THE ROSES

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

The Roses starts out strong, with a lot of promise, and then it kind of . . . peters out. The whole point of this movie is to be entertained by a warring couple who let things get out of hand in a divorce, and ironically, the flashback scene of when they first met is possibly the most entertaining in the movie. It certainly establishes Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch as having undeniable chemistry, as Ivy and Theo Rose.

And then, The Roses takes way too long to get on with what we came to this movie for. The runtime is 105 minutes, and it’s not until well into the second half that we even see this couple truly start to sour on each other.

I get what director Jay Roach and writer Tony McNamara are trying to do, I guess. They do a fairly impressive job of presenting characters who are both empathetic in their own ways. I’m just not convinced it needed to take well over half the movie to get there. The poster goes out of its way to note that this movie is “from the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things,” apparently to underscore one movie that was far more successful than this one has any hope to be, and another one that had far greater depth and wit and humor.

As it happens, The Roses is based on a 1981 novel called The War of the Roses by Warren Adler—which the 1989 film The War of the Roses, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, was also based on. Crediting both films as simply based on the novel saves this new one, on a bit of a technicality, from being considered a “remake”—it’s simply another adaptation. The first film, directed by Danny DeVito, was a much more pointedly dark comedy and therefore much more my jam; I enjoyed The Roses okay but would be much more inclined to recommend you simply seek out The War of the Roses from 1989 and watch that.

In the first film, the couple is a lot less verbally vicious, and the focus is more on their curdling resentments that evolve into sabotage and comic violence. This new The Roses spends so much time on the success of the first ten years of the Roses’ marriage that I became convinced it would not end on the same comic but deeply dark note the first film ended on. I won’t spoil the ending here, but I will say this: it surprised me, but also managed to be somewhat ambiguous in a way that allows the movie to have its cake and eat it too. I left the theater saying I prefer that movies have more balls than this.

Theo Rose is a successful architect and Ivy Rose runs a local seafood restaurant too far off the main road to be successful—plus she’s called it “We’ve Got Crabs,” one of this movie’s attempts at wit that doesn’t quite land. Theo loses his job after a signature building he designed, with a structure atop it meant to evoke a sail, collapses in the middle of a freak rainstorm. I should ask my architect friend how plausible this scenario is, because I found it hard to believe—but, the sequence itself has its share of both effective humor and thrill to it. The humor then gets undercut by the amount of time Theo spends afterward obsessing over the video that gets re-edited to music and then goes viral, a plot detail now wildly overused.

On the same night, the main road closed, a bunch of drivers are diverted to We’ve Got Crabs, and this includes a local food critic who reviews the restaurant. The review is so glowing that by the next day the restaurant is overwhelmed with customers, and within weeks Ivy is being flown to San Francisco to hang out with famous chefs.

This is where things turn for the Roses: Ivy becomes the great success and the publicly disgraced Theo can’t get work. Breadwinning and parental roles are swapped, and differing opinions about parenting are a big part of brewing tensions. Although I will say, for the record, I’m with Ivy on this one: kids should be allowed to have fun—the clarifier here is that there should be moderation in all things, and Ivy just wants to be the “fun parent” and Theo is excessively regimented with the kids. Speaking of which, while Ivy and Theo are relatively well-rounded characters, their relationship with the two kids is never fleshed out in a satisfactory way. Having them move to the other coast in Miami on a fitness scholarship at the age of thirteen is a little weird. As is both kids’ all-in subscription to their dad’s fitness obsession.

This does, however, get the kids out of the way so that we can get to the Roses’ climactic battle—but not before they meet with Ivy’s lawyer, played by Allison Janney, yet another thing The Roses takes too long to get to, because as always Janney is great. Theo hires neighbor friend Barry (Andy Samberg) as his lawyer, and the running gag of Barry’s wife Amy coming on to a reliably disinterested Theo never quite works either. Amy is played by a game and entertaining Kate McKinnon, but given Theo’s lack of interest, Amy just comes across as inexplicably oversexed and it never really works, even feels like it fits with the rest of the movie.

Instead of peppering the entertaining battles through the movie, The Roses builds up to a climactic battle between the two leads. There’s a sort of montage of one-upmanship, including a dinner party that I hoped to get more out of, until a final blowout between Ivy and Theo in the house—which Theo designed and built, but Ivy paid for, thus being the one thing each of them refuses to give up. This sequence is pretty entertaining, until it becomes almost cartoonish (in what world would a woman who works as a chef “learn AI” and create a deep-fake video in one evening?). I do like how the falling living room chandelier is a nod to the first The War of the Roses from 1989. But, the 1989 sequence is far better, and any nods in this movie are just gestures to things already done better. You might as well just go watch the other movie instead.

Theo and Ivy make a mess of things in The Roses.

Overall: B-

SPLITSVILLE

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

Splitsville takes romantic comedy into a peculiarly unusual direction, contextualizing it with the concept of open relationships in a way that may not be for everyone. Broadly speaking, it worked for me. I laughed more than I do at most contemporary romantic comedies. I may need to spend some time thinking about exactly how non-monogamy is explored in this movie, and everything ties up a little too neatly in the end, and in a way some may feel negates the idea that people can do non-monogamy successfully. I’ll let other people get into the debate about that, though, because I was as entertained as I hoped to be and therefore got what I wanted out of this movie.

