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Send Help (2026)
I am grateful for Sam Raimi and I’m even more grateful for Sam Raimi movies. The director began in low-budget gore-fests with a dash of goofy slapstick to balance the gross-out gratuity, and these sensibilities have never left the man. He enlivens any genre he works in, from Western (The Quick and the Dead), to superhero (original Spider-Man trilogy, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness), and the occasional awards-drama crime tragedy (A Simple Plan). But the man is at his best on his home turf of horror/thrillers with his gonzo style and devilish sense of humor. Send Help is the most unabashedly “Sam Raimi movie” since 2009’s Drag Me to Hell, which already makes it worth your time. It’s basically the schlockier, more condensed and focused version of Triangle of Sadness, even borrowing a similar premise of a put-upon corporate subordinate (Rachel McAdams) and her fussy, misogynist, blowhard of a boss (Dylan O’Brien) are stranded on a deserted island and the power dynamics flip. Now she’s the one in charge because she has leaned several survivalist skills thanks to her aspirations to being a contestant on the reality TV show Survivor. As the movie progresses, what I really appreciated was the level of nuance given to both of these stranded characters. It would be all too easy to make her character impossibly noble, and the screenplay adds some intriguing dimensions that make you question some of her motives. It would be all too easy to make his character irredeemably evil, and while you’re never going to be in anger of switching loyalties, the screenplay provides shades of empathy to him too. I also appreciated how nasty the movie gets, both in lurches of horror comedy zaniness, but also in how nasty the characters get to one another. McAdams is wonderful, though even the concerted effort to “ugly up” a Hollywood starlet amounts to frump sweaters and a dash of tuna fish. There was no point I wasn’t entertained, especially from the shifting dynamic between the two leads. I may be in a minority here but Send Help is a better developed and more satisfying version of Best Picture-nominee Triangle of Sadness. It made me laugh and cower. May we never be without new Sam Raimi movies.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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No Other Choice (2025)
The title of the Korean movie No Other Choice is spoken, in English actually, a few minutes into the movie. It’s the brief, unhelpful reasoning from an American exec that just bought a South Korean paper company and is reducing the local labor force. Our main character, Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), has been work-shopping his spirited speech about how important these jobs are to appeal to the American businessmen, and then when it comes time to deliver, he’s reduced to chasing them down as they quickly depart. Before he can even get into a second poorly-formed sentence, the exec cuts him off by saying, “No other choice,” and then sidles into the protective safety of a chauffeured vehicle. The implication is that this business has to reduce its labor force to stay profitable, and yet rarely is this so simple. In legendary director Park Chan-wook’s (Old Boy, Decision to Leave) latest, characters will often repeat the title of the movie as a deference to guilt, that they were forced to make hard decisions because those were the only decisions that could be had. Unfortunately, as this mordantly funny, exciting, and intelligent movie proves, people have a way of deluding themselves when it comes to finding justifications for their bad behavior and greed.
The real plot of No Other Choice is Man-su’s readjustment. In the beginning, we see the life he’s built for his family, his wife Lee Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), stepson Si-one, and daughter Ri-one, with their two big dogs. After a year of job searching, Man-su is bouncing from one job to another, and the family has been forced to make cutbacks to their lifestyle (“No Netflix?!” the son says in shock). Lee Mi-ri takes on a part-time job as a dental assistant to a hunky doctor. The dogs are shipped to Lee Mi-ri’s parents. Ri-one might have to stop her expensive cello lessons, which is a big deal as her teacher says the Autistic child is a prodigy, but her parents never hear her play. The paterfamilias needs to find a good job fast. That’s when Man-su gets the idea to post a fake job for a paper company manager to better scope out his competition. He takes the top applicants, the guys he acknowledges would be hired ahead of him, and creates a list. From there, Man-su pledges to track them down and eliminate them so his own odds of being rehired climb up.
