Thoughts on Project Hail Mary

    At the Alamo Drafthouse in Manhattan, I went with my friends to see Project Hail Mary, a 2026 sci-fi adventure film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, written by Drew Goddard, and based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Andy Weir. The film centers on Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a man who awakens from a coma on a spacecraft. The other two passengers died in their comas. He struggles with temporary amnesia and figuring out why he's on this spacecraft, and he slowly remembers as the film intercuts the present-day scenes with flashbacks scenes from 12 years prior, as he has been traveling for nearly 12 light years on the spacecraft Hail Mary. 

    Grace was a middle-school science teacher and a former molecular biologist, and there is news that the Sun is dimming due to a fictional microorganism called astrophage eating up the sun's energy, and that in thirty years, the Earth will have cooled 10 to 15 degrees, destroying food sources, plant life, and making humans and animals extinct. Grace is recruited by government agent Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) because of a paper he wrote in the past, and has been working with scientists from all over the world to develop a solution to save the sun. Grace figures out that astrophage, coinciding with the development of an infrared line from the Sun to Venus called the Petrova line, breeds on Venus via their carbon dioxide and energy from the Sun. The mission to Tau Ceti, the only undimmed main star, is a one way one, as the spacecraft only has enough fuel to get there, but can send probes back to Earth with the crew's findings to save the world.

    Grace wakes up on Hail Mary and gets his bearings, and he encounters an alien spacecraft, who is trying to communicate with him, sending him cannisters of materials. The alien spacecraft makes a tunnel walkway of xenon to allow Grace to enter, and he meets a spider-like alien with a rock-like body, who speaks by rubbing its limbs together, creating a musical speech, and Grace makes a computer translator program to be able to communicate more, with a voice (James Ortiz) to give the alien, named "Rocky," more of a human quality.

    

    It turns out that Rocky, from the star system 40 Eridani, is the sole survivor of a mission to stop the astrophage. Neither Rocky nor Grace can survive in each other's atmosphere, so Rocky enters the Hail Mary in a small, pressurized glass ball as a spacesuit, and the two of them work together to save each other's worlds from extinction, and develop a bond as friends and roommates.

    

    I really enjoyed this film a lot. At 156 minutes, it is long, and there were parts in the last third that I felt could have been cut down, where the story seemed like it was ending but kept going, so that part felt tedious. But I liked the mix of realistic science with humor, and Andy Weir, the novelist who wrote the Project Hail Mary book, also wrote The Martian, and there were similar feelings between the film adaptations, mainly with a man alone in space or on a planet, who has a biology background and uses his scientific knowledge and sense of humor to survive on his own and avoid losing his mind. Ryan Gosling has an easygoing charm as Grace and is fun to watch, and his relationship with Rocky (performed by Ortiz and several puppeteers as an animatronic robot) was funny and delightful, and got into real pathos as the story reached higher stakes. There are also funny ongoing gags of Grace wearing shirts with science puns on them, like a periodic table joke on one shirt, and the inspiration came from Val Kilmer's character in Real Science, who also wore a lot of funny pun shirts.

    I really liked Hüller as Eva Stratt, a no-nonsense East German woman who is frank and honest with Grace about the risks to Earth if a solution is not found, and believes in him even when he has self-doubt and just sees himself as a lowly science teacher and not a hero. She is wryly funny, and especially shines in a karaoke scene during a moment of levity and steals the film from Gosling in that moment. I really liked her a lot in Anatomy of a Fall, so I was happy to see her back again.

    Lionel Boyce, best known as part of the hip-hop collective Odd Future and as pastry chef Marcus on The Bear, delivers a strong supporting role as Carl, a government agent who acts as a security guard, who Grace takes a liking to and brings him along on his science experiments, including a fun moment of shopping on the government's expense account at a big box store and bowling down the aisles.

    I would recommend this film if you like science fiction comedies that mix realism in science with humor, and obviously if you liked The Martian.

Thoughts on Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.

    On Hulu, I watched the 2023 coming-of-age dramedy Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret., written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), based on the 1970 novel of the same name by Judy Blume. The film is set in 1970 and focuses on 11-year old Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson), who lives in New York City with her mom Barbara (Rachel McAdams) and Herb (Benny Safdie). Her parents tell her that they are moving from NYC to a New Jersey suburb, and Margaret is upset about leaving her friends and her life behind, and most importantly, her grandmother Sylvia (Kathy Bates). The family moves to the suburbs, and Margaret is immediately befriended by her neighbor and soon-to-be classmate Nancy Wheeler (Elle Graham), who shows up at the Simon's house already knowing the basic stats on Margaret and being like, "You're with me now." She invites her into her friend group with Gretchen Potter (Katherine Kupferer) and Janie Loomis (Amari Alexis Price). Nancy organizes the group to have a secret club where, according to Nancy, none of them can wear socks (leaving Margaret with blisters on her first day of school), they all have to wear a bra (in which three of them get a Gro-Bra training bra), and they have to keep a "Boy Book" of their school crushes, mainly admiring the same boy, Philip Leroy (Zackary Brooks). And the famous "we must, we must, we must increase our bust" chant with the arm pumping looks ridiculously funny when acted out than when reading it on the page.

