The Sheep Detectives (2026)

Score: 5 / 5

One of the most charming films in recent memory, The Sheep Detectives manages to also successfully entertain on all levels while doling out healthy doses of philosophy with its comedy, wit, and of course the gnarly whodunnit of it all. It's a perfect blend of innocent childhood fantasy in the vein of Charlotte's Web or Paddington, effortlessly charming cozy British murder mystery, and a shockingly funny ensemble piece with likable talent clearly having fun with the brilliant screenplay. The mystery itself cleverly weaves its way through the wide cast, allowing every character their moment to shine while keeping us guessing at every turn. 

We first meet George (Hugh Jackman), a shepherd who lives in his mobile home parked in the middle of an idyllic English countryside, surrounded by his flock. He's the kind of guy who seems to live simply but builds incredible depth in each moment, carefully naming his sheep and caring for them in an edenic routine that had me thinking fondly of James Rebanks's memoir The Shepherd's Life. After his work of feeding, shearing, and healing his sheep ends for the day, he reads aloud to them from mystery books, his favorite. One morning, however, George is revealed to be dead, and the evidence points to murder.

And it's the sheep that drive the investigation.

Little did George know that his sheep actually were paying attention to his stories, and spend much of each evening debating, well, whodunnit in the "nighttime stories," as they call them. Their understanding of fiction is a bit confused, but so is their understanding of pretty much anything. Their herd mentality -- often frustrating for the slightly more intelligent among them -- often leads them to collectively forget recent memory, including sad or scary incidents. Thankfully, the wisest of them (herd leader Sebastian, voiced by Bryan Cranston, and smartest sheep Lily, voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) convince them all not to forget, aided by Mopple (Chris O'Dowd), a ram who cannot forget anything. Thus, the sheep band together (including the voice talents of Patrick Stewart, Regina Hall, Bella Ramsey, Rhys Darby, and Brett Goldstein) to solve the murder of their shepherd, learning some important lessons along the way.

And that's perhaps the most unexpected joy of this film. Movies centered on talking animals don't always work for me, but this one does. In part, its success stems from some truly eye-popping CGI, which feels weighted and heavy and tactile; this is magnificent animation, full stop. But it also stems from the film's intangibles. Themes of belonging, belief, bravery, perseverance, critical thinking, grief, community, and acceptance all hit home by film's end, and I wept openly in the cinema several times. Heck, I've wept the two times I've seen it at home, too. But this is no sob story; indeed, the heartwarming tearjerker moments (not unlike The Wild Robot, tonally) and more thrilling sequences (a nighttime scare in a neighboring field might prove too intense for the youngest viewers) work best because of the film's sophisticated and often witty humor, including moments as diverse as the sheep commenting on God and religion and the sheep wandering into a rival shepherd's slaughterhouse as they consider their own mortality. It turns out that sheep don't turn into clouds as they believe.

The film also features human characters, of course, and while few are as well-rounded as I'd have preferred, the actors add layers to their performances that make them work really well. Nicholas Braun as the sole local police officer brings a gangly awkward earnestness while functionally leading the human cast of the film; he's aided by a deliciously arch Emma Thompson as George's lawyer, Hong Chau as the innkeeper and George's sometime lover, Tosin Cole as a neighbor shepherd seeking to profit off George's assets, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as the town priest, Nicholas Galitzine as a disgruntled journalist eager for a good story, and Molly Gordon as George's estranged daughter, brought to town for his will reading. 

Apart from a few perhaps understandable curiosities that gave me pause (like references to lawyers instead of solicitors, dollars instead of pounds, miles instead of... well, you get the idea) the film is nearly perfect and is easily already a favorite of mine for this year. It trusts its audience to keep up -- even younger audiences -- and rewards attention to detail, both for those interested in its solvable but twisty mystery and for those interested in its endlessly cute interplay between species and personalities in a small town. The film offers the unusual moral of learning to accept and handle painful memories and heavy feelings in order to be fully alive and in community with others, a touching lesson packaged in nuanced beauty and joy that feels keenly targeted at 2026 Americans and our obsession with dissociating online (rather like sheep, in a way) rather than with minding our flocks and touching grass, ironically enough.

Apex (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

One of the more efficient thrillers in recent memory, Apex, released on Netflix this spring, should have been released in cinemas. Its survival thriller story shifts from something like Fall to The River Wild, doing it with the state-of-the-art filmmaking of Baltasar Kormákur (Everest, Beast), who opens the film with a hell of a nasty shock, even on a living room screen. We're introduced to a couple of climbers asleep in their tent; obviously partners in both outdoor exploring and love, I felt my stomach turn as they poke their heads out of their tent to open void. They've inexplicably mounted their tent at a hard right angle to the sheer cliff and there is nothing beneath them but wind. 

It helps, in a film like this, to offer vistas that make the audience feel involved in the scene. Cinematographer Lawrence Sher (of many comedies, but also Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Joker, Joker: Folie a Deux, Black Adam, and The Bride!) lenses the adventure here with a constantly moving camera, sweeping around the action with vertigo-inducing fluidity. While the boundaries of practical sets, locations, and digitally stitched-together backgrounds are sometimes a bit obvious, for the most part the film centers not on landscape vistas but on the characters laboring their way through them.

Or, rather, character. After tragedy befalls the couple -- Eric Bana, bless him, is barely in the film -- in a distinctly upsetting inciting incident, Charlize Theron is left to grieve and to stop mountain-climbing. Five months later, apparently healing enough to want to be out in nature again, she takes a trip through an Australian national park to travel down a river in peace and put her hubby's ashes to rest. In true Deliverance fashion, she runs afoul of some local jerks, slimy men who leer at her and follow and terrorize her as she sleeps in her vehicle one night. But one guy (Taron Egerton) is nice and suggests the area's "best-kept secret" location so she might avoid unwanted attention.

Spoilers incoming, because to even summarize this film is to spoil its plot, any element of which will come as a surprise only if you've never seen a survival thriller. Just when you think she's safe, things go awry, and of course Egerton's character is the most dangerous predator in the Outback. Anyone who likes killer animal movies won't get our kicks in a flick like this (we get one moment with a snake, but that's about it for wildlife), but Egerton and Theron are so physical in this film -- along with a nasty little surprise feature to Egerton's character that had me writhing in my seat -- that it forces us to consider the boundaries between human and animal in nature. Egerton (forgive me for not remembering or caring about their character names; they don't matter) in particular is terrifying as his cat-and-mouse game begins in earnest, and his refreshingly straightforward launch of the hunt for his most dangerous game transitions us with compelling economy into the main thrust of the film.

Their performances are exhausting to experience; Egerton for his chillingly unhinged brutality and Theron for appearing so natural while clinging to rock faces and plummeting over waterfalls. The landscape frequently mirrors the characters' internal journeys, with thanks to writer Jeremy Robbins's efficient and smart screenplay, who by film's end sets up some brilliant reversals of fortune that keep us comfortably on edge. I say comfort, but it doesn't take long for these characters to get seriously injured, and my stomach didn't always care for the broken skin and bones bloodily highlighted on screen. I didn't even care for much of the rock climbing, because it seems impossible for that activity to work well for anyone, at least as dramatized here. But even for a film whose characters are thin and flat at best -- the better to focus on the chase, my dear -- these actors bring nuance and surprising emotion to their roles, elevating the already solid material to a level that really should be seen by more people and on much larger screens.

