Before I was a friend and colleague, I was a fan.

In my early and mid-teens in the 1970s, I was a loner jock/pop culture nerd who was obsessed with these pursuits:

Playing and watching baseball and football and to a lesser extent basketball, and consuming issues of Sports Illustrated and Sport and Baseball Digest, and reading books such as Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, David Wolf’s Foul! The Connie Hawkins Story and George Plimpton’s Paper Lion.

Watching late-night and weekend TV, especially talk shows such as “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” “The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder,” ABC’s “Good Night America,” wherever Dick Cavett had landed in a given season—and the Chicago-based “Kup’s Show,” with the legendary Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet presiding over an eclectic group of guests engaging in “the lively art of conversation.”

Movies. Movies movies movies.

Then came a program that merged two of those three passions: movies and talk shows. At some point in late 1975 or early 1976, I became aware of “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You,” a monthly review program on WTTW-Channel 11. The show featured Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert and Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel talking about new releases in the low-key but instantly engrossing style that made you feel like you were eavesdropping on your two favorite teachers as they verbally sparred between classes. (Roger was 33 when the show debuted; Gene was just 29.)

It was great. I watched every week. I took notes. (I had piles of spiral notebooks back then, filled with scribblings about everything from stats comparing the 1927 Yankees to the mid-1970s Big Red Machine, to my ratings of various episodes of “The Tonight Show.” Like I said: nerd.) Conventional wisdom has it that Roger and Gene were awkward, unpolished and slightly geeky in those early years—and while there’s some truth in that, they were also pretty comfortable in their respective personas from the get-go, clearly knowledgeable and passionate about films, and respectful of each other’s opinions, even when they vehemently disagreed.

When I had the cash to see a movie at the Dolton Cinema or the River Oaks in Calumet City, I based my choices largely on Roger’s reviews in the Sun-Times (we were never a Tribune family, no offense)—and what Roger and Gene had to say on “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You.” It was a well-produced show from the start, but it also had a quirky, almost no-budget, enormously charming local public television vibe. The guys delivered insightful and sobering commentary on major films such as “Taxi Driver”—but they never took themselves too seriously, as evidenced by segments titled the “Dog of the Week” (with Spot the Wonder Dog) and later the “Stinker of the Week” (with Aroma the Educated Skunk), shining a harsh but playful light on terrible movies. As memory serves, in both cases, real animals were supplanted by plush toys. Easier to wrangle, I would imagine.

Fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s, when Roger and Gene were syndicated across the country. The review show was still must-see television for me—but as a talk-show geek, I was also a big fan of the Siskel & Ebert chat show appearances, including the grandaddy of them all, “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” (Years later, Roger told me that when he and Gene were backstage at “The Tonight Show,” a producer told them Johnny was going to ask about the best movies currently playing in theaters—and they both drew a blank. From that point forward, whenever they taped a talk show appearance, a producer would be at the ready back at the Chicago offices in case they needed to make a call.) 

They were great with Regis and Kathie Lee, with Oprah and Johnny and Jay and Arsenio, but best of all were the appearances with David Letterman, who recognized comedy gold in these fellow Midwesterners. Roger and Gene would come on and mostly talk about movies (the running joke was that while Letterman would have only one guest on at a time, he always kept two chairs on the set “for Siskel & Ebert”) —but they were also featured in comedy bits. They made quick cameos, gave their concession stand recommendations at a makeshift snack counter, and perhaps most famously, filmed a segment where Dave, Roger and Gene went door to door in New Jersey, cleaning the gutters at one woman’s house, playing a game of basketball in a driveway court, and even stopping in to pay their respects at a funeral home in West Orange. They had become such household names that when Michael J. Fox was on with Letterman to promote his movie “The Hard Way,” nearly an entire segment was devoted to Fox’s feelings about Gene and Roger and their respective reviewing styles.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate the impact Siskel & Ebert had on the careers of filmmakers, and on the popular culture. When they championed films such as “Hoop Dreams,” or did an entire show in black and white to decry the horrific practice of colorizing films, when they touted the works of Spike Lee and Errol Morris and Werner Herzog and the Coen Brothers, millions were watching and taking heed. At times, Hollywood players would take not-so-thinly-veiled shots at the lads. Roland Emmerich’s “Godzilla” had the incompetent “Mayor Ebert” (Michael Lerner) and his advisor, Gene (Lorry Goldman). In “The Ref,” where Richard LaGravenese had J.K. Simmons playing a deviant character named “Siskel” because Gene had said LaGravenese’s screenplay for “The Fisher King” was the least deserving of the Oscar nominees in that category in 1991. Gene and Roger were on “Saturday Night Live,” lampooned in Mad Magazine, on the Howard Stern Show, and were depicted in animated form on “The Critic.” They were as famous as the movie stars and directors they talked about.

Through it all, though, the Roger and Gene we saw in the balcony every week were the same guys who popped up on Channel 11 back in 1975. They never moved the production from Chicago to Hollywood. They never added unnecessary bells and whistles or gimmicks. It was two smart guys who loved movies sitting across the aisle from one another, speaking with passion and knowledge and savvy about the movies that would be opening that weekend at a theater near you. It was magic.

Director Andrew DeYoung (“Friendship”) and “I Think You Should Leave” collaborators Zach Kanin and Tim Robinson continue their exploration of dysfunctional masculinity in the American suburbs in the consistently funny “The Chair Company,” premiering on HBO on Sunday. Like most of their work, it sometimes stretches believability to try and get a laugh, but it’s a captivatingly strange piece of work, a show that feels like it reaches for commentary in a way that these guys haven’t really done before, becoming a study of how paranoia, conspiracies, and feelings of inadequacy can blend into something dangerous in the male psyche. It’s a show that plays alternately like a mystery and a study of a man going insane. It might be both.

The hilariously long tagline for “The Chair Company” kinda says it all while also saying nothing, which is fitting for the show: “There’s a world under the surface and only Ron has any idea about it. And sometimes the two worlds collide, and sometimes they don’t. Ron holds them at arm’s length from each other. Watch every week to find out when he can and when he can’t.”

Ron Trosper (Robinson) works at a company where he’s leading a team planning the construction of a local mall in suburban Ohio. What should be a successful time in Ron’s life is thrown into utter chaos at an office meeting to celebrate the project when, well, something happens that HBO has asked not to be spoiled, which kind of makes the what of this show difficult to unpack. Let’s just say it’s one of those embarrassing moments that can so easily become an object of obsession, the kind of thing that keeps you up at night and allows you to ignore everything else in your life. And it sends Ron down a rabbit hole to “explain” why it happened. We’re often told in life that everything happens for a reason. Ron needs to know the reason.

Robinson understands the kind of guy who focuses on something so much that the stuff that matters, like his job and family, becomes dangerously ignored. The mall project suffers, his kids suffer, his wife suffers, all while Ron is out looking for answers. It’s his best performance to date as Robinson finds layers that the script for “Friendship” didn’t really allow in that he’s allowed to play a more ordinary, relatable guy who happens to be going crazy … maybe.

Countering the constantly twisting mysteries of the show are the scenes between Ron and his daughter Natalie (Sophia Lillis), which are clearly meant to echo a generation of young people who have had to smile and nod at whatever crazy thing their parents have become obsessed with on social media today. While Robinson and Kanin have a habit of pushing their humor into surreal, unbelievable corners of comedy, “The Chair Company” is at its best when it remains tethered to the viral insanity of today, either through Natalie’s or Ron’s eyes. We all have people in our lives who have gone down rabbit holes that allow them to believe something they previously thought impossible (or maybe we’ve done it once or twice ourselves). This guy makes it his entire life.

“The Chair Company” also deftly weaves issues of modern frustration with the way things actually are into Ron’s mental decline. When he screams into a phone about never actually being able to talk to anyone at a company that he needs to reach for his investigation, he’s speaking for millions of us who are tired of automated contact lines and endless hold music. Robinson’s show is at its best when it’s walking that tightrope between its creator’s unmistakably out-there sense of humor and something that feels like it’s about more than just this specific man-child.

There’s an image late in the season that reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” and I realized how much the two projects have in common. They’re both stories of male Alices who plummet into Wonderlands that feel borne from their own insecurities. HBO didn’t send the finale to press, but if Ron ends up at a masked orgy, I may head down a conspiracy rabbit hole of my own.

Seven episodes screened for review. Premieres on HBO on October 12.

10 NEW TO NETFLIX

“10 Things I Hate About You“
“28 Years Later“
“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret“
“The Blackening“
“Bombshell“
“Daddy’s Home“
“Karate Kid Legends“
“Liar Liar“
“The Pledge“
“San Andreas“

15 NEW TO BLU-RAY/DVD

“28 Years Later“

Danny Boyle’s long-awaited sequel to “28 Weeks Later” is a truly insane and ambitious blockbuster. There aren’t a lot of filmmakers would even attempt something this bizarre, much less get Sony to put up $60 million for it. Set the titular time after the virus that decimated England, Boyle shot his film on iPhones, included more prosthetic penises than seems reasonable, and even embedded a Brexit commentary in his action flick. At its core, it’s a traditional coming-of-age action narrative about a young man who discovers that not only is the world unsafe but that adults in it will betray you, but it’s also just a visually stunning piece of work, a movie that looks like nothing else that played in a multiplex this year. The Sony Blu-ray quality is fantastic, showing off Anthony Dod Mantle’s unforgettable cinematography, but the special features are a little slight. With another movie coming in January and a third Boyle flick in production, a more special edition of this seems inevitable, but this will do for now.

