Category: Film Reviews

A look at the hot doc and a (different kind of hot) hot fairy tale

Do you need to see a nearly three-hour documentary about Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes in theaters?

I feel like that’s the big question with the 172-minute You Can See Everything (in theaters). As you’ve probably heard, the documentary (or whatever) is directed by Nathan Fielder and his whole straight-faced comedian deal. The first chunk gives us Elizabeth Holmes and her husband/partner Billy Evans staying with their two young children in a house on a beach in California in the month leading up to her incarceration for fraud in 2023. We see Liz, as most people call her, sort of mentally preparing herself for her sentence by spending time with her kids, snuggling with Billy and talking to someone on the phone about prison rules. We also see her and Evans making fundraising calls on behalf of some new medical thing that sounds a lot like Theranos and is described using language that makes you wonder why anybody picks up their call. Through it all, Fielder just sort of lurks on the edges, soaking in the weirdness of it all.

The movie’s second chunk is, er, even stranger. The idea of Elizabeth Holmes and who and what she is is omnipresent but the actual person, now in a minimum security prison, is mostly not seen or heard. Instead we check in with Billy Evans, now a few years later, with his “aggressive YouTube ad for protein powder” vibe and his total control, via power of attorney, of Elizabeth Holmes’ public image. Fielder at times seems to act like he’s annoyed with himself for having been suckered by Elizabeth and at other times seems to be trying to uncover something about Billy, perhaps something that will make Elizabeth seem more sympathetic? Is Fielder being manipulated by her? Are we being manipulated by Fielder? Is everybody doing a bit? Are we in the audience in on the joke or are we the joke? Is demanding adherence to an objective idea of The Truth its own kind of con?

The journey of thinking about all these things is the fun roller coaster the movie takes you on. Theranos was never my jam in terms of favorite tech-related scandals and I’m only somewhat aware of what a Nathan Fielder is, so I probably went in a little “I don’t care about any of these doofuses.” But the movie sucks you in, introducing you to its primary leads and then suggesting maybe you haven’t met them at all, playing a shell game of “who is the real villain” for a while and then doing a round of “what is truth, anyway.” I maybe came back around to “I don’t really care about these doofuses” by the end of the movie but the ride is captivating, including the piece of the movie, which you’ve probably read about, that looks more directly at the idea of this kind of true crime story as entertainment. So yes, yes, see the three-hour docu-whatever in the theater, both for the odd journey it takes you on, trapping you in this world the specific way that a movie theater can, and for the fun discussion you’ll have with your movie companion on the ride home.

I don’t know that you must watch Wicker(theatrical release) in theaters, but it’s a nice, low-effort kick-back movie that’s definitely worth watching at some point. The movie’s load-bearing elements include a horny Olivia Colman and a soliloquy-delivering Peter Dinklage, and both of those elements are enjoyable treats.

In an otherworldly sort of medieval-England-ish once-upon-a-time place, women get a ceremonial metal neck collar at their wedding and they go from being called by their father’s profession to being known by their husband’s profession. Thus did Doctor’s Daughter become Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki). But the single Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) is called by her own profession, that is when she isn’t being called something worse due to her smelly clothes or her dirty appearance. The other women of the village are such jerks about her romantic prospects that when she accidentally winds up with the “you’re next to marry” egg at a wedding ceremony, she spitefully asks the Basketmaker (Dinklage) to weave her a husband and pays him a handful of coins to do it. Come to the chapel in a month, he says. And in a month, Wicker (Alexander Skarsgard, wearing all that weaving very well) is there. After their very fast wedding comes their very satisfying wedding night. Sure, it’s weird that he’s a guy made of wicker, but he’s Alexander Skarsgard-height and says soulful things to Fisherwoman and soon all the townswomen who were catty about her life choices are longing for some basket action of their own. The men, naturally, are not delighted about this and soon everybody in town is grumbling about Fisherwoman and Fisherhusband/Wicker.

I don’t know that all the elements of this story about the joy of a love-match and the crappiness of mindless tradition and the importance of competent doctoring always work, but this twisted fairy tale with a little gender equality thrown in is fun. Debicki makes an excellent grown-up mean girl. Fresh off The Other Bennet Sister, Ella Bruccoleri adds a nice element of romantic desperation of her own as Baker’s Wife. Richard E. Grant as the Doctor offers a dash of entertaining, completely unwarranted, negligently homicidal confidence.

Colman is, of course, always a good time. Here she mixes humor, hurt and genuine heart in Fisherwoman and does a good job at making the relationship with Skarsgard spark with heat and emotion despite the basket-y shell his character is in.

Featured photo: You Can See Everything

A look at a few recent weirdo movies

It’s a week of oddities.

Klara and the Sun (in theaters now) is a Taika Waititi directed and co-written adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel of the same name. And I feel like “Taika Waititi” is the most accurate description of its genre as well — like, what would you call Jojo Rabbit, because this is also that.

Klara (Jenna Ortega) is a sun-charged Artificial Friend, specifically a B1 model, which is an older model and not as cool as the new Fancy Friend robots. Nevertheless, Store Manager (Natasha Lyonne) gamely tries to sell these discontinued models, even Klara, who is known among the other AFs as being weird. While spending time in the store’s front window, Klara sees Josie (Mia Tharia), a teenage girl. Josie gets her mom, Chrissy (Amy Adams), to purchase Klara for her, perhaps, as we come to realize, to serve as another set of watchful eyes on Josie because she is sick. Josie and Klara become teen-girl style besties, with Josie lending Klara her clothes and helping her navigate in the world (no easy task as Klara becomes momentarily disoriented in any new environment). Josie introduces Klara to Rick (Aran Murphy), who is Josie’s nearest (human) neighbor and who Josie calls her boyfriend. Rick is a sweet, nerdy tinkerer but he is not “lifted.” That is, he hasn’t had the surgery that enhances his intellect and abilities — which Josie received and which seems to have put an unfun burden of perfection on her. Also, when we see a group of “lifted” students together, they come off as teens whose “enhancements” have mostly enhanced how punchable they are. Long a believer that the Sun is a sort of deity that gives life and listens to her prayers, Klara turns to the Sun for help in healing Josie.

