Stuff I watched in...the second half of July, 2026

His Girl Friday

Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday is one of the greatest screwball comedies in existence. I highly recommend you watch the film with subtitles if you can, because that way you'll catch maybe 70% of the jokes, versus catching only about 50% of the jokes if you just listen with your ears. Catching 100% of the jokes? In your dreams! Maybe if you rewatch it enough times you'll eventually catch them all, but the dialogue in this film is so fast, so snappy, so overlapping that's it's going to take some work.

Walter Burns (Cary Grant), a newspaper editor, discovers that his ex-wife, Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), is about to get married to Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) and quit her job as a reporter. Burns, you see, is a feminist, so he knows that Hildy won't be happy as a housewife! So he ropes her into reporting on the pending execution of Earl Williams (John Qualen), a man who killed a Black police officer. Burns believes that Williams was insane at the time of the murder and that his life can be spared if Hildy reports on the fragile state of Williams' mind. Hildy can't resist the opportunity to save a man's life, so she allows herself to be pulled into what becomes a night of increasingly wild hijinks and shenanigans...on the eve of her wedding to Baldwin!

His Girl Friday is a lot to take in, but it is SO worth it to get off your damn phone and actually watch the movie! It's so funny that I was vibrating with laughter, and Rosalind Russell is a GODDESS. She just has a vibe that feels really different from other screwball comedy actresses. This film is a classic and is worth watching...again and again and again. 

Grade: A

***

Jaws

I saw Jaws for the first time probably decades ago (really concerning that I can measure my life in decades at this point) and was...not too impressed with it. I found it boring and not scary at the time. Well, like a lot of movies I watched "decades" ago, I'm glad I gave this one a second chance because I really, really enjoyed it this time around! 

I'm not going to describe the plot because if you're reading my blog, there's probably a 95% chance you've seen Jaws, one of the most famous films of all time (if you haven't, then this is your sign to go watch it). I'll just say that I really appreciated the chemistry between the three leads: Roy Scheider as Chief of Police Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as oceanographer Matt Hooper, and Robert Shaw as Quint, the seasoned shark hunter. These men--both the actors and the characters--work so well together, playing off of each others' personalities and eccentricities. 

While Jaws isn't *that* scary to me (I don't have a lot of fear about sharks or the ocean), the film is consistently tense and thrilling. It's also really funny! It's an incredibly well-crafted story (based on Peter Benchley's novel) and it's not surprising that it represents a turning point in Steven Spielberg's career from up-and-comer to "one of the greatest American directors of all time" 

Grade: A+

***

To Be or Not to Be

A comedy that takes place in Poland in 1939 as the Nazis take over and adultery is one of the main plot points? I'm in! 

To Be or Not to Be should not work as a comedy, given how dark its themes are, but of course dark themes often make for particularly insightful and skewering comedy. Carole Lombard and Jack Benny play Maria and Joseph Tura, a married pair of famous and beloved stage actors in Warsaw. Robert Stack plays Lt. Stanislav Sobinski, a pilot who begins an affair with Maria (the title of the film comes from their agreement that he will meet her in her dressing room when Joseph, as Hamlet, begins his "To be or not to be" soliloquy). 

But when the Nazis invade, Sobinski joins the Royal Air Force and ends up on a mission to warn the Polish resistance leadership of a rat amongst them. A professor, Siletsky (Stanley Ridges), is a double-crosser working for the Nazis. He has a list of Polish resistance members he plans to give to his superiors...unless Sobinski, Maria, Joseph, and the entire theatre company can put on the show of their lives pretending to be Nazis and get Siletsky to give them the list! How wacky!

You know, they don't make comedies like they used to. Between To Be or Not to Be and His Girl Friday, I really had to use my brain to keep up with what was happening. Both films leave you feeling satisfied that you actually watched a good movie that made you laugh and think and you didn't just half-watch some slop while looking at a second screen. 

Grade: B+ 

***

Forbidden Fruits

Forbidden Fruits, a satirical horror film directed by Meredith Alloway and based on the play by Lily Houghton, really surprised me. I feel like it was both better and worse than I expected. Worse in the sense that I felt it was a bit muddled in its ostensible message about sisterhood and women supporting women, and also the tone just felt a bit all over the place. There was also some bad editing in certain scenes. 

But better in the sense that it was a super fun, funny, and compelling film despite the overall messiness...and the acting is INCREDIBLE. Like, way better than what you'd usually expect from a campy horror movie. Whoever did the casting for Forbidden Fruits deserves high praise!

The movie, which has been compared to The Craft, Mean Girls, and Jawbreaker, focuses on three women who work at a store called "Free Eden" (based on Free People). They are: Apple (Lili Reinhart), Fig (Alexandra Shipp), and Cherry (Victoria Pedretti). Apple is the head bitch--or head witch, I should say--who bosses the other Fruits around and also leads them in the occasional ritual (or hex) after hours in the store. 

Fig, who is a bit more of a freethinker than Cherry, starts making the acquaintance of Pumpkin (Lola Tung), who works at the food court. Despite Apple's disdain for food court girls, Fig convinces Apple to give Pumpkin a job at Free Eden and let her join their coven. After all, you need four fruits to cover the entire retail seasonal cycle, right?

Pumpkin is even more of a freethinker than Fig and isn't scared of Apple's wrath, so she begins questioning some of Apple's decisions and learning more about the previous fourth Fruit--Pickle (Emma Chamberlain)--a girl who apparently went crazy after the coven put a hex on her boyfriend. Boyfriends aren't allowed amongst the coven members, by the way, because the coven is women supporting women!!

The more Pumpkin delves into the secrets of the Fruits, the more dangerous things become. Will Pumpkin become the next Pickle? Or can she find true sisterhood with the devious Apple?

Forbidden Fruits is campy and hilarious. As I said, the entire cast is excellent, but Lili Reinhart really blew me away with her mix of aggression and vulnerability. Victoria Pedretti, a bona fide "Scream Queen", disappears into her role as a doe-eyed sexpot who follows Apple around like a puppy, waiting to be given orders or to be given a smack. 

I was initially annoyed at this film for leaning into negative stereotypes about women, but upon reflection I don't think Forbidden Fruits is about the failure of feminism (because women be two-faced bitches, am I right?) but rather the failures of performative feminism. These ladies love their rituals and their rules in the coven, but when push comes to shove, they (or, specifically, Apple) don't want to support their friends as they are, but rather as they think they should be. Many of us have experienced friend groups where the jockeying of big personalities gets in the way of genuine belonging and connection. Forbidden Fruits just ups the ante with hexes and potions. 

