MOVIES: The Musical (2026, Giselle Bonilla)

Doug (Will Brill) is a middle-school drama teacher, curdled by his failure to become a successful playwright. As he returns for a new school year, he's hoping to reconnect with Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), the girlfriend from whom he's been (he thinks) on a summer "break." He is horrified to learn that she's now dating Principal Brady (Rob Lowe, magnificently smug and smarmy).

He sets out to get revenge by destroying Brady's chance of winning the Blue Ribbon of Academic Excellence for the school by putting on one of his own plays as the annual school musical. (This point is never convincingly explained: If Doug is so convinced of his own brilliance as a playwright, then why would he think that his work would harm the school's reputation?) 

The comic tone starts dark and never lightens, as Doug drags the class into his own paranoia. "Surprise is the superpower of theater," he tells them, explaining why they have to keep the play swap a secret. And as we learn more about the subject of Doug's play and its specific take on that subject, his lessons get weirder and more conspiracy-minded.

The three principals are strong, and while none of the kids in Doug's class have enough screen time to become a fully rounded character, the young actors sketch them with smart efficiency and comic timing. I wish we'd gotten to see a bit more of Doug's musical; we get the gist in a crisply edited montage of the performance, but it would have been nice to get at least one full song.

A very promising debut from Bonilla, and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

MOVIES: The Social Reckoning (2026, Aaron Sorkin)

A "companion piece" -- not, everyone involved insists, a sequel -- to The Social Network. Sorkin, who wrote both movies, adds director to his list of duties this time, replacing David Fincher.

Our central characters are Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). In 2019, Haugen was a member of Facebook's "civic integrity" team, responsible for user safety issues. She discovered that Facebook's policies had been altered to increase user time on the site and company revenue, despite the company's executives knowing that the changes they were making were prioritizing disinformation and rage bait over truth and the emotional well-being of their users. She begins providing company documents and information about those policies to Horwitz, eventually leading to the publication of the "Facebook Files," a long series of articles that won Horwitz the Pulitzer Prize.

The Huagen/Horwitz story alternates with scenes set in 2021, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) is being prepped for a Congressional hearing by a team headed up by crisis management specialist Raya (Wunmi Mosaku); Zuckerberg is challenged most bluntly in these prep sessions by former colleague Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr), whose history of challenging Zuckerberg has led to a personal and professional estrangement between the two men.

This is the hardest kind of movie to say much about, because it's neither good nor bad to an extreme that is memorable, or that inspires any thoughtful commentary. It's fine, and I never felt that it was trying to be anything more.

The most direct point of comparison between Social Network and Social Reckoning is the portrayals of the one character they share, Zuckerberg. In Social Network, he's played by Jesse Eisenberg, who doesn't particularly look or sound like Zuckerberg, but who gives us a thrilling performance; a character emerges from the work, and we feel like we're being given some insight into who Zuckerberg is and how he things. By contrast, Strong has been styled to look very much like Zuckerberg, and duplicated his familiar vocal and physical tips. It's a skillful impersonation, but it's not much more than that, and we don't get any understanding of who Zuckerberg is beyond the superficial recreation of his social awkwardness.

The best performance in the movie is from Portia Doubleday, who is at the center of the prologue. She's a former friend of Haugen, and she's been radicalized by the white supremacist groups that have been fed to her by Facebook; we watch as she has a confrontation with the police, which she tapes and later posts to her own feed. After such a strong start, it's even more disappointing when the rest of the movie turns out to be a blandly competent march through events that just aren't very cinematic. It would take a better writer than Sorkin, I fear -- and I am generally a fan of Sorkin's work -- to make the movie's many long explanations of internal statistics dramatically compelling.

MOVIES: Fjord (2026, Cristian Mungiu)

Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) met in Romania when she was working there as a missionary. They have recently moved with their five children to Lisbet's home village in Norway. When their teenage daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceban) arrives at school with bruises on her face and back, the school refers the matter to Child Services, suspecting abuse. The cause of the bruises turns out to be nothing particularly troubling, but when they are questioned, the parents acknowledge that they have spanked, and occasionally still do spank, their children, and suddenly the investigation isn't merely a civil court matter, but a criminal one. 

An already complicated process becomes more so because the Gheorghiu family are conservative evangelical Christians, and Mihai in particular believes that these investigations are a form of religious persecution. We follow the legal process as the parents fight for the return of their children, who have been removed by Child Services and placed with foster families.

The biggest problem with the movie is that Mungiu is fighting harder to play fair between the two sides than is justified by the facts of his story (which is based loosely on actual events of about a decade ago). Unless you live in a theocracy, religion is not a legitimate defense when you've violated the law, and Mungiu's attempts to present child abuse as a culturally/religiously defensible practice can only fail. The Gheorghius are abusive parents, and their children should be removed from their home; their (and Mungiu's) arguments that this prosecution is a violation of Norway's stated value of respecting diversity is a flimsy bit of both-sides-ism that falls flat.

Still, the cast is strong. Stan is very effective as Mihai, who is constantly seething with anger; and while I don't like the way the government prosecutor has been written -- he's condescending and smug in a way that is meant to increase our sympathy for the parents -- Christian Rubeck's performance is precisely detailed.

But the cast can't overcome the flaws of the storytelling, which is trying extraordinary hard to defend the indefensible.

MOVIES: Verity (2026, Michael Showalter)

Colleen Hoover is, at the moment, our hottest author of romantic thrillers; this is the fourth cinematic adaption of one of her novels in the last two years.

It's the story of two authors. Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) is the Colleen Hoover of her universe, a massively best-selling novel of dark thrillers, always written from the villain's point of vew. Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) writes in the same genre, and has recently published her first novel, which was greeted with general indifference. It is understandably a surprise, therefore, when Verity's husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), offers Lowen a ghostwriting job. The Crawfords' young daughter died recently in a boating accident, and Jeremy tells Lowen that Verity is still indisposed. The new novel is due soon, though, and publisher due dates wait for no author, so Jeremy wants Lowen to complete the current novel. She'll have full access to all of Verity's notes and outlines, and Jeremy even offers to let her stay with them at their ridiculously remote, even more ridiculously large and palatial Vermont home.

