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The Last House (2026)
What begins as a clear allegory for COVID lockdown with a supernatural, Twilight Zone twist unravels quickly to be a muddled, confused, and disappointing monster movie that feels far too busy and silly for a movie this self-serious. The Last House starts off promisingly with a mysterious rain that essentially traps everyone in their homes, acting like a superglue force field. From there it becomes a question over if you were trapped in your home, what could you do to survive? At first it’s just general boredom with a family of four, and the parents (Wagner Moura, Greta Lee) trying to maintain their sanity. As weeks pass, it becomes a more pressing question over resources and food. I was expecting the movie to get creative with solving its in-universe dilemmas, but some of those solutions feel rather arbitrary and cheap. Why is there still electricity? If the rain is presented as creating a barrier, why is a hole in the chimney somehow able to circumvent this rule? There’s a whole lot of animal death in the movie, including mercy-killing the family dog and literally using its chopped carcass to lure small woodland creatures into a improvised fishing trap. It would be more disturbing if it wasn’t so ridiculous. I’ll credit the script for a major time jump because it renewed my flagging interest, trying to analyze what growing up in this extreme setting could do to a new generation who have only really known a strange world of isolation. I suppose that wasn’t interesting enough to Netflix because the last 40 minutes of the movie are about fighting Lovecraftian monsters that are, I guess, controlling the rains and just messing with people. Much like the characters onscreen, the movie is trying to do as much with what little resources it has left. The movie combusts at an alarming rate once it becomes an incomprehensible monster movie, and incomprehensible about even following the quick-cut action onscreen, which is obscured by the editing but also a majority of the scenes being underwater. The actors are wasted, the ideas are wasted, and The Last House doesn’t even give us the benefit of a true ending, instead previewing what a Last House(s) franchise could like like. I’d rather stay inside and eat the remains of my dog.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)
Despite being arguably the most beloved superhero of our era, once again proven by its vaunted box-office performance, it sure does seem like it sucks to be Spider-Man. The fourth film with Tom Holland as your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man examines the fallout from 2021’s No Way Home, with the whole world having forgotten about poor Peter Parker. He’s lost his friends, he’s lost his love, and he’s lost his Avengers allies, but he keeps on plugging along, working alongside the police and the Department of Damage Control, tasked with housing super threats that prisons cannot contain. There’s a mysterious new threat, a person with the powers to control minds through proximity but has to leap from person to person like psychic tag. The movie excels at the action-adventure shenanigans, with new director Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi) providing the visual fireworks, including slow-mo splash page imagery taken from the pages of Spider-Man’s famous comic covers. There’s fun to be had as Hulk and the Punisher (Jon Bernthal) are mixed into the story, especially when they have to battle each other. You don’t introduce a ninja clan in Act One without knowing there will be a ninja fight in Act Three (I think Chekhov said that once). The best parts of this movie are not the Spider-Man heroics and action but the Peter Parker moments, which are somber, sincere, and nicely felt by the young cast that has grown into their characters over a decade. There’s a rich emotional investment built up, and Brand New Day takes its time to dwell in Peter’s downturn before setting him on a better path. There’s one moment with Mary Jane (Zendaya) that caused me to gasp out loud. I really enjoyed how there isn’t a sleight-of-hand secondary antagonist; it’s who we follow, and they have an interesting connection/parallel to Peter, and I especially liked that the climax of the movie is about a division over mercy and forgiveness rather than punching an army of faceless robots or stopping a giant sky beam of world annihilation. These modern Spider-Man movies are consistently very entertaining but also emotionally engrossing, and they do something unique with their villains, providing more surprises and nuance and perspective-shifts than just about any other superhero franchise. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is not so much a reinvention of the character or the series but further confirmation that we have the right people making these movies matter.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Masters of the Universe (2026)
Masters of the Universe is an intriguing conundrum. It was a box-office failure upon release, as it seems few people wanted to venture out for a reboot of a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon that was created to primarily sell toys for Mattel. It was an expensive flop, and then upon its arrival to Amazon Prime and wide availability, the movie has since become one of the most streamed movies in Amazon history. I think I can explain this. The fan base for this franchise is dwindling with aging Millennials and few felt a big-budget remake was a necessary theater appointment, but in the privacy of your own home, and thinking back on the bad headlines and buzz, you might find yourself just like me, remarking, “I am actually digging this. Why were people so harsh?” It’s a candy-colored meta-fantasy adventure that rips Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) into the real world for some fish-out-of-water comedy, then reunites him back as an adult into his home world, Eternia, under the sway of the dark lord, Skeletor (Jared Leto). The tone is clearly inspired by Taika Watiti’s Thor: Ragnarok, keeping things breezy while side-stepping the more ridiculous elements with an eyebrow-raise. I actually enjoyed the explanation that the very simplistic names for the characters, such as Fisto and Ram-Man, were because Adam was a kid when he was deported and that’s what a kid would recall. The joke does run up to the line of excess, and it’s not alone, but I think overall the tone is so unabashedly fun that I could forgive missteps or annoyances. Under direction by Travis Knight, a man from the world of stop-motion animation, the big screen visuals are crisp, dynamic, and consistently making excellent use of the space of the frame, something I find that directors with animation experience really utilize better. There are nice character moments I appreciated (“Your dad’s gonna turn around any second and see… any second now…”), entertaining fights and locations, and maybe my favorite Leto performance in… years? He’s actually quite enjoyable as the contemptuous baddie. I never cared in the slightest for He-Man and the cartoon growing up, so I have no built-in nostalgia for this franchise, but even I found myself enjoying the characters, their comradery, and the confrontations. It’s hard not to be cheesy or goofy given the subject matter, but I think Masters of the Universe threads the needle as well as could be between reverence and irreverence. It may not be masterful but it’s plenty entertaining and fun and, certainly with lowered expectations, a perfectly fine way to unwind over two hours at home.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)
