CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 8-28-26
- Nick Digilio
- 5 hours ago
- 42 min read
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review seven new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, August 28th, 2026.
Like so many people, I grew up on Looney Tunes. I watched them constantly on television as a kid in the '70s, saw many of those cartoons in theaters, and those characters became part of the fabric of childhood.
Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety, Sylvester, Elmer Fudd, the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, these aren't just cartoon characters anymore. They're cultural fixtures. And Wile E. Coyote was always one of my favorites. I rooted for the guy.
I know the Road Runner is supposed to be the lovable one, but after a while the Road Runner always seemed like kind of a jagoff to me. Beep beep, run away, let the poor coyote blow himself up for the 900th time.
Wile E. is the guy putting in the work. He's designing things. He's building things. He's ordering elaborate products from Acme. He's risking his life. And every single thing he buys immediately explodes, collapses, catches fire or drops him off a cliff.
So the idea behind Coyote vs. Acme is absolutely perfect: after decades of abuse, Wile E. Coyote finally gets a lawyer and sues Acme.
It's based on Ian Frazier's hilarious 1990 New Yorker parody about the coyote taking the corporation to court over all those defective products, and turning that premise into a feature-length live-action/animation courtroom comedy is one of those ideas so obvious and so good that it's amazing nobody successfully made it earlier.
Of course, the story of how Coyote vs. Acme actually reached movie theaters is almost crazier than the movie itself.
The film was completed years ago, directed by Dave Green from a screenplay by Samy Burch, with story work by Burch, James Gunn and Jeremy Slater. Then Warner Bros. Discovery announced in 2023 that it wasn't going to release the finished movie at all and intended to use it as a tax write-off.
After massive backlash from filmmakers, animation fans, actors and pretty much anybody who thinks maybe finished movies should actually be allowed to exist, Warner eventually permitted the filmmakers to shop it around.
There were bids. There were negotiations. There were petitions. There were hashtags. There were screenings where people said the movie was really good. And for a while it appeared that this completely finished film might still disappear into a corporate vault forever.
Then Ketchup Entertainment stepped in, bought it and finally gave it a theatrical release.
The irony is almost too perfect, because Coyote vs. Acme is itself a movie about a giant corporation mistreating people (or in this case cartoon characters) in pursuit of money.
You couldn't write a better publicity campaign.
The movie takes place in a world where humans and cartoon characters coexist, and Will Forte plays Kevin Avery, a down-on-his-luck personal injury attorney working out of one of those offices advertised on cheap billboards and late-night television commercials.
Wile E. sees one of his ads and hires Kevin to sue Acme for the countless injuries he's suffered while using their products in pursuit of the Road Runner.
And the opening 20 minutes of this movie are fantastic.
Sight gag after sight gag lands beautifully, and Wile E. is handled exactly right. He doesn't speak. He communicates through signs, expressions and elaborate physical behavior, and his relationship with Kevin becomes both very funny and eventually surprisingly moving.
Forte is perfectly cast because he's able to play pathetic desperation and sincerity at the same time. Kevin has spent years settling cheap cases and avoiding risk, while Wile E. represents somebody who has spent his entire existence taking gigantic risks despite failing every single time.
There's a wonderful sequence where Wile E. tries to convince Kevin that they need to take a chance by attempting to leap between two cliffs. Of course, because he's Wile E. Coyote, it goes catastrophically wrong in exactly the manner you'd expect.
He falls, the cliff collapses, everything goes to hell, and somehow the scene works both as a classic Road Runner gag and as a metaphor for what Kevin needs to learn. That's the movie at its best.
Lana Condor plays Kevin's niece Paige, who works at the firm, and Martha Kelly is absolutely hilarious as Dottie, another member of the office. Anyone who remembers Kelly from Baskets knows exactly what she's capable of with that beautifully dry, deadpan delivery.
She underreacts to everything, remains casually distracted while insanity unfolds around her and gets some of the biggest laughs in the movie simply by refusing to react the way everybody else does.
Then you have John Cena as Buddy Crane, Acme's gigantic, smug corporate attorney and Kevin's old law-school rival. Cena is clearly having a blast.
He gets to strut, pose, chew scenery and play this absurdly confident asshole who walks into court knowing he has virtually unlimited corporate resources behind him. His opening statement is hilarious, particularly when Kevin tries to imitate the way Cena casually drinks water and completely screws it up before delivering his own pathetic argument.
The courtroom stuff is consistently funny. Luis Guzmán plays the judge and has a great recurring gag involving whether he should use an actual courtroom gavel or a giant ridiculous cartoon gavel that makes a squeaky noise.
And the movie is absolutely loaded with Looney Tunes characters.
Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Sylvester, Foghorn Leghorn, the Tasmanian Devil, Granny, Elmer Fudd and plenty of others show up in significant roles and quick cameos. There are Easter eggs everywhere, but thankfully the movie doesn't simply stop and point at them while yelling, "REMEMBER THIS CHARACTER?"
There's a terrific gag involving Tweety getting whacked in the head and seeing little Sylvesters circling around him instead of birds. There's also an incredibly funny throwaway joke involving Pepé Le Pew that acknowledges, in about five seconds, all the obvious modern issues surrounding a character whose entire personality involved sexually pursuing women who desperately wanted to get away from him.
That joke got one of the biggest laughs out of me.
The larger plot involves Acme secretly using cartoon characters as disposable product testers through something called Project Sisyphus. Every rocket, explosive device, giant spring, complicated trap and ridiculous machine is tested on cartoons first because, essentially, nobody cares if they get hurt. Which gives the movie a surprisingly sharp satirical edge.
Acme sees the cartoons as expendable. They're useful when money can be made from them and irrelevant when they're injured. It's corporate exploitation taken to a literal cartoon extreme, and given what happened to this actual movie behind the scenes, the whole thing plays even more strongly now than it probably would have when it was originally finished.
The little guy is going against the giant corporation. Again, the irony writes itself.
There's also still the matter of Wile E.'s lifelong obsession with the Road Runner. Even while he's suing Acme, meeting witnesses and dealing with a massive corporate conspiracy, he's constantly constructing elaborate traps in hotel rooms trying to finally capture the bird.
Kevin will wake up in the middle of the night while Wile E. is sawing, drilling, welding or building some enormous contraption next to the bed. Those scenes understand what makes the character funny: persistence.
Wile E. isn't lovable because he succeeds. He's lovable because he absolutely refuses to stop trying. And that's ultimately where the movie finds some unexpected emotion.
I've spent my entire life watching this character fail. Anybody who grew up with these cartoons knows the exact rhythm. He runs off the cliff. He looks down. He realizes he's standing in midair. He holds up a sign. He drops.
We know every beat.
So when the movie begins taking Wile E.'s determination seriously without ever losing the joke, it actually works.
There are some terrific action sequences as well, with rocket-powered skates, absurd car chases, refrigerators being used in ways refrigerators were never intended to be used, explosions, giant quantities of glue and mountains of birdseed assembled as part of ridiculous Road Runner traps.
The filmmakers genuinely understand the physics of Looney Tunes, where anything can happen provided the gag is good enough.
