Movie reviews

Akira is nearly 40 years old and still looks absolutely gorgeous, especially restored in 4K on a theater screen. The animation, colors, motorcycles and movement through Neo-Tokyo remain spectacular, while Kaneda, Tetsuo, government experiments, psychic children and political unrest still build toward some properly apocalyptic chaos. I did not return looking for a grand new interpretation; I went because a classic this visually extraordinary deserves to be seen as large and clearly as possible. It did not disappoint. If a 4K theatrical rerelease comes near you, take the opportunity. This is exactly what the big screen can still give you that home cannot.

The Bridge on the River Kwai turns Colonel Nicholson’s courage into something far more unsettling without ever changing who he is. His stubborn defense of military rules against a Japanese prison-camp commander initially looks heroic; once that same pride drives him to build the enemy an extraordinary bridge, principle starts resembling arrogance and obsession. William Holden’s survival-minded Shears provides a sharp counterweight, while Saito receives enough humanity to keep anyone from becoming simple. The movie patiently makes you admire a construction project you rationally need to fail, letting character create every conflict. I finally understand why it is a classic: intelligent, morally complicated and absolutely worth seeing.

Coyote vs. Acme turns Wile E. Coyote’s lifetime of defective purchases into a courtroom comedy, mixing live action and animation with enough craft and affection to justify its long-delayed release. I had fun with it, even if I wanted a much bigger helping of the wider Looney Tunes world and never became especially invested in the human characters. John Cena also feels conspicuously like John Cena wandered into the movie. Still, this escaped the studio vault for a reason: it is an enjoyable movie worth seeing.

Yeon Sang-ho returns to South Korean zombie territory with fast, increasingly coordinated creatures and the kind of polished action and choreography the genre reliably delivers. Colony works whenever people are running for their lives, and a brother-sister relationship supplies its strongest emotional material. What it lacks is the character depth and intelligence that made Train to Busan more than an expertly assembled zombie movie. This is good, energetic genre filmmaking rather than another classic—an easy recommendation for zombie fans who keep their expectations there.

Four young friends discover that the road home simply will not end, turning an ordinary drive into an increasingly existential test of how long people can remain trapped with one another and keep moving. The actors have the chemistry needed to sustain such a confined premise, and Alexander Ullom lets their conversations and relationships evolve without stretching the movie past its natural length. It Ends has the distinct voice of young filmmakers rather than an older industry imitation of them. Some viewers may find the repetition monotonous; I found it thoughtful, timely and remarkably absorbing.

Ridley Scott can make even a thin post-apocalyptic story look extraordinary, and The Dog Stars is gorgeous—especially in Dolby Cinema. Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley and Guy Pearce all do solid work in a world of isolated survivors, scavengers and precarious communities, but the script rarely escapes familiar genre territory. The action has flashes of fun and the cast gives the material more weight than it naturally carries. This is a beautifully made version of a weak story: worth seeing on the largest, best-looking screen available, but not something I would call essential.

Finding Emily happily revives the classic romantic-comedy engine in which a young man searches everywhere for the woman he thinks he wants while failing to notice the one beside him. A missing digit in a phone number leads Owen into a campus-wide, privacy-destroying hunt involving every Emily at his university, with Angourie Rice joining the chaos as a psychology researcher. The destination is never mysterious, nor should it be. Spike Fearn and Rice are charming enough to make getting there the pleasure, and the movie’s unapologetic sincerity reminded me how much I miss this kind of rom-com.

A movie can surround me with awful people and still work if those people are funny, fascinating or recognizably human. Idiots gives me a delinquent teenager and two deeply unequipped men stumbling through a disastrous assignment, but never finds the quality that would make spending time with them worthwhile. The filmmaking and performances are competent; the problem is a story that seems to expect sympathy or solidarity its characters never earn. I left less offended than completely unconvinced that this story needed telling.

