in which Bonnie’s playtime reveries are presented in 2D fluorescent hues are particularly striking.) The returning cast members are all clearly having a blast but invest their line readings with enough focus and emotion so that it never feels as if they are just going through the motions in exchange for a big paycheck. (Simply hearing Cusack, who has been away from the screen for a while, busting out her cowgirl exclamations is a delight all by itself.) The new additions to the cast fit in quite nicely as well—I suspect that Conan O’Brien’s work as Smarty Pants might prove to be a bit divisive with some but I found him to be hilarious.

Toy Story 5 is ultimately a testament to the power of imagination and does so by demonstrating plenty of its own reserves of that ingredient—one that is elusive enough in a typical summer blockbuster and especially in one with a “5” in the title. It is a film that viewers of all ages will treasure—younger viewers will hopefully use it as a springboard to help fuel their own imaginations while older ones will be reminded that movies aimed at the biggest audiences imaginable can still be smart and challenging instead of just dumbing things down for the lowest common denominator. It is no secret that the once-seemingly invincible Pixar has had a somewhat shaky output over the last few years but based on this spring’s fairly inventive Hoppers and now this, they seem to have regained their mojo and are once again doing the kind of grandly ambitious and giddily entertaining films that they were once synonymous with back in the day. At a time when even the Star Wars franchise seems to have lost its way, at least cinematically, this is a rare bit of good news for moviegoers to cherish.

Oh yeah, the song during the end titles is pretty good as well.

Although the title might suggest otherwise, The Furious is not the latest installment in the increasingly bizarre action franchise that began with people boosting DVD players and eventually found them rocketing into outer space in retrofitted cars for reasons long lost in the mists of time. It is instead a martial arts film from Hong Kong that arrives in theaters with no small amount of buzz among fans of such things after playing at a number of genre-specific film festivals over the last few months. As someone who has seen more examples than he cares to recall of films hyped as the next big thing in action cinema only to prove to be anything but (unless you want to make some kind of case for the likes of Hardcore Harry or Guns Akimbo and I would prefer that you didn’t), I admit that as I sat down to see it, I may have felt a certain degree of cynicism regarding the possibility of it actually living up to the hype. Happily, not only does it manage to live up to its advanced word, it mostly exceeds those expectations by giving viewers a breathlessly and relentlessly exciting example of kick-ass (among other body parts) cinema that deserves to be compared with the likes of Mad Max: Fury Road and the John Wick films as instant modern action classic.

The storyline is so absurdly simple and direct that it could be sketched out on a matchbook cover with room left over for revisions. Following the death of his wife, mute handyman Wang Wei (Xie Miao) is trying to raise his daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou), who is just old enough to start chafing at his overprotective ways and his urging to take her martial arts training more seriously for her safety. One day, she is snatched off the streets by a gang of child traffickers and while he isn’t able to save her—though he certainly gives it his best shot—he manages to collect enough information to theoretically give the cops something to go on. Alas, the local police chief seems weirdly uninterested in doing anything in regards to this crime and so Wang decides to search for her himself.

Meanwhile, journalist Navin (Joe Taslim) is also looking into the trafficking ring in the hopes of finding his wife, who disappeared while doing her own investigation. At a combination night/MMA arena connected to the traffickers, Wang and Navin eventually cross paths while separately fighting off hordes of henchmen and when they do, they spend the next ten minutes or so pounding the crap out of each other, both believing the other to be one of the bad guys. Once all that is straightened out, they join forces to battle their way through the underworld in the hopes of finding their loved ones, snapping as many spines as necessary along the way.

Sure, the plotting is as predictable as can be—this is the standard one-man-against-an-army revenge saga that has been done hundreds of times before—but no one is going to a film like The Furious for the story nuances. That said, while the narrative most likely will not be winning awards anytime soon, it gives us just the right amount that a film like this requires. After seeing too many genre exercises that bog things down by trying too hard to create multi-layered universes and elaborate backstories, it is almost a relief to see one that is content to simply boil things down to the basic essentials in the manner of the lean narratives of Walter Hill. Likewise, the characters, with perhaps one exception, are not exactly complex or surprising but we get just enough to know who to cheer for and who to boo and the performances are just good enough during the occasional respites from the fighting to keep us interested in what happens to them.

No, what people are going to see a film like The Furious for are, of course, the big action setpieces and in that regard, it is an overwhelming success. You would think that nearly two solid hours of fight scenes might get a tad monotonous after while but director Tanigaki Kenji, stunt coordinator Sonomura Kensuke and what I suspect was a mammoth crew of stunt people and choreographers have made sure that this is not the case. Unlike so many action scenes these days, which utilize whiplash editing, camera tricks and CGI in order to help create the suggestion of excitement but more often than not coming up with visual sludge in which you can hardly tell who is fighting who or where they are in relation to each other, the fights here tend to favor wider shots that allow a more unobstructed vision of what is unfolding and edits that enhance rather than distract. The choreography is also impressive in the way that it often involves the combatants delivering complicated combinations of moves that flow into each other with a kind of balletic grace, particularly when our heroes are facing multiple attacks at the same time—this is not one of those Kung-fu films where the bad guys patiently wait to lunge at the good guys one at a time instead of just all ganging up on him at once. To pick a highlight amongst them all is almost impossible but I will say that the opening sequence I made reference to in which Wang tries to rescue his daughter—which starts with him chasing a speeding garbage truck in his bare feet and doing battle with everyone on board—would be the unquestioned breathless high point of most normal films in terms of staging, execution and the pure exhilaration it inspires. It might well be that here as well but as the film goes on, it gives that scene a lot of competition.

It is still relatively early in the summer movie season but if another movie comes along that manages to come even remotely close to supplying the kind of pure kinetic energy on display throughout The Furious, I would be very surprised. It contains some of the best action scenes I have seen in a long time and I think that more devoted connoisseurs of the genre will come away from it with a combined sense of amazement over the sights that they have just seen and astonishment over the fact that no one was apparently killed while creating them. Alas, after a few weeks of disappointing duds, The Furious has the bad luck to come out on the same weekend as Disclosure Day, a film that a.) has a slightly bigger promotional budget and b.) also happens to be really good. You should definitely see Disclosure Day, of course, but if you have even the slightest interest in action cinema, you will need to carve out time to see The Furious as well, if only to be able, a decade or so from now when its place in the pop cinema firmament has long been secured, to brag to others that you got to see it back in the day and on the big screen to boot.

Although I bow to no one in my belief that Steven Spielberg is more than deserving in his place at the top of the cinematic pantheon, I must confess to finding his work over the last quarter-century somewhat on the uneven side. I admire both his consistent work ethic and his continued willingness to try new things at a point in his career when he might normally be expected to simply offer variations of his greatest hits—the one-two punch of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report, the underrated likes of Bridge of Spies and The Post and his ambitious reworking of West Side Story serving as the big standouts in that regard. One of my key problems is that when he has gone back and expressly tried to recreate the feel of those early blockbusters that helped to cement his legacy—films like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.—he has shown himself able to recreate the mechanics but not the magic, leading to film ranging from disappointments like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and War of the Worlds to flat-out atrocities like The BFG, The Adventures of TinTin and, god help us all, Ready Player One.

Therefore, I confess to having more than a few hesitations regarding the prospects of his latest epic, Disclosure Day, which, even in the few scraps of information that have seeped out over the past few months, suggested another attempt to evoke the glories of his past. That turns out to be true, more or less, but it only took a few minutes for those hesitations to disappear and be replaced with wide-eyed delight at what I was seeing. Unlike those previous attempts to reconnect with his past, this one is not only his most completely, compulsively entertaining and engrossing film to come along in a while, it is one deserving of comparisons to those earlier classics as Spielberg demonstrates that his considerable gift for cinematic storytelling is still as sharply honed as ever.

While I am sure that there will be plenty of reviews out there that will cheerfully reveal and dissect every single plot point, I will try to be as circumspect as possible in regards to details, though anyone wanting to go in completely fresh should probably set this piece aside until later. It does indeed deal with the notion that we are not alone in the universe and the possibilities of what might occur if our paths did indeed cross, the basic premise that drove the likes of Close Encounters, E.T., War of the Worlds and Crystal Skull. The conceit of the screenplay by David Koepp, working from a story conceived by Spielberg himself, boils down to one basic question: What if everything that we think we know about the possibility of encounters with alien intelligence on Earth over the last 79 years—Roswell, alien autopsies, probings, crop circles—was not just the inspiration for decades of conjuncture and conspiracy theories but all true?

Here, the premise is that all of this has happened and a top-secret private defense contractor, currently led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), has been charged with keeping all of it hushed up by any and all means necessary, ostensibly due to fears that the world (which is already currently on the edge due to a rapidly escalating conflict with North Korea) is simply not ready for such potentially destabilizing news, though he and his group are also keen to utilize and replicate the astounding alien technology that they have acquired along the way. However, a group of former employees, led by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), feel differently and have quietly broken away with the plan to at last reveal all of this information to the world using purloined data and technology as their proof before Scanlon and his men can find and stop them.

Deeply involved in all of this is Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who was behind the theft and is now carrying around all the information and narrowly avoiding capture at seemingly every turn while desperately waiting to be brought in by Wakefield’s group. Along for the ride is Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), Daniel’s girlfriend who had no idea about who he was working for or what he was planning on doing but is nevertheless drawn into the conflict as well. To be fair, she has a few secrets as well, primarily the fact that she was a former novitiate who left the church because of doubts about her faith and Daniel’s revelation to her about what is happening, while on the run, shakes her even further, especially when Scanlon figures out a particularly diabolical way of using her to get to Daniel. Meanwhile, in a seemingly unconnected storyline, Kansas City weather reporter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) has an odd encounter with a cardinal one morning while having breakfast with her slacker boyfriend (Wyatt Russell) that precipitates a lot of weirdness on her part—she begins speaking in languages she claims not to know, she seems to know intimate details about the lives of random people that she encounters on the way to work and, when she goes on air, she only delivers a series of strange clacking noises before collapsing. She also begins receiving strange impulses that inspire her to escape from the hospital and go on a search for Daniel, who is someone that she does not know in the slightest but who she is compelled to seek out in the hopes of getting answers to what is going on.

In a number of ways, Disclosure Day feels like a remix of Close Encounters, another film that dealt with alien entities, government coverups and ordinary people who find themselves inexplicably caught up in the middle and determined to get answers. Another point of comparison is that both films try to juggle feelings of paranoia and mistrust regarding the government’s clumsy efforts to try to keep information from getting out with a more positive and optimistic take on what the aliens may want from us—there may be orgies of destruction on display throughout but they are all 100% man-made. And yet, while there are undeniable similarities between the two films, Disclosure Day never feels like a retread, mostly because Spielberg’s approach to the entire notion of contact with aliens has clearly shifted over the years. Instead of giving us an insular story of a couple people trying to have their questions answered, he genuinely and wholeheartedly sees the notion of the possibility of extraterrestrial life to be perhaps the last real hope for humanity—the one thing with the potential to cut through everything from world conflicts to political tensions to an increasingly fragmented media landscape and bring us all together as one—and manages to keep firmly fixated on that idea despite all the chaos going on in the attempts to bring that moment to humanity.

Spielberg and Koepp take a chance by almost literally starting the film in mid-chase and then filling in viewers on the particulars of what is happening along the way. This is a risk for a couple of reasons—it runs the risk of confusing viewers right off the bat and it suggests that large amounts of explanation and exposition will be required at some point to eventually bring them up to speed. However, Spielberg is, of course, a master at visual storytelling and between his still-undiminished talents in that regard and his faith in a contemporary audience’s ability to pick things up and put them together, the narrative manages to move along without a hiccup—he presents everything in such a way that they can pretty much understand everything, even if viewers do not specifically know every single detail of the convoluted narrative that they have been dropped into or even how they manage to know them. When the explanations begin in earnest, things admittedly get a bit lumpier but Koepp’s screenplay gets through these moments without allowing things to get too bogged down.

That is largely because Disclosure Day is a throwback to the grand summer popcorn entertainments that made Spielberg’s name as a filmmakers in the first place, one where every element on display is working in a well-oiled manner without ever giving viewers the sense that they have seen it all before. Spielberg is obviously a master of large-scale chase/action scenes and even though there are a number of them on display here, you never get the sense that he is simply ransacking his old bag of tricks and indeed, a couple of them—particularly one involving a car and a couple of trains—are as impressive as anything that he has attempted in his career. All of his collaborators, most of whom he has worked with in the past, turn in top-notch work (the score from John Williams is particularly impressive) and keep things moving along at a headlong pace that leaves viewers exhilarated rather than exhausted, which is particularly impressive since it clocks in at nearly 2 1/2 hours. The performances all around are completely engrossing—O’Connor and Blunt are both fascinating as they play ostensibly ordinary people who find themselves enmeshed in extraordinary circumstances and while Hewson has become a reasonably familiar face on the screen in recent years but this may finally prove to be her big breakthrough. Amidst all the chaos, they supply a convincing human center that keeps the film from simply becoming a technical exercise and as a result, when Spielberg goes for the big emotional climax, it works because he and the story have earned it.

Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of discourse, as it were, about the massive successes of Obsession and Backrooms, two films made by young men who started out doing things on YouTube instead of going the typical film school route, and what this means for the future of Hollywood. As someone who likes the idea of filmmakers coming out of nowhere to beat the studios at their own game, hated the films in question and dreads the onslaught of crap that will be coming along in the next couple of years from people trying to repeat that phenomenon, I am somewhat pessimistic as to where things are going to go in the future. Now comes Spielberg, who was himself the industry boy wonder once upon a time, and while he couldn’t have possibly foreseen the impact of those films, he has made one that almost serves as a rejoinder to them to say that the old guard still has things to say and are not content to simply rest on their laurels. Will younger audiences who did not grow up with Spielberg’s films respond to Disclosure Day in the way that their parents may have responded to the likes of Jaws or E.T.? I dunno but if you did grow up with those films, my guess is that you will be feeling the same rush of excitement watching it unfold as you did back in the day.

