EDDINGTON

Directing: B-
Acting: A-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+

Soooo how many times are we going to keep writing Ari Aster a blank check just because his first two movies were the critical and commercial successes Hereditary and Midsummar? Maybe someone needs to convince him to stick with horror. Or maybe just stop making movies with Joaquin Phoenix?

There are multiple ironies here, not least of which is the fact that Joaquin Phoenix is by far the best thing in both Beau Is Afraid (a deeply unpleasant, three-hour panic attack) and Eddington, which is a straight up mess of a movie with a few redeeming qualities (like Phoenix’s performance). Another irony is that Eddington attempts to be a snapshot of the pandemic-era zeitgeist of “late May 2020,” and that was the exact month in which I finally gained the courage to watch Hereditary for the first time.

I think most of us have a perfectly vivid memory of what it felt like in May 2020, arguably the greatest collective trauma experienced across every nation around the world in a solid century. Eddington fails to reflect that moment, five years later, with any real accuracy or authenticity—hard as it tries. Granted, it seems to be going for satire, maybe half the time. The other half of the time I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was going for.

As early as April 2020, I shared, in part, that the way pop culture reflects this uniquely global experience for a long time to come was going to be interesting. Predictably, however, we haven’t gotten a lot of it: Covid-19 remains too recent (not to mention variants of it still going around to this day) for people want to revisit that collective trauma. It also remains relevant that a pandemic where millions died but for most of us the challenge was just loneliness and monotony does not provide much opportunity for excitement in a medium like film. So it’s understandable Ari Aster would gravitate toward the turbulent nationwide fallout of the George Floyd murder and subsequent violent protests, and how that fallout eventually makes its way to a fictional New Mexico town with a rivalry between its sheriff (Phoenix) and its mayor (Pedro Pascal), who are running against each other in the upcoming election.

I’m just not sure Ari Aster is the right person to tackle these things. If, say, Spike Lee or Jordan Peele had made this movie, it probably would have been good—it could have been great. As made by Aster, it’s not terrible. It’s just consistently baffling, and leaves you with a lot of questions—and not the kind of unanswered questions that make a movie more intriguing. These are the kinds of unanswered questions that makes you think: What the fuck did I just watch?

I don’t know what the population of Eddington is supposed to be, but it’s clearly meant to be very small. Filming took place partly in Truth or Consequences. New Mexico, which has a population of just over 6,000. Maybe I just don’t know enough about politics, but is it normal or a mayoral candidate of a town of such size to hold a major fundraiser six months before the election? Don’t even get me started on the scene in which Phoenix’s Joe Cross hosts a “town hall” in a local restaurant, the few attendees sitting silent (and masked) at dining tables, not one of them saying a word through Joe’s rambling speech being recorded for his socials. In what universe would not one of those people pipe up and say anything during this event—which, by the way, occurs during a contentious protest that forms all of a block away outside?

There’s a lot of White protesters who openly express their White guilt in over-written and obvious ways, clearly designed as the aforementioned satire, but never quite landing. It consistently feels contrived in a misguided way, and like something people on the right could easily misinterpret as just making fun of “woke people.” Aster’s ideas are far more nuanced than that—he just can’t seem to make the ideas come together coherently.

Both Emma Stone and Austin Butler are among the most talented actors working today, and their talents get wasted in supporting parts that never connect. Stone plays Joe’s wife, Louise, who has a peculiar romantic past with Pascal’s Mayor Ted Garcia but which has been misrepresented in local media. Butler plays the quasi-cult leader Louise eventually gravitates toward. There’s a scene in which Louise and her mother (Deirdre O’Connell) arrive home late in the evening, Austin Butler’s weirdly charismatic character and another couple in tow. This guy shares a story of bizarre childhood abuse with so many plot holes that even Joe starts to pick it apart. This might be the moment when the audience also first says: Huh? It’s certainly the point at which Eddington lost me, and it’s not even the point at which it goes completely off the rails.

I would say that both Beau Is Afraid and Eddington are roughly equal in quality, albeit for different reasons. Eddington is certainly more pleasant to watch and more entertaining, although in its final act it descends into a chaos that is very similar to the entire runtime of Beau Is Afraid. What they have in common is excellent performances—this is clearly Aster’s greatest strength, and I am increasingly interested in seeing how he would do directing someone else’s script. And while Beau Is Afraid was far too long especially for its unending sense of foreboding and anxiety, Eddington feels like it was also made as a three-hour movie, then whittled down to its current 148-minute runtime, somehow cutting out the scenes that would have made it make sense.

The opening shot is of a homeless man with some kind of mental health issue, walking into town. Call him Chekhov’s homeless man: he turns up multiple times again, until he’s predictably part of a pivotal plot turn. In the middle of the movie, there is a hard cut to a group of agitators on an airplane, clearly headed for Eddington, after Instagram video of Sheriff Joe wrestling the homeless man to the floor in a bar is shared. There have long been stories of agitators perpetrating violence among otherwise peaceful protests just to sow greater unrest and damage collective reputations, and in Eddington Ari Aster takes this idea to their most wildly violent conclusions—to what end, is very unclear. He does fold in Joe’s two local deputies, one White (Luke Grimes) and one Black (an excellent Michael Ward), just so he can show what Joe initially declares “a them problem” before the problem creeps its way inevitably into the relationships between the three of them.