    Margaret adjusts to her new school and her friends, trying to fit in with Nancy, even though Nancy encourages bullying of Laura Danker (Isol Young), a taller girl who developed earlier than the other girls, making up slut-shaming rumors about her. Margaret though is struggling more with her religious identity, as her mother is Christian and her father is Jewish, and she wasn't raised with either religion, her parents wanting her to choose when she is an adult. Her class is assigned a year-long research assignment, and based on Margaret's answers in a class questionnaire, Mr. Benedict (Echo Kellum) encourages her to choose religion as her research project. Margaret goes to temple with her grandmother on an NYC visit, much to Sylvia's joy, and she goes to church with Janie and her family.

    Meanwhile, Barbara is trying to adjust to suburban life, joining various PTA committees, though her activities keeps her away from her true passions of painting and teaching art. Herb tries to mow the lawn, but cuts his finger, so a neighborhood boy, Moose (Aidan Wotjak-Hissong) cuts the lawn. The parents are happy together, and there is a cute flirtatious moment on the lawn when Herb pretends to rev up the mower seductively to tease Barbara.

    The film spans over the school year, as Margaret experiences the high and lows of her adolescence, like crushes and peer pressure, and anxiously awaiting growing breasts and getting her period, not wanting to feel left behind in her friend group, especially when other girls get their period ahead of her. There is more grappling with her religious identity, and not wanting to disappoint her parents or grandmother over which religion to pick, and feeling stressed out by her internal struggles.

    I really liked this movie a lot. I read the book when I was around 11, and while it's not my favorite of Judy Blume's books (that would be Starring Sally J. Freeman As Herself, based on Judy Blume's childhood in the 1940s), it's memorable for a funny childhood memory of mine as a 1990s kid. I hadn't had my period yet, and I was reading the book and read the 1970s description of a sanitary pad attached to a belt, which clips onto the underwear, as that was the feminine hygiene product at the time before adhesive pads were invented. I was upset and went downstairs to my mom and told her about that, and whined, "I'm gonna have to wear a belt?!" My mom laughed and said, "It's not like that anymore." Later printings of the book did change that part to an adhesive pad, and the movie depicts it as an adhesive pad as well, even though that would have been anachronistic with the period setting of the movie.

    Abby Lee Fortson was wonderful as Margaret. She brought a lot of realism and sensitivity in her portrayal, making Margaret not perfect, a little messy (especially when she snaps at Laura Danker and goes along with Nancy's bullying, then immediately regrets it when Laura calls her out on her meanness), and overall a normal kid. Fortson had played Paul Rudd and Judy Greer's daughter in the first two Ant-Man movies, and was just cast as Velma in the latest Scooby-Doo project, so it'll be good to see how her career progresses.

    Elle Graham had a harder role to play with Nancy, of making her a Type-A leader with a controlling personality, who bullies another girl over being too tall and having boobs, yet isn't a monster or a horrible person, and it's a fine line to balance, and Graham is great in making Nancy feel like a normal kid as well. She is immature while is a natural leader, encourages her friends to talk about their periods and their crushes and their breasts, and is still a kid, like when she gets her period for the first time while out at a restaurant with her family and Margaret, and is embarrassed and is calling for her mom to help her. She really shines in this film with a more complex role to play.

    Rachel McAdams is great as always, playing a woman who is watching her daughter grow into puberty, not wanting her to grow up too fast. When they go bra shopping (and Barbara is hesitant, like "Do you think you really need one?") and Margaret tries on a bra and is like "I immediately want to take it off," Barbara goes, "Welcome to womanhood." Her parents disowned her because she married a Jewish man, and she and Herb wanted Margaret to make her own decisions about religion and not have it define her life or choices. 

    When Barbara is trying to fit in with the local moms, she is eager to join, but finds it tedious, like cutting out lots of cloth stars for a school dance to fill up the ceiling, or having to put on a fake smile for things she doesn't want to do. It is a relief for her that, at the end of the school year, when time comes to re-enroll in committee activities, she at first looks for an excuse before happily going, "I don't want to do it!" and driving off.

    I liked how the music had early 1970s songs without them being the obvious hits, or that the characters seemed more contemporary and not hitting the audience over the head with "This is the 70s!" in a cartoonish way. It's like when I watched The Wonder Years as a kid and didn't notice that the show was set in the 1960s and 1970s, because I wasn't noticing the costumes or period details, paying closer attention to the stories and characters, and that the themes about family and school and friends were still relatable today. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. had the same feeling, of a story about girlhood being the same regardless of the period details, and I really thought it was a wonderful film.

Thoughts on Get Low

    Last Sunday on Tubi, I watched Get Low, a 2009 drama directed by Aaron Schneider and co-written by Chris Provenzano, C. Gaby Mitchell, and Scott Seeke. The story is loosely based on a true story about Felix Bushaloo "Uncle Bush" Breazeale. The film stars Robert Duvall as Felix Bush, a man in 1930s Tennessee who has lived as a hermit in a cabin in the woods for 40 years, and the townspeople don't really know him, so they've spread rumors and stories about him for years, saying they've "heard" that he killed in cold blood, or that he's in league with the devil. One day, Felix comes into town in the local church, with a large roll of cash, and asks the preacher if he can have a funeral for himself, but while he's still alive, not after his death. The preacher refuses, finding it sacrilegious, but the local funeral home director Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) is facing financial troubles, and offers to arrange Felix's "living funeral." Felix wants to have the funeral to hear what everyone would say about him after he dies, and to hear what kind of stories they've been telling about him.

