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

GOOD FORTUNE

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

Good Fortune is, unfortunately. a textbook case of the best parts of a movie having been in the trailer. Admittedly part of my problem is how often I go to the movies, and therefore how often I sit through the same trailers over and over again—something the average moviegoer does not contend with. The rest of the audience at the movie today laughed at several moments where I had to stop myself from thinking: why are they laughing? This bit is overplayed! But, most of them weren’t even remembering what they saw in the trailer.

Still, the script for Good Fortune is undeniably lacking, and it’s the weakest part of the production. This is not great, since the script is arguably the most critical part of a movie’s success. Sometimes great performances elevate mediocre material, but that doesn’t quite happen here, even though the cast is stacked with either deeply talented people, bona fide stars, or in many cases both: Keanu Reeves is the angel Gabriel, who gets out over his skis when he leaves his assignment of saving people from texting-and-driving accidents to save what he sees as a “lost soul.” Sandra Oh appears as Gabriel’s boss, Martha, in a sort of heaven middle-management. Keke Palmer plays a working-class woman trying to organize her hardware store coworkers into a union. Seth Rogen is Jeff, a wealthy entrepreneur oblivious to how good he really has it.

It pains me to say this, because I like Aziz Ansari and his work, but he’s the weak link in all of this. Not only does he play the part of Arj, the lost soul Gabriel has decided to save, without any sense of true dedication to the craft, but he also wrote and directed this film—his first time doing so with a feature. He doesn’t particularly excel at any of these three jobs. I find myself wondering if he might have done better just doing one of them and not the other two. Would his performance have improved with a different director? Could he have polished the script if not starring in the film had given him more time? He stacked all the supporting parts, so he clearly could have cast a better actor as the lead. Good Fortune could have worked a whole lot better if Ansari had just picked a lane.

To be fair, there are auteurs out there who have succeeded at being this very kind of triple-threat. Ansari just isn’t one of them. His Netflix series, Master of None, was very well written, and his performance in it was fine. Good Fortune, though, is presented and billed as a really fun comedy. At best it’s a slight amusement. I got one truly good laugh out of its 97-minute runtime.

And I do rather like the premise, a sort of It’s a Wonderful Life except it’s not Christmas, and instead of showing a depressed man how the world would be if he had never been born, this angel takes a more misguided approach and decides to show Arj what would be missing from his life if he were given the life of the rich dude, Jeff (Rogen), he’s been working for. Jeff is thus switched into Arj’s life, and at first he doesn’t realize it, until a peculiar plot point has Gabriel giving Jeff all his previous memories but not yet his old life. It gets a little convoluted, where these two can only switch back if Arj actually wants it and can see that it’s a life worth living. Who made these arbitrarily strict rules, anyway? These angels are assholes.

Keke Palmer’s Elena is Arj’s love interest, and she’s the only character in the film with a truly grounded sense of the worth of a working-class life. This comes to a head when the rich-version Arj woos Elena, and she’s taken by it at first, but then pulls back when Arj proves to be out of touch. This is all fairly predictable, and that might even have been easily overlooked if the movie were actually funny.

The biggest problem I have with Good Fortune, really, is its point of view. Ansari seems to be congratulating himself for how much he understands the struggles of working-class people, all while still managing to come across as out of touch himself. It’s worth noting that Aziz Ansari reportedly has a net worth of $25 million. The thing is, rich people don’t think of themselves as rich if they know other people who are far richer than they are, and all we have to do here is consider that Seth Rogen reportedly has a net worth of $80 million and Keanu Reeves $380 million. Compared to Reeves, Rogen’s fortune is chump change, and compared to Rogen, Ansari is the “little guy.” I’m not sure he’s fully thought through how most people watching this movie have a tiny fraction of what even he has, or that his movie could have benefited from a pass on the script by someone much closer to the lives he’s depicting.

He does showcase a very diverse cast of characters here, I’ll give him that—right down to the Latino restaurant owner with a thick accent. It’s likely not an accident that the only principal characters who are White are the rich ones (and yes, we know, there are White poor people too). The thing is, none of these characters are very interesting. I probably never would have thought of this myself, and I wish I did, but I’ll have to borrow this from the observation made by the friend I saw the movie with: every single character could have been more interesting, with minimal effort. So why aren’t they?

