NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE

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

Here’s the burning question about Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie: what if, like me, you watch this film having zero familiarity with the Canadian TV show on which it was based, Nirvanna the Band the Show, which aired on Canadian premiere network Viceland 2017-2018; or the web series that was based on, Nirvanna the Band the Show, which was made 2007-2009? Does this movie even work for such audiences? The answer is an emphatic yes, and surprisingly well at that.

I suppose it might work better for audiences familiar with these earlier works, but I don’t know if it’s by that wide a margin. I had a great time with this movie, which blends old and new footage so seamlessly I kept wondering how the hell they did it. There is a sequence in which Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll, playing fictionalized versions of themselves (as they did in the previous iterations of the show), go back in time 17 years to 2008 and encounter their younger selves. None of this looks like a special effect; none of it looks like digital de-aging—just looking at the screen is enough to convince you this is actual footage of these two from 2008. I had to find a current YouTube video to learn that not only did they indeed use original video footage from 2007 to 2009, but everything you see in this film was culled from the cutting room floor of those original web series episodes—everything you see here, even if it’s 17 years old, is something never seen before.

As far as I can tell, the series never used time travel as a plot device—this is something new cooked up for the movie, and how they tied the new footage together with the old. They use well-used plot tropes that make no sense upon close examination, which is clearly part of the point. In fact, it lifts so many plot elements from the Back to the Future series that the film is legally regarded as a parody, which allows them to get away with a lot. In this film, Matt creates a fake “flux capacitor” for their RV, which then magically works exactly the same way it does in Back to the Future thanks to short circuiting after he spills 1990s Canadian fruit drink Orbitz all over it. (It’s the last one of a case they’ve had for years. Who could never make a case of favorite discontinued drink last a decade and a half? This movie is very unrealistic.)

They wind up in the year 2008—specifically in Toronto, where the series were filmed. It didn’t even occur to me until later that all the establishing shots of the urban environment indicating it’s 2008 would likely also have just been pulled from old footage from the time. This includes things like a movie poster for The Dark Knight or other pop culture references. As part of the present-day Matt and Jay navigating 2008, there is one pretty hilarious scene where Matt goes into a movie theater playing The Hangover. (That film was actually released in 2009, but let’s not quibble.) Matt witnesses the scene in the film that features the line “Paging Dr. Faggot”—one of several things in that film that have no aged well—and it’s when Matt notices the entire audience finding this hilarious that he realizes something is amiss. It’s worth noting that a film with no queer content otherwise makes it a point to highlight how awful it is to use that language regardless of context; I was really happy to see it contextualized this way, even contextualized as humor (the humor being that he had gone far enough back in time that average people thought this was okay).

There are so many references to the Back to the Future franchise, in fact, that they go back in time, return to a present day that’s been altered, and then go back in time yet again to fix the mistake—this means they reference both the first and second Back to the Future films. And I haven’t even mentioned the mockumentary style, a whole lot of it shot guerilla-style with unspuspecting, real people on the street. This seems to have been largely the premise of Nirvanna the Band the Show all along, and it works here much better than, say, in Borat, which exists to expose regular people’s prejudices through the use of “ironically bigoted” humor. That shit never sat well with me, and there is none of it here. Even the presence of a queer epithet exists only to show how much progress has been made, rather than having the protagonists pretend to be homophobic themselves.

This gets back to how much of the film had me wondering how they pulled it off. Very early in the film, Matt and Jay attempt a publicity stunt in which they parachute off the CN Tower. A lot of this is clearly staged, but even here we see people around them who seem to have no idea what’s really going on—and it sure looks like there was actual footage shot atop that building, in one case all the way to the tip-top of its antenna, a spot not accessible to the public. Is it possible that this show is just so beloved to Canadians that they managed to get access for filming? Some of this footage is astonishing.

