#kevrock

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Sinners.

D) Ryan Coogler (2025).

In a sawmill on the outskirts of Clarksdale, Mississippi that Elijah “Smoke” Moore and his brother Elias “Stack”, (both played in a double star turn by Michael B. Jordan) prodigal sons and veterans of World War and Chicago crime who have mysteriously obtained enough of a bankroll to purchase the land (from a known Klansman) and turn it into a juke joint featuring their cousin, the teenage preacher’s son and blues genius Sammie (Miles Caton radiating both adolescent cockiness and bluesman gravitas in a strong film debut), are parlaying for entry with a group of white folk musicians led by Remmick (Jack O’Connell exuding untrustworthy menace) who they will soon know as a vampire. He promises to leave if they can give him Sammie, whose music led him to the joint and then in a combination of plaintiveness and cynical hucksterism that recalls the slaver of Randy Newman’s “Sail Away” he makes his pitch “We believe in music and equality. Can’t we just for one night be family? I am your way out. This world already left you for dead. Won’t let you build. Won’t let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever.”  It’s a satanic version of the promise America has made to black people since emancipation, a promise they have learned not to trust even as they determine to hold the country responsible for it, a promise that is at the center of Coogler’s wildly ambitious, blues-drenched horror film. Sinners has enough ideas for at least three movies. Ideas that don’t so much bump into each other but intertwine like snakes in a basket. The first hour, about Smoke and Stack preparing for the juke’s opening night (and introducing a cast, from Delroy Lindo’s alcoholic piano player, Hailee Stansfield a passing-for-white former flame of Stack, and Wummi Mosaku as Annie, Smoke’s Hoodoo practicing ex-wife, who are given a depth unusual for second bill horror characters) is saved from narrative sluggishness by the whip-smart pace Coogler establishes and by the charisma of Jordan as two men trying to live as free men – as Americans – for at least one night. It dovetails into Sammie’s portrait of an artist-as-young shaman where in a jaw-dropping sequence, he plays Blues licks described by Annie as “so true it can conjure spirits from the past and future and pierce the veil between life and death,” conjuring rock guitarists, African tribal drummers, Rappers and DJ (we don’t see them appear, they’re just suddenly THERE) out of his own mesmerizing singing and metaphorically burning down the house.

That it also summons the vampires who Coogler presents as both the embodiment of the Faustian powers that “the Devil’s music” is said to call up and the white culture both eager to take it’s power for itself and spread it through the land which gives the bloody climax a heft and weight that kicks the movie past bloodsucker cliché’s into the dark heart of a country that still deciding whether it’s cursed or not. It’s Coogler’s best film.

[kevrocksicehouse]

Frankenstein.

D: Guillermo del Toro (2025).

Guillermo del Toro would be the world’s best horror director if he was really interested in horror, instead of seeing it as a shortcut to a dark romanticism.  The film has it’s share of ultraviolence and gore – it’s first five minutes features a monster (Jacob Elordi uglified by makeup into a perverse beauty) destroying half the crew of a naval expedition ship  that has rescued Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) a badly injured man with a fantastic story to tell. As the ship briefly flees “The Creature,” Frankenstein tells how after the death of his mother despite the ministrations of his surgeon father (a renowned doctor and so mean and scornful he’s played by Charles Dance), he vowed to use the fringiest extremes of science to defeat death through the reanimation of dead tissue. After a series of abortive attempts (scenes in which del Toro achieves a David Lynchian disquietude) he  succeeds in turning a  corpse into a living being (and as a side effect gives him phenomenal strength and a healing ability that makes him, for all purposes, immortal).  But while trying to educate his creation into humanity, Frankenstein mirrors the mistakes of his own upbringing, becoming impatient, disapproving and cruel eventually turning his son/creation into a rage-filled brute intent on destroying his creator and everything he loves.

But when the creature catches up to the ship, (killing another fair chunk of the crew, he tells his own side of the tale to the Captain, the story of a son rejected by his father, rebuked by almost everyone he meets and unwillingly causing death to those who trust him.  In  “The Creature’s story,” Del Toro applies a thin veneer of whitewash to Mary Shelley’s tragedy of a tabula rasa corrupted by his creator into the dark heart of humanity by making the Creature an inherently noble innocent betrayed by a flawed and monstrous humanity, shifting the story from a dark tragedy to a (Grimm) fairy tale. Shelley pitied her monster, but like the ghosts in Crimson Peak and the Amphibian Man in The Shape of Water, Del Toro loves him.

[kevrocksicehouse]

Superman.

