#10- Slanted
[Watched in theaters]
Slanted is a film about a Chinese immigrant who grew up in America but has been treated unfairly by her peers due to her appearance who decides to make a permanent life-altering change where she gets an experimental surgery to become white. The premise alone is enough to make one tug at their collar a bit because there’s a world, multiple even, where this is an incredibly cringe Daily Wire “comedy” produced by Ben Shapiro, but instead it’s a theatrically released film starring McKenna Grace.
I was really worried about this movie because, yes, I felt like it was absolutely reaching for the low hanging fruit and in a world where race-based humor isn’t as in as it was back in the aughts; there was a very real possibility that this would end up being tasteless and just a series of jokes poking fun at white peoples or minorities. It’s not a comedy, nor marketed as one, but the satire here is pretty crucial and there was a risk that it could end up being done really poorly. Luckily, I think it ended up being a mostly pretty enjoyable body horror meets teen comedy.
Yeah, this is basically
The Substance High but rather than the movie commenting on women’s worth deteriorating with age, it’s about minorities, and particularly female minorities, and their worth being tied to looks. Much like
The Substance, this movie is very disgusted by the mere mention of the term subtlety, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing for a sort of biting satire and while the satire and overall product here isn’t remotely as good (
The Substance was my favorite film of 2024 after all and this is not going to be that for 2026) they’re cut from the same cloth and I appreciated the way they handle it. There are fun moments of satire here and there while not avoiding the gross and the horrific elements of the movie, especially in the latter half after the surgery where McKenna Grace’s face begins melting.
The cast here is good and both women who play the lead (McKenna Grace and Shirley Chen) both do a good job feeling like they’re playing the same character. The ensemble is weaker for sure with most of the high school characters feeling pretty vacuous and hollow (maybe the point, but I think they could’ve gotten better characterization, especially the boyfriend and best friend characters) but the standout here is the father played by Fang Du who is such a sweet and caring character you feel really bad for him throughout the entire experience.
Overall, do I think
Slanted is perfect? No, far from it, but it was definitely better and much more well-handled than I initially expected. It doesn’t become racist in its satire (cough
White Chicks cough) nor does it feel preachy, it just feels like a new take on a classic formula of teen movies ala
Mean Girls. It’s gross, it’s funny, it’s uncomfortable, and I had a pretty good time with it.
#09- Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere
[Netflix]
I’m unfortunately familiar with the Manosphere through cultural osmosis. Being a politically engaged person, you end up becoming familiar with folks like Sneako, the Tate Brothers, etc. that are just some of the biggest losers on the planet with some of the biggest followings on the planet as well. I fully blame these people for the situation we’re currently in due to their influence on the dumbest most insecure men among us. I’m no Kamala Harris fan or anything, a “moderate” establishment democrat and former prosecutor who thought she could girlboss her way into the presidency isn’t remotely my first choice, but as the documentary establishes, there’s a pretty big link between young men voting for Orange Julius and those same young men watching people within the Manosphere.
I’m not familiar with Louis Theroux’s work other than this and I was more intrigued about the subject matter than the personality behind it and luckily I do think he handled it all pretty well. He wasn’t obnoxiously front-and-center like a lot of documentary hosts tend to be, instead he just kind of sat there and let these absolute idiots make absolute fools of themselves without him even needing to step in. These absolute meatheads he interviews have such a warped perspective of things that it’s almost comical ands Theroux manages to harness that pretty well.
The biggest issue I had here was less about anything in the doc and more about platforming these people even more. Sure, I can’t imagine a young insecure dude watching this and discovering what these people do, but it still does get their names out there for people who aren’t familiar. I wish I had no idea who Myron is or what the f**k Fresh and Fit was, a life of blissful ignorance there would be wonderful, but this doc makes that impossible for anyone watching it. It also lets their ideas get out there and while Theroux is actively fighting back on those harmful ideals, your dumbest uncle or cousin who stumbles across this won’t understand that because those types lack the ability to do any sort of media analysis and will just hear how badly women just want an alpha male and then run with that.
