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Wicked: For Good (2025)
To paraphrase a famous debate line, I knew Wicked, Wicked was one of my top films of 2024, and you, Wicked: For Good, are no Wicked. Obviously that’s not completely true as For Good is the second half of the adaptation of the popular Broadway musical, of which only the first act compromised the prior movie released a year ago. The problem was that the first Wicked movie felt complete, and had there never been another second after, it would have served as a fitting and even moving portrait of the unknown back-story to the Wicked Witch of the West and the implied propaganda that would taint the perception of the citizens of Oz. The movie was two hours and forty minutes but it felt extremely well-paced and developed. It felt, more or less, complete, even though I know it was only adapting half the musical. In short, it did too good of a job, and now Wicked: For Good suffers as a sequel because what’s left to tell just isn’t as compelling or as emotionally or thematically coherent as its charming predecessor. Plus, all the banger songs were clearly in the first movie.
After the events of the first movie, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivio) has assumed the mantle of the Wicked Witch of the West and is sabotaging the Wizard of Oz’s (Jeff Goldblum) plans at expansion and animal abuse. Glinda (Ariana Grande) is the Wizard’s public ambassador and the “good witch” to inspire the masses, even though she doesn’t possess actual magical abilities. Glinda wishes dearly that Elphaba will change her mind and decide to work with her and the Wizard. However, Elphaba wants to expose corruption, and the Wizard is at the top of her list of the corrupt and powerful needing to be toppled for good.
For Good suffers from the adaptation struggles the 2024 Wicked film was able to avoid. The first movie was an effervescent treat built upon a poignant friendship and some killer songs given the full showstopper visual treatment. It was a vibrant adaptation, and while it expanded upon the stage show significantly, the extra time with the characters felt like breathing space, and it all contributed to what felt to me like an extremely well paced and well developed and arguably complete movie experience. Now the second act of a musical is almost always the shorter of the two, and For Good is about 30 minutes shorter than its predecessor. The filmmakers even added two new songs for Oscar eligibility and further padding, neither of which are winners (more on the songs later in the review). That sense of care is not present in For Good, as characters are frustratingly repeating beats they already worked through. Take for instance Glinda, who begins the first movie as an entitled popular girl used to getting her own way, and by the end of the movie, she’s grown to see the world differently and through her sisterly friendship with Elphaba, she has a more empathetic and grounded perspective. She has already changed for the better, and yet in For Good it feels like the movie kicks her character growth backwards. She has to again learn that maybe the Wizard and others are not the best people in charge just because they are. Wicked is a victim of its own success. The character development and arc was so well realized in the first movie that Glinda feels like she’s repeating lessons she’s already learned. I also don’t buy Elphaba being seriously tempted by the Wizard’s offer of collaboration after all she experienced and learned earlier. It’s irksome to have the characters seem curiously different from where we left them in 2024’s Wicked. There is also a character relationship revelation that I and many others had figured out FROM THE OPENING SCENE of the first movie. Behold, dear reader, For Good doesn’t even address this until the last twenty minutes of the movie and it does absolutely nothing with this revelation. I was flabbergasted.
The biggest time-waster and padding is when Wicked drags The Wizard of Oz characters and plot incidents awkwardly into its own universe. Granted, the entire enterprise is supposed to be the unknown back-story for the villain of The Wizard of Oz which gives it its identity. Except Dorothy and her lot are not essential at all to telling this story, as evident with the sense that the 2024 Wicked could feel complete. Dorothy and her motley crew of locals, some of whom are made up of previously established characters, are given the Rosencrantz and Gildenstern treatment, meaning they’re primarily kept off-screen and incidental. You don’t even see Dorothy’s face once. These characters feel annoyingly tacked-on and inconsequential to the story we’ve already spent three hours with. They’re knowing nods for the audience and they’re also making efforts to better pad out the running time. I don’t fully comprehend their importance in this new retelling. The treacherous Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) sees the presence of Dorothy as an advantageous development, like she can use her as a Chosen One to thwart Elphaba. It’s never remotely explained why this makes sense. Why this person versus any other Oz citizen? Dorothy possesses special shoes but we’ve seen what can be accomplished with them. They’re not really some superpower or a weapon, more an item of personal attachment for Elphaba she would like returned. In this retelling, the entire inclusion of Dorothy and her friends is a means to an end for a public ruse. It might seem odd to say this Wizard of Oz back-story would have been better minus Dorothy but there it is.
Now it’s time to discuss the actual songs for this movie musical. The best known and most popular tunes were all in the first act and thus the first movie. The songs for For Good are a combination of middling ballads and continuation of the leitmotifs and themes of the previous one. There’s perhaps a bigger emotional current when characters bring back melodies and lyrics from the first movie to expand or contrast, like “I’m Not That Girl.” Did you want another song with Goldblum singing? The biggest number is “For Good” where Elphaba and Glinda face off and admit their shared sisterly love for one another, but again this was already established by the end of 2024’s Wicked. It’s more explicitly stated through song but the sentiment was evident to me already. Adding further disappointment, returning director John M. Chu (Into the Heights, Crazy Rich Asians) lacks the same thoughtful staging of the musical numbers in this edition. He is a filmmaker who innately knows how to adapt stage musicals into the medium of film, and he did so splendidly with 2024’s Wicked. With For Good, the staging lacks a real immersion and visual dynamism, often murky or overly saturated, like “No Good Deed” being performed almost entirely with intrusive sunsetting silhouettes dominating the screen. The less engaging songs, added with less engaging visual staging, make the movie feel longer and less jubilant. I don’t know if “For Good” has the intended emotional crescendo simply because this movie isn’t nearly as good.
As a personal note, the 2024 Wicked was the last movie I saw in theaters with my father while he was alive. We were supposed to see Gladiator II together as a family after Thanksgiving but he wasn’t feeling up to it, and then a little more than two weeks later he was unresponsive. I’m happy Wicked was such a pleasant and enjoyable experience for him, but as we left the theater, he asked me, “Wasn’t there supposed to be more?” We had seen the stage show when it toured through our city many years ago, and I remarked that there was going to be a whole second movie adapting the second act of the musical and it was going to be released in a year. He nodded and I felt the silent acknowledgement shared between us: he would not be around to see the conclusion, that it was a future unavailable to him. So it’s hard for me to not have some melancholy feelings with For Good, and I’ll admit maybe that’s influencing my critique.
