A House of Dynamite: A Review - A Nuclear Dud

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An instantaneously forgettable cinematic exercise that is so lifeless and inert as to be frustrating.

A House of Dynamite, directed by Academy-Award winner Kathryn Bigelow, examines the reaction from the U.S. government and military to the launch of a nuclear missile aimed at the United States.

The film, which is streaming on Netflix, features a cast that includes Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Tracy Letts, Jared Harris and Anthony Ramos among many others.

There have been many notable films made throughout the years about the dire threat and fear of nuclear annihilation, Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove immediately come to mind. Rest assured A House of Dynamite is not even remotely in the same class as either of those two classics.

In fact, A House of Dynamite is such a tepid, thin gruel, it barely even feels like a movie, never mind a good one. It looks, sounds and feels like a post-9/11, self-serious ABC Wednesday night drama series or something as equally superficial and vapid.

The movie is structured in three acts that are less acts as they are episodes…thus making the entire enterprise seem like one big “very special episode” of 24, Designated Survivor and The West Wing combined.

Unfortunately, it is also shot like a tv show, with very flat visuals, orthodox and rudimentary framing and camera work, obvious sets and forced melo-drama.  

The opening act of the movie holds a modicum of promise as it follows the people working the Situation Room at the White House when the alert comes that a missile launch has occurred. It isn’t great by any means, but compared to what comes in acts two and three, act one seems downright riveting.

In acts two and three, despite the countdown clock to the missile hitting the U.S., the film becomes remarkably inert dramatically. Act two and three are so poorly written, poorly directed and poorly acted that it is embarrassing to behold.

The film thinks it has something profound to say but its politics are as trite and vacuous as its drama. The whole venture is so devoid of gravitas it ultimately feels like a blackhole of self-seriousness that eliminates all responses to it except for derisive laughter – the most notable example of this is the film’s ignominious ending (which I won’t spoil).

Speaking of derisive laughter, there are a bevy of really bad performances in this movie, and some of them come from very good actors, which is baffling.

For example, Idris Elba is a terrific actor, but he is so afwul as the president in this movie it is jarring, and painful, to watch. He is so disconnected from the role, and to be fair it is horribly written, but he is also devoid of any charisma – which is shocking.

Jared Harris is another actor I really like but he is extraordinarily bad as the Secretary of Defense. Harris, like Elba, is British, and like Elba his American accent is sort of all over the place and entirely distracting. It also doesn’t help that his character is egregiously written as well.

Thankfully Anthony Ramos, of Hamilton fame, is American…but unfortunately, he is also an absolutely atrocious actor. I am sorry to say but it isn’t just Ramos’ work on A House of Dynamite…it is every film he does. Guy is a terrible actor. Please Hollywood…please just make Anthony Ramos go away.

To be fair to the cast, who are all not great in the movie (with the exception of the ultra-luminous Rebecca Ferguson who has one moment in the movie that is the only moment that feels real), the script is utterly appalling….and the direction is amateurish as well.

Which brings us to Kathryn Bigelow.

Bigelow is absolutely adored by some in the movie industry. I am not one of those people. I don’t have any inherent dislike of Bigelow’s work, in fact I have admired some of it, but I also have no time for false filmmaking idols.

Bigelow has made some popular movies, like Point Break, that I find to be forgettable popcorn nonsense. She has also made some serious pieces of cinema…like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. You can quibble with the politics of Zero Dark Thirty, but there is no quibbling over the quality of the deft and skillful filmmaking on display. The same is true, at least regarding the filmmaking, of Bigelow’s Academy Award winning film The Hurt Locker.

But unfortunately, those films were the undeniable apex of Bigelow’s career. Her follow up to Zero Dark Thirty, and her film previous to A House of Dynamite, was 2017’s Detroit…which was an absolute shitshow of a movie. It is one of the very worst films of this century…and maybe the last one too.

A funny anecdote, but after writing a much-deserved scathing review of Detroit, I had a dear friend cut me out of her life entirely in a rage. This was the height of the first Trump hysteria (God helps us that I had to say “first”) and the #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite nonsense that gripped Hollywood (and much of the country) at the time. My former friend was suffering with Stage Four of Trump/MeToo/OscarsSoWhite/BlackLivesMatter hysteria – and I was immune to it. Due to her ailment, she apparently got so furiously enraged that I had the temerity to not adore Detroit – a movie about a racist police incident from the 60’s, that she could no longer bear to know me or read anything I wrote because apparently, I was a racist or sexist…or both…or something like that. At the time I thought that was bizarre to the point of being literally insane…in hindsight I still think I am 100% accurate in my diagnosis.

To be clear, not wanting to be my friend is not insane, actually it’s a very rational notion and a sign of good taste, but what is insane (and also a sign of the very worst of taste) is not thinking that the movie Detroit is nothing but an odious pile of elephant excrement. (I wholly encourage you to read my review of Detroit)

Regardless…or as some like to say…”irregardless”…Detroit was a mess of a movie, and while A House of Dynamite isn’t quite as insufferable as that, it is still close enough to be quite an uncinematic embarrassment.

The bottom line is that A House of Dynamite yearns to be a taut thriller chock full of profundities about the dangerous nature of our world and the current moment – a truly noble cause, but it is so dreadfully written, poorly constructed and amateurishly executed that it is rendered a dramatically impotent and cinematically flaccid affair.

The truth is that the vitally important topics addressed in the film deserved considerably better…and so do audiences. Unfortunately, audiences would’ve been better served, and definitely more entertained, if A House of Dynamite was titled A House of Dyn-O-Mite! and was a gritty drama about the golden years of JJ Walker from Good Times (only old people will get this joke).

Jokes aside, A House of Dynamite is streaming on Netflix, but it is so instantaneously forgettable that you shouldn’t waste even a single second of your time watching it.

©2025

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 140: One Battle After Another

After a long hiatus, the boys are back!! On this episode, Barry and I shout "viva la revolution!" as we talk all things One Battle After Another, the new PT Anderson film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Topics discussed include the film's many failings, politics in film, and the current state of cinema, culture and the movie industry. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 140: One Battle After Another

Thanks for listening!

©2025

Eddington: A Review - The Madness of Covid...and a Lot of Other Things

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT NOW.

Eddington, written and directed by Ari Aster and starring Joaquin Phoenix, hit theatres way back in July…but I only just saw it this past weekend…and I have a lot of thoughts.

The film, which bills itself as a “neo-Western dark comedy thriller”, tells the story of the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico and the personal and political trials and tribulations it faces during the Covid pandemic.

Ari Aster is a filmmaker of whom I think highly – so why didn’t I see Eddington until this past weekend? Well, Aster’s first two films, Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), were really top-notch elevated horror movies that I loved, but his third feature, Beau is Afraid (2023), was a film that was so affecting that I literally could not watch it all the way through. In fact, I tried multiple times to stream Beau is Afraid and each time I made it roughly 30 minutes in and bailed.

To be clear, I am not saying Beau is Afraid is a bad movie (it might be but I can’t judge after watching only 30 minutes of it - twice), what I am saying though is that it was so affecting that I had a terribly uncomfortable visceral reaction to it – the reasons for which even I am not completely clear on (paging Dr. Freud!!) – so much so that I had to stop watching. This is something that has never happened to me before (or since).

So, when Eddington came out this past Summer, I thought that seeing it in the theatre was not a priority because I might want to bail on this one too. And so…all these months later when it is now available on VOD, I rented it for $4 and watched it. And oh boy…am I ever glad I did!

Eddington is the very best film I have seen this year, and it isn’t even remotely close. It is incredibly smart, insightful, bold, brave and brilliant.

This film is once again very affecting…even uncomfortably so…but it is such a compelling and dynamic film that it is impossible to turn away from it…even when you want to.

One of the reasons you may want to turn away from Eddington, is because it so expertly recreates the Covid experience – both socially, personally and medically, in such visceral and palpable ways that watching it literally feels like having a Covid fever dream.

Ari Aster masterfully captures the disorientation of the Covid era, which felt like an assault on our senses, psyches and souls. This disorientation from Covid (both the disease and the cultural reaction to it) created rampant hysteria and mania that spread like wildfire during the insanity of the Covid era. Ultimately, that hysteria is the true pandemic that thrives to this day having lived long after the disease of Covid has faded into distant memory.

Eddington is a comedy, a thriller, a horror movie and a political satire, but above all else it is an indictment. The indictment of how foolish and gullible and easily manipulated we all are. How even now we suffer from such aggressive cognitive dissonance that the excesses of the Covid era, and the worst offenders of Covid hysteria (and the accompanying BLM mania) have never been forced to acknowledge their egregious and calamitous errors, never mind pay for them.

As time passes and we gain more distance from the lunacy and imbecility of our current age, Eddington, with its sharp and incisive criticisms, will age like the finest of wines. The film’s insights will become more profound over time for those with eyes, and the intellectual courage, to see them.  

As you may have noticed I have intentionally avoided any and all plot points for Eddington, and that is because I think it is best watched with as little information known about it as possible. That said, I will try and convey my appreciation for the film despite my strict spoiler limitations.

First of all, Joaquin Phoenix, who plays protagonist Sheriff Joe Cross, gives a stellar performance. Phoenix is brilliant, his Sheriff Joe is a stew of subdued defiance and fury mixed with smoldering self-righteousness that often curdles into hubris.

Phoenix is the great actors of our time and he creates a deliciously complex character in Sheriff Joe, that is so captivating and subtly magnetic that it is a marvel. And Phoenix’s ability to convey physical ailments is truly stunning – and I will say no more about that.

The rest of the cast, which features Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Deirdre O’Connell, and Austin Butler, all have smaller roles but do exceptionally noteworthy work. Pascal, in particular, is an actor who can often grate, but his unlikability is used to great effect in the film. Stone’s role is small but she is completely bought into it and does exceptional work despite minimal screen time.

Cinematographer Darius Khondji does his very best work on Eddington, using the high desert landscape and the small-town setting to great effect. He also deftly paints with a deft palette and masterfully frames his shots throughout – heightening the drama.

The real star of Eddington though is writer/director Ari Aster. It took balls the size of watermelons to make this movie and Aster has them. He has been pilloried by many critics for Eddington, but I think that has more to do with the perceived politics of Eddington rather than the filmmaking skills on display from Aster. I also think many critics are among those who so wholeheartedly embraced the Covid and BLM hysteria and are so ravaged by cognitive dissonance that they aggressively resist any notions of coming to grips with how foolish they look in hindsight.

The reality is, is that the “conspiracy theorists” were right all along…and still are…or at least they’re more right than the buffoons who think “conspiracy theorist” is a derogatory term. The most amusing thing that has happened in the last five or six years has been that tinfoil hats have been transformed from objects of ridicule into crowns of knowledge and wisdom – worn proudly.

To be fair, the “conspiracy theorists” are closer to the truth than the normies…but they still are a far way off from the truth. The conspiracy theorist’s real enlightenment comes from the fact that they understand the one undeniable fact that “normies” are loathe to admit…that the “official” story is, always and every time, a lie. And Eddington is one of those rare movies that not only acknowledges that fact…but aggressively embraces it.

The unacknowledged mantra of the dystopian digital age is – “The map is not the territory” – as our culture is so detached from the territory of reality because they have their noses buried in the map…their phones. Because of this fact we as a people are easily manipulated – emotionally, mentally, politically, and Eddington is a film that slaps us across the face in an attempt to wake us from our technologically induced stupor – and it does so with cinematic and dramatic aplomb.

You may not want to see Eddington, but trust me when I tell you…you NEED to see Eddington, you NEED to absorb Eddington, and you NEED to eventually accept what Eddington is teaching you.

Make no mistake, Eddington is thus far the very best film of the year…and is also the most important film of the year, if not the decade.

©2025

Paul Thomas Anderson Films - Ranked Worst to First

PT ANDERSON FILMS – RANKED

Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest film, One Battle After Another, hit theatres at the end of September and has garnered massive critical praise and generated a cavalcade of conversation.

I love any conversation that involves the films of Paul Thomas Anderson…so I thought I’d start another one…namely by ranking his films.

