The internet is awash in self-awarded laws (Godwin, Sturgeon, Betteridge) and I am proposing another one, not out of vanity, but sheer exasperation. Call it Burlingame’s Law: the moment a piece of commercial fiction feels insecure about its moral seriousness, it will default to a human-trafficking plotline in lieu of a better idea.

Such is the case with Mutiny, a forgettable action thriller starring Jason Statham, where the action star has more deadly moves in his repertoire than words in his vocabulary.

Statham stars as Cole Reed, the personal bodyguard of Tibu (Raman Tikaram), a one-percenter shipping magnate based out of Bangkok who is on the verge of selling his company so his failson Kam (Chaneil Kular) can chart his own path. After a celebratory dinner where Tibu waxes poetic about his reputation for seafaring ethics and fetes Reed for his loyalty, he is unceremoniously gunned down, and Cole becomes the only suspect. But the high seas wait for no one, and business must resume apace.

Cole knows something fishy is going on aboard the freight ship and sneaks on board. Fortunately for him, one of Tibu’s assassins looks kind of like him and leaves behind photo ID.

Cole’s suspicions are confirmed when he hears cries from a locked storage container and realizes there are humans on board. After venerating a billionaire who ships freight, this is where Burlingame’s Law comes into effect.

The captain is corrupt and knows what’s going on, while the failson maintains plausible deniability. Danish ex-con turned movie star Roland Møller, whose Wikipedia page notes he has ten convictions for assault, plays the captain. His boat is staffed with yes-men, stooges, and henchmen, save for a last-minute call-out that forces Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis) to fill in as third mate.

The captain and Ellis are soon at odds on the trafficking Y/N issue, and she is in exile aboard the ship until she runs into Cole. Together, they become two thorns in the side of a captain who can ill afford one pain in his ass, let alone two.

The plot, for all its predictability, does have something going for it: efficiency. Mutiny is a brisk 95 minutes, and it asks nothing of the audience beyond being passive viewers while Jason Statham kicks ass. Statham is actually quite charming with his tough-guy, take-no-prisoners persona, and I do enjoy watching his action scenes.

It’s not high cinema one seeks out in Statham-starring thrillers, and it’s almost unfair to judge them as such. And I have a well-documented record of praising such movies. Still, Mutiny left me feeling cold and cynical. Cold and cynical enough that I coined my own “law” to dunk on its reliance on morally heavy cliché.

There was a time (2021, to be exact) when I wrote, “I’m a simple man and sometimes I just need to watch Jason Statham beat the shit out of some bad guys. Ya know?” Something changed since then, and the change is 100% on me, because the movies stay exactly the same.

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Mutiny opens today, August 21, in wide-release.

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I really wanted to like The Magic Faraway Tree. It has an excellent cast (including very talented child actors), a cute premise, and is filled with nostalgia and the magic of childhood. It has the makings of a great family film, but it doesn’t quite hold up against other classics. Instead, it seems to be fan service for millennial parents who grew up on The Neverending Story and The Chronicles of Narnia and think their kids are spending too much time on screens.

Simon Farnaby takes a lot of liberties when adapting Enid Blyton’s classic novel, transporting the quaint mid-20th-century English storyline into the modern day, complete with Wi-Fi dependence, an overbearing capitalist grandma, and at times too-on-the-nose feminism. Screen time, unfortunately, plays too big a part in the plot to feel entirely believable and is even less conducive to the story. When Polly Thompson (Claire Foy) decides to quit her job, she and her husband, Tim (Andrew Garfield), set out to fulfill their dream of moving their family to the countryside for a fresh start. Leaving their friends (and worse, their Wi-Fi) doesn’t go over well with video-game-obsessed Joe (Phoenix Laroche), quiet Fran (Billie Gadsdon), and apathetic Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy). But soon the kids wander into the forbidden ‘enchanted forest’ and befriend a myriad of magical characters, unofficially led by Silky (Nicola Coughlan). 