Lowen takes the job -- the promised pay is too large to turn down -- and arrives to find that Verity is not merely "indisposed;" she's catatonic and getting full-time nursing care. And among the notes and writing waiting for her in Verity's office, Lowen finds several pages from the draft of an autobiography in which Verity puts a very different spin on her marriage and the death of their daughter.

And so we dive into a "who can you trust?" erotic thriller that never quite lives up to its potential, mostly because Dakota Johnson doesn't seem capable of giving it the campy, manic energy that something this goofy really needs.

When a friend asked me to describe the movie, I told him it was an old-fashioned "had I but known" story. He wasn't familiar with the phrase, and I said, "You know, 'had I but known the evil waiting behind the doors of the mansion...'," and he instantly started laughing. And that is precisely the correct reaction to a story this overwrought; it should be played -- well, perhaps not entirely for laughs, but at least with an understanding that this setup and the endless series of Shocking! Twist! Revelations! that follows cannot be played with a completely straight face. It really is silly on some level, and the movie desperately needs to be aware of that and to steer into it. (That understanding is one of the things that makes, for instance, Fatal Attraction work so well.)

Johnson either can't or won't do that. She's playing this as if it's the drabbest of kitchen-sink drama. Hartnett could, I think, find the right tone, if he had a different scene partner. But Johnson's bland performance traps him in the same style, and because he is (to his credit) trying to at least be consistent, he's nearly as dull even in his scenes with Hathaway, who comes closest to getting the right tone. Replace Johnson with, for instance, Olivia Wilde or Amanda Seyfried, and this movie could have soared. As it is, when we get to the final twist and the "was anyone ever telling the truth?" ending, it's hard to even care anymore.

MOVIES: Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (2026, Steve Cox & Matthew Walker)

The third movie in Aardman Animations' Shaun the Sheep series of movies for small kids. The stories aer set on a farm called Mossy Bottom, where Shaun and the other sheep get into comic tangles involving the Farmer and his dog, Bitzer.

This one begins when the Farmer accidentally destroys the pumpkin patch that Shaun has been growing so that the littlest lamb will have jack-o'-lanterns for Halloween. Shaun goes full-on mad scientist, attempting to create a super growth serum in order to quickly grow at least one pumpkin, but it accidentally winds up in the Farmer's hands.

The Farmer's nervously planning to ask the local vet to the Halloween dance (not knowing that she's just as nervously planning to ask him), but he's insecure about his baldness. Thinking that Shaun's serum is a hair-growth tonic, he rubs it into his scalp, and before long, the Farmer is nowhere to be seen and there's a great hairy beast roaming the streets of the local village. Shaun, Bitzer, and the vet, each with only partial knowledge of what's going on, attempt to solve the crisis and restore order to the farm and village. 

Like the other movies in the series, there is virtually no dialogue, only very expressive grunts and groans, so Natalie Holt's score carries more of the narrative load than usual, and it's a charming bit of work. It helps to set the movie's tone, which is scary enough to be fun for four-year-olds without giving them bad dreams at bedtime.

The movie is, in essence, a sort of Baby's First Horror Movie, and watching the kid-friendly version of classic horror tropes play out gives the adults in the audience something to be amused by. There's a torch-and-pitchfork wielding mob chasing the monster through the countryside, the poor hairy Farmer boxed into a crate to be carried off to remote Bigfoot Island, the Frankenstein-esque lab in which Shaun creates his growth potion and the antidote -- all of them adding just the right tinge of horror to Aardman's usual charming British comedy.

As we've come to expect from Aardman, the stop-motion animation is beautifully done and the jokes are impeccably timed. Unless you are (like me) unusually fond of animation, you probably don't need to see this unless you have a child to watch it with. But if you are an animation geek, or if you do have a preschooler who needs to be entertained, this will make you and the kids happy without any guilt about rotting their brains away with mindless drivel.

MOVIES: Digger (2026,  Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

Already firmly ensconced as the biggest flop of the year, maybe of the decade. But while it is indeed not a good movie, it's not as bad as you may have heard, and there are some things in it that I liked very much.

The challenge for my purposes here is that there is a major reveal about 30 minutes into the movie which should not be given away (too many reviews have, so read with caution), and it's hard to talk about a lot of the movie without spoiling things.

We open in the mansion of oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise, buried in prosthetics and a fat suit), who is getting the news from assorted underlings of a disaster at his oil field in Greenland. A massive ice shelf has broken off the coast and is drifting into the North Sea, where it is likely to cause catastrophic tsunamis and flooding throughout northern Europe.

Digger's head of environmental security (Riz Ahmed) shows up to tell him that, no, the folks in Greenland are not exaggerating; it really is going to be that bad. So Digger meets with the blustery President (John Goodman), the ineffectual Vice President (Michael Stuhlbarg), and the Cabinet -- all of whom come to his mansion, because he's just that important -- to discuss the crisis.

It's at about this point that the major reveal lands, and it forces us to recontextualize everything we've seen. Some of the movie's stranger choices -- the generally enormous acting styles, some set design eccentricities -- begin to make more sense, and Cruise takes on a second character (who isn't nearly as interesting as Digger).

Critics have been strongly divided on whether what Cruise is doing here is good acting, but there's no doubt that it's a lot of acting, or that he's making very big choices. Sometimes they work: A scene in which Digger addresses the world's political leaders, giving his version of the "you can't handle the truth" speech from A Few Good Men, is the movie's high point, aided greatly by striking costuming that has Digger in a dark reddish brown suit, sharply popping against the greys and beiges of all the other suits and of the room itself.

Riz Ahmed is the most successful in finding a way to fit in with the general bombast while still finding some room for subtlety and understatement; and in a smaller role, Jesse Plemons does very well with a monologue late in the film that drops the movie's other big twist/reveal. The rest of the cast is generally weighted down by Iñárritu's directing choices and by the clomping screenplay (by Iñárritu and multiple collaborators).