Clearly the most impressive element of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is its editing, not just with present-day footage combined with footage from the late aughts, but with narrative (or, as was mostly the case, improvised) footage of the actors interacting with regular people. I would recommend this film on that basis alone. But, there would also have to be a VFX element to this, particularly when old and younger Matt and Jay are in the same sequence together (using clever narratives where neither of their younger selves fully register that their friend looks 15 years older—there’s a lovely line about how you don’t notice your best friend growing older). There are also the scenes in which the RV-turned-time-machine does its time jumps, with effects that look exactly like those used in Back to the Future.

What I find most impressive about Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is how lovable the characters are, and how easily invested you get in the outcomes of their stories, even if you haven’t seen the series it’s based on. I don’t know much about how “Nirvanna the Band” came to be, as there isn’t a single reference in this film to the Kurt Cobain-fronted band, and I have no idea whether there ever was in the series; I can only assume this was itself a joke, this duo who call themselves “Nirvanna the Band” but make music that sounds nothing like Nirvana. It makes for a fun, if misleading, expansion on the series title. I have a friend who was a huge Nirvana fan and when I first told him I had seen this film, he clearly thought it must have been some amazing documentary about the grunge band. Nope, not even close.

I mean, it is in the documentary style. There is a lot of inconsistency regarding how the guy holding the camera follows Matt and Jay around without being noticed by key people in certain scenes, not to mention a documentary crew actually traveling through time with this duo, and even keeping tabs on the two of them when they have conflict and separate. But as I already indicated, plot logic is nowhere near these guys’ top priority here. And the overall experience is so much fun that anything you might want to nitpick is incidental. Given all the elements of how it was put together, the fact that this film exists at all is practically a miracle, and how funny it manages to be is icing on the cake.

Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll pull an extension cord connected to the top of the CN Tower in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.

Overall: B+

GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON'T DIE

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

The more I think about Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, the less impressed I am with it. The best thing I can say about it is that Sam Rockwell gives a great performance, and is clearly having a blast. I wish I could say the same of the rest of the cast, who really seem like they’re just phoning it in. Well, Juno Temple gives a relatively strong performance, but far from a comic one; she plays a grieving mother bewildered by the offer of getting a subpar clone of her son who was killed in a school shooting. Michael Peña and Zazie Beets play school teachers who are a couple struggling in their relationship, and Haley Lu Richardson plays a suicidal young woman with an allergy to cell phones and wifi. Yes, really.

Rockwell is the otherwise nameless Man From the Future, who shows up at a diner and announces to everyone that he’s come back in time to save us from destroying ourselves with social media and AI. Social media gets name-checked early on, but only once or twice; after that, the target is both generally and consistently “AI,” and this film’s penchant for conflating the two (both being dangerous when unregulated notwithstanding) does nothing for its effectiveness.

This opening scene plays out very strong, giving a real sense of hope and promise for a fun and clever movie, which does not take very long to fade. And this is definitely a movie that thinks it’s clever—written by Matthew Robinson and directed by Gore Verbinski, I’d say at least this is a singular vision that is not written by committee, except that it feels like it was. I was diverted well enough by this film as I watched it, but it is blandly entertaining at best. The script takes on the point of view that AI is bad for us all, and then puts a bunch of VFX onscreen that looks like AI slop. I want to be amused by a centaur with an upper body made of hundreds of cats, except that it looks exactly like the AI crap that people keep sharing on Facebook.

Perhaps this was exactly the point? I can’t really tell how “deep” this movie is trying to be. If that is the intention, however, it fails. Satire needs to go hard, and this movie is jus lobbing thematic softballs. I wonder how many people watching even realize how deeply derivative it is? The aforementioned cat-centaur is the result of our group of heroes basically dreaming up their own adversary—exactly how the Mr. Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was manifested in the original 1984 Ghostbusters. Michael Peña plays a substitute teacher who makes the mistake of touching the smartphone screen of one of his students, which triggers to signal to all of them and causes them to mindlessly come after the teachers like zombies. Get it? There are even multiple scenes of teenagers, phones in hand, crashing through walls to get at the adults trying to hide from them.