There are a lot of fascinating pieces here, starting with the production and costume design, which themselves feature a lot of fascinating pieces from store signs to Chrissy’s strangely futuristic-1960s outfits to her odd mansion sitting in the middle of fields of wheat. Inside the giant mansion, we see a massive dog sculpture and a piano and stereos that seems to feature reel-to-reel. It’s all stunning and confusing.

Likewise, elements of this movie are fascinating and confusing and don’t entirely mesh together into a coherent story. Mia Tharia gives a charming, natural performance as a young teenager dealing with a difficult medical prognosis and a bunch of heavy family stuff (her older sister died, her father has left, her mother is a clenched fist of fear and grief). Amy Adams is solid as a person whose grief and desperation have kind of made her crazy. Rachel House is funny and tart in a supporting role as a longtime family housekeeper. But there are times when they each feel like they are in a slightly different version of this story, when their performances don’t fully seem to gel with each other. And then there’s the relentlessly chipper Ortega, who plays Klara as something between a golden retriever and a 1980s-sitcom version of an exchange student. There is a way that her whole deal could have worked but she joins the rest of the movie — its characters, its Big Ideas about love and parenthood and family, its thoughts on robots and superhuman enhancements — just kind of floating in space, bumping into each other occasionally, but never quite interacting. Klara and the Sun, while not unpleasant, is a scattered watch.

Buddy (rent or purchase) offers a delightfully strange addition to spooky season. The movie is set in It’s Buddy, a kids’ TV show, something of the 1990s Disney/Nickelodeon live-action variety mixed with some Barney-esque large mascot-type creatures. Buddy (voice of Keegan-Michael Key), an orange unicorn, helps kids learn to be brave and to clean up via chirpy songs. Four children dance around and hug Buddy and sing songs with him — well, not Josh (Luke Speakman), who just wants to be left alone to read his book. When he rebels against some Buddy-supplied magic dancing shoes, we hear an off-camera scuffle and then Buddy later announces to the remaining three kids — Freddy (Delaney Quinn), Wade (Caleb Williams) and Oliver (Tristan Borders) — that Josh loved dancing so much he decided to go dance professionally in Diamond City. The kids are happy for Josh until Freddy sees his book, covered in blood, in the trash. In the next episode, new girl Hannah (Madison Skyy Polan) arrives but Freddy and Wade still want to figure out what happened to Josh and what they can do to help themselves.

Meanwhile suburban mom Grace (Cristin Milioti) does not believe her husband Ben (Topher Grace) when he says that their two sons represent the totality of their children. She even hires a psychic (Brooke Bloom), who senses something foreboding at the same time that It’s Buddy suddenly appears on the television. Though Ben shuts the TV off, Grace can’t shake the feeling that the show is a part of the mystery.

This movie is bloody, but goofily so (though very much R-rated). Buddy is obsessed with getting to the end of an episode so his “show” (and whatever physical damage he incurred) can reset and he can remain the center of everybody’s love and attention. Though occasionally TV-to-real-world transcending, Buddy mostly exists in It’s Buddy, in a fake-grass covered “park” with flowers that have faces and “alive” objects such as the mailbox (voice of Eric Bauza, who also voices Couchy and Trashy the trash can) and Freddy’s backpack (voice of Patton Oswalt). The look of the world is impressively accurate (by which I mean purposefully low-budget) and adds to the well-crafted sunshiney horror.

Put recent theatrical release Digger on an oddball, climate-change-related-ish double feature with Sacrifice, recently released on Netflix and starring Chris Evans having an absolute blast as Mike Tyler, an action film star. Mike, trying to rehabilitate himself after a viral breakdown, prepares to attend an event in Greece at which a character who I thought of as Shmeff Shmezos (Vincent Cassel, playing bald billionaire Ben Bracken) plans to announce a new source of energy. But the evening goes awry when a gang of cult members led by Joan (Anya Taylor-Joy) shows up to kidnap three people who will be sacrificed to a volcano to prevent an impending catastrophic eruption.

The movie features some nice supporting work: Salma Hayek as Ben’s wife who may hate him, Sam Richardson as Mike’s agent who is just trying to get him a new role. Though often laugh-out-loud funny, it is so much weirder even than Digger. Brutal violence, rich jerk satire, nature-delivered catastrophe — I guess that’s what we’re doing here in late 2026?

Featured photo: Klara and the Sun

Films in the two fall flavors

This latest adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (in theaters now) really highlights its status as the capital-R Romantic one of her core-four books.

This movie is also capital-G Gritty, though not in the “mean streets of Devonshire” sense but in the “Regency England probably did not smell great” sense. There is visible dirt on the grimy floor of the cottage the Dashwood ladies are banished to after their father dies and his weenie son (Tom Brooke) from his first marriage, egged on by his graspy wife Fanny (Stacy Martin), takes over the family estate. Widow Dashwood (Caitriona Balfe) does not like how her stepdaughter-in-law treats her and her daughters — Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) and young Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) — so Mama Dashwood takes distant cousin Mrs. Jennings’ (Fiona Shaw, who is chef’s-kiss perfect) offer of the cottage. It is small and dirty and puts Elinor very far away from Edward (George MacKay), the kind and seemingly-marriage-material brother of Fanny. But Mrs. Jennings assures the Dashwoods that her whole deal is matchmaking and she’s got the perfect (wealthy) Col. Brandon (Herbert Nordrum) for somebody, maybe Marianne. But Marianne is all starry-eyed about her own notion of romantic love, which should be full of passion!, which Austen always defines as “a handsome jerk,” who in this case is Willoughby (Frank Dillane).

