Brian Duffield proves to be an excellent choice to adapt Daniel Kraus’s outstanding 2023 novel Whalefall. And while the film is slightly held back by some sloppy writing (highlighting the different skills needed in writing a screenplay vs. a novel), I found the emotional highs to be just as impactful in this film, with Duffield’s outstanding visuals more often than not supporting its emotional core.

Whalefall is about Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams—truly on a stellar run after Resident Evil), who is dealing with the grief of losing his father and, through a series of ill-advised events, finds himself swallowed alive by a sperm whale and needing to escape.

The setup is clunky and outrageous. And where the book managed to spend the right amount of time building up to the ultimately horrific dive resulting in this (nearly) impossible scenario, the film fails at achieving this delicate balance. However, if you can stay on board, Duffield will take you on an unforgettable ride that culminates in an outstanding third act that, while sometimes silly, is played with such heart by Abrams (with support from the ever-charismatic Josh Brolin) that you’d have to be heartless not to be moved by this physical manifestation of grief, loss, and empowerment.

It’s the relationship between Jay (Abrams) and his father (Brolin) that anchors the entire film—and these two are cast perfectly. Some of the family background is sorely missing, but the film smartly nails the dynamic between the two, which ultimately elevates it from schlocky body horror into an emotional bomb that is impossible to defuse.

I’d love to see Kraus hone some of his screenwriting skills, as there are a few impactful moments that are neutered by unnecessary dialogue (you need to show in a movie, not tell!), but so much of Whalefall works that I am hard-pressed to say these amateur errors fully detract from this excellent film. Fans of the book will find a lot to like here, and those who have not read it will be richly rewarded by doing so even after seeing the film.

La Bola Negra is a revelation—both epic in scope and emotionally devastating. Written and directed by the filmmaking duo Los Javis, La Bola Negra is a must-see film filled with stellar performances, unforgettable scenes, and a deeply moving, decade-spanning story about art, love, and shame.

The film starts with a bang—taking us first to 1937, where Sebastian (Guitarricadelafuente), a trumpeter in a small Spanish village, is caught in an Italian bombardment during the Spanish Civil War. In an instant, the film establishes these dire stakes, shaking me to my core and never letting off the gas despite interweaving additional stories from 1932 and 2017.

We follow Sebastian as his story intersects with Alberto (Carlos Gonzalez), Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), and Carlos (Milo Quifes) as they wrestle with family history, real-time persecution, and personal shame through three compelling time periods that ultimately come together in an unforgettable tableau.

Flanked by stellar performances from Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close, the maximalist filmmaking on display delicately avoids melodrama by authentically presenting the harrowing stakes for the entire cast. Guitarricadelafuente, Gonzalez, and Quifes are all given ample time to truly inhabit their characters, but I was most impressed by just how real even our tertiary characters feel.

La Bola Negra uses truly marvelous filmmaking to color every inch of these worlds, breathing life into everyone we meet and every location we visit. It’s frankly shocking that this film works because it is constantly throwing so much at you—these pieces should not fit together, but somehow they do. Los Javis are so successful at executing everything from horrific scenes of war to transcendent musical and dance numbers (I’d argue this film has two scenes that rival the musical interlude in Sinners).

The film is not perfect by any means. In particular, the modern story would better serve as a framing device than the full story it is intent on telling, but the sheer audacity and ambition of trying to make something of this scope is enough for me to forgive some of what does not work. And while the film could be improved by a tighter edit, I still found myself deeply moved by the culmination of these stories, the value in the sacrifices we make for future generations, and the complexities of living as our true selves in a world that is often dangerous and unsafe for many of us.

Tony Gilroy directs Behemoth! like an action movie—if only the film moved more like one. Starring Pedro Pascal as Alex Serian, a renowned cellist playboy searching for something deeper, the film asks Pascal to carry an emotional core that is largely nonexistent in this sprawling, nonlinear drama. Unfortunately, I don’t think he has the chops to manufacture what the script itself cannot provide.

Flanked by another one of Olivia Wilde’s über-memorable performances (seriously, can we nominate her three times for an Oscar? Behemoth!, The Invite, and I Want Your Sex have all floored me from the Wilde perspective), and a hilarious turn by Will Arnett as Alex’s equally troubled brother, the Pedro Pascal of it all really does not work for me. I’ll confess I am not a fan, but in a world where we can lose the world’s greatest living movie star (Tom Cruise) in the character of Digger Rockwell, I’d implore you all to ask for more from our leading actors.

Pascal is not totally at fault here, though. It’s the writing of Behemoth! that really fails him. Jumping years between scenes, there is no rhythm to these arguably strong tableaux that Gilroy can direct the hell out of but cannot imbue with the pathos required for a story like this one. And Gilroy does direct the heck out of this. The opening scene is thrilling, and there’s a stunning sequence that feels like we’ve been transported into a Bond film (even if the stakes are admittedly lower).

This great directing is accompanied by a truly stellar score. Composed by the Behemoth Collective (an absurd collection of all-timer composers including Alan Silvestri, James Newton Howard, Michael Giacchino, and others), the music is unfortunately attached to such an underwhelming film. And while this score feels like its own form of Oscar bait given the collaboration and pedigree, I am generally unopposed due to its incredibly high quality. The orchestra is deeply moving, and when the film takes time to inject the score directly into the story, I found glimpses of the emotion the film desperately wants you to feel—even if it can’t quite pull it off any other way.

Which is all to say: great direction, an incredible score, and strong supporting performances can only do so much for an underbaked script. This drama spans decades of family trauma and the ongoing indignities and challenges of simply living, but nothing lands with the impact it really deserves. The nonlinear structure seems designed to create mystery and emotional accumulation, but instead it keeps resetting the film before any of these relationships can truly take hold. I’d argue this is worth watching alone for Olivia Wilde’s 10 incredible minutes of screen time, but they’re surrounded by nearly two hours of a film that never quite earns the attention it continually demands.

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Everytime 4.5/5

Everytime might have had a more fitting title in Aftersun, but that is unfortunately already taken by Charlotte Wells’s Paul Mescal-starring masterpiece. Similar to Aftersun, Everytime is a film about grief, and I’ve struggled to write about it without returning to that comparison because these films feel like spiritual siblings, though there is no formal connection between them.

Everytime tells the story of Ella (Birgit Minichmayr), Lux (Tristán López), Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling), and Jessie (Carla Hüttermann), all delivering powerhouse performances, as they live through one of the worst experiences of their lives—the inexplicable death of someone dearly beloved.

I won’t spoil more than that—though this could hardly be considered much of a spoiler. The film, even in its less obvious moments, is overflowing with tragedy. And while it is incredibly challenging to watch, I found the slow shift from the literal to the surreal to be an utterly compelling representation of grief: the impossible process of learning to live alongside it and discovering what, if anything, can emerge on the other side.

Accompanied by a magnificent Minecraft-inspired score by David Schweighart, nearly everything about Everytime just works. This is most apparent in a truly haunting third-act turn (also reminiscent of Aftersun, though nonetheless effective) that recontextualizes the entire film right up until its final moments, leaving you wondering how the hell Wöllner managed to pull the whole thing off.

Certainly not for everyone, keep this film in mind if you need a good cry—or are far enough away from your own grief that you can find some comfort in seeing the experience represented in a way you likely never have before. I can’t help but recommend it. The best art moves us, and I found myself deeply moved by this unlikely group of people drawn together for the most horrific of reasons, only to discover some measure of comfort in one another anyway.

Jesse Eisenberg is on a roll. Across When You Finish Saving the World (criminally underseen) and A Real Pain (arguably overrated but well-liked), I am so pleased that The Debut is his best film yet, and easily one of the best of the year.

Julianne Moore is Mona Friedman, a shy, unfulfilled housewife close to the edge of her breaking point, who auditions for Nosy Neighbors, a New Jersey community theater production helmed by Jerry (Paul Giamatti). As Mona breaks out of her shell through the validation and persistent attention Jerry gives her as the director of Nosy Neighbors, Eisenberg takes us on a truly transformative trip that is deeply moving and absolutely hysterical.

Nearly everything in The Debut works. The cast is incredible. Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti seem to be shoo-ins for Oscar nominations and would be my front-runners to win—though I’d argue I was equally impressed by Halle Bailey’s supporting role as Stef, who, with limited screen time, nails the emotional core of the film in its final moments.

The script is nearly perfect—making this the funniest film of the year. The entire cast is given so much to work with that I am already itching to see what kind of outtakes might exist. These perfect performances, combined with such a strong script, resulted in my NYFF audience literally applauding Julianne Moore’s performance halfway through the film—something I have yet to see replicated at this year’s film festival.

Even Nosy Neighbors, the fake musical at the center of the film, is better than it has any right to be, simultaneously ridiculous enough to work as parody and sincere enough that you understand why these characters care so deeply about putting it on. In the third act, when the first performance is finally on display, I was tickled by how much of Nosy Neighbors had been held back for a wonderfully comedic payoff that kept me on the edge of my seat. As much as I am here to celebrate film, I am pleasantly surprised that so many of my favorites this year have been anchored by theater (whether literally or figuratively)—I’m thinking Digger, The Invite, and The Musical in particular.

There I go mentioning Digger again—but how can I not? The Debut is a fascinating companion piece because it picks up on one of its many threads, expands on it, and takes it to a hilarious conclusion. Both films are fascinated by performance itself: why people act, what they are looking for when they do it, and whether art can actually reveal something truthful about the person performing it. Without spoiling anything, The Debut is a celebration of art, but even more so a celebration of acting. What does it mean to be an actor? Why do we do it? What does it take to be good at it?

This earnestness is felt throughout the entire film, nowhere more than in the contrast between Moore and Giamatti’s performances (in maybe their greatest performances ever, though I find myself saying that after every new film I see them in). Mona is discovering what performance can unlock in her, while Jerry already understands the intoxicating power of being the person who gets to unlock it. This is a film that will make you deeply appreciate acting (all while pointing out how silly this whole thing is), without ever undermining the magic of it all.

This delicate balance does nearly go off the rails. The third act sees Mona’s character take a dark turn that feels slightly incongruous with the rest of the film—though I can’t help but forgive it for missing that one swing because everything else is so superb. And even if the script loses itself just a little bit, our characters never do—with Moore and Giamatti going above and beyond to sell this heightened version of reality.

The Debut is a great film, not only because it is astoundingly funny and deeply entertaining, but because it is such a celebration of the art form itself. It has renewed my appreciation for all the actors willing to throw themselves onstage so that we, as the audience, can also experience that private moment when a performance manages to move us in the same way the actor was moved the first time they read the script.

