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CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 8-21-26

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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, August 21st, 2026.



For about the past 15 years, we have been inundated with a particular kind of supernatural horror movie, many of them somehow connected to James Wan, Leigh Whannell, Blumhouse or one of several franchises that have become virtually interchangeable in my brain.


There are the Conjuring movies, the Insidious movies, the Sinister movies and assorted spinoffs, prequels, sequels and demon-related side projects, and I swear to God I can't keep half of them straight anymore.


I know I liked the first Conjuring quite a bit. I remember liking the first Insidious. I think one of the Sinister movies was pretty good. There have been individual sequences scattered throughout these franchises that work very well.


But they're all starting to blend together. I'll remember something creepy and think it happened in an Insidious movie, only to discover it was actually in The Conjuring 2, or I'll think something from Sinister happened in one of the other ones. They're mostly slick, competently made and completely interchangeable supernatural horror products.


Which brings us to Insidious: Out of the Further, the SIXTH Insidious movie, if you can even contemplate that. And the frustrating thing about this one is that for about 45 minutes, I thought maybe we were actually getting something different.


Written and directed by Jacob Chase, Out of the Further begins in 1999 with a young girl named Gemma living with her increasingly unstable mother. Gemma is a smart kid who sleeps with her favorite flashlight nearby, while her mother appears to be suffering from some combination of addiction, emotional collapse and outright madness.


Of course, because this is an Insidious movie, we eventually discover that Mom wasn't simply losing her mind. Something supernatural was happening inside the house, culminating in tragedy.


Flash forward to the present, and Gemma, now played by Amelia Eve, has returned to that same childhood home and is raising her own daughter, Maya. Gemma is now working in dentistry, and it isn't long before she begins experiencing the same kinds of supernatural disturbances that destroyed her mother.


And this opening section is really good.


Chase, who previously directed the interesting but flawed Come Play with Gillian Jacobs, knows how to construct an effective scare. The geography of Gemma's house is established extremely well, which is something that matters enormously in a horror movie and is too often ignored.


We understand where the rooms are, where Gemma is in relation to her daughter and where something might be lurking. There's a terrific nightmare involving Gemma getting trapped inside one of those little forts kids build out of couch cushions, pillows and blankets. Something completely innocent becomes claustrophobic and terrifying.


And then there are the dental scenes.


If you have even the slightest fear of dentists, dental drills, rotten teeth, diseased gums or anything remotely connected to somebody sticking sharp metal instruments inside your mouth, parts of this movie are going to make you want to crawl under your seat.


There's one sequence involving Gemma examining a creepy older man and pulling these incredibly long strands of hair from between his rotting teeth that is absolutely disgusting.


It's all shot in these horrible close-ups, and I mean "horrible" as a compliment. There are drills. There are bad teeth. There are nasty mouths. It's stomach-knotting stuff, and Chase directs it beautifully.


Even the neighborhood initially has an effectively strange atmosphere. There are three creepy elderly people wandering around with oxygen tanks who immediately seem threatening without actually doing much of anything.


Gemma's nightmares get progressively worse. The sound design is excellent. The editing is tight. There's a sense that something awful is closing in on her.


And then the movie remembers it's an Insidious sequel. That's when everything falls apart.


Gemma discovers that she can travel into the Further, the shadowy spirit realm that has been central to this franchise, but there's a new twist: she can actually bring entities from the Further into our world. This obviously makes her extremely valuable to all the horrible things hanging around over there, including a sinister cult figure named Cyrus Lamb and his followers.


In theory, that's not a bad addition to the mythology. In execution, it means we spend much of the second half wandering around yet another dark supernatural dimension while characters explain rules to each other.


And the Further itself has become completely uninteresting. Watching these sequences now, it's impossible not to think of the Upside Down from Stranger Things. Of course, Stranger Things itself cheerfully borrowed virtually everything it could from '70s and '80s genre movies, so now we have an Insidious sequel ripping off something that was already assembled out of pieces of other movies. It's a copy of a copy of a copy.


Everything that felt specific and unsettling during the first half suddenly becomes generic supernatural mush.


Lin Shaye eventually returns as Elise Rainier, the paranormal investigator who has been appearing throughout this franchise despite the inconvenience of having died several movies ago. I love Lin Shaye. She's been a terrific character actress forever, and she's been one of the most reliable things about these movies. But she's completely wasted here. Elise essentially walks through dark rooms carrying a lantern while explaining the plot.