PT Anderson is my favorite current filmmaker. He is a unique cinematic genius, a brilliant writer and an extraordinary director of actors. All that said…he is for many, an acquired taste…one which I have certainly acquired. Which makes it all the more profound when I DON’T like one of his films.

Anyway…without further ado here is my list of PT Anderson films ranked worst to first. This list is…ALIVE. It can change not just everyday but sometimes every hour. For example, just in the course of writing this piece my top three films flipped back and forth at least three times.

So here is the list…let the debate begin!!

THE NOT-SO-GOOD

10. Hard Eight (1996)– Hard Eight is Anderson’s feature debut and while it is a decent film featuring a solid performance from the ever-reliable Philip Baker Hall, it is definitely as bit rough around the edges. It’s impressive for a debut but not a particularly good movie.

Available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime

9. Punch-Drunk Love (2002)– This was Anderson shifting gears into a less ambitious cinematic undertaking after the sprawling Magnolia and the decade spanning Boogie Nights. The film is devoid of ambition though as Anderson makes the calamitous decision to cast the grating Adam Sandler as his lead in this unusual and dark romantic comedy. That was a very poor decision.

Punch-Drunk Love is beautifully shot, of that there is no doubt, but the script feels cloying and trite and the lead performance from Adam Sandler is unbearably amateurish.

I know people who have Punch-Drunk Love ranked number one on their PT Anderson list…those people are idiots.

Currently streaming on the Criterion Channel

8. One Battle After Another (2025)– All the caveats apply regarding my feelings about One Battle After Another. I’ve only seen it once…and saw it on a shitty digital projector at the local cineplex – which just got new chairs but failed to get better projectors and sound systems – so now people can be comfy and cozy watching movies on their sub-par projectors!

Anyway…maybe my feelings about this movie will change after I see this movie a few more times or with a better projector…who knows? But after one less-than-cinematically-ideal viewing I was not a fan. To Anderson’s credit, it is a tremendously ambitious film, but I thought it failed by almost every metric…including the performances.

Currently in theatres

7. Licorice Pizza (2021)– This film is really gorgeous to look at but ultimately, it’s all empty calories as there is no meat on the bones of its story.

The bottom line is it’s a rather vapid “hang out” movie that ends up being rather forgettable despite some great scenes and sequences.

Currently streaming on MUBI

THE VERY, VERY GOOD

6. Inherent Vice (2014) – I, unlike many, absolutely loved this movie and found it to be a psychologically profound piece of work that felt like a fever dream.

Like One Battle After Another it is based on a Thomas Pynchon novel…unlike One Battle After Another it is exquisitely crafted and filled with rich metaphor.

It also features top-notch performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin…and is laugh out loud funny on occasion.

To me, the list of best PT Anderson films really starts here with Inherent Vice, an audacious arthouse gem.

Currently streaming on Amazon Prime

5. Phantom Thread (2017) – One of the more elegant, eloquent and dark relationship stories in cinema history, Phantom Thread features luminous craftsmanship – most notably its cinematography and wardrobe design.

It also features one of Daniel Day Lewis’ greatest performances as the persnickety Reynolds Woodcock. Leslie Manville and Vicky Krieps also give truly phenomenal performances in the film.

Phantom Thread is an often-overlooked Anderson film…but it shouldn’t be.

Currently streaming on Netflix

THE GREAT

4. The Master (2012) – Ok…the final four films on this list are out and out masterpieces in my mind.

The Master is a tour de force film that boasts two all-time great performances. Philip Seymour Hoffman is utterly amazing as the cult leader/con man Lancaster Dodd – it is one of Hoffman’s very best performances, which is saying quite a lot since he was one of the greatest actors of his generation.

Then there is Joaquin Phoenix as the lead Freddie Quell. Phoenix’s performance isn’t just the greatest of his career, it is the single greatest and most revolutionary piece of acting in modern cinema history. You may think that is hyperbole, but trust me, it isn’t. Phoenix re-invented the art of acting with this intricate and stunning performance.

The Master is a mesmerizing meditation on masculinity and the modern man, and it requires multiple viewings to fully flesh out its meaning…and it deserves as many re-watches and you can manage.

Currently streaming on Roku

3. There Will Be Blood (2007) – There Will be Blood is at the very top of this list on many…if not most…occasions, as it is a full-on masterpiece featuring both Daniel Day Lewis, cinematographer Robert Elswit, and in some ways PT Anderson, at their very, very best.

A dark brooding tale about capitalism, masculinity and America, There Will Be Blood is a dramatic powerhouse that devours everything in its path.

Day-Lewis brings all of his substantial power and acting prowess to bear on his role as Daniel Plainview…who, in case you didn’t know…is an oil man.

There Will be Blood is as intense, expansive, jarring and invigorating a film as you will ever see. A truly spectacular piece of cinematic art.

Available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime

2. Magnolia (1999) – Magnolia is a bit of a controversial choice at number two as it was raked over the coals by critics and many fans back in the day. But the fact of the matter is it is the very best Robert Altman film ever made…and it wasn’t even made by Altman!

Magnolia features a cavalcade of top-notch performances, great writing, and some of the best editing in recent history…not to mention Robert Elswit’s glorious cinematography.

Tom Cruise of all fucking people, gives the very best performance of his career…and it is utterly amazing as Frank T.J. Mackey. Only PT Anderson could get Tom Cruise to be that great…and he really, really is that great in Magnolia.

Philip Seymour Hoffman too gives one of his best, most subtle, and most tender performances in the film as well.

I hadn’t seen Magnolia in quite some time and re-watched it this past week and it definitely still holds the same emotional power and melancholic mastery as it did when I first saw it 26 years ago.

Currently streaming on the Criterion Channel

1. Boogie Nights (1997) – As previously stated, There Will be Blood could easily be at this top spot, but the truth is that Boogie Nights is the PT Anderson film I have watched the most (I typically watch it at least once a year if not twice) and that I enjoy the most.

Seeing Boogie Nights for the first time back in 1997 was a religious experience for me – hell I was so enraptured by the movie I even wrote a paper on its symbolism and cinematography back in film school! It is a masterfully constructed film with a complex sensibility, a funny bone and devastating dramatic punch.

Boogie Nights announced PT Anderson as THE guy to watch in moviemaking and part of the joy of watching it was experiencing the giddiness of expectation for the unknown PT Anderson films to come.

Boogie Nights itself gets the very most out of actors like Burt Reynolds (a resurrection project – Burt gives his career best performance) and Mark Wahlberg (also giving his career best performance).

Then there is the unbelievably fantastic cast – Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, Luis Guzman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Baker Hall, Melora Walters, Thomas Jane, Alfred Molina and William H. Macy – all of whom are superb and give pitch perfect performances.

A great cast, a scintillating script, Elswit’s stunning cinematography and Anderson’s audacious direction make Boogie Nights his best film (at least for today), and most watchable – and re-watchable, and my favorite, film.

Currently streaming on Paramount +

Quibble all you want…but this is the official PT Anderson film ranking list!! If it makes you angry, that’s okay…because the list has probably already changed in the fifteen minutes after I wrote it.

In looking over Anderson’s filmography the thing that stands out the most to me…besides the glorious cinematography and usually inspired writing…is that Anderson is able to get the very best out of the very best actors around. You’d think that is an easy thing to do…but it isn’t.

Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, Joaquin Phoenix in The Master and Inherent Vice, Philip Seymour Hoffman in Boogie Nights, Magnolia and The Master, Tom Cruise in Magnolia…and on and on and on.

PT Anderson isn’t just mandatory viewing for lovers of cinema and hopeful filmmakers, he is mandatory viewing for actors of all stripes and at every stage of their career. Beginner or old pro, actors everywhere can learn boatloads just by carefully watching PT Anderson films and seeing how a master director can elicit supreme performances from the entirety of his cast.

Alright…enough of my rambling…thanks for reading and hopefully I’ll see you at a screening of One Battle After Another where I try and catch the fever for this film which has thus far avoided me.

©2025

One Battle After Another: A Review - The Art of Cinema Loses Another Battle

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.

One Battle After Another, written and directed by acclaimed auteur Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, tells the story of Bob (DiCaprio), a revolutionary fighting the fascist powers that be while trying to keep himself and his family safe.

The film, which is inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, and stars Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Tayana Taylor and Chase Infiniti, opened on September 26th and has been praised by critics and seen a modestly successful return at the box office – over $100 million, the biggest of Anderson’s career (with a budget of $150 million or so – also the largest of Anderson’s career, it has a long way to go to profitability).

Paul Thomas Anderson has long been the darling of film bros, and as long-time readers know I am the film bro-iest of film bros, so Anderson is my favorite filmmaker and I consider him to be the greatest filmmaker of our time. Anderson’s talent with the typewriter, the camera and particularly with actors, is undeniable. His filmography is proof of this as it includes a bevy of extraordinary masterpieces (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master) as well as a handful of exquisite and brilliant arthouse gems (Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread).

I found Anderson’s last film, Licorice Pizza, to be a disappointment. It was beautifully shot but beyond that it was a rather empty venture devoid of meaning or purpose.

So it was that I was somewhat trepidatious when going to see One Battle After Another. Despite my long-standing practice of embargoing information about films I’m interested in, news seeped through the blockade and I heard whispers about how One Battle After Another was fantastic.

In order to find out if that were the case, I went to a sparsely populated Sunday matinee at the local cineplex here in flyover country. The film was shot using VistaVision – a rarely used practice that can only truly be appreciated in like four movie theatres in America – and mine certainly wasn’t one of them. No, I watched the film like the rest of the hoi polloi – on a very shitty digital projector.

After sitting through the expansive two-hour and forty-five-minute runtime, my take away from One Battle After Another is this…it just doesn’t work. It isn’t funny, or even mildly interesting or the slightest bit profound. In fact, the only thing profound about this movie is how disappointing it is. It is such a misfire it makes the tediously middling Licorice Pizza seem like Citizen Kane.

As previously stated, I saw the movie on a digital projector, so take this with a grain of salt, but I also did not find the film technologically or cinematically impressive in the slightest.

When the film ended and I walked back out into the blinding daylight, I was stunned at what an underwhelming experience I had just endured. It was shocking to me that an enormous talent like PT Anderson could create such a lifeless movie that fails to stir even the slightest bit of a spark from such acting luminaries as Leo DiCaprio and Sean Penn.

One Battle After Another is garnering a cavalcade of critical adoration – not surprising considering two things – Anderson’s well-earned status as an elite auteur, and also the film’s political subject matter.

The film is essentially about a revolutionary group fighting a fascist government that rounds up illegal aliens – if it were a Law and Order episode they’d say it was “ripped from the headlines”. The specter – or odor, depending on your political perspective, of the Trump administration hangs over this movie like a ghost of Christmas past, present and, unfortunately, future.

No doubt critics, and most audience members, will get a thrill from the fight against fascists at the heart of the film. The problem though is that the film’s politics are both ludicrously heavy handed yet compulsively vapid, vacuous, trite and aggressively unchallenged. If you want to see a much better (and very different) film about modern-day violent revolutionaries, go watch 2022’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline – a flawed but feverishly compelling film.

Tonally One Battle After Another, labelled an action-thriller, struggles as well, as there is minimal action and even less thrills. Anderson’s other adaptation of a Pynchon novel, 2014’s Inherent Vice, was a weird and woolly conspiracy crime comedy, and I thought it was a wonderful piece of cinema and supremely psychologically profound. One Battle After Another is never as funny as Inherent Vice, and never as smart and certainly not even remotely as profound either.

I laughed exactly once watching this movie, and it was when a flustered DiCaprio tries to close a curtain and the curtain falls to the floor and he is left puzzled as to what to do next…and then apologizes. The rest of the time I was, as was the rest of the audience, as silent as the grave.

There were some amusing observations in the movie, particularly about the generational divide when it comes to revolution – the fragile Millennial/Gen Z woke keyboard warriors versus Gen-X’s hearty bomb-throwers…but that was minimal and not especially insightful.

