After the Hunt: PREDATOR: BADLANDS

Since 1987 we’ve had six and three-fourths Predator movies about the eponymous alien big game hunter coming to Earth and hunting, and one and one-fourth Predator movies about humans going to another planet and getting hunted. The nice thing about Predator: Badlands is that, despite being the ninth movie to feature the hulking, dreadlocked, toothy aliens, it finds something new to do. This time it stars the predator. He’s a runt hoping to prove himself, so he blasts off to the most dangerous planet in the galaxy with the goal of bringing back the head of a hitherto unbeatable beast. This means that most of the movie we’re listening to a grunting alien language and watching a performance buried under makeup and CGI augmentation running through special effects. The fun thing is that it works. 

Writer-director Dan Trachtenberg is here making his third in the franchise, which makes him the first filmmaker to do so much with the material. Turns out he’s a great steward for this series. His first attempt, 2022’s straight-to-streaming Prey, was a period piece with the alien fighting a tribe of indigenous Americans. That had a great concept and modest charms. His second, another Hulu original, was this summer’s Predator: Killer of Killers, a vibrant splash-panel animated triptych that put the hunters up against first vikings, then ninjas and samurai, and then World War II fighter planes. That movie’s a ton of stylish action fun, using its animated form to draw creative skills and kills that never wear out their welcome. It’s clear that Trachtenberg is enjoying an impulse to unleash a fan’s imagination. His every effort with the Predators stems from the simple questions: who haven’t they fought before, and what would be cool to see. It’s a playground conversation—who’d win in a fight?—done on a pleasing, modest studio budget. 

Badlands ends up Trachtenberg’s best Predator movie yet because of its high-gloss, yet economical, use of convincing effects and an underdog story so bone-deep basic that it’s hard not to root for the main character, toothy uncommunicativeness and all. It helps that the performance is actually charismatic and sympathetic under all the fakery. (One gets the sense that for Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, the relatively unknown 24-year-old New Zealander actor in the role, this would have big star-making potential if anyone could recognize him.) It also helps that the warrior alien is teamed up with a chatty robotic woman (Elle Fanning), who just so happens to have been torn in half and therefore carted around by our lead for information in her head crucial to this particular planet’s dangers . This gives the movie a relatively sweet and uncomplicated dynamic, and a straight line from setups to payoffs, that gives the movie a modest matinee charge. It’s has all the lasers and creatures and ships and decapitations you’d want from a Predator movie, with the right balance of familiarity to freshness to make it appealing once more.

Rebirth: FRANKENSTEIN

It’s no surprise that Guillermo del Toro would direct an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein. He’s a writer-director obsessed with Gothic fiction and monster movies and fantastical consequences and mythic metaphors and doomed Romanticism and sympathy for the creature. That’s animated his entire filmography so far, from creeping ghosts (Crimson Peak) to Mexican vampires (Cronos) and Spanish legends (Pan’s Labyrinth) to post-World War II American fish-men (The Shape of Water) and creature commandos (Hellboy). He’s always asking: who’s the real monster here? So by the time he’s gotten around to actually doing the real deal story, it feels a little played out. He’s been here before. It doesn’t help that the story of Victor Frankenstein assembling a new creature out of cadaver parts, and then fleeing from accountability for its development or responsibility for his actions, is itself so familiar. It gives the whole production a feeling of dustily reiterating what we’ve already seen countless times over. 

What’s surprising, however, is that Shelley’s original work has lost none of its power through that cultural ubiquity. To read the 19th-century novel itself in the year 2025, even if you’ve read it before, is to encounter with a shock its morbid earnestness and its deeply embedded wrestling with philosophical implications. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be a person? How does one learn? To what does one owe the people in our lives, or the people one creates? Tough, tangled, painfully emotional questions are the stuff of Shelley’s vision, so much more than the cartoon caricature we’ve seen it become in the intervening centuries. Perhaps it is because of that softening that the hard edges of the original still retain the capacity to provoke and unsettle. Perhaps it is also what has maddeningly lead several film critics to confidently, and erroneously, state that Del Toro has been “faithful to the book” despite its clear, and frequent, divergences from it. He nonetheless feels the fate of the monster deeply, and is eager to situate it in his typically lush visual style that drips with affection for his horror inspirations. His movie is every bit as idiosyncratic and driven by passion as his other works. 