Tender Loving Care 4/5

Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care is a delight—filled with humor and humanity while maintaining a laser focus on a larger and powerful message. It does not quite reach the heights of Hard Truths (I’ll never forgive the Oscars for robbing Marianne Jean-Baptiste of an Oscar nomination, let alone a deserved win), but Leigh’s likely final film serves as a timely denouement to a storied career of small films punching far above their weight.

Tender Loving Care stars Kate O’Flynn (Amy) and Marion Bailey (Birdie) as lifelong friends who function more like sisters, reconnecting later in life while balancing their desire for companionship with the demands of their thankless social worker careers. This odd couple is flanked by a real couple, Amy’s parents, Geoff (Paul Jesson) and Rosie (Alice Bailey), who are perfectly lovely—though Amy still struggles with being honest with them.

Geoff and Rosie are getting older. It’s clear Geoff has had some health issues, while Rosie looks older but frequently moves like she is just one of the girls. The film follows Amy as she exits a toxic relationship, moves back in with the single Birdie, and falls right back into their sisterly dynamic. Leigh spends most of the film in quiet, personal moments with each character, highlighting the titular tender, loving care they provide to one another in life’s most challenging seasons. And the humor is spot-on—there’s one moment in the film that cuts away during a girls’ night out that had the entire theater in laughter.

It’s all a delight and feels like we are being invited into this world with our own family. We commiserate with Birdie and Amy after a hard day’s work, as they struggle with wondering if they are doing any good at all. We also watch Geoff and Birdie share new experiences together—the exact kind of seemingly insignificant moments that will inevitably become nostalgic stories retold to friends and loved ones years later.

Life can be boring, but Leigh never sees it this way. Or maybe, more accurately, he does not see ordinary life as unworthy of our attention. We have good days and bad, and his choice to highlight those moments that feel like nothing at the time but become core memories in the future is adept and shows just how masterful he is at choosing what to show and when to show it.

Beneath this family drama, though, lies a highly critical message about what happens when care—personal, social, or institutional—is no longer available to the people who need it, subtly set up throughout the film and paying off in a moment that is sure to take your breath away. Leigh, in just over an hour and a half, successfully shows the challenge and necessity of tender, loving care—while also highlighting the tragedy of its absence. This is a meditative, reflective, melancholic movie that feels right at home with Leigh’s filmography but is especially meaningful as his likely final film. After a career spent making small films about ordinary people that somehow manage to contain entire worlds, Tender Loving Care feels like an appropriately modest—and quietly devastating—way to bow out.

My favorite part of Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial was the introduction, during which I was the only person to clap in the 1,000-person Alice Tully Hall when After the Hunt was mentioned. All kidding aside, it’s nearly impossible to discuss Artificial without talking about Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, which serves as a scathing rebuke to this film.

What’s good? The score by Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn. It sounds and feels like a great new Gorillaz album, echoing the work Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did on their iconic The Social Networkscore while injecting it with a modern tinge of horror and synth. The Social Network comparison does not just end with the score, though—Artificial feels like this generation’s version. It’s a melodramatic takedown of the people behind the latest tech innovation, though the fact that it veers just a bit too close to its spiritual predecessor robs it of any true bite or powerful critique.

Wait—this is supposed to start positive. Luca Guadagnino directs the hell out of this thing. Excellent staging makes Artificial feel like a modern-day period piece and simultaneously a Shakespearean tragedy. San Francisco has never felt quite so cold, as if the city itself bends to the whims of these tech giants.

And the performances are stellar. Andrew Garfield (Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, Sam Altman here) perfectly encapsulates the sinister nature of our antagonist. He captures the mannerisms perfectly on the surface while plumbing the depths of his true depravity. The real standout is Yura Borisov (in an unrecognizable turn from his genre-defining performance in Anora) as our protagonist, Ilya Sutskever—the brains behind this leap in artificial intelligence that we cannot escape. He’s an unmitigated genius, but painfully stupid about all the things that really matter. Ilya is the core of the film, wrestling with making something that has the potential to be great but an even bigger potential to be horrific.

And it’s this attempted balance between the humor on the screen and the underlying tragedy of where this has gone (and will likely go) that neuters the film’s message completely. It is fun to laugh at Ike Barinholtz’s spot-on Elon Musk impression, but most of our cast (even the unrecognizable ones) veer too quickly into caricature—feeling closer to an SNL skit than a prestige drama. These are talented actors, but the script keeps asking them to deliver punchlines when it needs them to feel like people.

For a film that turns very dark very quickly, the danger it warns of is hampered by the script’s reliance on caricature—and its legacy as a less competent copy of The Social Network is fully cemented.

Artificial is anti-AI through and through (Amazon MGM Studios dropped it from its release slate before Neon picked it up), but it does not give its message enough teeth.  Fincher mines the emotional core of Mark Zuckerberg, deftly tying the lonely, broken nerd to the inevitable creation of our modern social media hellscape—but that film benefits greatly from Facebook being established and known. The race for AI is still on, and Artificial may prove to be more prescient as time goes on, but instead it already feels outdated and irrelevant.

The script is ultimately to blame here (reunite Justin Kuritzkes and Luca Guadagnino—please!). No combination of great performances, stellar scores, or talented cinematography can outrun a bad script. The humor does work—but only at the expense of its broader message. How can we sit here and laugh at these immensely powerful and amoral people when AI appears to spell the end of humanity? Guadagnino does his best to reinforce this point, particularly with some sparsely used but haunting shots of our sets without anyone in them.

In some respects, I’d argue the script is too faithful to real-world (and well-reported) events, though I’d challenge it even more by arguing that the balance between cinematic liberty and the stories we’ve all heard could have worked with a more consistent tone and a better grasp of what to include and what to leave out. Instead, the film feels like (and generally is) a faithful retelling of the rise of OpenAI and the dramatic ousting (then reinstatement) of its CEO, Sam Altman, but the emotional beats are robbed of their impact by a script frequently opting to tell instead of show—nowhere more egregiously than in the credits sequence that literally spells out where we are now rather than trusting the audience to understand that from the film we are watching.

Andrew Garfield, as Sam Altman, says, “So… THAT just happened”—an archaic line read that symbolizes how outdated and out of touch Artificial feels compared to the masterful The Social Network. If you are looking to better understand the world we are currently living in, I’d implore you to spend your money and time on Digger instead (which does more with its antagonist in less than 15 minutes of screen time than Artificial does with its two-hour runtime). Heck, I’d even recommend After the Hunt for a more scathing and adept critique.

Colleen Hoover is a bad author. I say that having read exactly one of her novels, so take my sweeping literary assessment with whatever grain of salt you deem appropriate. That novel was Verity, which I found sort of fun but ultimately demeaning in the way it pits women against one another and treats that cruelty as the engine of the story. I am a bit shocked to say that Michael Showalter’s Verity adaptation manages to elevate the best parts of Hoover’s work, even if he ultimately succumbs to the same misogynistic tendencies of the source material.

Verity, at the very least, is campy fun. Dakota Johnson (Lowen), Josh Hartnett (Jeremy), and Anne Hathaway (Verity) all bring an exuberance of melodrama to a generally trite thriller that falters under the softest of gazes; think about the plot for more than a few seconds and the whole thing starts to fall apart. Johnson is particularly wonderful in her role as the audience surrogate, tasked with uncovering the truth behind the Crawford family tragedy that resulted in Verity’s catatonic state and the death of Verity and Jeremy’s daughter.

Johnson engages in a superfluous amount of sweater acting (YouTube: John Early Sweater Acting to see what I mean), and her gorgeous, distant affect is perfect for the source material. To Showalter’s credit, he seems to be keenly aware of the film he is trying to make, constantly experimenting with humor that neatly makes fun of the world we are asked to inhabit. One of the most memorable line reads of the year is Dakota Johnson, overlooking an obviously frozen lake where the tragic death of Jeremy’s daughter took place, asking, “Is that a field?” with genuine sincerity.

Anne Hathaway similarly finds a ton of joy in this campy performance. Throwing on an unidentifiable accent is the right choice when she only seems to exist as a voiceover for the manuscript Lowen is reading (and a handful of flashback sequences). Hathaway does a hell of a lot with a hell of a little, and she proves time and time again that she can make even the corniest of moments feel full of bravado.

It’s just a shame that the film is so faithful to the source material. On its face, this is a pseudo-rom-com thriller, but dig a little deeper and it feels a hell of a lot more like toxic female wish fulfillment, where Lowen is presented as rightfully manipulating her way into the arms of a #GoodMan and vanquishes the evil witch who never appreciated him.

The third act remains as messy as the book, with too many twists that are simply unearned. Hoover fails at recontextualizing the story because she seems unwilling to make the audience even remotely uncomfortable. Showalter’s hands are tied, and I appreciate the ways he is able to improve the material presented to him (there is even horror scene that felt straight out of Bring Her Back), but that ultimately leaves you wanting the truly unhinged, no-holds-barred adaptation that exists only in subtle glimpses. Allow the audience to feel uncomfortable. Present Lowen or Jeremy as the true master manipulator, instead of ending on a largely inoffensive final scene. Verity, instead, only knows how to leave you frustrated with what could have been.

Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut, Club Kid, knows how to pull on your heartstrings, but only in the shallowest of ways.

Firstman plays our protagonist, Peter, a gay 20-something, then 30-something, who practically owns NYC club culture through drugs, sex, and low self-esteem. His world is flipped upside down when, 10 years after a threesome gone wrong (and hardly remembered), Arlo (Reggie Absolom) shows up on his couch. Arlo is his son from this ill-forgotten tryst, and Peter is the only parent he has left.

Club Kid is frequently funny (“fucking bitch” will forever be memorable), but beneath this comedic facade is the shallowest of coming-of-age stories. Peter has to get his life together now that his responsibilities extend to his own child, and the film continues on as predictably as you might expect. To Reggie Absolom’s credit, Arlo anchors the whole film. He’s boisterous but shy, balancing charm and edginess. He’s a lost kid finally feeling seen in the same way that Peter also finally feels understood.

But Absolom’s performance does not excuse the chore of a script Firstman has penned. The film fails to deliver anything deep or meaningful, instead presenting a straightforward narrative more akin to a Hallmark movie than a prestige drama (which it seems to think of itself as, given the overwrought filmmaking that proves Firstman can cleverly copy style but can’t develop it himself).

In one performatively poignant scene between Peter and Arlo, the script falters as Firstman feels the need to explicitly name the subtext. This is not clever commentary, but rather an insult to audiences everywhere. This egregious example is but one of many (don’t even get me started on the first date with the entirely superfluous Diego Calva).

Most surprising, frankly, is how downright offensive I found the film. More than tinged with conservative moralizing, the film doubles down on the sinister lifestyle that Peter has lived and must wholly reject to become a worthwhile human being. I’m not defending many of this character’s actions, but the film is unwilling to engage with the complexities evident in all of us and would rather tie a neat bow to give Peter an all-too-happy ending that feels more like a devious critique of the LGBTQ community than any sort of transformational, empathetic change.