I think it’s unfortunate because there absolutely are good things that could be done in the line of getting young men more confidence and support. I’m on a weight loss journey of my own and it’s freaking brutal and I hate every waking second of it, having a content creator that understands that plight and helps young men through things like that would be truly beneficial. Helping young men gain confidence in their body, their personality, finding partners, these are real things I know I and a lot of other people in my demographic could benefit from, but instead that niche is filled with dumb rich kids with daddy issues who see women as objects, emotions as weakness, and the world as out to get them, and it’s no wonder a lot of men fall down this rabbit hole and end up in communities like Asmongold, Sneako, or even Nick Fuentes. It starts as “I’m fat and ugly and girls don’t like me” they find a fit dude with lots of girls around him, he says “all you have to do is join my Telegram” and then a year or two later these impressionable idiots are shouting about the “great replacement” and voting in literal fascism.
Most of that has nothing to do with the documentary, that was just me rambling, but yeah, I think this was well put together and it t got some emotions out of me (mainly second hand embarrassment and mild rage), I just wonder if making documentaries about these subjects do more harm than good ultimately. Still, if you are familiar with the Manosphere and just want to laugh at a bunch of the dumbest motherers you’ve ever seen, this is a pretty good way to do it.
#08- A Magnificent Life
[Watched in theaters]
I’ll admit I’m not all that familiar with Marcel Pagnol nor any of his works, French Cinema in general is one of my blind spots, but after checking out and truly adoring
Arco earlier this year, I figured that when my Regal was showing another French animation this time about the life of a famous playwright and filmmaker, if nothing else it’d be an interesting experiment to check it out. Coming out of
A Magnificent Life, there’s a lot here that I really enjoyed even if as a whole it didn’t blow me away.
A Magnificent Life is honestly a pretty by the books biopic except rather than being in live action, it’s stunningly animated in this incredibly stylized way that looks like it’s halfway between hand drawn 2-D and mocap. I know this director also directed the Oscar-nominated
The Triplets of Belleville which is also beautifully stylized so there’s not really any surprise on that front. For the most part, the animation is pretty straightforward, but it does get to have a little fun here and there, especially in a memorable gag where Pagnol is described as “an anteater” and he gets to literally be depicted as one for just a few frames, that stood out to me as a fun little touch you couldn’t do in live action.
The story very much goes cradle to grave (or at least early childhood to grave, I don’t think it actually showcases him as a baby) and follows Pagnol’s life from the early days of him wanting to be a writer, moving to Paris, serving as a teacher, beginning to write plays, then writing movies, World War II, etc. all the way up until the 1970s with his passing, but one notable thing it does is that each character who passes away in the story be it his mother, brother, friend, daughter, etc. all appear as ghostly or maybe closer to angelic figures who interact with him one last time. It’s a beautiful and interesting way to plus up an otherwise by the books kind of biopic.
Again, as someone not all that familiar with Pagnol’s life or work, I don’t think this played out as well as it would for someone who is invested, but I do think I’m going to check out some of his films, especially the Marseille Trilogy since Raimu in this movie was easily the most notable part and I’m interested in seeing the real guy perform. That said, for now I think this was a solid movie I don’t think I otherwise would have checked out had it not been showing at my Regal, so a big thanks to them for showing it because I did end up enjoying it.
#07- They Will Kill You
[Watched in theaters]
It’s crazy to me that in a year that contained an actual Sam Raimi movie, this ended up having the most Sam Raimi vibes of anything I’ve seen this year.
They Will Kill You is the second movie in two concurrent weeks that features a woman being hunted by a satanic cult of rich a-holes where she has to rekindle her relationship with a sister she abandoned when they were younger. It’s genuinely crazy how similar the general story beats between this and
Ready or Not 2 are, it feels so much like
Immaculate and
The First Omen from a couple years ago in their insane similarities. That said, the two are able to differentiate themselves in style if not in substance.
Where this movie thrives is in its ridiculous set of rules. We have this hotel/high rise building where all these immortal rich live or hang out or whatever they do (it’s never really officially stated that I recall) and they have to sacrifice someone to the devil in order to maintain their immortality. That immortality allows for some Sam Raimi
Evil Dead type antics including a character’s eyeball moving around independently, a headless body chasing after the protagonist, etc. as well as honestly some early Burton-esque stuff that felt like
Beetlejuice in a way. The movie is clearly inspired by Raimi and Burton but also by Tarantino and Akira Kurosawa in the way the violence and blood spattering is done. It was a really neat and fun combination of aesthetics.
