"The Odyssey"

 ☆☆☆☆

The same rule applies to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey as to every other film ever made: Is it a good story? Does it hold your attention and excite your senses and show you something that moves you, whether big or small?

Because if it does, then how it's made is irrelevant. Cinerama Holiday might be a fun novelty, but it fails as a movie. Comin' at Ya! may have shown off 3-D but it was a lousy movie. Now comes The Odyssey, the first-ever full-length movie shot with IMAX film cameras. For months, every IMAX 70mm film screening has been sold out. Over and over on social media, you'll see the posts: IMAX 70mm is the only way Christopher Nolan intends his film to be seen!

Only 41 movie theaters in the world can show The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX, so even if it's true that's the way Nolan would like people to see it, almost nobody will. The numbers don't pan out. At its height in the early 1960s, Cinerama had four times the number of theaters worldwide than IMAX has for 70mm film presentations.

So, what's going to matter most to audiences isn't the format, no matter what Nolan wants — it's the movie. Is it any good? Does it thrill? Does it excite the senses? Does it offer all the things a movie should?

Guess what? It does. This is no Amityville 3-D. It's not a gimmick. I saw The Odyssey projected in 70mm, which means I saw it projected on film more or less in the screen size and format most people over 40 grew up with. Nothing special, you might say. And the good news is, The Odyssey works. It works well.

Which isn't to say it's perfect, but as far as Nolan movies go, it's more accessible than most, it's more narratively engaging and emotionally compelling, and after seeing it I cracked open my print version of The Odyssey to read a little of what I had just seen — if nothing else, Christopher Nolan may turn a whole bunch of movie tech-heads into curious readers, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Nolan's version of The Odyssey, for which he's the credited screenwriter as well as director, begins, as so many of his movies do, with some rushed confusion. Nolan is never particularly concerned with how to accustom audiences to his stories — he throws them right in, and even though it takes some time to acclimate to The Odyssey, once that happens, the movie carries you along.

Matt Damon is Odysseus, both as a younger king and as an older man trying to make his way home after he's victorious in the Trojan War, thanks to that horse. Anne Hathaway is Penelope, his patient wife. Tom Holland is their son Telemachus. Robert Pattinson is Penelope's villainous suitor Antinous. And so forth. There's Zendaya! There's Charlize Theron! There's John Leguizamo! There's Lupita Nyong'o!

It's a wonder the poster for The Odyssey hasn't put all their faces into little boxes at the bottom. This is about as close to an old-fashioned "star-studded" cast as you're likely to find today, and sometimes the movie feels a little like a "spot-the-cameo" disaster movie, but I think that's part of the fun. Yes, it's serious stuff. Yes, it's made at a very high level of quality. But, still, it's a movie — and not just any movie, but one with gods and adventurers, a witch, a cyclops and a whirlpool, sirens and monsters and even a trip to the underworld (which looks an awful lot like Iceland).

In truth, The Odyssey could probably use a little of the levity of those old Ray Harryhausen films where Odysseus' first cousin Jason leads the Argonauts and fights all sorts of monsters on his way to the Golden Fleece. Nolan's Greek mythology is pretty grim and realistic by comparison.

At times, it can also be hard to follow. Nolan's movies are rarely straightforward, and The Odyssey can sometimes suffer from clunky editing that renders the action a little unclear and Nolan's favorite technique of muddying dialogue and overwhelming it with ear-throbbing sound design. It can be an overwhelmingly aggressive movie, at times, and its battle sequences can get pretty confusing.

But The Odyssey always finds its way back to a story that has survived 3,000 years. Nolan doesn't botch it. If anything, he adapts it with, on the whole, so much excitement and flair that he's done something important: Brought Homer into the 21st century and tied it, especially in the film's final few minutes, loosely but pointedly enough to the world as we know it today that suddenly these gods and monsters, who exist in a changing world rocked by war and betrayal, feel excitingly vibrant, real and relevant. In IMAX ... or not.

Viewed July 18, 2026 — American Cinematheque Director's Village

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Favorite Films: "Chinatown"

Not many films have been endlessly analyzed and examined as Roman Polanski's Chinatown. It would be foolish for me to try to add anything to the academic and artistic discussion of the movie. All I can do to explain why it's such a favorite is to try to share why it works on me so well, why it feels as urgent and vibrant and new today as it must have 52 years ago.

There's a scene in Chinatown that's a masterpiece of storytelling and suspense — not as if that doesn't apply to the entirety of this complicated, endlessly rewarding movie. J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson, of course) wants to know why a certain dead body has turned up in a certain reservoir. None of his police pals are going to give him anything more to go on. He'll have to do this alone.

So, there he is, behind the gates of the secure reservoir at night. We have no idea what he's looking for, because he has no idea what he's looking for—which, of course, is the plot of Chinatown in a nutshell: Gittes only knows he's onto something, he never has any idea what. Neither do we. Then, from the darkness:

"Hold it there, kittycat!"

An impeecably dressed little man holding a knife, played by Polanski himself, flashes a knife as Gittes' rival Claude Mulvihill pins him to a fence. "You know what happens to nosy fellas?" asks the ltitle man. I know, I know, I'm describing a scene you've probably seen a half-dozen times, but have you ever noticed the way the crickets chirp in the background? The inkiness of the night behind the fence?

These two little details are key to Chinatown, and Polanski doesn't make a big show about either. But, he's included them, perfectly, for a reason: Everything around Gittes is dark and unknowable, and the forces of nature that make it all work are entirely indifferent. As Chinatown progresses, Gittes uncovers and confronts evil and corruption on a magnitude he never imagined possible — and those crickets in the night? They'll keep chirping no matter what.

Chinatown is a despairing movie, a film that confronts real evil — not the imagined kind from The Exorcist, released the year before, but the kind that lives in our world. The kind we have to face every day. Polanski, just a few years after the ghastly murder of Sharon Tate, had lived through the Holocaust, but it's worth noting that J.J. Gittes and the other characters in Chinatown—which is set in 1937—have not. True, unexpurgated evil is unknown to them. So, it's understandable that as Gittes starts investigating the case he thought was brought to him by Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), he has no idea of what he's getting himself into.