As for the performances, much was anticipated when news came out that Leonardo DiCaprio would be teaming with PT Anderson…like a dynamic duo of generational talents.

DiCaprio gives, frankly, a rather forgettable performance as Bob, the stoner revolutionary trying to navigate life in the underground. Never once does he command attention, or feel as if he fully inhabits the character. To be fair, DiCaprio is not aided by the script, which has his flaccid character often deeply at odds with himself.

Sean Penn fares even worse. It has often been said of late that Sean Penn looks like all three of the Three Stooges combined, and that was never more-true than as his work as Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, an obsessive and ambitious military man hot on the trail of revolutionaries.

Penn, an actor I greatly admire, gives a frivolous and forgettable performance as the fiery Lockjaw. He is all hat and no cattle. An empty vessel floating aimlessly through the doldrums of a poorly written script.

Regina Hall seems to be in a different, and much better, movie with her performance as Deandra, a revolutionary. Hall is grounded and human as Deandra, which is considerably more than anyone else in the cast can say.

Benicio del Toro does Benicio del Toro things and sort of waltzes calmly and coolly through his role as Sergio, a martial arts instructor and underground railroad engineer. Not once does he seem like anything other than a character in a movie.

Chase Infiniti is so lightweight as Willa, Bob’s daughter, she might as well have been a tumbleweed rolling silently through her scenes.

And then there is Teyana Taylor in the crucial role of Perfidia Beverly Hills – the most important revolutionary…and Bob’s wife and Willa’s mother.

Perfidia is supposed to be this dynamic, magnetic and undeniable energy who carries the revolution – and the first act of the movie, on her back with panache and flair. But Taylor is, unfortunately, a rather repulsive screen presence, which makes her being the object of attention and fetishized desire a rather ridiculous notion – so much so that it is unbelievable.

Taylor lacks the charisma and presence to pull off this vital role and the film is mortally wounded by it from the get go…and then DiCaprio and Penn stick their stakes through its heart all thanks to Anderson’s unfocused and unpolished script.

PT Anderson making two sub-par films back-to-back (Licorice Pizza and One Battle After Another) is an earth-shattering experience for me the poor little Gen X film bro. For the majority of my adult-hood he has been the guy. He has consistently been brilliant (the one notable exception is, thanks to the abysmal Adam Sandler, 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love), and to see him stumble twice in a row is jarring to say the least.

I hope I am wrong, but this feels like when in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Muhammad Ali, the greatest of all time, lost his athleticism and his mojo. Ali shockingly lost to Leon Spinks in 1978 – but then got his belt back by beating Spinks eight months later. But even in victory Ali looked like the shadow of the great fighter and man he once was.

Two years later Ali was destroyed by Larry Holmes in one of the more brutal reality checks in boxing history. A year later he suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of Trevor Burbick, thus ending his once glorious career.

PT Anderson’s most recent two films are not as bad as Ali’s last two fights…but they do feel the same to me. A giant of a talent losing his mojo and being humbled by Father Time is never pretty to watch.

The positive critical reaction to what I see as the failure of One Battle After Another is reminiscent of those who cheered when Ali got his title back from Spinks…thinking the great champion “still had it”. Despite the victory, he still didn’t have it. He was done. My great, great fear, is that the same is true of PT Anderson…not so much that he is done as a filmmaker, but that his best work is behind him and that it is all downhill from here. That is a terrifying notion to me as it signals that this once in my lifetime filmmaker is…just like me…coming ever closer to his end, both artistically and physically. And also…what the hell am I going to look forward to if I don’t have PT Anderson films to look forward to anymore?

Ultimately, it truly pains me to say that One Battle After Another is a rolling morass of banality and bullshit that never coalesces into a successful cinematic venture. To be blunt…it is not very good. Now, to be clear, PT Anderson’s version of not very good is considerably better than everybody else’s…but it is still not very good, and is certainly not a film I will recommend. I will watch it again though, as Anderson has earned that at a minimum with his past work, but upon first viewing, I found trying to find something good to say about One Battle After Another to be a losing battle.

©2025

R.I.P. Robert Redford: The Sundance Kid Once Saved Cinema

Robert Redford, the iconic movie star, filmmaker and Sundance Institute founder, died yesterday at the age of 89.

As gigantic a movie star as Robert Redford was…and he was a monumental movie star, particularly in the 1970’s, the most important thing about him is what he did for, or to, the film industry with his creation of the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival – which he took over in the mid 1980’s.

It is impossible to imagine the depths to which filmmaking would have fallen if Redford had not built Sundance, the place where “independent” filmmakers could develop and then show their films.

Without Sundance, the renaissance of cinema in the 1990’s, which includes the emergence of such filmmaking luminaries as Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, would never have occurred.

Did Sundance quickly go from being sanctified and deified to becoming corporatized and commodified? Yes, it did. And is it now little more than a movie business version of the red-light district in Amsterdam? Yes, it is. But that doesn’t diminish its original importance or the good it did for cinema back in the early days…and it is crucial that we do not forget that when remembering Robert Redford.

As for Redford the actor, he was an impossibly handsome leading man who was gifted with a tendency toward stillness (a skill few actors possess) and the ability to share the screen with other actors with a charming effortlessness.

Redford was a good movie star, good enough that he could unflinchingly share a screen with Paul Newman, one of the biggest movie stars of all-time, for two memorable movies – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting.

He was also a good and often underrated actor, who could comfortably share the screen with acting luminaries like Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep.

Redford, with his all-American good looks and stoic demeanor, resembled an old school movie star from the studio system but who hit his heights during the glorious age of the New American Cinema in the free-wheeling 1970s.

Redford catapulted to enormous fame in 1969 when he starred with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – what some have called the perfect movie.

Butch and Sundance – with their snarky bromance, are essentially the template for every action comedy and Marvel movie of the last 50 years. You don’t get the Lethal Weapon, Die Hard and Marvel franchises without Butch and Sundance and their witty quips to one another under fire.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid really is a remarkable movie in that it is pure movie star popcorn entertainment but its shot with a glorious aplomb by Conrad Hall – and directed with verve by George Roy Hill.

Redford and Newman’s chemistry is legendary, and while many have tried to replicate it – like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, none have succeeded. The problem with Clooney and Pitt trying to be Newman and Redford is that Pitt is not Redford - despite Hollywood’s determination to make it so, and Clooney sure as shit ain’t Newman, no matter how much Clooney tries to pretend otherwise.

Redford’s filmography is, not surprisingly considering the length of his career, a mixed bag.

His best/most popular films are most certainly Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men and The Natural.

I can say without hesitation that I unabashedly love all of those movies, and love him in all of those movies.

As previously stated, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is popcorn perfection. Three Days of the Condor is a truly spectacular film and a glorious piece of 70’s paranoid cinema that I adore. All the President’s Men is a movie with undeniable momentum to it that compulsively compels. And finally, The Natural is, in my not-so-humble opinion, the greatest baseball movie ever made and also a phenomenal American myth that Redford perfectly embodies.

As much as I love those Redford films, the Redford movies that I find most intriguing are Downhill Racer, Jeremiah Johnson and The Candidate. These three films, all from the 70’s, show Redford giving his most complex performances, and are all really fantastic films that are often-overlooked.

The final movie I’d recommend is the lone late-period Redford movie that I think works well. The film is 2013’s All Is Lost directed by J.C. Chandor, which is about a man lost at sea by himself. Redford barely speaks at all in this movie, and it was a ballsy performance for him to undertake. I loved the film but others hated it. I think it’s worth watching now as it will take on particular profundity in the wake of Redford’s death.

Another movie some have mentioned is 2018’s The Old Man & the Gun, directed by David Lowery. I thought this film was a misfire, but I could see how it could be nice to indulge in its nostalgia now that Redford has passed away.

As for Redford as a filmmaker, I never really thought very much of his directorial skills. Redford was undoubtedly interested in independence and freedom for other filmmakers but as a filmmaker himself he was extraordinarily restrictive in his artistry.

The films Redford directed, Ordinary People (for which he won a best Director Academy Award), The Milagro Beanfield War, A River Runs Through It, Quiz Show, The Horse Whisperer, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Lions for Lambs, The Conspirator, and The Company You Keep, are all suffocatingly staid and cinematically conventional.

The lone Redford directed film that I would recommend is Quiz Show, and even that is a rather middlebrow piece of mainstream cinema that never quite rises to the heights you feel like it should.

Regardless of the merits or imperfections in Robert Redford’s acting and directing career, the truth is that anyone who enjoys movies, be they cinephiles or cineplex-goers, owe a huge debt of gratitude to Robert Redford. Without Robert Redford and his Sundance Film Festival and Institute, both the movie business and the art of cinema would be in much worse shape than they are today – and it;s important to remember that the Sundance Film Festival never happens if Robert Redford doesn’t become the Sundance Kid.

So, a big tip of the cowboy hat to the Sundance Kid on a job well done and a life well lived. Thanks for saving cinema…let’s hope that one day that it can rise from the ashes and once again be worthy of all you’ve done for it.

By the way…here is a 2013 article I wrote about Redford’s acting that you might find of interest.

Stillness: Lessons from Redford, DeNiro and Penn

©2025

Jurassic World: Rebirth - A Review: Dumbed-Down Dino Doo-Doo

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. If, like me, you’re a huge fan of dinosaur movies you’ll see this anyway so you don’t care what I have to say…but normal people can skip it altogether.

Jurassic World: Rebirth, starring Scarlet Johansson and Mahershala Ali, tells the story of a group of mercenaries and an unfortunate family who all stumble into a cornucopia of deadly dinosaur shenanigans.

Jurassic World: Rebirth, which opened this past weekend and made an impressive #318 million at the box office, is the seventh film in the Jurassic Park franchise, the fourth film in the Jurassic World franchise, and a direct sequel to Jurassic World: Dominion.

You would think that you really can’t go wrong if you make a movie about dinosaurs. I mean, who doesn’t love dinosaurs? And who doesn’t love watching dinosaurs wreak absolute havoc upon a bunch of dipshit human beings?

The dino-delivery system that is the Jurassic Park franchise has had some ups and decidedly down downs, but it always got a pass from me because it mostly delivered where it counted…in glorious dino-fueled destruction.

The Jurassic Park franchise got off to a great start with Steven Spielberg’s perfect summer blockbuster Jurassic Park in 1993. His sequel 1997’s The Lost World, was a major step down in terms of quality, but it still delivered the requisite dino-chaos and that was good enough for me.

Jurassic Park III (2001), directed by Joe Johnston, was an abysmal movie and featured a sclerotic script…but it too had a bunch of dino-carnage and that was good enough for me to give it a grudging pass.

The franchise then went into hibernation for fourteen long years and awoke with a new name and new stars. Jurassic World (2015), was led by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard and it reinvigorated the franchise by being a delicious bit of pure popcorn fun.

The follow up, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), was half of a good movie. It once again featured the charming Pratt and Howard, but despite its thrilling first half, it’s second half was disastrously designed and scuttled the whole ship.

Jurassic World: Dominion (2022), revealed a franchise aware of its deep decline, as it rolled out the nostalgia train by bringing the stars from the first movie (and sort of in 2 and 3), Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum, and joining them with the Jurassic World cast of Pratt and Howard.

Dominion was a mess and a major misstep, but it did give us some dino-mayhem and that was good enough for me…and if not for me, then definitely for my young son.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is an attempt to…well…”rebirth” the franchise…gone are the original cast and the Pratt/Howard combo…and in their stead comes Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali.

I went with my young son to see the film on a Sunday afternoon at the local cineplex and the place was packed. We were fully prepared for some dino-action as we watched all of the earlier Jurassic Park/World movies in the days leading up to Sunday.

If brevity is the soul of wit, then my attempt at a witty review would simply be – Jurassic World: Rebirth? More like Jurassic World: Stillbirth. Or…where’s a meteor when you really need one?

This is not a good movie. It doesn’t even resemble a good movie, which most Jurassic films do in that they are trying to recreate the fantastic original.

