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The End of Oak Street (2026)

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The best movies for kids are usually films that meet them where they’re at, movies which capture the feeling of childhood experientially and textually, and that tell a story that a child might imagine for themself. What if an alien were my best friend? What if my friends and I built a spaceship in our garage? What if I could enter a magical world by reading a book? What if I got shrunk to a tiny size in my backyard? What if an evil carnival came to town? What if I got taken by a UFO and came back eight years later? All of those were film plots from the 1980s; several were developed and distributed by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, while others were greenlit and produced by other companies that were seeking to capture the essence of what came to be known as “that Amblin feeling.” E.T. is the most memorable keystone for that entire genre, and the intervening decades have been spent trying to recapture it, with mixed success. One of the most obvious and blatant examples was J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 in 2011, which, despite technically being set in 1979, set the unfortunate trend going forward that all any media attempting to recapture the feeling of Amblin would get stuck as period pieces set in the eighties, and thus mostly end up recreating the texture of those films without the substance thereof, or understanding what made them special. 

Updating the narrative of Stephen King’s IT to be set in the 1980s and the 2010s instead of in the 1950s and the 1980s respectively is a logical choice, but one need look no further than the general public outcry about the downward spiral of Stranger Things and the fact that we’re now producing media about how an overly nostalgic generation has deprived contemporary youth of anything new to know that the well has been pulling up naught but dust for a while now.  As such, it’s a refreshing surprise that another film that is shameless in its evocation of the Amblin style, set (partially) in 1982, manages to pull off that feeling by just as shamelessly aping one of Spielberg’s biggest films of the 1990s, Jurassic Park. The End of Oak Street’s imaginary play catalyst is “What if my neighborhood got transported back to dinosaur times?”, which is as perfect a jumping off point as one could hope for in a film like this. Even the film’s eightiesness is understated. Other than a scene in which Audrey finds solace in Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” and another in which the opening credits for The Love Boat are playing on the family room TV, the predicament in which the Platts and their neighbors find themselves isn’t one that lends itself to the “Remember this?” pop culture references in which nostalgia slop normally traffics. I did appreciate that the art department stuck a Battlestar Galactica poster on Brian’s wall so that we would know his dog is named for Dirk Benedict rather than Herman Melville, but it’s reasonably subtle for this genre. 

The suburban Platt family is going through a rough patch. Patriarch Greg (Ewan McGregor) has recently been laid off and is keeping this a secret from his wife Denise (Anne Hathaway), who can sense that something is off and that he’s not being honest with her. At the very least, she’s frustrated with his inconsistency, like bailing on a promised family day at a neighborhood block party and undermining her by allowing their son Brian (Christian Convery) to bring his disruptive Blue Heeler, Starbuck, to the cookout. The family’s precarious monetary situation is already somewhat known to daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), a budding astronomer who longs to go to Cornell and study under Carl Sagan (relatable) but knows that her family can’t afford it. For his part, Brian is entering puberty and beginning to show signs of adolescent rebellion and is hiding from his parents that he was responsible for seriously injuring another boy in the neighborhood. Denise has a friendly relationship with elderly neighbor Mrs. Huddleston, who was the uncredited editor of her novelist husband, and the older woman has been giving Denise feedback on a manuscript that she’s been writing, through which Denise is working out her mixed feelings about her life as a suburban mother. All of this familiar domestic malaise is interrupted by bizarre phenomena, like the inexplicable presence of a plant that’s been extinct for millennia in Mrs. Huddleston’s yard, or the sudden appearance of a mound of animal dung in the yard of the Platts’ hostile neighbor Mel (P.J. Byrnes). It isn’t long before the family is awoken one night by thunderous noises and blinding lights and discover that everything within a one-mile radius of the center of their neighborhood has been moved to 200 million years in the past, and the area is being infiltrated by the hungry megafauna of yesteryear. Can their family survive this crisis? 

There are many things that are flawed about The End of Oak Street. The dialogue is frequently cheesy and often outright treacly; Anne Hathaway continues to prove that she has a generational talent for interpreting some of the hokiest lines imaginable with genuine pathos (see also: Interstellar). Several sequences in which the family talks about their situation feature increasingly unhinged framing choices that make extensive, inexplicable use of split diopters for no thematic reason that I can comprehend. There are editing choices that are likewise baffling. In an early scene in which Denise and Mrs. Huddleston are discussing the former’s writing, their conversation plays out with one character occupying the left third of the frame while the other two-thirds are filled with a bay window that looks out over the block party festivities, with hard cuts to an inverted ratio of the right third of the frame containing the party who’s speaking while the left-two thirds is taken up by the window. If what is being communicated thematically is that Denise sees a potential reflection of herself in Mrs. Huddleston, a woman who subsumed her life into caring for a man who expressed no gratitude, then that’s a shot that’s begging to be framed symmetrically with the women mirroring one another. If that’s not what’s being communicated cinematically, then why not take advantage of the talent and throw in some shot/reverse-shot close-ups to break it up? I also didn’t quite love the technobabble explanation for their general predicament, but it’s a necessary evil and is decently actualized from a visual effects standpoint. 

The film’s most glaring flaw, overall and narratively, is that it never lands on a solid understanding of who its audience is. I mentioned a lot of eighties kid flicks up at the top, but it’s worth noting that The End of Oak Street is not suitable for children despite the childlike imagination inherent in its premise. In some ways, this film bears a strong resemblance to nineties classic Jumanji, but the violence there is mostly fantastic in nature; you might see a child forcibly turned into a monkeyboy or be bloodlessly sedated by a mean-looking barbed plant, but you’re not going to see that film’s animals feeding on the viscera of corpses or a blood-stained roof where a neighbor unsuccessfully challenged winged predators. The film, as also cited above, takes inspiration from Jurassic Park, but the dino violence of that movie almost feels quaint in comparison to the computer-generated gruesomeness of Oak Street, in which we witness dozens of people being ripped to shreds by prehistoric beasts, all while fleeing and screaming, first from fear and then from pain. It’s decidedly not for kids, and even a little extreme for a PG-13 film, but the film’s overly pat, sentimental ending also means that any child over thirteen is going to find it corny. 

Although the script’s dialogue is laughable, it adheres to the specific structural guidelines of screenplay instruction so precisely that it’s impossible to fault in its construction. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) knows this formula like the back of his hand, and he never overlooks a chance to let the rule of threes play out. It’s most noticeable with regards to Brian’s toy bow and arrow, which he attempts to use twice without success before managing to finally get a good shot in when his home threatens to become the new lair of a white worm. Both parents are realistically flawed; Greg’s hesitancy to tell his wife about his newfound unemployment comes from a place of patriarchal pride, but it also prevents her from being able to pitch in and help out by finding work herself before their financial straits become any more dire, while Denise has realistic conflicting emotions as a midlife stay-at-home mom to two children who are finding their independence. The conflict arises from their lack of communication without either being a villain; the film mostly lacks one, other than the neighbor who threatens to shoot Starbuck if the Platts don’t become more responsible pet owners. 

