Multiplex Madness
Dead of Winter
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Thriller
Director: Brian Kirk
Starring: Emma Thompson, Judy Greer, Marc Menchaca, Laurel Marsden, Brían F. O'Byrne
A snowbound Emma Thompson accidentally stumbles upon a kidnapping plot in the middle of nowhere in this thriller. Thompson plays her heroine both resourcefully and haplessly, sometimes working hard to gain an advantage and other times accidentally stumbling into the right area. Sometimes she leaves so obvious of a trail that I can't tell if she's doing it intentionally or if she's just obliviously ignorant. Judy Greer is a pretty great villain, playing cold, manipulative, and selfish with a desperate drive. The movie has a pretty rich atmosphere, with its unforgiving setting and relentless pace. Some plot points are a bit of a stretch, trying to reward Thompson's character for being empathetic, though you can easily see how it could go wrong for the character if that empathy were misplaced. All of these elements make the film sometimes stirring and sometimes a bit dim but it's definitely a good watch for people who love a chase movie.
Eleanor the Great
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Direcror: Scarlett Johansson
Starring: June Squibb, Erin Kellyman, Jessica Hecht, Chiwetel Ejiofor
Scarlett Johansson makes her directorial debut with a curious farcical dramedy starring June Squibb as an elderly woman with a flair for exaggeration who's Jewish best friend passes away. Squibb seeks comfort in a support group, which turns out to be a support group for Holocaust survivors, where she tries to save face by telling her friend's tales of the era and claims them as her own. She befriends college student Erin Kellyman, who finds herself inspired by her stories, which forces Squibb to double down. Hundreds of movies have been made with a variation of this story, though most don't go into the heavy drama of Holocaust survival. Because this movie does, the tone is strange and disingenuous. The movie buoys back and forth between offhandedly humorous and really dark and draining subject matter. Squibb tries to balance all of it but, as talented and as naturally funny as she is, she can't carry such a small production that has too much on its plate. That being said, I respect the story trying to be told about a woman who is both living her own life and trying to continue the life of her departed friend. That's an idea, and I see why it was thought to be a worthy one to make into a movie. I also respect that Johansson tried to storm out the gate with a project that had both heart and audacity, though sometimes you need to know when you're juggling too much.
Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Comedy, Fantasy, Adventure
Director: Ryan Creggo
Starring: Kristen Wiig, Laila Lockhart Kraner, Jason Mantzoukas, Gloria Estefan
Whenever I see a modern-day G-rated movie, I reflect on how different the rating is today than it was when it was conceived. Back in 1968, you could show Charlton Heston's bare ass and people getting shot through the neck in Planet of the Apes and achieve a G rating. During my childhood, G mostly seemed to mean a family movie that might have tepid violence at worst. In 2025, a G movie means a movie has been scrubbed with bleach to cure it of any offensiveness and is targeted at toddlers. I don't understand how this happened, but nobody wants a G anymore. I'm trying to think if I ever watched a G-rated movie for this section of my blog. Even that Paw Patrol movie was a PG. If you're rating is supposed to mean "kids can watch this" and you're losing Paw Patrol, I think the rating has been rendered essentially meaningless.
So yes, I sat through a movie made for three-year-old girls this weekend. I can justify it by saying I'm just supporting Kristen Wiig or I can double down in a ridiculous fashion and say that I firmly believe this movie has a better chance at winning Best Picture than One Battle After Another. Either way, I'm still the one who watched the Gabby's Dollhouse movie. Yay me.
Based on a Dreamworks television series, Gabby is a young girl with a dollhouse full of cat-themed toys. By way of magic and sparkles or something, she can tug on her clip-on cat ears and hop into the magical world her toys inhabit and go on adventures with them. On a road trip with her grandmother, Gabby loses her Dollhouse, which winds up in the clutches an adult collector and Gabby needs to save her friends from a lifetime of not being played with. Movies like this seems to have some weird beef with adults who collect toys. Some adults collect toys as a hobby. It's not even that weird. But if you asked Toy Story 2 or The Lego Movie, it is some sort of unforgivable sin. I guess it's trying to look at it from a child's point of view that toys should be played with, but every time a talking toy movie comes out, it feels like shots are fired. This movie's toy collector is played by a deliciously hammy Kristen Wiig, who spends the movie positively eating. I love that Wiig is this sort of Cruella-deVille-lite who is so much of caricature of a self-absorbed spoiled rich brat that she seemingly has a blood feud with a group of girl scouts for no reason. Eventually, she seems to discover that she's an adult woman who has stumbled into a children's show and she plays it as a sign that she's having a psychological breakdown.
