DISCLOSURE DAY

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

Look, I reserve the right to change my opinion of Disclosure Day over time. I’m seeing it again next week; perhaps my opinion will evolve. After first watch, I found it riveting from start to finish, but I thought the aliens looked kind of dumb. Thankfully their cumulative screen time is mercifully brief.

As is always the case with Steven Spielberg, this movie is much more about the people—as in, the human people. Tonally, Disclosure Day is like a cross between Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Spielberg’s 2005 take on War of the Worlds—a flawed movie that I still return to every few years. (It is perhaps worth noting that the War of the Worlds aliens from 21 years ago looked better than these ones do.) Disclosure Day isn’t perfect either, but it spoke to me in a way Spielberg has not managed in a very long time, perhaps not since the 2001 science fiction extravaganza Minority Report.

Still, it’s easy to find things to be ambivalent about in this movie, and while I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it polarizing, one can anticipate a degree of mixed reviews. The special effects, frankly, are not up to Spielberg’s usual standards. Some of the effects shots in the trailers, out of context, look worse than they come off while watching the film—but you can still see the CGI of it all. It would be one thing if the animals that appear out of nowhere to sort of mesmerize a couple of the lead characters were always part of a hallucination or a flashback of memory, but there are instances of this where we are meant to take it as occurring in their present reality.

And I really have to criticize the aliens themselves. Spielberg is clearly using the prototypical alien form from as far back as the forties as a reference. But, there are shots in which these guys just look like beanpole children in rubber costumes. There’s a shot in the final sequence that for me, pushes against the line of ridiculous; others might reasonably feel it crosses that line.

It’s a testament to the writing, by both David Koepp (who has written a great many great movies, including four previous Spielberg films) and Spielberg himself, that I am easily able to overlook these things. Ditto the direction, and also the phenomenal editing by Sarah Broshar (another frequent Spielberg collaborator). Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is very good but not at quite the same level; there are a bit too many lens flares, and one major nitpick is the shot of a crowd of people recording through a window with their smart phone lights on—they would just be recording the light reflecting in the glass. It makes for a cool, haunting image, though.

Janusz Kaminski is yet another frequent Spielberg collaborator, and that seems to be a major theme here. Much of Disclosure Day is a revisit, of sorts, to ground he’s covered before. To its credit, it also looks forward, and although it hardly gets into the weeds, it has some pretty provocative philosophical questions to pose, and this is a big part of what elevates it. Should we be keeping proof of extraterrestrial life secret because we fear aliens, or because we fear how people will handle it? (There was one scene in which I thought: if this were the real world, some idiot would just whip out a gun and shoot that thing.) What kind of impact would proof of aliens have on global religious consciousness? These are things that characters in the film actually talk about, and we get very reasonable arguments from multiple sides.

Now, it’s on the record that Spielberg himself is convinced that aliens walk among us, and this is a perspective that clearly informs his approach to this film. My reaction to that is: that’s cute. The adorable old man thinks aliens on Earth are real! The idea is of course preposterous on its face. If any evidence actually did exist, it would have been leaked eons ago. There’s a throwaway line in this movie about how U.S. presidents are kept in the dark since they are civilians again eight years after being in office, and that explains how they are kept in the dark, and gives an out for speculation regarding the unnamed current president. The thing is, presidents still stack agencies with people who are just as moronic as they are, and it’s silly to think anything this huge could ever be kept secret by hundreds or maybe even thousands of people with knowledge of it. It’s mathematically impossible.

It sure makes a great movie, though. Conspiracies are typically ludicrous in the real world, but they make for great thrillers, and Disclosure Day is indeed a great one. Even better, it’s fantastically cast: Colin Firth is a government agent on the tail of Josh O’Connor on the run with the government secrets he’s spent a decade being paid to protect, and they both slip into their roles organically—as does Eve Hewson as O’Connor’s girlfriend, who is having a crisis of faith in the face of the information being shared. The standout, though, is Emily Blunt, as the Kansas City TV news meteorologist who suddenly finds herself uttering a click-like laguage nearly no one can understand, and occasionally slipping into Russian or Korean. She gradually discovers other abilities that I won’t reveal here, except to say that they provide a delightful mix of mysterious and comic moments alike. Blunt’s performance, as a relatable middle-aged woman confused by suddenly extraordinary circumstances, arguably makes Disclosure Day worth seeing on its own. Colman Domingo, on the other hand, is a a great actor underused as a guy who spends most of his screen time on the phone with one or another of the other characters.

