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Hamnet (2025)
It’s the sad Shakespeare movie, and with Paul Mescal (Gladiator II) as Will, it could just as easily be dubbed the Sad Sexy Shakespeare movie. Hamnet is a fictionalized account of Will and his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) processing the death of their young son, Hamnet, which we’re told in opening text is a common name transference for Hamlet. Right away, even before co-writer/director Chloe Zhao (Nomadland, Eternals) brings her usual stately somberness, you know what kind of movie you’re in for. It’s pretty (and famous) people in pain. The entire time I was watching this kid Hamnet and just waiting for the worst. It doesn’t arrive until 75 minutes into the movie, and it’s thoroughly devastating, especially the circumstances surrounding the loss. This is less a Shakespeare movie and more a Mrs. Shakespeare movie, which is more illuminating since she’s typically overshadowed by her verbose husband. She’s an intriguing figure who shares some witchy aspects, communing with nature and even foretelling her future husband’s greatness and dying with only two living children, which presents a pall when she has three eventual children. Once Will finds success as a London playwright, he feels like an absentee father and husband, briefly coming in and out of his family’s life in Stratford. However, the final act is what really doesn’t seal the movie for me. I don’t think it’s really a spoiler to admit the final 15 minutes of the movie is basically watching Hamlet performed on stage, with Agnes as the worst audience member, frequently talking through the show and loudly harassing the actors before finally succumbing to the artistry of the play and finding it a fitting outlet for her grief. In short, the movie is meant to provide more personal insight and tragedy into this famous play, asking the viewer to intuit more meaning (“Oh, Hamlet is his dead son, Hamnet! I get it”), but ultimately the ending is just watching Hamlet. I don’t feel like we get any meaningful insight into William Shakespeare as a person besides his irritation at being a Latin teacher, and frustratingly, Agnes is constrained as well, held in a narrow definition of the grieving mother. This is a shame since she showed such fire and individuality in the first half. Buckley (The Lost Daughter) is terrific, ethereal, earthy, and heartbreaking and a shoo-in for an Oscar. I found her final moments, especially reaching out to her son, so to speak, especially poignant. Hamnet is a good-looking, well-acted movie about sad famous people who then rely upon the arts to help heal their gulf of sadness. There’s not much more to Hamnet than that, but with such exceptional professionals and artists at the ready, it might be more than enough for most.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Regretting You (2025)
I do not care for Colleen Hoover as an author. She exploded thanks to social media and has, as of 2024, sold over 34 million books, primarily romantic dramas, primarily featuring wounded women trying to get back on their feet. She is a full-blown publishing phenomenon. Hoover has become so prolific and successful that she takes up an entire shelf. She’s already joined the ranks of your James Pattersons, Stephen Kings, Danielle Steels, the familiar names of authors that can be found in grocery checkout lanes. Her popularity is indisputable. Her quality is another matter, and that’s where I have trepidation with Hoover as a storyteller. Admittedly, I have never read any of her novels, so take all criticisms with a degree of incredulity. I’m making my judgement based entirely on the movie adaptations of her novels. Again, this might be an unfair guide considering if I did the same thing for, say, Stephen King, it would be easy to form a scathing opinion of the man’s literary work. 2024’s It Ends With Us made me deeply uncomfortable with its misplaced attempts to romanticize domestic violence. It wasn’t just misguided but it offered little insights into the mentality of abuse victims, instead slotting this disturbing story element into the awkward love triangle expected from the genre. It wasn’t good. Next, we have Regretting You, based upon Hoover’s 2019 novel of the same name. At this point, I’m wondering if I need to hold a regular spot in my annual worst of the year lists for the slew of Hoover adaptations to come.
In 2007, Morgan Grant (Allison Williams) and her friend Jonah Sullivan (Dave Franco) are clearly in love. I guess it’s too bad they’re seeing other people. Both are also dealing with pregnancies. Morgan marries Chris (Scott Eastwood) and has her baby, Clara. Jonah abandons his pregnant girlfriend, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) but comes back many years later to have another baby together (I guess Jenny terminated her earlier pregnancy but it’s never really dealt with). Cut to present-day, and teenage Clara (Mackenna Grace) is smitten with the charming film school aspiring Miller Adams (Mason Thames), a guy ripped out of a quirky rom-com. Then the big tragedy happens: Jenny and Chris die in a car accident, the same car, and it’s revealed the two were engaging in a longstanding affair. Morgan and Jonah must try and navigate these complex feelings of betrayal while also determining how much to tell Clara.
Just glancing through that brief plot synopsis, there are a LOT of elevated, dangerously soapy story elements packed into a two-hour movie, and that’s not including Clancy Brown as a cranky grandfather who Miller feels indebted to take care of as he’s scheduled to begin chemotherapy. There’s a lot going on here, and I’ll just state that there are two movies jostling for dominance that should have been split. The teen storyline does not fit next to the adult storyline. Every time it jumps from one to another, it was tonal whiplash and it became so much more dissonant. That’s because the teen storyline is awash in the burgeoning feelings of new love that we see in many YA tales and teen-centric rom-coms. It’s new and hopeful and very familiar for the teen drama genre. The adult storyline is awash in grief and betrayal, with both spouses trying to make sense of their pain and heartache and uncover what they can of what they didn’t know. One of these stories is bubbly and sunny and comedic, and one of these stories is tragic and searching and painful. They do not work in tandem, each taking away from the appeal of the other.
In particular, the adult drama deserved its own showcase to really explore the details of its complex feelings. Discovering after death that your spouse was not who you thought they were is so conflict-rich, especially that they were linked to another person experiencing that same shock and loss and confusion, it’s a recipe for real anguish and an unknown path of healing. Morgan and Jonah should never have known one another, let alone had an unrequited romance that hangs over them as adults. All this does is set up the obvious coupling, cruelly killing their spouses so these two can finally be together as destiny demands. It would have been far more intriguing for them to discover one another through this shared betrayal, but then again that might remind people of Random Hearts, but then again I doubt anyone recalls much about this 1999 movie that has an 18% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This is where the real drama lies, but like much else of Regretting You, it’s unexplored and replaced with tropes and predictability. The exploration of grief and anger isn’t even given its proper due. Morgan primarily sits on her couch and drinks wine throughout the day. Jonah at one point rejects his new baby thinking he’s not the biological father. This conflict is, like many others, resolved so simply, merely having Morgan tell him to man up. These characters should be discovering unexpected aspects of themselves through this unique circumstance. These two characters should be striving to process their varied emotions but it’s all too easily distilled into a predictable payoff to their decades-in-the-making romantic matching. It’s reductive and boring.
The YA-styled romance is also too familiar and underdeveloped as its adult drama. Miller (I hate that his first name is “Miller” – apologies to all first-name “Miller”s out there reading) is the kind of kid who loves movies but never seems to talk about what he loves about them or even make references to them. He wants to be a filmmaker but we don’t see his projects. That’s because Miller isn’t so much a character but being a dreamy ideal boyfriend, a sweetheart who is always concerned for Clara’s well-being and is so respectful of her boundaries and desire to wait to be intimate. He requests help moving a town limits sign a couple blocks every so many days with the intention of eventually having the ability to order from his favorite pizza place that said his home was out of their delivery zone. This is the kind of cute, whimsical activity we expect from the Manic Pixie Dream Girls of romantic comedies. If you think harder about this it actually becomes nonsensical. Why would the pizza shop change their earlier refusal because now there is a sign in front of Miller’s home that says it’s within city limits? It’s only a single sign. The house hasn’t physically moved, the distance is still the same, and the store’s GPS would still indicate as such (“But-but there’s a sign, and even though the sign is inaccurate, you should abide by it”). This is only a silly detail that I don’t mean to harp on but it’s indicative of the lackluster character writing. Because of this there’s really no genuine conflict between the two young lovers. He’s a dull dreamboat ideal.
Really, the only drama present with Clara is when she will discover the harsh truth about her father, and so you’re just waiting for this eventual Sword of Damocles to fall, to have her question why her mom would make this choice. In some regard it makes sense, to hide a painful truth from her daughter, to delay further having to process it herself, but it’s also something that cannot be contained forever. She’s going to find out eventually, and then she’s going to be additionally upset that her own mother withheld this news from her. It’s not like Morgan has complete ownership of this information. It likely would be common knowledge that they died together, in the same car, and it’s hard to believe rumors would not emerge, with classmates snickering behind her back through the school hallways or taunting her directly. It’s a shame that this looming hard truth is the only thing that Clara has going for her in this movie. Their relationship is generally conflict-free, or what conflicts there are are so easily resolvable. She’s young, in love, and her dreamy boyfriend easily ditches his girlfriend, the one obstacle to their union. This is because Clara is not her own character, not even a reflection of her mother; she is only a plot device to be plucked into tears.