This is driven home in some truly atrocious ways. All Black, queer, trans, and fat characters are cast aside so that Peter can achieve his new goal of fatherhood.

The movie will move you, but not because the movie is good—because it knows how to play on basic emotional beats anchored by truly one of the cutest kids you’ll ever see. Reduced to punchlines (and further into punching bags), this is a privileged white narrative through and through, and I am shocked by the positive critical reception.

One character, Nicky (Eldar Isgandarov), is the most egregiously targeted here. An unwanted roommate who inexplicably changes from a refugee clown to a literal straight ally, he is one of the few characters who appears to “grow” alongside Peter throughout the film. Firstman is a gay man who seems to be only capable of using his queer kin as caricatures and, you know what, I will talk about Diego Calva.

Maybe one of the most infuriating characters in the entire film. Calva plays Oscar, Arlo’s social worker, with whom Peter develops a romantic relationship, going so far as to effectively court one another in the most traditional sense. Firstman jammed a Hallmark movie in here with a character who serves almost no purpose.

He appears to be the antithesis of Peter’s former gay life but seems to be blatantly ignorant of the consequences ultimately facing Peter. This love interest is even more egregious when another character is literally set up to be Peter’s love interest, but I guess Devon (Nigil Whyte) is too fat and too Black to serve this script’s purpose.

This is a story of a man who finds redemption in rejecting his queer identity—in assimilating to heteronormative culture. At multiple points in the film, Peter is asked to thank those oppressing him (the judge, Arlo’s legal guardian), and he gladly follows along and thanks them for it. Club Kid is a downright shallow film, and the deeper you dig, the more grotesque it becomes.

I watch a lot of movies, and with that come certain expectations. There are directors, writers, stars, and stories that inevitably help set my own biased expectations. I don’t bother myself so much with this (though I do respect the unsullied movement of filmgoers who shield themselves from all marketing and trailers to ensure they have as untarnished a cinematic experience as possible). For me, I recognize and own my own biases. This means that sometimes a film I am desperately looking forward to results in disappointment largely disproportionate to the actual quality of the film. The first example that comes to mind is adoring Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers and We Are Who We Are, and then being deeply disappointed by Queer, a perfectly fine adaptation that just didn’t work for me. The fun of this little game, though, is that oftentimes a film hardly on my radar that I know very little about can erupt onto the scene and become one of my favorite films of the year (like Josephine at Sundance or La Gradiva at the NYFF).

But rarer than all of that is when a film I have an incredible bias toward manages to exceed my wildest expectations. And it is with that that I am delighted to share that Alejandro Iñárritu’s Digger is a genuine cinematic masterpiece. I do not say that lightly. You all know I am an enormous Tom Cruise fan (cut to celebrating my 30th birthday by renting out a theater to show the first Mission: Impossible movie). As a lover of film, I have the utmost respect and admiration for Tom Cruise. He may be our last great movie star, and I could not feel more vindicated in holding that belief with the release of Iñárritu’s magnum opus.

Before I get into spoilers, I’ll just say that this film is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It feels like the kind of film we may spend years wondering how anyone was ever allowed to make. Tom Cruise is transformative as Digger Rockwell. It is challenging and uncomfortable, bursting with ideas and showcasing some of the most clever and complex filmmaking you may ever see. And I say that in all seriousness. This film is a box office disaster. Impossible to market (for reasons obvious to anyone who has seen it). Made for an unconscionable amount of money. Released on the precipice of the Paramount/Warner Bros. merger. It is a miracle this film exists and, as the entire film industry sits on the glacier’s edge of great change, Digger reminds us of all we have to lose. As Udo Kier said (and where I found inspiration for the site): “Envelop yourself in the darkness of the movie hall and submit to the artist’s vision.”

This is your final warning.

Digger is not simply about Digger Rockwell, a billionaire oil tycoon who causes the destruction of the modern world. About 30 minutes into the film, Digger unveils the first of its many magic tricks—the film we are watching is actually a rehearsal for a play about Digger Rockwell called Fossil Fools. Cruise faces the greatest acting challenge of his career by needing to both find the character of Digger Rockwell in real time on the screen before us and embody the actor Curtis Markson. I’ll say it again: Cruise is transformative. Considering he is the most recognizable star on the planet, he has an even bigger hill to climb, as we need to see him as these two distinct characters. This is aided by some stellar makeup and prosthetics (this compliment can be extended to the entire film, which is wholly inventive in how it uses the camera and VistaVision to also capture the nuances and detail of a stage play), but it’s Cruise’s performance that sells the whole thing. He vacillates between the satirical bravado of Digger and the less boisterous Curtis Markson with ease, going full-on God mode during the most impressive monologue of the year when Digger addresses the UN (don’t worry—the other most impressive monologues of the year happen to be in this film too).

Cruise is flanked by a truly outstanding supporting cast. Most memorable is Riz Ahmed’s turn as Dr. Nirav Ganesh, Rockwell’s head of environmental safety and the (purposefully) ineffectual audience stand-in. Sandra Hüller’s limited screen time is maximized and recontextualized during the film’s second great monologue, this time provided by the scene-stealing Jesse Plemons, who is eventually revealed to be Digger Rockwell’s nephew, Kenny, financing the latest production of Fossil Fools. The fictional Digger Rockwell existed. Fossil Fools is dramatizing what he did. And the people financing and performing this version of the story are themselves connected to the history they are attempting to recreate. Sandra Hüller? She plays Kenny’s mother, and it becomes quite clear how all these puzzle pieces now so elegantly fit together.

And what a brilliant turn this is. It’s nearly impossible to come up with one thesis for the film, as Iñárritu has enough material to mine for dozens of them. This is maximalist film through and through, and subtlety is simply not needed given the stakes presented to us.

Digger is magnificent because it never gets lost in its maximalism—it is the only way this story can be done justice. This is not a simple satire from the likes of Adam McKay (boy, does this film seem to stick a dagger in the heart of films like Don’t Look Up), and nobody is spared. The politicians and the billionaires, of course, are rightfully skewered. What I think most audiences will find challenging is that the film does not stop there—it points the finger at you. At the role we all play in the complicity of the world we live in. It’s easy to direct our anger at others, but Iñárritu knows that isn’t the whole story, and he’s the only brave motherfucker willing to spend $180 million to so correctly point the finger at all of us.

This is a film about truth, so how could it possibly leave such an obvious factor on the table? Other films do it. We are consumers, after all, with money to spend and money for everyone else to make. As much as we might like to think of ourselves as isolated from these larger issues, they are not beyond our reach. And don’t worry, Iñárritu is not just condescendingly pointing the finger at all of us—he goes so far as to do it to himself, too. One thesis of the film can be best summed up by a scathing quote from Kurt Vonnegut, who said: “During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we’ve ever been in—and which we lost—every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

Nobody is spared in Digger—nor should they be. What works so well is that this critique is so deeply well-argued in the film. It is blistering and horrific. One scene has been stuck in my head since leaving the theater: Dr. Ganesh proclaims that perception is not reality—reality is reality. In a world that can best be described as post-truth, we have to ask ourselves why we are okay with this. It’s apparent why those in power are—controlling the narrative is what most of Digger’s proverbial leaders discuss, not how to actually fix the problems they wrought—and in Digger’s UN monologue, he nails the point home. He is the sin-eater. We can place our blame and our hatred and our shortcomings on those in power to free us from responsibility so we can go on and enjoy the many conveniences and privileges granted to us.

Digger asks the question, answers it, and forces you, the audience, to reckon with what that really means. What does it mean to be free? Walking away from the film, you will feel awakened to these questions we’ve been so willfully dodging. We are not truly, deeply, irrevocably free anymore. Not when so many of our choices are shaped by systems we know are destructive but continue to participate in because the alternative is inconvenient, expensive, or seemingly impossible. This moment is hammered home in the most jaw-dropping credit sequence I have ever seen. I found myself, surprisingly, moved to tears at the end. I have a hard time saying why. As all the threads came together and the puzzle finally became clear, I was profoundly overwhelmed. And as I sat there, with the curtains closing on the opening night of the 25th anniversary of Fossil Fools, Iñárritu had one last trick up his sleeve. We see the audience don these high-tech face masks as they are ushered out into a destroyed world.

This destroyed world is horrific. It’s clear this catastrophe happened decades ago. The world has ended—but what happens when the world ends and nobody rebuilds it any better? The survivors have not fixed anything. Society has been lost and is continuing to deteriorate. Then Iñárritu blares the “Level 4” warning for us—the audience in our plush recliners. And everything clicks. The audience watching Fossil Fools and the audience watching Digger suddenly become the same audience. How are we so comfortable sitting here, laughing and being entertained by these atrocities when the world around us is falling apart? America will bomb your country, and then we will sit back and enjoy a film about the plight of our soldiers. We can turn suffering into entertainment faster than we can reckon with our own role in creating it.

At the same time, Iñárritu delicately balances both the importance of art and the sheer ineffectiveness of it. Great art will not save us. It can bring us together, provide us with things to learn from, challenge us, and move us—but it will not save us. And this is where I think at least some of the savage critical reception to Digger comes from. Digger is preachy, and it has absolutely no interest in making that preaching comfortable. More importantly, it refuses to give the audience the easy satisfaction of agreeing that somebody else is the problem. There is no focus-testing this film into palatability.

Iñárritu’s fellow artists are just as much to blame for the sick state our world is in. Art can be co-opted. It can aid and abet as much as anyone or anything else. This is not an affirming film. It’s reckoning with the fact that it is screaming into the void—a point proven correct by its dismal opening weekend numbers. As Digger explains in the film, a triple is more impressive than a home run. A home run clears the fence. With a triple, you still have to hustle. You have to earn every base. By that definition, Iñárritu and Cruise have themselves one hell of a triple with Digger. The most inventive and excruciating film of the decade—and likely the last of its kind.

4.5/5

Marine Atlan’s debut feature, La Gradiva, is nothing short of a masterpiece. Following a group of French students on a school trip to Pompeii during their final year, Atlan uses Mount Vesuvius as a metaphor for the burgeoning adulthood of her ensemble cast: all that pressure slowly building beneath the surface, waiting for the inevitable eruption.

I’ll forgive the comparison for being so obvious because the film itself is anything but.

La Gradiva makes space for its enormous ensemble—almost entirely composed of non-actors in their first roles—to exist as real, complex, authentic people. At times, the film feels less like a drama than a documentary, an effect aided enormously by the astounding camerawork Atlan brings to the film while serving as her own director of photography (a role she’s honed in her prior work).

The tragedy of Pompeii may be an obvious metaphor, but Atlan slowly builds upon it until the film brilliantly re-contextualizes much of what came before. More importantly, it is the room she gives these characters to simply breathe that elevates La Gradiva beyond the typical coming-of-age story. It’s no surprise the film won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.

