Morbius (2022, directed by Daniel Epinosa)

Posted on October 13, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) has devoted his life to creating artificial blood, but he publicly declines to accept the Nobel Prize because he still hasn’t found a cure for the rare blood disease that is affecting not only him but also his best friend, a man he calls Milo (Matt Smith) for reasons that are too stupid to get into. Using the genes of Costa Rican bats, Morbius finally develops a cure, but there’s a side effect. Taking the cure transforms someone into a living vampire. Morbius is now strong and fast, but he also has a craving for blood. Morbius knows that the cure is even worse than the disease, but Milo doesn’t care and takes it anyway. Now, there are two living vampires wreaking havoc in New York City.

It’s not just New York that suffers due to Morbius. It’s also Sony Pictures, which released the film to terrible reviews and bad box office on April 1st, 2022. After the film was yanked out of theaters, someone at Sony noticed that a lot of people on Twitter were posting a meme that featured Morbius. Mistakenly thinking that this meant Morbius had become a so-bad-it’s-good cult phenomenon, Sony rereleased Morbius in theaters on June 3rd, and the film flopped a second time.

I know that I groaned when I first read that Sony was developing a Morbius film to be a part of their “extended Spider-Man universe.” That’s because Morbius was always one of my favorite Marvel characters, and I knew Sony would probably never be able to do the character justice. I was right. Morbius is mostly interesting as a throwback to what comic book films were like before the MCU and Zack Snyder came along. There’s no real affection for the characters and none of the type of big moments that usually made even the least inspired of the MCU films worth watching. It looks cheap, it feels cheap, and the whole thing is totally by the numbers. Matt Smith is given little to do as the villain, and, for all of his reputation for eccentricity, Jared Leto gives an anemic performance. He lets his beard and his hair do most of the acting. The worst thing about it is that it’s just boring. In the comic books, Morbius mixed his brilliance with a feral bloodlust. That’s what made him such a memorable character. In the movie, he’s just Jared Leto.

Morbius the Living Vampire deserved better.

Tom Cruise is going to dig us out of this mess in the Digger Trailer!

Posted on July 13, 2026 by Leonard Wilson

Okay, Disaster/Comedy it is?

Warner Bros. just released the full trailer for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger, which is kind of giving off a mix of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and some classic Coen Brothers fare. It also features more of the cast, which includes Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal), Sandra Hüller (Project Hail Mary), John Goodman (Kong: Skull Island), Emma D’Arcy (HBO’s House of the Dragon), Sophie Wilde (Talk to Me), Robert John Burke (HBO’s The Last of Us), Jesse Plemons (Bugonia), a trio of Guillermo Del Toro actors in Burn Gorman (Pacific Rim), Corey Johnson (Hellboy) and Michael Stuhlberg (The Shape of Water).

Tom Cruise’s character looks like he sets off a chain of events that he’ll have to set right, though how, we’ll have to find out when the film premieres later this year.

Enjoy!

Playing Catch-Up With The Films of 2017: Megan Leavey (dir by Gabriela Cowperthwaite)

Posted on December 25, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

One of the best (and, in my opinion, overlooked) films of 2017 was Megan Leavey.

Based on a true story, Megan Leavey tells the true story of … well, Megan Leavey. When the film starts, Megan (played, in one of the best performances of 2017, by Kate Mara) is living a somewhat directionless life in upstate New York. Her parents are divorced and she’s closer to her father (Bradley Whitford) even though she has more contact (and shares a much more strained relationship) with her mother (Edie Falco). Speaking as a child of divorce, the scenes of Megan trying to navigate the mine field between her parents rang painfully true at times. I spent the entire movie waiting for Megan and her parents to have some sort of big moment where, in typical artificial movie fashion, all conflicts would be solved and everything would suddenly be okay. To the film’s credit, that moment never comes.

Instead, Megan enlists in the Marines. She finds herself assigned as a Military Police K9 handler. What that means is that Megan finds herself in Iraq, working with a dog named Rex. Rex’s job is to sniff out explosives and other threats. One wrong move by either Megan or Rex will result in not only their deaths but also the deaths of everyone around them. Remember how tense some of the scenes in The Hurt Locker were? Well, that’s nothing compared to the intensity of the bomb-sniffing scenes in Megan Leavey. After all, in The Hurt Locker, we only had Jeremy Renner to worry about. Megan Leavey, however, features a truly adorable dog.

When Megan returns home from serving two tours in Iraq, she struggles with PTSD and the adjustment to civilian life. Rex is assigned to a different handler and continues his duties, leaving Megan without the one creature that she felt she could trust. And again, Megan Leavey deserves a lot of credit for not offering up any easy or pat solutions for Megan’s difficulties to adjusting to life back in the States. It’s too honest a film and has too much respect for it audience to cheapen its narrative with easy or manipulative sentiment.

