The Sixth Sense (1999)

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Bruce Willis, Toni Collette, Olivia Williams, Haley Joel Osment

Have I Seen It Before: I have a distinct feeling this is going to make up the majority of the review*. The film works—as so many of Shyamalan’s do—as a magic trick. The first time I saw the film, I could swear—and I mean swear, just as much as I swore that Beyond the Cabin in the Woods did an episode of Maximum Overdrive (1986) five years before we actually did one—there was a scene where Lynn (Collette) and and Crowe (Willis) have a conversation about Cole (Osment).

Has that scene—which would fundamentally undercut everything about the film that made it special—ever been in the film at any other point I’ve seen it? No. It was never there.

But as I watched the film the first time, my brain filled in the missing parts of the story. As such, the narrative sleight-of-hand that both branding and possibly compulsion have demanded from Shyamalan ever since worked like a charm here. I was looking exactly where the film wanted me to look at every single moment, so that when the boom is finally lowered, I was thoroughly fooled.

And so were you. Admit it.

Did I Like It: Judging a Shyamalan film but the success of its final reveal feels a bit reductive, if unavoidable. Unbreakable (2000) lives rent-free in my head because the magic still works, but I dismissed the entirety of The Village (2004) the moment I figured out the ending** and dismissed it as a kind of dumb. Here, the ending that we’re all dancing around is kind of beside the point. The reason this film made Shyamalan a household name is because the film that precedes it is filled with performers engaged with well-realized material, and bringing everything they can to characters we care about.

Maybe the ending of Shyamalan film never mattered, after all?

*Look at that. I was right.

**Which was about twenty minutes into the film, incidentally.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

Director: Guy Ritchie

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Noomi Rapace, Jared Harris

Have I Seen It Before: Yep.

Did I Like It: I was a little down on Sherlock Holmes (2009) when I re-watched it recently, feeling like it was taking stray elements of the Doyle Canon and packaging it into an assembly-line action movie. All of the ominous portents of the Moriarty (Harris) to follow in that original film come to pass here. That means this becomes a sausage of typical action movie sequels, filled with bits of the Doyle Canon.

And somehow, I found myself enjoying it more than I did the original. Why? There’s something to be said for those genre films that feel unencumbered by setting things up. There’s a breezy adventure to be had here. It also helps that everything that did work about the original has mostly stayed in place here. Rachel McAdams is tragically underused*, but Downey and Law’s chemistry is still firmly in place, and the rustic score and production design set this apart from other on-screen Holmeses and Watsons.

With a rebound like this, it’s kind of a wonder how this film series hasn’t continued with several more entries up until this point. Even in those uncertain years before Avengers: Endgame (2019) and Oppenheimer (2023), a return to Baker Street might have been a smart move for Downey’s career. There are even whispers of a return trip with this version of the detectives (although who knows if Ritchie will be on board) is still in the offing, but I have a hard time imagining such a film existing without it being primarily about Holmes and Watson being over the hell. That feels less fun, and like it has been done before.

Then again, blanching at the idea of “it’s been done before,” would mean that no one would ever play the detectives again.

*She may be the Paul Winfield of female movie stars tragically underused in franchise sequels. I’m looking in your direction, this film, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).

The Odyssey (2026)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson

Have I Seen it Before: Nope!

Did I Like It: I’m still digesting it, which is usually a good sign, and almost everyone I’ve talked to about it since is still digesting it, which is an even better sign.

It has almost (more on that later) everything the Nolan brand generally and the promotionaly materials specifically promised for the film. It is epic in scope, more of then than not thrilling moment-to-moment, and the performances are uniformly excellent.

That which I and others continue to chew on are the fundamental realities of making such a film in 2026. In decades to come, both we and new viewers may be able to look at this film and judge simply by the stylistic choices that this is a film of the 2020s, but the entire ethos is less about Ancient Greece and its attendant difficulties*, but with its meditation on the breakdown of the basic social contract and the crumbling of human society as a result, it is somehow spiritually about the 2020s as well. Not only is it a film of the now, it ends with something of a positive viewpoint, that the problems of today will crumble along with what we might have insisted worked, and renewal will follow.

