Movie Reviews - 2025 posts

Walters between two horrors: “He had fascinating friends.”

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” doesn’t tell us everything. It’s insular. It’s written and directed by a woman (Jackie Jesko), most of the talking heads are female TV journalists (Oprah, Katie, et al.), and most of what they say is supportive. She’s their shining star and they buff her up. It doesn’t help that it was produced by ABC News Studio, the network/news division where she worked for decades. It could’ve used, as we say in the biz, fresh eyes.

Example: The doc talks up early criticism of how Walters blended celebrity and hard-news interviews. We get her in voiceover—reading from her autobiography, I assume, since she died in December 2022:

I was criticized for doing specials that had people in the news along with celebrities: You can’t do both. Well, you can, and I did. And today we see it all the time.

As your parents will tell you, “We see it all the time” isn’t exactly a justification, particularly since that was the very fear behind the criticism. That those realms would blur and it would become the norm, and we wouldn't be able to distinguish between the two. That we would become a less-serious country.

Others in the doc come to her defense but it’s not much of a defense: 

Cynthia McFadden: This was very controversial to put hard-news interviews next to celebrity interviews. And there were many who felt she was just lowering standards.

Bob Iger: She had a vision back then that celebrities are news. She was criticized in that regard because she actually believed it—and I think she turned out to be right, that they were newsmakers.

Sure, but what news? Relationships? Gossip? What Angelina Jolie does won’t affect my taxes or healthcare coverage for my father.

Tellingly, as McFadden says “hard-news interviews” above, we get a shot of Pres. Reagan, and for “celebrity interviews” it’s movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. Shortly thereafter, of course, Schwarzenegger would become hard news himself when he was elected governor of California, just as Reagan had once been celebrity news as a B-movie actor for Warner Bros. in the 1940s. The lines were already beginning to blur when Walters arrived but she helped erase them.

Here’s what the doc doesn’t begin to ask: Did lowering those journalistic standards to the point where celebrities and U.S. Senators were interchangeable personalities on the idiot box, did that help create an environment where, oh, I don’t know, let’s just say a two-bit huckster TV host and raging misogynist and racist could get himself elected president of the United States and then systematically curtail minority rights, women’s right, and the rule of law?

That was the fear. The fear is what we’re living through.

Not recorded here
If you’d asked me beforehand what stands out about Barbara Walters I would’ve said Gilda Radner’s “Baba Wawa,” the infamous “If you were a tree” question to Katherine Hepburn, and how the “Barbara Walters Special” aired every year after the Oscars. We get 10 seconds of Gilda and none of the rest. I mean, yes, the specials, but no mention of that prestigious timeslot. And no tree question.

I could’ve used more on her early steps in journalism before the “Today” show. We get the childhood—her father ran a NYC nightclub, he went broke, she had to become breadwinner—but this is mostly used in a pop-psychology way to explain her behavior. It’s why she was so driven (breadwinner), why she liked scoundrels (her father was one), why she had a longtime friendship/relationship with Roy Cohn (he helped her father with a tax issue).

The Cohn revelation was a shocker to me, particularly because, per Walters, it went beyond friendship. Peter Gathers, who edited her autobiography, says, “They talked about getting married. I have no idea how serious it was, but I would say to her: But he’s gay.” Her response? Not recorded here. Instead, another BW voiceover:

Roy was very well-known and had a great deal of power. He would take me to the Stork Club, to some of the great restaurants, he had fascinating friends.

Where do you fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? That’s Roy Cohn in “Angels in America." That’s what he cared about, and that’s what she cared about.

Which is why Walters had such a problem when Diane Sawyer showed up all tall and blonde on ABC in the 1990s. She was “a goddess,” per Walters, and Walters was frosty with her. As for what Sawyer thought? Not recorded here. Instead, the doc talks up how Walters opened doors for women everywhere even though she herself admits that wasn’t the goal.

We get her daughter, adopted. We get the example she set for the likes of Oprah and Katie Couric, even as each took the opposite lesson from her: Oprah saw her fumbling motherhood because she was married to work, and decided she herself couldn’t do both and never had kids. Couric thought Walters seemed lonely and became determined to have a family.

We get the exclusives: the first joint Sadat-Begin interview (landed, I assume, because Begin had the hots for her); the first Menendez brothers; the first Monica Lewinsky. That’s our trajectory: from stories that matter to tabloid crap. We’re less serious every day.

And the rest
You know who’s really good in this? Bette Midler. She’s also one of the most articulate about why Walters was good at what she did. Walters made the interviewee comfortable, and familiar, and then suddenly, bam, the tough, rude question. To Harvey Fierstein: What’s it like to be a homosexual? To Muhammad Ali: Are you faithful to your wife? To Midler: Do you do drugs? Do you think you’re good looking? Do you think you’re sexy? The doc also gives us Midler today looking at her responses from back then. Nice touch. I would’ve liked more of that.

The mid-1980s interview with Clint Eastwood is charming, too, particularly the way he flirts with her. She was good at these. She was good with the rich and famous and powerful. I don’t know if she did the rest of us any good.

In my defense, it did premiere at Cannes.

WARNING: SPOILERS

On the last day of my vacation in France, as a way to avoid the afternoon heat and as a kind of experiment, I did something tres gauche: I went to see “Mission: Impossible ­– The Final Reckoning” at the Grand Rex on the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris. 

It was a kind of experiment because the film wasn’t VO (version originale) but VF (version francais). It was dubbed. I was curious:

• Did the French voice actor sound anything like Tom Cruise?
• How much would I understand with my shitty French?
• Would I be able to follow the plot anyway?