The Jurassic franchise has gotten lost in this weird storytelling cul-de-sac where they can no longer entertain with regular dinosaurs…no…now they use genetically altered super-dinosaurs. I get it that they think they must up the ante, but the reality is that the new dinosaurs they develop all look ridiculous and don’t have half the menace as the wondrous T-Rex.

The story in Rebirth is really not worth getting into as it is an even dumber rehash of the usual “evil corporation is trying to use dinos for nefarious reasons and good people get hurt in the process” thing that overwhelmed Dominion and Fallen Kingdom.

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who hates corporations more than me, but even I am tired of this horse being beaten once again in such unimaginative ways.

In addition, it is pretty rich that Universal Studios, a subsidiary of one of the all-time evil corporate behemoths - Comcast, is making a movie about corporate nefariousness. Physician, heal thyself.

There is, of course, a “child/family in peril” storyline here as well, which is de rigueur in the franchise, but this family seems to come out of nowhere, are the most unappealing cast of characters imaginable, and are so dull and disinteresting I was praying they’d all be someone’s lunch and right quick.

The mercenary storyline is more interesting and could’ve been mined for some cinematic gold, but, pardon the mixed metaphor, all those grapes died on the vine.

Once again, the film, like all Jurassic films, features some pretty sweet dinosaurs that are great to look at. The T-Rex looks as astonishing as ever – hat tip to the CGI team. But…once again the creators push things too far and a bunch of genetically modified dinosaurs are placed front and center and they just don’t work for me at all. The big bad, named Distortus Rex, looks like a retarded version of a T-Rex combined with a Xenomorph from Alien…and it just doesn’t come together at all.

The performances in the film are…well…bad.

I like Scarlett Johansson quite a bit and find her to be a beautiful and charming screen presence, but she is woefully miscast in this movie and is just awful. Her line readings are emotionally incoherent and she does little more than smile and smirk, and…believe it or not…she doesn’t look good at all – which is a shock.

Mahershala Ali has won two Oscars and yet he barely registers as being in this movie. Ali’s performance is less an acting exercise and more a disappearing act.

The same is true of Rupert Friend as the “bad guy”. Friend is so lacking in gravitas it’s like he’s a tumbleweed rolling through his scenes.

As disappointing as those performances are, they all look like Sir Laurence Olivier compared to the actors playing the Delgado family. Out of pity I won’t even list their names because…hoo-boy…they are brutally bad. Yikes.

As for the dino-mayhem…it is just ok. There’s a cool T-Rex sequence, and a cool sequence with a Quetzalcoatlus, but beyond that everything kind of falls flat.

It takes some cinematic malpractice for me not to dig a dino movie. The first movie that comes to mind in this respect is the dreadful Adam Driver movie 65 (2023), which is so bad it made my colon hurt.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is moderately better than 65, but that’s not saying much.

It must be said though that while I found the film lacking, my young son loved it unequivocally. As we left the theatre, he turned to me and said, “now THAT’’S a great movie!!” I was very glad he loved it, and did not discourage his praise at all as I want him to not be afflicted with the jaundiced, critical eye that I am.

So, if you have kids old enough to see the movie – I’d say 9 and up is good…then they’ll probably love it. But adults with a working cerebrum will probably be disappointed.

As someone who is always trying to help my corporate overlords, here is my advice to Universal – a Comcast Company. If you make another Jurassic movie – and they will because this one made lots of money, then go all in on either real world dino-stories…like a T-Rex is loose in Chicago and so are some Raptors and chaos ensues! Or have a Jurassic film where the corporate bad guys have won and dinos are a major part of the military industrial complex. In other words, a war movie with dinosaurs – it can be set in a Vietnam type of jungle, or an urban landscape or whatever works best. But it would work because people don’t want to see the usual families in peril stuff anymore…they want carnage…so why not give it to them unapologetically.

And before we go…a very brief breakdown of the Jurassic franchise from worst to best.

7. Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)

6. Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)

5. Jurassic Park III (2001)

4. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

3. The Lost World (1997)

2. Jurassic World (2015)

1. Jurassic Park (1993)

2025

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 137: F1

On this combustible episode, Barry and I buckle up and crash head on over the Brad Pitt racing blockbuster F1. Topics discussed include is this movie any good? As well as Brad Pitt vs Tom Cruise, and the not-so-secret formula of summer blockbusters.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 137 - F1

Thanks for listening!!

©2025

F1: A Review - Buckle Up!!

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Popcorn Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A fun, mindless summer blockbuster that features some truly thrilling racing sequences.

F1, starring Brad Pitt, is a sports drama that tells the story of Sonny Hayes (Pitt), a former racing whiz kid who fell on hard times and faded into obscurity, and now in his fifties, is given a shot in the big show for one last ride.

The film, which is directed by Joseph Kosinski – whose last movie Top Gun: Maverick - was a gigantic billion-dollar blockbuster, opened in theatres last weekend to solid reviews and even better box office.

Before I share my thoughts on the film, I think it best to put them in to context. I started watching F1 the sport, about a decade ago, while taking care of my newborn son. You see, my wife and I would break down child care into six-hour shifts, with me taking the overnight hours and her taking the early morning hours.

This system worked pretty well. In the middle of the night when my son would wake up and need changing and a bottle, I would take him to our living room and get him all taken care of and then sit holding him until he fell asleep. Even after he fell asleep, I would just sit there with him in my arms and not want to move for fear of waking him up again. So, I would often sit in the dark and just be on watch for ghosts and goblins and the like.

To fill this time, I couldn’t read because I would just fall asleep…and I realized I couldn’t watch narrative tv or movies because I was too tired to really pay attention and also, I didn’t want to turn the volume on.

So, what I did was I set my cable box to record racing of any kind and then watch it in the middle of the night to help the time pass. Racing was perfect because I didn’t really have to pay attention, I didn’t need the sound on, and I didn’t really care about it one way or the other as I wasn’t a racing fan.

Then a funny thing happened…I became a racing fan. I watched NASCAR, IndyCar, F1 and even MotoGP and out of those I ended up really liking F1 and IndyCar.

For some reason I found myself particularly mesmerized by F1…there was just something about it…the type of cars or the drama or something, and I got hooked. And so, I now watch F1 regularly, and in a cool twist of fate I even watch it with my young son who is now old enough to have an interest in such things (he’s a big Max Verstappen fan).

This is a long-winded way of saying…I like F1 the sport.

Which brings us to F1 the movie.

F1 is, pardon the pun, very, very formulaic, but it employs a tried-and-true sports movie formula of old guy gets one last shot, and it works.

The movie opens with an exhilarating racing sequence that is accompanied by Led Zeppelin’s song “Whole Lotta Love”. This opening (and that song with its driving guitar riff and bombastic drums) is so vibrant and engaging that it grabs you by the throat and never lets you go.

F1 is certainly a flawed film, for example it is so implausible as to be utterly preposterous, and it is chock full of paper-thin characters and a cornucopia of exposition. But despite its faults, and thanks to its racing scenes, which are consistently viscerally invigorating, gloriously shot and filled with distinct drama and tension, F1 is, in many ways, a perfect, mindless, “original” summer blockbuster.

The film was made in conjunction with F1 (and Apple Films – and its budget is between $200 and $300 million) – and it shows, as it was shot on real tracks, with real racers, in front of real crowds. The movie is essentially a two-and-half hour commercial for F1, as it is a glitzy, glossy and glamorous introduction to the sport.

If you know the sport, you’ll roll your eyes at the frequent fantastical liberties taken in the film regarding racing reality, but you’ll also love the pulsating inside look at the actual racing.

If you’re a newbie, you’ll get a crash course (once again – no pun intended) into the basics of the sport and how to digest it – for example you’ll hear about soft vs medium vs hard tires, and race strategy and all the rest, given by the beautiful cast of Brad Pitt, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem and Damson Idris.

Director Joseph Kosinski’s last film, Top Gun: Maverick, was a big budget blockbuster that “saved movie theatres” post-pandemic. I have to say that I hated that movie…and found it so cloying and imbecilic as to be insulting.

F1 is an equally big budget, sort of a more realistic Top Gun: Maverick with race cars minus the politics of empire and military industrial complex propaganda…and frankly, that worked for me.

It must also be said that F1 shows that Brad Pitt is much better at this sort of stuff than Tom Cruise. Cruise is such a self-serious blowhard that he comes across as completely cringe and grating. Pitt, on the other hand, seems to be in on the joke of it all, and while he mostly sleepwalks through this movie, he does his job of movie star with an ease and sturdy sense of self of which Tom Cruise seems to be deathly allergic.

The rest of the cast are…fine.

Javier Bardem, as team owner Ruben Cervantes, chews scenery with his usual aplomb.

Kerry Condon, as team technical director Kate McKenna, is as charming as always and does the best she can with the little she’s given.

Damson Idris, as teammate/rival Joshua Pierce, is a bit lacking in charisma and charm but I guess he does his best to pass as a self-absorbed F1 driver (they are all notoriously narcissistic).

The storytelling in F1 is not exactly its strongpoint, nor is its character development…but what does shine is its technical prowess.

The film, the racing sequences in particular, is very well shot. And the editing and sound are truly fantastic. I saw the film in a shitty cineplex which usually disappoints on all technical matters, and I was still blown away by the sound in this movie.

Be forewarned, my podcast partner, the incomparable Barry Andersson, absolutely loathed this movie with the fury of a thousand suns. And maybe that’s because he dislikes racing in general…or maybe it’s because he has terrible taste…or maybe it’s because he’s a terrible person…who knows?

So maybe those unfamiliar with F1 as a sport will dislike F1 the movie…I don’t know. I think the film is a perfect, original, non-superhero/I.P. bit of empty-headed action for the summer season that will entertain anybody with the will to be entertained.

To be clear, F1 is not a great movie in the vein of say Ford v Ferrari or something like that…but it is a fun time at the cineplex, and I think you should check out of the summer heat and go check it out.

©2025

Predator: Killer of Killers - A Review: Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

**THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!**

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A wasted opportunity that gets bogged down in poor storytelling.

Predator: Killer of Killers, is a new animated science fiction anthology action film that is currently streaming on Hulu.

The film is the sixth film in the Predator franchise and is the second Predator film to be directed by Dan Trachtenberg, who directed Prey (2022).

I liked Prey and thought its premise of a predator taking on Native Americans in the 1700’s was a very clever one. The film wasn’t perfect, for example it had an unhealthy amount of the usual virtue signaling of woke politics that has become so commonplace nowadays. But despite that, I found it to be a compelling take on an old action franchise and I particularly liked the lead actress Amber Midthunder.

In fact, in my review of Prey I wrote that the franchise would be wise to stay on this track and move forward and set new Predator movies in other interesting times and places, like “Shogun era Japan…”, and lo and behold that’s exactly what they did…sort of.

Predator: Killer of Killers is an anthology of four different stories, the first set in Viking times (Scandinavia 841), the second in Shogun era Japan (1609), the third during World War II (1942), and the fourth on the Predator planet itself.

Unfortunately, still prevalent in these stories are the tiresome woke politics of our own annoying times…sigh. For example, the first section is about a female Viking warrior princess who kicks everybody’s ass…because of course it is…and the second section is about Japanese men – as it should be, and the third about a Latino man…because apparently leading white men are now entirely anathema in the Predator cinematic universe, even when they’d make the most sense…like in the Viking story.

I know this is animated science fiction and all, but it still beggar’s belief that creatives don’t understand how when you subvert reality to such an extent that a woman is the greatest Viking warrior around, it makes suspending disbelief that much harder and the story that much less interesting.

This Viking warrior princess should have been a man as both history and myth would tell us, for the arc of her story is, frankly, a masculine hero’s journey, and when a feminine agent takes the masculine hero’s journey it deprives the myth of its archetypal and sub-conscious power.

This first story does feature some cool animation and action sequences, but it could have, and should have, been so much better because it is a really cool idea. One can only imagine the predator taking on beserkers in a gory battle sequence…but alas t’wasn’t meant to be.

The second story is set in Shogun-era Japan and features two Samurai warriors with a long-held grudge against each other.

