Movie reviews

Toy Story 5 finds the right modern opponent for Bonnie’s toys: not newer toys, but the screen through which children now socialize. Pixar handles that anxiety without collapsing into “technology bad,” making room for imagination, unstructured play and digital life to coexist. Jessie grows naturally into leadership, the pacing is strong and even a suspiciously marketable drone Buzz is genuinely fun. My own franchise fatigue—and Woody’s reduced role—kept the movie from hitting me like earlier chapters, but that is hardly its fault. Parents watching tablets reshape childhood may feel this one much more deeply than I did.

Hugh Jackman gives a terrific performance as an aging, violent Robin Hood wandering through a beautifully photographed medieval world of guilt, brutality and approaching death. The problem is that the film barely engages with the mythology attached to his name; change the character names and almost nobody would identify this as a Robin Hood story. Michael Sarnoski seems to be pursuing a Logan-like meditation on an old killer seeking redemption, but the journey lacks the characters and emotional destination that made Logan work. Jodie Comer is strong and every image looks expensive. I was still mostly bored watching a man wait to die.

The Furious is a brutally efficient “father with a particular set of skills” story elevated by some of the most inventive fight choreography I can remember. Xie Miao plays a mute handyman dismantling a criminal organization after his daughter is taken, while Joe Taslim enters as an equally capable ally with his own missing person to find. The villains can genuinely fight, ordinary objects become lethal and each set piece somehow tops the last without losing physical clarity. Simple motives, heroes worth backing and bodies that appear to feel every blow: this is a vicious modern evolution of classic Hong Kong action and the best pure action movie of 2026.

I wandered into Stop! That! Train! only because I arrived too late for Ponyo and found the farce I had wanted from recent attempts to revive the Zucker and Mel Brooks tradition. It packs an enormous amount of silliness and charm into its running time, with original songs, dance routines and RuPaul fully committed to the joke. Where The Naked Gun and Scary Movie strained for this kind of comic momentum, this one simply keeps finding laughs. An accidental screening turned into an easy recommendation—and if RuPaul returns, I am entirely ready for the sequel.

Disclosure Day is technically immaculate Spielberg—confident direction, gorgeous images, an excellent John Williams score and alien spectacle that kept a theater full of my movie group entertained. Thinking about its ideas afterward is where the experience collapsed. The film insists its extraterrestrials are empathetic and morally superior while showing them violating human consent, then treats reasonable suspicion as fear or ignorance. Its gestures toward religion, disclosure and humanity never receive the serious competing perspectives they require, and the plotting repeatedly abandons logic for emotion. I enjoyed watching it; I also found it intellectually one-sided, morally confused and much dumber than it believes itself to be.

Pressure turns the weather forecast before D-Day into a duel between Andrew Scott’s James Stagg, championing emerging meteorological science, and Chris Messina’s Irving Krick, relying on historical patterns. It is a legitimate corner of history, professionally made and dramatically inert. Everyone knows the invasion happens on June 6, so the characters must supply the uncertainty; instead, the central meteorologist is abrasive, the emotional relationships feel manufactured and Brendan Fraser never disappears beneath his Eisenhower costume. World War II cinema has set an extraordinarily high bar. This clears basic competence, but not the question of why this particular story needed a theatrical movie.

Tuner wraps a heist around an unusually warm story of music, loss and rebuilding a life after talent no longer gives it direction. Leo Woodall plays a former piano prodigy whose extreme hearing lets him crack safes by ear, but his charisma, the gentle mentorship at a piano-tuning shop and a naturally developing romance matter more than the mechanics of crime. Classical music, jazz and conversations about both give the film its pulse, with Herbie Hancock appearing as a welcome grace note. The plot is not revolutionary or difficult to predict. The people are funny, emotionally honest and such good company that reinvention hardly matters.

Backrooms feels less like a coherent journey than wandering through somebody else’s damaged psyche. A man loosely attached to reality retreats toward an alternate world that seems controllable, only for its spaces, images and rules to grow deeply wrong. The horror is atmospheric rather than dependent on jump scares, and one chase in particular operates as pure nightmare fuel. I knew little about the internet phenomenon behind it, which may explain some confusion, but uncertainty is also central to the film’s effect. Obsession explores related territory more successfully; this remains strange, flawed and memorable enough to deserve a look.

The Mandalorian and Grogu looks terrific in IMAX and delivers the polished action, creatures and cameos expected from modern Star Wars, but it still feels like several television episodes sewn into a two-and-a-half-hour feature. Time spent reintroducing the characters leaves them almost exactly where they began, while Grogu’s permanent intelligent-baby routine increasingly limits how much he can grow without sacrificing the gimmick audiences love. Mando fights nearly everyone and Filoni devotees will get more from familiar animated faces than I did. This is an enjoyable, rewatchable big-screen adventure that never quite explains why it had to be a movie.

Naomi Ackie and Keke Palmer carry I Love Boosters on such effortless comic chemistry that I could have watched them steal things for another two hours. Poppy Liu and Taylour Paige complete a lively crew, while LaKeith Stanfield arrives looking like Prince playing some sort of deeply unserious vampire. This is Boots Riley, so the anti-capitalist argument comes through absurdism shouted directly into the audience rather than ideological subtlety. The actual logic of mass shoplifting as labor politics collapses almost immediately, and the narrative never fully coheres. The charisma and committed nonsense still make the vibe considerably more fun than the theory.

In the Grey promises professionals who steal back stolen billions, which raises the more interesting question of who recovers the money after Guy Ritchie steals a production budget. I propose Operation: Ruse de Première: Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal as mismatched accountants, Eiza González as a fast-talking tax lawyer and Jason Statham as an insurance adjuster whose claims expertise includes indiscriminate murder on behalf of studio shareholders. There—I spent roughly as much time developing that premise as Ritchie appears to have spent writing the movie we actually received.

