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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

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2025)

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2004’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was the first—and to this day—only movie I’ve ever watched on a bootlegged camrip. I was a senior in high school at the time, and there was something still novel about torrenting a movie online before it was officially released in theaters, no matter the quality. A friend smuggled a copy of the movie on two CD-Rs into our high school art class, where we cheered & squealed over Quentin Tarantino’s newly achieved levels of cartoonish bloodshed & overwritten dialogue. I’m sure I also saw the movie in theaters that same week, but I don’t remember that experience. I do remember Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2 being in constant rotation as second-hand Blockbuster liquidation DVDs during my college years though, casually thrown on the living room TV when no one’s sure what to watch (the same way Boomers in no particular mood end up listening to the Beatles as an automatic default). Vol. 1 was always The Fun One, Vol. 2 was always The Boring One, and they were always buried behind a layer of standard-definition fuzz and only half-paid attention to, like animated dorm room wallpaper. So, twenty years later, I might have just experienced The Kill Bill Saga the way it was meant to be seen for the very first time, despite having been in the same room with “Tarantino’s 4th Film” untold dozens of times. Only, not exactly.

The Whole Bloody Affair is a new, seemingly finalized edit of the two Kill Bill movies, now smashed together to create one monstrously ginormous butt-number. Tarantino has been casually playing around with this project since 2006, undoing the Weinsteins’ work of splitting his mid-career epic into two separate parts by occasionally trotting out this one-long-cut version into prestigious venues like the Cannes Film Festival and his own vanity movie theater The New Beverly Cinema. The original uptown location of The Prytania recently secured a 70mm print of the film and has been running it on loop for the past few weeks, giving its local New Orleans rollout a prestigious feel it wasn’t afforded when DCPs were screening out at the Metairie AMC Palaces last December. So, it’s funny that I still left the theater feeling like I’ve only seen Kill Bill in a compromised, mucked up form. It seems that in Tarantino’s current, meaningless pursuit to land the “Perfect Ten” filmography, he’s gotten distracted by some George Lucas-style tinkering with the original texts. I’m willing to forgive the new silly title cards underlining that both halves of this picture technically count as “The 4th Film” in the Tarantino oeuvre, since the original project was split into two parts by meddling producers. Still, though, I’m skeptical that his original intention was to make a 5-hour movie with a Fortnite cutscene epilogue (“Yuki’s Revenge”), which is what The Whole Bloody Affair ultimately amounts to. I’m also unsure why he felt the need to extend the original films’ anime segment with newly commissioned footage, other than that no one is around to tell him “No” anymore because his most looming collaborator is currently, rightfully imprisoned. All of the newly printed material inserted into the Kill Bills of old are a waste of time & resources, but if putting up with those distractions is what it takes to revisit these films on celluloid with a savvy crowd I’m willing to go along with this fussy nerd’s legacy-curation bullshit just a little bit. At least he didn’t retroactively add a CGI Bruce Lee into the picture, Jabba the Hutt style.

Just as Kill Bill has changed over the years (through newly added animation, alternate takes, and a self-imposed intermission), so have I. It’s difficult to say anything about how this project’s place in the larger cultural zeitgeist has shifted, since it’s been so long since I’ve engaged with it and, more importantly, I’m no longer a teenager. I hadn’t personally seen much anime, wuxia, or kung-fu cinema when Kill Bill first came out, so the film’s stylistic flourishes are no longer as impressive to me now having seen The Original Texts like Lady Snowblood or The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Like all Tarantino pictures to date, there’s nothing in Kill Bill that represents the best of any genre he liberally borrows from, but he has admittedly remixed them all into something undeniably entertaining & cool — like a video store DJ. Allow me, then, to play overly-opinionated video store clerk for a moment myself and talk about where this outing ranks in Tarantino’s filmography. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 has always been Jackie Brown‘s strongest competition for the best of his best, and the newly restored cartoonish violence of the Crazy 88s fight sequence (previously censored for MPAA approval) only strengthens that case. It succeeds through the same method that Jackie Brown does, by employing real-life participants from the vintage genres he’s riffing on: Blaxploitation superstar Pam Grier & Hong Kong fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, respectively. If The Whole Bloody Affair does Kill Bill any favors in the greater Tarantino rankings, it does so by elevating Vol. II, integrating it more smoothly with its better half by dropping the “Until next time …” teaser that once divided them. And yet, the newly, needlessly extended anime sequence drags the first half down a little, so who knows (or cares). Everything else that’s changed about these movies is a jumbled mix of passing time and personal maturity. The choppy bangs, flip phones, and low-rise jeans scattered throughout the revenge epic have marked the passing of time since it first premiered in the early aughts, when all those props & fashion accessories felt as natural as oxygen. I’ve also found a new appreciation for Lucy Liu’s performance as the unlikely assassin turned yakuza figurehead O-Ren Ishii, with her Big Speech about her gender & heritage bringing unexpected tears to my eyes through sheer fierceness. I’m sure that in 2004 I was just happy to watch her decapitate an underling in the following seconds. It was a simpler time; I was a simpler man.

