ANACONDA (2025)

In the comedy Be Kind: Rewind, Jack Black and his sidekick make homemade movies to replace real ones, which is exactly what happens here, only in this case, the two comic actors are usually the comic leads: so each one is each other's equal sidekick, basically... or something...

While Jack does his usual thing, including singing beautifully as if he's making fun of beautiful singing because it's a surprise he sings so beautifully in the first place, Paul Rudd is basically playing Paul Rudd, only he looks older than usual, painted with a strange spray tan... perhaps intentional... And when they were kids they made Super 8 horror movies (trope city), and for nostalgia they go to the Amazon to film a remake of the cult classic Anaconda since Rudd, as a loser D-rate extra-actor, acquires the rights to the 1990's film, which makes no sense... What results is a semi-meta slog where one minute the group (including two ladies, of course, including young and hot Daniela Melchior) are trying to stay out of actual trouble (the usual THREE AMIGOS "this is real" device that most people credit to TROPIC THUNDER), and the next they're acting in their movie-within-a-movie that, who knows, might have turned out more interesting had the actual movie been their own fake movie... As in, it could have been worse, more fun to bag on, which this otherwise mediocre sendup of a sendup needs to be... To be anything at all, that is, if so-bad-it's-good movies like Anaconda are what they were really after anti-celebrating. Or something.

THE HUNTING WIVES (2025)

The Stepford Wives meets Twin Peaks meets The L Word  meets Desperate Housewives meets A Simple Plan (and some Gypsy, another Netflix series, thrown in)... About rich Texas Republicans who use every cliche (and red state reference) in the book, which is obviously overly deliberate, and thankfully the characters thaw out of their formidable shells into seeming more human than hackneyed... With a frame story about a gorgeous blonde teenage cheerleader whose death rocks the town, straight from that famous David Lynch series, but THE HUNTING WIVES isn't really ironical or weird, just extremely sexual...

The two main characters are Malin Akerman and Brittany Snow: one's older and hot and confident; the other's shy and mousy-cute, looks 22 when she's 40... Their lesbian romance is so overly hinted at and teased, there's not the necessary tension in their inevitable hooking up... Overall, despite the high-class-suburban conservative setting, things are so sensuously liberal that there's really no shock value in the nighttime soap opera elements... it's like lighting up a fuse that's already sizzling... But these two ladies are good enough in their opposites-attract attraction to keep the pulpy/page-turning (eventually neo-noir inspired) cadence worthwhile. Rating: ***1/2

SEAN COMBS: THE RECKONING (2025)

Here's yet another Netflix documentary with four parts that should have been two, as there's simply too much time spent on interviews with particular people suing Sean Combs... Each episode has at least one or two people being interviewed about a lawsuit and what led up to the lawsuit...

The problem is, these long stretches of repetitive allegations simply gets in the way of an otherwise intriguing documentary about the rise of a supposed music icon who's definitely a music mogul... It's one thing to have a frame story that, in this case, is self-shot footage of Combs in the nervous days leading up to his arrest: But there are multiple frames here and there needed only that one...

The most interesting episode is the third, after piggybacking on what seems more a Suge Knight/Tupac biopic... when Puffy rises as a contrived phoenix from the ashes of his biggest act, Notorious BIG, meets Cassie Ventura, and begins a downward drug-fueled spiral... But then we're tortured with twenty-minutes of more allegations... from a male "sex worker" (who's not very attractive) saying (without proof) that he slept with Cassie AND Diddy, which segues into a studio musician in the final episode accusing him of rape... All these bulwarks might be important on paper since the court case is the elephant in the room, but they simply ruin the overall flow here as a documentary with way too many cooks and conspiracies. Grade: C—

THE NAKED GUN (2025)

It all began in what was basically a shot-for-shot remake of a 1950's Airline Disaster film named ZERO HOUR starring Dana Andrews as Ted Stryker... and the "y" became an "i" and Andrews became Robert Hays... But the scene-stealer was one of three then-veteran actors who were famous for being extremely serious in extremely serious movies, making their otherwise deadpan humor funnier around such non-stop joke-a-second, modern-era hijinks...

