CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 7-4-25
- Jul 5
- 14 min read
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It's a holiday weekend (and, not to mention, MY BIRTHDAY weekend), so it's a fun time. I am wearing nice shorts. Nice Film Critic Shorts that is. They fit. They are on, and I'm ready to review four new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, July 4, 2025.
I've never been a fan of the Jurassic Park franchise. Yeah, yeah, I know. Heresy. Sacrilege. I'm supposed to bow at the altar of Spielberg's 1993 dino spectacle. But here's the thing: it takes forever for the dinosaurs to show up, the characters are flat as cardboard, and the script is loaded with clichés.
When Jeff Goldblum sarcastically asks in the first one, "Are there going to be any dinosaurs in your dinosaur park?"—I was like, exactly! My thoughts precisely.
I grew up on Godzilla. When you promise me monsters, I want monsters. Eating people. Wrecking things. Not 90 minutes of smug scientists standing around talking about chaos theory.
I've felt that way about almost all of the entries in the Park and World series. Underwhelming, overproduced, and loaded with one-dimensional characters, the Jurassic series (except for some cool sequences in The Lost World and the terrific, inexplicable Gothic Horror-inspired final half of Fallen Kingdom) is just not good.
Which brings us to Jurassic World Rebirth. My expectations? Below sea level. But what I got was something I never expected: the best damn movie in the entire Jurassic franchise.
A wildly entertaining, tongue-in-cheek, absolutely bonkers monster flick that finally, finally delivers the movie we've deserved for thirty years. This isn't just a course correction. It's a complete, glorious, hilarious rebirth.
The film kicks off with a disaster caused by a lab tech who just wants a Snickers bar—yes, you read that right—and, in doing so, accidentally sets off a chain of events that will lead to a mutated, six-limbed Distortus Rex wreaking havoc on an isolated island. If that doesn't set the tone for what you're in for, I don't know what will.
The story? Scarlett Johansson (looking fabulous and having fun) plays Zora Bennett, a mercenary brought in by a shady pharma company to extract biomaterials from three remaining prehistoric titans. The DNA could cure diseases... or make rich people richer. You can guess where this goes.
She's joined by Mahershala Ali (stoic boat captain), Jonathan Bailey (earnest paleontologist), Ed Skrein (resident jerk), Rupert Friend (the most cartoonish corporate villain since RoboCop), and a cast of disposable side characters, including a stranded civilian family. There's the heroic dad, the moody teen, the dumb boyfriend, the cute little girl, and—yes—plenty of dino bait.
This is David Koepp at his smartest. The guy who wrote Jurassic Park comes full circle and, rather than trying to pretend the franchise still has gravitas, decides to roast it. Rebirth is pure satire. It's Congo for the 2020s. It's Tremors meets Aliens meets Jaws meets Gilligan's Island. And it knows exactly what it is.
Every character is a cliché—and Koepp knows it. The dialogue is knowingly dumb. The action is hyper-staged. The archetypes are embraced: the cold-hearted mercenary with a change of heart, the noble scientist, the greedy pharma exec, the bumbling but lovable boyfriend who comes through in the end.
You've seen it all before—but never like this.
This is what happens when a screenwriter says, "Screw it, let's blow up the formula and have some fun."
Gareth Edwards (Rogue One) steps behind the camera and absolutely nails it. The man knows how to shoot action. The set pieces are explosive, gorgeously composed, and packed with old-school tension.
We get thrilling sea monster attacks. We get jungle ambushes. We get a full-blown Aliens-style escape sequence through a subterranean lab filled with failed dino experiments, both dead and alive.
The editing is sharp. The effects are top-notch, mixing practical and CGI in ways that pop off the screen. And best of all, Edwards keeps the humor flowing without sacrificing the thrills. This is popcorn cinema done with craftsmanship and wink-wink wit.
The dinosaurs here? Fantastic. Weird, mutated, monstrous, and gloriously impractical. The Distortus Rex—with its six limbs and malformed body—is nightmare fuel in the best way.
There's a mid-movie set piece involving aerial pterosaurs attacking climbers on a cliff face that's pure Spielbergian suspense...if Spielberg still had the sense of humor he once possessed forty-five years ago.
And people actually die in this movie! Gloriously. Stupidly. Bloodily. Others get yanked off ropes, devoured by sea monsters, or blown to bits by collapsing bunkers. These aren't sanitized PG kills. These are big, dumb, satisfying horror-movie deaths.
It all culminates in a wild third act in a decaying underground lab where the team races to escape while the Distortus Rex tears through everything like a mutated Godzilla on bath salts. Characters scream. Helicopters explode. There's a race to the boat. The boyfriend redeems himself. You know the drill. But it's all done with such energy and glee that you don't care.