Aster is just throwing everything at the wall here. The first conflict, which is the initial frustration before everything else strains the entire community as too much for them to handle, is the debate over public policy regarding mask wearing. When Joe walks maskless through a grocery store and explains the difference between public policy and law, he’s technically right, but that doesn’t make him any less of an asshole. Conversely, Mayor Ted Garcia is portrayed as nakedly ambitious and disingenuous, even if he’s correctly obsessed with following public policy. Eddington features almost no characters who are likable or empathetic (Michael the Black deputy comes closest), and this is an excusable choice only with either truly successful satire or a film with an unmistakable point of view. Eddington is neither, leaving us instead with a truly random and wild choice in its final scene. And trust me, you’ll never guess what happens in that final moment—not even while watching the movie, not until the very moment it happens. You’ll leave the theater saying, “What the fuck?” and that about sums it up.

Can’t we all just get along? Maybe if we got better movies!

Overall: B-

JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH

Directing: B-
Acting: B-
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

Talk about a diluted franchise. Steven Spielberg’s original, 1993 film, Jurassic Park, is easily one of the greatest blockbuster movies ever made, and people have now tried six more times to recapture its magic, with varying degrees of never fully succeeding. In terms of box office, the reboot Jurassic World (2015) came the closest. Ironically, even though it felt like a significant comedown, Jurassic Park’s first sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park came closest in quality. It was the only other one also directed by Spielberg, at least—and is really the only other one that still had the same sense of wonder, alongside the monster menace.

Reporters love to note that Jurassic World made the most money out of any film in this franchise, but what they constantly ignore is that figure being in unadjusted dollars. Adjusted for inflation, Jurassic Park remains the biggest grossing film in the franchise by a fair margin—by that metric, it remains the 18th-most successful movie ever made in the U.S. Jurassic World ranks 30th, and The Lost World: Jurassic Park ranks 113th, much further down the list but notably higher than any of the other sequels.

No one even thinks about Jurassic Park III (2001) anymore. Even though Jurassic World was itself a massive success, rebooting the franchise 14 years after the end of the original trilogy, it could also be said that no one thinks about its two sequels anymore either: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), which was flawed but still pretty fun upon rewatch; and Jurassic World Dominion (2022), which held exciting promise by combining that trilogy’s cast with the cast of the original film, only to turn out to be hot garbage, easily the worst movie of either trilogy.

Should Hollywood leave well enough alone, then? Of course not! All of three years later, let’s . . . do another reboot! Functionally that’s sort of what Jurassic World: Rebirth is, although it has too much in common with its immediate predecessors to feel too separate from them, even with an entirely new cast. And let’s be honest, Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey are all far more compelling than Bryce Dallas Howard, and arguably at this point, even Chris Pratt.

Here’s the downside of these otherwise incredibly charismatic actors in Rebirth: I could not possibly give less of a shit about their characters. Scenes offering us backstory near the beginning of the film are so dull, I thought about how I’d rather be napping. This film takes some time to get to any real dinosaur action—one of several allusions to the original Jurassic Park (something even Jurassic World did, making this a bit like a copy of a copy)—but what made Jurassic Park work so incredibly well even in scenes with no action was its clever humor, vibrant performances, and genuinely compelling characters. At the end of Rebirth, when one of the principal characters turns up alive when everyone else was terrified they were dead, I found myself thinking: I’d have way more respect for this movie if the six-limbed mutant “Distorus Rex” suddenly appeared and ate that person after all.

So yes, this time around, a large number of the dinosaurs are cross-bred mutants. We meet the Distorus Rex in the opening sequence, a flashback from “17 years ago” introducing us to the second-ugliest creature ever to appear in this franchise. (The ugliest, and also the stupidest looking, would still be the feathered Pyroraptor from Dominion.) They even talk about how these genetically mutated creatures were not something any park goers wanted to see. So why do they think movie goers want to see them? Distorus Rex doesn’t even look like a real dinosaur. It looks like the xenomorph from Alien crossed with the Elephant Man.

It really kind of sounds like I hated this movie, doesn’t it? Nope! I just . . . didn’t love it. Distorus Rex aside, Rebirth still has a whole bunch of other creatures that are very cool, in sequences that are very exciting. Granted, no part of any of them is original: much of Rebirth just feels like a cross between the original Jurassic Park, Jaws (particularly the boat sequences, complete with characters shooting nonlethal devices at the sea creatures), and King Kong (specifically the sequence where they visit an island that turns out to be still inhabited with dinosaurs). Those are all great movies, at least, and when Rebirth pays homage to them, it generally does them well. Which is to say: when it’s focused on the characters, this movie is dull as hell. But when the dinosaurs start eating people, it cooks.

It was easy to feel optimistic, having the likes of Gareth Edwards as director, and David Koepp—who wrote the scripts or both Jurassic Park and The Lost World—as the writer. It may be relevant to note that Koepp is 62 now, and not exactly brimming with the original ideas he once had. (Or maybe he just needs to work with the right director: his script for Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, also released this year, was excellent.) This time out, he shoehorns a completely unrelated family into the plot: a divorced dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is sailing across the Atlantic with his two daughters (played by Luna Blaise and Adrian Miranda) and the older daughter’s boyfriend (David Iacono), and they inevitably get their boat capsized by a giant sea creature. Johansson & crew hear the distress call in their own boat, go to rescue them, and that’s the only reason why the Delgado Family winds up tagging along on a misguided and harrowing adventure.

