The Invite (2026)

Score: 4.5 / 5

The surprise of the summer! 

An unhappy married couple host their upstairs neighbors for a dinner party that devolves into a nightmarish spiral of social and sexual anxieties. This is exactly my kind of story, its roots deep in theatrical chamber pieces like God of Carnage and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in a certain absurdist lambasting of bourgeois niceties. 

Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen play the primary couple, and their winsomeness is carefully calculated to fracture and tear at key early moments. Each plays their part with energetic conviction, adding rich layers to characters that could be played quite straight. Trapped at home for years in a life that clearly doesn't satisfy, she's been buying expensive (and, frankly, a bit gaudy) materials to spruce up their large and expensive apartment while walking naked by her single-pane window on her community courtyard to catch the eye of a neighbor. He's a miserable band teacher who has lost touch with any inspiration (he was once a promising musician) and hides from the world at home while complaining about a bad back and doing nothing to help himself. They live in wholly separate worlds, and have clearly each attempted therapy without following through; within moments of him returning home on this day, they're hurling passive-aggressive jabs while deflecting with half-baked psychobabble. As they scream at each other in the kitchen, one wonders if their upstairs neighbors who are expected momentarily can hear them.

Which is funny, because half of the fight is about them. Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz, a sexy, worldly couple who have caught the eyes of both Wilde and Rogen separately, are apparently not quiet about their sex life. As the main couple fester in a sexless, loveless hell of their own making, Norton and Cruz have vivacious and very loud sex regularly in the dead of night. Rogen wants to confront them about the noise and establish some sort of dominance; Wilde seems eager to know more about what's happening up there and maybe compete or join. Once the dinner party commences -- which is an unmitigated disaster, for several increasingly hilarious reasons including dietary restrictions, a lack of wine, and the ultimate carnal purpose for the entire evening -- it's clear that the bohemians upstairs are in fact a little too perfect an opportunity for their repressed downstairs neighbors. Not all is well in their world of seemingly unbridled pleasure. 

Without having seen the 2020 Spanish film on which this is based, I admire writers Will McCormack and Rashida Jones for their incisive, kinetic screenplay that keenly and knowingly dives into the darker and more graphic subtext found in most sex-adjacent sitcoms. These jokes aren't salacious in nature or mean-spirited about who deserves pleasure and fulfillment in any kind of puritanical schema; rather, they take a frank look at people being genuinely curious while also being riddled with anxiety and demonstrate the inherent humor of being forced to reckon with oneself while trying something new in a nonjudgmental way. This refreshing approach is bolstered by four top-notch performances, each of which deserves an award.

Wilde herself directs this venture, which is saying a lot because her performance was the standout for me, with an aesthetic visually more in line with a thriller. Somewhat drab lighting in frames upon frames -- doorways and windows constantly restrict movement of these characters in their starkly artificial world -- makes the film appear a little jaundiced in its sickly amber pools of light. Her pacing is fast and I found myself cackling aloud in the cinema while sometimes chiding myself for laughing at certain moments of insults and cruelties. It's apparent that this is originally based on a play, and I'd love to see it live. Wilde succeeds, in making it a film, by deftly and artfully controlling the scope of our reactions to every beat -- awkward, horny, and hilarious -- as they come. The first act might throw some viewers off because of the forceful directorial approach (by which I mean the cinematography and editing, both firing on all cylinders from the first scene), but once you settle in to her style, you can start collecting boons. When the music starts interjecting slasher-movie stings in the middle of a particularly funny and tense scene, I found myself thinking that Wilde was parodying Hitchcock in a clever blend of Psycho and The Trouble with Harry. 

By the second half, things calm down a bit visually and aurally, and the actors rise to the occasion to carry us through the climax and denouement with some career-best work. Where she started the film encouraging us to judge the characters, she opens up in the final act with a more mature approach, allowing the film and actors to breathe, and us by extension. This is a slice of life; strange, funny, and earnest, meant to remind us that what connects us all isn't necessarily money or sex but something a bit more mysterious and satisfying. Purpose and communication, negotiation and patience, kindness and hospitality; these things should matter more than they do in 2026 America, and films like this help us cut through the confusion to find our profound shared humanity. The laughter and sex just help us swallow the pill.

Moana (2026)

Score: 3 / 5

I've long been an apologist for Disney's live action remakes, for reasons shared elsewhere on this blog. And despite not liking a handful of them, I find myself of a new opinion entirely when it comes to the new Moana: utter ambivalence.

