"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

1610

"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

1350

"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

1600

"Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die"

  ☆☆☆½ 

A digital wristwatch doesn't tick, but it might as well, because the ticking clock is the classic device that brings constant tension to the zany, overstuffed Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die. The frequent reminders that time is running out for the movie's heroes give the film a relentless propulsion that effectively masks other more mundane problems.

Chief among those is that the movie's setup is so perfunctory, and so familiar, that the movie never offers a chance to get perspective, to really understand what's at stake or feel emotionally invested. So, it moves along like a roller coaster ride, engaging the senses and occasionally the brain, but still feels aloof and not quite fully formed.

The setup is this: Inside an L.A. diner one night, a Man from the Future (this is his only credited name) appears out of nowhere and insists he's on a mission to save the world from certain doom. He's dressed in wild fashion, and if he seems a little like Doc Brown, it's not the last time the movie is going to reference Back to the Future.

Or Terminator 2. Or Back to the Future II. Or 12 Monkeys. Or The Matrix. Or any number of time-travel and sci-fi movies that inform everything in the movie, which is crafted in director Gore Verbinski's signature style — that is, it never slows down enough to give you time to think, and is laced with darkness and despair just behind its humor.

Sam Rockwell is the Man from the Future, who recruits a number of the diner's customers to join him on a mission to find the source of an AI program that will take over and ruin the future. The customers include Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beets, Asim Chaudhry and Juno Temple. Richardson and Temple make the strongest impressions, while the other recruits don't get enough personality to make an impression.

Most of them get flashbacks that help us understand why they're tagging along, though the character that matters most — the Man from the Future — is a cypher. Ultimately, we understand his connection to one character, but beyond that the movie doesn't tell us much about the world he comes from, or why he's been selected (or selected himself).

Those aren't small complaints about a movie so filled with story and character, but they're offset by some cogent, cutting commentary about the world we live in now they ways our near-obsessive dependency on technology may have terrible implications for the future. Those ideas are worthwhile, intriguing and sometimes downright pointed.

They're key to and yet not wholly integrated into the story, which ends on a frustratingly vague and too-clever note that doesn't feel fully resolved. And yet, the moment Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die ended, I left my phone in my pocket ... and kept it there. For ten whole minutes. Vive la résistance.

Viewed March 7, 2025 — Alamo Drafthouse

1830

"Crime 101"

  ☆☆☆☆½ 

The prevailing view of movies made by streaming networks is that they dumb things down too much, that distracted audiences scrolling social-media websites and ordering delivery food while keeping one eye on the TV represent the future of movies. It's impossible, the reasoning goes, to create a really good movie for an audience like that.

So, consider it a minor miracle that director Bart Layton has adapted a novella by Don Winslow into a movie as slam-bang great as Crime 101. With Thor himself headlining, my expectations were low, but not only does Chris Hemsworth deliver a phenomenal performance as a master jewel thief with an odd code of ethics, he's joined by some of the smartest actors working today. The result is a crime thriller that can stand alongside some of the true movie greats.

Somehow, in 2026, more than a decade into the streaming revolution, here's a movie that feels suspiciously like it's going to become a classic.

Which doesn't necessarily mean it will play well on streaming, ironically enough. It's a twisty, complicated thriller, a movie that spends the first hour of its considerable running time setting up what turns out to be practically a factory full of machinery that needs to run precisely. Does it ever.

By the time Crime 101 gets where it's going — and by that, I mean a very specific location somewhere in L.A., though I wouldn't dare spoil the surprise — all those pieces need to fall into place. As a viewer, the true delight for me was: I had no idea what exactly they had been designed to do. As one character after another descends upon that location, I was filled with an unbearable and delicious sort of tension, because I could not figure out just what was going to happen once they all arrived.

It's a long time getting there, and the movie begins the process by introducing us to the good-looking, brooding Mike (Hemsworth, of course), who knows his way around jewel heists. He has a rule, though, one he won't violate: Nobody gets hurt.

Mike has been pulling heists for a gravelly-voiced fence named Money (Nick Nolte), who senses Mike might be unable to pull off the next job, set for a Santa Barbara jewelry store. All of the heists, it turns out, are pulled at locations right off the 101 Freeway in Southern California. That fact catches the eye of police detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), who is trying to figure out not only who's stealing the diamonds, but how he's doing it.

The how, it turns out, involves some digital shenanigans, and in preparation for the next job, Mike needs to hack into the files of Sharon (Halle Berry), an insurance broker who specializes in very high-end clients. Meanwhile, Mike finds himself drawn into a relationship with a meet-cute stranger named Maya (Monica Barbaro), who may be far too guileless for his tastes.