Grade: B+

***

Cat People (1942)

I don't have a ton to say about this supernatural horror film where a man marries a woman who comes from a long line of, well, women who turn into (large) cats. It's a really interesting film, especially how it approaches gender and sexuality. It feels very of the 1940s, with some really sexist shit, but also--as horror films tend to be--subversive in its approach to gender as well. The main character, Irena Dubrova (Simone Simon), is terrified of her family history and lore. She marries a man, Oliver (Kent Smith), but then refuses to have sex with him--even after marriage--because according to the tales she was told growing up, passion leads to the transformation from woman to panther. 

Irena's fear of her own sexuality drives Oliver into the arms of another woman, but it also allows her to defend herself from a lecherous psychiatrist. Of course, it's the 1940s, so a woman who becomes a panther and mauls lecherous psychiatrists cannot be allowed to survive the movie...but Cat People feels a lot like a proto-"Good for Her" film. If you like older films, this is a really good one. It also features one of the earliest examples of a "jump scare"!

Grade: B

***

Touch Me

Touch Me is a bizarre horror-comedy about a pair of friends, Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and Craig (Jordan Gavaris), who are immature, codependent, reliant on booze, and broke as fuck. They move in with Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), the rich man Joey is fucking. There's only one problem: Brian isn't a man. He's an alien. Well, there's two problems: he's also a narcissist who dresses exclusively in tracksuits and talks like a cult leader. Ok, there's three problems: when he touches you, all your anxiety disappears...but then you become addicted to his touch.

So...there's a lot of problems. 

The film, written and directed by Addison Heimann, is quite obviously about drug addiction and how trauma intertwines with substance abuse. But instead of being a ham-fisted or cheesy, Touch Me is really fucking funny. Joey and Craig have this straight girl/gay man repartee that's like, loving and mean at the same time. Lou Taylor Pucci is equal parts disturbing and hilarious as Brian the break-dancing alien who uses his intense powers of pleasure to control and manipulate people. If you're into tentacle porn, you will probably really like this movie because HOO BOY...there's a lot of tentacle sex (or "cross-species intercourse", as Brian would call it). 

It's interesting that a movie that touches (heh) on so many serious themes, from drug addiction to childhood sexual abuse to domestic violence, could also be so silly and weird. Touch Me is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but I really enjoyed it. If you like absurd, psycho-sexual horror comedies (or if you like tentacle porn), give it a watch!

Grade: B

The Odyssey

I'll say it right out the gate: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a masterpiece. The film, based on Homer's epic poem, is utterly haunting in the best possible way. It's not only entertaining as a fantasy-historical-action film, it manages to say something true and earnest about human nature and man's continual and ongoing fuck-ups without coming off as preachy or sentimental. 

Nolan is, in general, a cold director. On a technical level, his films are excellent. But he's not really a director that makes you cry. Or, at least, he's not a director that makes me cry. My favorite film of his is The Prestige and I think one reason it's so good is because it's a film about obsession--a concept that Nolan is personally familiar with. That drive to innovate and be the best at what you do is something Nolan understands, and so his film about rival magicians trying to one-up each other, damn the consequences, feels honest in a way some of his other films don't.

But The Odyssey, despite its backdrop of war, violence, and suffering, is Nolan's warmest film to date. And not just "warm" in the sense that Penelope (Anne Hathaway) faithfully waits  for decades for her husband, Odysseus (Matt Damon), to return to her, or in the sense that Telemachus (Tom Holland) longs to finally meet his father one day. But warm in the sense that the film explores and seems to truly understand the tragedy of humanity and human weakness. There is an existential vulnerability explored in The Odyssey. Mere men cannot fight against fate. They cannot fight against the gods. 

That might sound the opposite of warm--it might sound nihilistic. But as someone intimately familiar with the Serenity Prayer, this shit hits different. Nolan's The Odyssey covers a myriad of themes: hubris, fidelity, betrayal, pride, memory, love. But the themes that struck me the most were acceptance and responsibility. 

The general plot of The Odyssey is fairly well known since many people had to read the poem in school. Or they've seen the Wishbone episode about it (or The Simpsons's take on it). Odysseus is the king of Ithaca who is instrumental in winning the Trojan War because of his idea to sneak men into Troy hidden in a wooden horse offered as a gift to Athena. Once the men are inside Troy, they open the gates to allow all the Greek warriors inside to sack Troy. During the journey home, Odysseus and his men run into obstacle after obstacle: the cyclops, being turned into pigs by Circe, the Sirens' alluring and deadly song, the tightrope of sailing between the whirlpool Charybdis and the monster Scylla, and, finally, Zeus's wrath. In the end, only Odysseus makes it home...only to have to fight all the suitors who have taken over his home in an attempt to woo his wife, Penelope. 

Nolan's The Odyssey covers all this ground and more, bouncing between Odysseus' journey (which is often shown out of chronological order), and Penelope's impossible situation of waiting for her husband while knowing that Ithaca needs a king. The movie never felt overly long, but it also didn't feel like it was moving too quickly either. A problem I had with Nolan's Oppenheimer is that there was so much stuff happening and so quickly, that the film felt both too long and too short at the same time. Not so with The Odyssey.

There are many scenes in The Odyssey that stand out to me, including Circe (Samantha Morton) turning Odysseus' men into swine, Odysseus screaming in agony as he hears the song of the Sirens while tied to the ship's mast, and the extremely satisfying scene of Odysseus stringing his own bow and shooting an arrow through 12 axe heads. But the scene that feels most central to the film is when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, is invited to talk with Penelope. Under the guise of being a veteran of the Trojan War who knew Odysseus, he confesses to her about the weight Odysseus feels after the Trojan Horse scheme. How in winning the war, he may have damned humanity. The characters speak of "Zeus's law" throughout the movie: the command to provide hospitality to strangers and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Odysseus believes that his trick broke Zeus's law on a massive scale:

We left them a gift in an offering of peace that they took into their home. We violated all that is ever sacred between people, and turned the fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entirely...one man's idea, one man's trick...to break Zeus's law forever. We lived in a world of palaces, trades, language, blinded by beauty...until we broke it.

After facing starvation, death, destruction, and literally taking a trip to Hades, Odysseus finally accepts that he is powerless in the face of the gods. It's when he gives up control that he finally makes it home and is able to grapple with what he has done and how the world has changed.