And yes, there's a final moral takeaway—about using science for good versus profit—but the film never gets preachy. Because really, who are we kidding? We're here for the dino kills. And Rebirth delivers.
Jurassic World Rebirth is dumb. And funny. And exciting. And yes, satirical as hell. It's everything this franchise should've been from the beginning: a full-throttle monster mash with just enough brains to know how stupid it is.
Is it high art? Of course not. It's the definition of a summer blockbuster. But it's great summer blockbuster filmmaking—clever, crowd-pleasing, energetic, and just a little subversive.
I loved it. Some people are going to hate it. Some already do. But I had a blast. This is easily the most fun I've had with a Jurassic movie—and honestly, it might be the only good one. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
40 Acres is not a great post-apocalyptic thriller. It leans heavily on familiar genre beats, throws in a subplot about cannibalism that doesn't really go anywhere, and its messaging occasionally trips over its own symbolism. But I'm still recommending it—and I'll tell you why.
At its core, 40 Acres is a survival story, yes. But more than that, it's a family drama. A gritty, uneven, sometimes frustrating but undeniably unique perspective on the end of the world told through the lens of a Black and Indigenous family fighting to protect what's theirs. And that's something we don't see often—especially in this genre.
What ultimately holds this movie together is one of the best performances I've seen all year. Danielle Deadwyler is extraordinary. She's the reason this thing works, even when it shouldn't.
The film opens with the usual post-apocalyptic text crawl: 98% of the animal population is wiped out by a fungal pandemic. Food becomes scarce. Civilization collapses. Cannibalism enters the chat. A second Civil War erupts. You've heard variations on this before.
But what makes 40 Acres different is the setting and the people at the center. The Freemans are descendants of African American farmers who settled in Canada after escaping slavery in the 1870s. Fourteen years after the collapse, they're holding down a 40-acre farm passed through generations, surviving off the grid and trusting absolutely no one.
Danielle Deadwyler's character, Hailey, runs the farm like a military base, which makes sense—she met her partner, Galen (Michael Greyeyes), when they were both soldiers. Their kids are trained in combat, firearms, and farming. It's part The Road, part Home Alone, part survivalist boot camp.
But the real conflict begins when Manny (Kataem O'Connor), the teenage son, takes in an injured outsider named Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas). Desire, empathy, and rebellion follow—because, of course, they do. He's a teenager who's never known connection. It's all very apocalypse-meets-coming-of-age.
Danielle Deadwyler gives a performance that's equal parts fury and heartbreak. She's a hardened soldier, a protective mother, and a woman barely holding it together. Whether she's training her kids with boxing gloves or stabbing a guy in the neck, she commands every frame she's in.
Deadwyler was terrific in Till, The Piano Lesson, and The Woman in the Yard, and here she adds "post-apocalyptic action hero" to her résumé. She's believable in every moment—stoic, fierce, funny, and occasionally terrifying. She's the movie's heart, muscle, and soul.
This is the feature debut of R.T. Thorne, a director with a background in music videos and TV. And you can tell. There's style here. A nighttime shootout lit only by the flashes of gunfire is a standout. It's creative, effective, and budget-friendly. Smart directing.
But other scenes feel flat. The pacing lags. Some of the character beats are undercooked. The cannibal subplot—introduced early, referenced a few times, then largely forgotten—feels half-baked. There's a moment where a raid on the farm is shot like a horror sequence, but the threat never fully materializes.
Thorne's got potential, but this isn't a home run. It's a competent first effort, not a breakout.
We've seen this apocalypse before—food scarcity, ecological collapse, distrusting outsiders. What's fresh is the perspective. This is a Black and Indigenous family defending their land against outsiders, and the title 40 Acres doesn't exactly hide its symbolism. It's not subtle, but it's powerful.
There's also a lot of generational tension in the story—how trauma and history inform survival. Hailey sees the world as something to keep out. Her son sees the need to let something in. That conflict, while not always elegantly written, is real and resonant.
The humor works in spots—there's a great moment where Hailey interrupts her son's emotional moment with a perfectly timed, no-nonsense mom command. The family dynamic feels lived-in. That helps.
Let's be honest: the cannibalism angle is kind of a throwaway. It's teased as a big threat, then barely explored. A few nods here and there, but it never feels like a real part of the world. If you're going to introduce that level of horror, you have to commit to it. 40 Acres doesn't.
And for a movie being marketed as a thriller, it's really more of a character piece. If you're expecting 28 Weeks Later-style pacing or The Road-level dread, you might be disappointed. This is a slow burn—more about family dynamics than flesh-eating horror.
Also, the messaging can be heavy-handed. The symbolism of the land, the history, the mistrust—it's not subtle. That's not always a bad thing, but it doesn't leave much room for nuance.