Released in 2000, the original Scary Movie was a slapdash enterprise designed to allow various members of the Wayans family to skewer the then-current rise in meta-slasher films inspired by the mammoth success of the 1996 game-changer Scream and to allow Miramax, who produced both, to profit mightily off of said skewering. It wasn’t much of a movie to be sure—all it really did was prove just how hard it was to properly spoof a film that was already serving as a knowing subversion of its genre and lacked the genuine wit and affection that the Wayans brought to their delightful blaxploitation goof I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka!—but the sheer outrageousness of some of the humor (which seemed to be more of a reaction to the previous summer’s American Pie) was occasionally bracing and it did offer viewers a first glimpse of an inspired new comedienne in newcomer Anna Faris. Over the next few years, there were four sequels (only the first of which was done by the Wayans, who were pushed aside by the good folks at Miramax), each one more dire than the last, and when the last one disappeared from the collective memory after popping up in theaters, I suspect that few mourned their passing.

Of course, after laying fallow for a few years itself after its own series of increasingly uninspired sequels, the actual Scream franchise came roaring back to life a few years ago with a combination legacy sequel/reboot that brought back familiar faces like Neve Campbell (except for when Paramount didn’t want to pay her quote) and Courtney Cox for the old fans along with a group of hot young performers like Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barerra (except for when Paramount elected to fire her for making pro-Palestinian statements online, inspiring Ortega to bail as well) to attract a target audience that was not even conceived when Scream 3 hit theaters, making a ton of money and inspiring a wave of similar hybrids. As a result, it probably should come as no surprise that the franchise that made tons of money making sophomoric sport of those films should come back as well with its own revival goofing on the new Scream movies as well as other key horror titles of the last few years. It should probably also come as no surprise that the gulf in quality between the new iteration, inevitably called Scary Movie, and the original (which was hardly anyone’s idea of a classic) is at least as wide, if not more so, than the gap between the new Scream films and the one that started it all.

What passes for a plot here is basically a piss-take (among other fluids) of the storyline of 2022’s Scream and the recent Halloween trilogy that kicks off with Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif)—get it?—getting attacked by Ghostface, prompting the return of her pill-popping older sister Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan), along with her not-at-all-suspicious boyfriend Jack (Cameron Scott Robert). It turns out that Tuesday and Sara are the daughters of franchise stalwart Cindy Campbell (Faris), who has transformed into a heavily armed recluse awaiting the return of her old nemesis. Before long, Ghostface does indeed show up to chop their way through a cast that includes both the familiar likes of Brenda (Regina Hall), who has essentially turned into Octavia Spencer’s character in Ma (which the film cheerfully namechecks in case you forgot about it), stoner Shorty (Marlon Wayans), still-closeted Ray (Shawn Wayans), ambitious reporter Gail Hailstorm (Cheri Oteri) and mentally challenged Deputy Doofy (Dave Sheridan) and newer younger characters, including one young woman who really enjoys butt plugs and another who is so strident in her political correctness that even while being stabbed, she is correcting a bystander about her pronouns.

As was the case with the previous Scary Movie films, this one is little more than a laundry list of gags that mostly revolve around recent horror films—besides the aforementioned Scream and Halloween reboots, there are also gags inspired by the likes of Sinners, MEGAN, Get Out, Nosferatu, The Substance, Final Destination, Weapons and the proverbial many many more. As was also the case, none of the numerous contributors to the screenplay seem to have any real thoughts about these films and their current popularity or much of anything else. Essentially, the film has a single comedic concept that it repeats for 90 minutes—replicate a key moment from a familiar film and then add a scatological twist that will send the 13-year-old boys who have managed to sneak into the multiplex auditorium into giggle fits. As lazy as this sounds, there are times when the film can’t even be bothered to do that—there is a bit involving Art the Clown from the hyperviolent Terrifier films that would be practically indistinguishable from the source were it not for the fact that those movies, as crudely low-budget as they are, are done with slightly more style and flair than director Michael Tiddes can muster up here.

There are roughly 900 jokes or so on display in this film and of them, maybe five brought something resembling a smile to my face and one of those was the end credit revelation that this was shot at Tyler Perry’s studio complex in Atlanta. The vast majority of the rest are either uninspired goofs on the movies that inspired it—one of the kids in the Weapons spoof is running around in the dark and gets hit by a car—or jokes disgusting enough to once again demonstrate that the MPAA is little more than a joke. In promoting the film, the Wayans have proclaimed that with this film, they aim to take on the whole “woke” mindset and kill off cancel culture with the power of laughter. Based on the available evidence, this appears to be more of a cover to allow them to trot out the same tired bits of homophobic humor that came across as ugly and insensitive 25 years ago and which has not exactly aged well in the ensuing years. (You get the feeling that the Wayans family elected to return to the fold solely so they could finally get around to making a Brokeback Mountain joke.) The cast flails about but t not even they can do much with a narrative that lacks the dramatic spine and biting humor of a skit in a latter-day Bob Hope special and while Faris is still a welcome sight for comedy fans, she can’t help things much because the film keeps her off the screen for far too long.

As someone who has never found this franchise to be particularly amusing—even at its best, it was always a couple of horsehead bookends shy of reaching the heights of Student Bodies—my dislike of Scary Movie should probably not come as much of a surprise. However, even those with a taste for defiantly lowbrow humor are likely to find this film more desperate in its attempts to schlock and amuse/appall than anything else, particularly since you can almost certainly find stuff more wild and outrageous online than is on display here, and those looking for a jape on current horror trends will probably be more bewildered that things like the super-pretentious offerings of Ari Aster and Osgood Perkins (save for a blink-and-you-miss-it riff on Longlegs with Chris Elliot aping Nicolas Cage, which sounds funnier in theory than it proves to be here) have been pushed to the side for lame variations on jokes that you have already heard before along with enough padding (such an extended takeoff of that notable horror favorite John Wick and a parade of cameos, all but one of which fail to do much of anything) to stretch things out to feature length and even that is thanks in no small part to a very extended end credits sequence. Even thought no sane person could have held out much hope that this film was going to somehow prove to be a modern comedy classic, the sheer laziness on display in every frame is so overt that anyone foolish enough to go see it will come away from it feeling as much contempt for the filmmakers as they clearly had for them.

By the time that the adventures of He-Man and his fellow Masters of the Universe began in 1982, first as a line of toys designed by Mattel to serve as a blatant crossbreeding of Star Wars and Conan the Barbarian aimed squarely at the allowance of young boys and then a year later with a daily animated television series designed to serve as a barely disguised commercial for said toy line, I had long since outgrown such things, not that they would have been my particular cup of tea at any point. As a result, the only actual exposure to the franchise that I have had at any point was viewing Masters of the Universe, the 1987 attempt to extend the brand’s popularity to the big scree with a live-action film that flopped hard enough at the box office (thanks in no small part to Cannon Films, the schlock outfit behind the production, slashing the effects budget to practically nil just before filming began) to help bring the entire thing to a screeching halt, though it would inspire an amusing anecdote—Sylvester Stallone, whom Cannon was wooing, made a visit to the set, saw Dolph Lundgren, his Rocky IV co-star, going through his paces during a scene and reportedly turned to someone and said “You gave him lines?” For the most part, when I hear the phrase “Masters of the universe,” my mind gravitates more towards The Bonfire of the Vanities than blonde guys in leather jockstraps and swords.

I bring this up because Hollywood, in its unerring pursuit of exploiting every bit of existing intellectual property still out there for the taking (and no doubt spurred on by the massive screen success of another adaptation of a Mattel property, Barbie), has elected to give He-Man & company another shot at multiplex glory, this time in a film that is also titled Masters of the Universe but with a budget clocking in at upwards of $200 million, and I figured that I should give faire warning that this will not be one of those reviews obsessed with the minutiae or the in-joke references or how it compares to previous incarnations of the franchise. (My ignorance of He-Man lore is so complete that I spent the entire film assuming that one character was going to be revealed as someone else, only to discover that the someone else was actually someone else.) If you go online, my guess is that you will be able to find any number of reviews or commentaries that will do just that. All I can do is just give my reaction to the movie before my eyes and in that case, my response is that the film as a whole is too long, too bloated and too unsure of the kind of tone it is trying to achieve, though not without its occasional moments of charm as well.

The film opens on the bucolic planet of Eternia, where our scrawny pre-teen hero, Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), is trying to live up to the ideals of his stern father, King Randor (James Purefoy) by training with chief general Duncan (Idris Elba) and daughter Teela (Eire Farrell) when the land is attacked by the malevolent forces of the vile Skeletor (Jared Leto), who yearns to possess the Sword of Power that will make him the most dangerous thing in the universe. At the last second, Adam is spirited away to Earth with the sword by a sorceress (Morena Baccarin), who admonishes him to keep it with him so that he can return one day and set things right. During the trip, however, the kid loses the sword and, perhaps worse, lands in Oklahoma City, where he grows up (now in the form of Nicholas Galitzine) to become a schlub working in Human Resources while still pining for the world that he still remembers—even while on a date in response to being asked where he is from—and hoping to find the missing sword that will bring him back.

Eventually, he does find the sword, which brings the now-grown Teela (Camila Mendes) to pick him up and, following the requisite big brawl with a bizarre creature on the city streets, bring him back to Eternia, which is now a hellhole thanks to the ravages of Skeletor and right-hand sorceress Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie). Before long, Adam is reunited with the people whose memories he has been carrying for the past fifteen years, including the likes of Fisto (Johannes Haukur Johannesson), Ram Man (Jon Xue Zhang) and Trap Jaw (Sam C. Wilson), along with a now-drunken Duncan and a formerly-fierce combat robot now reprogrammed for domestic duties (voiced by Kristen Wiig). After his initial attempts to deal with Skeletor’s forces through HR techniques regarding de-escalating tensions fail to do much good, Adam finally manages to embrace his inner warrior and unites his fellow outcasts on a seemingly doomed attempt to destroy Skeletor and take back Eternia once and for all.

Although Masters of the Universe pilfers blatantly from any number of well-known sources—everything from Star Wars to The Wizard of Oz to Barbie and many, many more—the most obvious, if slightly unexpected, influence is clearly Flash Gordon, the bizarre 1980 attempt to bring the famous sci-fi character to life with a combination of gaudy visuals and a mostly campy tone (one seemingly achieved by apparently telling leads Sam Jones and Melody Anderson to play everything straight and everyone else, particularly Max von Sydow, Ornella Muti and the great Brian Blessed, to play to the rafters while chewing on them)—the film even includes the bombastic sounds of Queen on the soundtrack to complete the homage. To be fair, there are points where this approach kind of works and not just because the mind reels at the thought of a dark and gritty version of the material. The production design by Guy Hendrix Dyas is cheerfully lavish and garish in equal measure, the screenplay contains a few nifty zingers (though I could have lived with a few less jokes about the names “Ram Man” and “Fisto”) and while the role of He-Man is not one I would want to wish on any actor determined to still have a career afterwards, Galtizine (who scored a number of big laughs in the infinitely better Bottoms) is about as good in the role as one could hope to be. Hell, even the usually loathsome Jared Leto has his moments as well, though the fact that he has been visually and aurally digitized beyond recognition might have helped things in that regard.

The problem with these bits, however, is that they only serve to underscore just how ungainly the enterprise is as a whole. The script vacillates between overt campiness and earnestness but never quite figures out how to maneuver between one and the other—the jokes don’t always hit and the overtly sincere elements, particularly the tepid semi-romance between Adam and Teela, are more tedious than anything else. As is usually the course for films of this type, the female characters are largely forgettable—Camila Mendes does little more supply numerous closeups of her spandex-clad rear while the sight of Alison Brie in her sorceress garb spitting one-liners is more odd than anything else. Although the direction by Travis Knight—perhaps best known for being the man behind the only palatable entry in the Transformers franchise, the genuinely likable Bumblebee—is more engaging than one might expect from an endeavor of this sort, he can’t quite overcome the overstuffed, undernourished screenplay that he is working with and at nearly 140 minutes, there is enough bloat on hand to ensure that most viewers will come away from it feeling more exhausted than excited.

I cannot in good conscience go so far as recommend that you actually go out and see Masters of the Universe—it never quite connects either as a nostalgia piece or as its own contemporary thing, its occasional stabs at irony, satire and meta-movie oddness pale in comparison to what Greta Gerwig was able to accomplish so deftly in Barbie and as sci-fi/S&S hybrids go, it is no Krull by a long shot. And yet, while it never worked as a whole for me, it still has its occasional moments of inspiration and it certainly make for a more interesting experience than the lugubrious likes of The Mandalorian and Grogu. If you are an undiscriminating child, an undiscriminating adult guy who was a fan back in the day or someone who reacts to the sight of Camila Mendes in a manner not unlike that of a character from Tex Avery cartoons, you might get more of a kick out of it than I did. If not, prepare for a long and occasionally exhausting slog with a few bright spots and a lot of dead ends before concluding with the hint of a sequel that I suspect few will be truly eager to experience anytime soon.

Although I am old enough to have seen the original Star Wars during its initial theatrical release way back in that long-ago summer of 1977, it is not a franchise that I overly venerate as many of my general age and belt size have tended to do over the years. Some of them I have loved (particularly Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Rogue One and The Last Jedi), a couple I have really disliked (especially Return of the Jedi and those goddamned Ewoks) and I remain fairly indifferent towards the rest of the lot. That said, even the lesser installments have had their moments of wild ambition and crackerjack technical style and even if the end results didn’t quite land with me, I could at least concede that the filmmakers were still trying to dazzle and amaze their audiences and weren’t just offering up second-rate goods while hoping that decades of viewer goodwill would allow them to get away with it. That, alas, is not the case with Star Wars: The Mandalorin and Grogu, a startlingly lazy and dramatically poky effort that demonstrates none of the ambition or spectacle that even the weakest of the previous films were able to muster and is more content to offer up lazy stabs at servicing the loyal fan base than to give viewers something of their own that they can latch onto. In other words, it is exactly the kind of Star Wars film that you would imagine emerging from the mind of director/co-writer Jon Favreau—very expensive, very nerdy and ultimately so forgettable that you will be struggling to recall elements from it five weeks from now, never mind five decades.