Wicked: For Good is a frustrating, disappointing extension of what had been a sterling and magical original movie. It doesn’t outright ruin what came before it but confirms for me that 2024’s Wicked could stand on its own. The songs aren’t as good. The staging and visuals aren’t as good. The character development feels repeated and occasionally confounding. The plotting is stretched and unsatisfying. The inclusion of the more direct Wizard of Oz characters feels arbitrary and unnecessary. The actors are still charming and affecting and sing wonderfully, but they’re also unable to defy the gravity of the material they’re stuck with. If you’re a super fan of the source material, albeit the original story by L. Frank Baum, the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie, the Gregory Maguire book, the 2000s stage musical, or even the first movie, you will probably find enough to sing along to and walk away fairly happy. I loved the 2024 Wicked and was left mostly cold at the concluding half but I realize I very well may be a curmudgeonly minority here. My advice would be to consider the 2024 Wicked a complete movie and skip For Good.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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The Black Phone 2 (2025)
The original 2022 Black Phone was a relatively entertaining contained thriller where a kid was relying upon the ghosts of victims to escape the clutches of an evil kidnapper. It had other elements to fill it out as a movie, like a psychic sister, but the central conceit and execution worked well, especially a disturbing performance by Ethan Hawke as The Grabber, the aforementioned grabber and locker-away-er of unfortunate children. Then it was popular enough to demand a sequel, but where do you go when the villain has been killed and the source material, a short story by Joe Hill, has been exhausted? The answer is to turn the very-human Grabber into a Freddy Krueger-style supernatural predator terrorizing our survivors in their dreams. The kids from the first film are now teenagers and really the psychic sis is the main character. She’s the one most affected by the Grabber’s supernatural vengeance. Most of the movie is watching the sister get tossed around invisibly in the real world and talking to irritable ghost kids. There’s a mystery about uncovering the truth about what happened to their deceased mother, who too could have a personal connection to the Grabber from a Christian summer camp located in the far mountains. The snowy locale makes for a visually distinctive setting, though once you see the Grabber ghost ice skating it does take a little of the mystique away from the overall menace. The Black Phone 2 just didn’t work for me, feeling like another “let’s help these dead kids be at peace” adventure like a weekly TV series, but the scenario just didn’t have the draw and satisfaction of the original. I suppose the returning filmmakers wanted to expand their universe and its mythology, Dream Children-style, but the material doesn’t seem there to build a franchise foundation. The first film was simple and complete (makes me think of a variation on a line at the end of Bioshock Infinite: “There’s always a Grabber. There’s always a black phone. There’s always a ghost”). The sequel cannot compensate for that, and so it feels overstretched, underdeveloped, and goofy. At least they tried something different than just a straight replica of the original but it would have been best to leave the Grabber and us at rest.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
It’s not just the increasing age of producer and star Tom Cruise, the Mission: Impossible movies have become victims of their own outlandish success, and this might have led to their ultimate end. This franchise has become known for its amazing stunts and placing Cruise in the thick of them. After every gasp-inducing, eyeball-popping stunt, the inevitable question arises, “What could top that?” And so writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, who has steered the franchise for a decade straight, has placed himself in a filmmaking arms race of action set pieces, and these budgets keep getting bigger and bigger, to compensate for the increasing scope and scale. As a result, these movies need to make an even higher amount of money to break even to cover their expanding expenses, and it doesn’t look like the M:I franchise has reached that next level of success (six of the previous seven movies have grossed between $175 million and $220 million domestically). As a result, Final Reckoning is the winding down of the franchise, or at least this incarnation, and it has enough to satisfy long-time fans, yours truly included, but it’s also a reminder of how things have gotten away from the series in the name of chasing spectacle.
Agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is tasked once again by the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) to save the world. In a continuation from the 2023 movie, Dead Reckoning, an evil A.I. known as The Entity is taking over the world’s complex computer networks and taking over control of nuclear missiles. It’s only a matter of time before the last four nations fall victim as well, so Ethan and his team (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and now Hayley Atwell as Grace) must work together to get the only code that can kill The Entity.
Final Reckoning is the Scream 6 of the Mission: Impossible franchise. For those who never saw the sixth entry in an irony-drenched, self-reverential slasher series, it was intended to be the final entry in the franchise, and in doing so that made it try to tie back as many elements and moments as possible to the previous five movies. It was meant to feel not just final but full-circle for the fans. Naturally, the problem for Scream 6 is that it wasn’t going to be the final movie, and so a sequel is scheduled in 2026, and all that finality and franchise-reflection seems a bit like misguided internal stargazing. Coincidentally, the Mission: Impossible franchise also began the same year as the first Scream, 1996, and so this movie is intended to (possibly) close the door on the 30-year franchise and on (possibly) Ethan Hunt’s career as the best damn agent the IMF has ever had and yet whom they always doubt his motives in every movie.
M:I 8 takes far, far too much time trying to set up its stakes, which were already set up in M:I 7, which at the time was titled Dead Reckoning Part One before the “Part One” was scrubbed. Seriously, the first 45 minutes or so is awash in M:I clips from the previous seven movies and sloppy attempts to connect everything back together. Now the evil A.I. threatening the world has been revealed to be born from… the “Rabbit’s foot,” the undetermined MacGuffin from the third Mission: Impossible in 2006. Is that better? Does anyone really care about that? How about one of the cops being the son of a previous character? Does that change your opinion of Chasing Cop #2? How about the one guy in the first movie who found Ethan’s knife after he broke into the CIA in that movie’s most memorable sequence? Did you ever wonder what happened to him? Did you ever care about his well-being? I strongly doubt it. These Easter eggs to the older movies would be less egregious if this supposed final movie didn’t squander its first 45 minutes going over its own history as a means of trying to convince the audience This Stuff Really Matters. It’s even more egregious when the running time is 165 minutes long. All of this backward-looking ret-coning and clip show montages feel like an attempt to add weight to a franchise that never needed it. Let the stunts and set pieces stand for themselves. I don’t need all this nostalgic congratulatory back-patting.
