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-

28 YEARS LATER

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

There is a lot that makes 28 Years Later stand apart from its two predecessors, the breakthrough 28 Days Later from 2002, which was a watershed moment for zombies (they’re fast now!) as well as the horror genre overall; and 28 Weeks Later from 2007, which was arguably even better. Now, 18 years after the last film, 28 Years Later does some surprisingly deft genre blending, easing into some dramatic territory, and it’s something I really respect. I will also be very up front about this, though: this film just isn’t as good as the previous two.

It does make one wonder, though, how anyone going in blind to this film might digest it, with none of the baggage of films that changed cinema history in mind. It’s certainly not critical to understanding what’s going on in this story, especially since, as all of these movies do, it opens in flashback to the outbreak of the “Rage” virus (a term I don’t recall any character saying in this film, come to think of it). In this case, we are introduced to a young boy who narrowly escapes the “infected.” The character shows up again in the very last scene of the film, serving as narrative bookends—neither of which land especially well. The rest of the movie in between is far better.

I really must say something more about that final scene. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say that the character has become someone I think of now as “Parkour Altar Boy.” If you think that sounds painfully corny and stupid, you would be right. Indeed, the scene offers a tonal turn that makes no sense whatsoever, and left me just thinking: What the fuck is this? Truly, my overall opinion of this film would be higher if not for that one scene, which truly knocked the entire enterprise down a peg, and has the unfortunate distinction of serving as its final note.

After we flash-forward from the opening sequence, to 28 years later, and until that closing scene, the characters we follow are entirely unrelated: Alfie Williams is excellent in his feature film debut as Spike, the 12-year-old embarking on a rite of passage in his isolated, island community. After decades of the entire island of Great Britain being under strict quarantine—anyone who steps foot on it is not allowed to leave—a smaller island has sustained a community that sporadically ventures to the mainland via a heavily fortified tidal causeway. Spike is now being escorted by his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), to the mainland to experience his first kills of infected.

Here we already arrive at Nitpick Corner. I rewatched the previous two films in recent weeks to prepare for this new release, and my biggest complaint about both films was the astonishingly stupid decisions the characters kept making. To 28 Years Later’s credit, there’s not nearly as much of that, as there is far more logic to character behavior this time around—which also allows for a pretty funny sequence in which a shipwrecked Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) tries to explain to a confused Spike what life in his home country, which is clearly just like ours in the real world today, is like. Not only has Spike never seen a smartphone, he doesn’t even know what a radio is (although that seems implausible). There remains a lot of unanswered questions, such as the first film’s establishment of the ability to starve infected to death, and yet now the infected seem to be thriving.

They also seem to have adapted and evolved, in some cases in very odd ways. The trailer to 28 Years Later is cut to suggest there are now giant swamp-monster infected, as well as a possibly sinister psycho played by Ralph Fiennes. Both suggestions are very misleading, and the “exciting twist” of this third installment isn’t so much a new direction with “fast zombies” as a new population of slow, bloated zombies that look like giant baby dolls that just dug themselves out of their own graves. Also they love to eat earthworms (or shoelaces, in a pinch).

I suspected at first that Spike and Jamie would get stuck on the mainland and have to fend for themselves, maybe survive and maybe not, for the entire movie. They do make it back to the island, albeit barely—thanks to a beautifully shot, harrowing nighttime sequence in which they barely escape a giant one of the infected. (Who is naked, by the way, as are all the infected in this movie. You’ve never seen so much zombie dong.) But, Spike also has a mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), who is clearly unwell with increasingly frequent spells of confusion, in a community with no doctors. When Spike learns there is a doctor not far away on the mainland, he slips Isla across the causeway in search of the doctor, even though Jamie insists he’s insane.

Dr. Kelson is indeed a nut, weirdly obsessed with death and collecting human bones and skulls to fashion into giant towers. He’s had a lot of time on his hands, I guess. Anyway, of course Kelson is not quite what he seems. Ralph Fiennes plays Kelson in a way that injects 28 Years Later with a welcome new energy, although he’s really only present in roughly the final third. The narrative shifts from focusing on Spike’s relationship with his father to that with his mother, and eventually there are people in the theater audibly sniffling. “Horror tearjerker” was a new direction I was not expecting.

Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland worked together on 28 Days Later in 2002, and they re-team here, to mostly satisfying success. “Mostly” is the operative word there. They bring welcome new ideas to the franchise, most notably that death can be beautiful even in a post-apocaplyptic world. Maybe not fully fleshed out, but whatever. A whole lot of 28 Years Later is uniquely compelling. I just wish it didn’t end with a narrative choice that was utterly baffling.

Here we are, guests of a very stable and very normal person.

Overall: B

SINNERS

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

Apparently I’m a White guy who just doesn’t get it. Or at least, I didn’t at first. The deeply allegorical nature of Sinners had to be spelled out to me. A friend spelled it out, in a way that made it click for me: this is an allegory about the vampiric nature of White communities, and how they appropriate other cultures, specifically Black culture.

It’s also much more nuanced than that, of course. The line that has stayed with me perhaps the most vividly is when a vampire who has been frozen in youth for decades approaches an old man, a man who is near the end of a decades-long career singing the blues, and offers him eternal life as an alternative to dying of old age. The blues singer, actually a key character from the film just much later in life, replies: “I think I’ve seen enough of this place.” Someone in the theater shouted at the screen: “No kidding!”

Most of the action in Sinners takes place over the course of a single day, the exciting stuff deep into the film, when twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) mount the opening night of a barn converted into a juke joint in 1930s Mississippi. It may be a surprise to learn that I kept thinking about Jurassic Park, which follows a very similar narrative arc: the solid first half is nothing but setup, the second half nothing but thrilling payoff. Indeed, very little of consequence seems to be happening in the first half of Sinners, in which we spend a lot of time getting introduced to characters and learning back stories. Most notable among them are those of Smoke and Stack, who have returned after seven years in Chicago—which turned out not to be the bastion of Black freedom it was cracked up to be. “Might as well play with the devil you know,” they say.

One of the twins reconnects with an old flame, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), with whom he once had a baby who died as an infant. The other pushes away his old flame, Mary (Hailee Seinfeld), in his mind for her own protection—she’s found a “rich White husband” (a character we never meet), but by 1930s standards, she exists in a liminal racial space, due to her grandfather having been half-Black.

There’s a lot of music in Sinners, and I am happy to report that the excellent soundtrack is available, either for purchase or on a music streaming service near you. It features a lot of blues, with Irish folk music sprinkled in—writer-director Ryan Coogler, here producing his first original, non-franchise feature film since his 2013 breakthrough Fruitvale Station, has real skill for using music to both uplift and unnerve. It feels a bit pointed that the primary vampire villain in this film, a local White guy named Remmick (Jack O’Connell), sings an Irish jig in the creepiest way imaginable, several Black characters who have been turned stumble-dancing in a circle around him. This isn’t so much a judgment of traditional Irish culture—which, notably, the Black characters in Sinners openly appreciate—but rather a commentary on the very existence of rich culture actually available to White people, particularly at that time, but it’s still not enough for them. They must also consume the culture surrounding them.

Many characters we meet, get to know, and come to care about in Sinners are eventually turned into monsters. This is very much the point. It also includes two Asian-American characters, a married couple who run a general store and a grocery store on opposite sides of the same street in the local town. There’s probably a lot to unpack regarding the way these characters interact with the Black community here, but I’ll just go ahead and leave that packed, as it isn’t my bag to mess with. There is also a memorable scene, when we first see Remmick, that features members of the Choctaw Nation, having chased him to the home of a White couple he manipulates into inviting them into their home.

This, again, is rather far into the runtime of Sinners, which clocks in at 137 minutes. This is a bit longer than necessary; the aforementioned formula would have been just as effective were the two halves just an hour each. Coogler also takes a couple of moments to show off the special effects, especially as it pertains to Michael B. Jordan playing twins. Around the time we see them for the first time, we see them pass a cigarette between each other’s fingers, and the CGI effects are obvious. Mind you, I’ll never complain about getting to see more of Michael B. Jordan, but would it not have been simpler just to cast a pair of actual twins?

Coogler is an undeniable talent, though, and plenty of people are clearly eager to work for him—in this case, including Delroy Lindo as pianist Delta Slim, and even legendary blues singer Buddy Guy as the aforementioned blue singer character nearing the end of his career. Sinners is overflowing with acting talent, and one wonders how much of the film’s roughly $100 budget went to paying them—the visual effects could have used a bit more of that budget.