The film is a spinoff of The Mandalorian, one of no less than 13 Star Wars-related television shows that have turned up since the release of the last feature film, the woeful The Rise of Skywalker, in 2019. I should state that I have never actually seen an episode of this or any other of those shows—call it some residual emotional scarring from having watched that Star Wars Holiday Special back in the day—and while going into the screening, I must confess to some sense of trepidation that the story might be tied in so specifically to the show’s particular history and lore that I might not have any idea of what was going on. The good news is that the story on display is easy enough to follow even for newcomers like myself. The bad news is that said story is a tedious and unpropulsive slog that, for all of the booming sound and filmed-for-IMAX visuals on display, comes across like little more than three or four TV episodes stitched together into an ersatz narrative and not the kind of episodes strong enough to make one consider looking into the series as a whole.

The show, sort of a riff on the beloved Japanese manga/film series Lone Wolf and Cub, revolves around Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), a relentless and almost always-masked Mandalorian bounty hunter who goes through the galaxy in search of his targets with his apprentice, Grogu, a non-speaking but overtly adorable young variation of whatever creature Yoda was. (When the show first premiered, he was just basically referred to by everyone as “Baby Yoda.”) In the film, which is set a couple of years in the wake of the events of Return of the Jedi, the Imperial Empire has broken up and Djarin and Grogu have been employed by the New Republic to track down and apprehend Empire loyalists to bring them to trial and prevent them from reforming. The film’s opening sequence depicts them going after one such miscreant and it is easily the best part of the film—the action, much of it set atop a snowy mountain, is staged in a reasonably thrilling manner, contains elements of actual wit amid the chaos and offers an intriguing glimpse into life in this universe in the immediate wake of the original trilogy. In other words, it feels like an actual Star Wars movie but once it ends, the film almost immediately shrinks its ambitions and scope to such a degree that you can practically hear the creaking as it downsizes into TV mode.

After this episode does not quite go as planned, Djarin is given a new mission by superior Col. Ward, played, perhaps inevitably at this point, by Sigourney Weaver. He and Grogu are to go to Nal Hutta, the home planet of the fearsome Hutt family, and help them track down Rotta, the imprisoned son of the late criminal kingpin Jabba the Hutt (you’ve see pictures), and bring him home. When this task is completed, the Hutts will provide the identity of a heretofore unidentified Imperial supporter. Djarin tracks him down easily enough, only to discover that Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White) is a ripped and shredded (as much as a Hutt can be) gladiator fighter who is one brawl away from finally working off his contract with gangster Janu (Jonny Coyne) and has no interest in returning to his family and what he believes is their treacherous ways. Djarin doesn’t care about any of that—he has a job to do and is determined to complete it—but when it turns out that Rotta’s concerns are more than justified, he must set off to make things right with Grogu, who has by this time acquired his own cadre of pint-sized and easily Funkoized creatures to follow him around, right behind him.

Sadly, that is about it in the way of plot development here, which is strange for a movie that clocks in at well over two hours and especially so for a Star Wars movie, a franchise that has usually told stories that juggled between a number of distinct narrative threads at any given time. To fill the time, there are any number of big action beats, ranging from shootouts in outer space to a big chase scene through a neon-hued cityscape straight out of Blade Runner to a number of fight scenes, including one in which Djarin and Rotta are forced to team up in the gladiatorial ring when they find themselves betrayed by Janu and outnumbered by a bunch of bizarre-but-deadly rivals and another in which Djarin is forced to battle a massive dragon-snake hybrid in a vast water pit. There are introductions to a number of new alien characters, the most notable of whom is a gabby fry cook voiced by no less a figure than Martin Scorsese, a choice that is momentarily diverting, to be sure, but which will ensure that for years to come, lazy reporters will be asking one of our greatest artists some variation of “So, you said you didn’t care for Marvel films but you were in a Star Wars film—isn’t that weird?”

The idea of telling a more streamlined Star Wars story not bogged down with backstory and with plenty of space left over for action scenes is not necessarily a bad one, I suppose, but Favreau and co-writers Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor never manage to come up with one particularly worth telling. The story merely lurches from incident to incident for most of the first half before more or less grinding to a halt in the second with nary a surprise to be had and the most interesting idea on display—the notion of Djarin going out to hunt down Imperial loyalists in the manner of the people who went out to find hiding Nazis in the aftermath of WWII—is introduced early on in the proceedings and then quickly and inexplicably abandoned. There is always the sense that Favreau and company, spooked by the reaction that some particularly whiny fanboy types had to The Last Jedi, which committed the sin of trying to move the overall storyline into areas not wholly beholden to the past films, were afraid of giving viewers anything new for fear of a similar backlash.There isn’t a single line of dialogue that you can imagine anyone quoting in the way that people still bandy about bits from the original and The Empire Strikes Back. As for the setpieces, the staging is technically fine but they never really generate much in the way of excitement because they too often feel like Favreau has lifted their ideas wholesale from the earlier films—the gladiator battle seems overly inspired by the escape from Jabba’s barge in Return of the Jedi while the fight in the water pit is an obvious riff on the battle between Luke and the Rancor monster in the same film. Again, the best sustained action scene in the film is the opening sequence and even that feels kind of familiar—in that case, though, the inspiration seems to be James Bond films like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and The Spy Who Loved Me, so at least those borrowings seem slightly fresher by comparison.

The real problem with the film, one that even more forgiven Star Wars fans may find themselves struggling with, is the complete lack of anything resembling a human element on display. For all of the complaints over the years that some have raised about the films being little more than soulless sound-and-noise machines, the best ones of the bunch have contained more than their fair share of entertaining performances, interesting characters and spiky bits of dialogue. By comparison, those elements are few and far between here. Although Pascal is one of the more engaging leading men working today, he doesn’t really seem to register as much of a presence here (and probably wasn’t much of one on the set since he is only visible for about three minutes tops) and even the relationship between Djarin and Grogu, which one might assume would have been the film’s key element, is too often kicked to the sidelines by keeping them separated for long chunks of time. Among the newer characters, Jeremy Allen White doesn’t really click either as Rotta (a character we first saw being kidnapped in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, an animated film that actually did consist of several episodes of the TV show of the same name), which is odd since the role—an ambitious young being striving to make a success of himself while dealing with any number of daddy issues—is so in his current wheelhouse that it comes perilously close to self-parody. The only human actor who makes any real impact is Sigourney Weaver but, with the exception of one brief moment toward the end, that is almost entirely due to the good will that she has generated among genre fans over the years—she basically serves the same kind of purpose that Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness did when they served as basically the only elements of the original Star Wars that moviegoers might have recognized back in the day.

Even as someone who has never quite been 100% in the tank for all things Star Wars, I came away from The Mandalorian and Grogu feeling a real sense of disappointment. Yes, there have been previous films in the franchise that I have not cared for and would even claim a couple as being worse than this one (yes, including Return of the Jedi) but even during those low points, you never entirely got the feeling that those involved were just going through the motions in the way that nearly every long-running franchise does from time to time—they were all films with genuine visions, even if they didn’t quite come together in a satisfactory manner for my tastes. With this one, however, I felt for the first time like I was just watching a piece of product being ground out by the Star Wars Industrial Complex with no other purpose in mind than to see if the franchise still has viability as a theatrical prospect or whether it is time to shift the focus entirely towards television. For those of us who have been following the series since its inception, that may sound like an unthinkable proposition but based on the results of what we have been presented with her, the outlook is not entirely promising. Thanks to things like cable, home video and streaming, my guess is that anyone reading these words have seen most to all of the previous Star Wars films on their televisions at some point in time. The difference here is that The Mandalorian and Grogu, despite the massive budget at its disposal, is the first one of the bunch that feels as if it belonged there in the first place.

Unlike a lot of the horror movies these days, what with their multiple Ghostfaces and their Lee Cronin-style mummies and whatnot, Obsession starts off with a premise that is both thought-provoking and legitimately creepy. The problem is that once it has established said premise, it doesn’t really know what to do with it and soon loses its way in a tonally uneven narrative that too often distracts from the awful implications of its own initial idea with forays into weirdo humor and extreme gore. This is a shame because it does contain enough elements that do work—particularly one legitimately spectacular performance—to keep you watching in the hopes that it will somehow find its focus and live up to the promise of its initial scenes.

The story is centered around Bear (Michael Johnston), an amiable schnook who is desperately and quietly in love with co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette), who inevitably looks upon him as a good friend and nothing more. While shopping in a weird New Age-style store to replace a crystal necklace that Nikki lost, Bear comes across a retro novelty gift called the One Wish Willow with an absurdly simple concept—you make a wish, break it in two and your wish will supposedly be granted. (Only one wish per customer, naturally.) Of course, the very idea that something with the power to grant wishes could be sold alongside the usual array of nonsensical tchotchkes is absurd, but what if it actually did come as advertised? The idea is undeniably alluring and so, after once again finding himself being relegated to the friend zone due to his unwillingness to take any sort of action on his own part, Bear states “I want Nikki Freeman to love me more than anything,” breaks the One Wish Willow that he purchased for himself and discovers only seconds later that it actually works and that Nickki is now totally devoted to him.

At first, this new and endlessly devoted variation of Nikki is everything that Bear could have possibly wished for—so much so, in fact, that he is even able to slightly delude himself that nothing strange is going on, no matter how much mutual friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless)—the latter who clearly has her own feelings towards Bear—might otherwise suggest. After a while, though, the appeal of Nikki’s endless proclamations of love and bouts of great sex begin to wane a bit and even Bear begins to recognize that her love, as it were, has begun to curdle into something darker and more sinister as her obsession towards him begins to alienate them from their friends and inspires her to retaliate violently towards anyone that she perceives as being an obstacle to their relationship. Having belatedly realized that his wish left a lot of wiggle room for things to go hideously wrong, Bear now struggles to find a way out of his own self-created predicament while Nikki, lost in behaviors not of her own design, spins out in increasingly gruesome ways to show just how deep her commitment really is.

Obsession is the latest riff on the old horror conceit of “Be careful what you wish for,” one which has taught people to be very careful and very specific in regards to having the deepest desires fulfilled as far back as “The Monkey’s Paw” and beyond. What Obsession does is take the kind of idle fantasy that will be recognizable to anyone who has come across a Magic 8-Ball in a toy store and idly thought, “Well, what’s the harm?” and contemplates exactly the kind of harm that such a thing could inspire, particularly in regards to a wish that results in someone losing all off their personal autonomy in order to fulfill the desires of someone else without even the slightest amount of consent. Yes, the basic premise of the film is goofy but it does have a resonance to it that is striking enough, particularly in the early scenes, to genuinely grab you and make you interested in seeing where it takes that central idea.

The problem, though, is that while Obsession definitely has a grabber of a basic idea, it doesn’t really seem to have an idea of what to do with it. Writer-director Curry Barker, who first attracted attention a couple of year’s ago with his micro-budgeted YouTube horror film Milk & Serial, makes a couple of token stabs at addressing the consent issue early on in order to present Bear as something more sinister than the lovelorn goof that the character would clearly like to see himself as at the outset. However, outside of bringing up the notion of consent, Barker doesn’t really seem to have anything to say about what any of that means and before long, he is more than content to let that aspect drift away as Nikki’s craziness and proclivity for face-smashings is allowed to dominate the increasingly repetitive proceedings. Like too many horror films these days, we are left with a story that might have made for a solid half-hour episode of a show like The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror but which ultimately becomes tiresome at three times that length, particularly in its often abrupt and generally awkward shifts between cruel horror and silly comedy, at times within the context of the same scene.

What makes Obsession particularly frustrating in this regard is that even when the film as a whole is more or less going off the rails, it contain a real eye-opener of a turn from Inde Navarrette as Nikki. In her early scenes, she is endearing enough but once her character unwittingly falls under the spell cast by her friend, her take on undying, unstoppable love is something truly frightening to behold as she suggests her once-friendly nature being replaced by something far more sinister at the controls. Even when we begin to get a pretty good idea of what Nikki is now fully capable of doing, Navarrette’s performance finds enough bits of surprising nuance (particularly during a particularly hair-raising extended party sequence that is arguably the film’s highlight) to keep us squirming in our seats over the possibilities and even in the final moments, long after the film as a whole has largely succumbed to its flaws, there is a moment of anguish in her work that is so piercing and true that you get the sense that she brought more of a sense of understanding to the character and her plight than Barker was prepared to handle as a filmmaker.

Obsession has been made with a certain amount of style and skill and as a calling card to show that Barker has the technical skills required to make it as a filmmaker, it certainly gets the job done. (He has already made his next feature with horror producers Blumhouse and has signed on with A24 to make the latest reboot of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.) More significantly, it gives viewers what is certain to be one of the more striking debuts by a new actress to come along in a while. Beyond that, however, it proves to be just another example of a contemporary horror film that is all high-concept setup but contains little in the way of a satisfying followthrough for anyone looking more than unrelenting brutality punctuated with with jokes on the level of a Please Don’t Destroy video. Even after realizing their inherent dangers for themselves over the course of the film, my guess is that a lot of viewers of Obsession would cheerfully crack their own One Wish Willows and wish for a smarter and more satisfying take on the basic material than they have been presented with here.

The problem with so many of the recent string of so-called legacy sequels is that the people involved with the making of them are so fixated on making sure to include replicate enough elements of the original project to satisfy their fan base that they tend to neglect to bring much of anything genuinely new or interesting to the proceedings that might help them to stand on their own. Take last year’s Freakier Friday, for example—although lord knows it was nice enough to see Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan together again, the film’s big conceit turned out to be simply doubling the amount of freakiness and hoping that viewers would be too distracted by the additional number of narrative plates being spun to notice that there was nothing there that they presumably hadn’t already seen before. That said, while I cannot say that I was exactly filled with anticipation over the prospect of seeing The Devil Wears Prada 2, the eagerly-awaited-by-some sequel to the hit 2006 adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s best-selling roman-a-clef inspired by her time working as an assistant for legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour, so many of the elements that the original dealt with, ranging from the current state of the publishing and fashion industries to attitudes towards toxic workplaces, have changed so radically in the two decades since it came out that it would seem that a follow-up would almost have to come across differently by definition. And yet, while it does make a few token nods to highlight that things are different, the film is too often content to try to simply repeat what worked for so many the first time around while removing what little edge it contained for something softer and more formless.

