In the wake of COVID-19, some changes…
Everyone is feeling the effects of COVID-19 and the entertainment industry, in particular movie studios and theaters, have been dramatically affected. I will be continuing to review new films when I can, albeit many will likely be smaller indies unless Hollywood embraces Video on Demand. I’m also going to make a real effort to continue seeking out Ohio-made indies and providing reviews for them. I will continue what I did for my huge 1999 in Rewind article and look back at my original teenage reviews and assess my current feelings on the movies and my old writing, for the year 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and now 2004. I’ll be on the lookout for amazingly new so-bad-it’s-gotta-be-seen movies (have you seen Love on a Leash?). In short, I’m going to keep writing. I hope you keep reading.
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The Love Hypothesis (2026)
This may have been my wife’s most anticipated movie of 2026. Ali Hazelwood is one of her can’t-miss favorite authors, and 2021’s The Love Hypothesis was her debut published work that cemented Hazelwood as a romance genre giant. The film adaptation is further evidence just how familiar formulas can be enlivened when the filmmakers recognize what is important to get right. The setup seems initially contrived, with PHD-student Olive Smith (Riverdale‘s Lili Reinhart) needing to find a fake boyfriend so her bestie will finally date the guy she once crushed over, and Dr. Adam Carlsen (Tom Bateman) needing to find a fake girlfriend so he receives his missing grant funds. Together, they will have to fool their friends and colleagues and maybe, just maybe, these opposites might find some real chemistry of their own. While being predictable, you simply won’t care because the fun of the whole combustible coupling is infectious. The bickering and eventual softening is a tried-and-true winning formula. Both of the actors have plenty of humor they get to showcase through awkward cover stories and improved physicality. It helps that the movie is directed by Claire Scanlon, who has a long history directing TV comedies like The Office and Kimmy Schmidt. The comedy bits feel natural to the story while giving the right berth for the actors to really hit their potential. The movie might be predictable as any genre formula can, but it’s the charming actors and their interaction that provides the right amount of swoon. I don’t know if it’s been confirmed in the Hazelwood fan-base but the male lead is definitely giving autism spectrum vibes, with his literal manner, rigid system of expectations, misunderstanding of social cues, and tonal affect. He’s more than a ball of tics, or dismissively a prickly Mr. Darcy stand-in, and Olive is more than an adorakable flibbertigibbet of a young woman. They are more than just facile genre archetypes, and the actors have genuine flinty-flirty chemistry that makes every interaction worth watching. The writing is clever without being self-consciously preoccupied with pithy banter or set pieces, instead drawing humor more from the characters, conflicts, and personalities in clash. There’s even a dash of satirical nods, like when Olive bemoans all the improbable scenarios that force people to share a bed. The Love Hypothesis is a sweet, funny, and ultimately satisfying example of the enduring appeal and comforts of rom-coms when they get the basics right.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Primetime (2026)
The mass media landscape of the early 2000s is a wince-inducing memory-hole of scandalized fearmongering and celebrity navel-gazing, much of which we’re still living through today considering our second-term with a tabloid president. The bending of reality TV and documentary subjects into confined, pre-fab identities to play to our baser levels of entertainment was hyper-accelerated from the rise in Internet gotcha journalism that looked to scrape the bottom of the barrel as a means of pride. “We’re giving the people what they want,” the slop-artists of the world justified themselves. Part of that peak slop was the television series To Catch a Predator. It began as a more leering segment on the Dateline news magazine show before it spun off into its own primetime specials, with journalist Chris Hansen trying to uncover some sort of psychological insight into grown men who drove long distances to meet up with children they had deeply inappropriate online conversations with. It wasn’t news-worthy but it was pure spectacle and Americans couldn’t get enough. What exactly is this show’s legacy? That’s what Primetime is here to explore in a Lynchian fever dream of style, bold swings, and definite creative license. Amongst all the grotesquerie, there’s an actual sad and haunting perspective here to helpfully measure the depravity, which can become a bit too much of the same muck.
It’s 2006, and Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) is trying to reach new heights of success. His Dateline segment is becoming insatiably popular with the American public, enough that NBC is putting it in primetime opposite ABC’s Lost. It’s a bigger stage and Hansen has to meet the raised scrutiny, with many peers in TV journalism looking down on his exploitation hidden camera show, as well as the National Enquirer extorting him with pictures of Hansen having an affair. The TV show is a hit but nobody feels good about it, and Hansen has to wonder how far he can ride this popularity to greater credibility. How far will the show go, and Hansen with it, to chase the best predators to chase the highest ratings?
First things first, by exploring the failings of the people behind the TV show, Primetime is not equivocating nor mitigating the harm of the pedophiles caught in these televised busts. It’s not excusing their behavior but it does question how much these men would have done on their own without someone on the other line reeling them in for exposure. It’s not like these men were fully entrapped. They made the choice to engage in sexually lascivious dialogue online with children, and they made the choice to meet in person with the strictly stated purpose of sexual activity with minors. They drove the distance, they stashed their vehicles with condoms and lube, and they entered the house with an underage decoy. These men are certainly guilty, but the clarity of their wrongdoing does not wash away the moral queasiness of the TV crew transforming their predatory behavior into righteous vigilante justice for mass consumption. Examining our own darker impulses does not cancel out or minimize the darkness of others.