As I continue to digest, it is likely to be one of my favorite movies of the year, largely as expected.

Indeed, my only complaint about the film, which is my complaint about most films, save Us (2019), is that for all of the sturm and drang about her casting in the dual role of Helen of Troy, and her sister Clytemnestra, the film is positively withholding in its amount of Lupita Nyong’o. Certainly, both figures have more to do if this were this to have been Christopher Nolan’s The Illiad, but I was so ready to go to the mat for this aspect of the film (and had even joked that I was mad Nyong’o wasn’t playing all of the roles in the film), only to have it wind up completely minor.

*Or, as the film makes clear in its opening title “In a time of apparent magic…” which rivals “In the 23rd Century…” in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) for an absolute banger of an introduction.

The World's End (2013)

Director: Edgar Wright

Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman

Have I Seen it Before: Sure.

Did I Like It: This is probably the weakest of all the Cornetto films, but that’s kind of like saying that the third greatest thing to ever happen to you was kind of a letdown after the other two things. The energy of the filmmaking, the chemistry of Pegg and Frost, and the fundamental charm of British immaturity all come together once again into a pleasing celebration of genre—this time an alien invasion piece—that stands right along with the films its gently trying to satirize.

Beyond hitting all the things one would expect from the series, there’s something so refreshing about the notion of a story ultimately about the reuinion of childhood/school friends, where the majority of the friends would rather be doing anything else. Set aside Glenn Close whoring out Kevin Kline in The Big Chill (1983), my main complaint about that film is that I wish more of the gang didn’t really want to be there.

Where things don’t quite hold together for me is the third act of the film, where things happen that don’t quite gel in my head, leaving the film less satisfying than it could have been. The problem is that Gary King’s (Pegg) brand of self-destructive childishness is the only skill suited for the new world order, leaving his refusal to go along with the semi-altrusitic (if ultimately draconian) invading aliens.

And that refusal ends up ruining the rest of humanity. Maybe the film’s attempting some sort of reverse world view, but why leave things that way? Shaun of the Dead (2004) may leave the zombies still running roughshod over humanity, but humanity adapted. There’s only disaster here, leaving me with the same feeling I often got watching The Walking Dead, in those times that I decided to do such a thing. There’s enough about the world that’s crushingly depressing, I’m never overly fond of when it happens in my entertainment.

Explorers (1985)

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix, Jason Presson, Robert Picardo

Have I Seen it Before: Never! I know, I know.

Did I Like It: This review, was almost—and I do mean it was this close—to being a meditation of the conflict between me perpetually feeling as if I have not seen enough movies in my life, and perpetually being delighted that there will always be more movies that I can enjoy for the first time. How many more Joe Dante-directed, Jerry Goldsmith-scored, complete with a Dick Miller supporting role movies are out there? Not that much, for various reasons. What other movies have I missed out there that are waiting for me? How many of them will be about nerdy kids more focused on Illustrated Classics and whatever sci-fi movie is on TV that night reaching out into the cosmos? Honestly, at some point I muttered as the movie unfurled, “This movie is dope…”

Then the movie kept going…

And going…

And not a whole lot actually ended up happening in the film. The boys get the Thunder Road up and running after any number of false starts. They actually manage to travel farther than anynone has ever gone before, and encounter aliens. They hang out a bit.

And that’s it. That’s the whole movie. They go back to dreaming about things that might happen, despite the best stuff already having happened to them, only this time the girl next door (Amanda Peterson), a character who is occasionally discussed but has almost no impact on the story, gets to come along.

How can all these things happen in a movie where not much happens? There couldn’t be some kind of complication when they get on the alien ship? There couldn’t be some kind of problem with the people of earth that our three heroes could be central to helping?

The studio may have rushed things for the film, but were they rushing it from the first draft of the screenplay? Was all of the plot filtered out of a rushed edit?

