THE LONG WALK

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

Stephen King wrote the novel The Long Walk when he was 19 years old. It was the first one he ever wrote, though not the first to be published (that was Carrie, published when he was 27). That would place the writing of The Long Walk during King’s college years in the late 1960s, during the peak of the Vietnam War—for which reviewers later interpreted this novel as being a metaphor.

Now, nearly 60 years after it was written and 46 years after it was first published, The Long Walk gets its first-ever film adaptation, starring Cooper Hoffman (the late Philip Seymour’s son), David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Mark Hamill, and more. I don’t know if Stephen King is just trying to cash in on as many film adaptations as possible or what, but I can’t say this film works all that well as a metaphor for much of anything, much less the Vietnam War, which has largely passed out of an active place in the American cultural consciousness. We have young adults now with no memory of 9/11.

The Long Walk is getting some rave reviews, and I can’t quite understand why. It has strong performances and is well shot, so it kept my attention, but I still rather found it lacking. The story is set 19 years after a war has left the United States in economic dire states and a diminished place in the world. I suppose it could be argued that it doesn’t matter, but the story as presented here tells us nothing else about why the war happened or how our society got to a place where there is an annual marathon with one “winner” from each state who must walk through a desolate rural America, always at least at 3 miles per hour on penalty of execution after three warnings, until only one of them is left.

This is where even the Vietnam War “metaphor” idea falls apart, because these young men volunteer for this opportunity—they aren’t drafted. The winner is granted one wish as well as riches beyond their wildest dreams, and much is made of the country being so economically depressed that everyone they know is eager to volunteer out of desperation. But that’s not exactly the same thing, is it? Average young men didn’t enlist for the Vietnam War out of desperation; they were forced into it by the draft.

“The Long Walk” is indeed televised for the country, and Mark Hamill as “The Major” mentions how production picks up all around the country each year after the Walk. This brings in a dark sort of televised entertainment into the premise, which is both similar to and pre-dates the likes of Kōshun Takami’s Battle Royale (published 1999) or Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (published 2008)—or indeed even Stephen King’s own The Running Man (published 1982), which itself is getting a second film adaption released later this fall, starring Glenn Powell (the 1987 adaptation starred Arnold Schwarzenegger).

The Running Man looks to be far more fun than The Long Walk, which leaves me still looking forward to it, albeit with a cautious optimism. At least that one promises exciting action set pieces, of which The Long Walk has none: my companion at The Long Walk today noted that it was the most violent movie she had ever seen with no action in it. It’s just a bunch of young men either walking, or, when they get too tired or get injured so they can’t keep the pace, getting shot. And you should get fair warning here: the kills in this movie are pretty gruesome, especially the first one, which shows a bullet tearing through a guy’s face. In many of the rest of the examples, you see bits flying out the other side of their head when they get shot. There’s quite a bit of this, but it’s not the only type of gross thing you’ll see: I’ll just say that one guy winds up with some gastrointestinal trouble, and we get a direct look at the results. I can only hope that I go with more dignity when I die.

But, basically, all these guys sign up for a 98% chance of an ignominious death. With there being 50 contestants of “The Long Walk,” I found myself running nerdy numbers in my head. For instance: if we assume 10% of the population is queer, then at least 5 of these guys should have been queer, but we don’t get a single gay character—a common issue with Stephen King’s vastly prolific writing, in which nearly everyone is cisgender and straight. Instead, we get a somewhat shocking amount of homophobic banter between these young men. I can’t figure out if JT Mollner, who adapted King’s novel into this screenplay, was just staying true to how King represented young men in the sixties, or if we are meant to rationalize this detail as the inevitable backsliding of social mores in a country that has become far-right authoritarian. The problem is that The Long Walk as a film provides no such clarity, so we’re just left to take the way these guys talk to each other at face value.

We don’t even get backstory on any individual characters. The closest is Raymond Garraty (Hoffman), the lead character, whose letter congratulating him on winning this “lottery” to represent his state serves as the opening title card. We see his mother (Judy Greer) driving him to the meeting point and breaking down when they say goodbye, and later we get the single real flashback regarding what was the ultimate fate of Garrett’s father—who defied national law by sharing old music and pop culture that is now banned with his son. That’s the extent of it with Garraty, and none of the other 49 contestants get even that treatment—not even Peter McVries (Jonsson, who was very impressive as the synthetic, Andy, in Alien: Romulus), who is eventually revealed to be the co-lead of the film.

