CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 8-14-26
- Nick Digilio
- 4 minutes ago
- 33 min read
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review six new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, August 14th, 2026.
“I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
- Anthony Bourdain "Kitchen Confidential"
As I write this review, I've already seen Tony twice. I fully expect to see it a few more times before the year is over. At this point, with several months of 2026 still to go, it is easily the best movie I've seen this year.
Nothing else even comes close.
Now, I should probably confess my bias up front because it's impossible for me to separate this movie from the enormous admiration I've always had for Anthony Bourdain. I loved him as a chef, a writer, a television host, and one of the most fascinating public personalities of the last thirty years.
I've read Kitchen Confidential, A Cook's Tour, The Nasty Bits, Medium Raw, his travel books, and I own several of his cookbooks. I've watched everything from A Cook's Tour to No Reservations, The Layover, and Parts Unknown. I still think No Reservations is one of the greatest travel series ever made.
I also love to cook.
For the past three decades I've spent countless hours experimenting in my own kitchen, watching cooking shows, learning techniques, and discovering new chefs.
Anthony Bourdain has always been one of the people who inspired me most because he understood that food was never just about eating. It was about people. It was about conversation. It was about culture. It was about sitting down with complete strangers over a great meal and discovering that we probably have more in common than we realize.
His visits to Chicago remain some of my favorite episodes of television ever made. Watching him eat at neighborhood hot dog stands, Italian beef joints, tiny taverns, and great restaurants I've visited myself always made me smile. He appreciated great food, but he appreciated the people serving it even more.
That's what made Anthony Bourdain special.
Tony, directed by Matt Johnson, tells the story of the summer that changed his life. Nineteen-year-old Anthony Bourdain (who insists on being called Tony) is drifting through college, lying to his parents, chasing a girl, and trying desperately to convince himself that he's destined to become a great writer.
A chance job washing dishes in a Provincetown restaurant introduces him to the chaotic, exhausting, intoxicating world of the professional kitchen, where he discovers not only a career but an identity. It's a remarkable coming-of-age story.
Dominic Sessa gives one of the finest performances of the year. He captures Bourdain before he became the confident storyteller the world eventually knew. This Tony is insecure, pretentious, arrogant, funny, self-destructive, and completely lost. Watching that cocky nineteen-year-old slowly stripped of his ego by the relentless demands of restaurant life becomes the emotional engine of the movie.
The kitchen scenes are extraordinary.
Anyone who's ever worked in a restaurant (or even knows someone who has) will recognize the insanity. The heat, the screaming, the impossible pace, the camaraderie, the drugs, the drinking, the practical jokes, the bruised egos, and the strange family that forms among people who spend every waking hour surviving impossible dinner rushes.
Matt Johnson captures all of it with astonishing authenticity. These sequences feel sweaty, dangerous, exhilarating, and alive. I have to admit, I wasn't expecting that.
I've never been much of a fan of Matt Johnson's work. I actively disliked BlackBerry, and earlier this year I thought Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie was one of the year's worst films. So I walked into Tony with fairly low expectations. I've never been happier to be wrong.
Johnson clearly understands Anthony Bourdain, not simply the celebrity, but the young man before the fame. More importantly, he understands that this isn't really a movie about becoming a chef. It's about finding your purpose.
Tony spends the first half of the movie pretending to be someone he isn't. He lies to his parents, exaggerates his accomplishments, and follows a girl to Provincetown believing she will somehow solve all his problems. Instead, the kitchen does.
Antonio Banderas gives one of the year's best supporting performances as the restaurant owner known simply as Chef. He becomes the father figure Tony never really had, teaching him everything from the smallest details of kitchen discipline to the philosophy behind cooking itself.
Their scenes together are among my favorites of the year. Whether he's demonstrating how to refill a ketchup bottle properly, explaining classical technique, or sharing stories from his own culinary past, Banderas fills every scene with warmth, mystery, and quiet authority.
There's one wonderful sequence where Chef finally invites Tony inside his home after weeks of letting him sleep in a hammock outside. They eat, they listen to music, they talk about food and life, and you can practically see Tony's future beginning to take shape.
It's beautiful filmmaking.
Leo Woodall continues what's already been an extraordinary year (Nuremberg, Tuner) with another terrific performance. As Tony's reckless kitchen mentor, he's simultaneously charismatic, dangerous, funny, and self-destructive. He is the darker path Tony could easily follow if he loses himself completely.
Emilia Jones is wonderful as Nancy, while Rich Sommer, Stavros Halkias, and the entire supporting cast create a world that feels completely lived in.
One of my favorite moments involves something that only Anthony Bourdain fans will truly appreciate. Chef introduces Tony to his first shot of Malört.
As a lifelong Chicagoan who spent plenty of years drinking the notorious Swedish liquor myself, I laughed out loud. Anyone who's ever tasted Malört remembers that first horrifying sip, and longtime Bourdain fans know he frequently talked about discovering it during his early years.
It's a hilarious scene, but it's also one of dozens of little details that demonstrate how much affection this movie has for its subject.
The screenplay is filled with moments like that. Tony learning how to describe food. Discovering discipline. Burning himself. Learning to taste properly. Falling in love with the rhythm of the line. Every small experience slowly becomes another piece of the Anthony Bourdain the world would eventually come to know.
The film also looks and sounds terrific.
The recreation of the mid-1970s feels completely authentic without ever becoming nostalgic for nostalgia's sake. The soundtrack is sensational, filled with perfectly chosen needle drops that energize the story without overwhelming it.
Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven," Kool & the Gang, Richard and Linda Thompson, Eric Burdon, the music is woven beautifully into the narrative. Jay McCarroll's haunting score is equally impressive, quietly supporting the emotional moments without ever announcing itself.
Most importantly, Tony understands what made Anthony Bourdain unforgettable. It wasn't simply that he became a famous chef. It was that he remained endlessly curious about people.
The final act beautifully brings together everything Tony has learned over the course of this remarkable summer. He doesn't magically become a culinary legend overnight. He simply discovers purpose. He finds a family where he least expected it. He finds mentors. He finds discipline. And he begins understanding that maybe his gift isn't choosing between cooking and writing.
Maybe it's doing both.
The final scene is absolutely perfect. It ties together the entire emotional journey while pointing toward the extraordinary life still waiting for him. It's satisfying, moving, and completely earned (and features a fantastic surprise cameo).
Tony is one of the finest coming-of-age movies I've seen in years. It's one of the best biographical films I've ever seen. It's funny, heartbreaking, suspenseful, beautifully acted, and wonderfully crafted.
It captures the insanity of restaurant life, the exhilaration of discovering your calling, and the complicated humanity of one of the most beloved cultural figures of our time.
If you're an Anthony Bourdain fan, this is essential viewing. If you're a food lover, it's essential viewing. If you simply love great movies about flawed people discovering who they really are, it's essential viewing.
For me, Tony isn't just the best movie I've seen in 2026. It is one of the best movies about finding your purpose that I've ever seen. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
If you’re an Anne Hathaway fan (and I am) 2026 is turning into a pretty good year.
The End of Oak Street is the fourth of five movies starring Hathaway scheduled for release this year, and this one has apparently been sitting on the shelf for about a year and a half.
That is usually not a particularly encouraging sign, but in this case I have no idea why they waited so long to release it, because this is one of the genuine surprises of the summer: a beautifully made, surprisingly dark, funny and genuinely scary dinosaur movie that also happens to be a very sincere love letter to the kind of genre filmmaking Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and Robert Zemeckis were doing in the 1980s.
And unlike a lot of movies that try to recreate that feeling, The End of Oak Street actually understands why those movies worked.
The film is produced by J.J. Abrams, who made his own attempt at a Spielberg tribute with Super 8 back in 2011. I didn’t think Super 8 was a particularly good movie, but Abrams clearly loves that period of filmmaking, and you can understand immediately why he responded to this screenplay.
The more interesting name here is writer-director David Robert Mitchell, who made the stunning horror film It Follows and followed it with the strange, darkly funny Andrew Garfield mystery Under the Silver Lake. Mitchell hasn’t directed a feature since that movie nine years ago, and it’s great to have him back, particularly with something this ambitious.
The End of Oak Street takes place in the early 1980s and opens at an idyllic suburban block party. Greg and Denise Platt, played by Ewan McGregor and Hathaway, live on Oak Street with their two kids, Audrey and Brian, played by Maisy Stella and Christian Convery. On the surface, they look like exactly the kind of happy suburban family you would find in a Spielberg movie from that period.
They aren’t.
Denise is frustrated with her life and desperately wants to become a writer. She retreats to the basement to work on a novel inspired by her own family, hoping someday somebody might actually read it. Greg has lost his job, hasn’t told his wife the full extent of their financial problems, drinks too much and secretly delivers pizzas to make ends meet.
Their kids are dealing with their own teenage problems involving crushes, bullies, sibling tensions and the realization that Mom and Dad may not be nearly as happy as they pretend to be.
And then dinosaurs show up in the backyard.
There are strange lights, bizarre plants begin growing, the climate suddenly becomes hot and humid, and before long the entire Oak Street neighborhood has somehow been ripped out of 1980s suburbia and deposited approximately 250 million years in the past.
Suddenly there are enormous prehistoric creatures wandering between the ranch houses.
Flying predators attack people. Giant snakes slither through living rooms. Dinosaurs smash cars and destroy houses. Pets disappear. Neighbors start getting eaten. It is a wonderful premise, and Mitchell handles it beautifully.
What immediately separates The End of Oak Street from something like Super 8 or even Stranger Things is that Mitchell isn’t simply playing with 1980s iconography. This isn’t just “Look! A cassette tape! Look! A BMX bike! Remember the ’80s?” nostalgia.
The period is important because Mitchell understands the particular mythology of suburbia that those movies created (the supposedly safe neighborhood, the family home, the station wagon in the driveway, the kids riding around without parents knowing where they are) and then he unleashes prehistoric monsters into the middle of it.
The influences are everywhere. There is Spielberg, obviously, and not just Jurassic Park. There’s Zemeckis and Back to the Future. There’s the wonderful suburban chaos of Joe Dante’s Gremlins. You can see traces of Attack the Block, which also took an ordinary neighborhood and turned it into a battleground against creatures from another world.
But Mitchell doesn’t merely copy those movies. He makes this one his own.
For one thing, The End of Oak Street is considerably darker than you might expect. This is PG-13, but Mitchell pushes that rating pretty damn hard. People die. Characters you assume will be protected because of their importance to the story are not necessarily protected.
There are limbs involved. There are animals in danger. The dinosaur attacks have consequences, and Mitchell is willing to take the story into places that genuinely surprised me. The suspense sequences are terrific.
There is an extended scene involving an enormous snake-like creature silently slithering through the Platt house and gradually closing in on Denise and the kids that is beautifully constructed. Mitchell understands how to delay the payoff, how to use the geography of a house and how to make you nervous about what might be hiding just outside the frame.