The adventures the kids go on at the faraway tree are genuinely magical and exciting to watch, and Farnaby and director Ben Gregor do a fairly good job of paralleling the children’s adventures with their normal lives with their parents. However, the way each child grows throughout the film is tainted by the shallow backstories they are given. Fran says only four words in the first twenty minutes of the film, but no reason for her muteness is ever given; the audience is just told she used to be imaginative and give her mom “all her best ideas,” and now her parents high-five when she says four words in a week. Her transformation into a strong young girl, once again in tune with her imagination, has the potential to be really powerful, but instead it falls flat. And unfortunately, this flat transformation is true of the whole family. Farnaby transports the story into the modern age, but fails to put any thought into the true repercussions this has on the characters.

The Magic Faraway Tree is blessed with excellent performances by both seasoned, award-winning actors and its brilliant three child actors, pulling you into the magical (and at times mundane) adventures of the Thompson family. The film ends, as you’d expect, on a happy note with nice, wholesome messages and an invitation to remember the imagination and fun you had as a child. And for that, I’d recommend it as a casual family movie night—just don’t expect it to hold a candle to the classics of your own childhood.

The Magic Faraway arrives in theaters on Friday August 21st
Image courtesy Vertical

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In Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film, an auteur and aging starlet are intertwined in a fantastical journey of self-discovery inspired by an imaginary 1980s slasher franchise about a psycho killer with a metal HVAC block for a head, a twin-tipped sea spear for a weapon, and the provocative nom de sangre The Little Death.

With obvious affection for the likes of Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp, the best storytelling might just be in its opening credits that situates the audience into the fictional reality. An ingeniously handcrafted montage communicates the decades-spanning cultural phenomenon surrounding a horror film franchise. Through headlines and lovingly handcrafted ephemera, we see how the film became a phenomenon that inspired sequels, board and video games, and action figures. A string of press clips hint at reclusive stars, actors dropping out of sequels, and the franchise taking a nosedive into obsolescence, the Trans killer being reappraised as problematic, later re-evaluated and reclaimed by the culture, to the point that a reboot helmed by a Sundance wunderkind is in the works. Set to an Okay Kaya cover of R.E.M.’s  “Nightswimming”, it’s both a cheeky reference to Camp Miasma’s killer periodically emerging from a lake to exact revenge, the potency of clandestine sexual awakenings, and proof that no 1990s original was too slow and moody to escape the “make it even slower and more moodier” cover trend. 

With the montage having set the milieu, the film introduces this “wunderkind” in the form of Kris (a bespectacled Hannah Einbinder), an auteur whose critically-praised festival debut may not have won a mass audiences, but who caught the attention of studio execs eager to to potentially valuable “zombie IP”. All the better if it’s retrospectively-problematic representation issues can be cleansed at the hands of a young queer woman in an unsatisfying polycule. Kris heads to the rural unspecified Pacific Northwest to seek the approval and participation of Billy, the reclusive “final girl” from the original Camp Miasma. Although she’s only planning a two night trip, Kris stocks up with shopping carts full of candy at the local gas station where she even finds a copy of one of the franchise’s many sequels to watch on the hotel’s dusty DVD player accompanied by a giant tub of popcorn and added Raisinets. [As a dedicated popcorn and peanut M&M’s guy (possibly also a Mr. Robot reference?), I was immediately a mix of appreciative and skeptical.]

Soon enough, a shaky GPS leads Kris to Billy’s residence: surprisingly only to her, it’s the filming location of the original Camp Miasma. Surprising to audiences is that Billy is portrayed by Gillian Anderson, styled like a Golden Age Hollywood pinup with a Blanche Dubois (extremely fake-sounding) Southern accent. How or why a one-and-done teen starlet from a pulpy franchise could afford to purchase a defunct summer camp and preserve it as a something between a museum and a Sunset Boulevard callback is not addressed. Instead, the fantastical matte painted backdrops signal that Kris’s every step along the long snow-covered driveway and through the uncannily preserved grounds is one further from one reality and into another experiential realm where such practicalities are orthogonal to the point (and especially irrelevant to Schoenbrun’s interests). 

Somewhat reluctantly and awkwardly, Kris is entering into a pas de deux with an alluring but oddball shut-in. It’s one that will involve revelation, self-discovery, seduction, and a comedically exceptional quantity of fried chicken (and even more dipping sauces). From oversized dinner tables, to storybook fireside chats and chalet-style conversations overlooking an enchanted-looking forest, the women reveal intimate details of their own sexual histories, hangups, frustrations, and desires. Einbinder is good in familiar territory as a bottled-up creative, but Anderson’s commitment to the role and all its many hammy eccentricities is deeply admirable and the only miraculous reason that any of this works. 

