Viewed as part of Virtual Sundance Film Festival 2026
Despite clearly positive intentions, Rachel Lambert’s domestic drama Carousel (C) is a whole lot of the same. It’s nice to see Chris Pine in a dramatic role: here he portrays a sad dad coping with changes in the physician clinic where he works, with an anxious daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson) and a childhood love interest (Jenny Slate) re-emerging in his life. The plot just doesn’t spark and the dialogue doesn’t crackle as the film quietly observes the machinations of domestic life. Most confounding, the chemistry between Pine and Slate doesn’t manifest with much natural energy, and it’s unconvincing these lifelong connections had a palatable past relationship. Still, despite the inertia of this particular movie, Chris Pine’s presence in it should remind casting directors we want to see more of him challenging himself in future juicy roles.
Viewed as part of Virtual Sundance Film Festival 2026
Talk about men with a mission! J.M. Harper’s Soul Patrol (B+) is a moving documentary about a valiant recon team in Vietnam comprised of Black soldiers reuniting a half century later. It is enlightening and therapeutic for all involved, including this elite team’s wives endeavoring to pierce the veneer of bygone and often troubling memories. It is all the more poignant leveraging Super 8 camera footage captured by the Company F, 51st Infantry soldiers in action, many of them teenage innocents abroad facing adversity and experiencing a singular solidarity bonding them forever. The flashbacks are effective and in some cases quite tense as viewers learn the origins of the men and the challenges they faced on a variety of battlefields. Harper chronicles an abundance of history with craft and cunning, collapsing the past and modern day subjectively and with mastery. By the time the Blind Boys of Alabama’s “I Shall Not Walk Alone” plays as the heroes appear in modern day in the aisle of a Piggly Wiggly grocery store, it’s truly a stand up and cheer event.
Viewed as part of Virtual Sundance Film Festival 2026
There’s never an optimal time to make tough decisions affecting one’s personal destiny, and for the female protagonist in the Lithuanian film How to Divorce During the War (B+) directed by Andrius Blaževičius, separating from her partner on the eve before the Russian invasion of Ukraine is just the beginning. Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė stars as steely corporate breadwinner Marija opposite Marius Repšys as faux-hipster homemaker husband Vytas, and the crumbling couple shares a precocious pre-teen daughter Dovilė, convincingly played by Amelija Adomaitytė. Set in Vilnius in 2022 in the Baltic state adjacent to a simmering war territory, the characters occupy a clinical and sometimes lightly satirical world as they maneuver through complacency about shifts to the status quo and soul search to be properly performative about life in flux on both domestic and geopolitical fronts. Jakštaitė is particularly effective, from an iconic early sequence told almost entirely through a windshield to her fluid interactions with corporate colleagues, refugees and even her own rebellious offspring. The elegant, classical composition of sequences by cinematographer Narvydas Naujalis against unsettling and insistent music by Jakub Rataj places the players in this ensemble as fascinating pawns in a zone of interest. Examining both the propaganda and realities of politics and war in their extended families tightens the psychological lens. From home life and corporate settings to the art scene and schoolyards where protests large and small start conjuring, a meditation on messiness plays out in interesting ways, even though the film feels like a pilot episode of an even more interesting plot to come. While those next milestones don’t fully manifest within the boundaries of this movie, its makers provoke a deep sense of introspection and conversation about identity in an interconnected world.
Let these lyrics wash over you as the latest examination of office toxicity plays out in a modern milieu: “They just use your mind and they never give you credit / It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it.” Sam Raimi’s buoyant horror/comedy Send Help (A-) functions as both a delirious deserted island escapade and also a twisted battle of the sexes, with pulp friction aplenty to scratch the itch, feed the beast and satisfy the gods of carnage attuned to his particular directorial sensibilities. Rachel McAdams brilliantly creates a singular character: an undervalued cubicle denizen with mad coping skills who finds herself on shipwrecked shores with a boss most boorish, played with a dashing grimace by the ever-more-fascinating Dylan O’Brien. This deeply entertaining two-hander traces the peculiar power dynamics of two incredibly committed actors, all the while steeped in the tropes of a survival story. This adventurous allegory offers continuous fresh takes and mixed genres, with plentiful splashes of giddiness and gore. Bill Pope’s crystalline cinematography and Danny Elfman’s understated score add zest to the demented dynamics. It’s watercolor meets watercooler as corporate culture get an epic seaside skewering.
