Tag Archives: Film Review

Review: Munich (dir. by Steven Spielberg)

Posted on by Arleigh

If you’re looking for a comfortable, easily digestible thriller with clear-cut heroes and villains, Munich is going to be a tough sit. This 2005 film, now two decades old, finds Steven Spielberg operating at a peak level of craft, but it’s a cold and angry kind of mastery. It’s a dense, paranoid, and deeply unsettling historical drama that feels less like a movie and more like a wound that’s been picked at for years. Based on the book Vengeance, the film dramatizes the secret Israeli mission, “Operation Wrath of God,” to hunt down and assassinate the Palestinian militants responsible for the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. But here’s the kicker: this isn’t an action movie about a bunch of spies getting revenge and feeling good about it. Spielberg isn’t making a war film about who is right and who is wrong. Munich is a film about the ugly, corrosive nature of state-sponsored violence and the way it eats away at the soul of everyone involved. It’s a thriller, sure, but the tension isn’t built around whether the team will succeed, but around the psychological and moral cost of their success. There’s no triumph here, no victory lap—just the sinking realization that for every target they eliminate, the wound in the world only seems to get deeper.

The movie is anchored by a phenomenal performance from Eric Bana as Avner, the team’s leader. He’s a man of deep patriotism, handpicked for this mission by Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) herself, but he’s completely unprepared for the psychological toll the job will take. He’s joined by a fantastic ensemble that includes Daniel Craig as a brutal and cold-blooded South African operative, and Mathieu Kassovitz as a toymaker turned reluctant bomb expert. They’re a tight, desperate group, and as they move from one European capital to the next, meticulously planning and executing assassinations, the initial sense of righteous duty slowly curdles into paranoia, guilt, and nihilism. The film doesn’t shy away from the violent acts, but it presents them not as a cause for celebration, but as messy, brutal affairs that often have unintended, horrific consequences—like a scene where a bombing intended for a target gets dangerously close to an innocent child. You can feel the weight of every decision pressing down on these men, and Spielberg makes sure you sit with that discomfort rather than brushing past it for the sake of pacing.

One of the most crucial—and still controversial—aspects of Munich is its willingness to humanize the Palestinian perspective. This isn’t a film that paints the Black September terrorists as caricatures of evil. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Avner and a PLO member named Ali (Omar Metwally) engage in a tense, philosophical debate about their respective claims to the land. Avner warns that the world will see the Palestinians as “animals” for their actions, to which Ali chillingly replies, “Yes, but then the world will see how they’ve made us into animals. They’ll start to ask questions about the conditions in our cages.” The film doesn’t excuse the terrorism, but it forces the audience to understand the desperation and statelessness that fuels it, presenting a horrifying symmetry where both sides see themselves as victims fighting for survival. It’s a gutsy move for a mainstream Hollywood director, especially in the mid-2000s, and it’s precisely that moral even-handedness that made the film so divisive upon release—and still makes it so damn compelling today.

And that’s where this film connects to a larger, darker moment in Spielberg’s career. Munich was released at the tail end of what some critics have rightly called his “Post-9/11 triptych,” alongside Minority Report (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005). These aren’t just three random films. They are all steeped in a profound sense of paranoia and fear of the outsider that was so prevalent in America after 9/11. Minority Report imagines a society where you’re arrested for a crime before you commit it; War of the Worlds literalizes the fear of a sudden, devastating attack on American soil; and Munich transposes those anxieties onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Spielberg used this triptych to explore the American psyche’s newfound sense of vulnerability and its willingness to embrace extreme, morally ambiguous measures—like torture and preemptive strikes—in the name of security. It was a director grappling with a changed world, and Munich, with its focus on a secret, government-approved assassination squad, feels like his most potent and cynical entry in the series. You can almost hear the echo of post-9/11 rhetoric in every scene, as if Spielberg was holding up a dark mirror to his own country’s creeping acceptance of extrajudicial killing.

But the bleakest part of Munich is how it transcends even that specific historical and political moment. The film relentlessly returns to the theme of the “violence loop.” The team assassinates one target, and he is immediately replaced by someone even more radical. They get a hit, and there’s a retaliatory bombing. It’s a terrifyingly accurate depiction of what has continued to happen for decades after the film’s events. Avner realizes that their entire operation, the endless cycle of state-sponsored revenge, is ultimately pointless for achieving peace. It’s a desperate, bloody game of whack-a-mole that only ensures the conflict continues in perpetuity, a cycle of vengeance that simply feeds on itself. As the film shows, and as is still plain to see today, the violence doesn’t end when the “list” is completed; it just regenerates. The final scenes, where Avner finds himself unable to even sleep in his own bed, watching his young daughter with a haunted look, drive home that the real casualty of state-approved assassination isn’t just the targets—it’s the humanity of the people pulling the trigger. He’s won the tactical war, but he’s lost every single battle that actually mattered.

Ultimately, Munich is a masterclass in filmmaking that offers no easy answers, and watching it today, with the current geopolitical landscape looking more fractured than ever, its relevance hasn’t faded one bit—if anything, it’s sharper and more painful now than it was in 2005. The same arguments, the same grievances, the same bloody score-settling between Israel, the Palestinians, and their Arab allies are still playing out in real time, with no end in sight. And yet, for all its brutal honesty, the film also exposes a tragic truth: this movie, like so much of the discourse surrounding the conflict, will probably only deepen the divide between the two groups watching it, as each side can point to it and say, “See? That’s what they do to us. That’s our pain validated.” It becomes another piece of ammunition in an endless argument rather than a bridge toward understanding. The brilliant cinematography from Janusz Kaminski and the chilling, minimalist score from John Williams only add to that oppressive, paranoid atmosphere, making it not a film that will make you feel good about anything, but one that will make you think—and perhaps that’s exactly why it remains so damn relevant decades later.

So what’s the way out? The film doesn’t give you a manual, but it does whisper a desperate question between its frames: can either side actually step back from the brink long enough to see the loop they’re both trapped in? Because the violence loop isn’t a natural disaster—it’s a human creation, and what humans build, humans can theoretically unbuild. But that would require something infinitely harder than pulling a trigger or planting a bomb—it would require acknowledging that your own righteous suffering doesn’t cancel out the other side’s legitimate pain, it would require looking at the face of your enemy and seeing not a monster but a person who also loves their children and believes they’re fighting for survival. The film dares to suggest that the only real break in the cycle might come from exhaustion, from the sheer soul-crushing fatigue of burying one more generation, or from a moment of radical, almost insane empathy that makes someone say “enough” before the next retaliation.

