Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

Score: 5 / 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four Good Days (2021)

 Score: 4 / 5

In the tradition of parent-child trauma-dramas that has spiked in recent years, Four Good Days pits the unlikely duo of Glenn Close and Mila Kunis together in a battle of wits, heart, and drugs. It doesn't quite reach levels unseen in the sub-genre, and it hits pretty much all the predictable milestones until its climax. Even in that, it sacrifices plumbing the depths of dramatic insight in favor of a few didactic stingers and a frantic attempt at kinetic energy otherwise lacking from the film. But those are only really criticisms if you feel that these character dramas -- rather, vehicles for stars -- actually require a plot with momentum. The creators of Ben is Back certainly did.

And yet this movie is only typically like that picture, or the similar Beautiful Boy. The major difference is, obviously, that this movie centers on and almost exclusively considers two women in impossible circumstances. Molly (an almost unrecognizable Kunis) has been through rehab no fewer than fourteen times, and so when she shows up at her mother's doorstep, we can see the history of pain, mistrust, and evaporated love between the two. This is largely because Deb is played by Close, a master of single-look character studies, whose guarded stillness in contrast with the daughter's intoxicated mannerisms tell us chapters worth of backstory in moments. Deb gives Molly anything but a warm welcome, and the two clearly have an understood series of tough boundaries, no doubt due to prior problems with stealing and lying and endangerment.

Deb's heart, however, won't have it, and as Molly sleeps outside on the cold stones, her mother paces indoors and watches her. She wants to believe her daughter is serious about getting clean this time, just as Molly is desperate to get inside the house. In the morning, Deb gets her coffee and promptly takes her to a detox facility. They both know the routine a little too well, and it's all a bit cold. Deb certainly doesn't want to get her hopes up, but she senses something might be different this time. Is it only her weary, wishful thinking?

After three days in the facility, Deb picks up Molly and the doctor makes a shocking offer: an opioid antagonist. Essentially a monthly shot that will prevent Molly from getting high -- which begs the question from ignorant me, won't an addict still try and then overdose after not getting high? -- both Deb and Molly leap at the opportunity. Or at least, they dare to hope this might finally work. The doctor says that Molly must stay clean four more days; that will allow her body to prepare for the shot. Deb brings Molly home with her, and so begins the bulk of the film. It's a cat-and-mouse game of suspicious stares, tense conversations, and forced attempts at normalcy. Suitably hard to watch, the anxious energy the film taps into is firmly rooted in the maternal home, a strange domestic thriller without action but with a lot of heightened emotions and deadly consequences.

The screenplay by director Rodrigo Garcia and reporter Eli Saslow (who wrote the 2016 article that inspired this film), despite often engaging in brutal and honest discussions as well as situations, never quite manages to balance itself. Drifting from heavy-handed and sometimes groan-inducing symbols (an unfinished puzzle in the garage) to otherwise brilliant moments of unspoken tenderness (Deb is an esthetician and provides her services to her daughter in their most intimate scene), the movie only really works because of the dedication and remarkable skills of its cast. Close defies powerful urges to either hang her daughter out to dry or embrace her while knowing she'll pay for it. And Kunis really shows us her mettle as a serious actress, balancing desperation with manipulative ferocity and then shifting to psychological and bodily agony; her unexpected gentle moments hit with the same force as her feral scenes.

The powers of hope and love and perseverance are what make this movie so haunting, memorable, and important. And while that could be said of any of its ilk, at least this one gives us some Glenn Close to put in our eyes. For as long as your eyes aren't pooling with tears.

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

Score: 3 / 5

Science fiction has hit a bit of a roadblock in the last two decades. Nobody really seems to know what it is anymore, in our culture of radically evolving technology, and so most of the mainstream sci-fi flicks have done little more than adapt and expand older franchises. Think of Alien, War of the Worlds, even Star Wars. These may be the staples of the genre, but they have also become the go-to narratives for sci-fi, and so the genre has become conflated with horror, adventure, and even fantasy to such an extent that "sci-fi" as a category can really only be found now in independent films. Sometimes.

Jupiter Ascending is no different. The Wachowskis' newest enterprise feels like a bizarre mash-up of Star Wars concepts and Matrix style, and it flies along at a breathless clip from fight to fight to climactic fight. Its premise is a tad too familiar: sad, hardworking girl is targeted by assassins, hunky hero comes to save her and reveals her true royal identity, and together they fight a vague evil ruler to reclaim the throne and fall in love along the way. Now please excuse me while I gag.

AND YET -- I really liked this movie. Why? Despite its shortcomings in plot and dialogue, its visuals are some of the most striking and beautiful I've seen from a mainstream adventure in years. The costumes are incredible. And (!) the cast: Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne, Sean Bean. Why wouldn't you want to see a bunch of sexies camping up the galaxy and generally being badass? Oh, and I guess it would be worthwhile to mention that, for how much she is objectified through the film (and by the camera), our heroine also asserts herself as a strong, articulate, and intelligent woman without losing her femininity or sex appeal. That's a tough balance to strike, if we look at the history of female leads in this type of film.

That's really about all I can say about the movie. It's not the smartest adventure we'll see this year, and it doesn't have the bright colors of a Marvel Studios picture. But it has a specific brand of comedy -- a sort of pure entertainment -- that stops it from ever getting dark and morbid. And if you allow the pulsing energy to guide you over the faulty logic and vagaries of the script, I promise you'll walk out smiling. Which, if we're being honest, is also a rarity among our millennial sci-fi adventures.

IMDb: Jupiter Ascending