Special Features:

• Days to Years
• Capturing the Chaos
• The Survivors
• Becoming The Infected
• Behind The Cameras

“Creepshow 2” (Arrow)

Arrow Home Video continues its admirable quest to give even the most unloved horror sequels the kind of treatment typically reserved for widely acknowledged masterpieces. While George A. Romero and Stephen King’s 1982 anthology flick “Creepshow” is widely considered a classic of its era, you would have trouble finding anyone willing to say the same about its follow-up, which was directed by Michael Gornick and dropped five years later.

This sequel had some notorious production problems (there were supposed to be five stories but the budget was cut so badly that it was trimmd back to three), and was widely hated by critics (29% on RT), but I’m here to defend at least “The Raft,” based on a short story included in King’s great Skeleton Crew. I think about it every time I’m on a raft in a lake (which is more often than you might think).

More importantly, Arrow nailed another horror release with interviews, commentary, and much more; however, the coolest feature might be a comic adaptation of “Pinfall,” one of the aforementioned canceled segments that was originally written for the first “Creepshow.” Given it’s never been included in a short story anthology, it feels like a must-own for King collectors.

Special Features:

• Audio commentary with director Michael Gornick
• Screenplay for a Sequel, an interview with screenwriter George A. Romero
• Tales from the Creep, an interview with actor and make-up artist Tom Savini
• Poncho’s Last Ride, an interview with actor Daniel Beer
• The Road to Dover, an interview with actor Tom Wright
• Nightmares in Foam Rubber, an archive featurette on the special effects of Creepshow 2, including interviews with FX artists Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero
• My Friend Rick, Howard Berger on his special effects mentor Rick Baker
• Behind-the-scenes footage
• Image gallery
• Trailers & TV spots
• Original screenplay galleries
• Creepshow 2: Pinfall, a Limited Edition booklet featuring the comic adaptation of the unfilmed Creepshow 2 segment “Pinfall” by artist Jason Mayoh
• Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring writing on the film by festival programmer Michael Blyth
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Mike Saputo

“Daybreakers“

Ethan Hawke is having an incredible year with one of the most acclaimed new shows (“The Lowdown“), an upcoming drama for which he should be considered for an Oscar (“Blue Moon“), and a soon-to-be-hit horror sequel (“Black Phone 2“). One of the best actors of his generation, there was a time when he seemed to be struggling to figure out the next phase of his career, appearing in genre flicks like “Staten Island” or “What Doesn’t Kill You.”

Even in this stretch of his filmography, Hawke distinguishes himself by working with interesting directors, including the Spierig brothers, who broke through with “Undead” in 2003 and would work with Hawke again on the fascinating “Predestination.” In between was the 2009 vampire flick “Daybreakers,” now given a 4K steelbook treatment with an excellent new cover and even new special features. The release also includes a commentary by the Spierigs and their short film “The Big Picture,” from 2000.

Special Features:

• NEW Building the World of Daybreakers
• NEW Art and Craft: The Actors of Daybreakers
• NEW Gag Reel
• NEW Art Department and Lighting Tests
• NEW Costume, Hair, and Make-up Tests
• NEW First Subsider Test
• NEW Make-up Effects Tapes
• NEW Stunt Department
• NEW On the Set of Daybreakers
• Making of Daybreakers
• The Big Picture (The Spierig Brothers Short Film)
• Audio Commentary with Co-Directors Peter and Michael Spierig and Creature Designer Steve Boyle
• Theatrical Trailer
• Poster Art Gallery

“Elio“

The first ten minutes of “Elio” are a tender study of a grieving child who becomes so lonely that he wants an alien species to take him away from everything. It’s a reminder of how empathetically Pixar can handle this kind of material. Sadly, the rest of “Elio” is largely a different movie, an adventure story of a kid and his alien BFF saving the universe.

While it remains largely inoffensive in a time when family entertainment from major studios can often be horrible, it squanders that early potential. And Pixar clearly saw the writing on the wall, burying this more than any movie they had made previously. Part of me wants to defend “Elio” because I dislike that Pixar has become a nostalgia factory that only supports its sequels. But even if we need more original Pixar ideas, we also need better ones than that.

Special Features:

• Inside the Communiverse: The World and Characters of Elio
• Out of This World: An Astro Q&A
• Astronomic Art Class: Ooooo and Glordon
• Extraterrestrial Easter Eggs and Fun Facts
• Galactic Gag Reel
• Deleted Scenes

“Flow” (Criterion)

One of the most unexpected Oscar winners was this Latvian tale of a cat trying to survive a dystopian future with rising water levels. Rather than just give the critical darling the Janus Contemporaries treatment like they’ve been doing with a lot of recent arthouse hits, Criterion gives “Flow” the full boat of special features, including new interviews and a new commentary with director Gints Zilbalodis.

As they’ve been doing often lately with new filmmakers, they include short films from early in his career, both with commentaries by the director. There is also a making-of documentary called “Dream Cat” about the making of the film. Everyone talks about the Oscar win (and nomination for International Feature), but here’s another cool piece of trivia: This is the most-viewed theatrical film in Latvian history, and has made over 50 million Euros worldwide on a budget that’s a fraction of that. People love “Flow.”

Special Features:

• 4K digital transfer, with 7.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, approved by director Gints Zilbalodis
• 4K digital master of Away (2019), Zilbalodis’s debut feature
• One 4K UHD disc of Flow and Away and two Blu-rays with Flow, Away, and the special features
• New audio commentary featuring Zilbalodis
• Full feature-length animatic
• New interviews with Zilbalodis and cowriter-coproducer Matīss Kaža
• Dream Cat (2025), a making-of documentary produced for Latvian Television
• Aqua (2012) and Priorities (2014), short films by Zilbalodis, with new commentaries by the director
• Unused-shot reel, with new commentary by Zilbalodis
• Trailers, TV spots, and proof-of-concept teasers
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio
• PLUS: An essay by critic Nicolas Rapold and collectible stickers

“Friendship“

Just as Tim Robinson’s brand of cringe humor is about to return to pop culture in HBO’s “The Chair Company,” A24 drops his acclaimed anti-buddy comedy in which the “I Think You Should Leave” star plays the most awkward guy in suburbia. It may be written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, but “Friendship” clearly channels Robinson’s sense of humor, and all of his fans should snag this A24 online shop exclusive.

He plays Craig, a guy who becomes a bit too attached to the new guy in his neighborhood, a meteorologist played by the always-likable Paul Rudd. Robinson is all-in for this story of a friendship that approaches stalking, and A24 has given the future cult classic a solid release with a commentary and deleted scenes. One more thing: This movie wins the award for tagline of the year: “Men Shouldn’t Have Friends.”

Special Features:

• Commentary with Writer-Director Andrew DeYoung, Director of Photography Andy Rydzewski, and Conner O’Malley
• Deleted Scenes
• “Men Talking in the Dark” Extended Q&A with Eric Rahill, Paul Rudd, Tim Robinson, and Andrew DeYoung
• Conner O’Malley Extended Garage Scene
• Six Collectible Postcards with Behind the Scenes Photography

“The Good, The Bad, The Weird” (Arrow)

This might be my favorite Arrow release of the year, and that’s a high bar to clear. 2008’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Weird” is a wonderfully gonzo Korean Western from the brilliant Kim Jee-woon, who also directed “A Tale of Two Sisters” and “I Saw the Devil,” two modern horror masterpieces that I’d love to see get the Arrow treatment too.

“GBW” is a gorgeously shot film that centers on two of the best Korean actors of their generation: Song Kang-ho, of “Parasite” fame stateside, and Lee Byung-hun, of “Squid Game” and the upcoming “No Other Choice,” in which he may do his best work to date. They are just two parts of this creative, funny, thrilling film. Arrow pulls out all the stops, offering multiple versions of the movie, multiple audio commentaries, new interviews, and stunning artwork. Get this one.

Special Features:

• DISC ONE – 4K BLU-RAY
• 4K MASTER approved by director Kim Jee-woon
• DOLBY VISION/HDR PRESENTATION OF THE FILM
• Includes both the International and Korean versions of the film presented via seamless branching
• DTS-HD MA 7.1 audio on both cuts of the film
• Optional English subtitles
• Audio commentary by film critic James Marsh and film critic and producer Pierce Conran
• Archival audio commentary of the International Cut by director Kim Jee-woon and actors Song Kang-ho, Lee Byung-hun, and Jung Woo-sung
• Archival audio commentary of the Korean Version by director Kim Jee-woon, cinematographer Lee Mogae, lighting director Oh Seung-chul, and art director Cho Hwa-sung (Korean Version)
• Introduction to the film by Kim Jee-woon
• DISC TWO – BLU-RAY
• Corralling Chaos in the Desert, an interview with director Kim Jee-woon
• Dusty Dust-ups and Sweaty Saddles, an interview with martial arts coordinator Jung Doo-hong
• Archival making-of films and featurettes
• Trailer gallery
• Image gallery
• ADDITIONAL CONTENT
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Nathanael Marsh
• Perfect bound collector’s book featuring writing by Darcy Paquet, Kyu Hyun Kim, Cho Jae-whee and Ariel Schudson
• Three postcard-sized artcards
• Double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Nathanael Marsh

“Hellbender” (Arrow)

The Adams Family becomes a more essential part of the genre landscape every year. Their truly excellent “Mother of Flies” is currently making the fest circuit after lauded screenings at Fantasia and Fantastic Fest. Be sure to check it out when it drops early next year.

