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‘DEATH OF A UNICORN’ a Satirical Creature Feature that Beats the Dead Horse

When uptight compliance attorney Elliot (Paul Rudd) drags his teenage daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) on an out-of-state business trip, what was meant to be a major career opportunity takes a turn for the absurd: they hit a unicorn. In a moment of panic (or probably just impatience), Elliot bludgeons the moaning mystical creature to death and stuffs its bleeding corpse into the rental’s trunk. But not before Ridley touches its horn, forming a vague, E.T.-style bond with the mythical beast. Read More

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‘MAGAZINE DREAMS’ Showcases Jonathan Majors at His Best — And Most Frightening

In Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams, Jonathan Majors plays a roided-up rage monster who hurts those unfortunate enough to cross his warpath. I’ll let you do the association to real life events on your own here. It’s a shame, truly, that Majors, who was convicted of assaulting his ex-girlfriend before being swiftly ejected from the MCU, is a person who has done objectively bad things. Because he’s also an objectively great actor. His turn in Magazine Dreams—as an emotionally-isolated, physically imposing bodybuilder with frighteningly low IQ and EQ—would be among the best performances of any year. The guy can act. But watching him embody this volatile, dangerous man, knowing what he did off-screen, makes for an alarmingly uncomfortable experience, as it is alarmingly difficult to separate the art from the artist in key moments.

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‘LAST BREATH’ an Effective Exercise in Sustained Underwater Tension

In 2019, director Alex Parkinson released Last Breath, a documentary chronicling diver Chris Lemons’ first descent 330 feet beneath the North Sea. After days of breathing a specialized gas mixture to acclimate to the brutally inhospitable conditions awaiting him, Chris is about to take on one of the world’s most dangerous jobs: repairing miles of pipeline on the ocean floor—the very infrastructure that, we’re told, keeps regular Joe Schmoes warm through the winter. He and his crew expect to be cut off from the air-breathing world for a full 28-day cycle: a few days of acclimatization, long underwater shifts divided among three teams of three, and a final three-day decompression period. But rough seas and a sudden power outage turn their routine work tour into a desperate underwater rescue when Chris’ umbilical cable is severed, leaving him trapped 100 meters below the surface—without enough oxygen to survive until help arrives. Now, in 2025, Parkinson returns to the same harrowing tale, this time adapting Last Breath as a feature film.

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‘THE MONKEY’: Oz Perkins’ B-Movie Goes Bananas

A ceramic drumming monkey (don’t call it a toy) wields the awesome power of life and death – though mostly death – in Oz Perkins’ madcap grindhouse horror movie, The Monkey. A wickedly sardonic midnighter-comedy with its tongue planted firmly in simian cheek, Perkins’ follow-up to his 2024 cult hit Longlegs sees the celebrated genre director fully embracing B-movie sensibilities—leaning into excessive gore and absurdist storytelling to deliver a shockingly barbaric yet gleefully silly fable about the dangers of wielding fate’s cruel blade. Read More

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‘CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD’ Heralds a Bold New Era of Superhero Sameness

Much has been written about the death and resurrection of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—and the wider superhero subgenre writ large. Fatigue! Fanfare! Box office records! In both the red and the black. The story has been told from every angle, re-examined with fresh eyes upon every new theatrical release, trailer drop, or scrap of casting news. And so the discourse around the superhero film has become just as stale and beaten to death as the genre itself. To its credit, Captain America: Brave New World, directed by Julius Onah and co-written by Rob Edwards, Malcolm Spellman, and Dalan Musson, at least postures at doing something differently. With a fresh(ish) face donning the iconic mantle, Marvel (kinda, maybe) actually passed the torch—only to mostly fumble the handoff, failing to make it mean much of anything. Read More

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‘WOLF MAN’ Redux Howls With Heart and Horror

The Wolf Man has a shaggy history in the annals of cinema. After premiering in George Waggner’s well-regarded 1941 feature, the character went on to appear in increasingly desperate mashups alongside Frankenstein, Dracula, Abbott and Costello, and—for some godforsaken reason—Alvin and the Chipmunks. Joe Johnson’s 2010 dreadfully dull remake with Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins was widely panned. Years later, Ryan Gosling was briefly set to play the character in the quickly-sundowned Dark Universe series. Like a full moon waning, the monster movie icon was put to rest. Following a successful stint reviving the Universal monster movies with the critically acclaimed, box-office hit The Invisible Man, writer-director Leigh Whannell (Saw, Upgrade) was tapped to try his hand at this oft-cursed property, recruiting Christopher Abbott as his leading lupine man to star opposite Ozark’s Julia Garner. Read More