What exactly are they doing then, you ask? Just kidding, you didn’t ask. Nobody cares! Except it’s so dumb, I’m going to tell you anyway: they need blood samples from live specimens of the largest dinosaurs of those now thriving only in the equatorial region, so they can use it to cure heart disease. Because they have such huge hearts, you see! Whatever, move along, next we have another thrilling action set piece.

None of these movies have ever been plausible, not even the original Jurassic Park—although that one at the very least had adjacency to plausibility, a clever conceit that could sound real enough to the uneducated. They’ve just gotten dumber as they went along, but they all work when characters are getting chased and sometimes eaten by menacing dinosaurs. (This was the fatal flaw in 2022’s Dominion: nobody cares about giant mutant locusts. We want dinosaurs!)

It could be argued that the action setpieces are more satisfying throughout the film in Rebirth than any of these movies at least since Jurassic World. Gareth Edwards knows how to shoot this kind of stuff with a sense of scale, if not always wonder—that’s kind of his thing. It’s the wonder, really, that’s missing here. But at least it has heart stopping thrills, and that’s all anyone is going to these movies for.

Mutadon? More like MutaDUMB!

M3GAN 2.0

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

I go to the movie so often, I often have to sit through trailers to the same movie so many times that, even if I am interested in the movie, I get deeply sick of the trailer. MEGAN 2.0 was a prime example of this, and it also means I committed a great deal of that trailer to memory—against my will. There’s M3GAN breaking through a giant doll box to strangle a man. There’s M3GAN saying to rival robot AMELIA (“Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android”), “I’ll make you a deal. You can kill Gemma, but don’t touch Cady,” before an exasperated Gemma (Allison Williams) snaps, “M3gan!” (She pronounces the 3 as an “e.”) And best of all, there’s the obviously-gay stan in a blonde wig who says, “I don’t care if she did kill four people. She is a smoking’ hot warrior princess!”

Except: none of these slips from the trailer are actually in the theatrically released cut of the movie. This is fairly common, as editing of the full film typically isn’t done when trailers are cut. But it seems particularly egregious here—some of the most fun stuff used to sell us on the movie isn’t even in the movie. Are we supposed to wait around for a “director’s cut,” or what? Of this?

The original M3GAN (2022) got surprisingly good reviews. I thought it was fine. To be fair, it seems to work better as a re-watch: I watched it again to refresh my memory before going to see this sequel, and I think I enjoyed it more the second time around. I still stand by the solid B I gave it. M3GAN 2.0 isn’t faring quite as well with critics. It is objectively less-good than its predecessor, but let’s be real: not by a huge margin. There is some bonkers-ridiculous shit that happens in this movie (in what universe would an obvious home invasion turn out to be the FBI coming in with a search warrant? Well—this one!), and yet: I still found myself having a pretty good time in spite of it all.

Perhaps the most obvious thing about M3GAN 2.0 is its existence as a reaction to an original film that found far greater success than anyone expected, thanks to a sneakily campy tone that did not fully reveal itself until the second half of the movie. Now, not only is most of the principal cast returning (including Violet McGraw as Cady, now three years older), but so are the writers (Aleka Cooper and James Wan) and the director, Gerard Johnstone. The only difference there is that this time around Johnstone is also getting a writer credit. And what every one of these people are trying to do is transparently to catch lightning in a bottle. This predictably proves impossible, mostly because it can no longer be sly about its subtle camp—and yet, it does get closer than you might expect.

They also go very obviously for a Terminator 2 version of M3GAN, where the character who was the lethal villain in the original film is brought back to become the hero, and fight against a more advanced villain. To 2.0’s credit, M3GAN the character remains pretty threatening and sinister well after getting re-introduced into this new story. The greater threat now is AMELIA, this one an android played fully by a real human (Ivanna Sakhno, perfection the art of not-blinking). It also takes a page from the Alien franchise, dialing down the horror from the original film and leaning into action.

You may be sensing a theme here, in that there aren’t really any original ideas to be found. There’s still joy in the project, and that is still to be found in the tone: M3GAN’s bitchy attitude; some of her tone deaf decisions (there’s a scene of her singing a song to Gemma at the wrong moment and I got a kick out of it); even the multiple choices clearly mirroring similar moments in the first film. Some of it lands better than others; when we get a M3GAN dance at an unexpected moment in this movie, it doesn’t work anywhere near as it did the first time around precisely because now we’re expecting it, waiting for it to happen.

Part of what made M3GAN work as well as it did—to the extent that it did work—was the character’s very size: she’s small for a girl, big for a doll, but still quite obviously a doll. This time, when Gemma redesigns her, M3GAN says “Make me taller.” This makes her a bit less effective as an amusingly creepy doll, but at least she remains markedly shorter than any of the adult humans around.

No one expects a movie like this to be plausible, but some of this stuff threatens suspension of disbelief, even by M3GAN standards. If she can construct an entire basement lair complete with wall screens and furnishings, why in the world would she need Gemma and her colleagues to help construct her an upgraded body? But whatever, when she and AMELIA are fighting, it’s fun—especially AMELIA’s cleverly gruesome kills. The action is actually used more sparingly than it needs to be, but the restraint on that front actually helps it work.

I suppose there can also be too much restraint, though. The original film was a perfect length at 102 minutes. M3GAN 2.0 is a solid two hours, which, for a movie like this, is . . . not perfect. There’s actually more to enjoy than you might expect in this film, but the flip side is how it can give you too much of a good thing. The marketers of this movie clearly attempted to capitalize on a character that instantly became a camp icon, but such things never land exactly as desired when you have to work so hard at it.