Director Lance Oppenheim (Spermworld, the forthcoming You Can See Everything) makes his narrative debut from the realm of documentaries and definitely brings a heightened sense of reality to the production. Camera angles are all over the place, sometimes so close to the actors you can see their pores; sets will take on extra surreal layers like the central Predator stage that always has an island in the middle of the house, with lighting that feels like a hellish furnace; the movie is shot on many different video and film formats with different aspect ratios, intermingling the slippery sense of what is real and what is staged. It’s a sensationalized approach that encourages the actors to go big, and the biggest of all is Pattinson (The Drama, The Odyssey). I was spellbound by the man’s performance, a combination of darkly comic neediness and desperately serious intonation. Watching him insist on more takes to nail the right line reading of the perverted text exchanges is hilarious but also a perfect minor detail about who this guy is and what he sees this show as, coming down to a grandiose battle between the cosmic forces of good and evil. I’m not kidding. There’s a lengthy anecdote Hansen reveals about discovering real evil in the world on an international assignment. The movie leaves it open whether Hansen is a true believer or is just using this personal story as a flimsy rationalization for his show. There are plenty of characters who have no such illusions about the kind of show they are part of, particularly Merritt Weaver as Hansen’s producer and chief enabler. Much of Primetime feels like we’re trapped in a room full of ghouls, each subsisting off of human misery and finding ways to assuage their personal guilt and accountability.
Every salacious second of Primetime feels elevated with the filmmakers underlining how exactly they want you to feel. The insights are going to be rather limited as we watch person after person compromise their morals for ratings or money or acceptance. It’s not a very deep look at the show, more of a jumping off point to condemn in every direction. I doubt the real Chris Hansen was as contemptuous or self-involved as the film version, a man who wakes his boys up to watch the latest taping of To Catch a Predator, you know, a show for the whole family. He seems more like a satirized cardboard stand-in of a media figure than a real person. I’m not complaining about the lack of subtlety for such an unsubtle TV series, though it doesn’t degenerate into a facile “who’s really exploiting who?” question of moralizing blame-shifting. I appreciate the overt grandiosity and operatic sense of style that Oppenheim displays throughout, lending the movie a hypnotic and nightmarish quality that would have made David Lynch proud. While watching Primetime might not educate you much as an outsider to the ways of the show, it does convey the grimy anxiety of the moment and its cumulative effect. You might want to take a lengthy shower afterwards to make yourself feel clean.
Fortunately, the movie plays its own narrative bait-and-switch game, a rug-pull Hansen might tacitly approve. The real heart of this movie is the character of Daniel “Dan” Plum (Skyler Gisondo), an aspiring actor looking for his big break. His audition video features him singing a song from Rent before the casting director cuts him off to ask, incredulously, “Do you know what kind of show you’re here for?” He doesn’t, and his complex process of discovering just what will be expected of him, and his response to that pressure, is the missing emotional core of this surreal hyperbolic cartoon of media satire. This young man’s dream is to be an actor and he now has an opportunity that will pay him handsomely, provide accommodations for his travel, and present a primetime showcase that millions will watch. It feels like he’s come far. His more dismissive friend rationalizes, “Yeah, but people watching won’t remember you.” He’s the decoy. He tries to view the role as a character, thinking of back-story and motivation and all the acting techniques he’s learned, but he’s only just the bait. He’s there to be believably underage to lure in the lustful targets, requiring Dan to raise the pitch of his voice or dress more childish. He thinks he’s an important part of the show, and he even gets to have a catch with Hansen like he’s some surrogate father figure, but he’s just another person being exploited. The awkward acclimation of Dan to his work environment produces a rise-and-fall narrative that allows us to witness the changes and harm this job is taking on his soul. The accumulated cost of the moral degradation of the show is exemplified by this man’s journey and how normal it all becomes. It becomes an ongoing question of how much he’s willing to accept and where his breaking point may be. The Hansen performance will get the attention, but it’s this character that provides the unexpected tragedy. As much as Pattinson’s gonzo performance is the draw, Gisondo’s performance is the lasting power.
Primetime is disturbing and darkly comic, satirical and broad while also being dismissively insightful for a drama about a group of people taking it upon themselves to root out pedophiles. It’s got two killer performances, intoxicating style that can also be insufferable for many, and an overall elevated and surreal tone that makes the movie feel bizarre and superficially connected to its topic. There’s plenty to be entranced with here but also a lingering feeling, much like from those who watched To Catch a Predator, that there could have been a better presentation for this material that would catch more than headlines.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Resident Evil (2026)
I’ve never played any of the popular Resident Evil video games but I have watched every movie, at least the ones starring Milla Jovovich, as I consider them the right kind of entertaining trash. In no way will I argue that any of the six movies from 2002 to 2017 are defensibly good by traditional standards (I’m purposely ignoring the 2021 failed reboot Welcome to Racoon City). I will, however, gladly sit and watch any of them if they are on TV because they are, at their best, gloriously ridiculous and silly spectacles. My interest dramatically increased in a new Resident Evil movie when writer/director Zack Cregger’s name was attached. The man behind twisty genre-benders Barbarian and Weapons helming a video game franchise best known for schlocky genre filmmakers like Paul W.S. Anderson? Weapons won an Oscar for a performance, a rarity for a horror movie, and now that same filmmaker wants to revive Resident Evil? My interest increased even further when Cregger confirmed it would be an original story and not really beholden to the established characters and plots of the many games (many fans did not agree with me). It felt like a fresh start with an exciting filmmaker on the rise, and having seen Resident Evil, I can declare it a gory blast, a brilliantly-calculated thrill ride to make you laugh and scream in good fun.
