RENTAL FAMILY

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

There’s something about Brandan Fraser’s performance in Rental Family, a kind of forced “aw-shucks” quality I found slightly off putting. He also keeps doing this thing with his mouth, where he sort of scrunches his lips to one side. To be fair, it’s very different from anything he’s done in other roles, but all I could think about was how he was simply making specific acting choices for this character. But isn’t that the kicker—that I should not be conscious of acting choices? I should readily suspend disbelief, and accept Phillip Vanderploeg as an individual.

I feel bad dumping on Brendan Fraser like this; I do like him as an actor, generally speaking—his performance in The Whale was incredible, and was the only thing that kept me from dismissing that wildly problematic film completely. Considering these respective performances, I suppose the next step is toward the director, in this case a Japanese director named Hikari, who apparently goes professionally by one name, like Madonna or Beyoncé. She most recently directed three episodes of the excellent Netflix series Beef, and has one other feature film on her resume, about a young Japanese woman with cerebral palsy called 37 Seconds and which ironically had a runtime of 6,900 seconds (115 minutes). Anyway, I can only imagine that either Hikari was happy with the performance Brendan Fraser gave her, or this was what she coaxed out of him. Either way, I found it a little cloying.

The performances of everyone else in the cast ranges between pretty good to great—the latter applying to the very impressive 11-year-old Shannon Mahina Gorman, whose very presence improved Rental Family any time she was onscreen. Finding a child actor who is both talented and natural is a difficult feat. Gorman is biracial, as is the young character she plays, Mia, whose single mother hires the “Rental Family” agency to provide a stand-in American dad for her. Mia’s mom is trying to get her accepted into a good school, which she believes previously rejected her because of the absent dad. Enter Phillip, here playing another person as provided by the Rental Family agency.

Rental Family follows dual plot threads, one where Phillip bonds with Mia, and another where Phillip pretends to be a journalist interviewing an elderly actor named Kikuo (Akira Emote) who is afraid the country is forgetting his life’s work—his daughter hires the agency in an effort to make him feel better. The story moves into these other two plot threads after we see Phillip’s first job, as a hired groom at a wedding, staged for the benefit of the bride’s parents. This sequence ends with a particular reveal that I won’t spoil, except that it seems to serve as a justification for the agency’s existence, and is fairly moving.

But, thanks to an occasionally muddled script, cowritten by Hikari and American writer and executive producer Stephen Blahut, there are times when even Rental Family seems ambivalent about a service like this, which is apparently quite prevalent in Japan. Is Hikari making a statement, or a judgment, about them? I can’t quite tell. This film seems to support some of their services, such as what is revealed to be the reason for the wedding, but not some other services, such as “apology services” where cheating husbands hire a fake mistress to apologize to their wives. Do none of these husbands think of apologizing themselves?

Multiple times in Rental Family, a character will comment on how people outside of Japanese culture will never fully understand it. This is coincidentally in keeping with my experience of this film, which I could never fully connect with. I wanted more dimension to the characters, and particularly to Phillip, who spends far more time onscreen pretending to be someone he’s not. The only thing we know about why this “big American guy” has been living in Japan for the past seven years is that a widely seen toothpaste commercial was what brought him there to begin with. Do actors really move to Japan just for one commercial gig? I want to know more about his family back home, and why he had such an apparently absent dad. But, evidently the only reason we know even that much is so he can express reservations about playing a parent himself.

We lean early on that Phillip is lonely in Japan, no friends to speak of, no romantic partner, just a woman who is evidently a sex worker—also a very undeveloped character, although I can appreciate that at least in this movie she’s much more than just a sex object, a thoughtful woman who also provides Phillip companionship. Really, all the characters around Phillip are far more interesting than he is, not just because they are all have a fair amount more dimension to them, but because Phillip’s only mode seems to be uncomfortable awkwardness.

There’s nothing egregiously wrong with Rental Family, I just found it somewhat lacking. It’s a blandly pleasant entertainment, and I tend to want more than that. Others may locate more insight in it than I did. It won’t elicit much passion: it’s fine for what it is, and it won’t be long remembered.

I kind of wish the movie were about her instead.

Overall: B-

HAMNET

Directing: A-
Acting: A+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-

The final sequence in Hamnet involves the staging of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, with Shakespeare himself (Paul Mescal) playing the part of the Ghost, and Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), at the front of the floor crowd crunched right up against the stage, having made an unannounced visit to view the play. This is a scene with a lot of extras, thankfully none of them computer-generated, and the staging—if you’ll pardon the pun—is superb. It’s not often that even the performances of the extras in a scene is impressive, and this is a testament to the directing skill of Chloé Zhao (who also directed and co-wrote the Best Picture-winning 2020 film Nomadland). Agnes becomes deeply invested in the story unfolding onstage in front of her, but so does this entire crowd, who at one point take a subtle collective action as led by Agnes, which is one of the most moving moments in the film. We do not see any of William Shakespeare’s productions up until this point, and this sequence alone makes Hamnet worth seeing, and it’s worth waiting for.

It’s also worth noting that Zhao also co-wrote Hamnet, along with Maggie O’Farrell, author of the 2020 novel of the same name—and that this story runs with a lot of historical conjecture, such as the idea that Hamlet is at all directly tied to the death of Shakespeare’s one son: Hamnet. Indeed, we are told with an opening title card that in their time, the names “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were virtually interchangeable. This film literalizes this notion when, upon first seeing the play start, Agnes shouts at the actors “Don’t you dare say my son’s name!”

As O’Farrell and Zhao tell it, The Tragedy of Hamlet ultimately served as a way for William and Agnes to come to an understanding regarding the grieving of their son. This is reportedly the product of speculation, but in the film, it is very effective. I cam to this film armed with tissues, and it did not disappoint on that front—although I will admit to expecting to weep a bit more than I did. I still wept plenty.