Before then, pick up the latest Arrow edition of one of their works, 2021’s twisted “Hellbender.” Arrow turns this one into a study of the family that acts, writes, and directs together, not only allowing all four of them to do a new commentary but including a 2021 short film by Zelda called “Fort Worden,” and four music videos made for the band within the film (who also handle the music in the new one, by the way, because of course they do).

Special Features:

• Brand new audio commentary with filmmakers Toby Poser, John Adams, Zelda Adams and Lulu Adams
• From the Forest She Rises, a brand new video essay by filmmaker Jen Handorf
• Black Magic Tricks, a featurette on the visual effects by VFX artist Trey Lindsay
• Behind-the-scenes compilation footage
• Fort Worden (2021), a short film by Zelda Adams
• Four music videos: Hit and Run (2024), Drive (2021), Lovely (2021) and Black Sky (2020)
• Original trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by Beth Morris and original artwork by Sister Hyde
• Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Natasha Ball and Kat Hughes

“High & Low” (Criterion)

One of Akira Kurosawa’s best films (and that’s truly saying something) was remade this year in Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest,” which takes the basic premise of the 1963 original and then truly turns it into a Lee film in the second half. It’s a great example of how to do a remake, blending both the original voice and your own.

But this isn’t about Spike, as we’ll sadly probably never get a Blu-ray of that Apple TV+ original. This is about Akira, who shot this thriller about a man (Toshiro Mifune) who struggles when his chauffeur’s son is kidnapped after being mistaken for his own. Criterion has released this before, but has gone back and given it the 4K treatment, including archival material such as an interview with Mifune and a Toho Masterworks documentary about the making of this masterpiece.

Special Features:

• New 4K digital restoration, with 4.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• Audio commentary featuring Akira Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince
• Documentary on the making of High and Low, created as part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create
• Interviews with actors Toshiro Mifune and Tsutomu Yamazaki
• Trailers and teaser
• PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and an on-set account by Japanese-film scholar Donald Richie

“Jurassic World Rebirth“

It’s hard to believe we’ve now had more “World” movies than “Park” movies, as this is the fourth flick since the relaunch of the franchise based on the hit novel by Michael Crichton about people who resurrect dinosaurs. “Jurassic” feels like it becomes bigger every year with theme park rides, video games, Netflix cartoons, and more. But how about the movies? This is another bland CGI blockbuster, a story of a team that travels to a former dinosaur facility to extract some samples and gets caught up in dinosaur chaos again.

While I appreciate the simplicity of the plot (it’s essentially the first movie in which scientists go in and need to get out), the overabundance of CGI strikes me as lifeless. None of it creates the same sense of wonder that we experienced from Spielberg’s original over three decades ago. You should know that this is an impressive Blu-ray, complete with alternate opening, deleted scenes, featurettes, and two commentaries. At a time when studios seem to be pulling away from physical media, kudos to Universal for producing this one so well.

Special Features:

• ALTERNATE OPENING
• DELETED SCENES
• RAPTORS – Featuring Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, David Iacono, Luna Blaise and Audrina Miranda
• MUTADON ATTACK – Featuring Scarlett Johansson, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, David Iacono, Rupert Friend, Luna Blaise and Audrina Miranda
• JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH: HATCHING A NEW ERA
• THE WORLD EVOLVES – Journey into a reimagined Jurassic World with Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali and the rest of the cast and filmmakers.
• OFF THE DEEP END – Dive into the thrilling ocean sequence and learn about the challenges of shooting on open water, the one-of-a-kind gimbal used to toss around the Essex and Mariposa, and the VFX wizardry that brought the Mosasaurus and Spinosaurs to life.
• TREKKING THROUGH THAILAND – Follow the cast and crew’s footsteps as they navigate the challenges of shooting in exotic jungles, beaches, and tall grass fields that become home to the Titanosaurs.
• REX IN THE RAPIDS – Brace for a T. rex encounter that’s different than anything experienced before with a nail-biting river chase recreated from Michael Crichton’s original Jurassic Park novel.
• DON’T LOOK DOWN – Soar into the Quetzalcoatlus sequence with Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Bechir Sylvain as they train for and shoot their cliff rappelling scenes.
• MINI-MART MAYHEM – Go inside the heart-stopping third act of Jurassic World Rebirth and witness the process of crafting sets that allow the movie’s mutant dinosaurs to step out of nightmare-inspired designs and stop on an exhilarating rampage.
• GAG REEL
• MEET DOLORES – Meet the animatronic Aquilops with an extraordinarily lifelike personality.
• MUNCHED: BECOMING DINO FOOD – Get a victim’s firsthand view inside the frightening jaws of deadly dinosaurs that munch, chomp, and chew their way into creating unforgettable death sequences.
• A DAY AT SKYWALKER SOUND – Actress Audrina Miranda guides a personal tour of Skywalker Sound in California to meet the audio editors, foley artists, and mixers who design the movie’s wide array of sounds.
• HUNTING FOR EASTER EGGS – Find out where to look for cleverly hidden Easter eggs that pay homage to everything from the first Jurassic Park film to other Steven Spielberg classics.
• FEATURE COMMENTARY WITH DIRECTOR GARETH EDWARDS, PRODUCTION DESIGNER JAMES CLYNE, AND FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTOR JACK RAVENSCROFT
• FEATURE COMMENTARY WITH DIRECTOR GARETH EDWARDS, EDITOR JABEZ OLSSEN, AND VISUAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR DAVID VICKERY

“Lilo & Stitch“

I don’t know what to say anymore about the live-action remakes of Disney and now DreamWorks titles that haven’t been said repeatedly by critics all over the world. Most of them are soulless echoes of the original, and it feels like people I talk to agree with their artistic vacuity, and yet they make a FORTUNE. This one made more than its source did in its entire run on its first weekend, ending up with over $1 billion worldwide. They’re already working on the sequel. Can we ensure that one doesn’t resemble a Disney+ original? Please? I’m begging.

Special Features:

• Deleted Scenes
• ‘Ohana Means Family: Making Lilo & Stitch – Learn how an animated classic becomes an instant live-action favorite. Explore the challenges of bringing Stitch into the real world, how the familiar images of the original were recreated, and join returning cast members on a set that embodies ‘ohana.
• Drawn to Life – Check out scenes from the animated original film alongside their live-action counterparts to see how these beloved key moments were faithfully recreated. And uncover some easter eggs along the way!
• Bloopers – Take a look at some of the fun mishaps on set with the cast and crew of Lilo & Stitch.
• Scenes with Stitch – Hear Stitch talk about some of his favorite scenes as he watches the movie play.

“Materialists“

Celine Song’s follow-up to her Oscar-nominated “Past Lives” is a smart movie that knows it’s smart. Sometimes, that intelligence is a drawback in scenes where characters played by Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal sometimes sound more like screenwriters’ creations than real people. As a matchmaker and the millionaire she personally matches with, both performers are engaging; however, the real MVP of the movie is Chris Evans, who delivers his most relaxed and genuine performance in years. He’s a bit miscast in that it’s hard to believe he’d struggle as much as he does into his mid-30s (he’s kind of a “unicorn” in a different way), but it’s so great to see him in something this naturally charismatic.

As much as I love “Past Lives,” this is a bit of a step down, but it’s not the sophomore slump you may have heard. And, even with its flaws, I wish we saw more films like it.

Special Features:

• Director Commentary with Celine Song
• “The Math of Modern Dating: Making Materialists” featurette
• Composer Deep Dive with Japanese Breakfast
• Six Collectible Postcards with Behind the Scenes Photography

“The Phoenician Scheme“

Wes Anderson is the king of physical media this month with a fantastic box set from Criterion of his first 10 movies that I’ll cover separately later this week. Also recently released? His 12th film is this clever 2025 comedy about a man who reconciles with what matters in life after several attempts to kill him. While that might sound more melodramatic than Anderson typically attempts, this movie smartly weaves issues of religion and business into another Anderson diorama film, one of precise compositions and quirky characters.

After how much I adored “Asteroid City,” I think this mid-life crisis Wes may make for one of the more interesting stretches of his career. Note: This is a bare-bones edition with an awful cover. Safe bet it’s a placeholder for an inevitable Criterion release in the next couple of years.

Special Features:

• Behind THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME
• The Cast
• The Airplane
• Marseille Bob’s
• Zsa-zsa’s World

“Superman“

The highest-grossing superhero flick of the year is James Gunn’s launch for his vision of the DCU, a complete dismantling and restart for some of the most famous heroes in world history (with the possible exception of Matt Reeves’ “Batman” films, which appear to be progressing). Gunn does a few smart things with his take on the Man of Steel. One, he eschews the origin story everyone knows by heart and drops us into a Metropolis already reckoning with their alien hero. Two, and this is even more important, he discards the cynicism that has drowned so many recent DC films for a story of kindness.