A glossy first half teases something muscular: sleek cinematography, knockout-looking frames, and Yash carving through well-staged fights, even if the swagger keeps circling familiar, empty beats. Then the interval dangles promise—and the movie detonates into a baffling second half that mistakes incoherence for audacity. Not AI-slop so much as less sensible than AI: you can outline the conceit on paper, but it still reads idiotic in execution. By the time clown ninja paratroopers descend, exhaustion replaces curiosity. At three hours, style can’t camouflage a story this messy or this dull.

Clown. Ninja. Paratroopers. Toxic opens with slick surfaces—sumptuous cinematography, glossy glamor, and a few crisply staged fights that let Yash mow down obstacles with balletic efficiency—and still left me bored, checking my watch before the hour mark. The interval dangles promise, then the back half nosedives into incoherent chaos. Not “derivative,” not even “AI slop”—worse, because it resists basic sense while insisting on its own grand conceit. Whatever vision is here dissolves into bafflement, capped by those clown ninja paratroopers I cannot justify to anyone. At three hours, it’s a stylish endurance test without a story worth enduring.

Gorgeously mounted and clearly devoted to Enid Blyton’s world, The Magic Faraway Tree plays like a faithful, family-first adaptation that longtime fans and kids may fall for more easily than I did. Despite handsome craft and solid adult turns—Andrew Garfield remains my guy, and Claire Foy is reliably sharp—the film’s gentle pacing and extended runtime left me drowsy rather than transported. The child performances are fine but not magnetic, and the storytelling never quite pulls me in. I’m not the target audience, but if your household loves the book, this looks great and should land for them.

Buddy builds horror out of the bright, synthetic cheerfulness of children’s television, with Keegan-Michael Key as an oversized TV character whose friendliness already feels faintly threatening. The premise is clever and the world has an intriguing internal logic, but the movie reveals its hand early and then keeps playing the same card. What might have made an excellent 45-minute episode becomes increasingly tedious at feature length. There are worthwhile ideas and effective moments here; there simply is not enough story to support ninety minutes, and a horror movie should not leave me fighting sleep.

SIX reimagines Henry VIII’s wives as a fiercely talented girl group, each Queen arguing through song that she endured the worst marriage before becoming backup for the next woman’s spotlight. That structure gives all six performers room to shine while building the generous ensemble spirit I enjoyed most. The show is energetic, smartly paced and exactly as long as its premise needs. Putting a lengthy making-of documentary before the performance is a baffling presentation choice, but once the music begins, this becomes another persuasive argument for bringing more great stage productions—and great casts—to movie screens.

The Brink of War dramatizes Reagan and Gorbachev’s 1986 Reykjavík negotiations as a careful contest between two leaders who sense an opportunity to reshape the nuclear arms race without knowing how desperate, sincere or politically exposed the other man may be. The performances and characterizations are strong, with amusing side currents involving their wives and the intelligence teams downstairs. Because I already knew the history and its sticking points, the procedural drama felt dry rather than suspenseful. Viewers newer to the material may find more tension, while today’s unraveling arms-control order gives the conversations a sobering relevance.

Jane Schoenbrun begins with a filmmaker trying to revive a worn-out slasher franchise and turns that assignment into a slippery exploration of horror, sexuality, memory and the stories people use to understand themselves. Hannah Einbinder is strong, but Gillian Anderson gives one of the year’s great performances as the reclusive final girl whose account of the original film may or may not be trustworthy. The movie keeps moving between reality and mythology without flattening either into an easy answer. It is strange, layered and genuinely provocative—worth seeing for Anderson alone, with much more waiting underneath.

Tony wisely refuses to turn young Anthony Bourdain into the fully formed, beloved traveler he would become. Dominic Sessa plays him at nineteen as spoiled, narcissistic, self-destructive and largely useless, stumbling into his first restaurant kitchen while choosing between Antonio Banderas’s model of discipline and craft and Leo Woodall’s much cooler example of charming irresponsibility. Banderas supplies the movie’s enormous heart, while Woodall confirms his leading-man charisma. Tony can be exhausting because Tony himself is exhausting, but that honesty is its achievement: it finds the beginning of Bourdain’s story without pretending he began as a saint.

