Two murderers go on a holiday at some beautiful location and suffer through a melancholic journey of self-doubt. Oh, the older murderer records his thoughts on a tape recorder so it can be turned into some written work someday. There’s a joke about having a couple of nickels in here since director Martin McDonagh essentially combined his In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths screenplays for Wild Horse Nine, but setting this movie against the grim backdrop of the 1973 Chilean coup d’état brings a new level of grounded and emotional honesty to his usual brand of sad male friendships.

For much of the first act, Wild Horse Nine plays out like an absurdist buddy comedy where nothing much happens. Having just played a key role in setting the aforementioned coup in motion, Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell) are headed to Easter Island on some irrelevant CIA mission. As the pair explore Easter Island and its famous moai, cinematographer Ben Davis, who’s worked with McDonagh on the director’s previous three movies, captures the island’s beauty with gorgeous wide-angle and helicopter shots that could’ve been taken from McDonagh’s 2022 ode to Ireland, The Banshees of Inisherin. As the movie lulls us into a contemplative mood with the geography, we’re also getting (real) world-building and character beats couched in banter that would make Aaron Sorkin envious.

McDonagh has always been a master of the back-and-forth between wisecracking weirdos, and he’s on fire in Wild Horse Nine. ‘You’re always eating, except when you’re sleeping or if you’re shooting a guy,’ says Chris, the no-nonsense, philosophical rambler to Lee’s exasperated straight-man foil, which leads to a great bit about Czechoslovakia. Underneath the dark comedy, these witty conversational cul-de-sacs constantly hint at or reveal tidbits about their history. How many meals have they actually had together? Did these meals take place during CIA missions? How long have they been doing this? Why is Lee always eating?

It’s fitting we get plenty of eating or drinking moments in Wild Horse Nine because these are appetisers to some of the harder-hitting emotional moments, particularly from Malkovich.

Taking his usual chaotic energy and steadily drip-feeding it to us, Malkovich upstages every 2026 performance in showcasing the weariness of a man who’s lived a life with weighty consequences. We get a hint of it pretty early on when he and Lee are at the airport and he tries to chat up two young Chilean women, Monica and Alicia (Mariana Di Girólamo and Ailín Salas), about their country’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende, telling them with a sneer, ‘Enjoy him while you can, ladies.’ When he’s waxing lyrical about dinosaurs one minute before talking about how ‘you only have to taste American cheese once to understand why we lost Vietnam,’ you get the sense that he’s got enough life experience to be well beyond the ‘find out’ stage and firmly in the acceptance stage of his life.

While the inciting incidents for each of McDonagh’s previous movies are fictional, the use of real events in Wild Horse Nine adds an extra dimension to Chris’s constant meditations on life, which is bolstered by Malkovich’s trademark whispering vocal quality. Killing a kid by accident as Ray does in In Bruges is awful, but being responsible, to varying degrees, for the many thousands of real deaths during the 1973 Chilean coup d’état is next level awful. As the true purpose of the Easter Island mission is revealed in act two and the consequences (a recurring theme) come home to roost in act three, it’s no wonder why Chris is always philosophising and commenting on everything: he’s processing it all as it catches up to him in real time.

So, where exactly does Lee fit into all of this? He’s Chris’s colleague, yes, but it’s far more than that. It’s a combination of an office husband, platonic life partner, and mentor. He’s been through a lot with Chris, and for all their seeming friction, Rockwell, who oozes charm out of every pore, sells their unbreakable bond with ease without turning Lee into a doormat. I definitely believe it when Lee says he can’t spell Czechoslovakia. As he goes through his own crisis, it reinforces an undercurrent of sadness in Wild Horse Nine. When Lee wearily calls his wife (Parker Posey) and asks how their kids are, only for her to reply, ‘who cares?’, it’s gutting because he, like Chris, is aware of the machinations happening but has sailed past caring and is buried deep in the acceptance stage.

You can also extrapolate the ways McDonagh is using the 1973 Chilean coup d’état as a way to comment on the awful geopolitical happenings in 2026, but that’s ultimately incidental to the movie’s bromance throughline, as somewhat distracting as this element is on occasion. But the thing that separates Wild Horse Nine’s protagonists from McDonagh’s other characters is the surprising lack of regret or anger.

Chris and Lee argue over the dumbest things, but they’re never yelling at or mad at each other. Not genuinely. For all the cynicism projected by the pair about their life and history as CIA agents, this is a very emotionally honest movie. In fact, it’s arguably McDonagh’s most hopeful movie despite it being set during a hopeless period of history. The pair may lie for a living as CIA agents, but they’re open with each other. At worst, they lie by omission - clearly scar tissue from the paranoia that comes with being a CIA agent during the 70s - but it’s never done with malice.

Wild Horse Nine wants us to like both its protagonists as much as McDonagh does, but it won’t gloss over the nasty parts to get us there. Make no mistake, both Chris and Lee are objectively awful people, but their collective jadedness makes it easy to root for them because, well, being jaded is quite relatable. That and how well Malkovich and Rockwell sell their verbal Laurel and Hardy schtick.

At the end of the day, once everything is said and done, and we’re shuffled off this mortal coil, Wild Horse Nine makes a pretty convincing case that as long as you go out with no regrets and the people you love know that you love them, then you’re doing okay. As Chris muses into his tape recorder, ‘I’m going to say a poem, which is strange because I suck at poems, but I met this horse and it taught me how to not be afraid,’ accepting whatever your lot in life is bloody difficult but definitely possible.

To Catch a Predator tried to show some kind of nobility in catching would-be predators on camera. Think about the show’s whole premise too long, though, and you realise that, yes, the would-be predators are freaks, but those filming the freaks are weird in their own twisted way. Primetime wants us to stew in that uncomfortable weirdness until we’re left wondering about the toxic dynamic between ego and exploitation… and how long you should shower for after watching this movie.

The narrative spine of Primetime centres on the heightened recreation of several stings where Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) and his crew, led by cynical To Catch a Predator producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), lure sexual deviants into carefully curated houses using actors pretending to be underage children online. From the outset, this movie is sleazy, almost like we’re being voyeurs witnessing something we shouldn’t.

Primetime starts with Hansen prepping himself by repeating some mantra, the camera right up on his face and well within his personal space. But instead of affirming words, like ‘you got this’, he’s saying distressing things like ‘virgins having sex hurts’. By the time Hansen enters a living room set up to entrap an ex-Marine child predator (Tony Revolori), the door curtains pulled back dramatically like a fabulous queen entering her realm, you’re disgusted and uneasy, yet you can’t look away. There’s a train wreck brewing. You just don’t know how the crash will happen.

Mind you, Primetime isn’t a biopic. If anything, this is an anti-biopic. While real people are depicted, this is a fictionalised retelling of gauche early 2000s culture wrapped up in a nightmarish media satire and social horror skin. Having been primarily a documentarian until now, director Lance Oppenheim brings a heightened yet detached omnipresence to Primetime. The line between fiction and reality is all but blurred, while all the ethical and moral lines crossed by To Catch a Predator are laid bare for us to see.

Oppenheim uses 12 different camera formats (ranging from mini-DV to vintage TV) to depict everything, ranging from conversations to recreations of the TV show, and holding us at arm’s length from the whole experience. For two-thirds of the movie, everything is shown to us in uneven editing rhythms like, well, an episode of To Catch a Predator. We’re often put directly in the camera whenever we watch Hansen confront a predator, the 4:3 aspect ratio and grainy playback trapping us within the tunnel vision of what he is trying to achieve. But come the third act, Oppenheim pushes Primetime into an insane Zero Dark Thirty-inspired aesthetic, complete with night-vision cameras and first-person shots. This is, quite simply, a beautiful movie to look at, but it wouldn’t work without the right person anchoring it all.

And boy did Primetime strike gold with Pattinson.

In easily his most audacious performance (so far), Pattinson doesn’t just ‘play’ Chris Hansen. He wears the TV presenter’s persona like an alien wearing a human skin that decays over the course of the movie. At no point does he come across as anything remotely resembling a human. He’s always modulating his vocal mannerisms and physical behaviour, like he’s performing for cameras that aren’t always there, resulting in a character that is too ridiculous to be real, but too real to dismiss as fiction. I don’t believe the real Chris Hansen spits out mouthwash like a Looney Tunes character, but I can definitely believe him calling up a vending machine helpline to complain that it stole his money and starting the conversation with, ‘This is Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC.’

Yet, as stylish as Primetime is, Oppenheim makes a bold choice to abstain from being preachy or didactic. It’s an interesting decision given how the topic of child predators is such an easy black-and-white one (unless you’re in ‘Murica). Instead, he opts to present events and characters in an objective manner, letting us decide what to make of it. It’s a very uncomfortable spot to be in because nearly every character truly believes in what they’re doing, and don’t learn any moral or ethical lesson. Bender is particularly unsympathetic, her soft-voiced demeanour disguising her utter ruthlessness and ‘content-at-all-costs’ mentality. It’s what makes her delivery of ‘I can make that work for TV’ at the end of the movie so crushing.

Daniel Plum (Skyler Gisondo) is the only character who has any semblance of emotional intelligence, and he slips into the role of audience surrogate by default. Even though Plum has his own selfish motivations for partaking in To Catch a Predator - he’s a struggling actor who needs work, after all - Gisondo’s inherent Jimmy Olsen-esque energy somewhat alleviates what would otherwise have been a grim watch. Whereas all the sleaze slides off Hansen, Bender, and the rest of the TV crew like water off a duck’s back, Plum carries every single messy interaction with him. His storyline is the most compelling in Primetime, yet it also highlights the movie’s polarising presentation.

In trying to depict the exploitative nature of the whole machine, Primetime complicates matters by being indecisive about where we should place our empathy - if we should even have empathy for any of the movie’s characters at all. The movie isn’t exactly glowing about our protagonists, but the depiction of the child predators isn’t exactly straightforward either. This is highlighted by a brilliant sequence in which Plum interacts (in character) with a disabled would-be predator, who admits that he typically just stays in his basement all day. The way To Catch a Predator draws out would-be criminals isn’t exactly right, but exploiting and exposing people like that - even if they’re coming out of the shadows for horrific purposes - doesn’t feel like the right way to do it either.

As grim and sad as the subject matter is, Primetime is an unexpectedly hilarious movie. Oppenheim’s detached visual language helps make the laughs feel acceptable because all the comedy comes from the absurdity of the events unfolding, the seedy early-2000s setting (a brief shot of Jared from Subway drew huge laughs in my screening), or from the characters themselves. When Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher) excitedly tells Hansen and Bender about potentially landing a ‘whale’ (i.e. a big target), Hansen replies deadpan, ‘… like the President?’. That’s just perfect comedic timing while being incidental to the movie’s overall seriousness.

Whether you like Primetime or not is ultimately dependent on how well you can stomach the ‘Murica of it all. If you’re from North America, the movie comes off as a funhouse mirror of itself. But everywhere else in the world? The whole thing feels like a searing indictment of ‘Murica and how easily it’ll sell its soul for a quick buck (which feels very prescient right now). By the time the credits roll, you’re left aghast, confounded, or intrigued by what Primetime is doing, but there’s no denying that Lance Oppenheim had a vision and he stuck to it right to the end. This must be what it felt like to watch To Catch a Predator for the first time. I suppose I do see how it looks.