For all I know, maybe one day I will find the writing in Disclosure Day less impressive and the visual effects somehow more sensible. All I know is, I look forward to seeing it again, and I look forward to being able to discuss it with people. This is a movie that grabs you from its opening shot, from the point of view of a professional wrestler stomped in the face. Within moments, we see O’Connor’s whistleblower character nervously sitting in the crowd, already on the run. Disclosure Day does not waste a moment, and is so well edited that its 145 minutes pass swiftly. This is action-thriller filmmaking at its finest, not a narrative sag in sight. It occasionally invites nitpicking, but that’s relatively inconsequential considering how high it’s flying when the story soars, and I felt like I was windsurfing on its intrigue the entire time.

To be perfectly Blunt

Overall: A-

I LOVE BOOSTERS

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

I Love Boosters is only the second feature film by writer-director-producer Boots Riley; the first came eight years ago, Sorry to Bother You, a movie I struggled to connect to or make sense of. I Love Boosters is largely more of the same, but at least I can make slightly more sense of it. “Slightly” is the operative word here.

Riley is clearly a guy with a thing for gonzo excess. In this film, Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylour Paige play Corvette, Sade, and Mariah, respectively, also known as the Velvet Gang, the “Boosters” of the title—people who shoplift from high-end fashion outlet stores and resell them at a discount price. They quickly get the attention of the billionair fashion maven and Metro Designer outlet stores owner Christie Smith, played by a perfectly cast Demi Moore, who, along with her 2024 film The Substance, is really going for it with out-there roles in her sixties.

Moore is hardly the only fun casting choice in I Love Boosters, though. Don Cheadle shows up totally unrecognizable as Dr. Jack, a guy selling a pyramid scheme. Will Poulter is pitch-perfect as Grayson, the snooty manager at the Metro Designer store where Corvette, Sade, and Mariah manage to get jobs in an elaborate plan to boost its clothing. Eric André gets barely more than cameo time as a character credited as “Futuristic Police Tank Cop.” And while we’re on the subject of credited character names, LaKeith Stanfield plays “Pinky Ring Guy,” and I can’t even remember anything about a pinky ring; only that at one point one of the women says “He looks like sex”—and she’s right: LaKeith Stanfield need only stand still and stare at the camera to put a stir in the loins of viewers of any gender. (I guess I’ll take this moment also to name-check Jason Ritter as “Upstanding Community Member”; Kara Young as “Crying Black Mother”; and Jermaine Fowler as “Based Young Dude.” These characters all show up on news feeds offering backward talking points in defense of billionaires and corporations.)

I Love Boosters is surreal to the nth degree, to the point where the Velvet Gang are soon joined by Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a Chinese factory worker who steals two prototypes of a device with three different functions, depending on the setting: “Teleporter,” “Situational Accelorator,” or “deconstruction,” which renders anything it’s aimed at into the elements that made it. The plot is so wildly convoluted it would take an age to describe it all, but suffice it to say that the corporation is using this prototype to send product from China to the U.S. to save on shipping costs, but Jianhu teleports herself to the U.S. to start sucking all the Metro Designer outlet merchandise through the teleporter and right back to China.

This is where I Love Boosters has a lot in common with Sorry to Bother You, in which low-level workers are revealed to be literal “work horses.” The metaphor there was very on the nose, and much going on in I Love Boosters is moving in that same direction. Boots Riley throws in a lot of stuff about seemingly disparate groups of people actually fighting the same cause, and sets quite a lot of scenes in the Chinese factory where they are assembling the fashion. I’d say that there’s something ironic about the money spent to make a movie like this, using studios that arguably represent the very thing the movie is purportedly speaking out against, but this movie was made with a budget of $20 million and has grossed less than $5. Maybe Boots Riley knows what he’s doing, wasting production studio money!

I Love Boosters even features a bizarre, surrealist turn rather similar to the “work horses” of his previous film, just this time with a group of characters running after the Velvet Gang as stop-motion bodies of nothing but muscle and bone—complete with dangling, skinless penises—after being forced to shed their “suits,” which turns out to be their actual skin. This isn’t even the most memorable image in the movie; that would involve “Pinky Ring Guy,” who turns out to be way more than a guy wearing a pinkie ring, and is featured in the single most unfortgettably wild and hilariously disgusting scene in the movie. (It might also affect how much you agree that he “looks like sex.”)

This is a movie packed with gags, a ton of them visual, from Christie Smith’s office being in a leaning high-rise to the outfits worn by the Velvet Gang designed to contain all the clothes they’re boosting. A lot of the time, the gags work. A fair amount of the time, they kind of don’t. If there’s any signature trait to Boots Riley feature films—all two of them—it’s that they go in countless different wild directions and struggle to come together as a coherent narrative. I suppose a movie like this can work if you know what the very specific vibe is, and what it’s going for. I’m still not quite sure what I Love Boosters is going for exactly, but I picked up on the vibe. It worked better for me than Sorry to Bother You, but kind of barely. These movies are a lot, and you need to be ready for that. If you are then you’ll have a good time.

