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-

SIFF Advance: TWINLESS

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

Twinless is about an unlikely friendship that occurs between two guys, one straight and one gay, after they meet in a support group for people grieving the loss of a twin. That is the log line of the film, and it remains an accurate descriptor from beginning to end, albeit deceptively so: Without spoiling anything, I will say that a major twist occurs in the second act, and it was one I found deeply disappointing. I wanted this to be an exploration of an unlikely friendship under these circumstances, but not only do the circumstances change—we discover them to have been different all along. This allows for some profound conflict between the two lead characters, but does the conflict have to be that profound? I would argue that it doesn’t, and that it changes what makes their connection compelling in the first place.

And yet, here’s the thing: I was utterly charmed, and sometimes deeply moved, by Twinless in spite of this disappointment. It’s a big thing, but it’s still the only thing I didn’t like about this film. And it should be noted that writer-director James Sweeney, who has been developing this script for a solid ten years, has written his characters with such dimension, depth, and authenticity, it goes a long way toward making up for that one disappointment. Sweeney himself plays the gay character, Dennis, and it’s always impressive when a director can star in his own film and actually pull it off. It could be argued that Dennis is borderline psychotic, at least judging by his behavior, and still he’s undeniably empathetic, even when it becomes unclear whether he deserves empathy.

The crucial element of Twinless, however, is Dylan O’Brien, previously best known for Young-Adult roles like Thomas in The Maze Runner or Stiles in the television series Teen Wolf. Now in his early thirties, he’s making a new name for himself in indie cinema, and nowhere more impressively than here in Twinless, as Roman, who is grieving the loss of his identical twin brother, Rocky. O’Brien’s performance is amazing in this movie, the one thing that most recommends it.

There is a relatively short flashback sequence in which O’Brien also plays the twin brother, Rocky—the gay one. This makes the second film in short order featuring a non-twin actor playing twins onscreen, and although the movies share nothing in common otherwise, it still invites mention of Sinners, in which Michael B. Jordan does the same. The key difference is that Jordan plays opposite himself in a great deal of Sinners, in ways that are often disctracting because we know, and can tell, that there were never two of him actually on camera at the same time. Sweeney deftly sidesteps this problem by making Roman and Rocky estranged, and never showing the two characters onscreen at the same time.

There’s also the fact of Roman and Rocky’s diverging sexualities, though—something that becomes a key plot point, and one very well handled. This does mean that O’Brien, a straight man, spends some time playing a gay man, which is something many often argue should not be done. While I agree broadly that gay actors should be given gay parts, I am also not militant about this, and believe context and circumstance always matter. It’s certainly relevant that Sweeney himself is gay, and he was the one giving direction on these performances, reportedly with some reticence on O’Brien’s part to get too far into depicting effeminacy. The minor miracle of Twinless is that O’Brien’s performance is incredible, both as Roman and as Rocky—they may be technically identical, but they have distinct mannerisms and appearances (choice of clothing, facial hair) that make then feel like wholly different people. In the Rocky flashback scenes, it took me a while to realize it was even the same actor.

The central theme of Twinless is loneliness, and though it is contextualized with the specificity of losing a built-in best friend that often comes with being a twin, it also transcends that specificity. Dennis is lonely for different reasons, and these two guys are dealing with their loneliness in very different ways, but have found each other as a means of, if not filling that hole, then covering it up a bit.

Twinless also has great, well-rounded characters, particularly Marcie (Aisling Franciosi), the receptionist at Dennis’s work who Roman starts dating after he accompanies Dennis to her Halloween party. Dennis has spent a lot of time making wildly inaccurate assumptions about Marcie, which makes it easy for us as viewers to do the same, to see her as a sweet but incredibly naive woman. She actually is sweet, but not naive, and it turns out she won’t stand for anyone’s bullshit—certainly not Dennis’s, and not Roman’s either. In addition to Franciosi, Gilmore Girls’s Lauren Graham is a welcome presence in just a few scenes as Roman and Rocky’s mother, playing tensions with Roman as they both navigate the loss of a loved one. In a scene when both Marcie and Dennis go home with Roman for Christmas, Marcie, ever the understanding one, tolerates their inevitable arguing with grace, explaining to the less-understanding Dennis, “I think they’re grieving.”

