IS GOD IS

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

I feel a bit like I’m in an impossible position with Is God Is, which is a movie that I have to admit really did not speak to me, but then, I am perhaps not the person it’s speaking to.

I didn’t even realize until after seeing the film that Is God Is is based on a stage play of the same name, and a rather critically acclaimed one at that. I wonder if I would have felt differently about the play? Well, the play was written by Aleshea Harris, who also wrote and directed this film adaptation. I had never even heard of the play, much less seen it, so I have no idea how well it translates to film as compared to its original medium.

I left this movie a little stuck on how dedicated it was to its story of revenge. We have two twin sisters, Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), now young adults but long psychically connected, contacted by their birth mother, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) after having long ago relinquished custody. All three of them have severe burn scars, Ruby worst of all—she is bedridden and now actively dying—as a result of her husband and the girls’ father (Sterling K. Brown) having set Ruby on fire. Anaia tried the hardest to save her and so is also significantly disfigured in the face; Racine’s face is unblemished but her arm and hand are severely disfigured. And, after all this time, Ruby has summoned her daughters to tell them, “Make your daddy dead. Real dead.”

The thing is, Racine and Anaia–who just address each other as “Twin”—take up this request, and go on a journey through which a pretty notable body count takes place, and with people who don’t necessarily deserve it. This is a film with an all-Black cast (as was the case with the play) and thus is sort of a Black woman’s answer to Quentin Tarantino, and I’m all for that. I guess I just expected something a little more stylistic, which is how the film was marketed. There’s something more nuanced going here, but if the theme is cyclical violence, it didn’t feel particularly clear while watching the movie. It felt more like a movie that just went along for the ride with these women destroying anything that gets in the way of their ultimate target, their monster of a father.

This much is clear: Racine is much more comfortable with the violence than Anaia is, and this grows into a rift between these telepathically connected sisters (we even get several silent exchanges of facial expressions, translated into dialogue with subtitles). I know this is arguably a silly nitpick, but there’s a moment when Racine and Anaia refer to themselves as having been “from the same cell,” but that would only be possible if they were identical twins, which they quite clearly are not. I could suspend disbelief here if they were two actors who looked similar and at the very least were the same height, but Mallori Johnson is literally four inches taller than Kara Young. Either Aleshea Harris is just deliberately ignoring how this works, or she doesn’t understand that fraternal twins happen when two separate eggs are fertilized by different sperm and develop in the same womb. Furthermore, it’s typically identical twins that report having some kind of psychic connection, and there they are basically telepathic with each other.

All that aside, Anaia is increasingly uncomfortable with Racine’s proclivity toward violence, and that did seem to be a clear thread in the narrative. It just didn’t strike me as consistent, or with thematic clarity, when it came to which characters actually seemed to be dangerous or capable of violence in the end. I could never quite grasp what Is God Is was trying to say, if indeed it was trying to say anything at all. At times it seemed only to revel in its own odyssey of vengeance.

Perhaps that’s the point. Maybe I just don’t get it. It wouldn’t be the firs time. There’s also a religious thread in this story, between Ruby, the mother, being referred to as “God” (hence the title) because she gave these twin sisters life; and Racine and Anaia’s encounter in a church with another woman their father abandoned, and who is now a cult-like preacher. I couldn’t quite grasp what Harris was going for here either.

There’s a lot going on in Is God Is, and yet each scene kind of takes its time, giving it a somewhat belabored pace. I’m fully aware of the acclaimed critical consensus enjoyed by this movie, which does make me doubt myself a little; maybe this just went over my head for some reason. What am I missing? Maybe I’m just missing something that wasn’t made for me, and that’s okay.

Ironically, this movie could have stood to have a bit more fire lit under it.

Overall: B-

READY OR NOT: HERE I COME

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

I’m going to nitpick right out of the gate, because I have to stay on brand. All of the marketing materials, right down to its IMDb.com page, lists this movie’s title as Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which is boneheaded. The phrase is “ready or not, here I come!” Why stick a “2” right in the middle of that? It’s quite obviously a sequel either way. And guess what? The title card in the movie itself just reads, Ready or Not: Here I Come. That actually makes sense!

It’s also maybe the cleverest thing about this movie. Or at very least, there is nothing else in this movie more clever than that. This film was made by the same team as the 2019 original Ready or Not, with co-directors Matt Bettinelli and OlpinTyler Gillett; also with co-writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy. It’s been nearly seven years since the original Ready or Not was released, which is not ideal; that movie was a surprising delight, but not something you’d expect many to have a fresh memory of seven years later. You could partially blame pandemic-related delays, except nearly the exact same team (just one co-writer different) made Abigail, released in 2024. And all three of these films are very similar, ultra-violent horror-comedies, each with an ensemble cast either hunting or being hunted, and each in turn has offered diminishing returns. Ready or Not was a camp kick; Abigail was fine but undermined by the need to reveal its secret plot twist in order to market it; and Ready or Not: Here I Come is running on narrative fumes.

The major difference here is that Samara Weaving, as the bride Grace MacCaullay, is joined by Kathryn Newton as her estranged sister, Faith. I had high hopes for this casting choice; Newton is relatively unknown but a deeply underrated talent. She was a big part of what made the 2021 body-swap horror movie Freaky watchable, and was one of the better parts of the 2024 camp-horror film Lisa Frankenstein. She works well being cast as Samara Weaving’s sister, but the problem is in the writing. This movie wants us to be invested in their relationship and backstory, but all we get are vague references to Faith feeling abandoned by Grace when the latter moved away from their home with an apparently perfectly decent foster family at the age of eighteen. This backstory is narrative weak sauce, and exists solely as a lazy way to explain sisterly resentments. In a movie like this, you’d expect a shared history that was a little more twisted or morbid.