This is very much a story about men. At one point during one of the Cabinet meetings, the President scolds someone for cursing: "Watch your language, there are ladies present!" Everyone looks around and bursts into laughter, because of course, there are no women in the room. Sandra Hüller has the largest female role in the movie -- she's Digger's sister and business partner -- and she's barely present.

Ultimately, though, the movie's a mess. The exaggerated volume and style of the performances is eventually explained, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant to watch. There is too much reliance on a handful of unfunny jokes, such as Goodman's President being forced to explain repeatedly that he has "cancer of the asshole."

But the movie looks remarkable; Ahmed is quite good; and if nothing else, it's nice to be reminded that Cruise can do something more than run really fast and perform elaborate stunts. Give him a real part to play, and a director who will push him to use all of his skill, and he can do some fine acting. I fear that the poor reception of Digger will send him running away from ever taking such chances again, and that he'll be content to spend the rest of his life making fourteen more Mission: Impossible movies.

MOVIES: By Any Means (2026, Elegance Bratton)

The movie begins with a "based on a true story" text card, and ends with text telling us that the FBI has never confirmed any of the story the movie tells. It would seem that Bratton has left it up to us how much faith we should put in his ostensibly true story.

It is, if nothing else, a colorful tale, and a few parts of it are confirmable history. In 1966, the home of Mississippi civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer is firebombed by the KKK; Dahmer dies in the fire. The FBI sends one of its agents, a Black man originally from the area, to investigate.

And here we have our first "really?" moment. It is unsurprising that no one in the area is willing to talk to anyone from the FBI, for fear of Klan retribution; surely even the blinkered white guys at the FBI would have understood that a Black agent was even less likely to get cooperation. It also seems unlikely to me that they would place in charge of the investigation an agent who was a close friend of the deceased.

But in this telling of the tale, at any rate, they send a Black agent, who gets no cooperation. And that leads his superiors at the Jackson field office to send him a partner, a Brooklyn Mafia hitman who is sent in with instructions to get information -- ideally, to get a confession -- by any means necessary, including violence, torture, and murder. The hitman has done this before, he tells the agent, working on the investigation into the Chaney/Goodman/Schwerner murders. The FBI agent is initially shocked, but eventually swayed by the results the thug is getting.

Bratton has certainly assembled (with one exception, which we'll get to) a fine cast to tell his story. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is Agent Wayne Strider; Nicole Beharie is his wife, Allison. Dahmer and his wife, Hattie, are played by Giancarlo Esposito and LaChanze. The bosses at the FBI field office are Josh Lucas and David Strathairn, and LisaGay Hamilton shows up for one impeccable scene as Dahmer's neighbor, who witnessed the firebombing and is reluctant to say anything.

There are moments when those actors deliver fine work, and Bratton's movie comes to vibrant life. The Dahmers and the Striders chat after a voting rights rally; that lone scene between Abdul-Mateen and Hamilton -- in those moments, the movie is populated with real people and genuine emotion.

But too often, especially as the violence gets more intense, Sascha Penn's screenplay is content to skim the surface, offering us the familiar cliches of the 1960s civil rights movie. And when he does veer away from cliches, he does so in improbable ways. Is it really likely that Agent Strider would need to have Malcolm X's "by any means" philosophy explained to him, or that a dimwitted Mafioso would be the one to do it?

And the even bigger problem, the one that really sinks the movie, is the casting of Mark Wahlberg as the Mafia hitman. Wahlberg dives cheerfully into full "dese/dem/dose" mode, playing the cartoon version of a violent thug; you get a better, more nuanced portrayal of evil from Foghorn Leghorn in Coyote vs. Acme.

I mostly liked Bratton's first feature film, The Inspection,  a semi-autobiographical story of a gay Black man in Marines basic training. It had the typical problems of a first film, but as is (mostly) true in this movie, Bratton got strong performances from a smartly chosen cast. I'm happy to see that his work on that movie has gotten him the opportunity to work with bigger names and a larger budget. Given his usually sharp eye for finding the right actors, I'd be willing to bet that Wahlberg was foisted on him by a studio that wanted at least one possible box-office draw (albeit a somewhat faded one) in a big role.

I am hugely skeptical about the "true story" aspect of this movie; its unusually violent version of a "white savior" narrative is extremely icky; and there is no getting past the sheer awfulness of Wahlberg's performance. But the things that do work here are enough to keep me interested in following Bratton's career

MOVIES: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982, Colin Higgins)

We are still at heart an intensely Puritan nation, and sex makes us uncomfortable. We've made some progress in recent years -- some of us are more likely to use the phrase "sex workers" than the word "whores," and to treat them with at least a little bit more respect than we once did  -- but I don't think we're ever going to fully get over our queasiness about the fact that sex is pleasurable enough that some people are willing to pay for it, and some people are willing to sell it.

And so it is a measure of just how much America loves Dolly Parton that in a movie released in the dark ages of 1982, she plays a madam and has us fully rooting for her in the first five minutes of the movie. Miss Mona might be a prostitute, but by god, she is also Dolly Parton, and that matters more.

The movie's premise is efficiently laid out by our narrator, Deputy Fred (Jim Nabors, doing the full Gomer Pyle voice, and a character only a smidge less dimwitted and naive), who explains that Mona has recently taken over the management of the Chicken Ranch, the bordello on the outskirts of Gilbert, Texas. Local men have been visiting the Chicken Ranch for generations, and it is a beloved local landmark. It has earned that status by hard work on the part of Mona and her predecessors, who use their arguably ill-gotten gains to benefit the community; we see Mona dropping off a check to pay for uniforms for the entire Little League team, and it's clearly not the first time she's done something similar.

Even Ed Earl Dodd (Burt Reynolds), the county sheriff, is willing to ignore the law when it comes to the Chicken Ranch, if only because he and Mona have an ongoing romantic relationship.

But the Chicken Ranch's cozy position is disrupted by TV consumer watchdog Melvin P. Thorpe (Dom DeLuise), who has made it his mission to shut the place down.

