"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

1550

"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

1615

"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

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"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 certain 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

"Song Sung Blue"

  ☆☆☆½ 

Movie screens used to be filled with films like Song Sung Blue, which exist for no reason other than to entertain a large number of people, to give them two hours of simple entertainment grounded in humanity rather than spectacle. Song Sung Blue makes no great demands on viewers; it only wants to please them. The entertainment industry has largely moved on from movies like this, but thankfully writer-director Craig Brewer refuses.

Song Sung Blue is a lot like its central characters, Mike and Claire Sardina, who have a dogged, sincere and almost singular determination to entertain and please audiences, which they do by impersonating popular singers. Claire specializes in Patsy Cline. Mike is sort of an all-purpose pinch-hitter, though as the film begins he's aware he can go too far. The six-foot-something White guy, who's a recovering alcoholic, draws the line at performing "Tiny Bubbles" like Don Ho.

Neil Diamond, though. There's an idea. Pretty soon, Mike is trying ridiculous haircuts, donning sequined shirts, and urging his dentist-slash-manager to get a leaf blower so his hair will move in the wind. These are not unserious people — they are just very serious about rather unserious things.

Song Sung Blue is a simple, quirky slice-of-life comedy, and it's filled with songs by Neil Diamond, one of those singers you might think you don't know until you start humming along to all the songs.

Hugh Jackman plays Mike. It's long-since established that Jackman is a consummate performer with a strong, clear singing voice, and he uses every trick he has to make his character come to life. It helps that the movie is based on a documentary about the real-life Mike Sardina, who really did form a Neil Diamond cover band called Lightning and Thunder with the woman who became his wife.

That woman is played by Kate Hudson, who has long been hampered by her connections — for many audiences, particularly those who are in the target age demographic for Song Sung Blue, she's been "Goldie Hawn's daughter." She's been strong on screen before, stronger than perhaps most people remember, but Song Sung Blue lets her finally break free. She takes a role that seems simple and one-note and finding stunning dimension.

Though the story is primarily about Mike, who Jackman plays with enormous appeal and heart, Hudson becomes the movie's emotional anchor. Song Sung Blue is built around her ability to sing, to charm, and, ultimately, to descend to some depths that are never even hinted at in the way the movie is positioned.

This is, at one level, a sweet, audience-pleasing comedy, but there is tragedy, and it turns out to be the kind that doesn't feel manufactured or predictable. Director Brewer remains true to both the real-life story that inspired it, and to the realities of the hard-scrabble lives its characters live. They may present themselves as happy and glamorous, but nothing comes to them easily.

The movie's fundamental challenge is that a lot happens to the Sardinas and their family, and Song Sung Blue is pretty overstuffed. From the start, it glosses over the nuance, doesn't spend a lot of time on subtlety, and its determination to fit in everything that happens to Mike and Claire can feel a little underdone. Mike, in particular, proves troubling as a character — a man who is so determined to follow his big dream that he neglects too many of the smaller, more urgent details.

But Brewer always returns to honest emotion, including moments of genuine suspense and earned pathos. With the constant strength of Hudson, whose Oscar nomination this week was both surprising and incredibly well deserved, Song Sung Blue is like a Neil Diamond song: a little schmaltzy, a little predictable, and sometimes even a little embarrassing, but it makes you misty-eyed, it makes you smile and, manipulative as it may be, it gives you no choice but to sing along.

Viewed January 22, 2026

Digital Screener

"Disneyland Handcrafted"

  ☆☆☆☆ 

For many of us, Disneyland has always existed. Even for those old enough to have known a world without the physical theme park in it, Disneyland has become such a ubiquitous presence — not just a place but a concept, an ideal — that it's basically impossible to conceive of it not existing.

But, as the fascinating new documentary Disneyland Handcrafted shows, there was indeed a time when Disneyland was just an idea, and not a very popular one at that, and when all that land in Anaheim, Calif., was just a bunch of orange groves.

Walt Disney is one of the most remarkable people ever to have lived, and it really is something of a shame that the company he created owns and cultivates his image so carefully that we'll likely never get a true look at the complexities of the man. Disneyland Handcrafted is no exception: You'll find no shots of Walt Disney smoking or drinking, rarely doing anything except smiling, certainly not angry or frustrated or worried.

And yet, surprisingly, filmmaker Leslie Iwerks (granddaughter of one of Walt Disney's earliest colleagues) a certain outline of that complicated man emerge in a 95-minute film filled with rare color footage of Disneyland's creation. Walt himself, perhaps oddly, isn't really at the center of the documentary — no single person is, because this is a film about the people who actually built Walt Disney's vision.

Most of them are glimpsed only briefly, though they are heard through audio recordings. Ardent Disney fans will likely know all the names, though it's a little tough to keep up with who's who as they speak off screen. But what they say is revealing throughout the movie, which begins one year before the planned July 1955 opening date of Disneyland.

As the film opens, that opening date seems impossible: there's nothing but dirt in the midst of orange trees in what appears to be the middle of nowhere. Today, Disneyland is in the middle of the urban sprawl of greater Los Angeles; back then, it seemed so impossibly far away as to make people laugh.

