Opus (2025)

John Malkovich (channeling Nicolas Cage) plays what amounts to a cult leader at a commune under the guise of a musical prodigy who has just come out of retirement. Ayo Ebediri plays the only rational character in the film who questions his motives and all the weirdness surrounding them. It's a bit of the horror comedy persuasion (not unlike Get Out and Blink Twice), but feels like it could have gone much, much further. Standards must be slipping over at A24.

2½ bites of the communal bread out of 5

Black Bag (2025)

An espionage thriller about a British intelligence officer and his wife who investigate an internal leak among four other spies. It's a premise that starts out intriguing and shrouded in mystery, but quickly proves to be dry and dull as ditchwater. It's the kind of film that thinks it's cleverer than the audience, but joke's on them: I didn't give a single shit about any of it in the first place.

The good thing about Steven Soderbergh is if you don't like one of his movies, just wait 6 months, and he'll come out with another one.

2 polygraphs out of 5

Riff Raff (2024)

Ed Harris plays a reformed criminal in a blended family who is inconvenienced when his former wife, his son and his bride-to-be come to visit, who are being hunted down by two relentless hitmen that make their lives a living hell. As a dark comedic thriller, this movie is a bit of a mess in its feeble and meandering execution. I'm not sure how this even landed in theaters because it screams direct-to-streaming to me. Even the bumbling team of Bill Murray and Pete Davidson (never thought those two would be paired together) left me wanting more. And poor Jennifer Coolidge just seems like she's typecast at this point.

Also, not sure why they ripped off the theme to Howard Shore's After Hours.

2 guys named Roger out of 5

Novocaine (2025)

Nathan Caine is a mild-mannered bank manager with an extreme case of CIPA (Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis), which basically means he feels nothing. When the girl of his dreams is taken hostage during a bank robbery, he sets out in pursuit, setting off a chain of events in motion which set the stage for plenty of violent antics at his expense. It's a fun premise that runs dry quickly and isn't quite clever enough to sustain an entire feature. There is a lot of potential to be had with a man who is impervious to pain, but the film doesn't do enough with it and leaves it all on the table. Jack Quaid brings plenty of charm to the role and makes it watchable, if not forgettable.

2½ epi-pens out of 5

Mickey 17 (2025)

Mickey Barnes is an Expendable. Essentially a disposable crew member on a space mission, he serves as a human crash dummy used for test experiments and dangerous missions that usually result in fatality, at which point he gets "reprinted" with all of his prior memories intact, like a video game character. The only rule being that only one clone can exist at a time. It's an intriguing premise for a film, but unfortunately the execution is all over the place. It's a big, sprawling mess that falls disappointingly short of the source material.

3 creepers out of 5

Parasite (2019)

AKA: Gisaengchung

A poor family of grifters attempt to ingratiate themselves within the employ of a wealthy household. A searing satire of monumental proportions, the way this film builds and builds upon itself is brilliant. This stuff is as captivating as Game of Thrones. It's such a fun twisty-turny ride, I'd rather not say anything more about it and let the viewer experience it for themselves. Submitted as a non-English entry at the Oscars, it won awards for Best International Feature as well as Best Picture, the first film of its kind to do so.

5 blinking lights out of 5

Hard Truths (2024)

Mike Leigh's intimate character study of a deeply unhappy woman who lashes out at everyone she comes across, perpetuating the cycle of negativity and bringing everybody down. Marianne Jean-Baptiste is spellbinding in the role and makes it her own, embodying the kind of misery and self-hatred where you retaliate at everybody else in an effort to bring them down to your level. It's such a stark and unsympathetic portrayal of someone in pain, which offers no easy solution. The film doesn't cast judgment on the characters, it simply presents the situation as is. It's a difficult movie that never shies away from deeply uncomfortable moments or asks us to agree with the choices. The title is apropos because there are no concessions or easy ways out. This is one of the most brutally honest movies I've ever seen and it's memorable for that very reason. It's hard to say I "enjoyed" the film per se, but I'll never forget it.

4 bouquets out of 5

Last Breath (2019)

A deep sea diving mission goes horribly wrong when the umbilical cable carrying oxygen gets severed, stranding one of the divers underwater.

This is such an amazing documentary compared to its cinematic counterpart. The most incredible part is all the footage captured prior to the incident that served as inspiration for the film and made this story worth telling. Do they always shoot this much coverage for such a routine job, or was it fortuitous timing? Recreated events are also included, which blur the lines even more.

There comes a moment where you understand why they take certain dramatic liberties in film. One detail is the fact that everyone underwater speaks in high-pitched squeaky voices due to the heliox they're breathing. It's almost completely impossible to take any of it seriously when they sound like Yakko from Animaniacs.

