"After the Hunt"

 ☆☆

I could lie. Lying would be thematically appropriate when talking about Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt, which is a movie about truth, lies, beliefs, philosophies, all that heady stuff. So, I could easily lie and tell you that the movie had me riveted. But here's the truth, and it's one I don't like to say: I dozed off watching After the Hunt.

On paper, After the Hunt should be fascinating and compelling, but something goes terribly wrong, and the movie is only interesting in fits and starts and sometimes it moves so slowly, so coyly, that ... well, I can't make excuses. Yes, I nodded off, and I'm embarrassed about it, so take that into consideration.

Is it fair to write a review about a movie that I watched in such a state? What's fair, anyway? Maybe I'm entitled to do so simply by virtue of having been in the theater while it screened. It's the kind of argument that one of the film's characters might make.

They're all academics — not just any sort of academics, either, but professors and students at Yale University, where Julia Roberts is Alma Imhoff, a philosophy professor who lectures about Foucault's Panopticon and is on the tenure track. So is Andrew Garfield's Hank, who she used to mentor. Alma has a long and passionless and shockingly unbelievable marriage to Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg, playing it soft and emasculated), and they have an even more shockingly unbelievable house where they hold a party at the beginning of the movie.

During the party, a PhD student of Alma's named Maggie (Ayo Edibiri) engages in the kind of witty banter in the warmly lit living room that might feel like it was lifted straight out of a Woody Allen film shot by Carlo DiPalma or Sven Nykvist. To a large degree, After the Hunt seems to revere Allen, down to the opening titles — white Windsor Light lettering against a black screen.

But ... Woody Allen? The once-hallowed director brought down by allegations of sexual misconduct? What is Guadagnino saying here? Within moments, it's clear: After the Hunt exists less as a melodrama than as a political statement against the sins of political correctness, cancel culture, and ultra-liberal moral relativism.

After that opening party, Hank takes Maggie home. The next day, she alleges that Hank may have done ... something. She tells Alma, who is not just good friends with Hank, but also has had an affair with him. All of which sounds intriguing, except After the Hunt takes a ... very ... very ... long ... time ... to establish all the contours of its plot, and when it finally does, all of it feels half-thought.

It's as if Nora Garrett, the screenwriter, is aware of all the hot-button topics the movie covers, but just barely. The movie doesnt' dive too deeply into any of them. After the Hunt takes about a dozen big issues, ranging from trans rights to cancel culture to academic politics, and gives all of them lip service but can't figure out how to narrow in on the most salient ones. It's a weirdly unfocused movie, which combined with its glacial pace makes it a challenge to sit through.

Is it about the aftermath of sexual assault? Is it about personal responsibility to speak out against injustice? Is it about entitlement? Gender disparities? The decline of patriarchal authority? Sexual identity? Academic integrity? Maybe it's about all of those things, but scattered among them is a specific story about Alma, her problematic past and her (yes, really) pill addiction. 

It's no wonder, then, that as good as the actors are — and there are moments when Roberts comes close to equalling some of her best work — they often seem lost. When Chloë Sevigny comes on screen in an unflattering wig and glasses, she seems genuinely confused about what she's supposed to be doing. If the other actors appear relatively more confident, they're also perplexed about the film's viewpoint and motivations. The performances may be technically sound, but they're uniformly unconvincing.

So's the film — so much so, I lost the struggle it posed. The final third is nominally better than the rest of it, until a final epilogue scene that feels so irrelevant and unbelievable that it undermines the already shaky ground the rest of the movie occupies and presents such a morally and ethically unlikely scenario that it seemed to undermine many of the film's primary arguments.

Frustrated, often confused by motivations, I finally had to give up. You may have a different response. But if you do go see After the Hunt, go ahead and bring along a pillow. Just in case.

Viewed October 28, 2025 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"Frankenstein"

 ☆☆☆☆

More and more, the question to ask about movies isn't, "Is it any good?" but, "Can I watch it at home while doing sixteen other things?" Movies are being made to appeal to viewers who treat "content" (Hollywood's favorite word of late) as "second-screen" or even "third-screen" entertainment. They've turned their streaming service to a movie, but they're watching Instagram videos on their iPhone while talking with a friend on FaceTime.