Much later, in a climactic scene in which The Man From the Future is attempting to get the attention of a 9-year-old child said to be the architect of the AI that becomes self-aware, there is a moment when a bunch of dismembered and reassembled robot and toys come to life. One of them looks straight out of the Star Wars sequel trilogy; others look straight out of the scary neighbor kid’s yard in Toy Story.

A lot of these things reference movies so old that a many young viewers today won’t even know such references are happening. Or are we supposed to believe these similarities are coincidental? If so, that’s preposterous. If not, I can’t tell what the point was. Have Fun, Good Luck, Don’t Die has a lot to say about how our constant attention to screens is making us all brain dead, while doing exactly the same thing to its own viewers. Is this a lack of self-awareness, or a stroke of genius? I can assure you this film is not a work of genius, and a movie like this will hardly work as intended when the joke being made is on the audience.

But is it fun? Sure, some of the time. It’s far too long, at 134 minutes, for a film of this nature, which ultimately takes it into the realm of tedium. There are some scenes that work incredibly well, such as when Juno Temple’s grieving mother is asked by a smiling but impatient staffer to choose from comically limited personality options for her cloned son (who, by the way, is conditioned to inject ads into everyday conversation—this being something we already saw in the most recent season of Black Mirror). Or when she later meets another set of parents who have lost both their original daughter and two subsequent clones to school shootings, this being the kind of cutting, dark satire of our present era that this film doesn’t lean into enough.

Other times, the backstory just doesn’t land, as with Haley Lu Richardson’s young woman in a princess costume (she works children’s birthsay parties as a job) loses her “anti-phone” boyfriend (Tom Taylor) to a virtual reality game that mysteriously shows up at their door. They’ve been living off the grid, so who sent this console to him, and why? This movie has no interest in these questions—only that he’s received the device. In any case, the dissolution of this relationship is too rushed and contrived, even within the context of a film in which you readily accept its ridiculous (and overused) premise.

I cannot find any evidence that AI tools were used in the making of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, but it sure feels like it was. If you asked an AI prompt to create a comedy about the dangers of AI, it’s easy to imagine this movie being the result. Aside from Sam Rockwell’s impressively committed performance—it was his delivery alone that got the most laughs out of me—really nothing about this film is particularly smart or clever. It’s just a barrage of shit we’ve already seen before, repackaged and redelivered.

This movie is about as smart as it looks.

Overall: C+

THE MOMENT

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

Listen, I’m nearly 50 years old now. Anyone who has been reading the movie reviews the more than 21 years I have been posting regularly would be for the most part as old or older. It should come as no surprise that I barely even know who Charli XCX is—even though she’s been actively making pop music for 13 years. As in, since she was 20 and since I was 36. I was well plugged out of the pop music zeitgeist by then, unless you count Kesha I suppose. And it was a year after Kesha released her second album that I even started paying attention to her.

Okay, what’s my point, then? The Moment follows a long tradition of pop stars using their music career as a launch pad into the movie business. Until last year, she only had a couple of parts and a couple animation voice acting gigs. The key difference with The Moment and any pop singer movie vehicle in the past is that here, Charli XCX not only plays herself, but in a documentary style. Anyone not in the know might actually only gradually realize it’s not actually real. This is something it very much has in common with its direct cinematic ancestor, This Is Spinal Tap, which was released eight years before Charli XCX was even born. That movie was hysterically funny, particularly in its time—when it had its own moment. The Moment has moments that are well-observed and very funny. But, I could hardly go so far as to call it hysterical.

As such, for me The Moment was kind of a mixed bag. I wonder if it plays any differently to her fans, who know all of her music and whatever her real story is? It’s clearly very much a product of its time, and casually reflects how pop stars make their money performing and not from music sales—something that has been the case for basically Chari XCX’s entire career. This makes all the people in her orbit approach her, and their own careers in relation to her, differently than they might have ten or twenty or forty years ago. What The Moment illustrates very effectively and vividly is that the industry remains as ridiculous as it ever was.