There are a few creative decisions that caused me deep confusion. Chief among them is the choice to have the same actors play their mid-to-late 30s selves as their high school selves. The opening high school graduation just establishes the four characters’ relationships, the obvious fact that Jonah and Morgan feel something for one another but oh well, and that there are unexpected pregnancies. From there the movie makes a sizable time jump but doesn’t make that clear this has happened. So we went from Morgan at a graduation party to Morgan chatting with Clara, and I thought she was a younger sister. Why would I have automatically assumed this is now the 16-year-old daughter that we had just confirmed was a zygote in the previous scene especially when Williams is made to look exactly the same over those 17 or so years? I don’t think the opening was even necessary. They could have established these character histories without a direct flashback where Jonah literally says that maybe they’re with the “wrong people” as he stares deeply into her eyes. This is also the kind of movie that has no faith in its audience, and yet we’re intended to catch the big time jump. Clara sees a movie at Miller’s theater, and he asks her why she’s crying at the conclusion of a Mission: Impossible sequel. She says it’s because her dad took her to a lot of movies. We get it. She associates the movies with her father who she dearly misses. But then the movie adds an additional line where she literally says, “That’s why I’m crying.” Thanks, movie. Ugh.
Something amusing to me that I doubt anyone else would really notice is the design of the movie theater. Miller works at an AMC movie theater so there are a few sequences, including the big rom-com rush to greet one another and have the big swooning kiss moment. Because the movie is a Paramount production, there are only posters present promoting other Paramount movies, 2025 releases like The Running Man and the latest Mission: Impossible, but then also classic movies like Sabrina and The Godfather. God forbid a movie theater advertise other titles from competing film studios. Perhaps this is just a very singularly loyal theater. Anyway, as a person who worked at a movie theater for over a decade, this little incongruous detail stuck with me. It’s the same thing with Miller’s bedroom. All of his posters are Paramount movies, which means he just loves that studio so much. Maybe that’s why he works at a movie theater that plays exclusively Paramount movies (the corporate synergy reminds me of young Christian Grey having a Chronicles of Riddick poster in his childhood bedroom brought to you by Universal). Perhaps somehow Miller doesn’t even know the existence of non-Paramount movies and is in for a world of shock when film school students talk about stuff like Godard and Cassavetes and Fincher and Tarantino, and he’ll just be so pitifully confused.
With a title like Regretting You, it allows for so many ready-made quips, especially when the finished movie isn’t quite up to snuff. The term “soap opera” is usually referenced as a pejorative, that a movie has so much heightened incidents to be distanced from the nuance of adult reality. However, just because something is soapy in scope doesn’t mean it cannot be fascinating and engrossing in execution. The films of Pedro Almadovar (All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Parallel Mothers) are often, on paper, a random assembly of soap opera histrionics, and yet the man’s creativity and empathy finds, almost without fail, ways to really open up and explore the details of his characters and their unique emotional states. The premise of Regretting You could have done this, but the desire to be appealing to teenagers with the YA-styled teen romance, sabotages the exploration of grief and betrayal into a clipped and frustratingly tidy little package. It’s not good storytelling, folks, but it had some potential to be. There are two more Colleen Hoover film adaptations slated for 2026, and most definitely more even after, so it’s best to prepare dear reader because It Ends With Us wasn’t actually predictive with its title. It only begins.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Train Dreams (2025)
What a superb, tender, and deeply humanistic portrayal of life through the eyes of one man, Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton), a logger in Idaho in the early twentieth century. His life isn’t too different from the lives of many. He wants to spend more time with his wife (Felicity Jones) and child, less time away for months on end for logging, and he has difficulty making friends in his profession of hard work and inherent transience. He feels more connection to the natural world, of which he is felling one tree at a time. The nature of the script, adapted from the 2011 novella by author Denis Johnson, is episodic, people coming in and out of this man’s personal life. The narrative feels like a collection of memories, jumping back and forth in time, connected by ideas and imagery like we do in our minds, and providing a sum total for a life lived. There’s an inherent solemnity and awe to the movie, whether it’s about the transcendence of man’s place in the world, the march of progress, or merely the pull of tragedy and love that seeps into our core being. There is a personal tragedy that defines Robert, and it is devastating to experience and process with him. Director/co-writer Clint Bentley (one half of the same creative team behind last year’s Sing Sing, one of the best movies of 2024) uses this character to represent the totality of the human experience, making the movie feel deeply felt and empathetic even decades removed from its subject. That’s because logging isn’t the movie. It’s about the people, places, and experiences that define us. William H. Macy hasn’t been this good in years. You give me a wise, elegiac narrator in the spirit of Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with such pristine details readily supplied, and I’m already a sucker for your movie. The only thing holding back Train Dreams for me was that post-tragedy doesn’t get the attention I think it deserves. You’d expect the second half of the movie would be the process of grieving and coming to terms, and in essence it is, but the movie is far less direct about its processing, which I felt was a minor misstep for an overall great movie.
Nate’’s Grade: A-
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Frankenstein (2025)
One of the reasons Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein has been so richly relevant two hundred years later is because of her thought-provoking themes and concepts, which still prove potent with each new malleable reinterpretation from the newest creative caretaker. It’s the “be careful what you wish for” adage combined with man’s hubris and our self-destructive impulses to play with things we don’t fully understand. It’s also a monster story that asks us to reconsider the perception of who the monster may truly be, and under writer/director Guillermo del Toro, the answer is always and forever man himself. This isn’t a surprise from the same filmmaker who gave us Hellboy and The Shape of Water. The man identifies with the monsters more than other people. The man turned his astounding stop-motion animated Pinocchio movie into a deft Frankenstein allegory, so the famous story has been on his mind for quite some time. It’s been an obvious influence, and now that he’s gotten his chance on his own imprint, it’s hard not to see elements of del Toro’s other movies everywhere. It creates this bizarre echo chamber of creative influence where the movie can feel derivative at times even though the source material was an influence on those other del Toro works. It’s just the nature of finally tackling the influence later in his career. It reminds me of 2012’s John Carter, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ highly influential sci-fi series, and yet because it took 100 years to leap to the big screen, it couldn’t help but seem derivative of the same popular movies that were inspired by it. This is a convoluted way of saying del Toro’s Frankenstein is a much better Guillermo del Toro movie than a Frankenstein adaptation.
You probably know the story well enough to recite it yourself. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is obsessed with conquering death after his own mother’s demise in childbirth. He gathers the parts of criminals and dead soldiers to reanimate into a new being, a Creature (Jacob Elordi) of superhuman strength and regeneration who cannot die. Victor’s cruelty punishes the Creature and disowns it, setting the stage for a showdown between dysfunctional father and son and the havoc caused by recklessly playing God.
There are deliberate decisions that mitigate some of the more compelling characterization of the novel. With del Toro’s version, Victor is the clear-cut villain. There’s some setup given to his strict childhood where his domineering father (Charles Dance) would quiz him and physically abuse Victor if he failed to recite the correct answers to his medical questions. Dear bad dad was doing this, you see, out of a belief that good doctors need to know intuitively because any hesitation could cost lives. When we witness Victor abusing the Creature in the same manner, we’re meant to see the connection between abusive fathers confusing disappointment with defiance. In the original story, Victor abandons the Creature on the night of its birth and then it’s gone. In this version, Victor imprisons the Creature, keeps him chained, attempts to train him, grows frustrated, and then tries to destroy the evidence. That’s a little more diabolical than simple morning-after regrets. This Victor can also be viewed as a forefather of incels the way he projects his romantic feelings onto Elizabeth (Mia Goth) and then gets huffy when she doesn’t return them. There are other deaths later in the story that are directly attributed to the Creature that are now Victor’s doing, which continues to squeeze out moral ambiguity from Shelley’s novel. If the Creature is purely innocent and Victor is purely villainous, that makes the relationship between father and son, Creator and Creature, far less meaningful and layered. It’s so obvious that another character, in their literal dying words, says to Victor, “You are the real monster.” It all becomes an ongoing cycle of bad fathers and the Creature ultimately trying to reach forgiveness. Even if the Creature ultimately finds that, is this Victor even worthy of redemption?
Another significant feature of del Toro’s retelling is, how do I put this delicately, the inherent magnetism of the Creature, a.k.a. Sexy Frankenstein. Elordi (Saltburn) is a tall, lithe actor to begin with with classical Hollywood features, but there was a conscious choice to portray this figure in a certain light, a sexy light. You might find parts of you that are suddenly alive while watching the character onscreen. That’s why even though he’s a literal assembly of corpses the makeup effects are very minimal and less intentionally grotesque or monstrous. The delicate lines around his body make me think of a cross between the Engineers in Prometheus and the body paint of that Gotye music video “Somebody I Used to Know.” The gentle makeup is meant to further convey the Creature as a sensitive figure; granted, he’s also capable of ripping the jaw off a wolf. By swerving away from the Creature’s physical deformities, the movie is also inadvertently downplaying the isolation that he felt that led to such rage and resentment. Is this man that hideous that some good woman couldn’t love him as is? The movie is already presenting Elizabeth as someone who sees through to his gentle nature, and she certainly also seems more than a little attracted to what he’s got going on. This Sexy Frankenstein reconfirms del Toro’s penchant for identifying with the monster, the outcasts, the underdogs. However, Sexy Frankenstein also takes something away from the horror and cost of the creation if he’s just going to be another brooding, misunderstood Byronic hero. Still, there are definitely worse pieces of meat you could be watching, so enjoy monster sweethearts.