D: James Gunn (2025)

It’s both obvious and surprising that the first film in James Gunn's rebooting of the DC cinematic universe is a Superman movie, written and directed by himself. Gunn is the auteur of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise as well as the best Suicide Squad movie, and an absurdist pop culture provocateur who has never tainted his love of superheroes with even a hint of reverence. Superman of course is the DC flagship hero, an alien from planet Krypton who is raised in Kansas by Jonathan and Martha Kent (Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell whose Kansas accents sound suspiciously Alabama) and whose combination of  immeasurable power (super strength, speed, flight, and super-vision) and upright (read: square) values make him both a God on earth and a comic straight man worthy of Ralph Bellamy (David Corenswet perfectly melds the dual identities). You’d be forgiven for expecting a Gunn vs. Superman abrasive mishmash (and the film opening in the middle of the action made me fear the worst) but Gunn’s junky clutter of a movie isn’t a hipster sneer so much as an affectionate salute to a character who in more than eighty years has picked up a fair amount of silliness. So we have a Krypto the superdog (whose adorableness  almost covers for his untrainability), a Fortress of Solitude run by effete robots (voiced by Gunn mainstays Alan Tudyk, Michael Rooker and Pom Klementieff), A Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) who  Elon Musk’s lawyers must surely be investigating, a “Justice Gang” (Nathan Fillion, Isabel Merced, Edi Gathegi and later, Anthony Carrigan) who roll their eyes at Superman’s determination to save any man, woman and squirrel during a battle. The movie is stuffed but not overstuffed and Gunn keeps everything moving at breakneck speed. He also spends ten minutes on an interview between Supes and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan in the best live action version of the reporter) debating whether the hero is “punk rock” (“You trust everyone and think every one you’ve ever met is like…beautiful.” “Maybe that’s the real punk rock”) that you’d think would be a mawkish embarrassment. Instead it’s touching and funny. Maybe the Boy Scout and the anarchist are made for each other after all.

[kevrocksicehouse]

The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

D: Matt Shakman (2025).

What the new Fantastic Four reboot brings to the MCU is a sense of quiet and a team of adults. The film takes place in another reality where it’s the 1960s and the only superhuman heroes are scientist/explorer Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) who can control and stretch his entire body, his wife Sue (Vanessa Kirby) who doesn’t so much turn invisible as control invisibility (and project invisible force fields), her brother Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) who can produce and control fire and Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bacharach) who was transformed into a super-strong rock monster by the Reed-caused cosmic accident that gave them all their powers. But unlike the comic dysfunction of other Marvel teams like The Avengers or Guardians, the characters have lived with their powers longer and moved beyond the  comic-book angst that's too easy to substitute for character. Quinn and Moss-Bacharach mute Johnny’s immaturity and Ben’s self-pitying anger, (and add about 10 IQ points to the characters  and Reed and Sue have the chemistry and ease of a good marriage (She is two months pregnant when the movie opens).  It helps that Shakman evokes the gleaming progressiveness of Space Age architecture and the kind of innocent celebrity culture that deifies the heroes. 

That faith and their marriage will be tested. When Shalla Bal (Julia Garner) a cosmic surfboard riding scout for Galactus, (Ralph Ineson) a godlike cosmic giant who gets his energy from consuming planets, the team heads into space (refreshingly, the fact that Sue is visibly showing isn’t remarked on) finds him, are captured and then offered  a version of Sophie's choice – give up what they most love to save humanity-and if they refuse  face humanity’s judgement. That choice doesn’t just inspire the film’s most inspired action sequence as the four have to elude the Surfer through space even as Sue goes into induced labor. It also cuts to the core of the Richard’s union as his cerebral pragmatism clashes with her maternal passion. Both Pascal and Kirby keep melodrama at bay as they keep their intimacy and trust in emotionally devastating circumstances. The inevitable post-credits sequence promises a dimension-hopping tale that will bring the foursome to the “main” MCU. If the filmmakers can bring it off it’s likely to inject Marvel movies with an invaluable panacea – sanity.

[kevrocksicehouse]

Catherine O’Hara

1954-2026.

Catherine O’Hara may or may not have been the funniest female comic actress of her time -- she did share the world with Madeline Kahn, Carol Burnett, Lily Tomlin, Lucille Ball, Wanda Sykes, Amy Sedaris and Aubrey Plaza – but she was almost certainly the craziest. The touch of pure madness, that sense that any minute she could release the comic imps running through her synapses into the world was mostly present in her TV roles as sexpot Lola Heatherton (“I love you Johnny Larue! I want to bear your children! Haaaaah, Hah!”)  and Moira Rose (“Crows don’t just have eyes…We have WINGS! CAW! CAW!”) on Schitt$ Creek. In the movies she appeared for a moment of “What the hell was that” in Mike Nichols Heartburn (1986); Was  Winona Ryders mother (and a woman who could frighten ghosts) in “Beetlejuice” (Tim Burton 1988) and its 2024 sequel; Was madam “Texie Garcia” in Warren Beatty’s  Dick Tracy (2000); Was underused in her most famous role as the mother who realizes she left her 10 year old son “Home Alone” (“KEVIN!) in the 2000 blockbuster; And played the good-hearted and pixilated judge, Justice Strauss in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004).