I kind of liked Gabriel, I’ll admit. There’s something endearing about Keanu Reeves delivering the line “I’m a dumb dumb.” Reeves is perfectly cast as a “budget angel” with a kind of hapless incompetence. This guy never had the greatest range as an actor, but he’s still a star—so much so that Ansari wrote into the script that at least two people comment openly on how hot they think he is. There are even plenty of circumstances that should be more of a blast to watch, such as when Gabriel tastes some mushroom chocolate. But that scenario, as in all of them here, just leads to a whole lot of not much, which is maybe the best way to describe this movie.

Keanu Reeves puts his hand on Seth Rogen’s shoulder, and suddenly Rogen realizes this movie isn’t very good.

Overall: C+

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-

THE BALTIMORONS

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

I’ve seen The Baltimorons described as “cringe comedy,” and I suppose that’s what it is—but it also feels like an unfair act of pigeonholing. This is a movie that is utterly and completely itself, in spite of all the other things you could call it: a May-December romance, a Christmas movie, a single-day story, etc. The thing is, The Baltimorons works incredibly well as all of these things.

Set over the course of Christmas Eve, Cliff slips on the stairs while taking his potato pecan casserole to his future-in-laws’ house for dinner, and knocks out a tooth when he bashes his face into the door frame. He calls all over town to find a dentist that’s open, and the one who picks up is Didi, who only reveals her office was actually closed when she shows up and lets Cliff in.

I should note that the May-December aspect here has Cliff as the younger one and Didi as the older one. We never learn the characters’ names, but Cliff is played by 36-year-old Michael Strassner; Didi by 66-year-old Liz Larsen. That’s a pretty wide spread, sure, but the gender inverse of what has historically been seen onscreen, and at least Cliff is clearly well past his youth. These things actually make a difference, and the casting of The Baltimorons is one of its greatest strengths: Strassner and Larsen have incredible screen chemistry, and their characters really work together.

Most crucially, the day that unfolds before them takes them many unexpected places, but it always feels organic. This is thanks to the skill and talent of director and co-writer Jay Duplass, as well as Strassner himself, who co-wrote the script with Duplass. Strassner is an alumnus of The Groudlings, which clearly informs the improv sketch comedy background of his character (“The Baltimorons” is the name of the improv troupe Cliff used to be in).

The improv background doesn’t even come into focus until well into the film, as we get Cliff, a sweet guy who also has plenty of fuckups under his belt but has also been sober for six months, entering the dentist office of Didi, who has just learned her ex-husband eloped with his newer, much younger wife and turned their Christmas Eve dinner into a wedding reception, thereby co-opting Didi’s Christmas Eve dinner plans. Cliff overhears the breaking of this news as he makes a wrong turn looking for the bathroom, and insists on taking her out to dinner as a thank-you for fixing his tooth.

That’s a pretty specific reveal, I realize, but this happens so early in The Baltimorons that it’s not any kind of spoiler. What follows is a series of events, some a bit more plausible than others but none so unrealistic that you don’t buy it, that keep these two hanging out even after multiple moments of what they both believe to be a parting. They wind up all over Baltimore, in cars and at the aforementioned Christmas Eve reception and at an improv show and on a boat and even briefly at a jail.

All of this makes The Baltimorons sound like a wild ride, which it really isn’t. It’s more sweet than anything, even in a key scene in which Cliff is very reluctantly pressured into performing improv and Didi finds herself on stage with him. I suppose this is where the “cringe comedy” idea comes in, because there are so many moments that feel like things may be headed to a very bad place—but it never is. It’s more like a lot of near-misses, which packs The Baltimorons with a lot of feeling of relief. But also laughter: I laughed quite a lot at this movie. I also found myself touched by its unusually sincere sweetness, to a point that I even got a bit teary-eyed. This is the kind of movie that really works on the softies.

If I had any one true criticism, it would be the subplot of Cliff’s betrothal to his girlfriend, Brittany (Olivia Luccardi). It’s fine, I guess; and it does provide some context for people who care about Cliff being worried about him because of his past precariousness of emotional state. Still, it felt a little like a plot contrivance to create a clearer-cut barrier to Cliff and Didi’s connection, and the way they meet and their age differences are plenty barriers enough. Every scene with both Cliff and Didi onscreen is far more compelling than any with Brittany onscreen, which I spent just wanting Cliff’s story to return to Didi. That just underscores what a great duo these two are, though, and I would recommend The Baltomorons to anyone who loves being utterly charmed by the movies.