I haven’t said much yet about how funny Twinless is, with both a unique sensibility and a unique sense of humor. This film is very much a dramedy, and I would indeed recommend having tissues handy. It also has a keen understanding of how people deal with grief in very different ways, and may hit differently if you have lost someone very close to you, twin or not. But it also has some incredibly effective humor, often cutting through the grief in the best way. It’s often uncomfortable, but I hesitate to call Twinless “cringe comedy,” as it rarely truly made me squirm in my seat (not usually my favorite kind of humor). It could also be said that a gay character pining after a straight guy he can’t have is a bit overdone, but again, Sweeney effectively makes it his own, creating a truly singular story. Were it not for the one thing that genuinely disappointed me, I would probably be saying I adored this movie, to a similar degree that I adored films like All of Us Strangers or National Anthem. But, reconciliation through disappointment—also a major theme of Twinless—has its own deep and lasting value.

They don’t have their twins but they have each other: a complicated but compelling story of connection between a straight man and a gay man.

Overall: B+

FRIENDSHIP

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

My experience with deeply awkward movies is very similar to that with horror movies. I spend a lot of time covering my face, unable to look at the screen. I might peek through my fingers. This is how I spent a lot of the time watching Friendship.

And, much like with horror movies, I am typically loathe to subject myself to such experiences, or certainly to recommend them to others. I make exceptions for films that transcend the genre. I suppose that makes Friendship the Exorcist of awkward-relationship movies. Except the comparison, made my many others already, to Fatal Attraction is far more apt. Nobody boils a pet in this movie, but there is a scene in which you become terrified that the obsessed character might actually kill somebody.

Marketing a film like Friendship is clearly a tricky task. I sat through the trailer to this at many other movies, always wondering at all the pull quotes from critics talking about how funny it is, while only showing clips that make it look like a disturbing thriller about someone who is increasingly unhinged. It was a very incongruous juxtaposition, and if nothing else, I knew to expect painful awkwardness—and found myself having little interest. But then the movie I was going to see tonight was revealed to have terrible reviews, so I looked over what the other options were. I couldn’t even remember what Friendship was by merely seeing the title on the theater schedule, but I looked it up and was surprised to discover it getting pretty positive attention.

So, my movie companion and I thought: what the hell, why not? Let’s pivot to this other movie where we have no idea whether we’ll be into it or not. I did come across the phrase “the Fatal Attraction of male bonding comedies,” though, and that piqued my interest immediately. That should have been used as the logline.

And, lo and behold Friendship actually is hilarious, the kind of movie that twenty years ago would have quickly gained a cult following. People familiar with Tim Robinson, and particularly his Netflix sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave (which, full disclosure, I have never watched, may not be so surprised by this. But he is by far the best thing about Friendship, turning in an amazing performance as Craig, the socially awkward app developer who forms an unlikely friendship with his new neighbor.

The neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd), is a local weatherman with his own insecurities, the kind of guy you wouldn’t particularly want to hang out with either but who feels like a straight up everyman compared to Craig. Craig’s wife, Tami (Kate Mara), encourages him to accept Austin’s invitation to come over for a drink. Tami has her own things to deal with, such as a fledgeling floral business and an almost-uncomfortably intimate relationship with their teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer, previously the lead in the deeply underrated HBO limited series We Are Who We Are).

When Craig and Austin first hang out, it’s just the two of them, and Austin manages to take the awkwardness in stride. It’s when he gets invited to a group hangout with Austin’s other friends that the awkwardness begins to go truly sideways. The plot then follows a familiar arc, but it feels fresh because of the context: an obsessive man-crush taken up too many notches. Craig starts calling Austin too frequently, he shows up unannounced at inappropriate times and places, and tries to emulate some of Austin’s reckless but cool behavior, but at which Craig is deeply inept.

Rudd is well cast as the weatherman whose own social skills lack any genuine depth. But Robinson is the one who truly shines here, the single source of a great many uniquely fantastic comic moments. The parade of expressions that flash across Craig’s face is a delight unto its own, as he reacts with confusion, then suppresses it with quick denial. Robinson can be skillfully subtle one moment, then singularly over the top the next. Truly, I laughed far more at Friendship than I expected to.

Some people love the emotional turn of laughter through tears, What Friendship has to offer is laughter through suspense, a nagging sense of danger, such as when Craig goes to deliver one of the many packages that keeps getting delivered to his house by mistake, and then finds himself causally walking through Austin’s unlocked home. We don’t even know if Austin is there. And when Craig finds something truly dangerous in Austin’s office, we know Chekhov has been paged. This pays off spectacularly later.