In addition to the dirt and the wrinkles on clothes and the frizz in hair, this movie feels rawer than, say, the glossy 1995 adaptation, more openly emotional while still being aware of the Dashwoods’ precarious economic and social situation. This movie also has more sisterly-ness; the 1995 movie featured the then-mid-30something Emma Thompson and 20-year-old Kate Winslet as Elinor and Marianne, and they had a relationship that often felt more mother-daughter. Here, Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles clock in at 28 and 26 respectively, making them feel more like they are both going through the turmoil of young womanhood at the same time, if in their different ways. They are both making mistakes and learning, rather than Marianne just absorbing good behavior from Elinor. Likewise, Balfe brings a little something different to her role as their mother, who is often given little to do but be “old widow.” Here she doesn’t get a love plot but this Mrs. Dashwood isn’t someone in her dotage, she’s someone learning how to be in her new circumstance. One nice moment features her trying — without much success, based on Elinor’s facial expression — to figure out how to cook after years of being cooked for. (Also, Balfe as a performer is just a joy to be with.)

The movie is a fun watch, for fans of romances and Austen fans alike. And it has me eager to revisit the book, and maybe more adaptations. If you’re looking for other Sense and Sensibilitys: Hallmark+’s 2024 Sense and Sensibility is streaming on Hallmark+ and available for rent or purchase. A BBC three-part Sense and Sensibility from 2008 is available on a variety of platforms (Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, Pluto, Peacock, Hulu/Disney+, Britbox, The Roku Channel, etc.). The 1995 Sense and Sensibility is available for rent or purchase and on Pluto TV.

Fittingly, the rest of this week’s watches rest somewhere on the spooky or thriller continuums.

Whalefall, also new in theaters last week, had so much dumb potential, based on its premise: guy gets swallowed by a whale. The Bible did it and more recently 911 did it, the original-recipe Los Angeles-based version of the goofy rescue procedural (airing on ABC, available on Hulu/Disney+). In that Season 9 episode from 2025, guest star Mark Consuelos getting stuck in a whale (while on his cell phone!) was only one of several events in the episode (though it led to this whole multi-episode arc where some characters go to space, like definitely check it out if dumb fun is your thing). Here, we take about 30 minutes to get to guy-in-whale; in this case “guy” is Jay, played by Austin Abrams, who I kept thinking of as off-brand Timothée Chalamet. Jay goes diving off the California coast looking for the remains of his dad (Josh Brolin), who suffered from an increasingly debilitating illness and died by suicide a year earlier. I don’t know if “look for remains a year later” is how the ocean works but this setup does provide the shaky scaffolding on which to hang several flashback scenes of Jay and Dad’s terrible relationship. Each incident of crummy parenting does, however, contain advice that Jay is able to apply to his attempts to get out of the whale. Along the way, he runs into other still-alive creatures that have been eaten and deals with his unresolved guilt about not seeing his dad once he got sick.

The mix of gross-out whale-stomach scenes and borderline abusive parenting is weird and not what I’m looking for in my “guy swallowed by whale” movie. The movie’s moments of dumb fun-ness or improbable whale biology really clash with the scenes of, like, a drunk Brolin’s character smashing a beer can on his head and trying to give his son a face tattoo with a knife.

For more — and better! — scary-water stuff, definitely check out Below, a six-episode series on Netflix starring Josh Hartnett. Hartnett plays Cal Penny, who lives in Newfoundland and would be a fisherman, like his forefathers, but for government regulations about commercial fishing. Instead, he fishes for chunks of icebergs, which he sells to the local vodka distillery. Cal has three adult children: son Wade (Charlie Heaton), who lives with him; daughter Mary (Ruby Stokes), who returns to the island from college in Montreal with boyfriend Noah (Kaleb Horn) for a townwide celebration, and his son Jay (Rohan Campbell), who works in oil fields out west. He is still mourning the death of his wife, their mother, and the long-ago death of his father, which happened when the family was being relocated by the government from a smaller fishing town to the slightly more populous small town he lives in now. And from which Cal and everyone he knows may be relocated again. Cal is attached to his home and to the ocean, even though, on the day his father presumably drowned while bringing the family across a bay, Cal saw a big Something in the water. That Something may be back, possibly related to changing climate and warming waters in the ocean, as local scientist Fonda (Mackenzie Davis), suspects.

Reviews frequently compare this show to Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay, and while that series is superior, this one has some similar small-town, spooky-water vibes and is plenty fun. The standout performance for me is Willow Kean, who plays Cal’s sister Ruth and whose whole person emits delightful “Not Here For Your Nonsense” vibes.

Hokum (a May theatrical release that is now available for rent or purchase and streaming on Hulu) is an old-school haunted-house/scary-witch story. Miserable jerk author Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is having a hard time ending his popular book trilogy. He goes to Ireland to be miserable and jerkish in a new locale while he fights this writer’s block, and to scatter his parents’ ashes near the grounds of the quaint (which in this case means “mildew-y looking”) inn where they went on their honeymoon decades ago. Upon arrival, he has a full day: scattering ashes; meeting Jerry (David Wilmot), a local who makes moonshine and grows psychotropic mushrooms; being a real butthead to bellhop Alby (Will O’Connell), and even laying on thick snark with Fiona (Florence Ordesh), a bartender who is nice to him even when he’s being the worst. Fiona is the one who tries to return the stuff he left at the bar after drunkedly returning to his room. She has a bad feeling about the headspace he’s in, and subsequently finds Ohm attempting to harm himself. When Ohm finally leaves the hospital days later, he learns that Fiona went missing the day after she saved him (which happened to be Halloween) and that the inn is preparing to close for the season. Jerry finds Ohm and is certain that Fiona is calling to him from the hotel, probably from the honeymoon suite, which is locked up tight because the owner says he captured a witch in there years earlier.

