I recently had the opportunity to participate in an interview with the Native American author Sherman Alexie. We were discussing some of our favorite films, and he threw out MEKKO (2015) as a movie he really liked. I was surprised because it’s a movie I had never heard of, and I consider myself in the know when it comes to all things movie related. I checked and it’s streaming on Tubi, so I decided I would check it out for myself.
The story follows Mekko (Rod Rondeaux), a Native American who heads to Tulsa after serving nineteen years in prison for killing his cousin in an alcohol-fueled fight. When what’s left of his family turns their backs on him, Mekko finds himself living on the city’s streets with many other Indians. While he finds a few friends, he also comes across the predatory and murderous Bill (Zahn McClarnon). When Bill turns his focus Mekko’s way, he decides to take things into his own hands.
I’ll just say right off the bat that I think that the best thing about the film is the incredible performance by Rod Rondeaux in the title role. He doesn’t have a lot of credits to his name, but he’s absolutely perfect here. It doesn’t even feel like he’s acting. His face seems to carry a lifetime of regret, but also a hope that his hard-earned wisdom will eventually mean something positive for him and the people he cares about. Rondeaux plays Mekko with a dignity that feels completely out of place with the world he now finds himself in. It’s a masterful performance that would net him the Best Actor award at the American Indian Movie Award ceremony for 2015.
MEKKO was written and directed by Sterlin Harjo, who also created the series RESERVATION DOGS for FX that ran from 2021-2023. A citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, Harjo presents us with a grungy, realistic film that’s also full of old tribal stories and myths. One of the main reasons that Mekko decides that he must take care of the murderer Bill himself is due to his grandma’s stories about evil spirits and witches that sometime insert themselves into people’s lives. Harjo’s film treats these beliefs at face value, and based on what we’ve seen, it’s hard to argue with him.
I’ve been to Tulsa on a few occasions to watch the PGA Championship at the Southern Hills Golf Course. I’ve never seen the Tulsa that’s presented here. This Tulsa is dirty and extremely dangerous. Harjo used real locations and a lot of regular people from the local Native community, and that certainly adds to the authenticity of the story. As Mekko visits the homeless camps and soup kitchens, it just feels real. When Mekko takes on Bill (a truly frightening performance by Zahn McClarnon), it’s both a physical and spiritual reckoning that seems completely necessary.
MEKKO is definitely a slow burner of a film that’s rough around the edges, but it’s also an undeniably powerful film. It feels honest in a way that most movies don’t. It’s about a wounded, decent person who’s trying to live a better life, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it for days.
“This is not a war any more than there’s a war between men and maggots… This is an extermination.” — Harlan Ogilvy
When looking back at the vast filmography of Steven Spielberg, science fiction usually evokes a sense of sweeping wonder, starry-eyed optimism, or at the very least, a deeply felt humanism. Films like Close Encounters of the Third Kindand E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial taught generations to look at the stars with hope rather than dread. Even when things took a darker turn in Jurassic Park or the neon-drenched corridors of Minority Report, there remained a foundational thrill—a cinematic ride that ultimately leaves the audience exhilarated. However, his 2005 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic novel, War of the Worlds, stands as a radically different beast altogether. It is arguably the bleakest, most claustrophobic blockbuster Spielberg ever directed, operating less as an adventurous alien invasion epic and more as a raw, nerve-shredding analog for collective trauma. Emerging a mere four years after the collapse of the Twin Towers, the film strips away the romanticism of cosmic exploration and replaces it with a visceral, ground-level nightmare of sudden, inexplicable annihilation.
The brilliance of Spielberg’s approach, working alongside screenwriter David Koepp, lies in how intensely localized the narrative remains. Rather than tracking the invasion from the traditional perspective of military command centers, global leaders, or brilliant scientists, the audience is trapped inside the chaotic, deeply flawed perspective of Ray Ferrier, played with a brilliant, unheroic franticness by Tom Cruise. Ray is not a savior; he is a deadbeat, blue-collar crane operator living in a graying New Jersey suburb. He is the kind of father who doesn’t know his son’s school schedule and has an empty refrigerator when his ex-wife drops off their two children, Robbie and Rachel. By centering the apocalypse around a fractured, working-class American family, Spielberg roots the cosmic terror in a painful reality. The impending destruction of the planet mirrors the collapse of Ray’s domestic stability, forcing a man who can barely manage basic parental accountability to suddenly navigate the literal end of the world.
From a purely technical standpoint, the first act of War of the Worlds features some of the most masterful suspense and terror ever committed to celluloid, heavily leaning on a barrage of explicit 9/11 visual imagery. The sequence where the first Martian Tripod emerges from beneath a New Jersey intersection is a masterclass in modern cinematic dread, directly weaponizing the fresh, collective trauma of the post-9/11 American public. Spielberg eschews the clean, omniscient visual language of standard disaster cinema for an organic, chaotic documentary style, mirroring the sudden, disorienting informational and electronic blackout experienced by millions during the real-world attacks. The camera lingers on heavy, ominous storm clouds moving against the wind, the eerie crackle of localized lightning strikes, and the unsettling silence of a neighborhood stripped of electronic life. When the asphalt fractures and the colossal, three-legged war machine rises from the earth, the sound design hits the audience like a physical blow. The Tripod’s horn—a terrifying, mechanical foghorn groan—instantly triggers an ancient, mammalian fight-or-flight response. As the machine opens fire with its disintegration beams, turning nearby pedestrians into literal puffs of ash, the camera tracks Ray running for his life through a massive, rolling cloud of dust and debris. When Ray finally makes it back to his house, the ash of his vaporized neighbors covers his clothes and face, an unmistakable and deeply unsettling visual that explicitly echoes the horrific reality of the streets of Manhattan on September 11, 2001.