I Like Boosters Enough

STAR WARS: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU

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

Gather around, younglings. Let me tell you of a time very different from the one we currently live in. A time when a new Star Wars feature film release elicited palpable excitement. I’m not even talking about the prehistoric times of 1999, 2002, and 2005, when the Prequel Trilogy caused a global sensation in anticipation alone—only to disappoint millions (and yet delight viewers who were as young then as we were when the Original Trilogy was released). I’m talking just last decade—as recently as 2019, the appearance of the Lucasfilm Ltd logo elictited whoops from audiences. It’s worth noting that that was a full seven years after Disney bought Lucasfilm. But, it was at the end of their wildly misguided choice to flood the market with five feature films in as many years.

When I sat down to watch The Mandalorian and Grogu in a local theater, it was the first time I experienced that opening Lucasfilm Ltd logo and found it met with . . . silence. Everyone’s tired now. Star Wars is your parents’ franchise. The heyday has long since passed.

And yet: in a way, this helps The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is about as much fun as you can hope for with a feature film based on a television series, which was itself part of a broad franchise universe. It leans too heavily on action and is light on character development, but I have to say, most of the time the action is a blast.

There are many who act as though a lot is riding on this movie, and I’m not really convinced of that. I went in hoping for a good time that had no promise and no need to reinvent the wheel (or hyperdrive), and that’s precisely what I got. Perhaps more importantly, it gives a ton of screen time to that achingly cute character once known as “Baby Yoda” but whose name is actually Grogu, and it turns out that cuteness goes a long way. Even with a ton of screen time, Grogu never overstays his welcome. (For his part, Pedro Pascal gets one sequence without his all-important helmet on; they can’t have a star in one of the title roles without ever showing his money maker.) Having four new Anzellans, the small humanoid creatures who specialize in fixing things, doesn’t hurt either. The Anzellan Babu Frik was the best thing in The Rise of Skywalker, otherwise the one Star Wars movie to get worse with each viewing, and we didn’t get enough of him. We get plenty more of his kind in The Mandalorian and Grogu and it is always welcome.

All that said, there are elements of The Mandalorian and Grogu that are a bit of a mixed bag—namely, some of the casting. It’s bad enough that the opening sequence features several throwaway characters giving genuinely bad line readings, but this may be the worst I have ever seen Sigourney Weaver perform onscreen. It’s as though they just used the first take for every line she delivered, apparently having learned them just beforehand. How many science fiction franchises does Sigourney Weaver need to be in, anyway? Are Alien and Avatar not enough? Now she’s not only getting greedy, but apparently getting lazy. She genuinely feels out of place here.

The character around whom the plot turns is Rotta the Hut, a CGI character voiced by Jeremy Allen White, in a deepened voice that renders it unrecognizable. In which case, what was the point of casting him? At least Martin Scorsese’s voice is recognizable as Hugo Durant, a monkey-like character with four arms, odd a casting choice as that may be.

It’s somewhat of a miracle that Pedro Pascal is one of the few characters whose actual face we almost never see but who doesn’t seem like he’s phoning it in. Just as had been the case in the television series (but it should be stressed: you need not have seen the TV show to understand or enjoy this movie), there remains a delightful chemistry between him and the tiny puppet character—thank all the gods in the galaxy they never pivoted to rendering him fully in CGI—and that is truly the engine of this story, the reason to watch.

The Mandalorian and Grogu offers nothing particularly new, it doesn’t move the franchise forward in any real way, but it does prove it’s still viable. People may not be excited about this movie the way they were with previous ones, but this movie makes it easy to imagine one coming along that captures the public’s imagination again. Given the indelible nature of both the Mandalorian and Grogu as characters, it could easily be argued that this is better than Solo: A Star Wars Story, which made the mistake of making a Han Solo movie without Harrison Ford in it. The Mandalorian and Grogu has more potential for lasting impact, and is a fairly effective palate cleanser even seven years after The Rise of Skywalker squandered all the thrilling potential that came with The Last Jedi.

I do find myself curious about the way they title these movies. It feels a little like Lucasfilm backed themselves into a corner by retroactively making all official titles of any film in a trilogy start with the words “Star Wars,” and then making the subtitle to all standalone films “A Star Wars Story.” Except this new one is a standalone story and its official title is apparently Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu. Are they just sticking with “Star Wars” as the beginning of all feature films now and scrapping “A Star Wars Story”? Make up your minds!