It’s a fascinating exercise to watch a pop star play herself in such a straight way. She’s not really satirizing herself, and plays most of the scenes straight. It’s everyone and everything around her that is heightened, and exaggerated—or is it? You get the feeling that most of this stuff is inspired by things she has actually witnessed in the wild. I would believe it. Charli XCX spends most of the movie either responding to everyone around her with a varying mix of frustration, exasperation, and befuddlement.

To get very specific, The Moment focuses on—and is literally a reference to—the whole “Brat Summer” phenomenon of 2024. (I barely knew what it was while it was happening.) This film is an alternate reality in which a documentary crew follows Charli XCX as she prepares for the tour in support of the Brat album. In this fictionalized world, her label (Atlantic Records, which is her actual label and gets name checked multiple times in the film) and other industry people are desperate to keep “Brat Summer” going as long as possible, if not forever. They bring in a douchey concert film director (Alexander Skarsgård—hey, at least he’s my age! which is astounding considering how hot he is) who ultimately takes over and strips the concert’s artistic vision of any of its soul, alienating the people who were helping her stay true to herself in the process.

I do have a particular nitpick about this, and that is director and co-writer Aidan Zamiri’s apparent inability to fully commit to the bit. There are passing references to the camera crew following Charli around, but there are countless scenes in which no documentary camera crew would ever actually have access or be privy to the conversations we see. This is a key difference from any of the Christopher Guest mockumentary films, which quite earnestly stay true to the “documentary” gimmick. It’s an inconsistency of style that I found distracting.

What I did find fairly impressive was the acting. The Moment is a film full of people onscreen who understood the assignment, and that includes Charli XCX—who, by the way, is credited as having the “original idea”—more than any of them. Charli has a choice to make by the end of the film regarding her artistic integrity, and there is a pretty clear difference between the fictionalized version of Charli and the real-world version of her.

When The Moment has humor that lands, it really lands—it got some good laughs out of me. They were just fewer and further between than a movie like this really needs. The story unfolds with incisive cleverness, but the tone goes a bit back and forth, and would have been helped by more frequently pointed humor. I had a good time; it just wasn’t quite the party I wanted it to be.

Charli XCX is just along for the ride. Or is she the one driving?

Overall: B

SEND HELP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help is not coming, Bradley.

Overall: B+

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: C

IS THIS THING ON?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen, Alex Novak. It’s on, okay!

Overall: A-

ANACONDA

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

I wonder how many people are going to see the 2025 Anaconda without ever having seen the original 1997 film? The friend I went to see this with, and I both fall into this category. And it would seem that to say your mileage may vary is an understatement: my friend laughed so hard she was crying. I, on the other hand, vacillated between feeling embarrassed that I occasionally laughed at some of this movie’s knowing stupidity, and being genuinely annoyed by some of the straight up lazy filmmaking.

Ironically, I was tempted to say I might have been better off just watching the original—except that film has a score of 37 on MetaCritic; this one has a score of 44. This was an improvement?

There are just too many things in this movie that are nonsensical. Over and over, the giant anaconda in this movie lunges at people, or moving vehicles—and misses. Is this snake on sedatives? Maybe this is something that also happens in the original film; I wouldn’t know. I can’t gauge how much in this movie is knowingly leaning into its lack of logic. There are some who note that Paul Rudd and Jack Black are both 56 years old, but we’re supposed to believe they loved the original Anaconda as kids—even though they would have been 28 when the film was released. There is a very brief line in which they say they were in college when the movie came out, so I guess maybe they’re playing six or seven years younger than their actual ages?