The focus of Hamnet is never truly on the title character, but on how his life and death of his parents, one of whom is arguably the most famous artist ever to live in the Western World. Long before any of the children are born—and there are three; an older daughter, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and a pair of fraternal twins, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes)—the story focuses on the love story between William, and Agnes, the local orphaned child with a reputation for being a witch. Hamnet only leans slightly into the witchiness of Agnes, with her insistence that she can see visions by touching people’s hands, or her deep, generational connection to the forest. She even gives birth to Susanna by herself in the woods. This, of course, is well after William and Agnes secure their betrothal, in the face of certain lack of permission by either William’s parents or Agnes’s guardian, by simply getting pregnant.

I find myself wondering how these plot threads play out in the novel, as although the film clocks in at a quite-reasonable 125 minutes, some of these details felt a little bit rushed to me. Most notably, the contempt this couple’s parents or guardian have for their beloved, which seems to have dissipated on the part of William’s mother, Mary (Emily Watson), within a couple of scenes—as soon as the narrative jumps forward to the birth of Susanna. As for Agne’s stepmother, Joan (Justine Mitchell), we see her very briefly in only a few scenes, and when Agnes much later says to her very coldly, “You are not my mother, and you never were,” we have seen so little of Joan that the nastiness feels unearned.

The narrative also jumps forward from the twins’ infancy to their age at around ten, and we do not get a lot of time getting to know any of them, either—though we do get to know Hamnet himself slightly better than the others. Just enough, indeed, to get a sense of how much these children mean to their parents. Jessie Buckley’s performance of maternal grief is so stunningly visceral that I found myself wondering if she has children of her own (she has one), and Paul Mescal has kind of already made a career out of tortured interiority. These two do not express grief in the same way, and in this telling at least, it takes the writing of Hamlet to bring them back around to each other

Hamnet is more than anything a love story, and that is indeed where it shines. The performances are phenomenal, especially those of Buckley and Mescal, but really across the board—right down to the aforementioned extras in the theater watching Hamlet in the final sequence of the film. And although I’m sure it would help deepen the appreciation, you need not have a detailed knowledge of Shakespeare’s work to appreciate this story, or indeed even how Hamlet is used therein. Shakespeare himself was well known for writing “a play within a play,” which is effectively what is happening here—quite similarly using the play as subtext. By the end, though, it becomes the text, in a way deftly executed, so that even with the quibbles I had with the plotting, I felt emotionally cleansed.

Agnes is deeply moved, and so are we.

Overall: A-

ETERNITY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

I really enjoyed Eternity, but I also have a lot of nitpicks. Let’s go through them all!

But let’s back up a step, to the premise, which is that our three main characters spend time in a place called “Junction,” where they have as long as a week to decide a single environment (or world, or universe, whatever you want to call it) in which to spend eternity. The twist, and the whole reason for this story, is that Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) is also faced with another agonizing decision: whether to spend eternity with the first husband, Luke (Callum Turmer), who died in the Korean war, or her second husband, Larry (Miles Teller), with whom Joan enjoyed 65 years of happy marriage.

The first death we see is Larry’s, and it’s the circumstances of this death that is my first major nitpick. It happens at a gender reveal party for one of their great grandchildren. A gender reveal party? Really? To be fair, the script, by Patrick Cunnane and director David Freyne, passingly acknowledges how stupid these parties are: “People die at these things!” says Larry as an old man, played by Barry Primus (Joan as an old woman is played by Betty Buckley). There is even a bit of a callback to this gag when a later couple met in Junction is revealed to have been killed in a freak accident at a gender reveal party. Still, the deliberately inoffensive jokes aside, the use of a gender reveal party in the opening sequence of this film both reflects and participates in the preposterous normalization of "gender reveal” parties. These things are both pointless and blithely presumptuous, and might as well be called “Genital Identification Parties.” But nobody in this movie dares say that.

We learn on the car ride to the party, before Larry dies, that Joan has cancer, and is waiting until after the party to tell the rest of the family. When Larry wakes up in Junction, he’s the first character we follow there, and at first the story is just from his perspective. But, we already know that Joan is not far behind, and basically the second act involves a shift in perspective to hers. Not long after that, we learn that Luke has been waiting for Joan in Junction for the past 67 years.

The rules of how things work in Junction are both undeniably entertaining and often nonsensical. This film clearly owes its existence to the widely loved (I always thought it was just fine) 1991 Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life, except instead of a character pleading his case for having lived a life worthy of spending eternity in a better place, here characters merely have to choose where to spend eternity—and in this case, with whom.

Why time means anything in Junction at all escapes me, but it very much does: “clients” are assigned an Afterlife Coordinator (“AC”) as a guide to help them choose, but they get one week in which to do it. The people who work these jobs in Junction, whether they are ACs or janitors or bartenders, are people who have chosen, for various reasons, not to go to any eternity at all. Some of them just enjoy helping others and that gives them a feeling of purpose. Some are waiting for their beloved to arrive, as in Luke, who has waited there for 67 years. It’s a little weird that measurements of time should be so important in Junction when it means nothing in eternity, but whatever.

The thing is, in the film Eternity, it’s all the scenes that take place in Junction that are really fun and compelling—and, crucially, contains all of the surprisingly effective humor in this film. Now, it also makes no sense that the system here should be so modeled on capitalism, with representatives from countless “Worlds” trying to sell it to people passing through Junction—not with money, but just simple persuasion, I guess. We see characters walking past countless booths (or in some cases, watching commercials) for different “Worlds,” from Paris Land to Smokers World to 1920s Germany “with 100% less Nazis.” Larry’s inclination is toward Beach World, and Joan’s is toward Mountain Town—basically the same argument they had in the car on the way to the party. I loved seeing all these examples of eternities, and when I saw booths for Queer World and Studio 54 World side by side, I thought: I’d have a hard time choosing between those two. That said, why does this system only have a selection of offerings created by someone else? Can’t we just create one of our own? What if I want to spend eternity in Andrew-Garfield-and-Timothée-Chalamet-Sandwich World?

Junction is also made much more fun by the supporting characters who are Larry’s and Joan’s ACs, respectively: Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and Ryan (John Early). These two are very invested in their clients but also have a sexual past together, which is an odd turn in this film given how openly and obviously queer John Early is. He does marvel at the handsomeness of Luke, a running gag in the script, but he later explains to Anna that he could never do polyamory because “I am a one-woman man.” Oh really, John Early? The oddest thing about that exchange is that it is the one time in Eternity that polyamory is brought up, and it’s only within the context of Ryan and Anna’s relationship. Why does no one ever bring up the idea to Joan, Larry and Luke? Couldn’t they at least test out Polyamory World?