Friendship pays off, in all senses of the phrase. This is a delicate performance walking a delicate line, and a quite impressive one at that. Offering a familiar story arc that still manages not to be predictable is no small feat. It’s all in the details, and the best details are in Tim Robinson’s performance, which is both weird and nuanced. We’ve all been in group settings with that one guy who has no idea he’s the oddball no one really likes but no one wants to hurt his feelings. If you haven’t, then maybe you’re that guy. Friendship gives us all a lot to think about.

Letting the dangerous naïveté blossom in Friendship.

Overall: B+

THE WEDDING BANQUET

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

It’s probably safe to say that Ang Lee’s international breakout 1993 original The Wedding Banquet is not a broadly famous movie. It’s probably also safe to say that film is widely appreciated among aficionados of queer cinema, international or otherwise. The film was notable for several reasons, not least of which was its nomination for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (which it lost to the Spanish film Belle Epoque). It has charm to spare, although one particular plot point, which was played at the time as borderline innocent but by today’s standards crosses a line into sexual assault, has aged rather poorly. Overall, this makes the original Wedding Banquet an incredibly progressive film for its time.

Enter director and co-write Andrew Ahn (Fire Island), who has reimagined The Wedding Banquet for 2025 sensibilities with mostly great success. The broad strokes remain the same, but many of the details have been reconfigured. Instead of the bride who marries a gay man for a green card being a desperate tenant, this time she’s part of a lesbian couple: Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) are trying to start a family using IVF, now disappointed by the failure of a second attempt. Chris (Bowen Yang) has been best friends with Angela since college, when they made a single attempt at straight sex; he’s now coupled with Min (Han Gi-Chan), whose family fortune inheritance is conditional to his involvement with the family business.

Said business is managed by Min’s grandmother, Ja-Young (a stupendous Youn Yuh-jung, Best Supporting Actress winner for Minari), a very stern woman who makes a stark contrast with Angela’s per formatively supportive mother, May (Joan Chen). Ja-Young is the catalyst for one of the best and most unexpected twists of this version as compared to the 1993 original, as it pertains to the attempted ruse—I won’t spoil it here.

Evidently by virtue of Angela and Chris being best friends, both couples are also very good friends—so much so that Chris and Min are living in the garage of Lee and Angela’s house. Side note: ff Min has access to a fortune, why he would be living in someone’s garage remains a mystery. Min is an evidently very talented artist and Chris’s life lacks direction, so maybe it’s just the lifestyle they’re choosing, although it still doesn’t make a lot of sense under scrutiny. All of that regardless, the depiction of a gay male couple and a lesbian couple being such close friends is maybe my favorite thing about this movie. I can’t recall ever seeing that in cinema before, at least not where all four people are the principal characters.

I do think the Chris character is a bit awkwardly underdeveloped. I could never make any real sense of what his problem is, why he has such insecurity that he won’t accept Min’s proposal of marriage. Min is perhaps the most open-hearted of the four characters, the kind with the potential to provide a lot of comedy—and, although there is plenty of comedy, The Wedding Banquet is not quite as funny as I expected or hoped. Han Gi-Chan as Min is fun but rarely funny; Yang gets perhaps the most chuckles with subtle gestures and expressions executed with finesse; Kelly Marie Tran (The Last Jedi) is convincingly messy as a woman terrified of being a bad mother; and Gladstone brings an almost incongruous gravitas to a film meant to be a romantic comedy. She’s a stellar actor but not the funniest person in the world.

Where The Wedding Banquet isn’t funny, however, it is repeatedly surprisingly touching, and I shed several tears over several different scenes. To the credit of Ahn and his co-writer James Schamus (who wrote the original), the many narrative threads in this film come together with impressive precision. Among the ensemble cast, Bowen Yang is really the only one with a true understanding of comic timing, which leaves this film feeling a bit more like a sweet dramedy than a straightforward comedy.

But even if I didn’t get quite the vibe I was hoping for, this is an incredibly satisfying watch, just for different and unexpected reasons. Some narrative turns are predictable if you have seen the 1993 film; some are not, and those changes serve this new version well. This is not a film that will make its mark on cinema history the way the original did, as that one was genuinely groundbreaking, poorly aged flaws notwithstanding, and the same cannot really be said of this one. Still, most of the characters feel real and multi-dimensional—especially Angela and Lee as a couple. The four of them are ultimately served up as an excellent example of found-family, a ragtag group of people who care deeply for each other in ways that are thicker than blood. It’s a uniquely satisfying representation of possibility.

