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Oct 14 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “After the Hunt”

Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield star in this heady sexual-accusation psychodrama set in the world of academia

After the Hunt
Starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebirl, Michael Stuhlbarg & Chloë Sevigny
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Oct. 17

When a Yale doctoral student accuses one of her professors of sexual assault, it sets off a chain reaction of consequences in this provocative psychodrama set in the heady world of academia.  

Julia Roberts leads the stacked, all-star cast as Alma Imhoff, an adjunct psychology prof suffering from some internal mystery malady (she heaves over the toilet a lot). Maybe it’s stress related, since she’s certainly anxious about getting tenure—and mired in conflict when one of her students, Maggie (The Bear’s Ayo Edebirl), claims she was raped by one of Alma’s professorial colleagues, Hank (Andrew Garfield).

The situation is further complicated by the fact that Alma really likes both Maggie and Hank. Maggie insists she was raped. Hank proclaims his innocence. Who does Alma believe? Who do you believe?

Another professor (Chloë Sevigny) sniffs about Yale’s “entitled” student body, and how they’re quick to claim victimization of any kind. Michael Stuhlbarg plays Frederick, Alma’s doting psychiatrist husband.

After the Hunt is a-swirl with recriminations, he-said/she-said ambiguity, long-buried secrets, career-altering revelations and smoldering sexual tension. It’s about a “hunt” for truth, and assigning blame. It’s interwoven with talk about white male patriarchy, female solidarity, #MeToo, sexual misconduct, morality, restorative justice and racial inequality. There are conversations dense with banter about Aristotle, Freud, Arendt, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Sometimes it feels like a philosophy crash course.

It’s a knotty, complex story, largely told through Alma’s perspective as she reacts to what’s going on all around her—and realizes the need to reconcile her own past with her present. Roberts and the rest of the cast are terrific. The soundtrack (by the three-time Oscar-winning duo of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) scores what we’re seeing onscreen with a sometimes-unconventional sonic undercurrent effectively conveying the sense of creeping uncertainty and growing dread. Director Luca Guadagnino continues his interest in exploring the many ways passion, sexuality and amour can be twisted into dysfunction and dysphoria; After the Hunt certainly slices into a thematic vein shared with the Italian director’s previous films Challengers, Queer, Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All and Suspira.

It’s all very handsome, tony, provocative and well-crafted, but it asks a lot from the audience—including, with a running time of over two hours, more than a bit of patience. And it presents some truly thorny ideas and issues without really resolving or wrapping them up in the end—even though a hospital scene in the final stretch offers some insight, if not a tidy little bow. A “five years later” coda adds to the sense that time may not, in fact, heal all wounds. It’s not a feel-good movie, by any means. It challenges you to watch, listen, think and stew along with its characters.

As Alma snaps to Maggie in a heated up-close encounter, “Not everything is supposed to make you feel comfortable.” That obviously includes After the Hunt.

—Neil Pond

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Oct 08 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “A House of Dynamite”

Are you ready for doomsday? Directory Kathryn Bigelow’s latest makes us think about the unthinkable.

Rebecca Ferguson gets a troubling phone call.

A House of Dynamite
Starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Tracy Letts & Greta Lee
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, Oct. 10 / On Netflix Friday, Oct. 24

As an intercontinental ballistic missile bears down on the United States, everyone scrambles to find out who fired it and what to do before it reaches its target in about 20 minutes. That’s the ultra-high-stakes situation in A House of Dynamite, which plops a bona fide doomsday scenario into our laps and forces us to think about the unthinkable.

Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) expertly tightens the screws and amps up the tension with every taught, fraught second, inventively overlapping timelines to show us how different politicians, advisors, generals, military personnel and Washington insiders grapple with the toughest decision they’ve ever made, from the U.S. President (Idris Elba) on down the chain of command.