40 Acres is a flawed film. It's uneven, occasionally clunky, and not as thrilling as its premise suggests. But it's also an original vision grounded in a point of view we don't often see in this genre. The post-apocalyptic landscape is usually whitewashed. Not here.
It's coming out the same year as 28 Years Later and Ryan Coogler's Sinners—two other apocalyptic stories rooted in racial, generational, and systemic themes. 40 Acres definitely belongs in that conversation, even with its flaws.
Call it a trilogy of timely survival stories. This one's the smallest of the three—but it still earns a seat at the table, and it is actually better than Coogler's overrated film.
And again, Danielle Deadwyler. She's a reason to watch. Period. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Sorry, Baby is not an easy film to review. Not because of its subject matter—which is undeniably serious and deserves respect—but because it's one of those rare indie films that gets everything wrong while clearly thinking it's getting everything right.
Critics have fallen over themselves praising it since its Sundance premiere. A24 snapped it up after a bidding war. Barry Jenkins is a producer. All the ingredients of a modern indie hit are here.
And yet, this thing plays like someone found a lost mumblecore movie from 2007, slapped on a few contemporary themes, and tossed it into a time machine headed for 2025.
This isn't a movie. It's a film school project that thinks it's saying something profound while serving up warmed-over tropes, twee structure, and style-over-substance storytelling.
It's as if someone watched every bad Sundance entry from the early 2000s and decided to remake them all at once—with chapter headings like "The Year With the Sandwich."
Yes. That's real.
The film centers on Agnes (played by writer/director Eva Victor), a college professor trying to recover from a sexual assault. Told mostly in chronological order but peppered with jarring, non-linear fragments, the story opens in a chapter titled "The Year with the Baby," where Agnes is visited by her pregnant best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie).
We're then taken back to "The Year with the Bad Thing," where Agnes, then a student, was assaulted by Professor Decker (Louis Cancelmi). The film sidesteps depicting the actual event in a deliberate, observational style—lingering instead on the outside of the house for hours as time passes.
I get the intention. Eva Victor wants to avoid cheap emotional manipulation. They don't want to make another trauma porn indie. But in trying so hard to be different, they've created something so removed and restrained that it becomes emotionally inert. Agnes's experience is treated like a puzzle instead of a tragedy. The result is cold, distant, and tonally confused.
Let's talk about mumblecore. If you were around in the mid-2000s, you know the deal: low budgets, handheld cameras, naturalistic dialogue, lots of awkward silence, and twentysomethings emotionally stunted in sweaters.
There were some great mumblecore movies—The Puffy Chair, Wendy and Lucy, Obvious Child, early Noah Baumbach, and early Greta Gerwig. But for every gem, there were ten tedious, plotless slogs made by film school dropouts pretending to be deep.
Sorry, Baby is one of the latter. It's a time capsule from 2009, wearing all the worst elements of that subgenre like a badge of honor. Chapter titles that feel cutesy and forced. Dialogue that sounds like improv warmups.
Plot points that are dropped in casually and then never followed up. Non-linear structure for no good reason. Handheld shots that scream, "Look at me, I'm an indie film!"
The long one-take after Agnes's assault, as she drives home in shock, is meant to be powerful. But it plays like a film school thesis reel. A gimmick. A "watch this" moment that pulls you out of the story instead of drawing you in. The film constantly reminds you it's being directed, and that's a problem.
The cast here is genuinely stacked. Naomi Ackie is a force—warm, authentic, and deeply empathetic. Her scenes with Victor are the best in the movie.
Lucas Hedges plays the sweet next-door neighbor Gavin with his usual mumblecore charm (of course), but their relationship is predictable and tepid.
John Carroll Lynch shows up and, as usual, blows everyone off the screen in five minutes flat. He's the only one who feels like he's inhabiting a real person.
But even the best actors can't save a script that confuses vague gestures for character development. The attempts at humor fall flat. A stray kitten as a metaphor for healing? Really? That was old in 1998.
The supporting cast has rich potential, but they're trapped in a structure that's so afraid of melodrama that it forgets to be human.
I want to make this very clear: I have nothing but respect for the seriousness of the subject matter. Sexual assault is not something to be handled lightly. And Victor clearly has personal stakes in this story. You can feel them trying—trying not to make an "issue" movie, trying to avoid the clichés, trying to be fresh and irreverent and unexpected.
But the film fails not because it's about something serious—but because it's not well-made. The tone is muddled. The comedy isn't funny. The emotion doesn't land. The script is cluttered with posturing and pretense. It wants to be Barry Jenkins meets Frances Ha, but it ends up as The Year of the Overcooked Idea.
