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

‘Dumb Money’ is Smart Storytelling

September 13, 2023

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So Dumb (CREDIT: Sony Pictures/Screenshot)

Starring: Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Seth Rogen, Shailene Woodley, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan, Dane DeHaan, Myha’la Harold, Rushi Kota, Talia Ryder

Director: Craig Gillespie

Running Time: 104 Minutes

Rating: R for Dumb Profanity and Cheeky Nudity

Release Date: September 15, 2023 (Limited Theaters)/September 29, 2023 (Expands Wide)

What’s It About?: STONKS! I could attempt to continue to write the rest of this review of Dumb Money in the lingua franca of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, but alas, I’m probably not well-versed in it enough to produce something coherent. So I’ll instead keep it generally prosaic. Back in 2020 and early 2021, r/WallStreetBets was the social media hub for something rather strange happening in the stock market. Based on the advice of a chicken tender-obsessed financial analyst named Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a whole cadre of amateur traders decide to go all in on the retail chain GameStop. Meanwhile, Wall Street types like Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) and Kenneth Griffin (Nick Offerman) are fairly confident that they should do exactly the opposite by short selling GameStop stock, what with the general decline of in-person retail video game sales. But the meme-fueled enthusiasm of working class folks like a nurse (America Ferrera), a couple of college classmates (Myha’la Harold and Talia Ryder), and even a GameStop cashier (Anthony Ramos) ensures that Opposite Day will be arriving very soon.

What Made an Impression?: Cutting Through the Malarkey: If you feel that the financial markets are a rigged game, it’s probably because their rules are too intricate and incomprehensible to anyone who can’t afford to spend hours poring over them every day. So it’s a bit of a minor miracle that Dumb Money is so easy to understand despite all that. It certainly helps that it’s based on a story that was widely covered by the media. And the underlying concepts are straightforward enough that you don’t have to sweat the details. But maybe we’ve also become more financially literate as a society since the days of Occupy Wall Street and the other populist movements that followed in its wake, along with the democratizing rise of the Robinhood stock trading app, which plays a major role in this story. But also, it comes down to simple storytelling skills: the characters are compelling, so it’s easier to pay attention to what’s going on.
A Busy Pandemic: Recent history is a major part of popular cinema, and if that trend is going to continue, then we can’t ignore the COVID-19 of it all. As this story takes place during the height of the pre-vaccinated pandemic, there are a lot of face masks. That was a time of heightened anxiety, but it was also a time of doing whatever the hell else was part of your life, whether that meant surreptitiously texting in class, trying not to curse in front of your kids, or even trying to run that sub-4:00 mile you could never quite pull off in college. Buying stocks that become worth millions of dollars isn’t cool, you know what is cool? Making billion dollars’ worth of memories that you’ll cherish forever.
What’s Behind the Screen?: Context is king. Dumb Money relies on a fair amount of pre-existing news footage, as well as clips of real politicians from Congressional hearings. This mix of documentary and dramatization equals illumination. The events of this story initially played out behind Zoom screens and Internet-speak, and now we get some juicy peeks into how those scenes might have played out in the flesh. They’re filled with the high-stakes foibles of humanity, offering an irresistible mix of voyeurism but also sympathy, as well as savagery but also a dollop of optimism. If the Almighty Dollar remains king, we’ll all remain dumb for it, but hopefully we can still blast through the status quo a bit in the meantime.

Dumb Money is Recommended If You Like: The Social Network, The Big Short, Memes

Grade: 4.5 out of 5 STONKS

Appropriately Enough for a Movie About an Abortion, ‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’ is a Full-On Empathy Generator

March 9, 2020

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CREDIT: Focus Features

Starring: Sidney Flanigan, Talia Ryder, Théodor Pellerin, Ryan Eggold, Sharon Van Etten

Director: Eliza Hittman

Running Time: 101 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Having to Be an Adult While You’re Still a Teenager

Release Date: March 13, 2020 (Limited)

Abortion remains one of the most fraught debates in American society, so it’s a bit of a small miracle when a movie about it is able to get produced and released, even when it’s something as small as Never Rarely Sometimes Always. It is reminiscent of the 2014 indie comedy Obvious Child insofar as it matter-of-factly presents the termination of an unplanned pregnancy, but with all the corresponding differences that go along with a protagonist who is a decade younger and lives in a state with more restrictive legislation. Accordingly then, it is a much more somber, exhausting affair. Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) is the one with the unplanned pregnancy, a teenage girl living in sleepy little Northumberland County in central Pennsylvania. Her best option for procuring an abortion is taking a bus to New York City, which is something that she is able to do if she sets her mind to it. Phrasing it that way kind of brushes aside the more difficult parts of this journey, but it’s an attitude that’s needed for Autumn to adopt to survive this experience.

Any major medical procedure is difficult to handle on one’s own both on a practical and psychological level, so luckily for Autumn, her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) is available to accompany her. I don’t like imagining how Autumn would’ve handled (or not handled) everything if she didn’t have a travel partner. From the moment she realizes she might be pregnant, her existence is in unending string of stress and indignities. She is forced to watch a graphic video discouraging abortion. She and Skylar encounter a creepy guy (Théodor Pellerin) on the bus who invites them to a show at an abandoned subway. She discovers that she has to stay overnight with no place to sleep because her pregnancy is farther along than she realized. She has to pay for the abortion out of pocket (thus depleting her bus fund) even though she has insurance, as she does not want her parents to be notified of what she’s doing. And then she must endure a series of multiple-choice screening questions (whose possible answers give the film its title) that force her to confront the pain of adolescence she’s been internalizing.

I don’t imagine Never Rarely Sometimes Always will change anyone’s minds on this issue (at least not immediately). I don’t think that’s what it was designed to do anyway. Cinema, famously, is known for its ability to generate empathy, and I hope that that power still applies even when viewers fundamentally disagree with the choices the main character makes. So while I don’t imagine that any needles on this issue will be moved anywhere significantly, I do hope that everyone who witnesses Autumn’s story can understand where she is coming from and appreciate the truth of her situation.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always is Recommended If You Like: Obvious Child but wish it had been a drama

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Bus Trips