However it got made, I have a strong feeling that Sinners would be particularly rewarding upon rewatch. Much is made of how music can conjure both darkness and light, and within the context of ancestral wisdom, from the past and into the future. A particularly great scene liberalizes this, when the performance of a blues song morphs into other genres—both that resulted in the invention of the blues, and what later would not have existed without it. Coogler’s cinematographer, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, swoops and weaves the camera through the revelry in the juke joint full of people forgetting their pain for just a moment, lost in the music, nameless characters passing here and there, in the dress and playing the instruments of cultures from different times and different continents, from Africa to America and from centuries past to the Great Depression, and on to the eras of rap and hiphop. Sinners references many times, places and cultures that have come and gone in specific ways I personally have no power to put my finger on, but on a thematic level, I can at least appreciate that something profound is at work.

Brace yourselves—for something both familiar and unprecedented.

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-

NOSFERATU

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: A
Editing: B
Production Design: A

Given that Nosferatu was directed by Robert Eggers, nothing in it surprised me. Had it been directed by someone else, some of it may have. Coming from Eggers, the closest thing to a surprise is how straightforward it is in narrative structure—no gonzo isolationist craziness or bizarre cutaways to Bjork in this movie. Still, Nosferatu indicates an odd sort of consistency to Eggers’s work, with great performances spread unevenly among the cast; stunning cinematography and production design; and writing that is competent but never great.

It must be noted, though, that Nosferatu really steps it up in the production design department. The Production Designer is Craig Lathrop, who worked on all of Eggers’s other films—and then, a bunch of others no one has ever heard of. Here, he designs a world of dark gothic horror that goes to great lengths to realize Eggers’s bent vision.

Mind you, this is a remake of a German expressionist silent film classic from 102 years ago: Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. I have seen it one time, 19 years ago, at which time I declared Max Schreck’s depiction of Count Orlok to be “alternately grotesque and comical.” I did not even think to re-watch it prior to seeing this version, which I think was the right choice, as it would just invite inevitable but unnecessary comparisons.

This time around—this century—we get career villain Bill Skarsgård’s depiction of Count Orlok. One does wonder whether even this will come across as “alternately grotesque and comical” after another hundred years. Surely audiences in 1922 found Count Orlok to be simply grotesque, and that is absolutely the case with Skarsgård’s Orlock today. He’s beyond disgusting, covered in oozing bumps and sores, and a test of one’s patience to boot: he is the one character in the film speaking exclusively Dacian (with English subtitles), an extinct language from Southeastern Europe. That wouldn’t be so bad on its own, except that every single line is belabored, Skarsgård delivering each word in a slow, guttural and exaggerated accent. Get to the point, you ghoul! I’ll give him credit for incredibly well-kept, long pointy fingernails, though; someone get me the number for his manicurist.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this version of Nosferatu for roughly the first half of it. This film is stunningly produced and shot throughout, but the front half is very focused on an ambitious newlywed, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult, who spends pretty much the whole movie either nervous or terrified), being sent to a faraway land in 19th-century Germany to secure a real estate deal. I know many people who would get bored by this movie very quickly. I can’t say I ever got bored, but I did find myself wondering where it was going.

My favorite thing about this Nosferatu is on a meta level: I absolutely love that they released this gothic horror film on Christmas Day. As it happens, it’s actually set at Christmastime, the production design details very specific to the region and era, as are all the others. In one scene, we see a Christmas Tree, decades before the invention of Christmas lights, actual candles propped on its branches. All I could think about was how often houses caught on fire from Christmas Tree candles, but the characters had far more pressing matters to attend to.

Thomas’s young wife is the most key figure in the story, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) having been taken in her youth—depicted in a brief but terrifying opening sequence before the title card—and now being both possessed from afar and pursued by Nosferatu after he’s been summoned from his grave. Eggers unfolds this story with a fair number of horror movie jump scares and tricks uncommon in his other work, but makes up for this deceptive conventionality by offering some of the most horrifying and grotesque sights you’ll see this year. You won’t see a lot of it in the comparatively plodding first half, but trust me, they are coming. Whether that means it’s a worthy payoff depends on what you’re looking or in a movie like this. I mean, if you came to Nosferatu—or even a Robert Eggers film—expecting anything resembling wholesomeness, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Nosferatu has a curious history, though most of it is tied to the first film, which was the first film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula ever made. Stoker’s widow, Florence Balcombe, was angry about an unauthorized film based on the classic novel, sued, and won. The negatives and all prints of the film were ordered to be given over to her to be destroyed, but as we all know, the film survives, with restorations for home video beginning in 1981 and the most recent, for DVD and Blu-Ray, having been in 2006.

