CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 9-12-25

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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review four new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, September 12th, 2025.

1) SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES

Early in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Christopher Guest's Nigel Tufnel says to his wife, "Maybe this wasn't a good idea." And you know what? He's right. It wasn't a good idea. This is a sequel that should not have been made.

Now, is it the train wreck I was bracing myself for? Not quite. It's not as catastrophically unfunny as it could have been. I did laugh hard a few times. But make no mistake: this is a lazy, recycled, completely unnecessary sequel. What Airplane II: The Sequel was to Airplane is exactly what Spinal Tap II is to This Is Spinal Tap.

The brilliance of the first Spinal Tap was that it committed fully to the mockumentary style. One or two cameras, the feel of a real documentary, Rob Reiner's Marty DiBergi shaping the story as though we were watching vérité footage of an imploding rock band. That's what made it work.

Here? That consistency is out the window. At times, it plays like a mockumentary. Then, suddenly, it abandons the style completely and becomes a regular behind-the-scenes movie with multiple cameras and coverage angles that no "documentarian" could possibly capture.

Later in the film, Reiner tries to patch it by having Marty say, "Follow David out there with your camera," but by then the damage is done. Stylistically, this movie is a mess. It's sloppy. It's lazy.

The film is obsessed with replaying old bits. Jokes that were fresh in 1984 get dragged back out, dusted off, and beaten into the ground. The "goes to 11" gag is now about guitar pedals instead of an amp.

The dead drummer joke gets a 15-minute workout, complete with endless cameos from drummers (Questlove, Lars Ulrich, Chad Smith) who literally Zoom in to say, "No thanks, I don't want to die."

A member of the Blue Man Group shows up for an audition. And yes, the new drummer might ultimately die too. What was once a background running gag is now the main event, and it's exhausted by the time the film is half over.

The music? Almost entirely recycled. A couple of concepts are kind of funny (Derek Smalls' "Rockin' in the Urn" song made me chuckle), but mostly it's just Spinal Tap playing their old hits. And not in a good way.

This isn't a great parody concert. It's just a bunch of guys doing their Greatest Hits set, while the movie itself tries to do its own Greatest Hits routine with the jokes.

Yes, there are famous people. Paul McCartney, Elton John, Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood. Fran Drescher and Paul Shaffer pop up. And yet almost none of them are given anything funny to do.

Elton John literally just shows up to play with them. That's it. Paul McCartney has a couple of laughs, mostly because he's Paul McCartney, and his best moment is in the end credits.

Think about that: you sit through 80 minutes of reheated material, and the biggest laugh comes after the credits have started rolling.

One of the sneaky genius things about the first Spinal Tap was that, even though the guys were idiots, you still cared. When their tour fell apart, when Nigel left, when they were playing second billing to a puppet show, there was actual pathos underneath the absurdity.

Here? None of that. The movie makes the characters as stupid as possible, but never makes you feel anything for them. Any conflicts are manufactured, resolved in a heartbeat, and forgotten. You don't care.

There is an attempt at social commentary with the band's new drummer, who is a young woman, lesbian, covered in tattoos, and four decades younger than the rest of the band. There's potential there. But the film reduces it to the old guys ogling her and being "shocked" at her sexuality. Lazy.

There are far too many stale jokes that seem forced and out-of-date, including a groan-inducing reference to Stormy Daniels that probably wouldn't have even gotten a laugh in 2017, when it was at least timely.

The last 15 minutes are just a filmed concert in New Orleans. That's it. McKean, Guest, Shearer, and Elton John come out, play the old songs, and we watch. There's no narrative payoff. No satisfying conclusion.

No sense that this reunion means anything. It's literally just a concert they filmed and dropped at the end of the movie. Cold, uninspired, abrupt.

To be fair, I did laugh. A bit with the Blue Man Group audition. A couple of improvised moments in Reiner's interviews. Chris Addison as Simon, the clueless concert promoter, is consistently very funny whenever he's onscreen.

But for every one joke that works, ten fall flat. And almost all of the funny stuff exists only because we remember how great the first film was.

Look, I love This Is Spinal Tap. It's one of the greatest comedies ever made. But Spinal Tap II: The End Continues? It's lazy, inconsistent, and completely unnecessary.

It has a few chuckles, a couple of good laughs, but mostly it just reminds you of how perfect the first one was.

