Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Aug 13 2025
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Movie Reviews

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 Reviews

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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Jun 10 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “How to Train Your Dragon”

How the new live-action redo keeps the animated original’s messaging, more timely than ever, intact

How to Train Your Dragon
Starring Mason Thames, Nico Parker & Gerard Butler
Directed by Dean DeBlois
Rated PG

In theaters Friday, June 13

A live-action remake of the 2010 animated Dreamworks flick, the new How to Train Your Dragon remains faithful to the original film’s messaging of acceptance, friendship, coexistence, family and self-discovery in its tale of a fresh-faced Viking lad who longs to be a dragon-fighting warrior. But Hiccup has a change of heart when he tames—and trains—a creature that represents exactly what the rest of his clan loathes.

It’s faithful to the original in other ways too. In many instances, it almost seems synched, framed, blocked out and sequenced shot-by-shot. That won’t do much to convince people who decry how Hollywood just seems to make the same movies over and over and over, re-mining old “intellectual properties” for new profits. In this case, it’s literally true.

Mason Thames (formerly menaced by Ethan Hawke in The Black Phone) stars as the teenage dragon whisperer Hiccup, the son of his tribe’s burly, dragon-slaying chieftain (Gerald Butler, who also voiced the original animated character). British actress Nico Parker (the daughter of actress Thandie Newton) plays Astrid, Hiccup’s competitor in the dragon-fighting arena who eventually becomes his dragon-taming ally and love interest. British funnyman Nick Frost is Gobbler the Belch, the village blacksmith.

The screen is filled with a plethora of CGI winged creatures, dragons ranging from monstrous to whimsical, pint-sized to preposterously gigantic. Hiccup has a gaggle of misfit teen friends. Everybody wears horned helmets (they’re Vikings, after all), and lots of fur. There’s a sly G-rated joke about a metal headpiece made from a female breastplate.

In a unique twist, director Dean DeBlois was also the director of the original animated film, plus its two follow-ups. This is a guy who knows his Dragons. And he also knows what works, mixing soaring, clanking, swooping visual spectacle—that might remind you of Avatar mixed with Netflix’s Vikings and a dash of Gladiator—and softer family-friendly coming-of-age drama woven into sentimental themes of a father and a son, a young man finding out who he is—and a group of comedically crusty, battle-hardened Vikings learning, again and anew, how to live in peace and harmony with something they once feared, fought and killed.

In these troubled and turbulent and fractious times, maybe that’s a message that we all need to watch—and see and hear—again.

—Neil Pond

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Jun 04 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Ballerina”

Ana de Armas puts a fiercely feminine stamp on the wild world of John Wick

Ballerina
Starring Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Angela Huston & Gabrielle Byrne
Directed by Len Wiseman
Rated R

In theaters Friday, June 6

A little girl named Eve who dreams of becoming a ballerina grows up on a path of vengeful retribution in this rock ‘em, sock’em John Wick spinoff. Cuban-born Ana de Armas stars, throwing herself with gusto into the super-stylish ultra-violence, astronomically high body count and epic levels of combative extermination that have become franchise cornerstones.

And it’s not a John Wick movie, per se, but John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is also around for a stone-faced cameo that feels less like a plot necessity and more like a calculated nod and bit of connective tissue for faithful fans, who’ve pushed the four previous films—the first of which debuted more than a decade ago—into the rarified billion-dollar box-office zone.

De Armas showed her kickass bona fides as a James Bond associate in a memorable scene from No Time to Die (2021), and she also made lasting impressions in two Blade Runners, Knives Out and Blonde, for which she was Oscar nominated in her starring role as Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe. But she’s a newbie to the off-the-charts action of Wicki-world, and she makes a scorcher of a debut. I found myself constantly marveling at the high-level skills behind all the controlled chaos of the stunts, the elaborately staged destruction, and the fantastical implausibility of anyone—like Eve—actually surviving the punishments she endures, and dishes out, onscreen.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” she’s asked at one point.

On Eve’s back is a tattoo reading “Lux en Tenebris,” which is Latin for “Light in the Darkness.” Just in case you miss it, she’s a force of good, fighting a dark cabal of death-dealing bad guys. Good thing she knows how—as the end soundtrack song by the rock band Evanescence reminds us—to “Fight Like a Girl.”