Sparrows (1926)

Director: William Beaudine

Cast: Mary Pickford, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Roy Stewart, Mary Louise Miller*

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: I had it established in my head as I watched the film that this must have been an early film in Pickford’s career, a star for whom I have little awareness outside of her role in the creation of United Artists. As such, it’s a surprisingly well-realized work that largely works for a modern audience, and was worth preserving long before it degraded into so much vinegar and nitrate. It turns out this was the second-to-last silent movie she ever made, and she didn’t last too long once the movies started talking.

That only makes the film more fascinating, and just a bit more unsettling. There’s not an ounce of Pickford’s performance, or the movie surrounding it that indicates she’s at the end of a career. She is America’s Sweetheart at the top of her game.

The only problem with being America’s Sweetheart in the 1920s, is just what that actually means for America. Molly, Pickford’s character, is never depicted as more than fifteen years old. What’s more, she lives only to be deeply—if somewhat malapropistically—religious, and to be the primary caregiver of every child that comes across her path.

Is that what America was in love with between the first two (of a yet to be determined amount) World Wars? It’s kind of a drag. The only thing that could have made things worse were to be if she were to be this picture of adolescent madonna-hood, and then grafting some degree of romantic comedy onto her dealings with Mr. Wayne (Stewart).

*There’s a weird moment when you watch a film celebrating its 100th anniversary, where you think the infants in the film are all probably, but not definitely dead by now.

The Jerk (1979)

Director: Carl Reiner

Cast: Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, Caitlin Adams, Jackie Mason

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: In these reviews, I’ve often talked about how material can be served well or poorly, depending on the form in which the material is packaged. Star Wars may work better on average as a feature film on the biggest screen possible, with some exceptions. Star Trek works better—with some notable outliers—in hour-long television episodes. Fletch is better as a light novel you could read during a day in which you had nothing else to do. Batman was born to live in a comic book before anything else.

So it was that I was chuckling through the movie on this watch, but not especially enjoying myself. The jokes seem isolated to the point of being largely non sequitur/. That can usually elicit breathless laughter from me, but there is certainly a measure of diminishing returns on repeat viewings.

I became so put off by the pacing of the film that I eventually had to stop and play Martin’s Let’s Get Small album. I remember laughing at the absolute insanity of both that album and Wild and Crazy Guy* when I was a kid, and as I listened to it again, I found myself laughing anew at bits like cat juggling and being born a poor black child all over again, even though they left me largely stone-faced on screen just a short while before.

Maybe the thought of these ideas loses something once they are no longer an idea introduced into your imagination, and made a concrete sight-gag in a movie. Maybe it’s simpler than all the at: Martin’s earlier stuff just works better as a stand-up act.

*For whatever reason, I may have listened to Comedy is Not Pretty! once over the years. Not entirely sure why, other than the fact that my dad may just not have had the vinyl on that one.

Ghosts of Mars (2001)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Ice Cube, Natasha Henstridge, Jason Statham, Pam Grier

Have I Seen It Before: Never. Three years ago, I was of a mind to watch all of Carpenter’s library* through the summer between my final years of grad school, but time slipped away before I got to this one.

Seems like a long time ago.

Did I Like It: I kinda-sorta wished I had watched this one that summer and let Vampires (1998) go by the wayside. That earlier of Carpenter’s final big-studio releases felt like a mean-spirited swing at the dirt (complete with a star turn from the positively rancid James Woods), and this feels like something of a return to form.

It’s a b-movie at its core, with a budget that can’t quite acquit itself, and a cast that generally seems stiffer than they have proven to be in other films. There’s also the slight problem of this—despite being something of a space opera—being nothing new for Carpenter. One might have been able to call it Escape from the Red Planet (although you probably would have needed Kurt Russell in the Ice Cube role) or even Assault on Planet 4. It’s a western at its core, as most of Carpenter’s films are, and there’s just a flash of hope that he might have been rebounding more fully, and the 2000s could have been his best decade yet. It didn’t come to pass, obviously, and he sat the decade out, largely cashing obligatory checks from remake productions of his earlier, more celebrated films.