The thing about all of the film’s issues is: who cares? This is a movie about what it would be like if your neighborhood got sucked through a wormhole to the Jurassic period. You get a (semi) modern family encountering every kind of Mesozoic monster you can imagine: chicken-sized raptors capable of taking down a family pet, a Spinosaurus capable of knocking a car through a house, aerial reptiles that don’t take kindly to being shot at, horse-sized feathered bipeds that are surprisingly fast and always hungry, and the obligatory visit from the perennial favorite T. Rex. There are also beasts in this movie that I hadn’t even contemplated before, with the standout being some kind of albinic, amphibious, limbless tetrapod thing that made my skin crawl. The family dog reappears in the climax to fight off a Pteranodon! What more could one ask for, really?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Miami Blues (1990)

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What happens when a sociopathic California criminal flies to Miami to start a new series of con jobs and thefts and is surrounded by the most absurd people on earth (i.e., baseline Florida residents) in a film that proves 1990 was still basically the 1980s? You get Miami Blues, the second of four films adapted from Charles Willeford’s novels, and the only adaptation that came from his popular series of novels about hardboiled detective Hoke Mosely. Directed by the late George Armitage, one of Roger Corman’s many disciples, fourteen years after his last film (1976’s Vigilante Force) and seven years before his most famous (1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank), Miami Blues is a bizarre picture that combines elements of neo-noir, erotic thriller, dark comedy, crime drama, and action flicks into something fascinating, funny, and thrilling. 

A man calling himself “Junior Gottlieb” (Alec Baldwin) arrives in Miami, and he’s barely made it off the plane before he’s stolen a stranger’s suitcase and broken the finger of an obnoxious Hare Krishna. He slips onto a courtesy shuttle and checks into the luxurious hotel that it takes him to, where the lead bellhop offers to send up a prostitute, and Junior accepts. When the young woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) arrives, Junior reveals that he has no interest in her sexually, and that he was hoping to instead convince her to purchase some of the clothing in the luggage that he stole. Junior sees through her sex worker alias and tricks her into revealing that her real name is Susie, and the two end up sleeping together anyway, as the naive girl from Okeechobee falls for his dubious charms. Unbeknownst to Junior, the cultist that he assaulted at the airport died of shock, and the case falls into the lap of homicide detective Hoke Mosely (Fred Ward), a grizzled oaf of a man with terrible fashion sense, sharp observational skills that bely his slovenly appearance, and false teeth. He catches up with Junior at Susie’s apartment in less than 24 hours, implying that he knows the young man is guilty and highlighting the telltale signs in his behavior that indicate he’s served time, but also drinking up most of the young couple’s beer and (maybe) playing the dumb drunk in order to ingratiate himself. Junior sees through the act and tracks Hoke down to his residence, where he savagely beats the cop, stealing his badge, gun, and dentures, making him more dangerous than ever. 

It’s here that the film takes a fascinating turn. It’s very funny from its earliest moments; when Susie tries to beg off of spending the night together because she has a “lot” of homework that night—she has to write a haiku—Junior robs her neighbors while she takes a bath, all while extemporaneously composing several of them like “Breaking, entering / The dark and lonely places / Finding a big gun.” But once he has Hoke’s badge and gun, he opens up a whole new way to terrorize and rob people, which he gets away with for quite some time largely because he just … behaves like a cop. After shooting a would-be smash-and-grab thief at a dockside restaurant (only calling out “Freeze or I’ll shoot” after pulling the trigger) and realizing the power he wields, he tries to strongarm the bellboy/pimp who sent Susie to him by pretending that she was underage, at which point the man claims that he knows this isn’t true because her ID was checked by the cop he’s already bribing weekly. Junior interrupts several crimes in progress and takes advantage of the situation by “allowing” the perps to get away then making off with their loot, but what one notices the longer this goes on is that a violent psychopath is consistently responding to burglar alarms, purse-snatchings, and drug deals when the real police are nowhere to be found. At one point, Junior “busts” two musclehead drug smugglers and has them handcuff themselves to a metal bar, then he steals their product; Hoke’s soon-to-retire partner Henderson (Charles Napier) informs him that one of the two men was the killer in “The Dumbbell Murders,” a homicide that Hoke has been working for over a year, and jokes that maybe Hoke should let Junior close a couple more cases before apprehending him. 

The performances here are excellent. Jennifer Jason Leigh is almost unrecognizable, sporting a blonde pixie cut and an equally audacious southern accent, and although Susie’s under-written and dim-witted to a fault, Leigh still imbues her with a sense of pathos that demonstrates her understated abilities as an actor. Fred Ward is one of the great unsung character actors of his generation, and he is an absolute delight in this role. There were three more Hoke Mosely novels published after Miami Blues, and one gets the feeling that there was an attempted franchise in the making with this film that simply never continued, which is a shame; I would have loved to see him play this sleazeball a few more times. Perhaps the reason this never came to fruition is that Alec Baldwin simply steals the show here as the dangerous, deranged Junior. Miami Blues may be the best non-Jack Donaghy performance of his career, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that so effectively utilizes his icy, cold eyes as well as this one does. His ability to flip back and forth between dealing out unhinged violence and playing house with the beautiful young woman he’s conned into falling for his sob stories is truly something to behold, and he plays every scene with Leigh with a bizarre glee, as if he can’t believe he’s getting away with such an obvious farce. He thinks he’s hit the jackpot, but his cons mostly succeed because he’s facing off against deviants, simpletons, and deviant simpletons. It’s also worth noting that this is a film that isn’t hesitant to play on Baldwin’s contemporary sex appeal; he’s clad in nothing but his underwear or otherwise shirtless for long portions of the film, and the camera spends more time ogling his semi-nude form than it does Leigh’s. Fred Ward is also quite attractive (this was only two years after Big Business, after all), but the film keeps him covered up in tacky screen-printed silks and hospital neckbraces so as not to distract from the fact that this film is partially selling itself on Baldwin’s taut torso. 

The smaller roles here are also delightful. Charles Napier has a lot of fun playing off of Ward; their introductory scene finds them arguing about who has to break the news to the family of the deceased Hare Krishna, with Napier’s Henderson begging off even though it’s his turn because he took “the fat lady who sat on the kid,” which he claims “counts for two.” The exposition that he’s only one week away from retirement sets up the expectation that he’s going to die in the final reel, but he makes it to the end intact, firing off bon mots as he heads into the sunset. Nora Dunn gets less to do as Hoke’s new partner, Ellita Sánchez, but she’s memorable nonetheless, and it was probably more surprising to see her in a more serious role in 1990, fresh off of her five season run on SNL. Miami Blues is also a film that’s chock to the brim with one scene wonders. Paul Gleason, probably best remembered as the principal in The Breakfast Club, is a lot of fun playing against type as the vice cop who’s on the take with regards to the hotel prostitution ring, who finds and beats up the real Hoke after Junior tells the bellhop pimp to send money to him at Hoke’s apartment. The best minor performance, however, is probably the Honeymoon Killer herself, Shirley Stoler, as a no-nonsense pawn shop matron who sees through Junior’s act almost immediately and is one of the only characters who ever manages to get the better of him. 

