Roger Ebert

Co-directors Steven Kanter and Henry Loevner reunite (after their COVID-set breakup comedy “The End of Us”) for their sophomore feature, “Peak Season.” Engaged couple Amy (Claudia Restrepo) and Max (Ben Coleman) jet off from NYC to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for a breath of fresh air as they finalize details for their upcoming wedding. And while towering mountains and sprawling landscapes are the perfect backdrop for romance, it isn’t the betrothed who experience it.

Max is an inattentive, self-absorbed workaholic. While “Peak Season” tells us they’re in love, the fact of their engagement is the only evidence we’re given. Their interactions are stiff, as Max often steps on top of Amy’s words and feelings to insert his own will and opinion. Most of her desires to spend time with him are met with dismissal at best and abandonment at worst (even ditching their hiking plans to go to a workout class with a female acquaintance they bumped into). So when his job (as an oft-stereotyped supply chain bro) calls him back to the city in the middle of their trip, Amy is forced (or, rather, gets the privilege) to kill time solo. 

Going to their scheduled fly-fishing lesson alone, she meets Loren (Derrick Joseph DeBlasis), the community’s beloved outdoorsman who saddles between fishing lessons, rock climbing sessions, and dishwashing at a local spot. Yet despite capitalizing on a litany of opportunities in the town’s nature-forward gig economy, he’s barely scraping by, living in his SUV and showering with water out of a canteen that he rigs up in a tree. The two hit it off and spark up a fast-growing friendship that tiptoes the line of something more and calls their supposed contentment with their lives into question.

“Peak Season” investigates the principles of settling, romantically, personally, and otherwise. While love is at the center, foiling Max and Loren, the film delightfully takes its time fuzzing the lines between platonic and romantic connection, building the connection over its runtime rather than forcing a tired love-at-first-sight narrative. They rub shoulders at a Western bar where they have a meet-cute of sorts post-lesson. They giggle together at a rodeo. And realistically, they argue, aptly butting heads while trying to give Loren’s friend advice on the idea of settling down. While the theme of settling paves its way through the film, it does so rather simply, and we’re made hyper-aware of the point “Peak Season” wants to make. 

Amy values comfort, while Loren puts stock in passion and freedom over stability, and this debate scene becomes a microcosm of the film’s dilemma. It makes us wonder: if we’re led to believe that Amy loves Max, then surely the thing to wonder about is if she likes him. However, some of the nuance of the juxtaposition in this love triangle is negated by the fact that while Loren has depth, Max is archetypically bad. We’re not given any reason to like him other than goodwill. He’s constantly selfish, demeaning, and corny (not even in a charming way). 

The film’s performances also leave much to be desired. DeBlasis is the star here. Funny, charming, and empathetic, his performance yields an entire person, while Coleman and Restrepo occupy singular, liminal spaces in their characters. While Restrepo has a moment of redemption at the tail end of the film’s final act, every step of Coleman’s decision-making is seen and felt as plain as day. 

“Peak Season” is a mostly charming reflection on the stalemate that occurs when you fear courage and comfort in equal measure. There are poignant moments, namely in the film’s conclusion, but for much of the run time, the observation grows stale as we struggle to connect to the performances on screen. “Peak Season” feels like a bunch of friends making a film; at times, this intimacy and dialed-back scale is charming. At others, it pokes holes in the facade of the fourth wall, and immersion is lost. 

The name Hammer used to command a certain level of respect in the annals of horror cinema – from the late 1950s to the early ’70s, you could pin the label to some of the campiest, schlockiest, most entertaining creature features around, from camp retellings of Universal monsters to sci-fi Quatermass mysteries. But the Hammer Films of this year’s “Doctor Jekyll” is hardly the same company William Hinds and James Carreras built; the opening titles proudly plaster “A John Gore Company” below its production logo. Indeed, for as much as “Doctor Jekyll” rides high on its compelling central performance (and the gender politics therein), the film that surrounds that star turn can’t quite hide (or Hyde?) its weightlessness.

This isn’t the first time Hammer has put a gender-swapped spin on the acclaimed Robert Louis Stevenson story – see 1971’s “Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde,” in which a serum transformed a male Henry Jekyll into a libidinous female alter ego. But “Chicken” director Joe Stephenson and screenwriter Dan Kelly-Mulhern have re-adapted the story into a low-fi chamber play whose campy delights take far too long to take murderous shape. 

Its delights, apart from Blair Mowat’s delightfully outre, baroque score, fall mostly on Eddie Izzard, and her mesmerizingly controlled turn as Dr. Nina Jekyll. She’s a reclusive billionaire with a mysterious condition that requires her to take her meds on time (gee, I wonder what happens if she skips a dose?). With her stern handler Sandra (Lindsay Duncan) overwhelmed, she puts out a call for hired help, and who should answer but Rob Stevenson (“Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2″‘s Scott Chambers), a baby-faced bad dad fresh out of prison and rehab, trying to get his life together so he can see his daughter. 