The movie keeps shifting in new directions and tones with each new target, and it creates a much more fascinating and intriguing experience. I loved how each of the targeted rivals is treated differently and how each of these men come across as people who are struggling, hopeful, and quite like our beleaguered protagonist. There are good reasons why this movie has been described as Chan-wook’s Parasite, his culminating condemnation on the pitfalls of capitalism, how it pits peers against one another when they should be allies. Man-su views each man as his competition, impediments to him getting that prized position. However, each of these people is far more complicated than just their resume. At any time the movie could stop on a dime and just have two strangers, one of them intending to possibly kill the other, just have a heartfelt conversation about the difficulties of providing for your children and knowing that there are hard limitations that cannot be overcome. One man is struggling to adapt to a new marketplace after working in the paper industry for twenty years, and Man-su even echoes the complaints from the man’s wife, chiefly that he could have applied himself to other industries and jobs, that he didn’t have to be so discriminating when it came to a paycheck. Now, from her perspective, she’s arguing this point because she feels he is not casting a wider net for promising non-paper job opportunities. From Man-su’s perspective, he’s chiding the man because he doesn’t want to kill him but the guy’s intractability has put him in Man-su’s crosshairs. The unspoken comment is that Man-su is doing the same thing. At no point does he really consider getting a different job and thus being in a position where he does not feel forced to literally eliminate his best competition. He too is just as stubborn and blind to his own intractability. The system has a way of turning men against one another in order to boost a corporate balance sheet. This movie is just taking things a little further to the extreme when it comes to cutthroat competition.
I also appreciated that the movie has a larger canvas when it comes to charting the ups and downs of its conspiracy. Man-su’s wife is not kept as some afterthought, you know the kind of movie where the husband goes on these wild journeys of the soul and his wife is just as home going, “Where have you been?” She’s an active member of her household and she is not blind to their financial shortfalls nor her husband’s increasingly worrying behavior and absences. She’s worried her husband may have begun drinking again after years of sobriety and peace. She makes attempts to reconnect with her distant husband, who is becoming more consumed with jealousy about her boss and his desirability. She’s not just the doting spouse or concerned spouse. She’s a resourceful character who recognizes problems. When another threat to their family materializes, Lee Mi-ri takes it upon herself to find a solution. Naturally, given the premise, whenever you have one member of a couple doing dastardly deeds, whether they get caught by their partner is a primary point of tension, as well as if so, how will their partner respond. I think the track that Chan-wook and co-writers Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKeller, and Le Ja-hye decide is perfect for the story that has been established and especially for the darker satirical tone of the enterprise.
Despite the murder and gnawing guilt, No Other Choice is also a very funny dark comedy as it channels the absurdity of its premise. It’s always a plus to have amateur murderers actually come across as awkward. Just because they decide to make that moral leap shouldn’t translate into them being good at killing. There’s unexpected humor to Man-su’s amateur stalking and preparations. He’s also not immune to the aftereffects of his actions, getting queasy with having to dispose of these men and thinking of the best ways to obscure his physical presence from crime scenes (there was one moment I was literally screaming at the screen because I thought he forgot a key detail). Lee Byung-hun (Squid Games) is terrific as our lead and finds such fascinating reactions as the movie effortlessly alters its style and tone, one minute asking him to engage in silly slapstick and the next heartfelt rumination. I don’t think the film would be nearly as successful without his sturdy performance serving as our foundation. You really do feel for him and his plight, and perhaps more than a few viewers might feel the urge for Man-su to get away with it. The culmination of the first target is a masterful sequence where three characters all have a different misunderstanding of one another as they literally wrestle for a gun inside an oven mitt. It’s one of those moments in movies where you can stop and think about all the small choices that got us here and appreciate the careful plotting from the screenwriters. I found myself guffawing at various points throughout the movie and I think many others will have the same wonderfully wicked reaction.
I could go on about the movie but hopefully I’ve done enough to convince you, dear reader, to give No Other Choice the ultimate decision for your potential entertainment. It’s a movie that covers plenty and leaves you deeply satisfied by its final minutes, feeling like you’ve just eaten a full meal. The ending is note-perfect, but then I could say just about every scene beforehand is also at that same artistic level. I won’t go so far as some of my critical brethren declaring this as Chan-wook’s best movie; I’ll always fall back on 2016’s The Handmaiden, also an adaptation of an English novel, much like No Other Choice (would you believe the source materiel is from the same author who gave us the novel for Play Dirty?). Regardless, this is exceptional filmmaking with a story that grabs you, surprises you, and glues you to the screen because you don’t know what may happen next (Patricia Highsmith would have loved this film).
