Category: Film Reviews by Amy

Scream VI (R)

Another sequel, another spate of Ghostface killings in Scream VI — or, wait, is it a franchise now?

After all, as Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), one of the Core Four (as they extremely reluctantly call themselves) next-generation survivors from the last movie (the 2022 installment, the fifth Scream, called just Scream), says, the rules for a franchise are different. Legacy characters like Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) can die. Main characters like Sam (Melissa Barrera), last movie’s lead girl and daughter of OG Ghostface Billy Loomis, and her younger sister Tara (Jenna Ortega) also can die — or be the new killer. They killed Luke Skywalker and Tony Stark, Mindy explains; franchises can do anything.

Scream VI takes the action out of Woodsboro and to New York City, where Sam and Tara and Mindy and her brother Chad (Mason Gooding) have all moved to try to put the past behind them but still stick together. They are all dealing, sorta: Tara is going to frat parties and making bad choices, Chad is slow to act on his feelings for Tara, Mindy is hanging close in part because what are the chances lightning (i.e. a serial killer) will strike twice (heh), and Sam is attempting therapy, in part because the narrative about Sam has shifted. The internet has decided that she is the secret true killer, not her boyfriend and his secret girlfriend, whom (the internet says) she framed. So sometimes strangers throw drinks on her and call her a killer while filming her reaction — a particularly disturbing turn of events because Sam does wonder if some part of her does have her father’s stabby inclinations.

Right away, the killings start — actually, as Mindy predicts, the movie goes bigger and actually starts with two Ghostface killings, rather cleverly setting up the movie’s whole vibe of being not just self-referential in its dialog but structurally meta too. And intentionally, I think, the movie pretty quickly lays out the best suspects for the murders, subverts your expectations a little but then steers right back onto the path you suspected from the start. And it works? There’s something sort of cute about how it plays with and fulfills your expectations at the same time. It’s, I dunno, fun in a way that keeps this movie, so so deep into its lore, so full of characters I do not remember at all (did you remember Hayden Panettiere was in this series? because I did not), unexpectedly lively. The new characters are fun, the old characters are fun. This is a solid cast that seems to understand what’s being asked of them and are able to (mostly) keep their characters just interesting enough to get me moderately invested in them. (As to the “mostly,” the movie itself points out that you’ve gotta fill out the cast with some redshirts.)

While I didn’t find most of the movie particularly scary or horrifying (it is not quite Cocaine Bear goofy in its gore but it’s also not entirely not that), there were a few legitimately unsettling moments, usually tapping into some non-horror-specific fears about whom in your life you can trust and some nice “everybody looks like a serial killer on this subway” shots (it’s Halloween in the movie so there are legitimately multiple civilians dressed as horror movie villains but also that kind of paranoia is well conveyed).

Scream VI is, ultimately, fine — which was more than I was expecting and just enough to make me like it more than not. B-

Rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, and brief drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick, Scream VI is two hours and three minutes long and distributed in theaters by Paramount Pictures.

65 (PG-13)

Adam Driver reminds you that he can do action movies with 65, a non-Jurassic Park franchise film that allows for fighting dinosaurs.

It’s been a minute since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) and he’s done more prestige-y stuff since then, so walking around in a chest-hugging shirt wielding a big sci-fi gun while uttering a minor amount of dialogue is probably good, career-wise, just to keep his hand in.

Mills (Driver) is the captain of a science space vessel transporting a bunch of people in cryo-sleep. The trip is going to take him two years, two years when he’ll be away from his wife (Nika King) and his young daughter Nevine (Chloe Coleman). This makes him sad but, as his wife reminds him, the trip significantly boosts his pay, giving the family the means to pay for Nevine’s medical treatment.

So, you know, paying for health care is a bummer everywhere, even a long time ago on a planet far far away, because, as we’re quickly told, we’re 65 million years ago and Mills and his family live on another planet.

Mid voyage, Mills’ ship runs into an unexpected asteroid field and is badly damaged. It crashes onto an unknown planet, with the cryo pods being flung this way and that. At first it appears that all the passengers have died, but then Mills discovers that one pod, carrying a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), is still intact and he takes her out of cryo sleep. He searches for the escape pod that will take them off the planet to where they can be rescued. It is about 13 kilometers away, which doesn’t sound so bad on this planet with breathable air and potable water except that Mills quickly realizes it is also chock full of giant bugs and even gianter people-eating dinosaurs. And there is a ticking clock on this endeavor; it seems that a catastrophically large asteroid from the field his ship flew through is headed to the planet.