You will find no plot summary here, as I’m already embarrassed to have added this much text to the server space reserved for discussing Tarantino’s filmography. All I can muster the energy for is observations about how the passage of time can dull or distort a movie that means a lot to you when you’re a teenager. For instance, it’s much easier to be dazzled by a live-action Hollywood film indulging a brief diversion into anime when you’re not as hyper aware that there’s much better anime out there; extending that sequence with five additional minutes of footage doesn’t help either. It’s also much easier to enjoy Tarantino’s work in a vacuum without decades of hearing him say things that range from idiotically petty (taking out-of-nowhere potshots at Paul Dano as “the worst actor in SAG”) to outright evil (showing support to IDF soldiers during the ongoing genocide in Gaza). Even if you want to engage with the movies themselves and ignore the man behind them, he’s now stuck in a navel-gazing thought loop that makes the task impossible. Tarantino is currently terrified of directing another feature film because he might mess up his self-assigned “Perfect Ten” filmography, so he’s turned himself into a lowly film podcaster instead, and his niche topic of discussion is his own work. It’s shameful. There are two unqualified positive things I can say about Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair: 1. Its theatrical release is the only good thing to have come out of Tarantino’s current self-analysis era, and 2. It was smart of him to bury his newly commissioned Fortnite animation sequence after the 20 minutes of end credits, where few people are likely to see it. Otherwise, everything that I like about The Whole Bloody Affair I already liked about Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2: two solidly, separately entertaining pieces of post-modern pop art from one of Hollywood’s sweatiest loudmouth bozos.

-Brandon Ledet

Shakedown (1988)

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Midway through the 1988 police-corruption thriller Shakedown, Sam Elliott’s undercover cop hands a revolver to Peter Weller’s disheveled lawyer and asks, “You know how to use one of these?,” and Weller responds in his default, deadeyed deadpan, “Fuckin A, bubba. I’m from New York City.” It’s a throwaway action-movie one liner, but the entire picture is framed within that assumption that anyone who’s tough enough to survive 1980s NYC street life is always a half-second’s notice away from engaging in some good, old-fashioned gun violence. The movie opens with Law & Order veteran Richard Brooks minding his own business smoking crack in Central Park, when he’s approached by an undercover “blue jean cop” who reaches into his jacket for a concealed weapon. By the time the ambulance arrives, both men are bleeding to death on the ground from gunshot wounds, with no witnesses having seen who shot whom first. To determine whether the crack dealer (Brooks) fired his gun in self defense, the public defender assigned to his case (Weller) has to team up with the only blue jean cop he trusts (Eliot) to shoot even more guns at even more cops & drug dealers across the city’s seedy underbelly. They start shootouts in the backroom brothels above 42nd Street porno theaters; they pistol-whip perps during fistfights on Coney Island roller coasters; they chase stolen cop cars through homeless encampments and set fire to the resulting wreckage. Fuckin A, bubba, welcome to New York City.

Shakedown doesn’t have the same lost-and-found mystique as the recently restored Night of the Juggler, but it emerged from the same vintage gutter sludge. Narratively, it’s a by-the-books buddy cop thriller, except one of the cops happens to be a lawyer . . . and maybe also a robot. Peter Weller is as glaringly inhuman as always in the lead role of a long-suffering public defense attorney who’s tempted to leave the street-level grime behind in favor of a cushy yuppie lifestyle at a private firm. He says he’s tired of having to defend the “the scumbags, the jerkoffs, the sex freaks, and the killers” of NYC in court, but anyone who knows him sees right through the facade. When he’s assigned to defend the Central Park dealer who killed an undercover cop in self-defense, you can tell he loves the job far too much to ever walk away. In order to prove his client’s innocence, he has to team up with the only non-corrupt cop left in the city: Sam Elliott, a humble Texan expat. We meet Elliot in a grindhouse cinema, watching an absurd downhill skiing shootout from director James Glickenhaus’s previous feature The Soldier, teasing the insane action spectacle to come once he & Weller hit the streets and turn up the heat. The movie quickly delivers on that promise, scoring its whirlwind tour through pre-Giuliani New York City with the infinite supply of “ghetto blaster” boomboxes that used to decorate every street corner, along with the dealers & sex workers who operated them.