Garraty reveals a plan to avenge his father, which prompts some wise advice from McVries: “Vengeance doesn’t help.” In the end, this is a big part of what makes how The Long Walk ends—very differently from the novel, to be clear—so baffling. It’s as though writer JT Mollner, and director Francis Lawrence, can’t decide what they’re trying to say. The Long Walk is clearly designed to be unsettling, and it very much works on that front. But, to what end? The character left standing at the end makes a truly momentous choice that is antithetical to what had previously seemed to be his own wisdom, and then walks off into the night in an environment that suddenly changes in a way that makes no practical sense. Are we supposed to take this at face value, or is this a fantasy in a character’s head? Again: this movie doesn’t seem to know. It would be one thing if The Long Walk were being provocatively ambiguous, but it feels more like it just doesn’t quite know what it’s going for. To that end, I can tell you what you should be going for: a better movie.

Are we there yet?

Overall: B-

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-

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-

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-

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-

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-

DROP

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

I have just one major complaint about Drop, the thriller set mostly in a Chicago high-rise rooftop restaurant: the climax doesn’t even take place there! For that, we go to the protagonist’s neighborhood home. BOOOOO. Boring! That skyscraper was literally the single reason I went to see this movie, what the hell do I care about someone’s living room?

Okay, a couple of pretty cool things do happen at “Palate,” the fictional restaurant where Violet (Meghan Fahy) is terrorized by someone holding her young son hostage at home, and demanding she kill Henry (Bandon Sklenar), the man she’s on a blind date there with. To Drop’s credit, at least two thirds of the cool action that takes place in the restaurant is not even shown in the trailer. I just wish the action had stayed in the restaurant, rather than pivoting to a car speeding through the streets of Chicago, to a regular house that is surprisingly quick to drive to from the middle of the second-largest city skyline in the country.

I’ve tried very hard to figure out what the building was that was used for exterior shots of Palate Fine Dining Restaurant. Filming took place primarily in Dublin, which means the view of other Chicago skyscrapers through the restaurant windows was artificially rendered. How tall is this building supposed to be? I’m going to guess something like thirty floors. These are the things I’m interested in. Drop doesn’t care. To be fair, probably neither do most of its other viewers.

It is established early on that there must be at least two people working together here, to make demands of Violet and threaten to kill her son if she doesn’t comply. One is the masked man in her home, with an impressive number of security cameras in every single room. Another is the mystery person who is definitely in the restaurant with her, sending sinister memes via a “drop” app on her phone. Eventually Violet realizes there are tiny cameras installed all over the restaurant, particularly in the women’s room and at her table by the windows. We can only wait until Violet inevitably finds some way to outsmart her terrorizer, all while getting “drops” in a restaurant from which there is, it’s say, a thirty-floor drop–get it? Listen, director Christopher Landon: I’d get it a lot better if you kept the action in the restaurant!

Landon does have a bit of a penchant for fairly novel premises. He also co-wrote and directed the 2020 horror film Freaky, a twist on Freaky Friday in which the people who switch bodies are a serial killer and a teenage girl. That film was elevated by great performances by its leads, especially Vince Vaughn as said teenage girl. Drop doesn’t have any such thing to elevate it; the acting is fine, but each performance is interchangeable with countless others who could have been just as effectively cast in the parts.

The “twist” of who the home invader turns out to be is something we can see coming a hundred miles away—and that’s saying something, because I never watch movies looking for things coming even a mile away. Violet’s son is being babysat by her sister, Jen (Violett Beane), who eventually gets in on some of the action—one thing to enjoy about Drop is the extent to which the women in it actually do kick some ass, even the bartender (Gabrielle Ryan). A bit of an odd addition to the script is Jeffrey Self, a charismatic performer saddled with the part of a waiter working nervously on his first-ever shift, and constantly shot from wildly unflattering angles from just above table-height.

Most of Drop is effectively suspenseful, at least, and it has enough action in the final act to make it worth the wait through all the tension. I was entertained enough, but not enough to tell you to bother seeing it. I could be singing a different tune here if they had kept the action in the restaurant, so the filmmakers really have themselves to blame.

I’d say stay for the view but it’s totally fake and they don’t even stay themselves anyway.

Overall: B-