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Weapons (2025)
Zack Cregger began his career as one of the co-creators and co-stars of the sketch comedy troupe, The Whitest Kids U Know. This led to a poorly received sex comedy, 2009’s Miss March, which Cregger co-directed and starred as the lead. Then in 2022, Cregger made a name for himself in a very different genre, writing and directing Barbarian, a movie whose identity kept shifting with twists and world-building buried underneath its simple Air B&B gone awry setup. From there, Cregger joined the ranks of Jordan Peele, John Krasinski, and other horror-thriller upstarts best known for comedy. It became a question over what Cregger would do next, which sparked a bidding war for Weapons. It’s easy to see why with such a terrific premise: one day a classroom of kids all run out into the night at the same time, all except for one child, and nobody knows why. Weapons confirms Cregger’s genre transformation and the excitement that deservingly follows each new release. Each new Cregger horror movie is a game of shifting expectations and puzzles, though the game itself might be the only point.
The premise is immediately grabbing and Cregger’s clever structural gambits add to that intrigue. Right away in the opening narration from an unseen child, we’re given the state of events in this small town, already reckoning with an unknowable tragedy. The screenplay takes a page from Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino, following different lead characters to learn about their personal perspectives. It continually allows the movie to re-frame itself, allowing us to pick up details or further context with each new person giving us a fuller sense of the big picture. Rather than resetting every twenty minutes or so, the movie offers an implicit promise of delivering something new at those junctures, usually leaving that previous lead character in some kind of dire cliffhanger. With each new portion, we can gain some further insight, but it also allows the story to ground its focus and try on different tones. With Justine (Julia Garner), we see a woman who is trying to figure out how to regain her life she feels has been unfairly stripped away, and many of her coping mechanisms are self-destructive old habits. With Archer (Josh Brolin), we see a father consumed by his sudden loss and the reflection it forces him into, while also obsessing over what possible investigative details he can put together to possibly provide a framework of an answer. Then with other characters, which I won’t spoil, we gain other perspectives less directly involved that approach a dark comedy of errors. At one point, you may even wonder when the movie is going to remember those missing kids again. I appreciated that Cregger resolves his mystery with enough time to really examine its implications. This isn’t just a last-minute twist or Scream-like unveiling of the villain coming to light. I also appreciated that it ends in such an enthusiastic climax that left me cackling and cheering. It’s a mystery with a relatively satisfying answer but a climax that is also cathartic and exhale-inducing after all the dread and build-up.
The technical elements are just as polished as its knotty screenplay. The movie is genuinely unnerving at many points. Even the image of kids Narutu-running off into the night is inherently creepy. There are a few cheap jump scares but most of the movie is built around a quiet sense of desperation and dread. Cregger prefers holding onto shots to build tension, like a door opening and waiting for something, anything to pop out of the darkness. There are moments that made me wince and moments that made me gasp, like suddenly being compelled to stab one’s face with a fork dozens of times. However, a significant drawback for me was the lighting levels of the cinematography. To be clear, the photography was eerie and very evocative. My problem is that this was a movie whose light levels were so low it made it excruciatingly hard to simply identify what was happening onscreen. I’m sure my theater’s dim projection was part of this, but this is also a trend with modern movie-making, the murky lighting, like everyone is trying to recreate those Barry Lyndon’s candle-lit tableaus. Sometimes I just want to see what’s happening in my movie.