There’s not a lot of highfalutin pretenses to gum up all the ballistics, the bloody brawling and exploding bodies, despite the movie’s stridently fem-centric focus on family, fathers, daughters and fateful choices. “Are we going to die?” a young girl asks her papa. Let’s just say, if you’re in this movie, the odds are somewhat stacked against you, by just about whatever means you might imagine, including pistols, assault rifles, knives, pickaxes, hammers and hand grenades. There’s even an extended duel between flame throwers, and a restaurant brawl that weaponizes dinner plates. The final third of the movie is set in a snowy Czech village where everyone—even kids—is trained to kill.

The cast will look familiar to John Wick fans, with role-reprising turns from Gabriel Bryne, Ian McShane, Angelica Houston and Lance Reddick. And hey, there’s The Living Dead’s Norman Reedus, as an assassin with a big bounty on his head. The movie is a teeming immersion into a shady Euro fantasia, a subcultural alt-universe of diabolical criminal underworlds, life-and-death codes of conduct and—as fans are aware—a hotel franchise, the Continental, that caters only to killers. Would you like some hollow-point bullets with your room service omelet?

“When you deal in blood, there must be rules,” we hear from Eve’s mentor at the Ruska Roma, the German criminal “tribe” of gypsies that adopt the tiny dancer and turn her into a lethal weapon. And indeed, there’s a lot of bloody bang for your movie buck in Ballerina, particularly in de Armas’ full-throttle performance as a woman who’ll stop at nothing to get her revenge—with a gun, a knife, a hammer, duct tape, a flamethrower or a fire hose—as she widens and feminizes the fierce, ferociously wild world of John Wick.

—Neil Pond

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May 29 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie review: “The Phoenician Scheme”

Director Wes Anderson’s latest eccentric curveball of a movie has an all-star cast in a globetrotting tale of shady international business shenanigans

The Phoenician Scheme
Starring Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton & Michael Cera
Directed by Wes Anderson
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, May 30

Like other films by director Wes Anderson, The Phoenician Scheme is an eccentric curveball of quirky characters, dark humor, deadpan delivery and meticulous visual flair. If you loved Moonrise Kingdom, The French Dispatch, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel, you’ll feel cozily at home with this wildly unpredictable, globetrotting tale of an amoral, assassination-dodging 1950s tycoon (Benico Del Toro) trying to put together a massive power-grab project in the Mediterranean.

In between recurring avant-garde afterlife dream sequences, there’s international sabotage and market manipulation, oddball investors, retro-cool gizmos, an insect-loving Norwegian etymologist (Michael Cera) with a secret, and a pipe-smoking young woman (Mia Threapleton) who may, or may not, be cut out for the convent life. Tom Hanks and Brian Cranston play a pair of characters who do business over a game of basketball…in a train tunnel. There’s Scarlett Johannson, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Riz Almed, F. Murray Abraham, Jeffrey Wright, Charlottes Gainsbourgh—and Benedict Cumberbatch as an estranged uncle with a grudge, and a golly-whopper thicket of facial hair.

A recurring line is “Help yourself to a hand grenade.” And most people do.

Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera

There’s a group of militant guerrilla fighters, discussions about faith and atheism, two plane crashes, quicksand, flying arrows from a crossbow, and an endearingly soft emotional subtext about the importance of family.  And oh, yeah, Bill Murray is God.

It’s all played super seriously for laughs, with everyone all-aboard the big, caustically funny running joke. Some of the faces will be familiar from previous Wes Anderson movies, but Threapleton (the daughter of Oscar-winning Kate Winslet) and Cera both shine in their debuts with the director, becoming central to the movie’s ever-evolving plotline. Here’s hoping to see them both again in another wild-ride Anderson caper.

“This is just…crazy,” Threapleton’s character says at one point. You may agree. The Phoenician Scheme is, indeed, crazy—but it’s precisely the kind of delightful absurdity that fans of Wes Anderson movies have come to expect and adore.

—Neil Pond

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May 22 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning”

Tom Cruise goes out with a slam-bang in his supposedly last installment of the iconic big-screen spy-action franchise

Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning
Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg & Esai Morales
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, May 31

In this eighth (and ostensibly final) installment of the big-screen franchise, which revived the deep-dish espionage of the iconic 1960s TV series in the ‘90s, Tom Cruise reprises his starring role as Ethan Hunt, a rogue IMF (Impossible Mission Force) agent faced with another seemingly “impossible” task— to save the world from annihilation by an all-consuming truth-eating digital parasite known as The Entity.