I've seen Chinatown innumerable times, and it's grown from a film I admired but didn't entirely understand to a movie that I think is utterly indispensable — not just in my mind, but to Hollywood and, to a larger extent, to an understanding of America. It's a movie whose real meaning is as deeply hidden as its solution, but once you uncover it, Chinatown takes on the feeling of a philosophical treatise.

That last line — "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown" — has been dissected over and over. It's become a cinematic version of semantic satiation, that odd experience of hearing a word so often that it loses its meaning. But keep examining that line, and what happens after it's spoken, and Chinatown truly reveals itself:

There's no explanation. The only thing you can do is walk away, stunned, into the night — that same night that consumes a world that has been here for millions of years and will be here for millions more, and takes no notice of your suffering, of cruelty, of pain and sorrow. You'll never, ever understand it. And the more you dig for answers, the fewer you'll find. People are terrible. The world is awful. And that's just the way it is.

Bleak? You bet. And yet, such despair has rarely been as involving as Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne make it in Chinatown. As I watched it again a few weeks ago, time fell away — yes, it's easy to recognize young Jack Nicholson and young Faye Dunaway and long-gone John Huston and the rest. It's obvious the film was made a long time ago. And yet, the way it casts its spell, the way it grips the viewer and refuses to let go, makes it feel every bit as fresh and new as a movie made this year. It's perfectly cast, perfectly designed, perfectly edited, perfectly scored (by Jerry Goldsmith), perfectly shot (by John Alonzo), so perfectly crafted it seems almost set apart from other movies.

It's so easy to watch, so entertaining, so compelling, that it's not until those last couple of minutes that you're reminded, yet again, of everything the movie is meaning to say — that Gittes is every one of us. Poor, stupid Gittes, smart enough to find the truth but not smart enough to understand it. He keeps believing that somewhere, somehow, there's got to be a rational explanation. That if he just keeps trying, he'll find a way to stop all this. How painfully familiar all of that sounds right about now.

Like I said, it could have been made today.

"The Invite"

 ☆☆☆☆☆

There isn't a moment in Olivia Wilde's The Invite that feels false. I haven't seen The People Upstairs, the 2020 movie on which Rashida Jones and Will McCormack based their screenplay for this film, but as an exploration of a specific kind of American mores, values and stressors, The Invite feels wholly new, alive and relevant.

It's also very, very funny. The first thing a comedy like this has to do is make you laugh, and The Invite does, which is why some initial comparisons to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? seem off-base — The Invite is a sharply observed, perfectly delivered examination of a certain kind of marriage. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to wonder if Jones and McCormack were eavesdropping on them, especially for the first third of the movie.

In that opening, Seth Rogen and Wilde play Joe and Angela, a married couple in San Francisco who know each other maybe a little too well. They can anticipate almost every word the other will say, yet they have no idea how to adjust their own behavior to that knowledge. When the movie opens, Rogen, a disappointed music teacher, exhausts himself bicycling home. When he gets there, he discovers his wife has been preparing an elaborate dinner for the couple who live upstairs.

This is not what he wants. This is not the time. This is not the day. And there's no wine. Yet, in the way of married couples (straight, gay, young, old — almost any couple will see themselves in this film), she's not going to back down.

Soon enough, there's a knock at the door. It's Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pína (Penelope Cruz), and they are intruding at the worst possible moment for Joe. Then again, Joe doesn't have any best possible moments. Fumbling through an attempt at dinner, the four finally sit down to talk, and it turns out that Hawk and Pína have an ulterior motive. There's something they've been wanting to talk about.

It doesn't take much to find out what the topic is, but I'm not going to reveal it here, and the best way to experience The Invite is not to know it, either. But it's a balm for movie screens that have been beseiged by blockbusters and animated adventures and really loud movies playing in premium formats. The Invite has its sights set both lower and higher than that — it's a decidedly analog affair (Wilde shot it in 35 mm) that finds much more adventure and revelation in conversation than in action.

Eventually, the movie does work itself around to action, at least of a sort, which in turn leads The Invite to the most unexpected of destinations.

Jones and McCormack have crafted a screenplay of uncommon emotional intelligence, and though a lot of the setup is played for laughs, some slapsticky and some awkward, when it gets where it's going, the weight of it all is such that the audience I saw it with stopped the guffawing (there had been a lot of it) and went completely silent.

The Invite deals with the serious, messy, uncomfortable business of being an adult in an uncommonly frank way. The topic at its core is rarely explored in mainstream films, and almost never with this kind of genuine insight and empathy.

As Hawk and Pína challenge Joe and Angela in ways the latter couple could never have imagined when the night began, the movie also challenges the audience to examine long-held views about the way marriages and relationships work. It's serious stuff, but as a director Wilde knows how to handle it — and to balance it with observational, character-driven humor that never feels forced or unwelcome, though often feels like a relief.

In a single set, designed with curious flattening of colors that suggests a lot more about the characters than perhaps it's obvious at the outset, The Invite feels intimate, not claustrophobic. It may be physically constrained, but Norton, Cruz, Wilde and Rogen manage, through the way its characters grow and change in the course of an evening, to make it feel expansive and meaningful.

It's been an uncommonly good year for movies, but The Invite is among the very best of them.

Viewed July 14, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"Leviticus"

 ☆☆☆½

Leviticus continues the 2026 horror-movie trend of positing the notion that the greatest horror in the world isn't a monster or the devil or the physical world but rather ourselves and the way others respond to us. Like Obsession (a man's wish undoes him), Exit 8 (a man's inability to commit traps him) and Backrooms (a man gets lost in his own mind), Leviticus proceeds from the idea that a person's very nature can be turned against them.

This time, it's not one person at the core of the story but two—Naim and Ryan, two teenagers living in a bleak part of rural Australia. Naim (Joe Bird) is there because his mother has relocated them to a community more in keeping with her conservative Christian values. Naim meets Ryan (Stacy Clausen), and as the film begins the two boys are discovering their mutual attraction.

For Naim, it's more than physical. He grows deeply attached to Ryan, but Ryan may not quite feel the same way: Naim catches him with Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), and out of anger and jealousy tells Hunter's parents about the boys.