Confusion, dread and disbelief abound. Who launched the missile, headed straight for Chicago? Was it Russia? North Korea? China? Why didn’t America’s intercept-and-destroy defense network work? “That’s what $50 million buys us!??” barks the incredulous Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris). Should the U.S. makes its own retaliatory strike, before it’s too late? What VIPs and essential personnel will be evacuated to safety deep inside a mountain bunker, and who’ll be left behind? Will a governmental communications expert (Rebecca Ferguson) ever see her husband and young son again?

And what about the 10 million citizens expected to die when the missile hits its target?  The horrific specter of all-out nuclear Armageddon looms large, with one bomb likely to start a chain reaction of mutually assured destruction. As one character notes, we’re living in a house full of dynamite.

Bombers scramble to take out a Russian submarine in the Pacific.

The impressive ensemble cast includes Greta Lee, Anthony Ramos, Gabriel Brasso, Jason Clarke, Kaitlyn Dever and Tracy Letts. How does WNBA basketball star Angel Reese fit into things? Or a date with an Appleby’s waitress, elephants in Kenya, Civil War re-enactors or young soldier-sentries standing guard at a remote Alaskan outpost? The movie unnervingly depicts the wide-ranging ripple effect, across a spectrum of geography and life, about to be affected in the worst possible way.

It’s like Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Dr. Strangelove, but without any of that 1964 film’s scathing satire—this is deadly serious stuff. And it takes on even more gravity with current events being what they are, global politics fraught with growing tensions, and nuclear proliferation a very real thing and a very real threat. How would today’s leaders—generals, cabinet members, and yes, the president—respond if faced with that situation?

And consider this unnerving premise from the film: Despite America’s expansive, high-tech defense systems, such an attack is well within the realm of possibility.

In one early scene, Rebecca Ferguson’s character toys with a tiny plastic dinosaur, handed to her by her son before she left for work that fateful morning. As she wonders if life as she knows it may be ending, that little prehistoric creature comes to represent an even more discomforting mega scenario, one in which all humankind might very well become extinct, extinguished like the dinosaurs. And, in a grim irony, done in by our devices.

A House of Dynamite is a sobering countdown, a colossally jarring wake-up call about the fragility of our very existence…and about a time—and a day, in a span of minutes—that we can only hope never comes.

—Neil Pond

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Oct 01 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “The Smashing Machine”

The Rock takes on a new kind of role—and a pounding—in this bruising sports drama about a real-life “extreme fighter”

The Smashing Machine
Starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt
Directed by Benny Safdie
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Oct. 3

The Rock’s latest role finds him taking a beating—and giving even more of them out—in this gritty drama about real-life mixed martial arts “extreme” fighter Mark Kerr, one of the pioneering superstars of the hybrid wrestling sport some 25 years ago.

As fans of extreme fighting know, MMA is a combo platter of combative styles from around the world, from judo and jiu-jitsu to boxing and street fighting. There’s a lot of grappling, eye gouging, neck choking, head kicking and fist pummeling. Sometimes the fights are staged in “cages.” The events of the film take place between 1997 and 2000, when Kerr was a rising star in the MMA global arena, especially in Japan. It’s kinda like Rocky, with saki!

Johnson—who was himself a pro wrestler known as the Rock before beginning his acting career—immerses himself in the role, making an almost phenomenal transformation into Kerr by using multiple facial prosthetics. The muscles and sculpted body look familiar, but you sometimes have to keep reminding yourself that it’s really the Rock in there, underneath the false nose, cheekbones, forehead and ears. It’s more than a few movie miles from the upbeat, popcorn-y roles Johnson became known for in pumped-up, action-adventure romps like Jumanji, Skyscraper, the Fast and Furious franchise and San Andreas, or animated family fare like Moana, Hercules or DC League of Super Pets.

Although we see plenty of Johnson’s character doing his thing in the ring—the brutal fight scenes are very convincing—we also watch Kerr in psychological battles with himself and with his girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt). We see how the fighters may try to beat each other’s brains out, but they can be friends—even besties—when the show’s over. An actual former MMA fighter, Ryan Bader, has an integral supporting role as Kerr’s good buddy Mark Coleman, who’s also his direct competitor.