When Rex develops facial paralysis, he is retired from active duty. With the help of her U.S. Senator, Megan adopted Rex and gave him a home until he passed away in 2012. That senator was Chuck Schumer and thankfully, Megan Leavey resisted the temptation to cast Chuck Schumer as himself. Instead, when Megan approaches her Senator on the Capitol steps, the senator is played by a professional-looking character actor who looks and sounds absolutely nothing like Chuck Schumer. By making this simple casting decision, the film keeps the focus off of the politicians and on Megan and Rex, where it belongs.

Did Megan Leavey make me cry? You better believe it did. However, it earned every one of these tears. This is a wonderfully sweet and moving film, one that works largely because it refuses to overemphasize the sentimental aspects of the story. Instead, Megan Leavey always remains rooted in reality. It’s a gritty film about a dog and a soldier who survived being sent to one of the most dangerous places n the world. It’s the story of how Rex saved Megan’s life and how Megan returned the favor by saving Rex’s. It’s a sweet, straight forward story that can be appreciated even by people, like me, who prefer cats.

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: Captain Phillips (dir by Paul Greengrass)

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Here’s an interesting and often overlooked fact:

It has been 17 years since Tom Hanks was last nominated for Best Actor.

When I discovered this fact, I was shocked because Tom Hanks is one of those actors who has a reputation for always getting nominated. We tend to think of him as almost being a male Meryl Streep, an actor who will be nominated simply for showing up. But, actually, the Academy last nominated Tom Hanks, for his performance in Cast Away, in the year 2000.

Hanks has given plenty of strong performances since then and he’s continued to appear in acclaimed and Oscar-nominated films. And you would think, considering his apparent popularity in Hollywood, Tom Hanks would have been nominated for everything from Charlie Wilson’s War to Bridge of Spies. But no.

Personally, I think Hanks should have been nominated this year for Sully. But you know what Hanks performance truly deserved some Oscar recognition?

Captain Phillips.

Playing the title role in this 2013 Best Picture nominee, Hanks gave perhaps the best performance of his career. That he was snubbed by the Academy is not only shocking but it’s actually a bit unforgivable. Perhaps Hanks was so good that the Academy took him for granted. Perhaps they thought that since both Hanks and Richard Phillips are decent, down-to-Earth guys, that Hanks was just playing himself. For whatever reason, Tom Hanks deserved, at the very least, a nomination.

Captain Phillips was based on a true story. This is another docudrama from director Paul Greengrass, filmed in his signature (and potentially nausea-inducing) handheld style. (Actually, if any aspiring director wants to understand how to effectively use the handheld style, Greengrass is the filmmaker to study.) In 2009, a four Somali pirates hijacked the Maersk Alabama and took its captain, Richard Phillips, hostage. Captain Phillips was eventually rescued by a group of Navy SEALS. Three of the pirates were killed while their leader, Muse (Barkhad Abdi), was captured and is currently serving a 33 year sentence in a federal penitentiary.

This was a huge news story in 2009 with the rescue being described as being the first major foreign policy victory for the new presidential administration. When Phillips was rescued, people took to the streets and the “USA! USA!” chant was heard. “That’s right,” the media and the government and the chanters seemed to be exclaiming in unison, “America’s back! We were abused and it’s never going to happen again!”

A lot of that jubilation was because, at the time, the term “Somali pirates” conjured up visions of cinematic villains who would be more at home in Mad Max: Fury Road than in the real world. The reality of the situation, of course, was that the “pirates,” whose deaths were celebrated as some sort of political victory for the government, were actually poverty-stricken Somali teenagers, the majority of which worked for warlords who remained (and still remain) safely hidden away.

One of the more interesting things about Captain Phillips is that it devotes almost as much time to the Somali pirates as it does to Phillips and his crew. Rather than presenting them as a nameless and personalityless threat, the film allows Muse and his men to emerge as individuals. Much as Phillips spends the movie trying to keep both himself and his crew safe, Muse spends much of the movie trying to keep an increasingly out-of-control situation stable. Both Phillips and Muse are in over their heads. Barkhad Abdi gives a smart and intimidating performance as Muse. The film never makes the mistake of excusing the actions of Muse or the other pirates but, at the same time, it does provide a more nuanced view of them than one would normally expect.

But really, this film totally belongs to Tom Hanks. Captain Phillips works because of Tom Hanks. It earned its best picture nomination on the strength of Hanks’s performance. As an actor, Hanks could have easily coasted on the good will that the audience would have already had for him but instead, he fully commits himself to playing not Tom Hanks but instead Captain Richard Phillips. The film’s final scene — in which Phillips goes into a state of shock and can’t stop talking — is a masterclass in great acting. How the Academy ignored it, I will never understand.

Captain Phillips was nominated for best picture of 2013. However, it lost to 12 Years a Slave.