Well…

• All the voice actors sounded plain, regressed to the mean. Maybe that’s the nature of that biz.
• My shitty French didn’t help.
• I still understood most of the movie.

It’s an action movie, after all, not complicated, and I know the tropes. I’ve been watching these things about as long as Tom Cruise has been alive.

La cle, boss, la cle
He’s showing his age a little, isn’t he? He’s in fantastic shape—entire scenes are him in his skivvies, Joel Goodsen + 40 years—but in some scenes his face is oddly puffy. I assume because of the stunt work he insists on doing? You know that footage of pilots and astronauts with contorted faces from G-Forces? I think it’s hangover from that. Cruise has been hanging off too many planes during his career. He does it again here—twice. He plunges into Arctic waters—twice. He runs superfast and super-upright to try to save a friend’s life before a bomb goes off. Once.

Here’s what the plot of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” seemed like in French with my shitty French.

Ethan Hunt is in possession of the key from the last movie. He and the girl, Grace (Hayley Atwell), are kidnapped from a swanky opera by the villain, Gabriel (Esai Morales), and Hunt is tortured, Grace is threatened, but they break free. Hunt is with his IM team when he enters a pod that shows him a vision of the end of the world—nuclear destruction. So now we know what he needs to do: prevent that. But first his computer guy, Luther (Ving Rhames), is trapped with a bomb and Ethan races across empty London streets to set him free. He doesn’t. He and Luther talk through the plastic partition, like Kirk and Spock in “Star Trek II,” with Luther most likely saying some version of the needs of the many outweighing him, even though he weighs a lot. Boom.

Now we’re in the North Atlantic. Ethan jumps into frigid waters, is about to die of hypothermia, but he’s saved by doubtful U.S. military scuba forces, one of whom winds up being a traitor.

Meanwhile, his IM team visits a scientist and his Inuit wife on an Arctic island, but uh oh, other forces are there, too. Russians? Gabriel’s? There are discussions and standoffs and gun battles.

Meanwhile, the president of the United States (Angela Bassett), keeps debating with her advisers, including Gen. Nick Offerman, about what to do about the impending nuclear apocalypse.

Hunt is doing more than debating. He scuba-dives into a sunken Russian nuclear sub—didn’t we see it sink in the beginning of the first movie?—and that’s the point of the key, you use it there for something, which Hunt does; but he also lets in a lot of water, so on the ocean floor the sub keeps turning and groaning and turning, and it’s about to fall into a deep chasm. Ethan works frantically to escape, but the only way he can do it is to strip to his skivvies and swim through icy waters to the surface. He swims and swims, and slows, and stops. And dies. And that’s it for that.

Kidding. He passes out, and when he wakes up he’s being warmed by Grace and reunited with his team. Somehow.

Then it’s to an underground facility in South Africa, where there are discussions and standoffs and gun battles between Gabriel, IM Forces, and U.S. intelligence repped by that jerk Kittridge (Henry Czermy). Beloved IM dude Benji (Simon Pegg) gets plugged, Gabriel runs away with the doohickey that matters, and Ethan runs after him.

Now we intercut between:

• The IM girls, including Pom Klementieff’s Paris, trying to defuse a bomb with the help of a wounded Benji.
• The U.S. president still arguing with advisers, and being threatened, and Gen. Nick Offerman getting his Sgt. Al Powell “Die Hard” moment—the sudden savior.
• Ethan pursuing Gabriel, who escapes via biplane.

Actually two biplanes. Gabriel pilots the first, his lieutenant(?) the second, which is the one Ethan latches onto. He pulls himself up, decks the pilot, takes control of the plane, and goes after Gabriel. No, Gabriel sees him first, and decides to have fun, like Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. But then Ethan climbs onto Gabriel’s plane and gets the doohickey from around his neck. And as Gabriel gets swept into a propeller (I think), Ethan parachutes out while plugging that doohickey into another doohickey, and that’s the thing that saves the day at the last second. Whew.

Back in London, the surviving IM members, including Benji, look at each other and nod about saving the world, and then go their separate ways.

Not sure if it made more sense in English.

The pill with the poison is in the podkova going nova
In English I’d have the names and reasons for things. The standoff with the scientist on the island, for example? That’s about getting the Russian sub’s coordinates, which are relayed to Ethan so he can retrieve something called the Podkova, which is the thing you need to defeat the Entity.

Right, the Entity. That’s what’s missing from the above. It’s the movie’s main villain—artificial intelligence. Maybe that’s the takeaway from this French-language experiment: AI makes a lousy villain. Because where is it? Here, there and everywhere. But not on the screen.

It’s the Entity that’s going to launch everyone’s nukes, and Ethan needs to jump through all these hoops to make sure it doesn’t happen. But—I’m curious—does Gabriel want the world to end? He certainly keeps getting in the way of trying to save it. So maybe he’s part of the “undercover doomsday cult” Wiki mentions that I don’t remember seeing either. By the way, I totally dig this line from Wiki on the film’s climax: “Ethan finds a second parachute and plugs the Poison Pill into the Podkova in midair…” That’s a master class in maguffins. Or pornography.

“Final” is the eighth (and supposedly final) of the Cruise “M:I” movies, which seem to have run their course. They're certainly not increasing their take:

* As of June 27-29 weekend

To its credit, it embraces its past. The island scientist (Rolf Saxon), for example, is the CIA analyst Ethan fooled with the zipline-above-the-floor stunt in the first film, while that jerk Kittridge was also a jerk in that first film. Pres. Erika Sloane? Back in 2018, as CIA head, she foisted the traitorous, mustachioed Henry Cavill on IMF. Now she’s the black female president because in real life we can’t have such nice things. Oh, and Shea Whigham and his great skeptical expression turns up as the son of Jim Phelps, the star of the TV series (Peter Graves), and the great betrayer from the first film (Jon Voight). He and Ethan shake hands in the end. Bygones, bro.