At 82 minutes, it's mercifully short. But even then, it feels too long. This doesn't play like a real movie. It plays like a Comedy Central special from 2006 that should have aired after a weak episode of The Daily Show. Not a disaster, but not good. A disappointment.

So yeah: what Airplane II is to Airplane, Spinal Tap II is to This Is Spinal Tap. Which is to say: completely unnecessary, mostly unfunny, and absolutely not worth your time. - ⭐️⭐️

2) THE LONG WALK

Another Stephen King adaptation, another disappointment. And not just disappointment, it's exhaustion. Because The Long Walk, Francis Lawrence's big, glossy, ultra-violent take on King's first novel, feels less like a movie and more like a test of patience.

A literal endurance test. An endurance test where the prize at the end isn't riches, or a wish, or survival, it's simply getting to leave the theater.

This is the third bad King adaptation this year. We already slogged through The Life of Chuck, a massive misfire that somehow made a short story about mortality and humanity into a laughable mess of embarrassing performances and unearned, corny sentimentality.

Listen, let's not even discuss Oz Perkins' unspeakably awful film version of King's short story The Monkey, which is one of the year's very worst.

And now, just a few months after The Life of Chuck, we've got The Long Walk. It's bigger, slicker, gorier, and somehow just as hollow. The Long Walk just wants you to walk and walk and walk with these one-dimensional characters until your legs and brain give out.

Here's the thing: this isn't exactly King's "lost masterpiece." It's the first book he ever wrote (back in the '60s as a college freshman), published later under the Richard Bachman pseudonym. And it reads like it.

It's not terrible for something written by a nineteen-year-old, but let's be honest: it's a patchwork of ideas from better dystopian stories. Orwell. Lord of the Flies. Bradbury.

Even the concept: kids competing in a government-run death march, has shades of The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, Squid Game, and about a dozen other dystopian nightmare "game" setups. The difference? Those later stories actually found ways to be relevant to their times. This doesn't.

The movie makes the fatal mistake of sticking way too close to the book while also refusing to define anything. When does this take place? The cars, the clothes, the tech, it looks like the late '60s or early '70s. Which would make sense, since that's when King wrote it.

But we're watching this in 2025, and we know damn well that dystopian takeover never happened. There was no massive military regime in 1974. No death marches televised for the masses. None of that happened.

So is this an alternate history? A symbolic nightmare? Or just a filmmaker shrugging and saying, "Eh, let's leave it vague"?

That vagueness isn't mysterious; it's maddening. I spent half the movie thinking I had missed something. Did I sleep through the part where America turned into a full-on police state in 1972?

Did the filmmakers forget to explain that this is an alternate timeline? Or did they just not care? And by the end, I realized: nope, they didn't care.

So here's the setup: 50 boys from across America are chosen to walk. They have to keep a pace of 3 miles an hour or faster. No stopping. No bathroom breaks. Three warnings and you're done, meaning a bullet to the head from the soldiers flanking the road.

The last one standing wins money, a wish, and riches beyond imagination. And the whole thing is televised, because of course it is.

On paper, there's some potential there. As a metaphor for youth sacrificed to the system, for the grinding machinery of war and capitalism, for the futility of survival in a rigged game, sure, there's something.

But on screen? It's just walking. Endless walking. Punctuated by overwritten conversations where nobody talks like a human being and by the occasional ultraviolent execution. Then back to walking. Then more yapping. Then more walking.

There's even a ticker in the corner of the screen showing us what mile they're on: mile 1, mile 50, mile 100, and so on. I swear, I started to feel like I was on the walk myself.

And those conversations. Good lord. Nobody, and I mean nobody, under the age of 20 talks the way these kids talk. Half the time, they sound like they're in a bad one-act play written by a college sophomore desperate to impress his philosophy professor.

The rest of the time, they're spouting monologues that feel like they were copied and pasted from other dystopian stories. Big, creaky, overbearing symbolism. Staged debates about life, death, government, and survival. No actual dialogue. No humanity. Just overwritten nonsense.

The shame of it is that the cast is talented. Cooper Hoffman, son of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, is the lead. And the kid's good. He's excellent. There are moments (fleeting, too few) where he brings honesty, humor, and heart.

There's a monologue about his father's death that could have been devastating, especially given his own personal history. But it's flattened into cliché by the writing.