As the film opens, our erstwhile heroine, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), has indeed become an intrepid award-winning journalist and, like so many of them these days, she has just been fired by the private equity weasels running her newspaper. No sooner has that occurred that she gets a big offer to return to Runway, the venerable fashion magazine where she was once employed, to serve as their features editor and to help pull the publication out of a PR nightmare involving a fawning article involving a clothing manufacturer who proved to be deep into sweatshop labor. When she arrives, she naturally, if inexplicably, returns, Andy assumes that she was brought back at the behest of fearsome editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) but soon finds out that it was really the idea of the magazine’s aging publisher and that she a.) doesn’t even remember Andy and b.) is merely going along with it in order to ensure that a promotion goes through.

While mulling over a friend’s suggestion of writing a tell-all book, Andy helps Miranda to make nice with advertisers, particularly Dior, which is now being run in part by former Runway nemesis Emily (Emily Blunt), and helps to strengthen the editorial content, not that Miranda takes much notice. However, when Andy manages to land a key interview with the the philanthropist former wife (Lucy Liu) of a dopey billionaire not a million miles removed from someone whose name rhymes with “Jeff Bezos” (Justin Theroux), things seem to be on the upswing for all involved. Alas, just when Miranda’s ascension seems to be a given, a monkey wrench is thrown into the works that threaten both her job and the future of the magazine, putting Andy in the position of trying to save both her former tormentor and, it is implied, the future of journalism as a whole.

While I didn’t much care for care for the original The Devil Wears Prada, it at least had a few bits of nicely cutting humor and the enormously charismatic likes of Streep, Hathaway, Blunt and Stanley Tucci (as Miranda’s second-in-command who took the hapless newcomer under his fabulously appointed wing) to ensure that it went down better than those odious Sex and the City movies. All four of them have returned and while it is fun at first to seem them all together again, things begin to wear thinner than some of the models on display when it becomes apparent that director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, also returning from the first film, haven’t really given them much to do this time around. Although it does offer the occasional acknowledgment that times have changed in the last 20 years, especially in the way that magazines like Runway (and, implicitly, Vogue) are now dinosaurs in what is essentially a digital medium, it ultimately spends too much time trying remind viewers of what they saw the first time around, from Andy’s latest romance, this time with a benevolent real estate developer (Patrick Brammall) so uninteresting that you will be yearning for the glory days of Zach Grenier, to a fashionista finale set in a glamorous foreign locale (Milan this time instead of Paris), and with the big dramatic conflict being which billionaire is going to buy Runway. There are plenty of quips that strive the achieve the zingy quotability of their predecessors but most of them feel a little too forced to really work (though Blunt delivers hers with enough panache so that they still mostly land) and, like the first film, it oddly doesn’t really seem to have much of any stance or opinion of the fashion industry as a whole, which seems odd for a film theoretically revolving around it. (Even Robert Altman’s largely maligned Pret-a-Porter had more to say on the subject than both of these films combined and it wasn’t even trying.)

The biggest flaw, however, is the way that the film handles the character of Miranda Priestly this time around. Granted, it wasn’t much of a character beforehand but Streep was clearly having fun milking every quietly venomous line for everything they were worth. The film has a few funny moments early on showing that character’s uneasy fit into the contemporary workplace model—the key job of her latest assistant (Simone Ashley) seems to be reminding her sotto voce of when her behavior is drifting dangerously close to a potential write-up from the goons in HR—but after a while, things grow increasingly toothless as the film increasingly wants to present her not as the ultimate boss from hell but as a survivor worthy—no, demanding—of our respect, admiration and sympathy for all that she has accomplished and to have us forget about all that other stuff. Perhaps the idea of presenting a female boss, especially one played by Meryl Streep, in this day and age as flawed or imperfect was considered untenable but it leaves a big hole at the film’s center that it never quite manages to fill. When both the book and the first film came out, there was all sorts of speculation about how much of Miranda’s character dovetailed with her real-life inspiration and how Wintour might retaliate to that unflattering portrayal. If you want to get an idea of how this film approaches her, all you need to do is check out the cover of the current issue of Vogue and see for yourself.

For those who are perhaps more forgiving than I, The Devil Wears Prada 2 may be somewhat more palatable. It is slickly made, looks good and benefits from the presence of Tucci (who basically steals every one of his scenes), Theroux (who is clearly having a blast playing the dim billionaire) Hathaway (even though her performance is far less interesting than the one she gives in the current and infinitely better Mother Mary, another film, curiously, in which she plays a character having an uneasy reunion with a fashion icon from her past) and a performer in a cameo that I will keep secret, though it will have almost certainly been revealed by the time you read this. Beyond that, the film has nothing more on its mind than trying to exploit audience love/loyalty to the brand as ruthlessly as the greedy moneymen driving its listless narrative. If that is all you ultimately want, then you will most likely come away from it feeling reasonably entertained. For anyone hoping for something more, the results are uninteresting enough that if the film were an actual magazine, you would most likely be cancelling your subscription.

As you have no doubt heard by now, Michael, the hugely hyped biopic on the life of Michael Jackson, does not in any way deal with the various scandals and accusations that dogged the singer during the latter portion of his life—it concludes its narrative in 1988, a good five years before the first reports of improprieties involving children became public. Although an omission of this size seems inexplicable, it does make sense because there is no way that Jackson’s estate would such a project to go forward unless it painted him in the best possible light whatsoever. Besides, it isn’t as if the whitewashing of sketchy behavior in the course of a pop star biography is anything new, as anyone who saw Great Balls of Fire or Baz Luhrmann’s monstrosity Elvis can attest. No, the problem with Michael is that what is actually on the screen is a bland, formless mess that has no real interest in its subject, either as a person or as an artist, and recounts his story in a manner that emphasizes montages over storytelling and which ultimately gives a bad name to both hagiographies and jukebox musicals.

The film ticks off a number of the key incidents that occurred during this time. The young Michael (Juliano Valdi) and his brothers being molded, sometimes brutally, by his taskmaster father Joseph (Coleman Domingo) into a polished musical act while his saintly mother Katherine (Nia Long) frets on the sidelines. The group getting the attention of Motown Records, where they record a string of pop hits while label head Berry Gordy (Larenz Tate) takes a special interest in Michael’s talents. The now-adult Michael (now played by Jafaar Jackson, who is Jermaine Jackson’s son and Michael’s nephew) determined to break free from the family unit and express himself creatively, first through his first real solo album, 1979’s Off the Wall, and then with a little thing called Thriller, which remains one of the most successful albums of all time. Joseph’s increasingly ham-handed attempts to tamp down Michael’s attempts to break free while exploiting his son’s extraordinary popularity, particularly by roping him into following up Thriller with another album and tour with his brothers. Michael’s brush with death when an accident during the filming of a Pepsi commercial lands him in the hospital with severe burns. Michael’s final determination to finally break free of his father and become his own true self, both personally and professionally, ending with him finally standing alone on the stage during his Bad tour in 1988.

Even for a film that is determined to leave the latter portion of Jackson’s life on the sidelines (all we get after the triumphant “Bad” performance is a title card stating “His Story Continues,” hinting at a sequel that I cannot imagine ever being made, considering the areas it would have to go into), there was more than enough material to make for a potentially fascinating and horrifying look at a kid who was essentially robbed of his childhood by a brutal and dominating father and managed to transform his pain and loneliness into pop perfection thanks to his extraordinary artistic gifts. That film, however, would need to be something darker and more penetrating and that is clearly not what the Jackson estate had in mind. Instead, director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter John Logan have given us the cinematic equivalent of the first half of Jackson’s Wikipedia page, hurtling from incident to incident, usually via montage, with no real connection between them other than the narrative of Michael’s uncomfortable relationship with Joseph. Jackson was one of the most transformative artists of his era but you never really get any sense of that here. You would think, for example, that the ambitious production of the Thriller album would be a key element of the film but it is yet another chunk of his life reduced to a montage that offers no insight into his creative process. (As for his attempts to follow that massive success up with Bad, the movie just skips over that struggle entirely.) Thriller was also notable because its overwhelming popularity eventually forced the then-lily-white MTV to start playing videos by Black artists but this significant change is represented only by a goofy scene in which Mike Myers turns up as record company head Walter Yentikoff, much in the same way that he did in Bohemian Rhapsody which, like Michael, was produced by Graham King.

The film gives no real insight into Jackson’s family dynamic outside of his relationship with his father—his brothers are given maybe two lines apiece and while sister LaToya (Jessica Sula) pops up once in a while, other sisters Rebbie and Janet are not depicted at all—and even that element kind of pulls its punches, never quite delving fully into the heartbreaking nature of Joseph’s abusive mess, which unfortunately reduces the impact of Michael’s final break from him. Other relationships are either reduced or strangely inflated—while someone like Quincy Jones (Kendrick Sampson) only turns up for a couple of brief scenes, there is a strange emphasis on Michael’s relationship with his brash and brilliant lawyer, John Branca (Miles Teller sporting a fairly hilarious wig), that seems inexplicable until you watch the end credits and discover that Branca is one of the producers. As for Michael himself, while Jaafar Jackson does a fairly credible job of mimicking his uncle’s incredible moves and stage presence but is less sure in the more dramatic scenes, though he is not helped by the shallow writing. As Joseph, Coleman Domingo gets to chew the scenery as the unabashed villain of the piece but the character, as written, is so one-dimensional that we never get any real sense of what drove his unending exploitation of his own children for his own means.

Like the aforementioned Bohemian Rhapsody, Michael is a musical biopic that has no interest in presenting audiences with a nuanced portrait of its subject—all it wants to do is provide a tenuous excuse for fans to shell out their hard-earned money to sit in a movie theater and see and hear large chunks of their record collections blasting away in Dolby Atmos. This approach clearly and inexplicably worked in the case of Bohemian Rhapsody, which made a ton of money, and I have no doubt that the same thing will happen hear. If that is all you want, then there is an excellent chance that you might enjoy Michael. However, if you are looking for even the slightest bit of insight or understanding of who he was and what he accomplished, you will have to wait until someone else comes along to tackle his story without being encumbered with the need to satisfy so many other parties along the way. Trust me, you will be much better off skipping the film entirely and just looking up the real Jackson’s videos and live performances online—doing that, you will be able to get a sense of his talents in a way that this movie, despite all the attendant noise and flash, simply never manages to accomplish.

From well-known titles such as Out of Sight, Logan Lucky and his three Ocean’s Eleven films to more obscure works like The Underneath and No Sudden Move, Steven Soderbergh is clearly one of the top people around when it comes to films revolving around heists and while his latest take on the genre, The Christophers, may not contain the kind of slick thrills found in some of those previous efforts, it nevertheless proves to be an enormously engaging and entertaining one despite its comparatively low-fi approach. The film stars Michaela Coel as Lori Butler, a once-promising artist who, following an embarrassing incident, abandoned that path in order to work as an art restorer (albeit one who also works in a food truck to pay the bills) who is contacted by Sallie (Jessica Gunning) and Barnaby (James Corden), a pair of siblings who are the children of Julian Sklar (Ian McKellan), the once-renowned and now-retired painter who now fills his days drinking, recording Cameo greetings for fans and refusing demands from both the public and his children to complete the final set of paintings of a renowned series known as The Christophers that have languished unfinished and unseen in his locked storage room since the 90s. They have concocted a plan in which Lori will get herself hired as Julian’s new assistant, sneak up into the room and complete the paintings following his style so that they can be found after his seemingly imminent death and sold for millions. Although resistant at first, Lori has a certain history with Julian that convinces her to do it. As for Julian, he does hire her but quickly catches on that something is off and, assuming that it has to do with his greedy kids and The Christophers, demands that she destroy the canvases before his eyes in the backyard fire pit.

What I have described covers roughly the first half-hour of The Christophers and I will say no more to preserve most of the surprises in store in Ed Solomon’s smart and clever screenplay. That said, this is not a movie that necessarily lives or dies on the strength of its narrative twists and turns as much as it does on its sly wit, some deftly handled commentary on our culture’s ever-increasing commodification of art and the sight of two undeniably intriguing characters who, despite their overt differences in race, class and age—not to mention a shared past that only one seems to recall at first—nevertheless manage to find some kind of common ground on certain subjects, such as their thoughts about the artistic process and their attitudes towards Julian’s hilariously loathsome kids. The performances from the two leads are more than up to the task—McKellan is a hoot as the irascible artist who now finds himself a prisoner of both his past artistic legacy and current state of infamy and while Coel has the less overtly showy role (as is the case with her other film of the moment, Mother Mary) she more than holds her own throughout as well—and the supporting turns are so keenly detailed that even someone as normally odious as James Corden manages to snag a few laughs along the way.

For his part, Soderbergh is content to present the material in a fairly straightforward style while still lending the proceedings a striking look that is more impressive when you consider that the vast majority of the story takes place within the confines of Julian’s ramshackle neighboring townhouses. At this point in his career, Soderbergh has made so many films (this is the 11th feature than he has done since calling a halt to his self-proclaimed retirement in 2017) that there may be the tendency among some to not always give them the due that they deserve due to the sheer amount involved. That said, anyone who decides to dismiss The Christophers as just another Soderbergh film does so at their peril because, based on the evidence of both this film and its immediate predecessor, last year’s superlative Black Bag, he appears to be on another hot streak that will hopefully continue on into the future

.The notion of a pop star attempting to transfer their talents from the recording studio/concert stage to the big screen is nothing new, of course, but I cannot immediately recall any who gone quite as all-out in that pursuit than British singer Charli XCX. In the last few months, she has taken on a supporting role in 100 Nights of Hero, was front and center of the mockumentary The Moment and pops up in a bizarre cameo in Faces of Death and before long, she will also turn up in Gregg Araki’s wild I Want Your Sex and Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist. (I am not even counting her musical contributions to the otherwise misbegotten Wuthering Heights and Mother Mary.) In her latest stab at screen stardom, Pete Ohs’s Erupcja, she stars as Bethany, a British party girl on a vacation in Warsaw with her boyfriend, Rob (Will Madden), where they are forced to spend a few extra days when the eruption of Mt Etna shuts down air travel. As it happens, Warsaw is also the home of Nel (Lena Gora), a florist who has been friends (and possibly more) with Bethany ever since they met as teens when the 2010 eruptions in Iceland stranded her in Poland while on a trip (all of their subsequent reunions have been preceded by major volcanic activity) and when Bethany discovers that Rob is about to propose, she takes advantage of their coincidental attendance at the same house party to slip away with her for a few days of partying, getting high and dodging phone calls from Rob, who is frantically trying to track her down.

