Hope(9/7/2026)

When I think of major filmmakers coming out of Korea two names loom pretty large: Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook.  Those guys have gotten the most attention and achieved the most internationally, but beyond them the country actually has a pretty deep bench.  On the more arthouse side of things they have guys like Lee Chang-dong and Hong Sang-soo but there are also plenty of directors competing with the “big two” on their own “dark but genre-tinged and somewhat commercial auteur” level like Kim Jee-woon, Yeon Sang-ho, or Jang Jae-hyun.  Another guy who you might see on that later list is Na Hong-jin, who emerged in 2008 with a pretty cool thriller called The Chaser, a rather exciting crime film about a pimp trying to protect one of his “clients” from a serial killer.  He has not, however, been the most prolific of filmmakers.  He followed up that debut with a movie called The Yellow Sea in 2010 which I haven’t seen and didn’t hear much about and it would be a six year wait for the follow-up, the 2016 quasi-horror film The Wailing upon which he got a bit of a renewed reputation.  That movie was a weird and kind of challenging piece of genre cinema that wasn’t for everyone but was rewarding for those who vibed with it, which I did to some extent.  Neither of these projects ever quite hit the level of international popularity than Bong or Park did so he would in some ways seem like an unexpected choice to mount what is said to be the most expensive Korean movie ever made, but selected he was and the movie in question is called Hope.

The title of Hope has a bit of a double meaning, as it’s set in a Korean town called Hope Harbor which is near the Demilitarized Zone but otherwise seems to be a pretty sleepy place with an aging population.  There does, however, seem to be some excitement one day when a group of hunters finds a cow that seems to have been violently mauled by some sort of animal and left dead without having been eaten.  This is reported to police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and the group comes to the conclusion that this mauling must have been done by a tiger, an animal that isn’t common in the area but could theoretically show up there.  Ko is weary and decides to keep an eye out for this tiger.  However, as you may have guessed this was not really done by a tiger, and it does not take long for all hell to break out in the village as there’s an all-out attack by a large and roughly humanoid monster and its up to Ko and various other re-enforcements to bring that situation under control and soon they will come to learn that the situation they’ve run into is a lot bigger even than a single monster attack and that all involved are in for a day of intense fighting and that the future of the entire world could be at stake.

While The Chaser was a take on the thriller and The Wailing was Na Hong-jin’s attempt to put his unique spin on the horror movie, this is a full-on action/sci-fi movie.  The film’s characters are appealing enough in their prickly ways but they’re ultimately not what you’re here for and the movie doesn’t strike me as having a terribly complex plot or rich themes; for the most part we’re here for the spectacle.  And the quality of that spectacle is kind of uneven.  On the good side the sets used to build up and break down this town are excellent; you get a really good sense of this town of Hope Harbor pretty quickly and see it get wrecked in pretty vivid detail and the monster rampages through it.  I’ll also say that the staging of a lot of these action scenes is pretty cool.  Na clearly has a pretty good idea of how to film chases and shootouts and on paper he has some pretty good ideas for how these monsters should look and behave and comes up with some cool ideas about how they can leap around and throw things in combat scenarios and generally give off video game boss energy and that’s pretty cool.  However, a lot of this is kind of marred by some pretty sub-par CGI.  This isn’t uniform throughout the movie as there are definitely some shots that are more effective than others including some visuals towards the end that are quite intriguing and well executed but some of these creature shots are just very clearly bad looking, especially during some of the early scenes where the movie really needs to be selling the audience on these creatures.  This is downright jarring given that the rest of the production is pretty top notch and you have to wonder if they just ran out of time and money at some point and needed to prioritize some scenes over others.

Do these special effects shortcomings ruin the movie?  No.  But they do take points off the board.  The other big knock against this film is that it’s actually a “part one” despite not having that in its title and the movie actually ends on a pretty substantial cliffhanger.  This is kind of frustrating because the movie is actually ramping up quite a bit right before it cuts off and starts introducing some interesting complications to what we’ve just seen but it then ends before we can see that new direction through.  Presumably we’ll get that in a potential sequel, but that “part two” has not as of yet been filmed and I don’t think there’s a guaranty that we’ll even get it and if this movie ends up having to stand on its own it’s going to feel rather incomplete.  So on one hand I’m impressed that they got me as intrigued as they did at the end but I’m also a little annoyed that they took this long to get to that point and if they don’t manage to deliver and ending that’s going to make the film a lot worse in retrospect and even if I knew a “part two” was already in the can I’d be kind of at a loss as to how to judge all of this without really having an ending.  That having been said, for all the film’s flaws I still really enjoyed it, the bad CGI was a distraction but it was a distraction from what was otherwise a very cool action movie and the ending was frustrating but it was only frustrating because of how intrigued it left me in wanting to see where it went and along the way we got some really well staged action scenes that kept me pretty intrigued throughout.
***1/2 out of Five

