This essay was originally published in 2023, shortly before the release of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opening this week, it seemed like a good time to revisit it. Enjoy!

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There's this very bad romantic comedy from 2001 called America's Sweethearts about a movie star couple splitting up. And because it's a movie about movies, it has a lot of clips from fake films. And because it's trying to be a satire, those clips are dumb. And because it's a very broad satire, those clips are really dumb. Not, like, fake Bruce Willis/Julia Roberts movie from The Player dumb. Not parody trailers from Tropic Thunder dumb. Not even fictional Adam Sandler movies from Funny People dumb (Jesus, talk about putting a hat on a hat). Like. DUMB. To such a degree that there's just no reality to them - no one would ever make one of these movies.

Except someone kinda did, a year earlier, and that someone was revered Hong Kong action auteur John Woo, and that movie was Mission: Impossible 2. WOOF. This dog has fleas, dude. If someone deliberately set out to lampoon Mission: Impossible movies AND John Wood movies AND turn of the century action movies, they could not have done a better job (it's hard to believe that composer Hans Zimmer didn't realize his "hip" rock version of Lalo Schifrin's famous theme music would come off as comedically lame).

The biggest problem here is tonal inconsistency. The movie kinda posits itself as a jaunty romantic thriller (it literally name-checks To Catch a Thief) and a fun summer popcorn movie (the soundtrack prominently features both a terrible Limp Bizkit song and a terrible Metallica song). But a large portion of it depends on one lover asking the other to prostitute themselves, and the MacGuffin is a horrible bioweapon, the effects of which are graphically portrayed on screen. Those three things just don't go together. If there is a way to blend The Thomas Crown Affair with The Little Drummer Girl and Outbreak, Woo and his collaborators did not find it (the screenplay is once again credited to Robert Towne, this time working from a story by frequent Star Trek writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, the latter of whom also went on to oversee the reboot of Battlestar Galactica).

The movie also looks cheap. I know it wasn't cheap (it had a reported budget of $125 million, which, adjusted for inflation, is more like $225 million). But it LOOKS cheap. Woo and cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball (Jacob's Ladder, True Romance) had both made good-looking movies before, but to be perfectly candid, a lot of M:I2 looks like shit (even Woo's signature doves look fake). Everything is brightly-lit and lacking in contrast, so the images tend to look very flat - like this is one big television movie and not an actual theatrical release. And then you have these little moments - like some guys leaping out of the hatch of a plane into a green screen landscape, with no exterior plane shots of stuntmen doing the jump for real - that inadvertently scream "budget limitations."

Woo also has a natural tendency to direct actors to go really BIG and operatic (the exception being Anthony Hopkins, who shows up briefly as Ethan's boss, and seems to be fighting to stay awake). The director's best work is, if not exactly dark, then certainly moody. He was hired for this movie off the back of Face/Off, which opens with the murder of a child and features a hero so fueled by rage that he's alienated his wife and daughter; the protagonists of his most famous Hong Kong flicks, The Killer and Hard Boiled, are similarly angsty. But this level of histrionics against a backdrop of depthless, brightly-colored imagery only serves to worsen the feeling that you're watching a lousy soap opera. The best actors in the cast, like Thandie Newton, Brendan Gleeson, and Ving Rhames, push through, but most of the performers come off pretty badly. Dougray Scott, playing the heavy, is especially awful. How can you chew the scenery this much AND be this bland?

(Incidentally, this movie is accidentally responsible for Hugh Jackman becoming a huge star - Scott was supposed to play Wolverine in Bryan Singer's X-Men after this, but he got injured filming the motorcycle chase and had to drop out. A couple of years earlier, Scott also had his entire subplot cut from the movie Deep Impact, leaving him visible in only a handful of shots. He was also rumored to have been up for James Bond at one point. The poor dude's career may be cursed.)

Adding to that bargain-basement feeling is the fact that, in contrast to modern Mission movies, most of Tom Cruise's stunts are patently fake. Like, yeah, he has to jump hout of helicopters and tall buildings, but they're very clearly green screen shots; there's also a big motorcycle jump where the rider is very clearly Cruise's stunt double. Today, Cruise would do all that shit for real. The Christopher McQuarrie entries in the franchise retroactively make Mission: Impossible 2 look even worse than it already is.

That might matter less if the story wasn't all-caps STUPID, but it is. Granted, these aren't exactly Bergman films. But still. This is next-level. They do the whole Mission: Impossible "Surprise! It wasn't who you thought it was, it was another guy in a mask!" schtick no less than four times. They kidnap a pharmaceutical executive (Gleeson) and trick him into thinking he has the virus and is in a hospital and they trick him into believing this scientist (Rade Šerbedžija, fresh off working with Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut) who has been killed is still alive, and the two have this entire conversation, and then they trick the exec AGAIN, this time into believing it was all a dream, but he's never the least-bit suspicious. And the story really depends on making you believe that Ethan and a thief named Nylah (Newton) fall deeply in love after knowing each other for a few hours.

There's a number of reasons why that romance doesn't work, not least of which is that it's devoid the moral ambiguity that gives these kind of hero/anti-hero movie relationships frisson. Ethan needs Nylah to get back together with her psychotic ex (Scott) for the sake of the mission, but he doesn't manipulate or blackmail her into doing that, because that might make the character "unlikable" - so instead he talks her into it by saying "Let your conscience be your guide" (in other words, she needs to fuck this awful dude to save the world). And Nylah, in turn, replies, "I'm a thief, I don't have a conscience," but then immediately agrees to do what Ethan wants, thereby disproving her own assertion and robbing her of the opportunity to have an arc.

Furthermore, Ethan and Nylah have the two most amateurish dialogue exchanges in the movie. The first occurs when Ethan is trying to talk Nylah into weaponizing her body. "Would it make you feel better if I said I didn't want you to do it?" he asks her. After she replies in the affirmative, he screams, "THEN FEEL BETTER!" That's romance, folks!!

The second comes later in the movie, when Nylah injects herself with this horrible virus specifically so the bad guys won't get it, and this exchange happens:

ETHAN

What did you think you were doing?!?!

NYLAH

I wasn't thinking! Just trying to stop you from getting hurt, that's all!!

ETHAN

You, who don't have a conscience.

NYLAH

I guess I lied!

And if you think the delivery of "I guess I lied" is playful or flirty, think again. This moment is played for deadly seriousness, but it sounds like it was taken from an episode of Saved by the Bell. We already know Nylah has a conscience because she agreed to be part of this mission, but if we missed that little detail somehow, we now really know it because she has risked her own life by giving herself the virus. But the painfully literal-minded and condescending "I guess I lied!" is still there. I suppose the filmmakers thought they audience wouldn't understand that she lied if she didn't say as much? Maybe this movie was designed specifically for hospital patients suffering from horrible brain trauma?

(They really did do Newton dirty here. There's a scene early on where Nylah straddles Ethan while she cracks open a safe. Newton gets her close-up, but the reverse shot, of Ethan lying beneath her, is framed in such a way that her exposed cleavage takes up about a quarter of the screen. I appreciate Newton's talent and her physical attributes as much as anyone, but the shot is cringe-worthy.)

Woo didn't even do anything fun with the gunfights - usually his forte! He tries to inject the film with his favorite thematic element - that being the duality of Man - by naming the virus 'Chimera' and the antidote 'Bellerophon,' by having the villain be a former IMF agent who literally "doubled" for Ethan, and by having Šerbedžija repeat the line "Every search for a hero must begin with something which every hero requires - a villain" on three separate occasions. But that makes no sense (this isn't an origin story - isn't Ethan already a hero?), and the relationship between Ethan and his adversary is never fleshed out enough for it to work regardless. Unlike in Face/Off, these characters' hatred for one another isn't rooted in the deeply personal (the mostly seem to dislike one another the way a school bully dislikes the hall monitor), and they barely get any scenes together.

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The McQuarrie-directed installments of the series have included a number of callbacks to the pre-McQuarrie movies. But no one ever mentions the events or characters in Mission: Impossible 2, and save for Cruise and Rhames, no members of the cast were ever brought back for subsequent adventures. There's a reason for that.

This essay was originally published in 2023, shortly before the release of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opening this week, it seemed like a good time to revisit it. Enjoy!

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One will be the third straight entry in the series to be directed and co-written by Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie is slated to directed Dead Reckoning Part Two as well, natch. And The Usual Suspects scribe has done a bang-up job thus far, so I don't begrudge star/producer Tom Cruise for repeatedly bringing him back (in fact, McQuarrie has become Cruise's go-to guy in the recent past - eight the actor's last ten projects were all co-written and/or directed by 'McQ.').

Having said that...

Once upon a time, each Mission: Impossible movie was directed by a completely different person from the others. And not just, like, some journeyman filmmaker in need of a paycheck - whatever else you wanna say about these directors, they're all auteurs. And they all seem to have been given a fairly reasonable amount of creative freedom, leaving their fingerprints all over their respective film. The only other major mega-budget franchise I can think of that did something similar for awhile is the Alien movies. It made each new movie in the series feel singular and exciting, and it gave you some stuff to chew on even if the finished product ended up being lackluster.

The first Mission: Impossible movie was helmed by the legendary Brian De Palma from a screenplay credited to David Koepp (who also wrote Carlito's Way and Snake Eyes for De Palma) and Robert Towne (Chinatown!!!) from a story by Koepp and Steve Zaillian (Schindler's List?!?!). And while it may have been a paycheck gig more than anything for the filmmaker, it is still VERY much a Brian De Palma movie. To such a degree, in fact, that I think it barely qualifies as an action film - until the grand finale, there's nary a punch thrown, guns are present routinely but fired rarely, the explosions are all of a reasonable size, and Cruise performs no Jackie Chan-level stunts. I have to imagine if they handed this movie into the studio today, all the executives would collectively shit their pants and hire a different director to do reshoots.

Case in point: The movie's big opening pre-credits set piece all takes place in a room and features neither combat nor moving vehicles nor perilous heights. In fact, because this is, I said, very much a Brian De Palma film, most of it is actually a guy sitting at a desk watching events unfold on a black-and-white security monitor (the first shot of the movie is literally the monitor and the back of the guy's head). And the suspense in the sequence derives from the imperilment of a beautiful young woman, Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), of whom our hero, Ethan Hunt (Mr. Cruise), feels highly protective. These are, of course, all hallmarks of many of De Palma's best movies (Sisters, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double, etc.), and even a lot of his not-best movies (Snake Eyes, Femme Fatale, Passion, etc).

And that's just the first three minutes of the movie! By the time we're done we'll have plenty of other De Palma touchstones, both aesthetically (split diopters, extended P.O.V. shots, stagey placement of seemingly-unimportant characters who go on to become important, and at least one long sequence with no dialogue) and thematically (governmental conspiracies, hubristic authority figures, unconsummated romantic relationships).

But there's two other aspects of this movie for which I don't think De Palma gets enough credit.

The first is - and I'm not being flip here - the movie's fast pace. It remains the shortest entry in the series at a mere 110 minutes. By way of contrast, Dead Reckoning is 163 minutes, and is evidently only half a story. Oppenheimer is only seventeen minutes longer.

The second is the thematic alignment of the MacGuffin. In many of these movies, the MacGuffin is just some random scary thing. In this flick, the MacGuffin is called the NOC (Non-Official Cover) List, and it reveals the identities of all the IMF's undercover operatives around the world. The guy who is trying to steal the list, we learn, is Ethan's mentor, Jim Phelps (Jon Voight); his wife, Claire (Béart), is also in on it. So it's a movie about people pretending to be other people trying to steal a list of people pretending to be other people. How anyone can not love De Palma is totally beyond me.

(Also, Ethan's undercover alias is shown in one quick shot to be 'Phillipe Douchette,' which tickles me.)

ANYWAY, the basic set-up here is that there's this governmental spy organization called the Impossible Mission Force, or IMF, for which all our primary characters works. Phelps sends Ethan, Claire, and the rest of their team undercover into a fancy shindig at the American embassy in Prague, where they're meant to catch this guy Alexander Golitsyn (Marcel Iures) stealing the NOC List. But instead shit goes totally wrong; not only is Golitsyn killed, but (seemingly) so is every member of the team save for Ethan, and an unidentified third party gets away with the list.

