Eddington (2025)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Have you ever got the feeling that a movie was made just for you? Eddington, Ari Aster's directorial project last year, has not so much left a mark on me as just fit into the grooves I already have. It won't be for everyone; it's too uncomfortable, expansive yet shallow, and quaintly recent for that. Yet in tackling this subject matter with so much humor and absurdism, Aster spins a tightly wound nightmare and ensnares his attentive viewer. He has no intention of explaining or even offering insight into the social phenomena that plague our current age. Anyone hoping him to make a clear statement about politics, technology, big tech, masculinity, whiteness, etc., will be confused and disappointed. But, by putting a mirror up to the audience and forcing us to watch the insanity unfold, he makes a strong metafictional case for art imitating life.

Just the opening scene is a masterclass in exposition dumping. In less than thirty seconds, we're shown a long man, shoeless and in grungy jeans, walking down a desert road while yelling obscenities and non-sequiturs without taking a breath; as we're trying to parse his vicious-sounding but hollow monologue, and figure out if he's under the influence of substances or experiencing a mental health crisis, the camera pans up and stops to see, in the distance, a sign for a new, incoming data center. This movie clearly has a lot on its mind, and this ain't even the half of it. It helps that we get veteran A-list crew: cinematographer Darius Khondji and editor Lucian Johnston together immerse us into the story while keeping us at an intentional remove.

Do you remember May in 2020? When we were told that things would fully open up again when summer finally it, maybe at latest July 4. After we had been told things would be open by Easter, a few weeks prior. When George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis and waves of protests erupted across the country. When we all became even more dependent on our phones than we had been six months prior. When we became more polarized, more isolated, more rude, more paranoid. If you, like I, choose to forget many of those scary, frustrating days, Aster is determined to shake us out of our stupor. Almost every line of dialogue sounds familiar, as if ripped from our memories and forced back into our waking eyes and ears. I had a similar experience while watching Sick, which is the other Covid-set film I highly recommend to anyone.

And he doesn't say anything about them. Piling on references to policies vs. laws, viral crime videos, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, stolen land, AI, viral media, Trumpism, mask mandates, conspiracy theories, rape and abortion, and more, Aster seems determined merely to overwhelm us with the unpleasant, discomfiting experience of hearing and seeing it all again in real time. There's a case to be made that society fractured during those months in 2020, and Aster here lays out the evidence for us to survey. Why is this satisfying for me? I'm still not wholly sure, because a mirror in and of itself isn't artful. But my conclusion is that Aster isn't after us to rethink any of those viral social movements or to get fired up about these issues again; Aster wants to show us how easily we lose ourselves.

Remember the constant confusion, anxiety, guardedness, defensiveness, mistrust, and division that we felt? That's what Aster's reproducing here. Much as he made Beau is Afraid to function as an extended anxiety attack, he basically repeats the formula here. The arguable difference is that he's being deliberately provocative for anyone who might see the film. None of his characters are sympathetic or likable, and they're all so complex and, frankly, realistic, that it's hard to label any. Thankfully, many of them label themselves -- and each other -- with political and ideological words meant to convey meaning but which, by film's end, feel as superfluous as the energy with which they are hurled. It's like he wants people, after the film, to discuss and argue hot button topics not because they are hot but because they're so much more complicated than we ever say on social media.

And amidst all this chaos I'm describing, Aster crafts a gorgeous film for cinephiles. His tendency for playing with genre reaches a high point here, shifting effortlessly from a Western structure to a political thriller, a crime drama, a black comedy, and back again. Joaquin Phoenix plays the weary, put-upon sheriff like an aging John Wayne of a small New Mexico town. His antagonist is the incumbent mayor, played by Pedro Pascal, on roughly the opposite side of the political spectrum. They have family issues -- some of which intertwines, to their lasting resentment -- yet going head-to-head in the coming election destabilizes an already shaky community to the point that it's all-out war. The secondary and tertiary characters provide a lot of context despite not having much screen time, and the ensemble cast are messily overplaying at exactly the necessary pitch: Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Deirdre O'Connell, Michael Ward, Luke Grimes. 

Social media ruins the race. Protests become riots. Police brutality approaches marshal law. Outside influences arrive to add fuel to the fire. Shadowy gunmen assassinate leaders. There's a version of this very same script that could have been penned by Tom Stoppard or Samuel Beckett, so absurd and bleak is its depiction of civilization collapsing on itself. I was also reminded starkly of Don't Look Up, which used anxiety to create comedy rather than the other way around as Aster does. It should be noted that the characters aren't depicted sympathetically: they jump to conclusions and do strange things, so don't go in to this film expecting psychological realism. Go in expecting to feel a little guilt about things you yourself did during those hellish months.

Two-and-a-half hours as it is, I still don't think it's long enough. The final act devolves into a bit of a silly chase sequence and a lack of climax for any but its primary characters. Thrilling though it still is, part of what makes the first half of the film so riveting is the moving parts of its ensemble. When Phoenix enters a store without a mask, we know it's going to be bad, and then his nemesis the mayor is revealed to be behind him in line! When a viral media darling arrives at a private dinner with the sheriff's wife in starry-eyed tow, we know he's trouble, but then he starts talking about getting abducted and raped by an Epstein-like figure and then hunted down like The Most Dangerous Game -- and eventually revealing himself to be an evangelical Christian! It can be a bit tonally tough to swallow, and I imagine some viewers will balk at the screenplay's relatively equal treatment of issues. I don't mean conservative versus progressive so much as I mean effectively giving equal side-eye to protesters of George Floyd's murder as to those who stubbornly refused to wear a mask in public. While we may be laughing at the absurdity on display, it's admittedly difficult to swallow making fun of teens screaming about how they as white people shouldn't even be speaking about the problems of racism in one scene, while the next scene has the lone Black cop in the precinct being framed for the sheriff's crimes. However, because this isn't formally an "issue" story, I don't see how these elements could have been any more reasonably and artfully balanced.