The entire 90-minute movie follows one character’s hellish night into the madness of the early signs of a deadly outbreak. We follow Bryan (Austin Abrams) as a medical courier delivering organs to hospitals. He’s ready to head home when he gets a special urgent delivery needed in Racoon City up in the snowy mountains. It will pay double and so he snatches the opportunity. It might be the allure of more money or it might be another chance to think about something other than the frightening reality that his girlfriend (Sara Paxton, off-screen) is pregnant. Along the dark and snowy drive up the mountains, a woman walks into his path and Bryan strikes her with his car. The rest of his night is about to get so much worse.
Considering its basis as a survival horror game, at least until it became a bombastic action-movie opera that better resembles the Jovovich screen spectacles, I think a streamlined approach by Cregger is smart. It narrows down the universe to this one guy’s very bad night, and it presents an immediately immersive experience, akin to playing a game and thinking through what is your best option out of a bunch of very bad options. From the very beginning, we are in Bryan’s frantic perspective. What he knows and experiences are what we know and experience. The clarity of focus provides a satisfying line of escalation as he gets into more and more danger. Cregger allows the audience to think through Bryan’s predicaments along with him, and there isn’t much he does that seems out of question, considering the extreme circumstances. I appreciated how once things really start going sideways that Bryan doesn’t miraculously transform into like an action movie hero. He’s just a normal guy relentlessly in over his head like any of us would be confronting monstrous horrors. I loved how bad he is with guns. Just because Bryan has some experience playing video games doesn’t mean he knows how to operate real firearms, and that doesn’t mean that the weapons of the real world perform like they do in games. There’s an ongoing joke about how he keeps trying to shoot off padlocks and failing that made me smirk every time. These little touches of realism in an elevated space made Resident Evil feel more engaging. It made it feel like even the little things mattered. This guy felt vulnerable, and sometimes his impulsive solutions only serve to get him into more trouble. The screenwriting plotting of A-to-B-to-C has a satisfying logic that manages to ground the mayhem on its own terms. He often has to think through an obstacle.
Cregger’s command of a scene is so enjoyable and assured, and he knows when he wants to make you squirm and when he wants to make you laugh. He can draw out a scene with excellent sound design for chills, like when a figure is quickly advancing on Bryan and clamoring up stairs while he desperately tries to reload a shotgun. The pacing of the moment is terrific. The resignation of desperation can also lead to many dread-fueled moments, like venturing into dark tunnels to sewers to blood-soaked halls. You don’t want to go down there, but you also kind of want to see. There’s also a heightened level that naturally draws mordant laughs, like when he’s being chased around a flipped-over police vehicle and sloppily shooting behind him. The movie wants you to laugh at the absurdity of trying to make sense of this nightmare scenario. It’s the release to get ready for more. Much of the humor is drawn from subverting our expectations of genre movies, like trying to ram open a locked gate, and particularly Bryan’s response to the madness. His panicked, befuddled reactions and clumsy physicality, accompanied with often high-pitched scream, serve as a reminder that he is a normal guy in unusual circumstances (I’d like to try and see you do any better). One of the biggest laughs for me was just a joke about stairs.
This is also a great looking movie. Cregger has the enviable talent of cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, the man who photographed The Crow, the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, and nine (!) Ridley Scott movies since 2012. The man knows how to frame striking contrasts, so the whites of the snow-covered landscapes in the first half visually pop with the dark blacks of the silhouettes and the blood trails. The movements of the camera and compositions add such a charged sense of energy that reminded me of the best of Sam Raimi without feeling like a derivation in Cregger’s overall sense of style. The movie also doesn’t bend over backwards to bring to life the visual dynamic of the game, though there are more than a few passing gun barrel POV shots to sate the faithful.
This is also a very messy movie in the best/worst way. For gore-hounds, there is some impressively gnarly gore, which isn’t surprising considering the viral outbreak is turning residents into split-faced, multi-tentacled monsters. The body horror is gruesomely inventive. There’s one monster that reminded me of a different video game, 2004’s Katamari Damacy, a Japanese game where you start with a small sticky ball and roll it around, collecting more and more items and people, growing in size to the point that you attach the whole world. Imagine that but a snowman of men, and you can only see limbs moving at angles that limbs shouldn’t do. It’s quite unnerving to glimpse. I also found myself audibly wincing during a sequence where zombies are throwing themselves off the roofs of buildings while Bryan runs down an alley, bodies exploding all around him in eruptions of viscera. There’s another sequence of zombie rats that makes me shake my head in disbelief even now remembering it. Credit to Cregger, the man is unafraid to go places other horror movies fear to tread. Whether it’s animals or children, nobody is safe in this disturbing universe. There was one moment in a mutated maternity ward where I cautiously decided to shut my eyes to avoid poisoning my brain with fresh nightmare fuel to review when I came home and embraced my almost two-year-old son. There are some things I just don’t need to see presently.
