MOVIES: La bola negra (2026, Javier Calvo & Javier Ambrossi)

Spain's official submission for Best International Feature Film at the next Academy Awards.

We move among the stories of three Spanish men. In 1932, Carlos (Milo Quifes) has been rejected for membership at an exclusive club because of rumors about his homosexuality; his father urges him to appeal the decision. In 1937, Sebastian (singer/songwriter Guitarricadelafuente, making his acting debut) is a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, assigned to guard Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), an injured prisoner, and finds himself attracted to the man. And in 2017, Alberto (Carlos Gonzalez), a playwright turned history student, receives word of an inheritance from the grandfather he never met, putting additional strain on Alberto's already difficult relationship with his mother (Lola Dueñas).

Eventually, the connections among these three stories are revealed, but it takes a while, and in the first half of the movie (and it's a long movie, at 159 minutes), all of the stories feel overly familiar. It was hard to be gay in the 1930s; even in the 21st century, parents of gay men can be rejecting and difficult. I found the 1937 segment particularly irritating, because I've never been fond of narratives in which someone is convinced that the person they've just met is the Great Love of their life. If you haven't spoken more than a dozen sentences to one another, that is not love, it's lust. A powerful force in its own right, to be sure, but unconsummated lust does not a tragic romance make.

But as the dots are connected, the story those connections form is more interesting and surprising than any of the individual stories. And even when the three stories feel somewhat by the book, they are told with great style (particular kudos to cinematographer Gris Jordana), and the cast is consistently fine, with Guitarricadelafuente and Gonzalez the standouts. Penelope Cruz is also excellent in a small role as a nightclub singer. (She and Glenn Close receive the "with the special participation of" credit that occasionally pops up in European films; Close feels a bit out of place, an American tossed in with an eye towards attracting American investors and/or audiences.)

There are, I'm sure, elements of this movie that would resonate more strongly with a Spanish audience, for whom the social and political issues raised by the Spanish Civil War and the ways in which they were or were not resolved would have deeper relevance. I am mostly ignorant of that corner of history, but I know enough to understand that a piece of the story has to do with things that were forgotten or ignored after the war, in some cases officially so, and the consequences of such forgetting.

I think the movie is being slightly overpraised -- it's being mentioned as a possible Best Picture nominee-- but I liked it very much. The first half is less compelling, but not so much so that I was ever bored by it, and the payoff in the second half is very strong.

MOVIES: Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (2026, Bassam Tariq)

For a time in the late 2010s/early 2020s, Bassam Tariq and Mahershala Ali were hired to direct and star in a Blade movie for Marvel. They eventually both left the project before it fell apart entirely, but they have re-united to make this movie, which gives Ali the chance to show off some of the martial arts training he went through for Blade.

Ali plays Latif, a hitman who works for a security company run by Mike (Laith Nakli). As the movie opens, Latif's wife has just died suddenly, leaving him a single father of three children, including an infant daughter. When his wife's breast milk runs out, Latif learns that the baby cannot digest formula, and he spends much of the movie driving around Houston, searching desperately for a source of breast milk.

That task has to be juggled with his continuing assignments from Mike, the latest of which involves Mike's dimwit nephew, Hatty (Abubakr Ali). Hatty runs a Muslim porn site, which has made him the target of a local cult leader/pastor (John Cho), who believes that Hatty's operation is a cover for human trafficking. Mike orders Latif to kill the pastor. 

Complicating matters even further, the death of his wife has triggered a serious crisis of faith for Latif, who is (or at least has been until now) a devout Muslim, and he turns to his imam (Giancarlo Esposito) for spiritual guidance.

The performances are solid; there's lovely supporting work from Adia (just the one name) as Fatiha, Latif's teenage daughter who is beginning to piece together what her father really does for a living.

The movie is, aside from its fight scenes, largely calm and quiet, with lots of conversations about faith and what it demands of us; those conversations come from multiple perspectives, including some brief appearances from the Mormon missionaries who live in Latif's apartment building. 

It's an odd combination of elements in what is, after all, an action movie at heart with fight scenes (very nicely staged) that include the obligatory hero-vs.-small army climactic battle, and it feels like it shouldn't work -- a Muslim hitman's frantic search for breast milk?!? -- but it does. An impressive achievement.