That doesn’t mean some of it is a little tricky. Let’s start with Dakota Johnson, the biggest star in the cast, and an actor who seems to embody characters who exist in the same universe no matter which movie they’re in. I would not say Johnson is the most versatile of actors, and yet there is something undeniably compelling about her screen presence. There’s something almost ethereal about her, which you wouldn’t think would work in the part of Julie, a thirtysomething mom unhappy in her marriage, and yet here we are. At least she lives in an incredibly nice house with floor-to-ceiling windows and a pool thanks to being married to a very successful husband, Paul (Michael Angelo Covino), so her elegant and very-Dakota-Johnson fashion choices seem to fit.

The story actually revolves around Carey (Kyle Marvin), who happens to be Paul’s best friend. Carey works as a private school gym teacher, and I suppose the private school is meant to indicate how Carey can work as a gym teacher and still be close friends with a wealthy property developer without any class differences causing awkward tensions. In the opening scene, Carey and his wife Ashley (Adria Arjona) are on their way to a weekend getaway, and after witnessing a freak accident on the road, Ashley declares she wants out of the marriage.

In a comically extended sequence, Carey bails out of the car and runs to the home of Julie and Paul, where talk of divorce leads to the revelation that Julie and Paul are not monogamous. I won’t spoil where things go from there, but I will say that these characters consistently justify their open relationships in ways that seem a bit regressive: “If you make the bad thing not bad, then it’s okay.” This seems logical on the surface, except that Splitsville spends its time suggesting that non-monogamy will inevitably lead to problems—which is to say, non-monogamy is inherently bad—rather than acknowledging that it actually works for some people.

To be fair, it also doesn’t work for a lot of people. Spoiler alert: when Carey takes Julie and Paul’s news as a revelation and proposes it to Ashley as an idea for saving their marriage, it doesn’t work. Especially considering who Carey decides to have sex with. All this is to say, the idea not working out for characters like these is still valid. I would just like to see a movie in which people have open relationships and it’s not the major challenge for them all to overcome.

And, to clarify, non-monogamy does work, for all of these characters, for quite a long stretch of Splitsville. It works until it doesn’t. Or it may never have happened at all. Things get complicated, of course–especially when sex and romance does a bit of merry-go-round movement around this foursome. Declarations of not feeling jealous are made, and petty jealousies are quickly revealed. One might even say predictably—though a fight sequence that occurs between Carey and Paul at Paul’s house, destroying furniture and windows and more, is exceedingly well staged and quite entertaining. These are characters who have trained on certain defensive moves, so they both get some good ones in, but they are also both crippled by rage and sadness, which makes them fumble a great deal, lending the scene some realism. They spend more time damaging the house than they do each other, although they still do plenty of that.

There’s a lot of great dialogue in Splitsville, sometimes just short of Aaron Sorkin-esque. This is a movie with both compelling ideas and compelling performances. I do have some technical nitpicks, though, such as the multiple sequences with the camera swooshing back and forth around one or the other of their houses, as a means of communicating the plot. At Carey and Ashley’s house, we see how Carey amasses a group of friends out of Ashley’s growing number of ex-lovers (and these guys—and one woman, though we never see her—run the scale of plausibility as characters). In another scene, we glide through the many rooms of Paul and Julie’s house during a birthday party for their son. In one moment of the extended cut, a guy the kid barely knows arrives at the door while the party is in full swing, and as he’s let in and the camera moves past him, we hear the man walking while bellowing “Feliz Cumpleaños,” as if that would happen. Everyone sings “Happy Birthday” together, hello!

As I said, these are nitpicks. A pretty big one is the decision to hire a “mentalist” rather than a magician or clown or the kid’s birthday, and he’s played by Succession’s Nicholas Braun. This is played as a comic thread of the many things going on in the scene, and it just doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the movie, nor is it ever very funny.

The rest of the movie is, though. Your mileage will vary with Splitsville, but it got pretty far with me. Nitpicks notwithstanding, I had a really good time with it.

Two couples get messy, and then clean up their messes, in Splitsville.

Overall: B+

CAUGHT STEALING

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

Thank god Darren Aronofsky finally made a movie I can get behind again.

I became an Aronofsky loyalist after The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010), having already caught my attention with Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000). The Fountain (2006), released between those two pairs of great movies, was fine, but not great, indicating that Aronofsky was not quite infallible—but then he seemed to double down on that notion with two genuine duds, mother! (2017), which was so awful it made me angry; and The Whale (2022), which won Brendan Fraser his Best Actor Oscar but was a wildly insensitive story about morbid obesity, played by someone who was not obese (don’t even get me started on the stupid double entendre of the title). The only Darren Aronofsky featurre film I haven’t mentioned here is Noah (2014), the one film of his I never bothered to see because it was such a wild departure, was based on a story in the Bible, and was poorly reviewed to boot.

It does mean, however, that Darren Aronofsky has not quite stayed consistent as a director who has earned my loyalty based on his name alone. For a while there I thought he had that status, along the same lines as the Coen Brothers or Pedro Almodóvar or Christopher Nolan. And then his most recent movies went from not worth seeing to dreadful to barely tolerable, so when the trailers began running for Caught Stealing, I could only be cautiously optimistic at best.