It’s been nearly a decade since director Gore Verbinski’s last movie, 2016’s A Cure for Wellness, and his dynamic visual style, impish sense of humor, and general prevailing oddness have been sorely missed in mainstream Hollywood. Here comes the creatively titled Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, which is accompanied by cheering children shouting he title whenever it appears onscreen. It’s a satirical sci-fi parable with its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. At 134 minutes, it plays like an entire season of Black Mirror episodes hung together with a wacky time travel adventure caper. Sam Rockwell plays The Man From the Future, actually his character name, though he looks like a scraggly hobo when he stumbles into a diner wrapped in trash and what appears to be a bomb. He uncorks a hyperactive speech informing the patrons he is from the future, that future is very bad thanks to technology, and he has come to this diner over 100 times previously because he is convinced within this eatery is some combination of the right people that will help him ensure this nightmare future never comes to be. Immediately, the screenplay by Matthew Robinson (The Invention of Lying, Love & Monsters) grabs you and refuses to let go, bouncing off the walls with ideas, gags, and manic energy mixed with trenchant commentary about the perils of technology in our crushing age of doom scrolling and diversion. Even better, the movie keeps shifting and surprising every so often. The structure is broken into a series of extended vignettes showcasing different members of the team and their personal back-stories, each treated like its own Black Mirror episode covering some different nefarious aspect of modern technology, from a school of student zombies addicted to their cell phones to a secret program that clones deceased children for the right price, though the government foots the bill if your kid was a victim in a school shooting. You can see the mordant tone and perspective of the movie. It gets dark but at no point is it suffocated by that darkness. Instead, Verbinski keeps things sure-footed and breezy, relying upon slapstick, goofy humor, sudden bloody violence, and layered revelations to maintain a consistent sense of entertainment. I don’t think there’s an emotional investment in the movie, and a very late revelation feels like a hasty attempt to force some in when that ship has sailed. I don’t mind that the film’s tone can be rather snide because its aim is strident anti-A.I. satire. It’s also easy to feel that many of the supporting players don’t get as much to do as they’re dragged along on this quest, especially after Zazie Beetz showed how capable she was as a formidable action heroine with They Will Kill You. Still, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a gonzo, violent, inventive, macabre whirlwind that invites the audience to laugh at the chaos and downturn of modern society. Hey, watching this screen is actually part of the solution, not the problem.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Supergirl (2026)
I have implicit faith in James Gunn as a filmmaker. He’s earned my trust over the decades, especially in the realm of superhero cinema, and especially after his rip-roaring and reverential relaunch of Superman in 2025. However, when it comes to James Gunn the reigning head of DC movies and television, well, I have more reservations. When he took over the high-profile position and plotted the new direction of DC cinema after the ignoble death of the Snyderverse, Gunn claimed that he would stress quality over quantity, particularly that the studio would not move forward with a project unless he felt the script was great. It’s a nice sentiment considering Marvel movies have for so long retooled and rewritten on the fly. However, it’s also a damning statement that can come back to haunt Gunn if any future DC movie has a script that feels, well, let’s say less than great. It’s one of those cautionary statements, like a politician saying, “I’ve never lied and I’ve never cheated on my wife.” You’re already priming your skepticism.
Enter 2026’s Supergirl, based on a highly regarded eight-issue comic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by renowned author Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely. I’ve read the 2021-2022 series, being an enormous fan of King ever since his astonishing and award-winning Vision series, and I can see why Gunn would model Supergirl’s big-screen relaunch with this story. It’s essentially a sci-fi version of True Grit, a familiar formula that’s easy to grab an audience with salient themes about vengeance, forgiveness, duty, and responsibility in a world that often feels too indifferent (a frequent repeated refrain is “It’s too big. We’re too small”). It’s a pretty great story and seemingly a great blueprint for a potentially great movie. Having now seen the Supergirl adaptation, I come back to Gunn’s explicit promise. Did he think this screenplay, by actor-turned-playwright Ana Nogueira, was great? Did he think this movie was ready? The whole of me doubts it, given Gunn’s innate understanding of story and character development from his other blockbusters. Yet, I can also recall Gunn’s company-man hyping of 2023’s Flash movie, saying he genuinely felt it was one of the best superhero movies ever. Audiences generally disagreed. I’m starting to think there are two James Gunns, the filmmaker and the boss. I trust the filmmaker. I don’t know yet about the boss, and Supergirl’s muddled and disappointing execution does not help solidify my faith.
Kara Zor-El a.k.a. Supergirl (Millie Alcock) is touring the galaxy for her birthday. She’s specifically visiting planets with red suns because it neutralizes her alien powers so she can actually feel the inebriating effects of alcohol. She wants nothing to do with quests and the downtrodden and that’s where Ruthye (Eve Ridley) comes in. She’s looking for hired muscle to avenge her family. The marauding Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts) is the leader of the Brigands, space pirates profiting off the abduction and sale of young women in particular. Things get personal for Kara when Krem steals her own spaceship and mortally wounds her dog, Krypto, with a poisoned arrow. Supergirl has three days before her little pooch succumbs to the poison. She sets out with Ruthye to track down Krem, rip the antidote conveniently hanging around his neck at all times, and maybe facilitate some old-fashioned vengeance.