This deliberate invocation of post-9/11 anxiety is the thematic engine that drives the entire film. Spielberg does not hide these parallels; he highlights them with a devastating accuracy that makes the film difficult to watch even decades later. When the invasion begins, a terrified, screaming Rachel asks her father if it is “the terrorists,” a line that perfectly encapsulates the collective, reactionary psyche of the mid-2000s American consciousness, where any sudden, catastrophic violence was instantly filtered through the lens of domestic terrorism. The imagery of walls plastered with photocopied missing-persons flyers, crowds of refugees trudging down desolate highways with whatever belongings they can carry, and a derailed, blazing passenger train hurtling past an abandoned station all tap into a very specific, historical vulnerability. In Independence Day, an alien invasion was an opportunity for global unity and triumphant, cigar-chomping counter-offensives. In Spielberg’s hands, the invasion is an overwhelming, asymmetric slaughter that reduces the world’s most powerful military to a collection of burning tanks rolling over a ridge into an invisible abyss.
However, while the film masterfully handles the grand-scale terror of the invasion, it stumbles significantly when navigating its internal family dynamics, particularly regarding Ray’s son, Robbie, played by Justin Chatwin. I completely agree with the widespread criticism that Robbie is an intensely annoying, deeply self-destructive presence whose actions and decisions repeatedly defy basic human survival instincts. Throughout the crisis, his behavior goes beyond typical teenage rebellion and crosses into pure narrative absurdity. Instead of helping protect his traumatized, screaming younger sister, Robbie consistently sabotages his family’s safety to aggressively gawk at a hopeless war zone. His sudden, obsessive urge to join a military force that is clearly being pulverized by an unearthly power feels entirely unearned and maddening to watch. His character arc reaches a peak of irritation when he blindly runs over a burning ridge directly into a mechanical meat grinder, abandoning his family for a bizarre, suicidal patriotic impulse. This makes his miraculous survival at the end of the film a massive narrative misstep; having him casually show up at his grandparents’ pristine Boston home after witnessing a literal military massacre completely undermines the high-stakes realism Spielberg spent two hours building, turning what should have been a tragic consequence of his own foolishness into a cheap, unearned happy ending.
As the narrative progresses past the family friction, the film shifts its focus from external spectacle to the internal breakdown of human morality under the weight of existential terror. This transition is embodied by the mid-movie introduction of Harlan Ogilvy, played with an unsettling, unhinged intensity by Tim Robbins. Trapped in a dark basement while the Martians harvest the surrounding countryside, Ray and Ogilvy represent two radically different, yet entirely believable, reactions to trauma. Ogilvy is consumed by a vengeful, nihilistic madness, obsessed with digging tunnels and launching a futile, suicidal guerrilla war against an enemy that operates on a completely different evolutionary plane. Ray, conversely, is driven solely by a desperate, animalistic urge to protect his daughter. The sequence culminating in Ray’s decision to kill Ogilvy behind closed doors to keep him from alerting the aliens is one of the darkest thematic beats in Spielberg’s career. It forces the audience to confront a disturbing truth: the true horror of the apocalypse is not just what the monsters do to us, but what we are willing to do to each other to survive another hour.
The film’s visual palette, masterfully crafted by cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, reinforces this pervasive sense of rot and despair. Kamiński utilizes a heavily bleached, high-contrast aesthetic that drains the world of vibrant color, leaving behind a cold, metallic landscape dominated by sickly slates, deep shadows, and stark whites. This visual harshness reaches its zenith during the infamous “Red Weed” sequence. As the Tripods begin carpet-bombing the landscape with human blood to fertilize an invasive, crimson alien flora, the film transforms into a surrealist, gothic horror show. The Earth itself is literally being terraformed by the bodily fluids of the slaughtered, creating a grotesque, bleeding ecosystem that visually mirrors the internal rot of the surviving human populations. It is a sequence that feels closer to the cinematic nightmares of H.R. Giger than the traditional whimsy of a Spielbergian adventure.
Despite its immense strengths, War of the Worlds is frequently criticized for its final act, a critique that deserves a nuanced evaluation. The abrupt resolution—wherein the seemingly invincible Martians suddenly succumb to Earth’s microscopic bacteria—is lifted directly from H.G. Wells’ original 1898 text. While narratively faithful, its execution in a modern Hollywood blockbuster can feel jarring, functioning as a biological deus ex machina that robs the human protagonists of a traditional, heroic victory. Furthermore, Robbie’s unearned survival represents a sudden, almost desperate pivot back toward Spielberg’s traditional family-first sentimentality. This neat resolution feels somewhat unearned given the preceding two hours of unrelenting, uncompromising nihilism, momentarily fracturing the film’s gritty, documentary-like reality.
Yet, looking past these structural stumbles, the final voiceover adaptation of Wells’ text offers a profound philosophical punctuation mark to the nightmare. The realization that humanity has earned its right to survive on this planet not through military might or moral superiority, but through millions of years of evolutionary struggle alongside the tiniest microbes, recontextualizes the entire ordeal. It reminds the audience of our inherent fragility and the hubris of believing ourselves to be permanently secure in our modern, technological fortresses. Spielberg’s War of the Worlds remains an incredibly potent piece of mainstream filmmaking precisely because it refuses to comfort its audience for the majority of its runtime. It stands as a brilliant, terrifying time capsule of an era defined by sudden vulnerability, demonstrating that even the master of cinematic wonder could look into the abyss of the cosmos and see nothing but our own reflections looking back in sheer terror.
When we look back at the historic cinematic landscape of 1977, it is almost impossible not to view it through the lens of a seismic cultural shift. That was the year a young George Lucas unleashed Star Wars upon the collective consciousness, fundamentally reshaping the Hollywood studio system and redirecting the trajectory of science fiction toward space opera, galactic dogfights, and mythic hero journeys. Yet, just a few months later, Steven Spielberg quietly delivered his own counter-argument to the stars with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. While Lucas looked outward toward far-away galaxies, Spielberg looked upward from our own suburban backyards. The result remains one of the most singular, agonizingly beautiful, and intensely personal science fiction films ever made, a masterclass in atmospheric tension that manages to balance deep blue-collar anxieties with a profound, almost spiritual sense of cosmic wonder. Watching it today, stripped of the immediate historical noise of the late seventies, the film stands out not merely as a technical milestone of visual effects, but as a fascinatingly messy character study about the terrifying, disruptive nature of inspiration and obsession.
