2 Best Movies To Watch After It Ends with Us (2024)

We’re in an era where audiences are starting to sour on heavy, blunt-force, metaphorical horror, especially when seemingly all metaphors lead to trauma. Luckily, the haters can find respite with Cuckoo, just not for the reasons you’d hope. It’s hard to pin down exactly what Cuckoo wants to be about. It’s a movie that doesn’t seem able to decide if it’s really about much of anything. There are mothers and daughters and references to births and blended families and, of course, blood and vomit and tears. It’s the last box you pack when moving, a hodgepodge of odds and ends you’re pretty sure you didn’t want to leave behind, even if you can’t really remember why. Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) doesn’t feel like a real part of her family, and maybe that’s why we meet her sitting shotgun in the truck with the movers, while her half-sister, father, and stepmom drive ahead in the station wagon. Hell, even the dog is riding in the car with them. Gretchen’s the odd one out. She lived with her mother after her parents’ divorce. Meanwhile, Dad went out and started a new family. But with her Mom's death, Gretchen’s dropped in the middle of a new family unit. She doesn't know how to adapt to them. She's in a country whose language she doesn't understand. It all has her feeling more isolated than ever. Continue Reading →

Throughout such films as Shotgun Stories (2007), Take Shelter (2011), Mud (2012), Midnight Special (2016), and Loving (2016), writer-director Jeff Nichols has shown himself to be a filmmaker particularly fascinated with telling tales of people living on the fringes of society. On the surface, his latest effort, the long-delayed The Bikeriders, would seem to be an ideal use of his particular talents. But that makes the failures of the structurally confused, dramatically inert, and ultimately meandering project seem all the more baffling. Loosely inspired by the work of photographer Danny Lyon, who embedded himself with the Chicago chapter of the Outlaw Motorcycle Club for over a year and chronicled it in the influential 1968 book The Bikeriders, the film charts the development and growth of the Vandals, a motorcycle gang led by Johnny (Tom Hardy). He's an ordinary suburban Chicago family man with a job as a trucker who is nevertheless compelled to form the gang after watching The Wild One on TV. (Good thing he wasn’t watching Guys and Dolls instead.) Soon, he collects a number of like-minded guys who seem to spend all their time riding, working on their bikes, or getting drunk and violent in bars and group picnics while their wives and girlfriends look at them with varying degrees of exasperation. One of those wives, Kathy (Jodie Comer), is our guide to the story, regaling the tale of the gang in a series of interviews with Lyon (Mike Faist). One night, she finds herself in a bar with the Vandals and catches the eye of Benny (Austin Butler), perhaps the most dedicated member of the group outside of Johnny himself. The two marry after only a few weeks, but his fealty to the group and his recklessly headstrong ways begin to drive a wedge between them. As the group changes and evolves over the years—becoming more violent and aggressive with the influx of younger riders wanting to prove themselves—a tug-of-war develops between Kathy and Johnny for Benny's love and loyalty, one which ultimately proves painful for all involved. Continue Reading →