That sounds less like a criticism of this movie, and more of the man himself, but I don’t mean it to be. He may have, indeed, had more films left in him, but he may not have felt the need to fight with a Hollywood that was less and less interested in letting him do what he does best. That’s a completely legitimate decision, one I think I even applaud. If I had to face the indignities of spending most of 1992 making a Chevy Chase vanity project I may, too, have thought getting high and playing video games for the last few decades I have left.

*Minus the stuff he did for TV. Honestly, that Elvis biopic he did couldn’t be as good as Halloween (1978), or Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), right?

The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975)

Director: Gene Wilder

Cast: Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, Dom DeLuise

Have I Seen It Before: You know, never. And that automatically feels like some kind of grievous error. Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, and Madeline Kahn* in a movie together less than a year—indeed, almost exactly a year—after Young Frankenstein (1974)? Where has the movie been my whole life?

Did I Like It: And that might be the—admittedly minor—problem. If it had this much talent behind it, shouldn’t it have been on the collective minds of people who were born after its release much earlier? There’s something here that is less—slightly, but still noticeably less—than the sum of its parts here. Maybe its Wilder as a first time director, able to trade on famous friends to do him a favor, but still lost under the auspices of being an auteur.

It might be unfair to compare this film to Young Frankenstein, but also impossible to completely avoid. I think the real problem might be that in that earlier film—easily my favorite film of Brooks’ library—there was a friction between Brooks and Wilder that made each of them better. They argued like hell over the “Puttin’ on the Ritz Number” in Frankenstein, and it became a delightful moment in a uniformly delightful film. Here, there are just too many whimsical musical numbers to not find them a bit distracting. So, too, Brooks movies never shaped up to be quite as good as they were when they worked together**. It’s more than a little bit fascinating to have a pretty good case study, even if the data is a little incomplete, but is complete with a control and experimental group.

*The single most reliable improver of any movie. Don’t believe me? Take her out of Clue (1985) and see what you have left.

**Yes, I understand that since I was born after 1975, I’m supposed to love Spaceballs (1987), but I just don’t.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Director: Guy Ritchie

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Some of you might have a hard time remembering, but in the late aughts, early twenty-tens, you were actually subject to being charged with a misdemeanor if you missed the theatrical run of a Robert Downey Jr. movie.

Did I Like It: Is the film great, or is it just that hard to screw up an adventure with Holmes and Watson*? Purists may want to blanche at any number of decisions made here. An American playing the detective is the kind of uncertain choice people might harp upon. Other Americans have played the role, to be sure, and while Downey manages to bring his breezy torrent of cool behavior to the role, there’s something in his attempt at an accent that makes one wonder if he ever really shook off the immersion he attempted in Chaplin (1992).

Jamming the stories of Conan Doyle into an almost obsessively paint-by-numbers action movie might draw some complaints as well. It’s fundamentally a buddy-cop movie. We see a big set piece in the early minutes of the film, and sure enough, it is the backdrop for the climax. To remind us all that it is indeed the late 2000s/early-2010s, Mark Strong plays our starter villain, and hints are strewn about that if we all avoided our potential misdemeanors, Holmes and Watson will face off against their rightful villain here in a couple of years.

And yet, it all kind of works. I had a good time then, and I have a good time now. Maybe Downey is really that charming. Maybe—and I really do think this is the answer—it is, indeed, a far loftier challenge to screw up Sherlock Holmes than we might have originally thought.

*Will Ferrell and company managed to get the job done in Holmes & Watson (2018), but the less said about that, the happier we all will be.

Freeway (1996)

Director: Matthew Bright

Cast: Kiefer Sutherland, Reese Witherspoon, Wolfgang Bodison, Dan Hedaya

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: Can a film be trash and well-crafted? With solid, unflinching performances from Sutherland and Witherspoon here, I think it can be. Witherspoon opens up with a performance that tells the movie-watching world she’s capable of almost anything, and appears to be taking it on faith that she will be allowed to be—as time goes on—packaged as the nice lady her image suggests. Sutherland—both before and after this film—always strikes me as an actor who was more concerned with his image than the material at hand*, but here he’s willing to play irretrievably vile from the word go, before his face winds up matching his personality.

