The Mongoose
The paperwork authorizing another Liam Neeson rampage is finally in order.
In other words, the ’goose is loose.
Disclosure Day
If you’ve spent all year praising Obsession, Curry Barker’s masterclass in doing more with less, may I remind you that he’s not the only living director who can take something you’ve seen before and turn it into something you can’t stop watching.
Spielberg submits Disclosure Day as evidence of how little machinery his own brand of enchantment requires. There are spectacular stunts, to be sure—two people board a moving train from a car being dragged underneath it—but the film seldom needs anything so elaborate to keep us captivated.
By Any Means
If you brave this thing, you might find yourself wishing for it to settle into nothing more than Scarpa’s door-to-door distribution of mob justice on the KKK guys with Strider falling into lockstep behind him.
I did. It’s the only part that approaches enjoyable.
Don’t beat yourself up over it. Whether the blows come from Scarpa’s fists or By Any Means’ wild tonal swings, we’ll all admit to something after enough head trauma.
Clayface
A desperate man agrees to experimental surgery and wakes up with a superhero franchise where his face used to be. Deadpool. Clayface. I’m starting to suspect Hollywood’s plastic surgeons waive their fees if you let them keep final cut.
But Nip/Fuck-it here we go.
Hope
It’s important to go through life with hope. Grandma just brought a machine gun and some snacks in case that shit doesn’t work.
Sacrifice
Unfortunately for the young revolutionaries, they choose possibly the worst moment to make an entrance and be taken seriously. Bracken’s soiree is in the middle of the pre-dinner entertainment, a delirious neon spectacle that looks like an early-2000s Madonna music video got drunk and decided to produce an Earth Day PSA.
Street Fighter
If all that sounds like I’m gratuitously throwing shit at the wall, welp you have a working understanding of Street Fighter, give or take some dick jokes. Evaluating whether this Pollock painting of electro-vomit succeeds would first require getting my head around what the hell it’s trying to do. And I’m convinced that doing so would mean missing the point altogether.
Matchbox the Movie
Credit to Michael Bay—well shit, look what this movie has made me say—for choosing a toy line with some actual mythology for his shill-fated Transformers. Autobots. Decepticons. Megan Fox. There was at least something to exploit besides the trademark. Or at least something to cut to.
Animals
If you’re just here for thumbs up or down, head out now. Greenlighting this thing was a worse decision than trying to do a prostate exam over Zoom.
The Social Reckoning
Reckoning is ultimately more invested in proving its case than making us feel the consequences of winning it.
Which is the hilariously inescapable fucking irony.
Here’s a movie about a company that perfected the art of keeping people engaged without making them feel connected that leaves us feeling like we’re just scrolling the investigation’s feed.
Over Your Dead Body
[The movie] is less Brangelina's sleek, sexy marital combat than the “we buy fake blood by the pallet at Costco” school of filmmaking. Closer to this year's other Weaving-anchored Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, only with a little marital resentment mixed into the arterial spray.
The Drama
This exact pickle may not appear verbatim in the sickness-and-health spiel, but romantic movies have been mining that quarry since roughly the invention of the Hallmark Channel.
Digger
Digger is like a Zillow listing describing a room with six chandeliers, leopard carpet, and an in-floor jacuzzi as “eclectic maximalism.” Sometimes a mess just has a media consultant.
Verity
Finally we get to the headboard-biting meat of it.
Obsession
Some movies just have the stuff. Watching them is like living for a day as Burt Reynolds in his prime. You’ve got the whole lifestyle at your disposal: the sex, the drugs, the tableside guacamole. All you have to do is sit down and enjoy the ride.
Unabomber
Structurally, Unabomber proceeds as a split-narrative taco salad of terrible.
Primetime
The only critical conclusion I’ll provide is that Primetime is absolutely worth watching. Some asshole standing outside the theater with a clipboard telling you how much you’re required to give a shit when it’s over, however, isn’t worth swerving for.
Supergirl
Alcock showed up ready to play a Kryptonian train wreck who could drink you under the table, beat the shit out of somebody in the parking lot, and still somehow be the coolest person in the room. All the screenplay had to do was stay the fuck out of her way. Instead, it made her the designated driver.
The Love Hypothesis
Put black powder under the right metal salts and you can make the sky explode in any color you want. Humanity figured this out hundreds of years ago. We still do it all the time.
Take a BookTok phenomenon and a production seemingly content to appeal only to its built-in audience, and you can produce The Love Hypothesis: a movie that has every ingredient required for combustion and still refuses to end in fire.
Runner
We’re just hoping the gigantor-and-tater-tot casting will be as funny as that recipe has been since time immemorial, which historians generally define as “before TikTok.”
And man, are those hopes plucked from our bodies like they’re just another target of the movie’s organ-harvesting bad guys.
The End of Oak Street
Nothing restores perspective to a strained marriage quite like several tons of prehistoric relationship counseling arriving through a wormhole.
Resident Evil
It’s creepy, gratuitously adorned with slime, and oh so long overdue.
Project Hail Mary
Project Hail Mary settles into what may be the most heartwarming intergalactic buddy movie ever made
In the Grey
Watch it once. Guy Ritchie has already watched it enough times for both of us.
Practical Magic 2
Sometimes the magic works. Sometimes you just own the IP.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Alas, enter the Punisher, our marvelously ironic savior from further punishment.
Hit Man
Sexy, clever, absurd, and enormously alive.