It's not lost on me that all the vile and disgusting discourse surrounding The Odyssey focuses on the racist and misogynist anger that this film has Black and Asian actors, as well as a prominent trans actor (Elliot Page)...but it completely misses a larger message about what it means to be "a man". Odysseus is a strong and wily warrior. No one could accuse him of not being manly. But all strength and all his cunning adds up to nothing in the face of the gods. It's only through surrender and responsibility that he proves himself to truly be a man, and to ultimately be reunited with his wife. The idea that the path to manhood is through emotional vulnerability, taking on responsibility, and coming to terms with one's mistakes and failings is something that would make the internet trolls and manosphere goons tremor to think on it. 

And speaking of manhood, Nolan is infamous (to me) for his lack of three-dimensional female characters. Take a look at his filmography and count the number of female characters who either betray men, kill themselves, or die to further a man's plot line. It's kind of astounding. The Odyssey still has these issues, but it doesn't feel as egregious to me as some of Nolan's other films. In fact, I think there's a feminist reading of this film because the women--including the goddess Athena (Zendaya)--all seem to understand the Trojan War for what it is: an excuse to dominate. It is men who cause the suffering, and women who bear the burden. 

Yes, The Odyssey is a man's story. It's a man's story of failure. Of hubris. Of coming to terms with dire, self-inflicted consequences. While the women are not as prominent, it's not because they're unimportant--it's because they didn't cause any of this shit and it's not their problem to fix.

A quick note about the acting and few technical aspects of the film and then I'll wrap up. I found ALL the actors to be excellent. Matt Damon kills it as Odysseus. Anne Hathaway excels as Penelope, one of the meatiest roles for a woman Nolan has ever written. John Leguizamo is heartbreaking as Eumaeus, Odysseus's trusted servant. Robert Pattinson is comically evil as the suitor Antinous. Some people seem to have not liked Tom Holland as Telemachus and Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, but, hell, I thought they were great! There is not a single performance I didn't think was at least good. I do think Charlize Theron was underutilized as Calypso, though.

The score by Ludwig Goransson (who also did the score for Sinners) was perfect--it wasn't as ear-blastingly loud as the scores for Oppenheimer (which was also Goransson) or Interstellar. It was powerful and present, but not dominating. 

I saw the movie in IMAX (regular, not 70mm IMAX) and it was totally worth it. The movie is made to be seen on a huge screen, and there was one scene in particular (when Zeus is destroying Odysseus' ship) that felt incredibly immersive. That scene takes place on a stormy sea at night, with thunder making your seat rumble and lightning punctuating the inky blackness. It felt otherworldly.

As I watched The Odyssey, I kept thinking: "This is incredible. This is incredible." For me, it's more than just a really excellent film. It's a feeling of reuniting with a director who has disappointed me a lot. The last time I really loved a Nolan film was Inception, which came out in 2010. And after hating Interstellar, being bored by Dunkirk, not bothering to even watch Tenet, and being disappointed by Oppenheimer, he comes back with what might be his best movie. And certainly one of my favorites of his. It's a nice feeling to into something and have it be better than your expectations. 

So, yeah, The Odyssey lives up to the hype. It has inspired me to pick up a copy of Emily Wilson's translation of the poem. It has even made me reconsider Christopher Nolan in a new light, something I thought would never happen. I don't feel the need to take back previous criticisms of Nolan because I think those criticisms still stand, but it's wonderful to see him make a movie that lives up to the hype of his most ardent defenders. 

Grade: A+

Stuff I watched in...the first half of July, 2026

I've seen so many movies this month, I'm doing another two-fer for July! In this blog post I'm pretty much exclusively covering movies that came out this year. Next blog post will focus on some older films.

***

The Invite

I generally avoid movies where the plot seems to be "a couple hates each other". Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is one of my least-favorite movies because I really can't stand to listen to couples argue and bicker. But The Invite, written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack and directed by Olivia Wilde, tempers the irritating aspects of this kind of film with a hefty dose of humor and surprise.

Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen play Angela and Joe, a married couple living in a really dope San Francisco apartment and raising a 12 year old daughter. Despite a very comfortable life, Angela and Joe have more than lost their spark--they borderline hate each other. Joe comes home from the job he clearly hates one day to find that Angela has invited their upstairs neighbors over for dinner. Despite Joe's protestations, it's too late to cancel--Pina (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) are at the door. 

The Invite walks this fine line between cringe and horny that I don't see a lot of movies do with finesse. Because, yes, Pina and Hawk are interested in Joe and Angela. And that interest, of course, flips everything on its head. Wilde gives an excellent performance as a woman overflowing with anxiety...and secretly filled with desire. Wilde pivots from anger to flirtation to embarrassment to resignation on a dime but in a way that feels really real. Because I know women like her: brimming with emotions and trying to keep them under control, but waiting for the right moment, or the right person, to free them.

Ed Norton is also great as the sensitive New Age guy. The type of guy who is soft-spoken and smart and deferential to women...but who is also kind of a fuck monster. I feel like Norton is uniquely perfect for this role because he embodies this version of masculinity that is a bit pretentious and annoying, but also...kinda hot? (hey, maybe it's just me). Hot in a way where you're annoyed about it and would be embarrassed to admit to your friends that you sat on his face all night long.

Rogen and Cruz are also great, though they do lean into their stereotypes (Cruz as a cool sex goddess and Rogen as a sarcastic, funny guy with a mean streak) a bit. But overall, the cast just works SO WELL together. I love it when actors are good at acting! 

The Invite is really, really hilarious with a clever script, great directing, excellent acting, and something to actually say about relationships. 

Grade: A

***

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass

This delightful little comedy is the latest from David Wain, the director and writer of Wet Hot American Summer, Wanderlust, and They Came Together. I don't think I've seen a David Wain film I didn't like! His style of humor is this interesting mix of sweet and edgy. His movies also reward multiple views--they tend to grow on me more and more when I rewatch them.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is also a take on The Wizard of Oz, a fact I didn't pick up on until halfway through the movie! A hairdresser from rural Kansas, Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch), is about to marry her high school sweetheart, Tom (Michael Cassidy). But when Tom has an opportunity to use his "celebrity sex pass" and takes it (Gail catches him mid-act), Gail starts to doubt whether she should go through with the wedding.

While on a trip to Los Angeles with her best friend, Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), Gail visits a psychic who explains that to save her relationship she must even the score by sleeping with her celebrity sex pass: Jon Hamm. So begins an adventure to find Jon Hamm and, well, fuck him. There's also a parallel plot where Gail accidentally takes the wrong suitcase at the airport and some bad guys need to hunt her down to retrieve the classified documents she inadvertently stole. 

Gail Daughtry is goofy, dumb, and good-hearted. On their quest to meet Jon Hamm, Gail and Otto meet three men: Caleb (Ben Wang), who works at a creative agency and is a bit of a dummy; Vincent (Ken Marino, also the screenwriter of the movie), a former paparazzo who has lost his heart for his work; and John Slattery (John Slattery), Hamm's co-star from Mad Men who is a bit of a coward. GET IT?? 