At a brisk 90 minutes, this is one of those rare movies I think would have benefited from another ten to fifteen minutes, especially with its abrupt ending. The final act loses some of the momentum accumulated beforehand, which isn’t a deal-breaker considering the film was moving like a runaway freight train up until that point. It also feels like a slightly different movie, both in approach and tone, going bigger and not exactly better. There’s also a question over what is gained from giving Bryan a characterization starting point. Over the course of the movie, he certainly re-examines his perspective on being a prospective father (and that’s before the mutated maternity ward). I thought this was going to climatically lead to a significant deliberation over making a selfish versus selfless decision, but Cregger doesn’t go there. The ending is kind of a cinematic middle finger to anyone expecting that character arc to come to something more meaningful, which is fine, but then why include the thread at all unless it’s just intended to be another deliberate rug-pull of your expectations? While the last ten minutes doesn’t quite live up to the amazing alacrity of the prior 80 minutes, it doesn’t ruin the good fun Cregger has earned in excess.
For many years, I thought it was impossible to make a good video game movie. This was because of the interactive nature of games versus the more passive medium of movies, but it was also a statement borne of the adaptations of the time, many of which had Uwe Boll’s name attached. I’m here to say times have changed but also so have the games. Over the last two decades, video games have reached new creative heights and that includes dramatic storytelling depth as well. Playing a game like Red Dead Redemption II is like burning through seven seasons of an epic and invigorating TV series. That’s not the intent of a movie like Cregger’s Resident Evil, a more streamlined and specifically designed contraption that is like riding a perfectly engineered ride. By the end credits, you might just have to catch your breath. While I have some minor quibbles about the ending and some dangling plot threads, Resident Evil is such a nasty, squishy, gruesomely entertaining movie, that I’m thankful for the privilege of watching Cregger operate at B-movie studio level (will Cury Barker be able to find similar results with his looming Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot?). If we can give artists with a vision the berth to see it through, we might be able to turn around every moribund video game franchise. Look out for Ari Aster’s Doom next, and it will still be three hours and a metaphor for penises.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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The Runner (2026)
Can we all agree at this point that Gal Gadot is pretty limited as a performer? There’s no shame in acknowledging a limit of range for actors, as many beloved actors have their bandwidths that allow them to excel, even if they are narrow (I’m thinking actors like Harrison Ford or Rami Malek). Placing Gadot in constant motion seems like a possible solution, and The Runner looks like somebody combined Phone Booth and Run Lola Run, except it’s not nearly as good as either of those two predecessors. The problem with this movie is that it’s a concept that makes little sense the more you consider it. Gadot plays Maia Martin, a prosecutor leading a case against a mob boss. It just so happens the villain has hired the Chatty Assassin to kidnap Maia’s son, put him into a diabetic coma, and coerce her into murdering the lead witness in the case. She’ll have to make this happen in real-time during her morning run while the Chatty Assassin hacks her phone and teases her about her past. If you’re a crime boss, why are you paying an assassin to go to improbable lengths to engineer someone else to kill the target when the assassin could just kill them? Just because it’s revealed that Maia killed her abusive father as a young child doesn’t mean she knows what she’s doing as a would-be assassin. This family back-story seems artlessly intrusive, with the Chatty Assassin using it to try and pick at Maia’s delicate psyche. Maybe that’s why he also shames her for taking lingerie photos for her boyfriend on her phone. Much of the movie is watching a heavy-breathing Gadot run through the streets and alleys of London, terrorizing the local citizens, snatching phones, trying to find some communication end-around but really just looking like a criminal nuisance. Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland, The Mauritanian) tries to liven up the proceedings with a lively camera and docu-drama quick edits and obtrusive inserts, but it’s all trying to dress up such an un-involving and unintentionally hilarious ticking-clock thriller scenario. There’s so much downtime because the killer’s is requiring Maia to run to her location. Could she not have taken a taxi? It all leads to a preposterous ending that is trying to be clever but is so convoluted to be laughable. Especially when you consider the Chatty Assassin’s back-up plan is to blow up the whole building, why even bother with Plan A with all its damning variables to go wrong? There isn’t one great sequence that feels built out of this premise and the plot events. This movie just doesn’t work, and while Gadot doesn’t improve it, no actor could have saved this mess. Not even porting over the entire pulse-pounding soundtrack to Run Lola Run could have saved this limp 75-minute workout video.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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One Night Only (2026)
What if you could only have sex one night a year unless you were legally married? That’s the bizarre premise of the even more bizarre rom-com One Night Only, nick-named the “sex Purge movie.” Directed by Will Gluck (Anyone But You, Easy A), here is a mainstream studio rom-com with a dystopian sci-fi twist, and I cannot stop thinking about what a weird miscalculation this whole movie is. Rather than worrying whether down-on-his-luck, recently dumped nice guy pizzeria man Owen (Callum Turner) will find a rebound, or whether struggling singer and sexually frustrated Allie (Monica Barbaro) will find a man worthy of her desires, instead I just kept wondering more about this nightmare world.