I am not familiar with the musical on which this movie is based. About half of Carol Hall's songs have been chopped for the movie; of the surviving songs, the only one I knew (and I suspect the only one anyone else is likely to know) is "Hard Candy Christmas," a melancholy ballad sung by Mona and her girls late in the movie (Parton also recorded a solo version, which did well on country radio).

And the reason you probably haven't heard any of Hall's other songs is that they aren't terribly interesting. "Hard Candy Christmas" is by far the best of them, and even it pales in comparison to the two Parton songs that were added to the film. To be sure, most songs look flimsy next to "I Will Always Love You," but Parton trumps Hall even with the relatively minor "Sneakin' Around," a duet for Parton and Reynolds.

What you remember about the Hall numbers in the movie is not the quality of the songs, but the skill of the performance. "The Aggie Song" is an energetic ensemble dance number for a college football team; "The Sidestep" gives us an unexpectedly nimble bit of song and dance from Charles Durning, playing the Texas Governor.

You may have guessed from the cast list that this movie steers firmly into broad comedy. Parton, Reynolds, and Nabors are skilled comic actors when playing within their comfort zones, but none are given to nuance or understatement. Even by those standards, though, Dom DeLuise is off in a world of his own. It is a performance so enormously flamboyant, so vastly over-the-top, that it is too big for even this movie; I'm not sure any technology exists that is powerful enough to contain what DeLuise is doing here. He struts across the screen dressed as if he'd been invited to the Sgt. Pepper's cover shoot, gesturing so broadly and screaming so loudly that the audience could hear him from across the Grand Canyon. It is painful and unpleasant, and the realization at one point that he is about to break into a second reprise of his song ("Texas Has a Whorehouse in It") is the most depressing thing in the movie.

But the movie survives or fails on the charm of Parton and Reynolds, which is considerable. In her memoir, Parton talks about how unpleasant this shoot was for her, and how poorly she and Reynolds got along. None of that shows.  Their relationship is convincing whether they're flirting, arguing (the audience I saw the movie with gasped audibly when Ed Earl hurled the word "whore" at Mona), or reconciling; and Parton tones down her voice enough to allow Reynolds to keep up in their duet, which is his only singing in the movie.

DeLuise aside, it's a likeable bit of fluffy musical comedy, and I'm grateful to my local AMC for taking the sad opportunity of Parton's death to put it on the big screen for a few shows.

MOVIES: Coyote vs. Acme (2026, Dave Green)

Coyote vs. Acme first made news in 2023, when Warner Bros. Discovery announced that they were going to shelve the finished film and take a tax writeoff instead of releasing it. There was great backlash, especially because the few people who'd seen the movie said it was good, and WBD eventually agreed to let the movie be released. Ketchup Entertainment bought the distribution rights; the movie's now in theaters; and whaddya know? It really is good.

It's based on a 1990 New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier, and tells the story of Wile E. Coyote's lawsuit against Acme for the many, many defective products he has bought from them in his endless pursuit of the Road Runner. He hires personal injury lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who has generally been content to file petty nuisance suits against Acme, collecting a few hundred dollars at a time for his client, but his niece/intern (Lana Condor) and Wile E. force him to file a much larger suit.

(Kevin is a partner at the firm of Avery, Jones, and Maltese. Those are the last names of Tex, Chuck, and Michael, three of the legendary creators of the original Looney Tunes.)

That puts him up against Acme's lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena), his old law school nemesis, and against the deep pockets of the generally beloved Acme ("we're a family values company that values our family of companies").

The Looney Tunes characters exist in the live-action world, and the mix of the two is beautifully done. The focus is on the classic Looney Tunes; none of the new characters from Animaniacs, Space Jam, or other more recent projects make an appearance. Eric Bauza has been voicing these characters for years, and while it's hard not to miss Mel Blanc, Bauza's imitations are solid. Wile E. remains silent throughout, communicating only through the occasional sign.

All of the major Looney Tunes characters, and a lot of minor ones, are here. Foghorn Leghorn gets an unexpectedly large role as an Acme executive, and in the current climate, the thought of United States Senator Elmer Fudd feels less absurd than it probably should.

Forte and Cena have the bulk of the human-toon interaction scenes, and they deal with that challenge in very different ways. Forte tones way down to let the toons dominate their scenes, playing a sad sack who is just as used to constant failure in the human world as Wile E. is in the toon world. Cena, on the other world, goes bigger than life, essentially transforming his already implausible physique into just one more cartoon character. A conversation between Cena and Acme agent Tweety Bird is one of the movie's comic highlights.

The jokes are funny; in particular, kudos to writer Samy Burch for finding the perfect way to slip in a joke about Pepe le Pew, whose womanizing is significantly less charming these days than it might have seemed in the Looney Tunes' heyday. The climax of the movie, an unexpected meeting between Coyote and Road Runner, hits with an emotional punch I wasn't expecting.

I was happy to see that the movie had a strong weekend at the box office, and I hope that word of mouth will keep it in theaters for a while.

MOVIES: The End of Oak Street (2026, David Robert Mitchell)

We open in a Michigan suburb in 1982, where the Platt family is under a lot of stress. Denise (Anne Hathaway) is writing a novel, obviously more autobiographical than she'll admit, about a woman trapped in an unhappy suburban marriage; Greg (Ewan McGregor) hasn't told the family that he's been fired, and that his "side job" of pizza delivery is actually his only job. The kids aren't much happier. Audrey is realizing that her dream of going to Cornell to study with Carl Sagan is financially out of reach, and Brian is a second-tier bully who's recently broken another kid's arm, and now lives in fear of that kid's big brother, the neighborhood's first-tier bully.

But the family's going to have to work together when they wake up after a strange electrical storm to find that a two-mile chunk of their neighborhood has somehow been transported back to the age of dinosaurs, and there are killer beasts everywhere. It's an inverse Jurassic Park; instead of bringing the dinosaurs to our world, the movie sends modern people back to theirs.