Spielberg doesn’t offer that moment in the movie, because he knows it hasn’t happened yet in real life—Munich isn’t a prescription; it’s an autopsy. Every few years, when the news cycle inevitably rolls around to another flare-up in that tortured corner of the world, this movie comes back to mind not as a prophecy, but as a painfully accurate diagnosis. It’s a powerful, haunting reminder that the echo of old violence is never truly silent, and that in the long run, vengeance is often a debt that can never be repaid. If you go in expecting a straightforward revenge fantasy, you’ll walk out exhausted and conflicted. But if you go in ready to wrestle with some of the ugliest questions about justice, morality, and state power, then Munich will stick with you like a splinter you just can’t dig out—and maybe, just maybe, that splinter is the first tiny crack in the loop that someone, someday, will have the courage to break.

Review: Minority Report (dir. by Steven Spielberg)

Posted on by Arleigh

“Sometimes, in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark.” — Dr. Iris Hineman

There’s a particular pleasure in revisiting Minority Report now, decades removed from its 2002 release, because it’s aged in the strangest possible way: it hasn’t dated so much as it’s caught up to us. Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story plays like a glossy, big-budget action thriller on the surface, all sleek gestural interfaces and Tom Cruise sprinting across rooftops, but underneath that polish is a film that’s quietly become one of the most unnervingly accurate predictions of how surveillance, data, and policing would actually evolve in the real world.

The premise is simple enough to fit on a poster. In a near-future Washington D.C., a special police unit called PreCrime uses three psychic “precogs” to see murders before they happen, allowing cops to arrest people for crimes they haven’t committed yet. John Anderton, played by Cruise with a kind of haunted, grief-soaked intensity, is the unit’s star detective, a true believer in the system who lost his son years earlier and has thrown himself into the work as a substitute for healing. Then the precogs name him as a future murderer, and the rest of the film is Anderton on the run, trying to prove his innocence inside a system explicitly designed to make innocence irrelevant. It’s a clever structural trick because it forces the audience to watch the hero discover, in real time, all the holes in a system he’s spent his career defending.

What makes the film work as more than just a stylish chase movie is how seriously Spielberg and his screenwriters, Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, take the philosophical rot at the center of the premise. PreCrime isn’t framed as a dystopian villain organization; it’s framed as something genuinely good and genuinely popular, a program that’s driven murder rates to near zero and that ordinary citizens are grateful for. That’s the unsettling part. The film isn’t asking you to be afraid of an obviously evil system. It’s asking you to be afraid of aSteve Harris system that works, that delivers real safety, and that nonetheless requires you to accept punishment without due process, fate without appeal, guilt assigned before the act. Cruise’s Anderton spends the film discovering that the machinery he trusted contains exactly the kind of ambiguity and abuse it was built to eliminate, and the film never lets you forget that the most dangerous systems are the ones that feel necessary.

Visually, this is one of Spielberg’s most distinct collaborations with cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, who bleached the color out of nearly every frame to give the film a cold, overexposed, almost silvery look. It’s a future that feels lived-in and grubby rather than chrome and gleaming, which was a deliberate choice; Spielberg and his production designers consulted with actual futurists and technologists to imagine a 2054 that felt plausible rather than fantastical. That’s part of why the gestural data interfaces Anderton uses, swiping and conducting evidence in midair like an orchestra conductor, became such a cultural touchstone; they didn’t feel like science fiction gadgetry so much as a believable next step from where computing was already heading.

And that brings us to the part of the film’s legacy that’s only grown more pointed with time. Minority Report arrived in June 2002, less than a year after September 11th, and it’s impossible to separate the film’s anxieties from that specific American moment. This was the period when the Patriot Act had just been signed, when warrantless surveillance and preventive detention were being normalized in the name of safety, when the entire architecture of American security policy pivoted toward stopping threats before they materialized rather than responding after the fact. Minority Report dramatizes that exact logic and then methodically exposes its flaws, showing a security state so committed to preventing harm that it’s willing to imprison the innocent, manipulate evidence, and treat dissent as a structural malfunction.

It’s worth situating the film alongside the other two movies Spielberg made in the years immediately following 9/11, because together they form a loose, unofficial triptych about post-9/11 American fear. War of the Worlds, his 2005 alien invasion film, restaged the trauma of a sudden, incomprehensible attack on home soil, with Tom Cruise again playing an ordinary man trying to shepherd his children through a landscape of falling ash, mass panic, and faceless threats descending from above, imagery that’s hard not to read as a direct echo of lower Manhattan that morning. Munich, released the same year, dug into the moral wreckage of a state’s decision to respond to terrorism with a covert campaign of targeted assassination, asking hard questions about whether vengeance dressed up as justice actually makes anyone safer or just perpetuates the cycle. Minority Report is the third leg of that stool, the one concerned not with the attack itself or the retaliation but with the surveillance and preemption apparatus built in the name of preventing the next one. Together, the three films trace a kind of emotional arc through American anxiety in that period: the shock of the unknown threat, the morally compromised vengeance that follows, and the paranoid, technologically enabled security state erected to make sure it never happens again. None of the three films name 9/11 directly, but all three are unmistakably shaped by it, by a culture suddenly suspicious of the outsider, willing to trade liberty for the promise of safety, and uncertain whether the institutions built to protect them could be trusted.

What’s remarkable is how much more relevant the surveillance angle feels today than it did in 2002. Predictive policing software is real now, with departments across the country having actually used algorithms to flag individuals or neighborhoods as high risk for future crime, often with the same built-in biases and feedback loops the film gestures at. Data brokers and advertising networks track movement and behavior with a granularity that makes the film’s retina-scanning ad billboards look almost quaint by comparison. The conversation about predictive algorithms making consequential decisions about people’s freedom, hiring, credit, and policing based on probabilistic models of future behavior is now a mainstream policy debate rather than science fiction. Watching the film now, the gap between its imagined 2054 and our actual 2026 feels uncomfortably narrow, less a futuristic warning than a documentary about tendencies we’re already deep inside of.

