EDDINGTON

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

Soooo how many times are we going to keep writing Ari Aster a blank check just because his first two movies were the critical and commercial successes Hereditary and Midsummar? Maybe someone needs to convince him to stick with horror. Or maybe just stop making movies with Joaquin Phoenix?

There are multiple ironies here, not least of which is the fact that Joaquin Phoenix is by far the best thing in both Beau Is Afraid (a deeply unpleasant, three-hour panic attack) and Eddington, which is a straight up mess of a movie with a few redeeming qualities (like Phoenix’s performance). Another irony is that Eddington attempts to be a snapshot of the pandemic-era zeitgeist of “late May 2020,” and that was the exact month in which I finally gained the courage to watch Hereditary for the first time.

I think most of us have a perfectly vivid memory of what it felt like in May 2020, arguably the greatest collective trauma experienced across every nation around the world in a solid century. Eddington fails to reflect that moment, five years later, with any real accuracy or authenticity—hard as it tries. Granted, it seems to be going for satire, maybe half the time. The other half of the time I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was going for.

As early as April 2020, I shared, in part, that the way pop culture reflects this uniquely global experience for a long time to come was going to be interesting. Predictably, however, we haven’t gotten a lot of it: Covid-19 remains too recent (not to mention variants of it still going around to this day) for people want to revisit that collective trauma. It also remains relevant that a pandemic where millions died but for most of us the challenge was just loneliness and monotony does not provide much opportunity for excitement in a medium like film. So it’s understandable Ari Aster would gravitate toward the turbulent nationwide fallout of the George Floyd murder and subsequent violent protests, and how that fallout eventually makes its way to a fictional New Mexico town with a rivalry between its sheriff (Phoenix) and its mayor (Pedro Pascal), who are running against each other in the upcoming election.

I’m just not sure Ari Aster is the right person to tackle these things. If, say, Spike Lee or Jordan Peele had made this movie, it probably would have been good—it could have been great. As made by Aster, it’s not terrible. It’s just consistently baffling, and leaves you with a lot of questions—and not the kind of unanswered questions that make a movie more intriguing. These are the kinds of unanswered questions that makes you think: What the fuck did I just watch?

I don’t know what the population of Eddington is supposed to be, but it’s clearly meant to be very small. Filming took place partly in Truth or Consequences. New Mexico, which has a population of just over 6,000. Maybe I just don’t know enough about politics, but is it normal or a mayoral candidate of a town of such size to hold a major fundraiser six months before the election? Don’t even get me started on the scene in which Phoenix’s Joe Cross hosts a “town hall” in a local restaurant, the few attendees sitting silent (and masked) at dining tables, not one of them saying a word through Joe’s rambling speech being recorded for his socials. In what universe would not one of those people pipe up and say anything during this event—which, by the way, occurs during a contentious protest that forms all of a block away outside?

There’s a lot of White protesters who openly express their White guilt in over-written and obvious ways, clearly designed as the aforementioned satire, but never quite landing. It consistently feels contrived in a misguided way, and like something people on the right could easily misinterpret as just making fun of “woke people.” Aster’s ideas are far more nuanced than that—he just can’t seem to make the ideas come together coherently.

Both Emma Stone and Austin Butler are among the most talented actors working today, and their talents get wasted in supporting parts that never connect. Stone plays Joe’s wife, Louise, who has a peculiar romantic past with Pascal’s Mayor Ted Garcia but which has been misrepresented in local media. Butler plays the quasi-cult leader Louise eventually gravitates toward. There’s a scene in which Louise and her mother (Deirdre O’Connell) arrive home late in the evening, Austin Butler’s weirdly charismatic character and another couple in tow. This guy shares a story of bizarre childhood abuse with so many plot holes that even Joe starts to pick it apart. This might be the moment when the audience also first says: Huh? It’s certainly the point at which Eddington lost me, and it’s not even the point at which it goes completely off the rails.

I would say that both Beau Is Afraid and Eddington are roughly equal in quality, albeit for different reasons. Eddington is certainly more pleasant to watch and more entertaining, although in its final act it descends into a chaos that is very similar to the entire runtime of Beau Is Afraid. What they have in common is excellent performances—this is clearly Aster’s greatest strength, and I am increasingly interested in seeing how he would do directing someone else’s script. And while Beau Is Afraid was far too long especially for its unending sense of foreboding and anxiety, Eddington feels like it was also made as a three-hour movie, then whittled down to its current 148-minute runtime, somehow cutting out the scenes that would have made it make sense.

The opening shot is of a homeless man with some kind of mental health issue, walking into town. Call him Chekhov’s homeless man: he turns up multiple times again, until he’s predictably part of a pivotal plot turn. In the middle of the movie, there is a hard cut to a group of agitators on an airplane, clearly headed for Eddington, after Instagram video of Sheriff Joe wrestling the homeless man to the floor in a bar is shared. There have long been stories of agitators perpetrating violence among otherwise peaceful protests just to sow greater unrest and damage collective reputations, and in Eddington Ari Aster takes this idea to their most wildly violent conclusions—to what end, is very unclear. He does fold in Joe’s two local deputies, one White (Luke Grimes) and one Black (an excellent Michael Ward), just so he can show what Joe initially declares “a them problem” before the problem creeps its way inevitably into the relationships between the three of them.

Aster is just throwing everything at the wall here. The first conflict, which is the initial frustration before everything else strains the entire community as too much for them to handle, is the debate over public policy regarding mask wearing. When Joe walks maskless through a grocery store and explains the difference between public policy and law, he’s technically right, but that doesn’t make him any less of an asshole. Conversely, Mayor Ted Garcia is portrayed as nakedly ambitious and disingenuous, even if he’s correctly obsessed with following public policy. Eddington features almost no characters who are likable or empathetic (Michael the Black deputy comes closest), and this is an excusable choice only with either truly successful satire or a film with an unmistakable point of view. Eddington is neither, leaving us instead with a truly random and wild choice in its final scene. And trust me, you’ll never guess what happens in that final moment—not even while watching the movie, not until the very moment it happens. You’ll leave the theater saying, “What the fuck?” and that about sums it up.