When we finally see the original Camp Misama, it’s as a movie-within-the-movie projected with film nerd eroticism from an original 35mm film in a private screening room on the grounds of the old campground. As we watch Kris and Billy watch (and watch each other watching), it’s clear why this flick made such an impression. The way that Schoenbrun films each of the actresses as they experience the film makes it clear that it still holds an intense power over them both. Much like the depiction of The Pink Opaque in I Saw the TV Glow, these scenes of camp counselors meeting ahead of the season, testing each others limits, and eventually getting gruesomely murdered looks nothing at all like 1980s teen slasher dreck. Instead, its shot with a mix of outstanding production values and so many outlandish fountains of Kool-Aid red blood, convey how its protagonist remembers seeing it as a too-young, too-impressionable kid who got their hands on a VHS tape one fateful night. The climactic bloodshed is scored with an entirely improbable 1990s hit radio ballad, although this time nothing but the original will do. 

The centerpiece one-shot horror sequence unlocks deeper levels of understanding, changing Kris’s approach to the reboot, and pushes all the action further from conventional reality into fantastical imaginings and a potent, blood-soaked, crescendo of self-discovery. Early on, Kris describes her work as having considered Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain. I assumed this was a little bit of a self-own on Schoenbrun’s part, an in-joke at their own self-serious expense via a bottled-up stand-in. But as the film presses toward a figurative and literal climax, one appreciates the deadly and erotic seriousness of the proposition. While still entrenched in the paradoxical ways that imaginary settings can feel more “real” than reality, Schoenbrun’s first film made post-transition finds their interests centered more deeply in the possibilities of long-delayed bodily pleasure, be it sex or mountains upon mountains of sugary sweets. 

As a visual work of self-expression, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is undeniably striking. However, the split in its mode of storytelling and corresponding intentions will be frustrating for anyone – myself sheepishly included – who was expecting a campy re-imagining of slasher horror tropes. The vibes might be impeccably intoxicating, but anyone so pedestrian as to care about plot might find themselves disappointed as the action presses further from convention. Appreciating Schoenbrun’s exceptional skills as a visual stylist and phenomenal facility with recontextualizing cultural artifacts, one wonders if it’s selfish (or terminally square) to imagine their next film and ask “why not both?”

Until then, we’re fortunate to have a front row seat to a major emerging artist who’s deploying a substantial budget to evocatively work-through their self-revelations on big, bold, beautiful canvas. As one of the slasher sequel’s advertising copy, helpfully posted boldly around the abandoned camp, promises: “If it gets too real you can always turn it off.”

Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma arrives in theaters on August 14, including a 35mm film presentation at SIFF Uptown.
Lead image courtesy of MUBI

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Imagine, if you will, if Jurassic Park, Land of the Lost, War of the Worlds (a la Tom Cruise), and a wholesome 80’s movie had a baby… you’d be close to getting the vibe of The End of Oak Street. We’re introduced to the Platt family at a block party they’re hosting, and within minutes we’re getting the tea on their family dynamics and pain points. Lets just say communication isn’t their strong suit. The next evening, a blinding flash of light takes them on a journey into a nightmare no one is ready to cope with and a grim chance of long-term survival.

To say this film gave a nod to tropes from the 80’s and 90’s is putting it lightly. At least the first third of the film felt like they were recreating specific scenes straight out of a John Hughes, Stephen Spielberg, or Robert Zemeckis joint. They may not have been an exact replica, but it sure felt like it; I was on the verge of cringe overload. It was just grounded enough to wonder if they meant it seriously or if it was a free-for-all goof of that era of family-friendly-turned-horror films. I’ll be real, I still don’t know for sure. With this cast of Anne Hathaway (Mom) , Ewan McGregor (Dad), Emily Koroda (friendly know-it-all librarian) and P.J. Byrne (annoying pissed-off neighbor) I figured it would be a cheeky version of Jurassic Park flipped on its head. It was more like the tension and fear of War of the Worlds, teenage drama of Sixteen Candles and occasional cheek of OG Jurassic Park. I keep comparing it to other stories because of the constant barrage of homage but it didn’t actually hit the mark with any of them. At least not until the final turn.