Granted, the whole premise of Ready or Not was that a seemingly innocent woman was hoodwinked into participating in a family ritual on her wedding night, which involves a game of Hide and Seek in which all of her in-laws compete to be the one to kill her. If they fail to do so by sunrise, they all die, and the manner in which this happens, at the end of that first film, was a big part of what tipped it over to the point of delight for me. These movies offer cartoonish violence for its own sake, and that is itself the appeal.

But what if it’s just more of the same as before? Ready or Not: Here I Come does little to innovate its premise beyond adding the sister. It attempts to raise the stakes by explaining to us that Grace’s rare victory triggered something in the Satanist organization’s “bylaws,” and now all the people that make up the worldwide “council” of five families must gather to play the exact same game again . . . the very next night. I will admit to finding it fun that this movie picks up right at the very scene that ended the first film: Grace lights herself a cigarette on the front steps of the mansion where she was hunted, faints, and she doesn’t get any further than the hospital before someone is hunting for her. But that hunter has jumped the gun and is about to forfeit his family’s participation; when he kills the cop who comes to escort Grace to the station for questioning by throwing a knife into his neck, a whole lot of time passes with not a single other cop coming to the scene. Does this hospital have no kind of security whatsoever? Okay, I’m nitpicking again.

One of the many delights of the first film was the mild-stunt casting of Andie MacDowell as one of the family members tasked with hunting Grace, and we get double the stunt casting this time around: Sarah Michelle Gellar as one of the council family members who, again, is hunting Grace and Faith; and Elijah Wood as a lawyer representing “Le Bail,” who is the demon behind all these people who otherwise control the world. It’s fun to see them in parts like this, except that Gellar’s fate in this film is disappointingly uncreative and unmemorable. Even I know Buffy deserves better, and I never even watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It’s very difficult to catch lightning in a bottle twice, and calling the original Ready or Not “lightning in a bottle” is itself a stretch. But getting a particular camp sensibility just right is a delicate needle to thread; it either works or it doesn’t. I want to say that some of the times it works in Here I Come, except if it’s not always working, then by definition it’s not working. The cast is game and it makes a difference that they all seem to be having a good time, but it’s the reheated leftovers of a script that is the problem. I had a moderately good time with this movie, taking it for what it was—one thing all these movies have in common is that they don’t pretend to be anything but what they are—but there is no lasting mark being made here.

You’ll totally be ready for this.

Overall: B-

THE BRIDE!

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

Let’s start with the good stuff. If there is any reason to see The Bride!, it’s Jessie Buckley. She tends to be the biggest reason to see anything she’s in, really; even in subpar material, she elevates it by her mere presence. This is deeply the case here, where she plays effectively three different characters: a rambunctious 1930s Chicago woman named Ida; the reanimated “The Bride” who has no memory of the time before her death; and . . . Mary Shelley.

And this leads us right into how The Bride! is a thematic mess, and pretty much always lacks narrative clarity. It would seem that Mary Shelley is writing this version of The Bride of Frankenstein herself, by possessing Ida before her death, as well as possessing The Bride after being reanimated, in so doing just confusing Ida. To some people this makes sense. To me, it does not.

And yet, there remains a lot to delight in The Bride!, mostly in the casting. Buckley is an extraordinary talent, and it’s worth noting that Ida is American and Mary Shelley is English, and Buckley regularly switches between the two accents with what appears to be effortless ease. (It’s also worth noting that Jessie Buckley herself is an Irish woman with an aptitude for accent work worthy of Meryl Streep; we rarely see her in her native accent, and none of the accents she uses here are her own.) We have a comparable talent in film veteran Annette Bening, who here plays a new version of “mad scientist” Dr. Euphronious. Notwithstanding the prosthetic teeth that border on distracting, I found myself wishing I could see a movie about that character—and it’s always great to see two actresses of this caliber together.

Then there’s “Frank,” as played by Christian Bale, another actor widely considered to be among the best of his generation. He does everything he is asked to do here, and he does it well. This is a world—much like Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein—in which Frankenstein’s monster has gone on living a very, very long time, in this case through the 1930s, and is apparently a known entity. Bale’s monster has simply taken on his maker’s name, perhaps a subtle nod to how often people confuse the two characters. (There’s also a unsubtle nod to the mispronunciation of “Frankenstein” from Young Frankenstein.) Frank has tracked down Dr. Euphronious due to her extensive research, to convince her to create a Bride for him out of a woman’s corpse.

I suppose we’re meant to think Ida’s corpse is found randomly; lucky for Frank, she’s beautiful—”too beautiful,” indeed, he says at first. The Bride! has a lot of feminist overtones, many of them so on the nose they might as well be punching you in the face, including repeatedly shouting the phrase “Me too!” If you really want to look upon The Bride! with a feminist eye, however, I would argue that it fails. Through most of the movie, Ida/The Bride either has no agency, or the film makes her agency very unclear. She’s either pushed around by men, or manipulated by the real-life author who’s ostensibly possessing her. And once we are clearly meant to understand she is taking command of her own agency, and she insists on giving herself a name, the name she chooses is “The Bride”—a generic phrase that exists to connect a woman to a man. Granted, in so doing she’s declaring her independence from Frank, except this makes it unclear exactly to whom she is supposed to be betrothed or married. Is this meant to be irony? I can’t tell. It further muddies the narrative when she cannot tear herself away from Frank even after this occurs.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is credited as both the director and writer of The Bride!; I find her very impressive as a director, less so as a writer (though I did like both elements of her work better in The Lost Daughter). I’d rather like to see what she could achieve as the director of someone else’s writing—and I suspect The Bride! could have benefited significantly from either a completely different writer, or at the very least a collaborator. Then again, there’s also the editing, which went through so many iterations in this case that the film’s original release date of September 2025 was postponed to March 2026. The end result makes it easy to see why.

