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Paint By Numbers

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A Magnificent Life

by Hope Madden

Sylvain Chomet is a filmmaker of eccentric, soulful films inspired by awkward, honest relationships, like The Triplets of Belleville. His films sparkle with love of vintage showmanship, the arts, and France. For those reasons, Chomet seems the ideal filmmaker to tackle a biopic about France’s prolific playwright and filmmaker, Marcel Pagnol.

Chomet’s animated feature A Magnificent Life opens in France of 1956. Pagnol is taking a bow, his early-career play having been successfully relaunched. But in a small party after the performance, he is listless. It seems the world has moved on, and he has nothing left to offer.

That emptiness, as we’ll see, is a post-success theme for the artist. Chomet positions these slumps as the points at which Pagnol would seek out a new challenge—from theater to film to literature.

The hand-drawn animation is an elegant wonder. The style for A Magnificent Life bears little resemblance to Chomet’s delightfully caricatured approach to Triplets or the endearingly wobbly look of The Illusionist. That’s not the only way the filmmaker’s latest animated feature changes pace.

A Magnificent Life follows a traditional biographical story arc, and that kind of reliance on familiar beats is out of character for Chomet. The film is also dialog heavy, which is wildly unusual for this filmmaker. In Chomet’s previous animated features, both Oscar nominees, any dialog became simply a blip or burble in a meticulously crafted sound design.

Pagnol’s life and career do seem fascinating. He rejected easy money, stood up to political and artistic pressures, and continually produced groundbreaking work. But A Magnificent Life gets mired in the detail and loses the larger themes. Since so many of those details deal with Paris’s difficulty with the Marseille accent so common in the writer’s work, the points are embarrassingly lost in the English language dub.

A Magnificent Life offers a perfectly lovely history lesson on one of France’s greatest playwrights and pioneers of cinema. But Chomet’s lost the off-center wonder of his earlier animated work, and a documentary might have been a better choice for a straightforward biopic.

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Retail Equinox

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Forbidden Fruits

by George Wolf

Just a few minutes into Forbidden Fruits, it’s clear that Apple (Lili Reinhart) has created a living space that does not bow to the patriarchy – at the local mall or anywhere else.

Apple, Fig (Alexandra Shipp), and Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) are the Queens of the Highland Place mall in Dallas, and the awestruck whispers we hear as they walk in tell us much about the kind of power the “Fruits” enjoy.

Reporting to an unseen manager named Sharon (stay late for an important reveal), the ladies work the floor at the Free Eden boutique, fleecing customers into big dollar buys, worshipping Marilyn Monroe and adhering to a strict regimen that includes sex on a schedule and communicating with boys only through emojis.

Also…there are hexes and spells when needed. So, all seems good with this coven as a trio. Until Pumpkin (Lola Tung from “The Summer I Turned Pretty”) strolls in from that pretzel place in the food court.

Pumpkin is unintimidated by the Fruits, confidently telling Apple, “My job doesn’t define me, my hotness and personality do.”

That’s just one of many priceless lines, and writer/director Meredith Alloway’s adaptation of Lily Houghton’s stage play becomes a sharp, sly and sardonic treat, spilling the beans (and the blood!) about the chaos and contradictions of trying to stay true to yourself.

All four actresses are terrific, carving out distinct identities that keep various secrets on simmer. Is Cherry really that much of an empty-headed vessel? Does Fig have aspirations beyond Highland Place? And what’s the real truth about the death of Apple’s abusive Dad (“R.I. – but not P!”)

Tung makes it fun to guess Pumpkin’s true motives for joining the Fruits, and Alloway crafts an engaging ecosystem of complex girl power. The limited setting of the play never feels claustrophobic, and the mashup of storefronts, costuming and technology creates an anachronistic callback to the glory days of mall society.

Alloway does take her time getting to the bloodletting, but leans in pretty hard with some fun practical magic once it does hit. Remember those warnings about getting caught in escalators? Ouch!

But the real delight here is how the film utilizes a horror device derived from the fear of a women’s power to discuss how messy and imperfect the path toward self-actualization can be. There is strength in community, but danger when – as Cherry points out – you forget Shine Theory and “ruin my glow!”