It works well enough, though. M3GAN 2.0 is mostly ridiculous and stupid, and these are things the movie knows about itself, which made it easier for me to just enjoy it for what it is, which is postmodern horror with a lot of deliberately weird humor. Even as it turned out definitively less good than the original, I kind of hope they make a M3GAN 3.0. And you never know, the next one could be better! We just won’t talk about the inevitable downsides of planned obsolescence.

You’re gonna let me finish no matter how long it takes!

Overall: B-

ELIO

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Animation: B+

Elio had its hooks into me from the very beginning. I really thought, until all the alien stuff started happening, that I might love this movie in a way I haven’t loved a Pixar film in a while, since their early days of one animated feature masterpiece after the other.

In retrospect, that was kind of the point. After thirty years of cinema history, Pixar has a playbook, and Elio very much follows it. I could mention who wrote the script, but who has time for that? This movie has nine credited writers. It feels a little like an advanced AI was prompted to “write a Pixar movie.” Opening sequence with overtones of incongruous sadness? Check! Lonely child protagonist who has lost either one or both parents? Check! Eventual non-human buddy for said child designed or optimum merchandising potential? Check!

Maybe I’ve just gotten old and cynical, but unfortunately, Pixar is feeling its age a bit as well. I was charmed well enough by Elio, but I could also see that it worked because of a well-worn and successful formula. The story is permeated by layers of familiarity. Pixar is supposed to be pushing the boundaries of the form, but Elio often feels like a cross between E.T. and Finding Nemo, at least in terms of its world-building.

Don’t get me wrong. Small children will almost certainly love this movie. Not that small children have standards. I long for the days of Pixar’s revolutionary depth of sophistication, both visual and thematic. WALL-E (2008) or Inside Out (2015), this is not. This is more on par with Onward (2020) or Luca (2021), more recent titles that push Pixar closer to the realm of “generic.” Elio is certainly flashier than those other recent films, and as such will probably dazzle kids more successfully, with its alien characters that are wildly varied, in both physical form and personality.

There’s still something missing, though, a certain depth of imagination. The visuals here are rendered well, but they take sometimes surprisingly rudimentary form. When Elio is sucked through a portal from earth by the aliens he so desperately wants to be abducted by, the tunnel of shifting lights and forms he glides through are patterns of simple goemetric shapes.

Elio begins with a huge amount of potential—even as it recognizably tugs at our heartstrings, introducing us to his aunt, Olga (Zoe Saldaña), who is still getting used to taking care of Elio (Yonas Kibreab) after the death of his parents. Olga being too busy with work to pay enough attention to him, and Elio’s deep loneliness and difficulty connecting, is all very familiar territory. But then we find out he is obsessed with connecting with life on other planets, and in particular the Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977 and equipped with a “Golden Record,” pressed with greetings in many languages from Earth.

Both Voyager 1 and the Golden Record figure prominently in the plot of Elio, which is easy to imagine catching the attention of anyone with an obsession with the intersection of science and history. Elio lends these artifacts appropriate thematic weight—until it doesn’t. In the end, these things are just used as plot devices for something . . . cute. If it ignites interest in any other kids in these artifacts, I suppose that’s a plus. But the story of Elio takes everything predictably back to themes of familial connection, using alien characters, half of which look like exotic sea creatures and half of which look like robots, as the vessel.

Elio himself is a delightful, charming, and deeply empathetic character, voiced well by Yonas Kibreab and rendered with visual nuance. The same goes for Olga, and the arc of these two, disconnected and then finding each other, was indeed something that moved me. I even got teary-eyed a couple of times. A formula that works is still a formula, and it’s the trappings that really make all the difference in greatness. Once aliens hear Elio’s call to come and get him, Elio spends much more time on standard cuteness than on anything truly meaningful.

Perhaps I ask too much of this movie. Indeed, not every movie has to mean something. My issue here is that Pixar spent years setting an industry standard, and now other studios are meeting that standard more than they do. It makes me sad. For the most part, Elio works—but, it works as a fairly generic entertainment, one that no one will be talking about generations from now, certainly not like they do with Toy Story or Finding Nemo or even Inside Out (all of which got boosts from sequels, granted—but good ones, all of them better than Elio).

I am constantly saying a movie should be judged on its own terms. That’s just the trouble with Elio, though: none of its terms are really its own. It’s a Frankenstein of Pixar films, stitched from previously used elements that saw better days in their previous lives. I had a pretty good time watching it, I smiled a lot, I suppose that counts for something. I’m also going to post this review and then get on with my life without ever really thinking about this movie again.

We know how to have fun, right?

Overall: B-

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B+

The burning question right now is this: what was the point of a live-action remake of the Dreamworks Animation hit How to Train Your Dragon, all of fifteen years later? What purpose does it serve, aside from greater box office earnings?

I’m coming up short on an answer. When the original animated film was released in 2010, one of my minor complaints was about its “needlessly breakneck pace from start to finish,” in a film with a runtime of 98 minutes. With this 2025 live-action remake, however, the runtime is 125 minutes—and that feels about 20 minutes too long.

Disney has already cashed in on a string of live-action remakes of classic animated features, which were also mostly pointless but for their box office potential. Dreamworks is apparently eager jump on this bandwagon, even though the animated How to Train Your Dragon already spawned two sequels, the most recent of which was released only six years ago. Sitting through the live-action version today, I found myself struggling to see how it justified its own existence, especially given how similar it is to the original, just fleshed out to a runtime far too long for an ostensibly “family film” one can assume would include children in its audience. Kids were rapt by the 2010 film; they may get bored with this one. For more likely, adults will.