Can’t we all just get along? Maybe if we got better movies!

Overall: B-

SORRY, BABY

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

Rare is the film that is as self-assured as Sorry, Baby, which is written and directed by 31-year-old Eva Victor—who also stars in the lead role, as Agnes. Directing oneself is an impressive challenge in the best of circumstances, and doing it this successfully is practically a miracle. Victor’s performance is simultaneously subtle and astonishing, the kind of thing it’s tempting to say deserves an Oscar, except the Oscars don’t pay much attention to “small movies” like these. And Sorry, Baby has so much integrity, it’s almost condescending even to mention the Oscars, as this isn’t a movie with any aspiration for prizes.

I find myself thinking of the male gaze, because this movie so deftly sidesteps it. This is a film very much about trauma, but it takes a unique approach to it. The separated chapters, each with a title card, aren’t even presented in a fully linear timeline. Once we get to “The Year with the Bad Thing,” the bad thing itself is never shown onscreen. The camera is stationery, across the street, facing the house where it happens. There’s a hard cut to dusk, another hard cut to night. Agnes leaves the front door clearly in a bit of a daze, which continues as the camera follows her to her car, and along her drive home. We only learn exactly what happened when we hear Agnes recount it to her very close, lesbian friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie).

One of the many things I love about Sorry, Baby is how much humor is in it, and nearly all of the humor occurs after we learn of this assault. There’s humor in the doctor’s office the very next morning, when Agnes is getting “standard questions” from a clueless doctor, with Lydia by her side. There’s humor in Agnes’s meeting of a random sandwich shop owner who calms her down when she drives off the road by his shop due to a panic attack. There’s humor in Agnes’s awkward dinner with university colleagues which includes a deeply jealous woman (Kelly McCormack) who believes she should have gotten the full-time position Agnes was offered. And there’s some subtle humor in Agnes’s cautious development of a relationship with her neighbor, Gavin. Lucas Hedges is perfectly cast as Gavin, having returned to film last year after a break to focus on writing. He’s been missed, and as always he works incredibly well as a character actor in supporting parts.

And Gavin, incidentally, is the closest we get to a male point of view in Sorry, Baby. And to say it’s told from a female point of view is itself a bit complicated: Eva Victor reportedly uses both they/them and she/her pronouns. Agnes, the character, never states any preferred pronouns, except for a scene in which an arrow is pointed to the space between M an F under “gender” in a jury duty questionnaire. Lydie, on the other hand, is depicted both post- and pre-coming out in subtle ways, consistently refers to herself as gay, but is in a relationship with a nonbinary person named Fran (E.R. Fightmaster, who is themself nonbinary). These variances in gender are never the focus of the story or any particular character, which is what’s so great about it: they just are, and art getting made by younger filmmakers will inevitably do this more often, thereby slowly but surely conditioning audiences to the idea, whether some dipshit Alabama governor likes it or not.

With all that in mind, it’s somewhat amusing to think of how Eva Victor is referred to when referred to only by last name. Sorry, Baby clearly has more than just these things on its mind—and even has the way people are treated based on perceived gender on its mind. There’s a scene in which two women on the faculty basically feign concern for Agnes when one of them says, “We know what you’re going through. We’re women.” Except it sounds like a memorized script, and that’s the point. It plays funny, but with a deep subtext of sadness. People who have never experienced sexual assault might feel like such odd, awkward or wildly tone deaf reactions to it are unrealistic. People who know the experience are fully aware of how often this sort of stuff happens—both being victimized and being completely misunderstood about it.

It would seem at first glance that Sorry, Baby is a movie about the friendship between Agnes and Lydie, but it’s actually far more specifically about Agnes, and how they come to terms with this trauma. Lydie, while clearly a very good friend, is just one of the narrative threads. Still, once the story gets to Lydie and Fran having a baby, we get to how that baby is, in her way, the title character. This is only revealed in the final scene, when Agnes is looking after the baby while Lydie and Fran are on a walk, and Agnes assures the baby that she can tell her anything no matter how scary—and scary things will happen. Life will have its challenges, but we’ll help each other get through it. And I feel lucky to have Victor take me through Sorry Baby, a film that turns deeply complicated issues and themes into a gem of poignant simplicity.

This might be the smartest movie you’e seen about such heavy subject matter.

Overall: A

SUPERMAN

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

About three quarters of the way through James Gunn’s Superman, I could no longer think of anything but this: Oh my god, this movie is dumb. But I am trying to lead with positivity!

There’s a few things I enjoyed about Superman, the seventh live action film with Superman as the top-billed character since 1978 (and I’m not even counting Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—because Batman got top billing). David Corenswet is well cast as the title character this time out, and when Gunn actually slows down long enough for us to get real character moments, the man is brimming with charisma and screen presence. He also has chemistry with Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), who works well as the scrappy reporter from the Daily Planet, because even in Gunn’s universe people apparently still care about journalism.

This many movies in—indeed, this many reboots in (I suppose this would make the third?)—it’s commendable that the story here doesn’t bother with Superman’s origin story. A series of opening titles inform us of the state of the world we are entering into, which includes “metahumans”—other people with superpowers, though Superman is the most powerful among them. I wasn’t crazy about yet another superhero movie with a supporting cast of second-tier superheroes, especially given that we never get any real chance to know “Mister Terrific” (Edi Gathegi), Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), or Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan) as characters. I understand these are all actual characters from DC Comics, but do we need to overstuff a 129-minute feature film with them? But! I did kind of love that, in this Superman movie, Lois Lane has full knowledge that Clark Kent is Superman, they are actively dating, and they even have some minor relationship problems. That is a refreshing change from how we usually see their relationship in these movies.

