First and maybe most importantly for its implications across the industry, it was recently announced that Martin Scorsese has begun backing and promoting an A.I. storyboarding firm called Black Forest Labs. I’ve held off on my complete thoughts on this for a while as I’ve sorted through both my love for Scorsese and his work and also the disdain and contempt I have for generative AI software. Personally, I have been and will be against the use of AI to eliminate artists from the creative process. Now, are there use cases for AI? Yes, as with any thing. I think it can help eliminate mundane work like data crunching and advance our ability to do great creative work. Recently, the YouTube group Corridor Crew released a great new program they hope will help eliminate the tediousness of trying to key out green screens called Corridor Key. This program uses AI machine learning to run hundreds of instances and models in order to key out green screen backgrounds of shots as seamlessly as possible and avoiding tedious frame-by-frame touch ups on edges that is inevitable for VFX artists. This sort of AI usage seems like a great idea to me, allowing VFX artists to completely eliminate or greatly reduce the time they spend on the tedious parts of the job so they can do the creative part.

With Black Forest Labs and Martin Scorsese’s partnership, they’re attempting to do something much more sinister. The goal of the company is to completely automate and generate AI-based storyboards based on prompt inputs using zero actual artists in the process. For those who do this work, this sort of program eliminates jobs. For someone like Scorsese, who has spent his 5-decade career hand drawing his storyboards for his films, it represents an acceptance of an easy way out without having to pay someone else.

It’s a shame because I love Scorsese and his work. What he has done for American and World cinema is second to none. He’s made some of the greatest films of all time and also spent so much time preserving underseen cinema from around the world. This sort of decision is so strange for someone so entrenched in the filmmaking process. But as I think about it more, I see it less as a sinister acceptance, but rather as an aging creative looking for ways to tell more stories before he dies. If something like what Black Forest Labs presents can help with that, then so be it. This in no way absolves him of the implications of this sort of partnership, but it helps me understand it. I still find it’s usage abhorrent, but for someone pushing 85 years old, it may represent something else, consequences be damned.

This week, we see the release of the brand-new Toy Story 5 in theaters. This is a bit of a weird one for me. I LOVE the Toy Story franchise. They’ve defined my childhood for many years. I grew up with the original two films and Toy Story 3 came out when I was 12. So, suffice to say I love this franchise. Yet, I’ve weirdly had very little hype for this new entry. I didn’t even realize it was coming out this month until last week. Personally, that feels like the sentiment I’ve been seeing leading up to this. No one I know has been talking about it, which is strange for such a tentpole franchise for Disney.

Nonetheless, my fiancé and I braved a tornado warning in my area to go see the film on release day.

I thought it was fine enough, but I wasn’t blown away like some of the other films. I actually had a good time! The movie looks great, and there were some real tearjerker moments that got me pretty good. The overarching concept felt like the proper direction to take the franchise.

So, I thought, in honor of the release of this film, I would rank all the Toy Story movies from worst to best. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

5. Toy Story 5

The newest entry in the franchise is also the weakest in my opinion. There’s a lot to love about this entry. Thematically it takes a logical leap to the 21st century asking what happens when tech and devices invade kids’ homes. I know personally I abandoned my toys as a kid as soon as I got a phone and a computer, so it felt relevant. I also liked how the film began to explore the interpersonal relationships of the human characters and how people connect to one another in an increasingly digital age. However, this one does take a while to get going, and there are some real jumps in logicality between the toys interacting with the real world that are hand waved away much more often than in previous films. It was smart to make the story focus on Jessie this time. However, I wish a lot of the other toys didn’t get sidelined for so much of this film. Did I have a good time? Yes of course. Is it my least favorite of the franchise? Also yes.

4. Toy Story 4

This is a hard spot for me because I am a Toy Story 4 truther. I adore this movie and believe it’s one of the more interesting films in the franchise. Fully moving beyond Andy, the toys go on a road trip with new owner Bonnie and her newly created toy Forky. Forky is a genius invention for this film that breathes some new life into it. Also, having Woody go through the emotional wringer to finally understand he doesn’t need an owner to be happy was a fitting conclusion to his story. This film looks beautiful, is well acted and moves along at a great pace. As with many of these films, it has a great villain in Gabby Gabby, and exploring the idea of lost toys or toys without owners was an interesting new direction. I had a lot of fun with this one and don’t get the hate.

3. Toy Story

This might be a controversial spot for this film, but you could probably interchange the next 3 on any given day. The original Toy Story is a phenomenal film. What a great concept to explore the secret lives of toys when humans aren’t around. This was innovative and creative and groundbreaking as the first fully CGI rendered animated movie. Woody and Buzz Lightyear are all time character creations, and the story is great. Yes, the animation looks super dated now in 2025, but I can’t really fault the film for that. What surprised me most on rewatches recently is actually how short this movie is. Very little actually happens and then it’s over. But it was still so cool to see the movie imagine what toys actually get up to. There are great set pieces, great locations (both Sid’s house and Pizza Planet are phenomenal) and seeing Buzz and Woody come together by the end are great. It’s the movie that started it all and it could easily be number 1 on any given day.

2. Toy Story 3

This is the film that I remember being the most excited for as a child. As I said earlier, I grew up on the first two Toy Story films and watched them on repeat, and I was 12 when this one came out. It was a huge step up in animation quality from the originals, and the concept was unique and smart. What happens when the owner grows up and doesn’t want to play anymore is such a great direction for the franchise. I loved the daycare setting and the heist aspects of this film are so cool. Some of my favorite moments of this franchise are when they’re breaking out of the daycare jail. Lotso Huggins is a great villain as is customary for the franchise, and the ending both at the incinerator and seeing Andy give his toys to Bonnie and play one last time had me in tears as a child. This is always a fun revisit, and maybe the most entertaining film of the entire franchise.

1. Toy Story 2

Was there ever any doubt? This is one of the greatest sequels ever made. The introduction of Jessie, Bullseye and Prospector Pete are welcome additions that all hit perfectly. Seeing Woody explore his origins is really cool while also engaging in what the toy collecting market means for toys. The whole gang gets to be involved in this one and Prospector Pete is the best villain in the franchise by far. There are some classic moments here, specifically Woody getting fixed, invading the Toy Barn and the rescue at the airport. This is the film that proved that this franchise was an absolute powerhouse for Pixar. Every idea feels fresh and unique, fleshing out the world that was established in the first film even deeper for all the main characters and giving audiences fun adventures that have a much deeper meaning under the surface. To this day, when Jessie starts thinking about her previous owner Emily and “When Somebody Loves Me” starts playing I can’t help but start bawling.

Physical Media Highlight

Last week, while I was out shopping for my beloved physical media, I came across this numbered 60th anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition of the Gene Kelly classic Singin’ in the Rain. Now, I have never seen this movie. It’s one that’s high on my list to see. I didn’t own the movie already, so I picked it up for a great price ($12!!). This edition comes with the Blu-Ray and DVD of the film plus special features, a 48-page booklet as is customary, reproductions of the theatrical door panel posters, as well as a themed umbrella. Now the reason I wanted to highlight this one specifically is to discuss briefly the idea of big box sets vs just buying the film. Personally, I am a fan of both. If you can get a great copy of a film on Blu-Ray or 4K, without any real bells and whistles, that’s worth it to me. But personally, I love a big box set with special features and collectibles. I find those editions to be really fun and to stand out on my shelf. Will I ever use some of these things? That remains to be seen. But I love collecting and owning something unique that represents one of my favorite films or one of the more iconic films in history is worth it to me. Plus, I like the effort that goes in to creating these editions. I won’t typically buy them at full price, but when I see them come up secondhand, it’s hard to pass up.

The Film Box Podcast

This week on The Film Box, we sat down with our friend Brock aka Movie Talk With Brock on TikTok to review Disclosure Day at great lengths. I wrote about the film last week in my column and Connor just released his review of it the other day, but we dive even deeper into this film that has simultaneously overperformed at the box office and become a polarizing film for the moviegoing audience. It was a great conversation full of diverse opinions on the film, so check it out!

That’s it for this week’s column! Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next week!

One of the titans of the industry makes his way back to the big screen as Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, hits theaters this weekend. Starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, and Colin Firth, the film follows a group of people who possess the knowledge of the existence of aliens on Earth and make it their mission to share this truth with the rest of the world. Spielberg is no stranger to the sci-fi genre and aliens as a subject, so like many, seeing a summer release had me excited for something special. What Disclosure Day ended up being for me was a good watch but ultimately disappointing.

Spielberg continues to prove why even at 79, he’s not slowing down. He remains one of the best at visual storytelling, meticulously blocking each frame in a way that a chef crafts each plate at a Michelin-star restaurant. He’s always been known for creative uses of reflections, lighting, and other camera tricks, and here he shows he still has his fastball. A scene I really want to highlight is when Josh O'Connor's Daniel is trying to get back to a farmhouse, but the government agency Wardex looking for him has already set a perimeter around the house. Spielberg shoots this scene in a creatively fun one take as he sneaks into one of their cars and then ends up driving into the house to get to his girlfriend, Jane, played by Hewson.

I don’t think I’ve ever fully appreciated how well Spielberg shoots car scenes, whether it’s just casual drives or full-on car chases. He and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński show off some incredibly inventive ways to shoot these scenes. The movie just feels like classic Spielberg, and while my issues lie mainly with the story and script, I can’t complain about the feeling I get from seeing his distinctive lighting and blocking style.

The heart of this story lies within Spielberg’s belief and wonder. In movies like E.T. The Extra Terrestrial we see that wonder for things we don’t know. But here, the wonder is in people. The movie really isn’t about aliens; it’s about the way people can come together, empathize with each other, and empathize with something they don’t quite understand. He is incredibly hopeful; he always has been, and that still comes through the screen. I also see truth as fundamental to the story. The whole plot hinges on the struggle between two factions fighting over the beliefs that people deserve the truth and the responsibility to withhold certain truths to protect others. This is a fascinating moral dilemma that really muddies the waters of what is right and wrong. You might think the obvious answer is that people deserve the truth, but when you factor in the effects the truth can have on people and on society, maybe some truths are best left a secret. I do wish the movie would’ve fleshed this out more, though, as Spielberg makes a definitive claim on which side he believes is right without deeper exploration. I felt like we could have seen more pushback from both sides to really emphasize why each is vindicated in their beliefs, but outside of a conversation between Domingo and Firth, the movie is less interested in that and more interested in establishing chase set pieces.

I found the ending of Disclosure Day to be mostly electric, as it is the culmination of every chase, every interrogation, and every getaway. The unsung hero of all this is Courtney Grace, who, as a former news anchor, carries the film’s conclusion with the raw human emotion the moment needed. People have spoken about being carried away by the emotions of the scenes, and while I did not have those experiences, I can certainly see why.

Speaking of performances, this is a Mount Rushmore-esque performance from Emily Blunt as Margaret, a weather reporter who discovers that she is more involved with the secret aliens than she ever could’ve guessed. She delivers a terrific performance that delivers the heart and warmth you expect with a movie like this but also the raw emotion of someone who has lived a life full of heartbreak and trauma. O’Connor, Domingo, Firth, and Hewson are all very good around her, but I did particularly enjoy Firth as Scanlon, the CEO of Wardex. He has a demeanor around him that balances a menacing side and a softness once some layers get peeled back.