As slight as this might sound in theory, it proves to be even less so in practice. Despite clocking in at a not-particularly-substantial 71 minutes, Erupcja feels more like a vignette concocted as part of some kind of themed anthology film that has been stretched and padded out in order to make it to something close to a proper feature length. That said, this is not the kind of film that is going to leave most viewers clamoring for more as very little of it comes across as convincing, particularly when it comes to the allegedly combustible power of the friendship between Bethany and Nel, which comes across here for viewers with all the charged electricity of watching home movies of other people out having fun. Instead of providing scenes in which are able to actually hear these two reconnecting, we only get brief visual shards accompanied by an omniscient narrator talking about what they like to talk about, though the scenes in which we actually hear them converse are not exactly enlightening or interesting either because, despite the efforts of the two leads, we never quite buy them as friends or as anything else. Erupcja has a couple of modest pleasures—the performance from Gora is pretty strong, the visual style serves as a love letter to Warsaw and Charli XCX once again demonstrates that she does have a presence that works in cinematic terms, even if the film doesn’t quite know what to do with it. For the most part, however, it is a film that must have seemed like fun during its conception phase but that spirit of adventure does not transfer to the finished product—it is a curiosity that just doesn’t seem to be particularly curious about anything in particular.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally had the chance to catch up with Boorman and the Devil, David Kitteridge’s fascinating documentary tracking the bizarre history of Exorcist II: The Heretic, John Boorman’s legendarily strange sequel to the enormously popular 1973 classic that was one of the most anticipated and eagerly hyped films of its time, right up til the moment when people discovered that the director, instead of offering a mere retread of the original, went in its own strange direction that was more of a visually astonishing meditation on the nature of good and evil amid locust attacks, tap-dance routines and an ending so strange that it wound up being changed while it was still playing in theaters in a desperate attempt to save it. Afterwards, I found myself ruminating over the fact that there was once indeed a time that major filmmakers like Boorman and Ken Russell were still allowed to take big and reasonably well-funded swings with genuinely strange and offbeat projects on the assumption that while they might not become blockbusters, they might well bring in some money from curious viewers looking for something off the beaten path. Alas, once the studios shifted to a all-blockbuster-all-the-time format (with the exception of Oscar season), that style of filmmaking, at least on a studio scale, quickly vanished and moviegoing as a whole became a little more boring as a result.

Oddly enough, that form of crazypants cinema seems to be attempting a bit of a comeback this year. A couple of months ago, we had The Bride, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s all-over-the-map feminist take on The Bride of Frankenstein that had more ideas than it really knew what to do with but had an energy and a willingness to push buttons that allowed it to stand out in blessed relief from the majority of current multiplex offerings. (Alas, it was rejected by both critics and audiences, a fact that I suspect future historians will look upon with incredulity.) Now comes Mother Mary, a film so strange and defiant of audience expectations that it makes The Bride seen practically staid by comparison. It was written and directed by David Lowery, a filmmaker whose oeuvre has covered the range from quiet dramas (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, A Ghost Story, The Old Man and the Gun) to historical epics (The Green Knight) to even a couple of Disney movies (Pete’s Dragon, Peter Pan & Wendy), and although one could certainly parse out some thematic similarities between this film and those previous works, this generally finds him striking out in audacious new directions with a film that spends roughly its first half as a brash, musically infused psycho-drama before making a shift in the second to something wild enough to leave some viewers (myself included) breathlessly excited over the sheer audacity on display and the other half muttering “WTF” and wondering if it is too late to get a refund.

The film—indeed, the entire world that it depicts—centers around Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway), a pop music icon whose highly theatrical presentation of her dance-pop epics and her wild wardrobe changes are at least somewhat suggestive of the likes of Lady Gaga. Years earlier, during her last concert tour, there was a highly publicized incident that took her out of commission for a while and left observers wondering whether it was an accident or something else. Now she is going to make her long-awaited comeback with a highly publicized concert at the Palladium in London that will serve as both a summation of her entire career and the debut of her new song, a tune called “Spooky Action” that she at one point suggests that “it might be the best song ever written in the history of songs.” The problem is that it is only a few days until the concert and Mary, who is already understandably emotionally fraught, has decided that the outfit designed for her is unacceptable. For her, the flamboyant outfits that she wears are as much of a statement of who she is as a person and as an artist as her music and the current outfit just doesn’t say anything, especially in regards to where she is at the moment. She realizes that there is only one person capable of designing the kind of stage outfit that she needs and that is Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), the person who created the outrageous outfits that first put both of them on the map.

This is easier said than done because while Mary and Sam were close friends long before fame arrived for them, a rift developed between the two of them and not only have they not spoken in 10 years, Sam claims that she has not listened to any of Mary’s music in that time. Nevertheless, Mary turns up (in the rain, naturally) to the remote country home where Sam does her work with the aid of an entourage almost as big as her own to plead her case and beg her former friend and colleague to help her out. At first, Sam claims to be too busy, especially for a dress that needs to be designed and created in only a couple of days, and takes the opportunity to make any number of snippy comments alluding to their once-unshakeable bond and how Mary brought it to an end. Eventually, Sam relents and takes Mary to the barn out back where she does her actual work to begin the design process. (She only relents to a certain extent—she refuses Mary’s repeated efforts to play a recording of “Spooky Action” for her, supposedly to avoid designing something that connects to the tune over Mary herself.) Alone together for the first time in a decade, they begin an extended conversation alluding to, but never outright explaining, their past partnership, the brutal manner in which it ended and the ways in which they have dealt with the fallout, Mary’s obvious discomfort with her reunion with Sam and the memories it stirs being juxtaposed with flashbacks to her confidently performing on stage to thousands of adoring fans.

With its observation of two former friends and artists reuniting after an extended separation and falling into an intense extended conversation about the paths they have gone on to during that interim as well as ideas about the nature of creativity and art, the first half of Mother Mary feels as times like a distaff take on My Dinner with Andre with fashion and pop music taking the place of theater and the spectral presence of the waiter replaced by the occasional appearances of Sam’s assistant (Hunter Schafer). Although this section of the film certainly flirts with pretentiousness—even the title of the new song is a reference to Einstein’s theory that long-separated particles can still have an effect on each other (get it?)—it still works for the most part. Lowery’s screenplay charts how these two confront each other after so many years and does a good job of exploring the resentments that took them apart and the feeling that they still clearly have for each other without being too obvious or overt about it. Visually, the film is quite striking with the starkness of Sam’s studio contrasting nicely with the packed arenas that are representative of Mary’s life. (There is an especially impressive transition when a door to the former is opened leading directly into the latter that is weirdly breathtaking.)

Lowery is also aided immeasurably by the performances from his two leads. Although Anne Hathaway may not quite be everyone’s initial image of a flamboyant art-pop diva on the edge of emotional collapse, she is pretty incredible here in demonstrating the endless tightrope walk that is now her life in ways that allow you to see and recognize both the vulnerable artist and the jaded star who could cut her longtime friend out of her life without a thought. Over the years, Hathaway has been the inexplicable focus of venom from some folks in the media and online and you get the sense that, having gone through all of that herself, she gets Mary in a way that most actresses, no matter how good, might not have managed. Her commitment to the role is undeniable—throughout the film, she has to come across like a walking open wound for two solid hours while at the same time convince viewers that she can sing and move like a genuine pop diva (with songs contributed by the likes of Jack Antonoff and, perhaps not surprisingly, the increasingly omnipresent Charli XCX) and manages to keep it up throughout in what is easily one of her best performances. Although her part is not nearly as showy, Coel is just as mesmerizing in her turn as Sam, making us feel every bit of every venomously-charged line that she sends Mary’s way while at the same time registering the genuine sense of pain that has gone into them as well. Although the film doesn’t quite know what to do with most of the secondary cast (which includes Atheena Frizzell, Jessica Brown Findlay and Kaia Gerber), it does bring in FKA twigs for a compelling few minutes in a role that I will leave for you to discover for yourselves.

It is right around the point where twigs makes her first appearance that the film makes its big shift from a reasonably straightforward, if stylishly staged, two-character drama to something very different in both form and tone—while I won’t give details, suffice it to say that it becomes weirder, darker and gorier as it begins to take on Mary’s own diminishing grasp on what is real and what isn’t. Although the idea of Lowery doing a film that ends up ultimately defying audience expectations is not that big of a shocker—as anyone who witnessed the medieval thrills of The Green Knight morphing into a metaphysical drama as it went on or the way that he hauntingly subverted all notions of what one might expect from a remake of a particularly shallow and unmemorable Seventies-era Disney product like Pete’s Dragon—the change-up that he provides here is his boldest by far and will clearly be the point when viewers either find themselves giddy with astonishment over what is to come or throwing up their hands in complete bafflement. While I cannot say that everything in the second half comes together in an entirely satisfactory manner, it does certainly give the material a jolt that both Hathaway and Coel are able to work with and inspires some truly striking imagery along the way.

Will Mother Mary prove to be just too much for moviegoers who, if the tepid response to The Bride is any indication, seem to prefer the smooth efficiency of something like Project Hail Mary—or even the sheer ghastliness of something like The Super Mario Galaxy Movie—to something that is more extraordinary than extra-ordinary? Probably, but even for its occasional dramatic hiccups and aching pretensions (including overt homages to such art-house favorites as Persona and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, this audacious attempt to transform the struggles involving friendship and artistic expression into a visually startling psychosexual fantasia with a beat that you can still dance to hits more often than it misses. As I said, the big shift in narrative and tone may make it a hard sell for some viewers but those who are able to work with it will be rewarded with a film that is unusual and fascinating in equal measure.

Although Kawamura Genki’s Exit 8 is indeed a film based upon a 2023 video game, let me hasten to assure you that it could not be more further removed from the hyperkinetic excesses of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and other movies of a similar ilk if it tried. Instead, it is a decidedly low-key existential horror film that begins with an extended unbroken shot following the commute of a young man (Ninomiya Kazunari), unnamed but dubbed the Lost Man for reasons that will soon become abundantly clear, as he journeys to his temp job, a trip that finds him studiously ignoring an irate businessman loudly berating a young mother over her crying infant and taking a call from his ex-girlfriend, who informs him that she is pregnant and unsure about what to do next. Departing from his train, he makes his way through the station but is suitably distracted enough that it takes him a few minutes to realize that he seems to be walking through the same lonely stretch of passage over and over again. Eventually he notices a sign on the wall that informs him that he is required to go through this particularly stretch of tunnel and notice any anomalies that in anything from the signs on the wall (including a poster for a M.C. Escher exhibition, ho-ho) to the behavior of another person, dubbed the Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who appears to be stuck in a similar loop. If he catches every single one, it will presumably lead to his escape but if he misses any, he goes back to the beginning. As the Lost Man continues to search for a way out of his predicament, he comes across a high school student (Hanase Kotone) who is convinced that she is in some form of Hell and a young boy (Nauru Asanuma) who just might provide the Lost Man with the key to his salvation.

As someone who is not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, I cannot say with any degree of certainty just how closely Exit 8, which Genki co-wrote with Kentaro Hirase, compares to its source material, though I suspect it probably comes closer to that goal than most other films inspired by video games have in the past. (I am certain that by the time you see this review, you can go online and find the similarities and differences explored with the kind of granular attention to detail once reserved for the Kennedy assassination.) Taken strictly on its own terms, it is a largely intriguing example of what the kids these days are referring to as “liminal horror”—a subgenre that uses spaces as empty malls or hallways that are so familiar that even the tiniest “off” element can prove unnerving—and while it is a form of storytelling that might not prove to be everyone’s cup of tea, Genki does a good job of mining its premise for some low-fi chills while putting us squarely into the shoes of the increasingly hapless Lost Man, scanning the walls right along with him in the hopes of picking up the latest differences. Perhaps inevitably, the film gets a little less interesting during the moments when it makes the occasional stabs towards traditional narrative, particularly in the way that the Lost Man’s relationship with the kid he comes across too overtly mirrors his own ambiguous response to the possibility of becoming a father, and it doesn’t quite stick the landing in the final moments. For the most part though, Exit 8 is certainly unusual and while I am not sure that “entertaining” is quite the word to describe it, it really is like nothing out there at the moment and those in the mood for something that prefers to be quietly creepy rather than constantly in your face with “BOO!” moments and excessive gore may find it to be a unique and mostly fascinating experience

.On the other hand, if you prefer something slightly more familiar than the likes of Exit 8, there is Hamlet, Aneil Karia’s adaptation of the William Shakespeare drama with which I will assume you have some degree of familiarity. That said, this is not a traditional rendering of the tale by any means as Michael Lesslie’s adaptation gives it a modern-day setting and makes large cuts to the original text, some of which will not be missed and some of which will no doubt raise eyebrows amongst fans of the Bard. Here, Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) is the son of a powerful and recently deceased real estate developer (whose holdings include a lavish property known as El Sinore) who is still grieving his father’s passing when he a.) learns that his Uncle Claudius (Art Malik) intends to marry his mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha) with unseemly haste and b.) encounters the ghost of his father (Avijit Dutt), who informs him that he was murdered by Claudius. This news sends him into a spiral of indecision that soon festers into madness that threatens to drag down anyone in his orbit, particularly Ophelia (Morfydd Clark), the former love of his life who cannot understand Hamlet’s new coldness and cruelty to her. If you know the story, you know where this is going and if you somehow don’t know, fe be it for me to ruin it for you.

Lord knows I have seen many screen adaptations of Hamlet, both traditional and modern-dress—among the latter are Michael Almereyda’s fascinating 2000 take (with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue amusingly set in the “Action” section of a Blockbuster) and, technically, the Bob & Doug McKenzie epic Strange Brew—and this particular is a particularly mixed affair. On the one hand, some of the elements on display here do work—Ahmed delivers an undeniably powerful take on the main role, some of the updates are inspired (particularly reconceptualizing the show presented by the Players denouncing Claudius as a murderer as a Bollywood-style dance and the startlingly visceral manner in which the murder of Polonius (Timothy Spall) is presented) and there is the intriguing (though not fully developed) suggestion that perhaps Claudius’s guilt of his brother’s murder is merely a manifestation of Hamlet’s own tortured psyche. On the other hand, there are a number of major cuts and eliminations—particularly the deletion of the key character of Horatio, whose function is given to Ophelia and her brother Laertes (Joe Alwyn), and Ophelia’s mad scene—that only serve to muddy matters that were once presented with crystal clarity. While the “To be. . .” soliloquy did make the cut, it is presented in such a bizarre manner—Hamlet screams the whole thing out while speeding through the night in his car while seen only in profile—that it takes one of the most sure-fire scenes in the history of drama and comes perilously close to making it a throwaway bit. Additionally, while the multi-cultural approach is a nice touch, presenting contemporary big business as a contemporary equivalent for the kingdoms, feuding families and power plays Shakespeare once wrote about is not a particularly fresh concept at this point and the film doesn’t bring any new observations to the table in this regard. Although not without its merits (in addition to Ahmed, Morfydd Clark is quite good in her truncated turn as Ophelia), this proves to be a version of Hamlet that has some ambitions, to be sure, but doesn’t quite know how to pull them off successfully enough to warrant a look.