I think “Superman” is a tick overrated and not my favorite Gunn, but I like what it promises for the future of all the heroes now under the Gunn empire. The Blu-ray? It’s pretty slight for one of the biggest films of the year, failing to include a commentary or deleted scenes. However, it does have that rocking WB 4K video quality, which is the best of the major studios.

Special Features:

• Krypto Saves the Day!: School Bus Scuffle – (5:32)
• Adventures in Making Superman Featurette (60:00)
• Icons Forever: Superman’s Enduring Legacy – Featurette (6:05)
• Lex Luthor: The Mind of a Master Villain – Featurette (5:18)
• Kryptunes: The Music of Superman – Featurette (6:31)
• Paws to Pixels: Krypto is Born – Featurette (5:54)
• Breaking News: The Daily Planet Returns – Featurette (5:23)
• The Ultimate Villain – Featurette (5:30)
• The Justice Gang – Featurette (10:37)
• A New Era: DC Takes Off – Featurette (4:53)

“This is Spinal Tap” (Criterion)

“Spinal Tap II” just hit theaters and was greeted largely with a shoulder shrug. The real news about everyone’s favorite ’80s rock stars is that they have joined the Criterion Collection with a new 4K special edition approved by Reiner himself and STUFFED with special features. There are three audio commentaries, including one that features the band members in character. Not enough? How about 89 minutes of deleted scenes? Does anyone remember the special “Spinal Tap: The Final Tour”? You can have that now, too. There are even interviews about the largely forgotten Back from the Dead, the band’s reunion album from 2009. It’s everything a Tap fan could ever want in one Blu-ray release.

Special Features:

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Rob Reiner, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• Alternate 2.0 uncompressed stereo soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
• Three audio commentaries, featuring Reiner; actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer; producer Karen Murphy; editors Robert Leighton and Kent Beyda; and band members Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls
• Conversation between Reiner and actor Patton Oswalt
• The Cutting Room Floor, featuring ninety-eight minutes of outtakes
• Spinal Tap: The Final Tour (1982)
• Excerpts from The Return of Spinal Tap (1992)
• Interviews with the band for its 2009 Back from the Dead album
• Trailers, media appearances, and music videos
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Alex Pappademas

Murder at the Arconia has become as seasonal as changing leaves and Pumpkin Spice Lattes, an annual comfort food as kids go back to school and the temperatures drop. The undeniably talented writers’ room on this Hulu hit understands the assignment, rarely straying much at all from a proven formula of high-powered guest stars and twisting mysteries. Since the successful launch of this clever blend of old-fashioned humor and podcast culture in 2021, celebrities have lined up to appear alongside Emmy nominees Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez. Whether murderer, victim, or suspect, everyone wants to be on “Only Murders in the Building” for a reason: it’s fun. It’s a clever show buoyed by the ridiculous timing of its legendary leads, two men who can make nearly any punchline sing.

If you’re of the camp that “OMITB” has worn out its welcome, the fifth season won’t dissuade you from that stance. In fact, it’s the first time that I felt like maybe it’s time to solve the final case. However, that sense of something growing stale is overtaken enough by the pure joy of spending time with Martin, Short, and Gomez. Call it a simple one. It’s that time of year.

The fifth season opens with the trio, once again, at carefully constructed crossroads. Oliver (Martin Short) has the most upheaval, planning to move in with his wife, Loretta (Meryl Streep), possibly even somewhere other than the Arconia. Mabel (Selena Gomez) no longer lives there but is around enough to make it seem like she does, even as she wonders if her favorite place is moving on. Charles (Steve Martin) seeks something to spark his final chapter, even joining dating apps to find a new partner.

Into this chaos drops the mystery of the murder that ended last season, when kindly doorman Lester (Teddy Coluca) ended up bloody in the courtyard fountain. Ruled an accident, the OMITB podcast hosts suspect otherwise after they find something upsetting in one of the leftover shrimp cocktails from Oliver’s wedding. Of course, that incident intersects with another guest star who started their arc at the end of season four in Sofia Caccimelio (Tea Leoni), who asks the gang to look for her missing husband, a local tough guy (Bobby Cannavale). How are the missing mobster and murdered doorman connected?

The season starts relatively slowly—even doing an extensive flashback episode on night one—but really takes off when a trio of billionaires enter the fray, played by Logan Lerman, Renée Zellweger, and Christoph Waltz. The double Oscar winner is clearly doing a bit of a riff on Mr. Musk, playing a foreign tech guru who can spy on every aspect of your life. The season’s social commentary comes through loud and clear in these AI-loving, overpowered characters, as well as an arc involving Lester being replaced by a robot named LESTR.

Like a lot of themes over the five seasons, the tech aspect of this year feels a little shallow, but it’s interesting to consider most in the context of two comedians who have been working together for over four decades. As they do wonderfully timed jokes that could be called “dad” against a backdrop of tech surveillance and talking robots, the best beats of the season obtain a meta commentary. In an era of A.I., will we even have comedians like Martin Short and Steve Martin?

Sadly, like last season, this year gets overcrowded quickly. I’ve only mentioned half the guest stars. Beanie Feldstein isn’t believable as an old friend of Mabel’s who is now a world-famous pop star, a character who exists purely to spark Mabel’s lack of self-confidence. (I will say this is one of Gomez’s best seasons, her timing sharper than ever. Da’Vine Joy Randolph is also an unsurprising MVP candidate.) Keegan-Michael Key is always great, but underutilized in the episodes sent to press. Ditto Jermaine Fowler as the new doorman, forced to compete with a robot for his job. Finally, there’s the wonderful Dianne Wiest as Lester’s widow, also pushed out by the crowd until more than halfway through the season. But there’s something magical about watching Oscar-winning legends Wiest and Streep bouncing off each other.

All of these people are great comic performers, and the truth is that’s often enough with “Only Murders in the Building.” Again, it’s comfort food, something that goes down easily through a blend of breakneck plotting—there’s a new twist every episode—and remarkable starpower. Could it be better? Sure. But sometimes, good enough will do.

Nine episodes screened for review. It returns to Hulu today, September 9^th.

★★★★

The ingredients for a dynamite entry into the Jurassic Park canon are no great secret. They’ve been in the public domain since 1993, after all. Quite why it’s taken thirty years and six attempts to remix them into a genuinely thrilling, and legitimately original is less clear. To be clear, 2015’s Jurassic World was good fun but a legacy remake if ever one were. No matter. Not content with gifting LucasFilm the best Star Wars film of the twenty-first century, Gareth Edwards has done it again for the Steven Spielberg’s Franchisousaurus Rex. Putting a new tranche of stars through hell, Jurassic World: Rebirth is nothing short of a hoot.

Credit where due, Colin Trevorrow’s 2015–22 sequel trilogy, in which “Park” became “World,”must have been doing something right to keep the flame so well alight. Dominion was a dino-bore but still topped a billion at the post-Covid global box office. And yet, bar a retention of the   “World” moniker in its title, Rebirth bears far closer resemblance to Park era in scope and ambition. The notion that dinosaurs now rub shoulders with rush hour on the streets of New York, an inheritance of 2018’s Fallen Kingdom, remains a fun one but a return to the playpen of deadly jungle tropics is more fun still. In the thrash of leaves and rising mist, where your visibility is a pithy three metres ahead, anything could be – and absolutely is – hiding.

The influence of Spielberg himself is flush in Rebirth. It’s in the lightness of touch, the familial core, and the scene that finds a young girl trapped in an abandoned convenience store fridge, cuddling the dino-puppy hidden in her backpack, as a mutant raptor breathes on the all-too-thin glass between them. The script is that of David Koepp, coaxed into return to the series with a Spielberg treaty, having penned the original with the late Michael Crichton himself. It would be madness for any root-able character to head back into the fray six films in but capitalism throws the ball every time. This time around, it’s caught by big pharma.

Specifically, it’s Rupert Friend who dons the film’s serpentine skins as suitably slimy ParkerGenix representative Martin Krebs. It is he who dangles zeros before the jaded eyes of covert operative cum mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and the opportunity of a lifetime for doe-eyed palaeontologist De. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) – a student of Alan Grant no less. The pitch is as contrived as it is conveniently straightforward. Infiltrate the forbidden and foreboding Ile Saint-Hubert, locate the three largest remaining prehistoric species from land, sea, and air, collect their DNA and cash the cheque. 

To keep things playful, the Ile Saint-Hubert is home also to an array of grim, mutated and blood-thirsty dinosaur experiments, the failed remnants of InGen’s time on the island some seventeen years prior. These include winged raptors, ring-tailed diplodoci and a blob-headed, six-limbed and ruddy enormous Distortus rex for the grand finale. Each enjoys thunderously weighty realisation across the screen, bolstered by a pleasingly callous attitude to picking off the excesses of Koepp’s early character count, which depends initially on a certain economising of character. When the climax comes, the whittling process is sufficient to ensure you care for the final band…mostly.