We don’t need to know as much as we do about each other, let alone the actors who are on our cinema screens. That blurring of reality and fiction can wreak havoc on our suspension of disbelief (see Tom Cruise in Digger). That’s why, despite being the titular character in Clayface, we’re kept at arm’s length from rising Hollywood actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) and witness only what happens to him in the here and now.

So, what do we know about pretty boy Matt Hagen? Well, he’s friendly with all his movie crew members, and he believes in taking the tragedy of one’s life to create something beautiful. That’s it, really. While Harries is easily believable as a properly nice bloke, we don’t even know if Hagen’s actually a good actor other than everyone telling us how great he is. The one brief moment of tearful joy when he learns about his Academy Award nomination is about as much as we get.

Director James Watkins makes the bold choice to make Hagen less of a character and more of a subject, one that’s ultimately malleable to the whims of a seemingly tragic story. Watkins cuts down his handsome tall poppy at a relentless pace, culminating in a local Gotham mob boss (David Dencik) maiming his face in a truly horrific sequence that dares you to keep watching. I lost count of how many times I winced at the violence, yet the intrigue kept building. You don’t really care what will happen to Hagen - a lot of what happens to him is self-inflicted - but you are invested in how this volatile test subject will react to adversity.

As melodramatic as Hagen’s downfall is, our lack of connection to him allows Clayface to have some unexpected fun in his despair. The repeated agonising over his face lampoons actors for being vapid and fixated on the wrong things. Our protagonist may be our main character, but the movie makes it doubly clear that his genuine nice-guy traits don’t make him a hero. Hagen’s mask of choice to hide his disfigured face is also an obvious but fun little reference to the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera. And who is his Christine? Enter disgraced scientist Dr Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) and her experimental AI/nanotech.

Obsessing over one’s looks is pretty stupid, but when a person sinks lower than rock bottom (in their mind), they will become desperate enough to do anything to escape their hell. For Hagen, it means signing up for Corr’s experimental trial. For Corr, it means crossing her ethical boundary as a doctor in the pursuit of her work. Their doctor/patient dynamic initially works, and so do her nanobots. But like the Phantom and Christine, it’s never going to end well, and that’s when Clayface hits its grossest and most engrossing stride.

The movie doesn’t waste time with ‘woe is me’ monologues, opting to show Hagen’s turmoil through ego-driven action and reaction. When his face starts melting, he goes against Corr’s advice and injects more nanobots into his eyes, with the camera never pulling away from the needle going right into his face. When his eyes start sealing shut, like a virus-infected version of Neo’s mouth from The Matrix, he cuts them open using scissors in an unbearably uncomfortable close-up body horror sequence. And when he confronts his attackers again, he inadvertently breaks bad when he learns what his new clay-like nanobots can do.

Corr and Hagen’s dynamic quickly mutates into a modern-day Frankenstein tale. Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini’s script tries to push the Hagen/Corr dynamic down the overused romantic route, but Ackie and Harries’s performances rescue what is easily Clayface’s weakest aspect. When Corr is monitoring Hagen’s vitals while he sleeps, her confused reaction to his subconscious is ambiguous yet tinged with something else. Is it pride? Affection? Hubris? He is proof that her work can be effective after all. On the flip side, Hagen claims he’s in love with Corr, but Harries plays it as someone desperately clinging to her like a morality chain.

As the nanobot-enhanced Hagen embraces his worst impulses, his transformation from subject to anti-hero is thrilling. The character turn was always lurking in the background, kept in the back of our minds by Volker Bertelmann’s haunting operatic score. The bellowing horns and sinister strings linger softly at the beginning before pushing to the forefront as Clayface reassembles Hagen into a terrifying horror villain for the third act.

When we reach the movie’s climactic action showpiece, it brings Hagen’s earlier musings about acting being a gateway to the soul full circle in the most imaginative and disgusting way possible. By this point, any inkling of a last-minute twist or rug pull has disappeared. Clayface never pretended to be a superhero movie that’s cut from a similar cloth as previous DC entries did, and credit to the filmmakers for committing to the story right until the end. What initially appeared to be a downfall story is recontextualised by the climax, revealing that something else entirely was unfolding before our very eyes the whole time.

What’s most surprising is that Clayface clocks in at a brisk 108 minutes. Not a single moment is wasted, and the pace of Hagen’s rise, fall, and reassembly is so relentlessly entertaining that you don’t realise the flaws or logical problems until you’re walking out of the cinema and gushing over how exhilarating the whole thing was. I could be hung up on Hagen making stupid choices or somehow not being smart enough to put the many obvious clues together, but it’s easy to wave those nitpicks away when a movie is as hellbent on keeping you entertained as Clayface is.

This was DC at its most confident and another sign that IP filmmaking can still be creatively satisfying for everyone. Turns out we truly didn’t need to know who Clayface was or is at all because when you have a story that only asks us to commit as hard as it does, you’ll have a great time without any lingering DC-shaped baggage hanging over it.

Street Fighter opens with a gorgeously stylised anime sequence introducing us to a boringly stoic Ryu (Andrew Koji), his himbo BFF Ken (Noah Centineo), and the fighting tournament in which we see Ryu brutally defeat Sagat by embracing his inner darkness. The colours are striking, the action is brutally captivating, and there’s intriguing character stuff going on. Where did THAT come from? Was this new live-action adaptation of Street Fighter secretly a reimagining of the iconic Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie?

Sadly, no.

In a year where video game movies have ruled, we’ve gotten a thrillingly original Resident Evil story that respects the source material, a horrendously embarrassing IP cash grab, and another fighting game adaptation that’s embarrassed of its own existence. Within that grouping, Street Fighter is a movie mired in a deep identity crisis over what exactly it’s meant to be beyond gratuitous fan service, yet proudly soldiering on while it and everything around it are on fire.

In one corner, you have the aforementioned Ryu and Ken storyline, which is clearly director Kitao Sakurai’s attempt at ripping off Warrior and landing somewhere in the region of K-drama and soap opera. Oh, there are some fight scenes, and Akuma (Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i) shows up for some reason.

In the next corner, you have an undercover agent storyline featuring Chun-Li (Callina Liang) infiltrating Bison’s (David Dastmalchian) base of voodoo science and harem of attractive female soldiers because he killed her father or something. There are some fight scenes, something about a fighting tournament, and Bison wanting power, but most of it is quickly forgotten. Yes, Dastmalchian does his take on Raul Julia’s iconic ‘But for me, it was Tuesday’ line.

And in the third corner, you have literally everyone else doing comedy schtick or an obligatory character fight scene and doing their best to make the most of their moment in the horribly lit spotlight.

Stringing these three disparate plotlines together are animated flashbacks, black-and-white flashbacks to scenes that just happened five minutes prior, and overly long exposition dumps poorly disguised as character monologues. Not that all this hand-holding does much to help us figure out the plot because it’s more nonsensical than Guile’s (Cody Rhodes) stupid hair.

With three movies’ worth of clashing ideas and a huge cast to service, Sakurai does his best to wrangle everything into something coherent, but never manages to find the sweet spot of campy yet fun where the best Street Fighter games typically land.

Half the cast take things way too seriously. Koji tries his best to find different ways to play stoic, but ends up looking constipated most of the time; Chun-Li has more anguished screams at the camera than a horror movie victim, and her dramatic scenes are undercut by unintentionally hilarious moments, like hard cutting from a thirst-trap-coded training montage to drinking vodka while crying over a childhood photo; and Ken masks his existential crisis with outward flashes of embarrassing masculinity and insecurity.

The other half think they’re in a campy homoerotic comedy. Guile is so overly macho (‘More for daddy!’) he’s just itching to Flash Kick his way out of the closet; Dastmalchian, who clearly understood the assignment, turns Bison into a snail-eating freak who waxes poetic about feet being the gateway to one’s soul, thinks Ken is a ‘poor, dumb, beautiful, fit, handsome boy’ and has the best ‘son of a bitch’ line read I’ve ever heard; and Jason Momoa is just doing Lobo (i.e. having the time of his life) but in green instead of black.

Speaking of homoerotic, one has to commend Street Fighter for not limiting it to just the shirtless hunky men. Cammy (Mel Jarnson) exists purely to hit on Chun-Li (‘Everyone keeps going on about your thighs, I don’t see what the big deal is.’) while giving her ‘do me’ eyes, her whole Special Forces background from the games be damned. In fact, the one consistent aspect, and where the bulk of the interesting filmmaking chops are shown, in this movie is the drought-inducing level of thirst.

The male actors are often shirtless, their muscles glistening in the over-cranked artificial lights, while Liang is often framed in flattering Michael Bay-esque mid-shots or close-ups that spotlight her hard-earned physique, all of which have very little to do with anything else happening in the frame. In fact, the single most imaginative shot in Street Fighter is when Chun-Li disrobes for a shower, clearly a homage to the character’s infamous shower scene in the animated movie. The steam strategically covers her body before seamlessly transitioning to a close-up shot on E. Honda’s (Hirooki Goto) sweaty chest for no apparent reason. That’s basically the whole movie in a nutshell: fan service in lieu of anything coherent, but at least it looks cool.

What’s most disappointing is how Street Fighter fails to capture the frantic, button-mashing fun of the games. There are fight scenes aplenty, but watching them is just tiring. Tiring to make sense of all the quick cutting and dim lighting obscuring every move. Tiring to square the on-the-nose needle drops - like The Offspring’s ‘Come Out And Play’ and 4 Non Blondes’ ‘What’s Up?’ - with what’s happening on screen, like when it cuts from Chun-Li fighting Bison to her suddenly fighting Vega with literally no explanation. What the movie does achieve, albeit unintentionally, is insult the audience it’s trying to court.

In the midst of all the excessive fan service and thirst trapping, Street Fighter gives an unusual amount of screen time to Chun-Li’s creepy incel-coded colleague, who is obsessed with her. What should’ve been a ‘hell yeah’ moment instead comes off as a cynical poke at the fandom when he gleefully takes a kick to the groin and revels in how ‘pathetic’ he is. For that to be the most coherent message in this movie is downright depressing, especially when there are some meaty plot threads, like Ken figuring himself out, Ryu’s dark side, and Bison Bison-ing it up, to pull at.

So what exactly is the point of this utterly incomprehensible mess then?

Well, despite one of the most unpleasant moviegoing experiences I’ve sat through, I keep going back to the fantastic animated sequences. Those isolated minutes are proof that something awesome can still be done with the Street Fighter franchise. Hell, it was done back in 1994, and it was brilliant. There’s simply no defending yet another shameless IP money grab here, but since IP stuff is inevitable at this point, give us the animated Street Fighter movie instead of this slop. Spare us the pain of enduring 115 minutes of rubbish for five minutes of quality because this movie is, at the very least, a good proof of concept that an anime movie may actually work.