While it's patently silly for Disney to remake something only a decade old, this is the kind of material they should be adapting. Human-centered narratives, in my apparently controversial opinion, should center the human element, so I tend to prefer such stories in live action. Why we haven't, then, gotten the likes of Hercules or The Hunchback of Notre Dame is beyond my comprehension, while Lady and the Tramp and its ilk fill up Disney+ with nightmare fuel. Animation is exactly for stories that cannot be told by real people in front of real cameras: stories like The Little Mermaid or Treasure Planet that would be almost entirely animated anyway. Yet in this expensive-looking production, I could not help but find myself annoyed that so much appeared to be CGI, and not much of it of more realistic quality than in the animated original.

Yet director Thomas Kail (mostly a theatre director, but whose Fosse/Verdon is still criminally underappreciated) and his extensive production team (including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Dwayne Johnson, returning to his role as Maui, and Auli'i Cravalho, who does not appear but who sings a new song during the credits) take great pains to make this film an almost shot-for-shot remake. One wonders why. The history of "The Long Pause" is intriguing, and surely within the past ten years there has been sufficient research into Polynesian history and interest in culture in general to have improved the storytelling of this otherwise simple plot and its straightforward themes. And in a year when The Odyssey will surely sweep the summer (and yearly) "best of" lists, it feels odd that Moana couldn't expand her horizons and seek out any new adventures.

The material literally sings for an inexplicable compulsion, a call from beyond the familiar to prove oneself and save one's home. Why, then, are we locked into the exact same screenplay with the exact same adventures? Only two years ago, Moana 2 gave us more options to play with -- though we can certainly debate the value of those options -- so this feels like a disappointing return to basics. Apart from a couple new guffaw-inducing jibes from Johnson's narcissist demigod, even the laughs are exactly the same, down to precisely timed beats involving the braindead google-eyed sidekick Heihei. 

Thankfully, it's all very fun and very pretty, much like the original. The ocean, delightfully animated in its fantasy, pseudo-anthropomorphized form, is wonderfully rendered, and I certainly don't tire of the tropical vistas of thickly jungled islands. Rena Owen is the pulsing heart of the film as Moana's grandmother who sets her on her quest and returns like a Force-ghost in Moana's climactic turn; her gravitas and whimsy combine in an effective characterization that wrung tears from my eyes more than once. Jemaine Clement returns, too, as Tamatoa, the monstrous crab who hoards shiny things, in a replicated scene of the original film's standout moment, but his voice does feel tired and uninspired this time around. Too bad he wasn't given some fresh material to crack open and masticate.

The strength of this movie lies almost solely in its human element. To that end, the film's first act is easily its strongest, as Moana is chosen by the ocean as a child and as she grows into her father's daughter, a chief-in-training to lead her island's people. The first big musical number is magnificent, and I found myself repeatedly wishing that Kail leaned even more into his theatre background and away from the original film. How much more satisfying it would be to have long takes of masses of Motunui islanders harvesting coconuts and fish while dancing and singing, instead of cartoon-esque choppy edits and eye-popping set pieces! Yet in seeing real people in gorgeous production design, we are nevertheless transported into an escapist fantasy as Disney does best. Alas, we must settle for what we've been given, and its mediocrity and redundancy won't work for everyone, though I had a lovely time singing along in my otherwise empty cinema.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

Opening immediately after the end of the first film, the film centers on Grace as her horrors continue. In a nice long take focused on Samara Weaving's face as she collapses and is carried into an ambulance, Grace blacks out but is resuscitated, each jolt reminding us of key flashbacks to the traumatic night she's just endured. The Le Domas family is no more -- well, apart from her now bearing their surname, legally -- and in case you missed the first one and for some reason started with the sequel, we're given some nice exposition early on. Grace's estranged sister Faith (yes, there's a jab about Catholic names) is her emergency contact and arrives as Grace is handcuffed to her bed, under suspicion of unspeakable things to the Le Domas family and estate.

But, as they do in all things, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and writer Guy Busick handle the our return to this world with wit and style. Even exposition dumps are riddled with humor and nihilism, earned by what they know fans loved about the first film. Swiftly, a new plan is hatched as the young women are attacked in the hospital and spirited away. We're shown a new assemblage of wealthy assholes, representatives of various families associated with the diabolic Mr. Le Bail (apparently literally the Devil), gathering at a remote estate; these new characters have been summoned to partake in a new "game" of sorts: a battle to vie for the High Seat of "the Council," a group of elites who have made Faustian deals and who now secretly control the world. One (played by David Cronenberg himself) is introduced to us as watching news footage of a war and calling someone privately to have a ceasefire, which is immediately enacted on screen. 

