Ron Howard Takes Us to ‘Eden,’ Shall We Join Him?

August 26, 2025

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Starring: Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl, Sydney Sweeney, Ana De Armas, Jonathan Tittel, Richard Roxburgh, Toby Wallace, Felix Kammerer, Ignacio Gasparini

Director: Ron Howard

Running Time: 129 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: August 22, 2025 (Theaters)

Okay, y’all. You know I love to review movies by asking, “Would I like to live in the world of this film?” And the based-on-a-true-story Eden is just SCREAMING for me to review it that way, as three very different parties settle on the remote Galápagos island of Floreana for three very different reasons. Set in 1928, Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby play a Nietzsche-loving couple who want to save post-World War I humanity, while Daniel Brühl and Sydney Sweeney play another couple who somehow believe this is the best place to raise their family, and Ana de Armas enters the mix as a so-called “baroness” set on building a luxury hotel.

So is this heaven on Earth?

No.

Not at all.

But… this is one of those situations where it’s better to be second than first. Or not necessarily second, but definitely much later than first. Which is to say, I bet 2028 Floreana will be better than 1928 Floreana (spoiler alert, sort of ).

Grade: A Supportive Family Is So Important

‘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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Napoleon’ Review: Raucous Romance, Straightforward Warfare

November 20, 2023

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Napoleon just does whatever he wants, gosh! (CREDIT: Aidan Monaghan/Apple)

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Ben Miles, Ludivine Sagnier, Matthew Needham, Youssef Kerkour, Phil Cornwell, Édouard Philipponnat, Ian McNeice, Rupert Everett, Paul Rhys, Catherine Walker, Gavin Spokes, John Hollingworth, Mark Bonnar, Anna Mawn, Davide Tucci, Sam Crane, Scott Handy

Director: Ridley Scott

Running Time: 157 Minutes

Rating: R for Horny Napoleon and Grisly Injured Horses

Release Date: November 22, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: If you paid attention at all during history class, then surely you remember Napoleon Bonaparte, the opportunistic general who rose all the way up to emperor and nearly conquered all of Europe. But ambition and ego got the better of him, as he lived out the end of his life in exile and inspired one of ABBA’s most popular songs. His story has similarly stymied filmmakers over the years, but now director Ridley Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa have finally managed to bring it to the big screen, with Joaquin Phoenix diving shamelessly into the title role. The movie mostly alternates back and forth between his military campaigns and his courtship with his first wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), and there’s certainly plenty to cover on those fronts. (Although I gotta be honest, whenever I read this movie’s title, I can’t help but reflexively hear Aaron Ruell’s immortally nasally delivery of a certain other “Napoleon.”)

What Made an Impression?: Making a Mockery Out of History: I’m no Napoleon scholar, so I can’t say with 100% certainty how accurate any of this movie is. But I can say that his interactions with Josephine sure feel accurate. Mr. Bonaparte strikes me as one of the most impetuous world leaders of the past few hundred years, and that is abundantly clear when he decides that he must find himself a wife. Their relationship is childish, raunchy, and profoundly id-driven. This is all to say: I wish that the entire movie had been a Napoleon/Josephine romantic comedy! They throw insults and food at each other, and then kiss and boink like rabbits in between all the cacophony. You gotta love it when costume dramas dress down.
A Bunch of Explosions, Too: In its efforts to be thorough, the movie also features seemingly every single one of Napoleon’s major battles. They’re all competently staged by Scott and his crew, but during those sequences, I was mostly waiting to return to the intimate humanity of it all. There’s just not much personality to all the mayhem. Although, at least at Waterloo, we get a clear sense of his enemies cattily boxing him in.

In conclusion, I don’t really have much to say about the battle scenes, as they didn’t get much of a reaction out of me. But the Josephine business is enough to make Napoleon worth recommending.

Napoleon is Recommended If You Like: Reading Wikipedia, The naughtiest bits of Amadeus

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Coronations

It’s the End of the World as We Know It, and ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’ Feels Fine

July 5, 2023

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Which one’s Dead and which one’s Reckoning? (CREDIT: Paramount Pictures and Skydance)

Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Henry Czerny, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Running Time: 163 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for A Reckless Relationship with Gravity

Release Date: July 12, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: This might just be the most impossible mission yet! That may sound like hyperbole for a series that’s famously death-defying, but honestly it lives up to the hype. Ethan Hunt (the freakishly indefatigable Tom Cruise) and his pared-down IMF team must somehow figure out how to dispatch a new enemy that threatens to wipe out humanity as we know it by reverting society to an analog dystopia. Of course, that premise is just a setup for the shameless stunts and sizzling globetrotting. In addition to this all-encompassing terror, Ethan is also being chased down by some law enforcement types who aren’t so sure he should be able to operate without impunity anymore.

