1. Send Help
I'm always down for some Rachel McAdams, and I still regard director Sam Raimi's output with guarded optimism. Send Help is... good, but of course not Spider Man 2 good or, going still further back, Evil Dead 2 good. It reminded me of many other movies, mostly Triangle of Sadness, but also Cast Away and Misery. Even so it's its own entity, and entertainingly gross to boot.
Every ticket purchased for this film puts Melania further in the hole, and I'd recommend it for that reason alone.
2. Goat
A goat dreams of playing professional "roarball" despite his diminutive size. I went into this one with zero expectations and walked out pleasantly surprised. It's predictable but it's also eccentric enough to be interesting.
3. Rental Family
This one had a 2025 release date in the States, but in Taiwan it arrived this month.
Oscar-winner Brendan Fraser stars as an actor living in Japan who finds work impersonating other people's friends and relatives. The last of Fraser's movies I saw was the decidedly depressing The Whale, and I was happy to see him in something a lot more lighthearted. Rental Family is a very solid movie, and although it wasn't a big hit at the box office (on either side of the Pacific) I could see it becoming a cult classic in the future.
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4. Crime 101
Bruce Banner attempts to catch Thor before he steals a bunch of diamonds and/or cash with Storm's help. Oh, and The Riddler's in their somewhere.
Sorry, wrong cinematic universe.
I think that Chris Hemsworth has, by this point at least, proved that he's more than Thor several times over, and the rest of the cast were well established in Hollywood long before we fretted over the next Avengers or whatever Sony might or might not be doing with the Spider-Man films.
Crime 101 isn't bad. I think it could have been edited down to a leaner two hours, but it's not bad. In terms of recent movies I've seen recently Rental Family is way better, but as crime thrillers go Crime 101 is a tightly constructed tale of thieves, cops and rich guys with too much money on their hands. It's not Heat or anything, but Barry Keoghan goes a long way toward elevating whatever movie he deigns to appear in.
Woah: Nick Nolte is now 85 years old.
Yet Another Comic Book Connection: Pedro Pascal was originally slated to star opposite Hemsworth, but dropped out to star in Fantastic Four: First Steps instead.
5. War Machine
A squad of trainee Army Rangers faces an alien killing machine. It'll remind you of Edge of Tomorrow, it'll remind you of Predator, but star Alan Ritchson is a good actor and the ending, although predictable, is very satisfying.
6. Project Hail Mary
Ryan Gosling journeys 11 or more light years away to save our sun.
I didn't like this one as much as I thought I would. Ryan Gosling give it his all, and the overall story takes some unconventional twists and turns, but it wore on me.
Its geeky scientism will remind you a little of The Martian, but that fact alone is only a slight mark against it. It's an unquestionably good movie, even though it could have been streamlined a bit.
7. The Super Mario Galaxy Mario
Not nearly as good as the first one but it'll entertain most five year olds. If you've played Odyssey as much as I have you might enjoy some of the settings, but otherwise there's not much here for adults.
8. Lee Cronin's The Mummy
I was disappointed. The trailer looked good, and I was a huge fan of Evil Dead Rise, but there are too many aspects of the plot that don't add up. There are some arresting visuals (though nothing on par with Evil Dead Rise), but this film's characters, especially the child's mother, behave in very inexplicable ways.
And what the hell was the deal with the walls in that house? Whose house has walls like that? And why was everyone so weirdly calm after they witness someone get devoured by coyotes? And why assume that danger has passed afterward? Why? Why? Why?
See Evil Dead Rise if you missed it in theaters. That movie is so metal it's ridiculous. For that matter Cronin's first film, The Hole in the Ground, is also good. The Mummy? If you haven't seen it already I'd give it a miss. Evil Dead Burn will be out this summer anyway.
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9. The Devil Wears Prada 2
If you liked the first one you'll like the second. It's a well constructed movie which manages to walk a tightrope between updating its characters and (re)creating the kind of moments that everyone who loved the original is waiting for.
I sometimes feel that Anne Hathaway doesn't get enough credit as an actress. She's pretty, she's been in a lot of famous films with slightly more famous actors, but she can also carry a movie. Without her The Devil Wears Prada and its sequel wouldn't work half as well as they do.
10. Masters of the Universe
One of the most solidly OK movies I've seen in a while. It won't blow your mind or anything, and the tone's a bit off in the first third, but the rest of the movie is consistent. It's head and shoulders above the 1987 version, and I expect we'll hear more from Nicholas Galitzine and Camila Mendes in the future.
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11. Backrooms
Of the 2026 movies I've seen so far this is the best one. It's hard to describe the plot without giving too much away, but let's just say that a furniture store owner finds a series of rooms inexplicably placed beneath his place of business. It only gets weirder from there.
Both the sound design and set design for this film are Oscar worthy, and Chiwetel Ejiofor deserves a Best Actor nomination he's probably not going to get.
12. Disclosure Day
Not nearly as good as Project Hail Mary above, and I'd place it near the bottom of Spielberg's filmography.
It gets off to a solid start, but were I to rank it in relation to Spielberg's other science fiction films, these being Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, War of the Worlds and Ready Player One I'd put it third from the bottom, above The Lost World and Ready Player One.