The Mandalorian and Grogu heralds a clearly transitional time in Star Wars franchise history, which has had high highs and low lows, and a few movies, like this one, which are just fine. I kind of wish some of the special effects were better; occasionally movement onscreen is weirdly jerky. Other times, the picture rendered onscreen is stunning. Rotta the Hut is pretty standard-looking as CGI characters go, which qualifies as a disappointment: Star Wars is supposed to stand apart in these areas. If it’s not exceptional with its visual effects, how can it be exceptional at all?

Thankfully, none of these things drag the movie down to any fatal measure. The truth is, in spite of its clear flaws, I genuinely had a blast watching this movie. I got a good many laughs out of it, and I can easily imagine enjoying subsequent viewings. It doesn’t feature a story with enough depth to make it a new classic, but it holds its own among the other decent offerings in the franchise.

This far into a franchise’s history, this movie gives us just enough of exactly what we want.

Overall: B

PROJECT HAIL MARY

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

If you’re looking for an incredibly charming and entertaining science fiction flick, for the next several weeks your go-to choice will be Project Hail Mary, easily the best film of 2026 so far. This one ticks an incredible amount of boxes, and will work for people looking for different things. It’s going to be a kick for science nerds, assuming they don’t get too picky about accuracy—and, being a layman myself, it all seems perfectly plausible to me. Many people loved The Martian, the last film based on a best-selling Andy Weir novel, precisely because of how (mostly) scientifically accurate it was. There is no reason not to expect the same here.

It seems worth noting that I am in a somewhat peculiar position of perspective in the case of Project Hail Mary, given that I quite recently read the novel on which it’s based. I have said over and over that films should be judged on their own merits, but I possibly made a mistake by making that impossible for myself in this case. I read the novel too recently and cannot separate the two experiences, most notably in that this film, as directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and especially as adapted by writer Drew Goddard (who also adapted The Martian), is a great achievement in adaptation. But how do I know I only feel this way because I have read the novel? Would this film have been as easy to follow had I not read the novel? I’m honestly not certain—especially given that the film, even at 156 minutes in length, really felt to me like it rushed through a whole lot of the story.

Because a lot happens in this story: Ryland Grace (a perfectly cast Ryan Gosling), a middle school science teacher, through a whole lot of happenstance winds up as the Science Officer on the interstellar ship The Hail Mary, sent to investigate the one sun that has not been infected by a cellular alien life form, thereby dimming its power and thus threatening the life of the planet in its orbit that otherwise supports life—in the case of humanity: Earth. All the known suns within relative proximity have been infected, except this one that is roughly 12 light years away.

Grace is part of a three-person crew sent to study this sun and see if they can figure out why it is not infected and use that information to save Earth. He wakes up from an induced coma to find his two crew mades have died, but he doesn’t remember why he’s on this ship or how he got there. His process of figuring this out lasts through several chapters in the novel, complete with flashbacks serving as memories sporadically coming back to him; in the film, this happens over just the first few scenes.

And given that Grace wakes up alone on the Hail Mary, there are not a lot of characters in Project Hail Mary. The film does have 31 credited actors, but for a huge amount of screen time, Grace is the only character seen onscreen: Gosling truly carries this film, largely on the strength of his uniquely quirky charms, mixed with his improbable good looks. Cumulatively speaking, maybe half the run time, if not more, Gosling is the only human character we see. Through maybe the second half of the film, he is one of two characters, the other being “Rocky.” If you have read the novel you know exactly who that is; if you have seen the trailer you can easily guess who that is. This whole thing would be way more fun if you just watched the movie not knowing who the hell Rocky is at all, but if that were the case, why would you even be reading this review?

Any other characters are seen in flashback, which are Grace’s memories resurfacing as part of the plot mechanics of the novel, but function more as straightforward flashbacks in the film, providing us with backstory. Sandra Hüller is also very well cast as Eva Stratt, the largely humorless but compassionate leader of the international task force created to solve Earth’s problem. Grace also enlists the aid of a security guard named Carl (Lionel Boyce) as he runs his experiments and somehow learns about “astrophage,” the star-eating cells causing the cooling and potential environmental collapse of the Earth, faster than anyone else around the globe.

So we jump back and forth between Grace getting his bearings and slowly coming out of amnesia on the Hail Mary, and the flashbacks; this is mostly how roughly the first act of the film goes. In the next act, Grace learns he is not alone, and in the final act, Grace and Rocky do a lot of collaborative problem solving. This is specifically what characterizes the vast majority of the novel: a lot of science and problem solving. Weir had also provided a ton of fascinating detail about how evolution might have worked on another planet with a totally different atmosphere, and none of this gets covered in the film—we just see the result of this evolution onscreen, and therefore really never think about it in those terms. It’s too bad, because it’s pretty enlightening stuff, and gives the film adaptation less depth than its source material. But what can you do? The plot turns in the film are astonishingly close to those of the novel, and that alone pushed the run time past two and a half hours—all of it completely absorbing and entertaining.

