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Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom December 21, 2023 By: Button Hunter Friesen It’s hard to care, let alone write, about the incredibly uneventful Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom , the last gasp from the bloated, rotten corpse that is the DCEU. It’s a soaking wet mess, not from H2O, but from the sweat of editor Kirk M. Morri as he tried to stitch this Frankenstein’s monster of a production together into a tolerably cohesive “cinematic experience.” The reports of multiple reshoots, reedits, reconfigurations of timelines, and just overall studio meddling are apparent at every moment, with the final product sharing the same amount of creative energy as a used Toyota Corolla. As the most well-liked member during Zack Snyder’s time at the helm, it’s fitting that Jason Momoa’s Aquaman / Arthur Curry would be the one to usher this mega-franchise out the door. Writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (with story credits also given to director James Wan, Momoa, and Thomas Pa'a Sibbett) wastes no time getting this farewell train going, revealing that Arthur and Mera (Amber Heard) got married, had a son, and now rule over Atlantis as king and queen. Still present are Arthur’s parents Atlanna (Nicole Kidman) and Tom (Temuera Morrison), as well as the allied King Nereus (Dolph Lundgren). But for every hero, there must be a villain, with Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) still maintaining that position from the first film. This time, however, he’s made a deal with an underwater devil: Free this long-imprisoned enemy of Atlantis and he will be bestowed with enough power to destroy Aquaman and everything he cherishes. Absolute power has corrupted absolutely, with Manta being blinded to the consequences his rage has on the environment. Blah blah blah… Arthur must learn what it means to be a king… blah blah blah… Patrick Wilson returns as Arthur’s half-brother Orm… blah blah blah… a giant battle commences… blah blah blah… the end. Look, we’re now 33 films deep in the MCU and 15 for the DCEU, so nothing can really be a spoiler anymore. We’ve truly seen it all, which was admittedly much shallower than I would have expected. But if you’ve developed short-term memory loss over these past few years or go full Velma and drop your glasses in the theater; you’re in luck, as this audiobook of a script doesn’t let anything go unnoticed through its relentless exposition. Whether it’s during a montage, a flashback, or just a regular scene, there’s always some sort of narration or formulaic plot-driven explanation. This might be one of the first blockbusters to treat the visual component of cinema as a secondary tool. And any visual flourishes here have been rendered naught by James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water last year (can you believe that these two films were at one point going to release on the same day!). There’s no egregious VFX sloppiness, just a lot of uninspired uses for such a vast world. Also paling to Cameron is the clunky messaging about environmentalism and xenophobia, with some of Arthur's speeches coming dangerously close to the level of Steven Seagal in On Deadly Ground . Kidman and Abdul-Mateen II are too good to be doing this kind of thing (again), with Willem Dafoe being the lone lucky one who was able to get out of his contractual obligations. It should have been telling that no major additions were made to this cast, with only talks of departures and backdoor firings. That’s pretty much been the DC way these past ten years: don’t try much of anything new and endlessly fight with each other. More Reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple January 13, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Rip January 16, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Dead Man's Wire January 14, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Chronology of Water January 9, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

The Exorcist: Believer October 4, 2023 By: Button Hunter Friesen Urination, the c-word, “help me” etched on skin, spitting blood, demonic voices. These are the trademarks of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist , adapted to the screen by The French Connection director William Friedkin just two years later. The reader’s worst fears from the pages of the novel were turned into ungodly imagery, many of these moments even more terrifying now than they were fifty years ago. David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer has all those same beats, many of them shot-for-shot. But just like how a joke is never as funny the second time, those images seem tamely pedestrian this go around. It’s the curse of the legacy sequel, or “requel,” where the iconic moments of the original material are treated like scripture. They have to be “honored” by being trotted out the exact same way you’ve seen them before as if doing anything different would cause hell on Earth. But things become less iconic the more you see them, especially when they’re cheaply remade without heart and soul, lessening what made the whole thing special, to begin with. It’s a creatively bankrupt process, but very few franchises that have done so are literally bankrupt. The Jurassic World trilogy may have never come within a mile of the playful virtuosity of Spielberg’s original, but they made just as much money. There’s also the Halloween (also revived by David Gordon Green) and Scream franchises both churning out more dough than they know what to do with. There’s no doubt The Exorcist: Believer will follow suit moneywise, but I seriously question whether anyone will have any connection to this movie even a day after they’ve seen it. Unsurprisingly, the story opens in a foreign land outside of America, this time being Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) and his extremely pregnant wife quickly find themselves caught in the middle of the infamous 2010 earthquake. A fatal injury to the mother means only the unborn baby can survive. Thirteen years later Victor is an overprotective single dad to his daughter Angela. One day he lets his guard down and allows Angela to hang out after school with her friend Katherine. Instead of doing homework like they told their parents, the pair go into the deep dark woods and perform a seance. It’s all done with childlike curiosity, but the results are sinister as the girls stay missing for three days, mysteriously reappearing with no memory and different personalities. The central mystery of the middle act is all about finding out what happened to the girls and what needs to be done about it. Except it’s not a mystery as we all knew how this