→ February 20, 2026
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It Was Just An Accident.

Part psychological thriller, part political satire, but entirely human at its core, It Was Just An Accident is the latest film from acclaimed director Jafar Panahi, who has continued to make movies despite decades of conflict with the Iranian dictatorship, which extended to a conviction and prison sentence in absentia just last December. The movie won this year’s Palme d’Or and landed nominations for Best Non-English Language/International Film at the Golden Globes and the Oscars, and, like several of his prior films, was made without the permission of the theocrats in Tehran. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

It Was Just An Accident begins with a coincidence: a man is driving home at night on an unlit road with his wife and daughter in the car when he hits an animal, probably a dog, and damages the car. He pulls into the first garage he finds, where a mechanic, Vahid, recognizes the man as his torturer from an Iranian prison. He never saw the man’s face, but knows the squeaking sound of the man’s prosthetic leg. He follows them home, returns the next day, knocks the man out, and kidnaps him, nearly killing him before the man pleads that Vahid is mistaken. Vahid then contacts other former prisoners to see if they can confirm that the man is indeed their captor, Eqbal, also known as Peg Leg, leading to a very darkly comic sequence of events that has six people traveling around in a van, arguing about what to do with the guy who might have destroyed all of their lives.

The plot is secondary to the dialogue and the gamut of emotions it reveals; each of the four former prisoners has a different perspective on how to handle maybe-Eqbal, from the volatile Hamid, who just wants to kill the guy, to the more measured Shiva, who is just as angry as the rest of them but seems to understand that his death won’t solve anything. Instead, the story is the canvas on which Panahi can paint his characters, with enough narrative greed to keep up the pace during the stretches where the characters are just driving around and talking.

For most of its running time, It Was Just An Accident is close to perfect, maintaining an ideal level of tension, including the core mystery of whether the guy is actually Peg Leg, while allowing each of the characters to expostulate with the others enough to give the audience a sense of how the government’s persecution of its enemies has infected all of Iranian society. These four survivors are not visibly wounded; the irony is that the only injured person in the van is the suspected torturer, not his victims. Yet they are all scarred from their experiences in prison, where they were thrown after protesting against economic hardships – another coincidence, as the country is currently engulfed in similar protests, with prices rising and the Iranian rial crashing to record lows. How can they simply go about their lives after the trauma they endured, and now with the added knowledge that the man who tortured them, threatened to kill them, may have even raped one of them, is walking around scot-free?

The movie doesn’t quite stick its landing, unfortunately, as another coincidence of sorts, or at least an unrelated event, crops up that forces the motley crew to make some sort of decision, although it does also allow Panahi to further demonstrate the deep humanity of these people and further contrast them to the regime that would imprison or kill them on the slightest pretense. Once that’s resolved, we get to the climax, with its Shakespearean tone and series of monologues, before a brief final scene that recalls the perfection of the earlier parts of the film.

I’ve only seen three of the Best Picture nominees so far, but I’d put this over Train Dreams and behind Sinners and One Battle After Another. It’s unlikely to win for Best International Feature, as two of its competitors, Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent, scored Best Picture nods, but I wonder if it has a slight chance in its other category, Best Original Screenplay, which seems to be a way to honor a film that’s not going to win anything else, at least about half the time in recent years.

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→ December 2, 2025
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Materialists.

I loved Past Lives, the first feature from writer-director Celine Song, which more than deserved its Best Picture nomination and should have nabbed one for its start Greta Lee, for the depth of its story, its beautiful yet spare dialogue, and its deep understanding of the complex feelings we experience while in love or moving beyond it. Song’s follow-up, Materialists, has some similarly strong dialogue and flashes some of the same emotional intelligence as the prior film, but this time the script goes nowhere and the lead character’s journey is hard to accept because she herself is just not credible. (It’s streaming on HBO Max and available to rent on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson) is a matchmaker in New York City, and very good at her job; as the film opens, she accosts a handsome middle-aged man in a suit on the street, asks if he’s single, and gives him her card. She’s just reached her ninth wedding, although she’s struggling to find a good match for her client Sophie (Zoë Winters), whose bad luck with men – with men being men, specifically – seems to be the one thing about the job that triggers an actual feeling in Lucy. While at her ninth client wedding, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a charming, obscenely rich, well-dressed single guy. Lucy takes an interest in Harry as a potential client, while Harry takes an interest in Lucy, period. By sheer coincidence, Lucy’s ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor, happens to be working as a server at the same wedding, which puts the two of them back in touch. Harry and Lucy begin dating, as he sweeps her off her feet with meals at exclusive Manhattan restaurants – including a real $950/person omakase bar that has since closed – and they have long, thoughtful conversations on the real meaning of marriage. Is it merely a business transaction? Does love need to be a part of it? Is there real meaning in Lucy’s job? Of course, John is Chekhov’s gun, here, and when something goes very wrong at work, he’s the one Lucy calls, not Harry, setting up a denouement where she has to choose between the handsome rich guy and the handsome poor guy.