These are definitely some hot topics for a day at the mall. But in the world of Forbidden Fruits, digging into them is even more fun than sorting through the blacklight posters at Spencer’s.

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Blood Pressure

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Alpha

by Hope Madden

There are drawbacks to being one of the most daring and original voices in cinema. Chief among them is expectation. Audiences anticipate that each new effort will somehow outshine the previous.

After 2016’s Raw, Julia Ducournau’s incandescent first feature, surely no one expected Titane. And I mean no one. Feral and unforgiving, homaging others but blazing its own wildly individual path, Ducournau’s sophomore effort took home Cannes’s Palm d’Or in 2021. The film that defies summarization managed to make Raw look tame, almost precious. Raw, by the way, is about a college freshmen overcome with cannibalistic frenzy whenever she’s aroused, if you haven’t seen it. Tame and precious.

So, expectations for Alpha, the filmmaker’s latest, were high.

The tale begins with its best scene. Amin (a wondrous Tahar Rahim) sits with his arm outstretched as his 5-year-old niece Alpha (Ambrine Trigo Oaked) makes his needle wounds pretty by connecting them, constellation-like, with a black marker. Simultaneously heartwarming and queasying, it seems the perfect opening to a Ducournau project.

We flash forward quickly to another disturbing scene. This time, 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) has her arm outstretched. She’s barely lucid, surrounded by teens partying obliviously, as someone tattoos an enormous A on her arm. The work is not professional and draws plenty of blood.

From here, Alpha oscillates between two timelines in an alternate reality France. The core story of love and negligence, family trauma and addiction, sits in the context of a blood-borne epidemic. An epidemic to which Alpha has now made herself susceptible.

The AIDS analogy is clear but expect Ducournau’s visual style to turn the somber into something harrowingly beautiful. Sufferers of this unnamed virus show symptoms of smoke escaping their mouths when they cough. As the diseases progresses, bodies turn to something akin to blue veined, cracking marble.

It’s in this world that confused, self-destructive Alpha comes of age. Her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor, becomes passionately, almost blindly obsessed with keeping her junky brother and her reckless daughter safe.

The crisscrossing timelines often rob the film of its momentum. The real problem, though, is that in the end, Ducournau employs a fantasy trope to connect the timelines and embody the mother’s anxiety. Vague as she is about it, and powerful as the final moments are, Ducournau cannot breathe enough life into the cliché to elevate it above cliché.

There is a haunting ghost story at work here. Ducournau’s cast is astounding, and her visual style, though far more somber here than in her previous work, is still enough to draw a gasp. But Alpha boasts less imagination than either of the filmmaker’s previous efforts, and it’s hard not to be a tad disappointed.

Outtakes

Running Dry

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The Well

by Adam Barney

Scarcity of resources always brings out the worst in humanity. With everything that is going on in the world right now, the conflict at the heart of The Well feels more plausible than ever.

In Hubert Davis’s film, society has collapsed and almost all of the world’s water has been contaminated with a deadly virus. Deep in the woods, Sarah (Shailyn Pierre-Dixon) and her parents guard a homestead that has the most valuable resource – a well with unlimited water that is safe to consume. When the filter for the well goes bad, Sarah must help her family by venturing out into the world to try and find a replacement part.

Sarah’s journey leads her to a cult led by the enigmatic Gabriel (Sheila McCarthy), who has held her ragtag group together on the promise of leading them to salvation. Sarah must not only navigate the dangers of the unforgiving world, but decide who she can trust when everyone is out for their own survival.

The Well is going to feel very familiar to anyone who has been watching the deluge of post-apocalyptic movies and shows released over the past decade. It doesn’t really offer anything new or unique, the plot largely unfolding as you would expect with characters that won’t stick with you too long afterward the closing credits. While it is well shot and acted, The Well ’s limited budget keeps the action in the woods. The film’s pace is slow, and it doesn’t really create much tension along the way. I like the idea of the world that The Well is trying to create, I just wish it offered up something more entertaining or memorable.

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Games People Play

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Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

by Hope Madden

Back in 2019, filmmakers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett released Ready or Not. This tale of scrappy hero Grace (Samara Weaving) delivered a giddy, action-oriented, splatter-fueled horror comedy with the relatable central message that rich people are evil.

