Movie reviews

The Mastermind turns slowness into meandering and contemplation into a theatrical waste of time. Nothing about the experience requires a large screen, a focused audience or the effort of leaving home. Wait until it appears on HBO during a lazy Sunday afternoon, when its minimal momentum can become background noise and its pacing can support a genuinely solid nap. Screen Unseen occasionally delivers discovery; this one delivered a reminder that mystery tickets can also conceal chores.

Soul on Fire is one of the strongest faith-motivated films I have seen because its religious conviction grows from a heartfelt human story rather than being applied as a sermon. The suffering at its center genuinely moved me, while the theme of redemption remained grounded enough to welcome viewers who are open to a light spiritual touch but wary of heavy-handed messaging. It has the life-affirming sincerity that made I Can Only Imagine work without imitating that film. This is an easy recommendation for audiences who want faith present as meaning rather than pressure.

Kathryn Bigelow directs A House of Dynamite with exacting tension, but the decision to replay the same crisis from multiple perspectives eventually turns urgency into repetition. Each version approaches the same stopping point, so anticipation keeps being rebuilt without advancing toward a payoff. The ending raises the nuclear stakes once more and then withholds the dread the entire structure seemed designed to deliver. There is something fascinating in the attempt, and the tone works scene by scene; the larger mechanism never detonates. A story about civilization-ending weapons should leave us shaken, not merely impressed by how efficiently the fuse was lit.

The Smashing Machine is well acted, confidently directed and visually impressive, yet all that craft is devoted to people whose lives never persuaded me they belonged on screen. Instead of discovering a compelling sports drama beneath the public competition, the film settles into a slice of life about dull people sustaining a toxic relationship. Technical quality can make a story legible and handsome; it cannot make the story inherently worth telling. I respected the production far more than I cared about anyone it portrayed.

Roofman was another Screen Unseen gamble that paid off. The story is funny and fascinating, the actors understand both sides of that balance, and the direction keeps its unusual subject engaging without forcing the eccentricity. Surprise screenings are at their best when they introduce a movie I might not have selected and leave me pleased that somebody else made the choice. This was exactly that kind of win.

Bone Lake has the bones of an effective thriller: attractive images, carefully constructed suspense, emotional manipulation and the promise of blood once all that teasing finally breaks. The problem is that the tension stretches longer than the payoff can support, and most of the destination is visible well before the movie arrives there. A late creepy turn adds some interest without retroactively making the slow journey gripping. This is polished enough to watch and too boring to prioritize. Streaming is the right home for it.

Coyotes is dumb without being fun, boring without being atmospheric and neither funny nor frightening enough to justify itself as horror comedy. If its hidden thesis is that Hollywood wastes money producing endless nonsense and should therefore be torn apart by wild animals or burned to the ground, the movie itself may be the strongest evidence submitted. Otherwise, I cannot identify a purpose. This was an entirely avoidable use of time.

The Lost Bus turns its journey through wildfire into such an immediate, exhausting experience that I left feeling as if I had been trapped in the smoke with Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera. Both are fantastic, but the filmmaking’s control of tension is the real star: danger remains present in every moment without numbing the audience through repetition. Apple’s dispute with the major chains condemned this to a limited release when it demanded a large screen and a room full of people holding their breath together. One of the most stressful theatrical experiences I have had in years—and a fantastic film.

Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari is uncomplicated romantic entertainment executed with enough confidence to make predictability part of the pleasure. The trailer tells you broadly what kind of journey you are taking, while the shifting relationships preserve one useful uncertainty: good luck confidently predicting who will end up with whom. 😆 Nothing here asks to be mistaken for sophisticated drama. It wants to be colorful, charming fun, and on those terms it works.

Good Boy is an impressively controlled piece of horror with several jump scares that genuinely work, but the revelation is the dog. Calling an animal an “actor” can sound cute or patronizing; here, the performance carries enough attention, reaction and emotional information to deserve the term without qualification. The film understands how much tension can come from watching a creature sense danger before the humans around it do. Really well done—and yes, that dog is amazing.

One Battle After Another earns its title through a relentless sequence of confrontations, arrests, disastrous decisions, raids and chases. Beneath that motion, the film appears to contrast French 75’s narcissistic revolutionary performance with a more useful, community-driven activism, but the idea never resolves clearly—especially when the next generation seems ready to repeat the inherited cycle without reflection. The white supremacists are drawn so farcically that they weaken the danger they should embody. There is always another battle to watch; I am less convinced the movie understands what any of them ultimately changes.

Billy Zane’s uncanny, committed Marlon Brando makes Waltzing with Brando watchable, but the movie surrounding him becomes a hagiographic celebration of champagne liberalism. Brando’s dream of a sustainable island paradise sounds noble until the film glosses over the reality of a wealthy celebrity pouring millions into a private playground on colonized land, treating local people as an exotic backdrop for heartwarming bromance and “spontaneous” adventures. Zane brings the icon back to life; the screenplay turns that life into flattering mythology. The result is frequently uncomfortable and ultimately a miss.