And explaining. And explaining.


She's not really a character anymore. She's an exposition delivery system.


But she's not even responsible for the strangest exposition in the movie. That honor belongs to Maisie Richardson-Sellers, who plays a tattoo artist with her own connection to the Further. We learn that she practices tattooing on grapefruits because apparently grapefruit skin is particularly useful for practicing tattoos.


Fine. But then the grapefruits become visual aids.


There is an actual sequence in which this character explains their complicated plan for entering the Further, grabbing things from one dimension and bringing them into another by moving tattooed grapefruits around to represent the characters.


I'm sorry, but once you're explaining the supernatural climax of your horror movie with tattooed grapefruits, you've lost me.


The other major influence hanging over the second half is John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, and the comparison doesn't do this movie any favors.


There are scenes involving Cyrus Lamb appearing through video imagery that strongly evoke the strange television transmissions in Carpenter's film, and even sections of the score sound remarkably close to Carpenter's magnificent Prince of Darkness music.


But rather than building on those ideas, Out of the Further mostly reminds you how much better Carpenter did them nearly 40 years ago.


And that's what becomes so disappointing. Chase clearly has talent as a director. The first half proves it. He knows how to use sound, how to frame a room, how to build a nightmare sequence and how to take something as mundane as a dentist's office and turn it into absolute horror.


But as the screenwriter, he doesn't give himself enough to work with once all the franchise mythology kicks in.


The scares become less effective. The imagery becomes less distinctive. The score becomes more derivative. Characters start explaining things instead of experiencing them. The movie that initially felt like it might have its own personality gets swallowed whole by the franchise it's supposed to continue.


Amelia Eve is quite good as Gemma, and she gives the movie an emotional foundation because the story is ultimately about a woman discovering that the mother she thought was unstable was actually experiencing the same supernatural nightmare she is now facing.


There's something potentially moving in Gemma coming to understand her mother's suffering while trying to prevent history from repeating itself with her own daughter. And, completely beside the point, Eve occasionally looks so much like Charlize Theron that I found myself distracted by it. That's obviously my problem, not the movie's.


There is a decent horror movie buried inside Insidious: Out of the Further. For approximately 45 minutes, you can actually see it. The opening flashback works. The house works. The nightmares work. The dental sequences are wonderfully disgusting. There are some legitimate scares, and Chase displays a real ability to create tension.


Then Lin Shaye arrives with her lantern, somebody breaks out the tattooed grapefruits, everybody heads into the Further, and we're right back where we started.


Another Insidious movie. Another dark supernatural realm. Another collection of demons, spirits, exposition and franchise Easter eggs. Another horror movie borrowing imagery from better horror movies.


And a week from now, I'll probably remember one of those horrifying dental scenes and mistakenly tell somebody it happened in The Conjuring 5. That's how interchangeable these movies have become.


Insidious: Out of the Further starts surprisingly well, which ultimately makes its collapse into generic franchise nonsense even more disappointing. There are some effective scares and genuinely disturbing moments in the first half, but once the movie enters the Further, I couldn't wait to get out of it.


Skip it. - ⭐️⭐️


Look, it's a Jason Statham movie.


At this point, you pretty much know exactly what you're getting when you walk into one of these things. You're getting Jason Statham looking stern. You're getting Jason Statham speaking as few words as humanly possible in that thick British accent.


You're getting steely looks, terrible one-liners, guns, knives, punches to the face and Jason Statham beating the shit out of people for approximately 90 minutes.


You're not going to get a complicated plot. You're not going to get richly developed characters undergoing profound emotional changes. You're not going to get lengthy, beautifully written dialogue sequences or complicated relationships. You're going to get a bald guy beating the crap out of people.


And if that's what you want, Mutiny certainly delivers it.


Statham plays Cole Reed, a former Marine who becomes entangled in a conspiracy after his billionaire mentor is murdered and Cole is framed for it. The movie begins in Bangkok with the usual collection of mysterious vehicles, fake authorities, assassins, gunfire, betrayal and a big action sequence, eventually sending Cole aboard a massive cargo ship where he discovers a human-trafficking operation connected to the people responsible for murdering his mentor.


So now he has to clear his name, avenge his friend, expose the conspiracy, rescue the trafficking victims and kill approximately 700 people.