How’s he going to do it? “We’ll figure it out,” he says.

Figuring it out is a bit of a challenge for the audience in this nearly three-hour spectacle loaded with gravitas, self-reflection, doomsday vibes, loads of expository blather and a couple of show-stopping stunt sequences. The plot is crazily confusing, its cup runneth over with actors from previous films, and there’s a lot of talking—about what’s happening, what happened, and what it all means. In case you’ve forgotten, it throws in some greatest hits of Mission: Impossible movie highlights from the past two decades.

But when Cruise takes a deep dive to the bottom of the icy Barren Sea, to find a digital doodad left behind in a sunken Soviet sub clinging precariously to the edge of a bottomless abyss, or when he dangles with derring-do in a grand finale involving two dueling biplanes in the skies over South Africa, well, such preposterously complicated, supremely slam-bang stunt stuff makes you forget about the movie’s more, ahem, tedious passages. In case you haven’t heard, Cruise proudly does his own stunts, and in these two extended scenes, he earns a couple more gold stars—and shows where some of the film’s reported budget of $400 million went.

Hayley Atwell returns as Grace, the former thief now turned IMF agent. There’s Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, as Ethan’s closest friends and allies. Pom Kiementieff takes a break from playing the alien creature Mantis in Marvel Guardian of the Galaxy movies to return as Paris, the French assassin with a vendetta for Gabriel (Esai Morales), who holds the key—literally—to The Entity. Angela Bassett is the U.S. president, who finds herself in a very tough geo-political spot.

If you’re looking for how the movie nods directly toward its predecessors, there’s the character played by Shea Whigam, from Boardwalk Empire, who traces the intellectual property’s genetic line all the way back to its TV roots. And hey, is that Nick Offerman as a high-ranking military general, and Ted Lasso’s Hannah Wadingham as a Navy official trying to prevent World War III? Yep!

At one point, Ethan is told that “Everything you are, everything you’ve done, has come to this.” That’s certainly true with Tom Cruise and his new Mission: Impossible, which makes a point of reminding us of its impressive run of big-screen escapism across nearly 20 years.  

The movie, which began filming back in 2022, hits screens at a time when its storyline feels especially linked to our contemporary world, with modern worries about AI and cyberspace, fraught international relations and the possibility of nuclear self-destruction. And it doesn’t appear like we can count on Ethan Hunt to come along anymore, hanging from an airplane wing or escaping from a submarine torpedo tube, to save the day.

But then again, you never know… And as we’ve learned in the movies, nothing is impossible!

—Neil Pond

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May 15 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Friendship”

Paul Rudd & Tim Robinson strike bro-crush gold in scathingly funny male-bonding comedy

Friendship
Starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd
Directed by Andrew DeYoung
Rated R

In theaters Thurs., May 15

Socially stunted Craig (Tim Robinson) develops a bodacious bro-crush on his new neighbor, the suave local TV weatherman Austin (Paul Rudd), in this new gem of cringe comedy about what can go hilariously off-track in male relationships.

It’s an impressive first film for director Andrew DeYoung, but Friendship really finds its wince-y, perfect-pitch groove in Tim Robinson, who spent four seasons as a writer and performer with Saturday Night Live before launching his own successful Netflix series; I Think You Should Leave was about a guy who drives other people away—which is exactly what happens here. Robinson’s Craig is like an overgrown, awkward kid who never fully matured, and much of the film hinges on his hapless, sometimes explosive ignorance in all kinds of situations at home, at work and anywhere else he tries—and fails spectacularly—to fit in.

Rudd, also one of the film’s executive producers, provides the perfect counterpart as a guy who seemingly has it all (a glamorous job, a rock band, a beautiful wife and cool hobbies), but also some insecurities of his own. Sometimes, it feels like Rudd is channeling bits of his smooth ladies-man reporter vibes from Anchorman, while Robinson’s substantial roots in SNL’s subversive sketch humor creep and crawl through everything, orchestrated to an original soundtrack (by Keegan DeWitt) that adds to the air of anything-might-happen unhinged-ness.