 Her best film moments were in a trio of Christopher Guest mockumentaries  -- As a dog show contestant with a multi-checkered past (when an old flame sing-songs “I’m not wearing underwear” she says “Bulge! Get outta town!”) in Best in Show (2000), playing a legendary folk musician with a VERY eccentric singing partner in A Mighty Wind (2003); and as an actress who has half-convinced herself she has Oscar buzz for playing a southern Jewish matriarch in an indie tearjerker called “Home for Purim” (“Is that my sweet Rachel’s voice I heard? Or am I just goin’ meshuga?”) she was a master parodist and still managed pathos – and a small role in After Hours, Martin Scorsese’s 1985 urban paranoia farce.  As a woman who takes in hapless yuppie Griffin Dunne, tricks him into forgetting a crucial phone number and stares him down while babbling non-sequiturs (“….and I have my own Mr. Softee truck…”) as if to say “Don’t come down here. This place is full of people like me. And you can’t handle it.” RIP.

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A Real Pain.

D: Jesse Eisenberg (2024).

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin don’t break new ground in A Real Pain but they dig deep. As Benji (Culkin) and David (Eisenberg), two Jewish cousins as close as brothers, who take a Holocaust tour of Poland to honor their recently deceased  grandmother they play their characters (Eisenberg an awkward neurotic, Culkin a glib man-child) like putting on comfortable suits but the actors (and Eisenberg’s funny and nuanced screenplay) keep finding pockets of empathy in the characters. From the way that Benji’s social charisma, his ability to bring the tour group into his every drama, makes David (a happily married family man) feel stiff and ungainly, or how Benji’s laugh-out-loud wit and vivacity coexist with a deep-seated dissatisfaction with his life read below the surface. As we learn more about the cousins’ relationship and the pain and isolation that underscore Benji’s gregariousness (Culkin gives one of the year’s best performances), and as the group travels through the history of Poland’s darkest days the film doesn’t so much conflate the Holocaust with one man’s pain and disconnection as it show how all the empathy and compassion in the world can’t make sense of one man’s sadness. Recommended. 

[kevrocksicehouse]

Thunderbolts*.

D: Jake Schreier (2025).

Thunderbolts* opens with  Yelena Belova  (Florence Pugh in a star-making performance to rival Robert Downey) delivering an interior monologue logic decrying the lack of meaning in her life (“There’s something wrong with me. An emptiness. Just… a void”) in a Russian accent dripping with self-disgust, despair, ennui and  just a touch of mordant humor, while steeling herself to jump off the roof of a skyscraper. That when she goes over, a parachute opens and the Black Widow-trained assassin-for-hire finishes her thoughts while wiping out a laboratory filled with armed guards, she sets the tone of the best Marvel movie in years an action comedy about depression and shame that wears it’s cynical fatalism on its sleeve while withholding the promise of easy redemption.

Yelena doing the dirty work of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss whose amoral self-regarding charm makes her a perfect Marvel villain) a corrupt CIA executive facing down a congressional hearing concerning an abortive and illegal attempt to create a superhuman operative for a mysterious “Sentry” project. In an effort to get rid of loose ends, she sends Yelena and several other henchmen – Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) an assassin with photographic reflexes; Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen) who can turn intangible; John Walker (Wyatt Russell, channelling his father Kurt) a failed and disgraced former “Captain America”; and “Bob” (Lewis Pullman, channelling his father Bill even harder) – to a remote facility/deathtrap in hopes that they’ll kill each other after which the building will incinerate them. Instead, they escape, join up with Alexie Shostakov, (David Harbour boisterously stealing scenes) a former Soviet “super-soldier” and band together first for survival, then (after being contacted/arrested by Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes) to take down de Fontaine. When things go spectacularly wrong culminating in a monstrous being threatening to cast New York into a soul-killing “Void” the team has to step up as heroes, not with the obligatory and by now banal final slugfest (that happens earlier and is mercifully short) but by putting their meager supply of optimism and hope against the bleakness of their past. Since this is a Marvel movie that doesn’t so much end as proceed to the next chapter, they achieve a tenuous heroism that they may or not be able to sustain (and as a post credit scene suggests, may soon encounter a much less nihilistic kind). Superheroes who distrust the possibility of idealism and virtue? Sounds just about right for our time.

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A House of Dynamite.

D: Kathryn Bigelow (2025).

In A House of Dynamite Kathryn Bigelow imagines a nuclear crisis three times, each with an increasingly certain result – the detonation of an ICBM in an American city. The missile is detected with only twenty minutes until impact and Bigelow uses her considerable ability at creating suspense to squeeze the audience, as officials at all levels of response from a Major at Fort Greely, Alaska (Anthony Ramos) whose team launches two interceptor missiles at the ICBM, to NSA advisor (Tracy Letts), to the US President (Idris Elba) who needs to choose a response between apocalypse and surrender, try to get a handle on the crisis, and we see actors as good as Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, Jason Clarke, and Greta Lee conveying the slowly rising panic of realizing the future of mankind depends on how they handle the next third of an hour – and as players in the drama, they’re not killing it. Bigelow means both to keep us in a horrifyingly uncertainty and leave us there with a resolution that eschews both last-minute deliverance and a spectacular Armageddon, if only to make us realize that’s where we are now and if we can reassure ourselves that we’re looking at a worst-case scenario, we are also seeing a best-case imagining of a team of competent and responsible people making tough decisions with the best information possible. The film was completed before January.