“Love makes a family” is more than just a platitude. It’s also a movie!

Overall: B+

A NICE INDIAN BOY

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

Full disclosure, it’s a bit more difficult for me to be objective in my assessment of A Nice Indian Boy than it is for most films. Setting aside the myth that true objectivity even exists, this is a film that really hits home for me: it’s about a white man who marries a South Asian man in an Indian wedding that’s made as gay as a traditional Indian wedding can be made. And, I am a white man who married a South Asian man in an Indian wedding as traditional as we could make it. Some of it was modified in ways it would have had to have been regardless of our sexuality: truly traditional Indian weddings last for days; ours lasted an afternoon. The same goes for the wedding that occurs in this movie, but which featured very specific, Hindu rituals that I performed in my own wedding to my husband.

It’s an unusual thing indeed, to see a film so steeped in South Asian culture, and yet even as a white guy, see so very much of my own experience reflected in it. A pretty significant subplot involves multiple characters’ love of the very famous 1995 Bollywood movie Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (translated as The Brave-Hearted Will Take the Bride), commonly abbreviated as “DDLJ”—and, very specifically, its signature song, “Ek Duke Ke Vaaste” (“For Each Other”). I have seen that film only once, myself; but that song has been a staple of my Hindi music playlists for a solid two decades. It has had a particularly nostalgic place in the hearts of South Asians the world over for thirty years that I could never access, but it also has a very particular nostalgic meaning to me personally.

A Nice Indian Boy does push the bounds of plausibility a tad, but therein lies the magic of movies, I suppose. Only once did I feel a bit dubious about the meet-cute setup between Naveen (Karan Soni) and Jay (Jonathan Groff), as they actually meet in a temple, Jay showing up to pray to the elephant god Ganesha, as though he were a natural practicing Hindu. But, not long after that, we learn that Jay, now orphaned due to his parents having been older when they took him in, was adopted by Hindu parents. So then, I though: okay, I guess I buy that.

Soni and Groff are well-cast and have clear chemistry, Soni as someone still struggling to overcome shame and embarrassment; Groff as someone self-assured after the heard-learned lessons of a youth spent in foster care before finding the parents who ultimately welcomed him home. I’d love to learn more about Groff’s unique experience, but the fact of his parents’ deaths makes it easier for the story at hand to focus on Naveen and his family.

A Nice Indian Boy is arguably more sweet and romantic than it is funny, although it is also plenty funny. I just wish I had known to bring in plenty of tissues—I cried a lot more than I expected to. It is perhaps to this movie’s greatest credit that all the tears were shed in response to touching and heartwarming turns of events, as opposed to anything sad or tragic. It is told in five chapters, starting with Naveen and Jay meeting and then going on a sweetly awkward first date. In a particularly well-executed scene at a bar, Jay surprises Naveen by admitting that he’s nervous. The special thing about Jay is his comfort with simply acknowledging such things, while Naveen still has much to learn on that front.

Naveen and Jay are very well rounded, flawed and adorable characters. But what truly makes A Nice Indian Boy special is the cast that rounds out Nareen’s family: his parents, Archit and Megha (Harish Patel and Zarna Gang), have had six years to come to terms with a son who is openly gay—so much so that, in fact, they spend a lot of time watching the gay cable channel—but, until now, no experience meeting one of his boyfriends. Naveen also has an older sister, Arundhathi (Sunita Mani), struggling with the loveless marriage her parents arranged and now resentful of how much more effort to be open minded her parents are being about their son than they seemed to have been when they married off their daughter.

It would be easy to make these characters one-note punch lines, but in all three cases, they bring a level of humanity not usually given to such supporting characters, particularly in romantic comedies—even good ones. These characters feel like real people, ones that you might meet in reality. Archit and Megha’s unusual acceptance of their gay son does not change that. These are simply loving parents who are making an effort, often stumbling adorably along the way. Archit in particular has a lovely arc in the story, never overtly judgmental of his son but with some clear discomfort, which feeds into Naveen’s discomfort with himself.

There is an on-again, off-again, on-again arc between Naveen and Jay that feels tied a little too neatly, but it’s the ensemble cast, including loving and colorful friends on both their parts, that really sells their story. There is real and believable development among all of the principal characters, concisely written by Eric Randall as adapted by the play of the same name by Madhuri Shekar. A Nice Indian Boy runs a brisk 96 minutes, which gives it a key thing in common with Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag (an otherwise very different movie—except that it’s also very romantic): it packs a lot into a lean runtime, without every feeling rushed.