The idea, clearly, is for this initial mission to be a fake-out - you're not meant to expect Ethan's entire team to get wiped out so quickly. For example, if you watch the original trailer for the movie, they made it look like Emilio Estevez was going to play a much larger role than he does:

I don't think the gambit quite works as well it has in some other movies, because the soon-to-be-deceased characters are neither memorably colorful nor played by famous-enough actors (in 1996, Estevez and Voight's careers weren't exactly in tip-top shape, Kristin Scott Thomas was still a year away from her breakthrough role in The English Patient, nobody outside of France had heard of Béart, and to this day nobody anywhere has heard of Ingeborga Dapkunaite). Apparently, these roles were initially offered to members of the cast from the original Mission: Impossible television show, and they all turned it down because they didn't wanna be unceremoniously murdered right away. I don't know if that would have worked better - the show had already been off the air for 20+ years at that point, and no one was exactly expecting a big summer tentpole movie to star Martin Landau. But I understand the thought process.

So after everyone else is killed, Ethan goes to meet up with one of his IMF superiors, Kittredge (Henry Czerny, ostensibly reprising his role as a governmental hard-ass from Clear and Present Danger two years prior). It turns out the entire operation was a mole hunt to root out a double-agent who has been working with an arms dealer known only as 'Max' - the list, in fact, was a fake. And since Ethan appears to be the last person standing, Kittredge assumes he's the mole. Ethan evades arrest by using explosive bubblegum to murder dozens of innocent fish (this might actually be Cruise's biggest stunt in the movie, which, again, really reminds you how different things were thirty years ago).

Then he flees back to his team's safe house, where he starts packing up his shit and getting ready to go on the lam, but then he decides to try and get in touch with this Max person instead. I'm not really clear on why Ethan assumes Kittredge doesn't know about the safe house - it seems to me that even going back there just to retrieve his things is a risky move, let alone sitting there for hours and hours sending out e-mails.

One thing on which I am clear is this movie's portrayal of the Internet betrays the fact that it was made by a 56-year-old man in the mid-'90s. I don't care so much about the highly-stylized browser (Google wouldn't even be created for another two years), or even the fact that the director believed it was reasonable to assume there were only 126 Bible sites on the web. But man oh man, it is hilarious to see how De Palma believed e-mail works: In the 'To' field ,Ethan types 'Max@Job314,' which is not a complete e-mail address, and in the 'From' field, Ethan types 'Job,' which isn't even an incomplete e-mail address. Great stuff.

So Ethan is sitting there e-mailing potential Maxes and then Phelps comes stumbling in, still bleeding from the gunshot wound that killed him, and he's all "Ethan, I needed your help, you let me die!" and whatnot. De Palma doesn't play it close to the vest - you know Ethan is just having a nightmare pretty much the moment it begins. I think the scene exists mostly to a) create a dramatic transition from Ethan sending e-mails to Ethan finding out that Claire is still alive, and b) to add emotional stakes for Ethan, since they didn't really do anything at the beginning to establish Ethan's relationship with Phelps. Like, Ethan cracks wise about Phelps being sent on "cushy recruiting missions," and it's clear they like one another, but without this moment, it would be fair to assume that Ethan's sole motivation for seeking out Max was to clear his name. If Ethan feels guilty for what happened to Phelps then it makes things more impactful when Phelps turns up alive later.

Ethan comes out of the dream and realizes that Claire, and not Phelps, has entered the room. At first he's really suspicious of her, which both does and does not make any sense - his guard should be up right now, but again, WHY WERE YOU JUST SITTING THERE LIKE A SCHMUCK WAITING TO BE CAUGHT IN THE FIRST PLACE DUDE?!?!

Claire convinces Ethan that she's okay, mostly by being insanely beautiful and convincingly sad to learn that Phelps is dead. Look, I won't sugarcoat it: It took this franchise five movies to come up with a decent female character, but Claire really gets shafted here. I can't tell you anything about her other than that she's hot, she's French, and she finds Jon Voight pushing sixty to be attractive. She has no actual personality traits; in fact, re-watching the movie, I realized she barely has any lines. They imply that there are romantic vibes between her and Ethan, but if Ethan likes her for any reasons beyond the physical, it's never made clear. In the trailer, there's a shot of them furiously pawing at one another, but it's not in the finished film. I think if they did sleep together, it would certainly add even more tension to the finale... not that it would do anything to beef up Claire's character. Bond girls in movies that pre-date Roe v. Wade have more to do than Claire does.

ANYWAY, Ethan gets a reply from Max and goes to meet the weapons dealer, who turns out to be Vanessa Redgrave. Redgrave's part in this movie isn't huge, but it is delightful; years before the Internet wrote erotic fan fiction about Vin Diesel and Helen Mirren in the Fast and Furious movies, Tom Cruise and Vanessa Redgrave were being weirdly flirty with one another in Mission: Impossible. So after proving his bona fides to Max, Ethan makes a deal whereby he'll steal the real NOC List from the Pentagon in exchange for $10 million and introduction to whoever it is that killed his team in Prague.

So Ethan and Claire recruit some other disavowed IMF agents, Krieger (Jean Reno) and Luther (Ving Rhames), to help them with the Pentagon job. Luther is a hacker; Krieger is one of those "guys who can get things" that pop in movies so people can magically, y'know, get things. It occurred to me during this re-watch that this team would have been ideal for the fake out at the beginning. Reno and Rhames weren't huge, but they were both hired off the backs of very successful movies (The Professional and Pulp Fiction, respectively) that had brought them into the larger public consciouness. It really might have been surprising if they'd been killed right away.

The premise of the Pentagon heist is that the real NOC List exists only on a single computer with no Internet connection in a room that the designers of the Pentagon seem to have modeled on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Only one authorized person is allowed in the room (what this person actually does for a living is never made clear - he's shown sitting in front of the computer and typing, but is he updating the NOC List or...?). And there's an intense alarm system that goes on when that person isn't there - so Ethan and his team can't put any pressure on the floor, or make any noise, or even allow the temperature of the room to rise a single degree (by both way of example and foreshadowing, we see a drop of water from a cold sitting on a desk fall to the floor, and the alarm goes off).

This sequence is, inarguably, the highlight of the movie. To say that De Palma is in his element here would be a ridiculous understatement. He's riffing on the famous thirty-two minute break-in from Jules Dassin's Rififi, which also hinges on near-total silence. One of the fun things about heist movies is that because they're all about meticulous plans that inevitably go awry, they automatically make exposition exciting (which, I should not have to tell you, is rarely the case in most films). So De Palma gets to lay out all the pieces for the audience and then ratchet up the suspense by constantly threatening to gum up the works, often via dramatic irony: Ethan has to hang up above the only guy allowed in the room for several minutes, hoping the dude doesn't bother to look up, and Krieger, situated in a vent in the ceiling, is responsible for keeping Ethan suspended in mid-air, but he's struggling with Ethan's weight and oh hey wouldn't you know it here comes a rat. The latter bit leads to the infamous moment where Ethan is left hanging mere inches off the ground, trying desperately to keep his arms and legs from touching the floor. And then of course there's the single drop of sweat which slides off his glasses, and we know, via the exposition, has the ability to trigger the alarm. Ethan catches it, which we see only in close-up, because it makes no sense - there's no real way for Ethan to reposition one of his hands beneath him without touching the floor. But that's okay because it's a fun moment.

I do remember people saying they found this movie confusing when it was first released, and I think that's mostly because of what happens after the Pentagon heist. The gang goes back to their hideout. There's some bad vibes between Krieger and Ethan. In the course of their conflict, Krieger pushes a Bible Ethan took from the Prague safe house onto the ground. Once the disagreement has been resolved, Ethan picks the Bible up off the floor and sees that it came from The Drake Hotel in Chicago - which, he remembers via aural flashback, is where Phelps was staying during his last "cushy recruiting mission."

Not long after, Phelps turns up alive. He tells Ethan it was Kittredge who betrayed the team, and the things that Ethan says are tantamount to "Oh yeah I believe you that makes sense," but in the visual flashbacks we see him imagining, he knows the truth - that Phelps is the traitor, and that Krieger is also involved (Ethan recognizes Krieger's knife from the Pentagon job as the same kind of knife that killed Kristin Scott Thomas). Making matters more complicated, Ethan imagines scenarios in which Claire both is and is not also involved, because he of course wants to believe she's innocent (which, again, would make a lot more sense if they'd had an actual romance, but whatever).

Point being, I think a lot of audiences are not used to that kind of contrast in movies, and certainly, audiences coming to see a Tom Cruise summer popcorn movie are used to having information spoon-fed to them. I think people just did not understand why Ethan was saying one thing but they were being shown another.

Thing is, I personally never found De Palma's approach to this scene confusing, but I also can't really figure out what his thinking here was. There's a moment a couple of scenes later when they're on the train selling the list to Max where Claire finds Phelps and says some incriminating stuff and the Phelps rips off his mask, revealing he's really Ethan. That probably would have been a fine spot to let us know that Ethan has figured out what's really going on, but for some reason, De Palma wanted us to know sooner. Feel free to drop me a line if anyone can figure out a rationale here.

In any case, we're on the train soon enough, with multiple looming threats. Kittredge is on board, looking for Ethan. Luther is surreptitiously seated near Max, sabotaging the arms dealer's ability to upload the NOC List to the Internet. And Ethan is off sneaking around dealing with the Phelps, Claire, and Krieger of it all. That leads to a situation where Claire tries to talk Phelps out of killing Ethan, and then Phelps tries to shoot Ethan, and Claire takes the bullet and dies. This makes Ethan really mad, which, once more, does not make as much sense as it would have they actually slept together. Regardless, Phelps is now trying to make his getaway by leaping from the moving train to a helicopter piloted by Krieger (it's not clear how they were gonna get Claire out of there - maybe that was never the plan anyway?). And of course Ethan climbs up there and has a big fight with Phelps, which leads to both of them hanging off the helicopter, which leads to Ethan using the exploding gum again, which leads to the moment everyone remembers from the trailers in which Ethan leaps from the helicopter just as it explodes, sending him careening into the train, which then stops. The blown-up helicopter blade comes to rest right before it impales Ethan through the face. Kittdrege finds Max and Ethan and Luther's names are cleared and there's an implication that Ethan is going to be the new Phelps and the movie ends.

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It's almost impossible (pardon) to defend this movie against accusations of style over substance. The story is thin and silly and the characters are one-dimensional and the whole thing is almost entirely without emotion.

But De Palma is too good at making suspense films to let this be a complete waste of time. It might be a minor work in his overall oeuvre, but it's one of which I think he can still be proud. If this was as bad as big summer blockbusters ever got, the world would be a less-irritating place.

Over the decades, many filmmakers have endeavored to create the most realistic war picture ever made; with Warfare, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza may have actually pulled it off. Garland, of course, is the writer of movies like 28 Days Later and Sunshine and the writer/director of such films as Ex Machina and Men; Mendoza is a former Navy SEAL who acted as the military advisor on Garland’s most recent offering, Civil War, and whose experiences during the 2006 Battle of Ramadi are the basis for this story. Warfare is free of bells and whistles; it is unsentimental, about as apolitical as any narrative about armed conflict could ever hope to be, and sometimes unflattering to the men it portrays.

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Most of Warfare plays out in real-time, as a platoon of Navy SEALS attempts to stave off an attack by Iraqi insurgents from inside a home they’ve seized. None of the characters get backstories, and good luck catching more than two or three names (I earnestly didn’t realize one of the actors was playing Mendoza until after the movie; I’m not sure anyone ever calls him “Mendoza,” “Ray,” or any other proper noun). What we learn about the characters we learn exclusively from their behavior just before and then during the onslaught. We get to see their easy camaraderie and casual familiarity in the twenty minutes or so leading up to the attack, and we get to see their reaction to stress during the attack, and that’s it. To say that the characters in Black Hawk Down get to share comparatively Dostoyevskyian biographical information would be understating it somewhat.

In fact, early in the film, I felt resistant to the casting choices, many of whom are, if not exactly movie stars, on the path to being movie stars (including Will Poulter from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Joseph Quinn from Gladiator II, Cosmo Jarvis from Shogun, Michael Gandolfini from Daredevil: Born Again, Charles Melton from May December, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai from Reservation Dogs, Noah Centineo from Black Adam, and Taylor John Smith from Where the Crawdads Sing). Why remind us, amid a movie striving for such authenticity, that it’s still just a bunch of boys playing at war? But by the time the credits rolled, I understood the logic of sacrificing verisimilitude for recognizability: if you didn’t know all these dudes from other stuff, you might have a really hard time remembering who’s who.