What’s more, “live action” is a term used very loosely here, as all the dragons are rendered with CGI animation. The only difference is the human characters actually acted on camera. The most fun thing, arguably, about this How to Train Your Dragon is that Gerard Butler reprises his role as Stoick, the disconnected father of Hiccup, this story’s hero.

Hiccup was voiced in 2010 by Jay Baruchel, who was 28 at the time but still had his youthful-sounding voice. He’s 43 years old now and clearly can’t play a teenage character onscreen—he wouldn’t even have been able to 15 years ago—so he’s replaced by 17-year old Mason Thames, much more convincing as the scrawny Viking kid who dreams of being a dragon killer but only manages to wreak havoc with his awkward mistakes instead. Thames is well cast as a live-action avatar for how Hiccup was drawn as an animated character, and he holds the screen well too.

On the off chance you don’t already know, the basic premise here is that Hiccup discovers the dragons of this world, of which there are many, are misunderstood animals and not the ruthless killers the Viking villagers have regarded them as for generations. He manages to injure the elusive “Night Fury” dragon, but when he goes to hill the dragon, whom he later names “Toothless,” he befriends him instead. What follows is a struggle for Hiccup to convince his village that the dragons are smarter than they appear and mean them no harm.

Hiccup is very effectively an awkward outsider, which makes for a lot of awkwardness in the first half of this film, which sometimes works and a lot of times doesn’t. A lot of this How to Train Your Dragon is so cutesy and cartoony, it again begs the question: why not just let the animated feature stand on its own? Nothing truly realistic occurs in this “live action” rendering, least of all the way Hiccup eventually figures out how to ride Toothless. And I said this in my review of the 2010 film and it still feels the same now: the creature design of Toothless has an uncanny resemblance to that of Stitch from Lilo & Stitch—and ironically, a live action remake o Lilo & Stitch is also in theaters right now.

To this new How to Train Your Dragon’s credit, it gets better as it goes along—the second half is much better, and certainly more exciting, than the first half. I suppose that’s better than it being the other way around. I eventually found myself invested in the characters and in the story, in ways I wasn’t for some time at the start. And some further fun casting includes Nick Frost as Gobber, the guy who trains upcoming dragon slayers; Julian Dennison (the kid previously seen in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Deadpool 2, Godzilla vs. Kong, and Y2K) as one of Hiccup’s fellow dragonslayers-in-training; and Nico Parker (Joe’s daughter from the premiere episode of The Last of Us) as Astrid, Hiccup’s eventual love interest.

By the time of How to Train Your Dragon’s conclusion, I had to admit I was pretty entertained. It just had to go through a bit more awkward, cartoony cutesiness to get there than I would have preferred. Entertaining or not, I remain unconvinced there was any great reason to make this movie to begin with, but if it’s the thing on the screen in front of you then it works well enough.

This seems awfully familiar.

Overall: B-

DROP

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

I have just one major complaint about Drop, the thriller set mostly in a Chicago high-rise rooftop restaurant: the climax doesn’t even take place there! For that, we go to the protagonist’s neighborhood home. BOOOOO. Boring! That skyscraper was literally the single reason I went to see this movie, what the hell do I care about someone’s living room?

Okay, a couple of pretty cool things do happen at “Palate,” the fictional restaurant where Violet (Meghan Fahy) is terrorized by someone holding her young son hostage at home, and demanding she kill Henry (Bandon Sklenar), the man she’s on a blind date there with. To Drop’s credit, at least two thirds of the cool action that takes place in the restaurant is not even shown in the trailer. I just wish the action had stayed in the restaurant, rather than pivoting to a car speeding through the streets of Chicago, to a regular house that is surprisingly quick to drive to from the middle of the second-largest city skyline in the country.

I’ve tried very hard to figure out what the building was that was used for exterior shots of Palate Fine Dining Restaurant. Filming took place primarily in Dublin, which means the view of other Chicago skyscrapers through the restaurant windows was artificially rendered. How tall is this building supposed to be? I’m going to guess something like thirty floors. These are the things I’m interested in. Drop doesn’t care. To be fair, probably neither do most of its other viewers.

It is established early on that there must be at least two people working together here, to make demands of Violet and threaten to kill her son if she doesn’t comply. One is the masked man in her home, with an impressive number of security cameras in every single room. Another is the mystery person who is definitely in the restaurant with her, sending sinister memes via a “drop” app on her phone. Eventually Violet realizes there are tiny cameras installed all over the restaurant, particularly in the women’s room and at her table by the windows. We can only wait until Violet inevitably finds some way to outsmart her terrorizer, all while getting “drops” in a restaurant from which there is, it’s say, a thirty-floor drop–get it? Listen, director Christopher Landon: I’d get it a lot better if you kept the action in the restaurant!

Landon does have a bit of a penchant for fairly novel premises. He also co-wrote and directed the 2020 horror film Freaky, a twist on Freaky Friday in which the people who switch bodies are a serial killer and a teenage girl. That film was elevated by great performances by its leads, especially Vince Vaughn as said teenage girl. Drop doesn’t have any such thing to elevate it; the acting is fine, but each performance is interchangeable with countless others who could have been just as effectively cast in the parts.