It’s worth noting how stunning Project Hail Mary is to look at. This is a film with a ton of visual effects, almost none of it used to showboat; it’s all integrated well and serves the story. I’m tempted to say some of the exterior shots above an alien planet during Grace’s space walks are a little too vivid, like the cinematographer got a little slaphappy with the color filters, but what do I know? I’ve never done a space walk outside a spacecraft above an alien planet.

Where Project Hail Mary strikes a perfect balance is between the science fiction leaning heavily on plausible science, and a deeply affecting story about friendship. Readers of the book adore Rocky as a character, and there’s no reason not to expect the same of viewers of the film. This is a film that would be very deserving of Oscar nominations in many of the technical categories, including Production Design, Sound, and especially Visual Effects. I don’t often pay that much attention to Original Score but Daniel Pemberton’s original score here is also wonderful.

Honestly I struggle to come up with much in the way of criticism of this movie. I suppose one thing I noticed was the implausibly wide array of changes of clothes Grace seems to have on this ship, which feel only designed to add to his personality (and Gosling has that in spades already). But this doesn’t seem worth nitpicking about; it’s a detail that will hardly get noticed by most viewers and is just part of the visual medium that is movie making. Project Hail Mary is fascinating, suspenseful, and at times even moving—everything a movie like this is meant to be. The people who made this movie understood the assignment and knocked it out of the park.

It’s everything you want and more.

Overall: A-

THE BRIDE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B-

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+

ARCO

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

I think I have finally pinpointed the primary reason I don’t care for anime. It’s the frame rate—or at least, the frame rate of moving objects. I prefer animation that looks more fluid, with a frame right high enough not to detect each individual frame with the naked eye. To be fair, anime covers a diverse array of visual styles, and some of it likely has higher frame rates; conversely, there are plenty of other animation styles that use lower frame rates. I don’t tend to care for those either. The key difference with a whole lot of anime is how it combines this style with stories that are either bonkers-weird or so culturally specific that I have no hope of understanding what’s going on.

You may be wondering why the hell I’m leading a review of a French animated feature that is definitively not anime with a paragraph about anime. Well, again: it’s the frame rate. We see our protagonist, the title character, picking fruit from a tree, and we see his arm in four positions as it raises up to the brand. Immediately I am thinking about how this was animated, rather than what the character is doing at this point in the story. I always find it a distraction.

At least this story is easy for me to follow. The closest this gets to bumping on cultural specificity is in the choice to release this film theatrically in the United States with American voice performances replacing the original French ones. This is the story of a preteen boy (Arco, voiced by Juliano Krue Valdi) who travels back in time from the year 2932 to 2075, and a trio of grown-men conspiracy theorists are sure they’ve discovered an alien in him, or some other equally mysterious entity, because of having seen a similar sight to Arco’s manner of arrival (with a streaking rainbow tail across the sky) twenty years earlier. In the American theatrical release, these men are voiced by Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea. They have several lines that just come across as somewhere on the line between odd and stilted. It was the thing that most made me wish I could have just watched Arco in the original French with subtitles. There’s a sense that there’s some level of nuance lost in translation.

And they got some pretty big names for the America voice actors. In the year 2075, Arco meets a preteen girl named Iris, voiced by Romy Fay, who is fairly unknown—but, her parents, only ever seen in hologram form because they are stuck at their jobs in the city, are voiced by Mark Ruffalo, and Natalie Portman (who also co-produced the film). Arco’s mother is voiced by America Ferrera. Another major character is Iris’s live-in nanny robot, Mikki, whose voice is a blend of Ruffalo and Portman.

The distracting frame rate aside, the animation is drawn beautifully. When we meet Arco, we are in 2932, and he is jealous of his sister who is of age and thus can legally time-travel with their parents. It seems they travel back in time to bring back specimens of fauna they mean to replicate. They wear hoods that have a diamond embedded in the forehead as a tool for time travel, and rainbow colored hoods. This makes them look a little like futuristic clowns. Maybe it’s a French thing. In any case, they live on platforms that sit on the ends of giant white stilts somewhat like trees, among the clouds. Arco sneaks out in the middle of the night, snatches his sister’s clown outfit, and leaps off the edge of his family’s platform—you’d think they would have protective railings in the future but whatever. The momentum of falling is what triggers the time travel.