I do have some problems with the movie. The biggest is that the rules governing this world are strangely unclear.
If humans and cartoon characters coexist, why does Kevin appear unfamiliar with Bugs Bunny? Why doesn't he recognize "What's up, Doc?" Why don't these people know who these legendary characters are, particularly when Kevin's entire legal practice apparently includes representing cartoon clients? That doesn't make much sense.
It's hard not to think about Who Framed Roger Rabbit, although comparing anything to that film is almost unfair. Robert Zemeckis' 1988 masterpiece remains the absolute gold standard of live-action/animation hybrids. Nothing else is even close.
That movie created an entire social structure around humans and "toons." Everybody understood who they were, where they lived, how they were treated and what their position was within society.
And the miracle of Roger Rabbit is something we're probably never going to see again because it brought together characters from Disney, Warner Bros., MGM, Fleischer and other animation worlds in one movie at exactly the right historical moment before corporate ownership made something like that essentially impossible.
So no, Coyote vs. Acme isn't Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Nothing is. But the rules here still could have been clearer.
The middle section also feels noticeably choppy. Considering the movie was finished in 2022, then shelved, shopped around, threatened with deletion, sold and finally released years later, I wouldn't be surprised if versions of the film were edited and re-edited during that long journey. Whatever happened, the middle sometimes feels jumpy and unfocused.
But the first 20 minutes are terrific, and the final half hour really delivers.
The story eventually moves to Washington, where the Acme conspiracy becomes the subject of a Senate hearing overseen by Elmer Fudd, which is exactly the sentence I hoped I would someday get to write.
Foghorn Leghorn becomes deeply involved in Acme's corporate defense, and the whole thing builds toward an unexpectedly emotional payoff involving Wile E. and the Road Runner. I won't spoil the details, but if you're somebody who spent years rooting for that damn coyote like I did, the movie earns those moments.
I've never, ever been a fan of the Space Jam movies. I hated the original, which always felt more interested in Michael Jordan, gym shoes, corporate branding and selling merchandise than actually understanding Looney Tunes. And then the abhorrent Space Jam: A New Legacy came along and somehow managed to make the first one look substantially better.
On the other hand, Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action is terrific, it's smart, beautifully animated, deeply respectful of these characters and made by somebody who clearly understood their history. Naturally, it bombed. Because that's how things work.
Coyote vs. Acme isn't quite as good as Dante's movie, and it's nowhere near Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But it's infinitely better than either Space Jam. It's funny, affectionate, visually inventive and clearly made by people who actually like Wile E. Coyote and understand why generations of people have loved watching him fail.
Most importantly, I'm thrilled we actually get to see the damn thing.
A finished movie made by hundreds of artists almost disappeared forever because somebody decided it made more financial sense as a tax deduction than as art. Instead, people fought for it.
And now this movie about Wile E. Coyote refusing to give up despite being crushed, exploded, humiliated and knocked off cliffs over and over again has somehow survived being crushed, humiliated and nearly destroyed by its own corporation.
That's almost too perfect.
Thank you, Ketchup Entertainment, for getting Coyote vs. Acme out of the vault and onto a movie screen where it belongs.
It's funny. It's flawed. It's surprisingly sweet. And for anyone who grew up rooting for that poor bastard with another Acme package under his arm, there's a genuine emotional payoff here.
Wile E. Coyote finally gets his day in court. And after everything this movie went through, so does Coyote vs. Acme. I'm definitely recommending it.
Also, any Looney Tunes family movie that ends with a Clash song blasting over the end credits, get's an automatic pass. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
If you know me at all (if you’ve listened to me on the radio, listened to my podcast, or read my reviews over the years) you know that I am absolutely not a member of the Ridley Scott fan club.
Scott has been directing movies for nearly half a century, and as far as I’m concerned, he has made exactly two genuinely great movies: Alien and Blade Runner. Those are masterpieces. They are also both more than 40 years old. Since then, there have been a couple of good movies, and an astonishing number of terrible ones.
I think Ridley Scott is one of the most overrated filmmakers in movie history, a director who can occasionally create an impressive image but who has repeatedly demonstrated very little ability to direct actors, develop believable characters, maintain a consistent tone, or simply tell a story without burying it beneath distracting stylistic choices.
And lately? Even people who actually like Ridley Scott have to admit things haven’t exactly been going well. House of Gucci was terrible. Napoleon was virtually unwatchable. Gladiator II was even worse than Gladiator, and I think Gladiator is a lousy movie in the first place.
Now comes The Dog Stars, based on Peter Heller’s bestselling 2012 novel, and Scott continues his remarkable streak with one of the dullest, most derivative and laughably generic post-apocalyptic movies I’ve seen in a very long time.
I haven’t read Heller’s novel, so I can’t tell you how much of the problem originates there and how much comes from the screenplay by Mark L. Smith. Smith has written some good movies, but The Dog Stars feels like somebody threw every post-apocalyptic movie made during the past 30 years into a blender and forgot to add anything new.
The film takes place after a devastating flu pandemic has wiped out most of humanity. Hig, played by Jacob Elordi, is a civilian pilot and mechanic living in an abandoned airplane hangar in Colorado with his dog Jasper and Bangley, a heavily armed former Marine played by Josh Brolin.
Hig flies an old yellow Cessna, scavenges for supplies, visits a Mennonite community led by Aaron, played by Benedict Wong, and occasionally returns to the home where he once lived with his pregnant wife Melissa, who died during the outbreak.
Hig is understandably devastated by everything he has lost. He regularly thinks about killing himself by flying his Cessna directly into the side of a mountain. There are flashbacks involving his dead wife, mournful memories of the life they once had, and lots of shots of Hig staring pensively into the distance while contemplating whether there is any reason to keep going.
Eventually, while flying, Hig picks up a mysterious radio transmission suggesting that there may be some kind of functioning community near Grand Junction.
He becomes obsessed with finding it, ventures beyond the territory he normally patrols, and eventually winds up stranded on property belonging to Pops, played by Guy Pearce, and Pops’ daughter Cima, played by Margaret Qualley.
Cima studied medicine before civilization collapsed, Pops is another heavily armed survivalist, and before long Hig and Cima begin developing exactly the relationship you know they’re going to develop approximately three seconds after they meet.
If you have ever seen The Road, I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, any of the Mad Max movies, or virtually any other movie about people wandering through the remains of civilization after society has collapsed, you have seen almost everything in The Dog Stars before.
There are abandoned landscapes, dangerous outsiders, bodies that have to be burned, fortified locations, guns, survivors trying to create little pockets of civilization, grief over the world that disappeared, the possibility of a safe haven somewhere over the horizon, and roaming gangs of murderous lunatics.
At one point, a huge group of these marauders descends on the hangar, and they look so much like the War Boys from Mad Max: Fury Road that I almost expected Immortan Joe to show up.
Other images of Hig and his dog walking through vast, empty landscapes look like discarded shots from I Am Legend. There are echoes of The Road everywhere, along with pieces of countless other movies that have done all of this before and done it infinitely better.