On the short list of things I actually liked about this movie, I have saved the best for last: Superman’s superdog, Krypto, gets extensive screen time. In fact, we meet him in the opening sequence, right after the title cards have informed us that Superman has just lost a battle for the first time. We already saw this in the very well-cut teaser trailer, in which Krypto drags Superman through the Antarctic snow back to his Fortress of Solitude. And I will say this to the dog lovers out there: if you love dogs, you are going to love Krypto.

Now, it should also be noted that Krypto is mostly an obvious CGI dog, something that is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. CGI doesn’t have to be obvious and it never has—Jurassic Park taught us that 32 years ago. You have the tools and you clearly have the budget. Maybe do it right? On the other hand, obvious or not, Krypto is adorable as hell, and possibly the best thing in Superman, which is otherwise far too busy and overstuffed, stupidly convoluted, and exhaustingly ridiculous, even by regular Superman standards.

Here’s where the casting wasn’t as inspired as I thought it was: Nicholas Hoult clearly wants to be an iconic villain as Lex Luthor, but, much like this film overall, he takes a giant swing—and then misses by a wide margin. This is hardly entirely Hoult’s fault, as he’s largely shackled by how bonkers-stupid James Gunn’s script is. Lex Luthor is supposed to be a mad genius, fine. But apparently this movie has to up the ante on that idea to such a degree that Luthor has managed to invent a means for traveling in and out of a “pocket universe” of his own creation. What? If I never hear that phrase again it'll be too soon. This level of idiocy leaves me feeling deeply wistful for the days of Gene Hackman, whose Lex Luthor had a delicious understanding of sarcasm and wit. Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor only understands cartoonish obsession.

I hate to give a piece of shit like Kevin Spacey any credit, but he was the only other Lex Luthor to come close to the spirit of Gene Hackman, when he appeared as the character in Superman Returns in 2006. That film remains the only halfway decent Superman movie since the first two Christopher Reeve films, and that one was released 19 years ago. In my review of that film, I wrote about the awkward challenge of marrying Superman’s old-school wholesome sensibility with the cynical sensibility of the 21st Century. In this new Superman, Gunn tries hard to update these characters for the current era, but sometimes it just doesn’t work. This film is rated PG-13, probably exclusively because of how frequently characters are swearing, but in a DC universe dominated by Superman, they just come across like people swearing to sound cool, which of course falls flat.

I wish I could say that at least this Superman is better than Zack Snyder’s 2016 film Man of Steel, but alas, it is not. These films just have different reasons for being cinematic beacons of big-budget mediocrity. James Gunn makes an attempt at infusing his film with some gravitas, even going so far as designing the credits in the style of those from the Richard Donner films. All this does is remind us how much better those films are—they are now very dated, to be sure, but they still manage to capture a sense of wonder that modern superhero films, and certainly those based on DC comics, lack. The Superman we get in 2025 falls victim to the same claptrap nine out of ten other superhero movies do, sagging under the weight of their own bloat, and throwing in stakes so ridiculous as to become meaningless. Other movies feature sequences wherein the villains threaten the existence of either the entire city or the entire universe—here, we get a “dimensional tear” that threatens both at once! And Lex Luthror is such an evil genius he can stop or start it with a bank of computers!

Why do filmmakers think they can improve overplayed iconic character stories by making them pointlessly convoluted with what amounts to magical nonsense? I’d love to see a new Superman that is simple but clever, inspired but straightforward. Or, I could just go watch the Richard Donner films again. The tagline for the 1978 film, which ushered in the superhero blockbuster era, was You’ll believe a man can fly. Nearly five decades later, we’ve seen so many men fly that our eyes have glazed over. The tagline for this new film might as well have been You won’t believe a man can revive a franchise.

One of the few memorable quotes in this Superman is when a guy on the news says, “The one thing liberals and conservatives can agree on is that Lex Luthor sucks.” I wish I could say that we can all agree that this Superman sucks, but conservatives are already priming liberals to defend it. And to be fair, “sucks” is a bit strong of a word. I suppose I could try to be like the cool kids these days and just say that James Gunn’s Superman is “mid.” It’s only David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, and Krypto that even raise it to that level.

If there is any reason to see Superman it’s Krypto the superdog. And I still don’t particularly recommend it.

Overall: C+

JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH

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

Talk about a diluted franchise. Steven Spielberg’s original, 1993 film, Jurassic Park, is easily one of the greatest blockbuster movies ever made, and people have now tried six more times to recapture its magic, with varying degrees of never fully succeeding. In terms of box office, the reboot Jurassic World (2015) came the closest. Ironically, even though it felt like a significant comedown, Jurassic Park’s first sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park came closest in quality. It was the only other one also directed by Spielberg, at least—and is really the only other one that still had the same sense of wonder, alongside the monster menace.

Reporters love to note that Jurassic World made the most money out of any film in this franchise, but what they constantly ignore is that figure being in unadjusted dollars. Adjusted for inflation, Jurassic Park remains the biggest grossing film in the franchise by a fair margin—by that metric, it remains the 18th-most successful movie ever made in the U.S. Jurassic World ranks 30th, and The Lost World: Jurassic Park ranks 113th, much further down the list but notably higher than any of the other sequels.

No one even thinks about Jurassic Park III (2001) anymore. Even though Jurassic World was itself a massive success, rebooting the franchise 14 years after the end of the original trilogy, it could also be said that no one thinks about its two sequels anymore either: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), which was flawed but still pretty fun upon rewatch; and Jurassic World Dominion (2022), which held exciting promise by combining that trilogy’s cast with the cast of the original film, only to turn out to be hot garbage, easily the worst movie of either trilogy.