Aster remains one of the best in his craft, and this production feels like an unpredictable turn in his career. I'm eager to see what he turns his attentions to next.

Crime 101 (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

When a career thief (Chris Hemsworth) gets a little rattled by a grazing bullet, he calls off his next hit. More than successful, he doesn't think it's an issue nearly as much as his fence (Nick Nolte) does; hired to carry out the next job is an unhinged, dangerous young thug (Barry Keoghan). Meanwhile, an insurance broker (Halle Berry) who works to help pay settlements for the thief's victims, is frustrated with being denied promotion in her company and so decides to help the charming thief in order to get a hefty cut. Oh, and the scheme has been obsessed over by an LAPD detective (Mark Ruffalo) whose theory is ignored by his precinct, sending him on a rogue mission because he refuses to "find a theory that works for the whole building."

Though its title seems to indicate a beginner's foray into cinematic capers, there's nothing elementary about the sleek yet grim presentation of Crime 101. The number instead refers to the 101 Freeway in sunny southern California, the primary setting of Hemsworth's crime spree and his means of reaching his targets and escaping pursuit. But this isn't the Los Angeles of La La Land; dark and warm, the city reads as richly layered in the dusk between its twinkling lights and chrome-plated vehicles. There's more than an air of noir to this material, and cinematographer Erik Wilson (of the Paddington films) seems intent on milking the visual dynamics of the oft-filmed cityscape for every drop of its shadowy beauty. 

I'm not sure I could repeat more of the plot reliably, nor the character names, so we'll stick with general impressions here. That's not to say this film is forgettable, at all, but rather that I was more entertained by seeing recognizable stars playing together in this mysterious world of greed, pride, and crime. Writer and director Bart Layton, adapting this material from a fairly recent novella of the same title, pulls from his inspirational sources with knowing and satisfying results; more than once, I leaned to my friend and muttered things like "Michael Mann," not because Layton felt redundant but because he so clearly was building off visual flair and thematic tensions familiar to fans of Thief and Heat. Take the protagonist as a case study: Hemsworth apparently grew up poor (and we see several shots throughout of homeless camps around LA) and, in one scene of emotional vulnerability, shares that his goal in stealing is to make enough money to stop working and enjoy life. Enjoyment, something he's apparently never really experienced, comes at a price, but one he never explicitly states. It's a cool move in a screenplay with serious messages to proclaim about class, earned wealth, privilege, and the divisions between desperate people.

Film noir and especially organized crime aren't my usual cinematic happy place, so I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Crime 101. Its likable cast does a lot of that heavy lifting, even those with smaller parts, like Corey Hawkins and Jennifer Jason Leigh. My favorite was probably Nick Nolte, whose brief screentime indicates that he's a Fagin-meets-King Saul type, whose paternal energy toward Hemsworth and Keoghan suggest that he's groomed these young men into hardened criminals (specifically, ones willing and able to become his personal soldiers in their urban battlefield). Everybody owns their time in front of the camera, which makes us care for these complex, wicked people expediently. That way, by the time Layton tosses not one but two excellent car chase sequences at us, we actually care about their outcomes (something I've never said before).

Other flourishes abound, and I eagerly anticipate a second screening, if only to pay closer attention to the stylistic choices in crafting this dramatic Gordian Knot. I recall that the opening sequence is a montage -- not wholly unlike the start of The Devil Wears Prada, an admittedly strange reference here, but it's what I thought of -- as Hemsworth, Berry, and Ruffalo all prepare for the day. We're listening to one of Berry's self-help audio recordings, which speaks vaguely about our interconnectedness with other people and how community should be our basic focus, and it made me think of Crash (2004) and the onslaught of huge ensemble dramas in the years surrounding it that didn't boast singular plots so much as slices of life of many plots that were all loosely and contrivedly bound together.

The film also skillfully avoids some of the more obnoxious clichés in movies of this ilk. Perhaps most tellingly, Berry's character is not defined by the male characters around her, and she has a vivid internal life shared freely with her audience. As she tells her jerk of a boss off, people audibly cheered. We don't usually get moments like that in a genre about men for men. Speaking of which, Hemsworth himself proves yet again his underused skills as a bona fide leading man, injecting such nuance into his character that it's easy to forget his superhero status among A-listers. Somewhat shy and awkward, he bears an aura of haunted gravity when he's unable to maintain eye contact, brooding behind the wheel, and it's largely left to us to interpret his silence. It's a risky move from Layton, but one that pays off in dividends thanks to this alchemical blend of acting and directing.

And, as a final note, it ends with something like hope. Or, rather, a surprisingly moving, emotional denouement. I stopped taking notes about twenty minutes into the film because I was so absorbed by the understated and unexpected craft of this fiercely intelligent and artful thriller, so another screening will be forthcoming. In the meantime, I can't recommend this title enough.

Wuthering Heights (2026)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Sometimes even the best filmmakers stumble. 

There's no denying Emerald Fennell's craft, here or elsewhere, but I simply can't understand what she was thinking about while attempting to adapt this material. Wuthering Heights is one of those mythic "unfilmable" titles that never fails to disappoint when removed from Emily Brontë's glorious prose. And yes, despite my personal affection for Peter Kominsky's 1992 adaptation for its Gothic intensity and steamy young stars Juliette Binoche, Janet McTeer, Jeremy Northam, and Ralph Fiennes in his feature film debut, it too struggles to bear up under the sheer weight of its ambitious task of adapting the entire plot. 