This segment is the best in the film as it is really cool and looks fantastic. It is by far the most compelling and profound story in the bunch as well, and its action sequences are the most vibrant.

The third section, which follows a young Latino man who yearns to be a pilot and then ends up being one in World War II, is not good at all. In fact, it is incredibly asinine and inane.

For the life of me I cannot understand why they chose this time and place, and this protagonist, as all of it feels terribly trite and not the least bit captivating.

The introduction of “modern” WWII technology into these stories just accentuates the technological advancement of the predators all the more, and makes the storyline moot, as the whole idea behind the Predator story is that man must return to his most basic, primal nature to take on the predator and OUTSMART HIM – think of Arnold Schwarzenegger mortally wounding the predator in the original film with a trap using a sharpened log and its heavy counterweight.

There are also some of the dumbest and least believable action sequences imaginable in this WWII section – which is saying a lot since it is an animated action movie after all.

The final section, which brings together the three protagonists from the other sections, is a total mess and patently absurd to the point of being ridiculous.

What really struck me watching this movie is that in the first Predator film, it seemed impossible that Arnold would actually kill this thing as it was such an elite predator. But in this anthology, all of the predators seem really bad at being…well… predators….like they don’t have minor league predator abilities…they have little league predator abilities.

Another frustrating thing about this movie is that it felt like the franchise wasted these story ideas on these short sections rather than making them better and expanding them into feature length tales.

For example, imagine a predator film (even animated) set in a Kurosawa or Shogun tv series type-of setting. That would be amazing and it would give proper respect to the culture being portrayed and give audiences a chance to connect with characters…which doesn’t happen in the short stories told here.

And just imagine how kick-ass a real Viking predator movie (again even animated) would be where the predator takes on a bunch of Berserkers and Viking warriors ravaging some village somewhere….that would be awesome.

I also think it would be great for predator to take on Spartans at the height of their military power, or Genghis Khan, or Attila the Hun, or Vlad the Impaler, or Crusaders in the Holy Land.

And if we’re gonna do a World War II story, flip the script and set it in Nazi Germany and have predator go apeshit on some Nazis, or have him destroy Japanese soldiers during the Rape of Nanking…in essence making Predator the good guy because he’s slaughtering the “bad guys”.

The possibilities are endless, but the hope that the people running the Predator franchise, people like director Dan Trachtenberg, will get it right, is slim to none at this point. It seems the only thing Trachtenberg really cares about is expressing his dislike of white men and virtue signaling his ‘perfect’ politics.

Ultimately, Predator: Killer of Killers felt like a wasted opportunity, which makes it a very frustrating viewing experience. If you’re a die-hard Predator franchise fan than I’m sure you’ll check it out and overlook its notable flaws.

But if you’re a normal person just looking to be entertained for 90 minutes, then Predator: Killer of Killers just isn’t the thing for you as it fails to entertain and fails to live up to its promising premise.

©2025

Alto Knights: A Review - Monstrous Mess of a Mob Movie

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Whoo-boy…this is a massive mess of a movie.

Alto Knights, which stars Robert DeNiro in dual roles as mobsters Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, chronicles the troubled relationship between those two gangster big wigs.

The film, which boasts a bevy of big-name talent besides DeNiro – including Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson and Oscar-nominated writer Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas), hit theatres on March 21st and bombed at the box office (it made $9 million on a $50 million budget). It is now available to stream on MAX, where I just watched it.

Alto Knights is an extraordinary piece of cinema if only becomes it is so incoherent and dramatically impotent.

The film, written by acclaimed scribe Nicholas Pileggi, feels less like a narrative arc than a collection of mismatched scenes pasted together like a kindergartener’s art class collage.

The film meanders from nothing to nothing with no dramatic stakes until it reaches a non-crescendo with a flaccid non-ending that is so odd and dull it felt like everyone just stopped showing up to work on the film one day and they decided to call it quits and let the editors try and figure out how to make it a full story.

To give some context, the final sequence/shot of this film is so bad and so poorly done it is actually shocking. Although I guess since it involves nothing more than an old man wandering around aimlessly it is fitting for this disastrous movie. (Not to mention that the sequence is cut to too quickly and cut away from even more quickly…so bizarre!!)

The film is meant to dramatize the often-tumultuous relationship between the fiery Vito Genovese and the calm Frank Costello, two major players in the mafia in the 1950’s and 60’s. The selling point of the film is that DeNiro plays both characters...much like Michael B Jordan plays the twins in Sinners. This construct actually works because DeNiro does very solid work as both Genovese and Costello, and unlike Jordan, gives both characters distinct traits and personalities and you never mix them up.

That DeNiro would do solid work is somewhat surprising considering his obvious struggles to give a shit in the latter part of his career, but that his performance would be absolutely wasted in this steaming garbage pile is a tragedy.

One can only assume that the responsibility for this mess lays squarely on the shoulders of once-esteemed director Barry Levinson. Levinson, who won the Best Director Oscar for Rain Man, was at one time one of the heavyweight auteurs in American cinema…but that time has long since passed.

A brief glance at Levinson’s filmography reveals a stunning-amount of terrific films at the start…films like Diner (1982), The Natural (1984) - my favorite baseball movie of all-time, Tin Men (1987), Good Morning Vietnam (1987) and his Oscar winner Rain Man (1988).

Then in 1991 Levinson made Bugsy starring Warren Beatty and Annette Benning. Bugsy was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but people with eyes to see (people like me) could see something had shifted. Bugsy is a bad movie – and similar to Alto Knights, it is dramatically incoherent and feels frantically stitched together by underpaid and under-appreciated editors desperate to find some coherence in a sea of nonsense.

After Bugsy, Levinson’s filmography takes a disastrous turn from relevancy into the dark void of the instantly forgettable. Toys, Jimmy Hollywood, Disclosure and Sleepers are all surprisingly second-and-third-rate films.

In 1997 Levinson has a bit of a comeback with Wag the Dog, a clever and decent enough film but one that isn’t nearly as good as it was claimed to be.

After Wag the Dog the wheels really come off the Levinson wagon and he makes a string of some ten entirely worthless movies over a nearly twenty-year span that thrust into the deepest depths of irrelevancy.

And now, at the age of 83, he once again has a big budget and movie star and he’s reaching for the brass ring one more time and he falls flat on his face.

It would seem highly unlikely that Levinson, at his age and with this level of failure artistically and financially on Alto Knights, would be allowed back into the arena and given money to make a movie again. In a sense that is sad…he seems like a nice guy and he did make some quality movies early in his career…but this is life…if you make shit for long enough, people will realize you can now only make shit…for proof of this theory look no further than Alto Knights.

As for Alto Knights, what is so frustrating about the film is that it could have, maybe even should have, been a really good movie. There is a terrific story at its core about Genovese and Costello, and DeNiro really does do quality work in the film, but it is all scuttled by some really poor storytelling and structure.

It also doesn’t help when disastrous casting decisions are made where Debra Messing is given a major role. Messing is so bad in this movie it actually made me uncomfortable and I felt bad for her. The same is true for Cosmo Jarvis, who comically contorts himself to such extremes in order to look like Vincente Gigante I worried he might give himself a stroke.

Ultimately, the problem with Alto Knights is that it is so poorly structured that it neuters itself dramatically by failing to have a climax or a clear and definitive ending. It just walks off into the sunset whistling to itself like a dementia-addled, elderly gangster in his pajamas being led off to a state-run nursing home with bars on the windows.

I suppose Alto Nights greatest accomplishment is having an awful lot of big-name talent attached to it, yet still managing to be nothing but awful.

 ©2025

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 136 - Sinners

On this episode, Barry and I head down to the Delta and sing the blues over Ryan Coogler's blockbuster vampire movie, Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan. Questions addressed include is Ryan Coogler good? Is Michael B. Jordan good? Is Sinners good? Stay tuned at the end for a rundown of the Summer blockbuster season and predictions regarding Fantastic Four and Superman. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 136 - Sinners

Thanks for listening!!

©2025

MobLand: TV Review - Top Notch Cast Saves Middling Mob Drama

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This isn’t a great show…and it might not even be a good show…but it is somehow, someway, a somewhat mindlessly entertaining show.

MobLand, which stars Tom Hardy as a mob-fixer in modern-day London, just finished its first season on Paramount +…and I have some thoughts.

As readers may remember, I have been in a bit of a funk when it comes to film and television as of late…television in particular. I have been overcome with a great sense of indifference to the current era of “prestige tv”, and have struggled to even watch a show for more than two episodes.

For example, the recent spate of new seasons of prestige tv dramas – Severance, The Last of Us and The White Lotus, I did not watch or quit watching after two episodes because I just didn’t give a shit.

Readers may also remember that I almost skipped the Disney + series Andor altogether, but ended up watching it out of some weird sense of duty and ended up really loving it.

Which brings us to MobLand.

I am not a regular Paramount + viewer. In fact, I’m usually not subscribed to the streaming service but because my wife wanted to watch one of the shows she enjoys (Yellowjackets) we got it for like a three-month deal or something. It was during this stretch that I saw ads for MobLand…and I saw it starred Tom Hardy, an actor I really admire, and when I was bored one day, I figured, why not give MobLand a try?

MobLand, which premiered its first episode March 30th and ended its ten-episode season June 1st, has quite the pedigree…it is produced by British filmmaker Guy Ritchie, it is co-written and created by esteemed playwright and screenwriter Jez Butterworth, and its cast features the aforementioned Tom Hardy as well as Paddy Considine, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren….not too shabby.

The series follows the travails of Harry De Souza (Hardy), a fixer for the Harrigan crime family. The Harrigans – led by aging patriarch Conrad (Pierce Brosnan) and Lady MacBeth like matriarch Maeve (Helen Mirren), are quite the collection of misfits and miscreants. Kevin Harrigan (Paddy Considine), son to Conrad and Maeve, is Harry De Souza’s childhood friend and his adult accomplice in crime.

Of course, Harry and Kevin have wives and teenage kids and they create all sorts of drama too, and Conrad and Maeve like to stir the pot with their various nefarious machinations as well. There are also the cops who are breathing down the Harrigan’s neck as is another crime family looking for blood and to take their crown.

I’ll avoid plot specifics from here on in…but rest assure there is A LOT of plot, and a whole lotta shit going down in the seedy London crime world.

So, is MobLand as great show? No. Is it a good show? I’ll be honest…I don’t think so. Is it a watchable show? Yes…most definitely.

The reason it’s watchable is because it has a terrific cast that do steady work despite the at-times trying script. The plot is…well…very tv show-ish…meaning it is preposterous and outlandish to the point of being absurd.

MobLand isn’t the Sopranos, or the Godfather or Goodfellas…and yet…I kept watching it, which is saying a great deal. As flawed as it is, its greatest trait is that it is somehow mindless enough to be oddly compelling.  

Tom Hardy does stellar work as the brooding Harry, who navigates the Harrigan spiderweb of treachery with a steely-eyed aplomb. Hardy never lets you down and that is very true in MobLand, as this show just doesn’t work without him.

Pierce Brosnan is showier than we’ve ever seen him as Conrad – the bombastic and brutal crime boss, and it is amusing to watch him huff and puff and blow doors down in every scene he inhabits.

Paddy Considine, a truly remarkable actor, gives maybe the best performance in the show as a conflicted and psychologically tormented son to greatness. Considine imbues his Kevin with a bruised and battered humanity that is desperately trying to survive in a cruel and heartless world, and it is quite riveting to behold.

Unfortunately, I found Helen Mirren’s performance as Maeve to be, frankly, distractingly bad, but at least she isn’t in it enough to really muck things up. There’s just something off about Mirren’s portrayal of Maeve…a sort of disconnect, which is not apparent in any of the other performances.

One performance of note is Anson Boon as Eddie Harrigan, Kevin’s rebellious son (and Conrad and Maeve’s favorite grandchild). Boon is so good at playing Eddie as a despicable douchebag asshole, that he might just ruin his entire career. And the costume designer who put him in the most off-putting douchebag ensembles, deserves an Emmy – well done. Boon is like that kid who played Joffrey in Game of Thrones and was so good at being an obnoxious piece of shit he essentially quit acting afterwards. Boon as Eddie has the most punchable face in recent memory and the attitude to match…and it is shocking how much I hated this little prick. Kudos to him.