After beginning the series with auteurs (Brian De Palma, John Woo, etc.), the last four movies have all been directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the guy who wrote “The Usual Suspects” but now seems in the Tom Cruise business. The last thing he worked on that wasn’t a Cruise movie was in 2013. Since then, it’s the likes of “Jack Reacher,” “The Mummy,” “Top Gun,” “M:I.” They might want to start seeing other people.

Tom Cruise? He was the great brat of the Brat Pack, our forever cocksure cousin, playing guys determined to be the best at a thing—test pilot, bartender, race-car driver—despite the doubt and desperation in their eyes. But he never quite grew up, did he? Did he ever play a father? “War of the Worlds,” I guess. He’s still best-known as a son—“Risky Business,” “Magnolia”—but he’s 63 now and a little old to be hanging off airplanes. Not sure where he goes from here. In the poster for this one he seems oddly serene, the desperation gone from his eyes. Maybe that's a way forward.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is there a subgenre of horror about anxiety rather than fear? If so, “Friendship” is a master class. I think I watched more of it through splayed fingers than any horror movie I’ve ever seen. If I wasn’t at the theater I would’ve turned it off, and if I wasn’t at the theater with my wife I would’ve fled. It’s excruciating.

But is it any good?

I didn’t laugh much. The Subway Sandwich scene, yes, long and hard, and an early moment in a couples group therapy session, when cancer survivor Tami (Kate Mara) talks up her fear that the cancer will return, and her doofus husband, Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson of the Netflix series “I Think You Should Leave”), says to her, “That’s not gonna happen,” out of the side of his mouth, mock knowingly. It was a such a wrong comment, told so wrongly, I burst out laughing. 

But it points out what’s wrong with the movie. She’s such an adult and he’s such a doofus that you wonder “How are these two together?” And then they’re not.

Same with work. How does he have this job? How is this guy a manager? And then he’s not.

The story is how Craig’s need for friendship with his cool-guy neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd) ruins his life, but it was ruined anyway. Because he’s Tim Robinson.

Opposite of zeitgeist
Robinson is probably best-known for the sketch/meme “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!” in which his character, dressed as a hot dog, attempts to join a group figuring out who drove a hot-dog shaped car through the window of a high-end clothing store. I also like the “Brian’s Hat” sketch. Two execs are on trial for insider trading, and texts are shared in court detailing their guilt—except 80% of the texts are them ragging on the hat of a colleague. But even there … I laughed more at the concept than its execution. And I don’t know if it’s because the hat in question was just so stupid—a safari fedora, basically—or if Robinson’s comedy doesn’t work for me. If he pushes comedy to a place that doesn’t make me laugh and doesn’t feel relevant.

Example: I thought “Friendship” was going to be about the difficulty of middle-aged men finding friends in the 21st century—riffing off that John Mulaney bit. Nope. The movie came about because writer-director Andrew DeYoung felt rejected in a midlife male friendship, got angry about it, realized how pathetic that was, and figured it would make a good comedy. The tagline isn’t that men need friends but men shouldn’t have friends. The opposite of the zeitgeist.

Craig is a marketer at a tech company who somehow manages a team even though no one has respect for him. One day, helping load flowers into his wife’s hatchback (she runs an online floral shop or something), a package arrives for their new neighbor and she asks Craig to deliver it. He does. And is immediately smitten.

What I like about the cool-guy neighbor is he’s not really cool. And are they riffing off of Rudd’s “Anchorman” character? Same hair, same ’stache, same dated lingo (a cool car is “cherry” and cops are “pigs”). Brian Fantana was a field reporter while Austin is a local TV weatherman who wants the morning slot. He also fronts a sad weekend band, goes mushroom-hunting in scabby woods next to a freeway, and wears a toupee. He’s got arrested development, too, just not as skewed as Craig's.

Much of the movie is skewed. It’s all just slightly off. Mother and son kiss each other on the lips? Mom has an orgasm when she’s lost in the sewers? Craig only wears one brand of clothing, Ocean View Dining, which keep getting ruined. He’s forever dropping his smartphone into puddles, too.

Austin, after showing off his ancient fossils that don’t look ancient, and the sad mushroom-hunting, takes Craig on a midnight excursion through tunnels and into city hall—which, again, feels like high school hijinks. The friendship goes awry when Austin invites him to a regular meet and Craig feels odd man out. Everyone else knows the parameters, the rituals, the songs. Craig? He crashes into a sliding door. Then, in a basement sparring match(?), he keeps getting jabbed in the face and winds up sucker punching Austin in frustration. As a result, Austin becomes more distant, and Craig more desperate, until Austin just lays it out: I don’t think this friendship is working.

So Craig tries to recreate what he had with Austin—with himself as Austin. He brings his direct-reports to his basement to show off his version of the fossil—a tiny dagger—but no one’s impressed, jokes are made about size, he has a fit. He leads a very reluctant Tami on the tunnel adventure and winds up losing her; the cops have to be called in. In short order, he’s fired and Tami leaves him, and really all you think is: “About time.”

