Sinners (2025): Absolutely glorious vampiring. Perfect, no notes.Fear Below (2025): I thought this was going to be just another “divers encounter a shark” movie (which is fine, I like that movie) but it was way better than that. It was “Australian mobsters in the 1950s force divers to recover their loot”, so it was all classic dive helmets and classic cars and classic racism. Also shark.Deep Cover (2025): Improv comics get recruited by the cops to pose as drug buyers in a sting, “things get out of hand”. It’s pretty funny.It Feeds (2025): A psychic goes into people’s dreamscapes to fight a hunger demon and rescue her daughter. The demon makeup is pretty good. This is basically a very long Buffy episode.Until Dawn (2025): Groundhog Day cabin-in-the-woods slasher. Pretty fun.Clown in a Corn Field (2025): It’s a traditional teen slasher, but everyone in the movie is aware of the tropes and can’t believe this shit is happening to them. It’s hilarious, the characters are good, and the effects are wonderfully gory.K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025): I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this was really fun. I don’t think I need to explain the plot to you, it’s right there in the title.Bottoms (2024): A pair of loser high school lesbians start a fight club to meet girls. Most of the humor is incredibly cringey, but it has its moments.Ironheart (2025): Genius teen fuckup and her supersuit and magical AI sidekick. There are witches. It’s fun.Thunderbolts (2025): As Marvel movies go, this was a lot of fun. I’d say that with the exception of Deadpool & Wolverine, this was better than the previous… nineteen? Marvel movies. I realize that is an exceptionally low bar in a collection that includes both Morbius and Kraven. But Thunderbolts made some of the franchise’s absolutely least-interesting characters ok.Ballerina (2025): This was definitely a John Wick movie. By which I mean: a gossamer-thin web of plot-shaped scaffolding from which hangs a showcase for some absolutely incredible stunt work. It does what it says on the can. I have already forgotten it.The Old Guard 2 (2025): Not as much fun as the first one, but it was ok. The mythology gets in the way of the ass-kicking, to some degree.Inheritance (2025) “My estranged dad is a spy and I need to get the MacGuffin.” It’s a solid entry in the genre. No super-spy shit, just a basic treasure hunt through fun locales. Remedial but fun tradecraft, good chases, a lot of oners.Daniela Forever (2024) Guy gets in a lucid dreaming study and processes the death of his girlfriend in the least healthy way possible. It’s a little bit Twilight Zone, a little bit Groundhog Day. Kind of slow, and a bummer, but not bad.The Life of Chuck (2024): This was great. The first act seems like a “Don’t Look Up”-style apocalypse, but then the second act flips it into something else entirely. It’s very clever.Predator, Killer of Killers (2025): Good animation. Pretty good historical predator killins’, with vikings and samurai, and the framing / epilogue tied it together in a fun way.The Occupant (2025): Mostly this is “Woman Versus Mountain” with the spooky stuff only coming in very late, but it’s interesting spooky stuff. (Not relevant but weird: I think it used some of the same sets as Ballerina.)M3GAN 2.0 (2025): Surprised to report that this was pretty funny. The “Xerox” stuff was hilarious, like finding out that your local taco truck was actually S.H.I.E.L.D. all along.Alien Earth (2025): I’m only 4 episodes in, but: The sets are very pretty. Slavish reproductions of the control panels from Alien.“Baby Zuck owns all of Asia, isn’t that funny?” – isn’t that funny.Baby Zuck in general. Or are we going with “Lex Loser”?I see we’re doing “born sexy yesterday” again, huh? Sigh.A whole-ass space ship hits a whole-ass city, and there are no air traffic controllers? No fighters followed it down? The only first responders are a single ambulance crew? WTAF man.This is not a show that should be making me say, “Hey, this scene is straight out of Cleopatra 2525”. Not once but twice.It’s set a few years before Alien, so… the timeline is stupid.I’m a Virgo (2025): An 18 year old awkward black kid has been raised in hiding at home because he’s like 20 feet tall, but makes his way out into the wilds of Oakland and tries to make friends. It’s really funny, and they do a lot with a low budget. The effects seem to make heavy use of puppets, large and small. Eventually a Homelander-esque superhero shows up, and the plot takes a militantly anticapitalist turn!Blindspotting (2018 movie) + Blindspotting (2021-2023 TV series): Oaklanders trying to stay out of jail despite the best efforts of their idiot friends. Somehow I missed these when they first came out, but they are both fantastic.Baby Assassins (2021): What if Ghost World, but these absolute shithead dirtbag slacker teen girls were also Japanese hitmen? It’s pretty funny, and has great Wickian gun fu.Red Sonja (2025): When this started my reaction was, “What is this time capsule of 90s Canadian television cheese?” But I gotta say, by the time they were fighting the Harryhausen cyclops in the slave pits, I was fully invested. Now, don’t get me wrong – this is no Scorpion King 5. But if you are looking for a low budget Bulgarian Red Sonja that takes itself absolutely seriously in all the right ways, this is what you ordered. And she wears the outfit.Nautilus (2024): Nine out of 10 episodes of this were fantastic. The interior sets on the Nautilus are great. Really, the detailing is out of control. The ensemble cast are interesting, and the villains were nice and scenery-chewing. I had questions about the tech, but this is also a show with sea monsters in it, so just let that go. I enjoyed it immensely, but I would recommend you hit stop at episode 9, just after they escape from Shieldmaiden Themyscira.
Episode 10 reads like, “We were told we’re cancelled, so here’s a clip show of every idea we had for the next 3 seasons.” I hate to harp on just one episode, but it’s so bad, and I liked the rest of the show a lot. The last episode starts off as a heist, then turns into a courtroom drama, one which makes no goddamned sense, and also has nearly no submarine. Anyway, don’t let that put you off, the rest of the show is great. It’s pretty much assured that there will never be a season 2, since the history is that Disney shitcanned this without intending to ever release it, but then someone else bought it from the trash pile.
Together (2025): A clingy relationship turns into literally clingy body horror. It takes a little while to get going, but it gets genuinely scary.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from horror movies, it is: never move from The City to a Quaint House Out In The Woods.
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