Then, Leslie Neilson and the AIRPLANE writer/directors created a TV series that everyone seemed to like, but no one seemed to watch because POLICE SQUAD only lasted a handful of episodes... But there's a thing called "cult following," and SQUAD had it in droves... igniting THE NAKED GUN movie franchise starring Nielson partnered with another deadly-serious veteran actor George Kennedy... The difference between the reboot's modern-day-veteran star Liam Neeson and Leslie Nielson (or Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and Peter Graves for that matter) is the latter came from a time before affected sarcasm turned everything (from war movies to action movies to horror movies) into partial comedies... Which, back in the 1980's, turned Neilson into a kind of thawed-out neanderthal where the humor relies on him being stuck in a time he doesn't (or his character Frank Drebin doesn't) understand...But Neeson, whose done every genre under the sun ranging from historical dramas to semi-comedies to a barrage of high-octane action-flicks, simply understands too much, so it's really no big deal that he's a hard-nosed cop surrounded by a myriad of jokey gags... he can simply embrace or ignore them and it doesn't really matter... Meanwhile, some of the jokes are kinda funny, some are basically ignored, some even seem made to be ignored and very few make you laugh out loud since somewhere within this NAKED GUN reboot is a genuine detective drama that didn't want to be humorous at all... For example, had they cast Liam as the new Dirty Harry, there would be no difference, really... but neither would work because neither franchise should have been rebooted in the first place.

DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE (2025)

Thomas was one of the best characters not only on Downton Abbey but maybe in the history of British TV series. He was an antagonist, from being a coward during the war to scheming against pretty much everyone in the downstairs working servant chambers... The fact he was homosexual, on the show itself, simply added to his perplexed nature... gave him a more human quality but hardly enough humanity to where he wasn't desperate and edgy, and enigmatic, interesting... 

But in the last of three movies, having already hooked up with a famous actor, here he merely gives knowing expressions of being the secret servant who is really an equal lover... deleting any significant edge the character once had... In different ways, the same could be said of everyone in the cast... by this third movie, which centers around the meager plot of royals having dinner at the titular castle, no one really means anything, and that ranges from the upstairs and the downstairs... 

None of the characters are even part of the ironical nature of the haves and have-nots since, being so beloved, their dreams came true upon the first motion picture so audiences can see them given a happy ending, from being contentedly married to becoming famous scriptwriters... So there is no tension or drama. The only b-story involves real life dramatist Noel Coward giving the same "one day we'll have rights" expression while supposedly basing his own future famous works on the characters here... Who aren't even worthy or intriguing enough to make their own movie entertaining... a series that should have ended either on TV or one farewell movie. Three is two too many. Rating: *1/2

AKA CHARLIE SHEEN (2025)

It's pretty amazing that you have a man with a live-changing disease, who was fired from a dream job getting 2M dollars per situation-comedy episode, who did every drug in the book and actually made drugs seem cool to kids on the internet... 

With all that, the director of AKA CHARLIE SHEEN seems intent on capturing Sheen's smug, cat-that-ate-the-canary grin about all the things that lead to one person's complete and utter downfall: Has it been long enough since the famous (or infamous) 2011 "Winning" breakdown that this all all really cool now? That's surprising given the whole MeToo Movement (backed by Netflix from the start) that made this kind of lionizing glimpse into womanizing and women-beating so... not popular... But other than the fact that the writer/director seems like an adoring fanboy not only interviewing Charlie Sheen but celebrating his actions, you have a subject that's interesting enough to merit a pretty interesting documentary... That's sporadically effective also despite how many unnecessary filler distractions are spliced throughout almost every word Sheen speaks about his roller-coaster life... The famous indie MY DINNER WITH ANDRE had a far less interesting subject taking about things at a restaurant table with very few edits... So of all people, Charlie "I've Done Everything Under the Sun" Sheen didn't need every syllable spoken to be orchestrated/backed by some kind of pop culture snippet, ranging from Charlie's own films (including Super 8 from childhood) to various old commercials... Also, the interviews weren't as good as they could have been, including Sheen's first ex-wife, who pretends she was reluctant to be interviewed, and that without her input the doc wouldn't be as interesting... The only truly interesting person here is Sheen himself, who had had the world hypnotized on cheap smoky-roomed online videos during his meltdown, and yet, this sycophantic (and sometimes downright intrusive) director didn't seem to have the faith that Sheen himself could carry his own vehicle...  But since Netflix only makes personal-propaganda pieces disguised as documentaries, in the end, no matter who's being covered, you can't delve any deeper than personal promotion. Rates: **1/2

TITAN: THE OCEANGATE SUBMERSIBLE DISASTER (2025)

By the time we reach the end of TITAN, to see what the audience is waiting for... the death of the five passengers including infamous Stockton Rush... the documentary is over, which is very strange... It's not that it seemed too short, because it's a good-enough runtime and definitely holds your attention... but there must have been lawsuits pending concerning the families of the people who died. With the exception of the daughter of Mr. Titanic (the one ringer on board who knows about the fateful ship, and who was used to legitimize things)... Instead, TITAN deals with the many, many, many mistakes/misjudgements leading up to the tragedy: so that way they attempt to explain the ending with all the problems of the past... which is somewhat interesting but ultimately a cop-out... 

