‘Weapons’ and ‘Sketch’ Look Pretty Different on the Surface, But I’m Sure They Have Something in Common, So Let’s Figure That Out

August 13, 2025

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Sketch-ing out some ideas about Weapons (CREDIT: Warner Bros./Screenshot; Angel Studios/Screenshot)

Weapons

Starring: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Cary Christopher, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Toby Huss, June Diane Raphael, Whitmer Thomas, Callie Schuttera

Director: Zach Cregger

Running Time: 128 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: August 8, 2025 (Theaters)

Sketch

Starring: Tony Hale, Bianca Belle, Kue Lawrence, D’Arcy Carden, Kalon Cox

Director: Seth Worley

Running Time: 92 Minutes

Rating: PG

Release Date: August 8, 2025 (Theaters)

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‘Highest 2 Lowest’ Review: Spike Lee and Denzel Washington Reunite for Another Thriller Through the Streets of NYC

August 12, 2025

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But I Haven’t Seen “Highest 1 Lowest”! (CREDIT: A24)

Starring: Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera, Aubrey Joseph, ASAP Rocky, Elijah Wright, Ice Spice, Dean Winters, John Douglas Thompson, LaChanze, Michael Potts, Wendell Pierce

Director: Spike Lee

Running Time: 133 Minutes

Rating: R for Language Mostly, Nothing Extraordinary

Release Date: August 15, 2025 (Theaters)/September 5, 2025 (Apple TV+)

What’s It About?: Operating out of a pristine Brooklyn high-rise penthouse overlooking his empire, Stackin’ Hits CEO David King (Denzel Washington) seemingly has it all: the millions, the cultural cachet, the beautiful family. But there are a few cracks starting to form. The sales aren’t as massive as they used to be, and there’s a buyout offer on the table. And then catastrophe strikes, when his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) is kidnapped for a $17.5 million ransom. Well, actually, the kidnapper meant to nab Trey, but he mistook his buddy Kyle (Elijah Wright) for him. He still wants those millions, though, even though Kyle’s dad Paul (Jeffrey Wright) isn’t in any position to put together all that cash. That leaves David in the driver’s seat, setting up an epic ethical struggle and a thrilling chase to exact justice when everything that matters is threatened from the bottom to the top.

What Made an Impression?: Big Big Big Big BIG: Spike Lee isn’t always the most maximalist filmmaker, but when he goes big, he doesn’t hold back. And in Highest 2 Lowest, let’s just say his approach is the opposite of small. Obviously, this is a high-stakes situation, but you can make some room for subtlety in even the most high-stakes scenarios if you want to. Or you can do what Lee and his cast and crew do and leave absolutely everything on the screen, and have it all triple-underlined by Howard Drossin’s bombastic operatic jazz score. Adjust your sensibilities accordingly if you don’t want to be absolutely overwhelmed.
NYC Isn’t Dead: Did you know that Spike Lee is a proud New Yorker? There are a few ways you might have found that out, like maybe if you’ve ever seen him courtside at a Knicks game, or if you’ve ever watched any of his earlier movies that just so happen to be set in the Big Apple. But even if Highest 2 Lowest is somehow your first exposure to Lee, there’s still a more-than-zero-percent chance that you’ll be able to figure out where he stands on the subject of his hometown, particularly during a subway-set piece in which a bunch of excited baseball fans start a chant of “Boston sucks!” while on their way to a Yankees game. It’s a little bit subtle, but not too hard to miss.
Arriving at the Crossroads: Ultimately, Highest 2 Lowest is preoccupied with posing the question: “Are you going to be the person you’re supposed to be?” Sure, there are some fun chase scenes and a raucous salsa concert on Puerto Rican Day along the way that might feel like they’re fun just for the sake of being fun. But the internal stakes are unmistakable. Is legacy more important than friendship and family? Can you be an artist and a thief? What do we owe the world if we have talents to share? Some characters are in more stable positions than others to answer these questions, but the stakes are captivating no matter what the specificities of the crisis.

Highest 2 Lowest is Recommended If You Like: The Bronx Bombers, Curating Your Record Collection, State Farm’s “Mayhem” Commercials

Grade: 4 out of 5 Ransoms

A Wedding-Focused Reaction to ‘Freakier Friday’

August 9, 2025

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A Lineup of Freaks (CREDIT: Disney/YouTube Screenshot)

Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Manny Jacinto, Mark Harmon, Chad Michael Murray, Maiteryi Ramakrishnan, Vanessa Bayer, Jordan E. Cooper, Stephen Tobolowsky, Elaine Hendrix, Chloe Fineman, Rosalind Chao, Christina Vidal Mitchell, Haley Hudson, Lucille Soong

Director: Nisha Ganatra

Running Time: 111 Minutes

Rating: PG

Release Date: August 8, 2025 (Theaters)