I couldn’t tell you yet whether I will wind up seeing A Nice Indian Boy many more times, or if it will become a long-lasting favorite. It might. All I can tell you for certain is that I was deeply moved by it, on a very personal level, and I would recommend it to absolutely anyone. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll love it either way.

I don’t know if you’ll fall in love with this movie but I would encourage you to find out, because I sure did.

Overall: A-

A MINECRAFT MOVIE

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

I could have had a field day ripping A Minecraft Movie apart—if it weren’t funny. But, the thing is, I laughed a lot. And maybe you won’t. Maybe you will. This movie has a pretty specific and peculiar sensibility, which gets very goofy and dumb, for no other reason that its self-reward. It spoke to me. And I don’t even have the slightest bit of knowledge or familiarity with the 2011 video game on which it’s based, although plenty of the action feels like a video game. Or what I imagine a video game to be like, anyway. What do I know? I played a few video games at a friend’s house in the summer of 1989, decided fairly quickly that it wasn’t for me, and haven’t bothered with it since. Most of this movie’s audience will have been born after that.

How easily I settled into A Minecraft Movie’s delightfully absurdist humor only better serves to recommend it. Anyone open to its brand of humor can enjoy this movie, whether they’re familiar with the video game or not. Granted, the setup a paper thin and utterly stupid, introducing us to Jack Black’s Steve, a doorknob salesman with a lifelong dream of being a miner. He follows his dream, goes down into a mine, and within minutes uncovers an “orb” (it’s actually a cube) that opens a portal into “the Overworld,” a place where creativity knows no bounds—well, except for the unstated fact that apparently everything has to be designed in cubed shapes.

Anyway, everything that so quickly gets Steve to the Overworked is ridiculously convenient and untied to any backstory to give Steve any character dimension whatsoever. I don’t seriously think this is the case, but I suppose you could argue that this setup is itself a meta commentary on the thinly contrived characters in any typical movie of this ilk. There are no intellectual pursuits here—getting right to the delightful absurdities is very much the point.

I could have lived without the way Jack Black’s delivery is far more over the top than it needs to be, every single line he delivers. He’s overly excited about everything he sees onscreen, or even any particular thought he has. It’s on-brand for Jack Black, I guess, and makes him fit better in the Overworld than he does in the real world. The others that find themselves sucked into this world give more naturalistic performances, with the exception of Jason Momoa as Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, a former “Gamer of the Year” in—speak of the devil!—1989.

Not all of the humor in A Minecraft Movie lands. What makes it work is that most contemporary absurdist comedies, especially wide-release big-budget ones, have far more humor that falls flat than that works. A Minecraft Movie is the other way around. For every gag that doesn’t work, there are five that do. I laughed far more consistently at this movie than I expected to.

Not all of the characters really work either, to be fair. Jennifer Coolidge appears as a high school Vice Principal, who invites a Minecraft villager to dinner after he wanders through the portal to the real world and she hits him with her car. Director Jared Hess, working with a script written be a team of six writers, cuts back and forth between the Overworld action and this dinner date, enough times to make you wonder what the point of the dinner scenes even is. In the end, the point seems to be only to get to a bit between Coolidge and the CGI villager during the end credits. Well, the bit is hilarious, one of the funniest things in the movie, so I guess it’s worth it?

Rounding out the principal cast are Sebastian Hansen as Henry, a very creative kid just starting high school in the Idaho town of Chuglass; Emma Myers as Natalie, Henry’s older sister who hardly looks like she should be out of high school herself (Myers is 23) and has been hired as the social media manager for the town’s potato chip factory; and Danielle Brooks as Dawn, the local real estate broker with a mobile zoo as a side hustle. Brooks in particular is a known talent who is somewhat wasted here, as all these characters are easily interchangeable with any serviceable actor, but they’re still all fun enough. Momoa, Coolidge and to a lesser degree Jack Black provide the most color as characters, although only Momoa provides a kind of colorfulness that fits neatly into the video-game-adaptation context.

The bottom line is, none of the plot, such as any plot exists, matters. What matters is a bevy of well-executed, adorably bizarre details, such as the villainous borde of cube-headed “piglins” from another dimension, led by a piglin witch named Malgosha. By and large, there is little to no rhyme or reason to anything that happens in A Minecraft Movie, but it’s the execution that makes it work—humor that works more often than it doesn’t; and more actors with charisma than without. It’s an impressively staged bit of organized chaos, set in a world rendered with surprisingly artful special effects. It’s a movie that is ultimately meaningless but kind of a blast, but sometimes a mindless blast is its own reward.