Compared to
Ready or Not 2, the character work and performances are definitely weaker. While I think Zazie Beetz’s physicality was phenomenal and I believed her in the action moments, I didn’t really care about her character nor her relationship with her sister which I found less engaging than Kathryn Newton and Samara Weaving in that movie. It’s possible it’s just comparison due to recency and the movies being so similar, but I think there was a notable disparity in the way the characters were written. None of the side characters really did it for me either, they felt more like meat sacks for Beetz to slash through than any sort of character and honestly I don’t think they named like 3/4 of them in the movie. It’s fun watching them get torn to pieces, but I didn’t really get any of their motivation or reasoning for doing anything that would have made the movie just that much stronger.
Ultimately,
They Will Kill You was a stylistic and entertaining blast of a movie that is definitely worth checking out, but it’s also kind of a hollow style-over-substance type experience. I can see this movie being an absolute blast had it come out when I was in high school where I could have friends over, order pizza and soda and just watch it, it’d honestly be such a high point of those years, but as an adult it’s definitely a fun movie, but not one I think delivers much beyond that. It’s fun, it has a lot of blood and violence, and it fills a niche of movies that will certainly become cult classics, so it’s at minimum a triumph of what it’s going for. I say check it out.
#06- Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
[Watched on Hulu]
Of course I had incredibly minimal expectations for a Hulu original action comedy starring Vince Vaughn, none of that seemed like it was setting out to be anything particularly special nor interesting. Yet, pretty much immediately into the movie when Jean-Ralphio is singing Billy Joel’s “Why Should I Worry” from Disney’s underrated film
Oliver and Company, I was kind of sucked in. Then it never really left me.
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice isn’t just an action comedy like you’ve seen Netflix or Amazon Prime pumping out once a month for the last six years, instead it throws in a twist of also being a time travel movie but more importantly (incredibly more importantly) it doesn’t take itself even REMOTELY seriously. There's not a serious bone in this movie’s body, it’s all tongue-in-cheek humor from the action to the character names like Roid Rage Ryan and Dumbass Tony. This stupid self-aware humor really benefited what would have otherwise absolutely been a super generic and incredibly contrived and convenient action comedy.
The plot is dumb, it’s full of plot holes and excuses to push the plot forward, but it knows that and embraces it. Why are they going through with this incredibly stupid plan instead of just confessing it’s based on a lie? Because. That’s why. Because. And honestly, I appreciate it. Then, at the end of the movie there’s a decision made that is so eye-rollingly convenient that in any other movie it would’ve made me groan, but instead it had me wanting a sequel just to spend more time in this world and with these characters. They’re not even that great of characters either, it’s just a ton of fun.
Is this the best thing ever? No, far from it. Is it even particularly “good?” Probably not, it has a lot of the tropes of these generic streaming action comedies and it’s full of plot holes, but was it a blast? Yeah, and I wouldn’t mind a follow up. I say check it out.
#05- Ghost Elephants
[Watched on Disney+]
As a conservationist, the plight of elephants has always been pretty high up there in the community’s concerns. They are, after all, the largest living land animal, incredibly intelligent, have amazing social structures, have very long gestation periods, and possess one of the rarest and most valuable natural materials on Earth on their body. Making a documentary about elephant conservation may seem like a really easy thing to do and yeah, I could see a lesser filmmaker bungle this pretty bad, but Werner Herzog makes a harrowing and emotional experience without ever trivializing the message of conservation.
I love the way Herzog narrates, directs, and is apparently on site for the mission and yet never one appears on screen. He stays behind the camera and knows his role is to let the experts do their thing and simply cover it. He also centers indigenous African peoples in a respectful and casual way, he doesn’t treat them as exotic oddities, he treats them as people with a culture and belief system that is different than his, but no less important. It’s honestly impressive coming from a German in Africa.
The documentary follows a research team trying to locate a lineage of elephants in the Angolan highland forests that are believed to be the genetic descendants of the largest elephant ever seen, the mount currently on display at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (one I’ve seen and it truly is impressive). It covers their methodology, the search, getting permission from the King of an area, and, of course, locating the elephants but it does it in a well-paced way,
The doc also does not shy away from showcasing some of the cruelty faced by African wildlife, especially during the Angolan Civil War. There’s a long extended cut of driving past countless skulls of Cape buffalo, impala, and other antelope species with music over it and it doesn’t cut away. We also see footage from notorious Italian mondo documentary
Africa Addio which is something I’ll likely never actually watch but even just the pieces shown here made my stomach sink and my heart hurt.
