Bigger
(WARNING: plot twists and story discussed in explicit detail!)
Digger for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is arguably his most expensive production yet ($125 million officially); for Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise it's September.
The film has been described as 'obnoxious,' 'self-indulgent,' 'pretentious,' and-- possibly most hurtful-- 'delusional;' it's also been called 'brave.'
Dying is easy; comedy, hard.
Of course I was going to check this out-- Zach Cregger's Weapons was one of the more interesting horrors of last year, Barbarians one of the more interesting horrors before that.
Does it deliver? Save you the suspense: yes, but how it delivers is I submit the question to ask.
Coming toon
I saw Dave Green's Coyote vs Acme and-- surprise surprise-- liked it.
Didn't sound promising. The premise itself is looney tunes-- that Wile E. Coyote would finally come to his senses and attempt that most American of undertakings, file a lawsuit against the Acme Corporation; that the case would blow up into a congressional hearing commanding nationwide attention; and that this whole silly drama would be material enough to fill a hundred minute feature.
Not to mention the real-world decision of Warner Discovery to treat the picture as a 30 million dollar tax writeoff; the struggle to find an alternative distributor; the last-minute rescue by Ketchup Entertainment, which bought the movie for fifty million.
The big online fuss surrounding its unlikely commercial release; the basically low boxoffice returns which, most unlikely of all, barely fazes the fans-- no one is blaming Ketchup, and a handful of articles have called the release a 'win' despite the modest numbers.
Marximum overdrive
Boots Riley's I Love Boosters is a truckload of fun. Gang of shoplifters (The Velvet Gang-- Corvette (Keke Palmer), Mariah (Taylour Paige), Sade (Naomi Ackie)) prey on a chain of fashion stores (Metro Designers) owned by ultrarich Christie Smith (Demi Moore); they're joined by Chinese factory worker Jianhu (Poppy Liu) and her band of laborers: high-style hijinks ensue.
(Warning: story and plot twists discussed in explicit detail)
Curry Barker Obsession (2025) is basically W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw," and "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp" meet Fatal Attraction and Misery-- nothing startling new, only he's leaned into the sneaky comic spin of the premise, has a terrific cast to inhabit the roles, and the visual chops to tell the story with snap and zing.
Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme takes its cue from its central character: brassy, loud, unrelentingly annoying, chronicling the life of one Marty Mauser, a nascent shoe salesman and up-and-coming pingpong player. Marty to put it mildly likes to burn both ends of his candle: he hustles players at the local bar; hustles his rich friend Dion (Luke Manley) to finance production of orange pingpong balls with his name printed on them; hustles his married friend Rachel (Odessa A'zion) for sex at the shoe store's back room; hustles his Uncle Murray (Larry Sloman) for $700 to help finance a trip to the British Open in London (to be fair Uncle Murray's hustling Marty too, trying to manipulate the young man into staying on as salesman while having an affair with Marty's mother Rebecca (Fran Drescher)).
Timothee Chalamet trades in his Kwisatch Haderach stillsuit for a long-sleeved blouse unbuttoned to reveal the sweatsoaked undershirt, glues a dead caterpillar to his upper lip the way I assume Guy Gardner likes to sport a bowl cut-- as a loud 'FUCK YOU' to anyone who objects to his grating personality. It's perfect; like him or not as an actor, have to admit this role fits Chalamet's less-than-charming persona to a t, down to the nipples standing defiantly erect 'neath the thin cotton.
(WARNING: details of the film explicitly discussed!)
I remember hearing that for the role of main protagonist (eventually named Dr. William Harford) in Stanley Kubrick's last project (eventually named Eyes Wide Shut) the director considered Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Bill Murray, Albert Brooks.
I shook my head. "No. They aren't right."
"Why not? It's a comedy, well an erotic comedy, and they're comic actors."
I shook my head. "No."
Masquerade
(WARNING: story and plot twists discussed in close and explicit detail)
Saw Tim Burton's Batman Returns on the big screen again after three decades and far as I'm concerned: not just the best onscreen incarnation of the character ever but one of three best examples of its genre, period. Channels a distinct look-- German Expressionism-- with extensive use of miniatures and forced perspective and gigantic sets and minimal digital effects; puts Danny Elfman's creepy-swoony-funny holiday season score to lively use; features a trio (actually a quartet) of stylized performances savoring the sparkling dialogue they've been served (by Daniel Waters)-- as if seated at an extravagant champagne feast of which they've never seen the likes before, and likely never will again.