And there is a truly outstanding action set piece that anchors this movie, so much so that it actually comprises a full hour of the film. Set up in the preceding movie’s prologue, we know the only way to kill the evil A.I. is by securing a code located in a Russian submarine at the bottom of the Bering Sea. Just planning to find the location is the first hurdle that Ethan and the team have to surmount. Then there’s getting onto a clandestine U.S. submarine and launching out its tubes to swim to the bottom of the ocean, securing passage inside the fallen sub, and working one’s way through the different chambers, filled with frozen dead bodies, while the sub rolls around, tumbling further and further along the ocean floor. Each smaller sequence has a clearly defined series of mini-goals and organic complications, the kind of exciting escalations that make these set pieces so much better. It’s not enough for the pros to come up with a comprehensive plan, there needs to be unexpected complications that force them to improvise. A foolproof plan that goes perfectly is anathema to action cinema. This sequence has it all, which is why I have no qualms about its length because McQuarrie has justified every link in this set-piece chain. It’s also fantastic visually and really taut, especially as Ethan is tumbling through the innards of the sub with torpedoes falling over and pinning him underneath. This is a prime example of the maximalist virtuoso blockbuster filmmaking excellence that people have come to expect from the franchise.
The problem is that there’s an entire hour after this sequence and, once again, an M:I movie has peaked early. I think only Fallout and Dead Reckoning have their best moments during their actual climaxes. It hurts that Gabriel (Esai Morales) is the weakest villain the franchise may have ever had. I don’t care that the prior film tried to ret-con younger Gabriel into killing Ethan’s love and thus motivating him for vengeance and entering into the IMF. That personal connection and tragedy is a transparent attempt to make this character more important and menacing, and frankly, I am still astounded that this guy… THIS GUY… killed Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa. I can confirm, sadly, she is still dead, a reality that astounds me in the realm of a spy thriller where people assume identities. It’s she that Ethan should be fantasizing about in what could be his final moments, not Grace, and I will stand by that (no disrespect to Atwell, who is a genuinely fun and flirty addition to the team as an expert thief).
Regardless, back to Gabriel, who is just an empty suit of a villain, partly because the real villain is the scary A.I. conquering the world’s nuclear arsenals. It’s hard to really vilify a computer code for a movie, so enter this human handler, but he was uninspiring, so they added the secret back-story connection. It doesn’t work. I don’t really care about this guy being defeated, nor do I find him particularly threatening, miraculously killing Ilsa notwithstanding. The ultimate fight atop warring biplanes is visually impressive with its aerial photography, but the conclusion feels anticlimactic and the thrill of the set piece feels even slightly redundant when we remember Cruise has already hung from the side of a plane in M:I 5 and dangled from a helicopter in M:I 6. There’s yet another ominous timer ticking down, yet another deadly device with wires needing to be cut, and yet another side character possibly bleeding out to death. It feels rather par for the series, perhaps a thematic distillation of all those clips. There’s also some extra Fail Safe-style political hand-wringing at the highest levels of the U.S. government whether to give Ethan the benefit of the doubt or resort to some unorthodox methods for added stakes. It just adds up to a final hour of some strong moments in passing and too much of the same for a franchise that chartered new heights.
Placing it through the M:I pecking order, Final Reckoning is probably the weakest of the McQuarrie Era and arguably lesser than Mission: Impossible III, but it is leagues better than the first two Mission: Impossible entries. Realistically, this isn’t the end of the Mission: Impossible franchise, which has grossed close to five billion dollars over the span of its eight movies, but it is the end of Cruise as our star. The franchise was already previously engineered to hand off to Jeremy Renner in 2011’s Ghost Protocol, but then the movie proved too popular to persuasively function as writing off Ethan Hunt (unlike the other franchise also trying to hand off to Renner at the time, 2012’s Bourne Legacy, which proved so unpopular that Matt Damon came out of Bourne retirement). Cruise is now 63 years old and probably aware that these kind of death-defying stunts might be behind him even at his pace. Though I think the three separate shirtless scenes with Cruise are intended to dissuade you about the limits of his age (hey, I hope I look as good as Cruise’s abs when I’m 63). Final Reckoning is another chance to bid goodbye to its seminal action hero, which may be why there’s so much looking back and connecting unnecessary dots. This franchise is a celebration of the highs of big–budget action storytelling with the most game superstar with a death wish Hollywood could provide, so it’s bittersweet to see it reach some form of an end. McQuarrie, the David Yates of the franchise, has been an excellent shepherd with a kinship with Cruise for grand popcorn entertainment. It’s not the best entry but even a lesser M:I movie still rises above just about most studio action cinema. It’s definitely underdeveloped, too long, and structurally questionable with its pacing and climax, but at its best, it still reminds you why this franchise rose above the rest.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)
“Rebirth” might be a bit optimistic in that title. The issue with the still-quite-popular Jurassic Park/World franchise is an ongoing lesson in diminished returns. Back in 1993, Steven Spielberg and special effects breakthroughs enchanted audiences on the peril of man’s hubris and the core love and undying appeal of dinosaurs getting to be wrecking machines. Thanks to the marvels of modern big-budget blockbusters, we can bring realistic dinosaurs back to life for perilous adventures in survival, but much like the famous line, the producers eager to crank out a new Jurassic movie every so many years only focused on whether they could and not whether they should. The movies are still significant moneymakers; the worst film in the franchise, 2022’s Dominion, still made over a billion dollars at the global box-office. Just imagine how much that could have raked in if it was actually, you know, good. Jurassic World touched upon the nature of diminished returns through satire, that audiences that were once wowed by the very presence of real dinosaurs have grown bored and need more to capture their flagging interest. Since then we’ve had a movie about dinosaurs eating the rich in a haunted house-style horror-thriller and a nostalgic-heavy conclusion that was more about giant locusts and far less about dinosaurs cohabitating with mankind. The interesting storyline (man co-existing with dino) has been there for multiple movies, and yet the producers keep neglecting that glorious potential. Now here comes Jurassic World: Rebirth, another attempt to keep this franchise chugging along with more mediocre sequels that have fleeting moments of popcorn thrills. Ultimately, it’s a bit more of the same, and like the characters in this world, I too am growing restless.