Lucy is just not a compelling central character. She is not very complex; she talks endlessly of “checking boxes” and seems to want to reduce everyone and every relationship to a matter of data. (I suppose you could argue she is just the matchmaking world’s version of sports analytics.) She ended her five-year relationship with John because they were broke and constantly arguing about it, and she wanted some of the finer things in life. Then she spends a good bit of her time with Pedro saying that she’s not a good enough match for him, implying that he should be her client rather than her boyfriend, which doesn’t even seem to add up in her version of math – all three of these people are very good-looking, and Lucy is gainfully employed, making enough money to afford her own apartment in New York City. She and Harry seem like they’d be a perfect match, not just in the sense of a coherent narrative, but in the sense of how Lucy views relationships and marriage in the first place. To have her suddenly break out into the chorus of “Seasons of Love” at the end of the movie (figuratively) makes no sense whatsoever, and Johnson is such a stolid actor that she can’t express Lucy’s joy or sadness or possible love for John well enough to make either of them believable.

There are also multiple twists in the movie that it didn’t need, including Lucy’s work subplot and a secret Harry has been hiding that refers back to something earlier in the film but adds up to nothing at all other than giving Pascal a chance to do something extremely charming for a moment in his $12 million condo’s kitchen. The plot seems forced as a result, as if those twists had to happen to propel anything here forward, such as setting up a reason for Lucy to reconnect further with John than she had after they ran into each other at the wedding.

I’ve seen Materialists pitched as a comedy or rom-com – Wikipedia’s entry calls it a “romantic comedy drama film,” which are words – but if that was the intention, it failed. Materialists is never funny. It might be too serious at points, but it is never frivolous. There are no jokes or gags, running or sitting still or standing in the corner or anywhere else. The closest this comes to humor is when we see male clients of Lucy’s detailing their insane demands for dates, including the 47-year-old who won’t date a woman over 29, but it’s not that comical when it’s just mirroring reality. It didn’t need to be funny, so I can’t hold this against the movie, but anyone who has called Materialists a comedy lacks a sense of humor badly enough to live in the comments on BlueSky. It could have been Song’s attempt to deconstruct the rom-com, or invert it, but the ending is far too traditional, to the point of cliché, for that to be the case. Materialists has some very strong moments hidden within it – Harry and Lucy’s conversation in the Italian restaurant stands out – but ultimately doesn’t reach the heights of Past Lives.

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→ October 1, 2025
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The Naked Gun.

One problem the new Naked Gun film, now streaming on Paramount+ and rentable on iTunes/Amazon, has is that it’s not funny enough. The bigger problem it has, however, is that it’s not funny often enough. This movie shoots more blanks than me since my vasectomy.

The hallmark of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker oeuvre, which includes AirplaneI, the Police Squad TV series (still the funniest show in the history of the medium), and the original three Naked Gun movies, was rapid-fire jokes that gave you little chance to catch your breath. That trio of writers had an endless capacity for humor, especially wordplay and sight gags, but they also understood that for jokes like theirs, it’s best to just keep them coming, so if one doesn’t land, there’s a better one right around the corner. Police Squad was the most joke-dense of their work, but most of their movies threw out jokes like automatic fire, so no one remembers the dull parts or jokes that weren’t as funny. You left all of those movies marveling about the jokes that did land.

So unfortunately the new Naked Gun film doesn’t follow that style at all, and is weirdly concerned with something the ZAZ crew rarely bothered with at all – plot. The film opens with a bank robbery where a very villainish-looking guy comes and retrieves a piece of electronics helpfully labelled as a “P.L.O.T. Device,” which I took as a wonderful sign that we were in for some silliness. Instead, there’s an actual plot, as Richard Cane (Danny Huston, unconvincing as an evil billionaire because he’s utterly charmless) wants to use this device to send out a frequency that will allow him to (the Brain voice) take over the world. It’s at least 50% more plot than the movie would need if there were more gags, and it seems like the writers made a deliberate choice to replace humor with plot, to the movie’s great detriment because the plot isn’t interesting or all that necessary.

