How Does Honey Do in ‘Honey Don’t!’? Let’s Find Out!

August 19, 2025

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I’ve heard that local Honey can help with allergies (CREDIT: Karen Kuehn / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC)

Starring: Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Charlie Day, Kristen Connolly, Talia Ryder, Gabby Beans, Jacnier, Josh Pafcheck, Billy Eichner, Lera Abova

Director: Ethan Coen

Running Time: 89 Minutes

Rating: R for A Few Hardcore Dalliances and Some Ridiculous Fatal Encounters

Release Date: August 22, 2025 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Another wacky cast of characters has made its way to the big screen in an off-the-wall crime caper from Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke! It all goes down in dusty Bakersfield, California and revolves around the mostly no-nonsense private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley). A trail of death starts to form with the discovery of a woman who’s driven off a cliff. Soon thereafter, Honey is dealing with a desperate guy who fears he’s being cheated on (Billy Eichner), as well as her wayward niece (Talia Ryder) and MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), the police officer she’s taken a shine to. Their stories all get mixed up with that of Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), whose flashy church is really just a front for (very messy) organized crime. Also, there’s a mysterious French woman walking around. If anyone can figure out what all these people are up to before it all blows up, it’s probably Honey.

What Made an Impression?: We Gotta Get Out to Get In: Man, I love a good opening credits sequence. And Honey Don’t! has a doozy of an introduction. From the POV of a car driving through Bakersfield, the names of the cast and crew appear on storefronts, graffiti, and other signage, while “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by The Animals rocks the place. Or at least I thought it was The Animals, until the end credits informed me it was actually a cover version. (But I’m not going to reveal who it actually was. Sure, it’s not like who sings a song is much of a spoiler, but you might enjoy being surprised the way that I was.)
Day for Q: There’s one really important character I didn’t mention in the synopsis, so I better go ahead and mention him now: Detective Marty Metakawich, played by the adorably agitated Charlie Day. He and Honey have quite the crackling repartee, but don’t expect them to end up together by the end! Marty is pretty easily Honey’s favorite man that she’s ever met, but here’s the thing: she’s just not into dudes. For whatever reason, though, Marty just can’t get rid of the mental block that won’t allow him to process her lesbianism. It’s bizarrely kind of sweet, or at least as sweet as something annoying like that can be.
Tough, But Rough: Thank God Margaret Qualley is so goshdarn likable. Most of this cast is pretty compelling, but she’s the one who’s really been solidifying her superstar status lately. Anyway, it really helps to have such an attention-grabbing lead performance when the screenplay feels so random. If you’re feeling particularly ungenerous Ethan Coen (and his brother/former collaborator Joel) could be dismissed as purveyors of unjustifiable kookiness. But at their best, they have a knack for making a circus feel like Shakespeare (or whatever literary inspiration they’re drawing from). Honey Don’t doesn’t quite harmonize in the same way, though. Or maybe we as a moviegoing society just haven’t gotten used to Ethan’s sensibilities while teaming up his wife Tricia Cooke as co-screenwriters. Although I did find their last effort, Drive-Away Dolls, pretty fun. So maybe in a few years I’ll start saying “Honey, I’ll give you another shot.” In the meantime, we’re at “Honey If You Must.”

Honey Don’t! is Recommended If You Like: Movies Where Two Ladies Get Really Handsy with Each Other in a Bar (If You Know What I Mean), Regardless of What Else Happens

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Macaronis

2-For-1 Review: ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ and ‘Materialists’ Both Make My Heart Go Thump-a-Thump

June 12, 2025

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CREDIT: Atsushi Nishijima/A24; Universal Pictures

How to Train Your Dragon

Starring: Mason Thames, Nico Parker, Gerard Butler, Nick Frost, Julian Dennison, Gabriel Howell, Bronwyn James, Harry Trevaldwyn, Ruth Codd, Peter Serafinowicz

Director: Dean DeBlois

Running Time: 125 Minutes

Rating: PG for Dragons Taking Humans Higher Than They Should Go

Release Date: June 13, 2025 (Theaters)

Materialists

Starring: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Marin Ireland, Zoë Winters, Dasha Nekrosova, Louisa Jacobson

Director: Celine Song

Running Time: 117 Minutes

Rating: R, mostly for Discussions of a Date Gone Very Wrong

Release Date: June 13, 2025 (Theaters)

Picture this: it’s the weekend of June 13-15, 2025, and you want to see a new release at your local multiplex. How are you supposed to ever decide?! Especially if they’re total opposites? That isn’t quite the situation we have here, although the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon and the Celine Song-penned-and-helmed rom-com Materialists are certainly aiming for separate lanes. So if you’re a thorough cinephile like me who tries to see absolutely everything, where should you focus first? Or should you try to pull a Barbenheimer and make a double feature out of it? Let’s suss out the situation.