A score by the mighty Alexandre Desplat finds fluidity enough in the original John Williams melodies to allow the necessary swells room to feel earned, without ever taking away from the urgency of his more dynamic additions. For his part, Edwards is in no rush to land his punches. Pitch perfect pacing blends breathing room with a half dozen breathtaking sequences, never losing sight of the tenderness required to make the latter count. An emotional encounter that places Loomis in the heart of the world he has so long studied from afar is gently done and all the stronger for it. 

While it is true that much of Rebirth does have a certain ring of familiarity, Edwards want is to find the future in the pre-history. A director well acquainted with maximising the limitations of his toolbox, he proves a smart pick, even with a much inflated budget on the likes of Monsters and The Creator. Of course, his characters lean heavily on those pre-established but it matters not a jot when those cast prove so well deployed. To similar ends, watch for the film’s mandatory T-Rex encounter. It’s blisteringly shot and edge-of-the-seat exciting. It can be done.

T.S.

Content Warning: The following piece discusses issues of sexual assault. If you need help and support, please contact RAINN‘s National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.

The first time it happened, I didn’t tell anybody. At home, I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror. My lips were swollen, as if bee-stung, and my eyes were red, as if all the veins had burst. I’d been choked so hard I almost passed out. I didn’t see it for what it was—sexual assault—until years later, when something similar happened again and I had begun talking, had begun forging meaningful friendships. In talking to friends, I was able to put what happened into context, to understand it. When you make friends, you need to talk. You need to feel okay about talking. 

The first time it happened, I didn’t tell anybody, not only because I didn’t know there was something to tell, but also (crucially), because I didn’t have anybody to tell. “We cannot really risk emotionality in relationships where we do not feel safe,” writes bell hooks in Communion: The Female Search for Love. I had people I could call acquaintances, but didn’t have relationships with them that were deep enough, grounded in intimacy or love enough, to call friendships. Unable to make sense of my own self and life, I was lonely and yearning for connection, and looking for it in all the wrong places—exclusively in romantic relationships.

My erstwhile loneliness and desire for connection were reflected back at me recently with disorientingly intricate detail by Celine Song’s sophomore feature, “Materialists.” A romantic drama about professional matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who finds herself needing to make for herself the choices she thrusts upon her clients daily, “Materialists” believes that true love is out there for everybody. This love, though, is uniquely qualified: it is only romantic love. 

In this belief, “Materialists” is much like its spiritual predecessor, “The Worst Person in the World.” At their core, both films believe that the only meaningful union two people can forge is a sexual, romantic one. The films not only discourage friendships, they seem not to believe in them as a viable source of happiness, leaving us with characters—for the most part women—who live atomized, lonely lives, apart from and against other women. 

This is not to say that friendship is completely absent in “Materialists.” (Indeed, it would be unfair to judge a film for something that is entirely out of its purview.) Rather, it is something that, though characters crave it, is denied. “I almost felt like we were friends,” Sophie (Zoe Winters) says to Lucy at one point with disdain. Sophie is one of Lucy’s long-standing clients—nearing her 40s, she feels immense shame about not having found a partner yet, for having hired an “expert” to help her. Lucy sets Sophie up with a man named Mark, who sexually assaults Sophie on their first date. Sophie holds Lucy responsible and feels betrayed and embarrassed. Mistaking the closeness necessitated by the professional relationship between a matchmaker and her client for genuine intimacy and friendship, Sophie is heartbroken by the fact that Lucy would set her up with someone who could hurt her so violently. 

“He was a strong match,” Lucy says helplessly to Sophie during a confrontation. She was just doing her job, in other words. Sophie expresses her sadness, anger, and pain in so many words to Lucy; with sobs hiccupping in her throat, she explains what happened the night of the attack. “I’m a person and I know I deserve love,” she says finally in one of the film’s most affecting scenes. It’s an opening up, a show of vulnerability on her part that Johnson’s Lucy is incapable of returning. Instead, Lucy retorts with silent reiterations of the axioms she has learned on her job. “I know you do, I believe it,” Lucy says, something she says often to her clients: she will believe for them that they deserve love, even if they don’t. Lucy maintains a professional attitude toward Sophie even as the latter melts before her from the heat of her sadness, yearning for closeness and affection. It’s as if a rejection of her plea for a bond, for a human connection.    

The assault is meant to serve as a reality check within the film, as a means by which to express the real danger women come up against every time they go out on a date. Though carried with grace and empathy by Winters, the event mostly reveals the protagonist Lucy’s priorities—it facilitates her professional growth. If anything, it causes Lucy to take pause and consider whether she wants to continue being a matchmaker in a world where people are talked about as though they are commodities. By the end of the film, we learn that she does want to continue, but not before another desperate plea for closeness from Sophie. 

One night, when Lucy is away with John (Chris Evans), her poor theatre-actor ex, she receives a frantic call from Sophie. Mark has shown up outside her apartment and won’t leave. Sophie is terrified and alone and doesn’t know what to do. She has called the police, but they can’t do anything because he hasn’t done anything measurably terrible, not yet. John rushes Lucy to Sophie’s apartment and waits on the stoop outside. When Sophie lets Lucy in, she is obviously exhausted and laughs nervously as if to let out the fear that has been trapped within her all night. Lucy talks to Sophie steadily, telling her that there is legal action she can take. Sophie nods, her eyes glassy. And when Lucy asks her if she would like a hug, it’s as if all remaining energy leaves Sophie; she collapses into the embrace and weeps. 

“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” Sophie says after a while. “I really need to get a boyfriend so I have someone to call that’s not my fucking matchmaker.” She jokes about dying alone, smiling a sad smile. “I promise you you’re going to marry the love of your life,” Lucy says before going on to reiterate, “You don’t have to believe it. I believe it.” Sophie says she’s not asking for a miracle, she just wants someone “who can’t help but love me back.” Lucy stays with Sophie for the duration of the night, leaving for a moment when the sun comes up to tell John, still on the stoop, that she will help Sophie file a restraining order. We never see Sophie again.

It’s an incredibly disappointing scene, an interaction between two women that Song absolutely bungles. Palpable in Winters’ Sophie is an intense desire for reciprocal love and tenderness, but Song never manages to realize or offer that what Sophie is looking for can be found in friendship. It’s as if Song senses through Sophie that friendship can soothe—through the character’s belief that she and Lucy are friends, through her turning to Lucy in a moment of crisis—but the writer/director falls short of seeing friendship as a relationship worthwhile in itself. 

It’s heartbreaking that Sophie repeatedly feels the need to apologize for or take back her feelings of friendship toward Lucy. It’s heartbreaking to hear her say that she should get a boyfriend so she wouldn’t have to turn to Lucy with her pain. The film doesn’t seem to realize that Sophie is turning to Lucy for things people often turn to their friends for. That Sophie misreads her relationship with Lucy initially is totally understandable, because she has put in emotional work in laying herself bare to Lucy; she, as hooks says, has come to feel safe with the woman. We want our friends to see us, to understand us, to comfort us when we need it. Lucy functions as a friend in Sophie’s mind, and the film’s ultimate tragedy is that it does not have Lucy, in turn, see Sophie as a friend; rather, it has her turn away or maintain a professional distance from the other woman. This scene, Sophie’s final scene, doesn’t end with Lucy comforting Sophie as a friend, but as a client, evident in Lucy’s reiteration of her axiom, in a return to terms of her trade. 

It is evident that Song has Sophie turn to Lucy in order that she may learn persistence. It is not because she wants the two characters to become friends, least of all because she wants to telegraph how friendship can allow healing after the kind of trauma Sophie has experienced. This refusal to privilege friendship is evident in what the two women end up discussing: boyfriends. Song doesn’t even seem to want to consider how lonely dating in the modern age has left us; she doesn’t say much about loneliness at all, even as she depicts deeply lonely characters. Rather, she seems to want to make the underwhelming point that we should not give up in our search for romantic love, because it will find us.

In the film’s final moments, Lucy is on the phone with her boss, who tells her that Sophie has hit it off with her latest date. It is suggested that the woman, who has seemed so incredibly lonely throughout the film, has finally found a boyfriend she can call. It’s not suggested that Lucy will talk to or has talked to Sophie again in any capacity other than as a client. The women remain separated by a wall of professionalism, with any friendship they might have had left unnurtured. They don’t talk to each other immediately, Sophie is rather talked about, because they don’t need to anymore, because Lucy’s work is done. The women have found their men and no longer have any use for each other.

In “Materialists”’ world, friendship feels like a mistake; it is something apologized for, or something that is only momentary, a placeholder until a romantic partner is found. No matter that couples break up all the time, Sophie could easily, later on, become as alone and without a person to call as she is during the film. What is important is that she has found a romantic partner, has achieved the goal toward which Sophie’s and Lucy’s energies have been focused. Any friendship that blooms is accidental and left to fizzle. Lucy is just as alone as Sophie, but while the latter craves friendship, Lucy seems to genuinely not want it: at home, she sits alone, and when something terrible happens to her in her career, she calls a man she’s seeing in a romantic capacity. In the way that the opening scene depicts a cave woman moving out and away from her mother and younger sister and toward a man, this film moves away from community and toward heterosexual love.  