Unfortunately, this means that it's double or nothing. The Council families will each send a representative at a time to kill the young women, and they'll be replaced by their own reserves. It's shockingly bleak for our heroines, one of whom is still quite injured from the previous day's exploits, the other of whom has to suddenly believe all this capitalistic, satanic insanity and simultaneously try to survive it. One imagines with agony the kind of physical stress these women underwent to make this film; they capably pull off what was surely a grueling shoot of goopy, sticky, slimy special effects and tons of fight choreography, to say nothing of all the running they do. 

Their deadly game board this time is a sizable, rural estate of many acres. What, in the first film, was a sort of flip on the Gothic whodunnit, is here a Grand Guignol vision of The Most Dangerous Game or The Hunt from a few years ago. Things seem even less fair this time around, even lorded over as they are by a delightfully perky Elijah Wood as a sort of cabal secretary or consigliere to these evil families. Their representatives are bizarre and hilarious as they arm themselves and prepare for the chase, especially Kevin Durand doing what he does and Nestor Carbonell with a caricatured Spanish accent through what seem to be exaggeratedly false teeth. 

While the filmmakers are never less than inventive, engrossing, and wildly entertaining, they do expand the scope of what's happening in a big way. That's normal for sequels, of course, and in a lot of ways this literally doubles the good stuff from before. But if you, like me, liked the restrictions in the first film with its limited cast and setting, you might find yourself both overwhelmed and numb to the much-expanded proceedings. There are too many characters for any to have much presence beyond an initial impression or superlative characteristic. Each has a spectacular death as well, which begin to feel camp as things get messy. Spontaneous bloody combustions happen fairly frequently this time around. The expanded mythology, too, is well-designed and sure to lead to yet more installments, but the lack of mystery does make things less intellectually stimulating. We already know Mr. Le Bail is not to be trifled with and that all the conspiracy is true, and so apparently does everyone else; whereas the Le Domases were torn on their belief, everyone in this film knows what's at stake.

Yet the film takes a few steps that are so intense and upsetting that I hesitate labeling it camp or even macabre satire. First, there's the rather shocking treatment of violence against women. Obviously that was a central theme in the first film -- the iconic bloody wedding dress is evidence enough -- but here, for the first time, I got uncomfortable to the point of squirming distraction as the two leading women were so viciously tortured on screen. There's one scene in particular when Faith (a wonderful Kathryn Newton, by the by) is beaten so brutally I had to avert my eyes, something I almost never do, because the camera and edit just lingers on it so long. The other is the wicked twin pair of Shawn Hatosy and Sarah Michelle Gellar, who are lovably nasty and almost sympathetic until a crucial climactic moment when Hatosy reveals that his evil is real. Without spoilers, suffice to say that his Patrick Bateman-like quirks are indeed fueled by hellish motivation, and when he shows his true face, he's quite scary.

While I'm still angry they haven't yet followed up with more Scream, I guess I can be happy that they chose to continue work on this material over something like Abigail. 

Scream 7 (2026)

Score: 3.5 / 5

"What's your favorite scary movie?" Kevin Williamson, the brilliant writer behind my favorite horror franchise, returns this time in double duty as both writer and director to a series foundering in the wake of some awful producing decisions. Without going into the muck of the business, suffice to say that the exciting plots and characters of Scream 5 and Scream 6 are on a bit of a hiatus (let us hope not abandoned permanently). Given his thankless job of taking the reins from what was clearly a planned trilogy and trying something different, independent, and ultimately safe, Williamson performs a Herculean task here to mostly successful results. While this will almost certainly rank lowly among fan favorites, I do think it's important to always take the art on its own terms; as such, we'll not be discussing the casting/directing/writing upsets that led us to this point, and rather focusing on the film itself and its place within its series.