Following a strange and bloody introduction that, for a long time, seems untethered to the rest of the film, Leviticus does not show itself as a horror movie. It's an uncommonly sensitive portrayal of two boys trying to cope with their homosexuality and their attraction despite their oppressive environment. Only when Naim is dragged to a bizarre religious ceremony conducted by a "deliverance healer" does something very strange begin happening.

Exactly how that works is a plot point I wouldn't dream of revealing, and it's the movie's most worthwhile idea. Writer-director Adrian Chiarella hits a nerve with his central conceit, and though it takes a little time to figure out exactly what's going on, when it all comes clear the consequences are genuinely terrifying.

What the parents of the community, including Naim's mother (Mia Wasikowska), choose to do to their kids is horrifying and painful to watch—often too much so. Leviticus revels just a little too much in gore, which increases as the movie goes on. It becomes a physically brutal film, but thanks to the earnest and believable performances by Bird and Clausen, it never loses touch with its humanity.

The movie gets a little tripped up by the "rules" of what's happening. They aren't numerous, but they're so specific that even as allegorical horror the movie starts straining credulity. It's likewise a bit of an overreach to create a character so unrelievedly awful as Wasikowska's mother. All the parents in this movie are terrible people, yet Leviticus never spends a moment considering why the community has oriented itself around such a specific hatred, or what the religious implications are. The ceremony that pushes the film into horror is never really explained, nor are its roots in Christianity.

Maybe because of the uncommonly good ways in which it shows two boys in love, struggling against community values that oppose them, the horror sometimes feels a little too forced. And yet, the love and attraction they portray is authentic, and in one pivotal, wordless scene on a bus, exquisitely, achingly believable.

Leviticus is a movie with a lot of ideas at its core. Not all of them are presented well, but the ones that are make this a cut above most horror films that is almost destined to become a queer classic.

Viewed June 20, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"Backrooms"

 ☆☆☆☆

In the '50s there were nuclear-created monsters. In the '60s, the dread of other people. In the '70s there was the devil. The '80s had slasher movies. Every generation seems to have its own specific kind of horror film, so what does it say, I wonder, that audiences in the 2020s seem afraid of, well, themselves?

Earlier this year, the Japanese Exit 8 left a man stranded inside a Möbius strip of an empty subway, forced to reckon with his own mind. A few weeks ago, Obsession said the thing fear most is what you desire—you will be your own undoing. Now comes Backrooms, which uses weird, incomplete liminal spaces to stand in for the liminal space of the mind, the incomplete, always growing, never knowable space inside our own heads.

The movie is notoriously based on a set of YouTube videos in which a camera wanders around endless hallways, most of them covered in a sickly yellow wallpaper, and occasionally encounters very weird, sometimes scary and malevolent, things.

The movie takes that concept and builds on it, expands on it, takes it into areas that are different, new, unpredictable, and sometimes fulfilling, sometimes not. It also grafts a story on to the idea — well, at least one story, possibly two, maybe even more than that. As much as Backrooms is, on one level, a surprisingly effective and intriguing psychological thriller, on another it's an almost depressing beginning of a Hollywood "franchise," a movie whose success will almost certainly beget sequels and TV shows and spin-offs until the whole thing burns itself out. Even more than Obsession, Backrooms is a 21st century Blair Witch Project.

Fortunately, it's vastly superior to that overrated snoozefest. Writer-director Kane Parsons seems to have conceived of his original Backrooms videos as part of a broader, interconnected science-fiction story. That may well work for the short-form videos — I've only seen a few — but it is less successful here. The ultimate "reveal" at the climax of Backrooms is the least interesting part of the film.

The most interesting is the setup and the human story that writer Will Soodik and 20-year-old Parsons have created here. (If 20 years old seems awfully young to direct a movie, maybe it is — but Parsons displays unquestionable talent.) It focuses on Clark, played by Chiewetel Ejiofor, the struggling owner of a struggling furniture store in a seemingly empty part of Silicon Valley in the early 1990s.

Clark isn't happy. He's dealing with a lot, including the breakup of his marriage, which has led him to live in the store. He sees a therapist named Mary (Renata Reinsve), who's struggling a bit herself. Her self-help series isn't doing well, despite late-night TV ads. Her approach to therapy is that all we have to do to help ourselves is to walk through one of the many open windows in our minds.

One night, Clark hears some mysterious goings-on down in the basement of the furniture store. He investigates, and falls into a sort of Wonderland, though this one is lit not by a beautiful sunlight but by ugly fluorescent lighting, and its population isn't quite as zany as the creatures Alice found.

The best parts of Backroom are the ones that treat Clark as a modern-day Alice, unsure of what he has discovered, curious and adventurous. He returns from his first few excursions, urging others to help him explore — including Mary, who imagines she is prepared for what she might find. She's not.

No one is. The mysteries of the seemingly endless back rooms seem unwilling to reveal themselves. Until they do. And that's when the movie starts losing a lot of its edge. It threatens to turn into a low-budget cinematic Lost, answering questions both far too literally and also too obliquely. Fortunately, the movie ends before it goes too far off track, with a final set of images that is as confounding as the best of them.

The thing about Backrooms is that it defies explanation. Whatever explanation we create for it is going to be infinitely more interesting than anything the filmmakers can. Whether Parsons knows that remains to be seen. In the meantime, his debut effort is more engaging, more mysterious, more intriguing and potentially more revelatory about the shape of the human mind that Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day. When a 20-year-old kid can go up against Steven Spielberg and win, you can bet that's a filmmaker to watch.

Viewed June 17, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"Disclosure Day"

☆☆

This is painful to see. Disclosure Day should be top-notch Steven Spielberg. This is, after all, the filmmaker who created Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. This is the filmmaker who generated such a sense of awe in those films, not just for creatures from outer space, but for how human beings can't help but wonder if we are alone in the universe, and what would happen if we found out we weren't.

Then again, Spielberg is also the filmmaker responsible for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, an embarrassing attempt to graft an alien story on to an Indiana Jones movie; and War of the Worlds, which has an extraordinary first forty-five minutes and then just gets worse and worse and worse.