When Jay (Austin Abrams) starts (wet)suiting it up for his deep-dive search of his father’s missing body, my scuba-diving friend whispered to me, ‘None of that is right.’ Not a good sign when we’re only 10 or so minutes into Whalefall. Next thing you know, he gets gobbled up by a sperm whale shortly after and is forced to channel his inner Pinocchio to survive.

The whole premise requires a level of suspension of disbelief that could give the most hardened person a fear of heights. Yet Whalefall works because of Jay’s massive skill issue.

I’ve always maintained that competence is a reliable and sexy movie staple. It’s what made Ryan Gosling shine in Project Hail Mary. Tom Holland knows when and how to lean on it in his Spider-Man movies. Hell, Matt Damon has made a career out of it. But Abrams upends this archetype by weaponising incompetence to an unreasonably entertaining level.

His performance as the useless junkie James gives Weapons some much-needed physical comic relief. He was utterly useless yet relatable as the NPC protagonist Bryan in Resident Evil, bringing a grounded everyman quality to a heightened scenario. In Whalefall, Abrams adds a new dramatic dimension to his unofficial incompetent character trilogy by weaving in some good ol’ fashioned introspection. Plenty of time to do that when you’re stuck inside a sperm whale.

Jay’s unresolved issues revolve around not getting any closure with his estranged late father, Mitt (Josh Brolin). The unsubtle emotional beats are exactly what you expect, but then again, this is a movie about a man getting swallowed by a whale. We’re not expecting Ad Astra here. Director and co-screenwriter Brian Duffield smartly weaves Jay’s incompetence and unresolved daddy issues into the narrative, creating a plausible cause and effect that ultimately lands him in the belly of a sperm whale. He could’ve walked or swam away at any point, but he didn’t, and that’s what gets him into trouble. Whalefall might as well be called Men will literally get swallowed by a whale to avoid therapy - The movie.

As Jay and Mitt’s fractious relationship is slowly revealed through workmanlike flashbacks, our efforts in piecing together the father-son friction mirror the work put in by Jay to problem-solve his predicament of escaping digestion, distracting us enough to give the clunky narrative structure a pass. We’re processing in real time what’s going on with Jay at the same time as he is. He’s way out of his depth (pun intended), but he’s resourceful, and it’s incredibly fun watching him repeatedly figure out how to put two and two together.

Whereas Abrams was a ball of twitchy, nervous energy in Weapons and Resident Evil, Whalefall features a predominantly internal solo performance juxtaposed with an insanely committed physical component. His inherent puppy-dog vibe clashes with Brolin’s trademark insecure masculinity energy, immediately drawing us to Jay no matter what. Whalefall may rewrite every damn law of physics, but Abrams’ effortless everyman likeability makes it easy to root for him. By the time we’re in the belly of the beast with Jay for the second act and most of the third, with the camera up close on his face and upper body almost the entire time, we’re with him the whole way. And boy does Jay go through hell.

Employing some of the most disgusting practical visual effects and gloopy sound design - both complimentary and complementary - in recent memory, you can feel the tactility of the whale’s stomach as Jay struggles to escape. Every squelch, every throat-ripping scream, and every brush against slippery membrane is visceral, leaving you in awe at the level of craftsmanship at work. Some of the logic doesn’t make sense, like the jellyfish-blue lighting used to light up the whale’s stomach, but Duffield puts in just that extra bit of work to try and explain things where he doesn’t have to.

Look, I need to stress this again: this movie is about a man with daddy issues who gets swallowed by a whale, which wouldn’t have happened if he were a competent diver or had seen a therapist. Whalefall takes itself just seriously enough for us to buy in, but never loses sight of how stupid it all is. For all the efforts put into the mature emotional stuff, this movie is intrinsically immature by design. It’s why you can accept that Jay is dealing with his trauma unhealthily in the same way you can accept how ridiculous yet entertaining the whole premise is.

When the movie’s credits started rolling and my scuba-diving friend started listing all the things Jay did wrong, it became apparent that Whalefall’s magic was how it took something utterly dumb and mixed in enough smart elements to make it feel like we’re watching something enlightened. You’re never going to get over the whole whale or the scuba-diving of it all, but like Jay, you learn to process it. And unlike Jay, you’ll enjoy the whole experience far more than he did.

NAZA isn’t some play on the word ‘Gaza’, though it has a nice ring to it. Rather, it is a slangy acronym for the term ‘Nezek Agavi’ used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to refer to innocent civilians. What does this mean exactly? Collateral damage in an airstrike. One innocent civilian killed by an airstrike is one NAZA, two civilians are two NAZA and so on.

Over the course of 77 harrowing minutes, most of which takes place on dimly lit rooftops in Tel Aviv between 2023 and 2025, directors Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham speak to a whopping 24 Israeli commanders and intelligence officers about how the IDF has integrated AI into its military targeting systems to kill Palestinians more effectively.

Each interview subject, their identities concealed by the cover of night and digital voice manipulation, speaks openly about their experiences and roles in the ongoing Gaza war. But this isn’t merely blowing the whistle on the many war crimes perpetrated by Israel in Gaza. NAZA also presents an unflinching exposé of the systemic rot present among Israelis that enables them to commit such horrific acts with no sense of remorse.

Whether we like it or not, we lie to ourselves as a form of protection. It’s a coping mechanism of sorts, a way to avoid the painful truth. But NAZA presents a damning case of what happens when those lies become so ingrained that whatever grey area existed has simply vanished. As one interview subject casually rationalises to Abraham that ‘there aren’t really Arab haters or extreme dehumanisation’ within the IDF, he is immediately at a loss for words when asked to consider that what he’s contributing to is genocide.

Lines and anecdotes like that are elicited from every interview subject with very little effort from Abraham. The documentary doesn’t hesitate to shock you from minute one, and it doesn’t let up until the credits roll. When another interview subject describes how Israeli forces play a twisted game to determine when to kill innocent Palestinian civilians trying to escape from the north to the south, he simply shrugs and tells Abraham, ‘Good luck to them.’

Games are a recurring motif, and the way the IDF AI systems work, as described by the subjects, is akin to how you would play a video game. As we learn more about these AI systems, there’s a sickening feeling of ludonarrative dissonance playing out in real life. When one officer talks about pressing a button that drops a bomb on a building, killing a dozen NAZA, he says it with the tone of someone trying to finish a video game level.

When descriptions aren’t sufficient, subjects draw rough diagrams of how the IDF’s AI systems work and some of the mass-murder tactics used. The drawings are no better than a child’s, but the impact is more visceral than if Abraham and Szor showed captured footage. Watching someone recreate such shocking scenes of violence from memory without any hesitation leaves you pondering how these people even exist. The way the subjects describe their roles and the psychological warfare inflicted on Palestinians is tinged with pride rather than regret. In fact, there’s no sense of regret to be found anywhere.

There are small moments of reprieve when shots of Tel Aviv residents living their everyday lives are slotted in between conversations, but those ultimately reinforce the narrative Abraham and Szor are crafting. After an interview subject describes in detail how they bombed a Palestinian family of six, all of whom are classified as NAZA, it cuts to a random Israeli person cradling their baby while watching TV. This simple juxtaposition is deeply upsetting, and the longer each explanation went on, the more disturbed I became. None of the subjects seem to realise the true impact of their actions. This isn’t compartmentalisation. This even goes beyond the banality of evil. This is the normalisation of killing innocents like they’re annoying flies.

The interview subjects may not have been the ones to pull the trigger or physically drop the bombs, but NAZA presents an undeniable case for how they played a crucial role in the whole machine. A cog, if you will, as described by a subject to hand-wave away any culpability. In trying to explain and justify their actions, each subject comes across as someone who ‘doth protest too much’. During a chat where a subject talks about wild dogs feasting on the bodies of dead Palestinians, he semi-defends himself, saying that he ‘watched from the cameras’ because he ‘couldn’t stand watching a dog eating a body.’ It’s difficult to feel sympathy for any of the subjects when they talk about killing people like it’s an average day job.

As description upon description of the ongoing Palestinian genocide piles up, like the bodies of innocent men, women, and children strewn across the ruins of Gaza, these subjects unknowingly hoisted themselves with their own petards. Abraham and Szor aren’t actively going out to demonise Israel and the IDF. They did that to themselves.

So the lingering question is why these 24 Israeli commanders and intelligence officers agreed to speak to Abraham and Szor? To seek redemption from the horrors they’re responsible for? Sympathy? Someone to talk to, since none of them sought any psychological support, even when offered?

Whatever the reason, it is impossible to find any leeway to give to the 24 interview subjects. At one point, Abraham straight up asks a subject whether he participated in a genocide, to which he replies, ‘Yes,’ with no hesitation before adding, ‘We kill these children deliberately.’ When the spectrum of empathy runs from ‘we kill children’ to ‘I’m not supposed to express any moral or principled position,’ you’ll be incredibly hard-pressed to offer them any.

There’s only one adequate way to sum up the feeling of disgust after watching NAZA, and it comes courtesy of the late Anthony Bourdain (in paraphrased form): Once you’ve watched NAZA, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Netanyahu and the IDF to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what they did to Gaza – the fruits of Netanyahu’s genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.

Before The Social Network even starts, Aaron Sorkin’s finely tuned dialogue gets things going before the studio logo has time to fade away. When Erika, eyes full of disgust and voice full of venom, verbally sledgehammers a shellshocked Mark Zuckerberg - culminating with a brutal ‘you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole’ - you knew something great and terrifying was unfolding, all while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s haunting electronic score pulsates like an omnipresent ghost.

At the start of The Social Reckoning, ‘Prologue: White girl wasted’ fades in slowly before an overlong, banter-laden back-and-forth between the aforementioned white girl and two non-white cops unfolds - culminating with the white girl getting arrested after provoking the cops with some racial slurs and threats. When we abruptly cut to the next scene - set up with an overused moving timeline graphic - with new Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) rocking up to the offices circa 2019 and pitching his idea to investigate Facebook to his editors, you knew something was going to go horribly awry without David Fincher at the helm this time around, all while Alexandre Desplat’s piano-driven score hums limply in the background.

Given the damning revelations from the 2021 Facebook Files leak and the platform’s contribution to social media’s negative societal impact since The Social Network’s release, the Facebook story circa 2019 to 2022 as depicted in The Social Reckoning is fascinating enough to function on its own with minimal modification. You have the stubborn journalist in Jeff and a whistleblower in Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a Facebook employee who becomes disillusioned with her employer and decides to help Jeff break open the story of her company’s misdeeds. But Sorkin inexplicably borrows all the worst parts of his HBO show The Newsroom as his north star, using journalism as a way to preach to the audience while letting his ego press its thumb on the scales a little too hard too often.

The Social Reckoning’s passionate defences of journalism are timely yet coated with the same arrogance that plagued The Newsroom. Hindsight is great as a learning tool, but weaponising it to tell everyone ‘I told you so!’ is unsavoury but perfectly within Sorkin’s modus operandi. When Jeff tells Frances things like ‘I’m not biased against tech for taking journalism jobs, it’s just that you’re doing such a bad job at it,’ that’s less of a character-driven line from Jeff and more of a piece of didactic preaching from Sorkin himself.