Even before Ye Olde Witch-Prison Inn, Ohm seems haunted both figuratively by his family’s past and literally by a ghostly figure. In addition, there may be at least one more uneasy spirit at the inn and there’s a lot of talk of a demonic witch who kidnaps children. All of this seemed to be both laying it on thick and resulting in an overall spookiness that felt a little thin — more like watching one not-great dude’s slide into a deeper pool of self-loathing, which is not the kind of “scary” I’m looking for in my Spooky Season movies. But about halfway through, the movie picks up, with a nice examination of grief and guilt along with some supernaturalness and good old-fashioned Mur-Der. This movie isn’t great but it’s quietly entertaining — or like, entertaining enough when you want something horror-y but not big scares or gore. And Adam Scott is naturally compelling enough that we can walk through this haunted house with him, jerkishness and all.

The documentary Clown Panic (streaming on Hulu) is an oddball scary-movie watch. It is about real events — the 2016 spate of clown sightings that I have a vague memory of from a year when a lotta other things were going on. Its interview subjects swing wildly from a reporter sent to do an early story about the clown sightings and a professional clown talking about how much the whole thing was a real bummer for his profession to the family members of both victim and perpetrator in a clown-related assault that ended with the death of one young man and the incarceration of another. And a pastor says something like “the story of the clowns is the story of modern America” which is both ridiculous and accurate. Lines are drawn to previous frenzies such as the 1980s Satanic Panic and the Salem Witch Trails. This isn’t a light lift, per se, with its pokes into issues of race, poverty, law enforcement and the 2016-ness of it all. I think in the end this documentary manages to be (mostly) respectful to the people who suffered genuine injury during this whole clown thing and to capture the absolute weirdness of it all.

It Ends(an August theatrical release, according to Wikipedia, that is now available for rent or purchase) is labeled on Apple as a thriller and there are definitely moments of suspense and even terror here, but I think the movie and the story it tells is a lot more “whatever you think it is” than that. Four friends from high school — Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth) and James (Phinehas Yoon) — have gotten together after three of them (all but Tyler) have graduated from college. A drive to drop one of them off leads them to take a road through a forest, one that is not lit, not populated and, Tyler realizes, probably taking them past where they were supposed to turn off. He makes a U-turn, heads back and finds a wall of trees where he’s certain they turned onto the road. As they try to figure out where they are and find phone service, they see and hear movement in the trees around them that quickly turns into a horde of people maniacally running toward them. They get back in the car and speed back down the road.

After all the initial “what is happening,” they start trying to investigate the situation — nobody is hungry or particularly sleepy, which would suggest no passage of time, but the sun rises and sets and when Fisher is injured he starts to heal. They time how long it takes between when they stop the car and the screaming horde shows up. They carefully scan through the radio frequencies. Tyler starts to take quick investigative dashes into the woods. Meanwhile, the combination of fear, boredom and uncertainty leads to a variety of conversations and intragroup relationship dynamics.

This is an existential nightmare? A metaphor for life? A commentary on post-college despair and confusion? I think “sure, could be” is the right answer for all of those things. The play-on-wheels quality is well put together (the story is both claustrophobically all in the car and also in an infinite unknown) and these characters, who we don’t know a whole lot about, are nonetheless very well built in terms of understanding their actions. It’s a compelling watch.

Featured photo: Sense and Sensibility.

In praise of fun messes and silly horror

This week, I appreciate the crazy swing and the “let’s just have fun with it” over the movies that get stuck in their own tar pits of seriousness.

“This is a big weird plate of crazy mess” was my thought while watching Digger(in theaters), the latest movie from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu (who also co-wrote). If your Iñárritu experience is, say, The Revenant, I could see how going from that to this could seem confusing in the “how is this the same guy?” sense (“cinematography and production design” would be my answer). There is more similarity here to his Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which like this movie has some backstage-at-a-theater elements. But really I think the line you can draw more directly is to 2022’s Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, where, for example, stuff about family and immigration and Mexico’s relationship with the U.S. is mixed with recurring images of axolotlsand the main character talking to the ghost of Hernán Cortés. This is very much that — Something Important to Say mixed in with a lot of ideas, strangeness and whimsy. And with elements that had me thinking of the Coen Brothers and even Wes Anderson.

Tom Cruise is the other big swing happening here — he plays a character named Digger Rockwell, a loud yee-haw American oil man. When an oil operation in Greenland causes an explosion that sets a big sheet of ice adrift, he’s more concerned with saving his business than saving the lives of the millions of Europeans in the path of what will be a devastating flood. Adding to the Coen Brothers feel are John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons and others as hapless U.S. government officials.

The movie takes some twists I found myself willing to just sort of go with, even to some obvious places. Headlines from early reviews and its dismal box office performance had me expecting a dud, but this is more interesting than that. It is fascinating in its presentation and Tom Cruise is clearly Doing A Thing, a little flight of fancy from his standard action fare. Here, he’s loose and weird and very watchable. Not great, exactly, but very watchable — which is also how I’d explain this oddball movie overall.

Expectation, of course, can color your reaction to a movie. Perhaps moviegoers expecting bloodcurdling horror will be disappointed by Other Mommy(in theaters), but I found it one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen about parenting anxiety, middle-age dissatisfaction and mom-pressure. Oh, and a demon — in addition to the mistakes of parenthood, the Big Scary here includes a demon.

Jessica Chastain plays regular human mom Ursula, who works a lot and doesn’t have patience for all the kid stuff, like listening to daughter Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) “Story of Me” essay. Chastain also plays Other Mommy, the spooky something-in-the-closet that Bela gets up to play with after lights out. Other Mommy looks like Ursula but with darker hair, sharper bangs and extra creepiness. Also, I guess she doesn’t walk so much as levitate.

