SHELTER

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Much like Gerard Butler in his B-movie quality disaster flicks, Jason Statham has really carved out his niche in January-release action thrillers. It all started with the surprisingly fun The Beekeeper, which set the standard in 2024 thanks to its self-awareness as revenge trash, which somehow made it good. Now, last year’s A Working Man failed to meet that standard by being far too self-serious and thereby sucking out any chance of fun. (Also that one was actually released in March, but its original release date before being postponed was in January so I’ve decided it counts. Plus it still very much has that forgettable-January-action-thriller vibe. It should have been released in January.) With Shelter, we get a movie that sits kind of in the middle: it’s not as self-aware or quite as fun as The Beekeeper, but neither is it as gravely self-serious as A Working Man. It does have its comedic moments, thanks to a charming performance by a 14-year-old Bodhi Rae Breathnach. This plus Statham’s typical no-nonsense violence makes Shelter just compelling enough.

2026 is shaping up to be a banner year for early releases that are far better than anyone would reasonably expect them to be. Sam Raimi’s Send Help is the best example of this and the one film of this ilk most deserving of recommendation, but Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple would also qualify. Shelter is perhaps the weakest of these examples by just a slight margin, but it could also be argued that it makes the strongest case for delivering exactly what you expect of it. In any case, January and February have long been referred to as “Dumpuary” for good reason, but some filmmakers are figuring out how to make movies that fit into the genres usually reserved for this time of year but that are also actually good.

To be fair, Shelter is hardly great, but no one is expecting greatness from it, which is a key element of movies made not just simply to entertain, but to entertain simply. Statham’s previous two films featured his protagonist characters on a revenge quest, but this time director Ric Roman Waugh (who, as it happens, also directed the original Gerard Butler B-movie disaster flick Greenland) and writer Ward Parry give him a new twist this year: he’s still on a quest, but now he’s aiming to protect her from a British government that considers her a “loose end” in the framing of him as a former shadow MI6 agent.

The story and character motivations are pretty simple. Mason (Statham) has been exiled on a remote island, in hiding from a government that won’t forgive him for refusing to kill an innocent man who had worked as an informant. A man who once served with him regularly brings supplies out to him from the mainland, and has started bringing his niece, Jesse (Breathnach), along with him. And this is how Mason and Jesse meet, as she delivers the crates of supplies by rowboat from the main boat to the shore, but gets stranded on the island with him thanks to a severe rainstorm. A surprising amount of time is spent on these two alone on the island together, as Mason helps nurse Jesse’s injured ankle back to health. But when Mason is forced to take a boat to the mainland himself in order to get needed medical supplies, the British government’s far-ranging surveillance state picks him up on one of the infinite number of cameras they have access to (in this case, in the background of a TikTok video—topical!). And now, with the government alerted to his location, they descend upon the island, and this is when the action can kick into high gear.

But, does it? I’ll be fair and say there is plenty of action on Shelter, but given the kind of movie this is, I kind of wanted a little more. This movie lingers on its quiet periods a bit more than necessary. This clearly isn’t high art, so let’s just get on with what we’ve come here for. That said, a lot of the violence that does happen is pretty problematic—Shelter is wildly cavalier about collateral damage. It never seems to matter to Mason that the people he’s attacking often likely have no idea that he doesn’t really deserve what they’re attempting to do to him, and he dispatches countless numbers of them, like Star Trek “red shirts.” There is one singular villain in the hired assassin (Bally Gill) sent to kill both Mason and Jesse by the head of the shadow group Mason was once a part of (played by Bill Nighy), and we do get one moment when Mason asks him, in the middle of their climactic fight, “Do you even know why you’re doing this?” His answer: “It doesn’t matter.” Oh, he must have been reading the studio notes. This movie is less interested in providing Mason the answer to that question than in giving Mason a reason to kill everyone that gets in his way in cinematically clever ways.

I still enjoyed this movie, I want to make clear—again, it has no pretensions about what kind of movie it is. I did find it distracting how often a character would be driving a car and looking at the passenger, or at their phone, a recklessly long amount of time without looking at the road. This happens three or four times. Eyes on the road, people! I know you’re probably actually on a soundstage, but that’s no excuse.

These nitpicks would make Shelter far less fun to watch if not for the solid casting of Jason Statham, who was born to play these roles in his fifties, and Bodhi Rae Breathnach, who has easy chemistry with him (she also plays the older daughter in Hamnet, proving she has versatility as a young actor). Shelter isn’t going to blow anyone away or even exceed anyone’s expectations, but it will deliver on its promise as a B-grade action thriller.

You’ll root for this odd couple in an action movie that is just fine.

Overall: B

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER

Directing: B
Acting: A
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B-

There’s a lot to love about The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s feature directorial debut. I just didn’t love all of it. I can see how it might work in its entirety for other people, but its endlessly quick and random cuts in the editing grew tiresome for me, as did the incessant voiceover, poetic as it might be.

Stewart also wrote the script, adapting from the memoir of the same name by Lidia Yuknavitch. This makes it a little harder to groan at yet another movie about someone working through astonishing traumas, as it’s based on real-life events. Suffice it to say that Lidia’s father is a deeply horrible person. Maybe the source text does a better job of explaining the logic in this, but I found myself astonished to find Lidia, and her older sister Claudia, kept him in their lives even after they grew up. Trust me, based on everything we see here, he deserves to be discarded and forgotten.