The “twist” of who the home invader turns out to be is something we can see coming a hundred miles away—and that’s saying something, because I never watch movies looking for things coming even a mile away. Violet’s son is being babysat by her sister, Jen (Violett Beane), who eventually gets in on some of the action—one thing to enjoy about Drop is the extent to which the women in it actually do kick some ass, even the bartender (Gabrielle Ryan). A bit of an odd addition to the script is Jeffrey Self, a charismatic performer saddled with the part of a waiter working nervously on his first-ever shift, and constantly shot from wildly unflattering angles from just above table-height.

Most of Drop is effectively suspenseful, at least, and it has enough action in the final act to make it worth the wait through all the tension. I was entertained enough, but not enough to tell you to bother seeing it. I could be singing a different tune here if they had kept the action in the restaurant, so the filmmakers really have themselves to blame.

I’d say stay for the view but it’s totally fake and they don’t even stay themselves anyway.

Overall: B-

BOB TREVINO LIKES IT

Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

I feel like I should like Bob Trevino Likes This less than I did, but a great cast sometimes makes up for a lot. It’s also possible that I am simply aging into the film’s target demographic, easily moved by rote emotional manipulation.

But I’m also not ready to sell myself short! And great credit and appreciation is due to Barbie Ferreira, a clearly excellent performer, giving the character of Lily Trevino far more nuance than the script asks of her. The same can be said, albeit to a lesser degree, of John Leguizamo, as Bob Trevino, the guy Lily finds on Facebook who happens to have the same name as her wildly selfish—and I do mean wild—dad, and strikes up a friendship with him. Leguizamo plays bob as an understated loner, and has an unusual, familial chemistry with Ferreira as the two forge a very odd but healing relationship. Leguizamo is a veteran actor with a certain amount of well-earned respect; and I pray I get to see Ferreira in other films as characters with greater dimension.

And to be clear: Lily has far more dimension than anyone else in Bob Trevino Likes It, directly because of Ferreira’s performance. With the simplest and subtlest gestures, movements, and expressions, she is captivating onscreen. She took an undercooked part and ran with it, in all the best ways.

Unfortunately, Bob Trevino Likes It is also bogged down, by the character that is Lily’s biological father, Robert Trevino (French Stewart)—a guy so deeply selfish, narcissistic and unlikable that he instantly becomes a caricature. Screenshots of Facebook messages are shown at the end of the film, indicating that the film was—here comes that phrase again—”inspired by” a real experience, had by writer-director Tracie Laymon. Well, to say that she contrived a fictionalized version of the story would be an understatement.

Lily’s father, who has started going by “Robert” because he thinks the women he’s dating prefer it, breaks off contact with Lily when she can’t get the details of a date right when she tags along, at his request. This is when she connects with Bob on Facebook, sending a friend request she thinks she’s sending to her dad. Weeks later, Robert finally calls and asks to meet up, insisting she break plans she’s already made (with Bob), only to give her an itemized list to demonstrate how much raising her has literally cost him.

I had difficulty getting over what a piece of work Robert was, with zero redeeming qualities—forming the perfect codependent relationship with a daughter who has zero self-worth. Do people like this even really exist? Broadly speaking they do, but even pieces of shit have some humanity, and Robert really isn’t given any. Conversely, Bob has a wife, Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones), a competitive scrapbooker who throws herself into implausibly winning the grand prize every year as a means of coping with the loss of a small child roughly a decade before. Jeanie is more pleasant than Robert, but does not have much more dimension—and she is used later in an unforgivable way. We are clearly meant to expect by her demeanor that she will be cold and unkind to Lily, only to bait-and-switch the audience out of nowhere, suddenly becoming incredibly sweet.

Who the hell are these people? Not even characters in small parts are given any grace. When Lily visits Robert’s home desperate to get him to answer the door, clearly in despair, the neighbors and a cop insist she leave and not disturb any residents, without offering a shred of empathy. It’s like the universe of Bob Trevino Likes It is populated by the soulless—except for the two main characters we’re meant to feel for, of course.

Indeed: feel for them, we do. In the end, Bob Trevino Likes It works in spite of itself. It has an unusual and compelling premise, the kind that can only be ripped from real life—and it’s refreshing that not only is there no romance even hinted at, no other character suspects it either. It would have made sense for Laymon to explore further into the idea of Lily latching onto Bob as a surrogate father, which makes much of the story here far more awkward than it often even seems intended to be. Instead, we all just take it on faith that they’re just friends, apparently with no strange daddy-issues dynamic. But Daphne (Lauren 'Lolo' Spencer), the young woman Lily works for doing in-home care, notes that it’s weird to suddenly make friends with a sixty-year-old man on the internet—and she’s one of the few characters here talking sense.

That said, I’m fine with trusting that this unusual relationship is sweet and rewarding, even healthy. I just resent how the story written to support it is so contrived, to the point of effectiveness: thanks in particular to Ferreira’s excellent performance, I was still moved to tears. I enjoyed watching these characters hang out together, grow, and learn from each other. I was saddened when they shared or experienced loss. I had a mostly pleasant time sifting through the trappings of mediocrity.

We’re the only real people in this movie, right?