And the film's so kinky. And subversive. And stuffed to the ears with eat-the-rich sentiment. A lot of frankly explicit jokes, including a scene of Selina (Michelle Peiffer) getting hold of Bruce's (Michael Keaton's) codpiece (prolly helped that Keaton-- clever lad--specifically requested to be able to relieve himself while wearing the costume). You could tell writer and director couldn't care less about the plot, much less the eponymous character (or at least his official job title), much less the source material, and it's a liberating feeling, a pretentious goth art film masquerading as a multimilliondollar superhero movie. Parents were right to be outraged and Warner Brothers was right to be alarmed, and I still wouldn't recommend this to anyone who thinks Pixar and Disney movies are worth watching. This is strictly a one-of-a-kind gloriously bonkers misfire that deserves to be treasured as such.
The neverending struggle
Paul Thomas Anderson has taken Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland and turned it into an epic production about immigration raids, white supremacy, radical leftist groups, generational conflicts, a father's love for his daughter and vice-versa-- the picture feels so overstuffed with high drama low farce and handheld ordnance you don't feel much if any of the 166 minute running time.
I'll call it: easily Anderson's best most ambitious most appealing work to date.
Psychospace
I thought Weapons-- Zach Cregger's brilliantly structured supernatural thriller about seventeen children running out their front doors and vanishing into the night-- was hot shit, arguably the best horror of 2025; along comes Kurosawa Kiyoshi saying "hold my beer."
Incoming
First things first: 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 released in 2022.
With that out of the way-- (WARNING: plot and surprise twists discussed in close and explicit detail!)
'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.
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.
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.
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.
Surface tension
Celine Song's Materialists on the surface is about the business of matchmaking-- an industry on the rise with the difficulty of online dating and of life in general (New York in particular); prices are not mentioned but looking at the clothes the characters wear and the milieu they inhabit you can probably figure it's in the five to six figure range for an annual service.
So the movie looks good and the cast looks handsome and the conversation in the trailer sufficiently sparkled (not Billy Wilder league much less Ernst Lubitsch divine but bubbles popped)-- is the actual experience worth it?
The B-Team*
*(Not the real Avengers)
So about that asterisk in the title-- (skip this one paragraph if you haven't seen the picture!) turns out it's exactly what it signifies, a mark meant to refer to a footnote or omitted matter, in this case the movie's real name The New Avengers, suggesting several things: 1) this is about the level of humor we're getting here on out, more meta and complicated and not that much funnier, and 2) this movie and the characters in it are placeholders for when the real thing arrives.
Which is both unfair and totally appropriate. Thunderbolts* takes the classic premise of misfits so misbegotten they can't possibly work together and somehow contrive that they not only do so but also win the day: think the original The Avengers (2012), or (off the top of my head) Stripes (1981), or before that and without superpowers (or even military hardware) The Bad News Bears (1976); think all the way back to one of the earliest misfit teams ever assembled for impossible missions, Akira Kurosawa's 1954 Seven Samurai, with Florence Pugh in the Kambei Shimada role of putative leader and David Harbour in the Kikuchiyo role of big-hearted comic relief.
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Movie opens with Tim Roth sitting in a diner telling Amanda Plummer the story of a man who walked into a bank. Hands a cellphone to a bank teller; voice tells teller man's daughter is held hostage and will die unless teller gives up money. Roth and Plummer then exchange endearments, pull out guns to announce a stickup. Blackout: guitar on soundtrack while titles in bright red and yellow crawl up the screen.
Welcome to the world of Pulp Fiction, one of the more memorable American films of 1994. Five were nominated for Best Picture Oscars last year: Four Weddings and a Funeral (lightweight); The Shawshank Redemption (pretentious); Quiz Show (plodding); Forrest Gump (simpleminded). Of the five Pulp stands out for being Not Nice, an aggressive, in-your-face ride through the fairly tangled mind of one Quentin Tarantino.