A quick note: for whatever reasons, this film has generated more online hubbub than most in recent memory, often accompanied by lengthy claims to knowing what the novel is "about." It's about classism. It's about trauma. It's about star-crossed lovers. It's about necrophilia. And, usually, these claims of enlightenment also claim to be the only one with that special insight. My pro tip for you is to ignore such claims. Anyone who wants to boil down a work as complex and vast in scope as Wuthering Heights to being "about" one thing is a fool who ignores much to aggrandize a limited perspective.

Surely, said I, surely Fennell will be up to her usual subversive tricks. When handling what I consider to be a story in the form of a highly organized nightmare -- a labyrinth of internecine cruelties enacted by stupid rich sociopaths on the only people they could enjoy life with -- Fennell will surely approach from a unique angle. Perhaps the resident servant of the Heights, Nelly Dean (played here by always thrilling Hong Chau), could be our protagonist: after all, she maneuvers her way into positions of influence and thus power in the mad power-plays happening around her. As a more antiheroic lens through which we could view the story in a new light, Nelly Dean could have been Fennell's inlet into an inspiring take on the endlessly reproduced tale. That's what Fennell did in Promising Young Woman and Saltburn alike, the latter even including more than a hint of Gothic aesthetic, which would have been all the more appropriate in this actual Gothic material.

Yet here we are, presented with this mess of anachronistic pop culture narcissism, glorying in its own trashy cheapening of the material while failing to provide us with anything it promised. Like a fever dream of horny high school fantasy, we're told a mere fraction of the story of Heathcliff and Cathy as if by AI-filtered summary of the novel. Narratively taking its structure from the famed 1939 film (with Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, and David Niven), which only told the first half of the story and set a dangerous precedent for most adaptations that have followed, the internal logic of the story collapses along with any pretense it has for thematic completion. At our screening, my friend frustratedly said something to the effect of "that was it?", to which I could only nod in annoyed sympathy. If you're going to retell such a classic, at least do it in an interesting way.

Which is the other problem I had with this film: the film itself. We could talk for pages about casting, but not about the tired online hullabaloo that needs to collectively do its historical homework on race and racial identifiers. We could talk for pages about acting: Chau is worth watching here, but Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are deeply uncomfortable to watch for their flat, breathy performances, which was really disappointing given this operatic opportunity. But the spectacle of rural, Gothic Yorkshire is undone time and again by confounding production design and lackluster cinematography (so. much. fog. And this was actually filmed in Yorkshire!). The Heights appears to be entombed in a protrusion of obsidian rising from a rocky moor, which would be maybe interesting if there were volcanoes nearby. Come to think of it, let's just move the setting to the rim of a volcano -- at least there could be interesting visual parallels to the existential precariousness between barren wilderness and boiling, seething, destructive passion -- but there's nothing so interesting here. Apart from a laughably candy-colored red hue repeated as the single visual motif so often it even appears in the Heights dining room. As the entire waxed floor.

Worse, the film promised us sex. This was meant to be the most erotically explicit, even explicitly kinky version of the story. I was down for that; who needs faithfulness to yet another retread of this story? If we're going to dive into the story's eroticism -- which is completely valid -- let's stop tiptoeing and go for it! There is an argument to be made for no explicit sex in the novel: if you want to believe (frankly unrealistically, but you do you) Cathy and Heathcliff and various other characters around them are chaste and abstinent the whole time, you may do so without dishonoring the original text, perhaps allowing that to inform their desperation, madness, and the ultimate tragedy of the whole saga. But that's been done to death. Fennell, rather than giving us a new hard-R vision of the tragedy, plays things distractingly safely. Other than a little skin in a couple scenes and some partially clothed thrusting -- mostly Elordi's, mind -- the only time we see real sex is as a voyeur from above, as two nameless servants (farm hands?) use a horse's bridle while having otherwise completely normal sex. The whole wretched moment is only barely glimpsed, and heard faintly, and it's so wildly unsatisfying that multiple people literally laughed out loud in our screening.

It's mystifying. Fennell has tackled much more transgressive stuff in her other work, approached familiar stories in unique ways, and subverted genre and form conventions all the while. But in this, her most overtly sexually-charged title so far, she fumbles in the sex of it all? What she's giving us isn't even good sex! It's the same issue I have with so much modern romantic fantasy novels, clearly written for middle class white women with a conservative upbringing, in that while they purport to be dirty and scintillating, what they actually describe in prose isn't even good sex so much as horny foreplay for readers with a fetish for frustration and problematic communication.

I'm probably harping on this breakdown of internal logic because Fennell herself seems to be aware of this problem. The film opens with what sounds like orgasmic breathing and rhythmic creaking before we're visually cued into the fact of the scene: a man being hanged publicly. It reminded me of the opening of Quills, and I just... if you know, you know, but that's my favorite film. Anyway, this moment primed me with optimism from the outset due to its explicit tying of sex with death and the complex ritual of violence as entertainment. Those are exactly the themes I'd like to see in a new version of Wuthering Heights, and it was clearly an option in Fennell's mind. She just chose to do the safest and silliest option instead.

Which is saying a lot when even that is at best a middling product on screen. The dialogue is as anachronistic as the costumes, the former being grating and the latter being at least interesting, which could have worked well. Given the modern pop music by Charli XCX, I wondered at times if we were about to lurch into a full Baz Luhrmann and have a ravey postmodern ball (a la The Great Gatsby). That would have been awesome. Alas, the whole thing gave me the strange sensation of being slowly submerged in water. The thing felt shadowy and bleak, strangely artless despite its artificially garish presentation, and even synth droning started to sound unfocused and hazy after a while. As if she knows she's lulling us into a stupor, Fennell takes pains to hammer us over the head with sensory information, less to keep us awake than to force us to Feel Things. What Things? Who knows? We're left adrift as waves of Intended Feelings crash into our eyes and ears, sent by a filmmaker whose boldness and ingenuity simply didn't synthesize with the material.