Our primary group is anchored by Toni (Colas Quignard), a lost soul searching for some sense of meaning while confronting generational trauma that increasingly feels impossible to overcome. His best mate, James (Mitia Capellier-Audat), exudes an almost indiscriminate erotic tension with everyone around him and couldn’t help but remind me of Nicholas Hoult’s Tony Stonem in the now decades-old (and still brilliant) British series Skins.

They are joined by Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), the quiet girl who can’t quite confront why she wants what she wants, seemingly biding her time until she can finally escape. This trip culminates in the student’s admission to college - the real next step into adulthood.

Then there is Madame Mercier (Antonia Buresi), their teacher and the only traditional actor among the principal cast. She serves both as a stand-in for an audience suddenly confronted with the complicated age-gap dynamics unfolding around her and as a woman reckoning with what it means to grow older in a world changing faster than she can entirely understand. She so desperately wants to help, but simply does not have the tools to make a real difference.

The rest of the cast is just as strong, and Atlan finds a way to give almost everyone a moment to shine. Even with limited screen time, she never shies away from the complexity that makes these characters feel so alive. The film moves through class, race, sexuality, love, money, generational trauma, and seemingly everything else that can make growing up feel impossibly overwhelming.

Maybe “feel” is doing too much work there. Growing up actually is that overwhelming.

Coupled with the film’s hyper-realistic dialogue, Atlan’s documentary-like approach creates the sensation that we aren’t watching characters so much as briefly being allowed into their lives. Beneath that naturalism, though, is an incredibly compelling story about how we find our place in the world, the tensions that arise as we discover it, and both the responsibility and consequences that come with truly seeing—or failing to see—one another.

I don’t want to spoil much, but La Gradiva is a tragedy through and through.

In one scene, Madame Mercier presents the class with a plaster cast of one of the many people who died during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The students spend time wondering what might have been going through this person’s mind: what they were thinking, what they understood, and what they felt as catastrophe unfolded and ultimately consumed them.

It is the same role Atlan asks us to play as an audience.

What does it actually take to see another person?

La Gradiva ends on a note of tragedy and regret, and by that point you can’t help but feel implicated in whatever failures its characters are guilty of. We have been watching them this entire time. We have seen the glances, heard the comments, noticed the tensions, and perhaps dismissed some of them as inconsequential because we did not yet understand where they were leading.

But the smallest words and actions can leave the largest marks on another person.

That is what makes the Pompeii metaphor ultimately work so well. The catastrophe itself may be enormous, but what remains afterward are the smallest traces of individual lives: a posture, an expression, a final moment frozen in time. Atlan’s gorgeous tableaux can similarly make it easy to become consumed by the beauty of the larger picture while losing sight of the individual people standing within it.

La Gradiva asks us to look closer.

By the time we finally do, it may already be too late.

La Gradiva plays in NYC and LA in December.

The Unknown

1.5/5

Arthur Harari’s The Unknown unfortunately has the distinct honor of being my first—and hopefully only—major disappointment of the 2026 New York Film Festival. Harari, co-writer of Anatomy of a Fall, commits the cardinal sin of squandering a remarkably compelling premise on a dull, lifeless film that somehow feels two hours longer than its already punishing 139-minute runtime.

On its surface, The Unknown is a body-swap pseudo-horror comedy featuring excellent performances from Léa Seydoux as Eva and Niels Schneider as David, two strangers who appear to swap bodies following a mysterious hookup at an art show/performance venue.

Clearly, something strange is happening. Whatever passes between them behaves almost like some horrific supernatural—or even alien—STD, but the film remains deliberately opaque, refusing to provide any concrete answers.

Which is fine!

Great art frequently invites interpretation. Ambiguity is not the problem. The Unknown fails because it is only capable of asking questions without ever digging into what makes those questions interesting in the first place.

For all the comparisons to David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, this is barely a horror film in any traditional sense. I found Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin a much more appropriate comparison. But where Under the Skin succeeds through absolute confidence in its tone and ideas, The Unknown seems content to borrow similar imagery and provocations without engaging with them in any remotely compelling way.

As Seydoux and Schneider embody different versions of Eva and David, their performances provide the movie with just enough momentum to maintain some semblance of your attention. Ultimately, though, their excellence only made me more frustrated. These are fascinating performances trapped inside a movie that simply does not deserve them.

Seydoux, in particular, is almost always worth watching, and I’d happily redirect anyone disappointed by this film toward the criminally underseen The Beast (La Bête), Bertrand Bonello’s decade-spanning masterpiece.

There are moments throughout The Unknown when it appears on the verge of doing something genuinely special, but those moments become almost as infuriating as the performances themselves. Every flicker of inspiration only serves as another reminder of how listless the larger endeavor remains.

The body-swap premise practically begs the film to interrogate identity, gender, sexuality, bodily autonomy, intimacy, and the unsettling experience of inhabiting a body that is simultaneously yours and not yours. The Unknown brushes against several of these ideas, but its pacing becomes a major obstacle to ever exploring them with any depth. Interesting concepts finally emerge far too late, only for the film to abandon them almost immediately.

The score suffers from a similar problem. There is the foundation of something genuinely evocative there, but the film refuses to build upon it. Again and again, The Unknown introduces something potentially fascinating and then simply leaves it sitting there—a pattern that perfectly encapsulates my frustration with the entire 139-minute runtime.

The film gestures toward gender, trauma, family, and political extremism, and I found there to be a potentially interesting far-right conservative reading buried within it—pay attention to the artwork in the background of the opening scene. But even that ultimately feels more provocative than purposeful. The imagery suggests an argument the film never seems willing to articulate, much less interrogate.

That unwillingness becomes the movie’s defining characteristic. The Unknown exudes a strange lack of confidence, as though Harari is afraid that committing too strongly to any one interpretation might diminish the film’s mystery. Instead, that hesitation slowly suffocates whatever tension the movie manages to generate.

Ambiguity can make a film feel enormous. Here, it makes The Unknown feel hollow.

Despite what might be the greatest needle drop of the year—two words: The Weeknd—The Unknown is a total bore. It somehow manages both to distrust its audience and, by the end, feel as though it actively resents us for wanting anything meaningful from it.

The Unknown releases by NEON in 2026 in the U.S.

Fans of How To with John Wilson will find plenty of what they love in The History of Concrete. For those unfamiliar with Wilson’s documentary work, I’d happily invite you to experience one of our most empathetic and talented documentarians with his first feature film.

And for those who might normally be uninterested in documentaries, this is not a traditional one.

John Wilson is, first and foremost, a storyteller, and his authentic (aka weird) personality gives him access to people, places, and ideas we rarely encounter—or would even think to explore in the first place. His particular genius lies in finding seemingly disparate questions to ask and then somehow uncovering the core of our shared humanity within them.

The History of Concrete, like so much of Wilson’s previous work, is uproariously funny. I saw the film at a sold-out screening during a nor’easter at the IFC Center in NYC—especially prescient given some of the flooding issues we learn about in the film itself—and you could have mistaken the screening for an outright comedy based on how much the entire theater was laughing.

Wilson’s humor shines through nearly every minute of The History of Concrete (and How To, for that matter), but what’s most impressive is how consistently he finds that humor without ever punching down.

Despite the truly eccentric people he meets—and I’m thinking back to the Avatar obsessives and vacuum collectors of How To—Wilson always maintains his curiosity and rarely judges. When that judgment does appear, it is almost always directed toward those in positions of power, and never unfairly. That’s perhaps most obvious in a split-second Tim Robinson cameo that I will not spoil any further.

And yes, you will learn a little bit about concrete—or “cement,” pronounced at one point in a way I had genuinely never heard before—but that is merely the jumping-off point. What you need to understand about John Wilson is just how unpredictable the path becomes once he asks that initial question.

Although, as a NYC resident, some of what we learn about concrete has me particularly concerned.

In The History of Concrete, Wilson travels from the oldest concrete building in Rome to the oldest concrete street in Ohio, but the film is ultimately about what it means to make something.

Why do we do what we do?

Along the way, we meet a cast of characters who can answer that question only for themselves. Somewhere between the Gum Busters and the 3,100 milers, Wilson manages to transform observations about concrete into existential questions about the monotony of daily life, the compulsion to create, the grind of making art in a world that increasingly cares more about money than the art itself, and, ultimately, what gives any of our lives meaning.

That might sound unbearably heavy, but Wilson somehow molds all of it into something immensely profound and moving without sacrificing the strangeness or humor that makes his work so singular.

I laughed. I cried.

The History of Concrete is John Wilson’s Hallmark movie, in a way that only his particular genius could create.

The History of Concrete is playing in theaters now.

Hope is an absurd movie.

It’s almost three hours long. At one point, I got up to use the restroom at the beginning of a poop joke. I didn’t dawdle, but I was still shocked to return and discover that the same joke was still going.

Points for my impeccable timing, I suppose, but I also think this perfectly encapsulates just how strange this movie is.

In many ways, Hope is the anti-blockbuster. Its humor is wildly hit-or-miss—the poop joke, meh; the unbelievable plot armor in Act Three, incredible—and its pacing can be genuinely grueling. The movie already feels like half of a larger story, and then it ends and REALLY feels like half of a story, delivering an all-timer of a cliffhanger that reminded me more than anything of Halo 2.

Maybe that comparison is more useful than it initially sounds, because Hope feels like a video game through and through.

The film appears to take place in a border town near North and South Korea, populated initially by what might as well be unnamed NPCs. Eventually, we assemble our party and begin moving through a series of missions: through the streets, into the forest, and eventually through what feel like a handful of cinematic quick-time events.

Much has already been said about the shoddy CGI, though I found that among the least of the film’s problems. The effects are mostly fine, and in a world increasingly filled to the brim with AI slop, it’s frankly refreshing to see flawed visual effects that still feel handmade, loved, and soulful.

The far bigger issue is the pacing. At its best, Hope approaches Mad Max: Fury Road, launching into relentless chase sequences with a sense of chaos and momentum. At its worst, it feels like a video game cutscene you desperately wish you could skip.

And yet, because the movie seems so determined to subvert expectations, I have a hard time holding it entirely accountable for flaws that occasionally seem intentional. Hope refuses to become the conventional crowd-pleaser it repeatedly appears to be setting itself up as. If the premise or trailer intrigues you at all, I think it’s worth seeing. Just don’t expect the movie to give you what you think it’s promising.

Because the world of Hope is fascinating.

There is a strange richness to nearly every interaction, and the film perfectly captures a world that looks and feels almost exactly like ours but is somehow just a little bit off. Everyone seems geared up and ready for war except, hilariously, our incompetent police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), who spends much of the first hour trying to figure out whatever the hell is terrorizing his town.