Where did this movie go wrong? I think we have a few culprits and poor decisions when it comes to the development of character arcs, themes, and in general making an audience care. Most people do not have the generational built-in knowledge about Supergirl and her origin, so the movie needs to be an introduction for us and provide a compelling reason why we should care about this latest hero. Having an arc where a character begins in an isolated, self-loathing, and cynical place only to become more engaged, motivated, and virtuous is a common arc, the stuff of Westerns and the like, the redemptive story of the old gunslinger who learns to fight for something bigger than himself. As evidenced in Supergirl, she’s reclusive and drowning herself in alcohol because of her survivor’s guilt, being one of only two Krytonians, along with her cousin Kal-El, a.k.a. Superman. She doesn’t feel at home, both literally when it comes to a place to call her own as well as within her own skin as a person. She certainly turns up her nose at the idea of being a hero or let alone the prospect of do-gooders. She says, “Clark sees the good in people. I see them for how they really are.” You can see where this is going as far as a character arc. It should be an important and triumphant moment when she, at long last, dons the Supergirl outfit, something she had dismissively rejected earlier. We should care. I still recall how emotional it was for many to watch Wonder Woman triumphantly walk across No Man’s Land in full regalia. The moment in Supergirl is more of a shrug because Kara is mostly a shrug of a character. I don’t think the screenplay presents enough to invest an audience’s emotions into her journey. Part of this is because the entire story feels confused and muddled, so for her to have self-epiphanies made me say, “Uh, really?”
That’s because this character arc goes into a dismaying place, with Supergirl making a choice at the end that seems counter-productive to being a more virtuous example for others. I think she argues she’s sparing an innocent from having to live with something they will regret that could change them, not to allow them to become as hardened and hurt as Kara. But isn’t she also reforming? Doesn’t that say something about starting over with redemption? Also, we’re not given a sufficient back-story that delivers a credible life Supergirl would not wish others to follow. With some later flashbacks, which I think could have served as the opening five minutes, we see Kara’s tragic back-story, losing her planet, then her family, then her adopted home, the only one she’s ever known up until landing on Earth. It’s tragic but it’s not like she’s suffering because of her own mistakes she has to live with. What ills from her past is she trying to prevent others from repeating? The circumstances are not exactly immediately repeatable.
As we begin, Ruthye wants sweet vengeance whereas Kara is indifferent. That’s different from Kara being indifferent to life, reliant upon her super strength to pummel people into submission as her first option. You could begin with her prone to solving every problem with violence and then end on her recognizing the harm of violence and the power of mercy. That’s an identifiable arc. Same with Ruthye going from upstart on an adventure to a more sure-handed and capable fighter, gaining confidence and certainty and learning about the emptiness of vengeance to bring personal closure. The movie doesn’t really do that either. Ruthye is a wet blanket of a character prone to whining, and by the end of the movie, she’s just as hapless in a battle as she was in the beginning. I don’t want to overly harp on the differences with the source material, but in the original comic, the entire story was told from Ruthye’s perspective as our narrator, and she was verbose and assertive, essentially the same persona of Mattie Ross from True Grit, with Supergirl being our curmudgeonly Rooster Cogburn. It made her more relatable and interesting. Now she’s been turned into a sulky teenager who gets rewarded with partying with her new friend.
Director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella) has been directing for nearly twenty years, going back to 2007’s Lars and the Real Girl. He’s a versatile director but seems to lean toward the quirk, with a heavy dash of Scorsese stylistics like fourth-wall breaks, flashy camera movements, and specific music cues. I don’t know if he was wrong for this material because I don’t think any director would necessarily rise above this script and its problems. The characters’ arcs are muddled. The villain is a dud, which is why they make him a sex trafficker midway through, because he lacks more definition beyond having a bedazzled 1990s jean jacket’s worth of studs embedded in his face. There’s also the frequency of Supergirl losing her powers. I know it’s to provide some danger and stakes since she’s so overpowered to skew the battles, but this happens literally four times. At some point, Krem shoots her with kryptonite arrows, but if she isn’t widely known across the universe, why would he assume these would be effective? Regardless, the action scenes are relatively lackluster and visually sludgy. Much of the movie takes place in dust-heavy desert dwellings, so it makes the movie feel like you want to wipe the camera lens. I can see the Mad Max: Fury Road leanings, especially with rescuing captive wives from janky biker gangs, but if we were going this route, why not make it central from the beginning? The tone of the movie is going for a jokey, breezy, attitude with-a-capital-A Guardians of the Galaxy vibe but it doesn’t work. It feels too forced and phony, the pale imitator of Gunn’s signature prankster anarchy. Too much of the movie feels like disparate elements thrown together over a prolonged and chaotic editing and re-shoot period. The finished film feels far from cohesive, and while that’s not exactly all Gillespie’s fault, he doesn’t save it.
Jason Momoa (Aquaman) is simultaneously perfect for the role of intergalactic bounty hunter Lobo as well as completely extraneous to this movie. He doesn’t belong and takes away from important time we could have been building the characterization and arcs for our leading ladies. And yet, there was a transparently obvious way to make Lobo more integrated into the story, so much that it is baffling to me that the filmmakers didn’t utilize it. Lobo is after one of the other Brigands to bring him in for a bounty, a guy we never really get to know. Why isn’t Krem his sought-after bounty? Having this character trying to capture Krem would immediately improve his involvement in the narrative. Now instead of just being a guy on his own tangentially related solo mission, now he’s a competitor at cross-purposes with Kara. His appearances now have meaning and he becomes a more urgent threat, the guy who will snatch Krem and deny Supergirl and Ruthye completing their goal. That’s a significant added conflict. Ruthye wants Krem dead. Supergirl wants him alive to save her dog. Lobo just wants him to collect a sizable sum of money. That’s how you do it, and yet the screenplay misses this storytelling avenue. As a result, Lobo feels like an interloper, an occasional fighting ally but more so a haphazardly grafted-on character meant to goose a narrative lacking certain energy or humor. Momoa is perfect as this character (seriously, look up drawings of Lobo, first introduced in 1983) as it allows him to growl, guzzle beer, wisecrack, and act like a carefree badass with more than a nod of machismo buffoonery. He’s having fun, but he could have been more meaningful to the movie rather than a special guest appearance diversion.