Hungry (2026)

Score: 2.5 / 5

Anyone interested in movies where man-eating animals stalk, terrorize, and eliminate a group of isolated humans will enjoy Hungry. It's basically Rogue (2007), but with a different monster. No matter your preference in terms of storytelling, screenplay, acting, effects, or any other element of film studies, this one has the distinction of being the first film to tackle hippopotamuses as man's better in nature. Of course the beasties are deadly in real life, and we often have to be reminded of that fact when we see the plump cuties with flapping ears and round cheeks bobbing along a muddy river. A character even says that in this film! But this is a far cry from the "Hungry Hungry Hippos" suggested by the title, and the film's potentially dark sense of humor stops at the title. Yes, even in the bleakly funny moments like when a character intones, "The only cute hippo is a dead hippo."

I expected something along the lines of the Anaconda reboot in tone, with knowing humor poking fun at exactly how dangerous hippos are and even with America's unique relationship with them. The killer (actually, it seems, killers, as it's never clear in this film exactly how many hippos are on their homicidal rampage) is tied, through dialogue later in the film, to a 1910 real-life historical project to import hippos into rural America, combating both inflated beef prices and slowing the problematic encroachment of an invasive choking weed in southern rivers. It never happened, but this film suggests that it did, in part, even if only as a test run. It's exactly -- and I mean exactly -- the kind of brilliant exposition that films like this need. Pull something weird from history and run with it. Look at Cocaine Bear as a prime example, which wildly fictionalized the real story but taught us all about the bizarre incident as a result! 

The film perhaps suffers in making the hippos -- or, again, at least the one with a vendetta against our boatload of tourists -- appear carnivorous. Though the humans fighting to survive against it mention repeatedly that hippos are herbivorous, the beasts more often than not bite and chew on their human victims rather than, I don't know, trampling and drowning and rolling over onto them. The point is made abundantly clear that hippos are territorial and especially violently protective of their young, but I found myself wondering (yet again, as I watch so many killer animal movies) the extent to which an animal, like a human, might be irrationally and uniquely insane, psychopathic, or otherwise exceptional in its murderous bloodthirst. Especially when their chomps are so spectacular and, well, gory. 

Unfortunately, the hippos are barely in this film. Of course Spielberg said, blah blah blah, keep the monster more secret to be more scary, blah blah blah. But when we don't even see a hippo for almost an hour of a 90-minute movie, it strains patience and interest alike. Too much of the film concerns its eight main human characters: a collection of idiosyncratic "every men," caricatures of people meant to let an audience partially relate (and mostly judge) before tossing them into a vicious little trap. This works if there is also genuine drama between the characters, or if it sets them up for profound growth. But here, they're just fodder for the monsters, and that is pretty obvious from their respective introductions. 

Thankfully, the filmmakers seem aware of this, because the characters also (SPOILER ALERT) nearly all die. Say what you want, but once bodies start dropping, they keep going. Fast. And bloody. I was shocked more than once at how quickly and unpredictably the characters were snatched off. It feels more random and more realistic than most films in any horror film, and I actually found myself respecting the film a lot more as a result of how it handled the senselessness of death. You're a jerk walking around in a full suit and heels? You're fine. You risk your life to help strangers have a slightly better chance? You're gonna get ripped to pieces before your own daughter's eyes. And when shit gets gnarly, more than often more than one character dies; I loved that, because that's far more realistic than usual films in this vein. When someone coming to save you dies, you'll probably also die. Obviously. 

The disaster's setup is also less contrived than in others of its ilk. This boat merely goes farther than usual to be sure and see a notably large gator with a GPS tracker; the rich lady paid extra for this excursion to cater to her son's request (or, perhaps, to impress her stepson, as we later learn in a rare moment of useful and dramatically crucial character confession). While none of the characters are solely good or bad, their dialogue does them no favors. Despite a few groan-inducing shifts in character alignment, for the most part, this film respects us enough to not hit us over the head with soapy nonsense; the drama here is largely intentionally relatable to a wide audience and the acting is mostly naturalistic enough to sell it. In fact, I'd say the acting generally elevates the mediocre written material to the point that I was genuinely touched several times during the screening only because of the acting; when the first victim is claimed by the hippo, our eventual final girl gapes on in a soundless scream that gradually rises in volume, which I found gutturally moving. Even when, later, the woman who has (by that point) lost both her father and son swims out into the swamp alone, seemingly pulling a Kate Chopin's Awakening moment while inexplicably mumbling the melody of the "Hush, Little Baby" lullaby, it's her performance far more than the shitty screenplay that make the moment memorable.

More importantly, the cinematography of this film is much better than I'd have expected, including some amazing shots of the Louisiana bayou and some clever perspectives on and around the boat. Just the opening scene features a glorious nighttime overhead of the bayou as we get closer to a gator closing in on its prey, snaking eerily through the water as its collar beeps with a blinking red light. I also really liked several small flourishes, in blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments, even when the tourists get to the dock near the beginning: the camera is (for no reason) mounted to the jeep window and as the guide opens it to get out, the camera swiftly detaches and tracks out. There's no reason for it, but I can't easily explain how the shot was even physically possible, yet here it is in an otherwise blasé scene for no reason. It's true there's a much funnier version of this film; there's also a much scarier version of this film. But for being a fun, violent, and disarmingly clever film in its own right, Hungry burned itself into my mind with some brilliant set pieces, economic filmmaking choices, and the sheer novelty of its delightful premise.

Sure, there's an annoying twist near the end that makes the monster sympathetic (?), not unlike the Cocaine Bear's den being the setting of the climax of that film. And not all the plot beats work; at one point, the final girl is tasked with going under the overturned boat to locate its GPS device and this involves a lengthy setup including getting a gasoline can and lighting a small perimeter of the water on fire to ensure (more or less) her safety, because as one character boldly claims, "everything is afraid of fire." Then, just as she succeeds, another character goes down to meet her, defeating the purpose of the entire setup. Yet despite such illogical missteps in the screenplay, director James Nunn and his team handle the material surprisingly well, finding thrills and unearthly beauty in the visuals of a swamp-fire and the warm glow in an otherwise dark and wet atmosphere. I should note that the film is never particularly dark, even when a character uses night-vision to help navigate; I'd have loved a darker production that leans into limited sensory detail. 

Case in point: check out the monologue delivered by the tour company's owner as some tourists wander through his museum and are flummoxed by his prized hippo skull: "That's the most dangerous animal they've got. Territorial, supremely aggressive, responsible for over 500 human deaths a year. Vegetarian, which means he ain't killing you to eat you. He's killing you for fun. [...] Young man, you think there's something funny about staring down the barrel of a three-and-a-half-ton beast with no natural predators? I've seen them taking down lions, crocs, cars -- ain't nothing they're scared of. And nothing they've got a conscience about, besides protecting the young. The mothers will die for their babies." Like Alan Grant scaring the kid by describing a velociraptor attack, this moment perfectly encapsulates the ridiculousness and abject horror of the story in a heavy-handed moment that makes the film as fabulous as its Grand Guignol roots. I guess part of what works so well about this film is its sheer novelty: we don't know the rules about killer hippos in movies yet. Er... we didn't. Now we do.

Disclosure Day (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

My favorite moments to experience Spielberg's genius are not necessarily his inventive, culture-shifting ones, but rather those quiet ones when he gently reminds us that he's one of the best filmmakers out there for a reason. The final scenes of this film did that for me.

Helped, I might add, by an amazing actor who commands our attention (and the world's) in the film's climax. I don't know who she is, but she crushes this moment to shine.