It might not matter quite as much if the characters were interesting, but they aren’t. They’re barely characters at all. They’re post-apocalyptic archetypes wearing dirty clothes.
Hig is a pilot and a mechanic, although Elordi never remotely convinces you that he is either. We know he’s a mechanic primarily because he occasionally works on things and, at one point, has a screwdriver sticking out of his mouth. That’s apparently all you need. Screwdriver in the mouth? Mechanic. Got it.
I continue to be baffled by the fascination with Jacob Elordi. Yes, he is very tall. Yes, he is very good-looking. But I find him incredibly stiff and unimaginably boring, like a very tall, handsome, hollow mannequin.
I didn’t think he deserved the Oscar nomination for Frankenstein, I hated Saltburn and didn’t like him in it, and while he was good as Elvis Presley in Priscilla, that was a supporting role in which he didn’t have to carry the entire movie. Here he has to carry almost everything, and he simply can’t.
Josh Brolin, meanwhile, could play Bangley in his sleep, and unfortunately it frequently looks like he is. Bangley is the gruff, gun-toting former Marine who calls people “bud,” refers to the marauders as “roaches,” spouts exposition and says virtually every line you expect this kind of character to say.
Margaret Qualley is reduced to eye candy, and has even less to do. Cima is compassionate, she has medical training, she has suffered loss, and therefore she and Hig are destined to become romantically involved because that’s what the screenplay requires.
Then there’s Guy Pearce as Pops. Pearce gives one of those performances in which every facial expression seems designed to remind us that Pops has Seen Some Things. He grimaces. He glares. He squints. He looks suspiciously at everybody. Every choice is huge and obvious.
Again, the screenplay gives him a one-dimensional stereotype, but Pearce responds by taking that stereotype and playing it at about 175 percent.
The best performance in the movie belongs to Jasper. Jasper is the dog.
Unfortunately, the action doesn’t save the movie either. Scott stages the attacks by the marauders with remarkably little tension or excitement. People run. Guns fire. Things explode. Characters hide. Bad guys attack.
But there is no real suspense or momentum to any of it. Scott has made enormously expensive action movies for decades, yet the action here feels perfunctory, as though everybody involved simply assumed that a bunch of people firing guns at each other automatically qualifies as excitement.
The movie’s emotional centerpiece is supposed to be Hig’s grief. He repeatedly returns in his mind (and physically) to the life he had with his wife before the pandemic. He remembers her pregnancy, their home and everything that disappeared.
He fantasizes about turning off the engine of his plane and simply letting himself fly into a mountain. Theoretically, this should give the movie some emotional weight: Is survival itself enough? If everyone you loved is gone, what exactly are you surviving for?
Those aren’t bad questions. The Dog Stars simply doesn’t explore them with any depth. The flashbacks are corny, obvious and manipulative, and because Elordi never creates a convincing interior life for Hig, the suicidal imagery becomes another repeated plot device instead of something genuinely devastating.
Eventually Hig finds another potential reason to live through Cima and Pops. The three begin forming a makeshift family, and after more attacks and more wandering around the wilderness, they head toward Grand Junction, searching for the source of the mysterious radio transmission.
And this is where The Dog Stars suddenly becomes a completely different terrible movie.
For about 10 or 15 minutes, Ridley Scott apparently decides he’s Stanley Kubrick.
After spending most of its running time as a drab, generic wilderness survival movie, The Dog Stars abruptly turns into this bizarre, colorful, surrealistic science-fiction nightmare filled with strange production design, crazy costumes, weird music and imagery that seems inspired by A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, a little John Carpenter, and even some of Scott’s own early visual work in Legend and Blade Runner.
Allison Janney shows up as the woman connected to the radio transmission, and she looks like a demented flight attendant from some bizarre futuristic airline. She has exaggerated makeup and this completely theatrical appearance that belongs in another movie.
Her performance is strange enough already, but for some inexplicable reason her voice also appears to have been electronically lowered and slowed down, as though Scott didn’t trust Allison Janney (of all people) to create an eccentric character without somebody screwing around with her voice in post-production.
The entire Grand Junction sequence is incredibly distracting because it has virtually no stylistic relationship to anything we have been watching. Suddenly the pacing changes. The production design changes. The performances change. The visual language changes. The tone changes. It feels like Scott woke up one morning during production and said, “Hey, remember when people thought I was a visionary?”
So he tries a little Kubrick-lite surrealism. It doesn’t work.
What’s fascinating is that this section isn’t better than the rest of The Dog Stars. It’s just terrible in a completely different way. For most of the movie, Scott gives us a boring, gray, derivative post-apocalyptic survival drama. Then, for about 10 minutes, he gives us an embarrassing exercise in self-conscious surrealism.
After that, the movie returns to the original dullness and starts wrapping up all of its questions about Hig, Cima, Pops, Bangley, the Mennonites, the plague and the marauders. By that point, I didn’t care.
There are potentially interesting ideas buried somewhere inside The Dog Stars. What does it mean to survive after losing everything that made survival worthwhile? Can human connection pull someone back from complete despair? Is rebuilding civilization possible when civilization itself seems to have been the thing that failed? Those questions have fueled plenty of terrific post-apocalyptic stories.
But you need characters. You need relationships. You need tension. You need something we haven’t seen 150 times before.
Instead, The Dog Stars is a collection of recycled images, stock characters, predictable emotional beats and badly staged action scenes occasionally interrupted by Ridley Scott reminding us that he can still put an interesting-looking image on a screen.
I will give Scott this: God bless the guy, he keeps working. He is approaching 90 years old and apparently has absolutely no intention of slowing down. There are more Ridley Scott movies planned, and I’m sure he’ll keep making them as long as somebody keeps handing him enormous amounts of money.
But movie after movie continues to disappoint me, and The Dog Stars is another one. It is dull, derivative, poorly acted and badly paced.
Its action scenes aren’t exciting, its emotional scenes aren’t moving, and its one attempt at wild stylistic experimentation feels like it was accidentally spliced in from another film.
One of the worst movies of the year. - ⭐️
I have to admit, I was not looking forward to Finding Emily.
Sometimes trailers do a real disservice to movies. Every once in a while, a trailer makes something look painfully broad, obvious and stupid, and then the actual movie turns out to be much smarter than the marketing suggests. That is absolutely the case here.
The trailer for this British romantic comedy is terrible. It makes the movie look like some frantic, misunderstanding-filled sitcom with mistaken identities, goofy reaction shots and endless romantic-comedy clichés.
The actual movie is much better than that. In fact, Finding Emily is one of the bigger surprises of the year.
Spike Fearn plays Owen, a 23-year-old sound engineer working at a student union bar at a fictional Manchester university. One night he meets a girl named Emily, they have a genuinely charming conversation, they dance, they connect, and at the end of the night she gives him her phone number.
The problem is that the number is missing a digit. Owen is convinced it was an accident, not a brush-off, and because he is a hopeless old-school romantic, he decides he is going to find her. That premise is admittedly kind of ridiculous, and the movie knows it.
Owen eventually crosses paths with another Emily, Emily Raine, played by Angourie Rice. She is a psychology student desperately trying to finish her thesis, which is built around the idea that romantic love is basically a form of temporary madness, an evolutionary impulse that makes people behave irrationally.