Home Video Round-Up 8/15/2026

The Dink (7/24/2026)
	Remember when there was sort of a trend of the Will Ferrells and Ben Stillers of the world were making comedies set in the world of seemingly every sport under the sun?  Yeah, this is trying to be one of those, this time covering the new trendy “sport” of pickleball.  The difference though is that while Stiller has a cameo and there’s supporting work from Ed Harris and Mary Steenburgen this is not really driven by a big comedy star at its center.  The lead here is the boringly named Jake Johnson, who was apparently on the sitcom “New Girl” and voiced Peter B. Parker in the Spider-Verse movies but who is otherwise not someone I’m that familiar with and I would not say that this movie made me a fan.  The basic plot is that we follow a former Tennis pro whose career was cut short by an injury and who now works as an instructor at his father’s Tennis club and gets caught up in a feud between said father and people wanting to use his club for pickleball, a sport that the father finds distasteful for whatever reason.  This “Tennis Vs. Pickleball” hostility is more realistic than you’d think and I have read articles about wars going on between tennis purists and the pickleballers who want to use their courts and I feel like there was room for a smarter comedy to be made about the pettiness of these feuds.  This movie on the other hand just kind of feels like a meager attempt to bring back a strain of comedy that’s been out of fashion for a while and which I frankly wasn’t much of a fan of back when it was still relevant.  This may hit other people’s funnybones more than it hit mine and there are some bits in it that I did chuckle at (including an amusing John McEnroe cameo) but for the most part this wasn’t for me. **1/2 out of Five
Mockbuster (7/28/2026)
“The Asylum” is the production company and distributor that became famous for producing cheap direct-to-DVD movies that were blatant ripoffs of whatever is popular in theaters at any given moment in the hopes of fooling grandmas into buying copies of Transmorphers for their grandkids who wanted copies of Transformers.  I find this practice to be functionally (if not legally) a form of fraud and have little respect for them, but some people like to view them as charming underdog rascals and they’re still doing their thing today (Alien Disclosure Day, not to be confused with Disclosure Day, is currently available to rent or buy on your streaming platform of choice) so clearly this business model has longevity. They are also at the center of this documentary, made by Australian filmmaker Anthony Frith, a guy who went to film school with large ambitions only to find himself making industrial films for a living. On a lark he one day offered to make a film for The Asylum on the logic that making any feature film, even a bad one, is better than never making a feature film and to his surprise they accepted and this movie chronicles his experiences making a movie for them in six days on a ~$200,000 budget. The film he’s assigned is less overtly mockbusterey than some of that company’s more infamous projects; it’s an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ public domain dinosaur adventure novel “The Land That Time Forgot,” which they were likely planning to time with the release of Jurassic Park: Rebirth but it’s not being completely shameless about that and reportedly they just assigned it to him because it seemed like a good project to shoot in Australia. The screenplay is written for him and he’s also seemingly not involved in editing the film or adding the (bad) CGI after the fact but does seem to have some autonomy despite constantly being given the advice to not try to fight “the system.” For their part the various producers and executives at The Asylum (who are happily participating with the documentary) have no delusions about the fact that they make garbage for money, a sort of honesty that some might find admirable but which I found very off-putting. Something that’s kind of missing from the documentary is any real acknowledgement that a documentary is being made alongside this Asylum film. Asylum clearly knows he’s shooting this but there’s no scene where Frith tells them this on screen or makes some sort of agreement about this and it’s unclear how much his documentary project inspired them to give him this job in the first place or whether it’s the reason they stuck with him as things start to go wrong with this shoot. Looking past that there is interest to be found here both as a peak into this operation that’s been an ambient online joke for years and also as your standard “filmmaker works against the odds and employs ingenuity to make a film” movie against all odds. As a look at The Asylum the film is interesting but incomplete as this isn’t a deep dive into what they do so much as a glance that this guy gets as he goes through their process and he doesn’t have a particularly sophisticated take on them. As a standard “making of” for a low budget movie it’s interesting enough but nothing to unique from what we’ve seen elsewhere. As an overall package it’s a neat little movie worth a look if you’ve ever been curious about this company but nothing transcendent. ***1/2 out of Five
The Bride! (8/1/2026)
	The Bride! is probably one of the more divisive movies of the year, one which was a pretty big failure at the box office and also got decidedly mixed reviews, but it does have its fans who are very willing to defend it and it seems to have at least some “cult hit” potential.  The film is notable for re-envisioning the “Frankenstein” story as a sort of riff on Bonnie and Clyde set in the 1930s with Frankenstein and his bride going on a crime spree that inspires the nation.  That’s certainly an interesting “take” on the material and while it seems like an odd fit at first it does make a certain sense given that Frankenstein’s monster has long been characterized as someone who kills by accident or in self-defense but gets labeled a “monster” and the infamy that Bonnie and Clyde received; it’s like they traded torch wielding mobs with tabloid headlines.  Where things go a bit wrong is that the film couldn’t just run with that as its concept, it needed to add a bunch of other “stuff” to the mix like having the bride have fewer memories than the monster setting up a bit of a “liar revealed” thing or having the ghost of Mary Shelly (whose novel exists in this world and was allegedly inspired by the “real” monster but with a bunch of changes) show up as a sort of narrator type thing.  That’s kind of a lot and it makes things pretty messy.  This is also a movie that I think might have been better served by being a lower budget movie that has more of a B-movie spirit to it.  Its celebrity cast is largely over-qualified and the production values are in a sort of bitter spot where they don’t look cool enough to stand out (especially coming off of Del Toro’s Frankenstein the year before) but whose scope kind of detracts from some of that scrappy b-movie appeal that something like this would normally have.  I’m not going to say I’m among the movie’s handful of “haters,” it’s a little too ambitious and has too many clever moments to really be angry at, but it is messy and never quite finds its voice and is tonally all over the place. **1/2 out of Five
Marc By Sofia (8/3/2026)
The “Marc” in the new documentary Marc by Sofia is Marc Jacobs, a fashion designer of some renown who’d been a pretty big deal since the 90s.  I’ve of course heard his name thrown around here or there but otherwise don’t know the first thing about him and couldn’t identify his clothing.  It should probably go without saying that I was mostly here for the Sofia part, a reference to Sofia Coppola, who directs this and is also a bit more upfront onscreen than your average documentarian and discusses how she’s been crossing paths with this guy for a while now.  By and large though this isn’t too dissimilar for your usual “profile doc” and I must say it’s one that’s a bit less inviting to outsiders of the scene it’s discussing than some of these are.  Part of the issue is that the film kind of just doesn’t really make Jacobs’ rise sound wildly dramatic.  There’s some childhood trauma that’s brought up by Jacobs and it doesn’t necessarily present his career as “easy” but I don’t get the impression that his rise was wildly dramatic.  I also can’t say that Jacobs struck me as a wildly interesting personality more generally though he seems like a reasonably smart guy with some perspective about art and pop culture.  I can get why Sofia Coppola would enjoy hanging with him but I wouldn’t say he’s an ideal documentary subject.  Granted I’m not the target market for this but I have seen other fashion industry documentaries like McQueen and Valentino: The Last Emperor that find a lot more drama in their subjects than this does. **1/2 out of Five
Redux Redux (8/15/2026)
	I’m told that this film had some sort of theatrical releases, but I don’t remember one and it doesn’t appear to have registered any revenue on the usual box office sources so functionally this is a streaming release and that’s probably the right habitat for it.  This is a not particularly high budget little high concept science fiction movie about a woman who has a machine that allows her to travel through the multiverse (yeah I know, tired concept at this point, but bear with it) and is doing so because her teenage daughter was murdered by a serial killer and she’s looking for a universe where she’s alive but mostly fails at this and instead just uses the opportunity to track down and shoot the serial killer and then leap to the next world.  Things finally kick in when she does finally find a living version of her daughter, but she’s different from the daughter she knew and is this rather streetwise girl who’s been raised by foster families and is a bit of a handful and she needs to find a way to both save her in this universe and find a future for both parties.  As “multiverse” stories go this one is a bit more down to earth and grounded, almost feeling more like a Groundhog Day-esque time loop thriller than something like Everything Everywhere All at Once.  There aren’t any huge special effects here and it often doesn’t feel that different from a more straightforward revenge flick.  Not necessarily a great revenge flick mind you, but and okay one.  This is decent weekend afternoon viewing and a serviceable enough modern B-movie of sort but nothing too memorable beyond that. *** out of Five

July/August Round-Up 2026

Evil Dead Burn(7/11/2026)