I think as a piece of conservation media, this is easily one of the best I’ve seen in a while. Its well-crafted, tells an interesting and important story, and does not pull punches in terms of how ed both European colonizers AND African citizens were to the wildlife of the area throughout the 1800-1900s post-Scramble for Africa and up to and through the independence movements and ongoing civil wars. This is a good bit of geopolitical and nature information and I recommend checking it out.
#04- Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
[Watched in theaters]
I’m one of those people who absolutely LOVED the first
Ready or Not as I have most of what the duo behind Radio Silence have put out. I know a lot of people were lukewarm or disappointed by
Abigail but I really loved it, and same for
Scream 5 and
Scream 6 which are both probably in my top 5
Scream movies behind only the first two, so I was always going to like this movie. Did I think
Ready or Not needed a sequel? Not in the slightest, I thought it was a near perfect stand-alone, but did I still have an absolute blast with this movie? Also yes, I really truly did.
Ready or Not: Here I Come (good naming convention, take notes
Now You See Me franchise) is one of those sequels that says “yes, and” to the first movie. Where that was about a satanist family hunting down their new daughter-in law, this one is about the rest of the families in their little Satan group all vying for a seat at the table vacated by that family’s demise in the last film. Beyond that, yeah, it’s mostly a lot of the same but bigger and with more characters, more kills, and a ton more blood.
Where this movie absolutely worked for me was in the performance by Samara Weaving who I think deserves to be one of the iconic scream queens of today because she was phenomenal in both of these movies at both her screaming and fear moments but also her general badassery in other moments. Elijah Wood is also delightful here as another weird little creep along the lines of the role he played in
The Toxic Avenger where he just gets to be a little freak and I loved every moment of it. He’s the devil’s lawyer (who knew there was something more evil than Satan?) and orchestrates the games and just has this very fun vibe to his strangeness. We also get Shawn Hatosy and Sarah Michelle Gellar as twin siblings involved with the hunt and both have a really strong dynamic and characters with Hatosy especially rising to icon level by the end. Kathryn Newton is also here in this movie as Weaving’s character’s sister and she gets some really solid moments as well, though I wasn’t as taken by her role as I was the others. Throw in more ensemble characters, a few cameos from David Cronenberg and Kevin Durand, and so much blood it must’ve been half the movie’s budget and you’ve got a solid movie here.
The biggest complaint here honestly is the familiarity and if you wanted something wholly fresh out of this movie, I do think you’ll walk out disappointed, but at the same time I don’t really think anyone expected anything fresh or new from this. I know I didn’t. We got some new lore about the rules of this group and we expanded the world a bit and that was enough for me. I absolutely don’t blame you if this didn’t work for you, I definitely don’t think it lived up to the first one, but for me it still ended up being a very fun very exciting little movie that I’ll absolutely end up adding to my blu ray collection.
#03- Hoppers
[Watched in theaters]
I won’t lie, it’s a little crazy to me that between this and
The Wild Robot, Pixar and DreamWorks completely switched vibes for their robotic conserving nature movie, yet both full on did an “eating each other” montage. That Wild.
I wasn’t all that excited for
Hoppers, I thought the trailers looked meh, the design of the animals looked pretty bad, the humor looked cringe, and while I have no reference for
We Bare Bears, the fact the showrunner of a late 2010s Cartoon Network show doing a Pixar movie didn’t really excite me. I’m sure there is quality there, but it felt very much of the “haha butts are funny” era of cartoons, so I was worried between the scene heavily featured in the trailer of the animals all screaming and the creative forces behind it that this would be a bridge too far for Pixar. I’m happy to report though that I was wrong, this is a really solid Pixar movie, their best original since
Luca for sure.
I’ve said it many times before, but I adore conservation-focused movies. I love
Princess Mononoke, I love
WALL-E, I love
The Wild Robot, Spirit, Avatar, even f*king
Hoot I like a lot, so this being about protecting the glade immediately hooked me in and when the movie did a classic Pixar montage at the beginning, it definitely got me, and by the time the hopping itself was introduced, I was already sold. The characters didn’t look like/feel like that gummy Pixar look we’ve gotten since the pandemic where
Luca, Soul, Elio, and
Turning Red all look just identical. Instead here we get some unique and fun character designs, and then when we get to the animals, they’re not nearly as bad as the trailer made me think they’d be. I didn’t LOVE them because animals are so a major part of my life and stylistic changes aren’t always my thing, but they looked much better than I expected.