When Owen shows up obsessively searching for this mystery woman he barely knows, Emily sees him as the perfect case study. So she offers to help him find Emily. What Owen doesn't know is that she is using him.
And that becomes the central engine of the movie. Owen is using Emily Raine to find the woman he thinks he may be falling in love with, while Emily Raine is using Owen to finish her thesis. Naturally, the two of them begin falling for each other, and from there the complications pile up.
Now, this could have been unbearable.
Instead, it works because the screenplay by Rachel Hirons gives these people actual personalities, and first-time feature director Alicia MacDonald allows the comedy to come out of character rather than simply forcing everybody into stupid situations.
Fearn is enormously charming as Owen. I remembered him as one of the stranger and more interesting things in James L. Brooks' Ella McCay, and he had a small role in Alien: Romulus, but this was the first time I really watched him carry a movie.
He's funny without trying too hard, romantic without becoming insufferable, and he gives Owen enough vulnerability that you understand why this ridiculous search means so much to him.
Rice is also terrific. Emily Raine is much more complicated than the standard romantic-comedy female lead because she is, for a significant portion of this movie, doing something genuinely awful.
She encourages Owen to escalate his search because the more ridiculous and obsessive his behavior becomes, the better the material is for her thesis. She knows exactly what she's doing, and eventually she hurts him very badly. The movie doesn't let her off the hook for that. That's one of the things I liked most about it.
Owen's search gets completely out of control after Emily suggests he contact every student named Emily at the university. There are more than 300 of them, and before long he has accidentally become known across campus as "Email Guy." He winds up on a podcast talking about his search, performs a song he wrote for the mystery Emily, and the whole thing goes viral.
Suddenly Owen becomes a campus symbol. And not in a good way.
A group of students decides that his behavior is creepy, predatory and representative of everything wrong with straight male behavior. There are protests. There are campaigns. He gets labeled toxic, dangerous and misogynistic.
Some of the accusations are based on things he actually did, some are based on misunderstanding, and some are simply people attaching themselves to a cause because everybody around them is doing it.
This is where Finding Emily becomes much more interesting than I expected.
The movie is written by a woman and directed by a woman, and neither Hirons nor MacDonald is interested in simply presenting Owen as some misunderstood saint while turning the women protesting him into villains.
Instead, the movie takes a pretty sharp satirical look at how quickly people decide who someone is based on social media, group dynamics and whatever narrative happens to be spreading at the moment.
Owen isn't a misogynist or some toxic creep. He's a lovesick idiot who makes a series of increasingly bad decisions because the person helping him is actively encouraging him to make them. And that person is Emily.
So the character who does the most damage in this movie is not the guy everybody is attacking. It's the woman quietly manipulating him for academic gain.
There is something genuinely interesting in that, especially because the film doesn't become some stupid anti-feminist rant. It's more about the way people in their early 20s latch onto causes, identities and beliefs with absolute certainty, then sometimes change their minds three days later.
That's college.
Everybody has a cause. Everybody has an opinion. Everybody is absolutely positive they're right. Then somebody says something else, a different video goes viral, the group chat changes direction and suddenly everybody is passionately committed to something new. The movie understands that very well.
It also has a terrific supporting cast.
Prasanna Puwanarajah is hilarious as Professor Westlake, Emily's completely exhausted psychology professor who has been teaching for far too long and barely bothers concealing his contempt for his students anymore.
He isn't evil or cruel. He's simply done. He has heard every excuse, watched every student convince themselves they're uniquely brilliant, and has reached the point where the only thing he really wants is five quiet minutes in his car.
There is an absolutely wonderful scene where he sits alone, trying to escape everyone, listening to "Careless Whisper" and essentially begging George Michael to take him away.
It's one of my favorite scenes in any comedy this year.
Minnie Driver is also terrific as the dean, another adult who has clearly had enough of these students and their constantly evolving emergencies. She has some wonderful throwaway lines, and her first appearance involving a very inappropriate phone conversation is hilarious.
Jack Riddiford is excellent as Owen's older brother Matt, and their relationship gives Owen some additional emotional weight because the brothers are still dealing with the death of their mother and the question of what to do with the family home.
Isabella Laughland is very funny as Freya, and the movie is filled with supporting characters who actually have specific comic personalities rather than simply standing around waiting to deliver exposition.
One of my favorite recurring gags involves a completely random student in a blue tracksuit who keeps appearing while groups of people are watching Owen's viral podcast appearances.
Everybody else is yelling at the screen or becoming increasingly emotionally invested, while this guy basically keeps wondering why the hell everybody is still watching any of this. His reaction shots killed me every time.
The movie also has a terrific soundtrack, beginning with New Order and continuing with a lot of great music that gives the whole thing a fun, slightly retro electronic feel. The George Michael material obviously becomes important, but music in general plays a real role in the movie rather than simply being wallpaper.
Eventually, the original Emily reappears and Owen discovers that her name is actually Amelie. They meet, but by then his viral reputation has completely overwhelmed whatever tiny connection they might have had. Meanwhile, Emily Raine has genuinely fallen for Owen, which is a problem because she has also been secretly documenting and manipulating his behavior for months.
You know eventually he is going to find out. And when he does, the movie earns the hurt.
That's another thing that separates Finding Emily from a lot of lazy rom-coms. The conflict isn't some ridiculous misunderstanding that could be solved by somebody saying one sentence. Emily actually betrayed Owen. He has a legitimate reason to walk away from her, and she has to genuinely acknowledge what she did before there can be any kind of reconciliation.
The movie is a little too long. At nearly two hours, it could lose 10 or 15 minutes pretty easily. Some of the roommate material gets repetitive, and the story takes a little too long to get Owen and Emily where we know they're eventually going.
But I didn't mind spending the extra time with these characters because I liked them. That's the key.
These are funny, flawed, recognizable people. Owen is romantic and ridiculous. Emily is smart and ambitious and capable of doing something incredibly selfish. The supporting characters have actual lives and personalities.
Even the campus satire has something to say about social media, public shaming, identity and how quickly young people can turn somebody into a symbol without really knowing them. And ultimately, it is still a romantic comedy.
If you're a regular reader, you know I'm not exactly the world's biggest rom-com guy. Most of them bore me because you can see every beat coming and the characters exist only to fulfill the formula.
Finding Emily follows plenty of familiar romantic-comedy rules, but it earns them because the people inside the formula feel alive.
The trailer made this thing look terrible.
The movie is smart, funny, surprisingly sharp, beautifully acted and much more thoughtful than I expected.
One of the nicest surprises of the year.
I really liked Finding Emily. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
It's interesting that Buddy is arriving in theaters at roughly the same time as Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, because they're both dark, strange, comic horror movies built around very specific kinds of nostalgia.
Camp Miasma dissects the colorful, goofy, frequently homophobic and transphobic slasher movies of the '80s, while Buddy goes after children's television, like the world of Barney & Friends, Blue's Clues, Pee-wee's Playhouse and all those relentlessly cheerful shows where colorful creatures taught kids how to share, behave and express their feelings.