At least it’s an adaptation where everyone is on the same page. His cast leans into arch genre exaggerations, shouting exposition as they pace through enormous sets and around opulently designed grotesqueries. Oscar Isaac plays Victor with wild eyes alight with reckless fervor and, in the arctic frame story, fearful regret. Mia Goth does pale, double duty as his mother and an empathetic young woman. Christoph Waltz chomps up some scenes as a broad composite character. But the real star of the show is, as it should be, the creature. Jacob Elordi gives a physical performance that plays off his movement skills and his stretched, lanky physique for maximum melancholy. Del Toro has twisted around the story to give him more interplay with his creator in his halting, post-birth moments, which serves to minimize some of the tension later when its clear everyone involved knows what’s up. No mystery what’s lurking about here. 

It’s part of Del Toro’s literal-minded adaptation, which somehow misses the haunted poetry lurking in the text. That’s especially odd, since he’s hit that tone in prior pictures. Maybe it’s just too explicitly the thing to which his other works allude. This film is constantly larded up with swooping camera movements over expansive fakery, characters plunging off enormous heights and slipping in muck and staring slack-jawed at special effects. No wonder its best moments are the smallest and quietest: a boy looking at a coffin, a monster looking at a blind man, a scientific demonstration with a puppet prototype creature sparking to life. I wish I liked the whole movie as much as I resonated with those moments. Besides, Del Toro is at this point such a jolly appreciator of cinema and ambassador for the art that to say one doesn’t like his new movie feels akin to kicking a puppy. We’re better for having him, even if this effort has, ironically, better parts than a whole.

Mother and Child: IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU

As the end credits rolled, a young woman down the row from me turned to her date and said: I thought this was a comedy. And so it is, but If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a thoroughly walloping one of emotional intensity. It has laughs, but they’re of the choking, scoffing, incredulous kind as a woman in crisis sees life pile on yet more stress at every opportunity. It’s a harrowing picture about how sometimes it feels like life won’t stop kicking you while you’re down. So no one showing up for lightness will get that expectation satisfied. Writer-director Mary Bronstein crafts a movie with the bitter absurdities of struggle, and keeps a tight focus on her main character. Her every silent micro-expression practically shouts through widescreen closeups and framing with shallow focus that hold her captive for our attention, our empathy, and our scrutiny. She’s played by Rose Byrne in a performance of exhaustion and honesty that sometimes feels physically painful to watch. It’s that good. She’s playing a middle-aged mother in the worst week of her life so far. Her husband (Christian Slater) is away for work for the next two months. Their young daughter has a feeding tube for a mysterious illness, and as such is in and out of a treatment center every day. And then the ceiling of their apartment caves in, leaving an eerie, cavernous hole over her bed. Mother and child are forced to live at a seedy motel down the street. And she still has to manage treatments, get to work, get to therapy sessions, contact contractors, and juggle her growing alcoholism with the role of caretaker. It’s a rolling snowball of one thing after another, each mistake feeding the next until she’s drowning in anxiety, depression, and despair. 