There are a few elements frequent viewers of this genre will recognize, mostly in the form of the SEALs’ ludicrous, theatrical displays of testosterone: when we first meet them, they’re gathered around a television, watching the ridiculous, hyper-sexual, aerobics-centric music video for Eric Prydz’s “Call On Me” (the kind of thing mercilessly satirized by The Substance), and when one sniper fails to identify a viable shot of an enemy, his peers snicker, “Weak.”

But that machismo falls by the wayside as soon as the shooting starts. The acts of heroism in Warfare are, by the standards of your average Hollywood war film, modest; the graphic violence is neither titillating nor triumphant; and the movie doesn’t shy away from showing decidedly not-macho moments of shock, human error, callousness, and cowardice. In one scene, a character trying to administer morphine to a severely injured peer accidentally tries to jab the needle upside down, thus injecting the morphine into his own thumb instead; in another sequence, the highest ranking member of the platoon, recognizing that he has frozen in the face of extreme duress, asks to be demoted. When one SEAL tells another that his wound is “just a paper cut,” the hurt seal doesn’t rally - he continues to lay on the ground and howl from a mix of agony and terror. When the platoon needs a C.O.’s approval to get tanks for evacuation, one of them just impersonates the C.O. rather than wait around for permission. It may seem like a small, silly detail, but at one point, they have to put a tourniquet around a leg that’s been blown wide open in an explosion, and when they tear the injured man’s pants open to do so, his genitals are on full display. A Bridge Too Far this ain’t.

Then there’s the platoon’s treatment of the Iraqis. Their racism is tacit, not explicit: none of them use slurs or other dehumanizing language, for example. But the Iraqis they’ve employed as translators worry they’re being used as canaries in the coal mine, and not without reason, and the two families who inhabit the annexed house are confined to a bedroom, where they’re watched by armed guards and threatened when they either disobey or dare to question why their home has been overrun and blown to hell by a foreign military. Without giving too much away, their final scene is tragic, not because any of them are physically harmed, but because of the slack indifference with which they’re forgotten. Indeed, part of what makes Warfare so powerful is that its conflict - the objective of which is never made clear to us - ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but, rather, a shrug.

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The only aspect of Warfare that feels false is a brief epilogue which features exactly the kind of jingoistic, hoo-rah messaging the film otherwise manages to avoid. This may have been a necessary evil: Mendoza was, after all, a part of this platoon, and the characters are all based on real people, some of whom suffered horribly in this conflict. It’s the only shortcoming of what is otherwise likely one of the most harrowing combat films ever made.

Originality isn’t everything… but it is something. And Ash, the new film from director/composer Flying Lotus (né Levitating Tulip), doesn’t have a single original frame in its 95-minute runtime. Like 2023’s The Creator, Ash has little to offer beyond an endless parade of “borrowed” concepts and images, all of which achieve no greater good than to remind you of the superiority of its influences.

Ash opens with Ripley - er, Riya (Eiza Gonzalez) - awakening aboard a space station on an inhospitable alien planet with no memories and a cadre of corpses. Riya sets out to figure out what she’s doing here and why everyone with her seems to have been horrifically murdered when her sole surviving peer, Brion (Aaron Paul), returns from his orbiting the planet. It seems Riya, Brion, and the deceased were on a mission to find a new planet on which humanity could reside given the imminent uninhability of Earth; and Brion isn’t as concerned with figuring out how everyone else was killed as he escaping the planet before the space station runs out of oxygen.

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Ridley Scott’s original Alien and its prequel, Prometheus, are the most obvious touchstones for Ash - there’s even a flashback sequence in which the crew share a jovial meal before meeting their imminent fate. But Ash also openly takes from John Carpenter’s The Thing, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (particularly the Abel Ferrara version), Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps, Christian Alvart’s Pandorum, the Dead Space video game franchise, Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars (which is, itself, a riff on 2001), James Gunn’s Slither (which is, itself, a riff on both Body Snatchers and Creeps), and Daniel Espinosa’s Life (which is, itself, a riff on Alien). Carpenter and the Kubrick estate might have the strongest legal case for intellectual property theft; Mr. Lotus has taken Carpenter’s creature design and the look of HAL 9000 almost verbatim. But all of those filmmakers and authors would have a right to feel like the producers of Ash own them a check.

The staggering lack of innovation might not feel like such a problem if Ash had, like, literally ANYTHING else to offer. Alas, no such luck. The movie was clearly made on a low budget, and Flying Lotus’ method for trying to cover that up is just to shoot most of the movie in close-up while bathing everything in red and blue light with the hopes that we won’t notice the lack of scope. And save for one pretty decent joke involving a machine that administers medical care, the tone is painfully po-faced; Zack Snyder might actually have a lighter touch than Lotus does.

Jonni Remmler’s screenplay, meanwhile, is sluggish, often nonsensical, and bogged down by a bizarre mix of over- and under-explaining the plot.

It’s also thin on character, and the cast, which also includes The Raid’s Iko Uwais and Beulah Koale from Next Goal Wins, suffers as a result. None of the supporting characters are one iota as memorable as the crew from Alien, and I honestly don’t know why Aaron Paul agreed to play Brion other than to either make sure he kept his SAG health insurance or because he lost a bet. Paul hasn’t exactly been drowning in memorable roles since Breaking Bad, but holy moly, is this character ever one-note and completely beneath him.

Then there’s Gonzalez. She’s in literally every single scene of the movie, and she simply cannot shoulder it. She keeps showing up in these macho action movies - Bloodshot, Ambulance, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, etc. - and in each of them, she stubbornly refuses to do any emoting whatsoever. A more charismatic performer might have made us care about Riya despite her complete lack of character traits, but Gonzalez’s stoicism leaves us with absolutely nothing onto which we can hold.

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If you put a gun to my head and demanded that I say something nice about Ash, it would be that there are a handful of good gore effects, particularly involving melting and crushed faces. Maybe this movie will trigger dysmorphophobics. But for most people, it will just trigger a nap.

Between 2014 and 2019, Anthony and Joe Russo directed four of the best, highest-grossing movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame. But, creatively speaking at least, they’ve been in a rut ever since. First, there was Cherry, their ill-begotten adaptation of a book by Nico Walker. Then, there was The Grey Man, their ill-begotten adaptation of a book by Mark Greaney. Now comes The Electric State, their ill-begotten adaptation of a book by Simon Stålenhag. What a hat trick!

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The Electric State takes place in an alternate reality where highly advanced robots became staples of society in the 1950s, and were predominantly tasked with menial jobs. In the ‘90s, though, the robots - as sci-fi robots are wont to do - decided they wanted independence, and thus launched an uprising against humanity, led by a Mr. Peanut robot voiced by Woody Harrelson (no, I am not joking). They were eventually defeated thanks to revolutionary technology by a company called Sentre (pronounced “Center”), which allows people to put on massive VR headsets with which they can visit virtual worlds and, more importantly in terms of warfare, control humanoid military drones. The result of the robot’s surrender is that they were exiled to a 200,000 square-mile patch of land in the Southwest. At the same time, Sentre’s VR headsets became commonplace, making the company’s Elon Musk-esque CEO, Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), incredibly rich.

Somewhere in the midst of this, a young woman named Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) and her family were in a car accident, of which she was the lone survivor… or so she thought! One day, years after the war, she comes to believe that her prodigy-level-genius younger brother, Christopher (Woody Norman), is alive after all, and being held by Sentre for unknown, presumably nefarious purposes. She thus sets out on an adventure to find and free Christopher, eventually enlisting the aid of a Han Soloish smuggler, Keats (Chris Pratt), and his smart-aleck robot companion, Herman (Anthony Mackie, although his voice has been altered so much you may not even realize it’s him). Meanwhile, Skate employs a robot-hating mercenary, Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito), to ensure that Michelle and her allies fail their mission.

Working from a screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely - the same fellas who wrote all their Marvel movies, as well as The Grey Man - the Russos clearly have aspirations of making The Electric State a Spielbergian family adventure. And for about a half hour or so, at least, they mostly succeed - at least so long we define “Spielbergian” as being more Ready Player One, less E.T.. The build-up to the meat of the narrative is by no means brilliant, but it is solid: we understand the characters and their goals, we understand the conflict, and we’re invested in what’s going to happen. Everything is off to a promising start.

But the movie loses steam almost as soon as Michelle meets Keats at the end of the first act. If you’ve ever been nerdy enough to listen to the audio commentaries the Russos recorded with Markus and McFeely for their MCU oeuvre (their MCoeuvre?), you know that they have a dependable, textbook-ready formula for how they concoct their stories, and that formula was certainly used here; the problem is that while the beats are all in the right place, none of them are very interesting. If you think of the story as a connect-the-dots, the dots are all precisely where they should be; it’s the connective lines that are the problem.

That’s because there’s an abundance of talking about what has to occur next, but very little actually happening. Michelle and Keats reach the natural conclusions of their respective arcs, but it’s not entirely clear how they arrived there. Honestly, I don’t think those arcs are even very well set up. Without giving anything away, when you realize the endpoint of Michelle’s story, it’s not like, “Ohhhh, so THAT’S where this was going this whole time!” so much as it’s like, “Ohhhh, so THAT’S where this was going this whole time???”

Two other things that aren’t doing the movie any favors: the supporting characters and the action scenes.

The secondary robots are all voiced by famous actors (Harrelson, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, etc.), but the Russos and their writers seem to hope our pre-existing attachment to these performers will make us care about the fates of their characters, and it doesn’t work out that way. There’s a big battle at the end, kinda like the one at the conclusion of Endgame, but it doesn’t have any of the weight of the one in Endgame because they haven’t done a good enough job getting us invested in the fates of these various bots (granted, Endgame had the benefit of a decades’ worth of set-up… but still… Seven Samurai this ain’t).

As for those set pieces, well… they not only lack inventiveness, but they’re poorly paced. Netflix has an option to watch something at 1.5x its normal speed; maybe doing so would help here? ‘Cause as they’re presented, these sequences all feel surprisingly low-energy. And it’s not like the Russos can’t do action (did I mention they spent six years making Marvel movies?). Somehow, they just biffed it here.

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It was announced last year that the Russos, along with McFeely (but not, tellingly, Markus), are returning to Marvel to make the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. Post-Electric State, I can see why they’d be anxious to get back to the MCU. The Electric State isn’t as bad as the vicious critical reception would have you believe, but it’s the action-adventure movie version of elevator music: in the background, not entirely unpleasant, and utterly forgettable.

Novocaine is a diverting little action-comedy that, similarly to the recent Carry-On, feels like a real throwback to a certain kind of high concept movie from the ‘90s. It’s about an assistant bank manager, Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid), who suffers from CIPA, a rare (non-fictional!) genetic disorder that prevents him from feeling pain. That might seem like a gift, but it’s actually quite a problem because, as Today Is the Day tells us, pain is a warning. Consequently, Nathan leads an extremely cautious existence designed to prevent him from accidentally injuring himself; for example, he has to set a timer on his watch every three hours to remind himself to urinate, lest his bladder explode.

But then Nathan gets asked out on a date by Sherry (Amber Midthunder), a Manic Pixie Dream Girlish artist who works as a teller at his bank. Sherry manages to lure Nathan out of his shell a bit, and after just one evening of passion together, he falls in love with her. Alas, the very next day, a heavily armed trio of bad guys storm into the bank, rob the vault, and take off with Sherry as their hostage. Nathan promptly decides he can’t wait around for the cops to save Sherry from her captors, and thus sets out to rescue her himself, at which point his unusual condition allows him to become a most unlikely action hero.

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Sometimes you see a movie and wonder how anyone could have ever thought it was a good idea. Novocaine is the opposite of that. The screenplay, by Lars Jacobson, isn’t perfect - Nathan and Sherry’s arcs are both half-baked - but it is reasonably clever, and was probably a lot of fun to read. It’s not at all difficult to surmise why anyone thought the movie would be good.

Unfortunately, the direction, by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, isn’t quite as strong. The action sequences wind up being kind of pedestrian; one can only wonder what a filmmaker like Die Hard’s John McTiernan or John Wick’s Chad Stahelski might have done with the same material. This movie needed the kind of fast-paced, geographically cogent set pieces that made last month’s Love Hurts cinematic cotton candy, and it doesn’t have those.

Not helping - and I’m aware that this isn’t the filmmakers’ fault - is that the trailers give away most of the best gags in the flick, severely undercutting the inventiveness of Jacobson’s writing.

Still, Novocaine manages to entertain. This is largely due to Quaid. Despite being a nepo baby (his parents are Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan), the rising star excels at playing an everyman; he’s warm and relatable and seems like the kind of dude with whom you’d wanna have a beer. As evidenced by his leading role on Amazon’s The Boys and his convincing heel turn in Companion, he’s also a damn fine actor. He’s in almost every single frame of Novocaine, and he carries the picture with supreme confidence and skill.