And the cherry on top is the hair. Wiig's fake hair piece in this movie is way too sexy for a preschooler movie. I love it. I shall call it "The Kristen Wig."
There's a pretty good chance that this movie would have zero adult appeal if Wiig weren't present and giving the film a moderate feeling that it's not always talking downward to kindergarteners. Even still, I'm actually surprised at how much of the humor of this movie actually is genuinely well-crafted. The movie does walk around on pillows most of the time, and while most of it is baby-proofed, occasionally it will impress by throwing one of it's soft punchlines with expert timing and rhythm. Despite the movie's plastic presentation, it feels like it was assembled a touch of humanity.
As for educational value, the movie does have a theme of growing up that the Toy Story movies have already been melancholy about several times over. What's interesting about the way it's presented here is that it seems to be coping with the fact that Gabby's Playhouse star Laila Lockhart Kraner is growing up. The cat-eared youth is well into her teenage years now and probably has goals outside of playing with dolls for the rest of her life. Interestingly, the movie seems against the idea of putting childish things away, which can be a damaging lesson if done poorly. If one refuses to grow up, then the life of an adult will probably destroy you. The morality should probably be closer to treasuring the joy of childhood and keeping it within your heart, no matter how much adulting sucks. Gabby's Dollhouse is a movie I'd be hesitant about telling children that they should take too seriously because of that, but it's sparkly entertainment for the wee ones.
The Lost Bus
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Thriller
Director: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vazquez, Ashlie Atkinson
Matthew McConaughey finally plays the role he was born to play: a divorced, disgruntled bus driver. And now he is driving around aimlessly through a wildfire. This is when we should demand higher wages because the cost of living is too high to put up with this bullshit. McConaughey is struggle-bussing (see what I did there?) with family squabbles at home and is prepared to lose his job so he can give his kid an all-important dose of Tylenol (this is an actual plot point, so eat shit, RFK Jr.). But he is detoured as a raging wildfire has left a group of children stranded at their school and he is the only bus close enough to deliver them to safety. Of course, getting across a raging inferno and, even worse, evacuating civilians is easier said than done. The villain of the movie should be the fire but the actual villain of the movie is bullshit traffic. As someone who has also driven in California, I fully understand. The film is directed for thrills by the less numbing Michael Bay, Paul Greengrass. Greengrass adds this to his collection of "real hero" films like United 93 and Captain Phillips, and it is decently thrilling and mildly inspiring enough. It feels a little too much like an embellished melodrama. Greengrass's commitment to throwing the audience straight into the chaos succeeds in building urgency but is also too frantic to really take in the big picture. The few times it does expand beyond that, it's mostly dry exposition noise, as the film wants us to be fully on-board with the people in the midst of warring with the blaze while making sure we know that the power company caused it, while not giving them actual presence except for a few one-dimensional scenes of indifferent incompetence that seem to try to demonize them but honestly mean nothing. It will certainly play well with the audience it was made for, as it should. It's a tad empty, but it's pretty good.
One Battle After Another
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Thriller, Comedy
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti
Paul Thomas Anderson deals with political violence, interracial relationships, and daddy issues in his latest, where Leonardo DiCaprio plays a neurotic former-freedom fighter whose thought-to-be daughter is in danger from her militarist biological father Sean Penn, who sees her biracial existence as a threat to his white supremacist ambition. One dad tries to kill her as one dad seeks to save her as Anderson tells his spin on the blood family against chosen family. You know, that theme that James Gunn likes to play with. It's not the only thing Anderson stuffs into this behemoth film, wanting to tackle racism, power abuse, and even a little bit of the generation gap, which makes the movie come off more "Old Man Yells At Cloud" than I think he realizes. But the movie is nothing if not ambitious. I just wish I liked it.