In a somewhat climactic opening moment, we're dropped in medias res as Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) attempts to hand over a bogus bag to agents of Wardex, a secretive corporation operating as a US government contractor. Its head, Noah (Colin Firth), will stop at nothing to reclaim, it seems, something Daniel stole from them during his employment. Their efforts now include kidnapping, evidenced by the presence of a cuffed Jane, Daniel's girlfriend (Eve Hewson), and masquerading as FBI agents. It's the sort of opening that thrills even as we're not quite sure what's happening. While we get some cues in their interactions, it takes a few scenes afterward to fully grasp the plot, which feels a risk in something marketed as a blockbuster, but a welcome one. Any film that resists constant rehashing of the plot like too much media these days is already a leg up in my book.

It's not until over half an hour in that the veil starts to lift and we learn -- along with Jane -- that the government has covered up Wardex's experimentations on aliens and their technology. It feels like a spiritual successor to The X-Files, and often visually recalls that sort of grimy bluish-green hue millennials might recall from '90s television viewings. Daniel is carrying, functionally, the truth that is out there: he's working with a team of Wardex defectors to whistleblow and leak videos of alien experimentations to the world. This plan, what they are calling an impending "Disclosure Day," will be the coordinated result of their team, led by Hugo (Colman Domingo), and they're just waiting for a sign. 

Speaking of which: Daniel and Jane's journey -- fleeing Wardex thugs and following unclear instincts and insights to random places -- is told parallel to Margaret Fairchild's journey. Margaret (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist sees a cardinal one day that seems to speak to her, unlocking a psychic ability for her to speak other languages like Russian and Korean without noticing it and understanding people's thoughts by looking them in the eyes. On air that day, she starts clicking and making meaningless sounds before fainting. Apparently only Daniel was able to understand her. Together, they must continue to evade Wardex and Noah -- the latter of whom uses an alien device to attempt mind control on others, specifically Jane -- as they make their way to find Hugo.

I'm still not sure I followed all the plot (it's not my strong suit), and another watch would behoove me. But this is the kind of film that rewards repeat viewings. Veteran writer David Koepp is firing on all cylinders here, piling on ideas and characters and references until it all feels perhaps too much; talk of religion, philosophy, civilization, individualism, and more make for a cerebral chase of it all. Because, narratively, it's just an extended series of chases between people running after their own MacGuffins. Yet even that isn't usual action or crime thriller fare: lensed by master of the craft Janusz Kaminski (and regular Spielberg collaborator), the story moves along as slickly as its camera, which is almost always in fluid motion, keeping us locked in even when things occasionally slow down.

This won't have the staying power of some of Spielberg's other alien- or monster-related films because its main characters are not "everymen," or at least not experts who rise to the occasion to help in a larger-than-life situation. The ultimate reveal of this plot is that Daniel and Margaret were quite literally chosen for this moment of cosmic revelation to humanity. We learn later in the film that they had both been abducted by aliens as children and apparently given their newfound psychic powers as almost biblical witnesses to the truth. Even when they seem a bit too unrealistic, O'Connor and Blunt clearly have fun enlivening their characters with quirks and a certain energy of constantly thinking, "what the heck is happening to me?" Blunt, especially, has to do a lot by merely gazing into someone else's eyes, and she does so with shades of empathy we rarely see on screen, all in lightning-fast shifts in microexpressions that left me often distracted, but blissfully so. She's a powerhouse.

I was also distracted, less blissfully, by the occasionally forced bits of action and spectacle in this film. As the aliens can apparently control and/or masquerade as animals, there are several animals that interact with the characters. All rendered in CGI, it just feels like a disappointingly cheap choice from a team of such craftsmen. The focus on cars feels catering at best, and not just in terms of product placement; though there is a particularly tense moment with some train tracks, it quickly devolves into a ridiculous drag-and-climb stunt piece that completely took me out of the movie. 

Other moments, however, brought me right back in. Revelations that Jane was a novitiate lead to conversations with her Mother Superior (Elizabeth Marvel) that give us really nice insight into the metaphysics of this world. What would we do, after all, with our churches, if we did discover another race of "supreme beings"? More importantly, the film's emotional climax comes when the two leads find Hugo, which basically uses immersive psychology and architecture to provoke Margaret to psychically respond. That feels especially authentic to Spielberg, especially considering that his last film, The Fabelmans, is all about film as a vehicle for nostalgia and, thus, healing. And the lead-up to this film's climax, which is its final scenes, had me squirming on the edge of my seat. I wept, and can't quite explain why. I gasped, but more out of my spirit than out of my nerves. I cheered (quietly) as our heroes race to make their announcement. And then the film ends with a single word that rings like a clarion call.

Some people will be annoyed at the lack of resolution in Disclosure Day, but those are plot people. I'm annoyed by the overabundance of unnecessary actions and spectacle in this film, and would have preferred less chasing and more talking and strategizing. It's a bleak film until the end, and then its hope is almost intoxicating.

Hokum (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

Damian McCarthy has carved out a nasty little niche for himself as a successful auteur, and Hokum is only the third feature-length example of his genius. The Irish filmmaker blew most of us out of the water with his mystery-thriller Caveat and the opening scene of his sophomore film Oddity still gives me nightmares. Combining a contemporary sense of horror timing with timeless Gothic premises, McCarthy's work insightfully scares us, building on a rich sense of place and utilizing an almost primal sense of justice (no religion, per se, not even pagan) to undergird his haunting traps.

And traps they are: each of his films features a single location that contains most of the film's plot, usually with some contrived means of isolating the character so they must battle both inner and outer horrors and, hopefully, emerge better. McCarthy is also a new champion of folk horror, pushing the genre in a direction ripe for theorization. In his stories, the real monsters are humans: corrupted by avarice and externalized insecurities, bad people cover up murder and sundry crimes that unearth or catalyze hauntings. When the troubled protagonist arrives, we're on a journey with him to separate the supernatural from the criminal and bring both justice and peace back to the setting. And, crucially, in McCarthy, the protagonist only makes it with some help from the reliably kind if strange locals. While I didn't care as much for Hokum as Oddity, it fits the bill and managed to scare, delight, and haunt me each of the now three times I've seen it.

So if all this sounds of interest to you, I beseech you to stop reading and watch the film. Part of its pleasure, as a bonafide mystery, is to unravel its plot points, characterizations, and thematic subtleties as you go. But, if you've already seen it or are find with spoilers, let's get into it.

Did I already say there's a contrived plot to get the protagonist to the haunting? Well, here it's even worse than in McCarthy's previous two films. An American writer struggling to finish the end of his trilogy, Ohm Bauman (a troubled and caustic author played by Adam Scott with remarkable sobriety and nuance) books a trip to rural Ireland to dispose of his parents' ashes. Apparently they honeymooned at this remote hotel, so he dumps their ashes at a redwood tree featured in a picture of his beloved mother (I should say that he unceremoniously dumps Dad's ashes, but Mom's are lovingly poured out along the roots). His mother's cause of death from many years prior will be revealed in the film's thematic slow burn, but his alcoholic and abusive father's past is mentioned more fleetingly. 

Other than thematically, the film is by no means a slow burn. Starting with an often humorous flavor, the film introduces us to the quirky people working at the hotel, including a surly groundskeeper slaughtering pesky goats, a creepy wheelchair-bound owner telling ghost stories, the performative and put-upon front desk clerk (and son-in-law of the owner), and the insightful bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh). We get a brief indication that there are local legends of a witch who kidnaps naughty children and leads them in chains through the underworld, but that's surely just a spooky Halloween tale. Indeed, Ohm has arrived on October 30, and a party is about to commence.