Which of these characters is the most fun? You get one guess!

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-

NOVOCAINE

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

The best thing Novocaine has going for it is its clever and innovative premise: an Assitant Manager at a bank breaks the streak of an incredibly sheltered life to go on a wildly dangerous quest to save his crush from bank robber hostages—something he’s uniquely able to do because he has a genetic condition that prevents him from feeling pain.

What this means is two things. First, for an action comedy, Novocaine gets surprisingly graphic and gory. Second, for a mid-tier movie like this, Novocaine is genuinely funny, often precisely because of the graphic gore. Some of it actually reminded me of the 2023 comic gore fest Cocaine Bear, which actually put some viewers off because it relied so heavily on violence as comedy, but I got a big kick out of it.

Novocaine spends more time getting comedy out of its character relationships, to varying effect. Jack Quaid is well cast as Nate, the man with the “Novocaine” nickname. We learn that he grew up sheltered because it’s so easy for him to get injured and not realize it—he even avoids eating solid foods for fear of biting his tongue off (and when he is finally convinced to try a bite of cherry pie, I was really afraid that was what actually would happen). Quaid embodies the put-upon recluse well, although the full body of tattoos (all drawn on my Nate himself) strains believability. Plus, he has real charisma with Amber Midthunder, who plays the object of Nate’s crush at the bank, Sherry.

The bank robbers, though, are to a person thinly drawn, utterly contrived villains who fail to be interesting despite the best efforts of the people playing them—including Jack Nicholson’s son, Ray Nicholson. Between him and Quaid, who is the son of Randy Quaid and Meg Ryan, Novocaine is quite the “nepo baby” movie. But if an actor has the juice, it doesn’t matter who their parents are. It’s easy to see potential in Nicholson, but it would be nice to see him cast as a character whose motivations actually make sense. In Novocaine, his Simon character kills people indiscriminately both during and after the bank robbery, racking up a body count with no interrogation whatsoever into what’s behind his behavior. No sane criminal who has actually had multiple successful heists already would act so recklessly, but here I guess he serves as a potentially lethal danger to a protagonist who can withstand massive injury without blinking an eye.

Speaking of which, co-directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, and writer Lars Jacobson, are fairly careful about making sure Nate’s injuries actually last and don’t magically disappear. This does happen a bit with cuts and bruises on his face—Quaid is the star, after all—but the burns on his hand after sticking it in boiling oil last the rest of the film, sometimes taking other characters aback. An injury to his leg has him limping thereafter. And by the climactic sequence at the end of the film, Nate is finding ways to use his own injuries as weapons.

And this is all we’re going to Novocaine to see, really: the comic violence and clever gore that comes with a guy on a dangerous mission who can’t feel pain. That, and Jack Quaid himself. Few other actors would be as good a fit for Nate, a guy who is fearful and cautious until he is driven to put his body through the ringer. There’s a twist about halfway through that I did not see coming but which I’m sure others will see a mile away. It does make the story more interesting, but in a way that is severely limited by a pack of one-dimensional villains whose motivations only get halfway to making sense about half the time.

The trick to this movie—and most action comedies, really—is to go in with expectations properly calibrated. I certainly expected nothing special out of Novocaine, and that is precisely what I got. But it’s also very well paced and consistently funny, which is how a movie that could easily have fallen flat manages to work. Sometimes you just want solid entertainment even if it’s ultimately forgettable.

Nate never gives a handout because this just might be what he gets back.

Overall: B

Advance: THE PENGUIN LESSONS

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

The Penguin Lessons is one of those movies “inspired by true events,” in this case an adaptation of Tom Mitchell’s 2016 memoir of the same name, recounting his time in 1975 Argentina, when he rescued a penguin from an oil spill and then the penguin refused to leave his side. And although that is indeed what happened, “inspired by” remains the key phrase in the film adaptation, which engages with many typical movie tropes.

The biggest difference, though, is a curious one: Tom Mitchell was 23 years old in 1975, but here Steve Coogan plays him at the age of 59, complete with a tragic backstory that no 23-year-old is likely to have. The careless nature of rescuing a penguin on a holiday in Uruguay, and then smuggling it back to the Argentinian boarding school where he works, is much more befitting of a young man in his twenties. But, to be fair, Coogan kind of makes it work.