With all that being said, del Toro’s Frankenstein is still a sumptuously made and entertaining Gothic spectacle. The production design is immense and immersive with del Toro’s knack for perfect details to create such a lived-in sense of mood (never enough giant stone face edifices). I loved Victor’s models of human torsos that looked almost like ballet dancers at rest; granted, ballet dancers having their skin peeled back by dozens of hooks. I just wanted to spend as much time as possible soaking up these sets and this heightened Gothic realm. It’s the kind of world where Victor’s laboratory needs to be an opulent abandoned castle complete with a pit in the middle of the floor plan that goes through several floors to a sewar/aqueduct basement level. There’s even what appears to be a water slide out of the estate, and the Creature gets to escape it in the most fun way. The movie is gorgeous with del Toro’s signature orange/green color palette bathing his universe. Even if the story isn’t quite reaching the heights it could, the visuals are always sterling and inviting. There’s also a surprising amount of gore, which maybe shouldn’t have been that surprising. I don’t know if we needed as much of the Arctic framing device, which itself was structured as a series of letters in the novel. It’s a platform for del Toro to demonstrate the Creature’s physical prowess and get some quality big-screen bloodshed flowing. I don’t know if we needed to keep cutting back throughout the whole running time like it’s a Christopher Nolan movie. Regardless, if you’re a general fan of monster movies, there’s going to be plenty here to proverbially sink your teeth into and savor on that super Netflix budget.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein gave birth to science fiction in 1818 and the James Whale movies from the 1930s gave birth to some of cinema’s most iconic and lasting images and influences. There’s quite a legacy for anyone who wants to put their own stamp on the material, so it helps that Guillermo del Toro has quite a legacy himself, a career built upon the dark recesses of a verdant imagination (I’ll always lament what could have been his version of The Hobbit movies, alas). His Frankenstein has all the hallmarks of a classic del Toro film experience, from the impeccable technical qualities, to the celebration of the mythic and Gothic, to the sympathetic portrayal of the outsiders condemned by a society too square to accept them, and an unironic emotional undercurrent that can approach self-parody. It’s a little long, a little ungainly in its shape, and a little too simplistic with its themes and characterization, but it can also be fittingly transporting and romantic and easy to feel that swell even if it’s all too familiar. For my money, the best Frankenstein adaptation is still the 1994 Kenneth Branagh version, flaws and all.
Nate’s Grade: B
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The Long Walk (2025)
The quality of Stephen King adaptations may be the scariest legacy for publishing’s Master of Horror. The best-selling author has given us many modern horror classics but the good King movies are more a minority to what has become a graveyard of schlocky productions. Everyone has their own top-tier but I think most would agree that for such a prolific author, you can probably count on two hands the “good to great” King movies and have a few fingers to spare. 2025 is a bountiful year for King fans, with the critically-acclaimed The Life of Chuck, the remake of The Monkey, the upcoming remake of The Running Man, which was originally set in a nightmarish future world of… 2025, and now The Long Walk. Interestingly, two of these films are adaptations from King’s Richard Bauchman books, the pseudonym he adopted to release more novels without “diluting the King brand,” or whatever his publisher believed. The Long Walk exists in an alternative America where teen boys compete to see who can last the longest in a walking contest. If they drop below three miles per hour, they die. If they step off the paved path, they die. If they stop too often, they die. There is no finish line. The game continues until only one boy is left.
The Long Walk is juiced with tension. It’s like The Hunger Games on tour. (director Francis Lawrence has directed four Hunger Games movies) I was shocked at how emotional I got so early in the movie, and that’s a testament to the stirring concept and the development that wrings the most dread and anxiety from each moment. Just watching a teary-eyed Judy Greer say a very likely final goodbye to her teenage son Ray (Cooper Hoffman), contemplating what those final words might be if he never returns to her, which is statistically unlikely since he’s one of 50 competitors. How do you comprise a lifetime of feeling, hope, and love into a scant few seconds? It’s an emotionally fraught opening that only paves the way for a consistently emotionally fraught journey. In essence, you’re going along on this ride knowing that 49 of these boys are going to be killed over the course of two hours, and yet when the first execution actually takes place, it is jarring and horrifying. The violence is painful. From there, we know the cruel fate that awaits any boy that cannot follow the limited rules of the contest. The first dozen or so executions are given brutish violent showcases, but as the film progresses and we become more attached to the ever-dwindling number of walkers, the majority of the final executions happen in the distance, out of focus, but are just as hard-hitting because of the investment. Every time someone drops, your mind soon pivots to who will be next, and if you’re like me, there’s a heartbreak that goes with each loss. From there, it becomes a series of goodbyes, and it’s much like that super-charged opening between mother and son. Each person dropping out becomes another chance to try and summarize a lifetime, to communicate their worth in a society that literally sees them as disposable marketing tools. I was genuinely moved at many points, especially as Ray takes it upon himself to let the guys know they had friends, they will be remembered, and that they too mattered. I had tears in my eyes at several points. The Long Walk is a grueling experience but it has defiant glimmers of humanity to challenge the prevailing darkness.
I appreciated that thought has been taken to deal with the natural questions that would arise from an all-day all-night walkathon. What happens when you have to poop? What happens when you have to sleep? The screenplay finds little concise examples of different walkers having to deal with these different plights (it seems especially undignified for so many to be killed as a result of uncontrollable defecation). There’s a late-night jaunt with a steep incline, which feels like a nasty trap considering how sleep-deprived many will be to keep the minimal speed requirement. That’s an organic complication related to specific geography. It’s moments like this that prove how much thought was given to making this premise as well-developed as possible, really thinking through different complications. I’m surprised more boys don’t drop dead from sheer exhaustion walking over 300 miles without rest over multiple days. I am surprised though that after they drop rules about leaving the pavement equals disqualification and death that this doesn’t really arise. I was envisioning some angry walker shoving another boy off the path to sabotage him and get him eliminated. This kind of duplicitous betrayal never actually happens.
There’s certainly room for larger social commentary on the outskirts of this alternative world. King wrote the short story as a response to what he felt was the senseless slaughter of the Vietnam War. In this quasi-1970s America, a fascist government has determined that its workforce is just too lazy, and so the Long Walk contest is meant as an inspiration to the labor to work harder. I suppose the argument is that if these young boys can go day and night while walking with the omnipresent threat of death, then I guess you can work your factory shift and stop complaining, you commie scum. The solution of more dead young men will solve what ails the country can clearly still resonate even though we’re now four decades removed from the generational mistakes of the Vietnam War. The senselessness of the brutality is the point, meant to confront a populace growing weary with The Way Things Are, and as such, it’s a malleable condemnation on any authority that looks to operate by fear and brutality to keep their people compliant. There are some passing moments of commentary, like when the occasional onlooker is sitting and watching the walkers, drawing the ire of Ray who considers these rubberneckers to a public execution. They’re here for the blood, for the sacrifices, for the thrill. It’s risible but the movie doesn’t really explore this mentality except for some glancing shots and as a tool to reveal different perspectives.
Let’s talk about those leads because that’s really the heart of the movie, the growing friendship and even love between Ray and Pete (David Jonsson). They attach themselves early to one another and form a real sense of brotherhood, even dubbing each other the brother they’ve never had before. They’re the best realized characters in the movie and each has competing reasons for wanting to win. For Ray, it’s about a sense of misplaced righteousness and vengeance. For Pete, it’s about trying to do something better with society. His whole philosophy is about finding the light in the darkness but he is very clear how hard living this out can be on a daily basis. It’s a conscious choice that requires work but a bleak universe needs its points of light. Of course, as these gents grow closer to one another, saving each other at different points, the realization sets in that only one of these guys is going to make it across the proverbial finish line. We’re going to have to say goodbye to one of them, and that adds such a potent melancholy to their growing friendship, that it’s a relationship destined to be meaningful but transitional, a mere moment but a lifetime condensed into that moment. It’s easy to make the connection between this shared camaraderie built from overwhelming danger to soldiers being willing to die for their brothers in arms. Hoffman (Licorice Pizza) and Jonsson (Alien: Romulus) are both so immediately compelling, rounding out their characters, so much so that the whole movie could have been a 90-minute Richard Linklater-style unbroken conversation between the great actors and I would’ve been content.
My one reservation concerns the ending and, naturally, in order to discuss this I’ll be dealing with significant spoilers. If you wish to remain pure, dear reader, skip to the final paragraph ahead. It should be no real surprise who our final two contestants are because the filmmakers want us to really agonize over which of these two men will die for the other. Since we begin with Ray being dropped off, we’re already assuming he’s going to be the eventual winner. He’s got the motivation to seek vengeance against the evil Major who killed his father for sedition by educating Ray about banned art. He’s also been elevated to our lead. Even Pete has a monologue criticizing his friend for ever getting involved when he still has family. Pete has no family left and he has ideals to change the system. The screenplay seems to be setting us up for Pete being a change agent that forces Ray to recognize his initial winning wish of vengeance is selfish and myopic for all the bad out there in this warped society. It seems like Pete is being set up to influence Ray to think of the big picture and perhaps enact meaningful change with his winning wish. There’s even a couple of moments in the movie Pete directly saves Ray, going so far as to purposely kneel to allow Ray the opportunity to win. There’s also the Hollywood meta-textual familiarity of the noble black character serving as guide for the white lead to undergo meaningful change. It all feels thoroughly fated.