Should Hollywood leave well enough alone, then? Of course not! All of three years later, let’s . . . do another reboot! Functionally that’s sort of what Jurassic World: Rebirth is, although it has too much in common with its immediate predecessors to feel too separate from them, even with an entirely new cast. And let’s be honest, Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey are all far more compelling than Bryce Dallas Howard, and arguably at this point, even Chris Pratt.

Here’s the downside of these otherwise incredibly charismatic actors in Rebirth: I could not possibly give less of a shit about their characters. Scenes offering us backstory near the beginning of the film are so dull, I thought about how I’d rather be napping. This film takes some time to get to any real dinosaur action—one of several allusions to the original Jurassic Park (something even Jurassic World did, making this a bit like a copy of a copy)—but what made Jurassic Park work so incredibly well even in scenes with no action was its clever humor, vibrant performances, and genuinely compelling characters. At the end of Rebirth, when one of the principal characters turns up alive when everyone else was terrified they were dead, I found myself thinking: I’d have way more respect for this movie if the six-limbed mutant “Distorus Rex” suddenly appeared and ate that person after all.

So yes, this time around, a large number of the dinosaurs are cross-bred mutants. We meet the Distorus Rex in the opening sequence, a flashback from “17 years ago” introducing us to the second-ugliest creature ever to appear in this franchise. (The ugliest, and also the stupidest looking, would still be the feathered Pyroraptor from Dominion.) They even talk about how these genetically mutated creatures were not something any park goers wanted to see. So why do they think movie goers want to see them? Distorus Rex doesn’t even look like a real dinosaur. It looks like the xenomorph from Alien crossed with the Elephant Man.

It really kind of sounds like I hated this movie, doesn’t it? Nope! I just . . . didn’t love it. Distorus Rex aside, Rebirth still has a whole bunch of other creatures that are very cool, in sequences that are very exciting. Granted, no part of any of them is original: much of Rebirth just feels like a cross between the original Jurassic Park, Jaws (particularly the boat sequences, complete with characters shooting nonlethal devices at the sea creatures), and King Kong (specifically the sequence where they visit an island that turns out to be still inhabited with dinosaurs). Those are all great movies, at least, and when Rebirth pays homage to them, it generally does them well. Which is to say: when it’s focused on the characters, this movie is dull as hell. But when the dinosaurs start eating people, it cooks.

It was easy to feel optimistic, having the likes of Gareth Edwards as director, and David Koepp—who wrote the scripts or both Jurassic Park and The Lost World—as the writer. It may be relevant to note that Koepp is 62 now, and not exactly brimming with the original ideas he once had. (Or maybe he just needs to work with the right director: his script for Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, also released this year, was excellent.) This time out, he shoehorns a completely unrelated family into the plot: a divorced dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is sailing across the Atlantic with his two daughters (played by Luna Blaise and Adrian Miranda) and the older daughter’s boyfriend (David Iacono), and they inevitably get their boat capsized by a giant sea creature. Johansson & crew hear the distress call in their own boat, go to rescue them, and that’s the only reason why the Delgado Family winds up tagging along on a misguided and harrowing adventure.

What exactly are they doing then, you ask? Just kidding, you didn’t ask. Nobody cares! Except it’s so dumb, I’m going to tell you anyway: they need blood samples from live specimens of the largest dinosaurs of those now thriving only in the equatorial region, so they can use it to cure heart disease. Because they have such huge hearts, you see! Whatever, move along, next we have another thrilling action set piece.

None of these movies have ever been plausible, not even the original Jurassic Park—although that one at the very least had adjacency to plausibility, a clever conceit that could sound real enough to the uneducated. They’ve just gotten dumber as they went along, but they all work when characters are getting chased and sometimes eaten by menacing dinosaurs. (This was the fatal flaw in 2022’s Dominion: nobody cares about giant mutant locusts. We want dinosaurs!)

It could be argued that the action setpieces are more satisfying throughout the film in Rebirth than any of these movies at least since Jurassic World. Gareth Edwards knows how to shoot this kind of stuff with a sense of scale, if not always wonder—that’s kind of his thing. It’s the wonder, really, that’s missing here. But at least it has heart stopping thrills, and that’s all anyone is going to these movies for.

Mutadon? More like MutaDUMB!

M3GAN 2.0

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

I go to the movie so often, I often have to sit through trailers to the same movie so many times that, even if I am interested in the movie, I get deeply sick of the trailer. MEGAN 2.0 was a prime example of this, and it also means I committed a great deal of that trailer to memory—against my will. There’s M3GAN breaking through a giant doll box to strangle a man. There’s M3GAN saying to rival robot AMELIA (“Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android”), “I’ll make you a deal. You can kill Gemma, but don’t touch Cady,” before an exasperated Gemma (Allison Williams) snaps, “M3gan!” (She pronounces the 3 as an “e.”) And best of all, there’s the obviously-gay stan in a blonde wig who says, “I don’t care if she did kill four people. She is a smoking’ hot warrior princess!”

Except: none of these slips from the trailer are actually in the theatrically released cut of the movie. This is fairly common, as editing of the full film typically isn’t done when trailers are cut. But it seems particularly egregious here—some of the most fun stuff used to sell us on the movie isn’t even in the movie. Are we supposed to wait around for a “director’s cut,” or what? Of this?