For those of you who are either too young to remember or had either too much self-respect or overly restrictive parents, Faces of Death was a schlocky 1978 movie that that attempted to fuse together elements from two different horror sub-genres—the so-called “mondo” movies, the name taken after the notorious hit Mondo Cane, that purported to be documentaries of weird, bizarre and often disgusting practices from around the world supposedly filmed for our educational benefit, and “snuff” movies, those rumored films in which real people were supposedly actually killed while the cameras ground away. (Yes, I suppose that by including the infamous footage shot by Abraham Zapruder, it could be argued that Oliver Stone’s JFK is the most commercially successful snuff film ever made, though that is probably a discussion for another time.) Sort of a That’s Entertainment with a body count, the film purported to be a collection of film sequences curated by pathologist Dr. Francis B. Gross showing people and animals dying in various gruesome ways ranging from tragic accidents to executions tend way beyond. Although there was some footage interspersed here and there that was genuine archival material, many of the sequences—including the most notorious ones, such as a group of people in a weirdo restaurant beating a monkey to death at their table with hammers before feasting on its brains—were faked and quite badly at that.

Although the film was not particularly successful when it first appeared, it would gain considerable notoriety in the mid-80s when it found a new audiences thanks to the miracle of home video. Many people, not realizing the fake nature of the film, denounced it as an atrocity and a number of stores were forced to pull it from the shelves. However, that did not mean that the film disappeared from view entirely—if you looked hard enough, you could usually find a place that had a copy that it would lend out, even if it was under the counter and required a hefty cash deposit to prevent one from simply walking away with it. Over the years, it would continue to be a steady underground favorite as new waves of viewers—usually teenagers looking for a new thrill—would dare themselves to watch it and wonder whether it was actually real or not. (I recall it playing a midnight show in a Chicago neighborhood with a high gay population, resulting in a marquee that read “Philadelphia Faces of Death”) I know that I saw some of it at some point, most likely on video at some kind of party or gathering, and thought that a.) it was an obvious fake, b.) it was pretty goddamned stupid and c.) if all went well, it was nothing that I would ever have to think about again for the rest of my life.

Of course, back then, I had failed to grasp that literally any film, no matter how grotesque or crappy, would one day be looked upon as less an embarrassment or more like a valuable piece of intellectual property that could be profitably exploited down the line. Lo and behold, the once-notorious title will now be seen on marquees nationwide thanks to Faces of Death, a big-budget (okay, medium-budget) take in which director/co-writer Daniel Goldharber reworks the grisly basic concept of the original into a slickly produced effort featuring such reasonably familiar faces as Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery and, perhaps inevitably, pop star Charli XCX, gallons of gore and a meta-horror conceit at its center that is so self-aware that the original Faces of Death and its attendant notoriety ends up becoming a key part of the narrative. Although the initial conceit is somewhat intriguing, I suppose, the film doesn’t really do anything with it and though it clearly wants us to think that it has something important to say, it has no solid idea of what it is or how to go about saying it while transforming potentially provocative material into generic slasher slop.

Ferreira stars as Margot, who works for the YouTube-like video platform Kino as a content moderator, spending her days watching an endless stream of clips in order to flag any potentially disturbing content—anything involving sex and/or drugs is pretty much a non-no (even instructional videos explaining how to put on a condom or use Narcan get the hook) while ultra-violent imagery gets waved through with no problem. She has taken on this job as a form of penance for her participation in a stupid online challenge that resulted in the death of her sister and unwanted internet infamy for herself but is increasingly disillusioned at the possibility of that actually happening. Even when she comes across a couple of videos that look a little too real for comfort—especially considering that one of them appears to feature a filmmaker who has recently vanished—she is unable to convince her boss (Jermaine Fowler) to do anything that might jeopardize Kino’s algorithm or stock price.

Although forbidden to do so by company policy, Margot starts doing some more investigating and eventually comes to the realization that the videos that have disturbed her so much appear to be recreations of some of the more infamous scenes from the original Faces of Death, which her horror-buff roommate Ryan (Aaron Holiday) describes as being the first truly viral video. Although she cannot convince her boss or the police of her suspicions, we know she is correct because we have already met the person behind the all-too-real videos, a creep named Arthur (Dacre Montgomery) who uses his tech skills to track down people with a certain amount of Internet fame, zap them with an EpiPen full of fentanyl and drag them into his basement, where he stages his recreations. The two eventually cross paths with her trying to convince anyone that her admittedly wild story is true and him seeing her as the ultimate, if unwilling, participant in his demented game.

In theory, Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei are trying to use the basic concept of Faces of Death as a springboard to tackle any number of potentially interesting ideas, from questions about media literacy (which many seem to be in desperate need of a refresher course in, if some of the responses to The Drama are to be believed) to the responsibilities of not just those who produce grotesquely violent imagery as entertainment, but also those who both consume said imagery and then go about processing it in their various ways. Sadly, it isn’t long before the screenplay more or less abandons its headier meta-movie concepts to become an increasingly predictable and toothless slasher film—if you ever wondered what David Cronenberg’s thematically similar 1983 masterpiece Videodrome might have been without any of the heady, challenging and audience-indicting ideas at its core, this comes pretty close to that dubious accomplishment. The ending is particularly clumsy as Arthur goes about explaining his philosophy and rationale for bringing admittedly fake deaths to life in a way that is presumably supposed to be chilling but which comes across more like a rejected blood-soaked denouement originally intended for one of the lesser Scream sequels.

As the increasingly hapless heroine, Ferreira is likable and sympathetic enough but is increasingly hampered by a script that doesn’t really have much of an idea of what it wants to say about her or her efforts to try to atone for her past trauma, one that she is consistently (and increasingly implausibly) reminded of by everyone from co-workers to the people standing in front of her at the liquor store counter. As for Montgomery, there is initially a kernel of interest in his character—with his determination to recreate famously gory material in the most meticulous manner imaginable, he seems like a homicidal version of Gus Van Sant trying to recreate Psycho as an art project whose point was inscrutable to everyone but him—but as the film goes on, he just becomes an increasingly generic mad killer who is so over-the-top that viewers no longer have to feel uneasy about what he might represent. None of the additional victims on display make much of an impression and if the presence of Charli XCX has you piqued, you should know that she has maybe two minutes of screen time tops and her presence proves to be more of a distraction than anything else.

Goldhaber, whose previous films have included the more interesting Cam and How to Blow Up a Pipeline, handles the material with a certain degree of style and conjures up a couple of moderately engaging suspense sequences here and there. Those moments do work but when it strives to say and do more than that, it stumbles badly in its inability to properly formulate or convey the things that it clearly wants to say. Perhaps the ultimate message that the film has to offer is one regarding to its own existence and the ease in which something that was once considered to be transgressive beyond all acceptable boundaries of taste can be smoothed out and commodified for mass consumption and even that will hardly come as a shock to anyone who has seen the corporate-minded remakes of such once-startling works as The Last House on the Left, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. As a film, I would have to give this iteration of Faces of Death to its predecessor, mostly because it didn’t leave me with the urge to take a Silkwood-like shower afterwards. That said, I also suspect that I will mostly forget about everything in this film within a few weeks and while I will await that time with no small amount of relief, the fact that a film inspired by such infamous source material could be so completely forgettable seems harder to believe than any of the actions that it depicts.

Commodification of transgressiveness

Kristoffer Borgli is a Norwegian-born writer/director whose first two films, Sick of Myself (in which a struggling artist trumps her boyfriend’s new-found fame by gruesomely disfiguring herself in order to become a social-media sensation) and Dream Scenario (in which Nicolas Cage portrayed an average schnook who keeps popping up in the dream of strangers with increasingly bizarre and creepy results), have shown him to be an intriguing and offbeat filmmaker who is not at all hesitant to go there with chancy and potentially divisive material. Of course, his name is not that well known in these parts quite yet so for those not in the know, his latest, The Drama, might as well be the film that the trailers sort of suggest—a wacky romantic comedy starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as a young couple facing some surprising obstacles on their way to the altar. In the broadest strokes, that description hold but it is in the details—particularly in regards to the chief obstacle—that the film moves from its seemingly light and frothy premise to something much darker and corrosive, one that will no doubt deeply offend a large percentage of the audience (even the ones who are hip to Borgli’s work) and leave the rest debating both the film’s central premise and whether or not it ultimately has something to say or if it exists only for shock value.

As the film opens, we bear witness to the initial meet cute between the two Boston-based central characters, awkward British museum curator Charlie (Pattinson) and book editor Emma (Zendaya), one day in a coffee shop, where he sees her reading a book and is instantly besotted. He tries to talk her up by pretending to be a fan of the book she is currently reading (which will inevitably come back to haunt him) and grows frustrated at the way she seems to be ignoring him until she finally turns around and tells him that he has been talking into her deaf ear. Nevertheless, she still appears to be somewhat charmed, the two begin dating and when the story picks up a few years later, they are in the stressful final week before their upcoming wedding, struggling to learn the steps for their first dance as a married couple and putting together their speeches for the reception. The one moment of relaxation, at least at first, comes during a final pre-wedding tasting dinner with his best friend and best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and his wife, Rachel (Alana Haim), who is also serving as Emma’s matron of honor.

It is at this point that the story takes its big narrative swing as a few too many glasses of wine inspire the idea of each one of them revealing to the others the worst thing that they have ever done. The stories offered up by Mike and Charlie are fairly benign—the former panicked when a dog began attacking him and a soon-to-be-ex and the latter claims to have cyberbullied someone as a kid—but Rachel comes up with a real lulu of a tale: when she was younger, she went to some dilapidated shack deep in the woods with a mentally impaired boy, locked him in a closet and fled, not telling anyone about his whereabouts even after search parties were deployed, a story that comes across as even more horrible due to the way in which Rachel tries to downplay the act and her culpability in her recounting. Then it is Emma’s turn and she recounts an event from when she was a teenager and while I will not reveal the particulars (though it appears that a number of critics hoping to score clicks from curious people searching for spoilers have done just that), it goes without saying that while she didn’t actually act on what she had contemplated doing, just the fact that she even thought about it is enough to make Rachel’s confession seem like child’s play by comparison. Put it this way—Bobcat Goldthwait once wrote and directed a film called Sleeping Dogs Lie in which a bride-to-be saw her life turn upside down when she confessed to her fiancé that she once had sex with a dog and I suspect most people would consider that revelation benign compared to what Emma has to say.

Needless to say, the dinner comes to a roaring stop with Rachel being particularly outraged over Emma’s reveal, though it goes without saying that, unlike her, Emma didn’t actually do hers. The next morning, Emma is mortified by how badly her story has gone over, particularly when Rachel instantly ghosts her, and worries that this is going to forever change things between her and Charlie. He insists that nothing has changed about his feelings for her but it is clear that he has been shook by her admission and the possibility that he might be marrying a monster and his attempts to try to process this new information increasingly drive him to distraction, most disastrously when an attempt to use a sexy co-worker (Hailey Benton Gates) as a sounding board for his issues goes very wrong. Nevertheless, Charlie and Emma do make it to the altar—not exactly a spoiler since you see this in the aforementioned trailer—but all of their issues come out in spectacularly mortifying fashion during the reception, a sequence that makes the one seen in Melancholia seem practically laid-back by comparison.

Of course, it is slightly tricky to write a review for a film that doesn’t reveal a key narrative decision when it is that very element that will prove to be either the selling point or breaking point, depending on your opinion. Since I cannot possibly anticipate how everyone who chooses to see The Drama will react to its central conceit, all I can do is discuss how it worked on me and let you go from there. In that regard, I think it does work up to a point. Although I didn’t know the details going into the screening, I was familiar with Borgli’s previous work and figured that the secret hinted at in the trailer would be an eyebrow-raiser and it certainly does that. While the scene in which Emma tells all is startling, Borgli doesn’t merely deploy it for shock value, though those who dislike the film may feel otherwise. Instead, he uses it as a leaping-off point to explore the universal questions of whether we can really and truly know the person that we ostensibly love, whether that love can overcome a game-changing event and the difficulties that we have in coming to terms with something that we as a society have steadfastly refused to come to terms with as a whole, preferring instant self-righteousness over self-examination.

Much of this is quite funny and bizarre—particularly in the stuff involving Charlie’s co-worker—and builds to a climax that is appropriately bananas in its relentless deployment of the cringiest humor imaginable. However, the film has one major structural problem in the sense that once Emma makes her confession, she kind of ceases to exist as a character as the focus shifts almost entirely to Charlie and his emotional discombobulation. It just seems as if the story should delve a little more into Emma’s reaction to both her actions and the way Charlie begins obviously changing in his feelings towards her just days before they are to be married. For a while, the thinness of Borgli’s screenplay in regards to Emma is not that noticeable, partly because because the initial audaciousness has not yet worn of and partly because Zendaya is pretty spectacular throughout in the role, but once it is all over and you find yourself mulling all of it over—as you undoubtedly will—you may find yourself wishing that the film had gotten a little more into her head.

