The Death of 'Superman Lives': What Happened? (2015)

Director: Jon Schnepp

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Tim Burton, Kevin Smith, Jon Peters

Have I Seen it Before: I’ve heard Smith tell his small part of the story, and I patiently sat through the more esoteric part of the third act of The Flash (2023). What more is there?

Did I Like It: My largest complaint is that absolute beast of a title. Why “What Happened”? If we take the logic that added that subtitle, it should be on every documentary. Ken Burns’ The Civil War: What Happened? Capturing the Friedmans: What Happened? Hearts of Darkness: What Happened?

Utter madness.

To the film’s credit, there’s at least something more to it, and Schnepp finds that something more. Smith is here to tell his side of the story again, but we also get Jon Peters largely living up to that legend, while still managing to deny he ever insisted that Superman not fly in the film as he developed it.

I’m surprised they could get Burton on the record about the whole thing, but his insights are more fascinating than anything else. I’m surprised that the fate of the film still sort of bothers him, and that he was ever going to get talked into doing a superhero film for Warner Bros. again after the apathy they berated him with in the wake of Batman Returns (1992).

But the thing that I’m most surprised to see is that there was at least a possibility, had Superman Lives been actually made, it might have actually worked. Simply put, despite teaser posters sent and test footage shot, this film was a very long way from coming to pass. Were they actually filming, Burton would have found some way to bring his vision to a project that never felt on spec like it was going to be a fit.

The studio would have hated it, and the McDonald’s high command would have a riot, but that’s when Burton can really start to cook.

Or he just would have made this instead of his Planet of the Apes (2001). That’s the thing about films that are never made. They can either be the greatest thing you will never see, or it can be so insanely bad that the human brain simply can’t process its dimensions.

The Roses (2025)

Director: Jay Roach

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman, Andy Samberg, Allison Janney

Have I Seen it Before: You go into this feeling like you probably have, as long as you’ve seen War of the Roses (1989)…

Did I Like It: But that’s not quite right. It’s a precarious position to criticize a film by comparing it to another film, but it’s hard not to touch on that here. The heart of DeVito’s film is pitch black, with the doomed lovers committed to hating one another straight through to their final breaths. This is a broad Hollywood comedy, coming from one of the chief purveyors of broad, Hollywood comedies. Cumberbatch and Colman are sufficiently biting at their height, but the ending—even in its bleakness—is entirely too soft. The original works so well because Douglas and Turner seem to hate each other, even when they’re in love, whereas Cumberbatch and Coleman seem to love each other, even when they’re trying to kill one another. There should be no happy ending in the tale of the Roses, merely a sense that we can try to be a bit happier in their stead.

The films problems don’t end there, either. I laugh occasionally, but the cast is so stacked I’m left wanting more from the supporting characters. Ncuti Gatwa’s all-too-brief tenure as the Doctor let us all know he has the charisma that he should be leading his own movies, not playing the fifth Ken. Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon play Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon, earning their paychecks. The real missed opportunity here is Allison Janney. One would think that getting featured on the poster and generally being a national treasure would warrant more than a single scene which taxes none of the comedic minds at work here. This movie sold me the idea that she would be playing the Danny DeVito role. It was far less than that, and that’s a real shame.

A good adaptation makes one want to seek out the source material. Why does a lackluster remake also make one want to do the same thing?

Patriot Games (1992)

Director: Phillip Noyce

Cast: Harrison Ford, Anne Archer, Patrick Bergin, Sean Bean

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. I can’t help but be a sucker for anything Jack Ryan related, as long as it comes from that era before Clancy started believing his own press, or worse yet, died.

Although, I do probably have deeper, more lasting memories of the score. As a young kid, I practically wore out the cassette I had of Horner’s music from this film, but then again all kids went through their phase where they listened to James Horner scores non-stop, right?

41-year-olds have the same thing, right?

Did I Like It: That last section covers a lot of ground for a proper review. The Horner score—one of his best—can propel through quite a bit. The story, too, has a simplicity to it that makes it easier to swallow than even The Hunt for Red October (1990) and Clear and Present Danger (1994). The less said about the later films in the series, the better, and definitely the less said about the doorstops books that never saw the light of the projection booth, the much, much better.