Except in Buddy, if you don't express your feelings correctly, the giant orange unicorn might kill you.
And between these two twisted satires, I prefer Buddy. It's flawed, and the second half doesn't live up to the terrific setup, but it's crazier, funnier, scarier and more stylistically assured than Camp Miasma. It takes a very big swing. It doesn't hit it out of the park, but I admire the hell out of the swing.
Buddy is the feature directorial debut of Casper Kelly, who is a fascinating guy whose work has mostly existed in the strange little corners of Adult Swim and short-form comedy.
He's probably best known for Too Many Cooks, the brilliant viral Adult Swim short that begins as a parody of those endless opening-credit sequences from '70s, '80s and '90s sitcoms and gradually mutates into something completely insane. It moves from sitcom to cop show to prime-time soap opera to Saturday morning cartoon and eventually into outright horror.
Millions of people watched it, filmmakers and celebrities went nuts for it, and it became one of those bizarre little pieces of pop culture that could probably only have happened in the internet era.
Kelly also worked on Adult Swim's Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, and he created that hilariously ridiculous macaroni-and-cheese commercial that appears in Panos Cosmatos' completely insane Nicolas Cage movie Mandy. He has spent years taking familiar pieces of pop culture, bending them into weird shapes and then pushing them into disturbing places.
That's exactly what he does with Buddy.
The movie drops us into a 1999 children's television program called It's Buddy!, hosted by Buddy, a giant bright-orange humanoid unicorn voiced wonderfully by Keegan-Michael Key.
Buddy has the giant smile, the colorful set, the relentlessly positive attitude and all the educational lessons you'd expect from this kind of show. He's surrounded by children and talking props, and everything is about sharing, playing games, doing chores, controlling emotions and telling everybody how much you love them.
Except something is obviously very wrong.
The children appear to be trapped inside the show. They don't really remember how they got there, they're forced to participate in Buddy's games, and every episode operates according to a bizarre collection of rules. Everybody has to smile. Everybody has to play along.
Everybody has to love Buddy. Then somebody doesn't. And Buddy does not handle rejection well.
When the cheerful veneer finally cracks, the movie gets surprisingly nasty. There's a sequence involving Buddy brutally attacking a nurse with an axe while the children are essentially frozen in place, still forced to maintain their happy television-show smiles, and it's genuinely disturbing.
Suddenly all those qualities that made children's television comforting (the repetition, the artificial happiness, the insistence on participation) become horrifying. That's the central joke of Buddy, and it's a good one: toxic positivity becomes a form of imprisonment.
The kids begin discovering the rules of this strange universe, including what happens when Buddy's name is spoken at the wrong time, while various friendly talking objects reveal increasingly sinister qualities.
There's a talking backpack voiced by Patton Oswalt, Michael Shannon provides voices for Charlie the Train and a ventriloquist dummy, and Clint Howard plays a wonderfully deranged Howdy Doody-like cowboy puppet. There's even a couch that immediately made me think of Chairry from Pee-wee's Playhouse.
The vocal work is terrific across the board, particularly Key, who has to make Buddy both genuinely convincing as a lovable children's television character and completely terrifying once the mask comes off. He understands exactly how to make that exaggerated children's-show enthusiasm sound slightly threatening even before Buddy actually becomes a monster.
Outside this bizarre television world, Cristin Milioti plays Grace, a mother investigating the disappearance of the children and eventually uncovering the history of the forgotten show. Milioti is one of the most captivating actresses working right now.
She was fantastic in The Penguin, and she has this ability to remain completely emotionally grounded even when everything surrounding her becomes totally insane. That's extremely useful in a Casper Kelly movie.
The movie gradually becomes a commentary on childhood nostalgia and media consumption, about how these television shows shape us, how we remember them, how corporations package childhood innocence and how disturbing some of that programming becomes when you look at it through adult eyes.
There are shades of Poltergeist, The Wizard of Oz and especially David Cronenberg's Videodrome, with television becoming something you don't merely watch but something that can consume you.
And oddly enough, Videodrome also hangs over Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. I love that David Cronenberg's bizarre, subversive 1983 masterpiece is apparently having a moment more than 40 years later. If filmmakers are going to steal inspiration from something, Videodrome is a pretty damn good place to start.
Technically, Kelly and his crew do a terrific job recreating the look and rhythm of cheap children's television. For a surprisingly long stretch at the beginning, you're essentially just watching an episode of this deeply strange kids' show.
The sets, props, costumes, music, forced cheerfulness and slightly artificial performances are all exactly right. And because Kelly commits so completely to that world before tearing it apart, the horror becomes much more effective when it arrives.
There are some genuinely scary moments here, and some surprisingly gross ones. The movie occasionally goes much further than you expect it to, which I appreciated. Just when you think Kelly is going to settle for making a clever parody of Barney, he reminds you that you're watching a slasher movie.
The problem is that Casper Kelly has spent most of his career working in short form, and you can feel that limitation as Buddy moves into its second half.
Too Many Cooks works because it's a concentrated blast of insanity. The fake commercial in Mandy works because it's a few minutes of perfectly controlled absurdity. Here, Kelly has to sustain his particular kind of surreal comedy-horror for an entire feature, and eventually the ideas begin repeating themselves. The first 45 minutes are considerably better than the final stretch.
Once Grace's investigation becomes more important, the movie acquires a more conventional plot. We get explanations, escape plans, mythology and a big final act where the worlds begin colliding.
Ironically, the more Buddy explains itself, the less interesting it becomes. I was much more fascinated when I had no idea what the hell I was watching.
That's also where the satire begins losing some of its bite. There's only so much mileage you can get from taking something adorable and turning it horrifying, and Kelly occasionally pushes a gag beyond its natural endpoint. The movie becomes repetitive and, by the final half hour, a little exhausting.
But there's enough imagination here that I remained interested even when it wasn't completely working.
That's the difference for me between Buddy and Camp Miasma. Both movies have terrific ideas. Both eventually become repetitive. Both are made by filmmakers with very specific obsessions who are using horror to examine the pop culture that shaped them.
But Buddy feels more playful and more willing to surprise me. Its best moments are wonderfully strange, and Kelly's affection for the material he's destroying comes through even while Buddy is hacking somebody apart.
I like movies that take chances, particularly horror movies, because God knows we have enough generic horror franchises recycling the same demons, ghosts and jump scares over and over again. Buddy is definitely not generic.
It's messy. It's overlong. The final third doesn't match the first. Some of the ideas would probably work better in another 15-minute Adult Swim short.
But it's also funny, disturbing, imaginative and occasionally completely frigging nuts.
Casper Kelly took the strange sensibility that made Too Many Cooks such a sensation and tried to stretch it into a feature film. It doesn't entirely work, but there are enough inspired moments, terrific performances, great vocal characterizations and legitimately surprising scares to make the experiment worthwhile.
It's a big swing. He doesn't hit it out of the park. But he hits enough of it that I'm recommending Buddy. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
About nine years ago, writer-director Macon Blair came seemingly out of nowhere with I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, a terrific little pitch-black comedy-thriller that won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and established Blair as somebody to watch.