I can never tell if I’m just a contrarian or I’ve become more crotchety in my old age, but pop films like these don’t speak to me like they do the general populace. Maybe I’m harsher on a film that seems to be popular just because word of it spreads like wildfire through social networks regardless of whether folks think it’s good or not. It’s the hype that brings them to the theater. Either way, I was holding my judgement, but then I was genuinely taken by surprise. Every few years, there’s a film that does something unique, but then there are at least a dozen, if not many more, that follow suit with the same concept. I don’t know if that’s the case with Oak Street, but that turn two-thirds into the movie is what got me. Everything after that was fun, exciting, thought-provoking and even easter-egg hiding. That’s when the film really started for me. Is that enough for me to say that I loved it? It just might be. I don’t know if it’ll live up to the hype for you, but I am glad I made it to the theater for this one. Well done, you got me.

The End of Oak Street in theaters on 8/14

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Meltdown: A Nuclear Family’s Ascent into Madness (2023 | USA | 85 minutes | Colton Van Til)

Ever since Vincent Price dropped acid in the silly but very fun 1959 B-flick The Tingler, bad drug trips have provided fuel for some fascinating genre detours.

Movies utilizing hallucinogens as a plot element run the gamut from consciousness-exploring sci-fi (Altered States) to warped political thrillers run amok (Blue Sunshine), to horror comedies (Get Duked!), to period dramas (A Field in England). The trope lends itself to a rich (if not always subtle) vein of metaphor, encompassing rampant sensationalism, socio-political commentary, deep-seated fear, or any combination of the above depending on the film.

Meltdown: A Nuclear Family’s Ascent into Madness, the sophomore feature directorial effort from former Redmond native Colton Van Til, aims to be more than just drug-scare exploitation. And if it doesn’t quite knock it out of the park, it’s still a surprisingly compelling indie drama/thriller boasting some great performances and an assured presence in the director’s chair.

The movie opens in 1950s rural America, where mayoral candidate Norman Richards (William Elsman) is planning on hosting seasoned political rival George Nelson (Eric Hanson) and his family. The tenuous summit meeting between the two prospective lawmakers and their respective families is unceremoniously thrown into chaos—and worse—when the entire group is dosed with LSD. Soon, underlying tensions and some very unseemly skeletons in a couple of closets come into play, culminating in a night of bad trips and revelations that swing from uncomfortable to horrific.

Don’t let the rather lurid title, and the equally lurid synopsis above, throw you off. Meltdown unfolds with a fair amount of restraint, taking its time to craft a near-idyllic 1950s suburban setting that feels unforced and resplendent with the gentle headiness of a southern summer. Van Til and cinematographer Thomas George are aided in constructing the evocative surface by composer Jamal Green’s nimble score.

Van Til’s work is bolstered enormously by an ensemble cast that hits the mark. As Norman’s and George’s respective spouses, Hannah Beck and Celena Rae depict ‘50s-shiny-happy-housewives to the point of caricature, until their altered states open their eyes to the weight of patriarchy, and some genuine layers surface. Elsman and Hanson contrast that with solid interpretations of two men who aren’t nearly as far afield from each other as they’d like to think, despite their differing views. David Wendell Boykins turns in great work as a persistent reporter who’s interesting enough to follow in his own right. Anachronistic haircut aside, Finn Roberts radiates considerable charm as Nelson’s son Galen. The jewel of the ensemble just might be Maleah Goldberg, who delivers a natural and emotional turn as Richards’ daughter Joan. 

Once the acid kicks in and the characters start to descend into their respective trips, Van Til and George get a lot of mileage out of saturated colors and skewed angles without beating those visual devices to death. Green’s imaginative music responds with shards of atonality, jabs of strange synths, alien percussion, and shifts in speed and distortion (a faithful cover of that ‘50s chestnut, “Rockin’ Robin,” gets warped, sped up, and slowed down to great, disorienting effect here).

Van Til and team have assembled a movie that shows admirable tact in its portrayal of encroaching drug psychosis, favoring characterization and human drama over cheap tawdriness. At times, the approach feels a little too polite—Sometimes Meltdown’s bad-trip energy doesn’t quite feel delirious or dangerous enough. And while the screenplay by Van Til, Ashley Tropea, and co-producer Sophia Hoefle touches on a lot of great ideas—hallucinogens as philosophical/social liberation, the pernicious and multi-tentacled nature of patriarchy, the loss of innocence looming just around the corner with the onset of the ‘60s and the counterculture—not all of them are fully-realized.