I love weddings. And if 2003’s Freaky Friday and its sequel Freakier Friday have taught me anything, it’s that body swaps tend to happen in the leadup to a wedding. So do I have a little switcheroo to look forward to in my own matrimonial future? Perhaps. Does a new stepparent situation need to also be part of the mix? That’s what these movies seem to imply, but there are surely other valuable lessons that could be learned from changing perspectives like this. Anyway, body swapping right before a wedding might sound fun, but the reality is that I’d probably be too busy with last-minute wedding prep for the experience to be fully satisfying. (Even if I were just a passive observer and not one of the swappers!) But I’m glad that Freakier Friday has shown us another way that it might go down. Jamie Lee Curtis is still having the time of her life!

Grade: More Frothy Than Freaky, as Per Usual (But That’s Okay)

‘Together’ We Can Take Our ‘First Steps’ (And Many More Steps to Come)

August 6, 2025

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July at the Picture House (CREDIT: Germain McMicking/NEON; Marvel Entertainment/Screenshot)

Together

Starring: Alison Brie, Dave Franco, Damon Herriman

Director: Michael Shanks

Running Time: 102 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: July 30, 2025 (Theaters)

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Starring: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn, Julia Garner, Ralph Ineson, Sarah Niles, Mark Gatiss, Paul Walter Hauser, Natasha Lyonne

Director: Matt Shakman

Running Time: 114 Minutes

Rating: PG-13

Release Date: July 25, 2025 (Theaters)

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Oh, Hi, ‘Oh, Hi!,’ I’m So Glad I’ve Met You

August 1, 2025

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Oh, hi, Logan. Oh, hi, Molly. (CREDIT: Sony Pictures Classics/Screenshot)

Starring: Molly Gordon, Logan Lerman, Geraldine Viswanathan, John Reynolds, David Cross, Polly Draper, Desmin Borges

Director: Sophie Brooks

Running Time: 95 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: July 25, 2025 (Theaters)

The first line of the 2025 movie Oh, Hi! is the title itself. And that immediately got things right in my favor, both because I appreciated how it fulfilled an implicit promise and because one of my favorite films of all time is famous for its frequency of characters greeting each other.

Anyway, in case you haven’t seen it, Oh, Hi! stars Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman as Iris and Isaac, a couple of fresh-eyed lovebugs on a romantic weekend getaway in a rental house. Everything seems to be going perfectly, especially when they stumble upon the owners’ S&M gear and decide to have some kinky sex. But then Isaac reveals that he doesn’t want to actually be exclusive, so Iris keeps him handcuffed to the bed indefinitely until she can make him definitively fall in love with her.

I bet a lot of modern daters have found themselves in a situation a lot like this one! Maybe it’s a bit of an exaggeration from reality, but the clear and immediate stakes nevertheless paint a template for anyone to practice how they might handle this scenario. Important things to keep in mind: Iris certainly takes things too far, but Isaac does do plenty of things that would seem to indicate he’s ready for a committed relationship. It’s a good idea to be prepared, and Oh, Hi! is here to help you get there.

Grade: 12.5 Miscommunications out of 15.5 Lovemaking Sessions

‘The Bad Guys 2’ Review: I Watched It, Here’s How I Reacted

July 31, 2025

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As bad as they want to be (CREDIT: DreamWorks Animation/Universal Pictures)

Starring: Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Awkwafina, Craig Robinson, Anthony Ramos, Zazie Beetz, Danielle Brooks, Natasha Lyonne, Maria Bakalova, Alex Borstein, Richard Ayoade, Lilly Singh

Director: Pierre Perifel

Running Time: 104 Minutes

Rating: PG for Gravity-Defying Cartoon Action

Release Date: August 1, 2025 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Following their release from prison, the anthropomorphic professional criminal crew known straightforwardly as “The Bad Guys” – Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), Mr. Tarantula (Awkwafina), Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), and Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos) – is trying to break good. But that’s not so easy with their notorious resumes holding them back. Plus, there are certain factions who would rather they stay in the heist game, particularly a group of lady criminals who frame them, kidnap them, and force them into their plan to commandeer a space station to steal all of the world’s gold. Through it all, they try to convince the skeptical chief of police (Alex Borstein) that she can trust them, even though they keep forgetting that she’s been promoted to commissioner. At least they have an ally in the form of Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz), who’s tried to help them on the inside while doing her best to keep her own sketchy past a secret.