Hamnet (2025)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Few filmmakers view mundanity -- or indeed nature -- with the level of Romanticism displayed by Chloé Zhao. The Rider and Nomadland deal with individuals practicing their individualism in an unforgiving and bleak western America that nevertheless feels warm and richly layered. This palpability is shared even by her MCU entry, Eternals, which I find one of the most visually original and beautiful of the franchise (take another look at that naturally-lit forest fight scene if you want to argue me). Though I find the stories she chooses to tell stupefying, superheroes excluded, I cannot deny the spiritual craft at work in her attention to atmosphere and landscape. Her characters are not isolated in nature; her characters find connection with each other through nature, and it seems that's also how we're meant to connect with them.

Based on the 2020 novel of the same name (which I've admittedly not read, and now do not plan to), Hamnet tells a fictionalized story of how William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, may have dealt with the untimely death of their son. Meant to be a tearjerker of a certain literary order, we'd have seen a title like this sweeping the Oscars back when The Weinstein Company was churning out Best Pictures every damned year. The Academy loves a period, British biography and sob story. Or at least it did. As it is, star Jessie Buckley (playing Anne as Agnes, presumably in reference to her sometime legal name, according to official records) brings the bulk of the film's emotional intensity. Much as Frances McDormand managed to wrangle profoundly emotional work out of the otherwise dismally dry Nomadland screenplay, Buckley here has her work cut out for her.

Not that Hamnet, here adapted by novelist Maggie O'Farrell along with Zhao herself, is dry. Quite the opposite: this heartfelt and deeply sad material could have gone a number of directions, perhaps most dangerously melodrama. Yet Buckley and her costar, Paul Mescal, carry us through with rigorously internalized beats of eroticism, affection, loss, shame, guilt, withdrawal, and communion. One wishes to have been a fly on the wall during their intimacy coordination sessions, where surely simply hearing them talk through their craft would have sold expensive tickets. Unfortunately, they're forced to navigate familiar, dare I say rote, scenes with predictable revelations, resignations, and reconciliations to the point that I nearly dozed off in our screening.

Moments of interest abound, here, though they're rarely explored in any length or detail. Agnes is supposedly the daughter of a forest witch, hence her connection to nature both visually and aurally. The sound designer (IMDb tells us that Johnnie Burn won the Oscar for The Zone of Interest recently, deservedly) lures us into the woods in the same way cinematographer Lukasz Zal (also from The Zone of Interest) arranges it around us. Lush and sensual, the forest feels alive and communicative. It's telling that we're introduced to Agnes as she's dressed in a startling red gown, curled up under a tree, and our first instinct is of Grimm fairytales or Puritanical nightmares about alluring women in the woods. Her contrived but horny encounter with the man she'll be remembered for marrying feels natural in this setting; it's an effective storytelling device to immerse us in this cinematic world.

The first half is quite charming, and I found myself absorbed into the dynamics of this family. Between their somewhat mythic family being born and raised -- superstitions and all, as one child is miraculously revived from stillbirth -- to the intergenerational makeup and casting (shout out to Emily Watson and Joe Alwyn in almost pointedly underwritten roles), Hamnet sets up a lot of narrative and thematic possibilities. Yet, from its title and what we already know of shadowy history, the loomings and forebodings never allow us the opportunity to enjoy the present so much as dread what's coming.

Come it does, in full operatic fashion. Grief has become somewhat trite in some genres, drama included, arguably since 9/11, and this is no exception. Shrill and histrionic, the film luxuriates in the visceral pain both Mescal and Buckley deliver: score swelling, light fading, camera lingering in moments of private sorrow for far too long. I could feel the other bodies in my theater shifting with unease as we voyeuristically fed on the characters' bereavement. Powerful stuff, sure, but not clear in its own purpose or efficacy.

As a side note, if you haven't yet, please do yourself a favor and go watch All is True from 2019; the film tackles the same tragedy, navigating the same fraught marriage, but through the eyes of significantly older versions of the characters. It's wonderfully literate, minimalist in execution, with some of the most underrated acting and screenwriting of that year (by Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, and especially Ian McKellan). 

And then there's the mess of Hamlet, which is posited in this material as being Shakespeare's therapeutic response to his son's death. The historicity of that notwithstanding -- I'm not the person to judge, as I'm a bit of a conspiracist when it comes to the Bard's identity -- the film discredits itself as pandering claptrap when Mescal recites the Danish prince's "to be, or not to be" soliloquy like Inspector Javert looking at his reflection in the river and contemplating suicide. There's a nice nod to the play when, in the film's climax, Agnes travels to London to see Will's new hit; the playwright might say here that the play's the thing wherein he'll catch the feelings of his embittered wife. Agnes, sure that Will has been avoiding coping, or is profiting from their son's death, becomes enraptured in the play, pushing forward through the groundlings to all but crawl onto the stage itself.