The story follows Roy Neary, a blue-collar electrician in Indiana who, during a late-night power outage, sees something inexplicable in the sky. He’s not alone—across the state, a young mother named Jillian Guiler also witnesses strange lights, and her toddler son Barry becomes eerily fascinated by them. What Roy and Jillian don’t know is that similar sightings are happening worldwide, from the Gobi Desert to the air traffic control towers of Indianapolis. The film then does something unusual: instead of cutting to a military briefing or a scientist’s whiteboard, it stays with Roy as his ordinary life starts to fracture. He becomes obsessed with a shape he can’t quite remember—a mountain, maybe, or a tower—that he begins sculpting out of mashed potatoes, shaving cream, and whatever else is at hand. His wife and kids, understandably, think he’s losing his mind. Jillian, meanwhile, faces a more immediate and terrifying version of the same mystery.
What’s remarkable is how Spielberg handles characterization. Roy isn’t a hero in any traditional sense. He’s a loud, slightly goofy family man who loves model trains and bad jokes. Richard Dreyfuss plays him with a permanent crease of confusion between his eyebrows, as if his brain is trying to process a frequency nobody else can hear. The film never explains why Roy is chosen or why the visions hit him so hard—it just shows the consequences: lost jobs, a crumbling marriage, a man who starts seeing his living room as a prison. Jillian, played with fierce tenderness by Melinda Dillon, is the emotional anchor. Where Roy’s obsession feels almost euphoric, Jillian’s is rooted in primal fear and love. She doesn’t want to meet the unknown; she wants her son back. The film wisely never pits them against each other. Instead, they become accidental allies, two people dragged toward the same inexplicable destination for very different reasons.
Then there’s the other side of the coin: the government. François Truffaut (one of the founders of the French New Wave film movement), in a wonderfully offbeat piece of casting, plays Claude Lacombe, a French scientist leading a secret U.N. team that’s been tracking the phenomena for years. We see them discover something astonishing in the Mongolian desert—a lost ship from World War II, returned without its crew, in pristine condition. Later, they find an entire tanker ship deposited in the Gobi, miles from any ocean. These scenes are brief but crucial, because they establish that whatever is happening has been happening for a long time. Lacombe and his team aren’t villains; they’re just as baffled as Roy, but with better funding. Their method of communication—a simple five-note musical phrase—becomes the film’s quiet heartbeat. Spielberg trusts you to understand that this isn’t a code or a weapon. It’s a greeting.
The film’s middle section is where most blockbusters would insert a chase or a battle. Instead, Close Encounters gives us a slow-burn portrait of obsession as a kind of grace. Roy drives his family crazy. Jillian chases rumors. Hundreds of other ordinary people—the film calls them the “paranoids”—start showing up at rural crossroads, drawn by the same psychic pull. Spielberg shoots these scenes with a documentary-like patience: a traffic jam of confused believers, a midnight roadblock, a man who just knows he has to go to Wyoming. You start to feel the pull yourself. By the time Roy finally understands what the mashed-potato mountain is—Devil’s Tower, a real volcanic plug in northeastern Wyoming—the movie has earned every ounce of that revelation. It’s not a twist. It’s a release.
The final forty minutes of Close Encounters are best experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible, so I’ll stay vague. What I will say is that Spielberg stages the arrival of the unknown as a religious event, not an invasion. There are no laser cannons, no ultimatums, no speeches about humanity’s destiny. Instead, there’s light and sound, a symphony of colored orbs and humming engines, and a sequence of hand gestures that communicates more than any dialogue could. The aliens, when they finally appear, are small and pale and oddly childlike—not scary, not angelic, just other. And a choice that Roy faces, involving whether to stay or go, lands with the weight of a moral question, not a happy ending. Spielberg doesn’t tell you if it’s right. He just shows you a man’s face, lit by unearthly glow, and leaves the rest to your own compass.
Technically, the film is a marvel of analog craft. The UFOs aren’t digital—they’re models, lights, and smoke, shot with such loving care that they feel tangible. Douglas Trumbull’s visual effects prioritize scale and mystery over menace. John Williams’s score, anchored by that five-note motif, does the emotional heavy lifting without ever feeling manipulative. And Spielberg’s direction is all about waiting—holding on a character’s face as they process something impossible, letting a shot of the night sky breathe for an extra five seconds. That patience is the film’s secret weapon. In an era of quick cuts and louder-is-better spectacle, Close Encounters dares you to sit in the dark and listen.
Does it hold up? Almost entirely, though with small caveats. The pacing is glacial by modern standards, and Roy’s family is written as shrill obstacles—Teri Garr does her best with a thankless role. Some viewers may find Roy’s eventual choices hard to forgive. But those complaints miss the point. Close Encounters isn’t about good fathers or responsible citizens. It’s about the ache of the ineffable—the feeling that something is out there, just past the treeline, and it knows your name. Spielberg made bigger hits, but he never made anything more personal. If you’ve never seen it, or haven’t since you were a kid, watch it in the dark. Turn your phone off. Let the tones wash over you. You might find yourself humming that five-note song for days. And honestly, that’s the whole point.
“We are gonna have sex in your car. It will happen again!” — Dirty Mike
Adam McKay’s The Other Guys feels like the moment a class clown who is secretly a genius finally snaps and decides to teach the entire school a lesson while making them laugh so hard they forget they’re being educated. Released in 2010, the film lands right in that sweet spot of McKay’s career where he was pivoting away from the pure, unhinged mania of Anchorman and Step Brothers and starting to smuggle razor-sharp satire into the multiplex under a mountain of stupidity. It is, without a doubt, one of the funniest movies of its decade, but calling it just a comedy feels like a disservice. It’s a buddy cop movie that hates the irresponsibility of buddy cop movies, a financial crisis explainer disguised as a screamo TLC tribute, and a showcase for two lead performances that should have spawned at least three sequels. If you’ve somehow managed to sleep on this one, it’s time to fix that.