This time, the optimism paid off. The one thing I’ll give Aronofsky credit for when it comes to every one of his movies is that everything he makes is unlike anything else he’s ever made—and yet you can find his sensibility somewhere deep in all of them. Caught Stealing isn’t quite a comedy, but it has several funny moments, making it the closest thing to a comedy he’s ever made. He clearly has both a sense of humor and a soft spot, as evidenced by the almost-incongruously cute animation element of the closing credits.

Caught Stealing is more of a farce, albeit one with plenty of gritty violence in it. My favorite thing about it is the lead character, Hank (Austin Butler, excellent as always), is a regular-guy bartender living in 1998 New York City, and although he gets caught up in extraordinary circumstances, he’s no action hero. After being hospitalized by goons looking for his punk Brit neighbor Russ (a nearly-unrecognizable Matt Smith), Hank freely admits to police Detective Roman (Regina King, in a part that takes one of this movie’s many surprising turns) that he’s really scared. Eventually Hank steps up and does heroic acts, but only when he’s otherwise out of any conventional options, and never with any “alpha male” energy. This is a guy who’s vulnerable, who cries, who gets physically hurt—quite badly.

I won’t be the first to mention the violence in Caught Stealing, the knowledge of which had me going in with the expectation that I may be unsettled by it. The trailers make it look almost comic. It’s certainly startling at times, but very much to the credit of both Aronofsky and script writer Charlie Huston, the violence is only ever in service of the story and the character development.

Almost every character is given more dimension than their screen time would lead you to expect; virtually every actor in this film brings something more to what’s merely written on the page. This is particularly the case with Zoë Kravitz as Yvonne, Hank’s love interest, in spite of getting disappointingly little screen time (for justifiable reason, in terms of plotting); and both Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio as Hasidic mafia brothers Lipa and Shmully. There is a brief detour to their mother’s place with Carol Kane that is a delight, but then Carol Kane is always a delight.

The less you know about Caught Stealing going into it, actually, the better. Not all the characters are what they seem, and some of the characters turn out to be what they seem but also helpful in surprising ways. Certain characters that would live to the end in other movies don’t here, and others that you fear for make it out okay. There’s a feeling of randomness to all these characters’ fates, but in a way that’s surprisingly satisfying. Most critically, Caught Stealing is utterly unpredictable, perhaps because people are often utterly predictable.

I will mention there is a cat. Bud the Cat, played by a remarkably chill cat named Tonic, is part of the inciting incident—Russ the neighbor asks Hank to look after Bud when he has to go home to the UK for a family emergency. Russ is tied up with all these criminals, and Hank simply has the bad luck of being in the way when the goons (including one named Colorado, played by Bad Bunny) come looking for him. Other key plot elements include the kitty litter, a fake plastic poop, and a literal key.

Caught Stealing even features character development between Hank and Bud the Cat, which is the sweetest part of the movie, even though I have a hard time believing a cat would just chill inside his open carrier whether he happens to be between a driver and an airbag, or on the beach at Coney Island. Regardless, I’m a big fan of Bud the Cat, and also a big fan of Caught Stealing.

Tonic stars in Caught Stealing.

Overall: B+

HONEY DON'T

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

Honey Don’t is a very peculiar film, in that the mixed-bad reviews are hardly unjustified, and yet I found the experience of watching it to be a surprisingly enjoyable one. It’s the kind of movie that, in another time, could have easily become a gay cult hit—it fits neatly into the “lesbian noir” genre, after all, and has a deeply subtle but pervasive camp sensibility to it. There’s a lot in it that might go over the heads of mainstream audiences but which gay audiences might appreciate. Plus, the lead character, private investigator Honey O’Donahue (a wonderful Margaret Qualley), is gay.

So are multiple other characters: local cop MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), with whom Honey has a fling; Mr. Siegfried (Billy Eichner, criminally underused), who has hired Honey to investigate who his boyfriend is having an affair with; and Collegian (Christian Antidormi), Siegfried’s boyfriend who meets a delightfully dark fate that I won’t spoil here. That fate, however, is very directly tied to Hector (Puerto Rican actor and singer Jacnier), who has an illicit sort of employment with local Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans, always fun to see in parts that are not Captain America).

It doesn’t take long for bodies to start piling up, in ways that are both amusing and decidedly Coen-esque—this is another film directed by Joel Coen but without his brother Joel, here co-written by Ethan and his wife Tricia Cooke, and this may be the Coen film made by one without the other that I have enjoyed the most. That doesn’t make it the best, per se; I just enjoyed its oddball mix of noir and queer sensibility. I kept thinking of the 2021 film French Exit, which I enjoyed in a very similar way. That’s a different movie, except that it also has its own (much more overt) camp sensibility, also easy to have a blast with in spite of its obvious flaws.

There’s something to be said for casting. Margaret Qualley has such great onscreen charisma she carries Honey Don’t through what otherwise would be lulls in the plot. Charlie Day plays a local detective who is charming enough to make up for his clueless declarations of “You always say that!” when he hits on Honey and she tells him “I like girls.” Evans hits the perfect notes in his performance of an oversexed minister who keeps doing ministry even in bed.