In its first act, “Doctor Jekyll” plays out like a perverse low-budget spin on “Phantom Thread” – the tortured genius puttering away in their empty home, the fresh-faced muse unwittingly wrapped up in their machinations, the taskmaster training a jaundiced eye at the both of them. But the film struggles to maintain any kind of suspense as to Jekyll’s true motivations for hiring Rob, and the secretive nature of her condition; subplots involving motion-sensor cameras, locked rooms, and Rob’s drug-addict ex-wife flail about aimlessly before colliding in a bloody mess near the film’s end.

To her credit, Izzard holds the lean script aloft with aplomb, and she’s a solid 80% of the reason to watch this. She’s always been a tremendous performer, but being given the chance to lean so hard into her transness in these more recent roles unfolds new layers of performance that are nothing short of mesmerizing. As Nina, she’s prim, quiet, and commanding; she tears into a bowl of “crunchy, nutty corn flakes” with all the fervor of a filet mignon. As Rachel Hyde, she sneers and purrs her way through each line with divine camp. It’s hardly Shakespeare – funny, since she just came off a one-woman production of “Hamlet” – but she has tremendous fun with the part.

It’s her co-stars that let her down, for the most part. Sure, Lindsey Duncan frowns with the best of them, offering a Lesley Manville-sized fly in the ointment. But Chambers is simply not up to the task of keeping up with any of his co-stars, mugging and pouting and stammering his way through his lines as if the producers just couldn’t get Freddie Highmore on the phone. 

Of course, it’s impossible to ignore “Jekyll”‘s implications regarding gender and transness; the original story, after all, is about transformation, of finding the hidden self that lies within and setting it free. By casting a trans woman as Jekyll in the first place, Stephenson complicates that narrative in ways both intriguing and befuddling. After all, both Jekyll and Hyde in this version are women, the split becoming less about her gender and more about her morality. (A black-and-white flashback awkwardly ties Nina to the original Henry Jekyll, though it humorously establishes that the “drug” that keeps Hyde in place comes in a cigarette that glows green when you smoke it. Talk about a hybrid strain.) But as the film barrels towards twists both predictable and not, a final turn throws some deeper confusion into the allegory in ways I can’t spoil but would be eager to hear other trans viewers’ thoughts on. 

At 90 minutes, one could hardly fault “Doctor Jekyll” for being languorous. But it’s often too patient for its own good, content to slow-roll its inevitable outcome without giving us much to chew on besides Izzard and some cornflakes. The chance to explore the Jekyll-and-Hyde story through the lens of a late-in-life trans woman is too enticing to botch, especially with a performer as layered as Izzard in the title role. But it teeters too precariously between camp and character study, and never quite lands successfully on either side. And its final minutes seem to imply that, no matter how you identify, the body you truly want to occupy might not really belong to you. That’s a troubling implication to unpack. 

Max (Ruaridh Mollica) is like many young writers I met in my 20s. Ambitious, smart, rather dashing when talking about an art he’s passionate about, which in his case, is literature and the work of enfant terrible writer Bret Easton Ellis. Max is a touch cocky for a freelancer, he’s known to accidentally alienate friends and colleagues with harsh words, and thinks he knows better than his editors. However, unlike most reasonable writers, he’ll stop at nothing to find inspiration, even if it puts him in danger. 

On his quest for the bestselling debut novel, Max takes on the persona and name of Sebastian – which also gives this movie its title – to go undercover as a sex worker in search of stories to tell. He learns the new digital sex work landscape, meets clients of all kinds, and flits from one’s bed to another’s couch, typing away about the encounters once he’s back in the safety of his computer. But his muse comes with the very real dangers of sexual assault and abuse, especially if any of his clients were to learn the truth about why Sebastian is really doing in their home. At the same time, the 25-year-old writer is facing off against the whims of the publishing industry, requests to be more active on social media, and morphing himself into becoming a celebrated author – with the pressure that his work will live up to expectations. 

Written and directed by Mikko Mäkelä, “Sebastian” plays like a cautionary tale about toxic ambition. From the start, our main character Max is vocal about his goals, with the hunger to move up shining in his eyes, even as he’s missing deadlines to chase flashier assignments. It’s almost unpleasant to watch how desperately he wants to climb the ladder before the years catch up to him. At one point, he compares himself to his hero and sadly notes how he’s already older than when Bret Easton Ellis was when he first arrived on the literary scene. As both Max and Sebastian, Ruaridh Mollica delivers a nuanced performance, navigating the young writer’s fears and confidence with equal measure. He plays the character sympathetically even when he’s at his most petulant or manipulative. Yet Mollica’s scenes with Jonathan Hyde, who plays one of Max’s older clients seeking companionship, are beautifully tender – like an antidote to the movie’s harsher scenes. 