Given that the setting is a fascist government state where those in power are regulating people’s bodily autonomy, it feels really strange to take this scenario and turn it into a breezy rom-com. It’s not that you can’t set comedies across any landscape of tone, but significant work needs to be ably handled to make that work. As an extreme example, imagine a meet-cute between a star-crossed couple of crazy kids that just can’t get enough of each other, complete with wise-cracking gay best friends, set in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Hopefully you just winced reading that. It feels like a miscalculation to tell this kind of story with this tone and with this setting. Frustratingly, the movie rarely engages with the larger implication of its fascist state, and that’s exactly where all of my thinking went. I didn’t so much care about the characters as I did this scary world they seemed too blithe to contemplate. If this totalitarian government is so against premarital sex, why do they even allow for one available night? Wouldn’t having no available time force more people into marriages? Why would they even allow a “sex purge night?” Along those lines, what is the divorce rate in this universe? I would assume numerous very determined and very horny singles would be shacking up for many a weekend marriage that they could then annul. Once you’ve got the official matrimonial ring on that finger, does that thwart extra-marital sex? Can you cheat on your spouse, as long as the person you’re cheating with is also married? If that’s the case, what’s stopping every person at the age of early adulthood from getting married to the first agreeable person, shaking hands, and going about their business for the rest of their lives until they actually may want to settle down with a legitimate partner? How exactly is masturbation covered? Why does the conservative fascist government look the other way when it comes to non-heterosexual activity? That seems certainly out of character for repressive regimes policing people they despise. Wouldn’t there be a seismic exodus of unmarried people to other countries that permit premarital sex? Wouldn’t there be a natural brain drain of young professionals leaving the American work force? It’s a world that doesn’t make sense and the more you pull at the edges, the more it all unravels, and that’s all I wanted to do, because this setup was so bizarre and unique, I just wanted to keep exploring this alternate world.
There’s another aspect that the sex during this one night of physical freedom must be used with a contraceptive. Much of the movie becomes a chase to find a condom, strangely like a 1997 Jennifer Love Hewitt sex comedy The Trojan War. This didn’t make sense to me. First off, wholesalers should be selling out of condoms and up-charging them all week leading up to this event considering the incredible rise in demand approaching. How does the government know whether or not someone’s genitals have a thin latex barrier over them? Even if that stopped your traditional hetero sexual congress, you’re going to tell me enterprising and horny people are going to limit themselves to only one option? More so, if this is indeed a conservative American government, and considering they’re oppressively dictating people’s bodily activities, I’d say that’s clear, then they also likely subscribe to the panic that not enough Americans are having enough babies. The insistence of contraceptives would seem antithetical to their larger goals of a higher birthrate. Imagine a government office making sure certain people get condoms and others don’t. I did laugh at Owen trying to improvise a condom in desperation. Imagine baby booms every nine months after this sex purge. It seems believable given the circumstances. Again, all I want to do with this movie is pick apart its strange cracked-mirror world-building, which we don’t often get in rom-coms.
I’ll say that this premise could have worked but it needed a different setting. It needed to be in a more fantastical and altered version of a near-future world, something akin to 2009’s Timer or a Black Mirror episode. It can be recognizable but it shouldn’t be too recognizable given the fantastical nature of its premise. Maybe it’s about a couple trying to go through the bureaucratic hoops and hurdles and paperwork to apply to have a sexual relationship, something more akin to runaway regulation and satire than merely a fascist police state that wants to make unmarried people second-class citizens.
The problem with releasing this movie with this premise with this setting in 2026 is that the United States is already undergoing the starts and stops of a government more politically aligned with fascism than democracy. For many, especially those in vulnerable communities, it’s not hard to imagine a universe where government-controlled sexual health is a reality when the current administration is stripping people of rights, protections, and especially bodily autonomy for women and the trans community. It’s harder to brush this daunting and terrifying reality aside to sit in a theater and giggle at familiar meet-cute antics and rom-com plot devices when this world seems too close to our own. And when the movie is so resolutely incurious about analyzing its universe, then it becomes even worse. Rather than being some kind of revolutionary act of defiance, an exploration of the forces being oppressed by this regime and their refusal of acceptance of this absurd status quo, it demonstrates a myopic acceptance, rolling over and trying to live one’s life while ignoring the ills of society. Again, you could fashion a rom-com happening during Nazi Germany where a charming boy meets beautiful girl and their whirlwind courtship just happens to be while the neighborhood is being evacuated of specific minorities, with the characters shrugging and going about their days without larger comment. Does that seem enchanting? Does that seem like a good idea? I hope you would say no.