Near the film’s end, there’s a scene in which vinegar pie, a nineteenth century custard pie that allowed for vinegar to be substituted as an acid for the more difficult to obtain lemon, plays a vital role. For contemporary critics, Miami Blues seems to have been a vinegar pie in and of itself, something that was almost unpalatable, too sweet and too sour at the same time, but it’s managed to become a bit of a cult classic, as indicated by its current presence on the Criterion streaming service. It’s definitely worth finding the time to enjoy.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

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I made several mistakes before attending a screening of the latest MCU corporate product, Spider-Man Brand New Day. The first was re-watching Spider-Man: No Way Home, a film that I gave 4.5 stars to upon my initial viewing, which was at a drive-in theater on top of a parking garage, continuing to observe COVID protocols in late 2021. In the years since its release, I’ve seen many people online attempt to revisit this film, only to discover that it fails to work at all outside of a theatrical experience, because the film has clear pauses for the audience to react to the return of characters from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films as well as those starring Andrew Garfield in the lead role. I never paid much attention to that criticism. After all, I hadn’t experienced it in a theater, and I found myself sufficiently pleased with the choices of who to include, and I was appropriately emotionally invested. Upon rewatch five years later, however, I could hardly believe how utterly bored I was. The first half hour meanders endlessly as we watch Peter Parker (Tom Holland) deal with the fallout of the exposure of his secret identity (and his being framed for the death of Mysterio) before the first returning villain, Arnold Vosloo’s Doc Ock, enters the narrative. I was still sufficiently moved by Garfield’s Peter’s emotional response to saving MJ (Zendaya) when he couldn’t save his own love, but otherwise, the stakes couldn’t have felt lower or more disinteresting; even the death of Aunt May lacked any kind of resonance this time around. No Way Home is nearly 2.5 hours of film-making so emotionally hollow that it did the opposite of making me excited for Brand New Day. 

My second mistake was probably the most common one for filmgoers, which was that I failed (or rather chose not) to do the homework. And the homework that I did do didn’t even help! Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is in this film, not as the “Smart Hulk” we last saw on the big screen in Endgame, but as his normal, collegiate professor self, with Hulk repressed via a wrist-worn device that exists solely so that it can be damaged later for dramatic purposes. I’m one of the dozens of people who watched She-Hulk through to its conclusion (there is nowhere on this earth that Tatiana Maslany can lead that I will not follow), and even I had completely forgotten about the inhibitor device being a plot point on that show. Even then, the last time we saw Hulk on screen, it was in the final episode, and he was still in his merged Smart Hulk form. So why are we back to a Banner/Hulk Jekyll/Hyde paradigm that hasn’t been the status quo since 2018? I don’t know, and the corporate overlords behind Brand New Day didn’t bother to make up a reason. They know you haven’t been able to keep up with all of this, and that as a result, you’re going to assume something happened on one of the shows you couldn’t be arsed to watch. If there really is a reason that I’m not aware of, please leave a comment on this post. 

The third, and perhaps biggest, mistake that I made was being an X-Men fan. The biggest comic book movie news heading into the weekend last week was the casting of Samara Weaving as the MCU’s Emma Frost, which was both (a) perfect casting and (b) incredibly awful optics at the very least, given that the announcement of the casting of “The White Queen” coincided with the quiet cancellation of both the long-delayed MCU Blade film starring Mahershalah Ali and the TV series Wonder Man, which also had a Black lead. The ongoing win-them-back campaign that the MCU corporate product machine has been working on over the past year has reeked of sweaty desperation for cultural relevance, from the return of Chris Evans and Robert Downey, Jr. in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday to the near-daily announcements of who’s-been-cast-as-who for the upcoming addition of the X-Men to the franchise. One of said announcements turned out to be something of a major spoiler for this movie, which really seems to indicate that the left and right hands of this greater enterprise aren’t entirely coordinated with one another. 

Enough preamble. It’s been almost five years since we last saw Peter Parker, who enlisted magical assistance in trying to reclaim his secret identity, ultimately requiring that he sacrifice all of his familial connections in order to save the multiverse. In the interim, he’s become New York’s beloved masked hero, taking on countless well-known villains and working with both NYPD detective DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), the head of the so-called “Department of Damage Control,” a former S.H.I.E.L.D. sub-unit created by Tony Stark for post-battle clean-up. Although his once-girlfriend MJ and former best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) no longer remember him, Ned’s frequent social media posts have allowed Peter to keep up with their day-to-day lives. It’s a solitary existence, and it’s taking its toll on Peter, who begins to manifest black eyes and further mutation of his body (including the development of organic web shooters) even before he has a run-in with the film’s villain, a body-hopping consciousness that can move from person to person with ease but can’t possess Peter himself. Things come to a head when Peter learns that MJ and Ned have moved back to NYC after graduating from MIT, putting them in danger from the latest super-threat. 

If you thought that the pauses to allow audiences to whoop and holler when they recognized something that they saw on screen in No Way Home were distracting and unnecessary, you’ll really find yourself taken out of the moment when it happens here. Besides the aforementioned returning Hulk (who one must imagine is a deadbeat dad since there’s been no mention of his space son from She-Hulk in the last four years), there’s also new Black Widow Yelena (Florence Pugh) and Frank “Punisher” Castle (Jon Bernthal) in the mix. These amount to little more than cameos in which Pugh is given nothing to do but make unfunny jokes about the varying sizes of the metaphorical “potatoes” that she and Peter are tasked with (Bernthal is better integrated and better used). The reveal that the villain of the piece is someone that we know from other superhero media is also one of these moments, and although there was a gasp in my theater (second in volume only to the audible excitement at the appearance of Michael B. Jordan in the trailer for the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair), I had a much different experience with this revelation. 

I want to tread lightly around this subject, since this might come as a pleasant surprise twist to others, and who am I to steal that joy? This doesn’t appear to be a well-protected spoiler; my barista friend from whom I got coffee this morning already knew it and he’s going to see the film later this week. If you Google this movie, perhaps to see showtimes in your area, the performer and their character are the first result in the “cast” widget, even before Holland or Zendaya. Nevertheless, I’ll touch on this as lightly as I can. Early in the film, the villain’s ruthlessness and casual disregard for human life is made clear as they pilot a stolen tank through the streets of the city causing mass destruction and certain implied death, Peter’s last minute rescue of an awestruck child notwithstanding. After realizing Peter can’t be taken over, when surfing from body to body, the villain deliberately walks the person it’s possessing into the street to be hit by a car; later, the villain compels a possessed MJ to throw herself off a building. In the end, with the reveal that the obviously nefarious operation was unsurprisingly doing nefarious deeds (I’m sorry, what do you mean that the death cult works for you now?), we get a maudlin flashback that explains the character’s trite little origin story. In the moment that Peter turns his monitor around and says, “I’ve identified [them], [their] name is [major spoiler],” I didn’t get the little thrill that the interconnectedness of this universe used to inspire; my first thoughts were a simple “Really?” followed by an image of Don Corleone saying “Look at how they massacred my boy.” They made [redacted] a murderer right out of the gate! What are we doing here? In the same way that the promotional and productive arms of this behemoth don’t seem to be communicating with each other very much, the first and second halves of this film don’t cohere into a whole because our callous, murdering villain of part one is an innocent victim in part two, but you can’t have all that collateral damage early on and not grapple with it later. It’s maddening! 

With the rising tide of more, new Christopher Nolan discourse in the wake of The Odyssey, one of the talking points it appears we failed to leave in the past was whether or not Nolan was arguing for or against a fascist mass surveillance state in his Batman trilogy. The scenes in question revolve around Batman creating a network of cameras for tracking down criminals, and his trusted mentor Lucius telling him that this is a dangerous technology that should never be used. And he’s right! In this film, we get an “I didn’t hear that” reaction from Detective DeWolff when Peter admits that he’s created this very thing, and it’s just a passing joke. It’s not even plot-relevant, since that’s not how Peter manages to get an image of [redacted]’s face; he gets their photo with his goggles. I’m sorry if you thought that you could blissfully take a little excursion into the Marvel Cinematic Universe again and catch up with your old friends without getting soft Flock camera propaganda. Hey, look over here! Don’t think about how those cameras in your neighborhood are being used by cops to stalk women, misread license plates and create deadly situations as a result, or being used to monitor you with no reason and without a warrant. Get used to them being around all the time, because they’re not going anywhere (unless you do something)! They’re a totally normal thing that we’re joking about in your Spidertwunk adventure to normalize it, not a careful, constructed step into a full-blown surveillance state!