What Made an Impression?: What’s All This Now?: The Mission: Impossible series combines elements of espionage, big budgets extravaganza, and practical stunt work, all genres that are notorious for being accompanied by nonsensical plots. And Dead Reckoning Part One might just be the nonsensical one yet! As far as I could tell, the enemy wasn’t exactly human, but it could take human form. Or maybe I misunderstood that. But I don’t think I did! The opening scene provided a very thorough explanation, after all. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that Esai Morales plays the villain in question, but confusion still lingered with me by the end. If you find yourself just as confused as I was, you can still enjoy the movie, though you’ll also probably find yourself mulling it over more than you need to.
New and Old, Which One’s New?: In terms of character carryover, Mission: Impossible is kind of like the hall-of-mirrors version of Fast & Furious, if some of those mirrors were covered by blackout blinds. In addition to Cruise as Hunt, you can rely on Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg to be there as his regular IMF buddies. But on the flip side, you could have a love interest like M:I 3‘s Michelle Monagahn just unceremoniously disappear. There’s also a little bit of room for new favorites like Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby to remain after their initial appearances, and for new recruits like Hayley Atwell to seamlessly find their place. And we can even reach way back for originals like Henry Czerny who were there in the beginning but have taken most of the sequels off, and you can be tricked into thinking that they’ve been there all along. Basically, the casting in this franchise is a magic act.
So Much Delivered, So Much More to Come: But let’s finally get down to the bread and butter. The best setpieces all involve a climactic train ride. There’s a cliffside jump to arrive on the train, fights within and outside the train, and a desperate scramble to stay alive and not fall off the train. Before that choo-choo checks in, you might actually wonder what’s taking so long for Dead Reckoning to go for broke as much as usual. But once it does, the massively wound ball of tension lets loose and doesn’t give you any time to catch your breath. And this is just Part One! A nearly three-hour opening chapter, after that. (Or the first half of the seventh chapter, from another point of view.) This is just the latest 2023 blockbuster that forces you to wait another year for the end of the story, but you won’t feel deprived. Dead Reckoning Part One can stand fully on its own, and quite frankly, you’ll need all those extra months to recover.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is Recommended If You Like: Saying “Huh?” and “Woo-hoo!” at the same time

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Trains

Movie Review: ‘Hobbs & Shaw’ is Surprisingly Goofy, Unsurprisingly Family-Oriented, and Annoyingly Convoluted

July 31, 2019

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CREDIT: Frank Masi/Universal Pictures

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Idris Elba, Vanessa Kirby, Eddie Marsan, Eiza González, Helen Mirren

Director: David Leitch

Running Time: 136 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Big Vehicles and Big Egos Slamming Into Each Other

Release Date: August 2, 2019

Spin-offs should offer something that the original couldn’t. Hobbs & Shaw immediately feels off in that regard, considering that Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) have already been a couple of the biggest characters in the last few Fast & Furious movies. Although, they aren’t quite members of the core family, so that leaves them enough wiggle room to break out on their own. But it can’t be too different! This franchise has a sterling stunt reputation it needs to maintain, and while director David Leitch and company do not try to be as relentlessly mind-blowing as Fast Five or Furious 7, there is at least one memorable moment when a motorcycle slinks between some truck tires.

The separation, then, mostly comes in Hobbs & Shaw being at its core an odd couple buddy comedy, and in this case, that means a few celebrity cameos who inject their own particular brands of impishness. These moments feel out of place in this world, but they might also be the best parts? Their charms cannot be denied. Honestly, though, I think we would have been better off spending more time with Hobbs’ daughter (Eliana Sua), as her scenes are both delightful AND internally consistent.

As wonderfully corny as Hobbs & Shaw is willing to be, it can’t change the fact that most of the plot is convoluted high-tech, globetrotting nonsense. Idris Elba is the cybernetically enhanced big bad, and we get a few genuinely disturbing shots of how he is becoming a superhuman or something beyond human. There is a hint of a larger conspiracy at play here, but only a hint. Meanwhile Vanessa Kirby plays Deckard’s sister Hattie, an MI6 agent who has been infected with a virus that’s going to kill her and apparently everyone around her also. The explanation for how the virus is supposed to spread is either glossed over or not emphasized enough, which is a problem because the race to cure Hattie is what drives most of the action.

Thankfully, the reward for dithering through all that is a surefire demonstration that we must, in true F&F fashion, celebrate the importance of family. It’s not as flat-out heartwarming as the series proper, but Hobbs takes us all along to Samoa to meet his mom and brothers, and Helen Mirren totally rocks her prison jumpsuit in her return as Mama Shaw. I could do without all the derivative action flick gobbledygook, but I’m grateful for the good vibes.

Hobbs & Shaw is Recommended If You Like: James Bond, but with a goofy postmodern (though not quite parody) sensibility

Grade: 3 out of 5 Friendy Insults

This Is a Movie Review: Mission: Impossible – Fallout

August 12, 2018

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CREDIT: Paramount Pictures

Mission: Impossible – Fallout is to Ethan Hunt what Spectre is to James Bond, but not that (transparently) insane and mostly successful. But what I really want to talk about is this idea that Hunt is irreplaceable. The conjecture that there is only person for the most dangerous jobs in the world is certainly compelling, but is it healthy? If we’re talking about how it applies to reality, certainly not. For the sake of the world and for the sake of their personal lives, experts and superheroes should have backups and successors in place. But when we’re talking about the cinematic medium, the calculus is a little different … or is it?

M:I isn’t the only spy and/or insane stunt franchise that has been killing it in the past 20 years, which means we’ve got our backups. And when Tom Cruise finally calls it quits (in a billion years or so), maybe a worthy Ethan Hunt successor will somehow run into our hearts. In the universe where the IMF exists, Hunt really shouldn’t place the entire weight of the world on his shoulders. But since this world is a fictional place, it’s working as it’s supposed to.

I give Mission: Impossible – Fallout 4 Cliffhangs out of 5 Shifting Allegiances.