I suppose I could just be speaking from my own experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse—something that is not even quite clear is going on in The Chronology of Water for a while. Stewart presents a highly stylized story, shots in all awkward angles or extreme close-ups. Lidia doesn’t even state plainly to anyone that her father was sexually abusive until the last act of the film. We all deal with trauma in specific and individual ways, I guess, and this was how Lidia did it—first by finding the release of self-reflection through writing, and later, apparently, through the dreamlike lens of fractured memories. Or at least that’s the way it’s filtered through Kristen Stewart’s lenses.

The Chronology of Water begins with quite a stretch of this kind of dreamily fractured presentation, dialogue either minimal or nonexistent. It tested my patience a little, to be honest. There comes a point where an actual narrative comes int focus, but it’s some time before that happens. I get what this movie is going for, I guess—there’s a sense of being inside Lidia’s mind, prone to addiction and self-destruction, repressed memories brought back by specific triggers. There’s a challenge to this experience, and your mileage may vary when it comes to its effectiveness.

For me, what saves The Chronology of Water is the performances. Imogen Poots is a revelation as Lidia, unsurpassed by any other performance in awards contention this year. Thora Birch is incredible, and slightly underused, as Claudia, Lidia’s revered older sister who leaves home to save herself even though it means leaving Lidia behind. There’s a curious element to the relationship to these sisters, where you might expect Lidia to grow up resenting her for leaving her in the sights of their disgustingly horrid father, but it is established early on how Lidia worships Claudia—”You were mythic to me,” she later tells her. It would seem that never quite went away.

As you might imagine, water figures prominently in the story here, though I still left the movie not quite understanding the phrasing. But, Lidia is a competitive swimmer, who is offered multiple partial scholarships, all of which her father (played by Michael Epp, an unsettling combination of handsome and creepy) dismisses by declaring it means she’s “not good enough.” Eventually her mother (Susannah Flood), who is usually totally checked out, comes through and gets her off to college. “I almost loved her,” Lidia says, in voiceover. But after Lidia squanders her potential as a swimmer with drug and alcohol abuse, she eventually finds writing as an outlet, and the plot turns yet again. There are several scenes with Jim Belushi as novelist and mentor Ken Kesey, and he is also fantastic.

To Kristen Stewart’s credit, a whole lot of detail gets packed into 128 minutes, and it manages not to feel overstuffed—occasionally difficult to follow, but the broader arcs are easier to register. The performances in this film are the strongest argument for seeing it, and that consistency across the cast is an indicator of Stewart’s talents. I have to admit, I really sold her short back in the Twilight days. (To be fair, it’s still true that her performances were shit in those movies.) This is a woman who has truly broadened her horizons and effectively diversified what she has to offer—and, in the right hands, is actually an amazing actor herself (consider Spencer, my favorite film of 2021). Clearly she knows what great acting is, and can coax it out of others.

It’s the technical stuff I’m less convinced by. It’s not incompetence, to be clear: it’s easy to tell that all the choices here are very intentional and thought through. They just made much of The Chronology of Water, particularly in the beginning, feel inaccessible. I felt pretty detached from this movie for the first quarter or so of it, and that’s more than enough time to lose a lot of people. I’m hesitant to say you should stick it out, but in the end I was glad I did.

Imogen Poots is amazing in this movie that is otherwise a bit of a mixed bag.

Overall: B

SEND HELP

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-
Special Effects: B

Here is a movie that works incredibly well even though the special effects are not quite perfect. Why? Because Sam Raimi understands good writing, good pacing, and delivering the goods. Send Help has no pretensions, spends no time trying to convince us something it’s not, and then is so well executed it rises above its knowing, trash-entertainment premise. If Sam Raimi had directed 9 to 5, a movie so old now that anyone under the age of 40 probably doesn’t know what the hell it is (look it up, you won’t regret it), it might have been a lot more like Send Help. Come to think of it 9 to 5 and Send Help would make a spectacular double feature.

And this is quite the comeback: Send Help is Raimi’s best film since Spider-Man 2, which was released in 2004. I lot of people really liked the unique touch he brought to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but I didn’t think it was that great—ditto Oz the Great and Powerful. But with Send Help, we see Sam Raimi going back to his roots. And by that I mean pre-Spider-Man, fun-gory roots.

Everything Send Help does, it does incredibly well. This would be an absolute blast to go in blind, as it begins in an corporate office setting, Linda Liddle (a spectacular Rachel McAdams) being a talented worker with no people skills who is dealing with people taking credit for her work, and Bradley Preston (a superbly cast Dylan O'Brien) coming in to take over his late father’s job as the new boss and bluntly telling Linda why he’s offering his frat buddy the job that had been promised to her. Between Anna Cahill’s costume design and McAdams’s performance, Linda’s “awkward frumpiness” is laid on really thick—these scenes are so deeply and so effectively awkward that they made me want to hide under my chair more than any of the horrors we see later in the movie. And best of all, at this point, unless you’ve seen the trailer, you have no idea what’s coming. Someone going in blind would still think this is, say, an awkward office comedy, something akin to a contemporary take on Office Space, perhaps.

And boy, would you be wrong. Of course, you might also wonder why they handed out 3D glasses when you walk in. At least, I did: the AMC booking said nothing about this being a 3D movie. But when Bradley and Linda are on the same flight to Bangkok and there’s suddenly a spectacular plane crash sequence, the 3D starts to make sense. Except, to be honest, I’m certain I would have enjoyed the sequence—and the entire movie—just as much in 2D, perhaps even more. This is here some of the special effects show their seams, but the entire sequence is so well staged, and critically, features so much gruesome humor, the quality of the effects hardly even matter. It really is true that it’s not the size of the budget, it’s how you use it.