This movie is fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. We’re fine. Peter saves the day by opening up his mind and letting the villain get a pep talk from a memory of Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), because why not have the cake of milking the main character’s mother figure’s death for all it’s worth in the last movie and also eat it too by having her show up the very next outing. It cheapens the emotional stakes and impacts of both movies, but that’s fine. It’s fine. It would be nice if Peter had a few memories of May reminding him to eat a vegetable from time to time, but if I could subsist on nothing but label-to-camera Little Caesars and look like Tom Holland I wouldn’t bother with leafy greens either. Some extra iron might have helped with his spider-puberty, though.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Conan the Sequelian

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It would be ridiculous to claim that the sword & sandal genre is having “a moment” in Hollywood right now, given that two isolated examples do not equal a trend, and the two examples in question—Christopher Nolan’s epic Odyssey adaptation and Mattel’s failed He-Man reboot—are more of a “hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby” situation than they are brothers in arms. Regardless, spending so much time watching ripped men wield swords against wizards & monsters in theaters this year (over 300 minutes of combined runtime) had me thinking back to the ultimate icon of muscly fantasy cinema: Conan the Barbarian. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s casting as the sword & sandal comic book warrior Conan made for some gorgeous meathead action-fantasy imagery, and much of the original 1982 Conan the Barbarian film plays like high art as a result, despite its thoughtless participation in the lowliest of genre tropes. That mix of high & low makes Conan one of the quintessential examples of its genre, but what’s to be made of its two lesser-seen, lesser-loved sequels? Are they also high-art pop cinema like Nolan’s The Odyssey or are they ironic toss-offs with open disdain for their childish audience like the new Masters of the Universe? The answer, of course, is yes; they’re both.

As hyper-violent & hyper-horny as the original Conan film can be, the audience who most gleefully latched onto it were children in the same age range as its source-material comic book’s demographic. At least, that appears to have been the thinking behind its 1984 sequel Conan the Destroyer, which softens Conan’s sex & violence just barely enough to step down from an “R” rating to “PG” (in the precarious months just before the invention of “PG-13”). Conan is in live-action He-Man mode here, thrusting his giant sword against goofball monsters (like the pro-wrestler goblin played by a rubber-masked André the Giant), and picking up a goofball sidekick to crack wise along the way (Tracey Walter, whose performance splits the vast difference between Rob Schneider & Peter Lorre). Still, blood spews by the gallon from open wounds, and decapitated heads still fly across the screen, so Conan the Destroyer ends up playing like a remarkably gory kiddie feature. The highly sexualized casting of Wilt Chamberlain & Grace Jones as Conan’s companions on a mission to transport a young princess with her virginity intact feels like a winking joke that the movie’s school-age audience is too young to get. What they would get, however, is some insanely age-inappropriate violence, like in the climactic battle where Conan slowly rips the bleeding horn out of a yonic demon’s skull while it screams in agony.

While Conan the Destroyer exposes its school-age audience to adult-level bloodshed, the 1985 Conan spinoff Red Sonja exposes them to adult-level sexuality. Red Sonja technically isn’t a Conan the Barbarian film at all, since it’s adapted from a different property penned by Conan creator Robert E. Howard, and Schwarzenegger is officially credited as playing “Lord Kalidor.” Whatever, he’s Conan; the audience cannot be fooled. The only non-Conan thing about him is that he plays second-fiddle to the titular female lead, the red-haired warrior Sonja. Major kudos to series producer Dino De Laurentiis for managing to find an actress who could match Schwarzenegger’s cartoonishly wooden line deliveries in Brigitte Nielsen; Sonja & Conan make a lovely bonehead couple, especially in scenes where they use violent swordplay as an act of foreplay — teasing their mutual intent to “conquer” each other. The only problem is that there’s now a literal child onscreen jealously watching these foreplay bouts, acting as the audience surrogate and the would-be couple’s pint-sized sidekick. Also, the story starts with Sonja’s violent rape (which scares her off of men until she meets the godlike Conan), then goes on to include footage of a topless belly dancer and jokes about the child companion’s enormous penis. On paper, I’m not sure “misandrist rape-revenge saga” screams “kid-friendly adventure comedy,” but that’s exactly how it plays out, which is probably  the reason why Red Sonja is considered the nadir of the series.

Despite their dire reputations, I was mostly amused by Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer. The only major disappointment, really, was that for kiddie version of Conan the Barbarian, they don’t make full use of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s talent for delivering groaner one-liners. There are a couple of jokes in Red Sonja that heroically go for the cheese, such as Arnold’s quip, “Tomorrow, I start my diet,” while crawling through a collapsed cave or “How’s the food around here?” when crashing a party in an enemy’s palace. For the most part, though, the wisecracking is left to the other sidekicks in his traveling parties, and no one comes near matching his comedic chops. There’s no reason why Conan the Destroyer had to have Conan punching out poor, innocent horses for the audience’s entertainment, but would it have killed them to have Arnold punctuate the gag with a deadpan line reading of “Quite horsin’ around”? Much like in the original Conan the Barbarian, he’s mostly used in the sequels as a visual symbol rather than a genuine acting talent, when he’d soon become one of the funniest comedic actors of his era, ironically or not. Neither of the Conan sequels go fully goofy with it, which leaves them trapped between violent action spectacle and kitschy kiddie fluff — a no man’s land for finding & pleasing an audience.

-Brandon Ledet

Disclosure Day (2026)

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I remember reading an interview with Steven Spielberg years ago in which he talked about how having children had changed his point of view as an artist. Specifically, he mentioned that Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film that sees its protagonist abandon his family to go with the aliens, would have had a different ending if he had been a father when he made it, as this was a choice he couldn’t conceive of having a character make after he himself became a parent. There’s a lot to unpack there about the way that a person’s real life can impact their art. Roland Barthes’s delineation of the concept of the death of the author has largely been the North Star of my critical approach, but it’s also an imperfect guide.  The man who made 2005’s War of the Worlds is not the same man who made Close Encounters; as an auteur, Spielberg had changed too much in three decades, and his stamp on both is very different as a result. Close Encounters would not be a better movie if Richard Dreyfuss stayed behind with Teri Garr at the end. With even such a minor change, it wouldn’t even be the same film. Unfortunately, Disclosure Day is a weak effort that shows that Uncle Steven may be getting a little too out of touch. 

While WWIII threatens to break out in the background of the film, two people find themselves inexplicably and inextricably drawn to one another: Kansas City meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) and cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor). The former is a rootless tumbleweed, dragging boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) from one metro market to another while trying to find her niche, citing that she’ll know where she’s supposed to be when she gets there. Kellner is a fugitive on the run from the sinister intelligence organization Wardex and its overseer Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) while receiving directions from Wardex defector Hugo (Colman Domingo) about how to stay ahead of Scanlon long enough to get the classified data that Kellner stole into his hands so they can reveal an earth-shattering truth to the masses. Kellner is accompanied by his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), a former novitiate whose past connection to the church helps them briefly find shelter in the convent where she was raised under Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel). 