Eggers’s 2024 Nosferatu is a fascinating specimen in its own right for sure, but certainly not something that will be still discussed in the context of cinema history a hundred years from now—and the 1922 version absolutely will be. Just because the original has greater import to history and the more interesting backstory, however, does not mean it’s the better watch today. It creates a certain distance between itself and its audience—another hallmark of Eggers films—and is thus perfect for intellectuals with an affinity for horror. Trash, this is not, but is there also any real depth to it? I could not find any, beyond the layers that exist in its undeniable technical achievements.

Nosferatu is a breathtaking vision, both in terms of its visual design and its impressively sustained tension between fear and desire. If nothing else, this is a movie that delivers on everything it promises.

Nosferatu clearly remembers AT&T’s slogan from the eighties.

Overall: B+

THE SUBSTANCE

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

There is a lot going on in The Substance, both metaphorically and metatextually. It takes a wild, uniquely gory look at self-destructiveness (a pretty literal take on that, actually), self-loathing, obsessions with fame and celebrity and youth.

Writer-director Coralie Fargeat is looking at all this through a decidedly feminist lens. I’m honestly surprised it doesn’t seem to be getting review-bombed by users at places like MetaCritic or IMDb, and my working theory is that Fargeat is offering so much legit body horror that the incels are too giddy to notice. This movie is entirely set in Hollywood, begins and ends with a shot of a (fictional) star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. One brief shot of it actually getting snowed on seems a little odd, yet still emblematic of how stylized and heightened everything is. Nobody talks like a normal person. The do, however, say things we’ve heard said in earnest a million times, like “Pretty girls should always smile!” It just gets a delivery with a kind of exaggerated effusiveness that only underscores how ridiculous it is.

Dennis Quaid is the third lead in The Substance, and he’s the one who utters that line, as a slimeball TV producer—multiple times. He is perfectly cast, and as performer, he knows the assignment.

Best of all is Demi Moore, in a lead part more significant and high-profile than anything she’s done in well over ten years, arguably even twenty years. She plays a bit of a has-been as Elizabeth Sparkle, who won an Oscar once upon a time but long ago pivoted to many years of leading an exercise show on television—shades of 80s-era Jane Fonda there. When she learns that the producer is looking for a much younger woman to replace her, Elizabeth finds herself facing an offer: turn into two selves, one young and beautiful, the other her current version. They must switch back and forth every seven days. It gets complicated.

And this is where the metatextual elements begin, very early on: it’s Elizabeth Sparkle’s 50th birthday, but Demi Moore is 61. With that knowledge, she looks amazing—even factoring in how much work she must have had done. Which begs the question: if you can tell you’re faking a youthful appearance, then what’s the point? Ironically. this may be the lease vain performance Demi Moore has ever given. Dare I say: yes, brave. Within minutes after The Substance starts, we see countless extreme close-ups. This includes close-ups of Dennis Quaid, including a scene of him eating shrimp in a restaurant that is just as disgusting as anything else in this very, very gross movie. But there are also many close-ups on Demi Moore’s face, as Elizabeth becomes self-critical to the point of insanity, but we are seeing Moore’s actual face, her actual pores, her actual blemishes. It’s an incredible commitment to the art.

Mind you, Moore gets much uglier later in the film—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The Substance is a film that nearly transcends its obvious imperfections simply by being uniquely compelling. It’s less concerned with saying anything new than it is with illustrating extremities, particularly of women and the pressures to be young, beautiful, and entertaining, by themselves as much as others. The finesse with which Coralie Fargeat draws these illustrations is perhaps a larger question. The Substance is 140 minutes long, its length perhaps being a part of its statements on excess, except it could have been even more effective had it clocked in just under two hours.