When it comes to movie watching in 2025, the movie is almost beside the point.

Netflix has come to excel at these sorts of disposable movies for fractional attention spans. It doesn't matter if they're good or bad, as long as they're ... on.

And yet, once a year Netflix comes out with a half-dozen movies made to feel like old-fashioned movie theater movies, the kinds of films that compete for Oscars and get recognized by critics. This year, Netflix begins its "halfway-decent-movies" juggernaut with Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. What an odd thing to do. Anyone who tries to watch this movie while doing something else will come away perplexed.

To most people, even after 90 years, Frankenstein's creature is still Boris Karloff with the flat head and the neck bolts and those boots. To those who know anything about Mary Shelley's novel — and Guillermo del Toro knows a lot about it — Dr. Frankenstein and the creature he creates is not like that at all.

Viewers expecting a "horror movie" will be nonplussed to discover del Toro's made a gothic melodrama, a movie in which one character dies so beautifully that crimson blood spreads under her stunning dress as she's laid on a rock and whispers words of love that Jane Austen might have found a bit too silly.

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein demands patience, attentive viewing, and careful listening — not qualities that Netflix has tended to encourage in viewers. And despite the existence of 55-inch and 65-inch and even 95-inch TVs, much of what del Toro has created for this film will be lost on motion-smoothing home screens.

That's because del Toro has made a real, honest-to-God movie with Frankenstein, and I had the pleasure of seeing it in a movie theater, projected on 35-millimeter film, and it’s a captivating experience. If nothing else, the movie is masterful at creating and sustaining the exaggerated, almost campy, high emotions and extreme drama of Gothic fiction. If you thought del Toro indulged his gory, Gothic whims a little too much in Crimson Peak, wait until you see Frankenstein.

The general contours of the tale are well known — the "mad scientist" who stitches together corpses and re-animates them through electricity, creating a fearsome and often pitiful creature. The surprisingly large scope of Mary Shelley's original novel is maybe less known (though it has been adapted rather faithfully a number of times), so del Toro plays with a lot of the ideas in it.

He plays a little too much (and illogically) with the ways Frankenstein's "monster" can be killed, and because del Toro takes a lot of liberties here, the movie winds up being almost ponderous in its repeated ruminations on life, death and the meaning of existence. 

But del Toro has assembled a cast that is more than game and willing to risk looking very, very silly in billowing costumes with wild hair that blows in the wind to help express emotion. Oscar Isaac, Christoph Waltz, Charles Dance, Mia Goth and most especially Jacob Elordi are unafraid to look silly — courage del Toro's direction rewards.

Isaac is the doctor and Elordi is his creation, and while we remember from the 1930s (and 1974's "Young Frankenstein") that the creature mostly expresses himself through grunts and moans, that's neither true in Shelley's novel nor here, where the "monster" becomes more and more eloquent. Since he's played by tall, handsome Jacob Elordi, he also becomes almost comically sexy, though Elordi always finds a strong beating (if undead) heart. He's impressive, expressive and surprisingly elegant.

So is the movie. It really is. True, it goes on for about 20 minutes too long and contains far, far too much CGI (the central set looks like it was digitally ported over from Wicked), but this is a compelling, thoughtful and exciting movie. Is it any good? It most certainly is — but will anyone notice?

How strange and sad (much like the monster itself) to imagine how little attention most people will pay to watching it. It's a movie truly designed to be seen in a movie theater, yet like the poor monster himself, it is fated to have a miserable, ignoble existence that ignores its true potential. It’s going to be another piece of interchangeable content.

Viewed October 21, 2025 — Egyptian Theater

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"Good Boy"

☆☆☆½ 

As a horror movie, Good Boy is pretty toothless. It's an okay haunted-house story with a couple of really nice jolts and a PG-13 rating that seems a bit on the strict side. There's a solid argument to be made that on the horror scale, Good Boy is more of a family film, pretty safe for everyone who wants some gentle scares.