Weaving is back for the sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. Grace is paired with her sister and reluctant sidekick Faith (Kathryn Newton), as both are forced to endure Round 2. Last go round, newlywed Grace had to survive until dawn on the evening of her wedding while her husband’s family tried to kill her. There were rules, specific weapons—they aren’t savages. They’re Satanists.

Well, in surviving the Le Domas family’s game of hide and seek, Grace triggered a second game. And what this game teaches us is that the entire world is run by a bunch of billionaires, each of whom is unspeakably, irredeemably evil.

Just like real life!

But in the movie, the evil billionaires face consequences. So Ready or Not 2 is a cathartic joy.

Weaving and Newton share a fun, funny, bickering chemistry. Their backstory becomes the spine of a film that, like the original, delivers series of entertaining, bloody set pieces.

Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett surround the sisters with a great ensemble, including the legendary David Cronenberg as the Danforth family patriarch.

Elijiah Wood is an understated hoot as Satan’s lawyer, reteamed for the first time since The Faculty with Shawn Hatosy, effortlessly psychotic and endlessly familiar as that white guy born into loads and loads of money. (Titus is his name.)

Sarah Michelle Gellar also stars as Titus’s twin sister Ursula Danforth. Geller’s turn is a manipulative delight, a billionaire convinced that a little evil is OK in the grand scheme of things if you do good stuff too.

Kevin Durand, Nester Carbonell, Maia Jae and the whole set of entitled hangers on are also spot on and fun. The entire film feels a little like therapy, honestly.

If you enjoyed Ready or Not, I’m hard pressed to believe its sequel won’t also leave you smiling.

Outtakes

Wide Open

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Dream Story

by Hope Madden

It takes chutzpah to choose to follow Stanley Kubrick, but Florian Frerichs is undeterred. His Dream Story, based on the same novel as Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, mines the sordid tale of high society orgies for a few different ideas.

We are still focused on the bored, rich, and horny, though.

Set in Berlin, where it does feel at home, Dream Story follows Jakob (Nikolai Kinski), a wealthy doctor. After putting their precocious, opera loving son to bed, Jakob and his wife Amelia (Laurine Price) reminisce about a recent night out.

When Amelia admits to a powerful, unfulfilled longing for a stranger, Jakob’s marital contentment begins to feel like foolishness.

What’s a guy to do but visit a secret, cloak-and-mask orgy?

While most of the story beats echo those from ’99, there are some clear differences. Dream Story is indifferent to Kubrick’s themes of the grotesque heartlessness of the wealthy. In Eyes Wide Shut, the rich are so accustomed to treating everyone as a commodity and everything as a transaction that they’ve lost their humanity.

Frerichs is more concerned with the “dream” in Dream Story (a title derived from the English translation of writer Arthur Schnitzler’s original title). Upon hearing of his wife’s unsatisfied lust, it’s as if Jakob wakes from the dream of a loving bond. Now, insecure and hurt, he wanders as an almost childlike outsider looking to be a bad boy.

Frerichs amplifies the dreamy quality of the film with fanciful moments—Jakob’s operatic fantasies and instances when he breaks the fourth wall, for example. There’s also a trippy animated sequence to deepen the spell.

Frerichs, who adapts Schnitzler’s 1929 novella Traumnovelle with frequent collaborator Martina van Delay, also enlists bloody imagery. This he does less for the sake of horror and more to signal Jakob’s own mortality. Frequent callbacks to the death of a patient in Act 1 keep the doctor’s preoccupation with his own morality top of mind. His quest to do something debauched, springs from a sudden sense of all he’s wasted being faithful to a woman who may not even want him.

Dream Story is, in the end, more of a love story. In carving out so clearly a new path with the material, Frerichs delivers a whole new reason to watch. 

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It’s Time Go

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Project Hail Mary

by George Wolf

The arguments about Awards Season 2026 may still be raging on social media, but Project Hail Mary arrives to start the conversation about next year. It’s the kind of lavish, well-polished, big movie star project that could generate word-of-mouth excitement, bring crowds back to the theater, and leave audiences with an inspiring message of hope and humor that is sorely needed.