Spielberg will turn eighty at the end of this year, and I think that’s vital to understanding this film and its intentions, and where those intentions fail or otherwise fall short in this text from one of our most respected living directors. The marketing for this film almost seemed to promise a return to form for the man: government agents in pursuit of something inexplicable but perhaps wondrous, as in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; the potential to find beautiful meaning in something beyond ourselves as in Close Encounters; the promise of something spectacular and never before seen as in Jurassic Park. And credit where credit is due: the man knows how to shoot some stunning images. There are several exquisitely choreographed car chases, a daredevil train stunt, and numerous impressive tracking shots that follow characters narrowly escaping apprehension. But those are all technical achievements, not emotional ones, and as such fail to be cinematic ones. This does not feel like the Spielberg classic that the advertising would have you believe that it is; this is Spielberg recursively making an Amblin-inspired JJ Abrams movie, right down to the unnecessarily complicated mystery box at the center. 

Screenwriter David Koepp has had some misfires over the years, but he’s also the man who wrote or co-wrote Death Becomes Her, Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Presence, and Black Bag. This script attempts to tackle the concept of faith and belief and what effect the proof of aliens may have on either; it’s not only terribly misguided while simultaneously being overwrought and undercooked, it’s also facile to the point of ridicule. Here, the dialogue is stilted and unnatural, if not downright corny. Josh O’Connor is an actor I’ve come to like quite a lot, and it’s unclear if his delivery of every line of dialogue as if he’s not sure what the next word he’s going to say will be is a result of an acting choice, an attempt to breathe some life into this flat screenplay, or a directorial mandate, but it’s not doing no favors for Koepp, Spielberg, or O’Connor. Margaret Fairchild is woefully undercharacterized, so that in one scene she’s almost messianically beneficent, then swinging into a broad tantrum about not wanting to become a religious figure, then weeping uncontrollably. It gives Blunt the opportunity to play a range of audition reel-ready emotional states, but they don’t flow into one another with any kind of plausibility or humanity. Domingo and Firth are probably my favorite out of the bunch. Domingo brings a beautiful empathy to most of the characters he plays, and Hugo is no different; his dialogue is some of the corniest, but it feels the most true when delivered by him. Firth rarely gets to play such one-dimensional villains, so it’s nice to see him do something different for once and menace someone, even if it doesn’t add up to much in the grand scheme of it all. 

What really makes Disclosure Day old-headed is its belief in humanity. That’s probably a very cynical way of looking at things, but it’s also the most honest one. If you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading here. The “disclosure” of the title is the broadcasting of data that the U.S. government has, via proxy management of a private corporation, spent eight decades covered up evidence of extraterrestrial organic life, both in the form of corpses discovered in crashes and living beings kept imprisoned (and tortured) for years. This sudden revelation stops the entire world dead in its tracks, as every person with a cell phone or near a television watches with rapt attention as Kellner uploads classified video footage of the recovery of alien bodies, “interrogations” of living ETs, and so on. It’s implied that this is so universally life-changing that it brings mankind back from the brink of its final, extinction-level war. That’s a story that might have worked when Spielberg was a younger director, an optimism of an earlier age. All the protagonist has to do is get the truth out there, and the world will be saved! In 2026, it has the odor of neoliberal Boomerism—a West Wing-esque belief that we live in a world where the work of making societies as a whole empathetic again—is as simple and clean as making everyone watch videos of atrocities. Everyone already does that, every single day. It’s not helping! 

Most of the atrocities that Wardex have committed aren’t shown to us directly. We see the beginnings of videos, and then we watch the characters within the movie react to them with alarm, disgust, fear, and distress. We hear more than we see. But some of the images that the audience does get to witness are eerily familiar, especially as the aliens in most of the videos appear to be very small, like children. In the Roswell video that we see part of, we watch as government officials pick up their tiny, frail, broken bodies with shovels; they’re piled into body bags together en masse, evoking the imagery of mass graves. It’s distressing, yes, but it’s also virtually identical to the images of the broken bodies of children in Gaza, Darfur, and Uvalde, images that people see and then scroll past immediately, ignored background radiation of modern living. Large portions of the West have been brainwashed into not caring about these kids because they don’t have the same skin color as the observer, and the idea that showing childlike beings of a different planetary origin undergoing mistreatment would somehow bring everyone together is patently false. It’s only sweet, hopeful, and optimistic if you are completely out of touch with reality. I’m all for optimistic media, but when it’s this tone deaf, it comes off as irredeemably ignorant. 

This is a clumsy, clumsy movie. Technical proficiency does not in and of itself an excellent film make. Pair it with a flimsy, trite, facile look at religion, add in a purely Amerocentric view (what, has every UFO only ever landed in the U.S.?), and have actors of vastly different calibers deliver faux philosophical dialogue, and you’ve got the makings of a film that serves as a reminder that the cost of being the voice of a generation is that, if you allow yourself to be defined by your generation, eventually your art will stop having any real world relevance.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert (2026)

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There was a round of headlines earlier this month announcing that George Miller is looking to complete his ongoing Mad Max saga with a new TV show & movie, which is impressively ambitious for an 81-year-old filmmaker nearing the end of his career. To his credit, Miller’s advanced age didn’t affect his ability to deliver high-octane action spectacle in his last Mad Max chapter, Furiosa, which found the octogenarian still experimenting with new ways to wow his audience with comic book mythmaking in every brutal frame. Even so, it appears Warner Bros is reluctant to allow Miller another spin behind the wheel of the war rig, so it might be a while before we see what Furiosa and the gang are up to in the proposed final chapter (if we ever see it at all). In the meantime, Miller was on the top of my mind while watching a different over-the-top action spectacle from an aging auteur, 80-year-old Yuen Woo-Ping’s big budget comic book adaptation Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert. Yuen’s flying-swordsmen action epic recalls Miller’s work both in its CGI sandstorm surrealism and in its shockingly elaborate brutality for a man of Yuen’s age. His name may not be as readily familiar to American audiences as Miller’s, but rest assured you are already a fan of his work, and you owe it to yourself to see how far he’s still pushing his craft while major movie studios are still allowing him to do so.

As a director, Yuen Woo-Ping is most famous for making Jackie Chan a household name in 1978’s Drunken Master, half a century ago. However, he’s most revered by martial arts fans in the West for his work as the fight choreographer for 1990s & 2000s actioners as formidable as Kill Bill & The Matrix. He effectively brought authentic wuxia action to the America for the first time, notably choreographing the flying-swordsmen spectacle of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which still defines the wuxia genre for most Western audiences. So, even if you are not familiar with the comic-book source material for Blades of the Guardians, you likely have some expectation for what a top-of-his-game Yuen Woo-Ping can bring to big-screen fight choreo. He exceeds expectations by the end of the first fight, much like Miller wowing audiences with the late-in-the-game ferocity he brought to the nonstop chase scenes of Fury Road. Yuen’s camera gets inches away from the hand-to-hand street brawls that break out at the opening locale, then pull away to catch a top-down aerial view of the same ongoing action. A nameless goon is pantsed & humiliated mid-fight by our vagabond hero in that opening bout, recalling the anything-goes tonal shifts of Hong Kong’s action filmmaking heyday. Later, two assassins battle each other with flaming swords in an oil field setting worthy of a heavy metal album cover. Arrows fly all the way through horse riders’ skulls mid-gallop, throwing them lifeless to the ground. An epic one-on-one assassin battle is staged during a world-ending sandstorm of Fury Road proportions. Blades of the Guardians travels across the desert from one action set piece to another like a true big-budget blockbuster, far from the philosophical sparseness of King Hu-style wuxia titles like A Touch of Zen. It’s a big-canvas crowdpleaser designed to keep your heart rate up and your fist in the air, held there by a seasoned elder of its genre.