Ostensibly a sequel to Red October I can’t help but compare the apples and oranges of Baldwins and Fords*. Ford feels like the kind of guy that Clancy imagined when he was writing, but there’s something so anxious about Baldwin that gave Ryan an almost nebbish quality. That quality is all gone now.

Ultimately, this is a nice little thriller from that peak era of Harrison Ford’s peak thriller era in the 1990s. Although I’d probably watch The Fugitive (1993) or maybe Air Force One (1997)** before this. It’s the kind of movie that as a kid I imagined watching, because it was the kind of movie that grown ups watched.

*You won’t need to guess much where I stand on the eternal Anne Archer vs. the blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Gates McFadden debate.

**Could you imagine if Ford continued with the role? Things could have gotten real weird, real convoluted, and more than a little prophetic. Seriously, go read Executive Orders. No, wait. Don’t do that. Read the back of the book. You’ll get the idea.

Mr. Brooks (2007)

Director: Bruce A. Evans

Cast: Kevin Costner, Demi Moore, Dane Cook, William Hurt

Have I Seen It Before: Yes. I have a vague memory of watching at some point in the last 18 years, and it has been sitting on my DVD shelf for several years, so I really had to have.

For the entire time I’m sitting there during this viewing and thinking that there would be—and indeed, I had even previously seen—a revelation that William Hurt’s Jiminy Cricket character looks like Costner’s father.

But that isn’t really there. What film was I watching way back when?

Did I Like It: It’s a nice—especially in a pre-Dexter world—premise, telling the story of a seemingly respectable man harboring a monster inside.

The problem with a nice premise is that it will only reliably fuel a trailer. I’m sure the trailer for Mr. Brooks is quite nice. Then again, I couldn’t be troubled to watch that trailer on the DVD, so… I don’t know.

Yes, I do, actually, know. If there is a hypothetical limit to the critical mass of subplots, then Demi Moore’s character in this approached it, if she didn’t shatter it. She’s after Kevin Costner (but doesn’t really know it). She’s tangling with Dane Cook, thinking he has some Kevin Costner energy. He doesn’t, but I’ll get to that here in a bit. She’s also got an ex-husband that’s causing problems. Then she also has another case that is haunting her. All of this, and she is not really the protagonist. That’s too much. So much, in fact that it’s inevitable that all of those elements will make up the parts of the third act, and do so pretty awkwardly.

It’s an awkward ungainly way to do a film.

And against all odds, I only get to the end of this review before I note that I have no idea why Dane Cook is in this film, and he never seems to quite know either. It’s not so great when he’s got to be the catalyst for all these plots.

Starship Troopers (1997)

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. All young people think they’ll have the same buzzy, borderline narcotic feeling for all of Verhoeven’s films that they had when they first saw Robocop (1987)*.

Did I Like It: You can keep your Showgirls (1995) and your Hollow Man (2002), this is as good as late-stage American Verhoeven can get. And this is even excluding the fact that Denise Richards has never been able to get anywhere in the vicinity of being able to act. I can’t say Van Dien is all that better of a performer than his love interest, but Van Dien is at least able to fit into the testosterone heavy parts of the film. I don’t think Richards has ever fit into a role correctly. I must be mellowing in my increasingly older age. Time was, one resoundingly false performance can obliterate an entire movie. I’m not sure when I got to the point where I can look past something like that.

There’s enough of the demented political satire present in Verhoeven’s best to keep things interesting, but you really have to want to get what’s going on in order to get it. Something about the crowd I saw this with made me think that they were resolutely on the side of not just the humans, but the humans with enough moral fortitude to strive for citizenship.

The film is resoundingly on the side of the bugs, and at this point so am I. They’ve made some mistakes, sure, but I don’t think they started traveling among the stars wanting to start any trouble. They were just prepared with trouble when it came.

And I don’t care what the brain bug did, no one deserves that kind of treatment.

*When not edited for TV, naturally.

Doomed!: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's The Fantastic Four (2015)

Director: Marty Langford

Cast: Oley Sassone, Alex Hyde-White, Michael Bailey Smith, Roger Corman

Have I Seen it Before: No. I’ve been on a documentary jag as of late, ad this story always fascinated me, but it felt like I should probably go ahead and actually watch the fabled The Fantastic Four (1994) before I did so.