Ohm himself, however, is the real character of this film. Gruff and rude to the people around him, he is the kind of person who seems eager to make enemies at every turn. Whether it's the possibly predatory owner of the hotel or a rather pushy bellboy who wants Ohm to read his manuscript, Ohm reacts with funny yet disturbing cruelty to the staff. Actually, he's not a far cry from Stephen King autobiographical caricatures in his own books, like in The Shining or 1409, two stories that seem consciously referenced in Hokum. Curiously, the only person Ohm treats decently is Jerry, a local hermit living off the grid who he meets in the forest; Jerry, high on psychedelic mushrooms that allow him to experience the supernatural world (so he says), provides Ohm with some moonshine, and the two bond in what is easily the film's sweetest scene. It helps, too, that David Wilmot's performance as Jerry is a knockout jolt of energy that this film sorely needs.

Well, that, and the time jump. Ohm tries to kill himself on Halloween Eve and is found and rescued by Fiona and the bellboy. We leap ahead to apparently some days later when Ohm returns to the hotel to collect his belongings, discovering that the hotel is in the process of closing for the season. Fiona, it seems, has been missing since the party, and Jerry is the prime suspect. Confronting Jerry, Ohm learns of his suspicion that Fiona's corpse is still in the hotel (he saw her ghost, you see) and that someone who worked there is guilty of the cover-up. After the staff leave, they break in and locate the Honeymoon Suite, where the ghost directed Jerry to look: a boarded up suite under lock and key due to its status as supposedly haunted by the local witch.

When Jerry is dispatched temporarily by the groundskeeper, Ohm is left alone for the night to explore the hotel, and things get scary fast. The filmmakers highlight long, dusty hallways, hidden doors, disused accoutrements, and negative space with electrifying energy, drawing our eyes with insidious intent into shadowy corners and gaping, dark frames. Like the best of Chekhovian theatre or a cinematic chamber piece, each element of design will have some role to play in the subsequent cat-and-mouse series of encounters between human and inhuman threats, from the dumbwaiter and its time-sensitive mechanics certain to cause logistical problems to the bathtub filled with brown and chunky, unspeakably fetid water. Even elements outside the hotel itself have purpose, with interconnectedness in plot points and theme extending to the goats, the mushrooms, and even the conquistador that opens and closes the film (a character from Ohm's trilogy that offers perhaps too many psychoanalytic and symbolic insights into Ohm's character).

Even with Joseph Bishara's incredible score, this film never feels too big for it britches. We're meant to buy into its mythos and the possibilities of boundaries between reality and horror becoming blurred. We're meant to understand and honor the arcane, spiritual significance of solving a murder for the good of the community. And so, like fairytales and fables that teeter toward darker subject matter, this film guides us into Ohm's own darkness so that we experience a catharsis along with him. No jokes, no grotesque style, just an earnest ghost story that's deadly serious.

Primetime (2026)

Score: 5 / 5

Easily a favorite film of the year for me -- yes, already -- Primetime is exactly what I needed to see to start spooky season. A dark comedy masquerading as a thriller with elements of stark psychological horror baked in, this piece of drama preys off our cultural obsession with true crime while implicating us as users of similarly-acting social media. You want to see the ugliness of human society? Lean in, and help us shame those we collectively have decided are worth shaming.

No matter how you felt about it, To Catch a Predator took our country by storm in the mid-2000s. Essentially a vigilante documentary crew worked in tandem with actors and, eventually, law enforcement to lure pedophiles from online chatrooms to a sting house, where they'd be caught on camera in the act of preparing to have sex with a supposed minor. Enter Chris Hansen, the perhaps overly dramatic host, who leads the almost-criminal in a dance with hard-hitting questions about "what was about to happen here" and "what you would have done had I not intervened." Publicly shamed and often taken into custody for investigation and questioning afterward, the evildoers of society were being stopped before they could harm a child. Naturally, debates about entrapment and of course the show's salacious and graphic essence made it quite controversial, even to this day. But it's hard to think of the show itself as being bad when it was doing so much good. Right?

Primetime dramatizes the ethics of the show far more than it dramatizes any historical events. Written by Ajon Singh, the screenplay is foremost a dual character study of actors and what they're willing to do to make their craft more real. Is what's real for an actor their motivation or their affect? The preparation or the performance? And what are we to do with the icky feeling of making undesirable people (who are arguably also just victims of society using the internet to mitigate their problematic desires) victims in their own right? At one point, a rabbi is caught and accused by Hansen, and he asks the host, "By what right do you do this?" While the film's protagonist is, of course, Hansen, we're also pushed into the perspective of the lure: two young actors (played wonderfully by Skyler Gisondo and Phoebe Bridgers) are brought in as improviso performers and trained to look, dress, sound, and act enough like an underage kid that they can get the perp to enter the sting house long enough to be caught on camera. But nobody really prepares them for the psychological trauma you'd experience being face-to-face with a predator who wants you in those crucial, horrifying moments before the gig is up. 

Much will be made of Robert Pattinson's performance in this movie as Chris Hansen, but I wanted to talk about those actor characters first both because their performances are no less transformative and brilliant but also because I had never considered their perspective before, despite having watched the show and its reruns. Those "lures," the bait, figured so briefly in the show -- and, surrounded as they were by crew and producers, they were surely very safe -- that I have never imagined what was going through their heads. How much was an intentional craft? We see Gisondo practicing for seemingly days, adjusting his voice in a higher register and meticulously shaving, using techniques from acting school; when, after his first episode airs, he asks his best friend about his performance, his friend basically says he was unnoticeable. Nobody watching the show cares about the intended victim. And that hit me hard because, well, neither did I. I don't think most of us did.

It's a similar approach to pseudo-reality as dramatized in May December, and actually this film has a similar tone and style. While we might agree with certain motivations or be able to empathize with certain feelings, none of these characters are clear-cut good or bad guys. If anything, they're all pretty bad, either enacting some kind of evil or reacting to some kind of evil in a way that also taints them. There's a line in John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt (and its excellent film adaptation, spoken by Meryl Streep's character Sister Aloysius) that reads, "When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God, but in his service," and that feels relevant here. What would you do to stop a predator? Does he have to have committed a crime first? To what extent can you entrap someone intent on committing a crime? These are difficult questions to answer, especially when the moral center to your efforts is also one of livelihoods, earning money and recognition, and fame.

That's what's represented by the character of Hansen in this film. His sleazy, antiheroic presence drives the film as a vehicle for Pattinson's expertly calculated performance. Rising above the criticisms of his methods, Hansen and his equally ambitious producer Andie (a chillingly cynical Merritt Wever) push the show to be more hard-hitting and more spectacular, eager to succeed in their new spot in titular prime time, when most families in America are settling down to watch an episode of tv before bedtime. They're up against ABC's Lost, for cryin' out loud, as multiple characters parrot in excited and awed timbre. But, as we're treated to the "inside scoop" of several shoots, it becomes difficult to root for them -- despite their obviously good goals of stopping some of the worst (or potentially worst) people in society -- as we see their venal vendettas play out as ploys for ratings and studio privileges. Most of Pattinson's time on screen is of Hansen before a "performance," as he rehearses his idiosyncratic inflections and enunciative quirks, actively creating the character we all know in real life as Chris Hansen. 

Some will criticize this film for not being very realistic, of taking liberties with Hansen, maybe even of making him a bad guy (there is frank handling of his extramarital affairs in this film, though it never quite reaches fruition). But this isn't a biopic so much as it is a character study, and more of the persona and psychological profile of someone who might do what Hansen did. In Pattinson's work, Hansen becomes a vampiric firebrand, so sure that his work is righteous that he can take the time to develop himself personally and professionally, spending far too long rerecording the same voiceover narration for the show instead of researching a new case or moving on to the next sting. Rich cinematography by David Bolen (which deserves its own review... and awards) often captures close-ups on Hansen in the moments before he enters the room, a hungry gleam in his eye as he approaches the villain, eager to soak up his confusion, embarrassment, rage, indignation, self-pity, and remorse. Pattinson would give Bela Lugosi a run for his money.