Can you turn off your brain and enjoy One Night Only? Every person is unique, so perhaps, but I might judge you a little for it, if I’m being honest. The comedy for me never rose above the occasional chuckle. It’s less a sex comedy and more a rom-com set in a fascist universe of puritanical repression. The comedy never rose above the questions for me, and the lingering bad taste of the movie’s universe and especially its characters’ attitudes to their world left me befuddled. There’s some pushback, which feels obligatory to check a box of red flag atonement, but the entire enterprise feels built upon such a drastic tonal miscalculation that it approaches in-universe propaganda. As so many of the randy characters eager for a physical contact are wont to hear, reader, you could certainly do better than this.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Coyote Vs. Acme (2026)
It’s the movie Warner Bros never wanted you to see. Intended to be scrapped for a $30 million tax write-off, the little family film about the little guy taking on the power and corruption of big conglomerates seemed destined to be yet another victim of ledger-shifting for CEO portfolio bonuses. Fortunately, an indie distributor came in and bought the movie and now, three years later, audiences can see Coyote vs. Acme and judge for themselves. And it’s actually pretty great. Reminiscent of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the movie has a meta-satirical take on legal thrillers, but it’s also so unfailingly pleasant, inventive, and silly. Will Forte is the real star as the self-doubting lawyer tasked by famous Looney Tune Wile E. Coyote to sue the Acme company for years of faulty products. Forte plays the straight man to the chaos around him and provides a well-needed baseline that allows the audience to take in the zany jokes and wonderfully daffy visual gags. The melding of animation and live-action is lively and the physicality of it all provides an ongoing sense of wonder. John Cena is also wonderfully pompous, exactly how I like him, as Acme’s lead attorney. I was smiling and chuckling throughout, but what genuinely surprised me is that I felt a lump in my throat at the very end with what my pal Eric Muller deemed the most emotional “beep-beep” in cinematic history. It’s a satisfying movie that can appeal to all ages, even if you don’t recognize the classic Looney Tunes or a cartoon Peter Lorre. Even more, the fact that this good movie is widely available to be enjoyed is itself an act of defiance against corporate greed. Coyote vs. Acme is worth the wait and a reward for families.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Buddy (2026)
What if Barney the friendly dinosaur was really a murderous monster? That’s the catchy premise of co-writer/director Casper Kelly’s surreal horror fantasy Buddy, a crazy yet admirably committed exploration of kids TV tropes to their fullest extent. Considering Kelly might be best known for his insane yet brilliant deconstruction of sitcom opening theme songs, the Adult Swim short film Too Many Cooks, this makes sense. My first question was whether the pastel-colored, stagey world of Buddy the Unicorn (voiced by Keegan Michael-Key) was supposed to be literally real or was simply a TV set. The universe of Buddy, while adhering to the tropes and mechanics of children’s TV storytelling, is indeed its own reality. I enjoyed how Buddy knows he must gather the children to sing the closing theme song because then “the words appear” (he means end credits) and everything resets, which would allow him to heal from his injuries or perhaps have the children forget witnessing his horrors. The puppet-heavy world of Buddy is interesting, as are the subversive and disturbing edges glimpsed like Buddy trying to explain the disappearance of a child and the strange “red paint” on his outfit. Short of twenty minutes, the entire movie takes place in this strange fantasy setting, so I kept wondering about the lore and workings of this universe, especially how Buddy is capturing kids from the real world. The last ten minutes fulfilled that but I wanted more. That’s because the Buddy set itself, modeled after PeeWee’s Playhouse and Barney, feels a little too closed-off, the building threat of Buddy being rather redundant. I became frustrated at how limited the movie was settling with its subversive satire, at several points feeling like an overextended skit going off the rails rather than a complete movie. Then again that structural gambit might appeal to other viewers who are on the same twisted wavelength of Kelly. It held my interest, but I kept wondering if this was all there was, and whether maybe Buddy was a little too much of the same.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
After 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow, writer/director Jane Schoenbrun became an indie darling with a daring perspective and a genre-bending feel for combining 90s nostalgia with coming-of-age ennui. While the movie didn’t exactly entrance me, I did write, “It’s a weird movie but it’s designed for weird kids, or weird adults who used to be weird kids, who found kinship through weird media.” I think this might be Schoenbrun’s style from here out. Their follow-up, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is another conflation of tones and styles, looking at the slasher movies of the 1980s with satire and fondness. We follow Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a Sundance-darling director whose big artistic break has now given her the opportunity to reboot the dormant Camp Miasma horror series. The killer, a gender fluid camper that was drowned in the lake, comes back as Little Death, wrecking bloody havoc across camp. Kris wants to approach the franchise’s original Final Girl, Billie Presley (Gillian Anderson), who voluntarily left Hollywood afterwards and has been a mystery. Kris wants Billie’s blessing to reboot the film, but Kris might also be looking for something more from Billie, and their relationship changes dramatically.