Here are the only other things you need to know. Bradley is a douche at his core and he’s a pompous idiot. Linda is a survivalist who once auditioned for the actual show Survivor, and she has skills both in and out of the office that put Bradley to shame. And what becomes increasingly clear is that they would both go to great lengths to achieve their selfish aims—and by “great” I mean “horrifying.”

It was smart to cast Dylan O'Brien in this part for many reasons, but not least of them is his relatively scrawny physique. He’d still be physically stronger than Linda under normal circumstances, but he also spends much of the story being nursed to health after an injury. This levels the playing field when it comes to brute strength, but Linda has the upper hand in the skills department, while Bradley takes some time to register that he’s not the boss anymore. As the story unfolds, it becomes a battle of wills in which they are constantly upping the ante, to the point where they are beginning to literally tear each other apart.

There’s something special about the graphic violence in Send Help. On one level, it’s cartoonish; on another level, it’s just-enough over the top to become effectively comical. I seem to have a weakness for hilarious violence, of which there is plenty in this movie. And yet, Raimi actually employs it sparingly—as this film masterfully convinces you it has slipped into a pleasant dramedy about how two office adversaries learn to get along under extraordinary circumstances. And then, suddenly, one of them reveals one deception or another, and the other one steps further over the line. And it’s always in ways you don’t see coming, like the gouging an eye, or what appears to be castration. I’m barely scratching the surface here. Just ask that eyeball.

Send Help would have been a blast without it, but we even get the most delightful twist near the end. It’s almost shocking how well everything works in this movie, because it’s such a “trash entertainment” premise. But the writing, by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, truly elevates the material, and the inspired casting choices really make the difference. This is a movie that could have been garbage, and in fact it was given a release date usually given to garbage. But this is what a genuinely good January release can and should be—spectacularly well-executive entertainment. I couldn’t have asked for a better time at the movies.

Help is not coming, Bradley.

Overall: B+

H IS FOR HAWK

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A
Editing: B+

One might be forgiven for watching H Is for Hawk and saying: We all experience grief, I get it! How many films in recent years have tackled the subject of grief, in one way or anther? And, across genres—countless horror films in particular, presented as “a metaphor” for grief. Grief, grief, grief! Bad grief, weird grief. Good grief!

Well, here’s the thing. I was much more taken with H Is for Hawk that I expected to be. And when it comes to grief, it really cannot be repeated too many times that everyone deals with grief in different ways, all of them correct. In this case, it’s quite the specific expression of grief: college professor and avid birder Helen (a wonderful Claire Foy) gets herself a goshawk to take care of as a massive distraction from dealing with the death of her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson, not given nearly enough screen time, most of which is in flashbacks of Helen’s memories). She lets the massive challenge of taking care of this bird of prey keep her from confronting her emotions, plummeting herself into a deep depression.

I went in thinking, based on the trailer, that this would be a story about a woman who adopts a bird and the experience helps her through her grief. But, it’s actually the opposite: she uses the bird as an excuse not to confront her grief. This does make for a pretty fascinating story, even as her mother (Lindsay Duncan), her brother (Josh Dylan), and especially her close friend Christina (Denise Gough, in quite the departure from her iconically villainous performance as Dedra in Andor) look on helplessly, and attempt to reach out to Helen with increasing futility.

This would all be compelling enough, honestly, but I must mention cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, because so much of H Is for Hawk is beautifully, stunningly shot. Helen spends a lot of time building trust with the hawk she pointlessly names Mabel, building up to taking her out to fields and forests where the bird can hunt. This film features several scenes of Mabel hunting, and they are absolutely incredible, with some shots defying the imagination. I cannot find any information on whether CGI was used in this film, only reports of the painstaking manners in which cameras were camouflaged to pick up the birds they used for filming. Several stunning shots are in perfect focus of the bird in flight, though, and one memorable shot has the camera trailing the bird in flight—I can’t imagine how they did that practically, but it absolutely looks real. For an indie British drama about a woman denying her grief, they went truly above and beyond with the visuals in this film, to a far greater degree than they needed to. But it left me deeply impressed.

The questions it raises about keeping wild animals in captivity is perhaps another story. H Is for Hawk is impressively frank and objective in how it avoids any anthropomorphization of a bird of prey, and even Helen as a character is quick to clarify that this is a species that does not feel affection. Helen holds no illusions about how Mabel feels about her, and I love that about how this story is told—but, Helen also allows herself to get far too attached to Mabel. There’s even a moment when Christina says to her, “I think you might be overidentifying with Mabel.” Helen responds by saying she’s certain she is not, even though she clearly is.

But, beyond all that—why buy the bird to begin with? When Helen buys the bird, she meets the seller on a pier, and Christine, who is with her, says, “This feels like a drug deal.” Indeed. Conversely, H Is for Hawk features a memorable scene in which Helen is giving a public talk about Mabel, and a dipshit young man attempts to take her to task for “killing for fun,” as if a natural predator is just hunting for kicks. Helen is memorably struck between defending the bird of prey hunt as a natural act and getting flustered due to her state of grief. But what I often thought about, and what the film does not ever directly address, is whether any of this is actually good for the bird itself.