Which is not even to bring in other heavy hitters from the director's filmography into the discussion, movies like Jaws, Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List. No, Disclosure Day is a far cry from those other, vastly superior movies, and I think that with time reviews of it will reflect this reality. Even compared to its most closely related cousin, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Disclosure Day has some glaring flaws, not least of these being the idea that we'd all believe that aliens are real just because we saw something to that effect on television.
Don't get me wrong, Emily Blunt is great in this movie, it's just that the story we see onscreen isn't the concise, character-driven thing Spielberg is known for. What we get instead are weird, unnecessary debates on the people's right to know vs. the government's need to protect the public, old school Catholicism vs. an understanding that we're not alone (or unique) in the universe, and even a species-centric view of morality vs. a larger empathy towards all living things. Spielberg has tackled a lot of these topics more effectively elsewhere, and what's worse is the fact that this movie is overlong, unnecessarily drawn out, and downright slow in parts.
I did enjoy that sequence around the farmhouse though. Hats off to the cinematographer for that bit.
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13. Supergirl
A little too much like Guardians of the Galaxy if you ask me. Sure, I get that James Gunn's fingerprints are all over this cinematic universe, and I also get that Supergirl is, in a sense, a sequel to Gunn's Superman, but they had an opportunity to do something different here, and they chose not to do it.
Milly Alcock is fine in the lead role, I just wished that her dialogue hadn't felt so canned, as if scriptwriters went over every single word with a fine-toothed comb. A better approach might have been to let the actors improvise more. They were probably on a tight schedule, and all of the effects shots in the film likely didn't allow for that, but there were certainly ways around the problem.
Lobo was also disappointing. Hearing Jason Momoa say "bastich" in live action sounds dumb. He's also buried under an unnecessary amount of makeup, and likewise burdened with lines that felt a little too precious to me.
Beyond all of that Kara's relationship with the young girl doesn't make all that much sense. This young girl is also, to some extent, a wet blanket hanging over the entire movie, and either the revenge subplot needed to be toned down or the rest of the film needed to be darker to match it. And what's that young girl going to do with that sword, anyway? Somehow kill a being with godlike powers?
So far this movie is underperforming even in comparison to 2023's The Flash, so don't expect a sequel anytime soon.
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14. Michael
Saw this recently on a flight between Taipei and Seattle. Captive audience, you know.
I think Colman Domingo delivers a solid performance as Michael Jackson's father, but in any other respect this attempt at whitewashing Jackson's life is a thorough disappointment. What bothered me most was how it leads viewers to the conclusion that the Jackson 5 wrote their own Motown hits, when in reality it was the Funk Brothers, Motown's in-house band, that penned songs like "ABC" and "I Want You Back." Michael certainly sang on them, but they were written by other people.
Those interested in Michael Jackson's life would be better served by documentaries related to people, places and things portrayed in this movie. Standing in the Shadows of Motown for one, and also Quincy, the Netflix documentary about Quincy Jones directed by his daughter.
It's hard to pin down the best documentary directly about Michael Jackson, but I think Living with Michael Jackson, Martin Bashir's 2003 television interview, is the most frequently referenced.
I very much doubt that a sequel to Michael, if it ever gets made, will be worth watching. As it is Antoine Fuqua's original cut was drastically edited prior to its release, and the post-Bad years of Jackson's life are the subject of many ongoing legal disputes.
15. Seven Snipers
Seven seemingly incompetent snipers confront an eighth, slightly less incompetent sniper who still makes some seriously inexplicable choices. As sniper movies go this one's shooting blanks.
16. Twisted
Lauren LaVera, from the Terrorizer franchise! And hey it's Djimon Hounsou, in his first horror movie!
Critics didn't like this film but I thought it was OK. Aside from Lauren LaVera's personal hotness there are few genuinely creepy scenes in this story of medical experimentation gone very, very wrong, and both LaVera and Hounsou are convincing in their roles. It went straight to streaming, but I'd still put it above many theatrical horror releases from this and the previous year.
17. Black Box
Some lower level acting, but it's not bad if you're considering a TV movie-tier science fiction horror outing. I enjoyed the ending even if the cast wasn't quite up to the challenge.
18. Deep Water
The same little girl plays the same kind of character in Deep Water. Both movies involve plane crashes, and in both movies she's annoying in different ways.
Aaron Eckhart pilots this one, or at least he does in the American version. I have the feeling that it was financed with a lot of Chinese money, and there may be another cut of Deep Water for Mainland Chinese audiences.
This movie gets stupid once the strangely aerodynamic sharks show up. The plane crashes, breaks into pieces atop a coral reef, and the passengers have to dodge these sharks until help arrives. One of the characters even jokingly refers to an older woman as "Shelley Winters," so yeah, you can probably guess the rest of the plot from that point onward.
19. Cold Storage
A space fungus turns people and animals into explosive zombies in a storage facility. It's just as stupid as Deep Water above, but this film knows it's stupid, and moreover revels in the fact. I'd give it 7 stars out of 10, though it did remind me a bit too much of Return of the Living Dead.
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