story would go before we even sat down, making those middle 40 minutes a tedious bore. Things only get moderately interesting once series original Ellen Burstyn comes back into the picture as Chris MacNeil. She delivers an “I’m just here for the money” performance, which can’t be blamed considering Green and co-writers Peter Sattler, Danny McBride, and Scott Teems can’t find much of any reason for her to be here besides replicating exactly (it’s literally the same demon) what she did a half-century ago. The child performances from Lidya Jewett and Olivia O'Neill are quite incredible. They have a handle on the range needed, delivering both innocence and perversity. Odom Jr. is a capable lead and Ann Dowd might as well be playing her character from Ari Aster’s Hereditary . The rest of the supporting characters are blandly drawn and forgettable. For all the scares he tries to conjure up on the screen, the most frightening thing Green does here is take another beloved horror franchise and turn it into a lesser version of itself. I’m not sure where they’re going to go with the two planned sequels. That would be cause for excitement most of the time, but I’ve lost all faith considering the lazy path they took here when total freedom was available. More Reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple January 13, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Rip January 16, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Dead Man's Wire January 14, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Chronology of Water January 9, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

The Boys in the Boat December 15, 2023 By: Button Hunter Friesen I’m just as surprised as you are. Four stars? For a George Clooney movie? About rowing? In 2023? It’s such an unlikely outcome that I’m still in shock just as much as I was during minute one… and minute fifty… and minute one hundred. I kept waiting for this Jenga tower to come crashing down. There surely were moments where it started to falter, but then Clooney or the charismatic Callum Turner would make everything right again. In an act of full transparency, I’ll start with what is probably the worst element of the film, which is the bookending scenes (never a good sign). We open and close with an elderly Joe Rantz sitting on a dock watching his young grandson learning how to row. These images of pain and perseverance bring him back to his college days at the University of Washington during the Great Depression, where he was living out of a broken-down car and using newspapers to plug the holes in his shoes. The corny bits of narration from the trailer are all featured in these opening segments, along with the usual visual trademarks of Depression-era poverty. What’s more scarce than money are ways to make money, which is why Joe (Turner) and a few of his classmates try out for the university’s rowing team, as anyone who makes it gets a part-time job and a place to sleep. For Joe, hunger, both in its physical and mental form, is enough of a substitute for a lack of technical skill. But making the team is only the first hurdle. Staying on the team is the bigger challenge, and the only way to accomplish that is to win. These eight boys will go up against schools with bigger and better programs filled with kids who have had rowing passed down through generations. Because no one would ever make a movie about a sports team that repeatedly loses (“winning gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics” is literally the ending to the studio-supplied plot summary), it’s not surprising that Washington’s fortunes turned out to be considerably grander than they ever imagined. They were a bunch of boys who had nothing to their names beyond their need to survive. Clooney and writer Mark L. Smith (writer for The Midnight Sky ) do well to illustrate the strength and resilience needed to succeed in such a demanding sport. Severe blisters, cramps, and overall exhaustion are not a probability, they’re a certainty. Clooney perfects his craft as a director just as much as the boys do on the boat. It’s his biggest leap in becoming this generation’s Clint Eastwood, a name-brand director who doesn’t possess any distinct flair, yet always delivers a respectably crafted studio film. Each race is a feat of momentum and inertia, and commendably displays the strategy required in rowing, which is far more complicated than simply going faster than the opponents. Aiding that is Alexandre Desplat’s triumphant score and great sound work that details each facet of this well-oiled machine. There’s something sweet in how committed Clooney and Smith are to the underdog sports script, even down to the slightly underdeveloped, yet fully endearing romance between Joe and his classmate Joyce (Hadley Robinson). There’s even the usual camaraderie between the boys involving them building up the confidence of the quieter member of the group. Turner is a more than capable lead, possessing what's required both physically and emotionally. Joel Edgerton also does decent service as the team’s coach, who’s up against a rock and a hard place between demanding alumni and the Nazi-hosted Olympics. The Boys in the Boat is the type of film that would have made quite a name for itself back in the 80s and 90s. Don’t let that statement make you think it doesn’t deserve a place today, as it possesses a timeless amount of heart and soul. It’s a highly entertaining and much-needed life preserver for Clooney’s directorial career. More Reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple January 13, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Rip January 16, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Dead Man's Wire January 14, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Chronology of Water January 9, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