I can’t say that affected my appreciation for the story being told here, however. To what degree a film like this might upset conservationists, I have no idea. My focus remains on the fact that Helen is making ill-advised choices in the thick of grieving the loss of her father, and this is done incredibly well. I am frankly not a fan of any birds, and this movie gave me a new appreciation for them, so there’s that. I suppose we could have a separate conversation about the ethics of how the birds were used in the filming of this movie, and arguably we should have just left the source text of Helen Macdonald’s autobiographical book of the same name at that. To my mind, I am only here to judge what is onscreen, and ultimately, H Is for Hawk just really worked for me.

Helen (Claire Foy) walks her unconscious distraction through the streets of Cambridge.

Overall: B+

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Music: B+

The Testament of Ann Lee is a musical like none other. It’s almost like a musical on a technicality: it has people breaking out into song, for sure, but nothing lyrical or catchy. Instead, it repurposes actual, 18th-century Shaker hymns. The voices, especially that of Amanda Seyfried as the title character, are angelic. But, they are only ever used as a tool to convey deep piety and faith. There is even dancing, but in a sort of physical version of speaking in tongues—the faithful allowing the spirit to move them.

There is a curious and fascinating element to this film, in that it never casts judgment on Ann Lee or her followers. One might even be tempted to call her a cult leader, but we only see the story through her experiences. This is a woman who bore four children, all of whom died before reaching the age of one. The one sex scene that is included features Ann Lee and her husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott), is early in their marriage, and completely devoid of tenderness or sensuality. Abraham is weirdly obsessed with a ritualistic act in which he whacks Ann Lee on the ass with a sort of broom of switches. It’s unclear to me whether there was some genuinely devotional aspect to this, or if he was just looking for an excuse to engage in a particular kink.

Whatever the case, Ann Lee clearly does not enjoy sex—whether because she’s never had it with her own pleasure in mind or because she’s simply not into it at all is perhaps an open question—and, as she allows herself to become the prophet of a religious movement, she makes celibacy a central tenet of their belief. You cannot be close to go when engaging in the pleasures of the flesh, that sort of thing. I would argue the opposite, but whatever. My life experience is nothing like this woman’s.

There’s something very odd, and detached, almost impenetrable, about The Testament of Ann Lee. It feels like the kind of “high minded” film that regular filmgoers just aren’t going to get. I felt like I barely got it myself. It has an excellent lead performance in Amanda Seyfried, solid performances among the rest of the cast, scenes that are very well shot, beautifully performed music that is otherwise fairly inaccessible to modern audiences. It’s the story itself that seems to aspire to greatness without quite getting there. I can easily imagine a select few people finding this film to be an amazing experience, but I could never fully connect with it.

This may just be a personal thing. While director Mona Fastvold, who cowrote the script with The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet, never cast judgement on the “Shakers” (so named because of how they dance in religious ecstasy), neither do they explicitly endorse them. The story is narrated, a little too much for my taste, by Ann Lee’s close friend Mary (Thomasin McKenzie), with clear reverence for her. We also see Ann Lee’s rise as a religious figure, from Manchester to New York, looked upon by Abraham with utter befuddlement. There’s a scene in which he demands she perform her wifely duties and I feared it would take a dark turn, which thankfully it doesn’t—although what he then does right in front of her is not much better. We’re clearly not meant to be on his side, but I never felt compelled to take her side either, at least not as a religious figure claiming to be the Second Coming of Christ in female form.

This is simply a telling of her story. Ann Lee certainly does suffer some serious hardships, over many years, from the deaths of all her infant children to a horrifying and degrading attack by neighboring locals in New England. There are suggestions of Ann Lee being a witch, but only somewhat in passing. I won’t spoil the age to which she lived, even though it’s a matter of historical record, but I found myself surprised by it. This is a film that follows her from childhood to her death, making it quite definitively a biopic. I’m not a huge fan of life-spanning biopics, and even here it seems like huge swaths of her life get gleaned over. And yet, clocking in at 137 minutes, the style of the storytelling often makes it feel like a bit of a slog.

Much of The Testament of Ann Lee is like an immersion into her psyche. Sometimes a religious-themed film is something conservative Christians can take as an extension of their own faith, but that does not seem likely here. I think Ann Lee is likely to be as alienating to faithful Christians as she would be to those of us who practice no religion at all. This is still a compelling idea, given that the movement she led is a variation on longstanding Christian beliefs from her own culture. It’s so insulated in this way that this film barely touches on her disdain for slavery when she witnesses it for the first time in New York, and we see just one shot of Shakers interacting with an Indigenous man. Surely there are countless nuanced implications here, especially considering this was a group of White people migrating from Britain to the “New World,” but Fastvold isn’t much interested in examining them.

This is all about Ann Lee, and her unquestioning faith in God—her God, anyway. She’s careful to state that people should join them of their own free will, but should they break the rules, they are cast out. One wonders if Ann Lee had a mental health disorder. It’s impossible to say, as this was so long ago that The Testament of Ann Lee essentially amounts of speculative fiction. A fair amount of that speculation is fascinating to me from an intellectual standpoint, but as narrative storytelling I found it to be just slightly less than the sum of its parts.

Overall: B

28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

Lest we forget, after four movies, there are technically no zombies in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. They’re called the infected. And by this film, they are almost incidental. They’re just a normal part of the landscape, something the skilled survivors on the abandoned island of Great Britain dispatch with dispassionate ease—good guys and bad guys alike.