Also, there has never been a scarier, more formidable noise than what the submarine was making as it went further underwater... It was like Satan using a pick-axe on someone's nerve-endings... The fact that Oceangate founder/CEO Stockton Rush was able to con all these people into taking such risks is like some kind of unexplainable cult... But even THAT aspect could have been delved into further: not necessarily the good/positive aspects of Rush, but the confidence he must have had that allowed the people to be conned in the first place (from workers to investors), and for so long: It must have been more than money that brainwashed these people... many of them scientists... Instead he's a kind of nerdy impatient scientist instead of the mad scientist they're building-up... whenever he's interviewed it's a bit of a let-down... Meanwhile, since the frame-story involves his former employees in court while delving into all the near-implosions and endless testing of the submersible, what could have been totally suspense-filled, isn't... Except the scenes with actual footage of being underwater with Rush and his cohorts... from another famous wreck to The Bahamas... which has aspects of watching an underwater thriller, like The Abyss...Speaking of, there should have been (more) footage of James Cameron (or perhaps interviews with him) because he was warning people before and after the tragedy, and is far more interesting than anyone interviewed here: he'd have made a perfect Van Helsing to Rush's bloodsucking murderer... And it's very annoying and anti-climactic ending on the second-to-last run with the obnoxious "influencer" who resembles a superhero's boxer shorts... too much 11th hour time's spent on him and his fake crying-for-the-camera... So when things sum up, they literally... sum up, and quickly... Probably because everything in this case is still in red-tape limbo... perhaps Netflix should have waited a few years to make this documentary... which means, they too, like Stockton Rush, basically jumped the gun on a creation that just wasn't ready.  Rating: ***

ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR

Blake Lively in ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR Year: 2025 Rating: **

Chalk this up as one of the most unnecessary sequels ever made. The original, Paul Feig's modern-film-noir-comedy-thriller, was a nice little surprise, and worked especially during the first half as single mommy/blogger Anna Kendrick begins an investigation... 

Turning into a kind of girl-crush/lightweight-obsession with older and downright beautiful Blake Lively, providing both intrigue and suspense, and even sensuality, the only drawback being the casting of Lively's husband, who Kendrick cheats with, an actor seeming more suited to a sitcom... 

Blake Lively in ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR

Well he's only briefly joined by the two returning leads on a tropical island paradise... in what's more like the Knives Out sequel setting than a locale providing a logical continuation of the first film's deliberately over-bright suburbs... which director Feig served-up with an equal amount of genuine-suspense and crime-genre-satire... 

Making this new balmy location and the entire film itself a distraction to the fact that nothing really happens, as in, there's no real investigation to pull in Kendrick or the audience this time around. 

Anna Kendrick in ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR

THE LAST SUPPER (2025)

When you think about it, the best movies ever made, The Godfather and The Godfather 2, although loosely adapted from Shakespeare's King Lear, is very biblical in its ancient-based Italian-sourced deceptions and power struggles... And here was an opportunity for that original muse to imitate its imitator, having the two central characters, Judas and Peter, at surreptitious odds leading to the titular Last Supper, which, plot-wise, is hardly even treated like a light snack here...  

And while the acting was surprisingly decent, it was far too obvious who was who... For example, in the opening Feeding of the 500 scene: even if it were a silent film, the way one of the disciples timidly ducked his head into a shady cloak, it was obviously Judas, and he never let go of those contrived physical mannerisms, as if he were playing a junky-snitch on an episode of Kojak...

Meanwhile, Peter, while not badly cast, looking like a genuinely rugged fisherman, doesn't do enough to merit the inner-struggle he goes through during the initial prediction of the betrayal, and then the betrayal itself... It's almost like The Last Supper was trying to recreate a sort of after-game-highlights version of Mel Gibson's Passion (including the horror-trope Satan and the harshly whipped Jesus) more than narrowing itself into an effective thriller with built-in treacherous suspense straight from the source material... making the last half feel like an eternity. Grade: C—