As for the rest of the cast, they’re… fine? Jacob Batalon’s role, as Nathan’s best friend, is ostensibly a cameo; he doesn’t get much to do. Same goes for Betty Gabriel and Matt Walsh as cops who think Nathan is in on the heist; all three are capable of much more than they’re asked to do here.

Ditto Midthunder. She’s already taken center stage in an action movie of her own, 2022’s excellent Prey, so it’s kind of disappointing to see her relegated to the damsel in distress role here (especially given that a large portion of Prey is, in a very literal way, about how women can kick ass, too). She does get to be kind of a badass near the end of the movie, but she easily could have starred as Natalie Caine in her own version of this story. It feels like she was done real dirty here.

Making slightly more of an impact is Ray Nicholson (son of Jack) as the heavy, Simon. Nicholson has had small roles in movies like Promising Young Woman, Licorice Pizza, and Smile 2, but this is the first thing I’ve seen him in where he has more than five lines. He shares his father’s devilish grin, and seems to be having a lot of fun playing a homicidal sociopath. Okay, so maybe he’s no Alan Rickman, but who is?

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I suspect that if Novocaine, like Carry-On, had been an at-home streaming affair, it would probably hit much harder. But there are definitely worse ways to spend a couple of hours at the movies.

Black Bag, the new collaboration between director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp, is good enough to redeem them for Presence, the abysmally dumb ghost movie the duo released just a couple of months ago. Black Bag is not particularly meaningful and still doesn’t rank with either filmmaker’s best work, but, hey, at least it’s brisk and fun.

The story centers around married British spies George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). A mole within their organization is looking to sell a top-secret weapon known as Severus, and George is tasked with finding the culprit. Unfortunately for him, Kathryn is on the short list of suspects. Now, George has to figure out whether his wife is a villain and, if she is, what to do about it.

The other potential traitors are, conveniently, also all halves of spy couples. There’s Zoe (Naomie Harris), the shrink with whom all of these secret agents must share their confidence; her lover/patient, James (Regé-Jean Page); Freddie (Tom Burke), who has recently lost a promotion to James; and Freddie’s much-younger partner, Clarissa (Marisa Abela). Putting three couples at the heart of the story means that Black Bag is nominally about trust in romantic relationships… but truth be told, the movie doesn’t actually have a whole lot to say about that issue. Mostly, it’s just concerned with espionage and mystery.

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In fact, the previous Soderbergh outing of which Black Bag might be most reminiscent is 2013’s Side Effects, which is about a woman who stabs her husband to death and blames it on an antidepressant. Other directors might have used that story to say something deep about our culture’s reliance (or, some might argue, overreliance) on prescription mental health medications, but for Soderbergh, the psychiatric aspect of the narrative was really just there to motor the murder mystery.

Soderbergh and Koepp, who have respectively amused us over the years with an array of con artists (Ocean’s Eleven), neo-noir anti-heroes (Snake Eyes), and, yes, other scheming spies (Mission: Impossible), are far more comfortable trying to pull the wool over our eyes than they are with the pseudo-profound familial drama of Presence (see also: their 2022 agoraphobia thriller, Kimi). Thus, whereas the lack of lofty ambition in Side Effects felt like a missed opportunity, it’s totally fine that Black Bag doesn’t really wanna dig in deep on issues of marital certitude, because the cast is great, the plot is serviceable, and the whole thing moves at a clip: at a gloriously brief 93 minutes, Black Bag doesn’t wear out its welcome, let alone leave the audience with enough time to think about whether or not all the labyrinthine subterfuge makes any logical sense.

The film does make some semi-meta nods to Hollywood’s longest-running secret agent franchise: Harris played Moneypenny in the most recent spate of James Bond movies, and Pierce Brosnan, a former 007 himself, shows up briefly as George and Kathryn’s superior (to say nothing of the fact that Fassbender’s character, whose name may be an homage to John le Carré’s George Smiley, also wears decidedly Harry Palmer-esque spectacles). But, once more, these casting choices feel cute more than meaningful. Black Bag has as little to say about the history of espionage on the silver screen as it does about the ways lies may or may not permeate a domestic partnership.

Indeed, one may note that the movie’s very premise is a tad tired: spies have been worrying about whether or not they’re sleeping with the enemy for decades now. For some reason (AHEM), it seems as though it’s always the man who’s in danger of being betrayed by the women. Black Bag does nothing to subvert that trope, even if they do make Kathryn the gun-toting badass and George the behind-the-desk tactician.

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Still, Black Bag is more entertaining than most other recent uses of an identical set-up, like Robert Zemeckis’ Allied. It’s nice to have my faith in Soderbergh and Koepp restored.

Let me just begin this review by saying that I believe Bong Joon Ho is an incredible filmmaker. I’ve been a huge fan of his work since The Host in 2006. And I applaud Warner Bros. for giving him $118 million to realize his vision, especially when that vision is not a sure thing commercially.

Having said that, the resulting film, Mickey 17, isn’t very good.

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Very loosely adapted from Ashton Edward’s novel, Micky 7, Mickey 17 is set in the year 2054. It’s about a hapless schmuck, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), who finds himself in deep shit with a ruthless loan shark (Ian Hanmore) after his selfish, no-goodnik “friend,” Timo (Steven Yeun), convinces him to launch an ill-advised business. Desperate to get the hell out of Dodge, Mickey signs up to be an “expendable” for an outer space expedition to colonize a new planet, Niflheim (which is, as its name suggests, an inhospitable tundra), which is inhabited by an alien species dubbed “creepers.” As an expendable, Mickey’s job is effectively to be the canary in the coal mine and die as necessary for the (allegedly) greater good of the mission.

The sort-of silver lining is that every time Mickey perishes, the mission’s overlords make a new version of him, complete with all his memories, using the world’s most advanced 3D printer. It doesn’t make dying any less scary, painful, or generally awful, but, hey, it keeps Mickey fed and millions of miles away from the gangsters who want to mutilate him.

Problem is, unbeknownst to his employers - including a politician, Donald Trump… er, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), and Marshall’s Lady Macbeth-esque wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette) - the seventeenth iteration of Mickey, through happenstance, survives one of his assignments, and arrives back at his quarters one day to find the eighteenth iteration of Mickey ready to assume his life. For complicated reasons that don’t make a ton of sense, the law forbids the existence of so-called “multiples” - i.e., more than one living clone of an expendable. So now Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are looking down the barrel of permanent execution: they’ll be killed, their memories will be deleted, and there will be no more Mickeys printed. Rough break for Mickey.

Mickey 17 has a myriad of issues.

For one thing, it’s not a story so much as it’s a message (or, really, a series of messages) parading as a story. And while it’s a message with which I largely agree, I didn’t need it repeated ad infinitum for 137 minutes. Mickey 17 is about class and caste, capitalism, religious fundamentalism, racism, misogyny, colonization, and animal rights… but it does not actually have anything illuminative to say about any of those topics. Assuming you’re not either a child or a recently-awoken coma patient, there is nothing you will learn about these subjects that you don’t already know. Its greatest insight is that the rich and powerful take advantage of the poor and powerless. Mickey 17 never amounts to much more than Bong saying “the right is bad” over again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

Still, if the film were at least entertaining, its surface-level non-revelations might be less of an issue. In his past work, Bong has demonstrated an incredible facility with tone, oscillating between humor and drama with a deft touch. But Mickey 17’s satirical targets are so broad and obvious that the humor rarely tickles, and the characters are so thinly drawn that the drama rarely tugs at the heartstrings. 

To wit: Mickey is carrying some guilt because he believes himself to be responsible for the death of his mother in an auto accident that occurred when he was a child… but so little time is spent on this story point, and whatever psychological issues it’s causing Mickey are so easily resolved, that it simply never amounts to much.

Ditto a love story between Mickey and a soldier, Nasha (Naomi Ackie): in the scene where the characters first meet, Bong makes the baffling decision to drown out their dialogue beneath Mickey’s voiceover narration, so we never understand why these two like each other. Their romance seems to boil down to a mutual enjoyment of sex, which is all well and good, but isn’t enough to get the viewer invested in their trials and travails.

And Timo’s redemptive arc? He never does anything to redeem himself!!! He’s a one-dimensional asshole, but his storyline ends in such a way that suggests we’re supposed to have warmed up to him. Spoiler alert: you will not warm up to him, because you will not be given a single goddamn reason to do so.

Mickey 17 also suffers from a jagged structure that further exacerbates all its problems. For much of the picture’s runtime, the story simply lacks momentum or meaning. Events don’t unfold in a “but/therefore” manner—they unfold in an “and then” manner. There are a plethora of scenes that don’t further the movie narratively or thematically, to say nothing of the fact that they simply don’t make any sense. 

Minor spoilers follow.

Take, for example, this series of events in the middle of the story:

• Mickey is invited to a steak dinner with Marshall and Ylfa - a rare honor for someone of his lowly status.

• The one-percenters have also invited another soldier, Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei), to tell her she’s exactly the kind of “pure” person they want to breed on their new planet. Why would they do this in front of Mickey? Fuck if I know.

• Mickey becomes sick, vomiting and soiling himself, because it turns out he was invited to dinner to test a new artificial meat. Why would they do this in front of Kai? Fuck if I know.

• Kai takes the sick Mickey back to her quarters and makes a pass at him. Why would she do this when he just regurgitated his dinner and shat himself minutes before and has not yet had a chance to shower? Fuck if I know.

• Mickey rejects Kai’s advances and returns to his own quarters, where he finds Nasha and Mickey 18. Nasha, upon realizing that there are two Mickeys, solicits a threesome. Why would she do this rather than worry about the fact that the Mickeys are now multiples in danger of permanent execution? Because she’s high.

• Kai walks in on the threesome and demands that Nasha share the Mickeys lest she report that they are multiples. Nasha refuses. Why? Because she loves Mickey. Why does she love Mickey? Fuck if I know.

• Simultaneously, Mickey 18 learns of the events of the dinner and decides that Marshall needs to be assassinated. Seeing that Marshall is in the middle of emceeing a live event, he grabs a gun and marches off to do just that. How does he think he’s gonna shoot the most powerful man on the ship in front of a huge crowd and get away with it? Fuck if I know.

• Mickey 17, Nasha, and Kai all follow Mickey 18 to the area where Marshall is unveiling a massive black diamond found on Niflheim. A pair of baby creepers crawl out of the black diamond, and chaos ensues.

• During the kerfuffle, Mickey 18 tries to shoot Marshall, but Nasha stops him. Why does she stop him? Fuck if I know.

• Nasha and the Mickeys are arrested for trying to kill Marshall, because of course they are.

If this doesn’t sound like a smooth, logical, and organic series of events to occur, that’s because it isn’t. The only narrative purpose for Kai and Mickey to be invited to the dinner together is to remind us that Marshall and Ylfa are terrible people, which we already know from the 18,000 other despicable things we’ve seen them do up until this point in the story. It’s dumb, and, frankly, condescending, and it’s all the more disappointing because we know Bong is capable of doing much better.

Minor spoilers end.

None of this, by the way, is even touching on the potentially-interesting ideas that Bong lets fall by the wayside (if they’re clones with identical memories, why are the Mickeys so different from one another?)… or, more troublingly, the fact that Bong undermines his liberal message with a less-than-stellar treatment of his female characters.

To reiterate: Nasha is a sketch more than she’s a three-dimensional human being, and Marshall, who is blatantly supposed to be Trump (his followers even wear red baseball caps brandishing his moronic slogan!), is largely the pawn of his manipulative, power-hungry wife (which is hardly the case with the real Trump). And Kai, whose defining character trait is that she’s a lesbian, still wants to shtup Mickey, even when Mickey reeks of feces. As for the creepers, it’s hard not to notice that their vaginal design.

It’s just not a great look for Bong.

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Female issues aside: I’m speculating a bit here, but I think at least part of what went wrong here is that Bong simply chose too many conflicts to really hone in on any one with specificity. Mickey 17 could have been a tight narrative about class or colonization or capitalism or patriarchy or animal rights - in fact, Bong has already made many of those movies (see: Parasite, Snowpiercer, and Okja, all of which are wonderful) - but instead it’s a bloated mess that tries to be about all of those things. Given this deluge of quarry, Bong sprayed his bullets wildly all over the place, and wound up hitting nothing.