At one point, Billie gently chastises her special guest to stop thinking about film in such exclusively academic terms and to see it as a movie and less a discourse, and I feel like that advice could have been heeded by Schoenbrun. I come away from Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma feeling like it is a movie that exists in air quotes, that resides on a level of discourse far above the events of the movie, that it’s intended less for artistic expression and entertainment and more as a film theory thesis for smug Letterboxd users. That’s not to deride the movie because it has a point of view or is another deeply personal exercise that feels like Schoenbrun turning their awkward coming-of-age into a transformative tableau for public consumption and, well, discourse. I don’t have an issue with Schoenbrun’s movie wanting to go deeper in an analysis of our personal connections to problematic art, in this case the schlocky slasher movies of the 1980s, otherwise known as a genre built upon “flesh and fluids,” as Billie informs us. My nagging issue with the film is that I don’t feel like it adds up to much, that Schoenbrun is so busy operating on that academic level with the material that it feels beyond reach. If the movie wasn’t occasionally elbowing you in the ribs by underlining its metaphors, I wouldn’t ultimately know what the larger themes or messages are amidst a miasma of haphazard ideas and genre riffs. I love the premise and how it twists into a Lynchian psycho-sexual nightmare that causes our characters to question what is real, but the end results left me shrugging and wishing I was enjoying the finished product more.
The idea behind Camp Miasma has all sorts of juicy layers-within–layers fun. Kris is obviously a stand-in for Schoenbrun and their experiences shuffling through the studio system as the Next Hot Indie Auteur, likely offered all manner of IP slop and zombie franchises similar to the flagging Camp Miasma horror franchise. Kris knows that her queerness and perspective is being commoditized to resuscitate an outdated franchise that has a history of transphobia (the Sleepaway Camp allusions are pretty clear here). Kris accepts these studio suits want to use her to provide cover for bringing the franchise back, but she wants to use them as well. Instead of delivering the same old schlock, Kris wants to go back to the original Final Girl who swore off acting afterwards, using the movie as her personal vehicle to interrogate a reclusive actress that she just happens to have a formative sexual connection with. Combine that with our Norma Desmond-like faded star literally living on the camp grounds where the original movie was shot, and that’s a terrific mixture of intrigue and obsession, of fantasy and reality bleeding together. So why does the finished movie feel rather unfulfilling to me then? Why does the sum feel less than the pieces?
Maybe it’s because the obviousness of some of Schoenbrun’s points acts as an artistic ceiling. The voyeurism of slasher cinema in particular, born from Norman Bates and given new form by Michael Myers, is endemic to the genre, placing the viewer in the perspective of the mad murderer and the nubile teens finding silly ways to slink off to their gory demises. Kris is obsessed with one moment in the original Camp Miasma when a young Billie had a certain look in her eye that has always haunted her. It just so happens this moment was during the scene where Billie’s character lost her virginity on film, and there is an added context to the scene that makes the moment even more unsettling. Schoenbrun hinges Kris’ sexual awakening to a moment of old media that also happens to be Billie’s own sexual awakening, linking the two characters through a mirror of art, with the camera serving as transport. The nature of the scene involved Billie imagining Little Death coming for her and killing her, with her seeing the moment from her own eyes but also simultaneously from the eyes of the killer. It’s the voyeurism that unlocked something in both of these women, and yet Schoenbrun doesn’t seem interested in going further with an examination on this topic, only setting it up to be repeated and shared as supposed personal growth. Maybe, but maybe it could have been more interesting to dig into why disassociating from her own body during sexual congress was the key to pleasure for this woman, especially from a trans filmmaker. Likewise, there are some points that are blunt but to the point of making me want to sigh. Our killer has a long phallic spear that he struts around repeatedly thrusting and penetrating his victims. We get it. The killer is named Little Death, the pithy French term for an orgasm, which is perhaps why he wants to spear all these people. We get it. It’s so obvious it circles back from meta clever and back to just being too obvious. The ending descends into a wacky Ari Aster-like dark cartoon of fantasy convergence, like the movie had just been consumed from the inside out, but the insights are limited and glancing, amounting to little more than, “Hey, everybody can like the art they like and we don’t get to choose what turns us on.” Sure, I guess. Like what you like, folks. I was hoping the movie might be more than one woman’s quest to harness her big O under very specific scene-dependent circumstances.
Far be it from me to dictate what artists should do with their personal stories hewn from their souls, but there’s a strong part of me that feels like I would have enjoyed a more straight-forward (pun not intended) version of this story. I think a fledgling director getting in over their head and blurring professional and personal lines with their subject is ripe for engrossing drama and conflict. Likewise, having a reclusive actress on the cusp not just of a comeback within the industry but possibly of a fellow artist that really took the effort to understand her perspective and wanted to give it a meaningful platform, that too could be intoxicating, so for the both of them to feel an attraction would only further complicate boundaries. Simply delving into that would be a fascinating exploration of fantasy, projection, and power dynamics. It could also explore the difference between when reality doesn’t match our personally-curated fantasy. Throw in some repressed sexual kinks tied directly to the problematic art/genre, like Kris admitting she can only feel pleasure if she imagines herself as the highly sexualized Final Girl of 1980s horror, and that’s quite a fascinating brew destined to challenge characters and their identities and desires. Now imagine that movie had an extended sequence of Little Death’s point of view while he speared and decapitated people with set to the Counting Crows’ “Long December.” Now imagine the concept that the movies aren’t movies but real life is the movie, and we’re all the characters that Little Death is watching in his underwater video store. Okay. Sure, I guess. Look, maybe you’ll click with Schoenbrun’s wavelength but I felt like it was too often operating outside itself, keeping me distant.
