The answer is a resounding “hell yeah!” screamed from atop a giant sandworm riding through the desert.
Dune: Part Two is the completion of the story of Paul Atreides as he fights for control of the desert planet Arrakis. While the first part of the saga was a hit with audiences and went on to win a leading six Oscars, the real test was adapting the complex and morally grey second half of Frank Hebert’s novel.
The result….
Quick cut: Dune: Part Two is a visceral masterpiece and one of the best science fiction movies ever made. Besides delivering a visually impressive assault on all the senses, it’s also a riveting political thriller and character study that struggles with morality, religion and power. Director Denis Villeneuve guides every facet of the movie—costumes, production design, visual effects, sound—to the very top of its craft.
Dune: Part Two is a The Empire Strikes Back or The Return of the King-level event. A science fiction classic in the making that’ll inspire the next generation of science fiction and fantasy films. Denis Villeneuve continues his unblemished filmography.
📽 P.S. You can see every movie I’ve ever recommended right here. 🍅 I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic on Rotten Tomatoes! You can find new movie reviews here and here.
Happy Valentine’s Day to all the yearners, hopeful romantics and the… happy couples… I guess.
To celebrate, I’m recommending an unsung romantic-comedy and a couple other articles to get you through this chilly evening.
With love, Karl.
What to Watch: Plus One
Today’s movie is Jeff Chan & Andrew Rhymer’s rom-com Plus One. For those yearning for the days when you’d have to go to ten weddings a year this one will hit your right in the gut. Don’t worry, when this is all over you’re in for one hell of a wedding season.
What’s it about: Plus One follows two single friends (PEN15’s Maya Erskine and The Boys’ Jack Quaid) — one recently dumped and the other a commitment-phobe — who agree to be each other’s plus one for the ten weddings they have to attend that summer. One thing leads to another and… well, you know how it goes.
Why you should watch it: The rom-com works best when it’s character-driven and has a fresh perspective, both of which Plus One has. However, it also helps that the movie is so incredibly funny and filled with sharp one-liners delivered with precision by Maya Erskine and Jack Quaid. But it’s Erskine who really steals the show with one great sarcastic quip after another. Read my full review.
“I cried… but I cry every day, so it doesn’t mean anything” — Me (but also Erskine in the movie)
It’s not perfect. The story drags in the third act and it falls into some genre cliches. But, for the most part, Plus One is a hilarious and, dare I say, relatable take on the classic romantic comedy formula with enough gags to keep you hooked.
Best Picture nominee Past Lives crosses decades and cities to tell the story of two childhood friends that may have missed their chance at true love. Or did they?
My best friend and fellow movie over-analyzer Ana breakdown the romance, what it means and whether there is a “right person.”
Yearning for a forbidden love? Trying to get over an ex? Dreaming of a perfect Italian summer? We’ve got a playlist for you.
Inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 romance Call My By Your Name, Ana curated a perfectly tailored playlist to bring you through the love, confusion, longing and heartbreak of the story.
Emma Seligman’s vision of high school in Bottoms is equal parts satiric and surreal. Like if Luis Buñel directed The Breakfast Club or Andrei Tarkovsky directed Clueless. The pure absurdity of Bottoms is something to marvel at. Like the movie’s tagline suggests — “a movie about empowering women (the hot ones)” — it’s completely aware of the near-parody that it is. And thanks to Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott’s performances that cement them even further as our brightest rising stars, Bottoms rides on top for most of its runtime. Read my full review →
📽 P.S. You can see every movie I’ve ever recommended right here. 🍅 I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic on Rotten Tomatoes! You can find new movie reviews here and here.
Happy Thursday and welcome back to Smash Cut, the internet’s most consistently inconsistent movie newsletter. If you’re new here I’m your host Karl. Every Thursday I recommend my favorite movies available to stream on Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, or HBO Max. Think of me of that friend you text on a weeknight when you just poured yourself a bottle of wine and want a movie to cry to. Love, Karl.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by our gorgeous friends at Paramount+.Try Paramount+ free for one week and stream some of my faves like Babylon, Black Bear, Top Gun: Maverick, Scream VI, and much more.
Today’s movie: Fair Play 💼
▶︎ Streaming on Netflix (Oct 6)
What it’s about: Emily (Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) are a crazy, sexy, cool couple drunk (and horny) on their recent engagement that they have to keep secret since they work together at a highly competitive hedge fund firm. But when Emily is promoted over Luke, insecurity, competition and jealousy threaten to destroy their relationship. Here’s the trailer.
Why you should watch it: Fair Play plays like a ticking time bomb as the couple’s relationship is put under the strain of Luke’s arrogance and Emily’s ambition.
It’s the balancing of those two threads that make the movie — particularly writer director Chloe Domont’s sharp screenplay — so impressive. At times, the movie is a corporate barnburner about Emily navigating her newfound success as a woman in an industry that is decidedly a boy’s club. In others, it’s a darkly funny psychosexual relationship drama about how deviations from the traditional gender dynamics can send men into a tailspin — let’s just say Luke probably loved Joker. And at its most satisfying, both worlds come careening together as the pair navigate the minefield of their relationship in the workplace.
Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich give powerhouse performances that give the melodrama some much needed gravitas. Cutthroat, sharp and entertaining as hell, Chloe Domont didn't come to play.
🎬 Chloe Domont // 🖊 Chloe Domont // 🎭 Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich, Eddie Marsan, and Rich Sommer
More movies, less problems
Here are a few more movies that I loved recently, in theaters or streaming:
🥊 Bottoms Emma Seligman’s vision of high school in Bottoms is equal parts satiric and surreal. Like if Luis Buñel directed The Breakfast Club or Andrei Tarkovsky directed Clueless. The pure absurdity of Bottoms is something to marvel at. Like the movie’s tagline suggests — “a movie about empowering women (the hot ones)” — it’s completely aware of the near-parody that it is. And thanks to Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott’s performances that cement them even further as our brightest rising stars, Bottoms rides on top for most of its runtime. Read my full review →
💔 Passages Passages follows a narcissistic director who can’t stand when people in his real life don’t follow the script he’s written in his head (i.e. every sad Brooklyn boy who’s “working on a script”). With darkly funny humor and painfully relatable characters, writer-director Ira Sachs crafts a sharp and incisive movie about gay men, relationships and the entanglements we find ourselves in. Read my full review →
🇺🇸🇬🇧 Red, White & Royal Blue Red, White & Royal Blue is every bit as corny and sappy as you’d expect for a romantic comedy with a premise as improbable as the First Son of the United States and the Prince of Great Britain falling in love — but it’ll have you grinning from ear to ear. With a clear queer perspective and strong chemistry between Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine, it’s almost impossible to resits. Read my full review →
📽 P.S. You can see every movie I’ve ever recommended right here. 🍅 I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic on Rotten Tomatoes! You can find new movie reviews here and here.
Happy Friday and welcome back to Smash Cut, the internet’s most consistently inconsistent movie newsletter. If you’re new here I’m your host Karl. Every Thursday I recommend my favorite movies available to stream on Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, or HBO Max. Think of me of that friend you text on a weeknight when you just poured yourself a bottle of wine and want a movie to cry to. Love, Karl.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by our gorgeous friends at Paramount+.Try Paramount+ free for one week and stream some of my faves like Babylon, Black Bear, Top Gun: Maverick, Scream, and much more.
What it’s about: Quiet pushover Don (David Jonsson) and energetic extrovert Yas (Vivian Oparah), two recently-singly twenty-somethings, fatefully meet in an art gallery. What starts as a stroll through their neighborhood Rye Lane turns into a mission to get back at their exes, karaoke jam, and maybe romance? Here’s the trailer.
Why you should watch it: There’s magic in the way that director Raine Allen-Miller portrays the South London neighborhood Rye Lane. It’s a splash of color and music and personalities. As Don and Yas stroll through the neighborhood, much like Jesse and Celine in Vienna in Before Sunrise, there’s something interesting going on in the background. Whether it’s kids playing or a couple arguing there’s life happening around them. Meanwhile, Dom and Yas’ lives are on pause. Their conversation, constantly charming, funny and poignant, challenges both of their beliefs around love and intimacy. With quippy one-liners, hilarious flashbacks, and two nightmare exes, Rye Lane is impossible resist.
🎬 Raine Allen-Miller // 🖊 Nathan Bryon, Tom Melia // 🎭 David Jonsson, Vivian Oparah, Simon Manyonda, Karene Peter, Benjamin Sarpong-Broni, Malcolm Atobrah, Alice Hewkin, Poppy Allen-Quarmby
🍷 Loved Rye Lane or already watched it? Try:
When Harry Met Sally| Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) share a ride from Chicago to New York City where they’re both starting new chapters of their lives. Over the course of their journey they discuss love, sex, and friendship — little do they know that conversation will go on for eleven years. Streaming on HBO Max.
What it’s about: Startingin the 1920s silent-era of movies and ending in the 50s Golden Age, Babylon follows a group of dreamers from New Jersey-born aspiring actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and Mexican-American film assistant Manny Torres (Diego Calva) through the rise and fall of silent movies — and the magic (and mess) of Old Hollywood. Here’s the trailer.
Why you should watch it: By the time the title card for Babylon roars onto screen we’ve seen every bodily fluid imaginable—blood, sweat, tears, cum, bile, spit, shit (both human and animal). There’s song, dance, contortion, acrobatics, and an elephant. Welcome to Hollywood circa the late 1920s. The film industry is hitting its stride and dreamers from all over converge to have their hopes crushed and realized. But that’s what all of the films in director Damien Chazelle’s short but prolific filmography are about—people fighting to realize their dreams. As Jean Smart’s character describes Nellie, Babylon is “a confluence of bad taste and pure magic.” Read my full review here.
📽 P.S. You can see every movie I’ve ever recommended right here. 🍅 I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic on Rotten Tomatoes! You can find new movie reviews here and here.
