Movie reviews

Avatar: Fire and Ash gave me little to object to and not enough new story to justify another three-hour commitment. The scale and craft remain impressive, but much of the experience feels like an extension of Part Two rather than a substantial new chapter. Somewhere around the whale council, the movie lost me to sleep and required a five-minute personal intermission walk before I could finish. I enjoyed what I saw; I simply cannot give four stars to anything incapable of keeping me conscious for its entire runtime.

The Housemaid begins as a wonderfully tense domestic contest between a woman and her employee, each probing boundaries and trying to control the household, before evolving into a smarter psychological thriller than I expected. Amanda Seyfried gives her best performance in years, Sydney Sweeney matches her and Brandon Sklenar knowingly embodies the handsome dime-store-novel husband placed between them. The characters have enough depth to keep the film from becoming disposable twist machinery, although those turns remain a major pleasure. Avoid advance details; this is much more rewarding when the house reveals itself room by room.

Song Sung Blue is a well-made musical biopic with solid work from Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, but this genre depends heavily on whether the music means something to you. Neil Diamond does not mean much to me, making most of the performance sequences tedious despite several lively rounds of “Sweet Caroline.” Hudson’s rendition of the title song finally reached the emotion the rest of the soundtrack could not. In a year crowded with portraits of more compelling musical figures—and, in my opinion, better music—professional execution only carries this so far.

Ella McCay is so inhuman, unnatural and emotionally disconnected that it plays like the first major production built from an AI prompt requesting an “earnest political comedy-drama” full of generic offices, understated male disappointments and thematic nuance without dramatic conflict. Every line feels synthesized to approximate James L. Brooks while omitting the lived observation that once made his work human. An extended scene between Ayo Edebiri and Spike Fearn briefly suggests an actual movie, earning the entire star and a half. The rest is prestige-flavored garbage assembled from instructions rather than experience.

George Clooney’s natural magnetism becomes both gift and prison in Jay Kelly. He plays a man who can charm the public while remaining unreachable to almost everyone in his private life, and the film makes that contradiction compelling rather than merely glamorous. Clooney gave me new respect for his acting, Adam Sandler is excellent beside him, and the gradual desire to see this isolated man form one genuine connection supplies real emotional force. A tribute sequence, with Kelly searching the faces of his fans, complicates the sacrifices behind that distance without excusing them. This is thoughtful, generous work from both stars.

100 Nights of Hero flattens rich source material into a discount Handmaid’s Tale, stripping away its mythic structure and worldbuilding until only market-tested ingredients remain. A potentially compelling lesbian romance is surrounded by blunt patriarchy and a handsome shirtless man wandering through the film sweaty, bloody and available to anyone wanting a different flavor of spectacle. None of these pieces develops enough to support the others. This is not adaptation through interpretation; it is reduction—an imaginative story converted into a little yearning, a little oppression and a male torso for balance.

No Other Choice is very murdery. That is not an accidental grammatical shortcut but the cleanest description of the movie’s governing energy: decisions narrow, consequences accumulate and homicide becomes less an isolated event than an atmosphere. Elaborating much further risks either spoiling the escalation or pretending my immediate response was more complicated than it was. Sometimes the precise critical term is simply “murdery,” and this film earns the adverbial intensity.

JUJUTSU KAISEN: Execution charges theatrical prices for an hour-long season recap followed by what amounts to a one-episode preview of the next arc. The new material is good once it finally arrives, but no isolated stretch can justify paying twenty dollars to watch familiar television again before the presentation cuts off. In the same year Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle and Chainsaw Man: The Reze Arc showed how anime can become genuine cinema, this feels particularly cynical. I would rather fast-forward through Season Two at home than sit through that recap again.

Wake Up Dead Man deliberately abandons much of the playful Knives Out energy for a heavier, morally ugly world in which nearly everyone—from the suspects to the Catholic institution surrounding them—lands somewhere between compromised and awful. Benoit Blanc remains the anchor, but even his charm is subdued; the young priest is the only other character who inspired real warmth. The shift makes this the darkest and least family-friendly entry, despite its PG-13 rating. It is exceptionally well acted, carefully made and engaging throughout. I admired it more than I enjoyed it, which is a very different response from the joy these mysteries usually leave behind.

Hamnet spent much of its running time hovering around three stars for me, with stately pacing that frequently became a slog. Then the final fifteen minutes reorganized everything that came before. Chloé Zhao’s decision to cast Noah Jupe as Hamlet after his brother’s role as Hamnet creates an emotional and theatrical connection that pays off with extraordinary force, and Jupe earns every cent of his salary. The ending does not merely improve the film; it reveals what the slow accumulation was building toward. If that final movement cannot reach you, I am not sure the movie—or perhaps any movie—can.

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t expands into a seven-character ensemble without doing the character work required to make an ensemble matter. The Avengers could stage that payoff because six earlier movies created investment; here, new magicians arrive without history, emotional weight or a world substantial enough to hold them. The plot is thin, the spectacle moves quickly and a few sequences work in the moment, so boredom never becomes the problem. Forgettability does. Wait for streaming, revisit the first film or watch The Prestige or The Illusionist instead—movies that understand a magic trick needs more than additional hands.