The first delight of this movie is that after a basic introduction to Ursula and her husband, Russell (Jay Duplass), who is the primary kid caretaker, and to the marital tension between them, we pretty quickly get to Russell setting eyes on Other Mommy creepily hiding under a table. Russell freaks out, grabs Bela, leaves the house and calls the police. Not long after this, Ursula also gets a look at Other Mommy and is also freaked out. Thus we totally skip all the “is it a ghost or just the wind?” nonsense that stretches out your standard horror movie and get right to this couple trying to figure out what the heck to do about this entity. Can they just leave the house? Do they need to call a priest? Does Ursula’s mother (Karen Allen), a frequent consultant of psychics and mediums and a big Russell-disliker, have friends who can help?

There are some jump scares here and some real-world “my child is lost in a ball pit!” fears. But most of the horror, such as it is, is the ever-swirling, low-grade dread built on the “am I screwing up my kid with some element of my life I don’t even realize impacts them” stuff. The movie tempers this with a fair amount of sly humor that for me made this more funny than scary. And it accomplishes all of its fun-horror business in a brisk 93 minutes.

Going funnier could have helped Soulm8te (streaming on Hulu and available for rent or purchase), a highly skippable spooky-season movie, which Wikipedia says is or was supposed to be part of the M3gan universe but which doesn’t capture that movie’s blend of scariness and zaniness. In Soulm8te, the sentient evil robot is now a “companion” (which means exactly what you think it means) with robots in beta testing who all look like Lily Sullivan, who plays “Sara,” main nerd David’s (David Rysdahl) special new robot friend. David is a sad nerd still mourning his recent-ishly deceased wife and can’t yet act on coworker Aubrey’s (Claudia Doumit) totally unwarranted attraction to him. But he sure as heck can help devise a “Sara” who can be his bestest friend and confidant. When “Sara” isn’t sassy enough to feel “real,” David messes around in her code and yada yada yada her software update makes her a clingy killer.

I get that this movie probably thinks it’s doing Social Commentary about what men think they want and how women feel they need to respond. I happened to see the Saturday Night Live “Mean, Scary Girlfriend” skit with Dakota Johnson about the same time I saw this movie, and that video short does something in a few minutes that is similar and funnier than what this movie does in its 99 minutes. Soulm8teneeded to be smarter and/or a whole lot dumber to reach those M3gan absurdity heights.

Taking itself way too seriously is The Social Reckoning(in theaters). A sequel to 2010’s The Social Network, this movie is also written by Aaron Sorkin, who this time replaces David Fincher in the director’s chair. This means that for The Social Reckoning Sorkin, not unlike Mark Zuckerberg as portrayed here, has no one to tell him “no.” Every scene with a man and a woman talking to each other features at least one line of dialogue that makes me want to throw something at the screen and the only things more loathsome than the villains are the “nice guy” heroes. And Jeremy Strong does a very good job of making Zuckerberg a pretty loathsome villain. We primarily see him as he preps for his appearance at U.S. Congressional hearings. This prep happens to take place on Jan. 6, 2021, in the movie’s telling, which means that all the arguing he does with staff and advisors about the wording of his answers and why he won’t fact-check political ads eventually takes a back seat to real-world troubles that social media has inflamed.

Intercut with these scenes are scenes of Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) starting in 2019 when he begins covering Facebook. Eventually he makes contact with Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a true Facebook believer who works for the company’s civic integrity team. She’s concerned about some of the evidence Facebook is ignoring about its operations — specifically, she learns that a formerly politically progressive friend has become a racist right winger. How does this happen, she asks, kind of knowing how it happens but initially reluctant to blow open all of Facebook’s dodgy methods for increasing engagement.

Set aside the arguments between Frances and Josh, two people presented as roughly the same age, that sound like an aughts-era Millennial girlie versus a Boomer dad debating the issues at Thanksgiving. And the criminal underuse of Betty Gilpin, who plays an editor/boss cartoon character. And the movie’s attitude about those Wall Street Journal stories which, as you’ll recall, totally led to serious, well-enforced regulation of social media, a culture of robust local and national journalism and a fully functional government. Even setting aside all of these variously maddening things, The Social Reckoning feels like a movie that could have been an op-ed, like Sorkin wanted to be sure that we know that he knows The Social Network wasn’t the end of the story. There is no narrative reason for this movie to be; the Wall Street Journal series does not provide the dramatic tension the movie seems to think it does. Full of Sorkin-y twitches, this movie doesn’t feel like it has anything particularly new or thoughtful to say about Zuckerberg, the later years of Facebook or what Sorkin thinks it all means.

Similarly mired in its own Importantness is Netflix’s new release Animals. The quick review of Animals is that I liked it better when I saw it last year and it was called Highest 2 Lowest (still available on Apple). Like that Spike Lee movie, Animals features a seemingly wealthy and powerful man dealing with the kidnapping of his son, which then is revealed to be something else. But while that movie, imperfect though it was, had a Spike Lee bounce and riveting performances from Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright, Animals has just a whole lot of flailing.

Ben Affleck is, according to Wikipedia, a co-writer and director in addition to the movie’s male lead, Mark Kimball. A candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, Mark gets a call that his son, Denny (Christopher Woodley), who he believes is out trick-or-treating, has been kidnapped by a man who wants $7 million for his safe return. Mark should have the money but, as he’s neglected to tell his wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington), he’s basically blown most of their money, including the significant fortune inherited from his father, on the election that he is currently losing. Don’t worry, though; Abigail has her own secret and his name is Ron (Ray Fisher), a man who has just left his own wife so they can be together.