Bad Boys: Ride or Die June 4, 2024 By: Button Hunter Friesen It may seem like another lifetime ago, but we’re only four years removed from the third entry in the now long-running Bad Boys series, Bad Boys for Life , being the highest-grossing movie at the domestic box office. Of course, that year happened to be 2020, so more than a few asterisks should be applied to that record, especially since 1917 and Jumanji: The Next Level were not that far behind in the rankings. But the film’s lucky-as-hell January release date is not the only credit it should be given, as Michael Bay replacements, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, made the smart choice of dumping out the racist jokes and nihilism for coherent storytelling and bearable action. In other words, they actually made this franchise fun to watch. So where does your sequel go when the previous entry had the benefit of being able to shake everything up? Not much of anywhere it turns out, as Ride or Die pretty much peddles more of the same from the Bad Boys for Life . That’s not a bad thing considering the very real alternate reality we could have lived in where Bay kept digging this franchise into the ground, à la his Transformers pentalogy. We’ve been here and done this before, so there’s not much use in getting all worked up. The attempt at uniqueness in this fourth entry comes from our main character’s ages. The thoughts of mortality are starting to creep into the psyches of Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence), as the now AARP-qualified detectives are slowly being physically and mentally edged out of the game. Bad Boys for Life may have toyed with these ideas through obvious Gen-Z mockery in the form of the up-and-coming AMMO squad (all of them returning for this sequel), but this entry is where the pedal really hits the medal. For starters, Mike is transforming from a boy to a man by marrying Christine (Melanie Liburd), with Marcus suffering cardiac arrest on their wedding dancefloor. A new lease on life puts some perspective on Marcus, almost adopting a new zen-like “go with the flow” identity. There’s also Mike’s son Armando (Jacob Scipio) still in prison after the events of the last movie. He gets brought back into the fold once the deceased Captain Howard is framed for corruption by some no-good goons that he can identify. Even though Michael Bay is out of the director’s chair, this is still a Jerry Bruckheimer production, which means the plot will be generic and the action will go boom. The bad guys may be hiding in plain sight to our characters, but we as the audience can spot them from a mile away, especially when they make vague speeches about rectifying the past and doing stuff for the greater good of the country ( Hot Fuzz just keeps getting more relevant by the day). All that really matters is that their faces and demeanor make it super satisfying when they get punched, or, in this case, shot in the head. The carnage is quite high and gruesome, with limbs and skulls splitting from bullets and throats getting slashed on multiple occasions. Adil and Billal still keep everything flowing with jittering energy, almost like a kid hopped up on candy, a craving Marcus struggles to control after his operation. A drone camera becomes the director’s best friend during the firefights, ducking and dodging through smoke and a hail of bullets. A first-person POV is sometimes employed, with the camera swapping bodies at a moment’s notice. The giddiness of the production doesn’t always match the tone of the story. I can only take a scene where a bad guy forces someone to commit suicide so seriously when it’s immediately followed by a Fast & Furious montage of the finest bikinis in Miami. Smith and Lawrence do better with the balance, both of them never showing a single hint of losing a step after inhabiting these roles for almost three decades. The film grinds to a halt on several occasions for them to just stand around and bicker, but their unmatched chemistry makes it all tolerable. The script may start hinting at the end of the road for these characters, but everyone involved still has enough left in the tank for a few more rounds. More Reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple January 13, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Rip January 16, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Dead Man's Wire January 14, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Chronology of Water January 9, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

Jurassic World: Rebirth July 1, 2025 By: Button Hunter Friesen Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me six times, shame on both of us, I guess? In its thirty-two-year-long existence and now seven-film catalogue, the Jurassic Park franchise has produced only a single decent entry: Steven Spielberg’s iconic 1993 original. A .142 batting average would get a major league baseball player sent down to the minor leagues the next day. In Hollywood, it nets you billions of dollars. Rebirth is the worst kind of baseball player: the kind who strikes out looking. Despite nearly all of its swings missing by an ever-increasing number the longer it stood at the plate, the Jurassic World trilogy at least had the gumption to have an idea about what’s next in the prehistoric cycle of life. Rebirth isn’t remotely concerned with evolution, just survival. It’s a scientific fact that 99.9% of species that have ever existed on Earth are extinct. Time has proven that survival isn’t enough. Now I’m counting down the days until this franchise gets kicked out of that exclusive 0.1% club. It’s no secret that nostalgia in its most weaponized form has been the oxygen that keeps this dying flame from completely going out. Nostalgia for the first time you saw a dinosaur on screen, so real that you could have walked up and touched it. Nostalgia for John Williams’ score, which immediately evokes a sweeping grandeur. Nostalgia for the one-liners coming from likeable characters. Rebirth attempts at mimicking all that without an ounce of shame. Even when it does hit the target, which, to be clear, is not often, the positive effects have been diluted down. Another shady company wants something from another dinosaur-infested island, which means another ragtag group of characters must defy another set of million-to-one odds in order to live to see another day. Supplying the financial motivation is Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a representative of ParkerGenix, whose top scientists have found out that the blood of three dinosaurs is the final ingredient to developing a miracle cure for heart disease. Ex-special forces Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) is the hired muscle, Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) is providing the on-the-ground paleontology expertise, and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) is the only boat captain brave enough to venture into certain death. There are a few other members of this expedition, but the absence of their names from the poster immediately signifies that they’re sole responsibility is to be dinosaur food. With stars like this, there’s an innate likability to these characters. Unfortunately, you leave the theater with nothing more than what you brought in. I’d estimate that 80% of Bailey’s character is his cute glasses and sweater. Returning from the original film and its immediate sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park , screenwriter David Koepp pushes past all notions of characterization, truncating important aspects like motivation and depth. Running in conjunction