 MOVIES: The History of Concrete (2026, John Wilson)

John Wilson is to documentarians as Douglas Adams is to novelists. There is a topic/plot in their work, but only as much of it as is absolutely required to hold together the digressions which are really at the heart of what they're doing. So it's not surprising that this documentary, while it touches on concrete, wanders far afield to cover a business that preserves the tattoos of the deceased as framed artwork, a 3,100 mile road race that consists of running around the same New York block for months, a Christmas album from the late rapper DMX, and a trip to Rome that pretty much blows the budget for the movie.

It is Wilson's distinctive gift to edit together images from his near-constant videotaping of New York street scenes, interviews with people in quirky professions (meet the guy who sandblasts chewing gum off the sidewalk!), and the slightly fumbling drone of his own second-person narration into dryly witty meditations on urban life. The strange topical leaps and the unexpected detours become a commentary on human interconnection, and the meandering always does somehow circle back to the ostensible topic, if only tangentially.

To the extent that this movie has a throughline, it's Wilson's struggle to find funding for a movie on such an apparently drab topic. We get Zoom calls with potential funders, and the way the light drains from their eyes when they hear the title becomes a running joke. Wilson heads to the one course the Writer's Guild is offering during its strike -- "How to Write a Hallmark Movie" -- and decides to use those guidelines as a guide to structure his movie, which he sort of does, in his own digression-forward way.

My expectations were high walking into this movie. I adored his 3-season HBO series, How To with John Wilson, which gave us similarly semi-focused 25-minute video essays on things like how to appreciate wine, or make small talk. And the best moments of the movie live up to the standard set by that show. But it's a lot easier to make this style work in short doses than it is for 100 minutes, and the droll melancholy does wear thin at times.

If you're already a Wilson fan, this will give you enough of what he does well to be worth your time. If you're a newcomer, it might be a good idea to look at an episode or two of the TV show first, because Wilson is not everyone's cup of tea, and if you're not on his wavelength, this will be a very long 100 minutes.

MOVIES: You Can See Everything (2026, Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim)

This documentary was first seen as a secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival just over a month ago, and it instantly became the most talked-about documentary -- heck, most talked-about movie, period -- of the year. This is a rare case in which you should believe the hype.

In the month before she begins her 11-year federal prison sentence on fraud charages related to her healthcare company Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes invites the directors into her home to record her life with partner Billy Evans and their children; Fielder eventually moves into the house as a 24/7 guest.

Given the 17 books, 43 podcasts, 6 documentaries, 14 TV series, and (one assumes) 3 sea shanties that have already been devoted to Holmes and her crimes, you might wonder what else there is to say. As the movie begins, the focus seems to be her attempt to let people see the softer side of Elizabeth Holmes, to humanize herself in the public eye. She is, of course, incapable of doing so because she has no softer side; she remains as brittle and socially awkward as ever. But the intersection of her awkwardness and that of Fielder, who is the primary onscreen presence for the filmmakers, proves fascinating.

Holmes heads off to begin her prison sentence about halfway through the movie, which does lose energy for a bit. But Fielder and Oppenheim find a new focus for the rest of the movie and, using some of Fielder's trademark techniques, explore a part of Holmes's story that hasn't been so overexposed as her Theranos crimes.

The first half of the movie is a pretty good run-of-the-mill glimpse into a subject's life; the second half of the movie is spectacularly innovative and thoroughly fascinating, and the less you know about it going in, the more you will be delighted by it. It's not out of the question that this could be the first documentary to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, and it would be well deserved. 

MOVIES: The Weight (2026, Padraic McKinley)

The story is awfully thin in this action thriller, but Ethan Hawke is strong, and the action sequences were just enough to keep me engaged.

Hawke stars as Murphy, a veteran of World War I who's struggling to provide for his young daughter during the Great Depression. He winds up in prison, with a long enough sentence that his daughter will be removed from foster care and put up for adoption before his release.

As part of his sentence, he's sent to a labor camp, doing work to clear the way for new roads. The warden (Russell Crowe) is impressed by his cleverness and initiative, and moved by his desperation to get back to his child, that he offers Murphy a chance at early release. If Murphy and a crew of fellow inmates can transport some gold bars across many miles of wilderness within six days, the warden will grant him an early release. But, he is warned, if even one bar is lost, the punishment will be brutal.

The crew of four sets off on a perilous wilderness journey -- the role of Oregon is played by Bavaria -- eventually joined by a Native American woman (Julia Jones) whose nature skills prove useful. There are some terrific set pieces along the way -- the crossing of a rickety rope bridge, a river crossing interrupted by a dangerous log jam, confrontations with bandits out to steal the gold.