That’s what makes Minority Report so achingly prophetic, not just in its prediction of our tech, but in its prediction of our mindset. We live in a world now where predictive policing algorithms are actually being used, where social credit scores are a reality in some places, and where the debate over privacy versus security is a constant, exhausting hum in the background. We’re not at the level of precogs, but we don’t need to be. We have big data, machine learning, and a populace that’s been slowly conditioned to accept that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. The film is a warning shot across the bow of that complacency. It asks us to consider the cost of a crime-free society, and it suggests that the price might be our very souls. Spielberg, ever the optimist even in his darkest films, ultimately comes down on the side of human fallibility. He prefers a world with crime and free will to a world of perfect, totalitarian peace. And watching it today, in an age of deepfakes, biometric tracking, and algorithm-driven justice, that preference feels less like a luxury and more like an urgent, desperate necessity. It’s a hell of a ride, with more twists than a pretzel factory and a car chase that still holds up, but the real thrill of Minority Report isn’t the action—it’s the haunting feeling that we’re not watching a dystopian future anymore. We’re watching the news.

Review: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (dir. by Steven Spielberg)

Posted on by Arleigh

“Monsieur Neary, I envy you.” — Claude Lacombe

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.

Review: The Other Guys (dir. by Adam McKay)

Posted on by Arleigh

“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.

Review: The Longest Day (dir. by Ken Annakin, Andrew Barton & Bernhard Wicki)

Posted on by Arleigh

“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.

Review: Normal (dir. by Ben Wheatley)

Posted on by Arleigh

“I used to be a regular sheriff.” — Sheriff Ulysses

Ben Wheatley has built a career on making audiences uncomfortable. From the cultish dread of Kill List to the seasick chaos of Free Fire, he specializes in a specific kind of British miserablism that suddenly snaps into shocking ultraviolence. So, the idea of him directing a snowbound, American action-comedy starring Bob Odenkirk felt a little like hiring a surgeon to cater a birthday party. You know the food will be technically proficient, but you are terrified of what might be in the sauce. The 2026 film Normal, written by Derek Kolstad and Bob Odenkirk, is exactly that catering job: it is messy, bloody, surprisingly filling, and leaves you with a weird stomach ache if you think about it too long. But in a summer movie season often defined by joyless CGI sludge, Normal is a blast of R-rated, mid-budget freshness that knows exactly how stupid it is, even if it stumbles on its way to the finish line.

The premise is a beautiful piece of elevator pitch simplicity. Odenkirk plays Sheriff Ulysses, a haunted, world-weary interim sheriff who takes a short-term gig in the tiny, freezing Minnesotan town of Normal. The previous sheriff died under mysterious circumstances (ice fishing accident, sure), and Ulysses is just looking for a quiet place to drink coffee, ignore his wife’s phone calls, and heal. The problem is that Normal, Minnesota, is anything but. As Ulysses walks the beat, he notices the quiet desperation of rural America has been replaced by a strange, Stepford-like prosperity. The knitting store sells AR-15s. The diner’s walls are lined with loaded rifles. The town has somehow raised sixteen million dollars for a new town hall. It turns out that the citizens of Normal have sold their souls—and their town—to the Yakuza, acting as a quiet, frozen Swiss bank account for Japanese organized crime. When a pair of bumbling out-of-town robbers (Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher) hits the local bank, the bulletproof glass shatters, and Ulysses finds himself trapped in a blizzard, fighting for his life against an entire town of friendly, flannel-wearing killers.

Having Odenkirk as co-writer explains a lot about why Normal feels different from Kolstad’s other work. Where John Wick and the first Nobody are lean, machine-tooled scripts, Normal has a looser, more character-obsessed texture. The dialogue is full of weird pauses, non-sequiturs, and the kind of conversational detours that defined Odenkirk’s television work on Better Call Saul. You can feel the actor’s hand in every scene where Ulysses just stares at a absurd situation and mutters something mundane like “Well, that’s not ideal.” If you have seen the Nobody films, you know the rhythm Odenkirk plays as a performer. But what makes Odenkirk so fascinating to watch in Normal is how he continues to solidify an idea we haven’t really seen since Liam Neeson stumbled into Taken: the deeply unconventional action hero. Think about it. Before Neeson, action stars were Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis—men built like refrigerators. Then Neeson showed up at fifty-six, all grief-stricken eyebrows and theatrical training, and suddenly audiences realized that a sad dad with a “particular set of skills” was just as terrifying as any bodybuilder. Odenkirk is the spiritual successor to that twist.

No one ever looked at the guy who played slimy lawyer Saul Goodman or the hapless comic from Mr. Show and thought, “There is our next great screen fighter.” Yet here we are, years after the first Nobody, and Odenkirk has quietly become the most believable everyman action lead of his generation. Unlike Neeson’s brooding intensity, Odenkirk brings a specific, almost pathetic vulnerability. In Normal, he excels at playing the “sad dad” action hero—the guy whose joints pop when he stands up, who looks like an accountant but moves like a bar fight. Ulysses isn’t a retired assassin; he’s just a cop who is very, very tired. When he dispatches a thug with a fire extinguisher, there is no cool one-liner, just a wheeze and a wince. That grounded exhaustion is the Odenkirk brand, and because he co-wrote the part, it fits him like a tailored suit. He sells the physicality without losing that “I’m too old for this” shuffle, making you believe a middle-aged man could survive a gauntlet of killers purely out of stubbornness and regret. Henry Winkler, as the smarmy Mayor Kibner, chews the frozen scenery with glee, playing a man so polite and effervescent that you want to punch him immediately. Lena Headey shows up as a barkeep with a shotgun, and while she doesn’t get enough to do, she brings the necessary grit.

However, the secret weapon here is actually Ben Wheatley and his “anti-action” philosophy. In a recent interview, Wheatley described the violence in Normal as being akin to Final Destination. That is the smartest thing about this movie. In a typical John Wick movie, the hero is a force of nature; he actively kills people with surgical precision. In Normal, Ulysses doesn’t so much defeat the town as survive it. In one fantastic set piece, a character slips on ice and impales themselves on their own bayonet. In another, a massive sign falls and crushes a gunman mid-monologue. The town itself becomes a hostile, slippery, glass-strewn deathtrap. This gives Normal a chaotic, Looney Tunes energy that separates it from its cousins. You never know who is going to die next or how, and Wheatley directs the carnage with a blackly comic eye. The sound design of bones crunching against frozen asphalt is disturbingly hilarious. This isn’t the graceful ballet of assassination; it’s the slapstick of murder, and it is refreshing. And Odenkirk’s performance is the perfect anchor for this chaos because he always looks slightly surprised to still be alive—a quality Neeson, for all his skills, rarely conveyed. The fact that Odenkirk helped write the script means those reactions of shock and reluctant disgust feel genuine rather than performed.