It’s in the plot threads that Honey Don’t is likely to lose people. This movie is all of 89 minutes long, and is a rare case of one you find yourself wishing had been longer. It ends with multiple narrative threads that neither get any satisfying resolution, nor do they appear to have any connection to one another. It’s difficult to say which does more to make or break a movie, the script or the editing, but it feels a lot like both are at fault with this one.

At least the charismatic actors are also shot well, giving this a slight feel of older, better Coen Brothers movies (and the opening credits have a particularly fun and clever design). As the story goes along, as long as you’re not thinking too hard about what the hell is going on, it’s easy to have a great time. It’s tempting to say Honey Don’t is ultimately a failure, except for the parts I enjoyed so much—the actors, the cinematography, the subtle notes of camp. I would recommend it only to a very particular group—queer people who love a knowingly, esoterically ironic point of view. It’s pretty cool that Ethan Coen went in that direction, if nothing else.

It’s no masterpiece, but it’s fun to watch!

Overall: B

NOBODY 2

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

When Nobody was released in 2021, it worked perhaps better than it deserved: released in May, it was the first movie I saw in the theater since covid stay-home orders had begun 14 months before. There was something freeing about the experience, both the return to normalcy for us movie lovers, and the violent release of pent-up tension that unfolded in the plot, about a guy with a problem resisting an urge to pick fights—but always with good (sort of) on his side. It also established Bob Odenkirk as the latest in a line of unlikely older-man action heroes.

Odenkirk was 58 when Nobody was released, which makes him 61 now. That film also featured Connie Nielsen as his wife, Becca; Christopher Lloyd as his dad, David; and RZA as Harry, his brother—all of whom return for Nobody 2. Even Gage Munroe and Paisley Cadorath return as Hutch and Becca’s children, who are quickly established at the beginning of the film as increasingly frustrated by their dad’s absence—but not as much as Becca.

Nodody was hokey and contrived as hell, but lots of fun not just in spite of but because of that: it was a movie that made no bones about what it was, and that’s what made it work. It was kind of a blast. Nobody 2 has a bit of a problem in that it simply attempts to replicate what the first movie did, giving it the feel of a copy of a copy. Nothing is innovated here, and the film seems to serve little purpose other than to stage ultra-violent combat sequences at a rickety amusement park.

Hitch and Harry were taken there once as kids by their dad, you see, and it was the one family vacation they ever took—something Hutch is attempting to replicate by returning there with his own wife and kids. Naturally, what else is replicated is how the dad gets sucked back into old habits there, particularly when an asshole employee swats his daughter upside the back of the head. This results in violent retribution that is so wildly out of proportion, the movie quickly stopped being fun for me. Acting in self-defense is one thing, even when it’s excessive, but in response to a swat on the head? Bashing a guy’s head through an arcade game?

Nobody 2 attempts to make this behavior okay—for the sake of the audience, anyway; Becca doesn’t approve, at least not at first—by having Hutch admit to Wyatt (John Ortiz), the park owner, that “I lost my shit,” but in response to what still qualifies as assault against his daughter: “What would you do?” Wyatt, the park owner who starts off as a potential adversary after his son and Hutch’s son get into a scuffle (this is what starts it all), seems to ponder this briefly and then basically give Hutch a pass.

But there are some truly wild characters we have yet to meet. There’s the local sheriff, Abel (Colin Hanks, at 47 looking shockingly like his father in middle-age), ridiculously corrupt and acting as a sort of middle-man between Wyatt, who oversees an underground drug operation for which the amusement park is a front (seems unduly complicated), and the most bonkers character of all, Lendina, played with unselfconscious relish by Sharon Stone. She’s the boss of this entire operation, a ruthless woman about whom a character might say “She’s wiped out entire bloodlines for less.” Funny how Hutch can wipe out her henchmen like they are, you know, nothing but story props.

I won’t lie, I had kind of a good time with Nobody 2. That can happen when you just surrender to what a movie is, in this case a moderately amusing action movie with modest ambitions and zero pretense. That doesn’t make this movie good, and this is just a rehash of a previous film that barely succeeded on such flimsy merits. Nobody might still hold up, actually—but it was the kind of movie that worked precisely because it shouldn’t, but it was saved by great fight choreography and charismatic performers. The performers are mostly the same in Nobody 2, but the premise and especially the villains are so ridiculous that it sometimes took me out of the movie. Every supporting character in Nobody 2 is not only a caricature, but practically a cartoon.

But, if you just want to see a bunch of people get dismembered and blown up in an amusement park, I suppose you’ll have a great time.

Fire in the hole! In the plot hole!

Overall: C+

WEAPONS

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

Weapons is a tricky one, because its success relies so heavily on how little you know going in. How much can I tell you about it, then? About as much as the setup is revealed in the trailer: all but one student in a single third-grade class suddenly run out of their homes at the same time in the middle of the night, run out into the darkness, and no one has any idea where they went. The parents of these students are deeply suspicious of the class teacher, Justine (Julia Garner, perfectly cast), for little reason other than it’s the only thing they have to hold onto, the closest thing to a shred of sense. She is seemingly the only thing all these kids have in common.