Why I found Disclosure Day to ultimately be disappointing is the story works, in theory, but the script does it no favors and, at times, actively feels like it is a detriment to the movie at large.

It feels like when Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp were working on creating the basis of the story, Spielberg rattled off all these grandiose ideas he had, and Koepp tried to incorporate them all in, even if they didn’t work. This leads to an uneven story, poor pacing for two thirds of the film, and so many interesting story lines that are introduced and end up going nowhere. Hugo working for this highly classified government agency and recruiting other employees to turn against the state to steal decades’ worth of proof of aliens on Earth? Throwaway line. Jane having a crisis of faith over people and whether or not people can still believe in God if they’re introduced to a new being? Resolved in a single phone call. The whole film being set against the eve of World War 3? Just throw in a few shots on a TV and a scene of a gas station in turmoil, and it’s fine. Like the old screenwriting rule goes, the most interesting idea in your pitch should be the basis of your story, not throwaways.

This is not even to mention the convenient alien device macguffin that allows people to hijack people’s minds only when they need to (or even when it’s relevant to the plot) or turn an entire newsroom’s power back on after all their power is cut or the ease with which Daniel, Jane, and Margaret have escaped Wardex captivity multiple times because it’s not time for the big final conflict. I know in a movie about the existence of aliens being disclosed, you need to suspend some disbelief, but there has to be some standards in place.

This is less of what the movie did wrong and more of what is wrong with me, but I just don’t think my cynical self can buy into what Spielberg is selling here. The movie really works if you believe that people can have a unifying moment and empathize with things they don’t understand. This isn’t our world he’s portraying. It’s the world he’s hoping we could one day be, but I just don’t think it ever felt like he connected with me in particular on that sentiment. There was never a good enough grasp on what life is currently like to then drop this sort of come-together moment. I suppose that’s what World War 3 was supposed to be used for, but again, completely undeveloped. In real life, there is an everyday struggle with the massive amounts of information we have to process to determine what is real and what is fake. There is an incredible amount of burnout that also comes from all the information we’re processing, whether it’s good or bad news. What this movie felt like to me is the equivalent of when someone of an older generation tells you how easy it was to buy a house in their generation. Spielberg is projecting a lot of his childhood wonder and imagination onto his audience again, and while I can appreciate the nostalgia of that in a movie from my childhood like E.T., as a broken-down adult, I just can’t relate.

I almost feel like the sentiment would’ve worked better if the movie had been released back in the 2000s. In an immediate post 9/11 world, that connectiveness was much more present than in this era of American history. Not to mention, I believe certain aspects of the story (importance of local news, trust in government officials, and the world in a state of war) would’ve felt more pressing to the story, and the lack of technological advancements in Spielberg’s storytelling wouldn’t matter as much. It is wild to say it, but I have a much harder time buying into the premise that people can view a story on the news and not question its validity instead of aliens existing on Earth for almost eighty years.

Concluding Thoughts

Disclosure Day is a good film that ultimately is a victim of mismarketing and a poor screenplay. I enjoyed the visuals Spielberg is known for, as well as the performances, led by a great Emily Blunt. I do believe that this is a movie that maybe in a few years or after a few rewatches will age better than it did on the first watch. It’s not one of my favorites from one of the best directors still working, but Disclosure Day is one that will have a devoted audience that will see the beauty in what he created.

That said, June has got me thinking quite a bit about Spielberg and his legacy in film. I’ve been watching his filmography non-stop in preparation for a podcast episode at the end of the month on his movies, and the rest of June we’ve been diving deep into his alien films for the podcast. Needless to say, it’s been quite top of mind for me lately.

What fascinates me about Spielberg and how he creates alien movies is that, while the central plot may feature extra-terrestrial beings, the films themselves are rarely ever truly about visitors from another world. Instead, they quite often, in the way many of his films do, deal with the relationships between people in the face of discovery. This throughline carries through most of his films and if you look back at each of these movies I’m going to discuss today (minus one particular choice) through that lens, you’ll see that Spielberg often asks what discovering aliens means for humans.

In addition, some of his most famous work also frames the aliens around a family relationship. It’s no secret that Spielberg’s parents getting divorced when he was a child has become a major driving thematic element of almost every film. So it comes as no surprise that this dynamic comes into play in these movies.

But the central element of his alien films is that they’re all surprisingly human. No matter what the “alien” of the story actually is, Spielberg is more interested in how we as a society and as people contend with it. Disclosure Day is no different. I spoke briefly on the film in my review on TikTok, but we are also doing a full-length episode of The Film Box Podcast covering it that releases next Tuesday, so buckle in for my full thoughts there.

Instead, let’s dive into the rankings, from worst to best of all Steven Spielberg’s alien movies.

5. Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I bet you forgot about this one huh. Yes, the fourth Indiana Jones adventure and the last one to be directed by Spielberg is in fact an exploration of aliens. Unfortunately, this is also easily the worst film on the list. Instead of Spielberg’s penchant for interpersonal relationships in the face of discovery, this is framed as a typical adventure romp in the clothes of Indiana Jones. On the surface, it makes for a fun concept. In practice, it’s truly one of Spielberg’s worst films, not just in this small subgenre, but in his whole filmography. Yes, Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones is always enjoyable and Shia Lebouf is (regrettably) really good as Indy’s kid. But bringing back Karen Allen just to give her nothing to do was a mistake, the plot is nonsensical and goes so over the top that it feels outlandish even for an Indiana Jones flick, and the effects and set pieces just aren’t all that fun. There are some redeemable moments here and there, but they’re surrounded by absurdity that’s just not fun to watch. And don’t even get me started on whatever Cate Blanchett is doing here. She’s actively bad in this film, and I think she’s one of the best actresses we have working today. I hadn’t seen this in probably 15 years before I popped it on today, and I don’t think I’ll ever revisit it.

4. War of the Worlds

In a significant step up in this ranking comes maybe the most cynical Spielberg gets on this list. His rendition of the H.G. Wells novel from 1898 is far from a perfect film but does quite a bit right in its telling of the famed sci-fi story. Starring a terrific Tom Cruise and electric performance by a young Dakota Fanning, Spielberg takes the classic work and twists it to fit his personal theme of family dynamics. Where the original story’s protagonists are two brothers, Spielberg’s follows Tom Cruise as he tries to reunite his estranged children with their mother in the face of an alien invasion of Earth. There’s a lot to love about War of the Worlds, especially the performances and cinematography from his longtime collaborator Janusz Kamiński. I also think that making the focus about people and how they react in the face of ultimate extra-terrestrial danger is smart. There’s surprisingly little actual fighting of the aliens, save for a couple awesome set pieces. The real action comes from how Cruise and family have to navigate panicked masses and complete strangers as they all try and survive the invasion. If not for the horrendous ending to this film, it would probably end up much higher on the list.

3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

It’s now been almost 50 years since Steven Spielberg’s first alien film, and it still holds up to this day as one of his best. Thematically one of the first films of his to really dive into his family dynamics (The Sugarland Express did it first, but this one did it best to that point), you can tell just how personal this story is for Spielberg. It’s one of only a handful of films he has a screenwriting credit on for good reason. The film follows Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary as he has a close encounter with aliens and inextricably becomes obsessed with finding the aliens to the detriment of his family. You can feel Spielberg almost yelling at his father for what he believed at the time as him abandoning his family. Like almost every film on this list, the true throughline of this film is how an experience with aliens impacts the social dynamics of the people involved. In Close Encounters, the aliens represent the thing that drew Roy away from his family into the unknown, but we really don’t know anything at all about them. They’re as mysterious to us as they are to Roy, but Roy just can’t control his need to understand what’s out there. At times, the film is nasty and mean, especially seeing Roy break down in the shower while his son shouts “Crybaby!” at him (something Spielberg took from his own childhood) or Roy’s wife Ronnie - played by Teri Garr - screaming at him to figure things out for the sake of his family. It’s heartbreaking and yet, when the alien mothership touches down, you feel for Roy and understand all at once why he ventures into the unknown. We covered this film in depth on The Film Box podcast, so give it a listen there! If not for another film on this list coming just 5 years later, this could have been his best alien movie.

2. Disclosure Day

Here we come to Spielberg’s newest film, Disclosure Day. I’m quite surprised to see the divisive nature of the reactions to this film. Some love it, some hate it. Personally, I thought it was incredibly profound, but also extremely enjoyable as Spielberg mixes genres and themes like the master of his craft he is. Disclosure Day is part political conspiracy thriller, part action-adventure romp, part character study all framed against the idea that if humanity discovered aliens, would we need to know and how would the world react to that news. I think many people went in expecting an alien invasion film a la War of the Worlds, when in reality this is not that at all. Once again, it’s Spielberg grappling with very human themes and dynamics with the backdrop being aliens. Personally, I loved Disclosure Day and feel it’s one of his best films, not just in the alien subgenre, but in his whole filmography. I was locked in the entire time, and the last 20 minutes were incredibly visceral and felt all too real in a way that really made me uncomfortable. Emily Blunt gives a tremendous performance in one of the lead roles that should earn her an Oscar nomination, and the entire cast impressed me quite a bit. Is the film perfect? No, there are actually quite a few things that I wish they had explored more, but as a whole I found the film really fun and enjoyable.

1. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial

Was there ever any doubt? Not only is E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial Spielberg’s best alien movie, but it’s also maybe top 3 greatest films he’s ever made and, in my opinion, the most important film of the 1980’s as a whole. This is Spielberg at his very best, asking the audience to consider what a friendly alien would mean to us if we made contact and framing it through the eyes of a child. Thematically, this is Spielberg framing his parents’ divorce from the opposite side as he did Close Encounters. Here, Dee Wallace stands in as Spielberg’s mother, a single mom whose ex-husband has run off with a new woman and left her dealing with the three children at home. It’s incredibly personal, but you feel Spielberg speaking to the audience through Henry Thomas’ Elliot as he discovers and makes friends with E.T., who in turn is curious about humans and Earth. This dynamic makes for an absolutely timeless film that’s great for anyone of any age. Not to mention that it’s a great portrait of suburban life and a rollicking adventure film on top of it. There’s a reason why this was the number one film at the box office in 1982 and made over $350 million at the box office on its initial release. We just covered this film in depth on The Film Box Podcast, so give it a listen there!

Physical Media Highlight

For this week’s physical media highlight, I wanted to show off the editions I own of the films I highlighted in this column. Obviously, Disclosure Day has just come out in theaters, and I don’t own Kingdom of The Crystal Skull and probably never will, but the other films I do own in some cool copies that I thrifted. War of the Worlds is just in a normal but hard for me to find Blu-ray. Close Encounters has a cool 30th anniversary Blu-ray box set that comes with all three cuts of the film, a cool booklet and a reversible poster of the original movie poster on one side and a full cut comparison of the three cuts on the other. For E.T., I started with the original DVD collector’s edition set, which was a cool foldout edition where the discs are designed as the moon that Elliot and ET fly over in the film. Recently, I acquired this 4k 35th anniversary box set with lenticular slip that comes with the film on 4k, a booklet with behind-the-scenes photos and essays and a CD with the soundtrack. It’s a nice set and was the way I watched the film last week with my family. The film has never looked better.