    As the funeral party is being planned, Frank's assistant Buddy (Lucas Black) is uncomfortable with the arrangements, feeling it isn't right, but goes along with Felix' wishes. He too finds Felix to be a mystery, and as others express skepticism over Felix' reasons for the party (one man [Scott Cooper] thinks that Felix wants to arrange everyone in one room for a mass shooting). Felix sweetens the deal, offering a $5 raffle with his property as the prize.

    Things get more complicated when an old story from Felix' past resurfaces, involving a local widow Mattie Darrow (Sissy Spacek), who was Felix' girlfriend 40 years prior in the 1890s, and her deceased sister, Mary Lee, who she accuses Felix of having been in love with and using Mattie to get to her. With a preacher friend Charlie Jackson (Bill Cobbs), Felix wants to use the funeral party not just to hear what others think of him, but also to tell the truth about something that happened decades prior, for which he feels immense guilt and built his cabin like a prison to sentence himself in all that time.

    It's a small film that feels personal and intimate, and like a folk tale that one would tell their children or grandchildren many years later, a story that would turn into a local legend. Robert Duvall was 79 at the time, and delivered one of his best performances late in his career, as this stubborn old man who secretly carries a lot of humanity in his heart. Bill Murray, Lucas Black, and Bill Cobbs were all good, but Sissy Spacek was fantastic, in a supporting role where she challenges Felix on his hardheadedness and makes him confront the past to get out of his self-exile. Spacek has always been such a naturalistic actor, with subtle performances in her senior years that can get taken for granted, and she was great in this film.

    I really liked Get Low. I had heard of it when it came out, and it got some critical acclaim, but didn't become a big mainstream hit. But with Duvall's recent passing at age 95, it's gotten some long overdue love, and I'm happy it's getting rediscovered nearly twenty years after its initial release.

Thoughts on Send Help

     Last week, I went to the Alamo Drafthouse in Lower Manhattan to see Send Help, a 2026 comedy thriller directed by Sam Raimi and co-written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift. The film stars Rachel McAdams as Linda Liddle, a meek but hard-working office drone who has been awaiting a promotion to vice president at her corporate job. Unfortunately, the president died, leaving his arrogant son Bradley (Dylan O'Brien) in his place, and he is immediately disgusted by Linda's nerdy looks and the specks of her tuna fish sandwich on her face, and wants to make his frat buddy, who has only worked at the company six months, vice president. He plans to have Linda transferred out to a dead-end position at a satellite office in Bangkok to get rid of her.

    Linda lives at home alone with her cockatoo, has tons of books about wilderness survival, and films an audition video to be on the next season of Survivor. She stands up to Bradley at work, about him taking back her promotion, and he invites her on a business trip with him and his other slimeball bro executives to Bangkok to finalize a corporate merger. On the way there, a storm causes the engine to fail and the plane comes apart, crashing by a remote island in the Gulf of Thailand. Linda and Bradley are the only survivors, and with Linda's survival knowledge, she immediately knows to collect rainwater, build shelter, tend to Bradley's injured leg, and hunt for food. When Bradley is recovering, he reverts to treating her like a subordinate, despite that they are now stranded on an island and are no longer in an office environment. Linda tests Bradley's attitude by leaving him alone for two days, and when he nearly dies of thirst, she gives him water and takes control.

    The film focuses on a power struggle between Linda and Bradley, as Linda, thrilled at being the one in charge and with control, avoids any potential rescue by search teams because she doesn't want to go back to office life with Bradley back in his CEO position humiliating her. Bradley resents that he is now dependent on Linda, and will try to outsmart her, but keep failing at it because he doesn't have any real-world survival skills from growing up rich and privileged. 

    The movie is really funny, both due to McAdams' gleeful performance as a woman getting revenge on her boss, who just may be more twisted than he realizes, and O'Brien's performance as a smarmy jerk who is reduced to being a sniveling whiner when bested. The movie has blood and gore moments, like when Linda kills a wild boar, blood spraying in her face as she stabs it, or when she vomits after eating poisonous food, her yellow puke looking like creamed corn.

    I really enjoyed this movie, mostly for McAdams, and for liking the thriller and comedy combination, the homages to Cast Away, Misery, and Swept Away, and the silliness of it all.

Thoughts on Double Happiness

     On Criterion, I watched the 1994 Canadian drama Double Happiness, written and directed by Mina Shum. The film starred Sandra Oh in one of her earliest screen performances (and for which she won a Genie Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role) as Jade Li, a Chinese-Canadian woman who lives at home with her traditional Chinese family, and is struggling with wanting to be an actress and a creative artist, while also wanting to please her parents, who want her to marry a Chinese man and uphold their values. Her older brother Winston has been disowned and lives in the States, and she fears disappointing her parents and facing the same fate.