Mitchell does a terrific job of building suspense in the opening of the movie, hinting at the lurking monsters in clever ways before finally revealing them to us. The movie is a tight 99 minutes, and there's not a wasted minute in it. Deaths are both gory -- this one is definitely not for the smallest kids, or for the most squeamish adults -- and funny; action sequences and chase scenes are thrilling; and the characters are more rounded and better developed than you expect from this sort of movie.

We already know that Hathaway can cry on cue, and she gets plenty of chances to do so here; what is less expected is what a great scream queen she makes. She delivers perfectly calibrated terror and determination, and it is Denise who is the most practical and realistic about what it will take to survive this ordeal.

This is a excellent family adventure thriller. The jump scares work, and never feel as cheap and desperate as jump scares often do. There are enough jokes to leaven the suspense and fear. There is one narrative choice late in the movie that I thought didn't work; it cheapens the most consequential moment in the movie. But that's a small flaw in an otherwise delightful movie.

And for those who particularly worry about such things, the family dog will be just fine.

MOVIES: The Rivals of Amziah King (2025, Andrew Patterson)

Patterson's first movie, The Vast of Night, had the bad fortune to be scheduled for release in the spring of 2020, so like a lot of movies that year, it wound up with a graceless dump onto streaming and never found the audience it deserved. Not that it would have been a massive box office hit, but it was a smart take of 50s SF paranoia that did a lot on very limited resources. (Sadly, it doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere at the moment.)

Six years later, he's back with a bigger budget and a couple of actual movie stars. Matthew McConaughey is Amziah King, a widowed Oklahoma beekeeper. As the movie opens, he and some friends are jamming in the parking lot of the local fast food place when a state cop asks for his help. They've intercepted a shipment of stolen honey, and they hope Amziah can help them figure out whose honey it might rightfully be.

The first half of the movie is shaggy and rambling, never sticking to any particular plotline or moment for very long. Amziah is reconnected with Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass, making an impressive film debut); fifteen years ago, she was one of many children for whom he and his late wife served as foster parents. He has more jam sessions with friends; there's a good amount of music here, all of it great fun in a sort of amateur Mumford & Sons style.

But the long chain of digressions is entertaining, and a couple of them are spectacular set pieces. McConaughey has a delightful monologue (Patterson also wrote the film; he's credited under the pseudonym "James Montague") in which he introduces Kateri to her new neighborhood by explaining the backstory of every casserole at the church potluck, and a bee emergency at the local elementary school is the movie's comic highlight.

A sharp narrative turn brings the back half of the movie into tighter focus, and moves Kateri into the spotlight. It also introduces Kurt Russell (with an unnerving resemblance to Steve Bannon) as the local industrial agriculture tycoon.

This is McConaughey's first on-screen role in six years (he's done some voice work), and Patterson makes impeccable use of his laid-back charm. It's a strong enough performnce to carry us through the meandering first half of the movie, and when the turn comes, we realize just how sharply he's used those seemingly random scenes and moments to define Amziah's character. LookingGlass matches him at every turn, and as Kateri is forced to draw upon the strength that Amziah helped her to find, LookingGlass gives a performance of sly resilience and determination.

Russell isn't asked to do much more than be a hissable villain, but he does that with enthusiasm and crisp comic timing. The assorted locals to whom Amziah and Kateri turn for friendship and aid are played by a fine assortment of character actors -- Scott Shepherd, Cole Sprouse, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori.

Currently in limited release; opens wide on the 21st. Well worth the time if it's playing near you.

MOVIES: Six: The Musical Live! (2026, Liz Clare)

The musical proshot seems to be turning into more than just an occasional novelty; this is at least the third one to play in theaters in the last year (Merrily We Roll Along came out at the end of 2025, and Hadestown just a few weeks ago). It was filmed in 2022, and reunites the 2018 West End cast.

The show begins with the entrance of six women, who announce that they are the wives of Henry VIII. They wear magnificent costumes, designed by Gabriella Slade, that fuse the style of a Renaissance royal court with the sparkle and short skirts of a modern pop diva. At the back of the stage are Ladies in Waiting, their four-woman band. The wives are getting ready for a tour, and they want the audience to choose their lead singer by deciding which of them had the worst marriage.

From there, Six becomes essentially a rock concert, with each wife getting a solo number (the other women sing backup) telling her story. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss have written pop songs, each loosely inspired by one or two specific divas; Catherine of Aragon (Jameia Richard-Noel) is a Beyonce/Jennifer Hudson type, Katherine Howard (Aimie Atkinson) is a mix of Britney Spears and Ariana Grande, and so on. (I am mildly surprised, given the success of the show, that the producers have never put together some sort of EP in which the songs are sung by the pop stars who inspired them; it'd be a terrific charity fundraiser.)

Most of the songs are tightly tied to each character's history, which makes it difficult to imagine them having any sort of independent life outside the musical. The exception is "Heart of Stone," a ballad for Jane Seymour (Natalie Paris). Seymour tells most of her story in pre-song dialogue, and the song is an emotional response to those events.

Marlow and Moss wrote the show while they were still university students, and there's an "aren't we clever young things" attitude throughout, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. That sort of winking attitude is entertaining for a while, but it can wear thin; they were probably wise to keep the show short, coming in just under 90 minutes.

The history is often framed in very contemporary terms. Anna of Cleves (Alexia McIntosh), for instance, explains that Henry sent for her from Germany after being impressed by her portrait, but he was disappointed when she arrived, as the portrait had exaggerated her beauty. In her song, "Get Down," Anna explains that "you thought that I tricked you / cause I didn't look like my profile picture." McIntosh is terrific in this number, a Nicki Minaj-inspired rap/song hybrid, and it's the highlight of the film.

By the end of the show, it's clear that Marlow and Moss are less interested in getting all of the historical details precisely right than they are in using the wives as a way to explore the broad (and limited) types into which women are sorted, both by history and by musical theater. The final moments pound the feminist message home with a little too much clunky enthusiasm, but there's a sense of humor that is strong enough to keep that message from derailing the show.