And that will be awesome, truly. So, I already feel like a cynical jerk for not thinking it’s a masterpiece.

Thanks a lot, Ryan Gosling.

Actually, it’s pretty damn hard not to love Gosling’s turn here as Dr. Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist who’s teaching middle school science thanks to some of his less-than-peer-approved theories.

But when he wakes from an induced coma on a ship in outer space, “Grace” is our last hope for saving Earth from the nasty space dust that is about three decades away from destroying the Sun.

How did he get here? And how can a man “who puts the ‘not’ in “astronaut'” hope to succeed all alone?

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller give us those answers, adapting Andy Weir’s best-selling novel with another crowd-pleasing script from Drew Goddard – who also adapted Weir’s The Martian for the screen. And much like The Martian, we’re among the stars with a solitary man who must rely on science to find the solution to survival.

But Grace isn’t really alone, once he meets a crab-like alien (voiced by James Ortiz) he calls “Rocky” thanks to an appearance that resembles a strategic stacking of stones. Rocky’s planet is also facing extinction, and the two form a bond that quickly aligns the film as a family-friendly mashup of 2001 and E.T.

Gosling’s self-deprecating charm and sharp comic timing are instantly likable, and once Rocky learns some basics of English, the alien’s penchant for inverting certain words and gestures leads to warmly funny exchanges. Lord & Miller (The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) bolster the rapport with wondrous IMAX sequences, but can’t completely overcome the feeling that this is all just a little too obvious and cute.

Flashbacks to a terrific Sandra Hüller as the impatiently blunt leader of the Hail Mary project give the film some much needed depth, and the mild twist in Act Three pulls the narrative out of the safe zone, albeit too briefly. The Martian suffered from the same calculated, broad brush feel at work here, and thankfully Lord & Miller don’t follow suit and resort to a succession of eye-rollingly precise needle drops.

The film’s title could also apply toward winning back those finicky theater-goers. And Project Hail Mary is perfectly suited to be a memorable cinematic experience with mass appeal. It looks great, there’s a charismatic leading man, his little alien buddy, and an easily digestible life lesson.

An enjoyable trip to the movies will be had. It just ain’t a trip to deep space.

Shudder Premiere

Women Talking

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1000 Women in Horror

by Hope Madden

Shudder has produced some fascinating and enlightening documentaries about the genre they serve. Both the film Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror and the series Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror shine overdue light on the history of films and filmmakers genre lovers need to know.

In that vein comes Donna Davies’s 1000 Women in Horror. The doc is written for the screen by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, on whose nonfiction book it’s based. Longtime film critic and genre expert, Heller-Nicholas contributed brilliantly to Alexandre O. Phillipe’s 2024 Texas Chain Saw Massacre doc Chain Reactions, as well as Kier-La Janisse’s 2021 doc Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. She knows her way around a horror documentary, is what I’m saying.

So does Davies, for that matter, whose 2009 TV doc Pretty Bloody: The Women of Horror swam similar waters.

The title is an intentional joke. As the film makes clear, women have been a driving creative force in horror films for more than a century. But the film doesn’t spend much time focusing on individual women as much as it does basic genre themes that relate to women: childbirth, the depiction of women on screen at different stages of their lives, and rape, for example.

We do hear from some powerful creators, though. Mary Harron (American Psycho), Nikyatu Jusu (Nanny), Jenn Wexler (The Sacrifice Game),Gigi Saul Guerrero (Bingo Hell) and loads more shed light on how women create and are reflected in horror cinema.

The interviews are sometimes fascinating and often ferocious. Kate Siegel expresses the conflict underlying childbirth in horror better than most could. Throughout, it’s such a joy to deconstruct certain tropes with women, to hear how these tropes—for better or worse—influenced these filmmakers.

A little more of a history lesson would have been appreciated. I’d love to have made myself a list of vintage horror and, more importantly, early pioneers to dig into after the film was through. But when I think of the number of documentaries on cinema I’ve seen over the decades that included solely the voices of men, having just one that asks the opinions of only women experts feels revolutionary in itself.

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?