    She switches between speaking English and Cantonese with her family, and is close with her younger sister Pearl (Frances You). Her family is concerned with putting on a good public persona to their friends, like when her father's (Stephen Chang) childhood friend Ah Hong (Donald Fong) comes to visit and the mother (Alannah Ong) makes her daughters wish him luck and a happy new year in rehearsed Cantonese unison. Jade's family sets her up on dates with the Chinese sons of their friends, including one, Andrew (Johnny Mah), who is secretly gay and just goes along with the dates once a year to appease his mother. For the dates, her family makes her dress up in pearls and an overly coiffed hairdo, to which her mom approvingly tells her that she looks like Connie Chung.

    The "double happiness" of the title is from Jade trying to live both her paths in life, as an aspiring actress and hanging out with her friend Lisa (Claudette Carracedo), and being in deference to her parents, who scold her for any mistake she makes and treat her like a child despite that she is a grown woman in her twenties. She wants to move out, but is afraid to confront her parents about it, not wanting to be cast out like Winston was.

    Through a chance meeting and brief hookup, she meets Mark (Callum Keith Rennie), a shy but cute nerd who had awkwardly flirted with her outside of a nightclub they were both denied entry to, and while Jade is hesitant to date him because he is white and her parents wouldn't approve, she still feels drawn to him, and they see each other casually, with her feeling torn between her desires for him and her duties towards her family. Their chemistry is really sweet and adorable, and their romance was one of my favorite parts of the movie.

    There's a lot of talk about a conflicting pressure to assimilate while still upholding her family's culture, like being expected to be fluent in English and Cantonese at the same time, and being held to Asian stereotypes when auditioning, or being told by an Asian woman that she's not really Chinese if she can't read Chinese in a script.

    I really liked this film a lot. I liked how it felt relatable to me in feeling family obligations, and wanting to be free to do things while not wanting to feel controlled by parental influence and being shamed for it. Sandra Oh was excellent in this film, and I especially liked the sequences when she is in her room practicing monologues and going into abstract worlds, with the colors and costumes changing, before one of her family members would be calling for her from downstairs and interrupting her inner world, it had a very dreamlike feel to it.

    There's an excellent sequence where Jade is escaping one of her dates (whose face is never shown, he's meant to be representative of the generic Chinese white collar men she is set up with by her parents) by running down the street, throwing off her coat and mussing up her Connie Chung hairdo, crying and literally breaking free while Sonic Youth's "Sugar Kane" plays, it's very emotional and thrilling to watch.

    The film will also have confessional sequences, done documentary film style, where the characters will talk to an unknown person, and there's a great scene where Alannah Ong as Jade's mother talks about being a child and joining in on the bullying of a mute woman, calling her "Dumb Dumb," then only after being a mother herself learning about the trauma that was inflicted on that woman that caused her to never speak again, and feeling shame for her ignorance and cruelty towards her.

    Some of the film score is by the Toronto-based band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, who are best known for doing the theme song to the TV show The Kids in the Hall.

    I really liked how the film is more about holding onto a sense of self and not giving up one's identity just to satisfy family expectations, as it can feel good in the short-term to appease what parents want but isn't good for someone's long-term mental health. The film is dated as a 1990s Canadian independent film, but still holds up a lot with its messages about family and identity and being a first generation child of immigrant parents.

Thoughts on Laggies

    I rewatched Laggies today, a 2014 film directed by Lynn Shelton and written by Andrea Seigel, and I liked it, but I couldn't suspend my disbelief that Sam Rockwell's dad character Craig would really let this random near-30 year old woman named Megan (Keira Knightley) stay in his house because she is friends with his teen daughter Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz) (which already came off as weird and questionable), buying her cover story of "waiting to move into her new apartment," and just being dumb enough to give her a pass because she's attractive. It felt really implausible to me, especially since Craig comes off more as a sarcastic cynic type, and is a lawyer, and should have seen the red flags come up more.

    Megan had been with her boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber) since high school, she's had the same friend group since then, and they're all 28 and Megan is going through a quarter life crisis, not having a real career and being stagnant in her life, so when Anthony proposes to her, she freaks and makes an excuse to go to a seminar for a week on nearby Orcas Island, and really by chance befriends Annika and her friends (including a pre-fame Kaitlyn Dever), uses the apartment excuse to lay low at her and Craig's house, and is operating under false pretenses while getting involved in their lives.

    I like the movie, mostly the lead performances, but the stretches that people will believe Megan's lies makes the story less believable to me.

    A funny aside: when I watched the movie years ago with the commentary on by the late director Lynn Shelton, she comments on a sexy moment where Sam Rockwell drops his umbrella and pulls Keira Knightley by her coat into a kiss, and Lynn goes, "And that's why Sam Rockwell gets paid the big bucks." Lynn Shelton passed away way too soon, she was a great talent in the indie film world.

Thoughts on Bright Star

   I had heard of Bright Star way back in 2009, Jane Campion's romantic period drama about the brief love affair between John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). It was so quiet and full of longing, set in 1818 Hampstead, England, where John Keats is a shy, quiet poet who is a penniless instructor, and Fanny Brawne is a outspoken flirt interested in fashion who comes from a middle class family, and they share a double house, living on different sides of it, and eventually fall in love, but can't be together because of his meager circumstances. As her mother says, of his reluctance to initially pursue her, "Mr. Keats knows he cannot like you, he has no living and no income." She pines for him when he goes to London to try to get work, waiting for his letters and is melodramatic in the period between receiving responses from him, acting like she will die of despair. When he returns, her mother is worried that she is growing too attached to him, wanting her to be available for more eligible suitors.