He also make The Penguin Lessons a film more appealing to older audiences, which I can’t help but suspect was deliberate. I attended an advanced screening billed as part of an AARP program called “Movies for Groups.” My husband and I drove out to the suburbs to watch it, and the theater was nearly filled to capacity with senior citizens. My husband is 51 (hence the target demographic of AARP, being over 50); I am 48, and I was almost certainly the youngest person there. One wonders: would an advanced screening of a sweet but slight movie about a young man and his penguin friend garner such a crowd size? The event was contextualized as part of fighting ageism, and I am all for making more movies for older audiences. Whether they can make money in the cinema landscape of the 2020s is another question. We already know they can’t.

The Penguin Lessons actually has a pretty wide range of ages amongst its characters. The Swedish fellow teacher who thrusts a somewhat unwanted friendship upon Tom is played by 39-year-old Björn Gustafsson. The headmaster of the school is played by 77-year-old Jonathan Pryce. The school’s resident housekeeper (Vivian El Jaber) whose outspoken young adult granddaughter (Alfonsina Carrocio) gets taken by the oppressive Argentinian military of the era. And Tom teaches English to a class full of teenage boys, a few of whom are minor characters in this story. That classroom is where The Penguin Lessons starts to feel a little like Dead Poets Society if the teacher happened to have a literal penguin sidekick—Tom gets the students to improve academically by bringing the penguin, given the name Juan Salvador, to class.

As directed by Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), this story unfolds with all the expected charms of a movie that revolves around an adorable animal. Usually it’s a dog or a cat, so at least a penguin is something different—and something pulled from a real story. There is little doubt of the typical embellishments of film adaptations, though, particularly the young woman who reminds Tom of his lost daughter. On the plus side, there is no romantic interest there at all, and The Penguin Lessons really veers from cinematic obligations by having no romance at all. Unless you count the way everyone who encounters him falls for Juan Salvador. Multiple supporting characters become part of a running joke of finding themselves on Tom’s balcony, confiding in the penguin like he’s the attentive listener friend they always needed.

The adapted script, as written by Jeff Pope (Philomena—which also starred Steve Coogan, incidentally), is a little bit clunky, especially in the early scenes, with dialogue somehow both stilted and sedate. The live penguin used to play Juan Salvador injects life into the proceedings, though, and turns The Penguin Lessons into a cute comedy. The subtle comedy works better than when things turn more dramatic, and the penguin is used as a strained metaphor for resisting fascist governments. The movie itself even acknowledges this: when Tom refers to “putting the penguin in the pool” as a metaphor, Pryce’s character actually says, “not a very good one.”

Still, I cannot deny that The Penguin Lessons ultimately got to me. It took a while, but eventually I was locked in, both charmed by that flightless bird and shedding tears of sorrow for it when the inevitable occurs by the end of the film. This is a movie with a job to do—manipulate our emotions—and it does it well. Granted, I spent a lot of time also thinking about how much bird shit there must have been for someone to clean up, something this movie only references a couple of times as offhand gags. It spends a bit more time acknowledging the pungent fishy smell that follows Juan Salvador everywhere he goes.

I have mixed feelings about this sort of domestication of a wild animal at all. There’s the argument that Juan Salvador would not leave Tom no matter how much tried to shoo him away, so what could he do? He probably should have just left the penguin and let nature take its course—notwithstanding the character who literally counters, “Oil spills aren’t natural!” A student later notes that if a penguin loses its one chosen partner, they separate and eventually die. We can feel for Tom and his inability to push Juan Salvador away, except that a subplot involves Tom struggling to get the local zoo to take the penguin, only to change his mind. The quarantine area of the zoo, clearly designed to look like the 1970s zoo version of a medieval dungeon, puts him off the idea. This is an example of a film easily convincing its audience that the wild animal is better off living in as a boarding school teacher’s roommate than in a place that’s actually best for it.

But hey, look at me, just being a killjoy. The Penguin Lessons is pleasant enough. I’m happy to have seen it. I just, as always, have thoughts. This film is sweet and entertaining, but taking a penguin home with you is never a good idea! This concludes my overlong public service announcement.

That is one very unconventional TA.

Overall: B

MICKEY 17

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

It was always going to be a challenge for Bong Joon Ho to follow up his 2019 film Parasite, which turned out to be a watershed moment in both cinema and Oscar history. This is a guy with a penchant for genre mashing, and actually never more so than in Parasite—but no one would expect him to match that, and it makes sense that he would return to his oddball science fiction sensibilities with Mickey 17, a movie with neither hopes nor aspirations for Oscar glory. This is a movie just made by a bunch of people who are clearly having fun.