The original M3GAN (2022) got surprisingly good reviews. I thought it was fine. To be fair, it seems to work better as a re-watch: I watched it again to refresh my memory before going to see this sequel, and I think I enjoyed it more the second time around. I still stand by the solid B I gave it. M3GAN 2.0 isn’t faring quite as well with critics. It is objectively less-good than its predecessor, but let’s be real: not by a huge margin. There is some bonkers-ridiculous shit that happens in this movie (in what universe would an obvious home invasion turn out to be the FBI coming in with a search warrant? Well—this one!), and yet: I still found myself having a pretty good time in spite of it all.

Perhaps the most obvious thing about M3GAN 2.0 is its existence as a reaction to an original film that found far greater success than anyone expected, thanks to a sneakily campy tone that did not fully reveal itself until the second half of the movie. Now, not only is most of the principal cast returning (including Violet McGraw as Cady, now three years older), but so are the writers (Aleka Cooper and James Wan) and the director, Gerard Johnstone. The only difference there is that this time around Johnstone is also getting a writer credit. And what every one of these people are trying to do is transparently to catch lightning in a bottle. This predictably proves impossible, mostly because it can no longer be sly about its subtle camp—and yet, it does get closer than you might expect.

They also go very obviously for a Terminator 2 version of M3GAN, where the character who was the lethal villain in the original film is brought back to become the hero, and fight against a more advanced villain. To 2.0’s credit, M3GAN the character remains pretty threatening and sinister well after getting re-introduced into this new story. The greater threat now is AMELIA, this one an android played fully by a real human (Ivanna Sakhno, perfection the art of not-blinking). It also takes a page from the Alien franchise, dialing down the horror from the original film and leaning into action.

You may be sensing a theme here, in that there aren’t really any original ideas to be found. There’s still joy in the project, and that is still to be found in the tone: M3GAN’s bitchy attitude; some of her tone deaf decisions (there’s a scene of her singing a song to Gemma at the wrong moment and I got a kick out of it); even the multiple choices clearly mirroring similar moments in the first film. Some of it lands better than others; when we get a M3GAN dance at an unexpected moment in this movie, it doesn’t work anywhere near as it did the first time around precisely because now we’re expecting it, waiting for it to happen.

Part of what made M3GAN work as well as it did—to the extent that it did work—was the character’s very size: she’s small for a girl, big for a doll, but still quite obviously a doll. This time, when Gemma redesigns her, M3GAN says “Make me taller.” This makes her a bit less effective as an amusingly creepy doll, but at least she remains markedly shorter than any of the adult humans around.

No one expects a movie like this to be plausible, but some of this stuff threatens suspension of disbelief, even by M3GAN standards. If she can construct an entire basement lair complete with wall screens and furnishings, why in the world would she need Gemma and her colleagues to help construct her an upgraded body? But whatever, when she and AMELIA are fighting, it’s fun—especially AMELIA’s cleverly gruesome kills. The action is actually used more sparingly than it needs to be, but the restraint on that front actually helps it work.

I suppose there can also be too much restraint, though. The original film was a perfect length at 102 minutes. M3GAN 2.0 is a solid two hours, which, for a movie like this, is . . . not perfect. There’s actually more to enjoy than you might expect in this film, but the flip side is how it can give you too much of a good thing. The marketers of this movie clearly attempted to capitalize on a character that instantly became a camp icon, but such things never land exactly as desired when you have to work so hard at it.

It works well enough, though. M3GAN 2.0 is mostly ridiculous and stupid, and these are things the movie knows about itself, which made it easier for me to just enjoy it for what it is, which is postmodern horror with a lot of deliberately weird humor. Even as it turned out definitively less good than the original, I kind of hope they make a M3GAN 3.0. And you never know, the next one could be better! We just won’t talk about the inevitable downsides of planned obsolescence.

You’re gonna let me finish no matter how long it takes!

Overall: B-

F1

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

Brad Pitt and Damson Idris play rival racecar drivers of different generations, who butt heads when first put together on an F1 racing team, and—spoiler alert!—eventually learn to work together and find mutual respect. This is the driving force behind the ultimately very simple and very Hollywood plot of F1, the movie, and it really offers us nothing new in terms of storytelling.

As always, however, it’s the context that matters. F1 is set entirely within the world of Formula One, complete with blink-and-you-miss-them cameos of real-life F1 drivers, and is sure to be a delight to bona fide Formula One fans. The thing is, though—I’m hardly a fan of Formula One (I would best be described as utterly indifferent), and even I was pretty delighted by this movie.

Here is the credit director and co-writer Joseph Kosinski deserves: the surest sign of a truly skilled filmmaker—indeed, a truly skilled storyteller—is an ability to make something of otherwise no interest compelling. Kosinski did this extraordinarily well with Top Gun Maverick and its jet fighter planes, and now he’s done it again with car racing.

Whether Brad Pitt’s career-highest salary of $30 million, or the film’s reported $300 million budget, turn out to have been wise investments, remain to be seen. If nothing else, the money appears well spent onscreen: F1 has many racing sequences, all of them gripping, if not outright thrilling, thanks to excellent editing and a certain kind of cinematography that stops just short of being too flashy.

In any case, there is not much to be said for the depth of any of these characters. But, this film is so well cast that they infuse otherwise fairly stock characters with real chemistry and personality. I was relieved to find Brad Pitt is playing a character roughly his actual age (61), making him a believable friend to Javier Bardem (56), playing the owner of an F1 team struggling to win any races. Ruben (Bardem) has convinced Sonny Hayes (Pitt), a driver whose seemingly limitless prospects were destroyed in the nineties by a horrible racing crash, to join a team with another young man with incredible talent, Joshua Pearce or “JD” (Damson Idris). Sonny’s hire is widely seen as a last-ditch desperate act, with hopes pinned on combining cocky youth with cocky experience. Can you guess how things turn out? No spoilers! (I suppose there are literal spoilers. Those are things on cars, right?)