Wu Jing (Wolf Warrior) stars as a 1st Century transient bounty hunter who’s constantly dodging offers to settle down as a government official (training troops in sword fighting) or as a small-village family man (raising the adorable young child he’s seemingly adopted Grogu-style). His skills as the #2 fugitive of the empire are put to the test when he’s hired to transport the empire’s #1 fugitive—the enigmatic leader of The Flower Revolution—to safety at the opposite end of the desert. The revolutionary in his care does not help make this task easy in any way, both wearing a conspicuous cat mask that broadcasts his identity to all onlookers and being so feebly averse to conflict that he makes each fight harder just by hanging around. Meanwhile, every assassin in the game is eager to collect the bounty on the revolutionary’s head, and the protector’s unwanted road companions land him in larger crises of political intrigue that complicate the mission at every stop. Like most wuxia actioners, Blades of the Guardians is adapted from popular lit that presumes familiarity from its audience and only offers rapid-fire exposition dumps and character-intro title cards for narrative bearings. If you can let go of needing to know the political & historical alignment of every character beyond their obvious designations as “good” or “evil,” however, it’s follows a fairly familiar action blockbuster path, wherein a seemingly stoic warrior gradually warms up to his found family of traveling companions after initially taking on a mission for selfish personal gain. The rest is all communicated in the broad strokes of horseback battles, head-chopping sword fights, and unexpected whirlwind romance — each depicted with an incredible amount of elaborate detail and technical precision from a Hong Kong industry legend who doesn’t get the opportunities to flex his muscles nearly as often as he used to.

I don’t think it’s inappropriate to dwell so much on the long-spanning legacy Yuen Woo-Ping represents in the director’s chair. Blades of the Guardians very deliberately acts as a passing of the cultural torch from older generations of Chinese action blockbuster filmmakers to youthful up-and-comers. While Wu Jing might headline the film after two solid decades of onscreen martial arts spectacle, he has costars so young & fresh to the game that their cast listing on Wikipedia links to a K-pop boy band instead of their own designated page (namely, Dong Sicheng of NCT, among other boy banders in the cast). It’s a movie that goes out of its way to pay respect to the industry’s old-timers, though, including small roles for Jet Li & “Big Tony” Leung Ka-fai and a last-minute cameo from Yuen Woo-Ping himself. You just wouldn’t know that if you saw any of the film’s elaborately choreographed fight scenes out of context, since they each convey a relentless eagerness to wow the audience that’s usually associated with younger filmmakers who feel they have something to prove. The stylized fights of Blades of the Guardians are unmistakably aligned with Yuen Woo-Ping’s most iconic work (especially recalling The Matrix in its hand-to-hand closeups and Crouching Tiger in its fantastic swordfights), but I still found myself thinking of George Miller as he staged those fights across the vastness of the landscape’s whirling sands. The two old-timers share a demonstrated hunger & ferocity you wouldn’t typically expect from filmmakers’ their age, putting to shame all of the other auteurs of their generation who get generously graded on a curve for the sloppiness of their own “Late Style” missives.

-Brandon Ledet

Masters of the Universe (2026)

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The objectively, morally correct thing to do is to reject all generative AI slop in artistic spaces, which of course means rejecting all movies wholly or partially generated by AI prompts. Generative AI may be attractive for movie studios looking to avoid employing human artists by plagiarizing their pre-existing work, but what the audience gets on the other end is a clinical amalgamation of things we’ve already seen, a systematically averaged-out, artless mediocrity. Of course we should resist that. I would argue, then, that our resistance to AI slop should extend to rejecting corporate studio schlock that just happens to look & feel like generative AI, even if it was technically made by human hands. The new Masters of the Universe adaptation, for example, is spiritually AI: a soulless averaging out of recent decades’ IP action blockbusters into a meaningless mush indistinguishable from what an AI prompt to generate “a live action He-Man movie” would produce. There is no discernible artistic impulse behind its creation beyond using vintage 80s pop culture nostalgia as a vehicle to deliver product placements for companies like Coca-Cola and Amazon. As a result, the only useful service something like Masters of the Universe can provide is to offer a summation of everything that’s currently wrong with big-budget corporate filmmaking in one convenient, insultingly middling package. It’s just as dispiriting as it sounds.

The #1 issue with modern blockbuster filmmaking, as exemplified by Masters of the Universe, is bloat. This is a movie adaptation of a cartoon that was designed to sell toys to children in the 1980s. There is no possible justification for its production costing over $200 million, for its runtime stretching beyond 140 minutes, or for its screenplay saving its source material’s most exciting ideas for a promised sequel (which, thanks to the disastrous first-weekend box office results, is never coming). A lot of that bloat is a result of Masters of the Universe suffering a lethal case of the Surf Draculas, indulging in a full hour of narrative place-setting before He-Man fully becomes He-Man, needlessly having him tread water on Earth as a displaced Prince Adam for the entire first act. If this movie is Mattel’s attempt to create a Barbie for Boys opportunity with one of its other signature toy brands, the company could’ve learned a lot by paying its four(!) credited screenwriters to study Gerwig & Baumbach’s Barbie screenplay, which has the good sense to start with a fully formed Barbie living her daily life in Barbieland. Instead, we meet Prince Adam as a young whiny child, then watch him travel via magical portal to Oklahoma City and waste fifteen years’ worth of the audience’s time growing into an even whinier adult (Nicholas Galitzine), who has to work a desk job and sit in on conflict-resolution meetings while biding his time until he can find his back to the faraway planet of Eternia. No one on Earth nor Eternia could possibly give a shit. The idiotic beauty of the original Masters of the Universe series is that it’s all surface and no backstory, so simple that even a toddler could instantly understand its appeal. It’s a cartoon universe populated by literal action figures come to life, so why delay the joy of seeing those absurd characters in action?

A major issue with the film’s bloated, years-long production is that its multiple screenplay drafts have left it thematically & politically incoherent, dangerously so. While wasting his youth at an Earthbound desk job, Adam’s potential as the muscled-up master of the universe is held at bay by wimpy HR types and visibly queer-nonbinary coworkers. His cubicle’s nameplate includes “he/him” pronouns, which is intended to read as a joke about his destined transformation into the redundantly named He-Man, but also opens the movie up to political interpretation as a right-wing screed about how masculinity is in crisis because of the pervasive wokeness of modern office culture. Adam’s muscles are just aching to burst out of his baby pink button down, but the fascist feminazis who employ him are weighing him down too much to flex. Was there an early draft of Masters of the Universe that borrowed Barbie‘s fish-out-of-water gender commentary by contrasting the fully roided-out He-Man of the cartoons against the post-“toxic masculinity” culture of the modern era? It certainly feels like some scraps from that draft have been scattered throughout this final product’s opening act, which the rest of the movie leaves thematically & politically unresolved. So, it just takes as a given that the audience finds the sinisterly feminizing forces of modern life to be a grave social ill, encouraging us to cheer on He-Man’s journey back home to the Manosphere of the 1980s as a small victory for macho men everywhere.

