Year: 2024

Godzilla Minus One (PG-13)

As people in Japan try to restart their lives after World War II a new threat emerges in Godzilla Minus One, a pretty great Godzilla movie but also a surprisingly good movie about war and its aftermath.

Reluctant kamikaze pilot Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) returns to his family home in Tokyo only to find it destroyed and his parents dead. Haunted in part by an end-of-war run-in with Godzilla when Shikishima failed to fight back against the monster, he forlornly spends his days in the ruins of his parent’s house until he meets Noriko (Minami Hamabe), a young woman who shoves a baby at him as she is chased through the market being called a thief. These three unrelated people — Shikishima, Noriko and the baby — eventually form a found family, with Shikishima getting a job helping to clear the coastline of underwater explosives dropped during the war.

Meanwhile, the U.S. tests nuclear weapons at Bikini Atoll, which is a Godzilla hangout spot. He is injured and angered and also seems to acquire great regenerative powers as well as the ability to shoot out a heat ray that is roughly the equivalent of a nuclear explosion. One day at sea, Shikishima witnesses these new abilities close up and is horrified as a bigger, badder Godzilla heads to the mainland.

The movie features some significant ramp up to post-war Godzilla. We get a lot about Shikishima’s guilt over the war and his inability to truly live — to put the war behind him and accept his new family, marry Noriko and find some peace. But there is enough Godzilla-ness interspersed with these elements to keep the movie going, and ultimately the emotional and relationship parts of the story do pay off.

I also liked this movie’s visual effects — no surprise as it won a visual effects Oscar at the 2024 awards. There is a real tactile quality to everything here from Godzilla to the buildings he crashes into. I’m going to say “guy in a rubber suit” and that’s going to sound like an insult but I mean it in the sense that Godzilla has the quality of a real entity moving in and reacting to its surroundings, not a weightless cartoon inserted after the fact. Even if some visual elements looked a little stylized, it made sense with the overall visuals of the world created here.

This movie doesn’t have the awe-inspiring beauty of some of the shots of the 2014 Godzilla but it does have a story that is more cohesive, more “real” and more compelling. A Available for rent or purchase and on Netflix.

Wicked Little Letters (R)

Olivia Coleman has fun as meek spinster Edith Swan, who receives vicious hate mail in interwar Britain. Filled with profanities that horrify her (horrible) parents (Timothy Spall, Gemma Jones), the letters are brought to the local police, who quickly investigate the Swans’ neighbor Rose Gooding (Jesse Buckley). She’s a woman who drinks, swears and is Irish, which seems to be the basis for her being a suspect. While the men of the police department are quick to arrest her, “Woman Police Officer” Gladys Moss (the excellent Anjana Vasan of We Are Lady Parts) has other ideas — not that those ideas are listened to.

Wicked Little Letters is a delightful little treat and if anybody wants to make a show with Vasan’s Moss solving crimes with the help of her townswomen irregulars (including Joanna Scanlan, Lolly Adefope and Eileen Atkins) I am here for it. B Available for rent or purchase.

Brats (NR)

Andrew McCarthy directs the documentary Brats, which is kind of a rumination on the idea of the “Brat Pack” and what it meant for his life and his career. McCarthy deeply hated the “Brat Pack” label when it first appeared in a New York magazine cover story in 1985. He describes feeling like it was an immediate diminishment of his career and the careers of his fellow “Pack” members — though who exactly that includes becomes part of the movie’s discussion. The casts of St. Elmo’s Fire and The Breakfast Club probably yes; adjacent people like Lea Thompson, Tom Cruise and Michael J. Fox probably no. John Cryer, who appears here, is Duckie forever but doesn’t consider himself a Pack member, though he did date Demi Moore and appear in movies with Molly Ringwald. The documentary offers memories of the time and what the phenomenon meant for the Pack-ers by the likes of Cryer, Thompson, Ally Sheedy, Moore, Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe and then turns to movie reviewers and pop culture commentary types to talk about what the movies meant in the wider culture. It’s a fun bit of ’80s teen culture nostalgia. B Streaming on Hulu.

Hit Man (R)

Glen Powell stars in and co-wrote Hit Man, a movie directed by Richard Linklater.