David Jonsson is equally strong. If you saw him in Industry or in Alien: Romulus last year, you know he's got the goods. Here, he's stuck in repetitive dialogue and still manages to bring some humanity to his scenes.

Charlie Plummer, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Ben Wang, they all have moments. These guys are trying. And every once in a while, they break through the sludge.

But here's the problem: they're not characters. They're types. Archetypes. One-dimensional sketches. The kid with the tragic past. The awkward one. The cryptic loner. The angry rebel.

They're not people you care about; they're chess pieces. And after a while, you stop caring which ones get gunned down, because the film hasn't bothered to make you care.

And then there's the violence. This is a shockingly, brutally violent movie. Heads blown apart. Bodies riddled with bullets. Limbs mangled. Kids collapsing in pools of blood.

On one hand, you could argue it's appropriately horrifying, given the subject matter. On the other hand, it's just numbing. Because the movie hasn't built any suspense. It hasn't made us care.

So the violence exists only to jolt you awake every 20 minutes. Like, "Hey, still with us? Here's another kid shot in the head!" But it doesn't deepen the story. It doesn't add horror. It just adds gore.

And then there's Mark Hamill. I know, I know. He's Luke Skywalker. He's beloved. He's an icon. But let's just say it: he's a terrible actor. He always has been. He was bad in Star Wars. He was bad in The Life of Chuck earlier this year. And he's bad here, maybe his worst work yet.

As The Major, the guy running the Walk, he shows up in sunglasses, barking orders in a gruff, gravelly voice that sounds like a parody of a parody. Every line reading is over the top. Every gesture is cartoonish.

He chews scenery like he's auditioning for a bad SNL sketch. And it's unintentionally hilarious. The first time he appeared, I laughed. By the fifth time, I was groaning. By the end, I just wanted him gone.

Francis Lawrence is not a bad director. He made Catching Fire, the best of the Hunger Games movies, and the terrific Constantine. He knows how to handle dystopian spectacle. He knows how to elicit good performances from young actors.

And visually, The Long Walk is polished, even beautiful at times. The problem isn't him. The problem is the script. The problem is the source material. The problem is that no amount of slick direction can disguise a hollow story.

By the time the film limped to its conclusion, I didn't feel anything. No horror. No suspense. No catharsis. Just exhaustion. Exhaustion from the endless walking. Exhaustion from the incessant talking. Exhaustion from watching good actors wasted on bad dialogue.

The biggest sin? It's boring. And you can't be boring when your entire movie is about a death march where kids get shot for slowing down. That should be horrifying, suspenseful, and riveting. Instead, it's just… dull.

So, yeah. Another bad King adaptation. Another wasted opportunity. Another film where you walk out wondering why they bothered.

The only nice thing I can say about The Long Walk is that it's not quite as bad as The Life of Chuck. But that's like saying food poisoning is not quite as bad as being hit by a bus. Either way, you're miserable.

The Long Walk is a beautifully shot, well-acted, competently directed movie about nothing. A walk to nowhere. A walk you don't want to take.

And unless someone figures out how to update Stephen King's early, half-baked material for the present day, we're going to keep getting more of these. And that's scarier than anything in the movie. - ⭐️1/2

3) DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE

So, I am not, nor have I ever been, a dyed-in-the-wool Downton Abbey fan. I didn't binge the series when everyone else was swooning over the Crawleys and their servants on PBS. I never cared deeply about the romantic entanglements of Lady Mary or the politicking of Lord Grantham.

I've dipped in here and there, I've seen the previous two movies, and yes, I can recognize the wit, the structure, the beautiful settings, and the strong acting. But personally? It's never been my cup of tea. And yes, pun intended.

That said, I can also recognize quality when I see it. And Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is a well-made, classy, beautifully mounted farewell to this long-running British soap opera in fancy dress.

It's Julian Fellowes doing what Julian Fellowes does: buttoned-up melodrama with wit and polish, served with the finest costumes, lavish production design, and actors who slip back into their roles like they never left.

If you're a fan of the show or the previous two movies, this is a love letter directly addressed to you.

This one is set in 1930, which of course means big change is coming. Downton's old guard is fading, new blood is stepping in, and the Crawleys themselves are staring down scandal and financial troubles.