Both Crystal Skull and War of the Worlds were written (or co-written) by David Koepp, who is often cited as the highest-grossing screenwriter in movie history. In Hollywood, money, not quality, is the most important metric, and so Koepp has re-teamed with Spielberg for another alien movie. The result is not good, which is a stunning shame to see.

Disclosure Day is, ostensibly, about what would happen if all the evidence the government has been (allegedly, at least) hiding about contact with extra-terrestrial visitors were made public. Unfortunately for Disclosure Day, that really has been happening, at least to some degree, and mostly has been greeted with a big collective shrug. Most of the "evidence" doesn't seem very convincing.

But Disclosure Day imagines it would be. That the revelation of alien contact could be enough to stop global wars and create an instant sense of responsibility. That idea has been explored before, back in James Cameron's 1989 The Abyss. (The alien subplot was mostly dropped for the theatrical release, but restored later.)

To get there, Disclosure Day puts some of its characters in a cross-country car chase, with lots of car wrecks and exciting moments where the heroes try to outrun the law on rural backroads. Kind of like Spielberg's first major film, The Sugarland Express.

During Disclosure Day, we're told that some small children (for spoiler purposes, I won't reveal who) previously met and interacted with aliens in an experience that changed them forever. Kind of like Spielberg's E.T.

The movie also follows a seeming "every-man" named Daniel, played by Josh O'Connor, who becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about the aliens. He meets a woman, named Margaret, played by Emily Blunt, who is overcome after a mysterious, inexplicable incident, and feels compelled to travel to the place Daniel thinks will reveal the truth. And that's a lot like Close Encounters.

Over and over and over, Disclosure Day seems like a slice-and-dice of earlier, better movies. Koepp's screenplay stitches these together with another story about the evil (quasi-)government official who is covering up the truth. He's played by Colin Firth. There's another escapee from the (quasi-)government agency where Firth works. He's a good guy, named Hugo, played by Colman Domingo. Exactly what he's doing is unclear, even once the movie shows us what he's doing.

Why is Hugo building the thing he's building? To what end? How does he know that Margaret is the key to everything when she's not even aware of it until the day before the movie's action begins? What is the connection between Margaret and Daniel? Why is an international conflict brewing throughout the movie (except to make a point)? What is this device that is the film's "MacGuffin"? Why does it seem to have powers that are exactly what the script needs to keep going, and no more, and seem endlessly flexible? Why is so much made of Catholic and Christian faith throughout a movie made by the director of Schindler's List? And by the time we get to the unimpressive climax, where exactly has that certain thing been, and why is it brought out just now? (You'll know it when you see it ... boy, will you.)

It's charitable to call the screenplay for Disclosure Day an absolute mess, and though the story is credited to Spielberg, it's genuinely hard to imagine a filmmaker of his caliber reading this screenplay and believing it to be ready to film. It needs at least a few more revisions.

Even more shocking is that at key moments throughout Disclosure Day, computer-generated critters of both the terrestrial and extra-terrestrial variety, look comically bad. While there are some genuinely impressive visual effects in the movie — particularly an exciting moment on a fast-moving train — key encounters with animals and aliens look awful. Some fifty years after Close Encounters, it would be nice to see aliens presented with just a bit more imagination.

Despite all its shortcomings, the performers are all strong. Blunt is particularly good. It really is among her finest work, though sadly it's in service of such an ill-conceived idea. When Disclosure Day finally grinds to a halt, it's an abrupt one — it's Blunt who has to deliver a final line that no doubt is meant to seem provocative but feels more like everyone just ran out of ideas. Blunt, indeed.

Viewed June 14, 2026 — AMC Universal

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"Stop! That! Train!"

 ☆☆½

If confession is good for the soul, I am about to make my soul better, because this is no small thing to admit: I have never seen an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race. Ever. Am I the only gay man who has not? Maybe so, and I'm not sure I'm proud of that.

That means I probably missed a lot of the jokes in Stop! That! Train!, a movie in which RuPaul Charles plays the American president, a woman named Judy Gagwell. Does the name Judy Gagwell make you laugh? Then Stop! That! Train! will certainly be the movie for you. Does it make you chuckle or smile, even half-heartedly? Then give Stop! That! Train! a try. Does it offend you? This is not your movie, and it knows that it's not your movie, and it's delighted not to be your movie.

President Gagwell is not the center of Stop! That! Train! That important spot falls to two drag queens, here playing best, best, best friends. Jujubee is DeeDee and Ginger Minj is Tess, and they work for Stank Rail, whose name is a fair example of the kind of humor this film offers. When Stank Train suddenly goes out of business, Tess and DeeDee manage to get jobs at the ultra-luxe Glamazonian Express.

In the world of Stop! That! Train!, everyone takes trains, and rail tracks criss-cross America, and I wondered if the people who made this movie really understand the challenges of the American train system, or if they've ever been on a train. But it doesn't matter.

The story of Stop! That! Train! doesn't matter, either. It's just an excuse for camp silliness, and it's so gloriously, stupidly silly that it makes total sense when Charo shows up as "Sexy Train Traffic Controller." That's the kind of movie this is.

Fifty years ago, Charo might have done something very similar to Stop! That! Train! but as part of The Brady Bunch Hour, with Dom DeLuise joining in, maybe. This movie is about at that level, but instead of hiding its gay camp roots it shows them, proudly and loudly and generally to good effect. There's no plot to speak of, there are some really funny moments and some really stupid moments, and in the end what matters is figuring out if you laughed more than you didn't.

I did, though only just. Most of the movie has humor that barely rises to '70s sitcom level, then adds in some grown-up humor delivered by drag queens. The performers are all up to the task, but the script really isn't, though it tries, and the whole movie has a decidedly cheap look. The performers always look terrific.

There's no way to "review" Stop! That! Train! You'll laugh or you won't. If you know RuPaul's Drag Race (and now I'm sorry I don't), this may come off even better for you. As it is, I laughed — often more than a chuckle, rarely for a sustained period, and occasionally a genuine guffaw, though as this train barrels down its remarkably silly tracks, your mileage may well vary.

As for Drag Race, I feel better having gotten that off my chest.