The film does also bring up the obvious criticism that a show like this had the potential to drive someone -- who by any metric may not actually be a criminal and may be merely mentally disordered or ill -- to commit suicide, which of course did happen in 2006. That event signals the end of the film, leaving Hansen in a devastating (and devastated) awareness that his single-minded crusade had finally grown beyond his grasp and created deadly stakes with immediate effect. It's not dissimilar from Ahab's ill fate, and this climax comes on the telling verbalization that this particular sting was to catch "the whale," a codename indicating the biggest catch of the show's run, someone connected with upper government.

On top of all this high drama and thrilling, inspired-by-reality-you-remember resonance, the film also manages to tonally act not as hard-hitting investigative journalism nor as a historical treatise of entertainment but as a neo-Gothic opera. Thick stylizations in production design, lighting, sound and score, acting style, and of course cinematography make the viewing experience akin to Black Swan even as the plot, theme, and characters reminded me constantly of Nightcrawler. There's even a demonic figure who keeps appearing in Hansen's world, an apparent embodiment of ancient evil. The climax, during a violent thunderstorm, races to its bloody peak while ghostly memories flood Hansen's -- and our -- experience. 

And yet it's also chock-full of genuinely funny moments, from dry recitations of perverse transcripts of chats to unexpected and grotesque facial reactions and vocal tics from Pattinson. You might come to the film to get a glance behind the scenes into how To Catch a Predator moved to primetime (a la Saturday Night), but this isn't that. You might stay to enjoy Pattinson's masterful performance as a crazed, wicked man trying to merely be better than his targets. But I found boundless pleasure in its formal elements, too, and will be long haunted by its focus: not criminals, the law, or even really the entertainment, but on the human faces of vigilantism and the spiritual toll on actors doing something practical with their craft.

Digger (2026)

Score: 4.5 / 5

As he is wont to do, Alejandro G. Iñárritu graces us with an unexpected artistic tour de force this year, ushering us into awards season with panache. While the marketing for this film will have you believe it's a character study in an unconventional action flick to earn Tom Cruise accolades -- and don't misunderstand me, this performance will do just that -- this is no action movie. An icily incisive satire on capitalist governance and environmental culpability, Digger is a spiritual successor to Iñárritu's Birdman and something like a cross between a Wes Anderson comedy and a Yorgos Lanthimos film. 

Warning: it's not really possible to talk about this film without spoiling some aspect of it, so if you're worried about such things, stop reading now and go experience this amazing movie for yourself.

Digger Rockwell (the names in this screenplay are delightfully chosen) is a larger-than-life character played by Tom Cruise as a sort of Trumpian oil baron. His W. Bush-esque mannerisms allow him to act rather silly while being utterly captivating, a showman whose charisma and confidence bolstered by being the wealthiest man in any room allow him to act with impunity. We're introduced to him in his garishly opulent home, a mansion attended by servants, tending to his decrepit white cat (whose name, Maggie, and bejeweled costume invoke Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) who is clearly actively dying. Having fouled the bed she shares with Digger, she's then treated to a bath and more doting than a single living creature should ever have to endure. This opening scene feels perhaps more theatrical than it should, adding a heady mix of conversational drama to the otherwise borderline slapstick nature of its comedy.

Cruise disappears into the character, and for long stretches of the film I didn't think about his real-life persona at all. He's always been a gifted actor when allowed to do something like this -- I think of his performances in Lions for Lambs, for example, and of course Magnolia, among others -- but here he's mesmerizing. At once hilarious and disgusting, he injects moments of intimidation in interactions with other characters that make the deplorable character a bit scary. In many ways, the film is structured as a character study of him, and his arc is that of a tycoon meant to stop drilling for oil because of an impending crisis. It seems one of his rigs in the Arctic is expanding a crack in a glacier, causing an ice shelf five times the size of Washington, D.C., to crash into mainland Europe and cause catastrophic tsunamis. Millions of lives will be lost and -- more convincingly to the US cabinet -- trillions of dollars. 

In the film's second act (it's hard to know how to describe the distinct theatrical scenes in this film, as we will discuss presently), Digger is summoned to the White House, where he discusses the matter with officials. It's a room of self-serving white men (with an explicit nod to this within the dialogue) whose corrupt plans are less for the good of society than for their own benefit; instead of offering warnings to anyone, their first plan is to enact a firewall, allowing AI bots to censor and bury any keywords associated with the disaster online. The characters assembled -- including Riz Ahmed's mousy scientist and John Goodman's blowhard president with asshole cancer (literally) -- raise the energy of the film to an infectious fervor, more akin to a Coen brothers or McDonagh comedy than anything I expected here. And just when I thought things were heading in a clear and joyous direction, the film literally freezes and a tree that falls outside the White House window is revealed to be a miniature.

They're all on a stage, rehearsing a play; in the most jaw-dropping moment I've experienced in a film in years, the scene resets, with makeup artists hurrying on to touch up the actors, boom mics dropping into view, the scrim at back getting readjusted to better show the landscape projection of miniatures to create a lifelike backdrop. It's a Brechtian shift that I will not soon recover from. The director (Sophie Wilde of Talk to Me) enters to give notes to her stars during this, their final dress rehearsal. The play -- cleverly titled Fossil Fools -- is apparently a big-budget revival of the play on its 25th anniversary, meant as a satire on a real-life disaster that has since changed the world. Cruise, now revealed as actor Curtis playing Digger in the play, has a bizarre subplot of trying to locate his daughter flying on a plane through a hurricane, which indicates the real-life stakes of the "comedy" he's depicting on stage. How can we laugh at such existential horrors? Why are we simply making fun of the men responsible for the willful destruction of our world?

That largely seems the point of this film: how can and will art move forward and address things like the rise of fascism and late-stage capitalist corruption of Western society when (and if) we survive our current moment? The play is being produced by a mysterious young man (Jesse Plemons) who keeps floating around the stage and dressing rooms -- Digger's story is broken up by a few such interruptions of the "behind the scenes" resets that allow for jumps in time and location but not for any rest in the drama and comedy of this film -- eventually revealed as the real-life Digger Rockwell's nephew, who earnestly believes and expresses in his climactic speech to the cast and crew of Fossil Fools that people need a way to respond to tragedies and horrors of our past and that perhaps satire and theatre are a perfect means. It's a surprisingly uplifting moment (a la Charlie Kaufman in, for example, Synecdoche, New York) that inspires the production to push forward, even when (as the denouement reveals), the audience will need gas masks before they can go out onto the post-apocalyptic street after the bows.

This humanistic valorization of art is unexpected but sorely needed after the film's middle act -- its Shakespearean climax -- in which Digger addresses a sort of model Parliament/UN body of assembled heads of state. In a scene deserving of much screen time during awards ceremonies, Cruise as Curtis as Digger enters a room of powerful people knowing full well he is the most powerful among them. Fanned to an explosive fury by prior testimony about Digger's guilt and brazen disregard for the common good, they're prepared to effectively tar and feather him; their grayscale monochrome fury has the effect of seeming a Greek chorus. He's Mark Antony, about to paint himself as a hero and turn the crowd against Brutus again. He's Coriolanus, entering the court of public opinion and about to hand their asses to them on a spike. He delivers what must have been a ten-minute speech basically implicating the world (and us by extension) in his evil; we're too satisfied with living our unsustainable lives, he says, to do anything more than point fingers at him, the man actually doing something to make our lifestyle possible. It's damning, and truly hard to sit through.