Then the Subway Sandwich scene. The kid at the smartphone shop promised him something stronger than drink, and one day Craig is so depressed he takes him up on it. Nothing glamorous: He lays down in a back stockroom and gets high by licking a toad. Except instead of some mind-bending experience, Craig finds himself at a Subway ordering a sandwich from a gray-haired Austin, who knowingly compliments all his choices. That’s it. When the kid asks him what far-out adventures he had, Craig furiously admits it was just ordering a sandwich at Subway.

Speed bumps
I also like the speed-bump bit. That’s long been Craig’s one contribution to society—he got the city to put speed bumps in their neighborhood because “this isn’t a freeway.” But at the end, when he tries to ram Austin’s new yellow Corvette, guess what prevents it? The speed bumps.

After Craig pulls a gun on Austin and his friends (yes), he’s arrested. Final scene: In the back of the patrol car, he looks over at Austin with need in his eyes, and Austin turns around in slow-mo and winks. And Craig smiles. Sure.

I wanted to like “Friendship” more. I want to like Tim Robinson more. But I don’t think this relationship is working.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Did they issue warnings before showing this movie? I don’t remember any.

We get warnings before everything now—“The following contains mentions of assault, bullying,” etc.—and usually I roll my eyes, I’m an asshole, but this one feels like it deserves a warning label. Because it’s not just a light-hearted superhero movie; its main villain is clinical depression. Yes, a superpowered depression envelopes all of Manhattan. People disappear into its void. I’m not someone who suffers, but if you do, if you’re someone who hasn’t gotten it under control, I imagine folks disappearing into that long dark shadow might be a little triggering.

That said, the most depressing thing about Marvel movies lately has been Marvel movies. So this is an improvement.

Ready for her close-up
Julia Louis-Dreyfuss’ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine has been a background figure forever: two episodes of “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” uncredited in “Black Widow,” unremembered in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” All of that was 2021-22. This is what I wrote about her character two years ago:

You kind of wonder when they’re going to get around to her story—or if she’s just going to be like Viola Davis in the dipshit DC Universe: the evil bureaucrat behind the scenes who gets a few lines and nothing else. What a waste. 

She finally gets her close-up here but it’s still kind of a waste. She’s VEEP as sociopath. I get that there are people like that, who think everything/one is expendable in their relentless push for power (see: half the Trump administration), but that doesn't mean they're interesting.

Depression is foreshadowed in the opening scene: a woman jumps off a building. Except the woman is Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), sister of Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow; the building is the Merdeka 118 building in Kuala Lumpur; and she’s on a mission for de Fontaine’s CIA or NSA or the Marvel equivalent. Oh, and Pugh really did jump/fall off the second-tallest building in the world. That’s not CGI or stunt work. Apparently she has a thing for heights and convinced Marvel to let her get her Tom Cruise on.

Even so, Yelena is depressed in the wake of her sister’s death. She’s walking through missions. So much so she complains about her life to her hostages. For some reason, it works.

Then we cut to congressional hearings and an attempted impeachment of de Fontaine. Led by Cong. Gary (my man Wendell Pierce, wasted), we find out that one of his colleagues, the freshman congressman from Brooklyn, is none other than Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan). That fact actually took me out of the movie for a moment. Wait, so the Winter Soldier, who is like 100 years old, and spent half his life as a brainwashed Russian asset/assassin, even trying to kill Captain America several times, that guy is now a U.S. congressman? Well, I guess if Marjorie Taylor Greene can get elected…

The hearings are true-to-life in this manner: the good guys make insinuations, offer zero evidence, and promise more studies; the corrupt dance and dismiss. With Starbucks-type coffee in hand, and assistant, Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan), forever in tow, she orders the destruction of evidence about the “Sentry” project—a collusion between the federal government and her own private company. Topical.

Evidence includes not just papers but people, and Yelena agrees to one last mission. Turns out she’s not just assassin but target: de Fontaine sent a whole slew of B-grade villainish superheroes to eliminate each other: Ava Star/The Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), last seen in “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” and John Walker/Dipshit Captain America (Wyatt Russell), from the “Falcon/Winter” thing. In the basement lab, they also come across a confused civilian, Bob (Lewis Pullman), who has somehow survived whatever experiments were happening. He has a power reminiscent of Christopher Walken in “The Dead Zone”: anyone touches his hand, they’re transported back to a seminal, horrific moment in their past. For Yelena, it’s when she was a child and betrayed and helped murder a friend in the Soviet Union’s Black Widow program.

Amid the bickering, everyone bands together to escape to the surface, and then to escape from de Fontaine’s special forces ringing the perimeter—during which everyone discovers Bob is less civilian than experiment that worked. He’s superpowered. Seemingly limitless. He’s also clinically depressed, maybe bipolar. Not a good combo.

de Fontaine thinks she can still manipulate this superpowered problem child, and, from Tony Stark's old Avengers HQ, he handily defeats our titular heroes—now joined by Bucky and Yelena’s father, Red Guardian, the Captain America of the U.S.S.R. (David Harbour, GREAT). But then she pushes too many buttons. He’s a second from choking her out (wouldn’t it take less than a second?) when Mel to the rescue with a “kill switch.” Except, right, dude can’t die. When he’s resurrected, it’s as if his dark side takes over. He now has the power to just point and people become dark smudges on the sidewalk. He hasn’t killed them, he’s transported them to their own worst memories. It’s Yelena who voluntarily enters the void to try to talk Bob back.

Phased out
“Thunderbolts*” follows the usual route—characters meet, bicker and fight, run from the bad guys, lose but regroup for the final battle—but it works. It's funny and even poignant. And it does this with characters I don’t like. Dipshit Cap is supposed to grate on you, but man does he ever, while The Ghost is a nonentity, and Bucky has never been my bag. When I was a kid, he was dead. He was the trauma the real Captain America suffered. But somehow director Jake Schreier (“Robot & Frank,” “Beef”) makes it all work. It helps that Yelena is the moral force and her father the brilliant comic relief.