And while far too much of Hamlet is shown here in the film, largely out of context -- and the case is frankly not made convincingly that the playwright had bereft paternalism in mind when writing this tragedy -- there is a keen observation that should be more clear. This is art therapy, both for its creator and its audience, and it works effectively. We watch the play (or, rather, a montage of its most irrationally recognizable one-liners) mostly through Agnes's eyes. There's a clever touch here, in that the actor playing the actor for Hamlet is Noah Jupe (A Quiet Place and its Part 2, Wonder, and series such as The Undoing) is the older brother of the actor who played Hamnet. It's as if Agnes is seeing her own son, grown up rather than fatally arrested, acting on stage, as he'd excitedly desired as a child. You'll notice, during this scene, that the cinematography and sound design revert to similar techniques from the opening scene: we hear the breathing of the crowd, the pulsing rhythm of life around a singular woman attempting to connect. The theatre is as natural and, indeed, lively as the forest of Agnes's origins, and she's spiritually returned there as a result of catharsis and finding meaning through art.

Iron Lung (2026)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Based on a 2022 video game of the same name, Iron Lung starts promising. Opening narration tells us that a "Quiet Rapture" occurred, as many stars and planets suddenly disappeared and reduced the human population. Presumably, we've colonized the stars at this point, so it's a more existential threat than the similar phenomenon we saw in Stephen King's The Life of Chuck last year. The main character, Simon, is a convict who gets assigned on a mission in exchange for his freedom. He's forced into a small submarine, about the size of an escape room in the real world, alone and without any training. Hell, he's without guidance either: nobody seems able to tell him what he's looking for or meant to be doing. I can see how this would work well as a game, investigating the sub (its name provides the film's title) and using whatever is at hand to try and figure out your own purpose while mysterious things start happening to you.

Unfortunately, the film is a bit of a dud. Directed, produced, written, and edited by Mark Fischbach, the YouTuber of apparent renown who goes by the moniker "Markiplier," the film also stars the man himself in what is basically its only character role. And there's a lot to be said for this obvious labor of love. Atmospheric and absorbing, I found myself slowly swept into the intrigue of his existential horror trip. Who is he? Why is he here? These questions lead eventually to more pointed ones: did he deserve to be here? We get inexplicably little insight into this character, though, as half our energy is constantly diverted to attempting to understand the setting.

They're apparently diving, you see, into an ocean of blood. Literally. It's not clear if this is another planet or perhaps what remains of Earth, and indeed maybe it doesn't matter. We never even see the outside of the submarine. This is a single-room experience, not unlike Hitchcock's Lifeboat or Rope, or more recent thrillers like Buried. Using flashes of x-rays, he's able to "see" outside the sub via x-ray images in black and white momentarily projected on a huge screen that makes up one wall. Slowly getting the hang of his mission, Simon eventually locates what appears to be a massive skeleton on the ocean floor, seemingly his objective, and must then retrieve a sample. 

Curiously, at this point, he starts having misgivings about the purpose of his dive and the reason for collecting such a sample. This is where the film really lost me. Sure the voice speaking to him via intercom (Caroline Kaplan as "Ava," whose vocal performance I quite liked) is inconsistent and a bit shady, but his identity and motivations don't change: surely he still wants his freedom, even at the cost of doing a strange, risky task for dubious benefit. It's just an odd choice to alienate the viewer from Simon at this late point in the film, which is already ridiculously overlong at 127 minutes. We should be more invested in him, not less.

Fischbach clearly loves the material and wants to give it justice. And it's an impressive production for such a small budget and a first-time independent feature venture. Yet for all its nightmarish restraint, haunting lethargy, and moody sensory experience, Iron Lung is a miserably boring movie. There's just no getting around that.

Attempting to mimic the style of a survival, puzzle game is admirable, to be sure, but it is also foolish. Films are meant to be seen. Storytellers in film should always default to show us rather than tell us. So the problem with this approach to such inert material is that we aren't shown anything. For the entire movie. Worse, the story hinges on being able to know/understand what's happening contextually, and there is none here. We're constantly teased with images of the exterior landscape (ocean bed, so... seascape?), yet they are almost entirely abstract. I couldn't tell a blessed thing on that screen, until a shot or two that might have included what appeared to be a rib bone, and one that seemed an alien or monster's face. Part of what's so frustrating about this, too, is the budget: okay, so you can't actually show us what's out there in an ocean of thick, dark blood. But you can't even give us decent drawn or "photographed" images via the technology you've included as a crucial element for that sole purpose?

As it is, Simon is just not an interesting character, and Fischbach is not an interesting actor here. Simon is mostly single-note as a stressy, sweaty mess, and it gets grating before long. His dialogue is clunky and unnatural; his delivery is even less natural, with a forced concern that comes off more like he's compensating for not knowing his lines by sounding increasingly angry. And that seems to be a subtle indication of a larger theme: if violence is the only way for some people to assert themselves, what does that say about nature? We're in an ocean of blood, after all, and before film's end it's confirmed to be human blood. What are these monsters swimming in this mysterious ocean? Is this all that's left of Earth? And how many times as the enigmatic company conducted such missions? We learn Simon is not the first, and much like the Weyland-Yutani company in Alien, this organization has ulterior motives and is all too willing to make personnel sacrifices in the name of profit.

What can I say? I would have liked at least some of my questions answered. I would have liked to see this film rather than just listen to most of it. I would have liked to like it more. Admiration for the impassioned art and joy at what this might signal for runaway independent releases like this in the future does not nullify my suffering through two hours of boredom with only brief, fleeting moments of intrigue. 

Send Help (2026)

Score: 4.5 / 5

One of the most thoroughly entertaining movies I've seen in long months (maybe in over a year), Send Help is a gift only someone like Sam Raimi could have given us. Uniting one of the most criminally underrated actresses working today (Rachel McAdams, whose reliability is second only to her peerless breadth of work in varying genres and styles) with an appealing young heartthrob (Dylan O'Brien, here making a masterful case for himself as a serious Hollywood leading man), Raimi mashes his own genres with abandon, delivering a wholly original and endlessly riotous adventure thriller with no small amount of horror comedy. 