You know. A Tuesday for Jason Statham.


Mutiny is directed by Jean-François Richet, who made the two pretty good French Mesrine films with Vincent Cassel, but has also made some extremely generic American action movies, including the lousy 2005 remake of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13.


Most recently, he directed the Gerard Butler movie Plane, which remains one of my favorite stupid movie titles because the movie was about people on a plane and somebody apparently said, "What should we call this?" and somebody else said, "I don't know. Plane?"

Apparently, Mutiny was originally going to be called Ship.


I cannot tell you how disappointed I am that they changed the title.


Jason Statham in Ship, from the director of Plane, is so magnificently stupid that I would have respected the movie simply for existing. At least that suggests a sense of humor, which is something Mutiny desperately needs.


Most of the movie takes place aboard the cargo ship Artemis, where Cole teams up with Angie, played by Annabelle Wallis, and begins working his way through a seemingly endless supply of henchmen. And Statham uses just about everything he can get his hands on.


Machine guns. Handguns. Daggers. Meat hooks. Giant wrenches. Screwdrivers. Blowtorches. If somebody accidentally left a waffle iron lying around, I'm fairly certain Statham would find a way to kill somebody with it.


He also gets stabbed a lot.


In fact, Mutiny may set some kind of cinematic record for the number of times Jason Statham gets stabbed with a knife, pulls the knife out of his own body and immediately uses it to stab somebody else. After a while I started wondering whether his body was basically functioning as additional weapons storage.


There are fires, explosions, tunnels, pipes, anchors, cargo containers and all kinds of industrial ship-related objects for Statham to climb over, hang from or use as weapons.


Eventually there's a long fight with the ship's captain that moves across cargo containers and onto one of those boarding ladders hanging over the side of the vessel, because apparently simply punching each other on a stable surface wasn't dangerous enough.


The action isn't particularly well staged, though, and Richet has one stylistic trick that he apparently loves: blood hitting the camera lens. Somebody gets stabbed: blood on the lens. Somebody gets shot in the head: blood on the lens. Somebody gets slashed: more blood on the lens. We get it.


The problem isn't that any of this is especially incompetent. The problem is that we've seen every single bit of it before, including in about 15 other Jason Statham movies.


The Beekeeper. A Working Man. Shelter. The Mechanic. Killer Elite. The Crank movies. Pick one. Statham has essentially created his own action subgenre in which the titles and supporting actors change but Jason Statham remains exactly the same.


Even when the movie attempts character development, it becomes unintentionally funny. Angie gets shot in the shoulder, leading to a sequence where Cole digs the bullet out while she explains her personal life, you know, deadbeat ex-husband, child she loves, regrets, motivations, all the information the screenplay suddenly realizes we're supposed to know about her. Cole, naturally, reveals almost nothing because Jason Statham characters don't discuss their feelings.


And then about ten minutes later Angie is lifting things, throwing things and fighting people as though she didn't recently have a bullet buried in her shoulder. People heal incredibly quickly in Mutiny.


Statham gets shot, stabbed, punched, kicked and thrown around the ship, and none of it seems to matter very much because we've seen enough of these movies to understand that Jason Statham is basically indestructible. There's never much suspense because we know the formula. Bad guy appears. Statham looks at him. Bad guy says something threatening.


Statham says something stupid. Bad guy dies. Repeat until credits.


There is also a Rolex watch that becomes symbolically important and keeps popping up throughout the movie, because apparently even Jason Statham's revenge needs product placement.


The supporting cast contains some talented people who aren't given much to do, but I was genuinely delighted when Adrian Lester suddenly appeared as the captain of a Navy vessel responding to a distress signal.


Lester is one of my favorite British character actors, a tremendous stage performer who has done terrific work in movies and television, and I particularly loved him in Mike Nichols' wonderful Primary Colors. I had no idea he was in Mutiny, so when he showed up I thought, "Hey! Adrian Lester!"


He's not exactly killing himself trying to disguise his British accent while playing this Navy captain, and I'm pretty sure this wasn't the screenplay that made him say, "Finally, the role I've been waiting for." But he's Adrian Lester, he's terrific, and merely having him around temporarily gives the movie a little more weight than it deserves.


Unfortunately, there's only so much Adrian Lester can do.


The frustrating thing is that Mutiny is only about 90 minutes long, which should be exactly the correct running time for something like this. Get in, establish the conspiracy, put Statham on the ship, let him murder everybody, get out. And somehow it still overstays its welcome.