I’m bummed we didn’t move on from de Fontaine, who survives intact: still in power, she rechristens the group “The New Avengers.” We get a good montage during the credits of various media reactions to this: I particularly liked the punny hed in the New York Post (“B-vengers”), and the poignant drawing on the New Yorker cover echoing its 9/11 work. The final post-credits scene teases up the new “Fantastic Four” movie.

“FF” begins Phase VI of the MCU, believe it or not, so this ends Phase V. This is what we got:

• A good “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie from James Gunn, who now runs DC’s universe
• A funny, all tongue-in-cheek “Deadpool & Wolverine”
• The dregs: “Quantumania,” “The Marvels,” “Captain America: Brave New World”

Good riddance. At least it went out with a bang.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I got a Quentin Tarantino vibe early on—ironically, before everything turned bloody.

It was the scene in town where Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) tells the young girl to watch his car and honk if anyone tries to steal anything, offering 10 cents for every minute she does this. Though initially scared of one of the infamous Smoke-Stack Twins (both played by Michael B.), she quickly agrees. Then he tells her, no, you don’t quickly agree, and he shows her how to negotiate. He schools her even though it means losing money. The old term is “race man,” someone interested in raising his people more than himself, and that’s what Smoke is here.

About a half hour in, I leaned over to my wife and whispered, “Every scene is good.” It was. There was drama within each, and each added to the overall.

I wonder what I would’ve thought if I didn’t know vampires were coming. Would I have been disappointed when they reared their blood-smeared heads at the 50-minute mark? “Damn, I thought I was watching historical drama, man.” Truly, the only time I didn’t think the movie was great was at the juke joint, where some scenes felt overlong. It was as if writer-director Ryan Coogler knew this was the last time we’d see these folks and had trouble letting go.

Resistance is futile
Something else I thought: We don’t make movies like this anymore.

This ain’t exactly news, but there’s a divide these days between eat-your-vegetables movies and empty-calorie movies, and not much bridges it. Some serious films are entertaining (“Oppenheimer”), some popcorn movies contain serious elements (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier”), but mostly they don’t blend. This blends. It’s what Hollywood used to be able to do all the time. It’s both deep and light, historical and entertaining. It treats its audience like it has a brain, but please let’s have fun, too.

It opens in Mississippi 1932, with a young black man driving a jalopy. He stops in front of a one-room church house, and we see he’s been through the ringer—bruised, bloodied, and scarred, like someone thrashed a rake across his face. He grabs something from the backseat, and we’re wondering if he’s there to enact revenge on whoever did this to him. No. Inside, the preacher calls to him, asks him to put down what’s in his hand—a guitar, or what’s left of it. He pauses. And pauses.

Cut to the proverbial “One day earlier.”

Confession: Initially, I thought the Smoke-Stack twins were the vampires. I thought that explained the confidence with which two black men moved through Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Turns out they’re confident because they’re smart, strong, have money and guns, spent years working for Al Capone, and fought in the Great War before that. They’re part of FDR’s “Forgotten Men.” If Coogler had really wanted to go all in on 1932, he could’ve named the film “We Are Fugitives from a Capone Gang.”

They have plans. They buy an old slaughterhouse from a KKK grand dragon named Hogwood (David Maldonado), and get it ready as a juke joint. They want to be impresarios. Much of the first half of the film is rounding up the talent to make it happen, including:

• Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), an old, hard-drinking blues man
• Cousin Sammie Moore (Miles Caton), a blues guitarist, who looks and sings like Robert Johnson
• Bo Chow and wife Grace (Yao and Li Jun Li), who paint signs and supply food
• Smoke’s ex, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku of “Loki,” “Lovecraft Country”), to cook
• Cotton-picker Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) to act as bouncer

Who knew that last job was the most important one?

The vampires arrive with Choctaw Indians on their trail. Fifty minutes in, we see a man, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), thump on the foreground, smoke billowing from his back, as he makes his way toward a small house. To the couple inside, he says injuns are after him, and when the Indians come the wife greets them with a shotgun. They warn her the man isn’t what he appears to be, but she ain’t buying it. Bad move. In the back, Remmick is already looking better except for the blood around his mouth, while hubby has already turned. And now they turn to her.

We get traditional vampire tropes:

• Fangs/blood
• Fly/superstrong
• Vulnerable to sunlight, garlic, wooden stakes

But Coogler adds one that I first saw in the “Let the Right One In” franchise:

• If you’re inside a building, vampires can’t just attack; they must be invited in

He also adds a feature that I believe he invented. These vampires are like the Borg from “Star Trek”: Once someone is turned, their knowledge becomes part of the collective. So once Bo Chow is turned, Remmick can speak Cantonese, and he knows the sexual proclivities of Grace; and he knows where their daughter is. It’s a great addition, but it also makes you wonder (as with the Borg) how they can possibly lose. 

Here’s how: time management. They forget when sunrise is. They needed me on the team. I’m someone who has to be at the airport two hours early, so I could’ve helped. “Uh, Remmick? Just two hours until sunrise. Not saying stop, but … [motions toward wristwatch]. Either way, I’m heading back now. You do you.”