As for the structure of the series, it is kind of all over the place. The show starts small and gets much too big for its britches and it becomes more preposterous with every passing moment and by the end of season one is borderline psychotic. But like I said, it is an oddly fun piece of mindless tv…and can be enjoyed in that way.

If you’re bored, or bed-ridden, or have nothing else to do but stare out a window, you could do much worse than watch MobLand to pass the time. It is one of those shows that asks nothing from you and lets you just watch with no pressure and no expectations.

MobLand certainly didn’t end my indifference towards television, but it did do enough to keep me watching it…and that should be considered a victory…for who I have no idea.

©2025

Sinners: A Review - Don't Believe the Hype

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An over-hyped horror movie that under-delivers on every count.

Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler, is a period horror film that chronicles Black twin entrepreneurs, Smoke and Stack, who open a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta in 1932 and contend with racism and vampires…and not necessarily in that order.

Sinners hit theatres on April 18th and was a run-away smash hit. The film was a box office blockbuster, making $350 million on a $90 million budget, was a critical darling, and generated a ton of positive buzz...some of which included Oscar talk.

I missed Sinners in the theatre, but as a fan of vampire movies, Blues music, actresses Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku and actor Delroy Lindo – all of whom have supporting roles in the movie, when the film hit Video on Demand this week, I quickly bought it (for $25 – essentially the price of two theatre tickets) and was excited to watch it and see exactly what all the fuss was about.

Having watched all two-hours and fifteen minutes of Sinners, I regret to inform you dear reader that I am completely at a loss for what all the aforementioned Sinners fuss was about.

Simply said, despite how much I wanted it to be, Sinners is just not a good movie…hell…it isn’t even an entertaining one. It is poorly paced, egregiously shot, incoherently written and at least in terms of its lead Michael B. Jordan, abysmally acted.

The film opens with a long set-up that introduces us to Smoke and Stack, the twins played by Michael B. Jordan. They have returned to Mississippi from Chicago where they worked for Al Capone. They are also combat veterans from World War I.

Smoke and Stack have a pile of money and buy an old lumber mill from a Klansman and turn it into a juke joint. The film takes place on the day they open the juke joint and the whole community (Black community) comes out to party there.

The languid first hour has the distinct pacing of a prestige drama, but it lacks both the prestige and the drama. The film then transitions, slowly…very slowly…into a horror film that is as derivative and dull as imaginable, and as predictable as can be.

The unquestionable highlight of the film is a scintillating music sequence in the juke joint that masterfully connects Delta Blues with African folk music and then to contemporary Black music. It is a visually and musically compelling piece of cinema. What makes that sequence stand out all the more though is that everything surrounding it is so visually unimaginative and aesthetically anemic.

For example, cinematographer Autumn Arkapaw, makes the decision to compose all of her shots exactly the same way, with the main subject smack dab in the middle of the frame. I know this style is en vogue nowadays but that doesn’t make it look any less amateurish and reprehensible. The cinematography in this movie looks like something from a second rate tv show on the USA network.

Another piece of cinematic malpractice is the mismanaged and poorly shot crescendo to the main action battle – which is cinematically obtuse, visually incoherent and dramatically incomprehensible…and a truly absurd and aggressively pandering coda tacked on at the end that only extends this already interminably long and decidedly lifeless movie.

Sinners is not aided in the least by the poor performance from Michael B. Jordan as the two leads. Jordan does next to nothing to differentiate between the twins and does little more than pose and preen his way through the film.

Jordan, who I once thought had such great promise as an actor – most notably in Friday Night Lights and Fruitvale Station, has eschewed acting for “blacting” in his movies now. “Blacting” is a vacuous and vapid form of stereotype incarnation in the place of actual acting among Black actors – and occasionally white ones. When someone “acts”, they create a rich and complex human character, when they are “blacting” they simply do a shallow pantomime of hollow Black stereotypes. Michael B. Jordan does blacting, not acting, in Sinners…as well as in the vast majority of things he’s been in over the last few years.

Jordan’s fall from artistic grace mirrors director Ryan Coogler’s similar precipitous stumble…not surprising since they have teamed up often over the years and both had their breakout with Fruitvale Station.

Coogler garnered much acclaim for Fruitvale Station, which was a film that showed him to be a director bursting with potential. Unfortunately, he has squandered that potential with a series of sub-par franchise films (Creed and Black Panther).

Yes, I know that Black Panther (which also starred Michael B. Jordan) was a blockbuster and got nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award…but I said it at the time and will say it again now…Black Panther is a middling Marvel movie. It just isn’t good…but critics slobbered all over it because it was a “Black movie” that came out at the height of the Trump shitshow (or first incarnation of the Trump shitshow) and all the #OscarSoWhite stuff and the rest of that era’s racial “awakening”.

I wrote about the middling nature of Black Panther when it came out and have only been proven more right as every day passes. That movie too was very poorly shot…and its cinematographer was…you guessed it – Autumn Arkapaw.

Black Panther II, which came out post Trump I and pre-Trump II, was a truly atrocious Marvel movie, and it showed the ever-expanding cracks in the Coogler myth that I astutely diagnosed much earlier on.

Now with Sinners, audiences and critics have been wowed, and I am left shaking my head in dismay, if not disgust. I get people want to be excited about movies again, and want to have a communal cultural experience, but Sinners is not the answer now…just like Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t the answer a few years ago.

Lowering our standards and pretending that Sinners (or Top Gun: Maverick, or Barbie) is a great movie, or even a good one, does no one, not audiences, not critics, not Hollywood and certainly not the art of cinema, any good.

Ryan Coogler’s success, like Jordan Peele’s and Greta Gerwig’s success, is a function of cultural wishful thinking, critical and audience virtue signaling, and a steep lowering of cinematic standards across the boards.

Sinners is a film that has no business making $350 million or of being adored by critics or of garnering Oscar nominations. The film’s success, both with audiences and critics, speaks less to its quality and more to how far both American intelligence and the art of cinema has fallen.

Ultimately, Sinners is the type of movie that dumb people think is deep, and stupid people think is smart. It is an instantly forgettable and entirely frustrating cinematic endeavor and you shouldn’t waste a single second of your precious time on it.

©2025

Black Bag: A Review - Just Another Forgettable Soderbergh Film

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An ultimately forgettable spy thriller that is devoid of thrills and banal to the core.

Black Bag, directed by Steven Soderbergh, is a spy thriller that follows the travails of a husband-and-wife spy team caught up in high-stakes MI6 intrigue.

The film, which stars Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett, was released in theatres on March 14th to little fanfare, and less than a month later is now available to stream on Peacock.

I remember seeing Steven Soderbergh’s directorial debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape, back in 1989 in the theatre with my girlfriend at the time. After the film we spent hours talking about it, which was a testament to what a unique, original and interesting piece of work it was. I remember thinking at the time how exciting it was that a talent like Steven Soderbergh existed and looking forward to seeing how his career played out.

Thirty-six years later I can tell you that I have never been impressed with Soderbergh’s work beyond his debut. In fact, I have found his career to be a terrible disappointment. That may come as a shock to some readers since Soderbergh has won Oscars and made big, successful movies, but to me Soderbergh has never lived up to his potential as either a filmmaker or an artist.

Sex, Lies and Videotape was a daring and insightful piece of work. It’s not the smoothest piece of filmmaking you’ll ever see, but it is a brutally honest depiction of humanity…and that is the thing that has been missing from Soderbergh’s work ever since.

Despite Soderbergh being a hero to film hipsters everywhere, his filmography mostly reads like an inventory of discount dvds you’d find if you were fishing at the bottom of the bargain bin on the way out of Walmart. Following Sex, Lies and Videotape he made Kafka, King of the Hill, The Underneath, Schizopolis, and Gray’s Anatomy…all films I’d be willing to bet readers have either never seen or if they have seen them have totally forgotten them.

Then came Soderbergh’s commercial success with Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven (and Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen). These movies were box office successes and some, like Traffic and Erin Brockovich, won Academy Awards. The most noticeable thing about this string of success from Soderbergh is that these films are all painfully vacuous – they are monuments to style over substance. Gone is the intellectual/emotional intrigue of Sex, Lies and Videotape, and in its stead is slick filmmaking, Hollywood posturing and absolutely zero gravitas.

These films are so thin and shallow that they nearly disappear upon rewatch. Traffic, which I really liked the first time I saw it, reveals itself to be a paper-thin piece of made-for-television tripe even upon re-watching it for the first time.

The Ocean’s trilogy were uber successful, and admittedly they have a certain undeniable energy and movie star momentum to them, but ultimately they are a little more than an exercise in style over substance.

Soderbergh’s films after this grouping are more artistically daring but prove the filmmaker lost his deft touch so apparent in his debut. Full Frontal, Bubble, Solaris, The Good German, The Girlfriend Experience, Che: Part One and Two and The Informant!, are, despite some interesting moments, a collection of entirely forgettable films.

2011’s Contagion, which is a compelling watch post-covid, is another of Soderbergh’s slick but empty vassals – like a high-end movie of the week. This was followed by Haywire, Magic Mike, Side Effects, and Logan Lucky…some of which were financially successful, but all of which were an insult to thinking cinephiles.

Then we get into the small production, self-shot current era of Soderbergh’s filmography….which includes Unsane, High Flying Bird, The Laundromat, Let Them Talk, No Sudden Move and Kimi. None of these films are good…and like his early era most haven’t seen these movies and those that did would barely remember a single thing from them. And yet, there are a certain class of cineastes who will vociferously praise Soderbergh up and down and say “I really liked (any movie on this list)”, which I always counter with, just because you like it doesn’t make it good or even cinematically worthwhile. These same people couldn’t tell you a single thing about the plot, story, purpose or meaning behind any of the secondary Soderbergh films they allegedly adore.

Soderbergh then returned to the Magic Mike nonsense with Magic Mike’s Last Dance, yawn, then went arthouse supernatural thriller drama with Presence, and now the spy thriller Black Bag.

If Soderbergh were a major league hitter his lifetime average would be well below the Mendoza line (.200). He doesn’t strike out a ton, but he does ground out weakly to second base an awful lot. His filmography is mostly a collection of second-rate, unremarkable, entirely forgettable movies.

The reality is that Soderbergh is a craftsman, sometimes a very good one, but he is not an auteur because he has nothing of interest or of impact to say in any of his films.

Which brings us to Black Bag. Is Black Bag a terrible movie? No. The truth is it doesn’t feel like a movie at all, it feels like an episode from some pseudo-prestige, AppleTV spy series or something that no one would watch or talk about (like almost everything on Apple TV).

The most notable thing about Black Bag is how insubstantial, inconsequential and irrelevant it is. It is a frivolous, fleeting and entirely forgettable film.

Black Bag’s story is, like much of Soderbergh’s work, convoluted to the point of being incoherent. It is also, somehow, cinematically slick but still devoid of any notable or distinct style.

The cast, which features Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett – no slouches, as the married spies, do professional yet unimpressive, dare I say, uninspired, work.

Fassbender, whom I’ve always liked as an actor, is tightly wound as George Woodhouse – a second generation master spy, but not tightly wound enough to be genuinely interesting.

Blanchett is Kathryn, George’s wife and his equal in the dark arts of spycraft, but she too gives such a restrained performance that she is never compelling, which is sort of shocking considering she is one of the great actresses of her generation.

The rest of the cast are at best uneven, with Naomie Harris doing strong work as agency psychiatrist Dr. Vaughn, and Rege-Jean Page truly abysmal as a fellow spy who may or may not be one of the good guys.

Black Bag attempts to be an Agatha Christie parlor game mixed with John Le Carre spy thriller with some marital drama thrown in for good measure, and of course it contains the usual Soderberghian tricks and reveals…but all of it falls decidedly flat.

None of the characters compel, none of the drama crackles, none of the spy game entices, and none of the thrills manifest. Black Bag is so mediocre and mundane as to be anemic and it feels like something you’d have on in the background while you do other things…which is a shocking thing to say about a movie starring such talents as Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett.

