35 Best Movies To Watch After Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Your Monster
Doppelganger films are a weird but fairly well-documented phenomenon at this point. They’re two films with eerily similar plots. However, their release dates happen so closely together, tarring either as plagiarism is unfair. And yet, their plots share eerie similarities. Think your Deep Impact and Armageddon or Dante’s Peak and Volcano. It happens again with the release of Your Monster, a modern-day echo of February’s Lisa Frankenstein. In this spin on the theme, Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera) survives cancer. Sadly, everything about her life that isn’t directly about her heart beating, her lungs respirating, and so on seems utterly decimated. Her boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan) ditches her while she’s still in the hospital under the weakest of excuses. To make matters worse, he’s going forward with the musical he wrote for her and with her help. Instead of Laura, though, he’s cast some Hollywood dabbler, Jackie (Meghann Fahy), in the leading role. Her best (only?) friend Mazie (Kayla Foster) picks her up at release. It isn't long, though, before Mazie rushes off for some vague other commitment. That it comes moments after promising Laura she’ll be there no matter what only adds salt to the wound. Thanks to the break-up, she has to move back into her childhood home with her mom. Except mom is too busy globetrotting to even come home for her recovering daughter. And, of course, there’s still a chance that the treatment and surgery didn’t work. Continue Reading →
The Wild Robot
A word of warning: this is a slightly different kind of review. I took my son, a massive fan of The Wild Robot book series, to see an advance screening of the film with me. So, there will be a paragraph with his reaction to include a 10-year-old kid’s perspective on this family feature. The rating and rest of the text are mine, though. Sorry, you have to deal with my usual nonsense to get the real opinion that matters. Sometime in the future, a robot awakens on a beach. “She’s” surrounded by broken crates and other debris makes it clear that this was not an intended destination. Programmed to be of service, she attempts to get any of the island’s denizens, all animals, to give her a task. Even after an intense software update gives her the ability to understand and speak the language of the animals, none of them will give her something to do. Soon, though, an accident provides the task. After falling down a hill, thanks to the animals’ cruelty, the robot crushes all but one goose egg in a nest. Unaware of what the eggs are or the process of imprinting, she unintentionally is in the right place, at the right time, to become the newly hatched gosling’s defacto mother. Now she has a task, one that she has no programming for and only the vaguest idea of what to do. Like all new moms. Or parents, for that matter. Continue Reading →
Kneecap
“Every fucking story about Belfast starts like this…” star Mo Chara bemoans in the opening lines of Kneecap as a barrage of footage from the Troubles flashes by on screen. “But not this one,” he adds with a smirk we can feel. And it seems writer and director Rich Peppiatt is taking the same stance when it comes to music biopics, tossing the playbook solidified by movies like Walk the Line in the trash. Instead, we’re going to get a stylish, sexy, political, and hilarious story about how the Irish-language hip-hop trio Kneecap was formed that cares less about being accurate and a lot more about the fight for Irish identity in a world where only around 71,000 people call themselves daily Irish speakers. Set in 2019, right when the Official Languages (Amendment) Bill 2019 was first introduced, tensions between Irish and English speakers in Northern Ireland are high. Street hoods Mo Chara (himself) and Móglaí Bap (himself) are petty drug dealers and wannabe hip-hop stars. After a scuffle, Mo Chara is arrested and questioned by the police, but he refuses to speak English with the cops, and JJ Ó Dochartaigh (himself) is brought in as an interpreter. Continue Reading →
Mother, Couch