There are also detective characters Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz), a corrupt cop with a kind of remorse that comes across as crocodile tears, and a far more skilled investigator who has no opportunity to get credit for her work because she’s a woman. These characters are given very little to do that is actually interesting, and seem to exist only to have contrived conversations about men and women in the workplace. It’s too bad, because these are also two incredibly gifted actors, and they both deserve better than this.

Some of the writing is downright sloppy. There’s a pivotal scene in a ballroom during which The Bride is pointing a gun at all the revelers and a couple dozen cops who also have guns pulled. The scene is played as though it’s an equitable standoff because they all have guns—except this is The Bridge against countless guns on the other side, and in any universe, even one as characterized by fantasy as this one, the cops would all just shoot her. As if to underscore this point, there is a later scene in which you actually hear a cop say, “She’s got a gun, shoot her!” Um, okay.

The Bride! is one mess of a movie, but it’s also highly stylized, fun to look at, often fun to watch, and characterized by great performances. So is this the kind of mess that’s easily dismissed as stupid, or the kind of mess that’s fun? Because there are fun messes. Hell, it’s fun to make a mess, which is precisely what Maggie Gyllenhaal did here. There’s little doubt that all these people had a great time making this movie, and that can easily extend to the audience. There was a lot in this movie that I found delightful, including Maggie’s brother Jake playing the part of a classic Hollywood star Frank is obsessed with, but when considering it as a whole, The Bride! is very much less than the sum of its parts. It’s a good time a lot of the time, but not something I’ll be eager to revisit.

Still trying to decide to root for or run from Frank and his monster.

Overall: B-

MIDWINTER BREAK

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

I have kind of a thing for movies about older married couples who have been together for decades. Life isn’t all young love, you know—nor is it even all about new love (though I do also enjoy movies about older people who find love). I’m fully aware that the average moviegoer isn’t exactly demanding stories like this, and my being on the precipice of 50 years old is probably a factor here. So what? If any of you young whippersnappers don’t care about this then go read some other movie review!

Well, here’s the thing. Midwinter Break is still, unfortunately, kind of forgettable. We could start with the title itself. I saw the trailer to this movie several times, and still I often struggled to remember the name of it. Midwinter Break sounds like an off-brand version of the Vacation franchise, except trust me, nothing outrageous happens here.

What does happen is some very good acting. Ciarán Hinds and especially Lesley Manville effortlessly elevate what is otherwise pretty milquetoast material, about an older couple whose one child has long since moved out, they are set adrift in their lives together, and the absence of other family puts their conflicting spiritual beliefs into sharper relief. Stella buys tickets to Amsterdam as a Christmas present to Gerry, and they mean to go on an adventure together. You know, in midwinter.

I was very interested in the location shooting in Amsterdam, as I will be visiting there for the first time this summer (not in winter, thankfully). We do get several shots of Stella and Gerry walking along the canals, and one brief sequence of them walking through the Anne Frank House, which winds up becoming a relevant detail in one of their later conflicts about their respective approaches to religion. I’m not sure it’s the best reflection of the narrative onscreen that I found myself thinking, oh right: I definitely need to book timed tickets to the Anne Frank House before we get there.

To call Midwinter Break “meditative” would be an understatement. It’s filled with quiet, contemplative scenes. Early on, we just settle into Stella and Gerry’s quiet routine together, the comfortable way they coexist, though we see very quickly how Stella feels alienated and Gerry is a bit oblivious. She goes to Christmas mass without him, and she’s very devout; Gerry, for his part, basically puts up with her piousness, though he does also scoff a bit, something that naturally comes up later.

It’s not that I didn’t find Midwinter Break compelling, though I do think that with other actors it would really have been a drag. Plenty of viewers will likely find this a drag regardless. But director Polly Findlay gradually builds up the idea of a secret that Stella is living with, and it has to do with when she was once caught in crossfire during a siege in Belfast when she was pregnant. Eventually Stella delivers a long monologue about it to an expatriate fellow Irishwoman she’s met in Amsterdam, and Manville’s delivery, as always, is impeccable, even moving. Nevertheless, once the reveal we’ve been waiting for occurs, it’s hard not to think: that’s it?

Ultimately Midwinter Break is about the beginning of a long-term marriage unraveling, due to religious incompatibility, basically. Stella uses the word “spiritual,” but I would argue it’s more religious—the taking of comfort through religious ritual. It ends on a very subtly hopeful note, after an emotional exchange at the Amsterdam airport while they wait for their delayed flight in a snow storm—I do rather wish we could have seen more of the city to give this relatively drab story some more environmental character. Ultimately, Midwinter Break isn’t for everyone, but some, like me, might at the very least be moved by the performances.

This is a vacation we’re bound to forget.