    I really liked a scene where they communicate with each other by rapping on the walls opposite their rooms, trying to listen to each other, it was really sexy in a hidden desires kind of way.

    I liked how it was a quiet courtship, how they kiss so softly with a lot of restrained emotion, and how delicate yet powerful Ben Whishaw's performance as Keats was. I liked Abbie Cornish's performance, how it was a little more broad because Fanny can afford to be more dramatic than John can, but still had a lovely soul to her characterization. I liked how they bonded over poetry, and how the film honored Keats' poetry and legacy while describing the beauty and intimacy of his relationship with Fanny.

Thoughts on Scarlet

    Scarlet (2025) was a gender-bent fantasy version of Hamlet, where the princess Scarlet, in late 16th century Denmark, tries to avenge the death of her father (the king killed by his brother to usurp the throne), only to be killed by her uncle and end up in the Land of the Dead, where people roam deserts and can still be killed in the afterlife, being turned into dust and nothingness. She still wants to avenge her father's death and kill her uncle, who is now in the afterlife along with his men and all the people of her kingdom, as centuries has passed, and she is joined by a contemporary paramedic who is in denial that he died, and she only has revenge on her mind and killing minions while he wants to heal people and not kill anyone.

    I really liked the animation, as there were some stunning shots, though the switch between 2D and 3D animation was a little jarring, it reminded me of watching Titan A.E. and the rocky switch with 2000s-era CGI mixed with 2D animation, and this movie came out last year.
I wasn't into the forced love interest with the guy, as I found him pretty dull, and she had been dead for centuries and still obsessed with killing her uncle, which made the afterlife seem more miserable if people could still die a second time there or be forced to just roam aimlessly.

    At one point, the guy plays a lute and is like, "Here's a song from the far future," and I started giggling in the theater, because I half-expected it to turn into a "anyway, here's 'Wonderwall'" meme or for him to play "Baby Got Back."

    The story was mostly about how she was letting vengeance consume her and that she had wasted her life plotting to kill her uncle with her fight training, only to die and still be obsessed with wanting revenge, and her having to learn how to let go.

    This was directed by Mamoru Hosoda, who also directed Belle in 2021, an anime film I had really liked that is more contemporary, where the main character is a teen girl who has a popular Internet avatar as an alter ego.

    I liked the movie, I don't hate it like the other reviews on Letterboxd do, but I just think it was really pretty and gorgeous to look at with an interesting fantasy version of Hamlet, but could have had better story and character development.

Thoughts on Peter Hujar's Day

   On Criterion, I watched a 2025 biographical drama titled Peter Hujar's Day, written and directed by Ira Sachs, based on the 2021 book of the same name by Linda Rosenkrantz. It's likely because of my own close ties to NYC, though I grew up in Long Island. But I'm 42, lived in NYC for twenty years, and now live in Jersey City but commute to Manhattan for work. So it's still always been very close to me.

    The film was taken from the transcript of a lost-to-time audio recording that writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) made while interviewing her friend, photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) on a December day in his downtown NYC apartment in 1974, asking him about all of his activities from the day before. Peter is a successful photographer whose work had been in The New York Times and The Village Voice, but is often broke and just getting by, chasing down people to get paid for his work, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and chain-smoking cigarettes in his apartment. He sits with Linda as he smokes and talks about tracking down Allen Ginsburg to photograph him for the Times, finding contrast between his chanting and Eastern religion vibes and then being crude about William S. Burroughs' proclivities for prep school boys in neckties; acting as the go-between for Susan Sontag and another artist friend; and making his way through the loose artsy bohemian world of friends and friends of friends. Linda just listens and doesn't judge and is very understanding and not surprised by anything.

    I really enjoyed this film a lot. I liked how Hall and Whishaw, two British actors, nailed this 1960s-1970s liberal intellectual NYC accent that I can't describe how it sounds, but is the kind of voice heard in 1970s Woody Allen movies. The language is dated in a 1960s book kind of way, like saying "we were making it on the couch" for sex. The film has this quiet cozy vibe to me, that I felt relaxed just watching two excellent actors play the kind of New Yorkers of a bygone era, that now really exists with the kind of elderly New Yorkers who have lived in their rent-controlled apartments for over 50 years and have tons of books in tall bookcases and a lot of old-school charm to them.

Thoughts on Hidden in the Fog

    On Criterion I watched Hidden in the Fog, a 1953 Swedish mystery noir film directed by Lars-Eric Kjellgren and co-written by Kjellgren, Vic Sunesson, and Barbro Alving, based on Sunesson's 1951 novel of the same name. The film starred Eva Henning as Lora, a woman who is on the run after shooting her abusive and unfaithful husband Walter (Georg Rydeberg), and she thinks she killed him by shooting him, and is wandering around the streets of Stockholm in a daze. She gets caught by the police, and learns that he had died by poisoning prior, and he was already dead when she shot him. The detective Kjell Myrman (Sven Linberg) is trying to figure out the murder mystery, with Lora as the prime suspect, and there is a lot of speculation among her friends and family on how her husband could have been poisoned.