It seems like that’s the only thing that could be a suitable compromise for all three of them. Why should Joan have to choose? Isn’t eternity supposed to be the place they choose in which they’ll be happiest? This script does, amusingly, acknowledge how one eternity could quickly get tedious: enforcement officials are constantly running down people trying to escape the eternity they have chosen, one of whom shouts, “Museum World is so boring!” But would not any eternity be so? Whether it’s an eternity at the beach or in the mountains?

Indeed, there’s a ton of detail in Eternity that is really easy to pick apart, not least of which is the fair amount of time spent in different eternities in the second half of the film. These scenes are constructed so that characters can reflect on whether or not they made the right choice, but when the backdrop is just serene mountains or an inexplicably overcrowded beach (why would there be a limit on the amount of beach that can be shared for eternity?), Eternity, as a film, instantly just becomes far less interesting, compelling, or fun. It’s less fun without Early or Randolph around. And the technique for rendering the “Archive” building in each Eternity where characters can view replayed memories from their lives is mystifying: they see themselves as tangible people, but in a sort of diorama box with the environment of these memories rendered in large hand drawn backdrops. I can’t tell if this was a legitimately artistic choice or if it was a production cost saving measure. It sure felt like the latter,

Eternity is the kind of movie that is undeniably entertaining but also does not stand up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny. I laughed a lot the entire time the film was set at Junction, from the many sight gags to the delightful performances of both Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early. This made me happy to have seen this movie even though none of it really makes any sense.

Overall: B

SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE

Directing: B
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

Sisu: Road to Revenge opens so similarly to the original 2022 Finnish film Sisu that, for a brief moment, I thought I had misunderstood something and somehow found myself at a rerelease of that film. The first thing you see is a title card offering the definition of the word Sisu: “a Finnish word that cannot be translated. It means a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination. Sisu manifests itself when all hope is lost.” And in both films, this is followed by voiceover narration as we see an animated map of Europe—in the case of Sisu, we learn it is 1944 as the Second World War is coming to an end; in Sisu: Road to Revenge, it is two years later, 1946, shortly after the end of the war. We learn of the land area of Finland that was ceded to the Soviet Union, forcing nearly half a million Finnish people to relocate—and that this was the homeland of our hero, Aatami (Jorma Tommila).

Once these introductory scenes are out of the way, the two films then move forward in fairly different ways. In Sisu, it began with quiet serenity while Aatami prospects for gold, ultimately interrupted with approaching Nazi carnage. In Road to Revenge, we see Aatami driving a huge truck across the border, where he finds the home of his family who was murdered by a Soviet Red Army officer. He commences with dismantling the lumber of the house, marking the pieces as needed for reassembly, and stacks it on the bed of the aforementioned huge truck.

You could say there is a sort of serenity to this early sequence as well, except that writer-director Jalmari Helander, who wrote and directed both of these movies, moves through it much more quickly. And, just as in the first film, sequences are divided up into “chapters,” most of which last no longer than a single set piece.

And here is where I really get to the point: what surprises me most about Sisu: Road to Revenge is how it’s gotten a more positive response, from both critics and audiences, than the first film. The best I can guess is that people find the action sequences, and the delightfully inventive violence that defines both films, to be even more exciting than before. For me, though, there’s something about the time the first film takes before shifting gears, and the specific tone from an international perspective that gave it a novelty that by definition cannot exist with a sequel.

There’s a bit of an irony in how I would call this a rare instance of it being actually advisable to watch the original film right before going right into watching the sequel. Because even though the films are set two years apart, they very much feel like the same movie. Helander reportedly was very deliberate in keeping the run times of these films at a tight ninety minutes because he is “not a fan of 3-hour epics” (according to IMDb.com). And yet, you could easily watch these two films back to back for a solid three hours and feel like you’re watching a single, epic story of wildly implausible but deeply entertaining revenge violence.

Indeed, in Road to Revenge, we do get a villain as the character who murdered Aatami’s family—Red Army officer Yeagor Dragunov, played by American actor Stephen Lang. This actor is the guy perhaps most notably recognized as the primary villain in both Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water, except in those movies he’s super jacked, and in Road to Revenge, his character having just been released from a prison in Siberia, he’s pretty scrawny—almost emaciated. But, the Soviets are eager to dispatch this mysterious man who has killed hundreds of men, and so they release Dragunov to “clean up the mess he made.” This leads to an inevitable showdown.

Both Sisu movies make the curious choice of shooting nearly all the dialogue in English—evidently as a means of broadening the audience potential of a film out of Finland. Lang gets by far the most lines in Road to Revenge, presumably meant to be in Russian but performed, evidently for our sake, in English. A lot of his lines are super contrived or outright stupid, to such an extent that they would have played better in Russian with English subtitles. As an evident nod of respect to Helander’s homeland, any dialogue by Finnish characters is indeed performed in Finnish with English subtitles. In Road to Revenge, this only occurs with two lines at the end of the film. Even then, Aatami himself says nothing, as a defining characteristic of both of these films is that he is a man of few words. He says only a couple of lines at the end of the original Sisu; he makes it through the entirety of Road to Revenge without saying anything at all.

Mind you, it’s pretty easy to say that if you liked Sisu, you will certainly like Sisu: Road to Revenge—especially as the latter gets to the action a lot more swiftly, as is par for the course with sequels like this. There’s a pretty great chase sequence with Aatami and several armored men on motorcycles that is basically Indiana Jones meets Mad Max. As always, Aatami sustains a great deal of injury, but a big part of the point of these films is how the blind desire for vengeance is what keeps him alive even in the direst of circumstances, even as he regularly achieves the humanly impossible, let alone the implausible.