What Made an Impression?: Laughing the Story Along: The plot of The Bad Guys 2 revolves around a device called “MacGuffinite,” which made me and a few other adults in the screening chuckle. If you’re a cinephile, you probably already know that a MacGuffin (also spelled “McGuffin”) is a device that drives the action of a story forward, without being what the story is really about. I doubt that the youngsters that this movie is primarily targeted towards will get the reference, but it’s a nice touch nonetheless.
Vibrant Colors & Familiar Voices: Weirdly enough, I haven’t seen the first Bad Guys movie, nor have I read the graphic novels they’re based on, nor do I have any kiddos in my life to pester me about their love for them. So while I’m not bringing much emotional investment to this theatrical experience, I can still appreciate the zippy painterly animation (and its occasional hallucinatory switches into other styles) and also enjoy playing a round of, “Hey, Who’s That Actor’s Voice I’m Pretty Sure I Recognize?”
Completing the Assignment: Ultimately, The Bad Guys 2 held my attention and provided some mildly diverting attention for an hour and a half. And I wasn’t asking for anything more than that! Maybe you’ll vibe with this one a little more than I did, whether or not you’re a kid, and whether or not you have kids. But we can go ahead and file this review of mine under “Not a Rave, But Can’t Complain.”

The Bad Guys 2 is Recommended If You Like: Heists for Beginners

Grade: 3 out of 5 MacGuffinites

It’s Legal for Comedy to be ‘Naked’ Again in 2025

July 30, 2025

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Have Gun, will Naked (CREDIT: Paramount Pictures)

Starring: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Danny Huston, CCH Pounder, Kevin Durand, Liza Koshy, Cody Rhodes, Eddie Yu

Director: Akiva Schaffer

Running Time: 85 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Cartoonish Violence and Pixelated Nudity

Release Date: August 1, 2025 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Carrying on the inimitable legacy of his late father, Lieutenant Detective Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) is the pride of Los Angeles’ Police Squad division. But he and his partner Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) – son of Frank Sr.’s old boss – find themselves a bit stymied by their latest case. Or pair of cases, really. Which are really the same case. First there’s a bank robbery in which none of the culprits actually take any money. Then there’s a dead man in an electric car in a ditch in an apparent suicide. But the deceased’s sister (Pamela Anderson) suspects some foul play. And it all leads back to tech mogul Richard Cane (Danny Huston), who’s seeking to electrically revolutionize the world in his image.

What Made an Impression?: Legacy vs. Independence: In one of the first scenes of this rebooted version of The Naked Gun, Drebin Jr. looks at a portrait of his dad and asks him if he can be both exactly the same as him and also completely his own man. That’s basically the core challenge of any legacy sequel, but it’s especially acute when following in the footsteps of one of the most beloved spoof series of all time. Successful comedy thrives on surprise, but you risk alienation if you stray too far from the established formula. Well, I’m here to happily report that Drebin and Company have achieved their goal. This Naked Gun indeed honors the profoundly silly legacy of its predecessors while also working in a sufficiently altered milieu and blazing its own path.
All the Funny: It certainly helps when the crew behind the scenes has a knack for crafting funny business. Akiva Schafer is the key creative voice here, serving as a director and one of three credited screenwriters (along with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand). Schaffer is best known as one-third of The Lonely Island, the crew responsible for Saturday Night Live‘s Digital Shorts era. Unsurprisingly, he brings an omnivorous and shameless approach to the cavalcade of joke-a-minute gags of display. Vocal puns, text puns, visual puns, background gags, running gags, misdirects, hallucinatory diversions, bizarre character beats: if you hate one joke, don’t worry, because the forecast is like mountainous weather. Which is to say, a new joke is coming in just a minute.
A New Drebin for a New Era: The original Naked Gun movies and the Police Squad! TV show were released in a time when fictional police officials were widely accepted as trustworthy authority figures. But the cultural temperature is a little different in 2025. This Naked Gun is hardly a merciless takedown of copaganda, but it does take some genuinely hard shots at Drebin Jr’s extra-legal behavior. Neeson is just as occasionally oblivious and literal-minded as Leslie Nielsen was before him, but he’s also more feral and clearly deserving of being knocked down a few pegs.
L.A. is Full of Characters: Thus far, I’ve mainly talked about the director and the No. 1 Guy on the Call Sheet, without really spotlighting the supporting cast. So let me say: they’re all great! Pamela Anderson is a natural as the femme fatale, and Hauser is always reliable, while Huston and CCH Pounder also clearly understand the assignment of: “play it straight, and the laughs will follow.” Comedy is alive and naked, baby!

The Naked Gun (2025) is Recommended If You Like: To Laugh, and Laugh Again, and then Laugh Some More

Grade: 4.5 out of 5 Coffee Cups

Will ‘The Home’ Find a Home in Your Eyeballs?