Weapons is certainly a thought-provoking premise, but with some distance from the movie, I’m starting to wonder what more there may be under the surface. Now not every movie has to be designed for maximum layers and themes and metaphors; movies can have their own points of appeal before getting to subtext. I do think most viewers will find Weapons engaging and intriguing, and the slippery structure helps make the movie feel new every twenty minutes while also testing out different tones that might have been too obtrusive with different characters and their specific perspectives. However, once you straighten out that timeline and see things clearly, it begs the question what exactly Cregger is actually saying. The sudden and disturbing horror of a classroom of children all disappearing has to have obvious connections to school shootings and mass killings, right? The trauma image is too potent and specifically tied to schools to be accidental or casual. Taking that, what is the movie saying about our culture where one day, any day, a class full of young children can just go missing? Despite a literal floating assault rifle appearing in a dream, there doesn’t appear to be much on the movie’s mind about gun violence or even weapons in general. I’m reminded of my favorite movie of 2020, the criminally under-seen Spontaneous, which explored a world where one high school class of students lived under the threat that at any time they could explode. There was no explanation for this strange phenomenon, though scientists certainly tried, and the focus was instead on the unfair dread hanging over their day-to-day existence, that at any moment their life could be forfeited. The parallel was obvious and richly explored about the pressure and anxieties of a life where this very disturbing reality is considered your accepted new normal. That was a movie with ideas and messages linking them to its school-setting of metaphorical trauma. I can’t say the same with Weapons.
I’ve read some people analyze each one of the characters as one of the stages of alcoholism, and I’ve read other people argue that the movie is an exploration of a town come undone through unexplainable trauma, but I seriously doubt that last one. Don’t you think the mystery of the missing class would draw national and international media attention? Hangers-ons thinking they cracked the case? Intruders harassing the bigger names? People trying to exploit a tragedy for money or a sense of self-importance? Conspiracy theorists linking this mystery to their other data points for a larger conspiracy? It doesn’t feel like the impact of this unique mystery has escaped the county lines. Certainly there are characters searching for answers and treating this poor schoolteacher as a scapegoat for their collective fears and anger, but by turning the screenplay into a relay race where one character hands off to the next for time in the spotlight, it doesn’t expand our sense of the town and the broader effects of this bizarre tragedy. Instead, it pens in the characters we do have, which all seem to interact with those very same characters, making the bigger world feel actually smaller. Narrowing the lens of perspectives makes it more difficult to articulate commentary about community breakdown in the face of uncertainty. The creative choices square with the central mystery and the nesting-doll structure, playing a game with the audience to discover the source of this incident, but once you discover that source, and once we reach our ending, you too may appreciate Cregger’s narrative sleight-of-hand but eventually wonder, “Is that all there is?” Maybe so.
Weapons is an effective and engaging follow-up for Cregger and confirms that whatever stories he feels compelled to tell in horror are worthy of watching, preferably with as little prior information as possible. You definitely feel you’re in the confidant hands of a natural storyteller who enjoys throwing out surprises and shock value. I have some grumbles about ultimately what might all be behind that intriguing mystery and the lack of foundational commentary that would permit multiple viewings of close analysis. Then again not every movie is meant to be a repeat viewing. Some movies are one-and-dones but still enjoyable, and that might best sum up Weapons. It’s sharp and cleverly designed but maybe lacking a finer point.
Nate’s Grade: B
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KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
I’ve watched KPop Demon Hunters four times in the last week on Netflix, so I may be a bit partial to it. Sony Animation’s newest genre-bending stunner is an action musical with surprising heart to ground the supernatural multi-dimensional battles between the forces of good and evil. Our main characters are the three young women who form the Korean pop group Huntrix; they play sold-out arenas by day and slay demons by night, working toward sealing a barrier that will protect mankind from soul-sucking demons. They meet their match when the demons form their own boy band, the Saja Boys. Handsome, charming, and media savvy, the Saja Boys begin pushing Huntrix out of the top spot and stealing their fans and their souls. It’s a cute premise buoyed by spry and colorful animation with terrifically designed and pleasing action sequences. It also helps that every song is an absolute