Obsession begins almost like a romantic comedy about a weak-willed man unable to tell his longtime friend how he feels, then gives him a magical way to force the answer he wants. What follows is a feature-length Twilight Zone punishment: disturbing, violent and increasingly twisted as desire curdles into consequence. The jump scares worked, the atmosphere kept tightening and by the end my heart was pounding. Horror rarely frightens or even interests me; this left me simultaneously exhilarated and vaguely traumatized. It is excellent filmmaking that I do not need to experience again soon—which is about as strong a recommendation as this genre can earn.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 gave me exactly the pleasure I wanted from returning to this world. I do not have a complicated theory or a grand argument about why it works; the characters, performances and familiar fashion-industry energy were simply good company again. Not every enjoyable sequel needs to justify itself with reinvention, and this one left me much happier than analytical. I had a genuinely good time.

Frank Grillo plays the rare former Marine who is also an elite biophysicist, which becomes convenient when a supermoon triggers a global werewolf pandemic. He must protect his family, search for a cure and repeatedly apply the boxing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu Grillo practices in real life to creatures considerably hairier than his usual opponents. That is the premise. Honestly, either the combination of scientist-soldier Frank Grillo and moon-powered werewolves has already sold you, or nothing I add is going to help.

I tried to see The Sheep Detectives with my mother for Mother’s Day, but she fell asleep thirty minutes in and we left. I returned alone a few days later, fell asleep after fifteen minutes myself and woke with five minutes remaining. The beginning seemed fine. The ending seemed fine. Whatever happened between them remains beyond my professional capacity to evaluate. Perhaps that is not a failure at all; a film about sheep successfully put two generations of my family to sleep. The method works.

Damian McCarthy sends Adam Scott to a remote Irish hotel as an arrogant novelist trying to finish a book and scatter his parents’ ashes, then steadily erodes the certainty of a man who believes every mystery has a rational answer. Scott weaponizes his familiar likability by playing someone almost entirely unpleasant, while folklore, eccentric locals and a series of unsettling discoveries keep the film suspended between human crime and supernatural horror. Hokum has scares, puzzles and surprises, but its real pleasure is watching skepticism become harder to maintain. This deserved a much larger audience than its quiet path to video-on-demand provided.

One Spoon of Chocolate is neither good nor especially smart, but it possesses the underrated virtue of never becoming boring. The story may not withstand much scrutiny and the filmmaking never persuaded me that its ideas amounted to anything substantial, yet it kept moving and kept finding another thing to put on screen. That is not a recommendation so much as an acknowledgment: plenty of better movies have made time pass more slowly. This one fails energetically.

Mile End Kicks is good—genuinely good—right up until a final make-out session pushed me past whatever tolerance the rest of the movie had earned. I cannot defend that reaction with an elaborate critical framework, and anyone who knows me probably understands it without one. The movie worked; that moment did not. Sometimes a review arrives at the boundary between analysis and “absolutely not,” and this one ended firmly on the other side.

Jaafar Jackson is phenomenal as his uncle, reproducing Michael’s movement and physical presence with uncanny precision, and the music remains beyond criticism. Almost everything surrounding him is a sanctioned greatest-hits playlist with no liner notes, interior life or meaningful relationships. Janet disappears entirely, the brothers become props and a controlling father serves as the generic explanation for an impossibly complicated man. This is a biopic designed to protect a legacy rather than illuminate a person, and those goals are incompatible. Watch Jaafar’s performance, then return to Michael’s own music videos; they reveal far more of the superstar than this film dares to.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy tested me with dumb plotting and enough boredom to require caffeine, but I was prepared to endure both. What I was not prepared to accept was a Latin family apparently included so the film could mistreat an elderly religious woman and use her rosary for provocation. No, sir. If Cronin needs that image, he can write an elderly Irish Catholic woman and do it to his own people. I walked out with twenty minutes remaining. If curiosity ever returns, an AI can tell me how it ended; the movie forfeited the right.

They Will Kill You combines Ready or Not’s trapped-in-a-deadly-game energy with a little of Kill Bill’s stylized appetite for revenge. It is not nearly as smart as Tarantino’s film, but intelligence is not the only measure of whether blood-soaked genre filmmaking works. This moves, fights and spills enough to justify the ticket, delivering exactly the sort of gleefully violent experience its title advertises. I had a bloody good time.

The AI Doc feels like receiving privileged access to someone else’s extended existential anxiety attack. I am not convinced Daniel Roher’s journey through artificial intelligence leaves the audience substantially more informed or enlightened, but his barely controlled neurotic energy kept me interested and entertained. That same intensity clearly does not prevent him from producing excellent work—Tuner and Navalny prove otherwise—even if it occasionally made me hope someone had recommended counseling. Watch this for the personal crisis as much as the technology, then watch those stronger films to see what Roher can do when the subject gives his restlessness firmer shape.

Robin Hood was hot green garbage when I walked out eight years ago, and time has done nothing to inspire regret or mercy. This is not a rediscovery, reconsideration or nuanced reappraisal; it is the formal documentation of longstanding disrespect. The half star exists only so nobody mistakes the absence of stars for an accidental omission. Taron Egerton and Jamie Foxx are legitimate movie stars, but not even they deserve to remain attached to this. Some films improve with distance. This one merely gets farther away, which is the best thing it has done.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come plays less like a fully separate sequel than the second half of the movie we already saw. It expands the same violent comic game without radically changing its rules, which makes the experience familiar but not unwelcome. A more ambitious follow-up might have justified the number in its title; this one is content to keep the earlier momentum running. Fortunately, it remains fun enough that “Part B” is a description rather than a fatal complaint.