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.

Practical Magic 2 (2026)

Score 2 / 5

Yet another legacy sequel graces us this month, unceremoniously opening the door to spooky season by reminding us why the '90s were better. Y'all know I'm no enemy of this endless new genre, but at some point audiences must surely come together to stop revisiting pre-millennium material to line the pockets of studio executives, right?

The 1998 cult classic Practical Magic carved a curious niche for many of us. A causally feminist comfort film that's a bit too sexy and scary for kids but too simple for mindful, invested viewing, the film manages to appeal and repulse simultaneously. Its gentle and memorable charms seem to be what has remained in fans' minds: midnight margaritas, self-stirring teaspoons in idyllic suburban homes, and needle drops so pointed that even nonsensical ones (yes, "Coconut" has a reprise here) feel like blunt-force trauma to the head. A film so mainstream and artistically parched it needs to tell viewers how to feel at each significant moment is not one meant to be taken seriously.

Yet here we are, almost thirty years later, returning to the Owens sisters. Akiva Goldsman inexplicably adapts this sequel to the original (from a novel by Alice Hoffman) and seems more interested in rehashing familiar ground than in capitalizing on new moments of comfort, joy, or inspiration. Yet he curiously also insults the memory of that first film more than once, begging the question why this film even exists.

Sandra Bullock's Sally ended the first film with happiness (and with Aidan Quinn, arguably synonymously), yet at the start of this one we learn he's been dead for decades. Apparently shortly after their wedding, Sally was forced to reckon with the Owens family curse yet again, denying her the life with him she fought for that whole movie. Oh well, Goldsman says, too bad. Let's try again!

Sally is determined to protect her daughters from similar heartbreak, so she swears off romance and enchants her children to forget they are even witches. The story proper begins with her now-adult daughters (though their ages and mannerisms are wildly confusing on that front) discovering that they are, in fact, witches and that their love lives carry a curse in real time. Bullock is immensely unlikable in this role. Not only is her character pretty awful in constantly attempting to control others by not communicating healthily, but she's also doing her Bullock thing: a sort of arch, dry caustic wit leveled at everyone around her but coming from a place of obvious and obnoxious self-repression. While surely most fans want to see Bullock being Bullock, I'd have rather watched a movie about Sally Owens. Sue me. 

Thankfully, Nicole Kidman swoops in to carry us through when we need her most. Her Gillian is a sort of Steve Nicks-esque sunflower who blooms on screen, never featured as she deserves but graciously nudging along key characters on their own paths. Director Susanne Bier (of too many titles to name, though I was both surprised and pleased to see her name attached to this feature) thankfully softens the blows of this film, making it perhaps less intense than it could have been. In her hands, the film is a patented love-letter to the original, evidenced by its early focus on the home life of the Owens women. Aunts Jet and Frances -- who I always thought were lesbian but are apparently actually really sisters? -- are shown providing for their community in peace and respect, which is nice. 

But then, instead of leaning into that dynamic and crafting a theme of community-building and intergenerational bonding, Practical Magic 2 dives into a fresh attempt to undo the Owens women's curse by its newest generation. Promptly doing away with Jet, the film aggressively says "goodbye" to its aged cast members in a way that feels both perfunctory and genuinely honorable. I'm not sure why Dianne Wiest had to be the one to go, but at least we get an underused Stockard Channing for the rest of the runtime. And Jet's plot is as bewilderingly awful as Sally's: these women's secrets are what is really cursing their family! Maybe the real practical magic in this world is simply telling the truth. Alas, Bier and Goldsman focus their time not on such ripe opportunities but on a convoluted new plot about a book and a raven and another book and a seer living in England and the whole thing is just absurd in the worst way. 

Characters don't communicate with each other well, resulting in annoyingly avoidable problems that render the film's runtime -- about half an hour longer than its predecessor -- an egregious slog. Two men show up to tempt the younger two generations of characters, including Lee Pace in a smoldering sort of role, and you probably don't need a crystal ball to guess where their plots will end up. I still couldn't tell you all the ins and outs of this tangled mess of a movie, even though Gillian and Sally are the exact same characters as before and people constantly act against their own interests.