The opening sequence is a masterclass in bait-and-switch. We are introduced to Danson and Highsmith, the city’s top cops, played with magnificent, self-serious swagger by Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson. They’re chasing down a minor misdemeanor in a way that destroys half of downtown Manhattan, culminating in them heroically jumping off a twenty-story building to land safely in some bushes. Except they don’t. They splatter. It’s a shocking, hilarious, and instantly iconic death scene that serves as McKay’s thesis statement: the action movie logic you’ve been fed for decades is a lethal fantasy. With the heroes dead, the spotlight shifts painfully to the guys who have to do the paperwork on their mangled corpses, forensic accountant Allen Gamble and hot-headed loose cannon Terry Hoitz. These two are, emphatically, the other guys, and when circumstances force them onto a case involving corporate financial fraud, they stumble their way toward something resembling heroism, occasionally despite themselves.
What separates The Other Guys from the pile of mediocre comedy-action hybrids that came before and after it is the chemistry between Ferrell and Wahlberg, which is genuinely one of the more unexpected comedic pairings of that era. Ferrell plays Gamble as a deeply strange man who has weaponized milquetoast passivity into a superpower. His complete, serene contentment with a life of spreadsheets, Grand Theft Auto grand larceny sprees where he obeys all traffic laws, and a suspiciously beautiful wife played by Eva Mendes is a hypnotic thing to watch. Ferrell dials down the bombast and delivers something wonderfully weird and controlled, a man who is simultaneously a complete dork and, as we later discover, a shockingly capable pimp named Gator. Wahlberg, meanwhile, is doing something genuinely interesting here. Terry Hoitz is a walking wound, a great cop reduced to a desk jockey and public mockery for the unforgivable sin of accidentally shooting Derek Jeter during the World Series. He’s angry, humorless, and convinced of his own greatness despite ample evidence to the contrary. Wahlberg plays him completely straight, which is the exact right call, because his deadpan bewilderment at Ferrell’s behavior, the way his voice cracks with desperate, shrill anger when trying to explain a normal scenario, ends up being funnier than almost anything else in the film. Their chemistry is a perfect storm of a guy who wants to live inside a peaceful spreadsheet and a guy who wants to set that spreadsheet on fire while learning to dance the sardine.
This is the kind of comedy where the supporting cast keeps piling on gloriously unhinged performances, which makes Ray Stevenson’s work as the heavy all the more valuable. As Roger Wesley, the corporate enforcer who does the violent bidding of Steve Coogan’s billionaire fraudster, Stevenson operates in a completely different register from everyone else. While Ferrell is weaponizing passive-aggressive politeness, Wahlberg is screaming about peacocks, and Michael Keaton is unconsciously quoting Waterfalls while running a police precinct, Stevenson remains a granite slab of menace. He doesn’t crack jokes, he doesn’t do double-takes, and he certainly doesn’t care about the absurdity swirling around him. There’s something almost old-fashioned about his screen presence here, a grim, heavy-lidded seriousness that makes him feel like he wandered in from a real crime thriller and simply refused to leave. It’s the kind of straight-man performance that doesn’t just anchor the chaos; it makes the chaos funnier by contrast. When he’s methodically hunting down loose ends while Ferrell and Wahlberg are bickering about whether a lion could beat a tuna in open ocean, the collision of tones is pure McKay alchemy.
The plot, such as it is, involves the duo stumbling onto a massive white-collar crime conspiracy led by a billionaire played with smarmy, cowardly glee by Steve Coogan. It’s here that McKay’s deeper ambitions start to peek through the absurdity. While Terry is desperate for a classic action-movie shootout and car chase, the investigation leads them to the Lendl Global offices, where the real villainy isn’t drug lords or terrorists but leveraged buyouts and pension fund looting. There’s a perfect running gag where they keep trying to get into the action, preparing for a massive gunfight against a team of mercenaries, only to find that the corrupt corporate security detail is made up of ex-cops just looking to quietly retire with their benefits. It is the funniest anti-climax, a deliberate denial of violence that reinforces the film’s core idea that the most dangerous criminals wear suits, not ski masks. The financial villain is a thinly veiled stand-in for the kind of Wall Street grift that was very much in the cultural conversation in 2010, just a couple of years after the financial crisis. McKay would later go much deeper on that territory with The Big Short, but the seeds of that interest are planted all over this film.
The comedy in The Other Guys operates on two distinct but equally brilliant levels. There is the surface-level absurdity, the kind that produces quotes like “I’m a peacock, you gotta let me fly!” and the quiet, steady domination of Gamble’s totemic Prius, which somehow survives a fireball helicopter crash without a scratch. The “aim for the bushes” jump, the lion versus tuna debate that Hoitz treats with theological gravity, and the wooden gun gifted to Gamble are all top-tier ridiculousness. Then there is the deeper, more surreal well of humor that feels distinctly McKay. The entire subplot of Gamble’s past as a college pimp named Gator is a work of deranged genius, a slow-motion, honey-dripped flashback that reveals a world of casual, elegant pimping that Ferrell plays with a straight face so absolute it circles back around to being terrifyingly cool. The relentless jokes about Gamble unknowingly marrying way out of his league, his genuine confusion over why people think Eva Mendes is attractive, is a running gag that beautifully plays on Ferrell’s ability to be completely oblivious to the reality surrounding him. Eva Mendes is admittedly underused, though the film at least has fun with the joke by leaning into Wahlberg’s incredulous reaction every time she appears, which never gets old.
Visually, the film has a blandly competent sheen that actually works in its favor. Unlike the frattish haze of Anchorman, here McKay is directing a movie that looks like a real cop film, which makes the eruptions of insanity even more jarring. The action sequences are staged with real competence. The car chases aren’t played as joke sequences; they’re genuinely well-staged, particularly the Prius chase midway through where Gamble’s calm, methodical driving commentary clashes with a panicking Hoitz. It’s legitimately exciting before it goes completely off the rails in the best way. McKay never lets the plot drag even when the jokes need room to breathe. By this point in his career he’d clearly figured out the right pace for this kind of thing, and it shows. The movie moves. The film also showcases Michael Keaton in a delightful supporting role as Captain Gene Mauch, a cop who unconsciously works a second job at Bed Bath & Beyond while peppering his police work with retail slogans. Keaton’s deadpan delivery of lines about TLC references and towel specials, only to shout the chorus of Waterfalls at a moment of high tension, is a thing of beauty. Every single one of his scenes is a gift. It’s a running joke that never explains itself, and it’s all the better for it.