But let’s address the moose in the room. Normal desperately wants to be Fargo, but it only has the vocabulary of a comic book. The Coen Brothers’ masterpiece works because the quirky dialogue masks a terrifying emptiness. Normal wears its quirk on its sleeve like a cheap souvenir. The film tries to weave in social commentary about the death of rural America, gun culture, and even features a subplot involving a trans nonbinary teen (Jess McLeod) who was the child of the previous sheriff. These moments are handled with a surprising amount of grace—they aren’t preachy, just present. However, the film is moving so fast (the runtime is a lean 91 minutes) that it forgets to give these themes any weight. You get a five-second shot of a wall of guns, and then someone blows up. The commentary is there, but it’s just set dressing for the explosion.

Furthermore, the plot structure is lopsided. The film opens with a cold sequence in Japan with the Yakuza cutting off fingers and looking menacing. It feels like a contractual obligation to remind you this is from the John Wick universe, and it’s hard not to wonder if that was a Kolstad-driven choice while Odenkirk might have preferred more mystery. It completely spoils the slow-burn reveal of the town’s corruption. Imagine The Wicker Man if the first scene showed you the villagers burning the wicker man. The tension of Ulysses realizing that “the call is coming from inside the house” is neutered because we, the audience, already know the Yakuza are lurking in the basement. Also, for a movie called Normal, it is incredibly predictable within its own lane. Once the shooting starts, you know exactly where Ulysses is going to end up (spoiler: a hardware store and then the police station). The film devolves into a familiar Assault on Precinct 13 siege scenario, and while the kills are inventive, the geography of the action gets muddy. Wheatley shoots the snowy exteriors beautifully—the white landscape makes the red blood pop like neon—but during the frantic third act, the editing gets choppy, and you lose track of who is shooting whom. For a movie that prides itself on “anti-action,” it relies heavily on the generic rhythms of action in its final twenty minutes.

Despite these structural hiccups, Normal works because it never overstays its welcome. At a brisk hour and a half, it gets in, blows up a town, and gets out. Bob Odenkirk continues to prove that he is the most relatable action hero of the 2020s—the natural heir to the “unlikely badass” throne that Liam Neeson occupied for a solid decade. Where Neeson brought Shakespearean tragedy to the genre, Odenkirk brings a frustrated accountant’s fury. He looks like he just finished paying his taxes, and you believe he is furious about it. Having co-written the film only deepens that authenticity; this isn’t a star merely showing up to say lines, but an actor who has shaped the material to his exact strengths. Ben Wheatley manages to smuggle just enough British cynicism and nasty violence into the frame to keep genre fans on their toes.

Is Normal a great film? No. It is too shallow and too structurally messy for that. But is it a great time at the movies? Absolutely. It is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food laced with hot sauce. You know what you are getting, but the kick is still satisfying. For fans of Odenkirk’s grumpy charm and Wheatley’s chaotic tendencies, Normal is a perfectly abnormal way to spend an evening. Just don’t go looking for the heart that the title promises; this one is all viscera. And frankly, in an era where most action movies are built from the same digital spare parts, watching a former comedy writer freeze his way through a Yakuza invasion feels like the most refreshing kind of normal we could ask for.

Review: First Blood (dir. by Ted Kotcheff)

Posted on by Arleigh

“In the field we had a code of honor: you watch my back, I watch yours. Back here there’s nothing!” — John Rambo

You sit down expecting a brainless 80s action flick, and instead you get a meditation on trauma, bureaucracy, and the American wilderness. That’s First Blood for you. Directed by Ted Kotcheff and released in 1982, this is the movie that introduced the world to John Rambo, but don’t go in hoping for a body count or one-liners. What you actually get is a lean, gritty, and surprisingly sad drama about a guy who just wants to eat a hot meal and ends up accidentally declaring war on an entire small-town police force. And honestly? It holds up to this day. The film is adapted from David Morrell’s 1972 novel of the same name, but if you’ve read the book, you’ll notice some serious tonal differences right away. Morrell’s novel is bleak, brutal, and deeply nihilistic—a product of its era’s raw disillusionment with Vietnam. Kotcheff and Stallone sanded down some of those rougher edges, not to sell out, but to make Rambo a more sympathetic figure. The bones are the same, but the spirit is just a little warmer, and that choice changes everything.

Let’s break down the plot, because it’s deceptively simple. Sylvester Stallone plays John Rambo, a former Green Beret and Vietnam War hero who wanders into the town of Hope, Washington, looking for a fellow soldier he served with. He finds out the guy died of cancer from Agent Orange exposure. That’s the first gut punch. Rambo, already drifting and clearly struggling with PTSD, just wants to grab some food and keep moving. But the local sheriff, Will Teasle (a perfectly cast Brian Dennehy), takes one look at Rambo’s long hair, army jacket, and tired face and decides he’s a vagrant who needs to be run out of town. From a structural standpoint, Teasle isn’t a cartoon villain—he’s a classic dramatic antagonist: a rigid, small-town authoritarian who sees drifters as a threat to his orderly world. That realism makes the whole thing sting because you can almost see both sides. Almost.

When Teasle tries to escort Rambo to the city limits, Rambo walks back into town. That’s his big crime. He gets arrested, and at the station, the deputies start pushing him around. One of them, a veteran deputy named Galt (played with sneering menace by Jack Starrett), is the real problem here. Galt isn’t some young hothead. He’s an older, seasoned deputy who’s clearly been in his role for years, and he’s become entitled on the power of his badge. You can see it in the way he leans into the booking process, the casual cruelty in his eyes, the way he treats Rambo like a stray dog he’s finally allowed to kick. During the shaving scene, as deputies try to clean Rambo up after the arrest, Galt is the one who holds Rambo down, restraining him while another deputy wields the straight razor. He’s not waving the razor himself, but that almost makes it worse—he’s the enforcer, the guy who pins you in place while someone else does the dirty work. It’s a veteran cop who knows exactly how to exert control without getting his own hands bloody. That makes Galt far more chilling than some screaming bully. He represents the rot of unchecked authority, the way small-town power can curdle into casual sadism over time. And that whole humiliating process—being held down, having a straight razor brought to his face—triggers a full-blown flashback for Rambo. Then something clicks. Rambo explodes, beats down half the station, and escapes into the nearby mountains.

Now the hunt begins. Teasle calls in the State Patrol, the National Guard, and eventually his old mentor, Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), who knows exactly what kind of animal they’re chasing. Trautman warns Teasle that Rambo isn’t just a drifter; he’s a trained killer with a “purple heart, a silver star, and a congressional Medal of Honor.” And here’s the core irony: Rambo doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He just wants to be left alone. But the chase escalates, people die, and by the end, you’re not cheering for the hero to win—you’re hoping he gets some peace.