Although Alex Garland wrote and directed 28 Years Later, released just last June, and returning after having written the original 2002 Danny Boyle film 28 Days Later (I guess we’re all expected to just ignore 28 Weeks Later, released in 2007 and written and directed by neither of them—but still pretty good), Garland once again only wrote the script for The Bone Temple; the director now is Nia DaCosta, who directed Candyman in 2021, giving her horror bona fides, as well as The Marvels in 2023, giving her, let’s say, attempted-blockbuster bona fides. It would seem that The Bone Temple is DaCosta’s most critically acclaimed work to date by a healthy margin, and I would say she’s suited well enough for the project.

I found last year’s 28 Years Later to be compelling but flawed, with very high highs (including some stellar cinematography) and some very low lows, including the coda at the end which I still maintain was dumb as shit, when young Spike (the excellent Aflie Williams) is saved from attacking infected by a group of kids doing parkour off of rocks. The only appropriate response to that was: What the fuck is this shit? DaCosta evidently understands that, and opts not to show the “Fingers” gang doing any parkour in The Bone Temple, thank God.

In the opening scene this time around, Spike is forced into a fight to the death with one of the Fingers, and strikes a lucky blow to a main artery in a young man’s thigh. Aflie Williams is still very good in this film, but isn’t given very much more to do than look understandably terrified, forced into this gang of psychotics as an option barely better than dealing with the infected.

The flashy parts go to the two biggest names in the cast: Ralph Fiennes, who returns as Ian, the iodine-covered doctor who has built a shrine to the dead out of all their many skulls; and Jack O'Connell (previously seen as Remmick in Sinners—this guy knows from unhinged) as “Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal,” the leader of the Fingers and effectively a Satanist cult leader. Personally, I prefer the playful Satanists who use freedom of religion laws to expose Christian hypocrisy, but those guys wouldn’t fit in a 28 movie. This is horror, after all. We need at least one scene in which multiple victims are skinned alive just for the fun of it.

O’Connell really digs into a meaty part as a truly horrifying, human villain; the flip side of this coin is Fiennes, who really goes for it as Dr. Ian Kelson, taking the character’s nuttiness a step or two further than he did in the last film. It’s nice to see really talented actors having fun, especially when we get a subtle but unmistakable This Is Spinal Tap reference.

That said, last year’s 28 Years Later spent a whole lot more time on effective world building, placing us squarely in a place abandoned to these horrors for three decades, but with indicators of how life has moved on around the rest of the world, as well as some fascinating evolutionary changes to the infected. It had some truly funny moments that are noticeably absent here; The Bone Temple leans much harder into the gory-horror aspect of the storytelling of these movies. That doesn’t make it any worse, per se; I just prefer a nice sprinkling of humor. Still, I would have preferred a bit more of the world building as well, and this film sticks mostly to how horrible some of the survivors are—a well-worn idea that the original 28 Days Later already presented with far greater finesse.

We do once again get Chi Lewis-Parry with a giant prosthetic schlong as an “alfa infected,” which you might like to know if you’re into that sort of thing. We get no more evolutionary changes of the infected, but instead Dr. Ian Kelson makes some advances in the possibility of treatment—a concurrent narrative thread with Spike’s harrowing experience with the Fingers, through roughly the first half of the film.

The Bone Temple is also beautifully shot, though—not quite as stunningly as some of the sequences in 28 Years Later, but close. Cinematographer Sean Bobbit treats us to several fantastically composed overhead shots of Ian’s Bone Temple, particularly after he lights it up for a climactic sequence that is delightfully weird and features Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast.” The story concludes in this setting, with multiple sudden double-crosses that are pretty exciting, and in the context of a horror film like this, deeply satisfying.

The Bone Temple does have its own coda, and although it clearly sets up the next film (not likely to be released for a few years, as this one is not yet even in production), I feel fairly neutral about it, the surprising cameo it features notwithstanding. At the very least, it’s far better than the coda to 28 Years Later, which was so dumb it really dragged down an otherwise pretty great experience overall. In the end, albeit for different reasons, I feel the same about this movie as I did about the last one: a horror movie whose memorable performances and great cinematography don’t quite elevate it from being simply a solid B movie.

Take me to church!

Overall: B

GREENLAND: MIGRATION

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B-

Watching Father Mother Sister Brother and Greenland: Migration back to back is quite the one-two punch of bad movies—wildly different in every conceivable way, except they are bad. Oh sure, they both have their few barely-redeeming elements—again, in completely different ways—but the unredeeming qualities easily weigh them down. I wonder how many other people in the world have watched these two particular movies right after each other? Surely it’s just a small handful. Well, I’ll say this much for Greenland: Migration: at least it kept me awake.

I’m dropping the “2,” by the way, because that’s how the title card reads in the film itself. Posters and promotional materials are listing it as Greenland 2: Migration, which I don’t understand, because the two words together and unbroken actually work as a phrase, as well as a direct reference to what happens in the film. It’s arguably the only sensible artistic choice made in the final cut. And now, our hero, John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their now-15-year-old son Nathan (Roma Griffin Davis—not the same actor who was in the first film) are forced out of the Greenland bunker they’ve been living in for the past five years by tectonic plates causing earthquakes that tear it apart. Over the course of this film’s 98 minutes of utter preposterousness, they make their way to Southern France, where they understand an impact crater has somehow become a shield to all the storms and radiation and is lush green with life. Nobody talks about how safe this spot is from more meteors, by the way.

We’re meant to feel for this family undergoing harrowing hardships, but honestly, all things considered, John Garrity is leading a straight-up charmed life. Oh sure, he barely escapes a tsunami that we see obliterate what’s left of Greenland (a visual high point in the film), and he encounters marauders, and he nearly falls to his death in a somehow dried-up English Channel, among other things. But also, nearly every step of the way, the Garritys encounter some kind-hearted soul willing to help them out. Someone is always coming along to help them through whatever scrape they’re in, far more than would ever realistically occur in an actual post-apocalyptic wasteland. But we’re not here to think about that, we’re here to be entertained.

