“The sexiest thing is the mind.”  Although this quote has been misattributed to Sigmund Freud, it rings true anyway, because the mind is the source of our desires.  I thought of this while watching Verity, the latest cinematic adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel.  As a sexy thriller, it curiously never generates heat despite providing the requisite glimpses of skin and a few sexual encounters.  What does the trick is the dialog, which proves that talking about wickedness can be just as exciting as seeing it in action..  Freud would have been proud.

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Having watched 2022’s Fall and its sequel, the curiously titled Fall 2: Deadpoint, I’m convinced that I would never survive the contrived scenarios of either film.  It’s not because I would get confused over when to clip-in and clip-out, or how to climb a rusty centuries-old ladder.  It’s because when I needed to get some sleep while stranded on a platform or wooden plank overlooking a tremendous drop, I would roll over and plunge to my death.  Tossing and turning would be my downfall, so to speak.

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Did the fate of the free world really depend upon how American soldiers smoked their cigarettes during WWII?  Lucky Strike, named after one of the brands included in their rations, says that it did.  In this movie, that small part of military training played a key role in a soldier’s struggle for survival behind enemy lines during The Battle of the Bulge.  Accordingly, the movie is an interesting entry in the growing “little-known facts of WWII” genre, which emphasises small-scale stories over huge battle scenes.  But don’t worry–there are tanks and a flamethrower!

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Michael is a lively, if incredibly constricted look at Michael Jackson’s life.  It offers a swiss-cheese rendering of his personal life in between electric reenactments of him recording and performing.  Thankfully, the latter makes up for the former, and the movie is entertaining in a “hall of fame highlight reel” way.  Mildly recommended. Continue reading Michael (2026)

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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Tron: Ares isn’t a continuation of Tron and Tron: Legacy, but a spin-off.  It’s Tron-adjacent, set within the Tron universe with only the slightest connection to the previous films.  It’s the same approach behind this year’s Jurassic World: Rebirth, which was basically a CGI dinosaur movie  populated with entirely new characters.  This movie offers Tron-styled action and aesthetics with a completely different cast.  In both cases, branding propels the endeavor instead of storytelling continuity or narrative cohesion, with logic not entering into the equation.  On the plus side, members of the audience with minimal knowledge of what came before can still enjoy these films on the basis of the sheer spectacle they provide.  While that ultimately wasn’t enough in the case of Rebirth, it does make Tron: Legacy a very watchable experience.  It’s the most captivating screen saver ever created.

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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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