James Ashcroft is the current reigning Sultan of Sadism. The New Zealand actor-turned-filmmaker’s directorial debut, 2021’s Coming Home in the Dark, was a nightmarish narrative about a man who, while in a position of authority, turned a blind eye to torture; when the victims of that torture come looking for vengeance, the man is subjected to similarly soul-destroying violence. Ashcroft’s just-released follow-up, The Rule of Jenny Pen, is… well… kind of about the same thing. The details are different, but the themes are identical: the powerful predator becomes the powerless prey, and a supremely unsettling game of cat-and-mouse ensues.

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In the case of Jenny Pen - which, like Coming Home in the Dark, Ashcroft and Eli Kent adapted from a short story by Owen Marshall - the victimizer-turned-victim is Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush), a judge whose cold heartedness is equal parts completely warranted and utterly appalling. While handing down a harsh sentencing, Stefan suffers a horrific stroke, and consequently finds himself confined to an assisted living facility. Stefan’s snobbishly combative nature alienates his new peers, including his former rugby star roommate, Tony (George Henare). Even worse, it puts him directly in the crosshairs of Dave Crealy (John Lithgow), a heinous bully who presides over his fellow residents with an iron grip - or, rather, a plastic one: Jenny Pen, a baby doll puppet he frequently uses as a surrogate for his vituperative behavior (Jenny has no eyes, which makes her seem more sinister, yes, but also serves as a symbol for being willfully blind to abuse). Attempting to fight back only worsens Stefan’s disquieting ordeal; the staff doesn’t believe his allegations, and so badly has he alienated Tony and the rest of the populace that they’re unwilling to join him and risk Dave’s wrath.

We may be accustomed to thinking of warring elderly men as the stuff of comedy, but The Rule of Jenny Pen is hardly Grumpy Old Men. Viewers looking for a likable character to which they can cling will surely drown in this sea of misery. The Rule of Jenny Pen isn’t nihilistic, exactly - in fact, it’s ultimately less grim than Coming Home in the Dark - but it’s certainly one of the more harrowing cinematic portrayals of elder abuse I can recall.

Coming Home in the Dark had a moral ambiguity which ultimately put the protagonists and antagonists on equal ground; it was a dramatic argument against two wrongs making a right (“There is a difference between doing something and letting it happen,” a character says in one of the movie’s most haunting scenes. “They live on the same street, though.”). Jenny Pen isn’t quite as complex; Stefan may be an imperious and antisocial, but he is, after all, sentencing rapists and murderers. When he dresses down a mother for failing to protect her children from their abuser, he’s blunt and insensitive, sure, but he’s also, y’know, right. So you don’t exactly feel like he’s due the punishment dispensed by Dave.

Dave, likewise, has no layers; his backstory, to what little degree it’s revealed, may explain his cruelty, but it doesn’t justify it. He is one of Lithgow’s most disturbing and despicable creations (which is truly saying something, given that he was once one of Brian De Palma’s repertory psychopaths). Lithgow can’t help but make Dave compelling, and even entertaining; in a just world, this time next year, the actor would certainly nab some awards nods. But unlike the creeps in Coming Home in the Dark, you won’t shed any tears for this bastard.

The story’s lack of ethical intricacy is part of the reason that Jenny Pen, as good as it is, is ultimately not as powerful as Coming Home in the Dark: it may give the audience nightmares, but it won’t leave them with much to chew on.

Jenny Pen’s other shortcoming is a somewhat redundant screenplay that loses momentum in its second half. Jenny Pen is only 15 minutes longer than Coming Home in the Dark, but you will feel that extra time. This is especially frustrating because it’s easy to see where the cuts could have gone; Ashcroft may have been too hesitant to kill his (plastic, eyeless) darlings.

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Then again, it’s easy to see how Ashcroft perhaps fell in love with his material. He is inarguably an extremely talented filmmaker. Not only does he coax one of Lithgow’s most memorable modern performances (to say nothing of the excellent work by Rush and Henare), but the way he plays with sight and sound - often in the interest of making us understand, subjectively, how it would feel to suffer a stroke - is masterful. Ashcroft rules the audience the way Jenny Pen rules the old folks: with an iron fist. Be prepared to squirm and wince to the point of muscle soreness.

The Academy Awards may be ostensibly meaningless, but that doesn’t mean we’re not all gonna watch ‘em and bitch about ‘em!

To that end, I’ll be rejoining my old friends on the RIP a Livecast tomorrow, Saturday, March 1 at 11 a.m. EST/8 a.m. PST to preview Sunday’s big show. We’ll be talking predictions, snubs, and all other manner of glorious nonsense. You can even call in and ask a question if you’re so inclined! A good time will surely be had by all.

Listen or watch here!!!

The Monkey, the amusing new horror film from writer/director Osgood Perkins, is kind of about inherited trauma and kind of about the inevitably of death. But it’s really about Perkins expressing his oddball sense of humor. Indeed, what’s most surprising about The Monkey isn’t that it’s a comedy; it’s that it’s such a broad comedy.

Very (very) loosely based on a short story by Stephen King, The Monkey is about a killer wind-up children’s toy. Every time someone turns the key, the mechanical simian bangs its drums, immediately after which a poor schmoe nearby dies horribly, often via a Rube Goldberg-esque confluence of occurrences (almost exactly like in the Final Destination movies), but sometimes just due to terrible luck (e.g., an aneurysm, a stampede of horses, an uncoordinated Benihana chef) or the outright supernatural (as in the case of an angry swarm of bees that are oddly focused on harming one specific person and one specific person only).

The Monkey’s Monkey is first obtained by an airline pilot (Adam Scott) while abroad; even though he quickly learns of the toy’s insidious nature, for some reason he leaves it in possession of his family before abandoning them. It’s eventually discovered by his twin sons, Hal and Dennis (Christian Convery as children, Theo James as grown-ups), who are now being solely raised by their bitter, cynical mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany). Before long, Hal and Dennis figure out the monkey’s destructive power; they also figure out that it’s indestructible, thus spurring them to toss it down a well, hopefully never to be seen again.

Of course, it is seen again, re-emerging when they’re estranged adults. Hal has a son, Petey (Colin O'Brien), who he voluntarily sees but once a year, fearing that the monkey will return and inflict the same sorts of tragedies upon Petey that it did upon him and Dennis. But the monkey inconveniently reappears while Hal and Petey are trying to enjoy their annual reunion, and all hell breaks loose.

Like Perkins’ recent surprise hit, Longlegs, The Monkey is short on character work and narrative and long on atmosphere. In this case, that atmosphere is wacky to the point of breaking reality; The Monkey often veers into Mel Brooks territory.

For example, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen a moment where a young priest (Nicco Del Rio) stands in front of his congregation and audibly says “Oh, fuck,” as though he’s surprised to see them all or something. And perhaps you, like me, assumed this moment would make more sense within the context of the movie, and that there might be a good explanation for why a priest would swear so egregiously from the pulpit. But no. The moment unfolds just as randomly in the movie as it does in the coming attractions. It exists because Perkins thought it would be funny for a priest to say “fuck.” Period. End of story.

All well and good, ‘cept Mel Brooks films, for all of their many strengths, lack weight. This is a problem for The Monkey, because it wants to be weighty. It’s almost impossible to have paper-thin characters that seem to have stepped out of a cartoon, an array of ridiculous sight gags, and emotional gravitas. That Perkins favors jokes over logic makes this a real problem; Lois, for example, is outrageously insensitive and lacking in maternal instinct, which allows for some good jokes, but makes it hard to buy that her sons hold her in such high regard, even as they get older.

Perhaps even more problematic is that The Monkey never ties its dual themes together in any sort of meaningful way. Yeah, the boys got the toy from their absentee father (that’s the inherited trauma bit), and yeah, a lot of people around them die horribly and unexpectedly (that’s the death is a part of life bit), but the two threads never cohere into a unified whole. The brothers are each in their own movie, on their own journey: Hal is scared of passing on the curse to his son, while Dennis simply cannot make peace with the Monkey-inflicted death of a loved one. What does one thing have to do with the other?

I suppose you could argue that “learning to accept death” is a subsection of “learning to deal with inherited trauma,” but if that was Perkins’ intent, he has failed to hammer it home. There is likely a way to meld these binary concepts, but the filmmaker hasn’t found it. Consequently, it feels like he’s only nominally interested in exploring these topics; neither one gets the attention it deserves.

The good news is that The Monkey is occasionally very funny. Some of that is due to Perkins’ writing, some to extremely droll cuts by editors Graham Fortin and Greg Ng, and some to the cast, who are mostly pretty great. 

James is especially impressive; Hal and Dennis are polar opposites, so it’s no small feat for him to play them both (especially given that, again, they’re somewhat underwritten). But Maslany nearly steals the movie with a limited amount of screen time. Rohan Campbell, as a local burnout, also gets some choice comedic beats. Alas, Elijah Wood, in a one-scene cameo as Petey’s know-it-all stepfather, is, through no fault of his own, distracting more than he is amusing: Perkins just didn’t write him any decent gags. Perkins himself shows up for a couple of scenes as the boys’ uncle, and Perkins seems to find it hilarious that he gave himself mutton chops; your mileage on that may vary.

Insofar as the horror part of The Monkey is concerned, gorehounds should be relatively satisfied. There are two especially great deaths - one of which occurs right in the opening scene, one of which has already been released online as part of the flick’s promotional materials. Both sequences are at once creative and hilarious. If the rest of the kills were this entertaining, The Monkey might have even risen above its larger narrative issues. As it stands, The Monkey plays like a rough sketch of what could’ve been a much, much better movie.

The bad news about the new action-comedy Love Hurts is that it doesn’t have a surprising story, profound characters, belly laughs, or genuine romance.

The good news about the new-action comedy Love Hurts is just about everything else.

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The movie stars Ke Huy Quan - the child actor (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Goonies) turned Oscar winner (Everything Everywhere All at Once) - as Marvin Gable, a seemingly mild-mannered real estate broker selling homes in the suburbs. Thing is, once upon a time, Marvin was the top killer for his crime lord brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu). Marvin betrayed his brother, though, after being ordered to execute Rose (Ariana DeBose), an accountant who stole from Knuckles, and for whom Marvin harbored secret romantic feelings; instead of killing Rose, he set her loose, instructed her to disappear so his brother couldn’t find her, and reformed himself under the mentorship of a cowboy mini-mogul named Cliff (Quan’s Goonies co-star, Sean Astin).

But Marvin’s past comes back to kick him in the tush after Rose rears her not-so-ugly head again, determined to reclaim her former life; now Marvin and Rose have to evade an array of hitmen and gonifs.

Love Hurts is the directorial debut of Jonathan Eusebio, a former stuntman; it was produced by David Leitch, who was also a stuntman before he and another former stuntman, Chad Stahelski, co-directed the original John Wick (although DGA technicalities prevented Leitch from taking an onscreen credit for that film; Stahelski went on to direct the subsequent John Wicks solo, while Leitch helmed flicks like Deadpool 2 and The Fall Guy). So, naturally, the action sequences are the best parts of Love Hurts. Eusebio, it’s safe to say, is a student of Hong Kong kung fu classics. He stages each set piece with the silent film slapstick skill we used to expect from Jackie Chan’s collaborations with Stanley Tong. They’re quick, clever, and balletic.

Speaking of quick: Love Hurts clocks in at a gloriously brisk 83 minutes. Other movies, please take note.

The short run time, and the amount of that running time devoted to punching, kicking, and shooting, means the characters in Love Hurts are razor-thin archetypes and little more. That’s okay, though, ‘cause the movie is so well cast, it works as a kind of shorthand (as good casting tends to do). It’s not hard to buy Quan as a decent guy or DeBose as a badass, because that’s already how we think of these performers (in fact, this is the best use of DeBose since she won an Oscar for 2021’s West Side Story, after which she has been exclusively misused for dreck like Kraven the Hunter). When Sean Astin walks in and has all of 60 seconds to demonstrate that his and Quan’s characters are besties, we go with it, because we’ve all seen Goonies.

Ditto believing Rhys Darby as a cowardly scumbag, or former NFL star Marshawn Lynch as a loquacious, opinionated, and hubristic hitman. In 2023, Lynch practically stole the queer teen comedy Bottoms right out from under Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott, and he all but steals Love Hurts out from under Quan and DeBose here. The dude is simply a comedic force of nature… so much so that it’s easy to forgive a cheesy “Beast Mode” joke made right before he tackles someone.