Strap onto your seats, not out of a promise of actual cinematic intensity, but because only literal harnesses or handcuffs will keep anticipatory viewers sufficiently locked in for this misbegotten A.I. justice thriller. Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy (F) tethers career-worst performances by both Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson to a belabored plot, accompanied by a constant countdown which incessantly reminds viewers it’s almost over. The story places Pratt in a literal chair from which he must defend himself against a crime of passion before Ferguson’s monotone cyber judge with the assistance of computer files, municipal cloud recordings, location records and phone-a-friend technologies. This data dump boasts all the thrills of overnight mainframe maintenance. None of the film’s preposterous characters bears resemblance to any found naturally in reality, and the stakes are rotten from the get-go. The film’s format robs a generally charismatic actor of his charm and the actress of her nuance. Even a final act showdown is thwarted by mind-numbing dialogue and baffling answers to an already shaky thesis. This hour and a half of cheesy effects and weasely affectations is akin to an escape room where every participant simply wants out. It redefines “edge of your seat” in that you’ll find yourself rearing to slither away to any other place.
What happens when a battle-tested boy, an isolated physician, a naked and sedated alpha zombie and a gang of miscreants encounter one another for the second part of an inventive film trilogy in a long-running series? It’s bloody interesting, when that film installment is Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (B). Ralph Fiennes’ kindly physician character takes center stage, and his “bone temple” memorial to lost lives in an uncertain future becomes a veritable amphitheater for this movie’s showdown with some unlikely villains. This film amps up the gore, brutality and existential dread about true evil in the world, and Fiennes anchors the film with grace notes of humanity mixed with a hint of the unhinged. As the teen who came of age in the previous installment, Alfie Williams is again wonderfully emotive but a little sidelined in a majority of the story. Jack O’Connell is dynamite as a menacing leader of a band of renegades including an effective Erin Kellyman. Even Chi Lewis-Parry brings humanity to his hulking infected character. This latest trilogy upends many of the tropes of the undead genre, with conversation and contemplation featured more often than straightforward action. It’s still very engrossing, even if the myth-making in Danny Boyle’s previous movie was more revelatory than the religious angles of DaCosta’s. This is a delightful and delicate mash-up of genres and one of the most offbeat Hollywood tentpole films to be released in some time. Again, it’s exciting and insightful.
We are on the precipice of a very early Golden Globes weekend this Sunday (before Oscars, months away on 3/15/26 – and oh, do we have a viewing party in the works down at Trilith come the ides of March!) Expect parental anxiety and monsters (both literal and human!) to reign supreme for the wins! Timothee Chalamet as a ping pong champion (“Marty Supreme” now a hit in theatres), Michael B. Jordan as twin gangsters fighting the supernatural (“Sinners”), Rose Byrne and Jesse Buckley as parents facing unbearable crucibles (“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” and “Hamnet”), Jacob Elordi as a patchwork creature (“Frankenstein” on Netflix) and Amy Madigan wielding witchery and micro-bangs (one of my faves, “Weapons” now on HBO Max) are my predictions to triumph. Brazil’s “Secret Agent” could also be an acting spoiler, with big fans in the international voting wing. Expect “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners,” both now on HBO Max for those catching up, to clinch top prizes. Nikki Glaser hosts Sunday night on CBS and Paramount+. Expect it all to be as “Golden” as The Outsiders in their heyday or the ubiquitous “K Pop Demon Hunters” song.
