I loved the first two films from writer/director Julia Ducournau – RAW (2016) and TITANE (2021) – so of course I went to see her new one, ALPHA. I know it didn’t go over well when it played Cannes last year, and I sort of get that because I felt I didn’t connect with it as much as I did the other two, I didn’t understand it as much. But it’s a special movie. Ducournau paints sickly portraits of a world where flesh is malleable, pain is universal, behavior is extreme, and so is emotion. Any chance to spend two hours seeing through her eyes is a rare cinematic buzz, and as I go back over ALPHA to write about it I’m making new discoveries, it’s sinking in deeper. I urge all Ducournaunauts not to skip it.
I love her matter-of-fact presentation of the bizarre – a sort of magical realism but with weird shit instead of magic. In RAW she had such a persuasive depiction of savage hazing in a veterinarian school that I felt like I should look up if this was a real phenomenon. ALPHA starts with a character seeming to get off on stabbing himself with a tattoo needle, followed by our thirteen year old title protagonist (Mélissa Boros) getting the letter ‘A’ carved into her arm while drunk at a party, so at first I thought we were in for some body modification subcultures. But actually I remember my friends cutting the Dead Kennedys symbol into their arms in middle school, so this is not really science fiction. (I don’t recommend doing that. Good band, though.) (read the rest of this shit…)
PROJECT HAIL MARY is a nice crowd pleasing sci-fi movie based on a book by Andy Weir, same author as 
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.