And that's true for much of the film. I want to rewatch it with subtitles, because often the characters are shouting their lines over each other, desperate to be heard yet rarely with anything meaningful to say. These vapid, selfish monsters controlling our fate are ridiculous, and we are meant to laugh at their follies even as we recognize their clear parallels in our own world. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (a personal favorite) returns to work with Iñárritu with his typically brilliant work, shifting our focus from the gray malaise of the play-within-the-play to a marginally more colorful one in the theater, itself protected chromatically from the world beyond. Cosmo Sheldrake's score matches the timbre of the cast, often droning with deafening flourishes that feel operatic in small doses, like a sort of classical, sonic Tourette's. There's also a dose of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove here, both in comedic tone and meticulous approach to production design and uncanny surrealism. Digger won't be to everyone's taste, especially not those excited by the frankly misdirecting marketing, but if you're willing to get on its verbose and semi-surreal wavelength, it's a brilliant and haunting work of masterful filmmaking.

I dig it.

Verity (2026)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Synonymous with truth, verity dictates that I be honest about my feelings. I was crushed with disappointment by the time my screening of Verity ended last night. 

While Colleen Hoover has never held interest for me -- her novels, primarily immature romances, are not appealing, nor are the films based on them, despite starry casts -- I've been recommended her foray into mystery/thriller territory several times since its 2018 publication. So this past week, I tried reading it before this exciting new film released. Without meaning to yuck anyone's yum, it's simply not for me. Hoover's prose repeats itself ad nauseam, flirts with eroticism without actually containing any good sex, and rips shamelessly from better literature without twisting or adding anything of substance to the subgenera. In a rare move for me, I didn't even finish the book, and I'm better off for it. But I had hopes enough that the film would be diverting and entertaining, especially with its great cast.

Alas.

Paralyzed by a mysterious car accident, popular horror/thriller author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway, having an incredibly prolific year and clearly having a fun time with her insidious role in this film) is homebound at her remote, rural manse, cared for by a nursemaid and her attendant husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) and her sole surviving child, Crew. We learn that their other child, Crew's twin, had sometime previously been pulled from the lake behind their house, though the specifics are kept mum until much later. Her multi-million-dollar bibliography is unfinished, though, and her agent and fans alike are eager to capitalize on what's left of her creative power, though she's been rendered pathetically catatonic.

Enter Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson, in the wide-eyed ingenue with an axe to grind role she's mastered), a fairly average writer in a similar genre. She's our protagonist and entry point into the world of writing fiction: we meet her in a bookshop reading for her latest title, with all of five people in attendance, one quickly leaving when their phone interrupts the event. Walking somewhat dejectedly to a meeting with her agent, she is splattered in gore when a pedestrian is brutally slain by accident at an intersection. A perhaps too-nice man notices her shock and escorts her to a nearby bathroom to clean up, literally lending her the shirt off his back so she can make her meeting. Lo, and behold: he's Jeremy, the man who she and her agent indeed meet with shortly, and he wants her to finish his invalid wife's high-stakes series.

But the arrangement comes with strings, of course. He inexplicably won't gather Verity's notes and send them to the writer or an agent. Instead, he requires that Lowen come live with the Crawfords to go through the notes herself and, presumably, get a feel for Verity's life, style, and perspective. It's perhaps the first insult to the audience's sensibilities. Especially if you've seen any of the numerous attempts at re-dramatizing this basic yet oft-repeated plot, perhaps most recently in last year's The Housemaid, which I criticized some too in similar ways, yet ideas and images from which will remain in my mind for some time yet, to its credit.

Not only is it laughable that a man who seemingly has it all (and I found myself wondering what, exactly, it is he does for a living, since he's apparently the world's best dad and most attentive husband) can't make heads nor tails of some literary notes, but the whole premise is a blatant rip-off of other, more exciting stories in which a young female servant enters a domestic arrangement designed to undo her. Whether we're talking The Turn of the Screw or Jane Eyre, it's one of the oldest Gothic tropes in Western literature, complete with the incapacitated cuckquean wife trapped inside to witness (spoiler, I guess, if you've never read a novel) her abusive husband's latest conquest. Hell, this even steals from Rebecca, with Lowen regularly imagining Verity speaking to her in ghostly voiceover, narrating her stories and the secrets of her life in tandem.

By film's end, nothing comes of this genre-bound exercise. I counted no fewer than three revelatory twists -- Verity's memoir as fictional, Verity's faking of paralysis, and Jeremy's revenge -- all of which we see coming a mile off. Sure, I figured more than once that Jeremy himself had penned her dubious, casually confessional memoir (which Lowen discovers on a flash drive in a box of cigs and sets up a parallel plot in which Verity's romance and motherhood are dramatized), but the ridiculous idea that it was a psychological tool meant to help her fiction by getting into the mind of her signature protagonists (apparently exclusively homicidal femme fatales) is so outrageous, it feels almost intentionally harmful and targeted at art therapists. That she's faking it is hinted at multiple times, including early moments where Lowen sees Verity walking around the house, but that's she's apparently convinced everyone else (including a husband who literally tried to kill her and cover it up) for so long is impossible. At one point, I was sure the nurse had to be in on her performance, but nothing is made of that, and that character is utterly wasted. And by the time Jeremy fakes his own shock and surprise at learning of Verity's false written confession and suffocates his pleading wife, I was frankly embarrassed at having come to see this movie.

Instead of leaning into interesting conversations at such moments of heightened melodrama, the film suggests its ideas and then forces action to derail us. It's never clear exactly what Verity's plan was or why she wouldn't immediately try to get help out of her situation from the several people with private access to her.: the nurse, her son (though apparently he knows she's at least partly functional and they play together), Lowen herself, or even Verity's own agent, the moron who suggested she create a false autobiography in front of her husband. Johnson plays her well, but the character is unbearably fatuous to read (hence my DNF choice) and somehow the film pulls off the same effect, even without her actual narration. It's never clear what Lowen wants, either: she lounges around the house for days, helping herself to copious coffee and booze, creepily trying to get Crew to like her, spying on the resident invalid and her hunky husband, but the only work we actually see her doing is laying out a few dozen index cards (apparently Verity's notes on the series, so crisp, clean, and well-organized that a kid could have gone through it all faster) and lying down between them. She snoops and discovers Verity's memoir, it's true, but then she spends days reading it. I'm sorry, but this isn't just an interesting bit of free-time reading, girlfriend; it is literally your job right now to get inside the mind of the woman for whom you are ghostwriting. Make haste! And stop fretting that the husband isn't paying you more attention.

And don't even get me started on the ending, when, (again, spoiler, I guess?) Jeremy and Lowen, now pregnant, move out of Verity's house yet not before Lowen discovers a handwritten letter from Verity that is so nonsensical as to have completely taken me out of the viewing experience. Thus, Lowen knows she's doomed herself to Verity's own fate. But I already hated Lowen, so her fate felt grimly satisfying to me.