Leslie Mann, Michelle Buteau, Anna Faris and Isla Fisher take wine-mom comedy to a luxury spa, where old resentments, relationship problems and one spectacularly disruptive friend turn relaxation into chaos. The cast is capable—Buteau has fun material, Faris remains naturally funny, and Fisher commits completely to being the beautiful trainwreck nobody sensible would keep inviting—but the friendships exist mostly because the screenplay insists they do. This feels designed for a lazy Sunday at home, ideally playing in the background. Nothing made me regret seeing it; very little convinced me I needed to.

Mutiny belongs to the expanding genre best described as “Jason Statham does Jason Statham things.” This time he is a former Special Forces and NYPD officer framed for murdering his billionaire employer, which eventually puts him aboard a cargo ship punching, kicking, stabbing and shooting his way through an international conspiracy. The title barely makes sense, the plot feels algorithmically assembled, and neither the characters nor choreography offer much to remember. It is not aggressively terrible; it simply has no reason to exist unless watching Statham efficiently beat people up is reason enough for you.

The most remarkable thing about The Wrong Girls is how completely it evaporated from my memory within four days. Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat apparently play aimless women whose accidental encounter with an experimental drug pulls them into telepathy, mistaken identities and a conspiracy, but even rereading the premise barely revived the experience. I remember the two of them attempting stoner-buddy-comedy energy, fighting each other and various pursuers, and almost nothing else. I was awake, which somehow makes the absence of any lasting impression worse. A movie this recent should leave me with more than proof that I physically attended it.

Matthew McConaughey brings maximum McConaughey energy to Amziah King, a beekeeper, folk musician and charismatic center of a rural Oklahoma community who reconnects with his former foster daughter through the family honey business. The first half’s music, oddball humor and beekeeping charm worked for me; later, the film shifts into a much darker kind of story and asks us to accept choices I do not think it earns. That uneven turn keeps an unusual, entertaining movie from becoming a really good one. If two hours of folk music, bees and McConaughey sounds inviting, it probably will be.

Three Kansas City teenagers mistakenly believe Green Day has invited their garage band to open a Los Angeles show, sending them west in a funny, affectionate ode to bad bands, impossible confidence and the friends who make teenage dreams feel plausible. The music is deployed with real understanding, and the film’s love for kids creating something together is infectious. The strange part is that these “2026” teenagers live entirely like kids from 1998, in a phone-free musical culture preserved in millennial amber. That anachronism is distracting and fascinating—and perhaps part of why this Green Day skeptic enjoyed their world so much.

Damien Chazelle turns two ambitious people in Los Angeles into a classic movie musical, a romance and a love letter to the city at once. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone have ridiculous chemistry, the songs and images carry the story rather than interrupt it, and the relationship gives all that beauty something deeper to express. This is ultimately about the people who help shape us while we are becoming ourselves, and why a relationship need not last forever to matter. Ten years later, its mixture of old-Hollywood craft and emotional clarity still works beautifully. My friends skipped the rerelease; their loss.

A suburban neighborhood is ripped out of the present and dropped into a prehistoric world, giving Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor marital problems, skeptical children and a sudden abundance of dinosaurs. The family dynamics and survival material work, and ordinary houses surrounded by giant predators remain inherently entertaining. What makes no sense is the neighborhood: real humans would organize immediately, pool supplies, post armed watches and appoint some grill-owning dad commander. Here, almost everyone stays inside waiting to become dinosaur food. The social logic is absurd, but this is still the best dinosaur movie I have seen in a while—and one I would gladly watch again.

Ten years later, Train to Busan remains the day-zero zombie movie done about as well as it can be done. A father and daughter board a train as an outbreak begins, and from there the film delivers fast, terrifying—but mercifully stupid—zombies, clean action, characters worth cheering for and at least one passenger you desperately want to see get what he deserves. Ma Dong-seok’s Sang-hwa is still the man everyone should want on a zombie team. The movie never mistakes complication for intelligence; it simply understands its people, its monsters and the momentum of the ride. No notes.