Eventually, Kerr becomes dependent on opioids and painkillers, and there’s little wonder why. He is indeed a human smashing machine; he even smashes a door to splinters in a burst of anger. All that smashing takes a toll on his body. But he loves it, loves the winning, loves soaking up the cheers of the crowd. “It’s orgasmic,” he says. “The highest of highs.”

For all its brawn and brawl, the movie’s a bit lite on the drama. There’s not a lot of conflict, or emotional highs and lows, or surprises, in Kerr’s fight-club sphere. We’re never told about his prior life, as a high school wrestler in Iowa, or how worked his way up into the pros. It’s not so much a biopic as a window on a compressed period, much like the 2002 documentary about Kerr (from which this movie takes its title). Director Benny Safdie, whose previous films include the edgy Good Times and Uncut Gems, keeps the edges messy, showing us the sweaty, unglamorous and often bloody world of “outlaw” wrestling, where combatants keep fighting because they need the money, they’re addicted to it…and they can’t really do anything else.

The movie overlays some highly appropriate music onto its scenes. It’s hard to miss the messaging when we watch Kerr training to the tune of Elvis singing Sinatra’s “My Way” (and its line about “But through it all / When there was doubt / I ate it up and spit it out”). Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungle Land” orchestrates a particularly stressful, combustive interlude between Kerr and Dawn. And it’s quite appropriate that it all ends with the Alan Parsons Project and “Limelight,” about how the limelight, the spotlight, was “all I ever wanted since it all began / Shining on me, telling the world who I am.”

The Smashing Machine shows the who-I-am about an ultimate fighter who ultimately finds himself on the other side of the spotlight. But more impressively, it also shows how Dwayne Johnson has found the other side of the showbiz coin, as a serious actor in a substantial role, a smashing success at playing a real person instead of exaggerated, often cartoonish caricatures.

—Neil Pond

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Sep 18 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Him”

Stylish horror show stabs at the brutality of a sport worshipped by Americans every weekend

Him
Starring Marlon Wayans, Tyric Withers and Julia Fox
Directed by Justin Tipping
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Sept. 19

With phantasmagoric imagery, religious references and vicious stabs into the heart of American football, this high-toned horror show wants to make you think about the destructive brutality of the game that a young college quarterback (Tyric Withers) feels like he was destined to play.

Withers’ character, Cameron Cade, grew up with a football-obsessed father idolizing a (fictitious) NFL team, the Saviors (religious reference!), and their star quarterback, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). Ever since he was a child, little Cade dreamed of being the GOAT, the greatest-of-all-time QB. “I’m him!” he shouts.

When Cade gets a concussion, his plans of becoming the new Saviors quarterback are sidelined and he goes to train for a week at White’s private compound. There he enters a nightmarish swirl of violent drills, unsettling visions and bloody psychological games. Wayans, best known for his comedy work, shows that he’s more than capable playing a menacing, duplicitous mentor—a buddy-bro friend one moment, a grinning demon the next—in a HQ that looks like a cross between the lair of a James Bond villain and a massive desert monastery. And turns out White isn’t so ready to give up his own GOAT mantle.

Director Justin Tipping—working under the banner of producer Jordan Peele’s horror-centric Monkeypaw Productions—throws in a mad swirl of stylistic touches, mostly to heighten the sense of Cade’s increasing disorientation. Was Cade attacked (twice!) by a pickaxe-wielding mascot? Did he choke an overzealous fan to death, or was that a bad dream? Was he really seduced by White’s sexy wife (Julia Fox)? Are those NFL owners actually wearing pig masks? Sometimes it feels like an extreme Twilight Zone, or an episode of the British series Black Mirror, with dabs of grotesque, Fellini-esque weirdness—like a quick flash of a dinner staged to look like Jesus and his disciples in da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

At a party, the team doctor toasts Cade with what the New Testament notes as Jesus’ last words on the cross: “It is finished” (yet another religious reference.) But Him isn’t finished until it’s drilled home the intense commitment—and sacrifices—required to become a professional football star. “No pain, no gain,” we hear more than once. It’s a sport where players are “groomed” to conform to rules and learn to be ruthless, to become “killers”—or to get grievously injured. It’s a sport with violence and combative terms in its very vocabulary; a pass can be a “bomb” or a “bullet,” or “lobbed,” like a grenade. And it’s a sport that encourages the glorification—bordering on deification—of its star performers.