Gunn and Gillespie have a well-known affinity for needle-drop songs, but there’s one needle-drop choice in Supergirl that is gasp-inducing in its miscalculation. Plenty of modern blockbusters will marry anachronistic music for specific effect, so I’m not against unorthodox music selections. Not everything needs to be literally on-the-nose like 2016’s Suicide Squad, a movie with so many needle-drop music selections that it served as a lazy narrative shorthand. With Supergirl, there’s a slow-mo sequence toward the climax that circles around Ruthye when she finds herself in the fraught center of battle. As explosions and debris tear around her, with Supergirl zipping to and fro averting possible harm, a lilting song begins with an acoustic guitar followed by a woman singing the lyrics to Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle,” with electronic anthemic flourishes, enough so that makes it feel wrong to those familiar with the early 2000s tune. I generally enjoy tonally different takes on familiar pop songs, but this… does not work. Not only does it not work, it’s astounding how poorly matched this is to the scene. It immediately ripped me out of the movie and made me question the decision-making of so many related to this film. The cover itself is fine from a music standpoint. I have nothing against Kelty Greye and KidMote, the artists responsible. In fact I feel bad for them. They don’t deserve this derision. It’s not their fault. Their song could have been the perfect addition in a different movie. As used in Supergirl, it’s stunningly bad and joins the dishonorable hall of fame along with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” awkwardly playing during sex in Watchmen and the truly bizarre rendition of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by child slaves in Pan.
We’re now two movies into Gunn’s renewed DC film universe, with only two more scheduled on the horizon, a smaller genre experiment following Batman villain Clayface, and Gunn’s Superman sequel in 2027, Man of Tomorrow (maybe why they stripped the comic’s original title from this movie?). There’s not a lot to establish a larger universe of heroes and villains and drama. It’s been almost three years since Gunn announced a new Batman movie directed by Andy Muschietti and we haven’t heard anything else. It’s possible that the expansion of this new filmic universe is on a shorter leash, seeing how a small output performs before investing in a larger vision. I don’t think this movie will help matters. Supergirl is a fairly disappointing entry in the superhero canon, lacking charm and panache and excitement and satisfaction. It fails to make the case for Kara as an engaging character, although Alcock’s performance is fine. There’s just a pervading sense of blandness and a grasping quality where you feel the filmmakers’ indecision. It would be easy to say this was far from super, but I’m going to say Supergirl certainly could have flown much higher.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Disclosure Day (2026)
The prospect of Steven Spielberg returning to the world of aliens and summer blockbusters seems like a match made in heaven, the answer to the prayers of millions of eager moviegoers. Disclosure Day, based on a story Spielberg has been developing for decades, is all about forces trying to alert the world that aliens indeed do exist. The primary figures are Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a government whistle-blower on the run, and Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a local TV meteorologist who is suddenly speaking in foreign tongues, reading people’s minds, and even appearing as different people in the perception of others. Both are on a collision course to find one another and discover a repressed shared past as children. It just so happens there are a lot of armed paramilitary goons who want to stop them.
Disclosure Day is an old-fashioned Spielberg popcorn thriller, for better and for worse. Let’s focus on the good first. It’s an easy movie to get on board with, as the plot moves almost immediately from the start and it becomes one extended series of chases and escapes up until the very end, which makes for an exciting movie that has a definite sense of forward momentum. Does it always make sense? Do you care about the characters? Well, we’ll get more into that later, because right now we’re celebrating what works with Disclosure Day. It’s been eight years since Spielberg made a big-screen blockbuster action-thriller (Ready Player One), albeit it’s been twenty years since he made a great one (2005’s War of the Worlds). He’s been more prone to introspective or technically adventurous filmmaking choices of late, so to have Spielberg readopt the blockbuster mantle, and with aliens no less, feels like a thematic homecoming for the man who defined modern cinema over the last fifty years. He’s always been a little squishy and corny in his approach, and that can certainly be welcomed during trying times such as we find ourselves in (hopefully things have settled and improved when you’re reading this in the future). It’s a familiar yet old-fashioned model for a modern blockbuster that Spielberg helped perfect, so to have him return to this mode and have fun can be rewarding, especially for longtime fans giddy that the master is coming back to the world of extra terrestrials. Spielberg can still position his camera and visual arrangements like nobody else, and just immersing yourself in a masterful cinematic storyteller’s whims can be transporting and uplifting even if you’re not exactly on the same wavelength. In short, it’s gratifying to just experience Spielberg operate in his blockbuster space considering the man is almost 80. Who knows if we’ll ever get another one of these kinds of movies again, so there’s something thematically fitting for the master to return to his roots for added social commentary and sentiment.