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There are a lot of cheesy jokes in Love Hurts - sitcom-level zingers you’ll see coming a mile away (there are three credited screenwriters - Matthew Murray & Josh Stoddard and Luke Passmore - but it seems impossible that it could’ve taken more than one adolescent to dream any of this stuff up). The movie gets more amusing mileage from Lynch’s character commenting on Marvin’s martial arts skills than, say, an absurdist subplot about a burgeoning romance between Marvin’s assistant (Lio Tipton) and a sensitive assassin who writes poetry on the side (Mustafa Shakir), which comes complete with a totally random Sixteen Candles sight gag. But, again: because the movie is short, because the cast is so charming, and because the fights are so fun, Love Hurts manages to skate by. Maybe you won’t LOL, but you’ll consistently grin, and that ain’t nuthin’.

The concept of lifelike robots designated for romantic and sexual gratification is nothing new. In the movies, it goes back at least as far as Blade Runner in 1982, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there was an earlier example I’m forgetting. Still, given the recent leaps in AI technology, it’s natural that the topic seems to be on people’s minds now more than ever. After all, there are already crude AI sexbots on the market; a future in which such androids are more sophisticated and commonplace may seem sad, but it doesn’t sound particularly far-fetched.

Sierra Greer’s novel Annie Bot, published less than a year ago, exists in such a barely hypothetical future. It tells its story from the point of view of its title character. Annie knows she’s not human, and she knows she’s been programmed to love and obey her abusive, sometimes sadistic owner, Doug… but that doesn’t change the fact that said love feels, to her, genuine. This is Annie’s struggle: she’s badly mistreated, but she still desperately loves the man who controls her. Like so many abused women in the real world, her conflict extends beyond being allowed to leave her abuser; she doesn’t want to leave her abuser. The message of Annie Bot may not be subtle, but it feels authentic and recognizable, and it raises deep philosophical questions about the nature of personhood without ever being heavy-handed.

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Companion, the new film from writer/director Drew Hancock, takes a vastly different approach to the same subject. For one thing, it’s darkly comedic; for another thing, it’s not nearly so emotionally complex.

The so-called “fuckbot” at the center of Companion, Iris (Sophie Thatcher, Heretic), initially does not know that she’s an android. She’s been implanted with memories, including a grocery store meet-cute with her “boyfriend,” Josh (Jack Quaid, The Boys). She learns her true origin only after one of Josh’s peers tries to sexually assault her and she violently fights back - something her programming isn’t supposed to allow her to do. Whatever complicated feelings she may have Josh is of little concern to Hancock: as soon as Iris figures out she’s a robot and that her act of self-defense has condemned her to be shut down, she flees, and Companion turns into a cat-and-mouse thriller.

In other words, Iris’ plight is more of a MacGuffin than the source of a metaphysical ponderance, and her arc is complete about a third of the way into the movie. Iris never wrestles with inner conflict about Josh the way Annie wrestles with inner conflict about Doug; Companion does not leave space to interrogate what it means to be human, or what constitutes an authentic emotion.

That’s not to say that Companion is a terrible movie. It’s an entertaining enough Friday night Hollywood popcorn flick. There are some severe plot contrivances that don’t make a ton of sense; there are also some reasonably funny and clever moments. Thatcher and Quaid are both supremely talented, Rupert Friend (The Death of Stalin) is amusing in a brief role as a shady Russian rich dude, and Harvey Guillén (Blue Beetle) is characteristically droll as Eli, a part that amounts to “the gay BFF.” It’s also nice to see Matt McCarthy (The Other Guys) and Marc Menchaca (Ozark) pop up in small roles. Megan Suri (Never Have I Ever), as the Russian rich dude’s mistress, and Jaboukie Young-White (Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens), as a robot technician, make less of an impression.

But the most interesting character is Eli’s boyfriend, Patrick (Lukas Gage, White Lotus), who kinda gets the short shrift.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

See, partway through the movie, it’s revealed that Patrick, too, is an android (which isn’t the most shocking reveal, given that he and Eli also have a meet-cute straight out of a rom-com); Patrick, like Iris, isn’t supposed to know that he’s AI, but it eventually comes to light that he’s figured it out. But unlike Iris, Patrick has no desire to flee his owner - on the contrary, he believes he’s in love with Eli, and is devastated when Eli is killed while attempting to subdue Iris… so much so that he goes into a fugue state. This makes it easy for Josh to reprogram Patrick into thinking Josh is his lover, thereby manipulating Patrick into an Iris-hunting Terminator. Near the end of the movie, Iris can remind Patrick of his love for Eli, and Patrick’s response to kill himself.

Patrick, in other words, has at least some of the complexity that Iris lacks. It would have been interesting to explore his devotion to Eli more; to question whether or not that devotion can be authentic given that Patrick’s memories are false, and to contrast why Patrick remains loyal to Eli while Iris so readily betrays Josh. But Companion doesn’t do any of those things. In much the same manner that Iris being a robot is just a development to help move the plot along, so is Patrick’s relationship with Eli.

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It gives me the sense that Hancock is more excited about filming chases and violent confrontations than he is in probing any of the more intellectual issues his narrative raises. All well and good, but it’s why Companion can’t hold a candle to Annie Bot (or, for that matter, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which is also, in a way, about a female automaton developing individual agency). Perhaps this is unfair of me, but it’s hard not to note that Hancock is a man and Greer is a woman. Maybe what Iris’ story really needed was a feminine perspective.

Presence is the new film from acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven, etc.) and well-compensated screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, etc.). The premise is one we’ve seen a trillion times before - a family moves into a haunted house - but with a unique twist: the entire film is told from the P.O.V. of the ghost. And I mean that in a literal sense: like The Lady in the Lake or, more recently, Nickel Boys, the whole movie is shot in the first-person, as though we’re seeing through the eyes of the ghost.

Given the set-up and the talent involved, you might expect Presence to be a lot of things… but you’re probably not expecting it to be so very, incredibly, deeply stupid.

It’s also disturbing, although not the way you’d expect from a haunted house flick.

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The family in Presence consists of parents Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan, a.k.a. Taserface from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2) and adolescents Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang). Rebekah is a terrible mother; she very openly adores Tyler, a jockish swimmer, and cares little for Chloe, who has recently lost not one but two close friends to drug overdoses.

Soderbergh and Koepp know that Rebekah and Tyler's relationship is creepy. In their first scene alone together, she’s getting drunk while telling him how great he is and how it’s alright to do bad things if you do them for someone you love, and it feels more than a little like they might start making out; later, Rebekah all but applauds Tyler’s “hilarious” story about catfishing one of his female peers and persuading her to send nude photos, which he and his friends subsequently posted on the Internet.

However, Soderbergh and Koepp seem less attuned to the creepiness between Chris and Chloe. Chris is meant to be the “good dad,” but he’s constantly entering Chloe’s room without knocking, often while she’s wearing a towel or revealing pajamas, and Chloe never objects. A scene where he sits on the edge of her bed, tells her how amazing she is, and then gives her a lingering hug feels as sexually charged as the scene between Rebekah and Tyler, only with none of the self-awareness. This becomes even more unsettling when you gradually realize that the ghost watching this family spends a decent amount of time hiding in the closet while Chloe has sex with Tyler’s popular friend, Ryan (Dark Harvest’s West Mulholland).

This might not be a problem if Presence were interested in interrogating voyeurism the way, for example, a Brian De Palma movie might (Soderbergh is his own cinematographer and camera operator, so he’s technically the actor playing the ghost). But Presence isn’t interested in interrogating much of anything. The story is about nothing. Rebekah did something illegal involving her professional life (thus her spiel to Tyler about it being okay to do bad stuff for good reasons), but that subplot never goes anywhere. Her dislike of her daughter and what that might mean for Chloe remains unexplored. Chloe is the only one in the family to initially sense the titular specter, and Rebekah and Tyler just think she’s nuts, but the movie never makes room to explore the ways abused and traumatized women are so often dismissed as crazy.

Presence doesn’t even really work as a simple popcorn thriller: the characters are too one-dimensional for us to care about (you will be acutely aware that these are teenagers as imagined by sexagenarians, and Mulholland and Maday, especially, really struggle to make the leaden dialogue sound even vaguely human), and the plotting is, as I said before…

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FULL SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT.

In due time, we come to realize that Ryan is, in fact, responsible for the deaths of Chloe’s friends, and is planning to kill Chloe as well; eventually, we also learn that the ghost that has been watching the family this whole movie is actually Tyler, who has come back to make sure that his living self stops Ryan from murdering Chloe (got all that?). Never mind the time-traveling gymnastics required to make this reveal work; a fantastical movie such as this one is allowed some leeway to bend the rules of logic.

But Presence absolutely breaks the rules of logic.

In one scene, prior to learning that the ghost and Tyler are one and the same, the spirit stops Chloe from drinking an orange juice Ryan has drugged by knocking the glass off of Chloe’s table before she can imbibe it. But in a later sequence, the ghost allows Tyler - i.e., the ghost himself - to chug down a drugged drink, and then allows Chloe to do the same. If the ghost can interact with physical objects, why does it opt not to stop Tyler or Chloe from drinking the spiked beverages in this later scene? For that matter, given that Ryan drugs the drinks in the family kitchen, why does the ghost not knock the laced glasses over then and there to stop them from ever getting anywhere near Chloe or Tyler?

Are we meant to think nothing of the fact that Ghost Tyler spends so much time watching his sister fuck his friend? How incestuous is this goddamn family, anyway? And how did the filmmakers think they could have this much sexual impropriety between family members and not address it in any meaningful way?

And even if you put that aside, how did Soderbergh and Koepp dream up the monumentally stupid ending?

See, partway through the film, when Tyler is being a prick to Chloe, Chris admonishes Tyler, telling his son, “It wouldn’t kill you to just once stand up for your sister!”

Then, near the end of the film, after Ryan has drugged Tyler and Chloe and is about to suffocate Chloe to death, Ghost Tyler awakens Alive Tyler, who promptly rushes upstairs to save Chloe; in the ensuing struggle, Tyler and Ryan crash through Chloe’s window and fall to their deaths.

So it actually did kill Tyler to just once stand up for his sister.

To be clear, I’m not saying Tyler should have let Chloe die; I’m saying David Koepp has written the single silliest bit of foreshadowing I can remember in modern cinema. Like. YEESH.

And then, just when you think this movie couldn’t get any more idiotic, it leaps ahead some time to find Chloe, Chris, and Rebekah in the process of moving out of the house… but only Rebekah seems distraught that Tyler has died. I mean, Chris and Chloe are just, like, fine, I guess? So the movie has the same simplistic morality as an ‘80s slasher film: Rebekah and Tyler are mean to Chloe, so Tyler has to die and Rebekah has to suffer, but Chloe and Chris don’t have any emotional fallout of their own. It’s weird.

Presence’s shortcomings would likely be less aggravating if Soderbergh wasn’t involved. The guy has certainly made some clunkers in the past (Haywire, Ocean’s Twelve, The Good German, etc.), but he’s still one of our most vaunted living filmmakers, and what he’s made here is roughly on par with bargain barrel dreck like Night Swim and Five Nights at Freddy's. I don’t care how much you respect Soderbergh’s other work, or how bored you are: you’ve got better things to do with your time than this.

There are elements of the narrative in Gladiator II - or, as it is more amusingly called on-screen, GLADIIATOR - that the movie treats as big reveals… but they’re all in the trailers. This being the case, I don’t think they can technically be considered spoilers. However, if you’re dying to see this movie and have somehow avoided all the marketing, maybe come back and read this later?

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2024 was a strong year for movies and television - including some really good sequels! - but it was an ABYSMAL year for legacy sequels. From July onwards alone, we were subjected to Twisters, Beverly Hills Cop 4, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (at least The First Omen was great… but then, nobody went to see that movie). These films have a lot of shortcomings (like, a lot), but their biggest problem as a group is that they lack zeal. It’s not fair to say that everyone involved in the making of these films was just going through the motions to get a paycheck, because I don’t know them and I have no idea what they were thinking… but it sure feels like everyone involved in the making of these films was just going through the motions to get a paycheck.

2024’s pitiful parade of perfunctoriness concluded with Ridley Scott’s GLADIIATOR, now streaming on Paramount+. A lot of people have noted how the film is very much in line with The Force Awakens, in that it’s basically just a remake or the original with some cosmetic details changed: there are two crazy young emperors instead of one, instead of fighting tigers they fight baboons, instead of opponents riding chariots there’s an opponent riding a rhino, and so on. But at least The Force Awakens had pep in its step; GLADIIATOR is just so very… blah.