Apart from Maya, everyone in Crime 101 shares a common trait: They're exhausted. They're tired of trying so hard — and Sharon, in particular, is trying way too hard. When her paths cross with Mike, she begins to realize just how easy it would be to double-cross her thankless employer.

If this all sounds like a setup for a classic noir thriller, it is, and Crime 101 follows in the footsteps of some great modern noir by setting its story in L.A., where the sun shines brightly enough that the shadows appear by themselves; this movie doesn't need the cover of night to show the unseemly side of the city.

And yet, it isn't entirely unseemly — there's a surprising amount of humanity in Crime 101, including a far-too-brief appearance by a bedraggled Jennifer Jason Leigh as the wife of Ruffalo's detective. They've both given up trying. Most everyone in Crime 101 has. But a few million in fenced diamonds sure could solve a lot of problems.

Director Layton, who also wrote the considerable screenplay, hasn't made many movies, but the ones he has, including the documentary The Imposter, have been impressive. Still, maybe nothing could really prepare a moviegoer for a film as assured, gripping, thrilling and satisfyingly adult as this one. Crime 101 is solid proof that even in the age of short-attention-span streaming, it's possible to make a damn good movie.

Viewed Feb. 22, 2026 — Alamo Drafthouse DTLA

1445

"Pillion"

☆☆☆☆½

Pillion does something so rare in movies it's easy not to notice how special it is: It presents us with a relationship that we don't understand, maybe aren't meant to understand, and it never once judges anyone in the movie for the choices they make and the actions they take. Pillion wants us only to see two lives that intersect, and we do.

A "pillion," for those, like me, who don't know, is the word for the back seat on a motorcycle. It's also used to refer to the submissive partner in a BDSM relationship. It takes on both meanings in Pillion, and from that you might assume the movie is sort of the gay equivalent of Fifty Shades of Gray. But you'd be wrong.

Whether Pillion correctly represents a BDSM relationship is better left to those with more knowledge. What it clearly depicts is a consensual, intentional relationship between two people with specific, different needs that are sometimes complementary and sometimes at cross-purposes. To that end, Pillion is about as honest a mainstream film as could be made about two men who enter into a relationship the outside world is not meant to understand. They might not even understand it.

One of the men, Colin, is meek and gentle. He sings in a barbershop quartet and lives with his parents. His mother is dying. She would like to see him happy before she goes. On Christmas Eve, the pub where Colin sometimes sings is visited by gay bikers. They catch Colin's eye. One of them, a man named Ray, catches everyone's eye. Ray knows it. He gives Colin his phone number with instructions to meet him the next night. Colin's family is even more excited (and anxious) than he is.

It would be unfair to reveal exactly what happens next, but it's worth pointing out here that Pillion is not a movie that shies away from depicting sex between men. There are moments it comes close to matching the extra-steamy, extra-nude Stranger by the Lake for its unblinking depictions.

Colin winds up in a relationship with Ray. Since Ray is played by the impossibly tall and good-looking and magnetic Alexander Skarsgård, and since Colin is played by Harry Melling, who played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies, this does not seem to be, at least on the surface, a relationship of equals.

Nor is it meant to be. Ray is a taciturn, demanding, dominant and secretive man. Colin is sweet and shy and, he comes to realize, has "an aptitude for devotion." The movie is written and directed by Harry Lighton in an incredibly assured and impressive debut, and based on a novel called "Box Hill" by Adam Mars-Jones, and it never stops to question why Colin agrees to his situation. For that matter, it never pauses to investigate why Ray turns to Colin, when he could have his choice of any man and likely any woman he wants. (Indeed, his chest bears cryptic tattoos of women's names.)

Pillion doesn't care about the why. Neither, it's worth considering, does love or attraction. "Why did they end up together?" you may have asked yourself a hundred times about couples you've known, and this is just another one of those couples.

Pillion wants to get at some deeper questions about love and commitment, about the way we open up to others, and often how we refuse to do exactly that. As the movie progresses, Colin and Ray just make sense together, though it's sense that not everyone can comprehend. A wonderful scene in which Colin's mother (Lesley Sharp) expresses her strong reservations is a high point — and sets the film spinning into a different, altogether unexpected direction that refines and redefines everything that's come before.

While it plays as a light and breezy, if sometimes inexplicable, sort of gay rom-com for two-thirds of its running time, it moves into a third act that surprises with its depth of perception and its willingness to stretch its characters into the most uncomfortable places. Both Skarsgård and Melling inhabit their characters so fully that even when we don't understand them, even when we don't like them, we can't wait to see what they do next. And what they do turns out to be surprising and memorable.

Pillion won't be for everybody, but for those it is for, it's going to be hard to forget.

Viewed February 18, 2026 — AMC Burbank 16

1310

"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

1900