Mother, Couch doesn’t believe in a gentle leadup or easing viewers into its bizarre premise. Instead, it knocks you out of a plane with a hammer, letting you crash land in a world that only masquerades as the one we’re familiar with. On a grand scale, it’s a movie about familial trauma, loneliness, and the desperation that comes with trying to make your family be what you wish it were. On a more literal level, it’s about a mother who won’t stop sitting on a couch inside a furniture store. David (Ewan McGregor) and his brother Gruff (Rhys Ifans) have brought their mother (Ellen Burstyn) to a furniture store in search of a dresser when she settles herself on an expensive green couch and refuses to leave. Her children are baffled, and David, in particular, becomes increasingly frantic as hours turn into days of her refusing to budge. He’s doing everything he can to both understand his mother’s insane decision to essentially live inside a furniture store and get her to reconsider while his own family unit cracks and crumbles around him. The setting for all this turmoil is Oakbed’s Furniture — a shop full of showrooms designed to look like actual living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms with a labyrinthine layout on par with IKEA’s (as the characters repeatedly mention). Only instead of sleek, Swedish design, Oakbed’s feels like the memory of a house you visited in a dream where the layout is full of impossibilities that you accept without question. It’s only when you wake that you realize everything was wrong. Continue Reading →
Hit Man
I have to admit, I wasn’t really on board with Hollywood’s attempt to make Glen Powell the Next Big Thing. I thought there was something a little generic and forgettable about him, like he had been grown in a laboratory that specialized in manufacturing blandly handsome blonde actors. But I’m not too proud to admit that I was wrong, at least as far as Hit Man is concerned. Powell may at first blush be little more than a chiseled jaw delivery device, but as it turns out he has a lot of charm to spare, and a witty sense of humor, if the script he co-wrote with director Richard Linklater is any indication. It’s a fun, spicy comedy thriller for adults that might just give the struggling film industry a bit of juice, but of course in this era of truly baffling decision-making by those who earn far more money than they deserve for such things, it’s only getting a limited theatrical release before going direct to Netflix. Like Linklater’s criminally underrated Bernie, Hit Man is loosely based on a Texas Monthly article, this time about Gary Johnson, a Houston-area philosophy teacher who worked a side gig with the local police, passing himself off as a killer-for-hire in dozens of sting operations. Powell plays Johnson, an unassuming dork who lives quietly with two cats and considers a day of birdwatching to be the peak of excitement. Continue Reading →
The Fall Guy
"Delightful." That's the best word for The Fall Guy. It's a movie about moviemaking that loves moviemaking. It's a Tinseltown fairy tale. In The Fall Guy's world, going big at San Diego Comic-Con ("Hall H!" is a repeated refrain) guarantees that a nerdy, bombastic film will go big with general moviegoers. (Mr. Pilgrim would like a word.) The Big Bad Wolf is Tom Ryder, a gormless hunk with a smoldering gaze (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). He's the biggest action star in the world despite stealing credit from a stunt team he treats, at best, with disdain. The Heroic Lumberjacks are the passionate, the driven, the caring. For instance, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), a director pushing through writer's block to capture what she's carrying in her heart. Or Dan Tucker (Winston Duke), a stunt coordinator who knows the angles, timing, and how to bring out the best in his crew. And, of course, there's Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), a stuntman willing to get set on fire or launch himself into a wall until the illusion looks like truth. Moviemaking is, in part, an act of love. The Fall Guy knows this. Colt may be a ragged goofball who's fallen off his horse (not literally, though given his skills, he could), but he's still a knight. He cares deeply for first-time director-and-one-time-lover Jody. That's why he comes out of a self-imposed retirement triggered by the same accident that led him to ghost her. He wants to ensure the science fiction western war epic Metalstorm isn't her last film. Or that a conspiracy, gun-toting goons, and potent hallucinogens don't prevent it from seeing the light of day at all. Continue Reading →
Música