Then again, threading those symbolic needles would make for a much longer movie. And Van Til and company construct the movie’s most prominent skeleton in the closet with considerable tension, snap, and impact. Meltdown may not be quite as unhinged as its title promises, but it still works as an effective period piece peopled with well-realized characters, and as a compact thriller with a central mystery well worth following to the end. It’ll play great on a big screen. 

(Meltdown: A Nuclear Family’s Ascent into Madness plays August 14–16 at Seattle’s Admiral Theater, and at the Historic Lynwood Theater on Bainbridge Island. Tickets available here.) 

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Has it really been five years since we’ve seen a new, proper live-action Spider-Man movie? After what I call the “Home Trilogy” (Homecoming, Far From Home, and No Way Home) from director Jon Watts, Spidey is back with the same central cast: Tom Holland (Peter Parker), Zendaya (MJ), and Jacob Batalon (Ned), but with a new director, Destin Daniel Cretton (who previously helmed Marvel’s mostly awesome Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), along with a seemingly random assortment of MCU characters you’ve seen in other movies. Didn’t I just see Tom Holland and his real-life wife, Zendaya, in another blockbuster two weeks ago?

Brand New Day is good. Marvel has a formula that gives people what they want: cool action scenes, emotional resonance (though I only have two or three more “you don’t understand how hard being a superhero is” tropes left in me), references to past movies through the return of beloved characters, and a setup for future movies. It works most of the time.

The issue is that Marvel keeps overloading that formula with franchise obligations, spending too much of Brand New Day laying the groundwork for the next wave of MCU movies. Discussing how will require spoilers, so I will say no more.

The things Brand New Day does well, though, it does very well. Tom Holland remains my favorite of the modern Spider-Men. He does a nice job trying to keep both the Peter Parker/Spider-Man and the Spider/Man symmetries near equilibrium. I could certainly empathize with the problem of taking on too much when your body is demanding time to recover. I also admired the eclectic assortment of returning Marvel characters: Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Florence Pugh), and the Punisher (Jon Bernthal).

A big part of the plot is Spider-Man coming to terms with the Men in Black/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind trick of removing himself from MJ’s and Ned’s memories. How no past associate has ever asked either of them, “Whatever happened to that Peter Parker you guys were BFFs with?” remains one of the mysteries that keeps me up at night.

One more thing I appreciated is how grounded the movie feels. Even when Spider-Man is tasked with the immense job of keeping the Department of Damage Control safe from rogue invaders, his direct line to the NYPD is Detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas). Batman dealt directly with Commissioner Gordon, or he dealt with no one.

Despite my reservations about Marvel’s never-ending need to set up tomorrow’s movie, Brand New Day succeeds because it never loses sight of Peter Parker. Tom Holland remains an excellent Spider-Man, and that’s enough to carry a movie even when the weight of the MCU occasionally gets in his way.

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Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now playing in theaters basically everywhere.

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Last time Christopher Nolan had a new feature in theaters, he was helping save blockbusters, movies, and even summer itself with a three-hour drama about a nuclear scientist. It ruled.

Today, he is back in cinemas with his telling of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey and, frankly, epic is the only word that feels appropriate in my vocabulary.

The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus (Matt Damon), who rules over Ithaca with his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland). At this point, Telemachus’s ambition outpaces his abilities. Then Odysseus is drawn away to fight in the Trojan War for ten years and spends another ten years taking the scenic route’s scenic route home.

Like any good story, it’s about the journey, not the destination. On the way home to Ithaca, Odysseus and his men encounter some of the most famous stories in Greek mythology while making some catastrophically bad decisions on empty stomachs.

After surviving the Cyclops, the ensuing wrath of Poseidon, Aeolus, and the Laestrygonians, the crew ends up on the island of Aeaea (where vowels are $250) and meets Circe. She happily feeds Odysseus’s weary, hungry men before turning them into pigs.