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‘Red One’ Keeps It Icy for Christmas

November 14, 2024

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Oh, by the way, which one’s Red? (CREDIT: Amazon MGM Studios)

Starring: Chris Evans, Dwayne Johnson, Lucy Liu, J.K. Simmons, Kiernan Shipka, Bonnie Hunt, Reinaldo Faberlle, Kristofer Hivju, Nick Kroll, Wesley Kimmel, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Marc Evan Jackson

Director: Jake Kasdan

Running Time: 123 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Combat Between Humans, “Elves,” Talking Polar Bears, and Krampus

Release Date: November 15, 2024 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) has been a devoted cynic ever since he figured out before all the other kids that Santa Claus was a myth. So it was only natural that he would grow up to be a mercenary hacker and a deadbeat dad. So imagine his surprise when head of North Pole security Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson) shows up at his home and informs Jack that his shenanigans are partly responsible for the kidnapping of Saint Nick (J.K. Simmons) himself. This being a Christmas movie and all, mythological holiday creatures are very real, and Callum and his colleagues are responsible for making sure that naughty listers like Jack don’t screw things up. Trouble is, Callum is contemplating retirement as the naughty list threatens to grow longer than the nice list, perhaps eternally. So you know, multiple characters in Red One are in a position to rediscover the Christmas spirit.

What Made an Impression?: Santa, Santa Claus, Where Are You?: Just because Santa Claus is kidnapped, that doesn’t matter that he has to be a minor character in his own movie. But alas, Red One makes the puzzling decision to keep J.K. Simmons stowed away for the vast majority of its running time. His captor is a shapeshifting ogre played by Kiernan Shipka – surely they could have thrown an hour’s worth of zingers back at each other! And honestly this is one of the more interesting cinematic Santas I’ve seen in quite a while: basically a jacked zaddy who pumps iron to refill all the calories he burns on Christmas Eve. The Christmas cheer in Red One is fairly generic, but there’s no need to convince anyone that this St. Nick is worth saving.
A Little Bit of This, Some of That Guy, Then We Go Home: Red One left me feeling a little blue, or maybe even gray, but it wasn’t for lack of effort or ideas. There’s a bit about how toy stores are portals for North Pole workers, Nick Kroll shows up as a shady middleman for the Christmas baddies, and there’s some grounded interplay between Jack and his ex (Mary Elizabeth Ellis). It’s all pleasant enough to serve as background entertainment as you make your way through your Advent calendar, though it lacks the pizzazz to inspire the same yuletide rediscovery that Jack and Callum are destined for. Although, if somebody posts a series of behind-the-scenes videos of J.K. Simmons Claus pumping even more iron, then perhaps it will have all been worth it.

Red One is Recommended If You Like: A movie that seems like it should be going straight to Netflix ending up on the big screen

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Bench Presses

Does ‘Lightyear’ Come to Our Rescue?

June 18, 2022

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CREDIT: Pixar/Screenshot

Starring: Chris Evans, Keke Palmer, Peter Sohn, Uzo Aduba, Taika Waititi, Dale Soules, Isiah Whitlock Jr., James Brolin

Director: Angus MacLane

Running Time: 105 Minutes

Rating: PG

Release Date: June 17, 2022 (Theaters)

I went ahead and saw Lightyear with my dad on the day before Father’s Day. You can certainly celebrate Father’s Day all weekend, after all! I think I also saw the first two Toy Storys with my dad (plus the rest of my immediate family) way back when, so this was a pretty cool way to sequelize that. As the credits were playing, I scrolled through the RunPee app, and then I explained to my dad what RunPee is. Kind of funny that he’s never heard about it before now even though it’s been around for years. That must’ve been what it was like for Buzz Lightyear when the other characters explained how he was affected by all the time dilation. I enjoy cinematic discussions about time dilation! (Even if they don’t hold up to the scrutiny of real-life physics.) The robot cat was also pretty cool, even though he wasn’t terribly feline.