There are two groups of characters that we follow. The first is a clandestine science team funded by a large pharmaceutical company looking to create the next big drug as a result of studying dinosaur blood and tissue. This is the familiar movie world of quippy security experts and ex-CIA agents and panicky scientists thrust into danger in the field. The other group is a family going on a sailing trip through… dinosaur-infested waters for some reason. The first group is on a mission. The second group is just trying to survive, and possibly for the teen daughter’s boyfriend to grow on her skeptical father.
Rather than reinvention, Rebirth is once again more of the same old same old. There can still be intrigue and spectacle from simply interacting with living dinosaurs brought to life by the best special effects money can buy, so the Jurassic movies will never be without some level of primal appeal. There are some fun moments and sequences throughout Rebirth, but it’s hard to stitch together the whole movie from these minor pieces. I think the premise could have worked. The team on the mission has to track down and retrieve blood from the three biggest dinosaurs by habitat: one by land, one by sea, and one by air. There’s some flimflam excuse that these creatures have the biggest hearts and therefore the live blood they extract blah blah, but it doesn’t really matter. The premise of having to track three of the biggest dinos in different terrains makes for an episodic but varied structure that is easy to follow and engage with. All along the way, we know what the total number needs to be and the progression provides mini-climaxes. It’s just that the retrieval of all of these is completed before Act Three. That’s right, it’s all done before the movie is supposed to get really climactic and intense. The land dino isn’t even a challenge, more just an attempt to recreate the majesty of when we first saw those plodding apatosaurs in 1993. This feels like a mistake, and each of the dino retrievals should be getting moderately harder to succeed. There should be escalation so that each one feels more like an accomplishment with the team getting better not worse.
So what could be Act Three? Well you see, dear reader, this is yet another new island. I can already hear you asking how many islands there are, and the answer is however many the studio needs. This island could have been nicknamed Monster Island because it was the dinosaur experimentation labs. Here’s where the InGen scientists threw darts at a board and said, “What if you mixed a [anything] with a raptor?” That seemed to be their go-to for these sequels. We’re introduced into mutant T-Rex in the opening, presented like a monster lurking in the shadows, and then we come back to our giant lab-designed monstrosity. Except this is the silliest looking dinosaur mutant. I laughed out loud when I saw its full form. It made me think of the xenomorph and human hybrids from Alien Resurrection. Its head is so bulbous like he’s part mushroom, but there’s no contours or anything menacing like spikes or something evolutionary useful. It’s just a big goofy head. This is the kind of dinosaur that would be made fun of by the other dinosaurs who snicker when his considerable back is turned. It has larger forearms but walks with them like a hunched gorilla. A T-Rex was already frightening because of its size, as evidenced during one of the movie’s better sequences where a normal T-Rex chases after the beleaguered family in a raft. This just made the T-Rex’s head comically oversized, like somebody glued a shower cap on this guy. This guy has a bigger head but it doesn’t mean bigger brain. It makes for a rather perfunctory and silly ending fighting against a disappointing dino Frankenstein. We shouldn’t have held our expectations too high considering this mutant’s lab breakout all stems from a lone Snickers candy wrapper getting loose.
The characters are also pretty disposable and strictly archetypal. Scarlett Johansson (Fly Me to the Moon) is the lead as our quippiest ex-CIA agent, more or less playing a version of her Marvel persona. She has a slight arc about joining the mission for the money and being convinced by the idealistic head scientist (Jonathan Bailey) to release the medical information to the entire planet. I don’t think this is as hopeful as the characters think because it seems like you’re also making it so plenty more mad scientists have access to dino DNA to make their own at-home Jurassic Parks. The other lead character is played by Mahershala Ali (Leave the World Behind) as the boat captain who provides the movie with the most disposable of characters so that the dinosaurs have something to feed upon. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the one lost family is gifted a dinosaur baby that they trot around like an adorable puppy. That thing’s going to get extremely big and I don’t know if anybody is going to be able to pick up after it. I wouldn’t say any of these characters are memorable or even that likeable, mostly stars coasting on charm autopilot.
I didn’t know where else to put this but I loathed every time the Jurassic Park musical themes would start to trinkle into a scene, especially since so many of them are perplexing. Why would you insert that familiar theme over this scene? It’s intrusive, tone deaf, and just a bizarre creative choice.
It’s hard to really see the added value of returning veteran screenwriter David Koepp (Black Bag) and new director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, The Creator). This whole enterprise feels a bit like a runaway train rushing to meet its release date deadline. The development needed for a relaunch seems to go by the wayside so that we can squeeze in more set pieces, and I suppose two sets of characters equal always having a new and fraught action sequence we can jump to. It’s just that everything feels so rote and familiar, so much of the same kinds of thrills and chills we’ve gotten from the previous six movies. The most exciting development across these new movies since 2018 has been the reality of humans having to adapt to an Earth with dinosaurs in our ecosystems, and yet this again is hand-waved away in exposition that limits the dinosaurs to a much smaller band of the Earth. Turns out they only really live around the Equator now. Okay, if that’s the case, then tell me a story from that setting. It can still be done. Jurassic Park: Rebirth doesn’t feel like the start of something new or exciting or even promising. It feels like more of the same, sliced and cut up with different actors getting their turn to make frightened faces. It’s not as bad in design or execution as Dominion but Rebirth is no more than more of the same.