Is Six an important musical that's likely to endure for decades? No, I don't think so. But the cast is superb, the songs are skillful pastiches of modern pop styles, and it's a terrific calling card that marks Marlow and Moss as composers to watch. Not a movie you need to rush right out to theaters to see, unless you're a massive fan of the show or of musicals in general, but worth watching for when it comes to streaming.

MOVIES: One Night Only (2026, Will Gluck)

Alternate titles: The Sex Purge; After Hours: Fascism Edition.

Opening titles tell us that three years ago, the Mandate was panned, banning premarital sex. All Americans now wear implanted wrist monitors that measure vital signs and hormone levels; whenever two people are in the same place and their levels both spike in just the right technobabbly way, the sex police are alerted and sent out to make an arrest. But for one night every year, twelve glorious hours, the Mandate is suspended and all of the singles get to go wild and fuck like rabbits. This movie takes place on that night.

As the night begins, pizzeria owner Owen (Callum Turner) is planning to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke, in a role so underwritten that I didn't know the character had a name until I checked IMDB), who cuts him off by announcing that this year, she thinks they should screw other people. That sets Owen off on his quest for Ms. Right Now, during which he keeps running into Allie (Monica Barbaro), a studio singer whose career is made up almost entirely of singing old pop songs that have been rewritten as pharmaceutical jingles. (That's a pretty good running joke; sadly, it's the best one you're going to get.)

Allie and Owen keep running into one another as increasingly contrived circumstances keep them from acting on their obvious mutual attraction, and we cut back and forth between the two as they have a long series of pathetic/desperate/ostensibly comic encounters with potential sexual partners.

Considered only as a rom-com, this is a B-minus at best. Barbaro is charming, and I look forward to seeing her in better movies, but as hard as she's working, she does not have the power to singlehandedly drag any personality out of Callum Turner, who has all the warmth and charisma of a used bar of soap. The supporting cast is poorly used; they're unkindly used in some cases, notably Molly Ringwald and Levar Burton, playing Owen's mother and her boyfriend, who are trotted out for a few "old people have sex? Eww, gross!" jokes.

But we can't consider this solely as a rom-com, because its premise is so preposterous, and because the movie refuses to deal with what the world would actually look like if the Mandate had been posed. Some of the questions that came to mind as I watched the movie:

• Where are the anti-Mandate protests? If the government banned premarital sex, there would be riots in the street that would make January 6 look like a Sunday school picnic. And they wouldn't stop after a week or two, either. They'd still be going on, even three years later. This movie gives us a few listless chants of "fuck the mandate," an occasional bit of graffiti, and some halfhearted "Repeal" signs in windows. (Those signs are in the exact shades of blue and pink that are now associated with the trans rights movement, which is oddly distracting.)
• This movie takes place in a future near enough to be essentially our present, so I assume that it's our current right-wingers who have passed the Mandate. And the current sexual obsession of the right wing (at least as far as heterosexuals are concerned) is decreasing birth rates; they wouldn't be imposing restrictions that are going to decrease the number of pregnancies.
• We're supposed to believe that the federal government was able to install wrist monitors in every American in only three years? The government can't do anything that efficiently. And given the massive freakouts at the thought of getting a COVID vaccine, you think everyone's going to line up peacefully to have a piece of machinery implanted?
• How many people are required to monitor everyone's monitors for signs of unlawful sex, and how many new police officers had to be hired to make those arrests? And honestly, given typical police response times, you could probably get in a quickie and be out the door for brunch before the cops get there.
• There's a scene fairly early in the movie in which characters are trying to buy a condom (Oh right, condoms are mandated, too, which raises another whole batch of questions...), and all of the stores are sold out. On free sex night? The one night when you know there's going to be a huge demand for condoms, and none of the stores have stocked up with enough condoms to get them through the night? And it's not like this scene is at 6:45 am, when the clock is about to run out; it's pre-midnight, with hours to go yet.
• What about tourists, visiting the US from other countries? Surely the government isn't installing these expensive high-tech gizmos in every visitor. Every tourist is an opportunity for unmonitored sex. They're going to be the most popular people at every singles bar in the country. (They're also likely to be the victims of a vastly increased amount of rape and sexual assault.)

But even more than its minimization of its own enormous premise, what really drags the movie down is how conservative and anti-sex it ultimately is. Every attempt that either Owen or Allie does make to have sex goes horribly wrong, usually in humiliating fashion.; we don't actually see anyone in this movie having a happy night of sex. (Ringwald and Burton are as close as we get; they do seem to be enjoying themselves, but in ways that make them the butt of the joke.) We hear more than one character suggest that the pro-Mandate folks were right, and everyone really is better off waiting until marriage. Supporting characters are depicted as crass, disgusting lechers for being eager to have sex on the one night they're allowed ot do so.

It's anti-romance and it's not very funny. By my count, that makes it a flop on both halves of rom-com. Avoid at all costs.

MOVIES: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, Jane Schoenbrun)

As the opening credits play, Schoenbrun lays out in impressively concise fashion the history of the Camp Miasma slasher franchise: The unexpected success of the movie in the mid-80s led to cultural ubiquity – board game, video game, lunch boxes, magazine covers – and a long string of successively less successful sequels before the franchise faded into irrelevance. But recenly, film scholars and gender theorists have begun to reclaim and reevaluate the movie, despite its deeply problematic elements, and now the studio that owns it thinks it’s ripe for a reboot. A lesser filimmaker would have spent the first act laying in that 40-year history; Schoenbrun does it in a brilliantly edited sequence of about three minutes.

The studio is in talks with Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) to direct the reboot. She’s up for the job based on the strength of her first film, a Sundance smash (“it’s Psycho from the point of view of the shower curtain”), and all she needs to land the job is a good pitch meeting.

What they’re hoping for is a straightforward prequel, laying out the story of the franchise’s killer, Little Death (Jack Haven). Kris has something more complicated in mind, and is especially eager to confront the transphobia of the original. She’s arranged a meeting with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the “final girl” in the original film, in hopes of casting her in the reboot. Getting that meeting was an accomplishment in its own right. Billy turned down roles in the sequels and left acting. She now lives in seclusion at the same abandoned summer camp where the movie was filmed.