From an analysis perspective, where First Blood really earns its stripes is its restraint. The action sequences are tense but never escalate into cartoon violence. Rambo uses the forest like a ghost, setting traps, crawling through mud, and surviving on raw squirrel meat. He doesn’t mow down dozens of cops with a machine gun. In fact, the only person he kills is Galt, who falls to his death while hanging off a helicopter because Rambo throws a rock at the chopper. And Rambo immediately looks horrified. That’s the key. Even Galt, as entitled and cruel as he is, isn’t a villain Rambo wants to execute. The kill is accidental, a desperate act of survival. The movie takes its time showing how the very skills that made Rambo a hero in Vietnam—his survival instincts, his aggression, his ability to turn anything into a weapon—now make him a monster in peacetime America. The local cops are out of their depth, but aside from Galt, they’re mostly just scared men doing a job. Nobody else is pure evil. Just broken systems and broken people.

But let’s talk about that novel, because the comparison is crucial for understanding the film’s choices. David Morrell’s First Blood is a much darker animal. In the book, Rambo is more feral, less a wounded hero and more a walking death sentence. He kills multiple cops, not by accident or in self-defense, but with cold, tactical efficiency. The novel has no Colonel Trautman to serve as a moral anchor—Trautman is there, but he’s just as ruthless. And the ending? Devastating. In Morrell’s version, Rambo and Teasle essentially murder each other in a final, bloody standoff. Trautman finishes Rambo off with a shotgun blast to the gut. There’s no catharsis, no plea for understanding. Just bodies and regret. The tone is nihilistic to the core: the system destroyed these men long before the first page, and there was never any hope. Kotcheff’s film pulls back from that abyss. It keeps the violence lean and mostly off-screen. It gives Rambo that famous final monologue where he sobs about his friend dying next to him, about protesters spitting on him, about not being able to turn off the war inside his head. That scene isn’t in the book—not like that. The movie says, “This man is suffering, and maybe he can still be saved.” The novel says, “This man is already dead, and he’s taking everyone with him.” Both are valid responses to Vietnam, but the film’s slightly toned-down approach is why Rambo became an icon instead of a footnote.

From a performance standpoint, Stallone gives the work of his career here. Forget the grunting one-liners of later sequels. In First Blood, he barely speaks, and when he does, his voice cracks. Watch his eyes during that final monologue. After Trautman finally talks him down, Rambo dissolves into a sob. “Nothing is over!” he screams at Trautman. “You don’t just turn it off!” It’s raw, uncomfortable, and genuinely moving. You realize that the whole movie has been one long panic attack for this character. The Rambo that pops up in Rambo: First Blood Part II is a cartoon superhero. The Rambo here is a guy who needed a therapist and a hug about thirty years ago. That vulnerability is the film’s great deviation from the source material. Morrell’s Rambo never asks for understanding. Kotcheff’s does. And that small shift in tone—from nihilism to wounded humanity—is what elevates the film from a grim exploitation picture to a legitimate character study.

On the technical side, Ted Kotcheff’s direction is patient and atmospheric. He shoots the Pacific Northwest like a character—vast, wet, dark, and full of hiding places. The chase scenes are grounded, with long takes and practical stunts. When Rambo jumps off a cliff into a tree and lands with a thud that sounds real, it hurts. There’s no CGI safety net. Jerry Goldsmith’s score is mournful, with lonely woodwinds and a simple, haunting main theme that never pumps you up for a fight. It just makes you sad. The movie even has the guts to end on a downer—but not as brutal as the book’s. Rambo surrenders, crying in Trautman’s arms, and the final shot is him walking away in handcuffs into the rain. No freeze-frame high five. No sequel tease. Just rain. And yet, compared to the novel’s blood-soaked finale, that rain feels almost like mercy. That’s tonal balancing at its finest: the film acknowledges the darkness without drowning in it.

Of course, the cultural memory of First Blood has been completely buried by its sequels. Most people under thirty know Rambo as the muscle-bound machine gun guy from memes and video games. But the original is closer to a western like The Deer Hunter meets a paranoid 70s thriller like The French Connection. It’s a movie about a country that used its soldiers and then discarded them. Teasle represents the willful ignorance of middle America—“I don’t care about your war” is basically his attitude. And Rambo represents the bill coming due. Galt, as that entitled veteran deputy, represents the everyday cruelty of those who’ve held power too long and forgotten what it’s for—the guy who doesn’t need to swing the blade because he’s the one holding you still. That theme hits even harder today, decades later, when veterans are still fighting for basic support and stories of badge-heavy misconduct still dominate headlines. The novel took that theme to its logical, horrific conclusion: no survivors, no lessons learned. The film pulls back just enough to let you breathe, and that one small change turned First Blood from a bleak cult artifact into a mainstream classic. You can argue which version is more honest. But you can’t argue that Stallone and Kotcheff made the right call for the screen.

First Blood rules. It’s a rainy, sad, surprisingly smart action movie that will stick with you longer than any explosion-fest. It’s also a masterclass in adaptation, showing how a slight shift in tone—from nihilistic to wounded—can transform a story without betraying its core. Brian Dennehy is perfect as the stubborn but not evil sheriff. Jack Starrett makes Galt a quietly terrifying portrait of bureaucratic sadism, a veteran deputy who’s learned to love the leash and the privilege of pinning a man down while someone else does the cutting. Richard Crenna brings real weight as Trautman, a father figure who knows he helped raise a weapon he can no longer control. And Stallone acts his soul out. When he whispers “I could have killed them all” in the final scene, he’s not bragging. He’s confessing. That’s why First Blood is a classic. It’s not a recruitment poster. It’s a eulogy—just a little less hopeless than the novel that birthed it. Four stars, easily. Just don’t go in expecting explosions every five minutes. Go in expecting to feel bad, and you’ll leave feeling like you watched something real.