Nate’s Grade: C
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The Old Guard 2 (2025)
I wasn’t a big fan of the 2020 immortal action movie The Old Guard, but apparently it became one of Netflix’s most viewed movies, so here we are five years later with a sequel about the ancient conspiracy of warring immortals co-starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (not to be confused with Infinite, which is about an ancient conspiracy of warring immortals who are reincarnated into new bodies co-starring Chiwetel Ejiofor). I found the action and the general world-building to be underwhelming, but Old Guard 2 makes The Old Guard look like Michael Bay in comparison. There are two key developments in this sequel. Uma Thurman plays the first immortal and she wants to destroy the world or whatever. The second is that anyone injured by our newest immortal, Nile (Kiki Layne), loses their immortality. The rules of this universe get awfully hazy. I’m taking this directly from the film’s Wikipedia summary: “Additionally, anyone who has lost their immortality can regain their power by another wounded immortal who can transfer their power to the host they choose.” Still following? So we have one person who can make immortals mortal, but any mortal immortal can also choose to have their absent immortality bequeathed to a mortal immortal of their choice, reasserting their immortality. Okay. The confusing rules would be mitigated if we found any of the characters compelling. The sequel does bring back Andy’s (Charlize Theron) ex-beloved Quynh (Veronica Ngô) who was locked into an iron maiden coffin and dumped overseas. The established rules had immortals reawaken from death, so this poor woman would keep waking back up again only to drown instantly and repeat the horrifying process again. Let’s do the math here. On average it takes about two minutes to drown (FYI, I typed into Google “how long does it take to drown,” and now my computer is worried about my mental health). Let’s cut that in half from the extra water pressure filling her lungs. So let’s say she dies every minute. That means she dies 1440 times a day. Over the course of 500 years she has died 262,800,000 times. Rescuing this woman should be a recognition not just of her relentless suffering but the fact that her mind should be shot. Having to endure that horror would break anyone, and Andy coming to terms with her inability to heal someone who cannot die but is also unable to continue life any longer woukd be interesting. That’s my preferred sequel. Instead with The Old Guard 2 we get a bunch of lackluster fights and convoluted lore, and it doesn’t even offer a conclusion, more an implied hand-off to a third movie where the characters may indeed be able to finish what they’ve started. It’s time to let these mortal immortals just die in peace.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
A funny thing happens once you conclude a Final Destination movie. You start to see the world differently. After I finished watching Bloodlines, the first new film in the franchise since 2011, I found myself elevated by creative paranoia. I was holding onto an empty aluminum can and thought, “What if placing this on the counter will create a chain of events that leads to disaster?” Then I was washing our kitchen sink and looking at how close other electrical devices were to the faucet spray. Then I began thinking of all the dog toys that could position themselves underfoot and cause me to hit my head against our tile, perhaps then having that aluminum can fall on my head as a finishing move. If you’ve ever seen one of these movies, they are games of misdirection and dramatic irony, anxiously anticipating that any little item will contribute to a Rube Goldberg-esque wave of death. In many ways, the franchise brings an outlandish fear home and makes you just as crazy as the doomed characters. Final Destination: Bloodlines is a return to form for a franchise that never should have been on the brink of death. As long as people can come up with clever deaths and misdirects, there should be sequels.
Having watched and enjoyed every Final Destination movie, I will readily admit that while each of the five previous entries can be gory good fun they cannot be described as great movies, and that’s okay. They are delivery systems for amusement and absurd deaths, asking the audience to try and guess the ridiculous series of events that will contribute to the demise of whomever fills the screen. It’s a reliable formula that can be replicated again and again, where death itself is the main villain, or star, and where the appeal of the franchise is the winking game the movies are knowingly playing with the viewers. We’re here for the over-the-top machinations and dark humor of trying to guess what combination will succeed. The later sequels were populated with repellent or powerfully bland characters that we happily awaited their fateful demise, but the deaths were also getting stale, becoming more mean-spirited or more flimsier in design, giving to obvious obliteration options and then cheap shock alternative as mini-twists. If you’re going to have a game, it’s better to play by your rules. That’s where things began to go sour with me, but that doesn’t mean good writers who fully understand this franchise cannot revive it. I just thought it would have taken less time considering the inherent rebooting potential at play.
This brings us to Bloodlines, by far the most ambitious of all Final Destination movies. It attempts to really explore the mythology and history of the franchise while also grounding the characters and their drama in a surprisingly emotionally resonant manner. I’m not saying anyone is going to confuse this movie with, say, Sophie’s Choice, but the filmmakers have put in the work to make us actually care about the doomed characters and their fledgling efforts for survival. Usually these movies follow a group of strangers along with a small friend group that becomes our core. This is the first movie where all of the characters in peril are family members across generations. Watching your mother or aunt or brother die horribly before your eyes and knowing that someone else in your family is next is just more impactful than if the relationships were based on high school friendships, work colleagues, or strangers. That kind of trauma just hits differently. Also, the ages of the family dynamic present a clear direction for the path that death is planning to take, going from oldest to youngest, although death seems to put this chronological pecking order on hold to wipe out a line of siblings. Excuse the math word problem setup of what will follow. Let’s say you have Oldest Child and Youngest Child and both have two kids but Oldest Child’s kids were both born after Youngest Child’s kids. Rather than killing the descendants in descending chronological order, death would wipe out Oldest Child’s offspring first even though they are younger than the children of Younger Child. As always, it appears death is a stickler with its rules.
The opening sequence is an all-timer for the franchise, and because it sets everything in motion I don’t feel like discussing it is particularly spoiler-y, but you may decide otherwise and can skip this paragraph. According to the new mythos, this is the event that sets the entire Final Destination universe into effect. It’s a spectacular disaster set in a high-rise restaurant 400 feet in the air atop one of those Sky Needle skyscrapers. The entire sequence is brilliantly executed and edited with extremely heightened periods of dread. These first ten minutes introduce us to a young romantic couple and get us invested enough to feel bad about what’s to eventually come. They also set up the stakes as well as the twisted gallows humor to follow. I loved tracing the different elements at play, from the cracking glass dance floor, to a loose chandelier shard (if one little chandelier piece could cause cracks then this must be the weakest floor in history), to a loose penny causing mayhem all because of a snotty little brat, the real villain of the franchise. The cross-cutting between the different incidents as things ratchet up is wonderful, and the clever cuts to the creme brule being broken as that glass dance floor is cracking is just superb. This is more than just a sequence in vertigo terror. There’s a gas explosion, a falling elevator, a Titanic-esque splitting of the restaurant, and the use of a grand piano as a slapstick coup de grace that left me cheering. This opener lets you know you’re in bloody good hands with Bloodlines and it also begins to emotionally ground the film too.