There’s also the fact that everything The Substance does, the 1992 horror comedy Death Becomes Her did better. Trust me on this: if you have never seen that film, find it, and watch it. The way it skewers celebrity and youth culture is both evergreen and unparalleled. It even starred “aging” actors Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn (who were 43 and 47 at the time, respectively). Fargeat basically took that film and crossed with with notorious the notorious gross-out horror movie The Fly (1986). There’s even a close-up of a fly drowned in a wine glass, making one wonder if that is a deliberate reference.

In the last 20 minutes or so, Fargeat really puts the pedal to the metal, amping up the gore to such a degree that it comes across like the climax of Carrie as directed by Quentin Tarantino. The allegorical elements of The Substance kind of blend together after a while, making the narrative lose focus. Until then, we get standout cinematography by Benjamin Kracun (Promising Young Woman), and a script with such straightforward simplicity on the surface that it’s easy to forget how layered it really is. This is the very thing that gives this film a surprisingly broad appeal. At least, theoretically: it made only $3.2 million last weekend, on a budget of $17.5 million. It’s also competing against a lot of more straightforward horror movies, without the tiered depth.

If you’re looking for something that will gross you out, though, then look no further than The Substance. Margaret Qualley, as Sue, the “younger, better version” of Elizabeth, basically giving birth to herself out a slit in Demi Moore’s back is just the tip of the iceberg. You’ll also find plenty of vomit, pus, and deformed breasts and sometimes fall off of bodies. I’m a little bit lost as to why Marget and Sue, who are impressed upon that “You are one,” evidently don’t have memories of what their other selves are doing in the alternate weeks they have agency. But Elizabeth can’t let go of the dream of youth, while Sue has zero concept of the wisdom of age, and as a result they both make wildly stupid decisions, which only make things worse for themselves. Or herself.

Margaret Qualley is well cast as Sue, if not given quite as meaty material to tear into. Ironically, she seems cast more for her beauty than anything else. Indeed. there are many pointed, gratuitous shots of young, supple bodies, and I kept thinking about what the audition process must have been like for this movie itself. It’s participating in the very grotesquerie it’s critiquing. How effective that makes it as a living work of art is up to you.

Young or old, pick your poison.

Overall: B+

LONGLEGS

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

We all know Nicolas Cage is in his “I just like to work” era. For some reason, anyone who works with him is also in their “Let Nicolas Cage do whatever he wants” era. It’s that second part that I don’t get—this idea that getting the man is enough. Even a man with massive talent needs creative restraints. Otherwise, you might get a supposedly demonic serial killer with an unnaturally white face singing “Happy Birthday” in a high pitched voice.

Cage isn’t even onscreen all that much in Longlegs. I can’t find a number with an official source, but in a film that’s 101 minutes long, I would guess we see him about twenty of them. To his credit—I guess—he’s certainly memorable in them. I’m just not convinced he’s the right kind of memorable. In a moody horror piece written and directed by Osgood Perkins (Gretel & Hansel), Cage isn’t so much scary as he is ridiculous.

Longlegs feels like a mashup of The Silence of the Lambs and Hereditary, two films that are far superior to this one, which doesn’t take its themes or its genre anywhere new—unless you want to count Nicola Cage playing a killer for the first time. It starts off promising enough, in a seventies winter flashback using an aspect ratio with curved corners reminiscent of printed photos from the time. There are cool transitions between then and the “present” which is the 1990s, where those curved corners slowly expand into a modern, standard cinema aspect ratio across the screen. This includes some nice sound mixing, as with the sound of a little girl’s steps in a few inches of snow.

These clever transitions would mean more if the story amounted to anything more. The protagonist is a very autism-coded FBI agent named Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), hyper-focused on her work and indifferent to social cues. We see her on the phone with her mother a few times, asking how she is in a way that fails to convince us she actually cares. Eventually we see her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), whose behavior is even odder than Lee’s.

I had been a little nervous going into this movie, expecting it to terrify me. Instead, I found myself wondering when it was going to get scary. Perkins has a skill for establishing and settling tone, but here it’s “relatively eerie” at worst, and then Nicolas Cage appears onscreen and you’re left thinking: what? The acting is generally competent, with Cage’s overacting bringing down the averages. The rest of them generally speak in deadpan tones, in a way you might expect from a movie that clearly aspires to be like others that are far better.