The Evil Dead is probably one of the strangest horror franchises around with the original film being this super underground cult film which was nonetheless successful enough to inspire a pair of larger sequels and propel its director to the big time but never really big enough to that much of an ongoing concern like, say, Halloween.  In fact there was a twenty year gap between Army of Darkness and the 2013 remake and another ten year gap between that and the 2023 reboot Evil Dead Rise which seems to have finally turned this into an ongoing series in the 21^st century with the first follow-up being Evil Dead Burn, which I think is supposed to be a direct sequel to its predecessor but it has a different cast and tells something of a separate story about a rather dysfunctional adult family who come together for the funeral of a recently deceased son, which is awkward for his widow.  Soon it becomes apparent that these are the descendants of Benjamin Price, the scholar who was responsible for the original study of the Necronomicon and made the recordings that set off the trouble in the very first movie.  Now, my big complaint about Evil Dead Rise was that it was a little too effective for its own good at making its central family likable and making your root for them and once the horror cruelty started happening to them it just seemed kind of mean and unpleasant… this sequel does not have that problem.  Outside of the “final girl” the family here is kind of awful and while I wouldn’t exactly say they “deserve” what they get I certainly don’t mind them being in the middle of a violent horror film.  In broad strokes this is pretty similar the last film, which itself hued closely to the formula of the first movie and its remake: a group of people get trapped in a building (in this case a dilapidated country house), the infection/curse starts going around, and the deadites start killing people off in violent ways while taunting them.  So this isn’t the most creative of entries (none of them have been since Army of Darkness) but what it does have going for it is execution.  Sam Raimi has been using this franchise as something of a farm league for up and coming new horror directors like Fede Álvarez and Lee Cronin and he seems to have found another strong prospect with French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček, who clearly has something of an eye for clever camera compositions and choreography and also for depicting rather brutal violence.  I’m not going to tell you that his work here is “next level” or something but it more than gets the job done and will probably satisfy people who liked the last couple of Evil Dead movies but might be less satisfying for people who like the series when it was a bit more comedically minded.  This isn’t a movie that’s going to change the world or even the franchise it’s from and it has some problems including some kind of drab color grading and a questionable “final boss” but I’d say the strengths overcame the weaknesses for the most part and it was a pretty fun sensory experience for horror fans.
***1/2 out of Five

Rose of Nevada(7/19/2026)

Mark Jenkin is one of the more unusual filmmakers working today as he makes sort of quasi-experimental films that end to be rooted in the Cornwall region of England.  I mainly knew him from his 2022 ghost story Enys Men, which is set on a largely uninhabited island which may have a slightly haunted past.  His new film Rose of Nevada is likewise doing something of a homespun twist on a genre, in this case a sort of Twilight Zone inflected science fiction (maybe) involving time travel.  It follows a young man who takes a job as a deckhand on a small fishing boat called the “Rose of Nevada” which has re-appeared after seemingly having disappeared years ago and when the boat comes back he’s surprised to learn that he’s seemingly come back some twenty years earlier than from where he left.  This doesn’t seem to be traditional time travel however, there’s some sort of weirder magic at play and it’s also unclear how much of what’s happening while in this past is going to affect the future, and to some extent the film’s style discourages you from engaging with it the same way you’d engage with something like Looper.  Like his last two films, Jenkin shot this film on a hand cranked 16mm camera and added all sound in post-production, which was choice that made a lot of sense in Enys Men, which was straight forwardly a period piece set in the 70s with minimal dialogue and which was meant to have someone of a found footage feeling but it seems like more of an odd choice here.  It does capture some of the grit of the setting but adds a layer of anachronism to a film which seems to be predominantly set in the 21^st Century.  I will also say that the film took a while to grab me which is a bit of a problem because there’s some in retrospect pretty important set-up in the opening scenes that I probably should have paid a bit more attention to.  That having been said Jenkin does still very much conjure a feeling of unease with this movie that ultimately builds into something of an interesting morality paradox even if I think this style works a bit better on a pure mood piece than it does for something that requires as many plot machinations as a time travel film.
***1/2 out of Five

I Want Your Sex(8/2/2026)

Gregg Araki is a filmmaker I haven’t seen a ton of films from but I feel like I get the gist of his deal, he was like a Gen X John Waters who makes kind of wild sex comedies to scare the normies, but does it with a little more professionalism and formal skill and who has also made more serious fare from time to time.  His latest film I Want Your Sex would seem to be something of a return to his usual shtick but looks to bring it into the post-#MeToo world of Gen Z.  The film looks at a young college graduate played by Cooper Hoffman who gets a job working for an eccentric artist played by Olivia Wilde who has a very, uh, provocative “sex positive” demeanor and who finds herself crossing various boundaries with the Hoffman character leading to much mishegoss.  This whole business of gender swapping sexual harassment has been something of a go-to for movies that want to run thought experiments about questions of whether workplace sexual mores are valid and I’d say that’s not a particularly proud tradition, a lot of them seem like thinly veiled attempts to defend sexual harassment by suggesting it’s actually kind of sexy.  I wouldn’t say this movie is doing that (better HR policies at this place most certainly would have saved all involved from a lot of trouble and pain) but I wouldn’t say that it’s 100% not doing that either.  Araki clearly views this Hoffman character as being more repressed than the horndogs that populated his earlier films but the character isn’t fully virginal either; the guy has a live in girlfriend and while his sex life with her isn’t great it’s not non-existent either and he doesn’t seem to be remotely put off by his bosses erotically charged art either.  He’s really only prudish compared to Wilde’s proudly “slutty” character who has something of a dominatrix aspect to her demeanor inside and outside the bedroom.  So I’d say the message here is pretty muddled but fortunately the movie does have a lot going for it just as a straightforward sex comedy.  Wilde and Hoffman are both quite striking in their roles and tonally the film captures exactly that tone of heightened absurdity that I think Boots Reilly tends to shoot for but often misses by overstuffing his movies.  So I was certainly entertained and intrigued by this movie even if I can’t entirely get behind its message on a first viewing and that’s probably enough for me to view it as a “win.”
***1/2 out of five

The Samurai and the Prisoner (8/8/2026)

It’s probably stupid but I’m probably never going to hear the name Kiyoshi Kurosawa without at least for a beat to two thinking about the name Akira Kurosawa even though the two directors are not related and their movies for the most part are not very similar.  That’s about as logical as comparing Ken Russell with David O. Russell, but the mind does what it does.  Well, for the first time Kiyoshi is almost inviting the comparison by making a full on historical epic with samurai and I’d say that he very much holds his own in the milieu.  The Samurai and the Prisoner is a work of historical fiction focusing in on a figure named Araki Murashige, who is explained in an opening title card to be a feudal lord in charge of Arioka Castle during a siege by the warlord Oda Nobunaga, who Murashige was previously allied but then switch sides to an alliance with one of his rivals.  The aforementioned title card points out that to this date there’s a gap in the historical record as to why Murashige switched sides and the circumstances of why and this film speculates about that.  Set over the course of a year the film tends to focus on the relationship between Murashige and a prisoner he takes early in the film somewhat in violation of the bushido code which would have required him to execute this man (an outcome that the man himself preferred for the safety of his family), one of many signs of pacifism that Murashige exhibits that are contrary to the usual practice of his times and which have decidedly mixed results for all involved and which could be viewed as something of a meditation on the role of force in leadership more broadly.  The film however is also something of a murder mystery, or rather a series of murder mysteries, which is kind of an odd structure that yields slightly mixed results.  Still, the drama here is mostly fascinating with a lot of dense court intrigue that we get in rapid fire succession.  There’s a lot of history here and in some ways the audience (especially a western audience unlikely to be familiar with these figures and this world) is kind of dropped into the deep end but we do mostly get what’s needed to follow along if we’re paying attention.  I’m not going to say this is quite up there with the best samurai movies of the golden age of Japanese cinema but it’s definitely a cool drama that does some interesting thing with the form.
**** out of Five