After Odysseus makes a deal with Circe to restore his men to human form, they are determined to learn absolutely nothing. They eventually ignore the Sun God’s warnings about sticking to a strict vegetarian diet, leaving Odysseus to make the rest of the journey home alone—following only a brief, seven-year detour on Ogygia, where Calypso (Charlize Theron) keeps him comfortably distracted by feeding him lotus flowers every day to cloud his memory. Among the trials and tribulations Odysseus faced, being cared for by Charlize Theron for seven years is one of the better traps to fall into.

Meanwhile, Penelope is left to hold down Ithaca herself as Telemachus presumably reads some Joseph Campbell and goes on his own hero’s journey to find, or at least learn more about, his father. Ithaca is overrun by a band of would-be usurpers led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson) and Melantho (Mia Goth), who are resolved to outlast Penelope and seize the kingdom for themselves.

It might be a spoiler to say this all builds toward a battle for Ithaca between Odysseus and Antinous, but it’s a spoiler that’s been floating around for almost 2,800 years. I won’t say how Nolan stages it, only that it’s one of the most exhilarating final half hours I’ve seen in a theater in years.

It’s also remarkable how Nolan gets a cast full of blockbuster leads—from Batman to Spider-Man to Mad Max—to disappear into Homer’s world. Everyone feels less like a celebrity cameo and more like a character actor who wandered into Greek mythology.

Yet, for everything Nolan does to bring this classic poem to life—and make it as larger-than-life as possible for the big screen—the movie never loses sight of the human story. At its heart, it’s still about a man trying to get home to his family. Among the many tricks Nolan pulls off is making one of history’s greatest epics feel both monumental and deeply personal.

I hope Christopher Nolan expands The Odyssey into a trilogy like he did with Batman. He could do The Iliad next, obviously, and, well, chapter one of Ulysses is called “Telemachus,” so let’s do that one too.

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The Odyssey opens in theaters today, Friday, July 17.

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For just a quick overview, Moana is a live action remake of a 2016 Disney animated film of the same name. Moana is a chieftess-to-be obsessed with the ocean, yet unable to venture passed the inner reef of her native island at the warning of an overbearing father. As food resources become slim, Moana goes out on a supernatual quest to find a demi-god named Maui and restore the heart of her peoples’ goddess island in the hopes it will also restore her home to it’s natural splendor.

If you haven’t seen the animated version of the film, watching the live action remake wouldn’t be the worst way to introduce yourself to the story, but renting the animated version would probably get you about the same amount of joy. That being said, if this is your story, if they’re portraying your ancestors or if you feel connected to the people on the screen, then the live action film has a stronger sense of that simply because it uses human actors. You do feel more of a connection as a human to the story simply because of that fact.

In my review of the live action Stitch I lauded it’s fun and playful atmosphere and how well it integrated an animated character with live actors. However, I didn’t take that opportunity to discuss the whitewashing of a culture because I was sadly ignorant of that perspective and that’s definitely a failing on my part. So, I wanted to do better this time and look into how Pacific Islanders felt about the characters and the story. I want to add a caveat that any group of people whether it’s employees at a company or a nation of people, are not a monolith. The beauty of human is our diversity even compared to someone who grew up next door, because we are all incredibly unique. Identifying with a paticular culture can offer a sense of belonging, but when that culture is maligned, devalued or simply wiped from history books, it’s important to make sure portrayals do them the justice they deserve. I wasn’t able to interview any folks directly, but discourse I’m seeing online is a general joy at the representation in the story. There are smaller issues here and there (calling the tribal elder a “crazy lady” isn’t great) but overall it gives a voice to a people that deserve to be heard. This refers to the story and the animated series specifically. With the live action film, I want to broach what seemed to be a lack of indigenous folks working in make up, costuming and any other aspect of the film. The more folks connected to the story, the authentic it will feel. I believe they added a bit more indigenous language to the musical parts, but I may just be imaginging that.

As for the live action version of the film, it was fun. Hey Hey the chicken wasn’t cheesy or contrite (probably because it didn’t have any lines, just a lot of squaking), the interactions between Moana (Catherine Laga’aia) and Maui (Dwayne Johnson) felt genuine and even the moving tattoos on the demi-god’s body were silly in the right way and not overdone. The one “complaint” I have is Johnson’s highly overdone costume. I’m not talking about the Polynesian clothing, I’m talking about the muscle suit. That’s right, they added fake muscles to the already very muscular Dwayne Johnson. I get that the animated character he is portraying is unusually big and a demi-god, but one of the complaints I read about was that Maui is actually lithe, tricky, slim and a powerful warrior. Not a barrel-chested behemoth. Johnson would have done just fine with his own muscles and just adding the tattoos, it would have felt not only more realistic but more relatable… he is half-human after all.