I’m not entirely sure why. Not a lot of people have seen it, especially as the bootleg video market has gone online, then again I can’t imagine people would want to see this without having seen the subject.

Did I Like It: Ultimately, the film covers what it needs to, even without the cooperation of several of the people—some of them, like produce Bernd Eichenger were no longer living at the time of production—responsible for the burying of the first Fantastic Four film. We are ultimately left with speculation more than conclusions as to whether or not the film was ever intended to be released. That’s not a fatal flaw. A documentary can work with that kind of ambiguity.

The problem is two-fold. First, we never really get a sense of the story of the people behind the film. We see how Oley Sassone—the director of the ill-fated film—fared after the film imploded, but only a small picture of it. We get no sense of how the cast soldiered on, other than a vague sense that they weren’t cashiered out of Hollywood, nor did they see much of a career bump from their efforts. None of them became famous or infamous, and they have to take a strange level of comfort from the fact that their film got more attention for its unfortunate fate. Had Corman and company released the film as was, it would have been rather comprehensively forgotten by the time 1995 rolled around.

Second, the entire film plays out with the production value and editing of a middling DVD special feature. A documentary can be more than what we’re given here. That becomes all the more frustrating when it is very clear that there was more story there to tell.

Bye Bye Birdie (1963)

Director: George Sidney

Cast: Janet Leigh, Dick Van Dyke, Ann-Margret, Maureen Stapleton

Have I Seen It Before: I feel like I have seen those episodes of Mad Men where they try to cannibalize this movie for the very first Diet Pepsi* commercial. Does that count?

Did I Like It: There’s something vaguely unsettling about the movie at its very core, as if it were the natural conclusion of someone trying to make a gender-swapped Lord of the Flies.

Maybe it’s just that I get the sense that there was a version of this film—and certainly the broadway play—where Kim (Ann-Margret) is something of a second-tier character, and the story is really about Rosie (Leigh) and Albert (Van Dyke).

That film could have been a nice romantic comedy centering on two of the more charming personalities to ever be in a movie. That isn’t the film as presented.

As it stands, the teenage girls swarm over the characters of the film like locusts. I don’t even think the film is being fair to the phenomenon of adolescence, or even the phenomenon of adolescence in the late 1950s which it is seeming to satirize. But these girls are frightening. There isn’t even a frolicking chase to keep things light, as in A Hard Day’s Night (1964). These girls won’t be bough, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. They just want to consume this music star, Conrad Birdie** (Jesse Pearson), even if they’re not entirely sure what consuming him might be. There might not have been any need for Carpenter to re-make Village of the Damned (1960), this production got the job done only three years after the original.

No wonder Van Dyke and Leigh get pushed out of almost every frame they’re in. And it might be contrary to say so, but the film is poorer for it.

*Or Patio, if you’re nasty.

**While we’re on the subject, Birdie is clearly supposed to be a stand-in for Elvis, but named to spoof Conway Twitty, who ended up becoming the schmaltziest kind of country crooner. His beg legacy is a running gag on Family Guy. At least The Beatles and Elvis had some good songs…

The Fantastic Four (1994)

Director: Oley Sassone

Cast: Alex Hyde-White, Jay Underwood, Rebecca Staab, Michael Bailey Smith

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Technically, none of us should have seen it, I suppose.

Did I Like It: It’s not great, but the real question is: Was it really bad enough to get buried in the forgotten realms of bootleg videos sold for years at comic book conventions*?

Probably not. It certainly has less of a polish than other superhero films of the era. It wouldn’t measure up against Batman Forever (1995) released only a year later, but then again, anything that might have made The Shadow (1994) look like a classier picture is far from a deal breaker in my book.

This was clearly a b-production, but I never felt it was made with anything less than the best of intentions. It would not have damaged the brand. In fact, it might have been right at home among some second-string genre pictures, especially of a decade earlier. It’s a fair sight better than Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), and in all honesty the movie I kept thinking about as things progressed was Masters of the Universe (1987)**. The Fantastic Four is very much in the same league as that film. Then again, this film is resolute in giving us the best Fantastic Four story available at its budget, and never bothers to cheap out and make large parts of the story about some down-to-earth teens.

So, definitely worthy of release, if not quite demanding of adoration.