I suppose you could argue that it’s strange this community is not equally suspicious of Alex (an exceedingly well-directed Cary Christopher), as he is just as much what these kids have in common as Julia is: he’s from their class, and he’s the only one that didn’t run out into the night. Of course, adults are far more likely to suspect other adults than a child, and while they might also have been suspicious of Alex’s parents, those two are . . . let’s say: incapacitated.

Such is the central mystery of Weapons, and one that remains a mystery for quite a long time in this movie: what made these children run away, and where did they go?

This is perhaps the perfect time to mention that Weapons was written and directed by Zach Creggor, the filmmaker behind the 2022 surprise hit Barbarian, which established him as a bold new voice in cinema. What Weapons proves is that he is far from a one-hit wonder. This is a movie that does everything right. It establishes a mystery, then unravels it before out eyes without ever once telegraphing what comes next. It doesn’t have the wild tonal shifts of Barbarian (one of the many things that made that movie such a delight), but it does provide a fair amount of laughs—just don’t expect them to come too soon. Creggor wants to put you through the paces of nervous tension first.

Horror has never been my favorite genre, but horror with a healthy dose of humor gets me a step closer. Weapons has been likened to a cross between Magnolia and Hereditary, which does reveal a little bit, in an abstract way: we get several chapters, each titled the name of the character being focused on, the first being the aforementioned Justine. Another is Alex, and yet another is Archer (Josh Brolin), a parent of one of the missing children. There’s also Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a local cop; and James (Austin Abrams), a homeless addict who is given far more dimension than such a character is typically given in any movie, let alone a horror movie. Eventually we start to see how the narratives of all these characters intersect, which is where the Magnolia comparison comes in. The broader vibe otherwise can be inferred.

There is no allegory or metaphor to be found here; Weapons is simply a magnificently structured and cleverly written horror story, the kind that makes you remember how exhilarating it can be to go to the movies—especially with a crowd of people. I will admit I spent a lot of time with my hands over my face, and Creggor does employ several well-placed jump scares—something I usually hate. I have some mixed feelings about the multiple dream sequences, and in one of them the apparition of a giant machine gun in the sky feels a little on the nose (that sounds like something close to a spoiler, but believe me, it isn’t). Weapons clocks in at two hours and eight minutes, but to say there isn’t a dull moment is an understatement.

When it comes to the comparison to Hereditary, what I would clarify here is that Hereditary was much more unsettling than Weapons, which still succeeds at it to a degree. Weapons is far more thrilling, though, especially one it takes a decisive turn in the final act—which is where most of the humor also comes along. It’s also an incredible jolt of energy in a story that was already crackling, but it pivots from suspense to a beautifully executed sort of chaos.

Most critically, Zach Cregger shows admirable restraint. The final-act chaos is over just when you think you want more, but in a fully satisfying way. Nothing gets over-explained, or indeed in many ways explained at all. Amy Madigan suddenly shows up, and I won’t dare spoil in what capacity—only that she proves to be the wildest character of all. But whether it’s her or any of the other ensemble cast, they all feel like authentic people with dimension, even when they make you giggle (there’s one moment when Josh Broken delivers a perfectly executed “What the fuck!”).

I haven’t yet mentioned Benedict Wong as the school principal, Andrew, who also gets his own chapter. We don’t even realize for a while that he plays a gay man, and I was sort of taken with the scene in which he is grocery shopping with his partner, simultaneously trying to talk down a paranoid Justine on the phone while pointing at which cereal he prefers. I loved that Wong played his part straight (so to speak), while his partner is played by Clayton Farris with a perfect touch of effeminacy. The fates of both these characters is pretty wild in the end, but in neither case does it have anything to do with their sexuality. They are simply among a great many regular people caught in extraordinary circumstances.

I mean, they’re just caught in a movie, to be fair—but, in the best way. Weapons is not something you will soon forget, and will want to talk about at length, so long as it’s with someone else who has also seen it. No spoilers! Movies like this are why we love cinema.

Run, don’t walk, to the cinema to see this movie!

Overall: A-

THE NAKED GUN

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

Spoof movies in the vein of The Naked Gun had their heyday long, long ago—it started with Airplane! in 1980, and lasted perhaps through Hot Shots! in 1991. In the middle of that period, we got The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988, starring Leslie Nielsen, who had already surprised audiences by pivoting from a long career in serious dramas before pivoting to his part in Airplane! Nielsen then became, for all intents and purposes, the poster boy for spoof movies, starring in The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear in 1991, then The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult in 1994. Those diminishing returns continued with little-known films such as Dracula: Dead and Loving It in 1995; the Fugitive spoof Wrongfully Accused in 1998; and his injection into the Scary Movie franchise in 2003 (Scary Movie 3) and 2006 (Scary Movie 4).

By the 2000s, the Scary Movie franchise represented a genre long run out of steam, made by people who have exhausted all the good punch lines, and who clearly no longer quite understood the assignment. Scary Movie (2000) was the cinematic equivalent of a hat on a hat, created in response to Scream (1996) and its sequels—but those films were packed with self-referential comedy, a meta exercise that did not lend itself well to parody, because parodying something already comedic makes little sense.

Enter 2025, well into the era of the rooboot and the “legasequel,” and this new The Naked Gun qualifies as both. I would have preferred a well-made film in this genre that was an original idea, but The Naked Gun is what we’ve got. And here’s the surprise: this is perhaps the first spoof movie made in thirty years by people who not only understood the assignment, but have sharp, comedic minds.