If you’re looking for a fun time at an air conditioned movie theater watching a film that your kids might sit still for, then this could be the ticket. As far as the rest of it goes, it’s still a shot for shot, line for line remake of the 2016 animated feature. It was kind of fun to see how they reimagined specific parts like her grandmother’s blue aura in the ocean as she contemplates giving up or the enormous shiny crab in a bioluminescent hole near the center of the Earth, but nothing in particular stood out. Do with that what you will.

Moana arrives in theaters on 7/10

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The film is an ensemble dramedy about a couple (Wilde and Seth Rogen) whose marriage has been slowly deteriorating for quite some time. One Friday night, she invites their upstairs neighbors (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton) over for dinner. It’s a disaster, both logically and emotionally, and nearly every secret each character thought they had managed to keep buried comes to the surface in this powder keg of a film.

During closing weekend at SIFF, Wilde was the unofficial queen of the festival. In addition to the masterpiece she wrote and starred in, she also appeared in another excellent feature: cult filmmaker Greg Araki’s outrageous sex comedy I Want Your Sex.

Somehow, for reasons I still don’t quite understand—and likely never will—I found myself talking with Olivia Wilde on the red carpet before the screening of The Invite.

My understanding is that you were influenced by Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I also heard you mention Annie Hall recently to the people at KING 5. Those are two of my top five favorite movies. What was it about those films from the 1960s and ’70s that helped inspire this project?

Annie Hall has a real playfulness and an unpretentious attitude toward love and relationships. I also think Diane Keaton turns in one of the best performances ever captured on film, and she was a huge influence on me as both an actor and a director. Our film is actually dedicated to Diane Keaton because of that movie and the many others she made.

But Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is truly our North Star picture for this project. Like ours, it is based on a play. Our film is adapted from a Spanish play by Cesc Gay, who also wrote and directed the Spanish film version. A chamber piece based on a play can be made incredibly cinematic if you approach it the way Mike Nichols and his team did. They created a vivid, emotional experience for the viewer that is entirely different from what you would experience watching it on stage.

When it comes to adaptations, I always ask: why are we making this a movie? What does it gain as a film that it didn’t have as a play? Virginia Woolf is the ultimate example of material being completely transformed by the medium of film, making it even more emotionally vivid. As a performance showcase for those actors, it’s clearly unrivaled.

Absolutely.

We were all inspired by the way that film transforms from a comedy into something much more heartbreaking and tragic. Our film doesn’t get quite as dark, but it attempts a similar path—traversing genres and hoping the audience will hang on for the ride.

I also understand that you shot this completely linearly, in script order. What was that experience like?

I’ve never done it before, and it was incredible. None of us had. It felt like we were putting on a play, and it allowed us to continue workshopping the material as we went. As we shot, we could reimagine the narrative based on what we had just experienced in the preceding scene.

Because of that, we were able to stay entirely honest to where the characters were emotionally. We never had to ask the audience to take an inauthentic emotional leap; every single moment felt earned. I could go on for hours about the benefits of shooting in chronological order. It’s not always logistically possible, but I am now obsessed with writing pieces set in limited locations just so we can do it again.

I haven’t seen this film yet, but you had another movie playing at the festival this weekend that I did see a couple of nights ago. What is it like having two completely different movies playing the same weekend at the same festival?

It makes me feel incredibly lucky to be a part of the independent film community. In that film, I got to step in and be a part of Gregg Araki’s creative toolbox. I was able to defer to someone else’s vision completely and just enjoy everything I learned from Greg.

It was a completely different experience from directing, but that’s what acting has always been for me: a proxy film school. That movie is so distinctively Greg—it’s singular in the way he is. And I absolutely love Cooper Hoffman; I think he is a star and someone really special.

Having both films here reminds me of when we had them back-to-back at Sundance. It just makes you feel fortunate to be part of a community of filmmakers where we can act in each other’s projects and support one another.

I absolutely loved it—it actually got one of my top votes in the Critics Poll, so I’m a huge fan.

Oh, thank you! I hope you love this one just as much.