Viewed June 13, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"Pressure"

☆☆☆☆½

Weather forecasting isn't a subject that has lent itself to particularly memorable movies. There's Twister, sort of, and Nicolas Cage in The Weather Man. Temperature and barometric pressure both get some nice callouts in L.A. Story and Magnolia, underscoring L.A.'s fascination with meteorology.

Now here is Pressure, a movie entirely about correctly forecasting the weather on one specific day. Much of the movie takes place in one room where lots of stuffy-looking men stare at charts and draw lines. Yet, Pressure is captivating, delivering genuine suspense even though we know full well what the weather was  in Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944.

D-Day is the one specific day in question, and Pressure is about the decision Gen. Ike Eisenhower had to make: Whether to send 150,000 Allied forces into a situation that would kill tens of thousands of them in an effort to defeat the Nazis on June 5, 1944. Needless to say, he didn't. And the reason the world commemorates June 6 as the day the Nazis began to lose World War II came down to a weather forecast.

The man who made that weather forecast was named James Stagg, and he is played in Pressure by Andrew Scott, who does something really extraordinary. Stagg is presented as an uptight man, quiet and solitary, maybe slightly bitter, and not at all likable. He is hard and serious — it is all but impossible to imagine him cracking a smile. The world is at war. Maybe it isn't the time to smile.

Scott steps into the weather forecasting room that has been run by American Col. Krick (Chris Messina), who couldn't be more unlike Stagg. And he has an entirely different approach to reading the weather.

Eisenhower, played by Brendan Fraser with unexpected force despite no physical resemblance, calls them both into a room filled with the top Allied military officials. Krick says Monday, June 5, will be bright, calm and clear. Stagg says the opposite. Two storms are making the weather unknowable.

There are no satellite images to consult. There is no internet to hold the answers. There is science, there are observable facts, and there is skill. One man recommends landing at Normandy on Monday. He is jovial, accomplished and everybody's pal. Another man recommends against it. He is hard and cold and nobody likes him.

In playing Stagg, Scott makes absolutely no effort to show the audience something that nobody else sees. He is committed to the man's insularity, to his distaste for almost everything, and to his certitude. Scott delivers a performance that will almost certainly be overlooked at awards season but shouldn't be, because what he's doing here is almost impossible to pull off — we want a character we fundamentally dislike to succeed, not just because of the stakes but because he is right, and he is capable.

Years from now, Pressure might join 1949's Twelve O'Clock High as a movie studied by people who want to understand how leadership works, how conflict within organizations is managed, how the highest leaders sometimes cannot hear what they must because they don't like the messenger. (Kerry Condon makes a big impression in the cast as Eisenhower's secretary, who knows how to talk to him but not stand up to him.) If it does achieve that kind of lasting legacy, it will be deserved.

But for now, Pressure is something more urgent: It's a terrific film, made by adults for adults about adults dealing with complex, fundamentally difficult issues. Why the studio decided to release it at the beginning of the summer, to have it compete against far less meaningful movies for entirely different audiences, is anyone's guess. Pressure deserves better, because it's one of the best movies of 2026.

Viewed May 30, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"The Sheep Detectives"

 ☆☆☆½

Do not let it be said that The Sheep Detectives does not deliver on its promise. The movie features sheep detectives. They are trying to solve a murder. They are doing a better job than the local policeman, and they're a lot more charming.

The murder itself, of the flock's shepherd George (Hugh Jackman), is one that would be right at home in an Agatha Christie novel, and the movie ends with the policeman making a pronouncement about the real murderer (a red herring has been arrested) in front of the fully assembled cast. It's just like one of those Christie movies from the 1970s.

There is nothing that The Sheep Detectives claims to be that it isn't. It's sweet and silly, it's funny and intriguing, it's got what the literary community calls a "cozy murder" at its core, and it is acceptable for the whole family.

That latter point is not a small one. The Sheep Detectives isn't a kids' film—there really is a murder, and there are lots of discussions about things that will probably go over the heads of very young viewers. And yet, it's one that kids and can watch with parents, or that adults can watch on their own. It works on both levels, and when I saw it an unruly gaggle of kids in the front row was largely placated by the movie, but squirmed loudly during some of the talky parts.

After the movie told us whodunit and why, then got around to addressing some of the loose strings in the plot, one of the kids shouted out, "Can we just end the movie now?" If you're a grown-up, you may want to opt for an evening showing of The Sheep Detectives.

But you should opt for it. The Sheep Detectives, which was directed by an animation director named Kyle Balda (who is also surprisingly successful at the live-action bits), is genuinely delightful. Sure, we've seen talking-barnyard movies, before. No, we're never convinced that sheep really talk. And yet, the whole thing is charming and engaging and fulfilling — both as a sweet-natured comedy and as a murder-mystery.

Actors like Patrick Stewart, Bryan Cranston, Regina Hall, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Chris O'Dowd and Brett Goldstein provide the voices of the sheep, an largely manage to overcome the "who is that" problem of stunt-casting by creating real and vivid characters.

The humans are played by Jackman, Emma Thompson, Hong Chau and Nicholas Galitzine (Red, White and Royal Blue), and they've got just enough star power that The Sheep Detectives starts feeling like one of those live-action Disney movies starring Helen Hayes or Fred MacMurray ... just enough of a cast to feel "all-star." The entire movie has that sort of innocuous, funny, charming, engaging vibe.

It may be silly, but on many levels The Sheep Detective is exactly what it claims to be, and it's also exactly  the kind of movie people mean when they say, "They don't make 'em like that anymore." It turns out, they do. And they're just as enjoyable and fulfilling as ever. Just as silly and fluffy, too.

Viewed May 24, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"Obsession"

 ☆☆½

Obsession continues a recent trend of horror films that mistake "slow burn" for "slow pacing." There's a corker of a story here, one more than a little inspired by that old chestnut "The Monkey's Paw," and a captivating central performance by Michael Johnston as a kid who makes a very, very bad decision.

Too much of it, though, is undone by a first act that proceeds with plodding momentum that favors long, slow camera moves and a plot that takes its time getting where it's going.