    I liked this film, for the beautiful black and white cinematography by Gunnar Fischer (who also shot Ingmar Bergman films like Port of Call and The Devil's Eye), the allusions to Otto Preminger's 1944 film Laura (where one of the characters directly references it and compares her to the title heroine), and the intriguing murder mystery and flashbacks on piecing the story together. I really liked Dagmar Ebbesen as Lora's maid Vilma, who has more to do with the plot than one expects, and had funny asides as a character actor, as if she would be played by Thelma Ritter in the 1950s American equivalent of this film.

    This was included as part of the Criterion Channel's Nordic Noir selection, and this was really interesting to check out.

    

Thoughts on 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

    In January, I went to see 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a 2026 post-apocalyptic horror film directed by Nia DaCosta and written by Alex Garland. The film is a sequel to 2025's 28 Years Later, as part of the 28 Days Later film series, originally directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland. The films were produced back-to-back in 2025.

    I have only seen 28 Days Later, and have not seen 28 Weeks Later or 28 Years Later, so I don't feel like my review can be fully accurate of the series. But I knew the basic plot of 28 Years Later, which focuses on a family trying to survive in the post-apocalypse of the Rage Virus, an infectious virus which makes people act like rabid zombies. The Rage Virus had been successfully driven away from continental Europe, but was still active in the British Isles, leaving the countries in quarantine with few survivors. The story centered on the parents Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Isla (Jodie Comer), and their 12-year old son, Spike (Alfie Williams). Jamie and Spike hunt the Infected, and through the story, they meet Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a survivor who has created the Bone Temple, an ossuary he has constructed out of clean bones of both fallen survivors and the Infected, paying tribute to them in a respectful temple for them. Spike loses his mother to cancer and is separated from his father, and is picked up by a cult led by Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell), who are all dressed in blonde wigs and tracksuits to emulate Jimmy Saville, the late British TV host, whose sex offender crimes were discovered after his death in 2011.

    In 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Spike is forced to kill one of the cult members, who all go by the name Jimmy, in a death match as part of an initiation. Jimmy Crystal is charming but manipulative, and has no problem turning his followers against each other to prove their "loyalty," and is a Satanist, referring to Satan as "Old Nick." Spike, now renamed Jimmy, is horrified by being pushed to kill, but feels trapped and has no choice but to stay with the group for survival.

    Dr. Ian Kelson continues to build the Bone Temple, as a meditative ritual, paying tribute to humanity, and listens to Duran Duran records in his home, playing songs like "Girls on Film" and "Ordinary World," with pictures from his past life on the wall pre-apocalypse. One of the Infected, Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), who Dr. Kelson had sedated in the previous film with a morphine cocktail via blow dart, comes to visit him, becoming addicted to the morphine and finding calm and peace while sedated and sitting with Dr. Kelson. Over time, Dr. Kelson realizes that Samson is understanding that he is not a threat, and is coming of his own free will for the drugs to have peace, and that he may be finding his own humanity again. Samson grunts and makes sounds, but doesn't speak, but shows understanding, seeing Dr. Kelson as a trusted friend. But Dr. Kelson knows that his morphine supply will be running out in two weeks, and is testing to see whether he should euthanize Samson for his own well-being or if he can be cured of the Rage Virus.

    The film progresses with a lot of gore, as Jimmy Crystal leads his cult to murder people with knives, and Spike continually throws up at being sickened by the mayhem, with Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman), befriending him and trying to protect him while being honest about who they are. 

    It's a really interesting horror film that has a lot of violence, but makes room for character development, and I not only enjoyed the sympathetic performance of Fiennes and the sadistic performance of O'Connell, but I especially liked the performance by Lewis-Parry, a stuntman and martial artist who delivered a largely wordless performance with his physical acting as Samson, a giant of a man who, through being medicated by morphine, is learning to find himself as a person again after being consumed by the virus for years. He is also nude in several scenes in the film, and him wearing clothes again is part of him becoming a person and not a bloodthirsty creature.

    The climatic finale features a song that has been largely associated with Satan, but is used to expose the lies of Jimmy Crystal, as well as to protect the children who have been controlled by his evil influence. Dr. Kelson himself is an atheist, but still has faith in community, and is against the use of religion as a weapon by others. I give credit to my friend John Arminio, who covered these topics more deeply in his Letterboxd review of the film.

    I've been a fan of Nia DaCosta since her film Little Woods, and have enjoyed seeing how her success as a director, and as a Black female filmmaker, has risen over the years, with her work on the Candyman remake, The Marvels, Hedda, and this film. Her and Alex Garland brought a lot of care to this film, and combined the horror gore with empathetic looks at the human experience.

Thoughts on The Secret Agent

    On Monday, I went to the Village East Cinema to see The Secret Agent, a 2025 Brazilian political thriller written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. The film stars Wagner Moura as a former professor and widower named Armando Solimões living in Brazil in 1977 under a fascist state, who moves back to his hometown of Recife under the assumed name of Marcelo Alves, working in an identification card office and reconnecting with his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who is being raised by Armando's in-laws. He befriends other political dissidents while staying in an apartment building run by anarcho-communist Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), like Claudia (Hermila Guedes) and Angolan Civil War refugees Thereza Vitória (Isabel Zuaa) and Antonio (Licínio Januário). There is a two-faced cat, a Janus cat, who could be seen as representing Armando's duality between being himself and being Marcelo, or the cat's resilience in living in a tough environment. 