Crowe's role is significantly smaller than the movie's advertising would lead you to expect; he's present only for a few minutes to set up the journey, and for a few minutes at the end of the journey. He's very good in the role, and the scenes between Crowe and Hawke are the best parts of the movie.

Worth a look when it comes to streaming, if you like this sort of thing, but far from essential viewing.

MOVIES: Bad Apples (2025, Jonatan Etzler)

Maria (Saoirse Ronan) is an elementary school teacher in England; her students appear to be 11 or 12 years old. Her problem student is Danny (Eddie Waller), who is disruptive at best, violent at worst. After Danny breaks another student's arm, through a series of events too contrived to bother explaining, Maria winds up with Danny locked in her basement, and doesn't dare to release him for fear of the legal consequences. 

The movie's central joke, if we may call it that, is that with the "bad seed" removed from the classroom, the rest of Maria's students begin to shine, to the extent that Maria is singled out for praise after the annual government inspectors' visit.

That's a pretty bleak premise to begin with -- the way to successfully educate our kids is to lock the troublemakers away where they can't bother anyone -- and it takes an even bleaker turn late in the movie that turns the movie from a marginally tolerable dark comedy to so bleak a dystopian view of society that I was left with a sour taste in my mouth.

If you can stomach the premise, the central performances from Ronan and Waller aren't bad, and there is an unexpected sweetness in some of their scenes together. But I don't think that's reward enough to make it worth sitting through the movie's grotesque cynicism.

 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.

TV: Line of Fire (2026- )

Family/crime drama; NBC Monday nights, then streaming on Peacock. Three episodes have aired so far.

Meet the Hollingsworth family, a DC area clan devoted to federal law enforcement. Father Mike (Peter Krause) is a senior Secret Service agent; as the show opens, he's about to hit mandatory retirement age. His junior officers look forward to his departure, because they think he's a relic who hasn't quite kept up with 21st-century tactics and techniques. His estranged (but not yet divorced) wife, Jane (Hope Davis), is with the US Marshals Service.

There are three kids. Claire (Kat Cunning) is an FBI agent; Mike Jr. ("Micah" to his friends; played by Tommy O'Brien) is also in the Secret Service, assigned to the protection team of the president's daughter; and Russ (Taylor Bloom) is a former Marine who's just starting work in the national security division of the Justice Department.

The pilot finds the family caught up in various aspects of the case that will dominate (at least) the first season of the show: Someone is killing federal agents, and there is reason to think that the Hollingsworths might be particular targets. What we in the audience know is that the killer is Jack (Charlie Barnett), Mike's son from his first marriage. When asked about Jack, the family tells people that he is dead; it remains unclear which members of the family actually believe that, or (if any of them do) who's lying to them about it.

With that overarching serialized element of in the background, we also get procedural-style cases of the week, with each Hollingworth relying on the connections of their relatives in other departments to get hold of information that will help solve the case. Much of that assistance is not strictly legal, and it would be nice if the family and the show were more troubled by their willingness to cross departmental/legal boundaries in the name of family.

The show has a better sense of humor than crime procedurals are generally allowed; scenes in which the entire family is gathered have a touch of farce to them, especially when A wants B's help, but doesn't want C to know about it. The complexities of cross-agency negotiation over jurisdiction and secrecy are also somewhat novel, and add an interesting layer to the sometimes routine case-of-the-week narratives.

The cast is solid, and they're supported by interesting people in recurring roles: Campbell Scott as a US Senator on the Judiciary Committee who is Jane's boyfriend; Chris Chalk and Savannah Lee Smith as the President and his daughter; Antoinette Crowe-Legacy as the Homeland Security agent in charge of finding out who's killing all those agents. (It is no accident, I think, that when elected politicians make appearances, they are never identified by party; don't want to instantly alienate half your audience.)

At heart, this is a fairly familiar crime-of-the-week story, but the cast and writing are a cut above the standard, and the serialized elements are integrated into the story more smoothly than usual. I'm not a huge fan of most American police shows, but I'm enjoying this one.

 TV: Eterally Yours (2026- )

New sitcom; CBS Thursday nights, then streaming at Paramount+. Only one episode has aired, and the ending of that episode sends the show veering in a very different direction than the first 20 minutes had led us to expect. It's hard to talk about that show without talking about that ending, so this will be a bit more spoilery than my usual comments, at least for this specific episode. But like most first episodes, it's all setup anyway, so I don't feel too bad about giving away that ending.