I have often wondered what it would be like to remake Airplane!—full disclosure, my all-time favorite comedy—in the modern era. The pop culture references would have to be updated, as would any of the gags related to technology. Would it play quite as well? Probably not, but I would be very interested in seeing it attempted. I’ve gotten the next-best thing with The Naked Gun in 2025, which succeeds shockingly well at updating all the references and the technology, while fully honoring the tone of the humor in the original.

Plus, this Naked Gun has something other reboots almost never have, which is restraint—not in terms of all the deliberately dumb humor, which is the overall point of this exercise, but in any penchant for self-reference, or particularly reference to the original 1998 film. Aside from the plot connection that establishes this as technically a sequel rather than a reboot (Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin, Jr, son of Leslie Nielsen’s Lieutenant Frank Drebin; Paul Walter Hauser plays Ed Hocken Jr, son of George Kennedy’s Captain Ed Hocken), there’s only a couple of references to the first film, so subtle that only audiences who well remember the original will catch them, just as the passing shot of a stuffed beaver, or the very brief cameo by “Weird Al” Yankovic, which also happened in the original. There’s even a very brief cutaway to Priscilla Presley watching the news. And yet, anyone who has never seen any of the previous films can watch and enjoy without feeling like they’re missing anything—these are just fun little Easter Eggs for those of us who do remember.

A big part of what makes The Naked Gun work is its inspired casting, once again with people known as serious actors, who play their parts straight. Liam Neeson, already enjoying a reinvention over the past 15 years as an older action star, could not be more perfect as Drebin Jr. He shot this movie at the age of 72, and although that’s 10 years older than Nielsen was in the original Naked Gun, they still have the long career of serious roles in common. And Nielsen was indeed born 26 years before Neeson, which certainly makes them believable as father and son. Paul Walter Hauser has proven to be a versatile actor across genres, and I liked him better here than I did as the Mole Man in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, also currently in theaters. As Drebin’s love interest, Beth Davenport, we get Pamela Anderson, a worthy successor to Priscilla Presley in this genre.

With the addition of Danny Huston as the Elon Musk-like villain, Richard Crane, who sells electric cars but also plans to detonate a device with sound waves that makes everyone kill each other so he can inherit and rule over the world with fellow billionaires after waiting out the carnage in a bunker, The Naked Gun features a game cast of actors who all understand what kind of movie they’re in. None of it feels like a cash-grab, and the script, by Dan Gregor, Doug Mand, and Akiva Schaffer (who also directed), manages to make the humor feel fresh rather than rehashed.

I won’t pretend that all the gags land, but with this type of humor, mileage varying comes with the territory. The run time is a wonderfully brisk 85 minutes—exactly the same as the original film—which keeps the pacing breakneck, creating a far better feeling than the countless “comedies” of the past twenty years that bafflingly clock in at over two hours, creating opportunities for lulls. There are no lulls in The Naked Gun, and if one gag doesn’t make you laugh, there will be another one that will, and in a matter of seconds. That is precisely how these movies are supposed to work.

This may not be an original idea, but police procedurals as a target of parody is an evergreen proposition, and at least The Naked Gun is a recognizable property. Well, it is for us older folks, anyway—but I already noted that this movie can work just as well for anyone who has never seen the previous films in the franchise, or indeed are unaware that they even exist. Funny is funny, and as long as you’re open to this kind of humor (dumb jokes written by smart people), the bottom line is that this movie is funny. And things look surprisingly promising for this film: a score of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes; a score of 75 on MetaCritic; a surprisingly large crowd in the theater where I went to see it, at 10:45 a.m. on a Saturday. It’s tracking to make around $20 million this weekend, exceeding initial projections.

Whether The Naked Gun will prove to be rewatchable the way its predecessor was remains to be seen; I may see it again just to look for visual gags I missed the first time around. Movies like this tend to pack in a lot, which means some of it can get missed while you’re laughing. This is the best problem a comedy can have, and god knows movie comedies that actually get a theatrical release are a dying breed. It’s fantastic to see a movie like this come along with so much more life in it than anyone had any reason to expect.

There’s so much more to offer here than you’d think!

Overall: B+

THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS

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

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has clearly aged past its prime. It feels a little like the “cinematic universe” equivalent of a middle-aged guy prone to reminiscing about his glory days as a high school football star.

To be fair, I never fully locked into the “MCU” project the way millions of fans did. I am a fan of movies, not of genre, which means I can appreciate the special ones that break the mold (Black Panther, Logan, even Thor: Ragnarok) but can easily forget about the rest—and there is a lot of the rest. This new Fantastic Four movie isn’t seriously bad, even if it is still definitively dumb; it’s merely average at best, which makes it slip right into that same steady stream of superhero mediocrity.

I can’t help but compare this film to Superman, the DC competitor also currently in theaters, and although I have ultimately decided The Fantastic Four: First Steps is better, the difference is negligible. The thing is, there were things I hated more about Superman (it’s mind-numbingly stupid script) but there were also things liked a lot more about Superman (its far better casting; Krypto the Superdog, overused as he was). Its worse qualities tip the scale, which is perhaps ironic because at least Superman kept me awake. I nodded off multiple times during The Fantastic Four.

