MST3K, RiffTrax, and Beyond: Cinema Playground Journal 2026: Week 10 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

The Bride!

⭐️⭐️1/2

Genre: Horror, Adventure, Romance

Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal

Starring: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz, Jake Gyllenhaal

One of my most anticipated movies of the year is, like last year, a Frankenstein movie. This one not an adaptation of the novel, but rather an original story inspired by The Bride of Frankenstein. Jessie Buckley stars as a dead woman who has been brought back to life as the companion of Frankenstein's Monster (Christian Bale). As she struggles to reassemble her personal identity, the pair go on a Bonnie & Clyde style rampage across 1930's America. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has a lot of allegories for tortured womanhood that she wants to cram in one story, including spiraling questioning of self-identity, toxic relationships, and feminist rage. She seems to have an idea of how they go together in her head but, in the film, they battle each other for dominance. Gyllenhaal gets very expressionistic with the film, often trailing with poetic monologuing that invades the film in messy outbursts that trip up the narrative flow.

The movie has clear cut problems. Whether it's worth seeing is going to depend on which ones get under your skin and whether the things it knocks out of the park make up for the flaws. The idiosyncrasies of the film's presentation don't always work in the film's favor, but if a film is going to coast solely on vibes, may it have Jessie Buckley at the center to fully understand the assignment and positively devour the entire movie. Buckley plays the title role while also taking a dual role in the form of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, who narrates the film in little black and white inserts where she waxes poetically about what is going on and also...possesses (?) the Bride at times(?). It's a clear homage to 1935's Bride of Frankenstein, where Elsa Lanchester played both the Bride and Shelley in a prologue. Gyllenhaal's take of Shelley is a cackling romanticized vision of Goth queen who does beatnik stage poetry, which I don't think is what Shelley was, but it's very much a pedestal that she is put on, so it works for the film Gyllenhaal made. Christian Bale is less memorable as Buckley's monstrous partner because he's just a stiff who is obsessed with her, though he throws himself into several of the offbeat moments that he's given, including a random musical number that feels straight from The Mask.

The film has a lot to offer if you can ride how erratic it can be, often sacrificing cohesion for in-the-moment outbursts of creativity. This feels less like a story and more like an interpretive dance. To best enjoy the movie, one needs to flow with its current, which can surf some rocky waves. The movie is amazing at its best moments and baffling at its worst, but it's always something to behold.

Dolly

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre: Horror

Director: Rod Blackhurst

Starring: Fabianne Therese, Seann William Scott, Ethan Suplee, Max the Impaler

This grindhouse slasher homage sees a woman who is taken captive by a crazy woman who traps her in her house and treats her like she's her baby. Dolly is made with stunning accuracy to the era that brought us movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, made by someone who may have a particularly unhealthy obsession with 1973's The Baby. The main appeal of movies like this in the horror community always seemed to be that they made you feel dirty, like you were viewing something you shouldn't be seeing. It's something Dolly achieves effortlessly because it's unafraid to make its viewers uncomfortable. We have a string of awkward shock scenes, from the captive having her diaper changed to being breast fed. Some of these ideas were more effectively brought to us in Barbarian a few years ago, though Dolly wants to do them with a particular framing in mind. If there is is one thing it trips on with its style, it's that its recreation of this type of filmmaking is almost perfect with the exception of the actors, who are much more polished than we would traditionally see in what this movie is homaging. The acting is too naturalistic to replicate a movie like this, but if one's primary complaint is that the acting is too good, then maybe the movie is doing just enough right.