There is another spectacular sequence involving Hathaway and McGregor trapped in a car as an enormous dinosaur smashes them through a house. The special effects are excellent throughout, both the CGI creatures and the practical work, and Mitchell gives the dinosaurs weight. When these things hit something, you feel it.
And when they eat somebody, you feel that too.
P.J. Byrne provides some wonderfully dark comedy as Mel, the asshole neighbor who already hates the Platts before the prehistoric apocalypse begins. He blames their dog Starbuck for everything that happens in his yard, so when enormous piles of dinosaur crap suddenly begin appearing around the neighborhood, naturally he assumes the dog is responsible.
The giant dinosaur dung is also an obvious little salute to Jeff Goldblum’s memorable encounter with that enormous pile of shit in Jurassic Park.
Later, Mel ends up on his roof firing a gun at flying pterodactyl-like creatures, and the movie finds exactly the right combination of terror and twisted comedy. Mitchell understands something Joe Dante has always understood: monsters destroying suburbia can be frightening and absolutely hilarious at the same time.
The 1980s details are also handled with genuine affection. There are plenty of musical needle drops, but one of my favorite scenes is very simple. Audrey, played beautifully by Maisy Stella, climbs into the family car, puts a cassette of Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” into the stereo and sings along because she needs to escape everything happening around her for a few minutes.
Not just the dinosaurs, her family.
That’s the kind of detail that makes this movie work. Music was an escape for kids, and Mitchell understands that the emotional nightmare happening inside the Platt house matters just as much to Audrey as the prehistoric nightmare happening outside it.
The performances make that possible. Hathaway and McGregor are both terrific because neither treats the family material as something they have to get through before another dinosaur attacks.
Denise’s frustration about abandoning her ambitions and Greg’s shame about losing his job are real problems. The financial strain, the drinking, the marital disappointment and the fear that your life didn’t turn out the way you imagined are surprisingly adult subjects for a movie that also features giant prehistoric creatures smashing through suburban houses.
Stella and Convery are equally good as the kids. These are recognizable teenagers rather than generic Spielberg-movie children inserted into the plot to scream and run away from monsters.
And then there’s Starbuck.
Starbuck is the Platt family dog, apparently named after the Battlestar Galactica character, and he is one of the best movie dogs I’ve seen in years. He’s funny, smart, heroic and completely lovable. There are moments involving Starbuck that are going to make audiences cheer. The dog practically steals the movie.
What impressed me most about The End of Oak Street is how easily Mitchell moves between all of these tones. The movie can be funny, sentimental and nostalgic, then suddenly become genuinely frightening. The family drama never feels like an interruption of the dinosaur movie, and the dinosaurs never feel like an excuse to avoid dealing with the family.
They are part of the same story.
That is ultimately why the movie works so much better than most modern attempts to recreate this particular kind of 1980s filmmaking. The End of Oak Street isn’t using nostalgia as a substitute for having something to say. The dinosaurs become a way of tearing apart the artificial safety of suburbia and forcing this family to confront everything they have been hiding from one another.
By the final third, the Zemeckis influence becomes even stronger, particularly Back to the Future, and some of the payoffs are unapologetically sentimental. Denise wants to become a successful writer. The kids have fears they need to overcome. Greg has to confront what has happened to him. The family has to figure out whether it actually wants to remain a family.
You can see some of those resolutions coming. I didn’t care.
Mitchell earns them because he has spent enough time making these people matter before throwing them into a dinosaur apocalypse.
The End of Oak Street works as a tribute to Spielberg, Dante and Zemeckis. It works as a dark suburban family drama. It works as a nostalgic 1980s movie without becoming an endless parade of references. And most importantly, on the simplest possible level, it works as a kick-ass dinosaur movie.
The creatures are scary. The action is exciting. The special effects are terrific. There are deaths I didn’t expect, moments that genuinely shocked me, laughs that come from some very dark places and characters I actually cared about surviving.
It is much better than Super 8, deeper and more emotionally substantial than the endless nostalgia machine of Stranger Things, and it proves that you can pay tribute to movies from the past without simply copying their surfaces.
The End of Oak Street is one of the genuine surprises of 2026, one of the most entertaining movies of the summer and a terrific reminder of how much fun a big genre movie can be when there are actual characters underneath the special effects.
And a great dog. I highly recommend it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
I’m old enough to vividly remember the historic Reykjavík Summit in Iceland in 1986 between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan was already well into his second term, the Cold War was still very real, nuclear annihilation was something people actually worried about, and Reagan remained an enormously popular but also deeply divisive president.
I was never a big Ronald Reagan fan, and I remember this period well enough that I didn’t need a movie to explain to me what happened. Unfortunately, The Brink of War mostly plays like a history lesson for people who weren’t there.
The movie comes from Angel Studios, which immediately presented a hurdle for me. I have reviewed plenty of their films, and while being a faith-based studio certainly doesn’t automatically mean the movies are bad, Angel has a tendency toward very heavy-handed messaging.
Their films frequently lean religiously and politically conservative, and subtlety is not exactly their specialty. So when I heard they were making a movie about Reagan and Gorbachev, with Jeff Daniels as Reagan, Jared Harris as Gorbachev and J.K. Simmons as Secretary of State George Shultz, I was curious but cautious.
There is some of that familiar Angel Studios ideological leaning here, particularly in the almost heroic treatment of Reagan, but the bigger problem is that The Brink of War is simply a very stodgy movie.
Written and directed by Michael Russell Gunn in his feature debut, the film dramatizes the roughly 48 hours in October 1986 when Reagan and Gorbachev met at the Höfði House in Reykjavík to discuss nuclear arms.