Then there is the ending. For a film that spends nearly two hours being aggressively stupid-smart, the final moments make a radical pivot. As the bad guy is caught, the movie doesn’t just roll credits. It stops dead and turns into a miniature economics lecture. With animated infographics and hard statistics, McKay lays out exactly how Ponzi schemes, bailouts, and income inequality have shattered the American middle class, all while the Rage Against the Machine cover of Maggie’s Farm thrashes on the soundtrack. It’s a jarring, preachy, and completely unexpected move. On first viewing, it feels like the director violently smashing the emergency brake on the comedy train. But in hindsight, it’s the only honest way this movie could end. McKay isn’t just telling us that bank robbers are less dangerous than bankers; he’s stopping us from leaving the theater without understanding the scale of the theft. It doesn’t undermine the fun at all. If anything it adds a layer of purpose that makes the whole thing feel a little more substantial than your average cop spoof. It’s the moment the class clown pulls out a graph showing your student debt will cripple you for life, and somehow, it works because he’s been earning your trust with jokes for the previous hour and a half.
There’s something almost nostalgic about watching a comedy this confident in its own weirdness. The Other Guys arrived at an interesting moment for this kind of movie, when the mid-budget, R-rated studio comedy was still a viable commercial proposition. It made decent money even if it wasn’t a runaway smash, but more importantly, it trusts that you’re going to be on board for a scene where Ferrell and Wahlberg argue about whether they’d rather be a lion or a tuna, and it’s right to trust that. The criticisms are relatively minor. The movie is maybe fifteen minutes too long, and a subplot involving Wahlberg’s ballet background gets introduced and then somewhat dropped. The villain’s scheme, by design, isn’t particularly cinematic, and the film occasionally strains to make the stakes feel real. But these are the kinds of complaints you make about a movie you liked, not a movie you didn’t, and none of them meaningfully dent the overall experience.
More than a decade later, The Other Guys has aged into something of a classic, a revered staple of late-night cable and quotable group chats. It sits at a fascinating crossroads, holding onto the absurdist, quote-heavy DNA of McKay’s earlier work while laying the formal and thematic groundwork for what he would do next with The Big Short and Vice. It proves that the jump from Ron Burgundy to a film about the 2008 housing crisis wasn’t actually that far at all. He just needed Wahlberg to yell a little bit, Ferrell to explain why a lion would still beat a tuna, even in open ocean, and Stevenson to stand in the middle of it all looking like he genuinely wants to murder everyone in the room. Whether you come for the laughs, the surprisingly competent action, or Michael Keaton mumbling TLC lyrics under his breath, you’re going to find something to love. Absolutely worth your time.
“The thing that’s always worried me about being one of the few is the way we keep on getting fewer.” — Flight Officer David Campbell
You could be forgiven for thinking that a three-hour black-and-white war epic from 1962 about the D-Day landings might feel like homework. The Longest Day sounds exactly like the kind of movie your history buff uncle would insist you watch, and you’d brace yourself for stiff acting, dated effects, and a flag-waving tone that hasn’t aged well. But here’s the surprise: this thing still cooks. It’s massive, messy in the best way, and surprisingly modern in its storytelling. Directed by a quartet of filmmakers—Ken Annakin for the British sequences, Andrew Marton for the Americans, Bernhard Wicki for the Germans, and with uncredited help from John Wayne’s own ego (more on that later)—The Longest Day isn’t one movie. It’s five or six movies crammed into a single sprawling canvas, and somehow that chaotic energy works perfectly for a story about the chaos of June 6, 1944.
First, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: the cast. It’s absurd. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Rod Steiger, Robert Wagner, Curt Jürgens, and a young Gert Fröbe (the future Goldfinger) are just the headliners. There are about forty other recognizable faces popping up for two minutes of screen time. You half expect a narrator to say “and that guy from that thing.” But here’s the trick: The Longest Day uses star power not as distraction but as shorthand. When you see John Wayne playing Lt. Col. Benjamin Vandervoort, you don’t need a backstory. You just know he’s the tough, unkillable leader. When you see Henry Fonda as Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., you read quiet dignity and grit. The movie trusts that you’ll fill in the blanks, which allows it to jump between American, British, French, and German perspectives without pausing for emotional handholding. That’s a bold gamble, and it mostly pays off, though Wayne’s scenes are a prime example of the film’s one real weakness: occasionally, it lets the star overpower the story. His Vandervoort breaks his ankle jumping into Normandy and still leads his men—cool story, historically accurate—but Wayne plays it with that trademark swagger that feels more Rio Bravo than WWII. It doesn’t ruin the film, but it does remind you you’re watching a movie star, not a soldier.
Where The Longest Day truly earns its reputation is in its structure. The film opens with a ground-level view of the German defenders—foggy, tired, complacent. Rommel (Curt Jürgens) is home for his wife’s birthday. Junior officers are skeptical of the “invasion threat.” Then we cut to the Allied side, from Eisenhower’s agonized “go” decision to the paratroopers floating down into French nightmares. The film refuses to pick a hero. It bounces between a German machine-gunner mowing down Americans on Omaha Beach and a French Resistance fighter getting captured and executed. There’s no swelling music to tell you who to root for—the score by Maurice Jarre is often tense, percussive, or eerily quiet. That evenhandedness is shocking for an early-60s war film. The Germans aren’t cackling villains. They’re professionals, some cynical, some naive, all trapped in a bad situation. One scene shows a German officer calmly reporting the invasion to higher command while another weeps because his men have no air support. You don’t sympathize with them exactly, but you understand them. That’s rare for any war movie, let alone one starring John Wayne.