The main plot concerns McAdams, a corporate strategist whose meek and socially awkward demeanor in her big-time office does not earn her favors. She's like Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada, if Andy had stayed a mousy, tweedy little misfit for several years. Her dapper new boss, O'Brien, is the nepo baby of her old boss, who had promised her a significant promotion; unfortunately, O'Brien is a superficial moron who cares more about golf and suits and healthy lunches than about the people actually working in his company. Think 9 to 5, and McAdams is going to teach this "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot" a thing or two. Except that she's too busy being sad for herself when her coworkers laugh at her and avoid her smelly sandwiches and ugly clogs and unkempt desk.

But the film references don't end there. Invited on a consequential trip to Bangkok to advise during a major company merger, McAdams reluctantly joins, even as her plane mates viciously mock her. But when the plane spontaneously decompresses and its engines fail, she and her boss are the only survivors, washed up on a deserted shore of some remote Pacific island. With more than small dashes of Cast Away and Triangle of Sadness, Raimi sends us through twists of tone and plot and character that seem calculated to inflict whiplash. Carrying us through is a knowing critique about misogyny in the workplace, milked for its blackly humorous venom at every turn. Her toxic male boss, obsessed with status and the perception of success, desperately clings to the veneer of power he thinks he innately possesses. His foul, serviceable employee blossoms in tropical isolation, revealing her secret hobby of survivalist training, and growing more beautiful even as he breaks down and bleeds out. We're never fully sympathetic with either character; clearly McAdams carries the film, but it's not because she's a Mary Sue. Indeed, more than once Raimi forces us to judge her motives and methods and consider that O'Brien doesn't deserve his fate. This is where the film shifts to Lord of the Flies, or even Misery. 

Yet the screenplay (by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift of the Friday the 13th reboot in 2009), for all its unexpected brilliance, is brought back down to earth by Raimi's insistence on his Raimi-isms. You don't buy a ticket to one of his films without expecting explosive bodily fluids. Fountains of blood, geysers of vomit, rivulets of saliva and snot: it's all coming out, and likely in the dirtiest and most garish ways possible. Their power dynamic is constantly in flux, but so is their ability to survive. Wholly dependent on the flourishing, thriving McAdams is going to damage O'Brien's pride; it doesn't help that he's wounded in body as well as in spirit, so he can't just get up and walk away. They'll share more than just food, shelter, fire, and fluids before all is said and done, though: they'll share secrets. 

I won't spoil any more -- and believe me, it's more than worth it to go into this film blind -- and really, all I've given you is about the first 30 minutes. Send Help goes to strange, dark places, and it's a hell of a trip. Earned scares (I shrieked out loud twice in this film, and was not the only one to do so) lead to meaningful character development, which in turn informs our interpretation of the production. This is exactly what we go to the movies for. This is pure entertainment, artfully imagined and inspiringly realized, showcasing the inimitable talents of several artists at the top of their games.

Primate (2026)

Score: 3 / 5

Some movies are enjoyable because they are exactly what you expect. Whether you read the IMDb summary or watch a trailer -- heck, even seeing a poster might do it -- you know what Primate is up to. A fast and dirty creature feature, this classic B-list film dives in with laughable contrivances, ramps up with frustratingly inert characters, and delivers on its promise through brutal elimination of those characters. That's it. And it's a heck of a fun time.

Of course there's no reason for a college kid to return home to her million-something-dollar mansion on an isolated clifftop in Hawaii out of the blue, unannounced with a guest, and for her to have a single father, a veterinarian, who has been raising a chimpanzee. This movie is so bizarre in its setup that you can scarcely do anything but go along with it. It's a bit charming, frankly, and I found myself eager to understand who these characters are and why they've been assembled in this way. Unfortunately, the film never gives us anything satisfying in this regard. The exact same premise could have been in a townhouse in some mid-size city, where a chimp had escaped from the local zoo. The only difference would be that, here, there's a mix of tragedy in what is perceived as a senseless betrayal by the family "pet."

Because, as anyone with half a brain cell could have told you, the chimp snaps and then starts snapping necks. Or, rather, jaws. But this is no ripoff of Nope, with its relentlessly haunting depiction of a simple incompatibility between apes and a sound stage. Rather, this is a ripoff of Stephen King's Cujo. 

You got that right: our highly intelligent adopted pet/brother chimp, Ben, gets rabies.

I won't say anything else of the plot, which does what it needs to do in terms of piling on the contrivances along with the idiotic choices of its college-age main characters. This was never meant to be a deep theoretical discussion-starter about the thin, blurred line between civilized behavior and violence, or about what defines the missing link between varying kinds of primates. This is the kind of movie where a monster seeks to annihilate the obnoxious, sinning kids in increasingly inventive, gory ways. At a mercifully brisk pace, you barely have time to finish your drink before the credits roll; you'll never piss yourself out of fear in a movie this fast.

Ben himself is worthy of some discussion, though. This movie wisely makes the decision to focus on practical effects, situating movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba in the chimp suit and aiding his masterful performance with puppetry and a little CGI that you really can't differentiate. He's also kept shadowed enough that we never tire of his appearance, and I found myself squinting to see where he was looking and what his hands were grasping in scenes when he wasn't even moving. Though the human element of his existence on screen is palpable, you never really feel the light in his eyes; he's a monster, through and through, deceiving us (and his adoptive family) with the guise of sentience. There's some hubbub about the late matriarch of this family having taught Ben language as a result of her studies in literacy, and though the film eventually wants us to be emotionally invested, it never really works. She was no Jane Goodall, and this is no Mighty Joe Young. 