Arco wants nothing more than to travel back in time and see dinosaurs in person. I get it, that would be pretty awesome. But he makes a mistake and winds up in 2075, when houses are protected by automated glass domes from everything from gale force rainstorms to giant wildfires. Unlike in the distant future, the people of 2075 are integrated into a society with countless sorts of humanoid robots: the nannies are robots; all the teachers at school are robots; the police are robots; robots swarm to streets to work on repairs on damage from storms. I found myself amused by a pair of “insurance bots” that show up at Iris’s door with a very blue collar demeanor, and one of of them looks down at a tablet. Wouldn’t the robot already have the information from the tablet already stored in its memory? Younger audiences, of course, would not think to nitpick about this. Whew, good thing I’m here!

In any event, everywhere and any time between 2932 and 2075, every frame of Arco is beautiful to look at. Maybe that’s part of the point of the lower frame rate: it’s easier to soak in each frame. I still find it distracting. Lower frame rates are often a sort of cheat to save on production costs, and I can respect that. It doesn’t mean I have to have a preference for it.

Time travel stories are always tricky, and I am impressed when writers (in this case, Ugo Bienvenu, who also directed, and Félix de Givry) find a clever way to close the inevitable loop created by it. Arco does a pretty good job of it, both in terms of Iris’s attempts at helping Arco find his way back home, and of where Iris’s life leads after meeting him and how that influences the future. Having such a direct influence on how humanity lives 857 years later seems like a stretch, but I guess I’ll allow it.

It’s a fun premise, a fun story, and a compelling way to look at where society might be in 50 years versus centuries after that. Arco is the kind of movie that works very well as both surface entertainment and a treasure trove of themes when you dig deeper. I have mixed feelings about the three men who are chasing after the kids, who are quite easy to suspect as villains at first and then turn out to be something else. I can’t quite decide of that something else quite works, but if nothing else, even with the stilted dialog as performed in English, they are entertaining. Such is the case with Arco overall.

I guess that’s one way to look ahead.

Overall: B+

AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH

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

I think James Cameron wants the Avatar films to be the 21st-century equivalent of the Star Wars films—a modern mythology, with the same cultural impact as well as staying power. (Some might argue that Marvel already achieved this, but their moves are not going to have the same staying power.) Cameron is such a directorial megalomaniac, he’s probably convinced these films already have that status. He would be wrong.

To be fair. it had long been widely understood that it is a mistake to underestimate James Cameron. But these movies can only run on their own steam for so long. Avatar was a monumental technical achievement in 2009, and was worthy of its Best Picture nomination (although it would have been a crime had it won). The same could be said, actually, of Avatar: The Way of Water, the sequel Cameron took 13 years to make because he was waiting for technology to advance enough so it could achieve his aims. And it’s worth repeating that The Way of Water was so stunning on a visual level, it arguably moved visual effects forward for the entire industry in a way no other film has since Jurassic Park.

So here is where we run into Avatar: Fire and Ash, only three years after the last one—usually a pretty standard duration between films and their sequels, but we all know the Avatar franchise is a different beast altogether. And the criticisms of this film as being entertaining but repetitive are fundamentally valid. With one notable exception, the characters are all the same as they were in the last film, and the things that happen onscreen offer us very little that’s new. Okay, there are some very cool new Panodorian creatures, including giant floating beasts that pull ships for travel, and vicious squid-like creatures that live in the oceans.

None of them feature as actual characters, though. The only beasts who do are the Tulkun, the highly intelligent whale-like creatures that featured prominently in The Way of Water, and do again here. And so does Quaritch (Stephen Long). And so does Captain Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell), who—spoiler alert!—did not die in The Way of Water after all. I walked out of this movie saying that if this series has taught us anything, it’s that any onscreen “death” cannot be trusted. More than one character in Fire and Ash meets an end that is one way or another is left ambiguous. But even if it were unambiguous, would it matter? This is a world in which “sky people” (humans from Earth) can be transformed into Na’vi and there can be an Avatar-maculate conception, after all.

Side note on the Tulkun whales: who the hell does their piercings and tattoos, anyway?

All of this is to say: if you’re looking for a 2025 blockbuster with endless opportunity for nitpicking, I present to you Avatar: Fire and Ash. I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but it’s worth mentioning that this has a franchise-record runtime of three hours and 17 minutes (exceeding The Way of Water by five minutes), and it is far less successful than its predecessor at justifying its own length. The Way of Water is easily broken up into three parts, the middle of which is world-building that easily wowed audiences; the last of which is a truly thrilling succession of action sequences. Fire and Ash attempts to building on that foundation, but does far less world-building, overindulges on action sequences, and at the sacrifice of character development.