As with his difficult hero, Mäkelä can be also tough to figure out. In trying to run away from the trappings of a tragic queer story, which Max even points out in a tense meeting with his publisher, the movie ends up running right into some of its own tropes, especially in the sour moments of Max’s escapades. Our protagonist is shown to be rather isolated, very much in his own head, and keeping others – as well as the audience – at bay. When he’s left alone, he is at his most vulnerable, sometimes crying but we’re not entirely sure why – does he regret following his yearning for success? Does he regret the emotional toll of sex work? It’s also not quite clear what drove Max to picking up sex work for the sake of his book, although its encroachment into his life and free time plays out pretty organically with his ambitious personality. Mäkelä and his cinematographer Iikka Salminen draw on a dark color palette shaped by the fluorescent lighting of newer buildings and hotels, and the occasional venture into the warmth of a client’s home and the neon refuge of clubs. It’s as if the room itself will set the tone for the encounter-to-come, and perhaps it’s why when something goes awry, there’s a sense of betrayal, the destruction of safety in the harsh light of a reality check. 

Mäkelä’s follow-up to his feature debut “A Moment in the Reeds” is a complex portrait of an artist as a young man. Drawn into Max’s story by Mollica’s passionate performance, “Sebastian” follows the highs and lows of chasing fame, surviving the sting of rejection, and navigating the threat of being found out for using intimate hookups for public consumption in the pages of a would-be bestseller. In close-ups of Max, Mäkelä shows his audience the fleeting moments of unease, desire, pain, and lust in these encounters. There is so much left unsaid in the tense meeting of strangers who size each other up then give in to each other’s arms. Yet for all its gloomy aesthetic, there is something life-affirming about the kindness of a stranger who wants to read your work and the power that comes with owning one’s own words and stories. 

As someone who venerates Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson’s 1955 hymn to the power of imagination (I gift every love one’s new baby with a copy of the book with a purple crayon taped inside),  the idea of a film adaptation has always filled me with a certain sense of trepidation. This is due to the somewhat uneven track record of past attempts to bring the great works of children’s literature to the screen. Sure, a film like Spike Jonze’s take on Maurice Sendak’s beloved “Where the Wild Things Are” captured the delicate charms of its source material in ways that enchanted viewers both young and old. But for every one of those, there’s something like that monstrous live-action version of “The Cat in the Hat,” a movie just as bad as the original Dr. Seuss book was good.

Now “Harold and the Purple Crayon” has arrived in theaters in all its live-action glory. It starts on a surprisingly engaging note: a 2-D animated sequence that recaps Harold’s adventures in the book. The sequence finds a decent approximation of the book’s famous visual style and features narration by Alfred Molina. Unfortunately, that sequence lasts about 90-odd seconds, and the real story kicks in after that. Everything goes straight to ultra-garish Hell via a narrative that feels more like a failed “Jumanji” knockoff than anything that the late Johnson’s work could have possibly inspired. Here is a film that pays lip service to the importance of creativity without ever displaying a demonstrable shred of it during its seemingly interminable run time.

After that recap of the original story, we see a now-grown Harold (Zachary Levi) still cavorting through his cartoon world along with friends Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds) and the ever-present voice of the narrator. Then, one day, the narrator’s voice disappears, and Harold decides to use his all-powerful crayon to draw a portal to our world so that the three of them can try to track him down. Alas, the real world proves to be odd and confusing for them, so luckily, Harold and Moose (now in human form, though he occasionally switches back for no apparent reason) end up running into Terri (Zooey Deschanel) and Melvin (Benjamin Bottani), a mother and middle school-aged son who are still in the dumps since the death of Mel’s dad. For reasons that defy explanation, she allows them to stay the night at her house, where Harold finds Mel to be a kindred spirit — he has an unseen imaginary pet that is equal parts eagle, lion, and alligator — and lets him in on the magical crayon. (Porcupine, for the record, has gotten separated from the others and is off wreaking benign havoc on her own.)

While Terri is off at her job at Ollie’s — an institution shown far more reverence here than Johnson’s book — Mel ends up helping Harold and Moose to find the narrator, leading to any number of wacky slapstick scenes in which they fly through the air in a plane or cause mayhem at the store. They also enlist the aid of Gary (Jermaine Clement), a creepy librarian with the hots for Terri, who is also the author of an unpublishable fantasy novel called “The Glaive of Gagaroh” (allowing the film also to alienate fans of “Krull” to boot). Eventually, Gary reveals to Harold that he is, in fact, a character from a book, which sends Harold, Moose, and Mel off on a trip to Crockett Johnson’s house to finally see him. Although Google helpfully reveals the address, it inexplicably fails to mention the key reason why they could have skipped that trip. Meanwhile, Gary, having seen the crayon’s power first-hand, schemes to acquire it for himself and bring the universe of his book to life. 

Trying to transform Crockett’s 64-page book into a feature-length film would always be a dubious proposition. But even the most pessimistic of minds could have imagined something as dire as this. For starters, Harold himself has been transformed into one of the most annoying screen characters in recent memory thanks to the appallingly clumsy screenplay by David Guion and Michael Handelman that tries to make him into an irrepressible free spirit along the lines of Buddy in “Elf.” Still, he only manages to make him obnoxious beyond belief. Things aren’t helped much by Levi’s awful performance, which tries for winsome adorableness throughout but which comes across as if a.) Levi had been struck in the head with a board before every take, and b.) that director Carlos Saldanha did enough takes to rival Kubrick before he (and presumably only he) was satisfied. Beyond that, the storyline is choppy, the visuals are utterly blah, the big set-pieces are the usual CGI-happy dreck, the sentimental moments are woefully unearned, and the notion of a film ostensibly celebrating children’s literature utilizing a librarian as the bad guy is infuriating.