This is the most self-aware of the Final Destination movies but I think it works considering it’s the sixth entry, so having characters essentially be voices for the audience’s frantic clue-guessing is appropriate. One of the better sequences in the movie is when our protagonist, Stefanie (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), is walking through her neighborhood and trying to absently predict the everyday dangers on a garbage day. It begins as absurd and then it becomes even more absurd when everything she predicted lines up, though not as we might have expected. The whole thing plays out like a demented and extended joke setup with death as the punchline. Thankfully, it doesn’t take long for the family to get on board with this crazy idea that death is after them, so the second half of the movie is more their scrambling to plot how to cheat death established by the previous movies by either dying and being brought back or by taking a life and getting that person’s remaining time. There’s a gasp-inducing joke where characters, after discussing these rules, glance at a maternity ward and consider, “Could we actually kill a baby?” before shaking away the dark idea and going back to their original plan. It’s self-aware without being overly meta, working through the rules and expectations but without an ironic detachment that can cheapen the enjoyment of the drama and thrills. That’s important because this might be the Final Destination movie with the lowest amount of deaths after the big opener. Part of that is because we’re setting the story decades after that establishing catastrophe, where death has been busy chopping away the survivors before coming back around to our core family (there’s got to be a mathematical formula here how long it took death to catch up). You’ll have to wait longer for some kills, and a few are just haphazardly thrown together, but there’s still plenty of dreadful squirm and rueful chuckles to be had.
Considering its runaway success at the box-office, out-grossing all of the previous Final Destination movies, I doubt we’ll have to wait anywhere close to another 14 years for more franchise mayhem. These movies are perfect vehicles for twisted entertainment when they have the right people calibrating them. They may not always be great but they can be consistently great fun, and under the right mindset, exactly what you need to wash away the blahs and laugh at the absurdity of death and fate. It will also make you re-examine your home decorative plan for your own pre-emptive protection. Feng shui or die, ya’ll.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Thunderbolts (2025)
I will tell you right now, dear reader, that I’m never going to include the asterisk when I type the title of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) newest epic entry, Thunderbolts. The reveal one week into its theatrical release that the team was rebranded “The New Avengers” seemed at best like a peculiar marketing gimmick to try and boost ticket sales after its opening weekend. “Oh, there’s an ‘Avengers’ in this movie title? Well I’ll go see that now,” said likely nobody ever. It just felt like a marketing ploy and the presence of the asterisk in the title, meant to symbolize and facilitate that identity transition, is just a symbol of trying to be too cute by half. Just be the Thunderbolts. Accept yourself as the Thunderbolts. Isn’t that part of the lesson of the movie, finding acceptance despite your misgivings and doubts? Refreshingly, while there are the occasional action sequence and general fisticuffs, Thunderbolts proves to be a much more probing and psychological MCU entry and entertaining beyond just the escapism.
Yelena (Florence Pugh) feels adrift as a secret black ops agent doing the government’s dirty work. Her handler, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), has promised to let her retire after one last job. It just so happens that job is a scheme to have all of Valentina’s black ops killers to take each other out to spare her any embarrassing details coming out while she’s under Congressional investigation. That includes John Walker (Wyatt Russell), a disgraced Captain America place-holder, and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), the villain of Ant-Man and the Wasp who could phase through matter, and some mysterious man named Bob (Phillip Pullman) who suffers from amnesia and seems out of place. Along the way they’ll pick up other characters, like Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), who is serving as a freshman Congressman, and Alexei a.k.a the Red Guardian (David Harbour), Yelena’s adopted father who is eager to support his daughter and bridge a divide that has grown between them recently. The constantly bickering group of malcontents, antiheroes, and misanthropes band together to survive as well as figure out Bob’s importance for a person as dangerous and manipulative as Valentina.
Thunderbolts is about a group of screw-ups who know they’re screw-ups, who know the world sees them as screw-ups, trying to be something more, and it doesn’t take much to see larger themes surrounding depression, loneliness, and community. There’s long been a pleasure in watching oddballs, let alone an unorthodox team of them, find solace and camaraderie they have been missing. It’s satisfying under most circumstances. It also helps when we are given the understanding of why these characters feel so alone and so useless. I’ll freely admit, in the first months of 2025 with the current government doing everything in its power to make people feel scared and alone and useless, I connected with the themes and eventual uplift of Thunderbolts perhaps at a level I might not have had the movie been released in 2023 or, say, under a President Harris. Regardless, I found this movie engaging because it focused less on the literal and metaphorical strengths of its characters and more on their weaknesses and fragility and needs. There is no giant sky beam, nor any faceless easily disposable swarm of CGI robots or aliens, nor any real world-ending apocalypse they have to thwart in that final climax. It really all comes down to combating an epidemic of loneliness, and the only way to do so is to willingly open one’s self to the possibility of pain, of disappointment, of embarrassment, or rejection, and to do so anyway because the alternative is just too grim and self-defeating an option. It forces characters with very real pain and regrets to confront that pain and to still keep trying. The scary enemy is not resolved through a punch but through a genuine hug. You can’t punch out depression. For me, that’s far more engaging and emotionally resonant for the thirty-sixth movie in the MCU than just more punching and explosions amidst a CGI-laden morass.
This is proof that Florence Pugh (Dune: Part Two, Oppenheimer) can power anything with her acting chops and charisma. Her character was a breakout scene-stealer in 2021’s Black Widow, and I’ve been glad every time since she’s popped onscreen. I find Pugh to be such a compelling actor, but she’s driven by movies that tend to put her through an emotional wringer so much I’m worried her face will permanently lock into a sob. She’s great, but it’s also just nice to watch her cut loose and have fun playing a character too. Even though Yelena has a darkness to her, and I would argue qualifies as depressed, this is still a role that allows Pugh to play with lighter elements, giving her a sardonic bounce that makes her even more appealing. This is a character worthy of headlining the team, and Pugh shines once again given an even bigger Marvel spotlight. I also want to sing the praises of Dreyfus (HBO’s Veep) and Harbour (Stranger Things) as near-perfect encapsulations of their respective characters. She’s all blistering cynicism and he’s a blustery teddy bear.
Another refreshing aspect for Thunderbolts is how it feels like a real movie. Obviously the other 35 MCU entries are movies by definition, but here is a movie that feels more authentic. It looks and sounds better in presentation. You can tell there are real locations. The cinematography is by Andrew Doz Polermo, the same man who photographed The Green Knight. The musical score is by Son Lux, the same composer responsible for the eclectic and sensational music for Everything Everywhere All at Once. The co-writers are from Netflix’s acclaimed miniseries Beef, as is the director, Jake Schreier, whose first film was the 2012 amiable indie dramedy Robot & Frank. There is a genuine effort to do something a little different from the factory setting of modern Marvel movies. It was just nice to actually take in real surroundings, real terrain, natural light, and composed by such a skillful director of photography. The technical elements are blockbuster level but also infused with a little indie sensibilities, bringing a different visual flavor to this studio tentpole. It might sound like a backhanded compliment (“Oh, a movie that is, gasp, made outside a giant green screen warehouse or LED screen”) but I am genuinely grateful. This is a Marvel movie whose Act Three chase takes more notes from Being John Malkovich and its jaunt through repressed memories than any standard superhero action climax. After so many MCU entries, you celebrate the ones that not only try something different but succeed, especially after the impulse to be more of the same is so strong.
