Movies

I walked into "Red One" armed with precisely nothing but a minor hunch and perhaps a little hardened prejudice against movies that wear jingling bells on their sleeves. Christmas films—those syrupy retail rituals—usually march in like a mall Santa two cups deep, so forgive me for expecting a rerun of reindeer games. But director Jake Kasdan, of all people, produces something so deliciously unexpected, so giddy in its mash-up of action spectacle and Yuletide lunacy, that half an hour in I found myself grinning in the dark, my inner cynic in full retreat.

Is that a penis? No, really—is that Ralph Fiennes’s penis? I suppose we have to start there, because in Uberto Pasolini’s sepulchral take on the Odyssey, we’re given not just emotional bareness but the full-frontal variety—Ralph, exposed to the elements and the audience, and you do a little double-take in your seat. It’s the sort of unblushing exposure that might’ve stirred old Homer to put away his lyre and blink into the firelight. “They show you everything these days,” you can hear the gallery whisper—a groin-level “welcome home” that’s somehow more shocking than gods or monsters.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a small town, a crooked police force, an ex-Marine with more guts than common sense, and a rain barrel full of bad odds. But Jeremy Saulnier’s “Rebel Ridge” doesn’t give you the pleasure of seeing the expected bullet ballet. No—Saulnier is in his own, off-speed league. I went in fully bracing myself for a slow-burn revenge bloodbath in the “Blue Ruin” mold, but what Saulnier does here is cooler than that. Literally: cool as fuck.

If you thought the nadir of the franchise arrived with Rebel Moon – Part One, Zack Snyder’s kitchen-sink tribute to slow motion and empty spectacle, you are in for a fascinating descent. The Scargiver emerges as less a sequel than a dare—how low can the bar go? If the first film was a parade of hollow bombast, Part Two is the mop-up: a limp, shivering attempt to wring significance out of a narrative so lifeless, you have to check your own pulse to make sure it’s not catching.

Let me begin with a confession fit for the confessional booth aboard some recycled “Star Wars” battlecruiser: I thought Zack Snyder had already bottomed out with Army of the Dead, but Rebel Moon, bless its comic-book heart, is such a spectacular act of creative bankruptcy that it deserves a new wing in the mausoleum of derivative moviemaking. If Snyder’s ambition was to create the world’s loudest, longest Hot Topic commercial—set adrift in a galaxy where all ideas are borrowed and none are cherished—then he’s staged a minor coup.

Well, I settled into my seat for Alien: Romulus prepared for a ride that might soar or clunk—either way, I was ready to have my nerves worked over. You go to an Alien movie these days with more than just popcorn and a sense of dread; you come armed with a small arsenal of skepticism. Fede Álvarez, bless him, shoulders the Sisyphean task of giving the xenomorph mythos another go, determined to please both sweaty-palmed newcomers and the crusty acolytes who have studied Giger’s monsters as if they were cave paintings. What we get isn’t a catastrophe—far from it. But if your idea of greatness means trembling, wide-eyed awe, Romulus won’t have you seeing gods in the horror flicker. It’s good, yes—just not unforgettable.

Somewhere between the battered neon nostalgia of the original “Road House,” with its Patrick Swayze, Zen-and-fisticuffs swagger, and the pulse of high-gloss, 2024 bombast, I settled into my seat, half-expecting that singular jolt movies sometimes deliver—the kind that reminds you you’re watching a piece of pop detritus turned, against all odds, into folk art. There’s a peculiar ache that comes with these remakes: will the new kid on the block dare to dance like Swayze, or just step on my toes?