The set pieces remain jaw-dropping. Because this was made before CGI, every paratrooper you see actually jumped (with stuntmen and low altitudes). Every landing craft ramp dropping on Omaha Beach is filled with real extras who had to swim ashore in cold water. The famous shot of a lone French commando running across a bridge under fire? That’s a real explosion, real bullets (blanks, but still). The production employed thousands of military advisors and actual veterans as extras. You can feel that authenticity in the grain of the film. When American soldiers fumble with wet ammunition or a British glider crash-lands through a fence, it’s not slick Hollywood heroism. It’s clumsy, loud, and terrifying. The movie’s most quoted line—“The greatest thing about the greatest generation is they didn’t know they were the greatest”—isn’t in the film, but the spirit is everywhere. These guys aren’t quoting Shakespeare. They’re vomiting from seasickness, losing their gear, and crying for their mothers. Then they get up and climb a cliff. That contrast is what makes The Longest Day so effective: it’s a blockbuster that respects the small, undignified human moments.
If the film has a flaw beyond occasional star vanity, it’s pacing. The first hour is deliberately slow—building tension through radar stations, weather reports, and a French priest’s bicycle ride. That might bore viewers raised on Saving Private Ryan’s opening twenty minutes. But hang with it, because when the invasion starts, the deliberate pace pays off. You’ve been inside the German bunkers, heard their debates, seen their confidence. So when paratroopers land behind their lines with toy clickers (the actual “cricket” device from history), every crack of a twig feels tense. The other flaw is the film’s treatment of the French Resistance and civilians. They get a few noble moments—a girl running through gunfire to deliver a message—but overall, the French are sidelined. The movie is fundamentally Anglo-American, with German scenes as the “other” perspective. That’s honest to the command structure of D-Day, but it does mean the country being liberated mostly watches from the margins.
Still, The Longest Day achieves something that most war epics don’t: it’s a genuine ensemble piece without a single protagonist, and it never loses its moral clarity. There’s a scene where a German colonel (the wonderful Werner Hinz) looks at an American prisoner and says, “We fight for a monster. You fight for your homes.” That’s the whole movie in one line. It doesn’t demonize the Germans as evil—it shows them as humans who made terrible choices and are now paying for them. And it doesn’t sanctify the Allies—it shows them as scared kids with a just cause. The final image of the film is a lingering shot of the beach, littered with bodies and wreckage, as a narrator tells you the exact number of casualties on both sides. No music. No kiss. No flag. Just the silent aftermath. For 1962, that’s audacious. For today, it’s heartbreaking.
So should you watch The Longest Day? Yes, but not as a history lesson. Watch it as a time capsule of how we used to make movies: with real explosions, real extras, and a willingness to let a story breathe across three hours without a superhero or a snappy one-liner. It’s old-fashioned, sure. Some of the acting is stagey, and the black-and-white photography might feel like a relic. But once the landing craft doors drop and the bullets start kicking up water, you’ll forget the runtime. It’s not Saving Private Ryan’s visceral nightmare, and it’s not Band of Brothers’ intimate character study. It’s a reporter’s notebook of a film—raw, sprawling, and full of names you’ll never remember but faces you won’t forget. For a movie that’s over sixty years old, The Longest Day still has legs. And for a story about the longest day, it earns every single minute.
Mama’s Little Murderer opens with twenty-something Anthony (Isaac Kragten) being abducted and taken, with a bag over his head, to a random wooded location. Uh-oh, looks like Anthony is in trouble! Suddenly, we flash back to Anthony getting suspended from college because of his fearsome tempter. Then, a few weeks later, Anthony shows up at home where he is upset to discover that his mother, Constance (Sara Canning), is living with her boyfriend, Leo (Ian Kilburn). Anthony is jealous and goes to extremes to try to break up Constance and Leo.
Because of the title, I assumed that this film would be about a mom discovering that her son is a murderer. I also thought that the son would be much younger than he turned out to be. You don’t really refer to a twenty-year old as being “mama’s little anything.” Due to the title, I was expecting this to be a version of The Bad Seed. Instead, it just became a film about a selfish and rather annoying college student who couldn’t accept the fact that his mom was moving on with her life. Anthony went to extremes to try to break up Leo and his mom but, and please forgive the spoiler, he never murdered anyone.
While we’re watching Anthony act like a loser in the past, we’re also watching Constance and Leo trying to deal with him being kidnapped in the present. Now, I will say that there was some suspense as to whether or not Anthony was in on the kidnapping. Or at least, there was initially. But it soon became clear that, while Anthony was guilty of being a very bad son, he was not guilty of setting up his own kidnapping. Indeed, the kidnapping had very little do with his efforts to break up his mother and Leo.
As I watched this movie, I found myself thinking about how much I hated The King of Staten Island. That was the film that featured Pete Davidson as an annoying little jerk who got mad because his mother (Marisa Tomei) was dating a fireman (Bill Burr). My main issue with that film was that everyone seemed to be way too forgiving of Davidson’s character. The same thing happens here. Anthony does some terrible things. He doesn’t even tell his mom the truth about what happened at the college. But, when all of his lies and his schemes are revealed, he just apologizes and everyone’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s cool.” Whereas, in reality, they should have kicked him out of the house and had him committed somewhere.
(Needless to say, it’s never a good sign when a film makes you think about another film that you disliked.)
This was essentially two films in one. One film was about a mentally unstable son. The other film was a standard kidnapping film. Unfortunately, the two films didn’t really go together and neither one felt fully developed. It’s a shame because Sara Canning was likable as Constance and you really did hope that she would find happiness with Leo. It was hard not to feel that both Constance and Leo deserved better than having to deal with Anthony. They should have let the kidnappers keep him.
As a Texan who loves movie, I have to say that 2025 will always be a special year for me. 2025 was the year that Richard Linklater, the godfather of modern Texas filmmaking, was responsible for directing two of the best films of the year.
Blue Moon opens with famed American lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) collapsing in an alley and cursing under his breath as he dies. The film then flashes back a few weeks to Hart arriving at Sardi’s and waiting for the crowd to arrive from the Broadway premiere of Oklahoma! Hart is dismissive of Oklahoma!, largely because it’s the product of a collaboration between his former partner, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). Hart dismisses it as being simplistic, a crowd pleaser with no depth. But as Hart speaks, it’s easy to see that his disdain has more to do with his own hurt feelings than the actual show.