None more so than its star, Robert Pattinson, who plays two parts: Mickey 17 and Mickey 18. Technically he plays 18 parts, all of them the same person: Mickey has signed up to be an “expendable,” offering his body for fatal research on a planet marked for colonization, his body “reprinted” every time he dies, each time with his memory restored. Bong, who co-wrote the script, wisely doesn’t even try to explain what kind of science could make this possible, because it doesn’t matter, not pertinent to the story being told. This is just used as a tool for exploring other things that are on his mind.

In this future world, it has been declared unethical to allow “multiples” to exist at the same time: a person can only be reprinted after death. After we are taken through a pre-credits montage of Mickey’s first through 16th bodies, an unexpected twist of fate has 17 surviving when everyone assumes he has died, thereby printing 18 without realizing 17 is not really dead. These two characters are the leads in Mickey 17, and Pattison gives a performance that is unique, delightful, and illustrative of a breadth of talent wider than many realize.

Pattinson and Kristen Stewart have followed similar career paths after the Twilight series made them young movie stars—ironically, in both cases with objectively unremarkable performances (in Stewart’s case, that’s putting it diplomatically) in that subpar vampire fantasy series. In the years since, both of them have taken on far more interesting roles that have revealed surprising depths of talent. It would be fascinating to see them paired in a film again, but in a film that was actually good.

In the meantime, we can get a kick out of Mickey 17 in Mickey 17, a copy of a copy of a copy who is somehow frightened and insecure. When he meets Mickey 18, he discovers 18 to be very much over it, much more aggressive and even prone to revenge. You might even say nihilistic. I thought a lot about what might account for such drastic change in personality in the exact same person, and could never quite come up with anything. Mickey 17 is clearly fatigued by the memory of 16 different deaths. There is a fascinating thing to think about, though: with Mickey 17 still alive, presumably Mickey 18 can only be revived with the memories of Mickey 16, which means this is the first point at which two different versions of Mickey’s experience diverge.

This is much different from playing twins, and is more akin to playing clones, who are produced as people of the exact same age. It’s a deeply fascinating premise that Bong really doesn’t dig into deeply enough. The closest is when Mickey’s girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), delights in the attempt at sleeping with two Mickeys at once. Mickey 17 is understandably baffled, and Mickey 18 is into it—even at one point running his fingers through 17’s hair. The scene gets interrupted, but I found myself relating to all three people involved. Who wouldn’t want to sleep with two Robert Pattinsons at once? And even though he’s not so much “hunky” as possessing a kind of stringy handsomeness, if I had Pattinson’s body I’d sleep with myself too.

But I haven’t even gotten to the “creepers,” the alien life on this planet so named by the very Trumpian character Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, mugging in oversized teeth) and his wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette, stealing scenes as usual). These creatures have a vague resemblance to the “super pigs” in Bong’s 2017 film Ojka, only this time they’re closer to a cross between a muskox and a giant caterpillar. One of several nitpicky criticisms I have of Mickey 17 is how the “creepers” are the single form of life we see on the planet Niflheim. What sustains them? What do they eat? How do they thrive in a vacuum devoid of biodiversity? So far as we can tell, Nilfheim features only ice, and these creepers.

They do prove to be surprisingly intelligent, and a “translation device” gets introduced that, plot-wise, is a little too easy and convenient. Still, Bong manages to shoehorn in a lot of undeniably liberal talking points about colonization, and who is really an “alien.” And don’t get me wrong, of course I appreciate that, but much of it is a bit too on the nose.

Mickey 17 is undeniably entertaining, but also a bit too simple in its storytelling given the premise and its setting. The creepers are all impressively rendered, but I would have liked a bit more of the dazzle promised by this film’s marketing—either in terms of the visual effects, which lack color with its endless focus on white ice and snow contrasted with the metal and browns of the spaceship or the creeper creatures, or in terms of its plot turns. There’s not even as much action in this movie as you might expect. To be fair, it still has oddball sensibility to spare, which at the very least we can always expect of a Bong Joon Ho film. This is a movie that did not quite meet the excitement of my expectations, but the more I think about it, the more I think it will likely work well on rewatch.

Robert Pattinson doubles our pleasure in Mickey 17.

Overall: B