The real strength of the film, however, lies in its ability to surprise without confusing. In the early minutes of the film, one gets a sense of where this story is going.

That isn’t where the story is going.

Once Sutherland picks up Witherspoon, I have a completely different idea of where this story will go. With a monster getting more than he bargained for with his latest prey, the two characters would proceed to make each other’s lives a greater hell until the sun comes up, and one of them finally kills the other.

That isn’t where the story is going, either.

That cat-and-mouse game consistently eschews an easy answer as to who the cat is in this scenario, and never fails to keep one mortified and engaged in what might happen next. This might lead some to argue that there’s a tone problem here, with the story flitting between different scenarios to keep its runtime up, but all of these turns feel like they are of a piece with one another.

If you need another level of endorsement of the film, here it is: This was programmed in a late-night movie marathon, run in conjunction with Vinegar Syndrome, that Criterion Edition of Trash, and this was the only title from the night’s offerings that I bought to have for my own.

*For reasons even I can’t remember, I’ve been watching Designated Survivor recently and have been finding it to be something of a chore.

Road House (1989)

Director: Rowdy Herrington*

Cast: Patrick Swayze, Ben Gazzara, Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott**

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know, I’m not so sure what I was doing in the 90s, either.

Did I Like It: It almost has a nice—if paint-by-numbers—construction. A stranger (Swayze, naturally) comes to town, mixes it up, is nicer and smarter and stronger than anyone else.

Then he rips out somebody’s throat. Apparently, he’s been known to do that.

I’d be willing to forgive the film’s excesses if I were at all attached to Dalton’s journey. Like, at all. We can complain about these paint-by-numbers screenplays all we want, but what do we do when the screenplay does all of the things it’s supposed to do, except the most crucial part? Dalton starts the film, proceeds through it, and finally ends the film not wanting anything in particular. He can be swayed by a bit of money—but not a lot, as Brad Wesley (Gazzara) would have a far easier time of it, if money were the only thing in Dalton’s world—and Kelly Lynch, but he isn’t heading anywhere. Even a hoary cliché would have caused things to gel a little better. Have Dalton save up to open up his own joint. Have him have a sick old relative somewhere out in the world that needs him to be the best bouncer in the business. At least then he might have earned ripping somebody’s throat out. The way things are in the movie, it just seems like he really enjoys ripping people’s throats out, and the rest of us are left with a lazy, and not even all-that-bonkers, bad movie.

*If ever there was a director more suited, if only by name, for the material in front of him.

**And an insidiously, perhaps even criminally under-used Keith Davd. I mean, the man had already been in The Thing (1982). Why bring Keith David if you’re not going to let Keith David do his Keith David thing? It boggles the mind, and in point of actual fact may be the only cogent criticism I have of the film.

Miami Connection (1987)

Director: Richard Park, Y.K. Kim

Cast: Y.K. Kim, Vincent Hirsch, William Ergle, Siyung Jo

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Honestly, I don’t think I had even heard of the film before it was announced for this year’s Slumber Party.

Did I Like It: There’s probably a reason for that.

Look, I enjoyed (and occasionally still enjoy) episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it may have a few things to answer for the resurgence of films that maybe ought to have disappeared the instant they first appeared. This never featured on that show, but this, along with The Room (2003) and any number of other films, shouldn’t be part of our cultural knowledge, but here it is leading off a late-night movie fest.

I enjoyed the film because the unintentional laughs and the audience's vibe overshadowed its shortcomings. We were laughing every time Jim (Maurice Smith) mentioned his father, and laughed even harder when his father finally showed up, mostly out of nowhere. We laughed at languid editing so in love with the very notion of martial arts that you spend most of the film forgetting that there were motorcycle ninjas in the film, until they suddenly reappear (sans motorcycles) in the film’s final minutes. When the film offers a final title card that enjoins us to embrace world peace through martial arts, I imagine that every single person in that theater, now so breathless from laughter, may have thought the filmmakers had a point.