I had more problems with the old-fashioned qualities of the movie that didn’t feel like they connected for me and connected to a realistic depiction of our modern-day. The problem with a movie set in the present-day that concerns the revelation of alien encounters is that it’s hard to get a plurality of Americans to believe anything no matter if it’s scientific and correct. Just recall the COVID outbreak at the turn of this decade where people couldn’t even agree on things like masking preventing the public spread of viral infection and vaccines being a life-saver. We had people literally eating horse paste and drinking silver nitrate because charlatans told them to do so. The crux of Disclosure Day rests firmly on the world believing the public disclosure of aliens, presented none other than through network evening news. It’s a bit outdated to think that enough Americans, let alone the world, would hold faith in mainstream network news in our increasingly splintered and information silo-ed era. There are people this week who claimed one political party was controlling the weather to the embarrassment of the other political party, and you’re going to tell me these people are going to believe in the existence of aliens because it happens to be presented by TV news? That’s a bit naive, but I think Spielberg could have sidestepped this by having the movie set in the 1980s or 1990s. It would have been more believable, and holding onto collective faith in humanity coming together in times of crises would be more aspirational rather than, you know, remembering that some people rejected minor inconveniences that could save lives like they were tyrannical affronts to liberties. I don’t know about you, but my ultimate faith in humanity has only lowered when it comes to collective action and shared sacrifice in the name of the greater good.
Brushing aside my own cynical modern perspective, the conspiracy itself, and the machinations of the participants, is kept so frustratingly vague with arbitrary solutions. The movie is populated by two clandestine forces, one looking to divulge the existence of aliens and expose the coverup, and other looking to maintain that coverup. You can easily label them Good Guys and Bad Guys for all the complexity provided. That’s fine. The teams can be generic stock roles as long as our main characters are interesting and well-developed. Unfortunately, our main characters feel easily forgotten, often dropping in and out of the movie for unknown reasons and miraculously reappearing in the exact right moments. There’s a climactic showdown where Team Bad Guys is literally going to shut off the power to the TV news station because that will completely stop the flow of information (it’s not like people would just record with their phones and upload to social media). Then all of a sudden, a character that hasn’t been seen for twenty minutes, is just there, and they have a magic alien device that they know will… restore the power. As a climax, it just feels so goofy, outdated, and sloppy in its clumsy plotting. The bad guys have the power to inhabit other people’s minds and control their bodies, so why aren’t they doing this all the time? Once you start introducing alien technology without any clear definition or limits, it basically becomes a magic wand that can provide whatever the user, or the screenwriter, desires in that moment. It’s an obvious narrative cheat. There are occasions where this power can be diverting and fun, like an invisible escape that doesn’t make much sense but was at least entertaining to experience. However, because so much of the story elements are under-developed, it makes the ultimate showdown unfulfilling.
Another hindrance is that many of the characters feel more as tools of the story to get it from Point A to Point B rather than fleshed-out people. Not every character in a genre thriller needs to feel three-dimensionally accurate, but they need to feel interesting, at least enough to make us care or be curious. Daniel Kellner is the biggest dud for me. I genuinely like O’Connor as an actor and found him mightily compelling in last year’s Wake Up Dead Man, but he’s given so little to work with here. Being the point man on exposing a conspiracy should be plenty, and given the harrowing circumstances of constantly having to look over your shoulder it should provide plenty of mental conflict and second-guessing, showcasing different aspects of who this person can be. Instead, he’s less a character than a figure in motion, the person everyone else is chasing after. He’s more plot device than person.
Margaret is the more interesting character as she’s undergoing a mysterious change that she is struggling to recognize, but halfway through that confusion gives way to godhood, as she becomes essentially a superhero with powers of convenience. No matter what trouble she gets into, the script goes into a cheat code to get her out with a new alien power of contrivance. At some point, she stops even questioning or reflecting on these changes and just goes with it, which feels like the characterization simply giving up. It’s a shame because there’s great drama in the existential and personal crisis she was experiencing. I liked her revulsion at being worshiped as a religious icon once she could appear as people’s dead loved ones. Honestly, a whole different movie could have explored the psychological ramifications of that power and the needs of others to see and talk to departed loved ones one last time, to seek affirmations and closure, all against her own sense of agency with a power she feels has hijacked her identity. In the end, these two characters are mainly here to help convey the message, a human game of intergalactic telephone.
The biggest problem for me, besides the lackluster characterization, is that the most interesting part of this movie is its unsaid implications. I am less enthralled by two competing factions fighting over the alien conspiracy and more interested in how the world responds to the momentous revelation that we are not alone. I kind of wish that Disclosure Day’s Act Three had been its Act One, and rather ending on whether or not the world would discover the truth about little green men, the movie confirmed it and then said, “For the next 90 minutes, we’re really going to dig into how this affects people and changes society.” That’s the movie I want to see, the what comes next. The film briefly explores the spiritual ramifications as one character, a former nun, tries to square her faith with the reality of other intelligent life in the wider universe. Is that revelation comforting and confirmation or conflicting and confusing? I really wish the screenplay had gone further in that exploration, something akin to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which richly examined the upheaval to societies and personal identity. I suppose I was looking for more of what happens after Disclosure Day rather than leading up to the big disclosure, and I doubt I’m alone.
I will also be spoiling the exact ending because I believe it deserves unpacking, so if you would like to remain spoiler-free, please skip to the next paragraph, dear reader. Alright, with that out of the way, the climax hinges upon the news about aliens being disseminated to the public. It’s a little strange that so much of the climax is merely watching the footage with our characters on the sidelines. In fact, the emotional point of emphasis is placed on a new character, a news anchor played by Courtney Grace, who narrates the footage and its implications in real time. Her performance might be the best in the movie (Blunt is good, folks, but let’s pump the brakes on those “career-best” declarations) as she shows restrained and nuanced emotion trying to process the amazing and perspective-shifting revelation. It’s just strange that so much is placed on a brand-new character so late into the movie. Regardless, what stupefied me was that after all this the good guys literally roll out an elderly alien being in a wheelchair. What? You had a literal living, breathing, well more like rasping-alien (don’t want to cast aspersions, but maybe this alien adopted smoking in his time planet-side) and you just keep him at bay? Your whole goal is to raise awareness about the existence of aliens and you literally have an alien to prove the existence of aliens. Why did everything have to hinge on these two adults realizing they were given special powers as kids? Why did they have to wait 30-plus years for these powers to manifest? Why didn’t aliens just give adults these powers rather than children to wait on their maturation? Could the old alien not learn one of Earth’s languages or at least how to type? We have magic devices that can generally do anything but the creators of these magic devices cannot conceive of something to resolve a predictable language barrier? If the script were stronger or the characters engaging, my brain wouldn’t be consumed with these questions.