Shakedown is classic NYC sleaze with a stacked cast of always-welcome reprobates. Honeymoon Killers legend Shirley Stoler briefly pops in as a takes-no-shit security guard. Corman veteran Paul Bartel plays a night court judge in a single scene. David “Richie from Sopranos” Proval plays the corrupt cop who mans the evidence desk at the local precinct, stubbornly blocking Weller from the evidence that proves his client’s innocence. It’s a never-ending parade of celebrity cameos for anyone who happens to be the kind of person who would be watching a 1980s corrupt-cop thriller named Shakedown. After recently seeing Weller in Of Unknown Origin & Naked Lunch, Stoler in Frankenhooker, and Bartel in Basquiat & Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, it felt like a kind of season finale for my personal year in trash movie watching. So, I’ve come up with a quick, arbitrary metric to see how it ranks against other vintage New York schlock thrillers I’ve watched this year: determining its production crew overlap with my two most recently watched TV shows. According to the IMDb “Advanced collaboration” search, Shakedown shares 50 collaborators with Law & Order and 27 with The Sopranos. That’s ahead of Night of the Juggler (28 Law & Order, 6 Sopranos) but behind Cop Land (an impressive 75 Law & Order, 73 Sopranos). Of course, that’s more raw data than it is analysis, but all you really need to know about this movie anyway is that it’s aggressively grimy and Glickenhaus blows shit up real good. The rest is just character actors & mise-en-scène.

-Brandon Ledet

The Running Man (2025)

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It’s strange that we got two different films this year that were based on Stephen King novels that he originally published under his pseudonym of “Richard Bachman,” with The Running Man premiering just a few short months after The Long Walk. I haven’t seen the 1987 adaptation of Running Man since I was a kid, but I remember skimming the original text once in my adolescent years and not seeing many similarities, and reading that the earlier film had largely taken only a few concepts from the novel and changed much of the meat of it. Edgar Wright’s new film, based on a cursory examination of the text’s summaries online, hews closer to it, with a few modernizations to account for changing technology, as Bachman/King’s original, despite being set in 2025, couldn’t have foreseen the ways that we’d build our own dystopia. What struck me about this is that although The Long Walk was written when King was a student in the 1960s and was published in 1979, both that narrative and this one focus on a man driven to participate in a widely broadcast, necropolitical bread and circuses-style contest that ends in either death or functionally endless wealth. For The Long Walk, it’s clear that King drew inspiration from the seemingly endless Vietnam War, the first war to be televised. (As a side note, the Latin for “bread and circuses” is panem et circenses, with the Long Walk-inspired Hunger Games taking the word “panem” as the name of the nation in which it takes place.) The origin of what inspired The Running Man is less clear. 

Regardless, this made me curious about whether, consciously or unconsciously, King shunted the works in which he expressed rage against an unfair and unjust system into his Bachman-credited works while keeping his King brand spooky (as of the 1977 publication of the first Bachman novel, aptly titled Rage, King had published Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, and The Shining). Rage, which has nothing to do with The Rage: Carrie 2, has become semi-notorious since publication, as to the rise of school shootings in the decades since its publication has haunted King, who removed the book from publication after it became associated with some actual acts of violence. In that novel, main character Charlie Decker retrieves a pistol from his locker after being expelled and goes on a rampage, but he does so with no real ideology and the only clues we get to his reasoning are flashbacks to his abusive childhood. 

That’s not quite in the same wheelhouse as Running Man or The Long Walk, but the latter two do share similarities to the 1981 Bachman novel Roadwork, which could best be synopsized as “Charlotte Hollis does a Falling Down.” Roadwork features a man named Dawes whose sentimental attachment to the industrial laundry where he is employed and the house in which he raised his deceased son Charlie leads him on a campaign against the expansion of a highway that will result in both being demolished. He eventually finds himself in a standoff with the police before he detonates the house himself while inside of it, and the epilogue confirms that the highway extension project had only been approved so that the city could build the minimum number of miles to secure future federal funding. Roadwork was a contemporary novel, so it lacked the speculative fiction future setting of the dystopias of The Long Walk or Running Man, but despite a more realistic setting, the protagonist is still a person who, like the boys in the former and the running men in the latter, finds himself forced by an inhumanly callous and bureaucratic system into a path from which there seems to be no escape. It lacks the “being broadcast to the masses” element, but it is replaced by the fact that the piece is bookended by excerpts from a journalist who interviews Dawes both before and during his rampage. 