I knew about this age complaint going in, and was actually ready to give it the benefit of the doubt: this is a movie that’s all about being a fun, dumb monster comedy, and maybe this was part of that. The homemade film we see that these characters actually made as kids was actually called Squatch, about a monster Sasquatch. And yet, apparently, the dream they’ve had all their lives is to reboot Anaconda,

Well, Griff (Rudd) convinces his friends that in his time pursuing acting in L.A., he met a relative of the original writer of the source novel (the 1997 Anaconda was actually an original script) who gave him the rights. After some initial protestations by Doug (Black), who is ostensibly the most responsible family man of the bunch, two other friends, Claire (Thandiwe Newton) and Kenny (Steve Zahn), join them in a hairbained scheme not only to shoot their version of Anaconda, but to literally travel to Brazil to shoot it in the Amazon.

Kenny, a guy from their hometown of Buffalo who calls himself “Buffalo sober” (only beer and wine, “and some of the lighter liquors”), is the cinematographer. Griff and Claire are starring in the film, and Doug is both directing and writing. There are several shots of Jack Black “writing” the script, which basically inolves him looking intently at a laptop screen and raising and lowering his eyebrows.

I love a meta approach, and Anaconda frequently has characters referring to the movie they are making, and thus also the movie we are watching, as “a reboot” or “a spiritual sequel.” They even encounter another film crew on the river. Some of this is mildly amusing, but the meta aspect, as with just about every aspect, could have been done much better. Just about everything in this movie is forced, and not in the quirky, endearing way it’s clearly intending.

Inevitably, this group of characters comes across not just a giant anaconda, but illegal gold miners. They meet a local woman named Ana (Daniela Melchior, honestly giving the best performance) who proves to have a surprisingly significant part. By the end there will be cameos by more than one cast member from the original movie.

Aside from fans of the first movie, I’m not quite sure who this one is for. Why did I see it, then? The trailer made it look like silly fun—which was very much how my friend took it in, and she had a blast. My problem is that I have seen too many other movies that achieved the vibe this one is going for, with far greater cleverness and wit. I won’t begrudge a group of people just having fun, but I still hope for something more than utterly brainless. Okay, utterly mediocre, I guess is better: I did get some good chuckles here and there, which balanced out the oppressively bad parts to an average of mediocrity. The sequence with Jack Black and a boar strapped to his back actually was pretty funny.

The thing is, there’s silliness, and there’s well-executed silliness. It’s a difficult thing to do well. There’s a scene in which Doug is lying on a bed and instead of pointing with his finger, he lifts his leg to point with his toes, putting his foot unnaturally close to the camera. Anaconda could have used a lot more of that kind of silliness. It spends way too much time on these friends being earnest about following their dreams and how much they enjoy making things together. Like, who cares? Isn’t this supposed to be a movie about a giant killer snake?

This was why I enjoyed Cocaine Bear, which wasn’t as popular with others who felt it was too one-note: that movie absolutely delivers on its promise. It’s about a bear on a rampage while high on cocaine. There’s no token earnestness in that movie. I rather wish Anaconda had been more like it. There’s a few fun scenes in which the snake actually swallows people, but there’s also a lot of scenes in which some of those people are trying too hard to be funny and not quite getting there. I’m looking at you, Selton Mello, as Carlos Santiago Braga, the snake handler.

When Anadona steers straight into its ridiculousness, it almost works. It even has surprisingly good visual effects for this kind of movie (a critical qualifier). But the performances almost across the board are oddly unnatural, all of them feeling under-rehearsed. Is that part of the gag? If it is, it’s too subtle. The gags in this movie should only be obvious, like when they’re talking about their movie’s story and they keep repeating the word “themes!” This movie has no coherent theme, except its own superficialities. This might have worked really well as a ten-minute short, actually. That makes this movie about ninety minutes too long.

Overall: C+

WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

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

Is Josh O’Connor the new Pedro Pascal? This guy is everywhere! Six movies in the past three years, four of them in 2025 alone: Rebuilding (which I had intended to see but couldn’t thanks to bullshit limited release locations); The History of Sound (loved); The Mastermind (dreadfully dull); and now, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (spoiler: delightful). Even with the varied results, I don’t mind so much. O’Connor is a deeply talented actor, it’s great that he’s trying so many different types of roles, and frankly, he’s way hotter than Pedro Pescal. I said what I said!