I know a lady who can give us the cash, says Mark’s campaign manager, Sam (Steven Yeun, probably giving the movie’s best performance). Sam calls a woman Wikipedia says is named Dayle (Gillian Anderson), but it’s clear that’s not her name nor will any of these people ever know it. Dayle is someone who can show up with $7 million in cash in the middle of the night but requires $1.4 million as payment for that service. She also offers some advice on dealing with the kidnapper and does so in the clipped British accent of a Gillian Anderson having a great time playing a silly character. When the Kimballs’ housekeeper Cecilia (Adriana Paz) and her boyfriend Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez) discuss the character, what they decide is that everybody is scared of her and she seems like a Mafiosa, both of which are fairly accurate.

Cecilia and Ramon are mixed into the tale because Cecilia was with Denny when he was taken and because the Kimballs turned her down when she asked them to hire Ramon, who is undocumented. We in the audience already know from the movie’s opening scenes that the kidnapper’s whole deal is something else entirely, but the movie spends a lot of time talking about The Latino Community in a way that doesn’t feel, you know, problem-free. Mark is currently behind his opponent (a Latina candidate) in polls of Latino voters, whose votes he needs to win. And he can’t hire Ramon because that would break the law but later when Ramon needs his help Mark can’t turn him away because that would be bad for showing solidarity with those voters. Also Mark is a Good Guy who needs to make a Moral Choice and “oh barf” is my response to all the movie’s clunky nonsense about Mark’s goodness and of-the-people-ness.

This movie feels like it tries on different variations of who it wants Mark to be and those different types of guy don’t all fit together. There is a scene somewhere in the middle of the movie between Mark and Abigail that feels fully cut out of a different movie with different characters. This movie picks up story ideas, turns them around for a bit, and then, like, forgets them entirely. Unlike Digger, Animal isn’t a fascinating mess, just a box full of L.A. noir scraps and thriller pieces that add up to nothing.

Also having absolutely no fun is Apple TV’s release Matchbox: The Movie, whichfeels like a bit from Apple TV’s comedy series The Studio that accidentally became a feature-length movie. If Mattel’s idea here was that it could just Barbie any toy into a popular film, hopefully this will at least slow that IP wave a little bit. Unlike Barbie in Barbie, Matchbox cars here feel more like a product placement than like an integrated part of the film.

In a 1990s that looks more late-1970s, a bunch of kids who call themselves the Matchbox Gang hang out at one of their uncle’s (Bill Camp) salvage yard and autobody shop, playing with Matchbox cars, until one of their number, Sean, moves away from their home town. In the now, Sean (John Cena), a super secret CIA whatever, returns to pay his respects when the uncle dies and decides to hang out with old buddies Crosby (Sam Richardson) and Charmaine (Teyonah Parris), who are now married to each other; Ted (Arturo Castro), who is now an AP high school science teacher, and Aimee (Jessica Biel), Sean’s long ago crush. But “just a few drinks” leads to the gang getting drugged and waking up in a cargo plane. The CIA now believes that Sean never actually delivered the nuclear weapon he was supposed to deliver in the movie’s initial (forgettable) action scene. Sean insists he did deliver the weapon, which means someone else on his team has turned traitor. Soon Sean and his gang of regular-Joe friends (though each with some pretty specific and helpful skills, like Charmaine’s ability to fly a helicopter and speak a bunch of languages and Ted’s ability to blow stuff up) are tasked with finding the errant bomb to save the world.

Matchbox: The Movie is rated PG-13; had it gone for a PG, I think some of the flat-soda quality, the Supermarket Brand Movie Product nature of this could have been forgivable as the price you pay for watching something newly released for “free” with the whole family at home. But this movie is probably too violent for that and definitely too boring and plasticine to watch on purpose as an adult or a teen or anybody who has any better choices at all, to include other movies, TV, books, sleep or staring at the wall. Cena has less than his normal sparkle and nobody has any human chemistry with each other. The movie isn’t fun, isn’t funny and doesn’t, like, Matchbox at all.

Featured photo: Digger.

Half-baked but fully fun Verity

Anne Hathaway understands how to do the most. In Verity (in theaters), Hathaway plays Verity Crawford, a famous and wealthy author, as a cartoon Disney wicked stepmother-type, all arched eyebrows and devious glares. It’s a big, fun, campy performance and I wish the movie could have given it even more room to do its big campy thing.

Verity has suffered traumatic injury from a car accident and can no longer move or talk or communicate in any way. Cared for in her home by her husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), and a nurse, Anna (Irina Dvorovenko), Verity has left behind enough notes that her publisher believes ghostwriter Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) will be able to piece together three new novels. Lowen goes to Verity and Jeremy’s secluded Vermont lake house — where Jeremy lives with his young son Crew (Brady Warner) — to dig through Verity’s notes. The couple also had a daughter, Harper (Sienna Kulovitz), Crew’s twin, who recently drowned in the nearby lake. Also, Lowen’s mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship, recently died of cancer. Also, as the movie starts, Lowen is walking to her publisher’s office when she is showered with the blood of a bicyclist who is killed just steps away from her. The absurdity of how all this is presented was, for me, “ha!”-inducing and really set the tone for the operatic wail of a movie to follow.

When Lowen gets to Vermont, she paws through Verity’s things and finds a secret — secret! — manuscript which we hear/see Hathaway narrating as though it is an entry in some sort of “It was a dark and stormy night” contest for Most Dramatic! Was Verity harboring deep dark secrets — secrets! — or is something else behind the sinister vibe in the family’s home?

The fun part of a movie like this is that for any of this to work, everybody needs to seem a little bit like a serial killer and we, in the audience, get to guess who is the killeriest. Hathaway and Hartnett both walk this line — maybe a killer? — pretty well. Johnson, who the movie even pegs as having “resting bored face,” is probably less successful, with her built in “cool girl” quality pushing her just out of phase with the playing-it-straight performances that Hathaway and Hartnett are giving. When Lowen takes an earnest turn toward the end of the movie, it also feels sort of jarring and not quite fitting.