Tony(8/10/2026)

The death of food personality of Anthony Bourdain elicited several reactions and one of the more surprisingly impactful one was a tweet sent by writer Kyrell Grant on June 8^th 2018 which asserted that Bourdain had “big dick energy,” a tweet that is said to have been the springboard to the popularization of the phrase.  That sometimes misunderstood phrase refers to a kind of unflashy demeanor exerted by calmly confident people who are not, uh, compensating for shortcomings.  I bring this up because the guy that comment was directed at was the Bourdain people knew in 2018, the guy in his 50s and 60s who people saw on his travel shows, but it’s very unlikely to be a complement directed at the 19 year old Bourdain we see in this bildungsroman take on the guy’s early life in which he first found himself working at a small Cape Cod restaurant.  So this very much isn’t a “birth to death” biopic, it’s a “the one summer that molded this future notable person” biopic… so, like, The Motorcycle Diaries but for a dude who filmed himself going to restaurants instead of a future revolutionary.  This genre is usually prone to being a bit simplistic in their outlook; the movie gives the impression that this guy matured significantly over three months into becoming something a lot closer to the guy we used to know but anyone who’s read “Kitchen Confidential” will know that he was still a bit of a fuckboy well after that point and spent years being pretty wild and irresponsible long after that point.  That said, you don’t really need to know or engage with the Bourdain of it all to enjoy this movie, in fact I think it may well hold up better if you just view it as a coming of age film unto itself without worrying too much about the future of the famous figure in question.  It seems to captures that Cape Cod feel pretty well and the dynamics of stressful kitchen work (a trope popularized by Bourdain’s book) seem well captured.  Perfectly decent little movie but I can’t say this ever really felt particularly special and I’ll also say that this feels like a rather dull direction for Blackberry director Matt Johnson to take his career in.
*** out of Five

The End of Oak Street(8/14/2026)

David Robert Mitchell is a director that in retrospect feels like something of a precursor to people like Ari Astor who got a start in indie-horror and then leveraged the success of his profitable debut (It Follows) in order to make a crazy freakout of a movie called Under the Silver Lake.  The moneymen do not seem to have been all that forgiving of that movie’s box office trouble however so after an eight year wait he’s finally come back and he’s done so with a much more commercial project: a high concept thriller in which a suburban neighborhood gets transported (through never explained magic) back in time to the Cretaceous era where they must survive attacks by dinosaurs that quickly start walking onto their newly relocated street.  So, that’s a fun premise and there’s certainly some fun to be had here.  The early 80s suburban setting is clearly meant to be a pastiche of the signature Amblin style that was also recreated in the likes of Super 8 and “Strange Things” and is in some ways starting to be a little overdone but this is about as good as either of those projects at recreating that aesthetic and it remains a fun milieu.  I will say though that once the “adventure” kicks off I was a little surprised at how lonely the film gets.  “Oak Street” and its surrounding seems like a pretty big place but we don’t tend to see a ton of its denizens, or if we do it’s only one or two at a time.  Instead the focus is pretty squarely on this family and in typical Spielbergian fashion the parents have a pretty rocky marriage.  But we’re not really here for domestic drama, we’re here for dinosaurs and the creature scenes here are pretty alright.  I will say the film seems to be trying to go along with recent scientific consensus that dinosaurs were bird-like creatures that likely had feathers and that looks… kind of silly to my eyes.  Apologies to paleontologists but I think we should stick to printing the scaly legend on this one.  Still, dinosaur attacks are dinosaur attacks and it was kind of cool seeing David Robert Mitchell trying to out-Spielberg Spielberg with his own dino flick and some of the time travel shenanigans here are also fun.  Could have done without the epilogue though and I’ve got to say that at the end of the day this is a pretty shallow B-movie at its absolute best so I do hope that Mitchell has something more interesting up his sleeve for later.
*** out of Five

The Rivals of Amziah King(8/16/2026)

The Rivals of Amziah King, Andrew Patterson’s follow-up to his 2020 debut The Vast of Night, is a movie that’s had a somewhat tortured production and release cycle.  The film needed to get a special waiver to film during the WGA/SAG strike, there were disputes with producers about final cut, and while it was praised when it premiered at South by Southwest it wasn’t able to find a distributor and is now being given a very small scale theatrical release by an upstart company and is probably going to have a hard time finding an audience.  I’m glad to have finally seen the movie as it does have a lot going for it but also has some clear issues which are probably why people weren’t rushing to release this.  The film is set somewhere in rural Arkansas and the “Amziah King” of the title is a beekeeper played by Matthew McConaughey who seems to be what you’d call a “pillar of his community” amongst his neighbors and things kick in when he reunites with a young woman named Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass) who he’d foster parented when she was younger and offers her a job on his farm.  The film starts as something of a character study that showcases this community while focusing on the healing process for all involved… and then half way through there’s a somewhat jarring transition and the movie turns into a sort of neo-noir thriller that strongly resembles Winter’s Bone.  So, you’ve kind of got two different movies, both with their strengths and weakness, kind of awkwardly mashed together in a way that gives the audience whiplash and kind of undermines both.  Angelina LookingGlass’ performance is unfortunately part of the problem, she’s very well suited for the first part of the movie but much less well suited for the second and she isn’t really able to pull off the transition between the two, but I’m not entirely sure anyone could given that the script and the filmmaking is kind of failing her in this regard.  Still, there are some very good qualities to both halves just the same; the first half has a lot of folksy charm and the second half is a peak into the under-examined seedy underbelly that exists in a lot of rural America and the movie has a pretty good visual eye and populates itself with some interesting side characters.  Ultimately it’s kind of messy but also a movie I can’t be too mad at and there’s enough good there to carry itself over the finish line, albeit with a noticeable limp.
*** out of Five

Coyote Vs. Acme(8/23/2026)