Reluctantly, Disclosure Day fits squarely in the fulcrum between good and not so good, teetering between one direction and the other. It’s got high production values, good actors, and Spielberg cooking in the sci-fi/action/thriller realm. It’s enjoyably more tactile with its action set pieces, of which some are exciting and visually inventive. Others are just characters getting overlooked in plain sight, and this is before they introduce magic invisibility. However, the promise of the movie is never truly fulfilled from a story awash in underdeveloped characters and themes, arbitrary and overly convenient plotting, and a resolution that feels less than satisfying and more confusing in execution and implication. I genuinely wish that Disclosure Day was more about the aftermath of the news rather than the reaching of the disclosure itself. Even a middling Spielberg thriller can still have more entertainment than the best of many filmmakers, so I’m sure many filmgoers can find something to enjoy, but they’re just as likely to find something that sticks in their proverbial craw, that they chew over for days, and question why it couldn’t be better.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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In the Blink of an Eye (2026)
Having a sprawling meditation on the nature of humanity with a story spanning thousands of years sounds intriguing, at least for the ambition alone. Add in director Andrew Stanton (WALL-E, Finding Nemo) in his first live-action movie since 2012’s John Carter and there’s a greater curiosity factor. Unfortunately, In the Blink of an Eye is like speed-running through Cloud Atlas and losing all the connectivity and conflict. We have three storylines that we bounce between: 1) a Neanderthal family from 47,000 years ago, 2) Rashida Jones as a research scientist in modern-day, and 3) Kate McKinnon aboard a colony spaceship around 2400. Naturally, you would think these storylines would impact one another or at least find unexpected and interesting parallels, braiding together to demonstrate our shared humanity through past, present, and future. Yet it doesn’t really materialize, as the storylines feel too separate and fail to come together in a clever, satisfying, or enlightened way. As a result, In The Blink of an Eye now has three underdeveloped stories slammed together and butting in on one another over a still too tedious 94 minutes (about 75 minutes shorter than Cloud Atlas, by the way).
The problem is there isn’t much to learn from any of these storylines and they lack important conflict. The oldest, with the Neanderthals, has births and deaths, but it’s mostly a family sitting along a coastal forest. This entire storyline is also in an ancient language without subtitles, limiting its scope and impact. Next, the present-day story is an un-engaging romance between Jones and Daveed Diggs while she prepares to lose her mother. This dull relationship moves in such jarring starts and stops so it doesn’t feel believable, with Jones’ character more a prickly, socially-challenged egghead. The final storyline in the future has the most conflict with McKinnon having to figure out life-and-death stakes with depleting oxygen on her colony ship. With twenty minutes left to go, I kept thinking, “Everything is going too well in all three stories. We must be heading into Act Three disaster.” Nope. It’s such a strange movie experience because only one of the three stories has some danger and emotional involvement, with the middle only serving to provide some historical context for the oldest storyline (Neanderthals weren’t actually intellectually inferior, ya’ll) and vaguely set up the future. So we have an airy, slightly experimental movie driving at something more thematic and revelatory than a typical three-act structure following characters through momentous plot events. Despite some shared themes of grief, mortality, family, and legacy, the movie doesn’t have the space to really say anything meaningful, so its efforts at sentimentality feel mawkish and awkward, meant to salve the missing emotional investment. The characters thus become more symbolic and even less relatable. Even worse, it’s all so boring. We literally go from one scene where parents discuss their teenage son’s porn habits to the next scene where this same son, now an adult, is leading a Ted Talk about defying the laws of aging. They grow up so fast?
Lacking more thoughtful integration and contemplation, In the Blink of an Eye feels less like a film story and more like some overly generalized, glossy advertisement for some inscrutable company. It’s vaguely human-like, vaguely emotionally affecting or uplifting in intent, and forgettable in a blink. Just watch Cloud Atlas.
Nate’s Grade: C
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28 Years Later (2025)/ The Bone Temple (2026)
While not officially 28 years after its release in 2003, you’ll have to settle for only 23, comes a sequel to the zombie outbreak that kicked off a resurgence in zombie media in the 2000s. 28 Years Later is a far more experimental and meditative and genuinely surprising and surprisingly poignant sequel than I think many fans were expecting. They thought it was going to be more like a father/son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alfie Williams) coming-of-age zombie hunt and weekend of survival. It is that, but it’s also a meditation on life, death, family, nature, and how we respond to grief. Director Danny Boyle returns, for his first film since 2019’s Yesterday, and screenwriter Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Civil War) returns, and together they provide a sequel that attempts to answer what society might be like growing up in this new dystopian world. The movie can get weird, with old movies and archival footage thematically mixed into scenes, Boyle’s camera in constant nervous anticipation, an active member of the hunt, and the use of an iPhone rig to provide Matrix-esque bullet time effects for zombie head shot splatter. Garland has also come up with some interesting zombie evolution over those ensuing three decades of development (granted I thought since the “zombies” were infected living people that you just had to wait them all out to die from dehydration). It seems like a father/son adventure thriller, and it’s quite good at being that, but then it transforms into something unexpected, giving mom (Jodie Comer) the spotlight as she confronts the reality of her physical and mental maladies. From there, the movie becomes this beguiling and thoughtful examination on grace and grief, on processing loss and finding a sense of stability in an unstable world. Ralph Fiennes appears late as a former doctor who seems a little crazy, the grave-keeper to an impressive monument built from thousands of human bones. It’s such a welcomed surprise for a movie replete with them, a movie that refuses easy categorization and wants to do something meaningful than just being a zombie action/thriller.