Why do they converge on the juke joint in the first place? Because cousin Sammie is such a bluesman he calls out the spirits, both good and evil. He’s this universe’s Robert Johnson, the man who met the devil at the crossroads, and that’s who they want. Everyone else is just a bonus. It’s a helluva bonus. The crowd at the juke joint is large, not to mention sweaty and sexy (Jayme Lawson, goddamn), and once things go wrong, once Smoke’s girl Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) is turned and kills/turns Stack, everyone is sent home. I.e., out into the woods where the vampires are.

Everyone in the audience: NO!!!

One of the most chilling moments is when Sammie is in the grips of Remmick and starts reciting the Lord’s Prayer as if to ward them off or save his own soul. Instead, Remmick, and then the group, join in, monotonously, terrifyingly, mockingly. But Sammie still has a weapon—his guitar. Not to play; he hits Remmick over the head with it just as the sun comes up. That’s the winning move. They all fall down.

Oh, right, then Hogwood and the Klan show up. Their plan is to kill the uppity Smoke and Stack, but they find no Stack and a bloodied Smoke manning a machine gun and mowing them all down like it’s the Argonne again. He winds up wounded himself. As he lays dying, he sees the now-dead Annie with their daughter who died in childhood. It’s a vision of what he, God willing, will soon join.

Did we need the Klan scene? I mean, I get it. A black filmmaker makes a movie set in Mississippi 1932, so he better kill some KKK. Just feels tacked on after everything we’ve been through.

Plus we still have to return to the one-room church. What happens there?

The devil finds work
Not much. Earlier, Daddy Preacher (Saul Williams) had warned Sammie to give up his music because one day the devil would follow him home, and man if Daddy wasn’t right. So you’d think, at this point, Sammie might listen and drop the guitar. “Shit, I just got everybody killed. They’d all be alive if it wasn’t for me and my music.”

Instead, mid-credits—a maneuver straight out of Marvel—we get Sammie 60 years later, and now played by 88-year-old blues guitar legend Buddy Guy, doing a show in Chicago. (I love that the vampire scar on his face is a big part of his logo.) So what was it like the first time Sammie played again? Was he worried about summoning demons? Did he play some chords and then look around? Did he hold back?

After the show, having a drink at the bar, Sammie is told some folks are there to see him, and they have to be invited in. Yes, it’s Stack and Mary—vampires all these years. They look just as they did in 1932 except, well, I’ll say it, they lost all sense of style—dressing in loud “In Living Color” type-clothes. “But it was the ’90s!” one friend objected when I objected. Right. Except these two were born in 1900. Why are they looking like clowns in 1992? 

At the bar, Stack recounts a promise he made to Smoke not to kill Sammie—and he’s keeping his promise. But he also extends an offer. You want to live forever? Just say the word. 

I love the weary way Sammie/Buddy Guy responds after a bar: “I’ve had enough of this world.” Damn if that doesn’t resonate in 2025. He also says he wakes up paralyzed with fear recalling that night, but he admits that before the shit went down? It was the best day of his life. Stack agrees: “Last time I seen my brother. Last time I seen the sun. And for a few hours, we was free.”

Apparently Ryan Coogler negotiated a deal with Warner Bros. so the intellectual property rights revert to him after 25 years. So not only is he doing what the Smoke-Stack twins did in the film—getting ownership—but it’s basically the Jimmy Stewart “Winchester ’73” deal for modern times. After the collapse of the studio era, movie stars ruled and wanted a cut. Now what rules? IP. This is the first time Coogler worked on something that wasn’t historical (“Fruitvale Station”) or didn’t have an IP source (“Rocky,” Marvel comics), and he wanted in. Remember what Obadiah Stane (repping every corporation) said to Tony Stark (repping every creator) in “Iron Man”? “You think just because you have an idea that it belongs to you?” Now it is. Coogler’s is not just a black power-play but a creator power-play. And it’s about fucking time.

I’m curious what he might do with it. Post juke joint, you have, in Stack, a black gangster with vampire superpowers moving through the Jim Crow era, and thus possibly intersecting with lynchings, the Scottsborough Boys, 1940s Detroit riots, Emmett Till, and the nascent Civil Rights Movement. Don’t tell me there’s nothing there.

Not a fan of the title—I keep forgetting it—but I’m a fan of everything else. It’s a long time to Oscar season, but I hope “Sinners” isn’t forgotten by then. At the least, it should be part of the conversation.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Imagine you’re a reporter on the White House lawn as the president of the United States—a former military general who’s been in office a few months—holds a press conference. A war with Japan (yes) has just been averted, thanks to former Falcon/new Captain America Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie). The president takes some rude and accusatory questions, and then there’s a high-pitched screeching, something breaks into the sound system, and we get a recorded conversation between the president and another man, a kind of backroom deal in which the president seems to be doing everything he can so his daughter will like him again. At which point the president collapses behind the podium, shaking and bursting out of his clothes, and when he stands, he’s now a growling, giant RED HULK.

What do you do? What do you say? This is what this one says, in a tone not far removed from finding a new flavor of Oreos in the grocery aisle:

“Since when were they red?”

If this line were a one-off—or, better, an indictment of the modern press forever focusing on the wrong detail—great. But no, it’s just indicative of the douchebag-bro dialogue in this thing. Five credited screenwriters, including director Julius Onah, came together to write not one interesting line. Characters rarely say what anyone in their situation would say. They say things to further the idiot plot, or give idiot exposition, or, as above, provide idiot levity.

“Captain America: Brave New World” is an idiot movie that should never have been made. The weight of the backstory alone makes it unfilmable. It’s less brave new world than old stale one.

It’s not even a Captain America story.