Robert (Hugh Bonneville) has to decide whether to pass the reins of Downton to Mary (Michelle Dockery), who finds herself in the center of a public divorce scandal. Society in the 1930s didn't exactly roll out the red carpet for divorced women, so the family's reputation is suddenly on shaky ground.

Meanwhile, downstairs, Andy (Michael Fox) is stepping up as the new butler, Carson (Jim Carter) is finally heading toward retirement, and all of the usual upstairs-downstairs crosscurrents ripple through the halls.

Add in some American energy with the return of Cora's brother Harold (Paul Giamatti), toss in some local drama with Isobel (Penelope Wilton) running the county fair, introduce some new characters like Gus Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola) and Lady Petersfield (Joely Richardson), and you've got more than enough storylines to fill two episodes of the original show.

And honestly, that's what this feels like: an extended, very expensive, very polished Downton Abbey episode designed to send everyone off in style.

This cast is stacked, and everyone knows exactly how to play their parts at this point. Hugh Bonneville remains rock solid as Robert. Elizabeth McGovern, who has always been a personal favorite of mine, brings warmth and dignity to Cora.

Jim Carter and Phyllis Logan remain the beating heart of the staff. Joanne Froggatt and Brendan Coyle are as reliable as ever as Anna and Bates. Dominic West returns as Guy Dexter, alongside Robert James-Collier's Thomas Barrow, giving the movie a storyline of queer positivity that frankly should've been part of Downton much earlier.

But let's be honest: this is Michelle Dockery's show. Lady Mary has always been one of the juiciest characters, and here she finally gets the movie centered on her. She's icy, vulnerable, defiant, and magnetic.

If Focus Features decides to push anyone for awards this fall, it should be Dockery. She anchors the whole thing.

And then there's the look of the movie. Simon Curtis directs, and like the last two films, this is first-rate technical work. The cinematography, the editing, the costumes, the music, every element is polished to within an inch of its life.

You can practically smell the tea, the wood polish on the staircases, and the perfume wafting through the drawing room. This is high-class production, no question.

Here's where my personal take comes in: I can sit back and admire all of this. I can recognize that it's beautiful, professional, and finely acted. But did it grab me emotionally? No. Did it thrill me intellectually? No. That's not because it's poorly done, it isn't, it's because I was never invested in these characters to begin with.

The Crawleys and their staff never stuck with me. I couldn't tell you much about the plots of the first two films, and nothing about the series lives in my brain. But while watching The Grand Finale, I was never bored. And that counts for something.

It's not my thing. But it is a thing, an entire world, that millions of people love. And for them, this will be an absolute gift. A satisfying goodbye. A love letter.

Every dangling storyline gets tied up, every character gets a moment, and even the absence of Dame Maggie Smith's Violet is handled with grace. Her spirit hovers over the film, her portrait hangs prominently, and her cutting wit is still quoted as the family debates the future.

So here's where I land: Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is not a movie I'll remember next week. It's not going to haunt me, inspire me, or even really stick in my head. But while I was watching it, I was entertained.

I appreciated the craft. I admired the acting. I recognized the love and care that went into every frame. And if you're a fan, this will mean ten times more to you than it did to me.

For fans, this is a perfect goodbye. For non-fans like me? It's still a pleasant, well-made, handsomely mounted piece of entertainment. Not my cup of tea, but a very fine cup of tea indeed. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️

4) THE BALTIMORONS

Every year at film festivals, you get one of those little movies. The kind that doesn't have a giant studio behind it, doesn't come with a Marvel-sized budget or endless marketing, but instead sneaks up on you, hits you in the gut, and refuses to leave your head.

The Baltimorons is exactly that kind of movie. A very small film. A little film. But one that deserves to be discovered, sought out, passed along like a secret between movie lovers.

Directed by Jay Duplass and written by Michael Strassner (who also stars), The Baltimorons is about as simple a story as can get: one guy, one dentist, one weird Christmas Eve in Baltimore. And yet within that simplicity it finds humor, heartbreak, connection, and truth, the kind of truth that's rarely captured so precisely on film.

We start dark: Cliff (Strassner) tries to hang himself. It doesn't work. That's the first moment. And then, cut to Christmas Eve. He's sober now. He's quit drinking, he's quit improv comedy, and he's trying to be a better boyfriend for his girlfriend, Brittany (Olivia Luccardi).