Even more unexpected was an immediate sequel and continuation a mere six months removed from 28 Years Later‘s wide release. The Bone Temple is divided into two stories, both holdovers from the prior film. Spike (Alfie Williams), the son going on his own journey of self, has been conscripted into a weird and violent gang, The Jimmies, lead by Sir Lord Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), the twisted grown-up version of the child seen in the harrowing prologue to 28 Years Later. He’s a sadistic leader who also tells his followers he’s the son of Satan. Then there’s Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who we initially thought of as menacing but becomes the most humane caretaker in this post-apocalyptic landscape. The two male figures serve as competing responses to unmitigated tragedy, one retreating to religion as a tool for meaning but it’s really exploitation and manipulation through violence and fear, and the other devoting himself to science and making the world just a little more liveable through empathy and trial and error. Dr. Kelson develops an unexpected friendship with one of the big Alpha zombies, “Samson” (Chi Lewis-Parry), after he discovers this behemoth, who was ripping spines out in rage fits in the previous movie, is seeking out relief through the doc’s morphine darts. Dr. Kelson ponders whether or not there is a chemical compound that could bring back the humanity to the infected. The difficulties with communication do not deter the good doctor, and these paths cross in a climax where the Jimmies come to think of Dr. Kelson as the Dark Lord himself. The movie is consistently interesting, further building out this new damaged world began in 28 Years Later. Nia DaCosta (Candyman, The Marvels) takes over as director and offers a more patient camera, forcing us to dwell in the moments, both horrific and moving. There are torture sequences, long demented monologuing, and questions over the tenacity of human connection despite incredible obstacles, and yet the movie is both more a straightforward horror-thriller than its predecessor and a more focused human drama about loss and holding onto one’s sense of dignity and empathy. It lacks the visual fireworks of Boyle’s style, and I found Sir Lord Jimmy to be more tiresome than interesting, but The Bone Temple is an effectively engrossing lateral sequel that slowly builds Garland’s world a little wider. Now I’ll actually have a third 28 Years movie to look forward to that hopefully won’t take 28 (or 23) years..
Nate’s Grades:
28 Years Later: B+
The Bone Temple: B
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Mortal Kombat II (2026)
The 2021 Mortal Kombat movie was a mostly successful kick-start for the franchise to, at long last, stretch its legs on the big screen as a reverent representation of the appeal of the popular video game series. It was the first R-rated movie that showcased the inventively disgusting gore that is the hallmark of the bone-crunching series. It wasn’t a huge hit at the box-office so soon after the COVID shutdowns but it proved to be popular on HBO Max’s streaming network, and so now we have Mortal Kombat II, not strictly a straight adaptation of the game Mortal Kombat II, which was my favorite as a 90s kid when I had all the fighter moves and fatalities memorized. This time there is an actual fighting tournament germane to the story, and we’ve got the inclusion of movie star-turned-Kombatant Johnny Cage (Karl Urban). Can it escape the doomed fate of other Kombat movie adaptations and actually be good?
Early on, there’s an extended clip from one of Cage’s cheesy 90s action movies. It’s bad, goofy, and unintentionally funny as Cage fights his way through a warehouse of goons and does a jumping split kick over an incoming RPG. It’s a fitting send-up of the bombastic excesses of 90s action movies while demonstrating Cage’s limited real-life martial arts application. I wasn’t expecting Mortal Kombat II to essentially transform into that self-parody of 90s action movies. Watching the movie and trying to make sense of its runaway plot and throwaway explanations, I was reminded of the story modes in the newer games, how convoluted and ridiculous they are, bridging timelines and reincarnations and multiple iterations of characters and how it lacks excitement and engagement. For a fighting game, an okay story can be enough to connect between the different playable matches because the point is the hands-on fighting. This feels more like I’m watching someone else play the lousy story mode of the video game. It doesn’t feel like a movie to the point that I’m re-evaluating the 2021 movie on a higher level.
That at least felt like an adaptation that intended to exist as a film story, streamlining certain elements and making others accessible. This movie feels like it’s just made for diehard Kombat fans, not because it’s heavy in lore complexity and intrigue but because the fans will be the most easily forgiving. With Cage being the fish out of water, you would think his arc would take center stage. He’s the washed-up actor living off his fading reputation. He’s seen by the Outworld as a tremendous and worthy fighter but he’s just an actor. This misconception from his movies could have provided a more intriguing, grounded, and funny story along the lines of Galaxy Quest, where an actor has to keep up the ruse. This plays into the best scene of the movie, where Cage has to challenge the dentally-challenged blade-armed Baraka (CJ Bloomfield) among his community of angler fish-mouthed working class monster-people. Cage has to lean into his persona to become intimidating and then to escape the threat of his opponent. It’s the best fight in the movie because it has more setup and makes actual use of its geography. There’s also a fun dynamic of Cage having to live up to the reputation his running mouth has presented. This could have been the whole movie. Cage’s character arc is a dull zero-to-hero transformation, where I guess he has to believe in himself enough and then he’ll become a legendary fighter. Why this makes sense I do not know. It would make better sense if he was tapping into the muscle memory of his old fighting routines, like we watched him mirror those moves we saw in that introductory film clip. That would produce a setup and payoff. Instead, Cage becomes a deus ex machina fighter through his unshaken belief he can kick real good. His protagonist status is split evenly with Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), who is a familiar and boring archetype of the overthrown princess training to avenge her fallen father and restore her kingdom. For a supposed double agent, it never feels like Kitana is in any danger, especially as she travels back and forth between secret bases in broad daylight without bothering to cover her tracks beyond obscuring her special magic necklace. Because her character arc is so stock, we could have pared down her screen-time considerably and gotten the same effect, giving those precious minutes over to Cage for a fuller arc.