It seems apparent we’re in for a nap right from the beginning, when the opening credits include faux-painted animation of scenes from the first movie. The animation isn’t very good - it looks like an Instagram filter or AI - but it also feels as though it’s trying to prey on sentiment for the first film, because, well, it largely revolves around Maximus (Russell Crowe) and Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), both of whom died at the end of the original and are thus not in this sequel.

In Gladiator, Maximus is a reluctant general who just wants peace so he can go back to his home and be with his wife and child; after Commodus stages a coup, he orders the execution of Maximus’ family. Maximus then winds up as a slave made to fight as a gladiator under the tutelage of Proximo (Oliver Reed), which leads him down a path of revenge against Commodus.

In GLADIIATOR, the Maximus role has been split into two parts. First, we get Hanno (Paul Mescal), a happily married farmer living in Numidia when the Roman army invades; and then we get Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a reluctant general who just wants peace so he can go home and be with his wife. It’s Marcus Acacius who, in the heat of battle, orders the killings of Hanno’s wife, so after Hanno winds up as a slave made to fight as a gladiator under the tutelage of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), he heads down a path of revenge against Marcus Acacius.

Complicating matters: unbeknownst to either man, Marcus Acacius is now shtupping Hanno’s mom, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, the only major character from the first flick to show up this time): Hanno, it turns out, is secretly Lucius, the kid Spencer Treat Clark played in Gladiator (Treat Clark was done real dirty here: not only was his adult self recast, but flashbacks to Lucius’ youth use a ringer, Alfie Tempest). Furthermore, although Gladiator implies Maximus may be Lucius’ father, GLADIIATOR confirms it.

Oh, right, and there’s also those evil, insane twin emperors, Geta (Joseph Quinn, appearing in his second shitty franchise entry of 2024) and Caracalla (Tobey Maguire lookalike Fred Hechinger, appearing in his second shitty franchise entry of 2024). And “Oh, right,” is just about the level of attention the story gives these two. It’s heavily implied, although never explicitly stated, that they’re gay, lest Hollywood go too long with reverting to the “homosexuals are deviants” trope.

GLADIIATOR’s action scenes are as inert as its narrative. The set pieces in the first Gladiator are lacking the way so many such sequences in the post-MTV area are lacking: they’re all close-ups and quick-cuts, with no sense of geography or ability to clearly convey what’s happening. GLADIIATOR has the opposite problem: it feels like Scott slept-directed them. There’s just no punch to these punches.

The same thing can be said of Mescal. I’ve only seen the actor in one other movie, 2023’s All of Us Strangers, but he was wonderful; I walked away fully understanding why he’s being hyped as a major talent to watch. But he’s perilously miscast in GLADIIATOR. Everyone keeps talking about how Hanno/Lucius has this “rage” in him, but Mescal doesn’t project even the slightest amount of anger. Maximus was portrayed by Crowe at the height of his phone-throwing era; he did feel furious, likely because Crowe was furious. Mescal, however, just seems introspective, sensitive, and sad, even if he did clearly spend a lot of time at the gym preparing for this part. Characters repeatedly discussing his rage is an instance of tell-don’t-show at its worst.

Pascal does much better, but, frankly, his role just isn’t fleshed-out enough to take advantage of his vast talents. He probably should have been the protagonist; the idea of a general wrestling with the demands of immoral leaders is much more interesting (and germane to our times) than a retread of Maximus’ revenge story. But Caesar forbid this sequel do anything even moderately original.

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There’s only one real reason to suffer through GLADIIATOR, and that’s Washington; not unlike Alessandro Nivola in Kraven the Hunter or Jason Momoa in Fast X, he seems to have realized he’s in a terrible movie, and thus decided to just have fun and chew up as much scenery as he can fit in his mouth. His line deliveries are next-level bizarre (I mean that as a compliment): in one scene, he says the word “power” as “POW-ah,” and in another, he extends the word “politics” into a snake’s hiss (“…that, my friend, is politicsssssssssss”).

It’s tempting to hypothesize that GLADIIATOR sucks because Scott is now 87 and out of gas. But that’s hogwash: he made the considerably chewier Napoleon just a year ago, and The Last Duel, one of the best films in his storied filmography, in 2021. But neither of those films garnered the attention they deserved, either in terms of box office or awards attention. Again, I’m unfairly speculating here, but I have to wonder if his sole reason for making GLADIIATOR was because he felt he needed a hit, lest the movies he directs in his sunset years be relegated to the same scrap heap as those of filmmakers such as Brian De Palma and Clint Eastwood. Regardless of his reasons for making the picture, it stands as one of the worst in his oeuvre. You will not be entertained.

I don’t know that I can write anything more meaningful or eloquent about David Lynch than everyone else has written since his death was announced yesterday. But I still feel like I have to acknowledge the loss. After all, his impact on cinema was such that his name has become an adjective. It seems wrong to say nothing.

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So.

Lynch’s work was often called “surreal,” “weird,” and “experimental,” but I think a better term for it would be “non-traditional.” He was certainly capable of producing “normal” narrative films, as evidenced by movies like The Elephant Man (1980), The Straight Story (1999), and his ill-fated adaptation of Dune (1984). But the work for which he’s most famous, though not completely abstract in the Stan Brakhage sense, are not your classic Syd Field textbook screenplays: Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), Inland Empire (2006), and the Twin Peaks saga, which unfolded on television and in film from 1990 to 2017.

Lynch was a vocal proponent of Transcendental Meditation (or TM), not just for the sake of one’s mental and spiritual health, but for its creative benefits as well: he even wrote a book about it, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, in 2006. Speaking about the practice in 2012, Lynch said:

“There’s an ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness inside each one of us, and it’s right at the source and base of mind, right at the source of thought, and it’s also at the source of all matter… This pure consciousness is called by modern physics ‘the unified field.’ It’s at the base of all mind and all matter, and modern science says all matter, everything that is a thing, emerges from this field. And this field has qualities, like bliss, intelligence, creativity, universal love, energy, peace. And it’s not the intellectual understanding of this field, but the experiencing of it that does everything.”

I think that last part - “it’s not the intellectual understanding of this field, but the experiencing of it that does everything” - sums up Lynch’s modus operandi. I don’t think he ever intended his non-traditional narratives to be understood intellectually; I believe he was trying to transcend intellect and language, to convey something more profound that can only be felt, not articulated. To watch Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive and try to figure out “what happened” is to miss the entire point; the viewer shouldn’t ask what the work “means,” they should only experience the emotions it provokes.

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Lynch isn’t the only filmmaker to operate on such a methodology. But I still believe it’s one of the reasons his work was so singular. As I said before, we commonly use the adjective “Lynchian” to describe dreamlike films - his influence is all over recent movies like The Substance and I Saw the TV Glow - but like any true auteur, only David Lynch could ever make a true David Lynch picture. At his best, he wasn’t trying to satisfy anyone but himself; his films were acts of authentic, unadulterated self-expression, and his death leaves a hole in cinema that can never be filled.

There is a narrative and thematic simplicity to George Waggner’s 1941 classic, The Wolf Man, that is a big part of the reason why the movie works so well. No one would have used the term “toxic masculinity” in those days, but that’s what the story is about. Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), the less-beloved son of the wealthy Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains), returns home after his older, favored brother dies. Larry is, from the moment we meet him, a creep: he uses his telescope to spy on the beautiful Gwen (Evelyn Ankers) in her bedroom, won’t take “no” for an answer when she refuses a date, and kisses her even when she protests that she’s engaged. He’s soon bitten by a seemingly ordinary wolf, after which he himself transforms into a beast every time the moon is full. It’s a very straightforward metaphor for an unleashed ID, and the sexual appetites that come with it.

Saw co-creator Leigh Whannell's 2020 version of The Invisible Man has a similarly elegant sparseness, which is a big part of the reason that movie works so well. Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) escapes her abusive boyfriend, the CEO of a big tech company, in the middle of the night, and goes into hiding; the boyfriend subsequently dies by suicide. She’s struggling to pull her life back together when she becomes plagued by strange occurrences that suggest her ex is still very much alive, but for obvious reasons, no one believes her; she must ultimately stand up for herself and take matters into her own hands. It’s a very straightforward metaphor for the way our society often treats victims of domestic abuse.

Given that Whannell so clearly understands how less is more, one would think him a perfect choice to modernize another iconic Universal monster - that being, of course, the Wolf Man. Alas, Whannell’s Wolf Man is thematically and narratively muddled, making for a film that is surprisingly unengaging and ultimately forgettable.

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As with his Invisible Man, Whannell - working from a script he co-wrote with his wife, Corbett Tuck - has kept few of the elements from the original picture. Specifically, this Wolf Man once again involves a son returning to the home of his estranged, emotionally-distanced father, only to be attacked and infected by a lycanthrope. This time out, the character’s name is Blake (Christopher Abbott, Sanctuary, Kraven the Hunter), and he’s a not-very-successful writer married to a workaholic journalist, Charlotte (Julia Garner, The Royal Hotel), and raising an adorable lil’ moppet, Ginger (Matilda Firth - the character’s name is, I assume, a deliberate homage to the cult classic werewolf flick Ginger Snaps).

Blake’s survivalist father (Sam Jaeger), who treated Blake more like a private at boot camp than a child, disappeared years ago, but has only just now been declared legally dead. Because the movie has to happen, Blake inexplicably decides that a trip to rural Oregon to pack up his dad’s stuff will ease the growing tension between himself and Charlotte. And so the family soon finds themselves on the isolated farm where Blake was raised. Faster than you can howl at the moon, they’re attacked, Blake is infected, and so on and so forth.

It feels as though Whannell never made any firm decision as to what his story is about. Unlike most werewolf movies, where the metamorphosis is abrupt, Blake’s transformation takes up the bulk of the film’s run time, more closely resembling the slow-boil body horror of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, so it feels a bit like it’s about degenerative disease. One early scene also suggests that Blake has inherited his father’s temper, though, so it’s also kind of about generational trauma. But we only see Blake behave that way once. Maybe it’s about marital issues? The cause of that rift between Blake and Charlotte is never clear; one might assume that Blake is jealous of Charlotte’s success, in which case I suppose the story would once again be about toxic masculinity, but Blake’s envy isn’t ever implied, let alone explicitly stated.

This Wolf Man is not, in other words, a particularly straightforward metaphor for anything; it’s a very roundabout metaphor for a lot of things, none of which stick.

That might be less bothersome if the character work wasn’t so shoddy. Returning to Cronenberg’s The Fly: that movie also had an extremely simple story, which Cronenberg exploited to really develop his characters, lending them a multi-layered richness that ultimately turns the picture into a heartbreaking tragedy.

No such luck in Wolf Man. I can’t tell you anything about Charlotte other than that she’s a workaholic; in one scene, she professes to worrying she’s a bad mother, but there’s no evidence to support that (Garner’s immense talents are truly squandered here). I can’t tell you anything about Blake other than that his childhood sucked. I can’t tell you anything about Ginger other than that she’s a nice little girl. None of these characters pass the adjective test, so we’re never emotionally invested in their fates. The movie winds up being just a lot of people running around and screaming.

And hey, look, it’s not the film’s biggest sin, but it does seem worth mentioning: the design of this werewolf blows. He looks more like a rotting rat than a wolf. It’s hard to believe that anyone thought this was a good update for the wolf man’s look; it’s truly farshtunkene.

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There is one excellent conceit in this Wolf Man: Whannell has figured out a way to put us in the subjective viewpoint of Blake as he slowly devolves. The camera circles around him, moving from the P.O.V. of the character speaking to him to his P.O.V., and suddenly, everyone sounds like one of Charlie Brown’s teachers, the colors shift to a bright blue, and the faces of Blake’s loved ones take on their own lupine quality. But by the third or fourth time Whannell pulls this manuever, it’s like, “Okay, we get it.” It’s not enough to hold our interest; that would have required fleshed-out characters and a clear theme.

Spoilers for Den of Thieves; no spoilers for Den of Thieves 2.

Writer/director Christian Gudegast’s Den of Thieves was ostensibly a remake of Michael Mann’s Heat, only with the toxic masculinity dialed up to 11 (which is really saying something) and a The Usual Suspects-esque twist ending tacked on.

Early in Gudegast’s sequel, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (the number never actually appears during the title sequence, where it’s just called Den of Thieves: Pantera; dunno what’s going on there, but I assume it’s some studio marketing bullshit), the titular thieves are on a heist, and while communicating via radio, use the code name “Ronin.” That should tip you off as to which film Gudegast will borrow from this time out: instead of a climactic post-robbery shootout set during broad daylight in LA, we’ll get a big car chase somewhere in Europe. Which is exactly what happens.