But as a star vehicle, a movie that exists to present the world to a new screen sensation, Good Boy excels.

The performer in question is named Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever who technically co-stars alongside a few human performers, but because the whole movie is told from Indy's point of view, they're almost never seen.

What happens to Indy's human, a man named Todd (played, almost incidentally, by Shane Johnson) moves into a remote house in the middle of some rather forbidding woods. Todd is suffering from a serious illness, and he's having a hard time. His sister, Vera, doesn't like the idea of him being out there in the house that used to be owned by their grandfather, who died under some rather awful and potentially horrifying circumstances. Grandpa had a loyal dog named Bandit, who has been missing since the old man's death.

Indy is a loyal dog, a good boy if ever there was one, and watches Todd go through his physical decline, all the while paying attention to a rather sinister presence in the house that he, but not Todd, can sense.

The presence comes closer. It's shadowy and scary and lurks in all the dark corners, and Indy is ... aware.

Indy worries about Todd. And when the thing comes closer, it coincides with Todd's decline in both physical and mental health. Todd does some very mean (but don't worry, dog lovers, not that awful) things to Indy, but Indy never loses his faith in the man.

Indy doesn't understand what is happening. Then again, neither does Todd. But Indy knows that there's something in the house.

That's pretty much the whole movie. Indy watches this thing in the shadows, which sometimes makes an appearance.

When I was a kid, the dog movie Benji became a huge hit. Benji wasn't about much. The filmmakers kind of constructed a movie around the things that Benji (the actor) did as Benji, the character. But we all loved it, because Benji seemed so ... human. What an actor! Well, let's just say that Benji has nothing on Indy. Benji was a performer. Indy is a star. It's possible to imagine other movies told from Indy's perspective. Indy manages to hold the film in ways most human actors can never manage.

Like I said, Good Boy is just passable as a scary movie. It's only 72 minutes long, for one thing, barely long enough to qualify as a feature film. It turns out there's a reason. Playing with Good Boy when I saw it, placed after the film, is a five-minute featurette with writer-director Ben Leonberg, in which he explains how the movie was made.

It turns out that the secret to this movie was an almost infinite amount of patience. Leonberg took an interesting concept — telling a story from the dog's point of view — and pulled it off by using a film technique known as the Kuleshov effect. It's a fascinating thing: a man with a neutral expression is juxtaposed with a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a pretty girl, and even though the man's expression never changes the audience perceives him as hungry, sad, and lustful based solely on what he's implied to be looking at. It's this effect, Leonberg explains, that allows Indy to become a great performer.

Indy is mesmerizing. He makes the film. So what if the performance happened in the editing room? It might be a first for a dog, but it's happened to plenty of human actors who became stars.

The dog should have such a fate.

Viewed October 17, 2025 — AMC Universal 16

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"One Battle After Another"

 ☆☆☆☆☆

Don't be fooled by appearances. Although it's been more than a month since my last post about a current film, those weeks have been filled with moviegoing. The focus, however, has been on the growing number of theaters in the Los Angeles area that specialize in older films, and given the selection of big-budget studio releases lately, watching the massively underrated Joe Versus the Volcano or Terry Gilliam's messy and disjointed marvel Brazil have seemed far better options.

Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling, unpredictable, and almost impossibly entertaining One Battle After Another makes for quite a spectacular return to the current cinema. No Anderson film has ever been without its interesting qualities, and some, like There Will Be Blood and Magnolia, are among cinema's great achievements.

So it's no small feat that with One Battle After Another, Anderson tops even himself. While there are moments in which it can seem too overstuffed, too complicated and byzantine, every excess is ultimately forgivable in a film that makes a 2 hour, 50 minute running time seem like nothing at all.

Even more astonishing is how One Battle After Another was decades in the making and more than a year in production, but is so prescient and pointed about current political flashpoints that conservative, MAGA-style pundits have begun actively complaining about the movie, saying it's loaded against them, that it glorifies left-wing politics and makes heroes out of its "Antifa-style" protagonists.