The summit ultimately did not produce the enormous agreement both men were reaching toward, largely because Gorbachev wanted Reagan to restrict research into the Strategic Defense Initiative (the famous “Star Wars” missile defense program) and Reagan refused.
But the conversations established groundwork that eventually led to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and became an important moment in the winding down of the Cold War.
That is fascinating history. It is not automatically fascinating cinema.
Gunn did his homework. He spent years researching the summit, had access to transcripts and even interviewed George Shultz before Shultz died in 2021. The movie is dedicated to Shultz, which is a nice gesture, and you can certainly sense Gunn’s respect for the history.
But research and drama are two different things.
Too much of The Brink of War consists of people sitting in rooms delivering dialogue that sounds like it came directly from a history textbook. Characters don’t converse; they announce positions.
They explain politics to each other that everybody in the room would already understand. Human-rights issues are brought up, including the Soviet treatment of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, but even those potentially interesting exchanges are handled in an overly simplified way.
Jeff Daniels is good as Reagan without completely disappearing into him, and Jared Harris is strong as Gorbachev. J.K. Simmons is probably the most naturally convincing of the three as Shultz. These are three terrific actors, and when the movie simply allows them to sit across from each other and negotiate, there are moments that work.
Unfortunately, Gunn doesn’t trust those moments.
He keeps trying to make the material cinematic through visual tricks that become increasingly distracting. At one point the screen splits Reagan and Gorbachev even though they’re sitting in the same room. Whenever negotiations become particularly tense, the weather seems to become tense along with them. We get storms, thunder, lightning, steam and water shooting into the air.
If Reagan and Gorbachev disagree strongly enough, apparently Iceland itself gets pissed off. The symbolism is incredibly obvious.
The movie also keeps cutting away from the summit to American and Soviet journalists arguing with one another. These scenes exist almost entirely to deliver simplistic Cold War jokes and political talking points.
There’s even material about standing in line for the bathroom that becomes a joke about standing in line for bread in the Soviet Union. Nobody sounds like an actual journalist. They sound like actors assigned to represent “American Point of View” and “Soviet Point of View” in a high-school history presentation.
There are similar problems with the scenes involving the government staffs. Instead of giving us insight into the people surrounding these two leaders, the supporting characters are repeatedly forced into symbolic political conversations that no normal human beings would ever have.
Then there’s Nancy Reagan.
Hope Davis plays her, and the movie gives Nancy a strangely inflated subplot involving her frustration that Raisa Gorbacheva, played beautifully by Branka Katić, accompanied her husband to Iceland while Nancy remained in Washington.
There is also material involving what Raisa supposedly says about Nancy, and the whole thing starts feeling like an unnecessary political version of two women being pitted against each other.
The Reagan marriage gets plenty of attention elsewhere. Reagan calls Nancy from Iceland, there are attempts at playful banter, and an inexplicable running bit involving a stuffed reindeer head in his room. None of this humor feels particularly natural.
There is also a scene in which Reagan dreams about the 1981 assassination attempt, which later becomes part of his conversations with Gorbachev. Again, the movie wants desperately to humanize these historical figures, but it approaches almost every moment with a giant marker in its hand, underlining exactly what we are supposed to understand.
The relationship between Reagan and Shultz is another strange element because it reminded me constantly of The American President. The easy camaraderie, jokes and offhand exchanges between Daniels and Simmons feel remarkably similar to the relationship between Michael Douglas and Martin Sheen in that movie.
Except Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue had rhythm, wit and the feeling that intelligent people were actually thinking while they talked. Here, everybody sounds like they already know what sentence comes next.
That becomes the central problem with The Brink of War. There is almost no spontaneity to it. History is being recreated rather than lived.
We know what happened, of course, but knowing the outcome shouldn’t destroy suspense. Miracle works even though we know the U.S. Olympic hockey team won the game. All the President’s Men works even though we know Nixon resigned.
Great historical dramas make us feel the uncertainty experienced by the people who didn’t yet know how history would turn out. The Brink of War never does that.
Instead, it keeps reminding us of the significance of everything we are watching, and then, incredibly, it explains it all over again at the end.
J.K. Simmons delivers a voice-over essentially summarizing what happened after Reykjavík, what the summit meant, what Reagan and Gorbachev accomplished, what happened to the Soviet Union and what lessons we are supposed to take away from everything we just watched.
It feels like the teacher handing you the study guide after the movie.
And that final explanation reveals exactly what is wrong with the entire film. Gunn doesn’t trust the audience. He doesn’t trust history. He doesn’t even completely trust his very good actors. Everything has to be explained, symbolized, reiterated and finally summarized.
There is an interesting movie to be made about Reykjavík. Two enormously powerful men representing opposing ideologies sat in a relatively small house in Iceland and came remarkably close to agreeing to eliminate entire categories of nuclear weapons.
The personal dynamics, political pressures, fear, ego and uncertainty surrounding those conversations could make for an incredibly tense chamber drama. This isn’t that movie.
If you’re young and know very little about the Reykjavík Summit, The Brink of War may provide a basic introduction to what happened. But I lived through it. I remember it. And the movie gave me almost no insight that I couldn’t get from reading a straightforward historical account.
Daniels, Harris and Simmons do respectable work, and there are a handful of effective exchanges between them. But they are trapped inside a stiff, starchy, overly reverential history lesson with simplistic politics, clumsy symbolism and dialogue that rarely sounds like anything actual human beings would say.
The Brink of War wants to bring history to life. Mostly, it just reads it back to us.
I can’t recommend it. - ⭐️⭐️
How much you enjoy Nimrods may depend almost entirely on how much you love Green Day.