That’s not to say that there still isn’t more that could have been done to better shape and develop Thunderbolts. Ultimately it feels like a more solid idea with some good characters and themes than a fully realized screenplay making the best use of its two hours. The movie isn’t quite the ensemble it may appear from the outside. One of the characters is removed so unceremoniously early that I question why this character was even brought back, especially since nobody would qualify this specific character as a favorite. I suppose it’s to present the appearance of elevated stakes, but it just reminds me of the 2016 Suicide Squad that introduced Adam Beach (Windtalkers) as Slipknot, the man “who could climb anything,” who just gets his head blown off so casually before their first mission even begins. However, with Thunderbolts, the movie really has a top tier of characters, primarily Yelena and John Walker and Bob. There’s another lower tier of characters that kind of come and go and provide moments, either levity or convenience, like Ghost and Red Guardian. Then there’s another lower tier of characters with even less time who pop in to scramble things or remind everyone of the exposition or stakes, like Bucky and Valentina. It doesn’t feel as fully integrated as an ensemble as the best Marvel team movies, like James Gunn’s Guardians films, so it can be a little frustrating when we’re celebrating the value of a community but not everyone is pulling their own narrative weight. I’m sure I could fall in love with Ghost as a character, but when she just poofs in and out and her whole arc is, “Hey, she came back,” that’s not going to do it. I also find the whole superhero science experiment a little late in the MCU to be introduced. We have characters talking about being in grade school when the Battle for New York, the centerpiece fight of 2012’s Avengers, took place, like Millennials today speak about where they were on 9/11, so it seems very late for the government to be trying to produce their own superheroes they can control. Weren’t they already making superheroes in the 1940s anyway with the likes of Captain America? This is old hat.
The MCU has been in a bit of a slump since the conclusion of Endgame, though I would also maintain the “death of the MCU/superhero fatigue” storyline has been over-dramatized and beaten to death. Thunderbolts has some very appealing and refreshing elements, focusing more on its characters and their faults so that their eventual triumphs will feel even more emotionally resonant. It’s nice for the action to support the characters and their drama rather than the other way around, and especially refreshing for the climax to be one about acceptance and vulnerability rather than over-powering some physical menace. I liked the Thunderbolts characters and their combustible energy and banter and would have liked them even more if more of them felt more fully integrated into the movie and given richer arcs. Still, it’s hard to reinvent any franchise thirty-six movies deep, and Thunderbolts, or The New Avengers depending upon what Disney decides to do with its titling from here out ( a real Live, Die, Repeat situation), takes what works with quirky oddball team-ups and makes it work with refreshing artistic sensibility. It won’t be for everyone but it’s got enough going for it that, damn, these crazy kids might just make something of it.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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The Accountant 2 (2025)
I’m going to start this review by doing what everyone loves to read, the author patting themself on the back. Back in 2016, I found The Accountant to be an enjoyable thriller with a compelling main character that answered the question, “What if Jason Bourne was actually interesting as a character?” I concluded my original review with this observation: “It’s rare that a movie leaves me wanting more, and it’s even more rare when a movie leaves me wanting to watch a weekly variation of Christian Wolff living as whiz kid accountant by day and enforcer of justice by night.” Over the years, The Accountant became one of the most popular streaming movies, a real word-of-mouth sensation that gave it life long after its theatrical release. It was enough that another studio, Amazon MGM, wanted to buy the rights to pay Ben Affleck to produce a sequel that hit theaters and now is available on streaming, thus ready to be the next great movie that dads fall asleep to. It took longer than expected but The Accountant 2 does fulfill my request, showcasing what a regular series could be, for better and worse.
Christian (Affleck) is like Batman if Batman had Autism and did his own taxes. He has a multi-million-dollar foundation that looks for wrongs to right, and this time he’s called back into the action by the sudden death of Ray King (J.K.Simmons), the retired agency head who was tracking the elusive accountant for years. Ray was obsessed with a family lost to human trafficking and hoped to find the missing child. Christian takes up the case and invites his once-again estranged brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) to help.
The positives from the original Accountant still shine through, namely the entertainment value of Christian as an outsider character trying to fit into the larger world. He’s an unexpected and often funny person but also a man with his own code of justice, and it’s a treat to watch him bomb through a marathon of speed dating one moment and punch guys in the throat the next moment. Affleck is still enjoyably dry as the lead, and the movie is at its best in the moments where Christian and Braxton are butting heads. It takes a longer than it should to reintroduce Braxton and bring him back into Christian’s orbit, but once the brothers are together, the movie coasts on a chummy buddy comedy dynamic that can reliably work no matter the setting. That’s one of the features that led me to apply the movie into a TV adaptation; the characters are what make ordinary encounters that much more entertaining, and TV is the premiere realm for characters. We tune in on a weekly basis because we want to discover what the characters we love will do next. While The Accountant 2 is certainly a few steps behind its predecessor, the core dynamic that made it enjoyable for so many should still prove appealing to those same legions of fans.
The movie also demonstrates some creaky choices and execution that manages to make it feel less like a full and vital sequel and more like an iffy showcase for turning the franchise into that weekly TV series. The central mystery feels lifted from any generic crime procedural about discovering a human trafficking network. The particulars aren’t that interesting or complicated or even that surprising given the general public’s understanding of human trafficking nowadays. I was waiting for this storyline to give us a little insight into the people most affected, the vulnerable families being exploited as they risk everything to search for a better life or more stable employment. I was waiting for something extra that felt like this storyline would be anything more than a ripped-from-the-headlines rescue mission, and it just doesn’t materialize. Much like 2023’s Sound of Freedom, the complex issue of human trafficking gets boiled down to whether or not our characters can save one unfortunate child. Hilariously, during the climax, the movie keeps cross-cutting between the brothers riding to liberate the kids from their imprisonment and an excavator digging a hole intended to be the kids’ mass grave. One inclusion is enough for us to understand the stakes, but the movie keeps cutting back repeatedly, as if anxiously asking, “Oh no, will the bad guys get the grave completely finished in time for the kids to be dumped inside?”