But would anyone ever want to watch this again? I tend to think not. The gonzo laughs will never be recreated again. Would anyone—namely me—ever want to watch this without the benefit of a crowd? Not on your life. In that hypothetical future, I’m left with an incompetently crafted piece of nonsense from a guy who appears to be nice and lethal, and who made the classic mistake of assuming that making a film would be easy.

Spawn (1997)

Director: Mark A.Z. Dippé

Cast: Michael Jai White, John Leguizamo, Martin Sheen, Theresa Randle

Have I Seen it Before: Yeah. I have a stray memory of being obligated to spend several hours at some mall with a parent, and managing to talk them—my happiest of rhetorical skills—into just leaving me at the miniplex so I could just see whatever was playing. Enter, Spawn.

Did I Like It: Did anyone*? I’m relatively certain I didn’t think much of the film when I saw it way back when. After further reading, it seems pretty clear that everyone—especially White, beating Wesley Snipes to the black superhero game by a solid year—associated with the film didn’t think very much of it. Even Martin Sheen, that paragon of earnest virtue**, spends the entire film looking as if he is waiting—however patiently—for his check to clear.

I’ve never been able to get into the comics, or even the semi-concurrent animated series, so there might not be a version of this film that is going to light my imagination on fire, but this can’t be viewed as anything other than a perfunctory effort. The number of ILM staffers and former staffers who are trying to make their bones here would seem to point to the special effects at least being special, but everything from the landscapes of Hell to Spawn’s cape feels like beta-testing for better effects in better movies to come.

*Ebert gave a thumbs-up, and between this and the mild Two Thumbs Up handed to Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997), I’m not sure exactly what was in the water of Chicago in the summer of ’97. It probably earned more than a few mid-level programmers a couple of extra million in box office receipts.

**Even when the film is slowly tearing him apart, Mr. Coppola.

(500) Days of Summer (2009)

Director: Marc Webb

Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel. Geoffrey Arend, Chloë Grace Moretz

Have I Seen it Before: Never. It’s odd. Had I seen it in while it was still making the rounds in the festival circuit, it might have been a High Fidelity (2000) for a newer, somehow more neurotic age. Had I seen it during its theatrical run, it probably would have meant very little to me.

Did I Like It: Seeing it over a decade and a half later, it becomew something of an interesting cultural artifact. I’ve been Tom (Gordon-Levitt), although I wanted to make motion pictures and was* the guy who had all the DVDs and would have followed a woman practically anywhere if she expressed even a tolerance for the films of Woody Allen**.

You watch this film and you’re supposed to either feel more deeply the fact that you are Tom, or remember the time in which you were him. Summer (Deschanel, evoking the pupa stage between the cynical bloodhound of her earlier work, and the guileless Gal Friday she metamophosed into during New Girl) thus becomes the perfect black hat for that time in your life.

But let’s be honest, people: Hasn’t there beena time when we were Summer, just as much as we were Tom? Where our armor was impenetrable and the only governing element in our lives was our suspicion of other people?

Didn’t we leave some people in our wake during those times? I missed this movie for the better part of seventeen years***, but maybe that’s the right amount of time to wait. During that entire time, Summer has been painted memetically as one of the great villains of the screen, but we are the villain, just as much as we are the hero.

Maybe I picked exactly the right time to watch the film.

Oh.

Wait.

I get it. Her name is Summer. Now I’m all caught up.

*Still am, technically.

*Don’t still do that, for the record.

**How in the hell have we gotten to the point where people born after the release of The Dark Knight (2008) are now able to go to R-rated movies unencumbered? Don’t answer that.

Hook (1991)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Bob Hoskins

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I remember having the full action figure line and the Happy Meal toys on this one.

Was I the only one?