This is essentially a love letter to the band disguised as a coming-of-age road comedy, and if Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool occupy an important place in your musical life, there is probably a lot here that will make you smile.
If, like me, you think Green Day is perfectly fine but have never been a passionate member of the congregation, the movie lands somewhere closer to pleasant, amiable and completely passable.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Written and directed by Lee Kirk, Nimrods follows three teenage friends from Kansas City who play together in a garage band called Analog Dogs. Tommy, played by Mason Thames, and his buddies Fred and Chad manage to attend a Green Day in-store appearance and nervously hand the band a cassette demo.
Soon afterward, Tommy receives what he believes is the call of a lifetime: Green Day supposedly loved the tape and wants Analog Dogs to open for them at the Hollywood Palladium on New Year’s Eve.
Unfortunately, the call is actually a cruel prank from Tommy’s older brother. Tommy does not know that. So he steals a car, grabs his friends, and heads toward Los Angeles with almost no money, very little planning and absolutely no common sense.
You have seen this movie before.
The road trip immediately becomes a collection of familiar obstacles, strange people, misunderstandings, arguments, money problems, bad decisions and unexpected detours.
The boys end up in a biker bar. They encounter bizarre strangers. They get stranded. They enter an impromptu battle of the bands. They attend parties. They fight with each other. They reconcile.
They continue toward California while the audience waits for the inevitable moment when somebody discovers that the entire trip is based on a lie. None of this is remotely new. But Kirk gives the movie enough energy and affection to keep it moving, and the young cast helps enormously.
Mason Thames, who has been having quite a year, makes Tommy an appealing lead. Kylr Coffman and Ryan Foust round out the trio, and the three actors have an easy chemistry that makes them believable as teenage friends who have spent countless hours sitting in garages, listening to music and convincing each other that their band is much better than it probably is.
Mckenna Grace also appears as Olivia, and she brings some genuine warmth to the movie. She has become one of those young performers who almost always makes whatever she is in a little better, and she does that here as well.
Kirk has also surrounded the kids with a fun group of familiar faces. Jenna Fischer, who is married to Kirk, plays Tommy’s mother and gets one of the movie’s nicest moments when she pulls an old black leather jacket out of a box. It belonged to Tommy’s late father, who was also a musician, and Tommy ends up wearing it during the trip.
It is a small, sentimental moment, but Fischer plays it beautifully and gives the movie an emotional grounding it occasionally needs.
Angela Kinsey, Fred Armisen, Sean Gunn, Bobby Lee and others turn up along the way, and of course Green Day appears as themselves.
Kirk has worked with Billie Joe Armstrong before. He wrote and directed Ordinary World, which starred Armstrong, and Kirk’s first feature as a director, The Giant Mechanical Man, was a lovely little romantic comedy starring Fischer, Chris Messina and Topher Grace. I really liked that movie. It was funny, gentle and charming without working too hard to prove how charming it was.
Nimrods is broader and far more conventional. Its biggest problem is that almost every stop on this road trip reminds you of another, usually better, movie.
The biker bar sequence, where the boys end up performing in front of a rough crowd, feels like it wandered in from The Blues Brothers. There is an outdoor concert drenched in rain and mud that clearly evokes Green Day’s famous Woodstock ’94 appearance. The entire movie has a little bit of Almost Famous in its sentimental worship of music and the transformative power of being close to the bands you love.
But the movie it resembles most is Detroit Rock City.
In fact, Nimrods is basically the Green Day version of Detroit Rock City. Replace KISS with Green Day and you have something very close to the same basic idea: young fans desperately trying to reach a concert, encountering increasingly ridiculous obstacles and treating the band at the end of the journey like some kind of religious destination.
The difference is that Detroit Rock City is much funnier, stranger and crazier. Nimrods never quite allows itself to become that wild.
There are amusing sequences, and the movie has a loose, analog quality that I liked. These kids are operating in a world of cassette tapes, record-store appearances, flyers, word of mouth and the kind of musical obsession that existed before everybody could immediately pull up a band’s entire history on a phone.
The moment when the boys actually hand their demo to Green Day captures that nervous fan energy very nicely. They are simultaneously thrilled, terrified and trying desperately not to look like complete idiots. That sincerity is the movie’s best quality.
Kirk clearly loves Green Day, and the movie never feels cynical about music fandom. It understands what it is like to be young and believe that one song, one concert, one band or one unexpected phone call might completely change your life.
It also understands the way teenage friendships can be built around music, where the band you love becomes part of the language you use with your friends.
The Green Day music is obviously everywhere, and fans are going to recognize plenty of little references and visual echoes. The band itself is used effectively without completely taking over the movie, which was probably the right choice.
But ultimately, Nimrods stays right down the middle.
It is charming without being especially memorable, funny without being hilarious, sentimental without becoming terribly moving, and energetic without ever reaching the wonderfully chaotic insanity of the movies it is borrowing from.
I enjoyed watching it. I also started forgetting it almost immediately after it ended.
And I think my reaction would probably be stronger if I had spent a large portion of my life worshipping Green Day. I like the band. I respect the band. I understand why they matter enormously to people.
I just never belonged to that particular club.
If you do, Nimrods will probably work much better for you. You will catch the references, enjoy the music, appreciate the affectionate mythology surrounding the band and probably forgive the movie for following such a familiar road.
For everybody else, it is a perfectly enjoyable little punk-rock road comedy with a charming cast, some nice moments and absolutely nothing you have not seen before.