It's cute. I'm looking forward to watching it again and revisiting Wain's previous films and also the ones I haven't seen yet. While I wasn't busting my gut laughing at this movie, I did laugh out loud a lot in the theatre. Check it out if you're in the mood for a loose, silly comedy.

Grade: B+

***

The Sheep Detectives

Watch this movie immediately! Seriously, go watch it now!

Directed by Kyle Balda, who has a long career in animation, The Sheep Detectives is a family-friendly film about a group of sheep who need to figure out who murdered their shepherd, George (Hugh Jackman). The movie is basically an Agatha Christie novel, but with talking sheep. 

And if you think a PG-rated movie with talking sheep isn't for you--I thought that, too! And I was wrong. The story is absolutely heartrending at times and covers some pretty deep themes, including being a friend to the unloved, caring for your "flock" (and allowing them to care for you), and not avoiding painful feelings and memories. One interesting aspect of the sheep (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Chris O'Dowd, Patrick Stewart, and Bryan Cranston, among others) is that they can choose to forget things. So if something bad happens, they can simply...forget it. All of the sheep, that is, except Mopple (O'Dowd), who can't forget and therefore is in a painful position to bear the burden of remembering all the bad things that happened to the flock. The lesson the sheep have to learn is that if a loved one dies, like George, it's worth it to remember him, as painful as it is, because remembering loved ones is how they stay with us. I'm not crying--you're crying!

The mystery itself is a bit silly, but it does introduce us to a colorful cast of (human) characters--each with a reason to do harm to George. A bumbling police officer (Nicholas Braun) is able to solve the case with the help of the sheep. And the sheep are able to solve the case because George read them murder mysteries before bed each night! 

If you've ever thought, "I'd love to watch a movie that is a combination of Babe and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery", well this is the movie for you! But it's probably also for you if you've never thought that, because everyone I know, from casual moviegoers to cinephiles, like The Sheep Detectives. 

Grade: A

***

Faces of Death (2026)

The original Faces of Death is a 1978 horror film presented as a documentary claiming to show "real" executions, animal attacks, and war. Some of the footage was real, and some of it was fake, but it was presented as entirely real and became a sort of underground cult classic. I myself have not seen it and have no interest in seeing it.

The 2026 film Faces of Death is about a woman, Margot (Barbie Ferreira), hired to do content moderation for an app called Kino (basically, a fictional TikTok) and discovers what she believes are real murders filmed to look fake so they will pass moderation. The murders are recreations of scenes from--you guessed it--the 1978 film Faces of Death. Although Margot's coworkers tell her to let it go, she decides to solve the mystery before more people die.

This is just a bad movie. It's dumb as hell, and worse, it's boring. It's not violent or scary enough to be an entertaining horror film, and it's not tense enough to be a good thriller. What's bizarre, though, is that the director, Daniel Goldhaber, is a really good director! He directed Cam, which I really enjoyed, and How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which is an excellent movie. Likewise, Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery (who plays the killer) are talented actors. So this is just kind of a low point for everyone involved.

Faces of Death isn't the worst movie ever, but I really can't recommend it. There are better ways to spend 97 minutes.

Grade: C

Stuff I watched in...June, 2026

Leviticus

I had reasonably high hopes for Leviticus, a queer horror film directed by Adrian Chiarella. The film takes place in a religious community in Australia. Two teen boys, Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), take a liking to each other. There's something so uncomplicated about their relationship, which involves typical things boys like to do: explore abandoned mills, play-wrestle, and, uh, make out.

After being caught out, the boys are subjected to an exorcism-like experience from a "Deliverance Healer". This ritual attaches an evil entity to each boy that appears as the person the victim most desires. So for Ryan, this entity looks identical to Naim, and to Naim it looks like Ryan. But if you interact with this entity, it will kill you. The only way to protect yourself is to never be alone, because the entity only shows up when you're by yourself.

First of all, I had so many questions about the lore here. Like, I get that the "point" is to make gay teens terrified of their own desires. But this entity FOLLOWS you. So even if you reject your desires, the thing could still fucking kill you! How does that make any spiritual sense? Don't these religious loons want gay kids to become not-gay instead of not-alive? Also, since the entity leaves you alone if you're with other people...wouldn't that just be an excuse to stay attached to the hip of the (real) object of your desire? Once Naim and Ryan confirm that each other is the "real" person, they just need to be with each other at all times and the entity can't get them. I guess that's also the "point" of the movie: these religious nuts pushed the gay teen lovers into each other's arms! How ironic and romantic! Ehh...

So the lore of the film just doesn't make sense. Also, way religion is portrayed in the film didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Granted, it's Australia, so maybe I'm just used to good, ol' American religious fundamentalism and homophobia, but the community didn't seem homophobic enough to me in Leviticus. I know that sounds like a crazy thing to say, but if you're telling me that this community is SO religious and SO homophobic that they would bring in a "Deliverance Healer" to pray away the gay, I expect the community and especially the pastor to be brimming with disgust and hate towards teen male homosexuality and...that's not what I saw in this movie. Homosexuality is treated as more of a light annoyance or bit of teen foolishness (like smoking cigarettes) than an affront to God. None of it made sense to me!

Finally, the movie is too short. It's 88 minutes long, which is not enough time to let the audience get to know Naim and Ryan. It doesn't allow us time to get to know the community. It doesn't allow us time to fully understand the stakes. Instead it's just like: these kids are gay and now bad stuff is happening. Enjoy! 

I will say that the leads, Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen, are excellent. There is some solid gore and the score is great. But I think Adrian Chiarella, who is a relatively new director, needs to hone his craft a bit more. 

Grade: B-

***

Tuner

Tuner is a lowkey, character-driven thriller with a really interesting premise: a man with a sense of hearing so strong that it's debilitating realizes that he can crack safes by listening closely to them, thus leading him into some...er, not so legal situations.

Leo Woodall plays Niki White, a piano tuner who works under Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman). Niki used to play piano himself, but after developing hyperacusis, a sensory processing disorder which makes the sufferer extremely sensitive to loud noises, he had to give up his passion. Niki wears special earplugs all day every day and usually wears noise canceling headphones on top of that. Living in New York City can't be easy for someone who would fall to the ground in agonizing pain at the sound of a car siren.