Because — dun dun DUN — Mills is on Earth! Right before the dinosaurs are about to have a Very! Bad! Day!

This is maybe a mild spoiler; though I felt like the movie make most of this pretty clear pretty fast. There was something about this very blunt setup and the surface-level bleakness of the characters that made me worry initially that this movie would be very slow going with very little in the way of stakes. And while it did feel this way a little bit in the beginning, I did find myself interested enough in these two characters and in Adam Driver’s overall performance. Koa and Mills don’t speak each other’s language, which helps keep the cutesiness to a tolerable level. The movie uses very simple scenes and moments between them to build their makeshift parent-child relationship and I believed it enough. And Driver is compelling; I mean he brought something to Darth Sulkypants in the last Star Wars trilogy and he is able to make even the goofiness of House of Gucci watchable.

65 isn’t particularly deep or innovative in its Man vs. Dino interactions but it is a solid enough bit of action. B-

Rated PG-13 for intense sci-fi action and peril, and brief bloody images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods, 65 is an hour and 33 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Columbia Pictures.

Featured photo: Creed 3.

Creed III (PG-13)

Adonis Creed fights childhood trauma in Creed III, a thoroughly engaging entry in the Creed offshoot of the Rockyverse.

After finally beating Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew), his opponent from the first movie, Adonis “Donnie” Creed (Michael B. Jordan) retires from boxing and lives a happily family-centered life in Los Angeles. He spends time at his gym building up the next generation of boxers and takes care of his elementary-school-age daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent), including dressing up as a dragon or something for a tea party while wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson) is working on the music she writes and produces. He seems content — until childhood friend Damian “Dame” Anderson (Jonathan Majors) comes to visit him. Dame has been in prison for nearly two decades but before that he and Donnie were as tight as brothers when they lived in a foster care group home together. They still hung out after Apollo Creed’s widow, Mary-Anne (Phylicia Rashad), adopted Donnie, though apparently she didn’t think much of the friendship since we see a young Donnie (Thaddeus J. Mixson) sneaking out to hang out with young Dame (Spence Moore II), who at the time is a promising young boxer.

In the present, Dame’s presence pushes Donnie back into the headspace of his younger self, remembering the physical abuse he suffered at the group home and the incident that led to Dame’s incarceration. When Dame, who is older than Donnie, tells him he wants to get back to boxing, Donnie knows it’s a bad idea but he reluctantly helps his friend get a fight, out of guilt and obligation. As everyone around Donnie realizes faster than Donnie does, Dame isn’t just trying to recapture past glory; he has some serious grudges to work out.

The beats of this movie are all pretty much what you expect them to be. And there aren’t a lot of surprises in the arcs of the characters either. But everybody here — Jordan, Thompson, the suddenly everywhere Majors — is so compelling, so engaging to watch even when they’re working with some fairly familiar material, that I was pulled in even if this movie doesn’t have the spark of the first Creed. (And while this movie is plenty warm-hearted, I missed the squishy bear hug that Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky brought to these movies.) Nevertheless, I was in and I enjoyed this movie that is a smarter, well-finessed version of the boxing movie standard. B

Rated PG-13 for intense sports action, violence and some strong language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Michael B. Jordan with a screenplay by Keenan Coogler & Zach Baylin, Creed III is an hour and 56 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (R)

Jason Statham does a goofy riff on James Bond-ish spy adventure with the Guy Ritchie-directed and co-written Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, a movie that really feels like someone’s hoping to make it a part 1.

And I feel like, were this on Netflix and available for watching while you sipped your cocktail of choice and dozed on the sofa some Friday night after a long week, it would be a perfect part 1 for a perfectly moderately entertaining series.

Orson Fortune (Statham), a contract government spying-and-stuff type, is charged by his handler Nathan (Cary Elwes), who has been charged by British government official Knighton (Eddie Marsan, doing quality “exasperated”), to find a thing. What thing? It’s called “The Handle” and nobody knows what it is or what it does but it was stolen from a lab, it’s being sold by arms dealer Greg Simmonds (a delightfully sleazy Hugh Grant) and all the wrong sorts of people want it. So Nathan and his team of Orson, Sarah (Aubrey Plaza) and JJ (Bugzy Malone) have to get it back before any of the bad people get it. Unfortunately, someone has clearly tasked a competing team led by Mike (Peter Ferdinando) to do the same, so the two teams — who have professional rivalries with each other — are constantly getting tangled in each other’s operations.