I might also have liked Longlegs better without the supernatural element at all, let alone one that brings in life-sized young girl dolls. Whatever happened to good old fashioned psychopaths? Evil people are scary in their own right. That evil is undermined by the presence of demon eyes in shadows. In other words, I really wasn’t feeling it with this movie, which starts off promising and then devolves into derivative nonsense. Longlegs is far from terrible, but at least terrible is potentially more entertaining than average. The many people who have declared this movie great have left me mystified.

Ironically, I did nod off during this dark lullaby.

Overall: C+

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C
Specal Effects: B
Production Design: B+

Michael Keaton was 36 years old when he appeared in the 1988 film Beetlejuice—only Tim Burton’s second feature film as a director, it’s easy to forget. He’s 73 now. And this is one of the many elements of the sequel out this weekend, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, where there’s a bit of a dichotomy: in the “Beetlejuice” makeup, Keaton looks roughly the same as he did 36 years ago. But, there was a famously unique energy to his character in 1988 that is frankly lacking now. Beetlejuice just doesn’t have the pep that he used to. He’s still a wild nut, but there’s an undercurrent of tired old man in there.

This can be extrapolated to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a film overall, and by extension, to its director, Tim Burton. This is a man who spent the better part of two decades making dark classics for the modern age, from Edward Scissorhands to Batman to Sleepy Hollow to Sweeney Todd. Ever since then, his career has been one long paean to mediocrity.

Is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice any different? The answer is: yes and no. This is only the second time Burton has directed a sequel, and the last time was 32 years ago (and there’s an argument that Batman Returns was one of the best sequels ever made). Beetlejuice is a one-of-a-kind film that has been beloved by multiple generations, an execution of dark weirdness that could never have worked without all the pieces fitting just the right way. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has thus cultivated a kind of anticipation that a Burton film hasn’t managed in years.

I hesitate to say that it lives up to such expectations. As expected, there’s a lot going on in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and still, somehow, it drags much of the time, particularly in its first half. This movie is all of 114 minutes long, and it feels longer. Too many scenes linger on things that neither wow nor delight. And if we count Beetlejuice himself as an antagonist, then he is one of three, which is arguably two two many: the others are Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a local boy who befriends Astrid (Jenna Ortega), the teenage daughter of widowed Lydia (Winona Ryder) and is predictably not what he seems at first; and Delores (Monica Bellucci), the soul-sucking—literally—ex-wife of Beetlejuice who is resurrected and hell-bent on reuniting with him. And in both cases, we get very good performers saddled with parts that wind up being of little consequence in the end. Bellucci in particular, here channeling Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas as a dismembered corpse stapled back together, has an electric screen presence, and not enough to do to move the story forward.

This is one of the common problems with these “lega-sequels.” The first film had a straightforward, simple plot around which all the creative chaos could revolve. The second has to tie itself in convoluted narrative knots just to get mostly the same cast of characters back together.

In this case, Lydia’s dad has died. This was a character played by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Jones in the first film, who does not appear in this one. And yet his character, Charles, has a surprisingly large presence in this film. In one sequence, he appears in claymation. It’s actually pretty funny how they handle it.

And that’s the thing with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: there are many things in it that are hilarious, or super fun. It’s the many other parts that are neither that are the problem, and render the film disappointingly even. This is a movie with some very high highs, and some very dull lulls. It averages out to a movie that is just okay, which is a step down from earlier Burton films that were just wall-to-wall delights. In the end, this is a movie that is just riding on the coattails of its cinematic forebear from three and a half decades ago.

On the upside, it has some reliably solid performers. Catherine O’Hara’s Delia Deetz is the one character who makes the most sense after all this time, clinging to a desperate idea of evolving with the times with her pretentious art. Jenna Ortega is perhaps the best thing in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, proving she can elevate any material she works with. On the other hand, Willem Dafoe seems miscast as a former actor turned ghost detective, hamming it up in ways that often fall a little flat. And Winona Ryder’s Lydia, now deeply emotionally frail, seems incongruous with the bold but emotionally insecure teenager from the first film, or at least the self-assured version of her by the end of it. (It’s a fair counterpoint that spending a lifetime seeing ghosts could do a number on a person.) In the end, even the cast has better and worse, averaging out to—well, average.

