"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Face it, if Arnie wasn't in it, 1987's The Running Man would be strictly considered a B-movie. Edgar Wright's 2025 effort is a much bigger production, is more interesting, and like many name directors' 2025 output, speaks to the times. The Hunters are clearly I.C.E. agents preying on the poorest Americans, it takes place in a propaganda state where unions are illegal and health care is unattainable, and public narratives are more important than reality. To me, it's a lot of fun and aims for a punch the air, fight the power, ending, but for those who are closer to the events satirized, it may be a harder pill to swallow. There are some cool Wright-isms, though Edgar has restrained himself, perhaps to be more in line with the book's tone, but it's still recognizably in his style. Glen Powell plays the angriest man in America, righteously so, and he can do action without seeming invulnerable. If the movie has a flaw, it's that it goes on too long (one feels the novel's influence) and could have collapsed a few things (his many helpers, for example) or pruned some of the slack in between action scenes.
At home: Let me start by saying that Jurassic World Rebirth is perfectly competent, but I somehow expect a better monster film from Gareth Edwards. It's still better than more than half of this highly-frustrating franchise - at least it didn't actively annoy me - but it doesn't know when to pull out the Jurassic theme, and infodumps aside, only offers cookie-cutter characters. Years after the previous film, the world's dinosaurs have mostly died out, except for some islands You Know Where(TM), and now a team has to go in and get blood from three of the biggest animals to ever live, a crazy MacGuffin to make all MacGuffins extinct. Oh, and there's a family, and therefore a child, who get dragged into these events. Their story is almost more interesting, but it's still sharing space with ScarJo, Mahershala Ali, and a bunch of square-jawed pretty boys I couldn't give a fig about. Some nice twists on old creatures, a couple of nice moments, some weird mutated dinos that never really prove their worth to the story, and plenty of clichés. It's kind of a riff on the second Jurassic Park, which is not necessarily a strong foundation, and it starts with the notion that people have lost interest in dinosaurs. Well... the franchise is certainly working towards that.
Moby Dick on a snowy mountain, The White Buffalo is a mad idea for a Jaws rip-off, with Charles Bronson playing Wild Bill Hickok, not so much chasing his "whale", but a premonition of his encounter with it. But Crazy Horse is also tracking the beast to save his child's soul, so by now, you should realize that all facetiousness aside, this is like neither of the "inspirations" I referenced. It's really a very atmospheric western creature feature, where the beast is an almost supernatural force of nature, a living avalanche, or perhaps the spirit of all the buffalo slain in that time period. The snowy Colorado mountains act as a kind of ghostly place where the Natives, driven to extinction, claim ownership. Richard Sale adapted his own novel here, and retained interesting period language and a sense of place and time that's quite unlike your traditional western. A kind of precursor to Bone Tomahawk, perhaps, but it has its own unique vibe. And the monster looks surprisingly cool, too.
There's initially a nasty thrill to Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man - a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, who lived with bears in Alaska and was ultimately killed by one - because Herzog hasn't always been the most... ethical of film makers. So given that Treadwell was documenting his own journey, putting on a kind of potty-mouthed children's presenter persona, you may feel afraid this would turn into a snuff film at some point. But I think Herzog discovers his own limits and humanity when it comes to the deaths themselves. Using a lot of Treadwell's footage in addition to interviews with the people who knew him, the film dissects the circumstances of that death, and what drove Treadwell out there in the first place, painting the picture of a man going feral, in a sense, feeling more and more disconnected from society as he starts to imagine himself a part of the natural order. His own photography captures incredible moments, just steps (or inches) away from wildlife, enough to make Herzog jealous and draw him to this subject.
It's a love story, I swear! Headhunters stars Aksel Hennie as a corporate headhunter who steals fine art on the side, but his debts are accumulating and he thinks One Last Score(TM) will save him. Well... some people are more dangerous than others to steal from, and after everything goes tits up, it's a lot like watching a Liam Neeson movie from the perspective of the criminals. Not to say the art theft is the real reason behind the villain's homicidal ire - there's a lot more going on than we first suspect. Laced with vicious black comedy, Headhunters is full of misunderstandings and surprises and grows steadily more insane, but everything puzzles out rather cleverly by the end. Except some gory violence in spots, but again, I swear this is a love story! How far would you go for love? And how much should you pay for betraying it? Paranoid fun out of Norway.