It would have made a fine—“fine” will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this sentence—pilot for an hour-long FF television series that we really never got to see. That show might have even grown into itself over time.

Although, I really could have gone without Reed (Hyde-White) and Sue (Staab) making googly eyes at each other while the latter was still a child (Mercedes McNab). But that hardly warrants the film going unreleased. It lifts right out, and would still only make it the third most problematic film of 1994, behind Ace Ventura: Pet Detective*** and whatever movie Woody Allen made that year.

*The less said about my dear, departed Batgirl, the better off we’ll all be.

**Boy, The Cannon Group is really taking a beating in this review, especially since they had nothing to do with the film in question.

**Boy, the pre-Friends work of Courtney Cox is really taking a beating in this review.

Evil Dead II (1987)

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley

Have I Seen it Before: A couple of us guys watched it late one night in High School. When you’re taking in movies at that age, you’re more susceptible than at any other point in your life* than to have contrary opinions about movies, just for the sake of having contrary opinions about it.

I didn’t like the film. You would have thought that I had pledged my life to Al-Qaida. For years after that, I wondered if I had taken the stance because I too felt that need to not enjoy something everyone was.

I honestly haven’t watched the film since.

Did I Like It: Well…

I really wanted to. As you—or at least, as I—head north of forty, there’s a temptation to like something more than its reputation or your own memory would suggest. Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) becomes a unique symbol of the auteur, and a children’s film making the bold choice to be mostly about trade policy. Batman & Robin (1997) is a heartfelt action adventure film, if you can get over most of the writing and cheap staging. I’ll defend The Shadow (1994) despite an array of flaws weighing it down.

It’s time for me to give Evil Dead II another chance.

And yet.

Something about this film just doesn’t connect with me. It’s nothing more than a cheap array of horror gags. Perhaps more polished than the original The Evil Dead (1981), but never concerned with being as satisfying as Army of Darkness (1992). All of the pieces of Raimi’s brilliance are here, but they don’t cook together. The gore sprays. The monsters groan. Campbell mugs. Rinse and repeat. Campbell is a charming enough presence, but there’s a reason that he was never a big enough star to be the lead in Darkman (1990) or the villain in an eventual sequel to Spider-Man (2002). I think he might agree, and indeed has made a career based on this very same image, but Campbell isn’t much more than a B actor.

*Some people never get over it.

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters* (2007)

Director: Seth Gordon

Cast: Steve Wiebe, Billy Mitchell, Walter Day, Brian Kuh

Have I Seen it Before: It doesn’t feel like I would have pent a plethora of time in college watching a lot of documentaries, but I have distinct memories of much of the film. Maybe I was drawn into the film by a Netflix recommendation during those early, halcyon days when the big red N literally had access to all of everything and sent them to you on little discs via the mail. Kids, ask your parents.

Did I Like It: While certainly a competent documentary, the material is elevated by a number of happy accidents*.

First, the Rocky-esque storyline that naturally crops up in the struggle between Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell in pursuit of world record Donkey Kong scores naturally dramatizes the subject. Wiebe is angelic to the point of being occasionally pathetic, and Mitchell might complain about his role as the villain, but anyone who appears to enjoy being a villain this much can’t lay claim to all that much sympathy.

The film’s real strengths are in its supporting characters, though. Walter Day is a delightful eccentric, when he isn’t so comprehensively convinced of the depth of his own incorruptibility when it is constantly displayed as open for negotiation.

And then there’s Brian Kuh. In the near twenty years since I last saw the film, Kuh sticks in my head, and will probably continue to do so. Feebly searching for his own second-hand glory, while persisting in being service to those more talented than him, watching him scurry around a New Hampshire arcade telling anyone who will listen that kill screen for Donkey Kong is coming up is so obsequious, it haunts. I’d watch a whole movie about Kuh, but it might keep me up at night.

*My only real complaint about the film is that the title (really, most titles) should be cut off before the colon. There’s no real connection between this and A Fistful of Dollars (1964), which it references. What’s more, never once do any of the subjects of the film notably use a corner. I would imagine for a lot of these competitive play situations—to say nothing of the home machines that are often a sticking point for high scores—don’t involve coins at all.