Overall: B-

ZOOTOPIA 2

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

If you really want to see a movie as delightful as Zootopia (2016), nine years later, then . . . why not just watch Zootopia again? That’s what I did, and I had a blast. I nearly forgot how good it was, how clever, how consistently funny. I probably would have enjoyed Zootopia 2 more had I not watched both movies one day after the other.

Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy Zootopia 2; I did, generally. It’s the “generally” that I’m a little hung up on, because this new film is something that takes a clever concept and then does little more than rehash it. A ton of the gags in this film aren’t even original, but rather simply a trotting out of the hits we already saw in the first one. You might not be as prone to noticing this if you don’t watch the films back to back, but you might still notice that Zootopia 2 has a bit of old-school sequel-itis. I kept thinking about Die Hard 2, and how many characters it brought back from the first film for the sake of nothing but having us say, “Hey! That guy!”

As always, none of this is going to matter to kids. They’ll just eat this up, I’m sure. But what historically sets Disney apart from other animation is how well it works as entertainment for grownups as well as the kids. To be fair, Zootopia is still relatively entertaining for adults too, albeit in a bit more of a pandering way. Disney has just been far better at it in the past—including the past Zootopia movie, which had a sly message about unlearning prejudices and a consistently effective sense of humor at the same time. A lot of the gags here feel kind of like they would have been cut from the first film, and then just got reassembled here.

We even get a return of Shakira as the pop star Gazelle, right down to the “live concert” footage that plays with the first few minutes of the end credits. Beat for beat, Zootopia is simply the same experience as Zootopia, just without the novelty or certainly any of the originality. Granted, even the original Zootopia recalled the 1973 animated Disney film Robin Hood, a favorite of mine in childhood, but at least it put a new spin on the concept. There are no new spins to be found in this new film, which throws out a lot more movie reference gags for the grown-ups: a hedge maze with the iconic The Shining synthesizer score, a brief reappearance of Bellwether the sheep (Jenny Slate) behind a glass wall like The Silence of the Lambs (get it?). Unlike the first film, in which a reference to The Godather also served to move the story forward, these references exist only for their own sake.

They’re still fun, I guess. And although the relationship between Judy Hopps the bunny (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde the fox (Jason Bateman) strangely skirts the edges of romance but consistently lands firmly in the realm of “friendship,” an inevitable rift between them and their subsequent emotional reconciliation actually got my eyes a little damp. Maybe I’m just getting as soft as these animals.

Except, here’s the “twist” in Zootopia 2: instead of a society consisting only of mammals (side note, maybe my favorite gag was when they crash a “Burning Mammal” festival), we learn of an underground society of reptiles, pushed to the edges of Zootopia a century ago, the city being tricked into thinking of them all as untrustworthy. Never mind that this is nearly identical to the rift between two factions in the first film, predator versus prey. The cartoon logic of how these animals “evolved” made more sense in the first film, but the more into the weeds it gets in this second film, the less the logic holds. Not that cartoons were ever meant to be logical, I get it! There’s still something to be said for skilled weaving of a narrative, and Zootopia 2 is just a slightly degraded copy of an original. We do get a snake voiced by Ke Huy Quan, and a beaver voiced by Fortune Feimster. The aquatic mammal borough of Zootopia proves more fun and interesting than the reptile underground.

The animation is very well rendered, if often hard to focus on with all the quick-cutting action. The plot holds okay, as we learn about “weather walls” that control separate climates for different borough/habitats of the city, while I find myself wondering how any of them can visit any other, more inhospitable environments for any real amount of time and in so doing keep a whole city humming. But then, I think too much. It’s not that deep, right? Except Zootopia 2 clearly wants it to be, what with the continued, and slightly less sly, messaging about accepting each other for who we truly are. The allegorical component remains strong in this film, it just has a comparative lack of finesse. It’s just fun enough, but unexceptional, time at the movies.

I never thought I’d be this happy about the distraction of a beaver.

Overall: B

RENTAL FAMILY

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

There’s something about Brandan Fraser’s performance in Rental Family, a kind of forced “aw-shucks” quality I found slightly off putting. He also keeps doing this thing with his mouth, where he sort of scrunches his lips to one side. To be fair, it’s very different from anything he’s done in other roles, but all I could think about was how he was simply making specific acting choices for this character. But isn’t that the kicker—that I should not be conscious of acting choices? I should readily suspend disbelief, and accept Phillip Vanderploeg as an individual.

I feel bad dumping on Brendan Fraser like this; I do like him as an actor, generally speaking—his performance in The Whale was incredible, and was the only thing that kept me from dismissing that wildly problematic film completely. Considering these respective performances, I suppose the next step is toward the director, in this case a Japanese director named Hikari, who apparently goes professionally by one name, like Madonna or Beyoncé. She most recently directed three episodes of the excellent Netflix series Beef, and has one other feature film on her resume, about a young Japanese woman with cerebral palsy called 37 Seconds and which ironically had a runtime of 6,900 seconds (115 minutes). Anyway, I can only imagine that either Hikari was happy with the performance Brendan Fraser gave her, or this was what she coaxed out of him. Either way, I found it a little cloying.

The performances of everyone else in the cast ranges between pretty good to great—the latter applying to the very impressive 11-year-old Shannon Mahina Gorman, whose very presence improved Rental Family any time she was onscreen. Finding a child actor who is both talented and natural is a difficult feat. Gorman is biracial, as is the young character she plays, Mia, whose single mother hires the “Rental Family” agency to provide a stand-in American dad for her. Mia’s mom is trying to get her accepted into a good school, which she believes previously rejected her because of the absent dad. Enter Phillip, here playing another person as provided by the Rental Family agency.