The original pilot script for this show has been bouncing around Hollywood for a decade or more. At one point, it was considered dead enough to be featured on the podcast Dead Pilots Society, in which each episode features a table read of a TV pilot that never made it to air and an interview with the writers. It was good enough, though, to get writers Joe Port and Joe Wiseman a job as showrunners for CBS's adaptation of the British sitcom Ghosts. Now that it's finally made it to air, it is somewhat baffling to me that CBS hasn't paired it with Ghosts. To be sure, the idea of creating a schedule that will keep audiences from changing the channel between shows is less important than it was, now that most people are watching things on streaming anyway, but still, two supernatural-themed sitcoms would seem a logical pair.

The supernatural element of this one is vampires. We meet Liz (Allegra Edwards) and Charles (Ed Weeks, who had played the same role in that podcast table read) in 1526 when they are young and so in love that Liz is willing to be made a vampire to marry Charles. Five hundred years later, they're still married -- vampires are not allowed to divorce, we are told --  and suffering through a really long marital rut.

Their adopted daughter, Emma (Helen J. Shen), has also been made a vampire in order to save her life during a childhood illness. She's got a new boyfriend, Max (Jaren Lewison), and her parents don't approve of her dating a human.

Also living in the family home are other members of the vampire coven (I'd never heard that word applied to vampires before). Jesse (Parker Young) is a personal trainer who appears to be in his late twenties; his human wife, Phyllis (Rose Abdoo), is in her mid-70s, and gets her memory wiped whenever she stumbles into learning about the vampires. They have twin sons -- one whom got all the "good" vampire powers, and the other can talk to the dog.

So it seems very clear for the first 20 minutes or so what sort of a show we're headed for. Max and Emma date; Liz and Charles frown with disapproval; there will be lots of "oops! he almost found out we're vampires!" moments and misunderstandings.

And then -- here comes that mildly spoilery twist ending -- while visiting Emma's home for the first time, Max gets bonked on the head hard enough to kill him, and Charles has to bite him in order to save his life. And suddenly, it's not a show about the human boyfriend and his girlfriend's big secret; instead, it's a show about the new vampire learning what it means to be a vampire and how to hide that secret from his own friends and family.

That's not a bad concept for a show in its own right, and probably an improvement given that the memory-wiping shtick with Jesse and Phyllis is already wearing thin by the end of the pilot, but it's an odd choice to spend all that time setting up one show only to pull the rug out from under us in the last two minutes. Feels like a risky move; people who liked the show they thought they were getting could be alienated by the abrupt switcheroo, and people who disliked the apparent concept may have bailed out before finding out that the show they were actually getting would have been more appealing.

Sitcoms are always harder to judge out of the gate. They need more time to set up the premise and to figure out what particular comic skills their cast has, and which combinations of actors work best to tell which jokes. And this one is so busy setting up and discarding premises that it has even less time than usual to develop any of its characters beyond a single characteristic. But the cast is always at least likable, and in some of them, I can see potential for their character to develop in interesting ways.

A strange pilot, but with just enough talent and potential to keep me watching for a week or two to see how things develop.

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.

 Took a little longer than I had hoped to resolve the computer problems, but let the great catching up begin! You can expect a couple of posts every day for the next week or two. And the fun begins with...

 Aaaugh! Falling behind again, this time because I'm having computer problems. Hoping to have everything resolved by Tuesday or Wednesday, at which point there will be a flurry of posts for a few days.

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.

TV: House of Cards (1990) / To Play the King (1993) / The Final Cut (1995)

British trilogy of miniseries, each consisting of 4 one-hour episodes; loosely adapted into an American political context by Netflix beginning in 2013. All three miniseries are streaming in the US at Peacock, with the latter two identified as House of Cards: To Play the King and House of Cards: The Final Cut.

Ian Carmichael stars as Francis Urquhart, fictional Chief Whip (*) of the Conservative Party and a master of political scheming and manipulation. In the first installment of the trilogy, Francis maneuvers his way into becoming the party's new Prime Minister. To Play the King finds him confronting the new King -- never given a more specific name than "the King," but clearly modeled on then-Prince Charles -- who has the audacity to express political opinions in public; even worse, the King's opinions do not align with those of Francis and his Conservative government. The Final Cut begins at the (fictional) funeral of Maggie Thatcher -- in reality, she would live for another 18 years -- as Francis approaches her record as the longest-serving post-war Prime Minister.