Hope (2026)

Score: 3.5 / 5

The latest South Korean genre-mixing epic, Hope springs from the creative mind of Na Hong-jin, whose last feature film was an excellent horror titled The Wailing, a full decade ago.

Police chief Bum-seok watches over Hope Harbor, a small rural village near the Demilitarized Zone. Called out by a cousin to investigate some mutilated cattle outside town, Bum-seok returns to discover his town under attack. Bodies of townspeople litter the bloody street and buildings lie in wreckage that could have come from a tornado. He follows its path through town, finding friends alive and dead alike, none of whom seem able to understand the sudden violence visited upon them. Yet every time he slows to take a breather, another explosion, crash, or scream pierces the atmosphere, spurring him on to its source.

This takes almost an hour, nearly half the film. And it's magnificent. Na's command of suspense and production design make it an absorbing story indeed, as we learn tidbits of the chief's life and of those around him even as we follow him into danger. Na makes sure we never know more than the hero, and even the cinematography rarely lets us see more than what Bum-seok can see. We weave amongst dense sets and dressing, always in disastrous mess, often splattered with blood, each shot of which could be frozen and dissected for more information than we need. With each new crime scene, we're left wondering what on earth could cause such calamity? And can we trust the townsfolk, some of whom are intentionally painted as antagonistic.

Bum-seok's journey through his suddenly, mysteriously apocalyptic town is paralleled, in the plot, by that of his cousin in the forested mountainside nearby. He and his hunting friends search for answers to their original question in the woods before coming across... well, let's just say an answer to the film's central question of who or what is slaughtering the countryside. If you have any interest in seeing this film, I strongly recommend that you go in cold. There are moments of the viewing experience that can only be earned through your ignorance. You've been warned. 

Suffice to say that, even when the direct cause of the chaos is revealed at the end of act one, it's not really explained until later. Long tracking shots (the cinematography is utterly magical and transportive here; I was gasping as much by the action as by how they pulled off some of these shots) force us ever further into a treacherous, violent landscape, still smoking from its destruction. My mind jockeyed between possibilities in various genres before this one solidified itself. And while the journey to that revelation is more than worth a screening, I have to confess some dissatisfaction with the film's climactic ending. After the big reveal halfway through, the film levels up into a frenzied action flick, centered around an extended car chase through the ruined town that had me consistently on the edge of my seat. This sequence, CGI and all, gives any action scene coming out of Hollywood a run for its money and then some.

Yet by the time I was finally starting to feel some action weariness, the film's climax started. While I won't spoil it here, I think it's important to convey that the ending is wildly unsatisfying to this viewer. It riffs on a classic Western structure, of course, but in its final moments, the film swings us around to its surprise antagonists' perspective in a bizarre and wholly unexpected way. Thus the film's B-plot -- what I think of as its adventurous creature feature half, led by the hunting party and their discovery -- overwhelms its A-plot -- the riveting action of Bum-seok trying to save his home -- and ends itself right on the cusp of what, really, seems to be a missing second half. Not that I could endure more of this after two and a half hours of continuous action.

I could have, instead, used a bit more of the film's heart. A fellow cop shows up who is miraculously trained in field hospitals, offering some help to our hero and having his back in a big way. A couple locals provide ominous foreshadowing about what they know and what they've seen. But we don't really get to know or care about any secondary or tertiary characters, and that causes the film to feel more forgettable than it should. Arguably there's some drama towards the end, hinging on our understanding of the antagonists, but I found it unwelcome and nonsensical. Arguably, it's meant to complicate our viewerly desire for revenge and equilibrium, but I'm not sure the screenplay provides enough for that to be a convincing rhetorical move. And after the first half of the film visually sets up Bum-seok as its unlikely hero, the second half withdraws from this, making him feel weak and afraid in disingenuous ways to the film itself.