Grade: 400 Lightyears out of 300 Rescues

Movie Reviews: With ‘Knives Out,’ Rian Johnson Can Add the Whodunit to His Collection of Filmmaking Merit Badges

November 25, 2019

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CREDIT: Claire Folger © 2018 MRC II Distribution

Starring: Ana de Armas, Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Lakeith Stanfield, Katherine Langford, Jaeden Martell, Christopher Plummer, Noah Segan, Edi Patterson, Riki Lindhome, K Callan, Frank Oz, Raúl Castillo, M. Emmet Walsh

Director: Rian Johnson

Running Time: 130 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for A Few Explosions, Possible Poisonings, and (Attempted?) Stabbings

Release Date: November 27, 2019

If you’d like to dust off a musty old genre and guide it to unexpected new depths, then you might just want to call Rian Johnson. He’s already shown what new joys await in a neo-noir mystery, a time-travelling actioner, and the biggest franchise of all time, and now with Knives Out, he moves on to the whodunit, and the answer to that question is, “By golly, Rian Johnson has done it once again!”

Since every whodunit needs a murder victim and a set of suspects, Knives Out has a bounty of them. The recently dead man is super-wealthy mystery novelist (wink, wink?) Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), and the folks who might be responsible or maybe know something consist of his mother Wanetta (K Collins), his daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), Linda’s husband Richard (Don Johnson), their son Hugh Ransom (Chris Evans), Harlan’s son Walt (Michael Shannon), Walt’s wife Donna (Riki Lindhome), their son Jacob (Jaeden Martell), Harlan’s daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette), her daughter Meg (Katherine Langford), Harlan’s housekeeper Fran (Edi Patterson), and his nurse Marta (Ana de Armas). While his employees generally get along with him, his family members all have reason to resent him (and they also keep mixing up which South or Central American country Marta is from). Naturally enough, there are also a couple of police detectives on hand (Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan) and an idiosyncratic private investigator named Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who has been hired under mysterious circumstances.

CREDIT: Claire Folger

The trick that Knives Out pulls is that within twenty minutes, it reveals everything (or nearly everything) that happened in thorough detail. Harlan’s death is initially ruled a suicide, and we are shown pretty much unmistakably that he sliced his own throat, and everyone’s presence at that moment is accounted for. Done deal, then? Well, there’s still nearly two more hours of running time left. The script keeps itself honest thanks to one particularly telling character quirk: Marta’s “regurgitative reaction to mistruthing.” That is to say, whenever she lies, or merely even considers lying, she spews chunks. Thus, there is no other option than for the truth to similarly spill out, and there is no room for contrivances to keep the audience in the dark. But that having been said, information can be obscured and unknown unknowns can take some time to make themselves known. Ergo, Rian Johnson gives us the simultaneous joy of being let in on a little secret while also playing the guessing game.

CREDIT: Claire Folger

In addition to Knives Out‘s masterful mystery machinations, it additionally offers plenty of keen observations of human nature. There is the ever-timely message of the tension that emerges when the haves and have-nots bump against each other, as well as the chaos that can reign when fortunes swing wildly. Furthermore, there is an astute understanding of the difference between truth and honesty, and how the latter can help you survive when the former is hidden. All of this is to say, motivation matters a great deal in cinema, and in life.

Knives Out is Recommended If You Like: Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot, Logan Lucky

Grade: 4.5 out of 5 Colorful Sweaters

Avengers: Endgame First Thoughts

May 11, 2019

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CREDIT: Disney/Marvel Studios

Maybe some movies should be reviewed in parts over the course of months, or maybe even years. That’s how I’m feeling about Avengers: Endgame. So I’m going to go ahead and talk about what’s striking my fancy about it now and maybe talk about it some more later.

The closest comparison I can think of for the premise of Endgame is The Leftovers. The opening scenes for the two are eerily similar in terms of both tone and function. But of course they then head in very different directions. I didn’t stick with The Leftovers because I just wasn’t hooked by how its particular characters responded in their particular ways to the disappearances. But with Endgame, I already know the context, so I’m already in, baby. And no doubt about it, I am happy that the ultimate focus is on Tony Stark’s beating heart, and everyone keeping things right with their families. That emotional resonance is enough to buoy the whole affair along for three hours. And it’s also enough to prevent me from getting too angry about the characters who don’t have much meaningful to do or the moments that make me go, “But why?”

Also important: how about those end credits? It’s not very often 50-plus above-the-line cast members have to be assembled in some sort of appropriate order, so we must cherish it whenever it happens. And I’ve got to say, it appears that for the most part, there was no rhyme or reason to the assembly. But we shall, and must, investigate whether or not that is true for as long as we can. The cursive credits for the core Avengers are great, though.

I give Avengers: Endgame A Handful of Snaps to the Beat.