banger, with some exceptional melodies and anthemic choruses. It may prove impossible to resist the songs, making those dastardly yet dreamy demons all the more likeable. What works just as well is the character work put into establishing the friendship between Huntrix, whose lead singer, Rumi, is keeping a secret that she is herself part demon. She finds herself drawn to Jinu, the leader of the Saja Boys, who seems more complicated than simply being a remorseless creature. He has plenty of real remorse and feeling, as Rumi has plenty of self-repression and shame, and they find the other more complex and mysteriously appealing as they feel out a possible romance. There’s a lesson here about self-acceptance and being open with the ones you love, and it’s effectively developed to the point that, during the grand climax, with the crowd chanting in unison with our ladies, affirming that solidarity, you too might get a little misty of the eye. That’s the amazing part of a movie literally titled KPop Demon Hunters: it can have you bopping your head one minute and drying your eyes the next. The animation can get exaggerated into cartoon comic absurdity (eyes literally pouring popcorn another person gobbles down), but it’s the sincerity and messages about acceptance and tolerance that rise highest. Plus there’s that music. It’s all such a vibrant blast, and it’s got the infectious jams of the summer all in a tight yet playful and poignant 90 minutes.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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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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Until Dawn (2025)
I’m going to do something I don’t know if I’ve ever really done before in my twenty-five-plus years of toil as a film critic. I’m going to devote almost the entirety of this review to try and make sense of the ending and its cascading choices that confound and astound me. I’ll present some spoiler-free analysis beforehand but, dear reader, this is going to be a spoiler-heavy review because, quite simply, it’s all I want to talk about as it concerns Until Dawn. The horror movie is an adaptation of a 2014 PlayStation video game that itself was fashioned like a ten-hour horror movie. It was a love letter to the horror genre and your goal was to keep as many of the characters alive as you could through quick-time events and choices that could have lingering and unexpected consequences later in the game. It was, above all else, fun, and news that Hollywood was going to turn it into a movie made a degree of sense. After all, it was practically an interactive movie to begin with. Then news matriculated that they weren’t really adapting the game and instead were making something new and different, so why call it Until Dawn? Beyond the cash-grab from the use of a familiar name, if you’re going to be Until Dawn in name only, why not just be that original horror idea and let someone else actually adapt Until Dawn as it was? You’re not going to get another crack at this title, so why is the first attempt one that could be done without the game existing? Regardless, the movie is a bad adaptation of the game and a bad use of dwindling brain cells.
Five teenagers make a trip to search of Clover’s (Ella Rubin) missing older sister. They trace her last recording to a gas station just outside the mining town of Gore County. The gas station attendant (Peter Stormare) lets these curious kids know that weird things happen in town, and sure enough the weird stranger is right. The teens take refuge in a visitor center with a guestbook and a peculiar hourglass time piece on the wall. Soon enough they’re beset with masked killers and monsters and each of the five friends is slaughtered. Then they wake up back in the visitor center with the hourglass starting over. They have to learn about this mysterious location to try and stay alive all the way… until dawn!
Before the heavy spoilers begin, I’ll provide a few accolades to what the movie does well. Director David F. Sandberg (Shazam!, Lights Out) has a clear affinity for the horror genre and can summon some pretty effective and skin-crawling imagery. I actually like the premise of a horror time loop, though this was also covered with the tongue-in-cheek genre tweak that was 2017’s Happy Death Day. However, that movie primarily dealt with a slasher scenario whereas Until Dawn can mix and match different genres, which makes each new iteration feel like a blank slate to explore. I loved the shortest loop, where the characters hold up in a bathroom and gruesomely discover what happens if you drink the local water. It’s the best development in the movie and one I’m glad the script revisits from time to time. With most time loop movies, once the characters adjust to the reality that death is not final, they get a little more loose with their physical well-being. I enjoyed some of the turns the characters make with the understanding that they’ll come back again. The visual nods and connections to the game are there without feeling too gimmicky. Plus, having Stormare come back to play a variation on his nattering psychiatric weirdo from the game is exactly what the movie adaptation needs. Stormare is on his own unique wavelength.
Now, the madness. Abandon all hope ye who enter the spoiler section of this review.