Gary (Powell) is a slightly nerdy professor whose side gig is audiovisual technical support for the New Orleans Police Department. He works on a team that includes Jasper (Austin Amelio), a cop posing as a hit man; Phil (Sanjay Rao), another tech guy, and Claudette (Retta, just forever awesome), who seems in charge. When Jasper is suspended, Gary is tasked with being the “hit man.” On his first attempt, he scores big, turning in a believable performance as the self-assured, take-no-crap Ron and getting the person attempting to hire him to incriminate himself for attempted murder.

When Madison (Adria Arjona) attempts to hire Ron, he stops her before she makes the official ask and talks her out of it, forestalling an arrest. Later she invites him to a puppy adoption event and the two start dating — though Madison thinks she’s dating Ron, a killer for hire, not Gary, a cat owner who enjoys bird watching.

There are parts of this movie that are just whipped cream fun — Gary trying on different personas to placate the hit-man-seekers, the twitchy Jasper trying to catch Gary in wrongdoing, everything involving Retta. Elements of this movie exist in the gritty neighborhood of comedy — think Justified but not as smart. But there are other parts that seem plastic — that kind of too shiny, overly slick quality that feels like somebody asked AI for “sexy banter dialogue.” B-Available on Netflix.

Trigger Warning (TV-MA)

Jessica Alba is almost a convincing action star in Trigger Warning, one of those “soldier with a particular set of skills returns to their hometown to right wrongs” movies. Remember Dwayne Johnson in Walking Tall? It’s like that.

In Alba’s case, she plays Parker, returning from her “part spy, part butt-kicker” government job to her home town in New Mexico after her father died. Died in a collapse in his hobby mine? That’s the official story but Parker’s not so sure.

Early in our introduction to the town we see a campaign sign for a senator (Anthony Michael Hall) whose sons include the local sheriff (Mark Webber), who dated Parker in high school, and the local sleazeball criminal (Jake Weary). There are no surprises in how this plays out and it has dumb action fun potential but Alba is weirdly wooden for a lot of the movie. She doesn’t quite hit — but totally could, if you remember early seasons of Dark Angel — that baseline level of energy to really carry this kind of kicky-punch movie. C Streaming on Netflix.

A Family Affair (PG-13)

Zac Efron is a famous action star who stumbles into a relationship with his assistant’s mother in A Family Affair, a movie that is 30 percent friend, family and romantic relationships and 70 percent real estate and home design.

You know those $13 quarterly home magazines filled with architecture and interior design so beautiful in a “no human has ever lived here” otherworldly way that it might as well be about home design on Mars? This movie is full of these places, from a sleek production office to a young couple’s dwelling to the modernist estate of Chris Cole (Efron), an actor rich from starring in a series of increasingly dumb big-budget action movies. His Los Angeles mansion has this workout loft space that is all white surfaces and exceptional light and this massive door that is both beautiful and medieval-moat-bridge-like in its unwieldiness. His put-upon assistant Zara (Joey King) might be miserable at work, responding to his stupid actor whims and not getting any closer to the production job she was hoping for, but she comes home every night to her mother Brooke’s (Nicole Kidman) palatial yet cozy oceanfront mansion. Brooke is a writer who has mostly been writing for magazines and her late husband was also some kind of writer and unless what they wrote was collectively the most successful set of books of all time I’m going to say a big “nope” to them owning such a house.

None of these people have real problems, nor does Brooke’s mother-in-law Leila (Kathy Bates), who has some sort of cozy ski-country house that appears to be specifically for celebrating Christmas in. Zara’s friend Eugenie (Liza Koshy), who listens to her whine and is barely able to discuss her own relationship woes with the self-involved Zara, is having her fights and uneasy silences with her boyfriend in a very nice ground-floor apartment or maybe townhome with a separate bedroom and a very nice living room — these people are in their 20s! The kitchen is positively Nancy Meyers-ish!

The central tension of this movie is around the relationship Brooke falls into with Chris and how that icks out Zara. But who can even pay attention when Brooke is gazing into her massive closet specifically for unworn designer dresses that — wait, is it backlit? B- Streaming on Netflix.

Featured photo: Thelma the Unicorn.