If there’s anything that definitively does not disappoint about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, it’s the production design. It’s a relief that this film doesn’t try to “update” the look of the first one so much as augment it; there are bits of CGI here and there, but always well integrated into a plethora of practical effects. Beetlejuice’s office staff of shrunken-head workers, like so many other things in this movie, have antics that sometimes land and sometimes fall a little flat.

In retrospect, sadly, I have to say that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is about as good as I could have possibly expected. I so hoped it would exceed my expectations, but these days Tim Burton is nothing if not consistent. This is a guy with some real creativity left in him, but whose dark mojo peaked a long, long time ago. This is a movie that satisfies insomuch as we’ll take what we can get.

There’s great fun to be had if you’re willing to wait around for it.

Overall: B-

ALIEN: ROMULUS

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

Alien: Romulus plays a lot like it’s just “The Alien Franchise’s Greatest Hits.” Whether that’s a good or bad thing is a matter of opinion, but I mean it very much as a compliment.

There’s a fine line between homage and artistic theft, and this film often straddles that line. There’s a lot of fan service going on here, and if you’re familiar with the previous Alien films, you will find yourself watching, as if on a visual scavenger hunt, for the references and visual nods to virtually all of them. I, for one, had mostly a great time with this.

The score, by Benjamin Wallfisch (Blade Runner 2049), almost immediately features recognizable musical references to the Jerry Goldsmith score from Ridley Scott’s classic original 1979 Alien. (Side note: it’s a bit of a stunner to realize this franchise is now 45 years old.) The story takes place either on or just above a colonized planet very reminiscent of that featured in James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens, complete with elevator shafts and high wind levels—only in this case, it has an established, bustling society rather than a decimated group of fledgling colonizers. Even the films widely considered “lesser” in the franchise get nods, including a pretty obvious recreation of the most famous shot from David Fincher’s 1992 sequel Alien3, in which the alien hovers harrowingly close to Sigourney Weaver’s face. And this film’s already controversial final act is a basic recreation of the infamous final sequence from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1997 sequel Alien Resurrection, only with the concept inverted. Not even the prequel films are excluded, as we get introduced to a creature with a passing resemblance to (but clearly not narratively connected to) the humanoid aliens from Ridley Scott’s 2012 semi-prequel Prometheus.

I have not seen the two prequels anywhere near as many times I have seen the so-called “Quadrilogy” of original films in the franchise; as far as I can recall, I have still seen Ridley Scott’s 2017 follow-up to Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, the one time. Which is to say, for all I know, Alien: Romulus also has some kind of direct nod to Covenant as well, and I just don’t remember it well enough to recognize it. The same could be said of Paul W.S. Anderson’s 2004 crossover Alien vs. Predator (which I did see but very much wish I hadn’t) or Colin and Greg Strause’s 2007 follow-up Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (the one feature film featuring “xenomorphs” that I never bothered to watch, by all accounts wisely), although these are quite rightly not considered officially part of the Alien anthology, and I rather hope that, rather than there being references that I did not recognize, Romulus director and co-writer Fede Alvarez and writers Rode Savages and Dan O’Bannon simply did not bother with them.

The story beats of Alien: Romulus pretty faithfully mirror those of the 1979 Alien, right down to the team of working class miners getting picked off one by one until one of the women emerges as the unlikely hero. This gives the story a certain quality of predictability, but Romulus still has plenty about it that makes it stand apart. Perhaps most significantly, the principal cast is all quite young—all adults, but somewhat barely: Cailee Spaeney (Civil War), for instance, is all of 26 years old, and her character, Rain, could easily be read as several years younger. None of the previous films in the franchise featured a principal cast exclusively of characters so young, and the characters here get introduced to us behaving with a kind of dipshittery authentic to their age.

Of course, we simply cannot have an Alien movie without a “synthetic” (“I prefer the term artificial person,” we are told), here a character named Andy, played by David Jonsson in easily the film’s best performance. Andy is a nearly obsolete model, a lifetime companion to Rain who was long ago orphaned by the dangers of the mining work her parents did. Jonsson has a uniquely nuanced understanding of a robot programmed to convey the subtle emotions of someone with a childlike devotion to a functional sibling, yet a relentless drive towards his “directive.” Depending in what disc gets inserted into a port in his neck, his directive is either to serve what’s best for Rain, or what’s best for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, causing subtle shifts in allegiances depending on where we are in the story—and, thankfully, Romulus never goes down the clichéd route of a robot taking on implausibly human motivations counter to programming.