They even pick up a very pretty teenage French girl along the way (Nelia Da Costa), and director Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen) is surprisingly subtle about how we definitely need these two beautiful teens to start making beautiful babies. Maybe part 3 in this franchise can be called Greenland: Copulation. It wouldn’t be any less ridiculous than anything we see in Migration, which is easily the dumbest movie I have seen in recent memory.

There’s a peculiar quality to Greenland: Migration, that almost saves it, this sense that it barely takes itself too seriously. This is not a movie that is “in on the joke,” which in a way makes it more fun. There are plenty of laughable moments that are not intended to be. There’s a death scene in which a callback to an earlier scene is used, where Nathan recites a prayer he previously questioned. Never mind that in the scene being referenced, John is burying the body of an expendable character who had been in the car with them, and I just thought: These guys just dodged a bunch of meteors. I would not be wasting time burying a body. To say this film is filled with lapses in logic would be an understatement. In another scene, when John has run out of bullets defending his family against marauders, Allison comes to the rescue with her own gun. The thing is, we have only ever seen John get handed a gun, so where the hell did Allison get hers? I guess she pulled it out of her ass. She never seemed uncomfortable sitting on it, so color me impressed.

I should note that I am hardly the only person being much harder on Greenland: Migration than I was on the original Greenland, which was originally scheduled for release in 2020 but later released on VOD and which I did not watch myself until the VOD price went down, in February 2021. At that time, most of us were still working from home if we had jobs where that was possible, covid was still an actively scary thing, and a movie like this provided welcome escapist entertainment, even if it was a bit darker than most disaster movies. It didn’t hurt that it was relatively well paced and was better than most might have expected, particularly on a $35 million budget.

Well, Greenland: Migration had two and a half times the budget, and it is markedly worse. This time, it isn’t better than expected—it quite squarely meets expectations, and that’s not really a compliment. Gerard Butler pivoted into a full-time career of these B-movie disaster or action vehicles, several of which have actually been fun on their own terms, but we’ve reached the point where we’re getting diminishing returns even in that context.

So here’s the key difference between Greenland and Greenland: Migration. The first film used its special effects sparingly and effectively, and this film leans so much harder into the effects that their still-limited budget is even more apparent. This could have been a compelling survivalist drama if the script weren’t so deeply stupid, which means that even with what tools they had available, they could have at least entertained us with more thrilling set pieces. The greenland tsunami that we see is very early in the film, and the most thrilling sequence in it. It’s all downhill from there. Or rather, across the Atlantic Ocean, through a flooded Liverpool and a dried-out English Channel (someone explain this to me), and across war-ravaged France from there. There is a meteor shower that recalls the coolest action in the first film that’s relatively thrilling, if brief.

But in the end, something so dumb occurs that I covered my faces with my hands while saying “Oh my god.” This film has an earnestness that has no self-awareness, which makes it amusing in its way. I laughed several times. And now I can check this one off my list, and never watch it again.

I am stunned too. By how dumb this is.

Overall: C+

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: C+
Editing: C-

Look. Don’t talk to me about the “beauty in the ordinary.” We all get more than enough of the ordinary just walking down a residential street on any given day. Or, in an example much closer to the vibe of Father Mother Sister Brother, simply staring at a blank wall.

Every time I see a movie like this—or, more to the point, a movie that leaves me baffled by its very existence—I find myself imagining the talent reading the script for the very first time. All these people, in this case an ensemble cast of eight mostly-great actors, wanted to do this?

It would seem there is a whole lot here just flying way over my head. Over at MetaCritic.com, this film has a rating of 76 out of 100. It has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 81%. It seems worth noting that the user ratings on these sites are 6.4 out of 10 and 46%, respectively—and there’s nothing “woke” here for people to stupidly review-bomb. This may be a rare case in which the populist response is actually the voice of reason. You won’t find any pretensions toward an inflated sense of worth in this review—Father Mother Sister Brother does more than enough of that on its own.

Which is to say: holy Christ was I bored by this movie. In my opinion, writer-director Jim Jarmusch has a spotty record at best; my favorite film of his would have to be Only Lovers Left Alive, about a vampire couple contending with the prospect of being together for eternity, and I gave that a solid B. It was an absolute thrill ride in comparison to this film.

Jarmusch’s project this time is to present an anthology, three separate stories with a thematic connection: the death of a loved one hangs in the air at all times. There are some viewers who find something profound in this. I did, too: profound boredom. Halfway through the first story, “Father", in which Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik play siblings on a deeply awkward visit at the home of their widowed father played by Tom Waits, I thought: Is the whole movie going to be like this? It was not long into the second story, “Mother,” in which Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps play sisters on an annual visit for tea with their mother, played by Charlotte Rampling, before I realized: Yes, I guess it is. And when the third story was presented as “Sister Brother” and I realized there was only one more story and not two, I thought: Oh, thank God. In that one, by the way, Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore play twins visiting the emptied home of their parents who died in a small plane crash while one of them was flying it.

There are several details Jarmusch playfully—I use that term loosely—puts into all three stories. All of them feature extended shots of the adult children driving cars. All of them feature characters wearing, and commenting on, a Rolex watch. In all three of them, one character utters some version of “Bob’s your uncle.” In all of them, the characters have tea—although in the third one it switches to coffee. In only the first and third one, a toast is made with their drinks; in the first the question is asked whether you can toast with tea, and in the third the question is asked whether you can toast with coffee.

