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One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another

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For writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, no subject is too unwieldy for a movie.  In his latest film, One Battle After Another, Anderson explores revolution, something most of us have only either read about or experienced from a safe distance.  He wants us to understand what it’s like to be a revolutionary and embeds us within a violent political movement so that we experience the emotional roller-coaster of their daily existence.  In his view, revolutionaries aren’t a faceless group of angry radicals wielding guns, but ordinary people who live and breathe a cause.

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A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey

A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey

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In When Harry Met Sally, the characters are blocked from taking the logical next step in their relationship by their neurosis.  Eventually they come to their senses and there’s a happy ending.  A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey has basically the same premise, except that this time the couple spend the movie undergoing couples therapy before winding up together.  Call it When Harry and Sally Went to Psychoanalysis.  While this alternative take on the rom-com formula is intriguing, the movie’s emotional impact is underdone by its episodic nature and awkward tonal shifts.

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The Roses

The Roses

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Married couples going at each other has been a reliable source of laughs for as long as I can remember.  The Roepers on Three’s Company.  The Bundys on Married with Children.  The Barones on Everyone Loves Raymond.  When you put two actors who can deliver zingers with deadly precision together, it’s comedic gold.  Which is probably what interested Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman in The Roses, who play the eponymous warring couple in addition to being executive producers.  They knew how much fun they would have with this material, and that we’d enjoy watching them tear each other to shreds.  They were right.

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Nobody 2

Nobody 2

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Back in 2021, Nobody introduced the novel concept of seeing Bob Odenkirk play a violent action hero.  That incongruity worked surprisingly well, so it’s no surprise that a sequel would be forthcoming.  Nobody 2 picks up where the last one left off, with Odenkirk’s Hutch trying to be a family man while simultaneously working off his debts by way of dangerous assignments from his government handler.  While the movie has the same violent action sequences that gave the first one such a kick, it lacks the angry verve that helped the original rise above similar punch-fests.

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Weapons

Weapons

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The fact that Weapons begins with its most haunting images tells you something about what writer-director Zach Cregger has in store for us.  The movie is ostensibly about seventeen children who disappeared at the same time, but Cregger’s ambitions extend beyond that.  Although Weapons is a horror movie, it’s also surprisingly insightful in what it says about how tragedy affects us, the risks associated with everyday human kindness and the lonely plight of victimized children.  And on top of all that, it’s very funny.  Weapons is a big canvas horror movie that takes big swings and connects every time.

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The Bad Guys 2

The Bad Guys 2

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When you’ve played the villain your entire life, it takes more than a single good deed to change perceptions.  That’s the quandary these Bad Guys find themselves in.  They bought into the whole tail wagging thing last time around and used their talents to do a whopper of a good deed, but their past transgressions are still etched within everyone’s memory.  Did they make the right decision in breaking good?  Or should they revert back to what everyone still holds against them?  The Bad Guys 2 shows that it takes time, hard work and believing in yourself to make that happen.  I’m not sure if this movie’s target audience will appreciate the philosophical argument discussion that’s happening alongside the slapstick and chaos, but their parents can explain it to them later, I suppose.

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The Naked Gun (2025)

The Naked Gun (2025)

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When Liam Neeson agreed to star in The Naked Gun, he knew he had big shoes to fill.  If you’ve seen the previous movies in this franchise, you probably heard those words in the voice of leading man Leslie Nielson, a dramatic actor who quickly mastered the art of the deadpan delivery.  You may also have envisioned the 6’ 4” Neeson stumbling around in a pair of noisy clown shoes.  That’s the challenge with following up one of the greatest comedies ever made, filling those iconic shoes.  While Neeson is up to the challenge and the movie is funny, it’s not in the same league of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films from the Eighties and early Nineties.

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