Rental Family follows dual plot threads, one where Phillip bonds with Mia, and another where Phillip pretends to be a journalist interviewing an elderly actor named Kikuo (Akira Emote) who is afraid the country is forgetting his life’s work—his daughter hires the agency in an effort to make him feel better. The story moves into these other two plot threads after we see Phillip’s first job, as a hired groom at a wedding, staged for the benefit of the bride’s parents. This sequence ends with a particular reveal that I won’t spoil, except that it seems to serve as a justification for the agency’s existence, and is fairly moving.

But, thanks to an occasionally muddled script, cowritten by Hikari and American writer and executive producer Stephen Blahut, there are times when even Rental Family seems ambivalent about a service like this, which is apparently quite prevalent in Japan. Is Hikari making a statement, or a judgment, about them? I can’t quite tell. This film seems to support some of their services, such as what is revealed to be the reason for the wedding, but not some other services, such as “apology services” where cheating husbands hire a fake mistress to apologize to their wives. Do none of these husbands think of apologizing themselves?

Multiple times in Rental Family, a character will comment on how people outside of Japanese culture will never fully understand it. This is coincidentally in keeping with my experience of this film, which I could never fully connect with. I wanted more dimension to the characters, and particularly to Phillip, who spends far more time onscreen pretending to be someone he’s not. The only thing we know about why this “big American guy” has been living in Japan for the past seven years is that a widely seen toothpaste commercial was what brought him there to begin with. Do actors really move to Japan just for one commercial gig? I want to know more about his family back home, and why he had such an apparently absent dad. But, evidently the only reason we know even that much is so he can express reservations about playing a parent himself.

We lean early on that Phillip is lonely in Japan, no friends to speak of, no romantic partner, just a woman who is evidently a sex worker—also a very undeveloped character, although I can appreciate that at least in this movie she’s much more than just a sex object, a thoughtful woman who also provides Phillip companionship. Really, all the characters around Phillip are far more interesting than he is, not just because they are all have a fair amount more dimension to them, but because Phillip’s only mode seems to be uncomfortable awkwardness.

There’s nothing egregiously wrong with Rental Family, I just found it somewhat lacking. It’s a blandly pleasant entertainment, and I tend to want more than that. Others may locate more insight in it than I did. It won’t elicit much passion: it’s fine for what it is, and it won’t be long remembered.

I kind of wish the movie were about her instead.

Overall: B-

FRANKENSTEIN

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

We need to start by discussing how terribly miscast Jacob Elordi is as “The Creature” in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Not because he’s bad—he’s actually a talented actor. But, and stay with me here, because he’s too hot. I’m not sure what del Toro was thinking. Did he think that just because Elordi is 6’5”, that would make him a frightening and imposing figure? Hardly. He’s far too youthful, too healthy looking, too strapping—and more than anything, too thin. This movie should have been called Frankentwink.

Indeed, once The Creature is brought to life, by this story’s namesake, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), we are treated to a memorably large number of shots of Hot Creature in little more than what looks like a sort of mummy-loincloth. I found this distracting enough to hope there is a costume design featurette somewhere called “Frankenstein’s Bulge.”

If you have been living under a rock for the past 207 years and don’t know this, The Creature is made up of the body parts of many different cadavers, assembled into a new being. Whenever injured, his wounds heal with magical swiftness—in this film it’s nearly instant, as opposed to the weeks it takes in Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel. So, I suppose we’re not meant to think of his flesh as rotting. The Creature is not a zombie. He just can’t die. I still can’t imagine he smells great. He’s too hot in this movie for that to matter, Elordi’s whole body made up to look unsettlingly like an assemblage of disparate body parts. Except that Dr. Frankenstein finds all these different body parts from recently killed soldiers in battle. How did he get them all so perfectly proportioned?

Frankenstein does direct his assistance in the search to find larger bodies, “for scale.” Perhaps you could argue that most such men would indeed be young. This is a change from the novel, in which the body parts are found in charnel houses, slaughterhouses, and graves. I just keep thinking about the idea of The Creature being terrifying. You’d expect such a being to be both tall and thick. I saw Jacob Elordi’s Creature character and I just wanted him to spoon me.

He does have superhuman strength, so I guess I’d have to concede that can be scary, even if it’s an adorable 6’5” 28-year-old. Del Toro is far too indulgent with a lot of these details in this adaptation, however—at one point, The Creature single-handedly frees a dutch sailing ship from the clutches of arctic ice.

And this is where we must move on to the other marks against del Toro’s Frankenstein—namely, how indulgent it is, but also its truly terrible special effects. It does have impressively detailed period production design, but it’s also packed with truly subpar CGI. Fire in particular looks terrible in this movie, whether it’s from a giant explosion or just flames on candles. It practically looks animated. This film had a budget of $120 million; did they spend it only on production design and cast salaries?

It’s also too long, clocking in at two and a half hours. Ten minutes of this are the end credits; another ten are the “Prelude” We otherwise get “Part 1,” which lasts about 80 minutes and is narrated by Dr. Frankenstein; “Part 2” makes up the remaining 49 minutes and is narrated by The Creature. Jacob Elordi’s distracting hotness aside, The Creature’s section is by far the most compelling, as written by del Toro himself in his singlehanded script adaptation. I just wish it wasn’t so often bogged down by such bad special effects, as in one scene in which The Creature is attacked by a pack of wolves who might as well have been pixelated, they are so obviously not real. What the hell are we watching here, The Twilight Saga: New Moon?