Before you send me comments scolding me for not looking at this film through the eyes of a child, based on the available evidence, no one involved with “Harold and the Purple Crayon” had any real interest in engaging younger viewers on any level. Sadly, exploiting the good name of a familiar piece of IP in the hope of scoring a few bucks from families that have already seen “Inside Out 2” and “Despicable Me 4” and are looking for something else to watch seems to have been of more importance to actually living up to the legacy of said IP.

Ultimately, “Harold and the Purple Crayon” is the product of people working under the cynical belief that kids will just accept anything foisted upon them in the name of “family entertainment” as long as it is noisy and colorful. If you genuinely care for your kids, you will give this movie a wide berth and use the ticket money to buy and read Crockett’s original book and its follow-ups. Trust me, they’ll thank you for it one day.

Pop music really can change your life. That’s part of the setup of M. Night Shyamalan’s near-miss of a thriller “Trap,” a movie that feels less like the Night Brand than a lot of his twisty ventures, a pared-down version of what he does that needed a round or two more of fleshing out its best ideas and amplifying its visual language. Night is at his best when he has a team of craftspeople to help elevate his best ideas in films like “The Sixth Sense,” “Old” (a movie that has grown on me), and “The Village,” but “Trap” too often lacks the craftsmanship it needs to crackle with energy and tension. Despite these missteps, Josh Hartnett almost makes “Trap” worth seeing, imbuing his character with a playfulness that can be captivating. It’s a shame his great work sometimes feels trapped in a movie that doesn’t know what to do with it.

The majority of “Trap” unfolds at a place that can be truly terrifying for a parent forced to spend hundreds of dollars on the latest pop superstar. In this case, it’s Lady Raven, played by Night’s daughter Saleka Shyamalan, a pop star shaped in the image of someone like Taylor Swift – one of those performances wherein the average age in the crowd is in the teens, and everyone knows all the words. Saleka wrote and performed most of the music, and speaking bluntly, there’s a bit too much of it, especially because it’s not quite as catchy as T. Swift.

Attending this Lady Raven show in Philly is an average guy named Cooper (Hartnett) and his teen daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue). Shortly after their arrival, and with minimal character development, Cooper notices a strong police presence at the venue, including heavily armed men at all the doors. Through a brief act of politeness, he earns the trust of a vendor (Jonathan Langdon) who lets him on a secret – the cops and feds are there because they know that a notorious serial killer named The Butcher is in the building. Cooper is that man.

Their plan to stop every man who leaves the building and basically put them in front of ace profiler Dr. Grant (a woefully miscast Hayley Mills, likely here just because she’s famous for a different “Trap” movie and Night thought that was funny) to determine guilt makes absolutely no sense. Still, people buy a ticket for a movie like “Trap” knowing the premise, and Shyamalan’s film gets by on its set-up for a while, largely because it allows Hartnett to shine through the opening act. Hartnett makes numerous smart, subtle choices that convey Cooper’s precise personality, particularly in a sly smile that reveals how much this sociopath enjoys the unexpected challenge.

Sadly, Shyamalan’s script doesn’t give Hartnett’s performance the stage it deserves. Cooper should be a cagey genius, someone who has kept his identity secret from everyone in his life and only has to do so for a bit longer to escape capture again. Instead of sketching Cooper as the smartest person in the room, Shyamalan almost comically makes him into the luckiest. Cooper keeps narrowly averting exposure through what can only be called movie magic. And when Shyamalan’s concept is forced to leave the arena, it comes apart with a series of scenes that make increasingly little sense. There are numerous times when the answer to “Why would someone do that in that situation?” can only be “Because of the movie.”

There’s an undeniably unique energy at a concert for a major pop star, a place where people scream (usually with glee), the lighting can be unpredictable, and someone in the crowd may not be all they appear to be. It’s a clever setting for a thriller, and where most of “Trap” unfolds, but Shyamalan doesn’t do enough with the geography of the space. A better film conveys how even a massive arena can feel claustrophobic when thousands of people surround you. But the cinematography by ace director of photography Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (“Challengers”) is oddly captivated by the large screens over the stage instead of the actual performer. This approach is surely to keep us more trapped in Cooper’s POV, but it ends up making the actual Lady Raven performance feel lackluster when we watch most of it on a screen on a screen. The editing by Noemi Katharina Preiswerk (who also cut Night’s “A Knock at the Cabin”) also lacks the hum that “Trap” really needed to work.

Ultimately, there’s something to be said for a man who can get a movie like “Trap” made in today’s market. It’s a weird, unpredictable movie not based on a pre-existing IP, and we are in an era where there are depressingly few original ideas in blockbuster filmmaking. For that alone – and the Joshaissance clearly unfolding with “Oppenheimer” and now this – it’s tempting to give “Trap” a pass. It’s just too bad that it ultimately feels like the word people so often throw at pop music confections: disposable.