Did I Like It: With Spielberg making the rounds plugging Disclosure Day (2026), I’ve got to again listen to him occasionally dump on his own work here. He says he lacked much confidence in the second act of the film, and that feels right. The first half hour of the film may not make a whole lot of sense*, but the kidnapping of Pan’s (Williams, just maybe the role he was born to play; pity the script wasn’t a hair tighter) kids was sufficiently terrifying to stick in my head 35 years later.

That terror deflates like a punctured balloon by the time anyone gets to Neverland (which feels like it happens about an hour into things, which is its own problem) Hook is less some demented creature that will definitely take me away in the middle of the night, and just some clown dominated by decades—even centuries—of anxieties, resentments, and neurosis. Even if Spielberg never intended the message, or even if he couldn’t quite articulate it to his satisfaction, there is a a profound child-like fantasy at play here, and one that might just turn out to be true:

It’s the scariest of adults who are unavoidably the most pathetic creatures you’re bound to find out there in the world.

*If Hook (Hoffman, so wildly unrecognizable in the role that I was probably in my twenties before I realized the Captain and Rain Man are the same guy) could always just pop up in Wendy’s (Maggie Smith) bedroom, doesn’t that mean that the Neverlands Pirates could pretty much go anywhere they want to and make Pan’s life a perpetualy living hell?

Disclosure Day (2026)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo

Have I Seen It Before: By the end of opening weekend, I ended up seeing it twice.

Did I Like It: Well, I’ve found the film that every year seems to need lately. We’ve all got to take some position on this thing now, and it wouldn’t be the worst idea if we come up with our stances on the people who have a different stance.

If you completely dismiss the film, I find myself automatically distrusting you. We can have a discussion about where it might rank in the Spielberg pantheon, I may even have a qualm or two about the final act (more on that later). That’s all fine. When you watch it, it might not hit you in the way you had absolutely hoped. Judging a movie by your mood that day feels like it shouldn’t be the way to more incisive criticism, but it’s also hard to shake it off completely.

But if the think piece you’ve been cooking up for your own blog has a title anywhere alogn the lines of “Here’s Why You’re Right If You Hated Disclosure Day” then quite frankly, you are dis-invited from my birthday party this year. Just cancel, already.

Spielberg. Aliens. John Williams score. Not all of that’s going to happen a whole lot more times, lest I remind you. What’s more, the plot has something profound to say about what it means to be human in the 2020s. Cynicism is everywhere. We should listen. It also has some of the better car chases I’ve seen in a good long while, and Emily Blunt is giving one of the best performances of the year. You can have faith in Spielberg’s, and if something doesn’t quite work for you… I dunno. Go see it again?

That faith in the master’s skills might not extend to his philosophy. While I’m on board with the need for a little less guile in the world, the reality of this story ending with every one on the planet believing what they’re seeing doesn’t ring as true as living through the last decade of human history would seem to indicate.

But then that might be the point. When we were young, we had the fantasy of having an extra-terrrestrial best friend. Now, we are all much older, and we have to yearn for a world that might listen.

The Black Pirate (1926)

Director: Albert Parker

Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Billie Dove, Tempe Pigott, Donald Crisp

Have I Seen It Before: Never. I’m almost ashamed to admit I never knew that experiments with color motion pictures predated, or at least were semi-concurrent with the advent of sound.

Did I Like It: Here’s an axiom that also feels like a controversial statement, and sounds a little bit like a shame: new technology slows down films considerably. They’re just now getting to the point where IMAX pictures don’t lock the heavy cameras down to a scene that would have to live and die by its expansive background. The first five to ten years of synchronized sound in the movies wound up being just recorded theater. So, too, does the vibrancy of an adventure film from Fairbanks while he was still at the top of his game feels a little weighed down by the groaning attempts to get two strips of color out of nitrate stock.

But it kind of works. There’s an added dimension to everything.

Which is another problem when it comes to the increasing resolution of the moving picture. The old Batman episodes eventually started getting released on DVD, and everybody started to suspect the Joker had a mustache under all of that makeup. Here, too, maybe the audience was hadn’t developed guile yet, nitrate stock would only show the human eye so much, and special effects were still being perfected by the Germans, but every time this film cuts to a wide shot of any ship at seat, it’s clear that it is nothing more than a whittled piece of wood floating in a small tank of water.