Overall: B-

DEATH OF A UNICORN

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: C

The first thing you should know about Death of a Unicorn is the visual effects are kind of shit. It was made with a $15 million budget, and it looks like about $10 million of that went to cast salaries. That’s probably not how it actually was, but it’s certainly how it looks. Writer-director Alex Scharfman, in his feature film debut, employs a lot of camera tricks to minimize the amount of time we see actual unicorns on camera. Some of the time, it’s an effective technique for either illustrating the creatures’ enormity, or underscoring their darkly dazzling otherworldliness. Most of the time, it’s a transparent reflection of budget constraints. This is a film with many visual references to other, much better films, from Jurassic Park to Alien. Perhaps we are meant to see Death of a Unicorn as also an ode to Jaws, which also had to obscure its monster due to budget constraints and equipment failures, but with skilled editing became a masterwork of suspense. Once the shark was seen onscreen, audiences were in awe. Once we see the monstrous unicorns onscreen here, there isn’t awe so moch as a question of which cheap off-the-shelf effects software was used.

The second thing you should know about Death of a Unicorn, which makes up for a whole lot of flaws and mediocrity, is it is exceptionally well cast. Granted, most of them are basically phoning in their performances, especially Paul Rudd as Elliot, the misguided dad trying to ingratiate himself to a dying wealthy employer on a weekend retreat at his house in the mountains “this far north”—the most specific reference we get to the location. Are we in Alaska? Where? (It was filmed in Hungary.) But there are others, even when phoning in, who have such strong personas that you can’t help but have fun with them in this context: Richard E. Grant as Odell Leopold, the aforementioned dying employer; Téa Leoni as Belinda, his equally selfish and money-hungry wife; Will Poulter as Shepard, their even more single-minded, dickish son (who is constantly wearing pleated shorts, and somehow, it’s a perfect touch). Possibly my favorite among the cast is Anthony Carrigan, best known as NoHo Hank from HBO’s Barry, as Griff, the Leopolds’ increasingly put-upon butler. Jenna Ortega plays Ridley, Elliot’s daughter, and in the year 2025, Ortega probably qualifies as the film’s biggest star. Now 22 years old, I found myself wondering how long she can continue playing teenagers—although, to be fair, this movie never says exactly how old she is, and does make one reference to college studies.

The film opens with Elliot and Ridley, traveling to this weekend retreat, and it’s while they are driving through the mountains, frustrated with sudden loss of juice in their electronics (later a key plot point), when they hit a “horse-like creature”—or, as Ridley later puts it, “A fucking unicorn.” When the Leopolds discover the healing properties of this creature, and particularly synthesized powder from its horn, everything this greedy, wealthy family does from then on is utterly predictable—as is Death of a Unicorn overall. Let’s just say that the script is not this movie’s strongest element.

There’s something undeniably fun about the story in spite of its flaws, however. Death of a Unicorn might ultimately have been more successful if Scharfman had focused more on directing and collaborated with some other writers. To Scharfman’s credit, though, he strikes an unusually nice balance of tone, with consistently effective humor sprinkled into sequences that overtly veer into the horror genre, as the juvenile unicorn’s parents show up to exact their revenge. This movie has plenty of jump-scares, and I spent plenty of time covering my eyes with my hand.

How often do you get a horror-comedy-fantasy that is also a genuinely good time? This is not a movie that will still be talked about generations from now—or next week, really—but it’s a kick while it’s happening (sometimes literally). Even special effects that are subpar, if not outright terrible, do not detract from that. A lot of movies try to be simultaneously stupid and fun, but typically they land solidly on the side of stupid. Death of a Unicorn pulls off the minor miracle of succeeding at the fun part. With a bit more discipline, it could have been far better, but sometimes you leave a movie satisfied by the fact that it could have been much worse.

Death of a career? Not quite, but a fun step in that direction!

Overall: B-

THE END

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+
Music: B

I went in to The End really wanting to like it. The premise is right up my alley—a postapocalyptic musical about a family fraying at the seams after twenty years in an underground bunker. “Bunker” is a bit misleading; Tilda Swinton’s character, here credited only as “Mother,” has saved priceless pieces of art from the surface, and decorated all of their walls with them. We get many close-up shots of painted skies and clouds, the closest thing we get to seeing real versions of such things in the entire film.

I get that many details are completely irrelevant to the plot of this film, but there were so many that defied logic that I found it distracting. We never see any exterior walls to this structure this family lives in—Mother (Swinton), Father (Michael Shannon), Son (George MacKay), Friend (Bronagh Gallagher), Butler (Tim McInnerny), and Doctor (Lennie James). These six have been living in this self-sustaining underground home for over twenty years. We know this because it was twenty years ago the last time anyone tried to come after them from the surface.

But now, a stranger has managed to penetrate, and is found unconscious, no one with any idea how she got in. I watched the entire film thinking they were in cavernous snow caves, only to discover when I looked it up after getting home that, apparently, they are deep down a salt mine. Still, plenty of questions remain unanswered. All we know is, the group tentatively agrees to take the stranger in. She is played by Moses Ingram, credited here as “Girl.”

Over time, this young woman reveals that she is the last surviving member of her family, and she begs to stay with these people because she cannot survive on the surface. She sure looks well fed, though—not fat, but perfectly normal. You’d think she’d be as emaciated as she was desperate, but these are not details director and co-writer Joshua Oppenheimer is concerning himself with. Instead, the story focuses instead on how her presence gradually reveals how this wealthy family has spent decades both lying to each other and kidding themselves.

Normally, I would be really into this, except that The End spends a lot of its extended runtime—148 minutes—with very little actually happening, aside from them singing, to themselves or to each other. Oppenheimer’s choice to make the singing fully unironic is a bold one I can respect. The singing abilities run the gamut; neither Tilda Swinton or Michael Shannon are very good at it; George MacKay and Moses Ingram are much better at it. What’s more, the limited setting allows for little in the way of variety: we either see people sining inside a home amongst the paintings, or out in the salt caves.