Haq reduces my response to one word, but it is the word every part of the movie is organized to earn: justice. Expanding that into plot description would risk giving away the machinery and consequences that make the feeling land. What matters in a spoiler-free account is the destination rather than the route—the satisfaction of watching a story recognize what is owed and insist that the debt be paid. Justice.

I entered Eternity through a Screen Unseen presentation worried that its premise might produce two hours of unbearable cringe. Instead, the movie is lively, thoughtful and far more emotionally intelligent than that fear suggested. Strong performances, sharp direction and good writing keep the idea from becoming a gimmick, finding genuine feeling without sacrificing fun. Sometimes surprise screenings produce an evening of wondering what mistake you made. This one produced a banger.

Train Dreams is an exquisitely photographed meditation on existential angst that left me admiring nearly every image and struggling to remain interested in the life inside them. Readers of Denis Johnson’s novella describe the adaptation as remarkably faithful, so anyone already attached to the book may find exactly the screen version they wanted. For me, the contemplative pace became boredom rather than transcendence, and nothing in the experience made me curious enough to seek out the source. Beautiful fan service is still fan service; those without the prior relationship may spend more time ruminating on the runtime than existence.

Violent Ends worked far better for me than its critical reception suggested. This is a messy family crime drama in the tradition of Justified and Sons of Anarchy, where loyalties, grudges and violence are tangled so tightly that resolving one conflict naturally creates another. Viewers looking for polished moral clarity may understand the complaints; anyone who enjoys combustible families operating inside criminal worlds should recognize the appeal. I did, and the roughness felt like texture rather than failure.

A second viewing in a normal theater confirmed that Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc is considerably better when the seat is not trying to throw me into the aisle. Removed from 4DX’s mechanical assault, the animation, story and action had room to register as a movie rather than visual information glimpsed while holding on for dear life. The calmer presentation earned it an upgrade to three and a half stars—and served as a reminder that “more immersive” is not automatically a better way to watch something.

Anniversary combines an upper-middle-class family drama, a fascist takeover and a political allegory that refuses to admit it has politics, then hides behind ambiguity when those elements demand a point of view. The excellent cast delivers the minimum such talent guarantees, but the screenplay’s effort to offend nobody makes its world feel inauthentic and its warning incoherent. A story about political extremism needs to identify what its characters believe, not leave an empty shape for every partisan to fill with a favorite enemy. This becomes a parable about fascists taking over bland suburbia, apparently written for filmmakers who never decided why.

Roofman remains good. A repeat viewing did not expose some hidden structural weakness, drain the charm from the performances or make the original response feel generous. Sometimes returning to a movie produces an essay’s worth of new reservations; sometimes it simply confirms that the thing works. This is the latter. The verdict survives intact.

At intermission, Ek Deewane Ki Deewaniyat had become enough of a mess that I remained only to see whether my grim prediction for its central relationship would prove correct. It did not, which may be the first important point in the movie’s favor. More surprisingly, the actual ending found enough conviction and emotional sense to earn back a second star. That does not repair everything leading there, but it saved the experience from the complete collapse I was preparing to report.

Regretting You is a Hallmark movie released theatrically because the Colleen Hoover name apparently makes television-scale romantic melodrama feel like an event. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with it: the emotions are legible, the familiar machinery operates and people who enjoy Hallmark movies should have exactly the pleasant time they expect. I enjoy that formula myself. I simply see no reason it required a cinema screen or ticket price when it belongs naturally beside a couch, a blanket and an afternoon at home.

Dude is a waste of time. Elaborating would require spending additional time on it, which would only deepen the original offense. The movie did not leave behind a provocative failure, an interesting performance or even the productive irritation that makes a bad experience worth discussing. It consumed the allotted minutes and returned nothing of comparable value. Consider this paragraph the upper limit of the attention it earned.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is as visually gorgeous as the combination of filmmaker and material promises, with images and design worthy of Mary Shelley’s enduring creation. It is also thirty minutes longer than the strongest version of itself. The story once reached the screen in seventy-one minutes; this adaptation needs two and a half hours while still leaving me wanting a deeper emotional bond between creator and creature. Better editing could uncover a great two-hour film inside the very good one we received. The beauty is never in doubt. The discipline is.

What I could actually see of Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc looked very good. Unfortunately, Regal’s 4DX presentation seemed determined to kill me, turning much of the screening into a physical struggle to remain in my seat while animation occurred somewhere in front of me. My attention belonged to survival, not cinema. Three stars is therefore a provisional judgment on a movie filtered through an amusement-park assault; a normal Dolby presentation may reveal the film I was trying to watch and earn a reassessment.

After the Hunt refuses to assign the audience a morally approved side. Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri inhabit a dispute in which the alleged perpetrator, the person caught between competing loyalties and the larger institution all remain difficult to read, while Luca Guadagnino withholds certainty about what happened. That ambiguity has been mistaken for evasion or an anti-cancel-culture argument, but I found it honest about situations that do not arrive with narrators explaining whom to believe. The outstanding performances make uncertainty active rather than empty. Mixed reviews aside, this is a compelling film precisely because it declines to simplify itself for us.