Nimrods is fine. Green Day fans may think it is considerably better than that. - ⭐️⭐️1/2
Stoner comedies have been around for a very long time.
In fact, I’m putting together a piece for this website about the history of stoner movies, which goes all the way back to the 1930s and Reefer Madness, that hilariously misguided warning about marijuana that essentially told audiences that smoking one joint would immediately turn you into a psychotic murderer. Today, of course, people get high and watch Reefer Madness because it’s so ridiculous.
The modern stoner comedy really begins with Cheech and Chong. Up in Smoke in 1978 established the formula: two guys get incredibly high, do incredibly stupid things and encounter increasingly bizarre people while trying to accomplish something they probably wouldn’t be able to accomplish sober anyway.
Cheech and Chong turned that formula into an entire franchise, and dozens of movies followed, from Half Baked to Pineapple Express. Even Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused qualifies, although that movie is obviously much more than a stoner comedy. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made about being a teenager and one of the most accurate recreations of 1976 ever put on film.
Most of these movies have something else in common. They’re about men.
Usually two idiots, or two emotionally arrested men behaving like teenagers, smoking enormous quantities of marijuana and doing unbelievably stupid things. Well, it’s 2026. The women deserve to be idiots too, at least on the big screen.
On the small screen, we did get Broad City, the hilarious Comedy Central series about the pot smoking misadventures of Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson. That show was a riot, but it wasn't a movie.
The Wrong Girls is an unapologetically stupid, proudly sophomoric, female stoner comedy written and directed by Dylan Meyer in her feature directorial debut. Meyer is married to the film’s star Kristen Stewart, who also produced the movie, and the story was apparently inspired in part by Meyer’s experiences living with her best friend, smoking a lot of weed, avoiding responsibility and generally not getting much accomplished.
That is pretty much the movie.
Stewart plays Frankie and Alia Shawkat plays Molly, codependent best friends and roommates who live paycheck to paycheck and bong rip to bong rip. Molly wants to become a chef and spends her time preparing junk food as though she were competing on Top Chef, carefully plating garbage with the precision of somebody working in a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Frankie works as a delivery driver and hates her job. They smoke weed. They avoid paying bills. They frequent a beloved all-you-can-eat buffet and become genuinely devastated when they learn it is closing.
Then, because this is a stoner comedy, they accidentally become involved in an enormous government conspiracy.
A case of mistaken identity puts them in possession of a mysterious briefcase containing an illegal experimental substance. They drink it, because of course they do, and suddenly develop telepathic abilities. Government agents want them dead. Danish thugs are chasing them. There are mad scientists. There are parties. There are hallucinations.
And their cats start talking.
One cat is named Dio, after Ronnie James Dio, and is voiced by Seth Rogen. The other is GG, named after punk-rock lunatic GG Allin, and is voiced by Kumail Nanjiani. The cats get some very funny lines, and Rogen also executive produced the movie, because I believe there may now be a federal law requiring Seth Rogen to participate in any motion picture involving marijuana.
The supporting cast is ridiculous.
LaKeith Stanfield plays a character actually named Not Metal Head Dave, who is responsible for the briefcase mix-up in the first place, and he’s hilarious. Tony Hale appears briefly as a rich guy whose party the girls crash. Geena Davis pops up as a mysterious doctor. And Kate McKinnon plays one of the scientists involved with the experimental drug.
McKinnon is terrific.
Almost everything that comes out of her mouth is funny. She has exactly the right energy for this material because she understands that nothing happening in this movie should be played at anything resembling a normal level.
Stanfield gets it too. He can be an extraordinarily serious dramatic actor, but he also has this wonderfully strange comic presence, and the movie knows exactly how to use it.
Stewart and Shawkat are the center of everything, though, and they’re fun together. I have been a Kristen Stewart fan for years, and she clearly had a blast making this movie with her wife. Her physical comedy is very funny, her facial reactions are terrific, and there is something enjoyable about watching an actress who has spent years doing challenging independent films simply cut loose and act like a complete moron for a while.
And I mean that as a compliment.
There is not a lot of intellectual comedy happening in The Wrong Girls. Nobody is going to confuse this with Preston Sturges. This is a movie about getting high, talking cats, telepathy, junk food, government conspiracies and Danish criminals. It is incredibly dumb. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it really doesn’t.
Meyer’s direction is pretty rough in places. This is a relatively low-budget movie, and some of the action sequences expose those limitations. The visual attempts to make everything trippy and hallucinogenic are inconsistent, and the tone can be all over the place. There are scenes that feel polished and others that look like everybody just showed up, smoked a joint and decided to see what happened.
Which, considering the movie, may actually be appropriate.
There are also plenty of affectionate references to earlier stoner comedies. Cheech and Chong are obviously part of the DNA, as are later movies like Pineapple Express, but one of the clearest influences is The Big Lebowski.
Chris Estrada plays Frankie and Molly’s landlord, who repeatedly shows up because they are hopelessly behind on their rent. Except instead of simply demanding the money, he hangs around and smokes pot with them.
He is clearly a variation on the Dude’s landlord in The Big Lebowski, and Estrada is extremely funny, particularly when the Danish thugs arrive and his primary concern seems to be whether they might want to get high with him.
Those little performances keep the movie alive.
Estrada is terrific. Stanfield is terrific. McKinnon steals practically every scene she’s in. Rogen and Nanjiani get laughs as the cats. Stewart and Shawkat have an easy, believable chemistry that makes the friendship work even when the plot becomes complete nonsense.
And complete nonsense is where this movie lives.
There have been dozens of stupid, juvenile, sophomoric stoner comedies about men. I see absolutely no reason why women shouldn’t get their own stupid, juvenile, sophomoric stoner comedy.