Not that you were coming to Mortal Kombat II for a story, but it’s plenty bad. We have a second entry point character to learn the ways of inter-dimensional combat between gods and monsters, after the 2021 movie gave us… an entry point character. Seems rather redundant to go through this again, right? Do you even remember that character’s name? Do you remember what his special power was once he became fully self-actualized? I didn’t either, so when he appeared briefly in this sequel, it wasn’t until it was long over that I thought to myself, “Oh wait, that was that guy?” Even the protagonist of the first movie is a discarded afterthought. The story elements from the first movie are tacked on like calling upon support at the last moment, akin to hailing Godzilla to come out and fight the big monster terrorizing Japan for the first two acts of the movie. “Hey, remember the spirit of the Scorpion warrior? Well now he’s back to once again kill the spirit of Sub-Zero who is now Smoke with different powers, I think.” The entire universe-defining inter-galactic tournament feels so underrepresented and insignificant. There’s a culminating fight that requires not one energy beam blast, not two energy beam blasts, but three different energy beam blasts and a very special kick, and every moment feels as arbitrary and airless as the last. Even if you’re not expecting much from a movie that spells “combat” with a K, it should still follow the expectations of a movie, namely that the characters are meaningful and there’s an internal connectivity. Once you start introducing the mechanic that we can bring fighters back from the dead, or just stroll into the Netherworld to hang out with the dead and ask them favors, the stakes lessen dramatically. If death in the fight-to-the-death tournament is just a transitory phase, then why even stress about the tournament?
I know this sequel has a bigger budget than its 2021 predecessor but it looks so much worse visually. The increased number of special effects look dodgier and all of the sets look like big empty green screen stages. Too much of this world looks dim and fake. The fighting stages (acid pit, spike pit) are faithfully recreated from the video games but at a cost. There’s so little that feels tactile or even interactive with the actors onscreen. The environments feel empty and vast and often visually unfinished. There’s one stage surrounded by what looks like a screen saver of old with glowing stars moving like in Star Wars hyperspace. It’s not just that it looks phony, it’s that it doesn’t even appear to look otherwise. There are some gruesome deaths but even they are limited by the range of attacks from the primary villains. Having a big guy wield a big hammer limits what can be done. Often people are just being impaled, and I hate to sound like a jaded Spanish Inquisition flunkey, but you see one bloody impaling, you’ve seen most. Even by the standards of its memorable gore and intensity of its brawls, Mortal Kombat II falls flat. It’s too goofy to be as serious as it is, and it’s too serious to really generate a passing sense of fun.
By most accounts, Mortal Kombat II is going to be a movie that most viewers have a sliding scale of expectations for because it’s based on a fighting video game, because it’s a sequel, and because it’s populated with silly characters in colorful regalia. Is it my fault that I was expecting better? I don’t think so. The results of the 2021 movie show what could be possible, especially with its thoughtful and terrifying opening flashback to 1600s Japan establishing the deadly prowess of Sub-Zero. That’s what a Kombat movie could be like, elevated and cinematic and devastating. It doesn’t have to be junk. Mortal Kombat II doesn’t aspire to be anything other than tasty, disposable junk, and it’s not even good at that.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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The Bride! (2026)
Few movies leave you completely dumbfounded, trying to properly assess the miscalculated artistic choices and make sense of what you’ve just witnessed. The Bride! is one of those movies. I found myself asking, “What am I watching?” on more than five occasions. Ostensibly Maggie Gyllenhaal, serving as writer and director, was aiming to retell the Bride of Frankenstein (played by recent Oscar winner Jessie Buckley) as a feminist uprising set amidst a Bonnie and Clyde 1930s backdrop. That sounds like a workable idea, but then did you know that the literal ghost of Mary Shelley serves as our intrusive narrator because even after death she still had a few more things that she wanted to get off her dead chest? Did you know she’s also played by Buckely, so throughout the movie she’ll be talking like a 1930s Chicago dame and then, out of nowhere, she’s talking like a British aristocrat. This is because the literal ghost of Shelley is possessing this woman who looks exactly like her. Also, apparently, the characters Shelley created are… real in the same universe that she is? Did you know there’s a literal song-and-dance number to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” as a strange nod to Young Frankenstein? It’s not some imaginary diversion. It actually happens, I believe, thanks to that ghost of Shelley possessing a whole dance team. Did you know that The Bride inspires an armada of women to follow her supposed self-actualization to smear black crud on their face and rise up, becoming an avenging feminist force that appears to be about firing guns in the air and screaming about their ruined brains? The concept of reanimating The Bride with a healthy dose of feminist rage and re-framing her agency is a fitting vehicle to examine an overlooked perspective for a character better known for her silence and prominent hairdo. However, I don’t think this movie manages to make the character and her plight more universal. There are multiple incidents of sexual violence and predatory men, as well as Buckely screaming “Me too” in repeated emphasis during one scene. This is a big, broad, messy movie stitched together and careening through tone and genre homage. Buckley is unhinged and all over the place, fascinating you at one moment and making you cringe the next, especially when she alternates in and out of Shelley’s possession. There is a lot of style and intriguing ideas and commentary here just trying to find purchase amongst the overwhelming junk. This is an ambitious movie with some bold swings and the risk is that you may miss badly, and The Bride! is all misses.
Nate’s Grade: D
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