When it gets there, Obsession tries to make up for lost time by throwing almost too much at the screen, including lots of extreme violence and one image of a naked corpse that's so graphic and so disturbing that it's hard to fathom what was going through the MPAA's mind when they decided that this was an acceptable film for young audiences — who are, in the end, its target — to see. Obsession is not an obscene or fundamentally objectionable film, but it's maybe the best argument I've seen lately that the NC-17 rating has been all but forgotten.

The violence, including that corpse and—rather unforgettably—the way it became a corpse, are the unintended consequences of the bad decision Johnston's character, Bear, makes in his effort to persuade nubile young Nikki to feel about him the way he feels about her. That is, to obsess over him.

For reasons both unexplained and, based on the behavior of the character, a bit incomprehensible, Bear has an overwhelming crush on Nikki, his co-worker at a music store. One of the many things not entirely clear in the screenplay of Obsession is how old these characters are, but one of their other co-workers is awaiting college acceptance letters, so it's fair to assume they're not far removed from being teenagers.

They don't act like it, and they don't much act like it, but very few of the people in Obsession act much like real people. This is a movie that knows it's a movie, that is trading in some popular and well-tried tropes, and the shame is that Obsession has such a hard time getting off the ground that it makes the rest of the movie a little bit more of a slog than it should be.

There are also a lot of unanswered questions, and much in the way of last year's big horror hit Weapons, these oversights are either (depending on your point of view) almost unforgivably sloppy or intentionally vague enough to get fans chattering online. The latter has happened with Obsession, but the challenge to anyone who doesn't see the Internet discussions has to go with what's in the movie. And there's not enough.

The basic story is simple: Obsessed with his crush, Bear visits a mysterious shop (is there any other kind?) and buys a gag gift called a One Wish Willow. Break it, the package says, and your wish will come true. Got questions? Helpfully, there's a toll-free number. But calling it turns out to be ... unhelpful. And worrisome.

Naturally, Bear makes his wish. And wouldn't you know it? He doesn't really think it through. Nikki does start obsessing over him—immediately. Not long after, she starts taking it all to an extreme. And, boy, is it ever extreme. But why? What mysterious power has controlled her? Unclear. What about other people who use One Wish Willow? They must have stories. Why, yes. We see them for a few seconds. Otherwise, unclear. Why does Nikki resort to violence? Unclear. What role does the guy on the other end of that toll-free number play in all of it? Unclear. Why doesn't Bear just run away where he can't be found? Or call the police? Or take any of a dozen other actions of a rational person? Unclear. Is he really still in love with this unhinged monster? Unclear.

And the list goes on. Every question, it appears, has staunch defenders online, even though the only thing to really go on is the movie, which either plays coy or isn't complete. Johnston, particularly, sells it all well. He's a great "everyman" whose rising panic is convincing.

If only the rest of the movie were, too. At a minimum, Obsession is effective at what it's trying to do, which is disturb and unnerve audiences. The less familiar they are with the source material, the better. It's not so much that Obsession is a dumb movie; it's not. It's just maybe not as smart—or as complete—as it thinks it is.

Viewed May 23, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"The Devil Wears Prada 2"

 ☆☆

Gird your loins, Miranda Priestly is back. And somehow, she's turned into a bore.

It took 20 years to make the sequel to 2006's breezy, lightweight and delightful The Devil Wears Prada, and you would think after 20 years they would have had lots of ideas. They didn't.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a mess, both conceptually and in execution. There are moments it's not quite clear whether the actors were even in the same room when they shot their scenes, and lots of moments where it's not quite clear anyone — the actors, the screenwriter, the director — quite knew what was supposed to be going on.

The real and unfortunate trick of The Devil Wears Prada 2 is that it makes Meryl Streep look like she's struggling. Her Miranda Priestly from the first film was sharp, cruel, dedicated and ruthless. Time hasn't been kind. This time around, Miranda dull, vacant, rather shockingly kind, and weirdly soft. A running gag is that, after 20 years, Miranda doesn't even recognize Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway) the woman who used to be her assistant at Runway magazine.

At least, it's supposed to be a gag. I think. The way it plays out in the film is that Miranda looks shockingly like someone should call a doctor, because she might be having a stroke or suffering from dementia. It's not funny that she does not recognize Andy; it's worrisome.

Miranda constantly tries to come up with cutting barb — and once in a while a few land — but her heart doesn't seem to be in it. During the film, we find out that Miranda has gotten married to a man played by Kenneth Branagh, though Branagh doesn't seem to know what he's doing in this picture. In most of his scenes, he looks genuinely surprised and vaguely unready for the camera.

The rest of the cast seems generally uninterested in what's happening. Emily Blunt returns, trying to look cold and aloof, imperious and smug, but mostly looking somewhere between vaguely crazed and terribly bored. Stanley Tucci is less the acerbic but wise mentor than the actor who knows he's fourth-billed but is trying to seem happy to be there. It's genuinely odd how little impact he makes this time around. And Anne Hathaway seems mildly distracted, which is understandable since this is just one of five films she's starring in this year.

The movie begins when Hathaway's Andy is winning an award for her work at a prestigious, fictional New York media outlet called The Vanguard. But the entire newsroom gets laid off by text. During the awards show. Andrea needs a job.

Well, would't you know it? Miranda Priestly needs a features editor! Lickety-split, the job falls to Andy, who is qualified by dint of having worked for Miranda or because the movie requires she go back there. Something like that.

And within minutes, Andy and Miranda are no longer frenemies, they're on a mission to save the magazine. First, the script has to find a way to bring them back together with Emily (Emily Blunt), and the way it does so is convoluted, adding in the barely-used Lucy Liu and the uncomfortable Justin Theroux, who may be stand-ins for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. B.J. Novak shows up, too, looking confused, and there's a small role for an Australian hunk who looks like he wandered in from an episode of Sex and the City.

None of it makes much impact, so the filmmakers throw in cameos by Lady Gaga, Donatella Versace, and every wealthy media-industry socialite who was in the Hamptons last summer. The Devil Wears Prada 2 mostly exists as a sort of "three-dot column," mixing in a little gossip, a little plot, a little music (most of which sounds like the generic background noise in a hotel lobby), and a lot of wink-wink-nod-nods to the first film.