I don’t understand this movie. At all. I read over its Wikipedia summary and watched a few of those YouTube explanation videos to see if it was just me and I missed important pieces of information that would connect the various elements together. It’s not me, folks. These story elements don’t connect. They don’t form a coherent whole. I don’t need a reason why time loop scenarios happen; they never explained it with the genre grandaddy Groundhog Day, and if it’s good enough for Groundhog Day, it’s good enough for your movie. The problem is when they try to explain and it actively makes things worse, because now you begin to question everything. I liken it to 2019’s Us, a movie with plenty of outlandish story elements including the existence of a same-age evil twin for every person but living in a subterranean mimicry of surface life. I would have happily accepted that as-is, but then the movie tries to find a real explanation for where these people came from and why, and now the illusion of ignorance is shattered. Now all those pesky questions start flooding the mind that could have before been kept at bay.
Let’s examine the explanations for the two primary mysteries: 1) why there are monsters, and 2) why there is a time loop trap. Again, both of which didn’t even need explanations but here we go.
The mythology of the game gets ported over in starts and stops, but the movie keeps the setting of a mining town that had a tragic collapse that devastated the town. In this version, the majority of the town fell into a sinkhole below the earth. Do we get to explore these exciting and creepy locations? Nope. One of the town’s psychiatrists (Stormare) is still alive and continuing his mad experiments for… reasons. Like the game, there is a curse wherein if you resort to cannibalism you will become a spooky wendigo monster, so the creatures are a result of the former townspeople and other past residents from the previous time loops. Fine. I can accept that. However, late in the movie, our creepy psych doc clarifies for Clover that things aren’t just all in her head, a nod to the original game. Except that ending would have made more sense. The new ending says that Clover’s fears are responsible for manifesting the different antagonistic monsters and killers. Okay, so we’re externalizing the internal, fine, but why her? Why not any of the other friends? Does this mean every previous group was also responsible for manifesting their own tormentors based upon personal psychological fears? Why are we including this roulette wheel of terrors on top of the constant of the wendigo creatures? How is this even happening because the movie gives no scant indication? Do the deadly rules get reset with each new group? In our story, the characters can’t drink the water, but what about other groups? If every group is manifesting the same avatars of fear then why not just adopt them as stable rules? Why is this one man staying behind to catalogue the results? He’s mortal so he just lives in the sinkhole or works at the gas station, waiting for wayward teens to stumble into his next experimental group? Who is keeping the lights on in this visitor center? What does this guy do during the “off season” when there are no looky-loos? Does he have to feed the existing wendigos like some kind of demented zoo? What is to be gained from all these experiments? Is he planning on publishing his research later? What is this guy’s regular life like?
Then there’s the time loop explanation which is -wait for it- nothing. Absolutely nothing. Why are characters getting second and third and thirteenth chances to survive until dawn? Why is it thirteen? The movie doesn’t even have the time to demonstrate thirteen loops, instead jumping from like the fourth straight to the last one through the annoying use of, “Oh, let’s watch these film clips we took that we don’t remember.” If you didn’t have the interest or time for thirteen loops, why even make it thirteen? Why does the number matter if they inevitably turn into wendigos from desperate cannibalism? You would think the loops should be infinite to guarantee this result. Why would the other victims bother writing their name in the guestbook every loop? It establishes a timeline of sorts, but if writing can last in this guestbook, why doesn’t anyone write anything other than their name over and over? Detailing your experiences and lessons learned as a living record might be helpful to future loopers. Also, what obligations do these people feel about signing their names in the guestbook? Who accepts getting murdered over ten times but is still being a stickler for signing their name, and for what? Are they getting some little feeling of superiority that they were able to scribble their name thirteen times? Where did the hourglass come from? It definitely looks like it was installed with purpose, so did these just materialize? Why do the timeloops even consider having a mechanism for letting participants win and escape? What about the other quirks like how the weather is affected by the bad vibes of this place? Even the rain knows better.