Then in a surprise, Ray pulls the same stunt and purposely stops so his buddy can win by default. As Ray dies, he admits that he thinks Pete was the best equipped to bring about that new world they were talking about. He dies sacrificing his own vengeance for something larger and more relevant to the masses. And then Pete, as per his winning wish, asks for a rifle, shoots and kills the Major, thus fulfilling Ray’s vendetta, and walks off. The end. The theme of thinking about something beyond personal grievance to help the masses, to enact possible change, is thrown away. So what was it all about? The carnage continues? It seems like thematic malpractice to me that the movie is setting up its two main characters at philosophical odds, with one preaching the value of forgoing selfish wish-fulfillment for actual change. The character arc of Ray is about coming to terms not just with the inevitability of his death but the acceptance of it because he knows that Pete will be the best person to see a better world. The fact that Pete immediately seeks bloody retribution feels out of character. The Long Walk didn’t feel like a story about a guy learning the opposite lesson, that he should be more selfish and myopic. It mitigates the value of the sacrifice if this is all there is. Furthermore, it’s strange that the bylaws of this whole contest allow a winner to murder one of the high-ranking government officials. Even The Purge had rules against government officials and emergency medical technicians being targeted (not that people followed those rules to the letter). Still, it calls into question the reality of this deadly contest and its open-ended rewards. If a winner demanded to go to Mars, would the nation be indebted to see this through no matter the cost? Suddenly contestant wishes like “sleep with ten women” seem not just banal but a derelict of imagination.
Affecting and routinely nerve-racking, The Long Walk is an intense and intensely felt movie. I was overwhelmed by tension at different points as well as being moved to tears at other points. While its dystopian world-building might be hazy, the human drama at its center is rife with spirit and life, allowing the audience to effortlessly attach themselves to these characters and their suffering. I feel strongly that the very end is a misstep that jettisons pertinent themes the rest of the movie had been building, but it’s not enough to jettison the power and poignancy of what transpires before that climactic moment. The Long Walk has earned its rightful place in the top-tier of Stephen King adaptations.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Play Dirty (2025)
Shane Black is one of the best known writers in Hollywood across three-plus decades. His brand of witty, self-referential genre writing became its own appealing sub-genre of action cinema from the 1980s into the 90s. He resurrected Robert Downey Jr.’s career with Black’s directorial debut, the rollicking and immensely entertaining Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Downey returned the favor by getting Black the gig writing and directing Iron Man 3. It’s been eight years since Black’s last directing effort, 2018’s messy and ultimately disappointing Predator reboot (Black actually had a small acting role in the original film). Shane Black movies are never ever boring even when they’re not completely working. Play Dirty is based on the Parker book series, a character portrayed by six other actors including Mel Gibson, Jason Statham, and Jim Brown. There are 26 of these Parker books, but after watching Play Dirty, by far Black’s worst movie, I don’t even understand what the appeal would be. This character just plain sucks.
Parker (Mark Wahlberg) is a slick professional criminal trying to score big and get his revenge. In the opening sequence, one of his heist crew, Zen (Rosa Salazar), betrays the group, steals the money, and kills everybody except Parker. He tracks her down and she’s in the middle of an even bigger scheme, one involving billions of dollars from uncovering literal sunken treasure on the ocean floor. He doesn’t like her or trust her but he sure could use his cut of a billion dollars. He taps old colleagues from other old jobs, the colleagues who haven’t been killed, and they must all work together to get their next big score.
I was blown away by how powerfully unlikable the main character comes across. I don’t need characters to all be beholden to my opinion of likeability, but deficits in this matter are typically offset by writing the character with some degree of personality, menace, or intrigue, something that makes you want to keep watching them onscreen even if you don’t agree with everything they’re doing. However, this Parker guy, as portrayed by Wahlberg, is a big dumb guy who doesn’t recognize he’s a big dumb guy. As a result, he’s beholden to impulsive decisions that come across as cruel to the point of being sociopathic. Again, we’re used to criminal characters being flippant or prone to violence in other stories, but the introductory presentation of this character simply befuddles me and rubbed me the wrong way throughout.
Take for instance the literal opening minutes of Play Dirty. It’s in the middle of a heist but the story doesn’t start us off with the perspective of our thieves collecting their loot. It starts instead with a security guard stumbling onto their heist. He’s with his wife and child in the car and decides, rather than intervening, he’s going to use this opportunity to steal himself some of their ill-gotten loot. Right there, we’re starting with a character making a consequential choice, and our perspectives are not aligned with the robbers but with the robber of the robbers. I wanted him to get away, and frankly, following his story could have proven compelling as well, as someone who gets in over their head and tracked down by professional criminals who want what was taken. Parker gives chase through a race track and eventually shoots this man dead in front of his wife and child. Lest you think Parker is an irredeemable, unfeeling cretin, he takes stock of this woman’s grief and trauma and offers her ten thousand dollars of their loot, to bribe her silence and make amends for the murder of her spouse (that’s not even a good life insurance payout). I don’t know why Black wanted us to begin empathizing from the perspective of some guy who was only intended to be unceremoniously killed, in front of his wife and child. This move made me immediately dislike Parker, and then his little gift for the wife’s trauma felt completely insulting.
This incident isn’t the only example of Parker being a shoot-first-ask-questions-never brute of limited intelligence. When he reunites with Zen, she’s talking with some guy who planned her new big scheme. Parker doesn’t know anything about this guy other than his physical proximity to Zen. He shoots him dead. For what reason? I don’t know what he was trying to accomplish except an expression of his impatience and hatred for life. I wonder if an elderly nun had been standing next to Zen at this moment and would Parker have committed the same rash act of violence. What about if it was his own mother? To make matters even worse, Parker accompanies Zen to break the news to the dead man’s boyfriend, and it’s in this moment of shock and grief that Parker harasses this bereaved man that Parker berates for crying. He seems to take amusement in how bluntly he informs the other man that his love is never coming back, though leaving out the key part where he carelessly murdered the man. He also shoots Mark Cuban in the leg while he dines in a restaurant for no reason other than being near the guy that he wanted. Again, much of this could be workable if the character of Parker was… anything. He’s not funny, he’s not charming, he’s not really clever or good with plans; he’s just a big dumb guy prone to violence, scowling, and deep sighs. Wahlberg looks bored throughout the whole movie and it makes the character even harder to entertain. If this guy doesn’t want to be here, can we select someone else to be our requisite protagonist?
We might have a leaden dud of a lead, but what about the rest of our enterprising team of thieves and conmen? Do we have any winners here to compensate? Sadly, the team is just as listless. Take Grofield (Lakieth Stanfield) who fraternizes as a theater owner, one who is constantly losing money. That setup has some interest, a criminal who possibly longs to be more of a professional actor, perhaps that eagerness even pushes him into suggesting different covers and roles he could play in their heists. Perhaps he might even see himself above the others since he feels like he is trying to promote the arts. There’s all kinds of ways this introduction could better shape his personality, interests, and contrasts with the other crew. For the rest of the movie, Grofield is just another guy on screen, just another guy driving a car or shooting a gun. There is one brief moment that takes advantage of his interest in acting as he poses as a drunk on a rooftop threatening to jump. After a security guard arrives on the scene, he and Parker subdue the guard, coat him in the same outfit Grofield was wearing, and then toss him off the roof to his death (ho ho). There’s a husband and wife team of crooks (Keegan-Michael Key, Claire Lovering) and that could be interesting, especially if they’re mixing professional and romantic squabbles, or maybe working together is the thing that keeps their spark going, the showcase for their real teamwork. They have one scene with some passing bickering but otherwise they too are just more indiscriminate people onscreen, another person to hold a gun or drive a car. Even the bad guys are boring. Who should I actually care about? I was rooting for that grieving mother and the one guy’s sad boyfriend to team up and punish Parker’s crew.
Part of the fun of heist crews and con artists are the colorful personalities, the peculiarities, the intra-group conflicts and dynamics, but this movie gives us so little. It’s almost as if the characters are merely meant to trick the brain of a viewer barely paying attention, providing an assurance, “These are the guys,” without forcing thinking over differentiation. It’s like the film equivalent of not wanting to arouse like your elderly grandfather with conflicting evidence contrary to his memories. It’s like accepting defeat.
So the characters are lousy, are there any outstanding or fun caper or action scenes? Black is known for his snappy style and pulpy sensibilities across genres. He hasn’t made a boring movie yet, so I had hoped that even if Play Dirty ultimately proved lackluster, at least it would provide some flash and fun. Nope. Many of the action scenes are Parker and company just throwing caution to the wind and shooting a bunch of guys. There’s one sequence in the middle that involves actually planning and steps to draw our interest, it’s a ridiculously over-the-top plan that shows once again the crew’s disregard for collateral damage. Their valuable cargo is being shipped through the city on an elevated train, so the team decides to derail the train in the middle of the city. Not in a deserted area unpopulated by civilians, in the middle of town. As expected, the train careens off the tracks and through the city, likely causing the deaths of dozens of innocents we’ll never know because their existence is unworthy of the movie’s attention, much like the suffering of that widow and child in the opening sequence. The sequence is the equivalent of killing a mosquito with a flamethrower, and while overkill can certainly be cinematic and pleasingly entertaining, just ask Michael Bay or James Wan, it needs to exist in a world where that overkill is normalized. Otherwise, it just stands out as excessive and causes us to poke holes at the baseline reality.