He's trying to do the right things: show up at her family's house, play the part of the good partner. But life has other plans. He chips a tooth. His car gets towed. And that's how he meets Didi (Liz Larsen), a dentist who's older, divorced, melancholy, just kind of trudging through her days.

What follows is this oddball Christmas Eve odyssey: Cliff and Didi bouncing around Baltimore, dealing with her ex-husband, crossing paths with Cliff's old improv troupe (yes, The Baltimorons), and ultimately ending up on an improv stage together.

And along the way, these two people (one young, raw, trying to hold onto sobriety, the other older, worn down, yet still holding onto slivers of hope) connect in ways neither expected.

This is a movie about connection, yes, but it's also a movie about sobriety. And let me tell you: it nails it. I know. I've been there. As a recovering alcoholic myself, this movie gets it 100% right.

The details, the struggle, the way alcohol is not just a drink but a social glue, especially in certain worlds, like theater, like improv. I started in improv in Chicago. I know firsthand how much booze and that scene are tangled together. Every rehearsal, every show, every post-show hangout revolved around drinking. Separating yourself from that is brutal. And this movie captures that truth beautifully.

Cliff isn't just quitting booze, he's quitting a way of life. Quitting the riffing, the "yes, and," the community that defined him, because he knows it drags him back into self-destruction.

Watching him wrestle with that, while literally being pulled back onto the improv stage, was powerful. Painful. Cathartic. I sat there thinking: yep, been there. The jealousy, the competition, the toxic backstabbing wrapped in "comedy." And how tightly it's tied to drinking. This movie gets it.

But it's not just Cliff's story. Didi is equally compelling. Liz Larsen is outstanding here. Her face tells you everything: the weight of a failed marriage, the disappointment of a lonely holiday, the fragile hope when she meets someone unexpected. She's funny, warm, complicated, and yes, incredibly attractive in her realness. The chemistry between her and Strassner is electric.

And the way their relationship plays out is smart. It doesn't force labels. It doesn't demand they fall into neat categories like "rom-com couple" or "May-December romance." It's messier than that, more truthful. There's attraction, yes. There's friendship. There's mutual rescue. They save each other in ways that are hard to define. And that's what makes it ring so true.

There's a Christmas Eve party at Didi's ex-husband's house where Cliff improvises his way through awkward confrontations, claiming he can score football tickets, talking his way out of disaster. It's hilarious.

Then there's the improv stage scene, where Cliff and Didi get up and perform together, which is a release, a catharsis for both of them. I'll be thinking about that one for a long time.

And then there's the way the movie captures Baltimore itself. This isn't just a generic backdrop. It feels lived-in, real, specific. The neighborhoods, the streets, the people. This isn't "any city, USA." It's Baltimore. And Duplass nails that sense of place.

Look, sometimes a movie lines up with your own life in ways you don't expect. The Baltimorons did that for me. Its portrait of sobriety, its understanding of how alcohol and improv are tangled together, its honesty about relapse and temptation, and how hard it is to get through a holiday without screwing up, all of it hit me hard.

And the connection between Cliff and Didi, messy and real, felt like a reminder of how unexpected human contact can save us.

I saw this at the Chicago Critics Film Festival back in May and got to talk with Michael Strassner afterward. He's a recovering alcoholic himself, and you can feel that truth in the writing. This isn't some Hollywood version of recovery. This is real.

On top of everything else, this is a Christmas movie. A weird one, a messy one, but a Christmas movie nonetheless. And like Alexander Payne's The Holdovers, which is another new Christmas classic, this one's going into my yearly rotation.

Between The Holdovers and The Baltimorons, I've now got two fresh, wonderful holiday films I'll be revisiting every December.

This is a small movie. A little one. But it's special. It's funny, moving, truthful, and packed with two extraordinary performances. Liz Larsen and Michael Strassner carry the whole thing, but Jay Duplass's direction keeps it grounded and human.

And it's exactly the kind of film I want to champion, because in a year full of bloated, over-budgeted garbage, here's a tiny gem that says more about life, love, sobriety, and connection than a dozen studio tentpoles combined.

Like Twinless, which I reviewed recently, The Baltimorons will absolutely end up on my top ten list at the end of the year. For me, it's a classic already. Seek it out. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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