So, in summation, the time loops and manifesting monsters are unrelated to one another and there is no added context provided for like some ancient curse or witchy magic or anything to cause this mess. There is one nefarious wacko doctor who just hangs around for kicks, though why he is immune from the loops or the larger effects of the manifested monsters is beyond me. Is he recruiting the monsters like some sort of work foreman, telling this gnarly creature, “Need ya to pull a double today, Fangy.” It just all feels like scary elements working in parallel and occasionally drifting into one another’s orbit, but there’s no fitting or acceptable explanation, so why does the movie even try to present one in the first place? I’m stunned at how Until Dawn just completely unravels into incoherent madness by the conclusion, which sets up that there might be a larger universe of these doctors overseeing experiments. At that point, you might as well be watching The Cabin in the Woods. If you have no allegiance or familiarity with the video game, you might find enough to amuse you, at least for fleeting moments. I was open-minded to what an Until Dawn-in-name-only adaptation could do with a time loop gimmick, but the final results feel like an uneven grab-bag of imagery and ideas and directions that go nowhere.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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The Monkey (2025)
It was only minutes when I thought to myself, “I think I love this movie.” To be fair, this movie might only jibe for a very select few with a penchant for gory, outlandish horror and a demented sense of humor, but it just so happens that specific population includes yours truly. The Monkey is a dark comedy about the cruel indifference of fate disguised as a supernatural thriller adaptation of a Stephen King short story. It’s about two twin brothers (both played by Theo James as an adult) coming to terms with a family curse, a toy monkey that, when wound up, will beat its drum until the final blow correlates with the sudden, often shocking death of a random person. It’s essentially a death device and the brothers are haunted by it since losing both of their parents to it as teenagers, both grasping for meaning from their tragedy. One of them blames himself and the other blames his brother, and this has warped them into adulthood and how they view themselves, their responsibility as a parent, and their hostility to one another. The movie becomes a cagey reunion between the two brothers while also vying for power over a dangerous totem that loves elaborate Final Destination-style calamities. These deaths are over-the-top, often with bodies exploding in bloody heaps, and I found myself cackling along in response to the ridiculous violence. This is quite a change of pace for writer/director Osgood Perkins who just last year helmed the Satanic serial killer thriller Longlegs. Whereas that movie was a bit too lost in its slow-build atmosphere and a jumbled story burdened with underdeveloped plot elements, The Monkey is refreshingly straightforward and always entertaining in its contained madness. There are some bold and dark choices made and I appreciated every one of them. This is really a movie about trying to make sense of death and grief but it’s through the visage of spilled viscera and gallows humor. I didn’t think I’d walk away saying this, but I can’t wait to show my wife the movie about the killer windup monkey.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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The Gorge (2025)
While watching the action-thriller The Gorge, I kept thinking, “Wow, I’m surprised this didn’t get a theatrical release at all.” The Apple Plus original is the kind of movie you’d want to watch on the big screen, with large-scale action, atmospheric imagery, and a creepy sound design meant to elicit shudders. It has a dynamite premise that grabbed me right away: two elite snipers from the East and West, Levi (Miles Teller) and Drasa (Anya-Taylor Joy), are tasked with manning watchtowers overlooking a cavernous and mysterious gorge. They have heavy-duty Gatling guns to make sure whatever is in the gorge stays in the gorge. It’s a year-long tour of duty and both snipers are forbidden to communicate with one another. Naturally, out of boredom and necessity, they break the no-contact rule, first through white board messages, then through shared experiences and competitions, and finally coming face-to-face. For the first 45 minutes or so, The Gorge is actually a pretty lean and effective long distance romance of sorts. There’s ingenuity in the process of getting to know someone from across a large hole in the ground, and both actors have solid chemistry that will help make you silently yearn for a little global collaboration. The movie also has an intriguing scenario with tantalizing details that point to its secret history, until everything is literally spelled out in Act Three. The monsters, who look like a combination of Groot and zombies, are an unsettling character design, though I wanted more variety in their appearance. When the characters finally delve into the gorge for the majority of our climax, we got some new and nasty creepy crawlies, like a tree with rib bones like insect mandibles that ensnare like a Venus flytrap. Alas, I found the stuff inside the gorge to be fun and creepy with a great atmosphere to play upon what we can and cannot see, but it was the stuff above and outside the gorge that made the movie for me. That’s The Gorge for ya: come for spooky monsters, stay for the surprisingly involving romance between monster killers.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Moana 2 (2024)
