CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 7-31-26
- Nick Digilio
- 1 day ago
- 14 min read
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review three new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, July 31st, 2026.
Whenever I review a comic book movie, I feel obligated to begin with the same disclaimer: I am not a comic book guy. I never grew up reading them, I do not follow the complicated timelines, alternate universes, resurrections, reboots, streaming shows, post-credit sequences, or whatever other nonsense has been invented to keep these giant corporate properties alive forever.
I am also not a fan of the overwhelming majority of comic book movies produced by Marvel, DC, or anyone else trying to get a piece of that extraordinarily profitable pie.
To me, most of these movies are calculated exercises in fan service designed primarily to get people through the door, sell merchandise, and keep intellectual property circulating indefinitely.
Characters can die and return in another timeline. Entire relationships can be erased with a magical spell. Anything can be undone whenever the studio needs another sequel. There are no real rules because the only rule that matters is keeping the franchise alive and squeezing more money out of the audience.
That does not mean I have disliked every comic book movie ever made. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 remains one of the greatest comic book movies of all time and, more importantly, a legitimately great film.
Logan is beautiful and melancholy, and the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse are extraordinary, they are visually imaginative, emotionally rich, and far less beholden to the smug, self-referential formula that dominates so many live-action superhero movies.
Unfortunately, I have never been a fan of the three previous Spider-Man movies starring Tom Holland. I found them loud, shallow, overly cute, and consumed by Marvel references and irritating meta-humor.
Holland always struck me as an oddly bland presence whose performance felt strained, as though he were constantly reaching through the screen and begging the audience to find him adorable.
That changes with Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
This is easily the best of the four Tom Holland Spider-Man movies. Admittedly, that is not an especially difficult achievement, considering how little I thought of the previous three, but this one surprised me.
It has real emotional weight, it occasionally allows its characters to behave like recognizable human beings, and for the first time in this series, Holland gives a performance I genuinely liked.
The biggest reason is director Destin Daniel Cretton. He is not simply a hired hand brought in to service a corporate franchise. He made the excellent drama Short Term 12, a deeply compassionate and beautifully acted movie about damaged people trying to care for one another, and later directed Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, one of the very few Marvel movies I have actually enjoyed.
He understands character, emotion, performance, and visual storytelling. He also knows how to stage a big action sequence without allowing the special effects to replace basic human feeling.
His presence makes an enormous difference.
Brand New Day takes place four years after the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, when Doctor Strange’s spell caused the entire world to forget Peter Parker ever existed. Peter has chosen not to reintroduce himself to MJ or Ned because he believes they will be safer without him.
He now lives alone in a crummy apartment, dedicating virtually every waking moment to anonymously protecting New York City as Spider-Man.
His aunt is dead. His friends do not remember him. The woman he loves has moved on. He visits the cemetery, leaves flowers, returns home, and waits for the next emergency because fighting crime is the only thing preventing him from confronting the enormous sadness consuming him.
This is a movie about loneliness.
That gives Brand New Day a depth missing from the earlier Holland films. Peter’s heartbreak is not simply a plot device used to motivate the next explosion. It begins changing him physically and psychologically.
His senses become more intense, his behavior grows increasingly aggressive, and his body undergoes a frightening transformation. He develops the ability to produce organic webs, his eyes occasionally turn completely black, and he begins losing control of the person (and superhero) he thought he understood.
Peter turns to Bruce Banner, played once again by Mark Ruffalo, for help. Banner knows something about living inside a body capable of changing violently and unpredictably, and the relationship between the two gives the movie some of its strongest dramatic material.
Peter is terrified that grief and anger are transforming him into something he cannot control, and Banner recognizes that fear immediately.
Meanwhile, a mysterious figure begins moving from person to person, possessing bodies and using them to commit crimes and free dangerous prisoners, including Mac Gargan, better known as Scorpion. Eventually, the threat is revealed to be Jean Grey, played by Sadie Sink, who is seeking revenge against the authorities she blames for the death of her sister.
The body-hopping material immediately reminded me of The Hidden, the terrific 1987 science-fiction thriller in which an alien creature jumps from one human host to another, turning ordinary people into violent criminals before abandoning their bodies.
Wes Craven’s Shocker played with a similar idea a couple of years later. For a significant stretch, Brand New Day borrows so heavily from The Hidden that I kept thinking about how much I would rather be watching The Hidden.
The new version is certainly slicker. The special effects are excellent, and Cretton creates an effective sense of paranoia because Peter can detect the presence moving between people without always knowing where it has gone.
Sadie Sink has several strong moments, particularly once the movie stops treating her as a mysterious plot mechanism and allows her to become an actual character.