Threads
Pity poor William Hurt. In the 1970s he was in an off-Broadway play when another cast member mentioned he had to go to London for a screen test. When he asked for what, the young actor, Christopher Reeve, said, “Superman”—and Hurt tried to talk him out of it. It’s not what serious actors do, was the gist. He wouldn’t be doing his career or the culture any good, was the gist. But Reeve went, became a superstar, and then couldn’t break out of the Superman mold. But good roles soon dried up for Hurt, too. The country became less serious, and he took on less serious roles, including Marvel Comics' Gen. Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, whom he played, in bits in pieces, in the following five movies before his death in 2022 at age 71:

• The Incredible Hulk (2008)
• Captain America: Civil War (2016)
• Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
• Avengers: Endgame (2019)
• Black Widow (2021)

I’m curious if Hurt was promised anything. “Yeah, Bill, these are small parts. But eventually it’s going to lead to a storyline in which Gen. Ross becomes the thing he pursues. I mean, it’s Nietzschean, man! Gazing into the abyss, he becomes the abyss! You’ll totally dig it!”

Except with Hurt’s death, Harrison Ford gets the closeup, and … it’s not good. The “Thunderbolt” Ross I remember from the comics was someone who was always angry, always firing missiles at the Hulk, the Ahab to his whale, the Javert to his Jean Valjean. Hurt played him well, both subtle and dense, while Harrison Ford plays him like Dr. Richard Kimble on the run. He seems desperate and trapped. He’s worried about everyone finding out about his heart condition. He’s most worried that his estranged daughter, Betty (Liv Tyler), will never forgive him for … is it the attack on Harlem? Or the fact that he continually hounded her boyfriend, Bruce Banner, then played by Ed Norton?

That's the problem with this thing. There’s just so many fucking threads from so many different sources from so many periods of time. We get…

• Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), a black man injected with the supersoldier serum in the 1950s and then incarcerated and experimented upon like the Tuskegee Experiments, whose story was revealed in the “Falcon/Winter Soldier” TV series in 2021.
• The whole concept of Sam Wilson becoming Captain America. That was suggested in the final “Avengers” movie in 2019, I think, and made a reality in that 2021 Disney+ series, I think.
• Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), who wants to be the new Falcon. Also intro’ed in that series—though I don’t remember him.
• The Celestial Island, full of valuable minerals, mainly adamantine, that countries are fighting over. That’s from “Eternals,” the crap movie from 2021 that nobody saw, and even if they did, like I did, they’re not remembering this stupid Celestial Island from the end of it. By the end of it, our brains were dead.

But the chef’s kiss of all these plot points is the main one. Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), AKA The Leader, first appeared in “The Incredible Hulk” in 2008 and showed up again in … um … anything? No? Just that? Yes, just that. We haven’t seen him since 2008. Seventeen years ago. But you remember him, right? He was called “Mr. Blue.” That’s why he uses the Bobby Vinton song “Mr. Blue” as his mind-control music. Sure, you remember! Back then he was trying to help Bruce Banner—again, when he was Ed Norton—develop a cure for his condition, but wound up creating the Abomination out of Tim Roth. He also got some of Banner’s tainted blood in a cut on his forehead.

So what’s he been doing for 17 years? Ross, who subsequently became secretary of state, and is now president, had him incarcerated in a secret military facility in West Virginia the entire time. The point of Ross is to overreact to anything with gamma radiation, to hem it in and control it, even though it never works out. Never. It always breaks free. Including here. Sterns gamma-infected forehead cut makes him so smart he outsmarts everybody. I guess he uses his brain to help Ross become president? So he's like his own version of Facebook. Ross also has a heart condition, and rather than go to a doctor like a person, he trusts the advice of the guy he’s incarcerated for 17 years. Why not? They’re pals.

So what is Sterns’ scheme? How will he destroy Ross? By revealing that he incarcerated a man against his will for 17 years, among other crimes? Naw. His scheme is to gives Ross pills for his heart condition that are actually gamma-irradiated and that will turn him into thing he’s always despised: the Hulk.

I mean, if the movie had underlined this, we might’ve had something. But the movie doesn’t do that. It doesn't even acknowledge it. It gets lost in the threads.

Guess what else gets lost in the threads? Our title character.

Whither Sam? Whither Debora?
Remember in the 1980s when Hollywood made movies about how white people suffer trying to help liberate black people in the American South or Apartheid South Africa—essentially relegating black people to marginal status in their own story? Well, we finally get a black Captain America … and same. His story doesn’t matter.

What is Sam’s story? He doesn't get much of one. It's tacked on. At first he’s a good soldier who follows the president’s orders. Then he gets Bradley invited to the White House where he takes shots at the president—he and others, mind-controlled—so Sam spends the rest of the movie trying to exonerate him. There’s also the handwringing of “Should I or shouldn’t I take the supersoldier serum?” He opts not, and the rationale is vague. And stupid. In a world where everyone looks for an edge, he looks the other way. Plus wings + shield? Aesthetically it’s all wrong. 

Who is Sam Wilson? Where does he live, does he have a girl, how were his parents occupied and all before they had him? What's his favorite sport? Remember when we first met him? In “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”? “On your left… On your left…” and Steve Rogers’ little notebook of things he needs to educate himself about. What a great scene. Those were the days. Nothing like that here. But at least after non-super Captain America/Falcon subdues Hulk (you read that right), and Pres. Ross voluntarily submits himself for incarceration (unlike some presidents we could mention), his daughter shows up and they bond. Vaguely. Is Liv Tyler that bad an actress or is it AI? It’s weird. 

But at least there’s closure. For someone. Sam Wilson doesn’t need closure since nothing in his character is opened.