I just couldn’t quite connect with The End, and not for lack of trying. This is like a quiet family drama where the family members happen to break out into song. And what of the music, then? It’s serviceable. It’s not bad, but neither is it particularly catchy or memorable. The accompanying orchestrations are pleasant. Much like Emilia Pérez, the point of making this a musical is never readily apparent. I would propose that this film would be both a more reasonable length and more compelling without the songs.

The performances are solid across the board—something we can reliably count on with both Tilda Swinton (her somewhat distracting dark haired wigs notwithstanding) and Michael Shannon. There is real depth to mine in these strained relationships. I just found myself preoccupied with unanswered questions, such as where they get the eggs they eat from, when we never see any live animals down there. And if the stranger could survive that long on the surface, why do these characters never go up there? Surely there’s stuff they could scavenge. But I guess they are all committed to their insulation, as is this largely impenetrable movie.

A talented cast offers music without passion.

Overall: B-

GLADIATOR II

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: C

Protip: don’t rewatch the original film just days before seeing its “legacyquel” that’s being released decades later. I keep making this mistake. I watched Twister right before seeing Twisters; I watched Beetlejuice right before seeing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; I watched Gladiator right before seeing Gladiator II. The only consistent purpose this seems to serve is how the new film definitively fails to live up to the first.

You see where I’m going with this. Even more than the other examples, Gladiator II follows all the same basic story beats as its far superior, Best Picture-winning predecessor from 2000. The comparisons to The Force Awakens and Top Gun Maverick are apt—and I’d throw in Alien: Romulus as well, given how its story directly mirrors the original Alien from 1979. These movies do what they do with varying success, although it should be noted that Gladiator II does it with the least success.

Does this mean I wasn’t entertained? Absolutely not. My answer to Russell Crowe’s Maximus from the original film, when he asks the immortal line “Are you not entertained!” is an emphatic, I am. Granted, in this film Paul Mescal’s Lucius asks a question with similar delivery from the middle of an arena when he asks, “Is this how Rome treats its heroes!” It doesn’t land with quite the same import but I guess you can’t have everything.

Gladiator II is, overall . . . fine. But this is its greatest weakness, because the original Gladiator was so much better than that. It had an iconic hero in Russell Crowe’s Maximus; it had an iconic villain in Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus. It also had an undeniable movie star at its center, and the closest to that we get in Gladiator II is Denzel Washington—as the most notable scheming villain, among several. It should be noted that Washington is the best thing and most fun person to watch in this movie. Paul Mescal as Lucius the conquered and enslaved gladiator, and Pedro Pascal as the Roman General who is the target of Lucius’s vengeance, are both capable and talented actors but neither quite rise to what director Ridley Scott is clearly aiming to replicate with them. I hesitate to say it’s their fault, given that the script is one of the weakest elements of this film.

One might be tempted to celebrate the amount of queerness thrown into Gladiator II—until you realize it is exclusive to queer-coding villainous characters. Washington’s Macrinus, who is clawing his own way from a distant past in slavery with eyes on the throne, reveals himself to be bisexual, wears gold earrings, and always wears colorful, flowing robes. Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger play twin Emperors Geta and Caracalla, both of them presented as effete, one of them with a clingy male concubinus. And again, this young emperors are both villainous as well, but neither comes across so much as formidable as like a couple of fickle little dipshits.

These details are all unfortunate but relatively subtle; I was entertained enough not to be too bothered by it, at least until I had more time to reflect on it once the film ended. There’s a lot of gladiatorial combat, of course, and several large-scale battle sequences, and if there is any place where Ridley Scott shines, it is here. And if you can watch this without a vivid recollection of its better predecessor, the performances are compelling, especially among the three leads, as well as that of Connie Nielsen as Lucilla, one of three characters (and two actors) who return here from the first film.

The Colosseum gladiator scenes, however, must be called out in their ridiculousness. Ridley Scott used real tigers in one of the gladiator battle scenes in the 2000 film, and apparently felt it was important to “up the ante” this time—over and over again—but never with anything real. We get to see baboons, a rhinoceros, and even sharks, all of them transparent CGI. It’s difficult to care about the supposed danger characters face if they are effectively battling a cartoon. The sharks, for instance, dart around the water like they’re in a video game. The Colosseum apparently really did get filled with water to host mock naval battles as entertainment, but that’s the extent of the realism here. How the hell could the Romans ever have transport all these giant sharks to the Colosseum anyway, let alone captured them live in the open ocean?

Yeah, yeah: it’s just a movie, right? Suspension of disbelief still has its own boundaries, and those boundaries can be strained. Still, most of the time I watched Gladiator II, I adopted that very frame of mind: it’s just a movie, and in spite of all these details I can easily pick apart, I’m having a good time. I can’t say I was disappointed in it, mostly because I enjoy the actors, they play well off each other, and their performances do manage to elevate the lesser material, at least to a degree. The script lacks the tightness of the 2000 film, doubly unfortunate give the degree to which it simply attempts to replicate it—but, it was still compelling enough to follow. This is a 148-minute film and I never got bored. Will I ever go out of my way to watch it again, or recommend it to anyone else? Not likely.

Gladiator II was an adequate way to spend a Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t great. The key point here is that simply re-watching the original Gladiator was time much better spent.

Not a fully accurate representation of The Colosseum.

Overall: B-