It's a nice setting for a slasher-type horror film, and the production design of this mansion is beautiful to distraction. Unfortunately, we don't see all that much of it, as the plot only works due to the restriction of its characters. They get stuck in the pool, on a subset patio only reachable by a single curving staircase set into the stone. Frustrating as this setting is, it does prevent us from distractingly wondering what might happen if a rabid chimpanzee got loose in the Hawaiian jungle, which I can only imagine being the premise of an inevitable sequel. Moreover, there's something to be said here about Ben's character: this film could have really delved into some considerations of the extent of Ben's illness. Is he naturally this monstrous, or is it purely a result of rabies? How does the disease affect him (when he's not just "accidentally" slaughtering people, but rather setting traps and toying with his prey) and can we fully blame it instead? Does this change how we consider human serial killers and their (likely) illnesses?

But of course director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, 47 Meters Down Uncaged, The Strangers: Prey at Night) and his co-writer don't waste any time considering such intangibles. They've got blood to spill. And that they do, with some gnarly moments in an otherwise pretty lean thriller. Even knowing full well what I was walking into, I found myself annoyed to distraction by the characters' stupid choices; in another screening, I might invite my friends to loudly shout at the characters with me when they do the obviously idiotic thing. But that's part of the charm of this kind of flick: it's meant to be enjoyed by a large group of people only paying middling attention as they crack jokes and comment on costumes and settings and violence. 

Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

Score: 5 / 5

I hope Rian Johnson makes Knives Out Mysteries the rest of his career. Easily my favorite in what is now a veritable series of consistently excellent films, Wake Up Dead Man is also easily one of my favorites of 2025. 

This time around, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig delivering an inexplicably more interesting character, now three films in) is called to a small town parish in upstate New York. The Gothic setting is heightened by a new murder mystery: Reverend Wicks (gruff Josh Brolin), a charismatic and emotionally abusive monsignor dies, mysteriously and alone in a small closet adjacent to the sanctuary where he had been performing a Good Friday service. Johnson spends the entire first act of this five-act narrative in the parish community, so we get to know the dynamics at work first. Wicks gets a reassigned assistant pastor, a young former boxer (!) named Duplencity (a tortured Josh O'Connor), whose dark past and tendency toward violence make him all the more interesting to a burgeoning cult leader like Wicks. The parishioners are all naturally highly suspicious, including Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Thomas Haden Church, Cailee Spaeny, and of course Glenn Close as the devout and imperious right-hand woman of the head priest. In Johnson's capable imagination, however, their likely guilt isn't just a matter of fact; he forces us to consider, with each, the very realistic reasons they might fall prey to a toxic gospel, and how similarly we might do the same.

See, Johnson is of course doing an Agatha Christie thing, but he's also very much doing an America-in-the-2020s thing with these movies. In the first, he roasted insular families of wealth and the ways in which they prey on marginalized workers in a cruel twist of murder mysteries and legacy wealth; in the second, he skewered a wider swath of privileged people in the category of being "stupid rich" and how they prey on each other in a post-moralistic parable about capitalism. But now we shift -- though the motivation may still be about money -- to the realm of faith. Karl Marx famously called religion "the opium of the people," and Johnson seems eager to inject us with a counterdrug. In an age of fascists taking power in the "land of the free," it's telling that Johnson wants us to consider how religious conservatism and sociopolitical desperation leads to cults of personality.

Yet rather than merely scorching the devout -- or, indeed, painting this as a full-blown cult, a la Kevin Williamson's series The Following -- Johnson uses this focus to mine an opportunity. Rather than lambasting the faithful as weak or ignorant, much less willfully wicked, he develops the characters toward each other, reminding them (and us) of commonalities rather than irreconcilable differences.

Visually, Johnson hasn't been this strong since The Last Jedi. He and cinematographer Steve Yedlin create real magic with their lighting in this film, evoking Dutch Golden Age paintings with a dash of fever-dream lighting technique. Thick atmosphere and nebulous backgrounds are repeatedly pierced by golden, amber, or even white light through various doorways associated with life and death. The first especial time I noticed the gorgeous feast of color and light was, indeed, when Blanc arrives to the church at the start of the second act, and his shadow is superimposed over the bare wall over the shoulder of the man who needs him most. This motif is repeated twice in the film, for pointed thematic effect.

And indeed help is needed. The cast of murderous characters share something in common: not love of money, or paranoid false friendships, or even monstrous secrets, but in fact their anger. These characters, though desperate for healing, belonging, and purpose, all share a penchant for anger in its various forms. While Johnson's messaging, by film's end, is demonstrably about understanding other perspectives, de-escalating violence, and a counter-instinctive type of empathy, it's fair to say his approach to this material feels like his own angriest yet. Easily the richest thematic yarn he's yet spun in this franchise -- maybe ever -- Wake Up Dead Man also features an aggressive visual dynamic that demands to be see on as large a screen as possible, and with the best sound system. It's a crying shame so many people will watch this on phone screens.

I don't think I could accurately recount the plot to you, and I've seen it twice now. Johnson's plots, however, are intentionally unpredictable/unsolvable. His enduring legacy with these Benoit Blanc mysteries is more about why these murders happen than just about who dunnit. You know? Blanc even riffs on a Mulder and Scully dynamic with his young priest friend, essentially pairing a man of science with a man of faith as they grapple with inhumane questions. In Johnson's masterful language, they reach some profound epiphanies that will leave you shaken. Murder will always out; the battle for the soul, however, takes center stage in the best Knives Out mystery yet.