That's because the movie is so monotonous. The villains are generic. The betrayals are predictable. The dialogue is terrible. The human-trafficking storyline is essentially there to make the bad guys extra bad so we can enjoy watching Statham kill them. Nothing surprises you because every scene feels like something you've already watched in another movie.


And I'm simply exhausted by this particular Jason Statham formula.


Statham is actually a charismatic performer. He's funny when filmmakers allow him to be funny, and he has genuine screen presence. But he's become trapped in this one-dimensional world where seemingly every movie requires him to play another variation on the same grim, highly trained killing machine who has been betrayed by somebody and now needs to murder his way through an organization.


How many times can we watch this?


If you're a hardcore Jason Statham fan and all you require is 90 minutes of him shooting people, stabbing people, getting stabbed himself, pulling the knife out and stabbing somebody back, you'll probably be perfectly satisfied with Mutiny. It delivers exactly what the package promises.


I just want something more.


At this point, Mutiny feels less like a new Jason Statham movie than another installment coming off the Jason Statham assembly line. Change the location. Change the dead friend. Change the conspiracy. Give him another weapon. Press start.


I can't recommend it.


And I'll always wish they had called it Ship. - ⭐️1/2


Spa Weekend is a nightmare. An absolute nightmare.


It's one of those generic, desperately wacky comedies where a group of lifelong friends gets away for a weekend, everybody drinks too much, everybody behaves like an idiot, things get destroyed, secrets are revealed, feelings are hurt, lessons are learned, friendships are reaffirmed, and eventually everybody goes home having become a slightly better person.


You've seen this movie before. Many, many, many times.


Leslie Mann, Michelle Buteau and Anna Faris play Jane, Coco and Sophie, three burned-out longtime friends who head to Palm Springs for a luxurious spa weekend. They're all dealing with the usual collection of problems required by movies like this: marriages, divorces, kids, careers, working too much, not having enough fun, losing touch with themselves, wondering where their lives went, blah blah blah.


Then their fourth friend, Mel, played by Isla Fisher, shows up unexpectedly. Mel is the wild one. How wild?


Well, she's the kind of movie character who enters every situation screaming, drinking, breaking something, humiliating everybody and generally behaving in a manner that would cause actual human beings to stop inviting her places about 25 years ago. And then we're off.


There are mud baths. Steam rooms. Massages. Attractive shirtless men. Hunky Australian massage therapists. Drinking. Lots of drinking. A golf cart gets out of control and goes flying through the air. Things get broken. Things catch on fire. Fire extinguishers get sprayed.


Phones get grabbed and screamed into. Somebody inevitably gets embarrassed in front of somebody they're attracted to. Spa treatments go horribly wrong. Women who are supposedly functioning adults suddenly behave like 9-year-olds.


If there's a cliché associated with a "girls gone wild on vacation" comedy, Spa Weekend eventually gets around to it.


The movie comes from writers-directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, and these guys have been making variations on this exact comedy for years. They wrote The Hangover, Four Christmases, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Office Christmas Party, and directed 21 & Over, Bad Moms and A Bad Moms Christmas.


They have been stuck in this particular groove for about two decades now: gather a group of people, give everybody some generic personal problems, get them drunk, have them behave horribly, throw in some slapstick and then deliver heartfelt speeches near the end about what everybody has learned.


Sometimes it's guys. Sometimes it's women. Same movie.


And that's particularly frustrating because Spa Weekend has four genuinely talented comedic actresses. Leslie Mann has been terrific in many movies, including the films she's made with her husband, Judd Apatow, and she has a wonderfully specific comic personality.


Anna Faris is one of the funniest and quirkiest comedic actresses around when she's given the right material. Michelle Buteau has been very funny in plenty of things, and Isla Fisher has repeatedly demonstrated that she will fearlessly throw herself into almost anything for a laugh.


Here they're all trapped inside a screenplay that gives them virtually nothing interesting to do.


Fisher probably gets the most laughs simply because she commits so completely to Mel's insanity. She screams. She drinks. She says inappropriate things. She humiliates her friends. She barrels into every situation at approximately 150 miles per hour, and Fisher's willingness to go completely over the top occasionally generates some laughs despite the material.


But after a while, even that becomes exhausting.


