Month: December 2025

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Zootopia 2

Zootopia 2

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A lot has changed since Zootopia was released in 2016.  For starters, the buddy cop movie is practically nonexistent.  Decades ago, these movies regularly appeared in theaters in the form of action-comedies (Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour), spoofs (21 Jump Street), satires (The Other Guys) or fresh takes on the genre (The Nice Guys).  Besides the evergreen Bad Boys franchise, I’m hard-pressed to recall a notable buddy cop movie from the past ten years besides the one starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling.  If sneaking the genre into a family film helps keep the genre alive, I’m all for it.  I wish the filmmakers had given their animal detectives a better case to crack than the one in Zootopia 2.  Ah well, perhaps they’ll get one in the next sequel, which is hinted at in a credit cookie.

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The Thing With Feathers

The Thing With Feathers

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If grief appeared before me as a gangly, foul-mouthed, eight-foot tall crow who spewed insults, I’d assume I was done for.  Which is what makes The Thing With Feathers so oddly compelling.  The crow doesn’t appear before the Sad Dad in this film (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) to harm him, but help him.  The crow wants to shock him out of his grief so that an even worse creature doesn’t do him in, Despair.  As far as therapy options go, this one beats Yoga and keeping an “emotion journal”, either of which would push me off the deep end.

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Wicked: For Good

Wicked: For Good

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A year ago, I wondered how the sequel to Wicked would incorporate the source of its inspiration, The Wizard of Oz.  The answer arrives with Wicked: For Good, a noisy and unwieldy  contraption that sabotages much of the goodwill from the first movie while it furiously crams the classic movie into the plot.  Despite all of its clunky contrivances, the film is still modestly entertaining due to Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, who save the film from collapsing under its own weight.  If it weren’t for them, I would have prayed for flying monkeys to pluck me out of the theater and carry me to safety.

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