**That Gordon and company were skilled enough to harness for the purposes of the film.

Presence (2024)

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Cast: Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. In the chaos of the early part of this year, I missed it in theaters* during its original run, and it’s been bouncing around the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods schedule all year.

Did I Like It: For the first few minutes, I was prepared to not like it at all. An entire movie from the fish-eye lens POV of a ghost. Like the Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) of the Paranormal Activity franchise?

All right, that sounds terrific. I found the whole thing haunting in a sad way (perhaps we should call that “haunting with a small h”?) as it proceeded.

And then the ball drops, and…

Well, I think a spoiler alert—not customary in these reviews—is probably warranted here.

You good? Okay.

The ghost can travel through time, it appears. Indeed, one of the human characters is the ghost. I’ve been thinking a lot about it since watching it. If I had Soderbergh here, I’m sure he would insist that the ghost was always, is always, and would always be the Tyler (Maday), the son of the Payne family who moves into the house**. That’s the straight ahead interpretation of the film from its opening moments to its close.

However.

What if that isn’t the case? My personal head canon is that as we watch the film, the presence is actually the daughter, Chloe (Liang). As the plot unfurls, she begs for deliverance from her grim fate from anyone who will list, including her passed-out brother. Tyler meets the challenge, leaps to his death, and then becomes the Presence just in time for Lucy Liu to let America know she wouldn’t mind a few awards, if anybody has some lying around.

The film as presented seems to make us want to think that the Presence is able to move on to whatever is next after deeply upsetting their mother, but wouldn’t this all lead to a recursive plot loop, where Tyler wants to make amends for his own demise, only to have Chloe perish and then want to change things, over and over again, ad infinitum?

If God was ever terribly interested in punishing me for all eternity, a loop like that might be the ticket.

*But somehow made a point to catch Black Bag (2025). Weird.

**Honestly, if the human desire to lust after too-good-to-be-true real estate deals, the entire horror genre would collapse in on itself.

Avatar (2009)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez

Have I Seen it Before: I think if you were alive in 2009 you were required to see it. The box office numbers would certainly seem to back that up.

I first saw the film in IMAX 3D, which is probably the way to see it. I certainly enjoyed Avatar: The Way of the Water (2022) in that environment. What I wouldn’t recommend, however, is seeing the film in IMAX 3D… from the first row of the theater. I don’t like to include nausea in my filmgoing experience, unless Ari Aster is involved.

I feel obligated to say that this film is one of the few films my cat has ever taken an interest in**. It is entirely possible that I’ve only seen it the second time when I watched it with her, back when she was a tiny kitten.

Did I Like It: The film works better out of 3D in the long run. That’s a little bit because I don’t have to grumble about the rash of 3D conversions that riddled movie releases for the better part of a decade, but also a testament to Cameron’s fundamental skills behind the camera. He might have had ambitions to bring a new level of spectacle to the movie-going experience***, but he still understood that the movie would be playing on my crappy TV for the most of the rest of history.

I might complain—and was indeed, more than a little bit surprised—that the film leaned on VO narration so much, and the less said about “unobtanium,” the better, but when the shit really starts to hit the huge helicopter blades on Pandora, the film picks up with a pace that can’t be denied. If I’m more than content to judge the entirety of a film based on the strengths of its third act—and I am—it’s entirely possible that the film earned all of those eyes on it way back when.

*Even then…

**For obvious reasons.

***Essentially boiled down to “3D without people fling objects straight at the camera.”

The Great Dictator (1940)

Director: Charlie Chaplin

Cast: Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Henry Daniell

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, several times. So much so that I’m a little surprised it’s taken me this long* to write a review of this one.

The real question is: Have you, dear reader, seen it?

Odds are you probably haven’t seen the whole film, but you might very well have seen the infamous final scene where the barber (Chaplin), having completed his Prince and the Pauper routine on Adenoid Hynkel (also Chaplin, naturally) and gives a speech to a waiting world where he begs for the decency of humanity**.

Did I Like It: You really should watch the rest of the film, as it is one of Chaplin’s most fully realized comedies. A farewell to his Tramp persona***, he is doing things here that it took most of Hollywood still years to realize in the context of a sound film. It’s a deeply, deeply funny film. I challenge you to get to Hynkel’s first speech and not marvel that Chaplin was going to be just as funny when talking as he had been during his preceding decades of prancing.