Nate’s Grade: A
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Bugonia (2025)
A remake of a 2003 South Korean movie, Bugonia is an engaging conflict that needed further restructuring and smoothing out to maximize its entertainment potential. Jessie Plemons stars as a disturbed man beholden to conspiracy theories, namely that the Earth is populated with aliens among us that are plotting humanity’s doom. He kidnaps his corporate boss, a cold and cutthroat CEO (Emma Stone), who he is convinced is really an Andromedan and can connect him with the other aliens. The problem here is that the story can only go two routes. Either Plemons’ character is just a dangerous nutball and has convinced himself of his speculation and this will lead to tragic results, or his character will secretly be right despite the outlandish nature and specificity of his conspiracy claims. Once you accept that, it should become more clear which path offers a more memorable and interesting story. The appeal of this movie is the tense hostage negotiation where this woman has to wonder how to play different angles to seek her freedom from a deranged kidnapper. Both actors are at their best when they’re sparring with one another, but I think it was a mistake to establish so much of Plemons and his life before and during the kidnapping. I think the perspective would have been improved following Stone from the beginning and learning as she does, rather than balancing the two sides in preparation. The bleak tone is par for a Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things) movie but the attempts at humor, including some over-the-top gore as slapstick, feel more forced and teetering. I never found myself guffawing at any of the absurdity because it’s played more for menace. The offbeat reality that populates a Lanthimos universe is too constrained to the central characters, making the world feel less heightened and weird and therefore the characters are the outliers. I enjoyed portions of this movie, and Stone’s performance has so many layers in every scene, but Bugonia feels like an engaging premise that needed more development and focus to really get buggy.
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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Honey Don’t (2025)
It’s the second collaboration between Ethan Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke and reportedly the second in their “B-movie lesbian trilogy” (the planned third film is tentatively titled Go Beavers). It’s better than 2024’s Drive-Away Dolls, a randy cartoon that was so overpowering and underwhelming. This time the filmmakers play around in the film noir genre with Margaret Qualley as a wily private eye, Honey O’Donahue. The whodunnit plot is a series of disconnected threads and plotlines that don’t connect together in interesting or surprising ways. It begins with an immediate mystery: a woman, dressed right out of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, walking down an embankment to inspect an overturned auto and the body inside. Boom. I’m intrigued right away. Sadly, this might be the high point. A third of Honey Don’t involves Chris Evans playing a debauched minister selling drugs on the side and exploiting his congregation. His storyline seems to run in parallel with Honey’s investigation without really crossing in meaningful ways. It even resolves without her intervention. It’s also incredibly dull and repetitive, with Evans’ reverend being interrupted during sex multiple times for comedy, I guess. Honey Don’t exists as a winky flip on the noir genre, this time with lesbians! It doesn’t so much feel like a compelling story with colorful characters as it does a writing exercise. Qualley fares better as the straight-laced yet flirty private eye than she did as the horny caricature in Drive-Away Dolls. She’s got a self-possessed charisma and determination that works. If only the rest of the movie didn’t repeatedly let her down. It’s not offensively bad, or even as aggressively cringey as their previous collaboration, but Honey Don’t is another middling, daffy, disposable genre riff by Ethan Coen that makes me long for an eventual reunion with his brother.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Friendship (2025)
If you’re a fan of Tim Robinson’s brand of weird, cringe-inducing comedy that can accelerate in intensity or abrasiveness at a moment’s notice, then Friendship may indeed be the comedy of the year for you. I’ve never watched Robinson’s popular Netflix sketch comedy series, so consider me a novice to the man’s style of locked-in irony and chagrin. To say I “enjoyed” Friendship would be inaccurate. It exists on a comedy plane where I can mentally step back, assess the particulars, and often the sheer commitment to the bit, and think, “This is schematically funny.” Do I actually laugh out loud? Rarely. It’s a comedy that might be easier to admire for its jaunts into sudden weirdness and discomfort then it is to say you love the movie. Robinson plays a boring middle-aged man starting a new adult friendship with his new neighbor, played by Paul Rudd. It’s a comedy of errors as Rudd wises up to how weird and potentially unstable his newest friend can be, and he decides to end their brief friendship. Imagine taking a broad studio bromance like I Love You, Man, also starring Rudd, and mixing it through the perspective of Big Fan, the obsessive loner drama. There are a few amusing sidesteps, like when Robinson’s wife (Kate Mara) literally gets lost in the town’s system of sewers, or when he tries licking a psychedelic toad only to hallucinate a trip to Subway and feeling cheated from a better trip. The actors are all on the same wavelength, committed to selling the jokes by pretending no such jokes exist in this universe. I laughed occasionally but mostly shrugged my shoulders, hoping it would hit a new gear that never came.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Opus (2025)