With that frustration with (and ultimate defiance of) the system being a foundational element of most of the Bachman-credited works, and with the globalization of virtual omnipresence of social media creating a world in which most people have willingly submitted themselves to an online surveillance state, it’s not surprising that we would get a Running Man remake (or re-adaptation). And, if you’re going to do it, I can hardly think of a better person to play protagonist Ben Richards than Glen Powell, who has the handsome face and toned body to please a ravenous viewing audience, both those watching the film and the TV—or rather “FreeVee”—show within it. Edgar Wright has made some of my favorite little oddballs over the years; I was a huge fan of his Sean Pegg/Nick Frost/Jessica Hynes-nee-Stephenson TV series Spaced as well as Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and his Scott Pilgrim adaptation, and even if I was lukewarm on The World’s End and never saw Baby Driver, I was more fond of Last Night in Soho than most. The early reactions to Running Man, many of which expressed frustration with Wright and recommending he re-team with Pegg and Frost, had me worried, but I ultimately had a pretty good time with it. While catching up about recent releases we had seen in the top half of our recent podcast episode, Brandon and I talked about our different reactions to Predator: Badlands, and aligned on the fact that it was the perfect movie for a mid-afternoon beer at an action flick; this is exactly the same experience. 

Ben Richards (Powell) is a laborer who has been blacklisted from virtually every job because of “insubordination” like telling a union rep about radiation leakage; that one megacorporation has a monopoly on virtually all industry doesn’t help. When his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) is planning to hit a third shift at the seedy nightclub where she waitresses so that they can try to get medicine for their ill infant daughter, Ben instead heads off to audition for one of the many game shows that are presented on the megacorp’s FreeVee service. He promises that he’s not foolish enough to try and get on The Running Man, a show in which the contestants must try to stay alive for thirty days while staying ahead of the elite five person “Hunter” team led by the mysterious masked McCone (Lee Pace), the omnipresent “goons” (the corp’s privatized police which have replaced all other law enforcement in the U.S.), and all private citizens, who are incentivized to record and report the Runners with cash prizes. He ends up not having a choice, as he gets slotted to The Running Man after various physical and psychological tests, and he’s talked into accepting the signing bonus that will get baby Cathy in to see a doctor by network exec Dan Killian (Josh Brolin). Killian tells Ben that he thinks he has what it takes to go the distance, and even as he tries to endear himself to Ben by admitting that he says that to all the players but “this time [he] really mean[s] it,” Ben sees right through him, promising that he’ll destroy him in the end. Killian directs him to amp up his rage issues for the camera, and then Ben and the other runners, Laughlin (Katy O’Brian) and Jansky, are introduced to the in-studio and at home audiences by host Bobby T (Colman Domingo), where they’re painted as thieves, welfare parasites, and malcontents, to the jeers and boos of the frothing populace. 

The rules are simple. Viewers at home can record and submit footage of the Runners via an app, and they get cash payouts both for confirmed sightings and if their contribution helps “eliminate” the Runner; Runners have to stay alive and on-the-run while recording a ten-minute tape per day and then mailing it in, supposedly anonymously. After a near miss with the Hunters while staying at a similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from YMCA, Richards meets Bradley (Daniel Ezra), a rebel who takes him in as part of the underground resistance and whose online presence as an anonymous exposer of the secrets of the broadcasts means he can provide all the exposition that Ben needs. He helps secret Ben to Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera), another rebel who plans to get Ben to an underground bunker after pre-recording his tapes so that he can lie low, and whose house is booby-trapped to the gills. Ben attempts to get more information out about the real activities of the megacorp, but his tapes are edited before broadcast to show him confessing to having enjoyed killing the goons sent after him and that he literally eats puppies. The longer he stays alive, however, the more the in-universe audience transitions from believing the villainous image that the show paints him as to finding him a bit of a folk hero. 