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‘THE BRUTALIST’ An Intellectually Stimulating Work of Art With a Masterful Adrien Brody Turn

When Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce) meets László Tóth (Adrien Brody), he remarks—almost accusingly—that their conversation is “intellectually stimulating.” Tóth, an accomplished architect forced to flee his home country after the horrors of WWII, reflects that his love for architecture boils down to the simplicity of its form: nothing but architecture, he asserts, can be better seen than described. A cube can only be understood when it is witnessed. Van Buren’s comment seems complimentary, yet an undercurrent of foreboding and judgment tinges what could be mistaken for flattery. Perhaps it’s that this self-made American millionaire finds himself taken aback by the poetic musings of a Hungarian Brutalist architect, his sympathies and biases toward post-war Europe swirling into a hazy stew of pity and otherness. To glimpse genius in the battered face of an immigrant startles Van Buren, who is, at his core, an opportunist with a taste for fine art but a habit of sponsoring little beyond his own vanity. Read More

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Noodling Bob Dylan Biopic ‘A COMPLETE UNKNOWN’ Riffs On the Myth of the Unknowable Artist

I’ve never seen Bob Dylan live. In theory, I would love to, but I’ve been convinced that the artist whose music was such a beacon of personal resistance and revolution for me in my college years isn’t what he once was. As if by design, he deprives his audiences of the freewheeling early breakouts that largely define his career, favoring newer material—predominantly smoky R&B tracks with even smokier vocals. And yet, Bob Dylan, as presented in James Mangold’s smartly constructed and slippery biopic A Complete Unknown, has always, almost instinctually, rebelled against our expectations of him, bristling at the idea that his value as an artist is tied to his willingness to embrace any outmoded form of who he is. The Bob Dylan of today and the Bob Dylan of yesterday may be in conversation with one another, but the living continuum is not a hostage of the past. He doesn’t seek to be known, but he wants to be understood, especially for who he is in the here and now. Read More

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Endearing Then Glitchy ‘Y2K’ Runs Out of Comedic Bandwidth

Coming off his little-seen but largely effective feature debut Brigsby Bear, SNL alum Kyle Mooney’s sophomore feature attempts to mash up Superbad and This is the End in an apocalyptic teen comedy that fails to fully connect. Jaeden Martell and Julian Dennison star as Eli and Danny, two unpopular best friends on a quest to kiss girls, and feel boobs, and stuff. After a few shots to steel their courage, the dorky but sweet pair head to the kickback at Soccer Chris’ spot, where Eli’s longtime crush Laura (Rachel Zegler) is recovering from her recent breakup. Part virginity-losing quest, part end-of-the-world action-comedy, Y2K presupposes a revisionist past where all the Y2K fear-mongering was not, in fact, misplaced. The moment the clock strikes midnight in the year 2000, the electronics throughout Chris’ house, tethered together into an apocalypse-minded singularity, band together to attack and subjugate humanity. As is often the case with high-concept comedies, it’s funny until it’s not. Read More

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‘NOSFERATU’: Eggers Delivers an Instant Horror Classic That Seduces, Haunts

Evil is the plague of desire, heartache etched across time and space, in Robert Egger’s immaculately constructed gothic horror, Nosferatu. A remake that leans on this classical haunt’s impressionistic terrors as much as it engages in a century-long conversation with the story itself, mining the treasured material for new macabre corners to exploit and desecrate, Nosferatu is an artisanal implosion of Egger’s unholy but exacting storytelling sensibilities. The craft is front and center in Egger’s frigidly cold, knottily twisted reimagining of this vampiric tragedy: Jarin Blaschke’s moonlit, candle-flickering cinematography lures you into the shadows; Craig Lathrop’s meticulously haunted set designs create a tension between the living and the dead, the opulent and the otherworldly; and composer Robin Carolan’s deliciously unnerving score binds the film’s horrors into a single unholy hymn, deepening the dread that Egger’s impeccable craft brings to life. What prevails is a singular vision of demented yearning and moral corruption where you don’t dare look away from the screen for an instant—for fear of being seduced by Nosferatu’s spell—or perhaps because you already have been. Read More