The film also brings back Frank Castle, the Punisher, played by Jon Bernthal. This is where my usual frustration with Marvel briefly returned. Apparently, aspects of the relationship between Spider-Man and the Punisher had already been established elsewhere in Marvel’s endless parade of streaming programs and specials—none of which I watch. The movie simply assumes everyone knows why these characters recognize each other.
Well, I didn’t.
Once I figured it out, however, Holland and Bernthal became entertaining together. Their hostility gradually develops into an amusing older-brother-and-younger-brother dynamic.
Castle understands Peter’s isolation because he has also withdrawn from the world, and while their methods could not be more different, both men are responding to grief by turning themselves into weapons.
Bernthal brings his usual intensity to Frank Castle, even within the limitations of a PG-13 Marvel production, and gives Peter the kind of hard-edged guidance nobody else can provide.
Zendaya is also excellent again as MJ. She has always brought more intelligence and emotional specificity to these movies than the writing necessarily deserved. The difference here is that MJ does not remember Peter. Watching him remain at a distance while she lives an entirely separate life gives the story genuine pain.
There is no easy reunion or cheap return to the previous status quo. Peter must confront the reality that sacrificing himself to protect someone does not make the loneliness any less devastating.
I happened to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day during a particularly difficult and lonely time in my own life. Film critics are human beings too. We bring our histories, moods, losses, fears, and personal baggage into a movie theater just like everyone else. Sometimes a film arrives at exactly the moment when you are most vulnerable to what it has to say.
This one did.
Peter’s isolation, heartbreak, and desperate attempt to remain useful while feeling completely forgotten struck me personally. The movie understands how loneliness changes a person, not just emotionally, but physically. It alters how you sleep, how you move, how you think, and how you relate to other people.
Peter’s evolving powers become an effective metaphor for everything happening inside him. The pain he refuses to confront is reshaping his body and threatening to turn him into someone he no longer recognizes.
That is deeper and more emotionally intelligent than anything in the previous three Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, and Holland rises to the material. For once, he is not constantly mugging, quipping, and pushing that shrill, artificially charming persona I have always disliked.
He plays Peter as exhausted, frightened, sad, and emotionally stranded. His physical performance is strong, but the quieter moments are what finally convinced me. Cretton deserves enormous credit for drawing that performance out of him.
The action is also extremely well done. The swinging sequences have a real sense of speed and danger, the chases are clearly staged, and the explosions do not become the usual meaningless visual sludge.
A prison battle involving Spider-Man and sword-wielding fighters is exciting, beautifully edited, and easy to follow. There is weight and geography to the combat, qualities far too many modern superhero movies abandon in favor of frantic digital chaos.
Of course, Brand New Day is still a Marvel movie, and it carries all the usual Marvel baggage. There are too many smug meta-jokes and unnecessary references designed to make devoted fans applaud because they recognize something.
The movie runs approximately two and a half hours and is at least thirty minutes too long. The first forty-five minutes are excellent, but the pacing begins to sag once more villains, franchise connections, subplots, and action sequences are piled into the story.
Marvel remains terrified of simplicity.
There is a very good, much tighter movie inside Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but it is occasionally buried beneath the obligations of the franchise. The villain’s gimmick is derivative, the fan service remains irritating, and there are moments when the movie nearly disappears beneath its own mythology.
But it has feeling.
It has a central character whose pain matters. It has a director who understands actors. It has action sequences constructed with clarity and purpose. Most importantly, it treats heartbreak and loneliness as genuine emotional forces rather than temporary obstacles that can be eliminated with another magical spell.
Considering my general feelings about comic books, Marvel, cinematic universes, and this particular version of Spider-Man, the fact that I am recommending Spider-Man: Brand New Day says quite a bit.
It is flawed, overlong, and still very much a Marvel product. But it also has a heart.
This time, that was enough. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Gregg Araki occupies a fascinating place in modern independent cinema. Whether you love his movies or can't stand them, there's no denying his importance. As one of the defining voices of the New Queer Cinema movement, Araki helped reshape independent filmmaking in the early '90s with movies like Totally F**ed Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere.
His work challenged conventions, embraced outsiders, and pushed boundaries at a time when very few filmmakers were willing to do so. Over the years he's built an unmistakable style, one filled with loud music, heightened performances, saturated colors, fractured storytelling, and unapologetic sexuality. Historically, his influence is undeniable.
That doesn't necessarily mean I enjoy his movies.
I acknowledge Gregg Araki's impact on cinema far more than I've liked the films themselves. For me, he's always been a filmmaker who mistakes provocation for insight. His movies often feel like they're straining to shock you instead of saying anything particularly meaningful.
Everything is turned up to eleven (the sex, the music, the performances, the colors) but beneath all that noise, I've rarely found characters I genuinely care about or stories that linger after the credits roll. Twelve years after his last feature, I Want Your Sex doesn't change my opinion.