(* -- There's no real equivalent to this position in the US government, but it's sort of as if the Speaker of the House was a Cabinet official who had a lot more insitiutional force and tradition behind him to hold members of his party in line on key votes.)

When Michael Dobbs wrote the novel that served as the source for the first miniseries, he had no thought of continuing it; he actually killed off Francis at the end of the book. But the TV version was so popular that Dobbs was forced to ignore that death to write the novels that were adapted as the second and third installments in the series.

When this began airing, 36 years ago, it must have felt like pure escapism. Surely politics wasn't this  viciously nasty and cruel in the depths of its conniving and struggling for power, but there was a naughty thrill in imagining that it might be. Watching it these days, I suspect it plays more darkly than it once did; if there's any escapism left in it these days, it probably takes the form of longing for the good old days when this was as bad as it got.

Whatever the era and however the story might compare to the politics of the real world, the great constant of the series is Ian Carmichael's magnificent performance. Francis frequently breaks the fourth wall to directly address the audience, commenting on the stupidity of political colleagues and rivals, the ease of manipulating the media, and (of course) his own unparalleled political brilliance. It's a performance of silky smarm and oozing charisma, and remains one of television's towering achievements. 

The supporting players don't quite rise to that level, but there are fine performances among them. Susannah Harker shines in House of Cards as a naive young reporter who trusts Francis too much for her own good; Michael Kitchen finds the precisely correct mix of smug self-satisfaction and genuine concern for his people as the King in To Play the King; and throughout, Diane Fletcher performs her own subtle manipulation as Francis's wife, a Lady Macbeth manque who takes on a steadily increasing role in the scheming, truly coming into her own in The Final Cut.

At heart, this is trashy soap opera, Dallas set in the world of British politics instead of Texas oil. But it's the classiest possible version of trashy soap opera, and it's a grand good time.

TV: Ellis (2024 - ?)

British police/crime drama; streaming in the US on Acorn, where it's labeled as Inspector Ellis. Two seasons, each short even by British standards; season 1 is 3 90-minute episodes, and season 2 is 4 45-minute episodes, comprising two 90-minute stories. Haven't been able to find info on whether a third season is planned.

Sharon D. Clarke stars as DCI Ellis (her first name is never revealed), who is sent by her boss in London to lead murder investigations at smaller police departments that don't have the staffing or experience to deal with complicated major crimes. On her first case, she's partnered with DS Chet Harper (Andrew Gower) who will leave his position in that local department to become Ellis's partner in traveling investigation. 

The "I'm from the city, and I'm here to help" sets up an unusual dynamic, with local departments usually resenting Ellis's presence and the implication that they aren't up to the task; their attitude is often one of reluctant cooperation at best, outright hostility at worst. And in some of those rural departments, the hostility is only made worse by the fact that Ellis is a Black woman.

Clarke is terrific here, and it's a challenging role, because she's not given a large, colorful personality to play. She's reserved, quiet, and actively resists small talk. When she finally, near the end of the first season, tells Chet that she has a daughter (we viewers have known that fact, and gotten some hints that their relationship might be strained, but we don't know any more than that), it's a major step forward in their partnership, the first moment in which she's acknowledging that either of them has a life beyond the job. That daughter is the show's biggest step towards any sort of serialized storytelling; this is firmly a case-of-the-week procedural, which these days, is a refreshing change.

Gower's role is more familiar -- the junior officer, almost puppyish in his eagerness to impress the boss -- and the writers haven't done much to broaden him beyond that trope. (Three of the five stories are written or co-written by the show's creator, Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Barre.) He gets to flirt a bit with the IT officer (Charlotte McCurry) who occasionally joins Ellis and Harper on their cases, but even that slight hint of personality is quickly closed off when he finds out that she's married.

The opaque nature of the lead characters is the most frustrating element for me, and if there is a third season, I hope that Ellis and Harper will be allowed to develop a more relaxed relationship and reveal more, even if only between themselves. But that's my only mild problem with the show. The cases Ellis and Harper are sent to work on are interesting and complex, darker and grittier than the cozies we usually get in rural settings. Each story gives us a large cast of suspects, friends, and relatives, played very well by actors who will mostly be unfamiliar to American viewers; Mark Addy was the only major guest actor I recognized at all, and he's not exactly a household name here.

Not essential viewing, but a good solid procedural, greatly aided by strong casting from top to bottom.