The live-action/animation hybrid Loony Tunes film has become something of a cause célèbre among online film enthusiasts because it looked for a while like Warner Brothers was going to permanently shelve the finished film in order to turn it into a tax write-off rather than release the film, a wildly unpopular practice that Warner executive David Zaslav has become infamous for.  Fortunately the situation was salvaged after several years by an indie company called Ketchup Entertainment who is now distributing the film and, well, given how many posts I made taunting Zaslav it sure would have felt hypocritical to not go see the movie when it was made available even if a Looney Tunes movie isn’t necessarily something that would have had me rushing to theaters in a vacuum.  Fortunately it turns out the movie really is good!  The idea here is to basically dramatize the longtime half-joking conversation people have been having for years: “why doesn’t Wile E. Coyote sue the Acme corporation for all the defective products that keep failing to foil the roadrunner?”  Well in this movie, which takes place in a Roger Rabbit-esque world where “toons” walk amongst normal humans, the coyote does exactly that by hiring an ambulance chasing lawyer played by Will Forte to file a suit against this corporation and the investigation ends up uncovering a larger conspiracy this company is engaged in.  Obviously this is all meant to be something of a parody of courtroom dramas and corporate conspiracy movies with the premise of a mute accident prone bipedal canine going through all this legal rigmarole being rather comical and I almost wish the film had leaned even harder into courtroom accuracy just to heighten that comic juxtaposition.  That’s probably where this gets a little odd as a product; most of this courtroom drama parody (and accompanying anti-corporate messaging) is probably going to go well over the heads of most children and yet a live-action/animation hybrid Looney Tunes movie is going to still be a tough sell to adults.  If I had to guess that’s probably why Warner Brothers panicked and tried to (literally) write this one off.  It’s tempting to try to over-rate the movie because of its production history and I don’t want to oversell it too much, but on its own merits I do think this is a fun and humorous family movie.  Aside from the aforementioned Who Framed Roger Rabbit? the best “comp” to this is probably Akiva Schaffer’s Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, which was also a movie that tried to do something surprisingly ambitious and meta with a children’s property and got a lot of plaudits for it.  That was a cool movie but I’m not sure it’s one that’s really stuck with me and I’m not sure that this one’s quite one for the ages either, still, really cool use of a classic and frequently disrespected IPs out there and the fact that this solid movie could have been disappeared for crass business reasons is downright scary.
***1/2 out of Five

The Dog Stars(8/30/2026)

Ridley Scott’s lengthy streak of making rather large scale movies at a wildly fast pace continues this year with The Dog Stars, which I guess is a relatively “small” movie by Scott’s standards but which is nonetheless a fairly costly movie with something like a hundred million dollar price-tag.  The studio doesn’t seem to have a lot of confidence in getting that budget back and seems to have kind of dumped the movie into theaters with minimal marketing and while I do think the movie is better than that fate would suggest I’d also be inclined to admit there’s not a whole lot here to excite audiences.  The film is set in a post-apocalyptic future and follows a guy played by Jacob Elordi who has a bit of an advantage over other survivors because he’s a pilot who owns a small plane and can use that to fly into the city (Denver) for scavenging while living on a rural compound with a survivalist played by Josh Brolin and the film follows him as he considers breaking his routine and seeking out other settlements.  As tends to be the case with Ridley Scott’s movies this has some pretty well executed world-building and renders the world of this post-apocalypse pretty effectively and gives a pretty good procedural overview of this guy’s life.  However, while I think these are well realized I don’t think they’re pretty creative.  Since roughly The Road we’ve seen tons of visions of the post-Apocalypse (“The Last of Us,” The Quiet Place, “Station 11,” 28 Years Later…, “Fallout,” “Paradise,” etc) and this really just doesn’t have much new to add to the conversation.  On the other hand, I’d say that Scott still has some juice behind the camera for the most part and while the movie doesn’t make the greatest case for itself it doesn’t really have massive gaping flaws beyond a kind of messy third act.  So I wouldn’t say the movie is a total bust by any means and it may well prove to hold up a little better later on when people are less inclined to compare it directly with the competition within the genre that its up against these days.
*** out of Five

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma(8/13/2026)

Jane Schoenbrun may or may not be the filmmaker the world wants right now but they’re definitely the one the world needs.  Schoenbrun is a filmmaker for whom there aren’t really easy comparisons even though they’re not exactly shy about showing their influences.  They seem to have a rather uniquely millennial voice informed by pop culture touchstones and puts together these rather “meta” movies about people whose lives are as informed by media as they are by anything else in their lives and they’ve managed to establish all this with just two (now three) movies which seem to form something of a trilogy.  Their first film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was an experimental film seemingly about a teenager’s obsession with an online “creepypasta” which maybe lacked a certain visual oomph.  That was rectified with their second film I Saw the TV Glow, which was a trans allegory about a young person’s obsession with a 90s TV show.  That movie is to date their magnum opus and likely one of the best movies of the 2020s and its critical success has set expectations quite high for their follow-up, a film called Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, another movie about a character’s possibly dangerous obsession with a “screen” but this time around it’s the cinema screen and this time around it’s the pop culture of the 1980s that gets interrogated rather than the 90s or 2000s.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma centers around a fictional horror franchise called the “Camp Miasma” movies which, like lots of slasher movie series, began in the early 80s and then burned out after numerous sequels and is now being considered for a “reboot.”  The catch is that this series is now considered “problematic” and the original film has a transphobic twist akin to the one featured at the end of the 1983 film Sleepaway Camp (it otherwise basically seems to be a subtweet of the Friday the 13^th movies).  Because of that twist the studio has hired a young queer non-binary filmmaker named Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) in order to reboot the franchise, an assignment that suits her because she saw the original Camp Miasma at a very young age and feels a strange connection to it.  As part of her process in finding an “angle” into the material Williams decides to take road trip to meet with the original star of the first movie, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who purchased the summer camp where that movie was filmed and has turned it into a house.  The meeting the two have begins pretty awkwardly with Presley skeptical about Williams’ overly intellectual take on the property but the two do come to find some sort of understanding, but this becomes complicated as this property seems to have a strange hold over both of them and it starts to become unclear just how fictional the property even is in the first place.

Between seven different Scream movies, The Cabin in the Woods, and stuff like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon I’d kind of thought that the well was close to dry on the topic of slasher movie deconstruction but this film definitely managed to tap a new vein of material from the genre, in part from looking into what women and AFAB non-binary people get out of the genre.  Like the other movies in the “screen trilogy” this is interested in the effect that this media has on the viewer but not in the old “scary movies make people violent” pearl clutching way.  On the contrary this is about how the women who are often the murder victims as well as objects for the male gaze in these movies and the film’s protagonist, who became obsessed with the movie at a very young age, perhaps empathized with protagonist a little too much to the point where she equates sex with violence on some subconscious level.  This is a pretty complicated psychosexual dynamic to try to convey and the movie tackles it pretty directly.  Beyond that the film is generally a bit more overtly “meta” about the film series at the center including some (slightly dated) industry satire about the central filmmaker being assigned to the project for “woke” reasons and a very amusing opening credits sequence involving newspaper clippings and ephemera from the fictional franchise in question.  I might nitpick that the film is a bit inconsistent about just how successful the Camp Miasma franchise is supposed to have been in this world and about the Anderson character’s exact role in the film within a film (was she a “final girl” or did she get killed off?), but that’s not too big a deal.