But it’s no rah-rah endorsement of the game, by any means. It reminds viewers that football can chew up its players, break them inside and out. When it all ends, in a grand-guignol splash of severed heads, fountains of blood, slit throats and a body sprawled atop a pentagram, on a playing field surrounded by faceless cheerleaders and pompoms, it’s not exactly a rousing halftime show.

Him is a clash of the titans, a gladiatorial battle to the death, an angels-and-demons war exposing the ruthless soul of a sport that many Americans openly “worship.” And somehow, it makes sports mascots even creepier than they already are.

—Neil Pond

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Sep 10 2025
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Movie Review: “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale”

Concluding big-screen period-piece drama shows change afoot in Crawley Manor and its upstairs/downstairs world

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale
Starring Michelle Dockery, Joanne Froggatt, Elizabeth McGovern, Hugh Bonneville & Paul Giamatti
Directed by Simon Curtis
PG

In theaters Friday, Sept. 12

It’s time for one more—and one last—trip back to post-Edwardian England to gaze upon the Crawley family as they deal with a final, brow-furrowing wave of high-society scandal, a financial fiasco…and the hubbub of an American celebrity coming to dinner.

In this seqel to the 2022 movie, it’s 1930 and the Downton estate is rocked when everyone finds out Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is a divorcee—gasp! Then her uncle (Paul Giamatti) arrives on a visit from America, bearing some not-good news about the family’s investment assets. Can a posh dinner—with a guest appearance by flamboyant American playwright Noel Coward (Arty Froushan)—restore some high-society shine to this upper-crust Yorkshire world created some 15 years ago by British writer Julian Fellowes?

Downton Abbey, which began as a PBS series back in 2010, ran for six seasons before leaping onto the big screen. Fellowes returns in this third movie adaptation as screenwriter, and director Simon Curtis mostly picks up where he left off with 2022’s Downton Abbey: A New Era.


Laura Carmichael as Lady Edith and Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary

Fans will recognize a slew of familiar faces—in addition to Dockery and Giamatti—reprising their TV and movie roles. There’s Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham, showing the stress of years atop “the throne” of Downton alongside his wife, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern). Joanne Frogatt is Anna Bates, a Downton servant now expecting a baby with her valet husband (Brendan Coyle). There’s Mr. Mason (Paul Copley), a farmer married to a Downton cook (Leslie Nicole). And Daisy (Sophie McShera), a rising star in the kitchen, finds her voice in the community at large. Missing, though, is Dame Maggie Smith, who died in 2024. But her framed portrait, as matriarch Violet Crawley, looms large.

Among the new characters is Alessandro Nivola as a dashing, horse-racing “Yank” who captures Lady Mary’s fancy. But what are his true intentions? Can Lady Mary prove herself suitable to take over as the admin of Downton, to usher it into the next generation? How will the extended Downton “family” cope with the changes afoot in a world rocked with upheaval—a World War, the stock market crash of ’29, plus rising hemlines, same-sex relationships and the sloughing off of old stigmas, like marriages that just don’t work out?  

The Downton series and its movies have always depicted its era’s strictly enforced “segregation” of classes, from the upstairs aristocracy to the downstairs workers, and this one shows change afoot, as well, down in the servant quarters. Will Downton’s lords and ladies eventually progress to the point of having to (yikes!) cook for themselves?

It’s a posh, sumptuous-looking period piece, festooned with rich details, from dresses and ball gowns to top hats and a fleet of shiny vintage vehicles. There’s a fancy ball, a day at the races and a spirited county fair, where the two “classes” meet on common ground, a merry-go-round metaphor for equal social footing as Great Britain heads into its future.