There are plenty of other characters in the mix, played by the likes of Kerry Condon (as the team technical director, out to prove all her doubters wrong—and also to hook up with Brad Pitt, but I mean, who among us); Tobias Menzies (as a dubious board member); Kim Bodnia (as the team principal); even Shea Whigham in a surprisingly small part (as the owner of a team Sonny drove for at 24 Hours of Daytona), among others. Although Pitt is clearly the major star of this film, in another era this would be a reliable star-making turn for Idris; it may be yet. Otherwise, F1 is very much an ensemble film, and it succeeds as such—much is made of Formula One being a “team sport,” and this cast is well matched for approaching their onscreen performances the same way.

I found myself caring about all of them. Not in any profound way, as this film is not designed to be profound: it’s designed as entertainment. And it is very much that, especially with all the globe trotting it takes to actual Formula One race settings around the world. I had a very similar response to Ford V. Ferrari in 2019, and I would still say that one’s a slightly better movie. Formula One fanatics may disagree; this kind of thing can depend on where your interests and loyalties already lie.

My interests and loyalties lie far outside of any sport, let alone racecars—they lie in cinema. And that’s what F1 the movie is: it’s just a great movie-going experience.

Listen punk, just do your job, which is entertaining people at the cinema!

Overall: B+

ELIO

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

Elio had its hooks into me from the very beginning. I really thought, until all the alien stuff started happening, that I might love this movie in a way I haven’t loved a Pixar film in a while, since their early days of one animated feature masterpiece after the other.

In retrospect, that was kind of the point. After thirty years of cinema history, Pixar has a playbook, and Elio very much follows it. I could mention who wrote the script, but who has time for that? This movie has nine credited writers. It feels a little like an advanced AI was prompted to “write a Pixar movie.” Opening sequence with overtones of incongruous sadness? Check! Lonely child protagonist who has lost either one or both parents? Check! Eventual non-human buddy for said child designed or optimum merchandising potential? Check!

Maybe I’ve just gotten old and cynical, but unfortunately, Pixar is feeling its age a bit as well. I was charmed well enough by Elio, but I could also see that it worked because of a well-worn and successful formula. The story is permeated by layers of familiarity. Pixar is supposed to be pushing the boundaries of the form, but Elio often feels like a cross between E.T. and Finding Nemo, at least in terms of its world-building.

Don’t get me wrong. Small children will almost certainly love this movie. Not that small children have standards. I long for the days of Pixar’s revolutionary depth of sophistication, both visual and thematic. WALL-E (2008) or Inside Out (2015), this is not. This is more on par with Onward (2020) or Luca (2021), more recent titles that push Pixar closer to the realm of “generic.” Elio is certainly flashier than those other recent films, and as such will probably dazzle kids more successfully, with its alien characters that are wildly varied, in both physical form and personality.

There’s still something missing, though, a certain depth of imagination. The visuals here are rendered well, but they take sometimes surprisingly rudimentary form. When Elio is sucked through a portal from earth by the aliens he so desperately wants to be abducted by, the tunnel of shifting lights and forms he glides through are patterns of simple goemetric shapes.

Elio begins with a huge amount of potential—even as it recognizably tugs at our heartstrings, introducing us to his aunt, Olga (Zoe Saldaña), who is still getting used to taking care of Elio (Yonas Kibreab) after the death of his parents. Olga being too busy with work to pay enough attention to him, and Elio’s deep loneliness and difficulty connecting, is all very familiar territory. But then we find out he is obsessed with connecting with life on other planets, and in particular the Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977 and equipped with a “Golden Record,” pressed with greetings in many languages from Earth.

Both Voyager 1 and the Golden Record figure prominently in the plot of Elio, which is easy to imagine catching the attention of anyone with an obsession with the intersection of science and history. Elio lends these artifacts appropriate thematic weight—until it doesn’t. In the end, these things are just used as plot devices for something . . . cute. If it ignites interest in any other kids in these artifacts, I suppose that’s a plus. But the story of Elio takes everything predictably back to themes of familial connection, using alien characters, half of which look like exotic sea creatures and half of which look like robots, as the vessel.

Elio himself is a delightful, charming, and deeply empathetic character, voiced well by Yonas Kibreab and rendered with visual nuance. The same goes for Olga, and the arc of these two, disconnected and then finding each other, was indeed something that moved me. I even got teary-eyed a couple of times. A formula that works is still a formula, and it’s the trappings that really make all the difference in greatness. Once aliens hear Elio’s call to come and get him, Elio spends much more time on standard cuteness than on anything truly meaningful.

Perhaps I ask too much of this movie. Indeed, not every movie has to mean something. My issue here is that Pixar spent years setting an industry standard, and now other studios are meeting that standard more than they do. It makes me sad. For the most part, Elio works—but, it works as a fairly generic entertainment, one that no one will be talking about generations from now, certainly not like they do with Toy Story or Finding Nemo or even Inside Out (all of which got boosts from sequels, granted—but good ones, all of them better than Elio).

I am constantly saying a movie should be judged on its own terms. That’s just the trouble with Elio, though: none of its terms are really its own. It’s a Frankenstein of Pixar films, stitched from previously used elements that saw better days in their previous lives. I had a pretty good time watching it, I smiled a lot, I suppose that counts for something. I’m also going to post this review and then get on with my life without ever really thinking about this movie again.

We know how to have fun, right?

Overall: B-

28 YEARS LATER

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

There is a lot that makes 28 Years Later stand apart from its two predecessors, the breakthrough 28 Days Later from 2002, which was a watershed moment for zombies (they’re fast now!) as well as the horror genre overall; and 28 Weeks Later from 2007, which was arguably even better. Now, 18 years after the last film, 28 Years Later does some surprisingly deft genre blending, easing into some dramatic territory, and it’s something I really respect. I will also be very up front about this, though: this film just isn’t as good as the previous two.

