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: The Royal Hotel (2023)

Genre: Outback Drama  

Director: Kitty Green  

Starring: Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, Hugo Weaving  

Running Time: 91 minutes  

Synopsis: Backpacking Canadian friends Hanna and Liv (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick) are on a work-travel trip to Australia. After running out of money they accept bartender jobs at an isolated mining community. They have to endure a barely-civilized environment and nights full of rough, lusty, and drunken men, including the slightly refined Matt (Toby Wallace), innkeeper Billy (Hugo Weaving), the relatively quiet Teeth (James Frecheville) and the creepy Dolly (Daniel Henshall). Liv is outgoing and willing to enjoy the experience, but the more grounded Hanna is increasingly worried about their safety.

What Works Well: Director Kitty Green and star Julia Garner worked together on 2019's The Assistant, and here again contribute to an unsettling environment. The South Australia mining milieu is a time and place left behind by civilization, the men's pent-up isolation bubbling into boorishness and aggressive sexual advances during nightly drinking sprees. Garner and her co-star Jessica Henwick create a spiky friendship built on contrasting risk tolerance levels.

What Does Not Work As Well: A distinct absence of an actual plot becomes increasingly apparent after the opening act, eventually devouring the intriguing context. This is a tableau with characters but insufficient content, and sideways drift takes over. Men in coveralls sequentially gain then lose prominence, Hanna and Liv struggle in the absence of meaningful arcs, and a few plot points are just bewildering. A mysterious phone call from a previous bartender and the stern-faced cook who disapproves of everything but stops short of communicating hint at a story that never materializes.

Conclusion: Beware the featureless desert, where the promise of adventure can disappear into a mirage.



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The Movies Of Julia Garner

All movies starring Julia Garner and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are reviewed below:

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower (2012)

Grandma (2015)

Good Kids (2016)

The Assistant (2019)

The Royal Hotel (2023)

Weapons (2025)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: The Assistant (2019)

A day-in-the-life drama, The Assistant explores the troubled office environment of a lowly nobody, as she notices everything but is noticed by no one. 

In New York, Jane (Julia Garner) works as one of many assistants to the powerful boss at a movie production office. Her day starts before dawn, and her duties cover everything from making coffee, answering the phone, picking up litter, booking flights, hotels and limousines, greeting visitors, buying lunch for other assistants, and trying to calm down the boss's irritable wife when she calls.

Jane tolerates the thankless days because she hopes to one day make it as a producer. But when another young female assistant is hired from out-of-town and whisked away to a hotel room for a private liaison with the boss, she feels obligated to take her concerns to a human resources officer. Her day only becomes more complicated.

A sparse, almost experimental 87 minutes from writer and director Kitty Green, The Assistant is loosely inspired by Weinstein-type workplace improprieties, but more broadly observes office operations from the lowest rung of the ladder. This particular workplace is related to movie production, but it could represent any other high-stress, long-hours, traditional male-commanded white collar environment. With no music, barely any structured dialogue and no linear narrative, the film builds curious interest as Jane navigates the ups and downs of her day.

With this assistant having no workplace friends and deemed too unimportant for anyone to talk to, most of the conversations are overheard snippets between other people. Green adopts a passive bystander stance, following Jane around the office, with open doors in the background sometimes revealing offices hosting important meetings where Jane is never welcome. She is confined to the administrative periphery where success is measured by the absence of screw-ups.

But on this day first she says the wrong thing to the boss's wife, then she dares poke her nose into what looks like a power-imbalanced sexual liaison. On both occasions she has to confront the possibility of her employment coming to an early end. And yet to answer why the Janes of the corporate world put up with all the garbage, a one-line email offers a glimmer of a suggestion that there could be light at the end of her tunnel.

Julia Garner is at the center of every scene and carries the film on her shoulders. She conveys resigned sadness mixed with stern determination to whack through the thicket of hard days. Matthew Macfadyen appears in one scene as the HR manager, and the rest of the cast members are essentially glorified extras.

The Assistant lives a familiar reality for many, a balancing act of getting the job done while measuring minute-by-minute whether the emotional toll is worth it.



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Movie Review: Grandma (2015)

A drama-comedy character study, Grandma is an engaging story enhanced by provocative characters and excellent performances.

Elle (Lily Tomlin) is a fifty year old (or so she claims) grandmother, ex-poet, unemployed academic, lesbian and staunch feminist. Following the death of her long-time partner, Elle is now breaking up with the much younger Olivia (Judy Greer) after a four month relationship. Elle's granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) shows up unexpectedly seeking help: she needs more than $600 to pay for an abortion scheduled later that day.

Elle is also broke, but she decides to help by trying to collect money from a variety of sources. The pair visit Sage's boyfriend Cam (Nat Wolff), Elle's bookstore owner friend Carla (Elizabeth Peña), tattoo artist Deathy (Laverne Cox) and Elle's lover from a long time ago Karl (Sam Elliott). Finally, Elle and Sage have to gather up their courage to also seek help from Elle's daughter and Sage's mother Judy (Marcia Gay Harden), a perpetually high-strung businesswoman.

Written and directed by Paul Weitz, Grandma is a compact 79 minutes delving into the world of a fading scholar. The film is a showcase for 76 year old Lily Tomlin, who dominates the screen with a caustic performance as Elle. This grandma is bitter, foul-mouthed and proud of it, her life reduced to no debt, no apologies, and not accepting nonsense from anyone, and Tomlin brings her to life with gallons of bravado.

With no wasted scenes, the story is small and personal but also elaborate enough to explore relevant themes for Elle's generation, from the abortion question to the status of feminism and exactly where the battles for women's rights have landed. Weitz steers a delicate course, avoiding any sense of moral high ground or preachiness. Elle may have lived on her own terms, but her life is cluttered with the wreckage of her decisions, including an unfulfilled career and, closer to home, broken relationships with daughter Judy and former lover Karl. Elle achieved independence, but far from triumphantly.

The film cruises through the interactions Elle initiates in her quest to find the money Sage needs, and  grandma's world is revealed through the eyes of the granddaughter, oscillating between resigned, panicked and horrified by grandma's behaviour. Weitz challenges the millennial to assess whether the paths paved for her by the warrior women of the 1960s and 1980s are worth following. Julia Garner is excellent portraying a young woman forced to understand, all too closely, where she came from, but still inquisitively looking for her own trajectory.

Sharp and feisty, Grandma is worth knowing and does not overstay her welcome.

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