(That said, he’s still right about Oklahoma!)
Hart talks. He talks a lot. Perhaps the simplest way to describe Blue Moon would be to say that it’s a film about one man who won’t stop talking to the people around him. Bobby Cannavale plays the friendly bartender who has obviously heard all of Hart’s stories before. Patrick Kennedy (not the former Congressman) plays author E.B. White, who politely listens as Hart pours his heart out and takes note when Hart talks about a mouse named Stuart. Margaret Qualley plays Elizabeth Weiland, a twenty year-old acting student who Hart feels might be the love of his life despite the fact it soon becomes obvious that Elizabeth is smitten with a student her own age and that she views Hart as being just a potential mentor. Hart is the type who will talk nonstop, even if no one is actually listening. The only time that Hart stop speaking is when he’s alone with Elizabeth.
Blue Moon largely plays out in real time. It’s essentially a theatrical piece, with Ethan Hawke delivering what amounts to a monologue in which he portrays Lorenz Hart as being witty, self-destructive, and ultimately painfully lonely. Everyone he talks to appreciates his talent but it’s obvious that they’ve had their fill of his addictions and his fragile ego. Even when Hart is at his most vulnerable, it’s obvious that he’s burned too many bridges to ever make it back to where he once was.
Hawke gives a wonderful performance as Hart, playing him as being a natural performer. Like all great actors, Hawke is willing to be annoying. Hart can be witty but he can also be corrosive. There’s a mean-streak behind some of his comments But your heart still breaks for him when he begs Rodgers to collaborate on a new show or when he talks about the people from his past who loved him but “not in that way.” The film definitely has a stagey feel to it but, as a director, Linklater has the confidence to allow his actors to truly dig into their characters. The end result is a rather touching movie about a talented man who could not get out of his own way.
In 2025, Linklater also gave us Nouvelle Vague, a French-language film about the early days of the French New Wave. Featuring gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, Nouvelle Vague follows Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) as he directs Breathlessand changes cinema forever. Aubry Dullin plays Jean-Paul Belmondo while Zoey Deutch plays Jean Seberg. Nouvelle Vague is a both a tribute to and an homage to the French New Wave. It’s also a film about the joy of creation and the excitement of working on a film. Nouvelle Vague may be about the shooting of Breathless but it’s also Linklater’s Day For Night.
It’s a fun movie to watch, especially if you know about the history of the French New Wave. (This film helpfully includes title cards to let us know who is who. Everyone from Roberto Rossellini to Francois Truffaut to Agnes Varda to Claude Chabrol and Jean Cocteau makes an appearance.) If Blue Moon was about the tendency towards self-destruction that haunts so many artists, Nouvelle Vague is a celebration of creativity, cinematic revolution, and being young and idealistic enough to break all of the established rules without a second thought. Linklater keeps the story moving and he directs with a clear eye for detail. Zoey Deutch is perfect as Seberg, playing her as a Hollywood survivor who is alternately thrilled and annoyed with Godard’s unorthodox style of directing.
I have to admit that I did get a little bit sad as I watched the movie. In real life, Seberg committed suicide in 1979 and Godard followed over forty years later. While Godard and Seberg both made good films after Breathless, none of them were quite as transformative as their one collaboration. No other director seemed to understand Seberg’s unique persona quite as well as Godard did. Godard, meanwhile, fell into the trap of placing ideology before creativity. At least Jean-Paul Belmondo seemed to go on to have a happy life.
Blue Moon received Oscar nominations for Ethan Hawke and its screenplay. Nouvelle Vague was ignored by the Academy but Richard Linklater did become the first Texan to win the Cesar Award for Best Director and for that, I certainly applaud him. Getting the French to honor someone from Texas? That takes talent!
Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague, two of the best films of 2025, can currently be found on Netflix.
Taking place in a field in Saugerties, New York, Woodstock ’94 opened on August 12 and it ended two days later. Officially, it was held to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original Woodstock and it was produced and promoted largely by the same people who were behind the original festival. They were hoping to actually make some money this time but that plan failed when the fence surrounding the concert area was torn down by people who wanted to see the bands and hear the music without having to pay an exorbitant amount of money for tickets. In all, 164,000 tickets were sold for Woodstock ’94 but it’s estimated that 350,000 attended. To be honest, that sounds like a good example of the Woodstock spirit to me. The people in charge of the festival disagreed, which is what led to the disaster that was Woodstock ’99.
Woodstock ’94 tends to be overlooked, precisely because it was neither the spontaneous celebration of the first Woodstock nor the epic trainwreck of the third Woodstock. Instead, the second Woodstock was a largely peaceful festival that featured a good mix of older and, at the time, newer acts. The original Woodstock featured open love and the third Woodstock featured random acts of arson. The second Woodstock, on the other hand, featured a lot of rain. Apparently, Green Day got pelted with mud. Maybe a time traveler went back to 1994 and told everyone about American Idiot before the band started playing. It makes sense if you think about it.
The first Woodstock lives forever as an epic documentary. The third Woodstock has inspired at least two docuseries, both of which examine the festival with the grim weariness of a true crime recreation. Earlier today, I discovered that the second Woodstock actually was filmed as well, though apparently Bruce Gowers’s Woodstock ’94 was never released in theaters and instead went straight to video. It’s a sign of how forgotten Woodstock ’94 is that the film has never even been released on DVD or Blu-ray. That said, after I learned of the film’s existence, I really did want to see it. (I’m a completist at heart.) I discovered that, fortunately, it’s been uploaded to YouTube.
From the start, Woodstock ’94 sets out to duplicate the style of the first Woodstock. There’s plenty of split screens. We open with people working hard to get the festival grounds ready. There are interviews with concert goers. There’s an interview with a guy selling food. We get a few random announcements from the stage. There’s a hint of nudity, though nowhere near as much as in the first film. Probably the funniest moment in the documentary is when we see a sign telling us that a certain area has been reserved for those wanting to watch the concert nude. During the first Woodstock, the nudity was spontaneous. For the second one, it was prepared for. The main thing that I noticed was how pleasant everyone seemed to be. There was none of the anger that defined Woodstock ’99. There was none of the bad brown acid that inspired so many warnings at the first Woodstock. Instead, everyone appeared to be having a good time. Even with Green Day getting pelted with mud, the Woodstock ’94 audience appeared to be rather mild-mannered. Most of them seemed like they probably play golf now.