It does make one wonder, though, how anyone going in blind to this film might digest it, with none of the baggage of films that changed cinema history in mind. It’s certainly not critical to understanding what’s going on in this story, especially since, as all of these movies do, it opens in flashback to the outbreak of the “Rage” virus (a term I don’t recall any character saying in this film, come to think of it). In this case, we are introduced to a young boy who narrowly escapes the “infected.” The character shows up again in the very last scene of the film, serving as narrative bookends—neither of which land especially well. The rest of the movie in between is far better.

I really must say something more about that final scene. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say that the character has become someone I think of now as “Parkour Altar Boy.” If you think that sounds painfully corny and stupid, you would be right. Indeed, the scene offers a tonal turn that makes no sense whatsoever, and left me just thinking: What the fuck is this? Truly, my overall opinion of this film would be higher if not for that one scene, which truly knocked the entire enterprise down a peg, and has the unfortunate distinction of serving as its final note.

After we flash-forward from the opening sequence, to 28 years later, and until that closing scene, the characters we follow are entirely unrelated: Alfie Williams is excellent in his feature film debut as Spike, the 12-year-old embarking on a rite of passage in his isolated, island community. After decades of the entire island of Great Britain being under strict quarantine—anyone who steps foot on it is not allowed to leave—a smaller island has sustained a community that sporadically ventures to the mainland via a heavily fortified tidal causeway. Spike is now being escorted by his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), to the mainland to experience his first kills of infected.

Here we already arrive at Nitpick Corner. I rewatched the previous two films in recent weeks to prepare for this new release, and my biggest complaint about both films was the astonishingly stupid decisions the characters kept making. To 28 Years Later’s credit, there’s not nearly as much of that, as there is far more logic to character behavior this time around—which also allows for a pretty funny sequence in which a shipwrecked Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) tries to explain to a confused Spike what life in his home country, which is clearly just like ours in the real world today, is like. Not only has Spike never seen a smartphone, he doesn’t even know what a radio is (although that seems implausible). There remains a lot of unanswered questions, such as the first film’s establishment of the ability to starve infected to death, and yet now the infected seem to be thriving.

They also seem to have adapted and evolved, in some cases in very odd ways. The trailer to 28 Years Later is cut to suggest there are now giant swamp-monster infected, as well as a possibly sinister psycho played by Ralph Fiennes. Both suggestions are very misleading, and the “exciting twist” of this third installment isn’t so much a new direction with “fast zombies” as a new population of slow, bloated zombies that look like giant baby dolls that just dug themselves out of their own graves. Also they love to eat earthworms (or shoelaces, in a pinch).

I suspected at first that Spike and Jamie would get stuck on the mainland and have to fend for themselves, maybe survive and maybe not, for the entire movie. They do make it back to the island, albeit barely—thanks to a beautifully shot, harrowing nighttime sequence in which they barely escape a giant one of the infected. (Who is naked, by the way, as are all the infected in this movie. You’ve never seen so much zombie dong.) But, Spike also has a mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), who is clearly unwell with increasingly frequent spells of confusion, in a community with no doctors. When Spike learns there is a doctor not far away on the mainland, he slips Isla across the causeway in search of the doctor, even though Jamie insists he’s insane.

Dr. Kelson is indeed a nut, weirdly obsessed with death and collecting human bones and skulls to fashion into giant towers. He’s had a lot of time on his hands, I guess. Anyway, of course Kelson is not quite what he seems. Ralph Fiennes plays Kelson in a way that injects 28 Years Later with a welcome new energy, although he’s really only present in roughly the final third. The narrative shifts from focusing on Spike’s relationship with his father to that with his mother, and eventually there are people in the theater audibly sniffling. “Horror tearjerker” was a new direction I was not expecting.

Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland worked together on 28 Days Later in 2002, and they re-team here, to mostly satisfying success. “Mostly” is the operative word there. They bring welcome new ideas to the franchise, most notably that death can be beautiful even in a post-apocaplyptic world. Maybe not fully fleshed out, but whatever. A whole lot of 28 Years Later is uniquely compelling. I just wish it didn’t end with a narrative choice that was utterly baffling.

Here we are, guests of a very stable and very normal person.

Overall: B

JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE

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

Who decided on this English translation of Jane Austen a gâché ma vie, I wonder? That’s the original, French title of this film, and when you ask Google to translate, it comes up with Jane Austen Ruined My Life. That’s a better title, no? Am I wrong here? If you remove every word except gâché, however, it translates as spoiled. Should the title have been Jane Austen Spoiled My Life? I should note that I do not speak French at all, and for all I know, gâché is closer colloquially to wrecked in American English than to ruined. I have no idea! I’m really glad we had this talk, I think we really accomplished something here today.

Did writer-director Laura Piani, though? That’s the real question here, because I feel a little ambivalent about this film. It seems to have genuinely charmed a lot of critics. Right now I am kind of leaning toward the title Jane Austen Muted My Evening.

I mean: it’s fine. I have no major complaints. Well, except that I could get little sense of Piani’s direction, and I often could not tell if the characters here lacked any naturalism or if it’s just a vibe of French sensibility that is foreign to me. The characters interact with each other with an unusually comfortable familiarity, which ironically radiated off the screen to me as awkward.

Here’s a burning question. Are Parisians big on book stores? The one where Agathe (Camille Rutherford) works appears to be thriving. Apparently, this is one of the things in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life that is real: the French love books. In fact, the bookstore where Agathe works, Shakespeare and Company, is very real—an English-language bookstore that has been open in Paris since 1951. I wish I had known that while I was actually watching the movie. I’d have paid more attention during the many book store scenes. I remain a little annoyed by the seemingly haphazard way they put books on the shelves. Is there no order in this store?