The movie has such literally sensational commitment to its central focus on her mental state. It keeps the camera so close to her face that it often ignores other characters in the scene. Most evocatively, the daughter is a largely unseen voice, her presence just barely off screen. She’s a stress and a focus as looming danger or endangered figure. She’s omnipresent, dominating her mother’s worries while barely interrupting as a psychic presence the woman’s downward, inward spiral. Same, the husband, who is a voice over the phone. A patiently exasperated therapist (Conan O’Brien in an impressive dramatic turn) and a doctor (Bronstein herself) get some screen time, as do various irritating or menacing figures who add to her stress. You get the sense that she might not always be seeing others clearly, and wonder if her perspective is starting to warp ours. Even provisionally nice characters, like A$AP Rocky as a low-key charming neighbor at the hotel, are clearly only glimpsed through interactions with her. And then we keep returning to moody flashbacks half-seen with muffled sound, and ominous shots of machines pumping intravenous nutrition or gaping black holes on ceilings. It’s an obvious symbol of the darkness opening up inside this poor woman, whose near constant heightened state takes responses to every inconvenience, every impoliteness, every criticism straight out of control. Even the emergencies only tighten and heighten her already vulnerable state. Because the movie is so tightly filmed and precisely performed, it has so many emotional peaks and valleys while crescendoing to electric exhaustion. It never becomes a mere wallow in misery. It’s a movie that’s profoundly human, and humanely sensitive. 

Bronstein got her start in film associated with the so-called mumblecore filmmakers. Interesting to note that, twenty years on, the most prominent currently working veterans of that indie movement turned out to be formalists. Their cheap early efforts were often recognizable by their ugly consumer-grade digital aesthetic, slapdash blocking, and, yes, mumbled improvisation passing for dialogue. But now see Greta Gerwig’s Little Women or Barbie or Josephine Decker’s Shirley or The Sky is Everywhere and you see great interest in form through beautifully constructed works with intentional choices of style and mood that are some of the glossiest and handsomest—and most literate!—studio works out there these days. Amy Taubin’s infamous (to me, anyway) 2007 Film Comment takedown of the mumblecore style said it “never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding.” Probably so. But thankfully the best talents incubated there have lasted to give us such memorable and vivid cinematic expression. With this new feature, Bronstein has made a movie so detailed in style and with deep feeling and specificity to match, that the power of the experience is impossible to ignore, or to forget. 

Hive Mind: BUGONIA

A continuing delight of contemporary cinema is the Emma Stone collaboration with art house auteur Yorgos Lanthimos. Who’d have thought that her blend of screwball feistiness and laconic confidence would fit so perfectly in his dark deadpan extremity. And such variety! There was the snappy, fish-eyed period piece The Favourite, the explicit warped feminist Frankenstein riff Poor Things, and the bleakly wacky triptych Kinds of Kindness. In each, she pushes and pulls her physicality and psychological acuity with an intoxicating freedom, loose-limbed fearlessness launching through scenes both clever and exposing. They’ve re-teamed for the fourth time with Bugonia, and it’s the least of these. It’s no less well-photographed, rigorously sound designed, or precisely calibrated with discomfiting interpersonal dynamics. But the plot’s contortions, inspired by the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet, feel strangely stale and like an unusually disappointing dead end despite a live-wire contemporaneous flavor. Stone plays a calculated pharmaceutical CEO who is kidnapped by a desperately conspiratorial beekeeper (Jesse Plemons) convinced that she’s an alien in disguise. The bulk of the film concerns their mind games. He’s trying to get her to record a message for her mothership, demanding to be taken to her leader. He knows he's right because he's "done his own research." She’s trying to get in his head and talk him into letting her go. She never loses her sense of high status, even when her hair is shaved and she's shackled in a basement. It’s a tense standoff going nowhere fast. Screenwriter Will Tracy, of the similarly hollow The Menu, gets little deeper than the surface of the concept working despite all the right elements for something better buzzing around. 

It makes for a movie that’s largely a tense back and forth that’s also surprisingly static, going over the same points at progressively louder volumes. She’s so cruel and cutting, even in early scenes in which she’s a transparent, sanctimonious manipulator of a boss, and he’s so distressingly unhinged that we don’t get a good sense of where we stand. The movie is deliberately keeping us off balance, but it plays off our uncertainties with only easy points. We don’t much like the wealthy’s disregard for the common folk, but we also don’t want to see an innocent woman brutalized. We don’t much want a delusional man’s crackpot theories to be proven correct, but we also don’t want to see a grieving, mentally ill man taken advantage of, especially since he’s gotten his cousin (Aidan Delbis) wrapped up in this predicament, too. It’s a seemly intractable bit of unpleasantness surrounded by further characters who are either intensely vulnerable, like a comatose mother (Alicia Silverstone), or deeply disturbing, like a molester who’s now the town cop (Stavros Halkias). What could be bracingly misanthropic instead reads as empty provocation. It all adds up to a pretty grim straight line to a cosmic dark joke of a finale, and that’s hard to take. Where other Lanthimos movies are symphonies of bad feeling, this one’s pretty drearily one-note, despite his actors willing to go off on flights of fanatic nuance. He’s better than this. It takes a lot of talent to make a movie so well-made feel this much of a shrug in the end. 