Kate Mara plays Craig’s wife, Jack Dylan Glazier (from two It horror flicks, and Shazam!) is their son. I loved the son’s girlfriend (Anora’s Ivy Wolk), whose only spoken lines are “Hi” and “Thank you for the potato.”) And also the young ponytailed phone salesman (Billy Byrk) who doubles as a drug dealer on lunch breaks of Rollos and Red Bull.

How knockout funny is it all? Well, not every movie can wring laughs from neighborhood speed cushions, a psychedelic toad, mushrooms, aqueduct spelunking, soiled clothing and the very mention of a Marvel movie. But this caustic buddy-buddy cocktail truly swings in the awkward yin-yang between Robinson and Rudd, who demonstrate how riotously askew a male friendship can go—especially if you’re clueless, like Craig, to every social cue.  

—Neil Pond  

Apr 30 2025
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Movie Reviews, Music

Poolside with Swamp Dogg

Movie review: Wooly, wide-ranging doc spotlights the (almost) legendary cult musician and his friends

Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted
Documentary
Directed by Isaac Gale & Ryan Olsen
Unrated
In theaters Friday, May 2

He’s recorded and released more than 25 albums, worked with superstars and written million-selling songs. And most people have no idea who he is. He’s Jerry Williams Jr., better known as Swamp Dogg, a Virginia-born musician who became a cult figure during more than seven decades on the fickle, not-quite-famous fringes of the music industry.

This pleasantly quirky, engagingly colorful documentary introduces us to Williams and his two longtime housemates, Guitar Shorty and Moogstar, who shared his ranch-style home in a leafy Los Angeles suburb—where, we learn, nearly all the neighbors seem to be making porn vids. Shorty and Moog also share Dogg’s on-again, off-again relationship with what might be considered success.

We learn that Williams, now in his 80s, made his first record in the mid-1950s, toured constantly, later becoming a label exec, a producer, arranger and a multi-genre songwriter, dabbling in disco, rap, R&B and country, co-penning (with Gary U.S. Bonds) the 1971 Johnny Paycheck hit “She’s All I Got.” He started his own label, releasing what surely must be the most commercially successful of all CDs of Beatles songs “performed” by dogs, chickens, cows and sheep (1983’s “Beatle Barkers”). He recorded a duet of “Sam Stone” with John Prine, performed on the Grand Ole Opry and had his own cable-TV cooking show, If You Can Kill It, I Can Cook It. In the early ‘70s, he was investigated by the CIA in the 1970s for protesting the war in Vietnam alongside actress-turned-activist Jane Fonda.

Somewhere along the way, he devised his alter ego, Swamp Dogg. Some of his album covers—depicting him riding a giant rat rodeo-style, as a hot dog slathered in mustard and onions, or as Jesus on a cross—are visual hints of his wide-ranging, wildly idiosyncratic takes on multiple formats of music.

The film shows him working in the studio on what would be his latest album, Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St, released last year, blurring the lines between folk, blues, country, roots music and soul with a savory brew of new Swamp Dogg originals, favorites from past albums and timeless ‘50s R&B classics.

Swamp’s saga is a wooly, wide-ranging, hip ‘n’ flip tale of the ups and downs, ins and outs and upside-downs of a funky, improbably flexible lifetime in the music biz, the story of a true survivor who recounts much of his wildly unpredictable ride sitting in the shade of his backyard, watching an artist paint the bottom of his swimming pool. You don’t find out exactly what’s being painted until the end of the movie, but suffice it to say, it puts the perfect cherry on top of this swirly cinematic Swamp Dogg sundae.

Moogstar lives with Swamp Dogg in their “bachelor pad for aging musicians.”

One of the movie’s most endearing qualities is the turn of its spotlight often onto Dogg’s housemates in their “bachelor pad for aging musicians.” We learn how Guitar Shorty (whose death, in 2022, is covered in the film) was a winner on TV’s The Gong Show, and about a transformational encounter by Moogstar at the Montana gravesite of motorcycle-riding daredevil Evel Knievel. There’s a free-flowing, anything-goes kind of grooverey across time and space with a combination of archival footage, home videos and animation.

Dogg’s celebrity friends—like comedian Tom Kenny, the voice of Spongebob Squarepants, and head Jackass honcho Johnny Knoxville—also pop by the pool to swap tales and shoot the breeze. We meet one of Dogg’s five daughters, Jeri, now a neurologist. We learn how his late wife, Yvonne, became his lifelong anchor, partner and manager.