Playing the game of keeping track of these common details in all three stories is the best chance you’ve got at staying awake. Seriously I could have slept through this entire movie and gotten as much out of it. Even identifying the common details got tedious after a while, because it was the closest thing to anything actually happening in any of the scenes, and by the end these touches felt forced and contrived.

I took particular issue with “Sister Brother,” in which the twins’ backstory made little sense. They’re clearly in France, they’re ostensibly visiting the apartment they grew up in, but they both have American accents? Maybe the family moved here when they were teenagers. But then they examine multiple IDs and birth certificates left behind by their parents, and this is somehow the first time they learn they were born in New York.

Father Mother Sister Brother is brimming with intentionality; it’s clear that nothing in it is accidental—including the long, awkward silences that characterize most of the 110-minute running time that felt to me like an eternity. I can’t remember the last time I was so happy a movie was over. There is a tone here not far off from that of the 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which somewhat famously topped the latest Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll in 2022. That film also marinates in the ordinary, only in that case for three hours and 22 minutes. The key difference is that Jeanne Dielman has a point it makes far more clearly. I left the theater at a loss as to the point in Father Mother Sister Brother.

Maybe Jarmusch is your thing. He really isn’t mine.

Overall: C

THE SECRET AGENT

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

Those Brazilians, man. They sure know how to convince the world that their movie is significant, worthy of attention, and worthy of awards. The did it with I’m Still Here—a much better film, in my opinion—last year, and they’re doing it again with The Secret Agent this year. The thing is, I’m not fully convinced. Sure, this is a competently made film, but it also takes some truly bizarre turns, and it overall strikes me as compelling but flawed.

More importantly, The Secret Agent clocks in at 161 minutes, and I cannot see any reason why that was necessary. There is a climactic sequence that is genuinely exciting, the kind of crime thriller stuff you love to see in the cinema—but it happens after a solid two hours of languid plotting. I hesitate to say it was worth the wait.

I don’t even fully understand the title. How is Armondo (Wagner Moura) an “agent,” exactly? Does going into hiding from government officials who have put out a hit on youn make you a “secret agent”? This title suggests a spy thriller, but Armondo doesn’t spend any time spying. Granted, he does assume different identities, and depending on the circumstance he is known as Fernando. (To muck things up even further, Armondo also has a young son, Fernando, who we later see in flash-forward to present day, and the adult Fernando is also played by Moura.)

Don’t get me wrong, I actually liked The Secret Agent. I just have a lot of nitpicks, and enough of them to leave me mystified as to the idea that was one of the year’s best films. For example: there’s a single tonal shift that is so wild a departure from the seriousness of the rest of the film that I found it to be a true “What the fuck?” moment. It has to do with a running subplot about a severed human leg, first discovered swallowed inside a shark, and later snatched by local law enforcement and dumped into a river. We cut back to our regular programming for a while, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, the narrative jumps to the leg washed up on a riverbank, and it suddenly twitches on its own. It’s alive! Suddenly we’re in a park with a bunch of late-night public sex going on, both straight and gay. In one of the latter cases, a guy on his knees giving head is completely naked—like, what? did he just walk there from home without his clothes? or did he completely strip and toss his clothes aside in the park just to give head? This really isn’t how these things go down. Anyway, this severed leg with a bloody stump at about mid-thigh just goes on the rampage, hurling itself through the air to kick all the horny park patrons in the face, leaving them screaming and bloody.

I was stupefied. To be fair, I suppose, this sequence jumps to the group of people being protected in secret, Armando among them, reading this account from the local newspaper, cracking up at how the story is written as though this really happened. It turning out to be a sort of fantasy sequence notwithstanding, it’s a whiplash-inducing shift in tone.

There’s a lot of the rest of The Secret Agent that I quite liked; I might even be more inclined to think of it as a Great Movie if it simply cut out that attack-leg sequence altogether, and cut the rest of it to maybe half an hour shorter. The acting is solid, especially Wagner Moura himself, as a man achieving an outward calm while clearly often being deeply frightened. In the opening sequence, which I would argue is itself overlong, Armondo is stopping for gas after days of travel, and there’s a random dead body covered by cardboard in the dry dirt nearby. Armondo is clearly unsettled by this, but he also needs gas. This effectively sets the stage for what it’s like for him to navigate his native country of Brazil in 1977, during their military dictatorship.

We then spend a lot of time meeting a lot of characters, including a duo of hired assassins, stepfather and stepson Augusto and Bobbi, played by Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone, respectively. This is most notable to me only in that I hope to see more of Gabriel Leone because holy hell is he gorgeous. I guess it doesn’t hurt that he’s also a pretty good actor. On the flip side, there is also a cat with two faces that hangs out in the building where the people being sheltered are staying, and while I get the symbolism of duality, it’s a pretty unsettling sight.

There are also the local police chief in Recife, the northernmost major city in Brazil (it’s near the easternmost point of South America), and the chief’s henchmen; the guy who hires Armando to pretend to be a desk worker when a sham of a deposition is held in a space only made up to be the police station; several of the other workers in this space that is also an archive office; the Jewish holocaust survivor the chief harasses; Armando’s fellow political refugees also under protection; the government officials who hire the hitmen; and the father of Armando’s late wife who runs a local cinema—too many characters to name. I suppose I can credit the slow plotting for how easy it actually is to keep all of these characters straight.