While the final screenplay seemingly lacked attention to revision in theme & intent, it clearly was submitted for several drafts of Joss Whedon-style joke punchups meant to lighten the mood. Masters of the Universe is so jokey, in fact, that it’s outright apologetic about its own existence — fully crossing over from self-deprecation to self-hatred. The basic concept of He-Man as a sword-wielding space prince who fights against the tyranny of skull-faced Bad Guy with an army of action figure cartoon mutants is already ridiculous enough at face value. There’s no need to constantly nudge the audience in the ribs with “What the???” and “That just happened!” jokes pointing out the absurdity of the scenario. Say what you will about the live-action Golan Globus adaptation of Masters of the Universe from the 1980s (another notorious box office flop), but at least that version was sincere in its over-the-top goofballery. This modern reboot shamefully shields itself from any potential accusations of sincerity, pointing out how stupid and dated every character design is while actively hiding their most absurd details from public view. He-Man’s trademark Prince Valiant haircut has been reworked into a feathered blow-out; the Sorceress’s trademark eagle headdress is simplified to a vaguely birdlike cowl. The cowardly green tiger Cringer’s transformation into the courageous, armored Battlecat is largely kept offscreen and treated as a throwaway punchline. The floating smartass wizard Orko is saved for an end credits gag, in hopes that most of the audience would’ve already made a hasty exit without ever seeing him. He-Man’s brothers in arms against Skeletor are also deployed mostly for sex jokes about fisting (Fisto), giving head (Ram Man), and penis size (Power Sword) which, along with the constant violent murders of the back half, undercuts the movie’s potential marketability to the only audience who could possibly find any of this remotely entertaining: 10-year-old boys. In short, everything’s a joke, and nothing’s funny.

I won’t even get into the ugly intangibility of the film’s green-screen CGI effects, which places actors you know & love (most embarrassingly, Idris Elba & Alison Brie) in a soundstage otherwold where they look entirely disconnected from their environment and from each other. You’ve seen a Marvel movie before; you get the picture. Crucially, that general cultural familiarity with the past couple decades of corporate superhero filmmaking means that you can close your eyes and picture Masters of the Universe without ever watching a frame of it. It’s exactly what a computer would regurgitate onscreen if you prompted it to “imagine” He-Man in the MCU. The only glimmer of hope that this project might have produced something more substantial than that was the hiring of Laika figurehead Travis Knight to direct, as he had previously done the impossible by delivering a watchable, likeable Transformers movie a decade into that toy-marketing movie franchise (2018’s Bumblebee). There is no personal, authorial stamp to be found on this material, though. It is the exact amalgamated median of modern blockbuster aesthetics, with He-Man plugged into its predetermined proper-noun slots like a Mad Libs template. By the time it attempts to borrow some Guardians of the Galaxy charm in its mid-battle Queen needledrops and Brian May guitar work (hoping that the audience might misremember the 80s Masters of the Universe movie as having the Flash Gordon soundtrack), you might as well take a nap in the theater and watch the rest of the movie play out in your dream. You know exactly where it’s going because you’ve already seen everywhere movies of this type have been. It may not technically qualify as generative AI slop, but that’s a distinction without a difference. The only positive thing to come of it that some below-the-line workers got a paycheck instead of being plagiarized by a computer program.

-Brandon Ledet

Ronin (1998)

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I’m a simple man. If Robert De Niro whips out a bazooka in the middle of a car chase, I’m going to cheer like I’m watching sports and my team just scored. If he whips out that bazooka a second time, I’m going to fondly remember that movie for a lifetime, like my team won a championship. There’s something crassly, meatheadedly American about the 1998 espionage thriller Ronin, despite its distinctly European setting. On an intellectual level, there’s nothing any more complex to the film’s international power struggle between The Irish and The Russians on the streets of France than there is between any two teams in a Sunday afternoon NFL game. Both sides struggle for possession of a mysterious briefcase like it’s a football, running it up and down the proverbial field in their European sports cars. The main difference between these two sports, of course, is that the combatants of Ronin are free to fire bullets & missiles at each other in order to score easy points, which is something that would likely appeal to American football audiences if it weren’t for the mess of human causalities it would leave behind.

A lot of people die in Ronin; most of them just happen to be background actors, not main characters. Even Sean Bean manages to survive the vehicular gunfire mayhem, and he’s notorious for playing characters who bite it onscreen. It’s the poor bystanders shopping at fruit stands & fish markets, playing tourist at ancient ruins, and watching innocent figure skating exhibitions who get it the worst here, gunned down while trying to enjoy the Old World backdrop the high-speed gunfights are set against. Robert De Niro stars as the only participant in those gunfights who actively diverts his aim away from those potential victims, often pausing his mission to retrieve the MacGuffin briefcase to save a couple nameless bystanders along the way. He’s characterized as a noble murderer in that way, as indicated by his titular designation as a “ronin,” a masterless samurai who has taken to mercenary work but still abides by the high-minded principles of his disciplined training. So, when he fires a bazooka at a moving car, you know it’s for a just cause, not just because he likes to watch explosions as much as the slack-jawed audience watching at home. That bazooka saves lives, in a counterintuitive way.

Already in his mid-50s by the late-90s, De Niro was starting to appear a little old & creaky for this kind of lone-hero action thriller, which asks him to show off swift warrior reflexes and make out with young ingénues between the more plausible car chase sequences. However, the creakiest aspect of the script is the hero worship that puts him in that position in the first place. Ronin starts as a Reservoir Dogs-style heist plot where several international mercenaries who do not know each other are gathered on one uneasy team, feeling each other out as they put together a plan to retrieve their target MacGuffin. An ex-CIA operative turned masterless samurai, De Niro quickly proves to be the most competent and the most principled of the bunch, humbling the rest of the crew with stock bootstrap phrases like, “You’re either part of the problem, you’re part of the solution, or you’re part of the landscape.” From then on, every single scene is staged in service of making sure we know he is the smartest, toughest, coolest, classiest, handsomest hero to ever drive down the streets of Paris & Nice, while his new partners in crime can only gaze at him in awe. He is the star quarterback, and the rest of the team is only there to make sure he looks good.

Meanwhile, the actual hero of Ronin is director John Frankenheimer, who could’ve directed a cardboard cutout of Robert De Niro to the same thrilling effect. No star quarterback can thrive without the right coach calling the plays. Despite the muted browns & greys of the film’s Old World color scheme, Frankenheimer works overtime to bring an exaggerated cartoon vibrancy to the screen. De Niro’s briefcase-heist team is introduced in cartoonish widescreen closeups in their initial meetings, often framed in exaggerated split-diopter blocking. For the car case set pieces, Frankenheimer straps the camera to the front bumper, inches above the gravel that rushes past the audience to simulate a pure rollercoaster thrill. There’s a Friedkinesque approach to car-chase mayhem here, often driving down impossibly tight alleys and against highway traffic to cause as much demolition derby damage as the budget will allow. It’s unclear to me whether Frankenheimer was hired to direct French Connection II because he had already honed the skills needed to match Friedkin’s car chase expertise or if that’s the project where he learned the craft himself. Either way, he was shooting chases as well as the best of ’em by the time he made Ronin, which really goes the extra mile with its bazooka gags.