Joachim Trier’s critically acclaimed and apparently universally beloved film “The Worst Person in the World,” too, is a film that doesn’t seem to feel that community and friendship are worthwhile pursuits in life. In line with Song’s compartmentalization in “Materialists”—which seems stylistically indebted to Trier’s film—here a person is and can be either alone or in a romantic partnership. The film focuses on four years in Julie’s (Renate Reinsve) life as she tries to figure out who she is, with the four years depicted solely on her romantic and professional pursuits. 

While in “Materialists,” friendship is considered to be deprioritized and then overcome, in “Worst Person,” friendship is impossible. I understand that the film follows a woman who feels inadequate, who feels that she is failing at living a good life; nonetheless, it doesn’t feel part of Julie’s terribleness, or her “worst”-ness, in how she considers other women. Julie is solitary from the moment the film begins. As she moves from one discipline of study to another, she embarks on numerous romantic relationships, but no lasting friendships. “She observed her fellow students,” the narrator says at the film’s beginning as Julie looks over her shoulder at a group of female students talking to each other, being friendly with each other. Julie is sitting markedly apart from them. “Norway’s future spiritual advisors,” the narrator says, intercepting Julie’s thoughts. “Mostly girls with borderline eating disorders.” The next instant, she has an affair with her professor. 

It’s completely unwarranted what is said about the other girls having an eating disorder. Notwithstanding the fact that they have the exact same build as Julie herself, it doesn’t feel as though this is a comment about women’s body images and pressures to conform, so sharply and tersely lodged into the moment as it is. It just feels cruel. It’s as if to say, Julie doesn’t concern herself with her self-image like these other girls, she’s not like them, she’s too busy having sex with her instructor. From the film’s first beats, other women are defined as decidedly apart from Julie; they’re a group with uniform concerns while Julie thinks against the grain, and is troubled by more meaningful problems. Other women aren’t there to be friends with, but there to define oneself against.  

Women other than Julie hardly have a voice in this film, are never shown in a positive light, and are never seen to be living happy lives worthy of being entered into or being curious about. Instead, they live lives a modern woman ought to avoid replicating or fraternizing with. A few moments later in the film, Julie goes on a trip with her current boyfriend Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) to his parents’ home, hosted by his sister, her husband, and their kids. Julie feels that Aksel’s sister doesn’t like her, and Aksel tells her that she’s just shy. “That’s what you say about boring people,” Julie retorts. Later in the evening, one of the kids throws a tantrum at bedtime, and her mother chases her around the lawn as the girl screams. 

“Don’t make a scene,” the mother pleads with her child, tripping over herself as she tries to get hold of her daughter. Everybody, including the child’s father, just watches them; nobody helps the mother put the kids to bed. A scene is made, and the mother emerges from it looking like the loser. “Kids can be intense,” Aksel says with chagrin, and that seems to be the moment’s message. Not that mothers bear the burden of disciplining their children, nor that the father didn’t do anything to help his wife put his own kid to bed. Just that kids are intense. The lesson Julie gleans about herself from the scene is that she does not want kids; she and Aksel have a fight about this that night. 

It’s bitterly ironic that the next night, over dinner, Julie makes a feminist observation. Society knows everything about men’s problems, she says, but people are too shy to talk about period blood. What angers me about this scene is that Julie doesn’t look to the other women at the table for confirmation of her observation, which is certainly correct; she doesn’t look to them for camaraderie or recognition, and she doesn’t make eye contact with them at all. She only looks to Aksel and his brother-in-law, as if considering only these men as worthy of conversation. “If men had periods, that’s all we’d hear about,” she says before going on to make a point about mansplaining. 

Later yet in the night, they’re all dancing, and Julie tries to get the woman who, the previous day, made a scene with her daughter to dance, but it ends terribly when she hits her head on a lamp and injures herself. The night ends with Julie and Aksel overhearing that same woman fighting with her husband. “Shall we make a baby?” Julie whispers to Aksel with a sly smile. It’s meant to be a knowing jab at the idea that many couples commit to fighting after they have kids, but it feels mean in the way that the earlier remark about eating disorders feels mean. The woman who gets injured has spent what is meant to be a holiday working, taking care of her children, and she’s been hurt when all she wanted was to have fun; instead of making an effort to understand her, to allow her to express her frustration, the film mocks her through Julie.

This woman, with her children and her traditional concerns, tries to enter into dialogue with Julie, but Julie moves away from her. When she asks Julie if she has any friends with kids, Julie says only one, though we never meet them. Julie sees this woman, tired, hurt, and angry, and strives to avoid a fate like hers; it’s a life she can never want nor associate with. For Julie, people with children aren’t meant to be friends with at all; all she’s seen them do is fight and care for kids. Accordingly, she runs away from her long-term relationship. Single women, too, aren’t meant to be friends with; they have eating disorders. The only kind of relationship valued in Julie’s life, as we see it, is a romantic one, and when that becomes an untenable option, she chooses to be alone.   

The film’s final moments depict Julie in her small apartment, working on editing her photographs. The lesson Julie has learned is that she needs to choose herself, to work on herself, if she wants to be happy. The film ends with Julie having found self-esteem, and rightfully so. “Given our early obsessions with seducing and pleasing others to affirm our worth, we lose ourselves in the search to be accepted, included, desired,” hooks writes in Communion. And so at film’s end, Julie discovers herself, but this self-discovery is only conceived of in a professional sense, and comes at the cost of isolation. Julie does not forge community, does not make new friends. According to hooks, the feminist movement “told us that we were better off if we stopped thinking about love, if we could live our lives as though love did not matter, because if we did not do so we were in the danger of becoming a member of a truly despised female category: ‘the woman who loves too much.’”

Julie becomes a good woman according to patriarchal understanding: self-sufficient and self-reliant, she is not a burden on anyone; her desires snuffed, she is focused on making money. While she loved men earlier, by the film’s end, she has gotten it out of her system. She becomes a girlboss, a productive member of society, atomized like Aksel, a traditionally masculine man. Meanwhile, femininity (and all that it carries with it ideologically, things like friendship and community and messy desires) is meant to be absolutely avoided and unwanted; it is the bad life. It’s always haunted me how this film ends, so confined and clean, without desire, without love.     

On the face of it, these films centre a woman’s desires and feelings and internal landscapes. They seem progressive. But the lives they have their women live are endlessly lonely and individualistic, capitalistic in how they leave their protagonists as an atomized unit apart from a lively community. These films don’t seem to consider love as possible within community, in platonic settings, in friendships; it’s as if they are discouraging collectivization, and leaving unchallenged the current systems of oppression. As hooks writes, “female allegiance to males upholds heterosexism,” and in their focus on heterosexual romantic pairings as the only or most important site of socialization, as the sole bond worthy of effort or care or attention, these films implicitly uphold patriarchy. 

This is not to say that romantic comedies or romantic dramas are ill-equipped to depict platonic love alongside romantic love, because it absolutely is possible to hold space for both. As “Materialists” and “Worst Person” seem to run away from female friendship and platonic love, Gillian Robespierre’s “Obvious Child” celebrates and honours friendship in the same breath as it depicts a striving for romantic love. The film follows Jenny Slate’s Donna as she deals with the aftermath of a one-night stand and decides to get an abortion, and also nurtures a sweet relationship after the fact with her one-night stand, Max (Jake Lacy). And as it reckons with the idea of abortion without also glamorizing it or sensationalizing it, the film also allows Donna a little community where she can access healing and care.

Donna has friends: Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann) and Joey (Gabe Liedman). And they come together to just hang out, to talk over what Donna has experienced, to gossip, to make jokes, and to share confessions, advice, happinesses, and sadnesses. “Does having an abortion hurt?” Donna asks Nellie one night when the three of them are getting wine drunk. It’s a candid and free question, asked easily and answered easily. Donna is nervous. It doesn’t hurt, Nellie says, but there are cramps afterwards. The procedure only takes a few minutes, and it isn’t scary. 

“How often do you think about it?” Donna asks Nellie. “I think about it sometimes,” Nellie says. “Once in a while. And then I get really sad for my little teenage self.” But she never regrets it. It’s the kind of conversation friend groups have all the time, but it’s depicted in the movie with such ease and calmness, such inevitability and warmth, which is absolutely stunning. Of course, Donna talks to her friends about her feelings, and of cours,e Nellie shares her experience with Donna in an effort to make her feel less alone. It’s the kind of sharing of information that women have been partaking of for ages, the kind that saves lives, literally and figuratively, and it’s rooted in the safety that hooks talks about, that Sophie craves.   

And so even as the film ends on Donna and Max coming together in a romantic union, we know that Donna still has Nellie and Joey. They are, the three of them, still there for each other; they can still stay up all night drinking wine and sharing experiences and being silly, all the while holding each other, all the while loving each other in the way that only best friends can.  

I have been as lonely and starved of connection as Sophie, and like Julie, like any other girl coming of age under patriarchy, I have thought less of other women and of myself as special in an effort to gain patriarchy’s approval. But survival, happiness itself, isn’t dependent on eradicating desires for certain kinds of love, on privileging one thing over another—this is the kind of competitive thinking fostered by capitalism. 