and sometimes parallel to all of this is the story of a family stranded on the island after a whale-like dinosaur called a Mosasaur capsizes their boat. Their fight for survival grinds down any sense of momentum and tension, with long stretches of children in weightless peril. Director Gareth Edwards at least has the sense to create a pretty picture through some sun-baked imagery. As evidenced by his 2014 Godzilla film and The Creator , Edwards has a knack for establishing large-scale spectacle. What needs to be improved is executing on that promise. There isn’t a signature moment of awe or terror here, just several okay-ish copy-and-pasted sequences from previous entries. It’s worth pointing out that I’ve never had a fascination for either this franchise or dinosaurs in general. Heck, I didn’t see Jurassic Park until 2020, and that was because a local cinema programmed it to stay afloat during the COVID-19 drought, and I was going through withdrawals from not being in the theater for months. But even if these retreads hit all the right buttons for you, don’t you want more? Don’t you want to see at least an attempt at charting a new path? A better word than “rebirth” would have been “regurgitation.” More Reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple January 13, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Rip January 16, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Dead Man's Wire January 14, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Chronology of Water January 9, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

Mulan September 14, 2020 By: Button Hunter Friesen For over a decade now, Disney has been mining their animated catalog of magical stories and remaking them into live-action movies. This trend has had its ups (the visual spectacle found within The Jungle Book ) and its downs (last year’s joyless photorealistic The Lion King ), but each one has made buckets of money for the house of mouse. Originally set to join the line of remakes back in March was Mulan . For obvious pandemic reasons, that release didn’t go as planned and now the film has been released straight to Disney+ at the exorbitant fee of $29.99, which is on top of your regular monthly payments. It’s a price point no one should come close to thinking of paying, especially considering that the movie they are buying pales in comparison to its animated predecessor. If you’ve seen the original 1998 version of Mulan , then you’ve already seen this newer adaptation as the story follows the same path. The film opens in Imperial China as we are introduced to Mulan, a young adventurous girl that is often a disappointment because she does not fit her predestined gender role. In this opening sequence, we are dazzled with all the things money can buy. At a budget of $200 million, it’s no surprise that the sets are luscious, the costumes are pristine, and the makeup is vibrant. Further illustrating the power of money is the locations used by director Niki Caro and cinematographer Mandy Walker. The duo beautifully gives life to the rural and urban landscapes, even if some moments can be ruined by an overabundance of computer effect meddling. After an invasion by the villainous Bori Kahn, the emperor conscripts an army made up of one man per family. Unfortunately for Mulan’s family, the only man is their war-wounded father who surely will not survive. Under the cover of night, Mulan takes her father’s gear and sets out in his place for the army. Upon reaching the training grounds, we are introduced to the lot of supporting characters, first of which is Commander Tung. The rest of the gang are younger lads that only possess one character trait to set them apart. The training sequence is where Caro exemplifies her chops as a director. She creates bold imagery that gives off a sense of power and courage. Caro also injects a bit of wuxia (a Chinese action genre that suspends physics in favor of more fantastical action) into the action. Even if it is over-edited, the stunt work is something to admire as elaborate set pieces are constructed in various interesting locations. And while it’s no “I’ll Make a Man Out of You”, composer Harry Gregson-Williams does deliver a terrifically epic score to punctuate the action scenes. What clouds over this newest version of Mulan and negates many of its accomplishments is the shocking lack of fun within the movie. Stripping itself of the musical numbers and talking animals, and then adding on a dour tone about warfare doesn’t make for a very inspirational or entertaining time. Of course, a war movie doesn’t have to be all sunshine and rainbows, but it's next to impossible to take this movie seriously when there’s an identical bright, animated version that’s superior in nearly every way. Chinese star Yifei Lu plays the titular character with both grace and ferocity. She expertly tackles the language barrier and carries the majority of the film’s emotional weight on her shoulders. Her interactions with her father (brilliantly played by Tzi Ma) are the highlights. Playing a new character in the story is Gong Li as the conflicted witch Xianniang. She’s as mysterious as the dark side of the moon and often toes the line between hero and villain with her inventive powers. It’s a shame that she and Jason Scott Lee’s Bori Khan were given little to work with. Chinese megastars Donnie Yen and Jet Li play Commander Tung and Emperor, respectively. Yen and Li lend star power to their minor supporting roles, which was probably the only reason they were cast. The newest version of Mulan is a passable film that fares better than most of the assembly line remakes that have preceded it. But at the same time, it still falters to the original and lacks the entertaining bite that has never been in short supply within Disney films. At the high price required to view it, the best option would be to wait until December 04, when the movie is available at no extra cost to Disney+ subscribers More Reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple January 13, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Rip January 16, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Dead Man's Wire January 14, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Chronology of Water January 9, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