Review: Night Patrol (dir. by Ryan Prows)

Posted on by Arleigh

“They vampires. They drink blood!” Bornelius

You know the feeling of digging through a forgotten VHS bin and finding a movie that looks like it was beamed in from a parallel universe where grindhouse cinema never died? That’s Night Patrol in a nutshell. Directed by Ryan Prows, this scrappy, bloody genre mashup has a raw, politically charged energy that mixes social outrage with lurid horror tropes. And honestly, streaming services like Shudder have become the bargain bin of the 21st century—the place where genre films of dubious budget and quality get a new life, or in some cases, their only life. Night Patrol is a perfect example of that ecosystem: too weird for a wide theatrical release, too ambitious to be dismissed outright, and exactly the kind of movie you stumble upon at 1 AM, three scrolls deep into a streaming queue. The core idea is audacious: what if the most elite, secret unit of the LAPD wasn’t just crooked, but was actually a coven of vampires using gang violence as a cover for their midnight snacks? It’s the kind of premise that feels like it was dreamed up at 2 AM after a Super Fly and The Warriors double feature—and I mean that as a high compliment.

If you lean in, you’re in for a bumpy but often thrilling ride. The film centers on two LAPD partners: Ethan (Justin Long) and Xavier (Jermaine Fowler). Ethan is the legacy kid, the son of a legendary cop (Dermot Mulroney), who finally gets the nod to join the secretive “Night Patrol.” Xavier, who grew up in the very housing projects the unit is supposedly “cleaning up,” is left on the outside looking in, suspicious of everything. Naturally, Ethan quickly discovers that his new colleagues aren’t just trigger-happy; they’re literally heartless monsters with metal-plated fangs and a thirst for the residents of the neighborhood Xavier calls home.

Meanwhile, on the streets, Xavier’s brother Wazi (RJ Cyler) and his mother Ayanda (Nicki Micheaux) are realizing that the gang war heating up isn’t just about turf—it’s about survival against the undead. The film’s greatest strength is how it throws these characters into a blender. You have the buddy-cop tension between Long and Fowler, the street-level horror from Cyler’s perspective, and this ancient mystical element brought by Micheaux, who plays a matriarch dabbling in Zulu magic to fight the monsters. It’s a lot, but for the first hour, Prows manages to balance these plates relatively well. There’s a hint of that old-school exploitation energy here: Micheaux’s Ayanda refuses to rely on a broken system and instead arms herself with ancestral power, which gives the film a satisfying underdog-revenge backbone.

Let’s talk about the cast, because this is where Night Patrol either fires on all cylinders or sputters, depending on the scene. Justin Long, our reigning scream king, is perfectly cast as the moral compass who suddenly realizes he’s sold his soul to the corporate office. He plays the “good apple” realizing the whole barrel is rotten with a kind of weary, panicked authenticity. Jermaine Fowler is the secret weapon here; he’s grounded, funny, and provides the emotional anchor the film desperately needs when the visuals go off the rails. Think of him as a reluctant warrior caught between two worlds—the badge he wanted to trust and the community he can’t abandon.

Then, there’s C. M. Punk. The WWE champion plays a vicious white supremacist vampire sergeant, and I have to hand it to him—he’s terrifying. He doesn’t chew scenery so much as he drains it dry of all warmth. He has a physical presence and a cold, dead stare that works perfectly for a monster hiding in a uniform. On the flip side, while rapper Freddie Gibbs and Flying Lotus bring a fun, playful swagger to their gang-heavy roles, some of the other supporting performances—specifically among the vampire coven—feel stiff and amateurish. It creates an uneven texture where one scene feels like a gritty HBO drama and the next feels like a student film. That inconsistency is part of the movie’s scrappy charm, but it also keeps it from feeling fully polished—exactly the kind of rough edge you expect from a bargain bin discovery.

Visually, director Ryan Prows (who previously directed the segment The Subject in V/H/S/94) knows exactly how to make Los Angeles look like a sun-bleached hellscape during the day and a neon-drenched deathtrap at night. The cinematography is gritty and grainy, giving it that ’90s VHS vibe that makes every alleyway feel dangerous. It echoes the cheap, hungry look of independent cinema from decades past, which fits the movie’s B-movie ambitions perfectly. However, style only gets you so far, and Night Patrol hits a serious wall in its final act.

The pacing, which was already a slow burn, starts to drag heavily. There is a lot of talking. A lot of sitting in rooms explaining the “ancient lore” of the vampires, and honestly, the rules get so convoluted that you stop caring who the original evil vampire was and just want to see somebody get staked. The movie tries to have its cake and eat it too—it wants to be a serious critique of the “Thin Blue Line” ideology, an action-horror romp, and a mystical family drama. Usually, it ends up being a muddled version of all three. A tighter script would have known exactly how long to linger on a metaphor before cutting to the chase, but Night Patrol often forgets that lesson. This is where the bargain bin analogy really stings: you can feel the ambition straining against the budget and the runtime, and not every swing connects.

When the action finally does hit in the last twenty minutes, it’s brutally fun. There are guts ripped out, decapitations, and a final boss form for the villains that looks like something out of a heavy metal album cover. It’s just a shame it takes so long to get there. The social commentary is loud and clear—cops as gangs, systemic racism, the failure of the “few bad apples” defense. It’s not subtle, but for a movie where a guy gets thrown through a window in slow motion, subtlety isn’t really the goal. Night Patrol has teeth, and when it remembers to bite, it draws blood. It just spends too much time trying to decide what flavor of juice it wants to suck. And yet, without a service like Shudder, a movie like this probably never sees the light of day. It’s too rough for festivals, too niche for Netflix’s algorithm, and too weird for traditional distributors. Streaming has become the digital equivalent of the $5 DVD barrel outside a video store—full of misfires, hidden gems, and everything in between.

It’s a C+ effort that gets a B+ for sheer ambition, and honestly, in the wasteland of January genre releases, that’s more than enough to warrant a watch—if only to see Justin Long react to C. M. Punk turning into a bat-demon while Jermaine Fowler tries to talk sense into everyone. You can’t get that anywhere else, and that’s exactly why the bargain bin still matters.

Review: Obsession (dir. by Curry Barker)

Posted on by Arleigh

“Just because you chose this for her doesn’t make it less real.” — Phone Operator

There is something especially unsettling about horror films that begin with a simple emotional truth. Obsession, written and directed by Curry Barker, starts with a feeling most people understand: wanting someone to love you back. Barker takes that universal desire and twists it into something ugly, tragic, and terrifying. The result is a horror film that works both as a supernatural nightmare and as an uncomfortable examination of loneliness, entitlement, and emotional dependency.

The premise sounds deceptively simple. Bear, played by Michael Johnston, is a socially awkward young man hopelessly in love with his longtime friend Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette. Bear convinces himself that if circumstances were just slightly different, Nikki would finally realize he is the right person for her. When he discovers a supernatural object known as the “One Wish Willow,” he makes the disastrous decision to wish that Nikki would love him completely. Naturally, the wish mutates into something horrific, transforming Nikki’s affection into a violent and all-consuming obsession.