After a situation where Harry forgets the combo to his safe, Niki researches how to break into one and learns that if you listen very closely, you can actually hear the parts of the combo lock click into place and thus crack the safe. Not long after this discovery, Niki is tuning a rich guy's piano in the evening when no one is home and he happens upon a group of guys breaking into the client's safe. Niki helps them open it, mostly to get them to leave, and the leader of this gang of criminals, Uri (Lior Raz), gives Niki his card and tells him to give him a call if he wants to make some real money.

You can probably guess where this is going. Niki isn't a bad guy, but he does need money--and for altruistic purposes. Harry is sick and doesn't have health insurance, so his medical bills are sky high. Harry is like a father to Niki, so Niki starts taking on safe-cracking jobs to pay Harry's bills.

One of the best things about Tuner is how naturalistic the performances feel, especially Leo Woodall as Niki and Havana Rose Liu as his love interest, Ruthie. The budding relationship, which is threatened by Niki's line of under-the-table work, feels really real and not overly cute. Ironically, one of the worst things about Tuner is how unrealistic the overall plot is, but especially a twist near the end that is almost laughable in how unlikely it is. The mix of natural dialogue and acting with the ridiculous plot elements is a bit jarring. But that said, Tuner is *very* entertaining. If you like thrillers that aren't showy or full of action and big stars, this one really is for you. 

Grade: B+

***

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar

Happy pride! The bizarrely titled film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, while not exactly in my top 50 queer films, is a movie with a big heart and some solid laughs. The film follows three drag queens, Vida Boheme (Patrick Swayze), Noxeema Jackson (Wesley Snipes), and Chi-Chi Rodriguez (John Leguizamo), as they travel across the country in yellow Cadillac DeVille to participate in the "Drag Queen of America" pageant in Los Angeles. 

They are waylaid in the small rural town of Syndersville after the Cadillac breaks down and are forced to spend the weekend with the residents of this podunk hamlet. While there, they bring hope to the women of the town by giving them makeovers and helping them plan for the annual Strawberry Social. They also teach the hickish young men a lesson in manners and treating ladies right. The whole movie is so wholesome (in spite of thematic elements of domestic violence and rape) and feels old-fashioned. This is a 1990s film if I've ever seen one, with an uncomplicated message about accepting people who are different than you and how friendship and love will overcome hate and violence.

I will say that it's not quite as funny or entertaining as I hoped it would be. It's a warm, soft blanket of a film and a great watch if you're feeling down and you want something pleasant and not too challenging. The performances are all delightful, but the MVP is Patrick Swayze, a handsome man who makes for a beautiful, graceful woman. RIP Patrick, you were too good for this world.

Grade: B-

***

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

Another drag queen road trip movie, only this one is a little more boring and lot more depressing. Sorry! 

This time, it's Anthony "Tick" Belrose (Hugo Weaving) and Adam Whitely (Guy Pearce) traveling by bus across the Australian desert to perform at a casino managed by Tick's ex-wife, Marion (Sarah Chadwick). Along for the ride is Bernadette Bassenger (Terrance Stamp), a trans woman mourning the death of her younger boyfriend. 

Hijinks ensue, including the bus breaking down, homophobia/transphobia from bigots, a party with aboriginals which ends in an impromptu drag performance of "I Will Survive", secrets revealed, and life-long friends made.

Sadly, I found Priscilla to be dull and slow. Unlike To Wong Foo, in which the queens are on the right side of bitchy, the queens in Priscilla are just...bitches. Especially Guy Pearce, who is just a total cunt half the time (misgendering and badgering poor Bernadette, who did nothing to deserve it). Although there are some funny scenes, the overall vibe of Priscilla is...a drag (HAR HAR). This pride, watch something a little happier. 

Grade: C+

***

Half Man (TV series)

Created and written by Richard Gadd, who achieved acclaim with his heartrending miniseries Baby Reindeer in 2024, Half Man is...a lot. The 6 episode miniseries follows Niall Kennedy (played as an adult by Jamie Bell) and Ruben Pallister (played as an adult by Richard Gadd), two men who are not blood brothers, but grow up together since their mums lived together. Where Niall is a meek lad struggling with his sexuality and hiding almost everything about himself from everyone in his life, Ruben is a domineering, violent bully. Niall and Ruben have a fucked up, codependent relationship in which Niall worships and fears Ruben and Ruben menaces and protects Niall. 

On the day of Niall's wedding, Ruben shows up. He gets Niall alone in a barn to "talk". But what does Ruben want? A fight? Sex? We can't possibly guess. And from there, the show takes us back to the beginning of Ruben and Niall's traumatizing life together.

Half Man is not as good as Baby Reindeer, but Gadd partially succeeds in exploring the topic of people who can't help themselves from indulging in toxic relationships even after given multiple opportunities to move on.

Initially, the audience is primed to sympathize with Niall, a bullied kid dominated by everyone in his life: his classmates, his mum, and Ruben. But as time goes on, we see how Niall can't seem to get away from these toxic relationships even after given multiple fresh starts. We see that he is, in many ways, the architect of his own suffering. I really like this theme, which is also explored in Baby Reindeer, because this kind of nuance (essentially: victims who play a role their own victimization) seems almost taboo to explore in media. But Gadd walks this very fine line with precision and our sympathies keep moving back and forth between Niall and Ruben.

Gadd is clearly working through some deeply personal shit in Half Man and Baby Reindeer. Both shows feel vulnerable and honest in a way you don't always see in media, but they can also be deeply uncomfortable and even offensive at times. This vulnerability worked in Baby Reindeer, but just feels nihilistic in Half Man. The series leaves you asking what the point was. We watch these two men torment and betray one another and there seems to be no meaning behind it other than "toxic masculinity is bad". 

There is still something very compelling about Half Man. I wouldn't recommend it to many people, but if you're a fan of Baby Reindeer or into really intense, fucked up dramas, you could give it a spin and see what you think. Being a miniseries, it won't take up much of your time.

Grade: C+

***

The Testaments (TV series)

The Testaments, based on the book by Margaret Atwood (which I do recommend reading), is a sequel of sorts to The Handmaid's Tale. Why in god's name I wanted to subject myself to more Handmaid's Tale IP is a puzzle for my therapist to figure out. But despite the fact that the show is a very masochistic watch, I did enjoy it! 

Because The Testaments focuses on the young women of Gilead, it feels more hopeful. I heard the show described as a dystopian version of Bridgerton, and that's not far off: much of the season focuses on preparing for a ball during which the Commanders will meet the latest crop of "Greens": young ladies who have gotten their period in the past year and are now ready to marry. But will they get to marry the younger, cuter Commanders who are closer to their age? HAHAHAHA! Of course not, silly! These 16 year old girls will be forced into marriage with men older than their fathers! It's the way God intended things to be!