Play Dirty is astoundingly dull and witless, lacking any of the spark and personality flair I expect from a Shane Black vehicle. Mark Wahlberg’s somnambulist performance is the best symbol for this entire enterprise, a crime thriller going through the motions but with its mind elsewhere. I know I certainly felt my mind going elsewhere while watching. Not just dull and tedious, Play Dirty is also just an uncomfortable experience because we’re stuck watching a group of unrepentantly amoral characters endanger and kill innocent lives in the pursuit of ill-gotten gains, but these characters aren’t intriguing, complex, memorable, or even cool, so the whole movies feels like you’re watching a pack of dude bros just randomly terrorize anecdotal characters out of sheer detached boredom and nihilism. It’s not fun, it’s actually quite the opposite of fun, and I wish Black had put more of himself into this enterprise (hey, the Christmas setting is present). Who wants to play with characters this boring and repulsive for two hours?
Nate’s Grade: C-
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One Battle After Another (2025)
Over his thirty-year career, writer/ director Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) has developed a mystique and reputation like few other auteurs working in cinema. He’s a visionary filmmaker whose first few movies count among my favorites of all time (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) and whose latter output can leave me shrugging and sighing (Licorice Pizza, Inherent Vice, The Master). My decade-plus-long observational bon mot has been that Anderson decided to make amends for his plot-heavy early movies with more airy, far less plotted vibes-movies. One Battle After Another is something far different from Anderson. He’s making his own version of a $150-million studio action movie, with big ideas and Leonardo DiCaprio as lead (DiCaprio has long regretted passing on Dirk Diggler, still Mark Wahlberg’s acting high-point, so thanks Leo). PTA is using the big-budget storytelling of action cinema to tell something new and personal and politically relevant behind all the gunfire and daring car chases. It’s been dubbed the movie of the moment and perhaps the one to beat for the 2025 Academy Awards. Now that I’ve finally watched all 150 minutes of Anderson’s opus, I’m not as high on it as others but do acknowledge it is a thrilling, engrossing, and occasionally frustrating work from a visionary artist.
Bob (DiCaprio) used to run with a leftist military group known as the French 75. He fell in love with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), one of the leaders of the group, and together they had a baby, little Willa. Perfidia runs off, unable to settle down, leaving Bob to raise their daughter under a different identity. Sixteen years later, that old life comes back to Bob. It so happens Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) had an ongoing sexual tryst with Perfidia during one of their stings. There’s a chance that Willa (Chase Infiniti), now a teenager wanting to live a normal life, is actually his biological daughter. He needs to capture her under any circumstance and possibly dispose of her in order to be admitted to an exclusive white supremacist cabal within the U.S. government. Bob is forced back to action to find and protect Willa but he’s not exactly in the best shape. He’s been a burnout for so long. Can he now be a hero?
While the movie was filmed throughout 2024, and supposedly has been in the works for over twenty years by Anderson, One Battle After Another feels extremely timely and relatable in these troubled political days of ours (even the title expresses what it’s like to get up and try and process the daily barrage of horrifying news in this Trump Administration 2.0 Era). Anderson’s screenplay, loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, proposes a right-wing U.S. government swept up in fascist impulses that is highly militarized and declares war on immigration, rounding up primarily Hispanic men, women, and children and locking them away in camps. It’s also a law enforcement unit that pose as protestors to create a rationale for enacting physical violence and intimidation against peaceful protestors. At the core is a secret society of white supremacists running the show. Short of a concurrent documentary, it will be harder to find a movie more politically topical to the status of life in 2025, especially for the many shaking their heads and wondering how exactly we got here. Pynchon’s original novel was about the transformation of 1960s America to the 1980s, and it feels highly relevant to our 2025 times where there yet again seems to be great upheaval and conflict over those in power operating said power against the governed. It’s impossible to watch One Battle After Another and not think about the headlines. It’s not exactly the escapism many might be seeking. There’s never been a leftist paramilitary group as organized and as successful as the French 75 (they have their own affiliated convent – nuns with guns). The movie isn’t leftist wish-fulfillment to take down the current administration. It’s more a father-daughter battle to reunite in the face of state terror. It certainly has its fiery political commentary, but it’s more a family striving to stay together.
I did quite enjoy that the movie undercuts Bob as our hero, using him more as an entry point into other characters in this story, others who have a much larger impact and prove more capable. The character of Bob serves as a gateway for the other characters to really take over and shine, and it’s smart to use the familiar archetype of the old gunslinger being called back into action past his prime to atone for the sins of the past. We’ve seen this kind of character before, but Bob is kind of hapless and far out of his depth, and it makes the movie so much more entertaining. The rest of the movie exists in a more familiar action-thriller setting, albeit with some fun house mirror edges for pointed satire, but Bob is this bumbling, stumbling dope from a stoner comedy whose been copy-pasted into a different genre. He provided explosives for the French 75 but that doesn’t mean he’s got a wealth of clandestine knowledge and cunning at his disposal, especially since he’s normally inebriated. Now sixteen years later, the archetype would typically have to pull out their old skills that have calcified over a long hibernation, but Bob doesn’t have those skills. When he has an opportunity to take the big heroic shot, he misses. When he has the opportunity to make a daring escape, he falls off the side of a building. When he has to remember the coded exchanges of old, he can’t remember all of the parts. The climax doesn’t really even involve him as he’s playing catch-up for most of the extended conclusion. He’s more like the Big Lebowski waking up in, say, No Country for Old Men and desperately seeking shelter.
However, Anderson’s empathy for his characters of all stripes shines through, and while Bob is presented as diminished or bumbling, he’s not a complete moron without any redeeming qualities. His most resounding positive quality is his complete dedication and love for his daughter. We’ve seen this kind of story before, the overbearing parental figure trying to drill their child to be prepared for when danger inevitably arises, and the child growing resentful and distant to the parent because of that demanding and limiting home life. Then trouble strikes and the child has to rely upon those seasoned skills they practiced while that paranoid and obsessive adult was ultimately proven right for their unorthodox parenting. Bob’s love for Willa is what has shaped his life for these past sixteen years. He’s the parent who stayed, the one who settled from his old life to take on the responsibility of raising a child as a new life. He’s the one who changed her diapers, the one who shows up for parent-teacher conferences even if it’s to lecture the teachers about the curriculum while lighting up a joint. His love for his daughter is the thing that drives him forward and keeps him going. You feel that love between them, and in the climax of the movie, it becomes something poignant about the connection between these two over such extreme circumstances. There’s an ongoing question over the paternity of Willa but this never for a second changes Bob’s view of his daughter or his willingness to do anything to save her. If he was a Liam Neeson-styled master spy with a particular set of skills, the journey wouldn’t feel as rewarding. With Bob being punched down by the universe again and again but still going, it makes us root for him more.
Penn is completely enthralling as Lockjaw. His danger is never downplayed, and he’s frequently shown as a man who will use his considerable means of power to get what he wants, but Anderson also finds interesting ways to lampoon him and complicate him. I loved that the secret white supremacist society Lockjaw is so eager to join is called the Christmas Adventurers Club. It’s so stupidly anodyne that it sounds like a rejected title for a Boxcar Children novel. The members even pledge, “Merry Christmas. Hail Saint Nick.” It’s so stupid but so are many of the associative slogans of these right-wing groups (I learned the Proud Boys are named after a cut song from Disney’s animated Aladdin, “Proud of Your Boy,” and no I am not kidding). These men are indeed dangerous but they’re also not insurmountable, and I think that’s an important distinction. They’re small, angry, racist men trying to forcibly reshape the world but they are a minority of a minority clinging to power to reject progressive reforms. Lockjaw’s big problem is that he has a tremendous attraction to African-American women, the type of people he should see as inferior. The movie’s momentum is kicked into gear all because Lockjaw wants to be accepted in this special club. Penn is incredible in how he brings to life the snarling contradictions of this man, someone so aggressively challenging but who is also given to gnawing insecurities. Even the way Penn holds his body and walks is an indication of who this man is, with stick firmly planted in rear. He’s scary but he is also stupid, a fine encapsulation of our present political quandary. I’d expect him to be the current front-runner for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars but it is still plenty early for predictions.
I do wish those engaging supporting characters had more to do besides Lockjaw. Even at 150 minutes, there isn’t much development for Willa to really grow as a character. She’s the target for the chase, and she’s the one trying to understand what is happening as it happens. It would make sense for her to have been the protagonist as she has the most to learn. For far too much of the movie she’s just a passive passenger, being shipped from one location to another. I wish we had more moments to really grapple with her perspective and her shifting opinion about her father and his past. I do enjoy that she’s the real star of the climax but at that point I wished we had seen far more of her resilience and determination and making use of what her father had been teaching her, not simply trading coded conversations. If she is the future, the possibility of turning this world around as someone declares by film’s end, then maybe let’s spend a little more time with her being active and reflective and taking more ownership of her survival. It’s as much her movie as it is Bob’s but he gets far more generous screen time over those 150 minutes.