Ever want to watch a second-rate version of The Menu and be left wondering why you didn’t just watch The Menu? That was my main takeaway watching the indie horror/comedy (?) Opus, a darkly satirical look at the music industry and specifically cults of personality. John Malkovich plays Alfred Moretti, an exalted and reclusive musical genius who has earned numerous awards and built a devoted fandom. He’s invited six special guests to a listening party for his new album, the first since his mysterious retirement. It just so happens that party is at his compound and the guests are tended to by a cult of devotees. From there, people start to go missing and weirdness ensues. I was waiting throughout the entirety of Opus for something, anything to really grab me. These are good actors. It’s a premise that has potential. Alas, the movie is uneven and under developed and I found my interest draining the longer it went. The music satire isn’t specific or sharp enough to draw blood or genuine laughs. The weirdness of life on the compound is pretty bland, with the exception of a museum devoted to Moretti’s childhood home that is explored during the climax. The characters are too stock and boring, not really even succeeding as industry send-ups. The music itself is also pretty lackluster, but the movie doesn’t have the courage to argue that the cult has formed around a hack. In the world of Opus, Moretti is an inarguable musical genius. We needed the main character, played by Ayo Edebiri (The Bear), to be an agnostic, someone who doesn’t get the appeal of this musical maven and can destruct his pomposity. Alas, the obvious horror dread of the followers being a murder cult is never given more thought. It’s fine that Opus has familiar horror/cult elements (The Menu, Midsommar, Blink Twice, etc.) but it doesn’t do anything different or interesting with them. It’s obvious and dull without any specific personality to distinguish itself, and if maybe that was the argument against the cult leader, I might see a larger creative design. Instead, it all feels so listless. When the weird cult movie can’t even work up many weird details about its weird cult, then you’re watching a movie that is confused about themes and genre.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Death of a Unicorn (2025)
Unfortunately, this never became the glorious B-movie its premise promises, a monster movie with ghastly gore that also satirizes the rich business elites. Death of a Unicorn has enough appealing elements, from the father/daughter relationship between Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega, to some ridiculous gore and kills, to impressive creature prosthetics to bring the unicorn to life (and death). The setup has Rudd and Ortega run over a unicorn in a secluded nature reserve on their way to meet dad’s boss. They discover the unicorn blood can be miraculously healing, which is a fortuitous discovery considering Rudd’s boss runs a pharmaceutical company. You can see where this goes, especially when you learn that there are more unicorns out there and they are not happy. It becomes a wily creature feature from there, with unicorns picking off the characters one-by-one as they try and escape. The satirical broadsides are a bit too broad, thus only really glancing in their pointed attacks that the people in charge of medical care are themselves venal and selfish. Got it. Much of the humor is related directly to the absurdity of watching a unicorn as a blood-thirsty monster. If you replaced the unicorn with, say, a yeti, would the situation still be amusing? Maybe, but I seriously doubt it. Death of a Unicorn could have been a little scarier, funnier, even freakier, and maybe carried through on the courage of its convictions.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Mountainhead (2025)
Mountainhead is the first project from writer Jesse Armstrong after the award-winning run of HBO’s Succession. His latest excoriating black comedy takes aim at the tech bro billionaire class and their destructive narcissism during a weekend getaway that descends from petty dick-swinging to plotting a worldwide coup. We’re trapped in this glittering lodge with four selfish billionaires (Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, Cory Michael Smith) turning on one another. We’re never meant to empathize with them, only disdain their grievances and slights and unchecked egos and oblivious nature to taking accountability. One of them has released a new generative A.I. that is creating chaos around the globe, with sectarian violence fomenting and the public having a difficult time telling reality from fakery meant to enrage and divide. There’s a lot of phone checking in the movie. Listening to their banter can be like being in a tailspin of self-important CEO tech jargon as they actively dismantle society. The problem is that the movie feels like its stewing in a lower gear for so long, waiting for some escalation or encroaching insight. Then there’s a significant jump for its final act that doesn’t feel set up, and the tone of the movie is too indifferent to expect serious blood by the end. It’s a movie that gets by in its cutting remarks and retorts, but I grew tired of all the peacocking and pomposity of these supposed friends because it felt like the same conversation on repeat without new details or insights. The foursome do well but the real acting standout is Smith (Gotham’s Edward Nygma) as the pathetically vain and insecure Venis. Here is a man you will want to punch in hs smug, grinning face. Mountainhead feels like an under-developed episode for Succession that needed more shaping and direction with its blizzard of down time with bad people.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Heart Eyes (2025)/ Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025)
Slasher movies have been a popu;ar staple of horror, enough so to go through different phases of resurgence and ironic reinterpretation. They rose to prominence in the 1980s but are still wildly popular today, perhaps proving that there’s something timeless about a masked maniac chasing after dumb teenagers with his or her weapon of choice. Mix in heavy amounts of blood and gratuitous nudity, and it’s easy to see why this cost-effective entertainment strategy continues to endure. Two new 2025 slasher movies show the highs and middling lows of this horror genre known for its graphic kills and little else.