It’s difficult to gauge how successfully Alien: Romulus might play to someone coming to this franchise for the first time with this movie. It’s certainly true that the experience is enhanced by a broad knowledge of nearly all the films that came before it. Even the obvious references land with somewhat varied success, and an iconic line from the 1986 Aliens gets uttered in a way that doesn’t work as well as the smattering recognition of appreciative chuckles through the audience might suggest. There is even an appearance of an actual character from an earlier film, which I won’t spoil except to say that it’s a digital recreation of an actor who has since passed on, and the one instance in the film of obviously subpar visual effects. (The rest of the movie looks great.)

The bottom line is that Alien: Romulus is a consistently and undeniably entertaining action-horror thriller, its most critical successes being its propulsive pacing due to skilled editing, and several sequences with exeptional cinematography. This feels like a lived-in world, fleshed out in new ways in spite of its admittedly unavoidable familiarity. If anything, it could be argued that it has a bit too much going on, but given the nesting layers of threats—not all of them from the xenomorphs—posed to these characters, it all clicks together surprisingly well. The most important thing I can tell you about this movie is that I had a blast, and it’s not often that can be said of the seventh film in a franchise.

Remember me? Remember this? It warms the heart to reminisce!

Overall: B+

MAXXXINE

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

There was a time when actresses famous or their roles in horror films were called “Scream Queens,” and that is indeed what the title character in MaXXXine aspires to be—even though no one ever uses the phrase in the film. As it happens, Mia Goth has carved out a similar niche for herself, although it exists a few steps to the side of “Scream Queen.” I’m not sure what similar title we could give her—Feature Eater? Picture Witcher? Wackadoodle Chicken Noodle? We can worship it.

One thing that’s for certain is that Mia Goth has a vibe. And it’s one of a woman barely feigning stability. Such is the case as Maxine Mix, a porn star attempting to break into Hollywood in 1985 with the backdrop of the Night Stalker serial killer. People close to Maxine keep dying, and it’s made clear early on that the homicide detectives investigating suspect someone besides the serial killer, just trying to make the murders look like the work of the Night Stalker.

This is all fertile ground for a fun homage to eighties slasher flicks, replete with a banger soundtrack of mid-eighties pop hits. (Frustratingly, movies like this never assemble the featured pop tracks into soundtrack albums anymore; search for the title on your music streamer of choice and all you’ll get is the motion picture score. Boring!) And, for a little while, MaXXXine really is fun, with a protagonist who is delightfully damaged and demented.

We’re made to expect that Maxine can handle herself even in the face of danger. In arguably the most memorable scene in the film, she turns the tables on a would-be attacker in a dark alley, forces him to strip naked at gunpoint, and forces him to suck on the barrel of the gun before she does something kind of hilariously grotesque to him. And there was something I really liked about this scene, the way it flips the script on so many of those old slasher movies with helpless women victims: here, it’s the man who is degraded onscreen, the woman with the agency. It has the exact same exploitative vibe, just with the gender roles reversed.

But, strangely, I’d have to say that’s where MaXXXine peaks, although there’s another pretty great scene involving a man trapped in a car getting compacted. MaXXXine has nearly all the elements you’re looking for in a movie of this sort—except that it presents itself as something with more depth than what it’s imitating, and in the end, it actually doesn’t.

As time goes on, and we get hints of Maxine’s secret past, our protagonist proves to be more helpless than you might expect—resourceful for sure, but she gets out of multiple scrapes only with the assistance of others, mostly men. And when her secret past is revealed and becomes an integral part of a climactic sequence around the Hollywood sign, it’s all fairly disappointing. I wanted more out of this movie, which starts out with an inventive spirit and then just gets lazy with it.

On the upside, MaXXXine still has a compellingly retro-moody tone, and more importantly, very good performances, particularly by Goth, and by Elizabeth Debicki as a ruthlessly ambitious film director. Several other actors are a bit wasted, though: Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan as the two relatively dull detectives; Kevin Bacon as a dirtbag private investigator; Giancarlo Esposito as a shady agent. I just wish the script were better. For all its retro neon-mood recreations, this film still feels very much a product of its time, when homage runs rampant without anything new to say.

I don’t know if she’ll blow you away but she might cock your gun.

Overall: B-