The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Maybe if this film had been made and released two decades ago, before the entirety of the superhero splurge, I might have watched it thinking, wow, they really made something amazing here. But we cannot undo these things we’ve done, as someone once said, and the effect of having seen superhero group after superhero group after superhero group save the world again and again and again cannot be easily nullified. As it is, no amount of interesting conceptual design, or nostalgic kicks, or even just plain, good storytelling and performances, can get this work to break through against all that has come before it and lead the viewer to anything more than mild appreciation, to a diminished admiration that battles against a flattened sense of what a movie like this is supposed to be. It’s fine, really; all of the above mentioned elements are well done, and if you’d never seen another entry in the genre you’d probably rave about this one. But few of us out here are infants without prior experience, so the impact of this iteration is very much dulled. More standard than fantastic. 

The Naked Gun (2025)

Amusing, mostly. This flick is more a collection of moments rather than a cohesive comedic story. You could say that about the original police squad show and its sequel movies too, but they tended to hold together better than this work. Of course, those shows had the benefit of coming from the Zucker/Abrahams team, who were demonstrably comedic geniuses, whereas this film comes from a group of mostly nobodies. The difference in pedigree may be the source of the problem, as there’s just something missing in a lot of this plot; generally, the jokes take too much time to land, and then the movie lingers on them too long. These guys don’t seem to understand that a film like this requires a machine gun approach, not being satisfied with a good line or visual here and there. Liam Neeson and (particularly, maybe surprisingly) Pamela Anderson do the best they can with the material, and there are a few moments of laugh out loud hilarity—including one sequence that’s actually cribbed from an Austin Powers movie—but not enough good moments to make it seem like this reboot was all that necessary. If you’re looking to be a screw up, you’d better be a great screw up—otherwise, everyone will think you just don’t know what you’re doing.  

Cruella

Well, no—it’s not that exhausting rooting for the antihero. If, indeed, you do wind up rooting for her. That’s the tough trick to pull off in this outing: making a most iconic villain into something resembling a sympathetic character. It undermines the mission when, in the midst of these goings on, the henchmen start complaining about the nature of the lead character. It shows just how wide a span there is for this story to bridge. In this case, the program is helped a lot by Emma Stone’s work in the title role. She inhabits the personage to the maximum extent while still leaving room for the audience to give the well-known criminal a bit of a break. The rest of the rehabilitation is accomplished through transference: the movie introduces a new villain who takes up the mantle of vileness, and indeed, Cruella earns points by being the new monster's victim. It’s a fine line to walk, but it is mostly accomplished successfully here. As an added bonus, the film’s music—an aural travelogue of the 1960s and ‘70s—really helps put the viewer in a sympathetic (or at least neutral) mood. So does it all work in the end? Mostly, yes. All of the positives listed above, along with some fine humor and a solid (and admirably consistent) storyline make for a piece that, in certain respects, exceeds its inspiration and stands as a success in its own right. For once, Disney mined the back catalogue without going to the dogs.

Richard Jewell

The premise of this film, at its core, is that a couple of pretty people conspired to destroy a fat, ugly guy. Sounds about right. Perhaps I take that lesson away for personal reasons; but for my lack of a Georgia accent, I could be this guy’s cousin, and I watched this flick keenly aware that, had I ever been in the wrong place at the wrong time, I could easily have gone through what the late Mr. Jewell did. Paul Walter Hauser does good work as the title character, but it’s really Sam Rockwell and Kathy Bates who deliver the tour-de-force performances here. His outrage and her emotional depth drive home the personal dimension to a story that has a much larger scope: every time the government abuses its power, there is at least one individual who suffers terribly for that. It’s well worth taking the time to watch this movie and take that reminder to heart.