At its core, Obsession feels like an old-fashioned monkey’s paw story updated for the modern age. Barker takes the familiar “be careful what you wish for” premise and dials the nastiness up to 11. The film fully commits to the emotional ugliness of its concept, giving the well-worn trope a vicious bite that makes the movie far better than it has any reason to be. Instead of treating the supernatural element like a gimmick, Barker roots the horror in emotional selfishness and the terrifying consequences of trying to control another person’s feelings.

What makes the film work so well is that Barker avoids turning the story into a heavy-handed moral lecture. The script trusts the audience to understand the disturbing reality underneath Bear’s actions. Bear is not portrayed as a cartoon villain. He is insecure, lonely, emotionally immature, and quietly resentful. That complexity makes him far more unsettling because he feels recognizable. The film taps into a very modern type of “nice guy” entitlement, where affection is viewed less as mutual connection and more as something owed or deserved.

Michael Johnston gives an impressively layered performance as Bear. He never plays the character as openly monstrous right away. Instead, Johnston leans into Bear’s passivity and self-pity, making him seem like someone convinced life has unfairly denied him happiness. Even as events spiral out of control, Bear continues rationalizing his decisions instead of fully confronting the damage he has caused. Johnston manages to make the character pathetic, frustrating, and disturbing all at once.

Inde Navarrette delivers the film’s strongest performance as Nikki. Once the wish begins taking hold, Navarrette shifts between affection, emotional collapse, desperation, and outright menace with remarkable control. What makes her performance especially effective is that Nikki never stops feeling human beneath the horror. There is a lingering sadness to the character because the film makes it clear she is losing her autonomy piece by piece. That loss of agency becomes one of the movie’s most disturbing ideas.

More than anything, Obsession is about the horror of emotional suffocation. Barker exaggerates toxic relationship dynamics into supernatural horror, but the emotions underneath everything feel believable enough to sting. The film understands how frightening dependency can become when love starts turning into possession. In many ways, the supernatural curse almost feels secondary to the emotional damage unfolding between the characters.

One of the film’s biggest surprises is how confidently Barker handles tone. Considering his background in online comedy and internet content, it would have been easy for the movie to lean too heavily into irony or self-awareness. Instead, Obsession balances dark humor and psychological dread remarkably well. There are genuinely funny moments throughout the film, often rooted in painfully awkward social interactions, but the comedy never weakens the horror. If anything, it makes scenes more uncomfortable because the characters and situations feel recognizable.

Visually, the film punches far above its apparent budget. Barker and cinematographer Taylor Clemons create an atmosphere that feels claustrophobic and emotionally oppressive. The framing often leaves characters isolated within empty spaces, subtly reinforcing the loneliness and discomfort driving the story. The lighting also deserves praise, frequently bathing scenes in dim yellows, reds, and shadows that gradually make ordinary environments feel increasingly hostile.

The sound design is equally effective. Barker wisely avoids relying only on loud jump scares. Instead, the film builds tension through silence, distant noises, and subtle audio distortions that make scenes feel emotionally wrong before anything overtly frightening even happens. Combined with Rock Burwell’s unsettling score, the movie maintains a lingering sense of dread that hangs over nearly every scene.

When the horror finally erupts into violence, Barker shows admirable restraint. The graphic moments land hard because the emotional groundwork has already been carefully established. Some scenes are genuinely difficult to watch not simply because they are bloody, but because the violence feels directly tied to desperation, obsession, and loss of control. The film understands that emotional discomfort can often be more disturbing than gore itself.

If the movie has weaknesses, they mostly stem from Barker occasionally pushing the central metaphor a little too hard. Some later scenes become slightly obvious in their symbolism, and a few supporting characters feel underdeveloped compared to the leads. Still, those flaws never seriously damage the film because the central performances and atmosphere remain compelling throughout.

What ultimately makes Obsession stand out from many modern horror films is how emotionally specific it feels. Rather than chasing broad social commentary, Barker narrows his focus onto a very particular kind of emotional dysfunction. The film is less interested in making sweeping statements about relationships and more interested in examining the terrifying consequences of confusing love with ownership.

In that sense, the “One Wish Willow” works less as a magical object and more as a representation of selfish fantasy. Bear wants love without vulnerability, rejection, or reciprocity. He wants an easy shortcut to emotional fulfillment. The horror comes from realizing that genuine love cannot exist without freedom.

There are traces of earlier psychological horror films throughout Obsession. The movie occasionally recalls the obsessive fixation of Misery and the emotional body horror of Possession, though Barker filters those influences through a distinctly modern lens shaped by internet-age loneliness and social isolation. Yet despite those influences, the film never feels derivative. Barker’s voice as a filmmaker comes through clearly in both the emotional discomfort and escalating supernatural chaos.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Obsession is how assured it feels for a filmmaker still early in his career. Barker directs with confidence, gradually tightening the emotional pressure until the movie becomes almost suffocating by its final act. By the end, the film reaches a level of tragic inevitability that feels earned rather than forced.

Obsession succeeds because it recognizes how frightening loneliness and emotional dependency can become when mixed with entitlement and fantasy. Beneath the supernatural premise is a painfully human story about people confusing obsession with love. Curry Barker turns that idea into a disturbing, darkly funny, emotionally bruising horror film that lingers long after the credits roll.

For a filmmaker making such an ambitious leap into feature-length horror, Barker delivers something remarkably confident and emotionally sharp. Obsession is creepy, uncomfortable, tragic, and surprisingly insightful. More importantly, it feels like the arrival of a filmmaker who understands how modern horror can reflect real emotional anxieties while still delivering an entertaining and deeply unsettling experience. In many ways, Barker joins the recent wave of younger horror filmmakers like Oz Perkins and Zach Cregger who have proven that horror, dread, and dark comedy do not have to work against each other. Like those directors, Barker understands how to blend discomfort, absurdity, and genuine emotional tension into a cohesive whole, creating a film that is as unsettling as it is unexpectedly funny.