The Film Box Podcast

Speaking of E.T., this week on the film box podcast, we continued our dive into Spielberg’s alien movies by revisiting E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. This was a really fun conversation and one of our longest episodes in a long time. There’s a lot to love about E.T. and a lot to nitpick and we enjoyed ourselves quite a bit revisiting the film. Check out our conversation here!

And that’ll do it for this week’s Reel Reflections! Thanks so much for reading, and we’ll see you next week to talk about the movies!

We’ve already opined about both filmmakers’ backgrounds and what it could mean for filmmakers coming from YouTube and other non-conventional backgrounds. But another new signal could be raised off the backs of the success of these films. Both filmmakers aren’t even close to touching 30. Barker is 26 years old, and Parsons is an astounding 20 years old. This is an extraordinary feat to say the least. In my opinion, the movie-making culture is at its best when new, young voices have their turn to enter the canon and tell their stories. Young filmmakers have been at the forefront of major cultural shifts at the movies in the 70s and 90s.

So, in the spirit of pontificating far too much on this phenomenon we find ourselves in, I wanted to take some time to highlight some other filmmakers under 35 years old that are making their breakouts that you need to be watching.

Before I do, I do want to give a special shoutout to a couple filmmakers on my radar who just missed the cut. Firstly, Jane Schoenbrun, whose breakout film I Saw The TV Glow from 2024 put them on the map, and they’ve just premiered their 3rd feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, at Cannes this year to widespread acclaim. They’ve been an icon of transgenderism and Queer representation in film that I don’t think should go unnoticed, but at 39 years old, they just missed the arbitrary cutoff I set for this list. Alex Ullom also deserves recognition as an incredibly promising young filmmaker. His film, It Ends, premiered at South by Southwest last year and was met with wide acclaim. The film, which was made on a budget of just $50,000 went unacquired out of the festival but recently dropped on the Letterboxd video store, giving it a new spotlight where it was acquired by Neon for theatrical distribution. Finally, I want to shoutout Charlotte Wells, who made her directorial debut with 2022’s Aftersun, one of the most impactful dramas of the last five years that also launched Paul Mescal into the stratosphere (and earned him an Oscar nomination). Like Schoenbrun, Wells probably would have made this list, but she just missed the age cutoff at 38.

Without further ado, let’s dive in.

Eva Victor

Victor, who started as an actor on Showtime’s series Billions, had their breakout in 2025 with Sorry, Baby, one of the funniest and most poignant films on grief and trauma of the year. Victor sublet their cousin's home in rural Maine, secluding themselves for three weeks in the middle of winter with just their cat in order to write Sorry, Baby. I knew immediately they were a star in the making. I was lucky enough to see the film over a month early and very briefly got to meet Victor prior to the screening and listened to them in a q&a after the screening. Sorry, Baby was funny and incredibly sincere, with Victor writing, directing, and starring. I felt they were robbed of an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. Victor has a part in Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma as well as a lead role in Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!. I cannot wait to see what they do behind the camera next.

Cooper Raiff

At just 29 years old, Raiff has been making feature films for years now, starting with his debut Shithouse from 2020, when he was just 23 years old. He’s most known for his breakout film Cha Cha Real Smooth, a 2022 romantic dramedy starring himself opposite Dakota Johnson. The film debuted at Sundance and received acclaim as a departure from traditional rom-com norms. Since that time, Raiff has been working to get his next film off the ground as well as diving into television. Initially, he was slated to direct The Trashers, which would have starred David Harbour and Cooper Hoffman; however, the film ran into funding troubles and was sidelined. He instead created, wrote, directed, and starred in the tv series Harper & Hal, also starring Mark Ruffalo and Lili Reinhardt, to even further acclaim. In 2026, he’s set to appear in Jay Duplass’ family comedy-drama film See You When I See You, premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, and he has been cast opposite Annie Murphy in the rom-com All That She Wants.

Lance Oppenheim

At just 30 years old, Oppenheim has already solidified himself as one of the premier documentarians of the modern era, garnering acclaim for his films Some Kind of Heaven (2020) and Spermworld (2024) and creating the HBO docu-series Ren Faire (2024). He first broke onto the scene in college at Harvard, where he made a series of short documentaries that caught the attention of the New York Times, who acquired the films and released them as part of their The New York Times Op-Docs series. Since then, he’s officially dove into narrative feature filmmaking, and his debut Primetime is set to release later in 2026. The film, which stars Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hanson, just got its first trailer this week and looks really good. Primetime is being released by A24, whose gambles on younger filmmakers continue to pay off.

Michael Sarnoski

It’s hard to believe how quickly Sarnoski’s career has grown and also how little spotlight he actually shares. At just 26, he made his directorial debut in 2021 with Pig, an incredibly underrated film starring Nicolas Cage about a truffle hunter searching for his prized foraging pig after it is stolen. The film earned Cage a Critics Choice Awards nomination for Best Actor and set Sarnoski on a path that led him to direct a major franchise in 2024’s A Quiet Place: Day One, which he co-wrote with John Krasinski. Krasinski himself approached Sarnoski to direct after Jeff Nichols had dropped out of the project. That film made over $260 million at the box office and was well received among critics and audiences. Now, at 31, Sarnoski has a new thriller, The Death of Robin Hood, coming later this month on June 12th starring Hugh Jackman, Jodie Comer, and Bill Skarsgard. The film is once again distributed by A24. Sarnoski seems to be establishing himself as a mainstream movie director and has signed on now to helm the film adaptation of the popular video game Death Stranding.

Emma Seligman

With both 2020’s Shiva Baby and 2023’s Bottoms, Seligman has certified herself as one of the most promising young comedy directors we have. Originally a short film she created, Shiva Baby starred Rachel Sennott and became a COVID-era sensation for Seligman, who was just 25 when it was released. The film explored themes of bisexuality and family conflict with a comedic tone brought by Sennott’s great comedic chops. Bottoms, also starring Sennott, was an under-the-radar hit about a group of high school senior girls who form a secret fight club for women at a local high school in order to try and hook up with cheerleaders. That film became almost an instant cult classic. At 31, Seligman is continuing to explore queer and Jewish stories in her films, and her work has been nominated for numerous awards. While she doesn’t have anything official in the works, she’s expressed interest in directing a horror or spooky movie.

Physical Media Highlight

This past weekend I spent some time doing one of my favorite hobbies, going out to thrift stores/retailers looking for new physical media. On this occasion I found some cool items, but none cooler than this One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest box set from Warner Bros. It’s an excellent box set for a film that, once again, is a major blind spot in my filmography. Prior to this set I only owned it on an old DVD snapcase, but now I am happy to own a blu-ray special edition set as well. In addition to the film, this set comes with some character and poster art cards and a booklet along with a really cool themed deck of cards! I collect decks of cards, so this was particularly a welcome surprise.

The Film Box Podcast

This week on the podcast, we began our journey into Steven Spielberg’s Alien films in honor of Disclosure Day’s release later this month. For week 1, we went all the way back to the beginning by revisiting Close Encounters of the Third Kind from 1977. This is one of our longest episodes in a while and was a ton of fun to talk about Spielberg and this film. Give it a listen!

That’s going to do it for this week! As always, thanks for reading and go watch something great! See you next week.

Kane Parsons’ Backrooms follows furniture store owner Clark discovering a never-ending maze of liminal spaces in the basement of his store. He becomes entranced in the maze, and his therapist, Mary, is left to try to rescue him from the horrors that rest within. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark and Renate Reinsve as Mary, Parsons is able to turn his youtube creepypasta sensation into a big-screen hit.

Like we saw earlier this month with Curry Barker and Obsession, Kane Parsons is an extremely young, talented creative who got started on Youtube, making an anthological series for the Backrooms. These videos sparked so much dialogue for the creepypasta, that when the material was ready for a big screen adaption, Parsons was all for the opportunity. A24 began the development with co-production from James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins all for around 10 million. Ejiofor and Cristin Milioti were originally tabbed to star, but when Milioti had to back out, Reinsve stepped in.

I present this information because I want to emphasize how ridiculous and how incredible this is: A 20 year old who started his career on Youtube landed a multi-million dollar A24 deal with horror icons James Wan and Osgood Perkins on board for his first movie. He also got Academy Award winner Chiwetel Ejiofor and Academy Award Nominee and Queen of Cannes Renate Reinsve to lead in it. It’s an absolutely incredible time that we are living through with young filmmakers that Aaryn wrote about in his most recent Reel Reflections.

What stood out the most off the jump with Backrooms is how technically sound it is. The score perfectly accentuates the mood of each scene, and the sound design, especially in the backrooms, turns each breath, each step, and each creak of the floor into a tick of an unseen bomb that we don’t know when it will detonate. The movie impressively mixes first-person POV from a handheld camera that calls back to his youtube series with traditional filmmaking techniques audiences are used to. The movie isn’t heavy on jumpscares, but in these moments with the camera, the visuals are more dreadful than any loud cue could ever be.

Reinsve and Ejiofor put in fantastic work. They both tap into raw emotional depth for their characters and display both ends of the spectrum of how trauma and our actions can be controlled. I was a big fan of Mark Duplass in his limited role as Phil, the Async scientist behind the backrooms, as well as Lukita Maxwel and Finn Bennett as Kat and Bobby, who help Clark explore the rooms. Their inclusion played as an audience stand-in as they explored the rooms for the first time and learned there are consequences with each decision.

What Parsons captures well is the feeling of everything being a couple degrees off from being “right,” even when he’s shooting in the real world. This becomes amplified in the backrooms as everything gets further and further from reality. Furniture is melded together and stacked unnaturally, signs are written backward, and the people it tries to create, called “Still Lifes,” are based on a memory of what it saw and look like what an AI would spit out without ever seeing a human before.

The movie’s plot is heavily centered around these people and their past trauma: Clark’s wife left him for a bevy of reasons, and Mary’s relationship with her mother was ruined by her mental well-being deteriorating as well as the demolition of her childhood home.

One thing I think is clear is that the rooms can be seen as a manifestation of memories. The rooms are often described in the movie as if you asked someone who has never seen a dog to draw a dog after describing one to them. They understand the essence of the being but miss all the details. As you hold a memory longer and longer, the essence of the memory is there, but the details are fuzzy. I can tell you what my childhood house looked like, but I can’t describe what pictures I had on my wall, as an example. As the rooms try to remember the world, it can only remember the essence; only the strongest elements of the things it tries to create.

In my opinion, I think the rooms and the specific creatures within we are shown are created because of Clark. He is shown to be succumbing to his own mental state, in part to his inability to accept responsibility for his actions that have hurt the people around him, like his ex-wife, his coworkers, and Mary. The “Still Lifes” that Clark encounters seem inconspicuous at first, two random men, but the one that resembles his ex-wife Barbara has multiple faces. His resentment towards her, him feeling that she got everything while he worked and paid for her, made this Still Life this way.

Clark’s fatal flaw, however, manifests through the Captain Clark creature. He refuses to accept responsibility for his actions. He hurts people, he drives them away, and it leaves him alone, but he never accepts fault for his actions. The backrooms in turn create a version of Clark that is monstrous and chases away all the other beings who are in there. Specifically, the Barbara Still Life sprints away when it enters the room while the others remain where they are. After Mary realizes she can’t help him and human Clark tries to absolve them both of their responsibility, Captain Clark kills him, continuing his cycle of pain.