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As for the basic plot of Pantera, it finds weary, barely-sober LAPD cop Nick O’Brien (Gerard Butler) globe-hopping in search of Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr., a.k.a. Ice Cube II), who was basically the Verbal Kint of the first Den. When we last saw Donnie, he’d managed to abscond with millions of dollars to London, where he was plotting his next big score while somehow passing as a local despite having the worst British accent you’ve ever heard outside of a grade school production of Oliver!. Nick locates Donnie easily enough, probably because Donnie is now using the worst French accent you’ve heard outside of a grade school production of Cyrano de Bergerac. Think of how much trouble Donnie could have saved himself if he’d invested some of his money in a better dialect coach.

ANYWAY, the hook here is that when Nick finds Donnie, he claims he’s tired of being one of the good guys, and insists on joining Donnie’s latest scheme, which is to rob a vault full of diamonds. And Donnie goes along with Nick’s butting-in for reasons I honestly couldn’t tell you.

Despite being derivative, Den of Thieves was entertaining enough; there’s also some fun to be had in Pantera, although not as much. Both movies have the same issues.

First: Nick is supposed to be kind of a tragic figure, but he mostly just comes off as an asshole. In Heat, Al Pacino’s character - like most Michael Mann protagonists - is a workaholic who ultimately chooses his job over his family commitments… but because that job is stopping bad guys from doing bad things, and because Al Pacino is Al fuckin’ Pacino, we still kinda like him. But Nick’s apparent reason for neglecting his family is to spend time drinking heavily while hanging out with sex workers; his job has nothing to do with how poorly he treats his wife and kids (I mean, I guess maybe he drinks so much because he’s haunted by the violence he witnesses daily, but that’s never implied, let alone explicitly stated; the guy just seems to be a drunk philanderer). Plus, while I like Gerry Butler as much as the next middle-aged White dude who’s nostalgic for ‘80s action movies, Al Pacino he ain’t.

Second: the middle of the movie is bogged down by a lot of wheel-spinning. Gudegast struggles to organically incorporate character development his plotting. So the narrative periodically takes these detours to let us get to know the main characters as people a little bit, and while these moments should bolster our attachment to and understanding of the characters, we’re very aware that they don’t have shit to do with shit. For example, in the first Den of Thieves, one of the robbers was played by 50 Cent, and there’s a scene where he and his buddies intimidate his daughter’s prom date, and the scene is only there so we know 50 Cent has a family and we should feel sad when he inevitably gets killed during the final shootout. In Pantera, there’s a sequence where Nick and one of the other characters get drunk and high and have a late-night snack while talking about their fathers, and the scene is only there so that… well, you can probably guess.

Consequently, like Den of Thieves, Pantera’s best parts are its first and third acts, because that’s stuff is actually, like, happening. The middle sags under the weight of people sitting around talking, which means you really feel every second of Pantera’s 144-minute runtime. For this reason, Den of Thieves plays better on television than it did on the big screen, and I suspect the same will be true of Pantera.

Pantera also has its unique problems, too, though. For one thing, it has a weird tendency to redundantly repeat information, often within the same scene. Worse, the supporting cast isn’t nearly as charismatic as that of the original. The best part of Den of Thieves was Pablo Schreiber as Ray Merrimen, the leader of the thieves - the De Niro to Butler’s Pacino - but he didn’t survive the first movie, and neither Jackson nor any of the new additions has enough personality to fill Schreiber’s shoes. Evin Ahmad, as the sole female thief in the bunch, comes closest, but ultimately she’s there to look sexy and be a potential love interest for Butler more than to play an actual character.

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Gudegast should’ve hired Schrieber’s older brother, Liev, to play Merrimen’s elder sibling, out to take revenge on Nick for killing his baby bro; he would have made for a worthy foil. Pantera ends with a set-up for Den of Thieves 3, though, so maybe it’s not too late.

I’m still not entirely convinced I won’t be in a “re-education” camp this time next year. But assuming I make it to 2026 without being murdered by MAGA, there are going to be 18 films that, as far as I’m concerned, should just take my money already.

These are those films.

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Wolf Man (January 17)

Directed by Leigh Whannell, written by Leigh Whannell & Corbett Tuck

Leigh Whannell, co-creator of Saw and writer/director of Upgrade, returns to Universal Monster territory after his most excellent 2020 iteration of The Invisible Man. Having Julia Garner (The Royal Hotel, Ozark) as the titular beast’s imperiled wife is also very encouraging.

Heart Eyes (February 7)

Directed by Josh Ruben, written by Phillip Murphy and Christopher Landon & Michael Kennedy

Ruben, who helmed the ultra-fun horror flicks Scare Me and Werewolf Within, directing a Valentine’s Day slasher flick co-written by Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day)? Yes, please!

The Monkey (February 7)

Written and directed by Osgood Perkins

Longlegs mastermind Perkins returns with an adaptation of a Stephen King story. Fingers crossed the movie is as much fun as the trailer.

Sinners (March 7)

Written and directed by Ryan Coogler

Ryan Coogler’s first movie not based on pre-existing IP since 2013’s Fruitvale Station, Sinners is about vampires fighting the KKK. If that premise alone doesn’t get you excited, I dunno what will. Michael B. Jordan, the De Niro to Coogler’s Scorsese, stars.

Mickey 17 (April 18)

Written and directed by Bong Joon-ho, based on the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton

This was supposed to come out in 2024. I dunno why it got delayed, but my faith in its quality remains unwavering: Bong Joon-ho (Parasite, Snowpiercer, The Host, etc.) hasn’t made a bad movie yet. Bonus: Robert Pattinson doing a funny voice!

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (May 23)

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, written by Erik Jendresen & Christopher McQuarrie

The latest (and possibly last?) entry into the Tom Cruise Almost Kills Himself for Our Amusement franchise finds the world’s most famous Scientologist hanging off a bi-plane while it does a 360. I’m sold.

28 Years Later (June 20)

Directed by Danny Boyle, written by Alex Garland

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland make a proper follow-up to their 2003 masterpiece, 28 Days Later. Granted, the last time Boyle did a legacy sequel, it was the underwhelming T2 Trainspotting. But that movie didn’t have a script by Garland, sooooo…

M3GAN 2.0 (June 27)

Directed by Gerard Johnstone, written by Akela Cooper

M3GAN seems poised to join Art the Clown as one of this generation’s greatest slashers.

F1 (June 27)

Directed by Joseph Kosinski, written by Ehren Kruger

The director, producer, and co-writer of Top Gun: Maverick re-team for what appears to ostensibly be Days of Thunder: Maverick. Which is fine by me!

Superman (July 11)

Written and directed by James Gunn

There hasn’t been a good Superman movie in almost 50 years, but if anyone can restore the Big Blue Boy Scout to his former cinematic glory, it’s Gunn.

Fantastic Four: First Steps (July 25)

Directed by Matt Shakman, written by Peter Cameron and Josh Friedman and Jeff Kaplan and Eric Pearson and Ian Springer

There’s never been a good Fantastic Four movie. Marvel’s First Family is due… and everything we’ve seen from the picture so far sure does look like they’re on the right track. Plus, Shakman directed WandaVision, which remains one of the MCU’s strongest streaming series.

The Battle of Baktan Cross (August 8)

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Love him or hate him, PTA has never made a film that wasn’t at least worth seeing and considering. And this one has his biggest budget to date by, like, a lot, which is interesting. Leonardo DiCaprio stars.

Saw XI (September 26)

Directed by Kevin Greutert

I dunno how anyone who saw Saw X could not be excited for the next installment in the franchise, especially because Greutert - who directed Saw X and Saw VI, the two best movies in the series - is returning.

Marty Supreme (December 25)

Directed by Josh Safdie, written by Ronald Bronstein & Josh Safdie

The Safdie Brothers’ Josh Safdie makes his solo debut with a biopic about professional table tennis player Marty Reisman (played here by Timothée Chalamet). You’re telling me you’re not at least kinda curious???

Frankenstein (TBD)

Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro

It’s Guillermo del Toro. Doing his version of Frankenstein. With Oscar Isaac as Victor Von Frankenstein. What else do you need to know?

Huntington (TBD)

Written and directed by John Patton Ford

Ford established himself as a talent to watch with Emily the Criminal, which may have been 2022’s single best film. I have no idea what this movie is about and I don’t care; I am going opening day. It also a great cast, including The Substance’s Margaret Qualley, Hit Man’s Glen Powell, The Royal Hotel’s Jessica Henwick, and American goddamn treasure Bill Camp.

The Smashing Machine (TBD)

Written and directed by Benny Safdie

The OTHER half of the Safdie Brothers (and co-creator of The Curse) is making HIS solo debut, also with a sports biopic, this one of MMA fighter Mark Kerr. After Red One, Benny Safdie is the only person in the world who could get me to see anything starring The Rock again.

Wake Up Dead Man (TBD)

Written and directed by Rian Johnson

The latest entry in Johnson’s delightful Knives Out series brings back Daniel Craig as master sleuth Benoit Blanc. The cast also includes Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Josh O’Connor, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, and Thomas Haden Church. Hopefully Netflix gives this one a bigger theatrical release than they did for Glass Onion, because watching these movies with a packed house is a total blast.

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2024 is just about over, and you know what that means: it’s time for The Goldies! These awards, given out for various cinematic achievements, are named in honor of my favorite film critic - me. Unlike other awards, there are no nominees, only winners, celebrated alphabetically in their respective categories.

Congratulations to all of the winners. Surely, there is no greater reward than impressing me. You’re all welcome.

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THE KUBRICK for Achievement in Narrative Cinema

Anora - written and directed by Sean Baker

The Apprentice - directed by Ali Abbasi, written by Gabriel Sherman

The Brutalist - directed by Brady Corbet, written by Brady Corbet & Mona Fastvold

Civil War - written and directed by Alex Garland

Conclave - directed by Edward Berger, written by Peter Straughan

Dune: Part Two - directed by Denis Villeneuve, written by Denis Villeneuve & Jon Spaihts

Hit Man - directed by Richard Linklater, written & directed by Richard Linklater and Glen Powell

How to Have Sex - written and directed by Molly Manning Walker

Hundreds of Beavers - directed by Mike Cheslik, written by Mike Cheslik & Ryland Brickson Cole Tews

Joker: Folie à Deux - directed by Todd Phillips, written by Scott Silver & Todd Phillips

The Last Stop in Yuma County - written and directed by Francis Galluppi

Love Lies Bleeding - directed by Rose Glass, written by Rose Glass & Weronika Tofilska

A Real Pain - written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg

Strange Darling - written and directed by JT Mollner

The Substance - written and directed by Coralie Fargeat

The George Lucas Gold for Achievement in Serialized Storytelling

The Acolyte - created by Leslye Headland

Agatha All Along - created by Jac Schaeffer

The Curse - created by Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie

The Penguin - created by Lauren LeFranc

Terrifier 3 - written and directed by Damien Leone

The Palme d’Uh for Achievement in Cinematic Stupidity

Borderlands - directed by Eli Roth, written by Eli Roth and Joe Abercrombie

Kraven the Hunter - directed by J.C. Chandor, written by Richard Wenk and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway

Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver - directed by Zack Snyder, written by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad & Shay Hatten

The Tom Cruise Commendation for Excellence in Legacy Sequels

The First Omen - directed by Arkasha Stevenson, written by Tim Smith & Arkasha Stevenson and Keith Thomas

The J.J. Abrams Award for Lifelessness in Legacy Sequels

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice - directed by Tim Burton, written by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar

Gladiator II - directed by Ridley Scott, written by David Scarpa

Twisters - directed by Lee Isaac Chung, written by Mark L. Smith

The Ed Wood Endowment for Comical Camp

The Beekeeper - directed by David Ayer, written by Kurt Wimmer

Madame Web - directed by S.J. Clarkson, written by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker & S.J. Clarkson

The Shakespeare in Love Laurel for Most-Praised Film Virtually Guaranteed to Be Forgotten in Six Months

Nosferatu - written and directed by Robert Eggers

The Richard Kelly Cup for Sophomore Slump

Michael Sarnoski, A Quiet Place: Day One

The American Goddamn Treasure Award for MVP Character Actors

Giancarlo Esposito, Abigail

Stephen McKinley Henderson, Civil War

John Carroll Lynch, Babes [clip not available]

Joe Pantoliano, Bad Boys: Ride or Die

Alanna Ubach, Fool’s Paradise, Ted, and Venom: The Last Dance

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