Blink Twice August 15, 2024 By: Button Hunter Friesen Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut is loaded with so many symbols, clues, and hidden messages that the rapid-fire nature of their delivery might make you miss them if you blink (sorry, the joke just wrote itself). It’s the mark of a confident storyteller, someone who can transfer their vision onto the silver screen and trust the audience to go along for the ride even though they never get to play with a deck. To give us some credit, Kravitz’s symbolism and structure heavily mirror recent thrillers such as Get Out and The Royal Hotel , so the mysteries surrounding the plot become much simpler to solve once you identify that this is an equivalent equation, a delicious copycat nonetheless. “Be invisible” is the order Frida (Naomi Ackie) receives every day at her job as a waitress for a catering company. It’s something she’s unfortunately become an expert at, first seen sitting on the toilet of her rundown apartment as her roommate Jess (Alia Shawkat) asks if she has half of the rent. A coincidence could be her ticket to a better life, as recently #MeToo canceled tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum), is the prime benefactor of the charity event she’s catering. It’s all part of his apology tour, with the reason for his cancellation never being revealed, an omission that Kravitz and co-writer E.T. Feigenbaum feel that we can fill with our own doomscrolling mentality. The meet-cute between Frida and Slater is a rousing success, so much so that he invites her to his private island with some of his friends. Phones are strictly prohibited, replaced with endless shots of tequila, lavishly prepared meals by the seemingly brainwashed staff, and a drug that takes you to another world. It’s a perfect vacation… almost too perfect. Days and nights begin to blur together, with Frida and the other women’s memories starting to fade the longer they stay. The casting of Christian Slater, Simon Rex, and Haley Joel Osment as Slater’s entourage immediately rings the alarms that nothing good is ever going to happen on the island. Each of them are “nice guys” on the outside, asking the women if they’re having a good time and constantly snapping photos to prove how much of allies they are. Roberto Bonelli’s production design is eerily perfect as well, the bold red house being the center point where all the lush green grass converges. The visual connections to Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery remain strong as everyone is dressed in their finest whites, with DP Adam Newport-Berra always placing the background just out of focus and filled with unknown entities. The editing by Kathryn J. Schubert may be the most stylized tool in Kravitz’s arsenal, with a mixture of quick cuts matched with startling string scratches and long takes that drip-feed through the villa. It can sometimes be a little too showy for its own good, with Kravitz overplaying her hand and underestimating her audience. It’s propulsive once the cork pops off the wine bottle, with quite a few scenes of brutality to match what’s been lurking underneath. Kravitz’s stature as an actor may have been why she was able to assemble such a stacked ensemble. She directs them all impeccably, with Ackie and Adria Arjona (seen this year in Hit Man ) being the standout leaders. They’ve put themselves into an “adapt or die” situation, and the actors are in lockstep with the material at every turn. Rex, Slater, and Osment don’t do much adapting to the material, which isn’t a bad thing considering their presence already sells their character dynamics. Tatum leads us into the darkness with his charm, his vape pen and holistic views on therapy building up a “crypto bro” aura to mask his true intentions. Kyle MacLachlan and Geena Davis suffer from the number of actors on display, with the pair always feeling relatively insignificant. Even with all the devilish debauchery at play, fun is still the name of the game with Blink Twice . It’s meant to be a thriller that has you gripping the seat and jolting into the arms of the person sitting next to you. Kravitz wants you to be yelling “I knew it!” with each new plot twist, a task that is sometimes a little easier than it should be. There’s a lot of satisfaction to be had in that, and also in seeing a person reach a new rung as an artist. More Reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple January 13, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Rip January 16, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Dead Man's Wire January 14, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Chronology of Water January 9, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

Black Phone 2 October 15, 2025 By: Button Hunter Friesen In 1954, director Alfred Hitchcock released Dial M for Murder and Rear Window . Ingmar Bergman had Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal in 1957. 1974 saw Mel Brooks and Francis Ford Coppola simultaneously reach their apexes, the former with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein , and the latter with The Conversation and The Godfather Part II . And then, in 1993, Steven Spielberg seemingly did the impossible, conquering the box office and the Academy Awards with Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List . He then repeated the feat in 2002 with Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can … and again in 2005 with War of the Worlds and Munich … and again in 2011 with The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse . Now, in 2025, Scott Derrickson has sneakily achieved greatness with Apple TV’s The Gorge back in February, and Black Phone 2 this October. Of course, to compare a made-for-streaming creature feature and a horror sequel to some of the greatest films of all time is quite a hyperbole. To equate anything to The Godfather Part II would be enough to have my license as a cinephile revoked on the grounds of heresy. But the general sentiment is still true, with Derrickson exponentially raising the ceiling for two films that should have been lost to the swamp of nothingness. The Gorge was a dream come true for anyone who has longed for Call of Duty Zombies to come to the silver screen, with the PG-13 rating never barring Derrickson from getting down and dirty with some nightmarish creatures. Black Phone 2 drops the "the” from its predecessor’s title, yet never drops the terror or suspense. Shifting a few years later to 1982, Finney (Mason Thames) is still haunted by The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) despite killing him at the end of the previous film. But that only marked a victorious battle in a war that mixes reality with dreams (or nightmares). His sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw, delivering one of the best performances of the year), has a series of dreams about children being gruesomely butchered at a Christian winter camp in the Colorado mountains, their corpses etching letters in the ice before sinking to the bottom. Similar to how she solved the mystery of The Grabber while Finney was locked in his dungeon, these dreams are visions of what’s