The same can be said for Willa’s mother, Perfidia. I never found her that interesting as a character. She’s a true-born revolutionary from a family of revolutionaries, but some part of her is drawn back to Lockjaw, whether it’s simply the transactional exchange of sex for protection and assurances, or maybe something more, perhaps the power play of dominance over the very kind of bad men in power she wanted to control. She runs away from a domestic life with baby Willa because she knows she’s ill-suited for it. From there, she gets captured and turns on her former comrades to enter Witness Protection, which she runs away from. I kept waiting for her to resurface in a meaningful way in the story since we’re shown that she escapes into Mexico (Lockjaw lies that he killed her rather than admit she ran off). However, Anderson only utilizes the character as a catalyst, a means of entangling the two men into a paternal showdown. It’s disappointing that Perfidia is reduced to such a nothing of a character when there was much to explore.
And now comes the part of the review where we talk about Anderson’s bold leap into action filmmaking. He’s not the first prestige indie darling to make a grand genre jump into action-thriller bravado. One thinks of Sam Mendes tackling Skyfall with aplomb, Paul Greengrass with the Bourne series, Patty Jenkins going from Monster to Wonder Woman, Lee Issac Chung going from Minari to Twisters, and of course the big man himself, Christopher Nolan. It can be done with the right filmmaker understanding the key tenets of action, in particular how to connect the various set pieces and conflicts with the characters and their emotional state and chain of needs and priorities. I was impressed with Anderson’s sense of scope and his ability to wring tension. There aren’t really many strict action scenes. Much ink has been spilled on the climactic chase that utilizes a series of rolling hills as the focal point of this battle, and it’s immersive and exciting and different. I’d also be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed by it. This is because this sequence, up until the very very end, is all about one car tailing another. It’s taut and extremely well photographed, but ultimately it amounts to two cars following one another until one clever conclusion. It’s not really a sequence that changes and finds organic complications. It has the makings of a great action sequence but stalls. I thought back to 2014’s Snowpiercer and the sniper shooting match at two different points in the train, where each participant was waiting for the train to curve just so to better facilitate their shot. That was geography as advantage. Overall, Anderson is definitely making his version of an action movie but I don’t feel like he’s fully committed to the planning and development of those sequences. It feels more like ironic subversion when the genuine article would have been more appealing and impactful and just novel.
While One Battle After Another doesn’t rise to the capital-M masterpiece that so many of my critical brethren are falling over themselves to proclaim, it is a good movie with bold artistic swings. It thrums with energy and empathy. It’s probably PTA’s most accessible movie since There Will Be Blood or arguably Boogie Nights. I enjoyed the different characters and the brimming conflict and how much of the movie is grounded on the character relationships and their perspectives. There is a clear command of craft here like every PTA movie. He’s definitely passionate about bringing this world to life, which is eerily relevant to our own politically tumultuous times, but he still finds room for satirical mockery that doesn’t diminish the tension of the villains. It’s a universe I wanted more explanation and exploration, and the most interesting character by far is Benicio del Toro as a humble town sensei who is at the forefront of an immigrant underground railroad. I was never bored and often quite entertained but I stepped away wanting more, and maybe that’s greedy of me or an entitlement of the viewer. One Battle After Another flashes such terrific intrigue and personality that I wanted more refinement and development to better accentuate its mighty potential.
Nate’s Grade: B
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War of the Worlds (2025)
It’s almost refreshing when you discover a movie that is so bad it becomes a feat of amazement. Pitching a War of the Worlds remake primarily starring Ice Cube staring at his work computer sounds akin to pitching a Pride and Prejudice remake starring Jojo Siwa and it’s entirely about her gardening. You could do something like that but why would you? It’s almost like some setup for a joke. This movie was originally made in 2020 and has sat on the shelf for five years, enough so to make one wonder why anyone felt like now was the time to release it, especially in this final condition. I’m dumbfounded simply thinking about this movie. It’s so misguided in about every creative decision, from its stylistic approach to its thematic emphasis and especially making what may be the most boring alien invasion movie into an afterthought about government surveillance laws. Sheesh.
Author H. G. Wells published War of the Worlds in 1898, and it’s since been turned into many popular radio serials, movies, and TV series, including the 2005 Tom Cruise-Steven Spielberg hit. Whenever a filmmaker or production company shakes the dust off a story that we already have many versions of, the question arises what this new version will bring to the table. How will this one stand out? How will it connect in a way that the other movies had not? In short, why do we need another version? Naturally, Hollywood doesn’t think about the creative necessity of movies, only their profitability. The core difference with the new 2025 movie is that it’s a “screenlife” movie where everything we see is meant to approximate a computer screen. It’s a variation on the found footage genre. This technique was used to great effect in 2018’s Searching where John Cho tried to uncover his missing daughter’s digital footprint. That was an inventive updating of the detective thriller. Here, I cannot imagine a more boring way to illustrate an alien invasion. We’re watching one man behind a computer screen react to the news and cycle through camera feeds for exposition, having Face Time conversations with loved ones and Zoom meetings with government officials, and he apparently seems to be the only guy capable of doing his job during this war of the worlds. It reminds me of 2010’s Skyline, a smaller alien invasion movie that tried to mask its limited budget by following a group of characters trapped in an apartment that would worriedly look out the windows. It’s a bad approach, making the events feel too limited and like we’re missing out on more interesting events. Suffice to say, when the world is going to war and aliens are destroying cities, you don’t want the focus of our movie to be Ice Cube staring at you and furiously typing key commands.
Another significant blunder was making this less an alien invasion movie and more about government overreach when it comes to data mining. There will be spoilers in this paragraph, dear reader, but honestly I would actively advise you to read them anyway to just better appreciate how ridiculous this all is. The powerful aliens aren’t here for our natural resources, for turning people into food, or even a hostile takeover of the planet as their new home world. Oh, it’s far worse than that. What these dirty dirty aliens are really hungry for is… our personal data. Yes, you read that correctly. The aliens literally consume electronic data. What dull lives these creatures lead. This is less an alien invasion and more a stark literalization of data mining. These aliens are advanced enough to travel through space but need to be in such close physical proximity to harvest our data? They can’t just hack the Pentagon wifi? It turns the aliens into big dumb technological mosquitoes who just need to be directed elsewhere. I’m astounded that War of the Worlds presents an alien invasion and says that nosy government is the real problem. The movie tries to argue that these advanced aliens wouldn’t even be here if Big Government wasn’t wantonly collecting our data for their nebulous spying purposes. It’s an attack on the post-9/11 surveillance state born of the Patriot Act, but it’s also 15-20 years too late for this to be politically relevant.
The movie also picks the wrong character to serve as its moral awakening. It’s nonsensical that Ice Cube could be a trusted DHS official and be unaware of these systems and their reach. He seems to be the guy that the FBI is waiting on for door-breaching warrants that he tidily uploads as PDF files. He’s the guy NASA wants to clue in on their latest reports. He’s the guy the Secretary of Defense calls directly. He’s not the head of Homeland Security; he’s just a guy in the office, and seemingly the only guy in the building (was it a holiday weekend?). Ice Cube plays a man with some extreme boundary issues. He’s literally using government surveillance to spy on his pregnant daughter, hacking into her fridge, and I think even installing cameras into her apartment. He’s using government resources to criticize his daughter’s grocery choices. He’s overstepping his bounds and taking full advantage of that same government surveillance state that he decries at the end of the movie. At three different points someone will say incredulously about the government spying on people’s “Amazon carts,” and it’s just remarkable that something like that would politically galvanize this man when he’s already spying on his kids with that same surveillance apparatus. He’s knowingly breaking into their messages and social media and personal data. This can’t be a “what have we become?” epiphany when he’s always been there.
I like Ice Cube as an actor. He showed surprising depth in Boyz n the Hood, was hilariously applied in the 21 Jump Street movies as a stern sourpuss authority figure. There’s a natural intimidation factor, which was recently played for clever laughs with his appearance on The Studio. This is a performer that can be a great addition when aligned with his strengths. However, range is not a word one would readily use when describing the acting capabilities of Mr. Cube. Hinging this entire movie on Ice Cube’s emotional journey is too much of an ask. Having this man listlessly read gobs of exposition is not good for anyone. He doesn’t have that kind of arresting voice that could hypnotize us, like a Morgan Freeman or Jeremy Irons. It’s even worse when you feel the lackluster effort on his part. Strangely, despite his children being in direct danger, and the whole alien invasion backdrop, the moment that draws the most dramatic response from Ice Cube is when the aliens delete his deceased wife’s Facebook account (I would have accepted you consuming the planet, but when you delete Facebook pictures, now you’ve gone too far). The movie was filmed in the early days of the COVID pandemic and feels it, restricting everyone to their own little screens with nary the physical interaction. When you’re watching Ice Cube race through empty rooms of Homeland Security to insert a thumb-drive in the nick of time to save the world (along with shouting to the unconvincing alien special effects, “Movie bitch, get out the way”) it all just reminds you how painfully myopic and agonizingly restrictive this alien invasion approach ultimately proves to be.
