Saturday, August 16, 2025

Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025)

Incoming

First of all: Weapons is easily the best horror in 2025 to date, an ingeniously written inventively shot and staged film written and directed by Zach Cregger, whose debut feature Barbarian was also an inventive ingenious horror written and directed back in 2022. 

All that out of the way-- (WARNING: plot and surprise twists discussed in close and explicit detail!)

Thursday, August 14, 2025

Eddington (Ari Aster, 2025)

'Who is that masked man?!'

I have yet to warm up to Ari Aster, a talented filmmaker who does inventively staged and shot twists on classic horror but has yet to deliver a cohesive feature. Hereditary his debut starts off with a fairly unique premise-- a mildly dysfunctional family where the horror arises not from supernatural evil or witches' covens but from a peanut allergy; later Aster drags in the evil and covens, in a weak-tea attempt to emulate Rosemary's Baby. Midsommar is Aster's stab at remaking The Wicker Man with twice the budget and half the subtle wit. Beau is Afraid is arguably his most original work-- or at least his work with the most wide-ranging influences such that it seems original, even autobiographical-- and perhaps the one feature I like best to date. 

Eddington feels like a step backwards. Aster starts off well-- he almost always starts off well-- introducing a small town and half a dozen of the interlinked characters of that town, mainly Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and his boss Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and as Phoenix usually plays characters who lean into their awkward grotesqueness and Pascal usually plays charismatic patriarch figures you can be sure these two alpha males will lock horns at the mayor's re-election campaign. 

Monday, August 04, 2025

Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)



Burning down the house

Been years since I saw Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985) and decades since I saw it projected (an unimpressive 16 mm print in an improvised theater). Watching the 2016 4K UHD restoration on the big screen forty years after its premiere is like watching a storm surge approach shore: you're confronted with an unstoppable wall stretching from end to end, and you're not sure whether to run (where to?) or fall on your knees in worship. 

And then you realize, after so many viewings, like a shock of saltwater to the face: damn, but this film is funny.

Monday, July 28, 2025

Fantastic Four: First Steps (Matt Shakman, 2025)


Take four

You wonder why Marvel's First Family (and first collaboration between writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby) would have so much trouble transitioning to the big screen when predecessors (Captain America) and contemporaries (Iron Man; The Avengers) went on to cause a bigger splash; suspect it all stems from something folks behind those efforts remembered that folks behind this team's previous incarnations forgot: that it isn't the cosmic-ray powers that appeal to readers so much as the motivations they hold for fighting crime, supervillains, various forces of evil and injustice. Not the what, to paraphrase a key lesson taught in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, as the why.

Monday, July 21, 2025

Superman (James Gunn, 2025)


The man with the golden Gunn

A lot riding on James Gunn's latest movie: not just the reboot of DC Films (now called DC Studios, with James Gunn and producing partner Peter Safran as co-CEOs) but also a reboot of not just a DC comic book superhero but arguably the foundational superhero (not the first ever but damned close and arguably the most influential)-- in effect, the salvation of an entire movie genre, which lately has been in a box-office slump generating more bad publicity than Elon Musk on a ketamine binge. 

So did Gunn do it? I'd say you're asking the wrong question. 

Thursday, July 17, 2025

The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson, 2025)


Trump, Inked

Wes Anderson should really preface his pictures with a paraphrase of Tolstoy: All Wes Anderson movies are alike; the better Anderson movies are better in their own way. Anderson's work has stylized (some would say calcified) to the point where nonfans have thrown up their hands in despair, while more persistent viewers (fans, even) still flock to screenings, still attempt to suss out what's different in this installment and what Anderson seems up to at the moment.

So it goes with The Phoenician Scheme (2025) and surfacewise I'd argue it's easy to see the diff-- in The Grand Budapest Hotel the palette is decidedly based on different intensities of pink; in The Fantastic Mr. Fox it alternates between earthy brown and fur orange-- very autumnal colors; in Asteroid City it ranges from bright Granny Smith to deep lime; he dabbles in both live action and stop-motion, sometimes with extensive use of miniatures in the former; his tone will range from gratingly twee to deadpan black, and he usually turns a monomaniacal focus on well-off folk with an array of mostly self-inflicted issues.

Again the question, and of course a follow up folks might be interested in: is Anderson's latest different, and is it worth catching? Well let me tell you

Tuesday, July 08, 2025

Jurassic World: Rebirth (Gareth Edwards, 2025)


It's Alive VII: Island of the Alive

As if anything could actually kill the franchise-- comes Jurassic World: Rebirth, and this time it's all dressed up in basic retro: reuse, refurbish, reboot.

New characters, same strategy: bunch of people on island, well equipped well organized; things go pearshaped, and what used to be a mission (fact-finding, creature-hunting) is now an escape drama, the survivors doing best with what they got, mainly wits and guts ready to spill at moment's notice.