My friendships have saved my life again and again. Making friends allows us to make sense of the world and ourselves, to grow. “Commitment is the ground of our being that lets us make mistakes, be forgiven, and try again,” hooks writes. Such a commitment would have allowed Sophie to feel less guilty about calling Lucy, and might have allowed Julie’s life to still contain love. My friends allow me to move into the world with confidence, and I, like Donna, know that I can return to them at any time and in any state, and they will embrace me. They will show me love when nobody else can. Because of my friends, I don’t have to be the only one carrying the knowledge of my life anymore; I can share pain, stories, and fun. Because of my friends, I don’t have to look at myself alone in the mirror. I can see myself reflected in their gaze, and they reflected in mine.

Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic Dune and its sequels are notoriously challenging to adapt. Critics met David Lynch’s 1984 “Dune” film with scorn, calling it an inscrutable mess with no clear vision–Roger Ebert said everything from the costumes to the script seemed unfinished–and conflicts with Universal during production reportedly made it one of Lynch’s least favorite projects. Meanwhile, Sci-Fi Channel’s multi-part adaptation, “Frank Herbert’s Dune,” overcorrected and drew criticism for explaining too much and leaving too little to the viewer’s imagination, before Denis Villeneuve turned the novels into two Oscar-winning films. 

Developer Funcom sidestepped all these issues in its new online survival game “Dune: Awakening” by not adapting “Dune” at all, or not the tricky parts, at least. In “Dune: Awakening,” one of the most important events that didn’t happen in Frank Herbert’s novel or the film and TV adaptations does happen: Lady Jessica, concubine of Duke Leto Atreides and member of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, bears a daughter as instructed by her Reverend Mother. 

This single alteration sets off a chain of events that spins into an alternate timeline that may or may not make sense to you depending on how familiar you are with Suk doctors, Mentats, Kwisatz Haderach, gom jabbars, and all the other staples of Herbert’s world. Like most modern fantasy and sci-fi projects, “Dune: Awakening” is frontloaded with a dizzying number of proper nouns meant to show you it understands the source material and no attempt to make sense of them for anyone who doesn’t have a wiki page close at hand.

Instead of Paul Atreides and Lady Jessica trying to find the Fremen for the Bene Gesserit, an anonymous character created by the player has that task, only the Fremen have vanished. The empire hunts them down, and any trace of their former relationship with House Atreides is, seemingly, gone. Meanwhile, you’re free to help or hinder the Atreides or Harkonnen factions as you see fit, raid wrecked ships for valuable materials, corner the market on spice by cooperating with other players, build a lavish mansion—whatever you see fit. 

What influence the main story and your faction alignments might have on Funcom’s version of Arrakis, if any, is uncertain at this early point in the game’s life, when most people are still building rudimentary bases and trying to outrun sandworms. However, the setup is grounds for exploring Arrakis and Fremen culture in more detail without having to worry about how it fits, or doesn’t, with the world Herbert created. It’s also mostly in the background after the tutorial ends. “Dune: Awakening” encourages you to put the story on hold from time to time and focus on exploration and side quests, so you’re free to do what you like without the heavy hand of “Dune” lore hanging over you.

It’s worth leaving the main path behind as well. What matters more than the specifics of which house was involved in which assassination plot is what life on Arrakis is like, and Funcom adapts that brilliantly. “Dune: Awakening” borrows its basic structure from most survival games. You spend your time exploring, finding resources, crafting tools and machines to make survival on Arrakis easier, and survival is almost all about water management. Proper hydration affects everything from your maximum stamina to your health, to which pieces of equipment are best to wear at a given time. Funcom wisely kept other survival game staples, like fatigue and hunger, out of “Dune: Awakening,” and built the struggle for water and shelter into every part of the game. 

Adventuring during the day exposes you to intense heat, which dehydrates you more quickly, so you run through your water supplies or die in the desert. Any successful endeavor has to be planned around whether you’ll have enough water, if you can find safety from the sun, and whether you have a chance of outrunning an impending sandstorm. Death is a hurdle, but not a major setback, thanks to a forgiving system that lets you keep everything in your pack—unless a sandworm devours you. Almost every expedition sends you into open desert at some point, and there’s always a chance your footsteps might attract a worm’s attention.

The prospect of losing all your items is enough to make the sandworms of “Dune: Awakening” a fright best avoided, but Funcom leaned heavily into the psychology of that fear, giving the worms an almost “Jaws”-like quality. The process starts with a noise meter showing how likely you are to attract unwanted attention. Then the music changes if a sandworm approaches. You can see its heaving mass writhing under the ground as it shifts mountains of sand and changes the landscape. The tumultuous noise when it finally breaches echoes across the region even if you can’t see the beast, a stark warning of what might happen to you if you’re not careful. 

The genre staple of gradually gaining mastery over the environment does not apply to “Dune: Awakening,” even when you can start building heavy weaponry mounted on vehicles, and that’s for the best. Funcom looked for more creative ways to make you feel like you’re progressing in the game beyond just giving you more powerful tools. By the time you need to start mining high-quality ore, for instance, you’re on a part of Arrakis that’s more dangerous and demanding. You need better tools for a better chance of surviving, to dig further into the Fremen’s mysteries, and to establish a foothold on Arrakis—not just to get more items. 

It helps that so much of the grind that’s usually inherent in these experiences is just not here. Resources respawn after half a minute, so even though you need an inordinate amount of things like copper ore and plant fibers for basic crafting projects, acquiring it is rarely a chore. Harvesting items is fast and easy as well, thanks to futuristic tech such as a scanner-and-cutter item that exploits weak points in constructions, destroys them, and drops dozens of items in your bag in less than 10 seconds. The focus in “Dune: Awakening” is firmly on large-scale events such as discovering a new region, building your own dragonfly-like flying machine, or making an economic alliance with other players than it is on the tedium of finding 100 rocks to build another harvesting tool. The magic of science fiction tools might not save you from worms and heat death, but it can save you time.

Funcom might not have broken new ground for interpreting “Dune” by keeping the high politics and religious warfare out of “Dune: Awakening.” However, it’s done more than any adaptation at creating a sense of what it’s like to exist in Herbert’s world, of the desperate grab for resources, the feeling of being at the mercy of an unforgiving ecosystem, and the struggle of making your way in a system that’s just as happy to watch you die as it is to lend a helping hand. The perfect adaptation of Herbert’s novel doesn’t exist, but as combinations of setting and game design go, few do it better than this.

The publisher provided the review copy of this title. Dune: Awakening is available now on PC via Steam.

★★★

A bit player in the Chris Evans era, Anthony Mackie never really found definition as Falcon. Marvel gave him the wings (literally) but none of the personality and individuality he needed to fly. Not that standing out was ever easy among such charismatic company as was the original Avengers. And yet, this is an age of second gos for the MCU. Soon enough, Robert Downey Jr. will return, albeit in a different guise. In the here and now, Brave New World gifts Mackie the spotlight and shield-wielding mantle of Captain America. Boy, does he take to it well. This feels a promising new direction, even if the vehicle itself couldn’t really be justifiably termed ‘brave’.

Curiously, this fourth Captain America adventure proves as much a sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk – that little remembered, Edward Norton fronted, MCU originator – as Evans’ last stand. It relies, too, upon the events of Chloé Zhao’s more recent, but hardly better recalled, Eternals, and 2021’s scarcely watched Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. By necessity, then, the film treads a fine line. Brave New World has not the luxury of Evans’ heyday, in which Marvel could bank on religiously up-to-date audiences, and must tailor its narrative to the totally blind, without insulting the intelligence of the hardcore devotees still following every twist and turn. They’re still out there.

Largely, the balance is keenly managed. A little exposition here and there serves to prod viewers in the right direction but the action self contains itself well enough. It hardly matters if you’ve no memory of Thaddeus Ross or his history with Norton’s Hulk and Evans’ Cap’, it’s the type that counts. Besides, with Harrison Ford replacing the late William Hurt, he might as well be a different man. It’s not like Ross is an army suit these days either. Indeed, the film opens to his election day address as the newly returned US president. He stands on a platform of togetherness but it’s on his pioneered treaty with Japan – something to do with adamantium in the Indian Ocean (it doesn’t really matter) – upon which his reputation rests. This is being somewhat impeded by the propensity for his security intel to randomly try and assassinate him without notice.

As is the vogue of the Captain America line, within the broader Marvel brand, the tone here is that of espionage and political thriller. It’s rather splendidly graded to an almost Cold War stylisation and directed in suit by The Cloverfield Paradox’s Julius Onah. A peppy score by Laura Karpman, meanwhile, does well to inspire momentum in the film’s tone, if not quite the narrative, which isn’t just as clever as it hopes. Where Onah struggles, however, is in the capturing of gravity. As his action bounces around the globe, there’s little actual sense of the location changing or any real feeling of weight to the, supposedly monumental, actions of the characters within. It’s a coherent enough little romp but far from propulsive or pulse quickening.

Ford, at least, brings a certain heft to proceedings. A touch of class and star power energy. Certainly, his Ross enjoys the most compelling screen journey, even it – and the film in general – might have benefited from less revelatory promotional material. Against him, Mackie makes for a fair and fine enough action hero, agile in attack and stoic in all other regards. Unlike Evans’ Rogers, Mackie’s Sam Wilson hasn’t actually any super attributes and there’s something morbidly appealing about his fallibility in suit. Danny Ramirez makes for a fun addition as the new Falcon – so delicately dancing on the line of irritability – while Shira Haas cuts through nicely in the Scarlet Johansson shaped vacuum for a Black Widow convert. Both, one assumes, will return.