But also, so what? This movie is amusing even when it doesn’t entirely make sense. There is a dishiness, a smooth peanut butter richness to the movie that could use more bite but goes down easy enough that I didn’t really mind the smarter, stronger structure it was missing.

Featured photo: Verity.

A look at the latest from Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart plus more recent releases

Primetime, a recently-released-in-theaters look at NBC’s Chris Hansen at the height of his To Catch a Predator fame, does a good job at highlighting its best asset: Robert Pattinson throwing his whole body into playing a weird character with a weird voice.

Pattinson plays Hansen as a man singlemindedly obsessed with fulfilling NBC head Jeff Zucker’s (playing himself) command that he beat Lost, his time-slot competitor, in the new season’s ratings. This Hansen, who gives off the sense of spiritually being at the edge of a psychotic break despite looking like a standard, well-coiffed newsman, harbors deep insecurities, best demonstrated by his hilarious jealous rage at fellow Dateline reporter Stone Phillips (Bill Heck). Beneath the TV exterior of his personality, there seems to be a boiling cauldron of crazy — Hansen doesn’t know how to be a normal person with his wife (Anna Faris) and kids, with the woman (Caroline Hebert) he’s cheating with or with Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), the 20something actor who Hansen calls “Decoy Dan” for his work playing a young teen when the predators show up to meet in person. Perhaps the only person who can break through his delusion and paranoia is Andie (Merritt Wever), his producer, who is fully aware that they are working in a sleaze-based medium but is also pretty desperate to keep her position as this sleazy endeavor’s captain.

IMDb calls this movie a “psychological drama” and “thriller” and Wikipedia goes with “psychological crime thriller” but throughout I was mostly reading this as bleak, dark comedy about a specific era in media. Dan, just hoping to get his union membership from this role, is maybe the closest the movie gets to a sympathetic character. Pattinson’s Hansen is more of a fascinating trainwreck happening in front of you. I have no idea if the real guy is anything like this; “he thinks he’s Mike Wallace” some sound engineers say at one point. Pattison plays Hansen like a guy who is straining to believe he’s Mike Wallace and maybe cracking because he can’t “believe” away his personal and professional sordidness. I don’t feel that Oscar heft that this movie’s marketing had me expecting, but I do think this is a solid watch if you enjoy tense satire.

The Robert Pattinson-ness of Primetime led me to check out The Wrong Girls (an August theatrical release available for rent or purchase), whichstars fellow “Twilight movies take up ¾ of my IMDb known-fors” actor Kristen Stewart. Written and directed by Stewart’s wife, Dylan Meyer, The Wrong Girls is a showcase for my favorite kind of Stewart performance: Stewart as total goofball. See also 2019’s Charlie’s Angels and her Saturday Night Live appearances. Here, she’s Frankie, a Stanford dropout treading water in life, giving up immediately on anything that seems to be hard and putting all of her brainpower into inventing, for example, a giant bong. Frankie and roommate Molly (Alia Shawkat), who works a job she hates and dreams of becoming an avant garde chef for dishes (e.g. brownies with blue cheese) that are apparently excellent when high. Which this duo is most of the time. Behind on rent and accidentally handed a briefcase full of bottles of a strange glowy substance, Frankie and Molly decide to attempt to sell what they presume are drugs to make up their cash shortfall. They of course try out their product first, which gives them the ability to read each other’s minds and, when mixed with THC, possibly makes them telekinetic. Because, of course, other people want this substance, Frankie and Molly soon find themselves on the run with their cats (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani and Seth Rogen), whose very judgy minds they can also hear.

Zack Fox, LaKeith Stanfield, Tony Hale and Kate McKinnon also appear in this movie, which I would consider a very relaxed comedy; the jokes are loosely constructed and float by at a non-urgent pace. And it’s fine — enjoyable and funny in a comfy sort of way. I could take or leave the stoner-ness of the movie but I was charmed by the friendship, both the chemistry between Shawkat and Stewart and the “desperate love with minor quibbles about each other” quality of their relationship.

Here are some more recent releases I caught up on:

• Best of the Best (Netflix) is every great thing about a dance movie, a Pitch Perfect-style college extracurricular movie and a best friend movie. Maya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Anjali (Priyanka Kedia) are lifelong besties who have become roommates in their freshman year at UCLA. They also both love dance — though Maya doesn’t love that people know her as “Drone Strike” from a viral video shot at her high school talent show where a complex dance routine with drones lighting the stage went wrong and she took a drone to the head. When she learns about UCLA’s competitive Bollywood dance team, Maya encourage-pressures Anjali to join it with her, even though Anjali’s mother (Janina Gavankar) is extremely adamant that Anjali focus solely on her studies.

There are some boys (Ankur Rathee, Chaneil Kular) and some dance team politics but the true friction for this friendship is long-simmering resentments and fears — Maya says Anjali has always been the friendly, pretty one; Anjali fears Maya thinks she’s smarter and more talented. But we’re not friends, one says to the other at one point, we’ve always been sisters — hurray for best-friendship! In addition to this winning pair, the movie has some nice specificity about the experiences of Southeast Asian kids and their families and comedy that’s based on relationships and down-to-Earth (rather than, like, National Lampoon-style) aspects of college life. And we get some very fun dance numbers.

• The Rivals of Amziah King(an August theatrical release, now available for rent or purchase) is giving The Sticky vibes, if you recall that late-2024 series about maple syrup starring Margo Martindale on Prime Video (where it is still available and worth a watch), as well as some hints of The Lowdown (the latest very good Sterlin Harjo TV show on Hulu, slated to come back for its second season in October). Here (here being Oklahoma), Amziah King (Matthew McConaughey) is an expert in honey, which he produces (or rather, as he explains, his bees produce the honey — he is a man who deeply loves and respects his bees). The movie opens with law enforcement asking him to consult on some stolen honey, trying to help them track down who it might have originally belonged to. This leads to a strange series of events involving a dramatic farm injury that takes him to a hospital and then to a nearby diner several towns away from where he lives, which is where he runs into Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), a young adult woman who was once a foster child Amziah and his wife raised for a few years before his wife died. Amziah brings Kateri back into his orbit and she seems delighted to be working with him on his bees and hanging out with his circle of musician friends who perform at church socials and the like. Their peace is broken when Kateri discovers that all of Amziah’s hives have been stolen. The police understand how devastating the loss is for the farm but they can’t really do much about it. Kateri decides to take it on herself to find the bees, retrieve the honey and maybe get some vengeance against the person who wronged them.

