Movie Review: Weapons (2025)

Genre: Supernatural Mystery Horror  

Director: Zach Cregger  
Starring: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan  

Running Time: 128 minutes  

Synopsis: In a suburban Pennsylvania community, 17 out of 18 children from the same third grade classroom inexplicably leave their homes at 2:17am and disappear. Young Alex Lilly is the only exception. The class teacher Justine (Julia Garner) becomes the target of enraged parents, including Archer (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing kids. Police officer Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) and homeless addict James (Austin Abrams) are caught up in the mystery, made more bizarre by the sudden appearance of Alex's eccentric aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan).

What Works Well: The events immediately after the kids' disappearance are recounted from various perspectives. Teacher Justine, dad Archer, police officer Paul, and addict James shed different light on the intractable mystery, director and writer Zach Cregger rocking the small and seemingly quaint suburb with an inexplicable event and unleashing a sense of mounting dread. Julia Garner excels as the teacher in the middle of the storm, shrugging off the community's rage and doggedly conducting her own snooping into what may have happened to her students.

What Does Not Work As Well: After all the careful build-up, the final act is quite the let-down. While Amy Madigan is memorable under layers of make-up and in an outlandish wig, her character's appearance and the subsequent turn towards barely explained witchcraft punctures all suspense out of the narrative. Gore and humour take over, wasting the clever narrative construction. And in retrospect, the plot can only be enabled by incredibly slipshod police work.

Key Quote:

Justine (addressing a parents' meeting): The truth is that I want answers...just as badly as all of you.

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Movie Review: Fair Play (2023)

Genre: Drama

Director: Chloe Domont

Starring: Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich, Eddie Marsan

Running Time: 113 minutes

Synopsis: In New York City, Emily and Luke (Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich) are analysts at a prestigious but cut-throat stock trading firm. Against company policy, they are also secret lovers and planning to get married. When Emily is unexpectedly promoted and becomes Luke's boss, he struggles with jealousy and self-esteem issues. In addition to managing Luke's emotions, Emily has to prove herself to company owner Campbell (Eddie Marsan) and navigate a male-dominated office culture.

What Works Well: Director and writer Chloe Domont embraces a detached corporate aesthetic and strides into a complicated knot of shark-infested office politics, illicit romance, bro culture, career ambitions, a fragile male ego, impostor syndrome, and the interface between power and sex, all in an erotically charged milieu. The twisty drama is always searching for the less expected and more emotionally challenging path, and the don't-hold-back attitude is propelled by a fearless Phoebe Dynevor performance.

What Does Not Work As Well: The writing often lacks wit and subtlety, vulgarity used as an obvious crutch. Some of the more emotional scenes reach for excessive levels of loud theatricality.

Conclusion: The messes usually confined to bedrooms and bathrooms...here spill all over the office.



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Movie Review: Cocaine Bear (2023)

Genre: Monster Horror Comedy

Director: Elizabeth Banks

Starring: Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, Ray Liotta, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Margo Martindale

Running Time: 95 minutes

Synopsis: In 1985, a drug runner working for gangster Syd (Ray Liotta) drops cocaine-filled bags from a small plane over Georgia's Chattahoochee National Forest. A bear consumes the cocaine and becomes crazed, attacking two hikers. Syd sends his son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) and fixer Daveed (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) to retrieve the drugs, and they are pursued by detective Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.). Also in the park are kids Dee Dee and Henry, while Dee Dee's worried mom Sari (Keri Russell) searches for them. Park ranger Liz (Margo Martindale), an environmental officer, and a bunch of thugs are the bear's other potential victims.

What Works Well: Based on an actual incident in which a bear died after consuming cocaine dumped from a smuggler's plane, this is a silly, fun, gory, and often hilarious comedy. Highlights include a wild ambulance ride, the bear passing out in a most inconsiderate position, and wayward pistol shooting by the hapless park ranger. The special effects are generally passable, and the music score adds peppy energy with several mid-80's era songs.

What Does Not Work As Well: The cast is cluttered with a few too many bad guys, worse guys, and idiots, and although the insistence on using backstories to round most of the characters is appreciated, the intervals between bear attacks drift sideways into the forest of indifference. The combination of big gore and big laughs is sometimes jarring.

Conclusion: Unsurprisingly, "Don't Do Drugs" also applies to bears.

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Movie Review: The Yellow Birds (2017)

A drama about the horrors of war and resultant psychological trauma, The Yellow Birds trudges through well-worn terrain with familiar characters and a banal battlefield mystery.