Sisu is basically Finland’s version of a superhero franchise, albeit one that feels as though it was filtered through the sensibility of Quentin Tarantino. There are moments in Sisu that are quite emotional, though, and it never lets us forget that Aatami is still grieving the lost of his entire family at the hands of the enemy. This man does not see Nazis or Soviets as individuals, but as parts of a collective entity who wronged him. This makes it easy to root for his often gruesome killing of soldier after soldier. This happens in Road to Revenge, but of course, all as part of his path to Dragonov. This culminates in a pretty fun sequence of Aatami hacking and gunning his way through cars of men on a train headed back to Siberia.

A quick note on the special effects: some of it is very impressive in this movie, particularly wide shots of fighter jets attempting to gun down Aatami in his truck full of lumber. Other times, it’s very obvious CGI, such as the wide shots of the aforementioned train traveling through the night. At least it’s never overtly bad, and its use only ever serves the story, such as it is. This is a movie made to satisfy viewer bloodlust, and on that level, it delivers with a clever hand.

You missed a spot!

Overall: B

SENTIMENTAL VALUE

Directing: A-
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-

Anyone with a thing for juicy family dramas should look no further than Sentimental Value, Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his similarly excellent The Worst Person in the World (2021). The person he cast in the starring role is also the same in both films: the wonderful Renate Reinsve, here playing Nora Borg, an accomplished stage actress in Oslo, where she lives in a home that has been in her family for generations.

If I had any minor nitpick about Sentimental Value, it would be how no one ever talks about the hugeness of this house, which appears to have three stories and an unspecified but certainly large number of rooms. The generational history is discussed as far back as Nora’s great great grandparents, but I don’t recall any family iteration being larger than a family of four: two parents and two kids. Clearly more recent generations aquired the house through inheritance; maybe earlier generations actually made it a multi-generational home? I kept wondering how the hell any of them kept it clean. None of these generations are shown with a housekeeper.

Surely it would make sense that such a house would be easier to afford in the era of World War II—today, in the United States at least, this house would have been converted into an apartment complex long ago. Granted, this is Norway, and a lot of things work differently there—although the simple tenets of capitalism infect every corner of the globe. And, to be sure: this house figures prominently in the plot of Sentimental Value, a beautiful repository for collective memory and generational trauma, from Nora’s grandmother’s Nazi imprisonment and subsequent suicide inside the house, to Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, also excellent) witnessing the volatility of their parents’ marriage until their father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), leaves and spends the better part of the rest of their lives estranged from them.

Sentimental Value opens shortly after the death of Nora and Agnes’s mother, a character we really never get to know. This is about their relationship with their father, a once-famous director who has not made a film in 15 years. But, he has now written an incredible script, with the lead part tailor made for Nora, who wants nothing to do with it. Searching for other options, Gustav turns to an American actress he meets at a local film festival: Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning in a really tricky part that she nails. Rachel is curious about the deep sadness of the suicidal character she’s playing, and Gustave has to tell her more than once that it’s not about his mother. Meanwhile, he asks Rachel to dye her hair the same color as Nora. (And incidentally, Elle Fanning and Renate Reinsve bear an uncanny resemblance. If not for the different accents, they could more believably play sisters than the sisters we actually see onscreen here.)

What Gustav has written is highly fictionalized but still has clear similarities to his own life and family—and this is where we return, yet again, to the house. Gustav wants to shoot the film in the family home. He also wants to use his young grandson, Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven, the only cast member who is clearly not a practiced actor, just like the character), in the production—just like he once did Agnes, in a previous World War II-era film. Agnes was a great screen presence at the time, but did not pursue acting as a career as Nora did. Gustav, ever the undependable dad, complains of his dislike for live theater, and so never comes to Nora’s plays.

All of this comes together in a plot that is complex but never difficult to follow, and perhaps may even be a bit slowly paced for some viewers. It’s worth noting that although this is a family drama about two sisters with deep resentment toward their father, there are no histrionics here, no scene made for an Oscar clip. Where other movies of this sort go for familial cruelty, this one leans more heavily into a kind of benign neglect. There’s something about Stellan Skarsgård’s performance, though, that still elicits empathy. Few people can convey subtly tortured interiority like Stellan Skarsgård.

Gustav is a man who can’t help who he is, and doesn’t really know how to change—certainly not now at the age of 70. But, over time he uses this new script of his to convey how he has an uncanny understanding of Nora in particular, the daughter he wrote it for. In the end, it is through their art that they finally find a way to connect, and this is the subtle but very sweet note on which the story ends. Sentimental Value takes a sort of scenic route through its themes, never exactly a thrill of an experience but one with a finesse that stays with you.

A father-daughter relationship not quite like others you’ve seen.

Overall: A-

TRAIN DREAMS

Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A-

Who knew that Train Dreams had such a connection to Spokane, Washington—the city where I grew up? Set mostly in the Idaho panhandle over decades starting in 1917, Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton) works mostly in the logging industry, but spends a short time on the Spokane International Railway, and he later takes the train for visits into Spokane. There is a brief sequence, very late in the film, of Robert walking the streets of downtown Spokane, passing old buildings I remember vividly from my teenage years. There’s a glimpse of the clocktower on the Review building, which has stood since 1891—somewhere in the vicinity of when Robert was born. The sequence is set in the 1960s, and Robert has a brief exchange with a woman on the street as they watch live footage of the Earth from outer space on a TV in a store window. The sequence also features a barely-seen glimpse of the 16-story Washington Trust Financial Center, which was not built until 1973, but I guess I’ll forgive the movie for that.

As is typical of film productions, most of the filming of Train Dreams was not quite where it was actually set. Aside from the brief excursion to Spokane, which is located about 22 miles from the state line with Idaho, all the scenes with Robert and his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) are set in Idaho. There are many scenes of Robert working industry logging jobs far from home, but this still must be mostly in Idaho; we are told very early on that Robert never makes it further east than a few miles into Montana. These sequences feature deeply lush greenery that is very believable as Northern Idaho, where I have spent a lot of time. Nearly all of this film, however, was shot in Eastern Washington. The Inland Northwest is the Inland Northwest, I guess.

We get seldom enough film production oner here where I now live in Seattle; Spokane’s history with mainstream film is even spottier, with truly great films set there being rare indeed. Train Dreams represents a truly unusual circumstance in which I am jealous of their access to theatrical release: Train Dreams was just released today on Netflix, which was the only way I was able to watch it. As far as I can find, this film got no theatrical release in my local market at all. Netflix did their eternally frustrating thing with Oscar-worthy productions, giving it a limited release in order for it to qualify. I guess they took pity on Spokane, allowing locals to see it as it is best experienced: it’s currently playing there at the Magic Lantern Theatre.