Which brings us to what might have been my final straw: the "erotic" romance of this just doesn't work, unless you accept that they're all just terrible people. Especially Lowen. Once she finally decides to try and prove her host is faking her condition, a memorable scene has Lowen use a thumb tack to viciously stab Verity, insulting her and gloating about how she's taking Jeremy right under Verity's baleful gaze. Lowen is a monster, a parasite eager to suck up the things Verity has earned but that Lowen has only ever wished for. Including her husband, who is painted in such broad strokes as to be more of a caricature than a character, and I mean that in the screenplay, not as Hartnett capably plays him (always with that earnest, golden retriever energy calculatedly disguising an edge). It was he, we learn, not Verity, who had read Lowen's one successful previous title; he, not Verity, who liked her voice. He who had read Verity's fictional tale of murdering their child and chose to stage her suicide rather than, I don't know, talk to her about it or report it to the authorities. So by the time he and Lowen consummate their smut-coded yet disappointingly flaccid chemistry, I was just annoyed at everyone's annoying habit of making the stupidest choice available to them in any given moment.

If you like a basic story and want pretty things to look at, you could do worse than turning this on while working on a puzzle. The actors are all wonderful and add surprising and satisfying layers to their respective characters, especially Hathaway giving camp, doing a sort of upper class matron with sultry inflection. Gorgeous production design in costumes and the house seem to vibrate in some scenes, captured by warm light and some nicely balanced cinematography. The film draws us into its visual pleasures in all the ways the screenplay doesn't, and while Verity is far tamer and more prudish in practice than the erotic thriller of the late '80s/'90s it desperately wants to be, I'd still call it a sensual thriller for its alluring tactility. Its themes of truth and lies, fiction and reality, and obsession and control should have offered fertile ground for inventive, transgressive storytelling, but instead the pleasures of this source material stop there, forcing the filmmakers to, thankfully, improve at least the viewing experience if nothing else. I just wish someone in the creative team also improved what doesn't work about the source material.

And that's the truth.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)

Score: 4.5 / 5

The Mandalorian and Grogu is a magnificent Star Wars film. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Sure, there are no lightsabers, no large battlefields, and no overt connection to any previous films in the franchise. Sure, it's arguably the culmination of the so-called Mandoverse of streaming series (can we even call it television?) thus far. And sure, we follow a character whose face is almost never seen and his puppet sidekick in an endless parade of abundant CGI settings. But it's also a highly entertaining adventure, rife with riotous comedy (something SW is at its best, though rarely emphasized in its films) and weird sci-fi-isms, and a completely standalone pleasure to behold. You don't really need to know much lore to love this movie, and that's a rare thing these days. So if you want to know what I think, know that I loved this film and have now seen it several times.

But now, we plunge into nerd-dom, and I make no apologies for it. Proceed at risk of your own coolness.

Opening with excellent text for exposition, the film has the thankless task -- like its non-"episode" predecessors -- of bringing that SW sensation right off the bat. And it does! Between Ludwig Goransson's iconic score, here reorchestrated in multiple ways to feature more subtle sounds and prove flexible in liberal application to the runtime, and and some eye-popping visuals in its opening scene, this film grabs your attention, then earns it, then forces you to respect it. All before the title card and opening credits (yes, sadly, we do get opening credits here, for the first time in a SW film). While I wanted more context and story about the imperial remnant, it just wouldn't have been appropriate to introduce them in an otherwise independent film like this; really, they should be the focus of the next season of the show, if we get one.

So instead of learning about all the imperial (perhaps ex-imperial?) warlords roaming free, we zoom in on one who seems to have set up his base in a snowy mountain range on Maldo Kreis (one of two brand-new planets featured, along with Shakari, which seems to be an homage to something between Gotham City and Jazz Age Chicago). He's squeezing the locals for more than they can bleed until alarms start blaring. It sounds like an army is approaching quickly within the fortress itself. So when Mando, armor shining like a knight's, struts his way in amidst torrents from his wrist-mounted flamethrowers, you don't need to know about the three seasons of The Mandalorian or The Book of Boba Fett to know he's the baddest bitch in town. 

He takes out his enemies one by one, methodically stepping through impossible odds -- "never tell me the odds!" says another swashbuckler in this IP -- with surety, confidence, and grace. Apparently two different performers play the on-set physical manifestation of Mando, and their physicality determines our buying the core of believability and relatability in this film. They slay. Almost immediately after his indoor victory, Mando has to hurry outside to catch up with the Imp, chasing him down on a narrow mountain pass. The Imp is hiding in one of three AT-ATs, fearsome transports that Mando eliminates with something that resembles satisfaction, if not ease. But by this point, he's been joined by Grogu, his apprentice and adopted son, the puppet so long known as Baby Yoda due to his species remaining a mystery and rarity. 

The wee one's screen presence has arguably never been better, and that's really saying something. Each shot with the puppet is picture-perfect, so clearly calculated for maximum cuteness that it's a small miracle the rest of the film holds up. I haven't made so many noises in a theater in years, and by noises I mean shrieks, cries, whines, moans, sniggers, chuckles, cackles, sobs, chortles, whimpers, and yells. He just brings it out of you. Actually, he's not dissimilar in that way, for me, to Scrat, the squirrel from Ice Age, whose mere name has me breaking out in a goofy grin. Grogu is always moving, often lowkey scary (he implodes a mouse droid in his first onscreen moment), and hilariously eager to help. What can a nonverbal, foot-tall li'l guy do when danger approaches? Well, perched on Mando's shoulder as he is, Grogu knocks rapidly on the back of Mando's helmet. But the visual -- and the speed -- elicits a screech from my vocal cords every time. 

Thankfully, the two leads basically split the film's runtime as well as its narrative, which only seems fair given he titular double billing. The first half of the plot concerns a mission the pair are assigned by Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver in an underused but welcome appearance): to find and capture Commander Coin, the most elusive and mysterious remaining warlord. The Hutt Twins (featured in The Book of Boba Fett and introduced as the successors to Jabba's throne) have information they're willing to sell the New Republic in exchange for a mission of their own. As these things go, they task Mando to find and return Rotta the Hutt, Jabba's son (last seen as a wee slugy babe in The Clone Wars), ostensibly to free him from a captor but , secretly, really to kill him and eliminate any threat to their rule. 

Much of the first half, then belongs to Mando as he sleuths his way through Nal Hutta and Shakari to find Rotta. But Rotta, he learns soon enough, has no intention of going because he's a star. A self-made man who has escaped the shadow of his late father and made a legitimate name for himself as a gladiator-style warrior. He's a surprisingly insightful character, and an articulate one, and Jeremy Allen White's dulcet tones are a bit jarring heard from a hunk of a giant green blob before settling into an affected sonorous purr. He exemplifies the theme of complicated fathers and sons (a big SW theme, of course) that has been plaguing Mando and Grogu for so long now. And just when you think it couldn't get any more interesting or surprising, we, too, get thrown into a game. 

It's dejarik. Yes, that dejarik. The claymation sci-fi chess game we saw in the original film, which now we can only assume is the kid-friendly version of what is really a gladiatorial battle to the gory death. The rich criminals of this part of the galaxy -- run by local crime lord Janu -- pay big bucks to import deadly exotic monsters and thugs (oops, excuse, I meant animals and prisoners) and watch them slaughter each other in a truly brutal mess. And the crowds are eating it up. It's so easy to get on our moral high-horse in moments like this, but think on it: the masses of Geonosians cheering on the spies' demise in ep2, the decadent and wicked gamblers in ep8, the general "scum and villainy" (ep4) of the galaxy are most of the populace in a time of fighting against fascism. And watching these ones cheer on a vicious melee would be disturbing if it wasn't a dream come true for those of us who grew up wondering about those dejarik beasts on that holotable in the Millennium Falcon all those years ago.