If that film hadn't existed, The Devil Wears Prada 2 wouldn't stand a chance on its own. Its inevitable success speaks volumes about the enduring appeal of the first, though this new film is destined to join Grease 2 and Exorcist II as extensions that seemed like a good idea at the time. But weren't.

Viewed May 10, 2026 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Blue Heron"

☆☆☆☆☆

For the first 40 minutes or so of the brief but potent Blue Heron, it's not quite clear what we're supposed to be tracking. Sophy Romvari's beautifully crafted film seems to be a memory piece about a girl's childhood in Canada during one languid summer in the early 2000s.

The girl, Sasha, observes her family closely. Mother and Father are Hungarian immigrants on Vancouver Island. Father has a job he does from home, something to do with computers and the Internet — if we never really grasp what he does, it makes complete sense: Like their missing first names, Blue Heron lets us understand about as much as Sasha does. This is a rare film that manages to present the world in the close-up, insular way of an observant child.

What Sasha notices most, as the mostly plotless first half of Blue Heron progresses, is that her family is close and loving and Mother and Father are wonderful parents, though, perhaps the adults watching these memories may notice, they are frustrated, confused, more than a little worried. The problem, it comes clear, is their oldest child, Jeremy.

Jeremy is never quite involved. He's always off on his own, keeping to himself, irritable, strange. No one can put their finger on it, but Jeremy turns an outing to the beach into a tense, worrisome afternoon. Then one day, the police show up with Jeremy in handcuffs. But that's not the worst of it. Someone else comes to the house, and on one warm and beautiful afternoon while the other kids play on the trampoline, Mother and Father are forced into a wrenching, life-changing decision.

The second part of Blue Heron does something extraordinary with the first half, and it seems almost unfair to explain too much. Suddenly, as the audience, we're watching another story. There's a different woman on screen, someone who's examining what happened during the first part of the movie.

As a filmmaker, Romvari's change-up here would be breathtaking and showy if presented in another way, but she's willing to keep it low-key, to let the audience figure things out for itself. Eventually, it is clear that Sasha as an adult is assuming the role of Romvari the filmmaker in trying to understand what has happened with her family, to make sense of what happened to the brother whose actions that summer led to a life of unanswered questions and deep sadness for Sasha.

An adult is not a child. A child cannot be an adult. The same person cannot bridge the gap in understanding between the two parts of their lives. The questions that had no answers to the child become the inevitable answers that make no sense to the adult.

In a truly staggering sequence, adult Sasha haunts her own life, and as she does it makes total, heartbreaking sense on screen — this is what we all do: revisit the hallways and bedrooms of our childhood, looking for answers to lives that make no sense at all, except, maybe, to us.

Blue Heron made the festival rounds in 2025, and is now receiving a small theatrical release, primarily at AMC Theaters. In what's already become a strong year for movies, Blue Heron is one of the best I've seen in 2026 — and is worth seeking out and being patient with it. Its many rewards are deeply worth the effort.

Viewed April 26, 2026 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Mother Mary"

   ☆☆☆½

Mother Mary is a movie with keen insight into human nature, into the way people form and then break attachments and what that does to everyone involved. Just as it starts getting really interesting and engrossing, it buries those insights in a strange and not entirely effective story of the paranormal.

The result is both satisfying and not, both insightful and surface-level, but never less than entirely captivating to watch. It's not the Black Swan-meets-Burlesque campfest that the trailers have been promising, but something deeper, weirder and more challenging.

Anne Hathaway gets the top billing, but Mother Mary belongs equally to her and to the phenomenal Michaela Coel, whose intensity both smolders and burns, especially in the first half of the film, which, it must be said, surpasses the second.

Hathaway plays "Mother Mary," a pop-star who makes Madonna or Lady Gaga look a little like B-listers. Religious iconography is her schtick, and whether the woman known as Mother Mary believes in what she sells is never revealed. But she wasn't always Mother Mary (her true name is never revealed). Once, she was another singer in search of an image.

Fashion designer Sam Anselm created the image. In essence, she created Mother Mary herself. Now, as Mary is about to embark on a comeback tour after a mysterious tragedy (it's revealed in the film, but I'd never think to spoil it here), there's something off. It's one of her dresses. The dress for her big number. It's ... how should she put it? Not her.

Only one person can set it right: Sam. So, Mary flies to London to meet with Sam and plead with her to create the dress she needs by Sunday. She gets to London on Thursday. The task is impossible, but Mary is desperate.

All this sounds like it might be a dull drama, but writer-director David Lowery (The Green Knight) infuses everything, from the first shot to the last, with a mystical, dread-laced tension. And, importantly, a human tension. Sam and Mary were once not just colleagues but close friends, but Sam has taken Mary's success personally, or Mary has forgotten Sam in her success. Either way, the wounds run deep.

Mother Mary is best as a two-hander between these two headstrong women, whose relationship was once more than close, it was symbiotic. They made each other. 

In its exploration of anger, guilt, regret and love, Mother Mary shines brightest. No scene in the entire film comes quite as close to the near-abuse Sam heaps upon Mary by forcing her to perform a physical dance routine from her concert — without the music. It's a rhythmic, writhing moment of near-madness, one in which Hathaway seems to be channeling Linda Blair from The Exorcist.

Mother Mary is also filled with the razzle-dazzle of giant-sized musical performances that are visually thrilling but musically bankrupt. If this is what passes for pop music these days, I'm glad I've aged out. The musical bits showcase Hathaway as an impressively believable pop star and some spectacular costumes, but they feel curiously flat. More thrilling are those moments with just Mary and Sam.

Then, somewhere along the way, Mother Mary turns into a tale of the paranormal, in which the guilt and anger between these two women seems to manifest itself in weird and violent ways. It's a real testament to Hathaway and Coel that the movie never fails to mesmerize, even when it starts going off the rails.

That it never entirely jumps the track but also never entirely reaches the heights of its first 30 minutes leaves Mother Mary as a film that feels both fulfilling and not. Dark, curious, challenging and eye-popping, Mother Mary, like its title character, tries just a little too hard to be something it's not entirely sure it really is.

Viewed April 20, 2026 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Exit 8"

  ☆☆☆½

Exit 8 opens with a man on his way to a temp job. He's riding in a packed Japanese subway train, and not everything is going well. When he exits the train, he gets some unexpected news, then promises the caller he's on his way.