There are no earthquakes, no space aliens, superheroes or serial killers. Just the retro highs and lows of a bygone era, a concluding look inside the lush manor where everyone looks sumptuous, tea is served in fine china and gleeful kids play cricket on manicured lawns. It doesn’t look like anything in anyone’s real experience, and that’s always been part of Downton Abbey’s deep-dish fan-fantasy appeal. And this dressed-up version of the past couldn’t last forever, and now it’s time for everyone to move on.

“It’s hard to accept that it’s time to go,” says Lord Grantham, facing the inevitable. In one scene toward the end, Paul Giamatti’s character sends up a rousing cheer for a moment of joyous entertainment, giving it hearty “Bravo!”  Most Downton Abbey fans will probably feel the same way.

—Neil Pond

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Sep 02 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “The Long Walk”

Latest Stephen King movie adaptation is a bleak, unpleasant slog

The Long Walk
Starring Cooper Hoffman, David Johnson, Charlie Plummer & Roman Griffin Davis
Directed by Francis Lawrence
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Sept. 12

A bleak dystopian parable set in a too-close-for-comfort future, The Long Walk depicts America as a militaristic totalitarian police state and an entire generation so traumatized by war and economic collapse that a death march seems like a good idea.

Based on an early novel by Stephen King (the first he ever wrote, back in the 1960s when he was a freshman at the University of Maine), it’s about a grueling annual walking contest in which young men are “chosen” from every state to compete on a course of more than 300 miles. There’s no stopping for any reason, and everyone receives penalty “warnings” for rule-breaking infractions—like pausing to pee or poop, walking too slow, falling behind, collapsing, or stepping off the pavement. Get three warnings, and you’re eliminated. That’s permanently eliminated—blam, you’re shot. The walk is over when there’s only one walker left alive—the ostensible winner.

The thought of winning—surviving—is the carrot on the stick, the thing that keeps the men trudging ahead: The lone survivor will receive whatever their heart desires, “more riches than you could possibly imagine,” says the Major (Mark Hamill) who runs the show. The walkers fantasize about what they’d do with such limitless wealth.

And it’s all televised.

King is widely recognized as a maestro of the macabre for the many adaptations of his work that became horror touchstones, like Carrie, It, The Shining, Children of the Corn, Salem’s Lot, Creepshow and Cujo. But others of his writings—like the ones that became The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me—were slim on the supernatural and rooted instead in human drama.

It isn’t a horror movie, per se, even though it depicts some truly horrific human drama, like young men getting brain-spattering kill shots to the head. And the walk itself is a monstrous event, ghoulish entertainment for looky-loos desperate for any kind of diversion. But it won’t ever bask in the same glow as The Shawshank Redemption or Stand By Me.  

You might recognize some of the walkers. Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, made an impressive debut in Licorice Pizza back in 2021. David Johnson had a recurring role in HBO’s Industry. Roman Griffin Davis was the kid, Jojo, in Jojo Rabbit.

There are messages swirling around, about brotherhood and friendship, family, forced allegiance, how a society can easily slide into madness, our appetite for “extreme” entertainment. Director Francis Lawrence certainly knows dystopia; he helmed four flicks of the Hunger Games franchise, with a fifth in the works for next year.

But lofty messages can’t rise above the mire of this relentlessly dreary downer. It’s basically a movie about guys walking…and walking…and walking. And talking… talking… talking. Dying, dying, dying. There are exploding heads, pools of blood and other awfulness; a bloated, maggot-filled animal carcass on the roadside, a crucified crow strung up on a fence, a walker crushed to gristle underneath the treads of an armored car. It’s an ugly world; we get it. But the messaging is mired in the downer murk of one of the most visually unpleasant movie experiences of the year.

The Long Walk wants to lead viewers into a socially relevant cautionary tale. Too bad it takes such a nasty, depressing road-trip slog to get there.