Which it does. Gleefully. Proudly. Inspired by or loosely based on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (enough that Pynchon and his novel get on-screen credit), the movie telegraphs its political leanings right from the start, putting us into the thick of a mission by leftist revolutionaries to free hundreds of detained immigrants from the clutches of a militarized police force so vile it's run by a man with the cartoonish name Lockjaw (Sean Penn). The revolutionaries are called French 75 and are led by Perfidia Beverly Hills  (Teyana Taylor) and Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio). She's a fierce, committed warrior, unafraid to come face-to-face with Lockjaw, and certain about her cause. He's idealistic, laconic, and hopelessly in love with Perfidia Beverly Hills.

But she won't let love get in the way of her fight, and after she gets pregnant, she leaves the baby girl in the care of Bob and fellow French 75 member Deandra (Regina Hall), and sixteen years later the girl is a young woman who is testing the boundaries of her life, which has been constrained by Bob's fear of being found. He's right to be afraid, because Lockjaw has vowed to hunt him down.

Most of the movie, while set against some extreme (and distressingly familiar) political violence, becomes the story of Lockjaw's relentless pursuit of Bob and the daughter, Willa (played with incredible intensity by Chase Infiniti), after Perfidia — following an incident of terrifying violence — drops out of the world. To escape Lockjaw's dogged determination to find them, Bob and Willa seek the help of a Spanish-speaking karate sensei who leads a sort of underground railroad allied with what's left of Bob's revolutionary idealism.

For a moment, it looks like Bob and Willa might be safe, but Lockjaw won't let it go. He is Ahab to Bob's constantly stoned, Dude-abiding whale. The setup, both complicated and, ultimately, remarkably simple, gives Anderson the opportunity to do something he hasn't done before — show that he knows how to make an action movie. Does he ever. Woven into his story of politics, loyalty and relentless dedication to a cause are scenes of seat-gripping, gasp-inducing intensity. They're also — and this is the really unexpected thing — enormously fun and funny.

Anderson wastes no opportunity to make One Battle After Another into many things rolled into one: intense drama, sensational action, and, most satisfyingly, unpredictable comedy. I laughed harder than I have in even the highest-profile comedies, but they're mixed with bold and surprising action, so well edited and shot that a few of the chase sequences almost certainly will be included alongside the all time great action moments.

One Battle After Another is a movie that earns both the attention it receives from rapt audiences, and the many laughs and gasps it elicits along the way. It's a movie of big ideas, big images, and big characters. Penn's Lockjaw will go down as one of the most loathsome and wildly inappropriate military creations since Dr. Strangelove, a movie that shares some of the same DNA. Lockjaw's story leads to some of the most unexpectedly pointed political satire of recent years. It's no wonder conservative extremists are so worked up over One Battle After Another. They are the targets that this film aims for — and constantly, satisfyingly, always hits.

Viewed October 3, 2025 — Vista Theater

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"Lurker"

 ☆☆☆½ 

There's something about the title Lurker that implies — not quite promises, but more than suggests — a very different movie than Lurker turns out to be. It isn't about a stalker, not in the traditional sense, and it isn't about someone who sits around on the sidelines and watches. So if you go into this movie as I did, knowing nothing about it except the title, you'll be in for a lot of surprises.

There's no way I'd ever want to ruin any of them, because, at least until it starts to come apart a bit in its final third, Lurker is a movie that is worth seeking out. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has read this blog even a little that I recommend seeing Lurker in a movie theater, and if you do and you're lucky enough to see it with a responsive, appreciative audience as I did, you'll have a classic moviegoing experience — feeling absorbed by the movie, yet also responding to the vibe of the audience. Lurker benefits from that sort of response.

Revealing anything about the story will be saying too much, but it bears mentioning that Lurker has a long and impressive lineage, not just in the background of its writer-director, Alex Russell, who wrote for the TV series Beef and The Bear, but also in intense movie thrillers that ...

