Little Brother (2026)

John Cena plays the reluctant "Big Brother" to a troubled former foster youth (Eric André), who tracks him down after 25 years and turns his picture perfect world upside down. It's formulaic but funny, in that type of What About Bob? plot where everyone else but the main character (and the audience) finds his antics charming. It's a dumb comedy that owns its dumbness, and both actors commit to the bit. I resisted it a lot, but it's delightfully crude and did make me laugh hard on a number of occasions, even though I hated it at its very core.

2 rimjobs out of 5

I Love Boosters (2026)

"Boosters" are shoplifters who steal designer clothes and sell them at a discount price. However, whatever you think this movie is about, it isn't. 

Filmmaker Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You) crafts another surreal, absurdist high concept comedy with shades of slapstick, satire, sci-fi and horror, which defies any easy classification. It's bizarre and demented and unpredictable in all the right ways, but it also earns fashion points for being original and bold.

3½ skewed floors out of 5

Balls Up (2026)

A couple of marketers develop the Balls Up, a condom designed to cover up the balls as well, and pitch it as the official condom of Brazil in the World Cup, before inciting an international incident that has them on the run. I'm sad that this came from one half of the Farrelly Brothers because it's a poor attempt at recreating the raunchy R-rated comedies of its heyday and it lacks any heart.

Buddy comedies usually build on the chemistry of its actors, but Paul Walter Hauser does most of the heavy lifting here. There's so much talent involved in front of and behind the camera, it's appalling how disastrous this turned out.

1½ minnows swimming upstream out of 5

Happy Gilmore 2 (2025)

Nostalgia can be dangerous. An overreliance on the past can be a handicap. There's no reason for some things to be revived except for purely sentimental reasons. This wasn't one of them.

This film features many callbacks accompanied by old clips cribbed from the first movie to make you remember how much you enjoyed that one and desperately try to recreate those old feelings. Most of the time, it falls flat.

My other complaint is that comedies are too long nowadays. It's completely self-indulgent for this to be two hours. Clip it at 90 minutes and leave out all the fluff. It ages better that way. 

I sound like an old fuddy-duddy now. I didn't hate everything about it, I just wish it tried to do something different. For some people, same-old will be perfectly acceptable. It just feels sadder when these people are in their 50s.

1½ gratuitous cameos out of 5