Heart Eyes is ostensibly about a romance-hating masked killer who stalks happy couples on Valentine’s Day and gets all stabby with their insides. However, it’s really a pretty charming romantic comedy that just so happens to also have a healthy amount of gore. The clever screenplay follows many of the same tropes we come to expect from the rom-com genre but now with a twist. It’s Boy Meets Girl, as Jay (Mason Gooding) and Ally (Olivia Holt) are forced to work together to save a romantic ad campaign gone wrong. It’s Girl getting over the pain of her recent breakup with the emergence of a handsome new man in town. It’s Guy and Girl butting heads before creating sparks. And then they’re chased repeatedly by the masked killer. They yell, “We’re not even a couple,” but it makes no difference; their chemistry is just that undeniable. In that regard, this murder menace is actively driving these two would-be lovebirds together, forcing them to rely upon one another for survival, and revealing parts of themselves. If you cut out all the horror parts, it would still work as a romance, but it’s even more entertaining to watch how the two genres, both beholden to their formulas, mash so bloody well. The banter is witty, the silly are over-the-top gory, and this is a rare movie that could be loved by gorehounds and foolish romantics. It’s an elevation that is self-aware but not obnoxiously, more silly tongue-firmly-in-cheek. You can tell there is a love for both of these genres from the filmmakers. Heart Eyes is a fun and refreshing spin on the old.
The newest Fear Street movie, based on the scream teen novels by R.L.Stein, is by far the weakest in the Netflix horror anthology series. Prom Queen is a pretty straightforward rehash of your 1980s high school movie staples of horny teens, bitchy popular girls, the less popular girl striving for Prom Queen and having to reconcile the changes she’s willing to make to be a winner, and a knife-wielding killer. Ah, the nostalgia. The issue is that there’s nothing separating this movie from, say, Prom Night, either the 1980 original or the PG-13 remake in 2008. The most thought put into this movie is the gruesome kills with some decent gore, but the whole movie doesn’t even play like a cartoon. It plays like a TV special you’ve watched before, something not just outdated but that’s been iterated upon iterations, a bland copy of a copy of a copy. The mystery of who might be the killer has some slight fun but the culprit should be easy enough to suss out when you take into account what actors have names that you remember. There’s nothing wrong with emphasizing the more gruesome exploitation elements of the genre, but the kills aren’t that memorable or clever, nor are the characters that interesting even as generic stock roles. I found myself confusing many of the multiple Prom Queen candidates (why are there so many pale brunettes?). The previous Fear Street movies released in 2022 had an interesting gimmick connecting them with the history of the town going back centuries to explain its crushed nature. Prom Queen just exists in this space without doing anything to connect to the larger Shadyside mythos and cross-generational storytelling. It feels so dreary and perfunctory and rather boring, shuffling along like a zombie wearing the husk of Fear Street. It’s just not fun. It’s not outlandish enough to be silly and too dumb to be self-aware. It’s mostly unimaginative cliches warmed over and unrelated to a far more stylish and ambitious horror series. This is a Prom Queen that deserves a bucket of blood and social ostracism instead of any accolades.
Nate’s Grades:
Heart Eyes: B+
Fear Street: Prom Queen: C-
nathanzoebl 
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