So thematically it’s not hard at all to connect this with Schoenbrun’s other films but the form it takes is pretty different.  This is a much more comedic film than I Saw the TV Glow both in terms of its film industry satire and just generally the way the characters carry themselves.  At its center is kind of an odd meeting of minds between this Gen Z director and this Gen X actress and it takes a while for this relationship to really come together.  I was initially a bit put off by Anderson’s performance as Billy Presley, which is kind of broad, and while I liked Einbinder here this work isn’t too far removed from her work on the show “Hacks” which is notably also about an intergenerational meeting of minds between feminine people in entertainment.  It’s probably a bit of an open question how much Einbinder’s character is meant to be something of a stand-in for Schoenbrun themself given that both are experimental queer filmmakers who’ve suddenly gotten a higher profile gig and have similar media obsessions.  In fact it would not shock me at all to learn that some producer somewhere actually did try to offer a Sleepaway Camp reboot to Schoenbrun only to have them propose some crazy thing like this that said producer was not looking for.  That said if this character is meant to be a Schoenbrun self-insert it’s a very self deprecating one as this character is depicted as being a rather neurotic and kind of annoying young character, a sort of parody of the kind of person who would be part of a polycule, but despite that the film does still take this character’s emotional arc fairly seriously.

To say the least this movie plays really differently than I Saw the TV Glow does.  Deep down there’s a very similar melancholy here but it’s being processed by an older character, one who’s a bit more self aware and who’s in more of a position to work through their obsessions and traumas and as a result also by someone who’s more able to laugh at themselves a little.  In that sense it provides a relatively hopeful ending to the “screen trilogy” if that trilogy is even really a thing.  That said, call it bias for drama but at the end of the day I don’t see myself ever quite loving this movie like I do something as wrenching as I Saw the TV Glow, that movie was especially singular and it really caught lightning in a bottle.  On some level I’m tempted to hold this one to in lesser esteem just as a matter of comparison, but when I stop and think about it I still think this is quite a bit bolder and more interesting than most of the movies we see week to week.  Even for its occasional bits of messiness this still has some fairly powerful things to say not just about how we interact with media but also what inspires media and how potentially unsettling and offensive ideas are kind of always going to be out in the ether and it’s up to filmmakers to channel them in interesting, creative, and ethical ways.  The movie has its imperfections but I feel like I’m willing to take them for something that’s this willing to challenge its audience and be as watchable and entertaining and funny while it’s doing it.
****1/2 out of Five

Crash Course: Finishing the First Hundred Criterion Spines

I’ve been fascinated by the Criterion Collection since roughly the early 2000s.  I can’t put my finger on exactly how early I started paying attention to them but I can say I remember a time when there were less than 200 DVDs in the collection and that means I’ve been looking at that list of early titles for the better part of 25 years and I’ve particularly had a sort of fixation on the first 100 films that managed to get a spine number.  These selections were in many ways just as random as any other section of the collection.  I’m sure there were certain obvious titles like Seven Samurai or The 400 Blows or The Seventh Seal that they licensed quickly in order to make their brand clear but then there are other selections that seem to just be random quirks of licensing availability like “Fishing With John” or The Most Dangerous Game that seem to be borderline worthy of the collection at all.  Anyway, through the sheer amount of time I’ve had I’ve actually seen most of the movies from this span of the collection but I never made a concerted effort to check them all off, in part because the film Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom was sitting there at number 17 and I wasn’t just going to casually watch that thing to check it off a list.  Well, I did finally get that out of the way earlier this year and that leaves me with just six movies left to watch to say I’ve seen the first 100 Criterion spines and I think I’m going to try to do that this month.  Should be fun but I will note that there’s a reason I haven’t been rushing to see some of these so we’ll have to see if any of them are more to my taste than I expected.

Spine #38 Branded to Kill (1967)

Seijun Suzuki is a director I’ve long had trouble with.  If you dig into my Letterboxd account you’ll find a one star review of his film Tokyo Drifter (which is Criterion spine #39, and is thus presented as a companion piece of this) and I have my doubts that I’d stand by that review if I watched it again, partly because I’m a much kinder grader these days and partly just because I’m more inclined to admire the audacity and filmmaking that someone like Suzuki brings to the table even if it doesn’t speak to me and that’s kind of where I am with this next film of his.  In fact I’ve had a bit of a journey with this film as well.  Way back when, when I was just getting into cinema I tried watching this because I liked the title and thought it had cool cover art on the OG Criterion DVD but I think I only made it about twenty minutes in before turning it off, baffled at what I was watching.  That feels weird in retrospect, it’s certainly a weird movie but I’ve seen much weirder in the years since and I would have thought there was enough sex and violence here to keep me interested even if the storytelling was chaotic and the editing was kind of Godardian.  In fact, understanding the wave of global “New Wave” filmmaking was going on in the late 60s is kind of essential to understanding this.  The story, which is at its core just standard crime thriller hokum, is decidedly not the point.  This is more about style, one could call it “pure cinema” and it’s become influential in various ways.  The basic story (which, granted, is not the point) bears some clear similarities to David Fincher’s The Killer and that scene in Ghost Dog where someone gets shot through his sink pipes comes from this.  So, I am more equipped to process this now but… I don’t know, I think I’m still kind of allergic to this director.  The whole thing is just so chaotic and while it’s consistently “cool” I still like there to be a bit more of a backbone to the movies I watched so I’m glad that the best elements of this movie have been mined by other more conventional films that work better for me.
**1/2 out of Five

Spine #50 And the Ship Sails On (1983)

Long ago I’d been warned off of Federico Fellini’s late works with the rule of thumb that was handed down to me being that 1974’s Amarcord was sort of the end of his plateau and that it was mostly downhill from there.  That being said one of the earliest Fellinis in the criterion collection by spine number is this film he made in 1983, well outside of the ostensible imperial phase and having finally seen it I’m starting to question the advice I was given or perhaps speculate that I over interpreted it back when I heard it because this has a lot going for it.  The film is set on an ocean liner setting sail right on the eve of World War I and it’s kind of meant to look at the decadence and frivolity of the bourgeois classes of the per-war era.  The film feels a bit aimless in its opening sections (which probably could have used some cuts) but the film comes to life in its second half once the ocean liner is forced to rescue a bunch of Balkan refugees from a shipwreck, much to the disgust of the rich people on board who think that sailing with these people is beneath them.  That starts a neat conflict but this isn’t necessarily some Marxist tract about class conflict and is instead more of an almost nostalgic elegy to a more innocent time (albeit on with its blind spots) and this reminded me a lot of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel to the point where I suspect it was a direct influence.  For that matter the visuals here, which involve a lot of elaborate and knowingly sets and costumes and hair stylings also give me pretty big Wes Anderson vibes, that sense of colorful whimsy is definitely there.  So by the end of the film I was pretty into it but that slow first half does weigh it down for me a bit and I can also see why this maybe felt a bit out of place coming out in the year of our lord nineteen eighty three and might have felt a bit like Fellini almost doing a pastiche of his circus-like style, but on the other hand maybe he was just being taken for granted, not unlike the aforementioned Wes Anderson is today.
***1/2 out of Five