Eventually, the Nathan-Orson team lands on a means of getting close to Greg Simmonds that involves enlisting the help of/blackmailing into service Greg’s favorite actor, Danny Francesco (Josh Hartnett). The gang jumps around Europe, to Los Angeles and eventually to Turkey, pulling off assorted capers along the way to try to track down The Handle, which is such a McGuffin that I was a little disappointed when we actually learned what it is.

There are several more characters — a house full of shady types, a pair of sketchy tech types, an assortment of henchmen and women — I haven’t mentioned yet, the tonnage of which also gives the movie a feel of a two-episode pilot packed full of the characters we’ll bump into throughout the season. It also means that no one character, not the actor-y Danny or hacker Sarah or tough guy Orson (who has this whole character thing about liking fancy wine that just never really goes anywhere), gets time to really develop. Operation Fortune stuffs in a whole lot of a whole lot — fights, chases, Aubrey Plaza wackiness that feels a bit like her Parks and Recreation character doing a computer hacker a la Janet Snakehole — into its not-quite two-hour run time and yet it feels more like it’s stocking up on plot business than telling a complex story. I often felt like somehow in all this too much, there was not enough — not enough choreographed-action wows or sparky intra-character chemistry or general funness. Some of the action even hit that spot of movie white noise, where I felt myself having to work extra hard to stay awake — not a fatal flaw for a movie you watch on your couch where you can rewind but not ideal for a movie you put on hard pants to see. B-

Rated R for language and violence, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Guy Ritchie with a screenplay by Guy Ritchie and Ivan Atkinson & Marn Davies, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is an hour and 54 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Lionsgate.

Featured photo: Creed 3.

A bear does cocaine in Cocaine Bear, a movie that is 100 percent exactly what you think it’s going to be.

This movie opens with title cards giving us facts about black bears citing Wikipedia as its source, which feels tonally perfect. Like, here’s some information but we didn’t work super hard to get it and we don’t stand by its accuracy. (But, speaking of Wikipedia, a link on this movie’s Wikipedia page will take you to the tale of the “real life” Cocaine Bear, who has apparently been stuffed and is now on display at something called the “Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall” and also the bear’s nickname is sometimes “Pablo Eskobear” and, well, I definitely recommend the “Cocaine Bear” Wikipedia page.) This movie is directed by Elizabeth Banks and if you can picture her seriously reading you facts about bears, that gives you a sense of where this movie is, vibe-wise, even though she herself doesn’t appear in the movie.

It’s the “this is your brain on drugs” 1980s and a drug smuggler dumps duffel bags filled with cocaine out of an airplane and into a Georgia forest before jumping himself. Well, before preparing to jump himself. Before he can actually jump, he bonks his head, falls out of the plane and ends up splatting in someone’s yard. But the gang expecting the cocaine — led by Syd (Ray Liotta, in his final role, according to IMDb) — knows that most of it is still out there and needs to go collect it so as not to incur the wrath of the cartel wholesaling it to them. Syd sends his son, Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), who is still grieving the loss of his wife and is generally disinterested in his dad’s whole drug-dealing thing, and Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), a friend to Eddie but also no-nonsense in his approach to the cocaine retrieval, to find the missing drugs.

Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), nominally a detective but primarily an Isiah Whitlock character, suspects that Syd’s gang might be looking for the cocaine and goes on the hunt for it in hopes of nabbing them.

Before those opposing forces can get to the drugs, though, a trio of crime-minded dummies — whose IMDb names are “Kid (Stache)” (Aaron Holliday), “Vest” (J. B. Moore) and “Ponytail” (Leo Hanna) — find one of the duffels and hides it in the forest, hoping to go back for it later.

But before any of these guys start their cocaine search, a large female black bear finds some of the cocaine, consumes it and decides she loves cocaine. She is single-minded on getting more cocaine — possibly grunting something like “yum yum” when she’s near it? maybe that was my imagination. And while not usually portrayed this way, cocaine seems to give her the munchies, specifically for humans, the more clueless the better.