Earlier this year a movie was released and forgotten in such quick succession there’s a strong chance you didn’t know it existed. That’s fine, I almost missed it myself, except for one thing: I was looking for it. Why? It was directed by the great and lively Kim Jee-woon, the least celebrated of the big three South Korean genre directors who became popular midnight movie fixtures in America in the ’00s. His movies have been released to increasingly little fanfare, and to my knowledge, his TV series “Dr. Brain” went completely unacknowledged by Western critics (tragically, its star Lee Sun-Kyun, also of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Hong Sang-soo’s Oki’s Movie, passed away last year). 

His movies “The Foul King,” “A Tale of Two Sisters,” “A Bittersweet Life,” and “I Saw the Devil” put him on the map. He’s yet to produce anything since that has had the same reputation to the point where his most personal film, the film set comedy “Cobweb,” vanished without a trace. I like Kim’s movies now (especially his 2016 spy yarn “Age of Shadows”) better than ever, and here’s why, and why I still look forward to his every new movie, with a quick sojourn into the history of South Korean cinema that affected him and his peers. 

There’s never a time when I don’t feel like watching the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, the first of which was released August 1, 2014. That’s ten years ago this week. Time flies when a film is a classic. This one is. So are the sequels, even though there are vestigial plot elements from the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe in all three that you have to decide to ignore or look beyond when re-watching, like one of the major characters (Gamora) getting replaced by a “variant” of herself in “Guardians of the Galaxy 3” because she’d died in another movie set elsewhere in the same universe. 

It’s a testament to the imagination and tonal control of writer-director James Gunn that impediments that might’ve stopped another trilogy in its tracks become mere speed bumps. Gunn’s as much of a pop music obsessive as a comics obsessive—the films are filled with music video-like montages and action set pieces built around specific tunes. So it makes sense to think of the main characters as a band with an evolving lineup and the three movies as albums with no bad songs on them. There’s enough individual flavor to stand the test of time, even though the trends and fads that originally brought them into existence have faded. 

You could add Gunn’s name to a list of distinctive directors who should’ve made a musical by now, given their creative tendencies, but he already has three times (five if you count “The Suicide Squad” and its spinoff, the Max series “Peacemaker”). The musicality of the movies extends beyond the music-driven sequences. The banter between the characters has a pleasing, teasing rhythm, with delayed punchlines going off at unexpected moments. In each movie, the momentum and goodwill generated by the performances and the filmmaking means that the entire enterprise seems to walk with a spring in its step. Or maybe I should’ve said “power-walk,” which is what Gunn loves to have the Guardians do right before a big action sequence, like band members putting their battle faces on as they move from the wings to the stage and try to forget their egos and become part of a hive-mind.

It’s almost a shame that the “Guardians of the Galaxy” trilogy was ever officially part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The characters don’t pop in the “Avengers”-branded “Endgame“—in the same way that they do in their own features. And of all the films released under that corporate banner—34 and counting—they’re the three that come closest to having their own identity apart from the Marvel-Disney brand.

They have a slight edge that belies their PG-13 rating, and it’s carried by Gunn’s strong empathy for, and personal identification with, his core characters, all of whom are to some degree the sum total of their coping mechanisms after having suffered unimaginable trauma or loss, whether it’s Peter Quill, aka “Star-Lord” (Chris Pratt), initially entering the narrative as a bumbling Han Solo-esque “I work alone” type because, as a child, he was abducted by Ravagers immediately following his mom’s death from cancer; or Rocket (Bradley Cooper plus visual FX artists) constructing a nihilistic wiseass personality to submerge his pain and rage at having been manufactured in a lab; or Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) and her “sister” Nebula (Karen Gillan) repeatedly trying to kill each other as a result of having their minds twisted by their evil patriarch; or the Ravager leader Yondu (Michael Rooker), an abductee himself, transforming his own negative experiences into life lessons by adopting Peter instead of letting him be eaten, and telling himself he did it because Peter was a small boy who could fit into spaces where an adult smuggler couldn’t. (Groot, in comparison, is a bit of a special case: a pure innocent, really—the giant child they all look out for and who intuitively understands the rest of them.) 

Quill defines them all as “losers” at one point in the story. The description is not as self-flagellating as it initially might seem. He’s reclaiming the word by redefining a loser not as somebody who cannot or will not “win” but as somebody who’s lost something precious but keeps going anyway.

No other character in the MCU franchise is as believably and fully human as the mostly non-human ensemble assembled by Gunn in the “Guardians” films. Like the rest of us, they do things for reasons they don’t understand. And they usually strain to justify their actions later, in terms that often don’t make rational sense, or try to lie or cover up their actual reasons for doing things, often as a way of saving face in front of a group that treats locker-room style verbal jousting as a bonding mechanism. Gunn also has a rare gift for writing lyrically deluded comic characters who become funnier and funnier the more they dig in their heels defensively when another character successfully defines them, as when Rocket warns that the strongman Drax (Dave Bautista) cannot understand figurative language because his people are “completely literal…metaphors go over his head,” and Drax huffs, “Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it.”