The Wrong Girls is not particularly sophisticated, technically accomplished or even consistently funny. The filmmaking is sloppy, some of the hallucinogenic material falls flat and the plot is essentially an excuse to move Frankie and Molly from one ridiculous situation to another.
But everybody seems to be having a great time, and that occasionally becomes contagious.
I laughed. Not constantly, but enough. I enjoyed Stewart and Shawkat. I loved Stanfield and McKinnon. I liked the talking cats.
And I appreciated the fact that Meyer has made a stoner comedy completely uninterested in pretending to be anything more profound than what it is.
So I’m kind of recommending The Wrong Girls with one fairly significant qualification. This is probably not a movie designed to be contemplated over a glass of fine wine while discussing its thematic implications afterward. It is designed to be watched while you’re high.
And if you are, there is a very good chance you’ll think it’s considerably funnier than it actually is.
As stoner comedies go, I’ve seen much better. I’ve also seen much worse. - ⭐️⭐️1/2
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a very difficult movie to review, and part of the reason is that it is so obviously and intensely personal to filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun.
This is Schoenbrun’s third feature, following 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and the cult success I Saw the TV Glow. I still think We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is, without question, their best movie. It remains the most mysterious, unsettling, emotionally potent and genuinely original thing they have made.
Anchored by an incredible performance from Anna Cobb, it explored isolation, identity, sexuality, internet culture and the terrifying feeling of trying to understand yourself while living in a world that seems designed to make you feel like an outsider. I would love to see Cobb work with Schoenbrun again, because she was extraordinary in that film.
I Saw the TV Glow returned to many of those same ideas, but in a much more stylized and fantastical way, and I thought it recycled too much of what had already been explored more effectively in World’s Fair.
Now comes Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which may be Schoenbrun’s most autobiographical and revealing movie yet. It is also their most overt horror film, a tribute to and deconstruction of the slasher movies of the 1980s, made by somebody who clearly grew up watching those movies, loving them, studying them and being deeply affected by them.
The movie stars Hannah Einbinder as Kris, a queer independent filmmaker who breaks out at Sundance with a movie described as Psycho told from the point of view of the shower curtain.
That success gets Kris hired by a major studio to resurrect Camp Miasma, a long-dormant 1980s slasher franchise that produced more than ten increasingly ridiculous sequels, an arcade game, VHS tapes and all the usual junk that gets attached to a successful horror property.
There is one major problem. The original Camp Miasma mythology is deeply rooted in transphobic material.
So naturally the modern studio solution is to hire a queer filmmaker to rehabilitate the franchise, make it acceptable for contemporary audiences and, most importantly, make everybody a lot of money. That is actually one of the movie’s sharper jokes.
Kris becomes obsessed with locating Billy Presley, played by Gillian Anderson, the actress who played the final girl in the original 1980's film and then disappeared from public life. Kris eventually finds Billy living in isolation on the actual Pacific Northwest campground where the original Camp Miasma movies were filmed.
Billy has essentially transformed herself into a cheerful, stoned version of Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, complete with elaborate makeup, a thick Dolly Parton-style Southern accent and an eccentric collection of habits and obsessions.
Anderson is having a wonderful time with the role. She plays Billy at exactly the right heightened level, and she and Einbinder have genuine chemistry together. Einbinder is terrific in the movie as well, giving Kris a nervous, emotionally constricted quality that gradually begins to unravel as she becomes more obsessed with Billy, the original film and what these movies meant to her growing up.
That is where Schoenbrun’s real subject begins to emerge.
This movie is about the psychological effect that old horror films, particularly slashers, can have on a young person struggling with sexuality and identity. Schoenbrun is not merely referencing those films because they think they are cool.
They are examining how the movies affected them personally, how images of sex, gender, violence and punishment can become embedded in somebody’s mind before that person fully understands what those images mean. And there is a lot to examine.
The slasher movies of the late ’70s and ’80s frequently connected sex with punishment. Teenagers would have sex, or even think about having sex, and within a few minutes somebody in a mask would stab them through a mattress. Sex, orgasm, violence and death became almost interchangeable visual ideas.
If you were a young person already confused or frightened about sexuality, those movies could create an incredibly complicated mixture of attraction, shame, excitement and fear.
Schoenbrun also directly confronts the homophobia and transphobia that appeared in many horror movies from that period. The most obvious reference is Sleepaway Camp, which has one of the most notorious endings in slasher history.
There are also echoes of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Dressed to Kill, Psycho and dozens of other films in which gender identity, sexuality and violence were combined in ways that would be considered deeply problematic today.
Even the Camp Miasma killer, Little Death, played by Jack Haven, is constructed out of those influences. The character wears what looks like an air-conditioning vent over the face and attacks horny teenagers with an enormous phallic spear. The name itself is a joke about la petite mort, the French expression associated with orgasm.
Visually, the killer reminded me quite a bit of the murderer in Terror Train, the 1980 Jamie Lee Curtis slasher that also contains some very questionable material involving gender and identity. Schoenbrun knows all of this stuff. The details are often terrific.
One of the best sequences in the movie is an extended recreation of the original Camp Miasma, presented as an old, scratched 35mm print. We sit with Kris and Billy and essentially watch a chunk of the fictional 1983 movie. The VHS artwork, the franchise mythology, the increasingly stupid sequels and the cheap exploitation aesthetics are recreated with remarkable affection and accuracy.
The opening montage tracing the history of the franchise is especially funny if you grew up wandering through video stores and staring at ridiculous horror VHS boxes.