His follow-up, the wonderfully insane reboot of The Toxic Avenger, was funny, violent and much better than it had any right to be, but unfortunately got a little lost when it was finally released last year and never quite became the cult hit it deserved to be.
Now Blair is back with Idiots, which premiered at Sundance under the much better title The Shitheads. Apparently somebody decided you couldn't release a movie called The Shitheads, which is too bad because The Shitheads is exactly what this movie should be called.
Idiots is another dark, nasty, very funny Macon Blair comedy, and while it starts considerably stronger than it finishes, there's enough originality, terrific acting and genuinely sharp social commentary here that I'm recommending it.
I also hope people actually see the damn thing because I'd like Blair to keep making these weird, distinctive movies.
Dave Franco and O'Shea Jackson Jr. play Mark and Davis, two guys who have essentially hit rock bottom. Mark is an irresponsible slacker who would mostly like to remain high enough that he doesn't have to engage with his own life, while Davis is a God-fearing striver desperately trying to improve himself but failing at practically every turn.
They're broke, they're desperate, and they accept a job transporting a troubled rich teenager to a remote rehabilitation facility. How hard could that possibly be? The teenager is Sheridan Kimberley, played by Mason Thames, and he's a complete nightmare.
Sheridan initially presents himself as another troubled rich kid being shipped off by his wealthy family, but it quickly becomes clear that he's much smarter, much more manipulative and considerably more dangerous than either of the guys transporting him.
He studies Mark and Davis, discovers their insecurities and starts pushing exactly the right buttons to turn them against each other. And Thames is terrific.
He's been outstanding in recent films like Nimrods, the Black Phone movies, and the live-action How to Train Your Dragon reboot. Here, his character Sheridan may be the most interesting thing I've seen him do.
He can switch almost instantaneously between innocent kid, wounded victim, smug rich asshole and outright sociopath. There's something genuinely chilling about watching him figure out exactly what somebody needs to hear and then weaponize it against them.
Of course, the supposedly simple drive to rehab goes completely to hell.
The trip becomes a series of increasingly bizarre encounters involving drugs, criminals, disgusting roadside motels and various lunatics who wander into the story and then disappear again.
Kiernan Shipka is very good as a stripper named Irina. Peter Dinklage pops up as a character named Koko. Blair himself appears as a drug dealer. And Nicholas Braun has a hilarious turn as a SoundCloud rapper named Pricka Bush Da Werewoof, who is completely obsessed with lycanthropy because apparently this movie needed a werewolf-obsessed SoundCloud rapper. I'm glad it has one.
Blair creates this strange little universe where every exit off the highway seems to contain somebody more screwed up than the person we just met, and the movie has a definite Coen brothers influence.
You can feel some Fargo, Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski floating around in the mixture, from the eccentric criminals, bizarre side characters, sudden violence and people making increasingly terrible decisions while convincing themselves everything is going to work out.
There's also a little Midnight Run in there, particularly in the basic structure of two mismatched people trying to transport an extremely difficult human being from one place to another while absolutely everything goes wrong.
Dave Franco is especially good here. Mark is a complete mess, and Franco doesn't try very hard to make him conventionally likable. He's irresponsible, selfish, frequently high and mostly interested in whatever will get him through the next few hours without having to think too much about his life.
There's something about Franco's performance that actually reminded me a little of some of the characters his brother James used to play years ago, he is that detached, slightly dangerous screwup who might be smarter than he initially appears.
O'Shea Jackson Jr. gives Davis a completely different energy. Davis wants to believe he's a good person. He wants to succeed. He wants faith to give his life some structure. But he keeps screwing things up anyway, and the contrast between these two guys gives the movie its comic engine.
Franco, Jackson and Thames work extremely well together because the power dynamics between them keep changing.
But underneath all the road-movie insanity, Idiots is really about privilege. That's where Blair's movie becomes much more interesting than simply watching three people encounter increasingly crazy situations.
Mark and Davis are the characters society would immediately identify as losers. They're broke. They're unsuccessful. They make stupid decisions. One can't stop getting high and the other can't seem to make anything work despite desperately trying. They're exactly the kinds of people everybody looks at and says, "Get your shit together."
But they're not the real villains here.
The truly horrible people in Idiots are the people with money, influence and enough privilege to insulate themselves from the consequences of their behavior. Sheridan can be shipped off to an expensive treatment facility because that's what wealthy families do with their problems: pay somebody else to deal with them.
The movie is filled with people who can behave monstrously because money, status or followers have convinced them that normal rules don't apply. And Blair gets pretty vicious about that.
The movie keeps asking who the actual shitheads are. Is it the broke drug addict driving a rich kid across the country because he desperately needs the money? Is it the guy who keeps failing even though he's trying to improve himself? Or is it the wealthy sociopath who knows somebody will always be there to clean up the mess?
That's where the original title becomes even better.
Unfortunately, Idiots does lose its way somewhat during the final act. The road-movie structure inevitably leads toward some predictable character developments, and once the movie has introduced all these eccentric people and increasingly insane situations, Blair has some trouble finding a climax worthy of the setup.
It gets messy, some of the ideas start repeating themselves, and the final stretch doesn't have the same energy or surprise as the first two-thirds.
But there's too much good stuff here to dismiss it.
The performances are strong, the movie is consistently funny, the violence occasionally gets shockingly dark, and Blair has enough confidence to let some genuinely unpleasant people remain genuinely unpleasant. He isn't desperately trying to manufacture lovable characters out of everybody.
Most importantly, there's something underneath all the craziness. Idiots uses the familiar structure of a dysfunctional road movie to make a pretty nasty observation about class, money and who gets labeled a failure in this country. The supposed losers may be the only people in the movie who actually understand anything about the real world because they're the ones forced to live in it.
Idiots is flawed. The final third doesn't quite work, and you can occasionally see the Coen brothers and Midnight Run influences a little too clearly. But Macon Blair takes those familiar ingredients and gives them enough of his own strange, dark sensibility that the movie has a personality.
And these days, I'll take a flawed movie with a personality over another perfectly competent piece of generic crap every single time.
Idiots is nasty, funny, twisted and surprisingly perceptive about the people we call losers, and the much worse people who have enough money to make sure nobody ever calls them anything.
Definitely worth a look. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
It Ends is a pretty remarkable feature-film debut from writer, director and editor Alexander Ullom, and it's one of the more surprising movies I've seen this year.
On the simplest level, it's a strange, scary and sometimes very funny cosmic horror movie about four recent college graduates who accidentally turn onto a two-lane road that apparently never ends.
But underneath all of that, it's a deeply existential movie about something potentially much scarier than monsters, demons or whatever the hell might be hiding in the woods.
It's about becoming an adult.
James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth) and Tyler (Mitchell Cole) are four friends heading out on a late-night drive, and the movie initially just lets us hang out with them.
They're having exactly the kinds of stupid conversations young friends have in a car, with arguments about which animals would win in fights, social media, relationships and whatever else pops into their heads.
There's a very funny story about Tyler breaking up with a woman he really liked essentially because she wanted to go to an orchard and pick pumpkins. That's about as profound as things get. Then they make a turn.