To be fair, I was still perfectly happy to have gone to see this movie, as many of its action sequences are indeed thrilling. The visual effects are nearly as stunning as they were in the previous film; the inevitable downside to this coming out only three years later is that it’s unable to offer us anything truly novel on that front. The visual effects are the reason to see any of these movies, though, and they are what sets these films apart from others that use 3D as a cheap trick. Cameron knows how to make 3D worth the effort, and this is an extremely rare case in which I was also thrilled to see it in that format. That said, while the creature and Na’vi designs are exceptional, there are still moments when characters leap long distances and don’t quite move the way they should. It’s very subtle, but still gives them a hint of looking like video game characters rather than a believable character in a richly built universe.

In addition to Quaritch, who is really growing stale as an antagonist in all three of these movies, Fire and Ash does give us one new major villain: Varang (Oona Chaplin), leader of the Ash People, a clan of Na’vi whose forests have been decimated by a nearby volcano. This is a compelling addition to this world, especially the idea of warring clans on Pandora whose beefs actually have nothing to do with the Sky People. Except the Ash People’s motives, and especially Varang’s, are never clearly defined, and as a people they are given far less nuance than the Na’vi. At least we can understand the Na’vi as a narrative example of cultural appropriation. The Ash People are just angry and sadistic, and read a little too much like so-called “savages” of the Old West who are thought to commit unspeakable horrors against outsiders for no discernible reason.

I wish Varang had more depth as a character, and certainly more autonomy. Here she’s just hungry for the power of Sky People’s military guns, and that hunger is easily manipulated by Quaritch. Thank Eywa we have the likes of Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, a 76-year-old woman again doing motion-capture as a teenager) and Ronal (Kate Winslet) to serve as women characters who actually have some dimension. At least Fire and Ash passes the Bechdel Test.

Most of the time in Fire and Ash, though, there are just battles raging. One after the other, and this with multiple subplots that don’t all feel necessary. Maybe Cameron feels all of these narrative threads are vital for what’s to come in future sequels, but I’m not sure how much that matters. Kiri’s power to lock in with Eywa stayed mysterious through all of The Way of Water, and gets some further expansion and explanation here—some of which is legitimately dumb. I suppose that could be the tagline for Avatar as a franchise: “great action epics, some of which is legitimately dumb.”

Fire and Ash does bring Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) back around to his status as “Toruk Makto,” the legendary leader who unites the clans—his Leonopteryx, the giant bird-like creature he rides, is a loyal friend who is to a degree a creature-character in these films, as are, to a lesser degree, the banshees ridden by all the other Na’vi. None of this changes the problematic trope this title represents. When we hear the line, “Toruk Makto is coming!”—what I heard was: “White Savior is coming!” (Just because Jake was transformed into a blue-skinned human/Na’vi hybrid does not change what he represents in the narrative.)

And yet. And yet! This is how it is with all Avatar movies: they are riddled with flaws, particularly in the writing but also increasingly in the plotting and even the editing—but the things that are actually great about them make the flaws easier to overlook. Is that right? Perhaps not. Does James Cameron even understand a nuanced discussion of these things? I have my doubts. Is the man still a master at delivering mesmerizing entertainment? Absolutely. There is no question that I was on the edge of my seat and dazzled by Fire and Ash a whole lot of the time. I can’t say I was ever bored, in spite of the bloated runtime. What still defines this film more than anything, however, is this franchise’s diminishing returns. We can only hope that Avatar 4 will offer us something genuinely new, but being the fourth film in a series makes that a pretty tall order. It may be that we underestimate James Cameron at our own peril, but it’s starting to feel like he’s getting tired.

Overall: B

THE RUNNING MAN

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

Edgar Wright has directed and co-written so many delightful movies—Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)—it’s easy to expect, or at least hope, that a new one will at least be really fun. Baby Driver (2017) was fun but did not quite reach the heights of his earlier work; and Last Night in Soho (2021) was . . . fine. You can perhaps detect a shift here, and I suppose every good director, if prolific enough, will inevitably product an outright dud.

Enter The Running Man, an exercise in squandered potential if ever there was one. Wright also has a co-writing credit here, alongside Michael Bacall, who previously collaborated with Wright on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—a movie which, by the way, holds up surprisingly well. So what the hell happened? This The Running Man, the second adaptation of the Stephen King novel by the same name (the first having starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, in 1987), is badly written, phoned in by the actors, looks ugly, and is overlong. What person in their right mind thinks 133 minutes is a reasonable runtime for a movie like this? I saw that runtime before seeing the movie and immediately knew it didn’t bode well. A perfect runtime for a movie like this is, say, an hour and 45 minutes. (The 1987 film was an hour and 41.)