The dialogue doesn't help. We get jokes about mammograms and massages, endless conversations about relationships and families, and the kind of supposedly outrageous dialogue that sounds like it was written specifically so somebody could put it in a red-band trailer.


Then, because this is one of these movies, all the insanity eventually has to stop so everybody can explain themselves. Here come the speeches.


Somebody works too much. Somebody has neglected her family. Somebody hasn't allowed herself to experience love. Somebody has been hiding behind her outrageous behavior. Somebody needs to reconnect with the person she used to be. Friendship matters. Family matters. Life is short. We get it.


You know where every single character is going approximately 15 minutes into the movie, and Spa Weekend never offers a single surprise along the way.


We've seen versions of this in Bad Moms, Girls Trip, Rough Night and countless other movies. Bridesmaids operated in some of the same territory, except Bridesmaids was actually funny, beautifully performed and had characters who felt like recognizable human beings.


And if you want to move into an older demographic, Diane Keaton practically had an entire late-career subgenre built around women getting together, cutting loose and rediscovering themselves in movies like Book Club and First Wives Club, with 80 for Brady offering another variation on the formula.


There's absolutely nothing wrong with making a comedy about exhausted women escaping their daily lives and reconnecting with each other. There's plenty to explore there. Marriage changes. Friendship changes. Parenthood changes people. Careers consume time.


You wake up one day and realize that the people who were once the center of your world are now people you have to schedule three months in advance just to have dinner with. That's real. Spa Weekend doesn't have anything interesting to say about it.


Instead, it substitutes screaming, drinking and slapstick for actual observation. These aren't characters so much as familiar types plugged into situations we've already watched dozens of times. And when the movie finally wants us to become emotionally invested in their problems, it's difficult because they've spent most of the running time behaving like cartoon characters.


I will say this: Palm Springs looks lovely. The spa looks beautiful. There are a lot of extremely attractive, very well-built men wandering around without shirts, occasionally covered in mud, and everybody involved in making the movie appears to have had a terrific time. Good for them.


It looks like the cast and crew got a wonderful vacation out of this thing. I just wish they had made a better movie while they were there.


Lucas and Moore clearly have a formula they enjoy, and Spa Weekend feels like yet another attempt to run that formula through the machine. Take Bad Moms, move everybody to a luxury resort, add some massage tables and mud baths, change a few character details and hit "start."


The result is one of the most derivative and painfully unfunny comedies I've seen in a while. These four actresses deserve better. We deserve better.


Spa Weekend is one of the worst movies of the year. - ⭐️


Late Fame is one of the most fascinating movies I’ve seen in 2026, partly because the entire thing feels like some kind of wonderful cinematic time warp.


This is a movie released in 2026, set in contemporary New York City, based on a novella written in Austria in 1895, and somehow it feels like an independent New York movie made in about 1978. And I mean that as a huge compliment.


The original Late Fame was written by Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, although it remained unpublished during his lifetime and didn't appear until long after his death. The story, set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, involves an older man whose forgotten writing is suddenly discovered and celebrated by a younger generation.


Screenwriter Samy Burch has transplanted that basic premise to modern-day Manhattan, and director Kent Jones understands exactly why this story still works more than 130 years later. Artists haven't changed. Egos haven't changed. The desire to be noticed hasn't changed.


And young pretentious people sitting around talking endlessly about art instead of actually making any of it sure as hell haven't changed.


Willem Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, an aging Manhattan postal worker who wrote a slim book of poetry back in 1979 that essentially disappeared. Ed has long since abandoned whatever literary ambitions he once had.


He's settled into a perfectly ordinary existence: he works, drinks with his buddies, shoots some pool, goes home and does it all again. And he's not miserable. That's important. This isn't some tortured old artist staring at a dusty manuscript every night wondering where his life went wrong. Ed has simply moved on.


Then a young guy named Meyers, played by Edmund Donovan, tracks him down. Meyers has discovered Ed's old poetry and thinks it's a lost masterpiece, and he brings Ed into a downtown collection of young writers and artists calling themselves the Enthusiasm Society, who immediately begin treating him like some rediscovered literary giant.


These people desperately want to be the modern version of the Algonquin Round Table, that legendary collection of writers, critics and wits like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and George S. Kaufman. The difference is that those people actually had something to say.


The Enthusiasm Society spends an awful lot of time looking like people who have something to say.