The show follows two main girls: Agnes MacKenzie (Chase Infiniti, a very exciting up-and-coming actress), a girl born of a Handmaid and adopted by a Commander and his wife, and Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a "Pearl Girl". Pearl Girls are young women who live outside of Gilead and are recruited to join Gilead's way of life. These girls are usually homeless and desperate--think of vulnerable people preyed upon by a cult. But in Daisy's case, she's actually an undercover Mayday operative sent in to spy on the young women of Gilead and report back.

Shifting between Agnes and Daisy's point of view, the girls get ready for their futures and navigate forbidden crushes, schoolyard gossip, and preparing to be sold as slaves to their 50-something year old suitors. Y'know, just girl stuff!

This is the kind of show that if you're going to watch it, you already have. Plenty of people are not interested in signing up to watch a show where a young man has his hand buzz-sawed off for the crime of masturbation in the first episode. And then there are the sickos like me who are strangely drawn to the horrifying world of Gilead. 

Grade: B

***

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

This will shock you to your core, but I had never seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit it it's entirety until literally a couple days ago. I think I saw a few scenes of it as a kid and was too scared to watch the rest. Well, I finally got around to watching this stone-cold classic and, holy shit, it is so good. 

I'm guessing that every single person reading this review has seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit so no need to go too deeply into the plot. This is a film noir comedy directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant, a hard-boiled detective trying to find out, well, who framed Roger Rabbit (voiced by Charles Fleischer). The crime? The murder of Marvin Acme, owner of Toon Town, and a man known to play "patty-cake" with Roger's wife, Jessica. 

This movie is pure delight. It's SO fucking funny and ridiculous. It's a PG movie back when PG really did mean "parental guidance" because watching it as an adult I can see how it would scare the absolute shit out of children. The mix of cartoons and live action is uncanny in the first place, but also any scenes with Judge Doom--played by the incomparable Christopher Lloyd--are truly terrifying.

I also just love film noir dialogue because there's something inherently funny about it ("The dame had legs for days and a body for nights" type stuff), and it's perfect for a PG movie because the writers can get really creative with the insults and innuendos without slipping into adult territory. If you have a kid in your life, around age 8-10, this is the perfect movie to show them to make them think you're not like other adults--you're a cool adult. Because it will feel like they're getting away with watching something they're not supposed to. Be a little bit of a bad influence. 😈

Grade: A

Disclosure Day (and a bonus review!)

Steven Spielberg is one of the greatest directors in cinema history. But that doesn't mean that every single one of his films is a masterpiece. Disclosure Day is mid-tier Spielberg. This ain't no E.T. This ain't no Jaws. But not all movies can be E.T. or Jaws. 

Disclosure Day is a perfectly fine popcorn flick about a government conspiracy to cover up 80 years of evidence of aliens and the few people who know the truth and will go to any lengths to release that truth to the world because "people have a right to know".

Let me say this right off the bat: this movie doesn't make sense in 2026. It is exactly the wrong message and tone for what we know now about the government and about the amount (or lack thereof) that people care about "the truth". We live in a world where we KNOW that there are government conspiracies and that the existence of aliens is the least of our worries. We KNOW that people DON'T care about the truth and that the truth will NOT bring us together. So while Disclosure Day would have been an excellent and powerful film if it came out in 1990, it just feels like a joke in 2026. 

If you suspend your disbelief about the message of Disclosure Day, the plot is quite entertaining. A cybersecurity specialist, Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), steals not only video evidence of alien beings, but a device that allows the user to control other people's minds and actions. Daniel goes on the run with his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), and the CEO of Wardex (a private security company tasked with hiding the evidence of aliens and other government secrets), Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), uses everything at his disposal to find them before Daniel can release the evidence to the world.

Meanwhile in Kansas City, weather reporter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) has what appears to be a breakdown on live TV where she begins making these throaty clicking sounds no one can understand. She's also able to speak basically any language and read minds. For reasons she can't understand, she is compelled to find Daniel (a complete stranger to her) and help him with his mission. 

As you can see, there is A LOT going on in Disclosure Day and, frankly, not a lot of it is explained. One of the overarching messages of the film is that the alien beings use empathy as a survival strategy and want to give us humans that level of empathy so we don't all kill each other in WWIII. But this idea isn't really elaborated on. This is a movie that would have excelled as a miniseries. If it had the time to really explore the technology and lore, it would have been that much more interesting. Instead, it throws everything at the wall and expects us, the audience, to care and understand. 

Defenders of the film are very insistent that we don't need all the answers, we don't need the lore explained, we should ignore plot holes and any questions we have about why and how. I'm sorry, but that's a load of BS! Sure, some suspension of disbelief is fine. But Disclosure Day wants to be "important". It takes itself very seriously while not delivering the emotional transcendence it promises. Like I said, it's the exact wrong movie for the exact wrong time period. It's not so much that I don't believe in aliens...it's that I don't believe in the humans in this film. 

However, there is one really good thing that come out of Disclosure Day: it encouraged me to re-watch Spielberg's 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. There are folks who are saying that Disclosure Day is comparable to A.I. (it's not. A.I. is a masterpiece and Disclosure Day is a popcorn flick) and saying that Disclosure Day will be looked back on as a misunderstood masterpiece (it will not. People won't think about Disclosure Day much at all 5 years from now and if they do, they will think of it as one of Spielberg's lesser works). ALL THIS SAID...it led me to rewatch A.I. for the first time in 20 years and gottdamn if it doesn't hold up!

A.I. was, famously, meant to be directed by Stanley Kubrick. When he died, Spielberg took over the project and made it into an homage to Kubrick while also giving it that Spielbergian touch of humanity. The result is a profoundly emotional film about the nature of love and humanity that still has that signature Kubrickian clinical coldness. 

The film takes place in a future where climate change has destroyed much of Earth and childbearing is tightly controlled. Also, humanoid robots are a thriving market. There are robot nannies, robot lovers, and robot workers. But Professor Allen Hobby (William Hurt) wants to create a child robot that can truly, actually love. This would fill a void for childless couples who cannot have children of their own (and not to mention, make bank!). 

It just so happens that the company making these robots has the perfect guinea pigs in mind: Henry and Monica Swinton (Sam Robards and Frances O'Connor). Henry works for the company making these child robots and he and Monica have a son who is ill and will likely never recover. They allow Henry to take home David (Haley Joel Osment), a prototype robot child. David is initially a kind and polite, if generic, robot. He follows Monica around all day. But his features are not yet put to full use. When Monica is ready, she can read a series of words to David that will make David truly love her the way a child unconditionally loves a mother. Monica eventually does this, and in doing so, damns David to an eternity of unrequited love. 

