PROJECT HAIL MARY is a nice crowd pleasing sci-fi movie based on a book by Andy Weir, same author as THE MARTIAN. It’s directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, the team who directed 21 JUMP STREET, produced SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE and got fired from SOLO. It’s a huge hit, some people are talking it up like it’s Important, and it’s the closest thing Lord & Miller have done to a classy grown-up movie, so time will tell if it sends them on a catastrophic Adam McKay type trajectory. But right now we’re good. It’s a movie with lots of laughs and a lovable alien. People just get emotional about astronauts, I think.
Ryan Gosling (director of LOST RIVER) stars as Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher who accidentally winds up shouldering the responsibility of keeping the entire earth and at least one other planet from becoming uninhabitable. It’s kind of a long story doled out in episodic flashbacks, but an against-the-grain paper he wrote in a former life as a molecular biologist leads to him being one of numerous scientists recruited by a top secret international program to stop the crisis of single-celled alien organisms they call “astrophages” from blotting out the sun. (read the rest of this shit…)
PRIMATE is a 2026 horror movie that I enjoyed for very straight forward reasons: it has a simple premise, executed well, but a little smarter than I expected, and also with some flair. You almost don’t have to mention that it’s a premise with high difficulty to pull off, because the villain is an animal. They always say it’s hard to work with kids or villainous animals.
THEY WILL KILL YOU is one of those rare cases where the first time I saw the trailer was the first time I heard of it, and before it was over it had become one of my most anticipated movies. What it conveyed was that Zazie Beetz (
JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH is one of those sequel titles referring more to the series itself than the story. I think the only rebirth is that it’s new characters and storyline, you don’t need to remember any previous entries. They really exhausted all the bringing-back-characters gimmicks in the last couple so this is an all new cast with only one unobtrusive mention of one of them studying under part 1’s Alan Grant.
In 2017 there was a straight-to-Netflix movie called WAR MACHINE, a satire about the war in Afghanistan. I was interested because it was from director David Michôd (
THE HOUSEMAID is a 2025 thriller from director Paul Feig, the guy who did BRIDESMAIDS, THE HEAT and SPY, but remember he also did 
Here’s my quick Oscar preview, just because I wanted a place for everyone to share their hopes or predictions and then their thoughts after the show, if they want to.
Last time I saw THE SALUTE OF THE JUGGER it was called THE BLOOD OF HEROES. That only version available in the U.S. was about ten minutes shorter, but still kinda legendary as a slept-on gem by some of us. That version was recently put in its proper place as bonus material for the original 104 minute Australian version on a 4K/blu-ray combo from Umbrella Entertainment.
SONG SUNG BLUE (2025) is a feel good (but also sad) movie about the power of music, based on a 2008 documentary I hadn’t heard of about a Neil Diamond tribute band. There is a family member not mentioned in the movie who says it’s “all lies,” but from what I’ve read the basic outline stays reasonably close to the true events, and that leads to an unusual structure. For a while it hews pretty closely to a familiar underdog musician dramedy formula. Then life, even in its streamlined-for-narrative-purposes form, throws in some curveballs that make the story seem pretty crazy.