And I do wish I could have seen this in a theater, it is so beautifully shot. Robert Grainier spends a lot of time onscreen doing timber industry jobs, mostly chopping down trees, and sometimes barely avoiding tragic ends from falling limbs or sometimes entire trees. Indeed he witnesses the deaths of other workers several times. The train of the title is somewhat misleading, given how much more time is spent with timber. But, during a job on the railroad, he witnesses the casual killing of a Chinese railroad worker, and this haunts him for the rest of his life, often in his dreams.

It should be noted that Train Dreams is very quiet, meditative, and a kind of gradual easing into sorrow. One might even spend some of the first half of the film wondering what the point is, as we simply see scenes from Robert’s younger days, the way he happens upon the woman he falls in love with without actively searching for her. They build a house together, Gladys raises chickens, and has their baby. I knew going in that Train Dreams is largely about grief—this seems to be a very popular motif in film of recent years—and that had to mean Robert was destined to lose his family. I kept wondering how it would happen and what level of horror would accompany it. This is, indeed, a turning point in the story with true horror from Robert’s point of view, especially with no definitive closure as to the specifics. I’ll just say that, at the very least, from the audience perspective, at least this particular loss is not the result of any human cruelty. It’s closer to the indifference of nature.

In any event, Robert is left alone, and director and co-writer Clint Bentley—who also directed and co-wrote last year’s spectacular Sing Sing—very effectively conveys a potent loneliness in this man, for basically the rest of the film. That is, until, for one brief moment, he experience a genuine moment of connection. It is brief indeed, but also spectacularly executed: it’s a deeply moving moment, and one that brought tears to my eyes without employing any of the typical “sad movie” tricks.

Train Dreams is the odd kind of movie that has a melancholic tone that somehow also has a comfort to it. In the wake of the horrid scene with the Chinese railroad worker, Robert regularly encounters people who offer him understanding and kindness. There are three such key characters as the story unfolds: an annoyingly talkative shirking but kind old man played by William H. Macy; a local Native shopkeeper who looks after Robert in his deepest throes of grief, played by Nathaniel Arcand; and a kind of hermit kindred spirit in a forestry worker played by Kerry Condon. In a scene where they share some tea and have an unusually heartfelt conversation, the forestry worker reveals she also recently lost her husband, and when Robert asks if he sounds crazy, she astutely notes that when something like this happens, nothing you do is crazy. At the end of this exchange, she observes that they are “just waiting to see what we’ve been left here for,” and that line has really stuck with me.

Robert does also encounter other people who treat him with callousness, particularly younger colleagues as he begins to realize he is aging out of the manual work of timber. Still, he lives his entire life as a quiet, stoic man who really never changes, except perhaps in that brief moment near the end. But sometimes it’s only a brief moment that can make all the difference, and it was indeed the moment that opened up my love for this quietly beautiful movie.

Robert keeps walking the path set out before him.

Overall: A-

WICKED: FOR GOOD

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B
Music: B-

I think I made the right decision not rewatching last year’s Wicked: Part I right before seeing Wicked: For Good. It could only have made For Good more of a disappointment—because Part I was undeniably, unequivocally better. Not by a wide margin, mind you, but a distinct one. One is left wondering what justification there was in even splitting this story into two parts, aside from box office hopes. I actually rather enjoyed Part I, even though at 2 hours and 40 minutes, I still thought it was indefensibly long—based on the first half of the stage play, which was only 5 minutes shorter than the entire stage play (including the 15-minute intermission). Here, For Good clocks in at 2 hours and 18 minutes, which means director Jon M. Chu has given us a combined four 4 and 58 minutes adapted from what was originally 2 hours and 30 minutes of actual content.

Which begs the question: why not just adapt this into a far tighter, 3-hour entertainment spectacular? I think I already answered this, really. We have to bleed this property for all it’s worth, right? Indeed, it’s easy to forget how complex the history of Oz is, with the original L. Frank Baum novel having been published in 1900; that book being adapted into the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz; the original Gregory Maguire novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a revisionist take on Baum’s characters, having been published in 1995; Stephen Schwartz’s stage musical Wicked having been first produced on Broadway in 2003; and then just last year, we got Wicked: Part I, the first half of Jon M. Chu’s film adaptation of the musical.

Every iteration of stories in this universe has had their devoted fanatics, of course—albeit none with more staying power than the 1939 film, which was enjoyed untouched for nearly 60 years, unless you count the bizarre 1985 film Return to Oz, which never garnered the same kind of devotion. I never read the original novel Wicked, and perhaps I should; I suspect I would like it better than the films—and to be clear, I do enjoy the films (and I particularly enjoy Part I). After seeing Wicked: For Good, which was a movie I wanted to be delightful but which was just fine, I rather wish I could see a direct film adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel, rather than a film adaptation of a stage musical adaptation of the novel, which by necessity strips an original story of much of its detail and nuance.

For Good spends a lot more time than Part I on drawing connections to The Wizard of Oz, right down to offering origin stories for the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow. In each case, the retconned explanation for their existence is a stretch at best, even in a world of magical characters. Dorothy even shows up here, sort of—she figures surprisingly prominently in the chain of events, but only as a shoehorned narrative device, often as a somewhat forced in-joke. It’s easy to imagine how this can work better in a stage production, in which our main characters refer to a Dorothy we never see except as a silhouette. Chu, on the other hand, gives us glimpses of her, either very briefly from behind or just parts of her body, which makes her feel much more real, and therefore inexplicably ignored.

A lot that was established, and even leaned on hard, in Part I gets little payoff here—particularly the existence of talking animals who are oppressed by the governing characters of Oz. There are only a few brief scenes with animals actually talking here, which is actually fine because this element was one of my least favorite parts of Part I. That’s a lot of effort for such little satisfaction of resolution, though. I did enjoy the arc of the flying monkeys, one of the elements I like in both films: their origins, who they were originally loyal to, and the manner in which their loyalty shifts to Elphaba. They also, collectively, make for some of the more memorable cinematic images in For Good.