For Worse

⭐️⭐️

Genre: Comedy

Director: Amy Landecker

Starring: Amy Landecker, Nico Hiraga, Kiersey Clemmons, Bradley Whitford, Missi Pyle

Amy Landecker writes, directs, and stars in this little indie comedy where she plays a divorced woman who starts a semi-relatuonship with a man in his 20's at an acting class, only to fight with her own self-inadequacy when they attend a wedding together and she's around women half her age. Landecker seems to have a lot on her mind in making this movie, being a story of an aging Gen X woman suddenly single in a world that is no longer focused on her generation and who is not quite sure how to handle that. Landecker is the best thing about this movie because she's thoughtful, contemplative, and amusing throughout. The movie she made with these ideas is probably too sitcom-coded for its own good, making it feel inconsequential in the wrong places. Just about every character in the movie other than her feels like a shallow caricature, even the ones who have the largest roles. This is especially true in her scenes with twentysomething Nico Hiraga, who doesn't have much of a role other than to be young and attractive. Landecker's lack of chemistry with her youthful co-star is really the thing that lets the movie down. Its not just romantic chemistry, they don't really have comedic chemistry, either. It also extends to the immediate supporting cast, who all are trying to bring their own vibe of humor to different places but all seem to be working on their own separate frequencies, creating a scattered attempt at a comedy. The movie can be amusing at times, while also a little flummoxing when it chases a bit that isn't hitting the mark. But I did appreciate the effort in what the movie was trying to do.

Hoppers

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre: Comedy, Adventure, Science Fiction

Director: Daniel Chong

Starring: Piper Curda, Bobby Moyniham, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco, Meryl Streep

Pixar's latest sees a teenage environmentalist trying to stop freeway construction from destroying a local glave, so she does the only thing she can do...she infiltrates a science lab and plants her consciousness into a robot beaver body to communicate with the local wildlife. It's just logic! It feels like the setup is too complicated for a "human becomes animal something something nature is important" movie. After all, doing a naturalist message with robots feels a little deflating. By comparison, Brother Bear wasn't a great movie but it did its premise with spirituality, which got to the point much more efficiently. Hoppers is pretty fun, though. That accounts for something. The movie can be a little overzealous with its enthusiasm for itself at times, sometime to a distracting to degree. The trailers plastered the self-aware "This is just like Avatar!"/"THIS IS NOTHING LIKE AVATAR!" joke in a way that made me hesitant about this movie, because it's a bad joke that's thrown in to deflect base comparison. I had doubts that the movie wouldn't be beyond this level of writing but, I will admit, it proved me wrong. The comedy is rapid fire and it hits at an above average ratio, a lot of it is more varied that the advertisements let on. Some of it is casually dark, which invokes a unique vibe within the movie. It's a movie that kept surprising me with what it was willing to do to keep its audience engaged, and I admire that the movie put in the work because when it begins to pay off, the wait is worth it. Its tendency to overthink its narrative hurdles still leaves me wanting but this movie turned out a lot better than I thought it was going to be.

Protector

⭐️

Genre: Action

Director: Adrian Grünberg

Starring: Milla Jovovich, Matthew Modine, D.B. Sweeney, Don Harvey, Arica Himmel, Michael Stahl-David

Milla Jovovich IS Liam Neeson IN Taken 4: Momma's Home! Jovovich stars as a soldier with a particular set of skills who finds her daughter taken by a sex trafficking ring, who then goes through hell and high water to get her back. Not gonna beat around the bush, we've all seen this movie before. The question is whether it's worth watching again with Milla Jovovich in the lead? The answer is no. I enjoy a dumb Jovovich movie, and this movie still tested my limits. It's not just that its retreading well-worn ground, it's that it does so without actual vigor. The movie is a dull drum of Jovovich walking through halls, looking pissed, without worthwhile action scenes to cut her loose in. The movie also doesn't settle for being a Taken clone, feeling the urge to clone other action movies along the way, most notably First Blood as a former superior officer warns all the local law of how dangerous she is and seeks to bring her in. With all these "influences," the film becomes a narrative mess that can't maintain any sort of momentum. However, it does have a conclusive narrative turn at the end that does explain some of its unusual plotting quirks. I'll give the movie a little bit of credit for being ballsy in the home stretch. If only it weren't one of the worst action films I've ever seen while getting there, maybe I'd have cared.

Oscar Nominations

The Alabama Solution (N/A)

All the Empty Rooms (N/A)

Arco (N/A)

Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud (N/A)

Avatar: Fire and Ash ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Blue Moon ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Bugonia ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Butcher's Stain ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Butterfly ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Children No More: "We and Are Gone" (N/A)

Come See Me in the Good Light ⭐️⭐️⭐️