Which leads me to writer-director Rian Johnson, whose only feature films have been Knives Out movies for the past six years (though he did direct four episodes of Poker Face in 2023). I struggle to think of another filmmaker who so consistently makes movies with star-studded ensemble casts with such success—and all of them in the same genre, no less. Ensemble films with too many big stars in them have long been known to tip toward failure, but perhaps Johnson has a new insight: on average, his casts lean more toward “great actors” than “movie stars.” Granted, we’ve long since moved into an era when being a movie star doesn’t mean what it used to.

Josh O’Connor, for example, is a mid-level “movie star” at best, but he long ago proved himself a talented and versatile actor. Even his queer roles have all been great, from 2017’s God’s Own Country (when I first noticed him) to 2025’s The History of Sound, and I’m going to go ahead and include 2024’s Challengers—O’Connor’s biggest box office earner, at least among major roles—as well. Rain Johnson has perfectly cast O’Connor in Wake Up Dead Man as Father Jud Duplenticy, who gets transferred to another parish after rashly punching a rude deacon in the face (we never hear what the deacon said to him, as he is an otherwise inconsequential character whose face we don’t even see, but I was still mildly disappointed by that). Somewhat ironically given all that I have said about O’Connor thus far, Jud, being a priest, is completely sexless in this film, not just celibate but never even indicating any desires. His passions are reserved for a steadily growing hatred for the priest at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. Josh Brolin is also perfectly cast as Wicks, a complicated but blustering control freak of a man. Wicks, incidentally, is not so celibate, at least not by the strict rules of Catholicism: he regularly asks Jud to take his confession, and is constantly confessing all the times he’s masturbated, including the locations and varying techniques of it.

So this is where the ensemble cast aspect of it comes in: the inevitable murder happens, and the small number of regulars who remain loyal to Wicks’s congregation are all quickly identified as suspects: Martha the deeply devotional church lady (Glenn Close); Nat the town doctor (Jeremy Renner); Vera the lawyer (Kerry Washington); Lee the best-selling author now in a professional slump (Andrew Scott); Simone the former concert cellist rendered disabled by an undiagnosable chronic pain disorder (Cailee Spaeny); and Cy the YouTube-obsessed aspiring Republican politician (Daryl McCormack). None of these characters get a great deal of development, but that’s beside the point of the exercise in a film like this; what’s important is that each one of them gets assigned a clear motive.

And on top of all that, we get Mila Kunis as the local police chief in this small New York State town; Jeffrey Wright as the bishop who assigns Jud to Wicks’s church (Wright is always a welcome presence and he doesn’t get enough screen time here); Thomas Haden Church as Martha’s groundskeeper lover; and my favorite surprise appearance, Bridget Everett, comedian and star of HBO’s Somebody Somewhere, as a gabby construction company employee.

You may have noticed I haven’t yet even mentioned Daniel Craig. Well, now I have! We do see his face first in Wake Up Dead Man, but he’s reading a written account of what has transpired at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, which quickly cuts to that backstory as the narrative, introducing all of these characters and leading up to the murder. Craig isn’t seen at all through all this backstory, at least half an hour or more, until the police chief has called in Private Detective Benoit Blanc, he meets all of these characters in question, as well as the writer of the aforementioned account, and we finally figure out how he came to be in possession of it—in a way not quite suggested at first, by how this movie is cleverly edited.

And yes, the story and the vibe are both very close to that of 2019’s Knives Out and 2022’s Glass Onion—which is by design. Which is to say: if you enjoyed those other two movies (and I very much did), then you will enjoy this one. They all feature effective humor, intriguing mystery, solid performances, and a big reveal at the end of who the murderer is and exactly how the deed was done. It’s formula, sure, but also the point: it’s a formula that works. And to Rain Johnson’s exceeding credit, even people who usually figure out the mystery before it’s revealed don’t do it so easily in Johnson’s films. My husband cycled through four different theories—including that all the suspects worked together to commit the murder—until the final reveal proved all his predictions had been wrong.