There are also clever references scattered everywhere. There are jokes about meta-horror movies like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. There is even a strange reference to the old, completely unfounded Jamie Lee Curtis rumor that circulated for years about her being born with male sexual organs.
Schoenbrun knows the mythology, rumors, ugliness and strange cultural baggage surrounding these movies, and some of the screenplay’s most interesting moments come from those tiny details.
Unfortunately, the movie surrounding those details is a mess.
Stylistically, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma never finds a consistent language. Sometimes we are watching the old movie. Sometimes we are apparently inside Kris’s imagination. Sometimes we seem to be inside Billy’s memories or fantasies. Sometimes reality and the fictional slasher film begin merging together.
That can certainly be an interesting idea, but Schoenbrun never establishes clear enough visual rules for those shifts. The result is confusion rather than dream logic.
There should be a difference between the way Kris processes these movies and the way Billy does. These women have entirely different relationships with Camp Miasma. Kris has spent years intellectually analyzing and psychologically wrestling with it. Billy actually lived through its creation and has built her entire adult identity around being the woman who survived it.
Yet the movie often photographs their fantasies and memories in essentially the same way, until you are not sure whose perspective you are supposed to be experiencing. Sometimes that ambiguity feels intentional. Other times it just feels sloppy.
There is a long sequence involving Little Death murdering people in an elaborate single take set to Counting Crows’ “A Long December.” The sequence itself is beautifully staged and photographed, and there is some wonderful candy-apple-red blood flying everywhere.
But the song makes almost no sense in relation to the period being recreated, and the sequence does not stylistically connect with much of what comes before or after it. That happens repeatedly. Schoenbrun will create an individual image or sequence that works beautifully on its own, but the pieces never completely fit together.
The film also becomes much too obvious about its themes.
You understand very early what Schoenbrun is saying about sex, death, repression, horror movies, queer identity and the psychological damage caused by watching problematic material at a formative age. These are interesting ideas. Some of them are even fascinating.
But the movie keeps explaining them. And explaining them. And then explaining them again.
By the time the climactic sexual awakening explicitly merges orgasm with slasher-movie violence, the metaphor has been sitting in front of us for nearly the entire film. Schoenbrun does not trust the imagery enough. The symbolism becomes less powerful because the movie keeps underlining it.
There are moments where everything suddenly clicks, particularly when the film becomes funny.
The best scene in the entire movie may be a Zoom meeting Kris has with the studio executives producing the reboot. Dylan Baker appears as one of the producers and completely steals the scene.
It is funny, specific and, most importantly, recognizable. The corporate language, the attempts to appear progressive while protecting a valuable intellectual property and the absurdity of trying to manufacture artistic authenticity in a studio meeting are all captured perfectly.
It is probably the most effective commentary in the entire movie about filmmaking today.
Kevin McDonald from The Kids in the Hall also gets a few funny moments, and Sarah Sherman plays Kris’s agent. Sherman is amusing, but she is completely wasted.
Considering Sarah Sherman’s own obsession with gore, bodily fluids, mutilation and everything disgusting, what eventually happens to her character should have been ten times bloodier and nastier. If you put Sarah Sherman in a slasher movie, you should really let Sarah Sherman get disgusting.
The production design is very good, the cinematography is often beautiful, and Little Death is a terrific-looking slasher villain. There are recreations and variations on famous kills from older horror films, including the sleeping-bag murder associated with the Friday the 13th series, and Schoenbrun clearly takes enormous pleasure in reproducing the visual vocabulary of those movies.
But the movie is never suspenseful. It is never scary. And despite flashes of humor, it is not consistently funny either.
The violence becomes deliberately artificial and fantastical, with bodies sliced apart and enormous fountains of brightly colored blood spraying through the frame. That is clearly intentional. Schoenbrun is not attempting straightforward horror. They are trying to turn slasher violence into a kind of psychosexual dream language.
I understand exactly what they are doing. I just do not think it completely works.
There are obvious echoes of David Cronenberg late in the movie, particularly Videodrome, with reality, media, sexuality and bodily transformation beginning to collapse into one another. There are also similarities to Scream, The Cabin in the Woods, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon and plenty of other movies that have already deconstructed the mechanics and morality of horror films.
What Schoenbrun brings that is unique is their intensely personal relationship with this material. Scream never attempted to explore the specific emotional damage caused by transphobic or homophobic imagery. The Cabin in the Woods was not interested in how a confused young queer viewer might internalize the sexual politics of a slasher movie.
Schoenbrun is. That is valuable. But being personal does not automatically make a movie successful.
I admire the amount of themselves Schoenbrun has put into Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. I understand that these movies mattered to them, frightened them, excited them, confused them and eventually became intertwined with their understanding of sexuality and identity. That comes through very clearly. Perhaps too clearly.
I think Schoenbrun may simply be too close to this material. The personal journey is so important to them that the movie sometimes forgets that the audience still needs characters, momentum, suspense, humor and a coherent cinematic language. What might feel emotionally overwhelming to the filmmaker can remain intellectually obvious to the viewer.
That is why this is such a frustrating movie.
I admire Jane Schoenbrun as a filmmaker, and I remain fascinated by what they are trying to do. I also admire how fearlessly personal their movies are. But three films into their career, I am still waiting for them to make something as powerful, haunting and completely realized as We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has some terrific moments and two excellent performances, but ultimately it is a fascinating personal statement trapped inside a frustratingly uneven movie.
Disappointingly, I cannot recommend it.
But I absolutely want to see what Jane Schoenbrun does next. - ⭐️⭐️1/2
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