And Late Fame is very funny about this. These kids sit around coffeehouses wearing the right glasses and the right clothes, tossing around intellectual phrases and passing judgment on people across the room who don't look sufficiently artistic.


They romanticize the idea of the starving artist while Meyers is living in a gigantic Manhattan apartment funded by inherited money. These aren't the struggling bohemians they imagine themselves to be. They're privileged kids essentially cosplaying artistic poverty.


Ed knows this on some level, but here's where the movie gets much more interesting than a simple satire of pretentious young artists: being admired feels pretty damn good. After decades of nobody caring about his poetry, Ed suddenly has people hanging on his every word, or at least pretending to.


They ask him what it was like to be a writer in New York in the '70s, but when he actually tells them, they barely listen because they're too busy waiting for their own opportunity to speak. Still, their hero worship awakens something in him.


They convince him to write again, culminating in a public reading where Ed is supposed to unveil a brand-new poem.


Dafoe is simply remarkable here. He's one of the great actors working today and has been for more than four decades. That face alone is one of the great instruments in movies, he can be terrifying, hilarious, heartbreaking, sinister, sweet or completely insane.


Here, he's wonderfully understated. You can see Ed slowly remembering the person he used to be, while simultaneously wondering whether that person ever really existed in the first place.


The struggle to write again is beautifully handled because Late Fame isn't sentimental about creativity. Maybe Ed still has something to say. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe this attention represents a genuine second chance, or maybe it's simply flattering an old man's ego. Dafoe lets all of those possibilities coexist, and watching Ed wrestle with them becomes unexpectedly heartbreaking.


And then there's Greta Lee, who gives one of the best performances of the year as Gloria, an actress and singer who circles the Enthusiasm Society but seems slightly removed from it because, like Ed, she's older and has actually lived enough life to understand the difference between wanting to be an artist and surviving as one.


Gloria is volatile, theatrical, insecure, drinks too much and possesses an ego that constantly requires feeding. Ed becomes fascinated by her, and their strange relationship gives the movie its emotional center.


These aren't two people involved in some cute late-life romance. They're two people looking at each other and recognizing pieces of themselves, pieces they may or may not particularly like.


Kent Jones handles all of this beautifully. Jones was an artistic director of the New York Film Festival, made the terrific 2015 documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut, and directed the 2018 film Diane, which featured a wonderful performance by Mary Kay Place. He understands both movies and New York, and Late Fame is one of the most authentically New York films I've seen in quite a while.


Shot at street level in places like Greenwich Village and SoHo, inside coffee shops, bars and old Manhattan spaces, there's a loose, almost documentary quality to it. The handheld camerawork and occasional improvisational feeling give it a cinéma vérité quality, and at times I was reminded of John Cassavetes, with the sensation that the camera has simply wandered into a room and we're watching these people exist.


I spent time in New York in the early '80s, and something about this movie genuinely evokes that period. It's not some elaborate retro recreation because the film takes place now. It's more elusive than that, it's in the faces, the locations, the rhythms and the way people occupy these rooms.


It reminded me at times of Inside Llewyn Davis, with its portrait of Greenwich Village artistic life, and Frances Ha, with its funny and painful examination of young New Yorkers trying to construct artistic identities while reality keeps getting in the way.


There's terrific supporting work as well. Jake Lacy, who has become extremely good at playing jerks, creeps and assholes, has a great little turn as a slick, pretentious literary agent. And I especially loved Clark Johnson as Arnold, one of Ed's longtime friends.


Johnson, of course, is a terrific actor and director who was great on Homicide: Life on the Street and later appeared on and directed episodes of The Wire, which remains the best television show of all time as far as I'm concerned.


His scenes with Dafoe are among my favorites because there's no bullshit in them. They're two older guys who have known each other forever, talking about who they once were, what they thought they might become, and who they actually became.


Arnold has essentially accepted his life. Ed had too, that is until these kids showed up and reopened a door he'd closed decades ago.


Everything eventually builds toward the public reading, where Ed is supposed to present the new poem he's struggled to write. What happens there, particularly involving Gloria before, during and after the event, contains some of the movie's funniest, saddest and most powerful material.


I won't spoil it because the sequence works precisely because we've spent the entire movie watching Ed get seduced by the possibility of becoming somebody he thought he'd stopped wanting to be.