Review: Aguirre, The Wrath of God (dir. by Werner Herzog)

Posted on by Arleigh

“For here on this river, God never finished his creation.” — Balthasar

Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God opens with one of the most hypnotic sequences in cinema: a column of Spanish conquistadors and indigenous slaves snaking down a fog-shrouded Andean pass, cannon winched separately. From that first frame, you sense you’re watching not a historical adventure but a fever dream. The film is loosely based on the real-life Lope de Aguirre, a Basque mutineer who searched for El Dorado in the 1560s. But as Herzog later confirmed, historical accuracy was never the point. Aguirre is fiction—a myth sculpted from jungle heat, river currents, and one actor’s maniacal commitment. Remarkably, the production itself became a hellish mirror of the narrative: shot deep in the Peruvian rainforest under conditions so brutal that the line between making a movie and surviving an ordeal vanished.

The plot is simple. In 1560, a Spanish expedition descends into the Amazon basin, searching for the golden city of Manoa. When rapids prove too treacherous, a smaller party is sent ahead under the noble but hapless Don Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra). Among them is Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), a wiry, half-mad soldier who immediately undermines authority. After Ursúa is murdered, Aguirre seizes control, declaring himself “the Wrath of God” and proclaiming a new monarchy. What follows is not a rousing conquest but a slow hallucinatory unraveling: rafts stuck on looping rivers, starvation, arrows from invisible natives, and the collapse of every civilizing impulse. This is one man’s battle against nature and his personal crisis of faith—a crisis the production team would come to know intimately.

Herzog’s storytelling prioritizes mood over plot. The narrative drifts through long takes of jungle canopy, close-ups of Kinski’s hollow eyes, and Popol Vuh’s otherworldly score. But the film’s raw authenticity comes from its production: a near-literal trek through jungle hell. Herzog took a small cast and crew into the Peruvian rainforest with no insurance, no backup equipment, and no evacuation strategy. The Urubamba River was unpredictable, with hidden rocks and stretches local guides refused to navigate. Rafts capsized. Food spoiled. Actors began unraveling for real. When a soldier in the film announces, “We are walking in circles,” it is both scripted and a genuine observation from an extra who’d passed the same fallen tree three days running. Herzog left that take in. The boundary between fictional madness and documentary collapse dissolved completely.

And then there was Klaus Kinski. If the jungle was one monster, Kinski was another. The conflict between Herzog and his star is the stuff of legend. Kinski arrived volatile, prone to screaming fits, threatening to abandon the production. At one point, a native chief offered to kill Kinski for free. Herzog declined—he still needed the actor alive. On another occasion, Herzog reportedly held Kinski at gunpoint during an attempted walkout. Kinski stayed. That friction bleeds into every frame. Kinski’s rage and paranoid stillness aren’t simulated; they’re the genuine product of a man frayed by heat, isolation, and his own demons. That is not method acting in a safe studio. It’s a man on the edge, pointed at a director who refused to flinch.

What lifts Aguirre into high art is its philosophical dread, earned through real suffering. And at its heart is Aguirre himself, a character who feels less like a historical figure and more like a literary archetype. As played by the manic Kinski, Aguirre is a remarkable fusion: the tragic Miltonian rebel and the obsessive Melvillean monomaniac. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, Aguirre defies divine and imperial order, preferring to reign in hell than serve in heaven. His self-coronation and final soliloquy echo Milton’s antihero—magnificent in defiance, hollowed by pride. But Herzog drains the grandeur, leaving only the fall without the poetry. Simultaneously, Aguirre is pure Ahab from Moby-Dick: another obsessive dragging a reluctant crew into the void on a suicidal quest. El Dorado is his white whale, an obsession that obliterates loyalty, love, and sanity. Both are swallowed by their obsession—Ahab by the sea, Aguirre by the jungle. But where Melville gives Ahab a thunderous final confrontation, Herzog gives Aguirre a whimper: a circle of monkeys, a drifting raft, and a whispered promise of a dynasty that will never come. Kinski holds both archetypes in suspension—Satan’s pride and Ahab’s fixation—and grinds them into something unrecognizable, belonging only to Herzog’s fever dream.

In the film’s most famous scene, Aguirre stands alone on a raft littered with corpses, small monkeys crawling over his armor, and whispers, “I will be the Wrath of God. Who else is with me?” No one. The jungle has swallowed everyone. Herzog frames this as the logical end of both the Miltonian and Melvillean arcs: absolute power in absolute isolation. The scene was shot in one take—not for artistry but because the raft was about to be swept away. The monkeys were real, biting the crew and defecating on Kinski’s armor. He didn’t break character. He couldn’t afford to. That’s the difference between a film that describes madness and one that embodies it.

Visually, Aguirre is a masterclass in low-budget grandeur. Cinematographer Thomas Mauch’s handheld camera glides through the jungle like a ghost. The opening descent feels supernatural. Rivers fill the frame until you lose direction. A galleon stuck in high branches—a leftover from a previous flood—becomes the film’s central metaphor: even empire is helpless against nature’s chaos. That chaos was logistical as well as thematic.

If there’s a weakness, it’s that the pacing can feel punishing. This film doesn’t build to a climax; it decays. Characters die offscreen or vanish. There is no redemption, no final battle. Some viewers may find this anticlimactic, but that’s the point. Herzog isn’t telling a story about winning or losing. He’s documenting a psychic meltdown from the inside, and meltdowns don’t follow three-act structure. The production’s own meltdown—hunger, disease, screaming matches on muddy riverbanks—only reinforces that vision. Aguirre is not a film about a man battling nature and losing his faith. It’s a film that became that battle, in real time, with real stakes, and somehow survived.

Years after release, Herzog clarified that Aguirre bears only the loosest resemblance to the historical Lope de Aguirre. He claimed he dreamed the film during a hike in the Alps. That dream-logic explains why Aguirre feels less like a period piece than a prehistoric vision. History is just a costume; the real subject is the human capacity to mistake madness for destiny. And that destiny, filtered through Kinski, is neither strictly Miltonian nor Melvillean but a nightmare hybrid: a fallen angel who keeps hunting the whale long after the ship has sunk.

In the end, Aguirre, the Wrath of God remains a towering, unsettling achievement. It influenced everything from Apocalypse Now to Resident Evil 4, but no imitation has matched its specific, waterlogged power. Despite the leeches, dysentery, gun threats, and screaming, the film that emerged is haunting, mesmerizing—a surreal trip into one man’s battle against nature and his crisis of faith. Herzog wanted “ecstatic truth” rather than mere fact. Aguirre is ecstatic truth: a fiction that feels more real than reality, a portrait of a madman that makes you understand why sanity is fragile, and a warning about conquest that remains urgent half a century later. Watch it on the biggest screen you can find, late at night, alone. The monkeys will be waiting. And somewhere in the jungle, Herzog and Kinski are still arguing.