And yes, there are some good songs in For Good, particularly “I Couldn’t Be Happier” and especially “For Good.” Again, though, they still pale in comparison to what we got in Part I (and, by all accounts, this is a common refrain about Act I versus Act II of the stage musical): “Dancing Through Life,” “Popular,” and especially “Defying Gravity,” which serves as the spectacular big finish of both the first act of the play and the first of these two films. Part I also featured delightful choreography, which is all but nonexistent in For Good. This film spends much more time on Oz’s society turning for the worse, and a reconciliation between Elphaba and Glinda that is ultimately tragic.

Part I was so enjoyable, though, that it creates a lot of goodwill that carries into For Good, in a way that I don’t think For Good would be able to sustain on its own. People went to see the first film multiple times, and there’s no way that’s going to happen as much, if at all, with For Good. But we still love these characters, who mean just as much to us now as before, thanks in large part to the production for both films having taken place at once. We feel the love and struggle between Elphaba and Glinda because Cynthia Eivo and Ariana Grande embody them, respectively, so wholly and fantastically, with such clearly genuine affection for each other. If there is any reason to see this movie, it’s the two of them.

Splitting Wicked into two films really does both films a disservice. Part I feels like a great start that we now know had no hope of living up to expectations; For Good is decent but inherently inferior. I had a fine time at the movies, but can’t imagine going out of my way to watch this again. Had this been adapted into a single film, it likely would have elicited a much more enduring affection.

I don’t know who they think they are!

Overall: B

THE RUNNING MAN

Directing: C
Acting: C
Writing: D+
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+
Special Effects: B-

Edgar Wright has directed and co-written so many delightful movies—Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)—it’s easy to expect, or at least hope, that a new one will at least be really fun. Baby Driver (2017) was fun but did not quite reach the heights of his earlier work; and Last Night in Soho (2021) was . . . fine. You can perhaps detect a shift here, and I suppose every good director, if prolific enough, will inevitably product an outright dud.

Enter The Running Man, an exercise in squandered potential if ever there was one. Wright also has a co-writing credit here, alongside Michael Bacall, who previously collaborated with Wright on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—a movie which, by the way, holds up surprisingly well. So what the hell happened? This The Running Man, the second adaptation of the Stephen King novel by the same name (the first having starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, in 1987), is badly written, phoned in by the actors, looks ugly, and is overlong. What person in their right mind thinks 133 minutes is a reasonable runtime for a movie like this? I saw that runtime before seeing the movie and immediately knew it didn’t bode well. A perfect runtime for a movie like this is, say, an hour and 45 minutes. (The 1987 film was an hour and 41.)

I never expected greatness from this movie, but I thought it would at least be dumb fun. It was dumb all right, though in a particularly unexpected way: this movie thinks it’s way smarter than it actually is. This is a dystopian future in which the divide between wealthy and poor is massive; “megacorps” own everything including government and law enforcement; and mass entertainment caters to the lowest denominators of profanity and dehumanizing violence—all the same beats we have seen time and time again in dystopian movies. The Running Man goes further with characters regularly ranting about the state of inequality, in ways that thoroughly ignore subtlety and never sound like anything but platitudes.

All of this shit is going in one ear and out the other of anyone watching, who are just there for escapist entertainment in an American cultural hellscape. The very existence of this film is the product of what it’s pretending to be preaching against. It’s worth noting that the one thing this movie does that we haven’t seen much of before is use AI as a plot point, with The Running Man’s gameshow manufacturing footage that isn’t real in an effort to keep the audience against the contestant—except it’s never addressed as “AI” and only ever declared “not real” in ways, again, we’ve already heard a thousand times. The only thing that could make this entire production—with a budget of $110 million—more perfectly cynical would be to learn that AI was actually used in the making of it.

I do try to find redeeming qualities, and I found a couple, though they hardly make up for what makes this movie suck. The cinematography isn’t bad, but that doesn’t mean much when the production design is so dingy and drab. Ben Richards (Glen Powell) spends a lot of time running around cities with crumbling infrastructure and complacent bureaucracy. The special effects aren’t terrible, but none of what’s decently rendered looks very good. There is evident skill but a fundamental lack of imagination. Even when we first meet Ben and his wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson, given a truly nothing part to work with), we learn of their desperation to find medication for their young child with the flu. This is set in their tiny closet of a home surrounded by concrete walls, and the entire sequence is a deeply clunky exposition dump through their dialogue. This, along with Ben pleading with his shitty boss to get his job back, is how the film opens.

The Running Man reveals itself to be in trouble as soon as characters open their mouths. Glen Powell must be noted here, as deeply miscast in the role of a deeply disenfranchised, constantly furious man. After many roles as a romantic charmer of a leading man, I suppose it’s understandable that he’d want to be cast against type, except that he works well in those other roles and just isn’t believable here. He doesn’t feel genuine.

Naturally, as Ben spends a lot of time on the run, he crosses paths with an ensemble cast of supporting characters, including Scott Pilgrim star Michael Cera, here a surprisingly credible underground revolutionary who offers Ben aid. He’s booby trapped his large house so he can have fun with the “goons” (what everyone calls the police in this film, right down to the brief sighting of graffiti that reads AGAB) once they inevitably catch up with them. This is one of the more engaging action set pieces in the film, but for the fact that it comes along way too late and has no critical need to be included in the plot whatsoever.

The first helper Ben comes to is his old friend Molie, played by the always dependable William H. Macy, who is given far too little screen time—he’s in maybe two scenes. Sean Hayes makes a single appearance as the host of another dehumanizing gameshow called Speed the Wheel, in which we see an overweight man literally run to death on a human-sized hamster wheel. Lee Pace plays the leading “Hunter” among those professionally hired to chase down The Running Man. Pace spends most of the movie with a mask over his face, and it’s eventually taken off like a big reveal, only to show a guy whose biggest part to date has been as Brother Day on the Apple TV series Foundation.