It really feels like Captain Ron was meant to be a National Lampoon's Vacation movie, or at least rip one off. That Martin Short's role was written for Chevy Chase seems to confirm it. Had it been one, it would have been better than European Vacation, but not by much. It's just so obvious. A family that's growing apart inherits a sailboat they have to pick up in the Caribbean, hire a chaotic dude to captain it back to the States, get up to all sorts of shenanigans, and grow closer as a result. There's not question as to what harbor this ship is coming into. But while there are some fun self-referential gags along the way, the various adventures aren't particularly funny, and the characters not particularly charming (the teenage brat, the precocious kid, etc.). And wait, Kurt Russell, in the titular role, is playing it WAY OVER THE TOP, but Martin Short is the STRAIGHT MAN? The latter isn't playing to his strengths, and the former therefore seems out of place, tonally. He's too much, and I don't think we can side with his consistent irresponsible behavior. I wasn't sure if I'd seen this before or was confusing it with Overboard, but I can see how I might have wiped it from my memory, and will do so again.
It was Josh Brolin in an interview, I think, that said the audience is really the kids in A Woman Under the Influence. We're in a house, up close and personal, with a feuding couple - Gena Rowlands in her most iconic performance, as a woman suffering from undescribed (the year is 1974) mental illness, and Peter Falk, her supportive but volatile husband - with all the awkwardness and trauma that might imply. It's a good note, and the kids do an amazing job and feel very real (as real as everyone, a trademark of Cassavetes's style), but even when they're not there, we're at least guests of the household, paralyzed in our chairs as crisis moments explode. Today, we may perhaps better diagnose Rowlands' character as suffering from bipolar disorder - it's certainly more than alcoholism - but it's her reputation that gets her in the most trouble. It's tragic that I don't find her behavior worthy of the reactions she gets, but because people suspect her, it feels like they overreact and exacerbate the situation. And I'm drawn to Falk as well, who doesn't mind - even perhaps loves - the tics and quirks, and hates when she tries to repress them for others, but rages when she goes too far. He's always acted as a check on her behavior, and they have a lot of silent signals between them. He knows how to handle her, what might trigger her, and is frustrated (in a way we find objectionable) when he loses control, or is embarrassed in front of others. It's a MESS, just like life. Both I and the person I was watching it with got flashbacks to our own childhoods, memories of abusive parental behavior (not to necessarily say abuse), the things that we indeed didn't have a context for as children, but sadly understand now. One might say this walked so things like Uncut Gems could run, but nah, A Woman Under the Influence was running already.
In 2018, Andrew Scott (Sherlock, Fleabag) took to the stage as Hamlet, and the BBC was there to film it. His performance is actually pretty great. as it feels like he's reaching for the words and coming up with them on the fly, though I would understand if that gets a little tiring for some. Certainly, his is a more fragile Hamlet, not one who gets more confident after his return from exile, but actually gets worse, more manic. Indeed, this is a version where a lot of actors seem inspired by actual diagnoses. It's a modern world of dilettantes and hyper-surveillance (there's more spying than in the original text), the Bob Dylan soundtrack is well used, and the ending actually surprises even after all these centuries. There's one terrible scene, which might be a quirk of combining various quartos and folios - this is one of my blind spots when it comes to Shakespeare lore - but it feels like cod Shakespeare to me, a strange addition to cover Hamlet's return to Denmark. Doesn't matter too much, but it's a stain on an otherwise excellent production that's necessarily edited down for time, yet includes a lot of what is normally (and unfortunately) cut. I will be recording a podcast about it, stay tuned.
[Timor-Leste] Billed as East Timor's first feature film, Beatriz's War is an ambitious historical lesson, spanning decades, as the natives fight for independence from Indonesian tyranny - made manifest in a particularly ogreish officer - but also weirdly adapting its personal story from a famous legal case from 16th-Century France. It feels like it's "based on a true story", and it is, but transplanted into a different "true events" setting. As such, it's really three stories - love stories - in one. Act 1 shows us an 11-year-old Beatriz married to a sensitive boy as a way to create an alliance against the invaders. Children, war, that could have been the whole movie. In Act 2, Beatriz becomes a community leader as her village struggles to survive during the occupation, so a lot of misery and indignity - there are a lot of movies like this, but the (recent) history lesson is interesting. Act 3 has the legal case, and as intriguing as it is, it feels tacked on to the rest. But if you're getting the chance to make your country's first film, you probably have a lot to say.
[Solomon Islands] Released months before JFK's assassination, and about a year before DC Comics' Capt. Storm comics (where I learned everything I know about PT boats) which were almost certainly inspired by this movie, PT 109 recounts his heroic service of the then-current president in World War II's Pacific theater. So definitely propagandist in its approach. Kennedy is a natural leader who has no personal arc, who seems to have gone through the war with a confident smile on his face, ending up pretty much where he began in terms of his captaincy of a torpedo boat. And as a biopic, it feels a lot like this incident, then this incident, then this incident, but the final mission puts even the actors in dire straights, it looks like, and is damn heroic on JFK's part (it looks pretty well documented, so I guess it's all true - the president apparently consulted). In the end, it's your standard war film of the era - patriotism, a light touch, war is hell but we're happy to serve type stuff. There's lots of military hardware on the screen and the actors didn't mind getting wet. Bonus nerdgasm: Uncredited George Takei sighting!
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