Kris and Billy are instantly drawn to one another, and as they discuss the movie – complete with a viewing of Billy’s own print, on film – a complicated psychological and sexual relationship evolves between them. The lines between reality and cinema begin to blur. As the two walk across the campground, the landscapes are occasionally replaced by obvious matte paintings, and Kris begins to get the sense that someone is watching them.

This is largely a two-hander for Einbinder and Anderson, and both are excellent. Anderson is having great fun, putting on a massive blonde wig and a broad southern drawl; it’s like a fusion of Dolly Parton and Gloria Swanson. As the women watch Camp Miasma, you can almost hear her thinking “I am big, it’s the sequels that got small.”

In the final act, as those lines separating Kris and Billy from the world of the franchise get even blurrier, the movie stumbles slightly. Its metaphors become overly broad and vague, and Schoenbrun gets carried away with the meta of it all. The movie doesn’t stick the landing as solidly as Schoenbrun’s last film, I Saw the TV Glow (a masterpiece).

But even if the ending falters a bit, this is still a very good movie. Smaller roles are smartly cast with an array of fine actors – Eva Victor, Dylan Baker, Patrick Fischler, Kevin McDonald, Sarah Sherman – largely used to provide sharp comic relief. Cinematographer Eric Yue does an expert job of recreating the look of mid-80s low-budget horror in the scenes from Camp Miasma.

If you’re averse to the gore of slasher movies, I should warn you that there is quite a lot of blood here. But I am also not a slasher guy, and I found that the gore here is so exaggerated, well past the point of plausibility, that it stops being scary. When the neck of a decapitated teen spouts a Bellagio fountain of blood 20 feet into the air, that’s not terrifying. It’s just gross and silly.

MOVIES: Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg, 2013)

Over the last decade, Swanberg has made about a dozen micro-budget movies, generally working with unknown actors (some of whom, most notably Greta Gerwig, have gone on to bigger things). This is his first film with a cast of recognizable actors, and it's the first of his films that I've seen. I'm left a bit baffled as to what all the fuss is about.

Jake Johnson and Olivia Wilde are Luke and Kate, co-workers at a micro-brewery who've been attracted to one another for years but have never done anything about it. Jake lives with his girlfriend, Jill (Anna Kendrick), and their relationship is at the point where they have a discussion every few months in which they reassure one another that they do want to get married some day, but they never quite get around to making concrete plans. Kate's dating Chris (Ron Livingston), who doesn't quite fit in with her circle of friends.

They're all likable enough characters, despite their annoying-hipster tendencies, but none of them held my attention, and as Swanberg follows them through a series of social encounters -- a cocktail party at the brewery, a weekend at Chris's lakeside cabin, a weekend in which Luke helps Kate move -- I kept thinking, "OK, surely now is the moment when something interesting is actually going to happen," and it never actually did. The most significant event, a breakup of one of the couples, happens off screen, and we only get one tiny scene dealing with the fallout.

Maybe it's a generational thing. Perhaps if I were a 30-ish guy, clinging desperately to youth and cool-ness, I would find the minor problems of these four more interesting. But as it is, the movie felt like 90 minutes of aimless noodling about people who don't have the self-awareness or the initiative to do any of the things that might actually make them happy.

MOVIES: Short Term 12 (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2013)

You hear the premise for this movie, and you might understandably fear some sort of dreary exercise in sentimental manipulation: Two young 20-somethings, each carrying a significant load of emotional baggage, struggle to make their relationship work while working at a group home for teens who are waiting to be placed in a foster home. But writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton makes his characters so vivid and specific, and finds enough humor in their lives, to raise the movie far above the Afterschool Special level. It's one of the best movies of the year.

Much of the credit goes to Brie Larson, who stars as Grace, the staff supervisor at the group home. She's good with the kids, and has a genuine gift for being supportive without coming across as smug or condescending. She's less good at asking for help than she is at giving it, though; in the delightful and useful phrase of TV critic Daniel Feinberg, this is a Vocational Irony Narrative.

That tendency to close herself off causes difficulty for her boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), who is a character we see far too rarely in movies; he's a genuinely decent guy without being an idiot or a wimp. He accepts her reluctance to share certain things, but isn't willing to let himself be shut out entirely.

Grace and Mason both have personal reasons for going into this line of work, and those revelations felt a bit too pat and obvious. I think it more likely, in fact, that someone with Grace's background would have chosen any career but this one. Cretton's screenplay allows those revelations to play out in reasonbly convincing fashion, though, and they are dramatically effective.

There are fine performances from the actors playing the home's resident kids, too. Making particularly strong impressions are Kaitlyn Dever as Jaden, the newest resident, whose personal struggles hit very close to home for Grace; and Keith Stanfield as Marcus, who is about to turn 18 and has very mixed feelings about leaving the foster care system.

The writing and acting create characters and a background that feel utterly real; the emotion is sincerely and honestly earned. The fact that the actors are relatively unknown -- Larson, Gallagher, and Dever are best known for TV or theater work; and this is Stanfield's first feature film -- helps, I think, to create that reality, because we're not being distracted by familiar faces and big-name stars. This is a very special movie, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

MOVIES: Now You See Me (Louis Leterrier, 2013)

Four second-tier magicians (appropriately enough, played by four second-tier movie stars: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, and Dave Franco) are brought together to form "the Four Horsemen," a Vegas-caliber team who take to ending their shows with enormous thefts of money that they give away to their audience, Robin Hood style. Mark Ruffalo's the FBI agent on the case, Melanie Laurent's his Interpol partner, Michael Caine's the wealthy impresario who backs the Horsemen, and Morgan Freeman's the Amazing Randi-esque debunker.

The problem is that with today's digital trickery and effects, it's nearly impossible to make a good movie about magic; when you can do anything imaginable with movie magic, the audience has no reason to believe that it's seeing real magic, or to be impressed by what it sees.