—Neil Pond

Aug 27 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Caught Stealing”

Austin Butler is the VIP in this action-packed crime drama with baseball roots

Caught Stealing
Starring Austin Butler, Zoë Kravitz and Regina King
Directed by Aaron Aronofsky
Rated R

In theaters Friday Aug. 29

Austin Butler shook us up as Elvis, oozed Manson-cult menace in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and rip-roared across the Midwest as one of The Bike Riders. Now he really brings the heat in this brisk, bracing action-thriller as a good-guy everyman who finds himself caught up in a messy, dangerous and deadly web of underworld crime—all because he agreed to cat-sit for a neighbor.

Butler plays Hank Thompson (from the book series by Charlie Huston), a bartender in Manhattan’s gritty Lower East Side in the late 1990s. We learn how Hank’s youthful, fresh-faced baseball dreams were derailed a decade ago by a car accident. The movie leans into the baseball motif, reflected in its title, in more ways than one; as a transplanted Californian, Hank remains a big Giants fan, talks about games long-distance with his mom, and still knows how to swing a bat—which, it turns out, can come in quite handy.

The movie has a terrific cast of supporting players. There’s Zoë Kravitz as Hank’s sexy paramedic girlfriend; the sensuality of their chemistry together is palpable. A colorfully mohawked Matt Smith, from Dr. Who and The Crown, is Hank’s across-the-hall neighbor. Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Shreiber are a hoot as Orthodox Jewish gangsters (who can’t drive on Shabbos). Rapper Bad Bunny (whose real name is Benito Martínez Ocasio) is a terrifying thug. Regina King plays a compromised cop with a fondness for black-and-white cookies. You’ll also see Carol Kane, get a glimpse of Laura Dern, and discover Griffin Dunne as a grizzled bar owner.

Along the way, there’s also a missing key to something, some $4 million in purloined cartel cash, a car chase around the Unisphere in Queens, and much ado about a squeaky rubber coin purse that looks like poop. But these are minor distractions in a movie that belongs to Butler, who carries it with sexy, sculpted heft start to finish—along with the very charismatic cat, Tonic, a real scene-stealer. Director Aaron Aronofsky (The Black Swan, The Whale, The Wrestler) keeps this wild ride twisty, turn-y and crazily unpredictable, while adding emotional depth and backstory to Hank’s character.  It’s violent and bloody as the bullets fly, bodies pile up and Hank gets the bejesus beaten out of him eight ways from Sunday. But there’s also a vein of humor woven throughout, even in the psycho taunting of a runt-y mobster (Russian actor Nikita Kukushkin) who loves making baseball jokes while throwing punches.

The real power punch, though, is delivered by Butler, the VIP in this action-packed bruiser of a crowd-pleaser. The camera loves him, and it’s easy to see why: He’s a real charmer, even when scampering—and fighting—for his life. You’ll get caught up in the crazy, propulsively spunky high energies of Caught Stealing, watching the actor who memorably hunka-hunka’d Elvis now matching wits with monstrous Russian mobsters. Butler comes out swinging and knocks it out of the park.

—Neil Pond

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Aug 13 2025
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Movie Review: “Nobody 2”

Bob Odenkirk unleashes his inner badass in a rollicking, slam-bang “family” adventure inside a small-town amusement park

Nobody 2
Starring Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielsen, Colin Hanks & Christopher Lloyd
Directed by Timo Tjahjanto
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Aug. 15

Nobody plays Nobody like Bob Odenkirk.

In this follow-up to the 2021 action-thriller, the Better Call Saul star reprises his role as a former government assassin who just wants to disappear into mild-mannered family life as a “nobody.” But his past keeps bleeding into his present, quite literally.

After the events of the first film, Hutch Mansell now finds himself deep in debt and back at his old job, taking “assignments” to run a gauntlet of global thuggery—a gaggle of Croatians with MP7s, an elevator crowded with Chinese assassins, and a parking garage full of Mexicans with machetes. Like a lot of us, he needs a vacation. So he gathers his wife (Gladiator‘s Connie Nielsen) and their two kids (McKenna Grace, who played little Tonya in I, Tonya, and Gage Monroe), plus his still-sprightly dad (Christopher Lloyd) for a getaway to a small-town lakeside resort he remembers visiting as a child with his brother (played by the Wu-Tang Clan rapper RZA).

