"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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