Then the movie kicks into another gear with my favorite character introduction of the year: Jung Ho-yeon’s Im Sung-ae, who is simply a badass compared to Ko’s slapdash luck and perpetual confusion.

Some of these characters you desperately want to spend more time with; others will grate on you almost immediately. More interestingly, the film doesn’t seem especially interested in character growth. These people are game pieces, and they behave according to who they already are.

It’s a strange choice, but one that increasingly feels intentional given the significant shift that occurs in the film’s final few minutes. I won’t spoil it. All I’ll say is that Hope has a lot of big ideas, and it smartly uses humor to encourage the audience to confront its central question: What happens when all you know how to do is shoot first?

The entire film becomes a critique of reaction—of people responding to things they do not understand with the only tools they know how to use—until it attempts a final magic trick that left my jaw on the floor in equal parts wonder and incredulity.

For that, I can forgive the pacing. I can even forgive the moments when the movie seems inclined to subvert expectations simply for the sake of subversion rather than because it serves the larger story.

And if Na Hong-jin actually manages to make another one of these, I have absolutely no doubt that I will be seated.

Is God Is 4.5/5

leshea Harris’s directorial debut is a revelation. Based on her own 2018 play, Is God Is tells the revenge story of twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallory Johnson), scarred by burns inflicted by their estranged father (Sterling K. Brown), who finally hunt him down at the behest of their dying mother (Vivica A. Fox).

Fox’s casting as Mother—referred to as God by Racine and Anaia—inevitably invites comparisons to Quentin Tarantino, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. For years and years, we’ve watched filmmakers learn all the wrong lessons from Tarantino, merely mimicking his style without ever understanding what made it so compelling in the first place.

While that inspiration is certainly present in Harris’s filmmaking, it feels informed rather than imitative, resulting in a debut that is both wholly original and supremely confident. That confidence is anchored by a tight script, fortunate enough to have been honed on the stage, and an incredible cast led by Young and Johnson, who will make you believe these sisters can communicate through the subtlest facial expressions alone.

The performances and compelling central story completely engross you in this world, and this is where Harris’s confidence becomes most apparent. There is never any challenge in suspending disbelief because the world feels internally coherent, the characters are endlessly interesting, and, despite the darkness of this revenge tale, the film perfectly balances its violence and tragedy with some of the funniest moments I’ve seen in a movie all year.

Every filmmaking choice feels in service of the story and its central themes, leaving us with an electrifying film that borders on miraculous. Is God Is is wildly entertaining, thrilling, and funny, but it is also deeply emotional and surprisingly complex, with a third act that genuinely took my breath away.

This film deserves an audience, and I’m ashamed I missed it while it was in theaters. You can help rectify that by watching it at home—and, hopefully, ensuring Aleshea Harris has a very bright cinematic future ahead of her.

Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is poised to overperform at the box office and deliver the biggest opening weekend yet for the long-reviled Resident Evil film franchise, itself based on the long-beloved video game series. That potential success isn’t particularly surprising to me: Cregger is coming off the horror phenomenon Weapons, Resident Evil is coming off a great mainline game with Requiem, and audiences generally seem eager to show up for horror right now.

All of that did mean I went in with slightly inflated expectations.

And, considering I read the script months before seeing the finished film, I am glad to report that Resident Evil slaps.

While it’s not quite as good as Weapons, this feels like a near-perfect adaptation. It tells its own story while perfectly capturing both the horror and the inherent silliness of the Resident Evil universe. Don’t let the source material scare you away, either. I found the film supremely satisfying both for people familiar with the games and those who know absolutely nothing about them. If anything, it leans slightly more toward general audiences—but I don’t think that’s a mistake. This is very likely the start of a new franchise and I am on board.

Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a medical courier experiencing what can only be described as the worst day of his entire life. We meet him just as he learns his girlfriend is unexpectedly pregnant, shortly before he’s tasked with making an urgent delivery—for double pay—through the ice and snow to Raccoon City General Hospital.

This goes about as terribly as you would expect.

For a film that spends roughly 90% of its runtime with one character, often alone, Abrams is perfectly cast. He’s funny and likable, but also realistically incompetent. You can’t help but root for him, and his performance is a master class in horror acting considering how much of the film rests entirely on his shoulders. After his work in Weapons, I’m thrilled to see Cregger feature him so prominently here—and even more excited to see what he does in Whalefall this October.

Despite having read the script, I still found myself on the edge of my seat and jumping at nearly every scare. This is a great horror movie, and I found it far more satisfying than films like Obsession or even Backrooms. Resident Evil knows exactly how much it relies on jump scares, and this adaptation executes them extremely well.

What surprised me most was how funny I found the movie, especially knowing that Cregger reportedly cut much of the humor after an early test screening. It is still very funny. Not every joke lands—there are a few genuinely cringe-inducing moments I would rather not mention that feel completely incongruous with the rest of the script—but several cameos inject much-needed levity into the increasingly nightmarish world. That balance can occasionally feel uneven, and some of those appearances disappear almost as quickly as they arrive, but the movie moves fast enough that it rarely becomes a major problem.

The third act will probably be polarizing, though the more I’ve sat with it, the less unexpected—or unearned—it feels.

Resident Evil is an incredibly fun movie and absolutely worth seeing for horror fans. The scares are generally excellent, the set pieces are memorable as hell, and Abrams is a joy to root for. If you do see it, pay close attention to the kinds of monsters Bryan encounters and the ways they might reflect the internal reckoning he is having over his impending parenthood.

There is more going on here than a simple monster gauntlet and is well worth seeing on the big screen.

The Dog Stars 2.5/5

Ridley Scott is a director known to virtually everyone. From science-fiction masterpieces like Alien and Blade Runner to historical epics like Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven, his name alone can still bring people to the theater.

He may have lost some of his luster—and Scott himself seemed about as unhappy with Gladiator II as many audiences were—but after more than 50 years in the industry, his latest film also feels like one of his most personal.

In a 2024 interview with The Hollywood Reporter about his career and the Gladiator sequel, I was moved when, at the end of the conversation, Scott was invited to add anything else. Instead of plugging another project, he simply said: “I miss my brother.”

That is what The Dog Stars is about.

In a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by a pandemic, we are introduced to Hig (Jacob Elordi) and Bangley (Josh Brolin), an unlikely pair making do in a world that has ended. We spend considerable time simply observing them and their tenuous relationship. Bangley seems to have found some degree of comfort in the apocalypse, like a doomsday prepper who happened to be alive at exactly the right time. Hig is simply going through the motions.

He has found some solace in his dog, Jasper, but remains haunted by everything he has lost.

Hig is a former mechanic with a penchant for flying, braving the gangs roaming Denver to gather supplies that he shares with Bangley and a small Mennonite community nearby. The film is filled with scenes of Hig flying somewhat aimlessly, seemingly oscillating between suicide and hope. A radio signal from Grand Junction suggests there might be life beyond his near-solitude in Erie, a possibility he finds almost as tempting as simply flying the plane straight into the Rocky Mountains.

When Jasper is abruptly killed during an unprovoked attack on their compound, Hig—barely hanging onto a reason to live—sets out without Bangley to investigate the mysterious radio transmission.

What follows is an uneasy encounter with Pops (Guy Pearce) and Cima (Margaret Qualley), who reluctantly take Hig in after he experiences trouble with his plane. Cima and Hig eventually begin a romantic relationship before they are forced to flee their tranquil mountain home when hostile survivors descend upon it.

They head toward Grand Junction, where the movie takes a sharp turn into the absurd—and finally injects some actual fun into this world—before eventually reuniting with Bangley. That reunion provides one of the film’s few genuine moments of levity, shortly before Bangley essentially single-handedly defeats an army of attackers in a sequence that reminds you just how talented Ridley Scott still is when the material allows him to flex those muscles.

Unfortunately, so much of The Dog Stars is frustratingly unfun.

Elordi and Qualley have almost no chemistry, and Elordi in particular feels frustratingly one-note. The pacing is a slog, the film is probably 30 minutes too long, and despite some gorgeous aerial photography, the whole thing feels unfocused and uneven.

And yet, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised by any of that.

I can understand why this material stuck with Scott, who is still grieving the loss of his filmmaking brother, Tony. Grief is all-consuming in virtually every form. You can’t escape it. You find things that make it slightly easier to carry while constantly questioning whether they are actually enough.

Seen through that lens, even Elordi’s one-note performance begins to feel more intentional. Hig is a man who has lost almost every source of happiness and no longer understands how to find it again. His journey feels almost as uneven as Scott’s filmmaking here.

He is talented. That much has never been in question.

But what is the use of talent in the face of that kind of loss? Death is inevitable, and moving forward can sometimes feel impossible.

Eventually, both Scott and Hig find some version of hope. Hig and Cima appear prepared to begin a new life in relative safety, finding solace and comfort in one another despite everything that has happened to them.

Scott never seems entirely convinced by that resolution, though. The ending feels less like something tangible in the present than a distant memory hovering just out of reach.

Maybe that isn’t enough. But what is the alternative?

Scott will keep making movies. It may never make his grief any more bearable, but perhaps it makes living alongside that grief slightly more tolerable.

Some films turn a lens on society, breaking it down and ultimately arriving at some sort of solution. Other films are more nihilistic. They peel back the layers of culture and find nothing redeeming underneath. Our Hero, Balthazar is the latter.

We follow two boys on opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum: Jaeden Martell as Balthazar “Balthy” and Asa Butterfield as Solomon. Balthazar is a wealthy NYC teenager being shepherded to his private school by a private driver.

The best descriptor for him is disaffected. He seems to yearn for human connection, with the root of his actions stemming from a crush on his classmate Eleanor, played by Pippa Knowles.

Solomon is a much more sympathetic character. He’s destitute in rural Texas. His mother has died from an apparent drug overdose. He lives with his grandmother (Becky Ann Baker), who is only ever seen with a box of Franzia within arm’s reach.

His dad, Beaver (Chris Bauer), sees him as nothing more than another sale for his ultra-masculine supplement pyramid scheme.

Balthazar is fascinated by school shootings, spurred on by an anachronistically hilarious drill put on by an organization called “Act On,” in which the school... performs a mock school shooting to better prepare for the possibility of a real one. This whole scene draws parallels to the millennial version of this kind of preventative programming—DARE—and seems destined for a similar fate of complete ineffectiveness.

Balthy spends his nights imitating emotion and posting cringe social media videos of himself crying about gun violence. It perfectly captures the inauthenticity inherent in our social media culture, summed up in one deplorable action. He begins DMing with an alleged school shooter and, through a series of slightly unbelievable actions—including catfishing and sexting using AI-generated audio of his mom’s voice—Balthazar shows up in Texas to meet Solomon and stop a possible school shooting.