The best part about this movie though isn’t the characters, the animation, or even the story, it’s just how absolutely f*cking BONKERS this thing gets in the middle. It goes from being a pretty standard “save the forest” movie to something so unique and Fun I couldn’t not be sold. There are some great jokes and slapstick in the second half of the film I think will become Pixar classics at some point.
I don’t want to give much away because I had low expectations and ended up really enjoying
Hoppers, so I recommend checking it out!
#02- Project Hail Mary
[Watched in theaters]
(Honestly I've just been copy pasting my reviews from Letterboxd cuz I'm lazy today and I just did a one liner for this one so it won't be as detailed.)
Project Hail Mary was a genuine surprise. I expected it to be good, I didn't expect it to be GREAT and it really ended up being so. But do I really need to sing its praises when everyone else has? Just go watch it. Seriously.
#01- Undertone
[Watched in theaters]
The mixed reviews here aren’t all that surprising, you’re always bound to get them when a movie is dubbed “The scariest movie you’ll see all year” as I’ve seen for this movie, and that sucks. It builds this unattainable level of hype where if you’re not absolutely ting your pants every 30 seconds that it’s actually bad. Sometimes those movies are actually good, sometimes they’re not, sometimes they’re just kind of there, but it doesn’t matter because the only thing people are thinking about is “was that the scariest thing I’ve ever seen” and unfortunately, no,
Undertone is not going to be that movie. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad or even not scary, it’s just not going to live up to that impossible height.
For me,
Undertone was actually really ing creepy. It uses the type of horror that gets under your skin through suspense, sound, shots of walls and corners where you can’t really tell if you’re seeing something or just making it up, and for me that’s easily the scariest type of horror, and for me, I was actively creeped out both during and after the movie. It reminded me a lot of
Skinamarink where it’s less about showing you scary imagery and more about building up the tension without ever really giving you a release, and that’s my favorite type of horror, so I really ended up enjoying
Undertone.
The performance here from Nina Kiri is really good, and yes I say performance because you only actually SEE two people the whole movie and one is an elderly woman in hospice care on her death bed, so the only physical performance we get is from Kiri and I thought she was phenomenal. She’s the skeptic on this “scary story” podcast with her friend who lives in London so they have to record at like 3 am for her, she’s clearly incredibly stressed caring for her dying mother, and there’s also another life event occurring at the same time I won’t spoil, so she’s pretty stressed and that adds to your stress as you watch, at least it did for me. We do get some good voice acting here, particularly from her cohost played by Adam DiMarco as well as a doctor, some fans who call into the podcast, Kiri’s character’s boyfriend, and the two subjects of a mysterious set of audio recordings the podcast is sent, and it all builds up the loneliness and isolation Kiri’s character feels.
The sound design here is incredible too, everything is so loud and omnipresent that it almost becomes comforting and when she puts on her headphones to record, the effect they use for the silence is truly spine chilling, even before any of the really creepy stuff actually begins happening. It just sounds scary and that works really well.
A lot of people are having a problem with the ending and initially I did too, it felt a bit rushed and anticlimactic, but the last few days as I’ve sat with it, it’s grown on me as it fits the ambiguity that the movie has established and leaves lots of room for interpretation. It’s a lot like
Skinamarink in that way too, honestly that’s the best movie comparison I have overall. They’re wildly different stories, messages, and even delivery as we actually see characters and hear dialogue here, but the style of horror and scares are incredibly similar and I think your mileage with this will be in line with your mileage from that movie. If you HATED
Skinamarink, you’ll maybe like this one a bit more, but I still don’t think it’ll be on your wavelength. For me,
Skinamarink is one of my favorite horror movies of the 2020s, the last movie prior to this that truly got under my skin and kept me scared so this worked really well. It’s not a movie I’ll recommend to everyone, but it’s one I think I’ll end up rewatching a few times because I imagine this’ll be one of the few experiences where watching in a dark room on a laptop with headphones on will actually enhance the experience.
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