As the director, co-writer (alongside American Vandal’s Dan Lagana), executive producer, and composer of Música, Rudy Mancuso’s filmmaking debut suggests he’s carrying a certain “do it all yourself” energy over from his previous career as a prolific YouTuber. Impressively, it does not feel insular or self-involved despite his hands being in nearly all aspects of the process. That isn’t to say, however, that it all works. Mancuso plays, well, Rudy, a college student barreling towards graduation with little semblance of a plan for what comes next. His dedication to puppetry and music shows great creativity, but it doesn’t seem like a promising moneymaking venture if his occasional busking is any indication. Further complicating matter is his synesthesia, a condition that underlines every aspect of his day with a constant beat. It may be great for his musicality, but it also creates a distance between him and others. Often distracted, sometimes overwhelmed, by the music only he can hear, he frequently misses out on what others are trying to tell him. Rudy Mancuso explains the "What's up Brother" meme to Camila Mendes. (Prime Video) His perceived lack of ambition proves too much for his girlfriend Haley (Francesca Reale), leading to a break-up at the film’s start. This clears the decks for Rudy’s mom (Maria Mancuso, the filmmaker’s real-life mom) to start playing matchmaker with every Brazilian-American girl around his age she can find and for Rudy to fall for Isabella (Camila Mendes), an employee at a local seafood counter. When Haley returns, things fall apart quickly, thanks in no small part to advice from Anwar (J.B. Smoove), a food truck entrepreneur and seemingly Rudy’s only friend. Continue Reading →
Madame Web
The latest chapter in Sony's Spider-Man Universe makes Morbius look like a masterpiece. In an age where the Marvel Cinematic Universe has categorically lost its luster, it's tempting to imagine how green the grass is on the other side of the hill. To imagine that someone, somewhere, is doing inventive work with some of America's most pervasive modern myths -- without the heaving strain of an interconnected narrative, a cast of over-it actors, or visual effects teams stretched beyond their breaking point. You won't find it, however, in the strangely-dubbed "Sony's Spider-Man Universe" -- that casually connected series of antihero films (the Venoms, Morbius) that attempts to cobble together its own Sinister Six from the contractual scraps Disney left Sony after its acquisition of Marvel Studios. And Madame Web, the latest grasp at superhero relevancy in a dying comic book movie landscape, is easily its messiest, most forgettable shrug in that direction. It's astonishing to think that Sony could put out a worse product than 2022's Morbius -- a misfire of a mad-scientist picture that at least contained a few interesting images and the perverse sight of Matt Smith gnashing his pointy vampire teeth through a chopped-up villain performance -- but boy, Madame Web manages it. It's a passive whisper of a film, one that barely registers its own existence. The only reason someone would even deign to make it is because they're contractually obligated to maintain a specific character's intellectual property, not to mention a heaping stake of product placement from Pepsi. Continue Reading →
Mean Girls
The Broadway adaptation defangs its best characters in a misguided effort to appeal to a new generation of viewers. Paramount’s new version of Tina Fey’s cult classic Mean Girls boasts a tagline many Millennials found downright offensive upon debut: “This ain’t your mother’s Mean Girls!” The movie, based on the Broadway musical adapted from the original 2004 film, makes it abundantly clear that it’s aimed directly at Gen Z from its very opening moments, which look like a vertical phone video straight out of TikTok. Fey, the writer of both versions of Mean Girls, hasn’t been without her fair share of controversies over the twenty years since the first film premiered. In a clear effort to avoid upsetting younger audience members who have grown up with more sensitive media, Fey kneecaps many of her own best jokes. The updated script is a wobbly attempt to satisfy fans of the original without offending newcomers. The set-ups where there used to be jokes still remain, but they’re empty husks strung together by mostly forgettable songs. Though not without its unique charms, the musical Mean Girls is glaringly unfunny. The music, written by Fey’s husband and frequent creative collaborator Jeff Richmond, does little to make up for the chasms where cutting punchlines have been removed. Richmond can write excellent, hilarious songs like the ones in 30 Rock and Girls5eva, but his compositions here are basic and feel uninspired. Most of the sincere songs revolve around bland messages about self-esteem that lack any insight into the actual emotional experiences of teenage girls. Emo outcast Janis ‘Imi’ike (Auli’i Cravalho, Moana), formerly a supporting character, gets what feels like four separate songs about the power of Being Yourself. Only “Sexy,” a playful number about Halloween costumes performed by ditzy beauty Karen Shetty (Avantika), stands out. Continue Reading →
Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos directs a sumptuous adult fairy tale featuring Emma Stone at her very best. Here’s the thing about Yorgos Lanthimos: you’re either on board with him, or you’re not. Even in The Favourite, arguably his most accessible film, there’s a sort of joyful grotesqueness to it, leaving the audience laughing and wincing simultaneously. His latest offering, Poor Things, is his most visually dazzling film yet, with moments of stunning beauty and bittersweet insight, but still isn’t afraid to test the audience’s sensibilities. It’s a film about what it means to be alive, every little disgusting aspect of it. Based on Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, Poor Things opens in dreary black and white London, where eccentric scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is overseeing an experiment that’s both miraculous and horrifying. Baxter, whose face looks like it was carved into several pieces and then put back together the wrong way, has brought a woman back to life after she committed suicide. The woman, whom he’s renamed Bella (Emma Stone, with a magnificent pair of eyebrows), initially has the mind of a toddler, but she’s learning and maturing at an astonishing rate. Bella refers to Godwin as “God,” and so far knows no one and nothing else but him and their home together. Continue Reading →
Wish
Kids deserve better than yet another dull, going-through-the-motions misfire. The animation world was recently startled by Warner Bros.' announcement that they planned to shelve their recently completed feature Coyote vs Acme for a quick tax write-off, rather than spend money to release it. Not to be outdone, Disney Studios offers up Wish, an animated feature that is the kind of artistic misfire that deserves to be hidden away and never spoken about again. This is a creation so alternately bewildering and banal that it's implausible that at no point during the entire creative process did anyone point out the seemingly obvious fact that virtually none of it works on even the most basic levels. Wish takes place in the kingdom of Rosas, which was founded and is currently ruled by Magnifico (Chris Pine), a seemingly benevolent sorcerer who offers peace and protection for all those who live there. The catch is that they must surrender their deepest wish to Magnifico, who stores them in the lab in his castle in bubbles and once in a great while returns one to the person who made it. Inexplicably, the people of Rosas think this is a good deal, none more so than Asha (Ariana DeBose), a teenager who is all in on both Rosas and Magnifico and is hoping that the latter will present her beloved grandfather (Victor Argo) with his wish to commemorate his upcoming 100th birthday. Continue Reading →
The Holdovers
After stumbling with Downsizing, Alexander Payne bounces back with a gentle & witty comedy-drama. The artist Dmitry Samarov one said to me that the ratio of good to bad late periods in an artist's life was depressing to consider. For every Sir Edward William Elgar there was an Eric Clapton (my example, not his), and that it was rare to see someone sharpen as they aged. Now, I like Dmitry and certainly respect his opinion, but I can’t help but feel that when film overtook painting as the dominant artwork that people engage with, the ratio shifted towards bizarre experimentation and welcome self-reflection as much as dull self reflection. Take for instance 62 year old Alexander Payne, who, after the biggest disaster of his career (2017’s confused parable Downsizing), has started his fourth decade as a director by leaning hard back into what he knew (and what the royal “we” enjoyed) and rediscovered himself with The Holdovers, a movie no one can seem to stop comparing to Hal Ashby. No mean feat, of course, but even that sells its virtues short. This is no mere homage, no mere return to form, this is the movie that Payne’s been hoping to make since his 90s heyday, a film that earns both its jaundiced gaze and its catharsis. Continue Reading →
Trolls
The Trolls movies continue to indulge in their best and worst impulses in a third installment. The poster for this past summer's R-rated comedy No Hard Feelings had a reasonably clever tagline to explain the strained dynamic between the film's two leads. Against an image of Jennifer Lawrence squeezing Andrew Barth Feldman's cheeks, a single word is placed on top of each person's face: "Pretty" and "Awkward." Nothing revolutionary in design, but it gets the job done. Best of all, that tagline also makes for an apt descriptor for Trolls Band Together. The third entry in the Trolls trilogy (based on the popular 80s dolls), Trolls Band Together does indeed live up to the phrase “Pretty. Awkward.” The animators at DreamWorks keep coming up with gorgeous-looking environments for the titular critters to inhabit that look like they emerged from the wreckage of a craft store explosion. Unfortunately, the writing remains as stilted as ever. Continue Reading →