But at Plummerville, he runs into more trouble, including a viciously corrupt cop (Colin Hanks) and an extravagantly wicked criminal mastermind (Sharon Stone) with her thumb on a pipeline of bootlegged vice. John Ortiz is the top dog in Plummerville, but all his badassery barks and bites mask another, more nuanced side.

Setting the movie in a theme park provides for some colorfully creative action scenes, including a knock-down drag-out fight aboard a “Duck Boat” ride, a shootout in a house of mirrors and a children’s ball pit turned into a multi-hued minefield. It has a lot of bang-bang, boom-boom, snapped necks, broken bones and brutal hand-to-hand walloping—and one particularly memorable encounter where a head is sliced neatly in two. But there’s a come-together theme of family, of fathers and sons, and the bonds that can bring people closer—to right wrongs, fight bad guys, or weaponize a Ferris wheel.  

“Making memories” is what Hutch tells everyone he’s doing on vacay with his family. See Nobody 2 and your memories will include seeing Bob Odenkirk as an infinitely resourceful badass who can turn a waterslide into a death trap.   

—Neil Pond

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Jul 01 2025
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Movie Review: “Jurassic World Rebirth”

Dinos roar again in sixth sequel, with an all-new cast and Spielberg-ian overtones of the 1993 original

Jurassic World Rebirth
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey & Rupert Friend
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Rated PG-13

In theaters Wednesday, July 2, 2025

Dinosaurs became extinct some 66 million years ago, until, that is, director Steven Spielberg brought ‘em back in a big way. His Jurassic Park in 1993 established a dino-mite film franchise that’s still roaring, now into sequel number six.

In Jurassic World Rebirth, set several years after the events of the previous film, 2022’s Dominion, the Earth’s climate has proven unwelcoming to laboratory-bred dinosaurs. (Despite the franchise title, it’s just not “Jurassic” enough.) So, a team of covert operatives infiltrate an abandoned dino research facility on a remote island now inhabited by crossbred dinosaur mutants, which continue to thrive in the wilds of the equatorial tropics. They’re on a mission to extract dino DNA, while there are still some dinos around to provide it, that a pharmaceutical company intends to use for medical purposes.

What could possibly go wrong?

Scarlett Johannson stars as a mercenary for hire, lured by a multimillion-dollar payday. Ditto for the boat captain played by Oscar-winning Mahershala (Moonlight) Ali. They’re both working for a tagalong pharmacy rep (Rupert Friend), who also enlists a hunky-nerd paleontologist (Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey, who also starred in Wicked). To keep things interesting, they all cross paths with a papa Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (from The Lincoln Lawyer) and his three kids, who just happen to be on their own collision course with dinosaur island.

It’s a Jurassic movie, so of course there are monsters—in the water, in the air and romping and stomping and snarling all over the place. Director Gareth Edwards creates some intense, dramatic encounters with an array of menacing creatures, including some crossbred amphibious mutations like the terrifying Distortus Rex, with a bulbous head and six limbs, and the Mutadons, flying carnivores the size of military F-16s.  

Spielberg, who only directed two Jurassic flicks, remains onboard as a producer. Maybe that’s one reason so much of Rebirth seems to be retreading the past, with scenes that echo moments from the 1993 film and callbacks to the original, like a big unfurling museum banner that reads “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth,” which appeared in the closing shot of the first movie. One character misdirects a lurking dinosaur with a red flare, as Sam Neill did more than 30 years ago, and there’s another, whose greed leads him to a fate akin to Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) when he tried to smuggle dino embryos off the island.

There’s still that good ol’ Spielberg sentimentality, too, especially with a little girl (Audrina Miranda) who becomes a hero, her big sister’s wayward-teen boyfriend (David Iacono, from Netflix’s The Summer I Turned Pretty) who also proves his worthiness, and a cute little tagalong dino nicknamed Delores, which you’ll most likely be seeing as a mass-merched kids’ toy.