This is bad news not just for the cops and criminals on the search for the drugs but also for anybody who happens to be in the woods, like for example single mother Sari (Keri Russell), searching for her tween-ish-aged daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and Dee Dee’s buddy Henry (Christian Convery), who have cut school to go to the forest in search of a waterfall. And forest ranger Liz (Margo Martindale), who is far more concerned with seducing wildlife expert Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson).

Everybody, every Margo Martindale and Keri Russell and Ray Liotta body, seems to be having a total blast here — and why not. The movie is called Cocaine Bear and the coked up bear quickly overtakes all other storylines and character elements as being the key issue of the movie. This is not a horror movie, this isn’t even a thriller really, it’s just a bear, on cocaine, chasing O’Shea Jackson Jr., who like his dad (Ice Cube) is solid at being the straight man in a wacky situation. What’s not to enjoy? The movie — like this year’s Plane or last year’s Beast — is totally and completely up front about what it is going to deliver to you and then it delivers exactly that. What are this movie’s themes? Bear on cocaine. What is this movie’s central argument? That a bear on cocaine will want more cocaine. What does this movie make you feel? That you are watching a bear on cocaine — or, you know, a good-enough rendering of a bear. This movie does have some gore, which feels more for the comic “ew” of it all than to really induce fear. There is a “glued on mustache” sensibility that pervades this movie, which perhaps keeps it from reaching some, I don’t know, higher height of intoxicated bear cinema but also keeps things humming along at a nicely unserious, deliberately shabby level. Which is all to say, if Cocaine Bear seems both really stupid and like something you, with your daily stresses and worries, might need in your life, you are absolutely correct. B

Rated R for bloody violence and gore, drug content and language throughout, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Elizabeth Banks and written by Jimmy Warden, Cocaine Bear is an hour and 35 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Cocaine Bear.

Eternally youthful Paul Rudd returns for an adventure in the tinyverse in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Rudd) has a pretty good post-Thanos life. He’s written a book, he’s publicly beloved and his girlfriend Hope Van Dyne/the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) is using science to make the world a better place. But then he gets a call from the police department where his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) is being held after getting arrested at a protest where she may have shrunk a police car (Hope slipped her an Ant-Man-like suit). When Scott brings her home to the Pym/Van Dyne house, he learns Cassie has been working with Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope on tech to map the quantum realm. Everyone’s proud of young Cassie’s invention but Hank’s wife/Hope’s mom Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) gets panicked when she realizes the device sends a signal into the quantum realm. She tries to shut it off but the device malfunctions and sucks them all in — or down, I guess, as the quantum realm is the submicroscopic world below or inside or whatever our world.

Janet, you’ll remember, was once stuck in the quantum realm for decades and when the gang — separated into two groups: the Pym/Van Dyne family and Scott and Cassie — arrives they realize she knows more than she’s ever explained about this world. For one, it’s populated by an assortment of beings, some more humanoid than others. And one of those beings is apparently the big noise of the quantum realm with some kind of old score to settle with Janet.

Eventually we meet this guy and he is Kang (Jonathan Majors), a name to remember for Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you watched Loki and didn’t give up after one episode like I did, apparently he is familiar (and also there’s some Loki content in the post-credits, according to the internet; I only stayed for one mid-credits scene, which was wearying). He is the villain — I guess? Mostly, he just feels like the start to a Whole Thing.

This movie is primarily made of goofiness, some of which I enjoyed (a cute if not well-used cameo, some business with Hank Pym’s ants) and some of which I just found to be tiresome. Everything to do with the fraying of the multiverse or whatever, the half-baked “secrets Janet never divulged” stuff, and Kang’s whole deal all just feel like a drag on whatever fun the movie could have had.

This movie feels so invested in being the first chapter of a new thing that it seems like it forgot to put together a compelling stand-alone story. And while I have affection for both Paul Rudd and Scott Lang, that affection isn’t enough for the movie to skate by with so few redeeming elements of its own. C

Rated PG-13 because that is the most profitable rating — I mean, for violence/action and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Peyton Reed with a screenplay by Jeff Loveness, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is two hours and five minutes long and distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios.

Featured photo: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Channing Tatum’s Mike takes his skills to London in Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a movie about abs.