Suddenly they're traveling down a seemingly endless road surrounded by dense forest. When they try to go back, the road behind them is gone. And when they stop the car and get out to investigate, screaming people begin emerging from the woods and swarming the vehicle, desperately trying to get inside.
One of them claws Fisher's arm before the guys manage to escape. Eventually they figure out that whenever the car stops, they have roughly 90 seconds before these shrieking human figures come running out of the woods again.
So they keep driving. And driving. And driving.
Six hours become a day, a day becomes God knows how long, and the odometer eventually starts registering hundreds of thousands of miles. The gas never runs out. They don't get hungry. They don't get tired. They don't have to sleep.
Fisher's injured arm heals, so time is obviously passing, but none of the normal rules of human existence seem to apply anymore. They find another abandoned vehicle whose odometer has maxed out at a million miles. There is apparently nothing behind them, nothing ahead of them and nowhere to go except straight.
Now, you could just watch It Ends as a really clever Twilight Zone-like horror premise, and it works perfectly well that way. But Ullom is doing something much more interesting. That endless highway is adulthood.
These four people have just graduated, their entire lives supposedly stretched out in front of them, and suddenly they're confronted with the terrifying possibility that life isn't going to resemble anything they imagined.
Maybe there isn't a map. Maybe there isn't some grand destination. Maybe it's going to involve years of repetition, disappointment, boredom, frustration and occasionally wondering what the hell you're doing there in the first place.
This is a horror movie about the quarter-life crisis.
The Jeep itself becomes this little bubble of youth. It's the place where they're safe, but it's also a prison preventing them from moving anywhere except forward. The screaming people coming out of the woods can be interpreted in all sorts of ways, the expectations of society, the pressures waiting for you when you enter adulthood, everybody demanding to know what your career is going to be, who you're going to marry, what your plans are, what you're doing with your life.
And those abandoned cars along the road are pretty disturbing when you begin thinking about what they might represent. Other people have traveled this road. Some of them simply couldn't keep going.
What makes the movie work is that Ullom doesn't just turn these characters into four mouthpieces for his metaphor. They're distinct people who respond differently to the same impossible situation.
James is hyper-rational and analytical, constantly convinced there must be an explanation and therefore an escape. Tyler has trouble committing to anything. Fisher remains emotionally connected to his mother and the life he's left behind. And Day is carrying something much darker, eventually revealing to the others that she attempted suicide.
The longer they're trapped, the more those differences matter. Tyler eventually reaches a point where he simply can't continue and walks into the forest. Day and Fisher develop little coping mechanisms, including regular primal screaming sessions where they get out and scream their frustrations into the emptiness. James refuses to participate. He needs to solve the problem. He needs the road to mean something. He needs there to be an end.
And that's one of the smartest things about the movie. Who is actually coping better? The people who accept the absurdity of their situation and scream every once in a while, or the guy who remains absolutely determined to impose logic and meaning on something that may have neither?
Eventually Day and Fisher decide they've had enough. At more than 835,000 miles, they take the keys and tell James that his obsessive belief in an escape has become its own kind of torture. James gets the keys back and continues alone. He refuses to accept that this might simply be what existence is.
The performances are absolutely essential because most of It Ends consists of four people sitting inside a vehicle talking, arguing, joking, panicking and gradually revealing themselves. Yoon, Jackson, Toth and Cole are all terrific.
Their chemistry feels natural from the opening scenes, which means that when the friendships begin changing (and eventually breaking apart) you actually care. These feel like people who have history together, and that becomes crucial because the movie is also about something most of us eventually discover: the people who seem indispensable when you're young aren't necessarily going to be traveling with you forever.
Technically, the movie is remarkably accomplished for a first feature. Ullom creates genuine tension from an extremely limited environment, and the first appearance of those screaming figures rushing out of the woods is absolutely terrifying.
The sound design is especially good, with the engine, phone alarms, music inside the car, strange noises coming from the forest and the sudden intrusion of those screaming voices all become part of the film's psychological landscape.
Even the fact that the title doesn't appear until about 14 minutes into the movie is used effectively. By the time IT ENDS finally pops up, you're already thinking, "Well, apparently it actually doesn't."
But for all the horror and existential symbolism, one of my favorite scenes involves a Clif Bar. It is an unexpectedly beautiful and heartbreaking moment. I never thought I'd get emotionally worked over watching somebody eat a Clif Bar, but there you go.
Because suddenly the movie isn't about some gigantic philosophical abstraction. It's about taste. Food. Friends. Boredom. Screaming when you need to scream. The tiny ordinary experiences we barely notice while they're happening.
All the stuff that makes up a life while we're waiting for whatever enormous meaningful thing we think a life is supposed to become.
And I responded to that pretty deeply. It Ends made me think about how I dealt with problems when I was in my twenties and thirties, and how I deal with them now. Life throws things at you that you never planned for. There are crises, heartbreaks, stretches of boredom and seemingly endless repetition.
Some people adapt. Some people collapse. Some people leave. And some people just keep driving because they need to know what's around the next corner, even when there may not be a corner.
That's an awful lot for a movie about four people stuck in a Jeep on an endless road to accomplish.
It Ends is scary, funny, moving, purposely frustrating at times and filled with ideas without becoming some pretentious philosophical exercise. I can almost guarantee that if you see it with a group of friends, you're going to have a pretty complicated conversation afterward about what the road means, what the people in the woods mean, which character you identify with and exactly what you would do if you found yourself behind that wheel.
Alexander Ullom has made a terrific debut, it is a beautifully acted, tightly constructed existential horror movie about friendship, fear, adulthood and the terrifying realization that nobody actually hands you directions when your life begins.
And considering that It Ends is ultimately about staring down an unknown road and wondering what comes next, I'm very interested to see where Ullom goes from here.
It Ends is terrific. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
South Korean filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho has made quite a name for himself by creating intense, crazy, often wildly over-the-top horror and action movies.
He started in animation with adult-oriented films like The King of Pigs and The Fake, but his big international breakthrough was 2016's Train to Busan, which just celebrated its 10th anniversary and remains one of the best infected horror movies of the past decade.
And yes, I said infected. Not zombie. I get very particular about this.
A zombie, to me, is someone who dies and comes back to life. The living dead. That's a zombie. The creatures in Train to Busan, Peninsula, Seoul Station and now Colony are not technically zombies. They're infected human beings whose bodies and brains have been radically altered by a virus or, in this case, a biological agent.
I know that's incredibly specific. I don't care. Words mean things.
Colony is Yeon Sang-ho's latest variation on that kind of horror, and while it isn't quite as emotionally powerful as Train to Busan, it's another terrific, visceral, bloody genre movie with a much more contemporary idea driving it: hive minds.
The movie begins with a scientist, Seo Young-chul, played by Koo Kyo-hwan, threatening a bioterror attack inside a massive commercial building. A biotech corporation is demonstrating a form of slime mold being developed for cell regeneration, and before long that research is weaponized, people become infected, the entire building is locked down, and everyone inside suddenly finds themselves fighting creatures who don't simply attack.