For Mary, she is trapped at the mercy of her patient’s mind, just like as a child, when she was trapped in her house at the mercy of her mother’s deteriorating mind. When she is told at the end that she is most likely not going to be ever leaving, the rooms remember that feeling and create a Still Life of her, reminding us and her that the rooms are ever-changing and always evolving to whoever is there.

What’s most effective about the film is there really isn’t a defined reason behind the backrooms. Their existence makes no sense, and while there is plenty of lore to get familiar with, Backrooms as a movie doesn’t hold its audience responsible for knowing any of it. It truly works knowing as little as possible because the characters in this world know little to nothing, even the scientists who study it. This allows you and me to grasp onto things we see and make them make sense to us, however we can. I really like that approach, as it the movie needs to be seen and felt, not necessarily understood.

Concluding Thoughts

Backrooms is a bold, ambitious embarkment for both its director, Kane Parsons, and the film industry in general. It is currently smashing the box office on its opening weekend, and for good reason. Led by two excellent performers in Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, it captures a terrifying, dreadful feeling with its unique filmmaking style. Maybe its narrative structure doesn’t completely mesh well with the backrooms setting, but I would recommend this to all whether they know the Backrooms as an entity or not, because I believe we are seeing the beginning of something special with Kane Parsons.

When it comes to the movies, I watch box office performance quite a bit, trying to make sense of why this movie did well or that movie underperformed and why studios are funding these movies instead of those. So, dates and times and trends and diving into the why behind the movies we get interests me. We have seen a few distinct eras come and go in the past 75 years of filmmaking. Trends in filmmaking that align with what’s happening in society and culture. The death of the studio system in the 1970s created a generation of innovative young filmmakers getting money to make the movies they wanted to make with little restraint, giving audiences some of the most innovative stories representing an increasing disillusionment in the establishment. 20 years later, the independent cinema wave of the 90s came on like a typhoon as a response to the major blockbuster era of the 1980s, toppling what we thought the movie-making culture was settling into. 30 years later, in 2026, I think we’re about to enter a major new one.

This year, I will turn 28 years old. I mention this because my relationship with the movies has changed so much over that time, and from the beginning it looks a lot different than those even just 10 years my senior. Talking to my dad, who’s now in his mid-60s, about what the movies were like when he was my age, it’s like talking to someone from another planet. Part of that comes from my connection to technology. I grew up in the YouTube era—my formative years as a teenager were spent watching video game playthroughs by some of my favorite creators. It was like stepping into a whole new world, one where I could feel entertained by creators playing through games I couldn’t afford as a 13-year-old or making short films that felt like it did when I would hang out with my friends playing pretend in the backyard. And the best part of all of it was that it was free and accessible. I could watch it on my phone or my computer at any time. I didn’t have to go to the movies to see any of it. I could come home after school, fire up YouTube, and hit play on whatever was new that day. It was unlike anything else I could describe.

YouTube has become a bastion for people without the connections or the funding to make movies and share them with the world quicker, cheaper, and easier than it ever has been. It was only a matter of time until Hollywood caught on to it.

In 10 years’ time, we may very well look back at May 2026 as the true ringing of the bell ushering in a new era of filmmakers to Hollywood. This era could very well be defined by the YouTube filmmakers, artists, and creatives who get their start creating content on the internet before turning their sights to feature-length Hollywood filmmaking. The idea that something like this could even be possible first started swirling in 2011, when director Dan Trachtenberg released a viral short film based on the video game Portal called Portal: No Escape. 5 years later, Trachtenberg’s 10 Cloverfield Lane was released. This idea came to greater prominence when Jordan Peele made the jump from his sketch comedy show Key and Peele that he created with Keegan Michael-Key to becoming one of the quintessential modern horror filmmakers by releasing the acclaimed Get Out in 2017. His felt like the groundwork for non-traditional paths to filmmaking, and he’s gone on to make and produce highly acclaimed horror works to this day.

Cut to nearly 10 years later, and this wave has taken full form. The horror scene has become the catalyst for people like Zach Cregger, Chris Stuckmann, The Philippou Brothers, and more to create feature-length films. Cregger began his career similarly to Peele, creating the sketch comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know before making the leap to horror with Barbarian and last year’s surprise hit, Weapons. Now, Cregger has set his sights on the Resident Evil franchise, adapting the video game series into a brand-new feature starring Austin Abrams, and is also creating The Flood, a Sci-Fi thriller for Warner Bros. Stuckmann started his career as a YouTube film critic before turning to filmmaking with his debut horror flick Shelby Oaks. The Philippous created the YouTube channel RackaRacka back in 2013 and have now released two feature-length horror films, Talk to Me and Bring Her Back. Earlier this year, world-famous youtuber Markiplier miraculously self-funded an adaptation of the video game Iron Lung, then distributed the film by himself across the nation. That movie made over $50 million at the box office and was a huge hit.

Now, in May, we’re seeing two more filmmakers make their debuts. Curry Barker’s Obsession has taken the world by storm, tracking to make over $100 million in its theatrical run. Made for a measly $750,000, Obsession, in its second weekend, actually INCREASED its box office haul 39% more than it did in its first weekend. It’s rare for a film to do better on week 2 than week 1, and to be over 30% is almost unprecedented. There are reports that it could overtake Disney’s The Mandalorian and Grogu in the daily box office returns. That’s a movie with a major studio behind it in one of the most influential and biggest franchises of all time with a production budget 220 times the budget of Obsession. That’s a huge deal.

Barker started his career making videos with the sketch comedy YouTube duo “that’s a bad idea” with Cooper Tomlinson. In 2024, the duo released the film Milk & Serial to their YouTube channel to wide acclaim after being unable to find a buyer for it. Obsession, meanwhile, has launched Barker into the upper echelon of rising filmmakers. Before the movie even came out, A24 signed him on to helm their reboot of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The fact that a studio as prominent as A24 is gambling on a relative unknown to be the man behind one of the most iconic horror franchises of all time is a testament to his skills. Beyond that, rumors have been swirling that he has an open 7-figure offer for his next film, Anything but Ghosts, which he hasn’t even pitched yet. His seemingly sudden rise from out of nowhere has raised quickly debunked rumors on social media that he didn’t even direct Obsession, which I think really shows his abilities and prowess behind the camera.

In addition to Barker, May also sees the release of Kane Parsons’s A24 produced Backrooms. A24 has put their money behind young filmmakers before, and Parsons, now 21, is among the youngest and most exciting. Parsons came to prominence by releasing a series of original shorts of the liminal space backrooms concept to his YouTube channel “Kane Pixels” in 2022 when he was only 16. A24 quickly swooped in and began funding a feature-length adaptation of the short starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve with a budget hovering $10 million. That kind of money is almost unheard of for an unproven filmmaker. Similarly to Barker, Parsons has faced rumors that his Backrooms was shadow directed by other directors, a claim that I similarly find silly. As some have pointed out on social media, many prominent filmmakers began making movies at young ages. Spielberg was only 26 on Jaws, Sam Raimi was 21 when he made The Evil Dead, and John Singleton was 23 when he made Boyz n the Hood. This sort of thing happens more than you may think. That a filmmaker can come from YouTube in place of a more “traditional” route is a sign of changing times, where filmmaking equipment is more accessible than ever before.

And while Backrooms hasn’t officially released yet (it comes out this week), the tracking numbers are looking better than anyone expected. The film is now closing in on a $60+ million opening, which would be one of the biggest for a horror movie ever. That Parsons has essentially homegrown this audience through his work on YouTube is impressive. That Parsons is essentially obsessive about his vision, working tirelessly on creating sets with Blender and conceptualizing the exact details of his film, is a testament to his skill beyond his years.

Personally, I love this investment in filmmakers from non-standard backgrounds. There are so many stories to tell and so many people to tell them. Hollywood has always been and continues to be an ever-increasing nepotism-based industry, so getting new voices with true skill behind the camera and on the page is a welcomed new direction for the industry. It’s always confused me why Hollywood let mid-to-low-budget filmmaking die over the past 20 years. When it’s done right, and you invest in the storytellers that really have something interesting to say, it can become among the most profitable investments a studio can make. Let’s keep looking for those people with a passion for storytelling, wherever they may be, and champion their stories. It’s easier than ever now to find them.

Physical Media Highlight

This week, I’m highlighting a wonderful new release that I was recently able to acquire. Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven has become a highly sought-after grail in the physical media world. For the longest time, the more popular director’s cut was not available on 4k, that is, until May of 2025, when Disney/Buena Vista released a gorgeous 4k steelbook of the film. This was so popular that it sold out almost immediately, and resale of this edition began hitting the secondhand market at triple the price.

Back in March, as I was browsing the subreddits, I happened across a thread that said the steelbook was back in stock on Amazon. Of course, I immediately went to check it out and found it available. So, at that point, of course, I had to order it. Well, almost 2 months later, it finally arrived, and it is glorious. I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but I cannot wait to pop it in.

The Film Box Podcast

This week on The Film Box Podcast, we finished out Medieval May by checking out John Boorman’s epic King Arthur fantasy tale from 1981, Excalibur. This movie is absolutely buck wild, and it was a really fun conversation that highlighted the incredible highs and lows of this film. Give it a listen now!

And that’s it for this week’s edition of Reel Reflections! Come back next Friday for more, and as always, watch something great!

Passenger, directed by André Øvredal, follows Maddie and Tyler as they embark on their new life as vanlifers. One night, as they’re trekking across America, they come across a deadly car crash and soon realize that the memory of the night isn’t the only thing haunting them. Starring Lou Llobell and Jacob Scipio, Passenger has its moments but far too often relies on genre clichés to carry what is an interesting concept through its run time.

If you have been to the movie theater recently, I can assume the teaser trailer for this movie is engrained in your mind. It shot this movie up mine and a lot of people’s watchlists thanks to one of the best jump scares I’ve seen in a while. But similar to the short film Lights Out, sometimes short-form horror doesn’t translate to feature length very well. The movie opens by expanding on that teaser, and it’s the most tense I felt the entire movie, even though I’ve seen it play out countless times before each movie.

Once the narrative begins and we follow Maddie and Tyler, the story becomes almost too formulaic. You’re waiting for the inciting incident, the research scene, the reluctant old-timer who knows about the demon haunting them but won’t just tell them what it is until it’s too late, and a final showdown, all before they’ve even packed up their apartment and hit the road. To Øvredal’s credit, he does throw in some decently tense set pieces, but the timing of the jump scares ends up being far too predictable to really capitalize on them.

One scene, though, where Maddie is walking through a parking lot and hears the footsteps of the Passenger and keeps seeing the van get further away, is legitimately excellent filmmaking. In one continuous take, the camera spins around Maddie as she hears the footsteps of the passenger. When the camera settles, we see the van and the parking lot seem to have inexplicably moved another 20 yards away.

I enjoyed Llobell and Scipio’s performance as the lead couple, as well as the design for the passenger entity. The movie explores the idea of being stuck as a passenger in life, as Maddie feels like she is just along on Tyler’s journey. , it’s very apparent in how Tyler always insists on driving, calling her his “passenger princess.” It is what makes her the more desired target for the entity, but it’s when she takes control of her situation and takes the wheel for herself that she is able to fight and beat the demon. When every mainstream horror movie seems to be about dealing with grief and trauma nowadays, this is a theme I’m much more interested in exploring.