happened, the murdered kids being a key to The Grabber’s past, and how he’s still able to be a threat to the living. With a runtime of 114 minutes, this film is not brisk. But Derrickson knows how to maintain a creepy atmosphere through pacing, an interesting story, and some stellar performances. All of these things are hard to come by in horror movies as gruesome as this one, and it's rarer to have them combine so harmoniously. I knew I was seeing something that was a cut above when we were forty minutes into the film, and I wasn’t bothered that Ethan Hawke still hadn’t shown up yet. But good things come to those who wait, and Hawke’s turn as this movie’s Freddie Krueger is quite memorable, reaching down into hell and relishing in his demonic presence. A Nightmare on Elm Street is the central influence, mostly out of necessity, since there’s not much of a grounded reason for this sequel to exist. Gwen is cut, beaten, and tossed around by a seemingly invisible enemy, her dreams being the only time she can see The Grabber. But he can still harm those who can’t see him, as he does on a frozen lake with some makeshift ice skates and an axe. It’s a lot less goofy to watch than it is to type and read aloud, although it’s not all perfect. There’s still plenty of blood to be chillingly spilled, most of which is conveyed through Derrickson’s signature Super 8 footage mixed with eerily scratchy sounds. This franchise only has a few more time jumps left before its titular payphones go completely out of style. Even here, almost all of them are out of order and targets of ridicule for their unreliability. I can already tell you that my Old Spice whistle ringtone won’t conjure up the same level of scares as the clangs of a rotary phone. It’s a good thing I haven’t taken my phone off silent mode in almost a decade, as there might be a few calls from beyond the grave that I should probably miss. More Reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple January 13, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Rip January 16, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Dead Man's Wire January 14, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Chronology of Water January 9, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

A Quiet Place: Day One June 27, 2024 By: Button Hunter Friesen A Quiet Place , the franchise that suffers the most from sound bleed within multiplexes, returns to nearly four thousand screens this weekend. Any fan needs to pray that they’re not seeing it in a room next to a showing of either Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga or Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire . A24’s newest little indie, Janet Planet , would actually be the perfect companion piece, with its sweet sounds of summer barely registering over a whisper. But the absolute silence that A Quiet Place: Day One dwells in may be a necessary method of cracking down on the loud talkers, creaky seats, and loud munching that goes on in today’s theatrical environment. A lost battle today may mean a victorious war later. That's probably wishful thinking, though. Taking over the reins from previous writer/director/star John Krasinski, who was busy with IF , is Michael Sarnoski, who burst onto the independent scene in 2021 with the incredibly unique Nicolas Cage vehicle, Pig . As par for the course, Sarnoski finds himself leading a film with a budget 20x that of his previous one, a task that many before him have crumbled from. But the sophomore director, who also pens the screenplay (story credit shared with Krasinski), doesn’t fault under the pressure, finding a few paths to breathe life into this franchise, one that is further proving itself to be a one-trick pony. Those who have seen Pig will find it unsurprising that the best scene within this story of aliens and bloodshed comes relatively early on at a marionette show. A puppet blows up a balloon and dances around with it for a little while, Alexis Grapsas’ score twinkling as the stage light gives it a soft glow. It’s a scene that ranks relatively low in terms of significance, yet there’s something powerful about the stillness it creates just before fire starts raining down from the sky. From there, we pretty much go through the motions laid down by the previous two entities, as well as other creature features like Jurassic Park . Steven Spielberg’s 2005 remake of War of the Worlds came to mind a few times, with the fear of the unknown being just as spine-chilling as the ashy destruction. Sarnoski and his sound team make you see, or, in this case, hear, the world differently. The opening text states that the noise of New York City registers around 90 decibels at all times, which nearly equates to a constant scream. Everything that makes up that figure becomes a death sentence in this new apocalypse. A rip of a shirt or opening a briefcase too quickly is all that it takes to have the monsters descend the skyscrapers. For as well as they pull it off, this franchise still only pedals the same set piece for the monsters. It’s the one where the characters are walking quietly, someone accidentally knocks over a can or piece of glass, the monsters start chasing them, and then the characters sit in silence for a few moments until the monsters hear something else. We’ve seen it over a dozen times now, and the five to six times we experience it here are no different. While the story of Day One answers the “how” question of what happened to the world in the previous two entities, the characters within it answer the “why.” More specifically, they answer the question of why people try to exist in this world, why they’re clinging on when hell has taken over. Centering that is Lupita Nyong’o’s character Samira, who is terminally ill and already checked out on life. Nyong’o has already proved her masterful horror chops in Us a few years back, her facial expressions and body movements excellently developing the doppelganger premise. The minimalist dialogue here does her no harm, with her strengths as a performer being even more evident. The cat that accompanies her journey may as well be third billed just behind Joseph Quinn, who also puts in some good work. The world of A Quiet Place is not a place for dogs, that’s for sure. More Reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple January 13, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Rip January 16, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Dead Man's Wire January 14, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Chronology of Water January 9, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