Wake Up Dead Man does have a few minor details that don’t make sense under scrutiny, such as local police using sirens when merely arriving for a meeting with someone. There is a quasi-meta moment when Benoit Blanc notes that they are not in a mystery fiction, even though of course they are. And, as always, your mileage may vary on Daniel Craig’s Kentucky-fried accent, which some find fun and others find ridiculous. I fall somewhere in the middle on that one, though as these movies go on, it feels sort of like an essential trademark of the series. The bottom line is that I alway have a blast watching these movies, and while I would also love to see Brian Johnson branching out into other genres again, I would happily take another five of these, so long as the quality stays consistent. So far, it has—the first film is the easy favorite, of course, as the kick-off to the series, but I found the second one nearly as delightful (though one wonders how well it will age over time, given how much of its covid-era production was worked directly into the script).

I should note that Wake Up Dead Man made me laugh quite a lot, often really hard, especially in its first hour or so. The humor certainly tapers off as the tensions rise, and I kind of missed the humor in the second half. But, being set in a Catholic church and with congregants as most of its characters, Wake Up Dead Man also weaves in themes of duty, morality, and loyalty with a nuance not quite present in the previous films, which injects the Knives Out series with a new kind of life. Rain Johnson is a consummate writer, and particularly designer of plot construction, which is the real star of all these movies. I’ve been careful not to spoil anything here, as there are unsurprisingly many plot twists (watch out for the deliberately misleading trick of Blanc saying “Why’d you do it?”). Suffice it to say that Wake Up Dead Man is every bit the entertainment mystery it is designed to be. The only true disappointment is that, even by comparison to the previous two films, its theatrical release was significantly limited, mostly confining its access to Netflix. These movies are always more fun in theaters, but the flip side is that now millions of people have instant access. So fire it up and watch it right now!

You’ll figure it out as soon as they do.

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

ETERNITY

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

I really enjoyed Eternity, but I also have a lot of nitpicks. Let’s go through them all!

But let’s back up a step, to the premise, which is that our three main characters spend time in a place called “Junction,” where they have as long as a week to decide a single environment (or world, or universe, whatever you want to call it) in which to spend eternity. The twist, and the whole reason for this story, is that Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) is also faced with another agonizing decision: whether to spend eternity with the first husband, Luke (Callum Turmer), who died in the Korean war, or her second husband, Larry (Miles Teller), with whom Joan enjoyed 65 years of happy marriage.

The first death we see is Larry’s, and it’s the circumstances of this death that is my first major nitpick. It happens at a gender reveal party for one of their great grandchildren. A gender reveal party? Really? To be fair, the script, by Patrick Cunnane and director David Freyne, passingly acknowledges how stupid these parties are: “People die at these things!” says Larry as an old man, played by Barry Primus (Joan as an old woman is played by Betty Buckley). There is even a bit of a callback to this gag when a later couple met in Junction is revealed to have been killed in a freak accident at a gender reveal party. Still, the deliberately inoffensive jokes aside, the use of a gender reveal party in the opening sequence of this film both reflects and participates in the preposterous normalization of "gender reveal” parties. These things are both pointless and blithely presumptuous, and might as well be called “Genital Identification Parties.” But nobody in this movie dares say that.

We learn on the car ride to the party, before Larry dies, that Joan has cancer, and is waiting until after the party to tell the rest of the family. When Larry wakes up in Junction, he’s the first character we follow there, and at first the story is just from his perspective. But, we already know that Joan is not far behind, and basically the second act involves a shift in perspective to hers. Not long after that, we learn that Luke has been waiting for Joan in Junction for the past 67 years.