Liam Neeson steps into some giant shoes – there’s a sight gag they could have used – as Frank Drebin, Jr., although he doesn’t have the same deadpan style or oblivious look that Leslie Nielsen brought to the Drebin role. (I still marvel at maybe the best joke from the TV show: “Who are you, and how did you get in here?” Drebin: “I’m a locksmith [pause] … and I’m a locksmith.” There is nothing as funny as that scene in this entire movie.) Drebin thwarts the bank robbery with a surprising display of combat skills and agility, although some of it is really quite funny, but of course it lands him and his partner Ed (an underutilized Paul Walter Hauser) in hot water with their boss (CCH Pounder, who gets one great scene). Frank is off the case, and gets reassigned to a car crash that might be a suicide, except it’s actually connected to the bank robbery and to Richard Cane and brings Frank into the orbit of femme fatale Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson, the best part of the movie). She wants revenge, Frank wants Beth, and along the way they’ll both get what they want, along with a little hanky-panky with a snowman.

I was as primed to like this movie as anybody; I knew going in that it wouldn’t be the same as the original films or TV show, because it’s not the same writers, but I expected this film to mimic the original’s style a lot more than it does. Instead it tries to bridge the chasm between a conventional crime story and a ridiculous ZAZ comedy, and that just doesn’t work. There are many funny bits in the film – the windshield, the bedroom scene with Ronald, the name of the arena for the climactic scene – but they’re sparse. When Drebin asks Beth to take a chair, and she says that she has plenty of chairs at home, it’s such a callback to the original – and so rare in this movie – that it just left me with nostalgia for the first movie. You’ve got to follow that up with another gag, and another, and another. This film lets that joke hang, and revisits it at the end of the scene, without filling in the gaps with more one-liners, puns, and visual gags.

The ZAZ film Top Secret! had a bestiality joke that’s one of its funniest gags (and one I still can’t believe didn’t get the film an R rating), but it’s very quick and the scene quickly moves to the next joke. Compare that to the new Naked Gun’s bestiality joke, which is an eye-roller when it’s first on screen, and then it goes on … and on … and on. The writers failed to understand what made the ZAZ films and Police Squad tick: They would deliver a joke, and whether or not it worked, they’d just keep rolling to the next one. Instead we get the Krusty in the Big Ear Family treatment, even when a bit starts out promising (the Tivo gag).

Neeson doesn’t have Leslie Nielsen’s impeccable timing, which particularly shows up when his character delivers one of his nonsensical lines. When Drebin asks Cane to see some security footage, Cane asks “Oh. May I ask why?” and Drebin says, “Go right ahead.” The joke is great. The movie then screeches to a halt while Danny Huston screws up his face in confusion, as if they’re waiting for audience to laugh rather than just moving on to the next gag. The joy of the originals was that you often couldn’t catch your breath from one bout of laughter before the next, and you’d have to rewatch to see the jokes you missed from laughing the first time.

There are good jokes in The Naked Gun, from the snowman sequence to the Drebin’s conversation with a bartender to the football joke about Drebin’s late wife (where he was most reminiscent of Nielsen’s portrayal). There are a handful of great one-liners. There’s a very good running gag about coffee cups, something that the originals did well, going back to the same joke enough that a mediocre joke would become funny. There are even some pretty bold attempts at jokes that don’t work – the Bill Cosby one was probably too much – where you can at least respect the effort. They’re just dwarfed by fart jokes, shit jokes, a lengthy description of Drebin’s penis, and lots of lowbrow bits that don’t pay off. Fart jokes are the laziest type of comic writing there is, and in a movie that doesn’t even run to 90 minutes, it feels like padding the essay to get to the teacher’s word count.

It’s possible I am just too biased in favor of the originals and was hoping for something more similar to them in pace and style, but I’ve seen multiple reviews of this film that claim it’s a lot closer to the first Naked Gun film than it actually is. If ZAZ hadn’t set such a high standard, perhaps the new Naked Gun would seem stronger.

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→ June 2, 2025
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Sinners.

Twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, return from a few years in Chicago working for Al Capone to their hometown in rural Mississippi, where they plan to open a juke joint for their fellow Black Mississippians, with booze, gambling, and good old-fashioned Delta blues. It’s all good, profitable fun, at least until the white vampires show up, and the whole show turns into a battle royale.