It’s a sweeping, often funny, sometimes profane and ultimately sweet story of a man whose wholly unique claim to pop culture spans decades and crosses just about all the boundary lines that typically define musical categorization. And you come away with the feeling that, despite all the yin and yang, the winning and the losing, the highs and the lows, the hits and the misses, Swamp Dogg—and Jerry Williams—wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I consider myself one of the luckiest motherf*uckers in the world,” he notes. After seeing Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, you’ll understand why.

—Neil Pond

Apr 17 2025
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Movie Reviews

Fangs a Lot

Movie Review: Vampires attack a 1930s juke joint in ‘Sinners,’ a heady horror movie about…a bunch of things

Sinners
Starring Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Canton & Delroy Lindo
Directed by Ryan Coogler
Rated R

In theaters Friday, April 18

A phantasmagoric, blues-infused parable with a lot on its mind, Sinners brings together history, lore, music and mystical mojo into a spicy golly-whopper of a tale about lookalike twin veterans who return to their Mississippi homeland in the Jim Crow South after serving overseas in World War I.

Known as “Smoke” and “Stack” (and both played by Michael B. Jordan), the bros—toting a satchel of cash, likely from some gangsta-like postwar activities up north, in Chicago—want to open a social club where local blues artists can perform, people can gamble, drink, party and dance, and the money will flow.

But some vampires—yes, vampires—have other ideas. And they’re out for blood.

Director Ryan Coogler, who made his hit-movie bona fides with the Rocky spinoff Creed and Marvel’s Black Panther, shows he’s also adept with a rip-roaring, rampaging thriller about the undead, set to a vibe-rich soundtrack of deep-dish delta blues. Vampires, as you might recall, have always been depicted as seductive, sexually voracious creatures, and Coogler doesn’t shy from reminding us of that longtime connection. In Sinners, both the living and the dead clearly enjoy the pleasures of the flesh.

These vampires are also seductive in another way, “inviting” the living to join their ranks and exist for eternity, out of time, where all are welcome, regardless of credo or skin color.

The vampires represent several other things, too, including the “blood” ties of ancestry, the cross-pollination of cultures, a timeline connecting past and present, and the breaching of “boundaries” separating the living and the dead. The movie clearly evokes the fable of blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who was so “unnaturally” gifted that the story arose he must have breached that boundary, meeting the devil in a crossroads and selling his soul in exchange for musical talent.

In the movie, young guitar-toting “Preacher Boy” Sam (newcomer Miles Caton, making a most impressive movie debut), is chastised by his evangelist father (Saul Williams) about playing in honkytonks, making music for “drunkards and philanderers” and doing a dangerous “dance with the devil.” Sam is clearly the movie’s Robert Johnson surrogate, with Sinners suggesting that music has an almost otherworldly potency, a connective, life-changing power that can even open supernatural portals—like when the juke joint is suddenly filled for a dreamlike sequence with dancers and musicians across centuries. We see Native American spirit dancers mixing it up with hip-hoppers, twerkers and even a funkadelic guitarist. It’s a marvelously eye-popping head trip, just like when, later, a field full of vampires break into an extended Irish jig and a folk song, suggesting yet another regional current of musical heritage.

Hailee Steinfeld (above) is a femme fatale. Veteran actor Delroy Lindo plays Delta Slim, a bluesman with stories to tell. Britain’s Jack O’Connell is Remmick, the vampire chieftain.

It’s all woven into a rich, vibrantly detailed tapestry of the Great Depression South, with allusions to the region’s history of ugly volatility between Black and white culture, the concept of sin and transgression, themes of separation and segregation, and the thin line between faith and fear. It goes a bit gonzo in its second half, almost like Quentin Tarantino took the reins for the finale, when the blood finally flows and spurts, the vampires crash the party, and everything takes an explosively hyper-violent turn.

How does it all pan out? Well, you’ll just have to watch to see, but trust me, it’s a wild ride. Stay for the credits for a flash-forward with one of the central characters, now elderly (and played, in a nice touch, by real-life blues guitarist Buddy Guy).

A zestfully fresh take on thangs with fangs, Sinners invites you sink your teeth into the juicy, boldly unexpected turns of this spicy and sensual deep-South honky-tonk horror show.

—Neil Pond

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