The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

Score: 3 / 5

Elvira and her sister Alma arrive with their widowed mother, Rebekka, at their new home. Apparently lower class and approaching destitution, they are humbled and grateful to be accepted into the wealthier Otto's home, their new stepfather. Otto's daughter, Agnes, is beautiful whereas they are, well, comparatively ugly. Clearly, this story, written and directed by the Norwegian Emilie Blichfeldt in her feature debut, is a reimagining of the Cinderella tale from the perspective of Elvira. What becomes apparent, even early, is that this is also a bona fide horror film. The fantasy elements of the Disneyfied story are stripped here, to the point that this film feels more like a Grand Guignol production of the original Grimm material. 

Early on, Elvira pops a zit on her nose and we get to study the pus in extreme closeup. Eventually we'll see maggots and tapeworms and breaking teeth and needles near eyes and all sorts of violent, vicious horrors. Some of the tortures in the Saw franchise aren't as graphic as what we see here, and I had to excuse myself at one point to suppress a retch. I don't know quite how to express the visceral discomfort I had while watching this, except to say it was more harrowing an experience than Guadagnino's Suspiria or Roth's Hostel. That said, it's nice to see someone reimagine the source material in this way, really taking things to their creepy roots: grim if not wholly Grimm.

Unfortunately, that visual extremism isn't really my cuppa, so my favors will not go with this movie. Its points of interest were less than engrossing to me, though I admit some fascination on my part with the in-world obsession with physical beauty. It's more than a fad or a desperation to please the Prince and rise from squalor. There's a general hysteria around outer beauty, so much so that the extent to which Elvira will go to become beautiful is as laughable as it is horrifying. And it's all supported -- indeed, mobilized -- by her mother, who takes filial villainy to a whole new level. 

You can't help but get swept up in the wicked sense of glee evinced by director and actors alike. Lea Myren plays Elvira with so much gusto and verve that you can't help but be impressed. From under increasing layers of makeup and prosthetics, Myren maintains a dreamy, wide-eyed hope that her idolized Prince might actually love her when she's pretty enough. We might as well call this film The Passion of the Stepsister. After a brutal nose job and its Hannibal Lecter-esque mask she must wear after, her braces are brutally chipped off; she swallows a tapeworm to make her skinny, and now her tummy burbles ominously in an aural version of Chekhov's gun; false eyelashes are sewn onto her eyelids. Eventually her hair falls out and she's put in a garish wig. 

Yet for all its potential, the film never really manages to say anything about, well, anything. Except perhaps our ability to laugh at grotesque violence done to young women in the name of beauty. There's no real messaging about inner beauty, or found family, or sisterhood, or self-empowerment, or the ultimate cost of capitalistic beauty standards. Blichfeldt is either too angry for that or too enraptured with spectacle; her embracing of extreme awfulness here undermines and collapses the Grimm pretense of a cautionary tale. We don't even get much from Alma's perspective; why isn't she subject to these barbaric procedures? Is she immune from needing to marry well to support herself and their mother? What does she think, privately, of what's being done to Elvira? Alas, we get no such perspective. Blichfeldt instead keeps us on a loop, making a statement about desperation for beauty while butchering a young woman and then forcing us to relive this pattern several times without progression.

Strange Harvest (2025)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Stuart Ortiz makes his solo directorial debut with Strange Harvest, a mockumentary with some nasty fun surprises up its sleeves. Its sort of anti-X-files approach to crime features two detectives in the area around San Bernardino chasing down a serial killer known as Mr. Shiny. Well, chasing him down is a stretch; they're really cleaning up after him. For over a dozen years, Mr. Shiny has gotten away with horrific, vicious murders that haven't been linked despite somewhat ritualistic evidence at the crime scenes. Specifically, dismemberment and missing organs.

Taking as its hook our cultural obsession with macabre murder sprees in true crime procedural fashion, this low-budget affair smacks at times of authenticity. Not because it's so polished but precisely the opposite. Frankly, at times it feels like an amateur's work, or a film student's. Witnesses sometimes look like they've prepared their lines. The camera is propped at too conversational a level, with curious voids in the background instead of a wall or curtain. And this is all to the film's credit; much like in The Blair Witch Project, you can't help but get sucked in by the unpretentiousness of it all. This is going to be a gruesome little murdery story, so tuck yourself in and get cozy, yanno?

Which is when the film smartly takes a couple left turns. I was not prepared for the postmortem scenes, but they are shown in all their gory glory. This is clearly where the film's budget went: reminiscent of Saw or Se7en or the Hannibal series, we're forced into grisly scenes of torture and death with only the bloody residue to indicate how this atrocity happened. Oddly, there is one indication of a dead dog, which is censored, but the multiple murdered children are laid bare and plain for us to see. There's more than a whiff of Sinister here, and I had to avert my eyes at times. I was a little glad for this, because the film's general air often had me forgetting this was fictional, and not some true crime doc on a streaming service. In fact, I was most reminded of the nature of Strange Harvest -- it's a horror film, through and through -- in those nightmarish scenes when, via security cam footage or the like, we see Mr. Shiny in action. 

There's also more than a whiff of Lovecraft about the proceedings, and without spoiling too much, it's fair to say this is basically a Lovecraftian story. Mr. Shiny's suggested liaison with an eldritch evil gives the film its title, meant to account for a profane ritual involving human sacrifices. Whether or not you believe is up to you, in true fashion of the writer, but the film works regardless in its perverse sense of pop culture intertextuality. It belongs among the ranks of those I've already mentioned, of course, but also Lake Mungo, Resolution and The Endless, and Zodiac. There's a suggestion of The Exorcist, specifically when the suspect tours through Europe and the middle east. Ideas of the Manson killings and the Night Stalker swirled through my mind too. By the film's end, we still don't have all the answers we might want, but this film works by not giving us any more answers. 

Oh, and pay attention to the title song as the credits roll. It's a damn fine vibe.