The Running Man is just a series of misguided choices at every turn. Very late in the film, Ben takes a woman hostage played by Emilia Jones, who was previously seen as the hearing daughter of deaf parents in the 2021 Best Picture winning CODA, and much more recently as Maeve, the antagoinist’s niece in the HBO limited series Task. This resume reveals a very talented young actor who can disappear into different parts, but the only explanation I can come up with this one was that she wanted to be part of an action blockbuster.

I think I can say with confidence that The Running Man is not fated to be a blockbuster, especially once regular audiences start to see it, and do not rave about it. The closest thing to a saving grace this movie has is several fairly exciting action set pieces; once the clunky exposition was out of the way and Ben was on the run, I found myself more engaged, and thought maybe that would turn me around on the thud of a note the movie starts on. This sensation was short lived, as the writing is so inexcusably rote. Characters don’t make logical choices, but rather make dumb moves transparently designed to keep the action going. This gets ratcheted up to such ridiculousness that there’s even a gun battle in an airplane cockpit.

And all this time The Running Man is presented as though it’s confidently entertaining us, while also being thematically provocative. It definitively fails on both those fronts, ultimately serving up only rehashed ideas and recycled platitudes.

Is he angry or confused? After seeing this movie, you’ll be both!

Overall: C

FRANKENSTEIN

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: C-

We need to start by discussing how terribly miscast Jacob Elordi is as “The Creature” in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Not because he’s bad—he’s actually a talented actor. But, and stay with me here, because he’s too hot. I’m not sure what del Toro was thinking. Did he think that just because Elordi is 6’5”, that would make him a frightening and imposing figure? Hardly. He’s far too youthful, too healthy looking, too strapping—and more than anything, too thin. This movie should have been called Frankentwink.

Indeed, once The Creature is brought to life, by this story’s namesake, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), we are treated to a memorably large number of shots of Hot Creature in little more than what looks like a sort of mummy-loincloth. I found this distracting enough to hope there is a costume design featurette somewhere called “Frankenstein’s Bulge.”

If you have been living under a rock for the past 207 years and don’t know this, The Creature is made up of the body parts of many different cadavers, assembled into a new being. Whenever injured, his wounds heal with magical swiftness—in this film it’s nearly instant, as opposed to the weeks it takes in Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel. So, I suppose we’re not meant to think of his flesh as rotting. The Creature is not a zombie. He just can’t die. I still can’t imagine he smells great. He’s too hot in this movie for that to matter, Elordi’s whole body made up to look unsettlingly like an assemblage of disparate body parts. Except that Dr. Frankenstein finds all these different body parts from recently killed soldiers in battle. How did he get them all so perfectly proportioned?

Frankenstein does direct his assistance in the search to find larger bodies, “for scale.” Perhaps you could argue that most such men would indeed be young. This is a change from the novel, in which the body parts are found in charnel houses, slaughterhouses, and graves. I just keep thinking about the idea of The Creature being terrifying. You’d expect such a being to be both tall and thick. I saw Jacob Elordi’s Creature character and I just wanted him to spoon me.

He does have superhuman strength, so I guess I’d have to concede that can be scary, even if it’s an adorable 6’5” 28-year-old. Del Toro is far too indulgent with a lot of these details in this adaptation, however—at one point, The Creature single-handedly frees a dutch sailing ship from the clutches of arctic ice.

And this is where we must move on to the other marks against del Toro’s Frankenstein—namely, how indulgent it is, but also its truly terrible special effects. It does have impressively detailed period production design, but it’s also packed with truly subpar CGI. Fire in particular looks terrible in this movie, whether it’s from a giant explosion or just flames on candles. It practically looks animated. This film had a budget of $120 million; did they spend it only on production design and cast salaries?

It’s also too long, clocking in at two and a half hours. Ten minutes of this are the end credits; another ten are the “Prelude” We otherwise get “Part 1,” which lasts about 80 minutes and is narrated by Dr. Frankenstein; “Part 2” makes up the remaining 49 minutes and is narrated by The Creature. Jacob Elordi’s distracting hotness aside, The Creature’s section is by far the most compelling, as written by del Toro himself in his singlehanded script adaptation. I just wish it wasn’t so often bogged down by such bad special effects, as in one scene in which The Creature is attacked by a pack of wolves who might as well have been pixelated, they are so obviously not real. What the hell are we watching here, The Twilight Saga: New Moon?

I don’t know why it’s so hard for anyone to make a decent modern cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein. Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is so awful that I have never been able to tolerate more than half of it before turning it off to end my misery. To Guillermo del Toro’s credit, this 2025 Frankenstein is far better than that, but that bar is in the basement. At least I was still relatively entertained by this movie, my many complaints about it notwithstanding. Some trimming, particularly of the overlong Part 1 from Dr. Frankenstein’s perspective, would have improved it. I did like that, when the perspective switches, it still continues The Creature’s story right where Dr. Frankenstein’s left off, rather than rehashing anything we’ve already seen.

This film does waste some other major talent, though. Christoph Waltz plays Harlander, Dr. Frankenstein’s benefactor, but he’s just never a very compelling character. Mia Goth is cast as Elizabeth, Harlander’s niece who is also engaged to Dr. Frankenstein’s younger brother William (Felix Kammerer), but all she ever does is dote over The Creature as the only character who ever has any fully informed empathy for him. Goth has made a career of playing fantastic freaks, and this character is just too normal for her. We even get Charles Dance, gone after just a few scenes as Victor and William’s authoritarian father; and Lars Mikkelsen (Mads’s brother) as the captain of the aforementioned Dutch ship. The most interesting of these older character actors in the film is David Bradley (best known as Argust Filch in the Harry Potter films), as the blind man who treats The Creature with kindness and no judgment because he cannot see him.

Finally, and this is where I get a little more nitpicky, there are the lapses in logic, such as when The Creature, in pursuit of revenge against Dr. Frankenstein, allows a stick of dynamite to blow up in his hands. The resulting explosion is huge, the shockwave alone hurling Dr. Frankenstein’s body like a rag doll, and yet The Creature remains standing, unbroken. This would not have at least dismembered him? I suppose I can’t expect a story that ignores science to pay attention to simple physics.

Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix, and there are multiple reasons why this is a huge part of what kept the film from realizing the potential it clearly had. Netflix has a reputation for allowing auteurs to realize their full vision, and on the one hand that is to be commended. On the other hand, it also means that filmmakers don’t get any notes when maybe they needed some. Had this film gotten a full theatrical release, it might just have gotten some much-needed guardrails. Would The Creature still have been played by Jacob Elordi? Probably, just because he’s a hot young star. The Creature should be a genuinely grotesque being with heart, though—not a young hunk cosplaying as a loinclothed monster like some dude at the West Hollywood Halloween parade. Frankenstein’s monster should elicit pity, not lechery.

Choke me Frankendaddy

Overall: B-

PREDATOR: BADLANDS

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B

I would not likely have had much interest in Predator: Badlands based on its own premise alone, if not for the fact that it was directed and co-written by Dan Trachtenberg, who directed and co-wrote the quite pleasantly surprising Prey (2022)—easily the best film in the Predator franchise. Okay, fine: full disclosure, Prey was only the second straight-up Predator film I ever saw, and I saw the original, 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film so long ago I don’t even really remember it. But, I feel confident of this perspective based on critical consensus on al these films, which is generally a reliable barometer of quality. I guess I should say that “by all accounts” Prey was the best film in the franchise. It’s certainly remains the best of those I have seen.

The definition of which “Predator” films I have seen is a little murky, however, as is the degree to which Predator: Badlands should be regarded as a crossover with the (far superior) Alien franchise. The two Alien vs. Predator films are widely not regarded as canon in either franchise, the first of those being the sort of so-bad-it’s-good that I still never bothered to see its 2007 follow-up, which thus makes that one to date the only major film featuring a xenomorph that I have never seen.

Predator: Badlands has no further connection to the Alien vs. Predator films, however, beyond its inclusion of “synthetics” manufactured by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, two of which are played by Elle Fanning, without whom this film would not have worked at all. There are no xenomorphs in this film, but Weyland-Yutani and its synthetics are very overt pulls from the Alien universe, and I remain unconvinced that it was necessary. Certainly plenty of other science fiction franchises have their own forms of robot characters; why not Predator? Trachtenberg goes one step further by making the Kalisk, the impossible-to-kill monster on Genna, the planet on which most of the action takes place, the “specimen” that Weyland-Yutani is seeking to capture and bring home for its bioweapons division—just as had been the xenomorphs before it, though they get no mention here.

I did enjoy Predator: Badlands, and the critical response to it has been roughly equivalent to Prey, but I very much prefer Prey. That one had a far more efficient self-containment, within only the Predator franchise, but with what I found to be a far more novel premise: the earliest Predator sent to Earth, who winds up doing battle with North American Indigenous people of the early 18th-century—and specifically, a young woman. Predator: Badlands does a lot that has never been done in a previous Predator movie, but it’s all stuff that has already been done in other film sequels: turning the villain into the hero (which we’ve now seen in many films, from Terminator 2: Judgment Day to M3GAN 2.0); giving robots human feelings; turning a dangerous creature into something merely misunderstood. Even the manner in which the villain is destroyed in Terminator 2 has a very direct echo in this film.

Which is to say: Predator: Badlands is plenty entertaining, but lacks the cultural depth of its predecessor, and is certainly less rewatchable. There is a great deal of action in Badlands, which was a big selling point—for a film like this, I will go the uncharacteristic route of saying it could have used more relentless action, based on how it’s being sold to audiences. This film also features the first Predator ever to be given a name: Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), who is immediately emblematic of the “weakness” the must be “culled” from a “Yautja” clan (Yautja being the name given to the Predator species). He is much smaller in stature than others of his kind, and when his older brother protects him from being killed by their father, their father kills the brother instead. Dek then goes on to Genna, seeking the apex predator no one has ever captured on the widely lethal planet, and planning to bring it back home as a trophy to prove his worth, and also seek revenge against his father.

It’s a lot of detail, much of which is revealed in the cold open before the opening title. All this “honor” talk among the Yautja is just another form of machoism that I have little interest in, the rest of the film slowly inching Dek away from that mindset notwithstanding. But if he returns with an even slightly altered idea of honorable behavior, to a fictional culture created specifically to be loyal to such ideas to the death, what then? Badlands doesn’t really bother with these questions. Perhaps another film in the Predator universe will, but I’m not sure how interested I’ll be.

All the Weyland-Yutani stuff aside, it’s when Dek discovers the synth Thia (Elle Fanning) that Badlands gets really interesting. This film actually has no human characters at all, as the Earth mission to Genna is comprised entirely of synths (all played by only two people: Fanning, or Cameron Brown, who plays all the “drone synths” who ultimately serve as this film’s version of Star Trek “red shirts”—nameless and easily destroyed). Thia has had a run-in with the Kalisk, and her body from the waist down is missing. Dek spends much of the film carrying Thia’s upper half on his back (this also being a clear reference to C3PO in The Empire Strikes Back). One of the better parts of Badlands is when Thia’s upper half and her lower half, still separated, work as a team fighting off the aforementioned drone synths.

Perhaps the biggest selling point of Predator: Badlands is the creature design—not so much that of Dek, who looks basically like the many other Yautja we’ve already seen, but that of the many alien species on the planet Genna, from carnivorous plants to animals, to even razor sharp blades of grass. This film is also packed with visual effects, and while I can’t say the CGI particularly wowed me, it was pretty decent. At the very least, unlike far too many other CGI-heavy films, it doesn’t look distractingly artificial.

Badlands has further twists that are not necessarily had to see coming, but at least it’s an exciting ride while it’s in motion. Dek and Thia befriend a small, monkey-like creature that later proves to be an important detail on which the plot turns; Thia names him “Bud” and he’s weirdly cute, like a cross between a chimp and a bulldog. To Badland’s credit, a great deal of impressive work went into its production, from the creation of an entire language for the Yautja by linguist Britton Watkins, to very believable animal behaviors specific to different fictional species. I’d have liked a bit more originality in the story beyond “twists” that are just rearrangements of well-trodden ideas from other films, but anyone with a thing for sci-fi action films with detailed world building is going to have a good time here.

Teamwork makes the dream work in Predator: Badlands.

Overall: B