"Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie"

 ☆☆☆☆☆ 

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie puts me in a bind. I saw it as part of AMC's "Screen Unseen" series, which presents movies without giving away the title. The auditorium was crowded, and based on the scant hints provided by the AMC listing, I went in anticipating a low-budget horror film coming out soon.

When the Neon studio logo hit the screen, a little buzz went through the audience. Maybe others had expected that horror movie, too. I settled in, not sure at all what to expect.

The lights came up an hour and 40 minutes later, and I was elated. A movie I had never even heard of, about which I knew nothing at all, had left me feeling like the weight of the world had just lifted off of me. I was smiling. Others were, too. In the lobby, people were still laughing, talking to others, wondering if what we had just experienced was actually real — could a movie actually make people feel this good?

But here's the thing: If I tell you any more, I'll rob you of the experience to walk into this movie utterly unprepared.

Please, if you stumble across this review somehow and you get the urge to look up the title online, please don't. If you are wondering if the movie is for you, it is. As long as you're an adult in reasonably good humor who can handle a few surprises, this is the movie you need to see.

Yes. You need to see it.

It's not fair to heap such a burden on to a movie this wonderful, but I'm going to do it anyway: This movie is an antidote for everything else you read, hear, see, every toxic online conversation you take part in, every anger-inducing headline.

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie clicks into place almost immediately. You needn't know anything about the movie (I didn't, and you shouldn't, either) to more or less instantly get what you're seeing. But what you're seeing in the first few minutes, the things that make you laugh right from the first scene, are only the beginning of it.

This movie will make you smile. It will make you feel a little less lonely, a little less beleaguered, and a lot sillier. And that's all I'll say.

Except one more thing:

I think Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie may be the first great movie of 2026. I think it actually might be something like a masterpiece.

Time will tell.

But don't take my word for it. Go see it. Don't research it. Just see it. I am certainly you will be glad you did.

Viewed February 9, 2026 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Send Help"

  ☆☆☆½ 

Send Help makes you feel at least a little sorry for Dylan O'Brien. He's a terrific actor. He was jaw-droppingly good in the little-seen and strongly recommend Twinless, and he's fantastically effective in Sam Raimi's new gory, funny and exciting thriller.

It's worth taking a few moments to appreciate what he does here: namely, to play someone so thoroughly unredeemable that every time he steps into the frame, the audience should boo and hiss and cringe. O'Brien makes anyone seeing Send Help do something else, something harder. When his character, a nepo baby CEO named Bradley Preston, appears for the first time and even when he appears for the last time, we're repulsed because we know exactly who he is.

O'Brien and Raimi lean into that familiarity. They know we want to smack him. And O'Brien doesn't even try to find something redeemable. Still, he's so pathetic, so utterly incapable of doing anything at all that he we don't care about his fate. After his private plane crashes somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand, and all but two people perish, Bradley can die, as far as we're concerned. He's hateful.

But, he's the boss of Linda Liddle from strategy and planning. And she cares what happens to him. And since Linda Liddle from strategy and planning is played by Rachel McAdams, we kind of care, too. Because McAdams does something far more extraordinary than even O'Brien in this film, which by and large is a two-hander: She walks away with it. There hasn't really been a role or a performance like this since Kathy Bates won the Oscar for Misery, and, no disrespect to Bates, McAdams might be even better as a put-upon, forgotten woman who blends into the background in the real world ... but comes into her own when isolated with a helpless man.

Send Help may not do anything particularly unique with the concept of opposites stranded on a desert island. But where Anne Heche and Harrison Ford foundered in Six Days Seven Nights, and where Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis were wise enough not to give Cast Away a supporting character who wasn't a volleyball, Send Help makes it all work.

That it feels effortless comes in no small part from the two leads — and, did I mention, especially McAdams? If O'Brien has the harder task of not really changing much at all from the start of the movie to the end (though there are moments where we do wonder if we're wrong about him), McAdams plays a fun and fantastic range here. Raimi tries a little too hard, maybe, to make her look unattractive, adding in facial moles and warts, for instance, and dressing her in the frumpiest of clothes, but there's no hiding what McAdams is or what she will become.

Her character is presented (rather perfunctorily) as an obsessive fan of TV's Survivor, which is primarily used to help explain why she knows immediately, instinctively, what to do when they wind up on the island. Away from the things of man, Linda Liddell thrives. She finds her purpose.

The movie, meanwhile, finds plot strands from TV's Lost, from Survivor itself, and from 2022's audacious Triangle of Sadness, and very little happens that you probably can't guess. That doesn't make the movie any less entertaining.

What does distract and detract a bit are some visual effects shots that look so cheap and second-rate that it's hard to believe they're in a movie from a director of Raimi's stature. Some scenes in the movie look almost laughably phony, a glaring but ultimately minor irritation in a film that is otherwise massively entertaining.

Even if you see some of the plot points telegraphed almost from the start, Send Help is fun, exciting, entertaining — and impressively acted.

Viewed Feb. 7, 2026 — Alamo Drafthouse

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