It’s hard not to see the DNA of its original incarnations as a TV series for Disney Plus, as well as the awkward adjustments to slap this together into a feature film. Unless you’re a super fan of the original Moana who needs any additional content, you’ll likely have a less than impressive response to Moana 2. It feels quite episodic from villains and storylines popping up for small increments of time only to go away and be replaced by a new storyline, to a new batch of characters meant to hold our attention while other main characters, in particular Maui (Dwayne Johnson), sit out for long stretches. The animation is a notable step down as well, and while it’s still pleasing to watch and far from bad, it’s lacking the detail and refinement of the feature team, especially with lighting, as everything in this world lacks shadows with such high key lighting washing everything out. Without Lin-Manuel Miranda returning, it’s obvious the songs will not be nearly as catchy and enchanting, and the tunes for Moana 2 are pretty instantly forgettable. I’m struggling to rethink any melody right now as I write this. It’s hard not to feel like everything is so slight, from the storytelling to the visuals to the songs to the inclusion of the beloved characters from the original. I loved Moana and consider it the best of modern-day Disney, and I’m clearly not alone from the box-office dominance that the sequel was able to achieve. I actually think I would have preferred future Moana adventures as a TV series because the mythology and world has more to explore. But that version of new Moana has been transformed, Frankenstein-style, into a releasable feature film, one that suffers in the transformation into something it’s not suited for. Disney made a billion dollars from this gamut, but the rest of us are left with a Moana 2 that had much further to go.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Kraven the Hunter (2024)
Kraven the Hunter feels like a movie that was never meant to be seen. That seems paradoxical considering the efforts of many talented people over years took place to bring the Spider-Man villain solo movie to some form of creaking, wheezing life. Since 2017, Sony has decided to create their own Spider-Man universes minus, of course, Spider-Man. They’ve been making solo movies about Spider-Man villains and while the Venom movies have been inexplicably popular, the rest have been regarded as unmitigated disasters. In 2022, Morbius was bad enough that Sony thought they could re-release it to capitalize on the memes and derisive entertainment factor. To no avail and a total lack of morbin’ time. In 2024, Sony released three Spider-Man villain movies, though Madame Web was never really a villain per se, but then again nobody really wanted a Madame Web movie anyhow, though it once again gave us some memorable memes. Now Kraven is reportedly closing out this shared cinematic universe experiment, and the president of Sony is blaming those mean ole film critics for the failures of these would-be superhero classics (always a smart movie, assuming audiences are incapable of making up their own minds). Delayed almost two years from its original January 2023 release date, Kraven the Hunter is the death knell of this enterprise and it comes to a thoroughly mediocre conclusion, feeling even more disposable, poorly developed, and mechanical, and ultimately a footnote to a footnote of superhero cinema.
Kraven, nee Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, portraying his third superhero) is the son of a notorious Russian crime boss, Nikolai (Russell Crowe). One day on a hunting trip in Ghana, Sergei rescues his brother Dimitri (Fred Hechinger) from a lion. The lion injures Sergei and takes him for food, but thanks to a magic elixir from a tourist, Calypso (Ariana DeBose), who saves him. Now he has animal-like senses and speed and strength. As an adult, Kraven seeks out villains to bring to justice, but he’s also trying to square the legacy of his father and whether he is like dad. 
The problem with these Spider-Man-Minus-Spider-Man movies is making people get interested in the famous web-slinger’s rogues gallery. This usually means treating the character’s best known for trading punches with another hero as their own individual anti-hero, complete with a more villainous villain for our future villains to have to topple. Usually these villains (the actual individual movie antagonists, not the protagonists) are an imitation of our heroes (still referencing the future villains), the mirror version of them. So if your protagonist is going to be a vampire, then your antagonist is going to be a slightly more evil vampire. If your protagonist is an alien goo monster who likes to eat heads, then your antagonist is going to be a slightly more evil alien goo monster that likes to eat heads. You get the idea. However, you digest enough of these, and it all seems a bit too perfunctory, the main character having to defeat a version of themself. The main challenge is finding a way to make an audience care about these characters, and having them rescue a love interest or defeat a new-but-same villain with the implicit promise that maybe, if you’re patient enough, you might see them eventually try to murder Spider-Man, is not it. I’m not against the idea of giving these villains their origin tales, but it feels like in order to make them more palatable to a mass audience means they’re neutering the nature of these characters. The hypothetical future Sinister Six movie can’t all be six misunderstandings against Spider-Man.