None of this, of course, comes close to resolving Marvel’s pervasive, longer term problems. There’s little in Brave New World quite brave enough to return the studio to anything like the world domination it once enjoyed. Yet, under Mackie’s stewardship, there’s a glint of the new. Perhaps there’s something in aspiring beyond the Endgame years. In harkening back to 2008, the film recalls a bygone era in which such blockbusters offered nought but fun because fun was enough. It still is.

T.S.

We are barreling towards the next big Marvel event movie with Avengers: Doomsday coming sometime in 2026. But, if you’re like me, it doesn’t really feel like we’re building towards something great. Sure, RDJ is back as Doctor Doom, a decision that has divided fans, but other than that, does it really feel must see? Remember when we first saw Thanos at the end of The Avengers and then slowly built towards the Mad Titan’s infinity fisting the whole universe? There was not only hype, but a clear progression of how we were getting there and who the major players were going to be. But at the moment, The Avengers don’t exist, but Sam Wilson as Captain America is supposedly leading the charge to reforming the group. But if this movie was supposed to be our springboard to that inevitable end, I don’t think Marvel fully stuck the landing.

The MCU is going through a bit of an identity problem right now, with no real clear direction on where it’s going or what it’s trying to accomplish. Well, other than make a shit load of money. Its films and shows are wildly swinging in quality for a few reasons, whether it be a desire to produce stories as plainly and directly as possible or to throw as many references as possible at you to trick you into thinking the product is more exciting than it is. The latest addition to the Captain America quadrilogy is mostly the former, lacking in the weight or style of the past films while presenting a quote unquote “political thriller” that doesn’t actually have anything political to say. Central ideas like Wilson earning the title of Captain are shoved to the back in order to not retread ground, but it leaves our hero with nothing for us to really get behind. There are moments of intrigue with some of the action sequences and performances, but the dry, glossy sheen of it all doesn’t bring it all home. It’s competent at least, but with no clear voice or intention behind it, I don’t really see this as capable of rallying the troops.

Sam Wilson, now the new, bonafide Captain America, is thrown into a political conspiracy involving newly elected president Thadeus Ross and an unknown puppet master pulling the strings. Unaware of how deep this goes, Wilson and his partner Jaquin Torres, must take matters into their own hands and find the source of this sabotage until world peace crumbles completely.

Captain America going rogue and not knowing who in the government he can trust while trying to unearth deep, catastrophic information? Sounds a little familiar. While it’s not a complete retread of The Winter Soldier, one of if not my favorite of the MCU, the similarities are there in concept alone. The finesse, the uncertainty, and the execution that made that film so good? Yeah, they forgot to copy that part. What we’re left with is a film that doesn’t want to surprise you too much, playing it safe and easy so nothing interrupts the big bonanza they apparently have planned. Yet at the same time, it feels so hesitant to move forward and actually establish anything or anyone worth caring about, seeming to think that just having characters with names we recognize is good enough. This unfortunately applies to Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, who isn’t given much of a chance to reaffirm himself as the MCU’s new leader. His rebelling against the establishment comes from a place of narrative necessity rather than personal conflict, even though the pieces are there. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier show dealt with Wilson wrestling with convincing the world he’s worthy of adopting the title of Captain America, and Brave New World doesn’t really have that same kind of personal conflict. The world has accepted him more or less, so you would think the next step would be to see Sam reaffirming himself that he’s the right choice. And we get the tiniest sprinklings of that, but it never materializes into anything remotely interesting. What’s unfortunate is that the script never gives Mackie much room to let his charisma shine through, relegating him to dry plot speak or quips that don’t always hit their mark.

Out of the whole cast, I actually found President Ross to be one of the more interesting characters. Now portrayed by Harrison Ford, Thunderbolt Ross is a president weighed down by the misdeeds of his past, looking to move beyond them while never really taking responsibility for them. That could actually be pretty compelling, but his demons are never really given the gravitas they probably deserve. Instead, the film focuses more on building towards his turn as the Red Hulk, which is supposed to be more representative of his demons coming to light. It’s not exactly the cleanest metaphor, but the Hulk never really was to begin with. I do think the effect work for Red Hulk looks pretty solid, perfectly capturing Ford’s facial features while never feeling too disconnected from the film. It does feel like a bit of symbolism that writes itself was reeled back so as to not offend anyone, so if you like your political thrillers to be as unreflective as possible, then you’re in luck, baby.

But while Ross only plays a minor secondary antagonist role, there’s another man in the shadows plotting his and Captain America’s downfall. If you were looking for payoff from a 15-year-old movie most people forget is even part of the MCU, then you’re in luck, because Tim Blake Nelson’s Samuel Sterns returns to…not do a whole lot. Sure, he’s the one directing all of the misfortune, but he rarely feels like a viable threat. Compared to Baron Zemo, who was in a similar role in Captain America: Civil War, Stern’s impact and emotion behind his actions feel way too flat and uneventful. He’s supposed to be a genius, but only feels that way because the film tells us he is. He’s written like one of those movie geniuses who you can tell is smart because they appear to know the exact probability of every outcome, even though he’s wrong a lot of the time here. Even though his design is a bit of a far cry from how he looks in the comics, I do like the look we got, which comes off as both horrifying and tragic. I just wish that played way more into the actual character.

Falcon and the Winter Soldier may not have been a perfect show, but at least it actually made some efforts to be about something. An occasionally misguided and often surface level something, but something nonetheless. To not even attempt to follow up on the world and direction that the show established is pretty confusing, especially when the final choice for plot progression revolves around two of the most disliked films in the MCU. And it doesn’t even use these hanging plot threads in interesting ways. That dead celestial that’s chilling in the Indian Ocean is just used as a backdrop and nothing else. Its only real use is to be a half-baked tool to push the film’s message of “come on guys, we should all be kind to one another and work together”. And look, not every film needs to have an overtly political message behind it, but when your film looks like a political thriller, talks like a political thriller, and shits the bed like a political thriller, I expect it to smell a little like a political thriller. 

Additionally, the visual style of the film is just so uninteresting and bland, falling in line with many of the MCU’s films of the last few years. Action sequences present some fun ideas, especially with Wilson’s flying added into the mix, but they mostly feel weightless and are presented as boringly as possible. For slower moments, the film is mostly concerned with getting as much coverage as possible rather than using the camera to do some of the narrative heavy lifting. When I think of films like Blow Out and the Bourne films, I remember how intentful the camera was in instilling the right kind of emotion that was needed to make those films thrilling. But even when this film is looking to fulfill its superhero genre requirements, it does so with such little intrigue or innovation that I don’t think I’ll be remembering any of the action sequences after…well, now. And as for the writing, I swear Marvel is starting to do the same thing Netflix has employed, where they’ve been making it a point to have dialogue explaining what’s happening as much as possible just in case you happen to be looking down at your phone. There’s so many times where something happens, and then a character seemingly has to say what happened. The dialogue talks to the audience more than it talks to the characters, and that’s an issue.

Right now the highest compliment I can give this film is “competent”. Despite its lack of originality or style, it’s not outright terrible. Other than a few CG backgrounds, the film looks fine for the most part, and the narrative is structured in a way where it’s at least always moving along. But “competent” is a word I should be using for a first time director’s indie film, not the 35th film in a multi-billion dollar franchise. Captain America: Brave New World is further proof of a long running problem with Marvel; they’re more interested in throwing money at big name actors rather than creative minds looking to tell creative stories. They’ve backed themselves into a corner where they have so many characters and continuities to manage that they can’t afford anyone to try anything bold or, dare I say, brave. The characters are flat action figures flown through bare-bone narratives that are too afraid to offer any real humanity or reflections of the world we live in. It’s mostly watchable, but so are most things you’ll find at the theaters. I remember a time when that wasn’t the case for the MCU, but I don’t think that’s gonna change anytime soon. In conclusion, Brave New World is the same old shit.

RATING

RED HULK

The Red Hulk is a character often too hot to handle, but I think this cocktail manages to consolidate his essence in a manageable, enjoyable way. This bright red tiki cocktail packs a Hulk-sized punch thanks to its implementation of three types of rum, along with some orange and pepper liqueurs for additional flavor. Together, they form a sweet and powerful cocktail with just a hint of spice lying underneath. A light dusting of cinnamon on top makes the whole thing almost Christmas like, and I personally like to implement a lit match into the dusting to add a smokier element that can be both smelled and tasted.

INGREDIENTS

• 1oz white rum
• 1oz dark rum
• 1/2oz 151 rum
• 1.5oz cranberry juice
• 1oz lime juice
• 1/2oz Cointreau
• 1/2oz Ancho Chile liqueur
• Dusting: Cinnamon (with an optional match)

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Add ingredients to a shaker and shake with ice.
2. Strain into a tiki glass filled with ice (or other tall glass)
3. Dust top of cocktail with cinnamon. (OPTIONAL: Light a match over the cocktail, then dust the top with cinnamon to created a smoked effect)