Before Bachman was outed as King, some contemporary critics compared the “two” writers’ work and usually found that although their styles were very similar, Bachman’s endings tended to be more bleak than King’s, which were often dark but ended on an optimistic tone. I’m not sure I really agree; Carrie ends grimly, as does ‘Salem’s Lot, but this apparent discrepancy was highlighted specifically by Steve Brown, the bookstore clerk credited with cracking the case that Bachman and King were the same person, so there must be some merit in that analysis. The recent adaptation of The Long Walk makes minor changes to the ending (mostly regarding who wins) but retains that work’s dark tone. Wright’s reimagining of the finale of King’s Running Man rejects the original climax, in which Ben crashes a stolen jet into the megacorp network building, in favor of having Ben escape the plane’s destruction prior to the plane being destroyed by the megacorp’s missiles so that he can become the figurehead of a revolution. I’m not terribly concerned with textual fidelity, all things considered, but it’s worth noting that all of the Bachman texts have downer endings. Charlie is killed by the police at the climax of Rage, the winner of the titular Long Walk runs toward a specter of death on the other side of the finish line, Dawes blows himself up in Roadwork, and Ben Richards of the novel is a martyr (at best), not a revolutionary. Even the latter works that were published after Bachman’s true identity was exposed, Thinner and Blaze, end with their protagonists losing weight to death and being shot to death by the police, respectively. It does feel like The Running Man, in either prose or film form, shouldn’t really have a happy ending; it could have had a merely poignant one. Instead, this one ends in such a way that although it is a complete story in and of itself, it’s deliberately open-ended enough that it leaves the door open for a sequel that it should not have. 

Politically, the film is kind of shallow. Ben Richards is a man with a short fuse, and his driving need is to provide for his family. He is a man with a motivation but without an ideology, and although he takes up arms against the system, one never buys that his personal vendetta against Killian transcends the personal into the revolutionary. We never learn what becomes of Ben’s wife and child in the novel, and that kind of ambiguity makes for a more interesting text, giving you something to mull over, while the film explicitly shows him reuniting with his wife after “winning” the game, after a fashion. There are the occasional very minor references to our contemporary real world and its problems. The only broadcast FreeVee that seems to exist consists entirely of game shows and a Kardashians spoof called The Americanos, which reflects a lot of the current media landscape, and there’s one piece of graffiti that reads “A[ll] G[oons] A[re] B[ad],” but no one is going to go into this film and see themselves in any of the characters with negative traits. That’s not something that every film needs to have, but when one is making a satire, which this film purports (and occasionally manages) to be, if there’s nothing that challenges the viewer to recognize himself in the brain-rotted masses who cheer for the death of an innocent man because of manipulation tactics, then what are we doing here? When the film does hit, it does so in the way that the audience is manipulated. In one particularly noteworthy scene, the mouthpiece of a show that gives Richards a bonus for the death of a goon brings all of the children of the dead men on stage for a candlelight vigil. It’s good stuff, and it’s in these moments that the film manages to show a little of the edge that it’s reaching for but failing to grasp. 

It sounds like I’m really down on this film, and that’s not really the case. I had a good time, and this was a well-paced action thriller with a likable leading man and some side characters who, if they can’t be fully fleshed-out, can at least be quirky. Glen Powell’s selling some tickets based on his towel-clad hostel escape alone, I can assure you. ‘Tis the season of heavy, heady prestige dramas like If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, After the Hunt, Die My Love, and still more in the days ahead, and sometimes it’s nice to have something that’s pretty to look at and decently constructed, even if it’s a little empty, just to break things up a little. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

One Battle After Another (2025)

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The 2023 political thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline was a small production with no household-name movie stars and limited theatrical distribution. It vocalized leftist politics within the visual language of a mainstream heist thriller, often pausing its most explosive moments to explain the political motivations of its young domestic-terrorist dissidents, who actively disrupt the industrial processing of oil as a desperate act of global self-defense in the face of Climate Change. Despite all of its populist genre markers and its traditional Dad Movie rhythms, it didn’t make much of a cultural impact outside the usual cinephile circles. What it did accomplish, though, was presenting a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, dreaming of a better world for the American moviegoer and the American political discourse. And now, somehow, one of the last few Hollywood studios standing has put some real money behind making the real thing. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is the finished action-blockbuster product that How to Blow Up a Pipeline only sketched out in blueprint, one with real Hollywood money and recognizable Hollywood celebrities vocalizing revolutionary politics within the structure of a 4-quadrant crowdpleaser. It’s in no more danger of transforming the real-life American political landscape than its low-budget indie prototype was a couple years ago, but it does have a much better chance of provoking substantial political conversations among a wide, mainstream audience, because it’s got major studio muscle behind its production & distribution — improbably.