That’s not to say that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is without its virtues. It’s an often funny movie, though keeping to an awkward chuckle best personified by Anderson’s deep-fried Southern charm and peculiarity. Just listening to this woman opine about breakfast cereals could make me laugh. Both actresses give quite good performances and they have strong chemistry together, finding ways to sell lines and moments that might be too goofy to accept with actors of lesser talent. The gore is over-the-top and enjoyably ridiculous without the violence feeling uncomfortable, which itself is a feat considering there are some loaded themes of exploitation, hate crimes, and sexual assault throughout. The first ten minutes might be my favorite part because the precise period details of creating the fake history for the Camp Miamsa series, including the 8-bit arcade video game, are so wonderfully perfect. I appreciate how personal Schoenbrun makes every one of their movies, often exploring how art shapes our sense of ourselves and reckoning with that into the uncertainty of adulthood. Schoenbrun is a talent that exists on a slippery dream logic level, who likes to throw out questions without clear answers, and I appreciate their artistic ambition even if this is the second movie in a row that feels overburdened with ideas and stubbornly underdeveloped in execution.
There will be plenty that sing the praises of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and find personal connections that provide added depth and meaning. Art is personal, and every one of Schoenbrun’s movies is almost unbearably personal. There is a distinct affection and appreciation for what most would classify as “bad art,” these old junky movies that probably didn’t mean much to those making them but could be indelible to the right kid at the right moment late at night. Maybe some day Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will be that movie for some kid late at night, and that’s something even if it wasn’t quite something for me.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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The Last House (2026)
What begins as a clear allegory for COVID lockdown with a supernatural, Twilight Zone twist unravels quickly to be a muddled, confused, and disappointing monster movie that feels far too busy and silly for a movie this self-serious. The Last House starts off promisingly with a mysterious rain that essentially traps everyone in their homes, acting like a superglue force field. From there it becomes a question over if you were trapped in your home, what could you do to survive? At first it’s just general boredom with a family of four, and the parents (Wagner Moura, Greta Lee) trying to maintain their sanity. As weeks pass, it becomes a more pressing question over resources and food. I was expecting the movie to get creative with solving its in-universe dilemmas, but some of those solutions feel rather arbitrary and cheap. Why is there still electricity? If the rain is presented as creating a barrier, why is a hole in the chimney somehow able to circumvent this rule? There’s a whole lot of animal death in the movie, including mercy-killing the family dog and literally using its chopped carcass to lure small woodland creatures into a improvised fishing trap. It would be more disturbing if it wasn’t so ridiculous. I’ll credit the script for a major time jump because it renewed my flagging interest, trying to analyze what growing up in this extreme setting could do to a new generation who have only really known a strange world of isolation. I suppose that wasn’t interesting enough to Netflix because the last 40 minutes of the movie are about fighting Lovecraftian monsters that are, I guess, controlling the rains and just messing with people. Much like the characters onscreen, the movie is trying to do as much with what little resources it has left. The movie combusts at an alarming rate once it becomes an incomprehensible monster movie, and incomprehensible about even following the quick-cut action onscreen, which is obscured by the editing but also a majority of the scenes being underwater. The actors are wasted, the ideas are wasted, and The Last House doesn’t even give us the benefit of a true ending, instead previewing what a Last House(s) franchise could like like. I’d rather stay inside and eat the remains of my dog.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)
Despite being arguably the most beloved superhero of our era, once again proven by its vaunted box-office performance, it sure does seem like it sucks to be Spider-Man. The fourth film with Tom Holland as your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man examines the fallout from 2021’s No Way Home, with the whole world having forgotten about poor Peter Parker. He’s lost his friends, he’s lost his love, and he’s lost his Avengers allies, but he keeps on plugging along, working alongside the police and the Department of Damage Control, tasked with housing super threats that prisons cannot contain. There’s a mysterious new threat, a person with the powers to control minds through proximity but has to leap from person to person like psychic tag. The movie excels at the action-adventure shenanigans, with new director Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi) providing the visual fireworks, including slow-mo splash page imagery taken from the pages of Spider-Man’s famous comic covers. There’s fun to be had as Hulk and the Punisher (Jon Bernthal) are mixed into the story, especially when they have to battle each other. You don’t introduce a ninja clan in Act One without knowing there will be a ninja fight in Act Three (I think Chekhov said that once). The best parts of this movie are not the Spider-Man heroics and action but the Peter Parker moments, which are somber, sincere, and nicely felt by the young cast that has grown into their characters over a decade. There’s a rich emotional investment built up, and Brand New Day takes its time to dwell in Peter’s downturn before setting him on a better path. There’s one moment with Mary Jane (Zendaya) that caused me to gasp out loud. I really enjoyed how there isn’t a sleight-of-hand secondary antagonist; it’s who we follow, and they have an interesting connection/parallel to Peter, and I especially liked that the climax of the movie is about a division over mercy and forgiveness rather than punching an army of faceless robots or stopping a giant sky beam of world annihilation. These modern Spider-Man movies are consistently very entertaining but also emotionally engrossing, and they do something unique with their villains, providing more surprises and nuance and perspective-shifts than just about any other superhero franchise. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is not so much a reinvention of the character or the series but further confirmation that we have the right people making these movies matter.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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