There is a worrying lack of nuance because Sorkin eschews putting up arguments in favour of scoring cheap fist-pumping moments or laugh lines. He even evokes Woodward and Bernstein as a lazy shorthand to characterise Jeff and Frances’s importance to his story. But this pair lack the compelling love-hate relationship Mark and Eduardo Saverin had in The Social Network. Whereas that pair had a tumultuous relationship interspersed with moments of genuine care (Eduardo telling Mark he’s here for him post break-up still hits hard), Jeff and Frances have less spark than whatever is behind Zuckerberg’s eyes and their dynamic is built entirely upon him being a verbal punching bag for her. It also doesn’t help that both of them are little more than annoying cauldrons of overused archetypes.

Other than being awful with technology and doing journalism, there’s very little to grasp or care about when it comes to Jeff as a person, unlike the overly emotional yet loyal Eduardo. White does his best with the little he’s given, but it’s hard to relate or even feel anything for a walking piece of blank paper. He does do some pretty good subtle reactions, particularly when Frances tells Jeff ‘I like some of your work.’

As for Frances, she sadly continues a long lineage of poorly written Sorkin female characters. Her main schtick is wearing hand and ankle warmers and being a nerd, a point that’s weirdly lampshaded by one of Jeff’s editors inexplicably describing her as ‘that nerd in there.’ Sorkin’s half-hearted effort to give her an arc amounts to nothing more than her telling us how much she believes in Facebook’s mission, only to do something contrary to her stated beliefs or be the victim of some horrendous unc-coded writing.

When Frances attempts to tell her male manager her concerns about Facebook’s algorithm, she is rebuffed with an incredibly tasteless ‘you should try out that dating site, you could loosen up a bit,’ a line that could only have been written by someone like Sorkin, a self-professed pseudo-Luddite with lingering sexist notions. Ironically, this exchange inadvertently also captures the misogynistic environment that’s been festering in Silicon Valley for decades. The thing is, Fincher would’ve deliberately made this juxtaposition. Sorkin just thinks it’s a funny line.

Whatever characterisation Frances and Jeff lacked, Sorkin clearly saved the most interesting material for the movie’s antagonist. Whereas he previously tried so desperately to humanise Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), this time he shreds that pasty, headphone-wearing dork to pieces with an extra-sharpened (metaphorical) pen.

This version of the Facebook CEO is less a character than a looming spectre filled with the curdled insecurity that fuelled Jesse Eisenberg’s take. Strong makes the deliberate choice to push Mark to the point of satirical impersonation without letting the seriousness of his actions slide. The eerily accurate robotic mannerisms and childish petulance thinly veil a lingering banality of evil. When a monotone Mark delivers his board pitch to alter Facebook’s algorithm by juicing outrage bait, he is singularly focused on this goal and won’t be deterred. But when Raya, his legal counsel played by Wunmi Mosaku, tersely instructs him on how to behave ahead of a grilling by Congress, he immediately shrivels up like the incel he was portrayed as in The Social Network.

It’s an utterly fascinating and completely damning take(down) of Mark, yet ultimately a little bit redundant. We all know that the real Mark Zuckerberg is a piece of shit, and The Social Reckoning doesn’t really add anything more to the conversation other than showing us how pieces of shit don’t have a spine either.

Connecting the movie’s three main characters is the overarching story about Facebook’s role in the rise of extremist groups - culminating in the January 6 Capitol Riot - and the importance of freedom of speech, especially given its worrying decline. A lot of lip service is paid to this story’s importance, but whatever meaningful real-life impact this could’ve had is quashed by Sorkin’s creative choices.

In the same way Sorkin omits any character specificity, he paints Facebook’s complicity with broad strokes and uninspired camerawork. In contrast to The Social Network’s kinetic energy and varied use of tracking shots to break up dialogue scenes, The Social Reckoning is dominated by the same shot-reverse-shot whenever characters talk to each other. While using the COVID-19 pandemic to explain how the revamped Facebook algorithm works is smart writing, watching it actually unfold onscreen feels like witnessing a film student figuring out how to block conversations for the first time.

Unlike Fincher’s creative use of lighting and camera angles that somehow make two people talking about algorithms interesting, Sorkin directs with a still blandness that’s as dull as the grey offices that dominate this movie. The recreation of the January 6 Capitol Riot is captured in incomprehensible fast-cutting close-ups, making the whole sequence feel more like a cheap LARPing exercise than the hours-long horror show it actually was.

But that’s somehow not the worst decision Sorkin makes during the January 6 Capitol Riot sequence.

Despite Trump’s involvement in instigating the riot, his name is not mentioned at any point. We all know who is being referred to whenever a character says something like ‘he’s posted again!’, yet this choice to hide behind anonymity cancels out the movie’s whole thesis. Sorkin’s lack of specificity here not only hurts the movie’s messaging, but he completely abandons his own integrity while placing no trust in the audience to grasp what he’s preaching. But hey, at least he gets to rag on Zuckerberg owning a bulletproof couch that he can hide behind.

The whole idea behind this movie is a fascinating one in light of its predecessor’s enduring impact and the rise of authoritarianism thanks in no small part to Facebook becoming the platform of choice for far-right extremists. This is undoubtedly an important story to tell at this very moment in time, and Aaron Sorkin isn’t wrong about Facebook’s contribution to the troubled world we live in. It’s just that The Social Network said far less yet told a related and equally important story far more effectively. The Social Reckoning wastes the opportunity to build on that story in a meaningfully powerful way by going for the laugh instead of authenticity.

Describing your movie as ‘a comedy of catastrophic proportions’ is basically inviting failure, like revealing the punchline before the joke has been told. Not that director Alejandro González Iñárritu squeezes many punchlines into Digger. Or many actual jokes for that matter. Any laughs came in spite of what was happening onscreen. Maybe that’s the point of this whole endeavour.

On paper, Iñárritu and Tom Cruise are a perfect match for each other. Both are intensely driven by vision and ego, with Cruise manifesting it through death-defying stunts as externalised spectacle for the masses, while Iñárritu filters it through a demanding filmmaking process in pursuit of perfection that alienates most who work with him. The line between art and artist has blurred for both men in recent times - particularly Cruise’s obvious rebrand to ‘Mr. Movies’ - giving rise to the idea that they’re only able to understand the world, themselves, and what other people think of them through cinematic storytelling. It truly is ‘men will risk everything to make movies rather than go to therapy’.

It’s no surprise then that Digger swings incredibly hard with its ambitious, high-concept satire - in disregard of what everyone else thinks - because it’s basically all Iñárritu and Cruise know. Most telling is how both seemingly understand comedy theoretically, but are unable to properly convey it on a relatable human level.

Nothing in the sweaty script (co-written by Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman) goes directly or cleanly from A to B. Subtlety is dropped in favour of grandiose preaching in a similar environmentally conscious lane as Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up. This is a director who clearly cares about climate change and absolutely hates how all the greedy capitalist billionaires are destroying our planet in the pursuit of wealth.

But whereas McKay is didactic, Iñárritu flip-flops between self-delusion and resentment, like he’s got a massive axe (or shovel) to grind. ‘It’s stupid, it’s funny, and it makes no goddamn sense,’ rages Kenny (Jesse Plemons) midway through. This is just one of many attempts from Iñárritu to pre-emptively defend Digger from the expected polarised responses (as the marketing did), and it ends up taking up more space than any actual comedy. What’s ironically funny is the supreme confidence Iñárritu brings to every technical aspect of the movie.

Seemingly high on his own supply, Iñárritu doubles down on the showmanship that defined The Revenant and Birdman, pulling out all his directorial tricks that make the most out of every beautiful frame. Wide-angle shots capture the rich sets and wacky props in full detail - Digger’s house of hideous paintings and animal trophies is a visual highlight - and long takes are in abundance as every actor is given ample time to put extra mustard on their performances. Riz Ahmed and Michael Stuhlbarg do a particularly funny running bit with a malfunctioning coffee machine.

Dr. Strangelove is an inevitable yet apt comparison point for Digger’s ambitions. But instead of emulating Stanley Kubrick’s scathing wit combined with timely satire, this movie is more akin to the horrible in-universe slapstick movie directed by Zoidberg’s failed director uncle in Futurama’s season three episode, That’s Lobstertainment! Like that episode, supporting characters in this movie do subtle physical comedy bits in the background as the camera focuses on Digger or the dictatorial U.S. Pres (John Goodman), random body humour gags are slotted in random places, and that incredibly convincing one-eyed animatronic cat named Maggie hogs all the attention because it’s so creepy. To be fair, this movie comes at a time when satire is effectively dead since real life is more ridiculous than any fictional story.

I can’t really speak to the plot without giving away its secrets. What I can say is that Cruise brings the same level of commitment to Digger Rockwell as he does to Ethan Hunt. This is a broad, brash take on someone he thinks that we, the audience, think is funny. Whether you think Cruise is funny or not, or if you can get over the ‘Tom Cruise’ of it all, there’s no denying that he is giving it his all and is hellbent on showing us that he is more than an adrenaline-addicted stunt machine.

Cruise takes his shirt off minutes into Digger to proudly show off his (fake) gut, almost in defiance of the sex symbol status he’s been trying to cling onto for decades. Channeling the effort he puts into stunts, every line reading and micro gesture has clearly been studied and practiced to death, right down to the exaggerated finger-guns. It all reaches a booming peak at the movie’s midpoint where Digger steps up to face seemingly every world leader (and one clearly fake dummy) in defence of his actions that have resulted in a global catastrophe.

‘I really don’t give a fuck about polar bears, any more than they give a fuck about me!’ screams the grey-haired, cowboy-boots-wearing bastard love child of Les Grossman and Daniel Plainview. As Digger stomps across the room and onto the desks through several long unbroken shots, his increasingly intense monologuing takes over the chamber as every pissed off world leader gradually falls into line. ‘Oil is what we have! Oil is what God gave us! Oil is the mother’s milk of Earth!’ Am I convinced? Hell, is Digger (and Cruise) convinced? I doubt it. But it’s a damn fine effort in showcasing some Acting with a capital A.

Ultimately, Iñárritu’s tenuous grasp over Digger’s whole conceit was brutally exposed, albeit unexpectedly, during my screening when a fire alarm interrupted the start of the third act. Everyone sat there for several minutes without moving, thinking the alarm was part of the movie before realising it was the real deal and we actually had to evacuate the cinema. The most sobering realisation wasn’t that the fire alarm was a missed opportunity at a funny Gremlins or Looney Tunes-esque fourth wall break joke. It was the immediate sense that it was merely another unnecessary layer of stuff, much like Cruise’s fake prosthetics.

As Kenny later tells Digger, ‘You really get it. It’s fun to watch.’ If your idea of fun is to watch a self-congratulatory pat on the back, then sure. But Digger’s biggest joke is the one played on us for trying to derive any deeper meaning from this two-hour axe (or shovel) grind beyond what is shown to us on the surface. I appreciate the intent and effort, truly, because I would always prefer the huge swing over some crappy IP slop, but I stop short of giving Alejandro González Iñárritu and Tom Cruise too much credit because in wanting to fulfil both the ‘comedy’ and ‘catastrophic proportions’ promise, they’ve inadvertently ended up leaning too much towards the latter.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve watched Brad Pitt play a retired army guy who hangs out with an adorable big dog, I’d have two dollars. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice. What’s less weird is that unlike Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, Heart of the Beast has nothing interesting to say while having no conviction in its storytelling.

Any time a cute animal is deployed (pun somewhat intended) in a movie, there’s a high probability of emotional manipulation being weaponised in lieu of earned pay-offs, the worst offender being James Gunn’s god-awful Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Director David Ayer dispels that notion right away in Heart of the Beast as we immediately learn that Odin, the titular beast and goodest boy, survives the movie. That’s about the extent to which Ayer gets any modicum of credit. The rest of the journey is a brutal slog where the movie is less of a story and more of a series of events strung together, starting with Pitt’s James and Odin going on a camping trip in remote Alaska and eventually getting stranded.

Working off a minimalist script by Cameron Alexander, Ayer is clearly trying to infuse his trademark hyper-masculine energy with the gruelling physical character journey of All Is Lost or Into The Wild. But whereas those latter two films blended visual storytelling with the journey, Heart of the Beast gives us next to nothing about who James is and where his arc is headed. Sure he has a love of boujee Belgian brown ale and draws great sketches for fun, but his competence and survival experience sap away any tension or intrigue. He isn’t in Alaska because he got stranded. He chose to go there. Odin’s carbon fibre leg and titanium teeth carry more character intrigue than he does. What is intended as stoicism comes off as pure blandness, and a not-insignificant part of that is Pitt’s inability to be a convincing leading man.

For all his star power (and horrendous reputational problems), Pitt has always worked best as a foil or comedic counterpart to the headline act. He is a character actor with leading man looks, and he’s at his most interesting when his movie-star persona isn’t relied upon to shoulder the dramatic load. It’s why Troy and F1 feels phoned in while Ocean’s Eleven and Once Upon a Time In Hollywood feel like the best utilisation of his weirdo energy. It’s a shame Heart of the Beast limits the supporting cast to just two minutes of J. K. Simmons because he upstages Pitt so convincingly that I became more interested in his character’s journey than James’s.

That being said, it’s clear that Ayer and Pitt did not hold back on showing the difficulty that went into making this movie. Heart of the Beast is almost like a nature documentary at times due to the sweeping landscape shots that dominate the frame while James and Odin are merely small specks on the screen. Given the increasing frequency with which corners are cut digitally, it’s great to see how movies like this and The Odyssey went all in on the physicality. Pitt may not be overly believable as a military man (despite his best efforts), but I can see that he legitimately ate dirt, hiked mountains, and swam through rushing rivers.

But the most irritating attempt at a throughline is undoubtedly Ayer shoehorning in James and Odin’s wartime past as a character shorthand. Heart of the Beast has no conviction about whether war is right or not — quickfire flashbacks are tinged with a yellow-orange grading that implies a Middle East conflict, but it’s never confirmed — yet it places outsized emphasis on the importance of loyalty to the service. Since James is a bland cipher whose only allegiance lies with his former squad and Odin, everything comes off as pro-military propaganda rather than meaningful characterisation.

What really rubs salt in this tasteless wound is how Ayer tries to use Odin’s survival and a lazy final text wrap-up about the importance of service animals as a way to cover up the underlying ‘army is good’ messaging driving this movie. I almost wished that Odin had died an honourable death because sitting through what we got was emotional manipulation of a more insidious kind.

Watching Heart of the Beast is a strange experience because it is a well-made movie that ping-pongs between boring and downright gruelling. It says quite a lot when the non-verbal dog character holds the screen more convincingly than one of Hollywood’s most bankable leading stars. If I want to watch Brad Pitt play with a cute dog, I’ll just rewatch Once Upon a Time In Hollywood. That movie has a white guy beating up Bruce Lee, and that’s still less annoying than what Ayer cooked up here.

Why does Wile E. Coyote subject himself to the Sisyphean endeavour of trying and repeatedly failing to capture the Road Runner? Nearly a century’s worth of repetitive failure is well beyond insanity. Surely the Road Runner is much too gamey and lean to be a good meal. It’s insanity that I’m even thinking about a Wile E. Coyote cartoon on such levels, yet Coyote vs. Acme implores you to think just a smidge deeper than normal by attempting to unravel the mystery of this aforementioned ‘why’.

Despite literal decades’ worth of documented failures, Coyote vs. Acme wastes no time in finding inventive new ways for the Coyote to fall flat, literally. But when Coyote wearily remembers his most famous failed schemes — many of which are shown in their original animated glory — the detailed 2D animation of his bloodshot eyes and missing teeth conveys an important detail the many decades of cartoons couldn’t (or simply didn’t bother): Coyote’s pain is very real.

Of course, a self-proclaimed genius like the Coyote can’t accept that his failures are a skill issue. Upon seeing a Better Call Saul-esque ad for Kevin Avery’s (Will Forte) small-time lawyering services, he does what he knows best: he hatches a plan.

That plan? To sue Acme for their decades of faulty equipment.

The only problem is that Kevin is a terrible lawyer. He may have Saul Goodman’s schtick for self-promotion, but lacks the actual lawyering skills, much of which is supplied by his eager niece and intern, Paige (Lana Condor). It’s fitting then that Kevin ends up being Coyote’s legal representation and the pair immediately settle into an elevated push-pull dynamic inspired by old silent comedy movies.

Having played lovable losers who are prone to bouts of physical comedy, Forte is the perfect foil to the Coyote. Hell, they’re even a physical match for each other. Both are gangly and decked from head to toe in dank, beige-y colours. Only Forte can make nervously drinking a glass of water funny, and only Coyote can make reacting by literally faceplanting in exasperation an even funnier button to the joke. The combination of actor and cartoon goes a surprisingly long way in making us buy into the movie. Kevin needs Coyote to prove to everyone that he’s not a failure. Coyote needs Kevin for his latest plan… and perhaps someone who believes in him.

Comparisons to 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit are inevitable and apt. Coyote vs. Acme treads very similar territory, such as a stunning animation/live-action hybrid presentation, convincingly selling a world where cartoons and humans can co-exist peacefully, and weaving a layered David vs. Goliath legal caper between slapstick antics. The movie holds nothing back against deep-pocketed corporations who like crushing the (metaphorical) little guy, distilling all that evil into a thoroughly unlikeable Foghorn Leghorn (complimentary) and a perfectly smarmy John Cena, both of whom are clearly revelling in being the bad guys. Though the messaging is about as subtle as an anvil being dropped on one’s head (corporations = bad), it functions well enough to get the point across without being overly didactic.

Even if you disregard the legal caper stuff, Coyote vs. Acme is a hilarious movie that not only embraces Coyote’s failures in creative ways, but squeezes in plenty of jokes that feel perfectly in line with the Looney Tunes vibe. There’s a brilliant scene between Cena and Tweety Bird tinking and tawing away, and definitely keep an eye out for a great blink-and-you-will-miss-it Pepé Le Pew gag.

But zany antics aren’t the movie’s only trick.

The amount of emotional weight that’s unexpectedly Trojan horsed into this zany Looney Tunes adventure is its true triumph, even beyond its miraculous rescue from the movie grave by Ketchup Entertainment. Taking a leaf from the Pixar tear-generating playbook, Coyote vs. Acme conjures up some genuine pathos behind the seemingly basic foundation of the Coyote and Road Runner’s whole dynamic.

The movie isn’t exactly making the argument that the pair are a Harry and Sally-esque pairing, but they’re not simply predator and would-be prey either. Maybe 95 per cent, give or take a bit. It’s enough that when the ending comes along, Looney Tunes fans can feel safe in knowing that the status quo is basically intact while newcomers can leave with that warm, gooey feeling.

It’s enough that the clunky plot scaffolding can easily be waved away and hasn’t been mentioned once in this review until now. Honestly, the plot is secondary to everything else surrounding it. It’s not particularly memorable, nor are the revelations anything interesting. It does what it needs to do, nothing more and nothing less. Hey, at least it’s more than what Acme products can do.

Coyote may not be Sisyphus (and the Road Runner definitely isn’t the boulder), but Coyote vs. Acme assembling a compelling enough argument to earn our sympathy and attention. And we, the audience, have been blessed with the opportunity to watch a piece of animated goodness that was rescued by a (metaphorical) little guy who wanted to stick it to the greedy deep-pocketed corporations. For the record, Your Honour, cheering on Coyote’s victory this time around feels damn good.

Having sat through some truly uninspiring animated movies as of late (Zootopia 2 and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie being the worst culprits), it’s a lovely change of pace to have Forgotten Island remind us that animation can be much more than creatively bankrupt, audience-insulting money generators. This movie aims so incredibly high with its ambitions that you’re either in awe of its peaks, or you have to give respect for stuff didn’t quite work.

Written and directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, Forgotten Island is about the relationship between Jo (H.E.R.) and Raissa (Liza Soberano), a pair of teenage Filipino girls living in a highly stylised version of 1990s Philippines. They’re a classic yin-yang pair; Jo is the energy drink-powered comedic foil with no aspirations beyond the next day, whereas Raissa is the long-term thinking, straight-laced one. It’s not exactly original, but there’s an integrity to their friendship that could’ve only come from two people who have known each other for ages. I don’t believe Crawford ever set his butt on fire while at a Mercado family gathering (like Jo does), but I certainly believe that one of them did something embarrassing that the other found hilarious while everyone else looked on in deep disapproval.

Opening up to someone as much as Jo and Raissa do with each other is terrifying, but the idea of Raissa moving to California for her studies challenges their comfortable status quo and raises the age-old question: ‘Will everything still be okay?’ It’s a straightforward but effective hook because we’ve all been there in some fashion. There’s very little friction in getting us to buy into the underlying emotional stakes of Forgotten Island, but it’s also very easy to just power past all that when the fantasy elements take over the movie’s focus.

But before Jo and Raissa can grapple with the pending upending of their friendship, they’re magically transported to a fantastical hidden world called Nakali. What should’ve been a D&M over snacks has suddenly shifted to a Hangover-esque adventure where Jo and Raissa awaken on a beach with missing items (or hair in Raissa’s case), a neurotic were-aspin, Raww (Dave Franco), as their new third wheel, and a goal to retrace their steps since their memories are all hazy.

The plotting to get to Nakali is a bit sweaty and doesn’t exactly iterate upon the generic fantasy world scaffolding, but Crawford and Mercado keep things interesting by leaning hard into Filipino folklore and culture. Sprinkled throughout the first act are small moments of family traditions and humour, like the love of karaoke and lechon kawali. This all culminates with the reveal of Nakali, which is taken from Filipino mythology and carefully crafted to feel like it was organically grown from the stories told to Jo and Raissa throughout their childhood.

A lot of care was taken in depicting Filipino culture and it truly is a highlight as it gives Forgotten Island a distinct identity from the cut-and-paste animated fantasy adventures. Younger audiences will love the colourful depictions of food and the jokes, but older millennial audiences will find moments of recognition mixed with a lot of cringe. As much as the cultural specificity is a strength, there are moments where the movie is trying almost too hard to showcase Filipino culture rather than let it flow organically. The first karaoke reference was funny; repeating it three times is too much.

Where Forgotten Island doesn’t lack in confidence is the visual spectacle accompanying the cultural elements.

With so much lore and mythology to squeeze in alongside the story and thematic underpinnings, Crawford and Mercado infuse the movie with such manic pacing that older audiences’ heads will spin while younger watchers will be inundated with colours and stuff just happening.

In contrast to the usual fluid pacing of, say, Pixar, Forgotten Island crams as much as it can into every single frame, line, or joke. Jo says something funny? Slot in a reaction face insert shot. Flashbacks of Jo and Raissa’s big night? Rendered in Nickelodeon 2D animation or anime depending on who is retelling the story. Big fight scene? Let’s use some Street Fighter animation. The constant flip-flopping of animation styles is not only visually interesting, but it’s a great subtextual reference to the vibrant melting pot of Filipino culture and influences that’s been shaped through centuries of history.

But while the sensory overload may work on a visual level, the impact is surface level.

I bought into Jo and Raissa’s charming meet-cute, and then I was deeply invested when Forgotten Island did the unexpected thing of having both call each other out on their bullshit (Jo for being a selfish friend; Raissa for not being attentive when needed). But when the movie’s grand thematic wrap-up is a messily cobbled turducken of ‘the power of friendship’, ‘the real treasure was the friends we made along the way’, and a dash of ‘remember when?’, all that hard-earned emotional investment is utterly wasted.

Having been so audacious with the visual language, it’s disappointing that Forgotten Island couldn’t go the full distance with Jo and Raissa’s arcs. What was set up as a profound moment of acceptance in how their friendship will change as they grow older ends up concluding with an ultra-safe ‘best friends 5eva’ messaging route. Where Jo and Raissa end up by the movie’s conclusion feels plot-driven rather than the emotional pay-off that was seemingly being set up.

While Forgotten Island flops the landing, its impact is minimised by the sheer amount of fun squeezed into every frame. Not every aspect of the movie was successful, but I was never bored and there were several moments that were as good as anything we’ve seen in 2026. When taken alongside DreamWorks’ recent output, Forgotten Island is more in tune with The Wild Robot than, say, Kung Fu Panda 4. That’s a great spot to be in because we want movies like this to take risks, even if they don’t quite succeed. Upending the status quo may feel terrifying, but that’s how we grow and change for the better in the long run rather than be stuck in our boring, dead-end ways.

Child gets kidnapped. Their mysterious badass father/father figure goes on a rip-roaring rampage to rescue them. We’ve seen plenty of these movies over the decades. But Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious is the first since 2014’s John Wick or even 2010’s The Man From Nowhere to find new ways to perfectly balance some excessively absurd yet melodramatic stakes with the primal, smooth brain enjoyment of watching people fuck each other up in ridiculously athletic ways.

The craziness is set right off the jump: A female journalist, Matia (Jeeja Yanin), is infiltrating a child trafficking syndicate and gets captured, but not before she kicks the shit out of six guys. The action is kinetic, the choreography rife with scorpion kicks and ridiculous grapples, and Matrix-esque athleticism that feels bone-crunchingly real as it’s all captured on camera across several unbroken long takes. Tanigaki isn’t fucking around with The Furious. This feels like he looked at The Raid and said, ‘Let me show you how it’s really done.’

That opening sequence is immediately followed by the introduction of Wang (Xie Miao), a mysterious mute handyman, and the subsequent kidnapping of his daughter by the aforementioned child trafficking syndicate. I can’t speak much for the clumsy plotting, other than that it works in a perfectly serviceable way. But whatever qualms there are get quickly erased when Wang gets absolutely clocked by a truck as he’s trying to rescue his daughter, walks it off, sticks his limbs in some ice water, and is ready to go harder than ever in the next scene. The Furious always takes a moment here and there to remind you what kind of movie it is.

There’s also an unexpected timely quality to the narrative scaffolding tying all of The Furious’ action set pieces together. Tanigaki doesn’t have anything sophisticated to say about child trafficking other than ‘this is bad’ and ‘journalism is good.’ That’s perfectly okay! When the worrying normalisation of pedophilia (especially in ‘Murica), decline of journalistic standards, and overall moral decay are becoming ever more prevalent, watching child traffickers get their faces punched in repeatedly feels oh so good.

But I digress a bit here. The Furious is ultimately about the action and fights, and boy are we spoiled rotten.

As Wang infiltrates a nightclub run by the child trafficking syndicate, he inadvertently crosses paths with Navin (Joe Taslim), Matia’s husband and a journalist trying to figure out what happened to his wife. Once all the pieces are on the board, The Furious powers through the remaining 90 minutes with such skill and energy that it’s not a stretch to say that this movie is a frontrunner for the title of greatest action flick of the 2020s.

There’s no moment where the action is obscured or hard to decipher, even in sequences with little to no room to squeeze into. Tanigaki goes the extra distance to have every pinch and clinch depicted as smoothly as possible. If the camera has to take a step back like an enraptured bystander would, then so be it. Where The Furious elevates itself in comparison to its action movie forebears is the infusion of a comedy-like sensibility to the underlying rhythm of each fight scene, the best example being the three-way fight pitting Wang and Navin against child trafficking henchman Ho (Brian Le).

Lasting over five gruelling minutes, the whole sequence grips you with a whirlwind of fists and near-brushes with death. But just as you think things are getting a bit much (like Ho repeatedly getting back up after taking a sledgehammer to the head), it pulls you back in, much like a joke being repeated over and over again enough that it goes from no longer funny to funny again. It’s also bonkers how much punishment the human body can take in The Furious. Most fight scenes are multi-phase set pieces, yet it never falls into boring territory. Every bead of sweat and drop of blood is visible, and you can feel the sheer effort required to do all the fighting.

Wang is a Chinese martial arts connoisseur, which makes for a thrilling contrast to the various Pencak Silat and Muay Thai-savvy henchmen he faces. But there’s no obligation to understand who is a master at what because The Furious is primarily focused on controlled chaos. A smoothly blocked punch is cool, but immobilising someone with a leg before somersaulting over and knocking them out with a well-timed knee is the kind of fist-pumping finish that the movie relentlessly delivers.

Miao is convincing as a martial arts badass, but his physical acting elevates proceedings into ‘why is there actual acting in a movie like this’ territory. His eyes sell every emotion needed to push the story forward, and his ability to not utter a single noise even as he’s under extreme physical duress is astonishing. The problem with Wang being mute is that we need someone else to deliver exposition, and that role falls to Navin. Taslim is the smooth-talking yin to Wang’s yang, but his impact is blunted by having to deliver gobs of nonsense.

Thankfully, The Furious never forgets what kind of movie it is. The story parts are simply a means to a thrilling end. You won’t think much about the plot or ridiculous dialogue, but you will repeatedly wonder ‘how on earth did they do that’ whenever a new fight scene breaks out. This is a modern action masterpiece that will be talked about alongside the likes of The Raid, John Wick, and The Man From Nowhere, and I’ll be surprised if any action movie in the remainder of the 2020s can come close to what The Furious pulls off.

Gen Z aren’t having as much sex as previous generations; that is a fact. Instead, they’re either getting sucked into the manosphere or choosing celibacy for personal and/or safety reasons. So when the opening moments of I Want Your Sex start with Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) panting ‘fuck’ repeatedly, presumably mid-coitus, we’re seemingly being set up for a commentary about sex in the present day.

Except those panting ‘fucks’ had nothing to do with sex at all. Well, not initially anyway.

That misdirect sets a comedic tone which makes the movie’s explorations into sex far more palatable compared to, say, Emerald Fennell’s lowbrow high school fantasies of sex. I Want Your Sex director and co-screenwriter Gregg Araki is all about promoting the idea that sex should be fun, and Gen Z should go out and get laid (consensually). Quite ironic given how brutally cynical and bleak Araki’s previous movies (like The Doom Generation and Mysterious Skin) are when it comes to sex, but his uncharacteristic optimism is on point here. You laugh exactly where you expect to laugh, and get drawn into the drama whenever the movie asks you to lock in.

It’s not to say that Araki doesn’t acknowledge the perfectly valid reasons why Gen Z are becoming more celibate. There’s a tinge of self-doubt in every sentence Elliot utters; he’s in a completely passionless - and sexless - relationship with his workaholic girlfriend Minerva (Charli XCX, redefining deadpan); and all he’s got is a crappy job as an assistant in some pretentious art studio that specialises in incredibly unsubtle sexual ‘art’. It’s no wonder Elliot quickly succumbs to his boss, Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), meekly agreeing to be her fuck toy.

Through Elliot, Araki understands what Gen Z is going through. Having debuted in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza as a teenager infatuated with an adult, Hoffman is well-versed in the younger-man-older-woman dynamic. But whereas Licorice Pizza is deliberately chaste, I Want Your Sex puts Hoffman through the wringer as Erika’s sub, forcing Elliot into humiliating sexual acts while having the character harbour unrealistic aspirations of an actual connection with Erika at the end of the day. It’s completely ridiculous and almost naive of Elliot to believe that, yet Hoffman’s commitment sells it. He’s at his most convincing when he (rightly) attributes Gen Z’s celibate prudishness to being raised during a pandemic where in-person socialisation is frowned upon, let alone any form of physical contact or intimacy.

It doesn’t mean Araki can’t poo-poo the Gen Z perspective with his own viewpoint though. To him, it’s perfectly okay to be horny, pain and hurt be damned, and Gen Z should take a leaf out of Erika’s penis-shaped book.

Dressed like an edgier Miranda Priestly while rocking an air of ‘anti-woke’ confidence that would make the Runway Editor-in-Chief blush, Erika commands the camera whenever she’s on screen. While Araki consistently frames Erika from a position of power, filming her from a higher position than every other character, it quickly becomes clear that she’s full of shit. She knows it, but doesn’t really care, so long as she gets her fuck on.

Pent-up housewife with self-esteem issues has never looked more convincing than in The Invite. But Wilde goes so gung-ho in the opposite direction for I Want Your Sex that she’s forced herself into the conversation about the year’s best performances. She’s having the time of her life, and she delivers every single line from the script with a perfect blend of comedy and self-awareness.

As individual strands of sexual thought, Elliot and Erika work wonderfully well as both characters’ perspectives are fleshed out (no pun intended). But when brought together, there’s a clumsy forcing of mismatched puzzle pieces. As funny as Erika’s diagnosis of Gen Z’s plight is (‘You’re all dying to fuck but you’re too chickenshit to admit it.’), I Want Your Sex isn’t quite sure which viewpoint it wants to fully back as it feebly crawls back and forth, ball gag and leash attached, for most of the 90-minute runtime until landing lamely somewhere in the middle.

The strongest thread that’s maintained throughout the movie is when Elliot is fully in the throes of being dominated by Erika. There’s no ambiguity here; the movie is practically begging Gen Z to let loose and take risks. Sure, you’ll make bad choices - and boy are there bad choices made in I Want Your Sex - but that’s simply part of living and how you find the connection you yearn for. Withdrawing into one’s self simply isn’t a viable answer.

Araki gets plenty of comedic mileage out of having Elliot be the sub to Erika’s dom, but the grey areas of power and consent when it comes to BDSM get lost among the ‘you should have sex’ of it all. There are some intriguing ideas set up by the BDSM of it all, like the intersection between control and respect, but those are brushed aside for a quick visual gag or cutaway to Erika spanking Elliot’s bare ass with a paddle.

There’s also a comedic cleverness in linking both generational viewpoints of sex to I Want Your Sex’s campy satire of the art world, but the messaging isn’t as smart as Araki and Karley Sciortino’s script thinks it is. Are they trying to tell us that art is just a scam (Erika literally tells Elliot ‘contemporary art is a scam’) and all that it’s good for is to get laid? It’s difficult to parse through the message when Araki can’t quite decide what he wants to say about art and sex, other than art being a bogus industry.

But for all the unsubtle and confusing messaging being thrown at us, I Want Your Sex is never boring. The many funny visual gags, the one-liners about the crappy vagina chewing gum art, and several minutes of hilarity from Chase Sui Wonders and Mason Gooding keep the whole movie breezy, even when the subject matter is complicated. Gregg Araki doesn’t quite manage to pull the various sexual threads into a satisfying finish, but at least the foreplay was enjoyable.

The ‘Brand New Day’ subtitle of this instalment of Spider-Man promises change. Change to the messy Marvel storytelling formula. Change to the usual Peter Parker and Spider-Man narrative. Hell, just change in general, because the wider MCU is so narratively tangled that it’s practically begging for a much-needed reset. But as this movie likes to keep reminding us, Spider-Man can’t do this alone despite his best efforts.

It’s been a few years since Peter Parker (Tom Holland) wiped himself from the world’s collective consciousness. Burying himself in his work isn’t going to brush away everyone’s memory cobwebs, but he is still pining for his beloved MJ (Zendaya). Pining for any semblance of human connection. Pining, quite unashamedly, for the best parts of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, and for some inexplicable reason, The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

At least New York City absolutely loves Spider-Man. Even Mamdani couldn’t hold a candle to ol’ Spidey, but public affection does not equate to human connection. Okay, Peter does have a Tom and Jerry-esque thing going on with Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal), but a loose-cannon vigilante isn’t exactly best friend material in the same vein as Ned (Jacob Batalon). So Peter throws himself into work, which is depicted in mind-numbing fashion by director Destin Daniel Cretton, who is seemingly ticking off Marvel’s to-do list. Gratuitous cameos? Check. Overly glossy CGI fight scenes? Check. Quips? Hoo boy, check.

That’s not to say that Brand New Day isn’t watchable. It is indeed quite entertaining, as nothing shuts your brain off quicker than Spidey doing acrobatic action scenes, like the first-person web-swinging scenes that were aped from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (which were one of the few parts that worked in that movie). But I expect more from a Spider-Man movie because it’s proven to be possible.

The moments where Brand New Day is at its most balanced and functional are where Peter is not doing any Spider-Man stuff at all. When he’s on Instagram watching his two closest friends live their best lives or shopping by himself, those are some of the movie’s most emotionally truthful moments because they touch upon the very real issue of loneliness and isolation. For a few fleeting moments, Cretton makes the most of his Marvel shackles and manages to push Brand New Day within the vicinity of Spider-Man 2 by simply having Peter and MJ talk in fleeting yet meaningful ways.

Zendaya and Holland are only together briefly, but the raw emotion over past actions and subsequent consequences is immediately felt. It helps that they’re happily married, of course, but their moments together showcase their ability to command the screen. It’s why Zendaya can be convincingly haunting in The Odyssey while being hilarious in The Drama. It’s why Holland works as Telemachus. Both are capable of doing a lot with very little; her channeling years of magic-induced amnesia, him frantically web-slinging between self-pity, loneliness, and yearning.

Brand New Day does also capture the pure essence of Spider-Man as a character in that his Ls are greater than his Ws. But there’s never any excitement over whether Peter can overcome this latest struggle because the plot telegraphs what the next beat is faster than the character’s Spider-Sense. With no less than four different story and thematic threads to juggle, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers’ script is as overstuffed and tonally messy as Spider-Man 3. There’s no room for Peter to have any actual agency or introspection. Any change — physical or emotional — feels like we’re led there on rails rather than, ahem, organically.

I get that Raimi’s 2004 masterpiece remains Marvel’s North Star for what makes Peter Parker a fascinating hero. But we’ve seen him struggle with his powers before. It was great watching Tobey Maguire trying and failing to shoot his webs. It’s less interesting to see that same shot replicated with Holland, but with crappier lighting. At least there’s a somewhat interesting idea by having Holland’s Peter react to his bodily changes with disgust (clearly a clunky metaphor about his dissatisfaction with life) in contrast to Maguire’s Peter’s gleeful excitement.

What’s incredibly frustrating is how the script requires Peter to be incredibly stupid or to embark on seemingly random side quests for the plot to move forward. When the big third act arrives, it all feels forcibly contrived in the usual Marvel way rather than anything revelatory. If those six extra months to finesse the script resulted in clunky storytelling like this, I shudder to think of what Brand New Day would’ve been like had Marvel pushed on as originally planned.

By the time we get to the end of Brand New Day after a 145-minute journey, very little has shifted in the world of Peter Parker and in the wider universe, which begs the question of where exactly Spider-Man fits into the MCU at this point in time. He is in almost the same place, literally and emotionally, which further solidifies his solo movies as little more than setting up future movie arcs. At least he has organic web shooters in his arsenal whenever he next appears, whether it’s in Avengers: Doomsday or something else.

Try as Marvel, Destin Daniel Cretton, and Tom Holland might, we’re shown once again that the MCU is a beast that refuses to change. Just as we get something interesting to sink our teeth into, Marvel falls back into its worst impulses by refusing to let Peter Parker grow in any purposeful way that isn’t laying down more track. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is nothing more than a broken promise at best and a cosmic joke at its absolute worst.

Christopher Nolan has a lot on his mind, huh?

I labelled Paul Thomas Anderson as a master of ‘Trojan horsing’ the personal into a masterfully crafted epic when he dropped One Battle After Another on us. Leave it to Nolan to not only one-up his fellow cinematic auteur by turning The Odyssey into the grandest home movie of all time, with one of our most fundamental pieces of literature as the basis, but also wrap it up with everything about the crumbling of modern society that stresses him out. Oh, and he packs it all in a literal Trojan horse.

For all of Hollywood’s unashamed IP milking, The Odyssey has somehow escaped that treatment. For good reason, how in the ancient Greek world do you even begin to adapt a story about a man’s journey back home where gods and monsters roam wild? Given how Nolan’s last movie, Oppenheimer, was about his anxieties filtered through the harnessing of god-like power via the atomic bomb, he is perhaps the only one who could’ve taken The Odyssey and invested it with so much personal meaning and a thematic richness that serves as a logical continuation of a near-unmatched career.

Within the first scenes of Travis Scott’s bard character weaving a tale of Odysseus (Matt Damon), an expectation is set. Whereas Oppenheimer (and Memento) alternate between coloured subjective POVs and black-and-white objective views, Nolan’s take on Homer’s epic is all in rich colour. The Odyssey is a fairytale, told differently depending on who you ask. Is Athena (Zendaya) an actual goddess? Did Circe really magic Odysseus’ men into pigs? Was there actually a Cyclops? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s all about the journey, which is why the use of modern English instead of ancient Greek works. The source material may be centuries old, but Nolan’s screenplay is modern in its sensibility and dialogue, which goes a long way in erasing any difficulty locking in with the Homer of it all. Besides, no one knows what the ancient Greeks actually sounded like.

Given how the source material uses flashbacks and non-linear storytelling, Nolan must’ve been rubbing his hands with glee, as that’s his cinematic calling card. He depicts Odysseus as an amnesiac struggling to remember his life as a seasoned adventurer. In retelling his memories to Calypso (Charlize Theron), Odysseus’ story is trickled out piece by piece through flashback, and his journey becomes part travelogue and part remembering the moral lines he abides by.

It’s interesting how Damon portrays Odysseus as an introspective and incredibly capable leader who earns his men’s respect through thinking rather than brawn or trickery. It’s not a stretch to say that Nolan views himself as a low-key yet commanding figure on the same level. The increasing prevalence of ‘burdened great man’ narratives in his last few movies spotlight the responsibility he feels as perhaps the last remaining director who can command $250 million budgets to make whatever he wants that’s unshackled to IP. Like how Odysseus is responsible for his men, kingdom, and family, Nolan devotes his full, undivided attention to every movie he makes because he has to make the most of the resources he’s been given.

He certainly doesn’t miss a beat on that front because The Odyssey is the culmination of everything Nolan has learned so far about epic filmmaking. Like how home movies attempt to capture everything within the frame, almost out of fear of missing something important, The Odyssey maximises its ‘IMAX cameras only’ approach by making every shot as grandiose as possible. From sweeping shots of the Trojan horse half-buried in sand while remnants of the Trojan War burn in the background to the painstaking recreation of a slowly crumbling Ithaca, Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography implores your eyes to soak up everything with a sense of awe on par with Lawrence of Arabia.

That aforementioned fear becomes increasingly evident as more pieces of Odysseus’ past fall into place. This is a man who is also burdened with the guilt of the consequences from his actions, much of which is driven by hubris. Odysseus and J. Robert Oppenheimer are basically the same Nolan-surrogate protagonists in their increasingly cynical view of the world, the former often invoking ‘Zeus’ Law’ of ancient Greek hospitality that’s eroding, and the latter realising how the world has hit a moral point of no return when the bombs he helped make were used on people. What role do gods ultimately play when these men can seemingly defy them through sheer force of will and intelligence?

Nolan certainly doesn’t believe that gods are all-powerful beings with abilities far beyond humanity’s capabilities. There’s a gritty, practical realism to the more fantastical and mythological elements of The Odyssey, almost like Nolan is stubbornly showing how humans can recreate the power of gods through their own devices. The many ship sequences look and feel visceral in a way CGI simply can’t replicate, with only the most fanciful moments being touched up with technology. The Cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin) is clearly the product of puppetry, make-up, and clever camera trickery. Circe’s (Samantha Morton) magic is a stunning piece of on-screen mechanical transformation that makes you wonder how great practical effects can be when artists are left to do what they’re best at.

Running parallel to Nolan’s anxieties about the world and Hollywood is arguably his most personal movie yet. He’s never been shy about how important his family is to him, sometimes to a fault, such as his repeated use of the ‘dead wife’ trope and his lopsided love for his daughter over his son in Interstellar. The Odyssey feels like something of a course correction on both fronts. As Odysseus struggles to regain his memories, his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), is fighting off a mob of self-interested men who want her hand in marriage as a way to seize the throne before their son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), comes of age.

In a world ruled by the patriarchy, Hathaway plays Penelope as a pragmatist doing her best in a bad situation. Within the limited scope of what she can actually do, Penelope still retains her agency, which rubs up against Telemachus’ youthful arrogance. Holland swaps out his occasionally annoying Marvel ‘aw shucks’ vibe for that of a troubled young man whose soul remains pure but whose patience is tested constantly by his mother’s endless suitors, particularly Antinous (Robert Pattinson).

Pattinson, clearly relishing his turn as a villain, imbues Antinous with a despicable cowardice that feels like the personification of everything that’s wrong in the world. If this floppy-haired, wine-drinking wimp marries Penelope, you know everything is going to go downhill fast, not unlike Oppenheimer handing over the atomic bomb to the US government.

As The Odyssey marches towards its thrilling conclusion, Odysseus’ journey and the movie’s thematic explorations culminate in a surprising feeling of regret. In the same way that One Battle After Another is a generation torch-passing moment, Nolan feels almost apologetic over how far society has fallen in the hands of greedy men wanting to grasp power and ruin everything, yet he retains hope that his children (and future generations) can learn from the past’s mistakes and do better. We can argue to the depths of Hades whether Nolan thinks of himself as a ‘great man’ in the same vein of how he views historical figures (fictional and real), but what’s undeniable is that he remains almost incapable of not creating something great when given the tools - and essentially the responsibility - to do so.

There are over 1 billion reasons why this live-action remake of Moana needs to exist, none of which are good on any creative or entertainment level. Look, I get that big-budget IP movies like this are designed to make money. But this is easily the most audience-insulting cash-grab in recent memory. F1: The Movie and Jurassic World Rebirth are masterpieces compared to this.

That opening paragraph is almost a word-for-word copy of my review for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. But Moana insults its audience so much more that it’s only fair and fitting that I review it through the Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V lens that characterises nearly every aspect of this remake. So, why partake in such a pointless exercise when I should be exploring the merits of this movie?

I could ask the same thing of Disney. I’m merely giving it the respect it’s showing us.

There’s no point in going through the plot because it’s the same thing as the original animated movie. In fact, virtually every line, shot, and sequence is basically the same thing, just with an uncanny valley sheen covering every inch of the screen. The script might as well have been a literal copy-and-paste job from Jared Bush’s original screenplay. Co-writer Dana Ledoux Miller must’ve had the easiest time of anyone working on this movie.

Okay, that’s not fair. In the original, Moana’s shtick to bait out Tamatoa (Jemaine Clement) involves her walking from the left of the screen to the right. In the remake, Moana (Catherine Laga’aia) walks from right to left. See, massive difference. Actually, I take my earlier statement back. This must’ve also been the easiest payday of Jemaine Clement’s career, as every single line Tamatoa has could’ve been an outtake from the original movie and no one would be the wiser.

The only thing more tired than the script is, weirdly, Dwayne Johnson as Maui. He’s saying the same lines as the original animated movie, but they’re all missing that extra 10 per cent of zeal he brought to Maui the first time around. When he first meets Moana, he looks bored and over everything rather than the excited mischievousness one would expect from being given a potential escape route. That persists in every moment he’s on screen. Maybe he also thought the Maui wig looked utterly ridiculous, or perhaps it was the residual disdain for the 40-pound body suit he had to wear.

The only positive aspect is Laga’aia as Moana. She does her best with the character, but there’s only so much one can do with a nothing-there script and blue screens to act off. The music video sequence of her performance of ‘How Far I’ll Go’ gives off the same lifelessness as the musical sequences of the 2019 version of The Lion King, which encapsulates Moana as a whole. It’s not offensive or impressive, nor is it misguided. It’s just… reductive with literally no reason for it to exist. At least we get to hear how great Laga’aia’s voice is.

Working hand-in-hand with the lack of propulsive energy in Moana is how bland this $250 million movie looks. For a movie set amongst the oceanic beauty of Polynesia and filmed in Hawaii, the overly bright lighting and overuse of the same shades of green and blue make everything look like it was shot on a studio lot. Even more damning than the inability to recreate the animated original’s visual vibrancy are the awful water effects. CGI water has come a long way since 2016, but it seems like James Cameron is the only one who knows how to make it look good on a big screen because you simply don’t buy that any of the actors got actual water thrown on them at any point.

One has to wonder if director Thomas Kail was allowed to do anything that might’ve drummed up a drop of interest. Rather than providing an additive quality to the remake, Kail opts to trim things, such as omitting a funny tattoo joke at the start of the animated original’s opening montage or yada-yadaing Moana’s father’s backstory in about 10 seconds. I suppose he’s the steady, creatively agnostic hand you employ for a thing like this, given how his biggest successes have been directing other people’s work (mostly Lin-Manuel Miranda’s) rather than his own.

By the time the end credits roll, assuming you have the patience to get that far, the happy, fuzzy feeling one gets from watching the original Moana is replaced with disgust. Disgust that Disney had the arrogance to put this slop out and all but demand that we enjoy it. Disgust at how all the resources wasted on this could’ve been better spent on original stories from talented filmmakers. Disgust at the irony of how a great story about finding one’s unique identity has been completely undermined by it being unashamedly turned into corporate product. I can’t even make the argument that kids will like this movie because the animated original did everything first and did it far better. Even Heihei, the comedic unsung hero of the original movie, looks nightmarish here rather than cute.

Moana is proof of how far Disney will go when it comes to milking IP for a quick dollar. There’s literally no aspect of this live-action remake that warrants its existence, especially with the animated original being less than a decade older, other than keeping people gainfully employed. I can’t say that watching this movie is the best use of anyone’s time, not that Disney will care as long as audiences keep arriving in droves. If you were to spend 100 or so minutes watching something, you might as well watch the original Moana. At least that version still holds some magic.

‘A queer Hollywood writer caught up in a sexually-charged relationship with an older woman defined by her silver screen heyday of decades gone past’ isn’t a common premise, yet it’s funny how it’s a niche that Hannah Einbinder has built her career upon. It doesn’t exactly dampen the idea that creativity is merely a flat circle in Hollywood, especially with recent big-budget IP offerings doing little to dispel that notion. But in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, writer/director Jane Schoenbrun makes a strong case that there’s still plenty of gold to be found in the nostalgia well.

If Einbinder’s iconic character in Hacks is overflowing with confidence about who she is and what she stands for (to a fault), her take on Kris, the protagonist in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is the complete opposite. Kris is meek and unsure of herself, to the point where she doesn’t know how to react when a female store clerk sweetly flirts with her. It’s remarkable how a slight recalibration can lead to two wildly different characters who, on paper, appear to be the same.

It’s also remarkable how Kris managed to convince the Hollywood suits to reboot the Camp Miasma series — an in-universe fictional horror franchise in the vein of Friday the 13th and Halloween. That in itself says a lot about the industry’s obsession with rebooting old IP. Still, Kris does have a fixation with the Camp Miasma series, its iconic ‘final girl’ Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), and Billy’s thousand-yard stare as she’s approached by Little Death (Jack Haven), the franchise’s spear-wielding killer who wears a bizarre mask made of a ceiling vent.

For the first 20 minutes, Kris is filmed almost entirely in claustrophobic close-ups. Tension builds slowly, but dread is replaced with curiosity. Upon setting foot into Billy’s snowbound camp, it feels like discovering the Backrooms for the first time. As an overhead shot pans over Kris as she makes her way through the snowy fields, it’s like she’s embarking on a journey of discovery.

When Kris meets Billy, who has decided to become a recluse somewhere in the snowy forests of Canada, it feels like a very subversive and meta setup for slasher movie tropes to arrive in a flood of fake blood. But Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma isn’t that kind of movie. Other movies would very self-consciously call the meta-ness out. Schoenbrun simply acknowledges it by having Kris literally say, ‘This feels like a jump scare moment,’ before quickly moving on.

There’s a lot of fun to be had during Billy and Kris’s first evening together as there’s clearly something between the two. You’re not entirely sure how the dynamic is going to unfold, but Billy repeatedly telling Kris, ‘If it gets too real, you can always turn it off,’ feels either like advice or a warning. Or both. Einbinder and Anderson bounce off each other like a hot squash ball as the older woman gradually unravels the younger in every way possible. Unlike the overtly one-dimensional try-hard titillation in, say, Wuthering Heights, Schoenbrun packs all the sexual tension needed in one hilariously campy (compliment and pun somewhat intended) scene involving KFC and dipping sauce.

Summarising or intellectualising this movie beyond the first act threatens to dampen its power as a cinematic experience, like how Kris bores Billy with her analytical take on Camp Miasma. The thing is, though, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is so rich with ideas that it can have its (metaphorical) cake and eat it as well. As Kris confesses to Billy early on that her whole identity is tied to her work, the push and pull between the external (like Hollywood) and the internal (like Kris’s inability to get out of her own head during sex) operates in near-perfect harmony, especially during the scenes where the movie flashes back to Billy’s experiences while filming Camp Miasma.

Using screens as a literal and metaphorical lens to explore discomfort in one’s body and sexual identity is Schoenbrun’s bread and butter — they previously delved into similar territory with I Saw the TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma feels like Schoenbrun has hit the purest sweet spot in marrying medium, theme, and craft. During a Camp Miasma party scene, the camera flows gracefully from one teenager to the next in one unbroken, grainy take as they’re dancing away in a frisky, drunken daze. We have a romanticised idea of what an 80s slasher film looks like; Schoenbrun turns it into something far more beautiful than reality.

As the line between subtext and text blurs into a literal bloody mix of bodily fluids set to a soundtrack of breathy moans and synth-heavy needle drops from the 80s, it makes sense why Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma unfurls the way it does, even if the journey from A to B is a bit bumpy. In the logic of the messy and insane universe that’s been built, it’s the only way it could go. It certainly explains how gorgeous this movie is. From vibrant watercolour paintings overflowing with fruity colours serving as the camp’s backdrop to the eye-catching framing of Kris’s silhouette and face as she explores Billy’s theatre room, no camp in any slasher movie has ever looked like an actual wonderland quite like this.

No slasher movie has ever been quite so hilariously droll, either. There’s a touch of old views meeting modern-day ‘wokeness’, especially during one hilarious moment where Billy responds with a very un-PC ‘Mickey did that?!’ upon learning about the House of Mouse partaking in a dash of blackface back in the day. It’s not that Schoenbrun is ‘anti-woke.’ Rather, it’s an acknowledgement that there can be a gulf between old-fashioned views and how we would interpret them today. There’s no holding back on the Hollywood machine, though. The men are idiotic, the women are self-serving, and everyone is either incompetent, an expert at brown-nosing, or both.

We’re told repeatedly that ‘if it gets too real, you can always turn it off’. Jane Schoenbrun is clearly working through some very real stuff in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but at no point do you want to turn anything off. The 80s slasher elements are there, but the more impressive feat is showing how nostalgia, if used properly, can result in a movie that feels wildly original.

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