If there’s any glaring deviation from the traditional Hollywood studio action thriller here, it’s in One Battle‘s choice to de-center its archetypal lone hero to instead give credit to the heroic work of political collectives. Much like Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling stoner detective in Anderson’s previous Thomas Pynchon adaptation, 2014’s Inherent Vice, Leonardo DiCaprio’s revolutionary burnout is continually ineffective in his attempts to save the day; he’s mostly just thrashed about by political systems larger than him as he drinks & smokes his way through the pain. At the start of the picture, he’s a young bombmaker who’s joined a political resistance collective called The French 75, helping them destroy property and free prisoners of the state in the name of a future America with “free borders, free bodies, free choices, and [freedom] from fucking fear.” However, after he fathers a child with the most erratic radical in the crew (Teyana Taylor), his politics become secondary to his domestic duties as a parent. His girlfriend splits the scene and the French 75 fall apart spectacularly under the pressure of a militant fascist named Lockjaw (Sean Penn), leaving DiCaprio’s stoner dad raising his daughter alone under a stolen identity, separated from any meaningful political resistance in his middle age. He’s only dragged back into action by the abduction of the mostly oblivious teen in his care (relative newcomer Chase Infiniti), who becomes a pawn in a three-way battle between an ICE-like immigration taskforce run by Lockjaw, the remnant scraps of the surviving French 75ers, and a secret white nationalist cabal that wields more political power than anyone else involved.

A lot of the humor in One Battle After Another‘s action sequences is a result of its would-be hero’s complete lack of heroic skills. He’s long scorched away the political rhetoric & secret passcodes from his early revolutionary days with decades of bong rips, and the countless gallons of beer have left him too sluggish to keep up in the endless string of chase sequences. When tasked to attempt small parkour maneuvers following skaters to safety during a police chase, for instance, he falls 40 feet to the ground and is immediately tasered unconscious. All of the meaningful political action in the film is executed by underground networks of revolutionaries working as a collective, including one run by a karate dojo owner played by Benicio del Toro, who helps him limp along for much longer than he possibly could otherwise. At his age, DiCaprio’s revolutionary is mostly a dad whose mission is to retrieve his daughter before she’s harmed by a fascistic government he failed to change for the better in his own youth. Even in that context, he has little effect on the outcome, pathetically so. That’s largely because the right-wing forces he’s racing to keep up with are so absurdly evil and well-funded that a paunchy, middle-aged stoner has no chance to make a dent in their armor. Sean Penn is especially grotesque as Lockjaw, continually finding new, inhuman ways to hold his body & mouth that are just as worthy of laughter as they are of disgust. The racist cabal that calls the shots above Lockjaw’s head are also presented as a hilarious punchline despite their vicious cruelty, as they’re characterized as a Christmas cult that chants, “Hail, St. Nick!” with the same ecstatic fervor that their imagined enemies chant, “Hail, Satan!”

I don’t personally care too much about Hollywood studio spectacle at this point in my life; the most potent images & ideas in modern cinema are lurking in microbudget indies that would be lucky to secure 1% of One Battle‘s speculated budget. Still, it’s encouraging to know the modern studio picture can be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people. Paul Thomas Anderson announced himself as a skilled craftsman as soon as he debuted with Hard Eight & Boogie Nights in the 1990s. His immediate Altmanesque control on large ensemble casts and his Scorsese-inspired tension between humor & violence have only become more personal to his own name & style as his work has sprawled over the decades since. Here, he acknowledges that the revolution will not be televised (going as far as to reduce that infamous Gil Scott-Heron piece to call center hold music), but he also argues that the revolution can be sexy & fun anyway. For all of the sparse piano-key tension of Jonny Greenwood’s score and the restless kineticism of Michael Bauman’s bulky VistaVision camerawork, the tone remains remarkably light. These revolutionaries cut up, they fuck, and they celebrate their minor victories with wild, infectious abandon. Before Anderson funnels all of the plot’s political warfare into a single highway chase on an open desert road, the audience would be forgiven for forgetting that we’re watching an action thriller and not an ensemble-cast character comedy. What’s most impressive about the movie is that it credibly succeeds in both genres while making time to clearly define the nation’s current political factions: our cartoonishly racist overlords, their pathetically naive servants who hope to join their ranks, the largely disorganized leftist resistance, and the ill-equipped everyday people struggling to just take care of their own despite the boots pressing on all of our necks.

-Brandon Ledet