Ultimately, Black Bag is, like the overwhelming majority of Steven Soderbergh’s filmography, forgettable and not really worth watching. It is, unfortunately, a monument to the banality of Soderbergh’s work, and a reminder what a disappointment his once promising career has been.

©2025

Luca Guadagnino Streaming Double Feature: Queer and Challengers - What Else Can I Say...Everyone is Gay!

****THESE REVIEWS CONTAIN SOME SPOILERS!! THESE ARE NOT SPOILER FREE REVIEWS!!!****

 Queer: 2 out of 5 stars – SKIP IT.

Challengers: 2 out of 5 stars – SKIP IT.

Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino put out two films last year, Challengers and Queer, both of which garnered at least some awards buzz, but to the chagrin of some, neither got any Oscar nominations.

Having missed both in the theatre, I watched them on streamers recently and I have some thoughts.

Guadagnino came to the fore of film in America with his 2017 Oscar-nominated film Call Me by Your Name, starring Timothee Chalamet, which chronicled the gay love affair between a teenage boy and a man in his mid to late twenties.

Call Me by Your Name was showered with praise, including multiple Oscar nominations, but I found the film to be rather poorly constructed and executed, cinematically flaccid and philosophically infantile.

The thing that stood out the most to me in that movie is a monologue delivered near the end of the film by the teenage boy’s father, who reveals that he might be kinda gay and bemoaning the fact that he didn’t have a torrid gay affair as a young man. My reaction to that scene was to quote the Nirvana song “All Apologies” where Kurt Cobain sings the unforgettable lyric “what else can I say, everyone is gay”.

When I watched Challengers (now streaming on MGM+), which opened in April of 2024 and follows the ups and downs of a love triangle between a woman and two male professional tennis players over the course of a decade or so, that lyric was at the top of my notes after watching the film conclude in the absolutely gayest manner possible when both men realize in the middle of a big tennis match that they actually want each other and not the woman. What else can I say…everyone is gay, indeed.   

I avoided watching Queer, which opened in November of 2024, for quite some time because I assumed it would be the same old thing from Guadagnino. I finally watched it the other day (it is streaming on Max) and literally laughed out loud when Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch – who do the music for the film and for Challengers, opened the movie with Nirvana’s “All Apologies”, most notably the line “what else can I say, everyone is gay”. Bravo!

The reason I share this anecdote is because Luca Guadagnino, who is gay, seems completely incapable of understanding that there actually are people in the world who are not, in fact, gay.  Dare I say it…the reality is that the overwhelming majority of people in the world are not…you know…gay. According to some polls the percentage of gay and lesbian people in the world is roughly 3%, but in Luca Guadagino’s world it feels more like 103%.

In the past forty years or so homosexuality has transformed from being a much stigmatized and often criminalized trait into being a celebrated and shame-free lifestyle. It seems cinema, particularly gay cinema, is having a hard time catching up with the normalization of this once oppressed sexual orientation.

Let’s start with Queer. Queer, which is based on William Burroughs book of the same name, stars Daniel Craig as William Lee, a gay American ex-pat living in Mexico City in the 1950s who spends his time drinking, doing drugs and chasing men….definitely not in that order.

Queer could’ve, and maybe should’ve been great, or at least been celebrated by a film industry desperate to signal it’s progressive bona fides. But the film falls completely flat despite its witty Nirvana quoting opening.

Queer is such a bleak and dismal glimpse into the gay world (or A gay world) that I wouldn’t be surprised if some homophobic pastors  showed it to “confused” teens at gay Evangelical conversion camps.

All of the gay people in this film are the most repugnant and repellent human beings imaginable as they are all desperate, despairing, depressing and depraved. If they are supposed to be an accurate representation of gay men of that or any other era, then that is quite an indictment of that community. One can only assume, and hope, that the film is just focusing on one particularly grotesque group of gays that are not representative.

Daniel Craig, most famous for playing James Bond, no doubt took this role – which some might call gay-baiting, in order to get an Oscar, but his performance felt incredibly mannered to me and distractingly off the mark.

Craig, who has been the subject of quite compelling gay rumors himself, plays Lee as a sort of disgusting desperation incarnate. Lee is less gay as he is obsessive over gay sex, and he comes across like a two-bit actor playing Tennessee Williams in a community theatre production in Blaine, Missouri.

Lee isn’t the only repulsive character in the film, as Jason Schwartzman’s Joe Guidry is so revolting it sort of boggles the mind. That none of these people are even remotely interesting is secondary to how unappealing they are to spend time with.

The plot for Queer lacks any sort of emotional coherence, and devolves into a sort of dreamlike fantasia in the final third, which undercuts whatever gritty and grimy reality was established in the first two acts.

Ultimately, Queer felt like an over-indulgent exercise in gay exploitation rather than exploration, with Craig being so superficially committed to his character’s gayness it appeared like he just wanted to kiss a man in public to see if he could get away with it.

Challengers was the hipster choice for film of the year in 2024, but apparently, I am not a hipster because I found it to be so ridiculous as to be inane.

The film, which stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, is supposed to be this sexy jaunt through the world of tennis, but it, and its two lead males, is so transparently gay from the get-go, and features such unappealing dullards as the main actors, that I found watching it to be a tedious undertaking.

Let’s start with Zendaya. I just don’t get it. I admit I have not seen all of her work, for instance I tried watching the HBO drama Euphoria and thought it was garbage so I bailed…so maybe she is great in that…who knows? But everything I have seen her in she is an awful, anemic actress. The Spider-Man movies, Dune, and now Challengers. Just consistently bad, boring, dead-eyed and lifeless.

Josh O’Connor is supposed to bring a bevy of sex appeal to his role of Patrick, a talented but down on his luck tennis player, but he strikes me as a dullard and dopey looking doofus – which is probably why he was so good as Prince Charles in The Crown.

As forgettable as O’Connor is in this film, Mike Faist, who plays Art, his tennis and love rival, is like the invisible man. Faist, who I last saw in Spielberg’s useless remake of West Side Story, is a song and dance man, good for him, but he is so devoid of charisma he might as well be a tumbleweed. Good lord.

As Challengers goes on the story becomes more and more grating, as do the performances, until it all climaxes with the single most ridiculous, and gay, climax imaginable for a tennis movie…when Patrick and Art literally fall into each other’s arms in the middle of a tennis match.

What struck me about Challengers in the context of Guadagnino’s other work, is that the director really does seem to be incapable of understanding that people could not be gay.

Guadagnino’s approach on Challengers (and the father character in Call Me by Your Name) would be like a straight director making a movie about the Gay Men’s Chorus of San Francisco but the gay men in the chorus are actually, deep down, secretly straight.

Having typed out that last paragraph I now realize that I may have just revealed a billion-dollar movie idea…so remember that this material is copyrighted!!

In all seriousness, Challengers could have been an interesting movie set in a unique world, and the same is true of Queer, but Guadagnino has such a repetitive, one-track mind, that he is incapable of bringing any nuance, subtlety, intricacy or dramatic depth to his work. And so we are left with a one-note representation of gayness as some irrepressible truth that lies deep within us all. Sigh.

The bottom line is that both Challengers and Queer could have, and should have, been good, but neither rises to even the minimal level of being interesting, never mind entertaining.

In other words, you do not have to waste your time watching Queer or Challengers because I wasted my time watching Queer and Challengers. You’re welcome.

©2025

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 135 - Heretic

On this episode, Barry and Mike go door to door to spread the word about Heretic, the horror/thriller starring Hugh Grant now available on MAX. Topics discussed include the terrific cast, the fantastic first half of the film, and the trouble with finals acts.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 135 - Heretic

Thanks for listening!

©2025

RIP Val Kilmer - My Best Friend

Val Kilmer – My Best Friend

When I woke up this morning, I was rudely greeted with a text from one of my oldest friends, Fat Tony, alerting me to the fact that Val Kilmer – my best friend, had died of pneumonia at the age of 65.

The story of how Val Kilmer became my best friend is one of my favorite tales to tell, but also one that I mostly keep to myself because it means so much to me. But now that Val is gone, it seems fitting to share the story in his honor.

The truth is that Val Kilmer was not really my best friend…but I did meet him and work with him once many, many moons ago.

The year was 1996, the place is New York City, and Val was doing promotional work for The Ghost and the Darkness, which he starred in with my uncle Michael Douglas. Ok…Michael Douglas isn’t my uncle either but you’ll understand the reference a bit later.

So Val Kilmer, who by this time had already given truly monumental performances in The Doors – as Jim Morrison, and Tombstone – as Doc Holliday, as well as superb supporting turns in Top Gun and Heat, and had starred as Batman, was doing the rounds trying to promote The Ghost and the Darkness, a movie about two lions in Africa that were hungry for human blood. (The Ghost and the Darkness is also where I learned that the most deadly animal in Africa is the hippo, and that hippos fart out of their mouth.)

On this promotional tour Val went to MTV to do an interview. Fat Tony, who has been my friend since we met in high school and once upon a time was my roommate in the big city, was working at MTV at the time and he came up with a little comedy bit to get me on the air with some celebrities. So Fat Tony called me up one day and said, “hey, you wanna do a scene with Val Kilmer?”

Needless to say, I said yes.

The next day I went to MTV and was sitting in my buddy’s dressing room and he was explaining the idea for the bit and also letting me know that everyone was really nervous about Val coming. You see, at this time Val Kilmer had the worst reputation of any actor of which I’ve ever heard. He was known in the industry as being very, very difficult…so much so that he was actually on the cover of Entertainment Weekly with the title “The Man Hollywood Loves to Hate”. Yikes.

Val’s reputation as a belligerent asshole was legend at this point, and the MTV staff were scared shitless of having to deal with him and prepared for an hour or so of eggshell ballet in order to just get the interview in the can and Val out the door.

Fat Tony and I didn’t know what to expect, and the producers at MTV were, out of fear, dead set against me doing my comedy bit with Val, but Fat Tony convinced them to leave it to him to ask Val if he was cool with it. I considered this a victory even though it seemed obvious that the petulant Val wouldn’t go for it.

Then there’s a big commotion and headsets buzzing and everyone at MTV is scrambling…the eagle has landed…Val is in the building. Val played both Jim Morrison and Elvis in different films and he set the MTV staffers into such a frenzy you’d think the real Jim Morrison AND Elvis had entered the building.

The tension was palpable in the building, but since I was with Fat Tony, a guy with whom I’d seen and survived a lot of dark and precarious situations – up to and including raging streetfights, I wasn’t nervous, just curious.

Then something remarkable happened…Val walked into the dressing room, looked Fat Tony and I in the eyes, introduced himself, shook our hands, sat down, and then just hung out bullshitting with us…for a few hours.

Much to our shock and delight, Val was just another dude who liked hanging out talking about movies, music, art, and all sorts of crazy shit.

At one point I chatted with him about the movie The Island of Dr. Moreau, which also came out in 1996. The movie was awful, and Val was the one who offered that assessment, but he talked about the joy and insanity of working with Marlon Brando on the film. His story of Brando just showing up one day covered in white pancake make-up and wearing a giant muumuu was hysterical and included a spot-on Brando impersonation.

Fat Tony and I then talked with him about The Ghost and the Darkness and how we used to tell girls that Val’s co-star on that film, Michael Douglas, was my uncle – which some people fell for because I had the most remote resemblance to him. Val laughed his ass off at that and then admitted he could see the resemblance…and then talked about similar pranks he pulled off as a younger man while at Julliard (none I’ll recount here).

The conversation with Val was wide-ranging and entirely engaging. He was just a good guy and he seemed to cherish the opportunity to talk to two regular dudes about regular dude stuff. Throughout the conversation he was gracious, charming, easy with a smile and a laugh, and persistently engaging and interested.

Towards the end of this rather magical few hours, Fat Tony very subtly brought up the idea of Val doing a comedy bit with me during the interview…and Val didn’t just go for it, he was excited by the idea, and we spent the next half hour or so talking about it and riffing about stuff we could do.