Mirai is gorgeously photographed and filled with actors well chosen for their roles, creating a visual and performative richness the screenplay never fully matches. The cast works hard to suggest more life than the writing gives them, and the production remains enjoyable even when the characters and ideas feel underdeveloped. I had a good time, but mostly because the people and images made thin material pleasant to inhabit. Beauty and casting can carry a movie surprisingly far; they cannot finish the script for it.

Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra takes too long to discover its strengths. A sluggish first half gets bogged down in romantic material that adds little, while the second finally opens the story into the stranger, more energetic ideas the movie should have trusted from the beginning. Once it finds that gear, the larger world becomes fun enough to make the uneven setup feel like groundwork rather than a total loss. This is a solid first chapter, and despite my pacing complaints, I would return for Part Two.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale understands that completing a beloved series is less about reinventing its world than giving its people the farewell they have earned. The result is elegant, emotionally satisfying and appropriately final without treating closure as a checklist. Years of attachment do much of the work, as they should; this is a conclusion for viewers who already know what every room and relationship means. It is an excellent ending to a great series.

Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle offers little that resembles a self-contained movie plot; structurally, it is several episodes of the series playing out on an enormous screen. Visually, however, it is staggering. The animation reaches a level of movement, color and scale that makes theatrical presentation feel justified even when the storytelling remains serialized television. Existing fans are the intended audience, and we were served exactly what we came to see: familiar material rendered more spectacularly than it has ever looked.

The Long Walk wastes a promising dystopian premise on days of dull terrain, fascist cruelty and young men who rarely have anything interesting or thoughtful to say. One lead’s mush-mouthed imitation of an American accent adds another distraction while the group walks, curses its rulers and periodically shrinks through gunfire until the least compelling characters remain. Stephen King adaptations repeatedly convince me that this time the underlying idea will overcome my indifference to his writing. Once again, it did not. Movement is not momentum, and this very long walk goes nowhere.

Tinā is a Samoan Sister Act shaped by grief rather than broad comedy. Anapela Polataivao gives an outstanding performance as a teacher rebuilding her life after losing her daughter in the Christchurch earthquake, gradually becoming a maternal presence for students at an elite private school. Samoan choral music carries the film’s heart, with Antonia Robinson’s voice providing a particular highlight. I wanted broader Samoan representation and more engagement with New Zealand’s Māori-Samoan relationships, but those omissions do not erase the emotional and cultural force. Anyone susceptible to music, resilience and a well-earned tear should see it.

Hamilton remains the best, and this filmed performance preserves the original cast that made the phenomenon: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., Renée Elise Goldsberry, Daveed Diggs, Jonathan Groff and an ensemble with no weak link. Unless you were in the room a decade ago, this is the way to see those people inhabit those roles together. The writing, music, staging and performances have been analyzed exhaustively because they justify it. I have no corrective note or clever reservation to add. Good grief, it is amazing.

Twinless may announce itself more sexually than I expected, but sex and sexuality are not its real subject. This is an intimate film about grief, loneliness and an unlikely platonic bond between men who need forms of brotherhood neither knew how to seek. Dylan O’Brien plays twins—one outgoing, sharp and gay, the other introverted, simpler and straight—and makes them feel like separate human beings rather than a technical performance exercise. That dual work deserves recognition. One of the strongest smaller films of the cycle, it uses an initially surprising surface to reach something tender and emotionally specific.

The Threesome repeatedly approaches the safe, obvious exit offered by a conventional romantic comedy and chooses a more complicated route. That willingness to let its relationships become genuinely uncertain made the film substantially better than I expected, and I remained unsure how the emotional arrangement would resolve until it actually did. Surprise is not automatically sophistication, but here it reflects characters allowed to resist the genre’s easiest assignments. I enjoyed the uncertainty as much as the comedy.

Madharaasi delivers enough strong action to remain fun while building its hero from a remarkably lazy understanding of psychological trauma. His dangerous compulsion is written as a direct reaction to past suffering, then the woman who supposedly loves him deliberately reopens that wound so he will keep risking his life as an unpowered neighborhood superhero. The movie treats ceaseless retraumatization as motivational support rather than a path toward getting him killed. 😄 Clear motivation is not the same as credible psychology. Enjoy the fights; do not ask the romance to survive contact with its own logic.

Splitsville gathers several married people who are relentlessly cruel to one another and calls the result a comedy, although “romantic” has no place in the description. Every relationship is toxic, nobody should remain married and the movie never gives us even one person whose happiness seems worth protecting. It resembles a Judd Apatow relationship comedy from a decade or two earlier with the empathy and much of the charm removed. I enjoyed parts of the hostility, but meanness becomes monotonous when there is no human counterweight.

Honey Don’t! is hot garbage briefly made watchable by Margaret Qualley, whose presence carried me through the first hour despite nearly everything around her. Once even that interest could no longer compensate for the movie’s failures, I left. There is no buried virtue, provocative idea or technical achievement compelling enough to justify enduring the remainder. Qualley is interesting. The film is terrible. Walking out was the correct ending.