Some of my issues with this movie, admittedly, are fully justifiable inclusions in a movie based on a superhero comic book—I’m just not into these things, this idea that the heroes are for all intents and purposes gods, and therefore any presentation of stakes is fully an illusion. This is the case whether it’s in a comic book or a movie, and is perhaps a big reason I never got into comic books. I never get invested in the heroes’ success because their success is guaranteed—particularly in the first in an expected line of sequels.

I am also aware that The Fantastic Four is a bit notorious as a franchise, in that this film is the fourth—nice coincidence there—attempt at cinematic adaptation, at least if you count the 1994 production that never got released theatrically but can now be found online. A second attempt that did get theatrical release, and even did well at the box office (to the tune of $333 million worldwide), came out in 2005, with a nearly-as successful sequel in 2007. The second reboot, starring Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and Jamie Bell, tanked both critically (27 out of 100 on MetaCritic) and commercially ($56 million domestic). I never saw any one of these movies because I couldn’t be bothered to care, but I certainly know that none of them were regarded as a particularly good adaptation.

All that is to say: there was a lot riding on The Fantastic Four: First Steps, both with fans of this particular group of superheroes and with the future of Marvel Studios broadly. This is film is performing relatively well, although that success is mitigated by a $200 million budget—and this, frankly, is one of my problems with the movie. Why am I not actually seeing that money put to use, or at least put to use well, onscreen? James Cameron spent $400 million to make Avatar: The Way of Water, but that was money well spent, with visual effects so astonishing they largely made up for a frustratingly simpleminded script. The problem with movies like both Superman 2025 and The Fantastic Four: First Steps is that they have both the money and the means, and it still feels like everyone is phoning it in.

This is nitpicky, but I don’t care: the Fantastic Four have a car that flies. There is a scene in this movie where a couple of them rush in this car to the scene of some mayhem, and the car quickly stops in the air in time to skid on the ground a couple of feet, and the occupants pop right out and just keep walking like the badasses they think they are. There’s no fumbling, no recalibrating their balance, no visual acknowledgement of the physics of sudden changes in velocity—in short, it looks unnatural, because it is: bodies would never move this way, except in the results of rushed VFX. And it’s distracting when, even in a fantastical world like this, something looks straight up fake when it is clearly not meant to. There are so many things that look like this in effects-heavy movies these days, and within ten years people will rewatch this stuff and feel the same effects as we do today when watching stop-motion effects in 1930s films. Except in this case, it’s not because of any limitation of technology—it’s because people can’t be bothered to take the time to get it right.

Granted, The Fantastic Four: First Steps would not be much improved even if the effects were perfected. I found Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer to be the most compelling character—also referred to as “the herald of Galactus,” she scouts planets for the godlike Galactus (Ralph Ineson) to consume, in exchange for him sparing her home planet. Garner does a lot with a part that is limited both in screen time and in physicality: the Silver Surfer sports a body encased in silver, making her look rather like the villain from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (this may be a reference lost on you if you are younger than 30). The entire plot surrounds the Fantastic Four’s efforts to stop Galactus, and get the Silver Surfer out of their way of doing so, but in broad execution it’s all packed with so many lapses in logic that I lost count.

There’s also a subplot involving “Mole Man,” as played by Paul Walter Hauser, a talented actor who is wasted in this bit part about a rival to the Fantastic Four who ultimately comes to their aid by allowing all of New York City to evacuate—not to some area outside the city, that would make too much sense, but to his underground city of “Subterranea.” This happens after all but one of the “bridges” to another dimension around the world are destroyed, which is why Galactus must be lured to the only one still standing, conveniently for this plot, right in Times Square. And this is the only reason “Subterranea” factors into the plot at all.

As for the Fantastic Four themselves, and the actors who play them, this is a bit of a mixed bag. The overexposure of Pedro Pascal continues, as he is cast as Reed Richards, “Mister Fantastic,” clearly coded as the “head of the family,” and meant to be some wild genius, as he writes equations on chalkboards that I am sure look like gibberish to any actual genius. Also, for a genius, he sure spends a lot of the movie befuddled about what to do. I can’t say he has the greatest chemistry with Vanessa Kirby, who shines as rival to Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible movies, but here adopts an American accent for Sue Storm, the “Invisible Woman,” a part that basically exists so she can give birth in space, to a baby with as-yet-unknown superpowers (but Galactus sure wants him!). Joseph Quinn has arguably the most charisma out of the bunch, as Sue’s brother, Johnny Storm, “The Human Torch.” And Ebon Moss-Bachrach all but disappears as a personality inside the CGI suit of Reed’s best friend Ben Grimm, “The Thing.”

Much is made of Reed’s genius invention of teleportation, which he demonstrates successfully with an egg and then explains doing the same with Planet Earth should be just as easy because the difference is just “a matter of scale.” The problem is, even though it’s immediately made clear that this cast of characters exist in a different universe than ours, Reed’s teleportation scheme never explains exactly where he’ll teleport Earth to, and spoiler alert, Earth never gets teleported at all by the end of this movie. And let’s not even get started on this movie’s countless inconsistencies of scale. Except, perhaps, for this question: if Galactus is meant to consume an entire planet, why is he the size of a skyscraper?