The movie starts with McConaughey and his buddies playing upbeat Americana at a drive-in restaurant, and throughout we get to know Amziah’s open-hearted personality in part through the music he plays. This feels like it should clash with the crime (some of it quite violent) and heist elements of the movie that come later, but somehow it all works together. The movie is kind and good-hearted and joyous and features murders and chosen-familial loyalty. It’s a weird mix but McConaughey plays it well and LookingGlass shows herself to be one to watch.

• Tony (an August theatrical release available for rent or purchase) gives us the “portrait of the artist as a highly slappable young man” tale of college student Anthony Bourdain. When we meet him, Tony (Dominic Sessa) is fairly confident that he’s got a writing fellowship in the bag, even though it would take saintly patience not to make barfing gestures when he describes the plot of the pretentious novel he plans to write. He is a world-class talent at being a massive jerk, a fact the real-life Bourdain was later aware of, based on the quote from his memoir Kitchen Confidential that starts the movie. When he doesn’t get the fellowship and can’t bear the thought of a summer spent with his parents, Tony basically runs away to Provincetown, chasing a girl from high school who he ran into at a bar. His attempts to pursue her are so bad I actually turned the volume down while watching it because Sessa is excellent at crafting a character who is an absolute wienball while thinking he’s being clever and charming, which makes his wienballness so much worse. Tony’s despair leads him to get so drunk at a local restaurant that he winds up sleeping it off first on the sidewalk outside the restaurant and then on the chef’s hammock. When Tony asks to stay another night or two, the Chef (Antonio Banderas, whose character Wikipedia calls José Vatel, though I don’t know if we ever hear his name) agrees in exchange for Tony’s services as a dishwasher in the restaurant. Five days a week, show up at 10:45 a.m. — a task that José makes easier by waking Tony up every morning with a pot full of sea water to the face. Tony continues to insist that he is a writer but we see him finding his place in the hyper-masculine camaraderie/abuse (and substance abuse) and discipline of the restaurant kitchen.

I remember some of this story — the vibes, really, more than specific incidents — from Kitchen Confidential. What we’re seeing here is more a slice of one young person’s growth — a completely insufferable adolescent becoming a slightly more mature, slightly more outward-looking person. And, especially once life humbles Tony a little, it’s a compelling watch, with Sessa playing against Banderas and Leo Woodall (playing, basically, kitchen worker cautionary tale), who are pulling Tony in occasionally opposing directions of order and chaos, respectively.

• Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (an August release available for rent or purchase) is the most recent movie written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, who also wrote and directed I Saw The TV Glow. This movie feels like continuation of the thoughts in that movie — what it means to watch a TV show or movie and your reaction to it and how your reaction is and isn’t a part of the overall package of what the movie is doing and how your reaction at a young age can be completely different from what you feel rewatching it decades later. This movie adds another twist of ouroboros-like meta commentary by being about a director, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), trying to do a reboot on the Camp Miasma horror series, which the movie explains as sort of a Friday the 13th/Sleepaway Camp multi-entry franchise of decades prior. Kris travels to the abandoned camp from the first movie to seek out Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), that movie’s “final girl” actor who bought the camp to serve as her retreat from the world. As an LGBTQ filmmaker, Kris explains to Billy, she knows she’s been brought in to smooth out some of the transphobic elements of the original film and to bring a “woke” twist to the movie while still being recognizable IP, the only thing movie studios are willing to spend money on. Billy approaches all of this explanation with an eyeroll to all the over-intellectualizing — and she isn’t fully sold on having any part of the project, which Kris feels is important.

Anderson seems like she’s having a blast here, playing Billy as a self-aware Norma Desmond (she claims she’s not and then wears the turban) in Dolly Parton hair who always seems like she might be floating away to woo-woo land or might just be messing with Kris to amuse herself. Or maybe both. She’s great, is what I’m saying, and she pairs nicely with the very serious, very “I’m here to do the work” of Einbinder’s Kris. The movie has fun with the horror movie tropes while also having fun with Billy and Kris having fun with horror movie tropes, including how horror movies approach sex and what that all means. And it all works? Or works enough for me, mixing Hollywood movie-making humor with strange little story elements.

• Fuze (an April Prime Video release), a movie that starts with the discovery of a World War II bomb in present-day downtown London, will not pain you to watch but it also will not, sorry, blow you away with its energy or innovation. Major Will Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is called in when a construction crew digs up what appears to be a large unexploded bomb in a building site. The surrounding area is quickly evacuated — though in one building, a group of men (including one played by Sam Worthington) sit quietly in an apartment, not moving at the knock by police. As the Army works to secure and disarm the bomb, the men and their brains-of-the-operation George (Theo James) scurry around the neighborhood, sneaking into a basement and jackhammering through a wall to get to the bank vault next door. Because the police (as personified by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) have drones and heat sensors, they eventually catch on that the bomb-endangered area might not be completely empty.

This setup is fine — fun even. Who doesn’t like an overly complicated heist? But there is some tonal weirdness — is this a bouncy fun bad guys versus badder guys versus lady cop situation? Or a tense and serious affair? Or did the movie want to somehow do both things? And the movie builds itself up only to sort of balloon-slow-leak to the end.

Featured photo: Robert Pattinson in Primetime.