Special mention needs to be made for the over-the-top Amazon product placement in this movie. The company is referenced several times, even used as a motivator for a homeless man (what computer?), but it’s much worse when one of the characters is a proud Amazon delivery driver and he’s going to use their cutting-edge drone delivery tech to make sure Ice Cube gets that all-important thumb-drive in record time. Amazon helps in saving the world thanks to their logistics in package delivery. Thank you corporate overlords, and please enjoy this movie on your life-saving Amazon Prime account, dutiful citizen.
War of the Worlds 2025 is a fascinating and maddening case study in bad adaptation choices. It feels more like an anti-government surveillance state thriller that got awkwardly grafted onto an alien invasion. The way the movie just abandons its larger scale drama for lessons in modern-day privacy laws is creatively criminal. This is an astonishingly bad movie that gets just about everything wrong at every turn. I’m almost tempted to recommend people watch it just to try and reconcile it for themselves. There have been dozens of adaptations of this classic science-fiction tale, and I feel confident in declaring this one the absolute worst even if I haven’t seen every one of them. There can’t be a worse one than this.
Nate’s Grade: F
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Layer Cake (2005) [Review Re-View]
Originally released June 10, 2005:
Layer Cake may be the least intimidating name ever for a crime movie. It conjures images of bridal showers, cooking shows, and birthday parties. It does not necessarily bring to mind thoughts of gangsters, assassins, drug trafficking, and the seamy underbelly of London’s criminal underground. Unless you’re watching some really awesome cooking show I don’t know about. The “layer cake” in question refers to the hierarchy of criminals. This isn’t unfamiliar territory for Matthew Vaughn, who produced Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. This time it’s Vaughn sitting in the director’s chair and the results are exceptionally entertaining. Layer Cake is a cinematic treat.
Daniel Craig (Road to Perdition) plays our untitled lead, referred to in the end credits as “XXXX.” He’s a cocaine dealer but not a gangster by any means. He wants to make his money, not step on any important toes, and then walk away on top and without any gaping holes in his body. Craig is summoned by his boss Jimmy (Kenneth Cranham) and given two missions, whether he wants to accept them or not. The first is to relocate the missing daughter of a very powerful friend of Jimmy’s. The second, and far more dangerous job, is to secure a package of millions of stolen ecstasy pills and make a profit. Complicating matters is the angry Serbian mob that the pills were stolen from. They’ve dispatched a deadly assassin known as Dragan to track down their stolen drugs and kill anyone involved. Craig is left to juggle the investigation, find a buyer, stay ahead of Serbian hitmen, get some time in with a hot new girl, and all the while keeping his higher-ups content enough not to kill him themselves.
Layer Cake should be the film that makes Craig the star he so rightfully deserves to be. This man is a modern day Steve McQueen with those piercing blue eyes, cheekbones that could cut glass, and the casual swagger of coolness. Craig grabs the audience from his opening narration as he explains the ins and outs of his business. We may never see Craig sweat but he still expresses a remarkable slow burn of fear so effectively through those baby blues. He’s in over his head and the audience feels his frustrations. In an interesting character twist, when Craig does resort to killing, he’s actually tormented and haunted by his actions.
As with most British gangster flicks, there are a batch of colorful characters that leave their mark. Dragan (Dragan Micanovic) is a wonderfully enigmatic ghost of an assassin always one step ahead of Craig and the audience. Morty (George Harris) and Gene (Colm Meaney) add heart and bluster as Craig’s trusted right hand men. But the actor who steals the whole film with a malevolent glee is Michael Gambon (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). He plays Eddie Temple, the man behind the men behind the scenes. Gambon delivers the harshest of speeches with a velvety pragmatic calm. We don’t know what runs deeper with Eddie, his tan or his scheming.
Sienna Miller plays the thankless love interest to Craig. She’s pretty, sure, but there isn’t much acting ability on display in Layer Cake beside some smoldering glances. We never really know what Craig sees in her besides being another cute blonde to choose over. Miller isn’t alone in the “underwritten character department.” Layer Cake is crammed with secondary characters that pop in and out when it’s necessary. It’s not too annoying but it does mess around with an audience?s ability to follow along coherently.
Layer Cake is not one of the slick, whack-a-mole ventures Ritchie has given us (pre-Madonna). No sir, this is a brooding, serious and nearly terrifying look at the old adage “crime doesn’t pay.” Very few crime centered films express the day-to-day anxiety of just being a criminal. Jimmy reminds Craig that he’ll never be able to walk away because he’s too good an earner for his higher-ups. In Layer Cake, you can get killed for being too greedy, being too careless, being too good at your job, and even just being in the wrong place. Eddie sums it up best whilst describing Faust: “Man sells his soul to the devil. It all ends in tears. These things always do.”
Vaughn has a polished visual sensibility that doesn’t overwhelm the viewer. He keeps the camera fluid and steady with a minimal amount of cuts. A nifty opening scene involves an imaginary drug store (stocked with pot, cocaine, and the like) melting into a real drug store (one hour photo, impulse items at the register). When the tension does mount Vaughn knows just how to turn the screws. A late sequence involving a chase between the SWAT team and our batch of criminals had me on the edge of my seat. For a first time director, Vaughn also has great patience. He doesn’t rush his storyline and he doesn’t suffocate his movie with visual flourishes. He also has a great deal of faith in his audience’s intelligence. This isn’t as lively as Snatch or Lock, Stock, but that’s because Vaughn’s film is also much more serious and dangerous.
This is an intricate and gripping film but it might be a little too complex for its own good. Twists and double-crosses are expected in this genre, but writer J.J. Connolly has so many characters running around and so many hidden agendas that it’s nearly impossible to keep track. Some of the subplots and back stories add very little like the inexplicable “Crazy Larry” flashbacks. I left the theater still confused about plot points but refreshingly satisfied nonetheless.
Layer Cake is the most thoroughly exhilarating time I’ve had at a theater this year. This pulpy daylight-noir caper is full of memorable hoods, plenty of twists and turns, and a star making performance by the steely-eyed wonder that is Daniel Craig (rumored to be the next 007, though in my heart I’ll always root for Clive Owen). Fans of Ritchie’s frenetic gangster flicks should be entertained. Anyone looking for a clever and exciting potboiler that treats violence and crime seriously should start lining up immediately. If you’re suffering from the cinematic wasteland that 2005 has shaped up to be so far, then have yourself a generous helping of Layer Cake and thank the Brits.
Nate’s Grade: A
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Back in 2005, Layer Cake was really a proof of concept movie for many items. It was proof that someone could take a Guy Ritchie-style crime pot boiler with colorful Cockney criminals and plenty of twists and unexpected violence and play it straight and serious. It was proof of Matthew Vaughn as a director, who had previously served as a producer of those early Ritchie films. It was proof of Sienna Miller as the next It Girl, a proclamation that carried her for years despite mixed results with the movies. Most of all, it was proof of its lead, Daniel Craig, as being so suave he should be considered the next possible 007. James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli has gone on the record saying this movie is what officially put Craig on their radar and got him the gig that has defined his career trajectory. Twenty years later, Layer Cake is still a potent and smooth little thriller that glides right by on its intelligence, sex appeal, and Craig’s charisma
I find myself agreeing with so many of my original points from 2005 so I don’t want this re-examination to be merely a “ditto” without some additional critical analysis. Even though it’s based on a book by J.J. Connolly, who adapted his own novel, the movie feels very much in the company of those early Guy Ritchie movies that Vaughn began producing. Ritchie burst onto the international scene with 1998’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, a brash and stylish crime comedy with outlandish characters, violence that alternated between visceral and slapstick, and twisty plots that often left your head spinning. It was like a mixture of Tarantino and a more lewd Looney Tunes cartoon. While the early Ritchie films, including my favorite, 2001’s Snatch, have their share of characters with grounded stakes, the reality is exaggerated, with the appeal being these grandiose personalities butting against one another. No one would confuse one of these Ritchie movies with a realistic portrayal of London criminals. They’re fun. What Layer Cake does so well is take a Ritchie-esque premise with plenty of low-life screw-ups and hardasses and plays it straight. It takes this middle-level drug distributor and makes his life less a comedy of errors and more a never-ending anxiety attack about how he can become undone from any angle. The movie sure doesn’t make a life of crime look appealing.
Craig’s character, named XXXX, is a smart guy just trying to keep his head down and do his job. The problem for him is that he’s too good at earning money for bad men who like money. In this life, you can get killed for any number of reasons, some of them logical and pragmatic, and others rash and illogical: not being a good enough criminal, being too good of a criminal, thinking he’s too good of a criminal, someone else wanting to make a name for themself and establish cred by going after you, dumb luck, etc. XXXX has his rules and standards to live by to ensure he limits his risk, but when your profession is literally dealing with money and unscrupulous types, there is no absolute zero in that risk. He may be smart and measured but he’s also working with plenty of stupid people who don’t know they’re stupid, and then you mix in vice and avarice with that, and it can be a combustible cocktail of dangerous idiots intruding on whatever peace and distance XXXX has cultivated for himself. In the movie, XXXX is burdened with competing tasks. He’s been offered a stash of stolen ecstasy pills, and his slimy boss wants them sold no matter what, but the assassin hired to retrieve them definitely wants them back too. Either way, our lead character is endangering himself by making someone unhappy. He’s dropped into the sticky morass of power plays and competing interests that will challenge his intended neutrality.