Sorry, Baby is a film that thinks it's being brave by avoiding clichés—but in doing so, it becomes another kind of cliché. The tired Sundance indie. The over-directed debut. The mumblecore throwback. It's all too familiar and all too hollow.
Yes, it's about something important. But that doesn't make it good. You don't get points just for picking a serious topic. You have to make a compelling, original, effective movie about that topic. This isn't it. - ⭐️1/2
There's a certain brand of movie that you know will be dumb. It has the kind of trailer where everyone is shouting, every explosion is cut to a butt-rock riff, and someone yells, "Go go go!" while bullets fly past in a slow-motion gunfight. Heads of State is that movie.
A made-for-streaming slab of Prime Video nonsense where the pitch was clearly: "What if The West Wing was written by a 12-year-old who just discovered Call of Duty and Rush Hour?"
Well, Amazon said yes. And now we have this movie. And wow, is it dumb.
The film stars John Cena as Will Derringer, a former action movie star who is now the President of the United States, and Idris Elba as Sam Clarke, a SAS-trained Prime Minister of the UK. And they don't like each other.
One's a WWE-style blowhard. The other is an actual trained commando. Together, they must stop a global conspiracy involving terrorists, betrayals, and enough bullets to level half of Europe.
Air Force One gets shot down. They survive. Wackiness ensues. That's the setup.
Helping them is MI6 badass Noel Bisset (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), the only character in this movie who seems like she's read the script and decided, "Screw it, I'll give a real performance anyway."
Jack Quaid shows up to be the nerdy gun-loving sidekick (because of course he does), and Paddy Considine is the techy villain who might as well be named "Mr. Blank Stare."
Let's talk about John Cena for a second. He's a likable presence in the right movie (Peacemaker, anyone?), but here, he plays the President like he's still cutting a promo on RAW. Mugging, shouting, cartoonish overacting—it's the subtlety of a sledgehammer. His work on RAW is actually much more entertaining.
And somehow, next to Idris Elba's steely-eyed straight man, Cena looks even more ridiculous. Elba tries. He really does. He shows up, hits his marks, growls out his lines, and cashes the check. He's not bad—he's just marooned in a sea of nonsense.
Now, here's the kicker: this movie took four people to write. Four. And what they came up with is a collection of every buddy-cop cliché, mismatched duo trope, and action beat you've seen since 1988.
There are "I work alone" speeches. There are "We're not so different, you and I" monologues. There's banter so lazy it might've been generated by typing "insert witty insult" into a Word doc.
Political satire? Forget it. The most it offers is "cool Brit annoyed by loud American." It's like Veep filtered through Fast & Furious 9 but without any actual jokes.
Ilya Naishuller directs this thing. He's the guy behind Hardcore Henry (the all-first-person shooter movie that wore out its gimmick 15 minutes in) and Nobody (a mediocre action flick with Bob Odenkirk).
Here, he returns to his bag of tricks: fast cuts, lots of CGI blood, and shootouts that feel like someone threw every gun into a blender and pressed "puree."
Most of the action is uninspired. Seen it, seen it, seen it. Until—yes, wait for it—The Car Chase.
About 90 minutes in, Heads of State delivers one of the best action sequences of the year. No joke. An extended chase sequence involving the presidential limo, terrorists in SUVs, a fire truck, explosions, hand grenades, drones, and even a surprise small tank—all choreographed to Mötley Crüe's "Kickstart My Heart."
It's loud. It's chaotic. It's gloriously over-the-top. It's also the only part of the movie where Naishuller's direction actually clicks. It's the one time the tone, pacing, editing, and musical cue all work in perfect harmony.
For about 10 minutes, this movie becomes exactly what it should have been the whole time: fun, dumb, and awesome.
Too bad it's surrounded by 100 minutes of filler.
Priyanka Chopra Jonas is the standout here. She gets the tone right. She's funny, convincing in her action scenes, and adds actual charisma.
And after being presumed dead, she returns with a genuinely funny, quick-cut montage explaining how she survived. It's clever. It's stylish. And it's over in 45 seconds.
Stephen Root shows up to Stephen Root it up. Carla Gugino and Sarah Niles hover around as possible conspirators in a plot that's resolved with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the head.
And Jack Quaid? Annoying. Just... annoying. His big action scene is cut to the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," which deserved better choreography and a less irritating sidekick.
Heads of State is a textbook example of a streaming movie. Loud, lazy, and mostly forgettable—perfect background noise while you're doing literally anything else. But it does deliver that one killer car chase. And for that alone, maybe it's worth a half-watch.
Just don't pay the full price. Don't go to the theater. Don't expect satire. Don't expect smart.
Do expect a lot of bullets, clichés, and John Cena acting like he's still in a steel cage match.
But, man... that car chase is cool. - ⭐️1/2
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