What’s more, it’s funny about a thing that is often too horrible to really comprehend. And as such, it works just as well in 2025 as it did 85 years ago.

But it wouldn’t be a Chaplin film without it hitting you in the chest a little bit, and so we come back to that last speech. Imagining a world where Hitler—or any fascist leader of a city state; I’ll leave you to fill in the blanks—suddenly wakes up and wants to bring some measure of peace to the world is a pretty brazen fantasy. Did Hynkel’s followers take the words to heart? Did the world become more peaceful? Is it even possible for the world at large to respond to such a plea?

Maybe not. We don’t see that reaction, other than Hannah (Goddard, proving she was the luminescent star of the age) telling us to listen.

Maybe, just maybe, after a century, we’ll start doing just that.

So, sure. The final speech is as good a place as any to start with the film. But you should really watch the whole thing.

*So close to the fabled review number 1000 that I can nearly smell it.

**For some reason every clip plays with the score from Inception (2010), for reasons I’ll never understand.

***Chaplin insisted Modern Times (1936) is truly the last Tramp film, and that he would never make a sound film with the little fellow, but when our Barber dons a bowler and has a cane and trips through some pantomime, it is hard not to view this film as the ultimate fate of the Tramp.

The Clay Pigeon (1949)

Director: Richard Fleischer

Cast: Bill Williams, Barbara Hale, Richard Quine, Richard Loo

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: It’s a little difficult to write a review of this immediately after my review of Night Editor (1946)*, as they both have the same fundamental problem: a softness that flies in the face of the very core of film noir. A happy ending might make the second, b-picture in a double-bill go down smoother, but it leaves me thinking that the lengths which Jim (Williams) goes to get out of his bind—including becoming a fugitive from justice and manhandling the wife (Hale) of the army buddy he may be responsible for killing—as perfectly reasonable and something somebody ought to do when they’re in trouble.

Imagine if Touch of Evil (1958) had ended with Orson Welles, and Charlton Heston letting bygones be bygones and went out for tacos at the end of that film? Or take a neo-noir like Fargo (1996), and have it end with William H. Macy and Frances McDormand meeting Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare at the Radisson at the end, chalking the whole kidnapping plot up to a misunderstanding.

It’s even worse when one considers that the film could have been expanded and made a halfway decent 1970s paranoia thriller in the vein of Three Days of the Condor (1975) or The Parallax View (1974), and has been self-consciously imitated by Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014). Everyone wants to seem to call this noir, it was programmed in an ongoing noir series, but I think the film isn’t even all that interested in wanting to be noir. That’s okay! It can be another kind of film, we just need to finally tie down just what is and what isn’t noir. Not a problem. I’ll wait patiently here while the rest of you figure it out.

*After watching them both in a double feature at Circle Cinema.

Night Editor (1946)

Director: Henry Levin

Cast: William Gargan, Janis Carter, Jeff Donnell, Coulter Irwin

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: I’m struck by the moment in that episode of The Simpsons when Bart and his friends exit a theater after sneaking in to see the R-rated Naked Lunch (1991). Their one-line review of that film pretty much covers a goodly portion of this review:

“I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.”

Based on a radio series where newsmen trade stories, one supposes that the film was at least mildly meant to be the first in a series of films with a similar construction. That series never came, so we’re left with a logic that would have left The Princess Bride (1987) titled Grandpa Reads A Story and The Green Mile (1999) as An Old Man Gets Some Toast.

That might not even be all that much of a weakness of the film, as there is some quiet thrill in not having the entirety of a movie explained to me in the title card. The unavoidable problem here is a question of how we might just define film noir. It’s difficult to conclusively pin it down, butt one can certainly point to things that aren’t Noir. A happy ending feels less noir than it might be otherwise. Noir might feel like it lives in the trapping web of a femme fatale—this film has that in spades—but when the film bends over backwards to release its protagonist from the grips of that trap, there is something fundamentally less bleak about the story, and certainly renders any of the tension that the third act develops.

Honestly, the man (Gargan) is stabbed in the heart by an icepick and manages to go on to find a tidy middle-class income outside of the police force, and keeps his marriage and family. Crime may not pay, but there’s always a way out of it, apparently.