    The film opens with a darkly humorous sequence where Armando stops at a gas station, and sees a dead man's body with cardboard covering his face, about 20 feet away in the parking lot from the gas station. The gas station owner explains that he got shot and killed in an attempted robbery during the night, and that he called the police, but they're busy with Carnaval, so the body is just lying there. Stray dogs try to come at it, and the gas station owner shoos them away. Then cops show up, but aren't there for the body, but are investigating Armando's car, searching it for drugs or any kind of contraband. When they don't find anything, one asks Armando to make a donation to the police, like trying to extort money from him or as a bribe, and instead Armando says he spent his last dollars at the gas station, and gives them his cigarettes instead. It's the kind of world where the police can operate with corruption under a fascist system, and Armando is trying to survive in this crazy world, and knows that if not money, then cigarettes will buy them off for awhile.

    The film is broken up into chapters, and follows many side stories, like when the corrupt police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes) and his sons Sergio (Igor de Araújo) and Arlindo (Italo Martins) are called to investigate a severed human leg that has been found inside of a tiger shark. The leg makes news, and becomes the subject of absurdist stories meant to cover up actual crimes by the police state, like claiming the "hairy leg" kicked gay men who were out cruising at a public park at night, when in reality they were most likely being harassed and beaten by the police for being gay.

    Violence touches everyone's lives or is in the backdrop, like how a wrapped-up body in a car trunk is tossed over a bridge, and is supposedly a young woman who was murdered by her fiancé for being accepted into a scholarship program in Germany. Or when Chief Euclides, who has taken a liking to Armando, brings him along to see Hans (Udo Kier), a Jewish tailor who Euclides thinks was a Nazi, making him show his scars despite that everyone is visibly uncomfortable with Euclides' behavior, and Armando is annoyed by his stupidity and boorishness. Hans, in one of Udo Kier's final roles, yells at Euclides in German, knowing he can't understand the language, and has a menorah right by him, which Euclides doesn't notice out of his own ignorance.

    The film uses a cinema and popular 1970s films as a backdrop, where the Cinema São Luiz, where Armando's father-in-law Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) works as a projectionist. Jaws and The Omen play at the cinema, and both were blockbusters of the day, and Fernando is fascinated by Jaws and wants to see it, but Armando feels he's too young, knowing he gets scared just from the poster. And The Omen causes people to feel like they're possessed, having exaggerated reactions to watching a film about the devil in a predominantly Catholic society. The cinema is also where the journalist and political resistance activist Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) meets with Armando to tape her interview with him about why he's working as a political dissident and his past as a former professor.

    This film was really fascinating to watch, as a 1970s-set political thriller, and is timely with the current fascist state of the United States at this time, and seeing past uses of the resistance network with using notes and telegrams and pay phones (to avoid tapped phone lines) to share messages and meet in confidence. The film occasionally cuts to the present-day, where two history students are transcribing the digitized audiotapes of Elza's resistance network and researching newspaper archives, and it's an interesting way of connecting the past and present, including a scene where Elza is interviewing Armando and the theater audience downstairs is screaming at The Omen and the ones conducting the interview hear it, then cutting to one of the present-day history students, Flavia (Laura Lufési), hearing the screams but not understanding the context. As an archivist myself, I enjoyed watching it for the scenes of the present-day researchers doing their transcription work and piecing things together, as well as the period scenes with the analog way of working as resistance fighters.

    Wagner Moura is fantastic in this film, and deserves the accolades that he has received. I had only known him for his role as Pablo Escobar in the series Narcos ten years ago, so it's been fun to see him in a different role and outside of the Pablo look he had in portraying the notorious Colombian drug lord. I really enjoyed Tânia Maria as the 77-year old Dona Sebastiana, the funny and charming den mother of political dissidents, who hints at her past as an anarcho-communist in 1930s-1940s Italy, but won't tell further details of her life then, and helps activists live under assumed names and secure fake passports and find safety as a makeshift family. She was an excellent scene-stealer, and has only acted in a few films.

    There's a lot of fascinating details in this film, like how Armando is working at the identification card office in part to find the ID card of his late mother, because he wants physical proof that she existed as a person. Or how two men that are hired to kill Armando are so lazy that they outsource their hit job to a poor man, who takes obvious offense at being referred to as "like an animal." There are many musical needle drops, like Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now" or Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby," as well as Brazilian music, including an anachronistic song from 1986 in a scene.

    The film has a foot chase sequence in the finale that was absolutely fantastic and gripping to watch, and that I highly recommend seeing along with the rest of this great film.

Thoughts on The Ugly Stepsister

     On Hulu, I watched The Ugly Stepsister, a 2025 Norwegian black comedy/body horror film written and directed by Emilie Blichfeldt. The film is a take on the Cinderella fairy tale, told from the perspective of Cinderella's stepsister Elvira (Lea Myren), an average looking girl who is pitted against Cinderella's beauty, and is forced to undergo painful and archaic methods of plastic surgery to be seen as beautiful enough to win the Prince or any other rich man. Agnes' (later named Cinderella derisively) father Otto (Ralph Carlsson) marries Elvira's mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), but dies quickly afterwards, and each family thought the other had money, but they are broke, and Rebekka is spending money on finishing school for Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess) and Elvira, where the teacher favors the pretty girls, including Agnes, to be at the front of the class and sends Elvira to the back row with the "ugly" girls.