I don’t know why it’s so hard for anyone to make a decent modern cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein. Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is so awful that I have never been able to tolerate more than half of it before turning it off to end my misery. To Guillermo del Toro’s credit, this 2025 Frankenstein is far better than that, but that bar is in the basement. At least I was still relatively entertained by this movie, my many complaints about it notwithstanding. Some trimming, particularly of the overlong Part 1 from Dr. Frankenstein’s perspective, would have improved it. I did like that, when the perspective switches, it still continues The Creature’s story right where Dr. Frankenstein’s left off, rather than rehashing anything we’ve already seen.

This film does waste some other major talent, though. Christoph Waltz plays Harlander, Dr. Frankenstein’s benefactor, but he’s just never a very compelling character. Mia Goth is cast as Elizabeth, Harlander’s niece who is also engaged to Dr. Frankenstein’s younger brother William (Felix Kammerer), but all she ever does is dote over The Creature as the only character who ever has any fully informed empathy for him. Goth has made a career of playing fantastic freaks, and this character is just too normal for her. We even get Charles Dance, gone after just a few scenes as Victor and William’s authoritarian father; and Lars Mikkelsen (Mads’s brother) as the captain of the aforementioned Dutch ship. The most interesting of these older character actors in the film is David Bradley (best known as Argust Filch in the Harry Potter films), as the blind man who treats The Creature with kindness and no judgment because he cannot see him.

Finally, and this is where I get a little more nitpicky, there are the lapses in logic, such as when The Creature, in pursuit of revenge against Dr. Frankenstein, allows a stick of dynamite to blow up in his hands. The resulting explosion is huge, the shockwave alone hurling Dr. Frankenstein’s body like a rag doll, and yet The Creature remains standing, unbroken. This would not have at least dismembered him? I suppose I can’t expect a story that ignores science to pay attention to simple physics.

Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix, and there are multiple reasons why this is a huge part of what kept the film from realizing the potential it clearly had. Netflix has a reputation for allowing auteurs to realize their full vision, and on the one hand that is to be commended. On the other hand, it also means that filmmakers don’t get any notes when maybe they needed some. Had this film gotten a full theatrical release, it might just have gotten some much-needed guardrails. Would The Creature still have been played by Jacob Elordi? Probably, just because he’s a hot young star. The Creature should be a genuinely grotesque being with heart, though—not a young hunk cosplaying as a loinclothed monster like some dude at the West Hollywood Halloween parade. Frankenstein’s monster should elicit pity, not lechery.

Choke me Frankendaddy

Overall: B-

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

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

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is an unconventional biopic in a multitude of ways, not least of which is it’s definitively, pointedly unexciting. This is a movie about three things: the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album, Nebraska, one of the lesser-known albums of his 53-year career; depression; and childhood trauma.

This film really leans into the childhood trauma part, opening with a flashback to Bruce at 8 years old, with his parents played by Stephen Graham and Gabby Hoffman. This era of his life, always presented in black and white, is returned to consistently throughout the film. As we return to Bruce as an adult, dating a composite-character woman (Odessa Young) we never particularly care about, Springsteen is working on this album we are clearly meant to understand is informed by these childhood memories. It’s a bunch of acoustic songs, a major departure from his previous rock albums, and Springsteen is very particular about how it’s recorded, how it’s released, and how it’s marketed—which is to say, not at all.

At the end of the film, we get title cards informing us that even with no tour and no singles to support it, Nebraska still reached #3 on the album charts. It doesn’t bother to say that the album sold a million copies—an impressive number out of context to be sure, but his previous album, The River, sold five times that much; and his next album, Born in the U.S.A., sold 17 million, by far his greatest success and the 7th-best selling album of the eighties. To say that Nebraska was overshadowed by these other albums is an understatement, and it never would have sold nearly what it did without Springsteen’s other massive successes.

I had never listened to Nebraska myself. I’m listening to it literally as I write this. I have never been a Springsteen guy—I think he’s fine; he’s just not my thing—but, knowing I tend to like it when an artist does what a record executive in this film (played by David Krumholtz) calls “a folk album,” I expected to be into it. Well—it’s okay. My response to this album is about the same as my response to this film. Somewhat similarly, I noted with last year’s Bob Dylan Biopic—a far better film than this one—A Complete Unknown that I was never a Dylan guy either. I did like Timothée Chalamet’s singing performance as Bob Dylan, though; in fact I preferred that to the real Dylan. Jeremy Allen White does a pretty spot-on performance as Bruce Springsteen, including performance. But I also prefer Timothée Chalamet-as-Bob-Dylan to this.

At least A Complete Unknown, and several other music biopics before it, had moments of thrilling musical electricity. Such things are beside the point with Deliver Me From Nowhere, which is about a deeply personal album that clearly was, and clearly still is, very important to Springsteen. He was reportedly on set every day, which indicates that this film is similarly important to him. This is probably not the story most of his diehard fans would be interested in, but it’s the story he wants them to know. It’s also very drab and melancholy.

If you approach Deliver Me From Nowhere from the perspective of childhood trauma and adult depression, it becomes quite unconventional for a biopic and a fascinating examination of something rarely discussed in this context. On the other hand, the extent of this relationship with Bruce’s alcoholic father, and especially with his protective mother, is never given a great deal of depth, even with the large number of flashbacks. Most of this movie is just Bruce quietly moving through his life, recording a studio album that baffles his record label, and dwelling on these memories.