Darkman (1990)

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Liam Neeson, Frances McDormand, Colin Friels, Larry Drake

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: On spec, the notion of Liam Neeson leading a Raimi-infused action steeped in the aesthetic of the classic Universal horror films would be at the top of my list of films to watch this year.

Releasing the movie in 1990 before Raimi had his solid run in the 1990s leading up to the breakthrough hit of Spider-Man (2002) and before Neeson had even been in Husbands and Wives (1992) to say nothing of Schindler’s List (1993)… It seems like a crazy idea, but I’m so glad it is there.

For me, this one gives Spider-Man 2 (2004) a run for its money as Raimi’s best work. Every manic impulse is on full display, and none of it has the self-conscious quality of some of his later work. Neeson, on the same front, is becoming the gruff, irate action hero we now know him to be, decades before anyone realized he had a particular set of skills.

Many of the great filmmakers have those films that never got made and we’re left wondering what could have been. Spielberg always wanted to make a Bond picture. Welles (and, for that matter, George Lucas) had his eyes set on some kind of adaptation of Heart of Darkness. James Cameron’s treatment of Spider-Man has always been the stuff of legend, snuffed out by protracted rights issues. Raimi has been on the record wanting at various points to do an adaptation of The Shadow. He didn’t get the go ahead in the 90s, and by the 2000s, he had indicated that he was never able to crack the story the way he wanted. By now, it may be too late. But at least we have this film. It may make us long for that lost film even more, but we are given a taste of what could have been.

Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story (2025)

Director: Laurent Bouzereau

Cast: Steven Spielberg, Peter Benchley, Janet Maslin, Emily Blunt

Have I Seen It Before: This is definitely the kind of review where answering that question first might prove to jump into the meat of the review before its time.

Did I Like It: The opening minutes—and, indeed, the trailer—to this documentary both recognizes the challenge it has in front of us, and poses an intriguing question which will fuel the next hour and a half.

Is there anything you haven’t said about Jaws (1975)?

If there is truly anything that hasn’t been said about that point of origin for the modern blockbuster, I can’t fathom what it is, and Spielberg, too, find the question both intriguing and daunting.

Does the film actually reveal much new about Jaws. Not… really. The old hits are touched on, sure. Benchley’s book is startlingly different than the book, especially when it isn’t dealing with its titular shark*. The shark didn’t work, then it did, necessitating that we see as little of it as possible, to great effect. If Richard Dreyfuss** could throw a punch, it is entirely possible he and Robert Shaw would have killed one another. People were terrified of the water in the late 70s, and took it out on otherwise unassuming sharks.

It’s not nearly the revelation that the thesis question presents. That’s ultimately because there may not be much new to say about the subject after all. A vignette where Spielberg lightly admits to a modicum of PTSD in the years after the experience is a new depth into a subject that was already known.

Also, Emily Blunt is a pretty huge fan of the movie. I’m fully willing to admit I didn’t know that going in.

*Lora and I read it definitely, and the biggest revelation there is that Spielberg was elevating material before anyone even realized what he was capable of.

**If memory serves, there’s a drop or two of bad blood between the once and future Hooper and Spielberg, perhaps explaining why he only appears in the film via stock footage from the behind-the-scenes featurette when the film was first released on DVD.

Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy (2004)

Director: Kevin Burns, Edith Becker

Cast: George Lucas, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher

Have I Seen it Before: I’m almost positive that I have watched it before. By all indications, it as the main feature included in the initial DVD release of the original trilogy in 2004, and I was there the day it came out, my copy long-since reserved*.

Did I Like It: The documentary is fine. it’s professionally made, and it has access to its subjects, and a thoroughness in its exploration of the topic.

But let me take a moment from another piece of recent documentary filmmaking to illustrate this film’s weakness.

After Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) was released, George Lucas never gave an interview that wasn’t at least on some level about selling one of his movies or businesses. He has controlled the narrative of the story of how his films, just as closely as he controlled the story of the saga itself.

Now that he has retired from big-budget moviemaking and the Lucasfilm family of companies, he doesn’t need to have that same control anymore. In Disney+’s docuseries on Industrial Light and Magic, Light and Magic I finally saw Lucas be interviewed and have the filmmaker push back. In the talking head, he looked like someone had farted, but the truth of the moment was at least at least illuminated, if not fully explored.