Spine #71 The Magic Flute (1975)

Ingmar Bergman was a very prolific filmmaker with something like forty films under his belt which you’d think would keep him awfully busy but he actually had a whole other career working as a stage director around Sweden.  Those two careers finally collided late into Bergman’s film career when he opted to make a film out of a production of Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute.”  This is kind of a tricky film to categorize because it’s essentially a filmed version of a stage production but I don’t think the production in question was ever actually performed in front of an audience and that this was actually all staged for the camera even though everything that’s artificial about the theater is front and center.  The sets are clearly matte painting type things and there aren’t any “VFX” here (one of the first things we see is an attack by a dragon, which looks like a dude in a mascot suit) but the staging clearly choreographed with the camera in mind and we get a full array of close-ups and whatnot which can only be captured if you are unconcerned with getting A/V equipment in the way of an audience.  So this kind of is and isn’t a different beast from, say, the kinds of “pro-shoots” you see of Broadway productions and the like.  The production here in general seems pretty charming but it should be noted that “The Magic Flute” itself is kind of famously a lighthearted and kind of silly opera bolstered by music by an over-qualified composer and I can’t say I got particularly wrapped up in the storytelling here.  I’m also not going to say I’m terribly qualified to assess the skills of the various performers here, to be frank opera singing all kind of sounds the same to me.  So this movie was probably never really going to be “my jam” but if you are into opera the filmmaking here is quite well done and I can see why this might be something of a gold standard for how to film a stage production.
*** out of Five

Spine #77 And God Created Woman (1956)

Many years ago, before there was a Criterion Channel and even before there was a FilmStruck, the Criterion Collection tested the streaming waters by licensing some of Janus’ movies out to a sub-channel on the then fairly new streaming service Hulu.  Notably at that time you could sort movies on that service by different criteria like alphabetical sorting or sorting by run time and most notably sorting by popularity.  I remember this because when I sorted Hulu’s Criterion movies by popularity the number one movie was not one of the stalwarts like Seven Samurai or The Seventh Seal, no, it was Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman.  Why?  Almost certainly because the thumbnail had a naked woman on it.  I don’t remember the number two movie when ranked by popularity but it appeared to be popular for similar reasons.  But in many ways this is appropriate because despite whatever artistic merits the film had it likely became famous in the first place because of a salacious title and advertising campaign.  This is a movie that would have been considered very sexually open and salacious, probably even within European cinema, when it came out back in 1956 but there are still certainly limits to how much skin is in this (likely to the disappointment of many a Hulu user in the late 2000s.)  The film opens with a scene of Bridget Bardot tanning nude in the sun but you only see her from the side and the film uses angles and strategically placed objects throughout to avoid ever entirely showing you the most explicit of body parts.  Still, the sexuality baked into this story (about an eighteen year old orphan getting into a strange love triangle with two brothers) is daring unto itself and it especially brought to life by problematic fave Brigitte Bardot, who was married to Vadim at the time, and this movie was her big breakout as an international sex symbol and really pops from the screen whenever she’s on it here.  Vadim also brings some style to the proceeding, shooting the film in Technicolor widescreen, which was probably a slightly unconventional choice for this type of movie during this era and that brings a degree of professionalism and legitimacy to the whole thing.  Vadim would divorce Bardot shortly after the release of this film and eventually married Jane Fonda and made Barbarella with her which suggests that this guy had quite the aptitude for wooing iconic women who are out of his league and a unique interest in, uh, displaying them to the world.  He’s definitely not one of the greatest talents of the golden age of world cinema but he’s an interesting enough side figure of the era and this movie holds a similar status; something worth knowing about but probably not one of the greats itself.
***1/2 out of Five

Spine #81 Variety Lights (1951)

In 1963 Federico Fellini released what many feel to be his magnum opus: the unusually titled 8½.  That title referred to the number of films that Fellini had made up to that point and that total included a “half film” in part because of this movie, Fellini’s feature debut but one that he co-directed in collaboration with another filmmaker named Alberto Lattuada.  Lattuada is much less famous than Fellini but is he’s still a respected director with some classics like Mafioso under his belt.  It’s not known exactly how the two divided work on this film but at the end of the day it’s generally viewed more as the beginning of Fellini’s career and I’m probably better equipped to view it in that context without thinking too much about Lattuada, and the film definitely feels of a piece with Fellini’s work rather than some exception diluted by some other guy’s contributions.  The film is set in the world of Italian vaudeville and in some ways feels like a bit of a precursor to the circus troupe we see in La Strada, but these characters are given a much less interesting or dramatic plotline.  In a lot of ways this is kind of like one of those “backstage musicals” from the early sound era, but obviously this isn’t a musical and while you do occasionally see the vaudeville style acts they aren’t really meant to be a particular source of entertainment here.  If Fellini hadn’t gone on to be a major artist later on I have my doubts this movie would be particularly widely seen today but that shouldn’t be too much of an insult because it’s still a decent little movie for what it is and was as good of a place for the guy to start as anything.
*** out of Five

Spine #92 A Fiend Without a Face

Criterion has always taken it as something of a mission to represent a large variety of genres and film types, which often leads to some kind of unexpected choices that baffle people who’ve reduced the collection to a certain kind of arthouse cinema.  Right now we’re seeing some bafflement at their decision to release a physical version of K-Pop Demon Hunters but they’ve always been doing stuff like this going back to their infamous decision to put out Armageddon on DVD.  This instinct does not, however, always involve huge budget Hollywood blockbusters like that and it sometimes leads to even more baffling choices, such as the decision to make one of their earliest DVD releases this cheesy science fiction film about sentient brains trying to kill people.  This was one of those unofficially paired releases the company sometimes does alongside spine number 91, which is the much more famous 1958 produced sci-fi/horror B-movie The Blob.  In reality the (future) Criterion release this has more in common with is their “Monsters and Madmen” boxed set (spine 364), which is a collection of four films also produced by Richard and/or Alex Gordon and in retrospect they might have been better off saving this for that.  The film itself is a functional enough B-movie with a lot of the strengths and weaknesses of the form.  It’s an unpretentious production with some fairly stock actors and cheap sets but it notably some kind of interesting (if low budget) visual effects involving stop motion brains (some of them with spinal cords) killing people and that’s kind of neat.  Does the movie belong in the Criterion Collection?  Probably not by my metrics, and I’m not sure I’ve gotten much else from the Godons’ movies either and I’m not sure how much of a renaissance these releases provided for those guys either, so maybe this is just kind of a quirk of one of their programers’ taste, who knows.  Regardless, if you set aside the Criterion baggage this movie is mostly fine for what it is and I’m okay with it.
**1/2 out of Five