The conversation ran so long that producers got stressed because we were already way over time and so we cut the conversation short and had to shoot the interview. Val made it clear he didn’t care how late we ran…he was good to go.

So Fat Tony interviewed Val in the studio, and I set up out on the street for my “man on the street” question gag.

Then the time came for the bit and just as we had discussed previously, Val and I improvised a comedic question and answer thing, and he was awesome. He totally bought into the bit and he did his part with aplomb which made my part infinitely easier and we had a great time and then it was over.

The MTV people thought it was funny…Fat Tony thought it was funny…and Val thought it was funny. Success.

The interview then continued for a bit and I returned to the studio. When the interview ended Val could’ve just whisked off to the next thing but he didn’t. He made a beeline for me and he shook my hand and said “that was great”. I said “thanks for doing that, I really appreciate it”, and he replied, “any time brother”.

I then joked with him by saying “I don’t care what anybody says, I’ll work with you again”. He laughed, gave me a slight punch to the chest, and said amusingly, “and I appreciate that”.

After some more jocular conversation Val shook hands with Fat Tony and I and then went on his way with a smile. It is not hyperbolic for me to say that my interaction with Val Kilmer on this ultimately forgettable little comedy bit is, at least in my mind, the absolute apex of my rather abysmal acting career, and it’s all because Val Kilmer wasn’t just a great actor but a really good guy. Val didn’t just make my day by being so cool and kind and generous, he made my career. He was, without question, a bright light in this very dark world, and I am eternally grateful for his small act of acting kindness which remained illuminated through many a dark and dismal year.

HOLLYWOOD SIGNS

The “Val Kilmer is my best friend” joke between Fat Tony and I began on that day and whenever Val’s name came up in conversation it would always be preceded by “my best friend”.

Three or four years after my Val Kilmer scene, I was in Hollywood shooting a small movie. It was my first time in Los Angeles and I was actually staying on Fat Tony’s couch – he had moved there a few years earlier.

During my stay I went to a dinner with Fat Tony and a bunch of Hollywood producers…and I was in well over my head…and at one point the name Val Kilmer came up and I chimed in jokingly that “Val Kilmer is my best friend”…repeating the recurring joke between me and Fat Tony.  Well…the funny thing was that this is Hollywood and I didn’t realize this but to everyone else in the room it was very possible that I actually WAS Val Kilmer’s best friend…so they didn’t get the joke…and Fat Tony – amusingly enough…left me out to dry and scramble through the conversation on my own.

Immediately after saying Val was my best friend, a pall came over the table and one of the producers spoke up and said to me in all seriousness that I “should talk to Val about his behavior…he’s got a bad reputation”. My response to this was to stifle a laugh and just look mockingly concerned and condescendingly say “is that right?”

The producer didn’t know I was joking – and didn’t get my sense of humor, so needless to say, after that dinner my reputation in Hollywood was just as bad as Val Kilmer’s, but at least the “Val Kilmer is my best friend” gag was still wholly intact and would remain so to this day.

DARK SYNCHRONICITY

Another oddity, or irony, or dark synchronicity, regarding my best friend Val Kilmer is that Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2015 or so, and went through years of brutal treatment which included surgery and chemotherapy which left him ultimately unable to speak clearly. My faux uncle Michael Douglas was diagnosed with the same cancer in 2010 and went through similar treatment, but came out of it more whole than Kilmer did. And here’s the topper…in 2011 my friend Fat Tony got the same exact cancer as Kilmer and Douglas and has gone through brutal treatment, including surgery and chemotherapy, for over a decade – he is thankfully cancer free today.

That Val Kilmer, Michael Douglas and Fat Tony, three people integral to that magical moment in my life those nearly thirty years ago, would all be stricken by such a particular, and particularly cruel, form of cancer, is something that has baffled and unnerved me for years.

THE BRILLIANCE AND THE BATTLEFIELD

I just happened to have watched both The Doors and Heat in the past week, and as always was captivated by Val’s brilliance. He was one of the more enigmatic actors of his age, and when he was locked in to a role with a great director, there was nothing he couldn’t do.

In many ways, Val Kilmer’s career is a conundrum…he was never as big or as famous or as accomplished as he should have been. Many will chalk that up to his “difficult” attitude…but I don’t, I chalk it up to Hollywood’s limited imagination and artistic ambivalence…and I chalk up his “difficult” reputation to small-minded, gossip-fueled company men who kissed up and kicked down and never gave a flying shit about artistry or what acting really is and what it means.

I think Val Kilmer never reached his full potential as a movie star was because he was an actor stuck in a movie star’s body. He was impossibly handsome and so Hollywood thought he should be a leading man, but Val’s soul was that of an actor, an artist, always searching for that ethereal and fleeting moment of artistic transcendence that drives all great artists.

There were times when he hit the sweet spot in a film where he was both movie star and actor…The Doors comes to mind. Kilmer’s performance as Jim Morrison is absolutely stunning. It is a work of great humanity, charisma and pathos. That Kilmer wasn’t at least nominated for Best Actor in 1991 for that film is a crime…and I believe he should have won the award. I think it is unquestionably true that Val Kilmer’s work as Jim Morrison is the best performance in film history to have not been nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award.

Another, less seen, film that I recommend is 1992’s Thunderheart, the story of an FBI agent sent to investigate murders on a Sioux reservation. In that film Kilmer gives one of the more layered, subtle and compelling leading man performances of the era.

Of course, the other films worth watching are Top Gun, where he brings the heat to his work as Ice Man, as well as his comedic early films Top Secret! And Real Genius, which show his silly side.

The 2021 documentary Val is another must-watch as it gives us a glimpse into Val’s lifebefore and after throat cancer, and it is very well-made and heart-breaking. The film, which I highly recommend, shows Kilmer to be much like he was with me in our brief time together back at MTV…engaging, interesting and interested.

And finally…no Val Kilmer film festival is complete without showing the true gems Heat, Tombstone, and Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

I never saw or spoke to Val Kilmer again after our little scene together at MTV oh so many years ago…but I never forgot what a cool guy he was, how kind he was, how adventurous he was, and how professional he was. He didn’t have to be any of those things to a nobody like me, but he was, and that says a great deal about him, his character, his artistry and his humanity.

I’d like to think that when I shuffle off this mortal coil, and head to the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, that I will be greeted by, among others, a smiling Val Kilmer, who will give me a punch to the chest and say, “hey brother, you wanna do this scene with me?”

Yes Val, I do…in fact, it would be an absolute honor.

©2025

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 134 - Sing Sing

On this episode, Barry and I head to maximum security to discuss the prison drama Sing Sing, starring Best Actor Oscar nominee Colman Domingo. Topics discussed include the terrific cast, the terrible marketing, and the paucity of quality films like Sing Sing. Stick around for the bonus discussion about the 'Mike-terion Collection' - the best of the movies that Barry and I have reviewed. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 134 - Sing Sing

Thanks for listening!!

©2025

Heretic and Longlegs: Two Horror Reviews for the Price of One!!

***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!! THIS IS A SPOILERS FREE REVIEW!!***

Heretic – 2.75 out of 5 stars. SEE IT/SKIP IT.

Longlegs – 2 out of 5 stars. SKIP IT.

Heretic, written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, is a horror film that tells the tale of two Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, who attempt to convert Mr. Reed, a man who is not what he seems.

The film, which stars Hugh Grant as Mr. Reed, opened in the U.S. on November 8th 2024 and is available to stream on MAX, where it is currently the number one ranked movie.

Heretic was a success at the box office, raking in $58 million on a $10 million budget, and it garnered some positive buzz and even some awards consideration, with Grant receiving Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations.

I missed Heretic in the theatre but recently checked it out on MAX.

Heretic is one of those tantalizing movies that has a stellar premise, a wonderful set-up, terrific performances and a gripping first half, but that loses its way in its second half/final act and ultimately suffers greatly because of it. In this way Heretic reminds me Barbarian (2022), another horror film from a few years ago that was phenomenal for two acts and then stumbled badly in its final act.

The first half of Heretic really is remarkable as it deftly presents its characters and subtly creates tension. The film is at its best when it is essentially a philosophical and theological debate between the Mormon missionaries and Mr. Reed. The interplay between the three of them and Reed’s intellectual chess playing is extraordinarily compelling to watch.

Hugh Grant’s performance in the first half is outstanding as he chews the scenery and spits out dialogue with aplomb.

Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East as Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton respectively, also give top notch and very layered performances that in lesser hands would have been easily botched.

The dramatic interplay between Grant, Thatcher and East is a glorious stew for the first half of the film…but then a shift occurs (to avoid spoilers I won’t reveal it) and the script loses its way, and the film loses a great deal of its tension, and it is no longer as captivating a cat and mouse game.

Unfortunately, the film spins out of control in its final third to an alarming degree and it diminishes all that came before it. Gone is the intrigue, the tension, the intelligence, and in its place are some rather tired horror tropes – well executed but tropes nonetheless.

Again, Heretic’s fumbled final act reminded me a great deal of Barbarian because Barbarian made similar mistakes, such as expanding its story and setting unnecessarily which egregiously dissipated dramatic tension.

That said, there is no doubt that writer/directors Beck and Woods are skilled filmmakers as this movie is well-made, and are interesting thinkers…they just need to be more concise and more contained storytellers in order to make the most of their moviemaking opportunities.

Another horror film from last year that I just checked out was Longlegs, which hit theatres on July 12th, 2024 and is now available to stream on Hulu.

Longlegs was a big hit, making $126 million on a $10 million budget. It was well-marketed, and had very positive word of mouth, with many calling it the “scariest movie ever made!”

I missed Longlegs in the theatre and just watched it on Hulu and I can testify that Longlegs is most definitely NOT the scariest movie ever made. It is definitely creepy, and has some scary moments, but over-all it isn’t that scary and it also isn’t very good.

Longlegs is an exercise in creating mood, and it excels at that, but what it has in mood it lacks in story and character.

The basic premise of Longlegs is that it follows the travails of Lee Harker, and FBI agent in the 1990s assigned to the mysterious serial killer case Longlegs. Harker has the gift of clairvoyance and uses it in her FBI work, and so it seems she is a good choice to track down this killer.

As the story progresses, we learn more about Harker, and about Longlegs, and the more we learn the less it makes sense and the less we care about any of it.

The film is undoubtedly trying to pay homage to The Silence of the Lambs and create a newer more esoteric version of it, and it does a respectable job of capturing the weird and creepy essence of that film, but it lacks a coherent and compelling narrative to drive the story forward, and once again, it loses the plot in its second half.

The performances in Longlegs are all just a bit underwhelming as well. Maika Monroe does a decent enough job as Agent Harker, but shenever quite completely takes the role into her possession and instead seems just a bit too contained.

Nicholas Cage as Longlegs is certainly unnerving, but Nicholas Cage not as Longlegs is unnerving too. Cage never truly inhabits this sicko character but rather play acts at being a sicko…which has been the story of Cage’s career from the get go.

Blair Underwood and Alicia Witt have two supporting roles and neither of them feel fully fleshed out or adequately performed.

I left Longlegs with a certain sense of admiration for the film’s ambitions, and a certain level of irritation because it only succeeded in creating a marketing movement around itself rather than a great horror movie.

The reality is that Longlegs is a creepy vibes movie with some distinctly disturbing sequences that are nightmare fuel, but it is not a movie I would recommend because it never coalesces into a thoroughly successful horror venture. It ultimately falls flat in its fear-mongering because it can’t find a way to fulfill its promise and adequately finish.

Out of Heretic and Longlegs I would definitely choose Heretic even with its flaws, because it is vastly superior to Longlegs when at its best. Longlegs strikes me as the type of movie that pre-teens will absolutely freak out watching at a slumber party and keep themselves up all night trying to avoid nightmares…but unless you fit that demographic – I don’t recommend it.

If you’re a horror aficionado, then you’ll watch both of these movies…so my opinion is meaningless. But if you’re a regular person who only occasionally wanders into the horror genre, then I’d say the best option out of these two is Heretic.

©2025