That's what I really love about Late Fame. It's a movie about art, but it's also about the idea of art. It's about creating something versus wanting everyone to think you're someone who creates things. It's about the enormous difference between knowledge and pretension, and it's about wanting to belong, wanting to be admired and discovering that recognition can be just as dangerous as rejection.


Most of all, it's about how incredibly nice it feels when somebody finally tells you that you mattered. After spending decades living a regular life, suddenly somebody says, "No, you were special. You were an artist. You should have been famous." Who wouldn't want to hear that?


Based on a story written in 1895, Late Fame somehow understands that particular human weakness perfectly in 2026. Anchored by a remarkable Willem Dafoe performance and an equally terrific Greta Lee, it's funny, melancholy, beautifully observed and occasionally brutal about fake artists, real artists, failed artists and people who aren't entirely sure which category they belong in anymore.


I liked this movie very much. It's a great New York movie, a terrific actors' movie and one of the most interesting films I've seen this year.


It's about creating art, giving up art, rediscovering art and finally realizing that maybe the hardest thing isn't becoming famous.


Maybe it's figuring out whether you ever really wanted to be famous in the first place. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2


Enid Blyton was one of the most successful children’s authors who ever lived. Her books have sold hundreds of millions of copies around the world, have been translated into dozens of languages, and include enormously popular series like The Famous Five, Malory Towers, Noddy, and, of course, The Faraway Tree.


She began publishing in the 1920s and became a phenomenon, particularly in England, where generations of children grew up reading her stories.


She was also a complicated and controversial figure whose work and personal life have been reexamined many times over the years. There was a very good 2009 BBC television movie called Enid, starring Helena Bonham Carter, that explored some of those contradictions.


I have never been a particularly devoted reader of Blyton’s books, but I know her history, I know how enormously influential she was, and I certainly understand why The Faraway Tree stories remain beloved enough that somebody would eventually spend a lot of money turning them into a big fantasy movie.


That movie is The Magic Faraway Tree, and it is about as aggressively British as a children’s fantasy movie can possibly be. That is not a criticism.


Directed by Ben Gregor and written by Simon Farnaby, the film stars Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy as Tim and Polly Thompson, parents of three children who are not particularly thrilled when the family abandons city life and moves into a ramshackle barn in the English countryside.


Polly has quit her technology job after discovering that the company she works for intends to use her smart-fridge invention to spy on customers, while Tim sees the move as an opportunity to pursue his dream of making and selling homemade tomato sauce. Yes, tomato sauce becomes an important plot point in this movie.


Their kids, Beth, Joe, and the youngest, Fran, are considerably less excited about the move, particularly because their new home barely qualifies as a home and does not have all of the technology they have become dependent upon.


Fran, who has not spoken for years, eventually wanders into the nearby woods and discovers the Magic Faraway Tree, an enormous portal into a series of constantly changing fantasy worlds populated by some truly bizarre characters.


Fran meets Silky, played by Nicola Coughlan, Moonface, played by Nonso Anozie, Jessica Gunning’s Dame Washalot, the Saucepan Man, Mr. Watzisname and a collection of other eccentrics.


Eventually her brother and sister join her, and they begin traveling through the different lands at the top of the tree, where wishes are granted, food is enormous, buses can fly, dishes attack people, strange creatures appear, and the rules seem to change every few minutes.


This is basically Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Narnia, Stardust, a little Roald Dahl, and the Paddington movies thrown into a giant British fantasy blender. And for the most part, it works.


Simon Farnaby was exactly the right person to write this screenplay. He co-wrote Paddington 2 and Wonka, worked on the television series Ghosts, and has spent years working in this very specific world of eccentric British comedy and family entertainment. He also appears here as the farmer who sells the Thompsons their property.


Farnaby understands this tone. He knows how to combine broad silliness, strange characters, sentimental family material, visual comedy and just enough darkness to keep everything from becoming completely sugary.


The movie is also beautiful to look at. The production design is terrific, the costumes are elaborate and colorful, and the various worlds inside the tree have enough visual personality to keep the movie moving.


There is a sleeping bus that becomes an airplane, animated household objects, magical candy, spells, flying vehicles, ridiculous costumes and enormous sets. There is always something happening in the frame.


Unfortunately, there are also fart jokes.


There are moments when the movie creates a genuinely charming fantasy sequence with wonderful actors, terrific costumes and imaginative production design, and then somebody passes gas because apparently every family movie is contractually obligated to remind children that farting is hilarious.