A.I. is a heartbreaking film that pulls no punches (well, maybe pulls more punches than it would have if Kubrick directed it). When Monica and Henry's son Martin miraculously recovers, it's only a matter of time before David is pushed out of the family unit. Monica simply cannot love David as much as she loves her own son, and when David innocently and accidentally hurts Martin, it's game over. At the same time, Monica is a moral coward. She can't bear the thought of David being destroyed by the robotics company, so she just abandons him in the woods! She loves his too much to allow him to "die", but not enough to keep him in the family. Frances O'Connor's performance is just SO good as a woman in an impossible situation.

The rest of the film follows David's journey to find the Blue Fairy, whom he heard about in Pinocchio. He thinks that if he finds this Blue Fairy, she will make him a real boy and Monica will love him. 

Watching A.I., even though it's a long movie and even though I've seen it before, I was enthralled. I wasn't goofing around on my phone or taking snack breaks. I was almost hypnotized by the movie and it hit even harder than it did when I first saw it in high school. It also brings up a lot of interesting questions about what humans owe artificial intelligence. We live in a world in which increasingly complex A.I. actually exists and there are even "slurs" directed at A.I. The idea that you could insult or hurt A.I. sounds stupid as hell...but what if the A.I. looked human? What if it COULD actually love? Would that change anything? In A.I. David ends up at a "Flesh Fair" -- a rally where people mutilate and kill robots in a "celebration of life". The people at this event are portrayed as white trash redneck types and the event feels like a monster truck rally. But I know some people who hate artificial intelligence so fucking much, I could see them going to something like this. Artificial intelligence is scary, but humans are scarier, eh? Never underestimate the power of human sadism when faced with something that threatens us.

Having people talk about Disclosure Day and A.I. Artificial Intelligence as if they're on the same level just feels laughable to me. The two films aren't even close in terms of style, script, acting, and profundity. Disclosure Day is a perfectly acceptable action film with some excellent sequences and solid acting (especially Emily Blunt). But if you're looking for a movie that will really challenge you and probably make you weep, give A.I. a watch. It's the more difficult film of the two, and by far the more rewarding one. 

Disclosure Day: B-

A.I. Artificial Intelligence: A+

I Love Boosters

Director Boots Riley makes films that make me literally bark with laughter. His mixture of audacity and absurdism hits my funny bone in a way many other comedies do not. In 2018 Riley's first film Sorry to Bother You came out and it was unlike anything I've seen before. Riley's films are satires poking fun at capitalism and racism in ways that would feel ridiculously on the nose coming from any other filmmaker, but in Riley's capable hands the over-the-top elements work perfectly.

Riley is back with another satire of capitalism, I Love Boosters. Boosters are people who steal from retail stores and sell the lifted wares at a discounted prices. Corvette (Keke Palmer) is our main character and is part of a group called the "Velvet Gang" alongside Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige). They primarily lift from Metro Designers stores, which are run by Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a fashion designer whom Corvette--a budding designer herself--has admiration for (despite Smith being a horrible person).

The first third or so of I Love Boosters is pretty straightforward, with the Velvet Gang hatching a plan to get jobs at Metro Designers so they can loot the store of its inventory. The absurdist elements are in visual gags and corporate speak. However, an insane twist occurs at this point which sends the film into a whole new realm of absurdity (and science-fiction). So stop reading here if you want to be surprised!

*spoilers ahead*

One day while working at Metro Designers, the gang comes off a break to find that the entire store is empty. Someone else has come in and wiped out the store's entire inventory in the 5 minutes everyone was in the back room. CCTV footage reveals a woman opening her purse and all the clothes getting sucked into it. The Velvet Gang is set on finding the woman with the "magic bag". They hunt the woman--Jianhu (Poppy Liu)--down and it turns out that it's not the bag that is magic, but the device inside of the bag: a teleporter. 

Jianhu's family works at a sweatshop in China where all the Metro Designers clothes are made and they're paid shit wages and work in conditions that make them sick and even give them cancer. Jianhu and her cousin, Li Pan (Alan Z), discover that the sweatshop is experimenting with teleporters to cut down on shipping costs. They steal the teleporters and hatch a plan for Jianhu to go to the United States and teleport all the Metro Designers clothes back to China and hold the clothes until Christie Smith meets the workers' demands.

So the Velvet Gang and Jianhu team up, but for different reasons: Jianhu wants to help her family, Corvette wants to get back at Christie Smith for stealing one of Corvette's designs, and Sade just wants to keep selling the boosted clothes at a discounted price. Meanwhile, a coworker from Metro Designers, Violeta (Eiza Conzalez), keeps trying to get the gang to join her union efforts. The bigger message the film is trying to convey is that even when we have different reasons for fighting "the Man", we are more powerful together than we are separately. 

I Love Boosters is so packed, visually and thematically, that I have only scratched the surface on explaining the plot. If the film has a weakness it's that there is so much going on, especially in the final third of the movie, that it begins to feel incoherent. However, that's just how Boots Riley does things. The film is maximalist, with shit shoved into every corner of every frame and insane ideas bursting out like a snake bursting out of a can of mixed nuts. 

And I haven't even mentioned LaKeith Stanfield's role as a demon who sucks people's souls out while going down on them! 

In any case, I'm not going to run through the entire plot because we'd be here all night. I Love Boosters ends on a wildly optimistic note that will hit differently for different people. Some people see it as just another element of absurdism: the idea that everything can work out in the end is absurd! Others will perhaps see it as bad writing or a cop-out. 

I see the ending as one of many elements that makes I Love Boosters a very feminist/womanist film. Not only are all the main characters women (and most of them women of color), but I Love Boosters has this vibe of community, humor, joy, and care that feels very female activism coded. Something that really struck me is that when Christie Smith is defeated, nothing bad or violent happens to her. She just walks away, weary at the fact that she is forced to meet the workers' demands. This isn't a film about revenge and punishment (two things that play right back into individualism, capitalism, racism, and misogyny), it's about coming together as a group to care for one's community. Something horrific happening to Christie wouldn't have fit the overall tone of the movie which is playful and humorous. Even though the film is directed by a man, it felt more feminist to me than a lot of other social-political satires. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass, but that's the feeling I was left with after the film was over. 

I Love Boosters is great fun and will reward multiple viewings since it is stuffed full of eye-popping colors and visual gags. 

Grade: A

Stuff I watched in...May, 2026

Hokum

I rushed out to see the newest film from Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy. The director's last film, Oddity, was one of my favorites of 2024 and one of the most genuinely terrifying films I had seen in a while. McCarthy has a knack for building tension to the boiling point and then releasing that tension with jump scares that don't feel predictable. I just about jumped out of my skin multiple times while watching Oddity.