Iwerks stitches together truly revelatory footage, augmenting it with extensive foley work — detailed sound effects that fool you into thinking that silent footage actually has original sound. The effect is uncanny, even if it futzes with the strict definition of a documentary.

There are astonishing scenes of accidents and fumbles, along with shots of small details being put in place, some of which still exist at the theme park to this day, making the movie a true love letter from and to Disney fans. Full disclosure: I worked for Disney at its Burbank corporate headquarters, both as employee and consultant, for more than a decade, and have visited Disneyland frequently over the years. Seeing how many of the original touches remain in place is part of what makes Disneyland Handcrafted so special.

But what makes it really worthwhile for Disney fans and history buffs in general is the footage that brings a very early version of Disneyland to vivid life. No matter how many times you've been there, you've never seen Disneyland look like this.

It's worth noting that your appreciation of Disneyland Handcrafted will likely depend on your own fondness for Disney and its history. Those who aren't as familiar with Disney may want to drop a star or so from this assessment, but even for them Disneyland Handcrafted is a worthwhile trip down memory lane — with a tantalizing hint of the complexity of the man who risked everything he had on Disneyland, and lived to see it succeed beyond his wildest dreams.

Viewed January 21, 2026 — AMC Burbank 8

1545

"Megadoc"

 ☆☆☆ 

Moviemaking is a curious art form. Individuals are recognized as the creator of films, and yet dozens, scores, hundreds, even thousands of people are involved in bringing a film to screen. Unlike writing, music, painting, dance, acting, it's almost (not quite, but almost) inconceivable that an individual could ever create a film, especially one that can be shown theatrically.

That curious paradox of film — that A Film By Famous Director — really isn't at all "by" that person becomes all the more curious when you consider a movie like Megalopolis. It sprang from the mind of Francis Ford Coppola, who wrote the screenplay and directed the movie. But ... did it? Because the number of people it took to bring the film to screen is staggering. It's overwhelming. It's unmanageable.

Which is exactly what Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis became: unmanageable. To viewers, to actors, to the craftspeople who built it, to Coppola himself, it becomes clear during Mike Figgis's simultaneously remarkable and bewildering documentary Megadoc, which is available on the Criterion Channel.

In an extraordinary act of hubris matched only by that time Brian de Palma invited journalist Julie Salamon to be a "fly on the wall" of the set of his notorious disaster The Bonfire of the Vanities, Coppola asked Figgis — the noted director of Stormy Monday and Leaving Las Vegas — to document the production of his personal epic.

The movie, Coppola promises time and again, will heal the world. The first time he says it, the words seem odd, almost comical. The first time someone else says it, you realize what went wrong with Megalopolis, which the documentary doesn't flinch from revealing: Nobody could tell Coppola "no." This emperor must always, under all circumstances, have clothes, especially when he didn't.

Coppola spent $120 million of his own money to make Megalopolis. He sold off shares of his successful winery to fund the movie. In his mind — and it's one of the most cogent, coherent things he says in the documentary — there's no point to dying with a lot of money in the bank. He'd rather go bankrupt funding his dream.

Whether Coppola is bankrupt, I don't know. Whether his dream was worth staking his entire fortune on is something filmmakers can judge for themselves by watching Megalopolis, which I did last year. Whether he was able to communicate his dream to those hundreds and hundreds of people who helped him spend all the money is much more clear: No, he wasn't.

Nor is he able to fully communicate the idea of Megalopolis to Figgis, which is what makes this both a compelling and extraordinarily frustrating documentary. It's compelling because watching movies being made is never less than compelling. It's a staggering feat, and in the middle of the chaos — a word Coppola eschews — is the director, the one person everyone turns to over and over for answers. Coppola has none.

Without answers, Megadoc means watching something being made but not knowing what any of it means. The action itself is interesting, but the intention is unclear. Throughout Megadoc, Figgis incorporates on-screen titles that detail the staggering, unbelievable amounts of money being spent: $10 million for costumes, $1 million for catering. As a director, Figgis seems incredulous that Coppola is so profligate.

But he almost never stops to ask the fundamental question: Why? Nor does he show us the result. Megadoc ends when the film screens at Cannes, but ignores its rocky theatrical release or the overwhelmingly puzzled response the movie got from critics. Figgis allows people to make claims about the ways Megalopolis will "heal the world" but never challenges them. When Dustin Hoffman says he has no idea what he's doing in the movie, a more incisive documentary would have explored that.

It's Coppola's film. He's the director. As Jean Hagen said in Singin' in the Rain: "It says so right there." It took so many people to make it, though, and it's clear throughout Megadoc that most of them never really understood what they were doing or why.

Ultimately, Megadoc leaves the viewer almost as wanting for answers as Megalopolis itself — but it's vastly more entertaining. It's a must-see for anyone fascinated by the communal art form of filmmaking. For others, especially those intrigued by the artistic process of directors, writers, designers and performers, it's a bit too opaque. Though perhaps that's fitting for a documentary about a movie that seems to revel in its opacity.

Viewed January 19, 2026 — Criterion Channel