Jeremy Allen White does a very good job in the part, and Jeremy Strong gives a fine performance as his manager and friend Jon Landau, if not necessarily one that seems to justify his notorious method acting approach. Paul Walter Hauser appears as a guy helping Bruce with the recording, and Marc Maron as a studio engineer is so underused that in the first several scenes in which he appears he doesn’t even speak. At least he got to hang out and chat with Springsteen on set, seven years after Springsteen opened up about his struggles with depression on Maron’s WTF with Marc Maron podcast.

I’m all for cinematic examinations of trauma and depression, if they’re done well. They just don’t make for a very exciting music biopic, which, a bit ironically, the marketers of Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere basically promised. I find myself wondering if studio executives responded to the final product of this film the way executives did to the Nebraska albums: what are we supposed to do with this? Throw it to the wall and see if it sticks, I guess.

Deliver me to something more exciting.

Overall: B-

AFTER THE HUNT

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

Is it regressive to say that even though his character predictably turns out to be pretty much a slime ball, Andrew Garfield is my favorite part of After the Hunt because he’s so hot? I suppose it is, but “I’m just a simple man,” as his Hank says at a key point in the film when saying such a thing makes him sound like an utter dipshit. He could sure stand to lose the beard, though.

Luca Guadagnino is a director, and a man, of curious choices. He knows how to shoot a man in a way that accentuates his thighs—something he did a great deal with the tennis players in last year’s fantastic Challengers. He does the same with Andrew Garfield in After the Hunt, shooting him lounging in a bed wearing an open-button shirt and boxers. On the one hand, he seems to be trying to catch the interest of a clearly disinterested Yale colleague, Alma (Julia Roberts). On the other hand, the camera itself seems to be visually caressing those thighs. Is that for our benefit? Given the subject matter of this film, it’s maybe not the best time for it.

I just learned today that 54-year-old Guadagnino is in a long-term relationship with 38-year-old Italian director and screenwriter Ferdinando Cito Filomarino. I can’t help but wonder to what degree this might be relevant. Is that fair? Perhaps not. But a lot of things happen to characters in After the Hunt that are unfair. Some things are arguably very fair. More than one thing is clearly one or the other depending on the observer—both inside the movie and out. This is almost certainly what Guadagnino was going for.

I just wish it all tied together better in a cohesive narrative. Alma and Hank are both professors in the Yale philosophy department. This means we get a lot of conversations, in classrooms as well as at dinner parties, that are genuinely fascinating to listen to, even when they inevitably delve into generational differences in attitudes about ethics. A lot of the time, these discussions are pretty on the nose. I still found them engaging.

After the Hunt is a cinematic curiosity, in that it is deeply flawed and also ripe for discussion and intellectual debate. I can just imagine this movie itself being discussed in a university classroom. It could be a philosophy class or a film class, and I’d still love to be a fly on that wall. Well, as long as the participants weren’t complete idiots, anyway. One of the things this film makes unclear is whether it thinks educated youth today are idiots. What seems very clear is that it understands the point of view of the middle-aged people who are exasperated by them.

Alma is mentor to a student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), who leaves Alma’s dinner party the film opens with, with Alma’s longtime friend and colleague, Hank. We get a bit of an eyeful of Alma’s and Frank’s physical familiarity with each other, they way they put hands on each other’s thighs. There’s a moment when Hank grabs Maggie’s thigh, which is subtle but easy to clock. Later, clearly inebriated, Hank leaves the party at the same time as Maggie. We only learn after Maggie comes back to Alma’s apartment in the middle of a rain storm and gives a relatively vague accounting of what happened that they went to Maggie’s apartment together.

In another scene, particularly well-performed, Alma meets with Hank at an Indian restaurant, where he gives his side of the story. In neither case do we get a direct look at what actually happened, which is clearly deliberate. A similar choice was made, far more effectively, by writer-director Eva Victor in one of this year’s best movies, Sorry, Baby, which was also about university faculty. That movie was more about the effects of trauma, whereas After the Hunt is about how competing narratives play out in the public eye. With Hank, he pretty quickly comes across as a douche bag, but the narrative is still exploring ethical gray areas.

When movies don’t quite work, I often wonder about the editing. Guadagnino has loyalists now; there’s a key part with Chloë Sevigny, who previously appeared in Guadagnino’s wonderful HBO limited series We Are Who We Are, nearly unrecognizable as another professor. Alma’s husband, Frederik, is played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who played Timothée Chalamet’s deeply empathetic dad in the Guadagnino masterpiece Call Me By Your Name (2017). Stuhlbarg was perfectly cast in that film, but in After the Hunt Frederik is a long-tolerant husband with saintly patience. But Stuhlbarg plays him with an array of subtly quirky choices, none of which much align with the rest of the film. It feels as though these Guadagnino loyalists read a script they found deeply compelling but then had offbeat performance choices that were all met with “Sure, let’s try that!”

The one true exception is Julia Roberts herself, who gives her best performance in decades in this movie. It’s too bad it’s wasted on something that is thematically kind of a mess. Not only that, but there’s no denying the parallel themes between this and the incredible 2022 film TÁR, and let’s face it, underrated as Julia Roberts may be, she’s no Cate Blanchett. After the Hunt even tries its hand at sly humor, with basically zero success. The opening credits are all done in the font that Woody Allen used for his films for decades, even presented in exactly the same way, which practically screams “Look what I’m doing here!” But then the rest of the movie is completely different stylistically, to this attempt at “ironic whimsey” is wholly incongruous.