3 diving bells out of 5

Last Breath (2025)

Why don't they ever make movies about true stories where things go right? They only make them when things go terribly wrong. In this tense survival thriller, we're primed to see a deep sea diving mission gone awry. Ironically, it moves very slowly, even in moments where time is of the essence and every second counts. It's a concise film, but somehow still ends up feeling too long.

Director Alex Parkinson adapts the events from his own 2019 documentary.

2½ oxygen reserves out of 5

The Monkey (2025)

Everyone remembers the iconic image of the monkey with cymbals on the cover of Stephen King's Skeleton Crew. Or maybe you're more familiar with the poster of George A. Romero's Monkey Shines. Or perhaps you're conflating both of them, as I did, and thought they were the same story. The symbol of the cursed toy monkey that brought about death held a great deal of potential to the imagination of a young child. Regardless of what fear strikes into your heart upon seeing this poster, it's unwarranted. Oz Perkins stripped most of the dread out of King's original short story and replaced it with an over the top horror comedy that for some reason doesn't work as well as it should. Some of the gore and Final Destination-esque mishaps are fun, but it doesn't congeal into anything solid and feels more like a misguided parody of the genre.

2½ freak accidents out of 5

Theatrical Note: A teaser for Perkins' next film, Keeper, is featured at the very end of the credits.

Monkey Shines (1988)

AKA: Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fear

After being stricken down in an accident that renders him quadriplegic, a young man is gifted a service animal in the form of a sweet and lovable lab monkey being treated with an intelligence serum, who he quickly develops a close bond with. The first half of this film is genuinely engaging, though it loses some steam as it falls into the more predictable pitfalls of the genre. 

Despite the prevalence of the monkey with cymbals on all the advertisements (reminiscent of Stephen King's short story The Monkey), there were in fact real capuchin monkeys used in the film and the toy never once appears on screen. This has always driven me fucking nuts.

3 monkey mind melds out of 5

Captain America: Brave New World (2025)

Let's recap: Following Steve Rogers's (Chris Evans) retirement in Avengers: Endgame, the shield is passed down to Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), who makes his transition to Cap in the Disney+ limited series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Meanwhile, Harrison Ford takes over the role of Thaddeus 'Thunderbolt' Ross following the passing of William Hurt in 2022. Still with me?

Let's be clear. The only reason to watch this is for Red Hulk, which was ruined in all the marketing, including every single teaser and poster. That's it. There's nothing else to do but introduce yet another direction for this series to go. All these movies exist to do is cynically set up the next phase of the MCU (we are currently nearing the end of Phase 5 with this and Thunderbolts*). At this point, there are hardly any surprises left. How long can they keep doing this bullshit at the end of the credits where they tease a better movie? How long can they keep getting away with it?

2 gamma pills out of 5

Dog Man (2025)

This is the darkest premise for a kid's movie yet. After surviving an explosion, a man's body is stitched to his dog's head and that somehow makes him a superhero. It sidesteps all the uncomfortable questions: How do all the motor functions work? Who is actually in control, the man or the dog? Why does he sometimes seem intelligent, and other times he's just a dog? Does the man's soul exist trapped within the mind of a dog? He appears to exist in some kind of Orwellian nightmare where he's less than human. But the film never lingers on the horrifying details. I kept getting caught up in the logistics of this world, such as, why do all the cats talk, but the dog can't (not even as a "dog man")?

It's a highly ambitious attempt to establish a new IP, if not frankly exhausting. 

1½ Flippy ki-yay flippy-flippers out of 5

Paddington in Peru (2024)

After his aunt goes missing in Peru, Paddington must go back home to find her, as he gets mixed up with nuns and a riverboat captain on a quest to find El Dorado. If you're a fan of the others, it'll give you what you're looking for, but I didn't find myself as invested as the first two films and it hardly got an emotional response out of me. Most of the fun comes from Antonio Banderas as this entry's villainous lead. It's a cute adventure and the jungle scenery definitely pops on the big screen, but it's diminishing returns at this point.

2½ passport photos out of 5

Note: Emily Mortimer takes over the role of Mrs. Brown from Sally Hawkins, which probably accounts for why it feels so uneven compared to the others.

Paddington 2 (2017)

Paddington's second foray on the big screen picks up not long after the first film. Having fully integrated with his new found family, the titular talking bear takes up a series of odd jobs and is framed for a crime he didn't commit. This time around, Hugh Grant portrays the big bad as a clever master of disguise.

People seem to consider this one superior to the original (due to its 100% "fresh" score and a running gag in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), but it feels like a much more derivative family film and much less "grounded" in reality. While the humor and warmth is consistent and it remains wholesome and charming, it was massively overhyped for me compared to the original.

3 pop-up books out of 5