What we find instead is mostly a sad, depressed young man in Solomon, who has the means to pull off a school shooting and has even thought about it, but doesn’t really appear to be motivated to go through with it. This is a lonely kid dealt a terrible hand. He has no one and struggles to make connections. It even feels like he only really entertains the idea of a school shooting to impress Balthazar, who has made it pretty clear that’s the reason he came.

The film proceeds as tragically as one might expect. And while it is defined as a “black comedy,” I was hard-pressed to find anything even darkly comedic. This directorial debut from Oscar Boyson is confident and accompanied by excellent performances, especially from Asa Butterfield, playing very differently from anything we’ve seen from him before.

The third act has lows followed by even lower lows, and the script, though a touch sloppy at times, ends on a profoundly haunting image of Balthazar, now past the events of the film, being propped up for bigger and better things in a world that seems keen to reward what it wants to see rather than what is actually there. This film feels plucked right out of Eddington, with Ari Aster and Oscar Boyson sharing a similarly hopeless vision of America.

Summer is almost over, but we are lucky enough to have one more blockbuster to cap it off. David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street is a pure treat. Vintage Amblin in all the right ways (here’s looking at you, Stranger Things...), The End of Oak Street feels like a rhoto-Jurassic Park.

The film takes its time setting things up, making the 100-minute runtime drag just a bit too much as a few of those setups don’t quite pay off (the bully, for one). But once it starts moving, this flick really starts moving.

Set in the 1980s in an idyllic Michigan suburb, the Platt family is the perfect representation of the setting they inhabit. We have Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise (Anne Hathaway) with their two children, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Ben (Christian Convery), whom we find in various stages of discontent. Ben is rebellious and getting into fights, seemingly as a result of his parents fighting, while Audrey is a girl with dreams of college that remain just out of reach.

Greg and Denise are keeping secrets from one another. Denise has been secretly writing a book that appears to be more of a fantasy about escaping this suburban fairy tale, while Greg is hiding the loss of his breadwinning status, picking up pizza delivery jobs in an effort to stem the bleeding from his job loss.

The film is an overt critique of this façade of nostalgia and the desire to go back to a simpler time. I wish this critique had a little more chomp, though—especially when it comes to the ending, which feels a bit too happy, even if there are some disturbing ramifications.

What the film really gets right is the dinosaurs. Great designs effectively convey the danger and scale of our various prehistoric beasts. The film’s logic does crumble a little bit when it needs to split up our family for the sake of drama, but I’ll forgive it considering how real the threats feel. The buildup works, and my jaw dropped in the third act (multiple times) for reasons I won’t spoil.

Well worth seeing on the big screen. The End of Oak Street feels like a breath of fresh air, even when it has less of an identity of its own and is more a very strong imitation of past auteurs.

Tony takes us to the 1970s, before Anthony Bourdain quite literally became Anthony Bourdain. Dominic Sessa portrays our titular Tony (in his first leading role since his wonderful discovery in The Holdovers) during one formative summer in which a cavalcade of lies—which he seems to tell based more on instinct than intention—results in him finding his passion for the seedy, dark underbelly of the culinary world.

A writer in name only, Tony finds himself among a group of chefs at the long-gone Flagship restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the majority of the film takes place. Most memorable are Stavros Halkias (funny as ever) and Leo Woodall (sexy as ever), who get very little to do in the grand scheme of things. This is a story about a singular figure, and the film suffers from keeping its focus a bit too narrow, reducing Tony’s peers to funny quips and convenient plot devices.

Antonio Banderas is the patriarch—the head chef and owner of the Flagship who, for unexplored reasons, has given up a prestigious career at Michelin-starred restaurants for a slower pace of life in Provincetown. We can surmise why one might make this choice, but I’d be lying if I didn’t wish the film seemed more interested in exploring it. What we get instead is an excellent biopic that smartly refuses to bite off more than it can chew, telling us just one small but pivotal story in Bourdain’s storied life.

And this story is exhilarating, in the way only something this absurd could possibly be real. Tony struts around like he’s a man when he’s still so obviously a boy (with nunchucks, no less), getting the shit beaten out of him more times than you can count, through every fault of his own. He’s a lost soul who thinks he’s found his calling but doesn’t realize how far away he still is from it.

Chasing a girl to Provincetown after failing to receive a writing fellowship—a fact he can hardly utter out loud, let alone admit to himself—he fails his way into a job as a dishwasher, sleeping on Chef’s hammock and waking every day to a bucket of seawater in the face.

This tough love is exactly what he needs. He doesn’t realize it yet—but these are his people, as much as he may end up fighting it. Tony is a fuck-up. He lies. He cheats. He can’t help but sneak around and withdraw, leaving a wake of destruction in his path. It doesn’t matter. This is his journey, and even his redemption is clouded by the pull of his narcissistic tendencies. As I suspect Bourdain himself would have liked, this is not a character who is easy to root for. Every moment that feels redemptive is paired with harm and another pull toward destruction. This is what makes the film so interesting while also making it equally frustrating.

Tony wants you to root for him, and this comes together especially sloppily in the third act. Tony gets the girl. He gets into the CIA. He finds himself over the course of one excruciating summer. And while the film does give us a glimpse of the man behind the idol, it hinders itself by biasing the story toward the idealized version instead of the authentic one. Like I said, it’s compelling. The backdrop of Provincetown, this little village at the tip of Cape Cod, is magical and transformative, and the film uses its locale exquisitely, filming at many hot spots that still exist today—none featured more prominently than the iconic Spiritus Pizza. But the film loses itself in this idealization, with far too many close-ups of Dominic Sessa’s capital-A Acting and a script that does not quite know how to dock the boat.

This is most apparent in an eye-roll of a final line in which Tony explicitly transforms into Anthony, completing his character arc without trusting the audience to wrestle with the complicated boy turned man. Matt Johnson is a great director (see the masterpiece that is Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie or BlackBerry), so I am only this harsh because Tony does not quite live up to his other work. For fans of Bourdain, I would call this a necessary watch. For everyone else, I’d argue your time is better spent with the hundreds of hours Bourdain himself left behind for all of us.

Despite some of my trepidation, I Want Your Sex is easily Araki’s best work since Mysterious Skin and his best original work since the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy. Araki is a nihilistic and funny filmmaker—and we certainly see all of that here. From Olivia Wilde’s eccentric turn as the girlboss, art queen, sexual predator Erika Tracy (an obvious stand-in for Araki himself) to Cooper Hoffman’s Gen Z beta-cuck sub Elliot, Araki uses his innate sexual sensibilities to interrogate power, generational divides, art versus artist, incels, and almost every other salient sociopolitical topic grabbing headlines today.

Araki captures just how absurd our world has become and somehow manages to both rip it apart and provide an empathetic lens through which to understand it. This is, in many ways, his most optimistic film, and I found myself thinking of both The Odyssey and Disclosure Day from earlier this summer.

All three films find filmmakers ultimately reckoning with the world they are a part of, what it is today, and the role they—or their generation—have played in getting us to where we are. Araki is doing the same here—but with a truly fresh and exciting viewpoint.

Every moment of this film feels like a master at work. I’m not sure what the budget was, but you can tell the film punches well above its weight. This is where the Araki impact is really felt—he knows how to use the environment to perfectly enhance the performances. A great bit is the frequent reveal of the bottom half of Erika Tracy’s outfits, which frankly appear downright tame compared to the words coming out of her mouth.

Hoffman’s Elliot, too, is a Gen Z-ified protagonist: working in the glamorous world of contemporary art while struggling to pay rent, dressed like a traditional blue-collar worker (in a not-so-subtle dig at the workwear trends we have seen take over the hipster-adjacent world), and drifting through life as a pseudo-incel.

Araki’s perspective and life allow him to interrogate and expose both his peers and the generation coming up now in ways that feel like a magic trick. We see artists who sometimes do manage to be the voice of a generation… or at least a voice of a generation (looking at you, Lena Dunham), but I so rarely see a filmmaker manage to delicately balance different generations and the distinct experiences informing their lives, then bring them together in an ultimately hopeful message.

Yes, it feels like generational conflict is as old as time. The older generation will always complain about the younger generation and vice versa. You had it so easy. I had to walk uphill in the snow both ways to school. You could buy a house and afford school by working summer jobs. You could just drop off your résumé at a company and get a job. It’s an endless list of grievances—and yet we all inhabit the same world at the same time. We are all flawed and still have to work together.

And yeah—we might cause some damage along the way. But maybe if we worried a little less about being righteous and being a victim, we might actually be able to learn from one another, grow, and move through this fucked-up world a little bit better.

For a film about contemporary art and sex, I found it to be a prescient thesis on these seemingly insurmountable walls we are so ready to erect between those we see as different or wrong. The politics of the film may feel either anti-woke or post-woke—it doesn’t really matter. In fact, the film seems wholly disinterested in adjudicating facts or truth. There is a false catharsis in being “right.” We seek truth and facts as the ultimate goal when that’s an impossible folly—one that neither makes us feel better (at least beyond temporarily) nor helps us actually live with one another successfully.

Yes, Erika Tracy is a monster. And Elliot is an aimless and passive “victim” navigating a harsh world. Neither of those truths matters, though. Tracy and Elliot both need to break down their own walls and learn from one another. This isn’t pretty (though it is certainly entertaining), but it is necessary.

Life’s hard. Bad shit happens. You’re dealt the hand you’re dealt—so do whatever you can with it instead of grasping so desperately just to maintain some façade of stability. I Want Your Sex expertly tackles all of this in 90 minutes, leaving my face actually hurting from smiling so much.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day sees the return of Tom Holland as our titular hero in the fourth mainline installment of the third modern live-action iteration of Spider-Man. This alone feels like a minor miracle. Raimi’s trilogy, which deserves significant credit (or blame) for the past few decades of Marvel movies, is widely considered the template for a great superhero film—specifically Spider-Man 2—but that universal acclaim was squandered on an overstuffed third entry that effectively ended the trilogy that started it all. Andrew Garfield and Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man series never even made it past two movies, thanks to an agreement to reboot the character and align the new Spider-Man with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Tom Holland’s Spider-Man has managed to mostly avoid the sins of his predecessors. The MCU elevated his profile, and his character was a huge boon to nearly every film he appeared in, even as audiences have slowly but surely soured on the whole ordeal. And this partnership, providing some distance between Marvel and Sony, appears to have benefited nobody more than Spider-Man. His solo outings have been enriched by bringing over the best parts of the MCU and ignoring the rest—and you can get away with that when you have such a rich universe of characters at your disposal. Despite the lackluster performance of superhero films over the last few years, Spider-Man has proven immune.

I expected Brand New Day to be a success, but not to become the biggest Spider-Man movie ever, easily surpassing No Way Home (which had the benefit of uniting all our previous Spider-Men thanks to some multiverse shenanigans). Audiences turned up for Avengers, but the proposition of committing to another decade of buildup does not seem as enticing as it once was. The novelty has worn off. I expected the same with Spider-Man, and I’m quite pleased to be wrong.