Damn it. There I go again. Okay, fine, it's giving nothing away to say that Lurker is a thriller, and a very good one, though also one that falls victim to the same things that have long tripped up thrillers — it's got a great setup, an amazing follow-through, but it stumbles as its nears its end. The careful structure and intricate plotting that sees everyone in the film wind up in the same awful place near the end starts to come undone. Lurker lets the audience do what a thriller like this must never, ever let the audience do: ask questions. "But what about ... " and "Wait, didn't he say earlier ..." and "I don't understand, I thought ..." are not things that should run through an audience's mind in the last 20 minutes of a movie like this, but phrases like that kept creeping into my thoughts.

Key moments that should surprise or shock or unnerve and vaguely confusing, and even though — this is important — Lurker ends on a perfect note, there's no way to deny it gets there in the hardest possible way. I wanted Lurker to be as clear about its intentions and its characters' motivations near the end as it was at the beginning, and the movie frustrated me.

That's not the fault of its cast, particularly its two lead actors, the unnervingly ingratiating Théodore Pellerin and the effortlessly charismatic Archie Madekwe, who perform an odd and unexpected dance that in some of the best possible ways reminded me of characters in a Hitchcock film. The way they meet and then ...

Oops. No. I'm not going to reveal more. Despite its flaws, which are not inconsiderable, Lurker remains spellbinding in part thanks to these two actors and a flawless supporting cast who manage to feel relaxed and natural and effortless even while they tell a story that is far more deeply plotted and carefully controlled than it seems.

There are so many ways in which Lurker could have been better ... but even more, and more catastrophic, ways it could have gone wrong. That it mostly gets it right is worth celebrating, and Lurker is a movie worth seeing, and letting get under your skin — which it will. Those two lead actors will be sure of it.

AMC Burbank 6 — Sept. 6, 2025

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"Weapons"

 ☆☆☆½ 

It would be hard to conceive of a better set-up for a movie than the one Zach Cregger has dreamed up for his new thriller Weapons: 17 of the 18 children in one elementary school classroom get up out of bed at 2:17 a.m., leave their homes and run, arms trailing behind them like airplane, into the night.

They vanish.

Why?

Who's responsible?

Has some terrifying force, some evil spirit, taken possession of all of these children? And why is one boy left in the classroom where Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) teaches?

It's a story filled with tension, with deep uncertainty, a paranoia that goes far, far deeper than any ordinary tragedy — say, a school shooting, which the movie wants to evoke — would have generated. As a directer, Cregger has an amazing gift for milking that tension, both visually and through montage. This is a finely crafted movie, and though it utilizes many of the tropes of horror films, it plays much more like a disturbing, anxious update of the paranoid thrillers that were popular in the 1970s.

There is so much tension, that just the sight of a woman walking toward a car can get an audience screaming and fidgeting. The audience I saw it with seemed to regard this movie with a genuinely rare sense of dread, and Weapons leaves no doubt — particularly coupled with his previous horror film Barbarian — that Cregger is an incredible filmmaking talent.

It's in the fulfillment of the promise of those first 30 minutes that Cregger falters. Weapons bears more than a passing resemblance to the films of M. Night Shyamalan, even down to the rural Pennsylvania setting (though the film was shot in Georgia). The comparison extends to a fascination with creating a twisty, unpredictable plot that never quite connects all of its various threads.

Strangely, perhaps, there's another movie that came to mind while watching Weapons, one that I learned Cregger acknowledged served as sort of storytelling inspiration: Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 masterpiece of anxiety, Magnolia. Thematically, the movies couldn't be more different, but certain elements — an overwound cop, a constant rain, a cascade of interrelated stories, an oppressive sense of foreboding — combine to make Weapons ambitious and impressive. But still ...

Like Magnolia, Weapons begins with an omniscient narrator who establishes the mood and then disappears. What the narration and the first third of Weapons never hints at (just as Magnolia didn't) is the out-of-nowhere event that will change the course of the story. In the case of Weapons, it's impossible to describe this event without spoiling things — and this is a movie that, despite my reservations, shouldn't be spoiled. In Magnolia, the event (frogs raining from the sky) needed no explanation; its randomness, its weirdness, its lack of any greater meaning was the point.