Much like Krypto from Superman, I did enjoy H.E.R.B.I.E. (“Humanoid Experimental Robot B-Type Integrated Electronics”), Reed’s lovable robot assistant. And unlike Krypto, H.E.R.B.I.E. is not overused. Indeed, one of the better things about The Fantastic Four: First Steps is its successful sidestepping of self-indulgence: mercifully, this film doesn’t even clock in at a full two hours (its runtime is 114 minutes). Just because it’s not overstuffed doesn’t mean it’s not still a bit of a mess—a judgement I make fully aware that it’s largely informed by how tired I am of superhero-movie tropes. There have just been so many of these superhero moves over so many decades now, I truly long to see ones that stand apart with narrative innovation. Pinning any hopes for such a thing with this movie would be a mistake.

I don’t know, maybe try stepping in a different direction.

Overall: B-

OH, HI!

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

I’m feeling pretty ambivalent about this movie.

In 1992, Stephen King published a novel called Gerald’s Game, in which a woman spends most of the story stranded and tied to her bed, her husband dead on the floor after she induces a heart attack by kicking him in the nuts when he ignores her pleas to stop. I only bring this up because in the new movie Oh, Hi!, director and co-writer Sophie Brooks takes the basic premise of Gerald’s Game, swaps the genders, and turns it into a comedy.

Is it all that funny? Not really. I think I got a good, laugh-out-loud moment out of it one time. I kind of got a kick out of David Cross as the oddball neighbor who exists just this side of creepy. Even his performance is odd, though: in his first scene, in which he shows up, standing stiffly, at the lakeside admonishing the two main characters not to have sex in the lake—which they aren’t doing—his eyes appear fixed on nothing, so at first I thought he was playing a blind man. Then he shows up in another scene in which it’s clear he can see just fine.

Semi-ironic side note: one of the very minor subplots of Oh, Hi! is that Isaac (Logan Lerman), the male lead, is reading Blindness by Portuguese novelist José Saramago—a novel I found narratively compelling but a very difficult read due to its use of dashes instead of quotation marks for dialogue. Isaac never says anything about this, although he does get frustrated by two other character asking why the novel is called Blindness Blindness Blindness because of the visual design of the title on the book cover repeating the word. The second time that happened I did get a good chuckle, so I’ll give this movie credit for that.

Two other key differences between Oh, Hi! and Gerald’s Game is that Oh, Hi! isn’t in the least bit rapey—thank God—and nobody dies. Isaac does fear or his life, though, and for good reason. Iris (Molly Gordon), his girlfriend-or-is-she, is clearly mentally unwell, and when Isaac reveals he’s not looking or a relationship while still tied to a bed (let that be a lesson to us all: never share your disappointing feelings about your relationship while in handcuffs), Iris refuses to un-cuff him, and instead somehow convinces herself she can convince him to stay with him by refusing to let him free for twelve hours.

Two other characters come into the mix, about halfway through: realizing she is in far too deep, she calls in reinforcements from her good friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan), who shows up with her own boyfriend, Kenny (John Reynolds), in tow. Mind you, Isaac and Iris are renting a secluded getaway house in the country, which is why Steve the oddball neighbor is the only other person around, and allows for a primary cast of only four for ninety percent of the film’s runtime. In any case, Kenny is vaguely described as having law expertise, and once he comes into the house and sees that there is a captive upstairs who none of them has immediately freed, they are all potentially looking at jail time.

The performances are decent all around, and both Logan Lerman and especially Molly Gordon make the most of the material they are given. It’s the material itself that I am ambivalent about. I didn’t feel active contempt for this movie as I watched it, and generally the characters are compelling enough—with the exception of Iris, and given she is the central character, that’s a pretty big problem. Who was asking for a movie about a psychotic young woman who can’t handle that the guy she’s dating just isn’t that into her?

Oh, Hi! plays like it wants us to empathize with Isaac and Iris equally, and I take issue with that. Gordon may give a nuanced performance as Iris, but Iris is not nearly as nuanced a character as Sophie Brooks clearly wants us to think she is. And having Isaac soften to Iris after being literally held captive by her for so long that she has to hold a bowl for him to pee into—am I the only one who thinks that’s batshit insane? I can’t decide if I just don’t understand Millennials or if logically Isaac would actually go straight to the police the minute he had the opportunity.

I won’t spoil how Oh, Hi! ends, but I will say it ends with frustrating ambiguity. I’m not against empathy for even the worst kinds of people, in fact I very much believe in and encourage it—but not to the point of unhealthiness, and certainly not without justice. Oh, Hi! just feels a little like it doesn’t have a deep enough understanding of these things.

“It’s not that deep,” you might say. Sure, okay. I could also say that I’d like this movie a lot more, even with nothing else changed, it it were a lot funnier. But Brooks is trying to imbue the story with a certain kind of pathos, which is incongruous to the proceedings. Even a deeper backstory than the random bits of information we get on these two leads would have been helpful. In the end, I just left this movie moderately entertained at best and frustrated at worst. I was tempted to say “eternally frustrated,” except that I’ll probably forget this movie by next week.

It’s amazing how far out of hands things get when two of the hands are cuffed.

Overall: B-

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-