-Brandon Ledet

The Furious (2026)

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Every year at Overlook Film Fest, you’ll overhear some pedantic grumblings about what films do or do not technically qualify as horror, which is ostensibly the festival’s main programming hook. Personally, I love that the festival abides by loose genre definitions, since it’s allowed some of the more surreal, dreamlike titles to sneak into the line-up, like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, and Jennifer Reeder’s Knives & Skin, which were each met with some audible festivalgoer confusion. That’s why it was such exciting news that Overlook introduced a new sidebar selection of titles for this year’s lineup that freed it from having to even pretend that every offering is strictly horror, avoiding the complaint entirely. That “Side Shows” sidebar was described in the program as “genre diversions from horror tailor made for the world of the Overlook,” and the very first title that screened in the sub-section delivered on the promise: a not-even-horror-adjacent action thriller that featured some of the most gruesome, fucked up gore gags you could find anywhere at this year’s festival. It was a raucous good time, and no one felt hoodwinked.

The Furious is a child-abduction martial arts revenger from longtime fight choreographer Kenji Tanigaki, who seems determined to leave no audience left unimpressed with his commitment to craft. Much like this year’s straight-to-streaming actioner The Forbidden City, The Furious takes great care in staging elaborately brutal fight choreography so that each blow is just as precise as it is inventive, recalling the 80s & 90s Hong Kong action heyday when Tanigaki would’ve gotten his start. This particular outing is way more ruthless & relentless than The Forbidden City, though, both in the extremity of its violence and the extremity of the real-world evils that violence aims to avenge. After his daughter is abducted by human traffickers in broad daylight, an ordinary tradesman with extraordinary martial arts skills (Mo Tse) teams up with a rogue investigative reporter (Joe Taslim) to systematically murder every scumbag involved, freeing the children they’re holding hostage in the process. It’s the kind of man-on-a-mission action thriller that sincerely believes all the evils of the world can be solved with the swing of a hammer, like You Were Never Really Here restaged as an action thriller.

The sizes & shapes of the hammers our heroes swing vary wildly, from ball-peen to sledge to bike peddle to concrete chunk on a pole. When Mo Tse gets the hammer-vengeance started by taking down an entire underground MMA nightclub with just the ball-peen in hand, his over-the-top ultraviolence is scored with Mortal Kombat-style techno, signaling that the party is getting started. The Overlook Side Show screening was near-riotous from those first few minutes of mayhem until the very end, with the crowd loudly groaning at every hammer-smashed skull and cheering on the swift justice against every ghoulish villain in our heroes’ path. The Furious takes a pro wrestling approach to morality, with very clear faces & heels on either side of the good vs. evil divide. Simplistic or not, it’s difficult to not get emotional watching children get put in peril for petty payouts by heartless goons, especially when those children start bonding and looking after each other in their dingy-dungeon captivity. Despite the severity of that subject, Tanigaki keeps the mood oddly light & fun, continuing the Hong Kong fight-choreo tradition of utilizing every single prop that appears onscreen during the fights: garbage bags, ladders, water cooler bottles, whatever’s hanging around. It’s shockingly grim, but it’s also a total blast.

Because of its predilection for hammers and its momentary indulgence in a sideway-scroller hallway fight, The Furious will likely inspire a lot of comparisons to Park Chan-wook’s breakout cult classic Oldboy, but I think that sets up a much narrower expectation of the action’s scope than what Tanigaki’s imagination for fight gags can deliver. Personally, I found myself thinking back to the wild tonal swings of RRR, which alternates from abject human misery and sublimely goofy genre payoffs at the same delirious pace. Speaking of which, The Furious is very likely the best action movie I’ve seen since RRR, give or take Furiosa. It also very likely means something that every action movie I’m likening it to in this review happens to be about some form of human trafficking, solving a complex international issue with simple acts of brute-force justice. That simplicity is a major strength here, especially in the way it invites genre-savvy audiences to cheer in unison one gory gag after another. I hope the Overlook programmers were encouraged by that loudly enthusiastic reception and will push the new Side Shows section to even further genre extremes next year. Let’s see how wild & fucked up this beautiful thing can get.

-Brandon Ledet

The Forbidden City (2026)

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Remember when 90s action movies like Hard Target & Rumble in the Bronx would import Hong Kong martial arts filmmaking sensibilities to American cities like New Orleans & NYC (or, at least, Toronto cosplaying as NYC)? The new Italo crime thriller The Forbidden City plays like a nostalgic throwback to that cross-cultural moment, except it’s set in Rome and takes its duties as a mafia melodrama just as seriously as its elaborate fight sequences. Stunt performer Yaxi Liu stuns in her first lead role, playing a Chinese martial artist on an international revenge mission to retrieve her lost sister, whom she suspects has been sold into sexual slavery in Roman brothels. Enrico Borello co-leads as a dopey local, whose Italian heritage is so important to his characterization that he literally makes pasta all day in a restaurant indebted to mobsters. The physical proximity of that restaurant to the Chinese brothel down the street proves to be important to the two leads’ shaky connection, as the chef’s father and the fighter’s sister were violently “disappeared” by the same violent thugs. They team up to get their dual revenge, combining their respective skills for bone-crunching violence and mouth-watering cuisine to take down the older, corrupt men who have broken up their families. And maybe, just maybe, they find love along the way.

The funny thing about this particular action-drama mashup is that its two genres mix like oil & water. Its dual modes as a Chinese martial arts revenger and an Italo family drama remain entirely separate, with their own beginning & ending. We start in China, detailing how the nation’s recent-history One Child Policy could make children invisible to the system and, thus, vulnerable to human trafficking. In that grimy storyline, every Roman backroom is a potential sex-traffic hotspot, including the upstairs portion of family restaurants where customers dine totally unaware of the crimes being committed above their heads. Yaxi Liu’s wronged woman makes quick work of punishing the ghouls who run those backroom brothels, relentlessly beating the life out of them with whatever makeshift weapons she can reach for on-site: knitting needles, Compact Discs, slabs of beef, dead fish, flowers, whatever. When she makes an uneasy connection the pasta chef down the street, she finds there are other skills that can be used to bring powerful men to their knees, such as Catholic guilt and a well-cooked meal. Both combatants find their own satisfaction in their dual revenge mission through two separate endings with their own respective Big Bads. Their stories only meaningfully intertwine in an unexpected romance plot, which feels semi-incestuous by the time you realize their missing relatives also indulged a romantic fling of their own, which is why they’re missing in the first place.

Director Gabriele Mainetti previously made a name for himself as an off-kilter genre masher in 2021’s Freaks vs. The Reich, which combined the superhero team-up picture with the vintage sideshow horrors of Todd Browning’s Freaks. Here, he hits all of the exact genre markers you’d want to see in both of his oil-and-water ingredients. The action set pieces feature some of the most elaborate & legible fight choreography around today, and the Old-World setting makes the whole thing feel surprisingly romantic despite its frequent bursts of violence. It’s impossible not to swoon at the gallery-style nocturnal lighting of ancient Roman architecture, so much so that you frequently forget just how sordid & absurd the details of the central romance are in context. If the doomed lovers’ clashing cultures are convincingly explored in any way, it’s through the assessment of a villainous gangster who muses that in Rome, “Nothing is important, and everything is permitted,” while in China the exact opposite is true: “Everything is important, and nothing is permitted.” Within that framework, emigration to Rome is both a liberating lifesaver and a soul-corrupting death sentence, which proves true in the fates of its characters’ families and fellow immigrant communities. The emotional impact of its interpersonal character drama never hits as hard as the sequences of Yaxi Liu throwing punches & kicks at Dutch angles, but Mainetti appears to be displaying his heart on his sleave throughout, and his dramatic sincerity is just as charming as it is quintessentially Italian.

-Brandon Ledet