Concluding Thoughts

Passenger is an interesting concept that might not have had the legs for a feature-length film. While at times it proves itself to be frightful and entertaining, and it tackles interesting themes, it repeatedly falls back into safe tropes to carry itself from start to finish. While it’s not bad by any means, I really wish it took more risks. While it won’t be my favorite of the year, or even the month of May, I can see Passengers being a fun enough time with the right audience in the right setting.

Needless to say, this franchise means a lot to me.

I say all this because I’m at a weird crossroads. We've not had a new Star Wars film in 7 years. The last film we got, The Rise of Skywalker, was an utter abomination. Since that time, the franchise has dived headfirst into limited tv series with varying degrees of success. Andor proved to be one of the greatest Star Wars media ever made, a poignant look at the players behind the rebellion against the empire in an incredible 2-season run combining spy thrillers, political dramas, action, and heists. The Mandalorian season 1 represented a new direction for the saga with a classic western feel. But at the same time, shows like The Acolyte, Kenobi, Ahsoka, and the remaining seasons of The Mandalorian were rocky at best.

That brings us to today. The Mandalorian and Grogu is out now. This film serves as a pseudo-finale to the tv series with a standalone adventure of the titular pair. Next year, we’re getting Star Wars: Starfighter led by Ryan Gosling. And, for everything Star Wars has meant to me, I don’t feel excited in the least bit for these films. It’s a strange feeling. I’ve felt that excitement for every other film, the good and the bad, leading up to this moment. Maybe it’s because Mandalorian and Grogu feels so small or inconsequential. Maybe it’s because I’ve soured on things over the last few years. Maybe it’s some combination of it all.

Regardless, in honor of the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu, here are my rankings of all 12 Star Wars films from worst to best:

12. Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker

Putrid. Ugly. Uninspired. A complete and utter cash-in. Apparently the folks behind The Rise of Skywalker felt the need to give in to fan service and, as a result, created the absolute worst Star Wars film by far. Full of head-scratching character and story decisions (Somehow Palpatine returned? Hux is a rebel spy? “Killing” Chewbacca only to bring him back in the next scene? Centuries old Sith dagger lining up a map with destroyed Death Star parts only decades old? “They Fly Now”??) I mean, what were they thinking? This is a disaster of a film that deserves no one’s time and effort in watching. It’s a disservice to fans of the franchise and was mired with issues from the get-go. Don’t bother watching it.

11. Episode II: Attack of the Clones

This may be controversial, but I actually really love Attack of the Clones. It was a formative movie for me in my youth and used to watch it on repeat. So why is it so low on this list? Well, as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized the many issues with this film. Poor dialogue, bad CGI and wooden performances are abundant here. Anakin Skywalker’s “I don’t like sand” monologue has become a meme. It was made in the early days of fully computer-generated sets and you can tell. They’re just ugly. And the saving graces of the film, the geonosian arena and lightsaber fights, come way too far into the movie. It’s actually a really unique idea, utilizing the jedi as detectives looking into an assassination plot while a secret romance between a jedi and senator blooms is really cool! It’s just the execution that left a lot to be desired.

10. Solo: A Star Wars Story

Frankly, it’s been years since I watched Solo: A Star Wars Story. I don’t remember much about it. I remember a really solid cast and solid action. Contrary to public opinion, I quite like Alden Ehrenreich’s performance. But I also remember asking myself the death sentence for any blockbuster: “Why did we even make this?” Were we so hard pressed for stories that we had to explore Han Solo’s origins? It’s a well enough made movie that honestly just has little place in the Star Wars universe. Is it cool to see how Chewie and Han meet or how the Kessel run actually works? Sure. But I could’ve gone without the mystery being revealed.

9. Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

This is another controversial film in the Star Wars lexicon. Some folks absolutely despise this film. Others think it’s among the best that Star Wars has to offer. Personally, I sit somewhere in the middle. I think, as a sci-fi film, it’s incredibly interesting and brings the franchise towards asking some really interesting questions about the universe and our places in it. There’s good action and epic hero moments, and Rian Johnson certainly knows how to direct a good movie. That said, I think this really doesn’t fit well in the Star Wars universe. There are too many things that break with this movie. Holdo maneuver aside, the expectation subversions that happen in this movie kind of ruin characters for the rest of the trilogy. Fan backlash was so intense that Disney decided pivot solely to fan service going forward. Beyond that, the choices to kill Snoke and Phasma, as well as give Luke a sacrificial death, left the final film with very little to explore, and not allowing Finn to sacrifice himself in a total character 180 that would’ve felt incredibly earned is a head scratcher.

8. The Mandalorian and Grogu

Inoffensive. Harmless. Largely inconsequential. That’s how I would describe the latest entry into the Star Wars saga. The Mandalorian and Grogu do little to advance the stories of either The Mandalorian or Grogu, instead waving action set pieces and Grogu gimmicks like shiny toys at an audience for over 2 hours. Some of this film has promise. Ludwig Göransson absolutely crushes yet again with a monumental score blending traditional orchestral music, synth beats, and classic woodwinds familiar to the tv series. The planets, specifically Shakari, are incredibly cool-looking. It reminded me of Blade Runner in its neon-soaked futuristic city vibe. And some of the technical filmmaking looked great. Scenes with Grogu’s puppeteering are quite nice. That said, I just don’t understand why this is a movie. The story is half-baked; performances are all over the place, and dialogue seems written specifically to provide explicit backstory detail to audiences as if they’ve never seen a Star Wars film before. And by the end no one significantly changes or has real character development. If it didn’t exist, it wouldn’t have mattered in the slightest.

7. Episode VII: The Force Awakens

The Force Awakens is a fun movie. No doubt about it. J.J. Abrams knows how to direct a sci-fi film. Being the first Star Wars movie since Revenge of the Sith had audiences of all generations hyped for the return of their beloved franchise. I remember being there opening night and loving the film. Seeing Han and Chewie return to the Millenium Falcon gave me chills. There are great new characters with interesting backstories. But, at the heart of the film, it’s a complete retread of the original Star Wars. The First Order is the Empire. The Resistance is the Rebellion. Starkiller Base is The Death Star. There’s literally a trench run, and a major mentor character sacrifices himself. It’s just a total retread of what worked before. There were so many unique areas to take this movie, but instead it felt totally rehashed and unoriginal.

6. Episode 1: The Phantom Menace

This may come as a shock to many. By all regards, The Phantom Menace is among the most reviled in Star Wars fandom. My fiancé refuses to watch it because she says it’s boring and my podcast co-host hates it. The introduction of Jar Jar Binks and other kid-friendly elements left others with a sour taste in the 16-year gap between this film’s release and Return of the Jedi. But for me personally, I see this as the last bastion of technical filmmaking of the franchise before the headfirst dive into the digital landscape. The Phantom Menace was largely shot on location or in practical sets using film cameras with comparatively much fewer digital environments than the films that came after it. After this film, the franchise switched to digital cameras and green-screen environments that feel far less real. The action was epic, the music was captivating, and the performances were engaging. At the time, the trade dispute storyline was a topic of much debate, but in 2026 it’s quite poignant given current world events. I really like The Phantom Menace, and I’m proud of it. We did a whole podcast episode on it; you can listen to that here.

5. Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

The capstone to one of the most epic trilogies ever made, 1983’s Return of the Jedi, did not disappoint. This was an incredibly formative movie for me. Luke, Han, Leia, and Darth Vader each have proper conclusions to their stories. The opening 30 minutes in Jabba’s palace are electric. There’s a lot to love about Return of the Jedi. Is it a perfect movie? Certainly not. The tone at times is rather unbalanced between the kid-friendly Ewoks and the rest of the film determining the fate of the universe. Building a second Death Star is also kind of lame and uninspiring. But that doesn’t matter when everything else is so good.

4. Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Revenge of the Sith is easily the best of the prequel trilogy. There’s so much to love: epic action, great heroes and villains, a good story, and some of the best music in the entire franchise. Yes, there are plenty of memes that came out of this movie. Yes, it can be a little goofy and uneven at times. But where this one differs from Return of the Jedi is the pure wall-to-wall action. Starting in media res with the space battle over coruscant into a lightsaber fight is a great choice, and there are 4 separate lightsaber duels throughout. The dynamic between Hayden Christenson and Ewan McGregor comes full circle, and both deliver really good performances. Christenson’s ability to show a wide range of Anakin’s emotions just through his looks and without words is amazing. And once Order 66 happens, the movie goes to another level. We also did a podcast on this movie to celebrate its 20th anniversary; check it out here.

3. Rogue One

The most unique of the Star Wars films, Rogue One tells the story of what happens just before the lead-up to the original 1977 film and how the rebels stole the Death Star plans. There’s only one lightsaber in the film that comes in epic fashion at the very end of the film. And yet, the things that director Gareth Edwards and writers Tony Gilroy and Chris Weitz accomplished are truly incredible. Every character here is compelling, and you come to care about them despite their fate at the end of the film. The decision to kill them all off is bold and shows the stakes for the rebellion. This is the type of movie that properly fleshes out the deeper lore of Star Wars in a way that’s fresh and unique. Plus, you still get great action set pieces, espionage, and great locations that feel properly Star Wars.

2. Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

What else can you say about this one. Quality-wise, Empire Strikes Back may be the best made film of the franchise. There’s a great story that feels like a proper middle point in the story of Han, Luke and Leia. Each are learning more about themselves and their personal growth is great. This film also has some of the most unique locations of the franchise between the snow planet Hoth, the swamp world of Dagobah and Bespin’s city in the clouds. Lando Calrissian is a great addition to the franchise thanks to Billy Dee Williams’ charismatic performance, and the introduction of Yoda and the expansion of Luke’s jedi training is really engaging. Plus, it’s a movie where the good guys lose at the end. That’s a bold choice that really paid off. Everything about Empire Strikes Back is great. It’s not only one of the best Star Wars movies ever made, but also one of the best films ever made period.

1. Episode IV: A New Hope

This is my personal favorite film of the franchise. The original Star Wars was the movie that got me into movies. It made me think deeper about what movies could be and tapped into my imagination at an early age. The Binary Sunset, Mos Eisley Spaceport, Escaping the Death Star, Obi-Wan vs. Vader, and the Trench Run. It transported me to a world I didn’t even know was possible and haven’t ever left. Han, Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, Vader, and Obi-Wan are all great characters that feel unique to each other. But what fascinates me most is the technical filmmaking of it all. Special effects company Industrial Light and Magic had to invent new ways to film the visual effects, and George Lucas insisted on getting his vision on screen despite myriad issues in production. It’s amazing this film even got made. But from the moment it came out, it changed the film landscape forever, and for that, I will forever be grateful.

Physical Media Highlight

For this week’s physical media highlight, I am going appropriately Star Wars by showing off my collection of films from the franchise. I just picked up the ‘Star Wars The Complete Saga’ blu-ray box set from a local tag sale for $1.50, an absolute steal. Beyond that, I also own the original trilogy box set plus The Phantom Menace on VHS and the entire franchise on DVD as well as the Gendy Tartakovsky miniseries, the Clone Wars animated movie, Spaceballs on DVD (WHICH COUNTS) and a box set of the Family Guy Star Wars parodies. The only film I don’t own is Solo: A Star Wars Story, which I didn’t even realize until writing this. Goes to show how memorable it was. The DVD’s are noteworthy because they’re the only place currently you can watch the original theatrical cuts of the original trilogy at home. It’s not available on streaming or Blu-Ray/4k anywhere. Hopefully that changes with the 50th anniversary of Star Wars coming next year. They’ve just restored the original theatrical print, so I am hoping they release a 4k of the theatrical cut.

The Film Box

This week on The Film Box, we continued Medieval May by taking a look back at one of the most iconic parody films of all time, 1975’s Monty Python and The Holy Grail. It was a great conversation, and we shared a lot of laughs chatting about all the hilarious bits from the movie. Give it a listen here!

Thanks for reading this week’s Reel Reflections! We’ll see you next week, and as always, watch something great!

Curry Barker, Inde Navarrette, and Michael Johnston. Be prepared to remember those names. If you haven’t familiarized yourself with them already, because with Obsession, we see the emergence of three breakout stars.

Obsession follows Bear, a young man who is in love with his friend Nikki but is too scared to make a move. He instead turns to a One Wish Willow, which grants him his wish of making Nikki love him more than anything else, but he soon learns there are dangerous consequences for his actions. Directed by Curry Barker, the film stars Inde Navarrette as Nikki, Michael Johnston as Bear, Cooper Tomlinson as Ian, and Megan Lawless as Sarah, who all turn in great performances to make this one of the best movies of the year so far.

Like Zach Cregger, the Philippou brothers, and more before him, Curry Barker is a comedy sketch YouTuber breaking into the horror game. He’s already dabbled in the genre with short films like Milk and Serial and The Chair, but with his first feature-length film, he’s proving he has one of the most interesting new voices in filmmaking. What is very clear from the very beginning is that Barker is extremely experienced behind the camera, utilizing many techniques to amplify tension or to drive home points. I couldn’t stop thinking about how almost every interaction between Bear and Nikki is shot in a shot-reverse shot format, where two characters are conversing, but the shots alternate between them, rather than having both characters in the frame at the same time. Barker uses this to amplify the disconnect between the two characters, while also setting up tension for later scares.

In addition to his feel for the camera, you can sense his appreciation for tension and atmosphere. In my opinion, a horror movie is only as good as the moments between scares, and this is a movie that genuinely never lets you feel settled. He crafts scenes that always have you cautious for an explosion and, with some tasteful homages to classics like 2001’s Pulse, genuinely terrify you when they come. What Barker does so well is fill the quiet moments with so much unease, making you feel unsettled before the loud scares come. He does this incredibly well with his use of shadows, hiding Nikki’s face and only showing little glints of light in her eyes, making her feel inhuman. At one point, Bear and his friend Ian are talking at work after Bear makes his wish, and the entire time, you can see Nikki in the background, out of focus, never breaking eye contact with where Bear is.

The engine of Obsession, though, is the immaculate Inde Navarrette. What she brings both physically and emotionally to the role of Nikki truly cannot be understated. She gives a truly well-rounded performance as we meet and fall in love with the Nikki that Bear fell in love with but then are horrified at the Nikki she becomes after the wish is granted. The way she contorts her face into picture-perfect smiles and frowns; the way she walks in and out of shadows like a stop-motion puppet; and the way she delivers her lines like she just became human all round out one of the best characters, let alone horror characters, I’ve seen this decade. Navarrette has said she drew a lot of inspiration from Mia Goth in Pearl, and it shows.

Every person who watches Obsession can come out of this movie and cling to a different theme the movie explored. Barker makes it clear that even though we are following Bear around, he is no protagonist. Nikki is a victim, stripped of her freedom by a man who felt like he deserved it because of how strongly he felt towards her, even though he never could tell her. Johnston has spoken about how he wanted to bring a relatability to Bear, and in this current era of “nice guys not getting the girl,” he feels like someone who believes he is in the right. It makes his portrayal of Bear enjoyably despicable as he casually displays evilness. It reaches its tipping point when he converses with the real Nikki, and instead of show any remorse or compassion, he doubles down on his decision. He continually takes advantage of the situation until it crosses his boundaries, and even then, he still frames his thinking as how he can get out of it, not how Nikki can be saved. The ending is extremely poignant because of this; his decisions (or lack of a decision) are a showcase for that selfishness.

Final Thoughts

There are so many more thoughts to be had and a lot more scenes to dissect in order to properly tell you how good Obsession really is. For a minuscule budget and a largely unproven cast and crew, they came together and created a film that, for me, cemented itself as one of the best horror films of the decade. Whatever Curry Barker, Inde Navarrette, and Michael Johnston do next, count me in, but until then, make Obsession your next watch.

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In fact, I’ve recently been on a run of underseen, underacknowledged films of the past 50 years that have mightily impressed me. many of these movies are imperfect, but they represent a type of craft not seen much anymore. The big budget CGI movies shot on sound stages take up a predominant amount of the spending power that would otherwise be used to fund mid-to-low budget dramas that may not make as much (or any) money but elevate the art form in some way.

But we’ve known about this for many years now. As a 27-year-old film buff, I’ve been very much on the younger side of the ‘“film game”. I grew up at time where the MCU was what dominated the movie culture and big budget, high octane sequels, prequels, and franchise films were what studios were interested. For context, I was 9 (!!) years old when ‘Iron Man’ was released in 2008. These types of films that were abundant in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s are a far cry from what I grew up watching.

But enough doom-and-glooming. Let’s talk about what “Reel Reflections” is. This will be a weekly (yes weekly!) newsletter every Friday and will be a space for me to celebrate movies I’ve been watching recently, discuss what’s going on in the industry, highlight some of my favorite pieces of physical media, and anything else I’d like to discuss. Let’s now take a look back at 5 gems of years past that I’ve watched recently that I found charming, interesting our outright impressive that represent the kinds of movies we just don’t get anymore.

Lifeguard

Sam Elliott stars as Rick Carlson, a 32-year-old LA lifeguard wandering his way through life and dealing with as many beach antics as you can imagine while mentoring a much younger trainee. When he gets an invitation to his 15-year high school reunion, Carlson is suddenly faced with seeing all those people he grew up with again, most of whom have “real” careers and established lives, including old flame Cathy (Anne Archer). It’s an incredibly intriguing character study that feels thematically relevant despite being a perfect time capsule of life in the 1970’s.

Recently, ‘Lifeguard’ has been making noise through the film world thanks to The Big Picture podcast, where on recent episodes discussing physical media, Tracy Letts, Sean Fennessey, Chris Ryan and Tim Simons showed off the Fun City Editions Blu-ray release of the film.

As I finished the movie, I found myself yearning for more stories like this. Stories of simple people living their lives and learning who they are. Gone are the days of regular looking people living regular lives. Now, every star in every film looks as if they were pulled right off the factory floor to be as ripped as possible and put into big budget action films where the entire world is at stake. These types of low-budget slice of life’s are hardly present anymore and they’re consistently a refreshing and somehow nostalgic watch.

Personal Best

I’ve never quite seen the human body represented on screen like I did when I watched ‘Personal Best’, the famed screenwriter Robert Towne’s directorial debut in a film he also wrote and produced about two track and field Olympic hopefuls (Mariel Hemingway and actual athlete Patrice Donnelly) competing for a spot at the games and also managing to fall in love. It’s quite a beautiful movie, both in the way that it shows athletic performance on screen and the lesbian relationship away from the track. Now I won’t pretend to know the inner working of these kinds of relationships, but what I can say is that for 1982, it’s surprisingly progressive in depiction. It’s not made to be a big deal. The other athletes hardly acknowledge it and the head coach, played by Scott Glenn, doesn’t take issue with their relationship either, only their competitive natures. It’s surprising and refreshing to see.

On the flip side, one of the hardest things to nail in movies about sports is the actual competitions themselves. Having actors act athletic can be a total mixed bag with mostly negative results. See any number of these examples. But here, Towne uses all real track athletes, including former world #4 hurdler Donnelly in the film whose excellent as Tory Skinner, and while Hemingway wasn’t a real athlete, she trained for 9 months to nail the competitions depicted in the movie. I don’t know why more people don’t do this. We just discussed ‘Moneyball’ on The Film Box Podcast last week and we noticed largely the same issue except for Casey Bond, who plays relief pitcher Chad Bradford and nails the funky release Bradford used. Can you guess which sport Bond played?

But what impressed me most about ‘Personal Best’ is it displays the human body in action. Close ups of sweat-coated body parts doing the high jump, hurdles or throwing shot put almost feel perverse. Tracking shots of these women and men running along the track get you front and center for the extended racing depictions. And outside of the athletic performance, the human body is used incredibly effectively to move the story along through the interpersonal relationships of the characters. That’s a testament to the level of excellent performances throughout.

Simply put, ‘Personal Best’ is one of the best sports movies of all time, and it’s a shame it only has an old DVD release from Warner Archives.

Secret Admirer

Another type of movie we don’t see any more is the teen focused rom-com. This used to be a huge market, especially in the 90’s and early 2000’s with movies like ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’, ‘10 Things I Hate About You’, Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘She’s All That’ permeating the culture in that era. 1985’s ‘Secret Admirer’, the rom-com starring C. Thomas Howell, Kelly Preston and Lori Laughlin is oft forgotten but may be one of the earliest trailblazers of this type of movie.

The film stars Howell as Michael, a teenager who gets a mysterious love letter that he attributes to the popular Debbie (Preston) and pursues her with the help of his friend Toni (Laughlin), who is secretly the writer of the note. It’s a fun premise that blends some coming-of-age elements seen typically in the John Hughes films of that era with standard rom-com tropes (including an incredible ending chase for the girl’s love) and even hints of films like ‘Stand by Me’ or ‘The Outsiders’ in its portrayal of the group of friends.

The drawback, and why I think it never permeated the mainstream, is that it introduces ideas that truly are interesting, i.e. “who are Michael’s friends and why are they this mysterious but iron-clad group?” and trades them off for extended mistaken identity gags that run through both the main core and their parents. It’s rather repetitive by the end, but this movie holds up on the back of the three leads. Preston and Laughlin are both gorgeous and play their parts well and Howell is one fire. It’s surprising he didn’t have an even bigger leading man career a la John Cusack after this one. Pick this one up on Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber.

Sea of Love

Al Pacino in a murder mystery in which he falls in love with the potential killer, played by Ellen Barkin? Also starring John Goodman as Pacino’s police partner? AND IT TAKES PLACE IN NEW YORK CITY? Sign me up!

How ‘Sea of Love’, Pacino’s 1989 effort that comes one year before both ‘Dick Tracy’ and ‘Godfather Part III’ hasn’t become a larger part of the lexicon of neo-noir cop movies is beyond me. For all intents and purposes, it was a success at the time, making over 110 million dollars on a budget of just $19 million. ‘Sea of Love’ should be in the same conversations today as films like Michael Mann’s ‘Thief’ or ‘Heat’, Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’, any number of early Coen Brothers films, or De Palma’s 1980’s double shot of ‘Blow Out’ and ‘Body Heat’.

The film itself follows Pacino’s police detective Frank Keller, a burnt-out alcoholic whose wife left him for a former colleague. When people start turning up dead after placing want-ads in the singles section of the paper he, alongside John Goodman’s Detective Sherman Touhey, begin investigating the folks who respond to the ads, including Barkin’s Helen Cruger. As the investigation unfolds, Keller finds himself falling for Helen, a real issue as more singles are getting killed.

It’s an awesome premise performed to perfection by the leads who are equal parts sexy, disillusioned and at times downright hilarious. Pacino especially is throwing 110mph in classic Pacino fashion, alternating between despondence and explosivity in what is the start of a serious career resurgence in the 90s.

I watched this one in a cool Blu-ray double feature with ‘Scent of a Woman’, but it’s also available on 4k from Kino Lorber.

One False Move

Another recent neo-noir first time watch, 1992’s ‘One False Move’ directed by Carl Franklin, maybe best known for directing Denzel Washington in ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ and ‘Out of Time’ alongside extensive tv work in the 2000’s. The film was written by Billy Bob Thornton while also starring Thornton, Cynda Williams and Michael Beach as three criminals in LA who kill drug runners for money and cocaine and skip town towards the south to sell it.

The real engine of the movie, though, is Bill Paxton as Dale “Hurricane” Dixon, the local police chief of Star City, Arkansas, where the criminals are seemingly headed. Why is Dixon called the Hurricane? Well, we don’t know. But what we do know is that Paxton is absolutely electric as the eccentric, fast-talking Hurricane. He whips in and out of scenes while displaying a shocking amount of aptitude for police work to out of town LAPD detectives John McFeely and Dud Cole. How Paxton doesn’t get nominated for an Academy Award is beyond me. It’s one of the best performances I’ve seen in a film in a long time.

In fact, it’s those scenes in Star City that really make the movie go for me personally. I was less intrigued in following the three nervous criminals as they venture across the country towards their seemingly inevitable capture. But the work in Star City, which essentially boils down to figuring out who the criminals are and setting a trap for them is captivating. It’s in these scenes where we get to see the sort of small-town police work Hurricane deals with - domestic disputes, local drunks and the like - alongside some real commentary on race relations in the south (McFeely is black and so are two of the criminals).

It’s worth watching alone for Paxton’s work, but there’s a lot to love about ‘One False Move’, which you can purchase from the Criterion Collection in 4k or Blu-Ray.

Physical Media Highlight

On each edition of Reel Reflections, I want to take a few moments to highlight a piece of physical media I own. This week, I’m showing off not 1, but 3 different editions of John Boorman’s “Excalibur”. Just this week I finally acquired the brand-new Arrow 4k Limited Edition Box of the epic Arthurian tale. Before then, I owned the Blu-Ray which was just released a few months ago with a fun new slipcase from Wal-Mart as well as the original snap case DVD (contrary to public opinion, I LOVE the snap cases and have a pretty sizable collection growing).

Funny part of this, though, is I have not seen ‘Excalibur’ yet! It’s been on my watch list for ages, and I’ve started it many times but always found the streaming quality or DVD quality lacking. That changes soon. We finish out Medieval May with ‘Excalibur’ on The Film Box Podcast later this month so I will finally see it on glorious 4k!

The Film Box

Speaking of The Film Box Podcast, this past week we revisited ‘Moneyball’, the 2011 baseball movie starring Brad Pitt to celebrate my wonderful co-host and co-founder of The First Picture House Connor Jameson’s birthday. It was his choice and as a self-proclaimed baseball and analytics nerd, this is a match made in heaven. It’s a great episode and I’ve already mentioned it once this newsletter so check it out!

And that’s going to do it for this first edition of Reel Reflections! See you next week to talk more movies and in the meantime, watch something great!

Writer Ohm Bauman goes to The Bilberry Woods Hotel in rural Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes. After a girl he meets goes missing, he searches the hotel, where he learns that the building and the people it inhabits hold deep, sinister secrets. Directed by Damian McCarthy of Oddity (2024) and Caveat (2020) and starring Adam Scott of Parks and Recreation and Severance, Hokum continues in McCarthy’s work of proving there is nothing more sinister than the deepest pit of blackness inside of man.

Like Oddity and Caveat, McCarthy seeks to display that seemingly ordinary people can harbor true evil within themselves, while using witches, ghosts, and possessed golems as the boogeymen as representations of those evils. I see these three as an unofficial trilogy in that sense, all working together to strengthen that central idea. All three isolate their protagonist in rural Ireland, all three depict a violent crime against women, and all three use supernatural entities to personify the evil of those crimes.

The use of the supernatural is fascinating to me, as in each case, I often found myself wondering if the hauntings were a hoax. To me, paranormality works in two ways: a person can be haunted, and an environment can be haunted. A person being haunted usually harkens back to a past traumatic event that protagonists have to come to peace with and grow from. Here, Ohm is haunted by the ghost of his mother, who died from a gunshot when he was young. He carries the guilt of her death with him as he sees her ghost throughout the film. The environment being haunted can relate to several things, but here, it serves as a personification of evil. Without spoiling the ending of the movie, the witch that haunts the hotel chains Ohm and another man up, and only one of them is dragged to the underworld.

With so much of the film taking place in the hotel, and in particular, one room of the hotel, McCarthy makes the most of his space. Countless shots follow Ohm traversing the room, and we are peeking at the background, trying to see if there is something out of the ordinary. While a lot of the jumpscares ended up being telegraphed in a way like this, I still found them to be quite effective, with some getting physical reactions out of me. Beyond the jumpscares, the atmosphere is incredibly tense, especially as the movie hits its second act. Once Ohm returns to the hotel to look for the missing woman, Fiona, the movie fully clicks into gear. The movie is dark, and it utilizes its negative space well, making you never feel safe in a scene until the next one starts, only to start that cycle all over again.

I’d be remiss not to talk about how well Adam Scott works in Hokum. His bitter, cynical Ohm carries a lot of trauma with him, which influences his cynical work as a writer. What I found particularly interesting is how well adept Scott is at burying his trauma, only opening up after a few drinks. He’s abrasive, which is off-putting at times, but it makes his quest to find the missing Fiona all the more believable as he goes against all conventional wisdom to find her truth. His performance is nuanced and emotive, which effectively drives the story and heightens the fear.

Concluding Thoughts

Hokum is tense and frightening, making great use of its rural setting, and focuses on isolation. Damian McCarthy crafts a terrifying mystery, again showcasing the depths of evil. He is quickly becoming one of my favorite rising voices in the genre. Adam Scott delivers an incredibly nuanced and rich performance as Ohm. If you haven’t seen it already, make Hokum a priority watch.

On this episode of The Film Box Podcast, Connor and Aaryn are joined by special guest Marcel Urena to celebrate the 35th anniversary of one of only 3 Big 5 winners at the Oscars and a generational detective/serial killer movie: The Silence of The Lambs, directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, from 1991.

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Back in November, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment announced they were releasing for the first time 'All The President's Men' on 4k to celebrate the 50th anniversary of it's release. Upon the announcement, Aaryn pre-ordered it and it just came in. Join him as he unboxes it for the first time to see what it looks like in person!

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On this episode of The Film Box Podcast, Aaryn, Connor and Jasmine come together to talk about ‘Project Hail Mary’, the brand new sci-fi classic starring Ryan Gosling and Sandra Huller and directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Let’s get into it!

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To start, the absolute best thing about this movie is its cast. From Corenswet down to the minor side characters, this movie knocked the cast out of the park, finding actors who knew how to embody the characters they were portraying. David Corenswet is going to go down as one of the best Superman portrayals next to Christopher Reeve, with how well he blends the sincerity and earnestness of both Clark Kent and Superman. Rachel Brosnahan is excellent as Lois Lane, as she commands the screen in each of her scenes. Her and Corenswet’s chemistry was off the charts, and I personally believe it should set the standard for how iconic couples are cast in the future. 

Nicholas Hoult is one of my favorite actors, and he truly embodied the hate and envy Lex Luthor has for Superman. He is diabolical and legitimately evil, and also commands the screen in a way that Lex should. The Justice Gang members Nathan Fillion (Guy Gardner- Green Lantern), Edi Gathegi (Mr. Terrific), and Isabela Merced (Hawkgirl) crushed it in their small roles. Gathegi, in particular, elevated the story and created some of the most fun moments in the theater. The best I can say is that in their small roles, I was hoping to see more, and now I’m looking forward to the next time I can see them.

James Gunn has truly cemented himself in a tier above when it comes to comic book directors. It was a bold, creative decision to start a new universe not with an origin story and to introduce us to a universe already lived in. To some, I can see how that would be an issue as characters exist without introduction, and if you’re not familiar with them coming into the movie, you probably aren’t coming out of this movie knowing more about them. But for me, someone who enjoys these movies and grew up with comics and the animated shows and movies, this felt like a comic story ripped right from the pages and put onto the big screen. 

I was never the biggest fan of Zack Snyder’s overly gritty and cynical take on Superman. I didn’t like how alien he felt to his fellow humans, and I didn’t like the constant religious metaphors. The difference between these two iterations is so different, they feel like two separate characters. This Superman is one full of hope, full of love, and full of compassion. He stops in the middle of fights with giant monsters to save squirrels and dogs, and believes in the safe preservation of monsters instead of trying to kill them. In one of the best scenes of the movie, he and Lois talk about their different outlooks on the world, and Lois says that he believes everyone and everything is beautiful. He says that’s the real punk rock. He truly inspires hope for the world around him, and even when the world turns its back on him, he never loses that hope or humanity. Having Krypto be such a major part of the story added a layer of relatability to him as well. I mean, who amongst us wouldn’t fly against a black hole to save their dog?

In terms of boldness, Superman does take massive swings, with not all of them connecting. There is a lot of information that is thrown at the audience in the first chunk of the film, with Gunn trusting the audience to retain it all. Superman has been active for years, his conflict with Lex Luthor has ripened to a point where Lex has studied his moves enough to come up with counters, and metahumans have existed in this world for decades at this point. Visually, I appreciated the attempts the movie made to differentiate itself from the grounded movies the studio had been releasing earlier. While some shots weren’t pleasing and some sequences caught me off guard stylistically, I will never fault the creative team behind a movie for being unapologetically behind their vision. 

Their vision led to some breathtaking scenes of Superman action. His and the Justice Gang’s fight with the kaiju, his fight with Ultraman and the Engineer at the baseball field, and his final fight with Ultraman and Lex’s raptors are up there as some of the best choreographed scenes for a comic book movie in a while, in my honest opinion. I am not lying when I said there is a moment towards the end that brought tears to my eyes with how incredible the action was, with how the music was swelling. 

In terms of being unapologetic, this movie is also incredibly political, to the point where it would feel wrong not to address in this climate. One of the driving forces of the story is how Superman intervenes in a conflict in the Middle East between the fictional military power Boravia and the smaller, weaker Jarhanpur. It is a clear allegory for the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, and it is incredibly bold and refreshing to see Gunn take a stance on the topic. He hasn’t shied away from heavy topics like American Interventionism and proxy wars in The Suicide Squad, but this is making a firm stance on the topic. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Superman is everything I was hoping it would be. Yes, I had high hopes, and while it is imperfect, I came out of the theater with so much hope. The cast is excellent from the top down, the story is as entertaining as it is rich with lore, and it truly feels like what a comic book movie should be. I completely understand, though, that some choices the movie makes won’t work for everyone, and that’s ok. Movies should be subjective, and there shouldn’t be a right or wrong opinion to have. I happened to love Superman, and I hope you come out feeling a similar way. 

5/5

If you have suggestions for movies we should check out, email suggestions@firstpicturehouse.com!

Fountain of Youth opens right in the middle of what seems to be a heist gone wrong featuring Luke Purdue (Krasinski) as he tries to lift a painting from criminals in Thailand. In what's an incredibly elaborate sequence, Luke evades capture and fights off bandits in a solidly impressive set piece I've come to expect from someone like Ritchie. His action fingers are all over the set pieces of this film. In those respects its impressive. But through all the action and stunt work that get's audiences right into the thick of it, I felt there was something missing. A particular "sauce" that brings films like these together. And unfortunately that lies with Krasinski and his performance. Treasure hunting films rely on the lead to have a particular "it factor" to work. Somewhere around what Nicolas Cage does in National Treasure or Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones.

After watching Mission: Impossible and then moving to this film, it was clear that someone like Tom Cruise or Cage or Ford bring an intangible juice to films that Krasinski just doesn't have as an action star. Don't get me wrong, he can be particularly charismatic in a The Office-type role. But here it just feels off. Sure he can pull off all the moves and looks the part. But the intangibles just aren't there. It's like watching Russell Wilson play QB in 2024. The parts may be there and the name certainly gets recognition, but he just can't do what a Lamar Jackson or a Patrick Mahomes can. Not anymore at least.

After Luke gets away with the stolen painting, he encounters Esme (Gonzalez), a mysterious somebody that flags as an ancient protector a la "Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword" from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade almost immediately. She attempts to take the painting from Luke but he inevitably gets away, setting up the films overarching chase. Luke then goes to meet his sister Charlotte Purdue (Portman), a former treasure hunter turned museum curator going through a divorce. He tries unsuccessfully to recruit her to his team of hunters, in which case he steals another painting and Charlotte chases after him, inevitably getting fired for supposedly being involved, in which event she joins the crew that includes Domhnall Gleeson, Laz Alonso and Carmen Ejogo in the search for the Fountain of Youth.

All these plot beats play extremely by-the-book, as if lifted from every other film of it's type throughout history. Fountain of Youth plays extremely predictably in that sense. You pretty much know exactly how things will play out well before they do. That could be excused if the characters work. But Krasinski and Portman have exactly zero chemistry as the lead sibling duo the film hinges on. Portman especially feels rather flat which was disappointing given that she's an incredible actress.

A lot of the issues that arise can fall down onto Guy Ritchie. He fails to get the most out of the cast he's presented with. The film, while having some really cool set pieces that he's known for, does little to maintain interest in the slower moments. Ritchie's been on a sort of "one for you, one for me" schedule and this really feels like one for the studio. Too often they go through the motions of creating a film that satisfies corporate analytics and what the studio says the audience will like versus making a film that actually appeals to people.

The end product becomes something that's just "enjoyable enough". The set pieces provide enough eye candy that'll keep you interested, but not much more. Those set pieces, though, are cool and feel like the type of Guy Ritchie film audiences have come to expect. It's just everything between those moments that leave much to be desired. I feel that Fountain of Youth is an unfortunate case of eye candy that passes the "look who's involved" test much more than the "look what these people made" test.

3/5

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His production company, Atomic Monster, recently merged with Blumhouse in January 2024. The deal brings Wan back creatively to the beautiful beast he helped create with Leigh Whannel back in 2004. As expected with the news breaking so recently, there hasn’t been any traction on Saw XI, but I don’t think it will be long before we hear the announcement that a script is being developed and production is being set in motion. The original plan for Saw XI was to be released by the end of September 2025, but disputes between Twisted Pictures and Lionsgate ended any chance of that.

I have made it known that I am not a Blumhouse fan. I don’t like how formulaic their movies are, nor how often they resort to cheap jump scares or tired storylines of trauma and grief without adding any nuance or insight to the idea. Their recent stretch of movies has been anywhere from pretty decent (like Drop, The Black Phone, or The Passenger) to borderline garbage (AfrAId, Imaginary, and Night Swim). With Tobin Bell’s age, you have to wonder what direction the franchise will go, as the Chris Rock-led Spiral came out to mixed reviews and the lowest box office of the franchise without Bell in the mix. I hope that with James Wan back in the fold, they can find a good story that doesn’t lean too heavily into tired tropes but still can bring back the campy drama the franchise has been known for, all while delivering great traps and bloody kills.

I found one of the main pillars of the movie to be the extent to which these characters would go for their family. Andy is protective of Piper, even during the mundane day-to-day activities they experience. The movie opens with her trying to make friends, but the girls make fun of her for her eyes. He consistently paints the world in a lighter lens for her to protect her from how cruel it is. He hides that their father, whom she adored, abused him and caused him to act out.

Grief and loss are the other core of Bring Her Back. Laura, played by Sally Hawkins, lost her daughter tragically and was never able to let her go. She says how it kills her that she gets to sleep in a bed, but her daughter is in the ground. She goes to unspeakable, horrific lengths for the chance to see her again. I thought some of the best moments of the movie were when she and Andy were talking about Andy’s dad dying and her daughter drowning. There, we are able to dive into these characters' psyches and why they are the way that they are.

Sally Hawkins is excellent in Bring Her Back. Similar to Hugh Grant in Heretic, her soft, sensitive demeanor draws you in and allows you to sympathize with her, but as the movie progresses and her mask comes off, she can flip the switch. Even when she is at her worst and most despicable, she still somehow maintains her sensitivity at the end. She struggles with doing what is right and wrong, and I really found the ending shot for her to be really beautiful in a way.

Billy Barratt, Jonah Wren Phillips, and Sora Wong were great finds for the film. In her first real acting role, Wong was able to have real screen presence amongst other, more experienced actors. Her relationship to Andy is what sells their family bond and what makes this movie work as well as it does.

As for Barratt, he perfectly embodies what an older brother should be. He protects his younger sister at all costs from the evils of the world and does everything he can to ensure she can live a comfortable life. He lapses and lets his anger and his repressed trauma get the best of him, but it’s what makes him feel real. Jonah didn’t have much speaking to do, but his physicality is what elevated the horror of Bring Her Back. The way he’d twitch silently or bang into walls or glass added so much tension.

To that point, Bring Her Back is very much a slow-burning horror movie as opposed to a jumpscare-filled frightfest. I do feel like they could’ve incorporated more horror elements into the story leading up to the end, as leading up to the ending, you only have glimpses of what the movie is really capable of. The best way I can describe it is like if you shot a basketball and it spun around the rim a bunch of times before finally going in. The horror lies beneath the surface here, as I was filled with more dread than anything as the story unfolded.

There are snippets of VHS that guide Laura on how to bring her daughter back that are quite unsettling and frightening to watch, but the movie doesn’t utilize them as much as you’d expect from the trailers. What gets you is the gore and practical effects, specifically what is done to Jonah Wren Phillips. So many moments throughout this movie, I had to pull my hoodie over my eyes because it gets very visceral.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Bring Her Back is one of the best horror movies of 2025 already. It is thematically rich and overall such a dark, depressing, visceral watch. The performances are all so grounded and tortured, led by the wonderful Sally Hawkins, and the gore and horror are completely dreadful in the most complimentary way possible. Bring Her Back proves once again that the Philippous have such a bright future in horror.

4/5

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The story is reminiscent of early slashers where a masked killer stalks and hunts down a group of teens, save for a final girl. Our final girl, Lori, comes from a tragic background as her father died during his and her mother’s prom night, and she was accused of his murder. As the movie opens, she knows this night will end with her either dead or killing someone. There are plenty of red herrings running around, leading to a satisfying killer reveal. There are good crumbs left to put it together, even if it falls into a common trope that I’m beginning to grow tired of. 

The kills were decent enough, but I felt like they could’ve played more into the school setting. As the movie got to the end, they got more and more brutal as you can feel the killer’s rage and frustration begin to boil over. They did a decent enough job letting us know that no one was safe. One kill used the paper cutter, but aside from that, none played into the prom environment. The killer’s design was alright as well. The mask was creepy enough, and the red hood gave them a cool silhouette, but I wouldn’t call it incredibly memorable. 

The performances were fun and matched a high school vibe, in my opinion. No one felt perfect, but they at least felt real. Lori and her horror fan friend Megan had a fun dynamic. The mean girls group was well-defined and fun on screen. They clashed well with everyone on screen and even with their group. Watching Lori come into her own throughout the movie added depth, while everything else felt pretty shallow. 

My holdup with Prom Queen is that it is okay at everything it does. The performances are okay, the kills are decent and formulaic, and the twist reveal at the end is fun, but once you start to pick up on it halfway through, it is pretty telegraphed. For a movie that is only 90 minutes long, it doesn’t feel like it flies by. The 80s nostalgia might work for someone who lived through the times, but for a younger audience, it is just an excuse to cram a bunch of older songs, VHS-style segments, and show off apparel of the time. If the story took place in 2025, nothing fundamentally changes with the story. It is pretty formulaic in how it tells its story, down to the conflict between best friends Lori and Megan and how fast it is resolved. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

 Fear Street: Prom Queen is a decent, entertaining horror film, but it suffers from its formulaic story. At the end of the day, if all they hoped to accomplish was to deepen the lore of Shadyside, then they accomplished their mission. The kills were decent and the killer had moments to shine. This is just not a movie I think I have much interest in revisiting but I think it’s well worth watching once. 

2.5/5

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The film stars Vince Vaughn as Joe Scaravella an Italian man who, after his mother dies, decides to purchase and open an Italian restaurant in her honor. However, this isn't just any bog standard italian joint. No, Joe is dead set on staffing this new restaurant with Nonnas, italian grandmothers from his local area.

Now given the story and a cast that includes Vaughn and other iconic folks like Susan Sarandon and Linda Cardellini, you'd expect Nonnas to be played as a comedy. Surprisingly, this is not the case. Instead, the film plays more as a heartfelt drama a la Jon Favreau's Chef with comedic bits sprinkled throughout. Sarandon and the other older Italian ladies, played by Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire and Brenda Vaccaro, do most of the comedic heavy lifting. The film works with the four of them on screen together, riffing off of each other in mildly stereotypical Italian fashion.

Vaughn does some great dramatic work here, especially in two separate scenes at the end of the film. However, I did feel at times like he was falling into his signature fast-talking manner only to leave without a punchline, which felt unsatisfying. But regardless of that, the low stakes of the story allow for a very fun and fulfilling time even without a true comedic backbone.

But the place where the movie succeeds the most is in the kitchen. This is a movie about food, and specifically the love we share for family cooking. I gotta say, they nailed the photography of the food in Nonnas. Everything looked incredible, cooking shots were gorgeous and having the grandmas in the kitchen felt familiar in a sort of way that touches the heart. I loved seeing the cast cook here and fortunately there is plenty of it available.

Final Thoughts

Nonnas is a really fun time. It's laid back, not too serious, and quite nostalgic if you come from a family where food was a symbol of togetherness. For a Netflix streaming original, I'm impressed with the quality of the film and can imagine it being a feel-good staple in family households.

3.5/5

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