Sometimes you just find yourself having to “yes-and.”

Overall: B+

SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES

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

I keep rewatching the original films shortly before their “legasequel” comes out, and still hoping the new film will meet my expectations. Why do I keep doing this? What was the definition of insanity again?

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is far from bad—it just falls far short of the brilliance of the original 1984 film, This Is Spinal Tap, which launched an entire genre of filmmaking. To say it broke a mold would be an understatement, given the trick it pulled off at the time of convincing many people it was a real documentary about a hard rock band. Not only could no other movie in the same vein manage the same trick, but certainly no one’s going to fall for that in a sequel. Not even one released 41 years later.

It could be said that The End Continues is running on fumes, riding the coattails of that original film. It could also be said that’s sort of the point. There’s also a lot, however, that director Rob Reiner (who also directed the first film) brings to the table in a fresh way. This isn’t just about nostalgia, but a bit of a new angle. The first film reflected some ridiculous truths about the music industry, and this one reflects on aging in that industry.

Back in 1984, Christopher Guest, who co-wrote both of these films and also plays Nigel the guitar player, was 36 years old. He’s 77 now. The same goes for Michael MkKean, who plays the lead singer, David. Harry Shearer, who plays Derek the bass player, is 81 now; he was 40 when the first film was released in 1984. Rob Reiner, who inserts himself even more into the sequel than he did the first film, is 81 now. He’s the first one of these characters we see, and after a mildly amusing reference to “all this exposition,” that scene ends with a physical gag that does’t really work. There are moments in this film that feel like really old people trying to be as funny as they used to be.

To be fair, the actual talent on display remains undiminished. A big part of what makes Spinal Tap work is that the actors are both deeply skilled improvisors and accomplished musicians. The lyrics may be ridiculous, but they’re still making actual music, and actually harmonizing. Well, when they’re not singing out of key due to rustiness, anyway.

I do find myself wondering if I might like The End Continues better re-watching it after a fair amount of time has passed. That was basically my experience with This Is Spinal Tap. The degree to which these movies are edited down from what must be endless footage is incredibly impressive, as is these actors’ dedication to their characters. The trick they pull off is giving them all nuance even as they’re all on the spectrum between outrageous and stupid.

I just wished I had laughed more. Don’t get me wrong, I laughed pretty hard a few times. But a lot of The End Continues feels like it’s trying to keep me in stitches while I simply manage a relatively consistent chuckle. I did enjoy the way this film continues the running gag of the band’s long history of drummers who have died, this time hiring a young woman, Didi Crockett (professional battle drummer Valerie Franco), for the band’s one-time gig that is also their first time performing in 15 years. It’s this performance that serves as the climax to which the narrative is working toward, but I’ll only say this of Didi: make certain you stick around to the very end of the credits. This won’t be hard, as just as with the first film, more clips roll through the entirety of the credits. I actually found this to be the funniest part of the movie.

The legacy of this, I guess we can now call it a “franchise,” is also on full display in The End Continues thanks to a ton of high-profile cameos, two of which (Paul McCartney and Elton John) are already revealed in the trailer. A couple other very famous singers appear briefly in a TikTok video, and a couple of characters played by people in the first film who only later became famous also appear very briefly. This is all undeniably fun, but I don’t know how necessary it is. Spinal Tap has plenty notoriety on their own without stunt casting being brought in to validate them. Although McCartney has one line that did make me laugh pretty hard, less because of it being a particularly original joke than because of his delivery. Elton John gets far more screen time but isn’t quite as funny, though there is a sight gag near the end that I got a kick out of.

I had a good time at Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, and it comes together well enough to justify its own existence. The first film gained a cult following in an era where cult success was still possible; this new one is expected to underperform at the box office. And why wouldn’t it? Its very existence is a reference to an original property from four decades ago, and people as old as the people in it don’t go to the movies much. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of life The End Continues has on streaming platforms, but it’s unlikely to light a fire there either.

When it comes down to it, this is a movie made for the people who were already fans. It’ll hardly feel like a revelation or innovation in the “mockumentary” genre the first film started, but for fans, it won’t disappoint either.

Want to make old people look old? Put an iPad in front of them!

Overall: B