Serving as a soft reboot after the memory-wiping events of No Way Home, the film cruises through a few years as Peter Parker isolates himself, overworks himself, and attempts to dangerously control his evolving powers. The emotional stakes are clear and coherent. Being a superhero means making enormous sacrifices to protect those you love, and oftentimes those sacrifices are still too little, too late. It’s a theme we’ve seen time and time again, but Tom Holland does an excellent job expressing those feelings, showing frustration and regret even when faced with everything he has already lost.

Zendaya and Jacob Batalon reprise their roles as MJ and Ned, respectively. Both are excellent foils to Peter Parker, living their shared dream without consciously knowing they’re missing a key piece—though it’s clear they both feel the same absence Peter is vividly aware of. Special shout-out to Jon Bernthal as the Punisher, who serves as this iteration’s “father” figure and is equally, if not more, fun than Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark/Iron Man. Bernthal plays the role comedically while still oozing heart. The Punisher represents one path Peter Parker could take—and it’s a dark one.

Spoilers, but the film’s big bad turns out to be Omega-level mutant Jean Grey (Sadie Sink), in a pseudo-origin story that sees her honing her powers while hunting down the Department of Damage Control, led by the always mischievous Tramell Tillman, in search of her sister. Sink does an excellent job portraying the tragedy of the Grey sisters with limited screen time, and the introduction of this new version of the famed X-Men works well, never bogging the film down or making it feel overstuffed.

Most impressive is the portrayal of Jean’s telepathic powers, ingeniously rendered through real-time choreography in which she can “jump” a maximum of 33 feet, taking over unsuspecting victims as she goes. In a film still filled with CGI, I was thrilled to see this balance between practical effects—especially for characters and powers we’ve been watching on screen for more than 20 years—and the usual, though especially well-done, CGI of Spider-Man swinging through the city and the Hulk… smashing, per usual.

The film’s box-office success raises the bar for other superhero movies. With the right cast, the right script, and some smart ethos and pathos, these films can start feeling like complete stories instead of meaningless chapters building up to… what exactly? I predict Avengers: Doomsday won’t approach the success of this latest Spidey film because Kevin Feige has not quite figured out how to continue evolving this franchise in meaningful ways. And don’t get me started on the complete miss that Supergirl was as the sophomore DCU film under James Gunn.

This is all easier said than done, and the creative team behind Brand New Day lived up to the challenge.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is an epic in every sense of the word. Spanning almost three hours and taking place over decades, it is the first Nolan film that, to me, has felt constrained by the limits of cinema itself. Nolan himself seems to agree, given his decision to film the entirety of The Odyssey on IMAX—a feat that has never been accomplished before and required the development of a brand-new 65mm IMAX camera, appropriately named after David Keighley, IMAX’s late Chief Quality Officer.

The development of new technology to capture Nolan’s vision for one of the world’s oldest stories is triumphant. It reminds me of the dual role James Cameron has played in advancing CGI throughout his film career, particularly through the development of the Avatar film series.

These directors are visionaries through and through, and I don’t think it’s a shock that this approach has translated into enormous box-office success. In a world rapidly filling with AI slop, people yearn for authentic work that only a human can make. For a story that has been retold across generations, it’s fitting for Nolan to lend his vision to this definitive take on the character of Odysseus.

A WAR

The Odyssey, though, is not without its faults. It’s nearly impossible to follow a masterpiece like Oppenheimer—though, if anyone could do it, it’s certainly Nolan—and perhaps my expectations were as lofty as the cameras used to shoot the film. Still, I did not find Nolan completely successful in translating this epic text onto the big screen.

I should note: these critiques are minor. This film is a stunning achievement on both technical and storytelling levels. Nolan perfectly builds upon his penchant for nonlinear storytelling—pioneered in Memento, perfected in Tenet, and honed further in Oppenheimer—smartly utilizing the time Odysseus spends with Calypso as a vehicle for jumping among the story’s set pieces.

And while this nonlinear storytelling never detracts from the story itself, I did find the pacing just a bit rougher than Nolan’s usual crescendo into an all-timer of a third act—which we still get; it’s just a little bumpier getting there.

Nolan’s choices in this well-known story generally worked for me—from the Cyclops to the fall of Troy—but a number of sequences feel rushed. The moments themselves are compelling, but the audience has little time to sit with them or react before we jump to the next key moment in Odysseus’s journey. Both the battle with the Laestrygonians—which shows the ultimate hero of the Bronze Age being witlessly outclassed by the coming Iron Age—and the devastation of Scylla, one of many impossible choices Odysseus is tasked with making, unfold too quickly. We breeze through some scenes while still feeling their impact—the Sirens, for example, in a sequence that reinforces Nolan’s Christian reading of The Odyssey, with Odysseus undergoing this story’s version of Christ’s crucifixion—but these sequences feel too rushed. Nolan would have been better off either omitting or expanding them.

A MAN

Matt Damon’s Odysseus is the heart and soul of this film. The king of Ithaca, the mastermind behind the Trojan Horse, and the quintessential hero of the Bronze Age, he is also Nolan’s most unlikable protagonist—and Damon is perfect. Peeling back the layers of the myth, Damon captures the character’s humanity, including all the incongruities and faults therein, better than any other rendition of Odysseus. He has been depicted as both a hero and a villain, but Damon manages to delicately balance the two, finding someone all audiences can root for despite his obvious faults.

This epic only works, though, because of the stellar cast surrounding Damon. It’s nearly impossible to go through everyone, and while some performances are weaker than others—Charlize Theron, Travis Scott, and Jon Bernthal—none are bad. A few, however, stand out and deserve additional accolades.

Anne Hathaway is wondrous as Penelope. As Odysseus’s isolated wife, she has one specific monologue to Tom Holland’s Telemachus articulating the unacknowledged role she has played in her husband’s absence that is so profound and so moving. She somehow captures the entirety of the feeling that so many women who have stood beside—or behind—“great” men experience and rarely receive credit for.

Tom Holland, too, is excellent as Telemachus. Of course, we know Holland can play a puckish, if immature, boy in Peter Parker, but the film gives him one particularly standout moment in the third act. The parallel journey Telemachus has been on finally reaches its end, and he must silently compose himself because the journey now colliding with his own requires just a bit more of him.

Robert Pattinson eats up the screen as the sleazy Antinous. In a role that is already being memed across the internet—“Somebody get these beggars out of here”—it is both the fun Pattinson has as this delightfully evil character and the character’s pathetic nature that make him infinitely watchable. Seriously, at one point, he kicks an elderly dog and then places him on a pile of feces seconds later. Pattinson presents Antinous as a strategic man masquerading as confident, brilliantly capturing the underlying tension between his outward façade and internal doubt. He’s not someone to root for, but I’ll be damned if I did not love every second of his time on screen.

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Samantha Morton reportedly received applause on set while filming her scenes as Circe—and deservedly so. Perhaps the most compelling character Odysseus meets on his journey home, Morton injects an entire unseen story into the role, one never shown on screen but felt deeply through her character. She deserves a movie of her own and serves wonderfully as the linchpin of our understanding of Odysseus and his men, highlighting the sheer absurdity of their quest.

A THOUGHT

The larger theme echoing throughout the film is Zeus’s law, or xenia, which Nolan molds into the commonly understood Golden Rule—treat others as you would want to be treated—with a slight bend rooted in the Greek gods themselves: extend hospitality because the gods may take any form.

This thematic throughline anchors the film. From Odysseus’s men requesting accommodations along their journey to Penelope entertaining suitors in the halls of Ithaca, there is a clear moral core to this story. Its violation in the most profound of ways—the Trojan Horse—has tremendous consequences throughout the entire world.

Odysseus is a hero, but at what cost? The film wrestles with the idea over and over. Do the ends justify the means? Frankly, how could they after what we witness over a brisk 172 minutes? Odysseus is incapable of returning to his homeland until he reckons with what he has done—an act that took mere hours but that he comes to terms with over decades of tragedy and defeat. A hero known for plucking his bowstring to provide a fair fight for any prey he stalks, his actions at Troy violate xenia on both a micro and macro level.

A TRICK

When Odysseus and his men end up on the shores of Hell, confronted by the men they have lost, it all becomes clear. What has all this been for? How do we occupy ourselves with these superficial and frivolous conflicts, ultimately meaningless in the face of inevitable death?

At the steps of Hades, Tiresias—in an incredible turn by James Remar—reveals the divine doom awaiting Odysseus and his men. This journey is about Odysseus overcoming his faults and atoning for his sins, but none of his men are lucky enough to endure that torture and emerge from the other side.

This scene echoes the larger themes at play. We may be following one man’s journey, but the violation of xenia extends far beyond the literal act of the Trojan Horse—it has ingrained itself deep within the souls of Odysseus’s men and all those still alive in this waning Bronze Age.

This tragedy is not just about one man or one family—it’s a tragedy for the soul of an entire nation. Odysseus is to blame for the Trojan Horse, but there is far more blame to go around for the downfall of the greatest civilization that had existed to that point. We see this with Agamemnon, played by an unrecognizable Benny Safdie. As the general of the Trojan War, he is only technically the victor. He succumbs to his own tragic flaws—and to the consequences of an unimaginable sacrifice he made years before this story begins—meeting the same fate as the rest of Odysseus’s men.

A TRICK TO BREAK THE WALLS OF TROY

AND BURN IT SCREAMING TO THE GROUND

The third act alone is a masterpiece. After all the setup of the previous acts and the trials and tribulations we endure with our hero-turned-man, Nolan, his cast and crew, and the greatest composer in the world, Ludwig Göransson, go god mode on all of us.

Greece is doomed. By this point, that is clear—I’m looking at you, Athena, perfectly portrayed by Zendaya. But that doesn’t stop Nolan from executing an utterly compelling climax in which our tragic family is reunited and the villains waiting in Ithaca are given their deserved punishment.

You see, Odysseus and Oppenheimer are not so different. The Trojan Horse is treated as the atomic bomb, and the men who made it must reckon with the world that allowed such a thing to be created and the tragedy that follows. It’s this idea that Nolan grapples with once again, leaving us with an ambiguous ending for our characters that, in the moment, can feel optimistic, but underneath it all, we know that optimism has not yet been earned.

Men will continue to make the same mistakes, to the detriment of us all. Structures become nothing without respect for what they stand for. Myths and legends—stories—are at their best when they seek to enlighten, not just when they entertain. While The Odyssey does not quite reach the heights of Oppenheimer, it does cement Nolan as a generational storyteller. I just hope we can all heed his warning and find a new path forward.