    Elvira is very romantic, and reads love tales supposedly written by Prince Julian, and dreams of being swept up by the Prince, and being made "beautiful" after her braces are taken off and that her nose has healed post-nose job, for which she wears a strap on her face as a bandage for the majority of the film. The nose job is just the doctor breaking her nose with a chisel, causing immeasurable pain to her. She has false eyelashes sewn onto her in a particularly gruesome sequence, and is advised to swallow tapeworm eggs to become thinner, which leaves her with a grumbling stomach sound periodically throughout the film, as a foreboding warning sound inside of her. 

    Elvira is routinely told by her mother and the headmistress that she isn't beautiful and needs to marry a rich man, and Elvira grows envious towards Agnes, whose natural beauty gives her more ease in the world, as well as more suitors, like a stable boy named Isak (Malte Myrenberg Gardinger) who she has a secret romance with. Agnes starts out a little haughty towards her stepfamily, but is otherwise a nice girl, and is forced into servitude by Rebekka, seeing her as competition for the Prince's affections. Agnes is also angry that Rebekka keeps spending money on material goods, and refuses to have a funeral or a burial for her late husband, so his body is rotting in a forgotten room in the home, with flies around him, and Agnes will visit him with flowers, only to be horrified by the sight of her father's decaying corpse.

    Elvira's younger sister Alma (Flo Fagerli) witnesses all of this pain and abuse that Elvira goes through, is horrified that Elvira ingested a tapeworm and is mutilating herself, and is hiding that she got her period and started bleeding, afraid that her mother too will put her through the same torture cycle to be a "woman" and pimped out to a man.

    The film takes the pain and bloodiness of the original fairy tale, like the lengths to which the stepsister will go to to fit the shoe after the Prince's ball, and is a commentary on the restrictive beauty standards of then and today, punishing girls for not fitting the beauty standards and shaming them for going through the painful efforts, and still not getting it as easy as those who are "naturally" beautiful. 

    I really loved how twisted this film was, taking the darker origins of the fairy tale, and creating a sympathetic character in the "ugly" stepsister, while not turning Agnes/Cinderella into the villain and showing how she was victimized too. The ending is at both bittersweet and heroic, as Elvira suffers for her quest for beauty and love, but finds safety with Alma to escape their mother's cruelness at the same time. It's a really fantastic film, and I heard of it through the YouTuber Yhara Zayd on her list of her favorite films of 2025.

Favorite Movies/Performances of 2025

I didn’t think about writing a “Favorite Movies of 2025” list because I didn’t really have much favorites. I watch movies a lot, but didn’t feel like I saw a lot of new stuff that I really loved or adored, so it’s a small list of liking movies or certain performances:

David Jonsson has been a rising talent and standout actor in movies like Rye Lane and Alien: Romulus, and I liked him a lot in The Long Walk. The movie is depressing to watch, but he holds the screen with a lot of ease and star power, and he and Cooper Hoffman had good friend chemistry together.

Rose Byrne was fantastic in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, in an incredibly tense and uncomfortable drama, and I’m happy she won a Golden Globe for her performance.

Sinners was an excellent film that combined a blues musical with vampires, and was an experience to watch in theaters.

She Rides Shotgun was a fantastic thriller featuring Taron Egerton and the young Ana Sophia Heger, and I was gripped into this film in the theater.

Sentimental Value was a stunning family drama centered on a Norwegian filmmaker (Stellan Skarsgard) and his estranged relationship with his daughters (Renate Reinsve, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), and I liked how layered and interesting it was.

While I was mixed on the storyline for The Testament of Ann Lee, I loved the dance choreography by Celia Rowlson-Hall, and the soprano singing by Amanda Seyfried. Those two elements made the film more memorable and stunning to me.

Jessie Buckley’s guttural screaming and moaning in childbirth and in grief in Hamnet was raw and palpable to my ears.

Austin Abrams’ performance in Weapons made a junkie homeless dirtbag character into an unexpected sympathetic hero, and being better at finding missing kids than the cops were. And Amy Madigan as Aunt Gladys the witch looked like 1970s Bette Davis and was captivating to watch as this weird character.

Sally Hawkins in Bring Her Back was incredible, in taking a character who was obviously disturbed and gaslighting people, speaking in a pleasant voice while being driven insane by grief to hurt others.

I liked how The Mastermind felt like a quiet take on a heist film with a 1970s-set story, with Josh O’Connor as a protagonist who ignores the social news of the day with protests and the Vietnam War, coasting through life, and his lack of awareness catching up with him.

Black Bag was a really tight spy film in 90 minutes with an excellent cast led by Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett, and just felt fascinating to me.

Mickey 17 went on for too long, but I did like watching Robert Pattinson play clones and put on affected weird voices and look like he was having fun with the roles.

Final Destination: Bloodlines was stupidly fun to watch, and had a touching and heartfelt sendoff for the late Tony Todd in one of his final roles, in a speech about enjoying life and accepting death.

Sister Midnight (technically from 2024, but in theaters last year) was a really fun, weird dark comedy centering on Radhika Apte's performance as a young Indian woman miserable in her arranged marriage and spiraling into a feral force.