So, maybe I would recommend taking in a clip of this in order to take in the earliest of color film as the experiment it was. But if you’re really looking to enjoy a Fairbanks, I’d say stick with The Mark of Zorro (1920).

Tron: Ares (2025)

Director: Joachim Rønning

Cast: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jeff Bridges

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. It’s a long-ish story, but I’m definitely entering an era when the big blockbusters—or at least the hyped, big IP, predominantly Disney ones—are not appointment viewing for me anymore. I’ll catch them later from any number of streaming services for which I’m already paying.

That’s before we even get to my—and America’s?—fundamental reticence to see Jared Leto in anything.

Did I Like It: This thing has been on Disney+ for what feels like the better part of a year, so why not break down and finally watch it?

It’s that Leto, man. I’m happy to say that, despite being the clear lead and one of the creative forces behind the picture—barely makes much of an impression in the film. In other films, that might be a detriment. Here, I’m relieved.

That leaves the rest of the film to be a generic actioner of this era. If the Mouse House decided to jam one of the Avengers in the middle of the movie, I’m not sure most people would notice**. Was anybody else bothered by the entire plot hinging on finding a MacGuffin that allows programs to live longer than half an hour in the real world, when if I remember right Olivia Wilde’s character in Tron: Legacy (2010) was a program who joined the real world?

No? Didn’t think so.

The biggest disappointments are where the film runs a little withholding. The aforementioned Boxleitner-lessness makes the movie series increasingly poorly titled, but there’s more. I was told Gillian Anderson is in the film, and she barely is, doing her trusty Margaret Thatcher impression without the makeup. Excited to see Jeff Bridges again? He appears about as much as Wolfman Jack does in American Graffiti (1973), which is to say, not much. He does appear in a sequence that takes place in the frankly more visually interesting environment of the first film, but both the wisp of Kevin Flynn and the full-retro flashback are gone before you even get the chance to enjoy it.

*Not appearing in this film, by the way. Why this series couldn’t make peace with somebody like Bruce Boxleitner, I’ll never know. Made me want to go back and watch the original Tron (1982).

**OK. People—especially those who really care about all things Tron—might care, but I don’t think the movie would stay around in our memories long enough for it to become any kind of moment about which we all are going to be required to have an opinion. Give it all some kind of multiverse-thing, and those people might even applaud it.

Obsession (2025)

Director: Curry Barker

Cast: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless

Have I Seen It Before: Never. I will say this for a week without air conditioning, it certainly inspired me to get a little better caught up with what’s new in horror.

Never mind that the theater experience was lousy. One really ought to stick to the rivers and the lakes that they’re used to, I suppose. It’s tempting to reveiw the crowd and the house, but let’s not. Let’s get to the movie itself.

Did I Like It: It’s an interesting dichotomy. I had a perfectly pleasant experience watching Backrooms (2026), but the movie itself wins the second annual Weapons (2025) Award for “What the hell is everyone else so into about this?” Here, the theater made me long from the 85 degree heat of my house, but the movie itself is one of the best of the year.

I guess my problem with Backrooms stems from the fact that the further they descend into the liminal spaces, the more I’m wondering why they keep doing it. Here, our main character (Johnston) starts out on the road to damnation innocently enough. How could he know that the One Wish Willow would work? How could he know that it would go as far as it did?

He sure seemed okay with it far longer than he had any right to be, but that’s a minor quibble. The nerve-wracking, unsettling uncertainty that lurks in the shadow of his bedroom sets ones teeth on edge. Navarrette’s performance as the dream girl who is compelled by forces unknown to become a nightmare, even to herself is truly one of the great horror movie performances in recent years. We’ve opened the gates to films like this receiving awards attention, and there is zero reason her perfectly tuned ability to shift from terrifying to pathetic, to completely normal, and occasionally wind up being all three should be ignored.