Unlikely as it might seem after so very much crime there, the Macher house yet stands in Woodsboro, California. Drawn to the "true crime" setting of his own favorite serial killers -- and enthusiastically aware of the long-festering rumors of Stu's possible survival -- a young man and his girlfriend book the large estate as a sort of AirBnb for a spooky night. Given the material's tendency to blur the lines between history and reality, trauma and reckoning, heroism and cruelty, it's a bit surprising that we haven't really seen this yet; usually, it's Gale profiting off the fictionalized lives of others, yet here (and in our digital age) we see a potential nobody profiting off the tragedies that have occurred in this storied house. Who owns the Macher residence now? Who knows? Like the inevitable killer lurking in plain sight in the decked-out Halloween-esque attraction, it could be anyone.

Chandelier-related kill and all, the opening is effective and had me thrilled to be back in the world of Scream. We immediately shift to our protagonist: Neve Campbell back again in the spotlight as Sidney Prescott, of course. And while it makes sense -- indeed, easily could have been the character's development far sooner -- it's pretty damn cool to see her as a mother whose daughter is now being threatened by the horrors plaguing her life. Sid is a bit too strict and cold for my preference, but Campbell plays mama bear with a firm rigidity that hearkens to Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode in her final three Halloween titles. The difference is that Sid seems to not want to deal with Tatum as a burgeoning adult; she won't talk about sex with her daughter specifically, though she's aware of Tatum sneaking boys into her room. Even Tatum's name suggests a curious choice from her mother; similarly, Williams kept Mark as the name of Sid's husband (after being mentioned briefly before), but for some inexplicable and infuriating reason, it's not Mark Kincaid (Patrick Dempsey) but rather Mark Evans (Joel McHale), who is coincidentally the police chief. It's just an insulting switch for fans, not least because McHale plays Mark as kind of creepy.

Thankfully, Williams seems aware that, if we're not continuing the same story from Scream 6, we probably don't care about the plot. So he doesn't focus on character development for legacy folks. Instead, he launches into a series of solidly entertaining kills with enough intrigue around each to propel the whodunnit mystery forward. There's a stylish and memorable theatre kill, though one any theatre artist will decry as being outrageous; it's gotta be one of the most unsafe tech rehearsals ever, with a terrible teacher and stage manager. Soon after, there's a brutal, intense Ghostface attack in Sid's home. By this point, the film has revealed that it's playing things safe: this is a run-of-the-mill slasher whodunnit with characters we love. I don't hate that; frankly, if the worst this franchise can do is spin an entertaining variation on familiar ideas, I'll take it any day over more than half the shlock pumped direct to streaming. Yet, as a fan who knows what Williamson and this series is capable of, it's disappointing to see them not taking bigger risks. Even the cinematography feels more like something out of the classic Weinstein Company catalog than something from Dimension; bland, amber lighting and too much unnecessary editing sap what should be a dynamic vision of shadow and LED while forcing us to exist in real time and space with visceral kills.

Unfortunately, the cast of characters assembled here feel both rote and archetypal at this point, and none are given much opportunity to shine. Their collective energy simply doesn't electrify us, even as they discuss Important Themes like AI and societal collapse; unfortunately, it all feels a bit "too little, too late," not unlike listening to an old man complain about his 2020 election results six years after the fact. When Gale finally shows up -- looking fabulous, as usual -- she's joined by the two Meekses, Chad and Mindy, who are a breath of fresh air in this film. Weird as it is to see them without the other half of their "Core Four," Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding are as likable and endearing as ever, even if their reasoning for working with Gale is murky at best. All together, the heroes set the metafictional stage for us: Trauma is their life. Actually, once the killers are revealed, one of them literally says that to Sid, in the film's most glaring move into metafiction. And what trauma! Much like in the previous two films, these kids are brutalized in this film; Mark, who I would have been fine to see go in favor of the real Mark coming back into Sid's life, inexplicably survives.

While I liked the killer's use of AI to literalize "ghost faces" of previous Ghostfaces, I wish Williamson had leaned into it more. These films work because they are timely and state-of-the-art, bound by the technology of their setting. But Williamson shies away from it, instead trying to make a connection between new tech and old memories; I don't think it works to have nostalgia be a driving force for a film in this franchise. Yet moments of nostalgia that could only speak to real fans do land well. I'm thinking of Sid finally allowing Gale to interview her, including Roman in the lineup of killers, and the legitimately terrifying slow-mo reveal of the second killer, all of which are not really meant to gain new fans but are very much geared to satisfy longtime fans.

Yet the idea of self-help being a gateway to insanity and murder is so tasty that I cannot deny loving this movie. I love the fun whodunnit, the occasional grisly spectacle, the genuinely scary knives-behind-every-door suspense. And I love that this franchise just keeps going.

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.