Gunn was the beneficiary of a lot of lucky breaks in making the “Guardians” movies, the first one especially. A big one was Marvel supervising producer Kevin Feige’s willingness to say yes to the most off-brand of MCU movie adaptations. If Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, and Captain America were the comic book equivalent of a band’s greatest hits, “Guardians” was what a pre-Internet DJ would call a “deep cut.” But this proved to be a great creative advantage because there weren’t legions of fans champing at the bit to hyper-critique every aspect, and that freed Gunn to make, well, a James Gunn superhero movie. (That’s something the general audience had no sense of at that point unless they’d seen Gunn’s R-rated “Super,” a perverse and subversive vigilante satire starring Rainn Wilson of “The Office” that owes more to “Taxi Driver” than “The Punisher.”) 

Another advantage was timing. Disney, via its recent acquisition of LucasFilm, was generating a new trilogy of “Star Wars” movies around the same time the MCU entered its cultural dominance phase and Gunn was in production on the first “Guardians.” But the first entry in Gunn’s trilogy came out almost a year-and-a-half before the first new “SW” film in ten years, J.J. Abrams’ “The Force Awakens,” which meant that the brand new and shiny, according-to-Hoyle “SW” film got compared (sometimes unfavorably) to “Guardians” rather than the other way around. The first movie was not only a huge enough hit to not seem like an underdog in relation to LucasFilm products, it was more cohesive and original. All in all, it got closer to capturing the appeal of the original, medium-redefining 1977 “Star Wars” than “Force Awakens” because of its total commitment to the “band of random losers saves the cosmos” storyline. (The “Star Wars” sequels ultimately abandoned the democratic spirit they tried to impart in “Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi” by reverting in “The Rise of Skywalker” and tying things back to the same damn royal family the storytellers had supposedly been trying to escape the shadow of.)

Taika Waititi got a lot of acclaim for being one of the few MCU directors to successfully import his own distinctive voice into the franchise with “Thor Ragnarok.” Still, the blend of intra-family squabbling, arena rock needle-drops, and goofy-grandiose action showcased in that one had been done first by Gunn and arguably with more consistency and control. 

The “Guardians” movies are the kinds of films that some viewers bond with so intensely that they feel protective of them, as if they’re friends or family members rather than mass-produced entertainments. That’s because all of the characters, no matter how preposterous in conception, come across as real people, as inconsistent and emotionally fragile as anybody walking around on the street where you live, and all the more moving because of it.

While many have already reviewed the incredibly successful “Shadow of the Erdtree,” the multi-hour DLC for the smash hit 2022 game “Elden Ring,” I’ve been wandering the Lands Between and the Land of Shadow, obsessively trying to take in everything this ambitious venture has to offer before filing. To be honest, while I had put many dozens of hours into “Elden Ring” a couple years ago, I had in no way explored everything that game had to offer. So the launch of “Erdtree” allowed me not only to complete the main game, but explore so much more of it than I had before launching into this remarkable expansion (like 100+ hours more). For years, DLC often felt like deleted scenes from a movie, something that hit the cutting room floor in the first place for a reason. But “Shadow of the Erdtree” is much more than that, a lengthy expansion of the world of “Elden Ring” that builds on the main game while presenting fully-realized new settings, enemies, and even mechanics.

Rather than just add another chapter to the story of “Elden Ring,” the developers of From Software built “Shadow of the Erdtree” out of the game’s rich lore. It’s a massive game that always feels like it’s barely scratching the surface of its storytelling, and fans have sought to unpack the back stories and trauma of its many NPCs through hundreds of websites. The main game’s ending can radically differ depending on interactions with these non-playable characters (and if you complete what essentially amounts to side quests), and that questline structure continues in the expansion. So it makes sense that “Erdtree” would branch off characters already met in the main game while also reshaping a few of the ones we already thought we knew.

Most people know by now that, to enter the DLC, a player needs to have defeated two optional bosses in Radahn and Mohg before entering the Land of Shadow, a place with new challenges to overcome and secrets to uncover. Much of the success of “Elden Ring” has been chalked up to its open-world aesthetic, one that encourages players to explore instead of following a linear path through an RPG story. The world of “Shadow of the Erdtree” doesn’t just maintain this asset but feels even more encouraging of it. There are really only three bosses in the DLC that need to be vanquished to complete its story, but there are dozens more worth fighting and entire massive regions that would go undiscovered if someone tried to speed through it. One of the many things I love about this game is that sense of player freedom. Instead of other Soulslike games wherein a challenging boss merely stood in the player’s way until it was defeated, “Elden Ring” wants people to go find another thing to do, returning when they’re strong enough to win the battle.

On that note, since most people will be playing “Shadow of the Erdtree” at a high player level that makes traditional farming for runes to upgrade difficult – one needs more and more to do so with each level – the developers came up with a new upgrade system called Scadutree Blessings and Revered Spirit Ashes. The former makes you stronger, and the latter does the same for your beloved Spirit Ashes, but both enhancements only work in the Land of Shadow. It changes your strategy: you can’t just grind for what will make you stronger. You have to find it. This mechanic feeds into the aforementioned encouragement of exploration, although I think it works better for a late-game DLC than a full game.