Already it feels like we’re sanding things down in order to fit a formula. Another indication is the relationship between the brothers. Apparently the brothers have not seen nor spoken with one another since the events from the first movie eight years ago. This is odd considering much of that movie’s story was divided with the Braxton character in parallel and finally recognizing his long-lost brother. After all their years apart it feels more likely that they would have stayed in touch or better. By not going that route, the sequel gets redundant reuniting the brothers again, but this time they’ll actually stick it out because they’ve gone line dancing together and killed even more dudes, the two most brotherly-bonding activities possible. It feels like setting up the team for more fun adventures.
Although redundancy is part of what holds back the movie. Take for instance back-to-back introduction scenes for Braxton. Our first scene is him trying to psych himself up, and we may think it’s for a date or to talk to a woman he likes, but it’s actually to ask whether or not he can adopt his selected puppy even earlier. Funny, sure, and gets to his loneliness. The next scene he’s trying to have a conversation with a woman who is clearly not as interested and this perturbs him, and upon him leaving we see the trail of bodies he has left behind in the aftermath of some job. Both of these scenes are accomplishing the same thing: Braxton has difficulty connecting with others and is lonely. Why did we need the first scene when the second conveys the same information plus his formidable nature? Braxton even brings up his desire to get a dog later and Christian considers his brother more a “cat person” because he lacks the stable job and responsibility to care for a canine. This moment could have been the first time the film introduced Braxton’s desire for a pet. We don’t gain much from knowing this already. This may seem slight but it’s indicative of a movie that is filling time (hence the mass grave cutaways). For a movie over two hours, there is a surprising amount of fat that could’ve been reduced for narrative redundancy and pacing.
The most obvious sequel idea for a special-skilled accountant would be to meet his match, and The Accountant 2 does and doesn’t do this (some spoilers to follow in this paragraph). Much of the movie is about locating two people, the child stuck in human trafficking and a mysterious woman (Danielle Pineda) who the bad guys are after. She is linked to the missing child but she’s also a highly-skilled killer who is seeking vengeance of her own. It turns out this woman, who I won’t identify, had a traumatic experience and has now become a savant action superhero. This revelation is meant to explain how an ordinary woman could become this badass killing machine, but it awkwardly feels like a ret-con to try and apply Christian’s condition to anyone under unique circumstances (you too could transform, kids). Except the first Accountant made it abundantly clear that Christian was as skilled and methodical as he is because of being on the Autism spectrum, allowing him a unique dedication and attention to detail. Obviously, Autism is not some shortcut to super powers. If it were, RFK Jr. would actually try and read something relevant about medicine. But it was established that the same skills that Christian uses to be such an exacting accountant are the ones he taps into to become a crushing crusader. As someone who has worked with many on the Autism spectrum, I didn’t see this portrayal as insulting or insensitive, especially since much of the movie is about humanizing people with differences and showing how their capabilities can rise above the preconceived perception of others. It wasn’t saying Christian was like all people with Autism, but this is, again, only my nuer typical perspective. I don’t know if in the ensuing eight years that returning screenwriter Bill Dubuque (Ozark) decided that it was less problematic to have the secret formula be the brain’s response to trauma rather than being on the spectrum. It opens up the movie to other highly-powered super spy assassins, but it also takes away something from the premise.
The actual bad guys are a rather uninspired gathering of goons and shadowy business types. At no point will you feel like our characters are genuinely under threat, and at no point will you remember anything about these villains except for their rote application in the plot. The main trafficker is an evil Boston crime boss (Robert Morgan) that could have been ported over from any other generic crime thriller. His one quirk is that he whistles “Pop Goes the Weasel,” even when he’s murdering migrants in the desert. So there’s that. His main muscle is just… some guy. Literally there is no even cursory attempt to provide any point of characterization for this guy, and he’s supposed to be one of our biggest threats? They could have given this guy, bare minimum, like an eye-patch or an affinity for pop songs, anything. As a result, we have two sets of antagonists, one of which is revealed as an avenging antihero while the others are so disposable to be laughable. At least the first Accountant film gave us a real opponent who, granted, ended up being the younger brother to our main character, but there was a real question what could happen when their paths crossed. Would they use their skills to eliminate the other?
The Accountant 2 might not add up to the same degree of entertainment and thrills that its first outing offered, and there are several missteps and redundancies that take away the edge and uniqueness of that original, but as long as Christian is still determined to help others, I’ll always find this possible franchise worth watching. Now look out for that eventual Amazon TV series to be scheduled right after Reacher.
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-
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Another Simple Favor (2025)
The sly 2018 original was a tart breath of fresh air, chronicling a friendship between two moms, one of means and one of lesser means, that unraveled a conspiracy of death, lies, secret twins, ransom, and murder. It was an enjoyable diversion that was elevated by snappy banter, a combustible chemistry between Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, and some dishy twists. I wasn’t expecting a sequel, but with the same director and principal cast returning, I was at least a little intrigued as to what they would cook up. Instead Another Simple Favor is a warmed-over retread of the original. This time we travel to scenic Italy where Emily (Lively) has been released from prison and is now marrying a wealthy Mafia scion and wants Stephanie (Kendrick), her old frenemy, to be her maid of honor. At its best, the sequel has glimmers of the spiky fun of its predecessor thanks to the serviceably witty banter and ongoing fun between its lead actresses. Mostly, it’s a tangled mess chasing after what made the original entertaining and adult. I can pretend I fully understood the plot with its assault of soapy revelations, character intersections, and convoluted machinations, but that would be a lie. There are times where the movie feels like an overburdened runaway “yes and…” improv game, where anything and anything is accepted and absorbed into the script. I wonder if every additional movie is just going to add more versions of a certain character. If you’re a fan of the 2018 original there might be enough here to prove fleetingly engaging, like the fabulous villas and extravagant costumes, but mostly Another Simple Favor doesn’t feel like it’s doing anyone a real favor.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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