Road House March 20, 2024 By: Button Hunter Friesen Remaking Road House for modern times doesn't sound like a good idea on paper, with immediate expectations slotting it next to the other misplaced-in-time remakes of Ghost in the Shell and Baywatch . There wasn’t exactly a compelling story to the 1989 original, just Patrick Swayze delivering cans of whoop ass on greasy goons with his black belt in karate. And for a film that made less money than you would think, its cultural footprint has persevered throughout the decades thanks to the funny title, cheesy concept, and, for kids closer to my generation, the frequent Family Guy parodies . Even with the setting being transplanted to the modern day, Elwood Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) is still a man stuck in the past. He has no phone, a clunker of a car, and simply drifts from town to town scraping by through low-end cage fights. For him, it’s harder to fight the rage inside than any opponent. He’s calm and composed, but there’s always a twinge of insanity ready to let loose. “You don’t want to know me” and “I’m not afraid of him, I’m afraid of what I’ll do,” he says a few times, with brief snapshots of his UFC past (all shot at an actual UFC event) explaining how he fell so far. Like the idea of remaking the film itself, the casting of Gyllenhaal to take over from Swayze is an odd choice. He’s an actor not exactly known for being relaxed, as evidenced by his previous work in Okja , Nightcrawler , and Velvet Buzzsaw . It’s perhaps a case of the chicken or the egg, with Gyllenhaal being a great piece of casting for this newer take on the character, or his involvement changing the tone. Either way, it works out, with Gyllenhaal’s grounded approach never taking away from the fun. Plus, he’s already had fighting experience with Southpaw , so the producers probably saved a nice chunk of change on training costs. Dalton is hired by Frankie (Jessica Williams) to be the bouncer/enforcer of her family bar called The Road House, just one of several hit-or-miss attempts at some tongue-in-cheek humor by writers Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry. It’s located on a beautiful beach in Florida, with the only problem being the infestation of bikers and roid ragers. It’s nothing Dalton can’t handle, with his laissez-faire attitude towards kicking the crap out of someone almost making it more disrespectful. None of these guys were worth his time, which leads him up the food chain toward the head of the richest crime family in the area, Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen). He’s got some dastardly plan and needs the bar taken out of commission by any means necessary, including kidnapping, murder, and explosions. The further the plot progresses, the less fun Road House becomes. It’s a bit of a bummer that the first fight where Dalton dismantles five bikers singlehandedly is by far the film’s best-set piece. Even if they are cartoonishly punchable, there is plenty of guilty pleasure in seeing some hooligans get their comeuppance. However, you can’t exactly fill a two-hour movie with your hero facing no resistance, so former UFC champion Conor McGregor has to be introduced as a bruising wildcard. McGregor won’t find himself with a lucrative acting career like former fighters Dwayne Johnson and Dave Bautista, but he fills his wildcard role enough here to be entertaining. Helming this bare-knuckle brawler is director Doug Liman, who helped revolutionize the action genre in the 2000s with The Bourne Identity and gave Tom Cruise another action vehicle outside of his usual Mission: Impossible films with Edge of Tomorrow . All that prowess quickly goes out the window the longer the fight scenes drag on, with questionable visual effects and camera movements overselling the brutality and undercutting the choreography. Once gasoline explosions and boat jousting get involved, things quickly go all the way overboard. Still, for as much as its faults are glaringly apparent, there’s nothing offensive about Road House . I guess that’s what you get when you do a remake of a movie that wasn’t that good to begin with and have it released exclusively on Prime Video. More Reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple January 13, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Rip January 16, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Dead Man's Wire January 14, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Chronology of Water January 9, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

The Killer October 27, 2023 By: Button Hunter Friesen The Killer is a descent into bloody madness told by a director in complete control of their craft. Every frame is perfectly lit, every cut perfectly placed and executed, and every piece of sound is perfectly engineered to rattle your bones. It’s a pulpy uncomplicated story about revenge being a dish best served cold. For anyone who enjoys the Hitman video game series and laments the two laughably bad movie adaptations, this is the answer to all your prayers. Grant, Jefferson, Malone, Cunningham, Madison, Kincaid. These are the names The Killer (Michael Fassbender) goes by as he travels the globe trading corpses for cash. Anonymity is the name of the game, along with a cold “I don’t give a fuck” attitude. But for all his self-described ruthlessness, The Killer is a master of discipline. “If you’re unable to endure boredom, then this line of work just isn’t for you” he narrates in the middle of his week-long stakeout of his victim’s apartment. He’s developed a rudimentary philosophy to get him through the doldrums of contract killing, one that involves yoga, breathing exercises, and an understanding of how people go about their daily lives. 168 hours of waiting have passed, replaced by the 10 seconds of action that will make or break the mission. The Killer raises his rifle, squares it on his target… and misses. He’s never missed before, and there’s no telling if another chance like this will ever come again. An uncompleted job doesn’t get you a reprimanding like any other, it gets you a bullet to the head. The predator is now the prey, but there’s still time for those tables to be turned back. The Killer must retrace his past, tying up all loose ends by whatever bloody means necessary. Director David Fincher reteams with his Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, and the results are just as morally grubby as they were almost thirty years ago. Contract killing has become a gig economy, with The Killer reserving his hideouts through Airbnb (well, not anymore as Superhosts have too many cameras), getting lifts to and from the airport through Uber, and ordering his supplies off Amazon. The Killer is a flawed intellectual, a loner who watched too many Paul Schrader or Nicolas Winding Refn films but never understood the full picture. The cracks in his