There’s plenty of talking in between the post-prehistoric action, including discussion about the situational ethics of dinosaur breeding and big pharma spending mega money to make even more mega money. It’s hard to miss the parallel to the entire Jurassic franchise, which continues to mine movie dinos for astronomical profits.

And now, in the world spawned by Jurassic Park, humans and dinosaurs continue to coexist, even though the dinos don’t really have much use for the ongoing exploitation of us puny bipeds. “They may be through with us,” says the movie’s pharmacology dude, “but we’re not through with them.” Somewhere in the distance, I hear the roar of an eighth Jurassic movie…

—Neil Pond

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Jun 17 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “F1® The Movie”

Brad Pitt takes the wheel of rip-roaring motorsports drama

Damson Idris & Brad Pitt play racetrack teammates in ‘F1.’

F1® The Movie
Starring Brad Pitt, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem and Damson Idris
Directed by Joseph Kosinski

Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, June 27

What has four wheels and flies? It’s Brad Pitt as a pro race driver, flying around international Grand Prix tracks at 200 miles per hour in in this revved-up, rip-roaring, grandly orchestrated gearhead motorsports drama. He stars as Sonny Hayes, a veteran wheelman whose career was derailed decades ago, now onboard and back in the game once again.

Oscar-winner Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men) is a F1 franchise owner—and a former racing colleague of Sonny’s—who convinces his old teammate, now living as a nomad in his van, to rejoin him. He wants Sonny’s behind-the-wheel skills to help energize his elite team, struggling to stay in the high-stakes, big-money global competition.

Irish actress Kerry Condon (Better Call Saul, The Banshees of Inisherin) plays Kate, the team’s ace technical director, designing an array of aerodynamic racing do-daddery—that is, when she’s not swooning over Sonny.  Damson Idris (FX’s Snowfall) is the young media-star rookie, Joshua, who initially dismisses Sonny as a reckless, washed-up has-been.

Can the hotshot come to see the veteran as a friend, a mentor and a teammate, instead of a cocky, risk-taking intruder? Stick around and find out.

It’s all big, loud, shiny and expensive looking, rumored to have cost some $300 million to make, with $30 million going to Pitt—the loftiest upfront payday he’s ever received for a film. And the camera makes the most of his high-paid, high-wattage star power. There’s no question about who’s in the driver’s seat here—it’s the two-time winner of People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” designation, an actor who, at 61, certainly still knows how to light up a closeup. And it’s no surprise we get at least one good look at his still-toned abs.

If sometimes its style and rhythms feel like Top Gun on a racetrack, with combative cars instead of fighter jets, that’s probably because director Joseph Kosinski also directed that film’s 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. Sonny flies into the danger zone, much like Tom Cruise did, but keeps things a lot closer to the ground.

The movie immerses viewers in pro racing, putting you “in the cockpit” with drivers as they’re blasting through tight turns, tearing down straightaways and weaving through crowded packs of other vehicles. Cars were fitted with up to 15 separate camera mounts to capture the whooshing wowza action from every angle. We’re alongside hustle-bustle pit crews as they make repairs in mere seconds. We learn a lot about tires, and why they need changing so often. (I don’t remember any other movie, in fact, where tires become such a plot point.) We see some spectacular crashes and realize the constant danger. We watch Sonny slip a playing card into his race suit, just for luck, before each start. And everything is scored to a dramatic, sweeping soundtrack by Oscar-winning German mega-composer Hans Zimmer, with tuneful assists by Chris Stapleton, Led Zeppelin, Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat and others.

It all comes down to a big final Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi, elevating the breathless excitement and the tension with each lap in the capital city of the United Arabic Emirates. Will Sonny’s car hold together? Can Josh make it across the finish line without a smashup? Will all those Arabian dignitaries get oil stains on their white throbes?

At one point, Sonny talks about why he loves to drive, the transcendental Zen-like moments when speed becomes almost a drug, getting him high. For moviegoers with a “need for speed” and seeking a summertime cinematic high, F1 will certainly give you that—and maybe a little whiplash. So, harness up, grab a helmet, and hang on. And maybe tuck a playing card in your pants pocket, just for luck.

—Neil Pond

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