Sinners, the latest film from director and writer Ryan Coogler, is that story – but a whole lot more, with layers upon layers of meaning below the surface of a film that starts out as a celebration and ends up a horror film, although it plays with the tropes of all of its genres. It’s imperfect, to be sure, but with some strong performances and incredible music, it’s an unusually good time at the theater among the sequels and the IP- and merchandise-driven pablum.

Michael B. Jordan stars as Smoke and Stack, oozing charm and panache, although the two characters are largely indistinguishable beyond their attire. They come home and buy a decrepit mill from the obviously racist (Boss) Hogwood, planning to turn it into their new juke joint. They ask their young cousin Sammy, also known as Preacher Boy (perhaps a nod to Samuel Sharpe?), to come play his guitar at opening night, only to discover that he’s become an exceptional blues guitarist with a deep, powerful voice – so powerful, in fact, that it calls out to the devil himself in the form of Remmick, an Irish immigrant and vampire who has already infected a married couple who are Klan members and who are more than happy to join him in an attempt to invade the joint and turn everyone inside.

There’s so much story here that that alone would make it one of the most interesting American films of the last five years; so many movies work with less plot and equivalent run times, yet Sinners seems to abound with story and subplot, to the point that crucial characters, including Stack’s white-passing ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld, in her first significant film role since 2018) and Smoke’s ex Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), get a fraction of the back story they deserve. There are multiple movies’ worth of material and strong characters here, and Coogler knows it, playing with genre and tropes, starting the film out as a glorious celebration of Black culture and music, then turning very hard into a neo-horror film with revenge-fantasy elements that pits its white vampires against the Black heroes, literally surrounding them and threatening to burn the place down.

You can watch Sinners as is, without even considering the subtext beyond the obvious racial stuff – one of the film’s few moments of outright humor is when the vampires start talking about their belief in racial equity, and act offended that they’re not invited into the club because they’re white – but there appear to be layers upon layers of meaning below the surface. My first thought as the film ended was that the entire story might be a metaphor for the Tulsa Race Massacre, a real-life atrocity where Black residents of Tulsa built businesses that were profitable and part of the community, and white supremacists burned it all down and murdered dozens of Black Tulsans. But it could apply to all of Black history in the U.S. after the abolition of slavery, right up to our modern moment of a white minority seizing power to reverse decades of gains in civil rights. The blood-suckers aren’t just coming for the Black lives in that juke joint, but to feed off of the culture inside it, to profit from Black music and dance and traditions and leave the Black progenitors poor, wounded, or dead.

Jordan is going to earn much of the praise for his twin performances here, and he’s very good, but the two characters aren’t distinguished by much beyond their clothes; there are some references early in the film that imply that one of them is the more responsible of the two, the better business mind. The story just doesn’t do much with this, and the main distinction between them becomes their women, not anything innate to their characters. Steinfeld and Mosaku are tremendous in their supporting roles, as is Delroy Lindo as the drunk harmonica player who just wants to be paid in beer but ends up a voice of wisdom when calamity strikes. Sammy is played by a newcomer, Miles Caton, who boasts an outstanding, deep singing voice and apparently learned to play a mean blues guitar in just two months, and who delivers in what turns out to be the movie’s most pivotal role.

Sinners is overly ambitious in the end; as much action as there is, by the time it hit the two-hour mark I was ready for the conclusion – which it sort of telegraphed in the opening scene, a gimmick many filmmakers use that I really don’t care for at all. Let the ending surprise me, or at least let me come to it on my own terms. The largest action scene is very hard to follow between all of the very fake blood spurting everywhere (vampires, you know) and the dim lighting; I missed the fate of one of the characters entirely in the melee because I just couldn’t see. There’s also a mid-credits scene that I would say only sort of works – it’s sentimental where the rest of the film is anything but, yet it’s also true to some of the broader themes of the story.

This one is going to show up in all of the awards talk later this year, as it was a resounding commercial success, hits on a lot of themes that the voters seem to love, and was made by an acclaimed director who only has two tangential Oscar nominations to date – one for producing Judas & the Black Messiah, the other for the original song from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I would be very surprised if we get to January and it’s not nominated for Best Picture, with a smattering of other nods, definitely for Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Score, maybe for Coogler’s directing or Jordan for playing two parts. Regardless, it’s the kind of movie that I love to see succeeding, because there’s at least some small chance that future projects like this, untethered to any IP or previous films, have a little more chance to secure funding. I liked Sinners a lot, but I doubt it’ll be my favorite movie of the year; that said, if it wins all the things, I won’t be upset in the least.

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