The film follows an eager young man whose dream job working for a celebrated contemporary artist quickly evolves into something far stranger. Professional boundaries dissolve as their relationship becomes increasingly intimate, manipulative, and obsessive, eventually spiraling into a mixture of workplace satire, erotic comedy, and murder mystery.
It's an intentionally outrageous premise that gives Araki plenty of opportunities to indulge his favorite themes of sex, power, identity, and artistic pretension. The problem is that almost everything here feels borrowed.
Part workplace comedy, part BDSM satire, part art-world farce, the movie constantly reminded me of better films. There are shades of Secretary and Fifty Shades of Grey in its exploration of dominance and submission, while its fish-out-of-water workplace humor recalls everything from The Office to The Devil Wears Prada.
Even this year's Pillion explored similar power dynamics with considerably more honesty, humor, and emotional depth. That film actually taught me something about its characters and the world they inhabited. I Want Your Sex simply uses those dynamics as another excuse for broad comedy and provocation.
Araki also takes repeated swings at the contemporary art world, but again, it's satire we've seen before, and done much better. Pretentious gallery openings, self-important artists, ridiculous installations, wealthy collectors who mistake nonsense for genius...none of this feels fresh.
Movies from Art School Confidential to Ruben Östlund's The Square, and even the underrated Velvet Buzzsaw, have already mined this territory with sharper writing and far more insightful observations.
Going all the way back to Roger Corman's A Bucket of Blood, artists have been ripe targets for satire. Araki doesn't really add anything new to the conversation.
Visually, though, the movie certainly has energy.
Every frame explodes with bright colors, oversized production design, loud costumes, pounding music, and exaggerated performances. Araki has always understood how to create a sensory overload, and he certainly hasn't lost that talent.
The movie is constantly moving, constantly shouting, constantly trying to overwhelm the audience. Whether that's exhilarating or exhausting probably depends on your tolerance for his style. For me, after a while, it simply became repetitive. Bigger doesn't automatically mean better.
The cast, however, deserves considerably more credit than the material they're given.
Olivia Wilde (not one of my favorites) does attack this role with absolute fearlessness. She's completely committed, embracing the film's explicit sexuality, outrageous comedy, and heightened tone without a hint of hesitation.
It's a bold performance from a limited actress who has never been afraid to take chances, and she throws herself into every uncomfortable, awkward, and over-the-top situation Araki creates.
Unfortunately, the character itself never develops beyond a collection of familiar clichés about provocative artists and manipulative geniuses. Wilde does everything she can, but there's only so much an actor can do when the screenplay refuses to deepen the character.
Cooper Hoffman is equally committed and, in many ways, winds up being the movie's biggest asset. Like his late father, Philip Seymour Hoffman, he has an instinctive ability to find humor in uncomfortable situations without overselling them.
He generates most of the movie's genuine laughs, largely because he's willing to make himself look ridiculous while still maintaining an underlying sincerity. Even when the screenplay lets him down, Hoffman never does.
The supporting cast is filled with talented people who unfortunately don't get much of an opportunity to shine. Chase Sui Wonders comes closest, bringing an easy charm and comic timing that often elevates scenes beyond what the script deserves.
Mason Gooding has a few amusing moments, but Daveed Diggs is trapped playing yet another overworked, sarcastic assistant whose dialogue feels assembled from every movie and television show about impossible bosses.
Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho (two performers I absolutely love) are almost criminally underused. Their framing scenes promise a comic energy that never materializes. And Charli XCX feels less like an actual character than stunt casting designed to appeal to the movie's target audience.
That's really my biggest issue with Gregg Araki as a filmmaker.
Everything feels calculated to announce how daring it is. Every outrageous moment seems designed to make the audience notice how outrageous it is. The explicit sexuality, the loud soundtrack, the hyperactive editing, the exaggerated performances, the relentless visual excess...it all feels like surface.
Araki pushes buttons because he enjoys pushing buttons, not because doing so reveals anything deeper about the people on screen. The satire remains broad. The characters remain one-dimensional. The emotional stakes never develop.
For all its provocative marketing and explicit content, I Want Your Sex is surprisingly shallow. It mistakes volume for substance, provocation for insight, and style for storytelling. That's been my issue with Gregg Araki's work for decades, and this latest film only reinforces it.
I respect Gregg Araki enormously for what he's contributed to independent filmmaking and LGBTQ+ cinema. His influence is undeniable, and his place in film history is secure. I simply wish his movies were as intelligent, insightful, and emotionally involving as they believe themselves to be.
I Want Your Sex certainly gets your attention. It just never earns it. - ⭐️1/2
I've always found the work of Hirokazu Kore-eda to be fascinating. Even when one of his films doesn't completely work for me, I'm interested because he's one of those filmmakers who returns to the same emotional territory over and over again, examining it from different angles.