Private John Bartle (Alden Ehrenreich) returns from the Iraq War traumatized by what happened to his friend Private Daniel Murphy (Tye Sheridan). Flashbacks reveal the friendship between the two men developing from their training days under the guidance of Sergeant Sterling (Jack Huston) through to deployment and various difficult under-fire episodes.

Now Bartle refuses to communicate with his mother Amy (Toni Collette) and avoids Captain Anderson (Jason Patric), who is investigating what happened to Murphy. Meanwhile Murphy's mother Maureen (Jennifer Aniston) is desperate to learn her son's fate.

Battlefield mysteries and post traumatic stress disorder stories inspired by American involvement in Middle East wars have already featured in productions of various quality including Courage Under Fire (1996), Jarhead (2005), In The Valley Of Elah (2007), The Hurt Locker (2008), Stop-Loss (2008), Brothers (2009) and American Sniper (2014). Lacking anything new to say, The Yellow Birds unfortunately flies in lazy circles, unsurprisingly failing to extract any fresh drama from shrivelled material.

Director Alexandre Moors and writers David Lowery and R.F.I. Porto, adapting the Kevin Powers book, assemble the tired pieces with minimal heart and soul, resulting in a depressing and derivative tone. The time jumps between Bartle's present doldrums and his earlier training and battlefield encounters do little to camouflage the threadbare content. The resolution of Murphy's story adds to the sense of abject narrative incompetence, given the well-established value of a captured soldier in enemy hands.

The visuals are adequate, the action scenes in the dusty streets of Baghdad (filmed in Morocco) are rationally edited, and the cast members are better than their limited character definitions, with Huston and Patric particularly wasted. But despite some decent flaps, The Yellow Birds bumbles away into forgettable air.



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Movie Review: Rules Don't Apply (2016)

A drama, comedy and romance set in Hollywood, Rules Don't Apply is a wayward and tonally scattered story.

It's the late 1950s, and young starlet Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins) arrives in Hollywood with her mother Lucy (Annette Bening) to film a screen test and join reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes' RKO Studios. Marla's driver is Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), and after many weeks of classes and rehearsals, it becomes obvious to Marla and Lucy that very few people have ever met Hughes. Lucy departs back to Virginia, while Marla stays behind and flirts more openly with Frank.

Marla eventually meets the sociophobic Hughes (Warren Beatty), and he seems to like her, although he is preoccupied with corporate battles involving his airline TWA. Hughes also meets Frank, and brings him into his inner circle as a confidant. The relationship between Marla and Frank is hampered by his commitment to his hometown girlfriend, while Hughes suddenly expresses devotion to Marla, but she is drunk and he has devious reasons to find a wife in order to fend off corporate predators.

Directed and written by Beatty, Rules Don't Apply is an unfortunate mess. While the recreation of Los Angeles of the late 1950s and early 1960s makes for attractive locales, the story is a muddled bore, and the one obvious attribute is indecision over what the film is meant to be about, or why.

The first act appears to be Marla's story, with Lily Collins in excellent wide-eyed but mischievous form. Hughes does not feature at all in this chapter. Marla then fades as the perspective shifts more towards Frank, his dream of a grand real estate deal and his admittance into Hughes' bizarre world. Then the final chapter becomes all about Hughes and his eccentricities, Beatty belatedly placing himself at centre stage as the film becomes an examination of a billionaire's erratic behaviour.

The film ends with both Marla and Frank incidental to the story of a befuddled businessman's seemingly harmless eccentricities. Marla's late and triumphal re-entry with a new no nonsense attitude does not to dispel the sense that Beatty had no overarching vision.

At a running length of 126 minutes the pacing is lazy and the editing sloppy, with one mostly static scene between Hughes and Marla dragging on for an astounding amount of time, sucking all momentum out of the film. A barbarians-at-the-gate subplot about rival businessmen seemingly scheming to take over TWA contributes frequent interruptive and noisy distraction from the already fragmented narrative, but is barely explained and never expounded upon.

In addition to Annette Bening disappearing early, the cast features a star in every role, with the likes of Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, Dabney Coleman, Amy Madigan, Martin Sheen, Oliver Platt and Paul Sorvino either contributing little or being utterly wasted in single scenes.

Rules Don't Apply breaks all the rules of good film making, and as result fractures into forgettable cutting room floor material.

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