They learn. And they learn together. That's what separates Colony from Yeon's earlier infected movies.
In Train to Busan, the monsters represented something more primal, with aggression, fear, selfishness, every-man-for-himself panic. That movie also had a very powerful father-daughter relationship at its center, along with ideas about corporate ruthlessness, generational guilt and social anxiety.
Colony is colder.
The human relationships aren't nearly as moving, and the characters are more functional than fully dimensional. But the central metaphor is fascinating.
These infected creatures form a shared network. They behave like insects in a colony. Information passes between them. They share sensory data. If one learns something, all of them learn it. Every failed attack becomes data that immediately improves the next attack. That's scary enough on its own.
But in 2026, it's impossible not to think about algorithms, AI, social media and the way technology increasingly funnels all of us toward the same ideas, the same information, the same behaviors and sometimes the same completely idiotic conclusions.
Colony is about groupthink. It's about surrendering individuality. It's about what happens when a population stops behaving like individuals and becomes one giant network that simply reacts to the same signals.
There are obvious political and social implications there, but Yeon doesn't stop the movie to lecture you about them. Mostly he translates those ideas into scenes involving hundreds of blood-covered monsters sprinting after people. Which works for me.
Jun Ji-hyun plays Kwon Se-jeong, a biotechnology professor who gets trapped inside the building after arriving at a corporate presentation looking for work. She gradually becomes the person most capable of understanding what the infected are doing and how quickly they're evolving.
At first, these creatures operate almost entirely on instinct. They crawl. They smell. They react. Then they begin to stand. Then they run. Then they observe. Then they start anticipating human behavior. And because everything is shared across the network, their evolution accelerates.
Yeon gets tremendous mileage out of that idea.
There's a terrific sequence where survivors soak clothing and bodies in different perfumes because the infected are relying heavily on smell. There are moments where the creatures all stop simultaneously, raise their heads and respond to the exact same stimulus.
The sound design during those scenes is fantastic. When hundreds of infected suddenly become aware of something at the same moment, you hear it before you fully understand what you're seeing. The movie uses breathing, movement, distant noises and sudden silence incredibly well.
There are audio jump scares in this movie that are every bit as effective as the visual ones.
And visually, the infected are terrific.
Yeon used dancers, choreographers and movement performers to create a very specific physical language for them, and that decision pays off. They don't move like generic CG monsters. Their bodies jerk, collapse, twist and then reorganize in ways that look disturbingly human but just wrong enough to be unsettling.
As they evolve, the movement changes too. That's one of the movie's best ideas.
Koo Kyo-hwan is also terrific as Young-chul, the scientist at the center of the outbreak. He's not simply some cackling mad scientist. He's physically strange, emotionally irritating, intelligent and genuinely frightening, especially once he begins directly controlling the collective mind of the infected.
The movie also spends a large amount of its first half inside a shopping mall. And if you're making any kind of zombie-adjacent horror movie in a shopping mall, George Romero is going to be standing over your shoulder whether you like it or not. Yeon clearly knows that.
There are visual jokes, compositions and moments (especially an elevator scene) that directly acknowledge Dawn of the Dead, which remains, for me, the greatest zombie movie ever made. Romero used the mall to make a statement about consumerism. Yeon uses a similar environment to talk about networks, corporate biotechnology, automation and the loss of individuality.
And I honestly think Romero would have found the central concept here fascinating.
If Romero were still making movies now, with AI, algorithm culture and social media controlling so much of how people consume information, I have no doubt he would have had something vicious to say about it.
Colony is doing some of that work. It's basically asking what happens when human beings become an algorithm. That's a damn good horror premise.
Now, the movie isn't perfect.
The characters are fairly thin. Everybody gets a backstory, but none of the human material hits with the same emotional force as the relationships in Train to Busan. People die, people betray each other, siblings suffer, ex-spouses reconnect, authority figures reveal themselves to be cowards or monsters, but I rarely felt devastated by any of it.
The movie works much better as a machine. And it is one hell of a machine.
The geography of the building is beautifully established, which gives a lot of the suspense sequences a Die Hard quality. You understand where everybody is, which floors matter, which routes are blocked and how far people have to travel.
So imagine Die Hard, except instead of terrorists, John McClane is being chased by hundreds of rapidly evolving infected monsters controlled by a biological hive mind.
That's essentially part of what Colony becomes.
There are a couple of sequences I didn't like where Yeon leans too heavily into first-person-shooter imagery. SWAT teams move through hallways while other characters watch through monitors, and the cutting occasionally makes the whole thing look like a video game.
Whenever that happens, the movie loses some of its cinematic impact. Thankfully, it doesn't happen often. Most of the action is incredibly well staged.
This is a big Korean production, and you can see the money on the screen. There are huge crowds, helicopters, practical sets, elaborate stunt work, hundreds of performers, complicated choreography and large-scale action sequences.
Yeon's background in animation also still shows.
Some compositions are exaggerated almost like panels from a graphic novel. Some of the physical performances are intentionally stylized. The movie occasionally pushes beyond realism into something almost cartoonishly violent. But that's part of his style.
And then there are the monkeys. My God, the monkeys.
There's an absolutely insane extended sequence involving infected laboratory monkeys that break loose and attack scientists, SWAT officers and basically anybody unfortunate enough to be standing nearby.
Hundreds of furious infected monkeys start moving with the same hive-mind behavior as the humans. It's disgusting. It's terrifying. It's hilarious. It's ridiculous. And it is easily my favorite scene in the movie.
The choreography is wonderful, the effects are terrific, the editing is frantic without becoming incoherent, and the whole sequence escalates into exactly the kind of crazy horror spectacle Yeon does so well.
If you're going to make a movie about hive-minded biological monsters, I appreciate somebody eventually saying, "You know what this needs? A room full of homicidal infected monkeys."
Thank you.
The final act becomes more elaborate as Young-chul gains greater control over the infected, the hive intelligence begins overloading and Se-jeong figures out how to exploit the weaknesses of the collective system.
There's even an idea involving sensory overload essentially crashing the network, which is another clever extension of the movie's technology metaphor. Again: this isn't subtle. But horror doesn't always need to be subtle. Sometimes you can make a point about AI, algorithms and social conformity while somebody gets ripped apart by a screaming infected person. I'm fine with that.
Colony isn't as good as Train to Busan. It doesn't have that movie's emotional depth, and some of the character work is pretty thin. A few action sequences veer too close to video-game aesthetics. But when the movie works, it really works.
It's fast, bloody, scary, technically impressive and filled with inventive uses of sound, choreography and large-scale action. More importantly, there's something under all the carnage.
This is a horror movie about what happens when people stop thinking independently. When everybody receives the same information. When everybody reacts to the same signal. When individuality becomes inefficient and the collective becomes everything.
That's already frightening enough without blood-covered monsters chasing you through a shopping mall.
Yeon Sang-ho has made another terrific piece of infected horror, it is one that borrows some of the visceral energy of Train to Busan while finding a very contemporary anxiety of its own.
And if none of that interests you, there are still several hundred completely insane infected monkeys.
So there's that.
I'm highly recommending Colony. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
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