The majority of the documentary is devoted to the music. We see tightly edited performances from, amongst others, Bob Dylan, Sheryl Crow, Aerosmith, Crosby Still Nash & Young, Nine Inch Nails, Metallica, The Cranberries, Green Day (though we don’t really get to see the incident with the mud, which is a shame), and Primus. The festival had a good lineup. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are a bit on the dull side but Primus more than makes up for it. My only real complaint is that we only get to hear one song from each featured group.
Woodstock ’94 was surprisingly pleasant. It’s too bad that, five years later, the whole idea of Woodstock fell apart.
This Lifetime film has a title that makes it sound like it should be one of those British murder mysteries, set in the 1920s and featuring a Scotland Yard inspector limping around a mansion while trying to figure out who killed the notorious ne’er-do-well, Freddy Gibbs. (The Inspector would limp because of the wound he received while fighting in the Great War.) Was it the maid? Was it the groundskeeper? Was it the flighty flapper or the grand dame with the mysterious past? Or was the murderer the shadowy visitor from America, the one who is rumored to be connected to bootleggers in Toronto. Fear not! Stanley of the Yard is on the case!
Where was I? Oh yeah, I was creating a different movie in my head. Anyway, let’s talk about the movie that I actually watched….
Andrea Gibbs (Candice Lidstone) is visiting her son, Ethan (Cameron Brodeur). Ethan is a somewhat nerdy college student who is rooming with a platonic female friend who he is obviously in love with. Andrea can tell that Ethan has been friend zoned and sweetly asks his roommate to let him down gently. Ethan’s roommate later ends up dead at a dinner party that is attended by Ethan and Andrea. The dinner party’s host is a psychology professor, Alan Jackson (Mark Day). Jackson posts his fascistic lectures online and he has a loyal following of all-male students. Gee, can you guess who was actually behind the murder?
(Last summer, Erin and I watched several episodes of an old show that featured Jim Hutton as Ellery Queen. We loved it whenever Hutton would suddenly look at the camera and say, “Well, I’ve figured this one out! Have you!?” I have to admit that usually, I had not. Erin was much better at figuring out who the murderer was than I was. But, in the case of this film, I think Ellery probably would have looked straight at the camera before the murder even happened.)
There’s nothing particularly subtle about Death At The Dinner Party. The film’s portrayal of dangerous, right-wing college professors gives the whole thing a dated feel, as if it should have aired ten years earlier than it did. The film could have just as easily have been called Murder On The Intellectual Dark Web or Death At Evergreen College. Today, I imagine that members of the angry dishrag brigade are a more realistic danger than a fight club of psych majors. But the lack of subtlety and even the dated premise give this film a certain charm. It’s over-the-top and it embraces the melodrama, just as every Lifetime film should.
Though she only appears to be a few years older than the actor playing her son, Candice Lidstone does a good job playing the mother who is rightly concerned about what her child is learning in college. Indeed, the mother-child relationship was this film’s secret weapon. When I was in college, I never would have had the courage to invite my mom to a dinner party with any of my professors. Then again, at my college, dinner with a professor usually meant a lot more alcohol and definitely a lot more weed. However, there was also significantly less murder so everything evened out in the end.
Red Sonja is one of those films that was in development forever.
In 2008, Robert Rodriguez was rumored to be planning to direct a Red Sonja film with Rose McGowan in the title role. Then, in 2012, it was Simon West who was being mentioned as the film’s director. In 2018, Bryan Singer announced that he would be directing but he was dropped from the project (and every other project he had going) in 2019. Joey Soloway, best-known for co-creating the briefly trendy show Transparent, was announced as Singer’s replacement. Soloway left the project in 2022 and was replaced by MJ Bassett. Red Sonja was filmed in 2023 and then sat on the shelf for two years before it was finally released in 2025.
Needless to say, a lot happened between 2023 and 2025. By the time Red Sonja was released, it felt like an artifact from a different world. Red Sonja is very much a film of the action girl era. Sonja can beat up just about anyone and she usually does it without breaking a sweat. As was so often the case with the films of the action girl era, the film is so proud of itself for featuring a woman who can fight that no one involved seemed to notice that they hadn’t really come up with anything interesting for her to do.
Sonja (blandly played by Matilda Lutz) has spent most of her life in the forests of a mythical land, searching for the otnher members of her tribe and communing with the animals. When she has to hunt and kill a animal in order to eat, she is sure to say, “Thank you for your sacrifice.” I’m sure her gratitude will provide comfort to the animal’s family. (I’ve never really gotten the whole attitude that hunting is somehow noble as long as you use every bit of the animal and thank it for dying. I’m sure the animal would still rather be alive.) When Sonja is captured and forced to become a gladiator, she discovers that her people are being held prisoner by the effete emperor, Draygan (Robert Sheehan, who is even blander than Matilda Lutz). In the arena, Sonja shouts questions at the emperor and the audience because, thanks to Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott, that’s what gladiators do. She’s also given her famous chain mail bikini. The film is quick to make sure we understand that Sonja isn’t into the whole chain mail bikini thing but she has to wear something. Unintentionally, the film also reveals that the filmmakers aren’t really interested in making a Red Sonja film. Everything that made Red Sonja a memorable character in the comic books and the original film is either ignored or viewed with snarky disdain. The only reason the film is called Red Sonja is because Grim Barbarian Woman didn’t have the same zing.
Now, I will say that Red Sonja does get better as it goes along. In fact, the film’s climax features an unexpected twist and, if the entire film had that scene’s courage, this review would be very different. Unfortunately, Red Sonja looks and feels cheap and worst of all, it’s never fun. It’s very much a 2023 film and 2o23 was a year when anyone who dared to enjoy themselves was viewed with suspicion. It may have more of a political consciousness than the 80s version but it’s not as entertaining.
Through the Shattered Lens 