Mind you, I am fully open to the idea that The Secret Agent really is some masterpiece and it’s just not for me, because I don’t get it, and I am unable to—because I am not Brazilian, and the only history I glean from that country is through movies like this. Even the wild leg sequence could be explained as an illustration of the ridiculous ways the media of the time was used to obfuscate otherwise blatant corruption. I just found some of the depiction of queerness in it to be a bit misinformed, and the narrative contextualization of the entire sequence to be inadequate. But, that’s just me. I feel confident that the average movie watcher will be bored to tears by this film, and plenty of film snobs will hail it as a masterpiece. I don’t quite fall into either camp, in that I clearly have a lot of notes, but I’m not sorry I saw it.

I guess the secret is exactly what kind of agent he is.

Overall: B

IS THIS THING ON?

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

People like to make fun of Bradley Cooper for his unabashed earnestness as both an actor and a filmmaker, but you know what? I am here for it. A Star Is Born (2018) was shockingly good—both the movie and his performance—and although reviews were much more mixed for Maestro in 2023, I genuinely adored it (it was my favorite movie that year, in fact). I am so consistently impressed with this guy—much of The Hangover aging poorly notwithstanding—that I’m now leaning toward the position that he is underrated. And what’s wrong with being passionate about what you do? Isn’t that a good thing?

Which brings me to Is This Thing On?, which exceeds expectations on nearly every front. Cooper co-wrote the script with Will Arnett, who is also the star, and Mark Chappell, this is an unusually down-to-earth portrait of two middle-aged people unhappy in their marriage. But what sets this movie apart is not just that the protagonist, Alex Novak (Arnett), discovers standup comedy and that he loves doing it, but that both he and his wife, Tess (Laura Dern), gradually realize that the reason their marriage wasn’t working was not because they were unhappy with each other, but because they were unhappy with their own lives.

Now, they also have “Irish twin” boys, both of them—for a few months at most—ten years old: played by adorable and impressively natural Blake Kane and Calvin Knegten. Arnett is 55 years old and Dern will be 59 next month, which means if we are to think of their characters as the same age, then they had these kids in their mid- and late-forties. Not unheard of, granted, but unusual—I’m much more used to people in their fifties being grandparents. The script takes care of this by noting that Tess had children using fertility treatments. (It may still be worth noting that Alex’s parents are played by Ciarán Hinds and Christine Ebersole, who are both 72. I guess they had Alex when they were 17, which is actually quite plausible.)

I spent the first half or so of Is This Thing On? unsure of exactly how great I thought it was. Alex and Tess agree to “call it” early on, but then Alex, alone and without direction, walks into a bar and signs up for the open mic as a way to get a free drink. Is This Thing On? has a lot of scenes with Alex onstage, but it’s not overstuffed with it, and I spent a lot of time dreading how awkward it might become—but then, kind of miraculously, it never gets that way. He’s never shown being particularly good at comedy (and a fellow comic literally tells him “you’re not good at comedy,” albeit in a loving way), and this film’s many very funny scenes tend to happen between Alex and his family and friends. As all of this unfolds, the story becomes increasingly well-constructed. There’s something both sad and funny about a fellow comic calling Alex “Sad Guy,” and thanks to Cooper’s knack for compelling and innovative storytelling, you can’t help but feel for this broken down, sad, middle-aged White guy.

The trick, I think, is that Arnett plays Alex as a smart guy, who is also smart about comedy, even while he’s not particularly good at it. You believe it when he manages to hold his audience’s attention, even when he’s not being hilarious. They give him a lot of courtesy chuckles, but they also clearly support him.

There’s something wonderfully warm-hearted about this movie–even in the setting of the comedy clubs Alex frequents, which is not often how we see such spaces depicted. Here, the other comics see a newbie with potential, and they offer him tips and tricks of the trade. There’s no resentment among the ranks, which actually seems more realistic, and that’s not what this movie is meant to be about anyway. We get to see real-life comedians here and there, including Amy Sedaris (who shows up multiple times as an emcee) and Dave Attell, among others.

Meanwhile, Tess, who is a former Olympic volleyball player now long past her prime, is putting out feelers about becoming a coach and thereby finding a way back into a world she once had great passion for but gave up long ago. This is a significant subplot, which means Is This Thing On?, in spite of the implication of its title, is not just about a divorced dad discovering standup comedy. It’s about a couple in a marriage who have lost their way with each other because they either gave up on or have yet to discover what truly makes them happy. There’s also discussion about wanting to be unhappy together, a point about successful relationships that I really liked. Marriage isn’t constant bliss, and it’s finding the person you want to weather rough patches with that really makes it work.

Tess and Alex are part of a friend group that includes one straight couple and one gay couple. The straight couple figures more prominently in the story, both because we get a taste of their own struggles, and because they are played by Andra Day, who honestly doesn’t get the most interesting stuff to work with (although she does get one great monologue in which she shares with Alex why she detests him), and Bradley Cooper himself, as a real self-centered dipshit of an aspiring-actor guy. This character, who everyone actually calls “Balls,” seems at first like a bit of self-parody, except that Cooper embodies him well enough to give him dimension, even as he’s providing a good portion of the movie’s comic relief.

Is This Thing On? is mostly a drama, but with a lot of comedy in it—the best formula for the twin goals of entertainment and relatability. More than anything, though, it’s progressively uplifting. This is a movie about good but unhappy people finding the simple things that bring them joy, and that was the feeling I had as I left the theater.

Listen, Alex Novak. It’s on, okay!

Overall: A-