Agathe works with her best friend, Félix (Pablo Pauly), who indulges Agathe in her obsession with Jane Austen novels. She is also a writer, an insecure one who writers “cheap romances” (as one writing teacher puts it), but Félix submitted her unfinished chapters to the Jane Austen residency without telling her. After much resistance, Félix convinces her to go. This place is located in the middle of the woods somewhere in England, and the sweet old lady running the place speaks French fluently—as does her grown son she send to pick up Agathe, Oliver (Charlie Anson). These are British actors and characters, and Agathe of course speaks English fluently, so Jane Austen Wrecked My Life has dialogue pretty evenly mixed between the two languages.

Here we get to the Great Question: should Agathe be with Félix, or with Oliver? The story here plays out in a way transparently meant to mirror Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. Ironically, when Agathe and Félix first meet, he has a prejudice against Austen’s work, calling it “overrated.” We already know Agathe has deep pride in Austen’s work.

It’s all pleasant enough, although Agathe longs for the “poetic spark” of novels that she finds lacking in reality—and most of the time, I kind of felt the same way about this movie. The one exception, and a notable one at that, is when the Jane Austen Residency puts on a ball, with everyone wearing the clothing of Austen’s era, and doing the same English Country dancing. At this point, Félix has surprised Agathe with a visit, the day after she actually has discovered a spark with Oliver, and here she moves from dancing with one, to dancing to the other, and back. This sequence is dazzling in its execution, the moment when Jane Austen Wrecked My Life actually sidesteps into the realm of movie magic. I rather wish more of the rest of the movie were like it.

As it is, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is sprinkled with subtle charms, including Oliver’s dad evidently slipping into the kind of giddy dementia that has him gardening with nothing on from the waist down. I’ll probably forget this movie entirely within a week, as it blossoms in moments but utterly wilts in the shadow of the work that inspired it, but it’s still a nice memory for the short time it will last.

That moment when magic happens.

Overall: B

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON

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

The burning question right now is this: what was the point of a live-action remake of the Dreamworks Animation hit How to Train Your Dragon, all of fifteen years later? What purpose does it serve, aside from greater box office earnings?

I’m coming up short on an answer. When the original animated film was released in 2010, one of my minor complaints was about its “needlessly breakneck pace from start to finish,” in a film with a runtime of 98 minutes. With this 2025 live-action remake, however, the runtime is 125 minutes—and that feels about 20 minutes too long.

Disney has already cashed in on a string of live-action remakes of classic animated features, which were also mostly pointless but for their box office potential. Dreamworks is apparently eager jump on this bandwagon, even though the animated How to Train Your Dragon already spawned two sequels, the most recent of which was released only six years ago. Sitting through the live-action version today, I found myself struggling to see how it justified its own existence, especially given how similar it is to the original, just fleshed out to a runtime far too long for an ostensibly “family film” one can assume would include children in its audience. Kids were rapt by the 2010 film; they may get bored with this one. For more likely, adults will.

What’s more, “live action” is a term used very loosely here, as all the dragons are rendered with CGI animation. The only difference is the human characters actually acted on camera. The most fun thing, arguably, about this How to Train Your Dragon is that Gerard Butler reprises his role as Stoick, the disconnected father of Hiccup, this story’s hero.

Hiccup was voiced in 2010 by Jay Baruchel, who was 28 at the time but still had his youthful-sounding voice. He’s 43 years old now and clearly can’t play a teenage character onscreen—he wouldn’t even have been able to 15 years ago—so he’s replaced by 17-year old Mason Thames, much more convincing as the scrawny Viking kid who dreams of being a dragon killer but only manages to wreak havoc with his awkward mistakes instead. Thames is well cast as a live-action avatar for how Hiccup was drawn as an animated character, and he holds the screen well too.

On the off chance you don’t already know, the basic premise here is that Hiccup discovers the dragons of this world, of which there are many, are misunderstood animals and not the ruthless killers the Viking villagers have regarded them as for generations. He manages to injure the elusive “Night Fury” dragon, but when he goes to hill the dragon, whom he later names “Toothless,” he befriends him instead. What follows is a struggle for Hiccup to convince his village that the dragons are smarter than they appear and mean them no harm.

Hiccup is very effectively an awkward outsider, which makes for a lot of awkwardness in the first half of this film, which sometimes works and a lot of times doesn’t. A lot of this How to Train Your Dragon is so cutesy and cartoony, it again begs the question: why not just let the animated feature stand on its own? Nothing truly realistic occurs in this “live action” rendering, least of all the way Hiccup eventually figures out how to ride Toothless. And I said this in my review of the 2010 film and it still feels the same now: the creature design of Toothless has an uncanny resemblance to that of Stitch from Lilo & Stitch—and ironically, a live action remake o Lilo & Stitch is also in theaters right now.

To this new How to Train Your Dragon’s credit, it gets better as it goes along—the second half is much better, and certainly more exciting, than the first half. I suppose that’s better than it being the other way around. I eventually found myself invested in the characters and in the story, in ways I wasn’t for some time at the start. And some further fun casting includes Nick Frost as Gobber, the guy who trains upcoming dragon slayers; Julian Dennison (the kid previously seen in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Deadpool 2, Godzilla vs. Kong, and Y2K) as one of Hiccup’s fellow dragonslayers-in-training; and Nico Parker (Joe’s daughter from the premiere episode of The Last of Us) as Astrid, Hiccup’s eventual love interest.

By the time of How to Train Your Dragon’s conclusion, I had to admit I was pretty entertained. It just had to go through a bit more awkward, cartoony cutesiness to get there than I would have preferred. Entertaining or not, I remain unconvinced there was any great reason to make this movie to begin with, but if it’s the thing on the screen in front of you then it works well enough.

This seems awfully familiar.

Overall: B-