This relative lack of insight may prevent The Drama from coming across as the kind of modern-day Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf that Borgli is presumably aiming for here but that doesn’t meant that it isn’t worth seeing. As I said, there are a number of very funny scenes here, albeit those involving the darkest comedy imaginable and all of the main performance are pitch-perfect throughout—Pattinson, who has laudably used his Twilight fame to seek out oddball projects, is quite brilliant here in how he charts Charlie’s increasingly frazzled emotional journey while Haim proves once again that she could easily give up her day job in order to tackle acting full-time if she wanted. Whether you end up liking or loathing The Drama—and I cannot really see any middle ground—it is ultimately one that you won’t be forgetting anytime soon, even if it doesn’t quite pay off in certain respects. At a time when the multiplexes are crowded with empty-calorie junk like The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (which, in a perverse bit of booking happenstance, I happened to see literally just beforehand in one of the less-rewarding moviegoing experiences in recent memory), just the fact that it is willing to push, prod and provoke audiences instead of merely placating them is something worth celebrating.

While I didn’t review it at the time, I know that I saw The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the animated cinematic adaptation of the extraordinarily popular Nintendo game franchise that went on to gross over a billion dollars worldwide, coming in second only to Barbie as the world’s highest-grossing film of 2023–I even have it logged onto the list I always keep of all the new releases and theatrical presentations that I view every year. However, while I remember seeing it, I do not have any real memory of anything that happened during it and while part of this could admittedly be the result of my increasing dotage, I suspect the blank I am drawing was more likely due to the film being more than a noisy and overly frantic spectacle existing for no other reason than to separate family audiences from their money while providing them with what wasn’t actual entertainment so much as it was a crude simulacra of it. That is certainly the case with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, a witless endeavor that exists for one reason only—to hopefully bring in another billion or so into the coffers of Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment. I have no doubt that it will accomplish that goal, which is great if you happen to work in the accounting departments at Universal or Illumination but not so much if you are a parent who would prefer taking their kids to see a movie that was more than just an extended commercial designed to turn the minds of the young ones to mush so efficiently that the crazy mask maker from Halloween III might bow to it out of sheer admiration.

As the film opens, we see Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson) sitting down to read a bedtime story about the beloved adventures of brothers Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) to the Lumas, a horde of adorable star-like creatures for whom she serves as an adoptive mother when she is attacked and kidnapped by a giant robot piloted by Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie), the angry young son of Bowser (Jack Black), the blowhard monster who caused all the trouble in the first film and who now remains imprisoned in miniaturized form under the guard of the brothers back in the Mushroom Kingdom. When word of Rosalina’s kidnapping arrives at the Mushroom Kingdom, the fierce Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), who feels a strange and mystical connection with her, ventures out into space, along with aide Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), in order to rescue her. Before too long, Mario—who wants to ask Peach out on a date but is too darn shy to do so—and Luigi, accompanied by their new friend, an adorable dinosaur-like creature named Yoshi (Donald Glover), and Bowser, who swears that he has changed his ways, set off in pursuit, where they get involved in all sorts of wacky adventures that find them, among other things, being transformed into baby versions of themselves and encountering slick mercenary pilot Fox McCloud (Glenn Powell).

Considering the fact that I have not really followed any aspect of the Mario Brothers Universe outside of the original game, the previous animated film and, of course, the infamous live-action film from 1993 with Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo and Dennis Hopper all embarrassing themselves thoroughly, have, as stated, no conscious memory of The Super Mario Brothers Movie and am decades removed from the age of the targeted audience, it could be argued that I am perhaps not qualified to give The Super Mario Galaxy Movie a fully informed review. This is a fair point, I suppose, and I am sure that there will be plenty of reviews online from people who are intimately familiar with every aspect of the MBU. Even so, a film like this still needs to at least try to provide some kind of basic entertainment for those not fully versed in all things Nintendo as well as the hard-core fans and that is not the case here. The story hurtles from one incident to the next without ever giving viewers a chance to figure out what is going on. None of the characters are particularly interesting and, with the exception of Black, who invest Bowser with his usual bluster, the mostly impressive cast of actors deliver their lines with the kind of fierce commitment one normally associated with the likes of Krusty the Klown. The action sequences are noisy and flashy but nearly impossible to follow, the scenes in between those action beats are utterly nondescript (they feel as if they have been put in to encourage an additional trip to the snack bar) and it doesn’t so much end as it does just run out of energy in the manner of a kid finally crashing after eating a pound of Pixie Stix.

Will The Super Mario Galaxy Movie appeal to the children for whom it is clearly intended? Probably—it is bright and colorful and loud and silly enough to entertain, or at least distract, them for 90-odd minutes. That said, it does nothing more than that and the sheer laziness on display in regards to creativity is borderline embarrassing—unlike the best movies aimed for family audiences, it doesn’t offer them anything to hold on to once the end credits roll except for promotional crap for them to beg their parents to buy. Look, I confess that I did not quite get that K-Pop Demon Hunters thing but even so, I could still recognize that it was trying to do something a little different that viewers young and old sparked to and helped to make it a legitimate global phenomenon. This film, on the other hand, is little more than a feature-length visual babysitter and if that is all you want, then you may enjoy it more than I did. Personally, I wanted more and I like to think that if I had seen it back when I was a little kid, I still would have come away from it wanting more.

At first glance, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, the second feature from writer-director BenDavid Grabinski, looks like a familiar gangster romp. James Marsden stars as Mike, a minor-league hit man from a crime family led by kingpin Sosa (Keith David) who has decide to get out of the business for good and run off with his lover, Alice (Eiza Gonzalez). The problem is that she happens to be the estranged wife of his friend and literal partner in crime, Nick (Vince Vaughn), who then shows up at a party their boss, Sosa (Keith David) is throwing to celebrate the return of his dimwit son, Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro) from prison, asking Mike to come with him for a secret assignment. Mike goes along, fully expecting to be killed, but the truth turns out to be much crazier. It seems that not only has an angry Nick convinced Sosa that Mike was the rat and arranged to have him killed at the party, all of this, including the killing, has already occurred. However, an instantly remorseful Future Nick has managed to travel back in time in order to undo all of the damage he has done by convincing the present-day Nick to not go through with his plans and help get Mike and Alice to safety. This proves to be easier said than done as the four, over the course of one long night, struggle to sort out their own interpersonal relationships and avoid all of the heavily armed people who want Mike dead and are fine with killing anyone else in the way.

Although the premise for Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice may sound wildly convoluted and complex, it really isn’t and that, I fear, is one of the problems with it. It sounds funny, I admit, and there are a few amusing moments to be had as our heroes try figure out the rules of time travel on the fly. The problem, however, is that the time travel aspect proves to be little more than a gimmick brought in to liven up what is otherwise a standard-issue mob comedy, mostly by having Vince Vaughn appearing alongside himself in many scenes via the usual visual trickery. After a while, even the time travel gimmick is largely abandoned for the usual array of pop culture riffs (in one scene, the characters pontificate endlessly over who was Rory’s worst boyfriend on Gilmore Girls) before the big finale in which the entire thing turns into a John Woo homage with bullets, blood and body parts flying around with abandon. None of it is especially terrible, I suppose—Vaughn and Marsden make the most of the material, though the usually engaging Gonzalez is stuck with a largely nothing part, and there are a few laughs here and there—but there are long stretches where the whole thing practically drags to a halt and Grabinski never quite finds a handle for the tonal shifts from rude comedy to bloody action and even a few stabs at sentiment. Ultimately, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is more forgettable than anything else, a film that never quite manages to live up to the mad promise of its initial premise

Another super-violent action-comedy that fails to live up to its potentially intriguing premise is Vicky Jewson’s Pretty Lethal, a film that wants to come across like a strange riff on the John Wick universe but ultimately plays like what might have resulted if someone entered “Eli Roth’s Center Stage” into a slightly balky AI program. Off to Europe to participate in an important international competition, a group of five young ballerinas—working-class Bones (Maddie Ziegler), smug rich girl Princess (Lana Condor), ultra-religious Grace (Avantika), deaf Chloe (Millicent Simmonds) and her protective sister Zoe (Iris Apatow)—and their coach (Lydia Leonard)are stranded in a remote area of Hungary when their bus breaks down. They make their way to a hotel run by Devora Kasimer (Uma Thurman), herself a former top ballerina until her career was cut short by an injury, and teeming with sleazy criminal types. Inevitably, they witness one of said criminals (Julian Krenn) doing something especially heinous and it becomes clear that they will not be allowed to leave the place alive. The girls are not going to go down without a fight, however, and find themselves using the intricate ballet training—not to mention razor blades jammed into the toes of their slippers—to take down the swarms of bad guys looking to do them in while at the same time working out their own issues with each other.

Pretty Lethal has two things going for it—a game and appealing cast and an impressive extended sequence where the girls unleash their slaughterhouse sautés on a roomful of thugs, all of whom obligingly refuse to use their guns against them as they are being killed off—but the film strangely fails to take advantage of them. The screenplay from Katie Freund gives each of them a single unique personality trait early on but does nothing with them—Bones’s working-class roots are presented in any meaningful way and while it is interesting to make one of them deaf, the film goes out of its way to make that meaningless by separating that character from the action for a long stretch of time. The script also suffers from tone issues—it clearly wants to play as a blood-red black comedy but the blithe reaction that the girls have towards all the carnage that they either witness or cause is more off-putting than amusing. As for the aforementioned battle royale, it is quite impressive but instead of serving as the natural narrative climax, it goes on for another 15 minutes to allow Thurman and her accent to go out in a blaze of gory glory and by the time it finally ends, the genuinely giddy high you got from that fight scene has long since dissipated. Pretty Lethal is a film that might have made for an inspired short—a quick setup leading into the extended fight sequence—but comes across as formless and repetitive at a full feature length.

As meh as Pretty Lethal ultimately is, it does have a couple of elements that are worthy of note, which is more than I can say for the stridently irritating action/horror hybrid They Will Kill You, a gory, repetitive and derivative mess of a movie that essentially offers viewers a single mildly intriguing idea and proceeds to run it into the ground over the course of the next 90 minutes. Zasie Beetz stars as Asia Reeves, a young woman searching for Maria (Myha’la), the estranged younger sister that she abandoned 10 years earlier to their abusive father. Having tracked her down to The Virgil, a century-old NYC high-rise catering to the super rich where down-on-their-luck people go to find work on the housekeeping staff but are never seen again, she shows up one night pretending to be the latest applicant so that she can secretly try to find Maria. Fully expecting trouble, Asia has arrived with a number of weapons and her own considerable fighting skills in hand but quickly finds herself in over her head when everyone in the building from the tenants (including Tom Felton and Heather Graham) to the housekeeping staff led by Lilith (Patricia Arquette) are actually part of a Satanic cult intent on using her as their latest blood sacrifice. To make matters worse, or at least messier, one of the perks of their deal with the devil, as it were, is that they have been granted the power of immortality, meaning that no matter how much Asia chops, shoots, stabs, burns or smooshes her never-ending array of attackers, they are able to pull themselves back together again for another round, forcing her to simultaneously find Maria and figure out an escape from the building and a way of eliminating the residents once and for all.

At first blush, you might think that They Will Kill You is a bewilderingly timed film that arrives in theaters less than a week after the debut of Ready or Not 2: Here I Come and bearing largely the same plot involving a pair of estranged sisters forced together into gory battle against a group of super-rich jerks who happen to be Satanic worshippers preparing for an all-important ceremony with our heroine as the planned center of attention. It certainly is all that—so much so that the two films are practically interchangeable—but it seems that virtually every scene in the screenplay from co-writers Alex Litvak and Kirill Sokolov (the latter also serving as director) borrows elements and ideas from films ranging from The Seventh Victim to Rosemary’s Baby to the Evil Dead films to the Kill Bill saga and even Eyes Wide Shut, to name just a few. While the duo clearly have good taste in terms of influences, they don’t seem to have learned anything off value from those films because once the premise is established, it just becomes one scene after another of jerks being messily dispatched and then coming back to life as their severed limbs and organs put themselves back into working order for more. The first couple of times, this is sort of amusing, I guess, but it gets old very fast, unless you have a thing about watching Heather Graham dying horribly time and again. Beetz is an undeniably compelling screen presence but has nothing to work with here—the relationship between her character and the sister is so sketchily established that the scenes involving their uneasy reunion carries absolutely no weight—while the rest of the cast has little to do other than scream as gallons of fake blood squirt from their wounds. Things do begin to turn around in the final stretch a bit as things take an amusing turn for the weird but for the most part, They Will Kill You is little more than the kind of self-satisfied genre exercise that might play well enough for audiences looking for little more than a cinematic slaughterhouse that, unlike the majority of its characters, never manages to rise from the dead.

In recent years, there has been an explosion of documentaries revolving around the fashion industry with everyone from designers to models to makeup artists to magazine editors getting movies made about them. Considering the fact that fashion has always played a key part n her extraordinary filmography to date—from the clothes worn by her characters that subtly help to further underline their emotional states while still looking fabulous to using the iconography of photo shoots as a leaping-off point for her own visual approaches (such as the way she utilized the hazy look of 70s’s Playboy shoots in The Virgin Suicides)—it would seem that Sofia Coppola would be a natural to tackle such a project. Now she has done just that with her first documentary, Marc by Sofia, and while it makes for a pleasant enough watch—the cinematic equivalent of leafing through a copy of Vogue while sitting in a waiting room—it never goes much beyond that and the result is a curiously uninvolving work and the first film of hers that I cannot quite get behind.

The subject of the film is fashion designer Marc Jacobs and follows him during the 12 weeks leading up to Jacobs’s 2024 spring show and as it goes along, we see him as he gradually begins to figure out exactly what he wants to say with it. When he isn’t looking obsessively over fabric swatches to find exactly the exact one that he believes will best express those ideas, he sits down with Coppola to discuss his life and career, his process and his influences, from the creations of Yves Saint Laurent to the films of Bob Fosse and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. There is also a wealth of archival footage chronicling his career ranging from his early days as a whiz kid student at the Parsons School of Design in the 80s to his controversial tenure with Perry Ellis to his current status as one of the top designers in the industry. (We even get clips of a fabled 1994 guerrilla fashion show that Coppola helped stage in New York for X-Girl, a label co-owned by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon to establish her bona fides as a fashionista.) It all culminates with the show, in which the models strut around in exaggeratedly large outfits and wigs on a runaway dominated by an enormous folding table and chairs.