I never expected greatness from this movie, but I thought it would at least be dumb fun. It was dumb all right, though in a particularly unexpected way: this movie thinks it’s way smarter than it actually is. This is a dystopian future in which the divide between wealthy and poor is massive; “megacorps” own everything including government and law enforcement; and mass entertainment caters to the lowest denominators of profanity and dehumanizing violence—all the same beats we have seen time and time again in dystopian movies. The Running Man goes further with characters regularly ranting about the state of inequality, in ways that thoroughly ignore subtlety and never sound like anything but platitudes.

All of this shit is going in one ear and out the other of anyone watching, who are just there for escapist entertainment in an American cultural hellscape. The very existence of this film is the product of what it’s pretending to be preaching against. It’s worth noting that the one thing this movie does that we haven’t seen much of before is use AI as a plot point, with The Running Man’s gameshow manufacturing footage that isn’t real in an effort to keep the audience against the contestant—except it’s never addressed as “AI” and only ever declared “not real” in ways, again, we’ve already heard a thousand times. The only thing that could make this entire production—with a budget of $110 million—more perfectly cynical would be to learn that AI was actually used in the making of it.

I do try to find redeeming qualities, and I found a couple, though they hardly make up for what makes this movie suck. The cinematography isn’t bad, but that doesn’t mean much when the production design is so dingy and drab. Ben Richards (Glen Powell) spends a lot of time running around cities with crumbling infrastructure and complacent bureaucracy. The special effects aren’t terrible, but none of what’s decently rendered looks very good. There is evident skill but a fundamental lack of imagination. Even when we first meet Ben and his wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson, given a truly nothing part to work with), we learn of their desperation to find medication for their young child with the flu. This is set in their tiny closet of a home surrounded by concrete walls, and the entire sequence is a deeply clunky exposition dump through their dialogue. This, along with Ben pleading with his shitty boss to get his job back, is how the film opens.

The Running Man reveals itself to be in trouble as soon as characters open their mouths. Glen Powell must be noted here, as deeply miscast in the role of a deeply disenfranchised, constantly furious man. After many roles as a romantic charmer of a leading man, I suppose it’s understandable that he’d want to be cast against type, except that he works well in those other roles and just isn’t believable here. He doesn’t feel genuine.

Naturally, as Ben spends a lot of time on the run, he crosses paths with an ensemble cast of supporting characters, including Scott Pilgrim star Michael Cera, here a surprisingly credible underground revolutionary who offers Ben aid. He’s booby trapped his large house so he can have fun with the “goons” (what everyone calls the police in this film, right down to the brief sighting of graffiti that reads AGAB) once they inevitably catch up with them. This is one of the more engaging action set pieces in the film, but for the fact that it comes along way too late and has no critical need to be included in the plot whatsoever.

The first helper Ben comes to is his old friend Molie, played by the always dependable William H. Macy, who is given far too little screen time—he’s in maybe two scenes. Sean Hayes makes a single appearance as the host of another dehumanizing gameshow called Speed the Wheel, in which we see an overweight man literally run to death on a human-sized hamster wheel. Lee Pace plays the leading “Hunter” among those professionally hired to chase down The Running Man. Pace spends most of the movie with a mask over his face, and it’s eventually taken off like a big reveal, only to show a guy whose biggest part to date has been as Brother Day on the Apple TV series Foundation.

The Running Man is just a series of misguided choices at every turn. Very late in the film, Ben takes a woman hostage played by Emilia Jones, who was previously seen as the hearing daughter of deaf parents in the 2021 Best Picture winning CODA, and much more recently as Maeve, the antagoinist’s niece in the HBO limited series Task. This resume reveals a very talented young actor who can disappear into different parts, but the only explanation I can come up with this one was that she wanted to be part of an action blockbuster.

I think I can say with confidence that The Running Man is not fated to be a blockbuster, especially once regular audiences start to see it, and do not rave about it. The closest thing to a saving grace this movie has is several fairly exciting action set pieces; once the clunky exposition was out of the way and Ben was on the run, I found myself more engaged, and thought maybe that would turn me around on the thud of a note the movie starts on. This sensation was short lived, as the writing is so inexcusably rote. Characters don’t make logical choices, but rather make dumb moves transparently designed to keep the action going. This gets ratcheted up to such ridiculousness that there’s even a gun battle in an airplane cockpit.

And all this time The Running Man is presented as though it’s confidently entertaining us, while also being thematically provocative. It definitively fails on both those fronts, ultimately serving up only rehashed ideas and recycled platitudes.

Is he angry or confused? After seeing this movie, you’ll be both!

Overall: C