I knew this movie was not for me from the first scene, when Teyana Taylor corners Sean Penn with a gun, arousing him, which she takes advantage of by goading him into masturbating. It sets up a discomforting sexual relationship between the two but it's a sort of a overplayed, self-indulgent creative choice that I find myself a little bored at how desperately "edgy" it's trying to be. The movie plods through the rest of the prologue, trying to lay out what happened to Taylor and DiCaprio to get them where they are at the beginning of the main story. It's a lot to detail out but the movie somehow makes it both feel choppy and padded at the same time. And there is more of that Anderson quirk along the way, naming a character "Jungle Pussy" and successfully making me hold face in hand while saying "Jesus fucking Christ, this movie sucks." Anderson's writing gets better once the opening is out of the way and he stops trying to shock the prudes, and his humor begins to have a higher hit ratio. It's still not winning me over because the movie is still a lumbering beast, crawling through scenarios without any sort of rhythm to the pacing. But rhythm is not something the movie is concerned with, as even the musical score sounds like a cat licking itself on top of a piano. Really nothing about this movie is grabbing me. I'm not invested in DiCaprio's relationship with his daughter, Taylor's post-natal spiral isn't very interesting, and Penn being a one-note racist scumbag gets old pretty fast. On that last note, I did appreciate that Anderson did include a satiric commentary of racism stemming from suppressed sexual desire that one internally loathes. There are several things like this that are based in intellegent observation. I get this movie. It just never engaged me. The movie lost my interest so early that I just felt like I was watching it through sterile plexiglass through the rest of it, taking note of what few things caught my gaze but mostly viewing it with disinterest.
I spent nearly three hours (which is much longer than I'm willing to humor Anderson's personal quirks and idiosyncracies) trying to feel something, anything, about this movie. Love, hate, laughter, thrills, dramatic investment, endearment, something that made what the movie was throwing down worthwhile to me. The conclusion I came to is that if I were working this hard to try to convince myself "No, this movie is actually great, probably, maybe," then I need to stop jumping through hoops and just accept that this movie doesn't have rizz. Sometimes two sexy entities don't vibe together and they aren't meant to make sweet love. Not their fault. I'm willing to accept that this movie isn't my speed, and that's okay. Maybe there is another award season contender that is. As it is, One Battle After Another is one of those movies that I'm sure a thousand cinephiles are going to tell me I'm supposed to love unconditionally but I just throw my hands up and say "Yeah, no thank you. You go on and have fun though, kiddo."
The Strangers: Chapter 2
⭐️
Genre: Horror
Director: Renny Harlin
Starring: Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Ema Horvath
The audience: "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO US?!"
Renny Harlin: "Because you were in the theater."
Picking up straight where the previous film left off, the sole survivor is in a hospital where the killer continues to track her down, meanwhile Dr. Loomis continues his hunt for serial killer Michael Myers to put a stop to his rampage for good.
Oh wait, I was recapping Halloween II by mistake. Oh well, doesn't matter I suppose. The Strangers: Chapter 2 is the same idea. The film's not-Liv-Tyler lead Madelaine Petsch survives the attack on her and her boyfriend in the last movie. The Strangers catch wind of it, murder an entire hospital, block every emergency exit, and somehow knock out the cell service, all just to get this one chick. This seems like a hefty amount of going-out-of-your-way-to-finish-the-job when the premise of The Strangers seemed very reliant on the alluded idea that they were stabbing people for self-amusement and not because they were committed to the cause. They chase her down through the woods, somehow maintain her trail after she is driven down the road by someone else, stay at it all fucking night fueled on zero sleep at all, send a bloodhound wild boar after her for some reason, and keep at it until they have a sudden stand-off that the movie never actually built-up to until it abruptly ends with nothing resolved. This movie is so fucking stupid, y'all.