The Killer's Game
To talk about The Killer is to strip away pretense. Well, one can try. Cold it may be, but David Fincher's latest is an incredibly open film. The houses are made of glass; the windows are ceiling-high; the voiceovers from the title character (Michael Fassbender) give infallible insight into his worldview. The film is his worldview, simple in its machinations and complex in its philosophy. In most other circumstances, this would unfold over time. And it does here, at least to an extent. Continue Reading →
Dicks: The Musical
The audaciously titled Dicks: The Musical comes with an equally eye-catching tagline, boasting the honor of being “A24’s first musical.” That’s bound to intrigue cinephiles everywhere. After all, not every movie studio is trendy enough to regularly sell out of logo festooned merchandise. Or even make hipster merch in the first place. Continue Reading →
Dream Scenario
At this point, you can roughly divide the output of Nicolas Cage into one of two categories. First, there are films so tailored to his reigning wild man of cinema persona that it seems unimaginable they could exist if he passed. In the other camp are the quieter efforts like The Weather Man, Joe, and Pig that remind of what a powerful actor he still can be. His latest project, writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, combines both approaches into a single offering. The result is a strange and wildly audacious work anchored by a surprisingly deft and low-key turn from Cage that stands in marked contrast to the weirdness surrounding him. Continue Reading →
Flora and Son
About 75 minutes into Flora and Son, its script veers toward the self-reflexive. “What movie are you in?” Flora (Eve Hewson) snaps. “One without you in it,” her son, Max (Orén Kinlan), replies. This sort of exchange fits holistically into writer-director John Carney’s latest. It’s self-aware, sure, but it’s not meta. Like most of the film’s writing, it is entirely transparent in its machinations, going so far as to declare them at points. Supporting characters largely function as symbols rather than people. Continue Reading →
You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah
You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah has a simple premise. Stacy Friedman (Sunny Sandler) wants her bat mitzvah, only a few weeks away, to be perfect. Using that premise, the film takes off, exploring the growing pains of middle school. Continue Reading →
The Little Mermaid
The spate of recent live-action Disney remakes has run the gamut in quality from pleasantly diverting (Cinderella, Pete’s Dragon) to unwatchable abominations (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast.) Even the most well-received entries of the bunch struggle to find reasons they should exist in the first place. Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid is no different, but for one crucial factor that sets it apart from the rest: Halle Bailey as Ariel. Bailey is so captivating and winsome in the titular role that this remake almost feels worth it just to launch her into movie stardom. Unfortunately, sub-par CGI effects and clunky changes to Howard Ashman’s classic songs often make it feel like Bailey is left to carry the movie on the strength of her remarkable talent alone. With a shaggy runtime of two hours and fifteen minutes—a full hour longer than the original cartoon—it’s a heavy load for one performer to bear. Continue Reading →
Pinocchio
Disney released a “live-action” remake of Pinocchio earlier in the fall, which was greeted with the same indifferent to negative critical response their “live-action” remakes always receive. I put “live-action” in quotes because referring to them as such is a bit generous. They’re predominantly CGI, with barely enough human actors appearing to qualify as a regular feature rather than animation. As with the remakes of The Lion King and Aladdin, beyond the fact that there was simply no reason for it to exist, Pinocchio smacked of cynicism, and sent a clear message to audiences: we can keep making the same thing over and over, and you rubes will pay to see it. Continue Reading →
Disenchanted
“Not great, not terrible.” Continue Reading →