Fail Safe: A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

In A House of Dynamite, director Kathryn Bigelow brings the procedural precision of her War on Terror films The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty to a hypothetical doomsday scenario. In tensely believable scenes of people staring at monitors and tapping on keyboards and frantically setting up phone calls, we see a scarily workaday picture of how the end might arrive. As the movie begins, a nuclear warhead of unknown origin has been launched toward America. The whole security apparatus springs into action, tracking the object, attempting to intercept it, tracing its origin, planning potential retaliation, and, finally, bracing for the worst. It’s a vision of competence in the face of the inexplicable and cataclysmic, contingencies planned for since the Cold War suddenly defrosted and put to use. Bigelow marshals a large cast of talented, dependable actors whose very presence denotes professionalism. We check in at the White House Situation Room with Rebecca Ferguson and Jason Clarke, in the oval office with Idris Elba, with high-ranking officer Tracy Letts and cabinet official Jared Harris, and at FEMA with Moses Ingram. The cast expands as the options narrow. There’s something uniquely suspenseful about watching people who we believe to be thoroughly knowledgable and totally capable growing frightened as the implications settle into their faces. 

Bigelow has such a firm grasp of tone to keep things tense and tenable that it is a shame it doesn’t add up to more. She here deploys the typical modern signifiers of Hollywood verisimilitude: handheld camera, spontaneous movement, tumbling jargon. The actors are all crisp and clear. It’s all pleasingly convincing on the surface, although the political context of its release in this turbulent 2025 has with it a kind of disbelief or alternate reality feeling. I watched these rooms of professionals calmly and reasonably and thoughtfully respond to a crisis with the awareness that rooms like these don’t look like this now. Imagine the current president, and cabinet officials, and advisors in this situation and the cold sweat induced by the premise grows even colder. That said, the movie is ultimately a disappointment, not for this disjunction alone, but for the movie’s ultimate lack of a conclusion. The movie is three first acts in search of ending. Noah Oppenheim's screenplay takes us to a cataclysmic climactic point and then doubles back to show us a different perspective and then goes back again a third time. We never get past that moment of peak suspense, and each trip through the same beats is actually diminishing returns, never meaningfully adding to the scenario since many actors and key lines repeat anyway. Then the intention to leave us in doubt certainly plays a part in drawing out a political statement about the dangers of nuclear proliferation, but it’s all The Day Of with nary a hint toward The Day After, which gives the movie a big deflating lack of impact or release. It’s a lot of expert suspense with nothing in the end to say about its ideas. 

Angel in the Right Field: GOOD FORTUNE

In Good Fortune, Keanu Reeves plays a guardian angel looking for a promotion who tries to save his first lost soul by showing a guy how the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. The joke is that he swaps a poor man’s life with a rich man’s life and the poor man decides it actually is better that way. For a cute comedy, the movie’s pretty sharp about the wages of poverty, enumerating the indignities of part-time and gig work. The result is a sitcom concoction with an unusual combination of influences. It’s one part Frank Capra fable—think It’s a Wonderful Life without the deeper emotional force—and one part Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. That 2001 book-length work of reportage subtitled On (Not) Getting By in America is a now-classic look at the American working poor. To read its accounts of unpredictable schedules, runaway housing costs, labyrinthine fines and fees, arbitrary rules, and inconsistent low pay is to be reminded of the crushing obstacles toward success for those trying to cobble together a living with multiple minimum (or near minimum) wage jobs. The problems she describes have not been ameliorated, but instead exacerbated by the growth of fleeting transactional tasks mediated by tech companies’ apps. There’s no sense of community or connection between employer and employee in such insecurity and inequity, and certainly no sense of duty or responsibility to take care, either. It’s this tension that gets a working over in the writer-director-co-star’s Aziz Ansari’s comic concept. 