Hokum is perhaps not *quite* as effective or good as Oddity, but it's still incredibly solid and fun. Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, an author who travels to a hotel in rural Ireland where his parents honeymooned. Ohm is an absolutely miserable son of a bitch. He's rude, mean, and drinks too much. He also has a habit of butting into other people's business and sticking his nose where it doesn't belong. After making a connection with a hotel staff member, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), only to find out she went missing during the hotel's Halloween party, Ohm sneaks into a forbidden and cut-off part of the hotel: the honeymoon suite.

There, Ohm finds horrors beyond comprehension. I'm really holding back on the plot of Hokum so that you, dear reader, can discover it for yourself. But there are jump scares and disturbing imagery aplenty. Adam Scott is an interesting choice for a horror lead, but ultimately I enjoyed his performance. For most of the film, he comes off as unfazed by both supernatural horrors (he scoffs and says that the tales of the haunted honeymoon suite are "hokum") and natural horrors. But his tough exterior eventually breaks down and we see the deep well of pain underneath Ohm's curmudgeonly exterior. This is not unlike Scott's performance in Severance: a man repressing oceans of pain that eventually surge forth.

Hokum is one of my favorite horror combinations: scary AND cozy! I really enjoyed it and can't wait to check it out again.

Grade: A-

***

The Devil Wears Prada 2

I watched The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Mother's Day with my mom and my brother-in-law's mom (who is very much like an aunt to me). While I didn't expect it to be as good as the original film, I have to admit I was deeply disappointed by this movie. 

First of all, it's complete fan service, which is to be expected. Most of the original characters are back, including Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), and Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci). And there are repetitions of scenes and jokes from the original. All of that would be fine if the movie itself was good or had something interesting to say. It does not.

After losing her job at a newspaper, Andy is hired to lead the features department at fashion magazine Runway. Although Miranda Priestly, the ice queen editor-in-chief of Runway, will be Andy's boss once again, Andy was actually hired by Miranda's boss, Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), the owner of Runway's parent company. So Miranda and Andy are in a position to butt heads. Again.

Blah blah blah, there are these "almost" conversations the movie has about climate change and AI and sweatshops and billionaires. But The Devil Wears Prada 2 isn't interested in having these conversations for real. The movie feels completely out of touch both in the sense that we're talking about a magazine here, but also in the girl boss feminism of it all. Miranda and Andy have a conversation where Miranda says, "I just love working...don't you?" NO BITCH. WE DONT DREAM OF LABOR.

Look, it's fine to love your job or whatever, but let's face it: this movie is about wealthy, skinny, cunty people and as a society we're sick of that shit. Or, at least, I'm sick of that shit, unless it's going to genuinely make fun of these bougie shits. The original The Devil Wears Prada came out in 2006 and was the perfect film for its time and I still really love it. This movie, 20 years later, feels like something out of a time capsule and not in a good way. 

Grade: C

***

WALL-E

Believe it or not, I have never seen Pixar's WALL-E before. But now that I have a 4 year old niece, I get a chance to catch up on all the kid's movies I ignored. What a delight WALL-E is! The story of a trash-collecting robot left to endlessly do his mindless tasks on a long-abandoned Earth, only to find love with EVE, a robot sent from somewhere else to scan Earth for signs of life, is a lovely and contemplative one. 

I think most people find the first 30-40 minutes, which are dialogue-free, to be the highlight of the film. When EVE is taken back to her mothership, which turns out to be a giant cruise ship for the descendants of humans who left Earth when it became uninhabitable, and WALL-E follows, the movie turns into a message movie about the dangers of overconsumption. It's the kind of movie people watch now, 20 years later, and are like "Oh my god, it came true!" (similar to Idiocracy). Still, I found the second half of the movie pretty entertaining, even if it wasn't as meditative and pure as the first half.

I'm glad I watched WALL-E. I think it's considered one of the best, if not the best, Pixar films and I wasn't that blown away by it...however, I also wasn't fully watching it since I was being aggressively cuddled by my niece the whole time. 

Grade: B+

***

Passenger

I've given director Andre Ovredal enough chances at this point. The Norwegian filmmaker directed Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a movie I gave a rare "D" rating to, as well as The Autopsy of Jane Doe, a movie I turned off halfway through. His latest, Passenger, is the best movie I've seen by him and it's still a bit of a stinker. The premise of the film is excellent: a couple sell their house to start a new "van life", traveling across the United States with a decked out van they sleep in. But after stopping to help the victim of a car accident, an entity latches onto them and begins following and tormenting them. 

This intriguing premise is wasted on a film that is poorly written, poorly acted, and poorly directed. Passenger isn't awful, it's just very meh. The lead actors, Jacob Scipio as Tyler and Lou Llobel as Maddie, are...fine. Melissa Leo at least brings some welcome campiness as a veteran Van Lifer who tries to warn Maddie. But Passenger takes itself too seriously to go full camp mode. 

One thing that annoyed me is that the movie initially treats the entity (the titular "Passenger") as an unknowable evil and has Maddie do research into the lore behind whatever this thing is. However, near the end of the movie, Maddie and Tyler meet up with Melissa Leo's character, Diane, again and she basically explains exactly how to fight the thing. It's just very unsatisfying. And the nature of the Passenger is very Conjuring Universe-esque. 

Feel free to skip this flat, uninteresting film. 

Grade: C

***

Training Day

I saw Antoine Fuqua's Training Day around the time it came out, over 20 years ago. I revisited it on a majestic screen smaller than an 8x11 piece of paper while on a 6 hour flight, sitting next to a woman who refused to put the window screen down and couldn't stop coughing.

What is there to say? It's Training Day. The story of a rookie cop, Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke), and a complete psycho of an experienced narcotics officer, Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington), who get involved in a number of life-threatening shenanigans on Jake's first day in the narcotics unit.

This is a film of its time. It's copaganda where the Good Cop (Jake) emerges with his morals and ethics in tact after being put through hell by the Bad Cop (Alonzo). Am I out of pocket to say this movie feels...racist? Or, at least, the racial politics of the film are weird. It really leans in to a lot of stereotypes of Black and Hispanic men and women. But also, I'm a white lady from the suburbs who has never been forced to smoke PCP at gunpoint like poor Jake. So what the fuck do I know?

Training Day is an entertaining film with the smiling, evil, psychotic Denzel at its center. It's kind of the perfect movie to watch on a plane since you don't really need to follow the plot of dialogue all that closely. 

Grade: B