"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

"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

1915

"Hamnet"

  ☆☆ 

"Keep your heart open," exhorts the poster for Hamnet, the wildly acclaimed, careful, quiet, and deeply earnest movie that almost everyone says will wring tears from your eyes with ruthless efficiency. I kept my heart open as best I could, and I waited. Nothing happened.

I admit I had been conditioned to respond this way to Hamnet by having read Maggie O'Farrell's novel, which left my eyes equally dry and my open heart equally unmoved. And frustrated. Why had the world responded so fully and extravagantly to both the novel and the film while I sat there stone-faced?

Look, I'm the kind of person who got weepy at the end of Sinners, who sobbed in the final moments of Train Dreams. I can be reduced to a blubbering fool by some movies, and will never forget the time I couldn't leave the theater after a screening of The Bridges of Madison County because I was shaking. I like movies, I like being moved by them, I can fully submit.

But Hamnet did nothing for me except make me marvel at all the ways this exquisitely shot, finely acted film uses every trick it has to manipulate its audience. I watched it the same way some people watch a magic trick, looking to see how it's done. Clearly, a lot of people believe in the magic of Hamnet.

Does it stem from the slow, quiet, anguished way the movie proceeds? This is a film that plays everything restrained mode until someone needs to cry, scream or yell, then it lets its actors — who are all, there's no denying it, excellent, especially Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal — go wild. It's like 3-D filmmaking, where the director waits for just the right moment to turn on the gimmick. Director Chloé Zhao knows how to wield her tools, that's for sure.

Is it the spare music score by Max Richter that waits until just the right moment to unleash his own wildly overused composition "On the Nature of Daylight"? That piece is the ultimate piece of sonic manipulation, and has been used over and over to wrench tears out of audiences, regardless of what's on screen. Hamnet uses it unashamedly, and it feels, at this point, any movie that uses it should be at least a little ashamed.

Is it the emotional simplicity of Hamnet's basic story? A mother watches one of her children die. That's it. That's really the heart of it. To both the movie and the novel, it seems almost irrelevant that the mother is the wife of William Shakespeare, and that the child's name is Hamnet, which both movie and book say right up front is interchangeable with Hamlet.

Is it the story's pointed focus on the mother, to the exclusion of the father — the one whose fame is the impetus for writing the story to begin with? In Hamnet, Shakespeare is a supporting player, at best, and he's absent for almost all of the story, though the film gives him a bit more to do than the novel, ostensibly because they've cast Mescal in the role, and he needs screen time.

The structure of the story, the meaning of the story, would not change at all if the mother were the wife of a farmer or janitor or accountant. It's not until the last few scenes that Shakespeare's Hamlet factor in to Hamnet, and when they do, the tearjerking revelation that comes could just have easily stemmed from the mother randomly seeing the play.

But this is the scene that, as I understand it, makes audiences weep. Leading up to it, we've seen scenes of torture and suffering, which are mercifully briefer in the movie than the are in the book, which seems to delight in describing the enormous pain the child is in. We've seen the mother in excruciating anguish. Her name is Agnes, rather than Anne as you've always believed Shakespeare's wife was named. There is an explanation for this, though it is never spoken in the movie version and only offered in an afterword to the novel.

In the movie, this climactic scene is one in which Agnes watches Hamlet being staged at the Old Globe Theatre, and although the play is about a prince of Denmark and his father, and is about murder and revenge and takes place in a castle and not in a forest (as the stage production's background oddly depicts), and though Agnes is presented as simple and uneducated, she is moved by the play.

She is so moved that she weeps in stunned, disbelieving silence, overcome by cathartic emotion, and this is when it seems everyone who sees Hamnet becomes inconsolable. Except me, I guess. Honestly, though, I tried. I really did.

Viewed January 25, 2026

SAG Screener