I think the ending for Layer Cake is brilliant and very fitting. For almost two hours, we’ve followed XXXX through hell and back and it looks like he’s found a way out, siding with the right hoodlums and eliminating different risky angles needing to be resolved. He’s kept to his stated retirement of not going out on top and instead going out while comfortable and capable. He’ll leave the business to his associates because he’s tired of looking over his shoulder. And as he walks out with his pretty lady (Sienna Miller) around his arm, that’s when he abruptly gets shot by Sidney (Ben Whishaw – yes, the future James Bond is killed by his future Q). This isn’t some tough or some hotshot; he’s a lanky nephew to another gangster, and he hasn’t exactly shown anything close to a killer instinct. In his brief appearances beforehand, he’s seemed out of place, like a latchkey kid who wandered into a criminal enterprise and everyone has been humoring him for good measure. The only thing he has is… was… the blonde girlfriend (Miller) who’s clearly not interested in him. After playing it so cool and calculated, he’s taken out by this twerpy nobody because he had the audacity to try and steal “his girl.” Even if you are the smartest guy in the room and you’ve made all the right moves, all it takes is one twitchy trigger finger and one grumbling grievance to take you from living to dead. Our hero is denied his happy ending driving off into the sunset with his modest sums of money and his newly acquired pretty woman. Try as he might, XXXX, gunned down mid-sentence as he reveals his real name, becomes just another unfortunate corpse.
Vaughn’s skilled direction immediately made him an attractive target for bigger studio fare. He was originally attached to direct 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand but left weeks before filming for stated “family reasons.” In 2023, Vaughn revealed that he left because of the tight production timeline, going from pre-production to a complete movie in under a year, but it was really the shady behavior of Fox execs that pushed him out the door. Apparently one exec put together a fake script to lure Halle Berry back, including scenes of her character Storm saving vulnerable children in Africa to appease Berry, scenes that were never intended to ever be filmed. It was a ploy to trick her into signing onto the film. After two more geek-friendly adaptations, 2007’s Stardust and 2010’s Kick-Ass, Vaughn was courted yet again back to the X-Men franchise. Once again there was a tight one-year turnaround deadline but Vaughn stayed on board and delivered what I consider to be the best X-Men movie, 2011’s First Class. It revitalized the declining franchise, enough so to lure Bryan Singer back. Singer had departed in 2005 to make his Superman movie, opening the door for Vaughn’s first foray with the world of mutants. Now that Vaughn had reinvigorated the franchise with a new cast of younger actors, Singer was ready to take it back to helm 2014’s Days of Future Past. Vaughn was rumored as one of the potential names to make the first new Star Wars movie in ten years. Instead, he made his own action franchise with 2015’s Kingsman. Granted it was based upon the comic by Mark Millar, the same author behind Kick-Ass and Wanted, but it was Vaughn’s signature all over this new spy franchise. Vaughn had constructed a new Bond for a new age. At this point, I was dubbing Vaughn the best working director to use studio money. Each movie was different but made with style and panache with great structure and payoffs. And then…
I think he got so enraptured with the world of Kingsman that he’s now trapped himself creatively. In the ensuing years, he’s made one Kingsman sequel and one prequel, both of them varying degrees of underwhelming, and another action spy-thriller that might as well be called Kingsman-lite, 2024’s Argyle. For an artist that was dabbling with so many genres beforehand and finding sure footing and a way to make his stamp within each, he now feels stuck, finding diminished returns with each iteration of yet another swanky spy action movie with snark. I’m not even an Argyle hater, a movie that appeared on numerous Worst of the Year roundups but one I consider perfectly fine as a TNT Sunday-afternoon kind of chill entertainment. I loved Kingsman when it was originally released in 2015, but looking back, it appears like this was Vaughn building his own prison brick by brick. Maybe he was too preoccupied with turning it into a franchise with many tendrils stretching all over. I truly wish Vaughn would hop genres once again and leave the realm of spy action to others at this point. Maybe he needs a return to something straight akin to Layer Cake without its tongue already so firmly implanted in-cheek.
But this movie will forever be known as the movie that secured Craig as the next James Bond. He had been working in movies for a while with some high-profile supporting roles like 1998’s Elizabeth and 2001’s Tomb Raider and 2002’s Road to Perdition, but this was a platform that showcased the suave presence of this actor like nothing before. He was so magnetic and a perfect choice for this character, and just listening to him try and talk his way out of jams with so many loose canons was as impressive and entertaining as any high-stakes chase or shootout. These sort of star-making roles are rare and even more rare when they do indeed prove to be star-making. It becomes an artifact to analyze what qualities people with money and influence were won over by. It’s interesting that Craig’s character is so anti-guns and wanting nothing to do with the more unsavory and violent aspects of his profession. When he does hold a gun for the first time, one he compliments as being “really pretty,” he holds it out and strikes a pose, dashing through a hallway like he was James Bond, and it’s just especially funny with hindsight.
The movie is also filled with familiar faces that would become even more familiar over the years, including Tom Hardy, Sally Hawkins, Whishaw, Burn Gorman, and some Vaughn regulars, alums from Snatch and Lock, Stock, Jason Flemyng and Dexter Fletcher. Flemyng became Vaughn’s lucky charm, appearing in his first four movies in some capacity, much like Greg Grumberg does for J.J. Abrams. There you go, an SAT-style relationship sentence I never thought I’d write: Jason Flemyng is to Matthew Vaughn as Greg Grumberg is to J.J. Abrams. My original review in 2005 highlighted Michael Gambon as the biggest honcho, the top tier of this criminal layer cake. I wrote: “He plays Eddie Temple, the man behind the men behind the scenes. Gambon delivers the harshest of speeches with a velvety pragmatic calm. We don’t know what runs deeper with Eddie, his tan or his scheming.” He’s so good at being so malevolent without ever having to raise his voice or anything outwardly hostile.
This movie has a personal factor for me because I was so highly anticipating it that, during a trip through the British Isles with my father in May 2005, I bought it on VHS overseas. I naively thought that while DVDs had different regions to thwart piracy, that VHS tapes would be rather universal considering it’s just tape being read. I got home, popped it into my American machine, and the thing wouldn’t work. This was one of the biggest souvenirs I got for myself during that trip, which my father wanted to embark as something memorable we could share together, and now that he’s recently passed, I do think back on those experiences and part of me wishes my 23-year-old self would have been more actively appreciative. So now with Layer Cake, part of me will always think about that VHS tape, and that trip, and my father, and it will make me miss him more, but I am glad we got to share that experience.
Ever since I’ve been doing this re-review project, now going on five years, it’s a relief to see my twenty-year-younger self having written a smart and articulate review, especially when I mostly agree with it even so many years later. Again, I find myself nodding along to just about everything I had written with my past critique, from singing the praises of Craig and the general examination of day-to-day anxiety, to shaking my head at the underdeveloped Sienna Miller character served as little more than a trophy for our hero to take with him into retirement. It still is a movie overstuffed with characters and storylines and antics that probably could have been trimmed around the edges, but that same burdensome feeling connects with the emotional state of our lead, the anxious feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to achieve it, so in a way, it’s excusable. I don’t know if I think the movie is quite at the same level, calling it “thoroughly exhilarating” seems a bit much, but Layer Cake is still a movie that proves fresh even twenty years later, and one worth a second helping.
Re-View Grade: A-
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The Monkey (2025)
It was only minutes when I thought to myself, “I think I love this movie.” To be fair, this movie might only jibe for a very select few with a penchant for gory, outlandish horror and a demented sense of humor, but it just so happens that specific population includes yours truly. The Monkey is a dark comedy about the cruel indifference of fate disguised as a supernatural thriller adaptation of a Stephen King short story. It’s about two twin brothers (both played by Theo James as an adult) coming to terms with a family curse, a toy monkey that, when wound up, will beat its drum until the final blow correlates with the sudden, often shocking death of a random person. It’s essentially a death device and the brothers are haunted by it since losing both of their parents to it as teenagers, both grasping for meaning from their tragedy. One of them blames himself and the other blames his brother, and this has warped them into adulthood and how they view themselves, their responsibility as a parent, and their hostility to one another. The movie becomes a cagey reunion between the two brothers while also vying for power over a dangerous totem that loves elaborate Final Destination-style calamities. These deaths are over-the-top, often with bodies exploding in bloody heaps, and I found myself cackling along in response to the ridiculous violence. This is quite a change of pace for writer/director Osgood Perkins who just last year helmed the Satanic serial killer thriller Longlegs. Whereas that movie was a bit too lost in its slow-build atmosphere and a jumbled story burdened with underdeveloped plot elements, The Monkey is refreshingly straightforward and always entertaining in its contained madness. There are some bold and dark choices made and I appreciated every one of them. This is really a movie about trying to make sense of death and grief but it’s through the visage of spilled viscera and gallows humor. I didn’t think I’d walk away saying this, but I can’t wait to show my wife the movie about the killer windup monkey.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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