Family, grief, memory, loss, children finding their place in the world, these have been the cornerstones of his career for more than three decades. Whether it was Maborosi, Shoplifters, Broker, or Monster, he's consistently explored what defines a family and how people rebuild themselves after unimaginable tragedy.
Now, with Sheep in the Box, Kore-eda ventures into outright science fiction for the first time.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's a trip that suits him particularly well.
Set in a near future where advanced artificial intelligence has become part of everyday life, Sheep in the Box centers on a married couple still devastated by the death of their young son.
Through a company specializing in humanoid robotics, they bring home an android that perfectly resembles the child they lost, hoping that this impossible technological miracle might somehow help them process their grief. The experiment begins raising difficult emotional questions about memory, identity, and what it truly means to let someone go.
On paper, that sounds like a perfect fit for Kore-eda, but in execution, it never quite comes together.
The biggest problem is that the movie feels like a collection of ideas we've already seen this filmmaker explore, only this time filtered through a science-fiction framework that never feels entirely comfortable.
The emotional territory is familiar, but instead of uncovering something new, Sheep in the Box often feels like Kore-eda revisiting themes he's examined far more deeply and more honestly in earlier films.
Adding robots doesn't automatically create fresh insight. The science-fiction element, surprisingly, is the weakest part of the movie.
As I watched it, I couldn't help thinking about Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a deeply flawed film that wrestled with many of these same questions more than twenty-five years ago.
Even more unavoidable is the comparison to Kogonada's beautiful After Yang, which also explored an artificial child becoming an emotional member of a grieving family. That film handled the intersection of technology, memory, and loss with remarkable elegance and philosophical depth.
More than once during Sheep in the Box, I found myself wishing I were simply watching After Yang again. That's never a good sign. To be fair, there are moments that remind you why Kore-eda remains such an admired filmmaker.
He's still extraordinarily gifted at observing human behavior. The central performances are pretty powerful, and Haruka Ayase and Daigo Yamamoto make the grief at the center of the story feel authentic even when the screenplay begins wandering into more conventional science-fiction territory.
Their relationship carries emotional weight because Kore-eda has always understood how people communicate through silence, hesitation, and everyday gestures better than almost anyone working today.
I also appreciated the subtle contrast between the two lead characters. One is an architect, someone who imagines possibilities and embraces the conceptual. The other is a carpenter, someone grounded in physical reality and craftsmanship. That becomes an interesting metaphor for how each approaches the android child.
One desperately wants to believe in the emotional possibility of this replacement; the other instinctively understands that no amount of technological perfection can erase genuine loss. It's one of the movie's smartest ideas. I just wish the film trusted those human moments more than it does.
Instead, Kore-eda gradually pushes the story toward increasingly elaborate science-fiction and fairy-tale territory. The android child begins exhibiting weird behavior, wandering into mysterious forests, encountering other synthetic children, and becoming involved in a subplot that hints at something much larger happening beneath the surface.
Rather than deepening the emotional core, these developments pull the movie away from what initially made it compelling. The world-building never really convinces.
For someone who's spent most of his career making intimate family dramas rooted in recognizable emotional reality, Kore-eda doesn't seem entirely comfortable constructing a futuristic universe.
The mythology surrounding the artificial intelligence, the corporation responsible for creating these children, and the broader implications of the technology all feel underdeveloped. Instead of enriching the story, they often distract from it.
Ironically, some of the strongest scenes are the ones that emphasize the cold, clinical reality of the technology rather than its fantasy. There's a creepy sequence involving routine maintenance on the robot that captures exactly the kind of emotional discomfort the movie should have explored more thoroughly.
Watching this beloved "child" treated as a machine is genuinely disturbing. It's one of the few moments where the science fiction and the emotional drama actually work together. Unfortunately, those moments are too rare.
Not many contemporary filmmakers have explored fractured families, absent children, and emotional healing with more compassion than Kore-eda. That's exactly why Sheep in the Box feels like a missed opportunity. Rather than expanding those ideas through science fiction, it mostly repeats them. The technology changes, but the emotional discoveries don't.
Technically, the film is exactly what you'd expect from a filmmaker of Kore-eda's stature. It's beautifully photographed, elegantly edited, and understated in all the right ways. The performances are uniformly excellent, and there isn't a false note anywhere in the acting.
Craft has never been the issue. Originality is.
For me, Sheep in the Box ultimately feels like a talented filmmaker revisiting familiar material while borrowing too heavily from better science-fiction films that have already asked (and answered) many of the same questions.
I admire Hirokazu Kore-eda too much not to appreciate the sincerity behind the film. But sincerity alone isn't enough.
Sheep in the Box reaches for something larger, stranger, and more futuristic, but in doing so, it loses sight of the emotional clarity that has always made Kore-eda's films so memorable.
I wish I could recommend it. Unfortunately, I can't. - ⭐️⭐️
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