I wonder if there's a reading of this film in which Na is undermining and reversing the typical Western tropes of a hometown hero fighting off invaders. Here, that's how things start, but certainly not how they end. Characters become greedy and bloodthirsty, almost monstrous themselves, devolving before our eyes and under pressure from the calamity unfolding around them. And by the end, we're invited to consider the perspective of the invaders instead as being more righteous. Or at least more entertaining, which may also be the point. If so, Na is a genius who should be slapped for not finishing his commentary here and instead seeming to point at the need for a continuation of the story. 

Buddy (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

You've heard of the recent spate of gory horror flicks based on children's tales now in the public domain, yes? While I haven't yet experienced the guaranteed atrocities -- Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare, Bambi: The Reckoning, and Pinocchio Unstrung -- the trailers for Buddy had me worried about something similar. The titular figure, an anthropomorphic giant orange unicorn manifesting as a man in an oversized mascot costume, is a clear analogy to a figure like Barney or Big Bird, hosting an "educational" children's show teaching morals like telling the truth, being a friend, and cleaning up our messes. He snaps, going on a rampage with an axe, butchering the other characters trapped in his world.

But the film was -- to my surprise -- a psychological thrill ride loaded with deep questions about nostalgia, identity, and the dangerous ways we interact with both. Combining themes of absurdist entrapment from Severance and The Truman Show with Samuel Beckett's plays might be a lot to say of this film, but it certainly had me making those associations over its brief but effective 90-ish minutes. Actually, the best analogue to this film would be creator Casper Kelly's short film entitled Too Many Cooks, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in nightmare scenarios around childhood television shows. Actually, this might make for a cool double feature with Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow for the same reason. That which is comforting and fun becomes darker and dangerous as we sense its sinister reality bleeding into our own. 

The films' first act was my favorite: a Groundhog Day-esque series of truncated "episodes" of It's Buddy are strung together, end-to-end, as we meet the various child actors and their puppet-like friends who inhabit the television world. The mail carrier and nurse are human adults, but there's also a talking train engine, mailbox, backpack, flowers, and a giant friendly rabbit. The show is knowingly creepy -- Kelly clearly had a lot of demented fun riffing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" into a cult chant with adoring lyrics to the orange unicorn --and is designed to prey on millennial discomfort with knowledge of who inhabited those beloved yet inherently uncanny characters. Kelly slows things down with an incredibly deliberate pace, stretching out the film while packing in details and philosophic musings with gobsmacking economy. I think I counted at least three "episodes" before our first possible break from the show's usual format, and it feels like it, though I'm sure barely half an hour had passed by first bloodshed.

Because, dear reader, blood indeed flows. This is no gorefest like I feared, which makes Buddy's chosen moments of violence particularly nasty. No spoilers, but things start fairly tame and mysterious, but when Kelly decides to fuck with us, he doesn't hold back. Buddy himself -- voiced by Keegan-Michael Key -- is patently unhinged, a sort of charismatic and aggressively intimidating cult leader who demands everyone listen and adhere to his sense of how things should be in his world. His purported wisdom gets shallower and more desperate over time, and when he resorts to violence to maintain his control, he does so with a detached, almost cheerful inevitability. With cheerful voice he metes out both instructions and punishments in the style of Mr. Milchick in Severance, a sort of forcedly sweet hierarchical superior's tone that chuckles even as it tells you to obey.

The child actors are all excellent, and the featured adult roles -- especially by Cristin Milioti and Topher Grace -- added a wholly unexpected parallel dimension to the film when they're introduced in its second act. I can't spoil any more about the film's plot or structure because this truly is an experience you need to enter cold. With sly references to things like Beau is Afraid, Poltergeist, and even The Wizard of Oz, Buddy works on several levels simultaneously, engaging your mind and spirit with its twisted sense of what disturbs and unsettles us. While its ending left a bit to be desired from me -- it's shockingly bleak, and seems to want to open the door for a sequel I'm not sure we need -- this one will haunt my waking brain for some time yet.