July 29, 2025

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Pete Davidson is home, sweet home (CREDIT: Roadside Attractions)

Starring: Pete Davidson, John Glover, Bruce Altman

Director: James DeMonaco

Running Time: 95 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: July 25, 2025 (Theaters)

Sometimes new movies get an ostensibly wide theatrical release from a major distributor, but they still somehow completely slip through the cracks. They get hardly any promotional push, and then they disappear from multiplexes after just a week and end up shunted to on-demand streaming soon thereafter. Most of these movies aren’t secret masterpieces or anything like that, but a lot of them are at least kind of interesting.

One such flick is The Home, co-written and directed by James DeMonaco and starring Pete Davidson as a super at a retirement community. You might think that Davidson would have enough star power and Purge franchise creator DeMonaco would have enough horror cachet to get this a more premium treatment. But no such dice.

Anyway, this review is mainly a PSA to get the word out to audiences who might still be possibly ever so slightly interested. Maybe The Home is already completely out of theaters by the time you’re reading this. (In which case, keep an eye out for it in your living room.) Or maybe there’s a showtime at the picture house in 15 minutes. (In which case: go, go, go!)

But will you actually enjoy any of it? To be clear, I’m certainly not raving. The twist, while interesting, is kind of predictable, and the script could have benefitted from at least one more revision. But it’s just unique enough for me to be satisfied that The Home is right at home in my viewing diary.

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Retirees

Thank You, ‘Sorry, Baby’

July 24, 2025

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But not sorry to you, Mr. Kitty (CREDIT: Mia Cioffi Henry/Sundance Institute/A24)

Starring: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, Louis Cancelmi, Kelly McCormack, John Caroll Lynch, E.R. Fightmaster

Director: Eva Victor

Running Time: 104 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: June 27, 2025 (Theaters)

First things first: did watching the 2025 movie Sorry, Baby make me want to go right home and say “Sorry, baby*” to someone myself? (*-Whether “baby” refers to an actual baby or a significant other or even a pet.) Not really, but it did kind of remind me of the importance of remorse when necessary. Anyway, as for the actual meat of the movie, it’s about a woman named Agnes (Eva Victor) dealing with the fallout of being sexually assaulted by her grad school thesis adviser. But it’s also just about her relationships with the people at this point in her life, particularly her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie). My favorite part was when she was reporting for jury duty and she was struggling to tell one of the attorneys that she’d been the victim of a crime without fully saying it out loud.

Grade: 13 Sandwiches out of 17 Cats

The Documentary ‘Folktales’ Asks, ‘What’s the DEAL with Norwegian Folk High Schools?’

July 23, 2025

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Bow wow wow, yippee yo, yippee yay (CREDIT: Tori Edvin Eliassen/Magnolia Pictures)

Starring: The Students and Teachers of Pasvik Folk High School, Plus a Bunch of Sled Dogs

Directors: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady

Running Time: 106 Minutes

Rating: Unrated (But PG-Level)

Release Date: July 25, 2025 (IFC Center in New York City)/August 1, 2025 (Los Angeles and Other Cities)

What’s It About?: In the most unforgiving stretches of northern Norway there lies a learning institution known as Pasvik Folk High School. Some hardy teenagers choose to attend there for a year to get away from the routine of the modern world and learn how to survive in the wilderness, while also corralling some adorable sled dogs. Folktales tracks the journey of one class from their arrival through months of utter darkness all the way to the tearful goodbyes and reintegration back home, having changed. Through it all, their story is explicitly connected to the Norns, the goddesses of Norse mythology responsible for weaving the strings of human destiny.

What Made an Impression?: A Star is Born: Folktales focuses on three students in particular: the socially awkward Bjørn Tore; the Dutch Romain, who finds himself anxious and adrift; and Hege, who’s struggling after the recent untimely murder of her father. Their arcs are all pretty predictable – they’re just teenagers going through teenager stuff, even if they are in the wilderness! But Hege’s story is a little meatier than the others, as she takes to the school like a dog in the mush. I think the marketers recognized this as well. That is her on the poster after all, bonding with a howling husky.
A-Roooooooooo: Perhaps the most compelling scene in Folktales (or at least the most compelling to me as a canine connoisseur) is when the students meet the school dogs. Some of them are immediately friendly, others are a little more shy, but all of them are eager to please and run through the snow. I’m a little too old for high school now, but if I were still a teenager, these pups would be the way to convince me to spend months at the tip of Scandinavia.
Connecting to Infinity: After a quick opening segment introducing the Norns, directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady mostly settle into a fly-on-the-wall realism approach. But a few visual motifs hang around to maintain the Norse connection, particularly red strings crawling up trees and seemingly stretching everywhere and every when. It underscores the vibe that we’re all connected back to countless generations, a feeling that I’m sure is only amplified at Pasvik Folk.

Folktales is Recommended If You Like: Aurora Borealis, Bildungsromans, A Vicarious Braving of the Elements

Grade: 3 out of 5 Sled Dogs

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