In Conclusion

So, I’ve finally crossed off all of the first 100 Criterion spines (including that weird Beastie Boys music video anthology, which I watched all of via Youtube).  Did I learn anything from this?  No, not really.  Ultimately it was just kind of an excuse to watch a grab bag of movies whose titles have been nagging at me for a while and which I wanted an excuse to cross off.  There was definitely some decent stuff here though nothing too revelatory, there are reasons I’d avoided most of them and I can’t say they defied my expectations too much.  And the Ship Sails On… was probably my favorite of the bunch, that definitely clashed with its reputation as second rate Fellini and it did make me a bit more curious to check out some of that guy’s later work, most of the rest of the movie were kind of just what I expected.  I don’t plan on following this up with further explorations of Criterion spine number sets, firstly because there aren’t any other stretches with this few to cross off and secondly just because nothing else in the collection has gnawed at me as much over the years.  This was fun for the most part though.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day(7/30/2026)

There’s been a lot of talk as of late about MCU-fatigue and superhero-fatigue more broadly at theaters and at this point it’s pretty close to undeniable.  Just look at Supergirl, that movie had problems but it wasn’t terrible or even particularly “bad” in my eyes.  If it had come out in 2018 it would have had no problem opening big and doing decent business regardless but in 2026 it flopped hard.  Stuff like Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four: First Steps also struggled so clearly the days in which a Marvel or DC logo ensured a hit are probably done… however, there are complications to this narrative.  There appear to be certain top shelf characters that can still draw crowds regardless of how much trouble their “cinematic universes” are in.  People still showed up for James Gunn’s Superman and they also still showed up for Deadpool Vs. Wolverine.  These movies had most of the “easter egg” stuff these movies usually have but the people making them seem to have understood that these were in some ways “bigger” than the brand and can still put up huge numbers even when people are otherwise disillusioned by the rest of the genre.  It would seem that this dynamic goes double when it comes to the character of Spider-Man, who seems to be particularly bulletproof.  The Spider-Verse films are far and away the most popular animated spinoffs in all of franchise media and the last Tom Holland starring Spider-Man movie broke every record imaginable despite being released during a big COVID surge and by all accounts this new installment is not going to be diminished in the slightest by the waning interest in the rest of the MCU.  But does it deserve that?

This installment begins with something of a time-jump after the ending of Spider-Man: No Way Home, in which Dr. Strange’s spell made everyone forget both that Peter Parker was Spider-Man and also who Peter Parker (Tom Holland) was at all and left him on his own to fend for itself.  It’s now four years later and both MJ (Zendaya) and Jacob Batalon (Ned Leeds) have graduated from MIT and Parker has had to observe their actions from afar while he remains in New York and focuses on his superhero work as Spider-Man and he seems to have pretty successful at this and has even formed a pretty strong relationship with the NYPD (not sure what happened to J. Jonah Jameson).  In some ways this is all great for Spider-Man, but not so great for Peter Parker, who’s alone and stressed and generally not doing great.  This comes to a head after he crashes a house warming party that MJ and Ned throw when they move back to New York and rooming together and he sees that MJ has a new boyfriend.  This drives him so crazy that he comes to learn that it’s throwing off his spider-powers and making the arachnid DNA in him spike and heighten his aggression.  This comes at an awkward time because it’s happening right as Parker finds himself facing off against some unknown threat that appears to be able to possess ordinary people and force them to carry out crimes.

The first three Tom Holland Spider-Man movies were all directed by a guy named Jon Watts but for this fourth film he’s stepped aside and been replaced by Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings for Marvel but who is otherwise known for more character oriented films like Short Term 12.  This reflexes something of a change in tone for the series, which clearly realized that they weren’t going beat Spider-Man: No Way Home (which ended on a duel between three Spider-men fighting several super villains on top of the Statue of Liberty) so it’s pivoting to more of a focus on character arc.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of superhero action here, but the film does seem more interested in the growth of the characters who are now twenty somethings instead of teenagers and the filmmaking does try to match the heightened emotional stakes of that.  It’s not exactly clear what income Peter Parker is getting as Spider-Man and how he manages to pay the rent (and I still don’t know if Dr. Strange’s spell erased Parker’s Social Security records) but it is taping into that stress than many a young person feels as they’re forced to “hustle” to establish themselves at a young age and some of the toll this takes on their personal lives, sort of.  Honestly that’s a bit of a stretch, Parker’s loneliness is partly because he’s busy but also because he’s a superhero who “broke up” with his high school sweetheart under the weirdest comic book circumstances possible and still pines for her in a way that’s not healthy.

So I do think this does a decently admirable job of progressing the Peter Parker character but I’m a little less impressed by what it does as just a standard Spider-Man adventure.  For one, I think Destin Daniel Cretton’s visual styling here is generally less fun than Watts’ was.  The film has made the rather annoying decision to be presented in different aspect ratios in different theaters and I feel like some of the framing seemed a bit sloppy as a result.  I also found some of the scenes to feel oddly under-lit and thought some of the action scenes worked better than others.  I also found the film’s finale, which may otherwise have been somewhat impressive, to be oddly similar to another recent MCU movie’s finale in a way that stole some of its thunder.  That said there are definitely some bits of spectacle here that do delivery and I also appreciate that they don’t feel obligated to make this the biggest and most bombastic that Marvel has ever made.  I’d also say that the film has a fairly curious assemblage of characters it’s working with; the film’s ostensible villain played by Sadie Sink is a well-known Marvel character but not one you’d conventionally expect acting as a Spider-Man villain and likely makes more sense here if you take them at face value rather than bringing in outside expectations about them from their depiction in other mediums.  The Punisher, who actually has a pretty big part in this, also seems like an odd addition here at first glance but he does share a common link in the story as another person who’s been stripped of his family and left alone in his crusade against crime and The Incredible Hulk also makes sense here as a character fighting an inner beast he struggle to control; these aren’t just characters selected to set up future MCU movies.

Aside from those cameos, which granted isn’t a small thing, this actually kind of has a different “feel” from a lot of the MCU in certain ways.  Not dramatically different mind you, and not necessarily different in entirely good ways, but kind of different.  The dialogue feels less quippy and the story feels less streamlined, almost feeling more like a short TV run or maybe even more like a series of comic book stories than like a regular three act film.  The film seems to have a more serious tone, which may partly be a conscious choice or may be a byproduct of the jokes that are here just not being as good as they could be, but regardless it makes the film feel a bit different.  Again, whether that’s for better or worse is probably debatable, I kind of missed that MCU-feel but I’m also not sure it can really be recreated at this point, it’s kind of a magic trick we’ve seen to many times so maybe it’s best not to chase it.  The movie we did get though has a lot of cool stuff in it.  The villain’s “line of sight possession” trick is pretty fun and I did remain pretty interested in Peter and his growth as a person.  If the film had managed to make certain twists a bit less predictable and punched up the dialogue a bit I think we may well have had one of the best Spider-Man movie to date but I’ll take what I’ve been given and admire what it’s setting out to do.
***1/2 out of Five