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Of all the horror franchises to assault the public consciousness over the last 50 years, The Evil Dead catalog has proven to be one of the most durable—and surprisingly consistent—properties in the genre canon.

Two key elements have factored into the series’ durability. For one, it’s built on a potent high-concept central conceit: A spell read from the Necronomicon (AKA the Book of the Dead) causes demon-possessed corpses (Deadites, in Evil Dead parlance) to rise and raise literal hell. That skeletal framework’s allowed different directors to stir together whatever combination of horror and humor suits their sensibilities.

Ever since the original Evil Dead splattered onto movie screens in 1981, the franchise’s primary architects—director Sam Raimi, producer Rob Tapert, and original trilogy leading man/producer Bruce Campbell—have also exercised a laudable amount of quality control on anything bearing the Evil Dead name. Michael Myers, Freddy Kruger, and Jason Voorhees shoulda been so lucky.

So statistically speaking, that bodes well for Evil Dead Burn. And sure enough, this brand-new entry in the franchise delivers a walloping, blood-soaked, full-throttle rollercoaster ride of a great time.  

After an opening that provides direct ties to 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, Evil Dead Burn begins with restaurateur Will (George Pullar) and his co-operator/wife, French émigré Alice (Souheila Yacoub) getting into a particularly nasty argument. The fight ends with Will drunkenly jumping into his car. Soon, he meets an untimely, fiery death…thanks partially to an encounter with a Deadite.

Will, as it turns out, was an abusive piece of shit, which fills Alice with conflicting emotions during her husband’s funeral. There, she’s forced to interact with Will’s family, including enabling mother-in-law Susan (Tandi Wright), brooding and hostile father-in-law Edgar (Errol Shand), and Will’s benign but spineless kid brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan).

The familial tension’s thick enough to cut with a knife, which only exacerbates things when the family ends up trapped in their old house together. Connections between the family and the Necronomicon emerge. And before long, the curse of the Deadites begins adding literal rot to the metaphoric familial disintegration on display.

Evil Dead Burn manages to touch on some weighty topics before and during the scary bits. The corrosive effects of family dysfunction drive as much of the horror as any supernatural force. Alice, in the meantime, faces the mixed emotions stirred up with the passing of an abusive spouse, as well as the antipathy of a family that sees her as an outsider and traitor when she balks at continuing to run the family restaurant. Squint, and you’ll see a definite correlation between this popcorn horror movie and deeper issues plaguing the world we live in.

It helps that the cast uniformly give it their all, doing a lot of the heavy lifting characterization-wise. Yacoub manages to be likable and relatable, without sanding off Alice’s chain-smoking, sometimes prickly rough edges. Shand and Wright, two great New Zealand character actors in this New Zealand-shot movie, have already delivered solid work in two of my favorite genre films of the last five years (Mārama and Pearl, respectively). They both knock it out of the park here (Shand in particular makes for a mesmerizing, nigh-iconic heavy).

But director Sébastien Vaniček isn’t focusing on nuanced human dynamics here; the functional script by Vaniček and Florent Bernard exists to provide the springboard for the gory/gloppy/scary stuff. And that’s where Evil Dead Burn really kicks serious ass.

As he proved in his 2023 shocker Infested, Vaniček knows how to engineer a genre movie. Once shit goes down, the pace—and the gore—shift into harrowing, exhilarating high gear. There’s a masterful sequence set in the confines of a crashed car that deserves a place in the highlights reel of 2026 horror; and the abundance of gore gags and setpieces sent the packed house at the preview screening into joyous hysterics (you’ll never look at an open dishwasher the same way again after seeing this).  

Evil Dead Burn also balances the horror and humor that’s always been a franchise staple with a sensibility all its own. One climactic lapse into CGI fuckery aside, the mostly-practical gore scenes land with French-extreme precision, and Vaniček injects his own brand of merciless gallic wit to the gallows giggles.

Evil Dead Burn may not be as gleefully silly as the original Evil Dead trilogy, nor as emotionally resonant as the (surprisingly character-rich) Evil Dead Rise. But it delivers so much bang for your horror movie buck, you’re highly unlikely to care. Burn baby burn, indeed.   

Evil Dead Burn opens Friday July 10 in theaters everywhere. Image courtesy New Line Cinema/Screen Gems/Ghost House Films.

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