What’s most remarkable about “Shadow of the Erdtree” is an element that made the proper game stand out, too: the world in which it unfolds. Not merely being content to replicate regions from “Elden Ring,” the developers have built out a whole new setting, opening with a field of tombstones in the Gravesite Plain that’s instantly visually captivating. From the deep blues of the Cerulean Coast to the haunted mansion aesthetic of the Specimen Storehouse, the world of “Shadow of the Erdtree” feels unpredictably alive (and deadly). It also feels darker and more foreboding than the main game, filled with undead, aflame creatures that want you to suffer. 

It could be because it’s one of my favorite games of all time, but the nightmare-fuel enemies in this expansion also feel more like “Bloodborne” than any Soulslike since its release. From the swamps of practically unkillable specters that drive you mad to the ruins of massive fingers jutting from the earth, “Shadow of the Erdtree” sometimes feels like a cross between H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R. Tolkien, in all the awesome ways that implies.

As of this writing, I am at the final boss of “Shadow of the Erdtree,” after struggling to climb the rise of Enir-Ilim in ways that no Soulslike has ever given me. More than the full game “Elden Ring,” sections of this DLC feel almost too unpredictably punishing, even though I know there’s no such thing for hardcore fans. (I raced through some bosses considered impossible and then struggled with the non-boss enemies that followed in confusing ways, creating some baffling between-boss difficulty spikes.) There are enemies in this game, like the lightning-wielding warriors of Enir-Ilim that almost drove me insane, that would be bosses in many other titles. It’s a game constantly asking you to reconsider your strategy, and the DLC encourages you to try out its new weapons and gear; even though I was pretty attached to the melee build that I’ve fully upgraded through the main game.

It’s easy to say that “Shadow of the Erdtree” works because it follows my grandpa’s favorite saying: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But that undersells what this game – and at 40 hours, it really is more of a game than an expansion – does well, not just content to replicate what worked but to shift it in a new and fresh way. The developers have said there won’t be any more DLC for “Elden Ring.” They said the same for “Dark Souls 3” and then released a second expansion, for the record, so don’t give up hope. If that happens here, I’ll be ready on day one. But if it doesn’t, “Shadow of the Erdtree” reminds one how much influence this game will have on the team at From Software and the competitors who seek to replicate its success. Even if many will falter, I feel like we’ll look back on “Elden Ring” and “Shadow of the Erdtree” as titles that unleashed a creative ripple through the industry. At least until “Elden Ring 2.”

The Publisher provided a review copy of this title.

Every day, people from all over the world come to Washington, DC, to look at the historic sights. As the documentary “War Game” begins, we see a man looking through his windshield at the Capitol building and then taking pictures of the Washington Monument. He’s not a tourist sharing local icons with his friends on Instagram; he calmly talks to a passenger in his car about wanting US troops to “gun down patriotic Americans” and starting a fire at the Pentagon. It is chilling. And then, when we find out who he really is and what he’s really planning, it gets downright terrifying.

On January 6, 2021, the world watched as Trump supporters broke into the Capitol building to try to stop the certification of the election of Joe Biden. While some still argue they were just “tourists,” the footage shows that they smashed through barriers and locked doors. People in the mob and some in law enforcement were injured, and some died. Members of Congress had to evacuate until order was restored. 

That was the first time there was a violent attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power that is the foundation of a democracy. It led to criminal charges against many of the organizers and participants and an unprecedented second impeachment of President Trump, who urged the mob to march to the Capitol and, depending on your perspective, either protest the legitimacy of the election results or prevent the certification by force. It has also led, for the first time, to US investments being assessed for “political risk.”

The men we saw in the car were not planning an attack. They were trying to figure out how to respond to one. On January 6, 2023, a group of veterans and current and former government officials spent the day pretending that a much better organized and more powerful group had attacked the Capitol to prevent certification of the 2024 elections. This was a tabletop exercise or “game” to better understand the seriousness of the threat, the pervasiveness of the disintegrating trust in our democratic system from those who question the legitimacy of our government, and how our elected officials and military can and should respond. 

The set-up is detailed, serious, and all too believable. It includes a movie set-like replica of the White House briefing room and pre-recorded “news reports” on the events of the day based on the limited information—and some strategically distributed disinformation—as it becomes “available.” The enemy makes very effective use of social media, fake footage, manipulation of their followers, and their understanding that any use of force against them will make them more powerful as martyrs. 

All of the participants have broad and deep experience, and it’s fascinating to see them work through their options. The role of the President, who has just been re-elected by a margin of less than one percent, is played by Steve Bullock, former Democratic governor of Montana. His advisor is played by former Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-Nevada). One of the advisors in creating the fact situation is Alexander Vindman, Former Director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council, who blew the whistle on then-President Trump’s attempt to, depending on your point of view, persuade or bribe Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of the man Trump considered his likely opponent in the 2020 election. It is sobering to learn that the people who put the exercise together are veterans whose own experience in the military made them deeply concerned about the threat from inside. As Senator Heitkamp says, “We’ve always been able to unite the country when the threat is external.” However, we have relied on a dangerous form of exceptionalism in assuming that the US is immune to threats from rogue actors with access to military technology. One twist in the exercise made me gasp aloud because I realized how vulnerable we are: in a moment, the most senior government officials go from deciding whether to deploy the military to uncertainty about whether the person with the title Commander in Chief has the authority to do so.