In Weapons, the event and the character who embodies it also get no explanation, and that proves to be the movie's undoing. Without a sense of motivation, without crucial details about what this person wants, exactly, and why, the story begins to fall apart. Weapons is a movie best enjoyed in the moment, and the good news it can be enjoyed in the moment, quite a lot. But if you're like me, and you begin to try to answer any of the many questions Weapons leaves wide open, the car ride home after watching this movie is going to be a long one. And frustrating.

Weapons needs, earns and demands a sense of mystery. But ultimately even David Lynch needed to offer contextual explanations for a lot of his weirdness. Weapons not only doesn't offer the explanations, the movie left me wondering if it even cared that people might wonder. It's a puzzle, all right — a moody, tense, sometimes frightening puzzle, but every puzzle needs to have a solution. I'm not sure there is one for Weapons.

Viewed August 10, 2025 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Sketch"

  ☆☆☆ 

Many movies make the mistake of having a great setup with a disappointing payoff. They've got a great idea, communicate it perfectly, and get the audience so excited that the inability to stick the landing makes the whole film suffer by comparison.

Sketch does things the other way around, which works to the movie's benefit. The opening 20 minutes are rushed and don't take the time to explain what it is we'll be seeing, that it's easy to imagine the rest of the movie failing on similar terms.

So, it's nice to report that after that failed opening, Sketch just keeps going and keeps on getting better and more intriguing, until its final few minutes, which are every bit as good as you may have hoped.

Those opening scenes, though, feel like something's missing — the story is about two motherless children, siblings Jack and Amber. Since the death of their mother, their father (Tony Hale) has been struggling, too, and has recently put the house up for sale, to both the delight and chagrin of a neighborhood real estate agent who's also a family friend (D'Arcy Carden).

The kids discover that a nearby pond holds the power to fix things and make artistic submissions come to life. Bianca Belle is the daugher, about 11 years old. She's been coping with her sense of loss and helplessness by drawing pictures in her notebook and posting them social media. They're odd pictures. They are mostly of giant creatures and imaginary monsters.

Then, Jack accidentally tosses the notebook into the pond, and before you can say lickety-split, the monsters are running amok.

The performances are the key in Sketch, and the performers are all uniformly game, especially Kalon Cox, a child actor who has impeccable timing. All of the performers, especially the adults, are subjected to some terrible indiginities, but they all are impressive under the circumstances, particularly the adults. Tony Hale and D'Arcy Carden seem both aware and committed to the idea that they are making a family film that may be aimed at kids but isn't made solely for kids.

The action leads up to a sincere, cathartic climax that feels earned and appropriate, and underscores the movie's wisdom about the impossibility of moving on in the face of devastating loss.

But something feels off about the whole endeavor. Sketch follows in the footsteps of Weapons, a movie that couldn't be more different in tone, in refusing to explain anything about its central conceit. Anything. Why is the pond magic? How is it possible they've never noticed? Does a movie made primarily for a family audience need to explain a lot? After all, Mary Poppins could do all sorts of magical things, but no one ever knew or cared to ask why.

It may be fair to say the same concept should apply, but Sketch exists in an arguably more sophisticated world, and its kids have come of age in the time of cell phones and instant communication. The movie stumbles around as it tries to get us to buy into its basic approach. Kids will be less critical. They'll accept the explanations for the magic, and they'll probably be delighted (if not a little traumatized — parts of Sketched are undeniably scary).

Adults: your mileage may vary. 

***

Postscript: It's worth noting that Sketch was produced and released by Angel Studios, which says it has a mission to release uplifting, family friendly films. Hardcore Christian messaging is usually part of these movies, and after further digging it's clear that Angel Studios is a faith-based film company. Sketch does not contain any overt messages about Christianity or religion. But Angel Studios has a clear, stated goal, and some viewers may want to know that before going in so they can make informed choices. The movie also contains an explicit fundraising message in its end credits, which may also turn off some viewers.

Viewed August 9, 2025 — AMC Universal

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