Final thought: If you’re going to dive all the way back to 2008 “Hulk,” Marvel, would it kill you to give us a little Débora Nascimento?

WARNING: SPOILERS

The last time the comedy-detective team of Tang Ren and Qin Feng (Wang Baoqiang and Liu Haoran) visited America, it was New York in 2018; and while we got some B-movie stereotypes of the U.S. (everyone carries guns), and the movie took potshots at our dipshit president (the Trumpian police chief wants to build a wall to keep out the Chinese), it was mostly celebratory. We have arrived! We’re rockin’ the USA!

Seems forever ago.

Now and they
Now they’re back, although “now” and “they” aren’t quite accurate. My initial thought, when I saw the title and poster was: “Are they time-traveling?” No, they’re playing their ancestors. Although not stated outright, Qin Feng is now Qin Fu, so same family name. Meanwhile Wang Baoqiang’s over-the-top Tang Ren* is someone who was orphaned as a kid, raised by Indians, and given the name Ah Gui, or “Ghost”; but at the end Qin tells him he should get a full Chinese name and suggests Tang. Again, samesies.

(* From my limited understanding, this is the pun of the title: “Tang ren jie” is Mandarin for Chinatown.)

During its run, the movie series has visited Bangkok, New York and Tokyo, so why not just continue to Chinatowns in, say, Vancouver or London or Kuala Lumpur? Why go back in time? I'm guessing it's the propaganda. There’s no racism like old racism, and by going back in time the CCP and its cultural ministers remind Chinese moviegoers of historical atrocities committed on Chinese by the U.S. These include:

• The Chinese Exclusion Act
• Being transcontinental railroad fodder
• Stealing Chinese cultural treasures
• Cutting pigtails and general xenophobia

In this movie, we also blame Chinese for bringing “the plague,” which feels a little 2020.

The plot is convoluted and fast-moving. In an alleyway in San Francisco, a young white woman is murdered and disemboweled, an Indian killed beside her, and a young Chinese man, Bai Zhenbang, is charged with the crimes. Because he’s the son of Bai Xuanling (Chow Yun Fat), a powerful leader in Chinatown, Sherlock Holmes (Andrew Charles Stokes) is summoned. Except he’s uninterested in helping so he sends a wide-eyed assistant. That’s Qin Fu.

The Indian who was murdered turns out to be the adoptive father of Ah Gui, and an Indian medicine woman tells him the first person he bumps into in Chinatown will help him solve the crime. That’s Qin Fu again. That’s why they team up.

The girl who was killed, Alice (Anastasia Shestakova), is the daughter of a xenophobic politician named Grant (John Cusack!), who uses the crime, and its accused, to push for passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act—or maybe a stronger version of, since it passed in 1882. There’s also a Qing Dynasty delegation that’s trying to arrest Sun Yat-sen or something. There’s also a celebrated Chinese magician, beloved in San Francisco, who is about to embark on a worldwide tour. To be honest, we get a lot of moving pieces. How many? As of this writing, the plot description on Wikipedia stops halfway through the movie. Like they just gave up.

All the while, the younger Bai is silent on where he was when the crime was committed. Until he isn’t. Ready? Not only was he romantically involved with Alice, not only was she carrying his baby, but he was running guns, stolen from the Irish, to send to China to aid in its revolution. He's a hero! Except two other girls are then murdered/disemboweled, a hooded figure in a factory is confronted by cops and shot by Grant into a pool of water, and when the body surfaces it’s ... Bai. Case closed.

Not so fast! Qin Fu and Ah Gui untangle everything. The first disembowelment was done with surgical precision while the next two were hack jobs, so obviously not the same man. Plus there were shards of wood in a wound in the back of Alice’s scalp. So the killer was ... the xenophobic Grant the whole time! He accidentally killed his daughter during a struggle and disemboweled her to remove evidence of the half-Chinese child. The Indian was killed because he happened upon them. The other two girls knew too much, etc., and were killed by a Grant associate, who, not having been a wartime surgeon like Grant, does a hackier job. Rather than deny all (our heroes have no evidence), Grant confesses and kills himself. Case closed.

Not so fast! The elder Bai still has to go before a town council to plead for the Chinese cause against xenophobic politicians. It’s not a bad speech. Basically: We build your railroads, we do your laundry, we feed you, what the fuck is the matter with you people? The speech staves off the worst of the reforms but his property is still taken away. Think TikTok 1900.

Huaqiao: hao bu hao?
“Detective Chinatown 1900” goes on too long, with too many moving parts; but the production values are fantastic, the leads aren’t bad, and writer-director Chen Sicheng uses the tropes of comedy storytelling well: zoom ins, quick cuts, etc. The direction is as funny as the script. Funnier.

But it could’ve been edited down. Particularly if Chen was required to include all the pro-Chinese speechifying at the end.

Some of those speeches made me feel bad for the mostly Chinese crowd at Pacific Place Theater last Saturday. Near the end of the film, two men talk about what might happen if China pulls off its revolution and becomes a powerhouse: Why would any Chinese need to come to America? Yet here they were. Was the movie trying to shame them for living abroad? Or is this idea undercut by another character’s declaration that overseas Chinese can keep an eye on the rest of the world for China?

Is China upping its rhetoric? I'm used to being the only non-Chinese person in the theater when a new Chinese movie opens, and I'm used to foreigners being villains in these movies (we're forever stealing Chinese artifacts), but the speechifying here felt different. It made leaving the flick a little awkward. I was looking forward to seeing this one and getting that pre-COVID, pre-Trump, pre-Xi-Jinping-for-life feeling. But those days now seem deader than San Francisco 1900.