4 Favorites: Feb. 2025
A lot of horror - but it's fun horror
Welcome back to the 4 Favorites series!
First off, I know this is a movie newsletter, but I need to give a shoutout to some of the TV shows I’ve seen lately:
“Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous” on Netflix is the best “Jurassic Park”-related anything since the first movie. There’s five seasons and it feels like watching a Saturday morning cartoon from the early 2000s.
I am obsessed with HBO Max’s “The Pitt,” which is a mashup of the “ER” pilot and “24.” Each episode covers one hour of a shift at a Philadelphia ER. I hope the practical effects and makeup teams win Emmys for the episode that aired last night.
“Severance” on Apple TV+ feels like a show tailor-made to cater to my interests. I haven’t had this much fun theorizing and looking up recaps and Easter eggs since “Lost” was on air 20 years ago.
And finally, my beloved “Righteous Gemstones” is back on HBO Max on Sundays. The first episode from the final season swung big and set the whole hour back in the Civil War with none of the principal cast. Excited to see where it goes next.
Also: I had an essay published in an arts and culture journal! And you can buy a physical copy! More details below:
Broad Sound: Volume Two - Part Two is here
In December 2023, I came across a tweet from the writer Ethan Warren, who’s the editor of an arts and culture journal called Broad Sound. He was looking for pitches for the journal’s second volume. There were no stipulations on what to pitch; it just had to be an idea that you thought would never get picked up anywhere else.
But now, as Vin Diesel says … THE MOVIES:
“Heart Eyes”
The people are starved for inventive rom-coms. Nowhere is that more evident than “Heart Eyes,” a rom-com/slasher hybrid that is at its best when it’s upending and celebrating rom-com tropes instead of trying to be the next “Scream.”
The plot is so simple it’s a wonder nobody’s thought of it before: A serial killer is on the loose — but only kills couples. That’s bad news for Jay and Ally (slasher vets Mason Gooding and Olivia Holt, of the “Scream” reboots and “Totally Killer,” respectively), who totally aren’t a couple. They did kiss once, but it wasn’t a date! And maybe they like each other, but, ew, they don’t like each other like that — even if each thinks the other is attractive.
As they evade the Heart Eyes killer, they start falling for each other — but will that spell their doom?
The joy of this movie, aside from a laugh-out-loud Lonestar needle drop at the beginning, is how much affection director Josh Ruben and writers Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy have for rom-coms and slashers. This movie has coffee meet-cutes and a gnarly setpiece that involves a wine press.
Throw in ‘90s and ‘00s teen slasher vets Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster as a pair of cops named Hobbs and Shaw, and you’ve got a great time.
Now playing in theaters and also vailable to rent or purchase on VOD.
“The Monkey”
As I have said before, I am a simple man. If there’s a Stephen King adaptation in theaters, I will see it. I was pleasantly surprised by this one, a take on King’s titular short story about a killer toy monkey, written and directed by Osgood Perkins.
I didn’t vibe with “Longlegs,” Perkins’ last horror film, at all. But this one is right up my alley — a black comedy about the inevitability and randomness of death, filtered through some gnarly “Final Destination” setpieces.
“Everyone dies, and that’s life,” Lois (Tatiana Maslany) tells her sons Hal and Bill (both played by Theo James as adults and Christian Convery as kids) after a funeral early on in the movie. After that funeral, they dance in the living room, refusing to give death any power over their day-to-day lives. The rest of the film is like that too; the gleeful tone of all the death scenes functions as a middle finger to the very concept of death.
We’re all going to die someday. Might as well accept it, dance while we’re here, and enjoy it while we can.
Now playing in theaters.
“Mullholland Drive”
My David Lynch education continues, this time at the Texas Theatre.
Where to start with “Mulholland Drive”? Is Lynch’s psychosexual neo-noir all a dream? Is it about a dream? And whose dream? Is any of it real? If it’s one woman’s nightmare dreamscape, how does she know so much about the other characters in her life? And what’s the deal with the blue cube?
Many people have written about this movie before me (including this great piece at Salon from 2001, one of the internet’s first instances of entertainment explainer journalism; and this great 2001 review of the film from Sight and Sound’s Graham Fuller), so I’m not saying anything that hasn’t already been said, but this movie blew me away. I’ve never seen anything like it, where I followed everything scene-by-scene in a kind of dream logic, but then once I tried to make sense of all of it and the plot mechanics after I left the theater, I had more questions than answers. There are so many different interpretations you can take from this film, and Lynch famously never explained aything about his work.
But that’s not to say this is a confusing film; it works on an emotional level. It reminded me a lot of “The Big Sleep,” another vibe-heavy noir with questionable plot mechanics.
I’m still working my way through the rest of Lynch’s body of work, but so far, this feels like the piece of art that best encapsulates him.
Available to stream on Paramount+ and Fubo and also available to purchse on physical media and VOD.
“Sing Sing”
Years from now, I hope we will all look back on “Sing Sing” and realize Colman Domingo was robbed of a Best Actor Oscar.
Instead of rewarding Adrien Brody for his role in “The Pianist 2: Brutalist Boogaloo” (I joke, but the first half of “The Brutalist” is some of the greatest filmmaking I’ve ever seen, while the second half crumbles under the weight of its own importance and ends up becoming a hollow monument to itself), the Academy could have rewarded Domingo for his thoughtful, nuanced portrayal of Divine G, a man who leads a theater program for incarcerated men while serving time in Sing Sing Correctional Facility for a crime he didn’t commit.
But then again, that would go against the ethos of “Sing Sing,” which is all about trusting the process — of acting, of creation, of redemption, of brotherhood, of the long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. This is a film that could have easily leaned into tired old prison-movie cliches, but there is a realness here that sets it apart from all the rest. It’s funny, too, with a true earned joy behind each laugh. As Oscar-nominated musician Abraham Alexander said at a Q+A after my Texas Theatre screening, this is a “soul-correcting” film.
Speaking of Alexander, not only should he have won Best Original Song over whatever “Emilia Pérez” was cooking — he’s also a Fort Worth artist, and the film’s director, Greg Kwedar, is a native Fort Worthian! Read all about that here in the good ol’ Star-Telegram:
Available to rent or purchase on VOD now, and available to stream on HBO Max starting March 21.
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This newsletter is written by me and edited by my favorite person, Taylor Tompkins. Views expressed here are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of my employer.
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