There are no moments like that in this film. It’s a fully-approved exploration of the party line. Vader was always going to be Luke’s father**, Leia was always going to be Luke’s sister***, and Jabba was always in A New Hope****. It’s not hard to figure out that the truth is more complicated. The truly great documentary about Star Wars hasn’t been made yet, but the possibility exists now, and I’m waiting to see it. Not, a polemic like The People vs. George Lucas (2010) but a more concerted effort to illuminate the man who made those films and the process he took to get it done. A film version of Michael Kaminski’s The Secret History of Star Wars: The Art of Storytelling and the Making of a Modern Epic would be really something.

*I remember it so well because some girl had turned me down that night, and I remember watching the trilogy and by about the midway point of Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980), I had gotten over the unpleasantness earlier in the evening.

**Was never written down before the second draft of Empire.

***Wasn’t decided until well into the production of Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) when Lucas was drowning in what he wrought and decided he never wanted to make the sequel trilogy that would have introduced “the other.”

****Still doesn’t fit into the movie. It introduces the Millennium Falcon right before the scene that actually introduces the ship. Fight me about it.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)

Director: Tim Story

Cast: Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis

Have I Seen it Before: Considering I only just recently got around to to watching Fantastic Four (2005), it’s a safe bet that I’m only just now coming around to this one.

Did I Like It: This will sound a bit like damning with faint praise, but there is something so refreshing about a superhero movie—especially one of the mid-2000s—that is supremely un bothered by reckoning in any way with whatever is going on in the world at that moment. 9/11 is nowhere in sight. Afghanistan and Iraq are things the film can’t even bring itself to comprehend. The often thwarted* fight for gay rights doesn’t mean anything in a world with at least four verifiable superheroes.

At the time, especially with Nolan, Raimi, and (no judgments, at least in this context) Bryan Singer at the top of this form, it would make the film seem less than ambitious. After nearly two decades of genre films bending over backwards to be somehow relevant, this film just exists. It can just be enjoyed, and the fact that it isn’t weighed down by feeling the need to sell a mind-numbing soundtrack album (I’m looking in your direction, Daredevil (2003)).

Indeed, it’s relatively forgotten in the context of the glut of superhero movies made since X-Men (2000). Fans don’t debate about its relative merits. When the series was rebooted with Fantastic Four (2015), people weren’t bothered by losing this cast. With the characters now folding into the Marvel Cinematic Universe**, this film is unlikely to be celebrated in any kind of 20th anniversary.

It may not be the greatest superhero film ever made, but I’m struggling to think of another film in the genre that I don’t feel obligated to defend, or adore, or be ashamed of.

*And may yet still be. Yikes, what a mess we’ve made of things.

**Don’t look now, but there’s more plot similarities between this film and The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) than I think anyone is ready to talk about. Far more than the similarities one might find between Batman (1989) and The Dark Knight (2008).

Weapons (2025)

Director: Zach Cregger

Cast: Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. Brand new.

Did I Like It: There are long stretches where this film really reaches—and actually grabs—something special. Most of that happens in the film’s middle. That’s kind of a surprise all by itself, as most movies, and especially horror films get water-logged and flabby in their second act. Overlapping the stories of the various main characters keeps the attention far higher than average, and fully develops those characters. All have their flaws, but most of them* are innocent at their core. I’ll be stuck with the memory of their motivations and behavior all careening towards each other.

If that solid plot and character work had been coupled with an array of some of the more basic horror movie cliche you’re likely to find in a major release this year. Strange looking villain who’s strange looking for the sake of strange looking? Check. Jump scares a-go-go? Check. The camera pans across a character looking at something, landing on an open hallways and WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT? Check. Dream sequences within dream sequences that are just a vehicle for the aforementioned jump scares**? You better believe, check.

The film could have truly been great in a year filled with great horror movies, but I’m left with the frustration of a average-to-good film that couldn’t quite get out of its own way.

*Everyone but Paul (Ehrenreich), the opportunistically tee-totaling cop.

**When they aren’t offering one of the more over-the-top images I’ve seen in a film in a long time. One that doesn’t even feel thematically right, even if it does go a long way to offering a sweatier than it needs to be reason for the title being what it is.