Look, I've gone on record saying that I'm not the biggest fan of the Strangers franchise. I can watch the first two just fine but I'm not over-the-moon about either of them, despite acknowledging the attributes that make the first a horror classic and the second a cult classic. The first installment of this revamped trilogy was one I reviewed on this very blog and I was not kind to it. Right now I feel like I owe it a tiny apology because it's not as goofy as the second movie, but then I retract that apology and feel like I wasn't hard enough on it because that movie led straight into this one. That movie was a dull remake of the original film but one can justify that the reason it was made was to establish their own leading lady and then write their own version of "What happens next" and utilize her in her own story instead of continuing off of someone else's. From that point on, a Strangers trilogy could have gone one of two ways. The first is an upswing of intrigue, finding out what makes these films thematically interesting and justifying the entire experiment. The second is an instant justification to the first impression that the entire endeavor was a failure from conception. Clearly, this series has established itself as the latter, even if there are hints creeping in that allow you to see why someone thought it might have been a good idea. It's not but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Here's what I'll give this movie: the suspense sequences in it are a step up from the previous film. The paranoia aspect of the film is actually really interesting and Madelaine Petsch is effective in all of these scenes. The context to these sequences is often inane, but the movie is occasionally an effective chiller if you try not to think about it. But the honest-to-god truth is that you really have to ignore common sense for any of this to work at all. Nothing about this movie makes any sense. Right from minute one when Petsch tells the police "It was some kind of ritual." Wait...was it? When did we establish this? Three people banged on your door, chased you through the house, and stabbed you in the gut. What was ritualistic about it? From then on it's a chase movie. Petsch runs through the woods, occasionally coming across someone who might help, she becomes suspicious that they might be a masked killer, then they die almost as quickly as they're introduced. This happens over and over again, culminating in Petsch being bandaged up in someone's house when suddenly the Strangers are already inside and chasing her, having committed at least four murders within the span of five seconds and without having made a sound, several of which seem to be quite elaborate, with chairs and torture and shit. It's official, the Strangers have entered the Speedforce. The film ends abruptly, with Petsch still running and the Strangers still in pursuit. I think the climactic moment is that they want the audience to think the Petsch successfully struck back against them while also uncovering the identity of one of them, but it's not really much of a concluding moment. It has echoes of the second Hobbit movie where the big cliffhanger tease was that Bilbo accidentally pissed off a dragon and the "To Be Continued" moment is just "oops."
Another minorly soiled positive is that one does understand why the filmmakers seem so smitten with Madelaine Patsch. She's a solid actress, is quite photogenic, and her booty does round out those yoga pants that the climax shoves her into quite well. The first movie gave her nothing but generic happy relationship dialogue to chew on, while here she's allowed to go feral and hits her marks quite nicely even if she's surrounded by a lot of questionable production choices. That she's able to mostly survive the experience feels like a testament to her screen presence. If the movie threatens to work at all, it's because of her.
But the movie isn't really about her, it's about its attempted theme. The movie feels like it's building itself up to be a commentary on psychosis. I'm not convinced the filmmakers understand psychosis enough to be a nuanced take on it. This feels like a bunch of generic, stolen ideas of portraying psychopathic tendancies, not wanting to portray it seriously, but just relating the idea of "it's fun to kill people!" with a smile on the killer's face. This is all brought up in a series of flashbacks that attempt to enrichen "Strangers lore" by explaining why the hell they say "Is Tamara here?" I don't think anybody ever wanted a backstory on just who the fuck Tamara is but we get an answer in this movie. It's not the dumbest thing in the movie but it might be one of the most curious things that they felt they needed to do. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't interested in knowing where they were taking this bullshit embellishment of Strangers mythology that they've created. Everything they've concocted is the oddest creative decision they could make that I kind of have to know, at this point. I also need to know if any of this is salvagable. I swear to god, if the best movie in this trilogy winds up being the boring retread of the original movie, that will be seriously nuts.
New To Digital
The Fantastic 4: First Steps ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Splitsville ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
New To Physical
28 Years Later... ⭐️⭐️
Flow ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
M3GAN 2.0 ⭐️⭐️
Superman ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Coming Soon!
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