He's not.

The man is never given a name other than The Lost Man, and given his temp job, his casual clothes on a train full of suited men, and his bedraggled appearance, that moniker may have more than one meaning. So, too, may Exit 8, though this isn't Last Year at Marienbad. Based on a video game, Exit 8 is puzzling and engaging, clever and diverting, and filled with symbolism and meaning, but it's not inscrutable.

Building on a 25-minute video game that is all about careful observation, director Genki Kawamura (who co-write the adaptation with Kentaro Hirase) has created a film filled with dread, a movie crafted to do two things, both of which it does well.

The first is to captivate the audience with its simple story: On his way out of the subway station, the man finds himself trapped in an endless loop. The promised Exit 8 never appears. Over and over, the man wanders the same set of geometric hallways, always seeing the same businessman, the same set of posters, the same set of doors. What's going on?

Eventually, the man finds a set of instructions. They promise that if he can follow each rule carefully eight times, he'll get to the exit.

Why? Who knows. But it works. And it sets up the second thing beautifully:

As the man encounters slightly different moments, as the hallways fill with increasingly worrisome sights and sounds, the audience sees what he misses. The small audience I was with shouted at the screen — "Go back!" "No!" "Turn around!" — and not in a way that damaged enjoyment of the movie.

Exit 8 puts you right there with this Lost Man, invested in the outcome and in his every decision, focused even more than he is on the backgrounds and the details, and equally frustrated when one mistake resets the whole of the game.

Just as it seems the idea is about to wear thin, this tight 95-minute puzzler offers up something new, and if some of what the subway exit throws the man's way seem random, that may just be because you weren't paying enough attention in the opening shots. Memory and trauma, both personal and collective, also factor in to the story, as does a healthy dose of Stanley Kubrick.

Not for nothing does Exit 8 feel a lot like roaming the hallways of the Overlook Hotel, and it's no coincidence that a gushing wall of blood seems a direct callback to The Shining — this is a movie that hopes to be as labyrinthine as Kubrick's, as stacked with hidden detail and meaning.

Over time, Exit 8 may well get the sort of die-hard audience it deserves, the kind who wants to count up every gleaming white tile to see if it all means something. Does it? I think so — and it seems salient that the one thing Exit 8 asks viewers to do is put their phones down and concentrate, to focus on the world on screen. And, when the lights go up, maybe on the world around them, too.

Viewed April 19, 2026 — AMC Universal 16

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"Project Hail Mary"

 ☆☆☆☆

Project Hail Mary is a popcorn flick, a movie whose primary, maybe even sole, ambition is to entertain and delight audiences who want to be transported by a good story well told. In that, it succeeds in ways that are genuinely admirable.

The directors of Project Hail Mary are Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who were famously fired because they wanted to make the Solo movie (as in Han) into something more comedic and lighthearted, and on the basis of Project Hail Mary that was a terrible decision for Star Wars.

Here's a science-fiction movie that takes its science rather considerably less seriously than it does its fiction, and while that might deviate Andy Weir's original novel (I didn't read it, though I did read his scientifically dense The Martian), it's exactly the right approach for the film. Even though Project Hail Mary is ostensibly about the end of life as we know it on Earth, it's fun and at times joyous, with characters that are charming and fun and often moving.

The story might be a lost episode of Star Trek: Sometime in the future, Earth is under an existential threat from an outside force. It's not a scary alien in a spaceship, rather an alien life form that is eating the sun. To be fair, it's not only picking on the sun — it seems to be devouring other stars in the galaxy, too. If nothing is done, life on Earth will end in ... well, it's never said, exactly. A lot of things are never fully said or explained in Project Hail Mary, which makes it both vague enough to be consistently interesting and also vague enough to be consistently frustrating.

Somehow, these life forms that devour the sun and stars also can be turned into a huge source of energy — which, scientists theorize, could propel a spaceship to the one star in the galaxy that seems to be immune. At least, I think that's what happens. It's all a little murky, in a messy, quirky, charming sort of way. Project Hail Mary is the kind of movie it's best to enjoy without asking too many questions.

Sandra Hüller, a genuinely compelling performer even in a relatively thankless role, is the person in charge of the project, and Ryan Gosling — a genuinely compelling performer whose looks make it easy to forget just how good he is in everything he does — is the scientist who makes key discoveries about the alien life form-slash-fuel source.

The story of how the mission is put together is told throughout roughly half of this non-linear film. The flashbacks are in widescreen, while the main narrative is told in big, "filmed for IMAX" full screen. (Both, sadly, will lose what makes them feel special on the home screen, and since this movie is funded by Amazon, you can expect it to be on small screens soon.)

In those "now" scenes, Gosling is Dr. Ryland Grace, who winds up the only surviving crew member. As he nears his destination — that immune planet — he runs across a giant alien spaceship piloted by a walking, talking, dancing (yup) rock named, wait for it, Rocky. This character is largely a puppet performed and voiced by James Ortiz.

Rocky comes from another planet whose star is under attacked. Like Grace, he's the only crew member left. The way they come together, clear their communication (and physical) hurdles and collaborate is the movie's backbone. It's adorable. It's charming. It feels totally right, thanks to Gosling's breezy, effortless performance that also flirts with deeper, more challenging emotions.

Together, they work on finding a solution to whatever exactly the problem is. They seem to understand it, so we understand it, and that's one of the beauties of the film: You don't need to grasp it all to enjoy it.

Project Hail Mary makes its plot work, and beautifully. There are quibbles — about the movie's science and its ways (or lack) of explaining things; an ending that feels too pat and perfect after some genuine moral complexity and ethical questioning about what is essentially a suicide-mission trip. At times, I found myself replaying the basic scenario in my head over and over, just to understand the stakes (at one point, a character literally describes "the stakes," underscoring the notion that movies made for streaming sometimes dumb things down too much).

But they are indeed mere nitpicks in an otherwise splendid movie, a film so full of life, vitality, fun and even — the word that seems out of fashion now — optimism that it's really hard to resist.

Viewed AMC Century City 15 — March 22, 2025

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