Like every other 90s kid, I grew up watching Kenny Ortega’s 1993 fantasy comedy Hocus Pocus every Halloween season. My sister and I would buy the Pillsbury precut spooky-themed sugar cookies (the lil ghost was my favorite), light up a fire, and settle in on the couch every year well into adulthood. I’d hazard a guess that we’ve seen the Sanderson Sisters resurrected in modern-day Salem more than I’ve seen any other movie. There’s real magic (pun intended) captured in the movie. It’s like capturing lightning in a bottle. A perfect spooky-not-scary tone, both intentionally and unintentionally hilarious lines, outlandish running gags, and three iconic performances from Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker came together to make the perfect Halloween classic. To say Hocus Pocus 2 had a lot to live up to is an understatement. However, director Anne Fletcher and screenwriter Jen D’Angelo not only delivered a worthy sequel to the original. They also perfected the 90s nostalgia sequel.
More often than not, sequels to 90s IP that we have nostalgia for fail—Space Jam: A New Legacy, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Independence Day: Resurgence (they just love a subtitle). There are two reasons. First, because they try to mimic the original—whether out of reverence or an unsubtle attempt at leveraging our nostalgia for money—yet often misunderstand what we loved about it. Second, they try to one-up the original, again resulting in a misinterpretation of what made it good in the first place. Hocus Pocus 2, on the other hand, doesn’t ape the original. It doesn’t try to outdo it either. It completely understands the tongue-in-cheek tone and weaponizes it in an updated way without feeling like a grab for relevancy.
At the same time, it expands the lore of the first movie as it opens with more backstory for our three favorite witches—Winnie (Midler), Mary (Najimy), and Sarah (Parker). We learn that from their youth they have been outcasts, albeit aimless. That is until Mother Witch (Hannah Waddington) gives them the famous booooOOOOOk that gives them their powers—while also warning them against using a magica maxima spell to become all-powerful. In the present day, we meet our own rambunctious group of outcasts, Becca (Whitney Peak), Izzy (Belissa Escobedo), and their recently estranged friend Cassie (Lilia Buckingham). However, unlike Max in the original film, Becca and Izzy are ostracized for being into the occult.
Well, maybe the other students—including Cassie’s boyfriend Mike (Froy Guttierez)—are onto something.
That’s because while performing a ritual for Becca’s birthday on sacred ground with a candle they’re gifted from Gilbert, owner of the Olde Salem Magic Shoppe in the Sandersons’ home, they accidentally resurrect the sisters… again. This time, though, they enter with a musical number. Like “I Put A Spell on You” from the original, they sing a version of Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back” reworked as “The Witch is Back.” As Becca and Izzy are hiding watching the witches sing their song they wonder, “who are they performing for?” That question is answered when Mary suddenly appears beside them and says, “you!” In an attempt to save themselves from the sisters, the girls convince them they are actually 40, witches, and can help them get the souls of children.
Of course, hijinks ensue. In what is easily my favorite scene of the movie and an instant classic, the Sanderson sisters take on all of our nemesis: a Walgreens. Just like the “black river” in the original, Winnie hilariously takes on the automatic door—”the gates parted for her,” she snarls in amazement when Becca walks through—before our young heroines convince the sisters that the beauty products have the souls of children in them to keep them youthful. As they start to eat the product, Sarah delivers my favorite line of the entire movie, “retinol, what a charming name for a child.” And while a lesser movie would try to hit the original’s jokes beat for beat, Hocus Pocus 2 creates its own gags and jokes—including lines I’m going to quote forever.
However, what this also did is immediately signal to us that this isn’t going to just be a retread of the original’s plot. There’s added complexity including a revenge storyline involving the town’s mayor (Tony Hale), a coming-of-witch plot with Becca, and a reintroduction to our old friend Billy (Doug Jones). While the plot of the original was relatively simple, Hocus Pocus 2 expands the parameter of the world in new ways while maintaining its campy tone.
That’s not to say there aren’t references back to the original like an onstage performance by the trio—complete with drag queen versions of them played by Kahmora Hall, Ginger Minj, and Kornbred—a trap set up by our teenage heroines, and the sisters’ unconventional broom choices (did Roomba have a sponsorship?). However, the movie doesn’t rely on them to keep the movie interesting. It forges its own way while allowing Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker to have fun and live in these roles that have been so iconic in their careers.
Hocus Pocus 2 is nostalgia done right because it doesn’t rely on our nostalgia to keep it afloat. Instead, it casts its own set of spells to bewitch us in the same way it did 30 years ago. Watching this movie with my sister decades older in her home in New York City (but still with the cookies) just felt right. Like it fits in with the same routine we’ve been doing for years. I already can’t imagine a Halloween without it. Call me a sap, but this was the sequel my inner child didn’t know it needed—but maybe it’s just really just a bunch of hocus pocus.
📽 P.S. You can see every movie I’ve ever recommended right here. 🍅 I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic on Rotten Tomatoes! You can find new movie reviews here and here.