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1/5

James Gunn represented the hope for a new DC Universe after Zack Snyder’s controversial edgelord take on its classic heroes. Lacking Snyder’s abrasive edge but overflowing with heart, 2024’s Superman was a great inaugural entry in this new DC world. Gunn, a veteran of the MCU—and one of the few to leave the franchise unscathed, thanks, surprisingly, to one of the industry’s fastest cancellation-to-uncancellation turnarounds—was tapped by WB to bring some of that Marvel magic to DC’s classic heroes.

What impressed me so much about Superman was Gunn’s restraint. He established a distinct vision for the character. You can feel the DNA of his Marvel hits like Guardians of the Galaxy, yet he took care to subvert expectations and grow as a filmmaker. Gunn knows how to use a needle drop—see: the opening scene of every GotG movie—which works once but feels less magical the next dozen times. He wisely avoids relying on that device throughout Superman, giving the excellent use of “Punkrocker” during the film’s denouement an even greater impact.

If Superman was an exercise in restraint from a filmmaker who was cancelled and uncancelled in record time, there is some irony in the possibility that the second film in the new DC Universe, Supergirl, could bomb hard enough to kill this iteration just as it gets started. And the killing blow? The total absence of that restraint in Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl.

In what appears to have been a troubled production, WB took over final cut, and the version we see was signed off on by Gunn—hence some of the blame landing with him. This film needed to be at least as good as Superman, if not better. It may instead be the worst DC film since WW84.

It reeks of someone trying to emulate Gunn’s style while learning all the wrong lessons. The film is overstuffed, with some of the worst music choices I have ever heard in a movie. Whereas “Punkrocker” at the end of Superman will have you shedding a tear (complimentary), Supergirl’s closing song will have you bursting out laughing (derogatory).

Milly Alcock is the one redeeming feature, playing a great Supergirl—it is just a shame she is stuck in such a bad movie. Her character is largely incomprehensible, with contradictory motivations that serve to prolong the plot rather than align with any cohesive characterization. Is she good or is she bad? Why are we even asking this question?

Jason Momoa is also fine but saddled with truly terrible material as Lobo. Lobo is completely inconsequential to the film. Half of his scenes are designed to look or sound cool (they do not), and the other half tell the audience how to feel (which is impossible). Krypto is sidelined throughout the film, and I am shocked to say that my favorite part is a glorified cameo from Seth Rogen as a space-bus driver. I, too, wish I had called in sick for this movie.

The action feels like a CGI-slop fest, with all the weight of a cheap video-game cutscene. Every set piece feels the same, populated by totally interchangeable cannon fodder. The stakes feel too low, admittedly a difficult problem in a superhero film but not one James Gunn has not already proven he can handle.

And that is the shame of all of this. Maybe Gillespie was the wrong director, but this failure goes all the way up to James Gunn as the head of the DCU. For a man who has constantly espoused quality over quantity, he certainly failed to achieve it with Supergirl.

Supergirl is not just a failure in its own right but an indictment of the entire DCU project, which, for a brief moment after Superman, appeared to have a bright future. Somewhere, Zack Snyder is probably having a grand old time. He knows better than most that these properties are not easy to lead and manage.

On to this fall’s Clayface, which I now have little faith in after the debacle of Supergirl.

Leviticus

2/5

In our modern horror renaissance—with recent standouts like Obsession, a true box-office phenomenon the likes of which we have not seen since Top Gun: Maverick, and Backrooms, with Kane Parsons making a smash hit at age 20 and forging a new path for the next generation of filmmakers—I am sad to say that Leviticus does not reach the exceptionally high bar set by so many horror films of the past few years.

It is a 90-minute film that feels both too long and not long enough. It drags yet still fails to explore anything deeper or more interesting. There are a number of compelling vignettes, but a hodgepodge of short films does not a feature film make.

It squanders a relatively interesting premise—you actually can pray the gay away, but the reality is more horrific than you could imagine—and fails to carve out an identity for itself. It wears its inspirations on its sleeve, from the teenage sex and STD allegory of It Follows to its LGBTQ spin on doppelgänger monsters. Yet it does not do enough to elevate these familiar themes beyond throwing some gay paint over them and calling it a day.

When the film tries to capture something new and unique, it mostly works. There is simply too little of it, and none of it is explored deeply enough to really affect you. The complicated nature of the hidden relationship between Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) is fraught with tension, especially as we learn that Naim is actually the reason Ryan is forced into a horrific religious ceremony that feels all too real. But that tension never pays off in any meaningful way.

There are some steamy moments between the two leads that capture the shame and guilt of desiring something you have been taught never to want, and this is easily where the movie shines brightest.

Ryan and Naim have great chemistry. They act their age, which means they are clearly still figuring everything out and are bound to make mistakes—mistakes with consequences far larger than usual, though frankly comparable to those of the not-so-distant past. Their love story works, and you will be rooting for them to overcome the evil thrust upon them.

There is one heartbreaking scene in which a friend betrays Ryan while Naim watches in horror, unable to help and wrestling with the fact that his own actions are not so different from hers.

All that said, this is a horror film that sometimes feels unsettling but rarely feels scary. Not every horror film needs jump scares, but it does need to capture some sense of dread or tension; Leviticus lacks both.

Special shout-out to Mia Wasikowska as Naim’s mother, Arlene, who gets too little screen time but seems to ooze a compelling backstory. Was this religious curse inflicted on her?

The film works just fine as an allegory for internalized homophobia and religious trauma, but it fails as a horror film - and is a pass for me.

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5/5

Olivia Wilde’s The Invite takes place on a single set, with four actors, in real time over the course of one evening. It is filmmaking boiled down to its simplest parts—and each of those parts is executed flawlessly.

Wilde, as star, director, and co-writer, is revelatory. Every choice feels like the correct one. From casting and set design to syntax and diction, you can tell Wilde took special care—and backed it up with enormous talent—in adapting this remake from its source film, itself based, unsurprisingly, on a stage play.

All four performances—Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen as the hosts, Penélope Cruz and Ed Norton as the guests—are nearly perfect, but I have never seen Wilde act like this before. There is one scene involving a soufflé that contains the best bit of physical comedy I have seen from any actor in years.

Rogen is great as a down-on-his-luck, self-defeating middle-aged father—but it is not exactly a huge stretch either. Ed Norton and Penélope Cruz, as the cool couple next door who have loud sex, are… obviously the cool couple next door who have loud sex. Once again, not a huge stretch for anyone with eyes. That does not discount their performances in any way; they all have moments to shine.

Rogen shines when he moves away from being goofy and instead embodies the righteous indignation that only a man who feels like a failure can. Cruz plays an open-minded, sex-positive therapist who reads the room instantly but always appears to be waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Norton constructs a persona, then hilariously undresses it at the most inopportune moment (…Hawk). These moments give the characters complexity and depth, along with the chance to show their acting chops. That is hugely important given the scale of the film. Cruz, in particular, is outstanding. She is so precise with her language—even though English is not her first—and feels plucked straight out of an Almodóvar film.

But it is Olivia Wilde who completely blew me away. She plays a woman who cannot help but be honest while seemingly always lying. Her face gives her away seconds before her words do. She layers each lie by degrees, keeping much of what she says close enough to the truth without ever quite reaching it. Her performance is a true standout, but the fact that she also directed the film with equal precision is nearly unheard of.

So many films nowadays feel like TV (derogatory), with uninventive blocking and scripts that assume their audiences are only half paying attention. Wilde is a breath of fresh air. Every scene is blocked impeccably, with the characters inhabiting each room in subtle and telling ways—from the mirrored composition of Wilde speaking with Norton to Rogen sulking in the kitchen as the guests arrive. Each scene gives you so much to chew on.

I am still thinking about the clothes they wear, including the shades of blue that echo the paint colors Rogen and Wilde are testing for the bedroom: hers matches the shade she selects, while his matches the room’s existing hue, showing how he is being lost inside an inherited home he never truly chose.

All of these small details add up to a monumental triumph. Every single moment is meaningful and worth unpacking. There is nothing extraneous in this brisk film. Stripped to its essential and astounding parts, it builds to an explosively quiet ending that refuses to provide any clear-cut answers but eloquently shows how a single night can sometimes feel like a lifetime.

As much as I may recommend seeing a grand spectacle like Avatar: Fire and Ash or Mission: Impossible on the silver screen, this film earns its place on the big screen just as much as any of those blockbusters.

Backrooms

4/5

While Obsession is the current horror phenomenon—and boy, is it one, grossing over $400 million on a budget of less than $1 million—there is a second horror success story in Backrooms.

Also made on a paltry budget of under $10 million, Backrooms comes from Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old director who cut his teeth making inventive YouTube videos in his bedroom using tools like Blender. This nontraditional path led A24 to take a chance on a true Zoomer IP with Backrooms, and while Parsons is not the only YouTuber-turned-filmmaker, he is certainly the youngest and, after seeing this film, the most talented.

Backrooms, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, takes place in the ’90s. Ejiofor plays a failed architect managing a failing furniture showroom and inexplicably seeing a therapist, played by Reinsve, following the dissolution of his marriage. It is in this department store, Captain Clark’s, that an innocent investigation into a mysterious electricity bill leads to the discovery of a door—portal? entrance?—into the titular Backrooms.

The Backrooms appear endless, capturing a distinctly liminal atmosphere through unsettling set dressing and even more unsettling architecture. There are staircases to nowhere, doors that are too small, piles of clothes hiding something sinister, and, eventually, creatures that resemble humans grotesquely morphed into something else. The real star of the movie is, as it should be, the Backrooms—and what a star it is.

From the very first jump scare, I was on edge for the entire film. In the Backrooms, you never know what is lurking around each corner, what you might see next, or where the pathway forward—or backward—might be. It is a diabolical, horrific maze that begs to be studied but will never be fully understood.

In case you cannot tell, I am a big fan of this film, though that is in spite of its flaws—of which there are a few. Ultimately, a weak script holds it back from becoming the masterpiece lurking just behind its façade. Backrooms is incredibly compelling, but its stunning visual language is hampered by thin characters and a technically impressive third act that seems unsure of its own ending.

This lack of focus does not derail the film, but it does feel out of sync (hehe, iykyk) with the incredible quality of the images on screen. To Parsons’s credit, he did not write the film and seems aware that his skills lie more behind the camera than on the page. If he can find a better collaborator for the inevitable sequel, there is a real opportunity for Backrooms to become the defining horror spectacle of the decade.

I think the most complimentary thing I can say is that I had never engaged with the years of Backrooms lore Parsons developed on YouTube—or with the broader mythology spread across forums and subreddits—yet I left the theater ready to immerse myself completely in this world.

This film feels like the dawn of a new era of horror, finally moving beyond the “elevated” horror of the past decade—I am looking at you, Ari Aster—and into something new and fresh. Sign me the hell up!