It’s an amusing and earnest effort for Ansari. He plays the poor man who’s sleeping in his car and working multiple jobs when he crosses paths with a shallow tech bro played by Seth Rogen. When they are swapped by Reeves’ angel, it appears that, although money may not buy happiness, it can certainly alleviate a whole lot of unhappiness. It also turns Ansari into quite an unpleasantly selfish guy willing to trick his way into more time in this setup. It sneakily makes Rogen into the main character, too, as he’s humbled by just how difficult it is to get and keep work, let alone make ends meet. He’s paired with Reeves, who’s increasingly zen frazzled as he’s made mortal as punishment by his peeved boss (Sandra Oh), and the two guys make a fun odd couple bumming around the lower classes while Ansari just might realize how his hollow riches still won’t win him a second date with Keke Palmer’s pretty union organizer. The movie has a light touch even as it hits its socioeconomic points hard, with a pleasant, likable cast as characters and with bantering dialogues that bounce breezily through the plot’s modest complications. If you think it’ll end without everyone learning a valuable lesson and returning to a slightly better status quo, you don’t know what kind of movie you’re watching. It’s all so bright and brightly lit that it’s hard to dislike even as you sense it won’t get any deeper. 

Off the Hook: BLACK PHONE 2

The Black Phone has a perfect horror hook for today’s youth since it dares pose the question: what if the phone rang? That movie was ultimately a repetitively structured work of video game logic. An abducted boy (Mason Thames) locked in a basement takes ghostly calls from the previous victims of his kidnapper, the devil-masked Grabber (Ethan Hawke). The kid learns from their mistakes to level up his escape attempts until he can kill his foe and flee. Now here’s the sequel, Black Phone 2, and returning director Scott Derrickson and screenwriter C. Robert Cargill have some solid moves. It doesn’t quite turn the premise into a good movie, but it’s at least a more distinctive one. First, the sequel is built entirely out of the psychological and supernatural consequences of its predecessor. Turns out killing a serial killer has given the poor boy a sullen and aggressive affect. His younger sister (Madeleine McGraw) has it even worse: she’s haunted by ghosts who invade her dreams and call her toward a remote woodsy campground where The Grabber’s first victims’ spirits linger. This leads to the sequel’s other good move: taking the action out of a bland basement and into that snowy lakeside forest sleepaway camp. (Between The Shining and The Thing, you could make the argument that wintry weather is an immediate elevating element for a horror picture.) 

The siblings end up snowed in with the camp’s manager (Demián Bichir) and a few others. Once there the hauntings get stronger, with eerie violent visions of the victims and increasingly malevolent poltergeist nightmare logic from the ghost of the Grabber himself. And, yeah, there’s that phone ringing and ringing. Pick it up and you’ll hear dead people. Why they keep picking it up is beyond me, but they’re hoping for clues to stop the haunting and I suppose that’s as good a reason as any. The 80’s camp setting, the dream antagonism, and the gory slasher suspense cause the movie to play like separate good ideas for Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street reboots run full steam into each other. That gives the proceedings a sense of overfamiliar and off-brand thrills. To liven things up, Derrickson shoots dreams in grainy filmic near-abstraction and the “real” world in pale digital dreariness. The interplay between the images, not unlike the dance between frames in his best work, the snuff-film chiller Sinister, causes some decent jumps, and an invisible man finale has its bloody appeal. But there’s a dull, grinding sense of horror tropes underlying every plot point, whirring away at the expected under every scene. It’s an empty experiment in which characters are drawn up for the needs of the plotting and no further. Why is anything in particular happening other than to exercise some neat horror imagery adding up to only itself? Ah, well. Its style makes it a better brand of boring.