The rules of how things work in Junction are both undeniably entertaining and often nonsensical. This film clearly owes its existence to the widely loved (I always thought it was just fine) 1991 Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life, except instead of a character pleading his case for having lived a life worthy of spending eternity in a better place, here characters merely have to choose where to spend eternity—and in this case, with whom.

Why time means anything in Junction at all escapes me, but it very much does: “clients” are assigned an Afterlife Coordinator (“AC”) as a guide to help them choose, but they get one week in which to do it. The people who work these jobs in Junction, whether they are ACs or janitors or bartenders, are people who have chosen, for various reasons, not to go to any eternity at all. Some of them just enjoy helping others and that gives them a feeling of purpose. Some are waiting for their beloved to arrive, as in Luke, who has waited there for 67 years. It’s a little weird that measurements of time should be so important in Junction when it means nothing in eternity, but whatever.

The thing is, in the film Eternity, it’s all the scenes that take place in Junction that are really fun and compelling—and, crucially, contains all of the surprisingly effective humor in this film. Now, it also makes no sense that the system here should be so modeled on capitalism, with representatives from countless “Worlds” trying to sell it to people passing through Junction—not with money, but just simple persuasion, I guess. We see characters walking past countless booths (or in some cases, watching commercials) for different “Worlds,” from Paris Land to Smokers World to 1920s Germany “with 100% less Nazis.” Larry’s inclination is toward Beach World, and Joan’s is toward Mountain Town—basically the same argument they had in the car on the way to the party. I loved seeing all these examples of eternities, and when I saw booths for Queer World and Studio 54 World side by side, I thought: I’d have a hard time choosing between those two. That said, why does this system only have a selection of offerings created by someone else? Can’t we just create one of our own? What if I want to spend eternity in Andrew-Garfield-and-Timothée-Chalamet-Sandwich World?

Junction is also made much more fun by the supporting characters who are Larry’s and Joan’s ACs, respectively: Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and Ryan (John Early). These two are very invested in their clients but also have a sexual past together, which is an odd turn in this film given how openly and obviously queer John Early is. He does marvel at the handsomeness of Luke, a running gag in the script, but he later explains to Anna that he could never do polyamory because “I am a one-woman man.” Oh really, John Early? The oddest thing about that exchange is that it is the one time in Eternity that polyamory is brought up, and it’s only within the context of Ryan and Anna’s relationship. Why does no one ever bring up the idea to Joan, Larry and Luke? Couldn’t they at least test out Polyamory World?

It seems like that’s the only thing that could be a suitable compromise for all three of them. Why should Joan have to choose? Isn’t eternity supposed to be the place they choose in which they’ll be happiest? This script does, amusingly, acknowledge how one eternity could quickly get tedious: enforcement officials are constantly running down people trying to escape the eternity they have chosen, one of whom shouts, “Museum World is so boring!” But would not any eternity be so? Whether it’s an eternity at the beach or in the mountains?

Indeed, there’s a ton of detail in Eternity that is really easy to pick apart, not least of which is the fair amount of time spent in different eternities in the second half of the film. These scenes are constructed so that characters can reflect on whether or not they made the right choice, but when the backdrop is just serene mountains or an inexplicably overcrowded beach (why would there be a limit on the amount of beach that can be shared for eternity?), Eternity, as a film, instantly just becomes far less interesting, compelling, or fun. It’s less fun without Early or Randolph around. And the technique for rendering the “Archive” building in each Eternity where characters can view replayed memories from their lives is mystifying: they see themselves as tangible people, but in a sort of diorama box with the environment of these memories rendered in large hand drawn backdrops. I can’t tell if this was a legitimately artistic choice or if it was a production cost saving measure. It sure felt like the latter,

Eternity is the kind of movie that is undeniably entertaining but also does not stand up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny. I laughed a lot the entire time the film was set at Junction, from the many sight gags to the delightful performances of both Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early. This made me happy to have seen this movie even though none of it really makes any sense.

Overall: B