Still, the cast sells most of it.


Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy are both very good as the parents, although they are essentially supporting characters because the children really drive the story. Garfield brings his usual warmth and slightly goofy sincerity to Tim, while Foy gives Polly enough frustration and intelligence that she never simply becomes “the mom.”


Their marriage, their financial problems, Polly’s desire to do something meaningful with her life and Tim’s ridiculous tomato-sauce dream are familiar elements, but Garfield and Foy have enough chemistry to make them pleasant company.


The three young actors are also quite good, particularly Billie Gadsdon as Fran, whose discovery of the tree becomes the emotional doorway into the fantasy.


Then there is the supporting cast, which is kind of ridiculous.


Michael Palin shows up as one of the Know-Alls, and anytime Michael Palin appears in anything, I am happy. Jennifer Saunders has a great time as the children’s grandmother. Jessica Gunning is very funny as Dame Washalot. Nonso Anozie throws himself completely into Moonface.


Nicola Coughlan is charming as Silky. Judi Dench provides the voice of the smart refrigerator, because apparently if you are going to make a British children’s fantasy movie, eventually Dame Judi Dench has to become an appliance.


But Rebecca Ferguson steals the movie.


She plays Dame Snap, the terrifying headmistress of a school that is essentially a prison, and Ferguson comes storming into the movie wearing an enormous wig, a spectacular costume and an expression that suggests she has been waiting her entire career to terrorize children in an Enid Blyton adaptation.


Ferguson is completely over the top and knows exactly what movie she is in. Her introduction is probably the funniest sequence in the film. She is having a blast, and watching a serious actress like Rebecca Ferguson attack this kind of ridiculous character with total commitment is one of the movie’s biggest pleasures.


There are plenty of pleasures here, but there is also very little that feels particularly new.

The idea of technology-addicted children being forced to disconnect from their devices and rediscover imagination has become practically its own genre.


The troubled family moving to the country, the magical world hidden nearby, the children learning lessons about selfishness, parents rediscovering their dreams, siblings realizing that they need each other, we have seen all of this many times before.


There are shades of the Paddington films throughout the movie, although it never reaches the emotional or comic heights of those films. The fantasy worlds inevitably recall Narnia.


Some of the eccentricity feels like Roald Dahl. There is Alice in Wonderland everywhere, and the family material is familiar from countless other children’s movies. But familiar does not automatically mean bad.


What saves The Magic Faraway Tree is its enthusiasm. Gregor directs it with energy, Farnaby’s screenplay has enough clever British silliness to keep it lively, and the cast is far better than this kind of movie usually gets. Everybody appears to be enjoying themselves, and that enjoyment becomes infectious.


The movie also has a nice sincerity about imagination. Beneath all of the elaborate costumes, magical creatures, tomato sauce, flying buses and farting, there is a simple idea about children being allowed to explore, invent, make mistakes and discover things without having a screen shoved in front of their faces every second.


It is not exactly a revolutionary message, and the movie occasionally pushes it too hard, but I appreciate it.


I also appreciate that this is an actual children’s fantasy movie rather than another cynical piece of corporate IP machinery designed primarily to sell toys, launch a cinematic universe and plant seventeen references for adults to recognize on Reddit.


There is genuine imagination here. Some of it is borrowed imagination, certainly, but at least the filmmakers are trying to create a world.


British audiences already embraced the movie when it opened there earlier this year, and that makes complete sense. I am curious to see how American audiences respond because this thing could not be more British if Michael Palin drove through it in a Mini Cooper while eating fish and chips.


Fans of Enid Blyton will probably get considerably more out of it than I did, simply because they have a relationship with these characters and this world that I do not. Younger children will probably enjoy it more than teenagers, who may consider themselves far too sophisticated for Moonface, magical trees and Dame Washalot.


But I enjoyed it.


The Magic Faraway Tree is colorful, energetic, well acted and occasionally very funny. It has a terrific cast, handsome production design, some genuinely imaginative sequences and Rebecca Ferguson going absolutely bonkers as a psychotic headmistress, which is almost worth the price of admission by itself.


It is derivative, it is sometimes overly silly, but as an alternative to the usual loud, empty children’s franchise movie, this is charming enough.


A minor recommendation for a very British, very strange and reasonably delightful trip up The Magic Faraway Tree. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️



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