Coppola has always taken care in her narrative features to go beyond their oftentimes glossy and stylish outer trappings in order to get to the heart of what lies beneath in regards to both her characters and their surroundings, she never quite figures out a way of accomplishing that here. The thread involving the creation of the spring show is especially disappointing in the way that it has been presented. We never get any real sense of Jacobs’s process for devising the concept for his show, the evolution of the designs from the sketch pad to the final product or even what the ultimate success or failure of the show means to him at this point in his career. Even those whose knowledge of the inner workings of the fashion industry are rudimentary at best know that putting on a fashion show inevitably involves no small amount of tension and drama behind the scenes but despite Jacobs’s self-description as an obsessive personality, there is none of that here. What we see is so effortless and sweat-free (aided in part by the decision to pretty much skip over the first six of the twelve weeks, the period where the hard work of the initial development presumably took place) that the film at times comes dangerously close to feeling like a extended promotional film hyping Jacobs and his line produced in-house to ensure a smooth final product.

And to a certain extent, that is exactly what Marc by Sofia is. As is stated early in the film, Coppola and Jacobs have been friends for over 30 years and their careers have crossed paths on numerous occasions over that time—he has helped out with the clothes on a number of her films and she has served as a model/ambassador for his line and even wore one of his dresses when she won her Oscar for Lost in Translation—and so there is obviously a certain lack of objectivity as a result. This is not necessarily a problem in theory as there have been a number of documentaries where the friendship between the filmmaker and their subject has yielded fascinating results (Crumb perhaps being the ideal example) but that is not the case here. You definitely get a feel for the camaraderie between them but it results in a film that is way too relaxed for its own good. Although Jacobs is a genial enough subject, he is not particularly forthcoming for the most part and there are only a few times when he delves into anything that pierces the glib patter to touch something deeper. For her part, Coppola is not particularly probing or inquisitive as an interviewer and steadfastly refrains from pressing the conversation into areas that could possibly be uncomfortable. Even when the two are talking about things that they share a common interest in—such as the ways in which they each use cinematic imagery as inspiration for their respective fields of artistic expression—they never go into any real depth in the way that you hope a conversation between two celebrated and respected artists might. As a result, watching the film is like watching a couple of old friends looking over old scrapbooks and having a blast sharing memories in a kind of shorthand without ever quite letting the rest of us in on the fun.

On a surface level, Marc by Sofia is diverting enough—Jacobs is an engaging presence, Coppola has utilized the archival material to create some zippy montages, the soundtrack is one killer needle drop after another and the whole thing comes in at under 90 minutes. Compared to a number of the recent spate of fashion-related documentaries, it is even a little above average, if only because it doesn’t descend into full-on hagiography in the way that some of them have done. However, coming from the likes of Sofia Coppola, who I still firmly believe is one of the finest American filmmakers working today, it can’t help but come across as a bit of a disappointment. I have no doubt that she will continue to make fascinating films in the future and when all is said and done, this will be regarded as little more than an odd personal indulgence than anything else.

Picking up literally where its 2019 predecessor left off, the gory action-horror-dark comedy hybrid Ready or Not 2: Here I Come begins with the blood-slathered bride Grace (Samara Weaving) plopping down on the steps of a burning mansion containing the grisly remains of the wealthy family she very briefly married into, only to discover that they were Satan worshippers who forced her into a deadly game of hide-and-seek that was part of some long-ago demonic pact that they made. As it happens, they were one of a group of families that sold their souls for unimaginable power and their eradication has caused a vacancy for the top seat in their Satanic World Order. Naturally, this brings the heads of those families together for another game to decide who will rule and, just as naturally, the game has them attempting to hunt down and kill Grace and to further induce her to participate, they force her heretofore unknown estranged sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton) to play as well under penalty of death. Over the course of one long afternoon and evening, these wealthy weasels (whose ranks include the likes of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy and Nestor Carbonell) try to do away with the interlopers with a wide variety of weapons and while they manage to spill plenty of blood along the way, they largely prove to be no match for the sisters, even though they spend most of the downtime between attacks parsing the particulars of their mutual estrangement.

Like many of those who helped to make it a surprise hit, I liked the original Ready or Not quite a bit—it had a appealing fuck-the-rich attitude going for it, the gore scenes were fairly inventive and it was a clear demonstration of the star appeal of Weaving—but when it was over, there wasn’t anything to it that suggested the need for a continuation other than the amount of money it pulled in at the multiplex. That suspicion is quickly borne out here because while it is ostensibly bigger, what with the addition of the sister character, the multiple families and some new, if family faces, taking part (including Elijah Wood as an odd lawyer overseeing the new game and making sure that everyone obeys all of the rules to the letter and David Cronenberg in a brief cameo as the father of the characters played by Gellar and Hatosy), what returning directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are offering up here is literally the exact same thing as before, lacking the freshness, vitality and originality of the first one. Even though it has been nearly seven years since the first one came out, the film has the slapdash and hurried feel of a sequel to a surprise horror hit that was rushed into production to strike while the iron was hot (though a hot iron is one of the few implements not deployed here). Although it has the services of Weaving and Newton, two of the most charismatic of the current crop of scream queens, going for it, not even their contributions are enough to bring much energy to the increasingly tiresome proceedings. Ultimately, Ready or Not 2 is a film that clearly exists for only one reason—the first one made a lot of money—and its inability to ever once make the case for its existence suggests that maybe Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett sold their own souls in exchange for the success of Part One and that Satan has come to collect, unfortunately damning everyone in the audience in the process

.While Ready or Not 2: Here I Come may be a bad movie, it is not necessarily an incompetent one by any means—it was clearly put together by people who knew how to make a good movie, even if they didn’t in this particular case. I cannot say the same, however, for Vampires of the Velvet Lounge, a spectacularly gory and spectacularly stupid fusion of humor and horror that is so bad that not only do you get the sense that writer-director Adam Sherman is incapable of making a good film, you begin to suspect after a while that he may have never actually seen such a thing for himself. The film centers around the infamous Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the infamous character from centuries ago who was reputed to have bathed in the blood of human sacrifices in order to stay young and who was reportedly one of the inspirations for the character of Dracula. Here, she (Mena Suvari) is living in the American South and, along with her own personal coven (played by India Eisley, Sarah Dumont and Mark Boone Jr.), luring in their victims with the combine power of dating apps and the hallucinatory properties of absinthe. Her actions have not gone unnoticed, however, as a quasi-military task force is on their trail with super-soldier/vampire hunter Cora (Dichen Lachman), who has gone undercover as a prospective “date” but has to wait for an eclipse for her and her assistant (Rosa Salazar) to take the bloodsuckers down. Further complicating things is the arrival of a trio of aging douchebros (Stephen Dorff, Tyrese Gibson and Lochlyn Munro) who have been lured in for a weekend of supposed fun that quickly becomes more painful than anything in The Hangover and with fewer laughs to boot.

Under normal circumstances, I probably would not have even bothered with reviewing something as low-rent as this but, after having seen the trailer and assuming that it was a fake one made to promote some other item, only to discover that it was indeed a real film, I guess I was kind of curious to see what it might be. Alas, that curiosity extended to roughly the first three minutes with the remaining 102 proving to be a shockingly slipshod concoction of lame humor, scenes of gory excess somewhat undercut by the cut-rate CGI blood strewn throughout and clumsy performances in the service of a screenplay that feels like what you might have gotten from a 12-year-old gorehound who has just learned about the existence of such things as Bathory and absinthe and who knows that they want to see pretty women in their underwear but have no idea of where to go or what to do once they are down to their skivvies. The film has one mildly inspired idea in the notion of having the victims tripping on the absinthe and seeing the vampires as fang-bearing green fairies—sort of a more malevolent version of Moulin Rouge—but the rest is wasted on a story that never finds the right balance between the comedy and carnage and never makes sense for a moment, even on its own admittedly lowbrow terms. The whole thing feels as if it was slapped together as a way of killing some downtime between autograph sessions at a celebrity convention where all the B-level stars were appearing. Look, I know that it probably doesn’t pay to apply too much heavy analysis to a film like Vampires of the Velvet Lounge but even as a sleazy, silly B-movie extravaganza involving vampire babes luring unsuspecting dopes into their trap, it fails to deliver the goods—it wants to hit the giddy heights of the likes of From Dusk til Dawn but instead winds up paling in comparison to the likes of the not-exactly-immortal Bordello of Blood.

A man wakes up from a long sleep (judging by the luxurious array of facial hair he is sporting) to discover that he is on a spaceship hurtling through the cosmos, his two fellow crew members are dead and he has absolutely no memory of who they are or any of the circumstances that might help to explain his current predicament. Although this might sound like the setup for a potential fourth entry in the Hangover franchise, it is actually the setup for Project Hail Mary, an elaborate sic-fi adventure that is being positioned as the first big-screen blockbuster of the year. Featuring elaborate special effects, a genial crowd-pleasing tone and a winning central performance from Ryan Gosling as the man in question, it will almost certainly be a hit with audiences. I like it as well, for the most part, but not quite enough to overlook the structural issues and occasional tonal imbalances that keep it from being the instant genre classic that it is so clearly striving to be.

The man in question is Dr. Ryland Grace and while he stumbles his way through the spacecraft gathering his bearings while trying to figure out what is going on, we get flashbacks to explain who he is. It turns out that he is a former molecular biologist who was drummed out of his profession for advancing theories that his colleagues dismissed as nonsense and who now works as a grade schools science teacher. However, someone is clearly aware of his gifts because one day, some government agents spirit him away to an undisclosed location where a top-secret international science project is being overseen by official Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller). It seems that the sun, among other heat-emitting orbs in the galaxy, is losing heat at a rate that could lead to catastrophic effects for Earth within a few years if it isn’t stopped and the common link is a mysterious line of single-called organisms dubbed the Petrova line. However, one star, Tau Ceti, continues to thrive and so a plan is being hatched to launch a space mission to Tau Ceti, which is a few billions of miles away, in the hopes of figuring out why it is not being affected by Petrova and applying that knowledge to saving Earth, even though those selected to make that journey know going in that they will not be returning home.

The hitch is that while Ryland signed on to serve as an advisor for the project, dubbed Hail Mary, he was not supposed to actually be on the mission as he has had no astronaut training to speak of. Nevertheless, once he finally gets the enormity of his situation, he tries to live up to the task by trying to figure out how to operate the spaceship and how to go about accomplishing his task if he even manages to get to Tau Ceti in the first place. As it happens, he is not as alone as he thinks as a craft from another distant planet affected by Petrova has arrived on the scene as well and also contains a single surviving inhabitant, a faceless multi-legged entity that Ryland, upon making contact with it, dubs Rocky. After the two figure out a way to communicate with each other with a computer program that gives Rocky an extra level of adorability, the two team up to try to crack the mystery of Petrova in order to save their respect worlds and perhaps even work out a way of returning to them as well. As all of this is going on, we get additional flashbacks encapsulating both Ryland’s work on the project back home as well as the circumstances that led to his placement on the ship in the first place.

Although the concept of an ordinary man hurtling into the depths of space on a potentially suicidal mission with the fate of mankind in the balance, not to mention the extended runtime, may remind some viewers of Christopher Nolan’s super-serious Interstellar, once Project Hail Mary gets past its admittedly ghoulish opening, it settles for a largely lighter and more amiable tone that hews closer to the sci-fi/fantasy films churned out by Steven Spielberg and his like-minded colleagues during the 1980s, many of them under the aegis of Spielberg’s Amblin Productions. This is perhaps not that surprising as co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are largely associated with comedic enterprises such as the Lego and 21 Jump Street franchises. The film does indeed have a number of big laughs in it, particularly in the early going as Ryland struggles to work out his situation while dealing with limbs that are still in a state of atrophy due to the length of his sleep, and Gosling, who certainly knows how to get laughs, demonstrates a flair for physical comedy as well. If nothing else, the film is worth watching for Gosling’s turn alone, which is even more impressive when you consider that for long stretches, it is essentially a one-man show in which he is performing against elements that presumably would not be there until the FX people did their stuff.

And yet, as impressively as their efforts are, Project Hail Mary is not exactly a smooth ride. Lord and Miller have given us a smooth ride calibrated for maximum audience appeal, particularly in regards to the friendship that develops between Ryland and Rocky, it never really digs too much beyond its slick surfaces to give it much in the way of bite or personality in the way that Spielberg or Amblin vets like Robert Zemeckis and Joe Dante might have, preferring an attitude of vague glibness. We never really get a sense of who Rayland is as a person, outside of his outsider status back home and his gradually developing heroic nature up in space. Moreover, during the moments when the film occasional goes into a more serious mode—the Earth is being threatened with annihilation, you know—it never quite manages to handle the tonal shifts, making those scenes come across as a bit clumsy, especially later on as the film moves from tenuous stabs at hard science to more overtly cartoony moves.

Another problem is the string of flashbacks that are periodically dropped in to illustrate the events leading up to Ryland waking up in space. Although I have not read the novel by Andy Weir (whose previous book, The Martian, was also turned into a film), I assume that it has a similar structure and I can see how it might work on the page. In the film, however, Lord, Miller and screenwriter Drew Goddard have not quite figured out a way to make them work in cinematic terms. They don’t really seem to connect with what is going on during the present-day story and they don’t really feel as if they are things that Ryland is pulling out of his scrambled memory. The early ones help set up the story but after a while, they go on and on without adding much of anything to the narrative that we should have already be able to pick up via Gosling’s performance with some, particularly a long karaoke scene in which we get to see the imperious Stratt demonstrate a bit of humanity by busting out with a rendition of a Harry Styles tune, that only serve to pad the already-generous running time.

While Project Hail Mary never quite manages to hit the heights that some of the rapturous and hyperbolic early reviews have suggested, it is still a pretty good movie that is ultimately worth a look. That said, for all of its charms, its willingness to play it safe and friendly throughout instead of delving into darker and potentially more intriguing areas is a bit frustrating. As it happens, I saw this movie the day after watching The Bride and while that film, which was essentially written off as DOA by critics and the public before it had actually opened, was far from perfect, it was one that used its enormous budget to take some risks and if they didn’t all pay off, they resulted in something that will be sticking in my mind for a while. Project Hail Mary, on the other hand, is the kind of film that becomes the consensus pick among large gatherings of people because there is something in it for everyone to like to at least some extent and nothing that they will object to too strenuously. Although it may have been produced to take advantage of the comparatively vast expanse of the IMAX screen, it ultimately feels like the kind of film created in a lab for the specific purpose of playing in constant rotation in the cozy confines of basic cable for years to come.