After the Hunt has many great scenes, and makes a great discussion piece, arguably even more so because of its clear and plentiful imperfections. With the exception of solid performances across the board, it just falls short in the end—quite literally, as the coda set five years later is utterly baffling. “You won” is the last line we hear, but we don’t have clarity on how the supposed winning happened. I left the theater thinking less about who won or lost than about exactly what game was being played.

Julia Roberts is stuck between ethics and loyalty, and I’m stuck between Hank’s dipshittery and Andrew Garfield’s hotness.

Overall: B-

ROOFMAN

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

Roofman is an old-school, classic case of the trailer being wildly misleading from the actual vibe of the full film. The trailer is cut to make it look like a lot of fun, an entertaining comedy with maybe even a bit of action in it. Really none of that is the case. In fact, Roofman is a surprisingly melancholy film, when all is said and done.

It also can’t seem to decide on any coherent ethical center. The title character, whose name is also Jeffrey, or John when in disguise, is presented as a lovable family man who just can’t seem to get effective criminal behavior down. And, as played by Channing Tatum, Jeffrey is undeniably charismatic—which, we are told, was very much the case with the real-life person and story on which this film is based. Much is made of how “nice” Jeffrey is to the victims he locks into the walk-in freezer when he’s robbing McDonalds by—you guessed it—breaking through the rooftops. But I was out on Jeffrey almost from the very start. I’m supposed to empathize with a sharply observant guy who would easily get a great job if he just got his shit together, but instead decides to commit forty-five counts of armed robbery? Get real.

Furthermore, Jeffrey is recently divorced and has three children: a six-year-old daughter, Becky (Alissa Marie Pearson), and twin infants. The infants are never more than an afterthought, but the opening scenes have Jeffrey desperately trying to connect with Becky. But then, after Jeffrey is convicted, sent to prison, escapes prison, holes up in a local Toys “R” Us, and stupidly hides in plain sight while dating a local church congregant with two daughters of her own, Roofman might as well be suddenly saying: “Becky who?” It’s very odd, how Jeffrey inserts himself into this family, falls for the single mom who also works at the Toys “R” Us, Leigh (Kirsten Dunst) as well as her daughters Lindsey (Lily Collias) and Dee (Kennedy Moyer), all after making one passing reference to the existence of his own children, which he never brings up again.

At least, not onscreen—another odd element to the trailer is how if features scenes not featured in the final cut of the film. There’s a shot in the trailer showing Leigh saying to Jeffrey, “Tell me what’s going on—right now.” Now, to be fair, this is a very common practice and has been for ages; I can still remember the shot of Laura Dern tearing a prehistoric leaf off a plant in the trailer for Jurassic Park, and that shot not being in the film. But usually these changes are harmless. In this case we go in expecting a pointed confrontation between the two leads, and in the end, the way Jeffrey’s inevitable downfall is portrayed as something very passive on the part of Leigh. This is just one of several disappointing elements of the final product of this film.

And it’s too bad, because the story is still relatively engaging, the performances are solid, and Tatum and Dunst have real chemistry. One wonders whether Roofman could have been better than average before essential elements somehow got lost in the edit. There are certainly several other heavy-hitting actors in supporting parts that don’t amount to much, chief of them LeKeith Stanfield as Jeffrey’s army buddy friend, Steve. Stanfield has a proven record of great performances (Judas and the Black Messiah, Uncut Gems, even the opening sequence of Get Out—I could go on), and he’s just not given enough to chew on here. He deserves better than this. But so do Peter Dinklage as Mitch, the Toys “R” Us store manager; Ben Mendelsohn as the church pastor and Uzo Aduba as his wife; even Juno Temple as Steve’s girlfriend. This is a cast far more stellar than the mediocrity of the film would have you expect, which leads one to wonder how different the original script, by Derek Cianfrance (who also directed) and Kirt Gunn, was from the final edit. It’s worth noting that Cianfrance has written excellent scripts in the past, including Blue Valentine (2010), The Place Beyond the Pines (2013), and even a story credit on Sound of Metal (2019).

So what the hell happened with Roofman? Should we just blame the editor, Mikkel E.G. Nielsen? That’s probably unfair; he edited great films too, including both The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) and Sound of Metal. Maybe we should think of Roofman as a mystery movie, just in a very unique way: the mystery is how so many great and talented people got together to make a not-great movie. It’s not like that’s without precedent either, to be fair.

There’s another mark against Roofman, which I’m not sure anyone involved truly thought about: the misguided choice to present a deeply unethical man as a sympathetic hero. Sure, empathy is always a good thing, and that is something I actually feel very strongly about. But there’s a vast difference between empathizing with an unethical person and actively rooting for them in their unethical pursuits. Roofman doesn’t strictly do that, but it’s a bit of hair splitting to say so, when the movie never lands on true clarity regarding the matter. At best, it skirts around it.

Maybe Jeffrey Manchester actually is a fascinating, fun guy. And maybe a much more effective approach would have been to make a documentary about him. The end credits of Roofman features a bunch of archival news footage of people who actually knew him, and victims of actual robberies, talking about how nice he was to them. This is genuinely the most compelling part of the film, which is otherwise moderately entertaining but manages to spend more energy on that than exactly how wrong it is for him to be doing all these things.

Yes, we see you, giving a good performance in a barely-okay movie!

Overall: B-