Countless films have shown us the world on the brink of extinction, with serious men (and a few women) meeting in situation rooms and members of the military and the CIA staring into banks of computers, monitoring the risks and computing the options. Usually, the focus is on the action: the many actors who played James Bond and Jack Ryan, the many heroic roles played by Steven Seagal and Tom Cruise. But we eat our popcorn knowing how those movies are going to end. James, Jack, Steve, and Tom will always save the day. So, the specifics of the crises are not important. We get a couple of details about some McGuffin of a powerful thing that’s bad, just enough to give our heroes something to inspire crazy stunts, chases, and explosions and demonstrate their amazing skill, cunning, technology, and heroism.

There are few films that focus on the people in suits, ties, and uniforms who deploy the heroes, perhaps most compellingly in the savagely hilarious classic “Dr. Strangelove” (and the serious drama with a parallel storyline released the same year, “Fail Safe”) and the underseen “Eye in the Sky,” about the moral, political, and national security risks of drone warfare. 

“War Game” brings it all home, in my case literally – I live just outside of Washington DC. It’s the scariest movie of the year, especially when you consider that it was not Homeland Security, the NSA, the Pentagon, or Congress running the exercise. Instead, it’s a group of former military members called the VetVoice Foundation, stepping in because their experience showed them the gross underestimation of the possible threats from armed extremists. A note at the end tells us that they briefed the government on their findings. Let’s hope they listened. 

Apple TV’s “Women in Blue” / “Las Azules” is a flawed show. The acting is uneven, with some cast members going full telenovela while others stay in realist drama. Worse, it’s clear that this is a show about women created by men (Fernando Rovzar and Pablo Aramendi, to be precise). All of the episodes are directed by men, and the majority of the scripts are written by men, too. 

The beginning is particularly cliché, featuring a bored (and of course beautiful) housewife, who looks for (and finds!) meaning in work after she catches her husband cheating. Even the title sequence reads like a bunch of guys brainstorming markers of femininity – red heels? Check! The woman symbol? Yup! Women getting objectified in swimsuits? Absolutely. And the list goes on.

This surface-level understanding of what it is to be a woman makes some aspects of “Women in Blue” deeply frustrating – including the arc of lead character María (Bárbara Mori), the aforementioned housewife. It also means this 1970s, ostensibly feminist drama fails to have much to say about gender dynamics in the workforce, even as its whole plot centers around the women who sex-integrated Mexico’s police force. “Mad Men” this is not.

Still, it got me. “Women in Blue” has an enticing mix of elements, a certain hodgepodge that shouldn’t work but does. It’s a thriller as our titular “Women in Blue” use their police training to track down a serial killer targeting young women. There’s a “Silence of the Lambs” element when María hits up an infamous, incarcerated serial killer for advice. 

Then there’s the historical fiction aspect (“inspired by true events” as they say), complete with go-go boots, macrame beads, and white-roofed Cadillacs. “Women in Blue”’s take on the era’s sexism doesn’t go much deeper than that “it was bad,” but the critique is still there, reminding us that not so long ago (and maybe even today), the idea that women could serve effectively as protectors of the peace was entirely foreign.

Then there’s the commentary on policing itself. “Women in Blue” shines in how it dramatizes detective work, ringing suspense from how Ángeles (Ximena Sariñana) finds and organizes data (in the 1970s we’re talking paper files here). The show also presents various interrogation techniques, ranging from torture to compassion to much effect. Indeed, it’s particularly insightful when Gabina (Amorita Rasgado), the estranged daughter of the police chief, gets an insider’s perspective of what it really means to be a cop. State-side audiences may brush off this learning, believing Mexican police are inherently corrupt but the truth is more complicated, and “Women in Blue” does a good job of exploring that complication.

But this series is best at the blood-pounding thriller of it all. It builds a complex chase with the clues scaffolding nicely upon each other. When we get the killer’s back story, “Women in Blue” mines it for typical ideas of trauma and neglect but also delivers a strong rebuke of the typical violent-past-as-destiny trope.

As the cliffhangers mount, the suspension and stakes go with them. I prefer to watch my TV before bed and this show required an hour to decompress after – such was my state after exiting this intense, plot-driven environment. 

Yes, it’s feminism light (perhaps at the lightest: set in the past with no lessons other than things have gotten better). Yes, it’s a show that critiques policing but ultimately makes a hero out of those who don the badge. And yes, the direction and writing are uneven (it’s not until writer Silvia Jiménez’s seventh and eighth episodes that the characters finally start to get some human depth).

But it’s also a thrilling and satisfying ride, combining predictable genre elements with surprising turns. I was jumping in my seat, staying up too late and enjoying “Women in Blue” quite a lot, despite its many imperfections.