Sure, there’s other stuff: A romance between Tatum’s character and Salma Hayek Pinault’s character that never has quite as much charm and chemistry as their little pre-movie “thank you for watching this movie” message. A plot that feels like somebody watched part of an early Ted Lasso episode and said how about we do a little of that, sorta. A show within a show, to give us the big dance finale we bought our tickets to go see. Some impressive biceps, some (clothed) butts. But, like, if I had to sum it all up: abs, this movie is about really chiseled abs.

Narration — delivered by Zadie (Jemelia George), the bored teenage daughter of Maxandra (Hayek Pinault) — explains that Mike Lane (Tatum) lost his furniture business in the pandemic, which is why he is bartending at a fancy party in Miami. He runs into Kim (Caitlin Gerard), a woman whose bachelorette party he danced at back in the 2012 original Magic Mike movie. Now a lawyer for Maxandra, the woman throwing the fancy party Mike is working, Kim tells the divorcing and unhappy Maxandra about Mike’s past occupation. Max calls him into her house after the party and offers him $6,000 for a dance. He delivers and then some, which is how they end up in bed with Max offering to take him to London. She has a job for him — not that — that will require him for a month, after which she will pay him $60,000. He agrees, which is how he finds himself at a historic theater which has been presenting a fusty play.

Max got control of the theater as part of her divorce — mostly out of spite because her ex-mother-in-law loves it — and, after being danced on by Mike, decides that what she most wants is to bring the passion of that experience to the London stage. She asks Mike, with his male entertainer background, to direct this new production. She also declares that there will be no more romance between them; he declares that he will not dance in this production. Guess what happens!

The day I saw this movie, I consumed a fair amount of Magic Mike content. I finally saw 2015’s Magic Mike XXL and I listened to the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast episode about that movie (featuring hosts Joe Reid and Chris V. Feil with their Oscar-nominated buddy Pamela Ribon as guest). That episode was a delight, as was XXL — all goofy buddy energy and lots of dudes gyrating while trying to make flustered ladies feel sexy. It’s fun! It’s, as the podcast observed, all fun, with none of the more serious elements of the original movie.

I bring all this up because if that’s where you’re coming from, the “Woo-hoo! Pony!” vibe of XXL, Last Dance isn’t going to quite live up to that abs-tastic joyfulness, with Jada Pinkett Smith calling the female audience queens and Joe Manganiello being a loveable goof. The remaining Kings of Tampa are mostly absent in this third outing. Instead, we get a lot of relationship-building between Mike and Max, most of which happens with Mike talking and not dancing. There is also stuff about Max’s struggles to be a mother to Zadie and her difficult divorce — and, sorry to Hayek Pinault, but I didn’t care about any of that. Zadie, sassy teen, can be a fun balance to the sometimes kooky dreams of Max, and she and Max’s butler (Ayub Khan-Din) have a nice brothers-in-arms sort of friendship, but generally all of that stuff felt a bit like spinning our wheels waiting for dancing, which this movie felt rather light on. There is a cute sequence about halfway through that blends dance and caper, a director Steven Soderbergh specialty, and I wish the movie had done more of that, had more of that energy, lightness and general glee.

Overall, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is an OK amount of fun, a B maybe or a B- when compared to the top-notch “ladies make some noise” delight of Magic Mike XXL, which is a solid B+. And, for the record, This Had Oscar Buzz in general, and this episode in particular, are always an A+.

Rated R for sexual material and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Steven Soderbergh with a screenplay by Reid Carolin, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is an hour and 52 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Warner Bros.

Want more Magic Mike? The original movie is currently streaming on HBO Max, if we’re still calling it that, and is available for rent or purchase. Magic Mike XXL is also streaming on HBO Max and Hulu (where it’s labeled TBS on Demand) and is available for rent or purchase.

This Had Oscar Buzz is available where ever you get your podcasts and is an absolute must for movie nerds, especially during Oscar season.

Pamela Ribon, a one-time Television Without Pity writer, writer on a bunch of TV and movie stuff including Ralph Breaks the Internet and a co-host of the Listen to Sassy podcast (also excellent), is nominated for an Oscar in the animated shorts category for the movie whose title got a little moment when Riz Ahmed read it — starts with My Year of and if you Google it you can probably still find it to watch via Vimeo. Watch it, it’s great! (Decidedly not for kids but great!)

Featured photo: Magic Mike’s Last Dance.