Alas, Kraven is a real bore of an action movie even with its R-rating, the first for these Spider-Man villain movies. The added bloodshed and curse words don’t exactly make the movie feel more adult when we’re still dealing with plotlines like a super lion biting our hero and giving him super lion powers, much like the origin story of Spider-Man, or another villain suffering from a very silly and similar Amazing Spider-Man 2 Goblin-itus medical malady. This is not a serious movie in the slightest but that doesn’t mean it can’t be passably fun, but everyone is just so dour and passionless that it drains all entertainment. At least Madame Web was perplexingly interesting with its bad decisions. There’s such little energy to be had through the middling two hours. Kraven is gifted superhuman powers and he uses them to hunt down bad men and big game poachers, becoming let’s say Captain Planet if he watched nothing but Charles Bronson movies. There’s got to be an exciting movie there, or at least a more interesting one than what we eventually got here. It’s hijacked by some pretty rote family drama of a bad dad who was too hard on his kids and rescuing a kidnapped little brother who he feels guilty about leaving with the bad dad after Kraven got his new powers. The family drama is pretty rote and uninspired, with both of the other characters kept to the sidelines for most of the movie, which makes it hard to care that much about either of their impacts. The haphazard integration of a romantic subplot with Calypso is even more perfunctory when I would much rather see Kraven fall in love with a lion instead.
I like J.C. Chandor as a director, and he’s someone who leaps at new challenges. His debut movie, 2011’s Margin Call, was an engrossing character piece about Wall Street traders and execs on the verge of the 2008 financial meltdown. It was so bare-bones that it was practically a play. His next film, 2013’s All is Lost, was the exact opposite: a movie completely told through visual storytelling and with a minimum of spoken words as Robert Redford tries to patch up his sinking boat. 2014’s A Most Violent Year was a slow-burn crime drama about the lengths people will go to escape their past and their nature. From there, Chandor has been circling larger studio projects, leaving 2016’s Deepwater Horizon and then replacing Kathryn Bigelow for Netflix’s action thriller, 2019 Triple Frontier. He’s a chameleon of a director and the only real point of interest I had with Kraven. What would he do in the superhero space? Well, the answer is not much. The visual flourishes we’ve seen before in other movies but without a sense of humor. Watching Kraven periodically run on all fours may make him more animal-like but it doesn’t look good. The movie gets lost in the convoluted mythology and rules of its characters and what they’re capable of, and so the action sequences feel cobbled together and short on imagination. The climax is during a stampede of buffalo but there’s no real danger here like dodging around the animals. They very conveniently allow space for our hero to fight his battle, thus becoming a thundering backdrop. Even if you’re overly generous, there’s not much here to excite the senses or even your morbid curiosity.
There is one line of dialogue that needs to be singled out for its absurdity. While Madame Web was ridiculed for its “researching spiders in the Amazon with my mother before she died” line, the filmmakers had the good sense to eliminate it from the final film, though not the good sense not to include it in their initial marketing. With Kraven the Hunter, there’s a character who talks about her mother and literally says, “She died and I never saw her again.” That’s usually how that works.