code immediately begin to show once his perfect structure is disrupted. The only thing that can fill those voids is anxiety and uncertainty. Is that person tailing him? Is this seat on the plane too exposed? Does he look too suspicious? Even with this inner turmoil, The Killer is still extremely sharp and dangerous. Fincher perfectly engineers each of the six chapters this story is told in, flawlessly setting the stage in locations such as Paris, the Dominican Republic, New Orleans, New York, and Chicago. A slow-burn tension is felt throughout, much of it supplied by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ electronic score. Mank cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt shoots everything in a gleamingly cool color palette, and editor Kirk Baxter keeps things moving with propulsive pacing. It’s an incredibly satisfying cycle, climaxing with a terrifyingly brutal hand-to-hand encounter between The Killer and a much larger opponent. Michael Fassbender shows that he hasn’t lost a step after a four-year acting hiatus to go race cars. He’s often mute, maybe monotone when he’s at his chattiest. But he’s always compelling, creating a character that is both restrained to practicality and capable of committing acts of the utmost cruelty. It’s best that he often crosses paths with characters with a little more personality, such as Tilda Swinton’s rival in the same line of work, or Arliss Howard’s crypto billionaire client. The Killer is Fincher at his most surface level, playfully cutting loose from ambition and delivering his best film to date (yeah, I said it). Don’t expect to learn any life lessons, or have your perspective changed on an issue. Just sit back and be entertained. There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing a straightforward process being executed with pinpoint precision, and both our protagonist and Fincher accomplish their mission to outstanding results. More Reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple January 13, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Rip January 16, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Dead Man's Wire January 14, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Chronology of Water January 9, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

Mickey 17 March 7, 2025 By: Button Hunter Friesen It’s been nearly six years since South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, which, little to our knowledge at that moment, would be just the first of many victorious spots for the lauded social satire. The culmination of that journey would be at the Academy Awards, where the film made history by being the first foreign language feature to be awarded the prize for Best Motion Picture. Of course, with that much success comes the raising of the bar, and the inevitable questions of what’s next for a filmmaker who’s earned himself a blank check for whatever his heart desires. $120 million was the amount of cash that Warner Bros. plunked down to lure Bong back to the United States for this third English-language film, the first two being Snowpiercer and Okja , respectively. And while no follow-up to Parasite could possibly live up to the incredibly high standards placed upon it, Mickey 17 is an extreme disappointment no matter how you slice it. Between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s continuous efforts to commodify space, the stars we all share are beginning to lose their shimmer. The final frontier is now merely another capitalist hellscape to run away from your problems on Earth, which is exactly what Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) does after he gets in some deep water with a loan shark with an unhealthy obsession with dismembering the people who fall into his debt. With no special skills to differentiate him from the overcrowded employment lines, he signs up to be an “expendable,” where his memories and body schematics will be downloaded so that he can be reprinted/cloned whenever he dies. It’s only fitting that the most advanced technology that the human race has ever wielded is mostly used to more efficiently exploit the working man. The title comes from the fact that the iteration we become accustomed to is the seventeenth version of him, the previous sixteen dying in the name of “science” as the crew of his spaceship tries to colonize the icy planet Niflheim. Mark Ruffalo plays the ship’s commander, Kenneth Marshall, in one the laziest and most exhaustive Trump / corrupt egotistical politician impressions we’ve been inundated with over this past decade. Bong already reared his head around this territory with Tilda Swinton’s awkward corporate head honcho in Okja . These results are much more simplified, even down to the red hats that Marshall’s supporters don and his constant need for approval. Pattinson’s nasally narration is very much in “tell, don’t show” mode, rendering several scenes in need of the mute button. At the very least, it would allow for Jung Jae-il’s score and Darius Khondji’s cinematography to be more appreciated, the former reconfiguring the intense piano rhythms of Parasite into something a little more fluttery. There are so many ethical questions and dilemmas that Bong’s script, and adaptation of the Edward Ashton novel, could have investigated further or with more precision. Instead, everything is painted with the broadest brush possible, arming the satire with the same weight as a cold open from Saturday Night Live . Pattinson’s commitment to the role in all its eccentricities is what keeps the ship from capsizing sooner. That goes double when he gets preemptively reprinted for the eighteenth time, leaving everyone seeing double. Naomi Ackie plays his lover Nasha, although there really isn’t much to say about her. It’s one of the few times that the line “I don’t know what she sees in me,” can be shared by both the character and audience. There is one ingenious moment when they initially meet, and we don’t hear the conversation they share. All we see are their mouths moving, the gleeful expressions on their faces, and the joyous thoughts running through their heads as they realize they each found the person right for them. Bong has long held compassion for his characters, even if his view of humanity is never the rosiest. If only he shared some of that compassion for the audience’s intelligence for this go around. More Reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple January 13, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Rip January 16, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Dead Man's Wire January 14, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen The Chronology of Water January 9, 2026 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen