CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 5-16-25

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I enjoy wearing pants (my neighbors are also glad that I enjoy wearing pants). I particularly enjoy wearing my Film Critic Pants. They are on, and I am ready to review four new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, May 16th, 2025.

1) FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES

We're six films deep into a franchise that, let's be honest, nobody expected to last this long. The Final Destination series, born in 2000 with a modest plane crash premonition and a whole lot of Rube Goldberg-style kills, has become one of the most beloved cult horror franchises of the last 25 years.

And in Chicago, that love runs deep—just ask the packed house at the Music Box Theatre when they ran a full marathon of all the films.

So here comes Final Destination: Bloodlines, the sixth installment, and I'll admit—I was skeptical. What's left to say in a franchise about cheating Death? Turns out, quite a bit. Not only is Bloodlines the most polished, ambitious, and stylish entry in the series—it might also be the best one.

The film kicks off, in traditional Final Destination fashion, with a spectacular, over-the-top premonition. But this time it's 1968, and we're at the grand opening of the Sky View Restaurant Tower. Iris (Gabrielle Rose), young and seemingly clairvoyant, envisions a chandelier falling, gas igniting, and the entire tower crumbling into fire and chaos. Her warning saves lives—but it disrupts Death's master plan. And as every fan of this franchise knows: Death does not like to be outwitted.

Flash forward 56 years, and Iris's granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is having nightmares. Soon, family members start dying in gloriously gruesome fashion—one by one, because they were never supposed to exist in the first place. Cue the blood, guts, and one seriously twisted supernatural vendetta.

Let's get to what Final Destination fans really want: the deaths. And Bloodlines delivers in a big, ridiculous, gloriously over-the-top way. We get a lawn mower face-shredder at a family barbecue. A cousin crushed inside a garbage truck after a slapstick stumble. A brutal hospital sequence featuring an MRI machine turned weaponized death magnet. And yes, a vending machine kill that's so outrageous it deserves a standing ovation.

The beauty of these movies is the anticipation. You know someone's going to die, but how? What will fall? What will spark? What object, seemingly innocent, will become a projectile of doom? Watching these death traps unfold is like watching a gruesome, live-action Mousetrap game—morbid, yes, but darkly delightful.

And like Final Destination 2's legendary highway pileup, the opening tower sequence here is a stunner. Shot partially in IMAX, it rivals the franchise's best disaster sequences. It's bold, bloody, and brilliant. I've watched the FD2 opener probably 20 times. This one? I'll be watching it at least 21.

Kaitlyn Santa Juana gives Stefani just enough depth to carry the emotional weight. Teo Briones, as her brother Charlie, brings an earnest charm. The young cast is uniformly solid, believable, and—yes—very good-looking, which is basically a Final Destination requirement.

But it's Tony Todd, of course, who steals the show. The horror legend returns again as Bludworth, the franchise's mysterious harbinger of doom. This is his final performance before his passing, and though visibly frail, he still brings gravitas and that iconic voice—deep, chilling, prophetic. When Tony Todd tells you Death is coming, you believe it.

Let's be clear: Final Destination: Bloodlines doesn't try to be elevated horror. It knows exactly what it is—violent, funny, inventive, over-the-top mayhem. But this time, Lipovsky and Stein's direction is more confident, the effects are top-notch, and the tone strikes a perfect balance between grotesque and gleeful.

It's self-aware without being smug, outrageous without losing narrative clarity, and bigger, bolder, and better than anything that came before it.

There's a twisted sense of humor running throughout, and it leans into the absurdity of its premise in all the right ways. Yes, the logic is bonkers. Yes, the mythology is convoluted. But that's the fun of it. This movie has the confidence to be nuts, and that confidence pays off huge.

Against all odds—and I do mean all—Final Destination: Bloodlines is not just a worthy addition to the franchise. It's the best one. Big, bloody, and bursting with clever kills and warped humor, this is exactly what fans of the series have been waiting for.

It takes the core concept and pushes it to wild, imaginative new places. It's a tribute to what the franchise does best: make you laugh, squirm, and nervously eyeball every object in the room.

A gory, hilarious, beautifully made sequel that brings new life (and death) to a franchise that should've flatlined years ago. A must-see for horror fans. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

2) FRIENDSHIP

Let me start by saying this: I'm not anti-cringe comedy. I like it when it's smart, daring, and finds a way to make the audience laugh while simultaneously wanting to crawl under their seat.

But when it's done poorly, it becomes a lazy excuse for meandering discomfort. It leans so far into "weird" that it forgets to be funny; it becomes something else entirely: Friendship.

And Friendship is one long, uncomfortable, often irritating slog through the darker corners of the suburban male psyche, with little to no payoff. The kind of movie that thinks escalating awkwardness is a substitute for insight or humor. It's not.

Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) is a man on the edge. His marriage is fraying. His career is stale. His wife (Kate Mara) is emotionally and physically detached. His son seems more connected to her ex, Devon, than to him. So when a misdelivered package brings Craig into the orbit of local weatherman Austin (Paul Rudd), he latches onto the new friendship with a mix of desperation, obsession, and... let's call it psychological unraveling.

The early moments suggest a possible redemption arc. Craig and Austin bond. They explore underground tunnels (literally and metaphorically). But things go sideways fast. After a boxing match gone wrong and a soap-in-the-mouth self-punishment stunt, Craig spirals—barging into a live weather report, losing his job, getting arrested, and even leaving his wife lost in a sewer.

By the time he's breaking into Austin's house and waving a gun around during a guys' night, we're deep in deranged territory. And this is all presented as comedy.

Tim Robinson, of I Think You Should Leave and Detroiters fame, has carved out a niche as one of the poster boys of the modern cringe movement. When he's on, he can be brilliantly weird. His sketch show contains moments of comic genius.

But Friendship plays like one of his six-minute sketches dragged out to 102 painful minutes. What works in short bursts—awkward silences, escalating outbursts, irrational behavior—becomes tedious and repetitive when stretched across an entire feature.

Robinson's Craig is a deeply disturbed man. There's not much else to say. He's not just socially awkward or emotionally stunted—he's borderline psychotic. And not in a funny way.

In a way that feels claustrophobic, suffocating, and at times, mean-spirited. He screams. He threatens. He alienates everyone in his life. The man literally steals a handgun. And yet the movie treats this behavior like it's quirky and misunderstood.

Friendship falls into a very specific category of modern comedy that I've started calling "cringe-core." This is the style perfected (and often overused) by people like Nathan Fielder, John Wilson, Eric Andre, and Larry David. It's all about making the audience squirm. And when it works, it really works. But when it doesn't? It becomes exhausting.

The granddaddy of the genre and one of my favorite comedic performers of all time is the great Tom Green. He turned cringe comedy into an art form on television and made the finest film of the genre back in 2001 with his warped masterpiece Freddy Got Fingered. That's how you do it.

Yes, this movie is about toxic masculinity, suburban loneliness, male identity, midlife crises, and the weird performance of masculinity in small-town America. But none of that depth matters if you're not laughing or engaged. The film keeps pushing the awkwardness button without any tonal balance, and eventually, that button breaks.

Paul Rudd plays Austin like he's in Anchorman again—smiling, winking, aloof. It's clearly intentional—a satire of the kind of charming, safe, masculine energy that permeates American media. But it's still hollow. The performance lacks depth, and the character never becomes more than a vessel for Craig's obsession.

Kate Mara is solid but wasted. Her character exists mostly to be disappointed in Craig. Jack Dylan Grazer, their son, gets one or two moments, but again, everyone here is mostly in service of Craig's descent into madness.

And then there's the tunnel metaphor. Oh, the tunnels. Literal underground journeys into the "darkness" of the male psyche. The film hits that nail on the head so hard it splits the board. It's not subtle or clever. It's just obvious.

Look, I get it. This movie is not trying to be a conventional comedy. It's trying to challenge the audience. It wants to make you uncomfortable, and it absolutely succeeds in that. But discomfort without insight, awkwardness without heart, and darkness without levity just make for a miserable experience.

Yes, some people will defend this by saying, "You didn't get it." That's fine. I got it. I got it 15 minutes in. And then I had to sit through another 87 minutes of the same joke played over and over again with a slightly different costume or a slightly different scream.

There are ways to do cringe comedy right—Tom Green, Eric Andre, even Tim Robinson himself has done it. But Friendship forgets the most important ingredient in comedy: the comedy. - ⭐️1/2

3) HURRY UP TOMORROW

There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a musician creating a companion film to their concept album—hell, it's been done before, and sometimes brilliantly. Think Prince and Purple Rain, think The Wall by Pink Floyd. You can turn an album into a story, or at least an audiovisual experience that feels cinematic.

But when it doesn't work—when it's just a glorified, 100-minute music video dressed up as a psychological thriller—it ends up like Hurry Up Tomorrow: shallow, self-indulgent, visually sleek, and emotionally vacant.

This is a film that tries very hard to be profound. It wants to dig into mental breakdowns, insomnia, fame, loneliness, identity, fantasy vs. reality, and existential dread. But it never moves past the surface. Instead, it floats in a dreamy void of neon lighting, pounding synths, slow motion, whispered dialogue, and a whole lot of aimless wandering.

The Weeknd—sorry, Abel Tesfaye, as he's credited here—stars as a fictionalized version of himself. He's an insomniac musician in the midst of an emotional collapse who is dragged deeper into a surreal, psychological abyss after meeting a mysterious woman named Anima (played by Jenna Ortega).

Barry Keoghan shows up as a cryptic figure named Lee, who may or may not be real. The trio drifts through a kind of kaleidoscopic dream world, occasionally grounded by moments of reality but mostly just existing in mood and metaphor.

There's a narrative here in theory. In practice? It's mostly vibes. It's about as clear as fog at 3 a.m. on Sunset Boulevard.

Abel Tesfaye is not a good actor. That's just the blunt truth. And that's a problem when you're the lead in a movie that hinges entirely on your emotional unraveling.

Even when playing himself, or at least a version of himself, he comes off wooden, stilted, and emotionally flat. You don't get insight into the character's mind. You get posturing. You get the same brooding stare over and over again.

And if you watched The Idol, the spectacular trainwreck of a TV series that all but imploded on impact, you already knew this. That show was a disaster, and Tesfaye was a big part of why. And now here we are again—except this time the disaster is dressed up as art house cinema.

Thank God for Jenna Ortega. She's the best thing in this movie by far. She's magnetic, mysterious, and totally committed. Whether slinking through surreal dreamscapes or grounding the film in moments of tenderness or tension, she brings some much-needed depth to this otherwise hollow production. Her screen presence is real.

She's becoming one of her generation's most consistently interesting actors, and her work in Wednesday and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice proves she can do strange, dark, and layered better than almost anyone. She deserves better material than this.

Barry Keoghan also pops in, doing the kind of weird, twitchy thing he's made a career out of. It's fine. But again, he's working with a script that doesn't give him much to do other than be strange.

Now, here's where things get frustrating. Trey Edward Shults is a real filmmaker. Krisha was a bold, uncomfortable masterpiece. It Comes at Night was one of recent memory's most visually and emotionally harrowing horror films. Waves had powerful, visceral storytelling and incredible performances.

So what happened here?

Visually, yes, Hurry Up Tomorrow looks fantastic. Shults knows how to frame a shot, how to use color, and how to create unease through light and sound. But all that talent is wasted on a script that feels like it was cobbled together on a sleepless night, fueled by ego and good intentions but devoid of substance. The themes are shopworn. The narrative is incoherent. The emotional beats don't land. It's a showcase of talent with no clear purpose.

We've seen this before. Artists who create films to reflect their own mental states, their struggles, their "true selves." But unless you're really saying something—unless you have a sharp script, a strong point of view, and actual performance chops—it doesn't work.

This film plays like a long, moody promo reel for an album. And maybe that's what it is. Maybe it is just an album accompaniment that accidentally got a theatrical release. But if that's the case, it should have stayed a streaming visual album and not tried to pass as a legitimate feature film.

Even the best long-form music videos—like Halsey's If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power or even Beyoncé's mediocre Lemonade—are cinematic in ways this never is. And ironically, Halsey has turned out to be a far better actor than Tesfaye. She gave a terrific performance in Maxxxine and has the chops to carry a real film. The Weeknd? Not so much.

Hurry Up Tomorrow is a stylish, empty, and ultimately disappointing film. It wastes a solid cast, a talented director, and the potential to actually explore something meaningful about fame, mental health, and identity. Instead, it drapes those themes in smoke and mirrors, hoping we won't notice that there's nothing underneath.

Fans of The Weeknd might find something to enjoy here, especially if they're familiar with the album. But as a standalone film? It doesn't work. It's a moody music video pretending to be a psychological thriller, and it crumbles under the weight of its own self-importance. - ⭐️⭐️

4) THINGS LIKE THIS

Let's start with this: I always root for passion projects. Especially when someone puts themselves on the line—writing, directing, and starring in a film. It takes guts and drive, and in the case of Things Like This, it takes a lot of heart. Max Talisman clearly cares deeply about this story, and you can feel that in some of the sweeter moments between the two Zacks at the center of it all.

Unfortunately, heart alone doesn't make a movie work. While Things Like This is commendable in its intentions, it is simply too generic, too sitcom-y, and too flat to leave much of an impact.

Zack Anthony (played by Talisman) is a struggling writer. Zack Mandel (Joey Pollari) is an assistant agent stuck in a dead-end relationship. The two meet at a showcase. There's a moment of kindness. A disastrous, bloody-nosed first date. And then, a slowly blossoming connection, complete with flashbacks to theater camp and the revelation that their paths may have crossed long ago.

From there, the rom-com checklist is ticked off one by one. Quirky side characters? Check. A big misunderstanding? Check. Montage of growing closeness? Check. Over-the-top climactic gesture to seal the deal? You'd better believe it. The twist here is that it's a same-sex romance, which is refreshing and welcome, but its structure is so familiar that it doesn't do enough to stand out.

Talisman and Pollari have some decent chemistry. There are a few moments where their back-and-forth feels natural, where a glance or a callback joke actually lands. Pollari, in particular, seems more comfortable in the role—he's got a quiet charm that works well for the more grounded scenes. Talisman, meanwhile, puts his whole heart into it, but his performance is inconsistent, and his lack of directorial experience shows.

As a director, Talisman doesn't bring much visual flair to the table. Scenes often feel flat and staged. The pacing drags. Tonal shifts aren't handled well, and the comedic beats lack sharp timing. You can sense the effort, but it just doesn't click.

Now, here's where the film scores a few points: the cast. Somehow, Talisman wrangled a lineup of familiar, talented performers into this indie labor of love. Eric Roberts shows up (as he often does—he's in everything) and gives the movie a little more gravitas. He's still got that screen presence that reminds you why, in the '70s and '80s, he was considered one of the best actors of his generation. He's not given much to do here, but his brief moments feel grounded and sincere.

Barbara Barrie, another legendary performer, and Bridget Regan, Bai Ling, Cara Buono, and Charlie Tahan also appear. It's genuinely nice to see these faces pop up, even if they're given thin, underwritten roles. You can tell they came on board because they saw the heart behind the project—and there's something to be said for that.

What's frustrating is that the bones of something special are here. A rom-com told from a gay perspective, featuring two leads named Zack? There's potential for commentary, playfulness, and breaking tropes instead of following them like a how-to guide. But Things Like This plays it way too safe.

Every beat is predictable, and every development feels recycled. Even though the film is meant to be warm and uplifting, it never fully achieves the big emotional moments it aims for.

There's also a sitcom sheen over the entire production—dialogue that feels overly tidy, pacing that relies on well-worn setups, and character arcs that never dig deep enough. It's not bad so much as bland. You've seen this movie before—maybe not exactly this one, but close enough.

I want to like Things Like This. I really do. There's a scrappy underdog spirit to it. It's nice that it got made. It's nice that it's in theaters. It's nice that Max Talisman had the drive to put this all together, gather a cast of impressive names, and follow through on his vision.

But good intentions don't make for great storytelling. This is a movie with its heart in the right place but not enough originality, style, and substance to make it work. It feels more like a pilot for a rom-com sitcom than a fully fleshed-out feature. - ⭐️⭐️

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