As the final piece of Sony’s Spider-Man villain spinoff universe, Kraven the Hunter brings this diversionary superhero franchise to a merciful end. The frustrating thing is that Kraven as a character can work, as recently demonstrated in the popular Spider-Man PlayStation video game sequel. He’s supposed to be the ultimate hunter, a force of nature, but that doesn’t mean he needs to carry his own movie, just like Morbius or Madame Web or any other Spidey villain. Launching these characters could have worked but needed much more imagination and care. Instead, it was Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man and, with the exception of the Venom movies with their goofy buddy movie appeal, audiences have responded with the indifference you would assume. It’s not enough for these movies to merely be adjacent to Spider-Man to be appealing. They need to be good, to be able to stand on their own, and to support an extended time with this character. It’s hard not to see the larger machinations for eager franchise-extension as the primary motivation. But if these are the impressions of the characters we’re getting, who would want any more? Turns out nobody was actively cravin’ another underdeveloped and mediocre superhero movie.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Nightbitch (2024)
Motherhood can be a real bitch, right? That’s the lessons for Nightbitch, a bizarre movie that juggles high-concepts and tones like a struggling new mother juggling time. Based on the novel by Rachel Yoder, Amy Adams plays Mother (yes, that’s how she’s credited), an artist who chose to become a stay-at-home mother to her two-year-old son, and her life has become an endless stream of days appeasing a small tyrant who she also unconditionally loves. Early on, Adams uncorks an imaginary monologue about demystifying the glamour of motherhood and the guilt she feels about not finding every tantrum and bowel movement a thing of bronze-worthy beauty. She’s grappling with significant changes, and that’s even before she thinks she’s turning into a dog. I can find thematic connection with motherhood and body horror, as our protagonist feels that she no longer recognizes her body, that she feels a lack of direction and agency in a life that no longer feels hers. The added body horror of transformation makes sense, but this element seems so extraneous that I wished the movie had exorcised it and simply stuck with its unsparing examination of parenthood. You would think a woman believing she is becoming a dog would dominate her life. The ultimate life lessons of the movie are rather trite: assert yourself, establish a balance to have it all, and fellas, did you know that being a stay-at-home parent is actually hard work? There are too many half-formed elements and plot turns that don’t feel better integrated, like flashbacks interwoven with Mother’s mother, not credited as “Grandmother,” as a repressed Mennonite in a closed community who disappeared for stretches. There’s also a few curious reveals relating to Mother’s perception of others that are unnecessary and obtusely mysterious for no real added value (“Why that library book died forty years ago….”). Adams is blameless and impressively throws herself into the demanding roll, going full canine with gusto as she trots on all fours and eats out of bowls. The problem is that all the dog material feels a little too silly when realized in a visual medium rather than a symbol of freedom and rebellion. Nightbitch is more bark than bite, and I’d advise viewers looking for an unflinching portrayal of motherhood to watch Tully instead and, if desired, pet your household dog at home to replicate Nightbbitch but better.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Nosferatu (2024)
Director Robert Eggers’ remake of a famous rip-off of the most famous blood-sucker in literature is a finely crafted and highly atmospheric drop into the past, as should be expected from Eggers (The Witch, The Northman). It doesn’t redefine cinematic vampires but rather puts the story through the contemporary lens of a toxic ex-boyfriend who refuses to relinquish what he feels belongs to him. The story should be familiar to most, even if they never watched the original 1922 silent film, nor its 1970s remake by Werner Herzog. Bill Skarsgaard plays the mysterious and threatening Count Orlock, a wealthy Transylvanian outsider looking to relocate to the big city in Germany, primarily to prey upon poor Ellen Hunter (Lily-Rose Depp), the “one who got away,” so to speak. He haunts her dreams and drives her mad, with Depp mesmerized and convulsing most convincingly. From there it’s a battle between Ellen’s husband (Nicholas Hoult) and an expert in the occult (Willem Defoe) over whose will will win out. Skarsgaard is fascinating and chilling and you too may want to imitate the thick-as-stew Count Orlock accent afterwards. The technical elements of this movie are masterful, from production design, to costuming, to the gas-lit and moody photography. Eggers is a deeply sincere filmmaker who translates his passions and madness onto the big screen with loving care. Nosferatu is gorgeous and unnerving, though I’m hesitant to say it rivals Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula movie for modern vampire artistic triumph and pure horniness. It’s a gussied-up B-movie with a deeply committed filmmaker to deeply realized genre filmmaking, and so Nosferatu is an entertaining remake that most vampire fans will be happy to sink their teeth into this holiday season.
Nate’s Grade: B
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