This half of the plot gets wrapped up rather easily -- spoiler alert, but Janu is Coin, so once Rotta spills them beans, Mando's job is basically done. Well, there's a chase and a raid to be had yet, and those are thrilling action sequences laced with pitch-perfect comedy. The mystery dissipates too fast in that convenient double identity, so what's left is extraction. But's is all a muscly, nerdy fun series of set pieces that never lets up its sense of awe and pleasure in itself. That's the best kind of franchise film: one that just enjoys itself for what it is, on its own. Rather like Rotta, actually. 

The second half of the film is quite tonally different. If we didn't know that director and co-writer Jon Favreau wrote this film as a film, I'd swear it was two slightly expanded episodes of the show. Maybe he means it to feel that way. Embo (a mysterious bounty hunter seen in The Clone Wars) and his frightening pet dog (or perhaps partner?) catch and grab Mando to take him to the Twins for satisfaction on their deal. This leaves Grogu with a team of Anzellans (the cutest, most darling and equally noise-provoking little puppet aliens who speak in a heavily accented pidgin) to follow and rescue Mando from the Twins' stronghold. They do, and the story leans into rather thick sentiment when, once rescued, a wounded Mando must be attended by Grogu as his nursemaid, stuck as they are in the swamps of Nal Hutta with no available ship to flee. 

I must confess that, the first time I saw this film, I must have gotten some fatigue from pure joy, because it has only been in more recent viewings that I've found new things to laugh at and tear up about in the second half. It slows its pace, to be sure, even in its more action-y scenes, but now I feel it's a nice offbeat vibe to the film that fits its spacefaring gunslinging Western hero's genre-bending essence. And while I always want more SW stories about non-Jedi, this film's use of Grogu's connection to the Force is mercifully restrained, often to the point of only being used for comedy and expediency, which is better. And right around the time I was feeling ready to wrap it all up -- in a contented way more than in a distracted way -- we get a climactic sky battle with a squadron of X-wings bombing the shit out of the Twins' stronghold. Oh, and did I mention that this film features the Droid Gotra as the Hutt security team? We've gotten so little information about the Gotra, and I just love learning more about the various businesses and organizations and syndicates in the galaxy far, far away. The more, the merrier.

But this battle enraptured me right in time for a swift ending. It's exactly the uplift needed after a slightly more burdened second act, which is curiously the exact problem faced by Broadway musicals (is it a problem, though?). We even get Sigourney Weaver in one of those orange and white flight suits, which is a vision I'm thrilled to see. While I perhaps expected too much of this movie -- thinking, logically, that this would be time for a big character appearance or name drop or plot twist to launch us into the next season of Ahsoka and Dave Filoni's impending film climax to the series (it's all about Thrawn, which we simply do not have time to discuss here) -- I am now grateful that it resolutely and firmly does not make any overt connections to its own series. Sure, it connects characters, places, themes, and references from all eras of SW, and that's amazing and so satisfying for fans. But you don't even need to have seen all of the live-action series to thoroughly enjoy this film, and that's exactly what a franchise film needs to be if we're going to survive burnout. Look at what happened with the MCU (which so few of us keep up with anymore).

The Mandalorian and Grogu is how we keep this franchise alive and fresh.

Resident Evil (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

I am not the target audience for this franchise, but damn, that was one of the most entertaining cinematic experiences of my year. 

Never have I ever played a Resident Evil game, and though I think I saw one of the seven (?) previous films once in college, its memory does not burden me. I don't need excessively violent, gory horror that much. Thankfully, writer and director Zach Cregger (Barbarian, Weapons) makes his foray into this world accessible to even such an audience as me. Starting from scratch, he brilliantly crafts his own story in the world of the franchise, meaning that we don't need to know anything about its lore to fully enjoy this movie. 

While its title's meaning remains mysterious to me, this is the story of Bryan, an average young guy trying to do his job and get by. Austin Abrams (a breakout in Cregger's previous Weapons) imbues Bryan with a delicious sense of misery that allows him to be at once earnest and hilarious. A courier between medical facilities, he starts the film in a hospital and is tasked with taking a medical case with unknown contents to another hospital (one in Raccoon City, as fans of the series apparently know full well, meaning that the apocalyptic disaster plaguing the franchise hasn't yet begun). It's late at night and snowing heavily, so he declines the job before taking it for double pay. He's also on the phone with his girlfriend as they argue about what to do regarding her recent pregnancy, which really seems like the conversation one shouldn't be having while navigating a wintry mountain road. 

After striking a lone woman who runs in front of his car, Bryan's night goes from disastrous to hellish quickly. I hope a working title for this project was Bryan and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Night, because this kid cannot catch a break. Following Murphy's Law, the events of his night cascade into ever-deteriorating gauntlets and puzzles and chases he must survive. The woman survives and becomes violent, a cop pulls him over, his car fails, a dog chases him, he's attacked by randoms in a farmhouse, and so on. We learn soon enough that some kind of biological agent is spreading, turning people into vicious zombie-like monsters; once dead, they're usually still "alive," returning with decomposing skin and vicious tentacles and sometimes melding with other bodies. They're really more like John Carpenter's The Thing or del Toro's The Strain than any real zombies out there. Bryan still hasn't even gotten to Raccoon City, which we learn is overrun with the monsters; his goal of the top of the medical center's tower feels exactly like the goal of the video game we're playing.

Cregger and his team force us into the game-playing experience the film is clearly meant to provoke. We know nothing of the film's world beyond what Bryan knows. If he sees something, we also get to see it, and that's all. The camera is consistently -- and effectively -- hovering somewhere around his shoulders, and sometimes in his POV down the barrel of a gun. Cinematographer Darius Wolski (who often works with Ridley Scott, among other notable artists) also drowns the film in realistic, palpable darkness; sometimes only a gentle moonlight reflecting off the snow allows us to see the scene. Speaking of guns, a major concern throughout this film is how he will arm himself with weapons and ammo, yet they always tend to appear right before he needs them again. Gates often bar his path, armed with padlocks impervious to gunfire, which intensifies the remarkably sophisticated game-related humor this film exhibits. Set pieces are episodic, moving us from location to location with clarity of pace and purpose, propelling us forward with a classic grace. Actually, it might be better to say the screenplay is broken into missions, and there are fairly reliable "bosses" to overcome in each one. 

It's also notable here that Shay Hatten co-wrote this film with Cregger, and that his previous work was on John Wick Chapter 3 and Chapter Four, which also include video game-like obstacle courses through parades of never-ending enemies.

I can't say whether this is a suitable Resident Evil title, but I can say it's an astonishing work of entertainment and action horror. Sure, its climax was a bit too CGI-heavy for my taste and its ending was so unspeakably bleak and cruel that I'm not sure I liked its nihilism, but up to that point, it had me gasping for air. Beautifully crafted humor emanates from Abrams, whose Bryan carries the film as a fresh kind of horror film protagonist: an unwillingly violent young man whose moments of profound tenderness (pay attention to how he treats his entrusted package) are rivaled by his unbelievably capable physicality, which never gets to rest in this film. He's literally a gamer whose knowledge of video games helps him survive by using the cop's gun, the farmhouse's shotgun, and various real-time puzzle strategies. This movie might well earn the world record for number of spoken "fuck"s, because it's pretty much all he says in scenes only populated by himself and something that is trying to kill him. It's insane, and Cregger wants us to feel insane, too, which he does by so rooting our senses (visual and aural, of course, though more than once I wondered what Smell-O-Vision would do to a film with this much rotting flesh?) in Bryan's visceral experience. That way, the girl with a Lovecraftian leg and the Harkonnen substitute in the sewers feel so much scarier than anything we'd have imagined in an average zombie flick.