You can get around that if magic is just the backdrop for a good story about magicians, if character outweighs flashy tricks, but that's not the case here. The characters are standard action-movie thin, and while the movie's moderately entertaining in the moment, it's entirely disposable, and the plot twists that seem clever as they're happening fall apart the second you have time to think about them.

MOVIES: Lee Daniels' The Butler (Lee Daniels, 2013)

A wildly uneven hodgepodge of a movie, with some performances and scenes that work extraordinarily well, and some that are total disasters.

The story, based loosely on the life of Eugene Allen, is that of a butler -- here named Cecil Gaines, and played by Forest Whitaker -- who works in the White House from the Eisenhower administration through the Reagan years. There is a brief prologue, in which we see Cecil as a child, living in something not too far removed from slavery, taken from the field to the house by Southern matriarch Vanessa Redgrave (because apparently there were no elderly Southern actresses available that day), whose offer to teach Cecil to be "a house nigger" is, by 1912 standards, an act of kindness.

The movie splits its time between Cecil's work at the White House and his family life. The White House half of the movie is marred by a series of celebrity cameos as Presidents and First Ladies, most of which are so badly miscast -- Robin Williams as Eisenhower, John Cusack as Nixon, Liev Schreiber as LBJ -- that they feel like an endless series of Saturday Night Live sketches. James Marsden at least makes a reasonably good attempt to get the voice right as JFK, which is more than most of the presidential actors do. (By far the best of these cameos is that of Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan.)

The central story of Cecil's home life is his estrangement from son Louis (David Oyelowo) over David's involvement in the civil rights movement. And by "involvement," I mean that Louis is the Forrest Gump of civil rights, present at every major event -- a Woolworth sit-in, the Freedom Rides, Selma, jail with MLK in Birmingham, Memphis for the MLK assassination, Oakland with the Black Panthers. (Somehow, he misses the March on Washington, but that's about it.)

As Cecil ages, Whitaker chooses to reflect that age by making Cecil's speaking voice increasingly hushed and mumbly, and for the last half-hour of the movie, it's very hard to understand much of what he says. Far better (much to my surprise) is Oprah Winfrey as his wife, Gloria. It's a role that plays into Winfrey's public persona in some ways; Gloria is the grande dame of her household, used to being the center of attention (and loving it), and knowing exactly how to play to whoever else is in the room. Her relationship with Cecil is the strongest thing in the movie, a bond that remains sexual even when the two are no longer young; even in an embarrassingly awful black-and-white disco-era jumpsuit, Winfrey is sexy.

The Gump-iness of the civil rights story works against it, and makes it hard to take seriously. There is one spectacular scene, though, in which after a few years of estrangement, Louis and his girlfriend (Yaya Alafia), who is even more radical than Louis, come to dinner with Cecil and Gloria. In the argument between Louis and Cecil, we get a real sense of why some older African-Americans were scared by the intensity and the radicalism of some activists. I would have loved to have seen that idea explored more deeply (and there's a great movie there waiting to be made).

The good stuff in The Butler is very good; the bad stuff is ghastly. The whole is uneven enough that I can't recommend it with any enthusiasm, but I wouldn't argue too strongly against it if you're interested, either.

MOVIES: Elysium (Neill Blomkamp, 2013)

What a horrid mess this is.

It's 2154, and Earth is so badly polluted and unpleasant that the rich folks have fled to Elysium, a space station orbiting the planet. On Elysium, there are manicured lawns and swimming pools; most important, there are medical pods, high-tech gizmos capable of diagnosing and curing any illness or injury in about a minute.

Down on Earth, meanwhile, the poor live in slums and scrape out a living doing hard labor in factories. One such worker, Max (Matt Damon), gets zapped by a heavy dose of radiation that will kill him in days if he can't find a way to get to Elysium and into a med pod.

The planet is guarded by Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster), whose hard line stance on illegal immigrants -- she believes in shooting their shuttles out of the sky -- puts her in conflict with the more moderate President Patel (Faran Tahir).

So Max needs to get to Elysium, Delacourt wants to depose Patel (with the help of William Fichtner's Carlyle, a man so evil he literally orders people not to breathe in his direction), and the two are inevitably headed for conflict.

Alyssa Rosenberg has already done a fine job of tearing apart the confusion of the movie's health care dichotomy, but even if you toss that issue aside, Elysium just isn't very interesting. None of the characters have enough depth to be convincing, even by summer blockbuster standards, and Foster has chosen a bizarre accent that seems to be an indecipherable mix of French, South African, and Upper-Class Snob. The action sequences aren't exciting; Damon and the obligatory love interest (Alice Braga) have no chemistry; and the use of a sick child to generate pathos is the cheapest sort of emotional manipulation.

Entirely skippable.

MOVIES: In a World... (Lake Bell, 2013)

Writer-director Lake Bell also stars as Carol, a voice actress who ekes out a living giving accent lessons and doing the occasional commercial; her dream is to break into the world of movie trailers, where women are very rarely hired. Among her chief rivals is her father, Sam (Fred Melamed), a legend in the business.

This is an entertaining look into an obscure corner of show business, and Bell's screenplay is charming and funny. She's also a very likable and charismatic leading lady, and she's done a fine job of surrounding herself with talented actors. Chief among them is Melamed, who is (as he demonstrated in the Coens' A Serious Man) a master of using serenity and calm as a form of passive-aggression attack. There's also fine work from Ken Marino as another voice actor, Demetri Martin as the co-worker with a longstanding crush on Carol, and Michaela Watkins and Rob Corddry as Carol's sister and brother-in-law. (And Eva Longoria displays a nice sense of humor in a cameo appearance as herself.)

The romantic subplots for Bell and Martin, and Watkins and Corddry, do drag a bit, and are far less involving than the stuff set in the voice industry, but that central story is so involving and fascinating that the romance doesn't get in the way too badly.

I hesitate to say this, for fear that it will make the movie sound like a political polemic, but this is a seriously feminist movie about the importance, both literal and figurative, of women finding their voices. But rather than the angry screed that might suggest, In a World... is a lively movie that skillfully makes its political points in a delightful way.